Fred Reed, Joe Biden and John Cassavetes

As published at Unz Review, 4/3/21:



My illness is mostly over, I think. There’s still residual coughing, weak, tremulous breathing and difficulty sleeping, but I’ve been able to walk for miles each day, a restorative act that gets my blood flowing, and, of course, seeing people lifts my spirits. Here in Tirana, there are enough benches and green spaces to rest, and a strong sun has been out.

Although Tirana has almost no ornate buildings commonly associated with Europe, no fancy friezes, wrought iron balconies, fluted columns or caryatids, etc., Tiranians maintain southern European habits. Weather permitting, they prefer to be outside among their kind. Cafes and restaurants spill onto sidewalks. Yesterday, I walked by four old men playing domino, with a small crowd watching them. At another concrete table, there was a card game.

While there’s certainly collective grief, physical pain is always private, and once you’re afflicted with anything, all you can think about is escaping that condition. During the worst days of my illness, my small room suddenly appeared huge, simply because everything in it was so inaccessible. The distance from my bed to the bathroom door became a much dreaded challenge, often to be postponed for hours.

Though it was hard to think about anything, I thought of Fred Reed’s 2019 article about having 14 operations on his eyes, after they were injured in Vietnam. I was too much of a mess to reread it, however, but this morning, I finally revisited this unspeakably painful account, and the incredibly tough man who could endure such ordeals, though, typically, Reed downplays this aspect.

A 12.7mm round had gone through Reed’s windshield, “So I got choppered to the Naval Support Activity hospital in Danang with the insides of my eyes filled with blood, which I didn’t know because my eyelids were convulsively latched shut. An eye surgeon there did emergency iridectomies—removing a slice of the iris—so that my eyes wouldn’t explode. He also determined that powdered glass had gone through my corneas, through the anterior chamber, through the lens, and parked itself in the vitreous, which is the marmalade that fills the back of the eye. It had not reached the retina, though they couldn’t tell at the time, which meant that I wasn’t necessarily going to be blind. Yet.”

With calmness or even a weird sense of humor, Reed recounts one horrific operation after another, “The thing is, the patient can see all of this going on inside his eye. Really. It’s like watching shadow puppets. The microvit is clearly visible like a little rotorooter and you can see the snipping action of the cutter-part. Ms. Pacman, I tell you. I remember watching it go after a piece of black crud of some sort, snipsnipsnip, and eat it. It is a tribute to the efficacy of federal dope that the patient doesn’t leap up and run screaming from the room. You just don’t care. The whole business is dreamy, a sort of warm glowing Buddhist light show.”

Thinking about Reed’s enduring hell puts everything into perspective, all right, so whatever I have is no more than a minor bout of hiccups, and it’s almost over. Having cured myself, though, I can safely declare myself, with no immodesty, as a medical doctor, physical therapist and shrink. Fortified with this body of knowledge, I must send an urgent message to Joe Biden.

Listen up, Joe. What’s the point of having six million Jewish geniuses in your administration, if none of them can point out the obvious solution to this Covid crisis? Why hasn’t Rachel Levine, for example, whispered in your ears, “Mr. President, you must sign an executive order immediately, mandating butt plugs for all Americans.” Levine is already an expert at rearranging everything downstairs, even with the nastiest scalpels, so this is nothing but the gentlest of remedies.

There you have it. Why bother wearing three or four masks and keeping your social distance if the other end of your plumbing is exactly like a howling tunnel in the middle of a hurricane? Farting away, all the Covid-infected are gassing up America with a massive apocalyptic miasma of toxic viruses, so all you’re breathing in, night and day, is this evil exhalation.

You must lead by example, Joe. To reassure your anxious citizenry, you, and Kamala, too, must show everyone how it’s done. Biden, “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight, I have great news for everyone. After more than a year of collective suffering and collective sacrifice, not to mention collective loss of living, we’ve reached the end of the tunnel, and I mean this literally, as you shall soon see. Tonight, I’m signing an executive order mandating butt plugs for all Americans, even the newborn, and you must never take it off. With this easy, affordable and painless solution, Covid will finally be defeated.

“Many of you may not even know what a butt plug is. You may think, Doesn’t it sound rather pornographic? Not at all, my fellow Americans. It’s just a piece of rubber that you shove up your anus, like this,” and here Biden pulls down his pants, with admirable dignity, to show a snugly fitted and even stylish purple butt plug up his ass. “Kamala, will you show them yours?”

She readily complies. Her crimson butt plug is so huge, however, several journalists can’t help but gasp. They pull their pants up.

Biden, “They come in all sizes and colors, my fellow Americans, and many are quite cute, I must say. Even wholesome. X-ray scanners will be installed in all public buildings, including supermarkets, restaurants and bars, to ensure compliance. With this simple solution, our lives can return to normal, immediately!”

At the nadir of my sickness, I had basically one emotion, dread, so to warm up my soul again, I listened to Glenn Gould and watched John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz and Woman Under the Influence, movies I hadn’t seen in more than 30 years.

Cassavetes’ films are characterized by long takes of people making each other uncomfortable, although this is almost never their intention. Many of them are just too self-absorbed, thus lost. Tension abounds, screaming erupts, and too often, there’s even physical violence. Almost never entertaining, his flicks are excruciating investigations into the hidden pains of being humans, especially American ones. You go along, endure these torturous scenes, because you recognize yourself, or should, in all these characters.

Minnie (Gena Rowlands) has a lunch date with Zelmo (Val Avery), an Armenian who oddly declares himself an Arab.

“You are?”

“No… I mean, I don’t look like an Arab. I don’t wear blankets like that and I don’t have any camel. How tall are you?”

Even with the “How tall are you?” there’s already an awkwardness between them, but Cassavetes’ characters blunder routinely, just like we do in real life.

At the restaurant, Zelmo tries to get Minnie to talk about herself, a basic tactic, but when she’s unresponsive, he has no choice but to go on about himself. Too vehemently, he snarls, growls or shouts, “I hate business, Minnie. It’s funny, ‘cause I’m a fairly rich man, but I hate making money. I don’t know what to do with it. I get up in the morning, I ask myself, Zelmo, what am I gonna do with my money? I give it to charity, I give it to friends. I buy a big house, take a vacation—from what, I don’t know? I’m not married anymore. I was married to a woman that was… a very nice woman, we had no children… it didn’t last… not very long… I made a mistake on our wedding night… personal stuff, you know. You’re very easy to talk to, Minnie. You look like you care about me. That’s a terrific quality to have—a rare quality. I think those people that can listen endlessly are much more fascinating than the people that talk.”

Digging deeper, he tells her, “Minnie, I got to tell you… my problem is that I have hair down my back, and on my chest, and down my arms… but not on my legs—my legs are very smooth. I don’t know why I’m telling you this…”

“That’s all right. I have the veal piccata.” With Zelmo talking so much, they haven’t even ordered.

“You look at a man like me, Minnie, and what do you see?”

“I see a very nice man who’s taking me to lunch.”

“I can’t seem to make you feel what I’m feeling. It’s very hard.”

“Very hard.”

More of the same, and these takes are usually very long, and Minnie has finally enough, “Zelmo, I have absolutely no interest in you personally. All I wanted to do was to go to lunch.”

“Not one dirty thing did I say. Not one off-center thing did I say.”

“Zelmo, I want to go. I’m terribly sorry.” They have eaten nothing.

“Always with blondes. They got some kind of Swedish suicide impulse in them. Took a girl out to lunch once—the next thing you know she wants me to kick her. I said—me kick you—for what? What’s that supposed to be… something?”

Finally, Minnie runs outside, with Zelmo chasing after and shouting. The sunny parking lot is a relief after the claustrophobic restaurant scene, yet even here, Zelmo can’t shut up, “I took you out, I was sorry for you. Bleach blonde hair, $90 a week worker… I wanted to take you out. Give you a little education. Let you understand there’s some kindness in the world.”

Seeing Minnie abused, the parking lot attendant, Moskowitz, has to intervene, thus begins their unlikely relationship.

If anything, Woman Under the Influence (1974) is even more painful to watch, for it involves Gena Rowlands going mad for nearly two hours, and I found myself howling at points, with tears streaming down my face, but hey, all of my emotions, even those I didn’t know I had, were revived. Great art does that.

For Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes got an Academy Award nomination for best director, and Rowlands got one for best actress. Even the lowbrow New York Daily News gave it a glowing review, but America was a much different country then. It was a much more serious place, with people who could still think.

The movie’s simple yet very poignant and elegant soundtrack was done by Bo Harwood. To celebrate their Academy Award nominations, Cassavetes and Harwood went onto a fire escape to drink some cognac.

Harwood, “He brought two shot glasses, and he poured one for me, and one for himself, and he looked at me with that wonderful smile of his, and he lifted his glass over the city, and he looked at me and he said, ‘Fuck them!’”

I interpret that to mean Cassavetes made movies to follow, most ruthlessly, his own vision, and nothing else. Of the major studios, Cassavetes laughingly said, “They help us destroy them […] If we make a good film, they will only suffer.”

Awards would be nice, but you must never pander, “You have to fight every day to keep your sanity, and stop from censoring yourself.” To censor yourself, then, is to lose your sanity, but that’s all we do now. Cowering, we’ve long lost our minds.

In the safest space online, we can still flaunt our belligerence, glibness and stupidity, but that’s just more proof of our cultural, intellectual and emotional regression.

Selling Whiteness

As published at Smirking Chimp, Unz Review, LewRockwell and TruthSeeker, 8/12/19:






My last three years in high school, I was in Northern Virginia. I hung out at Springfield Mall and Wakefield Recreation Center. Though I had lame handles and an erratic shot, I still managed to get into pickup games, and each time I hoisted up a brick, my buddy, Kelvin Nash, would holler, “Riceman!” I was supposed to fill it up, you see, but rarely did. Son of a lawyer, Kelvin is now a real estate agent in Dallas. He married his college sweetheart, with whom he lost his virginity. So much for black sexual precocity.

I worked at McDonald’s. After I got a Mustang II, I ventured further afield. I’d go to DC to scrutinize the National Gallery and Hirschhorn, and snoop around Georgetown a bit. I checked out Old Town Alexandria, and even drove to Baltimore to catch Orioles games against my eternally shipwrecked Mariners. With its chewed up turf and view obstructing poles, Memorial Stadium was a gritty, well-tattooed sweetheart who called everyone hon. Once, an M’s outfielder just stared in disbelief at my screaming self, with my trident cap and pennant, all marooned in an empty section. That year the M’s were only, I don’t know, a hundred games below .500.

Excursions to any city remained rare. I was a suburban kid, so shopping malls like Springfield, Tyson Corner and Seven Corners were my main hangouts, where I encountered my community, outside school. There was no Main Street in Springfield or Annandale.

Appearing in the mid 1950’s, the shopping mall became a quintessential American institution, and emulated worldwide. Ironically, it’s still thriving just about everywhere else, but the USA. I’ve seen packed malls in Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Budapest, Tarragona, Norwich, London, Peterborough, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Johor Bahru, Batam, Osaka, Tokyo, Kawasaki, Mexico City, Istanbul and, now, in Vietnamese cities. In Kiev, the shopping malls are not doing so great, but that’s understandable.

Andrew Yang, “Malls used to be a hub for socialization and commerce in many American communities. They were where families would go shopping for school supplies before grabbing dinner and catching a movie. Teens would have their first jobs working retail there and spend their Friday nights with friends. A local mall was an economic boon.”

Hundreds have closed, with the rest barely surviving, so if elected president, Yang will try to convert these dead malls into offices, churches and recreational centers, “We should provide incentives and funds to help more developers reinvent these buildings and spaces. I’ve been in one giant office that used to be a mall and it was great, with tons of parking.”

Maybe they should become apartments or even homeless shelters, but there won’t be hardly any sidewalk dwellers, you see, because Yang plans on giving every American $1,000 a month, but the glitch in this plan is that the country itself is worse than bankrupt, a fact that will become increasingly stark, stinking and messy well before the next Puppet-in-Chief is installed. With its manufacturing gone, the US could still hope to become a nation of wheat, corn and soybean peasants, but even that modest aim has been battered by unprecedented storms, droughts and an unblinking China.

A recent headline in the New Republic, “I Work With Suicidal Farmers. It’s Becoming Too Much to Bear.” In Menomonie, Iowa, there’s a corn maze with “Your life MATTERS” and a suicide number hotline carved into it.

In Saigon this week, I spent a couple of hours each day in a shopping mall, Aeon, that’s miles from downtown. As soon as its vast, well stocked supermarket and adjacent food stands open at 8AM, people flood in, and they can’t wait until the rest of the shops, on four levels, start their business day. Since Aeon is Japanese owned, all store employees must bow deeply to greet this first rush of patrons.

I was in Saigon in 2000 when Vietnam’s first shopping mall, Thuận Kiều Plaza, opened, but back then, people simply trooped in to see what is was all about, without buying hardly anything. They winced at the prices. Now, shopping centers have sprouted all over Vietnam, and their main attraction is a taste of the West. They’re selling whiteness, and Vietnamese are buying, since they have much more cash than two decades ago.

At Aeon, most of the advertising models are white, mannequins have blonde or brown hair, and English is ubiquitous, not to be understood so much as to lend cachet. Even Vietnamese businesses have English names, My Kingdom, Smoothie Town or Ocean Coffee, etc. On a bowling alley poster, three white faces are smiling so earnestly, they look insane. Frozen joy, or joy in rigor mortis. In Aeon’s theaters, four of the six featured movies are American, with the remainders from Hong Kong and Korea.

At iBasic, a Vietnamese chain, there’s a promotion, “USA UNDERWEAR DAY.” On the poster is a man, a woman, a boy and a girl, all white, of course, though the boy appears biracial, so maybe he’s the adoptee in this fictional family. An American flag is draped on a chair.

Many shoppers wear clothes with English writing. An intense woman in her early 20’s has this on her breasts, “WARNING: YOU MUST FALL IN LOVE WITH ME.” A sumotori-proportioned four-year-old boy is emblazoned, “ROUGH / LIVE LIKE IT.” A six-year-old girl clearly has no clue what’s on her black T-shirt, “TO HELL WITH EVERYTHING.” A chunky woman flaunts this on her brown denim jacket, “NEWYORK ANGERS.”

A seven-year-old is tricked out like an American cop, with an oversized toy gun awkwardly shoved into his pant pocket. On the back of his blue uniform, “POLICE” is proudly displayed. The Stars and Stripes, Captain America, Mickey Mouse and Minnie regularly appear. It’s almost cosplay, each trip to a Vietnamese mall.

I pause to examine a baby blue tank top on a hanger. Beneath “GAME TO EAT / LET ME BECOME MORE POWERFUL” are four depictions of an alligator elongating as he devours a frog, turtle and ostrich. “JUNGLETTIGER / LIVING FOR YOURSELF” is the final message at the bottom.

As for American food, Aeon Mall has KFC, Texas Chicken, Baskin Robbins and Pizza Hut, not to mention the burgers and fried chicken from Lotteria, the Japanese chain, or the burgers, ribs, wings, pizzas and American styled pastas at Al Fresco’s, based in Hanoi.

At Vietnamese KFC’s, you can get a piece of fried chicken, cucumber, carrot and lettuce wrapped in seaweed, or you can try the legendary Chizza. Available only in Oriental countries, the Vietnamese version has onion and seaweed-embedded mozzarella, and no marinara sauce, on top of the chicken. Though critics have tried to outdo each other in poo pooing it, the Chizza is a hit. Singaporean Rahil Bhagat laments in cnet, “Each bite of the Chizza showed me regret does indeed have a taste.”

At Aeon, US businesses are limited to these few fast food joints, with the rest belonging to Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Singaporeans, Taiwanese and even a Spaniard, with his Mango clothing boutique.

There’s a play area, Molly Fantasy, that has a miniature burger joint, ice cream parlor, flower shop, cake bakery and fire station, with everything cute and idyllic. A child’s fantasy of an American Main Street, it’s a bizarre contrast to the more typical thrift stores, pawn shops, down and out bars, tattoo parlors, boarded up windows and sun-bleached FOR SALE signs.

In an Aeon elevator, there’s a travel ad, “GREET AUTUMN IN THE US / “BEAUTIFUL” PRICE / YOU DON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT.” Although there’s an image of the Statue of Liberty and Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll only visit Los Angeles, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Hoover Dam on this $1,295.79 “AMERICAN WEST COAST” tour of seven-days, two of which you’ll spend on a plane. Since Hollywood is an LA neighborhood, and Hoover Dam is just outside Vegas, you’ll go home with only the briefest glimpses of two American cities.

Ah, but the four-hour bus ride between them will leave a deep impression of how vast and empty America is, which means it can certainly absorb many more immigrants, such as you and your entire extended family, for example. With its endless freeways filled with huge cars and trucks, and all its homes seemingly vast and boasting a front lawn and back, America is indeed that golden beckoning sign on a Benjamin-carpeted hill.

What you won’t see are the many thousands of homeless Americans living in squalor on Skid Row sidewalks, or sprawled around Union Station, up Main Street to City Hall, and onto Broadway. Nor will you see the beat up luggage, ratty mattresses, shopping carts, tents and garbage along the Strand in Venice Beach. LA’s roofless are everywhere, really, in Duarte, El Monte, Carson, Marina del Rey, Citrus and San Dimas, on and on. They’re just not visible in the handful of spots you’re chaperoned to.

Millions of Americans with homes and jobs are also not coping that well, judging by the out of control opioid crisis, but of course, you’ll have no inklings of that either, for most of the Americans you’ll encounter at Huntington Beach, The Strip or Premium Outlets Mall seem quite content and, well, huge, so these people must have no problems stuffing themselves. You’ll go home without any idea of how lonely, hopeless and angry the US has become.

Vietnamese who can’t make it to America must settle for trips to places like the Aeon Mall, for it’s really a theme park, featuring the USA and whiteness. This is how white people live, supposedly.

In Philadelphia, my wife worked for a decade in a rundown mall, The Gallery. It was a magnet for dollar store browsers, broke assed idlers, the filthy homeless and often unruly high schoolers. Since fights would break out and arrests made, it was hardly a family destination. My wife witnessed quite a bit, but you don’t have to be an urban mall employee to know that mall disturbances, including shoplifting flash mobs and even riots, are no longer unusual in America.

Normally oblivious, even the New York Times couldn’t ignore this trend, “Chaos Strikes More Than a Dozen Malls, Disrupting Post-Christmas Shopping” [12-27-2016]. Of course, your “newspaper of record” couldn’t acknowledge that nearly all the “feuding teenagers” were black.

Last year, I gushed about Jonathan’s, a Japanese restaurant chain that’s “an evocation of a much gentler and cheesier America,” with many of its offerings Japanese spins on American comfort food. As the brick and mortar United States is increasingly looted, dismantled or even burnt down, its mythic version will survive, in tiny bits, across the globe, until that, too, fades away.







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[A parking lot security guard told me to move on as I was photographing this, and since I already got my shot, I did.]



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Saying she worked there, the lady in photo said I couldn't photograph this BIG HAMBURGER sign. Taking their cue from Homeland Security, many Americans now deem street photography a very suspicious activity, though only a moron would think "terrorists" practice street photography. In fact, they don't need to take a photo of anything before planting their bombs. Isn't that right, all you FBI terrorists?



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