Meme

[stolen from pity]

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Events

1568 - Battle of Langside: the forces of Mary Queen of Scots are defeated by a confederacy of Scottish Protestants under James Stewart, Earl of Moray, her half-brother.

1940 - World War II: Germany's conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse River. Churchill makes his "blood, tears, toil and sweat" speech to the House of Commons.

1981 - Mehmet Ali A?ca attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Rome

Births

1939 - Harvey Keitel, American actor

1950 - Stevie Wonder, American singer and musician

Death

1988 - Chet Baker, American jazz trumpeter

Washington Post Partum Depression

They Just Don't Get It

A stupid and vacuous editorial in today's Post has me fuming. Can they get their facts straight? Wilson may not have been sent by Cheney, but his mission was a result of a request by Cheney of the CIA, so what's the difference? And if Wilson was wrong about Niger, why did the White House retract the claim immediately after his Op-ed appeared, and then admit it should never have been included in the State of the Union?

Yes, Patrick Fitzgerald said at his press conference re: the Libby charges that his indictments were not about the intelligence or the claims made by the Administration which led to war. But to ignore, as this editorial does, that the point of all this shifty activity by the White House was to punish a critic for doing what the Post and other MSM outlets failed miserably to do before the war--that is, to vigorously question the 'evidence' of a threat--is embarrassing for a major newspaper. Of course Fitzgerald's investigation is focused on leaks of classified information, not on the Iraq War. But any moron can see why the leaks happened, and the Post's own reporting today, on page A1, points out that Fitzgerald's new filing puts Cheney squarely at the center of an operation designed to "discredit, punish, or seek revenge against" Wilson, using information from an NIE already known to be false. The revelation that Bush was involved--even peripherally--in this campaign is evidence of hypocrisy at the least. And yet the Post merely poo-poohs a "good leak" handled "clumsily." They suck.

Why doesn't the Post remind readers of Cheney on Meet the Press making the claim that "I don't know Joe Wilson and never read his report..."? Now we know that at the same time the VP was publicly pretending Wilson was beneath contempt, he was going balls-out after the guy to shut him up. A better editorial would have speculated about the reasons for Cheney's panic over Wilson's revelations--did Cheney and co. KNOW their case for war was fraudulent all along? Were they relying on a compliant group of media whores (like Judy Miller) to sell a gullible public their hogwash? Mission Accomplished!

Money quote from the Post article:

But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

UPDATE: I've been waiting all day to read what Jane (who grew to bloggie prominence on this issue) had to say. Worth the wait!

Netflix

Ennis and Jack take a gig up on Brokeback mountain guarding a herd of sheep. Jack spends his nights on the mountain shooting at coyotes, coming down to basecamp where Ennis has meals ready for him. Ennis is quiet and coiled like a laborer out of Cormac McCarthy. Jack is more loose and easygoing, like someone out of Midnight Cowboy. Ang Lee directs their emerging relationship as simply another natural feature of Wyoming; there are trees, peaks, rivers, coyotes, and boys being boys alone in this vastness.

Unfortunately no landscape is big enough for Ennis and Jack to live and love on their own terms. They get married after Brokeback, they have kids and lives, and don't see one another but a handful of times in 20 years. The sadness of this hidden love permeates everything.

This is a well-made tragic romance. It breaks no new ground excepting the obvious, but is simple and beautiful and sad.

Bernard Malamud

When I was teaching literature I used a story called "Angel Levine" by Bernard Malamud. A poor old Jew named Morris with a mortally ill wife is surprised to find a black man in his kitchen, said black man claiming to be an angel sent by God to help him. The story is marvelous; when Morris Mishkin fails to believe in Angel Levine, the angel becomes a gambler, a pimp, and a petty gangster, and Morris must redeem his helper to achieve his own salvation. A community of black Jews in Harlem points him along the proper path, and of course everyone is redeemed at the end and Morris realizes the humanity of divine beings and the divinity of human beings. [Apparently there's a film version starring Harry Belafonte and Zero Mostel!]

Strangely, I'd never read anything else by Malamud until Idiots First, which I finished not ten minutes ago. ALL of these stories are excellent--the comic and the tragic. Check him out.

Vivre au Paradis

We watched this in French class the last couple days, and I wish it was currently out on DVD because you should watch it too (as should every member of Congress arguing over immigration policy). Lakhdar, an Algerian living in un bidonville (a shantytown) outside of Paris during the Algerian civil war, finally saves enough money to bring his wife and children to France. What they imagine will be a paradise turns out to be a wretched existence as Lakhdar struggles simply to keep his family alive, eventually losing his soul in a quest for an apartment with indoor plumbing. They attend the October 17th riots in Paris protesting a racist curfew--more than 200 Algerian immigrants are beaten to death by police and tossed in the Seine. Here they learn how their new country views them.

As Lakhdar dreams the European equivalent of paradise--an apartment with a bathroom and lots of possessions--his wife begins assisting the FLN behind his back; her paradise is an ideal and independent Algeria.

That dream is fulfilled, but for the family only in an abstract fashion--after independence, the Algerian refugees in France are not allowed back, and remain in the French underclass interminably, as the recent riots attest.

Netflix

I was sure I was going to hate Rushmore, so sure that I avoided it for years. I was wrong. Strikes all the right notes, doesn't take itself too seriously, has a great cast, and is as touching as it is weird.

Cha is at JFK airport, having flown there from Reagan earlier this afternoon--one dead president to another. She's off to Milan in a couple hours for nine days of arts education seminars. I miss her already.

Game, set, and match?

Just now on MSNBC: David Shuster says Scooter Libby has testified that Bush and Cheney both authorized him to disclose Valerie Plame's identity to reporters in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson.

Shuster is painting this as a "PR problem" for the White House. I'd say so, given Bush's insistence that he wanted to find the perpetrators of the leak, and his claims that it was a serious investigation.

What was Clinton impeached for again? It wasn't the sex, it was the lying, right?

Update: Apparently CNN reported the same thing and retracted it--Libby's just-released testimony says Cheney told him Bush had ok'd leaking classified material, but not specifically Plame-Wilson's name...

Aunty Pothead

Stoners and former stoners can typically pick other current and former smokers out of a crowd by noting extremely subtle behavioral cues. To outsiders this can seem like a mystical power, but it's not, just as those gifted with "gaydar" are not mystically endowed, but are simply noticing things others might miss.

There's one Aunty here at the Liberry I've had pegged as an old pothead since my interview two years ago. The way she's at once incredibly bright and a bit slow is a dead giveaway (often she'll produce the most astonishing technical information but has to get at it in a fumbly roundabout way), and her drole sense of humor and laid-back aura added to my conviction. Sometimes when I ask her about a cataloging problem she'll freeze and her eyes will glaze over. She'll stammer visibly a few times before she gets out stuff she knows like the back of her hand. I know this state well--it's the pothead propensity to, well, not necessarily forget, but to temporarily lose access to simple things; just as my great-grandmother in her nineties would list all fifteen of her great-grandchildren's names before finding the correct one (Steve, Bill, Robert, Phil, Eric, Ron, Elmer...Geoff!) when she was angry, a burn-out will at times have trouble accessing even the most commonly used databases in the brain.

Last winter Aunty Pothead heard my wife and I had gone sledding and she told me she and her husband and some friends had sledded the same hill on an inverted car hood from a 1974 Plymouth Duster, flipping it up and over onto Charles Street many years ago. This story went into the "evidence of bong hits done" file in my brain. Then I noted lately she's taken to stringing a line of Tibetan prayer flags across the PC monitor on her desk--not your typical Aunty behavior. Of course not every Tibetan-prayer-flag-totin' liberal is a burnout, but again this went into the file.

It was only when she saw I was re-reading Carlos Castaneda last night that I became wholly convinced that this Aunty was a Grade-A smoker in days gone by, and likely an acid freak as well. She picked up the paperback, laughed nervously, said "wow, oh boy!", put it down, grabbed the sides of her face and made a strange sort of "zzzzz" sound, then said "Oh, yeah. I kind of remember reading that. Pretty far-out stuff."

"I'm reading them again to see how they hold up after 20 years," I told her. "They're not so mind-blowing as they were when I was a kid."

"Really?" She asked. "My mind was blown! Of course we didn't need books for that back in the day," she added with a wink.

We had a good laugh.