Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads.

Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage. [added July 2004] The pneumatic tubes didn’t work perfectly, but neither did the trucks. The question is, if you invested 40 more years of development and refinements into the pneumatic tube system, what would you have?

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

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Lee Harvey Oswald

Did Oswald Shoot Kennedy

No, of course not.

In 1978, Edward Jay Epstein published a book called “Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.” He tries to show that Oswald had very suspicious ties to Soviet Russia and Cuba. He doesn’t quite go so far as to say that Russia or Cuba planned Kennedy’s assassination, but he clearly lays out the groundwork for such a conclusion.

The book was published by Reader’s Digest. If that doesn’t tell you enough about it (condensed books for condensed brains), then consider that Epstein has no problem with the “magic” bullet which supposedly went through Kennedy’s neck, John Connally’s ribs, wrist, and thigh, and emerged without a mark only to appear on the wrong stretcher in Parkland Hospital, so that it could be definitively “traced” to Oswald’s rifle. Nor does he tell you that the palm print taken from the rifle, which matched it “conclusively” to Oswald, was only “found” by the FBI after the Dallas police had already concluded that the rifle bore no finger prints at all. Nor does he mention that the bullets used to kill police officer Tippit were not, in fact, traced back to Oswald’s personal handgun and that, in fact, they could not have been fired from Oswald’s gun.

But, gee, those are just facts. There’s better material in “Legend”. The best part is Epstein’s nodding and winking as he describes Oswald’s suspicious behavior in New Orleans. What did Oswald do that was so suspicious? Well, he marched around handing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets and appearing on radio stations.

Now, suppose for one minute that Oswald was, in fact, a Soviet or Cuban agent, sent to assassinate Kennedy in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs. Come on, you can do it. After all, he lived in Russia for several years and had a Russian wife. After all, he spoke fluent Russia.

So let’s say that some crazy day in 1960 or so, the KGB decided to shoot Kennedy. If you were a KGB officer, who would you choose to do the deed? Remember—if it is shown that you were behind the assassination, you would be in BIG trouble. For one thing, your own leaders would be fair game. For another thing, Cuba certainly would be invaded and re-colonized by the Americans. And of course, there was always the possibility of all-out war.

So who do you choose for this important task? Your cleverest, most experienced, most self-disciplined agent? Wrong. You choose an ex-marine defector with a Russian wife. You send him to America for a few years. You have him march around in New Orleans demonstrating and agitating on behalf of Castro’s Cuba. Then you send him down to Mexico to the Russian and Cuban embassies and have him loudly argue about getting a VISA to Cuba quickly because he can help the communists out by committing all kinds of violent crimes in the United States. You make sure the CIA gets all of this on their “hidden” cameras with the telephoto lenses.

Epstein is an idiot. His book is remarkable not because it defends the Warren Commission but because it simply pretends that none of the weird things about the Kennedy assassination even exist. In the thirty years since Kennedy’s death, most of the basic, confusing facts remain confusing. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of nut cases on both sides. But considered simply and directly, these facts certainly raise suspicions.

Oswald was a pretty smart guy who spoke fluent Russian, married a Russian woman, defected to Russia, defected back to the U.S., agitated for Cuba, tried to re-defect to Russia in October, 1963, worked at a map printing company that did secret work for the U.S. military, and sent a very, very strange note to a man named Hunt shortly before the assassination. He would have been a monumentally stupid choice for the Russians or Cubans to assassinate Kennedy.

Oswald is repeatedly described as having “fled” the scene. If he had been trying to escape Dallas, he could have gotten into a taxi at any time and driven off. Instead, he went home, and then to a movie theatre. He retrieved a pistol on the way. Think about these actions. If you had just shot the President of the United States from the building you worked in, would you go back to your home?

Witnesses to the Tippit shooting persistently denied that the man they saw was Oswald. Yet the FBI and the Dallas police continue to insist that the man they saw was, indeed, Oswald. Witnesses reported being harassed by investigators when they did not report the “correct” version of Tippit’s shooting.

Epstein believes that the problem with the magic bullet is easily solved. He simply decides that Oswald started firing sooner, while Kennedy was still out of view. Even the Warren Commission couldn’t be so bold, because the Zapruder film shows rather definitively that Oswald did not fire before the limousine drew behind the freeway sign.

The pristine bullet cannot have been the same bullet that shattered Connally’s wrists and ribs. It simply can’t. It was planted on the stretcher in the Dallas hospital (the wrong one, apparently) to implicate Oswald.

Oswald was spotted drinking a coke and having his lunch about 40 seconds after the last shots were fired. It is barely possible for a man running full speed to make the distance from the sixth floor window to the 2nd floor lunch room in that time. But according to several witnesses, including a police officer, Oswald looked cool, calm, and quiet, as if he’d been standing there for some time.

No fingerprints were found on the rifle at all. The FBI, much later, claimed to have found a palm print on the stock, underneath the barrel. This was after the Dallas police had already stated publicly that there was no fingerprints on the weapon. So Oswald wiped the gun clean of prints and made it down to the cafeteria in 40 seconds?

Shortly after the shooting, the police asked the manager of the warehouse for a list of all missing employees. We are told that it was found that only one employee was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, several employees were missing, but the police announced that they were searching only for Oswald.
The police obtained Oswald’s address from the Depository and broadcast it to all the police officers in the vicinity. The trouble is, this address, Elsbeth St., had been Oswald’s address six months earlier, before he began to work at the Book Depository. The address he had given to the Book Depository, and which was recorded in his employee file, was different. Where then, did the police really obtain this address from?

Jack Ruby was able to walk through a large group of police officers right into the basement of the police station, precisely at the moment that Oswald was emerging from the cell area, and shoot him precisely where underworld assassins shoot someone they really want to kill efficiently: in the stomach, the vital organs. By doing so, he ensured that no trial would take place, during which the evidence, and Oswald’s links to the intelligence services, would have been probed.

Just imagine a good defense attorney analyzing the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory, in court. Just imagine hearing all the witnesses testify that they heard shots and saw smoke coming from the grassy knoll. Just imagine a thorough dissection of the planning of the parade route, the actions of Roy Kellerman or William Grier – the slow-footed driver of the limo—and the rest of the secret service agents who had been up late the previous night partying. Imagine a thorough discussion of how and why Oswald obtained a job printing spy photographs considered top secret by the U.S. military just months before the assassination. If Oswald was a “lone nut”, he was the most well-connected lone nut in history. Imagine parading the Parkland doctors up to the stand to testify, as they did to the media immediately after the shooting, that the fatal bullet entered Kennedy’s forehead, not the back of the head, and that the throat wound was one of entry, not exit. Imagine a Grand Jury digesting the fact that the Parkland doctors were all deeply experienced with gunshot wounds, while J. Humes, the autopsy surgeon, had almost no experience in that area. Imagine how quickly a defense lawyer would have noticed that the frames of the Zapruder film, reproduced in Life Magazine, and in the Warren Commission Report, had been placed out of order, so that, coincidentally, they appeared to show Kennedy’s head snapping forward with the fatal shot, rather than backwards as it really did. Image a cross-examination on the question of why no finger-prints were found on the rifle, though Oswald could not have had enough time to wipe them off and run down to the second floor cafeteria on time to be spotted and questioned by a police man 40 seconds after the last shots were fired.

The lead attorneys for the Warren Commission, relying primarily on evidence supplied to them by the FBI, consistently ignored, degraded, or ridiculed any evidence that did not fit the preconceived “lone nut” and “single-bullet” theories of the assassination. The Commission report is riddled with omissions and inconsistencies, but the most glaring problem is the way eyewitness testimony is presented as reliable and demonstrative when it supports the Commission’s conclusions, and then ridiculed as unreliable and conjectural whenever it does not. Witnesses who saw a single gunman in the sixth floor window are triumphantly presented as damning proof of Oswald’s guilt. But other witnesses saw shooting from behind the grassy knoll, and saw bullets hit the curb (which would have meant more than three shots were fired) and saw a second man in the same window. In other words, the Commission’s only standard of truth was that which corresponded to its preferred theory of how and why the assassination took place. It was not an investigation at all. It was a rubber stamp. As a result, even people who believe the Commission’s conclusions do not bother defending the Commission report itself.

Top cabinet officials were on a plane bound for Japan at the moment of the assassination. White House communications were cut shortly afterwards. Neither of these two elements by themselves are suspicious, but, taken together with the other facts, they are positively eerie.

After years of reading just about everything there is to read about the Kennedy assassination, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of nuts out there who derive perverse satisfaction in proving to themselves that everyone, from the CIA to the KGB to the Mafia were all involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Possibly the worst expression of that view would be Oliver Stone’s movie hodgepodge, “JFK”, which combined every theory from the lunatic fringe into one incoherent, rambling, and chaotic film.

David Lifton, in “Best Evidence”, tackled the autopsy itself, at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and suggests that a brilliant team of conspirators managed to alter the body between Dallas and Washington, so that it appeared as if Kennedy was struck from behind. He goes too far. His mistake is that he believes that the conspirators were capable of such meticulous and foolproof planning. I don’t think the conspirators would have had any way of guaranteeing themselves access to the body for a sufficient length of time to accomplish the deed. It’s too preposterous. But he also believes that the body was “altered” to show that shots had come from behind. There’s no need to grasp at straws here—the existing autopsy report is riddled with inconsistencies.

The truth is that Lee Harvey Oswald, displaying not the slightest inclination for leftist politics, joined the marines. While he was with the marines, he was probably recruited by one of the U.S. intelligence services. He was trained in the Russian language. He began to publicly criticize capitalism and the American government in a way that seems utterly bizarre and ostentatious, unless, again, you assume there is some covert reason for him to make himself known as a communist. Then he “defected” to Russia. He tried to convince the Russians that he had information about spy planes to sell them. The Russians smartly realized that he was a plant and ignored him, even after he married a Russian woman named Marina. Having failed in this subterfuge, the American intelligence agency pulled him out by having him “renounce” his “defection”.

Back in the U.S., Oswald, who probably only married Marina as part of his cover, lived alone, and did a lot of strange things. He demonstrated on behalf of Cuba, but also tried to join a Cuban anticommunist organization. His office was in the same building and adjacent to an office used by men with direct links to U.S. intelligence agencies, including Guy Bannister. He had regular contacts with the FBI and other U.S. federal government agencies. (After he was arrested for distributing leaflets, and FBI agent came to see him and spent more than an hour talking to him in jail.) He briefly worked for a coffee company in New Orleans that would later sent a raft full of employees to NASA!

It should be noted that Marina did not tell the Warren Commission what it wanted to hear, until months after the assassination, after intensive questioning by the FBI, the Dallas Police, and other government agents. Members of the Warren Commission thought she was lying, because her story varied so much from the initial interviews. Their mistake was that they assumed she had lied in the beginning, and not after months of police harassment. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, insisted that her son had been working for the government. She too was coached by the investigators until she, sort of, got the story right.

Then, in Dallas, Oswald worked for a printing company that received contracts from U.S. military intelligence, printing photos taken by spy planes. He offered to kill Castro for the U.S., and then offered to commit terrorist acts for Cuba. And so on, and so on. None of these activities make any sense unless you believe that Oswald was working for U.S. intelligence and the general plan was to have him infiltrate communist organizations or governments, and that when these plans failed, they periodically came up with other tasks for him, the purpose of which he himself probably barely understood. Shortly before the assassination, he sent a plaintiff note to a Mr. “Hunt”, begging for an opportunity to discuss his “situation”.

Then the purpose becomes clear. Think about it. If a real “lone nut” had shot Kennedy, and escaped, the entire nation would have turned every stone searching for him. There would have been a huge investigation. There would have been powerful suspicions. There would have been grave questions about the changes in policy Johnson introduced—especially towards Viet Nam. Perhaps the Secret Service would actually have been require to fire their incompetent agents, including William Grier who, upon hearing shots fired, put on the brakes!

There might have been an inquest, a trial, deeper investigations by a Grand Jury. If the slightest substantiated suspicion had fallen upon Naval Intelligence or the FBI or the Secret Service, the political dynamic of the entire decade would have changed. People would have demanded that someone “clean up” the government agencies suspected of involvement.

The best way to dissipate such suspicions is, of course, to throw suspicion elsewhere, and to convince the public that a single “lone nut” committed the crime. Now remember, you have to think about how it was planned, now how it actually turned out. In my view, the assassination was actually botched, and came out far messier than the conspirators had planned. The Zapruder film, for example, caused grave complications, for it provided a precise time-line of the sequence of shots.

In any case, the plan was for Oswald to be positioned where he could be made the patsy. Perhaps he had been ordered to guard the sixth floor of the Depository on the day of Kennedy’s trip. Oswald had already begun to realize he was being set up, but had no idea of what for.

If Oswald was indeed employed by the U.S. intelligence community, it would not have been difficult for the conspirators to position him in the building, direct suspicion towards him, supply the police with incriminating evidence, and arrange for him to be shot while “resisting arrest”.

The real shooter is on the sixth floor, but there is also quite likely someone behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. They fire roughly at the same time, when Kennedy is in the best position for the shot from the grassy knoll, the best possible location for a fatal shot. The shooter in the Depository escapes in a Nash Rambler, as several witnesses suggested, while protected by numerous other agents. The shooter behind the picket fence disposes of his weapon and then joins a group of “hoboes” in a nearby railway car. Other conspirators, identifying themselves as FBI agents or Secret Service agents, prevent witnesses and police from following him quickly enough to identify the suspect, but witnesses from the the overpass see the puffs of smoke and locate the source of the shots, and find cigarette butts and footprints behind the fence.

Oswald’s background as a communist defector is ideal. The police and FBI—who despise Kennedy– immediately understand that the U.S. government will not want to go to war with the Soviet Union, so they downplay Oswald’s communism and play up the “lone nut” theory. So the conspirators correctly surmised that they could have their cake and eat it too. Top government officials could suspect that the Soviet Union was actually involve, while conveniently ignoring the implications and tacitly approving the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

The Warren Commission wishes only to placate an anxious electorate. It is clear from the notes and minutes of their meetings that nobody on the commission had a serious interest in uncovering any new facts. Nobody seriously wanted to suggest, at any time, that a conspiracy exists. Failing to kill Oswald at the movie theatre—too many police officers and witnesses around, probably—the conspirators arrange for Jack Ruby to burst into the Dallas police station at the exact moment Oswald is being moved. Ruby himself dies of cancer four years later after alluding to dark plots and explosive revelations.

My suspicion is that the FBI was not directly involved but it was well-known that Hoover hated Kennedy and liked Johnson—he was frequent dinner guest at Senator Johnson’s home in the 1950’s—so the FBI could be counted on to cooperate. In January, 1964, Johnson appointed Hoover head of the FBI for life, in spite of the fact that he was beyond the age of compulsory retirement. This was Hoover’s fondest wish. Reporters who knew Johnson well were astonished. They had understood that Johnson knew that Hoover was a dangerous, excessively powerful bureaucrat. Why would he extend his term?

The effects of Kennedy’s assassination are, of course, illuminating.

  • The Viet Nam war continued, as Johnson rescinded Kennedy’s decision to withdraw.
  • The military-industrial complex grew much, much bigger and richer.
  • A conservative Democrat replaced a liberal Democrat.
  • The CIA, which Bobby Kennedy had been trying to control, was given a free-hand to continue it’s sponsorship of various coups and insurgencies around the world.
  • The cold war grew more intense.
  • The oil companies (including several owned by the powerful Hunt family) grew rich.

Does it seem all that unlikely that the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy were also part of a continuing strategy to maintain real control of the U.S. government?

Richard Nixon, who was in Dallas on the day of the assassination, may have benefited the most from Kennedy’s death. He eventually became President himself, of course. But I doubt he was a conscious part of the conspiracy. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Nixon later on tried to take on the same elements of the intelligence community that conspired to assassinate Kennedy, and lost, big time. Except that this time, instead of having his brains blown out, he was impeached, and Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission (yes, he did!), became President. Since then, it’s been Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Carter and Clinton, like Johnson, are conservative Democrats. Reagan and Bush are Republican. There has not been a “liberal” president since Kennedy, and Kennedy was a moderate liberal at best. Johnson was a liberal on domestic social policy, but an unregenerate hawk on the war in Viet Nam, and military policy.

I believe the conspirators grew wiser, and, noting the continued obsession with John Kennedy’s assassination, realized that their goals could be achieved with less risk, by simply destroying, politically, those it believed were a genuine threat to their control, and buying off the rest. The result is a striking trend in the U.S. economy that shows wages for the average work as completely stagnant for the past twenty years, while over-all wealth has increased by an incomprehensible margin.

The long-term result of Kennedy’s death is what we live with today. This bizarre infatuation with huge, expensive weapons, by governments that declare that they are obsessed with reducing taxes. The inability of either party to nominate a genuine outsider for the office of President. The vastly overblown Lewinsky scandal. Colin Powell. Large, expensive military bases that remain open though they have no military purpose. Congress voting budget increases to the Pentagon that the Pentagon did not request. All very strange.

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Numbers Sanctify

One of the biggest problems with movies these days is the fact that so few of them are truly subversive, in any sense of the word. That’s right. Films today are not subversive enough.

We live in a screwy society. Rich criminals get to drive their limousines to the golf course. Poor criminals spend decades in filthy, violent prisons. The Third World sends the First World more cash in debt repayments than we send them in foreign aid. Schools are allowed to shove advertising down the throats of our students. Everyone sues each other over the slightest problem. What we need is something that undermines this state of affairs. We need more subversion, not less.

Oh, many directors like to see themselves as subversive, or at least, “shocking”. But these days, “shocking” refers almost exclusively to special-effects enhanced gore and splatter, or frontal nudity. “Natural Born Killers” comes to mind. For all the pompous strutting about by Oliver Stone, proclaiming, with every jiggly camera angle, with his incoherent script, and abrupt uneven edits, that this film “rocks”, “Natural Born Killers” is an utterly conventional film. The police generally behave like the criminals because our society believes that that’s the only way to deal with criminals, and the media try to exploit both sides. Everyone is trying to get something, and the preferred strategy is confrontation and violence. Instead of challenging the viewer’s assumptions about reality, “Natural Born Killers” merely affirms our most paranoid assumptions. It is an utterly boring film. It is a conformist film. Most people would walk out of the theatre without a single new thought in their heads.

Critics frequently toss around adjectives like “bold” and “shocking” when some new film reaches for new heights of explicit violence or sex. What is bold or shocking about that? It has been almost 30 years since “Bonnie and Clyde”, with its celebrated slow-motion machine-gunning of Beatty and Dunaway in that elegiac last scene. Since then, it’s been largely more and more of the same, to the point where explicitness can no longer be said to be subversive at all. Even drug movies, like “Trainspotting”, really don’t tread any ground that hasn’t already been stampeded through by “Midnight Cowboy”, “H”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, “Sid and Nancy”, or even “Days of Wine and Roses”. Been there, done that. What else can you show me?

There are a few, of course. Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. Todd Solondz’ “Happiness”. Maybe “Bulworth”. But “Brazil”, as imaginative and original as it is, still ends up telling us something we already know: mindless bureaucracies suppress individual freedoms. “Happiness” is more interested in personal emotional fulfillment than society. “Bulworth” suggests that the fundamental institutions of our society need merely be reformed.

You might be surprised to learn that one of the most subversive films ever made in the United States is almost 50 years old. It is Charlie Chaplin’s “Monseiur Verdoux”.

“Monseiur Verdoux” is based on the life of the infamous Henri Desire Landru, the French serial killer. Landru seduced over 400 women and murdered 10 of them. He was executed by guillotine in 1922.

Orson Welles thought it would be interesting to make a film of his life and suggested the idea to Chaplin. Chaplin fictionalized the story somewhat, to suit his own purposes (he wanted explicit links to the depression and World War II). But the most sensational aspect of the case remains intact: a supposedly rational, ordinary man makes a business out of marrying wealthy spinsters and widows so he can murder them and keep their money. The real Landru disposed of the bodies, sometimes, in an outdoor stove. So does Chaplin’s Verdoux. Neighbors in both accounts noticed the smoke for days but thought that nothing was amiss.

In Chaplin’s version, Monsieur Henri Verdoux is a former petty clerk at a bank with a charming wife (Chaplin, in one of his rare misjudgments, put her in a wheel chair—are we supposed to feel more warmly towards him now?) and young child. He lived a honorable, petty little life in the South of France until the faceless administrators at the bank decided to restructure and he was tossed out of his job. Until this point in his life, he resembled T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who “measured out” his life “in coffee spoons”.

Facing dire poverty, Verdoux picks himself up and goes into a different business. He travels around France seeking and seducing wealthy married women. After a time, he murders them and takes their property. He invests most of the money into land and the stock market, and supports himself and his family on a modest scale. He clearly sees this activity as nothing more than an extension of business to its’ logical conclusion, the way, as Chaplin described it, Clemenceau saw war as an extension of diplomacy. His family thinks he is a traveling salesman.

At one point, Verdoux, experimenting with a new poison, picks up a waif from the street. The script called for a prostitute, but the studio opposed that idea (this was the post-Fatty Arbuckle era of the Hayes Office and Hollywood’s voluntary repression of vice in the movies), so Chaplin had to make due with subtle suggestion. As he prepares a meal for the girl, with a poisoned glass of wine, Verdoux questions her about her life, expecting to find her hopelessly pessimistic. Instead, she is happy. She thinks life is wonderful. And she is optimistic. She is convinced that life is going to get better for her. Verdoux changes his mind, gives her a few francs, and sends her on her way.

It wouldn’t be Chaplin without the physical comedy. His attempts to murder one wife (played by the inimitable Martha Raye before she became a parody of herself and started doing Bounty ads on tv) are constantly interrupted. He takes her out into a lake (she can’t swim) and is about to toss her overboard when a group of yodelers appears. He mixes her some poison, but the maid thinks it’s peroxide and uses it on her hair. Finally, he smothers or strangles her (off camera) and cheerfully takes her money, sells her house, and moves on to his next conquest. It is his urbane self-possession here that viewers find most offensive. He is no madman, no self-loathing sexual pervert. Merely a businessman conducting his “business” with the same ruthlessness with which his superiors at the bank liquidated him.

There is a charming scene of Verdoux checking with a flower girl about some bouquets he’s been sending to a prospective victim. He phones the woman from the shop and rhapsodically proclaims his complete and passionate devotion to her. The flower girl, over-hearing, becomes breathless and can hardly tell him his change.

But Verdoux’s luck eventually changes. The stock market crashes and he is wiped out. His wife and child die—we aren’t told exactly why, but can presume he couldn’t afford medical care or adequate food or housing anymore.

Years later, we see an embittered Verdoux on the street. His face is a mask of dark sorrow and cynicism. A beautiful woman in a limousine recognizes him and calls his name. It is the prostitute. She is now married to a rich and successful munitions manufacturer. Grateful for his earlier kindness to her, she takes him out for lunch at an exclusive restaurant. Unfortunately, he is also recognized by another guest, the brother of one of his victims. The police are called and Verdoux is arrested.

At his trial, Verdoux is described by the prosecutor as a monster, a savage beast of relentless fury and remorseless cunning. Verdoux thanks the prosecutor for his compliments but claims he is not worthy of them. He catalogues the atrocities of recent and imminent wars and notes that Generals are awarded medals and described as heroes for murdering millions. In comparison, he is a mere “amateur”. He says, “numbers sanctify”. He smiles at the judge and jury and tells them, with horrifying prescience, that they will all be joining him very soon. For my money, it’s one of the great moments in film.

“Monsieur Verdoux” was pulled from the theatres after two weeks of savage criticism from the church, the public, and the media. Chaplin himself was driven out of the country and had his visa revoked a few years later (he had never become an American citizen) and lived the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland. Ironically, one of the issues raised was his support of the Soviet Union. This support was given during speeches he made in support of the war effort at a time when the Soviet Union was an official ally of the United States in the war with Germany! This was of a piece with the outrages that prompted Joseph Welch’s famous, “at long last, have you no shame?”

Why did Chaplin make such an offensive film? Why would anyone want to dramatize the life of a blue beard and scoundrel?

Chaplin saw, in Verdoux, the personification of the ruthless practices of big business corporations in the U.S. and Europe. Things haven’t changed much. Read through any Time Magazine or any newspaper and you will see that rich, successful businessmen like Bill Gates and Donald Trump—no matter how ruthless or greedy they are—are routinely worshipped and admired. Furthermore, it is very clear that when the rich swindle stockholders or investors out of millions of dollars, they never serve a day in jail—in fact, they never even give up their limousines and four-star hotels, even if they owe millions–whereas the poor are locked up and brutalized without a second thought.

Chaplin, having grown up in poverty himself, was acutely aware of these injustices. “Monseiur Verdoux” is simply a dramatization of the same ethics that drove Bill Gates to a fortune of billions applied on a more personal, immediate level, without the layers of lawyers and bureaucrats and advertising agencies that cushion today’s executives from the consequences of their policies.

chaplin_keaton.jpg (13349 bytes)

With bimbo cheerleaders like Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal waving their pom-poms from the sidelines, we have all come to accept that it is appropriate and right for businesses to operate in a cut-throat fashion, in order to ensure that the stock markets rise and profits increase and men like Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy—wealthy beyond the means of any sane man to ever possibly indulge. What happens to all those workers who are down-sized? How many families are disrupted? How many divorces? How many suicides? What about the damage to the environment? Why are governments using tax dollars to clean up the toxic wastes generated by profitable private corporations? Why are people being cut off from welfare while the government awards billions in tax subsidies to the wealthy shareholders of corporations like Boeing, or major league baseball teams?

Numbers sanctify. It is probably the most subversive film ever made in America.

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Exploiting a Tragedy

It might have been a wonderful story. Well, not a “wonderful” story. It’s a horrible story, actually. But part of the story would have been very appealing to a certain constituency: when one of the teenage killers at Columbine High School held a gun to the head of Cassie Bernall and asked her if she believed in God, she courageously said “yes”. Then he blew her away.

Oh wait. What do you mean “might have been a wonderful story”? Didn’t it happen?

The Christian community in the U.S. has seized upon this incident. It has a lot of appealing elements for them. First of all, Cassie was a young, attractive teenage girl. She had gone through a rebellious stage, including, allegedly, some dabbling in witchcraft, but her parents had straightened her out by sending her to a strict “program” at West Bowles Community Church. She wore a “What would Jesus do” bracelet. She carried a bible to school every day and was reading it at the moment the carnage began. She confessed her faith in words loud enough to be heard by her cowering classmates, though she knew it might mean her life.

So the story seems to provide a little of everything. Cassie was courageous because she confessed her sin. When she had rebelled, her parents no-nonsense, “tough love” measures worked. She carried a bible to school, where, of course, thanks to the godless liberals and feminists, prayer and bible study is no longer permitted. She was murdered by two young boys who were heavily immersed in video games, violent Hollywood movies, and rock’n’roll. Most importantly, she was murdered because she was a Christian. Because America turned it’s back on God when it banned prayer in school.

The latest fad among the ultra-right in the U.S. is to assert that they are now a persecuted minority. In a perverse way, this is the rationale they now use to assert their traditional privileged status in society. They claim that they are the only religion not allowed to have prayers in school (ignoring, with twisted logic, the fact that no other religion ever had a large enough constituency to even attempt to assert such a right in the first place, and ignoring the fact no other religion is or ever was allowed to lead classes or assemblies in prayer at any time).

It’s a story that plays into the social and political attitudes and platitudes of the Christian right.

The trouble is, the story is not exactly true. Well, it’s not true at all, essentially.
The report originated with one of the boys who was in the library, and who survived the assault. He was the brother of Rachel Scott who was killed outside of the school. He told the police that he heard the conversation and recognized Cassie’s voice.

The police later tried to verify the story. They took Mr. Scott through the library, as part of the process of meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events at Columbine. When Mr. Scott showed them where Cassie had been during the exchange, the police knew that the voice did not come from Cassie Bernall. Cassie’s body had been found in a different location. In fact, Cassie had been hiding under a table with Emily Wyant, quite some distance away from all of the other students. This is information that is not difficult to confirm.

This much is true. The gunman—most likely Dylan Klebold—asked a girl if she believed in God. The girl was not Cassie Bernall but Valeen Schnurr. Valeen did indeed answer yes, courageously, yes. But the gunman did not shoot her. In fact, he allowed Valeen, who was seriously wounded, to crawl away, without further harm.

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

The Christian community has adopted Cassie Bernall as a symbol of all that is forthright and courageous and virtuous in America, just as they have come to see Klebold and Harris as icons of deviance, immorality, and godlessness. Every hero needs a villain. Even Valeen Schnurr says she doesn’t mind that this spurious story circulates because it might bring someone to Jesus. Meanwhile, she has come under some abuse herself by “Christians” who are upset at her for disabusing them of their congenial myth.

So, she goes along with the silent consensus here among people who should know better: a little lie can be excused if it furthers the greater good.

I have trouble with this. So some minister is going to tell the story of Cassie Bernall at an evangelical service somewhere and fifteen young people, as a result of the story, will come to the front to pledge their lives to Jesus. No harm done? Not if they find out some day that Christian leaders knowingly perpetuated a lie? No harm done when reputable scholars and writers and journalists are aware of the deceit and draw negative conclusions about the integrity and honesty of the Christian community as a result? No harm done when a Christian congressman like Asa Hutchinson stands up in Congress and argues for a bill and some wavering delegate sits and listens and thinks, “Well, this is the guy who still goes around flogging the story of Cassie Bernall even though he should know better….”

If Christianity is true, would it’s adherents willfully lie about a thing like this?  If Christianity means something to its adherents– if it means anything– why does this happen, often?

 

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Whistling Dixie

Does anyone care that the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court likes to lead singalongs of “Dixie” (“I wish I was in the land of cotton…”) at public conferences?

I suppose we shouldn’t be too, too shocked. This is the same guy who sometimes quotes Gilbert & Sullivan in memos to other Supreme Court justices, and who designed a robe for himself that looks like it belongs in Brigadoon.

The guy is a lunatic. And he is in charge of seeing that the Constitution of the United States of America is properly enforced. This is a man who regularly makes final decisions about matters of race and religion and civil rights in America.

You have to think hard to imagine that you are black lawyer, fighting a case that involves racial prejudice, the results of which may determine whether your client lives or dies. And the Chief Justice sits up there behind his ridiculous robes and smiles at you and you can almost hear him whistling Dixie.

It could be worse.

It could be Robert Bork up there instead.

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The Senate: 100 Old White Men

They look oh-so-respectable.

Did you know that it is practically impossible to dethrone an incumbent Senator in the United States? That’s because the Senate is so good, so honest, and so hard-working, that nobody ever wants to change any of its members.

Well, yes, maybe. The truth is that once you have become a Senator, you can call yourself Senator Bigbottom and go around making speeches and public appearances and everybody pretty well assumes that anybody known as Senator anything is entitled to the position by virtue of the cool sounding title. Senator.

“Congressman”, on the other hand, sounds a bit ridiculous, even when applied to a woman. Anybody can be a Congressman. And President? Every two-bit Elvis Presley fan club has a president. What’s the big deal about the President. But Senator? Not many people ever get to be called Senator.

Now, take a wild guess as to how many black Senators there are? Come on. Go ahead. Give it your best shot. Don’t forget that about 18% of the U.S. population is black. So how many Senators, out of one hundred, are black? Ten? Five? Two?

The answer is 0.

That’s right. ZERO. And how many Senators are female? More than half the U.S. population is female, so how many representatives of this gender get to call themselves “Senator”? Fifty? Hoo haw! Twenty? You’re joking. Ten? Maybe.

Maybe two.

That’s all. That’s all you need to know about the Senate.

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Tail-Gunner Bill Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley, the famous American conservative with a fake, snotty British accent, has recently published a novel. With an audaciousness rarely seen in the literary community, he has decided to undertake the rehabilitation of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Sure, the rest of the world has come to see McCarthyism as a synonym for bigotry, intolerance, and fanaticism, but Mr. Buckley has decided that he alone can correct that erroneous impression. McCarthy was a hero. He was right. He may well have saved America!

I always feel reassured when conservatives show their true colors. You see, many conservatives seem to have turned their backs on McCarthyism and appear to agree with most people that McCarthyism was a bad thing. In a roundabout way, I think this causes many people to get the warm fuzzies when they see George Bush Jr. on television, talking about compassion, even if they know that the U.S. Treasury can’t print dollars fast enough to keep up with the orgasmic flush being directed to Bush, and the Republican Party, by big corporations.

In case anyone needs a refresher, Senator McCarthy chaired a committee which investigated the penetration of U.S. government agencies, including the army, by communist agents. You really need to see one of the good dramatizations of McCarthy’s tactics (“Fear on Trial” is a good start) to appreciate the man. Not a man to waste his time with obtuse diversions like evidence or due process, he merely smeared people with innuendo or suspicion and bullied corporations, the government, the army, and Hollywood, into destroying the lives of anyone who would not appear before his committee, bow before him, and rat on his or her buddies. He was finally disgraced when even Eisenhower couldn’t stomach him anymore. He died a lonely, broken man, an alcoholic, and left, as his greatest legacy, his name as an adjective.

But Mr. Buckley wants to rehabilitate his image. Did we all miss something? Was Senator McCarthy misunderstood? Did he really save America? Can you believe Billy Buckley Jr.’s version of events?

Buckley describes, in his novel, an old black man who asks if it is true that the International Communist Conspiracy is seeking to undermine the U.S. government. Yes, of course. Then why, he asks, don’t we just run them out of town, like we used to? Buckley thinks this is the right attitude. Why don’t we just run them out of town? And that is Buckley’s real vision of “democracy”. If we don’t like someone, we just run him out of town. And why apply that solution only to communists?

If you like that philosophy, then save a soft spot in your heart for “Tail-gunner” Joe McCarthy. And keep your bags packed. There is always a witch hunt somewhere

 

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Henry Cisneros

America the Pure

Henry Cisneros was the Mayor of San Antonio in 1988. He was married with children. Then he had an affair with his campaign manager, Linda Jones. It was not a very secret affair: almost everybody involved in civic politics in San Antonio knew about it. Cisneros decided to come clean about the affair: he called a press conference and admitted the truth. Then he left his wife, and moved in with Linda Jones.

Nobody admires an adulterer, of course, but it isn’t against any law in the United States or Canada. Cisneros left politics and tried to make a new life for himself with his new partner. Big deal.

About a year after he left his wife, Cisneros changed his mind and moved back in with his wife. Good. He did the right thing. But Linda Jones, in the meantime, had left her own husband. She graciously asked for a divorce without alimony. Gracious indeed, since she was the one who broke her marriage vows. After Cisneros left her to go back to his wife, Jones was not as gracious. She demanded some kind of support payments. She wanted $4,000 a month. Cisneros agreed. Everything, at this point, looks a little tawdry, don’t you think? Still, nothing illegal about it all.

In 1992, Bill Clinton made Cisneros head of the Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD). Before he could take up his new position, he had to pass an FBI “background check”. The FBI asked about financial issues and Cisneros did something a little strange. He informed the FBI that he had given money to Jones but he said that he gave a lot less than he really did. This is strange because there is nothing illegal– quite the contrary– about paying support to a former partner. Nevertheless, when Cisneros’ financial obligations increased– he has a child with a heart defect and two daughters in college– he stopped making payments to Jones. Jones sold her stories to the tabloids and launched a lawsuit. The FBI found out that the amounts he had previously paid her were far in excess of what he had said he paid her– more like $40,000 instead of $10,000 a year.

Janet Reno appointed an independent prosecutor to investigate the charges. Why? Who knows? It cost the FBI and the Independent Counsel $9 million to investigate Cisneros’ consensual relationship.

Cisneros now faces 90 years in jail. I’m not kidding. For what? For “conspiracy”, “lying to a law enforcement officer”, “obstruction of justice” (which sometimes appears to be the major crime of not telling the police when you are committing a minor crime or something that could be construed as a crime). Whatever.

What kind of a lunatic asylum is this? What kind of an idiot is running the Justice Department and the FBI? What kind of a nation tolerates this kind of hysterical persecution?

A nation that executes children. A nation that subsidizes millionaire athletes. A nation that rewards graduating high school seniors with breast implants. A nation that enters a war with the expectation that it will withdraw with the first casualty.

Update, February 2003:

I just discovered that Bill Clinton pardoned Cisneros in January 1999. One of the few pardons that makes sense..

Update January 2006: The Republicans want to reanimate the Cisneros scandal after a disclosure that– apparently– someone came to their senses and decided that $9 million was quite enough to spend on investigating a well-known divorce. Cover-up, Cover up!

Are most Republican supporters so whacko that they will be sufficiently aroused by Robert Novak to simply buy this story without actually checking into any of the details? Write me if you are a Republican and you actually did some independent research on the Cisneros stories before buying the “cover-up” spin. Please.

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Bush League

In a speech at a conference at McGill University recently, former U.S. President George Bush responded to charges that former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been too cozy to the U.S. President, selling out Canada’s needs and aspirations in order to cozy up to those big American mega-corporations. “However close our relationship was, the prime minister always had Canada’s best interests at heart.” Spoken like a true tart. He sounds like Dracula praising a woman for her lovely, long neck.

Brian Mulroney himself later proclaimed that where-ever he travels in Canada, “I am just about received in triumph”. It’s a very telling phrase: just about. I picture two old ladies with pom-poms asking if it’s true that Joe Clark is making an appearance. Just about.

Somehow this doesn’t jive with the reports of Conservative campaign workers who found, in the election following Mulroney’s resignation, that doors were slammed in their faces as soon as they identified themselves as representatives of Mulroney’s party. Doesn’t jive, either, with the election results: the Progressive Conservatives under hapless successor Kim Campbell were pretty well wiped right off the map. No one seriously believed this was a vote on Kim Campbell. The Conservatives still haven’t recovered. Mulroney claims that the media made him look bad. The media and about 10 million voters.

Well, when Bush wasn’t busy singing Mulroney’s praises, he lavished a few compliments on former Mexican President Carlos Salinas. Mexico certainly hasn’t lost it’s desire to see Mr. Salinas– he is hiding out in Ireland right now avoiding extradition on charges of pilfering the state treasury. Mr. Mulroney must have blushed with delight at having risen to such lofty heights– to be praised in the same breath with a corrupt former Mexican dictator!

What is so offensive about Mr. Mulroney’s attempts to rehabilitate his “image” is his cold conviction that he really was a great as he thinks he was, and it is only a matter of sufficient determination and persistence on his part for the rest of us to be so enlightened. One gets the impression that he thinks that the people of Canada were tricked into believing he was a creep, and they can be tricked back into believing he was a genius.

The problem with that is that if Canadian public opinion was really so wishy-washy, who would want the blessings of its favour?

Bush has the same problem in the U.S. He is generally regarded as a light-weight president, a man who led his country into the most one-sided and hollow military victory of this century, and, for all that, couldn’t manage to get himself re-elected while running against a shifty womanizing chameleon from Arkansas.

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Cutting Taxes

I just read that there is an election in Texas, and all the
candidates are promising to reduce the size of government
and cut taxes.

Here in Ontario, Mike Harris, of the Progressive Conservatives (wouldn’t that name sit nicely on some of those Neanderthal Texans!), is also promising to cut taxes.

This puzzles me. It seems to me that we’ve been cutting
taxes and reducing the size of government since the Lyndon Johnson Administration. The Viet Nam War was the most expensive undertaking by the U.S. government at that time. I can’t remember the last time I heard a candidate promise to “increase taxes and make the government bigger”. But if everybody has been cutting taxes and reducing the size of government, it seems to me that there shouldn’t be very much of either left by now. Just two guys in a rented office in Washington, and a driver’s license bureau in Peoria.

Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1979, promising to cut taxes. He criticized the Democrats as irresponsible “tax and spend” liberals. In 1979, the U.S. had a national budget deficit of about $45 Billion. Reagan won and cut taxes. He cut spending on a few things but increased spending on the military. When he left office in 1988, the U.S. national deficit was $500 Billion.

That’s the trouble with conservatives. When the deficits in most western countries were really high, they argued that governments could no longer afford to spend a lot of money on social programs and education and health care. People would have to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Workers would have to settle for smaller wages and less benefits. But then they went right out and squandered an unbelievable fortune on idiotic, ill-conceived, outrageously over-priced military hardware like the B-2 Stealth Bomber. (Remember– these are the companies that charged the Pentagon almost $1000 for a common pair of pliers, and $700 for a hammer). And the richest business and corporate leaders continued to give themselves mammoth increases in pay and benefits, while demanding that the government dump single mothers off welfare.

Is it really so surprising that “liberals” like Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien are finally eliminating those horrendous deficits? But even Clinton tends to give in to the military, which, in spite of the fact that America doesn’t have a single powerful enemy in the world, continues to spend money in the most wasteful way imaginable: on military technologies that are obsolete before they even hit production.

Think about this– the U.S. military budget reached a size that could truly be termed “colossal” at a time when most Americans believed that the Soviet Bloc was ten times as large and powerful as it is now. As it turns out, the Soviet Bloc was never anything near the military threat the Pentagon said it was. Yet the U.S. continues to spend even more today on the military than it did in the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s. A lot of thoughtful people think that this whole Yugoslavian adventure is primarily a desperate attempt by the military to justify sustained expenditures on new toys.

One last thing about tax cuts. Conservatives like Mike Harris love to rave about how they are giving the same tax cut to everybody, rich or poor, white or black, male or female, gay or heterosexual. That’s right. Let’s see. Let’s say it’s a 4% tax reduction.

If you make $50,000 a year and pay $8,000 in taxes, Mike Harris is going to give you a hefty $320 back! Whoooeee! Don’t spend it all at once! You may want to save it for appointments with your acupuncturist!

Now, if you make $500,000 a year, and pay $100,000 in taxes, then your tax break amounts to…. hold on to your hat! $4000! That’s right. Even though you make way more money than the poor schmuck making $50,000, the province of Ontario is going to give you ten times as much money back! Sort of Robin Hood in reverse. Especially when you consider that to get that $4000, Mike Harris had to borrow $24 billion, which is now added to the province’s dept. Actually, he also got some of the money by reducing services at hospitals and schools, that benefit everybody regardless of income.

Lest you think I’m just another of those “tax and spend” liberals, let me assure you that I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy. It just peeves me off when the government borrows money from all of us to give a big tax break to a few. Let’s at least eliminate the deficit before giving out any big fat tax breaks, and lets make sure we have adequate housing, medical care, and social services too.

Do you like walking past the panhandlers in downtown Toronto? Me neither. Harris’ solution is to truck them out of down. My solution is to rearrange priorities. Second BMW for a wealthy Ontario family? Second. Affordable housing for poor people in Toronto? First. Done.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it to my dying day: even the rich benefit from a stable, safe society, and you can only have a stable, safe society if you ensure that wealth is distributed fairly among as many people as possible.