PUTIN AND TRUMP ON THE PHONE (Selections from forthcoming comic novel by U.R. Bowie, "ONE TON")

My new comic novel, ONE TON: THE TRUE AND HEARTRENDING TALE OF A FATBOY'S TRIUMPH, is scheduled for publication in the next couple of months. This is the funniest thing I've ever written, HAR, HAR, HAR (I can't stop laughing).

Composed in the spirit of my favorite movie, "Dr. Strangelove," the novel tells the story of Leland (The Blob) Lebeau, hunger artist extraordinaire--who aspires to be the first human in history to attain to the weight of 2000 pounds.

Featured as characters in the book are, among others, Donald J. Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-Un.

Here is an excerpt, describing the first phone conversation between Putin and Trump, immediately following the latter's inauguration as President.

Over in Moscow President Putin was on the phone, making his first official phone call to the new President.

            --Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Is that you, Donald?

            --Speaking. How’s it going, Vlad? How’s it hanging?

            --Going good, always going good, hanging high. If it were going gooder or hanging higher we’d have good beyond mere good; we’d have the ultimate goodest of the good and the highest of the high hang (joked Vlad the Impaler).

            The Trumpster laughed wholeheartedly, though he didn’t get the joke. Russian humor (he thought). Sad.

            --Let me say first off, Mr. President . . . oh, is it all right if I call you Pussy Snatcher?

            --Sure, Vlad. That’s fine. All my friends call me that. The American people came up with that affectionate nickname.

            --Okay, well, first off, Pussy Snatcher, congratulations on being elected. When we first heard you were running, my people in the FSB said, and I quote, “That fat sap ignorant fucker don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of winning.”

            --Well, they were right. I didn’t. But I did!

            Now it was Putin’s turn to fake laughter. That must have been a joke, so I better laugh. The Trumpster joined in cackling, and the two laughed together for thirty seconds straight. Putin was the first to go on with the conversation.

            --So how has it been, being President for the first few weeks?

            --A lot of fun, Vlad. Fun, fun. Terrific.

            --Yeah. But then, the responsibility sometimes hangs heavy on your neck.

            --That’s what Obama told me: responsibility. But actually, I find the job kind of boring. They want me to read all these crappy intelligence reports. But if I did that it would take away from my tweeting time. And watching Fox News.

            --I see. What’s this about the courts putting the quietus on your anti-Muslim decrees?

            --No problem. It’s like swatting flies. So-called judges. Sad.

            --Strange country you got there, buddy, the way the court system works. Sticking its nose into presidential ukases.

            --How does in work in Russia?

            --Easy. No sticking of the noses. Then again, we have court trials, but the verdict is decided before, not after the proceedings.

            --Who decides?

            --I do.

            --Sounds like a good system. You and me, we got to get together and talk over that. Plus a few more things.

            --Like what?

            --Well, for example, we’ll be pulling out of NATO soon, those suckers don’t pay their fair share. It’s a bad deal. So you and I, we got to figure out what happens next. Like, for example, you can have Estonia back if you like.

            Putin narrowed his eyes and spoke now in a whisper.

            --What will you be asking in return?

            --Not much. Just your help in bombing ISIS back to the Stone Age, bombing all the Muslims in Iraq, Libya, Egypt. Stuff like that.

            --Sounds like a deal, Donald. You got it.

            --One other thing, Vlad. Might need your advice with some lying we’re doing.

            --Lying?

            --Yeah. We’re trying to figure out how best to bamboozle. We’ve come up so far with ‘alternative facts’ for every issue. Plus some doublethink and newspeak, you know? Maybe you could lend your expertise.

            --Hm. I’d like to help you, but lying was never in my lesson plan.

            --Really?

            --I’ve never told a lie in all my born days. I swear it on my mother’s grave.

            --Um. Okay.

            --HAR, HAR. Fooled you, fooled you, had my fingers crossed when I said that! HAR, HAR.  

Once again the Trumpster joined in with the laughter, although he didn’t find the joke funny. The two world leaders laughed together for another thirty seconds. Finally Putin spoke up again.

--Got to run, Mr. President. I’m on my way to help out some cranes.

            --Cranes.

            --Yeah, some sand-hill cranes are gearing up for their semi-annual migration, and I’ll be the guy in the crane suit, flying a tiny crane-looking aircraft and guiding them back to their nesting sites.

            --I see. . . . Well, have a good flight, Vlad.

            --Oh, before we hang up, I want to tell you something funny, Pussy Snatcher.

            --Right. Go ahead.

            --I looked up the word ‘trump’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, and guess what it said?

            --I don’t know. Trumpeter? Bridge player? Dealmaker? Brilliant mind?

            --It said, and I quote, “(slang) an audible act of breaking wind.”

            Vlad the Impaler went off into paroxysms of hearty laughter, while the Big Orange Pussy Snatcher sat bewildered, holding the phone in one tiny hand and staring off into space.

            --Oh, one other thing, Mr. President.

            --What’s that, Vlad?

            --Remember when you were in Moscow four years ago for the Miss Universe competitions?

            --Yeah. What about it?

            --Remember when we made a gift to you of Miss Uzbekistan, and Miss Chechnya, and Miss Tajikistan, and they went back to your room in the Metropole Hotel?

            --Sure. What about it?

            --Well, hate to spring this on you, Pussy Snatcher, but we’ve got videos of your bare ass. Real high quality stuff.

            --So what?

            --Just this. You do what we say from now on, or your bare ass will be on every TV screen and internet screen in the world.

            --That’s great, Vlad. Thanks!

            --Huh? What’s great?

            --It’s great for the notoriety. Then again, what a treat for the world! My bare ass is a beautiful sight. Terrific. Thanks again, buddy.

BIG BROTHER WANTS TO KNOW HOW YOU FEEL: COMPUTERS THAT READ HUMAN FACES (and THE RUSSIAN SLIT-EYED SQUINT)

There's a rather alarming article in Jan. 19, 2015 issue of "The New Yorker": Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel," p. 50-59.


The subject matter is how scientists are learning to create computers that read human emotions by studying facial expressions:

"Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say, and a few pioneers dedicated to decoding this information have made tremendous progress. Perhaps the most successful is an Egyptian scientist living near Boston, Rana el Kaliouby. Her company, Affectiva, formed in 2009, has been ranked by the business press as one of the country's fastest-growing startups. . . "(50).

The software, Affdex, looks at everything when it examines a human face: "the shifting texture of skin, the distribution of wrinkles around an eye, or the furrow of a brow. . . The algorithm identifies an emotional expression by comparing it with countless others that it has previously analyzed" (52).

Affectiva builds on models created by a research psychologist, Paul Ekman, "who, beginning in the sixties, built a convincing body of evidence that there are at least six universal human emotions, expressed by everyone's face identically, regardless of gender, age, or cultural upbringing [my emphasis, URB]. Ekman compiled a Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is widely used, e.g., by academics and police officers.

Computers now "outperform people in distinguishing social smiles from those triggered by spontaneous joy, and in differentiating between faked pain and genuine pain" (52).

Kaliouby and her colleague Rosalind Picard created the new field in computer science called "affective computing." In the early stages of their work their intentions were highly altruistic. Kaliouby, for example, worked on a project to help autistic patients better interpret human expressions. Her Mind Reader was a program that she hoped would "construct an 'emotional hearing aid' for people with autism. The wearer would carry a small computer, and earpiece, and a camera, to scan people's expressions. In gentle tones, the computer would indicate appropriate behavior: keep talking, or shift topics" (54).

But when the corporate world and the government found out about Mind Reader they swarmed around its inventors with inquiries. "Pepsi was curious if it could use the software to gauge consumer preferences. Bank of America was interested in testing it in A.T.M.s. Toyota wanted to see if it could better understand driver behavior" (56). And so on. And so on. You can bet that the CIA and NSA perked up their ears and antennas. FOX wanted to test all its pilot shows with this software; advertisers all and sundry were fascinated with the idea of using computer software to study a face, and to predict whether that face liked their product. Soon the good intentions and the altruistic impulses of the founder of this software were being stretched out into areas far from altruistic.

Affdex has now been so highly refined that it can "read the nuances of smiles better than most people can" (56). Now there are new projects to upgrade "the detection of furrowed eyebrows." Affdex ran tests on 80,000 brow furrows. Obviously, this computer program now knows infinitely more about brow furrows than anyone on earth.

So what next? The possibilities are rife. Emotion-sensing vending machines and A.T.M.s that would understand when users are in a relaxed mood and susceptible to advertising. Anheuser-Busch has designed a responsive beer bottle, because sports fans at games "wishing to use their beverage containers to express emotions are limited to, for example, raising a bottle to express solidarity with a team" (58).

Next, you suppose, will come the better, new and improved beer bottle with a built-in computer, to study your teeth for cavities and your brain for openings: places where a bit of advertising can intrude. Apple has recently come up with the iWatch, "which can measure heart rate and physical activity, and link these data to your location. The new products complement another line of Apple's research: mood-targeted advertising. . . With the new watch, they are going to know everything about you" (59).

Samsung is quoted as saying, "If we know the emotion of each user we can provide more personalized services" (59). This reminds me of the incessant message over the phone: "your call is being recorded to better serve you," which means, "to better serve us."

Pretty scary stuff, but, you may ask, what does this have to do with Russians or Russian literature? Well, quite a bit, as it so turns out. Take a look at this picture of a Russian face:

[from Barbara Monahan, A Dictionary of Russian Gesture (Hermitage Publications, 1983), p. 27.]


In describing this gesture, Monahan (p.26) cites Edmond Wilson's book, A Window on Russia, and Wilson mentions Anna Karenina's habitual gesture of narrowing her eyes in times of stress. Monahan writes that this gesture indicates, among other things, "I'm concentrating. I'm thinking what I should do next."

The other things (I think) are more important. The gesture, which probably originally came out of a fear of the evil eye, indicates apprehension. The person slitting his/her eyes is engaging in a defensive act, keeping intruding eyes out.

People other than Russians may also use this gesture, but, for example, I think that far fewer Americans do this slit-eyed squint than Russians do (with the possible exception of Clint Eastwood). It comes, largely, out of a thousand years of Russian paranoia.

Russians feel the constant need to protect themselves from hostile eyes. Russian simply do not trust very many people. They wear on their faces a habitual look of sour non-commitment, what Americans see as a frown. It's just not safe to open yourself up too much. In fact, Russians are firmly set against what they call "the American smile," which they consider something superfluous and frivolous. A Russian friend of mine, who has lived in the U.S. for years, walks around with his Russian look on his face, and Americans are constantly asking him, "Sergei, what's wrong?"

So what I'm wondering is this: could the Affdex computer software get anywhere looking at Russian faces? Could it look, say, at Vladimir Putin's face and figure out what he's feeling? Given that Putin wears not only the habitual Russian face mask, but also, on top of that, he wears the mask of the professional spook. So they say, he even sleeps with his spook mask on.

I don't know, but I'm guessing that the Affdex program would scream out for help if it had to deal with the Russian slit-eyed squint. What a shame for all the American mind-reading companies who would like to read Russian minds and make big money in the Russian market!