Laugh and Cry
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Lists of top good and bad appear near or at the end of each year, and usually bear witness to how crappy things are, or how how even-more crappy things are.
This week, The Buffalo Beast presented a list of the 50 most-loathsome people in America for 2008 — and it doesn’t leave out President Obama (he’s #50), noting “There’s nothing more loathsome than a likable politician.”
And the list also includes “You” dear reader, average American, listed at #43: “You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.”
(Illustration found here).
And the Numero Uno of loathsome people from last year?
Yes! Sarah Palin:
- Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency.
Palin should be sentenced to “Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.”
A great list and a very funny, good read — there’s all kinds of assholes between Obama and Palin, like the Clintons (#18); Joe the Plumber (#20); Keith Olbermann (#37); even the recently-departed John Updike (#38), charged with “Being foolishly wrong about absolutely everything for about a thousand years and counting. Getting rich applying faux gilt, and guilt, to the dull, pointless, overstuffed lives of New Yorker readers.”
I guess there’s no one good when everywhere you look it’s all bad.
(h/t to AlterNet).
Acid Oceans
Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Another nail in the coffin of the earth.
Climate change offered by human-induced CO2 discharges are literally sucking the life out of our oceans.
(Illustration found here).
In a report issued today, the horror of man-made CO2 will quickly make the world’s oceans more acidic and therefore unable to bear life.
From the New York Times:
- The panel, comprising 155 scientists from 26 countries and organized by the United Nations and other international groups, is not the first to point to growing ocean acidity as an environmental threat, but its blunt language and international credentials give its assessment unusual force.
It called for “urgent action” to sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
“Severe damages are imminent,” the group said Friday in a statement summing up its deliberations at a symposium in Monaco last October.
The statement, called the Monaco Declaration, said increasing acidity is interfering with the growth and health of shellfish and eating away at coral reefs, processes that would eventually affect marine food webs generally.
Already, the group said, there have been detectable decreases in shellfish, shell weights and interference with the growth of coral skeletons.
…
“The chemistry is so fundamental and changes so rapid and severe that impacts on organisms appear unavoidable,” according to James Orr, who headed the symposium’s scientific committee.
Dr. Orr is a chemical oceanographer at the Marine Environmental Laboratory in Monaco, an affiliate of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body.
And this from Reuters:
- Scientists who flew a modified corporate jet from pole to pole to study how greenhouse gases move found carbon dioxide piling up over the Arctic, but also higher than expected levels of oxygen over the Antarctic.
…
One of the major challenges scientists face is tracking the estimated 30 billion tons of carbon emitted each year by motor vehicles, factories, deforestation and other sources.
About 40 percent of the gas accumulates in the atmosphere, with the rest apparently being absorbed by oceans and forests.
How about some good-old fashioned coal-burning?
‘Let Them Eat Ironic Cake’
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If suddenly a world-wide hate for the arts: A lot of wealthy assholes would be out of work.
The greed of spotlight and treasure extends to just about everyone.
From the UK’s Telegraph on profits from the acclaimed “Slumdog Millionaire“: (h/t Think Progress)
- But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.
The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.
Slumdog Millionaire, according to IMDB, made $10,699,629 last weekend, knocking its total up since its release last fall to $56,065,245, and given the old Hollywood rule-of-thumb about production costs (Slumdog estimated to be about $15 million) — “break even” at double the production cost, the rest profit — so to take Slumdog in that light, $26 million so far has gone somewhere.
And the Golden Globes and the Oscar nominations will only drive ticket sales up.
In the comments section, however, at the Think Progress site several wrote that although they had not seen the film, won’t now because of this story.
Another Slumdog “backlash” reviewed here.
From the Telegraph piece:
- The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education.
But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children’s parents.
However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive.
They would not disclose the actual sum.
Director and producer of Slumdog issued a statement in response to the news report, in part which noted a “substantial lump sum” will be paid to the children when they turn 18-years-old — a decade away.
No urgent financial-stimulus package there.
Date-Rape Agent
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Politics | Leave a Comment
This is bad.
From ABC tonight:
- The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Just as President Obama told the Islamic world, “Americans are not your enemy,” some sex-crazed rapist puts the feud back into fuel for extremists.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, Andrew Warren, the 41-year-old CIA station chief in Algiers, had made videos of the sexual encounters and were found in his official residence along with the drugs, Valium and Xanax, the perfect date-rape high-ball.
And apparently this episode wasn’t the first.
- The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.
This incident is not only a slap at Muslims, but a real-burn on the CIA.
- “This will be seen as the typical ugly American,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. “My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas,” Baer said.
“From a national security standpoint,” said Baer, the alleged rapes would be “not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that’s something the CIA should have picked up on,” said Baer. “This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency,” he said.
Welcome to the age of the real ugly American, Mr. Leon Panetta.
Greed Control
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- “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.”
– Agent Smith, The Matrix
(Illustration of ‘Victory of Greed‘ by Jan Patrik Krasny found here).
Only on special occasion the last couple of years has Maureen Dowd done anything to prick my ears, even on a basic literary level and some of her columns during the presidential campaign last year hinted at some kind of crude use of fairy-tale fantasy (although the West Wing piece was a good, interesting read, but it wasn’t from her), but her exercise today in the New York Times does her good, old justice.
In Dowd’s cross-hair is John Thain, Merrill Lynch head honcho who has joined the growing list of greed-layered entrepreneurs carrying the banner of free-enterprise — the list now includes, among a stadium-sized board room of others, Bernie Madoff, Hank Paulson, Al Greenspan, Ken Lay, with the apparent icon of the whole bunch — Gordon Gekko.
Financial greed is not just a US national problem, but a human trait.
This week Iceland’s government collapsed (did buildings fall, chaos?) as a forerunner to how avarice can be tolerated well beyond just the financial district — but not for long.
In 2007, less than two years ago, Iceland was one of the richest countries per capita on earth, though, everybody sort of wink-winked, nudge-nudged on how it came about, and so few questioned a system which appeared to bring so much prosperity.
And this financial total-global meltdown going on right now didn’t spring up overnight — in long-range historical terms, I guess it would be overnight, as mainly just in the last century of so has economies shifted from physical treasure such as gold, silver or land, to vapor, such as those so-called financial instruments, which didn’t move actual treasure around, but just paper.
And whole governments, along with corporations attached to those governments, pushed this allowance for greed into being — final nail in the mortgaged coffin was repeal of the Great-Depression era Glass-Steagall Act.
And so around to the above-mentioned Mr. John Thain, who yesterday sharply snagged a subpoena on his designer cufflinks from the New York state AG’s office wanting details of his company bonus program.
Dowd then whips in her comments.
First nailing another Wall Street greed-lover:
- How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)
…
The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours.
Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.
Dowd makes real-good money and comes from a good-money family, so the “ours” expressed above has yet to reach her level, but I digress.
- In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Thain used the specious, contemptible reasoning that other executives use to rationalize why they’re keeping their bonuses as profits are plunging.
“If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.
Hello?
They destroyed the franchise.
Let’s call their bluff.
Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.
And with the infamous $1.2 million office re-deco job — Thain admits the greedy, opulent episode was a “mistake” — Dowd gets vengeful.
- Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?
“Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,” Thain replied. “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.”
Did it have a desk and a phone?
How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) — and not as perps?
Bring on the shackles.
Let the show trials begin.
Yes indeed.
Dowd, however, like many, many others are a bit scared of the word, “socialism,” because if implemented correctly would bring an end to even her social/professional world.
Which is greedy, too, like a virus.
Turn About Inward
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Watching Jack Bauer is like watching real-time terrorism at work — is everybody a terrorist?
Are those real-nasty and indiscriminate drone attacks into Pakistan last week, after apparently President Obama gave the thumbs up, be considered terrorism?
What about that US Special Forces attack earlier this month in eastern Afghanistan — another heated disagreement between US PR and reality on what really happened that night and what really happened to that small village?
Terror seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
The folklore of terrorism is that the enemy is THEM not us.
(Illustration found here).
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the horror of terror has been somewhere else, in some other country, in some other person’s home or village.
The problem is the US can create acts of terror itself, all covered by a blanket of respectable, law-and-order motives, but still kill innocent men, women and especially children.
As the Gaza war has recently shown, innocent people just get in the damn way.
Thoughts on this came from an antiwar.com blog, which pointed out the historical slant of terrorist vs legal police action, and the US falls short.
A small, thought-provoking piece about Obama as terrorist:
- If so, it’s not because he has associated with Bill Ayers.
He did, however, order a terrorist attack on Pakistan that resulted in the deaths of civilians.
That is a hard statement because we have been conditioned to believe that governments don’t commit acts of terrorism, terrorists do.
Well, we probably all learned in school that during the French Revolution, the government’s Committee of Public Safety carried out what was called the Reign of Terror.
I know I did, but never thought about it until I was recently reading The War on Terror: How Should Christians Respond?, by Nick Megoran (IVP, 2008).
Says Megoran: “Richard Falk, a professor of law at Princeton University, observes that the word terrorism first emerged as applied to the activities of the French revolutionary government, which used violence against civilian society to terrorize the population into acquiescing to the new government.”
How could I have forgotten this?
But even worse, how can so many Americans believe that a terrorist is anyone who detonates a bomb but doesn’t wear a U.S. Air Force uniform?
Where is the stop point?
‘Another Bush’
Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, would any leader react like George Jr., coming forth with incoherent strategy and bluster, only to create a far more disastrous conditional aftermath?
History does have a fond way of repeating itself, but would one guy view the situation the same as another, or does brains and cool overcome a Sarah Palin-like mindset?
And would another major attack on the US by Osama and his boys turn the newly-inaugurated president into a warmongering, Constitutional-busting loud-mouth?
Questions posed into the ether.
(Illustration found here).
This morning, Juan Cole at his Informed Comment site, brings this delicate set of questions to the forefront with an interesting tidbit from the Middle East.
- Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Shaikh Najih Ibrahim, the leader of the fundamentalist group al-Gama’a al-Islamiya in Egypt, said Friday that his organization fears that al-Qaeda will launch an attack on the United States shortly, in revenge for Israel’s assault on Gaza, with the aim of turning Barack Obama into “another George W. Bush.”
Ibrahim’s group called on al-Qaeda instead to observe a 4-month ceasefire toward the United States, so as to give Obama a chance to show he is really different.
Ibrahim said, “A repetition by al-Qaeda of new operations” [against the US] “will be a victory for Israel and a victory for the point of view of George W. Bush, underlining that violence is the natural character of Muslims.”
Although Gama’a turned from violence more than a decade, and it’s original 1970s leader, Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” is in jail in connection with the 1993 WTC bombing and not very popular in Egypt, Cole — a most knowledgeable guy on Mid Eastern affairs — is concerned by this episode.
- Al-Qaeda’s number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a kindred organization that cooperated with the Gama’a in the killing of Sadat.
Al-Zawahiri has loudly condemned the turn of the Gama’a toward peace as an ideal.
The Gama’a still has enough members connected to the radical vigilante fundamentalist underground that they might well be in a position to hear al-Qaeda chatter, and it makes me worried that they are worried.
One hopes Obama does not flip, sending the audacity of hope into the recklessness of revenge.
Afghan Afar Up Close
Filed Under Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
One building agenda-item in President Obama’s gnarly smorgasbord of agenda-items is the dangerous, weird-ass situation in Afghanistan.
Despite new supply routes to bypass nasty Pakistan, the US presence in country is about to strike another, harder chord.
Pakistan, however, still remains front and center.
And Obama is apparently staying the course, okaying a drone attack inside Pakistan today, reportedly killing 15 people, including three children.
(Illustration found here).
And from the Washington Post online this evening (set for print tomorrow):
- The shaky Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari has expressed hopes for warm relations with Obama, but members of Obama’s new national security team have already telegraphed their intention to make firmer demands of Islamabad than the Bush administration, and to back up those demands with a threatened curtailment of the plentiful military aid that has been at the heart of U.S.-Pakistani ties for the past three decades.
…
It remained unclear yesterday whether Obama personally authorized the strike or was involved in its final planning, but military officials have previously said the White House is routinely briefed about such attacks in advance.
At his daily White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the strikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”
Obama convened his first National Security Council meeting on Pakistan and Afghanistan yesterday afternoon, after the strike.
Even Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, didn’t pull her punches either during confirmation hearings.
- In blunt terms in her written answers to the committee’s questions, Clinton pledged that Washington will “condition” future U.S. military aid on Pakistan’s efforts to close down terrorist training camps and evict foreign fighters.
She also demanded that Pakistan “prevent” the continued use of its historically lawless northern territories as a sanctuary by either the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
And she promised that Washington would provide all the support Pakistan needs if it specifically goes after targets such as Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be using Pakistani mountains as a hideout.
What bothers is the strategy — what’s happening here?
Don’t tell me Obama is going with the disaster George Jr.started and couldn’t finish.
From McClatchy this afternoon:
- The deteriorating relationship between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his foreign allies, however, is only one of myriad obstacles that Obama and his just-named special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, are confronting in Afghanistan, Obama on Thursday called “the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.”
Central front? Front line? George Jr. is still lurking about.
- Although the Taliban, al Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups remain active along the remote border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bush administration failed to develop a coherent strategy to coordinate security operations in Afghanistan with international efforts to improve governance and provide schools, roads and other infrastructure.
U.S. commanders, however, say they don’t have enough troops to execute such a strategy, and Obama has embraced a call for another 30,000 U.S. troops.
Senior U.S. military officials, however, say that increase is probably insufficient for Afghanistan, which is twice the size of Iraq, and they say they lack answers to basic questions, such as what realistically can be achieved in the next three to five years.
And although the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, reportedly said last fall an “Iraq-style” surge won’t work in Afghanistan, Obama plans to dispatch 30,00 more US GIs into the country within the next 90 days — another surge by any other name.
The tactic of covert operations, such as all those drone missions, is bound to fail as the real tie-breaker came with the Iraqi invasion near six years ago, changing the attitude of Pakistan, and hence creating the current knot-like situation.
Although Obama’s pick of Richard Holbrooke should send a fairly-strong warning to Hamid Karzai about the future, the US will encounter enormous difficulties in country and must first settle on a overall, workable strategy — apparently from all indications, beyond the additional troops and related resources, there’s not much: “They are picking up after a period in which the Bush administration was very ambitious in rhetoric and not at all ambitious in resource,” CFR Senior Fellow Daniel Markey tells CFR.org. “And now, the question is, how do they intend to square that?”
Or the US will end up back at square one.
Day One — Night
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All day long President Obama played out across the airwaves — I listened to NPR at work, just about every aspect of the inauguration proceedings analyized, and little snippets caught between customers were dreary and boring.
An odd, flat day.
Read and see the whole shebang here and even see Decider George get booed here, but the event carried a sense of foreboding, beyond the dream-like images floating around the tube.
(Illustration found here).
A gut-level look at today’s most-fabulous Obama show was posted by Arthur Silber, most-likely one of the better, more interesting writers on contemporary life floating through the ether of the Internets.
Read Silber’s new piece at his Power of Narrative blog.
A snippet:
- Given the expectations raised, empurpled, and swollen by Obama’s adulators, the speech on this occasion was … limp.
What a moment to find that Obama simply wasn’t in the mood.
Perhaps Obama’s Chief Groper should have used some of the suggestions I generously offered without charge. A more explicitly anatomical approach might have stiffened the performance. Ah, well. I tried to help.
Silber is brutal honest with a cutting edge and although his essays/intellectual rants are sometimes a bit lengthy, he’s well-worth the read.
My own second thoughts about Obama started last summer (beyond the hmmm…feeling on the FISA vote) with the episode of the nonchalant, three-point basketball toss during his visit with US troops in Kuwait.
See the video here.
A sense of way-confidence, measured, assured movements in how he handled the ball, an image of familiarity and he even heightens the anticipation with some goof-ball stretching.
As he’s about to shoot: “I may not make the first one, but I’ll make one eventually.”
The ball arks smoothly, then sinks easily through the net.
The soldiers go wild — as do most of Europe and the Lesser Antilles during that “celebrity” tour across Western civilization.
Just a pause to consider: Too slick, too cool for school.
Only tomorrow will tell.
One shining relief: George W. Bush is no long The Decider — now he’s just George Jr., the not-worth-a-shit layabout.
Watching now Jim Lehrer again on PBS in a final look-see (at least for me) of today’s most-momentous event, but it’s not something new, but the re-run of this morning’s show.
A circle around, ending up where we started.
Day One
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This morning is historic — an end of nightmares and bad daydreams, an inauguration of optimism, or at the very least, minimizing the impact-reality of those true vapor visions.
(Illustration of “Joy of New Beginnings” by Chidi Okoye found here).
Watching the news coverage of the run up to Barack Obama’s inauguration ushers up memories of National Lampoon‘s “Missing Basement Tapes” which disclosed Dick Nixon’s swearing out ceremony — A voice sounding just like the “right” Rev. Billy Graham screamed: “Gawd Damn you Richard Nixon! Richard Nixon, you Son-of-a-bitch, you lied your ass off to the American People. Now fuck off!”
When I first heard this in the mid 1970s I laughed my youthful ass completely off.
We need a similar ceremony for Decider George.
Now we’re only a few minutes away from the big, big event.
Since the digital age is having trouble coming to grips with Northern California, I’ve become so sick of Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson on ABC (None of the other networks with accept my humble rabbit ears), so I’ve switched to Jim Lehrer on PBS — he sounds a lot better, more authoritative, more sense in his voice than those other two nit-wits.
The crowd seems to flow back as far as the camera eye can view, packed across the screen like human grass growing among the trees — shit load of people.
All the past presidents have filed in, the ceremony is near the starter’s gun.
Pictures of Michelle Obama — hottest First Lady since I was in sixth grade!
Jill Biden ain’t bad for an older woman either!
Lehrer says it right on as Decider George and Dufus Dick Cheney (wheeled out in a wheel chair — hurt his back shredding boxfuls of docs?) are presented: “Last time ‘Hail to the Chief’ will be played…” for those two bastards.
Now the real show!
Joe Biden, the old laugh-a-minute goofball — “I made it” — as he’s introduced.
And now Obama, walking like he getting married, as Lehrer notes, enters the history books as the ceremony approaches.
As Di Feinstein gives her little spiel about history and whatnot, the camera cuts to Decider George, who sits like a wounded skunk sitting on a dead tree trunk — lost in a sea of reality for the first time in eight years.
Fuck Rick Warren!
In a land of hypocrites!
Shut up! Enough!
A John Wiliiams composition, flutes, violins and where, may I ask, is JAWS?
Too soft for my taste — nowhere dramatic enough.
NOW THE OATH OF OFFICE!!!
“Are you prepared to take the oath of office?”
Duh!
“Congratulations Mr. President.”
Cries of “Obama! Obama!”
Barack’s speech:
Comments tonight…
(In my own reality, I’m a liquor-store clerk. Booze and smokes: Recession/Depression near-proof. And I’ve to go to work now, where the real financial reality gathers to stir and moan. People going to drank and smoke, walking in circles, worrying all about this new beginning, when the past in eating their ass way, way up).
Armed Inauguration
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In an uncertain age, President-Elect Obama’s inauguration Tuesday is a security nightmare — more than three million people expected to attend, creating an armed camp around the US capitol.
(Illustration found here).
A big, frightful pause in Obama’s security is the obnoxious, cadaverous head of the obnoxious Homeland Security apparatus, Michael Chertoff, who really could have stepped quick to accelerate action on Katrina, spoke of his “gut feeling” on terrorism, and in general has been a flake.
Chertoff in change makes us wonder at how real are the security measures for this Tuesday’s big event.
CNN took a tour with the Homeland Security chief:
- “I don’t anticipate anything disruptive. Part of my job is to hope for the best and plan for the worst,” Chertoff said during a final tour of key sites across Washington.
…
“We are constantly scrubbing and rescrubbing intelligence to see if there is a threat that we should be concerned about. And that is going to continue, frankly, through the inauguration itself,” he said. “We are literally going to be watching this every minute between now and the conclusion of events on the 20th.”
…
“Everyone has a common picture of what is going on,” Chertoff said. “If something arises, we know who has the ball. We know who plays a supporting role. If an issue that is not anticipated comes up, we are in the room; we can figure out what do; we can make a decision.”
Be afraid, be afraid.
A comparable event, at least to me, was JFK’s inauguration, Jan. 20, 1961, a bitter, cold day, but one without much concern for security — only about 50,00 had attended the ceremony in front of the Capitol — and Kennedy was late for the show (a notorious glad-hander and off-schedule guy) causing a 20-minute delay in starting the program.
Security was way different in 1961.
One dream-like, odd scene in Kevin Costner’s other JFK movie, Thirteen Days, was a public appearance Kennedy made just as the Cuban mission crisis was unfolding.
An attention to detail: Security seemed so-near non-existent as crowds gathered around JFK, even while riding in a automobile.
I saw him in person once — During some presidential trip to Eglin AFB in the Florida panhandle sometime (best I can recall) about 1962. The local school district had taken the day off, so a friend’s aunt got me and him on base to maybe catch a glimpse, positioning ourselves along the route right where the street narrowed to a single-lane, alley-like road to pass between two brick sheds which housed loud-gurgling air-conditioning units.
And sure enough, Kennedy cruised right by, standing up in his limo, passing just a few feet away.
I think he saw us, waved as he passed — can’t remember, only in the eighth-grade, about 14-years-old.
He was a big guy, that I do remember.
Although Kennedy never really did accomplish much other than be the icon of us boomers (Bay of Pigs, missiles in Cuba notwithstanding), he did create an historical illusion at the heart of the mega-delusional American dream, the short, weird ‘Age of Camelot,’ which coincided with my own personal best-time growing up — the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, 1960 to summer 1963 — but ended near-abruptly, first with a hernia operation that ended my Pony League season, second, Kennedy getting shot, and third, the Beatles.
All this in the space of a few months — really don’t know if I’ve ever recovered.
Security in 1961 was way different than now.
The big horror was nuclear war — security wasn’t anything personal, it was from faraway to be delivered by rockets.
Terror was all mental — scared the Reds would nuke us into the Stone Age.
From the Associated Press Jan. 20, 1961:
- WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (AP) A deadly serious John F. Kennedy became President today in deadly times with an eloquent plea for the Communists to join him in a quest for peace lest all humanity be destroyed.
…
The simple, impressive ceremony took but a moment, and Kennedy immediately plunged into the world problems that will occupy most of his thoughts during the next four years.
The President began his inaugural address with a vow that this nation would remain strong.
“Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wish us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
Obama ain’t Kennedy and this ain’t 1961 as the world is way worse.
And Obama’s going to have do a real-big job is just four years.
In the UK’s The Guardian this morning is an interview with Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and it’s not pretty.
- After eight years of opposing moves to combat climate change, thanks to the policies of President George Bush, the US had given itself no time for manoeuvre, he said.
Only drastic, immediate change can save the day and those changes proposed by Hansen — who appeared in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and is a winner of the World Wildlife Fund’s top conservation award — are certainly far-reaching.
In particular, the idea of continuing with “cap-and-trade” schemes, which allow countries to trade allowances and permits for emitting carbon dioxide, must now be scrapped, he insisted.
Such schemes, encouraged by the Kyoto climate treaty, were simply “weak tea” and did not work. “The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.”
Hansen, who started talking about heavy-duty climate change in 1988, also reportedly said, “We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”
Tuesday is either a new beginning or just another part of the end.
List of Lists
Filed Under Media, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
See a list thrown up there in wide-open spaces.
Think Progress has an incredible serial-names roll call of Decider George’s minions — caretakers as in Sarah Palin — during the past eight gruesome years.
Read it here.
keep looking »