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"Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom." Proverbs 18:1
| Politics & Religion | Literature & Cinema  |
Independence - July 4, 2010 A couple of days ago, I met an Ogala Sioux in a bar here in New Orleans called The Abbey, where people call her Suzie. Descendent from Sitting Bull, she is an example of what the colonists did to the natives of this continent, in the name of religious freedom. She used to be a prostitute, but now she’s too old for that, and is little but a drunk. Today, I saw her again in that bar while a drunken white customer bragged about having escaped from an alligator, as the bartender took every opportunity he could to try to ridicule Suzie. I asked the white drunk whether he knew why people call her Suzie and why he’d harassed the alligator. He said that maybe Suzie was her name and that the alligator was in a park named for Jean Lafitte. He said that her being a Sioux native of his country meant nothing to him.. 
Times-Picayune - June 22, 2010 For years after Katrina, New Orleans’ main newspaper’s first section mostly reported government and commercial ineptitude in cleaning up after Katrina. Now, it mainly reports government and commercial ineptitude in cleaning up after British Petroleum. But it still repeats media ineptitude. It repeated the Los Angeles Times’ suggestion that the bombing of an Iraqi bank the United States formed to channel international funds into Iraqi reconstruction was a joint effort of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that the bank’s director had said that it wasn’t a protest against government and commercial corruption, ignoring that the Taliban is an Afghan institution while Al Qaeda is an international institution and the possibilities of government and commercial ineptitude. And it repeated the New York Times’ suggestion that Netanyahu’s agreement with Obama to diminish restrictions against supplying food by land to Gaza was a concession, as though Gaza’s only land border besides with Israel weren’t a tiny strip to Egypt, like Israel will let in a sack of potatoes.
Summer washing away - June 21, 2010 Yesterday morning, as I walked into the French Quarter from my tiny temporary efficiency apartment on Chartres Street in Marigny, a little old lady of a kind one can tell loves New Orleans told me that the long hot summer had begun. This morning, as I walked home from an errand on the upriver side of Canal Street, a young black woman asked me whether the rain had fallen up there but understood that my shirt was wet from sweat and laughed at me when I told her I'd just moved back from Massachusetts. This afternoon, as I walked home from the Rouse's market that before Katrina was the oldest A&P store in the world, I dodged rain by waiting until the sky cleared a little before walking on to beneath each next centuries-old balcony.
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? - June 16, 2010 Watching the news, I wonder why the media are complaining about a young woman trying to sail around the world, and why people go to Aruba after a Dutch kid has shown the personality that imprisoned Nelson Mandela in Dutch South Africa for a generation. Living in South Boston, I’ve wondered how the Cradle of Liberty divides itself by race into ghettos, while its version of liberalism is letting a bunch of aging drunk guys form a club from which it excludes women and call it a health club. But maybe it’s because it also calls itself an athletic club, by naming itself after a sports team named after a tribe of natives of this continent the puritans tried to kill, the Chippewas. That young sailor is physically and mentally healthier than any of the professionals saying her parents should have kept her light under a bushel. Boston is similarly silly. Anyway, I’m returning home this week, to a city that doesn’t think Red Sox or Yankees or anyone else should fight each other, to a city that keeps adventure above any division between any people, to a city that doesn’t call its government’s corruption puritan. 
Priorities - June 15, 2010 During Katrina, the media blamed the Army Corps of Engineers for not responsibly maintaining the levees it had maintained for ever a century with two breeches. During Iraq and Afghanistan, the media have blamed Walter Reed Medical Center for not responsibly housing the soldiers it has healed for more than a century with no complaints. Now, the media is blaming the military for misplacing some of the body count at Arlington. Don’t the mass media have something better to do? If they wish to report something about Arlington, they should ask how Robert F. Kennedy has a place there without meeting any of the criteria! Or they should ask how John Kerry met those criteria. 211 is a tiny portion of the patriots people we’ve elected have sent to die.
Suckers watch sports! - June 14, 2010 After more than sixty years of life, my vision isn’t as clear as when the United States Army trained me to hit targets further away than the length of three football fields, with a rifle with no telescopic site. But it remains clear enough to do that, because age commonly diminishes the ability to see up close, but not far away. And, in those terms, far away is a television beyond a coffee table. So, I don’t see how Blue Ray can help me see a film more clearly than HD does, as I don’t hear how more than two speakers improve the fidelity of sound reproduction. In the 1970’s I was a stereo aficionado and spent a lot of money on quadraphonic sound, before I recognized that I have but two ears. Now, my stereo system has five speakers, but only because finding one with fewer is difficult. Similarly, I don’t get how interactivity will improve my appreciation of anything I can play on my television, if its sound and sights are a work of artistic or social integrity. It’s like killing someone with a car by paying more attention to a cell phone conversation than to the view of the road. The French call such as Hollywood directors auteurs, assuming that audiences pay attention.
Evangeline - June 13, 2010 ABC news said that nothing like the BP mess has occurred before in human history. Journalists should have to take enough courses in history and semantics to know that history is only human. But the media, like the electorate of the United States, promoted Al Gore’s kissing his wife as though it were as loving as kissing Sandra Bullock’s kissing Scarlett Johansson. Similarly, the electorate of the United States likes Admiral Allen because he drinks coffee, while ignoring how much time he spends changing clothes while never changing into what the Coast Guard calls ODU’s, operational duty uniforms, work clothes. New Orleans’ black Neville family sings about fat media and politicians "trying to wash us away.” FEMA and the Coast Guard and BP keep helping them try. 
Old slingshots for new - June 12, 2010 Helen Thomas, who has reported from the White House on every United States President since Eisenhower, said the Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.” She said they should go home to Germany and Poland and America. She’s dead wrong. Yes, Israel has been nomadic since before eleven of Israel’s sons drove the other to Egypt and followed him there for his wealth, before and after wandering forty years in flight from Egypt’s effort to regain the wealth. But the land three religions call Holy is neither Palestine nor Israel as neither are Germany or Poland or America. As the contents the world calls America after an Italian do not belong wholly to Italians or the natives of those continents or the governor of Arizona, whose legislative policy would deport her on suspicion of bleaching her hair were her skin as dark as that of the governors of Florida or Louisiana, all land belongs to those who work it. Israel has terrorized its neighbors for millennia. But Helen isn’t helping. Yet consider how the President of the United States, an African American with an Islamic middle name, who campaigned on a promise to sit down and talk with heads of states he called terrorists, responded to that ninety-year-old woman who had served his position for more than a half century, when she spoke as unreasonably as he does. He fired her, the day she said that, without taking the trouble to sit down and talk with her for a second. Obama is clueless, of the politics of his nation or the personalities of anyone anywhere, of reasonable conscience or unreasonable greed. He has no grip.
Bipartisan - June 11, 2010 Sunday, This Week presented Senators Kerry and Cornyn, arguing about BP’s disastrous mess. Republican Cornyn used a baseball metaphor, saying that we can’t always hit grand slams and that a lot of singles can win a game, such as working with Kerry to develop cleaner sources of energy ranging from solar to nuclear. Democrat Kerry’s response was to that Babe Ruth never stepped up to the plate hoping for a single and that he had no interest in working with anyone who did, as though Ruth only hit grand slams, and Kerry could do it all at once. Also Sunday, This Week aired the BP CEO’s PR advertisement three times, once for free for This Week’s roundtable discussion and twice for money for BP’s commercial sponsorship. After the rebuff, Cornyn mostly watched Kerry dig himself into more bigotry, more partisanship.
e difference between a lieutenant and a lieutenant general. Anyway, trusting CNN is at least ignorant, if not stupid. But what can one expect from people who think restless leg syndrome is a disease drugs should cure, who think any doctor can juggle all the side effects of all the drugs the drug companies pay the media to sell us, who think being all Advil is unlike alcoholism or heroin addiction. People are not funny. 
Promises - June 9, 2010 While MSNBC’s Brian Williams exaggerated how clean Pensacola’s beaches are, he reported Sonia Soto Mayor saying that she and her cousins in their Bronx public housing project had hamburger-eating contests at White Castle, as though she knew both poverty and life. Soto Mayor is the first Latina on the United States Supreme Court, while United States public policy is to deny entry into the United States Latinas or Latinos too poor to buy hamburgers anywhere, much less to hire attorneys to help them immigrate or to defend them in courts. Twice, Obama has passed up a supremely fair and balanced black woman with credentials indicating her fairness as both an attorney and a judge, to appoint white women to the Supreme Court of the nation that elected him to pander after his white party leaders.
Wicked web - June 8, 2010 The scariest thing about the “Don’t’s ask; don’t tell.” policy is that it’s federal law. Every witness in a court of law at any level of government in the United States must swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” That law punishes people for telling the whole truth. And a fact is that the first person I knew to have earned the Army Commendation Medal was an obviously gay sergeant from Guam for whom I worked in the 3rd Armored Division in Germany in 1966. The Japanese had tattooed Sergeant Bahiya with a serial number during their occupation of Guam before Pearl Harbor. The West Point graduate whom the Army booted for telling the whole truth raised the question of the inconsistency between the law and his alma mater’s honor code, but the problem goes further than that and beyond a gay World War II veteran assigned to my Army company in Vietnam. It requires soldier to be dishonest, and one lie tends to lead to other lies. And, in 1970, I ran across an obviously gay Army urologist at the 97th General Hospital, the hospital that gained fame in 1981 by its top secret psychological operation debriefing the Iran hostages. And both Sergeant Bahiya and I volunteered for Vietnam as soon as we learned of Johnson’s escalating our forces there. And another fact is that telling the truth didn’t excuse people from the draft during the Vietnam war. I knew soldiers in Vietnam who had tried to dodge the draft by telling their homosexuality. But, despite that, their presence had no adverse effect on mission accomplishment. They did their duty.
Executive privilege - June 7, 2010 CNN’s “news room” anchor Tony Harris tries to feed us more hogwash every day. Now he’s said that we shouldn’t worry about kids playing in BP’s oil but just “hose them off.” The day before he tried to feed us that, Mary Matalan asked a question fundamental to what Tony said immediately after recommending hosing off kids. She asked why BP executives were spending time and money on an advertising campaign to excuse themselves. Tony said they’re doing all they can. That’s tragic if true in all this time. Carville isn’t exaggerating now. And Harris said that while talking with CNN’s Kyra Phillips standing in Woldenberg Park with the steam boat Natchez behind her docked on the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Phillips was talking about how Admiral Allen has his plate full talking to everyone from BP executives to Spike Lee. Allen should do more than entertain BP or Kyra or film directors, as Obama should do more than entertain a man a crippled woman divorced. Everyone, from CNN to Fox, points out that Obama is in want of credibility. To get credibility, he needs to do something, something more substantial than singing Beatles lyrics to his attorney wife and talking on television to Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. He needs to preside over the constitutional government of the United States. Yes, the voters trust Simon Cowell more than they trust the congress they’ve elected, but those voters elected Obama to preside over their government. Until he does that, instead of sucking up to Reid and Pelosi, everyone is in trouble. Afghanistan has defended itself from foreign invasion since Genghis Khan, and Obama isn’t presiding over it or BP, or anything else.
It’s the economy, stupid! - June 6, 2010 CNN’s “news room” anchor Tony Harris has now implied that Louisiana charter boat owners shouldn’t ask BP to pay them to help clean up BP’s mess. Neither charter boats nor BP are charities, and Harris followed that story by reporting the demise of Ford Motor Company’s Mercury brand, and asking about the effect of that on jobs. BP has cost Louisiana many jobs, and its mess surely shall cost Louisiana many more, and many of those jobs are in the charter boat industry. If Obama supports jobs, he should ask CNN about ambiguity, if only because CNN keeps supporting him. Mercury is the mythic messenger of Roman gods, and Tony and CNN are fictional messengers of American idols, like Dr. Phil and Oprah and Fergie and the Clintons.
Perspective - June 5, 2010 Gaza’s land area is less than a tenth of Rhode Island’s, and its population is more than sixty times as dense, and it has nearly no industry. Of the United States’, Rhode Island’s unemployment rate runs a close second to Michigan’s, but less than a tenth of Gaza’s. And Israel says that putting food and helpful people into Gaza threatens the Israeli state. And consider the reason Gaza’s population is so dense. Israel, claiming conciliation, gave Gaza to the Palestinian and opened its borders long enough to fill it for target practice like ducks in a barrel. And the U.S. government supports that while the voters who’ve elected that government support that and wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t and why Palestinians behave desperately. The next aid ship to Gaza bears the name of a college student from Washington Israel crushed for standing between an Israeli bulldozer and the home of a Palestinian dentist in Gaza, and neither the United States’ government nor its mass media bothered to defend her, and they’re nearly never mentioning her name now. Her name is that of Israel’s first love. CNN’s Jack Cafferty, whom CNN’s Wolfe Blitzer shoves in our faces after gaining his fame by reporting the first Persian Gulf war the United States openly led, asked us to blog him whether we think Israel is trying to start a war by its murder in the Mediterranean. The Bible says Israel has started wars for several millennia. And history says it hasn’t stopped. 
Emoticon this - June 4, 2010 The mass media and the “royal watchers” feel sorry for Sarah Ferguson. Oh, poor Fergie, not being able to get by on millions of dollars a year! Is anyone thinking about anything, about ignorant people killing and starving people, all over the world? Gary Coleman said that he wasn’t cut out for show biz. He was cut out to be a short black guy with kidney problems. That’s a long way from being an American idol dancing with the stars. Brian Williams, the Bill Gates network’s evening news anchor, said Coleman wasn’t cut out for rising above his physical shortness of to reach for the stars. Coleman fit that cutout better than Fergie or Williams or Gates are likely ever to grow to do. He had far more integrity than any of them!
Job descriptions - June 3,2010 CNN’s “fact check” liar Josh Levs said that the problem in the latest BP approach is getting the cap to fit the pipe precisely, after BP has said that the cap can’t fit precisely and so will divert not all of the crude. CNN asked BP’s COO why the 400 BP employees who appeared for Obama’s photo opportunity left as soon as Obama was out of sight. I wish to know why they took time off from jobs more necessary than raking sand like an army trainee to help BP and Obama lie. Obama said to the people of Louisiana and America and Earth that the buck stops with him and that the disaster is the largest spill in American history. He hasn’t stopped anything, and it isn’t a spill but a gush and the largest single environmental disaster for all of Earth since whatever killed the dinosaurs, and consider Obama’s promise of bipartisanship. James Carville and Mary Matalan are a bipartisan couple, but they have never agreed in public until this threat to their home, and their agreement is on a plain obvious fact. Those most responsible are doing the least to stop killing pelicans or other fishers or fish. CNN and other mass media are saying that the name for the last BP failure was “top kill”, as though that were a technical term standard in the oil industry and not a term BP’s PR people invented for it. 
How long, O Lord? - June 2, 1010 Diplomatic relations between Israel and Iran began when a king of Iran (then called Persia) helped Israelites return from Iraq (then called Babylon) to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple the Babylonians had robbed and wrecked. Reconstructing Solomon’s temple took longer than the reigns of several kings Persia, and one of those kings stopped the support when he learned the imperialist policies Israel had pursued for centuries, but another king resumed the support long enough to finish the project. Now, Israel and Iran are at loggerheads, and Israel has nuclear submarines threatening polluting the Persian Gulf, to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons to return the threat, while people keep ignoring history to repeat it. And now Israel has attacked an international aid flotilla, claiming self defense. It claims that Israel didn’t kill anyone until the people on the ships tried to defend themselves against the attack, and it claims tiny Gaza is a threat. And CNN's "news room" anchor Tony Harris pointed out to a flotilla sponsor that that the people on the flotilla carried sticks. He called that all fairness in response to her pointing out that the weapons Israel found and photographed were marbles and slingshots a couple of minutes before he cut her off by telling her that he had given her a fair hearing. 
Just the facts, ma’am. - June 1, 2010 Danica Patrick proved herself at the brickyard again this year. Car problems gave her her worst Indianapolis starting position ever, but she fought those problems so well that she finished the race 22 positions ahead of where she’d started. I care nothing for Robin Roberts or GoDaddy.com, but I immensely respect everything Ms. Patrick does at the track, and anyone who doesn’t should stick to Oprah Winfrey and American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. 
Lies, lies, lies - May 31, 2010 Obama said that his daughter Malia knocks on the door of the bathroom while he’s shaving and asks him, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy.” The media are saying that he’s taken ownership of the gush it keeps calling a spill. Obama still prostitutes his children. And CNN reported Obama’s lie as though his daughter couldn’t see on CNN that he hadn’t, as though it were not a lie but indisputable fact, as though his lying shows he cares. What Obama has to come to own is his party, which owns congress while obstructing any equitable reform of government, but doing that would require him to take ownership of his conscience and responsibility for his family and his electorate. Meanwhile, Coastguard Admiral Thad Allen dodges every question, and Obama suggests spreading the National Guard more thinly than it already is from Iraq to Arizona. We the people of the United States didn’t mean to elect an Uncle Tom to preside over us. We meant to elect someone who would stop the pandering to the people Obama keeps bailing out. We meant to elect an honest representative of us the electing people.
The poor robbing the poor - May 30, 2010 Tim Cahill is challenging Deval Patrick for governance of the colony the Puritans founded. Examples of poor people are Deval Patrick and Tim Cahill. Patrick keeps pushing to increase gambling in Massachusetts, and Cahill brags about the growth of the Massachusetts lottery while he ran it. Poorer are the people who throw away their money on such. And poorer are the people who can’t find ways to be productive, people who are willing to help Patrick and Cahill for wages, cheapening everything in the name of economic recovery. They’re like the people stupid enough to get adjustable rate mortgages when rates are at rock bottom. Gambling is a way of taxing desperate people, people most in need of tax decreases, people already too poor. And, worse, it’s a way to push people further into debt, more likely to default on their mortgages, become homeless and commit crimes, from despair. I’m moving to Louisiana next month, maybe more corruption, but less hypocrisy.
Conspiracy - May 29, 2010 The scariest thing I’ve seen since 9/11 was CNN’s defection from brain surgery Sanjay Gupta giving medical advice on the CBS evening news. Next we’ll have former United States congressmen defecting from the electorate for money from anyone. But the main question is what happened to the anti-trust legislation’s promotion of competition. Yes, it’s like price fixing, or any other kind of collusion between companies presumably competing with one another. If two companies have the same employees, the two companies are the same company, in fact. And this is common practice. Yes the main question is how the electorate can fairly balance news. The main question is the First Amendment to the Constitution. It's the essence of democracy. [strawpig]
Smiley faces and nanny tattoos - May 28, 2010 CNN’s main purveyor of waving computer screens in our faces waves his fingers in our faces like Bill Clinton, and MSNBC’s main reporter of the technology failure in the Gulf of Mexico waves red fingernail polish in our faces like Marilyn Monroe, while MSNBC is the Bill Gates network and CNN rightly says people trust it. I don’t have a problem with Marilyn Monroe, given her place in the history of American economics, the affluence of the fifties. But I have a serious problem with Bill Gates, cheapening us with the money the world pays him, duping us into his emoticons. Gates is more like Angelina Jolie than Marilyn Monroe. Gates drives nails in coffins as Jolie drives needles into herself. They keep motivating and killing Norma Jean.
What is isn’t - May 27, 2010 Joe Sestak told Bob Schieffer Sunday morning that someone had asked him months after Obama had offered him a job in his administration in exchange for not running against Arlen Specter and that he had decided to answer the question honestly. Had I been in Schieffer’s position, my next question would have been what questions Sestak chooses to answer dishonestly, and my next question would have been that he answer the question. Sestak still refuses to say what job Obama offered him, and the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and toward its coast is not a spill but a gush. Another Sunday morning lowlight was Sam Donaldson’s saying that Richard Blumenthal should stay in the race but to win would need to talk the electorate into thinking that his being a lying sack of shit is less important than what he lies about.
Post-911 terrorism - May 26, 2010 Who you gonna call? A film I recently saw has a fictional Irish revolutionary seeking redemption for the killing peer pressure motivated him to and saying Muslims should consider what they do to Christian families. Is anyone paying attention? The shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the firecracker bomber! The current approach to anti-U.S. terrorism is to make the United States’ government and people waste resources to defend against any silliness that comes down the pike. George Will, a couple of weeks ago, pointed out that terrorists could bring the United States to their knees by bombing a few cineplexes. The response from the government would be to make people take off their shoes and go through a body scanner before seeing a movie. And most teenagers with backpacks could do that as easily as that guy parked his SUV in midtown Manhattan. Didn’t anyone ask why the Times Square firecracker-lighter asked why law enforcement took so long to catch him or how his extensive Taliban training and financial backing left him so inept? But, at least, he didn’t kill himself! Maybe that’s some improvement. The Irish revolutionary says we should live for our daughters but doesn’t mention what the Israelis are doing to Palestinian families with full support of the United States’ government. Ghost busters?
That smiley button on my phone - May 25, 2010 I don’t remember which network news reporter used the phrase “most potentially devastating” Friday evening, but it was like calling that guy who set off the firecrackers in his SUV the most allegedly would-be Times Square bomber, and it reminded us to ask again whether anyone takes or teaches English courses in high school in the United States anymore. My public high school college prep. English teacher taught his students to speak and to write concisely and precisely, not to misapply words such as “anticipate” to mean expect or “determine” to mean discover or “who” to mean whom or “bring” to mean take (Bring that here; take this there.) and not to use absurd phrases like “quite unique”, but the problem goes beyond semantics. People who use the words “truly” and “really” and say they’re not lying to us without our asking whether they are are people who often deliberately speak falsely and unrealistically and often consciencelessly lie, and those people are most people and include most news reporters if not all, people on whom we depend for appropriate use of the First Amendment.
Veterans - May 24, 2010 Why is Blumenthal catching media flak for lying about his service in Vietnam while Kerry keeps support from the same media after calling himself a war hero? Kerry tolerated four months in Vietnam, a third of an ordinary tour and no longer than he had to suffer to recommend himself for enough purple hearts to bail out, after he recommended himself for a Silver Star for killing a wounded fleeing soldier by shooting him in the back before he called soldiers who did their jobs murderers after he’d bailed! Kerry is like Secretary of State Clinton, who said she was under sniper fire in Bosnia while a little girl was giving her flowers, and the mass news media apparently have forgiven those phonies.
The party party - May 23, 2010 Much of Scott Brown’s attraction to the Tea Party is that his daughter was an American Idol contestant. The Tea Party claims to be conservative, but its general values head in the direction of permitting abortions for no other reason than to avoid taking responsibility for the child, or stretch marks. The Tea Party, whether or not it supports Brown’s truck, would keep people desperate to earn their living but unable to afford attorneys out of the clubs of young people who care for nothing honest, out of their arrogant affluent parties, out of the American dream. The Tea Party promotes the worst promotions of both main U.S. political parties, the worst of the right hand not knowing or caring what the left hand is doing, the worst of liberalism and conservatism, the least worthy values, the worst.
God bless America - May 22, 2010 The Columbia Broadcasting System, the media outlet named for an Italian illegal immigrant under commission from Spain, said Wednesday that the oceans aren’t British Petroleum’s but the American People’s. Amerigo Vespucci was also an Italian illegal immigrant, and St. Paul was an illegal immigrant to the Holy Land, and he founded the Roman Church before the Roman Empire fell before the Roman Church fucked little children. If anyone can tell me how, when Jesus said becoming like little children was the narrow gate to heaven, he meant we should stick our dicks in their little asses and mouths, and that we should let people who suffer that lead his church, I’ll retire from the World Wide Web. The junior President Bush took politics into pretentions of religion. Since then, other politicians have jumped on that bandwagon, and the media have capitalized on it. Now, everyone is praying for everything, especially on talk shows after a disaster of any kind, but also to win the lottery, anything! What happened to faith in Jesus, in his saying that God knows what we need before we do, and in the Lord’s Prayer? And why doesn’t anyone care that the Supreme Court of the land of the free includes no protestant? And why don’t Protestants, such as Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, protest? Yes, of course, the answer is hypocrisy! 
Shots in the dark - May 21, 2010 If Kagan isn’t anti-military, why did she limit the ability to recruit Harvard students into the military because of what Congress and Clinton did? If that was an honest mistake, how did she graduate summa cum laude from two Ivy League universities? That is, how can anyone expect her to be sincere? The charge against that guy who failed to bomb Times Square is attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, but the weapons were not chemical or biological or radiological. The electorate, as I keep saying, should be more attentive. Another example of narrowness of attention is that the mass news media frequently point out that Arlen Specter was a Republican before he was a Democrat. I pay much attention and have never heard the media point out that he was a Democrat before he was a Republican. The liberal media tried to let Saddam Hussein off the hook because his didn’t use chemical or biological weapons often or radiological weapons ever, although he tried to use all. Specter gained Republican support by pushing his magic bullet theory to cover up how Kennedy was killed. Kagan says she went to Harvard for the “simple joy of teaching”, as though what she taught was irrelevant to why. Neither she nor Specter care about anything more than their arrogance.
Afghanistan without kings or communists or theology:
| Dust, a novel
This film implies that white communists fronted Nelson Mandela and that he was sexually promiscuous, more than forty years after J. Edgar Hoover used the same approach against the junior Martin Luther King, and less than three years before Dirty Harry implied that a white soccer player saved South Africa.
Nixon - a 1995 film This film begins with the correct caveat that it isn't the whole truth and may wholly misrepresent any truth, and the next screen quotes the evangel Matthew quoting Jesus, implying that Nixon sold his soul. CNN calls Oliver Stone a controversial director, after his wife has turned the American Broadcasting Company's evening news into an all Advil Oprah drugh opera, like Stone's movies. Whether or not Nixon told his mother to think of him as her faithful dog, a fact Stone tries to soap or drug is that Nixon ended Johnson's insane war. History allows no excuse for either Nixon's hubris or stones. Or Hirohito's or Truman's or Kennedy's or Hoover's. History allows no excuse for Hitler or Netanyahu. Democracy needs objective reporting from ABC to Hollywood. Stone is at least as contra-factual as Nixon.
Avatar - a 2009 film The weirdest thing about this film is that nearly every mass media critic said its point was commercial technological superiority. The point fair watchers find from this film is that technology should serve democracy, not superiority or demagoguery, not alienation. Families risk death to flee Mexico to pick fruit for the free and legally republican citizens of the United States. And, instead of welcoming them, the people too lazy to do such work create laws to keep them out. They say that those people who can't afford immigration lawyers should not be allowed to attend their tea party. They call fruit pickers drug dealers to get them out of their faces. America, the land illegal immigrants stole from its natives, allows a population that sucks up to advertizing that it should be all Advil, while calling people not on Face Book degenerate.
Network - a 1976 film Netflix, a generation after this film appeared, bills it as a prediction. What it is is a fact of human life, recognizing that Jewish gold and Arabic black gold are no different in their effect on the ecumenical economy, the power of abstraction to make humans value hubris more than their lives. It sold Archie Bunker and Tide as it sells Oprah Winfrey and Tylenol.
The Devil's Arithmetic - a 1999 film The Israelis should remember the holocaust when they do what they're doing to the Palestinians. Arithmetic is that the Israelis keep building settlements while the United States tells them to stop building but never to dismantle. The "com" in compassion means with, and so compassion is a two way street and not a path of vengeance, and the Palestinians are more Semitic than the Israelis and neither German nor Egyptian. Nothing is more holy than home, and God made the land three religions call holy the homeland of people of many religions, long before crusades or jihads or the unprovoked Jericho slaughter. And the land of the free calls the Israeli theocracy, Irgun terrorizing Fatah, democracy.
The Celestine Prophecy - a 1993 novel and a 2006 film The novel is one of the few books whose promise bore out so poorly from its beginning that we couldn’t finish reading it. And the film was more inane, beginning with someone saying he was a history teacher responding to someone saying he was an archeologist saying that the early church had buried the title prophecy in the 6th century A.D., by suggesting that Franciscans might have done it. Francis began his life in the 12th century A.D. The title prophecy says that the present millennium shall begin with people’s recognizing the violence that has pervaded history and stopping it. Instead, the new millennium has begun with the historical inaccuracy of the Da Vinci Code making it the most selling novel of the first decade of this millennium. But maybe we can take hope from that. The prosperity of the last decade of the second millennium after Christ caused the recession of the first decade of the third millennium after Christ. We hope that that might force teachers and students and everyone else to work for all living for awhile.
The Ten Commandments – a 1966 film This film begins with its producer saying its basis is scripture and historical documents and that Moses’ accomplishment was to free people from slavery Next, the film misquotes the Torah and says Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses because she drew him from water. “Moses” is from Egyptian for “son”. Dan Brown admits The Da Vinci Code to be fiction and still has nothing on Cecil B. DeMille for hogwash misrepresenting the Bible and history, and so we have to ask why this film raised no Roman Catholic outrage. We’re thinking that maybe it’s sexism, since nearly no female character in it shows any purpose other than to fawn over men to give them sons or suck. But the next question, after how the Motion Picture Association of America ignores its violence to rate it G, is why no Judaic outrage. We’re thinking the Chosen might still be choosing the golden calf over the Ten Commandments, with help called Christian. The Bible says the Israelites did to the Midianites, the people it says took Moses in and gave him their king’s daughter, worse than what Egypt did to them and worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews. Maybe Israel let the film slide because it glosses over that and what Israel keeps trying to do to the Palestinians.
On the Trail of the Assassins - a 1978 book The author, Jim Garrison, Orleans Parish District Attorney, the only person to prosecute anyone for the assassination of J. F. K., is as crazy as Ann Coulter and the persons he accuses, if he wrote the book. The book falls apart in many ways incidental to Garrison's hubris or paranoia. One way is by its inclusion of the terms “false sponsor” and “sheep-dipping”. The people Garrison tracked must have been sheep-dipped false sponsors, as he must have been on the other side of the coin his book flips like dice. The people he accuses range from the CIA to Johnny Carson, as though that huge body of people could have kept such complicity from the huge body of people with whom they associate, and so on to all of Earth. Another way is in its assignment of motive, a factor essential to any prosecution in court. Garrison would have us believe that hundreds of people in a dozen government agencies conspired against Kennedy on the basis of their belief that he was going to prevent the war in Vietnam. Besides the question of why anyone wouldn’t like that, a fact is that Kennedy sent more troops to Vietnam than Eisenhower had. We suspect a more obvious motive for that assassination, far beyond New Orleans. Kennedy killed those people at the Bay of Pigs, by changing the original CIA plan and refusing to accept responsibility. Kennedy changed United States relations with the Soviet Union from checkers to the verge of nuclear destruction of all life. So, a few genuinely concerned persons at top levels of the Soviet and United States governments killed him to prevent that destruction. The false sponsors must have been after the fact. We have no doubt that the assassination was a conspiracy, as we agree that Oswald couldn’t have done all the shooting. But the human resources management of the deed must have been more constrained, leaving the smoke and mirrors the book sells to people as crazy as Garrison.
Idocracy - a 2005 film This film predicts a future when people try to grow crops with Gatorade, where the hero saves the world by watering the crops. In the present, people calling themselves environmentalist are trying to save the world by putting corn into gas tanks, while people around the world are starving. That hero's name is Not Sure, while in this day and age people claiming to be smart say they're say they're not sure, when truth they know is than they simply don't know. Those people are the people who say we should do something for the people of Darfur while saying we shouldn't have done anything for the people of Iraq. They are people like Mitt Romney and John Kerry, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Those people are the people who put criminals above persons who haven't had a chance to choose life better than crime and say their choice is compassionate, liberal. As this film indicates, those people are already taking their world into the dust this film predicts.
Rendition – a 2007 film Tolstoy was a communist before Marx and Lenin rationalized a way for Stalin to give Joseph McCarthy an excuse to terrorize as Hitler did. This film says what War and Peace says, that the cause of all war is the first person who obeys the orders of megalomaniacs like Napoleon and Hitler, and that the way to peace is recognizing that all of life is one family. And it says that the problem between Jews and Muslims is that Mohamed retaliated against Joshua’s violation of the Ten Commandments. It says what the fireman at the Children’s march said, when he refused to roll water unjustly.
Across the Universe – a 2006 Film The Beatles are a microcosm. Kids sing about holding hands until they acquire power, and then they let go of their friends’ hands and their own minds, for what Solomon called vanity. Like Greece and Rome, the United States were a world power before they alienated their kids in Birmingham and Vietnam, and those children turned their nation into an escape from everything. The Beatles said they named themselves for the Beatitudes, before they turned to drugs, or after they rode them, to compromise, for fame. Now, Lennon is dead, and McCartney is white bread, and the First World is all Advil. Now, Lenin is dead, while Liverpool and the Irish suffer. Viva Las Vegas, the ways of the world. Irish and Iraqi suffer for no reason beyond the I in their names, as Israel suffers for no reason more than that humans prefer bigotry and drugs to the Ten Commandments, from the diamond minors in South Africa to the diamond merchants in New York, to you inactivists.
The Cotton Club - a 1984 film Our favorite lines in that film are from a white couple entering the club. The white man says, “At least they don’t let niggers in here!” The white woman asks, “They don’t let them into their own club?” So Richard Gere gets billing over Gregory Hynes, two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now two more decades have passed, making more than forty years. Bootleggers like the Kennedy’s owned Harlem in the roaring twenties, and now the Clintons have moved in! How long, O Lord? Now we’re engaged in a great civil war, to see whether Obama can run the Clintons out of Harlem, and the Whitehouse. Cotton is white, while pickers are black, and now black has another fight to pick.
The Order of the Phoenix - a 2007 film Harry Potter answered a question most of us think impossible. The way to world peace is through the understanding that is friendship. Nearly everyone claiming a religion claims it as a superstition, although every founder of every remaining major religion argued mainly one point, the sharing essential to prosperity, loving one’s neighbor. Terror isn’t Islamic, as it isn’t Mosaic or Christian. Terror comes from such as Crusades and Jihads. Terror is in what Joshua did and in what Osama Bin Laden is doing and in what Hitler did and in what Israel is doing. It's in what every bigot does, and it won’t stop until all of us stop trying to blame it on Moses or Muhammad or Jesus, on everyone but ourselves. It won’t stop until we stop making excuses to covet our neighbors’ land, until we stop perverting the teachings of the founders of our religions from the Rishi’s to Muhammad, into ignorance of them. Only then shall we have something worth fighting for, and stop fighting. The essential weapon for peace is not secret. It’s plain.
The Last Hangman – a 2005 film Tolstoi said, in War and Peace, that the cause of the Napoleonic Wars was the first French corporal. This film says the same, that the cause of killing is rationalizing some excuse for it, be it vengeance or following orders, or supporting one’s country, or one’s family, or oneself. This film also says that we’re all in that craziness together, but it does not loudly enough say that, were each of us to refuse, it would all stop. Snail darters would die of their own accord, and they and all else could rest in peace. That Pierrepoint fellow was not the last hangman.
Meditation XVII - a 1623 sermon John Donne, not Jack Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway, said this: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Doctor Zhivago - a 1965 film This film is about the infinites shapes of snow.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley - a 2006 film This film shows that Ireland and Iraq are similar far beyond the fact that the names of both countries begin with "Ir" when written in the Roman alphabet. Ireland means anger land, and anger dominates both countries. And so does greed. When an Irishman told us that the strife between Catholics and Protestants in his country has nothing to do with religion, we didn't understand. This film explains. And neither is the strife between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq religious, and nor is Israel.
Rebel Without a Cause - a 1955 film "I think a father knows his son."
Dear Frankie - a 2004 film Why won't Shane come back, and why does Rhett not give a damn for Scarlett, and why does Denisov not marry Sonia? The answer is that they do, if Frankie and Bonny let them! That’s the best of life.
Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid – a 2006 book Although Mr. Carter writes from the point of view and with the tone of his claim to Christianity, sometimes uses words and phrases particular to popular expression of persons calling themselves Christians, and occasionally points out facts particular to such persons, this book is nearly all factual. That is, rather than expressing opinions, it mostly points out circumstances and events verifiable through public records. Yet, it has a reputation for being controversial. Of course the reason is that few people bother to differentiate between facts and opinions, because most people are as opinionated and biased as some say Jimmy Carter is, and few people bother to research public facts, much less see for themselves, as Mr. Carter has. In fact, if the book has any shortcoming, it’s that Mr. Carter doesn’t succinctly point out the most significant facts defining the situation. Those facts are: that Israelites or Israelis have been oppressing Philistines or Palestinians since the battle of Jericho, an onslaught with no provocation whatsoever; that Israelis have killed far more people and broken far more promises than Palestinians have; and that the 1967 Israeli state was not one nation until 1949. Moreover, if that former head of government of the United States of America were to carry religious metaphors in defense of the United States of America, he might have pointed out how David defeated Goliath’s superior physical size. Now, Israel has nuclear weapons and air superiority through military aid from first world nations, as European nations took superior weapon technology on the Crusades. So, now, Islam is continuing Saladin's jihad, against the world whose trade center is now Wall Street. All a president needs to do to stop the terror is be fair. Smart is truth, beauty.
The War - a 1994 film Both of these works show that children could keep us from wars, were parents to give them the key, at ground level. They show that pride is the deadliest of sins, and that stupid is as stupid does. Intelligence is telling in, not jerking out. Responsibility is sharing. It's understanding.
The Sound of Music - a 1965 film This film, set at the beginning of World War II, screened at the beginning of the United States presidency's escalation of Truman's advisory mission in Vietnam into a full scale war Nixon would would end. Three years earlier, West Side Story screened, asking the same questions. One film is about nations, while the other is about gangs while the only difference is scale, while presidents have ignored the politics of both. Both films, in retrospect, should cause us to ask why they didn't change humanity's prospects. That is, we should ask why we care more now about American Idols than about the ordinary people of Iraq or Darfur. Both films have iconic weaknesses. In one, a poor nun saves a family of aristocrats, and the other's title suggests that west is better than east. But the two share an eminently importantly iconic question. How do you solve a problem like Maria?
Flags of our Fathers - two 2006 films The second of these is Letters from Iwo Jima. The first looks at Iwo Jima from the United States side, and the second looks at that island from the Japanese side, and both show flagging responsibility, of fathers. Anyone seriously considering these films in tandem with the rest of life will ask why so few humans look at the Israeli/Palestinian situation from both sides, and whether Stephen Spielberg does! Maybe he does, but when shall humanity in general learn that compassion is the only salvation?
The Time of Your Life - a 1948 film This film set the theme for the best of Hollywood since. We had a problem with its epitaph, when the bar owner took the sign out of the window inviting folks in to be themselves and tore it in two, saying that enough is enough. But then we remembered that integrity is always exactly enough and shouldn't need a reminder! What's your dream?
Shine – a 1996 film Nothing is more important than music. Nothing is more important than the harmony of inspiration. This film says that. The horror of the holocaust lives on, from the horror of the captivity. This film tries to deliver a lesson to the Germans and the Egyptians, and the Israelis, all of us. The holy land is hardly holy, despite how the sun shines on Karn Hattin. Why don't Christians visit the Mount of Beatitudes? In the sixties, when the great society sent millions of Americans to kill Vietnamese doing nothing but trying to live their lives as best they could, a popular song borrowed a melody from Rachminov s second piano concerto and assigned it the lyrics “When I was young, I never needed anyone. Making love was just for fun. Those days are done.” Rachmaninov’s third piano concert is more difficult to play than his second while his second, played more in the film, is more sweet. And popular music is more sweet now, in the war on terror that has made Bethlehem a combat zone. How is Christ's birthplace in the shadow of death? Astrology, psychology, stars and butterflies, what life comes down to is common sense. This film is quite lovely.
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond - a 1931 poem A Harvard poet wrote that poem between the two world wars, between his imprisonment in France for driving an ambulance and German imprisonment of France for nothing. Films we find near to that poem are The Painted Veil and The Tiger and the Snow. Both films show what love between two people should be, as they show what love is. Imagine Nero walking the Great Wall, if you wish such as that. We all must remember that our enormous room is a small roe's chest. Otherwise we cannot love.
Paradise Road - a 1997 film "Oh, my dear, that's one to tell your grand children. . . . Don't worry: I love God, even though I sometimes don't know what he's doing. . . . Love is like a flame; it burns and is visible to all. . . . None of us will ever leave Sumatra. . . . Amen."
Bound for Glory – a 1943 autobiography This book is exactly an autobiography. Other works in that genre try to explain the effect of the life in question on others’ lives. This book tells succinctly how Woody Guthrie grew to produce his effect. Woody and his story are works of dynamic integrity. We need to listen, closely. Woody Guthrie was communist, in the sense that we all should share God's bounty. He was not a Marxist or a Leninist or a Stalinist. Nor was he a Washingtonist or a Jeffersonist. Nor was he an Amerigo Vespugian or a Paulist or any other kind of excuse for a name.
Reflections of a Cold Warrior – a 1996 memoire Richard Bissell was the principal administrator of the Marshall Plan, and the project chief for developing the U2 and what President Kennedy turned into the blood bath at Bay of Pigs. This memoir of Bissell's, published after his death, elegantly defers to the prerogatives of the presidency of the United States, but the facts are plain. Kennedy’s overweening might have made the cold war hot. He might have killed us all, were he not killed. Mr. Bissell is a world hero.
Jude the Obscure - an 1895 novel "Because we are too many."
Babel - a 2006 film With great technical and aesthetic prowess, this film shows how cheap and cowardly and stupid humans have become, the abstraction of the word “humanitarian”. Many of its details and time lines don’t work together, but neither do many humans attend much to what’s in their faces, rationalizing private greed against public concern. Journalists and politicians and doctors and lawyers keep trying to take advantage of the weakness of humans trying to be as suicidal, self-destructive, as they are. One of the twelve tasks of Hercules was to kill the Titan Antaeus, the difficulty being that Antaeus regained his strength whenever he was down to Earth. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps proving itself Herculean. But most important are our children. Note the dedication.
The Milagro Beanfield War – a 1988 film This was a Sundance production. It’s set in New Mexico, the state of the united ones whose flag represents the sun. Its theme is the power of the people, and it shows how humans can unite for the best of their life and love, against the power of humans who unite for smaller selves. But it waves a rabbit dead to excuse firing to frighten humans. Beans contain as much protein as animal meat, leaving killing cattle less practical than killing trees for golfing. Humans eat like pigs, but we work harder at it. This film promotes considering the lilies of the field, while it promotes eating sparrows. It does not pass through the eye of the needle. But it helps.
Hollywood Ending – a 2002 film In this film, Woody Allen closes his career by admitting the cause of his success, that he has catered to hypochondriacs, people who seek only pity. Aristotle pointed out the technical difficulties of the staging of his time, and the French called those limitations an ideal and adhered to that absurdity long after Shakespeare freed the rest of us, and long after Eisenstein offered us Shakespeare’s best wishes, and now their pride is in ennui. Cinema, at its best, goes straight to our hearts by opening our eyes, not by giving us more weak excuses. In this film, Allen admits he has nothing on Eastwood. And cinema is still beginning. To show, to move. Just see.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – a 1940 novel Richard Wright said that Ms. McCullers accepted blacks. More recently, linguists have called the non-white grammar and diction of blacks the “negro non-standard dialect”. African Americans no longer wish to be called Negroes, and Ms. McCullers did not accurately represent their dialect. But she did faithfully represent the lonely hearts of the down and out! Can Mick ever rediscover her music?
The Last Samurai - a 2003 film What’s the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist? This film is a story of redemption, a story of love for the best and worst of us. If one can divorce oneself from merchandising and violence, this film is beautiful. In its beginning, the protagonist is a soldier who failed to die in battle, a person dead of his past and living without future. In the end, his horse’s head is above his, as he bows to “the peace all of us seek and few of us ever find.”
The Elephant Man - a 1980 film This film, also in black and white, decades after The Wizard of Oz made color mainstream in motion pictures, shows also that much slowly changes. The 0000's, the 1420's, the 1930's, the 2000's, the same. We try to put others down to set ourselves up. And so we fail miserably.
War and Peace – an 1869 novel Tolstoy, while fathering thirteen children with a woman he married when she was half his age, is mostly about his love for her. The last hundred-some pages of the book he wrote while she bore most of them try to justify the book otherwise, as an essay on war regardless of peace. And, maybe so, he died leaving his wife, the mother of his children, to justify his thinking. Many of us live and die that way. We ignore our life.
"Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry, |
| We must remember Rachel at the well ! |
