the Diaspora Of Cultural Commonality edition

NF, One L 
​Issue SIXTEEN

1. Before Tom Cruise turned “Mission Impossible” into an episodic cinema vehicle for ways in which one could jump off of fast or tall things while appearing not to age due to some L. Ron voodoo, the kind only available to the world’s super-rich and various dictators and the upper echelon of Scientology’s Amway theology, Mission Impossible was a killer TV show.

2. It ran from 1966-73. The iconic theme song, written by the mighty and insanely prolific Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin (RIP Lalo, died last week at 93) was THE JAM at the time, even hitting #41 on the charts and spawning a million lesser thefts of exactly the same vein.

3. Martin Landau was a top name back in the days when oddly interesting/conventionally unattractive men over twenty-three could actually land roles based on the notion that their faces leant their characters character, instead of their anodyne youth lending them bland perfection. He played Rollin Hand, one of the best handles in television history. Cinema was not broken by “Jaws” or blockbusters or corporate overlords, it ceased being a reflection of life, and therefore a confection instead of an art form, when it stopped allowing actors to look lived-in. Sorry, there is not a single frame of film as yet released in which I buy, let alone feel, Timothée Chalamet’s pain.

4. The pulsating rhythmic opening of the theme is, in a stroke of pure genius, based on the Morse Code for the letters M and I, or DASH DASH DOT DOT, or five musical beats per measure.

5. Leonard Nimoy, The Doctor Of Spockingtown to you, also a poster boy for casting an interesting visage over tight abs, played the gangly, intense, death-stare Paris. Barbara Bain was Cinnamon Carter, Peter Graves was Jim Phelps, and the unthreatening Greg Morris was Black Tech Guy.

6. But the real point of this NF One L, granting the presumption that any of them have a point, is to talk about the long-deceased Cultural Unity of America.

7. The killer opening sequence, right before cutting to the first Palmolive (“You’re Soaking In It”) commercial, is a work of tight-editing genius made by Desi Arnez (Ricky Ricardo) and Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions! Each episode began, right from jump, by reminding the audience we were in a COLD WAR which at any time could become NUCLEAR WAR with our lifetime enemies THE RUSSIANS, who were GODLESS MARXISTS and needed to be fought on every possible front, not giving an inch, from Indochina to North Korea to Nicaragua to Cuba and back. So, sort of the opposite of our current President regularly fellating Russia’s current lunatic poisoner/ dictator, and handing him Ukraine on a platter of caviar as a housewarming gift.

8. All of which is to say, the opening had the famous line “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” which every single kid in America used as a reference all the time. But so did adults. Every teacher trying to relate to bored, disaffected students busted that phrase out before assigning homework. Your dad said it when you hadn’t emptied the garbage yet, and your uncle said it over a Miller Hi Life and laughed because he was asking you to go get him another one. Your boss said it. People on the bus said it. Comedians trod it into the ground on Carson as a punchline. There were T-shirts and lunchboxes and song titles.

9. It was the commonality of a cultural artifact, and as simplistic a shorthand as it was in many ways, it connected us. ALL of us. For reasons too boring to list, our country no longer has anything resembling that commonality of culture, but more importantly, of facts themselves. We now have a Commonality of Fracture. Which, as Roman angels even now scream down to us from Zeus' Elysium, is the sure sign of The Death Of Empire.

10. Because if you’re okay with our leaders yukking it up over Alligator Alcatraz, in front of CAGES FOR HUMANS, and think it’s just fine for masked, heavily armed, unidentified people to grab ANYONE and toss them into an unmarked van and send them to Florida or El Salvador, or the nine grimmer places we haven’t even heard about yet (like Abu Ghraib, leaked pictures of 2025’s Lindsey Englander will definitely come out soon), without due process, which is literally the foundation of this country and everything it purports to stand for, while you simultaneously whinge about your First Amendment whatever whenever it is convenient, you are not only an imbecile, but a traitor. You and I have NOTHING in common, from a television show to a sense of humanity, to even the dream of what America might have been.

11. Because, really, WHO THE FUCK thinks this is all okay?