"Five Minutes of Fire": Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
<v Speaker 2>Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link with the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 3>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 3>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>Emingway, Aikman, stranger in a Strange Landway, tell me about Hemingway. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>we are talking about Ernest Timingway, and I would just
<v Speaker 1>like to note he was my favorite author in high school.
<v Speaker 1>He is famous for his Iceberg theory of writing, which
<v Speaker 1>is a minimalist style that he developed while he was
<v Speaker 1>a war correspondent, a journalist who had to get to
<v Speaker 1>the heart of the matter quickly. He carried that over
<v Speaker 1>into his fiction writing, where he straightforward nuts and bolts
<v Speaker 1>and let you see the deeper maining for yourself underneath Iceberg.
<v Speaker 1>He wrote from the mid nineteen twenties on through the fifties.
<v Speaker 1>Ultimately was awarded the nineteen fifty four Nobel Prize in
<v Speaker 1>Literature for Old Man and the Sea. Unfortunately, that same
<v Speaker 1>year he was also in a series of accidents, injured
<v Speaker 1>in two plane crashes on successive days, leaving him in
<v Speaker 1>pain and ill health.
<v Speaker 3>Two Blaine crashes on successive days.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he was a bit revived when he remembered that
<v Speaker 1>he had buried some writing in some trunks and went
<v Speaker 1>and found those trunks like he buried in the nineteen twenties,
<v Speaker 1>went and found them, and they had all these writings
<v Speaker 1>that he had done. And so for the next couple
<v Speaker 1>of years he worked on putting those writings together as
<v Speaker 1>a memoir. It was ultimate released as The Movable Feast.
<v Speaker 1>But he still continued to sink into depression. Nineteen fifty nine,
<v Speaker 1>he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho. Wife caught him
<v Speaker 1>holding his shotgun in a very suspicious way, had him
<v Speaker 1>taken to the hospital because she knew of his depression.
<v Speaker 1>He was sedated, he was given electroshock therapy. He was
<v Speaker 1>ultimately released, but then he downstairs to the basement kicked
<v Speaker 1>out his favorite gun, his favorite shotgun, sat down on
<v Speaker 1>the porch and on July second, nineteen sixty one, committed suicide.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, tell me about this Eikman Guy Otto Adolph Eichmann
<v Speaker 2>was a member of the Nazi Party, officer in the SS,
<v Speaker 2>and a major organizer for the Holocaust.
<v Speaker 3>He's known for implementing the final solution to the quote
<v Speaker 3>unquote Jewish question.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>He was tasked by the SS with managing the logistics
<v Speaker 3>of mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos
<v Speaker 3>and to Nazi extermination camps. Is also responsible for collecting
<v Speaker 3>information on Jews, organizing the seizure of their property, and
<v Speaker 3>scheduling them on the trains. So at the end of
<v Speaker 3>the war, he was actually captured by US forces, but
<v Speaker 3>he had a false identity and so that allowed him
<v Speaker 3>to escape to Argentina.
<v Speaker 1>Probably invited there by one pron probably yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Several Holocaust survivors and Nazi hunters dedicated themselves to finding
<v Speaker 3>this guy. On May eleventh, nineteen sixty he was captured
<v Speaker 3>in a daring kidnapping attempt by a team of Nazi
<v Speaker 3>hunters and smuggled out of the country. He was tried
<v Speaker 3>and hanged in nineteen sixty two. Okay, de what can
<v Speaker 3>you tell me about Stranger in a Strange Land?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? Stranger in a Strange Land was a book that
<v Speaker 1>had been written by Robert Heinlein, who we've talked about before,
<v Speaker 1>a co sci fi writer with Philip K. Dick and others.
<v Speaker 1>He had actually been working on a book for about
<v Speaker 1>a decade, but didn't feel like that the world was
<v Speaker 1>ready with its social mores for what he was about
<v Speaker 1>to present. But sixties were happening and he thought, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I guess now is the time. It was an award
<v Speaker 1>winning book. It was about a Valentine, Michael Smith, who
<v Speaker 1>was born during the first manned mission to Mars and
<v Speaker 1>was the only survivor. He gets raised by the Martians
<v Speaker 1>and when he gets taken back to Earth, he doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have any knowledge of anything about the planet Earth and cultures.
<v Speaker 1>In fact, he had never seen a woman. But he
<v Speaker 1>happened to be the legal heir to an enormous financial empire,
<v Speaker 1>and the book is about him exploring human morality, the
<v Speaker 1>meanings of love, sex, other taboo things like religion and cannibalism,
<v Speaker 1>and he ultimately founds his own church preaching free love
<v Speaker 1>Because of this free love, many of the hippies of
<v Speaker 1>the nineteen sixties selected A Stranger in a Strange Land
<v Speaker 1>as their quote unquote Bible. Among these, Charles Manson. He
<v Speaker 1>was apparently just a petty criminal until he read this
<v Speaker 1>book in prison and then started his cult. After leaving
<v Speaker 1>it many years later, when asked about Stranger in a
<v Speaker 1>Strange Land, he said, I don't think I've ever read
<v Speaker 1>the book. However, his son was named Valentine Michael, the
<v Speaker 1>same name as main character in the book, so that
<v Speaker 1>seems a little bit strange. Also, the Manson family practiced
<v Speaker 1>several of the cult things in Stranger in a Strange Land. Okay, guys,
<v Speaker 1>that does it for today's episode. Next time for five
<v Speaker 1>minutes a fire
<v Speaker 2>Mmm,