From the Twenty-Five Cent Cable TeeVee Critic’s Corner: .

I missed most of George and Tammy, but the parts I saw were mesmerizing primarily because of Michael Shannon’s performance as George Jones. He was incredible.

Living in Bakersfield for awhile helped. I KNEW people like these.

They, too, drove big Cadillac El Dorados, usually yellow, with a hood long enough to land a Navy F-18 on. You’re tempted to laugh at them—Okies!—until you look at their hands and the damage cotton bolls have done them. Like many of Tammy and George’s generation, they dealt with the hand life dealt them by drinking and smoking, or with painkillers—an addiction that makes heroin look like Ovaltine— and they go out with breathing tubes in their noses and skin like paper, these people who once did the most demanding kind of field work, in cotton or in potatoes.

Their lives were measured then, when they were younger, by how much row was left to harvest in a farm field. When they looked up to see, the heat shimmered at the field’s edge.

Cotton scarred their hands, blister on blister and blood on the white fluff. For potatoes, they wore a spud belt that towed a gunny sack behind them that easily weighed fifty or sixty pounds when it was filled. Work like that would have reduced me to weeping within fifteen minutes. Work like that bent their spines forever.

The oeople who loved George and Tammy were among the people who built America, even as the work they did tore them down.

I watched the final episode last night and it was a tale, as fraught with dysfunction as the relationship was, about two people who never really stopped loving each other. They just couldn’t BE together.

And the music was wonderful: Shannon covered Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Jessica Chastain did a version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” that would’ve melted anybody’s heart except, of course, for Vladimir Putin’s, who’s missing his.

I wouldn’t even have watched those parts except for my hero, Ken Burns, whose miniseries on country music was, to me, a masterpiece. [So are Baseball, Jazz, and The Civil War.]

We got Netflix primarily because of Babylon Berlin, dropped it, but may have to re-up. I, like 68% of America, am hooked on Wednesday Addams’s high school dance scene.

The actress, Jenna Ortega, is stunning, and, like our niece Emmy, also stunning, a graduate of the Tisch School of Drama at NYU. She choreographed the sequence herself. She also, for reasons I haven’t divined yet, shows off some cool martial arts moves (you GO, Michelle Yeoh!) on three bullies dressed as Pilgrims.

It all looks very cool, and, by the way, I’ve never gotten over my crush on Carolyn Jones, Morticia in the 1960s Addams Family series. Elizabeth hasn’t recovered from the death of Raul Julia, sublimely charming as Gomez Addams in the 1991 film.

Here is Wednesday on the dance floor.

–Samuel Clemens

In July 1932, German elections energized the Nazi Party, which won 38 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, the Weimar (German) Republic’s Parliament.

The irony was that the sole reason the Party entered candidates in elections was to give it enough power within the Reichstag to destroy the Reichstag.

The past two days in the House of Representatives have revealed that the spirit of antidemocratic sabotage survives.

July 1932 marked the Party at its electoral peak. Later elections that year revealed that the Nazis were losing popular support.

But it was already too late. Even though they were a minority, the Nazis joined another antidemocratic minority party, the Communists.  [Both the Communists and the Nazis turned to elections after failed armed coups—for the Communists, the Spartacist Revolt in 1919; for the Nazis, Hitler’s failed attempt to topple the Bavarian government in the 1923 “Beer Hall putsch.” I will point out the obvious: January 6 is two days away.]

When the July Reichstag met, with Hermann Goering as Speaker, he immediately called on a Communist deputy, who moved that the Reichstag session be immediately dissolved.

It was. Everyone went home.

Thanks to byzantine plotting and an enfeebled President, Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933.

A new Reichstag, purged of all deputies except for National Socialists, would meet twenty times in the next twelve years, mostly as an obedient audience for Hitler’s bombast. It passed a total of four laws.

The emphasis below is mine.

“Our participation in the parliament does not indicate a support, but rather an undermining of the parliamentarian system. It does not indicate that we renounce our anti-parliamentarian attitude, but that we are fighting the enemy with his own weapons and that we are fighting for our National Socialist goal from the parliamentary platform.”  

–Wilhelm Frick, who would become Interior Minister under Hitler. Executed, 1946.


“…[W]e National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used democratic methods only in order to gain the power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us…”

–Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister under Hitler. In 1945, as Soviet troops were overrunning Berlin, Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children—five girls and a boy—with cyanide before taking their own lives.


“The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP [Nazi Party] had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of action.” 

–Ernst Rudolf Huber, Nazi legal and constitutional scholar. He was eighty-seven when he died in 1990.

Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?

Walter:  No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

–The Big Lebowski