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The suspiciously overpraised Zero Dark Thirty.

Make Kony Famous?

This 30 minute ramble of a video by Invisible Children is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. It made me both cry and cringe. Problem is, I cringed far more than I cried. And I cried.
The good intentions are beyond reproach, as usual. Who doesn't want to bring a monster like Joseph Kony to justice? Or better yet, kill the bastard. Its humongous viral reach is now beyond discussion. But I sat there utterly flummoxed as it unfurled, way too slowly and randomly, over 30 minutes of can-do American pizzazz. It was so gnarly, it captured my attention.
I agree with the video that the internet and social media are capable of giving the public across the world the power to exert pressure for change in an unprecedented way. So far so good. Then there is this ominous voiceover by Impossibly Handsome, Well Meaning, Not a Little Self-Enamored Dude that the next 27 minutes are an experiment and in order for it to work we have to pay attention. Treat me like a 6th grader, but okay, still with you. Next? Footage of the birth of this dude's son. A full minute or more of his cute little coddled son doing cute things, like fake bombing someone's ass with a special effect (they both love to make movies, the film will have you know). A lot of me myself and I and my golden child so far. Then finally, around minute 8, the actual story of Jacob the Ugandan kid. This is the part where you cry and want to give Invisible Children all your money, you want to go into the jungle and kill that motherfucker Kony by the most painful means at your disposal. This is all that was needed.
But then the silliness starts: we are going to stop African warlord Joseph Kony and Dude is going to tell us exactly how to do it: with posters and bracelets and a lot of enthusiastic high school kids asking the US government to militarily aid a foreign army. Hmmm... Oh, and by tweeting Rihanna and Lady Gaga, among other celebrities. Celebrities. Wow. I'm sure this and tweeting policy makers like George Bush and Condi Rice will bring Kony to his knees.
Then, in what I consider the most cringeworthy segment of all, Dude brings out his poor son again (there seems to be a daughter in there somewhere, but she is ignored) and supposedly explains to him about "the bad guy". You can self-aggrandize all you want, but why bring your child into this? It feels staged and willfully naive and is terribly unseemly. After all, you are talking about helping children who live in a nightmare of poverty, war, disease and violence. Get your spoiled kid out of the picture.
That the kid and his dad seem to have almost the same simplistic notions of morality is a little scary and quite telling, albeit unintended, I'm sure.  In the United States we live in a universe comprised of moral absolutes. The rest of the world understands life is a gray area.  But here is the kid talking about the bad guys in Star Wars, and it seems in Dude's worldview there is not much difference between that and a horribly complicated African civil war. The over-simplification of the American "bad guy" ethos is what gets the US in hot water most of the time, after all.
I could not help but notice every time they showed the International Court most wanted list, the second guy after public enemy number one Kony was also an Ugandan. Another Bad Guy. What about him?
The biggest problem is the marketing aspect of the whole thing. It sounds, smells and looks like one of those integrated campaigns that win advertising awards at the Cannes Lions every year. This one is glib, simplistic, banal, self-aggrandizing, willfully naive, tasteless and embarrassingly tone deaf. Don't get me wrong: the Dude has tried to make a difference with great amounts of passion and persistence for 9 years, and his operation is as buff and shiny and beautifully produced as a Hollywood movie. I don't begrudge him his commitment. In fact, I waver between admiration and queasiness, because I am trying to do something similar for a more modest social issue concerning kids (getting Mexican high school students in NYC to finish high school). And I had the same idea, being a creative person, to use creative tools and talent to raise awareness. A lot of what I saw in the IC video is admirable, and worth emulating, but I found most of the creative strategy and execution quite disturbing. More schools and mentors, education and support for Ugandan kids? Awesome. Bring it. Cheerleading the US to interfere with the Ugandan Army? Is that the only option? I'm not so sure.
I thoroughly despise the concept of "make Kony Famous". I find the posters that Shepard Fairey has designed to be so cool as to make desirable the icons of the "bad guys" (Kony, Bin Laden and Hitler, another reductio ad absurdum). Does Fairey have only one visual idea left? It looks just like his Obama poster!
I find the whole thing naive in the worst kind of way. And I'm not even discussing the realpolitik aspect of it, which I barely understand.
Clearly a lot of the money has gone to produce this highly polished piece of work, which is extremely well done, beautifully shot and edited, as is the website for the organization. These guys are communicators, not policy makers. They may have succeeded in bringing attention to the issue, but the fact they are being harshly criticized points to an extremely flawed communications problem.
In short: the campaign makes little sense. The posters of donkeys and elephants merging with a dove with a Kony 2012? Confusing. This might work stateside, but what does the rest of the world care for the GOP and the Dems? It makes it seem like Kony is a third party candidate, an option even worse than Santorum, which until now was inconceivable. Don't be surprised if some yahoos actually think Kony is  running for office. This beside the fact that it is way too American-centric, instead of aiming for a more global reach.
Buried in all that slightly revolting can-do all-together-now spirit is a tagline that makes sense: "the one thing we can all agree on". A global campaign could be built around this idea, beyond our pathetic two-party system. However, it's lost among all the aimless American self-congratulation. The bracelet? Let's not even go there. Tweeting Ryan Seacrest? Barf. And the idea of making this criminal famous? Abhorrent. This is the plan to bring Kony to justice: under cover of night we are going to paper our magnificent cities in posters. Now the entire world will know about Joseph Kony. Is this going to make him come out of the jungle waving a white flag? He is probably relishing the notoriety as we speak. Terrorists love fame. That's how they terrorize. Is this the best way to bring the guy to our attention, let alone the plight of Africa? No. It is the glibbest, the most vulgar, the most unfortunately attuned with our own farkakte, assbackwards American celebutard values, but that doesn't mean it's good.

Mexican Memes

Mexicans have always been known for their sense of humor. Mexican culture is awash with jokes, puns, double entendres and what we call ingenio, which is something as funny as wit, but less dry. Yet I don't think anyone foresaw how much mileage Mexican humor was going to get out of new technologies like Photoshop, You Tube and social media, which are starting to make Mexico look like the capital of memes. 

About a week after 9/11, if not sooner, I get an urgent email from my friend Pancho, with the following subject: "They found Osama Bin Laden". I open it, my heart racing, and I see a picture of Osama sitting placidly in a gondola in Xochimilco, a place where Mexican families go to have Sunday picnics on the water. To this day, it's the best thing I ever saw.
Apparently, it's the gift that keeps on giving:

Same when they couldn't find Ghadaffi:

Looks like the taquero from hell to me, even though, true to his Middle Eastern roots, he is hiding behind a spit of shwarma.
Any time a Mexican public figure makes a gigantic blunder, Mexicans and their ingenio take over cyberspace. A meme was created when newsanchor Joaquín López Dóriga attempted to interview Sir Anthony Hopkins and asked him "Juay De Rito" (Why The Rite?).
More recently, the PRI's candidate for president, a pompadoured calamity called Enrique Peña Nieto, was taken to task for not being able to answer correctly what three books have most influenced him, as he made an appearance at the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, the most important event of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world. You would think he'd brush up on his reading, given the nature of the event, but true to the caste of patronizing demagogues of his party, who are used to blathering from above and are completely unable to speak off the cuff, he was taken aback by the question and proceeded to pontificate without saying absolutely anything or remembering correctly the title of at least one book (not counting the Bible, which he said he had read parts of).
The barrage of tweets and doctored photos that invaded the net show no sign of abating.
His daughter then posted a tweet saying "a greeting to the bunch of fuckheads that are part of the prole (tariat) and who only criticize who they envy".
Now all of Mexico is claiming prolehood.
Gandhi, a chain of bookstores, famous for their clever ads, did not waste any time coming up with some funny print ads. Because their ads are easy to copy, Mexicans went to work on dozens of alternate versions:

There are pictures of Peña Nieto conferring with the actual Gandhi, with the Pope, and one of him as the swaddled baby of two of the most notoriously corrupt and sinister members of the PRI, ex-president Carlos Salinas and undying PRI fixture Elba Esther Gordillo.
Among the tweets:

"Let's read something by Martin Burger King #PeñaNietoBookstore"

"What is your favorite Benedetti? The pepperoni one, of course". #PeñaNietoBookstore"

"Three books that marked me for life: 1) Los Reebook, 2) La Notebook, y 3) El Facebook. #PeñaNietoBookstore"

 There are also many hashtags for the "prole" comment.

Apparently, at the PRI's behest, which is revolting business as usual, Twitter tried to censor the PeñaNietoBookstore# hashtag after it started trending with over 60,000 tweets. There was a huge outcry and they allowed it again. One thing these lamentable politicos do not appreciate is freedom of expression. They are used to despotism, but Mexico is changing. There is no more delicious schadenfreude than to see these corrupt bozos exposed by the citizenry for the frauds they are. It may not be funny to them, but it is seriously funny for us.
Social media can change things. Hopefully this idiot will not become the President of Mexico after this.

The Aftermath of Disaster

This was published in Spanish by Reforma exactly one year after the attacks.

After the initial shock, apparently I went back to my normal, ornery self:

Tuesday, September 11. Night.

South of 14^th Street, the island is cordoned off. Nobody can go below 14^th Street unless they show proof of residence in the area or are joining the rescue mission. Phones don’t work very well. I have less trouble calling my family in Mexico than making a local call. I feel relatively quiet, but I know my emotional distance comes from some automatic defense mechanism and not from my own volition.

The silence on the street is total, except for the sound of police sirens, helicopters and fire trucks, which is rather sparse given the magnitude of the disaster. I get international calls from some concerned friends. They know I live nearby. I watch TV and have internet on at the same time. On TV they regurgitate the horrible images of the explosions and collapses over and over, ad nauseam.

I have never heard such silence in my block, a spot full of usually crowded bars. A city in which people go out to eat, to drink, to dance seven days a week, has been completely silenced. A permanent hum scares sleep away. I don’t understand where it comes from. I open the windows to better listen to it. The smell of burnt rubber invades my apartment. I realize that what I’m hearing is the labored breathing of the buildings. 

Wednesday, September 12.

Today it smells worse. Giuliani has said that we should stay at home and we obey him. Giuliani, resented by many in this liberal city because of his abrasive personality and his puritanical and paternalist tendencies, behaves compassionately, intelligently and prudently, and he inspires trust. I have been cooped up at home all day. The phone rings every 15 minutes. Friends from all over the world call to comfort themselves that we are fine. Their calls make more bearable the loneliness and terror that have settled in the pit of my stomach. My intuition is that they are just as scared of the new world disorder that threatens to engulf us all. The calls are of mutual support. My friend Delia writes that her young daughter dreams at night of people jumping out of windows.

Between the acrid ashes and the media coverage, I’m disgusted. I decide to go outside and sniff around. Kids play under the cloud of dust and ash, followed closely by their parents. Some bars, restaurants and cafes are open. I see clusters of people standing on the corners that look south. I don’t understand what they are looking at. People wander around aimlessly from one corner to the next, shooting pictures and videos.

In this town of screamers, few people talk. At the corner of Houston and Sixth Ave, next to the fire station, a crowd gathers. People cheer every time rescuers or ash-covered firefighters go by. A young woman scrutinizes a lamppost and I decide she is crazy until I focus my eyes on the post and see the flyers with the pictures and names of the missing and the desperate messages imploring for news of their whereabouts.

I cry because these bastards have paralyzed my unstoppable city. But not completely. On the opposite corner, two Italian restaurants have opened their doors and the beautiful people eat pasta and drink wine au plein air, air rife with traces of asbestos, pulverized concrete and what in my view have got to be the human ashes of at least five thousand souls. However, I’m not surprised. I always knew that New Yorkers would never relinquish their inalienable right to go out for dinner, regardless of whatever catastrophe the future may bring. With this logic, I tell my husband, who is safe and sound in Panama, that this is the best week to make reservations at the hottest New York restaurants. But who has the appetite?
Since there is no traffic south of 14^thSt., some people make their dreams come true and glide through the empty streets on their rollerblades and bicycles.

Something never before seen: people look you in the eye as they pass you by. Men see me walking alone and look like they are ready to comfort me (and look like they are ready to be comforted back). The way things are, it seems that this week all the single girls may find a beau.

A guy gives me a small comic book. The doodles are very modern, but the content turns out to be an exhortation to return to the lap of our lord Jesus Christ, sponsored by one of those sects there’s no shortage of in this country, of loony evangelicals who are way too eager for the end of the world. Of course, they could not take long to materialize. How did they get to New York is beyond me, Greenwich Village even more so. Or were they already here?

At night there is thunder and lightning and military planes zoom by. I’m not scared. I have the air conditioner on to avoid hearing the silence. 

Thursday, September 13. 

North of 14^th Street, Manhattan seems perfectly normal, except taxis refrain from honking their insane horns. In the advertising agency I work at, I learn that one of our colleagues has lost his niece. My eyes tear up with indignation constantly.

Some of our clients have asked us to take a look at our commercials currently on air to make sure they don’t say things like “ A delicious explosion of flavor” or “A bomb of refreshment”. We make jokes in bad taste: “The Osama of sodas”, “A Jihad of nutrition for your family”.

Bush has declared that we all should go out at noon and pray at the worship place of our choice, which seems to me the stupidest idea that can occur to the president of a country in crisis, in a city which may still harbor extremists strapped with explosives. Besides, as an agnostic, I feel frankly discriminated against. In fact, I feel very alone in my distaste for these government-sponsored paroxisms of spirituality.

To judge from the tone that the media here have adopted, from now on we will be exposed to an indiscriminate barrage of sentimentalism and cheap patriotism. I have already started getting despicable chain letters with feelings of unity, prayer and revenge. The news are no longer news. They are lachrymose testimonies of the poor people who are desperately looking for their dead ones. I wonder what they are saying in the Middle East. What does Saddam think, for instance, what has Muammar declared, what’s the story in Kabul. If I watch the local news, I’m never going to find out. Here they are showing a paramedic that found a doll amid the rubble (there’s always one) and he intends to erect a monument with it if no one claims it.

The cloud of acrid dust has spread beyond 14^th street. I search for mouth masks at the drugstores. They are all out.

Bush, who since the incident, has the mien of a kid lost in the supermarket, uses an inflammatory and reductive rhetoric that seems taken straight out of a Hollywood action flick. We’re gonna smoke them, he says, Wanted, dead or alive. I haven’t the slightest doubt that this helps incite the incidents of harassment against members of the Arab-American community, and what is worse, against anybody who wears a beard and/or a turban. An idiot screams at the owner of a falafel joint nearby, “you make money here, but this is my country”, followed by a string of invective. Even though there are four Arabs and one aggressor, they remain silent. Standing half a block away, I can feel their fear. I don’t dare intervene.

Between testimonies, I read in the CNN news ticker the following item: an Islamic extremist in a German jail called the American authorities and warned them that there would be an attack on the WTC. Nobody talks about that. Nobody talks about the fact that Osama was trained by the CIA and that the Taliban is the result of American intervention in Afghan affairs. Nobody mentions these details, except some liberal friends that send me emails with such information. But, like Seamus Milne of The Guardian said, Americans react as if this instance of terror is a sheer impulse of evil that came out of nowhere, random and incomprehensible. They can't conceive that they may have done something to provoke it. They don’t know how much and why they are hated. It’s true. Information exists in this country and it is available to anybody, but few are interested. In general, the lack of American curiosity about the world is alarming.

 Union Square has become a spontaneous meeting ground to write thoughts, leave votive candles, hang pictures, play the congas. A group of young people sing and dance Give Peace A Chance, a song I’ve always found intolerably kitschy. A vigil has been organized at 7 pm. People are asked to light a candle in memory of the victims. A big crowd has gathered. A couple appears dressed as the Twin Towers. They are on stilts, dressed in black velvet leggings covered with shards of mirrors. They dance among the people, who are taking pictures. Why do these expressions of solidarity disgust me so much? Because they are vulgar, childish and innocent. Everything becomes a circus. I go to a movie and spend the entire screening thinking that an extremist is going to blow us all to pieces. 

Friday, September 14.

A regular day. North of 14th St. it looks like nothing ever happened. Taxis blare and create jams, people eat in restaurants.  New York, as usual.  

Saturday, September 15.

A friend who was upstate at the time of the catastrophe wants me to go with him to Canal St., which is now the border of the city. He wants to see something concrete. The only concrete thing to see are hordes of people with little American flags and tourists. People are snapping up postcards with pictures of the towers. The only concrete thing there is to see is a smoking crater at the end of the city’s canyons.

We have lunch at a restaurant where we are treated as if we had descended straight from heaven. Every two minutes they ask us if the food is to our liking. In fact, it is excellent. It is the first decent meal I’ve had since Tuesday. I feel it has been prepared with an intense desire to forget everything and come back to our banal normalcy. It tastes like glory.

A group of friends and I go to the movies. We need to get out of this funk. We pick Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of The Assassins, based on the book by Fernando Vallejo. The film is in Spanish, which is delicious. And it turns out to have plenty of resonance. It’s about a different kind of terror (drug violence in Colombia), but it is hilarious, blasphemous, violent, and we enjoy it. A lot of its dark humor escapes the small audience. One of us says that when you live with the social injustice that causes this kind of savagery, you have a much more refined sense of irony. A phrase in the film is burnished in my mind. I paraphrase: 

“But child, don't you know that the difference between thought and action is civilization?"

My friends go home but I don't want to go to sleep. I go back to Union Square. The candles and the congas are still there. There’s a group of pale bearded guys and skeletal women with long skirts that sing songs only they know. Another sect. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of lit votive candles, bouquets of flowers, poems, exhortations for moderation, prudence and sanity. The catch phrase of the day is "An eye for an eye and we all go blind". People, respectful, are silent.

I find a Mexican flag. Someone has written on it 500 mexican ilegals (sic) unnamed. I find it an exaggerated number, but I don't doubt it. They are the kitchen helpers, the pizza delivery guys, the bathroom cleaners. I have not seen photocopies of their portraits, nor their names, or faces or teary relatives on TV. 

I can’t say I’m praying for them and their families, but my mind finally becomes silent.

In the Apocalyptic City

I wrote this text in Spanish on September 11, 2001. It was published in Reforma on September of that year.

I have lived, for almost 10 years, about 20 blocks north of the Twin Towers. If you take my street and walk south, you arrive directly at their doors. Today, Tuesday, September 11, a splendid day, I left my house at 8:35 am, earlier than usual. I walked, as I do every day, on the east side of Washington Square Park. Suddenly, something made me look up. I saw the belly of a plane flying among the buildings, right above me. I was alarmed at how low it was flying. It was a commercial passenger airplane. I could clearly see the details on the fuselage. I feared it was going to crash against the thirty-story building I live in. It seemed to be heading straight towards it. I saw it tilt and correct course and I thought it probably had a mechanical failure and it would never make it to La Guardia or Newark, the nearest airports. 

I had a feeling something was very wrong.

I felt like making sure nothing had happened to my building, so I turned around and started walking towards it. To judge from the oblivious people on the street, I decided I was paranoid. No more than two minutes later, I heard a loud metallic noise. My heart skipped a beat when I saw people looking up and south. I approached the growing crowd and saw that the plane had caved a giant hole in the upper floors of one of the towers. People on the street were talking frantically on cell phones and on public phones and we were all asking each other what had happened, who had seen it happen. I decided to go home, because the Polish lady who cleans my house speaks almost no English, and I wanted to make sure she was fine. She hadn’t even noticed.

I decided to walk back to work. As all of us on the street gaped in amazement at the burning tower, an enormous ball of fire bloomed and exploded on the side of the second tower. At first we thought it had been caused by the fire on the first tower. Someone, with a cell phone on one hand and a Walkman radio on the other, said it was a second plane that crashed against the second tower. Up until then I assumed it had all been an accident, but now the possibility that it had been a terrorist act made me nauseous. I felt terror.

I don’t know why I went to my office. Perhaps to get as far as I could from there. People were clustering on the streets that had a view towards the World Trade Center. There were no screams nor panic, just incredulity, anxiety and a certain citizen solidarity. Some people turned on their car radios at full volume so we could all hear the news. People who probably don’t look at each other at the subway: office workers, homeless people, Blacks, whites, were sharing rumors and impressions. It was like being in a Godzilla or Hollywood disaster movie, with particularly spectacular special effects.

I stopped to greet my friendly Bangladeshi fruit vendor. He reminds me of the market vendors in Mexico because he always gives me a piece of fruit to taste. He told me he had seen the plane crash against the tower with his own eyes. He was devastated next to his fruit cart.

At the office, many of my colleagues were at the cubicle next to mine, which had a view of the conflagration. Everyone was somber and scared, although someone joked that “they” had made a mistake, the attack should have been meant for our building. Rumors were flying: a fire in the Pentagon, other hijacked planes, people are jumping out the windows of the towers. Then I heard my colleagues scream, and in a matter of seconds, only one tower was standing. Thick clouds of gray ash rose with a magnitude similar only to scenes of bombardments at war. To see only one Twin Tower in the New York skyline is almost like seeing someone lose a limb in front of you. An amputated city. More radio reports: closed airports, closed subways, closed bridges; the island, incommunicado. My stomach ached. From the bathroom I heard people running. When I came out, there were no more Twin Towers. Only a giant crater, from which rose monstrous clouds of ash and thick black smoke.

The accuracy of the destruction and its sadistic progression were unreal. Like people don’t tire of repeating, it was a situation comparable, at least visually, to the moronic, improbable things that happen in action movies. My friends conjectured even worse scenarios: panic on the streets, bombs in the tunnels that connect the island, biological warfare. But the great majority tried to articulate their shock and find a coherent motivation to explain an evil of such magnitude.

 We were sent home. Most people who work in Manhattan, come from outside the island: Brooklyn, or Queens, or New Jersey. Many were stranded in their offices or on the streets. Others crossed some of the bridges that were open only for pedestrians. From Brooklyn, my boss told me that his neighborhood was covered in ash and scraps of printing paper.

Walking back home, I had never seen so many people on the streets of New York. From the tip of the island masses of people advanced north. I was struck by the silence. By the absence of cars. The absence of horns, engines, the daily insults that make this one of the world’s noisiest cities. I went by an ATM and I was the only one there. The machines worked and they were loaded with money. I was comforted by the citizens’ absolute lack of hysteria. Supermarkets and delis were full of people, but they were calmly buying their lunch or groceries. I stopped by my Bangladeshi pal. People were buying fruit from him. I bought figs, strawberries and bananas. He gave me a discount and a free plum. The only thing he said to me was: “War”.

I refused to participate in the massive consumption of groceries, until a friend insisted I should at least buy bottled water, cans of food and candles. At the supermarket there was no bottled water or powdered milk left, but there was plenty of everything else. People whispered, as if we were ashamed of being alive and shopping. A guy used the opportunity to buy four tubs of ice cream. I also thought that the apocalypse is a good pretext to stuff yourself on potato chips, which is what I felt like doing, although I restrained myself and only bought water, basic staples and a ridiculous packet of instant ramen.

It’s now 6 pm, and the streets belong to the pedestrians and to the trucks and cranes at the ready to clean up the extensive wreckage. Some people use the unheard of circumstances to live their fantasy: they glide on their rollerblades or bicycles on the empty streets. Others take pictures and videos for posterity. Below my apartment, kids play ball just like in any other Summer afternoon, and the coffee shop in the corner is open. Some minutes ago, people on the corner watched one more building of the WTC complex collapse. 

Like Mayor Giuliani’s, the common sense of New Yorkers greatly moved me. This is the capital of the world. Not because it hosts Wall Street or because it concentrates some of the most important multinational corporations, but because of the people who live and work here. We come from every corner of the globe, we speak every language, we come in every color and have every religious belief. This magnificent city has adopted us all. To attack New York is not to attack the United States, it is to attack the entire world.

 

Anything Goes

Yesterday, as I was wiping tears of joy looking at all that spirited tap dancing going on in Anything Goes, I was thinking, this is what is truly American. Cole Porter is truly American. Putting on a Broadway show and hoofing gloriously is unabashedly, uniquely American. So I thought that a much more meaningful display of patriotism, rather than cheer for the death of that evil bastard (I am thrilled that he died, I just don't think I should erupt in pom poms and rah rahs in public), is to listen to the songs of Cole Porter, sing and dance to the songs of Cole Porter, learn tap dancing to the songs of Cole Porter, and fall in love to the songs of Cole Porter. If none of this is possible, go see Anything Goes on Broadway and you'll get a pass.
One should not be overly nostalgic for past eras, although the gorgeous costumes by Martin Pakledinaz (so rooting for a Tony for him) are so absolutely stunning that they made me pine for the days of the great depression and the Nazis. But that is the point of glamor. Those gorgeous bias cut satin silhouettes, all that art deco make one forget that 1934 was not a bed of roses by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, listening to the work of genius that is "You're the Top", and wallowing in misery at what passes for songwriting today, one does pine for the days of when Americans were as sophisticated, urbane, witty, elegant, smart and delightful as Cole Porter.
The guy was from Peru, Indiana, so there is no excuse.
Whatever happened to us? Couldn't we have enacted civil rights, gone to the moon, vanquished the Nazis, ushered in women's lib and all that jazz, without losing our joie de vivre and panache? Without becoming ignorant, holier than thou, vulgar and uncouth?
Anything Goes is a little musty, even with a spiffy new book the jokes are gently quaint, but it is enormously charming. This is the first time I see it and it is the very first time I hear the songs of Cole Porter in a play onstage, as part of a dramatic story. I can see why he is a favorite of jazz musicians (think Sinatra, Bennett, Ella), because those songs are so good they deserve not so much to be belted out, but whispered, with the utmost articulation, in one's ear. As much as I enjoyed the show, I felt there was far too much belting going on. A song like "I Get a Kick out of You" was so much more powerful when Sutton Foster sang it quietly.  Sometimes words were lost in the belting. And Porter's words cannot ever be lost, because that is a crime.
Also, today we have amplification. The most sophisticated microphones still make good singers sound tinny. So it's hard for me to imagine, when this show was staged before, was it amplified as if with a loudspeaker, or did people belt them out au naturel? Sitting way up in the heights, I could tell Sutton Foster is a total trouper. She is also like seven feet tall. I loved Joel Grey, even with all that shtick, he was super sweet and has perfect comic timing. John McMartin was great as Elisha Whitney, the lush, I particularly loved Jessica Stone as Erma the bombshell and the wonderful Adam Godley as Lord Evelyn Oakley.

He can say it better than I ever could:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose,
Anything goes.
The world has gone mad today,
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaux.
When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo'es,
Anything goes!

Revenge is Sweet

I am not talking about the USA's revenge against Osama Bin Laden, who was finally killed by US forces. Nobody really knows what this act will bring in terms of foreign policy or domestic security in the long run. 
My instincts are that it's better that it happened now, when the notion and the power of Islamic terrorism seems to have been greatly diminished, not only by the pounding they've been getting ever since 9/11, but more significantly, I believe, by the recent popular uprisings in the Arab world, that seem to distance the majority of Arab citizens from a desire to live in darkness under brutal, stone age theocracies. The Islamonazis have become highly irrelevant.
To see idiots celebrating in front of the White House as if they were cheering for a winning sports team, made my stomach turn. If they are really so proudly invested in this victory, the lazy asses should be serving their country in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, instead of beating their hollow chests from the sidelines.
But for President Barack H. Obama, this is a great vindication and hopefully (one can dream) an opportunity to end the demeaning discourse from his detractors and professional insulters once and for all. As a symbolic act, it is highly meaningful, making the former Bush administration's silly victory theater and pathetic posturing even more stupid and incompetent in retrospect, if that is possible. But for all those Republicans who fan the flames against the president with their insidious accusations of displaced loyalty, lack of patriotism, the wrong religion, and no citizenship, I wonder what are they going to say now. It was interesting that while the three major networks were covering the news last night since 10:30, only at the very last minute did Fox News start their coverage. Is John Boehner going to erupt in tears of joy and gratitude to Obama? At the very least I would hope that this will make Donald Trump go back to his filthy hole and stay there. 
I could have done without the heavy handed mawkishness at the beginning of the speech, even as I understand it is an attempt to temper, rhetorically, an action that is nothing but stone cold, almost Biblical, revenge (and hence not all that civilized, but some things have to be done). Would it have been better to capture the guy alive and start a whole new legal, media and political circus? With the horrible legal issues that we are still mired in with KSM and other terrorists in our hands, probably not. I bet the calculation was, better that Bin Laden be a stupid martyr than for us to have to treat him well and clothe him and feed him for years. Just wipe the bastard out. (Now go get Al-Zawahiri).
But what was important, besides the President's clarification to the Muslim world, which for the most part seems to understand Al Qaeda as an insane distorsion of their religion, is that Obama placed himself at the front and center of this decision process. It was not narcissism that prompted Obama to make clear that it was HIM as the Commander in Chief, who gave the orders to go ahead with the action. And it was HIM who has been involved in its planning and execution (far more impressive that putting on a bomber jacket and behaving like a child on the deck of a ship).
It was a timely show of leadership, and a huge domestic political victory. Hopefully a line has been drawn to stop the rhetoric of humiliation and show the POTUS some well deserved respect.