Can we talk?

Comedian, actress, talk show talker, celebrated-for-being-a-celebrity Joan Rivers has died, age 81.

If you’ve had any television service—even broadcast-only—in the past 50 years, you’ve heard Rivers. If you’ve had cable, you’ve heard and seen her, probably much more than you’ve seen your siblings.

Rivers was a comedic pioneer, not only because she was a woman, although she certainly blazed the trail for the women who followed her, but because she was absolutely fearless. She’d take on anyone and anything, including the Israelis and Palestinians, her own plastic surgeries and the suicide of her husband.

Everything was a legitimate target for her sharp and brash wit.

In recent years I could only take her in small doses—I didn’t watch her on all those red carpets, I caught the soundbites on YouTube. But she still made me howl, because she was saying what anyone with half an eye was thinking.

(I almost said, “what anyone with a modicum of taste”, but let’s face it: Rivers could take the piss with some of the outfits she herself wore. Didn’t matter—if someone wanted to take her on, let ‘em. But they’d better be prepared for return fire.)

I’m not going to go into detail; I’ll let her do it for herself. She was amazingly good at that.

Sharing the road

I was in one of the twin left-turn lanes from El Camino to Lawrence Parkway yesterday, and could not help but notice that the car next to me was composed mostly of stereo speakers, and there was something very lively on. But it was kind of a killer beat, so I let my inner spirit run free (as much as it can when you’re strapped in completely with your seat harness, which I never go anywhere without using, in case the CHP is reading this).

By which I mean I was car-boogying, head-bopping and hand jiving like nobody’s business. Look—it’s a long wait for the left-turn arrow at that intersection; I could have performed the second act of Swan Lake before we had to move. But I sadly did not have a tutu with me.

I didn’t bother to look for anyone who might be watching me; traffic on that part of El Camino runs about 45 MPH. The only person whose vehicle wasn’t moving was next to me, in the very loud car.

And what made me laugh and laugh was that—as cranked-up as he had the volume, and as irresistible as that beat was—this guy was as still as one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I mean, not one millimeter of movement. It was like he was completely frozen.

He didn’t even look around to see who was laughing like a maniac.

Literary matters

There’s this thing going around Facebook—you’re supposed to list ten books that have “mattered” to you. No specification on how they matter, but of course the challenge is to pare the list down to just ten.

Well, here’s mine:

Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, John Ellis.

This was my introduction to the First World War. I don’t even know why I read it that summer, but it was my WTF moment, such a vivid description of the ghastly life in the trenches that it sparked my concentration in New Military History, with a particular focus on mass warfare of the first half of the 20^th Century. When people ask me for recommendations on what they should read to “learn” about that war, Eye Deep in Hell is it.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi.

This is the book that goes with me if I’m ever sent into exile. It’s possibly the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Levi was a chemist in Turin; in 1943 his life was interrupted when the Germans occupied the part of Italy not held by the Allies, and he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was a slave laborer in I.G. Farben's Buna plant. He wrote many books, novels, essays, etc., but The Periodic Table is the one I keep returning to. It’s a series of autobiographical short stories, each one tagged to one of the chemical elements. The one I love the most is “Iron”; Levi’s friend Sandro is my ideal of how a good life is lived.

The Odyssey, Homer.

I read The Odyssey in high school, and we basically jumped joyfully into the whole sea-cruise-from-hell thing. It seemed so full of panache, and adventure, and had that happy ending where Odysseus shoots all those sons-of-bitches suitors. And his dog remembers him. After 20 years, which made the dog about 25 and remarkably long-lived. TO was my introduction-in-depth to Greek mythology, and archetypes and all that stuff; I enjoyed it. But by the time I got to college and read The Iliad, I was considerably less inclined to put up with chapter after freaking chapter of a monumental testosterone-powered whizzing contest, amongst both the mortals and the gods, especially when the butcher’s bill is so high. I could hardly wait to move on to Aeschylus, where Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon. Good riddance, I say.

The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer.

Long before there was the Internet to ‘splain the fine points of roasting lamb or making meringues, The Joy of Cooking was my go-to reference. In retrospect, I think I may not have actually made a whole lot of the recipes in the book, but I certainly consulted the daylights out of it when I was looking for technique. Eventually it was superseded to some extent by Julia Child. And then, of course, YouTube. But it goes with me everywhere, because—hey, it’s just the classic.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

TWITW is the prototypical buddy story; Rat and Mole are about as good a pair of friends as you’re ever going to find, inside and outside the pages of a book. Yes, they have to deal with that whackjob Toad, and with the Weasels—don’t we all? Rat and Mole make me think it would be a good thing to go messing around with boats, even though even the thought of being on the water renders me queasy. Every year at Christmas I reread “Dulce Domum”, because this is what the spirit of the season is.

Pictures of Perfection, Reginald Hill.

I’ve already told you how much I love Reg Hill’s police procedurals about Dalziel and Pascoe; this is my favorite. It’s so…daft, so delicate, so delicious. And watch out for the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten.

My BFF gave me this, and I read almost the entire book on my flights back to LA from Seoul. I loved the wit, earthiness and perseverance Rosten described in the Jewish peoples. The understanding it gave me proved foundational when I was studying 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Century European history, and it was also helpful in navigating the executive stratum in film and television production. I read, reread and consulted JOY until my copy literally fell apart. I sort of felt I should give it a Viking funeral, because it gave heroic service to my careers. However, I don't like the idea of burning books.

Lives of the Noble Romans, Plutarch.

This is a holdover from a college humanities class on Ancient Rome. The thing that impressed me about Plutarch was that he wrote about his subjects with a certain degree of honesty. The one I remember was Cato the Elder, whom Plutarch held up as an example of a man dedicated to the civitas; even though he was really tight with a denarius, and when his slaves became too old to work, he turned them out to fend for themselves. I carry it around in my car in case of breakdown, or for doctors’ waiting rooms where the only entertainment they have is a TV set to daytime talk shows or sporting events. Plutarch is way better than anything on TV.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

I laugh every time some ninja rockstar self-styled techno-business-innovator next-big-thing guru spouts some sound bite and attributes it to Sun Tzu. As opposed to them, I’ve actually read this book, and understand its implications for a lot of arenas. I’ve also read Clauswitz’s On War, which has applications to the business world as well, but for some reason the gururati haven’t latched onto that one yet. One of the big challenges for implementing some of the precepts in TAOW is that they’re predicated on understanding yourself, understanding your surroundings and understanding your enemy. Most people can’t manage that first step.

The Long Good-bye, Raymond Chandler.

It’s not the first Chandler I ever read, but it’s my favorite. (Okay, there’s a line from his short story “Red Wind” that pretty well blows away everything ever written about LA, but this is the best of his novels.) I bought my copy for 90p at a news stand in Gatwick Airport the night before returning to the US from my bicycle trip through France and Spain. I had no money and nothing to do until the Laker Air flight to LA the next day; TLGB got me through. Look, Chandler had me at the opening line: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

What's on your list?

Hard war

One hundred fifty years ago, while Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac was attempting to strangle the capital of the Confederacy at Richmond, there was another campaign going on in what was called the Western Theatre, with another strategic railhead city at the core of it.

We’re talking the concept of total war, which General (yes mam) Sherman was introducing to the South, starting around Chattanooga, Tenn., and moving towards the Atlantic. His idea was basically to manifest the Clausewitzian precept that the object of war is not to win battles, kill armies or even conquer lands; it’s to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. And you do that by destroying anything that can contribute to the war effort.

This is how successful he was: you mention his name anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line even now and you’d better be prepared for stick. It’s as though he was there last week.

The idea was that Sherman’s armies would rely less on Union supply lines and more on what the farms of Georgia could provide in the spring and summer of 1864. This would at once support mobility, deprive the Confederate armies of those supplies, and attack the morale of the entire South. What the Federals couldn’t take, they torched, pretty much.

The policy, delineated later in Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 120, was aimed primarily against property, but of course it rendered thousands of civilians homeless—shelterless—and without the means of feeding themselves. He called it “hard war”, and it was.

On 2 September 1864, Atlanta finally surrendered, after a battle that started six weeks before. Sherman then moved on to the Atlantic.

Essentially, Sherman’s campaign broke the back of the South. The fall of Atlanta also gave Abraham Lincoln something to take to the Presidential election that November, to use against George B. McClellan (ex-commander of the Army of the Potomac).

McClellan was running on a platform demanding a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Atlanta gave Union voters hope that Mr. Lincoln’s armies actually might be able to end the rebellion by military means, so they reelected him by a comfortable margin.

So 150 years ago today, the nation drew its breath, hitched up its trousers and carried on.

Gratitude Monday: Hard labor

Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services; and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t become part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Twenty years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno. Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions.

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name.

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.

It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.