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FLAVORS OF THE WEEK

11/30/2011

Flavors of the Week
    Can anyone make sense of the Republican circus now spiraling to its climax like a mid-West twister about to snake down from the under belly of a cloud and wreck the landscape? What a
tempting field for future PhDs in politics, psychiatry, mass hysteria, and side shows.
    A Republican pundit called three of them “protest” candidates whose rise in the polls indicated dissatisfaction with the field. These are Michele Bachmann, who lives in her own delusional world, Herman Cain, a carny barker to whom “truth” is inconvenient, and Rick Perry, whose fragile hold on his own thoughts makes you wonder how he survived as a military pilot, unless his C-130 had a flawless autopilot so all he had to do was take off and land. Okay for a Texas governor, but not for the U.S. President who may never stop piloting the ship of State.
    Ron Paul has never risen to the top, but his supporters will stick to the end. Rick Santorum’s smarmy religiosity and “right to life” mumbling scares all except fellow ideologues. And Jon Huntsman may yet get his 15 minutes of fame.
    Some feel sure that Mitt Romney will be the last man standing. A candidate as substantial as a hologram may confort panicky Republicans who can turn him into anything they please. But he lost many at a debate when the moderator asked, “How many here do not believe in evolution?”
    Most hands shot up, and then, as if measuring the crowd, Romney slowly raised, his, a sheepish smile on his handsome central casting face. Does anyone imagine that if all hands had stayed down, Romney would have raised his? If he picked up a few Tea Party pawns, he lost more reasonable Republicans. Would a man who flutters in the wind make a good President? Which way would he flutter when facing powerful world leaders and the stakes are life and death?
    The current flavor of the week is Professor Newton Leroy Gingrich, PhD, academic, historian, idea man, and smartest guy in the room. Despite his present high standing in the polls, one pundit dismissed him saying, “The problem for Newt, is that he doesn’t wear well.”
    Now that is serious, because politicians, like actors, must wear well, Try to imagine Newt in a starring role: Hamlet? The Godfather? Terminator? How about The Man who Came to Dinner? I’ve got it! The Bogart role in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. At least he’s mean enough.

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INTERSECTING WORLDS

11/29/2011

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Intersecting Worlds
My list began with my personal address book, plus names sent by readers, others cribbed from mail sent by groups like Dance Theater Workshop. Even when recipients aren’t visible, you can sometimes see them using HTML Anyone can get off my list with a one-word email, “Remove.” I hope you won’t want to.
   My blog, Reality Check, was inspired by Barack Obama. Athough not all my readers admire him, some keep reading anyway, for which I’m grateful. I try to keep myself out of most posts. Today is the exception. In the photo, left, I’m dancing with Martha Graham.
   Erving Goffman wrote an academic best-seller, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He revealed that how we act depends on where we are and who we are with. I’ll try to identify who I become in varying contexts.
   Before company comes, we (Liz and I) vacuum the apartment and tidy up. I close the door to my work room which is beyond tidying up.
   If I go to a meeting of Dancers Over 40, I wear an Italian sport jacket, gray slacks, maroon shirt, paisley tie, to project an image of an over-the-hill but still dapper dancer.
   In conversation with someone stimulating (often female), if something amusing pops into my head, out it comes. I don’t want to be too over-the-hill.
   At home I allow the grouch to show. Liz seems not to mind much.
   On the (few) occasions I’m invited to a rehearsal of my old troupe, I’m a hoary oracle, passing on wisdom of eras past.
   At a local restaurant, I’m a neighborhood denizen who mostly orders matzo ball soup.
   To the Latino clerks in the local deli, I’m the character who’s willing to show them Charleston, Suzy-Q, mambo, cha-cha, conga moves, and in return they show me meringue and salsa.
   In my workroom, in front of my computer screen, I’m the writer who was put on the back-burner when hit by the unexpected, irrational, and irrepressible need to dance.
   To the youngest members of my family—five to nineteen—I’m a hopelessly adoring relic from a history-book world that can capture their attention for seconds at a time.
   To readers, I’m political, sentimental, angry, contemplative, and to some, mostly wrong.
   To those who email, I’m a grateful recipient and always try to answer.
   With my few remaining WW2 buddies, meeting via the Internet, I go back in time to a great adventure and terrible war, now cosseted in the glow of vanished youth.
   On the day after Obama is reelected, Reality Check will vanish and I will return to my novel of a world millennia in the future, when earth has a total of 5 million people, they all live a thousand years, each spiritually bonded with a sentient tree, and God has been mathematically proven to exist.

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A RAY OF LIGHT AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS

11/28/2011

A Ray of Light at the Heart of Darkness
    Absolute monarchies are easy to understand; all power, brutal or benevolent is at the top. Democracy is complex, elusive, an ideal as much as a system of governance, and each is unique. The ancient Greeks, made the first democracy, but only for highly ranked citizens. In the 13th Century, English and Scottish lords created a parliament and wrote Magna Carta, another democracy for top dogs. And today, the Congo is going to the polls.
    Belgium’s King Leopold II, once considered the Congo his personal property, his only idea to drain its wealth—copper, cobalt, ivory, diamonds, and gold. In central Africa, obscure, mysterious, it inspired Joseph Conrad’s meditation on inhumanity, The Heart of Darkness. Europeans who'd been there reported disease, starvation, cruelty, and death, eventually forcing King Leo to loosen his scaly claws, but for the Congolese, things did not improve. The colonial government still had only one job, to direct wealth into foreign bank accounts. Uranium from its mines went into the atom bombs that brought WW2 to an end, after which change crept in. But the missionaries who crept in too, had goals curiously like what had been before; only instead of gathering wealth, they gathered souls.
    Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first elected Prime Minister, made the mistake of accepting Soviet arms, and his Congolese rivals, backed by the U.S., drove him from office to be jailed and executed. That try for democracy died, followed by Joseph Mobutu, whose anti-communist posture reassured the west. But for the Congolese, nothing changed. In power for 32 years, his only aim was to swell his personal bank accounts.
    And now they go to the polls for the second time in their history hoping to create their own democracy from scratch. Throughout their long ordeal they have hung onto their strong sense of identity, which means great inner strength and resilience. The world is rooting for them.

BLACK FRIDAY, or THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF STUFF

11/27/2011

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Black Friday, or, the Unbearable Heaviness of Stuff
    Every car I ever owned was used, the best a 1955 Ford Victoria bought in 1962 for $150. Drove it to Logan, Utah,
and back. Others took me coast-to-coast and border to border. And I never owned a house.
    Yet I’ve been a reliable consumer, had record players and record collections from shellac, to vinyl, reel-to-reel tapes,
cassettes, CDs, and downloads. Bought the first tape recorder on the market, a Brush Soundmirror. Tried to get interested in clothes, but whatever I bought looked like it came from Sears Roebuck. except for my first civilian suit after the army, custom -made with a crescent shaped handkerchief pocket I drew myself. It came from Sears Roebuck.
    I’ve had plenty of other “stuff,” “gear,” “loot,” did my part for consumerism and the manufacturing industry. However, filling shelves and closets was never my idea of happiness. Imelda de Marcos and Evita Peron were into shoes, thousands of pairs each. I call that a fetish.
    Now, judging by Black Friday, fetish is all over the map. Lining up for 24 hours to buy stuff strikes me as desperation. Yet the media acts as if it were wacky but wonderful, like opera buffs who get on line at 6 AM and wait all day to see a show that night. I comprehend opera lovers, but not loot lovers.
    Toys, trinkets, TV sets churned out in some Asian country, soon busted or obsolete, clothing or video games out of fashion by next season. Has America always been such a spiritual blank, or did it get that way when I wasn’t looking? Is Black Friday all that’s left of the American Dream?
    Michele Bachmann wants an electrified double fence with a no-man’s land between, Herman Cain wants a moat with alligators, Rick Perry wants agents with night-vision binoculars, helicopters, and drones. All agree that the goal is an American Maginot line to keep out invading Mexicans looking for a piece of the American Dream.
    Could be doing them a favor.

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A NAGICAL MYSTERY

11/25/2011

A Magical Mystery
    I can do lots of things, but I can’t draw. I’m okay with it, but it does make me ponder what it’s like to be able to draw because except for me, drawing talent runs in my family. My mother painted fish and under water scenes on our bathroom walls, and flowers on every chest of drawers. (I thought all moms did that.) My younger brother drew surprisingly good likenesses of Hoover and Roosevelt, copied from a newspaper before the election of 1932. He was six . Both my daughters drew, and so does my grandson.   My grand niece, Julietta Cole, is a virtuoso. The cat picture, above, is hers, white pencil on black paper. The original was exhibited in the Southern Vermont Arts Center. You need a magnifying glass to see the pencil strokes..
    I got a drawing toy when I was ten years old. You put a picture of any kind under it, and it sent an image to a blank sheet that you could copy with a pencil. If people who draw can “see” the picture on the page before they put a pencil to it, it explains how they do it. So I asked, “Before you put a line on paper, do you 'see'the picture?" Mostly I got puzzled frowns.
    I also ask if they have eidetic memory, the ability to look at a picture, then “see” it in their minds after it is taken away. I don’t get a clear answer to that either. There are tests for eidetic memory but I don’t know if there is research linking it to people who can draw. Sculpting is like 3D drawing. I read that
Leonardo de Vinci, could hold a lump of clay in each hand, and simultaneously mold one into a man, the other into a woman. But Leonardo doesn’t count; he could do everything so much better than anyone else I think he was an ET. The fact is, people who can draw don’t know how they do it, anymore than math
geniuses know how they do numbers.
    My childhood neighbors, Paul Bordt and George Legnos a year older, told me that at Brooklyn Technical High School they were taking “Three Hand drawing.” I couldn’t wait. It was a freshman course and turned out to be “Freehand drawing.” We made meticulous renderings of machine parts, followed the next semester by mechanical drawing, where we used straight edges and French curves. I got pretty
good at that.
    But being able to wield no more than a pencil and have something materialize right before your eyes is a mysterious and magical gift.

CONSPICUOUS CORRUPTION

11/25/2011

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CONSPICUOUS CORRUPTION
    Over many dynasties and centuries, China’s royal palace in the Forbidden City was run by a bureaucracy of 100,000 eunuchs. To get a job, males had to be castrated, and not a few chose castration as a career path. Anyone needing a royal service, gave one hundred taels, say, to a low-ranking eunuch, and after all had taken their cut, six
taels might reach the intended recipient.
    Palace eunuchs ran a hopelessly corrupt eunocracy which vied with an equally corrupt officialdom and army, which finally ejected every
eunuch and locked the gates leaving them outside where they stayed wailing and weeping for months. If only cleaning out Congressional corruption were that easy.
    Corruption exists at three levels. The bottom is small payments to minor officials. I observed it in Russia when driven by an embassy offiicial. Stopped by a cop, she handed over a note, gave me a sheepish smile, and we were on our way. Here we have storekeepers who pay off safety inspectors and police officers who fix tickets for family and friends.
    Mid-level corruption is bribes to turn a blind eye to regulations. A tragic recent example was an earthquake in Sichuan, China, where a school built with sanded concrete collapsed killing thousands of children. Here, we have payments to ignore mine or construction safety, contaminated slaughterhouses, payoffs to election campaigns justified by the “money is speech” doctrine of the U.S. Supreme Court, which illustrates corruption at the highest level.
    High level corruption has the widest consequences. A small country tyrant skims export revenues and puts family members in charge of industries and ministries. In the U.S.A, banks and finance companies create fraudulent instruments that legalize theft, corrupt laws define corporations as “people,” and secretly financed election campaigns yield a hopelessly corrupt Congress.
    American corruption is clearly superior to the skulking variety of poor backward countries whose thieving tyrants don’t bother to hide their thievery. Ours has succeeded in branding itself as “democracy in action,” and is now so deeply ingrained that no one even recognizes it, except, maybe presidential
candidates Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer, Occupy, and other lone voices crying in the wind.

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CAT TALK, FOR PBS

11/23/2011

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"Cat Talk," a New Show for PBS
    PBS’s Car Talk is a hit. But I know a subject with three times the potential audience: Cat Talk.
    There are some 200 million cars n the U.S.A., but only one in 10 car owners is eager to talk about them,. There are 82 million pet cats and three out of four cat owners consider their cats fascinating fur people and gossip-worthy family members. Cat Talk would have a potential audience of 60 million, compared to 20 million for Car Talk.
    Non-cat people ask: “What’s there to talk about?”
    First of all, every cat is different from every other. Cat people love to talk about their cat’s uniqueness.
    ✼ My cat opens doors by turning the doorknob ( Photo
left, Woogie, opening Door, by Alfred Gescheidt.)
    ✼ My cat bats at the cuff of the pants or slacks of anyone who sits in a certain chair.
    ✼ My cat will only eat fresh bluefish.
    ✼ My cat only eats Fancy Feast salmon.
    ✼ My cats eat raw chicken livers and broiled chicken breasts.
    ✼ My cat caught a mouse in our new 18th floor condo.
    ✼ We live in the country and my cat caught an ermine.
    ✼ My cat is a talker. When I say “Good Morning,” he always answers.
    ✼ Our cat sits in my wife’s lap, but never in mine.
    ✼ A video of a piano-playing cat went viral on YouTube.
    ✼ TS Eliot inspired a hit musical called CATS. I’m a dog lover too, but were a musical titled DOGS looking for backers, count me out.
    ✼ A contented cat walks with its tail pointed straight up.

✼ ✼ Some cats perch on their owners shoulders, and one in NYC, was photographed observing the world while sitting on its owner’s head (Photo, left, photographer unknown).
    ✼ In the 1940s, musicians and music fans called each other “Cats.”
    ✼ After a decent meal, a cat will spend an hour or so licking and grooming, nose to the tip of its tail, as soothing to watch as a tank of tropical fish.
    ✼ Cat people and dog people differ, but that’s no reason they can’t be friends.
    ✼ People who are afraid of cats need psychiatric help.
    ✼ People who de-claw cats should be forcibly tattooed: “Cat Abuser.”
    People with cats often have dogs, but there’s no competition between the species. A dog considers a cat phlegmatic inscrutable, and pointless. A cat considers a dog flakey, excitable, and irrelevant. But occasionally a cat/dog pair will accept one another and closely bond. It gives one hope that maybe humans will begin to accept one another too some sunny day.

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HERMAN CAIN BLEW IT, SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

11/22/2011

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Herman Cain blew it, so what else is new?
    When Herman Cain was asked what he thought of Obama’s Libya policy, for 50 agonizing seconds, he squirmed in his chair deserted by his bull-guano gift of gab. Had his head not been as empty as a ping-pong
ball he might have spun out pearls of wisdom ala Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich about it being war without Congressional approval, or made up some dandy lies. But he blew it. Too bad, because watching him debate Barack Obama would have been better than The Three Stooges Meet Superman.
    It’s hard to comprehend how anyone in the U.S., much less a putative
presidential candidate, can be unaware of Libya, and its stark contrast with every other troubled Arab Spring, especially now with Syria slaughtering Syrians and Egyptian generals, having slyly let Tahrir Square pull their Hosni Mubarak
chestnut out of the fire, move to seize power, and did anyone think they wouldn’t?
    But Libyans did their own fighting and defeated a tyrant’s army. Obama gave crucial help, and although irritably scolded by Sen. John McCain, never put American boots on the ground which would have sunk us in yet another hopeless quagmire. (Thank our lucky stars McCain was not President!)
    Obama’s policy will be studied by historians and analyzed by cadets at West Point as a brilliant example of power not flaunted, not shock and awe-inspiring not a feckless frat boy fantasy, but a judicious response to a deeply complex, almost metaphysical problem that includes the intricate history of Arab culture and its growing importance in the world. Obama's Libya policy did not usurp the central role of Libyans, which is now the only Arab country that sees Americans as friends. John McCain, an honest warrior whose courage will always shine, was and is not equipped to comprehend it.
    As for Herman Cain, that 50 seconds of squirming silence revealed a numb dunderhead to even his densest supporters. So we will not likely see the final act of the Herman Cain Follies.

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Foggia Riot Photos Snapped Up by Associated Press

11/21/2011

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Foggia Riot Photos Snapped Up by the Associated Press by Gene Cowen
After we stopped flying combat in World War II, Stuart Hodes and I stayed on occupation duty in Italy. We published a base weekly newspaper called The Foggia Occupator. We were always on the lookout for news. I stumbled upon a food riot where the people in Foggia hijacked a train that was attempting to ship wheat out of the country.
(Photo, left) A man came stumbling off the hijacked train. When he saw my camera, he spread his arms to show a bleeding face, and said, “Look what they did to me! "

I photographed the beatings and rock- throwing and nearly got beaned with a rock myself. But I got the pictures, which we published in the Foggia Occupator. We also posted copies of the pictures—which I must say, were pretty good—on bulletin boards for the locals to see. A number of residents were delighted to see how well they photographed beating up black marketers.
(Photo Left) The rioters flushed people they said were black marketers off the train and beat them with clubs and sticks. No one, however, was killed.

    We had a long-standing arrangement with the Stars and Stripes in Rome. That was a “real” newspaper, and we often phoned in stories from southern Italy, in exchange for which they gave us supplies, such as flashbulbs, which we never seemed to have enough of.
    The day after the riot, I sent them, by courier plane, negatives and prints of the
riot pictures that I had taken.
(Photo left) The rioters somehow got a U.S. flag. That picture got me in a little bit of trouble because the military brass said it made it look as if this hijacking was run by
Americans.

    Shortly later I got a call from Mortimer Belshaw, the Associated Press correspondent in Rome, who said he liked the pictures and would I mind if he offered some to New York? I said I would be honored and promptly forgot the incident.
    About two weeks later, I got a letter from home. In it, my mother asked if I had seen those terrible food riots in Foggia. In the envelope were clippings from the New York Daily News, the Mirror and the Journal-American. There were my pictures. I was famous! Or was I? The credit lines said simply, “Associated Press Photos.”
    Well, if not famous, then maybe I was rich. I had heard of news organizations paying large sums of money for good pictures. I quickly took the next Air Corps plane to Rome to look up AP correspondent Belshaw. He greeted me warmly and said that when he offered the pictures to New York, it was coincidental with former New York mayor Fiorella La Guardia’s taking over as roving ambassador to deal with food shortages in Europe. So the pictures were timely and lots of U.S.papers used them.
    "What are they worth?” I asked Belshaw.
    "We have a standard free-lance rate of three dollars a picture,” he said. “New York took seven of them, so I can give you twenty-one dollars.”
    Twenty-one dollars!
    I don’t cry readily, but I had a hard time fighting back tears right then. I thought about it for a while and realized there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. AP had the pictures, which I had taken while in uniform and on duty, with a military camera, so they weren’t even my personal property.
    "I don’t want the twenty-one dollars,” I said. “But could you give me twenty-one dollars worth of flashbulbs for the paper? We never can get enough of them."
    He agreed readily and as I got up to leave, Belshaw invited me to have a cup of coffee with him. No, I was soured on the whole relationship. So all I did was tuck the flashbulb packages under my arm and, thoroughly deflated, slumped off to the next plane back to Foggia.

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POST-MODERN POLITICS

11/20/2011

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Post-Modern Politics
    About 30 years ago, Post-Modern and De-construction took over the world. There was post-modern architecture (photo left), art, history, politics, and criticism. Dance stabbed at post-modern too with interesting if meager results. De-construction, invented by a French-Algerian philosopher, Jacques Derrida, shook up academe. Young job-seeking PhDs knew being “fer or agin” could determine a hire. Read Derridah if you dare. "[Writing] thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos." Logos means: word, speech, opinion, account, reason, expectation, if that helps.
    There were fascinating post-modern writers, Michel Foucault in particular, yet to me, the sum total added up to: Words can mean anything you want them to mean You can interpret anything to mean anything, Ergo: Nothing means anything.
    Yet de-construction has re-arisen, like a zombie, from a grave.
    Ron Paul: How do you pay for a tax cut? I think that’s the wrong principal because when you give people their money back, it’s their money, you don’t have to pay for it
    Michele Bachmann: The Affordable Health Care Act has opened the door for public dollars to be used to terminate pregnancies.
    Herman Cain: America wants a leader, not a reader.
    Newt Gingrich: You’re totally poor, you’re in a school that’s failing with a teacher that’s failing. ... These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school.
    Rick Santorum: ... We have vaccines in schools to prevent communicable diseases...this disease [cervical cancer] is spread through sexual contact.. Unless 11 year old girls in the state of Texas are encouraged to participate in that activity, this is not something that the government should be doing.
    John Huntsman: A whole lot of companies can afford to have lobbyists and lawyers on Capitol Hill. Let's recognize the reality that they're all paying 35%. We need to lower that to 25%.
    Rick Perry: It’s three agencies of government that are gone when I get there, Education, Commerce, and...uh.... um... er...?
    Mitt Romney: We’re going to let the lawyers sort out what to do and what he didn’t need to do, but certainly what you want to do is to have the agreement of all the people in leadership of our government, as well as our friends around the world.
    Is that clear?

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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