Man! Dude! Session #144

(D)ude: Man! Guess which book this quote came from-

(M)an: Dude! Guesswork’s never been my forte. I always promptly give thorough answers to my rhetorical questions.

D: Man! You give answers to all rhetorical questions!

M: Dude! Go on, let me hear the passage from whatever book you would like to share.

D: Man! Here I go. Eh-hem. I can’t agree. When you’re over there, in it, you don’t think there’s anything else in life. You can’t believe that somewhere people are sleeping in comfortable beds or sitting in a restaurant like this. It’s different in Europe. Everywhere you walk you see a bombed-out building- you live with the constant reminder. But when I came back here all of the death and bloodshed seemed so remote. It seemed that it couldn’t have actually happened- that it was some hellish nightmare. There was New York, the Paramount Building was still standing, its clock running just as it always had. The pavements had the same cracks, the same pigeons or their relatives were messing up the Plaza, the same lines were standing outside of the Copa, waiting to see the same stars. Last night I was out with a beautiful creature who spent hours telling me about the hardships she had endured during the war. No nylons, plastic lipstick containers, no bobby pins… it was awful. I think the shortage of nylons affected her the most. She was a model, and her legs were important to her. She said she was terribly glad we had finally discovered the atom bomb- she had been down to her last six pair when it hit.

M: Dude! I don’t know. I’m not sure. But it is a tragic reminder of how circumstances have changed for the worse because of the cheating tactics of the American Republican Party in 2000 and 2004. Is there any place on earth that has not suffered irreparable damage because of the Bush family’s disgustingly dynastic reigning via GOP thugs?

D: Man! I read that passage from the phenomenally successful and very original novel by Jacqueline Susann… Valley of the Dolls, circa 1966, but the events in the text itself covering the period of time from September 1945 to New Year’s Eve 1965. 

M: Dude! That reminds me of Mary Blume’s biography The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World… Did you know that right before World War II, the 1937 World’s Fair was held in Paris as a response against the fascist sentiments that were seeping onto the scene?

D: Man! The 1937 World’s Fair was a financial disappointment!

M: Dude! Yeah! But, get this, the fashion media was mum on the topic of politics. Like France in World War II, magazines like Harper’s Bazaar kept a very limited political scope and made very distinct tastes in fashion that were like harbingers of what was to ensue in France with the Nazi Occupation, which was limited because of the presence of trained French police officers who took on the role that German troops played elsewhere.

D: Man! What kind of fashion did Harper’s Bazaar consider distasteful?

M: Dude! Lederhosen and dirndls were targeted as questionable by Harper’s Bazaar after the invasion of Austria by the Nazi Germans, and antifascist Schiaparelli and anxious Balenciaga made a dash towards something different and defiant and intelligent.

D: Man! Like how Francis Ford Coppola has taken on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? In the wake of such horrific events like the Boston Marathon bombs and Newtown, Connecticut massacre, while the Republican Party continues to dance indecently alongside the ribald NRA.

M: Dude! Mary Blume’s really hits a present-day nerve when she reveals how –and from New York, Vogue’s editor, Edna Woolman Chase, cabled Bettina Ballard, “Send story on what smart women are wearing in air raid shelters.” Piguet was making jersey jumpsuits, Hermes offered leather gas mask covers as well as cashmere sleeping bags, Schiaparelli built muffs into the pockets of her dresses for standing in icy queues, and the best bomb shelter was at the Ritz with its fur-lined blankets. In the couturiers’ salons the collections went on as usual-

D: Man! All this fashion and pomp was happening while- what about the people who were sentenced to the concentration camps? Why wasn’t anyone revealing the horrors of the trains and ghettos that the Jewish people were being subjected to?

M: Dude! There were righteous gentiles, of course, but the calamity of the World War II era was when the United States and its Allies figured that there was no stopping the Germans and their political and economic agendas, only then did the United States and its Allies take the necessary steps to end what Hitler had begun and Churchill actually applauded at the beginning in an Anti-Semitic sentiment that was prevalent throughout the Western Hemisphere.

D: Man! The United States electorate had better open its eyes to the injustices that President Obama is heroically putting up with: The Republican Sequestration that the GOP hopes will lead to a paralyzed people who will be so hopelessly wasted socioeconomically that they won’t care about just what’s happening abroad, but will become indifferent with their own neighbors. I think the propaganda that the GOP wants to implement is going to be calculated as such that immigration reform is only a topic with which the Republican Party hopes to secure its seats in the House and Senate in the midterms.

M: Dude! Jordan and Iraq deserve to be given a hand in their efforts to supply shelter and other necessities to the women and children refugees coming into their borders from war-ravaged Syria. And I agree, how is a parent who is unemployed and now without Head Start for their child even begin to think about the disenfranchised abroad?

D: Man! And how can people struggling with cancer diagnoses and treatments be made to consider the welfare of others when their lives are on the line because of the Republican Sequestration and GOP Obstructionism?

M: Dude! President Obama needs people like Elizabeth Colbert Busch to defeat Republican candidates like Mark Sanford in South Carolina and beyond! It really surprises me how everybody talks about the Appalachian Trail and forgets that the United States itself has an Appalachian population of Kentuckians living in the bleakest circumstances imaginable.

D: Man! Like US, I don’t think Kentuckians voted for Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, but got stuck with the both of them like Texans are putting up with Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

M: Dude! Reading is fundamental, but I don’t think the message is advertised anymore with the deliberate lunacy of folks like Ted Cruz. Even Mary Blume’s assessment in her 2013 Balenciaga masterpiece sums up the dire straits that President Obama is protecting the country from, this deliberate lunacy: The good part was that the French didn’t even have to become German. Under the new regime, the collaboration government, with headquarters in the spa town of Vichy, was French-run and the French police were put in charge of all crime, including political crime. As Robert O. Paxton, the finest historian of Vichy France, wrote, “The logic of the armistice poison thus drew Vichy into trying to do the Germans’ dirty work for them.” Sometimes the work was dirtier than even the Germans demanded: sending Jewish children to their deaths was a French initiative.

D: Man! Mary Blume’s courage and timing is immaculate! Vive Mademoiselle!