The letter “J” (pronounced “Jay”), the 10th letter of the Latin alphabet, has got an interesting history as a Johnny-come-lately “bookend” of sorts…”J” is the English alphabet’s “Hawaii”, the last to achieve letterhood. This 26th and final letter was introduced as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing “I”. Phonetically, the vowel “I” and the consonant “J” used to sound the same and were interchangeable until a clear phonetic distinction between the two was made by an Italian grammarian (GG Trissino) in 1524. When Roman numerals were in their heyday “J” or “j” were used on the end of a sequence of numerals…so for “123”, instead of writing CXXIII, it be could rendered as CXXIIJ. Here’s a scattering of “J” words unlikely that you will find popping up in everyday intercourse.
Jabberwock: nonsense; gibberish [from “Jabberwocky”, dragon-like creature in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871)]
Janiform: having two faces looking in opposite directions [L. Janus “”Roman god”) + –fōrmis (“having the form of”)]
Janizary: (also Janissary) a follower or supporter; (hist.) member of Ottoman Turkish infantry, (14—(19th. [Turk.Yeni (“new”) + -çeri (“troops”)]
Janizary (source: Pinterest)
Jargonaut: one who uses excessive jargon [comb. Of “jargon” and Gk. -naut (“sailor”)]
. Jejunator: one who fasts [L. Jejunus (“fasting”) + -ator]
Jejune: dull; insipid; lacking in substance; superficial; naive; simplistic (of writing or ideas) dry and uninteresting [L. Jejunus (“fasting” – ie, being empty in a figurative sense)]
Jentacular: relating to breakfast; specifically to one taken early in the morning or immediately upon getting up [L. from ientō (“to have breakfast “) 🍳
Jeremiad: prolonged complaint; angry or cautioning harangue; lamentation; catalogue of woes [Fr. jérémiade, after Biblical prophet Jeremiah (Old Testament)]
Jeremiad of Jeremiah
Jesuitical: cunning; equivocating; quibbling [Fr. jsuitique (pertaining to the Jesuits)] (behaviours once attributed to the Jesuits)
Jovialist: a convivial person [L. ioviālis (“relating to the Roman god Jupiter”) + -ist]
Jumboism: admiration for bigness [(19th. circus elephant, Jumbo + -ism]
Jumentous: smelling strongly of horse urine or of some similar beast of burden [L. jumentum (“yoke-beast”)]
Jurisconsult: legal expert [L. jus (jur) (“law”) + consultus (“skilled”)]
Jurisconsult
Juvenescence: state of growing younger [L. juvenis (“young”) + -cence (?)]
Juvenilia: the works (literary, artistic, musical) of one’s youth (cf. Juvenal: a youth) [L. iuvenīlia (“of or pertaining to youth”)
StanleyKubrick’s 1964 dark satire Dr Strangelove is a classic of the genre which comically probes the collective anxieties triggered in the West by the Cold War at its height in the early 1960s. Kubrick hammers home the utter absurdity of the prevailing nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and the consequential existential threat to the planet from the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and “Doomsday bombs”. The movie’s plot involves the unilateral unleashing of a preemptive strike on Moscow by a deranged US Air Force general and the Pentagon’s shoddy attempts at “management” of the crisis.
Sellers as Dr Strangelove
˚ Kubrick and his film co-writers Terry Southern and Peter George give us three dangerously over-the-top, lunatic fringe characters – two gung-ho hawkish military types, generals Turgidson and Ripper, and the eponymous “Dr Strangelove”𝟙. The central figure in the nuclear nightmare scenario, Dr Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers), is a former German Nazi technocrat turned US strategic weapons expert and scientific advisor to the US president Merkin Muffley (also Sellers). Strangelove is creepily sanguine about the prospect for humanity post-nuclear Holocaust, expanding on his vision of a 100-year plan for survival (for some)…a male elite ensconced in an underground bunker where they can sire a selective breeding program with a plurality of desirable females [‘Dr Strangelove (character)’, Kubrick Wiki, www.kubrick.fandom.com].
Wernher Von Braun (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images)
˚ Strangelove a composite of various personages Though characterised by caricature and satire, the film’s three wildest characters are recognisable among the actual political, military and scientific figures of the day in America. The heavy Middle European accent of Dr Strangelove, his authoritarian-Nazi mannerisms and regular references to “Mein Führer”, has led some observers to conclude that the character was based on German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, instrumental in the Nazis’ V-2 rocket project and after 1945 in the US designing space rockets for NASA (a view given countenance by one of the screenwriters Terry Southern). Others have added émigré Hungarian scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller as models for Strangelove. Both men worked on the Super-bomb projects (A-Bomb, H-Bomb, C-Bomb) for the US government in the 1940s and 50s, and both were rabidly anti-communist and anti-Russian [P.D. Smith, Doomsday Men (2007)]. Teller in particular shared a number of Strangelove’s traits, eg, volatile nature, Soviet-fixated and obsessed with bombs, possessed of a prosthetic limb. It’s probably a reasonable bet that the there was something of the personality of all three men in Dr Strangelove, but other individuals were also sources of inspiration for the character.
Herman Kahn (Source: Alchetron)
˚ A Megadeath influencer from RAND Another real-life figure widely associated with the Strangelove character is Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and military strategist with the RAND Corporation𝟚. Kubrick got the idea of a “Doomsday Machine” from Kahn whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited the possibility of a winnable (sic) nuclear war. Kahn has been described as a “Megadeath Intellectual” with his robust insistence that the dangers of nuclear war were exaggerated (this also accords with the outlier position of General Buck Turgidson – see below)𝟛.
Gen. Jack Ripper (Photo: Columbia Pictures)
˚ Military madness Maverick general in the Strategic Air Command Jack D Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden) is gripped by the all-consuming communist conspiracy hysteria. His belief in the loony notion that the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans leads him to initiate a H-Bomb onslaught on the USSR without consulting the Pentagon. Ripper’s wild rhetoric and blustery style has been compared to Robert Welch, the rabid anti-communist founder of the ultra-conservative and reactionary John Birch Society. Ripper’s loopy claim about Soviet water contamination echoes Welch’s baseless anti-fluoridation allegations (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying’).
Gen. LeMay (Image: Mort Kunstler / Stag)
˚ Expendable dead Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C Scott) was largely modelled on four-star air force general Curtis LeMay𝟜. Turgidson is an unrepentant war hawk who wants to escalate Ripper’s nuclear attack on the Soviets, justifying it with the outrageous claim that it will result in only “limited” casualties from the ensuing superpower war, which in his estimate equates to 10 to 20 million dead! Like Turgidson LeMay danced to the beat of his own drum, he was well disposed towards a preemptive strike on the Russians and vociferously advocated nuclear strikes on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on North Vietnam during the Indo-China War.
Gen. Turgidson (Scott) in the War Room (Columbia Pictures)
˚ The actions and statements of the clearly psychotic Ripper and morally reprehensible Turgidson convey insights into the level of paranoia gripping the real-life military commanders in the climate of the nuclear arms buildup in the Sixties. [Fred Kaplin, “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove‘“, New York Times, 10-Oct-2004, nytimes.com].
Fail Safe (1964)
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Footnote: Satirical Dr Strangelove v Serious Fail Safe Intriguingly, at the same time Kubrick was making Dr Strangelove there was a separate film in the works also about an American nuclear attack on the USSR. Fail Safe dealt with the same subject but as a straight-up drama. In this second film about nuclear Armageddon the trigger to the catastrophic event however is not rogue generals but a technical glitch. Strangelove’s equivalent morality-free scientist character in Fail Safe is Professor Groeteschele (played by Walter Matthau) who draws similar comparisons with Herman Kahn.
𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝟙Dr Strangelove is broadly based on George’s novel Red Alert (1958), although the character of Dr Strangelove doesn’t appear in the novel 𝟚mimicked in Dr Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation 𝟛another Strangelove comparison is Henry Kissinger…suggested by a shared “eerie poise, lugubrious German accent and brutally pragmatic realpolitik” [Gary Susman, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, Time, 11-Feb-2013, www.entertainment.time.com] 𝟜although behaviourally the Ripper character (“cigar-chomping, gruff-talking”) also resembles LeMay’s style
SUCH is the fixation in the West with everything Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the story of the Third Reich’s dramatic rise and fall is just so familiar to everyone that it seems like we all have our own little piece of the megalomaniacal German dictator. Hitler is the most talked about/written about public figure of the 20th century. The obsession with Hitler and the Nazis since the end of the Second World War, now into its eighth decade—in cinema, in television dramas and documentaries, in popular literature, in scholarly dissertations and books from academe, in popular culture, in social media—is not only not abating but on the upsurge if anything🄰.
Hitler the demagogue in full flight (Source: Correo.com)
It seems as if every aspect, every scintilla, of the Nazi regime and every chapter of Hitler’s life, before and after attaining power, has been turned over, sifted through and scrutinised diagnostically to the nth degree. One explanation for the blanket coverage is the sheer volume of available material on the subject. We might not have the personal letters exchanged between the Führer and his mistress Eva Braun and we know that the existence of the Hitler Diaries was an outrageous sham fiction, but the Nazis, unlike other mass misery-inflicting, totalitarian regimes, left behind a plethora of filmic, photographic and written documentary evidence, to enable a compelling picture of the nature of the Third Reich to be pieced together [‘Why are we still fascinated by Hitler?’, John Jewell, Journalism, Media and Culture, 11-Sep-2013, www.jomec.co.uk].
Pages from the fake Hitler Diaries (Source: Times of Israel): though palpably bogus it’s “discovery” only fuelled the Nazi mania
Why does Hitler and Nazism continue to exercise this central role in the thinking of so many people? This question has continued to exercise the minds of international scholars, historians, political scientists, not to mention the average punter, ever since the 1940s.
The fact that the Third Reich remains relevant to our contemporary society—illustrated in a number of ways and forms—is a factor that keeps Hitler and his extreme right cronies in the forefront of peoples’ consciousness. There is the moral objectionableness of the Nazi regime per se. The nature of the regime was horrifically egregious to a degree that is sui generis, and the catastrophic consequence of its rise as a world power, total global war and mass destruction, stands as a lesson and a reminder for all nations of what happens when a hitherto cultured and advanced, democratic nation loses its moral compass and goes madly off the rails .
Source: Times of Israel
Hitler and the Nazis were not your ordinary garden variety mass murderers…when you weigh up the mega-scale and severity of the Nazis’ atrocities its hard to escape the conclusion that Hitler personified absolute evil. He and his vilified movement represent a moral abyss. Moreover, Hitler and by association German Nazism is the yardstick by which we measure the very essence of evil! Whenever someone or some institution acts in a brutal manner which we find anathema we tend to reach by reflex for the Nazi card (it might be prompted by something as everyday basic as an encounter with overbearing officialdom or a neighbourhood bully). As Roger Moorhouse put it, these “simple stereotypes (have made the term ‘Nazi’) part of the cultural furniture” [‘Why is the Public so Obsessed with the Nazis?’, Roger Moorhouse, History Today, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Mar 2020), www.historytoday.com].
Der Führer launching the VW, 1938 (Photo: AP)
We are reminded of the magnitude of the Nazis’ criminality whenever the media outs some elderly individual who is accused of having been a Nazi functionary or collaborator and is (sometimes) brought to trial – the most recent, nonagenarian Oskar Groening, “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015. At such times Nazism is thrust back into the spotlight once again (assuming it has ever left it)🄱. Then there’s the raft of large corporations who were associated with and in many instances benefitted from the dominance of the Nazi Party in the Thirties and Forties—household names from the business world such as Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bayer and Siemens—all still operating profitably today.
Although the German state capitulated in May 1945 and the Nazi empire was completely dismantled, the spirit of Nazism didn’t end with WWII. The postwar era has seen a rebirth of the movement in the form of neo-Nazi groups which sprang up across Europe and beyond🄲. Many of these far-right organisations still operate, espousing racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant views, including in democratic Germany itself (Alternative for Germany – AfG), their continued existence a reminder that the ashes of an abhorrent past are not entirely extinguished.
Neo-Nazi protest march, US (Photo: The Guardian)
Endnote: “The Nazi cinematic universe” Hollywood and European cinema in the postwar era has been awash with Nazi war movies, by far the biggest contributor to the war genre movie. Moviegoers have been assailed with a constant bombardment of films with various Nazi themes and stories…victims of the Holocaust; Allied POWs escaping from Nazi prisons; the Nazis invading Britain, France, Norway, etc; and so – a veritable avalanche of wartime action capers, many borrowing freely from popular fiction to embellish the history with fanciful tales of supposed Nazi plots.
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🄰 a good example pertaining to social media of the Nazi fixation is Godwin’s Law (AKA Godwin’s Rule of Analogies) – it states that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will bring up the subject of Hitler or the Nazis
🄱 this aspect of the Nazi memory does of course have a tangible end-date, given every active participant in WWII war crimes still alive would today need to be nearly 100-years-old or older
🄲 including in Allied countries who had fought against the Third Reich such as US, UK, Australia and France
Last year the US cable channel Comedy Central cancelled its totally left-field ‘reality’ program Drunk History after six seasons. On the surface it might seem improbable that a program with such a flimsy framework would have had such a good run in the cut-throat world of American TV. When the show started in 2013 I wouldn’t have put the ancestral home, or even the rustic “lean-to”, on its chances of surviving into a second season. My initial impressions—apparently mistaken, see below—were that the actors were pretending, not very convincingly and in fact somewhat ham-fistedly, to be drunk.
ˢᵏᵉʷᵉᵈ ﹠ ⁱⁿᵉᵇʳⁱᵃᵗᵉᵈ ᵒᶻ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ
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It’s relative longevity aside, another thing that surprises me about Drunk History was that the show didn’t really attract much flak from the Temperance Society, AA, the Religious Right, the Puritan elders or other moral crusaders for its portrayal of people in states of intoxication bordering on the point of being ‘legless’. In the Australian version of ‘Drunk History’ there were some mild rebukes in the media, mostly a bit of tut-tutting from viewers about the dangers of “glamorising excessive binge drinking” in a country with an extensive history of problems with the Demon drink§(David Knox, TV Tonight, 2019).
ᵈᵉʳᵉᵏ ʷᵃᵗᵉʳˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᶜˢᵗ ᵒⁿˡⁱⁿᵉ⁾
The germ of the idea for Drunk History came from, of all things, a late night drinking session its co-creator Derek Waters had with a fellow actor (who’d have guessed!) It premiered under the name Funny or Die as a web series in 2008, the debut webisode featured a liberty-taking retelling of the famous Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. From an unorthodox educational point of view Drunk History is a kind of adult version soulmate of the British children’s comedy series Horrible Histories, a similar serving of factually-based, humorously told anecdotes for junior viewers, which itself is a quantum leap forward pedagogically from 1950s children television fare of this ilk, eg, Peabody’s Improbable History, which consisted of an anthropomorphic cartoon dog who time travels with a naive and extremely annoying boy companion to earlier epochs to do a bit of history mangling.
The format’s opening gambit presents Waters in relaxed drinking mode with guest storyteller…with very little coaxing from Waters the narrator in no time descends into a boozy state and starts to unfurl a rambling, episodic, partially incoherent account of some historical event (the majority but not all from the pages of American history)…then it segues into a scene where actors in appropriate period costume act out the story while lip-synching the narrator‘s words with hilarious results. The narrators are usually stand-up comedians…possessors of the right skillsets for rambunctious story telling of course! Who better to do it than the dudes for whom off-the-lease manic ranting in booze-soaked establishments is second nature?
¹⁸⁰⁰ ᵖʳᵉᶻ ᵉˡᵉᶜᵗⁱᵒⁿ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵖⁱⁿᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵗ⁾
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Given the cavalier narration and fabricated and anachronistic dialogue littered with liberal snatches of “hipster-speak” and “dude-speak”, you might suspect Drunk History to be sloppy as to historical accuracy. The producers however went to some pains to be accurate with dates and names and what actually happened in the stories. This can be put down to the efforts of hired UCLA PhD students who did the research heavy lifting to keep the history on the tracks. Special care was also taken with the narrators, tasked with getting sufficiently inebriated to capture the desired mood. As host Waters plies them with drink medics are on hand during the shooting—which took place within the familiar and safe milieu of the narrators’ own homes—just in case the alcohol was getting the upper hand over the comics (apparently this was the case on more than one occasion!) (Justin Monroe, ‘The Sober Reality of Drunk History’, Complex, 01-Sep-2015, www.complex.com).
ⁱⁿᵛᵉⁿᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᶜᵒᶜᵃ⁻ᶜᵒˡᵃ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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But from being initially sceptical about Drunk History, my opinion mellowed (perhaps helped by imbibing a snifter or two myself during viewing) and I slowly warmed to the series. Ultimately I came to appreciate the novel things it brought… introducing me to hitherto low-profile, perhaps minor historical figures and little known events from the past, eg, invention of Coca-Cola, the birth of Hip Hop, Nikola Tesla’s breakthroughs, Tunnel 57 (1964 Berlin Wall incident), “Dr Feelgood”, Lawnchair Larry flight, Typhoid Mary, “Night Witches” (German WWII military aviatrixes)✪. The storytellers raise a glass or three to forgotten women chauvinistically airbrushed from history, one such ‘minor’ figure unearthed in an episode was 16-year-old Sybil Ludington who made an heroic night-time dash by horse to alert New York citizens of the impending threat from the British forces during the American War of Independence (sound familiar?), and alerting us to the fact of how very differently history remembers Sybil and other females (or doesn’t remember!), compared to the immortal glory and reverence heaped on Paul Revere for his famous ride. Another female heroine getting her due recognition in history from Drunk History is Rose Valland, a Parisian art curator in WWII who thwarted the occupying Nazis’ heist of a huge haul of priceless first rank artworks.
ˢʸᵇⁱˡ’ˢ ʳⁱᵈᵉ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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Giving an extra layer of lustre to the series are the various celebrities appearing in episodes of Drunk History – including “Weird Al” Yankovic as Adolf Hitler, Laura Dern as Nellie Bly, Jack Black as Elvis Presley, Will Ferrell as Abe Lincoln and Ben Folds as Nathan Cherry.
“ʷᵉⁱʳᵈ ᵃˡ ʰⁱᵗˡᵉʳ” ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᶜᵒᵐᵉᵈʸ ᶜᵉⁿᵗʳᵃˡ⁾࿏࿏࿏
Postscript:Drunk History International The runaway success of the US prototype has spawned a number of international versions, at last count the franchise has extended to the UK, México, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Australia.
