Silly Genocide

            Friday was a grey day, some parts of which were accompanied by rain. . In the afternoon there was a yellowish glow to the grey but it wasn’t from any stain of sun spreading behind the blanket of meh.

            I finished re-reading Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith”. There’s a simple, easy flow to his writing, like there is to Vonnegut or Heller, and he’s funny too. The story was built around the tension that can exist between Jews that want to fit in with society and those that want the world to adjust to them. A sergeant who’d just returned from fighting in Germany is put in charge with a group of trainees being prepared for what’s left of the war. Three of those trainees are Jewish and one of them whose name is Grossbart is conniving and pushy in his efforts to play on the Jewishness of both the sergeant and his own friends in order to get special favours for himself as a Jew. In the end Grossbart gets shipped off to fight in the Pacific and it was very hard to feel sorry for him.

            I didn’t bother to go through “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” again because I’ve read it quite a few times and besides it would take to long.

            I re-read Bharati Muckerjee’s “The Lady from Lucknow”. It’s an interesting story about an affair between a married Pakistani woman and a successful and also married immunologist in Atlanta. When she was four her next-door neighbour beat his daughter to death for falling in love with a Hindu and so the death burned the idea of perfect forbidden love as being interethnic into her consciousness. The exoticism of their passion though is made to seem cheap when his wife discovers them in bed together.

            I re-read Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”, which I have read many times but it’s short enough. It tells the story of Columbus’s arrival in America as if it were something that happened because Coyote let her creation powers run away from her. I don’t know if the light and humorous approach to the story, told in the oral tradition really conveys the gravity of the Native American Holocaust. I guess maybe it’s not meant to. It’s a way of saying that people that enslave or exterminate large groups of people are essentially silly and beneath contempt.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about a man named Charlie whose business partner and lifelong friend Eddie has discovered that Charlie has been keeping all the company profits for himself to the tune of $90,000. He tells Charlie that if he doesn’t give the money back by morning he’ll call the police and have him put away for 35 years. Charlie decides to try to kill Eddie before then and make it look like an accident. He sabotages the steering wheel on his own car so that it will veer to the right and hit Eddie while he’s taking his evening walk but Eddie, for the first time ever, walks on the opposite side, so Charlie ends up smashing into a parked car. Next Charlie makes up his mind to fake his own suicide. He makes a straw man and dresses it in one of his suits, rigs it with a weight and some underwater explosives (both Charlie and Eddie worked in underwater demolitions during the war), sets it on a railing along the boardwalk. He drops the weight into the water, which is at the end of a very long rope. As the rope uncoils and plunges into the water, he walks away and then calls out to everyone else, “Stop that man! He’s going to jump!” The weight pulls the straw man down just before anyone can reach it and then it explodes. Charlie’s girlfriend Danielle has been the classic dumb blonde through most of the story. She now attends Charlie’s funeral while Eddie gives a comically conflicted eulogy: “ … He never let ya down! Ever! Well, except toward the end a little. No! No! No! Not a little, not at all! If he ever took anything that didn’t belong to him … and he did! But … but that’s over, that’s done! He always had and open mind, an open heart … an open hand! A closed one! But the money’s gone and Charlie’s gone and that’s that!”

            Charlie and Danielle are preparing to leave for South America, but they have to get the money first. Charlie has been hiding it in a filing cabinet in the office that he shared with Eddie. After they get the money Danielle wishes they could make a toast to their success, so Charlie takes her into Eddie’s office to drink some of his finest bourbon. Charlie drinks and then begins choking. He wakes up bound and gagged. Eddie and Danielle get to keep the money, tax-free since Charlie has already stolen it. They then take him to the boardwalk, push him off the railing and he explodes seconds later as Eddie and Danielle walk away laughing, arm in arm.

Danielle was played by Joanne Moore, who was the mother of Tatum O’Neil.