Let it a lone. Please

Dear sweet baby Jesus—I just watched last year’s The Lone Ranger on cable TV.

Thirty years ago a friend of mine described 1981’s The Legend of the Lone Ranger thusly: “In which Klinton Spilsbury proves that Clayton Moore was not the world’s worst actor.”

Well, I can say with absolute confidence that Armie Hammer proves that Klinton Spilsbury was not the world’s worst actor.

And Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio prove that Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts, Michael Kane and William Roberts weren’t the world’s worst screenwriters.

And it was hard to tell whether Johnny Depp did a worse job of acting than the dead crow on his head.

I absolutely stand in shock and awe at the unremitting dreadfulness of this endeavor. And I hope to God that no one attempts another reboot of this franchise in my lifetime.

Pardon my ashes

I was rather nonplussed the other day to receive a solicitation from The Trident Society; even more so to realize that the California Department of Motor Vehicles had sold them my demographic details.

Seriously, DMV—you bastards!

There’s nothing like being invited to pre-pay your cremation expenses to remind you that you’re not getting any younger. Or healthier.

And it creeps me out that the DMV is making money by doing this.

I’m even more creeped out because I’m listed in their database as an organ donor. Clearly, they’ve shown that they’ll pretty much do anything for a little expanded revenue stream. And clearly my organs aren’t getting any younger.

Zulu plus 50

It has come to my attention that it is the 50^th anniversary of Zulu, the iconic film made about the battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879. They are celebrating the event by issuing a digitally remastered, wide-screen version, which premiered Tuesday evening raising money for charities focused on helping wounded soldiers and African children.

Prince Harry, a career soldier, was there, along with several people connected with the original, including Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Buthelezi, a colleague of Nelson Mandela in the fight against Apartheid, is the great-grandson of the Zulu leader Cetshwayo, whom he played in the movie.

(The film actually turned 50 in January, having premiered 85 years to the day after the actual battle.)

If you’ve not yet seen Zulu yet—step away from the blog now and stream it from somewhere. Seriously. Do not wait for the new version, just watch it.

It portrays the defense of a small outpost in South Africa by 140 British soldiers against a force of more than 4000 Zulu warriors, fresh from a major victory against a British army at Islandlhwana. Yes, the war was provoked by boneheaded, arrogant and imperialist British politicians, but the destruction of the 1300 well-armed troops at Islandlhwana was shocking to the British public and the repulse at Rorke’s Drift was a massive sop to national and imperial pride.

Plus—you know, a pretty amazing military feat.

As for the movie, Zulu has, without question, the single best battle scene ever filmed. It is all filth, blood, fury, fear, chaos, luck and some degree of strategy and tactics. The camera focuses in on the three lines of riflemen formed by the two commanders as they alternate firing—front rank, fire; second rank, fire; third rank, fire. Then fire, fire, fire, fire. Close-ups on the faces and the gunpowder smoke. When the shooting finally stops, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the pile of twitching bodies mere steps from the firing lines.

During the aftermath, Colour-Sergeant Bourne whispers, “It’s a miracle!” To which one of the commanders replies, “If it's a miracle, Colour-Sergeant, it's a short-chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.”

(Something I discovered only recently was that Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne, the actual Colour-Sergeant Bourne, was 25 at the time of the battle. Gesu.)

There are those who pooh-pooh the valor of Rorke’s Drift—because it was an imperialist action, and the British had no business being there. As I’ve said before, soldiers pretty much never vote on where they’re going to be deployed, so you only show your own pathetic pig-ignorance by declaring that Battalion X fighting to the last man was somehow less noble performing the same feats than Battalion Y because of the intentions of their political masters.

Fish story

I am not exactly sure what’s going on in the world of little wriggling fish, but anchovies are disappearing from the supermarket shelves in Northern California.

Actually—make that they have already disappeared. Not one single Trader Joe’s in Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale or Los Altos has so much as a tin, and they’ve taken to spreading out the smoked trout and sardines to cover up the major gap.

And Whole Foods had only a few cans, when there was space for two suppliers. Great, gaping space.

The manager at the Mountain View TJ told me that it’s a system thing—no anchovies in the pipeline anywhere. Although he didn’t know what the problem is.

There was apparently a mass anchovy suicide last month in Marina del Rey—thousands of the little silver buggers washed up on the beaches there. But the supermarkets have been bereft of them for longer than that. And most of the suppliers for the canned variety are in Europe, apparently.

Whatever. What this means for me is that there’s no Salad Niçoise for the foreseeable future, because you can’t have that without anchovies, you just can’t.

Which means—a whole lot more pasta primavera salads. Dang.

Gratitude Monday: Safe at home

As follow-on to last week’s Gratitude Monday post, today I am relieved and grateful that Dick and Carolyn have returned safely home after their adventures in Dresden.

They did move on to Berlin, although Dick’s activities were limited, and they flew back to Northern Virginia on Thursday.

(Once back on US soil, Carolun reverted to Carolyn, and stuff Nanny Autocorrect. But I’m still hoping to get Saint Virus on the fast-track to canonization.)

There was a bit of a kerfuffle over which local medical provider would step up to the plate for post-op care, but I do not doubt that it will get sorted. Because there are about 30 people on an email list who will make certain physicians’ lives pretty miserable if it doesn’t.

I would pass on Dick’s extremely vivid description of his symptoms, but I’ve already had to bleach my brain once to get that image out, and I don’t want to have to do it again.

Meanwhile, my gratitude really does overflow.

The weight of true leadership

In thinking about the 70th anniversary of the launching of Operation Overlord, I was reminded of one particular element, which didn’t make it into most of the coverage over the past few days, but is, I think, a mark of how different things—and men—were then than they are now.

The Normandy landings had been planned with extraordinary thoroughness. I have always stood in shock and awe at the idea that men and women from several nations (not to mention many different military and government branches) put together the strategy, the intelligence, the logistics, the training, the communication plans to get more than 150,000 soldiers and all the necessary matériel from the south of England to the Normandy coast (and beyond).

And they did it without computers. Without whiteboards, if you please!

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall responsibility, of course. Not to mention the heavy burden of keeping rampaging egos like Montgomery and Patton somehow working as members of a team. These days we’d refer to it as herding cats, only those two were very big jungle cats with sharp claws and vicious teeth.

But here’s the detail I’m interested in at the moment. Despite all the meticulous planning of this particular operation, it is a primary maxim of military leadership that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this instance, the weather—critical to safe landing and ongoing support of several armies that were far from operational ports—was a particular crapshoot. The only guaranteed result from pulling the trigger on Overlord was that men were going to get killed. Success was just one possible outcome.

So, in addition to the official “D-Day is underway” proclamation, Eisenhower prepared an alternative announcement, the one in which he admitted that the landings had failed, he’d pulled back the troops and they would have to rethink the whole thing.

And he said, “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He wrote this out in pencil—alone, no SHAEF PR flunkies polishing it, no discussion with anyone in his chain of command—and he put it in his pocket until such time as it might be necessary to have it typed up and transmitted.

These days no one embarking on any crack-brained self-aggrandizing political or corporate or military scheme on someone else's dime even considers the remote possibility that it could go belly-up. So (and probably because of that lack of forethought) when it (perhaps predictably) does go to hell in smithereens, after much behind-the-scenes scuffling and consulting of PR departments, crisis management companies, social media mavens, lawyers and other miscellaneous spin-doctors, a statement is issued in which someone grudgingly admits that “mistakes were made”, but the makers of those alleged mistakes are never named. And they are certainly never the persons reading the statement to the news outlets, Congressional committees or Oprah.

I am not a fan of the uncritical gushing about “The Greatest Generation” that has occurred since Tom Brokaw wrote his paean. The men and women blooded by the Great Depression indeed made the enormous sacrifices they were called upon to make during the years 1939-1945. And I am deeply grateful that they did. But I don’t see how it was somehow a greater sacrifice than what was asked for in the years 1914-1918.

(And if you want to talk military service, do not even try to tell me that the men and women who went to Vietnam were somehow lesser beings than the ones who went to Iwo Jima or Anzio or the Hürtgen Forrest. They suffered from bad military and political leadership and lack of strategy, not from any moral deficit.)

However—when I compare this scratched-out pencil draft of Eisenhower’s intent to accept full responsibility for the failure of Overlord with any no-fault statements made by politicians, generals or corporate executives caught in everything from flagrante delicto to global embezzlement and multiple manslaughter, it is clear to me that something indeed changed in the intervening 70 years.

And not for the better.

D plus 70

I’ve been following some of the coverage of the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, primarily, I guess, because all the surviving participants are creeping into their 90s, and this is probably the last “big” anniversary that will see them tottering or wheeling into those Normandy fields.

And I really don’t want their memory to fade away.

The 50^th anniversary, of course, was huge—concerts, commemorations, gatherings in the embarkation ports of England, and all along the landing beaches of Calvados. I watched and read it all from Washington, D.C. (Remember—this was before the Internet.)

I was in London for the next big one, in 1999, and from all the local reports, you’d have never known that anyone except British and some Commonwealth troops had landed in France in 1944. By 2004 I was back in D.C., where all US coverage of the events marking the 60^th anniversary stopped flat so news readers and blow-dried reporters could fill the airwaves with yacking about Ronald Reagan’s death. Once the announcement was made, there was no longer any news value to it, and the funeral wasn’t going to be for days, but to the last outlet, they dumped Normandy and produced nothing but 24x7 Reagan blather.

But the thing that has remained constant over the years is the genuine affection and appreciation held for the dwindling numbers of D-Day veterans by the people of Normandy. And keep in mind that these would be the people whose villages were bombed, whose farms were torn up and whose occupation force switched from German to Allied with not always much diminution of looting and destruction.

All that is put aside, though, and what remains is the joy at seeing them again, and the joy extends to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Calvados.

I particularly like the story by NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley on the celebration at La Cambe, a village near Omaha Beach—bloody Omaha, the costliest of the landing sites. It’s great that the contemporaries of those old soldiers welcome them as they debark their motor coaches instead of the Higgins boats of 70 years ago. But what I love is that one of the veterans is staying with a family he met back in 1944, and that the third and fourth generations view him as a relative.

(There are three major military cemeteries near the landing beaches: the British in Bayeux, the American at Colleville-sur-Mer and the German near La Cambe. I’ve walked them all. What is common to all of them is how young those men were when their lives were slammed shut; hardly a one of them was older than 22.)

We see the photographs of “les anciens”—American, British, Commonwealth or French—now, and they’re all so frail, with halting steps and hunching shoulders. It’s hard to imagine them in combat. But I expect that these men and women look at one another and see the 19- and 20-year-old versions of themselves; young, vital, adrenalin-charged, turning new pages in their lives and hoping that they’d live to write more chapters.

I recall vividly 20 years ago the group of 40 former paratroopers who basically got the band back together to make one more jump into Normandy—aging from 67 to 83, with some not having jumped for 50 years. There was an enormous flapdoodle from military authorities about the risk to their lives, etc. The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle wrote about both their training and their actual jump. (Sadly, only the former is available online; and I cannot believe that every single one of WaPo’s current D-Day stories is from the Associated Press.)

But in the end—not even the Pentagon was going to win against these guys, and they jumped out of C-47s over Ste.Mere-Eglise. As had happened 50 years before, the paratroopers were scattered by winds far from the drop zone. But this time it was daylight, and there were cafés open. The oldest, René Dussaq, 83, was only found two hours later, having a drink in a bar and regaling the patrons with his combat memories.

Dussaq died two years later of cancer. And all of the others are probably gone now, too.

But they are not forgotten. At least, not by the French

It saddens me that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these D-Day boys (for they were so young then) are largely ignorant of what they took on, of what they accomplished and of what price they paid. Perhaps if we had an app for that…

Civic confusion

Tuesday was the day Primary elections were held in the great state of California, and there's nothing like it anywhere else.

I have to say that the method of marking ballots here is passing strange. First of all: paper ballots, no voting machines. In a state that considers itself the vortex of technological innovation. 

And the ballots? No filling in a circle, or—God forbid—punching out a hole with a slender metal prong. (“You’ll poke yer eye out, kid!”. Plus, the two most terrifying words in all of electoral history: hanging chads.) No—we have to connect the front end and the back end of an arrow-like thingie.

But not just any old way—a very specific, singular way, as you can see from this instruction sheet.

Now, I find this quite interesting. For one thing, all the sample candidates are all dead white males. I’m assuming that George Washington, Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson need no introduction. John B. Weller was the fifth governor of California; can’t imagine how that qualifies to sit in the same company as Washington, Jackson or Franklin. William M. Gwin was one of our first Congressmen; but I imagine his gold-mine wealth propelled both that career and his placement on this sheet.

I always think of John C. Frémont as one of the dreadful political generals of the Union army who held high commands with disastrous results during the early years of the War Between the States. (Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” ran Frémont ragged in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, which in turn frightened the daylights out of the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C.) But he was one of our first U.S. Senators, and a founder of the Republican Party, so what’re ya gonna do?

Anyhow, evidently in our entire 164 years of statehood, there has been no woman and no person of color in the Golden State who has done anything as remarkable as Frémont, Gwin or Weller that would spark the Office of the Secretary of State (which manages election stuff) to use his/her name as an example here.

But the little instruction sheet is overly optimistic, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that people who can’t figure out the right-turn-on-red thing will not be able to pick the correct marking method from among all the options that this thing gives you on marking your ballot. 

Now that I think of it, this may be the reason California does not use voting machines, either.

Hand to heart

This story—this little, news-filler story—really heartens me. Newly-appointed Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein Suzi LeVine took her oath of office with her hand not on a book, but on an electronic reading device.

But for me, that’s not the great part.

The open document on which LeVine rested her hand was not a Bible, but the U.S. Constitution, open to the Nineteenth Amendment. That’s the one that granted women the right to vote.

You know, when you take Federal office or join the military or become a naturalized citizen, your oath is some variant of the notion that you’ll “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States”. Your loyalty and obligation are not to any human or humans, not an administration, a Congress, a political party, a religious sect or any of that nonsense.

The Founding Fathers agreed, in writing that Constitution, that we would be a nation of laws, regardless of which party might be in power. And the deal is—if you want to live here, that’s your price of admission. And if you don’t happen to like a particular law, you don’t toss your toys out of the pram or stamp your feet. You work—through the elective system—to get it changed.

(Yes, we are in the process of debasing that system with our system of lobbyists and campaign financing. But so far, although politicians have been bought, the Constitution hasn’t.)

And, in fact, Article VI, Section 3 flat out states, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Swirl that around your cup, Tea Party. 

Other office-takers have apparently also taken their oaths on copies of the Constitution, although this is the first time an electronic version was used. LeVine used some no-name e-reader, thus taking no position on the Kindle-Nook controversy.

I like all of this.

It's a Texas thang

I had a phone interview a couple of days ago with a hiring manager for a job in Austin. She started the call by advising me that her son’s school was on lockdown, and she might have to cut things short if she got notification that it was okay for her to go pick him up.

Well, sure, whatever. We had our chat and she indicated that she wants to talk further, so that’s being set up.

Meanwhile, I found out that the lockdown was on account of “armed burglars in the neighborhood”.

Well, that got me thinking.

Like—what the hell are burglars doing with weapons? How are you going to haul the swag if you’ve got a .45 in one of your hands? Seems like an inherent inefficiency to me.

But then it occurred to me: hey—this is Texas. Clergy are armed. The kindergarten teacher is probably packing. Why wouldn’t burglars join in the fun?

Well, evidently the situation was resolved, and mother and child were reunited, so it all turned out fine.

Except for the burglars, of course.