In a new book, the boundlessly curious “Hangover” star probes history’s greatest blunders—like how the C.I.A. tried to make Castro’s beard fall out—as a way to face the present, Henry Alford writes.
“Random Things Falling from the Sky” wouldn’t be a terrible alternative title for Helms’s new book, “Snafu”—based on his podcast of the same name—which recounts the biggest screwups of the past seventy years, like Biosphere 2, or our government’s efforts to weaponize the weather in Vietnam or to turn cats into spies.
At least one Helms fan, on hearing the title “Snafu,” has reflexively responded, “God bless you.” In Central Park, Helms, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, explained that the word was popularized during the Second World War and is an acronym for “Situation normal: all fucked up.” He added, “I grew up in the South with a lot of similar adjectives—wapper-jawed, cattywampus. Those and fubar, they’re all sort of in the same family.” New York: A Centenary Issue Subscribers get full access. Read the issue » You wouldn’t necessarily peg Helms as a historian. After all, he’s an actor , and actors are usually allowed to write only memoirs that are thinly veiled attempts to make us pity and adore them. In the past, Helms has confessed to being “time blind”; during the walk, he said that his frequent inability to put events into chronological order is a symptom of A.D.H.D., a diagnosis he received several years ago, after he read the book “Driven to Distraction” and found himself weeping: “I was, like, ‘I identify with so much of this book!’ ” But Helms has many attributes associated with historical wonkishness: he has worn glasses since second grade, he is uninterested in sports, he plays a mean banjo, he loved National Geographic so much as a kid that he wanted to be Indiana Jones , he performed a baton-twirling routine at his brother’s tenth-birthday party to the song “Eye of the Tiger” , and he was in an a-cappella group at Oberlin called the Obertones. Near the Sixth Avenue entrance to the Park, Helms became excited by a large boulder and sat on it. The previous day, he’d flown in from Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters; on the flight, he played the audio version of his book, listening to it at two and a half times the normal speed, an ability he ascribes to his A.D.H.D. While on the boulder, he talked about the section in his book concerning the C.I.A.’s numerous schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro, and also the agency’s plan, in 1960, to put thallium salts in Castro’s shoes if he left them outside his hotel room during a trip out of Cuba. Sometimes referred to as “the poisoner’s poison,” thallium salts can make one’s hair fall out; when Castro’s beard fell out, the plan assumed, he would look weak and powerless in the eyes of the Cuban public. “It almost seems like the C.I.A. had a writers’ room filled with comedy writers,” Helms said. “The thallium-salts thing is so ‘Looney Tunes.’ ” On the way out of the Park, Helms noted that, twelve years after “The Office” went off the air, he is still in a group text with other cast members from the show. “It will light up every so often,” he said. “Someone will chime in with a picture of their kids, or they’ll say, ‘My friend is in the hospital and is a big fan of the show—can you guys send some videos?’ We have such an incredible shared experience.” If contemplating fiascoes from the past is a nice way to contextualize, and possibly even defang, fiascoes of the present, it may also have lingering effects. “I’ve started listening to Bloomberg News, which is weird because I know virtually nothing about finance,” Helms said. “Other news sources were feeling a little shrill to me. Sometimes I want the cadence of news, but not the terror of news.” He went on, “There’s that beautiful Simon & Garfunkel rendition of ‘Silent Night’ that’s just piano and their two beautiful voices singing ‘Silent Night,’ with a newscaster reading the news underneath it. I grew up with NPR playing during my car pools—the ‘All Things Considered’ jingle is a deep groove in my neurological map.” ♦
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