Book Review 279: The World of Herb Caen

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Herb caen

THE WORLD OF HERB CAEN San Francisco 1938-1997, edited by Barnaby Conrad. 128 pages, illustrated.  Chronicle, $35

Newspaperman Herb Caen is the one who nicknamed San Francisco “Baghdad-by-the-Bay.” In the 21^st century it sounds like an insult.

It wasn’t meant so then, when Baghdad was associated with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sindbad.

How long ago it seems now.

When I was a young newspaperman in the East, I used to envy Caen. How wonderful it would be,  I thought, to have readers feed me such lines.

I’m older now and I suspect a lot of those reader lines originated with Caen. He sure could get a lot into a few words.

Just a few years separate the young Caen from F.P.A., but Caen sounds as fresh today as he did when he died, at an extremely youthful 80 years of age, in 1997, while Franklin Pierce Adams (what lout of a parent would name a son after Franklin Pierce, anyway?) seems as antique as the Augustan penmen of the 18^th century he used to imitate.

Caen, though, was an antique in a way, the last American boulevardier.

This book offers a tiny but amusing sample of Caen’s output, with lots of pictures.

I was only an occasional reader of Caen in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, usually when some provincial scribe lifted one of his items. Copies of the Examiner or Chronicle didn’t make it back east too often.

I was surprised and slightly disappointed to find that, when it came to so-called national tragedies like the shooting of Jack Kennedy, Caen was as mawkish almost as the columnists in the provinces.

Sodom and Go-Moore-ah

I was looking for the nation's noisiest and most disgusting religious bigots to declare that the tornado that swept Moore, Oklahoma, clean was the work of a righteously angry deity, the way Pat Robertson and Bryan Fischer did when Sandy flooded that den of iniquity New York.

But no. Not a peep out of either of those pus-filled charlatans, so far as I can find with the help of Mr. Google or Rightwing Watch.

Why is that?

Could it be that Oklahoma is the home of the 900-foot Jesus and a lot of pharaisaical Christians ? And one brave atheist.

Truly, the Moore tornadoes are the gift that keeps on giving to RtO. Never has one event so neatly skewered so many of the people RtO detests.

Hypocritical, money-grubbing preachers? Check

Hypocritical, money-grubbing Republican senators? Check

Hysterical climate alarmists? Check

Anti-regulating, small government Tea Party nuts? Check

Of course, it doesn't take am F5 tornado to knock down their houses of cards, but I couldn't have written a better script to expose the fallacies of the right wing.

Turns out, the Moore storm was not the first to hit the town. It wasn't even the first F5.

F5 tornadoes are slightly more numerous than Category 5 hurricanes, but there are only a few each year, spread over a vast range from Ontario to the Gulf Coast. For 2 to hit the same 10-square-mile spot in less than 15 years is remarkable (and to miss all the trailer parks still more remarkable), but Moore can claim to be the heart of Tornado Alley -- apparently it gets about 2 tornadoes every 3 years.

You may have heard somewhere that true blue rightwing Americans take responsibility for their own affairs and don't need any meddling bureaucrats to tell or even encourage them to look after themselves. So naturally, most Moore-ites had tornado shelters or safe rooms, and the buildings put up with grudgingly given tax dollars were both built to take a punch and provided with safe places for the children?

Of course not. Dollars are way more valuable than children in Moore. You can always make more babies.

But perhaps they are now having second, third or fourth thoughts? No.

Moore, Oklahoma, could obviously easily have afforded to protect its children. Moore is rich. No trailer parks.

But at least the Moore-ites intend to pull themselves back up by their own bootstraps without any meddling from the hated national gubmint? Well, no, of course not.

Why are Republican lawyers so dumb about the law?

There is no IRS scandal (see "Mass nervous breakdown over IRS review," May 21) but there is a little mini-scandal about the grandstanding congressional inquiry into the imaginary scandal.

A Republican congressman who claims to be a former prosecutor, and therefore, one would suppose, someone familiar with the rules of court procedure, thinks Lois Lerner abandoned her Fifth Amendment protections by stating to Rep. Darrell Issa's witchhunt squad that she had not done anything wrong. She did not say what she had done. That is an important factoid.

The volkisch view of the 5th, absorbed by older Americans via noir detective films, is not anything like the actual, legal meaning of the Amendment. If you are a witness in court, even if you have not been charged with anything, you have to invoke (a more proper term than the usual "plead") the 5th at the start.

Give your name and address and invoke the 5th. Do anything further, and the judge will likely direct you to answer the prosecutor's questions.

This is to protect the boundaries of cross-examination.

Issa, no lawyer though he's had a lot of time in court as a miscreant where he might have picked up a notion or two, at first rejected Rep. Cordray's plea for doing cross. Later, realizing he'd missed a chance to smear someone, he said he might change his mind.

Informed, as opposed to congressional, opinion, is trending toward the actual, legal use of the 5th.

A full-throated liberal statement is here. But even libertarians (a libertarian is a Republican who has read a book) are kinda, sorta OK with the traditional view of the jurisconsults.

On the other hand, a certified liberal with a long memory says Lerner can be put in the calaboose, because it is a well-established (by the Warren Court, no less, those leftists) that a witchhunting congressperson can throw you in durance vile anyhow, and the Constitution be damned.

RtO is with rightwingers like Professor Orin Kerr on this one: Lerner's statement does not contain anything she could be cross-examined on (because there are rules about cross procedure, too).

But in a practical matter, we're betting the liberal Professor Alan Dershowitz is correct and Lerner will become another martyr to neo-McCarthyism.

A good little girl, but without a gun

So much for the idea that keeping your home full of guns will allow you to cope with a bad man -- 2 bad men, in this case -- with a shotgun and a pistol.

From the sheriff's sergeant said:

:“The shooter outside the window was literally two or three feet away, maximum, from this girl,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jason Ramos. “And pumped four rounds in a very tight group.”

In a 4-year-old girl. Outside the window, firing by the light of the TV. So, no chance for mamma to grab the ol' hogleg and shoot back.

The neighbor said:

“In my day, there used to be some standards,” Larry Ellis, a neighbor of the Campos family told the Bee. “You didn’t go mess with someone’s family.”

Yeah, but that was before gun-olatry was amped up by a multimillion-dollar disinformation lobby and a million-man army of delusional gun nuts.

 

Mass nervous breakdown over IRS review

No one could be surprised by the reaction of the Teadiots to the revelation that they were being asked, just like anyone else, to support their application for a tax exemption. The whining of the Teadiots is as much a part of summer as the whining of mosquitoes. That they think that being asked to perform the duties of ordinary citizens has "singled them out" just reinforces the obvious fact that Teadiocricy is all about me, me, me and my rights and nothing ever about us, us, us, Americans with duties to each other. But it is surprising, a little, that most of the reality-based community has bought into this nonsense. True, no one wants to be seen as a friend of the Infernal Revenue Service, except RtO. RtO thinks taxes and tax compliance made this country great. Teadiocrity made Greece Greece and Italy Italy, as least as regards the public fisc. So, regrettably, RtO cannot restate the obvious about the imaginary IRS scandal. It will have to state the position as if it were new, although it really isn't. The key points are: 1. The Teadiots and conservatives were not singled out. Other, evidently leftish groups, also had to demonstrate their fitness for the 501(c)4 exemption. For example, Progress Texas. The difference is, the leftists have not been caterwauling about it. 2. What the IRS did was completely ordinary and necessary. In 2010, there was an explosion in new groups, partly, probably, because of the egregious Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case. These groups had no history, no evidence of past activities to indicate what exactly they did. Of course the IRS demanded evidence in justification of awarding a valuable exemption. The fact that, on the face of it, the Tea Party was entirely political and was proudly and loudly claiming it was going to sweep its partisans into office at the coming election would have raised the suspicions of anyone that perhaps a Teadiot or related organization might not really be primarily an educational group. Let me restate this obvious fact: The Tea Party 502(c)4 applications were prima facie suspect of being fraudulent. There was before the public no evidence -- zero, nil, nada, not any -- that Tea Party groups were non-political. It is not true that more Teadiots were audited than other political groups, although even if this were true, it would hardly be surprising. Teahadism was something new, at least in a political organizational sense. Most other -isms had been around and organized long enough that they were not applying for exemptions de novo. Yet even so, Teahadis were a smallish minority of those chosen for close review. All the above is so obvious that it shouldn't need comment, though of course, it does. The next is speculative: It may be (though I doubt it) that not all the Teadiot applications were fraudulent. Some may have been the result of mere ignorance of the law. The fantasy levels of the Tea Partiers I was talking with at that time were at RED ALERT levels.

How many rights are enough?

I am hardly following the dispute about why the government demanded Associated Press phone records, although it may be that it was unwise for the government to have done so. Here's why: I do not think newspapermen should have more citizen rights than anybody else. So, no shield laws. When I was a newspaperman, I was content to have the same civil liberties as my brother, who is not a newspaperman. There is, of course, an inherent tension, sometimes boiling over into bitter conflict, about the proper duties of government and the proper duties of a free press. The press is weaker but over the centuries, as the government evolved and became more self-aware, it tended to compromise more with journalists. The excesses of the first Adams administration were reversed, and the excesses of the Wilson administration were later seen, even by those in government, to have hurt even government's interests. It has not always been a one-way path to free expression. Think Nixon. But until recently, the public was doing better and better about being informed of what its government was doing, and fewer and fewer people were being punished for their opinions. The press, at its best, practiced some self-restraint in the interests of the wider benefit of society. This sort of negotiation of competing and, at some point, irreconcilable interests, is possible only when grown-ups are involved on both sides. In late years, grown-ups have in too many cases been chased off the field by the likes of, on one side, Roger Ailes, and, on the other, by Dick Cheney. We can see a like takeover of the childish in the field of the Second Amendment as well.

The follies of austerity

In The New York Times Review of Books, Paul Krugman writes an elegant piece demolishing the fantasies of the Teaconomists. (It is not much of a book review, however, barely mentioning the books supposedly under scrutiny, although I liked to see David Stockman ridiculed as a know-nothing goldbug.) Nut grafs:

How decisive was the turn in policy? Figure 1, which is taken from the IMF’s most recent World Economic Outlook, shows how real government spending behaved in this crisis compared with previous recessions; in the figure, year zero is the year before global recession (2007 in the current slump), and spending is compared with its level in that base year. What you see is that the widespread belief that we are experiencing runaway government spending is false—on the contrary, after a brief surge in 2009, government spending began falling in both Europe and the United States, and is now well below its normal trend. The turn to austerity was very real, and quite large.

And:

Clear evidence on the effects of economic policy is usually hard to come by. Governments generally change policies reluctantly, and it’s hard to distinguish the effects of the half-measures they undertake from all the other things going on in the world. The Obama stimulus, for example, was both temporary and fairly small compared with the size of the US economy, never amounting to much more than 2 percent of GDP, and it took effect in an economy whipsawed by the biggest financial crisis in three generations. How much of what took place in 2009–2011, good or bad, can be attributed to the stimulus? Nobody really knows.

And:

Three years after the turn to austerity, then, both the hopes and the fears of the austerians appear to have been misplaced. Austerity did not lead to a surge in confidence; deficits did not lead to crisis. But wasn’t the austerity movement grounded in serious economic research? Actually, it turned out that it wasn’t—the research the austerians cited was deeply flawed.

(As RtO has observed more than once, business confidence is a bad thing. When is confidence highest? Right before a crash.) I recommend reading the whole thing. There is one part of it, however, that I cannot accept. Krugman says nobody saw the crash of 2008 coming or if they were nervous, knew it was going to be so bad. RtO did. I recognized the problem around December 2007; this blog did not open for business until a few weeks later. From the start, and over and over, RtO recommended getting out of securities and into cash. I think I was getting strident about it by May. The crash came in October. I do not pretend that I saw it in spreadsheets. I saw it in history; to be specific, I was persuaded that the insolvency of Bear Stearns must mean that all the big financial houses were insolvent, since the so-called rationalization of financial markets had required that all players operate purely as hot-money banks. That that was unsustainable was obvious to anyone who had studied the Great Depression or, for that matter, paid attention to the way the S&Ls worked in the Reagan crash. If you think I'm breaking an arm patting myself on the back, well, the early posts of RtO are still up. Read 'em and weep (but you'll have to go to The Maui News blog; this mirror site did not start until 2012). When it comes to austerians, as Krugman calls them, both RtO and Andy Mellon advised liquidating securities. The only difference was that RtO recommended doing it before they had lost two-thirds of their value.