Welcome to the weekend edition of The Mark Steyn Show, with Mark's latest update on the Summer of Stupid, Campaign 2020, decoupling for cheapskates, We Build The Case Against We Build The Wall, plus poems and songs on the road not taken (for VJ Day anniversaries) - and Paul Sorvino sings Kipling to Mark.
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Btw my stories were subsequently printed by the harvill press under "Bearing Witness"
https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Bearing-Witness-Leopard-IV-Edited-Harvill/362260824/bd
Mark
As a very long time devoted acolyte of yours ( I write this on bended knee and head bowed lol), I can attest to your fantastic sketch re Burma and the road to Mandalay. In fact allow me to give your sketches some colour. I was incredibly privileged to spend quite some time there in 1991, 1993, 1996 and 1999 at a time when its was extraordinarily difficult today visit the closed state and as an photo journalistic with unique independence. Although a few times the military intelligence who tracked me were obsessed I was indeed CIA, leading to a few bizarre encounters. Indeed, in mid 1996, I waited there for nearly two months to go into the compound home of the now president of that nation and spend an hour our so with her for conversation and company, whereupon as a 32 year old aussie, I actually fell in love with a Burmese broad! ( On return to the UK, I had a pleasant evening with her then husband Michael Aris where I assured him the love was merely puppy..haha)
All the times I spent there were grim. As giant billboards across the country announced, this was "The Burmese Road to Socialism!". As I was often reminded by the wonderful imprisoned people on the street I met, " Mr Robert, you talk too much "! And so here we are in the west so many years later. I hold particularly fond memories of an overnight boat trip from Rangoon through the irrawaddy delta to bassein on a boat that no doubt would have been reminiscent to the one's Kipling travelled on. The first westerner to visit there in 60 years. Not so fond the sights I bore witness to of dying starving children and families, reduced to poverty by the Burmese military generals and their junta. One general whose daughter was another Burmese broad I also almost fell for! Funnily old world. Cheers
Dear Mark,
You gave us a very powerful and stirring reading of Mandalay, as did Charles Dance on Horse Guards Parade, five years ago.
In dropping Mandalay, The Burma Star Association was not consulted by the BBC. The beeb, in terms of relevance to the British people, is an organization which is rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror.
The "few" who still have time for the BBC are becoming fewer.
In inviting you to come fly with him, Frank is jerking his thumb towards
a Lockheed Constellation, ready for boarding, with another in the middle distance.
The much loved Connie was powered by four 18-cylinder Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclones.
The Connie looked more sleek, glamorous and aerodynamic than any passenger
jet flying (in theory) today, even on the tarmac.
It was in a Connie, on the tarmac at RAF Fairford, that I met the legendary Candy Bomber, Colonel Gail Halvorsen, a truly great man who took part, last year, in the Royal British Legion Rememberance Day ceremonies at the Royal Albert Hall, in the presence of HMQ and family.
All the talk and listening in the world is not going to win this war.
Socialists are by nature organized. Conservatives are by nature not.
We rely on law, family, "right", order, fairness and individual responsibility.
The left removes personal responsibility from the equation, so that all that we depend on circles the drain.
Irresponsibility is built in to socialism, and this is by design.
Looking to the immediate future - we win, but lose.
Trump will win in November. Then the fight starts.
We will have to fight for the victory, because it will be denied. Again.
Like General Flynn. Bannon. Or Steyn vs [enter name].
Our model is not designed for these times.
People need to ask themselves "what am I prepared to do?" "Am I prepared to meet fire with fire?"
If we don't fight back, the "dark lights of perverted science" will descend on Christendom.
You have to at least feel pretty good about the increase in gun sales, right? That's a good first step needed before organization: gather supplies and get training. Put these men in blue who are walking away from their jobs back to work. Hire a personal trainer!
If man could live on one author alone, like surviving on bread or crickets in a pinch, could the author be Rudyard Kipling? I think it could for me. The reading of "Mandalay" brought a tear to my eye and I'm not sure exactly why. But it does tells me that no awful deed done by the Chinese Communist Party is going to steal my soul away from me.
Your listener from Iowa got it exactly right. Using taxpayer funds to move supply chains out of China is a shovel-ready make-work project I could get behind because of all the future benefits for Americans. If our multi-national corporations had a patriotic bone in their bodies, they would already be moving all supply chain out of China, but they don't. It may take crony capitalism to get so-called U.S. businesses to do something in the U.S. citizens' interest.
I wish I could get on the bandwagon here but I am apocalypsed out for now. I get it already. The Durham investigation, among other things, may be like waiting for Godot, but what else can we do? The fact that it seems like that means, of course, that we have lost all confidence in public institutions. We can't go down to Walmart and get new institutions. The ones we have are still okay, at least in principle. But speaking of apocalypse, my grandparents lived through WW I, the Spanish flu pandemic, the Great Depression, WW II, and saw the long twilight road of the Cold War. My mother's parents saw their only son die as an infant. My father's parents sent their sons to war. When the war was over and they were looking forward to peace and prosperity their business burnt to the ground and they lost everything but started rebuilding immediately with next to nothing. My grandparents all looked like they were in their 80's when they were in their 60's, but they appeared nonetheless happy and never complained. Compared to them I don't feel qualified to comment on apocalypse. I wish they were still here so I could ask them many things I would never have thought to ask as a child.
I also feel compelled to put in a word for ordinary people here. The question is often asked why we don't see more pushback from people. We can't do the things the Left does because that is simply not who we are. I do the best I can with my meager abilities to uphold civilization and hope it somehow matters a little and so do countless other people. We expect our public officials to maintain an orderly and just society. That specifically is their job. The fact that many, if not most of them, don't give a damn about our well-being is too much for many people to believe. We don't live to create and maintain a daily narrative that is pure falsification of everything in order to keep the world turned on it's head. Again, this is too much for many people to believe is constantly happening. Why is President Trump so popular? He fights gamely every day against all the depredations we face and people know it. He may be easy to criticize at points but he is up against raging opposition from all quarters every day and his political weapons are limited by a weak, squishy Republican Party that only has a few bright lights within it. People know this too and have been trying for years to change it. I wish there was more space here but I'm not willing to believe we are on the road to oblivion just yet.
Mark replies:
The headline "On the Road to Oblivion" and the accompanying illustration refer to the fate of the poem and song that turn up about halfway through the show. It is not a reference to the Durham Report.
I get it. I was only using the phrase to describe what I felt to be the general tenor of the show. I that that was your point as well.
In a "Name that Tune" aside, am I the only one who noticed that the first notes of the "On the Road to Mandalay" chorus are identical to the opening notes of "The Poor People of Paris?" And in another aside, Dorothy Parker - cynical little leftist 'tho she was - was a great admirer of Kipling.
And day after day after day - whether it's when I hear snippets from the various speeches at the Democratic convention, or the cliched, self-congratulatory comments from professional athletes or other wealthy celebrities, or - in this case - some singer striking a blow for anti-colonialism by refusing to sing a Rudyard Kipling poem that's been performed for years - I always think to myself, if black lives matter so much to you, go find an actual black person who needs help and help him, or her.
Christopher Hitchens, too, admired the bookends of Burma in literature: Kipling and Orwell.
Yeah good point . I spent much time in Burma in the ninties and witnessed even then both those authors sketches.
Trump might be winning against cannibals and paedophiles, but the Democrat-Media Complex has control of the Covid narrative with #TrumpVirus and #MarchfortheDead.
The hospital curve was flattened after reopening across the Sun Belt (updated graphs on "NY-NJ vs USA" by Stephen McIntyre @ClimateAudit), yet Killer Cuomo is hailed as the great leader. At Day 160 of 15-days-to-slow-the-spread (!!!) health bureaucrats and teachers' unions are running the country and destroying lives "until there's a vaccine" (or until November 4th). The tests and masks that would have been useful in February - when Fauci and the CDC promoted hand sanitizers and claimed there was no community spread - are being ramped-up *after* the epidemic peak. News of widespread T-cell immunity (near-herd), affordable treatments and improved survival is ignored by the MSM - or labelled as "misinformation". And Big Pharma beneficiaries are laughing all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, Wuhan is partying (as per Laura's Links) to show the world the CCP-WHO has gotten away with murder, while tinpot leftist dictators of the "free" West are empowered to ruin the lives of the living.
#ChinaLiedPeopleDied
Don't you think that concert was just a piece of timed propaganda, though, Kate? Notice the men in black pants and white business shirts positioned at each end of the stage. The watchdogs so the band doesn't miss a beat or the official minders of the crowd? A staged stage scene. I had to look carefully to see. Everything seems so fake about it. That's China today on display.
This certainly is a dark period for the world and China must pay the price for the misery they've caused. Every day there's more inexplicable action taken by the local governments. I don't know where it is written they obtained all of this power. People will remember the pain and confusion the "leaders" created. We'll see what happens. I love the idea of getting everything manufactured for the West back to the West at whatever the cost.
Articulately put, K. There's not been a novelist born who might have imagined the situation before it materialised. Sours the milk in the jug.
Absolutely, Fran (re the CCP propaganda video) - that should be "partying" in quotation marks. Not sure what "normal" life is like in Wuhan but that video looks as staged as the scenes - after the epidemic had ripped through - showing Hazmat-suited teams methodically fumigating the empty city streets. It's all a head-fake to show that China has done the best job of beating the virus (that it unleashed on the rest of the world).
That said, even though NYC is also safely free of Covid - no cases and no deaths - thanks to a pile of corpses early on, life in Wuhan right now would be a lot more "normal" (taking BLM riots out of the equation - which by the way, I suspect China has had a hand in, via the Democrats). The CCP isn't killing the local economy 6 months later, or pretending that restrictions and masks *after* the epidemic wave are in any way useful. (Same thing in the UK/ affected Eu cities as in NY.)
RAC once noted that the CDC/ NIH/ FDA etc are part of the Swamp, which there's now good evidence for. The politicisation of Covid in the US has been grotesque, whether by "experts" or governors. Add to that the obvious financial conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, even conservatives moved on from China months ago: the death counts are now inconvenient and disputed statistics - not individual victims - as Mark has often noted. This may just be a rehearsal, too - and we can't say we weren't 'warned' by WHO in 2019 (they actually got one thing right about lack of preparedness).
PS. I thought Trump might've thrown Fauci under the bus months ago for the WHO/ Wuhan Institute links (in addition to his incompetence and partisanship). Just another thing that everyone moved on from.
Excellent summation of the timeline of the China virus and state of affairs, Kate. It's all terribly deflating. This is the strategy, to deflate the Trump base before November. As for your remark about Trump throwing Fauci under the bus, I think President Trump has to walk a fine line with Fauci but he clearly has distanced himself and is encouraging the states to fully open up again.
Trump insists that the schools reopen and Fauci warned against it. The Left uses Fauci as the science guy here when most Americans realize now that we're been played by more fake science. Just like the climate change cabal, the Left has used the fake science industry to control the masses. Instill fear! I knew when this virus was unleashed, it was going to tie into climate change but I wasn't sure quite how at the time.
When is a war not a war? China unleashed biological warfare upon the world. The present course is the virus as a tool by Western pols to reshape the West into the functional image of the aggressor. We are taking casualties but its deck chair arranging time instead ..many quietly happy that the CCP iceberg did its job. It is surprising that we won the Cold War despite decades of non-victories starting with Korea. Even if we beat the virus... this one for now... we still have to fight a strenghtened foe.
The road to oblivion ever leads away from the past. The past is another country... we wish to visit it... but can't. No matter how grime, the past is a "safe space" compared to the future in a world reluctant to win.
To celebrate VJ Day I looked up the Liberty ship that my father and his signals troop had loaded their kit on in Rangoon harbour when the news came through. SS Samvannah (originally SS Louis A. Godey, publisher of 'Godey's Lady's Book') built by Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation of Savannah, Georgia. 48 days from keel laying to delivery on 30 December 1943 (440 feet, 14,000 tons), that yard's best effort. One of the welders at the yard was Jane Tucker (16), trained in 6 weeks, going from $1/day working in a shop to $12 per 10-hour shift. Her older sister (17) and her mother also trained as welders and worked with her. God bless America!
We have our own famous Liberty ship breaking up on a sandbank off the Isle of Grain where she grounded on 20 August 1944. SS Richard Montgomery still loaded with 1,400 tons of munitions that could send a tsunami along the Thames Estuary if they go off. There's a contract out at the moment to cut off the rusting masts that threaten to collapse and set off the cargo. 2020 may indeed end with a bang and waves lapping over T.S. Eliot's beach shelter On Margate Sands.
The Liberty Ship SS Robert E. Perry was built in 4 days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. It should be noted that pre-fabbed sub-assemblies were used but that was an incredible accomplishment.
On January 29, 1945 the US Coast Guard Liberty Ship AK-97 USCGS Serpens lay at anchor a mile off Lunga Point, Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, Serpens was carrying 600 tons of ammo, torpedoes and anti-submarine depth charges when the she died in a flash beneath a full moon at 11:18 p.m.
The blast was so violent it rained shrapnel and debris on the island of Guadalcanal a mile away, killed a soldier onshore, knocked everyone standing within that radius off their feet, and flung one sailor into another vessel moored 650 yards away. That ship, the USS YP 514, had its bow and crow's nest demolished, and counted 14 injuries as "missiles" and "screeching shells" continued to explode and turn night into day.
Witnesses said the explosion generated an 8-foot tidal wave, and that the ground shock rippled five miles out. Some said the sky drizzled oil for two hours. When bystanders regained their senses, the 100-ton barge that had been transferring bombs onto the Serpens had vanished, and all that was left of the 441-foot cargo ship was its sinking bow, keel up. 250 died, my Uncle was in that crew.
When it comes to 76 year old explosives, they are either dead or deadly. Good luck.
Was surprised and pleased to see VJ celebrations last weekend here in Australia. Even on ABC
Must have been that 75 year's ago stuff that did it.
Hi Mark, this was an interesting show, I hadn't heard about the BBC and Sir Willard White refusing to use 'The Road To Mandalay' as part of their VJ Day commemorations due to so-called concerns about 'cultural superiority'. The BBC's attitude is entirely predictable but one would expect Sir Willard, as an opera singer who has performed works by long dead white men such as Wagner and Mozart, to possess more intelligence and common sense. Alas, it seems that he too has joined the ranks of the Wokerati. Will he now give up his knighthood as all titles and honorifics tend to smack of 'cultural superiority'? I think not.
Regarding the long delayed Durham Report, and indeed the whole Russia Hoax, it has come to resemble a real life version of Jarndyce and Jarndyce for me. It just meanders along as a backdrop to the main action, which is getting Joe Biden into the White House. Just like Jarndyce, the Durham Saga features a confusing and seemingly endless cast of characters: Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Rice, Obama, Fusion GPS, the Ohrs, Peter Strzok, Steele and his Dossier, the two Pages (Carter and Lisa), McCabe, Lynch and a never-ending lineup of lawyers. Most people have forgotten many of the details of the whole thing, if they ever really knew them to start with, and yet the shadowy Mr Durham just continues ever onward, painstakingly compiling his report. It must rival 'War and Peace' by now. If it is ever released before November (it will never be released afterwards if Biden is elected) it will probably prove to be as widely unread as 'W&P' is nowadays. I hope I'm wrong.
As ever, all the best to you Mark and all other Steyn Onliners, we might just see the end of this Covid Catastrophe one day and be able to read the Durham Report for ourselves as well! It could end up as one of the 'Tales for Our Time'. You never know your luck.
Thanks Veronica! Your suggestion of making the Durham Report a future Tales For Our Time caused my only audible laugh of the week. I thought your explanation was spot on as well. Too many characters, too many details, all now or soon to be forgotten. Actually, I'm still staggered by the odds of it all; first Hillary gets defeated, then the coup is uncovered, and then along comes the WuFlu to make sure it all stays buried. Finally, we've lost the rule of law at street level, so it's all beyond caring about now anyway. The Dems are evil from top to bottom, but they do seem to live a charmed life.
Fabulous show - thanks, Mark!
What would Kipling's daughter make of the BBC's cancellation of *even* the Sinatra version? No doubt Prince Harry is on board with Willard White, but why bother with VJ Day celebrations henceforth?
As for Captain Cook and his claims regarding New Wales, he's been cancelled by The 1619 Project. Or whatever. #BLM
PS. I agree with Brian, re Clubland Q&As.... along with the new shows, these are a favourite (not to mention all the "usual" essays and columns). The Q&A that was delayed an hour sounded convincingly "live" (at least in Australia where it's 14 hours ahead).
Mark's comment re: Rose McGowan makes me think of Tal's dilemma from yesterday: to watch the Democratic convention or to not watch the Democratic convention. Like Tal, I came to the same conclusion, albeit without the exciting alternative. There really wasn't much of a reason to watch as everyone participating shares the same opinion on every issue. Any Blue Dogs, to use an antiquated term, still around, or did they all meet the scythe after Obamacare? Tulsi would have been fun to hear, but I suppose that would've been a slap in Kamala's face.
God, what an outstanding reading! It transcends Kipling. Thank you for putting life into his masculine poetry.
This becomes just one more reason why Steyn Online is worth every penny/shilling/shekel.
Thank you!
Isn't it time we stopped calling it the Durham Report and started calling it the Godot Report?
Touché. Actually I had forgotten we were still waiting for it. I think it's a given that all Democrats will be cleared by the report by procedural nonsense or claims of good faith incompetence, as in Hillary didn't intend to share state secrets with the hacker world by ignoring government rules and storing them on a server in the bathroom, so don't make a something burger out of a nothing burger.
Oh yeah, Nicholas, we're still waiting. I think Durham has a very difficult task in trying to figure out how to do the very least possible while not being seen as doing nothing.
Meanwhile, I got curious about this Clinesmith guy who was going to plead guilty to something or other. I kept hearing that he was going to, so I checked and he actually did! His sentencing is set for December 10th and, of course, he's out walking around free and probably working on his book.
Not to worry, though. For one thing, he has to be debriefed by the FBI on submitting information to FISA Courts. Oh the humanity, right? However, he's looking at five years in prison. Looking and laughing, that is. The judge in the case, oddly a FISA judge himself, says the sentencing guidlines are "zero to six months". Wow. So he's looking at a debriefing and.... well, that's probably it.
Oh and he didn't have to appear in handcuffs.... or at all. He submitted his plea by teleconference from his lawyer's office. Covid concerns, don't you know.
You know, I just don't know where Mark gets his lack of respect for our system of "justice".
Let's have none of this swooping in at dawn for surprise arrests. We must move at a leisurely pace to ensure that the guilty have every opportunity to destroy any remaining evidence.
I can only tell you where I am in Aberdeen Scotland UK.
95% Trump. Well above 40% because he wasnt Clinton 2016.
He got conned with The Great Wuhan Bat Flu Farce. But he got USA out WHO.
Trump is the best leader in the world and he is half son of Scotland.
So very proud.
Funny you should mention it. I'm reading an eye-opening book by Herman: How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
With a lot of help from everyone else.
My absolutely best favourite is Einstein in history. Then I learned about Niels Bohr a Dane.
My son in law is a Dane.
Then I heard about Mark Steyn.
Just like sense. Just like anyone on here.
Thanks for the reminder about WHO, Ray. Nobody seems to remember the smart things that Trump has done while half the bureaucracy and the Obama administration were trying to take him down. In spite of all the efforts to get rid of him, DJT has held true to more promises than most Presidents in my lifetime. The Democrats look like fools trying to tell us President Trump has not yet grown into the job. Are the men and women wearing the blue saying that? Are the people at NASA thinking that? The Democrats are the ones who look very lost right now.
Heaven forbid we get a Pete Buttegeig, Susan Rice, Bernie Sanders, Hiawatha, and all the other losers in a Biden-Harris cabinet. That could happen! That would seal the deal that we'll all be the next slaves of China. By then, I guess, race riots, anarchy and 57 genders won't be kitchen table issues any longer.
Fran,
Hiawatha? You mean, I think, Minnehaha.
Except Mark's wonderful Crockagawea Fauxcahontas is the best.
Have you noticed that Liz Warren is not so grating on the nerves anymore? I think she has been studying Kat Timpf's impersonation of her and going to school on that. She's a little less harsh sounding, more like Kat now and she softened her colors. It's what I notice when I see these Leftists on TV. I blocked out their message a while back and just see what it is that could improve if someone worked with them and told them they would have much more appeal if they weren't so terribly caustic sounding.
Also, if they just told the truth about what they're going to do to improve our lives not wreck them even more. After this convention, they have a completely muddled message, just another humble observation. Is it me, or have they pretended nothing we've been seeing since George Floyd's life was ended has even occurred? What do they supposed we are anyway? Little masked marionettes being manipulated to dance to whatever their dastardly script dictates? Their dream plans for us will ruin us as a nation. We're dangling from the edge by a couple digits as it is.
That's the thing about Trojan horses, F.: innocent on the outside, lethal on the inside. Always, always fear Greeks bearing gifts.
When the Greeks emerged to sack Troy, they were mainly peaceful, too.
That's what I'd say. Okay, been in the sun a bit long... I thought we'd lost a mock orange and a croton, but they're both budding vividly. I should celebrate.
Take it you support the Dons (Whose two biggest claims to fame are winning the Cup Winners Cup vs Real Madrid under Fergie and being one of two Scottish clubs that have never been relegated from the top division along with my club Celtic). A few years back I saw a great bumper sticker both you and The Donald would probably get a kick out of: "England Forever (And Scotland For A Wee Bit Longer!)".
I've written before that I come for the civilizational decline, but I stay for the music. And I am thrice blessed that I did. Mark's recitation of the poem and Peter Dawson's and Frank Sinatra's versions all moved me deeply. What a treat. "An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay." Peerless.
I've been on the road to Mandalay myself over the last few hours, or at least as far as YouTube can take me. I've heard stirring recitations of the poem by the actor Charles Dance (once on the 70th anniversary of VJ Day in 2015, once as Lord Mountbatten in The Crown) and comic Jim Davidson (believe it or not). I've heard operatic versions of the song by Leonard Warren and Laurence Tibbett (who, along with Nelson Eddy, annoying pronounces Mandalay, and every word that rhymes with it, with a long i at the end). I've heard early performances from 1914 and 1922, and as relatively recent as Thomas Hampson's 1991 track. I've heard a comedic turn by Jerry Colonna, a breezy take by Frankie Laine, a takeoff by Garrison Keillor, and a singalong from Der Bingle. And I'm not done yet.
"The Caribbean, and Africa, and the Pacific were colonies; but India, and Ceylon, and Singapore were love affairs. And Burma most of all." That's really true, isn't it?
Mark has let slip that he has fled the surly bonds of America. Some day if the full story is every told, I imagine that pickup trucks, tarpaulins and midnight fishing boat runs to St. Pierre and Miquelon will figure in.
Robert's thought about $200 Billion per year to re-industrialize American should consider the offset of all the Social Security, Medicare, FICA, etc. contributions as well as the income taxes paid by the newly employed workers, not to mention the multiplying effect on the rest of the economy. The net cost would then be substantially less and would continue on beyond the 5 year period. Why wouldn't this work? The oligarchs would have to get their cut which would have to be several trillion dollars and most likely that half the jobs would need to be filled by H1b's.
Regarding the Empire and loss thereof of Burma, in Melanesian culture giving away your possessions makes you a Big Man. When the Americans gave the Solomon Islands back to the British after WW2, it was not lost on the natives. The gesture was part of the creation of the cargo cult.
Regarding slipping the surly bonds....does that mean the MSC will devolve into a version of Where's Wally? (Where's Waldo? for Americans), or perhaps a version of Elvis sightings and conspiracy theories? More likely Where's Wally? as there is a devoted fan club: The Wally Watchers.
In typical inertial human fashion there has been a mad stampede to shift all manufacturing to China until there is none left behind. Now let's begin the mad stampede to bring it all back.
In Mandalay, the Burmese girl has an exotic remembered glamor to the soldier that Sinatra punctures with his insertion of "broad" instead of girl. Broads are pretty much the same anywhere round the globe not to be confused with remembered glamorized foreign "girls" who eclipse the local gals back home. I wonder if that song is much of a hit with the ladies back home.
One also wonders why it was not an option to book a singer willing to sing Mandalay at the VJ Day remembrance.
"One also wonders why it was not an option to book a singer willing to sing Mandalay at the VJ Day remembrance."
It would probably be the last performance for any singer capable of being so "culturally insensitive".
Remember when Boris, as foreign secretary, was reprimanded by the UK ambassador to Myanmar for his off-the-cuff recitation? (The conversation that followed was actually pretty funny.)
Mark's reading was second to none... such a shame it won't be heard by a BBC audience!
Thanks for a great rendition of the poem, great appraisal of Sir Willard White, GWS*.
* Gross waste of space.
Agree entirely with the evaluation of the U.S. dollar's future as the world's reserve currency. I wish that there was more to read in the media on the probable consequences of that. It's a beautiful morning here, and I have no appetite for draughting an outline.
A happier memory of Road to Mandalay compared to these recent shenanigans was regularly hearing it sung by Peter Dawson on "Your Hundred Best Tunes" and subsequently "Golden Years".
Both of these long-running radio shows were presented by the excellent Alan Keith (real name Alexander Kossoff) who was the brother of the equally memorable David Kossoff. Alan was the uncle of Paul (guitarist with the band Free) and the father of Linda (a lady who exemplified the swinging sixties right down to having a Jagger/Richards song written about her - Ruby Tuesday). Quite a family.
Mark replies:
I knew Alan Keith slightly in my BBC days, John. An unmistakeable voice - and I can never hear the Pearl Fishers duet without thinking of him.
A most enjoyable show Mark. Many thanks.
However after around 13 minutes I was surprised to hear about, and had to wind back to check, the concerns of Sir Willard Wentworth White, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Knight Batchelor and Member of the Jamaican Order of Merit, about a song referencing (wait for it) The British Empire. You went on to say:-
"After discussing this with the bbc production team it was mutually agreed...........a different song".
Seriously? To use an unpleasant term the bbc would have been positively gagging to prevent anything by Kipling from being aired. The miracle is that it apparently took The Honourable (yes he's got that title as well) Sir Willard's intervention to achieve it.
Quite how he manages to reconcile this wokeness while still hanging on to his not inconsiderable honours and orders of chivalry is beyond me.
I've got the Sinatra "Live in Australia 1959" album with the Red Norvo Quintet which you played, and when somebody in the audience shouted out a request for "Chicago" he said "I don't know the words to that song," then he used that interruption as an opening to tell the audience the whole story of Mandalay. Without that interruption. He might not have gotten so catty about the Kipling family:
"This particular song was written from the poem by Rudyard Kipling. Now it seems that we have done a rather different version of 'Road to Mandalay,' [on 'Come Fly with Me'] so that his family has objected, and anywhere in the British Empire it's not to be played on that record. So they took it off the long-playing record of Come Fly with Me and replaced it with Chicago. But this is an unusual version of 'Road to Mandalay,' it's comedic, but it swings, it jumps. I think that Rudyard Kipling's sister [sic] was chicken not to let us put it on record."
In a June 1958 concert in Monte Carlo, Sinatra got even cattier about Ms. Kipling, saying, "Of course, she drinks a little bit, so we'll forgiver her." But then, Frank calling out a drinker sounds a lot like a compliment.
Sinatra probably knew so much about Mandalay because he had just (May 1959) filmed Never So Few with locations in Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India. Sitting at the hotel bar at night can be very educational.
Kipling was cavalier with Burma's geography. You're not going to see many flying fishes on the road to Mandalay, which is hundreds of miles up the Irrawaddy from Rangoon, and you certainly can't see the sunrise or anything else out of China. I think that Moulmein was the only place in Burma which Kipling did visit and that's probably where Kipling did see flying fishes. The Salween goes out to the Andaman Sea there and is presumably tidal. On Bilu Island, the other side of the estuary, the making of cheroots is still a major cottage industry.
Moulmein, in Kipling's time, was a British garrison town, so it probably has church bells, as well has temple bells. There are certainly at least two mosques, since the British Indian Army had a major Muslim contingent. The muezzins seem to make more noise than either the Christians and the far more numerous Buddhists combined.
Independent Burma was, more or less from the start, at war with its numerous minorities, most of all the people of the Karen state, who resisted rule from first Rangoon and then from the Orwellian city of Naypyidaw, built from scratch in the middle of nowhere as the new capital, in the early years of this century. For about half of the country's grim post-independence history, dictator Ne Win wielded overt or covert power. Money was in short supply in the grotesquely mismanaged economy, but what there was was used to sustain a very big army. This was used in 1988 to conduct a Tiananmen-style massacre in Rangoon, the year before Tiananmen.
When the army finally allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to form a civilian government, the generals retained control of the armed forces, police etc. You don't see very many soldiers on the streets, but their barracks in the countryside occupy mile after mile. Peculiarly, each one has the name of the resident unit in Burmese, one side of the gate, and in English on the other. Pointedly, this is despite the fact that English has no official status in the country (you won't find a word of English in a Burmese railway station, for instance). The doublethink explains how the generals felt entitled to insist that the official English name of Burma was Myanmar, while English-speakers must henceforth refer to Yangon, not Rangoon, a city which, for practical purposes, the British founded. Typical of the insanity: a slogan on a wall in Mandalay itself, in Burmese and English, which one is sternly forbidden to photograph.
Mark replies:
Indeed, Owen. I'm so out of it these days I can never hear references to the contemporary "Karens" without thinking of Burma.
On campaign 2020, was thinking about Joe's speech last night and when you splice the teleprompter output together, the message he seems to be going with is the "American people are good and decent" while also being systematically bigoted. Sounds like a winner. To paraphrase Mark, half a cup of ice cream mixed with half a cup of horse manure doesn't make for a great final product
I think that is Ben & Jerry's Unicorn Swirl flavor.