The Best American Poetry

Godwin's Law [by Joe Lehman]

“As an online discussion or argument grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” So says Godwin's Law, coined by author Mike Godwin. It's like "six degrees of separation" applied to political conversations (or rants), all of which reach their apex with Hitler. I personally attest to the validity of Godwin’s Law applied not just to online arguments but to discussions between and among friends, whether in person or on the phone.

Case in point: I was riding in the passenger seat in a car with my friend  Diane in the driver’s seat. This was close to a decade ago. We were discussing an Iraq War veteran’s impassioned speech before her church group, where the embittered vet called into question the reasoning for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was, he contended, a grievous mistake. The speech did not go over well with the audience. The consensus was that it was an inappropriate choice of venue for the speech. Diane and I mulled over the incident. She said the vet should have chosen a venue more congenial to antiwar advocacy. I countered that an "acceptable" locale or event wouldn’t be playing host to the audience the vet was targeting . He had selected the church group for a reason.  If he had spoken at an official anti war rally, he would end up preaching to the choir. Therefore, I said, it was more politically effective to speak to people not predisposed to agree your position.. Diane blurted out, “Well, would you say that the things Hitler and the Nazis did were politically effective for them?” I said that from Hitler’s standpoint, he was very ‘effective’ in advancing his own agenda. Of course, the discussion deteriorated from then on.

Hitler remains the trigger word, the invitation to the ultimaate unsafe space, that the 20th century left us. I challenge everyone to comment about his or her own experiences dealing with Godwin’s Law in a discussion or argument you may have had in the past.

Revisiting "D.A.R.Y.L." [by Joe Lehman]

1985’s D.A.R.Y.L., directed by Simon Wincer (“Lonesome Dove” of TV) and starring past child actor Barrett Oliver (The Never Ending Story) is a film that could easily be called a Pinocchio story. That is to say, it evokes the image of Pinocchio as rendered in the 1940 Walt Disney classic (not the mostly forgotten, harsh, serialized 1881 story by Italian journalist and radical activist Carlo Collodi). The Disney image is that of the naïve marionette-come-alive, with a penchant for telling fibs, and a longing desire to be accepted and adopted as a live boy by his would-be father, puppeteer Gepetto.

D.A.R.Y.L.’s place in the context of the Pinocchio tale is overlooked, unlike the similarly themed and better-known Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg collaborative effort 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which references Pinocchio ever so relentlessly. Upon re-watching D.A.R.Y.L. for the umpteenth time I feel it deserves special recognition, especially from lovers of ‘80s kitsch, who seem to constitute its largest fan-base.

          The Daryl of the film’s title is a preadolescent android whose name is an acronym of Data. Analyzing. Robot. Youth. Lifeform. Daryl stands out as a kind of Pinocchio-figure that strives to become authentic as a child on a reverse course from the immortal Tuscan marionette. Where Pinocchio becomes “real” through evolving into maturity, Daryl begins as fully matured and adapts childish qualities through his social interaction with the family and friends that become his by the story’s end.

          The movie begins with the “boy’s” mysterious appearance, following the opening shot of a military helicopter chasing a speeding car, with Daryl occupying the backseat. The chopper pursues the fleeing driver until the vehicle speeds to his demise, off a cliff, but not before the driver has released the child into the woods, where passing motorists discover him and deliver him to social services. From the start it is obvious that the boy has selective amnesia, and can recall only his name, Daryl, and the ability to speak proper English. Yet he is seemingly a prodigy in almost every cognitive and academic ability. He has a perfect photographic memory and talent for reading, for mathematics, and for processing new information in general, especially machines with computers, such as ATMs, an early model of which show up in one particularly funny scene. The movie postpones the explanation for Daryl’s origin, the identity of the doomed driver, and the reason for the helicopter chase until midway. This is a smart move.

Placed in the care of loving foster parents Joyce and Andy Richardson (Mary Beth Hurt and Michael McKean), whom he instantly adores, he makes friends of a neighbor boy, “Turtle” Fox (Danny Corkill), and his older sister Sherie Lee (Amy Linker), the son and daughter of Daryl’s social workers (Steve Ryan and Colleen Camp). Daryl quickly becomes an overnight sensation in Little League and sets an all-time high score on his Atari games – games that will be so familiar to ‘80s kitsch-lovers.

In his 1985 review, the late Roger Ebert writes:

D.A.R.Y.L. is a sort of Charly in reverse. Instead of a retarded man who is allowed, through science, to have a brief glimpse of what it would be like to be normal, what we have here is a super-intelligent thinking machine who gets a taste of being a real little boy. It’s an intriguing premise, and the movie handles it with skill.

I concur with Ebert’s opinion that Daryl’s relationship with his new best friend Turtle is central to the “Pinocchio” character’s evolution into a “real boy”:

 They know there is something odd about the kid when he starts doing his own laundry. That’s not natural for a grade-schooler. Daryl has some other strange attributes. He is unfailingly polite, obsessively honest and bats 1,000 in Little League [a fact pointed out earlier]. Finally, his friend, Turtle, pulls him aside and explains that adults don’t like it when a kid is too perfect. It makes them nervous. They need to connect with him, so they can relax around him. Daryl nods gravely, and his next time at bat, he strikes out.

If Daryl is a proverbial Pinocchio, then the character of Turtle represents the conscience. Turtle, who is portrayed as a typical ten-year-old, is mischievous and adventurous. In many ways he seems the kind of scamp that Carlo Collodi presented in the original Pinocchio. By way of contrast, Daryl is the reverse-Pinocchio. It is as if the characters have mashed up.  

Rebecca West, in her lengthy examination of Collodi’s original serialized novel, asserts that while the tale has “qualities that tie it to the genre of children’s literature” it also has elements that “are more allied to the tradition of adult, ‘serious’ prose fiction.”

The last lines of Rebecca West’s study are especially pertinent: “As in many fairy tales, in Pinocchio too it is the overcoming of obstacles that pushes the tale forward, so that the hero or heroine may be rewarded with the happy ending…In order to understand better the qualities that make of the puppet's tale something much more complex than a simple fairy tale-like story of goodness and obedience rewarded.” Pinocchio achieves his humanity, i.e., his transformation from a marionette to a flesh-and-blood boy through redeeming himself of his selfishness. The preadolescent android “D.A.R.Y.L.”, as the audience bears witness, achieves his humanity by transitioning into the normality of childhood emotion and experience. He becomes simply Daryl Richardson, ten-year-old adoptee. This is achieved by the middle of the movie, rather than the end. It is here, at the midpoint of the film that Daryl’s creator -- the essential “Geppetto” of the story, a government scientist named Dr. Jeffrey Stewart -- enters the picture. He and his colleague Dr. Ellen Lamb arrive as Daryl’s “parents,” come to reclaim their missing amnesiac child from Joyce and Andy Richardson, who have by now come to love the boy as though he were their own.

Only after Daryl is returned to the laboratory from which he was conceived is the truth of Daryl’s origin finally revealed. He was designed for military purposes by the Pentagon as many in the audience will have already suspected from the get-go. Apparently, the doomed driver from the beginning of the story was Dr. Stewart’s other colleague, Dr. Mulligan. Mulligan had begun to feel sympathy for the robot-child and had absconded with him in an attempt to free him from captivity. Upon his fascination with Daryl’s newfound emotions, Dr. Stewart eventually develops the same sentimental feelings. But the android’s transformation from plaid automaton to average All-American boy does not sit well with the typically jaundiced-looking military brass, which immediately schedule Daryl for termination.

With Dr. Lamb’s secret collusion, Dr. Stewart and Daryl make a break for it, initiating the action-adventure themed final stage of the movie. This involves the usual car chases; which Daryl is prepared for via his Atari game expertise. There is even a nod to the 1982 Clint Eastwood actioner Firefox: like Clint, Daryl commandeers a stealth fighter jet. But all this is inessential to the story’s significance as a Pinocchio derivative. Dr. Stewart displays his essence as Daryl’s own Geppetto in the film’s most poignant scene, when as he lies dying from a policeman-inflicted gunshot wound he tells Daryl, “Remember, you are a real person” With his last breath, he says, “I only wish” and then passes away before completing the statement. Perhaps he meant to say he only wished Daryl were his son. Unlike Geppetto, he doesn’t get that chance.

Just as a Blue Fairy transforms Pinocchio into a live boy in the ending of the Collodi story, Dr. Lamb, the last surviving scientist responsible for Daryl’s creation, grants Daryl the same wish, upon the film’s conclusion. After ejecting from his destroyed fighter jet, Daryl lands in a river. Has he drowned? Yes, but Dr. Lamb revives him with an electric charge to the microchip that serves as his brain. This is the final act of Daryl’s transcendence. He then makes a joyous reunion with the Richardson and Fox families.

Argo (Fuck Yourself) [by Joe Lehman]

Actor/Director Ben Affleck, center, with his “Argo” inspiration Tony Mendez, far left, and real-life “house guests” Kathleen Stafford, Bob Anders and Lee Schatz. At right are Pat Taylor and former Ambassador Ken Taylor (Keegan Bursaw/Embassy of Canada)           

 

Ben Affleck’s Argo opens with the image of the long defunct Warner Brothers logo that the studio used in the 1970s. It was upon seeing this blast from the past that I knew this movie was something neat. Ultimately Argo is a double-layered film: a movie wrapped in a movie. And that is what makes it neat. So much so, in fact, that when I examined it closer and found just how many conventional devices the film employs, my instinct was to overlook them. Argo is neat enough to be forgiven many clichés that might sink an inferior movie.

Argo is based on true events, some infamous and some unknown, kept under lock and key by the CIA for the past thirty years. As the world remembers it, Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two American Embassy workers hostage for a period of 444 days from November 1979 until January 1981. The image of the blindfolded captives, as broadcast on ABC Nightline every day of the ordeal, remains an icon of helplessness that continues to resonate for Americans today.

The events unknown until recently center on the escape of six embassy workers out a back exit. The six were sheltered for weeks at the Teheran residence of the Canadian ambassador before managing to depart Iran and its reign of terror under the guise of a movie crew scouting locations for a putative science-fiction picture and using false Canadian passports – the whole improbable but effective scheme cooked up by the CIA working with Hollywood. Argo reveals the newly declassified details of this great feat.

The hero of the story, CIA Agent Tony Mendez, as played by actor/director Ben Affleck, comes across as the typical battle-weary troubleshooter with a troubled home life, who can always be counted on as the voice of reason in a room full of indecisive bureaucrats arguing and dithering on how best to provide cover for the extraction of the six Americans (or “ex-fils,” a neologism based the inverse of infiltration). Getting approval for the operation from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance is “like talking to the two old fucks on the Muppets,” says Affleck’s CIA superior, played convincingly by Bryan Cranston. 

Affleck doesn’t have to reach too far to convey his character’s burnout and lassitude. His sunken-eyed expression says it all. As you might expect, it is his force of will that drives the rescue plan to fruition. At one point, Affleck stares definitively at the fourth wall, as if to say ‘let’s do it.’

Adding a dose of cynicism and black humor are two Hollywood figures, an irreverent make-up artist (John Goodman) and a cantankerous veteran film producer (Alan Arkin). The steadfast Canadian Ambassador (Victor Garber) is heroic, as is his young Iranian servant girl, who in one of the movie’s best scenes covers for the houseguests, standing up to questioning by the Iranian secret police, overriding her own conflicted loyalties in the process. The worsening situation tests the resolve of the film’s heroes.

Argo’s genius is in its mosaic of spy intrigue and revolutionary violence and its commentary on Hollywood egotism and the burgeoning popularity of Star Wars-like sci-fi movies. It makes clear that the anti-American demonstrations of the Iranian militants are just as much a type of theater as Hollywood’s overblown science-fiction make-up and movie sets and costumes. At one point a character points to the TV image of the U.S. flag-burning protestors and asks, “you ever think how this is all for the cameras?”

The ever-present stare of the Ayatollah Khomeini, emblem of the repressive regime adorns posters in Teheran. These are similar images to those found (even more threateningly) in 1991’s Not Without My Daughter, also set in the Ayatollah’s Iran. Starring Sally Field (in one of those crusading-mother roles usually assigned to Sally Field, Meryl Streep, or Sissy Spacek), NWMD recounts the true-life tale from the 1980s of an an American woman’s efforts to flee, with her young daughter in tow, Iran and her abusive Iranian husband.  Where Affleck in Argo attempts to convey sensitivity toward Iran’s complicated history and its people’s legitimate grievances against the American government NWMD demonizes the Iranian people.  In the opening voiceover, Argo is careful to include references to the 1953 U.S.-backed coup d’état against Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq and the subsequent backing of the Shah’s oppressive regime.  NWMD leaves these matters unmentioned. This is not to say that Argo is not without negative stereotypes, but Affleck is more thorough at balancing them out with his cultural liberalism.

There are elements of pungent irony: for example, a shot of burka-clad Iranian women eating buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Alan Arkin says of film extras in an unrelated picture he is producing in Africa, “They may be cannibals, but they still want health and dental insurance.” Arkin’s favorite catchphrase becomes the movie’s signature line:: “Argo Fuck Yourself!” As gloomy international events continue to air on the nightly news, Arkin mutters, “John Wayne is in the ground six months, and this is what’s left of America!”

A Sign of the Times: More Powerful than Dynamite. [Book review by Joe Lehman]

Thai Jones’ More Powerful than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York City’s Year of Anarchy (Walker & Company, April 2012) is literary proof that history authenticates our age. Reading it, one is seized with a feeling of bewilderment at the absence of this chapter from public schools’ core history curriculum. This bewilderment is followed by a sense of annoyance, perhaps even outrage at academia’s neglect of America’s radical past in the early twentieth century. The book is about a New York City mass movement that preceded that of Occupy Wall Street by nearly a century. But it is clear from reading Dynamite that OWS is not a resurgence of the aroused sleeping lion that is the American radical spirit; it is merely its extension. Or in the words of latter day political prisoner Tom Manning, "Revolution is never begun anew, only continued where others left off."

    Readers will surmise from the book’s title (taken from a quote by Walter Lippmann) that its content involves a radical theme. It is centered on several coinciding factions of a progressive political movement. The time is 1914. New York City serves as a microcosm of America as a whole. The most prominent factions are the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, represented by William “Big Bill” Haywood and John Reed; and the Anarchists, represented by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Intertwined, and not without competition, are the liberal, progressive, and socialist factions. These elements converge on the streets of New York, challenging the status quo of class inequality and the oppression of labor.  It is a panorama of demonstrations, violence, and reform. Jones succeeds in painting a picture where these forces of change can be viewed from afar as a citywide conflagration, while at the same time highlighting the differences between them. Jones’s sympathies clearly lie with the Anarchist movement. The most radical actors figuring in the book decry the ineffectiveness of mainstream liberals and socialists, and it is not difficult to envision Jones arguing the same points on his own.

    Jones is clever in his blending of mainstream political history with the radical alternative. He gives us an overview of domestic social conditions intersecting with international crises. As World War I erupts, tensions mount with Mexico, then in the midst of revolution. Both major political parties have embraced the language of progressive reform. (This is one area where 1914 largely differs from 2012: numerous politicians today have eschewed progressivism for austerity measures.) Both President Woodrow Wilson and New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel have been elected on progressive platforms. The events covered in Dynamite illustrate how radical organizing and street demonstration challenged the grip of these mainstream liberal authorities and of the reactionary forces of such capitalist titans as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

    Dynamite is not a romantic narrative of World War One-era New York City radicalism in the mold of Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians or the epic 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds. Far from romantic, Dynamite is a close examination of an environment that has become sadly familiar. The title of the second chapter -- “The Jobless Man and the Manless Job” -- sums up the feelings of hardship, hopelessness, and despair that are tangible in the present day Great Recession.  We encounter starving families and a city unable to cope with the influx of the homeless and unemployed crowding the streets and overflowing the shelters. In the midst of this turmoil an unsung hero emerges; teenager Frank Tannenbaum, an out-of-work dishwasher and devotee of the IWW cause. Young Tennenbaum’s story is one of countless prisoners of politics and principle. He is arrested for leading a throng of homeless citizens into a church for the purpose of claiming shelter. Charged with incitement to riot, he is railroaded through a trial, denounced for leading a “mob,” and sentenced to a year at the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Tennenbaum would later graduate from Columbia University to become a distinguished labor historian. In what can only be described as a clear example of historical whitewash, his 1969 New York Times obituary makes scant reference to his radical early life.

Thai Jones, himself the son of Vietnam-era antiwar radicals, an experience he writes about in A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004), explores an accidental explosion on July 4^th 1914 in a Harlem tenement that claimed the lives of three Anarchist bomb-makers, who were allegedly planning the assassination of Rockefeller Jr., the man widely held responsible for the April massacre of striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado. Jones describes the unfolding of the Ludlow Massacre in vivid detail. The images of state militiamen setting fire to the strikers’ tent colonies with women and children huddled inside are haunting. Students of more recent history may want to compare the 1914 Harlem explosion with the March 6, 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse blast in which three members of the Weather Underground died.

    The book’s epilogue shifts forward to 1917 and the entry of the United States into the World War I. The anarchists have correctly predicted that mainstream liberals and socialists would be the first to fall for endorsing the war effort, just as it was the social democratic parties of Europe that led their nations into the war in the first place. The revolutionary atmosphere of the previous three years has been effectively disrupted and broken up by the consequent jingoistic fervor and the police repression in the form of the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Mainstream liberalism had failed. Mayor Mitchel was defeated at the polls, and Warren G. Harding, running on a “Return to Normalcy” platform, succeeded Woodrow Wilson as president.

    There are many lessons to be taken from this gem of a book. One is that only true revolutionary movements can fill the gap left by the failure of mainstream liberalism to address the needs of a restive populace. Though Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent movement represent a positive step, the future is darkly uncertain. Thai Jones is a remarkable storyteller. One sees the masses marching through Union Square in 1914 carrying signs emboldened with the words, “Bread or Revolution,” and it remains a sign of the times.