Bushdoctor's Waiting Room

Skiing in the Rain in Vancouver: February 2010

2010-03-13T05:30:00.011-05:00

This weblog is now concluded. Maybe it's been fun, who knows? Email: rmcnally@rocketmail.com.

From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, and hers, dig it, because Gandhi hit the nail smack on the konk when he said:

"We must become the change we wish to see in the world."

Or as another wise observer of the human comedy put it:

"Do something. Do anything."

Or, in words everyone knows:

"Tag. You're it."

I've recently started volunteering one day a week as a mentor at a daycare center for children of homeless families run by the Salvation Army in Central Square, and I can't begin to tell you how pleasurable this is, what a relief valve for the psychic pressures screaming for change and progress in one's brain. To have stepped out of the Negative Comfort Zone in which one endlessly gripes and complains and moans AND DOES NOTHING and in which one has been trapped since, it feels like, the beginning of time, has been one of the best things that has ever happened to one.

Michelet wrote:

"In the end, the primary actor is always the people." And why is this? Because we have the numbers. We are the country. We are its life and its soul and its heart, and when we act, history is shattered and social justice is born.

U.S. foreign policy as a whole? Morally revolting, economically unsustainable. Question: How has "a government of the people, by the people, for the people" morphed, grotesquely, hideously, into "a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich." A PBS broadcast a couple years back mentioned in passing that 1 percent of the American population (the people who prefer to have their bread buttered on both sides) possesses approximately 40 percent of the nation's wealth. Since hearing that, one's life hasn't been the same. What serious social ill that we struggle with as a people can't be traced to this disproportionate and irrational distribution of national assets and power? It's disproportionate to a freaking extreme. ABC News reported in April 2006 that when Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond retired that year, he received a retirement package, including a pension, stock options and other perqs, worth $400 million. $400 million to one man. Question: what is it this one man does that's so valuable that he's entitled to that kind of cash? His paycheck for 2005, ABC reports, came to $51.1 million. That works out to $6,000 per hour.

Think he's worth it? Think anybody's worth that kinda pay, when we have people living in the streets in cardboard boxes and kids dropping out of high school at the rate of 50 percent per year in major cities and a suicide rate among the general population of one every two minutes?

Most serious undiagnosed problem in U.S. society? Fragmentation of consciousness by digital technology, fundamental reason this weblog is hereby brought to an end. The average person has lost the ability to investigate any given single issue in depth. And if we do not individually and collectively investigate the custom/institution/"right"/fraud of property, which is fundamental in the extreme because it determines the relationship of human beings to material reality, determining where one may walk and what one may touch, among countless other issues, we will destroy ourselves. As we may in fact be doing.

What will cause the United States, a country steeped in the viciousness and irrationality of capitalism and property, to take global warming seriously? Snowstorms in Florida? No. Widespread destruction of lives and property by hurricanes? No. Rising sea levels? No. Resource wars? No. Permanent U.S. economic recession due to sequential climate-related crises in international commerce? A little. (Cf. Paul Grignon's documentary Money as Debt, Pts. 1 & 2.) Disruption of the five oceans' single, primary circulatory current due to melting ice caps and consequent catastrophic loss of sea life? A little. Famine and starvation in the U.S. caused by persistent atypical droughts? Yes.

Is climate collapse a possibility? Prefer not to answer due to concern about the effects of defeatist thinking.

Is there anything, any social antidote, any social movement, anywhere in the world, capable of detoxifying capitalism and halting its international over-the-cliff momentum? If there is, I don't know what it is. A free, non-corporatist press is probably the only phenomenon standing between human beings and species suicide. (Cf. Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic.) Over evolutionary history, the vast majority of animal species that have existed, homo sapiens being but one of many, are today extinct. Cf. Stephen Meyers The End of the Wild which is the most recent Greek tragedy available in English: The battle for biodiversity has been fought, and it is over, and we have lost."

Quote of the day, from W. Whitman: "O despairer, here is my neck, / By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me."

Greatest cause for optimism? Freedom of speech has not yet by eliminated by a totalitarian police state.

Defining moment of our time? 9/11. Cf. Peter Joseph's documentary Zeitgeist.

Best available book of political science? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What Is Property? available from Cambridge University Press, UK.

Marriage equality? A fundamental human right guaranteed by the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If it makes sense to persecute people like John Maynard Keynes, Walt Whitman, Proust, Wittgenstein, Henry James and Michelangelo, then witches deserve to be burned at the stake and the moon is made of green cheese. To interfere with a person's sexual development is to drive a nail into her skull. Or his.

Recommended diet: More plant food, less meat (including milk, which is liquid meat).

Water conservation? More deodorant and one shower a week in winter; state-of-the-art flushless urinals.

Energy development? Immediate and full-spectrum government support of green technology; that is, if we take the issue of survival seriously, which is debatable.

Transportation? High-speed rail drastically needed and long overdue due to pernicious influence of oil companies and automakers on Congress and the White House.

Rational response to widespread and persistent unemployment due to 2009 crisis of capitalism caused by moral depravity and professional incompetence on Wall Street? Government- managed public works projects to rebuild national infrastructure in the tradition of FDR. How are the people of America bearing up under persistent 10 percent unemployment and the various other benefits of globalism, including but not limited to the wholesale export of jobs by transnational corporations, which has all but obliterated the manufacturing jobs the urban poor relied upon for a half-century or more? According to the weblog of Ryan Crofts, M.D.: "Between 1987 and 1997, the percentage of Americans in outpatient treatment for serious depression more than tripled. The 1985 the total annual sales for all antidepressants was approximately $240 million. Today it is approximately $12 billion."

The truest majority? The dead. They outnumber us by so many votes we don't have a chance. And their number gets larger every day. They're winning.

Best current novel? Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole. Far better than Gravity's Rainbow.

Best current film? Brooklyn's Finest, an entertaining portrait of what capitalism's profit motive, and the artificial scarcity it creates, can do to otherwise rational human beings. The Inferno at a theater near you. Necessary viewing. Delicate viewers should bring a friend whose hand they can hold, desperately.

Control? After Burroughs--Control is never a means to an end. Control leads to one thing and one thing only--more control, like junk.

Best treatment for catastrophic depression? Therapy with a course of medication, lifetime maintenance commonly necessary to prevent relapse, my person favorite being Effexor XR.

Autoerotic diversions? Without improved sex education in public and private schools, the U.S. rape and venereal disease epidemics will go on forever. The current issue of the Boston Phoenix (3-12-10, p. 9) reports that Boston University, a single college, "reported five forcible rapes in 2008 and 22 forcible sex offenses on its Charles River campus in 2006-2008." Down by the water indeed. The Boston Rape Crisis Center is currently sponsoring a billboard above the C. Saloon with the headline: "Every 2 minutes someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted."

Meditation? A zen monk is reported to have sat and stared at a blank wall for nine years. Cf. Alan Watts on zazen in The Way of Zen. Highly recommended, along with TM, for detoxifying netheads.

Best diet: All plant food, no meat, the ironic part of this being that one eats better after making the switch because one is forced to rely on one's innate creativity and ends up eating a greater variety of foods, most of which one overlooks as a consumer of animals. Consider eating your favorite pet. Not appetizing. Why do we treat certain animals with love and care, and eat others? Strange. Are animals alive? Do they actually have lives? Or are they just so much walking trash, walking hamburgers? They don't feel pain when they are slaughtered, do they? And they probably don't mind spending their entire lives sleeping in their own excrement in confined pens, indoors and out, on factory farms, which produce 99 percent of the U.S. meat supply. Ever see a picture of an animal in a grocery store? Not too often. Ever watch a YouTube hidden-camera video showing what goes on in slaughterhouses 24/7? Ever see a live cow dangling in the air by one leg, attached to an overhead conveyer by a chain? Factory farms consume 50 percent of the U.S. fresh water supply, account for 50 percent of total U.S. fish consumption, and their waste is an enormous source of fresh-water contamination, since it goes into rivers and lakes raw, Congress graciously exempting meat producers from treating this sewage, at all, in any way. The major source of current U.S. fresh-water contamination is simple runoff from rainstorms which washes the drippings of industrialism and the chemicals of agribusiness into our streams, lakes and rivers. This contamination may be poisoning us and causing a good deal of cancer, but at least somebody's making a profit off it.

Would mention that beer is fully allowable under the Best Diet protocol.

Fox News and AM talk radio? Essential to the political process because a healthy democracy cannot function without clowns, mental defectives and attention-whores.

Crucial sources of news? TomDispatch.com and DemocracyNow.org.

Most serious problem that America, a country that at times has done truly magnificent things and has a peerless documentary foundation, faces today? Profound social irrationality. Why does one say this? One says this because 1 percent of the U.S. population, today, possesses 40 percent of the nation's wealth. Heard it on PBS last summer.

Joke of the day: What's an Irish shishkebab?
Flaming arrow through a garbage can.

How do you sink the Irish Navy?
Put it in the water.

And that will do it.

As a wise person said: "Do something. Do anything."

Aimons nous les uns les autres, aidons nous les uns les autres.

Saying farewell from cyberspace . . . .

- Rick

© negative, R.McN., 2010. Free use to all.

The End, Pt. 4

2010-03-06T15:11:00.004-05:00

In the end, nothing matters. It counts. Cf. Being & Nothingness, then Macbeth V:v:26. Dark matter and all that funky stuff that exists but doesn't exist.

The End, Pt. 3

2010-03-06T15:08:00.002-05:00

If the human race goes extinct, the horror and suffering human beings experience will be reduced to--zero.

And what constituent of reality has not had a beginning, middle and end?

Just sayin' . . . .

Higher Education

2010-03-06T15:04:00.005-05:00

Harvard? One has encountered elements there that represent some of the most severe cases of rectal-cranial inversion one has had the bad fortune to run across, particularly touching how they treat staff.

Now that's going too far. Someone ought to delete that. Though I suppose I'm the one in charge "here" aren't I?

Or am I?

The truth of the matter is that this vile post was written, in its entirety, by the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) which has remote access to my keyboard along with every electronic device I come within ten feet of. Now the C.I.A. is the branch of the U.S. government that specializes in deception, disinformation, transnational illegality (cf. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.) and "terminations." And monitoring and manipulating weblogs like this one; alongwith all internet activity, the net being of course the ultimate surveillance system, "disguised" as "the information highway." There's a reason, in the home country of the world's most profit-obsessed militarist/capitalist/congressional complex, the net is free and will remain so.

Miseducation

2010-03-06T15:00:00.006-05:00

When I was a young Roman Catholic I was taught to pretend one's sexual needs didn't exist, or to crush them like a violet under the heel of a motorcycle boot. And above all else one was forbidden to talk about them. Perfect conditions for the flourishing of neurosis and despair.

Not anymore.

In the Dark: March 5, 2010, Passim

2010-03-05T18:50:00.008-05:00

Movies are faked experience and we can't get enough of them. We "groove on them." We swallow them like alcoholics on a final drink-yourself-to-death, the-more-the-merrier jag. They represent a Nation of Typists's almost deepest, most uncontrollable desire.

Two highest-grossing commodities for export produced by the United States:

Movies and weapons. Fantasia and premeditated killing.

Is there anything harder for a citizen of the United States than keeping the spirit of optimism alive? Yes. Maintaining allegiance to rationality.

Nothing sacred but the truth.

Healthcare Reform

2010-03-05T12:10:00.002-05:00

Letter from a friend on healthcare reform in the U.S.

"Dawg, saw this article in the Globe's Metro section the other day and thought you might be interested. I know you're a strong advocate of a single-payer system. But that'll never happen. It’s too simple and effective.

Q U O T E

STATE REP RUSHED TO MASS GENERAL

BY Tony Clifton
Globe Staff

State Rep. Chalfont Adonadio collapsed at his home in Brookline on Friday night after a dinner of All-Natural Cheese Puffs and sautéed pigs feet and was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis. The emergency room was overcrowded with undocumented aliens and jewel thieves and he was bedded in the men’s room. When he was examined at noon on Saturday, an immediate operation was necessary and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him. Then he was gangfucked by the Irish-Arab attendants, after which one of them—one Seamus bin Abdullah-Abdullah, according to the preliminary police report filed by Boston Police Department’s sergeant Nicky “The Loser” Cantwell--stole the penicillin ordered by the surgeon, substituting Saniflush, and fled the premises.

Mr. Adonadio is not expected to recover.

U N Q U O T E

This "clipping" is from a friend who thinks he's funny. But the question lingers: "Funny ha-ha, or funny weird?" And story seems somehow familiar. Gotta be a lift from somewhere. One is reminded of today's Word of the Day from UrbanDictionary.com:

"Self-defecating--To unintentionally demean oneself. To unthinkingly place oneself in an unflattering light. (People who minimize their genius are self-deprecating. People who eulogize their ignorance are self-defecating.)

The Dating Game

2010-03-05T09:32:00.002-05:00

N.O. Ting: "Men are interested in women for one reason and one reason only--when the sun goes down, it gets dark."

George Lopez: "I'm a bad man. I'm a bad man."

Time Factor

2010-03-05T09:11:00.001-05:00

Martin "The Nazi" Heidegger says there is no statement one can make about modern civilization that says more than:

"I'd really like to do it, but I don't have the time."

Our Miss Brooks, and Mr.

2010-03-04T23:24:00.005-05:00

Usta be that only secretaries typed. Now everybody types. Who taught all these people to type? Back in the day a male executive would have died of embarrassment if anyone ever caught him at a keyboard. Now you see nothing but men typing, clickety click, no compunction. Guys in five-hundred suits typing like their lives depended on it. And they do.

We've become a nation of typists.

God am I wasting time today this weblog is out of control gets more ridiculous by the day I hope I can sleep tonight this has gotta stop.

Penniless? I own the fucking copyright on penniless.

Scoop clear water out of the heart of the fire.

Cultural Evolution Imperative

2010-03-04T12:52:00.004-05:00

A kind of documentary on local community-access TV, an indispensable source of candor and depth-journalism. Buncha weird sci fi stuff mixed with persuasive consideration of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. program to militarize space. Clips from old movies and TV shows, with voiceover dialogue that didn't come near synchronization with the lips of the actors, a Woody Allen special, edited in with original material, so you're kinda snickering as it unwinds and then it lays down:

"Two thousand years of God, morality and patriotism and what has it gotten us? Horror, hatred and suffering beyond description."

Enough to drive a person into dysteleology.

But one has to think positive, without that all is lost.

Appalled, but not giving up on democracy.

Didn't catch the title of the show, surfed into it, emailed TV station to ask but no reply, thing was on for more than two hours, title cards after each set piece, Part IV, Part V, etc.

And these Homeland Security guys constantly trying to force their way in the door here, what a pain in the ass, I use rolled up newspaper to whack them as they barge in on me and drive them back outside. Then they start on the windows. I can't leave the house for more than 15 minutes at a time or something goes missing.

Since when is serial home invasion and burglary patriotic? Why can't they be satisfied with the phone and computer taps?

Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem

2010-03-04T12:34:00.007-05:00

And how's the recovery from the recession going?

Subway poster at Central by TheOvernight.org, a human services non-profit:

"A suicide is attempted every minute of every day." One assumes they're referring to the U.S.
I'm no mathematician, but my calculator tells me that comes to some 500,000 per annum. To think of all the movies those people are missing. But that's an unfeeling thing to say. I take that back.

The scary thing about this figure is that one knows it is tip of an iceberg. If 500,000 actually go through with an attempt, five or ten or more times that number are thinking about it. And scientific studies have shown that modern healthcare, whether covered by private insurers or public revenues, is ineffective in treating people who have killed themselves.

Land of opportunity.

An article in the Boston Globe of March 15, 2010 reports that according to Harvard associate professor of psychology Matthew K. Nock, more people die each year by suicide than by homicide or war. "We're all more likely to die by our own hand than we are by somebody else's" says Nock.

Well, there's always the movies to take our minds off things. But cf. M. LeClerc:

"The more we love movie stars, the more they don't love us back."

The Abyss of 'The Negative Comfort Zone'

2010-02-01T22:42:00.004-05:00

Who was the terrible person who said, You can't believe anything's true until the government issues an official denial?

By the Sea, By the Sea . . .

2010-01-12T22:13:00.008-05:00

In "Suicide Off Egg Rock" Sylvia writes:

Sun struck the water like a damnation.

In "Voyages I" Hart Crane writes:

The sun beats lightning on the waves . . . .

Someone pointed out (Acharya S?) that the path sunlight makes on water may have been the origin of the story of Christ walking on same.

In 1926, Crane ended a poem with the line:

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

In 1932 he drowned himself, going off the stern of a ship en route from Mexico to New York, his expenses having been covered by a Guggenheim fellowship, the boats lowered to look for him coming up empty.

And reading Sylvie is a gas. Nothin' says lovin' like something from the oven. She could have been a warm writer had she wanted. She wrote:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

She had no match.

- R

Genre Question

2010-01-09T12:44:00.003-05:00

In The Devil's Guide to Hollywood Joe Eszterhas writes:

"Screenwriting isn't about language. It's about character and action."

So why, then, is one writing screenplays?

- R

The Prophetic Works of William Blake

2010-01-09T11:05:00.002-05:00

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

Eerie.

What Jim Does

2009-11-06T15:24:00.004-05:00

from MANIAC MEMORIES BY JIM GUSTAFSON

WHAT DO YOU DO?

What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play the
blues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch
in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes
and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers.
I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin.
I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja to ninnies. I’m a professional
identity designer. Nothing, I’m rich. Nothing, I’m emotionally crippled.
I’m a media mogul who moonlights as a Chippendale dancer. I manufacture
ladies lingerie for Frederick’s of Krakow. I play golf with beatniks.
I design then live in the cities of the future... which sometimes takes all
afternoon. I sell gizmos to gooks. I wholesale freeze-dried mail order
brides. I design Boy Kaddafi’s stage outfits and sometimes read him his
fan mail. What do I do? Well, I’m waiting for this think tank thing to
come through so I can get tanked and think of new ways to screw citizens
out of the dollar or two they’d like to use to buy brew but instead goes
to you know who. I loot shopping malls in radiation zones. I cruise
the art zoos looking for what’s new in mutations. I sell crack at the
United Nations. I don’t have just one occupation. I’m an amalgamation,
a confederation, a conspiracy and a conglomerate. I do what I have to do
because I’m a man... that’s spelled M – A – N. I don’t do anything,
I’m just a writer.

© Jim Gustafson Estate, 2009

My critical review of this piece is as follows:

No criticism.

- Rick

2009-11-05T21:29:00.001-05:00

You talkin' to me?

NYC CAN March: Mark Crispin Miller

2009-10-05T16:33:00.001-04:00

Who's On First?

2009-09-18T20:35:00.001-04:00

Wall Street: Same Mistake Twice?

2009-09-15T16:50:00.006-04:00

A year since the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. plunged the U.S. into a massive financial crisis, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NYTimes stated on Charlie Rose last night that to date, despite windstorms of rhetoric, no new regulatory restrictions have been imposed on Wall Street by the federal government and that hedge funds, money market funds, investment banks and other traders are venturing back into high-risk operations and the trading of newly fabricated and highly complex financial products, these activities said to be capable of producing a new crash as big as last year's, when trillions of dollars of personal savings were permanently lost and the economy as a whole came to close to plunging into a major depression.

This is a clear indication of the role gross irrationality plays in our national life. Addiction to the profit motive to the exclusion of all other values is like an addiction to crack, a pathology in which even the instinct for self-preservation is lost. As a wise person said: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

The Trouble With Artificial Economic Scarcity

2009-09-10T17:30:00.014-04:00

Some of the hyper-rich, i.e. the upper 1 percent of the U.$. population that possesses 40 percent of the nation's wealth, as reported by Howard Zinn, are undoubtedly intelligent, hard-working, and, with the exception of their congenital blindness to the suffering artificial scarcity imposes on the working class, decent people, but as a whole the country club class can be classified as an enemy of rationality. It is not rational that the assets of this society are distributed in such a way that 47 million people have zero health insurance, resulting in an estimated 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year, according to press reports, and pushing the federal government toward bankruptcy. Wealth in this country needs to be redistributed via the tax code -- but that would require elected officials who are not funded by the hyper-rich, which is never going to happen without campaign finance reform that would enact public funding of all federal elections. Artificial scarcity exists to a large degree because of the enormous concentration of assets in that narrow, uppermost 1 percent, causing the rest of the members of society to fight among themselves in fierce competition for the remaining assets, this competition leading them to overlook the fact that the working class as a whole is being ripped off to an almost unbelievable extent.

Guideline for U.$. Foreign Policy

2009-09-08T14:32:00.003-04:00

Coleman McCarthy: "You can fight fire with fire or you can fight fire with water."

The Cause of Our Pain

2009-09-06T14:16:00.002-04:00

"According to the Buddha, the cause of the angst in our lives is to be found in the patterns of clinging and aversion that dominate our minds and govern our actions. From moment to moment, we are driven by the desire to prolong or gain pleasurable experiences and the desire to get rid of or avoid pain. So enmeshed have we become in patterns of desire and avoidance that these patterns have assumed lives of their own and come to control our lives. We do not act in clear awareness, but under the control of often unconscious drives and emotions. Our actions, rather than satisfying our desires, often result in further frustration and antagonism."

The solution?

Zazen, as explained in the works of Alan Watts.

Zen, Peter Oldmeadow (Sydney: Lansdowne, 2001), p. 10.

Not to mention, for millions of Americans, the lack of medical insurance.

America, snap out of it!

- Rick

Enormous Income Inequality in U.S.

2009-09-01T17:31:00.008-04:00

H. Zinn writes that from 1944 to 1961 the distribution of wealth in the United States "had not changed much: the lowest fifth of the families received 5 percent of all the income; the highest fifth received 45 percent of all the income. In 1953, 1.6 percent of the adult population owned more than 80 percent of the corporate stock and nearly 90 percent of the corporate bonds. About 200 hundred giant corporations--one tenth of one percent of all corporations--controlled about 60 percent of the manufacturing wealth of the nation."

A People's History, pp. 441-42.

Barry repeatedly talked about income inequality during his campaign for the presidency, saying it was the greatest it has been since the Great Depression.

Haven't heard him use the phrase once since he took office.

On health care reform, I was surprised to see a clip of Ted Kennedy on TV roaring that health care was a right, not a privilege -- in 1978! The fundamental reason reform is needed was clearly articulated a long time ago. The power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists to strangle necessary public policy is astonishing.

To provide health care as a for-profit business is inhumane and vile. In a civilized society, health care is a universal, inalienable human right. If one loses one's health, "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" instantaneously evaporate, and in a not insignificant number of cases, God help us, "life" itself vanishes. Press reports indicate that the lack of universal health insurance in the U.S. causes more than 10,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

How Much Is Enough?

2009-09-01T10:27:00.007-04:00

Have finished another draft of the screenplay COCKED & LOADED and have realized that I could go on rewriting this thing till the day I die. Henry James: "A work of art isn't finished, it is abandoned." Okay, but when? If I put it aside for a month and go back to it, I know I'll feel compelled to touch up all kinds of things. How much work is enough? Alexander Pope would let his poems "age" for four years before looking at them one final time prior publication, to help fight the writer's greatest fear--fear of embarrassment.

Currently rewriting second screenplay, THE MURDER PORTFOLIO.

Long Term View

2009-08-31T18:29:00.003-04:00

In today's NYTimes, columnist/economics professor/Nobelist Paul Krugman writes:

"Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system."

Too terribly true. Public funding of all federal elections is indispensable.

Krugman, whose column appears on Mondays and Fridays, is a dyed in the wool liberal in the tradition of FDR, J.K. Galbraith and M. Harrington who is consistently enlightening on the healthcare debate, which the howler monkeys on the right are determined to ruin.

Unbelievable Lack of Social Progress

2009-08-27T17:44:00.005-04:00

In Howard Zinn's outstanding A People's History of the United States [New York: Harper Collins, 1980 and subsequent editions], he reports that "By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners [in pre-revolutionary Boston] owned 44 percent of the [city's] wealth." Further on he writes: "As a result of changes in the [U.S.] tax structure, by 1995 that richest 1 percent [of the total U.S. population] had gained over $1 trillion and now owned over 40 percent of the nation's wealth."

Pp. 49, 662.

Uh 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the country's total wealth? ? ? That sound fair?

Who produces the wealth?

Origin of WTO

2009-08-14T17:26:00.004-04:00

More from The Sorrows of Empire, pp. (268-69):

"What began as a poorly conceived program of emergency measures for debtor countries early in the 1980s slowly matured into the hard orthodoxy of the 'Washington Consensus' in the 1990s. The U.S. government became determined to impose neoliberal economics on every country on earth. To do so, it unveiled its master plan, the 'Uruguay Round' of international trade negotiations (1968 to 1994), and its crown jewel, created on January 1, 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Acting in compliance with a seemingly innocent effort to create a common set of trade rules for all and to bring agriculture under such rules for the first time, 'many developing countries discovered that in signing on to the WTO, they had,' as Bello [i.e., Walden Bello of the University of the Phillipines] put it, 'signed away their right to development.' "

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) was created during WWII. The deliberations of these institutions, along with the World Bank, are totally secret.

Lawrence Summers & Pollution

2009-08-13T17:17:00.003-04:00

More from The Sorrows of Empire (p. 268):

"From 1991 to 1993, Lawrence Summers was the chief economist at the World Bank and the man who oversaw the tailoring of 'austerity measures' to each country that needed a loan. He decided exactly what a country had that Washington wanted to open up. On December 12, 1991, Summers became notorious for a leaked memo to senior officials of the bank encouraging polluting industries in the rich nations to relocate to the less developed countries. He wrote, 'I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and we should face up to that.' "

Nice. A true friend of humanity. What the hell was Barry thinking when he appointed him as a key economic advisor?

Globalization & History

2009-08-11T17:34:00.004-04:00

More from Chalmers Johnson, in The Sorrows of Empire, (p. 263), on the fallacies of globalism, which always insists that a country lower or eliminate its tariff barriers to allow international trade:

"Leaving aside the former Soviet Union, the main developed countries -- Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan and the East Asian NICs [Newly Industrialized Countries] (South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) -- all got rich in more or less the same way. Regardless of how they justified their policies, in actual practice they protected their domestic markets using high tariff walls and myriad 'non-tariff barriers' to trade. Britain, for example, did not accept free trade until the 1840s, long after it had become the world's leading industrial power. Between 1790 and 1940, the United States was probably the most highly protected economy on earth."

Imperialism Via Globalization

2009-07-28T18:05:00.007-04:00

"Proponents of globalism, particularly American academic economists and political scientists, cling to it with religious fervor . . . . Many otherwise sober business and political leaders in the United States have been carried away by globalization's messianic claims. This phenomenon, too, is not new. Classical liberalism blinded no small number of Englishmen to the racism, genocide, and ruthless exploitation that accompanied the growth of the British Empire. As Hannah Arendt remarked about that earlier period of market worship: 'The fact that the "white man's burden" is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.' It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. . . . THERE IS NO KNOWN CASE IN WHICH GLOBALIZATION HAS LED TO PROSPERITY IN ANY THIRD WORLD COUNTRY [emphasis supplied], and none of the world's twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine. What globalization has produced, in the words of de Rivero, is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities). There is occasional evidence that this result is precisely what the authors of globalization intended. In 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, 'It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.' Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder."

C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 261-62.

A Huge Concentration of Troops in Japan

2009-07-16T17:14:00.002-04:00

"[T]he Spanish-American War [1898] first set us on our modern path of imperialism. Some of the bases we acquired at that time--Guantànamo Bay, Pearl Harbor, Guam--are still overseas military outposts or are on territories that we later directly annexed . . . . It was was not until World War II that our empire of bases achieved its global reach, and the United States still seems to regard its continuing occupation of the territory of its former Axis foes as something akin to a natural birthright. The Korean War, though ended in a stalemate, nonetheless projected us onto the Asian mainland . . . . According to the Pentagon's September 2001 Base Status Report, the United States has seventy-three bases in Japan. These bases house some 40,217 uniformed service personnel, plus 6,431 civilian employees of the Department of Defense and 42,653 dependents . . . . The Japanese government pays us some $4 billion per annum to help defray the costs . . . making Japan perhaps the only country that pays another country to carry out espionage against itself. The troops on these bases have no military functions. They have been held in reserve for deployment elsewhere in Asia--in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Philippines, East Timor, and other places--as the need (or opportunity) arises."

C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 189, 202.

U.S. Military Empire & Public Awareness

2009-07-13T17:22:00.004-04:00

In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson writes that U.S. military bases in Israel "are known simply as Sites 51, 53, and 54. Their specific locations are classified and highly sensitive. There is no mention of American military bases in Israel in any of the Department of Defense's official compilations . . . . [O]ur own nation is filled with military installations--there are 969 separate bases in the fifty states . . . . The modern American empire can only be perceived, and understood, by a close look at our basing policies, the specific way we garrison the earth. To trace the historical patterns of base acquisition and to explore our basing systems worldwide is to reveal the sinews of what has until very recently, for most Americans, been a largely hidden empire [pp. 153, 188]."

So that's 900 military installations in the U.S. and some 800 abroad [Blowback, p. 36].

One had no idea. This is a huge phenomenon. And one reads the NYTimes on a regular basis and watches the corporate media virtually every night.

Totally in the dark.

Thank God one's local community access TV station broadcast an interview with Chalmers Johnson. The extent to which the corporate media fail to deliver crucial information to the American public is astonishing.

"I don't know, sir, but I'll find out."

2009-07-10T16:06:00.003-04:00

"Given that many of our bases around the world are secret, that some are camouflaged by flags of convenience, and that many consist of multiple distinct installations, how can anyone assess accurately the scope and value of our military empire? It is not easy. If the Secretary of Defense were to ask his closest aides with the highest security clearances how many bases abroad he had under his control, they would have to reply, using an old naval officers' cop-out, 'I don't know, sir, but I'll find out.' "

C. Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, p. 152-53.

Mercenaries & U.S. Foreign Policy

2009-07-09T16:27:00.006-04:00

"[T]he [estimated] revenues of the private military companies [i.e., mercenaries like Blackwater], which were at $55.6 billion in 1990, will rise to $202 billion by 2010. The companies even have their own industry trade group, the International Peace Operations Association--a name George Orwell would have cherished . . . . Much of this privatization of our armed forces is actually deeply disliked by uniformed professionals. As Colonel Bruce Grant notes, 'Privatization is a way of going around Congress [i.e., avoiding Congressional oversight] and not telling the public [about the nature of military operations being conducted by these firms]. Foreign policy is made by default by private military consultants motivated by bottom-line profits.' "

C. Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, pp. 141-42.

An American President Said That?

2009-07-07T17:02:00.002-04:00

Bush Junior to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

"I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain--I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Sorrows of Empire, pp. 291-92.

An Empire of Military Bases

2009-07-01T17:50:00.004-04:00

In Blowback: The Costs & Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), Chalmers Johnson comments that "Globalization seems to boil down to the spread of poverty to every country but the United States" (p.214) and notes that "There are still today, ten years after the end of the Cold War, some eight hundred Department of Defense facilities located outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases (p.36)."

Shouldn't the number of American military bases located abroad have decreased as a result of the end of the Cold War?

Eisenhower's words ring ominously in one's ears.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Diplomacy or Gunfights?

2009-07-01T17:22:00.003-04:00

In the Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson notes that "the Pentagon's budget is almost twenty times larger than the State Department's" (p. 137); that "Since 1991, the United States has been by far the larger single seller of munitions on the earth. From 1997 to 2001, it exported $44.82 billions in arms ...."(p. 133); that "The General Accounting Office has identified has identified at least 185 black programs [i.e., covert operations abroad whose budgets are kept secret] and notes that they have increased eightfold during the 1981-1986 period. There is no authoritative total, but the GAO once estimated that $30 to $35 billion per year [!!!] was devoted to secret military and intelligence spending" (p.118); points out that by using depleted uranium [DU] ammunition "the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classified DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction" (p.101); and concludes that "One certain legacy of the war in Iraq is that American political and military leaders can no longer be believed or trusted" (p. 95).

Little Known Fact

2009-06-28T15:53:00.002-04:00

"The United States is the sole country the old World Court [at the Hague] (which can try only nations, not individuals) ever condemned for terrorism--owing to the Reagan administration's covert action to destabilize and destroy the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in 1984."

Source: Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), p. 75.

Colossal U.S. Failure in Afghanistan

2009-06-27T17:35:00.004-04:00

Today's NYTimes online quotes U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan Richard C. Holbrooke saying that the U.S. has "wasted hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" on a failed program to eradicate the cultivation of the poppy crop in that country and that the program was being discontinued in favor of planned efforts to stop shipments of heroin out of the country and to encourage farmers to grow alternative crops.

Question: Umm, after say $1 million was wasted, why didn't the planners stop the program then? Or after the essentially colossal sum of $10 million was wasted? Or $50 million. It took the loss of the incomprehensible amount of "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" for the architects of this policy to determine that their program wasn't working?

What kind of management system is that? Who was running the program, the Three Stooges? A deeply dysfunctional feedback system was in play. What does this suggest about other U.S. foreign policy initiatives? A defective policy presupposes defective thinking.

Who's in charge?

Loose Change 2nd Edition (Full)

2009-06-11T19:14:00.001-04:00

Pinter, Iraq, 9/11 and the Duty of Patriotism

2009-06-11T17:11:00.005-04:00

As reported in the Guardian, December 7, 2005, Harold Pinter stated in his Nobel acceptance speech (the entirety of which may be found below via YouTube):

"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law."

One was unaware of any coverage of this speech by U.S. corporate media at the time the speech was given.

As to the need for a truth commission independent of the U.S. government to establish precisely what happened on 9/11, see the documentaries: Zeitgeist, 9/11 Mysteries, In Plane Sight, and Loose Change (the last viewable immediately above).

One calls attention to the evidence presented by these videos to help guard against the possibility that the U.S. might devolve into a dictatorship embracing all that is despicable and dehumanized about fascism, a dictatorship being a state governed by a supreme leader who is above the law (cf. torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, suspension of due process and habeas corpus, private security forces, warrantless wiretapping, dissemination of misinformation via a complicit, weak-minded corporate media establishment, demagogic speeches), a fascist state one where the government engages in terrorism against its own citizens. It is the duty of U.S. patriots to call attention to abuses by government and disseminate information that will enable the average citizen to defend and uphold the U.S. Constitution. Complacency, or willful denial of incontrovertible evidence of government malfeasance, can lead only to ruin. The true patriot must be eternally vigilant and speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Capitalism & Crack

2009-05-10T09:18:00.002-04:00

The subprime mortgage crisis shows what happens when psychological crack addicts, i.e., people who have surrendered their intellects to the insatiable demands of the profit motive, to the exclusion of almost all other values, including self-preservation, run the economy.

pinter nobel lecture

2009-05-09T00:56:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 7 of 7

2009-05-08T20:43:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 6 of 7

2009-05-08T20:42:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 5 of 7

2009-05-08T20:41:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 4 of 7

2009-05-08T20:40:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 3 of 7

2009-05-08T20:39:00.003-04:00

Arundhati Roy - We - 2 of 7

2009-05-08T20:39:00.001-04:00

Arundhati Roy

2009-05-08T20:34:00.003-04:00

First caught Ms. Roy on one's local cable-access TV channel.

Recommended without hesitation, reservation, or qualification. Excellent thinking, excellent music.

Arundhati Roy - We - 1 of 7

2009-05-08T20:22:00.001-04:00

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

2009-05-08T14:06:00.001-04:00

Overheard

2009-05-08T12:49:00.003-04:00

Overheard somewhere recently a comment that has stuck in mind:

"We can have separation of church and state but we cannot have separation of morality and state."

Why is the U.S. repeatedly resorting to criminality in its foreign policy? Why this determination to alienate the rest of the world? Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech on You Tube is recommended to interested readers without qualification, hesitation or reservation.

The right to dissent is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The obligation to dissent is enshrined in the human conscience.

Education is the only road out of the ethical swamp into which this country has descended.

All hail the teaching profession!

The U.S. military has issued a statement saying reports of more than 140 civilian deaths as a result of this past Monday/Tuesday bombing raid in Farah Province in Afghanistan are "over-exaggerated"--without referring to any facts to support the claim--and that an investigation is underway.

Afghanistan: The Oil Factor

2009-05-07T11:57:00.012-04:00

One is aware that the reason the U.S. military is in Afghanistan is to secure access to future oil supplies in Asia. Fine. Understandable idea. But it does not justify the killing of innocent people. An ends-justifies-the-means philosophy is the philosophy of the Nazis. We cannot prance through the world inflicting holocausts on innocent men, women and children. What the U.S. is doing is despicable, intolerable, irrational, self-defeating and--one says this without exaggerating--unforgivable. We must get out of Afghanistan immediately. If there are problems with respect to future supplies of oil, we'll deal with that then, acting responsibly and humanely and with honor.

Deeper Into the Abyss of Afghanistan

2009-05-07T09:00:00.004-04:00

The New York Times reports today that (1) the United Nations has put the total number of Afghan casualties in 2008 at 2,000, and (2) that the governor of Farah Province has stated that the American bombing and strafing raid there this past Monday from 5 p.m. till midnight may have killed more than the 100 civilians originally reported.

A U.S. military spokesman said the deaths "may" have been the work of the Taliban.

Obama has dispatched an additional 20,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

What is it with the U.S. government's enchantment with blood baths on foreign soil?

Man With Message

2009-05-06T11:09:00.001-04:00

The other night on one's wonderful and indispensable local cable-access TV station they broadcast a short documentary I guess you'd call it, no narration, showing a guy in a Speedo standing on the main corner in Central Square on a day when everyone was wearing coats and he's holding this sign on a stick that says on one side "Honk for Peace" and on the other "Honk for War" and he keeps switching it back and forth every so often and the honking is about the same for the one side as the other.

Contemporary Warfare

2009-05-05T18:21:00.003-04:00

What is contemporary warfare? It is the mass murder of innocent human beings. It is unethical, obsolete, finished. Technology has made the weapons so deadly they cannot--in a humane world--be used. You go into Iraq and 90 percent of the victims are innocent people. This is so despicable it's almost incomprehensible, surreal, bizarre. So much for "smart" bombs. We're slaughtering people by the busload.

The U.S. is supposed to stand for something besides mass murder.

U.S. Out of Afghanistan Immediately

2009-05-05T17:26:00.004-04:00

An AP dispatch of twenty minutes ago quoted Afghan officials stating that between 30 and 100 civilians were killed as a result of recent US bombing raids. This is murder. This is inexcusable. One's local cable-access TV station has reported that civilian deaths during WWI came to 10 percent of total casualties, 50 percent during WWII, 75 percent during the Vietnam War, and 90 percent in Iraq.

U.S. foreign policy is so far off the path of decency and rationality that one strikes one's forehead in disbelief.

Killing innocent human beings is beyond despicable, beyond contemptible--and what goes around comes around. To ignore the universal justice of "karma" is to walk off a cliff. The U.S. has gone over the edge.

To kill a single innocent person is inexcusable. In Iraq we've lost some 4,000 soldiers; the Iraqi government recently released an Iraqi casualty estimate of some 80,000. Is this a fair fight? Or is it unmitigated brutality and insanity?

I'm very disappointed by Obama's militaristic outlook on Afghanistan. We should pull out now. We've started another blood bath before we've even finished in Iraq.

It is immoral to kill innocent women and children. This is self-evident. I pray to God Obama realizes this and starts to pull our troops out immediately.

Peace is the answer, not permanent war.

Chilling Words

2009-03-20T15:46:00.003-04:00

Eszterhas quoting Paramount studio head B.P. Schulberg:

"We can't afford to alienate our movie audience by telling them the truth about themselves."

How to Handle a Trashing, etc., etc.

2009-03-19T17:38:00.004-04:00

Playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter: "As soon as he read my script Accident, the producer Sam Spiegel summoned me to his office. He began his commentary by saying: 'You call this a screenplay?' He then said, 'You can't make a movie out of this. Who are these people? I don't know anything about them. I don't know anything about their background. I don't know what they're doing. I don't understand what they're up to. I don't understand one thing. I think you have to seriously rethink the whole script.' I said, 'No, I'm not rethinking it. That's it.' " . . . . From the time screenwriters John Gregory Donne and Joan Didion began work on a script called Golden Girl until the time it was filmed as Up Close and Personal, they did twenty-seven drafts of the script over the course of six years . . . . Director Ken Russell to [legendary] screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky: "What's it to you whether you like the set or not? You're only the writer! . . . Take your turkey sandwiches and your script and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and get on the next fucking plane back to New York and let me get on with the fucking film." . . . . A screenwriter and a director were on a trip scouting locations. The script called for "white houses dotting the hillsides." The hills they were looking at were perfect except for the fact that blue houses were dotting the hillside, not white ones. The director, a freak for authenticity, turned the location down because of the blue houses. The screenwriter took the script out of the director's hands, then crossed the word white out and replaced it with blue. The director approved the hillside. . . . Screenwriter Renny Harlan (Cliffhanger; Exorcist: The Beginning): "I don't want accidents, I want disasters. I don't want dirt, I want filth. I don't want a storm, I want a hurricane. I don't want fear, I want panic. I don't want suspense, I want terror. I don't want humor, I want hysteria." . . . . Novelist/screenwriter Raymond Chandler: "Eventually there will be a type of director who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne."

Joe Eszterhas The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God.

Severely and absolutely recommended.

Slugs, Snakes & Lemmings

2009-03-19T17:32:00.002-04:00

Capitalism deifies self-inerest. The AIG men are today's gods and the worst thing about them is that I'm sure they don't think they've done anything wrong. Wall Street is a world of slugs and snakes and lemmings. I condemn all of them to continue to be what they are.

Writing Technique

2009-03-09T13:41:00.003-04:00

More from The Devil's Guide to Hollywood:

Raymond Chandler: "Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create."

Though Eszterhas notes: "Producer Ray Stark told screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison that as a young agent one of his jobs was to get Raymond Chandler off the floor of his apartment, where he sometimes slept fully dressed in a drying pool of his own vomit."

Screenwriter Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes): "My script is my head vomited up on paper."

Pp. 86, 147-8.

Getting Physical

2009-03-07T22:52:00.004-05:00

More from The Devil's Guide to Hollywood for purposes of this on-going critical review:

Author Hunter S. Thomson: ' There is a ghastly political factor in doing any business with Hollywood. You can't get by without five or six personal staff people--and at least one personal astrologer. I have always hated astrologers, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Hollywood. In Venice Beach, I ran into a man who claimed to be Johnny Depp's astrologer .... I took his card and examined it carefully a moment as if I couldn't quite read the small print. But I knew he was lying, so I leaned toward him and slapped him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, but very quickly, using the back of my hand and my fingers like a bull whip, yet very discreetly. He let out a hiss and went limp, unable to speak or breathe."

P. 83

Story Conference

2009-03-06T22:27:00.002-05:00

Eszterhas at a story conference with director Paul Verhoeven [Basic Instinct, et al.]:

VERHOEVEN
I am the director, ja? You are the writer. You will do what I tell you to do.

ESZTERHAS
If you use that tone of voice with me again, I'm going to come across this fucking table at you.

P. 59.

Noted In Passing

2009-03-06T22:11:00.002-05:00

From Joe Eszterhas' The Devil's Guide to Hollywood:

"Screenwriter William Goldman [Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, etc.]: 'Directors--even though we all know from the media's portrayals of them that they are men and women of wisdom and artistic vision, masters of the subtle use of symbolism--are more often than not a bunch of insecure lying assholes."

New York: St. Martins, 2006, p. 51.

The Printed Word

2009-03-05T00:55:00.003-05:00

When I think of all the books I've read that have led to an absolute dead end, I have to wonder why I go on reading. As a wise person said: "If we knew what it was we were looking for, surely we would have found it long since."

The Lemming Imperative

2009-03-03T18:05:00.004-05:00

Greed is one cause of the US financial crisis. Another is the psychology of the upper classes, which is the psychology of lemmings. One neighborhood banker starts giving mortgages to anyone who walks into his bank wearing shoes, and boasts about it at a social gathering of his fellow and sister lemmings, and soon the banker across the street is doing the same thing, and then it spreads to the next town, and on and on across the country. Some would say competition is the underlying cause, but equally important is the lemming imperative. The a Wall Street investment banker decides to "securitize" a batch of the doomed sub-prime mortgages, creating a brand new investment instrument that some sucker get-rich-quick investor snaps up. The Wall Street "innovator" tells his fellow and sister lemmings about his "securitization" of sub-prime mortgages at one social function or another and soon they are doing the same thing themselves and the practice spreads and spreads. Because if the upper classes are anything, they are social animals. Business lunches and conventions and trade shows and charity balls and conferences and on and on, buzz, buzz, buzz, they all swap notes about what they're doing and all go home determined to be a mirror image of the people they've been socializing with. No matter that sub-prime mortgages are a profoundly stupid investment--if everyone else is doing it, I'm gonna do it too. From sea to shining sea, the lemmings squeal in delight at how interchangeable they are in their expensive suits and cars and houses.

And in their lack of anything approaching independent thinking.

And as to possessing a conscience, that's a non-issue.

Perfected Speech In Israel

2009-02-16T14:13:00.002-05:00

The gifted and indefatigable Tsipi Keller has recently published two works of translation--Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, and The Hymns of Job and Other Poems by Maya Bejerano, links below, the third a review. The anthology was years in the making and offers a deep plunge into the sea of verse Israeli poets have been creating out of nothing.

Recommended without hesitation, reservation or qualification.

http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61737

http://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=192

http://www.jbooks.com/fiction/index/FI_Ostriker_Keller.htm

The Unknowability of Death

2009-02-06T18:39:00.004-05:00

Quote of the day, adapted from a maxim of George Butler in David Markson's overwhelming The Last Novel: "Every man who lives knows he will die, but no man lives to know he's dead." Now let's break out the frozen daiquiris and celebrate this gorgeous maxim. And there's another I like from John Osborne: "To ask a practising writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it thinks about dogs." And there's another from someone else that was amusing, I can't remember who: ""He who writes for fools will always have a wide audiendce." And then Brahms leaving a party: "And if there's anyone here I forgot to insult, I apologize."

Bonuses for Wall Street Slugs

2009-02-04T00:06:00.006-05:00

Barry has called the bonuses the Wall Street tycoons awarded themselves "disgraceful" but what he should have done is appointed a commission to investigate whether these funds could be confiscated by the federal government--or just executed a signing statement and confiscated them himself. I mean these clowns screw-up on the job, screw the overall economy, and then they get a bonus? Absolutely not. That money should be confiscated by the federal government and used to help deal with the national economic emergency the Wall Street fuck-ups have created. Talk about skeevy people my God.

The fundamental purpose of blogs is to mystify an already deeply confused planet.

Gargoyles for '09

2009-01-04T15:08:00.003-05:00

Some merriment for the New Year from Th. Bernhard's Gargoyles:

Bernhard: "Whenever people talk they undercut one another. The art of conversation is the art of undercutting, and the art of the monologue is the most horrible kind of undercutting. I always think, the prince said, that my interlocutor is trying to push me down into his own abyss after I have just barely managed to escape from my own abyss. Your interlocutors try to push you into as many abysses as possible simulteously. All interlocutors are always mutually pushing one another into all abysses."

Uphill

2008-11-18T00:13:00.002-05:00

Back to working on the screenplay that opens with the long voiceover, not caring much for it . . . but at least I was able to crank out ten pages tonight.

Any Friend of Joe's . . . .

2008-11-10T22:18:00.002-05:00

Hi Jerylann, welcome to the waiting room. I understand you're an Obama supporter. Good for you. Good for us.

Writer Wins Presidency

2008-11-04T23:38:00.002-05:00

What a wonderful night. Many things in this country are rigged so as to screw the unknowing and credulous, but one somehow doesn't feel a presidential election can be rigged. It's too big a phenomenon, too many people are involved, it's not subject to being completely controlled or manipulated by the vested interests and plutocrats. One truly feels the common everyday people of this country had an opportunity to rise to their feet and speak, and they took it, effecting a fundamental and sorely needed change of direction for the nation. Three cheers for Obama and three cheers for the U.S. Constitution.

Another Delon Loser

2008-10-24T23:43:00.003-04:00

Warning, danger, warning, danger! This DVD (1972, dir. Jean Pierre Melville) is so bad it's almost frightening. "Un flic" is a cop, Alain Delon. He chases gangsters. Awful awful awful. Tedious to an unbearable degree. Draggy, dull, bogus in every way.

CIA Interrogation

2008-10-21T22:57:00.005-04:00

London-based Pakistani P.I. Tommy Akhtar is the protag of Patrick Neate's novel City of Tiny Lights (titled after the Zappa tune) and he's being interrogated by CIA agent Chip Paradowski in an interrogation room in a UK police station and Chip keeps annoying Tommy by calling him "son."

"This wasn't the English version of the word as in 'my son' as in 'mate' as in 'like-minded individual,' this was the patronizing American version as in 'Just you remember who you're talking to, son.' 'Son?' I doubted the geezer was even as old as me and I knew he hadn't seen anything like the reality of yours truly . . . . Paradowski sighed. He adjusted his position and crossed his legs. 'Look, son, can I be straight with you?' 'Sure, Dad.' "

New York: Penguin, 2005, p. 203.

Paul Newman

2008-10-15T23:28:00.005-04:00

Caught The Sting on TV yesterday and was annoyed by the goofy music and the editing--the wipes may be corny but at least they're intrusive--but I was charmed by the premise of non-violence and God wasn't Paul Newman a great actor, you look at him and listen to him and he makes you feel so secure. Reading Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem this evening; found it abandoned in a box with some other books on Upton Street a few weeks ago, a paperback with one name written inside the front cover, along the top edge, in fountain pen, and another in ballpoint on the fore-edge; can't tell if I'm enjoying it or not, just reading along, it's a collection of magazine pieces, the last I read mentioning Newman. I had seen a photo of him on the cover of a tabloid some weeks ago, looking thin, so his passing didn't shock me. God what a wonderful actor. He could be so intense. And yet that smile; it made you feel everything was, unquestionably, going to be all right.

Existence Pain to Decrease?

2008-10-09T20:25:00.003-04:00

McCain has no chance. The battle cry, the ideological core, the mantra, the cri de coeur of the Republicans year after year has been deregulation of industry and it is deregulation that has caused the present financial crisis. The top headline in today's NYTimes: "U.S. MAY TAKE OWNERSHIP STAKE IN BANKS TO EASE CREDIT CRISIS." Excellent. This could be the first step in a shift from capitalism to socialism in this country. Under socialism, industries are nationalized by the federal government and operated to serve the public interest rather than the bank accounts of ownership elites. Commodities are produced not for profit but for use. Social justice becomes a reality, not a dream, and the existence pain of the general population decreases. So if this financial crisis compels the U.S. to turn to socialism in order to survive, it is a crisis with a magnificent satin lining.

More Health Care Idiocy

2008-10-07T23:22:00.003-04:00

In Monday's NY Times (p. A25) Paul Krugman writes: "Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain [health care] plan [which would eliminate the tax break for employer-provided health insurance] around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance."

Okay, PBS says there are currently some 40 million people in the US with no health care insurance. McCain would add another 20 million to the total.

Only the rectal-cranially inverted can support public policy this misguided. Oh when will an operation be invented to cure this stubborn and vexing condition?

Irrationality of US Health Care

2008-09-28T23:59:00.007-04:00

Wall Street has nearly self-destructed. Predictable, according to Marx. My question, my lamentation--why couldn't it have been the health care insurance industry instead? A show on PBS tonight claimed that the medically uninsured in the US, some 40 million people, cost the economy $130 billion a year in lost productivity--which is more than the cost of insuring them. Health care should not be managed as a for-profit business. Health care is a fundamental human right, not a privilege to be granted the sick based on their ability to pay or the insurance plan of their employer, if any. The Declaration of Independence states that each citizen has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When you're ill and can't afford to get health care, you have no happiness, your liberty is greatly impaired, and your life, well your life sucks. The Founders did not intend a country that would be populated by thousands of people roaming around on any given day saying, "My life is crap."

The Myth of CEO Accountability

2008-09-22T19:09:00.006-04:00

A letter to the editor in the Sept. 19 NYTimes (p. A22) from a Sharon Bermon:

"Nicholas D. Kristof doesn't go far enough when he suggests that overpaid American CEOs should 'learn from Britain and Australia.' I would like to see some masters of the [financial] universe line up, bow deeply and apologize to their employees and shareholders--in the fashion of Japanese managers. And then give back the money they didn't earn."

No Pain at the Top

2008-09-19T17:46:00.003-04:00

Three cheers for House speaker Nancy Pelosi who is quoted in today's NYTimes (p. A15) re the US financial crisis: "Let's hear from the private sector. How these captains of the financial world could make millions of dollars in salary, yet their companies fail and then we have to step in to bail them out."

Vested Interests on Their Knees

2008-09-17T20:43:00.007-04:00

All the full of shit conservatives and reactionaries and plutocrats and self-centered expropriators comprising the investment class are looking more than usually asinine these days, as the great Wall Street firms go belly-up from excessive greed and short-sighted thinking, and it's amusing to think of the way they always claim government is the source, not the solution, of the periodic economic catastrophes that afflict this nation, because when the chips are down the Republicans are down on their knees begging Washington to save them from bankruptcy, at the taxpayers' expense. Yet, metaphorically speaking, they are my brothers and sisters, these asshole investment high-rollers, and I extend my arms to them and would gladly take the time to explain to them the errors of their ways, if they would only find the time to fit me into their busy schedules.

Lynch & Stephen Daedelus Discuss Esthetics

2008-09-16T22:27:00.004-04:00

From Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

"--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cow dung. Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groin but without taking them from his pockets. --O I did! I did! he cried."

New York: Viking, 1964, p. 205.

Wall Street Self-Destructs

2008-09-15T20:01:00.002-04:00

In response to the collapse of the high and mighty Wall Street firms it is essentially impossible not to think of Gordon Gecko (Gekko?) from Wall Street and his famous ipse dixit: "Greed is good. Greed works."

Right.

Post Post

2008-09-10T01:23:00.004-04:00

I read an amusing script on TriggerStreet and posted a review there today. Story about postal service investigative agents. They go to a house suspected of drug trafficking via post and show their badges to the suspect at the door and he says: "What did I do? Forget to put a return address on an envelope?"

Nothing New Under Le Soleil

2008-09-05T23:07:00.003-04:00

I borrow a DVD from the library titled Gabrielle, a French film by I can't remember whom, based on a Conrad work called The Return and how does it start? With the longest opening voiceover I've ever heard. I didn't get around to watching it till the night before it was due, so I wasn't able to watch all of it, because I was tired, but I'm going to borrow it again and see how many pages, or minutes, it runs. It was kind of a typical French film in that it had long, long conversations between two people, the kinds of scenes I'm not allowing myself to write. It deals with a well to do couple who live in an enormous townhouse in what I suppose is Paris and they have like four or five servants, it's true decadence, holds one's attention--the maids wear white gloves when serving dinner. To think that they might accidentally touch the food! Mon Dieu! I'm back to working on the script that opens with the long voiceover after having finished major alterations on Intent to Kill, now titled The Murder Portfolio, based on an excellent story conference with Joe the Conqueror, query letter and one-page synopsis, along with tag line and logline ready to go.

Best for Last

2008-08-30T14:56:00.001-04:00

It's hard to believe, therefore I believe. It's easy to disbelieve, therefore I choose to believe. It's takes work to believe, daily prayer, daily trust, you gotta work at it, as you know. But hey when you take the big trip into the Sky, that's when it all pays off, for everybody involved. And there is a deep-seated instinct to save the best for last. Where does that come from, I wonder?

Caper Flick Flops

2008-08-26T00:39:00.004-04:00

Watched David Mamet's caper flick Heist, which he wrote and directed, on videocasette and it was awful--phoney-sounding, stagy, heavy-handed and a terrible waste of the great Gene Hackman, the main problem lying in the directing, which compelled everyone in the film to talk like a Saturday Night Live caricature of a Mamet character, everything drenched in unreality; one felt as if the characters had invisible scripts in hand and were reading their lines, everything seemed fake, and there was a horrible sameness to all of them, each in effect saying, "Hey, fuck you, I'm tough as nails and sly as a fox," and the next, "No, no, no, fuck you, I'm tough as nails and sly as a fox," and on and on, the mood of the film unalterably monotonous from beginning to end, the heist itself, of gold bullion from an jet that is on take off and cut off by a car, implausible to an extreme, all this inferiority genuinely surprising because I found Glengarry Glen Ross magnificent. [Later: The Research Department reports that Glengarry wasn't directed by D.M. but one James Foley.]

Necessary Precautions

2008-08-22T22:22:00.004-04:00

A character in Steve Toltz's novel A Fraction of the Whole is a career criminal by the name of Harry West who gives the following advice to an aspiring gangster: "If you're embarking on a life of crime, you never know when your enemies are going to attack. Knives, bullets, fists, they come out of the woodwork. Any place you go--the pub, the cinema, the bank, the dentist--as soon as you walk into a room, you better find a wall and stand with your back to it. Get ready. Be aware. Don't let anyone get behind you, you hear me? Even when you're getting a haircut: always make the barber do it from in front." Harry's world class paranoia followed him everywhere. "You couldn't get behind him! He'd slide against the wall and if he was ever in an open space, he'd spin like a top. He panicked in crowds, and when he was caught up in the throng, he'd really go into violent spasms. The funniest thing was when he had to take a piss outdoors. He wouldn't go behind a tree, because his back was exposed; Harry leaned against the tree facing out, one hand on his dick, the other holding a .45."

New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008, pp. 52, 100-101.

Valediction to Liberalism

2008-08-21T16:20:00.006-04:00

A note of some weeks ago to Joe the Conqueror on an article by a prominent playwright/screenwriter announcing that he was abandoning liberalism:

Jeaux the Conqueror,

Davey is writing from the lap of luxury, safely removed from the problem of the decline in real wages of the average worker over the past ten or twenty years, the workers slowly turning brain-dead from overwork and a sense of unending pointlessness and misery, the overlords going out to laugh at Davey's plays and films. He's abandoned the exploited. Well the exploited can return the favor and start reading someone else. The bushdoctor will take care of them. The bushdoctor honors labor. He sides with Blaise Pascal: "I only approve those who seek with groans."

Davey never groans, I can almost guarantee you.

As to teaching acting, remember Shakespeare's famous quote:

"All the world's a stage and the unemployment rate for the Screen Actors Guild is holding steady at 97 percent."

Get back,
RECCK

P.S. Funny we should be talking about a brain-dead liberal just as Patty publishes the latest post on her Alzheimer's blog. As a wise man said: "Life is funny, only it's not funny enough."

Story Conference

2008-08-20T23:31:00.004-04:00

A thank-you note resulting from a beneficial story conference with Joe the Conqueror:

Absolute Sir,

I can't thank you enough for the story consultation on Intent to Kill, which I may retitle The Murder Portfolio. Our discussion and your enthusiasm for the project reignited my interest in the world of Mr. Stallworth and I am amazed at the bonehead oversights in the draft you read. Not only would Nick Donatello not have paid a house call alone on Reed, if he had he would have had people on the fire escape to block Reed's exit. And when he trashed the place, he would have stolen Reed's laptop in order to find out where he worked. I have Reed go back and pick up the laptop after the break-in. Where was my mind?

Well I've junked the break-in and I've junked the shouting match between Reed and the super about the broken windows (makes Reed too much of a hothead, not likable) and I've junked the liaison with Jamie because it was an inessential subplot that went nowhere, and I've made Reed much more leery about coming back to the neighborhood after the night he clipped Michael Donatello.

Your keen observation that as of page 40 all the story is concerned with is finding Sal Bianco made me want to shrink this, but I found I was unable to. It is the nucleus of too many scenes. I would have had to junk the entire first 40 pages, and a cut of that magnitude was too much for me. It still stands as a Winner Take Nothing plot element that at least has a hard-bitten realism going for it. And it is a way of showing the nature of the relationship between Eddie and Reed. But I've changed it from Reed asking for Bianco's phone number to Reed asking both Zanetti and Eddie to vouch for him with Bianco, so a meeting can be set up, which Eddie finally agrees to do, for the grand.

But mainly it was your enthusiasm that enabled me to go back and do all this necessary work and for that, once again, I thank you kindly.

Word,
Rick

No Working Title

2008-08-07T00:13:00.003-04:00

I've ended up having the voiceover taper off rather than end abruptly and I'm halfway through the first draft, so I guess I'm committed to this thing, Screenplay 3, no working title, eight pages produced tonight adding a major plot development, wishing I felt better about it but remembering it's only a first draft, this after having abandoned two earlier attempts, each thirty or forty pages, trashed because of the lack of an outline and a lack of confidence about the material.

Terrible DVD

2008-08-03T15:37:00.006-04:00

This is a newly available DVD so lame that one struggles for words to express fully its awful terrible corny inexcusable nature. It is tedious, simple-minded, unconvincing, plotted like a cartoon and has truly annoying worn-out jazz for most of the sound track. Alain Delon, suffering from amnesia after a car crash, is the one sympathetic character but he moves in slow motion through a profoundly implausible murder mystery. The title calls to mind the fine thriller Diabolique and one is left marveling at how wrong a filmmaker, in this case one Julien Duvivier, whom apparently people take seriously, can go, no matter that he has an adequate budget, a gorgeous location and a capable cast. And the butler at the chateau is a creep. I don't think there was a screenwriter. I think somebody just assembled some loose papers found in a garbage dump. Do not view this DVD.

Screenplay 3

2008-07-29T23:57:00.004-04:00

I changed the tense of the voiceover from present to past, and added a final "action" scene representing a projection of the speaker's, i.e. the protag's state of mind--there is nothing to distinguish the action scenes (there are four or five of them over the 16 pages of V.O.) from the scenes showing the protag in his actual everyday life, other than their shocking nature, which will lead I hope the average viewer to understand that they did not in fact happen and are only dramatizations of the protag's mental life. A V.O. in the present tense I think comes across as a screaming artificiality; strange that this is the case because in "real life" we think in the present tense, don't we, at least part of the time? But it just doesn't seem to "play" on screen, at least when I hear it in my mind. Though I would like to hear it on screen that way, just to be sure. As if that's ever going to happen. Movie sets in the sky. I hope I'm not charged rent.

Self Flagellation

2008-07-26T00:13:00.003-04:00

It feels strange to be working from an outline but that's what I did tonight; makes one feel very much in command. But I'm having to whip myself to create the outline. A huge problem is that the primary antagonist in the story is the protagonist. One is supposed to devise multiple scenes where the antagonist and protagonist butt heads, in a carefully graduated crescendo, but but but but I can't. Maybe a solution will come to me tomorrow. I look forward to working with Joe the Conqueror on Screenplay 2, Intent to Kill. First step will be a plausibility check on each scene. It's gotta be real baby. It's gotta be as real as that saliva that's in your mouth all the time that you never notice but it's there.

Not Shakespeare

2008-07-23T01:12:00.004-04:00

Tonight, thanks to Joe the Conqueror, I learned that blank verse was introduced into English by translator and poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who first used it in a translation of the Aeneid. And introduced a subplot into Screenplay 3, having no sense whatsoever whether this was a good or bad move--it just happened.

Art Direction

2008-07-22T01:09:00.007-04:00

Added some brief shock-effect action scenes to the opening voiceover, and they're not wholly gratuitous, I believe, each shot composed and lit like a Rembrandt, LOL. But a massive amount of thinking remains to be done and I keep putting it off and putting it off. Switching one's orientation from theater of the absurd to the naturalism serious film demands is a truly wrenching experience, I don't recommend it, it's like asking a tiger to change its stripes to polka dots. How is it possible to have access to the "creative process" of a doomed screenwriter one has never met? It's because life with an internet is weird.