The president tonight will make an “address to the nation,” and even that’s a lie. It’s instead an address to the 36% of Americans who are likely to believe him, including what’s expected to be his relitigating “widespread voter fraud” (34 documented cases) in the 2020 election.

What makes tonight sobering is that Trump doesn’t need the other 64% of America, whose concerns, six years later, include inflation, an unwinnable war of aggression and ICE homicides.

All Mr. Trump needs are True Believers. They can guarantee a perpetual stay in power that will last beyond his lifetime.

History is instructive.

–In 1793, Robespierre’s Jacobins were a minority in the National Convention, the French revolutionary government. Military setbacks and the attempt by the royal family to flee France generated enough fear to put Robespierre in power. The Reign of Terror. symbolized by the guillotine–the “National Barber”–followed, until Robespierre himself died as his blade fell.

–Lenin’s faction of the Russian socialist movement were “Bolsheviks”–the majority. That’s a lie. Lenin’s followers were far outnumbered by more moderate socialists, led, from March 1917, by Alexander Kerensky. In October, Lenin and his then-comrade, Leon Trotsky. engineered a coup that toppled Kerensky. Opposition parties were banned. newspapers shut down a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (working class) began.

–In 1922 Italy, 50,000 Blackshirts staged the March on Rome. Their leader, Mussolini, took a train. Frustrated by a socialist parliamentary majority in the 1920 elections and an anti-Fascist general strike a year later (when the Fascists won two of 535 seats in the Italian parliament), Mussolini gambled. He was betting against a government that had signed an unpopular peace treaty and on a stagnant economy. He won. The government collapsed.

–In the midst of a Depression that hit an already weakened economy, Hitler’s National Socialists won 38%–their electoral high-water mark–to the Reichstag. They used their power to delay legislation, heckle opposition speakers and render the Reichstag impotent. That immobilization led to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Four weeks later, the Reichstag was set afire by an arsonist. A convenient suspect, a Dutch communist, was guillotined the following January. In the meantime, due to the “National Emergency” represented by the fire, Hitler became Fuhrer.

Our Reichstag Fire moment may or may not come tonight. But it’s getting closer all time—and all it takes is a minority to make a dictatorship.

You would think that since Casablanca is my favorite film, I would give its director, the Hungarian expatriate Michael Curtiz, the praise he deserves.

Nope.

That’s because I watched The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) yesterday on Turner Classic Movies. Several grievous errors appeared.

1. It starred Erroll Flynn, whom I dislike for his smugness. He was brilliant playing an alcoholic swashbuckling actor in 1982’s My Favorite Year. Unfortunately for the then-deceased Flynn, that film actually starred Peter O’Toole.

2. Light Brigade also starred Olivia de Haviland, the insufferable Flynn’s co-star in several Curtiz films. Did this poor woman not suffer enough as Melanie in Gone with the Wind? (The correct answer is “yes.”)

3. The script called for killing off David Niven (at right) halfway through the film. YOU DO NOT KILL DAVID NIVEN OFF HALFWAY THROUGH ANY FILM! Erroll Flynn is expendable, but they wait far too long in this film. At least Raoul Walsh had to wait to send Flynn’s Custer, in They Died with their Boots On, to the Underworld, but Flynn was Australian, after all.

4. The script called for a stiff upper-lip British defense against the Sepoy Mutiny in British India–Sepoys were Indian soldiers and were treated with spectacular insolence–followed by the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea. But some fuddy-duddy historian—possibly the one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail—pointed out that the Sepoy Mutiny occurred three years after the Charge of the Light Brigade. Damn. Get me rewrite, The British, by the way, dealt with the Sepoy Mutiny with all the charm of, say, David Niven. They lashed the accused mutineers to the ends of cannon barrels. Then they fired the cannons.

5. People more informed about weapons that I am also pointed out that the British, in this film, were using Model 1873 Springfield carbines, difficult to do in the mid-1850s. Custer’s troopers—there’s Erroll Flynn again!— used them at the at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. A fat lot of good it did them. (The shells. supplied by a Department of War just as competent as today’s, refused to eject properly.)

6. Flynn was known for his affection for children, especially teenaged girls. Light Brigade provides a gratuitous chubby little boy, the son of a Sepoy non-commissioned officer. The boy advances the plot, thankfully, by getting killed. His killer. an evil prince, Surat Khan, leads the savages that kill women and children, that terrible man, after fooling Flynn with a fake truce, sort of like the one that today governs the Strait of Hormuz.

Boy howdy, I guess you can learn stuff from history.

8. Somehow, the villain Khan winds up in the Crimea with the Russians. Maybe it’s because Putin has a dacha there. I don’t know. Flynn charges with the Light Brigade and becomes dead, but not before making Khan more dead. Justice is served.

9. The main order of business: Hating Michael Curtiz

Most of this film is set in India, where it alternates among treacly romance, casual racism and leaden humor.

But the last fifteen minutes, the cavalry charge, is one of the most stunning action sequences I’ve ever seen on film. “How did they get the horses to fall like that?” I asked my wife, Elizabeth, as they were mowed down by Russian cannonballs.

It turns out that Michael Curtiz used tripwires. One hundred twenty-five horses were used in the final sequence of the film. Twenty-five of them were killed.

If justice is truly served. Michael Curtiz is shoveling horse manure in hell. Or, to borrow from Patton, in Louisiana.

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I’m afraid that this piece includes a solicitation. Any amount will help,

https://gofund.me/6be82a3f8

I am exhausted from The Donald. We are called to be better. History, if we bother, is within our reach.

I’m from a small California town, but I took high school history students to Paris twice. On the second trip, I went

Oh!

I showed my AP Euro history students when we studied 19th century Paris, in a unit on urban social history.

Or this one.

This one was more for me.

This one was harder to show, and to understand, when we visited.

As was this one.

But the city kind of comes back to delight you. Like this:

Or this:

Or this.

Or even this:

I’m from a small town in California, so I may never dance in Paris. But it’s not a bad idea.

As many of you know, I’m recovering from both brain surgery and alcoholism. Tomorrow I will be sober two weeks.

But my recovery assignment for the next week, ugly to think about on Father’s Day, will be to deconstruct my dad.

I’ve spent the last twenty years mythologizing him, writing about him frequently in my blog. He has assumed heroic stature. And he was such a big influence on my life. He was a masterful storyteller, and in many ways he taught me how to teach. He was brilliant, capable, very funny and charming. An accountant, he was, as was his father, in supreme command of dense columns of numbers, arranged like parade-ground soldiers. His adding machine emitted machine-gun bursts from the den of our home on Huasna Road.

The part I’ve been concealing for twenty years is the other side. He, like me, was an alcoholic; It finally killed him in 1985, when he was only 67, and now I’m a bewildered 74.

You might say that I‘ve outlived him. No, I haven’t.

You might say “he did his best.”  No, he didn’t.

My father was terrifying. He had an explosive temper and was sometimes violent, attacking our mother. He was inexplicably cruel toward my big brother. There was always an undercurrent of violence in our home. I might go to bed wondering if I would die.

After one of his explosions, he would open the bedroom door and plaintively apologize. It was confusing.

After our mom died, he locked her Basset hound in his kennel, and when the dog bayed, begging our company, he beat it with his belt. Now you know why I have Basset hounds.

He drove drunk with us in the car down the Kern River Canyon. I still have nightmares about going over a cliff into the water. Once on Branch Street, he left Bruce and I in the car for three hours while he got drunk at Bill’s Place. He came out staggering and squinting in the sunlight and some stranger—an angel?—intervened, took his keys and got us home safely.

He did income taxes in addition to his work at Madonna Construction. The Outrigger, a Shell Beach bar, was his favorite place to do taxes. He’d show up late for open houses at school or my Boy Scout meetings. Or he wouldn’t show up at all.

On weekends he would get drunk twice. He’d start with Coors in the morning, start to slide, and take a nap. Then when he started the barbecue he’d transition to Ten High whiskey.

It was my job late at night when he was passed out at the kitchen table to make sure his cigarette would not burn the house down. Just before he passed out he demanded ice cream. I want my ice cream! he would shout.

Later, if I didn’t have to carefully remove the burning cigarette from his fingers, I might find it stubbed out in the ice cream

There are a lot of other things I need to talk about in this recovery business. But on Father’s Day I wanted to put this down because I know that some of you had had a similar experience with your father.

It’s okay for you to love your father. It’s okay for me to love my father. But now I have to make a break with him so that,  unlike him, I can be free.

The MonaLisa Twins really are twins, fraternal sisters born in Austria—I think in Vienna. Their Dad , Rudolf, Wagner, is a Boomer, like me, taught the girls his love for playing music and his love for British Invasion music. The girls inherited both loves and, as young women, are the featured act in The Cavern Club, a Liverpool pub that duplicates the Hamburg Cavern where the four lads first made a big splash.

So they do Beatles. Like this:

And this:

They do Revolver:

They do Rubber Soul:

They let old guys onstage for one of my favorite Beatles songs:

They do Hollies.

And they cover one of my favorite one-hit wonders:

So,, if bug’s ears are cute, these two are. They are also great fun. And, no, I haven’t yet figured out which is Mona and which is Lisa


P.S. There’s “cute” and then there’s “beautiful.” Like this: