(Display Name not set)July 2004 Archives

Commenting on John Kerry's acceptance speech the other night on PBS, David Brooks described the Democrats as the nation's Mommy Party trying to co-opt the Republicans in their traditional role of Daddy Party. I nearly fell off my chair laughing at what he passes off as punditry.

Since nobody else seems to have noticed that indelible moment -- it's not even recorded here -- I felt the need to mention it as the Bobo Boy Wonder's deepest plunge yet into condescending juvenilia.

I don't disagree with his conventional wisdom that Kerry has to come off as a trustworthy commander in chief to get elected, though it makes you wonder why our sitting nincompoop in chief doesn't have to. But I object to Brooks's patronizing implication that the nation is a baby in diapers.

And now back to my summer hiatus.

This is John Perreault's good idea, which I'm adopting immediately. He calls it "summer hiatus."

Martha Bayles gets personal: She writes that Michael Moore lacks the courage of his convictions in "Farenheit 9/11" and should say what he means, "instead of relying on innuendo. But that would require guts, as opposed to a big gut." I guess she really doesn't like the guy.

"A picture on July 4 with an article about Gerhard Richter's book 'War Cut,' depicting his abstract painting 'No. 648-2,' was reproduced upside down and in reverse." From the correction on July 18 in The New York Times.

Everybody, including the blatherati, is touting the latest trend in the lit market: graphic novels. May we recommend a neglected category? Let's hear it for graphic muckraking.

Did someone say truth is the best defense and ridicule the best offense? If not, consider it said. Here's one example of ridicule that tells the truth, and here's another. Some may prefer this or this. We like these oneliners, forwarded to us by Abbie Conant, who got them from Irene Stuber, co-host of Abigail's Rebels:

"President Bush has unveiled his first campaign commercial, highlighting all of his accomplishments in office. That's why it's a 60-second spot." -- Jay Leno

"A new poll says that if the election were held today, John Kerry would beat President Bush by a double digit margin. The White House is so worried about this, they're now thinking of moving up the capture of Osama Bin Laden to next month." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush released his new $2.4 trillion federal budget. It has two parts: smoke and mirrors." -- Jay Leno

"Bush admitted that his prewar intelligence wasn't what it should have been. We knew that when we elected him." -- Jay Leno

"As you know President Bush gave his State of the Union Address, interrupted 70 times by applause and 45 times by really big words." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush says he has just one question for the American voter, 'Is the rich person you're working for better off now than he was four years ago?'" -- Jay Leno

"Kerry is well on his way to reaching his magic number of 2,162. That's the total number of delegates he needs to win the Democratic nomination. See, for President Bush it's different. His magic number is only 5. That's the number of Supreme Court judges needed to win." -- Jay Leno

"There was a scare in Washington when a man climbed over the White House wall and was arrested. This marks the first time a person has gotten into the White House unlawfully since President Bush." -- David Letterman

"The White House is now backtracking from its prediction that 2.6 million new jobs will be created in the U.S. this year. They say they were off by roughly 2.6 million jobs." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush said he was 'troubled' by gay people getting married in San Francisco. He said on important issues like this the people should make the decision, not judges. Unless of course we're choosing a president, then he prefers judges." -- Jay Leno

"There was an embarrassing moment in the White House earlier today. They were looking around searching for George Bush's military records. They actually found some old Al Gore ballots." -- David Letterman

"This week, both John Kerry and Wesley Clark are making campaign appearance with the guys who saved their lives in Vietnam. Meanwhile, President Bush is campaigning with a guy that once took a math test for him." -- Conan O'Brien

"The big story now is that President Bush is coming under attack for his service in the National Guard. The commanding officers can't remember seeing Bush between May and October of '72. President Bush said, 'Remember me? I'm the drunk guy.'" -- Jay Leno

"Dick Cheney finally responded today to demands that he reveal the details of the Enron meetings. This is what he said. 'I met with unnamed people, from unspecified companies, for an indeterminate amount of time, at an undisclosed location.' Thank God he cleared that up." -- Jay Leno

"Plans are being discussed as to who will replace Dick Cheney if he has to resign for health reasons. It's not easy for President Bush. He can't just name a replacement. He would first have to be confirmed by the oil, gas and power companies." -- Jay Leno

"The White House has now released military documents they say prove George Bush met his requirements for the National Guard. Big deal, we've got documents that prove Al Gore won the election." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush wants to build a space station on the moon. And from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars. You know what this means. He's drinking again." -- David Letterman

"The new Prime Minister of Spain has called the war in Iraq a disaster, and plans to bring his troops home as soon as possible. In fact, President Bush is so upset at Spain that he is now threatening to close down the border between Spain and the U.S." -- Jay Leno

"The U.S. Army confirmed that it gave a lucrative contract in Iraq to the firm once run by the Vice President Dick Cheney without any competitive bidding. When asked if this could be conceived as Cheney's friends profiting from the war, the spokesman said, 'Yes.'" -- Conan O'Brien

"Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has unveiled a new color-coded system to warn the public about different states of danger. Red is the highest state of alert, and it means that Dick Cheney is about to eat a mozzarella stick." -- Conan O'Brien

She made it up. That's what police now say about the 23-year-old woman who told them a gang of young men who "appeared to be of Muslim North African origin," attacked her on a suburban train near Paris because they thought she was a Jew. She said they drew swastikas on her, cut her hair and overturned a stroller with her 13-month-old child in it, while onlookers watched and did nothing, according to an AP report that we quoted and editorialized about on Sunday.

It's no comfort that many others besides me fell for the hoax and condemned the reported attack as one more loathsome instance of increasing anti-Semitic violence. In France, where hate crimes have soared in recent years, everyone from President Jacques Chirac to human rights activists expressed moral outrage: One French daily, Le Figaro, compared the purported onlookers who did nothing to defend the woman on "The Train of Shame" with witnesses who watched the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese on a street in Queens, N.Y., but failed to do anything either, including calling the police.

I don't know what kind of apology I should make for drawing the correct conclusion from an incorrect news story. The best I can do is quote regular Straight Up reader Shane Hockin, who writes with a wink that the hoax "sort of gives anti-Semites a bad name." My staff of thousands wishes I'd been clever enough to think of that.

Before being found dead, slumped forward in the passenger seat of a Volga sedan with his forehead on the dashboard and "a copeck-sized bullethole in the back of his head," he had made his reputation as a journalist much admired for his reports on the Russian mafia and business corruption, among other pervasive social conditions hindering democratic reform in the former Soviet Union. Police at the scene of the execution-style killing said the bullet was fired from a 10 millimeter or .45 caliber automatic pistol.

The journalist was not Paul Klebnikov, the 41-year-old American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine who was "struck by four bullets" and shot dead Friday night in Moscow on the sidewalk outside his office, when "one of three men sitting in a Zhiguli sedan pulled out a Makarov semiautomatic pistol and started firing," according to the Baltimore Sun.

But like Klebnikov, "who began reporting on Eastern Europe and Russia for Forbes in 1989" and "spent years tracking the shadowy deals that underpin many of Russia's personal fortunes," he tried not to worry about his personal safety. More than that, he tended to dismiss threats against his life. His name was Mikhail Milyukin. And he received letters like this:

Your piece about St. Petersburg's "Cosa Nostra" was one of the most stupid, misleading piles of shit I have ever heard anyone gob out on national television. There is no such thing as "the Russian Mafia." The whole idea of a Mafia has been made up by people like you who try and make money out of selling scare stories. ... Our business methods have to be ruthless sometimes if only because in this stupid, backward country of ours there exists no understanding of supply and demand and free enterprise. If someone lets you down in business there is no real legal mechanism to enforce a contract or to have him pay compensation. So we break his legs, or threaten his children. Next time he'll do what he's supposed to. A man doesn't pay a share of his profits to his partners, we'll burn his house to the ground. This is just business. You are an intelligent man. You should understand this. And yet you continue to sell us the dead horse about the Mafia. A number of my business colleagues are very angry about this. ... So a word of warning. Stop it now. Because the next time you choose to describe joint ventures, traders, private businessmen, cooperatives as Mafia-run, you might not live to regret it.

We don't know whether Klebnikov received such letters, in part because nobody has yet chronicled his life with the richness of detail that Philip Kerr has brought to the story of Mikhail Milyukin's life. Chances are that nobody ever will, because few writers are as expert as Kerr in painting a word portrait, but also because Milyukin is, after all, a fictional character. He appears in Kerr's superb, out-of-print, 1993 thriller "Dead Meat."

Given its continuing relevance and its remarkable depiction of a society in collapse -- not to mention that Kerr writes the smartest, most vivid thrillers around -- maybe some publisher will see fit to put it back in print.

Does the United Kingdom have its own Michael Moore? We nominate Robin Cook, Britain's former foreign secretary and erstwhile leader of the House of Commons. Does the United States have another Michael Moore? We nominate Robert Greenwald, the noted filmmaker who's targeting the Fox News Channel. Any seconds? 

Here to entertain you: Click on this link.

David Johnston's report on how the "Powers That Be" conned Americans into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is buried so deep within the The New York Times Website today that it's virtually invisible.

You can always second-guess the way an article is played, of course, and the Times editors decided Johnston's rated only page 12 treatment in the print edition. It's not breaking news, after all, and it's just one of many stories fleshing out details of the scathing Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's prewar intelligence failures.

But the story's importance is clear, given the fact that we must wait until after the presidential election in November for the official verdict from the Senate committee on whether our bonehead Maximum Leader and his minions pressured the intelligence community into supporting a preconceived policy to invade Iraq.

Johnston describes how a CIA analyst doubted the information obtained from a crucial Iraqi source -- a defector code named "Curveball" -- claiming that Iraq had mobile bioweapons laboratories. When the analyst saw that Secretary of State Colin Powell was going to cite Curveball's information in his speech to the U.N. to justify going to war with Iraq, he expressed his concern.

"But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force," Johnston writes, "rejected the worries as irrelevant" and sent the analyst this e-mail:

Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.

It didn't matter that the analyst, an expert in biological warfare, was "the only American intelligence official" to meet Curveball before the war, that Curveball showed up at their meeting with "a terrible hangover," and that "intelligence officials were not even sure of Curveball's true identity." It didn't matter because "this war's going to happen regardless." 

Powell, who by his own account vetted "the backup material for each piece of evidence" cited in his U.N. speech and who demanded "multiple sources for every assertion," nonetheless included Curveball among the four sources who provided "eyewitness accounts" and "first-hand descriptions" that served as a basis for invading Iraq. (He has said he never heard any doubts about Curveball's information.)

Indeed, as the world watched and listened on Feb. 5, 2003, six weeks before the U.S. invasion began, Powell told the U.N. Security Council: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

In his speech, Powell went on to say:

One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.

The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. ...

The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. ...

This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.

A second source. An Iraqi civil engineer in a position to know the details of the program confirmed the existence of transportable facilities moving on trailers.

A third source, also in a position to know, reported in summer, 2002, that Iraq had manufactured mobile production systems mounted on road-trailer units and on rail cars.

Finally, a fourth source. An Iraqi major who defected confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.

"Yet now," Johnston writes, "all four of the sources on whom Mr. Powell relied concerning the supposed mobile biolabs seem at best unreliable, and at worst fictional. Curveball has been discredited. Another source was deemed a 'fabricator' which in intelligence circles is tantamount to a designation as untrustworthy. The third source said the information needed further checking. The fourth source could not corroborate Curveball's claims."

Although we'll have to wait until after the November election for the Senate to officially identify the "Powers That Be" who misled us into the war in Iraq, can there be any question about who arrogantly made the case for the invasion? Can there be any question about who has mismanaged the aftermath of the so-called military victory at the human cost of a thousand American soldiers' lives so far and thousands more wounded?

Can there be any question about who caused the death of thousands of Iraqi civilians and tens of thousands of civilian casualties? Or who has emptied the pockets of U.S. taxpayers of $122 billion to pay for the war so far, with no end in sight?

We don't really need to wait for the Senate to tell us. We already know who the Powers That Be are. We know their names. We know their style. We know their miscalculations. We know their arrogance. And we know we need a change.

The AP reports that we are all Jews under the skin, except for the anti-Semites.

PARIS -- A gang of young men attacked a woman riding a suburban train with her infant child, cutting her hair and drawing swastikas on her stomach. Other passengers watched but did nothing, police reported.

Police said the gang of six set upon the 23-year-old woman on a suburban train north of Paris and grabbed her backpack where they found identity papers that showed an address in the capital's well-to-do 16th district. "There are only Jews in the 16th," one of the group of attackers said.

It turns out "the young woman, who was not identified, was not Jewish and no longer lived in the district," according to the police. Ironic? Yes. But what the attack really says is that when it's up to anti-Semites -- whether neo-Nazis or Muslim extremists or, as reported in this case, a gang of suburban thugs, some of whom "appeared to be of Muslim North African origin" -- the rest of us are Jews. No one is exempt.

Since some critics have gone apeshit about the upcoming Brian Wilson release -- see Newsweek's Malcolm Jones on "Smile," which he calls (unbelievably, to my ears) a "masterpiece," or Deborah Solomon's interview with Wilson in The New York Times Magazine -- we offer our friend Bill Reed's more explicable Beach Boys adulation:

In the 1960s, while nearly all my rock crit brethren had the good sense to direct their energies toward writing about such trendoid outfits as Martha Proud and the Birth of God, AxeMeat, Urban Sprawl, the Desi-Rays, and the Triffids, etc., I had the "bad fortune" to be deeply strung out on the uncool Beach Boys. I was flakking for the BB's at a time when they couldn't even get arrested.

Pre-Beatles, they were the hottest thing in American pop, but by the time of the so-called Summer of Love, in 1967, they were considered a joke. A 1969 concert at the Fillmore East was a near disaster. They came on stage in ice-cream colored suits. Fillmore habitués liked their groups grungy, raw and au courant, and the Good Humor apparition on the stage couldn't help but bring out their sadistic side. By the end of their set the Beach Boys were reduced to goosing each other and acting like panicky circus ponies.

The "Boys" were so desperate for coverage of any kind, that I received their full cooperation during this period on numerous pieces I wrote about them in Rolling Stone, Fusion and in ROCK. For ROCK I had the opportunity to do a phone Q & A with the then notoriously reclusive Brian Wilson.

BRIAN: Have you ever talked to Mick Jagger?
ME: I never have. Why?
BRIAN: Are you going to?
ME: I'd sure like to. But I don't foresee it in the near future. Why?
BRIAN: I think you should.
ME: What do you mean?
BRIAN: I think he would be a really interesting rap. He's in this movie "Performance," where he's dressed like a girl, and I think he'd make a really interesting rap.
ME: Uh, okay.

In the same publication, after penning a slightly uncharitable piece about bubble gum music purveyors, Buddah Records, I received a phone call from its president, Neil Bogart, that essentially amounted to a death threat. It seems I had deemed most of their product "Mafia Rock." Big deal. It was the Sixties. I could write anything I wanted to. Big Man did manage to scare little me, though; in the end, I begged Bogart's forgiveness.

The last time I wrote about Bill Reed, in April, he was just back from Japan, where he'd arranged the Japanese re-issue of jazz singer Pinky Winters's CD, "Rain Sometimes," which he'd produced. He also sold other masters for Japanese releases, but it turns out the trip was largely a bust. One company went belly up since his return, and others didn't follow through on their agreements.

The main problem, he says, is illustrated by the following joke. Man #1 goes into a Japanese business meeting and makes Man #2 across the table an offer: "How would you like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?" Man #2 replies: "Let me think about it." "In other words," Bill says, "the Japanese will absolutely not come out with an unequivocal NO. They consider doing so an insult. Arghhhhhhh ..."

Meantime, he has been working on a sequel to his funny, affecting memoir "Early Plastic," and he's peddling it to agents and/or publishers. It's called "Son of Early Plastic," and includes Bill's paean to the Beach Boys as well as passages like this:

In 1970, I sold my first article to a national magazine article, Rolling Stone. Even at that relatively late date, RS was not the impregnable corporate monolith that it would eventually become, and so I was able to slip this one in "over the transom." Of course, it helped that I was writing about some unreleased Bob Dylan recordings I came across while rummaging through the closet of a Woodstock crash pad. None of the material was known to have existed beforehand, so it was basically a case of "Stop the presses ... Film at eleven." A scoop as it were. ...

Eventually I began to write more, shall we say, "grown-up" material for non-rock publications such as: Variety, the L.A. Reader, the San Francisco Examiner, International Documentary, and a number of others. For a short while, I even wrote for TV sitcoms, namely the hit series "One Day at a Time." Yet another fluke ... do we detect a pattern here?

And this:

My best luck with "go away kid you bother me" material was in the 1980s at the free paper, the L.A. Reader, which eventually became New Times, which finally ceased to exist altogether somewhere around 2001. The Reader's editor James Vowell was almost always receptive to my ideas, and several of my personal favorites in this collection ["Son of Early Plastic"] -- especially the Sally Marr and Lord Buckley profiles -- first appeared in its pages.

The Reader was far from being the only Southern California publication to undergo multiple foldings and mergers. Few magazines and/or newspapers in SoCal have been so re-conglomorized in recent times as Los Angeles magazine.

Somewhere around 1990 one its editors approached me to write an article on L.A.'s legendary black nightlife district Central Avenue. That's the sort of thing I usually had to beg to do. I completed the assignment in record time, then waited for the article to appear, followed by a check. But weeks went by, then months. ... I had been aware that during the interim, Los Angeles had been sold again and was skedded for yet another format overhaul. I phoned them. The long and the short of it was my editor who had assigned the piece was no longer there, nor was their any record of the assignment. How much was I to have been paid? I told the truth. $5,000. A few days later I received the check. Years later my head stills reels at the trusting efficiency of that transaction. I might try it again with Los Angeles some day just to see if it still works: "Hello, you don't know me, but ..." (Ah, the free-lancer's life.)

Any agents or publishers out there interested in getting a more complete look at "Son of Early Plastic," feel free to contact me. I'll be happy to let Bill know.

The New York Times keeps shooting itself in the foot. OK, sometimes it shoots itself in the head. Anyway, today's foot shot is a photo of Republican Sen. Trent Lott misidentified in the caption as "the majority leader." Caption errors are so common in so many newspapers that it seems churlish to single this one out. But an error such as this speaks volumes about the Times's reliability.

How could the editors of the so-called newspaper of record forget that Lott was ousted as the Senate's majority leader in December 2002? It was in all the papers. You remember the scandal that led to his ouster. It followed Lott's comment at the 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond that he was proud of Thurmond's segregationist record. That was in all the papers, too. Even in the Times.

The mis-captioned photo accompanies a story by Carl Hulse and David E. Sanger, "Republicans Move Fast to Make Experience of Edwards an Issue." Somebody was alert enough not to include Lott's photo in the online posting of the story. Hooray for the online Times.

Of course, there's no mention of the scandal or the ouster on Lott's Web site, which says merely that he now chairs the Senate's "powerful Rules Committee" and the Aviation Subcommittee, and is a member of the Finance Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. But that's to be expected.

Nor is there any mention of Lott's "long-term association with a white supremacist hate group, the Council of Conservative Citizens." (The Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch & Militia Task Force calls the CCC "the reincarnation of the infamous White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s," Steve Rendell recounts, terming it "the successor to the 'uptown Klan.'") But that's to be expected, too.

I suppose there's no point going over old ground like this except to suggest that it's time the Times got its act together and that good ol' boy Lott doesn't have it so bad when he can be mistaken for Sen. Bill Frist, of Tennessee, the Republican good ol' boy who replaced him as majority leader. That's in the record, too, even at the Times.

Attacks on "Farenheit 9/11" from the usual suspects on the right are not surprising. But when it comes from the left it's a story of "man bites dog."

Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" from City Lights Books, makes the case that Michael Moore's flick is a "Stupid White Movie." Jensen writes:

The sad truth is that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a bad movie, but not for the reasons it is being attacked in the dominant culture. It's at times a racist movie. And the analysis that underlies the film's main political points is either dangerously incomplete or virtually incoherent."

Jensen martials a detailed argument supporting his contention. He concedes that "it may strike some as ludicrous" to assert, as he does, that "Farenheit 911" is also fundamentally "a conservative movie." But he points out, accurately, that it buys into a false mythology:

[T]he film endorses one of the central lies that Americans tell themselves, that the U.S. military fights for our freedom. This construction of the military as a defensive force obscures the harsh reality that the military is used to project U.S. power around the world to ensure dominance, not to defend anyone's freedom, at home or abroad.

Even so, anyone who expects a profound, thorough analysis of what's wrong with U.S. policies from a Michael Moore flick is kidding himself. The trouble is, Jensen approaches "Farenheit 9/11" as if it were an academic paper published in Foreign Affairs. This is not to excuse Moore's insulting stereotypes, wrongheaded generalizations, implicit racism and other egregious mistakes -- all charges that Jensen levels against it. At the same time, however, the critique illustrates something delusional in Jensen's expectations.

My own reaction to the flick was favorable. I knew most of the movie's theme and variations beforehand, as anybody would who follows the news. So very little of the information was revelatory. But I wasn't bored, largely because I found the movie funny.

The moment I liked best -- it made me laugh out loud -- is a whacky one that some critics have singled out as juvenile: Moore commandeers an ice cream truck, sort of a Mr. Softee truck, and circles the street near the Capitol while reading portions of the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker. Along with the words, you hear the innocuous music of the truck's ice cream jingle. It's Moore's comic response to an interview with Rep. John Conyers Jr., of Michigan, which is both hilarious and devastating for what Conyers says about the Congressional legislative process in general and the Patriot Act in particular.

Another detail I loved is the video clip showing our bonehead Maximum Leader reading to the school children in Florida on 9/11 while the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are under attack. It's bizarre and funny because of the goofy look on his face, a moment stretched out for emphasis in slow motion. The bonehead appears to be channeling Alfred E. Newman's "What Me Worry?" gaze from MAD magazine. For that alone, the flick was worth seeing.

Two fascinating books: They're wonderfully short and easy to read (if a bit repetitive). One is "Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern." The other is "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" (with a terrific bibliography). They're both by John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and formerly professor of politics at Oxford University.

Both offer what seem like simplifications of more complex ideas written for general readers, but they are provocative. Here's an informative if scathing review, a bare minimum of which I agree with. It begins accurately:

John Gray has a bone to pick. His latest book, Straw Dogs, takes aim at a host of targets in what appears to be a wholesale deconstruction of human thought. Religion, humanism, philosophy, belief in progress (indeed, belief in anything), industrialization, even civilization itself has, according to Gray, kept us from realizing our true nature: that we are just one more species of animal.

Gray turns everything on its head, claiming for example that Al Qaeda, far from being a reversion to medieval thinking, is peculiarly rooted in the Enlightenment not unlike such diametrically opposed Western ideologies as Marxism and humanism. The main culprit for what's wrong with humanism (as we've come to understand it) is, in his view, the Positivism of Auguste Comte, a philosophy derived via Saint-Simon. I take Gray's seeming pessimism for well-substantiated realism.

Gray, you should know, is a former conservative who did a one-eighty. ("To the right, he is an apostate; to the left, a sinner who repented," says the British magazine Prospect. To Anthony Dworkin "he is a progressive who does not believe in progress.")

Here's a chapter from Gray's 1998 book "False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism," which George Soros has described as "a powerful analysis of the deepening instability of global capitalism." And here's Gray writing in the New Statesman two weeks after 9/11 about the impact of the attacks in New York and Washington on the idea of globalization:

[They] inflicted a grievous blow to the beliefs that underpin the global market. In the past, it was taken for granted that the world will always be a dangerous place. Investors knew that war and revolution could wipe out their profits at any time. Over the past decade, under the influence of ludicrous theories about new paradigms and the end of history, they came to believe that the worldwide advance of commercial liberalism was irresistible.

Financial markets came to price assets accordingly. The effect of the attack on the World Trade Center may be to do what none of the crises of the past few years -- the Asian crisis, the Russian default of 1998 and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, an over-leveraged hedge fund -- was able to do. It may shatter the markets' own faith in globalisation.

He continues:

It is worth reminding ourselves how grandiose were the dreams of the globalisers. The entire world was to be remade as a universal free market. No matter how different their histories and values, however deep their differences or bitter their conflicts, all cultures everywhere were to be corralled into a universal civilisation.

What is striking is how closely the market liberal philosophy that underpins globalisation resembles Marxism. Both are essentially secular religions, in which the eschatological hopes and fantasies of Christianity are given an Enlightenment twist. In both, history is understood as the progress of the species, powered by growing knowledge and wealth, and culminating in a universal civilisation. Human beings are viewed primarily in economic terms, as producers or consumers, with -- at bottom -- the same values and needs.

Postscript: In yesterday's New Statesman Gray critiqued the latest book by Francis ("the end of history") Fukuyama, "State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st century." Read the review and see how persuasive Gray is. He takes Fukuyama apart, drawing a conclusion especially pertinent to Iraq.

Can you believe this? "I pray whoever is leading the country will be led by God, and I believe this current administration answers to a higher calling," said Mr Bernsen, a well-known jazz musician living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

"I don't wear the man's shoes, but there's enough fruit that falls from that tree to tell me what I need to know. I believe George Bush has surrounded himself with enough of the right people for me to know he is a godly person."

It's helpful to know that Randy Bernsen is a godly person himself, if being a member the Calvary chapel mega-church in Fort Lauderdale and of a group called Christian Jazz Artists does the trick. More helpful would be the answer to this question: Is Bernsen's jazz godly?

Judging from this recording Live @Tavern 213, I'd say not a chance. Even recorded live -- scratch that, especially recorded live -- he sounds no better than canned. Some folks, like these reviewers, would beg to differ. Make up your own mind. Here's a home video sample of Bernsen playing solo.)

Admittedly, he does have a way with a title. Here's a cutie: "Music for Planets, People & Washing Machines." Maybe he sounds better on that CD, although I doubt it. But whatever his jazz sounds like, as a polite friend says, "if he really thinks the stuff falling from that tree is fruit, he must have the eating habits of a coprophagus."

Postscript from a reader: "Enjoying being petty: I listened, watched, and winced. I think 'canned' is extremely generous. Why is this no surprise after reading his quote?"

Spoke to the painter Mary Beach the other day for the first time in a long, long time. As she said, "It's been a thousand years." When we knew each other back in the late '60s in San Francisco, we collaborated on a little magazine together with the French writer Claude P�lieu and the artist Norman O. Mustill. It was called The San Francisco Earthquake.

Mary and Claude, who lived together, were workaholics when I knew them. They invariably spent their days writing, translating and slicing up reams of magazine illustrations for pop collages. But after work they partied. Their apartment up the hill from North Beach was the scene of many drunken evenings. The two of them were incomparable hosts who prized intelligence, wit and balls above everything. Next came barbed gossip about overrated literary poobahs that usually ended in fits of laughter.

At the time, Mary was the publisher of Beach Books, Texts & Documents, which brought out Mustill's "Flypaper," William S. Burroughs's "APO-33," P�lieu's "With Revolvers Aimed Fingerbowls," Carl Weissner, P�lieu and Burroughs's "So Who Owns Death TV?" They're collectors' items now.

Earthquake, which lasted for five issues and was distributed by City Lights Books, also published those writers and artists, along with many others: Charles Plymell, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ed Ruscha, Dick Higgins, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Gail Dusenbery, Janine Pommy-Vega, Doug Blazek, Sinclair Beiles, Harold Norse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Liam O'Gallagher and Nanos Valaoritis.

The first issue, co-edited with Gail Chiarrello (then using her married name Dusenberry), was printed by Mary's future son-in-law, Charles Plymell, on the old Multilith press in his bedroom. Charlie printed a lot of firsts on that Multilith, including Robert Crumb's first Zap Comix (scroll down), No. 0.

Claude died 18 months ago at 68, long regarded in his native France and elsewhere in Europe as a major figure among counterculture writers. Mary, who is 85, continues to paint. Here, for instance, is her portrait of Allen Ginsberg, and here is her portrait of Claude P�lieu. She'd probably laugh at me for mentioning that she was briefly interned in a Nazi prison camp and that, yes, she's a relative of Sylvia Beach, as the Enderlin Gallery notes, or that she had her first solo show in 1943 in Pau, France, and that she won the Prix du Dome at the Salon des Femmes Peintres in 1959 and 1st Prize, Vichy, France, Silver Medal, also in 1959.

Charlie, who refers to himself now as a white-bearded old poet, continues working, too. Probably best known for his prose memoir "The Last of the Moccasins" -- here's an excerpt -- he's the author of 11 books (scroll down), among them "Apocalypse Rose" and "Neon Poems" (two of his earliest) and "Hand On The Doorknob" (his latest). He's also the co-founder (with his wife Pamela and Josh Norton) of Cherry Valley Editions.

Mary's literary papers are held by New York University in the Beach Archive at The Fales Library & Special Collections. Mine are held by the Special Collections divison of Northwestern University Library. I don't know where Charlie's papers are. Hey, Charlie -- who's got 'em?

Postscript: "It's Wichita State University." -- < EM>CP

Speaking of old friends and old poets, Leon Freilich sent today's commentary:

In the lexicon on the Hill,
For both the dull and the brainy,
The newest expletive
Is, "Senator, go Cheney."