Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

Molly Ivins died today. As John Nichols of The Nation says, she was "the warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements."

She was a joy to read, not only because I agreed with just about everything she said, but because she said it with such a delicious mixture of passion and humor. She was renowned for her shoot-from-the-hip Texas-style zingers, and I've long marveled how the same notoriously right-wing state that gave us George W. Bush and Tom Delay (for starters) also produced a stellar lineup of progressives like Molly, Bill Moyers, John Henry Faulk, Jim Hightower, and Barbara Jordan.

From her column of January 7:

"This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to increase U.S. troop levels in this hellhole by up to 20,000, as he reportedly will soon announce.

"What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny?

"Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?"

From her last column, of January 11:

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war"...

"We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

During her losing battle with cancer, she was quoted as saying,

"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."

I'm sure going to miss her.

For more quotes, go here .

(Painting by Robert Shatterly ) .

Fifty Years ago in Pacoima

Planes Collide over Pacoima Junior High, January 31, 1957
I was just nine, but I remember it being a huge story: two planes colliding and falling from the sky onto a schoolyard where children were playing - a parent's worse nightmare, and many a kid's first awareness of random mortality. One student - Ricardo Valenzuela, was out of school, attending his uncle's funeral, that day - but legend has it that he (known to the world as Ritchie Valens), developed a fear of flying as a result - only to die, along with Buddy Holly, in the famous "Day the Music Died" small plane crash of February, 1959, at the age of 17.

Movie weekend

Robin got an unexpected Saturday off, so we've been catching up on movies, seeing Pan's Labyrinth and Letters from Iwo Jima in theatres, and a couple of others at home: Cabaret (1972), and Saraband (2003). My quick ratings:

**** Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) . Great film - my pick (so far) for Best Picture of 2006. See it in a theatre, not on a home screen.

*** Pan's Labyrinth (2006) . Good, but not as good as I'd expected from reviews.

**** Saraband (2003). Ingmar Bergman says it's his last movie. Sigh. When you see this movie, you know you've been run through the ringer, and seen something extraordinary.

**** Cabaret (1972).It captures the decadence of 1920-30s Berlin, the Kurt Weil-like music of the time, and great performances by Liza Minelli, Joel Gray, and Michael York. What's not to like? Nothing, from Robin and my point of view. Son James was more subdued in his praise.

Fifty Years Ago

At nine and a half, my reading consisted of Mad Magazine, Classics Illustrated, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift. Amazingly, Mad is still around. Back in the 1950s, it was cutting edge, and subversive - but in later years it seemed to go mainstream, losing its bite at the very time (the late 60s) when subversive was all the rage. I have no idea what Mad is like these days. My impression is that The Onion fills the role that Mad used to occupy.

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. By Chris Hedges

The jacket blurb says that Hedges, "who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, was a foreign correspondant for nearly two decades for The New York Times and other publications. He was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of global terrorism. Heges is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America."

This book is a probing look at the various organizations that comprise the Christian Right, and a warning to the rest of us that these people are a serious threat to our democracy, and need to be confronted and opposed in ways that liberals in Germany failed to do in the 1920s. They are highly organized, with millions of members, and have specific ideas about how to take over when the next great terrorist attack - or depression - or environmental catastrophe - occurs.

These folks, with leaders like James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, Rod Parsley, and many others, are looking forward to the gruesome deaths of all who disagree with them. They also look forward to "total war" in the Middle East. They may look kindly in their pronouncements on TV, but Hedges provide plenty of documented evidence to the contrary.

At the end of the book, Hedges makes an elequent summary:

"I do not deny the right of the Christian radicals to be, to believe and worship as they choose. But I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be, who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless. All dialogue must include respect and tolerance for the beliefs, worth, and dignity of others, including those outside the nation and the faith. When this respect is denied, this clash of ideologies ceases to be merely difference of opinion and becomes a fight for survival. This movement seeks, in the name of Christianity and American democracy, to destroy that which it claims to defend. I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi Party. But I do believe that the radical Christian Right is a sworn and potent enemy of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the tenets of a Christian fascism. In the event of a crisis, in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster, the movement stands poised to manipulate fear and chaos ruthlessly and reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation's founding. All Americans - not only those of faith - who care about our open society must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity, to challenge aggressively this movement's deluded appropriation of Christianity and to do everything possible to defend tolerance. The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as "nominal Christians," and those they brand with the curse of "secular humanism" are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a
vice. "

It's a great call to action: call these people out! don't be afraid to confront them. These Christo-Fascists are not interested in dialog, they're interested in taking over.

DEA goons raid medical marijuana outlets

Last Wednesday, federal government thugs descended on West Hollywood and shut down the area's medical marijuana dispensaries. Never mind that Californians voted to allow marijuana as medicine, and that the conservatives now in power at the Federal level have long argued for "states rights" when it comes to causes of their own (such as blocking civil rights laws).

The War on Drugs is like the War on Iraq: a bad idea, justified with truckloads of phony propaganda - but hard for politicians to oppose. Now, when most politicians have found their voice on Iraq, few are yet willing to state the obvious: that the War on Drugs is a total disaster. Our city streets are teeming with gangs that thrive on drug prohibition, our prisons are overflowing with people who wouldn't be there if drug use was treated as a health issue, and other countries - from Colombia to Afghanistan - have had their entire societies ripped apart because of our hunger for commodities that are only available through a black market.

Enough. We need to decriminalize drug use. For starters, marijuana, a plant with nowhere near the potential for harm that tobacco and alcohol pose, should be legalized, albeit controlled and regulated in much the same way as tobacco and alcohol. Then we should look at how to deal with the use of the "harder" drugs - oxycontin, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, etc. It's simply not fair that conservative talk show hosts get off with "treatment" options for using their drugs of choice, while inner-city minorities get nailed to doing hard time for doing the same thing with different drugs.

I'm not saying that one should be able to buy cocaine without a prescription, any more than one can buy oxycontin without a prescription. I am saying that the debate over those kind of drugs should be centered on public health policy - education, addiction prevention, treatment, recovery - not on sending people to prison.

Hillary announces White House run

Yucch! This was long anticipated - the big money, big establishment candidate, pimping and pandering to grab the nomination. I'll take Edwards, or Obama, or Kucinich, or Robertson, or Gore - or even Biden! - over Hillary.

If she's running in November, I'll have to hold my nose and vote for her over anyone the Republicans are likely to offer - but my favorites at this early stage are Barak Obama and John Edwards.

Sam Brownback starts White House run

This guy is truly scary. The darling of the Christian right, he's a perfect example of the religious crackpots described in Chris Hedges' "American Fascists" (a book I highly recommend). These people, ranting against abortion, the "homosexual agenda," and "secular humanism", want to establish a fascist Christian government. You think I'm kidding? Read Hedges' book.

Good spy movie!

Watched an excellent World War II spy movie last night: The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. I remember liking it as a teenager, and it holds up quite well. Holden, a studiously neutral businessman from studiously neutral Sweden, is strong-armed into working for British/American intelligence, gathering information for the allies on his oil-related trips to Germany. To further gain the trust of his German connections, he's forced to act like an outspoken Nazi sympather, publicly rejecting his Jewish best friend, without letting even his wife know that it's all an act. As he gets more involved, he witnesses an atrocity that shatters his cynical world view - and becomes wholly committed to helping the allies, deeply and personally involved with key players in the German underground resistance. Meanwhile, suspicious Gestapo agents are watching his every move, waiting for a slip-up.

This is great spy vs. spy stuff! It's talky by today's standards, but that's not a bad thing. It's incredibly tense, with an unusually nuanced portrayal of the various participants - "ordinary" Germans, neutral Swedes, ruthless allied intelligence, and the Danish resistance (the Copenhagen bicycle scene is a classic). According to reviews on the web, it's a true story, but I haven't been able to verify that. Shot at the actual locations of the events that took place in Germany and Scandinavia. With Hugh Griffith and Klaus Kinski.

David Brodsley

While the rest of the nation rightly remembers Martin Luther King, I will always associate January 15th with my friend David Brodsley, born on this day in 1944.

We lived next door to each other in the Wilshire / Miracle Mile district as kids, and David, older by three years, was the one to first introduce me to Mad Comics (later Mad Magazine).

We drifted apart after elementary school, but became reacquainted in our college years, in Boston: he as an aspiring architect, I as a freshman at Boston University. He was married by then, and he and his wife Ronna's apartment in Back Bay became my home away from the dorms on many a weekend. Back in California, in 1970, we renewed our friendship, and remained close for decades to come.

David passed away on September 29, 2003.

Fifty Years Ago

Humphrey Bogart (1899 - 1957)

I saw the headlines of his death on a news rack in Huntington Park. At nine, I thought he was really cool - I'd seen "Angels With Dirty Faces", "Maltese Falcon", and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," among others on TV. Wasn't he a little young to be dying?

New arrivals...

Steve and Veronica Winston's baby girl Zoe arrived at 12:30 AM, Saturday, January 6th. Mazeltov!

(photo sent by Steve)

The sun goes down on...

The sun goes down on...
Originally uploaded by gunga din.

Returning from a drive to Pismo Beach, we pulled off the 101 at the Gaviota State Beach exit, hoping to get some pictures of a nice sunset. But before we could even find a parking place, a state park official stepped up to say we needed to pay $8 for the privilege of entering the public facility - even if we didn't plan to park or get out of our car. He was "kind" enough to let us leave without charge, and we took an adjacent side road to a bluff that gave us a view of the ocean. But, as you can see, that side road was not a very friendly place.

Eight dollars to enter a public park? Barbed wire blocking coastal views on a public road? This is an ugly tend.

Check out this equipment...

My Dad, Ed Kanouse, at work
Originally uploaded by gunga din.

I came across this great photo of my dad at work at the L. A. Department of Water and Power in the late 1940s. He was an electrical engineer, specializing in transmission line design - but I have no idea what this machinery is. It looks like one of the old computers depicted in 1950s cartoons.

A good old fashioned double feature

Robin and I went to see "Children of Men" in Monrovia last night, then got back in line and saw "The Good Shepherd". Two good films in one night!

"Children" was an excellent sci-fi film, convincing and scary, with extraordinary camera work. Its vision of a nightmarish future paired neatly with "The Good Shepherd" - a revelation of the ugly doings of our government in the recent past. The illegal and murderous manipulations of the OSS/CIA, supposedly in the name of anti-communism, are laid bare - and there are plenty of scary reminders that these creepy Skull-and-Bones boys are more powerful than ever, now operating under the guise of the so-called "war on terrorism."

Ford's pardon of Nixon...

A friend writes...

I remember being quite upset [about the pardon] at the time, but was surprised that my parents (who hated Nixon) didn't seem to object. But to this day, I'm still a bit upset about it. Sure, without the pardon, the Nixon case would have occupied the newspapers and congress for a while, but surely it would still have been mostly in the background, just as most investigations only come to the forefront when there is something new. In any case, I don't think Nixon should have been pardoned until it had been determined exactly what laws he had broken.

I think he's right to still be upset about it. If Nixon had been forced to stand trial for his crimes, future presidents like Bush might not be so confident that theirs would also go unpunished. I also think there was a deal - perhaps unspoken, perhaps not. One NPR interview with a former insider from the time said that Ford, soon before Nixon's resignation, was asking "theoretical" questions about the scope of presidential pardon powers - and that Nixon's awareness of Ford's probable pardon was one of the factors that clinched his decision to resign.

Whether the deal was explicit or not, the pardon was a terrible move, and I fail to see why the media are falling all over themselves to glorify a lackluster caretaker president whose most important major decision was a bad one. I guess it's because the current president is such a disaster that there's some nostalgia for ANY former president.