Don't Forget Tisha B'Av!

I have had it with liberals of all advocacies whining, as they do on Facebook, “Whyyy didn’t we learrrrnn about THISSS in school?"

Well, maybe it’s because history is infinite. It is not just one thing; all things are connected. You learn basics in elementary school, more details in middle school, concepts and linkages in high school, and particulars in college. In fact, you never stop learning about history if you read. So all these things that snowflake bozos bitch about not being taught are not unknown. What they want is a history curriculum attuned to their desires, which of course would not be history at all but curricula of cultural superiorities.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that there is no single accurate viewpoint, but a patchwork of ideas, movements, and individuals that rose to an occasion for better or for worse.

Is there a single person reading this who did not know about Juneteenth until George Floyd was killed? Yet apparently we need a national holiday so Republicans can have something to claim they did for African-Americans. We have Lincoln’s birthday (subsumed into President’s Day), we know when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, we all know about the beginning and end of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We know about Bloody Sunday at Selma and we celebrate MLK’s birthday as a national holiday.

By all means, take note of Juneteenth, as we might note St. Patrick’s Day, Pulaski Day, and, yes, Columbus Day. Without Columbus, we wouldn’t be here to complain about the kind of oppression that has gone on since the beginning of time and conducted by every single nation-state and ethnic group. But do we need national holidays for Americans of Greek, Turk, Czech, Polish, German, Armenian, or Palestinian descent?  (I am very sensitive to national “days” because out of 365, only one commemorates nothing – “National Nothing Day,” which falls on my birthday.)

So we do know stuff because we are exposed to history texts, teachers, and books, not to mention "Jeopardy." What many of us learn about our own heritage is done through religious and family instruction. Must everything with a political following be made into a national observation? Maybe so, and then watch for “Juneteenth” mattress sales. But stop the mewling that “the white power structure didn’t teach us what they wanted hidden.” There is only so much to teach in schools and only so much to be absorbed by tiny minds that overpopulate social media.

Now, what about Tisha B’av? (Pssst, it's July 29-30.)

Portrait of Mobsters

From a book about a central character in the New York City business world in the 1980s by journalist Selwyn Raab:

“Flattering print and television stories about his opulent lifestyle, his unorthodox mannerisms, and his …invincibility magnified his opinion of himself. …  ‘He was made to order for the press. The way he looked, dressed, his arrogance toward the law. The press was manipulated by him and turned him into a folk hero’ (said a U.S. Attorney.) … He was heard fulminating at the government’s vendetta to convict him and how tough the law would be on him if he were ensnared.  Yet he repeatedly committed the fundamental mistakes that earlier had gotten him into difficulties, until they proved to be fatal. … His inability to judge loyalty and talent were pitfalls for (him.”

The author also expounds at length about his and his associates’ foul public insults of federal prosecutors.

The passages are actually about John Gotti, but it adds to the portrait of Donald J. Trump as the greatest organized crime boss ever.

My only optimism is that he will talk himself into impeachment, exile, or prison.

Call Western Union

I am appalled at the criticism of Green Book as Best Picture. First of all, this category rarely recognizes the actual best movie. Second, movies are not meant to provide deep social commentary or reflect the aspirations of this interest group or that. They are entertainment. Third, as with music and comedy, mileage may vary.

This is not rocket surgery. Movies are not philosophical treatises on humanity. They reflect what one ensemble of artists feel and see. What the critics, particularly in the black community, miss is that movies are made for a general audience – and for profit. The awards are based on voting by members of the industry, and the complaints seem to suggest that the Academy should pick members at random to fill out racial and gender quotas. Again, it is an industry award, with no meaning beyond that, just like a doohickey industry award for best thingamabob.

Yes, it is a feel-good movie that suggests that at least in one case – based on a true story though obviously not pinpoint accurate – a white and a black worked together and came out enriched.What do the critics want – like that bozo Justin Chang of the LA Times -- that a story written by the family of a white person be produced to show a “black perspective?” Do they want "feel bad" movies? The Shirley family, which may well be upset for some financial reason, complained they weren’t consulted and the movie is inaccurate. No movie is accurate. Movie-making fiction, not journalism or history. Feature films are not documentaries. The Shirleys could have produced a movie but did not. The Vallelonga family did. More power to them.

As Sam Goldwyn purportedly said, “If you have a message, call Western Union.” Movies are not about satisfying the needs of advocates. They are about telling stories. They are about making you enjoy the two hours in a theater watching them. On that score, Green Book and Vice were the best movies that this viewer saw in the past year. What would have Spike Lee and other professional victims said if the winner had been The Favourite – a nicely costumed mishmash of ugly people doing ugly things for no purpose and without any historical accuracy.

Green Book is a legitimate Best Picture because it has everything you want in a movie – good script, good acting, good sense of time and place, some comedy, some educational value, some point.

And before anyone tells me that Green Book is not Best Picture, explain to me: Shape of Water, Gladiator, Titanic, Kramer vs. Kramer, Shakespeare in Love, and, yes, Driving Miss Daisy, which beat out Do the Right Thing.

If namby-pamby loony liberal snowflakes don’t like what they are seeing from Hollywood, chill and watch Netflix.

Officially Dead

The most overused phrase on broadcast news and on the Interwebs is “It’s official!” (More so than the single word "just.")

Stupid, ignorant, thoughtless, uncreative drones who want to say something cannot say it without first inflating their importance by saying, “It’s official.” Aside from the fact that nothing except a law or judicial order can be said to be official, the phrase just delays a reader from getting to the point and tells dear reader the author fell out of the cliché tree and hit every branch on the way down.   

It is not official when a baseball trade is made, it is not official when  Jonathan Pollard is given parole days after it was leaked that he would. It is not official when Apple releases a new phone. It is not official when some “on-again-off-again” thing is declared by a puerile news writer to be “on again” (of “off again.”) Things just "are" -- officially or not.

There used to be a silly little game teenage boys would play with songs on the “Top 40,” consisting of placing the phrase “between the sheets” after the title of each song. (Try it!)  Now, scroll to the next blog or Facebook post, look at a piece of junk mail, or God forbid pick up a book and randomly  find a sentence and put “it’s official” in front of it.   

It is is even more infantile for an actual writer who actually gets paid to begin a narrative with “It’s official.” No. It. Isn’t.  

And even if it were, the phrase is officially the mark of a tedious dullard.

Is marriage a right or just a rite?

A major argument for same-sex marriage is that it is a family value that conservatives ought to be happy to encourage.  But that argument is as silly as opposition based on what the Bible says. Face it: LGBT people want the same rights as other people, and opponents of same-sex marriage think that homosexuality is immoral. It seems to me that both views ought to be respected. But why on earth is marriage the arena in which notions of equality and morality are fought?

A long time ago, many progressive people scoffed at the notion of marriage. They asked how can either a civil or religious ceremony bind two people who should be able to live together as long as they both shall love? Now, many of these people say the marriage act is essential for two people in love, as long as both are gay. The argument seems to be that everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law, which now favors married couples at the expense of singles. It makes sense to me, but why on earth are married people getting breaks in the first place? The only reason I can figure is that the state, for whatever reasons, believes marriage is important.  But what I can’t figure out is why the legal framework for marriage is up to the 50 states (or any level of government, anyway).

I don’t care how two people (or three or four; or gerbils or hamsters) choose to amuse themselves in private. Why should the state care? If there is a social good behind the institution of marriage, it seems to me it is because children thrive when their parents are married, and historically the more children a marital unit has, the more hands there are to work and to make up for infant mortality (neither of which is a big problem right now.)

If one is to argue that the purpose of marriage is to procreate, the question arises regarding couples who are infertile, those who choose not to repopulate and those who marry past the age of fertility. Should they be prevented from marrying? Of course not. Nor should anyone else. But, again, I ask, why should they marry in the first place? And, more important, why is it any of the state’s business to approve or disapprove of historically notorious promises of love and fidelity.

 

As the old gag goes about why marriage is important: "Why fight with strangers?"

Me and Bubba

In the fall of 1970, in my first full year as a reporter at UPI, the Baltimore Colts were on their way to the Super Bowl. I only covered home games, but during the week before each playoff game, I was assigned to go to practice and write a story for the national sports wire.

I was 22 and had long hair. Luckily, there was another guy just out of college who was on the team who also had long hair, but not as scary as mine. His name was Jim O’Brien, and he was a rookie from Cincinnati and was the nation’s leading scorer in college the year before. (Football scoring, that is.) But for the Colts, he was the place kicker. And for me, the guy I could most easily talk with and pick up usable quotes from.

So, one afternoon after getting there a little late, I’m in the locker room after practice and it’s just me, him and two other players still getting dressed. One was Billy Ray Smith, an evil, gap-t0othed, redneck from Arkansas. Ol’ Billy Ray started giving me some serious shit about being a hippie, being a girl, and so on. Then he finally started in on the rookie O’Brien. It was getting tense.

Then from a stool on the other side of Billy Ray slowly uncoiled a mass of black steel muscle to his full 6-foot-7 height. He stepped between Billy Ray and the two of us hippies and said in a quiet, menacing, I-mean-business tone, “Leave them boys alone.”

And Billy Ray did.

My savior, for whom I would always have pulled a paw-thorn, was a gentleman named Bubba Smith, a college All-America defensive linemen whose fans chanted, “Kill, Bubba, Kill.”

I was forever grateful, I rooted for him and I saw as many “Police Academy” movies as I could stomach.

And Jim O’Brien? He didn’t have much of a pro career, but in Super Bowl V, with 9 seconds remaining, he kicked a field goal to give the Colts victory over the hated Dallas Cowboys.

Charles Aaron Smith died today at 66, apparently of natural causes.

So long, and thanks.

Tradition and Treacle

Just spent a glorious Fourth, as a always, listening to military bands, the National Symphony Orchestra and America’s top musical artists, while watching the most spectacular fireworks display over the Washington Monument. The only thing better than being there is where I was – on my couch in an air-conditioned family room watching the whole Public Broadcasting System’s “A Capitol Fourth” on a wide screen HD TV.

I was proud to be an American until I was exposed for the first time to the vomitorious sack of treacle known as Josh Grobin. That he is as famous as he was said to be reminds me again of H. L. Mencken’s dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

(Note: The filthy ratbastard Republican leadership shown enjoying itself on the Capitol Lawn was partaking of an event broadcast by the PBS it wants to eliminate and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is also wants killed. On the other hand, the broadcast ended by thanking for financial support “viewers like you” and adding, of course, that the whole shebang of cannonfire and aerial explosions was “brought to you by the Boeing Corporation.” As were most of the wars of the past 70 years.)

I am still such a peacenik that I detest the ubiquitous public adoration of “wounded warriors” -- because if we stopped honoring morons who sign up to be shot at and then are surprised that it hurts, we wouldn’t have the forces to invade the half of the world we don’t like at any given time.

But I am still a sucker for small town parades, bombs bursting in air and the 1812 Overture, although I am amused that the most jingoistic day of the year must be accompanied by the strains of the Russian and French national anthems.

I also found it somewhat discordant, but amusing, to have as the penultimate act of the concert on the Capitol Grounds the proudly degenerate Little Richard (that’s Little Dick to you, Mark Halperin) singing the joyous filth of Fifties rock’n’roll while toddlers danced with their oblivious flag-waving parents and grandparents.

Is this a great country, or what!

Disfigures of Speech

Yesterday, I was in a community center when the public address system informed us that a test of the fire alarm was about to commence and that we should ignore it. I did, to the best of my ability -- but I could not help but wonder what a “fire annunciator” is or how exactly a “fire emergency” differs from, say, a mere fire.

Later, I was grocery shopping in a high-end store and was taken aback in the cosmetics aisle (just passing through, mind you) by a legend reading, “Ethnic Care.” I don’t know about you, or if this is just a girl thing, but I don’t know of anyone who has ethnics to care for anymore. (In the D.C. area, ethic care, maybe.)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am watching too much TV, which is not good for one’s language comprehension. Or logic.

Think about how many times you hear a broadcaster – an expert in television! – tell you that the station will have “film of the events” on a later show. I don’t know the exact date that film stopped being used on television, but I suspect it was around the time that an 8-track tape was last heard.

Of course, newspaper writer are equally ignorant of technology when they so frequently describe TV cameras “whirring.” Whirring went out approximately when Edward R. Murrow’s last cigarette did. (I would rather gay soldiers being wedded to each other than professional communicators wedded to clichés.)

On the same technology road to perdition, the revered Washington Post had an article yesterday about a political operative who was “expanding his Rolodex” That guy ought to find another profession is he is still using a Rolodex! (Actually they all should.)

Any time a newspaper reporter is trying to make sense out of something for which s/he has no actual evidence or on-the-record quotations, it is clear “a portrait is emerging.”

When a cable TV anchor doesn’t understand something (which is 24/7/365), she often “can’t wrap my head around it.” What a portrait emerges there! Clearly, I hope, she malapropped “can’t get my head around it” or “can’t wrap my arms around it.”

How about a simple, “Beats me?”

SEO: The Epitaph for Journalism

Looking for suitable employment in my area of expertise, communicating important information to the public, I feel defeated – defeated by the evolution of journalism from almost a priestly calling to a puerile exercise in “search engine optimization.’"

Much criticism of the “mainstream media” centers on the notion of “media elites” deciding what is important and then propagating a presumed progressive agenda that “real Americans” are too stupid to figure out. Actually, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not Ivy League, but I always thought I was smarter than the readers I was writing for and was doing them a favor by both reporting concisely and understandably about important government actions and presenting newsworthy material in a way that either explained the unexplainable or even offered a smile or two.
People who entered journalism over the past hundred years or so were actually spawn of the lower classes, had dirt under their fingernails, had an outlook on life representative of the commoner and had a passion for the underdog. Journalists knew what the people wanted because they were of the people. (A common aphorism that is still partially true today was that the definition of news is “what happened to the editor today.”)

Blame it on Watergate, which was broken by guys of no particularly great educational or social standing. After that, there was money and fame to be had. By the time I got to the White House in 1983, the rising stars in print and television came from money and New England schools and identified with the pain of high taxes, the importance of private schools for their kids and who got to play tennis or go to dinner with their presumed equals in governments.

A Brief History of Slime
Television news had already been sold down the river of greed when networks realized they could actually make a profit on it instead of using news as a loss leader. Print journalism had begun becoming professionalized. We student journalists, and later as paid journalists, began calling ourselves professionals. That was always a self-serving myth because there is no specialized training, board exam or licensing requirement. We were, in reality, people having the times of their lives snooping around and making life difficult for those in government, or out, who were unfairly taking advantage of people who did not have our access to information.

So many things have changed that I cannot now bear to watch more than the first five minutes of any newscast, local, network or cable. There is the matter of broadcast outlets hiring people who cannot write and cannot read. How often have you seen the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen, or the chyron describing what you are seeing and notice basic words and names being misspelled? How many times have you heard a ponderous anchor read something and jerk your head up and say, “huh?” How much longer must NBC employ the queen of nonsense, Janet Shamlian, who never fails to impress listeners with her vacuity – and sometimes her bent for the absurd, such as when she said, “A heat wave has a chokehold on the nation’s midsection?”


Why should I or anyone care about a two-bit bank robbery hundreds of miles away? Or a car chase on the other coast? Or a granny slamming a robber with her purse? A tire fire in West Virginia? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the vids. Matters of real importance are ignored unless they appeared in one of three newspapers that morning. And then the TV thieves pass off the information as their own, with no context whatsoever. Despite a multiplicity of broadcast and internet venues, all news comes from a handful of sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. If local news is big enough to go national, you might add the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

To my further dismay, what is written about or broadcast in most outlets is picked up from and credited to competing organizations. There is no attempt to independently verify much less even cover someone else’s story. The “news” you read on line on portals such as AOL, Yahoo, Huffpo -- and even some of the more prestigious online outlets – is frequently repurposed or merely linked to someone else’s report of a report. This use of someone else’s enterprise used to be a journalistic sin of the first order.

Competition from the Internet has rendered irrelevant even such a venerated organ as the Washington Post, which is so thin you can literally tear the non-ad portion of the Sunday paper in half. The daily version would blow away on your lawn if it weren’t tied up in plastic.

It is an old axiom in newsrooms that sex, violence, children and animals do automatically qualify as news. But, it also had to be local or of some national significance. Nowadays, every commercial television news program wallows in violence, fire and prurience that happens anywhere in the world – so long as video of it exists. Many stories are broadcast as “breaking news” for as long as two days after the event happened.

Online and on the air, there is zero quality control over news judgment. No one asks questions.

Scott Brown and Lara Logan
Sen. Scott Brown pitches a revelation (for his own pecuniary and political interests) that he was sexually molested by a camp counselor although it was never “consummated, so to speak” and although he will not protect other victims by actually prosecuting the offender.

I have never seen Lara Logan’s reporting to know whether it is good or bad, but I sure have heard of her, because this former swimsuit model has a penchant for becoming the story both within journalism and in the bedrooms of other journalists. Yet she becomes a national tragedy for, according to CBS, having been brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo.

Without minimizing the terror and injustice of it all, it appears from other accounts that she was stripped, hit with flagpoles and pinched. This is abominable, but if true, this – along with the headlines generated by former Cosmo nude model Scott Brown – falls short of the disgusting images that were intentionally meant to titillate us.

To whatever degrees Scott Brown and Lara Logan were defiled, why on earth is it any of our business? Because they are both in the business of selling themselves, the media are in the business of selling depravity and we consumers are in the business of lapping it up.

Wheat and Chaff
I, for one, want people smarter and possessing a broader knowledge of the world than I telling me not what I should think but what I should know. That used to be the foundation of any education. It used to be the true value of a newspaper or magazine – the placement of information you would never have thought to look for amid the funnies, sports and lingerie ads.

Not anymore. As I look over media jobs that are available, the requirements do include an ability to multitask at a reasonable level of proficiency with the language, but the prime attributes that news organizations are seeking are (as described in a recent ad for a reporting position with USA Today) experience with “SEO, audience metrics, promoting audience interaction.” On more than one job-listing site, journalism positions are to be found under the category “Industry: e-commerce.”

I am not naïve. Journalism has always been about money – publishers having all of it and reporters having too little of it to live on. But there was always the pretense of providing the public with an honest service and, for the most part, free from the publishers’ rapacious capitalist biases.

Today, with the advent of interactive Web sites and sophisticated metrics, editors and producers are capable of selecting as “news” only what people tell them they want. The old saw is truer than ever: editors separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Yes, I believe – as do all politicians – that the public is stupid and self-destructive beyond measurement and that better-educated and fair-minded people ought to tell us what is important -- which is exactly what happens when we hire hire lawyers, accountants and plumbers.

Mourning in America

I will watch the Super Bowl this weekend and try to keep up with events in the Middle East. But I will otherwise keep the television off lest I become convulsed with nausea at the national outpouring of treacle over the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan.

I was a reporter who had the privilege of covering the White House for four and a half years, encompassing the middle of his tenure. I believe I was as fair in my coverage of him as I was in coverage of anything else I reported. And I stood on a street corner to pay my respects as his hearse rolled through the streets of the capital city.

This recollection is merely a futile attempt to command the tide to stop, to speak up against the worship by weak, ignorant people of a saint who did what he could to drown this country in debt, death and decline. In my view, both close up and in retrospect, Reagan was a tool of an ideology that while it did not wreck America, certainly hampered the social, economic and international standing of this great country.

His life story was one of denial – the result of having to mediate between his mother and a drunken father; getting his first professional break by “re-creating” (that is, making things up) broadcasts of far-away baseball games; acting in movies whose lines or plots he would later in life believe to have been true; and moving from a union leader to a shill for one of the worst (or best, if you will) icons of runaway capitalism, General Electric.

Every president makes mistakes of policy, but the lasting damage Reagan did to this country was to advance and repeat the shibboleth that government is your enemy.

He would often tell adoring audiences – almost always all-white and middle-aged –“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (I am not sure he used that line when appearing before military audiences, which was his wont, because his handlers would never let him near an unfiltered crowd.)

First, let’s review some of the greatest hits of a president who some observer long ago aptly called an “amiable dunce.”

--Voodoo economics
--The Laffer Curve
--Ketchup is a vegetable
--Deficits don’t matter
--Evil empire
--We begin the bombing in five minutes
--Opposed sanctions against South Africa
--Opposed the Martin Luther King holiday as an economic loss to the country, signing it into law only after Congress passed it by a veto-proof majority.
--Opposed the original Voting Rights Acts, and originally opposed its extension in 1982, signing it into law and taking credit for it only after Congress passed it by a veto-proof majority.
--Sent Marines to Lebanon where they took the low ground at the airport and lost 220 of them in a suicide bombing, the Corps greatest single-day loss of life since Iwo Jima.
--Three days later invaded Grenada, a campaign in which more than half the U.S. deaths were from friendly fire and in which more medals were handed out than there were troops on the ground.
--Presided over the most corrupt administration in recent history, with at least 100 appointees tarnished by conflicts of interest, indictments, convictions or firings.
--Five years after vowing “we will never negotiate with terrorists” authorized the trade of arms for hostages, and then sent his hapless vice president out to explain to the public, “Mistakes were made.”

Ronald Reagan believed the government should stay out of people’s lives, except when they were in the bedroom, and he prevented family planning aid from being offered to developing countries that we preferred to keep poor and thus more susceptible to communist influences.

He glorified family values though he was a divorcee and spent six or seven years on the dating market as one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. I remember the day he met his 2-year-old grandson for the first time -- and called him by the wrong name. His elder son, the adopted one, was sexually molested at camp as a child, but did his father ever know? He had no use for his younger son or younger daughter, who opposed him on most major issues, and when there was a family portrait at Christmas, it looked like a hostage photograph.

He was a union president, but he hated workers, using his presidency to smash organized labor. He was a liberal Democrat but “named names” that put former colleagues on the Hollywood black list.

His hatred of government began only when General Electric started paying him to host “Death Valley Days” and then to propagate the company’s capitalism-uber-alles in lectures to GE employees all over the country. To paraphrase what he later said about the Panama Canal, They bought him, they built him and they were going to keep him. He became a conservative because during World War II, when all the other leading men in Hollywood were actually away at war, he got better and better movie parts, earned more money and had to pay taxes at a historically high level.

As a political performer, Reagan read a script great, keeping you on the edge of your seat waiting from him to drift into a miasma of mental mulch, only to recover in time and complete the sentence with a punch – though the sentences were usually false pieties that rarely made any policy sense.

He told great stories, but the best ones were not true, such as the one about him helping liberate concentration camps, or the one about the heroic Air Force pilot who, after his plane was brought down by enemy fire, comforted a wounded crew member by telling him, “That’s all right, son, we’ll ride this one down together,” leaving listeners wondering which one of the dead airmen related the story in the first place.

Everyone said he was personally warm, but only to those he thought could help him. To the extent that he was even made available to the press or public – which was hardly – I was in his face constantly as part of the press pool. After four and a half years, I am utterly convinced he had no idea who I was, or at least could not attach my name to my face. I bring this up because almost every other politician I ever met had as a chief political asset that very skill. In short, his only political skills were a smile and a shoeshine.

He appealed to the worst in Americans and was venerated because he tapped into the fantasies of white working people who wanted to follow him backwards into some nonexistent golden age when morning in America meant, racism, poverty, war and being what that unctuous Chris Mathews calls “regular people.”

His skill was in adopting simplistic slogans by which he governed. He was, indeed, the godfather of the hate-mongering vermin who now operate the Tea and Republican Parties in his name. He might even be appalled.

So upon the centennial of his birth, all I can say is that Abraham Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all of the people all of the time. The only reason his acolytes want to memorialize him as the greatest ever is because they know he was the biggest goddamn phony ever to rise to the presidency and they are afraid history will judge him so.

Separated at Firth

Not being female, I had not paid much attention to Colin Firth, confusing him from time to time with Colin Farrell, but not Colin Powell. Anyway, my wife recently noted she liked MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, and I figured out why.

Giving Rational Cover to Irrational Acts

What did George Wallace and Ronald Reagan have in common? They are the only two prominent right-wingers who have been targets of assassins.

Were JFK, RFK, federal judge John Wood, the husband and mother of federal judge Joan Lefkowitz killed by right wingers? Not necessarily, but when you add those cases to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and two abortion providers, plus the Oklahoma City bombing and outbreaks of violence in Waco and at Ruby Ridge, a couple of patterns seem to emerge.

• The United States is by far the most violent of Western democracies and among the least politically stable.
• There is a connection between lunatic actions and protected, if not revered, hate speech coming from those in positions of public trust.
• Something must be done about handguns.

Let me elucidate:

According to Columbia professor Steven Mintz, “Nine presidents have been the targets of assassination, along with one president-elect and three presidential candidates. In addition, some eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, 10 Representatives, 11 mayors and 17 state legislators have been violently attacked.”

Including threats of violence, actual vandalism and disruption of public political events, the targets are overwhelmingly liberals, progressives or others on the non-lunatic fringe right wing of discourse.

One cannot connect the dots between conservative conviction, or even hate-filled venom emanating from the jackals at Fox and the EIB Network, with violence aimed at politicians. No rational person -- not even Limbaugh, Beck or Palin – advocates gunning down political opponents. Only the irrational, disturbed persons, do such things. But somehow their paranoid rantings and objects of hate tend to be the government or agents of government that are also the targets of attack from distant voices on radio and television who prey on the fear of naïve listeners.

It is a lie perpetrated with increasing success in this week’s post-Tucson narrative that “both sides” need to tone down the level of debate. There are not two sides here. The mainstream media have always failed when it comes to reporting social or political divisions because of an ingrained fantasy that one side in a controversy has the same facts and moral force as the other side. Because Newt Gingrich and Fox chief Roger Ailes say both sides do it is reason enough to prove that the supposition is false, because their entire careers are built on mendacity. ccasionally a conservative Democrat in Congress may lose his temper and call an irresponsible right-winger a “Howdy Doody-looking nimrod” but the scales of invective are lopsidedly weighted from the Right.

Mine is a life of the word, and still I am undecided as to whether words are just words – used for effect – or whether words have intrinsic harmful effect.

I believe that rhetoric used by rational people is entirely figurative, and that only emotionally unbalanced people take rhetoric literally. In the private sphere, you may be sarcastic, argumentative or even obnoxious to someone of relatively equal mental capabilities. But you would not speak in such a way to a child, a stranger or someone you believe to be intellectually incompetent. And this is what the Limbaughs, Becks, Palins, Savages, O’Reillys, Hannitys and others must comprehend: The bigger their audience, the more harm they can do, simply because as the universe of listeners goes up, the more it contains simpletons. They don’t need me to tell them that because it is the First Commandment of broadcasting – know your audience. And they damn well know their audience, and that is why they do bear some measure of responsibility for ratcheting up the climate of violence. They give what rational cover an assassin needs to perform an irrational act.

Palin – who shoots defenseless moose and wolves for fun – can plausibly deny that putting crosshairs over Giffords’ district was a call to shoot the congresswoman. And Giffords’ last electoral opponent (who said in his campaign, “Get on target for victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly”) can disclaim responsibility for last Saturday’s act of political terrorism. But what rational person cannot see the connection? If you are a rabble-rouser, you must take responsibility not just for the rousing but for the rabble, as well.

And what of defeated Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, who campaigned on a platform of “Second Amendment remedies” for members of Congress she opposes? Had she made that speech outside the Safeway in Tucson minutes before Giffords was gunned down, she might have been in violation of federal law for crossing state lines to incite violence. But what legal remedies are there against speech that is divorced from the act? There are none, and that is the way it should be. People are responsible for their own actions – Jared Loughner and Sharron Angle as well.

As for guns, how ironic that Giffords not only is one of the few remaining Blue Dog conservative Democrats in the House, but she is a strong opponent of gun control. In fact, she boasted recently she carries a 9-millimeter Glock, the same type of gun that felled her, and is a good shot. More ironic is that the NRA gives her a grade of D and spent $39.000 supporting the opponent who wanted to “remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.”

Handguns have no place in any civilized society. But since the Second Amendment seems to have trumped the First (support for gun control is at its lowest ebb ever in public opinion polling) there is little hope of anything being done to ban a product whose one and only purpose is to kill people. My solution is this: Progressives ought to buy guns, join the NRA in hopes of changing its policies, and, in the alternative, learn to shoot.

The Worst and Best of New York

Kudos to CBS Radio News Thursday evening for taking a slow news day and making it better – by celebrating the deader.

Damn Yankee

What a schmuck, George Steinbrenner. When the only thing people can say good about you is that you were passionate about winning, it means you are a loser. A felon, a bully, an egotist and a thoroughly hateful man – ah, but he represented New York. He owned the Yankees. Two of the most overrated institutions in the world.

He was clever enough to see the possibilities in the newly created free agency system to buy and sell human beings on a scale not seen since antebellum South Carolina in order to continue a reign of Yankee supremacy and the slow decline of baseball as a national pastime.

That his teams occasionally lost games, or had off seasons despite the “talent” he bought, spoke to the axiom that people with big heads and big wallets don’t know squat about sports. Right, Danny Snyder?

The best thing ever said about this blivet of capitalist excess was by Reggie Jackson, who when referring to five-time-Steinbrenner-fired Billy Martin: “The two were meant for each other. One's a born liar, and the other's convicted."

George Steinbrenner – convicted felon (obstruction of justice) and misdemeanant (making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon) – was pardoned by President Reagan, whose career began broadcasting fake accounts of baseball games.

I'd like to think Steinbrenner, Nixon and Reagan are sitting together right now around the warm fires of where they belong, playing liar’s poker.

Fug-geddaboudit

He called his band “The USO of the Left,” and Tuli Kupferberg’s musical aggregation made a statement every time they were introduced. They were the Fugs.

The name was a tribute to Norman Mailer’s wicked way around censorship in “The Naked and the Dead,” an affirmation of the ‘60s and a guarantee their albums would not be played on radio, ditties including “(We Like) Boobs a Lot,” “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side” and the immortal “Kill for Peace.”

I have a couple of their records, and I can’t honestly say I played them very much. But having them on my shelf put me, and keeps me, on the right side of life.

Tuli Kupferberg was a small part of a social movement that made it possible for people like him to be memorialized on CBS. I bet he's ashamed!

DVD it to Beaver

I don’t specifically remember watching “Leave it to Beaver” but I know I did, and I think I was uncomfortable about it, maybe because the Beav and I were the same age, and not too different in looks and body slouch. And, unlike “Make Room for Daddy” or some of the1950s variety show sketches, the show presented a version of life that I never experienced – but, like everyone else, wished they had.

(OK, I’m sure Ward and June were Republicans. And how come the epitome of 1950s dad-hood, i.e, Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson, sold insurance?)

Anyway, as life unfolded and I have seen most episodes in rerun, it is clear that it was the best family-oriented show of its time, and maybe all time. As I watch reruns I am surprised that as with Twain and other satirists, there were two levels of understanding – the one for the Beav and Wally and one for the adults.

The comedy itself was not in-your -face but based on fairly clever realistic plot lines and smart writing.

The New York Times on Sunday has a good retrospective tied to the boxed-set release of all 234 episodes.

I’ll catch them on Nick at Nite, but the article itself is worth looking at, and if you really think about it, as much fun as was made of the white-bread nature of the Cleavers and their community, it was at least the best-written and acted of the sitcom genre.

A Link (or two) to the Past

I watched Jimmy Dean live on local TV in the early '50s when he was just starting out. I think he either preceded or followed the Alan Young show.

I think my predilection for country and western music may have begun in infancy, but maybe it was growing up in the D.C. area, which was a hotbed of the country and bluegrass genres because, in no small part, it was the biggest media market closest to the hills of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Carolina.

Anyway, I liked Jimmy Dean's cornball act because he seemed genuine and humble. Which is exactly how I found him about five years ago when I had a chance to chat with him at a function.

I'm not a huge sausage fan, but I did buy his product a few times and didn't die. Here's a "link" to his obit in the Washington Post.

Rolling Blunder and Sunshine Camo

Washington, D.C., is full of crap most of the time, but this weekend it is all of the time.

The crap this Memorial Day weekend is "Rolling Thunder," the massing of flag-waving bikers commemorating Vietnam veterans by revving their motors and pounding their chests in case anyone might think these losers also lost that undeclared, indecent, unnecessary and un-American war.

Most people don't even know what "Rolling Thunder" means. It was the name of most prolonged and least successful military campaign waged in modern times -- the three-and-a-half-year carpet bombing by the United States of civilian targets in North Vietnam, far surpassing the morally questionable, though probably justified, air terror unleashed by the Air Force against Germany in World War II.

Speaking of misplaced loyalties, the San Diego Padres baseball team showed up today in jerseys decorated in military camouflage, no doubt in tribute to the city's major industry -- training Navy and Marine Corps warriors.

These players are generally between the ages of 20 and 40 and among the physically fittest of Americans. Why aren't the American citizens among them wearing real uniforms instead of their phony camo jerseys?

If you would like your very own sunshine patriot camo jersey, you can get it on the Internet for $199.

Child Porn on Channel 9

Shame on Peggy Fox of WUSA-TV, Channel 9, in Washington, and shame on the CBS Morning News, and shame on all the other CBS affiliates that thought a YouTube video of 7 year old girls gyrating to a Beyonce song was news. Maybe it was. Maybe it is either a perverted reminder of Jon Benet Ramsey or maybe girls should be encouraged to exhibit their talents.

But clearly it was a news story because of the outrage the network and its affiliates wanted to engender. And how did they engender such outrage? By showing the pedophilic video at length, repeatedly.

The only comparison I can think of is the History Channel’s fascination with Hitler.

Os'quers

I actually enjoyed the Academy Awards this time, but this creature called a Mo'nique was a gigantic downer.

As a newcomer to acting, she won a big award for what many said was a spectacular performance. Enough so that she beat four other pretty good performers. But instead of being thankful or humble, the fat mouthed boor opened up by thanking the voters for "showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics."

WTF????

The Academy voted for what it thought was the best performance, and by suggesting that everyone else who has ever held an Oscar did so because of Hollywood politics both ignores a reality that everything in life is about seeking advantage and says that all the other actors didn't deserve it.

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I haven't seen it in any print accounts, but did anyone else notice that in spoofing the Na'vi language Ben Stiller recited part of the Hebrew blessing of the wine?