Oliver Stone's movie, South of the Border...

I haven't seen it yet, but I am very much looking forward to it. 

 

The mainstream media's vilification of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has never really let up & I'm surprised we don't hear more about what a demon Evo Morales is.  The vilification is especially bad on the cable news shows, even apart from Fox.   (Rick Sanchez has exceeded Chris Matthews as the most irritating avatar of the Instantaneous Conventional Wisdom--but I digress). 

 

While I "enjoyed"--if that's the word--Stone's movie,  JFK, I thought bringing together a mish-mash of conspiracy theories the way he did was a disservice to history.  (Like many armchair political philosophers,  I had my own ideas about who the Bad Guys were and ought to be, but I concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was pretty much who the Warren Commission said he was.  As for all the apparent anomalies--the incredible marksmanship, for example, well, I would say that sometimes a mediocrity under the pressure of an existential decision to change history can have his (or her) powers focused to a stellar degree that enables the act to proceed as planned..)

 

I became a convinced Chavista after watching the documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.   A group of Irish filmmakers--and they may have had a political agenda, but I don't know precisely what it was--planned to make the documentary simply by following Chavez around during his routines and interviewing him and his associates.  But this was in 2002 and what happened was that the filmmakers were trapped with Chavez in the Presidential Palace during the April coup.  They elected to stay in the palace when they could have left and the result was I think the most riveting political documentary I've ever seen. 

 

All this is by way of an intro to saying that based on what's said below, Stone and his associates have really done their homework on this one. 

 

The New York Times, as per usual  with this sort of thing,  attempted a hatchet job on South of the Border.  Stone and his associates replied: 

 

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/Op-Eds-Columns/Op-Eds-Columns/stone-responds-to-ny-times-attack
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Glenn Beck's novel

is headed for No. 1 on the bestseller list.

I don't think it means much.  Right wing think tanks buy up these protofascist publications in bulk and distribute them free or at cost--although I can see where his audience, whom I suspect are not voracious readers, might make an exception to their rule of thumb that books are "tools of the devil" (Thank you, Max Shulman, circa 1961). 

 

Once it's free at the library or a giveaway at a Half-Price Book sale, I might skim through it...(I know it's quite morbid--it's the intellectual equivalent of fascination with the grislier sequences of CSI or Bones)

 

Interestingly, skeptic Martin Gardner wrote a book comparing Mormonism to the Urantia book. I skimmed through Gardner's book & it seemed pretty convincing--but I'm a lot more tolerant of high weirdness than Gardner.  Harold Bloom's book, Omens at the Millenium (something like that) proposed that the U.S. was a gnostic country, founded on gnostic beliefs.  I think you have to stretch the meaning of gnostic beyond recognition to make the case, but Bloom's account was--well, interesting. Claims that Mormonism and Southern Baptist fundamentalism are the two paradigmatic American gnostic religions.   Scholars of ancient Christianisty have long debated whether or not gnosticism was even a useful term to describe the welter of beliefs in the 1st & 2nd century A.D.

 

Y'all probably know, but I should have mentioned that Beck is a Mormon. 

 

It will be interesting to see if Beck throughs his support to Mitt Romney in 2012. 

 

I don't think I've ever met an individual Mormon that I disliked on a personal level, but if that happens, I'm opting for full-throated paranoia about the Mormon hierarchy. 

 

R.   

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The fever is upon me...p.s.

I love it when the fever is upon me.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The fever is upon me...

Suddenly, I have to know everything there is to know about the poet Charles Olson. 

While looking for something else, I came across an allusion to Alfred North Whitehead's influence on Olson.  Whitehead's is the philosophy that more and more has me in its grip--fused with my idiosyncratic neo-Marxism in a way that I can't quite articulate.  'Cor I haven't been acceptable to other Marxists as One of Them for a long time--but that's okay, since I have but little doubt but that *my* understanding is the absolutely correct version.  {Throw in a little Taoism, Mayahana (sp?) Buddhism & Adoptionist Christianity (univeralist version) and there you have my worldview--well simpler than much of the stuff they brew at Starbuck's}. (No offense intended, Mary P.)

 

Speaking of Buddhism--my FB friend Pat Hartman turned me on to John Burdett's series of mysteries set in Thailand. Quite shocking stuff.  I don't know how Thai people would regard Burdett's view of the Thai (he speaks through the persona of a half-westernized Thai policeman) but it has the feel of authenticity.  

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Pursuit of Loneliness...

is the title of a book by Philip Slater from the 60's.  It lays out an account of the American psyche expressed in relatively simple terms drawn from psychoanalysis--which is not to say the account is wrong, but that there are other ways to say it. 

 

The book's thesis has to do with the fantasy that many Americans share, a sort of pastoral Jeffersonianism, a community of sturdy, independent yeoman farmers, one I induge in myself & I think a certain wing of the counterculture of the 60's was a clear expression of it--going back to the land, doing your own thing, etc. 

 

It is the ideal of individualism & total self-sufficiency, sometimes with modern technology, more often with "appropriate technology"--it has affinities with libertarian capitalism as well as with Jeffersonian pastoralism, and there is a definitely a certain animus against government and large institutions of any sort. 

 

Slater says, in sum,  that the overriding fear in American culture (and also British) is the fear of dependency. 

 

Professor Bernstein below points out, rather distressingly, how this same strain in the American character finds expression in the "Tea Party" movement.

 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Dog leads...

I'm going to be pretty busy this weekend helping Teresa re-arrange the house to accommodate our student boarder (daughter Claire), who will be staying with us for her first year graduate studies before she goes down to Port Aransas at the UT Marine Science Institute.  But if I have time, I got two dawgs to check out.  There's "Charlie" a pointer/red heeler mix, and "Hampton," a Newfoundland/Lab mix.  (A red heeler, BTW, is a kind of Australian cattle dog--thank God for Wikipedia) 

 

Info about Charlie's originary breeds would suggest that he might be a bit too lively, but his foster mother says that as an individual, he's pretty laid back.  Charlie is sorta off-white with reddish markings here and there.  He weighs about 50 pounds. 

 

Hampton is at the Animal Shelter in Leander, TX.  I was told by shelter staff (who are always brutally honest, of course) that Hampton has the laid-back termperament of the Newfoundland.  I didn't ask, but from the picture it looks like he don't have the drooly mouth.  Size-wise, Hampton  is all a body could hope for in a dawg--and more.  Hampton, in fact, looks like an over-sized black Lab.  In fact, don't ask how much he weighs. 

 

If I get Hampton, I would like to train him to eat the guy who goes around slashing tires in the neighborhood.  Well, we all have our dreams.

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Hope this isn't TMI...

But I'm like that old sailor having to go on and on about having shot that dang bird. 

 

I have found this to be true: 

 

If you wash your hairs with bar soap, rinse, repeat and rinse, why your hairs come out as squeaky clean as if you had used one of them expensive shampoos with ph & stuff.  Who is with me on this?

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Choosing a dawg--the pleasant angst of deliberation

Having been at least tangentially involved in the rearing of two highly adequate children and with retirement looming, I think now I am adequately mature for the awesome responsibility of being au pair for a mutt of my own... 

 

And a mutt is what I want (because of the "hybrid vigor" thing)--but I do think it important to have some sense of the nature of the underlying breeds. 

 

As usual, I am beset with conflicting criteria for choice.  I want an intelligent, easily housebroken (or fait accompli), easy going, medium to large critter who won't eat kitty cats (daughter is likely get one when she comes home), or our invalid shi'tzu, who won't go haring off after birds, or hares, for that matter; who will compel me to take moderately long walks several days a week, but who doesn't need to be entertained by herding sheep or hunting boar; who will stand fast if there's an intruder, who won't yap, whom I can leave alone for much of the day during the week (at least until I retire. 

 

A lot of these goals are in conflict.  Lab & retriever mixes may be a tad too active and too prone to separation anxiety.  Terriers like to kill small things & I think they tend to yap.  Greyhounds, when they're not running, are excellent couch potatos, but they do have a need to hare quite a bit and can't be off leash unless you're an incredibly skillful and compelling trainer. 

 

I'm not really a couch potato, per se, but I am sedentary much of the time.  I do work my butt off out at my "hobby farm" for several hours once every week or two & I do some light gardening in the back yard every week or two also.

 

It seems the best dogs for me, according to the online tests, would be mixes involving the following:  Great Pyrenees, Mastiffs, Newfoundlands, Bernese Mountain dogs, Neapolitian mastiffs...but DAMN--they're HUGE--and they, well, not to put too fine a point on, they SLOBBER.  I'm not too easily grossed out, but there are other humans that live in the house.  Maybe Teresa could work overtime, or something,  so we could pay for the steaks.  But one good thing.  The internets (as G.W. Bush would say) caution against exercising those breeds too much. 

 

Oh, well.  Knowing me, I'll probably choose something completely different on impulse and be as happy as a (non-Gulf-dwelling) clam.

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Here's Juan Cole on the Gaza Blockade

& the recent Israeli engagement with the humanitarian flotilla from Turkey. 

 

(Juan Cole is a professor of Mideastern Studies.  He is conversant with the several languages of the area and comes out of the Bahai tradition himself--although he has recently distanced himself from the U.S. Bahai group because the governance of the group has come to be dominated by "fundamentalist" Iranian emigres, who seem to regard Bahai's tradition of universalism as being for lip service only.  Otherwise, the Bahais occupy a position vis a vis Islam somewhat like Unitarians do with respect to Christianity.)

 

http://www.juancole.com/
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/