M*A*S*H (revisited)

"Heal Thyself"

Summer is here. Theater camp has concluded, my show has opened, and it is time for a little vacation with the family. A two-day drive, with four teenagers in the car, and guess what? We still all love each other.

Hotel life can -- if you can tear yourself away from your computer or phone -- provide the opportunity to take in some old fashioned television. We watched two episodes of M*A*S*H, back-to-back, just like I could on any single weekday during my childhood from seven to eight on Channel 43.

The vast majority of episodes from eleven seasons feature a cast of characters who were created for the television series, and not taken from any of Hooker's novels -- Potter, Winchester, Hunnicutt -- and the characters of Hawkeye and Houlihan grew to bear little resemblance to those from the books or from Altman’s 1970 film version, upon which the TV series is based.

Last night we saw the one where Edward Herrmann plays a relief surgeon who cracks under the pressure of “meatball surgery” (S08E17 "Heal Thyself") followed by the one where Col. Potter receives word that he’s the last survivor of his World War One buddies (S08E18 "Old Soldiers").

I have avoided re-watching the show for my entire adult life. When I was a kid I must have seen every episode several times over. I have probably watched M*A*S*H more than any other television program ever made. But whenever I happened upon a broadcast, revisiting just a few moments, I was appalled at the stupid jokes, the laugh track, and the general “niceness” that all the aforementioned characters fell into once they had jettisoned the difficult Trapper John and the impossible to make sympathetic Frank Burns.

Watching an episode play out in real time, from beginning to end, I was reminded of what made the show truly good. Yes, it was sanctimonious, I knew that as an adolescent. But take for example the way they took their time to play out the young surgeon’s disconnection from reality under pressure was truly affecting. I was surprised to learn they even borrowed from Shakespeare. I didn't read Macbeth until eighth grade. Herrmann’s doctor bemoans his inability to get imaginary (but also very real) blood off his hands.

The blood won't come off.
No matter what I do, it just stays there.
Just take it easy.
See what I mean? Look at that.
Never gonna go away.
No matter how hard I scrub or -- how much I wash it's gonna stay there.
Where do they come from? What do they -- What do they expect me to do? I can't.
I can't.

Well-written and well-played. When we moved into the next episode, and Col. Potter announced a sudden visit to Tokyo General, I knew exactly which episode this was. From somewhere in my head I heard the words tontine and pledge and the phrase, “give that man a cheroot.”

I may have been the only eleven year-old who knew what a cheroot was.

"Old Soldiers"

There were so any elements of the episode that I had no life experience to comprehend. The team of characters do not at first understand the colonel’s behavior, and one suggests he may have received a dire diagnosis himself in Tokyo. They never use the word cancer, not once, but when the gang is summoned to Potter’s tent, they have already braced themselves for the worst. “You have our total support,” says one, before learning the truth about the colonel’s recently deceased comrade.

You have our support? That struck my eleven year-old ear as odd, what kind of support do you provide someone who is ill? “I support you,” like he was being persecuted. Didn’t make sense. Now it makes sense.

Also, Colonel Potter’s entire war record was something I was unable to fathom. What I didn’t know about World War One was a lot. The final act of the episode features Henry Morgan speaking, taking his time, without interruption, describing the provenance of the bottle he has just received, the night in question, the fate of his comrades, an extended toast to lost youth … it is remarkably affecting.

The motion picture M*A*S*H is something I have also not watched in a long time. I saw it very young, and it had a poor effect on the way I saw the world. Indeed, it gave me an education in the madness of combat, and the joys of bucking the system. But it is cynical in the extreme, far too passive in its criticism of institutional racism, and downright condemnable in its treatment of women, especially women in positions of authority.

It is easy to tear down corrupt institutions, easier still to merely ridicule them from a distance. It is far more challenging to build up institutions based on basic human decency and understanding.

See also: Cleveland Centennial, M*A*S*H (TV show), January 20, 2012

Bright Young Things

The headline in The Onion ran;  4 Hours Scrolling Through Facebook Before Bed Referred To As ‘Winding Down’ (July 22, 2015) As is often the case, even now, twenty years on, their style of satire - which often consists of just saying true things pushed to logical extreme in flat, journalistic prose - exposing an Emperor who is already entirely exposed.

Last week I asked my wife to lock me out of Facebook, changing my password occasionally so I am denied access, like locking up the liquor cabinet.

I would prefer to have the wherewithal not to procrastinate, and to do the things I am meant to do. This summer I have been much more successful at reading, putting away three novels in the past month. Some has been research, but also fiction. Currently I am on my fourth summer novel, fiction which is also research; Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh.

Totally, odd ... I had asked my father for his copy and he forgot to bring it last weekend, but then as I was searching for a book for the girl to read I found his copy on one of our shelves at our house. I have no idea how that happened.

After a brief bit of confusion I have become entirely immersed in this tale of the "bright young people" in 1920s England. The picture of the Roaring Twenties from the other side of the Atlantic has similarities to that found in America, but like looking the wrong way through a telescope.

Young adults in Great Britain, for example, were the survivors of a generation slaughtered in the fields of France and Belgium during the Great War. Privation had taken a great toll on the established class system. They all just went a little nuts, drinking, taking drugs, throwing outrageous parties, pushing the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior.

I mean, America's "Lost" Generation was also behaving this way, only we seem so depressed and decadent, the British to be entirely disaffected and possibly demented.

As I continue my exploration of Agatha Christie's second novel The Secret Adversary, there are a few important elements which are drawing into focus. In the extremely helpful tome The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie by James Zemboy (MacFarland & Co., Inc., 2008), the author notes:

... unlike (her first novel) "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", ("The Secret Adversary's") characters are interesting and fun to read about ... the reader is treated right from the beginning to two loveable young people full of life and spirit ... (p.22)

Not monied as many of those real-life contemporaries written about by folks like Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Tommy was a soldier wounded in the war and now desperate for some kind of work, Also broke and with few prospects, Tuppence could return home to her family but as a modern young woman she would rather do absolutely anything else.

The manner in which they enter their business arrangement, which at first blush is practically an extortion scheme, retains the kind of disaffected pose that is so prominent in literature about young adults at that time. Christie herself was barely into her 30s when she wrote it and her dialogue is much more breezy and hip in this book than in her first.

There's also an awful lot of attention given to their eating, whenever possible, as thought they are constantly hungry, tearing into bread and tea when they have nothing, taking the opportunity for a meal whenever possible, and Tommy in particular obsessing about the time between feeding.

Dead Wake (book)

"It was 2 p.m. on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The Lusitania had been struck by two torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly ..."
- Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary (1922)

Fred Spear

Years pass, history accumulates, and as momentous events (those which appear to affect the widest number of people) occur writers will write about them, later writers will write about them, and still later writers will write about them, each either striving to create a more accurate account of just what happened, or to press a specific point of view about just what happened, or maybe just to make a buck.

Erik Larson has written several books that I should have read already, including Lethal Passage which traces the history of a single handgun (this, written twenty years ago) and In The Garden of Beasts, about the American Ambassador to Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Each of these interest me a great deal.

What I have just completed is Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, his most recent work, an account of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. Released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the tragedy, Larson sheds new light on the sinking from the point of view of passengers who survived - and also from those who did not - as well as from the captain of the U-boat which destroyed it, and those in British intelligence who were monitoring the seas as best they could with early 20th century technology.

With this book he seeks to add to the historical account corrections, most significantly the fact that the German sub "U-20" had by its own account fired only one torpedo, not two. Survivors reported two explosions, in obvious succession, and their assumption was understood. However, British intelligence had intercepted U-20's communique about their attack and chose never to set the record straight. Even Winston Church, at that time First Lord of the Admiralty, intentionally repeated what he knew to be false in one of his books.

Larson does not solve the mystery of what actually called the subsequent blast, though he does have a well-educated theory which has much to do with the physics of calamity. Regardless, why did the British government perpetuate this significant falsehood? No doubt because if firing one torpedo at passenger liner with 2,000 innocent souls aboard was at that time unthinkable, firing two is worse.

This is hardly the only piece of misinformation perpetuated by British intelligence, and a good deal of Larson's work implies (though he never proves this) that they allowed the Lusitania - which had more than 100 Americans on board - be destroyed in the hopes of bringing the United States into the war.


While this plan, if true, may ultimately have been successful, it did not happen straight away. Woodrow Wilson had run a successful reelection campaign in 1916 based in part on his promise to keep the U.S. out of the war.

Cartoonist Winsor McCay, who had lofty and admirable ideas about the power of the new field of animation, was deeply affected by the event. He was at that time working for William Randolph Hearst, who also sought to avoid war with Germany, and compelled McCay to create anti-war editorial illustrations for Hearst papers.

McCay spent his own money to create what was at that time the longest animated cartoon - Sinking of the Lusitania - a photo-realistic recreation of the tragedy, which was of course not captured on any film or through photography. This was also the first time cartoon animation had been employed to depict serious, historical subject matter. He and his team took twenty-two months to create the work, which was released in July 1918. By that time, the United States had already been at war with Germany for more than a year.

Agatha Christie's second novel, The Secret Adversary, begins with a prologue set on the deck of the Lusitania as it was sinking. No mean feat, creating a fictional moment with which to begin a thriller set in a familiar historical context, one already well-reported at that time a mere seven years later. The ship sank in eighteen minutes, I would have imagined complete panic. Larson's book informs me that until the final moments a great many were relatively calm, and so Christie's brief exchange no longer feels unrealistic.

More on The Secret Adversary to come.

Simple Gifts (1977)

New York at Night (1979)

R. O. Blechman (born Oscar Robert Blechman, 1930) is an illustrator and animator, you probably recognize his work. He made a name for himself creating sequential editorial cartoons for the Village Voice in the 1970s, later for The New York Times and plentiful covers for The New Yorker.

DID YOU KNOW ..? Like all great men, R. O. Blechman graduated from Oberlin College.

Without actually doing any research on the subject, I imagine the artist he is most closely compared to is Jules Feiffer, because of the shaky line. However, whereas Feiffer's people have detailed faces of angst and giddy nervous energy, Blechman's characters visages are so glyphic they are almost childlike, often succumbed by wonder.

R.O. Blechman (self-portrait)

His most-seen animation is probably something like the Alka-Seltzer commercial (1967) in which a man has an argument with his own stomach. My favorite work, however, was when he produced an hour-long holiday program for PBS called Simple Gifts. Seven animators presented works on the theme of Christmas.


Blechman's own piece, No Room at the Inn, retells the story of the Nativity with social commentary familiar to those who treasure his work. This acknowledgement of economic disparity and the plight of the poor is also reflected in Maurice Sendak's Introduction where a shoeless, miserable boy sacrifices his life to become a tree that brings joy to others.

Artist Chwast gives life to a bizarre tale from the bizarre novel Orlando by the bizarre Virgina Woolf, and there is an silly Toonerville Trolley cartoon. Three pieces, however, are biographical, and summon up Christmases from America in the 1860s (rich future President Teddy Roosevelt's My Christmas) and in the 1910s (poor future playwright Moss Hart's A Memory of Christmas)
and the tale most haunting, that of the "Christmas Truce" of 1914.


The story told in this letter from by Sir Edward Hulse was only one example of soldiers, largely British and Canadian, emerging from their trenches to meet and greet Germans (there are far fewer records of any French participating) in no-man's land. First they arranged to retrieve their dead, which led to the singing of hymns, then carols, the sharing of family photos and stories and finally playing soccer and exchanging of gifts.

The afterward to this animation, that Sir Hulse perished in the trenches, doesn't make the story any more poignant, if you are familiar with the wholesale carnage of the Great War. He died on a godforsaken field in France. Of course he did.

Following this dangerous breach of continual murderous violence, those at the top mandated that strict punishments would be meted out if there were any further peaceful gestures made toward the enemy. And once poison gas was introduced in 1915, most Christian amity was successfully broken.

A commercially produced video for Simple Gifts was last released commercial in 1993, and is currently available on VHS for around $130. It has never been released on DVD.

The Hobbit (book)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973)
"By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."
Some people like raising babies. My own wife has expressed that she misses the baby-era in our life. And I do, too, but not very much. Because we are in the Daddy Zone now. The children are old enough to "get things" and to make puns and have thoughtful conversations about absolutely everything. And then there are the books.

They are good readers, which makes me happy. And we read to them, every night. Every other book is something comforting and fantastic like Paddington or Mouse and the Motorcycle. But we are also moving into realms of fantasy and danger. During summer trips this year I read everyone the first two Harry Potter books. This fall we tackled The Hobbit (1937). At first they did not wish me to begin. Then they never wanted me to stop.

This was my second time reading The Hobbit. The first was in the late 1970s, I read it when I was a little older than the girl is now. The Rankin Bass animated TV version debuted Thanksgiving weekend during that magical year of 1977. Having only read it once, my impression of the book is much more informed by the cartoon, for better or worse. Orson Bean as Bilbo was very nice, and his voice still rings in my head every time I utter the phrase, "Bless my soul!"

Other voices are better and worse. John Huston as Gandalf? Yes, thank you. Hans Conreid as Thorin? Sorry, his work on Rocky and Bullwinkle made that a hard sell. And Smaug sounded like a thug on autotune, I am seriously looking forward to Benedict Cumberbatch tackling the role. The sounds of this one-hour Rankin Bass version is all the more impressed into my head because my parents got me the LP the same year.

But checking out clips on YouTube, it is remarkably good for a Rankin Bass endeavor, rich in detail, pretty faithful to the source material and with resonant music that stirred something deep inside when I heard it again after so many years.


Adam Gopnik wrote what was ostensibly supposed to be a review in The New Yorker for the final installment in the Eragon series, but since that did not appeal to him he instead wrote about Tolkien and how The Hobbit, while itself yet another chapter in an ancient tradition of British mythology, set the template for virtually every fantasy adventure tale written since.

We have dwarves, trolls, goblins, elves and men (men being the least interesting of them all) and then some kind of small creature who is a stand-in for all of the best qualities of simple, agrarian people. It is this last which marked Tolkien's tale as new and different, as our hopes and dreams lie not with the great king or warrior, but with the meekest of the team. (See: Star Wars, The Dark Crystal, Twilight ... and so on and on.)

Much has been written about The Lord of the Rings being inspired by the figure of Hitler and World War Two, which Tolkien flatly denied. And I believe him. Sauron is absolute evil, and as much as you can say about Hitler, he did not invent the idea of absolute evil.

However, reading The Hobbit, the author's own experience in the trench of World War One are undeniable. That is not to say that this book is a metaphor for that conflict. However, Bilbo's sense of helplessness in the run-up to The Battle of Five Armies is palpable, and earnest, and heartbreaking.

His comrades, the dwarves, for reasons beyond greed, insist in maintaining the entirety of the wealth under Lonely Mountain, in spite of the assistance granted them from the Men of Esgaroth. Arriving in arms, accompanied by the wood-elves who had imprisoned the dwarves, Bard makes a tactical error which could have been avoided.

One element I had forgotten about entirely (it wasn't in the TV show, and remember, I read this last when I was nine) is the Arkenstone, which our hero steals, knowing the worth placed upon it by the leader of this small team, Thorin Oakenshield. He betrays the dwarves, turning the stone over to the other army in the hope that it can be used to bring about a peaceful conclusion.

Bilbo Baggins betrays his friend in the name of peace. And as it was in 1914, he fails. The author knows well enough where all this is headed.

As it turns out, the goblin army arrives and men, dwarves and elves team together to fight their collective enemy. Tolkien's description of The Battle of Five Armies is not glorious, it is not majestic. It is horrible, devastating, chaotic, and ends fortunately for our heroes only because it is joined by a sixth army (the Americans -- I mean the Eagles, get it?) which entirely routs the goblins.

The bittersweet ending of this tale is merely a precursor for the next, much longer, and protracted engagement. And by that I do not mean as the events of World War One led to World War Two, rather that the events of World War One have led to absolutely everything that has happened since.

My play script "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie is available at Playscripts, Inc.

To End All Wars (book)

One of the signs of impending imperial collapse is the tendency of a dominant power to celebrate wholesale stupidity.

The Romans, awash in plenty, succumbed to decadence. One prime example was the phenomenon of the Gladiators. We know about the enslaved people who were subjected to violent arena games for the entertainment of the masses, but there were also the rich, pampered youth of the ruling class who, for want of the glory of combat subjected themselves to the public grindhouse for the sake of either glory or death, often both.

One of my father's favorite books is The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford, a chronicle of the "race" to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen of Norway and Robert Falcon Scott of England. It is a testament to the fighting British spirit that Scott's expedition, while a horrific failure, was celebrated by his countrymen as a shining example of English can-do resolve and daring. They also pasted Amundsen, who employed many modern techniques to get his crew to the Pole first and home safely (Scott and most of his men perished) as some kind of cheater. For example, the devious Norwegian used dogsleds and not horses.

Horses. Scott brought horses. To Antarctica. Hail Britannia.

Speaking of horses, I just finished To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild, a new history of World War I with a unique point of view; that the war was stupid and wrong. It covers not only the build-up to the "Great" war, and its execution (and that is an appropriate word to use) but also the British peace movement. There were loud voices against the war from the beginning, and they continued and built throughout, in spite of the draconian powers employed by the existing hierarchy to stifle them.

My education of WWI has been scant. Americans know a great deal about World War Two. It has been with us our entire lives. It shaped our nation. World War One ... not so much. For example, I have two uncles who served in the Pacific during WWII. One of my grandfathers was too young to have served in Europe in 1918, the other had a medical deferment. It is the war before talkies, before radio, before everything.

And yet, the war that started the 20th Century created the 20th Century. I was taught that the War was inevitable because of all of the interlocking treaties and that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (I LOVE that band!) lit the bug. What we are not taught is that after two centuries of colonial expansion, the great powers of Europe believed themselves invincible, the Masters of Earth, and that war was an un-loseable game.

And so they attacked with machine guns and barbed wire, and there was nowhere to go but down. British generals longed for the day which never came, the day when they could finally open their enemies defenses wide enough to send in the cavalry. The actual cavalry. You know, with horses. That would be a glorious day. Instead each side murdered the other, for years. It was only when the U.S. joined the fight, so late in the game, that Germany capitulated. Not because there was anything special about the United States. But in a "game" where the only end in sight was the entire decimation of the others' population, it was only a war of numbers. Numbers of men. Sacrificial men.

World War One was a waste of absolutely everything, gaining no one anything, and it effects have reverberated through every single battle since, up to and including today's. And tomorrow's.

My adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles goes into production soon. It takes place in the summer of 1917. Our narrator, Captain Arthur Hastings, is on medical leave from the Front. His friend Poirot is a Belgian refugee. Other characters are excused from battle for one reason or another, but contribute in their own way. Reading up on the period, I have discovered after the fact elements included by the author which were popular themes at the time - including the almost maniacal fear of German spies.

Styles was not published until 1920, during that period when hostilities were presumed over, but Great Britain was no longer so great, a point which is reflected in this story and all subsequent Poirot mysteries. Britain valiantly attempts to prevail, protesting its relevance in full-throated denial of things as they are.

A lesson to be learned, for every empire.


Happy Christmas.
UPDATE: My play adaptation of Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" is available from Playscripts, Inc.