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SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS

10/27/2012

SILVIO BERLUSCONI

One for the Good Guys
   The conviction and sentencing of former Italian PM, Sylvio Berlusconi, is a win against corruption. Before becoming PM, he’d been rich on the scale of Mitt Romney—a few hundred million. While his country went from financial hardship to the brink of ruin, his wealth increased almost 20 times to some four billion euros Thinking ahead, he pushed through a shorter statue of limitations, now likely to kick in before his presumed other crimes can be prosecuted. Convicted of money-laundering, his 4-year sentence was quickly reduced to 1 year, and he’ll likely not serve that. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, reasoning that a top leader in jail is bad for a country’s image. Some might consider it worse to let a convicted felon walk.
   I landed in Foggia, Italy, in 1944 when the Wehrmacht still held the Po Valley. After VE Day, I was assigned another year, falling in love with the country and its people. After a couple of months flying troops from Naples to Rabat, Morocco, I went back to Foggia, worked on an unofficial US Army newspaper, the Foggia Occupator. Despite the lamentable name, I was never treated like an occupier, feeling perfectly safe on dark back streets at any hour.
    I met the family Pedone, who had hidden downed American airmen from the Nazis on their farm. They could have been executed on the spot.
   “Why did you do it?” I asked.
   “They were such nice boys. We couldn’t let the Germans get them.” They showed me a box of signed letters with name, rank, serial number, and how long each had stayed.
   “These are worth money!” I exclaimed. They seemed embarrassed. “I will tell our town major, who will see that you are paid for sheltering our fliers.”
   I studied Italian with a dignified professore, who taught us the proper way to swear: “Accidente! means, ‘Dammit all!’” I still say it. I jeeped to Bari to get our paper printed, to Manfredonia for a swim in the Adriatic, across the mountains to Napoli for a story, and up the Gargano Promontory to San Giovanni Rotondo where Padre Pio—today Saint Pio—famed for bearing the stigmata, had his little church. Our Italian staff included Savino Bufalo, who’d been in the Italian army, captured, sent to America and while a POW, met a girl, gotten engaged, and planned to return and marry her. Another, from Sicily, tried to explain why it was necessary that a man not be a virgin when he married, but that a woman must be. We warned Maria diBari, our bi-lingual secretary, not to marry an American, but on a return visit to Foggia in 1954, I learned she had, and lived in Schenectady. Italy will always be in my blood.
    Whatever happens, or doesn't, I congratulate the Italians for exposing a corrupt leader, hoping it will inspire us to think hard about Mitt Romney’s refusal to reveal his taxes, his politically sensitive investments. his offshore bank accounts, and most important of all, just what he has in mind if he somehow manages to insert himself into the seat of power.

   (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

GEORGE McGOVERN, A WARRIOR WHO LOVED PEACE

10/25/2012

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SACK TIME AT CELONE FIELD, FOGGIA, ITALY

George McGovern, Warrior Who Loved Peace
   Each mission began at 4 AM when an NCO stuck his head in the tent. I fell out of my cot, yanked on my flight suit and Colt 45, ate a big breakfast, rode to a Quonset hut by the flight line where a huge map was mounted on the wall, the mission marked by a broad red line. Would the target be rough, like the oil fields at Ploesti or ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, or a “milk run?’ Hitler’s Wehrmacht was on the run, Goering’s Messerschmitts grounded for lack of fuel, and my missions were all milk runs. The Germans still had flak (acronym of Flugzeugabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft gunfire), and after my sixth, the crew chief of my B-17 showed me a piece as big as my hand that he’d dug out of the leading edge of my wing. “It had no juice left. Didn’t hit you, you hit it.” It was dull on one side, shiny on the other with a network of tiny cracks.
   “You want it?”
   “Hell, no!” I wanted nothing to do with it.
   Seven missions was my shooting war, so after VE Day, I stayed, Army of Occupation. Crews with a full tour, 35 missions, went right home, but George McGovern, B-24 Liberator pilot, 35 missions, spent a couple more months flying food into southern Italy where they were starving. He had to have volunteered.

FIRST LIEUTENANT, GEORGE McGOVERN

I thought of that when I read that he died, age 90. He’d been stationed near Cerignola, about 50 miles south of my base near Foggia. His tour included rough targets like Linz, Hitler’s heavily defended home town, the Skoda factories in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, crew members wounded, and emergency landings in a shot-up B-24 Liberator. Liberators were newer than Fortresses, also faster with bigger bomb loads, but tricky to fly and not loved by pilots. I voted for him in 1972, believing then, as I do today, that he’d have been a great president. But he lost by a landslide to Richard M. Nixon, first President to commit a felony in office, or get caught at it.

B-24, LIBERATOR

After proving his courage as a warrior, McGovern became a man of peace. He wanted us out of Vietnam and would have gotten us out, I’m sure, so I can’t help wondering how the world would have turned out if he’d won that election.
Supposedly you learn from history, although history itself seems to deny it. The folks who elected a felon president, then a combat-shy frat boy who started a frivolous war, are now trying to install a gutless schemer who can’t speak truth about anything. For history’s sake I hope they are outvoted by those who remember or learned about George McGovern, a warrior who loved peace.

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INTERESTING TIMES

10/23/2012

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Interesting Times
   In his final debate with President Obama, Mitt Romney reached a new stage in his development. Future historians with backgrounds in anthropology and entomology will trace the progress of a man able to use the complex metamorphosis of insects and a few animals to continually change shapes as they pass through stages including pupa, chrysalis, larva, nymph, imago, etc. After each stage the creature molts, sheds its skin, to emerge in a new shape.
   Each stage can be physically different, as caterpillar into butterfly, or tadpole to frog. Or change can be gradual, as with grasshoppers, in which each stage is unmistakably a grasshopper, lacking wings, genitalia, etc, until the mature creature is formed.
   Mitt Romney’s process is like the grasshopper’s, in which the outer shape is recognizable, changes subtle. Future historians will study the immature unmotivated college student, the Vietnam draft advocate who stays draft-deferred, the draft-deferred missionary, the motivated married graduate student, the hungry investor, the icy church bishop who demands a parishioner give up her child, the aspiring politician, the reach-across-the-aisle politician, the “seriously conservative” Teapublican, the shape-shifting all-things-to-all-voters presidential candidate, the debating I-didn’t-say-that quasi-moderate, and finally the centrist who endorses his opponent’s international policies claiming he’d do exactly the same thing, only better.
   Should Romney be elected, it will illustrate that shape-shifting is a path to political success. From moderate David Brooks, to hysterical Rush Limbaugh, each comes to believe that their Mitt Romney is the real Mitt Romney.
   As for the world, some may hope that shape-shifting will work on world leaders. Others will fear that in a context more complex than any he has ever faced, it could unleash an anti-American backlash. Romney faces a world able to destroy itself on the command of many leaders, from irrational Iran, to desperate Israel, ravaged Pakistan, isolated North Korea, to French, Russian, Indian, British, and inevitably, American bombs.
   Can an unpredictable shape-shifting Mitt Romney turn planet Earth into a lifeless atomic-radiating ember, or would he only wreak mild changes like those from, say, the Jurassic to the Ice Age? Would humanity itself shape-shift to some new evolutionary form, or go the way of the dinosaur?
   If voters put Romney into the seat of power, in the sense of the Chinese curse, we are in for “interesting times.”

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ROMNESIA, or, MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER

10/20/2012

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SENSATA TECHNOLOGIES WORKERS, FREEPORT, ILLINOIS

Romnesia, or, Multiple Personality Disorder.
   The Mundugumor of Papua New Guinea, studied by Margaret Mead, had dual morality. Lying, cheating, stealing, even murder, banned within the tribe, were admired when perpetrated on outsiders. The tribe was feared and loathed by outsiders but that didn’t concern them. .
   Dual morality is commonplace, the “not-in-my- back-yard” syndrome. Paul Ryan sells his cut in Social Security saying it won’t touch 55s and older, hoping dual morality, “I don’t care about my children or grandchildren,” will keep theIr elders quiet. The Good Samaritan, (Luke 10. 29-37), willing to succor strangers, has always been the rare exception. But dual personality can metastasize into Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD. Barack Obama dubbed Romney’s case,“Romnesia.”
   Among Teapublicans, Romney is a Radical Rightist. Before the general population, he’s a Centrist.
   A model of virtue in his church community, he’s a wily trickster in the business community.
   In debates, he talks tough about China. As a businessman, his Bain Capital buys an auto parts factory, Sensata Technologies, in Freeport, Illinois, gets temporary visas for Chinese workers, sends them to the factory to be trained by the American staff, fires the Americans, ships the factory and American-trained Chinese workers to China, and gets a business tax deduction for expenses. This actually happened (see photo above).
   The American factory had been profitable while paying its workers $17 an hour. Now they’re unemployed, no longer steady consumers, and the entire American economy is weaker. The Chinese workers get 99 cents an hour, and there are plenty more where they came from. To Mitt Romney, businessman and wily trickster, it was a no-brainer. That he and Bain Capital are loathed and feared in Freeport, Illinois is of no concern.
   This is the guy who “knows how the economy works,” and he’s running for President of the U.S.A. Which personality will he wear if he gets the job, and with it, responsibility for every American?
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(TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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AGMA, AGVA, AEA, CEA, AFTRA, SAG

10/18/2012

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          AGMA, AGVA, AEA, CEA, AFTRA, SAG
   My first union was the American Guild of Musical Artists joined in 1947 to dance—two weeks at the Zeigfeld Theater—with Martha Graham. When Actor’s Equity called a strike, I was in Once Upon A Mattress On the 3rd of every month a union retirement check arrives, the last thing I’d expected for dancing on Broadway.
   For Paint Your Wagon, I had to join Chorus Equity, for TV, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, for The Latin Quarter (a night club), the American Guild of Variety Artists, and for Peer Gynt, although a lowly dancer, I had to join Actor’s Equity, big brother to Chorus Equity. Each required an initiation fee and dues between jobs, or back dues when re-hired. The exception was Screen Actors Guild which gave the producer a “waver,” allowing him to pay almost nothing. A performer is allowed only one but SAG gave him a second for me. And when he tried to do me out of re-run residuals, it refused to lift a finger. I envied musicians, one union for all whatever and where ever they played.
   Rehearsing in a studio of the Zeigfield, a stage hand said if we put one foot on a prop, Martha Graham would have to pay four stagehands for four hours of work. We chalked its outline on the floor.
   Auditioning for Onna White, I couldn’t plug my record player into a wall socket, so hauled an automobile battery and converter to the audition.
   After an off-Broadway flop titled Morning Sun, disheartened composer, Paul Klein, was giving up show biz, so the cast wanted to make him a reel-to-reel souvenir of his songs. Our Equity deputy, a singer, said no. We did it anyway and when he nosed around the dressing room, dancer, Michael Maurer, sounded the alarm, singing, “Schmucks are taking over the world!”
   When I formed a young-audience in-school troupe, The Ballet Team, I wanted to go union. The rep approved $125 a week, saying they had a small opera contract for that amount. “You can play four shows on weekends.”
   “We play week days in public schools.”
   “We don’t have a contract for that.”
   “So write one!” He shook his head. We went non-union.
   Finally, Equity News is the most boring monthly trade paper in the universe, even though it reports on the most interesting people who live in it.
`   Hard working dancers are in natural opposition to producers, but theatrical producers are not soulless suits and union staff need to know the difference between Walt Disney and tiny start-ups like, yes, The Ballet Team.
   With the exception of fire fighters, unions have a poor public image not enhanced when the Chicago teacher’s union calls a strike as school is starting. Labor college types call it perfect timing. It’s also the worst possible PR.
   Wisconsin’s union-busting Scott Walker should have been kicked out, but too many Wisconsinites resent what they view as high-handed union power plays. The union movement, in decline for decades, desperately needs PR consultants. If the Wisconsin defeat wasn’t a wake-up call, I wonder what it will take?
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(TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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DEBATE TWO - WILL THE REAL MITT ROMNEY STAND UP, PLEASE?

10/16/2012

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Debate Two, Will the Real Mitt Romney Stand Up Please?
             Pundits debating who “won” the second Obama-Romney debate, are mostly giving it to Obama. Romney talked fast but said nothing new, not even which tax loopholes he’d close. Obama, less “polite,” pointed out mis-statements, policy reversals, investments in China, and took offense at Romney’s charge that he’d not cared about the Benghazi attack. Obama made strong points on women’s issues, but his killer line was that gasoline prices were low at the beginning of his term because following the Bush crash, demand was low, asking if Romney would lower gas prices the same way. To understand Romney’s flips, flops, and lies, one need understand that he’s applying “Game Theory” to his run for the presidency.
   Game Theory is "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers." Rigorously taught at Harvard, Romney applied it with great success in Bain Capital. In Game Theory, lying is not forbidden, it is a tactic. When he said, “I like to fire people,” he meant it. A Game player who empathizes with his opponents will lose, and in Game Theory, all are opponents, and losing is Original Sin. Romney believes Game Theory can be applied to his presidential campaign, and to running the U.S.
   He points to his long successful marriage, loyal wife, stalwart sons, and how he gave himself to his church as missionary, bishop, and to succor those less fortunate. Assuming this is true, in Game Theory, truths are also tactics. The real question is: can a man be selfless in one context and heartless in another?
   In Germany, in 1985, I met a university student of political science, who said, “I need to understand why the generation of our fathers became mass-murderers.” Today he is a professor, whose PhD is on “compartmentalization,” of governments and human souls. Extensive studies show that Nazi extermination camp guards who in the course of a day’s work beat people to death, could go home at night, listen to Mozart, and be dutiful husbands and fathers.
   So, yes, a person can be a family man in one context, icily cruel in another. Within his church community, Mitt Romney is a staunch family man, outside of it, a Game player who will do whatever it takes to win.
   Were Romney President, would the Game relieve suffering as he uses it hoping to speed up a slowly recovering U.S. economy? And how would he do against the unelected leaders of China, Iran, and other countries whose leaders got there by playing the Game, and whose chips are cowed populations, deadly arsenals, and zero regard for human rights? Remember that Stalin and Hitler were successful Game players.
   Finally, will American voters give Romney a chance to play his Game in the White House where his chips would be the 1%, the 47%, the 99%, and command of the world’s greatest military?
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   (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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BEFORE EVIL, AND AFTER

10/14/2012

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MALALA YOUSAFZAI

Before Evil, and After
   Both were vibrant young women, the embodiment of loving goodness and benign strength. Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a deranged loner, now imprisoned for life. Fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot by a deranged society who approves and calls for her murder. Is there any way to comprehend such a society?
   Smallpox, a viral disease, killed millions before it was eliminated in 1979. Yet despite its deadly role against humanity, one cannot call the smallpox virus “evil.” It does what it is genetically engineered to do. The only known remaining viruses are held in labs in the U.S. and Russia. Some say it could be needed for research, others are reluctant to destroy any form of life.
   Far back in evolution, there is a place before evil. Humano sapiens is a primate, along with gorillas, chimpanzees, lemurs, and marmosets, and like tigers, antelopes, spiders, and butterflies, our remote ancestors were innocent, their behavior dictated by genes. The cave art of Lascaux reveals fully human behavior, but fossil evidence reveals little about their society and nothing about any sense of right and wrong.
   Margaret Mead, in her Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, wrote of the gentle Mountain Arapesh who devoted themselves to raising children, also the cannibalistic headhunting Mundugumor, whose violent society was based on competition and aggression. The Arapesh were scattered by the Japanese during World War II. The Mundugumor, now melted into the modern world, still inhabit their ancestral land in Papua New Guinea.
   Colin Turnbull, in The Mountain People, wrote of the Ik, who seemed to have forgotten how to love, even parents for their children. He came to believe that it happened because they’d been a hunting society suddenly confined, and turned their hunting behaviors upon one another to develop a survival system based on stealth, stealing, and subterfuge. His suggested solution: scatter them far and wide so that their survival system would dissolve
   Human societies, like life forms, can take roads either enhancing or deadly. Germany, with its great thinkers, artists, and scientists, produced Nazis, and is now trying to ban all symptoms of that despised past. Are the Taliban another example of a society overwhelmed by evil, a social disorder to be banned like the Nazis, dissolved like the Ik, diluted like the Mundugumor, or eliminated entirely, like the smallpox virus?

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JOE BIDEN vs. PAUL RYAN---A SHATTERING REVELATION

10/12/2012

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Joe Biden, vs. Paul Ryan—A Shattering Revelation
   Joe Biden often broke into a helpless grin--can I believe my ears?—while Ryan repeated far right dogma. But the grin vanished when he spoke, while Ryan listened with a tight-lipped half smile, looking both defiant and cornered.
   Except for one shattering revelation (below), it was all predictable; Paul Ryan’s theories—he says said he’s influenced by the Russian-American novelist and screen-writer, Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, aka Ayn Rand—cover all bases. As a late teen I read her Atlas Shrugged, which struck me as pretentious junk, yet know a bright couple—husband and wife—who evoke it with verbal thumps, as if it were the Holy Bible. Where faith enters, reason flees, which is fine for faith but deadly for public policy. Whatever facts Joe Biden flung into Paul Ryan’s path, he leapt them with a single theoretical bound. It did not elevate the debate, which at one point degenerated into playground repartee:
   “It’s worked before.”
   “It has never worked before.”
   “It has worked before.”
   “No, it hasn’t.”
   The shattering revelation came in response to the admirable Martha Radditch’s question on how each man’s faith—both are Catholics—would influence their policy, particularly on abortion.
   Faith had been a major issue when John F. Kennedy was running for office. Amid cries (from types now in the Tea Party) that electing him would “put the Pope in the White House.” he calmly insisted that he would never allow his faith to dictate American policy.
   Joe Biden said that his faith defines him and that Catholic social doctrine demands we care for those who cannot care for themselves. But in the Kennedy mold, said he would never impose his faith on others, and where abortion was concerned, would never put himself between a woman and her doctor.
   Paul Ryan said he could not separate his faith from his public life. A man running to become Vice-President of the United States openly denies a basic American tenet—separation of church and state. This from a party that deplores government interference in people’s lives. Clearly it’s only their financial lives, not their intimate personal lives.
   Paul Ryan is ready to impose his economic theories via Ayn Rand and his religion on the American people. It revives the concerns of those who worry that electing the wrong party could put a foreign and profoundly un-American entity into the White House.
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   (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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O brave New World, That Has Such People In It. (William Shakespeare)

10/10/2012

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CHIMERA

“O brave new world, that has such people in it!”
                                                 (Wm. Shakespeare)
   Scientists in Japan have achieved a startling breakthrough. After making complete cells from mouse DNA, they coaxed those cells into becoming stem cells and from those stem cells generated a whole mouse. There is no reason it could not be done with human beings.
   You have a beer, someone takes your DNA off the glass and uses it to produce a child as much yours as if made from your sperm or your egg. There’s more.
   The way is open to combine segments of DNA that would never combine on their own, a human heart and blood in the body of a pig, say, offering an endless supply of heart transplants and blood transfusions. Would it stop there? Some scientists would leap at the chance to create their own “Chimera,” the legendary creature part lion, part serpent, part goat. How about a human body with a chimpanzee brain, a gorilla body with a human brain?
   In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a humble salesman wakes up to discover he’s an insect. Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius is about a dog with the mind of a highly intelligent human. Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home has a talking bear who plays saxophone and seeks love with a human girlfriend. Philip Wylie’s pre-Superman novel, Gladiator has a protagonist with super strength. Finding no real use for it, he climbs to a mountain top, asks God why?, to be answered by a lightning bolt that strikes him dead.
   What is happening now is not fiction; it is the looming future of today’s young adults. It is the world in which their children will grow up. Any country that bans such experiments will quickly fall behind in science. Considering what happens to even the most beneficial scientific discoveries, antibiotics, say, heedlessly dumped into animal feeds producing deadly strains of resistant bacteria, what might be done with this new breakthrough is beyond scary.
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(TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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CREEPY

10/7/2012

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CREEPY
   Barack Obama gave him plenty of rope, and in their first debate, Mitt Romney made more “about faces” than a military drill team. He denied everything he’s been running on since he decided to join the radical right by lowering taxes for the rich, eliminating corporate taxes, de-regulating banking, eliminating the pre-existing clause for medical insurance, and you name it. Teapublicans must be having fits.
   NY Times columnist, David Brooks, hired as a conservative voice but unable to swallow Romney’s radical manifestos, tried to claim that the “real” Mitt Romney had emerged. How can he tell? What Romney revealed, not for the first time, is that his grip on “truth” is as squirmy as that of a shyster lawyer (he has a law degree from Harvard) reading “the fine print.”
   He says again and again that 4 million jobs were lost “under Obama’s watch,” not mentioning that Obama’s watch began with the Bush crash. It’s as if the owner of the cruise ship, Costa Concordia, the one that was run aground off the coast of Italy and whose captain deserted, blamed the coast guard who came to the rescue for the deaths and injuries.
   As a venture capitalist, Romney is a “problem solver,” a numbers guy who studies spread sheets and can trace subtle pathways to profit-generating goals. In a life built on amassing money, “truth” is whatever it takes to do the job. Business has gone global, and so have businessmen. Many Americans would hesitate to invest in Chinese manufacturers, hide money abroad, bet against the American dollar, but to Romney it’s just business and he’ll do or say whatever it takes to succeed. Staples, for example, his shining success, advertises “bargains” which you can’t actually buy. That others call this “lying” must truly puzzle him.
   The queasy feeling Romney generates is that of a numbers geek trying to lift personality from a spread sheet. He heeds his coaches and handlers, produces relentless smiles, the pained simper seen in the debate (photo above), makes glassy attempts at eye contact, even tries a few disastrous stabs at humor. It’s gotten him from pathetic to creepy.
   When you vote, try to imagine that guy in the Oval Office, dealing with the 99%, including the 47% of moochers and victims he despises. Try to imagine that dollar-glazed spread-sheet personality representing the U.S.A. to the world.
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      (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal