The Rather Attack
By far, the most famous work by the author as of the midway point of 2021 is “The Frequency: Solving the Riddle of the Dan Rather Beating.” It is a strange unclear hybrid of genres though for the most part an intellectual quest contemplating what that whole “Kenneth, what is the frequency” incident which also inspired a hit single by R.E.M. The unprovoked, unexplained, and unusually pointless attack on then-CBS Evening News anchor Rather is an enigma which the band from Athens leaves unexamined with a lyrical shrug: “I never understood the frequency, uh-huh.”
For Allman, however, it is a microcosmic symbol of the great mythic American tradition of the inexplicable. The whole “Kenneth, what’s the frequency” episode is placed alongside all the other conspiracy theories which have taken the entire point of truth and fact out of the bargain in everything from whether George Washington never chopping down a cherry tree to the incontrovertible evidence pointing to Oswald as the only logical assassin of JFK. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma hidden beneath a veil of the mundane that few want to admit.
Dan Rather
Part of what makes the whole “what’s the frequency” attack fascinating for R.E.M, the author and almost everyone else familiar with it is lies in the disconnect between Dan Rather’s recognizability at the time and the address toward him by his attackers by a completely different name. Allman is convinced beyond a doubt that his attackers knew exactly who he was and were not confusing him with the mysterious “Kenneth” because as he rightly points out, at the time Rather was the very symbol of rationality in his role as the most-watched news personality in the country charged with delivering authenticated facts every weeknight which could be trusted without question.
Donald Barthelme
What lifts “The Frequency” to another level is the introduction of a character—also a real life person—who attains the same level of significance as Dan Rather. In his obsessive quest to understand the meaning of the incident, he is led almost by pure fate to an unexpected and statistically significance coincidence: the appearance of the name Kenneth and the phrase “What is the frequency” in a work by author Donald Barthelme, noted for his rather fantastical fiction. Just before declaring Rather to be the symbolic incarnation of the rational, he confers symbolic status upon Barthelme: “He was the king of the irrational, the surprising juxtaposition.”
Barrels and Wells
In his episodic Otis: A Novel, the title character is stimulated to try the impossible task of damming the Mississippi River because wells were replacing water barrels in the town of Braggodocio. The displacement of the outmoded technology of capturing rainwater in barrels in exchange for the modern plumbing system afforded by digging wells becomes the symbolic representation of every such paradigm shift in history: from horses being replaced by automobiles to human pizza deliverers being replaced by ill-conceived robotic vehicles.
“The Frozen Archive”
This is a fascinating mostly true story that sounds like it has to be a pure fiction: a huge library of forgotten silent films long thought lost forever discovered in a vault buried beneath an ice-skating rink which had once been a municipal swimming pool. The skating rink is the central symbol here, representing in almost literal terms how history is covered up by climate change, but rarely entirely destroyed. It is a testament to the power of preservation both natural and man-made.
