Nelson DeMille

I recently finished Wild Fire, the latest novel by Nelson DeMille. He is a spectacular author; almost every book of his turns out to be a page-turner. Cops, international terrorism, and Vietnam tend to be his frequent subjects. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, so he has some background experience to draw upon.

Two of them feature a character, Paul Brenner, who seems to be an alter-ego to DeMille himself.

Up Country. Features Paul Brenner. This is my favorite. Brenner goes back to Vietnam to investigate a murder which allegedly occurred in Hue in 1968, amidst the Tet Offensive. This involved a US captain – now a prominent US politician pursuing a higher office – who shot a US LT in Hue, an act witnessed by an NVA soldier. Brenner is sent to Vietnam to find out what this NVA soldier – if he’s still alive (?) - knows. He starts off in Saigon, then travels up to Nha Trang, Hue, Hanoi, then the interior of North Vietnam, accompanied by a beautiful American CIA officer, Susan Weber (go figure, with all the women in Vietnam, the love interest is nguoi my!). MUCH better than The General’s Daughter. I learned a few nuggets of Vietnamese to help me at my former law practice: “co dep” (beautiful girl) and “SAT CONG!” (Kill communists!). I already knew “khong biet” (“I don’t know”), “dung lai” (later), “ong luat su” (Mr Lawyer), “troi oi” (OMG!!), “toi yeu em” (I love you), “hon mong toi” (kiss my ass), “an cut” (eat shit) and other useful fragments.

The General’s Daughter. Paul Brenner is back. This was made into a movie with John Travolta as Brenner. Brenner investigates a murder at a US military base involving a US officer, a beautiful West Point graduate, the daughter of a prominent general. It turns out the daughter had some bad things happen to her at West Point, and was into some kinky stuff at the base. As with so many of DeMille’s books, all is not what it seems.
Another popular character is former NYPD cop John Corey, who does NOT appear to be a Vietnam veteran, just a major smartass whose stories are written in the first person.

Wild Fire. Corey, assisted by his beautiful wife, FBI Agent Kate Mayfield, investigates a wealthy right-wing radical, Bain Madox, who built an ELF transmitter in upstate New York and is plotting to wipe out the Middle East, by detonating 4 suitcase nukes in L.A. and San Francisco, which will precipitate “Wild Fire”, an obscure US mutually-assured-destruction plan which dictates that the Islamic world (except Mecca and the oil fields) will be nuked by US strategic nuclear forces if any nuclear device detonates in a US city.

Plum Island. John Corey is involved in something dealing with a top secret US installation on way eastern Long Island. Clearly one of the more forgettable ones.

The Lion’s Game. John Corey is on the tail of a terrorist whose aim is to track down every USAF pilot involved in Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya.

Night Fall. John Corey and Kate Mayfield are convinced that Flight 800 (the TWA flight which mysteriously blew up off the coast of Long Island in 1996) was NOT an accident – that a missile was involved, somehow. But the powers that be don’t want them to look into this issue, and have a vested interest – why??? – in shooting down the missile theory, despite many eyewitnesses who saw what appeared to be a missile. Somewhat of a paranoia trip, with the pair having to figure out who they can trust, and what is really going on.

The rest of the stories involve characters who just show up for that particular story.
By The Rivers of Babylon. Two El Al Concordes are brought down by a terrorist attack. The crew and passengers of one survive, only to be assaulted by successive waves of PLO terrorists very close to the ruins of Babylon in the Iraqi desert. We have corroboration in here, as noted in Red Horizons and Seven Pillars of Wisdom (both of those non-fiction) that Arab terrorists are notorious homosexuals and lousy soldiers. Remarkably, the Israelis hook up with a remote, isolated group of Jews who had been left behind in Babylon thousands of years ago (obviously these are their descendants…!)

Word of Honor. Ben Tyson, a US officer in Hue in 1968, is brought up on charges of murder in the battle in that city. He has to defend himself, yet ultimately the truth unfolds. This was made into a made-for-TV movie with Don Johnson as Tyson.

Gold Coast. Something on Long Island involving wealthy WASPs and Mafia types. Vaguely reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.

Charm School. This was the first one I read. It’s about a “charm school” – a finishing school in the USSR for the KGB. It’s complete with a 7-11, a McDonald’s, etc., and designed to give KGB agents the ability to speak and act like Americans, not merely fluent English with Russian accent. It even features a third generation (82-92) Trans Am.

Spencerville. Keith Landry returns to small town Ohio after years abroad in the CIA killing exotic people in exotic places. There he finds his high school sweetheart has married the local corrupt, brutal police chief. Although he hasn’t made any overtures at the woman, “this town is only big enough for one of us”, and the jealous chief starts making trouble for him immediately. You can pretty much figure out where this goes. His ex-CIA buddy reminds him: “BUCHAREST.” Like I need to be reminded.

Talbot Odyssey. Another Cold War relic; this one involves a Soviet plot to induce EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) by detonating a nuclear device at high altitude above the US. The Soviet consulate at Glen Cove, Long Island, is the focal point of this one. It also turns out that a high ranking CIA officer is a Soviet mole (no, it wasn’t Ames). One of the bad characters is… a Romanian woman. Clearly not completely fiction.

Mayday. This one was co-written with Thomas Block. A new-fangled high-altitude airliner fucks up somehow, leaving everyone except one Ted Striker guy either dead or permanently brain damaged. Ted has to land the plane himself (with no inflatable automatic pilot), but comes across resistance: the airline has cynically determined that its liability will be less if the plane crashes completely, killing everyone on board (including Ted) than it would be if Ted successfully landed a plane of brain-dead zombies the airline will be legally obligated to support for the rest of their lives. So quite apart from landing the damn thing (hard enough in and of itself) he has to deal with the bullshit from the airlines (sounds like something from “South Park”).

Cathedral. A bunch of IRA terrorists capture St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC on the eve of the St Patrick’s Day parade. They take the Bishop (not Terry Jones) hostage. An NYC cop of Irish descent, don’t you know, turns out to be better for the cops than the actual hostage negotiator.

As I noted above, they’re all worth reading, and though I preferred some over others, none were of substandard quality. Unlike Tom Clancy, though, DeMille doesn’t get bogged down in military technology, though there is more than enough of that in several of the books to keep the fans of that stuff satisfied. Of course, there’s also sex….which is always good.

Joyeux Noel

The true story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914 in WWI. On Christmas Eve, somewhere on the trench lines where a Scottish unit was stationed next to a French unit, peace broke out between the two sides. A German opera singer and his fiance (also an opera singer) sang for both sides; the troops came out and shared stories, alcoholic beverages, and pictures; and on Christmas Day they buried their dead and played some football. They could walk around No Man’s Land without worrying about shooting each other. Needless to say, the top brass considered all this “treason” and forbid this from ever happening again. Sure enough, it was GOOD for morale and BAD for the war. How can you shoot at men you’ve talked to in person just hours before? How can you go on when you can see how stupid the war is? When you see you have more in common with the poor soldiers on the other side than with the idiots running the war on your own? And imagine if this “truce” had occurred all the way up and down the trench line, from Switzerland to the English Channel. The war would have been over immediately; they would have faced a wholesale mutiny on all sides, German, French and British. It doesn’t take too much to imagine the soldiers telling the officers, “fuck you, if you and the top brass want a war, you can fight it yourselves!”

Clearly, soldiers who took enemy trenches could see that their foes lived in as much misery and filth as they did. Watching your own soldiers get wiped out by “friendly fire” drove home how much damage they were doing to each other. For the life of them, the soldiers could not grasp what the war was all about. Even had they been astute enough to have some idea of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, that still wouldn’t explain why Germans, French and British were slaughtering each other in France. Why not just let the Austrians and Serbs murder each other – assuming the Archduke’s life was worth even that?

In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers casually speculate on the reason for the war. Although (with a few exceptions) they’re fairly bright soldiers, they still come up with blanks. Even the dull soldier has the common sense to realize, “I’ve never even MET an Englishman until I fought them in the trenches, and I dare say many of them would say the same about us.” Time and time again the soldiers realize, “I have no particular beef, gripe, complaint, or grudge against the opposing side, either as an aggregate country or against enemy soldiers in particular.” How can they? They’ve never even met each other.

WWII was a bit different. There, suddenly, they had ideology to motivate them – ideological motivations which were mostly absent during WWI. The Germans were motivated by regular nationalism (most Wehrmacht personnel), National Socialism (Waffen SS), and anti-bolshevism (all of them); add to this the remarkable multi-national nature of the Waffen SS, somehow able to recruit French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, etc. (former enemies!) to fight against the Russians – hell, they got RUSSIANS to fight the Russians. Again, testimony to how brutal and unpopular Stalin and the Soviet government was that there was no shortage of not only Ukrainians and other ethnic groups, but even Russians, willing to fight for the Nazis against the Red Army. For their part, the Russians were motivated by their own nationalism (for most soldiers of the Red Army) and communism (for the minority). The Allies were motivated by abstract notions of freedom and liberty; and the moral indignation became even fiercer once US troops began liberating concentration camps and discovering what the Germans were really up to all this time. The Japanese sincerely believed in their own country’s destiny to rule Asia and defeat the caucasian US/European powers. Of course, WWII was also a dynamic war, with no stalemates on any front. Men died, but in the course of attacking and defending, not this business of thousands dead for a few inches of strategically inconsequential mud. The front moved too fast for soldiers to worry too much about how their enemies were dealing with it.

And in Iraq today there is no connection between the US troops and the insurgents they fight against. The insurgents don’t see us as normal human beings trying to make Iraq a better place, we’re just occupiers. And our troops aren’t inclined to view the insurgents as normal human beings trying to liberate their own country, they’re just a bunch of sick fucks (which they are). The cultural and religious differences are too much between the sides to permit the kind of fraternization which occurred in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in 1914, to occur in Iraq today.

Consider this, too: in the US, we have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. all living together peacefully without killing each other (Northern Ireland is a different story). Yet in Iraq there is civil war beween Sunnis and Shi’ites – sects of the SAME RELIGION! If Sunnis and Shi’ites can’t get along with each other, how can Muslims possibly relate to, much less peacefully coexist with, other religions? More directly, how can the Muslim insurgents ever relate to the US soldiers? We’re talking about fanatics by their nature. But at least us Americans and Europeans can enjoy our own peace and Christmas.

Deep Purple 1984-Present

[Originally posted 12/13/07.  Edited 6/30/2020.]

This could be called “Deep Purple Marks II, V, VI, and VII”. I love those Roman numerals.

Background. Deep Purple, as most people know it, is best known in its Mark II lineup: Ian Paice (drums), Jon Lord (keyboards), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Roger Glover (bass), and Ian Gillan (vocals). It originally disbanded in 1976 with the so-called Mark IV lineup: Ian Paice (drums), Jon Lord (keyboards), David Coverdale (vocals), Glenn Hughes (bass), and American guitarist Tommy Bolin. Their sole album, Come Taste The Band, wasn’t bad, but live the band started off OK but descended into mediocrity when they toured overseas and Bolin couldn't sustain his heroin habit.

Coverdale went off to form Whitesnake, Blackmore had already formed Rainbow, and the other members frequently jumped from one to the other. In 1980 Mark I & Captain Beyond vocalist Rod Evans was lured into a shady promoter’s scheme to resurrect “Deep Purple” (for which Evans was the only person with any connection to the band – Mark I bassist Nick Simper wisely refused to take the bait) which backfired badly.

By 1984 the various Mark II members were ready for a reunion, and came out with a new album, Perfect Strangers. When I first saw the album in the stores, I ignored it, assuming it was another compilation album. I got it for Christmas in 1984, and was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a reunion album for the Mark II lineup. We saw them at the Palais Omnisports Bercy the following summer, opened by Mountain (Leslie West forgot the words when singing).

They followed this up with House of Blue Light (which I listened to exactly ONCE), and then a live album, Nobody’s Perfect, featuring “Hush” brought back into the set.

Mark V. Thanks to Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan was fired and Joe Lynn Turner (Rainbow) was brought in for Slaves & Masters, another remarkably mediocre album. I suppose you could call this lineup (Turner in place of Gillan) as Mark V.

Mark II returns. For 1993, this was the 25^th anniversary, so the rest of the band felt Gillan should come back. They recorded The Battle Rages On, and went on a remarkable tour before Blackmore quit in the middle of the tour. This time Tommy Bolin was not available to take his place.  Famous guitarist Joe Satriani filled in for the remainder of the tour but declined to join the band permanently.

Note:  some people are classifying the Satriani touring lineup, 12/2/93 Nagoya through 7/6/94 Bayreuth, as "Mark VI".  Others are classifying the reunited Mark II lineups for Perfect Strangers/House of Blue Light and The Battle Rages On as separate marks.  Both are, of course, utter nonsense.  Satriani's lineup simply finished the Battle Rages On tour and did not record any new material, not even releasing a live album from that leg of the tour.  And the same five members who gave us Machine Head also recorded Perfect Strangers and The Battle Rages On.  Enjoy the band, but don't be stupid.  Please.  

Mark VI. With Satriani refusing to join the band, they brought in Steve Morse, an American from the Dixie Dregs (a band I’ve listened to none of) to take over, and he’s been in ever since. This should be referred to as Mark VI. They released Purpendicular and Abandon, both produced by Roger Glover, the bassist.

Mark VII. Eventually Jon Lord decided it was time to retire, and Don Airey took over on keyboards, resulting in DP Mark VII. This lineup recorded Bananas and Rapture of the Deep, produced by Michael Bradford, followed by Now What ?! and Infinite, produced by Bob Ezrin, with another album due out in August 2020, Whoosh!. With Lord gone, this means that Ian Paice is the only DP member in all seven lineups.  

Quality. I suppose many bands like Deep Purple could rest on their laurels and cynically release regurgitated crap year after year, assuming the fans will buy whatever they put out. But Deep Purple make a sincere effort at making quality material. I can’t say it compares favorably to In Rock, Fireball or Machine Head (the classic three original Mark II albums) but it certainly doesn’t suck.

Of the post 1984 material, I'd say Now What ?! and Infinite are the strongest.  The key is producer Bob Ezrin, veteran of Alice Cooper, KISS and Pink Floyd.  

Live. This is up and down. On one hand, Marks VI and VII play a lot of the lesser known (but no less quality) Mark II tracks such as “Pictures of Home”, “Maybe I’m a Leo”, “Woman From Tokyo”, “No One Came”, “Bloodsucker”, etc. Part of the problem with bands which have been around for some time is that get into a fixed pattern of certain classics which MUST be played. Iron Maiden did a recent tour in which they claimed to only play songs from the first 4 albums (which must have kept Janick Gers busy) yet such was the setlist that the only song we hadn’t heard in some time was “Phantom of the Opera”. Blue Oyster Cult seem to have ONE slot (song) per set which is some random variable, with the rest of the set being pretty much what we heard on the last tour. Granted, we know Purple will play “Smoke on the Water” – in the encore – but these other songs really make a difference.

On the other hand, they hardly tour nearly as much as they used to – especially here in the US.  When I originally wrote this blog, I hadn't seen them since the Bercy show in Paris in 1985.  Since then I've seen them at Bergen PAC (8/25/14) (Englewood, NJ), NYCB Westbury (7/26/15) (Long Island, NY), and the Warner Theater in DC (10/2/19).  They seem to release live material fairly often.

Roger Glover. My favorite member has to be Glover, who only missed out at the very beginning, and has been the band’s most consistent bassist. He’s eternally optimistic, a great source of information on all the liner notes, and the helpful re-producer of all the remastered Mark II material – and the source, through a nightmare, of the title to their anthem, “Smoke on the Water.”

Summer of '88

As the snow falls early this year, I’m reminded of…summer. Particularly, another special summer, 1988.


Background. I had finished sophomore year at University of Maryland, and was taking 4 summer classes in order to get into the business school in fall. This meant staying on campus over the summer instead of returning home to Paris. Fortunately my best friend Phil was around, and one of my top friends at UMCP, Baron, was also taking summer classes, even staying in the apartment next door.


Classes. I took Accounting I, Accounting II, Calculus and Statistics. The accounting I professor was a Chinese woman with an impenetrable accent. Calculus was an easy A, as it was less challenging than the calculus class I’d already taken in high school. Statistics was dull, but it was a night class. Although the summer schedule meant classes 5 days a week, they were at noon or 2 p.m. so I could sleep late every day. I had no idea summer school was this laid back.


Apartment. I was in an on-campus apartment with Dave – a Diamondback photographer – and Jeff, a Texan from Houston studying urban studies. In July my brother came down from NYC, and then my Dad came down, and we all went up to NYC when my summer session ended.


Car. I had been saving up for a late 70’s Trans Am, but just as I was about to buy one, my parents bought me an ’84 Chevrolet Cavalier. Excellent gas mileage, if not particularly reliable, but it had A/C, automatic transmission, 4 doors, and a tape deck; and it could fit the 4 cubic foot fridge I was using.
I had gotten my drivers’ license in summer ’86 as a 17 year old, but without a car to drive consistently, my skills were almost nonexistent. The MVA test was “parallel park behind the MVA building”, not a very good indication of highway driving. I knew I’d have to teach myself how to drive.
Fortunately, UMCP has a small “city” worth of roads, and during summer the campus is virtually deserted, allowing me to drive around and teach myself. From there I ventured forth into traffic on Route 1, then brief trips along the Beltway. When I first drove all the way around the Beltway to Fairfax, to visit my friend Phil, it was like crossing the ocean. From there I learned to drive at night, a completely different experience. I even had my first accident: a minor scrape with a UMCP utility pickup truck. The crew said not to worry about it, they wouldn’t even file their own claim.


Music. The big deal was that (A) I got a CD player (er…borrowed my brother’s over the summer) and (B) got into early Scorpions, mainly Fly to the Rainbow and Lonesome Crow. I managed to jam with my friend Ken in Columbia.


Concerts. This was a great year for concerts.

1. Pink Floyd at RFK, the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. Baron and his buddy Rob sold Floyd pictures Baron had taken at the Philadelphia show. I guarded the stash while reading Ayn Rand books. Our seats were in section 300,000 something.
2. Van Halen’s Monsters of Rock. Also at RFK, this time with Phil. Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions, and Van Halen (with Sammy Hagar) on the OU812 Tour. The fans set fire to the seats during VH’s set, forcing them to turn on the house lights. Sammy Hagar wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or amused.
3. Iron Maiden, at the Cap Center, with my brother. This was the Seventh Son tour. I got great tickets at the Stamp Union, “camping out” with minimal competition. A great show!
4. Judas Priest, at the Cap Center, with my brother. This was the Ram it Down Tour. More awesome seats! Not quite “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, but close. This was the first time I’d ever seen Priest in concert.
5. AC/DC at Madison Square Garden, with my brother. I scored 5^th row seats buying them at the box office a week before the show. White Lion opened. Another great show, even if the album they were touring, Blow Up Your Video, totally sucked.
   

NYC. Every other year we went back to the US for home leave in summer. In ’88, my parents decided to swap places again, but unlike ’84, when we got Bag End, this time we scored a huge apartment on 5^th Avenue & 96^th Street in Manhattan. We went to the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the guitar stores, the subway, Central Park, the library, and even walked all the way from 34^th Street back to 96^th. The AC/DC concert I mentioned above. Finally, we rode the Cyclone at Coney Island.

In 1998 I visited our relatives in Glens Falls, New York, only vaguely aware that France won the World Cup (“o que aconteceu????"). I have to wonder what summer 2008 has in store for us.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

"Stupid is as stupid does" - I noticed many movies or TV shows feature ridiculously stupid people, but the show itself is actually pretty smart.  In a sense it’s wisdom cleverly hidden amidst idiocy.

The Simpsons is one of the best examples.  Although Homer himself is almost completely clueless, the rest of the cast are considerably smarter.  And Groening’s humor has yet to peak.  There are so many inside jokes, left and right, it’s like an animated version of Dennis Miller without being nearly as obscure or pretentious.  You can count on this whenever Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) makes another attempt to kill Bart (“’Vendetta’ in English is…vendetta!” and Sideshow Bob correcting the Italian villager’s pronunciation of “bon giorno”).  Futurama could be labelled the same way: despite Fry being such an idiot, the humor and plots are fairly clever.  Homer and Fry each have a sort of endearing charm despite their mental deficiencies.  I’m convinced that Groening is one of the most creative and intelligent minds in the entertainment business, in the same rank and class as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Family Guy.  I mentioned this earlier in my comparison with “Peanuts”, “Snoopy vs. Brian”.  This show tries to be a little too clever, especially Stewie.  Peter’s stupidity has NEVER reached the point where I find it entertaining, unlike Homer and Fry.  But still worth watching.  Although South Park is clearly very intelligent, I can’t include it here because none of the main characters – even Cartman – are stupid.

Forrest Gump.  I have to put this one in here because of how stupid Forrest was, but I’m ambivalent about this movie.  On one hand, the story is amazing – including his trip to Vietnam.  On the other hand, he seems to triumph not through his own virtue or bravery but due to sheer dumb luck, as if we’re supposed to imagine some virtue in dumb luck itself, personified by Forrest.  Uhh, so what is the point?

Idiocracy: the whole point was that the world 500 years from now was incredibly stupid, thanks to something like 2000 generations of incessant breeding among the idiots who can’t conceive of, much less successfully manage, birth control or zero population growth, whereas the all-too-valuable intelligent fraction of the population has perfected it all too well.  But it is a good film.  Incidentally, it makes a fairly strong argument for the otherwise discredited doctrine of eugenics, whereby – “YOU!  OUT OF THE GENE POOL!!!” – the lesser among us are forcibly sterilized (possibly through execution) so that our inferior genes can be weeded out and humans selectively bred for superior traits.  This was brought to its logical conclusion, much to everyone’s horror, by the Nazis.  Before they slaughtered Jews by the train load, their initial targets for death were the old, crippled, and mentally retarded in a euthanasia program expressly designed to eliminate undesirable traits from the overall Aryan population.  This movie makes the doctrine make sense, at least as far as targeting stupidity as a trait worthy of sterilization if not elimination.

Beavis & Butt-head.  When I first saw this I couldn’t stand it.  They were just TOO STUPID to be entertaining.  This had to grow on me.  I noticed the satire of the touchy-feely social studies teacher, Van Driessen; the uptight Principal McVicker; and my favorite, Coach Buzzcut, who shouts everything as an order, as if he’s either a drill sergeant in the Marine Corps or back in Vietnam. But even the stupidity has a certain clever edge to it:

            Beavis [watching video of vintage Black Sabbath]: “Are these guys from Seattle?”

            Butt-Head: “No, they’re American!”  or

            Beavis [watching video of Slayer…or was it Pantera?]: “These guys must get lots of chicks!”

            Butt-Head [actually thinking for a change]: “Uhh, I think they probably SCARE chicks.”

            Beavis: “Cool. The only thing cooler than bands that GET chicks are bands that SCARE chicks!”

Bill & Ted.  In “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”, two idiots from San Dimas, California, Bill Preston (Alex Winter – where is HE now??) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves, marginally more “whoa”-y in this film than later) are assisted by Rufus (George Carlin) to save Earth from its own thoughtless cruelty and preserve a most excellent and righteous future. 

            The first movie featured them collecting various historical figures: Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, Billy the Kid, Napoleon (aka “short dead dude”), Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Socrates (whose name they pronounce “So-crates”), in order to successfully complete their history project and not fail, as destiny requires them to remain together as a pair.  

In the second film, killed by an evil pair of Bill & Ted robots near the rock cropped hillside – featured in three separate “Star Trek” episodes – they go to Hell, where they experience various personal “hells” before beating Death at various kids games, an obvious homage to “The Seventh Seal”, the dark, cynical classic B&W film with Max von Sydow.  They get to Heaven and work out – carefully and none too quickly – that returning to Earth alive isn’t enough.  They need help defeating the evil Bill & Ted robots or they’ll simply be killed again.  They get the alien “station” pair to help them out, and emerge most triumphant.

With Bill & Ted, the underlying idea is "be excellent to one another". How can these two idiots somehow figure this out, yet it eludes all us smart people?  What you have is an essentially Christian message hidden inside two dolts from San Dimas.  This is the ultimate stealth moral – a clever, decent message hidden deep within what appears to be colossal stupidity.