August 1944

When, after about 25 hours of viewing, the first US Army jeep arrives on the outskirts of "Un Village Francais," alone, it comes as a shock, if a welcome one.  In the course of four years, we have seen many elegant French sedans and no-nonsense French trucks, open German staff cars and also the light German personnel carriers that inspired the Volkswagen "Thing" in the late 1960s.  But the always iconic little jeep seems to signal defiance of the Wehrmacht all by itself, to signal, in fact, that the Liberation is at hand.  But by now we know that chaos and death will only accelerate in the short window between the jeep's appearance and the Judgment Day that awaits.

The jeep has come with two men to Villeneuve to blow up a bridge, so that a Panzer corps will be trapped in a pocket from which it can do no harm to the advancing US 7th Army.  Things go awry; "Bob" has to return to divisional headquarters to secure a new detonator, leaving his comrade Chris behind.

Our principal heroine, "Marie," a farmer who has risen to local leadership of the Resistance, convinces Bob to allow her to come along for the ride, for the purpose of convincing his commanding officer to rescue Villeneuve, with the Germans and the French militia threatening to slaughter the villagers on their way out of town.

At the headquarters, in the open air, Bob and Marie have a brief conversation as they wait for their audience with the CO.  As always in the series, Marie wears shabby clothes and appears to be without make-up, but the camera virtually caresses her beautiful and expressive face.  

Bob first asks Marie in his shaky French if she wants a cigarette.  (She does not smoke.)  Then he offers her a stick of gum.  "What is gum?" she says.  And then "I am not a cow!"  Finally he offers chocolate, and she lights up.  When he conjures a Hershey bar from a supply tent, here in the midst of battle, and more or less at the snap of his fingers, she smiles and says "Now I know that you will win this war!"

 

It's a Story More Strange Than Any Episode of "Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits"

But I beg your indulgence, to hear me tell it.

More than 300,000 years ago, a proto-Chinese man "married" a proto-Southeast Asian woman.  Let us call the tribe they engendered "Asia Man" ("AM").  Somehow, AM found his way, or was transported, to what is now Central Africa, below the Sahara.  The evidence for this includes the fact that the descendants of AM carry remnants of a disease that can only be contracted via the bite of the tsetse fly, whose range is narrow and concentrated in that part of the world.

Still about 300,000 years ago, Someone or SomeThing ("SoS") experimented with the DNA of AM, mixing it in with the DNA of chimpanzees or their close relations the bonobos, as well as other strains.  The result was the creation of an entirely new species of intelligent, bipedal creatures whom we shall call "Tridactyl Man" ("TM"), because its most striking features are its three-fingered hands and three-toed feet, both with more phalanges than are found in human fingers and toes.

There are other remarkable differences between TM and homo sapiens.  They are only about 60 centimeters tall, but their craniums are relatively large.  Their rib cages are structured much differently than our own.  Because they had no molars, we assume that they lived on a liquid, or at least very soft, diet.  The joints of their hips, and the structure of their feet, suggest that they must have walked in a way that would strike us as awkward and eccentric.

Some of the TM have metal plates, made from sophisticated alloys, embedded within their chests, perhaps implanted to overcome a genetic weakness in that part of the body.

And now something most difficult to explain.  By roughly the time of Christ, TM somehow had been transplanted across the Atlantic to the Nazca region of Peru, a coastal desert land that they shared with the Nazca tribe of homo sapiens.  There, some of the bodies of TM (the "Nazca Mummies") were buried in caves or tunnels, in what is called diatomaceous earth.  This is a powerful natural desiccant that is used even today to kill insects without poison.  It is assumed that it was used deliberately in the case of the Nazca Mummies to preserve their bodies -- not just skin and bones but internal organs and connective tissues as well -- because we find them now in a remarkable state of preservation after 2000 years or so.  Hence, the Nazca Mummies are not really mummies at all, not having been "mummified!"

The first of the mummies came to light, quite literally, about ten years ago.  Since then, a number have been subjected to intensive investigation by scientists in Peru and Mexico, but also in Petersburg, Russia and in the United States, the last under the auspices of one John McDowell who is, we are told, the eminence grise of forensic sciences in the States.  The research has included carbon dating, state-of-the-art medical scanning, and DNA sequencing that compares the specimens with all known terrestrial species that themselves have been sequenced.  Already, two peer-reviewed papers discussing preliminary results of investigations into their nature and origin have been published in mainstream journals.  Much much more will reach the scientific community and the public (if there is any interest in the public) in the next year or two.

Perhaps the best known of the mummies that have been studied is one called "Maria."  Her DNA analysis is so dense with information that scientists can conjecture as to the cause of her death -- a massive infection that was triggered by the eating of raw shellfish that are native to coastal Peru.

So far as we know, there are no elephants in Peru, but the elephant in this particular room is, of course, the implication that TM was made neither by natural evolution alone nor by the Hand of God, at least if God is conceived to be as portrayed in the Bible.  Who was this Someone or SomeThing that intervened in our world?  What was its purpose in doing so?  Is it still among us, or does it lie perhaps just beyond The Veil?

And a more disturbing question still.  Could we ourselves also have arisen, metaphorically speaking, from Someone's petri dish?

 

The French Language Is Bangin' Round Me Head

Thanks to three seasons of "Un Village Francais," binge watched with sub-titles.  (Four more seasons yet to be watched.)

Indelible characters.  Gorgeous period automobiles.  Gorgeous period women as well, but each captivating in her own, subtle way.  The farmer's ill-dressed wife perhaps the most beautiful of all.

The plight of the Jews portrayed unflinchingly, and not en masse; we have come to know each before a twist of fate or a betrayal places them onto cattle cars that the "sub-prefect" assures them are destined for a suburb of Paris, and not for Poland.

The factionalism.  The moral compromises.  The intense love affairs that the French simply can't seem to sublimate to the circumstances!

I understand for the first time what it really meant to join the Resistance -- often abandoning every semblance of normal life to live like a hunted animal, for a time indeterminate.

After three seasons, from the perspective of 1942, one can't help but see it through to the turning of the tide.  What will become, for example, of the SD Gruppenfuehrer Muller, who delights in extracting confessions by snipping strategic and most sensitive spots with the little wire cutters that he keeps in the drawer of his elegant desk?

Meanwhile, resonating at the Hour of the Wolf:

Ecoute-moi bien!

Pas de tout.

Les Americains sont sur les plages d'Afrique du Nord.  Personne ne sait ce que cela signifie.

(and lastly)

Ma cherie, je regrette completement de te connaitre, tu sais.

 

God Grant Me Respite From This Stupid Election

Respite, that is, in the form of two lengthy, European "streaming" serials -- "Babylon Berlin" and "Un Village Francais."

The first gives us a picture of Berlin during the Weimar years leading up to Hitler's ascension to chancellor.  We see chaos unfolding, and life-threatening struggles among many factions -- Hitler's Nazis, of course, but also brownshirts bitterly opposed to him, communists loyal to Stalin, communists loyal to Trotsky, militarists who want a revival of imperial Deutschland under the Kaiser, and the minions of vicious gangland figures.  And at the core, a beautiful, slow-unfolding romance between a police detective, scarred by his experiences in the trenches of WWI, who has been imported from Cologne to Berlin, and a young woman who splits her professional time between the Berlin Police Headquarters and a brothel that sits, not very discreetly, beneath the city's most popular and elegant dancehall/cabaret.

The second follows an ensemble of inhabitants of a French village that lies about halfway between Geneva and Marseilles -- Villeneuve -- from the day in 1940 that the Wehrmacht rolls in and from thence through the entire war.  Our focus is on a doctor who rather reluctantly becomes major of the town and his beautiful but faithless wife, the mayor's brother, a communist who takes up arms against the Germans, the brother's young son Gustave, the manager of a sawmill/concrete plant, his wife and his young mistress, who migrates into the Resistance, a sinister German functionary with an addiction to morphine, a police inspector of a certain age who falls in love with a Jewess who has been expelled from her position as headmistress of the town's elementary school, the endearing middle-aged man who is assigned to replace the headmistress, and a beautiful young teacher at the school who falls in love with a tall and handsome German sergeant.

The first production is German; the second is French; the creators/producers had nothing to do with one another.  And yet we can see the two stories as one story, separated in time by about ten years and in distance by less than 900 miles.  It is about a cataclysm in Germany that spread to become a cataclysm in France and, of course, further to the East, to the gates of Moscow, and how ordinary people were tested and ground up by that cataclysm.

This combined narrative disabuses us of the notion that we ourselves would have made the correct moral choices had we been Germans when Hitler was on the rise, or French people under occupation who had some choice to collaborate or not, to protect their Jewish friends and acquaintances or not.  Indeed in both countries, after the liberation and the defeat of Germany, there was a convenient re-writing of history on a scale that was massive and local at the same time, to exonerate ex post facto both the oppressors and those who chose to collaborate with them.

It might be a good moral exercise to blend the two character ensembles outlined above, all of the protagonists in the combined narrative that is, and imagine them standing at St. Peter's Gate.  Our charge would be to sort and rank them by the measures of courage and guilt, two sides of a coin.  We would find very few clear, un-nuanced cases, and we would walk away from the exercise feeling much more humble about our own standing in the world.