STATUE; GESUNDHEIT

Hope everyone has had a safe and happy Veterans Day, and thank you to all veterans for their service!

Before this day was called Veterans Day, it was of course known as Armistice Day, and specifically marked the end of World War I; it was changed, in the U.S., to a day honoring all veterans in 1954.

A month or so ago I was in Washington, D.C. for The Day Gig, and with a few hours to kill I visited the recently-dedicated World War I Memorial, in Pershing Park not far from the White House. Incredibly, D.C. didn't have a general monument to that war until now. I took a few pictures that do it absolutely no justice at all...

Titled A Soldier's Journey, it's the work of figurative purist sculptor Sabin Howard. His technique is magnificent and the horrors of war are emotionally depicted, but the piece could be seen as perpetuating a square-jawed romanticism about war along with the horror. It's a masterpiece, but it made me feel ambivelent.

Wandering around nearby I also saw this statue of late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry...

I lived there in 1990, when Barry was arrested for drug use in an elaborate sting operation; I can only imagine how we would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a statue of him in D.C. But he became Mayor again in 1995, proof of a much less ominous sort than what we're going through currently that sometimes there are, indeed, second acts in American politics.

A little farther away I found this statue of Jose Artigas, father of Uruguayan independence...

Coming across stuff like this is one of the pleasures of that town. At least, it is if you're nerdy.

BABBITT STEW

Closing this Sunday, November 3, in Washington, D.C. is Babbitt, Joe DiPietro's stage adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel.

None other than Matthew Broderick plays the title role in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production, which I was lucky enough to see a couple of weeks ago when I was in D.C.

Strange to think that Ferris Bueller is old enough to play George Babbitt. We might tend to picture the role as the province of actors like Guy Kibbee, who played it in a 1934 movie version, or the grinning, wolfishly genial Edward Andrews, who played the character...

...in the 1960 movie version of Elmer Gantry.

But time marches inexorably on, and carries even an antic high school hustler like Ferris into the realms of complacent bourgeois middle age. And Broderick, who was born five days before I was in 1962, makes the role his own with a sort of dreamy, disassociated voice, as if he's halfheartedly playing at being an adult.

Even though it's in the third person, the book depends so much on describing its hero's sometimes barely conscious internal narratives that I wondered how it could really make the transition to the stage. DiPietro was way ahead of me. He locates his play in a library--the lovely, pristine set is by Walt Spangler--where a variety of attractive actors in contemporary clothes, in a variety of ages and races, are browsing.

The cast eventually starts reading aloud from Babbitt. Then a return cart is pushed onstage, with a large object on top, under a sheet. Said object turns out to be Broderick as we first see George Babbitt, rising from bed in the morning, brushing his teeth, having his breakfast. As George's day progresses, the readers, or "storytellers," assume the other roles. The device ingeniously allows for a diverse cast, and it allows them not only to narrate but sometimes to comment, omnisciently and often ironically, on the action. 

I was very keen to see this show, as I've been fascinated by all things Babbitt in recent years. In the early 2020s, I noticed an old Signet Classics edition of the book...

...in one of those little take-one leave-one libraries in an Italian ice place my family and I frequent, and reflected that I had never read the celebrated yarn, even though I love Lewis, and like so many people was astounded at the terrifying prescience and relevance of his 1935 It Can't Happen Here.

So I picked Babbitt up. A year or so later, I read it.

Even those who have never read Babbitt may have some idea of what it's about. The book was a sensation when it first came out in 1922, to the extent that the title character's name became a byword for a person of George's type, and his sort of behavior became known as "babbittry." 1945's Ziegfeld Follies even includes a duet between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to a song by George and Ira Gershwin called "The Babbitt and the Bromide," in which two gents exchange the same mindless pleasantries in all of their meetings, separated by decades, the only variations being costumes and dance styles.

The book itself, however, is the chronicle of two years in the life of George Babbitt, a real estate man and loyal Republican, Presbyterian and civic booster in the midwestern city of "Zenith." A husband and father, George is a happy consumer--proud to own "the best of the nationally advertised brands"--and an unquestioning social conservative and conformist.

Lewis follows him in painstaking detail as he goes through his days, exchanging commonplaces with colleagues and lecturing his son, venturing into public speaking and local politics, throwing parties angled at social climbing and going on camping trips and business trips. A shocking crime committed by his best friend shakes him up; he has an affair and eventually even flirts with socialism, but he never really grows much as a person. 

What an extraordinary work. I had a funky reaction to it, though; I'm guessing I can't be the only person who ever felt this way about it. I can't think of one episode in the book that didn't ring true, and still relevant, to me. It's amazing and appalling, for instance, when you read the scene of the racist talk between Babbitt and the guys in the smoking-car and you realize that you could set the same scene today, one hundred fucking years later, between a bunch of awful old white guys talking among themselves, and you wouldn't need to change a word. (This scene is omitted from the play, by the way.)

But as to the general method that Lewis uses to observe his hero, I had to wonder whether, if you followed anybody around--certainly including and maybe especially me--on our daily routines and our little adventures, and accurately reported our nattering internal monologues, you wouldn't get largely the same results: the same platitudes and evasions and self-justifications. Sure, the political and social values would shift a bit, but using the banality of Babbitt's inner life as Exhibit A in your indictment of his specific values seems specious to me. It had the odd effect of making me feel a little protective of old Georgie against the snarky God's-eye-view narration with which Lewis describes him. Or is it possible that was the intention? In any case, to paraphrase Flaubert, "Georges Babbitte; c'est moi."

The stage version had some of the same effect on me; listening to a D.C. audience chuckle condescendingly at George's hypocrisies, I had to wonder how many of us, if any, saw ourselves up there, at least a little bit.

By the way, I was astounded by another detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." I'd love to see a sequel to Lewis in which Babbitt has to infiltrate a dragon's lair.

HOPPY DAYS

This week The Day Gig took Your Humble Narrator to Washington, D.C. for a couple of quick, eventful days. I found myself giving a short speech at the German Embassy...

...and hanging out with the likes of Robert Edsel, author of The Monuments Men...

(Courtesy of Monuments Men and Women Foundation / © David Trozzo, All Rights Reserved)

I also made it to Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Babbitt...

...a remarkable new stage adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel, with Matthew Broderick in the title role.

Best of all, I got to hang out and chow down with my awesome nieces and their husbands...

For Taco Tuesday, I was taken downtown to Oyamel Cocina Mexicano, where I partook of...

...a taco filled with Oaxacan grasshoppers, aka chapulines. It was okay at best. I've since read that chapulines are said to have a tangy flavor; I couldn't detect it, or any flavor, really. It was like eating a taco full of empty popcorn kernel husks. Luckily I was able to follow it with two other tacos, one lengua and one pescado, both scrumptious.

DUMB AND PLUMBER

Last night I finished watching the HBO limited series White House Plumbers...

...about the Watergate break-in, with Woody Harrelson as E. Howard Hunt and Justin Theroux as G. Gordon Liddy, presenting them both as buffoonish boneheads. Lena Headey is quite sexy as Hunt's ill-fated wife Dorothy, clearly much the smarter half of the marriage.

The Wife mostly lost interest in the show after the first of the five episodes, finding the tone too farcical for the subject matter. But I have a feeling that most of the absurd incidents it shows us are based on fact, or at least on stuff those assholes claimed actually happened.

It is broadly played, but I feel like the best, albeit posthumous, revenge against those traitorous twits is to depict them as stooges, self-impressed, amateurish wannabes. Playing them as steely-eyed villains is probably exactly what they'd get off on.

Anyway, it's mentioned several times in the course of the series that Hunt was a hack novelist on the side; it reminded me that I'd had one of his books on my shelf for years and had never gotten around to it. It was a 1972 hard-boiled noir/horror hybrid called The Coven...

...written under the pseudonym "David St. John" (the names of both his sons) and set in D.C. neighborhoods where I used to live and work. It's full of borderline-parody prose like this:

"From there I drove through a city well-lighted for the most part, but largely deserted, for honest people tended to stay indoors after dark in recent years. Out Rhode Island Avenue to a part of the District tourists seldom saw. Hell's Bottom it had been called in the early days. Murder Bay. Old, rundown, and shabby. Condemned windowless buildings, vandalized by gangs of homeless boys. By day a rude, brawling area where liquor stores cashed more relief checks than the few remaining banks. By night a furtive, shadowy zone whose sounds were the crash of liquor bottles, the bang of overturing trash cans, and strangled cries in dark allies. Where love and heroin were traded over barroom tables and stolen cars screamed around the nearby corner...A sprawling raucous quarter slated for demolition when the City Fathers could get around to it. A dying, decaying area where hope was as rare as a starched white shirt."

So you're saying...not a great neighborhood?

There are also loathing caricatures of hippies, Beltway insiders, political staffers, etc. And the hard-drinking lawyer hero is the perfect projection of the cynical badass that Hunt so clearly wanted to be. As an expression of the mindset out of which the abuses of that administration grew, it's a simultaneously fun and depressing read.

FORGIVE US OUR 'SKINS

To the meager extent that I can be called a sports fan at all, I'm a baseball fan, not a football fan. But during the brief period I lived in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1992, my girlfriend at the time was a passionate fan of D.C.'s NFL team.

She wasn't alone. Led by head coach Joe Gibbs and QBs like Doug Williams and Mark Rypien, the team was really good during those years. As a result, almost every home game was a sellout, and tickets were extremely hard to come by. There's a good inside-the-Beltway gag in the 1987 Bette Midler-Shelley Long comedy Outrageous Fortune, in which a CIA agent (John Shuck) is trying to persuade a KGB agent (Robert Prosky) to defect, promising him townhouses and all sorts of perks, and the KGB man hesitantly asks "Redsk**s tickets?" The CIA man furrows his brow; that may be too big an ask.

Anyway, as I said, my then-girlfriend Stephanie adored the team, and somehow or another scored two tickets for a home game at RFK in November of 1991. The lads were having a superb season; they finished 14-2 and went on to win Super Bowl XXVI over the Buffalo Bills. Their only home loss? You guessed it, the one game that Stephanie and I ever managed to go to together; a 24-21 defeat to their loathed rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, under head coach Jimmy Johnson and QB Troy Aikman.

I have many vivid memories of that chilly day, including watching a drunken and insufferable Dallas fan a few rows ahead of us get seriously manhandled by D.C. cops--to joyous applause--for taunting his neighbors. I also recall the palpable funk of anger and misery, including Stephanie's, on the Metro ride home. But I also remember, as we entered the stadium, seeing a good-sized band of Native American activists beating drums and chanting in protest of the team's name. I was handed a flyer explaining its offensiveness.

I wish I still had that flyer, to read it a little more attentively than I did at the time. I dismissed it then, thinking the matter trivial; I may have formulated some evasion along the lines of "gee, that community has problems they really should be focusing on ahead of a sports team's name." It wasn't until years later, hearing the matter debated in the media, that it struck me that the issue's triviality or lack thereof really wasn't my call.

Many American sports teams are named after Native Americans; the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Florida State Seminoles. I'm sure there are Native activists who would like to get rid of all of them, but to point out the obvious, the D.C. football team is a little different even from these--it's an actual racial epithet. It's not different, in any way that I can see, from using the N-word as a team name.

I was reflecting on all this to a friend of mine who told me that she had attended Miami University, aka Miami of Ohio. Their team was also called the Redsk**s in those days, and the on-field performing mascot at games was a kid dressed up in a stereotypical Indian outfit.

According to my friend, at a certain point Miami struck up a relationship with the Miami Tribe in Oklahoma, and sent their mascot performer to the tribe to train to do accurate tribal dances; they also provided scholarships and other programs for tribal youth. Even so, in 1996 they changed the name to the RedHawks, but kept the relationship with the tribe.

In 2014 Dan Snyder, the douche-baggy-sounding owner of the D.C. NFL team, started an "Original Americans Foundation" in answer to criticism over the name. But according to Sports Illustrated that funding has steadily dried up over the years since.

It will be interesting to see if the appropriately-initialed OAF continues at all in the future, as it appears that, almost three decades later, those protesters I saw that day are getting their wish; the D.C. team has announced it will retire the name. At this writing, the new name has not yet been announced.

The question of why slurs toward indigenous people have remained less socially opprobrious than slurs against other races for so much longer is an interesting one. I don't have an answer for it. Indeed, I don't have any great wisdom to impart about the matter at all; I'm just glad that the grotesque name has been retired, and that Snyder's obstinance has finally been worn down. I've heard some commentators wonder if the change will make some fans decide they're done with the organization. To that, I can only say that if so, they don't sound like very loyal fans.

41

RIP to George Herbert Walker Bush, passed on at 94.

In January of 1989, when he became the 41st President of the United States, I was living in D.C. Though I was a disappointed Dukakis supporter, my roommate Alex persuaded me that a presidential inauguration was not the sort of spectacle that came along every day, so the two of us walked, through what I recall being a fairly bitter, snowy-wet winter morning, from our apartment to the Mall to join the crowd there in front of the Capitol.

We couldn't really see much from where we were standing, though we had the satisfaction of watching the helicopter ascend and fly away, taking Ronald Reagan out of town. My fondest memory of the event, however, is of a Rastafarian-looking guy hawking pennants in the crowd by yelling "Bush! Two dollars! Bush! Two dollars!"

Though like many people I found him likable (perhaps perversely, Dana Carvey's SNL caricature made him even more so), I wasn't a fan of 41's politics. But it must be admitted that he kept his war in the Middle East relatively short and efficient, and didn't use it, or at least not too much, as a macho-nationalist psychodrama. And he signed the Americans With Disabilities Act. And by almost all accounts, he was a very nice man on a personal level. All of which is to say, in retrospect, and especially at the moment, he looks almost Lincolnesque.

Funny the stuff you remember: The evening of his inaugural, I went with my then-girlfriend to see the sci-fi horror picture DeepStar Six, in which an underwater research station is attacked by a sort of giant sea-louse. While watching it, I noticed a persistent pain in my left foot which increased considerably when I put weight on it leaving the theater. It didn't go away, and some weeks later a doctor told me I had likely given myself a stress fracture that morning on the long walk through the cold. It's bothered me, off and on, ever since, sometimes to the point of giving me a noticeable limp.

So that was my souvenir of the George H. W. Bush inauguration. And it didn't even cost me two dollars.