Having spent the last week poring over the JFK files, I can tell you the biggest question remains unanswered: Oswald’s coworker Bonnie Ray Williams says right before the assassination he was having a fried chicken sandwich. But Williams also says the chicken was bone in. Who eats a bone-in chicken sandwich? And who would serve such a thing? Alas the coverup continues.
But speaking of coverups, our Andrew Stiles reviews the Netflix miniseries Zero Day starring Robert De Niro.
“If you have a Netflix account, you’ve likely been prodded to check out Zero Day, a ‘political thriller’ starring the grumpy liberal activist Robert De Niro in his first television role. If you’re on the fence, there are two things you should consider before pressing play.
“1) Nicolle Wallace, the MSNBC host, makes several appearances as a fictionalized version of herself, which is to say that her on-screen persona is a relatively stable individual who reads ominous alerts from a teleprompter. In reality, Wallace tends to favor unhinged rants about how an adorable child with brain cancer might kill himself because of something Donald Trump did. She landed the role the old-fashioned way, by sleeping with one of the producers. Wallace’s second husband, former New York Times reporter (and regular guest on her show) Michael Schmidt, co-created the six-episode series with Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News who reportedly discouraged the network from covering Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse. The previous sentence alone is more compelling than Zero Day in its entirety.
“2) It’s really bad. Don’t waste your time. (Some spoilers below.)
“The two points are obviously related. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, mainly because professional journalists and media executives can’t relate to anyone outside their elite liberal bubble. They get really annoyed and sanctimonious when the unwashed masses refuse to respect their expertise and ignore their devastating fact checks. There’s just no way a couple of fancy journalists steeped in this contemptuous worldview could ever write an interesting story about American politics. And so they have not.
“De Niro stars as George Mullen, a former president who stepped down gracefully after healing the country in a single term. He is quite possibly the most respected and honorable man in the entire world. ‘You were the last president in modern memory who was able to consistently rally bipartisan support,’ his ghostwriter tells him in an early scene. ‘Your memoir has the potential to make a real difference.’ He’s a former prosecutor who is extremely passionate about the truth and absolutely despises misinformation. That’s fortunate, because when a mysterious cyber villain kills thousands of people by crashing every digital network for 60 seconds and promises to strike again, Mullen is brought out of retirement to save the country. He swore he’d never do it again, but he does.”
Curzio Malaparte might have seen himself as saving his country of Italy, but it’s more likely the writer was out to save himself. Dominic Green returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Maurizio Serra’s Malaparte: A Biography.
“Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert in Prato, Tuscany. His father Erwin was a German textile manufacturer of varying fortune and bad temper. His mother Elvira was a beautiful scold from Lombardy. A son of Tuscany without Tuscan blood, Kurt Erich became Curt, then Curzio, then Curtino. He acquired local patriotism during his Jesuit education but not Catholic piety. He was a born contrarian, but his Tuscan chauvinism had a ‘strident, artificial aspect.’ He sounds not unlike Evelyn Waugh, the compulsive contrarian who affected a strident, artificial impersonation of the aristocracy to which he did not belong, and who, after being divebombed by Stukas in Crete in 1941, wrote that ‘it was like everything German—overdone.'”
“He missed Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 but described it firsthand anyway and wrote a handbook, Technique du coup d’État, which would be consulted by the Gaullists of the Free French, Che Guevara, and the fascist Greek colonels. He changed his surname in 1925 because he disliked how his original patronym ended on an un-Italian ‘t’ sound. As Malaparte, he used the intellectual struggles of the fascist groups, which were really power struggles on paper, to chase a ‘great career’ in the party and the government. He managed ‘honorary roles’ and, in 1929, the editorship of La Stampa. ‘The revolution cannot grant power to those who do not wield it at the service of the collective,’ Mussolini said. ‘Malaparte will always, and only, be at the service of himself.'”
“Cometh the hour, cometh the violence-obsessed voyeur. As a ‘special correspondent to the awfulness of history,’ Malaparte acquired the raw material for Kaputt (1944), a fictionalized account of the degradations of death on the Eastern Front, and The Skin (1949), a fictionalized account of the degradations of life in American-occupied Naples. Malaparte fudged the dates so he could claim that he wrote Kaputt before the Allied invasion of Sicily and the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, but 20 years of assiduously protesting his ‘unlimited fascist devotion’ suggested otherwise. As a reserve officer, he was called up by both the Kingdom of the South, the anti-Mussolini state in Allied-occupied southern Italy, and the fascist rump state, the Republic of Salo. He served neither, pleading cystitis and colic, and smartly attached himself to the American high command as a liaison officer.”
“For all his talk of strength and heroism, he was, in the title of Alberto Moravia’s analysis of fascist psychology, The Conformist. He was driven, Serra writes, not by a will to power, but a ‘will to strength,’ the urge to fortify himself against his inner weaknesses. After the war, he turned communist. The neofascists would not forgive him, and it was good for his career.”
Opening Day is this Thursday (no, I do not count the “Tokyo Series“). So what better way to kick off the season than with Timothy P. Carney‘s review of Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America by Will Bardenwerper.
“Homestand is a book about baseball, and the author is a Mets fan. Thus, Homestand is a book about loss.
“It’s not only about loss, of course, and the Mets are only in the background. The 2022 Batavia Muckdogs, the centerpiece of Homestand, win most of their games, including an exciting playoff run.
“And Homestand isn’t only about baseball, either. It’s also about capitalism and community—and about the complicated relationship between the two.
“Batavia is a Rust Belt town in Upstate New York, and so you can probably guess some of the book’s themes. The railroads aren’t the business they once were. The Interstate bypassed the downtown. Industry fled. … There are big corporate bad guys in this book, such as the Big Box chain stores and Ogden Media, which the author describes as ‘profiting from the gutting of local newspapers.’ But the biggest and baddest of the bad guys is Major League Baseball, which announced in 2020 that it would terminate 40 of its 160 minor-league affiliates.”
“Homestand appreciates and wrestles with both visions, and argues, in effect, that we need some oases from the ruthless efficiency and constant disruption that capitalism provides—and that baseball ought to be one such oasis. Bardenwerper doesn’t want to deny baseball owners the chance to pursue profits, but he asks, ‘Does an enterprise that purports to be part of the fabric of America have a responsibility to prevent that fabric from fraying?'”
“Bardenwerper doesn’t provide the details of the Mets’ run that summer, but it’s a fitting backdrop. The Mets would win 101 games that season, yet didn’t win the division—and they got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. The 2022 Mets saw a never-before-and-never-again season of near perfection by their closer Edwin Diaz. It saw the sunset of the Mets’ career of Jacob DeGrom, a Hall-of-Fame-level hurler whose brief bloom was spectacular.
“These performances and runs were so beautiful, so exciting, so perfect that every fan wanted to hold onto them. But you can’t hold onto a sunset. You can’t hold onto a season. Summer always slips away.”
