When the Mummy Speaks, Beware!

George Will is just a corrupt and smug old mummy, his ethics as dead and dry as his dusty Brooks Brothers wrappings.

Go Ahead and Tread on Them. Please.

Tea Baggers fresh off the Fox-worshipped Cliven Bundy ranchmarched into a Las Vegas Walmart, murdered two police officers and covered their bodies with a “Don’t Tread on Me’ flag.

As the lid comes off the boiling pot of science-hating, greed-worshipping, ammosexual America, thanks to all the policies Fox News has lied to endorse, the Fox propagandists are going to have to be working overtime to deflect the blame. 
I hope it gives them all heart attacks.

H.L. Mencken, Avuncular A-hole

 “Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

— H. L. Mencken

The fabled Baltimore journalist Henry Louis Mencken was soft on Herr Hitler, loathed Mr. Roosevelt and sneered at the working poor — in short, he was an a-hole.

Oh, I know he was complex and had his good points, but his reluctance to criticize German militarism was palpable, and his indifference to the sufferings of ordinary people in the Depression was frankly brutal.

H.L. Mencken

The astute biographer Terry Teachout makes numerous special pleadings for the man. But you can only read so many sentences like "As fantastic as his point of view now sounds, it was well within the boundaries of normal political in the mid-thirties” before you conclude, “Okay, he was an asshole.”

“I knew Mencken's friend Huntington Cairns, although I was a small child at the time,” my friend Merri Ferrell recalled. “I remember the general ideology of his circle (my parents among them) that loathed FDR and their reactionary politics. Among other things, they embraced some version of Darwin that put them at the top of the heap, when in fact, they had none of the survival skills of laborers, but rather were born into privilege.”

I have admired Mencken’s quotes for decades, and am surprised to find how little taste I have for the smug little man himself. In his defense, I will say that great artists turning out to be assholes is not a rare thing.

Christopher Hitchens — who was oddly like Mencken in several ways — remarked, “In the celebrated confrontation with William Jennings Bryan, for example, where the superstitious old populist feared that scientific Darwinism would open the door to social Darwinism, Mencken shared the same opinion but with more gusto. He truly believed that it was a waste of time and energy for the fit to succor the unfit.”

Mencken's loathing for FDR went beyond the political into pure personal enmity, by the way. After Mencken denounced FDR in a speech before a press club, he was shocked to hear FDR slap him down handily in a talk before the same group later that same afternoon.

In a perfect riposte to his “friend” Mencken, FDR launched into an eloquent, high-flown dissertation on what fools and mountebanks American journalists — and by extension the men in the room — were. “A hush fell over the room,” Teachout writes. "Only one man knew at once that FDR's remarks had been lifted verbatim from 'Journalism in America,' the first chapter of Mencken's Own 'Prejudices: Sixth Series.'"

“Mencken was notoriously wrong in many of his opinions and judgments,’ noted Robert Schmuhl in the Chicago Tribune. “As far as he was concerned, the Depression was no big deal, Adolf Hitler was ignorant rather than evil and Franklin Roosevelt was the embodiment of American politics at its worst. But in dramatizing his views, Mencken always injected humor ‘full of slapstick vigor’ and distinctive phrasing that often made what he thought less compelling than how he presented his myriad prejudices. He endlessly ridiculed the ‘booboisie’ (a term he coined) and never missed a chance to expose the ‘buncombe,’ ‘balderdash’ or ‘numskullery’ of this ‘land of abounding quackeries.’”

Yes, Mencken did not suffer fools gladly. Unfortunately, he not infrequently made one of himself. Yes, Mencken could write beguiling memoirs about his childhood and young manhood in Baltimore, but the “Sage of Baltimore” spent most of his time as a political writer who was wrong in just about every political prediction he made (he claimed that FDR was a dictator who was worse than Hitler, and would terminate U.S. elections).

In other words, Mencken would have fit right into today’s American corporate media, where a pundit who is consistently wrong remains gainfully employed and is in fact handsomely rewarded as long as his erroneous copy kisses up to capital and backhands labor. Mencken could have fit snugly into that snotty Club of Davids (Brooks, Gregory and Broder). Of course, unlike those three, Mencken actually had to bear the burden of some talent.

“All men are frauds,” Mencken said. “The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

Source: “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken” by Terry Teachout

Savoring Somebody Else's Thrills

Live action super heroes were thin on the ground when I was a boy.

We had little beyond Superman and Zorro on TV and Tarzan at the movies until 1966, when Batman wowed the tube and Superman flew to Broadway.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that the generation ahead of me had been much luckier, thrilling to dozens of superheroes from the comic books, the newspaper comic strips, the pulp magazines, radio drama and original screenplays as they dashed manically across the movie screen in 15-minute chapter plays every Saturday during the 1930s and 1940s. Each hero’s adventure added up to three or four hours on screen!

I longed to see them as a boy, but they were never shown. When I did get to watch them as an adult, I could still see beyond the repetitive action of the endless, breathless chases and the strained production values to the cinema sorcery that set someone else’s childhood soaring.

The best superhero movie serials? I think they were: 
• Republic’s 1942 “Spy Smasher” starring the able, handsome Kane Richmond as the Fawcett Comic hero. The production values were high (I suspect they used some other film’s classy leftover sets), the action was fine and the wartime plot was even poignant at points.

Captain Marvel: Hollywood's first live-action superman

• Republic’s 1941 “Adventures of Captain Marvel” starring Tom Tyler, which helped propel the good captain into stratospheric comic book sales during the 1940s. The flying effects and fight stunts are still admirable, clearly labors of love. Watch, for example, as Captain Marvel kicks two thugs in the chin with a back flip.

• Columbia’s 1942 “The Secret Code,” starring Paul Kelly (an actor whose career was not confined to the serial ghetto) as the Black Commando. For once, a superhero identity has an almost credible rationale — Kelly plays an American agent who has infiltrated a Nazi spy ring, and who periodically thwarts their plans as the Black Commando without blowing his cover. It’s an original character, but, as my friend David Goode has observed, this could easily have been a serial featuring MLJ Comics’ popular hero the Black Hood.

•  Republic’s late entry, the 1949 serial “King of the Rocket Men.” More of those sharp flying effects are featured in serial about an original character who directly inspired Commando Cody and the Rocketeer. The serial ends, rather startlingly and spectacularly, with the destruction of Manhattan by super-scientific tidal wave.

I thought superheroes were supposed to prevent that kind of thing? Oh, well. Rocket Man did succeed in entertaining us.

Abnormal is the New Normal in Ammosexual America

"We now have the perfect formula for horror: cut mental health funding, cut education in the arts and everything else that builds empathy and the human spirit, worship a military industrial imperial 'culture' of violence sold as 'defense,' desensitize our young men with violent porn, abandon all gun regulation, accept irony and cynicism as entertainment and 'higher education' and then teach unstable young men to shoot and to glorify violence all round."
"We’re getting so cynical that we probably won’t even care or notice when there is a mass killing a week or a day, instead of 'only' once a month or so. Shoot-the-toddler video games anyone?" — Frank Schaeffer
By the way, Schaeffer wrote that before the American mass shootings were weekly, as they are now. Daily mass murder is coming right up.

“That didn’t take long,” Juan Cole noted. “The Georgia GOP rushed into law an ‘open carry’ provision in April allowing people to tote around guns in bars and churches (apparently these are felt to be complementary institutions in Georgia) and schools (these are apparently felt to be full of expendable if short people in Georgia).

“Then the national GOP and Fox Cable News (the ‘Josef Goebbels Commemorative Propaganda Division of the American Right Wing’) backed Cliven Bundy in his ‘sovereign citizen’ claims that he doesn’t have to pay federal grazing fees.

“So on Saturday a sovereign citizen and former Transportation Department employee (who made his money from the Federal government he hates) showed up outside a Georgia courthouse armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and other munitions and with the clear intent of taking hostages inside the courthouse.  He was open carrying, you see, and standing up against big government.  Or rather standing overtop it with a gun to its head.

“This was a clear act of terrorism, but since it was committed by a white person, no one brought the word up.”

The Letters "GOP" Spell "Shameless."

Everything 21^st century Republicans say is a calculated and shameless political lie.  Everything.  If they happen to speak the truth, it’s merely coincidental.

Here, for example, are real headlines from the same right-wing source.

10/13/13: "Horrible. Obama to Leave US POW to Rot in Afghanistan After Withdrawal."

6/3/14: "Figures. Obama Administration Promoted Bergdahl to Sergeant After He Reportedly Joined Taliban."

The Republicans have even scrubbed the previous, completely contradictory statements they made about the POW. Those erstwhile lies are “no longer operative,” as Nixon’s henchmen used to say. Down the memory hole of a compliant corporate media they must go. “The hypocrisy manages to be both stunning yet also banal,even predictable,” wrote Will Bunch. “It's not rocket science. Sgt. Bergdahl was never a living, breathing human to these people -- just what the director Alfred Hitchcock would have called a ‘MacGuffin,’ an insignificant prop that exists to drive the real storyline, and that storyline is tearing down Obama as an un-American pretender to the White House. In 2013, Obama was a coward who didn't understand our most basic principle of ‘no man left behind.’ In 2014, Obama was a treasonous dictator who put the nation at risk to rescue an undeserving deserter who should be court-martialed, maybe executed. The two narratives are ridiculously, laughably contradictory except for one element: They both involve a president named Barack Hussein Obama.”

Even that swine Oliver effing North weighs in.

In the Depression, Were They Depressed? Nowhere Near

Mary Beth Donahue in "42nd Street" News-Progress photos by Keith Stewart.

Little “nifties” from the Fifties,

Innocent and sweet;

Sexy ladies from the Eighties,

Who are indiscreet.

They’re side by side, they’re glorified

Where the underworld can meet the elite,

Forty-Second Street.

— “42^nd Street”

By Dan Hagen

When you think of the generic term “Broadway musical,” the Little Theatre’s 2014 summer season opener — “42^nd Street” — is probably the kind of show that springs to mind.

It’s that “You’re going out there a youngster, but you’re coming back a star!” musical. Yes, that very bit has been a cliché for 70 or 80 years now, at least since the deep Depression debut, in 1933, of the Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler film that inspired this 1980 stage musical.

And that’s the problem I always have with this show, the paper-thin plot we’re stuck with. It’s not so much a plot, in fact, as a skeletal dramatic scaffolding on which to hang a number of crowd-pleasing tap-dance numbers.

Why, for example, does the lead character Peggy Sawyer have to be convinced to return and become a Broadway star when that’s the only thing she’s dreamed of all her life? The answer is that it doesn’t make any sense in terms of the character. It’s just a place holder for a big production number of “The Lullaby of Broadway.” Actors like Alex Jorth are saddled with characters like Billy Lawlor, who falls in love with the heroine the first second he sees her and then does nothing but sing and dance for the rest of the show.

In any case, the romantic relationships here, such as they are, are mere afterthoughts, taking a back seat on the ride to this musical’s real love, which is ambition for fame. Americans have had their idols for a long, long time, you know.

What can be done with this show, director/choreographer Kelly Shook and her cast gamely do. Luckily, they are able to razzle-dazzle their way to several happy, kinetic high spots, aided by the colorful period costumes of Edward Carignan, the spectacular lighting design of Greg Solomon and the musical direction of Kevin Long.

Those high points include:

• The cheerily vulgar comic number “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” starring John McAvaney, the vivacious Melissa Jones and Little Theatre veteran Therese Kincade, who has stage presence to spare in case anybody else runs out.

• Big, showy, rainbow-costumed dance numbers like “Dames,” in which vividly bright girls emerge from a big deco clock, and “Shadow Waltz,” where dancers are choreographed to interact with giant shadows.

• Gus Gordon, a familiar face at the Little Theatre, who brings a convincing, matter-of-fact authority to the role of the producer, Julian Marsh, and the voice of authority to the title tune.

• Lee Ann Payne, an Equity actress who is awfully good, much bigger than the material. Last year she stopped the show as Reno Sweeney, the Merman part, in “Anything Goes,” and here she’s again the big, established star who looms large in numbers like “Quarter to Nine.”

Heather Dore Johnson and Alex Jorth

• Mary Beth Donahue, who is really perfect as the heroine Peggy. She’s spectacularly pretty with a face that seems to radiate genuine sunshine, neither forced nor affected. Donahue dances well, and has something of the star quality of a young Shirley MacLaine.

Incidental intelligence: “42^nd Street’ runs through June 15. Based on a film that was in turn based on a novel by Bradford Ropes, the musical has book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, lyrics by Al Dubin, and music by Harry Warren. A 1980 Broadway production, directed by Gower Champion and orchestrated by Philip J. Lang, won the Tony Award for Best Musical. In London in 1984, the show won the Olivier Award for Best Musical and its 2001 Broadway revival won the Tony for Best Revival.

The show has scenic design by Alex M. Gaines and stage management by Jeremy J. Phillips. The cast includes Michael Weaver, David Barkley, Marty Harbaugh, Andy Hudson, Gabriel Alonzo Smith, Hanah Rose Nardone, Haley Jane Schafer, Heather Dore Johnson, Megan E. Farley, Emily Bacino Althaus, Emma Taylor, John Cardenas, Mike Danovich, Brady Miller, Niko Pagsisihan, Josh Houghton and Andy Frank.

For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375