The Honeymooners – Complete Series Review – Overview

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I’ve always been a big fan of this show.  But nowadays the audience it was created for are either old or really old.  But, so what?  Shakespeare’s audience has been dead for over 350 years and his stuff is still plenty popular.  Am I saying Jackie Gleason compares to the Bard?  Maybe in comedy.  Have you ever watched “Taming of the Shrew?”  There really are an enormous number of similarities.  Kate and Alice Kramden are sisters under the skin.  And Beatrice from “Much Ado About Nothing” is right there too.  And Ralph Kramden and his buddy Ed Norton could be compared to Falstaff and Prince Hal.  Well, maybe not.  And Jackie Gleason and Art Carney had enormous chemistry together.  They were able to riff on whatever ridiculous plot device they were pursuing to incredible comic effect.  Physical comedy and clever dialog abound.  As clowns they stand up with anything Shakespeare produced.  And Alice Kramden’s aggrieved, long-suffering wife is perfection and provides the foil Ralph needs to justify his craziest schemes.  The weakest part of the cast is Trixie who really only acts as a plot device.  She’s a sounding board for both her friend Alice and as Ed’s wife whenever Ralph has gone so way overboard that Ed must rebel.

But anyway, there is an everyman or at least an every-Brooklyn-man of the mid-twentieth century in Ralph and Ed.  These are the guys who fought World War II and came back to Brooklyn and didn’t get to be the man in the grey flannel suit.  They’re the guys in the blue-collar uniform.  They don’t work in a Madison Avenue advertising office.  They work in the sewer or on a Madison Avenue bus and make awful wages and live in two room apartments in Bensonhurst and try to escape every chance they get to a game of pool or bowling or a Racoon Lodge Meeting to avoid their wives nagging them about the broken-down appliances, the bad plumbing and general lack of funds.

Ralph is the not-terribly-bright guy who thinks he is full of million-dollar ideas to get rich quick.  Norton is his best friend who follows Ralph’s lead and of course suffers the consequences constantly.  Their wives, Alice and Trixie are long suffering housewives who have more or less reconciled themselves to the marginal edge of the middle-class but not silently and often quite sarcastically.  The Kramdens and the Nortons are sort of the economic losers of the post-war economy.  But Ralph is always searching for that million-dollar idea and Alice and Norton and Trixie are right behind him being dragged along for the bumpy ride.

Jackie Gleason’s Ralph, Art Carney’s Ed and Audrey Meadows’ Alice are iconic characters that speak directly to Americans who believed in the American Dream.  Their striving and their frantic scramble to enjoy the American life of that time speaks to timeless pursuits of the human condition.  The Kramdens and the Nortons are a very lively spot in the history of fictional people.  The thirty-nine episodes produced in 1955 and 1956 are fine wine.  I like to watch them every once in a while, to remind myself of a happier time than our own.

A Jaded Mandarin

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People are always trying to compare the present era to other historical epochs.  Thucydidean Athens or Caesarian Rome or pre-revolutionary France.  All these analogies are clever or foolish depending on the author.  And all of them are of necessity partial in their similarity.  What’s the expression, “History never repeats itself but merely rhymes.”?

And that is true.  This era is like no other because the assembly of characters is unique.  What I notice about the cast of this drama is that most of them are a poor lot.  Don’t look for a Pericles or a Julius Caesar or even an Augustus.  We’ve got the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.  And when even these mediocrities walk away, we get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  Now I don’t mean to exhort Trump’s virtues as if he’s some messiah.  His feet of clay are legendary.  But he isn’t a politician.  He’s more of a supporting cast member dragged on stage because the headliners all forgot their lines and ran off stage in terror of the audience pelting them with tomatoes and oranges.

There’s something distressing about the people who run things from behind the scenes handing over the kabuki theater to really obvious fifth raters like Biden and Harris.  I can’t make up my mind whether they just don’t think it’s necessary to keep up the pretense of a republic anymore or that some bizarre sequence of circumstances has thrust these two truly unimpressive hacks into the limelight.  I’m not sure which of these two reasons is true and I’m not even sure which is a worse reason.

But for whichever reason, here we are.  And it is a spectacularly awful moment in our history.  For more than twenty years I have been steadily more and more dismayed by the path our leaders have been dragging us down.  Every presidential term has plumbed new depths until at this point it appears we may be well beyond the point of no return.  And so possibly the only thing left to do about our present situation is laugh.

Maybe mockery is all that’s left to do.  After all, exposing the stupidity and evil of our supposed leaders may even accomplish some small good.  Maybe it could even tip the balance by waking up even the terminally dense to just how imbecilic someone like Kamala Harris truly is.  And, if nothing else, laughter is good for the soul.  Watching those compilations of Biden stumbling and bumbling around trying to walk off stage or failing to remember words like government or health care were hilarious and without a doubt cheered me up.  And listening to Kamala expound on yellow school buses or the relationship of Russia and Ukraine on the map of Eurasia did my heart good.

But humor aside, I do think about what it means that Biden and Harris are now the caliber of leader that the dominant party of this empire finds acceptable.  It’s got to say something about how this country works.  We don’t elect political leaders.  We hire actors to read us the news from the regime.  In fact, it’s gotten so bad that we now have actors who translate the news from the actors we “elect.”  We have the Haitian Betty Boop come out and explain what Joe Biden meant when he mumbled incoherently about Russia or Gaza or ice cream.  We won’t get the truth but we’ll get today’s version of the narrative.

And so, looking at what we have devolved into I wouldn’t compare us to Athens or Rome.  I wouldn’t even compare us to Stalin’s USSR.  We’re more like one of the decadent Chinese bureaucratic dynasties right before the barbarians overran it.  We’re the Middle Kingdom that has always been and will always be.  It will go on regardless of ineptitude, graft and stupidity.  It will survive due to the titanic size and inertia of the whole interlocking structure.  Even the Mongol hordes were subsumed into its colossal bulk.  Maybe in a century a revolution will sweep the Earth and topple it to the ground but a century seems like the minimum time needed.

In the meantime, I hope for some miracle where Trump gets in and like some latter-day Heracles he beheads and cauterizes the polycephalic Hydra of the Deep State and returns sanity to our poor abused republic.  Otherwise, I better learn to bow.

Aspects of World Building – 1

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As is natural for a man of my era, Heinlein is the exemplar when it comes to science fiction craftsmanship.  But whereas in his youth he was something of a progressive I am a conservative.  So, whereas his earliest “what if?” scenario for his future history was the United States becoming an unlikely Christian theocracy, I’m confronted with the reality of a United States that’s already halfway to becoming a woke oligarchic police state.  Therefore, I’ll use that as the first component of my world building.  Of course, it’s hardly original or surprising.  Maybe it’s even lazy or boring.  But I think it fits.  Besides it can be a one off that’s quickly cured by a revolution that leaves a more interesting and fertile chaos in its wake.

And just as easy to add to the pot is the looming energy drought that is already a part of the daily conversation.  Global warming, green energy, fear of nuclear power; all of these conspire to make the future a bleak prospect for the everyday people trying to eek out a living and raise their families.  Therefore, technology around new energy sources and technologies is a no-brainer.

Now, all that’s good stuff but we need some cooler technology than geothermal turbines.  So, we’ll add in cold fusion (or at least warmish fusion) based on the alleged ability of some heavy metals (platinum group, tantalum, etc.) to produce neutrons under the right conditions.

And we’re going to need a Mars mission I’d say.  Why?  Why not?

What about global unrest?  I guess so.  I’m not all that interested in Asia or Africa, or Europe for that matter, anymore.  I guess I should think about their status to make the story convincing but I’ll leave that alone for the beginning.

What other technology?  Well, biological and genetic should be in the mix.  Maybe the ancient DNA information turns up some anomalies that point to a more complicated hominid prehistory that can be leveraged for some genetic engineering stories.  Maybe some research produces a useful understanding of how other aspects of the cellular apparatus beside the DNA mediate evolution.  Maybe some kind of evolutionary acceleration can be controlled using biochemical stimuli that are not currently recognized.  Maybe this science is unlocked by a genius who wants to change humans.  What kinds of change?  Obviously, intelligence but how about gills to breathe underwater?  Look at all those millions of square miles of ocean.  Maybe make humans photosynthetic.

Artificial intelligence is a for-sure part of the universe.  We need AI’s that in many ways appear to be conscious but whether they actually are I don’t currently know.  I’ll have to see what works.

Extraterrestrials?  I really don’t know yet.  Maybe it’s too early for that.  After all I don’t currently have a star drive.  Maybe I’ll start by finding out if there’s simple life somewhere in the solar system.  Could it be bio-pollution from Earth.  Could algae and tardigrades have drifted from Earth to Mars.  Sure, why not?  And could they have developed some interesting new tricks trying to survive on a freezing, almost airless desert?  Of course!

I used to toy with the idea that the gas giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) might have a stable layer somewhere in between their hot cores and cryogenic surfaces where creatures swim and fight and live and die.  Maybe that would be fun to play with or maybe an ocean inside of one of the Jovian moons would be better.

Okay, I think that’s enough to start with.

Well, They’ve Had Their Second Shot At Trump

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This second guy, Ryan Wesley Routh, has been trying to recruit mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.  Now what do you think is the chance that Mr. Routh doesn’t work for the CIA?

https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/would-be-trump-assassin-idd-as-ryan-routh-58-of-hawaii-sources/

It’s remarkable that we’re talking about multiple assassination attempts on the Republican candidate for president.  But, no big deal.  Probably a misunderstanding.  Maybe his meds were off.

Imagine if it were Harris.  The cities would be in flames.  Well, will they go for the trifecta?  Probably.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 15SEP2024 – Known Space

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You might try fitting your story into Larry Niven’s Known-Space/Man-Kzin Wars Universe. Since Niven allowed other writers access to what is now a shared universe, over 15 books of short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels have been written by numerous authors. The Tech timeline goes from 19th Century India, through the age of fusion reaction drives, Bussard Ramjets, and the 3-days per lightyear Hyperdrive. You could set your story in any period along more that 1000 years of technology. The Kzinti Occupation years on Wunderland are ripe for Resistance stories, as are the post-liberation years of political upheaval as surviving working-class colonists try to overthrow the semi-aristocratic Herrenmen who are descended from the original Fifteen Families in the first colony ships, who claimed all the good farmland, industrial concerns, and control of the government.

Known Space – Wikipedia