rUDY, MAN OF THE WEST? Last week I wrote mostly about Rudy Giuliani and his campaign to re-model himself from a New York liberal into an all-American conservative, who didn’t really mean some of the things he used to say to pacify the inhabitants of the Red Belt and keep them from shooting him in a cellar like they did the Czar once. On 9/11 he was actually caught in a cellar but got out in time and went on to better things. It was a close call. Advantage might have been taken of his situation. Writing about Rudy I also touched on the career of another presidential hopeful of the past, William Jennings Bryan, the paradigm for all candidates since he actually ran three times for the job and might have run again if he hadn’t died in 1925. The previous year the Democrats showed they had not forgotten him by nominating his brother Charlie for Vice President. In the family tradition he lost, but still his selection showed that there was still a soft spot for Bryans in the heart of the party. Even before his death 1925 had not been a good year for Bryan since he had antagonized his former friends, the militant liberals of the country, by his advocacy of the Bible in the Scopes “evolution” trial in Tennessee, even though he did not deny evolution. For this H.L. Mencken denounced him the day after his death, writing that ‘he was born with a roaring voice, and it had a trick of inflaming halfwits.’ He also denied his integrity, citing various alleged ideological switches throughout his forty-year career. This was odd, because Bryan’s most famous stand for principle came in 1915 when he resigned as Secretary of State because he could not approve President Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania sinking, believing that Wilson was holding the German navy to a different standard than he was the British. Mencken was an outspoken pro-German, but this sacrifice didn’t seem to improve his opinion of Bryan. He thought about him what he wrote about some one else, he was “the greatest demagogue since Peter the Hermit.” I read the attack first in the Fifties and it was still funny twenty-five years after it was written. But there’s more than one side to the Bryan question. Another writer, Vachel Lindsay, an Illinois poet whose “Congo” is in a lot of schoolbooks along with others of his poems, had a different read on Bryan. He wrote a poem called, of all things, “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” about a Bryan rally he attended in Springfield in 1896. It’s got 250 or more lines in it, and not one is boring. It’s all about the West, led by Bryan, rising up against the East, led by Ebenezer Scrooge apparently. All the money in the West was borrowed from the East and the people just hated the idea of paying it back, claiming they were being pauperized by usurious interest rates. So it was “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West” and a lot more hot stuff along the same line until you get to the tragic end, “victory of letter files And plutocrats in miles With dollar signs upon their coats.” If anyone wrote a poem like that about me, I believe I could get along without the Presidency. All this doesn’t mean I would have voted for Bryan. What he really was in 1896 was an inflationist, demanding inflation of the money supply through the “free coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one.” I’ve forgotten what the ratio means, but I know what inflation means and even though it enables debtors to pay off their loans with devalued money, most of us aren’t that deeply in debt that we need this edge and we do have a stake in stable money. In inflation for most people the prices of things they have to buy go up faster than their paychecks do. Writing about Rudy Giuliani led me back to Bryan but does not mean I either want or foresee a similar career for Rudy. Certainly not three unsuccessful runs for the presidency. One or two okay maybe, especially if one at least is a win. If this happens, I promise to write a poem about Rudy that will…well…be a poem about Rudy. How the hell do I know in advance whether it’ll be any good or not? I promise, though, I will only plagiarize from the best sources, preferably winners of the Nobel Prize.

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THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE (M. Beerbohm 1897)

In my last installment here I brought u the story of two young women in 1991 raped and thrown off a high bridge in St. Louis into the Mississippi River, where they drowned. I forgot to mention anything about their screams, which must have been terrible. I tried the internet for a transcript of the trial of their killers, to see what was said there, but couldn’t find one. I did find some history of the people who stood in silent protest in the usual way when one killer was executed thirteen years later. I am pretty sure they never read the transcript either.

I feel it’s natural to segue from this to discussing a man who, of all the males in this country can be considered as the least likely ever to hold a vigil for a murderer. He is much more suited to be the one escorting the fellow to his appointment in the death chamber. The man I’m talking about is of course Rudy Giuliani, and I believe it’s quite accurate to describe him in this way. People who have actually seen murders don’t usually feel much revulsion at seeing a murderer punished, and Rudy saw hundreds of murders committed in front of him on 9/11.

That’s Rudy’s great strength. He’s a tough guy and isn’t that what America needs? In New York the other day six young men were killed in one morning in separate shootings. Their ages were 21, 23, 24 and 25. In Wisconsin six people were killed in one shooting by a maniac. Third World countries are flooding us with drugs and illegal immigrants. Others are itching to get at us, preferably with nuclear weapons. We’re just too rich to be popular except as prey. A steady hand on the tiller is needed to get us through the breakers.

But Rudy’s in trouble with people who can’t accept his past support of abortion, gay marriage, gun control and I forget what other preoccupations of the American left. Such capers didn’t please his supporters either when he engaged in them, but they weren’t meant to please them, they were meant to appease his opponents. The left, led by the New York Times, hated Giuliani from the start. Leftists are a very powerful and very malignant element in New York. To defy them on their three pet issues is an invitation to them to work up their hate to boiling point and begin an all-out attack meant to embroil him in such melees that it would impair his ability to run the city.

Rudy’s drive to run the city was too strong for him to risk this. It was a lot easier for him to give the radicals the lip service they wanted than to take them on and jeopardize the job he was doing, which only he could do. He put first things first and refused to be diverted by things extraneous. That is my read on his declarations of support for the pet causes of the Times.

From my knowledge of his background, which isn’t so different from my own, I find it hard to believe that he is any kind of an enthusiast for gay rights or abortion or any other progressive panaceas. In other words, conservative voters should just regard his advocacy as simply a demonstration of hypocrisy and not be put off by it from voting for him. They’d better face the fact that Rudy is an opportunist, who is capable of “rowing to his objective with muffled oars” as the saying goes. But he has an objective.

There is no doubt what that is. It’s law and order enforced with an iron hand, his. Men like that, who follow a vision, are all things to all men when it comes to achieving their objective. When Giuliani got into it with Yasser Arafat at Lincoln Center I wouldn’t read about it because I knew it could be nothing but a stunt staged by Rudy to influence the Jewish vote. I believe it also attracted the attention of Osama Bin Laden, with bad results for New York.. But ambitious men do these things. They also tend to make the best presidents and prime ministers and generals.

Speculating on Rudy’s career led me to an analysis of the practices of the two major parties in making their quadrennial clutches at power in Washington. I have a baseball syndrome about this. We fans have an automatic reaction to our team’s postseason results. As soon as his team is eliminated in the playoffs the baseball fan automatically begins to calculate its chances for the next season. It’s genetic. And since I have a sense that Rudy isn’t going to make the White House this time, I took a look at his possibilities for the future.

They would appear to be better in the Democratic party than in the Republican. The Democrats are just more persistent than the Republicans. This tradition began in 1892. Grover Cleveland had been defeated for re-election to the presidency in 1888, but his faithful Democrats nominated him again in ‘92 and waddya know, he won. After that they really got in a groove. In 1896 they nominated William Jennings Bryan, who lost to McKinley. Undiscouraged, they nominated him again in 1900. Same story. He lost to Theodore Roosevelt. This only stimulated them more. They skipped 1904, but in 1908, who do you think they nominated again? That’s right, the indispensable man once more. They were convinced he couldn’t lose a third time, but there it was. Three strikes, he was out.

As a demonstration of party loyalty, all this was above and beyond but there was more to come. From 1932-44 they had a chance to demonstrate it again, this time at no cost to them, because Franklin Roosevelt won all four times. In 1952 and ’56 though, they went back to losing heroically with two nominations of Adlai Stevenson. Since then they have only re-nominated incumbents like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and given losers no second chance. The Republicans have followed the same rule, only once re-nominating a loser, in this case Tom Dewey, who lost big in ‘44 and followed it up by doing the same in’48.

If Rudy runs and loses next year, then 2012 looms ahead. Being the determined kind of fellow he is, I wouldn’t bet against him to lead the ticket again in that year. No more after that, though, unless he wins, of course. If he loses a second time, he probably wouldn’t even want to try again and possibly equal Bryan’s record. That distinction would never do for him. There’s no way that anyone’s ever going to call Mayor Giuliani, America’s pillar of law and order, a…three-time loser.






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DENY EVERYTHING Stories, stories. I have a pretty full portfolio myself, but I’m always ready to appropriate those I hear from other people. One of them, a shocker, came to me the other day from the American Justice program on the Arts and Entertainment Channel. It went back to 1999 on the Old Chain of Rocks bridge over the Mississippi River. A young white man and his two female cousins strolled over it one night and were attacked by a group of blacks. The girls were raped and all three were forced to jump seventy feet into the river. The girls drowned, but the boy survived. The police didn’t believe the story he told them and were about to have him arraigned when a search team discovered a flashlight and other items at the scene which they were able to trace to four local men. When they were searched they had property of the victims on them. They all confessed, but it took thirteen years before the ringleader, Marlin Gray, was executed. That was a quick summary. I usually don’t reprint stories like that here, preferring to draw on my own experiences instead, but sometimes you come across things that are so way-out and at the same time so forgotten or buried that they seem worthwhile repeating. So I’ve given you the Philadelphia poison ring of the Thirties and Forties, the Missouri massacre of 1932 and some other memorable incidents overlooked by history. There’s more where they came from, I’m sure. I have an episode from my own collection to bring out here that illustrates that when it comes to crime some things don’t change much even if they involve completely different people in widely separated locations. I’ve said that all the St. Louis suspects confessed to their acts when caught but of course that didn’t last. They later disclosed that they had been coerced by the police and had evidence planted on them even though they were never even at the scene, as attested to by some of their parents and relatives. These claims were given the full weight due to them and as a result they were all convicted and sentenced to life terms, except Gray, the instigator, who got the death penalty and finally paid it after his case had gotten before the Supreme Court two times. How does all this tie in with my own little episode that came down at a time and place distant from the horror show I’ve described? The likeness is not in the fact situation, but it is in the elements, as I will try to show. It all began with a peaceful scene on a quiet evening of an ordinary day. Three customers and a bartender were quietly co-existing at the bar of a neighborhood joint in Rosedale, Queens, when a chap named Felix Mojica strolled in with a friend named Raymond Masi and asked for change for a five dollar bill. The bartender refused this and Mojica put a gun to his head and demanded all his money. He then went behind the bar and extracted cash from the register drawer. There had been a little byplay between the two robbers, with Masi refusing orders to go behind the bar to get the money, so that one of the customers, who happened to be an off-duty sergeant, took advantage of the distraction to slip his gun out of his holster and confront Mojica from the far end of the bar. Instead of surrendering, Mojica aimed at the sergeant, who promptly blasted him with four shots to the chest and leg. That ended things and in due time I arrived along with an inspector to see what the commotion was all about. I eventually produced a report, which you are reading here in condensed from. It may seem that I’ve stretched things a bit when I claim there’s a link between the two crimes covered in this paper, but there is one there. I find it in the denial routine which was part of both stories. The only real difference between the two is that Masi, the accomplice in the stickup, didn’t wait for question time to begin his exculpation but got going right at the scene, telling the skeptical cops that, hell, he didn’t even know that dude that got himself shot inside, but only just met him outside and happened to go in at the same time. That didn’t wash because it was learned that the two “strangers” had been arrested together earlier in the year. Masi was reduced to claiming that he still wasn’t an accomplice because he’d refused to clean out the cash register when ordered by Mojica. So, with the repudiation routine used in St. Louis, and the anticipatory one in Queens, we have the common element of denial in both cases. I confess I was looking for one because after I had committed myself to writing the Queens story I came across the St. Louis one and felt compelled to write it, making it natural to look for a link between them. There may be a link between them but there’s no comparison, as I’ll freely admit. St. Louis was a horror like none I’ve ever seen, and I can only wonder why I never heard of it in 1991. Where was the publicity machine that’s put a trivial incident like Jena on every front page in the country but buried this atrocity? I wonder.

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MY WAY AGAIN

Taking time out from a close study of the pennant races I return to my survey of my progress as a commentator on current events other than baseball. I’m going about this the obvious way: I’m reviewing the titles in the website archive to see where I was coming from before I got where I am. The problem again is the titles -- I was too cute for my own good in choosing some that were good in their way, but they didn’t relate so clearly to the subject under discussion that I can tell from looking at a title what the hell I was talking about in the actual article attached.

A bad scene. But here’s an exception, “Christmas at Trenton.” No mystery here. I took a look at a book, “Washington’s Crossing” about George Washington’s come-from-behind win at Trenton on Christmas night 1776, when he caught the British Army’s Hessian allies worn out from guerrilla attacks (not hung over) and scooped up their whole force. A few days later he came back and beat the British themselves at Princeton. After that it was time to hibernate for the winter. The British were glad to let him.

These were the only battles Washington won in the war except for the final climactic one at Yorktown five years later. Washington was definitely a clutch hitter. “He won by losing” said one of his subordinates. Did I hear someone say that’s exactly the same strategy we’re using in Iraq? Let’s not go there.

I liked this article because the book had pertinent stuff in it about Washington’s attitude toward prisoners. He demanded good treatment for them even though his men weren’t getting it from the British. At the time of publication it appeared that some of our people at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere had forgotten this.

I kept writing about counties for a while. In one article I dealt with three of the most famous ones, Calaveras and Marin in California and Cook in Illinois. The first was immortalized by Mark Twain in his breakthrough story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the second is known for its rich collection of hippies, vegans, naturists, anarchists, star-gazers, tree-huggers, hunger marchers, and other such characters almost too fascinating to describe. There are characters and urban legends in Cook County also, seeing that the city of Chicago takes up most of its territory. A “county”, you know, was the territory formerly ruled by a Count in medieval days. Some people think that there is a hereditary ruling family in this county still, and their name is Daley, seeing that the present mayor-for-life is the son of a former mayor-for-life, and is grooming an heir.

Under the Daileys Chicago has settled down and the rattle of the machine gun is no longer heard on its streets. For my essay I made a list of Chicago “incidents” from its founding to the present. There was the Great Fire of 1871, the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903, The Black Sox World Series 1919, and other highlights. Rereading this I’ve been embarrassed to find that I omitted one outstanding occurrence. I left out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929. If you’re going to write Chicago history, you can’t do things like that. I apologize.

I continued after this to harp on some pet peeves of mine. One of them was the presumption of innocence, or rather the misunderstanding of it fostered by the talking heads on TV, which regular readers will recognize and avoid, so I’ll say no more about it here. My other favorite is the revival of the blue ribbon jury for the purpose of hearing difficult cases beyond the comprehension of the street-corner loafers now enlisted to mete out justice in the courts, when they would be much better employed by the government in grass-cutting or litter removal.

Well, it goes on. What other crusades did my zeal for reform lead me into? Currency reform? Initiative and referendum? Single tax? Universal health care? Zen? Aerobics? Psychic research? Simplified spelling? Rock climbing? Sky diving? Scuba diving? Power walking? No-carb dieting? Calligraphy? Ceramics? Antiquing? Genealogy?

Okay, that’s enough. If I take up any of these things, my readers will be the first to know. I won’t keep them to myself. You will all be invited to share in the joy of discovery of new worlds to conquer. I actually do hope there will be some changes made to improve and update my current product. As can be seen, I’ve abided by my resolution to curb my writing enthusiasm a bit and cut back to normal newspaper column length instead of spreading myself as generously as I have been. But I might go back that way too. Stand by to go about, as the sailors say.






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I DID IT M-Y-Y-Y WAY

I’ve been conducting this pillar of piffle (I don’t really mean that and neither did the man who originated it in his newspaper column years ago. But I use it now and then as a salute to his memory) for three and a half years now and today I’m calling a brief halt to look back at the whole thing and ask myself what have I been doing for all that time?

Not much, you say? Well I don’t know about that. I’ve produced over two hundred thousand words, which would make four books at the minimum length of fifty thousand words each, so I’ve definitely been working, no matter what anyone may think of the results I’ve gotten.

Any such results have been purely of the psychic kind because no one has yet paid me to reprint any of my articles, but then not many bloggers get those kinds of offers. Their reward normally is limited to the sense of satisfaction they get from venting their ideas about life and its ups and downs and turning them loose on the world. If a few compliments come back to reward them, they feel they have not lived in vain.

Where do you find things to write about? A lot of bloggers don’t consider this a problem. They simply zero in on whatever subject the media is concerned with at any particular point in time and add their contribution to the pile. Right now the hot topics are General Petraeus, O.J. Simpson, Senator Craig, the disorderly mob of candidates for President cluttering the airwaves, and three or more girls named BritneySpearsLindsayLohanParisHilton who all run together in my mind and become one woman whom I’ll never forget, although I’m perfectly willing to try.

The bloggers all pour out their hearts on these subjects, but they’ve already been so heavily covered by the media it’s hard to see what they have to add. When they try to be funny they usually don’t succeed too well, so it’s a lot of wasted effort all around. For myself, I lay off the so-called hot topics of the day for the reason that I don’t have any particular knowledge concerning them that’s not known to the public at large, whose time I don’t have any wish to waste. I write what I know, and looking back over my 178 pieces since 2003 I find that I still managed to cover a fairly wide field of topics, to wit:

Reading down the list of my titles…I don’t get very far. That’s because I was cute with them, for instance in using a lot of lines from popular songs for titles. This often makes it hard to figure out what I was writing about, and the only way to fix that is to re-read the pieces. I don’t have time for that right now, so I’ll just do my best to recall them and describe them here. Hold on to your hats.

My first adventure was with a poem, “The Ballad of Dutch Schultz.” It’s about a drug dealer, but some people taught I was writing about the original Dutch, the racketeer who died (suddenly) in the Thirties. You’ll see it again. I’m always trying to push it.

Next I had a couple of original proposals “Get the FBI Out of the Justice Dept.” and “Get the Supreme Court Out of Washington.” No action on them yet, but I’ll keep trying.

After that I branched out and went into action on a number of fronts. For a while I was doing a series on county government across the U.S. There are over 3,000 counties in the country, most of them totally unnecessary. Some states, like Texas and Georgia, have so many of them that their maps look like the tiled floor of a bathroom. Most of the better known ones like Harlan County and Deaf Smith County had lots of history behind them and provided good material for my space. With others you had to winkle the history out and punch it up a bit to make it interesting. Getting information wasn’t as easy as might be expected. There are no books on the subject and not much in the way of encyclopedia entries. It’s field that’s wide open for a researcher and I may go back to it again.

I reviewed a few books and movies here and there, usually ones that I thought were ridiculous and had no relation to reality in their description of law enforcement, my former occupation. One of them was the movie “Reservoir Dogs.” Grotesque. Another was a `book by a lady named Susan Sloan called “Guilt By Association.” Its cover was plastered with raves from critics, but that’s what they were, “raves” as in sanitariums, where there’s a lot of raving. The right kind of place for those critics. In both cases then I was bucking the critical consensus, but that’s the fun part of reviewing after all.

I’ve described how things were when I started writing this blog. I traveled over the landscape, finding all kinds of subjects to write about. Lately I find it more difficult. I can always go back to my reserve of police reports done when I was a cop, but I try not to. I want to be with-it, I guess. To make this easier on myself I’m going to cut down on words by a third, going from 1200 words weekly to 800, the normal length for a newspaper column. Some people thought I went on too long anyway. We shall see.






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Greatly inspired by my first contact with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1973 as described in my last article here I’m returning to the charge today with more about it. I don’t think I’m beating a dead horse. Our Civil War was over a century before 1973 but books are still pouring off the presses about it, arguments are raging about it -- cf. the continuing agitation over display of the Confederate flag -- and thousands of people get dressed up in its uniforms to reenact its battles for TV. 1973 was last Monday compared to that. Looking at ‘73 as a date in Russian history, it was a time when the Communist dictatorship was beginning to find itself on the defensive against its own people. This probably accounts for the strident tone of the articles, which uniformly celebrate the beauty of Communism and the infallibility of the Party and particularly its leader Leonid Brezhnev. The natives may have been restless, but you’d never know it from the GSE. One way of promoting tranquility among them was to avoid the mention of disturbing influences likely to upset the minds of the proletarian masses. So, as previously mentioned, there are no biographies of major figures like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Yagoda, or Malenkov. Take my word for it, these were all heavyweights; leaving them out is like leaving out Vice Presidents and Secretaries of State in the U. S.A. Some of their activities, all nefarious, did get mentioned, briefly. Most of the mentions were pure lies, but the big lie was the omission of the biographies in the first place. George Orwell knew all about this technique when he described it as the making of un-persons in “1984”. One character who did avoid this and enter the hall of fame was Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926). He got a page and a half of puffery. Why? He created the KGB, that’s why. A message was being sent. The KGB was still there. It wasn’t as deadly as in Stalin’s day when it specialized in sudden death for dissidents, but it still lurked about looking for people with so-called mental illnesses, which could be diagnosed by studying their attitude to the Russian government. If they displayed anything less than fanatical loyalty, they became candidates for “treatment” at a sychiatric “hospital” that went in for heavy doses of mind-altering drugs guaranteed to make the patient into a good Communist or a dead one. This kind of thing aroused protestors even in Russia itself , most of them people who had previously protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the government there was trying to de-communize itself. Not that you’d ever learn anything about this from the GSE. Their story about the tanks rolling into Prague was that the “progressive elements” in the “fraternal republic” had requested assistance to deal with the reactionaries who had insinuated themselves into the government in order to undermine the friendly relations between the Soviet Union and its loyal ally Czechoslovakia. Same damn thing had happened in Hungary in 1956 but good old Russia had come to the rescue there too. Come to think of it, the East Germans had raised hell a bit in 1953. And still to come were the difficulties with Afghanistan beginning in 1979 and Poland in 1980, which eventually led to the extinction of the Soviet Union starting in 1989. This realignment has led, I hope, to a different attitude, which permits an encyclopedia to be an encyclopedia instead of a promotional circular for defective goods, which is what the GSE amounted to. Its authors no more cared for truth in advertising than circus barkers shilling for the bearded lady and the Wild Man of Borneo. Their worst sin against the truth was in calling it an encyclopedia. All the encyclopedias that I’ve seen were interested in facts, not in selling the public a gold brick. Of course, being descended from the Encyclopedia Britannica , they took if for granted that the product they described would recommend itself on its own merits without the Russian kind of distortion and rearrangement. This is what we are used to and we can’t take it seriously when articles we expect to be factual are actually nothing but a lot of bombastic lies inspired by what? Vodka? Patriotism? Fear? All three, probably, but never by affection for the truth. Imagination ruled, but only in a way the Party found politically correct. One of the many capitalist victims was Herbert Hoover, the man who fed the starving Belgians in World War I and moved into Russia by invitation in 1921to fight the famine there. Google says he vaccinated 8,000,000 people and fed 10,500,000 daily, using 120,000 Russian workers led by 300 Americans. This was operating on a big scale in a situation where 5.1 million people died, but the GSE only says it was “some help” and its real objective was to support counter-revolutionaries, spies and saboteurs in the interests of American imperialism. Russia instead gets full credit for ending the famine, but it seems more likely that they did a better job of starting it than ending it. Such is their reputation. America stepped in once again to help them out in World War II, where we shipped them over $11 billion in aid to keep them in the fight against Germany. This time it was acknowledged, but grudgingly. One U.S. ambassador held a public news conference to denounce the Russians for deceiving their own people by plastering Russian labels on American supplies. That got their attention and they stopped doing this, for a while. I recommend anyone who’s interested to read up the facts in the GSE, where he’ll surely be irritated by the distortions about us, but also be entertained by the cheek of the Russians in printing them. Things have changed for the better, I hope. And we have to live with Russia just as we did when she was manufacturing lies about, well, everything, on a massive scale. With all this going on, there was still an army of our own people denouncing us for our hostile attitude, saying we were “intransigent” and demanding that we trust our dear reliable Red friends, who after all were people like ourselves and only wanted to live in peace with all mankind. They should have read the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

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IT'S A SIN TO TELL A LIE? I’ve been living on Long Island for eight years now and for most of that time visiting the same local library when necessary. That is not so often these days with Google standing by to answer questions you used to need to look up in a book. Still, there are times. And so going there I’ve finally come to take notice of one of the treasures of the place, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The layout is such that the Reference section is the first part of the library that you encounter upon entering and the Great Soviet is the first set of books you see there. There are 31 volumes, so they’re hard to miss. Russia is a big place after all. Even so I’ve managed to ignore this great feast of knowledge until very lately. But, as I’ve reported here, I have recently wrestled with a couple of Russia-centered books, one about the Great Stalin and the other about his associate and short-term successor, Lavrenty Beria, leading me finally to see what the encyclopedia had to say about them. Stalin came first. The encyclopedia was published in 1973 when Stalin had been dead for twenty years, so the article on him wasn’t the one that would have appeared when he was known as the “Leader of Progressive Mankind”, the “Hero of the Toiling Masses”, the “Genius of Marxism” and other such titles. In fact he got short shrift , with only a page and a half devoted to his career and no mention of such deviations as the Moscow trials of 1935-38 or the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952-53. The biographers contented themselves with noting that he tended to “overestimate” his abilities. Certainly, and the worst thing about Hitler was that he had bad breath. The new man in town in 1973 was Leonid Brezhnev. He had “rich experience” and “great organizational talent” and he “labored tirelessly” for the lucky people of the Soviet Union. There was a page and a half of this, much different from Stalin’s equal space. Not that anyone was going to create a “cult of personality” of course. That was what was wrong with Stalin. He encouraged all the adulation and genuflection that went on, but Leonid was made of sterner stuff. He deserved the compliments he got, that was the difference. He was a world-beater, Leonid, and if you thought otherwise, you kept your opinion to yourself if you knew what was good for you. In 1953 after Stalin’s death Beria freed a million people from the labor camps, but Lenny had filled them up again and there was always room for one more. And look what happened to Beria. He got shot for his troubles and not only that, his name was taken out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and he became a Great Soviet Zombie. I looked for myself and sure enough there was no entry for Beria. Clearly someone had made a mistake. There was something wrong with the research. How could they forget to include a man who was Stalin’s closest associate and who stepped into his shoes when he died in 1953, thereby becoming the best-known Russian in the world? I knew someone had said that Russian histories were issued in loose-leaf form, so pages could be removed and added as necessary, but here I was actually encountering this unusual process. No mistake had been made with Beria, because others got the same treatment. For instance, Zinoviev, one of the five top leaders in the 1917 Revolution, but executed by Stalin in 1936. No mention. His friend Kamenev. Another one of the Big Five. Also shot in 1936. Also overlooked. Some encyclopedia, this one. And so it goes. No Malenkov. He was the fat man who was one of the Big Four in1953 who stood on the balcony of Lenin’s tomb and took the salutes of the crowds below. They called it “collective leadership” in contrast to Stalin’s kind, which was more of the Genghis Khan type, with hints from Attila the Hun and the Marquis de Sade. Two of the Big Four did make it into the encyclopedia. They were Molotov, world-famous during World War II, and Nikita Khrushchev, famous after that. One was Foreign Secretary for years and the other Chairman of the Communist Party, equivalent to dictator of Russia until 1964, but both got into trouble along the way. Their bios in the book were reticent about this except to say that Khrushchev had been given to “subjectivism” and “voluntarism”, which I suppose are communist words for pounding a shoe on the desk at the UN and getting caught sneaking missiles into Cuba. Molotov had a standard bio, reciting all the offices he’d held without saying much about what he did in them, plus a list of his medals without any explanation of why he got them. At the end we learn that he had gotten a pension and, I suppose, had been told to get lost. In 1973 this kind of treatment was an improvement over former days when heads rolled freely and very few lived to get a pension. Civilization had advanced in Russia, but not enough by a long shot. How could it have when a modern government was willing to publish a guide to every aspect of its nation’s existence, which an encyclopedia is, which is nothing but a tissue of lies from Volume 1 to 31? Lies which even a large part of its own population would recognize as such, so as to return the regime’s contempt for them with contempt of their own. The people of Russia knew that Stalin had done a lot more than just win the war with Germany and yield to the “personality cult’ which had somehow gathered around him, and they knew that people like Zinoviev and Kamenev and Beria and Malenkov and hundreds of others had existed and that their exclusion from history was a form of lying by omission. This was a negative type of lie, but there was positive lying as well. Unlimited space was devoted to denouncing the evils of Trotskyism, (though Trotsky himself got no biography) which struck the encyclopedists as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” in the words W. L. Garrison used about the Constitution. Similarly, in an article about John Kennedy, after criticizing him for negative notions about the U.S.S.R. they noted that he had warmed up to it a little, thereby antagonizing American “reactionaries”. He was then viciously assassinated. The linkage is quite clear. The fact that Kennedy was shot by a Communist who had just come back from four years in Russia is not clear at all, because it’s not mentioned. In spite of this kind of blatant lying, this is a very scientific encyclopedia. There are pages and pages of diagrams and formulae illustrating scientific articles. A whole army of scientists and scholars is listed in the front of the book as authors of these articles. But their list of degrees and Orders of the Red Banner that they’ve earned does not impress me. Any intellectual who lends his name to a hoax like the GSE can’t possibly be respected for his honesty. After all, scientists can cheat and claim discoveries they never made. Every article in this book should be read with that in mind, whether it’s on aerodynamics or spermatozoa. The whole thing’s unintentionally funny, so I’ll return.

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BATTING PRACTICE

I’m one of those people who get asked “Why are you sitting there watching the TV without the sound on?” My answer is “I can’t stand listening to the chatter of the announcers. I want to watch the game.”

That’s part of the story. Lately I’ve been tuning out more people than just the gabby announcers. That’s because I find that quite a few folks on the screen talk too fast or too low for me to follow them very well and I’m better off if I just tune them out and use the Closed Caption facility to read the dialogue. I can still read Sometimes the CC comes up with words like “so shall list” for “socialist” and “fatter than a sneezing pullet” for “faster than a speeding bullet”, but that’s just due to the difficulty of writing words quickly enough to stay even with the speed of the actors speaking them, and usually corrections are made quickly.

As for the sports announcers, I don’t care what they say or what the captions say. I know they have to keep talking or their sponsors are likely to stop paying them, but I’m really not interested in hearing about how Pete Popout or Dave Dubbleplay is really a great guy who’s good to his mother and does a lot for charity that you don’t hear about because of all the unfortunate publicity about the barfights and speed tickets and other such distractions that seem to follow him around. They don’t represent the real man as his teammates know him, but obviously they’ve been preying on his mind and have a lot to do with his current 5-for-50 slump, during which he hasn‘t been able to get the ball out of the infield except for his fouls.

So much for the human side of the stars, about whose troubles the public knows so little and cares so much less. All they look at is the salaries these guys get without ever thinking of the secret sorrows behind the façade of the swaggering star with nothing on his mind beside his batting average, his little wife at home, and his little girl friend in her home. Even a star can have his happiness marred sometimes through these sources, causing him to resort to strange substances and exotic preparations to cope with his problems. He may even face a hostile stadium full of fans chanting “Steeroids!” as he comes to bat. At times like that he cannot be a happy camper.

Another aggravation a listener has to endure listening to baseball broadcasts is the massive destruction of the Spanish language by the announcers attempting to cope with names like Chavez, Santiago, Roman and all the rest now populating major league lineups. Spanish is pretty widely taught in our schools these days, being a popular choice where a foreign language elective is required since it’s the speech most closely related to English. The rules of pronunciation are simple enough but they seem to have been forgotten by the TV spielers, supposedly speech professionals. So we have “EScobar” for “EscoBAR”, “PaLLmero” for “PalmYERO” (“ll” equals “ly” as in “Amarillo”, “caballo”, etc., etc. We have silent “l’s” in English as in Jim “Pawmer”. He was never called “PaLLmer.”)

In basketball there’s a Mexican player named NaJERa, who keeps getting called NA-jera by the announcers, who appear to be quite proud of their mastery of Spanish. They should take lessons from Alex Trebek, the MC of “Jeopardy”. He has foreign words to pronounce on every show, but makes no mistakes with any of them because he takes the trouble to get them right. That’s professionalism.

Even Alec had to rise above principle the other night, though, and call “Notreh Dahm” University “Noter Dayme”, when introducing a contestant. The audience just wouldn’t have known what he was talking about otherwise. Some mistakes have been around so long they’ve driven out the correct pronunciations of the words involved and gotten themselves installed in their place. Even so I shudder a little every time I hear this one. I grew up with “Dayme” and it didn’t affect my growth at all, but when I found out about “Dahm”, it became impossible for me to accept “Dayme” any more. So I shudder. But I was born to suffer, I guess.

Life is like that when you’re a purist. People are continually making dumb mistakes and you can’t do anything about it. You just grin and bear it. You can’t write in to the newspapers and complain that their reporters are still saying some politician “chastised” his opponent for corruption or whatever when all he actually did was scold him or reprove him or maybe “castigate” him. Those words mean he was critical. “Chastise” means he beat him up. It’s in all the dictionaries. Nevertheless they persist in misusing it. I won’t even go into the misuse of “infer” for “imply.” It’s widespread. But if you protest these outrages in the letter columns of the newspapers, you will be classified as a nut case. There’s no justice.

Speaking of justice, there’s one real-life cop show that finishes every episode in a blaze of stupidity by informing the public that the skels seen being arrested thereon are “to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.” If that’s the case, what are the cops doing hauling them off to jail in handcuffs? If they’re not guilty, how can such things be? Oh, the cops are an exception, are they? They can presume them guilty, especially if they catch them red-handed. What about the judge they’re bringing them to? Yeah, he can do it too and hold them for the grand jury. So it’s all right for the jailors to lock them up inside the cells, is it? Yeah, that too. And yes, the district attorney can prosecute them even though they can’t be officially guilty or not guilty until there’s been a trial or a plea or a dismissal of the case.

So who is this TV message being addressed to then? Well, to the public at large. You mean they have to decide the case differently from all the people mentioned above? Or is it actually a fact that the Constitution requires the presumption of innocence but doesn’t tell us who’s bound by it? And since the people I’ve enumerated clearly aren’t bound by it, or no criminal would ever be arrested, why should the general public be so bound? Their opinions won’t decide the case, but…the opinions of the trial jury will. So by a process of elimination we arrive at the intent of the Constitution, namely that this jury, and only this jury, will give a defendant the benefit of the presumption of innocence and will try his case on that basis. Did I mention that I heard the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court enunciate this in 1969? Well, I did, but he didn’t mention anything about a defendant not having to take the stand in his own defense (yes, with the Fifth). Next case.






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IT'S A ZINN TO TELL A LIE America’s in trouble again. That’s the message of a movie called “Sicko” which is showing up in theaters here and there. It seems that Americans are getting a very low level of health care and might as well be living back in the days of bleeding and cupping and purging and all the other things doctors used to do to their patients so that the grave came as a relief to them. All the same, though, if you ask doctors about these treatments they look at you as if you were disturbed in your mind and treat your questions as a joke. They’re a long way beyond that kind of thing, they’ll tell you, with still more progress to come. I know about this progress. It’s mostly a matter of hooking you up to tubes that drip medicines into your veins or that meter changes in your bodily functions for the information of your caretakers. Well, I’m good with all that, but I still miss the primeval kind of hospital I encountered many years ago where you were only secured to your bed if you represented a threat to yourself or the other patients. In spite of this shackling and binding that takes place today, people still fight to get into hospitals on the premise that somehow they will keep you alive when all else has failed. I admit to being one of them, as little as I like being trussed up like a chicken to enable this to be done. It’s a disappointment to find that there really aren’t any miracle cures whereby you could be repaired without being overhauled like a misfiring engine. The big problem “Sicko” deals with it is the lack of health insurance to cover 40% of the population who don’t have it, or so it is claimed. Not everyone admits that the percentage is this high, but the gap does exist. According to the movie the way to fix this is to enroll everybody in the country in a national health insurance plan which will guarantee payment for every last individual for every variety of medical care he or she needs during a lifetime. Insurance companies are to have nothing to do with this. A government agency will receive all the appropriations necessary to pay the bills, or since there won’t be any bills, the salaries of the hundreds of thousands of caregivers necessary to treat the millions of patients covered by the plan. This is pretty ambitious. There are three hundred million people in this country now. There never has been a government agency that came in direct contact with all of them at once. Even when the armed services scooped up manpower in World War II, they only took in 11,000,000 men. Now we’re thinking of 27 times that number spread over 3.8 million square miles of territory. No wonder they call it universal health insurance. If the problem of dispensing care to this teeming multitude seems staggering, the question of paying for it is even more so. This is going to be an egalitarian system; everyone will be treated the same. The productive individual who contributed to the community and took responsibility for his own welfare by doing such things as investing in health insurance for himself and his family will be on the same level as the debauchee who has been poisoning himself all his life without ever thinking of the consequences he may suffer, much less of those befalling people unlucky enough to be his dependents. Egalitarianism stops here though. When it comes to paying for this humongous system, the usual arrangement will prevail, “Those most able to pay” will carry the load. In most cases they will be the people least in need of the services on offer. Well-to-do people generally take care of themselves. They live sensibly and don’t abuse their bodies. But it won’t matter if the Plan goes through. They will be pillaged to pay for it. They represent the only possible source of the billions needed to operate it. As a special favor, though, they may be permitted to opt out of it to some degree and actually contract with private doctors for treatments not readily available from the Ministry of Health. For this they will be allowed to use any funds they may have left after the government gets through with them. The costs are going to be astronomical. Throw out today’s figures, such as the income and outgo of the insurance companies. They have no relevance to a situation where the number of people seeking treatment for real or imagined ailments is going to increase a thousandfold. How can it be otherwise when the treatment will be free? But you ask won’t there be a means test to prevent abuse? There’s no mention of it in “Sicko.” Means test or no means test, the potential for abuse is simply beyond comprehension. There’s a reason why we have so many people who lack health insurance and it’s not always because they don’t have the money for it. Millions of them are just uninsurable. The biggest number of these are the butterballs we see every day ‘strolling up and down Broadway.’ They stand five foot one and weigh 300 pounds. No one in his right mind would insure them. In many cases they’re people who could get insurance if they took some of the money they spend on gluttony and bought a policy with it. The weight reduction resulting from the decreased grocery spending would help them get it. But don’t talk to them about it. They’re completely enslaved to their appetites and they don’t care about anything else. To these add in the huddled masses of junkies, alcoholics, sex fiends, vagabonds and other fauna and you have a burden that no government in the world can carry without collapsing. I hear, from the kind of people who make movies like “Sicko” that America is guilty of the sins of these people. Just last night a character named Howard Zinn was on television denouncing the society that had brought about homelessness, war, poverty, tax cuts for the “rich,” jails filled to bursting with two million prisoners and oh yes, 40% of the population without health insurance. All this comes from America’s success, not its failure. Yeah, Sweden and places like that have lower death rates and less homelessness and all the rest. They also have populations where 95% of the people work for a living. This is the only country rich enough to support millions of people who’ve never worked at all and have no intention of ever working in the future. Why should they when Uncle Sam provides so well that their major health problem is obesity? Now, if The Michael Moores and the Howard Zinns get their way, these same people won’t have to bother with waiting on line at the local emergency ward when they feel ill, but will get first-class hospital accommodation when they just think they feel unwell. Which is the way I feel when I think about it.

 

THOSE LITTLE RED LIES Greatly inspired by my first contact with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1973 as described in my last article here I’m returning to the charge today with more about it. I don’t think I’m beating a dead horse. Our Civil War was over a century before 1973 but books are still pouring off the presses about it, arguments are raging about it -- cf. the continuing agitation over display of the Confederate flag -- and thousands of people get dressed up in its uniforms to reenact its battles for TV. 1973 was last Monday compared to that. Looking at ‘73 as a date in Russian history, it was a time when the Communist dictatorship was beginning to find itself on the defensive against its own people. This probably accounts for the strident tone of the articles, which uniformly celebrate the beauty of Communism and the infallibility of the Party and particularly its leader Leonid Brezhnev. The natives may have been restless, but you’d never know it from the GSE. One way of promoting tranquility among them was to avoid the mention of disturbing influences likely to upset the minds of the proletarian masses. So, as previously mentioned, there are no biographies of major figures like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Yagoda, or Malenkov. Take my word for it, these were all heavyweights; leaving them out is like leaving out Vice Presidents and Secretaries of State in the U. S.A. Some of their activities, all nefarious, did get mentioned, briefly. Most of the mentions were pure lies, but the big lie was the omission of the biographies in the first place. George Orwell knew all about this technique when he described it as the making of un-persons in “1984”. One character who did avoid this and enter the hall of fame was Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926). He got a page and a half of puffery. Why? He created the KGB, that’s why. A message was being sent. The KGB was still there. It wasn’t as deadly as in Stalin’s day when it specialized in sudden death for dissidents, but it still lurked about looking for people with so-called mental illnesses, which could be diagnosed by studying their attitude to the Russian government. If they displayed anything less than fanatical loyalty, they became candidates for “treatment” at a sychiatric “hospital” that went in for heavy doses of mind-altering drugs guaranteed to make the patient into a good Communist or a dead one. This kind of thing aroused protestors even in Russia itself , most of them people who had previously protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the government there was trying to de-communize itself. Not that you’d ever learn anything about this from the GSE. Their story about the tanks rolling into Prague was that the “progressive elements” in the “fraternal republic” had requested assistance to deal with the reactionaries who had insinuated themselves into the government in order to undermine the friendly relations between the Soviet Union and its loyal ally Czechoslovakia. Same damn thing had happened in Hungary in 1956 but good old Russia had come to the rescue there too. Come to think of it, the East Germans had raised hell a bit in 1953. And still to come were the difficulties with Afghanistan beginning in 1979 and Poland in 1980, which eventually led to the extinction of the Soviet Union starting in 1989. This realignment has led, I hope, to a different attitude, which permits an encyclopedia to be an encyclopedia instead of a promotional circular for defective goods, which is what the GSE amounted to. Its authors no more cared for truth in advertising than circus barkers shilling for the bearded lady and the Wild Man of Borneo. Their worst sin against the truth was in calling it an encyclopedia. All the encyclopedias that I’ve seen were interested in facts, not in selling the public a gold brick. Of course, being descended from the Encyclopedia Britannica, they took if for granted that the product they described would recommend itself on its own merits without the Russian kind of distortion and rearrangement. This is what we are used to and we can’t take it seriously when articles we expect to be factual are actually nothing but a lot of bombastic lies inspired by what? Vodka? Patriotism? Fear? All three, probably, but never by affection for the truth. Imagination ruled, but only in a way the Party found politically correct. One of the many capitalist victims was Herbert Hoover, the man who fed the starving Belgians in World War I and moved into Russia by invitation in 1921to fight the famine there. Google says he vaccinated 8,000,000 people and fed 10,500,000 daily, using 120,000 Russian workers led by 300 Americans. This was operating on a big scale in a situation where 5.1 million people died, but the GSE only says it was “some help” and its real objective was to support counter-revolutionaries, spies and saboteurs in the interests of American imperialism. Russia instead gets full credit for ending the famine, but it seems more likely that they did a better job of starting it than ending it. Such is their reputation. America stepped in once again to help them out in World War II, where we shipped them over $11 billion in aid to keep them in the fight against Germany. This time it was acknowledged, but grudgingly. One U.S. ambassador held a public news conference to denounce the Russians for deceiving their own people by plastering Russian labels on American supplies. That got their attention and they stopped doing this, for a while. I recommend anyone who’s interested to read up the facts in the GSE, where he’ll surely be irritated by the distortions about us, but also be entertained by the cheek of the Russians in printing them. Things have changed for the better, I hope. And we have to live with Russia just as we did when she was manufacturing lies about, well, everything, on a massive scale. With all this going on, there was still an army of our own people denouncing us for our hostile attitude, saying we were “intransigent” and demanding that we trust our dear reliable Red friends, who after all were people like ourselves and only wanted to live in peace with all mankind. They should have read the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

 

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE In this essay I will be an attempting to describe the picture that was being painted of the U.S. by Russia in the 1970’s when the Cold War was at its height and U.S.-Russian relations were at their lowest depth, occasionally emerging therefrom, but then reverting. My information about this comes from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia , published in those days and now available to the public in a library near me in Long Island. It’s in thirty-one volumes in English and fully endorsed by the Russian government of those days. How my neighborhood came to possess this treasure is unknown to me. No other library out here has it. It doesn’t seem possible that we had a big Communist cell out here which demanded the great work for the library because the only identifiable organized association we have is the motorcycle crowd, who mostly have big American flags attached to their handlebars and would be more likely to run over a Communist if they saw one than to do anything else with him. This part of the island is also home to a large Polish community who more or less share the sentiments of the bikers. There’s a big Polish-American hall a block away from the library, whose patrons had to be in the dark when the GSE was smuggled in, or it would never have made it. It’s had no obvious effect on the local populace as far as its mission of preaching collectivism goes. I’ve never seen anyone consulting it. There’s only one eccentric who sits over it for hours cackling away, shaking his head in disbelief and making notes of the more astounding denunciations and proclamations. That is myself, hooked. To the res. To get to the real meat of the Soviet case against America, it’s best to begin on Page 651 of Volume 24. On the top of the page we’re accused of outsmarting ourselves in China in the 1920’s when we stopped supporting Japan against China because we thought the Japs were doing too well and would wipe out our Chinese trade -- we could not afford to lose our supply of hog bristles for our shaving brushes -- so that we naturally then switched sides and began backing the Chinese in the fight. Pretty duplicitous, as you can see. Having touched us up for interfering in the Far East, where we had no business, (Russia having got there ahead of us), the Encyclopedia next rakes us over the coals for exactly the opposite behavior in Europe in the 1930’s. We didn’t prevent the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, we didn’t stop Mussolini from invading Ethiopia, we recognized Hitler’s annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and in general acted, well, exactly as Russia did. There was one exception, also an omission on our part. We didn’t sign a treaty of friendship with Hitler. Russia did that. It’s not mentioned. The Encyclopedia continues with its account of the war years of 1939-1945. The U.S. appears to have been a pretty poor ally, by the account given here. We promised to open a second front in Europe in 1942 and then “delayed”. This was true. We came to our senses and stepped back from the cliff edge, realizing that we weren’t at all ready for this. We told the Russians and then invaded North Africa, a target we could handle. The GSE does admit that we finally invaded Europe in 1944, inspired by Russian victories at Kursk and Stalingrad. They put a little backbone into us. Probably we should be grateful for the mention of D-Day. Other things like the $12 billion in Lend-Lease supplies we sent Russia, or the obliteration of German cities by our bombers get passed over. We do get credit, if that’s the word, for our “monstrous” atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August ’45. Americans think this ended the Pacific war, but the reality according to the GSE is that Russia “compelled” Japan to surrender by invading Manchuria. Oddly enough, though, “Japan was occupied by the American Army.” After the war we continued on our imperialist way with the Cold War, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and other crimes against humanity. What could Russia do but defend itself against threats to peace and progress? But the “peace-loving” U.S.S.R. was ready for any sacrifice in the cause of international harmony and reconciliation. Why, in 1963, when U.S. policy toward Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing about a threat of armed conflict between Russia and America, the crisis was resolved by the “energetic action” of the Soviet government. They energetically dismantled the missiles they had emplaced in Cuba and energetically sent home the ships bringing more of them. And so it goes. President Kennedy gets assassinated in 1963, the “reactionary forces” increase their activity. I suppose this means that some outspoken characters kept reminding the world that a Communist fired the shots. The GSE leaves out this fact and jumps ahead to the more agreeable topic of America’s barbaric invasion of Vietnam in 1964. This is Fun City for the encyclopedia and it revels in descriptions of the atrocities of American troops and the victory of American Communists in overthrowing the law requiring them to register as “agents of a foreign power.” (The FBI couldn’t reveal its secret agent who brought them $2 million a year from Moscow). The article ends on an ominous note. It has been updated beyond the official date of publication to take in 1980, when still another reactionary, Jimmy Carter, decided to postpone indefinitely the ratification of the SALT II disarmament treaty, using as a pretext “recent events in Afghanistan”, i.e., the Russian invasion. Imagine, when the two sides had just agreed to respect national sovereignty and not to interfere in the others’ internal affairs. My thesis here has been that the exposure of America’s leadership to this kind of abuse on a daily basis in the digests of Russian publications which they were given, had to result in a total rejection of any and all claims by Russia to its peaceful intentions and its goodwill for this country. The Russian peace offensives got a lot of subscribers among the ignorant in this country, but they couldn’t make any impression on sophisticated people who saw the diet of lies they published every day, of which I’ve provided a sample here. Russia really needed perestroika and glasnost, which should have begun with the perestroika (restructuring) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for the purpose of introducing glasnost (truthfulness). Okay, Moscow?

  

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE, WHY NOT EVERYTHING? After dealing with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for the last couple of weeks and exposing its insults to common sense and common knowledge I’m retuning today to the U.S.A., where such things are unknown…are they? Fresh from full immersion in the Soviet sheepdip I find myself getting splashed by the brand dished out by the “Social Justice" movement in the New York City public schools, which one of our local papers has just exposed. It seems that some crazed mathematics teachers in the high schools have gotten together to teach math in a new way starting this fall when a new school term begins. It won’t anymore be that dull old stuff about John having six dollars and James having sixteen and what do they do about it. In the new curriculum James’s superior cash position proves that he is a capitalist pig and must share the wealth with John or catch the next train out to Siberia. That is the general thrust of the educational plan proposed by the math collective led by Professor Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts mathematics department. My own bet is that John won’t learn what a math lesson usually is designed to teach -- how to add up the two sums and divide them according to a rule -- but will easily grasp the idea that James should give up his sixteen bucks without further ado. A Google search for the names of people supporting this educational plan leads me to believe that they are not the kind to object to this solution. Redistribution is their answer to all the problems of the world. The escapees working on this plan to debauch arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry are all teachers in the unfortunate public schools of New York, the administration of which actually gave them a grant to promote their indoctrination efforts. One of the “subjects” they want to “teach” is the activity of H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt in “ripping off the poor”. I know what they’re talking about. I worked for both of those outfits. In other words I was a monster, a fascist one grinding the faces of the poor, at least in the eyes of people like Dr. Frankenstein, and with a name like that she ought to know a monster when she sees one. I won’t deny that, yes, I did deal with the poor and again yes, I did engage in so-called monstrosities when doing so. One of our favorite atrocities in Jackson Hewitt when I worked for them was the Instant Refund. This is actually the outrage on which Dr. Frankenstein’s whole campaign against Hewitt and Block is based. She sees it as a crime against the poor. Her problem is, the poor don’t agree with her. Not the ones I met anyway. They wanted that money and they weren’t interested in her attempts to prevent them getting it. Instant, as we’ll call it, was a fairly simple operation involving a tax return that called for a refund of tax overwithheld, which we then offered to obtain for the taxpayers overnight if they preferred that to waiting six weeks for their money. Most of them didn’t have to be asked; they knew all about it and they had come to our office to get it. They knew we were the quickest in the business and actually would have their money the next day instead of in three days, which was the best Block could do at the time. Having obtained the taxpayer’s consent, we then faxed their return to IRS in Washington where the identity of the payer was scanned against records of defaulters on student loans, child support payments, tax bills and other governmental obligations and if cleared, had the refund tentatively approved. The approval was then faxed to a local bank, which cut a check for the amount of the refund to the taxpayer, who signed a consent for the Treasury to credit the actual refund to the bank, where IRS would send it later. The end result was that the Treasury had a tax return out of the way, the taxpayer had his money, and the bank and Jackson Hewitt had fee income for all the steps involved in the transaction. It was not a gift to the taxpayer, but taxpayers don’t expect gifts. What they expect, and want, in these cases is instant access to their refunds, and they are willing to pay for it. It’s of no use to preach to them about the evils of instant gratification and the desirability of the deferred kind. It’s also not the business of a tax preparer to tell the taxpayer what he should do with his own money. He has no right to make judgments about the customer’s decisions thereupon. He may want the money for some illegal or immoral purpose, or he may need it for some emergency expense that has to be met immediately. This concerns him and nobody else. We treated the customers as grownups who knew what they wanted, and knew they would have to pay for it. Instant Refunds were so popular in fact that they had changed the whole face of the tax business. I came to Hewitt after several years out of the business, where I had last worked for Block. In those days the flood of returns crested in April, when return-checking went to hell and all that could be done was to try and keep up with the flood by staying late each night until the day’s returns had been assembled and sent to IRS. This had now all changed and business reached its height in February, not in April. This was all due to instant refunds. People received their W-2s by January 31st as the law required and the day after they arrived on our doorstep to apply for their refunds. The use of computers, which we hadn’t had to any extent in my earlier stretch in the business, had now made it possible for us to process the refunds and the bank loans involved overnight and in fact expedite the whole practice of tax preparation in a way that hadn’t been possible before. All I see here is a normal development of our time where electronics enable funds to be handled more efficiently than before. The money that IRS now returns more quickly to its owners is money it has always claimed it didn’t want. IRS has always discouraged overpayments and has tried to instruct taxpayers to avoid them. But millions of them actually want “forced savings” and pay no attention. Once the refund falls due, though, they want no delay in getting it. Far from “ripping them off” the tax preparers fill their pockets weeks earlier than IRS would have done it. For their investment in the hardware and software necessary for this they collect a reasonable fee. The Frankenstein faction object to this. They seem to want no fee charged. After all, they intend to teach their pupils that “all food should be as free as breathing the air”. Regarding themselves, they feel that, unlike the farmers for their produce, they should be paid for their product. It’s known as “education”. At least that’s what they call it.

  

NO TAXATION WITHOUT IRRITATION Strange things are happening. Mr. Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world, has found something to complain about. You think that’s impossible? So do I, but there it is. It’s complete proof that money doesn’t bring happiness. Kind of resigns one to one’s lot in life, doesn’t it? I mean, if the richest man in the world has problems, how can the rest of us complain? All we can do is sympathize with him and hope his troubles will soon pass and he’ll walk in the sun once more. Mr. Buffet’s problem, as he tells it, is that he isn’t taxed enough. He finds that after all the figures have been reconciled he only pays a rate of 17% on his $46M income, less than the 39% his secretary pays on her five-figure income. In some of the resulting commentary this got translated as a claim that she paid more than her boss. The people doing this were confusing the average over-all income tax with the marginal tax rate, that which is paid on taxable income over $97,000 in the case of single people, and similar amounts for the three other IRS categories of taxpayers. You can get to a tax rate of 17%, I suppose, by taking the first three segments of your taxable income, taxed at 10%, 15% and 25% respectively and getting an average. If you have a lot of capital gains taxed at 15%, you could shelter a lot more income this way, if you consider 17% sheltering. I’m not doing a tax seminar here, so I refuse to do an investigation of how a person could pay a rate of 39% on any income when the top rate is 35%, but I can see ways a person can calculate it by throwing non-taxable income into the scale and working out the consequences tax-wise. I think it’s enough commentary on Mr. Buffet’s complaint to note that the 17% he pays on his millions comes out to millions more than the 39% his secretary pays on her thousands…if she really pays that. So much for the idea that she and her boss are on equal terms with the IRS. What Mr. Buffet means by his complaint of course is that taxes are simply too low and should be higher. That seems odd coming from a businessman, but Buffet has something other than business in mind. He happens to be hostile to the idea of inherited wealth. He has already pledged his own assets to the Gates Foundation for the relief of humanity globally and does not intend to endow his children with great fortunes like his own. His objective then in demanding higher tax rates is to keep other high-earners in this country from accumulating the kind of money with which dynasties can be founded. He thinks dynasties have a way of obstructing able people from climbing into leadership positions in our society, since they find them already monopolized by the beneficiaries of inherited wealth. He apparently doesn’t advocate more taxes for any other reason, because if they were all he cared about, he could have solved his problem by unloading some of his assets on the Treasury. Some people don’t like that suggestion because they say Buffet is thereby being asked to commit economic suicide by stripping himself naked when none of his business competitors have to do the same. This won’t wash, though, because Buffet is stripping himself anyway with his gifts to Gates. This is proof of how little he really cares about taxes, except as a means of preventing the rise of huge inheritable fortunes. Given a choice of subsidizing the government or entrusting his money to private hands, he chose the second, demonstrating what he really thinks about the way the government uses our money. Doing this, though, has had the effect of undermining his plea for taxes. He hasn’t displayed any confidence about how they will be used. This is all right with people like me, who don’t buy the idea of more taxes, no matter who is doing the selling. And if low taxes lead to big fortunes in unworthy hands, we’ll just take the risk. Is it that great? It seems like lots of heirs and heiresses don’t live to become a bother to society. Drugs are their downfall. As for those who do take over their family’s business, they have a mixed record. The Ford empire seems to be in a state of collapse. The Chrysler empire vaporized a good while ago. The Rockefellers have stayed on course and kept their flag flying, but they are not what they used to be. Only one Rockefeller is prominent today, the Senator from West Virginia. David Rockefeller, his uncle, is the last of his generation and is pretty well retired from business. Inheritance has done its work, in other words. Two hundred years ago America ended primogeniture, the right of the first-born son to inherit the whole family estate, thereby making him the family leader using all its resources to preserve its power. Inheritance by equal shares to all legitimate children has made this impossible and has divided and re-divided estates until they are practically non-existent in the third or fourth generation. Mr. Buffet really shouldn’t worry as much as he does over the curse of inherited wealth. That concludes my observations on the subject of taxes and how to prevent them. You should not go to the length of giving away all your money to avoid paying them as Buffet has. That is going to extremes. Besides, with all due respect to those who administer charities and are likely to be on the receiving end of his contributions, I think today there’s a little more skepticism about them than there used to be. Not because some of them are frauds not to be trusted with anyone’s money -- there have always been people like that -- but because some of them are not frauds, but they’re not completely dedicated people either. By “dedicated “ I mean people who give themselves to their work without caring about what others do. Today there seem to be more and more enthusiasts who care a whole lot about what the rest of are doing or not doing in support of their cause. They try to enlist us with or without our consent. One way is through taxation of course. Get the charity run by you on the government payroll and your troubles are over. All that soliciting and begging alms and appealing to the public can be put aside while the tax money rolls in. No effort is required; the government takes care of that. No refusals are encountered; there are laws against them. I read a speech by Mr. Buffet’s friend Gates the other day, given to the graduating class at Harvard. He exhorted them to support the work he was undertaking to erase “inequities” worldwide. He wants to save a lot of lives that are lost to them. He’s putting up billions for it. Well done, you might say, and I’d agree. It was just that I got a little hazy kind of hint that Bill might someday decide that his fight was everybody’s fight and it was their duty to join in with him whether they wanted to or not. Time will tell. ‘

 

Yes, why do we fight? We seem to do an awful lot of it. In 1950 World War II had been over for five years and things were looking up. I myself was already past the ideal age for starting an army career (the teens) and was rapidly losing any interest in having one. Then one Sunday the Korean War broke out and the matter was taken out of my hands.

Four years later I was so confident that we wouldn’t get ourselves into a similar mess again that I took early discharge from the army which was conditioned on an increased reserve obligation not imposed on those who waited for their discharge until their full [compulsory] enlistment was finished. “I’m not worried about being recalled,” I said, “we won’t do this again.”

Well, we didn’t. Not immediately. Not soon enough to trigger a call-up for my age class. We escaped that. The class born twenty years after us didn’t. They got Vietnam, the war I said we’d never get into. We never should have either. Now that I look back on the rationalizations for it, they seem more pathetic than ever. One theory was that we needed control of the narrow waters of the world. It seemed that there were a certain number of marine choke points on the globe and if the wrong people controlled them, they would rule the world. One of them was the Gulf of Tonking, I believe. QED, we had to move in there immediately and hang onto it like grim death. There was also the famous domino theory. Besides that there was one to the effect that the French would go communist if we didn’t step in and relieve them of the burden of defending the place. This would mask their actual defeat, which would have been one too many for them to take without collapsing into anarchy.

There was no lack of theories. None of them made any sense, but they all had their advocates. This included Republicans like Nixon and Goldwater. Today the Republicans call it a Democratic war, but they were right there pushing Kennedy and Johnson into it. Kennedy was willing to be pushed because he wanted to prove the Democrats could be just as tough on Reds as anyone else and also he had pet ideas about limited warfare and the use of special forces (the Green Berets). Not to be forgotten either was the work of the Republican John Foster Dulles in creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, SEATO. Under that we guaranteed to defend everything in Asia from Shangri-La to Bali-Ha'i

If these people had the courage of their convictions they would have let the Vietnamese go communist and good luck to them. They all knew that the surest way to ruin a nation was to install a communist government. Vietnam was a slum to begin with, nothing but mud huts, oxcarts and rice paddies, with a Gross National Product that was a negative figure. Twenty years of communism and it would have been a total basket case. Our elite knew this, but they were afraid to trust their own instincts and instead played it safe, so they thought, by going to war so no one could say “They lost Vietnam.” A small loss it would have been. 

So we’ve gone from the Big War to Korea, to Vietnam, to the Gulf War, to Somalia, and now to Iraq. In between there have been flare-ups in Kosovo, Grenada, Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs and innumerable other places where we’ve been involved directly or indirectly. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” some people call it.

How did it all start? From 1865 when the Civil War ended until 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. went without a war except for the Indian campaigns. Thirty-three years. After that things started to happen. In less than twenty years we were in World War I, in a little over that it was World War II, then the succession I’ve listed above. One justified another. If WWII made sense, then so did Korea because the communists there would have been a threat to Japan, which we had laid flat and now had to defend. As for the rest, well, the Gulf was sensible enough since it was fought for the purpose of keeping our oil supplies in the hands of our friends even though our un-friends wouldn’t have had much choice except to sell to us the same as the others.

Somalia and Kosovo were adventures that were forced on us by world public opinion since we were the only country with the armament necessary to suppress the atrocities going on in those misbegotten countries. We succumbed to all the television scenes of slaughter and starvation and sent our troops to put a stop to it. This worked in Kosovo, didn’t work in Somalia. After Somalia there haven’t been as many calls for our services, even in Darfur, where things are alleged to be calamitous. One reason is that even the television people are afraid to go to Darfur, so the pressure to intervene isn’t what it was in Kosovo and Somalia. Even if it were we would hold out against it better than we did before we went through our experience trying to rescue the Somalis from themselves.

How did the U. S. come to be such a fighting nation, battling away against enemies all over the world? One reason that no one talks about is that we have a big military establishment that has to be kept tuned up to be able to do any good. No one becomes a soldier to spend his entire life in training for a war that never comes. Churchill said it about his soldiers “Muskets must flame.” It would be naïve to think that our soldiers hate war so much that they hope never to see one. That’s inconceivable. Our politicians try to avoid war if only for the reason that it can cost them their jobs, but at the same time they are conscious that there’s nothing like a taste of real fighting to keep an army up to snuff. So their resistance to war is not unlimited. In real life there must be adjustments.

In my next essay I’ll revert to another factor that’s much more important than any other in driving us into one war after another. To document it I’ve gone back to my good old reliable source for such information, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of the 1970’s. I only get to read this malignant masterpiece because I happen to live near the only library in Long Island that has a copy. The President and his government get to read its equivalent every day in the synopses provided by the CIA and other agencies. It is -- or was -- like getting an installment of hate mail from your worst enemy every day. Reading it regularly had to have something to do with the highs and lows of the Cold War. I’ll be back with documentation of the dialogue in my next installment.

 

I SURRENDER, DEAR Maybe I have too much time on my hands and not enough to do, but sometimes I find myself wandering down a mental byway where none have ever ventured before, held back by fear of the unknown. I got off on one of these tangents lately, inspired by a sequence I saw in a collection of scenes from old MGM musicals. “That’s Entertainment” is the title in case anyone is unfamiliar with it. Right from the beginning I got a strange impression of something a bit unworldly going on the screen as I watched a lady named Eleanor Powell as she danced her way through a battalion of male dancers whom she scattered before her like the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold. Pretty good for a woman, I thought, but then I recollected that she was a man too! She was dressed like one at least, with a well-cut set of tails and a top hat besides, although she did give things away a bit by wearing a pair of high heels. This was all confusing. Was I seeing a dominatrix in action or just a gal who had to get into pants to do the kind of acrobatics she did? Was Hollywood trying to sell us something or was it all just innocent fun? What about all these guys on stage collapsing before her? Was there a message here? More research was indicated. I began to take a closer look at the offerings in front of me. The next scene was from a movie about Florenz Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, who apparently thought the right formula for a show was as many girls as you could possibly fit on a stage with one male to do the singing. Not much to be learned from that. After that there was a feature with Lucille Ball, before she became “Loocy”, playing a kind of animal trainer whipping a lot of cats into line. The ones in the cat costumes were all females, though, so one couldn’t come up with great thoughts about reversal of sexual roles and people searching for their identities and all that, so it was time to go on to something else, with maybe a backward glance at those costumes. Still pursuing truth, I found myself caught up watching 22 Esther Williams movies. Well, at least excerpts from them. I didn’t learn anything about the battle of the sexes from them, except that in pool movies women counted the most. They were about bathing beauties, not a male category. Incredible as it may seem, I liked them all the same. I was like the man in the New Yorker cartoon looking at a chorus line and saying “Kinda makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?” And yes, I overcame my fear about the screen springing a leak. The next episodes brought me back to reality, though, to the front where the battle was really being waged. I mean, Cyd Charisse in a go-to-hell skirt and blouse simply staring down a crew of boxers complete with gloves and headgear and bending them to her will so that they sat up and begged like pet puppies. All in good fun, you say? I wonder about that. I see this kind of thing as brainwashing, part of the softening-up process designed for what…well, not for enhancing our view of male supremacy anyway. That’s a lost cause in these movies. It’s not what the songs and dances are about. I know showing the men in charge would be a bomb, old stuff, so that you have to be paradoxical and present the opposite to get attention, but it still worries me just a little. More radical feminism is on view when Ann Miller comes on to dance -- on a floor where she’s alone except for some saxophones and trombones protruding from holes therein. Under the floor some men are playing these instruments, but they don’t have a chance. Ann dances over to them and stamps her feet and the instruments disappear below the floor and their music is silenced. Presumably the unfortunate players have been knocked unconscious by the stamped feet and Ann remains in sole possession of the floor. What does all this symbolize? Once again, it ain’t about male glory. I could speculate on what it is about, but I’ll give that a rest for a moment and suggest that all it means in this case is that some scriptwriters couldn’t think of some sensible way to add a few props to dress up the bare dance floor and came up with the underground railroad solution instead. So I’m not going to classify this odd exhibition as anything but a dance routine that got overloaded with cute ideas that didn’t work. So I tell myself, but the next segment of the movie turns out to be a variation on the same theme. Can all this be coincidental? Or is there a plan here? Put men in their place and keep them there. Is that it? What else can anyone think when a lady named Dolores Grey also turns her dance into a battle with the musicians’ union, whom she overcomes with strongarm tactics straight from Jimmy Hoffa? Unlike Ann Miller, from whom the instrumentalists hid under the dance floor, Dolores’s victims stand up in their foxholes and resist her attempts to silence them. It’s no use; she literally slams trapdoors over them and continues her dance without them, smiling brightly all the way. As if that weren’t shocking enough, the next hell raiser we encounter is none other than, yes, the dominatrix herself, back for more troublemaking, still passing as a man in top hat, white tie and tails, plus high heels again, and once more tearing through massed columns of males similarly dressed. Eleanor Powell rides again, in other words, and she’s taking no prisoners. She’s even more ruthless than before although she’s making nice with a tune called “Fascinating Rhythm” played by two black pianists. In 1941. So it went in this movie. The men didn’t have much of a show. They got on the screen all right, but unlike the women, who were surrounded by male admirers struck dumb by their beauty and talent, they usually got along without a female chorus swooning in their presence. In this movie it was girls’ night out. There were three installments of the movie, one of which I haven’t seen yet. Between the three it looks like everyone whoever worked in an MGM picture got in, including totally non-musical types like John Barrymore. That made me wonder why none of the casts included Van Johnson or George Murphy, who did come from musicals. I said at the beginning of this piece that I probably had too little to occupy me, and this kind of thing shows it, I‘m afraid. More Trivial Pursuit in time to come.