Weekend Musings, July 16

How's that great ESG score workin' out for Sri Lanka?

Richard Fernandez:

Another day older and deeper in debt

St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the belt 'n road store

WSJ:

Developing world faces a credit crunch, but the biggest lender of all has been slow to cooperate with Western-style rescues. . .

But China, Sri Lanka's largest single creditor, offered a tempting alternative: Skip the IMF's bitter medicine for now and just keep adding on new debt to pay off the old, according to current and former Sri Lankan officials.

This utopian planning is working out well for the West, isn't it?

Things are real even for some of the elites in Sri Lanka now, though. Why weren't things real before the collapse? Babylon Bee:

The Sri Lankan government's sensible plan to become a green, climate-friendly utopia has experienced a slight hiccup after the nation's 22 million citizens have run out of food, fuel, and hope.

Advised by green activists and intellectuals, the Sri Lankan President's sprawling, vibrant agenda that included forced organic farming, massive debt to China, and skimming millions for personal gain -- was actually quite successful for the first seven minutes.

"You know, if it weren't for the inconvenient starvation of the entire populace, our program was working," said President Gotabaya Rajapaksa while fleeing on an eco-friendly, zero-carbon, upcycled, bamboo fiber raft with suitcases full of Sri Lankan dollars. "That's the problem with people, they always tarnish progressive policies by dying from them."

After the Sri Lankan people noticed that they were, quite suddenly, without food or jobs or fuel or security, millions of them paid a personal visit to the presidential palace to recommend some slight changes to the president's agenda. . .

Nice little video at the link. Communism. Heh.

Weekend Biographical Musings and Reading

I ran across an old (2017) piece from Intellectual Takeout suggesting that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 to prevent a dystopia, but instead he predicted one.

Ray Bradbury often said that he wrote science fiction not to predict the future but to prevent it. On this score, Fahrenheit 451 seems to have failed.

Sitting in the basement typing room of UCLA in 1950, Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days. The school charged ten cents every half hour to use one of its typewriters, and Bradbury spent a total of $9.80 to complete the book. Its publication launched the struggling writer to prominence and secured his place in the pantheon of science fiction literature. . .

What distinguishes Fahrenheit 451 from other dystopian fiction is that it's less about censorship than it is about self-censorship. Bradbury imagines a future in which technology has lulled people into complacency with mindless entertainment and a barrage of endless trivia. As a result, citizens have become sheltered from the realities of life and desire only to perpetuate an anodyne existence of pleasure and comfort. They have developed an intolerance for unpleasant truths, politically incorrect ideas, and opinions that might knock them out of their safe-spaces. Hence the burning of books, those containers of ideas from thinkers from the past that preserve and perpetuate a free and liberal society. . . .

The houses in the book had no front porches, so people couldn't sit in rocking chairs and talk. Go ahead and talk, Horde!

It's a strange irony that, in the age of the Internet, which was supposed to encourage more transparency and debate, the open exchange of ideas is under threat. This was pointed out by another famous science fiction writer, Michael Crichton. "In the information society," says Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, "No one thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."

Biographical notes on Ray Bradbury:

Ray Bradbury reportedly wrote every day throughout his long life (after age 12), but never turned to the computer or internet. There are several places you can get biographical insights into his life. This is a good one. And this one is official. He seems to have had a mystical side. Loved movies, comic strips and magic but was worried about TV.

He claimed that he was not a writer of science fiction, fantasy, or magical realism; rather, he saw himself as a word magician whose books wrote him. You could say Bradbury became a genre unto himself: a peculiar mix of the futuristic, the supernatural, the bizarre, and the nostalgic.

Back in 2017, the late, great OregonMuse wrote this under True Romance: :

"Science fiction legend Ray Bradbury met his future wife in a bookstore:"

If you want to fall in love with a reader, go where the readers go. The late Ray Bradbury met his future wife, Marguerite McClure, at Fowler's Bookstore in Los Angeles when he was 22 years old.

It was not love at first sight. McClure, who was clerking at the store, accused Bradbury of shoplifting.

"He carried a briefcase and wore a trench coat on a clear day, so I was immediately suspicious," she remembered later. "I expected him to slam his briefcase down on a pile of books and make off with a few. Instead, he told me he was a writer and invited me to have a cup of coffee with him."

"I thought this was sweet:"

McClure was the first woman Bradbury ever dated--and the last. They were married in 1947 and remained married for fifty-six years until McClure's death in 2003.

I miss OregonMuse. (Don't comment on old threads.)

You will learn in various biographies that Bradbury's wife did all the driving for the family because he never got a driver's license. He had poor eyesight (which prevented him from going to war in WWII) and had witnessed a terrible car crash as a teen which deeply affect him.

I once lived in a little duplex in Orange County, CA and when there was a limousine parked in front of it, I knew that Ray Bradbury was visiting my landlords, Ed and Clara. Well, mostly Ed, though he had known both of them since they were all teenagers. He came with a driver. I got a chance to say hello to him a couple of times. He generally wore white Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt.

You will read in biographies that Ray roller skated around Hollywood trying to get a glimpse of celebrities. I think it was more than that. I think he was trying to interact with celebrities. Ray and Ed sometimes sneaked into Hollywood theaters together for performances (often during rehearsals), skipping school. Eventually they managed to find their way into a Hollywood studio lot, where an actor (can't remember who) got a small group of conversationalists together around Ray in the cafeteria at lunch. They ignored Ed.

Ed was an orphan from Mexico, taken in by Clara's family. Ed and Clara both lost touch with Ray during WWII, when Ed was eventually sent to fight overseas and Clara was doing a "Rosie the Riviter" type job in the defense industry. After the war, they renewed their friendship. Ed also became a writer (of technical manuals for correspondence courses).

Clara said the kids they ran with in high school, many from the drama club, all thought Ray was crazy. So much for hero worship.

During the time I witnessed Ray's visits, Ed went from being in a wheelchair most of the time to being in a hospital bed. Toward the end of his life, Ed would sometime see things that the rest of us (except maybe Ray) couldn't, because one of the medications he took sometimes induced psychotic symptoms.

Ray stayed in touch with Clara after Ed's passing. He dedicated one of his later books to Ed.

Something I didn't know:

They Loved Me in Buchenwald

A week after Patton's Third Army liberated Buchenwald, on April 19, 1945, the inmates gave a concert for the soldiers who had freed them. Fourteen Czech, German, Dutch, Belgian, and French musicians made up the band. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles has the fading typed program on exhibit: There were sax, brass, and rhythm sections, and a sole vocalist--a Frenchman, Robert Widerman, who sang "In the Mood," "A Tisket, A Tasket," and "Honeysuckle Rose." He also performed both roles in a Mickey and Minnie Mouse skit of his own creation, which had been a hit with the Nazis and kapos.

"We performed on the stage, in our striped uniforms, exhilarated by our new freedom, and gave the greatest show of our lives which hundreds of GIs and inmates applauded and shouted," he noted in his memoirs. They closed the set with a "walloping version of 'Tiger Rag.'"

A few weeks later, back home in Paris, the boyish but indefatigable Widerman, age 19, opened at the legendary Olympia on the Boulevard des Capucines, then one of the many Parisian venues requisitioned for American soldiers' entertainment. He was the fourth on the bill, in an unenviable slot right after a performing dog act that always thrilled audiences. His first number was "Flat Foot Floogie," followed by "Daisy Venez Avec Moi." The audience wasn't buying it. He was distraught at the perfunctory applause. "I had two more numbers to do, and I was having flop-sweat. I didn't understand--they loved me in Buchenwald!"

Then came the pilot for the sitcom Hogan's Heroes, set in a Nazi POW camp, and his career-defining character as a tiny Frenchman, Louis LeBeau, who was not only a valiant little prisoner of war but also a gourmet chef (naturally). . . Successive seasons gave Clary more to do as his character developed, and his memoir, titled, like it or not, From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes--dwells on issues he had to contend with, with growing impatience, over the decades: No, he did not mind playing a prisoner of the Germans. The Germans in the sitcom were Luftwaffe and not necessarily Nazis, and a stalag observed the Geneva Convention and was not a concentration camp. The actors who played Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz--German Werner Klemperer, son of conductor Otto Klemperer, and Austrian John Banner--were Jews and he adored them as his "best friends" during the making of the show and as they aged together companionably in Los Angeles. Ivan Dixon, who played Kinchloe, was a brilliant performer who had already made the intense black-and-white movie Nothing but a Man in 1964; he would be the only cast member to quit the series for more ambitious work acting and directing. The only hint of tensions was with Bob Crane, who was the sole Republican.

Hogan's Heroes, Clary notes, would remain a global hit for decades to come, even in Germany, under the name A Cage Full of Heroes.

There is something to be said for persistence.

Music

Tiger Rag, Midlife Jazzband/Swiss Dixie Jazzer

Hope you have something fun planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's Thread, July 9, Why we have culture wars.

I closed the comments on this thread so you wouldn't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:14 AM

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