And reason…teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. ~John Locke
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them. ~William Faulkner
If we emphasize the life and works of our greatest contributors . . . people will come to realize that moral courage is bravery of the highest type, and America will be called the “Champion of Peace”. ~Senator Spark Matsunaga
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. ~Friedrich Nietzche
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland. ~John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society, 1976
There is little to be feared from the standard picture of a totalitarian society in which ‘cogs,’ who are watched by Big Brother or his equivalent, carry out orders emanating from the top. Such a society would collapse in inefficiency. What is infinitely more fearsome is the capacity of a dictatorship to use the principle of competition to organize terror and murder. ~Ronald Wintrobe: The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 328.
Freedom… refer[s] to a social relationship among people — namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect. ~Thomas Sowell
If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job - yours and mine — to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America’s might. ~Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds. ~Samuel Adams
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions… ~Gore Vidal
The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state. ~David McGowan
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. ~Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger 1916.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. ~Bertrand Russell
Fear always springs from ignorance. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear follows crime, and is its punishment. ~Voltaire
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery. ~Jonathan Swift
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. ~Eugene Debs
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other. ~Bertrand Russell
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous. ~Carl Sagan
Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children’s pastime like mere highway robbery. ~Stephen Crane
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. ~Edward R. Murrow
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. ~Marshall McLuhan
From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. ~William Blum
God grant, that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface, and say, “This is my country.” ~Benjamin Franklin to David Hartley, 4 December 1789
Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations. ~Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837
“What is the great American sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of “concentrated indignation” as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed….The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin.” ~Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922
Dec. 22, 2005
Carlos’s Way
Would it be baseball? Would it be the drug trade?
Growing up in the 1980’s and ’90’s in the notorious Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Carlos Carela, a good student and a fine athlete, found himself drawn, almost without thinking, to the easy money and seedy excitement of the narcotics environment that has flourished for many long years in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.
People shopped for drugs in Washington Heights nearly as casually as people shopped for clothes in a mall. Drug dealing was a common way of making a living. “That was the reality of the neighborhood,” Carlos said. “It was what young men did, and I guess I was following in quick pursuit. You know, if you live in that environment, the drug dealer is not someone you fear. He’s not the cobra who comes out of the alley – he’s the guy you grew up with. He’s the person who, when you’re hungry, feeds your family.”
Carlos’s older brother, Andy – Anderson Ramon Carela – was a drug dealer, and the neighborhood guys more or less assumed that Carlos would follow in his brother’s footsteps.
As Carlos pointed out, “It was hard to resist if you’re 14 years old and somebody is offering you $400 to take a bag and just put it someplace, like a phone booth. If you’re caught, you’re a minor. You’re fine. You don’t look at it as a bad thing. You take the bag and drop it off, and then you go home and watch cartoons. The older guys would start noticing who the smart kids were. The ones they could depend on.”
The most normal thing in the world, said Carlos, was for young boys from a poor background to be tempted by the big money that the various drug crews were making. “You see people driving Range Rovers and pearl Lexuses and Mercedes, and then moving out of the neighborhood and buying homes in the Dominican Republic, and they didn’t go to college. You just kind of figure,
‘Okay, how can I step into that?’ ”
But Carlos also had other interests. He was a cracker-jack baseball player and he got good grades in school. He saw sports, or maybe some sort of academic career, as a possible alternative.
The wake-up call for Carlos came in the worst possible way. His brother Andy, who had never wanted Carlos to become involved in the drug trade, was shot to death in a park in the Bronx in October 1993.
Murder was nothing new to the neighborhood. “There were a lot of guys on the block getting killed,” said Carlos. “But you never thought it would happen to someone so close to you, someone you thought was invincible. And that was my reality check. I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m not that smart. I can’t outsmart everyone.’ Because, you know, I thought my brother was actually smarter than me.”
The Carela family was in terrible trouble after Andy’s death. Carlos had two sisters, and a mother who was all but numb with grief and struggling economically. She cleaned office buildings when jobs were available and stared at the miserable prospect of welfare when they weren’t.
Carlos, 16 at the time, fended off neighborhood expectations that he would try to avenge his brother’s death. “People were saying, ‘Hey, man, they smoked your brother. You ain’t going to do anything?’ ”
What he did was play more and more baseball, escaping as best he could into dreams of a pro career. And he pushed himself to study harder.
The discipline and the hard work paid off in the form of a scholarship that enabled him to go to Vanderbilt University, an environment that was about as far from his Washington Heights neighborhood as he could imagine.
[Full disclosure: the scholarship was awarded by the Posse Foundation, a wonderful organization founded and led by my ultimate hero, my wife Deborah Bial.]
Homesick on the Nashville campus, and aware that he had made a decision that probably meant the end of his hopes for a baseball career, Carlos nevertheless stuck it out.
“That scholarship changed my life – forever,” he said.
He graduated in 1999, having majored in both human and organizational development and economics. The next thing he knew, he was working for Lehman Brothers and strolling onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
“I remember walking onto that floor for the first time,” Carlos said. “It reminded me of walking onto the field of Shea Stadium, or Yankee Stadium, like I did when I played on all-star teams as kid.”
For the past four years he’s been at Bloomberg LLP, in a department that manages institutional accounts. There was almost a sense of wonder in his voice as he said, “I’m here. It’s been an incredible opportunity and I’ve recognized that from the day that I walked in these doors.”
He’s 28 now, and plays a little semi-pro ball. At 6-3 and 235 pounds, he still looks very much the athlete.
Carlos also spends a fair amount of time talking to kids growing up in circumstances similar to his in Washington Heights. “It’s important,” he said, “that they not lose sight of the fact that they’re capable of much more than their environment would suggest. A lot of the time we allow ourselves to be defined by our environment, because we don’t know any better. Someone has to let the kids know that there’s an environment that is better than the one that is immediately accessible to them.
“Going away to Vanderbilt, to me, was my first exposure to that. I was like, wow, there’s a whole world out here.”
Carlos Carela had options, good ones and bad ones. He’s a hero in my book because he made his choices like a champion.
“I’ve done okay,” he said. “I’ve worked hard. I studied. But, you know, I wasn’t the brightest kid. Some of the brightest kids were among those who have been lost, like my brother.”
DPIC’s Year End Report Reveals Record Low Death Sentences,
Legislative Action, and Supreme Court Restrictions
WASHINGTON, DC – As the U.S.’s use of the death penalty continues to decline and support for the alternative sentence of life without parole increases, the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) 2005 Year End Report projects that fewer than 100 death sentences will be handed down in the United States during 2005. Based on data from three-quarters of the year, DPIC projects that 96 people will be sentenced to death this year, down over 60% since the late 1990s and the fewest number of death sentences in one year since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
“The year 2005 may be remembered as the year that life without parole became an acceptable alternative to the death penalty in the U.S.,” said Richard Dieter, DPIC Executive Director. “Death sentences are down dramatically while the use of life without parole has increased. More states are adopting this alternative as death penalty problems persist.”
Among the most significant developments of 2005, New York’s legislature refused to reinstate the death penalty after the state’s highest court struck it down, leaving life without parole as the punishment for capital murder. Texas became the 37th out of 38 death penalty states to adopt the sentencing option of life without parole for jurors, and the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles, thereby reducing the death sentences for 71 offenders to life. The Court also rebuffed lower courts for allowing racial bias in jury selection and ineffective assistance of counsel.
The public’s shift away from the death penalty was also evident in public opinion polls. An October 2005 Gallup Poll found 64% in support of the death penalty, the lowest level in 27 years. A 2005 CBS News Poll found that when respondents were given the sentencing options of the death penalty, life without parole, or a long prison sentence with a chance of parole for persons convicted of murder, only 39% chose the death penalty, 39% chose life with no parole, and 6% said a long sentence.
Executions rose slightly in 2005 (up from 59 to 60), but are still down 39% compared to their peak in 1999. Despite the nation carrying out its 1000th execution since capital punishment was reinstated, the majority of states with the death penalty did not carry out any executions in 2005. The size of death row declined to 3,383 people, down about 7% since 2001.
In the states, Illinois continued its moratorium on executions for a sixth year, and New Jersey’s ban on executions continued as the state reviews its method of execution. Also in New Jersey, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that would establish a moratorium on executions and implement a study of capital punishment. Kansas’ death penalty remained in limbo as the Supreme Court weighed its constitutionality. The New Mexico House of Representatives passed a bill to abolish the death penalty, and in Massachusetts, legislators resoundingly defeated the governor’s proposal for a “foolproof” death penalty. California and North Carolina both approved legislative commissions to study their respective death penalty systems.
As the number of people freed from death row increased to 122 and investigators uncovered a series of cases in which an innocent person was likely executed, conservative political leaders, judges, religious leaders, and victims’ family members joined a growing number of prominent voices criticizing the death penalty in 2005. In addition, new editorial writers spoke out against the death penalty. The Birmingham News announced that “after decades of supporting the death penalty, the editorial board no longer can do so” based on practical and ethical reasons.
The 2005 Year End Report is the 11th of its kind published by DPIC, a non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on capital punishment.
Travon Williams, son of executed co-founder of the Crips gang Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, during Williams’ funeral in Los Angeles.
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with Harold C. Wilson. Convicted of three murders in 1989, Wilson spent more than 17 years in prison, most of that time on death row. In 1999, Wilson’s death sentence was overturned due to ineffective counsel. However, his murder convictions were not - and he remained on death row. Finally, on October 31st, 2005, Wilson’s final trial began. DNA evidence was presented for the first time. On November 15th, he was acquitted of all charges and set free.
In an extended conversation, Wilson talks about his imprisonment, his trial, his soldier son, who is serving in Iraq, and his daughter, who is a prison guard in Arizona.
Many callers have inquired how they can help Harold Wilson. He can be contacted at haroldcwilson@gmail.com, and donations can be sent to Harold C. Wilson, PO Box 19709, Philadelphia, PA 19143
In violence, we forget who we are. ~Mary McCarthy
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Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. ~Murray Edelman
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Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid. ~Bob Dylan
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You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity. ~Roman Polanski
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When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing. ~Dwight David Eisenhower
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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. ~Jonathan Swift
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As long as we hate, there will be people to hate. ~George Harrison
Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517
Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12
Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah
Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18
Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a
Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23
Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien
Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5
[Thanks to Georgianne for the quotes above via Tom at ICH]
I am attempting to consolidate this site with my main site, donkey o.d. What you would normally find here you will now find there. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you!
December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
It Takes a Potemkin Village
By FRANK RICH
WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don’t get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers’ fictions to discern what’s really happening. What we’re seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration’s stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of “major combat operations” in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.” Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, “Plan for Victory,” multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather “Queer Eye” stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite the repetition of the word “victory” 15 times in the speech itself - Americans believed “Plan for Victory” far less than they once did “Mission Accomplished.” The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has “a clear plan for victory in Iraq.” Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush’s “Plan for Victory” speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - “We will never accept anything less than complete victory” - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week’s Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar “was primarily led by Iraqi security forces” - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle’s front lines, as “completely wrong.” No less an authority than the office of Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military’s inadequate leadership, equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the “Plan for Victory” show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that the administration’s main stated motive for the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was “an unclassified version” of the strategy in place since the war’s inception in “early 2003.” But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text “usually hidden from public view.” What turned up was the name of the document’s originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this “National Strategy” before its public release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the “Plan for Victory” speech fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm’s way are desperate for Arabic translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam’s W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help disseminate happy talk to his own country’s press to further the illusion that the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group’s articles (e.g., “The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq”) are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush’s speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We don’t have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers’ money for various Lincoln Group operations, and it can’t get any facts? Though the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey “was a founder and active participant in Lead21,” a Republican “fund-raising and networking operation” - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web site - and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business address identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from “Syriana” or “Glengarry Glen Ross.” While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for “the facts,” what we know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of “Lay, DeLay and Abramoff.”
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it’s failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer’s brother), so the White House doesn’t exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last weekend’s Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a “routine foot patrol.” As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen’s loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn’t know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice’s daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president’s latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the “success” stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don’t stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released last week was Mr. Bush’s approval rating for the one area where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his rating on Iraq. It’s a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.
One perspective during the early aftermath of Lennon’s murder
Speaking Personally; A LEGACY OF WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
By ELIZABETH FLYNN (NYT)
Published: January 11, 1981
I WAS 14 years old when Yoko, Anne’s cat, drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool. Anne, my best friend, was heartbroken. That was 1970. Now it is 1981. John Lennon is dead. I didn’t cry, and neither did Anne, although I did call her in Boston, where she now lives, to share with her my grief and disgust. We have both changed. The death of Sid Vicious and the appearance of Devo and Elvis Costello mean more to me now.
Enough of that. The papers already have related enough anecdotes to fill a book called ”Where Were You When JL Was Shot?” The recent re-emergence of John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, into the public eye was newsworthy in itself. Articles in Playboy, The Soho News, Esquire and other publications are proof of that. Lennon was back on the road, on his way to another round in the rink.
Now I don’t deny that Lennon held a ”utopian identification,” as Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice shortly after the killing; however, I do wonder about the controversial side of him, which seemed buried in the news coverage. Let’s face it: Lennon was as famous for his music as he was notorious for his bout with drugs and his bed-ins.
The New York Post called him ”the Beatles’ driving force.” President Carter said in a a statement: ”John Lennon helped to create the music and the mood of our time.”
Did anyone ever ask Lennon how he felt about the hostages in Iran? Almost more ruthless than Lennon’s death was the press coverage. Banner headlines and sidebar upon sidebar flashed in front of our eyes, shoving to the back pages news about the Italian earthquake victims, Ronald Reagan’s new Cabinet members, the problems in the Middle East and New Jersey’s water shortage.
From the billboard-type display of photographs on the front pages of some newspapers to the more-reserved spreads in others, the news of Lennon’s death gave a new aura to the press.
Before it was a week old, the day-after-the-death edition of The New York Post was selling for $2 (regular price: 25 cents), while The New York Times’s ”Quotation of the Day” for Dec. 11 read:
”I would certainly like to wish him -whatever. It’s hard to know what to say.” - DAVID CURTIS CHAPMAN, father of Mark David Chapman, the accused killer.
Even the radio and television waves broke new barriers. All-night vigils were organized on such radio stations as New York’s WNEW-FM, while ABC-TV News devoted 15 prime-time minutes to Lennon.
Throughout the week, news programs added as much as half an hour to the developments pertaining to mourners and the alleged killer and to pay tribute to the dead man. The prayer vigil on Dec. 14 was televised, interrupting regularly scheduled programs on most of the major networks. The entire 10 minutes remained silent as the cameras of Channels 2, 4, 7, 13 and Cable News Network swept over the silent mourners in Central Park.
Before me are stacks of newspaper clippings that I will file under Lennon or media (I’m not sure which yet). And in all those stacks what do I have?
Well, I know that:
- Lennon was shot four times (some say they heard five shots).
- He died from a loss of blood (although I also read that it was from shock).
- The suspect, Mark David Chapman, is 25 years old, is married to a Japanese-born woman, is from Hawaii and was reading ”Catcher in the Rye” when arrested.
- Five-year-old Sean Lennon was ”buddies” with his pop.
- Lennon’s estate is estimated at more than $30 million.
- Miss Ono is excellent as a financier.
- The accused man’s first lawyer resigned from the case because of death threats. His new lawyer is not afraid.
- Beatle records sold out the morning after Lennon was killed.
- The publisher is trying to meet the demand for the Grove Press book, ”John Lennon: One Day at a Time,” and Manor Books is planning an ”instant paperback” about him.
- Two people committed suicide because they were so depressed about the shooting.
- Gun control has been the subject of most major columnists.
- Lennon was cremated. An outstanding number of feature articles were written to pay homage to the star. Some were confusing. Were the writers paying tribute or trying to release their anguish? Granted, it is an awful, strenuous task to sit down and compile an obituary meaningful enough to chill the memories of one man in relation to all men.
Most writings had a twinge of strength, one phrase or tangent that began to hit on the vitalness of such a loss. But the bottom always fell through. Jimmy Breslin couldn’t do it, and neither did anyone else.
I’ve been looking for a piece that would send the chills through me, the kind I get when I sit down and actually think of the stunning reality of it all.
I think part of the difficulty was that most writers tried to go backwards. By starting from the 80’s and going back to the 60’s through the 70’s, one cannot possibly see it all in the proper perspective.
It was lazy for so many writers to use the quotes from old Beatles’ songs. That is very old news. Everyone already knows it all. Perhaps if one had really ventured into the past, a more realistic vision would have shown through. By taking words that were created in the beginning, there would have been stronger, much more identifiable feelings.
What it comes down to in the long run is: Lennon is dead and the era is dead. But the era died when the Beatles broke up. If all these people really believe that Lennon had a cause, how strong could his cause have been if his followers cannot follow it through?
The best piece I’ve read so far is from a very old copy of Life magazine. ”Their lyrics have provided a disarming but trenchant critique of their elders’ foibles,” an end-of-the-decade issue of 1960 said of the Beatles. And then, ”The arts intermixed frivolity and death, and the gun emerged as the all-purpose symbol.”
If all these people - writers, mourners and comrades - really believe, there is no need to bury any of the hope or the philosophy that the Beatles and Lennon have been credited with.
Let’s not isolate the issue. There are others who count. Need we quote the scriptures of the Beatles infinitely? Or can we relate to the words of a more recent song, ”The Beating of Another Heart,” by Graham Parker, who sings: ”Love takes another shot … You can’t stop the beating of another heart … the pounding goes on forever.” ——————————————————————— Elizabeth Flynn lives in West Orange.
December 10, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Can Mommy Know Best?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Can the network nightly news anchor evolve from the Daddy chair to the Mommy chair?
Will Americans ever trust a petite, pretty woman in jewel tones to deliver the news as much as they trusted tall men with dark suits and deep voices, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw? Can high heels match the venerable trench coat?
The network news anchor career path is laden with the same sort of gender tripwires as the one for the presidency. Who do we want to lead us through a crisis?
“Does Mommy know best?” a longtime TV industry analyst mused. “If there’s a gigantically frightening news event, people want to turn on the TV and see someone guiding them through it. Will they be comfortable with Elizabeth Vargas or even Katie Couric?”
Last summer, when ABC needed a replacement for Peter Jennings, I asked a top network executive whether the 43-year-old Ms. Vargas had a shot to be the first woman to get a solo network anchor gig. Shouldn’t that barrier have been broken long ago? I mean, women can read off a teleprompter as well as men.
At first he sounded optimistic: she is not a news division heavyweight, but she is a lovely, competent Hispanic woman, which could mean a more diverse audience. And she might draw in younger viewers, instead of the dinosaur evening news demographic that mostly attracts sponsors like Viagra and Depends.
Within 30 seconds, though, the executive got jittery. “I know this is going to sound really sexist,” he admitted with breathtaking candor, “but if there were another 9/11, I’m not sure if she has the gravitas to hold that anchor chair. … Maybe it’s not even sex. Maybe it’s age. I just think we’d need someone with a little gray in their hair.” (The network pushed Ms. Vargas out of the anchor seat in favor of Charlie Gibson when terrorists bombed London twice in July 2005, even though his day job was doing fluff on “Good Morning America.”)
I pointed out that Brian Williams was only three years older than Ms. Vargas, and not noticeably gray. Network executives hire babes, not old ladies with wrinkles. Now that high-definition TV makes faces with plastic surgery look so weird, the women will have to be even younger.
“He’s not 50?” the exec asked about Mr. Williams. “But doesn’t he have some gray? … Maybe we could let Elizabeth do it Monday through Friday and then someone else could do it if there was a crisis.”
I had to laugh. They’d allow a woman to present the news as long as there wasn’t any news. If serious news breaks out, send for the guy in pants.
So this week, it all came to pass. Despite the track record of the other two women who had to co-anchor the evening news with resentful men - Barbara Walters and Connie Chung - ABC teamed Ms. Vargas with the pretty-boy android Bob Woodruff.
TV and newspaper moguls are trying a less authoritarian news format. Brian Williams, who broke out of android status with his brilliant coverage of the administration’s attention deficit disorder during Katrina, blogs to show he’s a man of the people. Anderson Cooper knocked off Aaron Brown by emoting during Katrina, and being fetching enough to make People’s Sexiest Man Alive list.
Les Moonves, head of CBS, is looking for pizazz. “On the one hand,” he told The Times’s Lynn Hirschberg, “we could have a newscast like ‘The Big Breakfast’ in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there’s ‘Naked News,’ which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It’s a woman giving the news as she’s getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between.”
Mr. Moonves has been wooing Katie Couric to succeed Dan Rather - she seems itchy to move on from making eggnog with Martha Stewart. Like Barbara Walters, she’d get withering scrutiny for earning a record-breaking paycheck (even though a man probably wouldn’t).
But even if Katie breaks this barrier, presumably with her clothes on, will it be an important milestone for women? She is already the most important breadwinner for her news division, with morning chat shows outearning nightly newscasts. By the time women get to take over something - like Hollywood or Bush administration diplomacy - the thing is already devalued beyond recognition.
TV evening news is so feminized and soft-focus now - brimming with features on animals, diets and new “age defying” skin treatments - that Katie may forget she’s not still working the sunrise crowd.
Aunt Eula wrote from Fort Worth, Texas, to inform me that in 1954, 50,000 reindeer migrated from Lapland to Finland. An interesting seasonal note, but the most interesting thing about it is that we know it. Someone counts migrating reindeer so we know if they’re up, down or holding steady. Try getting an accurate count of the homeless in America.
You can find an estimate for New York City — serendipitously enough, it is 50,000, the same as the migrating reindeer of ‘54. After that, we start wandering up the scale — 250,000 across the country, 1 million, multiples of 1 million. No one actually knows. Obviously, at least some students of this problem are off in their count by at least 1 million.
Oh, no! I hear your vast collective groan — not another Christmas Column on the Homeless! Well, you know how it is with us liberals, we just can’t help ourselves — like Dr. Strangelove, our hands rise involuntarily, despite our best intentions, and write these Christmas Columns on the Homeless, thus managing to be boring and trite simultaneously, laying our liberal guilt all over an unwilling general populace. But grit your teeth and soldier on, if you will, in seasonal goodwill.
Not only do we not know how many Americans are homeless, we don’t know much about those who are. The most common form of denial about homeless people is that they deserve to be where they are. They’re drunks, winos, bums, addicts. Their condition is self-inflicted and thus not our fault. We have no responsibility. It’s not my fault, I’m all right, Jack.
The concept of addiction as a treatable disease has not made that much progress, despite the best efforts of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council. Many of us still think these are the Undeserving Poor. (Wouldn’t you think some sociologist would have done a comparative study by now to prove, as I have always suspected, that there is a higher proportion of Undeserving Rich than Undeserving Poor?)
But we know there is an additional admixture in our homeless population now — one there, as conservatives never tire of pointing out, because of one of those brave, new, liberal social experiments gone wrong.
Lots of nut cases are on the streets these days as a consequence of the movement in the ’60s and ’70s to deinstitutionalize people who are not dangerously insane. Since it was incredibly expensive as well as counterproductive to keep those folks incarcerated, it seemed like a good idea at the time to let them go home and get treatment there. And as liberals never tire of pointing out, the reason deinstitutionalization was such a failure is because the chintzy conservatives in the legislatures never appropriated enough money for community-based mental-health care.
As a result, we have nut cases on the streets getting no care, some of whom are quite dangerous because they get no care. For all our brave, new sophistication about mental illness, many of us still react to crazy people with primitive fear — don’t get close, you might catch it.
Blame and fear. The trouble is, not only have blame and fear never built a single unit of low-cost housing, they don’t cover the situation anymore.
All recent studies of homeless populations show an increase of two groups out on the streets — families and people with full-time jobs.
You may well ask why we should pay any attention to studies done by the same people who can’t even get a firm count on how many people we’re talking about, but the consistency of the results makes them hard to ignore.
About one-third of the homeless are now families, and about one-fourth work full-time for the minimum wage. Their problem is simple: They can’t afford housing. So is the solution — build more low-cost housing.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the studies showing that the majority of American families are only a couple of paychecks away from the street themselves that we resist thinking about this. That’s how denial works: The closer we get to whatever frightens us, the more vigorously we deny that it will touch us.
In several localities, we have now reached the apogee of idiocy by trying to outlaw the homeless.
Some of our professional hand-holders of the middle-class have lately been worried about “compassion burnout.” What with everything going on in the world, it is feared that the American public will wear itself to a frazzle worrying aboout others, resulting in a general concern shortage.
As I have yet to witness an overabundance of concern for our fellow citizens now freezing to death on the streets of America, compassion burnout is not high on my list of priorities.
It is not often that we have a major public problem to which there is a simple solution. During the Reagan years, about $3 billion was cut from low-income housing programs, and homelessness, amazingly enough, grew apace. Three billion is peanuts in the context of the military budget. We know what to do, we know the solution is not particularly costly, and her we are, doing what?
“Hark!” — the traditional beginning of the Christmas message of joy — is, according to my Aunt Eula, the start of a message that has gotten garbled in translation.
December 9, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Promiser in Chief
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Sometimes reconstruction delayed is reconstruction denied.
A few months after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush promised to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and economy. He - or, at any rate, his speechwriters - understood that reconstruction was important not just for its own sake, but as a way to deprive the growing insurgency of support. In October 2003 he declared that “the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.”
But for a long time, Iraqi reconstruction was more of a public relations exercise than a real effort. Remember when visiting congressmen were taken on tours of newly painted schools?
Both supporters and opponents of the war now argue that by moving so slowly on reconstruction, the Bush administration missed a crucial window of opportunity. By the time reconstruction spending began in earnest, it was in a losing race with a deteriorating security situation.
As a result, the electricity and jobs that were supposed to make the killers desperate never arrived. Iraq produced less electricity last month than in October 2003. The Iraqi government estimates the unemployment rate at 27 percent, but the real number is probably much higher.
Now we’re losing another window of opportunity for reconstruction. But this time it’s at home.
Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush made an elaborately staged appearance in New Orleans, where he promised big things. “The work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region,” he said, “will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”
Such an effort would be the right thing to do. We can argue about details - about which levees should be restored and how strong to make them - but it’s clearly in the nation’s interests as well as local residents’ to rebuild much of the regional economy.
But Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten about his promise. More than three months after Katrina, a major reconstruction effort isn’t even in the planning stage, let alone under way. “To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago,” a Los Angeles Times report about New Orleans says, “the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city’s homeowners and business owners.”
It’s worth noting in passing that Mr. Bush hasn’t even appointed a new team to fix the dysfunctional Federal Emergency Management Agency. Most of the agency’s key positions, including the director’s job - left vacant by the departure of Michael “heck of a job” Brown - are filled on an acting basis, by temporary place holders. The chief of staff is still a political loyalist with no prior disaster management experience.
One FEMA program has, however, been revamped. The Recovery Channel is a satellite and Internet network that used to provide practical information to disaster victims. Now it features public relations segments telling viewers what a great job FEMA and the Bush administration are doing.
But back to reconstruction. By letting the gulf region languish, Mr. Bush is allowing a window of opportunity to close, just as he did in Iraq.
To see why, you need to understand a point emphasized by that report in The Los Angeles Times: the private sector can’t rebuild the region on its own. The reason goes beyond the need for flood protection and basic infrastructure, which only the government can provide. Rebuilding is also blocked by a vicious circle of uncertainty. Business owners are reluctant to return to the gulf region because they aren’t sure whether their customers and workers will return, too. And families are reluctant to return because they aren’t sure whether businesses will be there to provide jobs and basic amenities.
A credible reconstruction plan could turn that vicious circle into a virtuous circle, in which everyone expects a regional recovery and, by acting on that expectation, helps that recovery come to pass. But as the months go by with no plan and no money, businesses and families will make permanent decisions to relocate elsewhere, and the loss of faith in a gulf region recovery will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Funny, isn’t it? Back during the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush promised to avoid “nation building.” And so he has. He failed to rebuild Iraq because he waited too long to get started. And now he’s doing the same thing here at home.
December 8, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Sharing the Sacrifice, or Ending It
By BOB HERBERT
If it is true, as President Bush and many others have argued, that horrific consequences will result if American forces are pulled from Iraq in the near future, then how is it that we are even considering a significant drawdown of troops in advance of next fall’s Congressional elections?
Opponents of a swift withdrawal speak of potential consequences that are dire in the extreme: the eruption of a wider civil war with ever more horrendous Iraqi casualties; the transformation of Iraq into a safe haven and even more of a training ground for anti-American terrorists; the involvement of neighboring countries like Iran, Syria and Turkey in a spreading conflict that could destabilize the entire Middle East.
Vice President Dick Cheney told troops at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Tuesday that in the event of a swift withdrawal of American troops, Iraq “would return to the rule of tyrants, become a massive source of instability in the Middle East and be a staging area for ever greater attacks against America and other civilized nations.”
Senator John McCain, who defines “complete victory” in Iraq as the establishment of a “flawed but functioning democracy,” told Tim Russert of NBC that achieving even that modest goal would be “long and hard and tough.”
If the hawks are right, if all of this is so - and if this war is, indeed, still winnable - then the Bush administration has an obligation to level with the American people, explaining clearly what will be required in terms of casualties, financial costs and other sacrifices, and telling the truth about the shabby, amateurish state of the Iraqi security forces.
As it stands now, the United States is incapable of defeating the insurgency with the forces it has in Iraq. So it is beyond preposterous to think that Iraq can be pacified in a year or 18 months or two years by a fledgling, underequipped Iraqi Army and a hapless police force riddled with brutal, partisan militias.
What’s more, the U.S. military itself is in danger of cracking under the strain of this endless Iraq ordeal. Troops are being sent into the war zone for their third and fourth tours, which is hideously unfair. The more times you roll the dice, the more likely snake eyes will pop up.
Even with lowered standards, the Army can’t meet its recruitment goals. And the National Guard and Reserves have been all but exhausted by the war effort.
The combination of troop shortages, declining public support for the war and the Republicans’ anxiety over next year’s elections all but ensures some substantial reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq over the next eight to 12 months.
And yet the hawks say we must continue the fight. Well, wars fought with one eye on the polls and one eye on the political calendar get lots of people killed for nothing.
If this war is worth fighting, it’s worth fighting right. And that means mobilizing not just the handful of troops who have borne the burden of this wretched conflict, but the entire nation. Taxes would have to be raised, the military expanded, the forces in Iraq bolstered and a counterinsurgency strategy developed that would have some chance of actually defeating the enemy.
To do that would require implementing a draft. It’s easy to make the case for war when the fighting will be done by other people’s children.
If this war is as important as the hawks insist it is, the burden should be shared by all of us. The youngsters sacrificed on the altar of Iraq should be drawn from the widest possible swath of the general population.
If most Americans are unwilling to send their children to fight in Iraq, it must mean that most Americans do not feel that winning the war is absolutely essential.
The truth is that no one knows for sure what will happen if we pull our troops out of Iraq. Many of those who insist that the sky will fall were insisting three years ago that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that invading U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators.
The public initially supported this war because the administration was very effective at promoting the canard that Iraq was somehow linked to Al Qaeda and involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Now the hawks must once again bear the burden of persuasion. They must persuade the public that the U.S. should continue indefinitely fighting this war, which has embedded us in such a hellish predicament and taken such a horrendous toll.
If it’s not worth fighting, then we should be preparing an orderly exit now.
In that famous photo, it wasn’t a sullen white segregationist sitting behind Rosa Parks on a bus after all.
Alison Graham on the bus she rides home from school in New Jersey, is next to a poster showing her grandfather, Nicholas C. Chriss, and Rosa Parks on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. Mr. Chriss was a reporter working at the time for United Press International out of Atlanta. He died in 1990.
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© 2007 donkey o.d.
