Archive Listing
February 11, 2012 - February 4, 2012

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

RELATED... There's a gaping hole in the documentation of most American natural disasters. We get to see the damage the day after. The TV journalists pose in front of the wreckage of people's lives.


They cover the story in accordance with their own traditional values -- Are the people weeping and scavenging the ruins for pitiful reminders of what they've lost, like photographs and crushed tricycles? Is FEMA here? Has the president visited? Yes? The government will provide. Mission accomplished. And all go home to await the next catastrophe.

If you look at the volume of documentaries produced by the various channels that proclaim a nonfiction mission, it seems impossible that they could have missed anything. They're all over dinosaurs, guys who accidentally shoot themselves in the head with nailguns, the pyramids, climate change, brand new old footage of the Titanic, bigfoot, shark week, UFOs, the origins of the universe, Atlantis, Hitler, volcanoes, Nostradamus, the ugliest ever catfish, serial killers and why women marry them, asteroids aiming at earth, the history of mud, more Hitler, fixing gigantic things that are broken, hummingbirds, Nostradamus and the 2012 apocalypse, Roman sexual deviancy, the menace of pythons in the everglades and bears in the suburbs, why Jesus was just a nice guy who got crucified, duplex trans-gender operations, frozen mammoths, Jack the Ripper, base-jumping and other suicidal hobbies, still more Hitler, the Loch Ness monster, the manufacture of microprocessors and toothpicks and skateboards, Satan, things that melt, aggressively fat meter maids, ghosts, stalactites, women unexpectedly having babies in the ladies room, the absolute final word forever on Jack the Ripper, everything in the world you could possibly imagine about Princess Diana, why Darwin was so incredibly right about everything and the Bible not so much, celebrity ghosts, shark month, stone-age Amazonian tribes with breasts, mail-order brides from Russia and how they died, how much we love the Brit royals, angels and why they don't exist, what the world will look like after the pestilence called Man becomes extinct, the Jack the Ripper we never knew until this newest latest revelation, African tribes with breasts, AND a great many of the more arduous strains of blue collar American life -- crab fishing, coal mining, logging, sewer cleaning, hog slaughtering, Alaskan everything, the difficulty of being a professional urban vagina on meth-amphetamines, wrinkled moms who live with a hundred cats and never throw out the trash, plus innumerable treatments of the general awfulness of the south, with a special emphasis on the underground railroad, dead jazz geniuses, and hick spouses who kill each other using their Bibles as silencers.

What you never see, though, is what happens after the news networks fly home to New York after a natural disaster. Well, except for post-Katrina New Orleans, where everybody sat and waited for the federal government to fix everything and, uh, are still waiting.

The word "except" is key here. The experience of New Orleans after Katrina is clearly the exception. There is a zone of the United States called Tornado Alley that rips whole towns to pieces every year. And guess what? Those towns rebuild themselves. Year after year, decade after decade. HOW EXACTLY DO THEY DO THAT?

Think about it. You've seen the splattered houses, churches, hospitals, and stores. Places where it's hard even to figure out which pile of rubble used to be Main Street. But the people who are from there don't leave, and they rebuild their lives. Yeah, I know there's government money and loans and such that figure in, but let's face it, the work is done primarily by the so-called 'ordinary' people we last saw standing on the splinters of their homes and thanking God that most of their neighbors are still alive.

I want to see the process. I want to see the bulldozers and backhoes that clear away the flattened houses and shattered trees. (Where do they put all the refuse?) I want to see how these communities that no longer exist except for the people who lived in them come together and start building anew on the cleared ground. I want to see the churchless church suppers, the pitching in of nearby less damaged counties and towns, the ad hoc schooling that goes on in the absence of air-conditioned classroom buildings and hardwood basketball gymnasiums, the families living with families while they struggle through how long (?) without income, the mayor making deals with contractors and banks and farmers, the doctors who set up clinics at the only gas station still standing, the women who run the food and clothing banks to keep body and soul together for parents and children while the town comes slowly back to life.

It isn't FEMA that does all that. It's American people hewing together and working their asses off to make miracles happen.

We know it happens. Despite all the lamentations about New Orleans, Mississippi -- every bit as hard hit as the Big Easy -- quietly went to work and pulled off the standard American recovery while the Big Easyites wanted somebody else to do it. Why is theirs the only story worth covering?

I'm absolutely certain people by the millions would watch a series about such a recovery. It's a black hole in the media depiction of "the bitter ones who cling to their guns and religion." Because that's not all they cling to, and we all know it. They cling to each other, help each other, work for each other, and give new life to each other.

Are you listening, History, Discovery, NatGeo, Green, Current, TLC, and company? I don't need another fantasy science documentary about brightly feathered dinosaurs. If you're using CGI, you don't know. You're just guessing. What I need is a glimpse of facts that don't require any guesswork. Average Americans routinely, habitually, come back from the brink. Why can't you get off your high horse and show us that?

P.S. Affirmation from commenter Patrick:


You see. My only point: we want to see, too. Need to see. All of us.

I mean, I know it seems like it should be a private thing, but it's gone beyond that. The rest of the country needs to remember how this country works. And not one micro-second of it is pity. It's learning.

Monday, May 09, 2011

UGH. AND THE LIBS TALK ABOUT HYPOCRISY. A bad day. A day when I do despair of America. But one more time, credit where credit is due. For once, Hotair has been pretty much on point with its areas of focus. Let me count the ways, large and small, that I am disgusted by the current scene. Some will have links. Some won't. If you can't verify the linkless ones on your own, to hell witcha. These all from the past week, in no particular order.


I could go on. Obama on 60 Minutes taking credit for his "gutsy call" without being asked a single question about why his Justice Department is still prosecuting CIA interrogators who were acting legally and acquired useful information that helped kill Osama bin Laden. Fox News interviewers failing to challenge ex-CIA flack Michael Scheuer who claimed, without on-screen objection, that three administrations have "lied" to the American public by misrepresenting bin Laden's hatred of the U.S. as anything but a desire to get our troops out of Arab countries. "He doesn't care at all who we are and what we think," Scheuer said with smug finality. Is that so? Then what of the worldwide push for sharia? And... oh forget it. Scheuer has books to sell, and he's a Fox News analyst. Frank Luntz, another Fox News analyst, pretending that there was anything significant about an orchestrated second-string Republican debate in South Carolina. News flash to genius Luntz:  Nobody cares about Herman Cain. He's a more polite and admirable version of Donald Trump. He is not a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the president's reelection campaign is already in full swing, with all the usual uncritical support of the MSM.

The new media are already as corrupt as the old media. And the ones who should be leading the charge are bunkered in fantasies that have nothing to do with either governing or fixing what's wrong.

Which is why I gave credit to Hotair up top. We've had our differences, God knows, but perseverance is a virtue, and Ed Morrissey has assembled a list of "Obamateurisms" that could and should be the basis for real Republican campaigns:

Previous 2011 “winners”:

• Can’t name a mistake at townhall in which he made three in one sentence
• Accuses GOP of trying to hurt seniors after lecturing them not to demagogue on entitlement reform
• “If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know, you might want to think about a trade-in.”
• Obama accepts his transparency award in secret, no-press meeting
• “War” first changed to “kinetic military action,” then “time-limited, scope-limited military action”
• Obama telling people it would be easier to be President of China because “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”
• Obama tells group that there is a “subterranean” racially-based agenda in opposition to his presidency
• Ferry for Americans in Libya comes three days late — and with a bill for passengers
• WH says Obama not addressing Libya because of “scheduling issue“
• After saying he hadn’t followed the Wisconsin issue, says Walker’s plan “seems like more of an assault on unions.”
• Businesses have “obligation” to create jobs and “pay decent wages”
• After losing verdict on first ever federal mandate to purchase private-sector product, accuses judge of “overreach”
• Obama bogarts Newt Gingrich’s book title for his “Winning the Future” SOTU speech
• 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner holds state dinner for man who has 2010 winner under house arrest
• After telling Boehner and McConnell that “there will be plenty of time to campaign for 2012 in 2012,”announces March start to re-election bid
• “I really want to figure out a way where I can spend more time outside of Washington listening and learning and engaging the American people.”

Not a hat-tip but hats-off to Ed. This time he said it best.

Cheer each other up. You won't make a dent in my pessimism today.

Friday, May 06, 2011

CULTURE ON CABLE -- WITH ADS. I saw this documentary on the new Ovation Channel and just finished explaining to Mrs. CP why it couldn't be a post. Irrelevant, elitist, niche-oriented. But it is a post. It's the story of how the musical "Phantom of the Opera" became the single longest running theatrical production and most successful entertainment property in history, playing to more than 100 million patrons for ticket prices easily ten times (and more) what any movie can command. At a time when we're falling hook, line, and sinker for a success story in the killing of bin Laden, it's worthwhile to consider the weird combination of brilliance, accidents, egos, false starts, reversals of fortune, bonehead mistakes, high risk intuition for good and ill, and, well, luck (unless it's fate instead) that results in spectacular collaborative achievements.

I should explain that we saw Phantom on Broadway, and Mrs. CP was absolutely transported. Which was my whole intent in planning it. Nothing prepares you for the array of talent it represents -- actors, singers, dancers, set design, costume design, music, special effects, and emotional immersion in a theatrical experience beyond compare.

So how did it all come to pass? Talented people doing what they do, TA DA. Hardly. It was a long and frequently painful process. Andrew Lloyd Webber had a score with no lyrics. He cobbled together a first act performance at a personal theater on his own estate, and the lyricist he chose for that preliminary performance was committed to humor and what we'd call "camp." There's a video showing the audience laughing throughout. It was enough to secure some initial investors, but the end result that finally hit the stage would cost more than two million pounds, a ton of tabloid controversy, and the firing of a legendary director, the first leading man, the first lyricist (a veteran traded for an unemployed youngster), the music director, and nearly the composer, too, who announced less than seven days from the opening that he was withdrawing his score from the production. His tantrum was defeated only by his inability to carry the record-breaking poundage of the score out of the theater.

And that's not the half of it. The man finally chosen to play the Phantom was Michael Crawford, known throughout the U.K. as a physical slapstick TV comic who sang in a near falsetto that engendered gusts of laughter but nothing like musical praise. And the leading lady was Andrew Lloyd Webber's own wife, who was regarded by critics as more wife than talent. (Indeed her initial understudy eventually took her place and went on to become the most beloved leading lady the show ever had in its London run.)

The problems in its shakedown preview performances were so various, constant, and grave that the London press dreamt up the meme "Curse of the Phantom," meaning that the fictional character behind the play was so unhappy with the proceedings that he was haunting and sabotaging the entire production. The now famous scene in which a boat glides through the waters under the Paris opera was controlled by a remote radio device like those used to pilot model airplanes; the remote control used the same frequency as the London Fire Department, and whenever there was a fire alarm, the boat took off in odd directions, once nearly into the orchestra pit, restrained only by the main force of Michael Crawford, who couldn't sing the key "Phantom of the Opera" number because he was so out of breath.

Crawford became a problem himself. He plunged himself into the character from the moment every day when he began hours of makeup to transform him into the egomaniacal persona he was playing on stage. With all the problems, he took to summoning everyone from musicians to dancers to stagehands to his dressing room, where still in Phantom makeup, he shouted imprecations about their incompetence that could be heard throughout the theater.

What was the real problem? The extraordinary ambition of the production. Every single aspect of theatrical resources was being stretched to the maximum. The set was more spectacular, the costumes more intricate, the effects more complex, and the roles more demanding behind the omnipresent masks than anyone had attempted before.

The end result was an utter triumph. Princess Diana attended the final preview and it went like clockwork. The show never looked back, but many lives were never the same. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sarah Brightman divorced about a year into production. All the ones fired along the way never got over it fully.

Success is a messy business in any collaborative effort. Something we should maybe remember when we 're holding the top man accountable -- be he Bush or Obama, or even Clinton or Carter -- for everything that doesn't go according to plan.

In retrospect, it all seems inevitable, fated for success. But what's clear in the history is that Phantom could have crashed and burned a dozen times or more. It didn't. Was that luck? Destiny? Or human determination in pursuit of a vision the creators couldn't abandon no matter how rough things got before fortune finally turned in their favor?

Ah, sweet mystery of life...

Thursday, May 05, 2011

HE STILL DOESN'T. Neither of the big-ticket items today. Not the Ground Zero visitation by a president who couldn't be bothered to attend 9/11 ceremonies in 2009 or 2010. I gave him the credit he was due, but this is campaigning, cynical and exploitative. Sad for him that he's bungled everything after his initial speech, all the shifting and confused stories told by the White House staff, the revelation of electronic intelligence gathered at the scene that should have been kept secret rather than boasted of, and the refusal to release the non-secret that there's photographic evidence of bin Laden's death. Who paid for this hit? We did. Why can't we see what we paid for?

Likewise, not the Republican presidential debate being trumpeted by Fox News. I don't care what any of them has to say at this point in time, because it's just a circus or a beauty contest, your pick. Don't need to see them carping at one another when none of them has yet stepped forward to articulate a plan to fix what's wrong at home and abroad. And now they all seem generally timid about mentioning Obama's gross incompetence because he accepted a fait accompli on an item of old business brought to fruition by the momentum of a previous administration he blames for everything but cancer. Please. Campaign positions aren't terribly effective when all they make you want to do is throw up in disgust. Leave me out of it.

But I do have a suggestion about what you can watch. Granted, you can't watch it today, as I did, because it's already been aired for the only time today, but you can at least look forward to it. (Netflix has it.)

It's a movie called Doomsday. Sound appropriate? The Comcast blurb for the FX showing promised a combination of 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, and Escape from New York. Right. Except that that's exactly what it is. The cast includes Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell, a gang of barbarian Scottish punks, some medieval knights, a Bentley Mulsanne, a Brit who looks like he could be Denzel Washington's earnest younger brother, and a kick-ass action heroine named Rhona Mitra (who also had a role in Stargate Universe). It won't be  for everybody -- what with a couple of decapitations and some incidental cannibalism -- but it's the kind of dark dystopian picture the Brits still do so well.

And it's the kind of picture that suits my current mood. Check it out. Maybe it'll cheer you up too.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

CHANGING OF THE GUARD. Things don't always work out the way you expect. I grew up in a house with two dogs (usually) and a cat (sometimes). The dogs were smart, German shepherds and various terriers, who were always in charge one way or another. Everything changed when I married Mrs. CP. As I've written before, sighthounds aren't always the sharpest knife in the drawer, and it's a comforting thing not to be constantly outsmarted by willful pets. Except that nothing ever really goes according to plan.

Life with Mrs. CP also means cats. I've told you about Izzie the Bengal, who's a handful, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned the three ferals too, including the sad fact that one of them recently died. Penny.


She was the in-between one. Cassie remains completely feral. She lives in the garage and hides, hides, hides. Mrs. CP announces a sighting as if she's seen a wonder. "I saw Cassie," she says. Which means she's still alive.  Hooray. The ferals were all from the same litter. Cassie, Penny, and Mickey. Penny tried to bridge the gap, came into the house, occasionally consented to be petted, but somehow escaped into the out of doors and was lost to us for a month. We could see her, slowly starving to death outside (feral doesn't mean you know how to hunt), but she couldn't bring herself to come inside. When she finally did she was skin and bone and Izzie sensed vulnerability and attacked and attacked. Penny regained some weight but never her health. She died some months ago in the living room. Maybe the most beautiful of them all. I will never forget her huge startled eyes and the white flash on her chest. Even more, that she sometimes let met stroke her, which felt like an extraordinary privilege. Miss her.

Sighthounds. Blah blah. Molly the beautiful. Andrew the dour. Raebert the impossible. I know I haven't provided an update about this monster lately but he's huge and he has eaten everything in his path. Plus, he insists on carrying everyone else's bowls into the dog yard and arranging them in some configuration of his own. When it comes to mischief, he never ever ever ever stops. He barks constantly. He can't resist messing with the greys or the cats. He's gorgeous and completely incorrigible.

But he's not the pack leader. That would be Mickey.

I didn't really realize it until we got Elliott, whom we've introduced before. Elliott's mom was afraid that he was such an alpha cat nobody else could live with him. Turns out she was almost right. Except for Mickey.

But I probably wouldn't have realized all this if it weren't for Elliott. Who is definitely an alpha cat and very very smart about dogs, even giant dogs like Raebert and tornado dogs like our pug Eloise. He just stays cool. But he does pick fights. In the first week he got into it with "Sugar Ray" Izzie (a draw), and then he squared off with Mickey. Who weighs twenty pounds and doesn't care who you think you are. Advantage Mickey.

Cutting to the chase. Elliott likes to hang out. So does Mickey. They take turns. But what I've been realizing more and more is that Mickey shows up for a purpose. Yeah, he likes affection. But what he really is is the Man. He's there when it's time for the dogs to go outside, when it's time for them to be fed, even though he has no set dinnertime but a constant bowl of catfood he can dip into anytime. Mickey is the pack leader. He tells me when something needs to be done for the others.

Go figure. He's a feral. It took me years to gain his trust. Now he trusts me, tells me what to do, and purrs when we understand each other. Life is a beautiful thing.

We hang out, too. He's enormous. And his eyes are the size of saucers. He's handsome. We have three cats who act more like dogs. They know their names, they come when called, and, well, isn't that the definition of a pack, even if the dogs aren't always as responsive?

CURMUDGEON REACTION (SEE COMMENTS). I'm weary of having to make comments like this:

Pete:

[Quoting Pete] "So now is a great time to end the Terrorist Recruitment Project/Government Empowerment Project that is American foreign policy. If you love the state, go ahead and disagree. Actually, it will end. Doing it proactively and now would ensure it doesn't end because government checks to soldiers are no longer any good (per IP's admission that inflation IS coming.)"

Phooey. You're a broken record on the foreign policy polemics. And btw, love your reference to my "admission" that inflation is coming. If you took the links, you'd find that I started "admitting" it in January 2009, with specific reference to Obama's massive new federal spending orgy in his very first month in office.

And weary of having to make posts like this. (To which there was never any response from its addressee.)

I'm in favor of youthful idealism until it becomes rigid, blind, and liturgically repetitive. Which is when, however smart and well read it is, it ceases to be intelligent or capable of learning. It becomes mindless cant. There's an arrogance at work which assumes that we just don't get how much smarter they are than we are, that if only they could drum another 5,000 words of reason into our dim brains we'd see the world the way they do. There's never any listening going on.

Which is why I don't expect any listening to this, either, but it's time to lay out a few basic truths that don't accord with the purist model of the Paulistas.


The Paulista response to what is obviously and inevitably an intricately interrelated world economy is to put their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la la la la la" whenever anyone mentions that the United States is a net importer of energy, that virtually no sophisticated American consumer products can be produced without parts or assembly from dozens of other nations, and that there are irrational agents of chaos and destruction who would be quite pleased to see the edifice of contemporary civilization reduced to the subsistence level of sixth century medievalism. Which kind of means we have to have a foreign policy. And a competent military.

To proclaim belief in unfettered capitalism and yet turn your back on all the explicitly hostile and/or predatory threats to America's enjoyment of capitalist benefits is to be supremely, almost incredibly, stupid.  

When the middle east declines into endless civil war that halts oil production, when the two Koreas embark on nuclear war over ancient grievances, when India and Pakistan embark on nuclear war over Kashmir, when Russia reinstates the soviet policy of using nuclear extortion to make money in the hotspots of tribal fury and genocide, when the U.N. ratifies the nuclear annihilation by Iran of of Israel... guess what? The United States will also be impoverished and devastated.

Why? Because the single dumbest thing about all you Paulista isolationists is that you've forgotten that the beginning of what we today call foreign policy is trade. If there's no one to trade with, there's no route to long-term prosperity.  You're just sharing general scarcity and swapping spit with each other.

You get all fired up about the "waste" of military spending. How do you explain away the Marshall Plan? We rebuilt Europe after World War II so they could trade with us. They're richer, and we're richer as a result.  Anything 'capitalist' in there you might recognize on a good day amongst your delusional jags?

I'm guessing you're uncomfortable with the idea of American Empire. Yeah, we are an empire. Fact of history. But we're the kindest and gentlest empire in the history of life on earth. We have not imposed ourselves and laws on everyone else. We have encouraged them to be free, to compete with us, and to become rich through our mantra of individual freedom and rights,

But you insist you have a monopoly on the idea of freedom. Live and let die. Cool. There are no moral imperatives except when it comes to the Federal Reserve and the IRS. Cool. Fine if Israel disappears in all the excitement about the end of the Federal Reserve... I get it.

Fed up, Pete. If you don't start thinking outside of the Ron Paul box, I will begin to despair of you. Fact.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

FOLLOW-UP. Don't get me wrong. I want to see a bin Laden picture. Because I'm InstaPunk and want to see the bastard's dead body. But it's not proof I'm after. Proof isn't possible in the way pundits and politicians are talking about it. I just want to gloat. Others pretend they have loftier concerns.

Apparently we've embarked on a new silly season. Senators are gravely disapproving of a swift burial at sea, as if it created some kind of problem that can't be fixed. Talk show hosts are offended that bin Laden received a muslim burial in accordance with the 24-hour rule Islam prescribes. Facebook brainiacs are sure there's something, well, fishy about the whole thing. (Other than Osama "sleeping with the fishes." Ha.)

I'm out of patience with all this crap. And it is crap.

A few things to think about before you join in the general grumbling. If Islamic terrorists want to believe that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed by U.S. Navy Seals, nothing will ever convince them otherwise. That's the nature of conspiracy theories. They subsist on preconceived assumptions, not evidence. Just look at the 'Truthers' and 'Birthers.' There is no factual evidence they will ever accept as refutation of their preconceptions.

Same goes for all of you who think this was a trick of the Obama administration. What would be enough to convince you? The body publicly displayed like Mussolini's, or Bonnie and Clyde's bullet-riddled flesh propped up in coffins, so that throngs can file past and spit on the remains?


Where would we do that, though? At Ground Zero? But most of you have never been to Ground Zero, have you? So should we arrange a road show and ferry the decomposing corpse of bin Laden from state to state, city to city, town to town, hamlet to hamlet, and fairground to fairground? So that you can be convinced? Even then, what would it prove? There's just a dead man dissolving, and are you really an expert at confirming the identity of the deceased?

Of course you aren't. Nor do you perform DNA tests or deconstruct Photoshop frauds or measure facial dimensions or conduct autopsies.

A DNA report and a photograph are all you're ever likely to get, and anything beyond that would be more than you're equipped to assess in any scientific terms resembling proof.

Meaning, if you think it's all an Obama trick, there's nothing that will ever convince you otherwise. Just like the Islamic terrorists.

Are we good so far?

Now, finally, the controversy about giving the man a muslim burial. Get over it. I'm InstaPunk and I've got no problem with it. What's the whole point of our 'War on Terror'? That we're the civilized ones and they're the barbarians. I don't need to feed his body to the pigs unless I believe in their false scripture and faith in a child-molesting, murderous, genocidal false prophet whose descendants are determined to wreck the world. I'm content to let him meet his Maker and account for what he has done at the Seat of Judgment.

If you thought about it, you'd be content too. But I'm sure some of you who haven't thought about it will be eager to pretend you're thinking up a storm.

So be it. Have fun.

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