Straight Up |: January 2006 Archives

We've posted 1033 items since this blog began 902 days ago on Aug. 11, 2003. That's more than one a day, including weekends. Add to that a year's worth of daily blogging earlier at MSNBC.com. So we've come to a decision: Enough already. We're looking to cut down.

Don't cry. We'll keep posting. How could we not? There's too much at stake to flat-out quit. Not that we kid ourselves about the megamighty impact we've made. But until we get through a few offline projects, which will take the rest of the winter, blogging will have less urgency for us. In other words, it won't be the first thing we do every day or any day.

That said, how about a little sweetener? We mean the illustration, below. It came to us in an e-mail from a friend, and we couldn't stop ourselves from posting it. Nor from linking to this great lede: "The newspaper you are reading has been lovingly compiled by hundreds of humans who urinated into plastic measuring cups for the privilege of bringing it to you." Nor this -- the bust of Benny F -- 'cuz it jumps out of the screen like you won't believe. And dint he say sumpin 'bout liberty vs. security?

Postscript: Feb. 1 -- After watching the disgusting love-in last night in the House of Disreputables, where the Bullshitter-in-Chief gave his Unstate of the Union, we are trying our best to keep from posting what we thought. But we can't help telling you that the spectacle -- topped off by Cheney Boy's thumbs up and instant analyses that dripped like the end of a warm piss -- was enough to make us gag.

Mary Beach -- the painter, translator and writer (and an old friend and literary collaborator) -- died last Thursday. She was 86. Her son, Jeffrey Beach, tells me she died of cancer. It had been diagnosed several months ago. She is also survived by a daughter, Pamela, and a granddaughter, Elizabeth, both of Cherry Valley, N.Y., and a grandson, William, of Rochester. A memorial is to be held on Sunday, beginning at 2 p.m., in Cherry Valley, at 142 Main St., where Mary had been living.

I wrote about Mary Beach briefly a year ago when some of her collages were exhibited as part of a group show, "326 Years of Hip," at The Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Museum on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Some of Mary's texts and visuals -- the one below left, for example, and another below right -- appeared in our little magazine, The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE, back in the '60s.

Mary devoted much of her time to translating French author Claude Pélieu's many books into English. She and Claude were together for more than 40 years. They were married in 1975. He died in 2003, and friends say she never truly recovered from his death. Pierre Joris wrote his obituary for Le Monde and translated a late '60s poem of Claude's from "Jukebox." (Le Monde cut the poem, Joris says, but it was posted along with the obit on a University of Buffalo listserve. Click the link.)

Hammond Guthrie has put up a tribute to Mary Beach on his Web site, which he tells me will grow. At the moment it has an obituary and photos of Mary that he put together from various sources; also a short reminiscence he asked me to send, along with cover illustrations of our little magazine collaborations from the '60s and some of the books she brought out as a publisher. My reminiscence is a slightly updated version of Memory Lane, which I'd posted here in 2004, after speaking with her for the first time in a long time. As she said: "It's been a thousands years." Six months later I visited her in Cherry Valley and took her to lunch, which turned out to be a tunafish sandwich -- a sad coda as I think of it now.

Here is my small, updated reminiscence about our time together in San Francisco from 1967 to 1969, when we collaborated on SFoEQ together with Pélieu, Norman O. Mustill and Carl Weissner:

Mary and Claude 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. Sometimes we spent the same sort of evenings at Mustill's place in San Anselmo, where he kicked the party up a notch.

At the time, Mary was the publisher of Beach Books, Texts & Documents, which brought out William S. Burroughs's "APO-33," Claude's "With Revolvers Aimed Fingerbowls," the Pélieu-Burroughs-Weissner collaboration "So Who Owns Death TV?" and Norm's "Flypaper," a demonic collection of figurative collages in black and white.

It was evident from "Flypaper" and even more so from the blazing abstract artworks hanging in his livingroom -- riotous wall-size collages made of billboard fragments in full bloody color -- that Mustill was the genius among us to rival Uncle Bill.

Earthquake lasted for five issues. Contributors included Burroughs, Weissner, Pélieu, Mustill, 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, Nanos Valaoritis, Charles Plymell and too many others to name.

Charley printed the first SFoEQ, left, on an old Multilith press in his bedroom. (He and Mary's daughter, Pam, were living together.) That issue had a cover by Mustill and was co-edited by Gail Chiarello (then using her married name Dusenbery). Charley printed a lot of firsts on that Multilith, including Robert Crumb's first Zap Comix, No. 0.

Mary's literary papers, along with Claude's, are archived in The Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. Mine are in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University Library. I dunno know where Norm's are, probably in his attic. He's just turned 75 and has long since decamped from California. Still living out West, he tells me he's "busily muckin' away at my Combo Electric Chair/Voting Machine and other expediencies. These are a series of sculpture-assemblages, the CECVM inspired by Jeb Bush, naturellement."

The chat began with a question posed by Felix Rohatyn, a former U.S. Ambassador to France: What would Alexis de Tocqueville say if he came back and saw America today? Bernard-Henri Lévy's reply, given his own admiration for America, was not surprising: Tocqueville "would feel comfortable" except -- and it was the big exception -- "he might doubt that religion and liberty go hand in hand." Which of course was what Tocqueville believed nearly two centuries ago in "Democracy in America."

Speaking last night at the Council on Foreign Relations -- one more promotion in an endless round of interviews for his own most recent book, "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville" -- Lévy, left, seemed the embodiment of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark in "The Crack-Up" that "the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Many of Lévy's remarks were restated almost verbatim from previous interviews -- for instance, his belief that American Francophobia is a myth, except in the media, where it's reported as a reality -- and some were evidence that he's more of a first-rate media hog than anything. (We won't bother with those.) But other remarks, in response to questions from the audience, were fresh.

For one thing, he said he now favors political correctness "in a way I never did, having mocked it before." For another, he vigorously defended the American press, all its recent mistakes notwithstanding. "I don't feel the American press is in such bad shape," Lévy said. "Maybe I'm naive. I don't believe so."

Asked about America's response to the issue of torture in the war on terrorism, he contended that "the American press has reacted more quickly to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo than the French press did to [torture in] Algeria." But the prolific Algerian-born author said he was mystified by the slowness of American public intellectuals to express outrage, which he said was much slower in coming than the outrage of French intellectuals on both the left and the right during the Algerian war.

Asked about the anti-Americanism that now grips much of the world, Lévy likened the phenomenon to a magnet drawing various constituencies that are not necessarily allied but which have a hatred for America in common. Further, in answer to a question posed by Financial Times reporter Andrei Postelnicu, who wanted to know why America couldn't sell itself better, given its ability to sell almost any kind of junk, Lévy asserted that "Anti-Americanism doesn't depend on what America does or does not do. ... It's a new religion. They don't hate the worst of America but the very best of it -- a free press, equality of women, open debate."

Earlier, noting that he liked Adam Gopnik's characterization of him in The New Yorker as "anti-anti-American," Lévy was at pains to point out that it was far different from, and much better than, being called "pro-American." (To be pro-American means supporting the death penalty, for instance, which he regards as unconscionable.)

Incidentally, the audience that gathered for the chat included a contingent of "beautiful people" not usually seen in the corporate environment of the Council on Foreign Relations. Among the glittering minions were Lévy's American-born wife Arielle Dombasle, the French singer-vedette, right, and seated next to her, Tina Brown (busily taking notes).

Considering the adulation Lévy has courted and received here, we'd be remiss not to mention Doug Ireland's take on him. Brother Doug is not impressed:

As someone who lived in France for a decade -- where I even once had the unpleasant experience of passing three hours interviewing the arrogant and indigestible egomaniac BHL -- I can tell you what most serious intellectuals in France know: that BHL is a fraud and an impostor. ... As an assiduous flatterer and intimate friend of business barons, showbiz stars, and political leaders, his conduct is a thousand miles from the "intellectual liberty" of which BHL likes to pose as the lyric defender. His only real talent is his manipulation of a media microcosm without intellectual standards and his endless and skillful self-promotion -- the lengths to which BHL and his trophy wife ... will go to promote themselves and their obscenely luxurious lifestyle as the incarnation of the "glitterati" is a matter of great hilarity in France.

Postscript: You've gotta read Garrison Keillor's hilarious takedown of "American Vertigo." It's the funniest book review I've read in years, maybe ever, and certainly the funniest I've seen on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. In tomorrow's edition (1/29), Keillor exposes Lévy as a bombastic writer whose touristic insights are too obvious to be taken seriously. He also provides the perfect bookend for this item, illustrating my reference to Fitzgerald's remark, but in the negative:

And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox -- America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans' party loyalty is "very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty." Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. [A] partner-swapping club is both "libertine" and "conventional," "depraved" and "proper." And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy's tedious and original thinking.

As was this listener the other night. And let's not forget: "American Vertigo" would have touched Keillor's heart if Lévy were a lesbian shepherd from Minnesota who knew how to grab a ram's balls. See this.

It was all off the record. So I can't tell you what Shirin Ebadi said at lunch yesterday, though I sat next to the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for nearly two hours and listened closely to her comments about working for human rights in Iran -- how difficult it is, especially under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's radical regime, to protect children and women from social and legal injustices, not to mention the imprisoned journalists who now comprise most of the clients in her Tehran law practice.

The truth is -- and I hate to say this -- nothing she said broke any news, nothing you wouldn't already know from reading the press, so there's nothing to tell even if her remarks had been on the record, except that it was Ebadi speaking.

She is a small, sturdy, earnest woman with close-cropped hair who wears no makeup or jewelry. She's a devout Moslem who dresses Western-style, and speaks cordially in rudimentary English and perhaps less academically in her native Farsi. (It seemed so when her translator spoke for her.) The get-to-know-Ebadi lunch, attended by dozens of reporters, was laid on by Random House, which is publishing her memoir, "Iran Awakening" (due out in May).

She did say one thing that surprised me, though. When asked whether she was alarmed by the prospect of Iran developing a nuclear bomb, she turned the question around. Possession of a nuclear bomb is not in itself the great danger apparently. Let me whisper it without quoting her: She's more alarmed by Iran's lack of democracy. A democratic government must answer to its citizens and, therefore, is not going to use atomic weapons. Out of politeness, I did not say, "Huh?"

Tunku Varadarajan, the editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal, interviewed Bernard-Henri Lévy, right, about his new book, "American Vertigo," over a dinner of raw clams and rare steak at a fancy Manhattan hotel. But what really caught our attention in all of Varadarajan's scene-setting details is his lip-smacking description of the author speaking with "an upward tilt of a nose so aquiline one might hang a hat on it."

Given the fact that Lévy is Jewish, and mindful of the historically anti-Semitic caricature of hook-nosed Jews, we'd say Varadarajan's insinuating description -- the only actual physical detail offered about the author, by the way, amid a ton of color on his French accent, inherited money and patrician style -- is not ironic, which is probably what Varadarajan would say it is, so much as:

1) Purposeful
2) Grotesque
3) Anti-Semitic
4) All of the above

We've written about Lévy before and hold no special brief for him. When his previous book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?," came out, we called it "maddening, egotistical, convoluted but ultimately brave and useful." We do hold Varadarajan in special contempt, however, for the obvious reasons and also for being stupid enough to think that playing on the caricature is a form of wit. He's hanged himself and his hat.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: At least one reader agrees with us, not that we've heard from many. He writes: "It's like talking about African-Americans and commenting about big lips or flat noses or something. The 'hang your hat on it' remark is completely over the top. Now that I think of it, it sounds like something out of Der Stürmer."

The reference is to Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, the semi-official Nazi rag that was published from 1923 to 1945. It had a peak circulation of 486,000 in 1935, but its readership was much greater, and theme issues had print runs of as many as two million copies, according to Randall Bytwerk. "For 22 years every issue denounced Jews in crude, vicious, and vivid ways," Bytwerk writes in an excerpt from his Streicher biography. The front page of Feb. 23, 1943, above right, shows a cartoon photo of a Jew, captioned "Satan," and a headline that says: "The Mobilization of the People."

PPS: "With its contrived anti-French attitude and polemic, the Varadarajan article is the usual rightwinger idiocy," Straight Up regular William Osborne writes. "The French are not anti-American. They just think Bush and the neocons are a bunch of assholes. That does nothing more than put them in league with a huge number of Americans. As the article notes, 'Mr. Lévy
regards his own criticism of America not as anti-Americanism, but as tough love.' It's true. Any decent friend of America at this point would definitely speak frankly to us about the dismal state of our political life and foreign policy. Good friends let you know when you have totally screwed up."

Osborne continues:

How could the Europeans not be exasperated with America? Just turn the tables for a moment. What would Americans think if the Europeans had established a bunch of secret torture camps spread around America -- and by necessity, without even the courtesy of consulting with our government? Our government's behavior could not be more boorish, stupid, and offensive. In reality, I marvel at the European's restraint and composure.

As our last two presidential elections illustrate, our country is deeply divided. The Republicans, through the machinations of people like Karl Rove, knew that drumming up hatred and contempt for "The Other" is an effective, time-tested method of creating an artificial unity. Arabs and the French became their scapegoats. Anyone with the least knowledge of 20th-century history remembers how effectively, and extremely, Hitler used this same technique. One thing is sure, the vast majority of the international community, both right and left, is waiting for this administration's last day.

Speaking of technique, we are reminded again of the Bullshitter-in-Chief's all-purpose 911 game plan -- this time to defend his illegal domestic spy program. As reported today (Monday, Jan. 23) in The New York Times:

[T]he White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as an asset, a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year. ...

Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Sometimes exaggerated"? Oh, never mind.

While a new translation of Eli Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, "Night," is being touted by Oprah Winfrey to millions of Americans, a much less publicized piece of Holocaust history is being played out in a federal court in San Francisco, where a former U.S. Army intelligence officer has testified that the man who became Pope Paul VI "helped hide and launder property that had been stolen" from Nazi victims in Yugoslavia during World War II.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz has "obtained testimony given last month by William Gowen," who is now in his 80s, which reveals that after the war Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (elected pope in 1963), right, was personally linked not just to those criminal acts but also "was involved in the sheltering and smuggling of Croatian war criminals, such as the leader of the Ustashe movement, Ante Pavelic."

Reporter Yossi Melman outlined the intricate, historical background of the case in a story, "Tied up in the Rat Lines," which appeared earlier this week in Ha'aretz, much of it familiar to experts who have followed the issue for many years. But the case is unusual for, among other things, directly accusing the pope by name.

Although reams of original documents have already been published about the Vatican's involvement with the so-called Rat Lines, a network that helped hide Nazi war criminals after World War II to keep them from being arrested and put on trial, the term "papal favorite" is the closest that a collection of documents as extensive as The Pavelic Papers has come to actually naming Montini.

Montini served as the Vatican's deputy secretary of state during the war, before ascending to the papacy. (Have a look at a declassified 1947 memorandum by Gowen, commenting about Pavelic's contacts in the Vatican.)

Melman notes:

Hundreds of war criminals were provided with church and Red Cross papers that enabled them to hide in safe houses and then flee from Europe, mainly to the Middle East and South America. Among them were Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon"), Adolf Eichmann, Dr. Josef Mengele and Franz Stengel, the commander of the Treblinka death camp.

The Vatican network was also used by leaders of the Ustashe -- the nationalist Croatian Catholic movement that was active in Croatia and collaborated with the Nazi occupation.

Melman cites an American document, based on a report from the Italian police and placed in evidence at the trial in San Francisco, along with Gowen's testimony. Gowen told the court: "The Reverend Dr. Prof. Krunoslav Draganovic seemed to be in cooperation with the Ustasha network. And he was given a Vatican assignment as the apostolic visitor for Croatians, which meant he reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini."

Melman writes further:

The leaders of the Ustashe headed by Pavelic are the ones who stole the victims' property: art and jewelry -- silver and mostly gold. After the war they fled with the treasure and laundered it with the help of Vatican institutions. According to Gowen's testimony, Montini, who in 1964 became the first pope to visit the State of Israel, was also involved in the Vatican's help in laundering the wealth.

Montini headed the Catholic Church until his death in 1978. The lawsuit, with an amended complaint added last week, demands restitution for the Jewish, Russian, Serb, Ukrainian and Roma victims. It is "based on earlier investigations and reports from American government agencies, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and committees of historians who researched the matter of the Jewish property in Swiss banks," Melman reports.

"Led by the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan order and others," the defendants "deny the charges against them and made every effort to have the charges dismissed," he adds. "So far, the court has rejected these efforts outright and determined that the deliberations would continue. But the defendants are tenacious and now they are demanding that publication of Gowen's testimony be prohibited." (Here's a Web site posted by the plaintiffs' attorneys.)

Gowen served as a special agent in an American counter-intelligence unit in Rome after the war ended. The unit was assigned to track down Italian Fascists, Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, including the Ustashe leaders. "To try and find Pavelic you had to discover how the Ustashe network in Italy was constituted, how it operated, what were its bases," Gowen testified, according to Melman.

Melman continues:

A key person in the Pontifical Croatian college was Rev. Draganovic, the Croatian ambassador to the Vatican. Draganovic and the college issued false papers to Croatian war criminals, among them Pavelic and Artukovic. "I personally investigated Draganovic -- who told me he was reporting to Montini," emphasized Gowen.

Gowen related that at a certain stage Montini learned, apparently from the head of the OSS unit in Rome, James Angleton, who nurtured relations with Montini and the Vatican, of the investigation Gowen's unit was conducting. [The OSS refers to the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.] Montini complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation.

Melman writes that "in his testimony, Gowen also stated that Draganovic helped the Ustashe launder the stolen treasure with the help of the Vatican Bank: This money was used to fund its religious activities, but also to fund the escape of Ustashe leaders on the Rat Line."

The issue of Vatican complicity in Nazi crimes has echoed for decades long after the war's end, complicated by the Catholic Church's "continuing secrecy," as U.S. News and World Report noted in 1998. This has forced accusers to equivocate, despite mounting evidence. ("We make no charges against the Vatican, but we keep building a very damning picture," Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, told the magazine at the time.)

But many of the historical connections, down to current times, have been out in the open in Europe even if less known in the United States. For example, "the Vatican made a huge push to break up Yugoslavia in the early '90s," William Osborne, a longtime observer of Holocaust history, says. "They thus helped provoke the civil war that happened. The Vatican wanted an independent Croatia, which is Catholic." It was "almost an obsession with the Munich newspaper Suddeutscher Zeitung and the ruling political and Catholic elite in Bavaria," where Pope Benedict XVI, above left, comes from.

Yugoslavia, which maintained considerable independence from the Soviet Union, did not collapse with the rest of the East Block. But when it did fall as the last communist country of Europe, he says, "the same old dark Catholic forces were a central player in all of it. Croatia supported the Nazis, and those links evolved into the relations Croatia has with Bavaria and the Catholic Church to this day. What goes unmentioned, and which is so ironic, is that the Vatican stands accused of harboring war criminals from the 1990s as well."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Did the producers of NBC's cop show Law & Order know in advance that the Supreme Court would hand down a headline-making decision about assisted suicide? We don't think so. But tonight's episode, "Heart of Darkness," does deal with the death of a depressed journalist whose demise may be a case of, hmm, assisted suicide.

Yeah, yeah, we know. The court's 6-to-3 ruling was focused on physician-assisted, not girlfriend-assisted, suicide. Just the same, before the ruling, we told our NAJP* colleague Carter Harris, left, who wrote the episode, that we'd promote it here. This is what he had to say:

"It's about a journalist, probably one disturbed by the collapse of the NAJP" -- we apologize for the inside joke -- "but it really deals with a bigger ethical issue: Is it ever okay to help a person suffering from intractable, violent depression to help them kill themselves?" We also apologize for his grammar.

"From what I understand," he went on, "some other countries allow assisted suicide, including Switzerland. And in Amsterdam it's debated as to whether or not doctors should be allowed to help not only terminally ill but mentally ill patients to die. ... My episode doesn't deal with the whole Doctor Kervorkian-type thing, as I wanted to approach it from a less polemical and more personal, and hopefully more dramatic, point of view."

'Nother thing: He adds, "I, Carter Harris, am NOT the journalist featured in the Law & Order episode (unless you want to read a whole lot into it)." We didn't think so, unless the dead can write, but we'll tune into the show tonight just to be sure.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

* NAJP refers to the National Arts Journalism Program, which lost its funding last year at Columbia University and is now defunct. Harris is a former NAJP fellow.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech -- given April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York a year to the day before he was gunned down -- is less famous than his "I Have a Dream" speech. But when you hear it, and you can listen to excerpts here, you realize again not just how much America lost when he was assassinated, but how much it needs him now.

Substitute the word "Iraq" for "Vietnam":

I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

That speech and Taylor Branch's op-ed today about non-violence, "Globalizing King's Legacy," ought to be required reading for the pipsqueak leaders of our time, when "spitballs pass for debate," as Taylor writes, and King's "ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged."

Axed NPR reporter David ("Roadkill") D'Arcy has filed a $5-million suit against National Public Radio and the Museum of Modern Art, according to the New York Post. The suit claims "he was slandered for his report on a Nazi-looted painting once displayed at the museum," the Post's David Hafetz writes. Last July D'Arcy complained to us, "I'm not even roadkill," and our bet was that "NPR hasn't heard the last of him. Network execs have said nasty things about D'Arcy, which may be seen as damaging to his reputation, and which they may yet be forced to regret." In case you're interested, we've unpacked the D'Arcy affair for months, with more than a dozen items posted since last March.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Better headline: "D'Arcy Sorta Drops The Other Shoe?" He messages: "We have NOT served anyone yet. ... We stopped the clock."

We're running out of ways to say it ourselves. So we quote (again) from the editorial page of an institution that represents the established order but hasn't let that get in the way of expressing the truth about the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his cronies:

You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.

Thus sayeth this morning's New York Times in its editorial, "The Imperial Presidency at Work." Which reminds us of our post of more than a year ago on Oct. 7, 2004, THE BIG LIE AND THE LITTLE PREVARICATIONS. It solemnly said:

Will America stand still for the corruption of its democracy? That's the real question voters are about to answer -- whether they will accept The Big Lie or repudiate it, whether they will go along with The Liar or throw him out of office.

On Nov. 2, voters will have their chance to redeem America's reputation for democratic principles. If they do not, if they submit to The Big Lie, if they let themselves be swayed by The Liar and his minions, who've upped the ante by amplifying The Big Lie in the debates and on the stump, they will have forfeited any claim to innocence. It's not as if the voters haven't been warned

Citing the evidence for the Bullshitter's arrogance and deceit, and for his regime's duplicity, can get to be an obsessive, full-time occupation. Sad to say, there is so much evidence that the work is never done.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

By way of introduction: I typed and retyped roughly 50 words in columns from the beginning of several texts. I then proceded to read across the columns and typed them again, trusting the words only. They showed me writers who were fed up with Reality. This was the way I saw it long ago: "A short blast of their machine guns, understand, and we talked better than their guns."

Words may amuse by exhibiting the ridiculous. If their dying images attract the intellect, it is because they earn their living in a dying galaxy. ("We just kept going until the thing happened in trance & horrible agony. Lightyears filled with compassion for you all.")

Chinese classics were never a one-way trip, not when juggling words seemed exactly right. On the edge, orbiting, wounded, paying dues. News of suicide hit me as it cared. So I typed and retyped these columns to talk.

I lay there riddled with the springs and traps of inspiration, courtesy of Brion Gysin. Streaming holes of what we breathe, terminal holes which formed in the air, in we who breathe in words. And words protest. They came in, hovering above us, a sort of antipray coughing white cloud of ruined sex -- Thee, the Out-word in action.

I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered down in gray bone-dry "heroin words." ("No, these are not the fossilized bones near the shores of Lake Rudolph. Addicts talk I am talking about.")

The patterns smelled surgical, visual & aural, racing alive again. Smelled like cotton & pistachio nuts and drifted away in one direction to sounds and colored money, in the other to my skin of conspicuously more brain waves ... minute electrical discharges oscillating with Dr. Vassily Lewis, who wrote in a messy hotel room: "Activity can be measured accurately. The pinhole has been graphically recorded where medieval epidemics are occluding."

We were holed up in Superville. He brushed a straight and certain exercise of authority through a lock of rust-colored hair. He used words, authority words, courtesy of Bill Burroughs. He uncovered the skull of a man more habit-forming than heroin, a creature who lived the use of words more than two and a half million years ago, where colorless words formed the bomb-throwers. The future will go next.

Enter ZZ, flipped, saying: "I gotta learn no-chance nugget voice of consciousness." How to use words? She stopped for about two minutes, then snorted out, thinking: "What are words anyway? A few banshee yells." She started to fall, and it frightened her. She haunted the subway and felt very lonely. Deprived of both outlets (sex & words), she became a ritilin freak who'd been drummed out. So she wandered, straight, and ended up in Tangier. "I was so serious, it was a monologue."

-- The Tireless Staff of Thousands took the day off.

P.J. O'Rourke writes in his review of "Dog Days," the new novel by Ana Marie Cox:

Ana Marie Cox made her name writing a political blog, Wonkette.com. I've never seen it. As far as I can tell, no one has. Admitting reading political blogs is like admitting watching daytime TV.

Christopher Buckley writes in his review:

I don't spend much time in the old blogosphere myself, and to be honest hadn't clicked onto Wonkette until now.

We have three reactions: Who are these guys? Where have they been hiding? And they forgot to say, "Heh, heh."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Does this surprise you? We're not suprised. How about this tasty morsel? We're dumbfounded. Now for something wild. (When the page comes up, click the URL in the central box. Then it's up to you.)

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Yesterday's rhyme and reason made good sense to us. That's why we posted it. This morning's New York Times offers an endorsement with its lead editorial, "Judge Alito, in His Own Words."

Though it lacks Leon Freilich's meter, the editorial gives more than enough reason to reject Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court -- Mrs. Alito's tears notwithstanding -- by breaking down the judge's Senate testimony into these categories: evidence of extremism; opposition to Roe v. Wade; support for an imperial presidency; insensitivity to ordinary Americans' rights; doubts about the nominee's honesty.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

We haven't made the government's "no fly" watch list. Not yet anyway. Edward Allen has. He's four years old. James Moore, who's considerably older, has been on the list for a year. "I will never be told the official reason," he writes. "No one ever is." Clayton Patterson, a Lower East Side activist friend of ours with a long history of arrests, tells us "being targeted is scary. I'm not sure people understand this." That's experience talking, and of course they don't. On Nov. 2, 2004, "a majority of American voters stuck its head up its ass," as we noted at the time, and "will have only itself to blame ... for failing to appreciate what's to come."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Since the judge was an elusive target (NY Times), who sought to distance himself from conservative political opinions he once held (LA Times) and flatly disavowed a line from a 1985 job application for the Reagan regime as "an inapt phrase, and I certainly didn't mean that literally at the time" (Washington Post), we asked our poet to clarify what his testimony on Tuesday actually meant:

SAMUEL ALITO LEVELS WITH
SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

I hold these truths to be self-evident:
Abortion is a sin -- that's heaven-sent.
The modern corporation can do no wrong.
Employees have the right to strike -- a gong.
Supreme power rests with the PRESIDENT.
Civil rights means being obedient.
The majority reflects the will of God.
Minorities need whipping with a rod.
The swing-vote seat on the Court's a holy site
The Lord Himself reserved for the Ultra Right.
These are the aims to which my heart aspires,
Beloved by all, including Harriet Miers.
What's more, I never crashed a Harley bike*
Nor met a prosecutor I didn't like.
I grant the law's the law, as all you know --
So long as the PRESIDENT agrees it's so.

-- Leon Freilich

*Der Gropenfuhrer either wasn't listening or didn't believe Alito when he professsed that no one is "above the law." For two decades Der Grope has been riding around on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle "even though he does not hold the required M1 license," says the LA Times. "His crash Sunday on Mandeville Canyon Road in Brentwood made authorities aware" of that. The Culifawnya governator, "brandishing 15 stitches on his top lip from the crash, told reporters Tuesday that he hadn't obtained a California motorcycle license because he had 'never thought about it.'"

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Our old friend Mugs McGuiness did us another one of his many favors. When he heard about our 'puter meltdown he sent over a box of used books, figuring that would cheer us up. Which it did. The man has fine taste in litrichur. We picked out of the box a slim Penguin paperback with yellowing pages that gave off the musty odor of long storage. Old age had set in. The book was printed 59 years ago, in February of 1947, and the copyright was dated 10 years earlier. But the hard-boiled writing itself smelled as fresh as our morning coffee. The story, beginning in Mexico City, revolves around an opera singer down on his luck and a Mexican prostitute of Aztec descent.

I was in the Tupinamba, having a bizcocho and coffee, when the girl came in. Everything about her said Indian, from the maroon rebozo to the black dress with purple flowers on it, to the swaying way she walked, that no woman ever got without carrying pots, bundles, and baskets on her head from the time she could crawl.

All you opera buffs know the author, right? If you don't, have a close look at the cover. Here, from much later in the story, is an excerpt that really ought to tickle anyone with a feeling for music and especially anyone who can afford season tickets to the Met, where the scene of our hero's comeback is set:

I made my debut in Lucia right after New Year's, sang standard repertoire for a month, began to work in. It felt good to be back with the wops. Then I got my real chance when they popped me on three days' notice into Don Giovanni. I had a hell of a time getting them to let me do the serenade my way, with a real guitar, and play it myself, without the orchestra. The score calls for a prop mandolin, and that's the way the music is written, but I hate all prop instruments on the stage, and hate to play any scene where I have to use one. There's no way you can do it that it doesn't look phoney. I made a gain when I told them that the guitar was tradition, that Garcia used to do it that way, but I lost all that ground when somebody in the Taste Department decided that a real guitar would look too much like the Roxy, and for a day it was off again. Then I got Wurlitzer's to help me out. They sent down an instrument that was a beauty. It was dark, dull spruce, without any pearl, nickel, or highlights on it of any kind, and it had a tone you could eat with a spoon. When I sounded off on that, that settled it.

I wanted to put it up a half tone, so I could get it in the key of three flats, but I didn't. It's in the key of two sharps, the worst key there is for a singer, especially the high F sharp at the end, that catches a baritone all wrong, and makes him sound coarse and ropy. The F sharp is not in the score, but it's tradition and you have to sing it. God knows why Mozart ever put it in that key, unless it's because two sharps is the best key there is for a mandolin, and he let his singer take the rap so he could bring the accompaniment to life.

But I tuned with the orchestra before the act started and did it strictly in the original key. I made two moves while I was singing it. Between verses I took one step nearer the balcony. At the end, I turned my back on the audience, stepped under the balcony and played the finish, not to them, but to her. On the F sharp, instead of covering up and getting it over quick, I did a messa di voce, probably the toughest order a singer ever tries to deliver. You start it p, swell to ff, pull back to p again, and come off it. My tone wasn't round, but it was pure, and I got away with it all right. They broke into a roar, the bravos yipped out all over the house, and that was the beginning of this stuff that you read, that I was the greatest since Bispham, the peer of Scotti, and all the rest of it. Well, I was the peer of Scotti, or I hope I was. They've forgotten by now how bad Scotti really was. He could sing, and he was the greatest actor I ever saw, but his voice was just merely painful. What they paid no attention to at all, mentioned like it was nothing but a little added feature, was the guitar. You can talk about your fiddle, your piano, and your orchestra, and I've got nothing to say against them. But a guitar has moonlight in it.

You guessed it, dincha? That's an excerpt from "Serenade," by James M. Cain, right, who is best known of course as the author of the crime novels "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1934), "Double Indemnity" (1936), "Mildred Pierce" (1941) and more than a dozen others. Cain was a singer himself, or wanted to be -- his mother was an opera singer -- and he studied to become a professional before abandoning the idea of a musical career. He took up journalism instead. After serving on the front in France during World War I, he went to work at the Baltimore American and the Baltimore Sun. There, the reigning star of the Sun, H.L. Mencken, met him and encouraged his literary efforts.

Cain published his first piece for Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, in 1924. It was a nonfiction profile called "The Labor Leader," which launched the magazine's series of "American portraits." Cain's hard-boiled style is already evident: "He is recruited from people of the sort that nice ladies call common ... the sort that mop up the plate with bread." (Cited in fellow AJ blogger Terry Teachout's Mencken biography "The Skeptic.") Mencken also gave a boost to Cain's career as a writer of fiction, publishing an early story, "Pastorale," in the magazine in 1928.

Although Cain went to Hollywood as a screenwriter after stints at The New York World and The New Yorker (where he was managing editor), and though his fame, such as it is, rests on the Hollywood movies adapted from his best-known crime thrillers -- "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946 and 1981), "Double Indemnity" (1944 and, for television, 1973) and "Mildred Pierce" (1945) -- he had nothing to do with those screen versions. The novels they were based on are not just different from the movies, but better. So says Mugs McGuiness.

"Serenade," too, was made into a movie. It was released in 1956, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Mario Lanza as the opera singer. Oy. We've never seen it, thank God, and can't imagine it being any good. Dawn Powell's comment about the novel, in a review in the New Republic when "Serenade" first appeared -- "There is nightmare material here for a whole winter" -- might apply, though not as she meant it.

One other thing (and we hope this isn't a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read "Serenade" but wants to): Cain's noir take on homosexuality, which underscores a major plot twist, has the limitations of a pre-Kinsey phobia -- to say nothing of today's "Brokeback Mountain" sentiments. Don't be alarmed.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Gareth Porter isn't fooled by the American 'ganda machine. While we were out -- thanks to our Dell laptop meltdown -- he rang in the New Year for the Inter-Press News Service Agency with an analytical piece headlined, "US Military Still Runs With Dreaded Wolf Brigade," just as the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime started rolling out word about plans to rein in the Iraqi death squads.

Porter -- historian, national security policy analyst and author of a new book about the Vietnam War, "Perils of Dominance," with particular relevance to Iraq -- began:

Despite the U.S. command's announcement last week that it would seek to curb abuses by Iraqi commando units, the U.S. military has been extremely tolerant of the most abusive unit of all -- the notorious Wolf Brigade -- because it regards it as highly effective against the insurgents.

And he concluded:

In light of the U.S. command's past close relationship with the Wolf Brigade and its attitude toward its abuses, the latest move by Washington to distance itself from commando operations such as the Wolf Brigade appears to be more of a public relations ploy than a substantive change in its own policy toward commando abuses.

Which is just what we'd been saying all along. In fact, the day his piece appeared on Jan. 2, Porter messaged us: "Great post on the US uses of Iraqi torturers and death squads." He was referring to our item of Dec. 20, HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT.

Porter's IPS analysis was the perfect riposte to PBS's News Hour With Jim Lehrer, which had an astonishing segment on Dec. 30, TRAINING IRAQI POLICE FORCES, featuring several government officials who were trotted out to express the U.S. regime's sudden concern about the death squads. One of the officials was Steven Casteel, right, identified as the senior U.S. advisor to Iraq's Ministry of Interior (which ran the Wolf Brigade) from October 2003 to July 2005. He was one of the key Americans who helped to oversee the training and creation of Iraqi police forces.

"By putting [U.S. military] mentors in there," Casteel said, "we are now continuing to build that leadership that needs to be present to keep abuses from occurring, to keep the rule of law present, and to build this force to the capability to replace the American soldiers that are currently in country."

The Newshour made no mention whatsoever that Casteel had been singled out in The New York Times Magazine and other news publications, along with another specially assigned U.S. military advisor (James Steele), for his dark history of collaborating with paramilitary death squads in Latin America. This made Casteel's expressions of concern for the rule of law and the Salvadorization of Iraq impossible to believe. Yet there he was, one of the chief architects of the Iraqi death squads, smooth-talking the issue of reining them in as segment host Jeffrey Brown lobbed him softball questions.

About that book: Gareth Porter argues in "Perils of Dominance" that "decisive military superiority," not fear of Communism, "steered the United States into the Southeast Asian debacle" of the Vietnam war, according to Publishers Weekly. PW's review notes, "This revisionist premise -- which suggests that, in the '60s, the U.S. acted as the world's lone superpower in much the same fashion as it does today -- upends traditional thinking on [that] war's major cause." According to its publisher, the University of California Press, the book "demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world."

Porter argues that "high-ranking national security officials" who believed in U.S. superiority were "the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam." You don't have to be a genius to draw parallels with the invasion of Iraq.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands