A New Renaissance, Part II

Some months ago I posted on the efforts of the entertainment industry to raise the cultural literacy of the American public by making films and TV series based on classical history and literature: Rome, Troy, 300.

But I now realize that the industrial-entertainment complex's educational efforts are actually far more pervasive and subtle than even I could have imagined. A couple of weeks ago I watched a popular film, hoping for just a few laughs: what I got instead was a brilliant re-working of traditional literary themes and devices for the new millennium.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: any teen who's seen Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is going to find world lit. class a breeze. I don't know why some critic hasn't pointed out the links between the literary canon and popular film before: Greek scholars have long known that the working title of The Iliad was Dude, Where's my Chariot?





Harold and Kumar go to White Castle has all the characteristics of a traditional epic. You might think a quest for White Castle burgers is unworthy of the genre, but no epic hero is really after anything that grand. Odysseus is just trying to get home for god's sake. * Don't get me started on The Iliad--the hero, Achilles, spends a lot of it sulking in his tent. Spoiled brat. And the Táin Bó Cúalnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), the Celtic world's great contribution to the epic tradition, is about stealing livestock.

No, Harold and Kumar are actually an improvement on traditional epic heroes--they're smart enough to know where they live, they can control their tempers, and they're honest enough to pay for their beef fair and square. Now, according to the good people at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the characteristics of an epic hero and his quest are the following:

1) Hero is possessed of supernatural abilities or qualities.
2) Hero has a quest.
3) Hero is tested.
4) Presence of numerous mythical beings, including magical animals, to aid the hero in his quest.
5) Hero's travels take him to a world normal humans are barred from entering.
6) Hero nearly gives up.
7) Resurrection.
8) Hero attains his quest.

First let me address an issue I know some people will bring up. In the traditional epic there's one hero. The fact that Harold and Kumar has two heroes is simply part of the re-imagining of the heroic tradition for our time. We're a culture that likes duos. Batman and Robin. Holmes and Watson. So it's gotta be Harold and Kumar.

1) Supernatural abilities: Our heroes really show what they're made of later in the film, but we do learn very early on that Kumar knows how to score amazingly good pot. A little later we learn that Harold can write financial analyses while stoned.

2) The quest: Get White Castle burgers. Duh.

3) Our heroes are tested in numerous ways: Harold gets thrown in jail and his car is stolen by Neil Patrick Harris. They are both attacked by a raccoon and humiliated by racists.

4) Aided by mythical beings and magical animals: They are helped by a vaguely cyclopean tow-truck driver and get a cheetah stoned and ride it through the wilds of New Jersey.**

4) Aided by mythical beings and magical animals: They are helped by a vaguely cyclopean tow-truck driver and get a cheetah stoned and ride it through the wilds of New Jersey.**

4) Aided by mythical beings and magical animals: They are helped by a vaguely cyclopean tow-truck driver and get a cheetah stoned and ride it through the wilds of New Jersey.**

5) Our heroes enter a world inaccessible to normal humans: Harold and Kumar pretend to be surgeons in the hopes of scoring medical marijuana and end up being called into an operating room to save a gun-shot man's life. Which they do! It's not a descent into the underworld--but hey, it's something most of the people I know will never do.

6) Harold wants to give up.

7) Kumar psychologically resurrects Harold with an inspiring paean to hamburgers.

And then, as if we didn't have enough literary devices and archtypes already, after Harold and Kumar get to White Castle they realize they're out of money. Just when all seems lost, Neil Patrick Harris appears out of nowhere and pays for their order:

Deus ex machina!

Who needs a liberal arts education when we've got Hollywood?***

*In some of the earliest written versions of The Odyssey, Book Seven, traditionally called "Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous," is actually entitled "If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now."

**Okay, it's not exactly magical--but a cheetah that'll smoke pot with you, how cool is that?

***And in less than two weeks a probing exploration of human rights violations will hit theaters: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Movie studios. Is there anything they can't do?

Americans: We Know No Limits

Do you know what I love about my country? We don't rest on our laurels. Was it enough to invent the airplane? No, we went to the moon. Were we content with having some of the world's best doctors? No--we also made them the most expensive. We're in a national recession, but are we going to stop it at our borders? No, we're going to share it.

Our refusal to limit ourselves doesn't go just for technology, health care or economic fiascoes. No, it goes for irrational behavior as well. A few years ago many of us were enraged with France for not supporting Washington's decision to invade Iraq--as if the French ever agreed with anybody on anything. Last year a banner that said BONG HiTS 4 JESUS was the subject of a Supreme Court hearing.

Well, that was some time ago. We seem to have forgiven the French, especially since they've elected a President who's anxious to succeed Tony Blair as Bush's lapdog--although the rest of the French (typically) don't agree with this. And nobody's mentioned BONG HiTS 4 Jesus in a long time.

We've moved on. To vodka labels.

Yes, vodka labels. For its Mexican marketing campaign, Absolut Vodka ran ads showing a pre-1848 map of Mexico--when what is now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Texas were still part of the country--with the caption "In an Absolut World."

Americans for Legal Immigration President William Gheen called for a boycott of Absolut, saying the ad was an endorsement of a reconquest of the Southwestern U.S.: "Absolut vodka is trying to sell liquor to Mexicans that aspire to control the Southwest United States." One blogger wrote that he poured his Absolut down the sink.

Another blogger called Absolut "traitors." Which I find a little odd, given the company's Swedish.

As usual, I'm baffled. What are people so upset about?

"Absolut vodka is trying to sell liquor to Mexicans that aspire to control the Southwest United States."

Seriously: if my country faces invasion by foreign enemies, I want them to be drunk--much easier to deal with.

I'm also baffled as to why Absolut thought this ad campaign was a good idea. A spokesperson for Vin & Spirit (Absolut Vodka's parent company), said the idea was to market the Vodka with "a Mexican sensibility," evoking "a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal."

I doubt that most Mexicans would consider the nineteenth century "ideal," given it was a time of social and political chaos. And if I were selling a product to Mexicans, I don't think I would want them to associate it with the loss of half their national territory.

In any case, Vin & Spirit has apologized and pulled the ad. However, William Gheen and his compadres do not appear to be appeased: at time of writing the Boycott Absolut website is still up.

Or maybe Gheen and his compatriots are simply expecting Vin & Spirit to outrage them again soon.

After all, the company has been bought by the French.

America's Finest at Work, Part IV

By now, most of you have probably heard of poor Mandi Hamlin, the 37-year-old who was forced by TSA employees in Lubbock, Texas to remove her nipple ring (with pliers) before she was allowed to board her flight.*

I certainly understand that people can be quite creative when it comes to improvising weapons. Which is exactly why the TSA should have let Ms. Hamlin's nipple ring stay in her nipple. Before she could begin to hammer her nipple ring out into a 1 or 2-inch knife, she would have had to remove it. The TSA of Lubbock, Texas actually aided and abetted a potential act of terrorism.

I know a lot of you probably sniggered at the CNN headline, "Nipple ring search procedures faulty, TSA admits" but it's the truth. I'm surprised any of those yahoos in the Lubbock Airport are still alive. Hamlin could have stabbed all the TSA guards with her nipple ring and then gone on a rampage with the pliers.

Clearly, if TSA employees are so stupid as to let potential terrorists remove potential weapons from their nipples, we have to be capable of ensuring our own safety. To better prepare you to recognize when a terrorist may be on the way to brandishing an improvised weapon, I leave you with this short short instructional video on nipple-ring removal.

Remember: only you can prevent terrorist attacks.


*In other news, there are people in Lubbock, Texas with nipple rings.

America's Finest at Work, Part III

Anybody, anywhere could be carrying a bomb. Which is why federal law enforcement has been monitoring Interstate 5* for nukes. Recently a federal agent was in the median strip. A car passes by. The radiation detector goes off. The agent chases the car and makes it pull over. A search of the car reveals not a nuke, but a cat. And not an al-Qaeda cat, or a Hezbollah cat, but a house cat. With cancer. The cat had been taken to the vet three days earlier for radiation treatments.

*********************************************************

Remember the PATRIOT Act, the package of laws that was supposed to protect us from Those Who Hate Us for Our Freedom? Well, as events in the Middle East remind us daily, our government hasn't succeeded in snuffing out terrorism. So, apparently they've decided to use the PATRIOT Act in the pursuit of more achievable goals--like winning the war on drugs. (It makes sense, at some point you have to cut your losses and move on, right?)

Last July, the ATF conducted a warrantless search of the house of Tyrone Andrews, whom they accuse of being a cocaine supplier for the Wichita Crips. Back in Bill of Rights days, when the feds searched your house they left a copy of the search warrant and a receipt listing the items taken.**

Andrews didn't find out his house had been searched until 90 days later. As you can imagine, his lawyer is displeased.

*Outside that hotbed of terrorism, Bellingham, Washington.

**Now I'm dying to know what such a receipt would like. "Taken: 1 radioctive cat. To be returned pending successful completion of investigation."??

America's Finest at Work, Part II

The men and women who guard the nation's borders will stop at nothing to keep us safe. Last September, they kept a British musicologist out of the U.S. And earlier this week, U.S. Customs detained (and eventually deported) a British memoirist.

Sebastian Horsley wasn't kept out of the U.S. for any of the normal reasons: it wasn't because he's British, and nobody suspects him of having dabbled in music scholarship. The problem was his memoir Dandy in the Underworld, in which he admits to having spent over £100,000 on crack cocaine and an equal amount on prostitutes.* The New York Times quoted a Customs spokesperson as saying that under the rules allowing Britons to enter the U.S. without visas, British travelers may be denied entry if they have admitted to a drug addiction or have been convicted of a crime "involving moral turpitude."

*Normally I defer to the wisdom of law enforcement, but with the government desperate to jump-start consumer spending, is this really the sort of man we can afford to keep out?

Got Security?

It's been a while since I've commented on the shenanigans, um, I mean hard, selfless patriotic work of the good people at Homeland Security. What made me realize this was not the emails from Michael Chertoff ("I'm beginning to think you just don't care anymore..."), but how many hits the blog had been getting. For much of N&C's short life the graph representing site traffic has looked the EKG reading of a corpse. Then one day I took a look in Google Analytics and people all over the world were checking out the blog on a regular basis. I was baffled until I recalled the topics of my previous three posts.


Write an insightful commentary on national politics and your friends will read it, your stats will shoot up for that one day and the next day you're back to zero. But mentioning Nazis--that's much better for site traffic. And when you write something silly that includes the words 'butt' and 'vagina'--next thing you know you're HUGE in Indonesia.

Well, I've decided fame doesn't really suit me, so it's back to weighty matters.

I realized the other day that we're well into our seventh full year without being attacked by the People Who Hate Us For Our Freedom, so I decided to check up on the good people at Homeland Security who have made this possible.

I fly quite a bit so one of the HS agencies that most concerns me is the TSA--the people who make sure I haven't inadvertently smuggled a bomb on board. I am fairly lucky, as frequent fliers go--I've never been in a plane crash, never been seated next to a Jehovah's Witness, never been in a hijacking, and I've never been robbed. But a lot of other fliers aren't so lucky. Over $31 million dollars worth of items have been stolen from passenger luggage during a three-year period (as Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing points out, this is all since the TSA instituted the no-locks on luggage policy). I think I get it: they're working to make us secure, but naturally national security has some trade offs,* so they can't make both us and our luggage secure--that would just be crazy.**

Seriously, the Transportation Security Administration has their hands full. Over 600 millions passengers board flights in the U.S. each year. And any one of them could be a terrorist--even a five-year old. And it doesn't help matters that many TSA hires leave within months. It turns out people who apply for jobs with the government actually want full-time work . Who knew? That fact simply demonstrates yet again this War on Terror is completely new territory, and we're all learning as we go.


*The Bill of Rights isn't even really in the Constitution--it's a bunch of amendments (constitutional lawspeak for afterthought), so it can't be that important.

**Of course, now I wonder why I haven't been robbed. Call me overly sensitive, but if $10-an-hour baggage handlers are turning up their noses at my stuff, I can't help but take it personally.

To close out the week....

....I decided to post about an item from the lighter side of German news to counterbalance the Nazi theme I started a few days earlier.

Mexican ambassador to Germany Jorge Castro-Valle is outraged that one of the hit songs in Germany for the past ten weeks has been Finger im Po, Mexico (Finger in the Butt, Mexico). He has called the song a "disgusting and disrespectful way to use Mexico's name."

Frankly, I think the ambassador's outrage is misplaced. Mexico's international image will in no way suffer from this: the roaring success of a song with a title beginning "Finger in the Butt" does say something unfortunate about a country--it's just not Mexico.



In any case, the song's performer, Mickey Krause,
doesn't understand why Castro-Valle is upset:
"Ich singe auf der Bühne auch: ,Finger in die Vagina, Bosnien Herzegowina.‘ Darüber hat sich auch noch niemand aufgeregt." ("On stage I sing, 'Finger in the Vagina, Bosnia-Herzegovina.' Nobody's complained about that.")




And if you've really got a lot of time to waste (and if you're reading this blog, don't pretend otherwise), you can listen to the song here.