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The Great Benghazi Conspiracy

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Attack on Benghazi, or Is It Just a Homecoming Weekend Bonfire?

It does not seem as if the Republicans have learned much from their decisive loss in the November 6 Presidential Election. A few Republicans have repudiated Grover Norquist’s insane no-taxes-under-any-circumstances pledge—and that is all to the good! But the continuing drumbeat on Benghazi and all the swirling conspiracy theories relating to who said what when continue to crowd the Right’s media noise machine.

That all doesn’t matter, does it? Talking points are not deeds. What matters is what is done. In the meantime, the various U.S. embassies and consulates in Islamic and some non-Islamic Third World countries will continue to be targets of opportunistic terrorists. Now Susan Rice is under attack by John McCain and his fellow senatorial troglodytes because she only passed on what she was told by intelligence sources. Of course, that puts her at the epicenter of this conspiracy which has gone on long enough.

I think that the sane half of the country should come up with its own conspiracy theories. Here are just a few possibilities:

  • Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are paid agents of the DPRK (that’s the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea).
  • Grover Norquist is a traitor and turncoat who is deliberately attempting to sabotage the political and economic future of the United States.
  • Mitt Romney is a robot created by the Chinese and programmed to take over the country; but, like many Chinese products, it was defective.
  • The House of Representatives is infiltrated by the descendants of Nazis who fled Germany in 1945 and who are attempting to build a Fourth Reich based on the teachings of Ayn Rand.

I have always thought that the obvious solution for failed U.S. Conservative wing-nuts is self-deportation to some tiny airless asteroid on a collision course with the planet Uranus. And I say that only because I’m basically a nice guy.

’Tis the Season … for Soup

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Japanese Udon Soup

Shown above is the Pork Udon soup made by the Men’s Club at the West L.A. Buddhist Temple Obon festival each July. Even though it is in the middle of summer, I always go to down a couple bowls of the stuff. I always add a little Shichimi Togarashi (Japanese chili powder with black sesame seeds) to bring out the flavor.

Soup and I go way back, to the beginning in fact. My mother was a great cook, especially when soups and pastries were involved. We always had a bowl of soup for every lunch and dinner we ate together as a family. Sometimes that bowl was all we needed, particularly if the soup was the hearty Gulyás Leves—or Hungarian Goulash, as it’s also called.

I wish I had the recipes for all her soups, such as the Hungarian egg-drop soup, the mushroom and vegetable soup, the green bean soup with sour cream, the Slovak dry bean soup, the beef broth with big chunks of beef in it (Husleves), the tomato soup, the rice and caraway seed soup—and the list just goes on forever. Mom’s homemade beef broth was the stuff of dreams, though I remember not appreciating it as much when I was younger because I thought my Dad asked for it too often.

Virtually all Hungarian soups begin with a roue (Hungarians call it rántás) consisting of minced onion and garlic, real Hungarian paprika (not the Spanish variety), minced parsley, and some flour. I’m still working at trying to get the right combinations to make it taste as if Mom made it.

Martine has not been feeling well for the last couple of weeks, so I will cook a home-made vegetarian minestrone tonight with a broad mix of veggies and crowned with some Swiss Chard that has been blended into the stock. I’ll try to remember to take a picture of a serving of it tonight and save it for later publication, perhaps with an approximation of the recipe I used. (I never follow recipes exactly: Usually I cherry-pick several recipes and add a few elements of my own.)

When we have soup, we rarely eat an entrée with it. Sometimes I’ll have some cheese and crackers.

If you want to get through the winter happy and healthy, I recommend you eat lots of soup. Real soup, not the canned stuff!

Serendipity: Flitcraft and Wakefield

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Hawthorne’s Wakefield

The scene takes place in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is describing a case from his past to Brigid O’Shaughnessy while the two are waiting for Joel Cairo to show up. Following is a slightly abridged version by Robert B. Parker:

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned….

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand…. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right….

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch, he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It took only a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like someone had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was that the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had gotten out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

“He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of woman that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

Now this passage set my mind to thinking. There was another story with a similar plot that was written approximately a hundred years before. In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne had released a short story called “Wakefield” and subsequently published it in his collection entitled Twice-Told Tales. It’s worth taking a look at, and you can find it by clicking here. The two stories end quite differently, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.

This is the first of what I trust will be a continuing series of things that surprise me in the course of my reading and traveling. Now it could be that Dashiell Hammett knew the Hawthorne story and copied elements of it, but somehow I don’t think so.

The above drawing of Wakefield, the hero of the Hawthorne story, comes from a Spanish blog called eldesconsciente.

 

Best American Films By Year, Part Two

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John Wayne in The Searchers

In this posting, I continue my list of “The Best American Films By Year” covering the period 1915 to 1977. What I am going from is a list produced by my friend Lee Sanders, with whom I am in substantial agreement. When there are two films for a particular year and the second one is in red, the second one is because I disagree with Lee’s choice (which you will find is not too often). Below is the continuation of the list from 1941 to 1960:

1941 – How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)
1942 – The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles); Casablanca (Michael Curtiz) – Lee actually had both films tied; I prefer the second
1943 – Air Force (Howard Hawks)
1944 – Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli)
1945 – They Were Expendable (John Ford)
1946 – My Darling Clementine (John Ford); The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks) – Lee had both films tied, a decision with which I agree.
1947 – Pursued (Raoul Walsh); Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur)
1948 – Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls)
1949 – Caught (Max Ophuls); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford)
1950 – Rio Grande (John Ford)

1951 – On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray); Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock)
1952 – The Quiet Man (John Ford)
1953 – The Bandwagon (Vincente Minnelli)
1954 – The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford)
1955 – Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)
1956 – The Searchers (John Ford)
1957 – Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk)
1958 – Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
1959 – Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks)
1960 – Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli); Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)

When I conclude this list, we will look at American films of the 1960s and 1970s (up to 1977, and I will bring the list up to 1980 with my own choices).

 

 

Zeus Goes A-Wooing

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Leda and the Swan

Whenever the Greek God Zeus was felt attracted toward mortal women, he disguised himself as someone or something else and just raped them. That happened in the case of Europa (either as a bull according to Ovid or as an eagle according to Robert Graves); Danae (as a golden shower—hey, I don’t make this stuff up); Callisto (as the Goddess Artemis); and Alcmene (as her husband who was away at war at the time).

Probably the most famous coupling was with Leda, for which Zeus became a swan. The result was Helen of Troy and Polydeuces. Leda’s legitimate children by King Tyndareus of Sparta were Castor and Clytemnestra. You may recall that Clytemnestra married Agamemnon and later murdered him in his bath when he returned from the Trojan War.

The above photo was taken earlier today by me at the Getty Villa in Malibu, one of the best collections of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities in the New World.

All this comes out in this magnificent poem by William Butler Yeats:

Leda and the Swan by W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Run Like Hell: The Holidays Are Here!

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Thanksgiving: Gobble Until You Wobble

The end of the year tends to be something of a blur for me. The holidays come one right after the other, starting with Halloween and continuing with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day. I am of two minds about these holidays. On one hand, I feel I am required to be in a festive mood and follow certain “family” traditions that were, in fact, never a part of my own family. On the other hand, while I appreciate the time off from work, I would rather pick my own holidays and spend the time going someplace interesting, such as Peru, Siberia, American National Parks, or Australia.

Still, for those of you who feel they have to be uplifted by celebrating our holidays in a traditional manner, my heart goes out to you. Just remember that your holidays do not define or delimit you in any way. You are a unique person with needs which other people might at times find off-putting. Never you mind! Just put on a happy face and grit your teeth. But whatever you do, remember to pay homage to your own daemons, once the needs of your loved ones have been taken care of.

I recognize that I am a little strange at times. But so are we all! There is a certain safety in being conventional, but that safety is an illusion. Any day of the year, I would rather read a good book than watch a football game; eat a pork tamale with a fiery salsa picante rather than turkey; give gifts because I want to, not because it is a social obligation.

Tomorrow, Martine and I will go to the Getty Villa to look at ancient Greek and Roman art. We will pointedly not join the throngs at the malls looking for Black Friday bargains. We would rather have a restful Friday looking at works of art which have survived for two or more milllennia that were created by people who were much like us.

 

The Law of Diminishing Returns

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Are We Reaching the Limits of E-Mail?

Every time a new technology comes into being, it gets vitiated by overuse as an advertising medium. I remember back to the early days of junk mail, when it was still a novelty, and I was more willing to consider it as having some value. That included those little voting guides put out by Citizens For … or Taxpayers Against ….The last Presidential election turned me into a person who wound up tossing most of his junk mail without so much as a glance. The same thing is now happening with all those mail order catalogs from various Indian Missions and yuppie techno-device vendors. It’s relatively rare for me now to salvage more tha n one tenth of what ends up choking my mailbox.

That goes double for e-mail. I have learned to distrust e-mail—even from friends—unless it shows some sign of knowing who I am. Several of my good friends have had their computers taken over by Malware that sends me e-mails that contain nothing but a URL. No thanks: That’s like inviting a vampire into your house.

Then, too, there are companies in my industry that think it’s a great idea to send me half a dozen e-mails a day. Unless they are announcing a new release of their software that has to be downloaded, it all goes into the Delete folder toute suite. I get invited to more webinars every day than any human being can reasonably be expected to take, so into the Biz Bag with them as well.

I suspect that smart phones will soon become the next garbage overload medium. Although my cell phone is a very dumb phone, it’s gotten to the point that I do not even try to answer it any more. I figure that if it’s important, people will leave a Voice Mail message—and those I eventually check.

Such a pity that the hucksters wind up killing all the new technologies.

 

Infamy as a Way of Life

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Israel’s Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu

Israel has a right to exist. The Palestinians have a right to exist—though no one but a few die-hard Arabs say that Palestine as a nation has a right to exist. I am not sure now that Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party, however, have a right to exist.

The path taken by Netanyahu’s Israel is a dangerous one. You could be hyper-aggressive and murderous to the maximum extent, but only insofar as the people are backing your every play. Eventually, you could cross a line where not only the world at large but your own people are tired of infamy as a way of life. What happens then? Can you continue to do the same sort of thing and continue to get away with it? Probably not.

Crusader States

The Arabs see Israel as just another “crusader state.” After the wildly successful First Crusade (1096-1099), much of the Holy Land was divided into a series of feudal states run by the Crusaders. These included the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa. Some of them lasted a surprisingly long time. And they might still be around today if the Arabs were not united under a powerful new leader like Saladin (from Kurdistan of all places), and the Crusaders became ever more disunited and fragmented over the next couple hundred years.

Who is to say that Israel’s continued aggression against the Palestinians and other Arabs will not result in a unified alliance to wipe it off the map? What will our attitude be in such a case? Will we have to send in our army to protect Israel’s right to exist? That would be good for another five hundred years of hatred in the Middle East.

I think the Western World had to keep a tight leash on Israel and do everything it can to stymie the right wing politicians who have been in the ascendant there since the days of Menachem Begin. (At the same, our own right wing will continue to support Israeli aggression and confuse the issue.)

 

 

 

Making Assumptions

Lemony Snicket

Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you’d made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.—Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

About That Glacier

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Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina

I have been asked by friends about that glacier shown atop my blog page. It is the Perito Moreno Glacier in the State of Santa Cruz in Argentina. Last year at this time, Martine and I were there on our vacation. In a country full of natural beauty, Perito Moreno is one of the top attractions. It is near the city of El Calafate, from where one can take bus tours that allow one to view the glacier from a number of viewpoints, including from a boat that travels close to its edge.

The man after whom the glacier is named was a 19th century Argentinean naturalist who was the South American equivalent of John Muir. Francisco Pascasio Moreno (nicknamed Perito, or “expert”) was born in Buenos Aires in 1852 and died in 1919. He was largely responsible for the creation of several Patagonian national parks and is memorialized in the La Plata Museum of Natural History.

One of the interesting facts about the Perito Moreno Glacier, other than its massive size, is that it is one of three Andean glaciers that are still growing in size—at a time when glaciers all over the world are retreating or even disappearing. The lake that the glacier melt drains into is Lago Argentino, which is flanked on its western boundary by a number of glaciers, including the massive Upsala and the Spegazzini glaciers.

I will change the image up top eventually, but Martine and I have happy memories of our Argentina trip, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I looked at Tarnmoor.Com.