Walls and Roads
The second part of a multi-episode historical film. A round of Roulette. Surveying a nonfiction children's book series. As I too often am, I'm re-reading yet more newspaper comics.
Picture Protocol
A pre-World War II isolationist politician is quoted in the second episode of The U.S. and the Holocaust as effectively commenting that a huge wall should be built around the entire U.S.A. to keep out both perpetrators and victims of any and all nationalist criminal aggression that takes place overseas and outside of our sphere of concern.
Naturally we know with the benefit of hindsight that it was in the myopic nature of such small-minded opinion-havers, of a type who still pipe up today from all corners of the political landscape, not to grok that the problem of the Third Reich and its allies never could have been contained to an area outside of America’s sphere of concern. The pointed inclusion by Ken Burns and his collaborators of the instantiation of a “build a wall” concept from before the U.S.A. entered World War II can’t not be read as a direct reference to one of the signature campaign pledges and most time-wastingly counterproductive failed policies of our absurd and incompetent forty-fifth President.
The heartbreaking leitmotif that the United States of America didn’t do as much as it could or should have to prevent the Holocaust, or at least to give safe haven to far more refugees than the U.S.A. took in, is developed more fully in this second episode. Here we see how the Germans began aggressively seizing European territory in every direction and got very serious about accepting the fact that they wouldn’t be able to simply exile all Jews off of the continent and would have to systematically destroy them. I didn’t know that there is real extant footage and photography of mass shootings, apparently the preferred method of slaughter before the innovation of using gas was developed. Watching historical footage of Nazis slaughtering civilians in mass graves and up against walls is difficult but the people who endured it had no choice, so literally the very least we can do as observers is not to avert our eyes.
However I did know, and this is a significant moral and historical insight of which I’m glad that this film makes note, that the determination to wipe out the entirety of European Jewry using gas chambers instead of mass shootings was meant to streamline the genocidal process by making it more palatable — not for the victims but for the perpetrators. In other words it was sometimes hard for the murderers to observe their own actions, and the industralization of this genocide was designed to help the perpetrators avert their gaze from their crimes and to partition their sense of conscience from an understanding of themselves and their victims as sharing a common humanity.
But as a layman and someone who has only a basic working knowledge of these historical events, I am out of my depth here, which is partly why I’m glad that this film has so many articulate experts of such high caliber for its array of talking head commenters. Among these is the distinguished historian, author and expert on European totalitarianism Timothy Snyder, whose books On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century I have read twice and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America I have read once. I recommend both highly.
As with all of Burns’s documentaries, he does that trick here where he casts noteworthy actors as historical personages. My attention was arrested in the second episode by the voice of none other than Werner Herzog speaking the words of Nazi high commander Hermann Göring.
Roulette
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss, read in 2016. Early Seuss. I’ve been reading and loving Dr. Seuss’s work all my life but for whatever reason this one was never an especial favorite, maybe because he got better later in his career. In fact I think I didn’t sit down and read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street until I was an adult. But it’s annoying me right now that I can’t really remember much about it. I know that the gist is that is has to do with a kid seeing a lot of wacky stuff on Mulberry Street. I should give it another look some time.
Beowulf by anonymous, read in 2015. I derive satisfaction from reading very old and influential works of literature, either because they’re worth it or just to say that I’ve read ‘em or both. Beowulf is an Old English poem by an unknown author from an unclear date about a sojourning warrior who falls in with a beleaguered tribe and becomes their king through a three-act structure of hand-to-hand combat, killing first an abominable monster, then the monster’s mother and then a dragon. (I’ve never been clear about just what the mother character is besides…something’s mother. She should also be a monster, right? Right?)
In general I dislike audiobooks, but whenever I think of having experienced Beowulf I recall that I did so by means of an audiobook translation that I would listen to while walking to work in the mornings. At the time my predawn walk took me through the San Francisco neighborhoods of Noe Valley and Dolores Park. So now Beowulf has for me one of those mnemonic associations that sometimes accompany a certain piece of media; when I think of Beowulf my mind conjures the image of one particular Noe Valley intersection. From there I would have been walking north over a hill and subsequently descending upon the downward slope of the verdant Dolores Park and its opulent view of downtown San Francisco. Maybe I should talk to someone about staging a phone-recorded movie version of Beowulf set on the playgrounds and tennis courts of Dolores Park and we can shove it out in snippets on TikTok or whatever bullshit.
Trump’s ABC by Ann Telnaes, read in 2018. I didn’t plan to mention the forty-fifth President twice in this newsletter but such are the inscrutable ways of Roulette. I actually really would prefer not to be writing about him at all but the rule for Roulette is that I have to write about whichever reads from my complete reading list the random number generator selects. I can’t skip a selection just because I don’t feel like mentioning the book’s subject more than once in the same entry.
Telnaes is a skilled editorial cartoonist who works for the Trump-opposed Washington Post newspaper. In 2018 she published a parody of a children’s board book about the nepotism, corruption and stomach-churning tackiness of the Trump administration, structured along a rhyme-scheme of alphabetical couplets to mimic an ABC primer (A is for this, B is for that and so on).
At the time of this book’s release I was living in Seattle; the comics publisher Fantagraphics, who had published my own book of cartoons the year before, was putting out Trump’s ABC and hosting a book release event for Telnaes at the Fantagraphics bookshop in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. I attended the event and on a whim sprang for a signed copy of the book as a gift for my girlfriend at the time, a Trump-disliker after my own heart. I don’t know if she still has it or not.
Literature Loophole
Here are all of the nonfiction children’s books I’ve read from the “Little People, Big Dreams” series:
Jane Goodall, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Beatrice Cerocchi, read in 2019.
Agatha Christie, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Elisa Munsó, read in 2019.
Audrey Hepburn, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Amaia Arrazola, read in 2019.
Stephen Hawking, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Matt Hunt, read in 2019.
Emmeline Pankhurst, written by Lisbeth Kaiser, illustrated by Ana Sanfelippo, read in 2019.
L.M. Montgomery, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Anuska Allepuz, read in 2019.
Anne Frank, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Sveta Dorosheva, read in 2019.
Ella Fitzgerald, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Barbara Alca, read in 2019.
Ella Fitzgerald again, still written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, still illustrated by Barbara Alca, read for the second time in 2019.
Georgia O'Keeffe, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Erica Salcedo, read in 2021.
And the most recent addition to this catechism is David Attenborough, written by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara, illustrated by Mikyo Noh, read right here in good ol’ 2023. (I don’t know why Vegara is credited as “Ma” on all the others I’ve read and “Maria” on the David Attenborough book and I don’t need to know because the books are still great and presumably her checks clear either way.)
David Attenborough is one of three people in the world who if you have a problem with them I don’t know what do for you. The other two are Miranda Lambert and my coworker Pete. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
Comics Contract
I didn’t plan where to go with my daily diet of classic newspaper comics after finishing the Little Nemo collection but as usual Providence was keepin’ an eye on me. I can’t help it if I’m lucky.
I found in a Little Free Library a paperback collection from 1962 called We Love You, Snoopy. Old Peanuts strips with the panels relaid haphazardly across the pages, sometime with panel borders erased or extraneous border-transcending new details drawn in. So basically, as someone who has read all fifty years of original Peanuts strips in chronological order, I have definitely read all this material before. But I’m hitting the road for two weeks soon and I figured it would be handy to have a small comics paperback in my bag.
Next: more on upcoming travels and some associated reading. Finishing The U.S. and the Holocaust and moving on to watching other stuff.