From an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by his adoring biographer Stephen Hayes:
"Am
I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his
hole?" Mr. Cheney said in 2004. "It’s a nice way to operate, actually."
Sunday Morning on the Planet: Buster Keaton
One of the most original and lovable of all Americans, sez me, is the great star of vaudeville and movies, Buster Keaton, a master of paradox.
When I was a student in New York City years ago, the 8th Avenue Cinema downtown near the Village used to run Buster Keaton movies every Sunday. With a friend I’d go almost every Sunday, and enter into another world. For a few months, it became a strangely religious experience. Darkness, the past, surrealism, an uplifting moment at the end: for me everything else fell away.
As a character, Buster Keaton is an everyman trying to do what he’s supposed to: hold down a job, find a girl, settle down. But the world has conspired against him. In the South during the war, he wants to enlist, but as a train engineer is refused. This is a double bummer for his character, because his girl has told him she wants nothing to do with him until he’s in uniform. He sits down on the drive-rod of the big locomotive, and barely notices as it begins to carry him up, down — and away.
Often his plight becomes surrealistic, as in his often-imitated "Projectionist," in which he falls asleep on the job, and finds himself battling to survive in one fanciful movie scenario after another.
Though a great athlete, he projected an uncanny sense of stillness, even when in frantic motion. Though funny as hell, he was known as "the great Stone Face," because in his movies he never smiled. Ever.
In time the dignified but always-slighted Keaton becomes a unique friend, someone you’ve always know was "different," and always liked for just that reason. And as Roger Ebert rightly says, because he mastered the minimalism of movie acting long before his peer Charlie Chaplin, in many ways he’s the most modern of the silent stars. (He’s also arguably the man who first invented what we call today the action comedy, in his masterpiece "The General," one of the biggest movies of its era.)
This month Turner Classic Movies, the only cable channel that still takes old movies seriously, is running a lot of little seen Keaton classics (including the spectacular short "Cops") on August 30. Worth a look.
Good-Looking Rook — and Presidential Candidate
Okay, it’s Saturday, time for something completely different. Here’s a stand-out video report from Jodi Kantor at the New York Times on the character of Barack Obama, as revealed on the basketball court.
To get the scoop, Kantor talked to a former college player named Craig Robinson, currently coach of the basketball club at Brown University, about what he learned about Barack’s skills and character while playing with him on the South Side in Chicago. That’s serious hoops, and Coach says the kid can play.
As Robinson says, we’ve had presidents who played tennis, and presidents who played golf, but we’ve never had a president who shot hoops on the South Lawn. It’s time.
Plus, extra added attraction, some video from Obama playing for his high school team in Hawaii. Rook wears number 23, Michael Jordan’s number, and he looks pretty smooth!
The Good News About the Day Fire
As the Zaca Fire continues to burn in the back country between Santa Barbara and Ojai, it brings up memories of last year’s epochal Day Fire, which burned for weeks, threatening our region repeatedly, costing tens of millions of dollars, and changing the landscape in hundreds of thousands of acres in the Los Padres National Forest.
But an excellent story by Ventura County writer Chuck Graham in Forest magazine, with amazing photos, reminds us that these changes aren’t all bad. Although the notion that the chaparral in Southern California is "meant" to burn is a little misleading, because it will take decades before it again blankets the land, the burn-off does have important benefits for wildlife, including endangered species.
Here’s Chuck:
It’s common to describe a charred wilderness landscape as devastated, but in this case the word isn’t accurate.
“For chaparral and grassland habitats like the Sespe,
these fires help create better habitat conditions that open up areas
that have been choked by vegetation,” says Chris Barr, refuge manager
for the condor recovery program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Sevice.
The fire, moving hot and fast, eliminated overgrown
chaparral that for decades created a canopy that stunted any new growth
beneath it. Cleared of the canopy, the area is now more hospitable to
two of the rarest creatures in the Los Padres National Forest: the
desert bighorn sheep and the critically endangered California condor.
The Sespe Wilderness, the westernmost point in the historic range of
bighorn sheep and one of the last sanctuaries of the condor, now has an
open canopy which will increase forage opportunities for both species.
It will also improve visibility for the bighorns, and thereby help them
evade mountain lions.
“Bighorns have the innate drive to go in a certain
direction when spooked,” says Maeton Freel, wildlife biologist for the
Los Padres National Forest. “Before, they didn’t know where the escape
terrain was, and mountain lions were picking them off.
And here’s a great photo he took of a California condor, while in the backcountry. Look close and you can see the radio beacon attached to the wing:
Flap Over 150th of a Degree Does Not Disprove Global Warming: WSJ
According to "The Numbers Guy" at the Wall Street Journal, the flap over a tiny error in the calculation of the warmest year by NASA is much ado about nothing.
Even Steve McIntyre, the former mining official behind ClimateAudit who first came across the correction, admits this slight recalculation on NASA’s part in no way disproves global warming.
“The reaction in the right-wing blogosphere is overwrought,” Mr.
McIntyre said. “I certainly haven’t said that this is some kind of
magic bullet that disproves global warming."
NASA scientist Reto Ruedy put it more bluntly, pointing out that both 1934 and l998 were within the margin of error, and calling the controversy "silly."
“This is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Ruedy said. “Lots of noise about noise.”
To Reduce Global Warming, We Need Another Katrina
A week ago in a column in the Philadelphia Daily News, Stu Bykovsky made a provocative point, arguing that "to save America, we need another 9/11."
To put it in a nutshell, he said that because the Bush administration botched the Iraq War, the United States has lost "its righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail" against the enemy.
"We bicker over trees while the forest is ablaze," he wrote.
Some pesky nitpickers might point out that going to war against Iraq was actually not the best way to attack Al-Qaeda. But let me put that aside and make a comparable point: To motivate us as a nation to act to reduce global the threat warming, we need another Hurricane Katrina.
No doubt Stu Bykovsky doesn’t really wish for the deaths of his fellow Americans, and as someone who lived through a deadly flood, quite possibly connected to global warming, that killed quite a few of my fellow Californians and tore up my property for months, believe me, I don’t wish a flood or other disaster, natural or unnatural, on anyone.
But the fact is that once again the discussion on global warming has bogged down in wonky arguments. Reducing carbon emissions won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible — if we try.
If we don’t try; no, it won’t happen. And we will find ourselves living on "a different planet" — which we won’t like as much as the one we have. As Nicholas Kristof writes in an op-ed today:
If we learned that Al Qaeda was secretly developing a new terrorist
technique that could disrupt water supplies around the globe, force
tens of millions from their homes and potentially endanger our entire
planet, we would be aroused into a frenzy and deploy every possible
asset to neutralize the threat.
It’s time to get serious — starting now. Already the insurance industry has taken action, and in its own monetary way is telling people to move away from the coast in Florida, along the Gulf, and even in the East. Local governments are beginning to move on the issue as best they can. But the powerful Federal government has done nothing, which has global and perhaps irreversible consequences. We need to act, and it appears that it will take what the experts call "a societal trauma" to make it happen.
I’m sorry, but somebody needs to say it. We need another Katrina — now.
The Gettysburg Address of Pop Music
That’s the best description of John Lennon’s classic "Imagine," I’ve ever heard, from a musician friend here in Ojai. We all know the song, but his best version is not the familiar piano rendition, sez me, but a live version Lennon sang with guitar at a benefit at the Apollo Theater in l971.
In the introduction, visible below, he mentions that he "lost his band," so he and some friends on acoustic guitar are going to have to "busk it."
It’s great, and–starting today–available on iTunes. (The recorded quality is considerably better than the YouTube version, by the way.) Look for the Acoustic record released last year, and the Imagine (live) version, the second-to-last song on the record.
The Environmental Wit of Alfred Hitchcock
“Bush’s Brain” Resigns — But Was Rove Really All That Smart?
The Prez liked to call him "boy genius," but among the chattering class in D.C., Karl Rove’s reputation as a political genius is in sharp decline, and some wonder if Rove is getting out while the getting is good.
Joshua Green, an original and talented writer who last year found the liberal side to Ronald Reagan, all but calls Rove a failure at governing in the latest Atlantic (subscription only). Matt Yglesias, something of a boy genius himself, seconds the point about the man once called Bush’s Brain, stressing that Rove’s belief in a Republican-dominated political realignment is precisely what led to his downfall.
But for an environmentalist, Kevin Drum highlights the essential point from the Green story, which is that Rove was put in charge in charge of the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, and could hardly have done worse.
Hurricane Katrina clearly changed the public perception of Bush’s
presidency. Less examined is the role Rove played in the defining
moment of the administration’s response: when Air Force One flew over
Louisiana and Bush gazed down from on high at the wreckage without
ordering his plane down. Bush advisers Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett
wanted the president on the ground immediately, one Bush official told
me, but were overruled by Rove for reasons that are still unclear:
"Karl did not want the plane to land in Louisiana."
Rove’s failure is visible in this compilation of polls from the Wall Street Journal ($). The Prez’s ratings are going to hell generally but Katrina clearly accelerated the slide (click to enlarge).
I thought it was notable that Rove predicted in his farewell address to the WSJ editorial page that his boss’s ratings would improve, perhaps to as much as 40%. 40%!
For any other president in recent memory except Bush’s father, such an end-of-term approval rating of that would be considered a miserable failure. In the unlikely event the Current Occupant reaches that mark again, it will be considered some sort of miracle.
Things Can’t Go On Like This, Yet They Must
This quarter in Granta, a literary magazine which unfortunately makes little of its content available on-line, is a tremendous memoir chapter by Jeremy Seabrook. It’s about his Aunt Em, a kind and vivacious woman whose ability to make friends and have fun was quashed by his cold mother. This might sound like a small matter–one woman’s unhappiness–but Seabrook shows his Aunt Em to be part of a society of women who devoted themselves to caring for others, and for their trouble, were mercilessly used and then forgotten.
But in my unsuccessful search for this memoir on-line, I came across another first-rate work by Seabrook, an essay on the concept of sustainability, published five years ago in the Guardian. Exactly as he says, the concept of sustainable development, once a hopeful phrase for environmentalists, but now been hijacked by financiers, leaving the idea a ruined mirror of its former self.
When George Bush the Younger refused to sign the Kyoto convention on
global warming on the grounds that nothing must be allowed to interfere
with US economic interests, he was echoing the wisdom of George Bush
the Elder, who spoke his famous words before the Rio summit that "the
American way of life is not up for negotiation". Their commitment to a
fundamentalist economic salvation simply writes the ecological
imperative out of the scenario.
Yet it was believed that the
solution to the great clash between ecology and economy had been
discovered in the 1980s: this was the idea of "sustainable
development", triumphantly enshrined in the Rio declaration.
Intra-generational equity would be balanced with inter-generational
justice to ensure that we do not take more from the Earth than we give
back to it. The excitement generated by this formula concealed the
possibility that it might be a contradiction in terms: when unlimited
desire is unleashed in a world of limited resources, something has to
yield. The "fruits" of industrialism turn out to be strange hybrids –
perhaps, ultimately, inedible.
Like all the brave concepts
offered up by environmentalists, sustainable development was doomed to
go the way of the rest of the treacherous lexicon of developmentalism –
empowerment, participation, poverty-abatement, inclusiveness, and so
on: ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to privilege.
Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear; what
originally meant adjusting the industrial technosphere so that it
should not destroy the planet has now come to indicate the regenerative
power of the economy, no matter how it may degrade the "environment".
Sustainable is what the rich and powerful can get away with.
Seabrook puts it in a sharp little nutshell: "Things can’t go on like this, but they must."
It’s as if we’re all just slightly misquoting Sam Beckett.
Kit Stolz 