hitchens and the king

Having read Christopher Hitchens' eloquent and clever critique in Slate of David Seidler and his screenplay for this year's Oscar frontrunner 'The King's Speech', I began to realise that there are two processes at work in the debate between these men, and that their points were illustrative of a discussion that arises again and again about films depicting the lives of real people, especially historically significant ones.

http://www.slate.com/id/2285695/pagenum/all/#p2

The film, by anyone's estimation is a masterpiece, masterfully performed, photographed, edited, but there is no denying that as a bio-pic the script takes considerable liberties with the historical facts.

Of course there's nothing new about cinema bending history to its will, but in this particular case, the screenplay in its zeal to gain the audience's favour for a man in personal crisis, to make him a likeable character whose story, whose plight we'll empathise with, even though he was the hereditary ruler of 25% of the world's people and wealthy from birth beyond our imaginations, paints George VI or Albert or 'Bertie' as a very different political being than he in fact was at the time.

The truth of the history as Hitchens unveils it would have certainly soured our sympathies for a leader, a man whose persuasions were, like his abdicated brother more in line with preserving the monarchy and his family fortune than in taking a moral stand against a Nazi regime that was enslaving Europe and murdering the continent's Jews, Gypsies, Communists, somewhat later Poles of all religious persuasions, really anyone they found in their disfavour. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that Bertie went out of his way to influence the government into denying entrance to British governed Palestine by Jewish refugees fleeing war-torn Europe, and thereby sealing the fate of untold numbers to the concentration camps and death in the ovens of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Jadwiga, Bergen Belsen, etc.

Once the die was cast, and war with Germany unavoidable, the leadership provided by the king as a voice to help rally Britain and to give strength to the inhabitants of an empire, at least those in England who were raised to feel comfort from the rule of a strong monarch, albeit a constitutional one, was undoubtedly an important factor in the war effort, and the film thoroughly engages us in the private struggle of the man in the process of overcoming a crippling disability to become the king. As Christopher points out, however, it is very dangerous for cinema, especially when it's executed with such a high level of creative skill, to pave over the serious cracks in the real lives of the figures it chooses to portray.

Balancing the tale of a man versus his deeds in the real world, or artistry and inspiring works versus the politics and personal behaviour of any individual has never been an easy task for the storyteller who seeks to inspire and to tell a compelling yarn to that end.

I think, however, the key lies in understanding that all characters, all men and women are a complex interweaving of good and questionable, and that if a writer or a director has faith in their ability to truly tell the story of a human being with all their shortcomings and attributes honestly on display in equal measure, then the reader, the viewer will in the end be all the more inspired by the narrative, and that honesty in all its shades of dark and light will have rendered the tale unassailable for its truth and the stronger story as a consequence.

Film may be entertainment, but it can also quite easily become a vehicle for ideology, and if we celebrate a motion picture's creative achievements, as will undoubtedly be done this coming Sunday evening in Los Angeles, then certainly we have a right, maybe even a duty to critique its manipulations of the truth along the path to providing us with those entertainments.

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have you ever seen an owl?

Have you ever seen an owl?

I don’t mean in a drawing or a photograph, but a live owl? They’re truly incredible to look at, the intricate pattern of their feathers, not really feathers as you might think of them, but more like fur, combed, ordered in a way that’s astounding, and they stare right back at you. It’s disarming. They’re larger than you expect them to be, that is, if you’ve only seen them in photo books, or as illustrations, especially the white ones. I saw one once in a short film directed by a friend, a colleague. There was a long tracking shot, and as the camera moved around the bird, it followed the lens with its eyes, its entire head swiveled. The wise, old owl. I think they have that reputation, or that myth is attached to them because they seem to stare right through you, as if they know something that you don’t, or maybe something about you personally that you thought only you knew for certain. They’ve uncovered your secret, and they’re telling you with their stare, they’re letting you know that they know. Wise indeed.

I think I’ve seen an actual owl. I think I’ve actually seen a real owl, but when I try and remember when, or where, I realize that I may have imagined it.

Another question. Have you ever seen a dead person?

Not someone lying in a casket in a funeral home, a relative or a friend that you’re mourning, although the viewing of the body probably isn’t done so much in our culture anymore. I mean have you ever seen a person actually die? There must be those who have seen many people die, soldiers, policemen, doctors, people who’ve had the misfortune to live in countries torn apart by war, or disease, but I’d be willing to guess that if you asked most people, people you know personally, they’d say no, they haven’t seen an actual person die, and considering how many people do actually die, that seems strange. Maybe most people who are confronted with death turn away, afraid to see themselves reflected in the face of the one who’s dying. That’s the way the story goes, the excuse we make for ourselves, and for others like us.

I think I’ve seen a person dying, but when I try to remember who, the image that I had in my head disappears, or becomes a scene in a movie, or a story I’ve told often enough to believe that it’s true, even though I realize that I may have imagined this as well.

I suppose the point that I’m getting at, the issue I’m contemplating, is how much of what we think we’ve experienced is really just a remembrance of something that never took place, or if it did, then we weren’t there to witness it taking place, but we’ve been told that it happened. Maybe we saw it happen in a film, or on television, while reading a book, or we saw it in our imaginations, and then it somehow became memory, but transformed to become the memory of our own personal experience, and as real to us as if it had happened, as if we had been there to see it happen.

When someone tells you a story about themselves, something that happened to them, how do you judge whether they’re telling you the truth? What if what they’re telling you is not the truth, but they believe that it is, because that’s how they remember it happening, as if they were there when it happened, as if it happened to them? Recently, I heard a character in a movie say, “Honesty is not synonymous with truth”. I was taken by the line when I heard it, but I didn’t fully understand what it meant at that moment, even though I knew that it was something profound, at least something thought provoking. I also knew it had been uttered by an actor who was not telling me a true thought of their own, or something that they believed in, but something that their character was saying, something that had been written for them to say that would have an effect upon me, me and the rest of the audience. In fact, I was so compelled to recall exactly what I’d heard the character say, that I found a copy of the screenplay and read it a number of times until I’d memorized it, all the while contemplating exactly what it meant. The character in the film was trying to convince a man she was having diner with, a man who would become her lover, her boyfriend later in the story, that she was a truthful person, even though she was confessing to having told a lie from time to time, “to smooth things over”. She was a truthful person, in her estimation, and even though she didn’t always tell the truth, she was an honest person as well. In other words, lying as a tactic in order to make things easier for herself, or for others, without doing any real harm, or at least no harm she was aware of, was understandable, forgivable, even a considerate thing, a kind thing to do.

So maybe truth isn’t as important as we’ve been led to believe, and maybe memory is as much a product of imagination as it is of any accurate recollection, any factual recounting of events, and there is the moral paradox of our age, perhaps of any age. We live in a world where the great storytellers are some of the most valorized members of our society. When they spin their yarns in the context of art, or entertainment, and when they capture us with their imaginations, allowing us all to borrow theirs to fill the empty space where our own might be, they are celebrated beyond imagination itself. In any other context, however, being caught in a lie can be met with humiliation, scorn, and if you don’t have enough money for a really clever lawyer, imprisonment. Truth is not absolute, as it turns out, but contextual.

Now think really hard. Have you ever seen an owl?

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the little girl in the window

In some way, I suppose that we're all damaged by events in our past. While it's true that we're also shaped by those joyous, illuminating, life-changing moments, a first kiss, the birth of a child, and others that we may barely recognize as significant at the times they occur, our characters, the essence of who we are as human beings is more a result of how we deal with the trauma in our lives. The psychic scars that form in the wake of those jarring confrontations we all experience with the way the world truly is, as opposed to our misperceptions and fantasies of how we'd like it to be are indelible. Pain, in the end, is more instructive than pleasure, and more lasting.

Sometimes the damage that we suffer as human beings, while intensely personal to each individual, is so widespread across a community, a race, a generation that the scarring becomes hereditary, and continues to mark the children who were yet to be born at the time that events have taken place. Even the children’s children are not immune, and the cultural psyche of whole peoples can be formed by experiences that are decades old, branding them arbitrarily as victims, or survivors, or simply as broken.

Anyone who's ever been through analysis will tell you that rediscovering the episodes where their personal damage first occurred, dragging those memories kicking and screaming into the light from the dark recesses of their minds where they've hidden them away from consciousness is an excruciating experience, but ultimately a liberating one, like the removal of an emotional cancer. The catharsis begins with the recognition of the occurrences that we’ve kept secret from ourselves, but there are some wounds that can never be completely healed, and for better or for worse, they define us. Those wounds become our character.

My wife is Dutch, and while she was born more than a decade after the Second World War in Europe, a good deal of who she is, of who so many of the children of those who experienced the events of that period firsthand are as well, was formed as a result of their families' histories. Sacha's mother, Adrie was born in the '20s to the daughter of a Christian family, and because she was illegitimate, and unwanted, she was raised in a home for unwed mothers, and later by loving strangers. Adrie's mother died of a respiratory illness when the girl was 3, and she once told Sacha about her earliest childhood memory of a woman, perhaps her mother, but she couldn’t be sure, in a hospital bed hugging her with a death grip, crying hysterically, and saying goodbye.

As a teenager, Adrie spent the years during the war shuttled between Rotterdam, where she was placed temporarily with an aunt and uncle, and a residence in the north of Holland. When the Allied bombing became overwhelming, she was sent back to Jet, her teacher and surrogate mother, who’d taken her from the orphanage after her own mother had passed. De Werkplaats where Jet taught, and where Adrie lived and studied was closed by the new government of occupation because of the socialist philosophies taught by it’s founder Kees Boeke, and Jet found a remote house where she and others could look after displaced children, including several Jewish babies who were being hidden from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators. As Sacha grew old enough to understand what her mother had experienced, and curious enough to ask, Adrie told her about how she'd helped keep the babies safe from soldiers who would come periodically to inspect their nappies. They were looking for the boys who'd been circumcised, and when sympathetic villagers would alert Jet that the Germans were on their way, Adrie would take the babies into a small boat and row out onto the lake nearby where she would keep them quiet for hours while the houses were searched. One of the boys who survived the war stayed with Jet Kirpensteyn as another of her special boarders, and like Adrie completed his studies at de Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap Bilthoven. Rolf became a lifelong friend to the young girl who helped save his life in the little rowboat, and later to her daughter.

Sacha’s father, Benjamin was born just after the turn of the 20^th Century to Jewish parents. His father was a craftsman who built railway carriages, and a member of the socialist workers party. Too young to fight in the Great War, and too old for the military in World War Two, Ben supported his wife and two children, Ab and Ita, by working for a printing company, a job his father helped him secure with his connections in the party. A handsome and charismatic man, Ben was able to acquire false papers for himself and his family before the Germans began deporting Jews to the camps, and he managed to find separate homes across the country for his wife, his son of seven, and his daughter, only four years old at the time. For the duration, they were disguised as Dutch Christians while he went to work helping to distribute an underground resistance newspaper Het Parool,‘The Password’. Ben would devote his life’s work to the paper, which became one of the country’s largest dailies after the war, and he served as its managing director in Amsterdam until his retirement in the early ‘70s. While Ben, his wife and children made it through the war physically unscathed, more than five years of distance took its toll on their family, and ultimately it did not survive. Ben separated from his wife a few years after their reunion in 1945, and the two children remained with their mother. Ben’s mother had died years earlier and his father remarried, and when word began to spread in early ‘41 that Jews in the cities were being detained, Ben’s father and his wife fled to the countryside where they were certain they’d be safe. A local farmer betrayed them for the reward of five guilders, and like more than 50,000 of their fellow Dutch Jews, neither ever returned from Auschwitz.

Adrie and Ben met one summer when she took a casual job as a receptionist in the building where Ben’s newspaper was published. Although separated by more than twenty years in age, they fell in love, and it would have been easy to understand the attraction. Ben was successful and exceedingly charming, and Adrie was tall, blond, and beautiful. They had both endured tremendous ordeals and were searching for fresh beginnings. It took five long years of trying for the couple to create the new family that they both so desperately wanted, and finally in 1956, Sacha, the girl that Ben called his golden child, was born.

For a while the three of them led a charmed life together in post-war Europe with summer vacations to Italy and skiing holidays in Switzerland, but beneath the surface was a recurring historical problem. Because Ben’s wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce, Sacha could not legally bear his name, and so like her mother before her, she carried the social stigma of illegitimacy. The reminders of Adrie’s own troubled childhood, along with rumors of Ben’s infidelities eventually drove a wedge between them, and as a result, family life became increasingly difficult for young Sacha, who was inheriting the damages that had been inflicted upon her parents long before her arrival.

By the time Sacha was a teenager, the house was not the most pleasant place to be. Her father had moved out for a time, and her mother had sought the comfort of a lover. Their pasts had caught up with them, and while Adrie, still the fragile abandoned child wanting desperately to be loved fell into a deeper depression, exacerbated by ‘60s era antidepressants, Ben sought solace away from home in his work as well as in his social life. The winter after Sacha turned fourteen, her mother, having had a few glasses of wine one evening, left the house and didn’t return. Sacha learned years later that her mother’s lover had refused to leave his wife and marry her, and the news had thrown her into an even darker despair than she’d been struggling with the past few years in her marriage. It was a freezing night, and when Ben realized that Adrie was missing, he contacted friends and eventually the police. A search was conducted, but it wasn’t until two days later that her body was discovered in a nearby wood. A little more than five years later, and just that long into his retirement, Ben de Vries died of a heart attack in an airport in the south of France, leaving his golden child alone in the world at the age of 20. Their new beginnings were overshadowed by their pasts, and tragically short-lived.

For most of 1942 and ‘43, Ben’s daughter Ita, Sacha’s older half-sister, had been living with a Christian family, her false papers identifying her as one of their own. She’d not seen her real mother or father for more than two years at that point, and out of caution, she was never allowed to leave the house for fear of her being exposed. Even if all the other family members needed to be away on any given day, Ita, at that time only six years old, was forced to remain behind alone with strict instructions not to answer the door to anyone. No exceptions.

She must have been a very bright little girl who grasped the consequences of breaking this hard and fast rule, and a very brave one as well because she’d left her family, her parents, her brother, and everything she knew to live with strangers, taking with her only a small poppen koffertje, a doll’s suitcase, carrying her few belongings.

One day while looking out of the window of her bedroom on an upper floor of the house, she noticed a man approaching the front door, and as he came closer, she recognized him as her father, whom she’d not seen since she was four. Ben had taken a great risk in coming to the home, but he felt compelled to try and see his young daughter, even if only for a moment. From her window, Ita could see her father at the door, and could hear his knock coming from downstairs, but she couldn’t cry out for fear of breaking the rules, rules that had been made for her safety. Sadly, he couldn’t see his little girl in the window, and for several minutes, she watched him in silence. After a time, Ben decided that it was no longer safe to wait for an answer, and he left. They wouldn’t see one another again for more than two years, after Holland’s liberation in the spring of 1945.

In literature, tragedy is defined by a character who is destined to destruction through some fatal flaw or by an overwhelming power, but in life, tragedy is more often the residue of history, events and circumstances that arise from our past to shadow our present, and if we allow them, our future.

Ironically, the components that draw us to tragedy are hope and longing, because even faced with a destiny of downfall, it’s human nature to try to cheat death, to conquer tragedy, and it’s that hope that we live for, that longing, against the odds, for things to turn out differently than we fear they might.

We are all damaged, but the antidote as well as the path forward is consciousness, and understanding. In the interim, the salve is hope.

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the case of Sarah

My first inclination was to say ignore her, and she'll go away. Stop feeding the frenzy by indulging in these quid pro quo responses and attacks, but then I thought about the conditions under which other demagogues have succeeded in capturing power in the not so distant past.

The easiest comparison of course, just for historical proximity really, is with G.W. Bush, but his ascension was as much a product of his political and economic pedigree, which just happened to have a finely tuned political machine built by his Father and Grandfather to mine the contemporary wave of populism that put him over the top.

Then there's Reagan, but again, the Madison Avenue support and manipulations of Donald Reagan were as much responsible for Ronnie being the 'tired old man we elected king' as any true people's movement. The era of image is everything, and there were plenty of puppet masters to help move his lips.

No, the more I think about it, the more I realise how many comparisons there actually are to Europe in 1931; the state of the economy, the warlike culture, the guise of patriotism that allows the most heinous of personalities to wrap themselves in the flag as a cloak of protection for their incendiary speech (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin, et.al.), the lack of education undermining the ability for the lumpen to understand the truth, the propaganda machine spreading fear and hatred in order to profit personally (Murdoch, Ailes, and the whole Fox pack of brownshirts), and one charismatic voice who to a large number of angry, disenchanted people looks like them, speaks for them, and is just telegenic enough to win their allegiance.

If you think that the kind of fascism that brought Hitler to power couldn't happen to the declining empire called the United States of America, and that Palin, the soccer mom with a rifle and the face of a B level beauty contest winner, couldn't capture power, then you may need to read your history more thoroughly. As Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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Jeff Richter on Facebook

healthcare in America . . . the real issue

Conservative Democratic US Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, both representing states with populations under 1 million people (650,000 in North Dakota and 950,000 in Montana), both of whom have had their campaigns and PACs heavily contributed to and subsidized by private insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and their lobbyists in an increasing fashion over the years (all the more so as the tide in US politics turned toward the Democrats in the last two election cycles), both of whom are on the Senate Finance Committee (Baucus is the Chairman) which has a stranglehold on healthcare reform proposals because of the necessity for approving the costs of administering any new program, and both of whom have expressed their strong opposition to the President's desire for and the House's bill provisions which include a public healthcare insurance option, are holding the American people (of whom an overwhelming majority of 77% in recent polls favor a public insurance option to any healthcare reform legislation) hostage to the economically motivated designs of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who have been largely responsible for putting these two men in office, and keeping them there for multiple terms.

If one considers the fact that each of these US Senators represents only half the population of their individual states, each state having two representatives in the Senate, then the spokespersons for approximately 800,000 American citizens are managing to overrule the will of more than 225 million Americans, all in the name of the multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry which has presided over 80% increases in health insurance costs in just the past decade and forced an already heavily burdened and rapidly escalating Medicare and Medicaid system to rise to the level of nearly 25% of the Federal budget, while still leaving more than 15% of the population, or 45 million citizens uninsured.

The Institute of Medicine with the National Academy of Sciences estimates that the lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States, and although America leads the world in spending on healthcare, nearly $7500 per every American (remembering that 15% receive no healthcare at all), it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all it's citizens have medical coverage.

These sobering facts stand in marked contrast to the more than $13 billion in annual profits made by just the top ten health insurance corporations in the US, whose CEOs take home an average annual compensation of $12 million, not including their stock options.

Healthcare reform is arguably the key issue of President Obama's administration, inasmuch as it affects the lives of every American as a social issue as well as determining the size of the ever increasing federal deficit, and by extension the US market economy, interest rates, the value of the dollar, and by further extension the world economy, etc., and in conjunction with the withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq and the further prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, will largely determine the perceived success or failure of the Obama presidency.

We should expect the likes of Senators Grassley of Iowa and Hatch of Utah, both Republicans and members of the Senate Finance Committee (Grassley the Chairman when the Republicans had control of the Senate), to oppose healthcare reform and certainly the public healthcare insurance option, on ideological grounds. Few would be surprised to read Sarah Palin rant about Death Panel provisions in the plan, with Grassley seconding the motion. Many may also have predicted that the insurance industry and it's surrogates would have mobilized their army of concerned citizens (read paid rabble rousers. Swift Boaters, et. al.) armed with misinformation and disruptive tactics to hijack the debate on healthcare and turn it into the shouting matches we've witnessed at town hall meetings, all further inflamed by the fair and balanced news media coverage. Baucus and Conrad, on the other hand, are Democrats in a US Senate with a majority of 58 Democratic members and a filibuster-proof Democratic caucus with 60 members, and it is their efforts in committee that will have the largest stake in determining the shape, even the existence of progressive healthcare legislation, not the hyperbolic rhetoric of the pundits or the screaming class.

The sea change in America, marked by Obama's election victory and majorities in both houses of Congress, was a transformation more encompassing than issues of race in America, or of the President's pledge to end the devastating war in Iraq that was perpetrated by Bush and his neocons on the heels of the 911 tragedy. It was in fact a recognition of a fundamental ideological shift in power back to a political agenda that hadn't been seen in the US since JFK, and perhaps not successfully achieved since FDR, and it marked the beginning of the recognition that the politics of greed, the dominance of the corporate lobby and an economy driven by the financial markets was about to be more greatly scrutinized and governed by the people, all the people, just as it should be in a democracy.

Let's not allow members of the Democratic Party, Blue Dog or otherwise, to undermine the will of the American people, who, despite opinions on K Street and on Wall Street to the contrary, know all too well what is in their best interests as citizens, and what arguments, misdirections, and obfuscations are in the service of private interests, motivated by private profits, and administered by elected officials representing themselves and their benefactors at the expense of their electorates, and more importantly the nation as a whole.

If you agree, please help expose Senator Baucus' and Senator Conrad's actions for what they are and put pressure upon them in the arena of public opinion to pass universal healthcare legislation with an option to every American for public health insurance through the Senate Finance Committee and on to the floor of the Senate.

for what it's worth,

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As few articles on the subject . . .

The White House's Reality Check

http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#i1

Sam Stein and Ryan Grimm in the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/21/budget-buster-kent-conrad_n_264123.html

Think Progress back in June . . . not much has changed

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/15/dean-coop-proposal/

Baucus' local print review

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20090813/NEWS01/908130303

A sample of what one gets in the Bismarck Tribune, Senator Conrad's hometown paper

http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2009/05/17/news/opinion/letters/doc4a0dd6d7d9482880759660.txt

Some suggestions for news agencies and public officials to whom you may be willing to write and express your own interests on the subject . . .

The President

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

NYTimes Letters to the Editor

http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter/formf.html

Great Falls Tribune

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/customerservice/contactus.html

Move On's Campaign

http://www.moveon.org/

The California Senators

http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.Home

http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/

Senators Conrad and Baucus directly

http://conrad.senate.gov/contact/

http://baucus.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

Fordham's moral compass

sydney morning herald, tuesday, 12.05.09

John Fordham, of the Fordham Company and manager of embattled former NRL player and Footy Show personality Matthew Johns said, "I don't deal with David Gallop [NRL chief executive] in relation to Matthew Johns' contractual arrangements at Channel Nine. David Gallop has no direct involvement in any way, shape or form with Matthew Johns' arrangements with Channel Nine or indeed with any other entity. I am therefore deeply surprised that he would want to involve himself in an employment issue in which he has no involvement."

sydney morning herald, wednesday, 13.05.09

David Gyngell, [chief executive of channel 9] said in a statement, "I fully endorse [NRL chief executive] David Gallop's comments concerning the indefensible conduct of some players and the lack of respect for women and the critical focus on all stakeholders to help eradicate it from our game. I join with him in extending my apologies and sympathy to the young woman involved in the incident, who clearly is still distressed as a consequence."

Dear John,

You may want to wake up to your massive PR blunder in yesterday's ill-conceived defense of Matthew Johns and realize just how much David Gallup's leadership of the NRL has to do with your client's former employers at Channel 9 and the Melbourne Storm, not to mention any public appearances and sponsorship deals you may have had planned for Johns' future.

Considering what would appear to be your level of understanding of the public's contempt in this case, and the moral issues at play, you'll probably be "deeply surprised" at today's revelations as well that 9 and the Storm are very much influenced by the opinions of the leader of a sports league who grants them the rights to work on the league's behalf; a leader I might add who actually understands the public's disgust for the actions of Johns and others, and what it means not only to the economic future of the NRL but what it says about the public's values and basic respect for human dignity, and decency. When a media personality excuses his participation in gang sex on a 19 year old by affirming that it was consensual, most of us would know that something is desperately wrong.

How a legitimate entertainment manager could have so badly misjudged public sentiment against John's behavior in '02, as revealed by the Four Corners program, and his absurd wink and nod apologia on the Footy Show last week in advance of the Four Corners' airing is beyond comprehension. Notwithstanding the lack of personal integrity for the absolute moral position any decent human being might have taken on the matter, in what must have been your advice to Johns about his comments on the Footy Show, you compound it by assaulting Gallup's right to take a stance on the employment of someone directly connected to the integrity of the league over which he has authority, and take the blundering to new heights by advising Johns to announce that there will be no public apology to the victim.

It's astounding really, but pride comes before a fall, and I can only imagine how some of your other clients will be reacting to your handling of the incident, and your seeming lack of any moral compass, especially the females like Lisa Wilkinson, Tracy Grimshaw, and Deborah Thomas.

Note for the future: the truth will always surface, and the only course of action for any person in the public eye is a full and complete admission of guilt, followed by an unequivocal apology to the victims . . . not to the hurt one's actions have caused their own family. It's media management 101, John, and more importantly, it's the right thing to do.

disappointed,

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the good, the blond, and the ugly

More than a year after the tempest in a piss-pot created over the Imagine I'm an Opinion Editor for the LA Times scandal began, and we're treated once more to the saga of sex, lies, and what passes for journalism in the City of the Angels this past week, via stalker emails, restraining orders, and of course lawsuits.

I'm amusing myself contemplating the rogues gallery of connections, and the potent punch of one petite flack, and her curious power in LaLaLand . . . yes it's the Katie Couric of publicists, Kelly Mullens, as cute as a button and as pernicious as, dare I coin it, a Blond Widow, and maybe that's the title of the bio-pic's screenplay? . . . well at least the first draft anyway.

The casting suggestions are already in full swing I'm sure, but who could you possibly get to play Grazer, but Grazer? Well, maybe Seth Green if you starved him for a month, put his finger in a light socket, and used a ton of hair gel to cement the effect.

Let's have a virtual look at Ms. Mullens' address book.

• Judith Regan in her lawsuit with News Ltd., Murdoch, Ailes, Giuliani, et. al.

• AFTRA in their who's-selling-out-the-rank-and-file dispute with SAG (hey, we're all one union aren't we?) over the AMPTP contract

• Isaiah Washington in his struggles with Grey's Anatomy, T.R. Knight . . . and homophobia of course

• Cruise-Wagner and Valkyrie, or National Socialism meets Scientology and gets 'clear' . . . way clear, as it turns out, of a film that anyone will want to see.  I understand that the cringe factor is quite high, and definitely not up to the comedic standards of "Mein Führer, I can walk!" . . . my lone script note was for the eyepatch to move from left to right several times during the course of the film, like Marty Feldman's (Eye-Gor's) hump in Young Frankenstein

• Quarterlife, and I never thought that after 30 Something I'd ever feel sorry for Zwick and Herskovitz, but how far one can descend from the brilliance of Blood Diamond to the depths of 20-something blog standard

• The McCourts and their stumbling, fumbling acquisition of the easy to buy but harder to sell the increased price of DDogs and seat license Dodgers . . . and you thought that O'Malley's land grab, rape of the inhabitants of Chavez Ravine half a century ago was venal . . . then a lawsuit with the Angels over who can use the letters LA (I hear they'll be taking Water & Power to (Mc)court soon . . . but watch out for Hollis Mulray!)

• R. Kelly and god knows what manner of depravity, was it Zappa who said "she's only thirteen, and she knows how to nasty", or is it the Firesign Theater's invocation of the great Morman leader Get'em Young that seems the more appropriate reference here?

• Paula Poundstone, and this one is better left alone really, but just for fun, see either Michael Jackson's playroom or the curiously aggressive female gym teacher and the pubescent pupil genre of cliches and celebrity nightmares where short haircuts and pantsuits are not optional . . . note to Ellen, we understand it signifies that one of you is playing the traditional male role, but do you really think we needed the extra visual aid to figure that one out?

• Tommy Lee and our collective cultural roll to the tattooed and pierced bottom of it all

• Brandy and the spin of her how-to-drive-like-a-man-slaughterer habits into a small fine and an apology to the victim's family

• And all this before the Andreas Martinez (yes there are red-headed people with Latin surnames who nonetheless look Irish), Grazergate, Sunday Opinion (are there any other kinds?), Allan Mayer-42 West-Fleishman Hillard-Universal Music, David Hiller, Chicago Tribune owned "substance-free" LATimes, editorial-news-PR-advertising-publishing-ethically challenged-everyone's in bed with everyone-no Chinese firewall-conflict of something if not interest (and who's really interested anyway), wacky, wonderful world of information we live in
  

Now that's what I call a CV . . . and I'll bet she's really something when the lights dim too, or to paraphrase Loudon Wainwright III "that Little (Blond) Riding Hood, she really does it to me".

Hey all you editors and publishers out there, maybe you can have one of Ms. Mullens' clients (and what a line-up we're talking about) guest-edit your opinions page . . . who knows what pro quo you might be able to get for a little quid?

I harken back in these ethically challenging times to the sage pronouncement of Mark Saylor, one of the great journalism-to-PR-with-no-qualms-crossover-artists in recent memory, and a former colleague of Mayer-Mullens (not that the distance between journalism and PR is the chasm it once was, morally or ideologically . . . no Snake River Canyon Knievel jump required), when he said, without dropping a stitch of irony mind you, that some of his clients may have "made mistakes or done wrong things, sure, but there's nothing I'm doing that I have the least ethical qualm about."

Says it all really.

I always get a touch nostalgic about my old home town and the tragicomic goings on in the industry . . . at least it affords me the opportunity to channel Richard Meltzer in the process of forming a response.  In the famous words of someone, you couldn't make this shit up . . . well maybe you shouldn't anyway.  

It's just another chapter in The Dazed of Our Lives.

yours,

downandunder