Why Was the Slave Named "Lucky?"

1/12/2019

Williams, Martin, Abraham, Irwin as "Lucky"

In the fall of 1988, our son and I went to Lincoln Center to see a revival of "Waiting for Godot."

Robin Williams and Steve Martin were quite fine in the two lead roles, and F. Murray Abraham was properly domineering as Pozzo, leading his abject slave, Lucky, played by the master kinetic actor, Bill Irwin.

I was thinking of that master-slave relationship Friday night when The New York Times broke the story that the FBI had begun an investigation in early 2017 of the apparent master-slave relationship between Putin and Trump.
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.html

In the real-life version, Lucky snarls and yaps at just about everybody else, but when Pozzo fixes his Lubyanka-basement glare at him, Lucky rolls on the floor and whimpers.

How did poor Lucky come to be led around on a leash? Beckett does not say. I am hoping this will soon be explained to us by Robert S. Mueller, III.

Lucky, left. Pozzo, right.

Roger Farrell

1/12/2019 10:53:05 pm

I am thinking of the movie "North by Northwest" when Cary Grant, hiding upstairs, flips a matchbook with a message toward Eva Marie Saint, to warn her that she was in danger. "they're on to you'', the message said.
With each passing day, we're on to him, just a little bit more.

George Vecsey

1/14/2019 09:21:35 am

Dear Roger, nice one. Your first comment on this site? GV

Roger Farrell

1/14/2019 11:00:14 pm

Yes

Hansen Alexander

1/13/2019 10:55:39 am

George, I saw that production at Lincoln Center and concur that it was terrific. I am waiting for the production of Robert Mueller's masterpiece as I write, LOL

Steven Lewis link

1/13/2019 11:32:36 am

And I'm thinking of Harold Pinter's brilliant film adaptation of "The Servant."

bruce

1/13/2019 09:37:37 pm

george,

not sure why, but i thought of 'being there'......

actually, that was my second thought.

my first was that i wasn't surprised they'd consider it.

bruce

George Vecsey

1/14/2019 09:23:47 am

Thanks to all, interesting to see the associations people make.
Then there was "The Manchurian Candidate."
GV

Josh Rubin

1/14/2019 09:35:45 am

Lots of analogies come to mind. Here are a few of mine:

House & Senate Republicans - Ionesco's Rhinoceros

Mueller - Porfiry in Crime and Punishment

Trump - Wizard of Oz (just a meek snake oil salesman behind all that amplification, bluster and pyrotechnics)

Altenir Silva

1/15/2019 09:14:21 am

Nice shot about the two presidents, they are - like in Beckett's play - on the same way, but without a pathway to follow. I think, our president (Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil) could be there, too.

George Vecsey

1/15/2019 07:27:41 pm

Josh: good point about the Wizard:

“Oh - You're a very bad man!"
Oh, no my dear. I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad Wizard.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Think Ronald McTrump would claim to be "a very good man?" GV

bruce

1/15/2019 08:39:24 pm

george,

i'm sure he would.

and, still, tens of millions of people would agree.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Why Was the Slave Named "Lucky?"

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