President Obama’s candid admission “We have no strategy,” also described the situation as the deadline for this week’s column approached. A plethora of topics were under consideration. As we struggled to settle on just one topic for this week’s column we recalled that one San Francisco based columnist used to occasionally resort to a catch-all column style that he called “clear the desk top” and so we decided to pay homage to Art Hoppe by imitating his shtick and sweep a bunch of disparate topics into our Labor Day end of the week roundup.
If the Russians had waited a few more days they could have launched their incursion into the Ukraine on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which might have gotten them better (and more sympathetic?) play in the world’s media.
We’ve seen news reports that state that the beheading of an American reporter has produced a wipeout for America’s reluctance to send troops back to the Middle East. A news report that cites a source for that conclusion (such as “according to a poll conducted by the New York Times”) is a news story. A vague conclusion (such as “most Americans now think”) is pro-war propaganda.
Has Obama offered to ignore the Russian incursion into the Ukraine in return for being given a free hand for dealing with ISIS forces inside Syria?
Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam to report on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, after his special was broadcast LBJ was reported to have said: “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the war.”
A Viet Cong representative commenting on the conflict said: “It has already lasted for more than twenty years. We can hold out much longer. Eventually the American people will tire of the war, and will turn against it. Then the war will end.”
Can George Bush’s “Forever War” refute that logic or will a new American President have his Cronkite moment?
In the last week of August of 2014, America’s TV audience saw a mother’s emotional plea to spare the life of her child. America’s network pundits predicted that the plea will convince American mothers to be stoical if troops go back to Iraq. Nothing is said on American TV about what a similar affect the thousands of collateral damage deaths of women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan might have on the citizens in those countries.
Is it possible that the American mother’s plea might have an unintended consequence on the ISIS leadership and accelerate their rush to punish the next journalist?
Could America’s lack of bipartisanship eventually disintegrate into a permanent perpetual state of mutual distrust and animosity that will eventually become as fully entrenched in American society as is the Sunni vs. Shiite division is in most countries in the Middle East (or to use a newly revive trendy old word: the Levant)?
In an effort to take the pulse of the USA, we have recently availed our self of an opportunity to wtch some cable TV news. When Megan Kelly talked about Obama going to Rhode Island for some fund-raising, she did a moue and rolled her eyes. It was so adorable but it made us wonder: “If Obama has lost Megan Kelly is the war lost?” and also: What happened to the “fair and balanced” style that ignored any criticism of Dubya when he took more and longer vacations?
If she gets all hot under the collar about that perhaps she needs to take the ice bucket challenge on air?
That, in turn, reminded us that we have been waiting to see next month’s Playmate of the Month dousing some member of management (Hef himself?) as part of this summer’s publicity fad, which would also illustrate the concept of the high school coach’s advice to “take a cold shower!” We fired off an e-mail to a fellow on the Playboy masthead asking how long we were going to have to wait to see photo evidence that that magazine is hip to the bucket challenge.
Our efforts to recall which columnist had used the “clear the desk top” shtick had caused us to do a roll call of the great columnists who had at one time or another called San Francisco their hometown. That list, in turn, convinced us that if the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ever decided to establish a brick and mortar Columnists’ Hall of Fame, it would have to be located in Fog City.
Hunter S. Thompson and Ambrose Bierce are perhaps the best known of a long list of writers who churned out columns while being residents of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Some naysayers might want to nominate the Big Apple as the appropriate location for a hypothetical Columnists’ Hall of Fame and we would reply: “Other than Walter Winchell and Pete Hamill who else has been a famous Manhattan columnist?”
It’s hip in Hollywood to call a telephone “an Ameche,” because Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a film back in the Golden Age.
There is a bar in Frisco called “The Philosophers’ Club” and that caused us to wonder if it would be worth while to open a gin mill (there are a massive amounts of synonyms for the word “tavern”), fill it with photos of famous columnists, and call the bar “The Columnists’ Hall of Fame.”
Smoke filled bars and newsrooms are a thing of the past. Aren’t actors permitted to smoke at work if the scene calls for indoor use of cigarettes (such as shooting a film noir set in the Thirties)? If that is so, what about declaring a watering hole a location shoot for a movie and paying the customers a $1 stipend for working as extras. Maybe students at a local film school could provide a crew that would work for peanuts? (Would they actually do filming for a student documentary project?) Thus they could have one more nostalgia laden nights in a place where extras and the actor playing Sam Spade could light up a Fatima (or other brand) cigarette (wasn’t it hip slang back in the day to call them fags?)?
Speaking of the good old days, the Berkeley Public Library has a copy of John McMillian’s “Beatles vs. Stones” book and we are enjoying it immensely. A concise review will be included in future column.
We saw “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” this week. It scored high on the 3G meter. Girls, Guns, and fabulous fast cars that require high octane Gasoline are Hollywood’s sure fire formula to please the male audience.
If a columnist, who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, misses smoke filled bars; was it the right move to legislate them out of existence?
We hope that the NRA will step in and get the Uzzi kid (or her parents?) a book deal and some lucrative speaking fees and perhaps a guest appearance on Letterman’s TV show.
CORRECTION: Last week we reported that movie director John Waters had done a book promotion at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Just as famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen used to cover goofs, we must quote Ricky Blane’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) line in Casablanca: “Apparently, we were misinformed.” It turns out that Waters and his friends were just visiting the famed tourist destination and where not there to promote Water’s new book “Carsick.”
[Note from the Photo Editor: Has any columnist ever inspired a brand name for a beer?]
Janis Joplin has been quoted as saying: “Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say, ‘The hell with it,’ stay stoned, and have a good time.”
Now the disk jockey will play Jack (Dragnet) Webb singing “Try a little tenderness,” Leonard Nimoy singing “I walk the line,” and William Shatner singing “Rocket Man.” (They are all available on Youtube.) Now we have to fact check the claim that San Francisco’s ten most famous citizens were all fictional characters. Have a “Do I feel lucky?” type week.
Hey, hey, LBJ how many unborn fetuses were killed today?
Mention the topic of birth control to a group of Catholics and folks leap (knee jerk reaction) to the assumption that the conversation will soon be about abortion, but not this time. While attending a Jesuit University in the early Sixties approving the use of birth control pills was an indication that the student was showing a nasty propensity toward unorthodox thinking and anticipated the need for the expression “get your mind right, Luke.” A comedian (wasn’t George Carlin always the source for all truly funny original thoughts?) back then made the assertion that “Catholics make the best fascists” and thus were used to accepting theological precepts while in the “unquestioning” mode of learning, but for one student who didn’t want to create waves and rock the boat, there were some very disturbing tangential aspects to the birth control debate which led the rogue thinker to question the morality of warfare, which was a very, very convoluted line or reasoning and best left unexpressed in a regimented atmosphere that equated heresy with treason.
At a time when American involvement in the internal affairs of South Vietnam was limited to sending a few advisers to help the South Vietnamese military handle dissent as they saw fit, questioning the morality of warfare was incidental in a segment of society that concentrated on stressing the rationality of using sperm and ovum to play a variation on the game of “Russian Roulette.”
Since college, even at a Jesuit University, is meant to be a time for sharpening one’s intellectual acuity, one particular student in the early Sixties was asking himself obscure questions meant to challenge his ability to analyze and assess regimented thinking. Such as? If one of the Ten Commandments advises folks to not do any killing, how then could the Pope reconcile German Catholics and American Catholics trading bullets, artillery shells, bayonet wounds, and aerial bombardments with each other during WWII?
Shouldn’t the Pope, whom we had been convinced spoke with absolute infallibility, have stepped in and, like a football referee, adjudicated the dispute and saved lives?
How could the Pope reconcile extensive killing from one side of his mouth while simultaneously assuring married couples that the sanctity of life required them to play a high stakes game of chance out the other side of his mouth?
Either life is sacred or not, but to maintain that young couples had to gamble with their future because the lives of their potential progeny were sacred and that once their children reached the age of 18 they were just cannon fodder to be used as counters in a world wide game of Imperial chess isn’t logical.
[We keep hearing PSA sound bytes on the progressive radio station in San Francisco reminding listeners to register with the draft board right after they celebrate their 18th birthday. Are liberals still dispensing advice on how to dodge the draft in Berkeley CA. You must register. It’s the law. Try fact checking this idea.]
Resources for fact checking abounded at a Jesuit University, because teachers of philosophy, logic, and theology were plentiful, but the answer to our question remained tantalizingly elusive. Ultimately we were able to pin down the official stance on war and killing as taught by the Pope and holy mother the church: “A Catholic citizen of any country may, in good conscience, participate in any war fought by his country as long as there is reasonable expectation of victory.”
That explained it. The American Catholics thought that Patton was going to take them all the way to Berlin, and the German Catholics thought that Hitler would quarterback a magnificent goal line stand by his team. No problem.
However, there was one teeny, tiny problem with that vague and nebulous doctrine that was just about totally irrelevant until after graduation. Early on in the American intervention in the affairs of South Vietnam, Americans were reassured that the United States wasn’t going to get bogged down in a long, arduous, and costly (in terms of lives lost) campaign for total victory. The U. S. would fight until things were back under control and then (like the Cheshire cat?) withdraw from the area formerly known as French Indochina.
If the US wasn’t going for victory how long would it be until the priests in the USA unanimously opposed the War in Vietnam on moral grounds?
When the students at UC Berkeley chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?,” were they referring to unborn fetuses?
Since we were assessed as having a draft status of 1-Y and since our nomadic existence precluded a chance to take vows and enter into the holy institution of marriage, our obsession with reconciling the birth control question with the problem presented by optional military adventures in foreign lands, was put on hold for a good long while. LBJ explained the lack of involvement with use of the expression: “He doesn’t have a dog in that fight!”
Later in life we became our own source for theological opinion by becoming an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. (We are still trying to fact check the assertion that all members of the Sixties band, The Rolling Stones, availed themselves of the same opportunity.)
Now that the fiscal cliff has been postponed and the only item of national concern is the perennial debate about guns, we have a chance to sit back, reflect on the past, and polish our omphaloskepsis (a word which baffles Word Spellcheck) skills and revisit some intellectual conundrums from the past.
Did the mavens of pop culture ever conclusively answer the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”?
How the heck did the Japanese Army become the Army of occupation so fast in Vietnam? It sure did provide a convenient launching pad for actions against certain British colonies later in WWII but efforts to consult the history books produce only a gaping gap when a fact checker attempts to find out how the Japanese Army took over so fast in Vietnam.
If austerity budgets become necessary isn’t it logical to conclude that suspending school lunch programs and funding armed guards in every school in the nation, is just a “no brainer”?
What would Ayn Rand advise about cutting Sandy Relief from the budget?
If Secretary of State Cordell Hull was quoted by UPI in a story that ran the last weekend in November of 1941 as saying that Pearl Harbor would be attacked and that war with Japan was inevitable, what would he say about the possible odds for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program?
Recently we saw a news story that hinted that some poor blighters are still serving a life term in Texas prisons for smoking one joint (i.e. a marijuana cigarette) back in the Sixties.
[Photo editor’s note: A photo taken in December of 1966 showed a lone war protester on Times Square in New York City in blizzard conditions holding a sign saying: “‘I’d rather see America lose face than it immortal soul.’ Norman Thomas” was assessed as being a great shot that generated too much anti-war sympathy and thus turned down for use on the AP wire. Since then it has disappeared without a trace from the World’s Laziest Journalist’s photo archives and we must rely on words without an accompanying graphic to lure some readers to this column.]
Is it too late for an old hippie to get national attention (Does CBS Evening News read the World’s Laziest Journalist?) by burning a fifty year old draft card?
President Lyndon Baines Johnson said: “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the country.” [Back in the Sixties unconditional love in the mainstream media for (Republican) Presidents was unavailable because Fox News had not yet been born.]
Now the disk jockey will play “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” “The Ballad of the Green Beret” and “Eve of Destruction.” We have to go write a tepid review of the new movie “Not Fade Away.” Have a “time is on my side” type week.