newyorker--2020-10-05--“Suffocation Theory,” by David Rabe

“Suffocation Theory,” by David Rabe

Something is up .
That ’ s what I think .
Something is up .
Anyway , back to the cars .
Or maybe not .
I don ’ t want to forget the pundits , who come on right after the shootings or the bombings , as regular as clockwork , these experts , talking heads , network contributors on national security or terrorism or profiling the criminal mind .
Lone wolf or affiliated ?
A bomb goes off and these experts weigh in , a banner below them broadcasting their names and specialties .
I find the fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way they chart a course through the mayhem .
Anyway , I came in the door eager to get settled in front of the terrible news .
I ’ d grown addicted , you might say .
“ Dependent ” was probably closer .
I had come to feel that it was important for me to pay attention to it all .
It seemed the responsible thing to do .
A gun , a bomb , or a car , the instrument was always in the hands of a person or people overcome @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea , this irresistible idea—at least to them—that killing a bunch of strangers would solve whatever problem they thought they couldn ’ t solve in any other way .
The problem might be personal—a lost job , a failed marriage .
Or it might be cosmic , with supernatural imperatives .
Some astrophysical battle between light and dark .
This religion or that one .
Or this one over that one .
But the solution was always the same .
Dead strangers .
Sometimes these terrible news events were deemed to be terrorist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the deaths were the result of rage or simple insanity .
Not that the factors couldn ’ t be combined .
And then there were storms , floods , tornadoes .
Those received some attention , too .
Entire small towns wiped out .
Overturned double-wides .
That kind of thing .
But I have to say that bad weather was a relief when compared with all the other pieces of terrible news , because it didn ’ t have a human behind it .
Unless it was due to our ignorance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ argued , “ Climate change this and that.
” But not this one environmentalist .
With dark , stricken eyes , he said that calling it “ climate change ” was wrong , because it should be called “ climate suffocation.
” That was what would happen once the oceans stopped making oxygen , which was already happening , with dead zones and oxygen declines .
The oceans were suffocating .
And after they stopped producing oxygen the trees would stop , too .
And the fish and sea life would suffocate ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I caught up with Amanda , I told her that I liked our apartment .
I hadn ’ t known we were thinking of moving .
But she had everything arranged , she said .
The movers were on their way up .
I went to the window and there were cars and people on the street , but no moving van .
Then I heard loud knocking , and she yelled at me to “ let them in , ” and when I failed to move , pretending I was captivated by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , shouting that she didn ’ t understand why she had to do everything .
I said I didn ’ t know why , either .
They came in , six big men in uniforms , with their names embroidered on their shirts in red stitching , right above the chest pocket—Brett and Tom and Buck were three of the names .
Actually , it was seven men .
And when I counted again there were eight .
There was a logo of a truck on the back of their jackets .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like cowboys or football players .
They started taking our furniture—two of them to the armchair , three to the couch .
Several were dismantling the television .
Grabbing my shoes before one of the movers took them , I headed for the door .
I told Amanda that I didn ’ t like the new apartment or the new neighborhood .
She gave me her patented fed-up headshake , which left no doubt that I ’ d just confirmed something she knew about me and could barely tolerate .
The point here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wasn ’ t that far from the old one , it was drastically different .
Our old place was on a wide , beautiful street running along the crest of a hill .
Below it was another street running parallel to the crest of the hill .
And below that another parallel street , and so on , for five streets down , each one getting narrower , more potholed , and dirtier .
Desolate and chaotic would be a good way to evoke the lonely , abandoned mood of the last street @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new apartment was .
Almost no one had a car and nearly everyone you saw was bedraggled and despondent .
The amount of trash adrift in the wind and kicked by these dispirited people steadily grew .
It wasn ’ t a class system , Amanda said , but just the way things were .
I ’ d gone out to look around and get a better feel for the new neighborhood when it suddenly got dark , and there were no street lights .
I was on one of the side streets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was an irritating feature of the area that the street signs disappeared as you got lower .
I couldn ’ t remember how to get back into the new building .
The door in front of me didn ’ t look right , but I went in anyway , and started to climb the stairs .
Usually , in this type of building , there ’ s a door on each landing , marked with a number to indicate the floor .
But this stairway didn ’ t offer that kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it switch back the way most stairways do .
It just kept going straight up , which meant that the building was very , very tall , and unusually wide .
At last , I spied a door very far above me , a hundred yards or more .
It seemed too far to go without knowing if I was in the right place .
After backing down a few steps , I turned and hurried the rest of the way until I was outside , where I recognized the shabby façade of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t have a key to the front entrance yet , but one of the movers held the door open for me .
The new roommate was the first person I saw when I got to the apartment .
Blond , younger than me , muscular across the shoulders , which was all I could see of him , except for his calves and the lower portion of his thighs , he trailed water on the floor , his hair sopping .
He had wrapped a beach towel around himself and tucked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way women do , so the towel covered him from his armpits to his thighs .
In one hand , he held a sandwich that looked like ham and cheese on white bread , gobs of mustard dripping out , and in his other hand he had a pistol , and he was walking around the way people do when they ’ re looking for something .
“ You look like you ’ re looking for something.
” “ Where ’ d you get that ?
” I nodded in the general direction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the gun .
“ I don ’ t want guns in this place.
” “ I ’ ll get one , too .
If you have one , I think I ’ d better have one.
” “ So right now the one I have is the only one here.
” He smiled icily .
“ But I ’ m going to get one.
” He pointed the pistol at me .
It was silver-plated with a long barrel and a white pearl handle .
“ Why ?
” He put the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pressed the barrel into my cheek .
He stuck it against my stomach and my chest .
He bumped my cheek with the tiny tip thing on the end of the barrel—one , two , three , four , five , too many times .
He tried to poke it into my mouth .
I pushed it away .
“ I don ’ t like it here , ” I said .
I don ’ t know how long we talked like that .
Amanda came back from wherever she was , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shower .
She pointed me to the bathroom , and that was when I discovered that there was no shower .
Just this old bathtub full of scummy water , which must have been left from the new roommate ’ s bath .
There was rust on the faucet handles , and the tub had old-fashioned legs , like chicken legs .
I started shouting that I needed a bathroom with a shower .
We argued for a while .
Amanda looked hurt and angry , but she kept yelling , so I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know for how long .
But when we stopped the President was on the television , shouting .
He wanted revenge .
He wanted to get even .
He started reading from a list of names of people and countries that he liked .
He had a second list of people and countries that he hated , and it was long , and eventually some of the names from the first list started showing up .
Then the front-door buzzer buzzed , indicating that somebody wanted to be let in , and when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ open there was Amanda , with dirt smeared on her face and a thick black hose thing in her hands .
“ I got this for you , ” she said .
At that instant , I heard cursing .
A large , lumpy man in a ripped shirt jumped out of his car and threw open the hood .
“ It ’ s gone , goddammit !
” I looked for Amanda , but didn ’ t see her .
Something tugged at my pants leg .
She was down on her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dirty tube thing was a car part that she had stolen .
“ For the shower , ” she said .
That was her way of saying that she ’ d taken the hose because I ’ d been upset .
She explained that she hoped to rig a shower by running the car hose from the tub faucet up over this kind of towel-rack thing sticking out of the wall , so the water could pour down .
“ But it will be filthy , because it ’ s a car part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You have not really thought this through.
” “ No .
The water will clean it out.
” She looked scared , and I wanted to help her , although I was mad .
I inched the hose in through the doorway , so as not to draw attention from the owner , who stomped around his car , screaming and slamming the hood .
I ’ d barely shut the door , with both of us safely inside , when my cell phone dinged .
It was a text from PETA : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its furry face contorted by a yearning to be friends with everyone .
Amanda and I were reading to the kids .
It was a children ’ s book , and we all four nestled around the open pages with their energetic illustrations .
A man came in .
Sports coat , linen slacks , top three buttons of his shirt undone .
He carried a bottle of wine .
For an instant , I didn ’ t remember that we had a new roommate , but , even when I did , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doing .
He shook his head and complained about his inability to find a corkscrew .
What the hell did he have to do to get along in this place ?
The children were waiting for the story to continue .
Amanda watched the new roommate , her eyes full of concern .
And then I remembered .
They were having an affair .
Amanda and Reed .
How had I ever forgotten ?
It had been going on for a long time .
He was over by the window looking out .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and there were other pockets in his coat .
His pistol could have been in any one of them , and I didn ’ t know which , but I did know that it wasn ’ t in his hand .
I sprang on him and got him in a choke hold from behind .
He wanted to grab for his pistol , wherever it was , but he couldn ’ t make his hands do anything but fly up to claw at my forearm , which I ’ d locked around his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of pleading sound that might have been his attempt to say “ Please ” and “ Don ’ t ” and “ Stop.
” I constricted every muscle I had , so that he ’ d never get away .
I could feel the life going out of him , and I could see the light in his eyes dimming in the full-length mirror that Amanda held up .
He was too heavy for me to keep upright , so we sank to the floor , where his life continued to slip @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ What are you doing ?
Let him go.
” I asked myself if I dared to do as she wanted .
Or did I really want him dead ?
He would be my bitter enemy for as long as we lived now that I ’ d done this .
I wished Amanda weren ’ t holding the mirror , because then I wouldn ’ t have to see his eyes .
They were so lonely and hopeless .
But she made sure I saw .
I collapsed off him .
He flopped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him .
She brushed his brow tenderly and placed her mouth over his .
She pinched his nose shut and blew into his mouth , and I knew I ’ d made two terrible mistakes—one in attacking him and another in letting him go .
She peeked at me out of narrow , hate-filled eyes as she established a rhythm for puffing the life back into him , until he let out a growling cough full of tears and then curled into a fetal position .
After a minute , she helped him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Where did you come from ?
” I asked her , thinking I ’ d make idle conversation .
“ Troy.
” Her dark eyes had a fathomless quality , with flickering light in the irises .
My cell phone dinged , and , though I didn ’ t recognize the organization that was texting , I did see what it wanted to tell me : “ Rabbits are screaming.
” I said , “ Troy ?
Really ?
The city ?
” I imagined her ship at anchor outside , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and debris , its square sail furled , its oars pointed skyward .
“ The President is unhappy , ” the sharp-faced female anchor said .
The men at the table conferred in intense tones .
“ THE PRESIDENT IS UNHAPPY , ” read the crawl across the bottom of the screen .
“ He imagines himself happy , ” the male anchor declared .
“ He imagines himself young .
He imagines himself handsome .
He imagines he is well liked by everyone in the world .
He imagines he is omnipotent.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the woman said , her lucidly intelligent eyes blinking .
She had straight brown hair .
“ Night after night .
Prowling the halls.
” The men at the table were solemn , nodding at the screen and then at me in a uniform way that made me uneasy .
Duppedee-do !
went my phone , delivering an e-mail with a yellow Labrador and a golden retriever looking at me mournfully , each trapped in a structure of metal rods that immobilized its head , as text explained , “ These innocent dogs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ holes in their skulls , in order to inject a deadly virus into their brains to kill them slowly.
” “ We ’ re trying to help the President , ” one of the men said to me .
“ He needs our help .
No one understands him .
He wants people to understand him so that they ’ ll like him .
So we ’ re trying to understand him , and then like him , so we can teach everybody how to understand him and like him.
” “ Oh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who was talking turned away , and so did the others , except for one who stared me down , his spiteful eyes full of plans .
Suspicion clouded the air between us , like an oil spill .
I went off down the hall and in a door .
Amanda and the new roommate were in bed .
Just lying on their backs with their eyes open .
They seemed to be staring at the ceiling .
“ What do you want ?
” he said .
I left .
Behind me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Who ?
” “ Open your eyes , Amanda .
For God ’ s sake , open your eyes—he was just here.
” “ We want to help you.
” “ We want to warn you , ” a different one said .
He shoved me .
“ We want to protect you , ” the first one said , and he shoved me harder .
I staggered back a few steps .
“ Don ’ t trip , ” another one said .
They kept shoving me every time they said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I said .
“ Now let me alone.
” “ We ’ re done anyway.
” They tried to speak in unison , creating noise like an out-of-kilter engine ready to explode .
I went toward the television I heard blasting .
Not the little one in the room off the kitchen but the big one that I usually watched .
The little one was gone .
The men who ’ d huddled around it must have taken it .
It seemed they ’ d taken the room , too .
The kitchen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off the kitchen was gone .
Duppedee-do !
went my phone : “ Help .
It ’ s up to you.
” I hit Delete and walked away .
I didn ’ t know where I was going .
When my phone dinged again , I knew better than to look , but I did anyway , and I learned that a man , infuriated by his crying infant daughter , had stuck his finger down her throat to make her be quiet .
I kept walking .
I don ’ t know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but I came to the small room off the kitchen .
It was back , as were the little television and the men watching it .
A beaming , impish man identified as a Presidential adviser announced , “ The President knows more than anyone about everything.
” The interviewer , a woman with a quirky mouth , asked , “ More than the scientists , who— ” “ You ’ re saying he knows more than the scientists , who— ” “ Wait .
I ’ m speaking of people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such as climate change .
Let ’ s talk about that.
” “ Cassandras ?
Your position is that the experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are Cassandras ?
That those predicting disappearing glaciers , rising sea levels , and— ” “ But she was a prophetess .
You know .
She told the future.
” “ Exactly.
” His face formed a childish , doll-like grin , while his eyes disclosed cold-blooded desires that he believed no one could see .
“ A prophetess people didn ’ t listen to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , nobody listens to you .
That ’ s the great part , that ’ s the fun part , the thrilling part—they know the future , and they tell us , but we don ’ t have to listen , because the President is smarter than anyone.
” Duppedee-do !
went my phone : “ AUSTRALIA IS ON FIRE !
” Images flashed : The sky blazing with supercharged pillars of twisting flame .
People retreating to a beach .
A woman spraying water onto frightened alpacas , their long necks pivoting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Oh , I know , he ’ s utterly useless.
” She looked at me .
“ You ’ re in the way.
” And then , to him , she said , “ Don ’ t pay any attention to him.
” I couldn ’ t take it .
I shouted , “ What are you doing ?
” “ We ’ re throwing all this junk away , ” she said .
“ I want it .
I like it.
” They laughed .
“ We ’ re getting new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after the other .
I picked up a short-sleeved shirt .
“ This is a good thing.
” I grabbed a coffee cup .
“ I really like this .
I ’ ve had it all my life.
” They laughed so hard they started to gasp .
“ He likes it .
He likes it.
” “ We ’ re getting rid of it .
All of it .
It ’ s old.
” “ Her , too , ” one of them said .
“ Her , too , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that they were talking about my mother , who I remembered was in a room at the very end of the hallway , a little room you reached after almost doubling back .
I ’ d hidden her there so they wouldn ’ t know , but they must have found her .
“ No , ” I said .
“ You will not !
” I hurried toward the hallway , aware that they were laughing uproariously behind me .
“ We ’ ve already done it , ” they shouted .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ was maybe the worst laughter I ’ d ever heard .
This was what they ’ d been thinking about when they were in bed , looking at the ceiling , and I walked in .
“ We can keep the reading lamp , ” I said , rushing back .
“ I think the reading lamp and some books.
” “ We ’ re moving , ” he said , and she said it , too .
“ But we just got here !
” The moving men walked by with their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , going into a room and shutting the door .
I saw how big their feet were .

I looked for Amanda, but didn’t see her. Something tugged at my pants leg. She was down on her belly, and I realized that the dirty tube thing was a car part that she had stolen. “For the shower,” she said.
“What?”
“For your shower.”
That was her way of saying that she’d taken the hose because I’d been upset. She explained that she hoped to rig a shower by running the car hose from the tub faucet up over this kind of towel-rack thing sticking out of the wall, so the water could pour down.
“But it will be filthy, because it’s a car part,” I told her. “You have not really thought this through.”
“No. The water will clean it out.” She looked scared, and I wanted to help her, although I was mad. I inched the hose in through the doorway, so as not to draw attention from the owner, who stomped around his car, screaming and slamming the hood.
I’d barely shut the door, with both of us safely inside, when my cell phone dinged. It was a text from PETA:
Friend—we have heartbreaking news: Slow lorises are threatened with extinction. But, instead of being protected, they are trafficked, because people want these cuddly creatures for pets or as status symbols.
A photograph presented a tiny primate, its furry face contorted by a yearning to be friends with everyone.
Amanda and I were reading to the kids. It was a children’s book, and we all four nestled around the open pages with their energetic illustrations. A man came in. Sports coat, linen slacks, top three buttons of his shirt undone. He carried a bottle of wine. For an instant, I didn’t remember that we had a new roommate, but, even when I did, I had to ask what he was doing. He shook his head and complained about his inability to find a corkscrew. What the hell did he have to do to get along in this place? The children were waiting for the story to continue. Amanda watched the new roommate, her eyes full of concern. And then I remembered. They were having an affair. Amanda and Reed. How had I ever forgotten? It had been going on for a long time. He was over by the window looking out. His baggy trousers had baggy pockets, and there were other pockets in his coat. His pistol could have been in any one of them, and I didn’t know which, but I did know that it wasn’t in his hand. I sprang on him and got him in a choke hold from behind. He wanted to grab for his pistol, wherever it was, but he couldn’t make his hands do anything but fly up to claw at my forearm, which I’d locked around his throat. He was gurgling with a kind of pleading sound that might have been his attempt to say “Please” and “Don’t” and “Stop.” I constricted every muscle I had, so that he’d never get away. I could feel the life going out of him, and I could see the light in his eyes dimming in the full-length mirror that Amanda held up. He was too heavy for me to keep upright, so we sank to the floor, where his life continued to slip out of him.
“He assumed the crown at a very young age.” Cartoon by Juan Astasio Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Amanda said, “What are you doing? Let him go.”
I asked myself if I dared to do as she wanted. Or did I really want him dead? He would be my bitter enemy for as long as we lived now that I’d done this. I wished Amanda weren’t holding the mirror, because then I wouldn’t have to see his eyes. They were so lonely and hopeless. But she made sure I saw.
I collapsed off him. He flopped onto his back. Amanda hurried to him. She brushed his brow tenderly and placed her mouth over his. She pinched his nose shut and blew into his mouth, and I knew I’d made two terrible mistakes—one in attacking him and another in letting him go. She peeked at me out of narrow, hate-filled eyes as she established a rhythm for puffing the life back into him, until he let out a growling cough full of tears and then curled into a fetal position. After a minute, she helped him to his feet and they went off.
I’m not sure where the young woman came from. She might have come from another apartment, or from one of the many rooms in the new apartment that I hadn’t been able to look into yet. She was animated, talking to people I didn’t know, who I assumed were Amanda’s friends, or maybe the new roommate’s. There was a circle of four or five men and three women, and they talked excitedly to the young woman. They were fascinated by her, though I could tell they didn’t know why. And then she reached for some chips in a bowl. As she ate, her eyes came to rest on me. She didn’t say a word, just crossed over to where I sat in an armchair and lowered herself onto my lap. She took my hands and put them on her waist. I didn’t care if people stared at us. An elderly man in a vest and bow tie approached with a tray of party snacks. She asked for a glass of water and rocked her hips a little forward and back, causing a shiver in me, and then in her.
“Where did you come from?” I asked her, thinking I’d make idle conversation.
“Troy.” Her dark eyes had a fathomless quality, with flickering light in the irises.
My cell phone dinged, and, though I didn’t recognize the organization that was texting, I did see what it wanted to tell me: “Rabbits are screaming.” I said, “Troy? Really? The city?”
“Troy. Yes.”
“The ancient city?”
I imagined her ship at anchor outside, where the dirty street contended with wind and debris, its square sail furled, its oars pointed skyward.
It was dark now and some men were gathered at a table in a little room off the kitchen. They were bunched around a light, and the biggest of them glowered at me. I didn’t recognize him, or any of them, but when I got closer I saw the smallish television that entranced them, their bodies warped by their angry, worried concentration. The volume was low, but I heard two sombre voices, before I saw the team of male and female newscasters.
“The President is unhappy,” the sharp-faced female anchor said.
The men at the table conferred in intense tones. “THE PRESIDENT IS UNHAPPY,” read the crawl across the bottom of the screen.
“He imagines himself happy,” the male anchor declared. “He imagines himself young. He imagines himself handsome. He imagines he is well liked by everyone in the world. He imagines he is omnipotent.”
“Day after day,” the woman said, her lucidly intelligent eyes blinking. She had straight brown hair. “Night after night. Prowling the halls.”
The men at the table were solemn, nodding at the screen and then at me in a uniform way that made me uneasy.
Duppedee-do! went my phone, delivering an e-mail with a yellow Labrador and a golden retriever looking at me mournfully, each trapped in a structure of metal rods that immobilized its head, as text explained, “These innocent dogs await the pharmaceutical experimenters who will drill holes in their skulls, in order to inject a deadly virus into their brains to kill them slowly.”
“We’re trying to help the President,” one of the men said to me. “He needs our help. No one understands him. He wants people to understand him so that they’ll like him. So we’re trying to understand him, and then like him, so we can teach everybody how to understand him and like him.”
“Oh,” I said. The man who was talking turned away, and so did the others, except for one who stared me down, his spiteful eyes full of plans. Suspicion clouded the air between us, like an oil spill.
I went off down the hall and in a door. Amanda and the new roommate were in bed. Just lying on their backs with their eyes open. They seemed to be staring at the ceiling.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Nothing,” Amanda answered.
“Not you.” He poked her. “Him.”
“Who?”
“Him.”
I left. Behind me, Amanda kept saying, “Who? Who?”
“Open your eyes, Amanda. For God’s sake, open your eyes—he was just here.”
Sinister men were waiting for me. They wore dark suits. They circled me and then moved closer. “You’re in danger,” one of them whispered. His eyes shimmered, like broken glass.
“I know,” I told him.
“We want to help you.”
“We want to warn you,” a different one said. He shoved me.
“We want to protect you,” the first one said, and he shoved me harder. I staggered back a few steps.
“Don’t trip,” another one said.
“There’s a border,” one said.
They kept shoving me every time they said something.
“There’s a border that is a boundary.”
“Don’t cross it.”
“It’s a boundary that is a border.”
“I understand,” I said. “Now let me alone.”
“We’re done anyway.” They tried to speak in unison, creating noise like an out-of-kilter engine ready to explode.
I went toward the television I heard blasting. Not the little one in the room off the kitchen but the big one that I usually watched. The little one was gone. The men who’d huddled around it must have taken it. It seemed they’d taken the room, too. The kitchen was there, but the small room off the kitchen was gone.
Duppedee-do! went my phone: “Help. It’s up to you.” I hit Delete and walked away. I didn’t know where I was going. When my phone dinged again, I knew better than to look, but I did anyway, and I learned that a man, infuriated by his crying infant daughter, had stuck his finger down her throat to make her be quiet. I kept walking. I don’t know for how long I walked and walked, but I came to the small room off the kitchen. It was back, as were the little television and the men watching it. A beaming, impish man identified as a Presidential adviser announced, “The President knows more than anyone about everything.”
The interviewer, a woman with a quirky mouth, asked, “More than the scientists, who—”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re saying he knows more than the scientists, who—”
“Yes, yes.”
“Wait. I’m speaking of people who are experts in their particular field, such as climate change. Let’s talk about that.”
“Cassandras. All of them.”
“Cassandras? Your position is that the experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are Cassandras? That those predicting disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, and—”
“Cassandras, Cassandras, Cassandras.”
“But she was a prophetess. You know. She told the future.”
“Exactly.” His face formed a childish, doll-like grin, while his eyes disclosed cold-blooded desires that he believed no one could see. “A prophetess people didn’t listen to. If you’re a Cassandra, nobody listens to you. That’s the great part, that’s the fun part, the thrilling part—they know the future, and they tell us, but we don’t have to listen, because the President is smarter than anyone.”
Duppedee-do! went my phone: “AUSTRALIA IS ON FIRE!” Images flashed: The sky blazing with supercharged pillars of twisting flame. People retreating to a beach. A woman spraying water onto frightened alpacas, their long necks pivoting between her and the burning world.
Amanda and the new roommate were throwing my things around. Into boxes. Into piles on the floor. I didn’t know what was going on. When I first came upon them, I was too startled to speak. I stood off to the side, hoping they’d explain without my needing to ask, but they just kept throwing my things. Finally, he looked at me, clearly thinking I was the stupidest person he’d ever seen in his life. “Amanda,” he said.
“Oh, I know, he’s utterly useless.” She looked at me. “You’re in the way.” And then, to him, she said, “Don’t pay any attention to him.”
I couldn’t take it. I shouted, “What are you doing?”
“We’re throwing all this junk away,” she said.
“Those are mine,” I said.
“It’s all junk.”
“I want it. I like it.”
They laughed. “We’re getting new things,” they said, one after the other.
I picked up a short-sleeved shirt. “This is a good thing.” I grabbed a coffee cup. “I really like this. I’ve had it all my life.”
They laughed so hard they started to gasp. “He likes it. He likes it.”
“We’re getting rid of it. All of it. It’s old.”
“Her, too,” one of them said.
“What?”
“Her, too,” the other one said.
And I realized that they were talking about my mother, who I remembered was in a room at the very end of the hallway, a little room you reached after almost doubling back. I’d hidden her there so they wouldn’t know, but they must have found her. “No,” I said. “You will not!” I hurried toward the hallway, aware that they were laughing uproariously behind me.
“We’ve already done it,” they shouted. “She’s gone.”
It was maybe the worst laughter I’d ever heard. This was what they’d been thinking about when they were in bed, looking at the ceiling, and I walked in. “We can keep the reading lamp,” I said, rushing back. “I think the reading lamp and some books.”
“No, it’s all going.”
“We’re moving,” he said, and she said it, too.
“But we just got here!”
“No, no, not you.”
“You’re not moving. We are.”
The moving men walked by with their stitched names, all nine of them, going into a room and shutting the door. I saw how big their feet were.
“If you’re moving,” I said, “if you’re—”
“That’s right.”
“Why take my things? I like them.”
“I hate them.”
Cartoon by Zoe Si Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Amanda hates them.”
“But they’re mine. And you’re moving out.”
“You’re such an idiot,” Amanda said. “You don’t understand anything.”
“Just leave my things, goddammit!” I screamed.
She ran in, the young woman. She searched wildly, perspiration on her brow. She had something to tell me, and her mouth was open with fear that she was too late.
Other people walked and talked all through the apartment. It was a party of some kind. Amanda and the roommate laughed, welcoming their guests. They were hosting. When Amanda gestured at me, the guests regarded me with the dismissive, intolerant attitude she modelled for them. The party guests shouted, drinking rabidly, grabbing goblets off trays. The young woman disappeared in the ribaldry, everyone smelling of perfume and drowning one another out in their hysterical good time.
“It’s a housewarming. In reverse,” Amanda said. And the way she howled, and everyone howled with her, made it clear that this was the wittiest comment ever made by the wittiest woman ever to live. “The end is here,” she added. “The absolute end.”
“Of everything,” the new roommate said.
They howled even louder. The young woman whirled back into view. Several men jumped in front of her. They grabbed at her arm. The women stayed aloof, behind blinding veneers of gems and furs, jewelry storming their ears, hair, and necks. But the young woman escaped.
It seemed impossible, but she did it, and she came straight to where I sat in the big armchair. Her eyes affirmed that, as I’d thought, she did have something to tell me. Out of breath from wrestling free from the party guests, she sank onto my lap, and leaned close, whispering so softly I didn’t understand. “What?” I asked. “What did you say?”
She threw her head back in a way that suggested anguish. “Mankind is suicidal, I’m afraid—a suicidal species.”
“Is that what you said?”
“I thought you heard me.”
“Oh, I hope that’s not true. It’s just too hopeless to think that. I want to have a little hope.”
“But what if there isn’t any?”
I stared into her profound eyes, following their dark invitation to consider her wide forehead, her high cheekbones, the depths she had yet to reveal. “Troy?” I said. “That’s where Cassandra lived, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I am Cassandra, the prophetess, whom no one believes. Cassandra, full of mourning and prophecy.”
Like the horizon, her eyes went on, until they could go no further. I was so relaxed, so dreamy, she could have said anything.
“It’s your body,” she said. “And my body. We’re animals. Two animals.”
I just wanted her to keep moving, and letting me fill with that bewildering syrup for which I felt only love and gratitude. “Are you Cassandra? Are you really?” I wanted to hear her say it again, but I couldn’t wait for her to respond. “I like to think that people are good at heart, Cassandra.”
“We all do, but unfortunately they’re not anything at heart.” She closed her eyes and chanted, “Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his crooked talons, and she cried pitifully. To her, he spoke disdainfully: ‘Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, Songstress. And, if I please, I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not gain mastery and suffers pain in addition to his shame.’ So said Hesiod, the Greek, of the fast-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.”
I groped to keep my hands on her waist. “Doesn’t it make you sad?”
“That people are not good at heart? Of course it does.”
“No, no. That no one believes you.”
“It’s a curse.” Again, she closed her eyes. “We possess in full bounty all that animals need to live, any animal, all animals. Of which man is one. Except he has decided that he isn’t.”
“Because mankind has a spirit,” shouted one of the partygoers celebrating the end of everything. Amanda handed him a megaphone, as if she were dissatisfied with how loud he’d been so far.
“Mankind may or may not have a spirit,” Cassandra roared. “But, either way, our bodies are animals and that’s true of me, you, Amanda, and the hawk.”


newyorker--2020-10-05--The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out

The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out

Four weeks earlier , B-59 had been dispatched from the U.S.S.R. with three other so-called F-class subs as part of Operation Anadyr , Nikita Khrushchev ’ s top-secret effort to install ballistic missiles in Cuba .
( The Anadyr is a river that flows into the Bering Sea ; the code name was intended to make even soldiers participating in the operation believe they were headed somewhere cold . )
Pretty much from the outset of the voyage , things had not gone well .
“ For the sailors , this Cuban missile crisis started even before its beginning , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another Cuba-bound sub , once observed .
The Atlantic that October was turbulent , and the pitching sea made it tough for the boats to maintain their desired speed .
“ You have to hold on to something even in your sleep , or else you ’ ll fall off , ” a crew member complained .
Communications , too , were difficult .
Once past Iceland , the subs had trouble contacting Moscow ; for a while , according to Ketov , the only voices audible over the radio “ were those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President John F. Kennedy learned of Operation Anadyr , on October 16th , the subs were halfway across the Atlantic .
By the time he announced the “ quarantine ” of Cuba , on October 22nd , they were nearing the island .
They were ordered by the Soviet naval command to change course and take up positions in the Sargasso Sea .
There a new set of problems arose .
The subs , built for navigating farther north , had trouble operating in warm water .
Temperatures inside rose to uncomfortable levels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a hundred and ten degrees , and carbon-dioxide levels climbed , too .
“ It ’ s getting hard to breathe in here , ” a crew member recorded in his diary .
By October 27th , conditions on B-59 were so bad that men were passing out ; in the words of one , “ They were falling like dominoes.
” American destroyers were practically on top of the sub ; this prevented it from surfacing to recharge its batteries and use its antenna .
The boat ’ s captain , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ communications that a crisis was unfolding above the waves , but , unable to receive radio signals , he had no way of learning about recent developments .
To avoid escalation , American warships were supposed to follow a careful protocol when they came across subs .
They were to drop harmless depth charges and instruct the subs to surface .
But that day someone decided to drop hand grenades into the water .
Savitsky ordered the crew to get ready to fire back .
“ Maybe the war has already started @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somersaults here , ” he shrieked .
“ We ’ re going to blast them now !
” What the grenade tossers did not know—what almost no one knew until four decades later—was that one of B-59 ’ s torpedoes was carrying what the Soviets called “ special ammunition.
” The “ special ” part was a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead .
Had Savitsky ’ s orders been carried out , chances are good that the Americans would have responded in kind , and a full-scale nuclear war would have broken out .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ useful lesson to be learned from that frantic afternoon .
But what , in God ’ s name , is it ?
R.F.K .
was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council , or ExComm , which was swiftly assembled to advise the President during the crisis .
In his memoir , eventually titled “ Thirteen Days , ” he plays a leading role in the deliberations—so much so that one White House aide , who read a manuscript version of the book in 1964 , a few months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said to have remarked , “ I thought Jack was President during the missile crisis.
” ( Bobby , who was by then campaigning for the U.S. Senate , reportedly replied , “ He ’ s not running , and I am.
” ) In “ Thirteen Days , ” R.F.K .
portrays himself as levelheaded and high-minded .
When other members of ExComm press for a surprise attack on Cuba , he counters that such an attack could not be launched without undermining the United States ’ “ moral position at home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Days ” was published in 1969 , a year after its author ’ s assassination ; it has never been out of print since .
In the nineteen-seventies , in the midst of the Watergate scandal , it was revealed that J.F.K .
had secretly taped most of ExComm ’ s deliberations .
He ’ d had a recorder installed in the basement of the West Wing that could be discreetly activated by flipping a switch under the table in the Cabinet Room .
In the nineteen-eighties and nineties , the tapes were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the breakup of the Soviet Union gave historians access to documents and other materials that had previously been off limits .
As a result , just about everything anyone has claimed about his own conduct during the crisis has been called into question .
In “ Gambling with Armageddon : Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis ” ( Knopf ) , Martin J. Sherwin summarizes the “ official ” narrative of the “ thirteen days ” as follows .
Members of ExComm , through “ their careful consideration of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of terrifying danger , and their wise counsel , ” steered the world to a peaceful resolution of a potentially civilization-ending conflict .
Nothing , he writes , “ could be further from the truth.
” The guidance J.F.K .
received was , for the most part , lousy .
Some of it was loony .
Had he heeded ExComm ’ s “ wise counsel , ” chances are I would not be writing this , or you reading it .
As the President told a friend not long after the crisis ended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much bad advice I had in those days.
” As it happens , much of this bad advice came from the author of “ Thirteen Days.
” “ Oh , shit !
Shit !
Shit !
” the supposedly levelheaded Attorney General exclaimed when informed that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba .
“ Those sons of bitches Russians.
” At the time of the missile crisis , R.F.K .
headed the awkwardly named Special Group ( Augmented ) , which oversaw the Kennedy Administration ’ s covert efforts to topple Fidel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been suggested to this end were Operation Free Ride , which would have dropped plane tickets on Cuba , good for a one-way trip to Mexico City or Caracas , and Operation Bingo , which would have staged an attack on the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay in order to justify a counterattack .
On Day One of the missile crisis , R.F.K .
proposed his own version of Bingo .
The U.S. should “ sink the Maine again or something ” to provide cover for invading Cuba .
So much for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1960 election , the Eisenhower Administration had started to train Cuban exiles in Guatemala ; the plan—supposedly top-secret—was that the exiles would return home as a guerrilla force and rally the disenchanted Cuban public to depose Castro .
The plan ’ s cover was quickly blown .
In October , 1960 , a Guatemalan newspaper reported that the C.I.A .
had spent a million dollars on a property that it intended to use for training exercises .
Eisenhower didn ’ t care for Kennedy .
During the campaign , he had declared privately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything to avoid turning the country over ” to him , and , to his staff , he referred to J.F.K .
as “ Little Boy Blue.
” According to Sherwin , Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to feel compelled to carry out his no longer secret plan .
At a meeting the day before J.F.K.
’ s Inauguration , Eisenhower told the incoming President that it was the new Administration ’ s “ responsibility ” to do “ whatever is necessary ” to get rid of Castro .
“ We can not let the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eisenhower reportedly said .
Kennedy had used Cuba against his opponent—Richard Nixon , Eisenhower ’ s Vice-President .
“ If you can ’ t stand up to Castro , how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev ?
” he ’ d chided .
This boxed Kennedy in ; if he rejected Eisenhower ’ s plan , he ’ d be criticized on precisely the ground he ’ d criticized Nixon .
The result , of course , was a fiasco .
On April 17 , 1961 , the exiles landed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bay of Pigs .
It took Castro ’ s forces less than two days to round up or kill them all .
Kennedy at first tried to deny that the U.S. had anything to do with the scheme , but that lie was quickly exposed .
The director of the C.I.A.
, Allen Dulles , had assumed that , once the operation got under way , Kennedy would send the U.S. military to support the ill-prepared guerrillas .
But the President refused to do so .
Following the debacle , some Kennedy confidants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the plan .
The President was enraged by this duplicity , and there ’ s some speculation that this was what prompted him to install the secret taping apparatus in the West Wing .
Eisenhower , for his part , insisted throughout his life that he had never passed on a “ plan ” to invade Cuba , a claim Sherwin likens to Bill Clinton ’ s , vis-à-vis Monica Lewinsky , that “ there ’ s nothing going on between us.
” ( “ It depends on what the meaning of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Clinton later explained . )
A lesson Kennedy seems to have taken from the Bay of Pigs—in addition to the importance of keeping good records—was that even the most knowledgeable advisers can screw things up royally .
After the Bay of Pigs , “ he was more skeptical of the recommendations which came to him from the experts , ” Ted Sorensen , one of Kennedy ’ s closest aides , later reported .
This would serve J.F.K .
well when it came time for him to deal with ExComm .
Before the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Khrushchev had managed to ship forty thousand troops and more than a hundred and sixty nuclear warheads to Cuba .
“ American intelligence was good for nothing , ” General Anatoly Gribkov , the Soviet General Staff ’ s chief of operations at the time , crowed years later .
The tipoff finally came from spy-plane photographs .

Eisenhower didn’t care for Kennedy. During the campaign, he had declared privately that he’d do “almost anything to avoid turning the country over” to him, and, to his staff, he referred to J.F.K. as “Little Boy Blue.” According to Sherwin, Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to feel compelled to carry out his no longer secret plan. At a meeting the day before J.F.K.’s Inauguration, Eisenhower told the incoming President that it was the new Administration’s “responsibility” to do “whatever is necessary” to get rid of Castro. “We cannot let the present government there go on,” Eisenhower reportedly said.
Kennedy had used Cuba against his opponent—Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice-President. “If you can’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” he’d chided. This boxed Kennedy in; if he rejected Eisenhower’s plan, he’d be criticized on precisely the ground he’d criticized Nixon. The result, of course, was a fiasco. On April 17, 1961, the exiles landed on the beach at Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. It took Castro’s forces less than two days to round up or kill them all. Kennedy at first tried to deny that the U.S. had anything to do with the scheme, but that lie was quickly exposed. The director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, had assumed that, once the operation got under way, Kennedy would send the U.S. military to support the ill-prepared guerrillas. But the President refused to do so.
Following the debacle, some Kennedy confidants falsely claimed that they’d opposed the plan. The President was enraged by this duplicity, and there’s some speculation that this was what prompted him to install the secret taping apparatus in the West Wing. Eisenhower, for his part, insisted throughout his life that he had never passed on a “plan” to invade Cuba, a claim Sherwin likens to Bill Clinton’s, vis-à-vis Monica Lewinsky, that “there’s nothing going on between us.” (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” Clinton later explained.)
A lesson Kennedy seems to have taken from the Bay of Pigs—in addition to the importance of keeping good records—was that even the most knowledgeable advisers can screw things up royally. After the Bay of Pigs, “he was more skeptical of the recommendations which came to him from the experts,” Ted Sorensen, one of Kennedy’s closest aides, later reported. This would serve J.F.K. well when it came time for him to deal with ExComm.
Khrushchev lit on the idea of sending missiles to Cuba almost exactly a year after the Bay of Pigs. He was convinced, correctly, that the U.S. was still intent on ousting Castro, and he wanted to prevent that from happening. Surely the Americans would think twice about attacking Cuba if they knew it was equipped with nuclear warheads. Also, just a year earlier, the U.S. had installed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Turkey, a Soviet neighbor, so he thought that missiles in Cuba would right the balance of terror.
Before the Americans realized what was going on, Khrushchev had managed to ship forty thousand troops and more than a hundred and sixty nuclear warheads to Cuba. “American intelligence was good for nothing,” General Anatoly Gribkov, the Soviet General Staff’s chief of operations at the time, crowed years later. The tipoff finally came from spy-plane photographs.
ExComm, whose members included Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, spent its first few sessions debating how best to destroy the missiles. Should there be a declaration of war? Air strikes on the sites? No one knew if any of the missiles were operational, which was obviously a major intelligence shortcoming. Should air strikes be followed by a full-scale invasion of Cuba? In that case, ninety thousand troops would have to be assembled, and it was hard to imagine how such preparations could be kept secret. McNamara warned that any form of “direct military action” would prompt a Soviet response along the same lines. But this might be “worth the price,” he opined. “Perhaps we should pay that.” R.F.K. worried that, in the days between air strikes and the deployment of ground troops, international pressure against an invasion would build. Wasn’t there some way, he asked, to get an invasion “started, so that there wasn’t any turning back?”
A few days into the crisis, Kennedy began to pull away from his advisers. It was imperative to get the missiles out of Cuba, but it was also imperative to avoid a nuclear exchange—what he termed “the final failure.” He argued in favor of blockading Cuba, rather than invading it. (The “blockade” eventually became a “quarantine,” because the former assumes a state of war.)
What prompted the shift in Kennedy’s thinking? Sherwin gives much of the credit to Adlai Stevenson, J.F.K.’s Ambassador to the U.N.—and his former opponent for the 1960 Democratic nomination—who, notably, was not a member of ExComm. Early in the deliberations, Stevenson happened to attend a lunch at the White House for the Crown Prince of Libya. After the lunch, the President pulled him aside to show him the spy photographs.
“I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render the weapons inoperable,” Kennedy said.
“Let’s not go into an air strike until we have explored the possibilities of a peaceful solution,” Stevenson replied. This hardly seems a novel idea, but, Sherwin maintains, it was “the first reaction of its kind to confront Kennedy.” Stevenson subsequently sent J.F.K. a memo advocating that diplomacy be pursued before attacks, which, in Sherwin’s account, “provided Kennedy with a blueprint to do exactly that.” In an interesting twist, Sherwin presents J.F.K.’s well-known dislike of Stevenson as evidence in support of his theory. “The psychology is complicated,” he acknowledges.
Despite J.F.K.’s (and Stevenson’s) best efforts, the world came perilously close to “the final failure” on day twelve of the thirteen—a Saturday. Even as Savitsky was ordering the “special ammunition” to be loaded, the situation on land was spinning out of control. On what became known as Black Saturday, an American spy plane was shot down over Cuba, and Khrushchev received a message from Castro that seemed to urge a nuclear strike against the U.S. (Castro’s thoughts, translated into Russian, were a bit hard for the Soviet Premier to decipher.) That evening, R.F.K. was charged with making an offer to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. If the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, the Americans would pledge not to invade the island. As an added incentive, the U.S., in the next several months, would pull its missiles from Turkey. Key to the deal, Dobrynin was told, was that the provisions about Turkey be kept secret.
In fact, they were kept so secret that most members of ExComm were unaware of them. Johnson wasn’t informed that the President had traded away American warheads, even after he became President. The lesson L.B.J. seems to have drawn from the crisis was that Kennedy had succeeded by refusing to compromise. This would have deeply unfortunate consequences when it came time for Johnson to deal with North Vietnam.
In the fall of 1962, Sherwin was a junior officer in the U.S. Navy. As the air-intelligence officer for an anti-submarine-warfare training unit based in San Diego, he was the custodian of the deployment orders that the unit was to follow in case of war. On the day that Kennedy announced the quarantine, Sherwin was instructed to retrieve the orders from his office safe and deliver them to his commanding officer. As he recalls, the orders said that, in the event of war, the unit was to deploy to an airfield in Baja California. There were jokes that Baja would be a beautiful place to die.
“I did not know until I researched this book how close to death we had come,” Sherwin writes.
Sherwin makes much of the events aboard B-59, and focusses, in particular, on the role of Vasily Arkhipov, a Soviet Navy captain who happened to be travelling on the sub. Before Arkhipov set off for Cuba, he had already been involved in a nuclear disaster, as an officer on a vessel designated K-19. This was the U.S.S.R.’s first nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarine. It had been rushed into service in an effort to keep up with the Americans, and it was so danger-prone that its crew began to refer to it as “Hiroshima.” In the summer of 1961, K-19 was participating in exercises off the coast of Greenland when its reactor-coolant system failed. It had no backup system. K-19’s commander sent in crew members to repair the damage, knowing they were likely to receive lethal doses of radiation. Within days, eight of the crew members who had volunteered for the task were dead.
According to various accounts, it was Arkhipov who talked Savitsky down from firing B-59’s nuclear torpedo and, potentially, starting the Third World War. Sherwin suggests that, if it weren’t for Arkhipov’s experience off Greenland, he might not have stepped in. More fundamentally, Sherwin concludes, it was a matter of chance that war was averted. Arkhipov, he observes, could have been assigned to a different sub. Or the commander of one of the other subs could have decided to launch a torpedo. Or Adlai Stevenson could have skipped lunch at the White House, or the message from Castro to Khrushchev could have been further obscured in translation, or Khrushchev could have rejected the deal that R.F.K. proposed to Dobrynin. Had countless other possible decisions been made during those thirteen days, the crisis might have been remembered very differently—had there been anyone around to remember it. As E. B. White once put it, admittedly in another context, “Things might easily have gone the other way round, and none left to do the accounting.”
“Unanticipated events can happen no matter how carefully actions are planned,” Sherwin writes. “Avoiding their terrible consequences is often as much a matter of luck as it is of careful management.” This would be a discomfiting message in the best of times. It seems especially so right now. Just two weeks after Inauguration Day, the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia—the so-called New START—is set to expire. The Trump Administration has already scuttled the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—it withdrew from the accord last year—and its efforts on behalf of New START have been so halfhearted it seems likely to lapse, too. As the journal Arms Control Today noted, were this to happen there would “be no legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time in nearly five decades.” In case you need another reason to lie awake at night, there’s that. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-05--A Few Clarifications About My Viral Video

I ’ m not a doctor .
I ’ m also not a statistician , a meteorologist , a lawyer , a politician , a generally informed individual , a scientist of any kind , a gymnast of any kind , a historian , or even an historian .
I ’ m also not a squirrel .
I ’ m not saying this to justify any of the content in the video ( especially the slo-mo part ) , nor am I trying to avoid a lawsuit .
I actually invite lawsuits !
They ’ re cute .
Send me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jesus and Gandhi and my local pediatrician were all real and in context , although they may have been paraphrased or misunderstood owing to translation/oral tradition/being out of context/being mildly to completely fabricated .
Yes , that is my real hair .
In the slo-mo part , where you see more of it , that ’ s , like , eighty per cent my real hair .
I am now aware that what was labelled as footage from a recent protest was in actuality doctored footage from a June , 1989 , episode @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place blame , but I blame the doctors .
It also turns out that Siri and Alexa did not have a trafficking ring , of the human type or of the car type , and that it ’ s actually impossible to hide human organs in either of their voices .
A lot of you are making fun of my pronunciation , but , for the record , I really was talking about the Ku Klux Clam .
Several of my former friends and former parents and also a few celebrities ( hi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alerted me to the fact that the audio from both Nancy Pelosi clips has somehow been replaced with a speech by a singer ( ? )
named Mussolini .
I legitimately don ’ t know how that could have happened , but I want everyone to know that I have a SoundCloud and a Patreon .
That ’ s not my nipple .
I ’ m not saying it ’ s not anyone ’ s nipple , but it ’ s not mine .
The “ incorrect ” statistic regarding vaccinations turns out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it to nutmeg poisoning .
Earlier , when I said the thing about lawsuits , I feel I should clarify that what I thought I was talking about were jumpsuits , which are apparently a different thing .
( One is clothing . )
Yes , that is my cat who runs through the shot at 18:02—thanks for asking !
!
Her name is Rescue , and she ’ s a tenth-generation competition-and-sushi-grade pedigreed H1N1 long-hair Bengal-and-cream-cheese mix that I bought on Conservapedia Marketplace from a very legit breeder named Back Yard Sh-h-h-h-h @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is liberal tears .
I did alter the Bible quotes just a little , but it was only to make them look cute .
In the slo-mo part , I think mostly what you ’ re all reacting somewhat strongly to might be the animation ?
I just want to be clear that the dancing blur was intended to be the mouth .
Finally , no , I do not attend that preschool , nor do I have any children of my own besides the ones I reference throughout the video , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ record those international-cabal secrets by planting a microphone in a strange child ’ s lunch box ?
Yes .
Did I need to remove a string cheese to make room for it ?
Absolutely .
Did it not matter anyway , because the microphone was ruined by leaking fruit juice ?
It is certain .
Do I still believe those things I said in the fourteen-minute rap ?
A hundred per cent .
I hope that this has cleared up most of the issues you ’ ve all been reporting/blocking me about !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ after reposting , thank you for reposting !
The truth is , I love the truth , but , even more than that , I love the idea of loving the truth , without whose help I couldn ’ t have made “ Open Your Eyes : Covidfluencer Propagandamerica Lies and Neon Eye-Makeup Tutorial 2 : The Second Video : So Much More Neon.
” Link below !
♦

Now that it’s gone viral, I just need to clarify a few things about that video.
I’m not a doctor. I’m also not a statistician, a meteorologist, a lawyer, a politician, a generally informed individual, a scientist of any kind, a gymnast of any kind, a historian, or even an historian. I’m also not a squirrel. I’m not saying this to justify any of the content in the video (especially the slo-mo part), nor am I trying to avoid a lawsuit. I actually invite lawsuits! They’re cute. Send me all of them.
Those quotes from Jesus and Gandhi and my local pediatrician were all real and in context, although they may have been paraphrased or misunderstood owing to translation/oral tradition/being out of context/being mildly to completely fabricated.
Yes, that is my real hair. In the slo-mo part, where you see more of it, that’s, like, eighty per cent my real hair.
I am now aware that what was labelled as footage from a recent protest was in actuality doctored footage from a June, 1989, episode of “Sesame Street.” Not to place blame, but I blame the doctors.
It also turns out that Siri and Alexa did not have a trafficking ring, of the human type or of the car type, and that it’s actually impossible to hide human organs in either of their voices.
A lot of you are making fun of my pronunciation, but, for the record, I really was talking about the Ku Klux Clam.
Several of my former friends and former parents and also a few celebrities (hi, Alyssa Milano!) have kindly alerted me to the fact that the audio from both Nancy Pelosi clips has somehow been replaced with a speech by a singer (?) named Mussolini. I legitimately don’t know how that could have happened, but I want everyone to know that I have a SoundCloud and a Patreon.
That’s not my nipple. I’m not saying it’s not anyone’s nipple, but it’s not mine.
The “incorrect” statistic regarding vaccinations turns out to be completely correct if you apply it to nutmeg poisoning.
Earlier, when I said the thing about lawsuits, I feel I should clarify that what I thought I was talking about were jumpsuits, which are apparently a different thing. (One is clothing.)
Yes, that is my cat who runs through the shot at 18:02—thanks for asking!! Her name is Rescue, and she’s a tenth-generation competition-and-sushi-grade pedigreed H1N1 long-hair Bengal-and-cream-cheese mix that I bought on Conservapedia Marketplace from a very legit breeder named Back Yard Sh-h-h-h-h Cash App Only. Her favorite food is liberal tears.
I did alter the Bible quotes just a little, but it was only to make them look cute.
In the slo-mo part, I think mostly what you’re all reacting somewhat strongly to might be the animation? I just want to be clear that the dancing blur was intended to be the mouth.
Finally, no, I do not attend that preschool, nor do I have any children of my own besides the ones I reference throughout the video, who are metaphors. Did I try to record those international-cabal secrets by planting a microphone in a strange child’s lunch box? Yes. Did I need to remove a string cheese to make room for it? Absolutely. Did it not matter anyway, because the microphone was ruined by leaking fruit juice? It is certain. Do I still believe those things I said in the fourteen-minute rap? A hundred per cent.
I hope that this has cleared up most of the issues you’ve all been reporting/blocking me about! For any viewers who lost their jobs after reposting, thank you for reposting! The truth is, I love the truth, but, even more than that, I love the idea of loving the truth, without whose help I couldn’t have made “Open Your Eyes: Covidfluencer Propagandamerica Lies and Neon Eye-Makeup Tutorial 2: The Second Video: So Much More Neon.” Link below! ♦


newyorker--2020-10-05--How James Beard Invented American Cooking

Only Beard could preside over such ambition .
For Beard , a stolid , even sleepy , presence that evening , was unquestionably , as the Times had called him in the nineteen-fifties , the “ Dean of American Cookery , ” in the same way that Aaron Copland was the “ Dean of all American music , ” as Leonard Bernstein called him in the same period .
In both cases , the reputation was somewhat independent of the achievements .
You didn ’ t have to know the tunes , or the recipes , to know that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cast .
Large , broad , and jovial-seeming , a Santa of the buffet table , he was untouched by the nervous tension , produced by early training and endless anxiety , that ran like an electric current through classic French chefs in those days .
He was also clearly a pro—he had run a restaurant and a catering business—unlike the charming amateur Julia Child .
Even in his waning years , he presented himself as a knowing headmaster overseeing the students .
Reading John Birdsall ’ s new biography of Beard , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ( W. W. Norton ) , I realize now that I had caught Beard in a somewhat sad dotage .
( He would die a year after our dinner . )
The only semi-memorable thing he offered that night was an anecdote , presumably meant to be mildly titillating , about eating in the nude with the great gastrophile M. F. K. Fisher , whom , of course , he called Mary .
This , too , was part of the act : though gay and happily so in private , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part in public when it came to his sexual tastes , as was the enforced manner of the day .
Birdsall ’ s biography is very different in tone from the largely serious and admiring biographies that have been written about Child and Fisher .
Without actually saying that Beard was a fraud , Birdsall suggests that he was something of a figurehead , one of those people who represent a field rather than remake it .
By Birdsall ’ s not particularly unkind record , Beard often borrowed other people ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and generally relied on other cooks for his innovations and , not infrequently , on editors and assistants for his prose .
Still , Beard emerges from the inevitable biographer ’ s bath of debunking as an essential figure in the emancipation of American cooking .
Perhaps his abilities were those of the actor he had been in his youth , someone impersonating a gourmet more than actually knowing how to be one ; Birdsall shows us a young Beard learning that all you have to do is swirl the wine around and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the role that Beard invented and played was vital in creating a new idea of what American cooking was .
In 1980 , in the best restaurant guide in New York , all the four-star places were classic French ones .
Four decades later , that type of restaurant has vanished , or has only been clinging to life ( even before the pandemic ) , while places that share Beard ’ s tastes , if not his food , are taken for granted as the best in show .
Beard , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serve , has everything to do with what they ’ ve accomplished .
Beard , we learn , played a suggestively ambiguous role in capitalizing on the American abundance of the fifties and sixties , and then mediated a dialogue between the country ’ s West and East Coasts that helped shape American cuisine .
Born in 1903 and raised in Portland , Oregon , Beard was really a member of the Liebling-Hemingway generation , imprinted as he was by his experiences of France in the twenties .
After a largely peripatetic childhood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new liberal-arts college , he spent time in London and in Paris , studying voice , and then dove into performing , without great success , in London and New York and even silent Hollywood .
His ambition to be an actor never really vanished .
His move to food occurred , as much out of desperation as purpose , in the late thirties , under the influence of a couple of now forgotten New York socialites , Bill Rhode and James Barlow Cullum , Jr .
Beard , his biographer tells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to go to bed with Bill ; after hearing him talk for a couple of hours in Cullum ’ s living room , he wanted to be Bill.
” Rhode showed that cooking could be a form of theatre .
“ His storytelling—the bravado behind the invented anecdotes—breathed life and drama into the recipes , ” Birdsall writes .
It was the central lesson that Beard absorbed : not merely selling the sizzle more than the steak but selling the story of how the sizzle came to be , even if the steak @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year , he joined with friends to open a catering business , the legendary Hors d ’ Oeuvre , Inc.
It ’ s hard to believe now that a firm called Hors d ’ Oeuvre , Inc. could change the face of New York food , but it did .
“ The food at most cocktail parties relied on cheap , starchy fillers and bland spreads , ” Birdsall reports .
Instead , Beard served vichyssoise and stuffed tomatoes .
Around this time , too , Beard met Jeanne Owen , a New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was Owen who raised the brow of Beard ’ s palate , teaching him what was possible in French food ; of the wineglass-swirling fakery , Birdsall adds that , if Beard “ waited a minute , Jeanne would subtly signal to him what to think of it.
” The relationship established a pattern in which Beard often depended on a woman partner who did not look the part of great chef quite as obviously as he did .
A lot of his authority derived from his appearance and his often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delighted an audience by mixing the egg whites and the base of a soufflé using only his hands .
And his story about nude dining seems to have been thematic ; he liked to cook and eat naked , and didn ’ t mind people knowing .
Building a reputation , he made his television début right after the war with a cooking spot on “ Radio City Matinee.
” It was here that he was introduced to a broad public , and he soon became a host of one of the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Eat.
” Birdsall writes that Beard exuded authority without pedantry— “ he tempered information with folksiness and self-effacing fun.
” One can ’ t help envy the ease with which Beard ’ s audience could be educated and edified—he encouraged viewers to seek out olive oil—but one recognizes that his tagline , “ Yes !
I love to eat !
, ” was exactly what Americans needed to hear to de-snob their culinary ambitions .
The happy stout man showed that you could eat well without being frightened of eating incorrectly .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to understand that the empire of frozen food , including so-called TV dinners , was stirring a contrary demand , among a smaller but choicer market , for fresh produce and “ natural ” options .
In an age when every neighborhood in Brooklyn makes six kinds of artisanal ale and every emporium on the West Side offers sixteen kinds of American chèvre , it may be hard to grasp that simply promoting decent American Cheddar was once a defiant assertion of value against the ascendancy of Velveeta .
Beard brought both an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservative sensibility then seen as French to “ The Fireside Cook Book , ” published in 1949 and gloriously illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen .
It expressed his love for the hearty “ traditional cooking ” of France , redefined for an American audience often simply by language games .
Beard ’ s “ country omelet , ” in which eggs were combined with diced bacon sautéed with potatoes and onion , was just a variant of the French omelette paysanne , which used salted pork belly .
“ With American smoky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it , ” Birdsall writes , “ James created something new in Fireside : a dish that seemed to have roots with farmers in the Willamette or Susquehanna Valley , not villagers in the Rhône .
American food.
” The book was , however , made up in large part of work already done : more than a hundred of its twelve hundred or so recipes were , Birdsall says , “ slight tweaks of ones published in James ’ s previous books , with perhaps only a single word altered ” ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-plagiarism.
” Self-plagiarism is a dubious concept in any case—Kant repeated the same ideas over and over—and in recipe books it seems an absurd one .
If you have made something well once , why make it differently for the mere sake of variation ?
Nonetheless , the recycling irritated the New York food world—about as generous and free from competitive malice then as now—and the book , despite its still unequalled beauty , got a nasty pan in these pages from , as Birdsall deduces , a food writer named Sheila Hibben @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , repetitious , padded with bits of women ’ s-magazine anthropology.
” Birdsall suggests that Hibben wrote at the direction of Jeanne Owen , who apparently had fallen out with Beard .
The experience left Beard with a cynical clarity : you just had to push your way through , and rely on consumers , not critics , for your living .
This primacy of a West Coast ethic in cleaning up New York anxieties was a general rule of American culture at the time .
The painters Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relationship to their material—the one to pop culture , the other to landscape—than their New York counterparts could .
Making the American sublime landscape into large-scale abstraction was a worry for Barnett Newman ; Diebenkorn just kind of did it .
The West Coast turned you on by turning off the pressure .
In the fifties , Beard moved to a town house in the West Village and began an extremely successful life as a cooking teacher .
By the mid-sixties , he held food seminars for a student body made up , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the executive class , seeking a new kind of fashionable accomplishment , much as nineteenth-century girls had mastered drawing .
Some of the food prepared will seem to us now more alarming than appetizing : Birdsall describes “ ‘ an elaborate jelly roll ’ of veal , salami , mortadella , and prosciutto , to be wrapped around hard boiled eggs laid end-to-end down the center.
” Beard published a series of books , some very successful and some less so— “ The James Beard Cookbook ” sold extremely well , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prejudices ” did not .
He continued to depend unduly on editors and ghostwriters for his prose , and never quite got past the charges of cynical recycling .
Birdsall makes the right point : that the food being taught , despite its heavy and righteous patina of Americanness , was still essentially French in conception and technique .
Tellingly , one of Beard ’ s protégés was accused of plagiarizing a series of recipes from Richard Olney ’ s “ Simple French Food ” for his own book on American cooking .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ neatly swivelled around says something about the common grammar of food .
( Indeed , as the fine forgotten restaurant critic Seymour Britchky wrote back in the eighties , about Forgione ’ s flagship , there was hardly a dish being served that , minus the American rhetoric , you couldn ’ t have sold at a French place down the street . )
It took small , constant waves of novelty—a variety of Eastern influences , the new primacy of Italian cooking , the emphasis on localism , implicit but not fully @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that for good , and make American cooking less showily “ American ” and more unself-consciously itself .
Birdsall has a good story to tell , and tells it well , but he is one of those authors who would amuse others more if he amused himself a little less .
He loves the sound of his own crabby and condescending judgments , and the proportion of sneering to seeing is sometimes high .
He also has a weakness for breezy but off-beam generalizations about people and places : though one of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the gifted and original illustrators of Beard ’ s “ The Fireside Cook Book , ” were not “ Disneyfied ” —just the opposite , their style being rooted in Greek vase painting and in the art of Juan Gris—and New York publishing , in an era when Knopf and Liveright were both central , seems mischaracterized as “ anti-Semitic.
” Birdsall ’ s generalizations about France , where Beard visited throughout his life , can be particularly puzzling .
De Gaulle ’ s cultural minister André Malraux did not clean the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to luring American tourists—on the contrary , it was a declaration of French cultural preëminence .
And if gay life in Paris was indeed driven underground in the fifties , compared to its supposed prewar flourishing , this has left little trace in the literary record ; it was in 1952 that the locus classicus of French homophilia , Sartre ’ s “ Saint Genet , ” appeared , making transgressive sex seem not merely acceptable but sanctified , and an influx of gay American exiles , from James Baldwin to James Lord @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Well , damn braces and bless relaxes , as Blake propounded , and Birdsall is at his best when he relaxes and tells rather than judges .
The Beard who finally emerges is indeed a big figure , and , if more role player than role model , his was the role that the play demanded at the moment .
His books are a chronicle of beautiful borrowing .
At one point , Birdsall , while pointing to recipes taken without credit , also points out that in Beard ’ s “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of secret record of twentieth-century gay migration to cities from across the county and beyond its shores , ” with Lemon Cake Pudding and Slaw with Egg Dressing marking the flight of young gay men from their imprisoning provincial backgrounds to the havens of lower Manhattan and Los Angeles .
The migrations are the man , and the food .
Beard ’ s energetic foundation has kept his name alive , handing out prizes and grants ( although this year ’ s Oscars of Food were suspended ) .
His critical contribution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is everything American , which is to say pretty much everything there is .
Appetite is too honest in its nature to exalt anything that it doesn ’ t relish .
The British love of curry survived the loss of empire and left space for South Asian cooks in Scotland to develop tikka masala .
French bistro fare , renamed , provided the syntax of American cooking , while the dietary staples of the Northwestern indigenous peoples provided its vocabulary .
For all that James Beard didn ’ t know , there was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your plate is hybrid , made from many kinds and from many places .
In this sense , all food writing is travel writing , a story of migrations and journeys , as all travel writing is at heart literary criticism , a comparison of books and experience .
All books , meanwhile , exist in the first instance to feed their authors .
The circle of life is shaped like a plate , and we share many at once , or just go hungry .
♦

I had dinner with James Beard sometime in the spring of 1984. I was a youngster editing a “feature” on mentors and their protégés for a men’s fashion magazine, with photographs by William Wegman, the avant-garde artist famous for his neo-Surrealist images of his dog—things like that happened in the eighties. Beard’s protégé was the chef Larry Forgione, whose recently opened restaurant on Lexington Avenue, An American Place, had a quote from Beard on the menu. Over dinner, I had the impression that, as happens often in life, the protégé had adopted the mentor more enthusiastically than the mentor the protégé; the epigraph from Beard was opaque, not to say a little fatuous: “The truth is, one must be inspired to cook. For, You Know, we always learn from others and end up teaching ourselves.” But the point of the restaurant was to cook American American food. Part of the kitchen’s indigenous exoticism—not a contradiction; the whole point—was the presence on the menu of halibut, which Forgione proudly presented as an overlooked American fish. (Things like that happened in the eighties, too.)
Only Beard could preside over such ambition. For Beard, a stolid, even sleepy, presence that evening, was unquestionably, as the Times had called him in the nineteen-fifties, the “Dean of American Cookery,” in the same way that Aaron Copland was the “Dean of all American music,” as Leonard Bernstein called him in the same period. In both cases, the reputation was somewhat independent of the achievements. You didn’t have to know the tunes, or the recipes, to know that the mantle rested here.
Beard was perfectly cast. Large, broad, and jovial-seeming, a Santa of the buffet table, he was untouched by the nervous tension, produced by early training and endless anxiety, that ran like an electric current through classic French chefs in those days. He was also clearly a pro—he had run a restaurant and a catering business—unlike the charming amateur Julia Child. Even in his waning years, he presented himself as a knowing headmaster overseeing the students.
Reading John Birdsall’s new biography of Beard, “The Man Who Ate Too Much” (W. W. Norton), I realize now that I had caught Beard in a somewhat sad dotage. (He would die a year after our dinner.) The only semi-memorable thing he offered that night was an anecdote, presumably meant to be mildly titillating, about eating in the nude with the great gastrophile M. F. K. Fisher, whom, of course, he called Mary. This, too, was part of the act: though gay and happily so in private, he had trained himself to play a cagey part in public when it came to his sexual tastes, as was the enforced manner of the day.
Birdsall’s biography is very different in tone from the largely serious and admiring biographies that have been written about Child and Fisher. Without actually saying that Beard was a fraud, Birdsall suggests that he was something of a figurehead, one of those people who represent a field rather than remake it. By Birdsall’s not particularly unkind record, Beard often borrowed other people’s recipes, frequently recycled his own, and generally relied on other cooks for his innovations and, not infrequently, on editors and assistants for his prose. Still, Beard emerges from the inevitable biographer’s bath of debunking as an essential figure in the emancipation of American cooking. Perhaps his abilities were those of the actor he had been in his youth, someone impersonating a gourmet more than actually knowing how to be one; Birdsall shows us a young Beard learning that all you have to do is swirl the wine around and sniff to pass as an oenophile. But the role that Beard invented and played was vital in creating a new idea of what American cooking was. In 1980, in the best restaurant guide in New York, all the four-star places were classic French ones. Four decades later, that type of restaurant has vanished, or has only been clinging to life (even before the pandemic), while places that share Beard’s tastes, if not his food, are taken for granted as the best in show. Beard, having little to do with what they serve, has everything to do with what they’ve accomplished.
Beard, we learn, played a suggestively ambiguous role in capitalizing on the American abundance of the fifties and sixties, and then mediated a dialogue between the country’s West and East Coasts that helped shape American cuisine. Born in 1903 and raised in Portland, Oregon, Beard was really a member of the Liebling-Hemingway generation, imprinted as he was by his experiences of France in the twenties. After a largely peripatetic childhood and a year at Reed, then a new liberal-arts college, he spent time in London and in Paris, studying voice, and then dove into performing, without great success, in London and New York and even silent Hollywood. His ambition to be an actor never really vanished. His move to food occurred, as much out of desperation as purpose, in the late thirties, under the influence of a couple of now forgotten New York socialites, Bill Rhode and James Barlow Cullum, Jr. Beard, his biographer tells us, “started the night wanting to go to bed with Bill; after hearing him talk for a couple of hours in Cullum’s living room, he wanted to be Bill.” Rhode showed that cooking could be a form of theatre. “His storytelling—the bravado behind the invented anecdotes—breathed life and drama into the recipes,” Birdsall writes. It was the central lesson that Beard absorbed: not merely selling the sizzle more than the steak but selling the story of how the sizzle came to be, even if the steak was not actually sizzling.
The next year, he joined with friends to open a catering business, the legendary Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. It’s hard to believe now that a firm called Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. could change the face of New York food, but it did. “The food at most cocktail parties relied on cheap, starchy fillers and bland spreads,” Birdsall reports. Instead, Beard served vichyssoise and stuffed tomatoes. Around this time, too, Beard met Jeanne Owen, a New York radio figure and a formidable gourmet. It was Owen who raised the brow of Beard’s palate, teaching him what was possible in French food; of the wineglass-swirling fakery, Birdsall adds that, if Beard “waited a minute, Jeanne would subtly signal to him what to think of it.” The relationship established a pattern in which Beard often depended on a woman partner who did not look the part of great chef quite as obviously as he did.
A lot of his authority derived from his appearance and his often heretical performances. He once scandalized but delighted an audience by mixing the egg whites and the base of a soufflé using only his hands. And his story about nude dining seems to have been thematic; he liked to cook and eat naked, and didn’t mind people knowing.
Building a reputation, he made his television début right after the war with a cooking spot on “Radio City Matinee.” It was here that he was introduced to a broad public, and he soon became a host of one of the first televised cooking shows, “I Love to Eat.” Birdsall writes that Beard exuded authority without pedantry—“he tempered information with folksiness and self-effacing fun.” One can’t help envy the ease with which Beard’s audience could be educated and edified—he encouraged viewers to seek out olive oil—but one recognizes that his tagline, “Yes! I love to eat!,” was exactly what Americans needed to hear to de-snob their culinary ambitions. The happy stout man showed that you could eat well without being frightened of eating incorrectly.
Beard’s rise on television in the forties coincided with the introduction of frozen food to America’s electric iceboxes, as they were called. Frozen food signalled both American ingenuity and the American degradation of fresh produce, and Beard skillfully played both sides of the supermarket aisle. On the one hand, he developed a professional relationship with the frozen-food company Birds Eye. (It soon sponsored his television show, which was renamed “Birds Eye Open House.”) “Despite himself,” Birdsall tells us, Beard came up with “recipes for frozen squash with oranges, frozen green bean and ham hash, and frozen three-fruit compote.”
On the other hand, he came to understand that the empire of frozen food, including so-called TV dinners, was stirring a contrary demand, among a smaller but choicer market, for fresh produce and “natural” options. In an age when every neighborhood in Brooklyn makes six kinds of artisanal ale and every emporium on the West Side offers sixteen kinds of American chèvre, it may be hard to grasp that simply promoting decent American Cheddar was once a defiant assertion of value against the ascendancy of Velveeta.
Beard brought both an American curiosity about adventurous cooking and a conservative sensibility then seen as French to “The Fireside Cook Book,” published in 1949 and gloriously illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. It expressed his love for the hearty “traditional cooking” of France, redefined for an American audience often simply by language games. Beard’s “country omelet,” in which eggs were combined with diced bacon sautéed with potatoes and onion, was just a variant of the French omelette paysanne, which used salted pork belly. “With American smoky bacon and an English name to reorient it,” Birdsall writes, “James created something new in Fireside: a dish that seemed to have roots with farmers in the Willamette or Susquehanna Valley, not villagers in the Rhône. American food.”
The book was, however, made up in large part of work already done: more than a hundred of its twelve hundred or so recipes were, Birdsall says, “slight tweaks of ones published in James’s previous books, with perhaps only a single word altered”; Birdsall calls these “brazen acts of self-plagiarism.” Self-plagiarism is a dubious concept in any case—Kant repeated the same ideas over and over—and in recipe books it seems an absurd one. If you have made something well once, why make it differently for the mere sake of variation? Nonetheless, the recycling irritated the New York food world—about as generous and free from competitive malice then as now—and the book, despite its still unequalled beauty, got a nasty pan in these pages from, as Birdsall deduces, a food writer named Sheila Hibben. She declared it “enormously pretentious, repetitious, padded with bits of women’s-magazine anthropology.” Birdsall suggests that Hibben wrote at the direction of Jeanne Owen, who apparently had fallen out with Beard. The experience left Beard with a cynical clarity: you just had to push your way through, and rely on consumers, not critics, for your living.
“The Man Who Ate Too Much” makes a fascinating and persuasive case that Beard was brought to an idea of culinary Americanness by re-experiencing the American West. Taken with the recipes of Helen Evans Brown, who wrote the first substantial California cookbook, he spent much of 1954 with Brown in San Francisco, back home in Oregon, and in Seattle and Salt Lake City. Beard glimpsed what he considered a more authentic form of Americanness, which depended on cooking not being too self-consciously American. Once again with a woman to guide him, he sensed clearly that the future lay not with French cooking made American but with something akin to what came to be called fusion cooking. As a child, he’d watched a Chinese émigré he met adapt her cooking to the ingredients of the Oregon countryside and start to create something new. And, Birdsall illuminatingly points out, San Francisco bar-and-grills had been high-low joints from the start, serving steaks and cioppino alike. Ever afterward, the richest vein in Beard’s teaching depended on this epiphany: that what mattered was the hybrid connection of culinary cultures with good local foodstuff.
This primacy of a West Coast ethic in cleaning up New York anxieties was a general rule of American culture at the time. The painters Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn both had a less harried and tense relationship to their material—the one to pop culture, the other to landscape—than their New York counterparts could. Making the American sublime landscape into large-scale abstraction was a worry for Barnett Newman; Diebenkorn just kind of did it. The West Coast turned you on by turning off the pressure.
In the fifties, Beard moved to a town house in the West Village and began an extremely successful life as a cooking teacher. By the mid-sixties, he held food seminars for a student body made up, significantly, of men, many apparently of the executive class, seeking a new kind of fashionable accomplishment, much as nineteenth-century girls had mastered drawing. Some of the food prepared will seem to us now more alarming than appetizing: Birdsall describes “ ‘an elaborate jelly roll’ of veal, salami, mortadella, and prosciutto, to be wrapped around hard boiled eggs laid end-to-end down the center.” Beard published a series of books, some very successful and some less so—“The James Beard Cookbook” sold extremely well, while the lively recipe-sprinkled memoir “Delights and Prejudices” did not. He continued to depend unduly on editors and ghostwriters for his prose, and never quite got past the charges of cynical recycling.
Birdsall makes the right point: that the food being taught, despite its heavy and righteous patina of Americanness, was still essentially French in conception and technique. Tellingly, one of Beard’s protégés was accused of plagiarizing a series of recipes from Richard Olney’s “Simple French Food” for his own book on American cooking. That the national styles could be so neatly swivelled around says something about the common grammar of food. (Indeed, as the fine forgotten restaurant critic Seymour Britchky wrote back in the eighties, about Forgione’s flagship, there was hardly a dish being served that, minus the American rhetoric, you couldn’t have sold at a French place down the street.) It took small, constant waves of novelty—a variety of Eastern influences, the new primacy of Italian cooking, the emphasis on localism, implicit but not fully realized in Beard’s food—to change that for good, and make American cooking less showily “American” and more unself-consciously itself.
Birdsall has a good story to tell, and tells it well, but he is one of those authors who would amuse others more if he amused himself a little less. He loves the sound of his own crabby and condescending judgments, and the proportion of sneering to seeing is sometimes high. He also has a weakness for breezy but off-beam generalizations about people and places: though one of them had worked at Disney, the Provensens, the gifted and original illustrators of Beard’s “The Fireside Cook Book,” were not “Disneyfied”—just the opposite, their style being rooted in Greek vase painting and in the art of Juan Gris—and New York publishing, in an era when Knopf and Liveright were both central, seems mischaracterized as “anti-Semitic.” Birdsall’s generalizations about France, where Beard visited throughout his life, can be particularly puzzling. De Gaulle’s cultural minister André Malraux did not clean the Louvre in the sixties with an eye to luring American tourists—on the contrary, it was a declaration of French cultural preëminence. And if gay life in Paris was indeed driven underground in the fifties, compared to its supposed prewar flourishing, this has left little trace in the literary record; it was in 1952 that the locus classicus of French homophilia, Sartre’s “Saint Genet,” appeared, making transgressive sex seem not merely acceptable but sanctified, and an influx of gay American exiles, from James Baldwin to James Lord, filled the city in that period.
Well, damn braces and bless relaxes, as Blake propounded, and Birdsall is at his best when he relaxes and tells rather than judges. The Beard who finally emerges is indeed a big figure, and, if more role player than role model, his was the role that the play demanded at the moment. His books are a chronicle of beautiful borrowing. At one point, Birdsall, while pointing to recipes taken without credit, also points out that in Beard’s “American Cookery” there is “a kind of secret record of twentieth-century gay migration to cities from across the country and beyond its shores,” with Lemon Cake Pudding and Slaw with Egg Dressing marking the flight of young gay men from their imprisoning provincial backgrounds to the havens of lower Manhattan and Los Angeles.
The migrations are the man, and the food. Beard’s energetic foundation has kept his name alive, handing out prizes and grants (although this year’s Oscars of Food were suspended). His critical contribution was to see that good American cooking is everything American, which is to say pretty much everything there is. Appetite is too honest in its nature to exalt anything that it doesn’t relish. The British love of curry survived the loss of empire and left space for South Asian cooks in Scotland to develop tikka masala. French bistro fare, renamed, provided the syntax of American cooking, while the dietary staples of the Northwestern indigenous peoples provided its vocabulary. For all that James Beard didn’t know, there was one thing he did: everything on your plate is hybrid, made from many kinds and from many places.
In this sense, all food writing is travel writing, a story of migrations and journeys, as all travel writing is at heart literary criticism, a comparison of books and experience. All books, meanwhile, exist in the first instance to feed their authors. The circle of life is shaped like a plate, and we share many at once, or just go hungry. ♦
An earlier version of this article misquoted James Birdsall’s biography of James Beard.