Flying Tiger Yee

The Denver Post has an intriguing story about John Yee of the suburb of Aurora, who claims to have been a translator for the American Volunteer Group in Kunming in 1941-1942. The burden of the story is that he was Claire Chennault's translator (which he wasn't), but it goes on to say that he worked in the aircraft warning and control system that protected Kunming from Japanese bombers (which makes a great deal more sense). At a time when the original Flying Tigers are dying off at an alarming rate, it's refreshing to discover another candidate for their number. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

$6.40 Flying Tigers

Here's a bargain: Amazon.com is selling some deeply discounted copies of Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942. Only twelve copies left! (Typically these are books that have been in a warehouse somewhere, have been returned to the publisher, and have been marked with a black line on the bottom edge so they won't be sold as new. They are new, however, though they may be a bit shelf-worn from their travels.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let's all be sad for the libertine

As all the world knows, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has moved into a luxe Manhattan apartment in lieu of a cell at Riker's Island. As the BBC reports in a heart-breaking expose: 'A lawyer for Mr Strauss-Kahn said on Wednesday his client was "very bored" under house arrest.'

Evidently his host is not providing maid service. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Naples to Venice at 38 mpg

The New York Times had a clever idea: buy one of those ridiculously unAmerican Fiats that are supposed to rescue Chrysler Corp from bankruptcy, drive it from Naples in Maine to Venice in Florida, and report on the experience. Of course the report is mostly favorable: the Good People are eager for the rest of us to drive underpowered, undersized, and overpriced ($20,000 for a Fiat?) automobiles, while they continue to jet between time zones and be met at the airport by Town Cars and stretch limos. (Or, in the case of Barack Obama, airlift a land yacht to Ireland and let it get stuck on a speed bump.)

One other complaint about an otherwise commendable review: the author assumes that the Cinquecento was born with the 1957 model. Not so! I hitchhiked many a mile through Italy in 1955, catching rides in the true original, the Fiat 500 that originated in 1936. The NYT correspondent faulted the rather cramped back seat of the current model--hey, he should have tried those that came out of the Fix It Again Tony factory in the immediate postwar years! They had no back seat at all. If I was the third passenger in the Topolino (as it was also called), I had to sit crosswise with my knees up to my chin. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lovett Forte-Whiteman meets the Gulag

Probably the most poignant story in The Forsaken (now bargain-priced on Amazon!) is that of Lovett Forte-Whiteman. He was born in Dallas, graduated from the Tuskegee Institute, edited the socialist magazine The Messenger, founded the American Negro Labor Congress, and--big mistake!--moved to Moscow in 1930 to work as a science teacher at the American School. After three years--even bigger mistake!--he changed his mind and applied for a visa to return to the United States. He was arrested for counter-revolutionary activities and sent to a labor camp in Kazakhstan. Beaten because he failed to meet his work quota, his teeth knocked out, he died of starvation on January 13, 1939, at the age of forty-four. So much for life in the worker's paradise. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Forsaken Americans

Here's the remarkable story of some hundreds or thousands of Americans who vanished in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and later. They took ship for Russia to escape the Great Depression in what they had been assured was a worker's paradise. Among them were some hundreds of former Ford Motor Company workers, hired to set up and run an assembly plant for Model A cars and trucks. (In a brilliant stroke, Henry Ford sold the plant just as he was phasing out the "A" in favor of the 1932 "B" model and the later and more streamlined V-8s.) In the end, many of them wound up being driven to prison in the very automobiles they'd helped to manufacture. Many or most were shot; some may have survived for years in the Gulag prison camps; at least one eked out his life in Kazakhstan, where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did his time, and where my friend Basia was briefly exiled. See it at Amazon.com. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The libertine

Gotta love the portrait of Dominique Strauss-Kahn after a night in the holding pen of a New York City jail. This may be the first time the head of the International Monetary Fund had to step momentarily outside his privileged cocoon, which includes a $3000-a-night suite at the Sofitel in Manhattan--and of course a first-class seat on Air France, from which the cops dragged him after he foolishly called back to inquire about his missing cell phone. France of course is up in arms, accusing America of hypocrisy., religious conservatism, and, most recently, of something called accusatory justice. A cooler head, the NYC judge, called Mr Strauss-Kahn a flight risk. Even if he didn't try to rape the chambermaid in her three major orifices, he's certainly that--a first-class flight risk. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Ride of the 45-ton Machine

I generally spare readers of this blog any reference to my opera addiction, but I did devote seven hours yesterday (including travel time and a technical delay) to Die Walküre, the second in Robert Lepage's Ring Cycle music dramas. I had a fairly good time at Das Rheingold last fall, but on reflection, and after that interminable first act in which Bryn Terfel with his stringy hair, huge jowls, and seven-day growth of beard filled the silver screen in dimensions never intended for an opera divo, I have to say that the new Met Ring is a multi-million-dollar, forty-five ton failure. It just -- doesn't -- work. (And I'm not referring to the Machine's failures during the premiere of Rheingold and the theater broadcast of Walküre.) I will be there for Siegfried in the fall, but it will be more of a duty call than a pleasure anticipated.

I saw a fairly decent Siegfried at the Kennedy Center a couple years ago. At the intermission, a Wagner buff told me how, when the Met put on Ring Cycles of its earlier production, Lufthansa laid on charter flights, so Germans could flock to New York to see the Ring as Wagner intended it to be seen. I doubt very much that anybody will be flying from Frankfurt to attend this version. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Enhanced capture

The Bush administration took a lot of heat for allowing "enhanced interrogation" of captured terrorists, sometimes in prisons outside American jurisdiction. Now that those interrogations have yielded us the corpse of Osama bin Laden, the heat is being applied (though ever so gently) to the feet of the Obama administration, which wildly denies that "torture" had anything to do with it. Personally, I don't think that waterboarding is torture, as opposed to real scary stuff, but then--I've never been waterboarded! (American soldiers are sometimes subjected to it, the better to prepare them to endure scary stuff.) And now Chris Wallace of Fox News has put his finger upon the crux of the matter:

"why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits -- why is that over the line?"

Indeed. And the absurdity of the whole affair is brought out ever more starkly as the interview continued. Tom Donilon, President Obama's national security adviser, gives the sane and sensible answer, which Mr. Wallace then boots across the goal line (but don't spike that football!):

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that waterboarding is right and proper. John McCain says it isn't, and if anyone knows about torture, it's Mr. McCain, who was subjected to it for years on end. But if waterboarding is wrong, how come assassination is right? Does it somehow qualify as enhanced capture if done by a left-liberal administration? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

War

 

I am writing about the Polish experience in the Second World War, and just came across this image from 1939. What a great photo! What's particularly awful is that the wreckage is from the winning side, in this case the "Germania" regiment of the Waffen SS, destroyed in a night attack by the Polish 11th Carpathian Infantry Division on the road to Lwow. I wonder if the little girl survived the war? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

What did the Pakis know, and when did they know it?

The press (or media, if you prefer) is full of eye-rolling about the Pakistani claim that they knew nothing about bin Laden's compound a few hundred meters from the country's version of West Point. On the other hand, we are told that the CIA had been staking out Osama for weeks or months from a nearby house, complete with mirror windows and other implements of the spook trade. Now, if the Pakis did know about Osama, then they must also have known we were stalking him, right? That's a level of duplicity that leaves me breathless. I find it easier to believe that they didn't know about either one. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Everyone's a souvenir hunter

Catching a memory outside the compound where bin Laden was killed. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Can't step twice into the same Holocaust

In his youth, Sandor Kepiro was a Hungarian Nazi who evidently took part in a massacre of 1200 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies in the Yugoslav city of Novi Sad in 1942. Astonishingly, he was actually tried and convicted for this atrocity, in 1944, but the conviction was quashed and he escaped to Argentina. He returned to Hungary in 1996, was smoked out by the Simon Wiesenthal hunters, and is now, at the age of ninety-seven, on trial in Budapest as a war criminal.

Naturally, Mr. Kepiro denies that he did anything wrong. (The sign he's holding accuses the court: "Murderers of a 97-year-old man!") And indeed, one must wonder: is this really the same man? Heraclitis famously argued that we can never step twice into the same river, because the water has changed; and it is equally true that we have changed. Mr. Kepiro not only says he did nothing wrong; he may even believe it. Suppose the court gives him a life sentence for murder! (Hungary has abolished the death penalty.) What does a life sentence mean when you are ninety-seven, for a crime you supposedly committed when you were twenty-eight years old, when not a single cell in your body remains the same, and your mind has no recollection of it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Rainy day outside Moscow

I read the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago many years ago, when it was first published in paperback in the U.S. Now I've read that volume again, and find to my amazement that there are two more, each as large as the first. Solzhenitsyn, I find, is a bit like Wagner or Proust: one has a richer experience the second time around, when one has a better notion of what to expect. Here he is on the subject of western liberals, as seen by a slave laborer after a rainy day trying to meet the quota the clay pits on a starvation diet:

"Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne or Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student cafes.... They railed against their own governments and their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union.... They judged everything in the world with self-assurance, but particularly the prosperity and higher justice of our country....

"The rain drummed on the back of our heads, and the chill crept up our wet backs." (Harper & Row 1976, vol. 2, pp. 195-196)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mission accomplished

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Superman leads from behind

With the president of the United States doing everything he can to dial back American hegemony, even the superheroes of yesteryear are following suit (or leading from behind, the new White House version of Manifest Destiny). It seems that Superman himself has renounced his American citizenship, the better to be a citizen of Mr. Obama's brave new world. To be sure, there may be a hidden motive: Mr. Man, as is well known, was never a natural born citizen of the United States; indeed, he was an illegal immigrant. And he is, after all, getting on in age, given that he was throwing automobiles around during the Great Depression. Realizing he can never win the presidency, perhaps he has his eye on the chairmanship of the United Nations. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford