Category: History

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About Schmidt– Bernhard Schmidt

I’ve been thinking about a German named Bernhard Voldemar Schmidt. Schmidt was so fascinated by stars and galaxies and space that he worked as an unpaid astronomer at the observatory in Hamburg in 1929. He invented a new kind of telescope that allowed the viewer to take large, fast photographs of the stars. Fritz Zwicky, who discovered black holes, used a Schmidt telescope at Palomar in California. Since then, thanks to Schmidt, there has been a tradition of devoted amateurs making important discoveries in space through small but powerful telescopes based on Schmidt’s design.

What made me think about Schmidt all day– as if that wasn’t enough– was this paragraph:

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Schmidt was so disgusted that he gave up hope and quietly drank himself to death.

That’s true poetry. A man who, through his dedication and ingenuity, gave the world a gift, that helped people contemplate the mysteries and beauties of the universe, of space, of colliding meteors and comets and collapsing stars, and even of time itself, as the universe continues to fling itself outward madly…. that this man should drink himself to death when his own universe contracted around him into a black hole of hatred and bigotry. It’s too much.

Technically, he died of pneumonia. More accurately: cognac. He spent the last year of his life in an asylum. He died on December 1, 1935, Wiki says he had just returned from a vacation in Holland. In December?

I can’t find any reference to wife or children.

He lost his right hand and fore-arm in an accident involving experiments with gunpowder when he was fifteen.

He sang a broken hallelujah to his grave.

I know, I know– he was kind of pathetic. You might even say he was a loser. It’s hard to be sympathetic to a man who gave up. It helps no one to give up and let yourself sink into a morass of self-pity and despair.

But I have a soft spot for Bernhard Schmidt because though he did not become a force for a change or a resistance leader or a leading dissident, he saw the truth and lived the truth the only way he thought he could. I don’t even know if he was wrong. It might be truthful to say that any action he could have taken, given his time and circumstance, would have been useless.

There should be an international prize called the “Bernhard Schmidt”. And it should go to the person who best exemplifies the spirit of dismay and grief at the incredible persistence of stupidity, bigotry, hatred, and violence in human affairs. The awarding committee, which should include Leonard Cohen, and Cyndi Lauper, will descend upon a bar somewhere, and move into a dark corner, and play a little fanfare on the ukulele and kazoo, hand over the award– a crystal beer mug– and then race back to their headquarters in the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam to begin considering nominations for next year’s prize.

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Billy Graham’s Recovered Memory

The Rev. Billy Graham apologized Friday for a 1972
conversation with former President Nixon in which he
said the Jewish “stranglehold” of the media was ruining
the country and must be broken.

Billy Graham, who must occasionally take a little pride in the fact that while Swaggert and Baker and others have fallen, he remains pure and unsullied by scandal, says:

Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office
conversation with President Nixon … some 30 years ago.

This statement was released by Mr. Graham’s Texas public relations firm.

It’s disgraceful. He has no memory? He has no memory of a conversation he had with President Nixon, in the Oval Office? He has no memory of the fact that he was an anti-Semite?

The thing is, the comments didn’t materialize out of thin air. They don’t sound like a man making conversation while waiting for a bus. They sound like a man deep in serious discussion with another powerful man for whom the issues being discussed are not academic or abstract. Mr. Graham, presumably, said what he believed. Why would it be something he didn’t believe? It’s not enough for him to say now that he doesn’t remember saying it, and doesn’t believe what he said. It is not enough.

You have to think of other things. You have to think about the civil rights movements and the antiwar movements and the media reporting on it all and the perception widely held among redneck Americans at the time of some kind of global Jewish conspiracy to undermine core American values. Mr. Graham was condemning the media for holding liberal values which he thought were alien to Mr. Nixon’s constituency, the so-called silent majority.

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s
going down the drain,” Graham said.

“You believe that?” Nixon says in response.

“Yes, sir,” says Graham.

“Oh boy. So do I,” Nixon agrees, then says: “I can’t ever
say that but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might
be able to do something,”

Now, what I am disturbed about is this: Billy Graham has a public relations firm?

Added March 2007:

President Nixon wasn’t able to break the “stranglehold” of the liberal, Jewish Media. So was God’s man in America, Billy Graham, being prophetic when he said America would go “down the drain”.

Are we down the drain yet?

I know some people think we are They think the pervasiveness of sex, sexual references, sexual topics, sexy bodies, sexy jokes, and sexy clothes are proof of that. The sex itself is not what leads us down the drain: it is the drain. We are here.

But by any objective standard, we actually live in a kind of neo-Victorianism where in Stewy’s little animated butt on “Family Guy” is now censored. I am not making this up.

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Hollywoodized Fantasies

And we really can’t expect Hollywood to give us the stark reality that we see in psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric outpatient clinics.

Dr. Glen Gabbard, psychoanalyst and author.

Why not?

And does it matter?

“A Beautiful Mind” is a wonderful film, if you like inspiring stories. It’s the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia. In the movie, John Nash attends Princeton University, develops some brilliant theories about economics while skipping most of his classes, begins teaching at MIT, and marries a beautiful student, Alicia. Then his life begins to break up. He begins having delusions– he sees people who don’t exist. He becomes paranoid and irrational. Alicia supports him through all of his struggles, however, and, eventually– after twenty years– he pulls himself together. He is nominated for a Nobel Prize (for work he did as a student) and makes a speech in Stockholm thanking his loyal wife for standing so firmly behind him.

Wonderful story, isn’t it? On a Christian website, the movie is given almost acclamation, “thumbs up” for it’s “inspiring” story. Is it inspiring? Do you watch this movie and think, wow, it’s wonderful to know that his wife was so loyal and supportive– I know I could be like that? The fact that it is a true story makes it oh so compelling! And so uplifting! That’s the kind of film some Christians feel that Hollywood should produce.

“A Beautiful Mind” is mostly lies and blather!

Oh, it is a “true” story. Other than the fact that John Nash married and abandoned a wife (and a child) to poverty before he met Alicia. And other than the fact that Nash didn’t “see” people (he heard voices). And other than the fact that Alicia actually did divorce him. And other than the fact that he went to Europe and joined an anti-American organization for a time. And other than the fact that he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s room in San Francisco (and that’s why he was fired from “Wheeler” — in real life, the Rand Corporation.)

Yeah, other than a few small details…

Some people I know say, “I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s true or not– it’s a wonderful story. Why can’t I just enjoy the movie without having to know the truth?”

Then you’re going to tell me to keep my chin up– if I only look on the bright side of things, life will get better.

The trouble is, in a few years, the movie will replace the real facts of the life of John Nash, just as “Schindler’s List” has begun to replace the real facts in the life of Oskar Schindler.

The funny thing is, in both cases, the real stories are far more compelling, far more interesting, and more “inspiring” in a true sense than the ridiculous Hollywood versions.

It’s worth a thought or two about Spielberg’s revisionist “Schindler’s List”. The original book was labelled “fiction” by it’s publisher until after the movie was released. It is now labelled “non-fiction”. So, who’s going to sue over the difference? There is no Association for Honesty and Truth to finance a legal challenge to this arbitrary conversion from fiction to projection.

And after all, what’s wrong with Schindler’s list?

Spielberg’s villain, Amon Goeth, likes to shoot at Jewish workers with a rifle, from his balcony. You see that he is a monster. But …

To pathologize Göth as Sadist, to demonize him and make him a monster is precisely to miss the most disturbing knowledge we now have of the average Nazi perpetrator: that he was, in an overwhelming majority of the cases, not a sadist, a “deviant” or an “aberration,” but rather a dutiful, law respecting civil servant carrying out his orders.  Robert S. Leventhal

And that’s the truth.

Added 2024-02-05

I saw this wonderful example of exactly what Leventhal is talking about:

Who is the greatest movie villain of all time?
Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List has to be way up there.
There’s a scene where he’s sitting in a room with a rifle, killing people in the street for fun because he can yet is totally nondescript in his dealings with Schindler. His portrayal still makes my blood run cold when I watch the film. He is ruthless and unfeeling throughout the film until he meets his fate at the end: but even then he remains fanatical and without remorse.
What’s worse is there were plenty of fanatic Nazis like him. Scary thought.
I’ve watched attempts at copying devils like Slobodan Milosovich and Ratko Mladic from the Balkans Wars; and others like Mengele and Auschwitz commandants and savage guards. None come close. What Fiennes was able to accomplish is both exemplary and more than just a little unnerving. But credit to Fiennes for showing modern audiences what Holocaust survivors, families and murdered victims faced in that war.
There was no behind the lines with men like him roaming free.

From “Movie and Entertainment Sphere”, one of those obnoxious Facebook inserts from who the hell knows where.

For a really effective corrective, see “The Zone of Interest”.  It’s brilliant and does exactly what Leventhal asks movies to do.  It reveals, brilliantly, just how the worst evils in the world can be committed by people who outwardly appear to be “normal”, functioning, average people.  Like us, if we allow it.  Like Trump supporters who blindly parrot their leader’s idiotic blather and joyfully march in his grievance parade.

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A Visit to Ottawa – Part II

Bill’s Trip to Canada’s National Capital: Part II

I stayed in Ottawa recently to take a course in Oracle, the world’s most powerful and expensive data base. I stayed at the Lord Elgin, which is really pretty fancy, though I assure you it is priced very competitively with Holiday Inn. They took my car away from me from the moment arrived– I haven’t even seen my keys in four days– so I was forced to walk everywhere.

I walked down the Rideau looking for a Wendy’s. There were two Burger King’s, a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen, and a food court in the Rideau Centre, a giant shopping mall. I ended up with a Mozza burger from A&W and New Yorker Fries and a complete waste of dinner.

On the way back, I stopped in at Chapters to try to find a book on humor by Gershon Legman. The staff were not helpful. Well, I’d never heard of him either until recently. The computers they have scattered throughout the store are supposed to help you find books. It found Legman’s book but it declared that not only was it not in stock, but it wasn’t even “available”. This is a book that some people with opinions I respect think is a very, very important book.

On the way back, I dropped into the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. There is a long staircase descending from Rideau St. to a long, empty hall, and then another staircase that descends to the main hall. On the upper hall is a display of photographs of images from a television set of an 8mm camcorder video taken by a guy named Ho Tam. In these images, Ho “moves between the roles of observer and participant” and produces a series of “grainy yet sensitive pictures”. Ho reflects on his schooling experiences (the shots are taken in a Catholic school he attended in Hong Kong) and, “most importantly, the ‘lessons’ learned during those formative years— love, desire, discipline, trust, fear, and loss of innocence”.

To me, they looked like a bunch of badly lit, badly aimed Kodak Instamatic photographs. What’s in them? What did you think would be in them, given the description above– “loss of innocence”? They consist of a bunch of images of the buildings, the kids playing soccer or hanging around, and the toilets, and foliage.

Well, that’s the problem with modern art, you know. I say I wanted to see some very sharp, specific images of faces and people acting upon each other and their environments. The artist asserts that I am oppressing him with a paternalistic and fascist sense of structured literalistic meaning.

But let’s think about this. Why do we have modern art? Because artists since 1920 have been so wildly inventive and imaginative that they have single-handedly struck upon a mode of expression that contains the unparalleled potential to illuminate the zeitgeist of our own era? No. Modern Art exists because photography came along and removed the figurative, representational purpose of painting and sculpture. With nothing else to do, art turned in upon itself and became self-referential, drawing attention to it’s methods and material elements and structure. The next thing you know, it is mocking those very self-referential elements, and then it is trying to draw attention to the fact that it is mocking itself, and then it tries to be so cool that it doesn’t even seem to be mocking itself, all the while demanding that patrons pay outrageous sums of money in order to exhibit these products upside down in their living rooms.

So you have Jackson Pollock with his splatter-paintings, and Andy Warhol with his soup cans. So you have the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York fighting bravely for the honor and respect of modern art now caught in it’s own theological disputes over whether or not post-modernism really exists and should have a place to display itself.

And you have Ho with his deconstructed photographs. What is he doing?

He is using a technology to imitate an art form that is a revolt against his technology.

Is he a genius?

No, because he doesn’t understand what he is doing. What he thinks he is doing is making his photographs “artistic”. How do you make them artistic? Well, good heavens, not by finding interesting subjects and photographing them accurately. You make them artistic by finding uninteresting subjects and photographing them in uninteresting ways, with uninteresting angles, in degraded colour and low resolution, and then you mount them on the wall and point to them and tell people–you have to tell them, or they won’t know– that this is art.

Your artlessness camouflages the fact that you have no creativity to offer, that you didn’t do the hard work of composition, lighting, camera angle, colouration, and so on.

Most importantly, you ban cameras from the building.

I’m not kidding. I’m looking at these awful illustrations on the wall and reading a sign and the sign says that anyone trying to steal these images will be prosecuted for copyright violation. God help us, someone might try to steal a photograph of your bad photographs! It makes me think of an old, fat, diseased whore: “Don’t you even think of trying to get me to pose nude for you, my boy!”

Down the hall, in the main hall, don’t you know, are more mature works by a more respected visual artist– Pierre Boogaerts.

I am reading the program notes on Pierre Boogaerts. Is there any greater testimony to the bankruptcy of modern art than phrases like this: “… belongs to the generation of artist who adopted photography as their preferred means of expression in the early 1970’s”. Isn’t that bizarre? It sounds like elevator conversation– you have to say something, so say something inane. Anyway, his work is “marked by a conjunction of influences from Pop Art, Land Art, and conceptual art, and called into question the formulation and function of the work of art itself”.

That kind of consummate gobbledygook may have been excusable once upon a time, when the philistines were upon us, or when Stravinsky almost started a riot in Paris with “Rites of Spring”, but to write that kind of crap in 2001 of a mediocre artist like Boogaerts raises the question of whether the curators of this museum themselves must realize that it sounds like a joke.

There’s more:

“The Exhibition is selected from the entire body of work donated to the CMCP by Boogaerts in 1994. Poetry, an essential dimension of Boogaerts’ production, which is frequently masked by its conceptual art trappings, is highlighted in the structure of the exhibition through the use of analogy. This approach focuses attention on the visual beauty and associative processes inherent in the medium, which influenced the development of the artist’s ideas.”

Maybe you can rationalize away the word “entire”, as if he had another body of work that wasn’t “entire”, or the coy link to poetry, and maybe even “conceptual art trappings”, but I defy any sane person to excuse, in the name of literacy, “associative processes inherent in the medium”.

If you’re still interested, his photographs consist mainly of repetitious shots of leaves and buildings, arranged in various uninteresting collages or shapes and sizes.

I was the only person in the museum for the first ten minutes of my tour. Four or five other people came in while I was there. The staff, three people, well-dressed, behind the main counter, seemed discernibly alarmed when I came in. A security guard tried to follow me but I think she didn’t want to appear to be too suspicious so she hung back and tried to look nonchalant while making sure I didn’t stick a photograph of a leaf under my coat. They didn’t check me for anthrax or bombs or anything– does Osama Bin Laden know that the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography is a sitting duck?

It reminded me of a moment in Europe, in 1977. I toured the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was great, and very busy, and the Van Gogh Museum, also in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris. At either of the latter two, I could easily have walked out with any painting, including the Mona Lisa. Shortly afterwards, a mad Dutchman sliced Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and that was the end of that era.

Everybody jaywalks in Ottawa, even the police. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I didn’t actually see any police jaywalk, but I saw several of them sitting in cars or Jeep Cherokees near busy intersections and not one of them tried to arrest me for jaywalking.

Being the law-abiding sort, I wanted to wait for the lights to change, but this young girl who looked like she knew what she was doing blustered ahead of me and charged through the red “Don’t Walk Sign” so I followed. In fact, she demonstrated a convincingly degree of leadership, so I followed her for several blocks, at a discrete distance of course. She was good at it. She knew exactly when you could charge safely through a red stop sign and when it might not be safe.

We passed a demonstration near the National Arts Centre. I didn’t notice what it was for. I was instantly sympathetic with their cause…. until they started chanting. That’s when I am forced to tell myself that I could never be one with the poor and oppressed of this earth. I am genetically programmed to become nauseated at the first sound of a sing-along, group chant, slogans, and such. I would be a lousy demonstrator. When the woman with the bullhorn demands, “what are we going to do about it?”, I would shout, “I don’t know. What? Can we think about it?”

There was some kind of diplomatic gathering at Hotel Laurier. There were about twenty limos there with various chauffeurs standing around, shaking hands and gabbing. It looked like a United Nations get acquainted party. The cars, each with a distinctive red license plate, were parked all over the place, including on the sidewalks. I noticed that some of the “limos”, probably from poor third-world countries, were Neons and Jettas.

I saw something on the sidewalk and picked it up. It was some kind of identity card, which must belong to someone important. This person is so important, he doesn’t need his name or any other identifying marks on his card. It just has a magnetic stripe., and it is attached to some kind of belt clip with a yoyo type wire that reels back into a little disc. Very cool. I looked around at the chauffeur drivers but none of them met my eyes, so I walked off down the street with it. A few blocks later, I passed a cop and thought of turning it over to him, but then I thought it might arouse suspicion in these paranoid times, so I tucked it into my pocket and walked back to my hotel.

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Bush – WTC II

So what exactly is George Bush Jr. going to do?

He’s already made a couple of major mistakes here. He declared that an act of criminal terrorism was actually an act of war. He has vowed to eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth. He has promised the American people that he will destroy evil in the world.

We’re all getting carried away here. It sounds ridiculous, considering the scale of the disaster, the World Trade Centre attack, but we are getting carried away.

First of all, it was not an act of war. You have to have two parties for an act of war and both parties have to be nations in some form or another. So far, what we have, is a tightly bound group of conspirators. We have about 20 men against the entire military and industrial might of the United States of America. If this was a war, it would have been over before it started.

Bush has yet to show the world any evidence of complicity of any sovereign nation.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush actually diminishes the horror of what the fanatics did. If it’s an act of war, it falls into the category of Dresden and London during World War II, or Hiroshima, or My Lai, or any of dozens of other wartime atrocities that history tends to excuse because it regards them as examples of excess, not criminality.

On this issue, I consider myself harsher than Bush: it was an act of criminal terror. It was mass murder.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush probably hoped to justify a vigorous and powerful U.S. response. The next question, of course, is what is that response going to be?

It seems to me that there are three major options.

  1. He can blame a particular nation and launch a full-scale attack and invasion of that nation.
  2. He can blame a particular person or group and launch a limited attack with the aim of killing or apprehending that person or group. Or…
  3. He can blame a network of organizations and political entities and launch numerous limited attacks on their bases and hideouts.

Is there some other viable option I missed? I can’t think of it. I tried to think of it because these three options aren’t really very good.

With his grandiose rhetoric, Bush has created high expectations. Americans are waiting to see a big development. Can he deliver?

Option 1 is hopeless. There are good reasons why the U.S. would not want to invade or occupy Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or whoever. It would take a long time, and there would be an enormous cost in lives. It would likely introduce instability into a potentially volatile region. It would create a large pool of new, future terrorists. It would create alarm and concern in China and Russia and Pakistan. If the U.S. occupied the nation, it would have to constantly contend with terrorists and insurrectionists.

It would result in disaster.  [2022-04-27: Looks like I was right about that.]

The Soviets couldn’t take Afghanistan. It is a nation of mountains and deserts, with no infrastructure left, after the Soviet Occupation, to destroy. An invasion would unite the fractious forces that are currently at each other’s throats, as well as recruit tens of thousands of Islamic volunteers from other nations, some of whom will try to bring the war home to America. Most importantly, it would destabilize Pakistan.

Pakistan has a bomb.

I can’t believe the U.S. will adopt this insane strategy.  [They did.]

Option 2 is a more attractive, viable option, but won’t be effective. It’s too easy for the targets to move and hide and avoid interdiction. If it is the option Bush chooses, expect a ton of spin on the results. We got them. We got most of them. We got a lot of them. But nobody is going to be able to pretend we got all of them, and the ones we miss will strike back with a vengeance. Two, three years down the road, someone is going to ask an embarrassing question: do you feel safer today than you did in 2000?

Option 3 will look the most impressive with a new CNN logo and theme music. Lots of maps and diagrams, showing a combination of missiles, bombs, and paratroops, taking out numerous targets, and making a mighty impression on the global reach of the all-powerful U.S. military.

Once again, I doubt it will be particularly effective, but it will look effective, and when terrorists continue to strike back, it can be made to look more like the results of having intractable enemies than foolish foreign policy. American allies in the region– Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt– can breathe a big sigh of relief as the Americans pack up their carriers and rush home.

What should they do?

They should launch a new era of activism abroad with a concerted effort to broker peace in Israel, and to promote economic development in democratic third world nations. The U.S. should sign the Kyoto accord and law of the sea treaties, and ease up on it’s demands in the areas of trade and intellectual property rights.

It should forgive huge amounts of global debt.

That last item would cost it a lot less than most of the military options.

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JFK WTC I

I keep thinking about the Kennedy assassination. It’s the only other event I can remember that parallels, in my mind, the impact of this catastrophe. At the time, people compared Kennedy’s violent death to Pearl Harbor, and the death of Roosevelt, so I guess that makes the lineage clear: Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy’s Assassination, the World Trade Centre. In a league of their own.

Only four men died, initially, in the Kennedy Assassination– if you don’t count all those “mysterious” deaths of witnesses– but one was the youngest, brightest, and most forward-looking President in the history of the U.S. The others included one of the most baffling figures in American history: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald allegedly also killed Officer J.D. Tippit (one of the most puzzling peripheral characters in this drama) and was killed, in turn, by Jack Ruby, who, in turn, died of cancer in prison.

It is to the eternal shame of the Warren Commission that it did not create a sensation with a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, who joined the Marines, helped service U-2 spy planes in Japan, spoke fluent Russian, defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian, defected back to the U.S., wandered around Dallas and Irving, Texas, and New Orleans, in the company of CIA agents and provocateurs, anti-Castro Cubans, and gay gun-runners and erstwhile assassins, and whose best friend in Dallas was a strange ex-Nazi CIA informant George De Mohrenschildt. Lone nut? Are you kidding? He had the craziest social life in Texas.

I just played back a speech Kennedy made in Houston on November 22, 1963. Someone converted it to an MP3 and put it up for file-sharing. (I love the internet.) He talks about 1990– I’m not kidding. In 1990, we will need three times as many spaces at our colleges and universities. In 1990, we will have long since landed on the moon and will have embarked on a new phase of the space program (the shuttle?). He talked about big government programs that would benefit all citizens. He talked about human progress and development.

Shameless, wasn’t it? One of the hallmarks of this age is that most of us would heap scorn and ridicule on big government programs even though those programs included civil rights, our highways, the internet, our defense systems, NASA, and the near destruction of organized crime.

There was a lot of innocence and optimism. The government of the United States can set it’s mind to a seemingly impossible task– landing a man on the moon — Johnson followed with a war on poverty– and accomplish miracles. It is amazing to me that Kennedy succeeded is his most grandiose project– though he never lived to see a man on the moon. He even succeeded within his schedule, before the end of the decade.

Kennedy’s charisma and wit were extraordinary. He describes a new booster rocket used in the space program and mispronounces “payload” into “payroll”. He pauses a second and then says, “it will be the largest payroll too… who should know that better than Houston?” and the audience roars with laughter. It’s not just the wittiness of the remark, but his timing, his utter confidence and charm, and total command of the facts and detailed information– correct names, numbers, statistics, (which, like it or not, was also a remarkable ability of Bill Clinton.) You had the extraordinary sense that he was probably smarter than his advisers.

This was a man so confident in his own abilities that he allowed film-makers to follow him around the White House recording every moment of the day. Nothing was staged or phony– these were real meetings and phone-calls. There was an extremely circumspect, tense phone call to a segregationist governor. There were discussions about how to deal with the crowds of segregationists blocking school entrances. It was extraordinary. I have not seen footage like this of any president since.

Kennedy wasn’t remotely perfect, of course, and it’s hard to tell where he was going since his administration was cut short. But he made a number of “helluva” good decisions and judgments under enormous pressure (the Cuban missile crisis, dispatching the National Guard to Mississippi), and he was arguably moving towards withdrawal from Viet Nam because he believed that the government of South Viet Nam did not have the support of it’s own people (it didn’t). And while Hoover’s FBI, terrified or indifferent, had made no progress against organized crime in 20 years, Bobby Kennedy turned the crime families upside down. By the way– the wonders of the Internet age– you can download a lot of Kennedy’s speeches through Morpheus or other file-sharing programs (along with the Zapruder film)– quite amazing. Listen for yourself. Has anyone sounded that articulate, and that visionary, in a million years?

By 1972, Nixon was talking about how best to withdraw, and that was probably the greatest difference between Kennedy and those who followed him: he thought ahead. He didn’t want to allow himself to be put into the position of having to “withdraw”. He wanted the nation to be somewhere farther along in science and education and culture 20 years down the road. He knew that new technologies would remake industrial America if the education system provided the talent and skills needed.

He was talking about 1990. He was thinking about quagmire. He reluctantly accepted the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned during the Eisenhower Administration, but when it failed he fired the people who planned it and had assured him it would succeed (one of these was the brother of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in 1963). He initially did not think America was ready to step ahead on civil rights but when Martin Luther King forced the issue, he realized there was only one path to follow, because there was a future and you had to think about that.

I think most people intuitively understood that the Warren Commission was a sham. The Zapruder film was withheld from the public for ten years because it was bought by Time-Life which was managed by C.D. Jackson who was a friend to the CIA and who kept it away from the public, possibly because it didn’t show what the Warren Commission claimed it showed. Dan Rather, the fatuous old ass, did see the film and publicly claimed that it showed Kennedy’s head jerking “forward” with the last shattering bullet. Then he assured America that all was well and that the constitution had worked and the peaceful transition of power had occurred. I have a feeling that a Chilean Dan Rather spoke similar words in 1973 in Santiago, with kind words for Pinochet.

In spite of this tacit complicity with the coup, media coverage of the assassination was genuine and stunningly compelling, probably because they didn’t know how to do it yet. There was no “The JFK Assassination” logo, no theme music, no pimped-up collagen-faced newsreaders with their best-rehearsed tragic faces, as there was in September 2001. Reporters didn’t habitually encourage people to cry on camera. News organizations routinely waited for confirmation before releasing new details.

There was Cronkite with a catch in his voice as he announced the death, sitting at a makeshift studio, reading the news on paper as it was handed to him, removing his glasses. The difference was that Cronkite was a newsman, a real reporter, who understood the significance of the story. And those men behind him at the teletype: real people, not props. And there was the incredible KBOX radio broadcast, live from the route ” something has gone terribly wrong with the motorcade…”. It was a reporter who was not yet trained on how to “package” a tragedy.

Anyone who is old enough probably remembers that the impact of the Kennedy assassination on the world was as great, if not greater, than this WTC attack. People stood on street corners in stunned disbelief. They crowded around stores watching television. Complete strangers began talking intimately. Men bit their lips and wept and young girls wailed in grief.

And it was a similar loss of innocence. This young, vibrant, popular president who was almost certainly headed for a second term, was suddenly replaced with the master of the back-room deal (not that Kennedy wasn’t), the sly old Lyndon Johnson. Nothing against Johnson– I think he was a better president than people give him credit for though his decision to escalate the American commitment in Viet Nam was was his undoing– but he didn’t have nearly the vision of Kennedy, or acute sense of what could or could not be accomplished, and at what cost. Johnson was old-style party politics, with cigar-chomping brokers, party favors, and big campaign contributions from vested interests.

[2022-04-27: I amend this: Johnson actually passed several visionary, milestone pieces of legislation.  But he was absolutely underestimated on domestic policy, and disastrously wrong about Viet Nam.]

Most people probably felt they didn’t fully understand what had happened or who was responsible. But the idea that they would choose a man to be their leader and that their sacred right to do this was unabridged and incorruptible was skewered.

Johnson was defeated by Viet Nam, and Nixon by Watergate, and Carter by the “debacle in the desert” (anyone remember Ken Taylor). What is it with the U.S. and the Middle East?

I don’t know if it was Oswald alone or if Oswald even fired a shot. The paraffin test failed to pick up gunpowder on his fingers, and it seems a stretch to believe he was able to fire three shots, hide the rifle and remove his fingerprints, descend to the second floor and buy a coke before building manager Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker ran into him in the lunch room.

I know the Warren Commission was totally concerned with convincing America that all was well and didn’t have the slightest interest in actually analyzing the crime. I know the autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist named Humes who had no experience with gunshot wounds and couldn’t draw the correct conclusion until he was told what it was. But there are so many crack-pot conspiracy theorists out there that it’s hard to sort out the truth anymore. Most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that there probably was a conspiracy. Someone changed the direction of history. Someone led us to Johnson and Nixon and Ford (who was on the Warren Commission) and Carter.

It wasn’t until Reagan came along that I think America realized it had finally emerged from it’s own quagmire, the nightmare of assassinations and wars and hijackings and oil crises, that seemed to have enveloped the 60’s and 70’s. They turned to Reagan after four smart presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter) and the world, by coincidence, changed dramatically at the same time. The cold war was over. The internet age had begun. A new era of unparalleled peace and prosperity emerged.

The Kennedy assassination followed a decade of relative peace and prosperity, as did the WTC. Kennedy won the narrowest of victories over Nixon. We all know about George Bush Jr.’s margin. Kennedy seemed to be entrusted with a new decade of progress and technological marvels. Bush inherited the first surplus since… Kennedy.

Kennedy’s assassination, like the WTC, was captured on video (film) and live on radio. The world watched in stunned disbelief. America was relatively isolationist under Eisenhower, but Kennedy launched the Peace Corps and a new era of activism abroad (Ich bin Ein Berliner). Bush seems to have started his administration with a return to isolationism, rejecting international treaties and choosing to “go it alone” on several international issues.

And now, the U.S. embarks on a declared war on terrorism, which, for me, bears an awful echo of Viet Nam. I don’t know if the results will be the same or not. There is an impressive tone of optimism out there about America’s ability to defeat terrorism, and just because America was equally optimistic, in 1965, about it’s ability to save Viet Nam doesn’t mean the results will be the same this time. But I think any thoughtful person would consider the question.

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The Stature of Rene Leveque’s Statue

I have always liked Rene Levesque, and I think I like him even more in death than I did in life.

In life, of course, Levesque was a Quebec Nationalist, a separatist who dreamed of creating a Francophone state from the remains of Canadian Confederation. I didn’t agree with his politics– I’ve always believed that Nationalism is just a tarted up version of tribalism– but he was an honest man, and a straight-shooting politician. He wasn’t a hypocrite either. That’s quite an achievement for a Canadian politician.

Levesque was 5′ 3″ tall. When the Quebec legislature decided to erect a statue of the former premiere, his family made it clear that they wanted none of that bombastic iconography that living hypocrites employ in honor of the dead. The statue would be 5′ 3″ tall.

Now you may think that it is only natural that a statue would be the same height as its subject. This is what the guy looked like. You can stand beside the statue and feel like this is a guy you could tell your problems to.

But most statues are not life-sized. Most statues, you see, are about 40% bigger than lifelike. Premiere Lesage stands about eight foot tall. When people walk by, they look up at this awesome man and think, what a hero!

Bourassa’s Statue.

Why is he a hero? Because his statue is so big.

Rene Levesque was also a heavy smoker. The statue makes it look like he should be holding a cigarette in his left hand, but the party leaders had to draw the line somewhere. The good citizens of Quebec generously stick real cigarettes into the bronze fingers: here, Rene, have one on me.

What goes through the minds of the functionaries, bureaucrats, and politicians when they decide on the size of a statue? Why would they make the statue eight feet tall? It seems to me that human nature is rather impure in this area. Monuments are rarely truly meant to honor the subject of the monument. They are made to honor the people who made the monument. France, for example, has innumerable monuments to wars and generals and battles. France, of course, has never won a single decisive battle in it’s history. These monuments are testaments to the spirit of denial and hypocrisy. These monuments say, “we are heroic, because we have monuments to heroes! Disregard the evidence of history: our leaders are giants!”

The monument to Levesque is unusual because it says, this was a guy who didn’t pretend to be any bigger or better than you or me. He was honest and real. He’d rather show you the unpleasant truth than a varnished lie. He knew what it was like to stand in a crowd of powerful, well-dressed men, and not be noticed. Quebec made him their first and best separatist leader.

But the leaders of the Party Quebecois want to put his monument on a pedestal so it will tower over the citizens of Quebec. They want the monument to reflect how they see themselves: Look at us and tremble! We are mighty giants!

I think they go to sleep in fear and trembling every night because they are afraid that after they die, someone will put up a monument to them, and it will be exactly the size it should be.

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Joyce Gilchrist Locks up a few Innocent Men

If you’re a regular visitor to these pages, I hope you’re not getting bored with the rants about false convictions. There are so many.

Joyce Gilchrist is a “forensic chemist” with a police crime laboratory in Oklahoma City. In 1986, she testified at the trial of Jeff Pierce who was charged with rape and robbery. Her testimony was decisive: she said that hairs found on the victim were “microscopically consistent” with samples taken from Pierce. He was sentenced to 65 years in prison. He served 15 before DNA testing– considered far more reliable than microscopic hair analysis– proved he could not have been the perpetrator.

I use the word “considered” with ambivalence.  The microscopic hair analysis was “considered”, in a manner of speaking, reliable at his first trial.  But it was not really “considered” at all: it was accepted with blind faith in this charade of forensic science.

You have to give credit to the police department here, where it is due. After an appeals court overturned several cases in which her testimony was pivotal, the police department ordered a review of other cases in which she had testified. (This may sound like something that should be automatic, but it isn’t. It is amazing how many police departments and prosecuting attorneys will refuse to admit they might have been wrong.)

At this stage, at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work: the police are supposed to find out what actually happened. In the Pierce case, it looks like they simply picked a likely suspect (he happened to be working as a landscaper in the area in which the crime was committed) and then tried to muster the evidence necessary to convince a jury.

Gilchrist was regarded as a prosecution-friendly witness, who was likely to provide the police with evidence that would confirm their gut feelings about the suspect. She rarely testified for the defense, which should tell you something. She is supposed to be a scientist. She is supposed to testify for whichever side happens to have good science with them. If the science appears to always favor the prosecution, you have to ask yourself a few questions…

An FBI specialist, according to People Magazine, had problems figuring out what led Gilchrist to draw the conclusions she did about Pierce’s hair samples. In other words, she either grossly exaggerated or lied about the similarities. Do you want to know how many other cases she was involved with? Hundreds. No wait. 1,800! I’m not kidding. And an FBI chemist who reviewed four of Gilchrist’s cases said that in all four of them, hair or fibers had been misidentified. Twenty-three of the cases in which Gilchrist’s testimony played a part involved capital crimes. Eleven of the defendants have already been executed. In some cases, the police have destroyed the evidence, so we’ll never know if they were really guilty or not.

In another case, she testified that an FBI test of a semen sample could not exclude Alfred Mitchell from suspicions of rape, sodomy, and murder. In fact, the FBI lab clearly asserted that the one thing the sample did do was exclude Mitchell. He was convicted anyway, on Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony. In 1999, a federal district judge threw out the conviction because of her “errors”.

And another: Robert Miller was convicted of raping and murdering two elderly women, again, largely on the basis of Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony that hair samples found on the victims matched his. After seven years on death row, DNA evidence fingered someone else. As if that wasn’t enough, DNA evidence pointed to a man Gilchrist had explicitly cleared of the crime.

Even more disturbing: the police had the FBI’s exculpatory evidence in their hands before they brought Mitchell to trial, and did not provide the defense with copies of the reports. This is your police department, friends. These are the people in charge of enforcing the law. The appeal judge stated that the “State’s blatant withholding of unquestionably exculpatory evidence is absolutely indefensible.”

Gilchrist is on “paid administrative leave”. Did you know that the laws are written in such a way as to release the police and prosecution from all potential liability for financial compensation for the wrongly convicted? So what does Pierce get for his 15 years in prison? Unless the state gets generous voluntarily, nothing.

The case of Malcolm Rent Johnson is fascinating. He was convicted in 1982 of the rape and murder or Ura Alma Thompson, who was 76 years old. Johnson was executed in January, 2000.

The police found many of Thompson’s missing possessions in Johnson’s room. Johnson claimed that he received the stolen goods from a friend. Gilchrist testified that hairs found on the victim were compatible with Johnson’s hair, and that fibers from a shirt the police took from his apartment were similar to fibers found on the body, and that the semen found in the victim was compatible with Johnson’s blood type. When the police confronted Johnson with the semen evidence, Johnson, according to police, said that was impossible because he hadn’t ejaculated.

Either Johnson was a complete fool– and victims of prosecution misconduct seem to be disproportionately poor and uneducated– or he meant to say that he wasn’t the one who raped Thompson and therefore couldn’t have been the one who ejaculated. It’s a strange statement to make, but even stranger that the police would regard a statement like that as believable enough to be incriminating but not believable enough to contradict Gilchrist’s findings that the semen matched Johnson’s blood type. If he inadvertently told the truth– that he raped Thompson but didn’t ejaculate– then the police should offer that as evidence that he committed the rape and murder, and Gilchrist’s evidence should have been thrown out. Instead, the police had it both ways. He is guilty because he told the truth when he implied he had sex with Johnson but didn’t ejaculate, and besides, the semen was compatible with his blood type.

Or, did Johnson receive the stolen goods from a friend who actually committed the robbery and rape and then “tipped” the police off to Johnson?

Gilchrist isn’t the only incompetent police expert around. In Randall County, Texas, a forensic pathologist named Ralph Erdmann was convicted in 1994 of falsifying evidence on at least six occasions, including at least one capital case. In that one case, an off-duty police officer, James D. Mitchell, approached a car that had skidded off the road and was shot by one of the occupants who claimed that he fired in self-defense. No one disputes who shot who, but the question of whether it is a capital offense hinges on whether the defendant, Randal Wayne Hafdahl, believed he was being threatened or not, and that determination was based on Erdmann’s evidence.

In New York, a former detective named Michael S. Race has made it his mission to re-examine some old criminal cases. He is already responsible for five men being released from prison, including Anthony Faison and Charles Shepherd, who were charged with the murder of a cabby. Some say that Race is trying to assuage his own guilt– he was involved in some these questionable cases as a homicide detective in Brooklyn. In some of these cases, a rather shady witness provided the only compelling evidence. It is clear that the police and district attorneys were derelict in their obligations to ensure that such witnesses were reliable and credible. It didn’t matter: the juries bought it. Innocent men went to jail. In the “tough on crime era”, few people cared.

What all of this means is that the criminal justice system in the U.S. is in a crisis. There is a drug crisis and a medical crisis and an education crisis. Why doesn’t anyone step up and announce that they will make criminal justice an issue in the next campaign? Because conventional political wisdom is that Americans want politicians and judges to be “tough on crime”. But I’ll bet that a lot of Americans are slowly becoming convinced that there is a difference between “toughness” and fairness.

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Requiem for the Yanomami

Deep in the rain forests of Venezuela and Brazil, there once lived a people called the Yanomami. They farmed. They hunted. They had wives and children. They fought among themselves, village against village. They had life and death. They had Shamans who taught them about gods and magic and matter and spirit. They were completely isolated from the modern world.

They were, for all intents and purposes, a nation. They happened to live in an abstract, artificial political entity called “Venezuela”, but this meant nothing to them. And why should it have? White men from Europe came to the South American continent and proclaimed that God had given all of the land– and it’s peoples, as we shall see– to them. They set up governments. They demanded money from the people they identified as “citizens” so they could build armies and award each other medals. They invented guns and blades and poisons to ensure that no one would stop them from taking everything they wanted.

The Yanomami didn’t know anything about all this until the 1960’s when they were “discovered”.

Discovered.

Think about the arrogance of the way we Westerners use that word– as if they did not exist, or had no importance, until we “discovered” them. Think of how that word helps us think of appropriating a people, their beliefs, their culture, their technology, and, nowadays, their DNA. We discovered them. Now we can exploit them….

But I’m getting ahead of myself. An American scientist named James Neel, a geneticist, and an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission who took part in studies of the effects of radiation on people in Japan after World War II, found out about the Yanomami and decided that they provided an ideal field laboratory for his strange and rather Nazi-ish view of human evolutionary development. Now the word “Nazi” is tossed around all too carelessly these days, in reference to everyone from feminists to Alliance Party members, but, in this case, it is probably quite appropriate. Neel’s theories of human development provide a remarkably congenial intellectual framework for anyone advocating doctrines of racial superiority.

There is a mystery about James Neel’s role in studies conducted by the AEC on unsuspecting patients in a Rochester Hospital and prisoners in penitentiaries across the U.S. The AEC exposed these people to radiation in order to analyze its effects on them. I stress, the AEC did not obtain permission to do this.

Do you think that government agencies would never, ever do such a thing again? Ever?

No one has any convincing evidence that James Neel himself conducted these illegal and immoral studies, but he worked with the people who did. Has he denounced these criminals? I don’t know. No one will ever know probably– Neel is dead.

Anyway, at the AEC, Mr. Neel worked with a Venezuelan named Marcel Roche. Roche returned to Venezuela after the war and began conducting experiments, injecting radioactive isotopes into the Yanomami and then studying their blood samples. Yes, this man had been employed by the American Atomic Energy Commission. He worked for the United States Government. He helped us defeat those monsters, the Nazis. Then he went into the Venezuelan jungle and injected members of the Yanomami with radioactive iodine.

In 1968, Neel and a then-protégé named Napoleon Chagnon decided to immunize the Yanomami against the measles. The Yanomami didn’t have measles. The Yanomami had never been exposed to the measles. Until Mr. Neel decided to immunize them. There was an outbreak and hundreds, perhaps thousands of Yanomami died.

Mr. Chagnon argues that the idea of immunizing the Yanomami against the measles was the result of an altruistic desire to better their lives. Some medical scientists argue that a measles epidemic could not have been the result of immunization. Other scientists are not so sure. I’m not so sure. In fact, I think it’s rather insane to believe that the measles epidemic– the first ever in the the thousands of years of history of the Yanomami– just happened to coincide with the introduction of the vaccine, or, at the very least, with the introduction of self-seeking white adventurers, missionaries, and anthropologists, but was not caused by them.

Chagnon also induced various Yanomami villages to stage little wars for Timothy Asch’s cameras, to provide documentary “proof” of his assertions about the innate violence of the Yanomami leaders. To ensure that the battle scenes would be vigorous, he gave gifts to villagers that he knew would arouse the envy of their “enemies” of the drama, to the point where real injury and death took place.

For these achievements, Chagnon was lauded around the world as a brilliant anthropologist.

Chagnon is still alive today. He is a retired professor “emeritus”. He disputes Tierny’s charges. So those of us without first-hand knowledge are left to sort it out. You have to read Chagnon’s arguments. They don’t reassure. Tierny, for example, alleges that Chagnon used his helicopter to brazenly flop into Yanomami villages, blowing the roofs off their houses and intimidating them. Chagnon doesn’t claim that he didn’t land his helicopter in the middle of the villages and blow the roofs off houses– he merely tries to convince you that the villagers wanted him to land near the houses, so they wouldn’t have to haul his equipment so far! Why, in heaven’s name, are the Yanomami hauling this self-seeking adventurer’s equipment up into their villages? Because they love him? Because he did so much for them?

Patrick Tierney also claims that Chagnon tried to become a shaman, and that he abandoned a village to the measles. Chagnon admits that he did behave like a shaman at least once, and did paint his body and wear feathers. He claims it was intended to persuade the Yanomami that the damnation and hellfire sermons of a local missionary should not be believed. Chagnon admits he left a village knowing that a man with the measles was there and that the villagers would soon return and were likely to contract the measles from the man. His response is somewhat lame: he thought someone else would make sure the infected man left the village before the Yanomami returned.

Tierney alleges Chagnon shot a pistol off every time he entered a village. Chagnon responds that he once fired a shotgun at a tree, when some Yanomami were threatening to kill him.

Terry Turner, professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, summarizes Neel’s views of Eugenics as follows:

according to his [Neel’s] eugenically slanted genetic theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for “leadership” or innate ability”) would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more frequently than less “innately able” males. The result, supposedly, would be the continual upgrading of the human genetic stock. Modern mass societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic “herds” in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not be eliminated by selective competition and superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity. The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females.

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The Worst Attorney-General in U.S. History: Janet Reno

You have to consider the fact that John Mitchell, Attorney-General under Richard Nixon, was essentially a thug who was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice and probably allowed his own wife to be assaulted in order to protect the Nixon Presidency. Pretty impressive for the nation’s top law enforcement officer. His loyalty was rewarded. Mr. Nixon, who promised, in the 1968 election, to restore law and order to America, greeted Mr. Mitchell with a party after he was released from prison.

Even so, Janet Reno has assembled a personal history that certainly puts her into the hall of shame for attorney generals.

Janet Reno’s political star began to rise with the prosecution of several “Satanic Ritual Abuse” cases in Miami, Florida. The most celebrated of these was the Frank and Ileana Furster Case. This is a very strange story. Ileana Furster, a 17-year-old native of rural Honduras, and her 36-year-old husband Francisco (Frank) ran a day-care centre in the affluent suburb of Miami called Country Walk. Ileana was a native of rural Honduras, where mothers and other care-givers thought nothing of kissing male babies on the genitals.  To them, it was no more weird or unusual then men kissing each other on both cheeks, or even on the lips in some cultures.  It was a considered a gesture of affection, something we may find as strange to us as the way Eastern European men will kiss each other in greeting, or the way women in some areas of Africa do not cover their breasts, or the way some Americans celebrate state executions with “tailgate parties”.

When one little boy reported the genital kissing to his mother, she called the local child welfare authorities who called the police who called the prosecutors– including head prosecutor Janet Reno. Ileana was arrested, placed in solitary confinement, and subjected to a continuous barrage of interrogations and dubious psychoanalysis. Reno’s strategy should be familiar to us from subsequent history. Ileana was offered a plea bargain: implicate her husband and get off with a light sentence, or continue to deny that anything happened and spend the rest of your life in prison. Meanwhile so-called “experts” on child abuse tried to convince her to “recover” repressed memories of her own possible abuse at the hands of her husband. Even so, it took more than a year before she caved and testified against her husband. She was then deported to the Honduras, where she immediately recanted her confession.

One of the little boys who, under the usual manipulative interrogation techniques used at that time, implicated Frank Furster also recanted as soon as the police were unable to continue to intimidate him. He maintains to this very day that no abuse occurred at Country Walk.

The children at Country Walk told the prosecutors that they had been made to drink urine and eat feces, and that some of the children had been tossed into the ocean to be eaten by sharks, and that Mr. Furster had video-taped the acts of abuse. Ms. Reno conveniently chose only the credible accusations to bring to court, disregarding the possibility that all of the accusations were fantastical, and the result of leading questions.

Frank went to jail for 165 years. He’s still there. Ileana remains in the Honduras surrounded by women who kiss baby’s genitals, and she probably thinks the United States is the wackiest, most bizarre country in the world.

The sharks got off scot-free.

Janet Reno, well, went on to contribute her savvy management to the Waco disaster. If you recall, a group of Branch Davidians were holed up in a large club house outside of Waco, Texas. The Bureau of Firearms and Tobacco and the FBI wanted to take away their guns. Kind of odd in a nation that markets and distributes guns like lollipops, especially in the State of Texas. But the Branch Davidians were, well, not like you or me. They were weird. They had to be controlled. And that was the real dynamic at play. The government allowed the confrontation to intensify into a control issue, thereby virtually guaranteeing a violent conclusion.

The strategy here was, once again, idiotic. Police and officials from the Bureau surrounded the building– even though no one inside was in imminent danger from the Branch Davidians– and terrorized the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh until they were able to create a crisis, which then, of course, “justified” violent police action. On April 19, 1993–after a 51-day standoff!– they assaulted the compound with explosives, tear gas, and incendiary devices, a fire broke out, and 75 people were killed. It appears that Koresh’s followers may have set some of the fires.

Darn.

If only they had had the good sense to walk out into a sea of automatic rifles, tanks, and tear gas!

The issue is not whether the Branch Davidians were responsible for the disaster or not. We know they had some very strange ideas and attitudes about the civil authorities. The issue is simply one of management. You have a bunch of allegedly crazy religious fanatics holed up in a compound with a large number of women and children. Is your goal to show them who’s who, or is it to ensure the safety of as many people as possible?

It was obvious from the actions of the government that they lost sight of the real issue and became absorbed in a power struggle with a group of highly unstable, unbalanced people. They had had the opportunity to arrest Koresh in the town of Waco, but they elected to wait until he returned to the compound and then demand that all of the persons inside surrender, unconditionally. In other words, they created the optimum conditions under which a disaster was likely to happen.

Afterwards, the courts got involved in the absurd argument of whether or not the FBI and ATF started the fires that killed most of the Branch Davidians. Why did no one ask if the FBI and ATF should have surrounded the building and applied as much pressure as possible to a group of unstable religious fanatics for 51 days?

You have to think that Reno is one of those naïve people who honestly, earnestly believes that innocent people have nothing to fear from the police.

Incidentally, a “motivational speaker” from Waco, Bill Powers, stood on a hill 3.5 miles from the compound and sold t-shirts to tourists as the place burned to the ground. I am not making this up. There are some very sick people in Texas, although most of them are shielded from us by holding comfortable positions in the government.

And he wasn’t alone. Another souvenir salesman, Hector Antuna, was also doing a booming business. He actually made jokes about it, intentionally and unintentionally: “I hate it. It’s awful. I feel for the people bad,” said Mr. Antuna. “But someone has to sell something. It’s just an honest living.” He addressed the 24 customers crowded around his tables: “Everyone, we are having a fire sale. Dishwasher, microwave safe,” he shouted, holding aloft a mug commemorating the standoff. “ATF, FBI approved.”

Reno’s adventures continued. She initiated the Whitewater investigation, which cost $50 million and yielded nothing of substance, and she appointed Kenneth Starr to slime Clinton.

Now, I know everyone feels that she was caught in a quandary. She was appointed Attorney General by Clinton. Had she suppressed the Whitewater investigation, the Republicans would have screamed like a pack of hysterical hyenas. To the Republicans, Whitewater was payback time for Watergate, which this generation of Republicans, apparently, really believes was just a Democratic putsch.

Reno didn’t have the guts to withstand that kind of pressure, so she caved. She wanted to look non-partisan, stately, and wise. Instead, by any objective measure, the Whitewater investigation was a colossal waste of resources and money. It came up bone dry. It found nothing.  It is one of the great congenital faults of the Democratic Party that they can be bullied into doing stupid, self-destructive things like this.

Now, when a man like Kenneth Starr, a passionate enemy of Bill Clinton, is unable to come up with the goods after three years and $50 million, you have to ask yourself if anyone but Janet Reno would have allowed the investigation to go that far in the first place.  You have to ask yourself if a man like that is going to admit that he spent $50 million of tax payer money on a wild goose chase.  You have to ask yourself if man like that can admit he is stupid.

Then there was the Cisneros Affair. Henry Cisneros had an adulterous affair with a woman, Linda Jones, while he was mayor of San Antonio. He admitted the affair. He broke it off and moved back in with his wife. For some reason, he didn’t tell the FBI exactly how much money he paid in support of his mistress after he left her to move back in with his wife. Reno ordered an investigation (after Cisneros was appointed head of the Housing and Urban Development Department) which cost $9 million to find out what everybody already knew.

If the issue was the money paid to Jones, why not just give her a check for $1 million and save the taxpayer $8 million? Because Reno has no sense of proportion. She has no common sense.

Then we have Elian. Reno had Elian Gonzalez kidnapped and returned to Cuba– doing the right thing, the wrong way. Here again, she chose a method that almost seemed calculated to bring confrontation. This is one macho attorney-general lady!

And now she is unrepentant about harassing Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who was charged with selling the “crown jewels” of nuclear weapons to the Chinese. The pattern is similar to the Country Walk case. The prosecution lays a large number of absurd charges. When it finds that it can’t actually prove any of the charges, it tries to bully the defendant into a guilty plea on one or two of the least significant charges, thus “proving” that there must have been something going on. Reno is kind of saying, hey, trust me— we know he’s guilty. She can’t believe we won’t just take her word for it. And those judges! Actually demanding evidence for everything! How inconvenient!

It would almost be worth seeing George Bush Jr. win the presidential election if that’s what it would take to get rid of this megalomaniac Attorney General. Fortunately, Al Gore isn’t likely to reappoint her either.

Yes, even John Mitchell pales by comparison. Janet Reno is the worst Attorney-General ever.