And that's the way it is.

The CBS retrospective on Walter Cronkite combined the best and the worst. Cronkite as the best, and the worst which is television news today. I wonder if Cronkite cringed as much as the rest of us do when Katie Couric mouths her oily platitudinous reductions.

The best was also the footage, and the worst was the endless narrating of how wonderful he was. Wouldn't a solid hour of nothing but clips be so much more a tribute?

Like all news junkie 50-somethings, I remember Walter Cronkite ... and given that I lived in Canada until the very tail end of his career as anchor to the nation, that's saying something. But I have to admit that the news he covered made more of an impression than he did. That's the way it should be. No Ashley Banfields, no Anderson Coopers, no Keith Olbermanns ... and certainly none of those babbling babboons on Fox ... No. News tells itself; the reporter's genius is in letting it do that.

The man led an amazing life. One of the greats.

This is the time of year when my entire life becomes focused upon the production of the course catalog for the Major Research University where I sharpen red pencils for wages. This year, we are not printing the thing, and the changes we made last year have created a production schedule that is vastly less stressful than every before. But still bloody stressful. So my posts may be a little reserved for another couple of weeks ... notwithstanding that I have a burning desire to answer the uninformed, narrow-minded, historically ignorant and bigoted nonsense of LZ Granderson on CNN. As I watched the Cronkite piece on CBS, I thought of combining the two. If I can get a solid day's work in on the course catalog tomorrow, I may devote a few hours to this pursuit tomorrow evening.

And I want to add, for those of my readers who follow my photography, that I am hanging on my own petard. I upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture in the middle of the busiest work period of my year ... and I can't find anything, my tags don't work, and the photos are like sand in my fingers. Give me a week or two.

Jesse Helms

Another old bigot bites the dust, and the world is a vastly better place for it. I cannot as a humanist wish for suffering ... I only wish the man had died 50 years ago instead of stinking up the planet and filling countless millions of lives with hatred and bile.

AP produced a nauseating collection of bons mots about the old fascist that the Chronicle printed. For once, Jesse Jackson was the only one to get it right: "At the height of his power, he fought for the values of the old confederacy. He resisted the new South. He resisted the opportunity to fight for a more perfect union." Well, half right, anyway. Typical of Jackson, he pointedly ignores the blistering, virulent homophobia. Helms actually argued that fags should die of AIDS ... no money, no research, just let 'em die.

That he is dead is a boon for the Republic. That he ever lived is a shame. Good riddance.

Obama

Notable article in the New York Times today that points out that the Obama campaign plans to compete in all 50 states ... this consequent upon the feedback relationship between their ability to raise money in all states, and the fact that they will thereby have lots of money. The article notes that even in states such as Georgia that they are not going to win, such activity will help Democrats in other elections. I should add that it will help build the party's base structure and create further opportunities as history and its horrors unfold.

Of course, this strategy has been obvious for a decade and more. But the yesterday's-wisdom regurgitators who have dominated the Democratic Party, not to mention the nattering classes, constantly blabbed about the Southern strategy that has been dead since Humphrey or suburban soccer moms or the hastily re-invented white working class male of this cycle. Hillary believed it, and look where she is. The Obama campaign understood the new world from day one, and they are determined to carry that forward. Bravo!

I heard a sinking-stomach rumor that Sam Nunn is under consideration for veep. If Obama does that, he will lose and he will deserve to lose. That is the sort of thinking that got us the Lieberman creature as one of the holes in the dinghy that sunk Al Gore before he found the light of environmental activism. Obama needs a veep who would have the same dynamism in office as he will have, someone in his age range, someone who can campaign to Democrats in Georgia to inspire them for the future not the sordid past that Nunn represents. I need hardly add that Nunn is a blazing homophobe of the first water, and we homos do not forget such bigotry easily ... leastwise I hope so. (RO and JG will no doubt point out to me that I am forgetting Obama's snub of Newsom and San Francisco for what amounts to anti-gay self-preservation ... I do not forget, but I think of it as low bore tactics and leave it at that in the face of the greater exigencies. BTW, the Firefox spell checker does not recognize homophobe as a word!)

This election is about confronting the future as it is, not as it appears to be in the mendacious constructions of the 'publicans or the idiotic self-servicing of the pundits. That future has staggering challenges and will involve loss and retreat. Hardly anyone wants to admit it, but the flooding in the central U.S. right now is a harbinger ... it is irrelevant whether this flooding or that flooding can specifically be laid at the doorstep of global earning. The extreme weather of the future is going to make large parts of the planet uninhabitable, and those parts, including the poetic white-picket fence small towns so vivid in the imagination of CNN, are going to be drowned or burned out. We need a politics that confronts that, and Obama is laying that groundwork.

No point in piddling around ... that's what Obama is saying ... they are going after the whole country. No point in us piddling either ... he is the only choice, and the only shot at mitigating the disasters that the 'publicans have foisted upon the nation and the world.


A note on poor Tim Russert: Look, I feel sorry for the guy, and his rise from the dumpsters of Buffalo is certainly Horatio Alger stuff. It was moving all the endless praise and chattering, and his son, eerily resembling him, has a shot at being a force in journalism. You have to root for the kid. But let's be real: Russert was the poster boy for the crap TV journalism that litters the political landscape. He didn't ask tough questions ... he framed the day's conventional wisdom into a question and then asked it with a scowl. That passes for toughness. Like all the in-crowd in Washington, he was dependent upon the favors and good graces of politicians. So he started as a Democratic aide de camp ... so what. The phony balance angle meant that he swallowed the talking points du jour whole, and the result is scowling and posturing, and an electorate who decides things based on somebody's pastor or somebody else's emotion or somebody else's absolutely invented-from-whole-cloth self-image as a maverick. Phony journalism. Au revoir, poor Mr. Russert ... now we wait in trepidation as they bring on the next scowling poseur.

Keith Olbermann, who appears to be angling for the new poseur role, ended his segment on Russert with a pointed reference to the rainbow outside the cathedral and the coincidence that the service had been closed with a ukulele version of Over the Rainbow. I wrote about that here. My point was that the ukulele version to which I refer, and which is likely the one to which Olbermann referred, had reduced Judy Garland's version (which I see as an appeal to reason against the pointless cruelties of life) to a kind of pure sentimentality. What a perfect metaphor for the phony political journalism that Russert represented. We are looking for reason and thoughtfulness, not an appeal to unexamined sentiments. The significance of the rainbow coincidence was lost on Olbermann.

Photos by Arod: the top one, dawn in San Francisco, the bottom is San Francisco street art as close to a rainbow as I could find in iPhoto on a short search.

The Old Bastard Died in Bed

The careful reader of my occasional musings will note two normally unconnected facts: I don't think much of state sanctioned murder and I hold a doctorate in Indonesian Studies. These items are curiously connected this week in what ought to be the unmourned death of the worst of the third world tyrants, Suharto.

I should note, sarcastically, that he is actually Haji Muhammad Suharto, so named by the Saudi king after he performed the hajj some time before he finally fell from power. So named, he immediately reverted to the decidedly more Javanese mono-moniker, Suharto. Occasionally Soeharto for the hopelessly archaic. The Muhammad part was never mentioned again so far as I know.

I won't rehash the history. I thought that the New York Times obit was balanced and factual. It quoted Benedict Anderson, doyen of Indonesian Studies in the U.S., who was a persistent and principled critic. I'll try to find an online copy of the famous Cornell Paper on the events of 1965 by Anderson and Ruth McVey [see bottom of this post for an update.] Until then, I will note here that I met the great scholar only once at the time of the devolution of our department at Cal into a bitter tenure-driven feud ... Anderson knew nothing about it ... again, some time I will have to write obliquely about how graduate students should never be trusted.

Onward, onward .... Suharto ...

I have only ever been in Suharto's Indonesia; I have not returned since he fell. I was last there in 1995. It often felt like a light-handed dictatorship on the level of everyday life. It was not the always visible totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge or the quaking fear state of the wicked Burmese generals or Saddam. But it was without doubt the bloodiest regime in the history of the de-colonialized third world. Suharto is personally responsible easily for a million, perhaps two million, deaths. His rise to power in the events following September 30, 1965 ... which the Indonesians refer to as Gestapu, an acronym for Gerakan September Tiga Puluh ... was the occasion of no less than half a million deaths over a year and a half. Benedict Anderson, in a well-known 1978 letter to the New York Review of Books (available only by subscription) quotes a CIA report:

In terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s. In this regard, the Indonesian coup is certainly one of the most significant events of the twentieth century, far more significant than many other events that have received much more publicity.

It has long been thought to be one of the CIA's greatest accomplishments, for it halted a popular Communism in one of the largest country's in the world with hardly anyone noticing. This iconic piece by Peter Dale Scott gives the broad lines.

Indonesia, the forgotten giant. And today's Indonesians seem to be willing to forget their own history.

But my purpose here was to reflect a little on Suharto not as the monster that he was but in terms of how I encountered his rule when I was a student wandering around Indonesia. I have two stories:

Wrong Way on Jalan Cendana

I was staying with my great friend DH who had taken a job with a Singaporan financial house in Jakarta. He lived in Kebun Kacang, a nice middle class part of town, quite central and very liveable. But he had taken up the idea that he ought to find a place in Menteng, the tonier part of town, much more central, generally described as leafy by reason of the trees. Suharto had always lived in his old house in Menteng on Jalan Cendana (for the fastidious, Jalan = street, and the 'c' is pronounced 'ch'). I believe that it is the house he was living in when the generals were seized on September 30, 1965, but I will have to confirm that and modify this.

So one evening, DH had this 20-something Indonesian friend who worked in real estate to show us around Menteng in DH's car. A pleasant evening ... and Jakarta is always more pleasant in the evening than by day when it is dusty and hot and sticky and uncompromisingly not-very-pretty ... looping around the curving streets of Menteng, whose madness reflects not the Indonesian sense of order but rather the Dutch sense of the quaint which is what invented this swamp as the Indonesian capital. We came to what I assume now was a five-way corner (again I will check on a map to see if that is true) ... DH at the helm ... ooops, wrong way down a one way street. Now DH, for all his brilliance and wit and courage, was not the world's most punctilious driver, and it turned out that the street he chose to barrel down wrong-wise was the one block in the entire archipelago where lived Presiden Suharto.

Jalan Cendana. Quiet, leafy, seemingly occupied only by a few warung, the ubiquitous Indonesian itinerant food stands. But these warung were manned by unusually buff and young peddlers, and they seemed to have rather few customers. Before we were half way down the block, from nowhere, soldiers appeared to pull us over. Within a moment, there was a large truck in front of us, its open bed occupied by a phalanx of rifle-toting soldiers.

My memories of the details are a little foggy, and no doubt DH will correct a few details. I was in the back seat. An officer came to the driver side window (they drive on the wrong side of the road in Indonesia), and asked what we were doing. The entire conversation was in Indonesian; I lurked throughout in the back seat not saying a word, and not indicating that I understood anything of what was going on. Soon enough, they hustled our Indonesian friend away ... he was evidently terrified ... and the officer slid into the driver's seat and off we went with the lorry full of rifleman following close behind. We drove around as DH and the officer more or less nakedly negotiated the bribe. I think DH was quite peeved because he had, by reason of living in Jakarta, paid plenty of bribes to assorted traffic cops and what not, and I think he saw no reason why this obvious little error couldn't be settled quite quickly in the usual fashion.

But the officer evidently wanted to know just where on the totem pole we sat. I figured that too high would mean no bribe, or maybe just a tip, as it were. Too low would limit the total take possibility. But we were right in the middle ... obviously no good could come of actually arresting us since then the bribe would have to pass to someone higher up. At the same point, mere convenience would dictate that we would be willing to pay considerably more than we would pay to some cop in a roundabout who wanted a little palm greasing.

Twice we circled past the local police station, slowed down, then moved on. Finally, as we returned to Jalan Cendana, DH just up and tossed Rp100,000 (Rp = rupiah) at the guy, and that did the trick. I believe that the rupiah at that point was around 1600 to the dollar. I was aghast at DH's arguably obnoxious behavior toward the guy, but on reflection it was apparent that that was part of establishing the relative position on the totem pole ... too obsequious might have got our "fine" doubled, too aggressive might have got us arrested.

We sat there for a while after the officer got out, and eventually our young Indonesian friend returned, and off we went. Our friend had had quite enough. He told us that they had grilled him about DH and me, but he made it eminently clear that he wanted to go home. I do not believe that he and DH had further commerce.

Certain Books

Again, my details are a bit fuzzy here, and I will amend this piece as I figure things out. I had spent a summer in Malang, East Java at an advanced Indonesian language institute. Malang is a pleasant highland town ... if you have followed recent history, between Malang and Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city, is the location of the great mud upwelling caused by a gas drilling project gone awry.

After a sweet summer in Malang, I returned to Jakarta's unbearable thickness and, among other things, set out to get copies of the banned books by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the Buru Quartet, so named after the prison island in the eastern part of the archipelago where he was imprisoned after 1965 until 1979. I knew the name of the publishing house, Hasta Mitra; it published other stuff, but Pramoedya's works were banned. I found the address in the phone book, and proceeded there. It was located in a monstrous and famous shopping center ... half modern concrete prison-like construction, half ancient trading bazaar. He was on the top floor, above the three or four stories of warren-like shops. I had to go a couple of times because no one was ever there.

I finally met a man whom I remember as Hasjim Rachman, and I told him I wanted "buku-buku yang terkenal" (certain well-known books). He replied in English, "You mean Pramoedya." Well, yes! We had a chat in Indoninggris, the fashionable dual-language version of Indonesian and English practiced by Indonesian cognoscenti and semi-fluent foreigners alike. And he took my address and told me that someone would come at such and such a time. Right on the dot, a young man who turned out to be his son arrived at my cheap, even seedy, hotel room with all the banned books that I requested and a few extras. They charged me through the nose, notwithstanding that I had honestly portrayed myself as a starving student. Indonesia may have been a cheap place to travel, but I was always on a tight budget.

And I had my books and my vicarious dance with the dictator who is now, at last, safely dead.

The photo is one of very few from the terrible events after September 30, 1965, well-known among those who have followed the history. The sight of the boy in the white shorts and the hell that followed scant moments after the shutter snapped has haunted me for decades. I post it here that it might haunt you too.

Curiously, Cornell continues to attempt to elicit $13.95 for the Cornell Paper. What are they thinking? It's 2008, and this is part of the scholarly conversation. Let it go, folks, let it go.

Heath again

Don't the Oscars ring awfully hollow every time you hear "the Oscar-nominated Heath Ledger." He was robbed by homophobia. Who remembers the film that won? Brokeback Mountain was a love story, certainly, but at bottom it was about the closet and how it destroys lives and tortured souls. The Oscars understood, and embraced the closet rather than this now gone, fabulous actor and his film.

Nice appreciation in the New York Times by A.O. Scott here. My earlier post on his death here. A Salon piece here, and my friend Jim Gaither's correspondence with Roger Ebert on Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar's here.

Heath and Moors

Heath Ledger's numbing death reminds me of Pip, of Dickens' Great Expectations.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

The fearful man was Abel Magwitch, a convict, who repays the kindnesses of young Pip with a fortune later in life. The fortune was earned in Australia whither Abel Magwitch had been condemned before returning to see the smile on the face of the young man whom he had helped. No smile though, for Pip was most aghast at the revelation that his benefactor was one so low.

In the face of death out of the blue, we are each one of us Pip .. afraid, suppliant, willing, retiring. What recourse is there against cruel untimely death.

Ledger could have played Magwitch, or he could have played Pip. He was that plastic. In either event, he is descended as are most Australians not from the Pips but from the Magwitches. Perhaps the allure of the Australian is that Magwitchian temperament. But in this sad moment, not to think of such fancies.

My memory of the young Heath is this. It was Christmas 2005. The careful reader will know that I imbibe much from Christmas, and use the season to skate on emotion, and freeze that emotion lest I forget in the intervening madness of the long year of making a living. For several such seasons, I had noticed the rise of an allergic reaction to something in Christmas ... I have since deduced that it is the cedar I bring into the house ... and I sought refuge from my sinuses one rainy day between Christmas and New Year's in a long drive. I went to my old haunts at Cal in Berkeley, abandoned of its normal denizens for reasons again of the season. I wandered about on the campus of the nourishing mother in the rain, and then headed north in the East Bay, picking my way across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge which soars past the depths of San Quentin, and then I zig-zagged down through Marin County to Mill Valley. And, lo, Brokeback Mountain was showing at the famous local theater. So, on a whim, I bought a ticket and settled in. You must realize, here, that I never go to the movies, that I loathe the crowds, and that I prefer my own company to a bunch of yappy popcorn-eaters. I also avoid the movies because I prefer to suffer the emotion that great art induces in solitude, and in control of the pause function, so that I am the more immune to the wash of sorrow and fear.

I shushed a couple of yappy ex-sorority gals, and settled into Heath and Jake. The performances left me without air, drained. Heath dancing with the clothing of his deceased lover ... I live in a house filled with the memorabilia of the army of friends I have lost to the plague ... it was love and longing and the impossibility of living without dread and anguish. From my groin, it was Jake I loved; from my heart and gut, it was Heath.

The next evening, my oldest friend Frobisher dragged me out of my isolation to a movie at the Sony Metreon. But, alas, Frobisher had misread the newspaper, mistaking a.m. for p.m., and whatevver froth we had envisioned was not available. The only movie left was Casanova, starring, ta da, the young sexy Heath Ledger. What a romp! Farce and the comeuppance of the self-righteous and a bunch of sexy repartee. What does not please here!

So, I ended up going to the movies two days in a row after not having ventured into a theater for over a year ... and both starred Heath Ledger.

Now, without a hint of a warning, he is gone. It reminds me of the emotion of when River Phoenix died. Both were keepers, men who would have grown into depth and vigor unike the frothy nothings who populate People magazine. I have never recovered from River Phoneix' death, and I think I will never recover from the passing of Heath.

Death and the gonads ... it is not that one harbors some realistic hope of a trist with a Heath. Rather, it is that he represents some ideal of the glory of the male erotic. Not strident, but nuanced. Not a stomp but a song and a dance. Not rage, but a dance of irony and joy and play and strength.

When we mourn our cinema heroes, we mourn our hopes, our faint dreams. I want to be Casanova. I wanted to be Heath. No longer.

When I was a boy, I wanted to know Pip, I wanted to wander with him on the moors. I wanted to suffer with him, exult with him, settle with him. Heath was Pip, and I wanted to know him as the sad man left alone in Montana, and as the prancing dandy in Venice ... but now he is Magwitch, a cadaver, gone, dead. Gone dead. Too sad.


Further short reflection on Heath here, and my friend Jim Gaither's correspondence with Roger Ebert on Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar's here

Good Riddance to a Hate Monger

Well, good riddance to Jerry Falwell, one of America's most infamous hate mongers. Too bad he will have to watch the rapture as a spectator.

The man was a veritable font of those "sins" that the bible spends lots of time condemning ... avarice, gluttony, pride, and hypocrisy, chief among them ... rather than those "sins" christians have invented for those they seek to revile. I think of Falwell primarily in terms of his boundless hatred. Despite the wafer-thin evidence for biblical homophobia ... the evils of shrimp eating get more coverage than gay love in the oft-quoted and more oft-ignored Leviticus ... Falwell created a profitable industry of hate mongering against gay people. He lied about us whenever he could to keep those dollars flowing from the troubled, the aged, the lonely, any victim for his con job empire.

With all due respect to Christopher Hitchens on Anderson Cooper last night, whether he actually believed or not is quite beside the point. He was a man of faith, and there are three kinds of the faithful ... the masses of the earnest, the isolated desperate, and the cynical who hold the power. Nothing prevents a cynic from being a genuine believer, and that is Falwell to the core. Believing has a reassuring impact on the faithful ... anything goes in the name of the belief, and for the cynics that means "even" lying, hating, profiteering ... not "even", but "especially." So he found his niche, selling reassurance to the earnest, extorting the desperate financially and politically, and employing the cynical to build an empire of greed and power. Mammon, indeed ... and in deed! Check out the sermon on the mount and compare it to the lived life of Jerry Falwell. Doesn't compute.

The man was always a doofus, but he got given some unctuous credit in the 80s because he created a political force. By the 90s he started fulminating about teletubbies, gay people causing hurricanes, secularists paving the way for 9/11, and Jewish anti-Christs. Larry King, the professional sycophant who did a lot to prop Falwell up in his lengthy dotage, had a long list of sanctimonious self-congratulators on CNN last night to slobber on the cadaver. No doubt there was some mighty bible-thumping and fag-bashing, all in the name of "news", but it was too sickening for me to actually watch.

America is besotted with religion. It rises up as a heaving from the gorge of a society that trumps its materialism periodically with a crypto-medieval revanchism more properly seen as a bizarre postmodern cauldron of the ridiculous and unprovable. Evangelism never forgets its roots in hatred. They love to rant on about loving the sinner and hating the sin. But those of us who have been the objects of their "love", both now when all they can do is intimidate and scorn, and in ages past when they burned us alive and imprisoned and drove us from our homes and livelihoods ... we know what they mean, and we know they know that we know what they mean. The earnest among the faithful may truly "feel" that it is love. But the death of this swindler Falwell should remind anyone committed to reason and rationality that the earnest faithful are too often led by diabolical cynics.

Religion is the root of all evil, and faith is its enabler. Step away, friends, and join the Enlightenment! In the meanwhile, good riddance, Falwell, hate monger, liar, thief, hypocrite.