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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11 , 2020. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ SU C
BY DAN ZAK
Consider the Kraken. Tentacled creature of
Norse mythology. Real nasty business, all
gnashings and sucking sounds, hidden in the
depths but then gigantically apparent. In lore
and literature, the Kraken capsized, disman-
tled and swallowed galleons of seafarers. In
reality, in the present moment, the Kraken is
shorthand for — what exactly? Over the past
month we’ve been told by defenders of Presi-
dent Trump that the Kraken was about to be
loosed. But to what end? Where had the
Kraken been kept, and for how long? What
exactly is the Kraken, for our purposes here in
land-based reality?
At one of Rudy Giuliani’s fugue-state news
conferences, someone asked attorney Sidney
Powell, who has described herself as the
“Kraken releaser,” about the Kraken.
“You spoke of unleashing the Kraken,” the
person said. “Is the country ready for this?”
It w as an absurd question, unless you think
about what the Kraken represents. Is it ametaphor for vengeance? Is it a strategy of
chaos?
Powell herself has been called the Kraken.
Her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former
(and recently pardoned) national security
adviser, has been called the Kraken. Support-
ers of the Kraken got very excited on Thanks-
giving eve, which they dubbed “Kraken Day,”
when Powell filed one of several election-
related lawsuits, each perhaps a tentacle of a
legal Kraken that would upend the election
result. Creepy people on Twitter, a cepha -
lopodic monstrosity of its own, have let their
imaginations run wild for the past month.
The Kraken, they say, m ight be a secret wing of
the intelligence community that is about to
bring Trump’s imaginary deep-state purge to
an epic climax. The Kraken, they say, m ight be
an advanced security system from the U.S.
Army that can detect a disturbance as small as
a rabbit from nearly four miles away.
Perhaps the Kraken is something less shad-
owy, less slithery, less imaginary. America is
SEE KRAKEN ON C2Release the Kraken?
It’s already loose.
As covid crests again, a mythological creature invoked by election fraudsters still has legs
ISTOCKBY LISA BONOS
Before every campaign of Ba-
rack Obama’s political career, he
knew he needed Michelle’s buy-
in.
Even though she gave the go-
ahead each time, the former pres-
ident writes in his recent memoir,
“A Promised Land,” she set
boundaries around her involve-
ment in any campaign and made
it clear when she wasn’t happy.
With Obama away from home so
often — first in Springfield, Ill.,
and then in Washington, D.C. —
the bulk of the domestic duties
fell to her, he writes, and that’s
not how they had envisioned
their partnership.
When it came time for his
biggest ask — What did she think
of him running for president? —
Michelle said no. But after some
time passed, they discussed it
again. When she asked why he
needed to be president, Obama
said that if he pulled it off, “the
world will start looking at Ameri-
ca differently,” he writes. “I know
that kids all around this country
— Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids
who don’t fit in — they’ll see
themselves differently, too, their
horizons lifted, their possibilities
expanded. And that alone... that
would be worth it.”
His appeal worked. “Well, hon-
ey,” she told him. “That was a
pretty good answer.”
This back-and-forth and those
that came before it — Michelle
saying she wouldn’t s pend time in
Springfield if he won an Illinois
Senate seat, that she wouldn’t
campaign for him as he sought to
become a U.S. senator, her mov-
ing from no to yes on the presi-
dency — fit the definition of an
egalitarian marriage, in which
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C2BOOK WORLDIn Obama
memoir, a
portrait of
a first lady
No, ‘take o≠
your mask’
isn’t on the
menu, gents
The upside to
wearing a mask at
work was that at
least it would
curtail the
harassment. As a
server, Sandy
Tran was used to
unwanted
comments on her
appearance, but the coronavirus
precautions enforced by her
Dallas restaurant now required
full-time face coverage — a
literal barrier between Tran and
creepy customers.
Then she heard the first
iteration of what would become
a refrain:
“Take off your mask,” the
diner instructed her while she
took his order one afternoon. “I
want to see your beautiful smile.”
“If I do it, it makes me seem
like I have no respect for myself,”
Tran thought, weighing her
options. “But if I don’t, he’s going
to leave me a bad tip.” Before the
pandemic, Tran could make
$200 a night. Now she often
went hours into her shift
without seating a single
customer, and her base pay was
$2.13 an hour. She needed the
money. So from a six-foot
distance, she pulled down her
mask. She felt “like a circus
animal,” standing there while
the customer pressed her to tell
him her ethnicity, saying she was
a “beautiful mix.”
“Take off your mask,” a man
ordered Drew Allison after she
served him at the bar where she
works in Knoxville, Tenn. “I want
to see your face; maybe you have
moles under there.” The
statement was so bizarre that
Allison obeyed without thinking,
briefly pulling her mask below
her chin. Only later did she
realize the implication: If the
man found her attractive
enough, he planned to tip her
more. From then on, when a
male customer requested she
SEE HESSE ON C3Monica
Hesse
BY HANK STUEVER
Wherever you currently land
on the subject of the Bee Gees
(Forgotten glitter gods? Perpetu-
al punchline?), director Frank
Marshall’s thorough and beauti-
fully appreciative HBO docu-
mentary “The Bee Gees: How
Can You Mend a Broken Heart”
will get you where you need to be
— which, I can practically prom-
ise, is a sublime state of awe.
An exemplary lesson in how to
make a revealing rockumentary,
“The Bee Gees” (premiering Sat-
urday) will satisfy lifelong skep-
tics and loyal fans. It’s less of the
usual tract (we had them all
wrong!) and more of a reckoning
with the profound degree of art-
istry and accomplishment that
should be the last word on any
Bee Gees story. The movie is also
a unique consideration of the
phenomenon of rise and fall, and
how one learns to live with it.
Spending almost no time on a
deep probe of the biographical
1950s family dynamics of the
Gibbs of Brisbane, Australia, it
instead heads straight into the
recurring theme of success and
fame as a matter of raw determi-
nation: Hugh Gibb, the father of
Barry and twins Robin and Mau-
rice, was a musician who simply
believed his sons’ harmonizing
vocals and knack for songwriting
deserved as much or more atten-
tion than, say, the Beatles. He
wrote to Beatles manager Brian
Epstein and offered up his cheer-
fully ambitious offspring; Ep-
stein handed them over to a
subordinate, Robert Stigwood,
and the rest is pop-music history.
But what kind of history and
why? This is where Marshall’s
film succeeds. With archival foot-
age and music cues that will
SEE TV REVIEW ON C3TV REVIEW
There are oh-so-many
high notes in ‘Bee Gees’
SHUTTERSTOCK/HBO
Robin Gibb, Barry Gibb and Maurice Gibb on top of the world in 1977. They’re the subject of Frank
Marshall’s “The Bee Gees,” a cathartic look at the rise, fall and recovery of the superstar trio.ROSS D. FRANKLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESSTOP: The 19th-century engraving “The Kraken, as Seen by the Eye of Imagination.” T he legendary sea monster is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway
and Greenland. ABOVE: Tara Immen of Happy Valley, Ariz., doesn’t seem happy at all outside the Maricopa County Elections Department.