“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger.”
― Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), speaking in 1966 in protest of the military draft.
Nearing the end of another NFL season, it’s easy to see how important a quality backup quarterback can be to a team’s fortunes in making it into the playoffs. Sixteen games, some of them on short rest on Thursdays, takes a toll on starting quarterbacks, especially since teams have become pass oriented in the past thirty or more years. When teams ran more than they passed, which was generally the case until about 1980, quarterbacks didn’t take as much of a beating as they do now. The NFL, as it has too often done, tinkered with the rule book at about that time, changing it to favor the passing game and increase scoring. No more low scoring defensive slug fests, if they could help it. Air Coryell, named for Don Coryell, the head coach of the San Diego Chargers from 1978 to 1986, became the model for a new style of NFL play.
The NFL has allowed greed to take the upper hand and has over saturated the market. Player protests against police brutality are the least of its problems, much as league officials would like to blame the protests for all its problems. Slipping in the television ratings started several years ago, before the protests began. The league’s real problems begin with a rule book as complicated as the Talmud, and the rigorous application of all its tenets can slow games to a crawl, along with all the artificial television timeouts taken to cram in over an hour’s worth of commercials into each game. The game has become a technocratic bore.
Johnny Unitas signing an autograph at the Baltimore Colts’ Westminster, Maryland training camp in the summer of 1964. Unitas, the starting quarterback for the Colts from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, was often hurt, but his backup many of those years, Earl Morrall, was probably the best in NFL history. Photo by Joel Kaufman.
Speaking of the protests, it seems there is no one around in the media to speak up for the players the way Howard Cosell spoke up for controversial athletes in his day. Mr. Cosell lent a real world perspective to sports that is missing today. Yes, he was bombastic, but the bombast was always mere showmanship, and most people understood that. Some were so irritated by Mr. Cosell that they couldn’t see past his bombast and arrogance, all of it done with a sly wink, and therefore they tuned him out, missing his points about keeping a realistic, adult perspective on sports in the larger world.
Comedian Billy Crystal tells a story about Howard Cosell in this 2013 appearance on David Letterman’s late night talk show. Howard Cosell was a good backup for his viewers against the more real and destructive bombast and arrogance of NFL owners and marketers, as well as other authority figures in sports and in the politics surrounding it. He would have backed up the players protesting police brutality now similarly to the way he backed up Muhammad Ali when Ali refused to comply with the draft. The league doesn’t always look out for the players’ best interests when they make rules changes and schedule expansions out of greed, and it appears no one in the current media has the stature and integrity Howard Cosell had in the late twentieth century, and will as he did back up athletes when they exercise their constitutional rights as citizens.
― Vita
Howard Cosell guest starred as himself on a 1972 episode of the television situation comedy The Odd Couple, with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Ironically, Mr. Cosell was at the height of his fame then largely because of his broadcasting duties on Monday Night Football, which started in 1970, inaugurating the bloat of the NFL into the ubiquitous bore it has become today.
If in early 1977 you had dropped off for a long sleep and, like Rip Van Winkle, awakened many years later, in this case late in 2017, and you were an avid moviegoer, you would find many changes in the types of movies that were popular in the different eras. Some of the biggest changes would have come about because of Star Wars (1977) which was released shortly after you nodded off, and was the first successful movie with “B” movie themes made on an “A” movie budget, and because of Batman (1989), which was the first successful movie to take a comic book character seriously.
Now in 2017 those types of movies have all but crowded out the big budget movies with adult themes that the major studios used to make, the prestige pictures like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) that David Lean directed, as well as other pictures by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. A few prestige pictures still somehow get made and released each year, but most movies with adult themes are small budget, mostly independently produced affairs that have a limited run in movie theaters before going to a movie rental service. The big money in Hollywood goes mostly to comic book superhero movies, “B” movies made with “A” movie money, and they take themselves very seriously.
A promotional poster for the 1941 serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, with Tom Tyler on the left and Nigel De Brulier on the right. Serials like this would not even have had the status of “B” movie, since they were usually only about twenty minutes long instead of feature length, though their production values were just as cheap.
When Star Wars first came out in theaters, its director, George Lucas, knew perfectly well he was borrowing themes and story lines from old “B” movie adventure serials, and he reveled in those corny conventions with a wink at the audience, who understood the whole thing was a kitschy romp. Similarly for Lucas’s friend, Steven Spielberg, several years later when he directed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), an adventure yarn based entirely on the cheap movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s. George Lucas was the executive producer on that film, and both he and Spielberg, talented filmmakers who were steeped in old film lore, were like kids playing in a very expensive sandbox. Those movies made a lot of money, but still no one took their stories too seriously.
That changed with the release of Batman in 1989, directed by Tim Burton, who claimed he was never particularly enamored of comic books, but who wanted to take the tone of his film far from the campy take on the comic book superhero of the 1960s television show. Burton nonetheless injected some tongue in cheek bits into his movie, mostly in Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker, though that may have been as much Nicholson’s interpretation as Burton’s. The movie was a huge success, and studios took note of how intent the fan base was on seeing a serious treatment of the subject when the fans followed every rumor about the film’s production, especially the casting of Michael Keaton, known at that time mostly for comedic roles, as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Comic book fans were upset that the casting of Keaton hinted the film would be another campy treatment, like the 1960s television series.
A publicity still from the 1941 serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, starring Tom Tyler as Captain Marvel, here beset by two pesky foreigners.
When those same fans went to theaters and saw just how deadly serious Keaton’s Batman was, they were delighted. Ever since then, Hollywood has been ladling up more and more deadly serious comic book superhero movies to that fan base, who appear to be insatiable. Since Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has achieved convincing results rendering the fantastic world of comic books over the past ten or fifteen years, movie producers have tripped over each other turning out more of these movies. All that CGI isn’t cheap, and a comic book movie can cost upwards of 100 million dollars to make. With a worldwide release, however, and all the merchandising tie-ins that comic book superheroes lend themselves to, a film studio can pull in upwards of one billion dollars from each movie.
A scene from the 1960sBatmantelevision series, starring Adam West as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson/Robin, that points to the silliness at the heart of the dual identity superhero premise.
Lawrence of Arabia probably did not generate enough merchandising to be worth mentioning. It was also a complex character study, and therefore did not have the broadest possible appeal. Comic book movies do not have the broadest possible appeal, either, but they have a broader appeal than the old prestige pictures that asked some maturity of their audiences in order to understand their themes. Is this what we want? It is apparently what the portion of the public with generous amounts of disposable income and low expectations wants when they go to the multiplex, because comic book movies have come to dominate the marquee listings. It would be nice if more new prestige pictures made it onto the marquee, because those are movies worth paying to see on the big screen, and in a theater with a terrific sound system. For those moviegoers, unfortunately, these are times of poor pickings, and they might as well stay at home to watch movies on their own setup, or take a long snooze, waking up in forty years to see if “A” and “B” movies have returned to their rightful order in the alphabet.
― Vita
Saturday, November 11, is Veterans Day, a day that an older generation remembered as Armistice Day from its origins in World War I. Not really a celebratory holiday like Thanksgiving Day later in the month, and a little more than a historical marker like Columbus Day several weeks before, in October, Veterans Day has become a day for honoring the service of veterans, living and dead, in war and peace, in the front lines and in the rear echelon. For all that, the day means different things to different people.
Veterans for Peace contingent in anti-war March on the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., 21 October 1967. Photo by White House photographer Frank Wolfe.
In the last twenty-five years or so, and especially after 9/11 and the endless wars it spawned, Veterans Day seems to have become a way for civilians who never served to either express gratitude honestly to veterans or to salve their own guilt by obsequiously expressing gratitude. None of that is necessary. More and more stores and restaurants offer discounts on merchandise or free meals to veterans or active duty military on Veterans Day, as well as other times of the year. Those are nice, well-meaning gestures, and are no doubt helpful to down on their luck veterans, but overall they are yet another sign of the American citizenry kowtowing to military culture, an inclination dangerous to liberty.
Fifty years ago at about this time of year, in Washington, D.C., tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of the flower power non-violent movement against the war and the glorification of military power and its culture. Among the marchers were Veterans for Peace and members of the Lincoln Brigade who volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Forty years later, in Seattle in October 2007, there was another march against another war, again including a contingent from Veterans for Peace. The scale of that march was far smaller than the one in Washington, D.C., in 1967. Ten years further on, in November 2017, there is hardly anything to be heard in the land but “Thank you for your service.”
Veterans for Peace contingent in anti-war march, Seattle, Washington, 27 October 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel.
The wars haven’t stopped; peace hasn’t broken out. Meanwhile, citizens choose to get upset over some football players and others kneeling during the National Anthem in protest against police brutality toward minorities, though what a lot of those citizens are really upset about is their misconstruing of the protests as being against the Anthem, the Flag, and members of the Armed Services, something that was strongly suggested to them by Supreme Leader. NFL owners and administrators are upset that customers are turning against their product on account of the protests, the top administrator of the league saying that fans don’t pay to see protests.
True, but can the NFL have it both ways? The NFL has for years wrapped itself in the Flag, put the Anthem front and center as part of each game’s introductory ceremony, and had a nearly symbiotic relationship with the Armed Services, including military color guards and fighter jet fly overs as part of its pageantry. All the patriotic trappings were good for marketing to its clientele, some of whom enjoy a good jolt of jingoism with their spectator sports. The NFL owners and administrators neglected to clamp down on players’ personal, political displays in contract negotiations with the players’ union, however, and now they are caught in a bind between some of their more principled players and the sunshine patriot fans angry that plantation politics is intruding on their football fun.
It’s a certainty the military/NFL partnership will be on full display at the games this Veterans Day weekend. Some of those same fans who howl with hatred at the players kneeling to express concern about the abuse of human rights in this country will quite likely take time to say “Thank you for your service” to someone in uniform or to a veteran. It probably won’t occur to the fans to examine any of that. It’s why the football stadiums are often filled to capacity, now more than ever, but not many folks are interested in marching in the streets against war, injustice, and the brutality of establishment enforcers. Hardly anyone understands placing flowers in rifle barrels anymore, but most everyone can say “Thank you for your service”, and without needing to understand it very well at all.
― Vita
Ladybird beetle perched on Forget-Me-Nots. Photo by Yvette Thiesen.
The Monarch butterfly,Danaus plexippus, may not seem to have any connection to Halloween other than its orange and black coloration, but in Mexico, where they overwinter, the butterflies are hailed as the spirits of friends and relatives who have died in the past year and are returning at the time of Halloween for one last visit with the living. The important dates for Mexicans, and indeed for many Hispanic peoples, are October 31st, and November 1st and 2nd, known as The Days of the Dead, or Los Dias de los Muertos in Spanish.
From the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum as a murderous and greedy self-anointed preacher sings “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”, while Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper protects the children inside her house from harm.
Before the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples believed Monarch butterflies were returning human spirits. After the Spaniards imposed Catholicism throughout the region, the Native Americans transposed some of their ancient beliefs onto the new religion. In the case of the Monarch butterflies, since their annual migration brought them to their winter home in the mountains of Mexico more or less at the end of October and the beginning of November, it was a simple matter for Native Americans to meld their traditional celebration of the dead and honoring of the return of the butterflies at that time of year with the Christian holidays of All Saints’ Eve (Hallow e’en, or evening) on October 31st, All Saints’ Day on November 1st, and All Souls’ Day on November 2nd.
This mixing of indigenous traditions with Christian beliefs and holidays follows a pattern seen in Christian communities throughout the world. In Ireland, for instance, where the version of Halloween celebrations started in a way that most Americans would recognize, the Christian holidays were overlaid on existing Celtic harvest festivals and honoring of the dead. It seems in the northern hemisphere at least, where the harvest occurs approximately in September, October, and November, that honoring the dead at the same time was commonplace. People prayed to their honored dead for a good harvest, and when the work was done they often symbolically shared the bounty with their dear departed at altars in the home. It was a short step for the Church to substitute, or merely add, saints and martyrs to the list of honored dead.
Overwintering Monarch butterflies in November 2005. Photo by Samuel from Toluca, Mexico.
Monarch butterflies, meanwhile, have troubles beyond being Halloween symbols for human beings. Habitat loss, pesticides, and destruction of food sources have all led to a general decline in their numbers over the last few decades. They are not yet under the protection of the Endangered Species List, and they may not be anytime soon given the hostility toward environmental protection of the current presidential administration.
The ending of the 2010 version of True Grit, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen, with Iris DeMent singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”.
It is more important than ever, therefore, for individuals to do everything they can to assure the continued survival of Monarch butterflies, rather than relying on governmental entities to take the lead. It’s not hard; the butterflies don’t ask for much. Leave some tall weeds standing at the edge of a property rather than mowing absolutely everything down to half inch high grass. Among those tall weeds, plant or encourage some milkweeds as fodder for the caterpillars, and some wildflowers as nectar sources for the adult butterflies. Stop using pesticides and herbicides, at least the general purpose ones that kill all insects or all vegetation. Pay attention, be observant and respectful, and in the end enjoy what you have helped along in a way you could not possibly enjoy yet more grass or asphalt. The spirits are watching.
― Vita
Sears, once the largest retailer by sales volume in the country, has been in decline for the last twenty years and is on its way out of business. Some of its competitors in the brick and mortar and catalog sides of retail merchandising have either already gone out of business or are also on their way out. Sears failed to keep up with the online retail revolution, and a look around its sales website indicates that the company still doesn’t have a handle on it. Sears closed up its famous catalog in 1993, and since it never established itself online, it was left with brick and mortar stores which are not doing well.
The Amtrak train The Cardinal departs Chicago in May, 2009, for points east. The Sears Tower, the tallest building in the skyline, was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009 by the Willis Group as part of its lease agreement. Photo by Russell Sekeet.
Throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, Sears was such a huge merchandiser that it accounted for about one percent of all retail sales nationwide. It was the Amazon.com of that time, which was no small feat considering the supply chain difficulties imposed by an infrastructure that would not become truly nationwide until the 1950s with the building of the interstate highway system. Sears made its name by using its catalogs to reach under served rural customers at a time when the majority of people lived outside of cities. Now online retailers can reach anyone with an internet connection, and shippers deliver directly to the consumer’s doorstep.
It was at this time of year, late summer or early autumn, that Sears used to issue its Wish Book, a shortened version of its catalog, with an emphasis on Christmas gift items. One of Sears’ competitors, Macy’s, still kicks off the Christmas shopping season by sponsoring a Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, though it has also been closing stores around the country. The 2008 recession accelerated the decline of the big nationwide department stores after a slow slip in sales since the 1990s. Specialty stores with a national or regional presence, like Radio Shack and Circuit City, have also either shut down or are close to doing so. What’s most often left then for Christmas shoppers visiting a physical store are the big box retailers like Walmart and Target.
Or people could patronize locally owned shops. The prices may be higher because the small shops don’t have the supply chain advantages of their much larger competitors, but the local small business gives back to its community. In that sense, the two types of stores should not even be considered competitors. Over there are the big box retailers selling goods cheaply, but also taking advantage of communities with unethical employment and supply chain practices. And over here are small businesses that are answerable to the community, because without local support and good word of mouth they are doomed to fail.
Left to right: Adam Gimbel, Frederic Gimbel, and Bernard Gimbel looking at a Luca della Robbia (1400-1482) statue of Madonna and Child, from the art collection of William Randolph Hearst. Parts of Hearst’s collection were sold at the Gimbels department store in 1939-1940. Gimbels had stores in the northeast and the midwest, and a prized location next door to Macy’s in Herald Square in New York City. Photo by Edward Lynch of the New York World Telegram & Sun.
Edmund Gwenn stars as Santa Claus in the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. The film’s setting is Macy’s department store in New York City.
It could be that the failure of the old retail giants like Sears will prompt renewed interest in shopping at local stores. Online retailers and a few big box retailers have already usurped much of Sears’ more than one century old business model. Sears and J.C. Penney and a few other large department stores have anchored enclosed suburban shopping malls since they first started appearing in the 1950s and 1960s. Now that those stores are declining, perhaps small, locally owned shops will pick up more business. That would be a welcome development, and it might eventually boost Small Business Saturday to a level competitive with Black Friday (it’s antithesis is Buy Nothing Day) and Cyber Monday. Like it or not, Christmas has been a commercial proposition in America for a long time now, and if small businesses can bloom from the ashes of the old retail giants, then at least some good will have come from that mercantile aspect of the year end holidays.
― Vita
It’s hard not to notice the impact of the national security state in daily life, particularly for people who travel regularly or pay attention to news stories. Pat downs and x-rays at the airport, police road blocks with DNA swabs that are voluntary but are implied by the police to be mandatory, stop and frisk in minority neighborhoods, the shoot first and ask questions later garrison mentality of the police, SWAT team no-knock raids, and the nearly complete disregard by governmental authorities for citizens’ rights under Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable or warrantless search and seizure operations.
It may be hard to believe it is the citizens of the republic who allowed their agents in government to accumulate all that oppressive authority. People like to think government has a natural tendency to creep into citizens’ lives and to aggrandize itself at their expense, and that is true. What people often fail to acknowledge, especially in a nominally democratic republic such as the United States, is their own complicity in allowing the government to get away with it.
Fear can cause people to do some foolish things, and one of them is relinquishing unchecked authority to government following a catastrophe, such as what happened after the events of 9/11/2001 in the United States. Save us! Kill them! The tendency of people to allow themselves to be stampeded toward war has long been noted by manipulators in government, industry, and the press, who have used it to their advantage. There is a long history in America of cynical manipulations toward war, but perhaps the most blatantly obvious occurred at the start of the Spanish-American War shortly before the turn of the twentieth century.
The citizenry are usually stirred to support these wars by patriotic fervor and by some wildly exaggerated stories in the popular press of atrocities supposedly committed by the new enemy. Most people tend not to take time away from their busy lives to examine things more closely and rationally. Remember the Alamo! Until thirty or forty years ago, except for the large scale conflicts of the Civil War and the two World Wars, Americans could largely go about their daily lives without reference to the far away battlefronts their leaders had stirred them up to support initially.
In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher at the time of the Spanish-American War, throws a party to celebrate his hiring of the staff from a rival newspaper. His colleagues, played by Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland and Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, provide commentary on the proceedings.
Superficially, that still seems to be the situation at home, where Americans can go shopping, while far away the world burns. Look more closely, however, and it becomes obvious that the so-called “War on Terror” is different than any other past war in that to a hitherto unprecedented degree it has allowed government to infiltrate lives at home as well as abroad in the name of security. The reasoning is that there is no “front”, as in a conventional war; the front is everywhere, and government must therefore defend everywhere, from flying drones over the huts of Afghani opium farmers to using the NSA to monitor the communications of American citizens.
A 2007 image of Susan Hallowell, Director of the Transportation Security Administration’s research lab, taken with the backscatter x-ray system, in use for airport security passenger screening. This is not the image that screeners see at the airports. The machine that took this image does not have the privacy algorithm.
People line up for security checks at the airport, the majority of them probably unconcerned with the larger issues of government oppression and infringements on their liberty as long as they can get through with minimal hassle to themselves. But the hassles will only grow. Highway road blocks and intrusive police demands will only increase. The courts will continue upholding these practices and implicitly grant the authorities ever more leeway in pushing people around in the name of security. The way the American military occupiers treated the Filipinos in the early years of the twentieth century continues reverberating in unexpected ways, such as in how it informed our use of torture in the early twenty-first century; our treatment of various Latin American countries throughout the twentieth century haunts our relations there and here to this day; and at last the methods, materiel, and mindset of occupation we are deploying throughout the world today, and particularly in the Middle East, have come home to us, the fearful perpetrators of so much unnecessary violence. That’s Homeland Security.
― Vita
Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, all we got are thoughts and prayers. After the latest mass killing in America, add “warmest condolences” from Supreme Leader, friend of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and hinter at how Gun Nuts could hide behind the Second Amendment to the Constitution in order to take out his political rival in the 2016 presidential election. Nothing will be done to stop the killing. This is who we are, what we have become, a sick society.
A scene from director Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket with a cool, aloof discussion of two of America’s many killers, at least until the end, when one of the recruits appears to be personally affected.
Gun company stocks are up again in the last two days, after slumping since Big Cheeto took office in January. Obama was great for gun sales, because his presence in the Oval Office fed the paranoia of the Gun Nuts, despite the real power to control their activities with gun control legislation residing with Congress, which has been bought many times over by NRA lobbying. The crazy black man is coming for our guns! But of course they would use a much less genteel appellation. Two Julia butterflies,Dryas iulia, drinking the tears of turtles,Podocnemis expansa,in Ecuador. Turtles bask on a log as the butterflies sip from their eyes. This “tear-feeding” is a phenomenon known as lachryphagy. Photo by amalavida.tv.
Big Cheeto was bad for business because the Gun Nuts believed he wasn’t about to come for their guns, but now with the latest mass killing there’s still the libruls and their Democratic allies in Congress to worry about. Better stock up! What Would John Wayne Do (WWJWD)? You better believe it. Shoot first, ask questions later, especially when confronted by one of them people, the kind who don’t stand up for the National Anthem. Amurica, love it or leave it, Commie. How did we come this far, only to fall back into the past? We never did advance as far as we supposed, only some of us did, and the rest, now with the backing of Orange Julius, are reacting against those advances – a word with a view they do not share – with massive retaliation. Making America Great Again, with warmest condolences.
― Vita
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.
Back in 2014, after New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a choke hold, which along with compression of the asthmatic Garner’s chest from having Pantaleo on top of him when he was on the ground, led to Garner’s death, a grand jury in Richmond County on Staten Island, where the altercation took place, refused to indict Pantaleo even though the medical examiner had ruled Garner’s death a homicide. Police were trying to arrest Mr. Garner in July for selling loose cigarettes. Eleven times Mr. Garner protested “I can’t breathe!” Officer Pantaleo pushed Mr. Garner’s face into the pavement. A bystander filmed everything using his cell phone.
After the grand jury decision in December, 2014, not to indict Officer Pantaleo, protests erupted in New York City and elsewhere around the country. Later that month a man shot and killed two New York City police officers, possibly in revenge for the grand jury decision. At the funeral for one of the officers, many New York City police turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio when he delivered a eulogy, believing his public condemnation of Officer Pantaleo’s actions earlier in the year led to the murder of their two colleagues. The police officers’ feelings on the matter were inflamed by the rhetoric of their union leader, Patrick Lynch.
“No Justice, No Peace”; the Eric Garner Protest on 4 December 2014 in Manhattan, New York City. Photo by The All-Nite Images.
It’s not as if the murder of Eric Garner by a New York City police officer was an isolated incident, an anomaly. There had already been a long history of overly aggressive police tactics, particularly against minorities, aggravated in recent years by the unconstitutional and demeaning “stop and frisk” tactic, also particularly used against minorities. Mayor de Blasio criticized some police tactics during his campaign for office, and that did not set well with Patrick Lynch. When Mr. de Blasio became mayor at the beginning of 2014, tensions between himself and much of the police force were high, and after his public comments about the Eric Garner murder, the stage was set for a confrontation.
In a few incidents since then, some New York City police officers have expressed their displeasure with the Mayor by turning their backs on him in public. They have exercised their First Amendment rights to free expression while in uniform, on the taxpayers’ dime. Very well. That is nonetheless within their rights. Their protest, however, in its petulant contempt for the mayor, overlooks the role of one of their own, Officer Pantaleo, in touching off all the criticism of them and of how they too often are unaccountable when they abuse their power.
The nationwide protests of the grand jury decision were a criticism of abusive police power louder than anything Mayor de Blasio ever said. In turning their backs on him, the police were turning their backs on all Americans who were fed up with their abuses. The police, egged on by the bellicose Patrick Lynch, were attacking the messenger, Mayor de Blasio, rather than examining their own complicity in the retaliation that resulted in the deaths of their colleagues. Everyone has a right to protest, to express in public their criticism of policies and tactics they abhor. That is honorable. It is not equivalent to the public expression of grievance over criticism that you shouldn’t kill someone because he doesn’t like being harassed for selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk.
― Vita
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.
Strange, megalomaniacal words from a potential head of state, who would become the 45th president of the United States after his 2016 campaign. Enough voters believed him, whatever “it” might have been in their own minds, to make him president in 2017. “It” was left open to interpretation in the election. Whatever “it” was, the strongman would fix “it.” That was good enough for a significant portion of the electorate to put him into office regardless of the will of the majority expressed through the popular vote. The fireball and developing mushroom cloud of the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific on March 1, 1954. Photo by the United States Department of Energy.
Since the election of the 45th president, people have speculated on what will contribute to his ultimate demise, a speculation which seems natural considering the 45th president’s proclivity for self-destructive public pronouncements via Twitter and his other activities. The president’s critics have said he will be impeached, or that the Vice President and Cabinet will invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. These are all pipe dreams, because they imagine real political courage among high level members of the Republican Party, which is not about to manifest itself.
American psychologists will deliver pronouncements on the president’s mental state and people will call on that account for his removal, invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, but his removal will never happen as long as Republican leaders lack the will to effect it. Republicans hold majorities in the federal House and the Senate, as well as in State Legislatures and Governorships. To attempt the removal from office of a Republican president without their approval and active participation is pointless. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is dependent every bit as much on political considerations as on physical and psychological evaluations of the president. Invoking it will be difficult, to say the least.
In the 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick, the president is portrayed as a mild-mannered, reasonable character surrounded by eccentric lunatics. What if the situation were different in that the head of state was the lunatic? In this scene, Peter Sellers plays Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley, and George C. Scott plays General “Buck” Turgidson.
Will the 45th president shoot himself in the foot? Quite likely, considering his past behavior. Will that be enough to secure his removal from office? That depends on the reactions of other Republicans in legislative offices and in the presidential administration, and while they may look to psychologists’ reports for corroborative evidence, ultimately they will base their case on legal and fiscal wrongdoing and their own political calculations, looking to a history in legal precedent that is cut and dried.
― Vita
Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm at landfall in Rockport, Texas, on August 25, has moved on finally after causing catastrophic damage, mainly due to flooding, in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. Following on Harvey’s heels is Hurricane Irma, currently a category 5 storm entering the Caribbean Sea, with many Caribbean islands, large and small, in its sights as it makes its way to Florida later in the week. Beyond that Irma’s track is uncertain, and it could affect communities anywhere from the eastern Gulf Coast to the southern portion of the Eastern Seaboard.
With the various early warning detection systems in place today and improvements over the years in computer modeling of forecast tracks, predicted landfalls of hurricanes has become better than guesswork and moved on to science. Until the World War II era and the development of radar, detection of hurricanes and predictions about their track relied largely on observations made by knowledgeable shipboard weather watchers reporting to shore stations and the tracking by shorebound observers of weather systems that might influence a hurricane as it approached land. Early warning of hurricanes in the first half of the twentieth century was limited to a few days, with an uncertain track left up to guesswork until practically the day before landfall.
View of the eyewall of Hurricane Katrina taken on August 28, 2005, as seen from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) WP-3D Orion hurricane hunter aircraft before the storm made landfall on the United States Gulf Coast.
Before the twentieth century, prediction of hurricanes was further limited to personal observations of weather conditions as the storm approached, because ships at sea were largely driven by wind power and were not as likely as coal, steam, or oil powered ships of later times to arrive in port well ahead of a storm and warn of its approach. People relied on observations of certain types of clouds and of the drop in barometric pressure, however they measured it, to give them indications of an approaching storm. Residents along the shore might have a day or two warning to head inland for higher ground. Absolute amount of fatalities could be high during the storm because of the short notice, but values of property damage were low because there were fewer people living along the coast and because they had not invested millions and billions of dollars in homes, hotels, and infrastructure to be destroyed.
USA hurricane weather warning flags. Drawing by Herostratus.
That formula has been steadily turned upside down through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Property damage amounts from hurricanes have skyrocketed due to the enormous increase in development close to the sea, while fatalities in proportion to total population have dropped dramatically due to warning times of several days to a week or more. Even if people do not evacuate the area entirely, they have sufficient warning time to load up on supplies and defenses to help them weather the crisis in place. In the past, shore residents did not have that luxury. To find a similar situation today of short warning of dangerous weather contributing to high fatalities, one would have to look at tornadoes, a highly localized phenomena when they do crop up.
No one who has ever survived the experience of a hurricane or a tornado or other severe weather disaster can ever dismiss the further possibility of such events lightly. They know in their guts how frightening and life-changing those events can be. The poor especially, as they do in all things in life, suffer disproportionately. The poor cannot afford to flee to higher ground. The houses the poor live in, where they might choose to shelter in place in order to ride out storms, are often flimsily constructed and the first to be destroyed by high winds or high water. Tornadoes are not magically drawn to trailer parks, it’s just that there is where the damage happens that draws the rubberneckers running the local television news stations.
We live in an age when severe weather events are becoming more common, regardless of whether or not an ideologically motivated minority continues to argue the point without reference to facts. Preparing for severe weather, however, has never been a better proposition for most of humankind over what it was in past generations. Ironic that our reliance on technology, which has brought us to the brink of climate destruction, could also serve to save us from its worst effects, at least in the short term.
― Vita
