It has been about two weeks since I last wrote here and it is raising my level of angst. It’s not like nothing has happened during that time, or that I haven’t thought about it, but, for some reason, unknown to me, I could never string together an interesting series of comments.
Mort Saul died last month and I wanted to say something, but what? I was a big fan of Saul’s but I haven’t seen or even heard of him for years so Saul’s dying, in Mill Valley at 94, was a shook mostly because I didn’t even know he was still alive. At first glance, dying at 94 seems like a pretty good run, but Saul actually died, as a comedian, when he became obsessed with the President Jack Kennedy Assassination and was canceled. Still, he was the most famous and successful comedian in the country for a while and he revolutionized stand-up. Before Saul, comedians told jokes, Saul riffed on the news, ad-libbing – well, seemingly ad-libbing – making comments on the day’s news from the folded newspaper he carried.
Today, Dave Chappell seems the most like Saul and, like Saul, people are campaigning to cancel Chappell over one, or, maybe, several. of his riffs. In Chappell’s case, it is his remarks in his last Stand up gig for Netflix, The Closer, on transgender people that got him in trouble. I’ve watched The Closer twice and, while Chapell makes several jokes at the expense of trans-people, to my ear, he is never is degrading. Just funny. I think, as importantly, both Saul and Chappell own up to what they have said, they know their jokes should be funny and, if that humor offends somebody, they don’t try to brush it off as “I was only joking.”
That is not the case with, say, the new “Go Brandon” meme that is making the rounds with some Conservative politicians and pundits in Washington. “Go Brandon” somehow became code for “Fuck Biden” but when challenged, the pundits brushed it off as “Just a joke.” But no joke is just a joke, every joke has a target, every joke is commenting on something, even a joke as unfunny as “Go Brandon”, and to brush it off is just a sign of cowardice.
Lastly, here are some pictures I took a couple of weeks ago. While we were at Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, we drove down to Lone pine on Highway 395 and then back up into the mountains on the Cottonwood Pass Road to a little over 10,000 feet, to see what the Sierras looked like with their new dusting of snow.
We are at Michele’s family’s mountain cabin in what was formally known as Squaw Valley. When we got here, the Truckee River was almost dry with shallow pools of standing water, and the creek behind Michele’s place was even drier. Then it started to rain and rain and rain, just constant, heavy, rain for two days. During that time, the creek went from “Oh, good, there’s water in the Creek.” to “Holy shit, the creek might jump its banks.” Sunday, we spent the day watching Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton in a tight race at the United States Grand Prix and running to the windows to watch the Creek rise. Sunday, as the light started to fade, the rain changed to snow, just as Weather Underground predicted and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
After two days of listening to the constant sound of rain on the roof and the roar of the Creek, the snow brought a welcome silence with big snowflakes floating down like the remnants of a pillow fight covering the landscape. In one night, late summer has changed to winter.
Local lore says that this area has been called Squaw Valley since the 1850s when a couple of white explorers came across a group of Indigenous women working in the meadow. A hundred years later, Alex Cushing named his new ski resort after the valley. At the time of the ski resort naming, Cushing – and many of the rest of us – probably did not consider it a racial or sexual slur, but the local members of the Washoe Tribe do and they have been working to get it changed.
Now the owners of the ski area have renamed the ski area Palisades Tahoe which has left the valley below the ski area is sort of in a linguistic limbo. Because Squaw Valley has been a census-designated place located near Fresno, California, since 1879, the valley below the Ski Resort has always had an official postal address of Olympic Valley. The rub is that everybody, from out-of-town skiers to the locals, calls Olympic Valley Squaw Valley or just Squaw, and very few people want to change. They feel that they have been calling it Squaw their entire lives and, since they do not mean it as a slur, they should have the right to call it what they want.
I don’t hold that position, I think that anybody and everybody has the right to determine what offends them. If somebody calls me a heeb, I have the right to be offended and, if the person calling me a heeb says that they don’t mean it as a slur, that doesn’t trump my right to be offended. They can continue to call me that – their right is even enshrined in the US Constitution – but they’ll be demonstrating that they don’t care about my feelings. In effect, they’ll be declaring that they either want to offend me or, at best, don’t give a shit about me.
I realize that this is also somewhat of a slippery slope. When people started tearing down statues of southern secessionists, or traitors if you prefer, I understood their anger, but when people started talking about changing the name of Sir Francis Drake Blvd*, I was taken back at first. But if the original settlers, the Coastal Miwok, find that name offensive, I think we should change it to a more neutral name. I don’t know how far into the rabbit-hole we should follow this string of thought but there is no doubt that we white people have labeled the landscape in a ratio out of proportion to our number (and actual contributions). That that labeling is now being challenged is not always an easy concept to accept.
*I originally wrote St. Francis but Gina Matesic pointed out that I had the wrong dude.
On January 21, 1991, the US bombed the only factory that produced baby formula in all of Iraq. Shortly after, Colin Powell dismissed the attack: “It is not an infant formula factory…It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure.” A Tweet by Human Rights Watch @queeralamode Anti-imperialist producing content for @MintPressNews.
In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent. A statement by Colin Powel on Dec. 13, 1968, when asked about a complaint, saying that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.”, by Specialist Fourth Class Tom Glen referring to incidents like the My Lai massacre that were taking place in, then, Major Powell’s command.
Secretary Colin Powell was an incredible American. An independent thinker and a barrier breaker, he dedicated his life to defending our nation and always showed the world the best of who we are. @SecondGentleman and I send our deepest condolences to his family. A Tweet by Vice President Kamala Harris @VPUnited States government official Vice President of the United States. Wife to the first @SecondGentleman. Momala. Auntie. Fighting for the people.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman
Poor Colin Powell, he seems like a decent guy that just fell in with the wrong crowd, and then, when it wasn’t quite too late, he seems to have redeemed himself. Like John McCain, he was a Republican that turned on – maybe it is more accurate to say was repulsed by – Donald Trump. Both of them became beloved by the Democrats because of that, but Powell even more so. He was a Black trailblazer and that helped, the first – and so far the only – Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first Black Secretary of State. He also fits very much into the inside the Beltway Washington mold of a thoughtful man, he was handsome, well mannered, and charismatic. He spoke in a calm, measured, voice and spread calm in chaotic situations.
He was also a big contributor to the breakdown of our faith in our government. First, in the US Army in Vietnam and then in the “They are building weapons of mass destruction.” crowd. He was often the only Black guy in a room full of powerful White guys, White guys that not only wanted their own way but, no mattered what, wanted the story told their way and he, maybe reluctantly, was willing to deceive to do that.
Everybody plays? acts? I don’t, know the right term exactly, performs, maybe, toward what is being tested. Toward the company goal, the organization’s goal because that is what is being tested. In the mid-twenty-teens, Volkswagen had the goal of becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world (an easy metric to measure). What mattered were sales and, big surprise, people were willing to cheat to increase those sales. In Vietnam, the United States Army’s goal was to win, a much harder metric to measure. As Wikipedia put it, For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations, victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count. That led to counting killed civilians as killed enemy combatants, and that led, eventually, to the United States Army doing more things it didn’t want to be public. The grunts were doing the actual war crimes but it was the leaders of those grunts that were doing the actual war crime hiding and lying about the grunts activities.
Colin Powell served two tours of duty in Vietnam in that Army, first as a Capitan advising South Vietnamese commanders then as a Major on a General’s staff, and he learned that to get ahead, it was best to go along. Whistleblowers, most especially Black whistleblowers, do not become generals, they become outcasts. I have no idea how hard it was for Powell to learn those lessons but he did learn them and took the lesson of going along to get ahead with him when he came into the elder George Bush’s Administration and then into Bush the Younger’s administration as Secretary of State. He was a man who would do as he was told and sometimes he was told to lie.
I don’t want to give the impression that lying to satisfy his bosses was all that defines Powell, it wasn’t. He was a genuine war hero having risked his life to save several people from a downed helicopter. In the chaotic battles of Vietnam he also learned that we need more than technological superiority to win wars, he learned we also need numerical superiority. It was a lesson that, as Chief of the Joint Chiefs he practiced but it was also a lesson the military and both the Bush Obama administrations soon forgot.
Poor Colin Powell, I don’t think he lived up to his own high standards. May he rest in peace.
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Good on @brianstelter for saying it straight out to Facebook VP Nick Clegg on @ReliableSources. “A part of me feels like I’m interviewing the head of a tobacco company right now.” Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyuI teach journalism at NYU, critique the press, direct @membershippzzle. PressThink is the name of my subject and my site.
When Patagonia organized a boycott of Facebook, I was all for it and I still am. Sort of. Facebook is such a great idea but, it also features a big downside. From what I read, it is not only my queue that keeps filling up with stuff that promotes fear and loathing, almost everybody’s queue does. Facebook is designed that way. Aparently, it wants to make me angry, which generates clicks and keeps me in their claustrophobic universe. Or, to be more accurate, Facebook stirs up my fears which my body reacts to as anger. Anger is a great motivator and my reaction to a post like Sherrif in Bumfuck Texas kills Hispanic toddler, just encourages Facebook to send me more of the same. When I got off of Facebook, I thought it would just be for a month or so, but I fell out of the habit and I’m calmer for it. But, I would still like to hear – or read – what going on, and I miss that about Facebook. If you have a comment – pro or con – about something I’ve written in my blog, I can be reached in the comments below. Even if you don’t have a comment, I would love to hear from you.
Speaking of Facebook-type news, this has been a hell of a couple of weeks for Michele. It started with her seeing a podiatrist for a hammertoe and they discovered that her “tibial sesamoid” – also known as a small bone in the foot – is degenerating. There is an outside – way outside, we are told – chance that it is malignant and will require a biopsy of the bone to know for sure (or, as the poditrist recommended, skip the biopsy and just remove the bone). About this time, Michele’s esophagus started spasming which resulted in a trip to the emergency room and cascade of tests, none of which have shown the problem. While that was going on, Michele started seeing strange blotches and made an appointment with our eye doctor. She – the eye doctor – immediately sent Michele to an eye surgeon where she had a tear in her retina lasered-sealed. So far, this weekend hasn’t brought any new medical disasters. Our fingers are crossed.
I’m an ambivalent New York Times subscriber, it is far from being the perfect newspaper, but it does do special stories better than anybody. What I mean by special stories is deep reporting on something that is not very controversial. A perfect example is an in-depth story on CalFire. It is fascinating the amount of manpower and equipment that is now involved in trying to protect people who live in the interface between the wild – for lack of a better word – and civilization. Check it out at Inside the Fight Against the Dixie Fire – The New York Times (nytimes.com).
As an aside, several news-type websites, including the LA Times and the NY Times, are leading this kind of story with a full-screen picture or, even, a series of full-screen short videos. I’m sure that the Dixie Fire piece is in the dead-tree NY Times, but it can’t be as impressive as opening up the story on my computer and having my 27″ monitor filled with a series of pictures. End aside.
Finally, Max Verstappen leads the Formula One championship by six points, 262.5 to 256.5 over Lewis Hamilton with six races to go. Their Instagram posts tell the story.
