Notes on how things seem to me from out here in Hollywood... As seen from Just Above Sunset
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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Saturday, 12 June 2004

Topic: Couldn't be so...

Things that just couldn't be so...

Just to keep the pot stirred.

In Monday's Time Magazine John Dickerson offered this: A Peace President?

To cut to the chase:
Indeed, the President is privately telling aides that after leading the nation to war in his first term, he wants to spend his next four years being "a peace President." Officials in the Administration contend he has more credibility as a diplomat now that he has shown a willingness to use force to back his principles. "The reason diplomacy will be effective in a second term is because of the use of the military," says a senior Administration official. Doubters suspect the shift is aimed at coaxing other nations to help rescue his failing Iraq policy -- and to present a less warlike face to voters. Bush campaign advisers concede as much. "It may help overseas, yes," says a top Bush campaign adviser, "but if nothing else, it gives us ammunition to push back against Kerry."
Oh yeah, that'll fly.

One commentator calls this lunacy. But qualified lunacy.
I don't mean lunacy in a "mental illness" way, I mean in a completely detached from reality kind of way. The reality is unimportant, only the label and perception that matters. Standard fare in politics, until the candidate and his people are unable to distinguish between the two.
Maybe so. Will people buy the sizzle and not the steak? If the most powerful man in the world says something is so, is it so?

We'll see about that.

Second Item

The ongoing prisoner abuse scandal - none dare call it torture? - is just a problem with a few bad apples (a silly metaphor). Yeah, right.

This from the Washington Post:

Soldier Described White House Interest
Staff Requested Data From Abu Ghraib, Probers Told
R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A03

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice had no idea such awful things were afoot?
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."

The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned "sensitive issues," and Jordan said, "Very sensitive. Yes, sir," according to the account, which was provided by a government official.

The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.
All the memos advising how to avoid being charged with ware crimes like torture being revealed in the press, all the photos, and all the recently opened investigations of homicide (of these damned wimp prisons who had the nerve to die on us - starting at thirty-two open investigations and now in the low eighties) - and now this.

It is hard to fight a war on terror when everyone is on your case about your methods.

Hey, if all this went to the very top, including daily reports to Condoleezza on how firm we were being with those we detained, wouldn't we all agree what our government does doesn't matter as long as we're safe. And the Rice woman needs something to make her smile each day.

Third Item

When you control the media, you get what you want.

As Kevin Drum points out - "Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi thinks a big turnout in Sunday's election will help his party. So, since ownership of half the media in the country apparently wasn't enough to get the word out, he decided to send text messages to all 56 million cell phones in the country."

Yeah, well, you can read all about it in The Guardian (UK) here. The idea didn't work out so well in practice:
Many of the messages arrived in the night, activating the alarms of hundreds of thousands of mobiles and waking their owners.

....Italian law authorises the government to carry out mass texting "in cases of disaster or natural calamities" and "for reasons of public order or public health and hygiene".

Mr Berlusconi's supporters argued that a decree authorising the move, signed by the interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, on Thursday, complied with the law because the messages would ensure a steadier flow of voters and thus avert any threat to public order.
Silvio Berlusconi must have the same lawyers as Rumsfeld.

The law can be a flexible thing, open to interpretation.

One hopes Colin Powell's son Michael, the fellow who heads the FCC, isn't getting ideas.

Fourth Item

From the Associated Press: Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh announced Friday that he and his wife, Marta, were divorcing. That's here. Add your own sarcastic comments if you wish about how this sort of thing is bound to happen when gay couples are allowed to marry - which is what Limbaugh likes to claim on the air. Gay marriage will destroy convention marriage.

Perhaps. If you read the AP item you will see this was Limbaugh's third marriage. He hammers the "drug culture" and it turns out he has a serious addiction problem himself. He rants about family values and that sort of thing, as his third marriage falls apart. And his six million fans love him anyway. No one is perfect and his opinions are still correct.

Oh well.

Posted by Alan at 09:40 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 12 June 2004 09:49 PDT home

Friday, 11 June 2004

Topic: Couldn't be so...

Choosing friends and allies....

It seems the new prime minister of Iraq, our new best buddy, Bush's special guest at this week at the G8 summit at Sea Island Georgia, has a bit of a history of terrorist bombings - you know, blowing up civilians for political ends - financed by the CIA. The source seems to be guys who used to work in the CIA. But details are sketchy.

Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks
Joel Brinkley, The New York Times, Published: June 9, 2004
WASHINGTON, June 8 -- Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.

... Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.

No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.

The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.
Well, I'm sure Allawi is a better man now. And this all seems vague. Maybe it never happened.

Assume it isn't true. This country does not associate with terrorists. They're evil. Bush would never have a press conference and sit next to anyone who had done such things, and say nice things about him.

Who are you going to believe?

But wait, there's more.

I saw this in This Modern World here - and Bob Patterson (The World's Laziest Journalist from Just Above Sunset) also sent me the link to the Saint Petersburg newspaper story

We all know Michael Moore's new movie suggests the Bush family is too close to the Saudi royal family. Well, "suggests" is too mild a word. Anyway, Kevin Phillips wrote the book on that whole business of who the house the Saudi royal family is entwined with the Bush dynasty - reviewed here (middle column) in early January.

You do remember how everyone insisted that those flights the day after the 9/11 attacks - quickly getting some important Saudi royals, relatives of Osama bin Laden, out of the country - only happened after regular air travel had resumed? That was the line. Then it might have happened before the air travel ban was lifted. But things weren't clear. And then the story changed - it turned out to be quite verifiable that Saudis had been flown somewhere or other during the air travel ban, but only within the country, not out of the country.

Now we find out more, from this in the Saint Petersburg Times.
TAMPA - Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.

The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.

The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane.

For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose.

But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA officials have confirmed that the flight did take place and have supplied details.
And the Bush administration is sort of saying that, well, maybe something like that happened - but absolutely refuses to say who authorized such flights.

Well, both these are minor items.

The first is too vague to used as any indication that the Bush team is so desperate for just anyone to take over Iraq for us that a former terrorist will do for now. Or if it turns out that the story actually is true - that the guy we laud as the heroic new leader of Iraq has a history of planting bombs in movie theaters for political ends - at least the cause was good, blowing up innocents to help rid the world of Saddam Hussein, and that's why we financed the effort. Regrettable. But noble. Ends justify the means. Worrying about the specific means and precise methods is for wimps. Sometimes you have to play rough. That seems to be the way we operate now.

The second item? So some folks got to fly to safety when everyone else was grounded, and they happened to be from the family of the rulers of the country that produced all but two of the 9/11 hijackers? You have to trust the Bush crew that the Saudis are our allies - that the Saudi nationals who participated in the death of nearly three thousand of our citizens were just, say, "bad apples." That also seems to be the way we operate now.

Posted by Alan at 21:59 PDT | Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

Sunset

Ronald Reagan was laid to rest this evening at sunset in the Southern California Hills - out in Simi Valley at the Reagan Library. For those of you who watched the ceremonies from elsewhere, yes, that's what it looks like here at sunset. This is from Mulholland Drive looking out toward Simi Valley.


Posted by Alan at 20:44 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 11 June 2004 23:03 PDT home

Thursday, 10 June 2004

Topic: Making Use of History

Ronald Reagan is dead. So is Emma Goldman.

Reagan, like Franco, is still dead - not one of my heroes, a little bit of a dim bulb, but pleasant enough. He had five thousand times the intellectual horsepower of the younger Bush, and not much of the inherent mean-spiritedness of the younger Bush. Everyone said he was warm quite good-hearted. But all in all a dangerous man.

On the other hand I saw my own parents slowly fall to Alzheimer's and it wasn't pretty. My memories of all those days, each and every one of those days, are far too precise to feel any glee at this at all.

I didn't care for the man, or his politics. But no one should die that way.

The assessments of the man fill the week. A lot of praise, and also more that a few critical comments on what he actually did and didn't do.

Just after the announcement of his death I received a comment from The News Guy in Atlanta (Rick Brown) -
So the guy hasn't been dead two hours and already I'm getting tired of people talking about him - especially the part (mostly from Novak) about his having ended the cold war. I'm still of the school that says he didn't see it coming, didn't know it when it arrived, and afterward, took credit for it, much like the proverbial rooster taking credit for the dawn.

And suddenly I also feel like the Barbra Streisand character in "The Way We Were" who, on hearing all these friends of her husband rejoicing at FDR's death, screamed something like "For God's sake, have you no shame? The man is dead!" Sorry.

But now that he's "passed," as they say here in the south, and after all these years as an untouchable invalid, are we allowed to criticize him yet? No? Okay, can we at least start filing the paper to rename that airport in Washington?
Suggestions for the new name for Reagan International Airport?

Bill Frist, Republican leader of the senate, wants to rename the Pentagon after Reagan. Others suggest his face replace FDR on the dime, or that we have his face on the twenty dollar bill, or the ten. Poor Alexander Hamilton. Poor Andrew Jackson. Some suggest his face on the fifty-cent piece, replacing JFK. Others suggest he be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore.

There is talk of a monument on the Mall in DC - but Reagan himself signed the bill that made that impossible until the person to be honored had been dead at least twenty-five years. Darn. No one has suggested just renaming the Washington Monument, the big white obelisk, for Reagan. But that will probably come.

This is the man who strongly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the man who decided the Apartheid rule in South Africa was fine, who laughed at the AIDS problem when he wasn't ignoring it... the list goes on and on.

Christopher Hitchens has his way of putting it -
Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too.

Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. ...
And that's not to mention his record in California.

But all of this is called mean-spirited this week. Maybe it is.

Perhaps it all should be left until next week.

Anything critical said this week is called crassly political at best, and really, at bottom, unpatriotic.

We'll we should be used to this. Agree with Bush and his neoconservative handlers and you'll be called brilliant. Raise an issue and you'll be called an appeaser of terrorists, in league with traitors, if not one yourself.

So next week I will take up a cause someone mentioned to me - getting Reagan's picture on every food stamp printed for the poor.

Well, long before David Frum put the words "Axis of Evil" into George Bush's defining speech, Reagan spoke often about the Evil Empire we had to fight. The sacred word this week is Reagan brought back pride in America and made us patriotic once more. No matter what mistakes he might have made, he did that.

In the meantime, think about what patriotism is.

I found this at a site called Body and Soul and it seems somehow appropriate to the week. The death of Reagan the ceremonies and the funeral swamped all else, or so it seemed.

Here you will find the text from Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays. Second Revised Edition. New York & London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911. Pages 133-150. Selected excerpts -
PATRIOTISM: A MENACE TO LIBERTY

What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivet?, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one "an eye should be," piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother's knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?

If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

What, then, is patriotism? "Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

Gustave Herv?, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition--one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate.

Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with bloodcurdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. It is for that purpose that America has within a short time spent four hundred million dollars. Just think of it--four hundred million dollars taken from the produce of the people. For surely it is not the rich who contribute to patriotism. They are cosmopolitans, perfectly at home in every land. We in America know well the truth of this. Are not our rich Americans Frenchmen in France, Germans in Germany, or Englishmen in England? And do they not squander with cosmopolitan grace fortunes coined by American factory children and cotton slaves?

... But, then, patriotism is not for those who represent wealth and power. It is good enough for the people. It reminds one of the historic wisdom of Frederick the Great, the bosom friend of Voltaire, who said: "Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses."

That patriotism is rather a costly institution ...

... The awful waste that patriotism necessitates ought to be sufficient to cure the man of even average intelligence from this disease. Yet patriotism demands still more. The people are urged to be patriotic and for that luxury they pay, not only by supporting their "defenders," but even by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

The usual contention is that we need a standing army to protect the country from foreign invasion. Every intelligent man and woman knows, however, that this is a myth maintained to frighten and coerce the foolish. The governments of the world, knowing each other's interests, do not invade each other. They have learned that they can gain much more by international arbitration of disputes than by war and conquest. Indeed, as Carlyle said, "War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other."

It does not require much wisdom to trace every war back to a similar cause. ...

... The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

However, the clamor for an increased army and navy is not due to any foreign danger. It is owing to the dread of the growing discontent of the masses and of the international spirit among the workers. It is to meet the internal enemy that the Powers of various countries are preparing themselves; an enemy, who, once awakened to consciousness, will prove more dangerous than any foreign invader.

The powers that have for centuries been engaged in enslaving the masses have made a thorough study of their psychology. They know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. And the more gorgeously the toy is dressed, the louder the colors, the more it will appeal to the million-headed child.

An army and navy represents the people's toys. To make them more attractive and acceptable, hundreds and thousands of dollars are being spent for the display of these toys. That was the purpose of the American government in equipping a fleet and sending it along the Pacific coast, [remember this was written in 1911] that every American citizen should be made to feel the pride and glory of the United States. The city of San Francisco spent one hundred thousand dollars for the entertainment of the fleet; Los Angeles, sixty thousand; Seattle and Tacoma, about one hundred thousand. To entertain the fleet, did I say? To dine and wine a few superior officers, while the "brave boys" had to mutiny to get sufficient food. Yes, two hundred and sixty thousand dollars were spent on fireworks, theatre parties, and revelries, at a time when men, women, and children through the breadth and length of the country were starving in the streets; when thousands of unemployed were ready to sell their labor at any price.

Two hundred and sixty thousand dollars! What could not have been accomplished with such an enormous sum? But instead of bread and shelter, the children of those cities were taken to see the fleet, that it may remain, as one of the newspapers said, "a lasting memory for the child."

A wonderful thing to remember, is it not? The implements of civilized slaughter. If the mind of the child is to be poisoned with such memories, what hope is there for a true realization of human brotherhood?

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism.

Considering the evil results that patriotism is fraught with for the average man, it is as nothing compared with the insult and injury that patriotism heaps upon the soldier himself,--that poor, deluded victim of superstition and ignorance. He, the savior of his country, the protector of his nation,--what has patriotism in store for him? A life of slavish submission, vice, and perversion, during peace; a life of danger, exposure, and death, during war.

... Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time. The centralization of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the workingman of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, "Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you."
Well, Emma Goldman isn't one someone should cite, I suppose.

She was a radical and an anarchist. Heck, finally 1936 she committed herself to the support of the anarchists and their fight against fascism and Stalinism - that Civil War in Spain. Against Franco, who wasn't dead then. She died in 1940. This is all just ancient history.

But she was onto something.

Posted by Alan at 21:55 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 10 June 2004 22:14 PDT home


Topic: Photos

As seen today in Los Angeles today...

A chair at a coffee shop, Westwood Boulevard at Pico ...
































Los Angeles Bauhaus ...


Posted by Alan at 20:24 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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