In Which Neither Could Realistically Imagine Being The Other

The Closing of the American Door

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg
FX

If the hardest thing you have to do is tell a cute Korean guy you're about to have his baby, I feel sorry for you. Stan invites himself over for dinner pretty regularly, although I am relatively sure he already met Pastor Tim. If the hardest thing you have to do is meet Pastor Tim, you are probably actually getting over your divorce. If you are over your divorce, I don't feel sorry for you. If Pastor Tim lays another guilt trip on another woman, I will never feel sorry for him again. Pastor Tim invites himself over for dinner pretty regularly. His wife loves lamb.

When you're inviting yourself somewhere, on The Americans, you appear reticent for a moment but no more. You are sad for the briefest of sensations until you find another feeling to replace grief. Very few men feel guilty for sex they do not remember, but Don Ho is one of those men.

Patty took her own life. She invited herself lots of places, and she always sold as many cosmetics as she could. RIP Patty, I really hope she doesn't run into Young-Hee at the grocery store and have to stab her with a rutabaga. I wonder what happened to the family of that African-American contractor. I hope someone paid for her funeral. It is nice that Patty was able to afford a decent coffin. It is not too much to ask, if you are going through the indignity of putting someone you love beneath the ground.

Intel was flying around, most conveyed by Stan Beeman, the worst FBI agent of his time. He exposed Martha's father, his friend the KGB agent (all his friends are Russian), Agent Gaad, his wife, Nina, Chris Amador, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North and the man who presses his excrebable suits. It is always best practice to keep a list of those who lives you plan to destroy; it is what separates us from the animals.

Maybe I'm naive, but I assumed that Patty was going to force Don Seong to settle down with her. They would fall in love, and have children very similar to the ones he already has, except half-Asian. Eventually she would hector him into taking her on vacation to Thailand, where he would die suddenly from stabbing himself on a stained glass window. Only then would she truly be happy in her love relationship.

Standards for Elizabeth are actually far lower. She makes all the dinners, she informs Pastor Tim, who has about as much to say for himself as Paige. Paige's daughter has a one track mind that revolves around driving the car, whereas Pastor Tim is always either apologizing or being apologized to. Torn between these two simpletons, Elizabeth cannot decide which person into which it is best to evolve.

She has a chance to go to Est and become thoughtful and unskilled at anything except dealing with her own emotional baggage. That seemed relatively complicated and difficult. Moreover, she has never fully understood Phillip's compassion and laughed when he tried to explain it. It is astonishing but quite realistic that neither could ever imagine being the other.

When we empathize too strongly with our partners, it hurts ourselves. Seeing the world through their eyes is impossible, so the sensation we acquire remains a false truth. It is present in the anguish we hear on that last telephone message, of a woman trying to understand what the man she loves is going through when he refuses to tell her directly. A glimpse into a shadow life.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"I've Been Waiting" - Rachael Sage (mp3)

In Which They Consider Themselves The Awkward Stepchildren Of The Nuclear Age

Pleasures of the Open Air

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

Next to a nude man in a queen-sized bed, Elizabeth Jennings slightly uncovers herself so that her asshole can experience the routine pleasures of the open air. It is always pleasant to wake up next to someone before they do. Their lives are in your hands, or at least remain perilously close to your hands, for those fleeting moments.

When I was a kid I had a friend who never liked to leave his bed. He did all his homework there. Sometimes he convinced me to sit on it and play the game of Life; other times I requested we do so on a table like human beings. If there is no safe place, then a place must be made safe. I have developed plans to place this sentiment on a bumper sticker and merchandise it on several platforms.

Nothing really changed on the family's vacation except Paige is now working people like a pro and Elizabeth feels moral compunction over some simple blackmail. It was honestly his fault for going up to her apartment in the first place and drinking wine. Then, he demurred at the slightest touch of her hand to his leg - bullshit. He knew why he was up there, he just wanted to seem somewhat reluctant to make them both feel better.

Pastor Fucking Tim can't leave well enough alone. When someone goes out of their way to secure you a great deal on international travel, you do not tell him that his daughter is sad. Tim will likely never come back from this African country, panicking his wife. Then he will show up suddenly with an African bride. Tim's ill-advised trip to Africa reminded me of how little an impact racism or sexism plays in the Cold War.

Despite the fact that Oleg seems to sleep with every single one of his gendered colleagues, nothing is made of this and the elegant, hardscrabble Tatiana seems to be using him for intel. It is still kind of messed up that they are so willing to be with this whimpering sod of a KGB officer. When Oleg finds out, defects to the United States and begins to feed her false intel, this will make Tatiana even more ridiculous. Unless this has already occurred?

Sleeping with other people, or pretending to, is the main intelligence-gathering function for women in the KGB. Just once I would love to see Elizabeth get what she needs by friendzoning some poor security guard. Presumably things are the same on the American side – we will never know since the closest thing to a woman operative is Agent Gaad's wife, who has taken him to Thailand for debriefing. For some, The Day After came and went a long time ago.

Paige's slow descent in agentdom is going better than ever, but it would be fun to see Hans get more screentime on the show as a boy she casually meets at church and brings home to her parents. They could sit on the edge of her bed and listen to records. I doubt she is wanting to talk much about God, but she could tell him all about her parents, and how all their friends are as straight and white as the day is long.

While Elizabeth was babysitting three Korean-American children, she taught them all the ways of her people. Pizza, racquetball and Chevrolets. It is impossible not to become addicted on some level to what is on offer, precisely because of the availability. We get good at everything we do repeatedly, finding all the shortcuts. If Elizabeth were to disappear to another part of the country, leaving all this behind, we sense she could do it without a second thought. Masks become habits.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Brand New Feeling" - Matt Costa (mp3)

In Which Water Remains The Sweet Elixir Of American Life

The White Clouds

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

"Every one of you here has the opportunity to live an authentic life," explains a guy wearing a really nice sweater. At Est, the concept of being trapped by other people's impressions and feelings about you is the real danger. "There is something so American about it," Elizabeth explains, since needing help with self-realization is a Western concept stolen from the East. They just didn't realize it.

Gary Snyder translated poems by a ninth century Chinese recluse named Han Shan that I was reading the other day. It is astonishing how modern they are, although Snyder's grasp of the timelessness of human expression in his translation is a major factor. Many Americans know and understand very little about life in other places, even within their own nation, and there has rarely been a good way of explaining it authentically.

This week Obama made an attempt at it, so he found himself drinking water in Flint, Michigan. It was an impressive feat; something I would never do. A famous moment in the 1992 campaign took place when Bill Clinton told an enraged protestor that he felt the man's pain; it also marked the permanent departure of the Clintons from the left-wing of that party. Why Obama drank the water I don't really know. It probably didn't taste very good, since afterwards he announced that "kids are very resilient" indicating that they could rebound from whatever illness the water imparted. Then he distributed filters for everyone.

One poem of Han Shan goes like this:

Spring water in the green creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silent knowledge — the spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.

This sentimentality is ancient. Even Elizabeth, after murdering an African-American woman with several kids, was momentarily absorbed into it. There is a literal nature to both politics and violence that Elizabeth grasps instinctively, in this episode directed by Matthew Rhys. What is common in both disciplines is a 1:1 relationship between the meaning of an act and the act itself.

Keri Russell's character embodies this completely. When Elizabeth says that Martha was simple, and straightforward, she was really describing her own outlook. To the extent that she has emotions, altering them isn't her forte, or her husband's.

Don't get me wrong: they can do what every good politician can do. It is only a matter of creating another feeling, and layering it over that initial anger. Bill Clinton did not "feel the pain" of the AIDS activist – in that moment he was merely a mirror. (The irony is that one of the campaign songs for Clinton-Gore was Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror.")

Martha was more complicated than a lot of people gave her credit for. She was more adaptable than she believed, although that was likely indicated by the fact she married her clandestine lover and suggested he take her from behind. For Martha, the world was not a literal place, full of sound and fury, signifying various somethings. No, the world is full of illusions of various values. Weighing one more heavily is only possible at the expense of another.

In light of that, Han Shan becomes a recluse. He writes,

There's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here.

It will take over two years to fix the pipes in Flint, Michigan. In the meantime, Kevin Drum put up a post explaining that very few children would be harmed by this, on average. He calculated half an IQ point, which was apparently not the biggest deal. I suppose it depends on how much of the water you drank.

In the neighborhood I grew up in, lots of people contracted cancer and many died. Looking at it statistically it must have been well above the average, for so many families to have parents taken away. Lots of theories went around as to why this was happening — many worked near a nuclear power plant, and there was other heavy industry in the area.

Most of those companies have moved their jobs overseas due to America's corporate tax rate. I don't think there are any travel agents around, and jobs in the region are hard to come by. Then and now, it was wise to make a point of not sampling the tap water. Some people were angry about the impact of cancer, but most tolerated it with good grace. We could not really know what had happened to us.

The Americans becomes a little too much like a fairy tale when Clark sobs for hours on end about how Martha is off to Prague. She made a choice, and knew what could happen. She's probably alive, and she should feel lucky that she had a chance to choose. I don't want to say that the people who make The Americans are spoiled, or that the people who walk into a town, sip the water and leave are inauthentic. I don't have any idea what motivates such an act.

The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.
Who can leap the world's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.