God left last year

Our afternoon and evening have been dominated by the return of the dishwasher flood, prompted apparently this time by attempts to use the washing machine or the kitchen sink. We had already unplugged the dishwasher and shut off its valve under the sink. We have complained to the property manager. We hope for a plumber before the kitchen floor starts to complain to us.

In pale silver linings, two episodes into the second season of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–) I am extremely entertained that this show has provided my long-sought third example of an unprepared heir elevated suddenly to power thanks to an airship disaster, following Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) and Emlyn Williams' Headlong (1980). I did not actually expect it to be a genre.

And all because a sweet girl came along and wanted a straw for her Coke

What an age of ephemera we live in when I can watch a post-WWII U.S. Army training film about venereal disease just because the medical officer who has to deliver the bad news is played by Wendell Corey.

Easy to Get (1947) was never intended for my eyes. Its production by the Army Pictorial Service explicitly restricted its audience to the servicemen at home and abroad whose adult education was necessarily exempt from the squeamish blinders of the Production Code which deemed the mere mention of condoms as taboo as full-frontal footage of uncut schlong, a serious impediment to a campaign of prevention and control whose even mixed messages needed not to be mealy-mouthed. Right down to the ominous entendre of its title, the 22-minute film follows the wartime playbook for sex hygiene as it dramatizes the communicable woes of a couple of representative GIs whose best-laid good times gang aft gonorrhea and syphilis. Clean-cut Corporal Baker gets the disenchantment of his life when it turns out the small-town sweetheart he met at the soda counter of a drugstore left him with more than memories, but even streetwise Private Anderson doesn't realize how much more than two bucks it'll cost him when he springs for another round in the sack instead of a post-coital stop at the nearest prophylactic station. Each of their predicaments occasions some interrogation by the medical officer who leaves the impression that he'd love to treat a sore throat for a change, but the real catechism comes from the narrator whose man-to-man omniscient razzing escalates from the clinical threats of gonococcal arthritis and syphilitic aortitis to the triple-distilled horror of what happens to a soldier's meat when he decides that rubbers are for sissies and whiskey's just as good a first-line agent as sulfathiazole and calomel. "Maybe you don't want to stay healthy and keep yourself clean," he dares his audience as the camera pans across a ward of shots of penicillin in the ass; the chancred money shot is yet to come. "Maybe you want to hop in bed with one girl after another. Well, maybe you'd like to hop into the same boat with these men!" It should go without saying that some tolerance for various conditions of dick is required by this film, but its anatomical correctness is actually most interesting when it eases off the scare tactics in favor of matter-of-fact tutorials in the antibacterial protocols of the pro station and its personally packaged equivalent of the pro-kit as a simple, sensible precaution after the fact. Protection is encouraged with similar frankness; the average soldier is assumed to know how to roll on a condom and it is fascinating to hear the assurance a full four decades pre-AIDS that a partner who won't have sex safely isn't worth having it with. The insistence on abstinence as the only surefire prophylaxis, however, dilutes this refreshing pragmatism and shrink-wraps it in misogyny when it relies on characterizing every woman as a potential fireship. "Doesn't matter if she's a high school girl or a juke joint girl—inside her there may be sores full of crawling little germs." Only for purposes of a grotesque vignette about congenital syphilis does the film admit the danger of infectious men; otherwise the identification of women with mortal corruption goes as hard as a Rops etching. A honky-tonk singer leans invitingly at her piano, spirochetes wriggle on a slide, a pair of streetwalkers bait their smiles into the dark. Not even public health could push the Army to acknowledge the presence of men who have sex with men in its ranks, but each time the narrator heterosexually thunders, "And you catch it only one way—from a woman," the more queerly minded viewer may worry about the soldiers who took the apparent obvious loophole to heart.

All these techniques of practical instruction and moral admonition can be found in the wartime literature of posters, pamphlets, and even previous productions of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. What sets Easy to Get in a class of its own is its Blackness. Released in the last year before the formal integration of America's armed forces, its setting of an all-Black unit tacitly illustrates the segregated conditions under which it was made to appeal specifically to Black servicemen for whom the default white archive of training films did not hold the same authority and at the same time offers a kind of accidentally unmarked sketch thanks to the everyman dictates of its genre by which its unfortunate GIs are no hornier, more reckless, or more ill-informed than their white counterparts who lost furloughs or missions of their own to VD. Whoever plays Corporal Baker—uncredited as usual for training films, but in his case I would welcome any pointers, since I do not recognize the actor and have found no external information to clue me in—his ten days of deep talks and movies and moonlit trysts with dream girl Ruby Dee are so achingly romantic, the least he owes her is a notification of exposure. However ironically it ends in line at the dispensary, the joint where Russell Evans' Private Anderson picks up the prostitute played with challenging smolder by Muriel Smith is authentically hot, jumping with fast-footed swing that couldn't more blatantly stand in for the jazz going on upstairs. With minimal exceptions such as Corey's medical officer or the solid citizen who keels over from tertiary complications at the luncheonette, the barracks, battlefields, bedsides and streets of the film's location-spiced sets are populated by Black officers, enlisted men, and civilians alike. It blurs the docudrama a little, as the intended audience might well be stationed in Allied-occupied Germany or Japan where the red-light districts wouldn't look so much like Philly or Detroit, but it recalls the world of race films, in which white characters could be peripheral if they existed at all. Joseph M. Newman's direction is on brand for his later, socially conscious noirs like Abandoned (1949), but I would love to know the authorship of the narrator who sounds like the sarcastically disembodied, unracialized know-it-all of so many educational films and yet introduces his final speaker with the curious, unmistakable, "Mr. Robeson has done as much good for our people as any man alive." It seals a tone that has been shifting steadily toward a quite marked state. Post-war, Easy to Get transposes the patriotic exhortation not to let down the Allied effort by catching a sexually transmitted infection—the posters in particular are remarkably blunt about representing cases of VD as victories for the Axis—into the language of racial uplift, invoking the heroism of Black American men against Nazi ideals through footage of Joe Louis demolishing Max Schmeling in 1938, Jesse Owens and Cornelius Johnson and John Woodruff racking up gold after gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. "Metcalfe sent the stars and stripes up above the swastika and the rising sun so often that Hitler and Hirohito should have taken the hint right there and quit." In fact, Lieutenant Ralph Metcalfe himself shows up to corroborate the value of physical as well as mental fitness, paving the way for the God-level cameo of Paul Robeson, not yet blacklisted and titanically political. "None of us will forget what we've learned from this movie," the voice of Othello, Ol' Man River, the Harlem Renaissance concludes, "but more important, let's not forget our responsibility to our communities, our families, and ourselves." Whatever the film's other omissions and hedges, for just a moment it seems much less conservative calling on Black pride rather than generalized nationalism; the enemy is more than VD, America the theater of war. Robeson had just headlined the American Crusade Against Lynching because the President of the United States was dragging his feet on civil rights. It sends the film out on a note of conviction that his call to public health sounds anything but respectable or trite.

Should you decide to check out this core sample of post-war sexual and racial attitudes for yourself, I cannot stress its not-safe-for-work-ness enough: one minute it's describing the ravages of neurosyphilis, then it's debunking myths of treatment and transmission, the next minute it's just cock. The combined effect can be watched on YouTube if you're willing to confirm your age and at the National Library of Medicine if you'd rather not bother. In trying to unearth more detail on its production, I turned up the puzzling record of an American medical officer stationed in Bad Nauheim referring to an "'Easy to Get'—VD Training Film (New)" in a letter dated February 1946, which does not at all accord with Corey only leaving for Hollywood in the summer of that year, having spent the previous six months co-starring on Broadway in Dream Girl. I may have to poke at the National Archives. He is extremely recognizable even glumly getting up from his microscope to tell a soldier who thought he had the most wonderful furlough, "You've got gonorrhea, Baker." This strain brought to you by my healthy backers at Patreon.