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Life Arts    H4'ed 4/14/21

Nobody's Burisma But My Own

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Hunter Biden
Hunter Biden
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Nobody's Burisma But My Own

by John Kendall Hawkins

I don't know about you, because I can't read your mind, but I'm beginning to lose mine when I read what appears to be MSM taunts about their hold on our collective narrative. Feels like, nah-nah, we control the honey (pictures naughty kids dressed as bees skipping down the road, taunting, like something out of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour in PNG), as if the Intelligence Community (IC) had sat down with MSM executives and guaranteed them oodles of dark money to cover ad revenue losses, if they'd just 'sign here' and sit on an IC lap once in a while and take dictation.

Well, that's the way it felt when I parsed a Guardian (Observer) review of Hunter Biden's memoir, Beautiful Things, the other day. "The scandal that wasn't: Republicans deflated as nation shrugs at Hunter Biden revelations." Nah-Nah. And then follows endorsements of the books monumental and "searing" honesty. Publishers Weekly loves it! Argh! Stephen King was inspired (oh-oh, we know what that means: Think -- Here's Hunter!). Even Dave Eggers us on. But the piece de insistence is Charlie Sykes' (How the Right Lost Its Mind) Much Ado Tempest Teapot quote:

It is amazing how many of their hopes and dreams did centre on Hunter Biden's addiction, Hunter Biden's sex life, Hunter Biden's laptop, and interesting for a political party that has based so much on 'nothing matters' to discover to their disappointment that nothing matters.

More helmet-polishing from the MSM. Sieg heil!

I have an 'alternate' fact-based take on Hunter's memoir. First, I was rather surprised to find the book open with a quote from Charles Bukowski's "Nirvana" (here read with comforting virtues by Tom Waits, Mr. Closing Time himself). Each flake is unique. You heard it here first. The Nirvana described in the poem is a bus traveller's coffee stop where a passenger sits in a cafe and he gazes out the window at the snow and finds perfect peace in that moment and doesn't want to leave. But like Robert Frost's "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening," the f*ck still has promises that will go south on him and miles to go before he truly sleeps. Biden probably found the work on the PoemHunter site.

Is it relevant though? You know, to the memoir, I mean. In the poem, just before the imagined beauty that suffuses the world in wonder arrives in a flash, the narrator is sizing up an "unaffected" waitress. I'm going with, he wants to stay, not for the snowflake moment, but for a chance at scoring some poontang on the road. Hunter, the womanizer, woof. Quick romance, during which he affected her (and after which she presumably disinfected herself), then on the next bus out of town, while she lay there sleeping, like the snow snoozing on the hushed dogie prairie. Poem accomplished, not a syllable too soon.

But more germane, maybe the Bukowski reference is to Barfly, the film about a drunken poet (said to be based on Bukowski life details) in which he nails Faye Dunaway (she is still beautiful, the way Hunter likes them, but at times in the film you can tell she's been in a machine gun ambush that her hairbrush just can't fix -- alcohol does that). "Nobody suffers like the poor," the character Henry (Mickey Rourke, before he threw his face under the bus) says to a pretty would-be agent/lover who 'discovers' his poetry and brings him a fat check (and who erotically cats it out with Faye later for the privilege of seemingly being the reference point in Dylan's "Just Like A Woman," when she lets on that she knew him when he was hungry and it was her world). This Barfly reference makes more sense, actually, as even in the chapter most spectacle-seeking readers would be salivating over in anticipation -- Burisma -- he openly admits he spent a lot of his monthly salary getting sh*t-faced. Darkness at Noon, etc. We'll get to that.

No, the real question the savvy reader wants to know is Who Wrote the Book? Personally, I'm not all that enamored of memoirs-as-told-to. Literally hear-say. Although it's not credited right there on front cover as being a co-written book, that is, in fact, what it is. Drew Jubera is an "acknowledgement" in the back of the book. There's nothing illegal about this arrangement, but I prefer a memoir to touch me more personally. I don't want to hear your story from someone else's lips. Doesn't feel right. It's got that Chinese whispers quality to it; something might have gotten lost in the translation from ear to ear -- you start out whispering, "Are you my little dumpling?" and comes out, 10 ears later, as, "Are you finished with that dumpling?" No, it sounds like a built-in weasel escape clause, in case information proves embarrassing under closer scrutiny, whereby you can just say Told-To-Face over there didn't hear me properly; he must be a nincompoop.

But I think it's worse than that. I think Drew wrote the whole inshallah while Hunter slept off yet another one. I can't prove it, of course. (That's the whole point: plausible deniability.) However, I do have a degree in applied linguistics, and it seems pretty obvious to my potty trained mind -- really without any need to expertly beat the snot out of wayward phonemes -- that Hunter had no hand, as it were, in writing the book. None. Like maybe one of Daddy's handlers dropped by Drew's and told him what the story was, what "facts" would be in it. Check out this excerpt from Drew's creative non-fiction book, Must Win:

Back in the segregated '60s, this white sharecropper's son from out-past-nowhere Georgia, whose father once whipped him for returning home from a dinnertime hunt with nothing more than a "skinny rabbit," had proclaimed that the first time a black kid pulled on a Wildcats uniform would be the last day he ever gave the school a dime.

Note the long, largely unpunctuated prosaic riffs; the tone and tenor. And cache register. (And how the story sounds vaguely like Steve Martin in The Jerk.)

Now compare that to this bit from "Hunter's" memoir:

I became a proxy for Donald Trump's fear that he wouldn't be reelected. He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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