Mullings by Rich Galen | Secret Decoder Ring for August 31, 2001

The Horror

Friday August 31, 2001

TITLE: "The Horror" The final lines of the character played by a grossly overweight Marlon Brando in the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola classic, "Apocalypse Now" were: "The Horror. The Horror."

Some "Apocalypse Now" stuff:
The story which inspired the film, as you know was, Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" What I'll bet you don't know because you slept through English Lit. at almost every opportunity, is hat story also spawned the famous poem by T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965) "The Hollow Men" which was published in 1925. The first line of the poem is "Mista Kurtz - he dead.". You may not be familiar with the title or the first line, but you ARE familiar with the final two lines of the final stanza:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That stanza is italicized in the original.

The tone of this poem is somewhat different than Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" published in 1939, which was the basis
of the unbelievably popular stage production T.S. Eliot
by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

BEFORE you hit the send button to tell me that Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and educated at Harvard, I know that. He moved to Europe, studied at Oxford and became a naturalized British subject in 1927. Except for his very earliest poems (like "Portrait of a Lady") all of his major work - the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize - was done overseas.

Welcome back to school for the fall semester. This material will be on your midterm.

"…Walter not Howie …" Col. Walter Kurtz was the name of the character played by Brando in "Apocalypse." Howard (Howie) Kurtz is the name of the media reporter for the Washington Post and the author of a number of excellent books about the media.

"…noted Conservative thinker..." Robert Reich is anything BUT a Conservative on economic matters or anything else. This is another example of what we call, irony.

"…Not including tolls…" There are no tolls between Alexandria, Virginia and the Capitol building. This is another example of what we call, irony.

"…equivalent of EBITDA…" EBITDA is a business analysis term which stands for "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization." It is a term which allows analysts to examine a corporation's earnings statement on a current operations basis: How much did it cost to make whatever we manufacture, how much did we sell it for, what was the overhead (and a few other items like sales costs, etc.), that gives us our earnings.

"…Hooverization…" Since 1929 the Democrats have blamed every person who ever registered to vote in a Republican primary for the Great Depression because Herbert Hoover was President when it started. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "Hoover, believing in the basic soundness of the economy, felt that it would regenerate spontaneously and was reluctant to extend federal activities."

Mullings' Catchy Caption of the Day:

Danny Almonte gets his first start as a Dodger
following his team's third place finish in the
Little League World Series.

(Photo: AP /Kim D. Johnson) ____________________________________________________________________________________

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