BartBlog

February 27, 2014

Haiti & me: In search of Jean Bertrand Aristide

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 5:33 pm

When thinking about Haiti, a lot of people think first about that terrible earthquake disaster of 2010 — and also about President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And I do too. So on my first day in Port au Prince, I toured most of the earthquake disaster areas. And on my third day there, it only seemed logical that I also attempt to meet up with the great man himself. And I actually came THIS close to doing that too!

After recovering from wandering around the Carrefour district’s Carnival celebration the night before, I then went over to check out Aristide’s house. “President Aristide is actually here today,” said the guard at the door, “but he’s not seeing visitors right now. However, you can always wave to him on our closed-circuit TV camera.” Great idea! So I smiled and waved and smiled and waved at the CCTV camera like the idiot tourist that I am.

Next I went off to visit Aristide’s Foundation Pour la Democratie and looked around there. Met some interesting diplomats, students, professors and a chicken.

Then I visited UniFA, a medical school established by Aristide in order to create more doctors in Haiti — where the ratio of Haitians to doctors is 10,000 to 1 in urban areas and 20,000 to 1 in the countryside (no wonder vodou cures are so popular here). “How many students study here?” I asked a bright-eyed first-year physician wannabe, sitting outside eating her lunch between classes. (Actually all the students here are clearly bright-eyed and diligent and idealistic — all young, gifted and Black. Go them.)

“About 700,” the student replied.

“So can you tell me how cure my sore knees?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t gotten that far in our curriculum quite yet.” Rats.

Lastly, I stopped by a large apartment building that had been constructed during Aristide’s presidency in order to house some of Port au Prince’s homeless population, right before GWB sent in the Marines. Two things about this apartment building were note-worthy. First, it was the only building for blocks around that had actually withstood the 2010 earthquake. And, second, the apartments all had two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.

In stark contrast, directly across the street one could also see a hundred-odd new U.N. housing units — such as they were. Each family had been allocated a really really small cube-shaped one-room dwelling with no bathroom, no bedroom, no kitchen and no running water. And their shared port-a-potties were all way down the street.

So just exactly who is this guy Jean-Bertrand Aristide? And why do American neo-cons and corporatists all hate him so much? I don’t know. Maybe because Aristide doesn’t want to keep Haiti forever “barefoot and pregnant”? Maybe because Aristide, a former priest, actually tries to practice the teachings of Jesus? Your guess is as good as mine.

In any case, here’s a bit more about Aristide’s back-story for those of you who have never heard of the guy. In 2001, Aristide was democratically elected as president of Haiti, just one year after George Bush stole the 2000 American election. But, unlike GWB, Aristide’s emphasis was on inclusion and education.

In just the few years that he was president, Aristide built more schools in Haiti than had ever existed in all of its long miserable history of being controlled by U.S. interests. Aristide also devoted 20% of the nation’s budget to healthcare. Good grief! No wonder Wall Street and War Street hated him. And overthrew him too. Violently. In favor of deadly U.N. “peacekeepers” and the Marines, who immediately shot everything up and turned UniFA into a military barracks. That was back in 2004. http://www.projectcensored.org/12-another-massacre-in-haiti-by-un-troops/

And now, ten years later, Haiti has been stuck with President Michel Martelly, aka the “Neo-Cons’ Choice,” elected in the same way that the U.S. got stuck with Dubya — illegally. “He is our guy!” cries Wall Street, War Street and the Deep State. http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/

And now WalMart is once again happily running sweatshops in Haiti, where workers get paid $4.56 a day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVx2dl3Hgso.

What the freak was Aristide thinking!

Surely Aristide should have known that anybody who denies WalMart access to economic slave labor is naturally gonna be in big trouble — and educating a country’s children and providing its citizens with healthcare is also a really bad idea because then countries like Haiti will no longer have a subservient labor force and a really dumb electorate — and that’s just not the corporatist way. Aristide should have known better. Even most Americans are clear on this concept, keeping their eyes down and their mouths shut. Why couldn’t Aristide do the same?

And if you still want even more information on Aristide and Haiti, here’s a great video to watch: https://ia700401.us.archive.org/20/items/FreedomIsAConstantStrugglePGMTelvueMPEG2/Freedom%20is%20a%20Constant%20Struggle_PGM-Telvue%20MPEG-2.ogv

PS: I truly love being in Haiti! It’s an amazing country. You all should all come visit it sometime. And, unlike those nasty rumors spread by neo-cons hell-bent on colonizing Haiti for fun and profit, Haiti is perfectly safe. And it’s lovely here too.

PPS: Here’s another interesting fact about Haiti: The whole population of this country has African DNA. So far, I’m the only white person I have met in all of Port au Prince. For instance, there were over 2000 people at the carnival in Carrefour last night — and only yours truly was white. And you know what? No one cared — because everyone was having such an amazingly wonderful time there, dancing in the streets, even me (except, of course, for my sore knees).

February 21, 2014

Shhh, I finally made it to Haiti!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jane Stillwater @ 5:09 pm

I was supposed to fly down to Haiti on February 12 but ice-storm Pax put an end to that plan. 3,000 flights were cancelled, including mine — which was sort of embarrassing because I had already told the world and his wife that I was going and hated to go back on my word. So when I suddenly came across another cheap flight to Port au Prince on February 20, I decided not to tell anyone I was going until I was actually really and truly there. Why jinx a good thing? Fingers crossed.

And now I really am actually here! And just saw Port au Prince up close and personal. And had goat stew for dinner. Yes!

Sure, Haiti is a third-world country — thanks mainly to the United States, Canada and France. And, sure, there are still people living in tents from the 2010 earthquake, and a lot of our money donated to Haiti has gone toward projects like building a five-star hotel and getting Baby Doc’s evil rep whitewashed. But today when I did a quick windshield survey of Port au Prince, I also saw a lot of school kids in uniforms going hopefully off to school and a lot of market women carrying on.

And I didn’t see as many homeless panhandlers here as I did back in the United States. But, like I said, Haiti is still a seriously third-world country.

Last night I slept for a half-hour on a red-eye flight from SFO to JFK.

Tonight I’m off to the Hotel Oloffson to hear the RAM band play music based on Haiti’s voudou heritage.

Liberal Journalism MIA in Berkeley?

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:23 pm

Dorothea Lange, then a Berkeley resident, took the Thirties era photo of a farmer’s wife (the image is called “Migrant Mother”) that became the “go to” image for depicting America in the Depression.  Mario Savio delivered the speech that some historians credit as the real start of the Sixties from on top of a police car in Spraul Plaza at UC Berkeley.  Morris Dickstein wrote:  “The History of the Sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times.”  It seemed only natural to expect that in the Bush era journalists would be clogging both Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues to relay stories and photos of the famous variations of Main Street to the rest of the world.

Wolf pack coverage of the latest installment of bad times still hasn’t arrived in the university town a few miles east of San Francisco and so the question must be asked:  Has Berkeley become passé or has America’s Free Press screwed up again?

The Berkeley campus has a student newspaper and a school of journalism and the fact that the J-students aren’t covering the city’s homeless as relentlessly as the paparazzi dog actors in Hollywood may actually be the story.

Ninja Kitty, a denizen of Shattuck Avenue, finds it curious that the local politicians ignore the homeless at the same time that tourists from around come to the city wanting to take photos of hippies.  Do the tourists contribute to the politicians’ reelection campaigns?

He may have provided a Rosetta stone clue when he noted that the dynamic duo on the Armstrong and Getty radio show distort their audience’s perception of the homeless by focusing attention on the fringe element of the contingent of Bay Area vagabonds and concentrate on warping their observations and generalizations by focusing on the panhandlers in San Francisco who are shunned by the majority of the homeless community.  Why would anyone want to provide such inept attempts at journalism?

Is focusing on a group’s radical extremists an example of fair and balanced journalism?  What if a Liberal radio show asserted that the Republicans Party was populated by people brandishing guns as a way of standing their ground to protect their right to handle rattlesnakes in a religious ceremony?  “You’ll take my rattlesnake from my cold dead hands!”

The World’s Laziest Journalist has listened to Armstrong and Getty and noticed that their basic knowledge of the homeless milieu is inaccurate.  The homeless in Berkeley regularly use the access they have for taking a shower.  The homeless, who often sleep in the open, keep dogs with them as a means of having a burglary alarm system while they sleep.  Any homeless person can verify the accuracy of the folk wisdom:  “The rich rob from the poor; and the poor rob from each other.”

The hippies became known as “freaks” in the late Sixties and since Diane Arbus was known for photographing unusual people, we often marvel that she didn’t document the vagabonds in the Sixties who hitchhiked into and out of Berkeley.

Richard Avedon was hired (by Rolling Stone Magazine) to set up a portable studio at the 1976 Democratic National Convention and take portraits of all the most prominent politicians.  We’ve often wondered why he didn’t cover the anti-war protesters in Berkeley earlier in his career.

If the mainstream media ignores the Berkeley angle now in a complete contradiction of how, hypothetically, Dorothea Lang would have responded to the opportunity, we can chalk it up to unknown factors, but the nagging question remains:  If students at UCB in the Sixties used their local Berkeley angle to gain entry to the exclusive mainstream media In-crowd of the New York publishing world, why then, aren’t the Berkeley panhandlers of today in need of a press agent to handle interview requests?

If you have ever closely watched a human and a dog walk together, the dog frequently makes an effort to get his stealth cues from the human’s face and body language.  They often check to see if the Homo sapiens are emitting subconscious (to the human) clues about how the canine should react.  Is the approach of a stranger a bad thing (grrrr) or a good (wag the tail)?

Could it be that the (Sixties cliché alert!) sell out to the Establishment by Journalists in the USA has become so complete and pervasive that J-schools project the “do not offend the media owners” attitude so thoroughly that the students in Berkeley don’t bother to send query letters to New York based editors about counter culture stories?  Many of the Sixties students were eager to tell their stories in underground newspapers and the trend morphed into a farm club system of developing talent for the In-crowd in New York City (see the book “Smoking Typewriters” by John McMillian) but these days in the Fox era, it seems that the method is to make absolutely sure that Journalism students know from the start that unorthodox methods and stories are off limits and a binary choice about the capitalistic society has to be made.  “Are you in or are you out?”

Speaking of higher minimum wage rates, we are investigating a rumor that makes the assertion that some affluent college students are offering prestigious firms substantial sums of cash to land an internship gig which will give them some material to list on their resumes.

A scholar from Boston, who is in Berkeley to audit a class in philosophy, has told us that he is interested in making some suggestions to the city council regarding urban development and since that topic has a cusp area that overlaps with the needs and wants of the homeless, a greater interest in affordable housing may soon become a relevant factor in an area where tenants rights is impacting the subject of affordable housing.

Since the overall Conservative strategy has long been “divide and conquer,” circumstances, which cause a uniting of the assorted activists working on the challenges of renters’ rights, the long term consequences of home foreclosures, and the problems of the homeless, could , if they all joined forces, become a worse nightmare scenario for the champions of capitalism in action.

The World’s Laziest Journalist believes that the One Percent does not want a permanent solution to the homeless problem and consequently that topic will be revisited in future columns for years to come.

Since many of the political pundits with national audiences have pointed out that the Republican Party seems to be simultaneously alienating women, Chicanos, labor, abortion rightists, pacifists, and the advocates of legalized pot; it seems that there is only one possible strategy available to the Republicans to win the contest.

Brad Friedman, the leading Internet voice for criticism (Google hint:  Bradblog) of the electronic voting machines, with no verifiable results, has been labeled a conspiracy theorist, and so the only response to the aforementioned challenge may require a reference to the W. C. Fields quote:  “If a thing’s worth having; it’s worth cheating for.”

Stoned munchies?  Cities in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley?) are finding that there is a noticeable increase in the sales of Girl Scout cookies at the locations that are in close proximity to the dispensaries for medicinal marijuana.

[Note from the Photo Editor:  A portrait of a fellow who is trying hard to cope with the new hard times will be used to illustrate this column.  Isn’t a poor attempt to imitate the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange, better than none at all?]

In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (on page 67), Hunter S. Thompson wrote:  “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

Now the disk jockey will play Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” and the Searchers’ “Needles and pins.”  We have to go look for a news story about the new Tonight Show host, Jimmy Falon, which mentions that one of his predecessors was Al “Jazzbo” Collins.  Have a “we don’t gotta show you no stinkin’ badges” type week.

February 14, 2014

Old soldiers tell excellent stories

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:26 pm

When two members of the United States Marine Corps, getting away temporarily from the rigors of combat on Guadalcanal, were put in a jail cell in New Zealand and told to sleep it off, they couldn’t shut off the adrenaline flow and so they spent most of the night telling each other their life stories.  Norm W. was impressed by the other guy’s determination to tell his story in a book that would be written “after the war.”  In the mid-Fifties, Norm noticed the publicity about the release of the film “Battle Cry” and headed straight for the nearest theater showing it.  He just had to see the new flick because the back story of the life of the author Leon Uris was the same information he had been told in New Zealand .

Norm told many wonderful stories about his experiences.  Once when a group of Marines wanted to have a sing-a-long in a New Zealand tavern, they were temporarily stymied by the fact that the place didn’t have a piano.  Luckily a near by gin-mill did have one so the Marines “borrowed” it and proceeded to have an impromptu songfest.  Norm’s stepson recorded one of his tales and just like in the movie “Big Fish” only regretted the fact that he hadn’t recorded more after Norm passed away.

Alan Lomax went around the USA recording and transcribing folk songs and earned a place in the Pop Culture Hall of Fame.  Why then doesn’t an enterprising film school student tape the every shrinking supply of World War II vets telling their stories?  There are plenty of excellent stories lurking inside some old infantry men who are very anxious to pass their stories on to future generations.  We don’t mean interviews such as featured in the Ken Burns films that discuss the overall strategy for WWII.  Where are the interviews that record for posterity the day to day events that get told at various reunions?

For example, once, many moons ago, the World’s Laziest Journalist was in the stacks at the Santa Monica Public Library trying to do some fact checking on WWII.  An old guy asked us why we were looking at the books in one particular section.

The 109 Regiment from the 28th Division, from our hometown of Scranton Pa., had been involved in the Battle of the Bulge.  The old guy pointed to the group of books on that particular topic and told us about the time he had seen a quiet empty café and (despite the fact it was against regulations) he parked his tractor trailer and had a quiet, memorable lunch.  He spoke enough French to get his food and pay the bill.  The village seemed to be a ghost town.  The next day he learned that Bastogne, where he had stopped for the meal, was in German held Territory.

One neighbor in Scranton told a story about talking to a German POW and discovering that the Kraut knew most of the popular bars in the North Eastern Pennsylvania town.

When we were young, we were strongly cautioned to realize that the slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges was not to be imitated or taken seriously because it was unrealistic.  We were told that an uncle in the Seabees had been attacked (on Guadalcanal) by an enemy soldier and had defended himself by killing the guy by hitting him on the head with an empty bucket.

Last year, on December 7, we heard news reports that the number of people who had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor had fallen to such a low number that the annual reunions in Hawaii were too impractical to continue.

While living in the Hollywood area, if we had collected a nickel for every time we heard the offer “we’ll write the script together and split the payoff,” we’d have enough today to buy a very fancy coffee latte.

We had a co-worker in Santa Monica who had a neighbor who had been one of the “Red tailed devils” (i.e. a Tuskegee airman).

Didn’t Tonight show host Jack Paar tell a story about the captain of a U. S. Navy ship that hid his girlfriend as a stowaway in the captain’s quarters for an entire deployment?

In Paar’s era, late night talk shows featured some fine examples of storytelling, but when the bean counters discovered that talk shows could be used to hawk Hollywood’s latest films, the talk show format became a series of disguised sales pitches which we call “promobabble.”

A once sentence synopsis of a plot for a potential movie is called a “pitch” in tinseltown parlance and Bo Zenga, who was the King of the Pitch became a movie director, so he would be a great potential audience for one particular WWII nurse’s story.  She was captured, became a P. O. W., escaped and made the journey to a neutral country and spent the rest of the war in that location.  It was “the Great Escape” with a woman protagonist.  Yeah, we know where Zenga’s office is.  Should we send him a query letter asking if we can “pitch” the old pitcher or what?  Should we contact a member of the Writer’s Guild and offer him half the proceeds if he can get his agent to make the pitch successfully?

Has the life story of combat photographer Dickey Chapelle ever been told in a movie?

Once, on a flight from Los Angeles to NYC, we expected the woman next to us to display snapshots of he world’s greatest grandchildren for our approval.  When we questioned her she said that she had spent WWII working in Washington D. C. as a secretary for a member of the government bureaucracy named William Donovan.  Wait just a darn minute!  We had heard Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the group that became the CIA, called many things, but we had never heard him be labeled as a member of the government bureaucracy.  We often wonder if she ever got around to writing her autobiography.

Obviously not all tales from WWII have commercial movie potential but with all the film schools turning out all the next generation’s award winning documentary film makers, why aren’t those youngsters doing the Leadbellly act and interviewing on camera the continuously diminishing supply of WWII veterans?

In the past, we did some online fact checking and found that in the San Francisco Bay Area there are some storytelling competitions.  When we went back to recheck that fact for this column we learned that there is an annual storytelling event which will be held

Recently Coach John Madden told KCBS listeners that golf tournaments that get rained out are the best because the golfers get to hand out in the clubhouse and tell their best stories (again).

There are a bunch of Irish bars in the San Francisco Bay Area and one, the Starry Plough,  offers Irish dancing and songs, but there doesn’t seem to be one fooking bar where an open mike is available for a real storytelling opportunity and/or competition.  WTF?  What would happen if an Irish bar had a storytelling competition?  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it would be “Katie bar the door” time, eh?

[Photo editor’s note:  The Berkeley artist, known as “Hardley Notee Sayahblay” on Facebook, is renowned for his digital images, but only a few get to know his ability as a raconteur who voices an Infantryman’s complaints about the Korean War.  We tried to select an image of him that implies an underlying back story.]

Robert McKee’s book, “Story,” is an excellent look at the art of storytelling from the scriptwriter’s point of view.  In it, McKee wrote (page 196):  “In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or anther, since the dawn of humanity, and that story could be successfully called The Quest.  All stories take the form of a Quest.”

We asked the disk jockey  to play songs that tell a story and he selected the Bill Parsons (AKA Bobby Bare) song “All American Boy,” Tom T. Hall’s “Forty Dollars,” and Red Sovine’s “Phantom 309.”  Our DJ will include a memorial spin of Shirley Temple’s “Good Ship Lollypop.”  We have to go see “Monument Men.”  Have a “they all lived happily ever after” type week.

February 12, 2014

Snowstorms just cancelled my trip to Haiti. No-o-o-o-o!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jane Stillwater @ 1:05 pm

I have been trying to get down to Haiti ever since the 2010 earthquake — and now, four years later, I thought that I was finally going to get that chance. But no. Leaving today as planned? Not.

“Severe weather in NYC has caused your flight to Port au Prince this evening to be cancelled,” said a rep from Jet Blue. “But we can still get you down there just two and a half days later — and we can probably still get you back home as scheduled.” Oh great. Just three days in Haiti? Or I could stay longer but with no guesthouse reservations? Forget that.

Damn you, climate change! Damn your eyes.

But one good thing has come out of this. I have been reading up on Haiti. A lot. Things are not really all that rosy down there right now. Lots of people still don’t have homes, food or even access to clean water — despite all the billions that have been spent on “building back better” after the quake. Most of that money seems to have gone to outside contractors and NGOs, according to Paul Farmer in “Haiti After the Earthquake,” not toward creating local jobs.

And Baby Doc Duvalier has been back in Haiti for over three years and is still running around free and acting like George W. Bush — like all those killings and tortures they committed weren’t really real, just stuff that has been made up by disgruntled liberals. Yet nobody seems to be asking all the amputees and ghosts born from their regimes.

According to Amnesty International, “While the victims await the Court’s decision [on Baby Doc's crimes], Duvalier has been taking part in public events. Most recently, on 1 January 2014, he attended a state ceremony to celebrate Independence Day in the city of Gonaïves. Former president Prosper Avril, a close Duvalier ally who came to power following a military coup in 1988 and ruled until 1990, also was there. President Michel Martelly justified Duvalier’s and Avril’s invitations as important to promote national reconciliation.”

National reconciliation? Then perhaps we should send GWB back to Iraq so Dubya could do some hands-on “reconciliation” with the million ghosts he created there. Or we should send Obama to Pakistan and Afghanistan for even more and better “reconciliation” after all his drone strikes on weddings.

Baby Doc? Nelson Mandela he is not.

I also learned that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is now living in Port au Prince but isn’t allowed to run for office again. And who isn’t allowing him to run? One guess. The same folks who had him ousted the last time he was legally elected. Or was it the last two times he was legally elected? Wall Street and War Street.

As Jose Marti once said, “If you look at all South American countries, the ones controlled by the United States are the poorest and the least free.” And over a hundred years later, this simple fact still rings true. Just look at Honduras. Just look at Haiti.

Then I read Isobel Allende’s book that took place in Haiti back when French “Christian” slave-owners were torturing their slaves and working them to death; for fun and profit. Nowadays slavery is illegal per se in Haiti, but American corporations have now replaced French slave-owners — and they can still get Haitians to work for them for slave wages and they can still work them to death.

“But Jane,” you might say, “if Haiti is such a freaking nightmare, why in the world would you want to go there?” Great music, nice people, wonderful historical sites, fabulous beaches — and a chance to give something back to the people of Haiti after European and American “capitalists” have spent the last six centuries taking so very much away.

PS: I haven’t given up yet. Sooner or later I WILL get to Haiti. And you should come too!

And when you get there, ask Ravix Evens (ravixevens@yahoo.com) to meet you at the airport and take you straight to the Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince — and then, later on, ask him to drive you over mountains beyond mountains to the beautiful historical city of Cap Haitien, a UNESCO world heritage site. That’s what I would have done.

Sigh.

February 7, 2014

Why authoritarianism doesn’t work: Because nobody likes it!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jane Stillwater @ 8:44 pm

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “David and Goliath” — wherein Gladwell says that, in the course of any human interaction, there will always be a graphic curve of diminishing returns when it comes to maximizing the use of force in order to achieve one’s goals.

In other words, always punching other people’s lights out in order to get your own way can very quickly become counterproductive. Good grief, I think that Gladwell might be onto something here.

Want examples?

If the maximum use of force in order to obtain one’s goals been successful in Iraq (and assuming that said goals were to depose a dictator and not just to create chaos and steal oil), then the Bush-led invasion would never have been such a dismal failure and there never would have been such a disastrous resistance war there — one that still keeps rolling right along to this day. So much for Shock and Awe.

If maximum use of force really worked, then Europe would still be saluting Hitler.

Slavery would still be on the books in Georgia and Alabama because of all those happy slaves it created. Or, alternatively, segregation would still be a huge success and MLK would have had no effect at all on it.

Descendants of Genghis Khan would still be running Russia and China.

There would be no Child Protective Services anywhere and parents would still be beating their kids to within an inch of their lives. And I would still be lovingly obeying my mean older sister.

Women would look forward to being placed in harems and having a dozen babies each and would never demand the right to be pro-choice. “Barefoot and pregnant.” They would know their place as slaves to their husbands and not strive for anything else. Rape would not be a problem for women and girls.

Those viscous stormtroopers who illegally seized control of Palestine 65 years ago by ruthlessly wiping out hundreds of villages and slaughtering Christians and Muslims by the thousands? They would not still be getting resistance from the Occupied Territories even now. And the current Israeli neo-cons’ constant brutal “eye for an eye” faux cleverness wouldn’t have forced Al Qaeda out of the remote caves of Afghanistan where it was holed up in 2001 — and forced it into not-so-remote southern Syria where Al Qaeda is now, right at Israel’s front door.

And there would not have been 30 years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland either.

And in South America, Pinochet’s ghost would still be running Chile, Argentina’s Dirty War would have made Henry Kissinger proud, the billions Reagan spent on killing peasants in Guatemala would not have been wasted, Batista’s grandson (not Castro’s brother) would still be ruling Cuba and all those tin-pot dictators that the CIA supported in Central and South America over the years would be in Heaven right now — not in Hell. And phrases like “Banana Republic” and “Military Junta” and “Drug Cartel” would all stir our hearts with pride instead of just making us queasy.

The Soviet Union would still exist — and Afghans and Chechyans would just love being a part of it. People there would stop praising Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Baryshnikov and start even more fan clubs for Stalin.

We would have “Fascism” and “Corporatism” engraved on our dimes now instead of just that stupid old word “Liberty”. And “Mein Kampf” — not “Romeo and Juliette” — would be required reading in all American high schools.

All seven billion of us human beings, when we were babies, would have been spanked every time we cried, been locked in closets for days for the slightest infraction and would have thrived on harsh whippings — and that would have been that. And as a result we would all have grown up to become obedient citizens, not axe-murdering psychopaths.

Jesus would have been just another loser with wild ideas. Even Mohammed and the Buddha would have been buked and scorned (and sent to bed without any Last Supper). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdllgBtXPaE

Everyone in America would be happily welcoming the NSA and the militarization of our police forces with open arms right now. More tanks driving down Main Street? More surveillance on our phones? More destruction of our Constitutional rights? Bring it on!

And Baby Doc and his Tonton Macoute would still be running Haiti and Jean-Bertrand Aristide would have been laughed out of the country instead of becoming a hero almost as legendary as Toussaint L’Ouverture.

So why don’t whips and chains and oppression and torture work out so well in the long run? One would think that they would. Isn’t Fear the greatest motivator? According to Gladwell, apparently not.

And why is “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” still such a hot item? You tell me. Which way would you prefer to be treated? As a friend or as a slave? Which way of being treated would piss you off to the degree that you would take torches and pitchforks in hand rather than live under a tyrant?

PS: And speaking of Haiti, I just got a really great deal on Expedia to go to Port au Prince over Valentines Day (flight there and back and five days in a guest house in Diquini, including breakfasts, for less than I can spend if I stayed home in Berkeley — plus a night of listening to RAM at the Hotel Oloffson on February 13 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eppC82rUK3g).

Does anyone know of any other interesting (and meaningful) things that I could see and do in Haiti — on a limited budget? If so, please let me know. Or how I could get interviews with Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Paul Farmer while I am there? Or I wouldn’t mind interviewing Sean Penn again either, who I hear now lives down there — when he’s not hanging out with Charlize Theron in Malibu that is.

Or even Baby Doc?

Beatniks, Hippies, and panhandlers

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:23 pm

In the arcane world of S & M, it is traditional for the masochist to eagerly and enthusiastically receive the punishment being doled out by the sadist.  For example, if the victim is being whipped, after each lash is received, the traditional response is:  “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

President Obama seems to have successfully weaned the Democratic Party onto the idea of building the XL Pipeline.  “Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”

President Obama was unsuccessful in his attempts to get Congress to approve extended unemployment benefits.  “Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”

It seems that cuts to the food stamp program are unavoidable.

“Mmurf murb.”

“What?  I can’t hear you!”

“THANK YOU, SIR.  MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”

“That’s better.”

Some time ago, this columnist suggested that the Passive Aggressive tactics of the Republicans in Congress were reminiscent of the sit down strike strategy used by workers at Chevrolet in the Thirties.  You will disregard that comment and only believe and repeat propaganda that is approved at the National Conventions.  Is that understood?

Who was it that said:  “What’s good for the billionaires is good for America!”?

On the night of February 5, 2014 to the 6in Berkeley, a person died on the streets.  It was rumored to be from hypothermia caused by the cold and rain.  If a weather dead can be reported in such a way that it subtly ridicules the idea of “global warming,” the national media put it on the Evening News, but if it happens as a result of a rainstorm, spike the story for being insignificant.

The Los Angeles County assessor was arrested in October of 2012.  In October of 2013, additional charges were filed.  The Los Angeles Time reported those bits of information.  The national media seems to be stonewalling the story.

The Fairness Doctrine is gone and the public airwaves are now overstocked with Republican talking points.

Berkeley war correspondent, grandmother, and blogger, Jane Stillwater, is going to Haiti to do some fact checking and gather some material.  She is seeking a letter of introduction which will help her get an opportunity to interview Paul Farmer, Jean Paul Aristide, and/or Francois Papa Doc Duvalier.  (Google hint:  Jane Stillwater blog)

Before WWII, Europe was crowded with journalists who were salaried employees for various newspapers in the USA.  These days it is up to citizen journalists to keep American voters informed.  “Thank you sir.  May I have another?”

Aren’t most (all?) of the reporters for American media covering the Winter Olympics?

Democracy in America is in shambles.  The spectacle of the President using the State of the Union Address to declare that he was retroactively endorsing the Imperial Presidency program initiated by George W. Bush was pathetic.

Will there be a future conspiracy theory that promotes the idea that President Obama was a Trojan Horse strategy used by Republicans to disarm the Democratic Party’s animosity aimed at the Bush Dynasty?  If Obama adopts every one of George W. Bush’s policies, what’s the use of continuing the snide remarks about the Bush Dynasty?

If the Dynasty resentment vanishes, what’s to prevent a JEB bandwagon in 2016?

What good does it do for the World’s Laziest Journalist to do all the grumbling?

One particular website has been an example of American Cultural Imperialism.  Did a column critical of that elitist attitude cause a change?  We noticed recently that they ran an ad proclaiming that they were now a portal to the radio stations of the World.  Does that mean that folks who are tired of Republican talking points can use that site to listen to Triple J, Skyrock, and/or Radio Caroline?  Maybe we can do some extensive fact checking and write an entire column about this new widow of opportunity for radio fans.

Isn’t there a goodly number of trucking music fans in America who might get some enjoyment out of hearing Australian trucking songs?

Is it ironical (or just an example of poignancy?) that while Republican ideology has become dominant on radio, Democratic Party programs (such as Gay Marriage and Medicinal marijuana) are proliferating at a rapid rate on the state level?

If capitalism works like the conservatives say it does, how long will it take before Top Forty music radio programming makes a comeback?

What if Casey Kasem’s Top Forty countdown becomes more popular online than Uncle Rushbo?   Won’t radio programmer wunderkinds want to play what sells?

Has any online source for radio programming registered the XERB.com domain name?  How hard can it be to find a gravely voiced disk jockey to become Wolfman 2.0?  World wide access would make “coast to coast, border to border, wall to wall and treetop tall” seem chintzy in comparison.

With just a skosh under three years to go, folks are going to get more than a wee bit fed up with “Thank you sir. May I have another?” fanatical enthusiasm for Obama and his capitalist masters.

While reading “Counter Culture through the Ages from Abraham to Acid House” (by Ken Goffman [AKA R. U. Serius] and Dan Joy) we noticed that while the conservatives have been exerting their influence on the media, the lack of news coverage of any current counter culture trend is rather unsettling.  Where is the counterculture action happening these days?  How many times in a Western movie did the statement “I don’t hear anything” evoke a “That’s what worries me!” response?

Back in the Sixties, boys and girls, the reporters for main stream media used to sneak hippie sentiments into back of the book trend spotting stories.  This fellow Hunter S. Thompson shaved his head while running for sheriff and then called his opponent with a G. I. haircut “the guy with the long hair.”

Is it still the case that “we don’t grow our hair long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do”?  Can we get back to you next week on that question?  Does the Haight attract more tourists than North Beach?  Would today’s kids rather be a hippie or a beatnik?

Recently the New York Times ran a front page story that made the assertion that franchise restaurants across the USA were struggling, but that posh upscale eateries were thriving.

If Mario Savio were attending UCB this year would he be driving a flashy Ferrari?

In 1965 weren’t the students protesting rising tuition costs?  Didn’t Prop 13 use a claim that homeowners would save hundreds of tax dollars to get them to pass a measure which saved businesses thousands (ultimately millions?) of dollars?  Didn’t Prop 13 pave the way for bankers to reap massive profits from student loans?

[Note from the Photo editor:  Is it sadistic to run a photo of a very exotic Ferrari with a column about how tough times are?]

The aforementioned history of the Counterculture informs readers (on page 232) that:  “Seeing no hope for positive change, the hipster had no desire to confront the repressive political apparatus and was barely even interested in offending ‘straight’ conformists.”

Now the disk jockey will play Lord Buckley’s “The Nazz,” Stan Freberg’s “Green Christmas,” and Jeff Bridges and the Abiders’ song “She Lay her whip down.”  We have to go find a used copy of a book called “Screw the Roses.”  Have a “needles and pins” type week.

January 31, 2014

Super Bowl, Olympics, and the Imperial Presidency (2.0)

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 2:29 pm

The entertainment industry’s awards season has shifted into high gear, football fans are eagerly awaiting the Superbowl this weekend, and the TV news anchors obsessed on the traffic problems caused by ice in Georgia this week.  Automobile enthusiasts learned that a museum for the “inventor” of the Ford Cobra, Carroll Shelby, is in the seeking funding stage of development.  The Winter Olympics will be next week’s big diversionary news gambit from the media.

Thanks to cable news’ need for new sensations syndrome, criticism and analysis of the State of the Union speech was (reluctantly?) given priority for one day.  Did anyone see a Libertarian spokesperson get network airtime to respond to the President’s speech?

The elation of the Democrats in response to the President’s State of the Union speech may have been a bit premature because, upon reflection, what Obama did by resorting to the strategy of using executive orders as a way around a recalcitrant Congress is to grant the Democratic Party’s retroactive approval of George W. Bush’s concept of the Imperial Presidency.

Since there was no particularly gruesome news story to report on Wednesday of this week, the political propaganda factory (AKA the news media) was forced to focus the public’s attention on a macho dynamic Republican who may have subtly been employing the macho hombre attitude of “Let’s see if Hilary can do this!” to confront a reporter with a chance to become a nationally known personality because of a failed attempt for a gottcha moment.

Senator Ted Cruz responded to the President’s State of the Union speech with an opinion piece for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that was very critical of the Imperial Presidency of Barack H. Obama.  Democrats who do not appreciate high quality hypocrisy will never understand what makes Republicans tick.

The President’s Year of Action may be the start of the Golden Age of Hypocrisy because this do-si-do maneuver now has the Democrats spouting old talking points that the Republicans used to defend the tactic when it was used by George W. Bush and the Republicans are recycling old Democratic criticism against Dubya to make citizens think ill of Obama.

This couldn’t have worked out better for the old Dubya cadre if they had meticulously planned it while they were occupying the White House.  Some conspiracy theory minded cynics make the bold assertion that the Bush junta used some very devious methods to engineer the Obama win in 2008 and then left the fellow in the White House no other option to salvage his legacy but to carry on Bush’s Forever War just as the Texas petroleum prodigy posse intended.

A large number of folks who will tune in to the Superbowl are mostly interested in seeing the commercials which makes us wonder: since the football fans get meticulous scrutiny of the play they just saw, why doesn’t a cable channel provide in-depth analysis of the Superbowl ads right after they air?  Heck if the casual viewer cares more about the sales pitches, why doesn’t some obscure cable channel have experts explain the hidden persuaders angle to the day’s biggest attraction and ignore the game completely?

Since Australia wants to promote tourism, why don’t they (with a little help from their friends at Qantas?) pay for a live commercial during the Superbowl featuring an attractive lass in a bikini reporting live from Bondi Beach or Cottesloe inviting the Americans struggling through the coldest winter of the Global Warming era to “come on down” and work on their tan?

Speaking of “Think Big!,” a friend in Kansas is going to get a passport and immediately head for Mexico.  Me thinks we should send her a “Best of Edith Piaf” album for her birthday.  Did Piaf do a cover of “April in Paris”?  What is Paris’ official theme song?

Speaking of Paris and Poughkeepsie (Didn’t famed model/photographer/war correspondent Lee Miller call both bergs “home”?) a gal pal in that area of New York wanted to lure the World’s Laziest Journalist into a screenwriting project.  Since we have seen two of our ideas appear on the TV screen and got nada for our efforts, we are inclined to send her a copy of Syd Field’s bible for rookie screenwriters and wish her the best of luck.  If we had a nickel for every time in L. A. that we heard “we’ll write it together and you will get half of the money!;” we’d have enough to buy a latte at a trendy coffee emporium.

How many folks would tune in if CBS reran the Ed Sullivan show featuring the first live American performance by the Beatles?  Replay the whole damn thing.  Commercials and all.  (“I want my Maypo!”)

The prospects for progressive pundits for the next three years are very grim.  In cold weather when a car won’t start a driver will often persist in trying and wear the batter down and thus insure that a call to Triple A for road assistance will be necessary.

The progressive pundits will spend the next three years trying to reassure the male voters that a woman Commander-in-chief for Bush’s continuing Forever War won’t be so bad.

Won’t Ann Coulter have such fun asserting that she was just joking when she was goading liberal men to boldly assert that:  “The old broad is the lesser of two evils.”?

Is it true that Karl Rove is saying:  “If they give the nomination to Hilary, we should pick Barbara Bush.”?

According to the hottest radio show on the West Coast, this week, in Sacramento, for the first time, a woman is the courtside announcer for an NBA team.

If the World’s Laziest Journalist were to be the only pundit to mention that Obama is using the “turnabout is fair play” philosophy and adopting the Bush Imperial Presidency methodology would all the paid commentators ignore the scoop or would they be ordered to not give the idea any chance of “going viral” via any publicity?

[Bike and pedestrian accidents are trending higher in San Francisco and the photo editor thought that a recent spot news photo could be used to illustrate a column that strongly hints that the President is throwing the Democratic Party under the bus.]

Annie Jacobsen, in her book “Area 51,” wrote (page 62):  “When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles.”

Now the disk jockey will play Pete Seeger’s “Where have all the flowers gone?,”  “Die Antwoord’s “I Fink U Freaky,” and a Waylon Jennings song, which we recently just heard for the first time, “Must you throw dirt in my face?”  We have to go buy the new copy of Ukulele magazine.  Have a “Just kidding, dude!” type week.

Quote of the Day

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 10:43 am


“Republicans blaming Barack Obama for not getting things done is like John Wilkes Booth blaming Lincoln for missing the end of the play.”

-John Fugelsang

January 29, 2014

Global (and judicial) warming and cooling: Why we get both

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 1:17 pm

It seems to me that the reason we get global warming in some places and global cooling in others should be as plain as the nose on your face — at least to those of us who live in Berkeley.

Whenever it gets hot in Walnut Creek, over the hill from Berkeley, we always get a strong wind here as our own cooler air rushes over to balance out Walnut Creek’s hotspots.

So global warming and cooling should clearly work in the same way — except on a planetary scale. As Florida really heats up, for instance, cold air from the Arctic should rush in to balance temperatures out. And hurricanes and tornadoes appear to be getting bigger and nastier here to compensate for temperature changes somewhere else. All over the planet, increased warm areas are being balanced out by increased cold areas — and vice-versa. That’s my new climate-change theory and I’m sticking to it.

And Justice works the same way as well. We gotta have liberty and justice for all — and not just for Poobahs and cartels. Because if we don’t, it’s all going to even out in the end eventually — one way or another.

Everyone everywhere keeps track of these things.

And when justice only goes to the wealthy and not to the poor, things definitely get hotter in one spot and cooler in another.

When big banks act unjustly and screw small homeowners, they are creating a financial “Polar Vortex” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425. When corporations get billions in welfare while people who actually need government services — and pay taxes for them too — are told they are moochers, then areas of highs and lows are created and wretched imbalances are struck.

When Justin Bieber doesn’t get deported for being drunk and disorderly yet other hard-working non-citizens who are helping to make America stronger get thrown in jail just for being on this side of a border, fair weather could become cloudy with a chance of injustice (although Bieber has just set a legal precedent that immigration attorneys all over America can now use to defend their clients. Way to go, Beebs!)

According to Noel Castellanos, “Justice is doing more than saving the drowning people, it’s changing the ones who are pushing them into the lake.” And in all too many countries all over the Global South, where social justice and economic democracy are in short supply, both economic disasters and violent (and non-violent) revolutions are common. “Why should I respect the rule of law when it doesn’t respect me?” seems to be the gist of thinking in the Global South.

And as social, economic and legal injustices become more and more common in America now too, and more and more of America’s “justice for all” has become only “justice for corporations,” economic democracy is now becoming a museum piece here too, a thing of the past along with crank telephones and kerosene lamps — leaving us open for violent (and non-violent) revolutions to start flowing into the low areas here too.

Handing out fake justice to some but denying it to others is a really good formula for making peace impossible all over the world and in America too — and, to paraphrase that old TV commercial, “Peace is our most important product”.

And apparently both the weather system and the justice system in America right now are refusing to tolerate extreme highs and lows.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

PS: Speaking of justice, at this month’s Berkeley-Albany Bar Association luncheon (curried chicken and caesar salad at the Berkeley City Club), a prominent trial attorney gave us his annual talk on what the U.S. Supreme Court had been up to this past year. And here are some things that he said. If I got any of it wrong, it’s my fault — not his. So don’t judge him. Judge me — for taking bad notes.

“The first thing you should know about the current Supreme Court is that it has a 44% approval rating with the American public.”

And regarding individual judges, the speaker told us that, “Thomas is silent on the bench at all times. He never asks any questions. Scalia is very influential, but I can’t see why. He also never looks at any foreign laws and is totally not interested in what other countries think. His originalism comes at a very bad time, however. Imagine if Thomas Jefferson had been like that. Kagan used to be a dean — and deans are all about authority. Alito is a pleasant person but has always worked for the government and has never worked with individuals who were being oppressed. Ginsberg used to work for the ACLU. Sotomayor is one of the most impressive on the court.”

“Five of these judges have committed our country to terrible things that they never revealed to the Senate during their confirmation hearings.”

“According to Dworkin, the job of a judge is philosophical and broad — and when doing it in a democracy, you also need to understand the basics of a democracy as well.”

“This year it is still the five vs. the four, and the four’s teeth are worn down to a terrible point because four is not enough.”

“Scalia came out against actual innocence this year. Most of us think that if you are proven innocent after sentencing, you should be able to turn in your orange jump suit and go home. One man, after 17 years in jail, was proven not to have committed the crime. Scalia disagreed that he should be released.”

“Criminal law has become an incredibly regulated event with regard to sentencing. Judges no longer have the flexibility in this area that they once had.”

“The Court struck down the identity-card voting law in Arizona. Thomas and Alito dissented.”

“Regarding ex post facto sentencing, Sotomayor wrote the opinion. Guidelines that were not in effect at the time of sentencing can’t change the sentencing later.”

“Regarding one DNA verdict, Scalia, Kagan Sotomayor and Ginsberg got together on this one — slowing that it was not just the usual straight five-to-four mix last year.”

“What if a defendant stops talking after he is arrested? Can his silence be commented on or held against him as evidence of guilt?” Not sure how that case turned out.

“Right to a lawyer — a competent lawyer, providing standards for attorneys not only the standards provided by the state bar. Trevino v. Thaler was habeas corpus case regarding ineffective assistance of counsel.” The court ruled that Texas didn’t consider that Trevino had ineffective counsel before sending him to Death Row.

“Daimler v. Bauman. Dealt with Argentina’s Dirty War and jurisdiction. No, you can’t hold to account foreigners involved in torture overseas. This one was recently decided.”

“The race factor: Not appropriate for U-Texas Austin to use it for admissions without an airtight justification and the application of direct scrutiny. Only Ginsberg dissented.”

“Adequacy of drug warnings are preempted by federal law.”

“U.Texas medical center v. Nassar: Employment discrimination must be proved by lots of evidence. Ginsberg dissented.” The Supreme Court made it harder for employees who were charging discrimination and retaliation to win their cases.” http://verdict.justia.com/2013/07/09/revenge-the-supreme-court-narrows-protection-against-workplace-retaliation-in-university-of-texas-southwestern-medical-center-v-nassar

“Class actions: The Supreme court has been limiting them in the past. However, in Angen v. Connecticut Retirement Plans, materiality did not need to be proved in order to establish a case as a class action. Alito, Thomas and Scalia dissented.” I just bet they did.

“Patents: DNA cannot be patented. Unanimous decision. Things that are open and obvious don’t deserve a patent. But no one on the Supreme Court knows much about patents. They are all generalists in an age of specialization — but, in their position, must take a broad range of cases anyway.”

PPS: Am leaving for Haiti on February 12. According to Dr. Paul Farmer, Haiti has undergone centuries of injustice on a frightening scale. According to Farmer, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.” http://www.pih.org/blog/paul-farmer-haiti-after-the-earthquake. And Haiti is now also the victim of climate change as well.

Haiti is a perfect example of what I have been talking about here. And apparently Haitians are totally ready to support both “justice for all” and climate stability — and also Jean-Bertrand Aristide as well. Go them.

Ye Olde Scribe Says…

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 9:04 am


A corporation is a “person” in the same sense that THE Rock is actual a “rock.”

January 24, 2014

Paranoia strikes deep: Why wisdom & kindness trumps greed, paranoia & fear

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 9:57 pm

I used to really really hate housework but don’t hate it so much any more — ever since I developed my fabulous new housecleaning system wherein I just do 15 minutes of housework a day, but do it each day consistently, using a timer so as not to cheat.

You’d be surprised how much you can get done in just 15 minutes, but you gotta do it daily, no matter what — even if some newbee student dentist has just finished scraping all those extra bone fragments out of the socket of your recently-pulled (phantom) tooth and then practiced her rusty stitching techniques on your poor bleeding gums.

And here’s another added bonus to my housecleaning system: After having spent approximately 5,475 minutes a year for the past six years on trying to keep this damn place clean, I have actually sort of started to bond with my home.

So. A few days ago I was cleaning stuff out of an old filing cabinet, and came across a whole bunch of articles that I had written way back in the day — back before we had all kinds of self-publishing apps available online; and even back before there was FaceBook or blogs or Kindle or Twitter or even Instagram and YouTube.

And, way back in those old paleo days, writers such as myself had actually been forced to photocopy our articles, write up a cover letter and then send them all off to magazine editors with self-addressed stamped envelopes enclosed. Totally old school. Can you even imagine doing that now?

And there at the very bottom of one of those file drawers, I found over two hundred rejection letters from various editors and publishers. Amazing.

Dontcha just love publishing over the internet instead? (And thank goodness for net neutrality too — which is currently being threatened. Shouldn’t we start boycotting Verizon, AT&T and Comcast over this? C’mon, all you independent bloggers, Tweeters and self-publishers, let’s get off our butts and fight for less intervention and more high-speed!) http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-net-neutrality-20140114,0,522106.story

And speaking of the internet, those huge and powerful corporations which now own our government are still using it to spy on all of us — and not just us writers. Now why would corporations want to do that? Because they are paranoid. And greedy. And afraid.

I used to be paranoid and greedy and afraid too — but am now here to tell you that, in the long run, paranoia and greed and fear are just too damn much hard work. Wisdom and kindness are better. And easier too. Just ask Jesus. And Gandhi. And Martin Luther King Jr.

“But Jane,” you might say, “that kind of slacker attitude could get you killed.” True. It certainly got King and Gandhi and Jesus killed. But at least I would die while feeling all proud of myself as I cross over — not huddled up in some miserable isolated Midas-like earthly fortress while watching the rest of the world end before my very eyes and with only my black, ice-cold-hearted evil soul (that nobody else would ever want to spend time with, ev-ah) to keep me company. Yuck.

Anyway, back at the filing cabinet, I began reading through some of my old articles again — and some of them were really actually quite good. The one about my struggles to get my aging father into an assisted-care home was particularly poignant — and how my mean sister had dragged me through probate court after he died, just when I was grieving the most. I later published it on the internet, entitled “Probating the Family Feud” — and a lot of people actually read it there too. http://veracityvoice.com/?p=1158

And I also found something I had written back in 2005 — back when Fallujah was a horrible war-crime-induced hot mess; about all my efforts to embed with the Army there. And how I finally did embed with the Marines in Heet and Haditha two years later http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html.

But apparently Fallujah is still a war-torn hot mess even today; the only difference being that Iraqis, not Americans, are now doing most of the killing in Al Anbar province. So does that make all this current senseless slaughter of civilians less of a war crime — because civilians are now being senselessly slaughtered by local hordes instead of by American hordes? http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-third-battle-of-fallujah/5364369

Ten years later, I still want to go to Fallujah.

Or as one friend in Iraq calls it, “Fallujahpaloooza”. Laughter through tears. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5qaMHQDfw&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDt5qaMHQDfw&app=desktop

And then I discovered, hidden back at the very bottom of my filing cabinet, a rough draft of my first novel. I loved that novel so much! But NOBODY would publish it. Nobody. That novel had everything — love, death, war, peace, history, philosophy, drama, even intergalactic travel — and even one fast-moving chapter on how wisdom and kindness always trumps greed, paranoia and fear. “Pictures of a Future World” was the title. I may get around to publishing it yet — but this time I’ll try Kindle.

PS: Here’s an excerpt from my old unpublished novel, “Pictures of a Future World”:

All eyes turn to the Shaman, who continues to speak from his deep trance.

The atmosphere in the sandstone kiva comes alive. The Shaman moves his mind to a new point of consciousness. Another one of his emanations begins to speak, this time in an intensely penetrating tone. “There is a tree on the mesa top,” the deep voice slowly intones. “It has watched the raider warriors kill our people one by one. It has seen us begin to build our houses here in the dark shadows of the canyon walls instead of up on the sunny mesa tops where they belong…so that we might be safe…from the raider warriors.

“They are killers.

“We are prey.

“So has it always been. So shall it always be.

“There is no place that we can go on the face of this earth that is safe from them…either now or in the far distant future… when even our mesa-top trees are dead.

“Raiders will always hunt peaceful men.

“They will find us, and they will kill our bodies just as the coyote kills the hare.”

Absolute silence falls like a black shroud inside the kiva.

Everyone waits for the Shaman to speak again. Even the Shaman himself waits. Is this all that he is going to say? By now the ceremonial kiva is as bright as day, the elders rigid with attention.

“Of these things we must never be afraid, ever,” the Shaman continues. “The raiders may search us out, the barbarians may chase us down and trap us and corner us like rats…from now until the end of time.

“The needy ones, the greedy ones will hunt us in order to make our wisdom and our abundance their own. They will act out of evil caused by envy, jealousy or need. Whatever their reasons — that is the way of it. No place is safe. We must be prepared to give up our bodies at any time, willingly and without fear or regret.

“Because our bodies are not us.”

The Shaman breathes slowly now, and the clan members sense that he is struggling within himself, trying to clarify what he alone is seeing, forcing himself to go on. A moment passes. The mask presses heavily upon him. Finally he continues: “We of the pueblo all know this. We are all made brave because of this knowledge. This we know: That always men of peace will die bravely. That always barbarians will try to kill us and to take our spirits.

“All of us know that the spirit of a man of peace can never belong to a barbarian and can never be harmed. Ever. It is this knowledge that gives us the courage to continue to live without fear in a world exploding with enemies, enemies gone mad with their own anger and need and violence and lust for our blood.”

The air inside the womb-like kiva begins to take on a life of its own; humid, dense, and pulsing.

Inside the ponderous deer-head mask, the Shaman tries to refocus his energy. He watches his body and his mind divide into a series of complex grids. Each one of these grids contains an image of himself. A part of him wonders which grid is his real self. A part of him knows that his real self is all of them — or none.

More chanting fills the air. The Shaman forgets about the raider warriors. They are a part of life. They will always be there…like the trees. Like the mesa.

Gonzo punditry from a sidecar

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:33 pm

 

“My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carole Lombard from 1936 was selected to be the first film in the Pacific Film Archives new Funny Ha-Ha series and was shown on Thursday January 16, 2014.  Since the film is a screwball comedy about efforts to rehabilitate a homeless guy, we made an attempt to try to get one of Berkeley’s panhandlers to be our guest at the nostalgic look back at a Depression era depiction of the life of a pauper.  The film confirmed the cynical view that the more things change the more they don/t.

While walking back to our base of operations, we chanced upon a new addition to the Berkeley business scene and opted for a nosh and a late night coffee.  We were operating in the guise of a Herb Caen wannabe searching for column items that would be interesting, amusing, and informative.

Did you know that football injuries are not a new topic?  One of the clerks at Pacific Cookie Company on Telegraph Avenue informed us that the subject had caused her grandfather,  Dave Meggyesy, to quite his job as a professional football player and write a book on the subject.  He was given the opportunity to go on the Dick Cavett TV show to promote his book (isn’t such video content called “promobabble”?).  It turned out, according to the clerk, that a fellow guest that night was Janice Joplin and the singer, we were told, came on to the author.  We then had the chance to view an excerpt from that episode that was available on the Youtube website.  The St. Paul moment when Meggyesy heard a bone snap sounded familiar.  Seeing the snippet of the show made us realize that we had seen that particular installment of the Dick Cavett Show when it was originally broadcast.  Is it time for a paperback publisher to reissue Meggyesy’s  book, “Out of their league”?

Extreme Pizza on Shattuck Ave. seemed like a logical place to look for a new entry in our attempts to find the best pizza in Berkeley.  What we weren’t expecting was a chance to cross an item off our Bucket List.  While returning to the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory at its secret location in the vicinity of the UCB campus, we noticed a motorcycle with a sidecar attached.  It was in front of the pizza parlor and a nearby panhandler informed us that the owner worked inside the pizzeria.  We have done a story about the replicas of a 1939 BMW motorcycle (Google Imz-ural) but a ride in a motorcycle sidecar was an item that still lurked on our Bucket List.  We learned that the cycle’s owner was connected to the Shattuck Ave. source for a pizza fix.  Since he did not have a spare helmet with him, he offered the chance for the World’s Laziest Journalist to return on Saturday for a ride in a sidecar.  We have ridden in a biplane and the view from the sidecar is better because it isn’t restricted by wings and a fuselage.

What does a whimsical description of a trip through Berkeley in a motorcycle sidecar have to do with insightful and perceptive political commentary?  Americans are avid advocates of the idea that the free press in the United States delivers the important information to the citizens that permits them to make informed decisions about which political candidates are the best choice.

Unfortunately the poor saps don’t get any news about the situation at Fukushima and the most likely scenario for the attempt to contain the damage.  The suckers don’t get much specific information about the Target hack or where it originated.  For complex political reasons, it is best if the free press just totally ignores the end results produced by the George W. Bush military adventure in Iraq.  The cost effectiveness of the money being spent to support American military operations in Afghanistan is too complex for the listeners of Patriot radio.

Soap opera news that gets viewers all choked up watching a video clip that is the TV version of a classic Dorothea Lang still photo of a Depression era woman looking all forlorn and bedraggled, is now considered the modern equivalent of “This is London calling” journalism.

Journalism in the United States today might best be compared to the experience of asking a buddy about the hundred dollars he owes you and in response getting the question:  “Did your mom get out of the hospital yet?”

The Pacific Film Archives retrospective of classic American Comedy moves, on Sunday January 19, 2014, featured the 1933 Marx brothers “Duck Soup,” which tells the story of how a rich woman was able to coerce the fictional country of Freedonia into accepting Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) as the country’s Prime Minister.  He promptly starts a war.  The film seems to be a prescient parable prediction of the Presidency of George W. Bush and that idea could be expanded into a complete column.

Would a column about poor officiating and bad sportsmanship in a football game be a suitable topic for use in the realm of progressive punditry?

In the Golden Age of skim reading and the short attention span, the challenge for someone who is expected to produce a steady stream of attempts to refute the Republican strategy of disparaging Hillary by providing sexist humor (where were the sexist Republicans when Sarah Palin was in the spotlight?) that questions the wisdom of giving the vote to (to use Frank Sinatra  terminology) frails, the challenge will be enormous because you can’t refute a funny one liner with a classroom lecture on liberal values.

The only valid way to fight a humorous attack is to “top” the one liner.  For example, when a woman said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill that if he were her husband, she would put poison in his coffee, he replied that if he were her husband, he’d drink it.

If the Republicans want to make Hillary the butt of their jokes for the next two and a half years, then the Democrats need to respond with ridicule for the Republican candidates.

The Brad Friedman’s Bardblog website pointed out a marvelous bit of Chris Christie humor by showing members of his audience a duet done by Jimmy Kimmel and Bruce Springsteen.  (Google hint:  Jimmy Kimmel Born to Run Spoof)

The Republican strategy for the Presidential Election seems to be a repeat of 2012.  They will let the media grind a series of Republican front runners into mincemeat and then at the last minute provide an unsullied “savior” candidate who has been waiting in the wings.  Our prediction for the last minute reluctant Republican candidate is JEB Bush.

We will annoy the snot out of a good conservative friend and ask if he can sees truth in this question:  Is the quality of journalism on Fox similar to the level of excellence rating given to the security provided for the audience at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont?

Would skepticism about Global Warming cause biased media to ignore San Francisco’s January “heat wave”?

Political issues are a lot like the weather.  Everyone talks about them, but neither party actually does anything to solve the problems.

As Janis Joplin once said; “Tomorrow never comes.  It’s all the same fucking da-a-a-y, man.”

Now the disk jockey will play Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get you outta my head,” Brad Buckland’s “Boomaroo Flyer,” and Slim Dusty’s “Lights on the hill.”  We have to go find a good Australia Day party to crash.  Have a “Get it while you can” type week.

January 17, 2014

Same as it ever was

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 1:31 pm

[<B>Note:  This column is an example of Gonzo commentary and is therefore exempt from the fact checking process.</B>]

Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss” paints such a grim picture of people who are doomed to an abysmal existence of constant sorrow that will inevitably lead to an early grave but it does offer a possible view of the world that some political recidivists want to revive for America in the near future.  Was London’s tale of picaresque adventures titled “The Road,” a precursor of beat literature?  Was London’s “The Iron Heel” an inspiration for “It can’t happen here” or just a book that would hardly ever be compared to “The Canticle of Leibowitz”?  Did London’s “John Barleycorn” inspire “The Lost Weekend”?

After skimming through a copy of a Jack London biography we encountered in the Berkeley Public Library, we hightailed it off to the world famous Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue to see if they had an affordable used copy of the Library of America’s book containing those five of London ‘s social novels.  They did and so we paid cash for it (are charge cards the new century’s version of eight track tapes?) and started reading.

London was a socialist and so if he were still alive today he would probably do an appearance on Jon Stewart’s TV show to lament the status of the unemployment benefits that were recently terminated by the Simon Legree Republicans in Congress.  No one in their right mind really expects them to be reinstated, but the liberals are expected to play the game and urge the recalcitrant Republicans to recant and approve the resumption of the checks that prevent despair in the ranks of the job seekers.  The challenge for the Republicans is to find the rhetoric that will make their hard hearted response seem to be a logical extension of their compassionate Christian conservative philosophy.  Quibbling over parliamentary procedures is, of course, the perfect example of how Jesus Christ would answer the question:  “Do you want to restart the checks or not?”

London might be sarcastic about the free press’ feigned outrage, which is supposed to make the Democratic “attempts” to perform a resurrection on the social program that has flat lined look genuine, but is, instead, designed to divert attention from other topics where some back room manipulation is needed.

When the Target security breech was first announced, the hottest show on the West Coast made the assertion that the source of the hack was in Vietnam.  Have you seen any news stories about the source of the mischief?  Why is that information about the specifics of the source of the hack being ignored in the American media?

Are the doubts about the potability of water in some areas of West Virginia coming from the same whack jobs who say they can “prove” global warming is occurring (i.e. “the Scientists?  [Doesn’t that sound like the name for a Goth band?])  Aren’t those two ideas equally ludicrous?  Who would decline a drink of smelly blue water just because one of the global warming posse said it was “dangerous!”?

Is Fox or the New York Times presenting better and more coverage of events in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon?

While we were reconnoitering the Jack London cabin (made with material from London’s Yukon cabin) we encountered some transplants from Boston who were exploring their new hometown area and gave them some recommendations about how to most fully enjoy (one of London’s recurring themes in life) their new local area.  Get a guide book, lest you obliviously sail past an obscure location that features an arcane attraction that would amuse and fascinate newbies and long time residents alike.  That conversation could easily be expanded into a full length column about the delights of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Heinolds’ First and Last Chance (bar/saloon) in Oakland has always been synonymous with the name Jack London and so on Sunday January 12, 2014, we went to that city to have a look-see.  Was London really one of their “regulars” back in the day?  They have a photo of a young London reading a dictionary in that very building (the owner gave the lad the book as a present) for Doubting Thomases and fact checking columnists.  The unique bar, which tilts because of effects from the famous 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, can best be described by the word “über-funky.”

While we where at that gin mill (the First and Last got its name because it was the closest tavern to where oyster fishermen “clocked in” and “clocked out” for their jobs), we had to order a diet Coke™ because hey didn’t have Sarsaparilla. (Taking photos of Jack London’s cabin and Heinold’s saloon in Oakland CA,for this column seemed like the most likely solution for this week’s challenge for the photo editor.)

While savoring our drink we chatted up the bar tender and realized that we could easily write a column about the great bars of the world, where we have had a libation.  (We missed the real Quinn’s in Tahiti [the one that’s there now isn’t the legendary original according to what we have read].)

We could also do a column just limited to the famous bars that were a “home away from home” for great writers.  Didn’t Jason Miller, who wrote “The Championship Season” (Go 49ers!), used to drink at the Dinner Bell in Dunmore Pa.?

In the spirit of “ripped from today’s headlines,” we noticed that in the “People of the Abyss,” the homeless were kept out of London’s parks at night and that the police roused anyone attempting to sleep in public at night.  Sounds like the same complaints we heard recently, while visiting residents of Berkeley’s People’s Park.

We have suggested to one of Berkeley’s most noticeable panhandlers, known by the street handle of Ninja Kitty, that he run for Congress on a “I’ll get rid of the homeless in Berkeley” platform.  The conservatives would expect him to implement a “Getting a job (i.e. work) will set you free” style program and the Berkeley liberals would expect him to help expand the under funded social programs to help the homeless and also vote for him.  He’d be elected in a landslide.  Hit the pause button for that idea, he told us he is too young to be a Congressional candidate.  Maybe he can just help collect signatures for councilman Kris Worthington’s petition?  Ninja Kitty does, however, have a facebook page.  (https://www.facebook.com/sherpaj.theninjacat?fref=ts)

Originally we had intended to write a column for this week that compares and contrasts the movies “Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle.”  The two are simultaneously both similar and quite different.  It’s like one baseball game that’s a no-hitter pitched by Nolan Ryan, and another contest between Boston and New York that, after the lead chances several times, ends 13 to 12, with a bottom of the ninth inning walkoff grand slam (for the Yankees, naturally).

London, if he were still alive, would probably be able to take diverse bits of information, such as the annual traffic fiasco, that inevitably accompanies the Forth of July fireworks display in the Marina del Rey area, the recent resignation of L. A. Sheriff Lee Baca, and the political headaches for New Jersey Governor Chris Cristie, and combine them into one coherent column, but we’ll have to check with the Marina Tenants Association for the background story and get back to you on that challenge.

In Chapter 27 of Martin Eden, London wrote:  “When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over, but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain.”  Does that explain why Republicans prefer to discuss the homeless while enjoying a good meal?

Now the disk jockey will play Boston’s “Don’t look back” album, Chicago’s “Greatest Hits” album, and John Denver’s “Rockey Mountain High” song (has that become the official anthem of the Legalize Pot movement?).  We have to go see if the record high temperature for San Francisco in January will be set today.  Have an “over the lips, and through the gums; look out ribs here it comes!” type week.

[After a clerk at the Pacific Cookie Company on Telegraph Ave. bragged that Janice Joplin had “come on” to her grandfather on a national TV talk show and then went online to prove it, we knew we had a great item for next week’s column.  Tune in next week at the same bat time, same bat channel for the full story.]

January 15, 2014

From a different perspective: Rethinking Ariel Sharon & Chris Christie

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 2:01 pm

Ever since Ariel Sharon began rising up through the ranks of Israeli neo-con politics by hook or by crook, I’ve always viewed him as a Bad Guy. But maybe he wasn’t all that bad after all — at least not within the time-frame right before his sudden stroke. According to former IGF officer Roi Tov, Sharon might have finally seen the light and started actually implementing some of the few hopeful features of GWB’s ill-conceived “Road Map,” now a document as long-forgotten as Mr. Bush himself.

Tov is an Israeli journalist who I always love to read because he always seems to have juicy insider knowledge of all the latest hot gossip about what is going on in the highest Israeli neo-con circles. And according to Tov, Sharon had been taking the Peace Process a little bit too seriously right before his sudden stroke and, like Rabin, needed to be stopped. http://www.roitov.com/articles/sharonmahriv.htm

Sharon himself must have constantly been aware, like all good neo-cons everywhere have known since way back in JFK’s day, that when you play in neo-con Big Leagues, you gotta toe the current party line or else. But at least Sharon, there toward the end, might possibly have tried at long last to do the Right Thing toward establishing peace with Palestine — perhaps knowing full well that doing so would cause him to tangle with the Shin Beth. Perhaps I should give Sharon snaps for that. Taking on the Shin Beth is not for the timid of heart.

Perhaps Sharon finally wanted to atone for being the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila. Hey, it could happen.

But, if so, Sharon must have also forgotten the Number One neo-con rule: “Cross us and you are a dead man. We eat our young.” Sucks to be you, Ariel Sharon!

Anyway. We may never know the whole story. Neither Sharon nor Rabin are talking. And neither is the Shin Beth.

Israeli politics are so much fun to watch — almost as much fun as watching American politics. Which brings me to the subject of Chris Christie. “What did he know and when did he know it?” seems to be the big question on everyone’s lips. But, for me, the real question here should be, “Why the freak do Americans continue to passively put up with all of America’s constant and soul-killing traffic jams in the first place?”

If Christie and/or his loyal staff hadn’t caused the Fort Lee traffic jam, then something else would have caused it.

There are traffic jams all over America right now, night and day. 24/7. And nobody seems to even notice or care. We all just passively endure wasting hours and hours of our life each day that we will never get back.

For instance, the new San Francisco bay bridge is awesome to look at, but as a vehicle-mover, it sadly fails. The old bridge handled up to one-third more cars-per-hour than this new, spectacular one.

But all these new bridges and old bridges and freeways and rush-hour traffic jams all beg the huge major question, which is: “What kind of harsh air-pollution hazards are all these idling, gridlocked vehicles creating? And when are we going to finally take climate change seriously and start eliminating the use of pollution-causing motor vehicles entirely?”

This new scandal regarding Governor Christie and Fort Lee might be offering us a really good opportunity to start a national dialogue with regard to, first, the development of more public transportation options in order to alleviate traffic jams and save the air, and, second, finally doing something about the limited safety and diminishing returns of using cars themselves in this disastrous day and age of life-threatening climate change.

January 13, 2014

Ariel Sharon (1928-2014): My country, because of thee…

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 12:59 pm

Sweet land of liberty? “For thee I mourn.”

Ariel Sharon just died. He was America’s friend. What does that say about us? The Butcher of Sabra and Shatila just died, a friend of Washington DC for the last 20-odd years, feted by the White House, praised by Congress — from every mountainside.

Sharon is the kind of man that catches the eye of American leaders. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/11/obama-mourns-sharon-death-vows-us-unshakable-commitment-to-israeli-security/

Men like Ariel Sharon are lifted up and feted and praised. Men like Ariel Sharon, who can coldly give orders to kill hundreds of women and children without a second glance or a second thought? These kind of men? These are the kind of men we can teach our children to admire and praise? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37297.htm

I’m sorry that Ariel Sharon is dead. I’m sorry when any human being dies. I’ll even be sorry at my own death — but it is for America that I mourn for the most at the passing of Ariel Sharon. America, who used to bravely condemn the actions of mass murderers? America who fought against Stalin and Hitler? America now actually feeds these monsters with cold hard cash — and places cold, hard weapons in their hands.

“Land where our fathers died….” Let freedom ring.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress