Recycled satire

I said that after the "Sherlock" review RtO wouldn't review any more movies and I'm sticking to that. But I would like to recommend a forgotten movie from the greatest period of Hollywood satire (mid to late '60s) that has resonance today because of the caterwauling of the Cuban fascists and their rightwing friends.

The movie was "Popi" with Alan Arkin  and Rita Moreno and even iMDB is barely aware it exists.

• Abraham is a Puerto Rican single parent with two boys. He is becoming very worried about them living in their run down neighborhood when one day he notices that Cubans who escape are lionized and given exceptional benefits. He thinks up a plot to have his sons washed ashore as cuban immigrants who will be adopted by rich anglos.
  - Written by John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net>

I think it was the best Hollywood satire of that period (and nearly as good as my favorite film of all, "White Voices," which was Italian and is even more forgotten, although it was prominent enough to be reviewed by Time -- "one long leer," said the reviewer who was a dense as most Time reviewers).

Besides the content, I liked "Popi" because the satire was somewhat restrained, unlike most of the satires of that period like "Dr. Stangelove" and "The Day the Fish Came Out."

When the Cuban fascists moan, think about the lesson of "Popi."

And the other lesson, which you do not get from the movie but is very obvious -- America has always been more welcoming to fascists than to democrats.

Strange tales of outsiders looking in

One of the ideas that forms the underpinnings of RtO derives from a long-ago feature in Le Monde, which is the French equivalent of the New York Times. In the '70s, Le Monde ran a series of full-page profiles of "great cities of the world."

For the United States, it chose Chicago, then the second city. In explaining why they chose Chicago and not some other place, the editors gave several reasons, of which I remember only one, but I have been marveling about it over the past 40-some years: "Unlike American cities like Boston, Chicago was never devastated by a great fire."

(I looked it up, and indeed Boston was devastated by a big fire, but that was in the early 18th century when Boston was, by modern measurements, not even big enough to be a middling county seat.)

Is it possible, I wondered then and wonder now, that my notions about France's second city (Marseille, which I have never visited) are as screwy as Le Monde's notions about Chicago?

My answer was and is, yes.

I keep that in mind with everything I write that is not based on personal observation. Which has not prevented me from forming decided notions about faraway places, but I try to make sure they are based on good sources.

I bring this up because of a New York Times story about how the people who live in Iraq (who really shouldn't be called Iraqis) are splintering their country. RtO has, since its inception and in many ways, doubted that a place called Iraq has any beyond a purely notional existence. This has led me to disagree with people who have had experience of Iraq, like Rory Stewart.

Believe me, when I do that I like to have solid reasons. In the case of Stewart, some of the evidence came right out of his book. (It is remarkable how many people, like Beauregard Bear in Pogo who could write but couldn't read, either don't read or do not understand the books they write.)

One of the joys of reading Stewart is his naïve restatement of the obvious. Early on, he decided that the approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- trying to deal with and amalgamate various former underdog factions (few of which had any higher ambition than being overdogs for a while) -- was wrong. Stewart thought the CPA should have worked through the sports leagues, the only organizations in the area that cut across all factions.

Do I have to say that if the only thing you have in common is soccer, you don't have the makings of a nation?

I wrote that in June 2008, very early in the run of RtO. It holds up well, does it not? (That review seems also to have been the first time I advocated, in print anyway, a free and independent Great Kurdistan, a theme I have returned to many times. That looks good, too, all these years later, does it not?)

All this leads up to a startling, if not surprising to me, admission by someone thought to be (by herself and others) a leading observer of Iraq society, Phebe Marr.

Allah knows she has had sufficient time to get it right, having studied Iraq since 1957. Still, she got it wrong:

“It never occurred to me when I wrote this that it would be a question if Iraq stays together,” said Ms. Marr, who is working on a new edition.

Sheesh.

What I DON'T want for Christmas

I mean, besides Bill O'Reilly's seasonal attack of the vapors.

I don't want beer-favored soda pop.

Keep it, Santa

I had never heard of this until spotting it among the Christmas candy and packaged plum puddings at a supermarket last week. After carbonated water, the main ingredient is sugar, flavored with hops and malt. It sounds awful.

Wikipedia says it has been around since 1910 and displaces Coca-Cola during the yuletide in Sweden. I have never been to Sweden but I have a Christmas album by the Swedish tenor Christer Sjogren that includes -- I kid you not -- "Green, Green Grass of Home" and "Dixie."

As a tradition, it beats O'Reilly attacking people for wishing strangers "Happy holidays," but not by much.

Cliff Slater was right

New price $500,000,200

Another post cockaroached from my commercial blog at Kamaainaloan.com.

Honolulu rail transit is going to be a disaster. It is no surprise that the cost overrun is already estimated at $500 million.
Still worse, Honolulu is thinking of plundering TheBus to cover TheRail. Honolulu once had a good bus service. No longer. And raiding the modernization fund will just destroy what’s left of it.
Extending the excise tax surcharge to forever for Oahu is also under consideration.
Expect someone in the Legislature to propose extending it to the Neighbor Islands.
Note to Joe Souki: Do not allow it.
#maui

Mr. President, tear down that pipeline!

Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post has a weekly feature on "Who Had the Worst Week in Washington." I don't think much of it; it's part of the inside-the-Beltway self-preening mechanism, and one of the numerous features that make the Post sound more childish than some of its competitors.

But even though I don't read it, as a subscriber to the Post, I know who Cillizza picks, the same way I know which Kardashian is in crisis this week: because I see the headline. Last week, in one of the more embarrassing journalistic pratfalls of 2014, Cillizza declared that Barack Obama had had the worst YEAR in Washington.

Obama then scored his penalty kick right in Putin's breadbasket, reveled in glowing economic reports and jiu-jitsu'ed the Republicans on appointments in the lame duck session of Congress. The opposition?

They managed to irritate the Latino voters, again (and they probably voted to repeal Obamacare though I didn't see that reported, but they do that an average of once a week, so they probably did).

However, I did not come here just to jeer at Chris Cilliza. I came to state what is obvious: The people who really had the worst week in Washington were the fascist lovers in the American rightwing. (Not all rightwingers are fascists but all fascists are rightwingers.)

Rachel Maddow also noted part of it. With her staff she was able to do what would have taken me days and days: Assemble a gallery of love-notes to the man she called "J. Alfred Putin" by various American fascists and fellow travelers. These ranged from Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani to various blowhards at Fox.

Maddow professes to find the love affair between American rightwingers and Putin puzzling, but she knows a lot of history and I suspect she really isn't all that surprised. After all, she included a photo of Putin with his shirt off, and I am sure she knows which other fascist who was the darling of the American right liked to take off his shirt for the masses.

No, I don't mean Clint Eastwood. This one:

(Digression: I had not thought of this before, but it is odd that that the man who introduced shirts into the vocabulary of politics was so eager to doff his.

(As Barbara Tuchman relates in a hilarious passage in "The Guns of August" about how the chief of staff of the Prussian Army died in his tutu (no, really), there is always a strong strain of suppressed homoeroticism and wishing to be dominated by a masterful, take-charge guy among rightwingers.)

(Query: We know Putin considers himself knowledgeable about history. Did he model his decamisadoismo on Mussolini or is it just a case of like minds thinking alike?)

It is amusing to note that -- as Maddow mentions in passing but does not highlight -- it was the rightwing hero Putin and not the leftwing demon Obama who canceled a pipeline last week. I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

In other news of American fascism, Obama stuck one in the eye of the Cuban fascists by threatening to normalize relations with Cuba. Younger Cuban Americans apparently thought, "About time" if they thought anything at all, but the older ones remained true to their anticommunism.

It is only restating the obvious to note that anyone who fled Cuba after Castro turned it left did not flee the equally antidemocratic but rightist despot Batista. Few -- perhaps none -- of the Cubans who flooded south Florida and poisoned its politics for the past half century were democrats.

They had no problems with fascism.

Curiously, the paladin who chose to snatch up the falling banner of Cuban-American fascism as it was falling toward the ground was Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the very, very few Cuban-Americans without the ancestral fascist taint.

Although Rubio's own version of his family history attempted to link it to the rest of the fascist diaspora, reporters have shown that his parents were apparently not political. They left Cuba during Batista's fascist regime but not to get away from him. They just thought it would be easier to grow rich in America and they were right. But not far right.

 

'Legitimate rape' part deux

You know how they say that all publicity is good publicity (except maybe around Sony Pictures)? Missouri, then, must be in hog heaven, publicity-wise.

“I’m just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you’re going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed,” Brattin says. “That’s just common sense.”

Brattin later said his use of the phrase "legitimate rape" was in a different sense than one-time Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin's use.

Who knew that the Show-me State was full of such subtle thinkers?

(Also, isn't capitalism the greatest? You cannot push around an American capitalist, even if you are just a shadowy generator of digital pathways. No sirree

UPDATE Sunday

The idiot wasn't kidding and he wasn't misinterpreted.

Safety v. risk

Sometimes I worry that RtO is repetitive. I have put up something over 2,000 posts since early in 2008, and I don't have 2,000 ideas, nor do I know about 2,000 things.

When I was a reporter, I didn't worry about redoing stories, because our readership churned so much (what with people moving in and out, dying and growing up) that I figured that any story more than four years old couldn't have been seen by half my current readers. And -- let's be frank -- most of the other half had forgotten it.

Blogging is, or may be, different. I don't know. But I do worry about driving off readers by too much repetition.

But perhaps I worry too much. In the early days of RtO, I wrote a number of posts trying to explain the difference between a "risk" bank and a "safe" bank. The idea is not complicated or deep, but as we learned in October 2008, most bankers don't understand it. (Readers of RtO learned it even earlier, as I had been hammering the idea all summer and predicting the crash. Roubini got famous, I didn't. Readers who heeded my mantra in the summer of 2008 -- conserve cash -- probably saved themselves a lot of grief.)

It has been years since I've written about risk banks and safe banks. (I had actually been lobbying local investors on the subject back before there was an RtO -- even before there was an Internet -- as a method of driving local economic development. But no one with money took it seriously.)

It turns out that the lesson of 2008 was not learned by bankers and not learned by rightwing politicians. Imagine my surprise.

I recommend Dave Hellings' piece in the Kansas City Star. I'll even say his explanation of the difference between a risk bank and a safe bank is clearer than any of my attempts ever were.

A swap is often compared to insurance — or, critics say, a bet. A lender pays a premium to a third party, who must pay the lender back if a loan goes sour.
If that third party misjudges too many loans, though, and too many loans default, he loses the bet and the money runs out, leaving the lender unprotected. In 2008, many swaps designed to insure risky loans collapsed, and lending banks turned to the government for help.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article4539005.html#storylink=cp

And remember: unregulated markets crash.