ANON
Remember, I have no name and there is no me as a real person.
BLIEDEN
That is the voice of the Anonymous man I interview on this show. My name is Michael Blieden. Welcome back to The Cold Bath, this is episode 6. Now the previous episode ended with Mr. Aonymous talking about a lesbian that he knows who is super hot but before that we were talking about Global Warming. Now, some of the things that Mr. A has to say I find disturbing or scary or wrong. His views on George Washington or liberal democracy in general do not fall into this category. His views on super hot lesbians, do not fall into this category. His views on Global Warming do. Now I've told him how much some of his ideas bother me and I've actually hurt his feelings. This is where we began for Episode 6.
BLIEDEN
Do you remember what you told me? What the most painful thing I ever said to you was?
ANON
That you liked that girl that I like?
BLIEDEN
Well that's another thing we have to talk about. What was the other thing? I said something and you once referred to it as the most painful thing I ever said to you. And it was about doing this.
ANON
You see I am a student of Dan Greenburg who wrote "How To Make Yourself Miserable." And I read that book carefully and my whole life I've been doing the opposite. So I suppress these things because what's without remedy is without regard.
BLIEDEN
This fucking pounding is killing me.
ANON
No no no, it's human. Everything that is human should be included in our show.
BLIEDEN
The first love of my life was a violin player, and I just. I loved everything about her. And she wanted me to help her record a demo because she wanted to go on and get her PhD in performance violin. She was very serious about it. And so we went into a studio and I recorded her and I put the mic very close so you could hear her fingers moving up and down the fret board and you could hear her breathing and it was just a very intimate recording and she listened to it and she said this is all wrong they don't want to hear that and I said "Why? They don't want to hear how great..." You know sometimes if you listen to classical music which I do very very rarely. But every once in a while I do and you can hear the breathing of the conductor. I love that detail.
ANON
That's why Bob Dylan said "Is it rollin'? Is it rollin'? Is it rollin', Bob?"
BLIEDEN
But the most painful thing I ever said to you, as you remember was...I said I am nervous, and I want you to start talking when you remember this, about...yeah
ANON
Right. Well of course. Look.
BLIEDEN
Don't...I want you to say it. What did I say though?
ANON
Yeah. You were nervous about having me contradict what is the religion of the young. Men can live without religion but man cannot live without it. Because you know I've had a lot of clients over the years. Every race color and creed. This is why I see everyone as equal, you know, as an idiot. And, this guy, Jewish guy, 600 year old guy and he went to the top of Mount Herob and he met the Aliens. But he had to interpret it within what he knew at the time. And then he came down and he saw the staff of the New York Times worshipping this thing they bought at Fortunoffs. The golden calf and he, I think he dropped one of the tablets because I think there were 15. And we only have 10 that survived and Spielberg knows that the arc of the covenant which contains the tablets...
BLIEDEN
Alright. I'm going to stop you becasue this is how people get lost and let me...let's just go back and parse what just happened.
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
You first referred to your political career by saying that you had a client. Then you said he was a jew.
ANON
Right. Moses.
BLIEDEN
Then you started talking about Moses.
ANON
That's my client.
BLIEDEN
Then you mix in...right.
ANON
That's my client. I'm the one who told him, "Look, they don't want to hear that you don't know who you met. So say it was Yahweh, and ah..."
BLIEDEN
How does this get back to the most painful thing I ever said to you.
ANON
Because what we're talking about is religion. Because we went from Judaism to Christianity. Christianity is only Judaism continued, or Christians would say completed, and then after that we had to go to some other universal religion so we became Animists. That's the seeing of God in nature. And that's why a lot of our people are environmental cases because they have...
BLIEDEN
When you do that voice remember you're imitating me. Because I'm an environmentalist.
ANON
No no no no no. No, I'm...well I mean I am imitating the straight modern Amercian males because they give a special pronunciation to that which they like and that which they don't like. Winston Churchill was another one of my candidates. You know he was fat. He had a good deal of...
BLIEDEN
He was not one of your candidates. I'm just saying that for the record because you were a...you were a politician.
ANON
I...listen. Let me tell you something. If I can tell'em that Moses was one of my candidates.
BLIEDEN
I'm just..
ANON
Oh no no. Hold on. If they, if I can tell them that Moses was one of my candidates they are smart enough to know that Winston Churchill was not either.
BLIEDEN
Okay. This is the first mention of Churchill in this episode but it's not the last. That's all I'm going to say. At this point we still haven't said what the most painful thing that I ever said to him was. Sometimes with Mr. A if you want him to say something he'll beat around the bush for so long you just have to say it yourself. Which is way less satisfying. Nevertheless. This is me now trying to repeat the most thing I ever said back to him. I said when we were talking about doing this I was nervous...
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
To let people hear what you had to say.
ANON
Of course.
BLIEDEN
Because you say things that A) scare me B) I disagree with. And I said to you, is it unethical of me to help you have this platform and it hurt your feelings. And as..now that we're doing it...it...I'm not worried about it but at the time I felt like maybe he'll convince people that global warming is...um...
ANON
Fun?
BLIEDEN
Well, you know...maybe you'd say something that...
ANON
Leads to orgasm?
BLIEDEN
You know it um...it keeps me awake at night. The global warming problem.
ANON
Listen. Read Dan Greenburg's "How To Make Yourself Miserable." And by page six you'll say "That's me!" Because he knew. He's...he gives the greatest quotation of the 1960's. And here it is. Put the quotation marks up in your mind. America sucks, comma, pass the joint. Close quote. See this is what poetry is. Poetry is taking the novel and boiling it down to one little sentence.
BLIEDEN
One of the things in talking about last week's episode was you and I discovered that the lesbian that you mentioned at the end, the one who you're attracted to
ANON
No, not attracted to. I adore her. Attracted to is different.
BLIEDEN
Okay. By some coincidence I knew her as a kid.
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
And she was so...
ANON
But not as a small child. You knew here when you were 14.
BLIEDEN
Yeah. I knew her when I was 14. 15.
ANON
That's the age where boys start to be interested.
BLIEDEN
She was so hot. She was..she was...she would wear these, we had an exercise class together. She would wear these really tight purple cotton pants and um...the only way I can express how hot she was...it made my dick hurt. It hurt. It was a physical....sensation. I remember that. I remember that.
ANON
I just want to warn our listeners. Friend of mine who's a very cultured boy, and a friend. A real friend listened to this and I tell them all I'm not an actor, so tell me what you reall think. Including it sucks. And he said "It's obscene." And he's a very cultured boy so he explained to me what that means. Obscene is French. It means "off" - ob - scene - "stage." Off stage. There are certain things like urinating, defecating, ah, having intercourse that you're supposed to do offstage. And what his contention is, because he's a religious person, that we brought the offstage onto the stage. And that's obscene. And of course what I say is obscene and I'll tell you why. We use language in politics as a substitute for open violence. And let me tell you something. Violence is not preferable to harsh language. And the obscene is better than the bomb.
BLIEDEN
Well I'll tell you something. One thing that I really can't stand is prudery of any sort. Because prude people don't tell interesting stories. And ah, you know...my job is not to judge. That's my job. You know I had a friend who was um....he was a clerk for the 9th circuit here in California. What a lot of people don't know about the courts is that the clerks have a ton of power.
ANON
Oh yeah.
BLIEDEN
The clerks are the ones who make the decisions. The judges read it and you know my friend's job was to judge. His job was to hear an argument and to decide which side was right. My job, I think, as a documentarian is not to judge. My job is the opposite. My job is merely to witness and so because that's what I try and do all the time I'm always looking for people who tell stories without coloring the details; people who can tell stories without trying to make themselves look better, or without try to make themselves look worse, but people who just tell the stories in an interesting and compelling way. And ah...I'm glad that someone said this was obscene because um... we're...ah...I'm trying to do something that isn't hung up in prudery.
ANON
What hurt is that this guy is not a prude, but he has a point of view and he expresses it honestly. Listen when you reach a certain age, not 30 not 40 , you reach a certain age. I don't want to say what the age is because I don't want people to faint. But when you reach a certain age you see yourself in every other person. It doesn't matter whether it's Jeffrey Dahmer. You see yourself in every other person. But hopefully only a little.
BLIEDEN
Okay, I don't want to build it up too much, but this where this episode takes a crazy turn. What you are about to hear me try to do is get Mr. A to tell a certain story from when he worked in politics as a teenager. I'll just go ahead and tell you right now, you're going to hear the story, but not in this episode. I tried. Really. But then at some point, and you'll know roughly when it is, I made the choice to just let him go in a different direction. I think it was completely worth it, but I'll let you decide for yourself. Here goes. I want you tell the story about your first job. At least when you told me the story it was your first job in politics when you were a little boy.
ANON
Alright. I want to be careful how I tell this story. First I want to say, without the police every city would be an instant slum. We need the police. And the great political philosopher Henny Youngman when asked "How do you like your wife?" He said, "Compared to what?" So how would you like a city without a police department. Now we have the same comissioner in Los Angeles that we used to have in New York. I don't want to say he cleaned up New York City, but he cleaned up New York City. And how do you clean up a city? First you have to clean up the police department. That's why Hubert Humphrey became a great man. Because he cleaned up the unbelievably corrupt Minneapolis police department.
BLIEDEN
So you respect the police.
ANON
No. I know we need the police.
BLIEDEN
Okay.
ANON
It's different.
BLIEDEN
I'm just trying to get you back to the story.
ANON
Well I'm gonna tell the story but I had to tell this lead in because the kids have been told the police are the bad guys and the police are...the guys. Okay...now....there's no unleavened good. The closest to unleavened good in government is the Fire Department. Or as I call them, the fuckin' Fire Department. Because normal people, in their right mind flee from a burning building. The fuckin' firemen go into a burning building. And if you're very dopey and you don't know what this means get the extended films of 9/11. You think these men didn't know they were going to die? You think they're stupid? They go into burning buildings for a living. But they climbed the hundred flight stairs in these buildings to rescue the twenty thousand that they could. So that's as close to an unleavened good as you get. Now I'm sure you can hear my eyes have teared up because when I think of the people who allow the rest of us to live and who run into the fuckin' burning buildings, I can't think of that without emotion. There's a short passage from Churchill and if I were an actor I would carry this in my pocket. It's less than a page. And I would read it to myself when I had to cry on cue, because, and I've shown this to many many people, and it's had very little effect on any of them. But, forgive the pomposity. I cry because I know what it means.
BLIEDEN
Okay I'm recording.
ANON
This is about the escape of the British Army in the disasterous beginning to the Second World War. The Second World War was just the First World War. They come back, fuck their wives, raised a new generation of cannon fodder, and then they were ready for Part 2.
BLIEDEN
By the way just so you're prepared, Mr. A's claim that this passage is less than a page is patently false, but you were probably expecting that.
ANON
The French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque. The French changed the spelling to the British spelling after what happened. Behind them lay the sea. It was England's greatest crisis since the Norman Conquest, I was in on that by the way. I was Harold's campaign manager. Vaster than those precipitated by Philip II's Spanish Armada, Louis XIV's triumphant armies or Napoleon's invasion barges at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone. If the Germans crossed the Channel and established uncontested beachheads, all would be lost. Not just for them, but for you. Now the 220,000 Tommies, that's the British soldiers, at Dunkirk (now spelled D-U-N-K-I-R-K) Britain's only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy's vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000 of the 220,00. That's their whole army. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for (this is why I love the British) "hard and heavy tidings." Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Gracie Fields; Tom Sopwith's, he was a great yachtsman, America's Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade's fire-float Massey Shaw „ all of them manned by civilian volunteers: English fathers, sailing to rescue England's exhausted, bleeding sons.
BLIEDEN
If you're not crying, at this point in this episode, then either you have no heart, or you're at work. I'm gonna play the rest of his reading from "The Last Lion," but see of you can tell me what it is that Churchill means to Mr. A. I mean, you know, he clearly identifies with this description, but there's something that runs a lot deeper with it, and um...I don't know. There's something there.
ANON
"Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain's soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven. I'm just gonna read that sentece again. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven. It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, that's Hitler to you. England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost. England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost. England's new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England's decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolph Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. You see the idiocy never changes. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaen, that's someone who sees good versus evil, who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in marshal glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of Victorious legions through Persopolos, and who could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted, a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action. One who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood, and thus give men heroic visions of what they were, and might become. Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of that word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism, and then distort it to his ends. An embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people. A great Tragean, who understood the appeal of martyrdom, and who could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great chunks of bleeding meat. Persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was equally good to live or to die. Imagine somebody saying that to us now. Who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler, but could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off mits of his infallibility, or destroying or even warping the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England's last chance. In London there was such a man."
BLIEDEN
Congratulations. You made it through the gargantuan episode 6. If you have anything to say to us, please write us at info at thecoldbath dotcom [spelled out to avoid bots]. That's info at thecoldbath dotcom. I'm going to leave you with a little tease for the next episode. See you next time.
ANON
It says, "Obama's book too full of I's." That's not eye, like eye dialogue, That's the capital letter I. Obama's book too full of I's. Now, what is this? This is Hillary Clinton, cutting Obama's balls off.