Rise and Shine; Destroy Broadcast Device

In a better world, I still might need to wake at 6:20 a.m.

But in that better world, I would not be waking to hear Tina Brown—

... I just thought this interview in Foreign Affairs was absolutely riveting, because it really gives an insight into the clarity of mind - the brilliant organizational, conceptual notion of how to run a war - which is what you get from Stanley McChrystal. And I have to say it also made me feel incredibly regretful that this guy was, you know, hounded from his post by a misdemeanor that was blown up by social media, something we've really seen again with General Allen's exit from commanding NATO.

It's tragic.

I will give her this: she has immense talent for gushing through an over 7-minute segment, without apparent need to draw breath.

The gushing was, in fact, so frenetic—and the combo groan-guffaws bursting from me was so loud—that, until NPR posted a transcript this afternoon, I completely missed catching just what she finds tragic.

Luis Bunuel in My Last Sigh, described how "Dali had an enormous fear of pain and death, yet he once wrote about how titillated he'd been at the sight of a third-class compartment filled with workers who'd been crushed to death in an accident. On the other hand, he claimed to have discovered death the day that Prince Mdivani... was killed in an automobile accident.... For Dali, the death of a prince was a reality and had nothing whatever to do with a carriage full of working-class corpses."

But, back to T.B.—

... people hear most about the targeting cycle, which we called F3EA: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit and Analyze. You understand who or what is the target, locate it, capture and kill it, or kill it. And you take what intelligence you can from that raid and go back for more.

Target, locate, capture, kill: it also serves as Tina's secret formula for destroying magazines?

A printed transcript does not—cannot—adequately represent the 7+ minutes; the full audio is needed to appreciate Ms. Brown on the "Post September 11 World." A brave world, it truly is, in the carefree tone-deafness our elite feel free to exhibit. But a world not so new, insofar as the opportunities for profit continue to be as unlimited as they have been for years.

"Very necessary and profitable," indeed—

—though I must say, by the standards of The Book of the Courtier, I wonder that Tina would have made the cut during the Renaissance. One suspects she has few of the talents recorded under the heading, BREEF REHERSALL OF THE CHIEFE CONDITIONS AND QUALITIES IN A COURTIER. It's actually a rather long list, and includes the expectation of a courtier "Not to be a babbler... or chatter, nor lavish of his tunge."

The only good thing about the misuse of airtime: the mainly anti-Brown comments on NPR's site. These include some from Guy Montag, who has written quite extensively on McChrystal's role in covering up the death of Pat Tillman.

Brown's mooning over McChrystal, as well as her other military-security-media crushes of the moment, were soon followed by the daily opener to my weekday mornings: The Customer Service Excellence Huddle.This week's theme: Trust.

I know only too well how much I can trust management—to make my life worse.

A mere difference in scale between that small milieu and what we can trust the larger management, and its Tina Browns, to do for us all.

History Lessons

From digby: excerpts of a 1966 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. The occasion: Dr. King's being among the recipients of Planned Parenthood's first Margaret Sanger award, for "excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights"—

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. 

With the second inauguration falling on the MLK Day observance, there's no shortage of painful ironies. They're in the president's pursuit of policies antithetical to Dr. King's philosophy. And his very presence in office is used by the usual suspects to claim the country has moved beyond race. Just as the Right (and its media enablers) promotes a fake version of MLK's message as one of mere color-blindness, not social justice.

Still, history refused to be past; not when the inauguration and MLK Day included this:

Down in the Gold section, everybody was quiet, and you could hear that great river moving again under everything, a history that this country too often resists, but that is irresistable because of the great contradictions within which this country was born. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first person ever to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration who wasn't a preacher. Didn't matter. Down in the Gold section, they knew who had won and who had lost, and what had triumphed, and what had been defeated, They knew grace when it fell on them.

Tragic

Have been trying to catch up with this terrible story in the last couple of weeks.

I knew nothing about Aaron Swartz before his suicide at twenty-six, when I caught some mass media coverage along the lines of "tech boy-genius gone wrong." Since then, learning about his talent and commitment only underscores what a tremendous loss his death is.

There's much speculation about his having made powerful enemies with his work on internet freedom, along with extensive social and political activism in general, as well as a connection to Bradley Manning.

As it happens, I've been reading Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power . One focus of the book is an account of another brilliant young man; also sensitive and emotionally troubled, and someone who would pay for his ability to spur people to action.

From the FBI records on which the book is based, Rosenfeld found ample and very sad evidence of how much effort was made to harass Mario Savio. Hoover, Reagan, local politicians, UC administrators—acting on varying agendas of "anti-communist" fears and career ambitions—for years blocked Savio's school re-admission applications; warned employers against hiring him; enlisted landlords to report on his movements. The harassment continued long after Savio had stopped being publicly active, trying to focus instead on family and personal problems; official surveillance wasn't dropped until 1975. There's no knowing how much the years of persecution might have undermined Savio's health (he died in 1996, at just fifty-three). Yet the authorities' campaign clearly took a toll on someone who had never sought the spotlight, but had merely tried to speak truth.

Charles Pierce this week suggests the incredibly heavy-handed legal action against Swartz is attributable to the political ambitions of the prosecutor; that "if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz for Governor campaign commercial one day." Which sounds much like the way a Reagan inserted himself into politics by running against Berkeley and Savio.

Who is destroyed, and what it does to the survivors—it's always an abstraction.

Now That They've Gone

Things learned, from the passing of another two of a generation.

At 90, Jack Klugman. Bitten by the bug at around 14

... when his sister took him to a play, "One Third of a Nation," a "living newspaper" production of the Federal Theater Project about life in an American slum; the play made the case for government housing projects.

"I just couldn't believe the power of it," he said of the production in an interview in 1998 for the Archive of American Television, crediting the experience for instilling in him his social-crusading impulse. "I wanted to be a muckraker."

He landed in Pittsburgh, where he auditioned for the drama department at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University).

"They said: 'You're not suited to be an actor. You're more suited to be a truck driver,'" he recalled. But this was 1945, the war was just ending and there was a dearth of male students, so he was accepted. "There were no men," he said. "Otherwise they wouldn't have taken me in."

More on career and roles of an always credible "everyman," who had an old-fashioned social consciousness—

In "Quincy, M.E.," which ran from 1976 to 1983, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.

"We had some wonderful writers," he said in a 1987 Associated Press interview. "Quincy was a muckraker, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote about injustices. He was my ideal as a youngster, my author, my hero.

"Everybody said, 'Quincy'll never be a hit.' I said, 'You guys are wrong. He's two heroes in one, a cop and a doctor.' A coroner has power. He can tell the police commissioner to investigate a murder. I saw the opportunity to do what I'd gotten into the theater to do -- give a message.

At 89, Charles Durning.

It sounds even more remote than the 1920s, the kind of poverty, disease, and loss his family endured during his childhood. But: another reminder of why we once had a New Deal.

The World War II experiences he survived are jaw-dropping. And then,

After the war, still mentally troubled, Mr. Durning "dropped into a void for almost a decade" before deciding to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he told Parade magazine in 1993. The school dismissed him within a year. "They basically said you have no talent and you couldn't even buy a dime's worth of it if it was for sale," he told The Times in 1997.

He went from job to job, from doorman to dishwasher to cabdriver. He boxed professionally for a time, delivered telegrams and taught ballroom dancing, meeting his first wife, Carole, at an Arthur Murray studio. Every so often he landed a bit part in a play.

His big break came in 1962, when Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, invited him to audition. It was the start of a long association with Papp, who cast him, often as a clown, in 35 plays, many by Shakespeare.

It was decades before he spoke publicly of his war experience and how it marked him.

In the [1993] Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. "I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium," he said. "A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn't have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn't shoot."

They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept.

Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else.

"There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don't want anyone to know about," he told Parade. "There's terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting."

"RIP, "king of the character actors."

The More Things Change...

Via Digby, here's a bit of old history I've been reminded of too, thought about, too, and it does give a sense of déjà vu—

WASHINGTON -- On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K -- the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from '99 to '00 -- the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes "over the fiscal cliff." (The difference between Y2K and the fiscal cliff being that computer programmers worked around the clock to ensure the former was a non-event.)

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months -- and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won't even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

Oh well: some truth in labeling, at last. Though the "post-bipartisan" has always amounted to as much.

The libraries have wait lists for copies of this, but I have heard David Graeber's Majority Report interviews, including this.

As I remember his historical summary, cash markets evolved around military operations. When paper money came into use, a bank would lend cash to the king, who would go into in debt. The king would then lend his debt to the populace, who used it for the exchanges that make up an economy, before sending it back as taxes.

"If the king ever paid back the debt," says Graeber, "there'd be no money."

Thanks, As Usual

The Propaganda Remix Project

Robert Bork.

John Kerry.

It's That Time Again

Release of the annual list of "best countries to be born in."

Here on planet We're Number One!, it's just one week after the latest mass shooting. One horrifying enough to still be in the news and public consciousness: a massacre of twenty 6-year olds, along with women school employees who must have reminded the guy of his mother.

But: a white loner guy, not terrorism, etc., etc., blah, blah to infinity.

Subtle marketing, this.

The usual crowd set out to prove how "Everything Except Guns Kills People." And to offer their solutions, like this.

Though the Right's newly discovered interest in mental health is quite touching.

An excellent business model; too bad about the sudden bad publicity.

And nice job, National Geographic: egging on deranged "preppers." One home stockpiler of an arsenal appears to have been the late Nancy Lanza.

To think: we geezers only needed to Duck and Cover against an abstract threat. Yes, it was assumed that at some time there would be a nuclear attack—and I think many of my contemporaries grew up assuming we wouldn't live long enough to become geezers. But no generation expects to become geezers, and this threat was deep in the background: something the authorities kept vague and "survivable," and certainly not something that was present daily in our lives.

Nope: civil defense drills were occasional, and nuclear holocaust was not a presence in our lives, as the terrifying images from Newton are for children now. And, if the noise machine gets its way, children will grow up with kindergarten teachers packing heat.

The NRA kept a low profile, until today's news dump no-questions event. Though Wayne Pierre with "bats flying out of both ears" could be a good thing, as far as attracting some public notice.

It remains to be seen if activism will overcome the longstanding absence of political will. And general public acceptance of a daily toll widely accepted as what "they" get for living in the wrong neighborhood.

The Newtown massacre followed last week's Michigan notch in ALEC's belt. Anti-union measures signed and sealed, Gov. Snyder dithered a few days over this. Evidently, Dick DeVos had no particular investment in this one.

One more state wrapped up and delivered for plutocrat Xmas. National austerity on the way, for deadbeat kids, disabled, and elderly. A bit hard to envision those armed guards being installed in every school, not when we don't fucking fund teachers or supplies.

"Best countries," indeed. Who would trade an ample safety net for our Freedom here, where any disturbed person is free to buy weapons of mass destruction, but health care, both physical and mental, is a privilege.