-Brecht and Lenya

von am 15. Juli 2018 um 13:52
Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, Text

Brecht and Lenya

In the famous photo of Brecht, you can almost smell the tattered stogie. He’s is a dead ringer for Groucho, but without the pasted-on brows and mustache – and the sly humor. Besides having an aversion to the odor of the stogie, I’m put off by the shabby atmosphere of his plays and the high-pitched moralism. I never liked sitting in classrooms, and I’m not wild about drama in which the author uses a blackboard and a pointer.

Unfortunately like many others, the writing of it took precedence over the living of it. And later, during the Berlin uprising, he remained in the confines of his theater until the storm had passed. He preferred to say it and to have a venue for saying it, rather than carrying through. Prior to that, when things got hot in the States due to McCarthy’s witch-hunt. When he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he simply belied what he allegedly was all about. And the next day he flew back to Europe.

To quote my late friend and mentor Emile Capouya: “Claudel was a Heavenly imperialist.” I say that Brecht was a Marxist imperialist, which I don’t think is a contradiction in terms. He wanted the world to be Marxist, come what may, as long as his plays were on the bill. Brecht did for Marxism what Claudel did for Catholicism. Claudel’s pragmatism also overrode his ideology. Claudel may have wanted the world to be Catholic, but besides being an idealist, he was a practical man. He is reputed to have fashioned a paean he originally wrote for Marshal Pétain to fit General de Gaulle. And he was right. Why waste well-wrought sentences after Pétain had justifiably fallen from grace? It’s a writer’s business to publish, and words should take precedence over deeds.

In the Fifties, I saw the legendary production of The Three Penny Opera with Lotte Lenya in Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village. That was when the Village was still the Village. There were theaters with off-Broadway productions and lots of non-chain bookshops, instead of just cafés, restaurants, bakeries and artsy-craftsy shops.
The Opera was marvelous indeed, thanks to Brecht, as well as Kurt Weill, John Gay and Brecht’s lady friends, who filled in what the master told them to fill in à la Rubens.

Weill broke with Brecht before they left for the States, because he didn’t want to be second man in a tandem. He did indeed become his own man and that man became a very American composer. He left the hard-hammer German mode behind for a lilting Broadway one.

Among his achievements is the classical Broadway musical, Knickerbocker Holiday, which included the great standard, September Song. And speaking of Marx,  when Weill left Brecht, it was like Groucho leaving Harpo and Chico. (Padron me for bringing Groucho into it again.)

Another marvelous Village production was Brecht on Brecht, directed by George Tabori with Viveca Lindfers.
I begrudgingly have to admit that it was good, but I that I wasn’t enraptured

I’d like to salute the ladies who played a role in his life, and especially the lady who is best known for playing roles in his plays and operas. She relates an anecdote that would make any author envious, including Brecht and his stable of lady ghostwriters.

Lenya and Weill left Berlin, thanks to Adolf Hitler, and arrived in the States in 1933. And what did Lenya do after arriving? She went shopping. In her own words: “I went to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought a sweater, and in my horrible English, asked the clerk, “Would you rape it for me?” “Sorry miss,” he said, “but it isn’t my type.”

Village Cigars

It’s still there – Village Cigars on 7th Avenue and Christopher Street in the West Village with its white lettering on a red background. It’s been there forever, and it’s one of the few popular landmarks left.

Greenwich Village is still an address. There good restaurants and bakeries, but the theaters and bookshops are gone. Not only that, even the cafés are gone. Café Figaro is no more and a lot of the artsy-craftsy shops are gone.
Sado-maso shops are doing good business on 4th St.

And my God, the Waverly Theater on Sixth Avenue is gone. How could that ever be? There’s still a movie house there, but it’s not the Waverly.

I remember the Village of the Fifties and Sixties. I saw a wonderful production of the Three Penny Opera in the Cherry Lane Theatre, and I still have the bilingual French and German poetry books I bought in the 8th Avenue Bookshop.

Yes, the Village is still an address, but that’s all it is – an address. If the Village symbolizes anything now, it symbolizes the decline of culture.

I have always been irritated by smoke, and I have swallowed more than my share of the grey substance that was blown my way. Why is it then that I love the Village Cigars shop? Because it’s all that is left of the Village I knew. There it stands with the Christopher Street Subway stairways going down on both sides of the triangular front. I wouldn‘t say it’s attractive.  I wouldn’t even call it pleasing, but it was and still is visually a part of the Village – the Village I knew.

When I stand in front of it, it’s as if I were standing in the old Village – the old Village that is nothing but a memory now.

 

– Herbert Kuhner

-Saul Bellow & Arthur Miller

von am 10. Juli 2018 um 9:56
Veröffentlicht in: Text

Marilyn and a Guy Called Joe

When Laurence Olivier directed Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl, she and Paula Strasberg her “dramatic coach” made him wish he had never been born. And after completion of the film, Larry went away limping and clutching his crotch.

A quarter of a century later, he saw the film again and here’s what he had to say: “I was as good as can be, and Marilyn! Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all.”

A good film and good performances had come from all the suffering, and Larry the gentleman had given Marilyn her due. That’s noblesse oblige!

Marilyn wasn’t the first artist who couldn’t deal with a career – or life, for that matter.

Yes, Marilyn often came late or simply stayed away. Those are diva airs, and there’s no excuse for that. Punctuality is the most essential part of professional behavior. But it must be said that in her film compendium there is no bad acting.

She was singular.The film Marilyn was a vamp, but a vamp with a vulnerable quality. And that’s a quality she had in real life.

There wasn’t much noblesse oblige in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, which is the dramatic depiction of his marriage to Marilyn. It is the put-down of all put-downs of the female sex –nothing but venom. Never in the history of the stage has there been a heroine who was less of a heroine and none more negative than Maggie, the Marilyn character, with perhaps the exception of the Bard’s Lady Macbeth.

Maggie has not one saving grace, nor any redeeming qualities – and not an iota of charm. No one can deny that charm was something that Marilyn had oodles of. Or was the charm she exuded only for celluloid purposes?

Billy Wilder put it this way: “Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town,” but Billy added: “or as utterly fabulous on the screen.“

Well, Billy survived the film and Some Like It Hot became a comedy classic.

There’s no denying that on a professional level Marilyn was hard to deal with. Larry, Billy and others have attested to that. But they all gave her her due.

But not Miller – nary a good word.

He married a vamp, but he wanted her to take on the attributes of the average homebody.
Actually she wanted that too. She had the best of intentions. She made such efforts for Arthur, even going as far as to convert to an anti-feminist religion.

Maybe he thought that religion might help purge her. Anyway she must have really loved him to go through all that rigmarole.

Religion has always been an instrument for oppressing women. The linchpin of every faith is depicting sex as Satanic and the female as the magnet for attaining the Satanic clinch. And of course, there is the aspect of the female as a reproductive machine with no fun at all.

No doubt about it, the marriage must have been rocky. After the divorce, he moaned: “She was highly self-destructive. “All my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success.”

Isn’t that a kind of stress and tell?

Joe DiMaggio, the husband prior to Miller, had a hard time living with the ghosts in her past and the nude calendar photos, and he couldn’t bear the male world gawking at her. The subway air shaft and her billowing skirt for The Seven Year Itch drove him out of his mind. Joe was an old-fashioned guy, not suited to be the husband of a Hollywood sex symbol. But he was the one who loved her.

Times change! Today there’s hardly an actress not shot in the nude – and some even in slam-bang action.

Marilyn was exhausted and checked in at Cornwall University Medical Center for to recuperate. She was forcibly transferred to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and locked in a cell. After three days, when she was finally permitted to make a call, she called Joe.

He rushed to the clinic from Florida and appeared there the next day. At the reception desk he demanded, “I want my wife!” He placed his hands on the desk and said, “And if you do not release her to me, I will take this place apart, piece of wood by piece of wood.”
Marilyn was released. It was six years after her divorce from DiMaggio.

No doubt about it, Marilyn was emotionally unstable, but that did not prevent the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Robert, from having a dalliance with her.

Did they compare notes?!

Excuse me from inserting an ethical note, but starting up with someone who has emotional problems is something you don’t do, unless you’ve made up your mind to stick it out.

While filming Something’s Got to Give with Dean Martin, Marilyn went AWOL to attend President Kennedy’s birthday Party in Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. Her rendition of “Happy Birthday Mr. President” was a swan song.

Marilyn was fired and rehired for Something, but the film had to be scrapped due to her permanent unreliability. Marilyn died on August 5th.

After her death, she became the sex goddess of all time. There will never be another like her.

Joe DiMaggio claimed her body and planned her funeral. He excluded all those he deemed morally responsible for her death.

Husband number one, the policeman, and number three, the playwright did not attend.
Even if “three” was on DiMaggio’s negative list, the ballplayer, who was a true gentleman, would not have tried to prevent him from attending.

Three did not pay his last respects. Can you imagine that?! At least he should have been there to thank her for inspiring a play.

For the next 20 years, Joe had a half a dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week. His last words on this earth were, “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”

 

Arthur Miller Sheds Marilyn

After the Fall by Arthur Miller is the most one-sided,
negative portrait of a woman in the history of drama –
perhaps with the exception of the Bard’s Lady Macbeth.

Marilyn must have had some saving graces.
or was the charm she exuded
only for celluloid purposes?

She made such efforts for Arthur,
even going as far as to convert
to an anti-feminist religion.

Marilyn was not the most well-adjusted of women.
Outside of the boudoir,
she started to get on his nerves.

And after writing a film for her,
in which she excels
he shed her without much ado.

At the time of her death
the play must have been
in gestation.

Imagine, he didn’t even
attend her funeral.

At least he should have paid
his last respects for
the negative inspiration.

 

Larry, Marilyn, Vivien and Noblesse Oblige

He could speak Shakespeare’s lines as naturally as if he were actually thinking them.
– Charles Bennett, English playwright

Larry was the greatest of them all – and the most handsome. He was the prince and his princess was Vivien. She wasn’t bad at acting, and she was the most beautiful of them all.

Laurence Olivier directed and acted in The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957, co-starring Marilyn Monroe, who was also beautiful in a ditsy way. She was the epitome of showgirls, starlets, pinups and party girls. It is not the elegant beauty of Vivien Leigh, but it was a kind of beauty too. Actually it was the kind of beauty that was more in demand. There was nothing subtle about it. The appeal was immediate. There was no aura to it, and it did not increase with observation. I wouldn’t use the word superficial, but I would say that it was anything but classic.

Marilyn had a reputation for showing up late and for being difficult to work with. Here’s how other directors put it. The words are Larry’s: “Billy Wilder said that it had been like working with Hitler. He and Josh Logan commiserated with me and said it was hell, but that I would be getting a pleasant surprise when it was over.”

Marilyn arrived in London with new hubby Arthur Miller, as well as Lee and Paula Strasberg –
to Larry’s dismay. Marilyn’s devil was aided and abetted by those other two devils.

Here’s Larry on Lee: “My opinion of his school is that it did more harm than good to his students and that his influence on the American theater was harmfully misplaced.”

Seven years later Lee would cross the Atlantic with Studio actors to assay Chekhov’s Three Sisters on the West End in one of his very few stints as a director. He got his comeuppance for whatever transgressions he had committed. The production was described as the turkey of all turkeys and the bomb of all bombs in the British press.

And here’s Larry on Paula: “The truth came to light with uncanny speed: Paula knew nothing, she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no, adviser – except in Marilyn’s eyes, for she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up. On one car journey I heard Paula play an innings in this, her special ploy, which pinned my ears back as I sat in the front with the two of them in the back. ‘My dear, you really must recognize your own potential, you haven’t even yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world, you are the greatest sex symbol in human memory, everybody knows and recognizes that and you should too, it’s a duty which you owe to yourself and to the world, it’s ungrateful not to accept it. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time; of any time, you name it; you can’t think of anybody, I mean – no, not even Jesus – except you’re more popular.’ Incredible as that must s exaggeration; and it went on in unremitting supply, for good hour, with Marilyn swallowing every word. This was Paula’s unique gift to the art of acting, or rather the artful success of Marilyn’s career, out of which the Strasbergs stood to make much capital. This was what I realized in growing alarm, I was stuck with.”

And it can be said that the Prince as actor and director suffered as no one in film and show business had ever suffered before and after the filming of “Prince.” Time and again he was insulted and humiliated.

Vivien had played the role on the stage, but in the film, she had to give way to Marilyn. Of course she didn’t relish being passed over. She had caused a stir as Blanche in Streetcar, and now unfortunately she started to live that role to the hilt.

So poor Larry was getting his ankles snapped at from all sides. He had them snapped at on the set, and there was snapping galore after he dragged himself home by Vivian, who had been left out of things.

But ankles were not the only part of Larry’s anatomy that suffered. His nether region was getting the brunt of it too. That’s the area of the greatest ache when the fair sex has in for men.

After the royal Prince torture was over, Larry limped off the set and went on to other things.
A quarter of a century later, he saw the film again and here’s what he had to say: “I was as good as can be, and Marilyn! Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all.”

So a good film and good performances had come from all the suffering, and Larry the gentleman had given Marilyn her due.

There wasn’t much noblesse oblige in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. The Marilyn character has no saving graces in the play, and not an iota of charm. Never had there been a heroine on the stage who was less of a heroine.

But Larry was not so noble with Vivien. Here’s what he wrote after her passing: “While I was keeping my short vigil in the bedroom, I noticed that between the bed and the bathroom was a stain, and connecting this with the expression on her face which had caused me to wonder, I now realized what must have happened. What a cruel stroke of fate to deliver that particular little death-blow to one as scrupulously dainty in such matters as was she.”

Quotations from Laurence Olivier: Confessions of an Actor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1982.

 

Whatever Happened to Saul Bellow?

Saul had a great career with successful novels, and he reached the top with the Nobel Prize.
Saul was politically your typical Jewish liberal. That sounds disdainful, but I don’t say it with disdain since the description fits me to a T, politically, that is.

Late in life Saul paired up politically with Lynne Cheney. Lynne not only happens to be the spouse of Dick Cheney, and who happens to be one of my favorite people, along with Henry “the Kiss of Death” Kissinger. Lynne not only mirrors her spouse’s s views, she’s even politically to the right of him.

With Lynne, Saul founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. One of the activities of that organization, as you can well imagine, was to keep an eye on errant university professors.

Saul lived to see Dick and George lie us into the Iraq disaster.

I insert a couple of items concerning Dick:
“When Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by (President) Ford,

pushed a plan to have government help develop alternative sources of energy

and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?
Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.”[1]

White House Joins Fight Against Electric Cars:
The Bush administration went to court today
to support the automobile industry’s effort to eliminate requirements
in California that auto manufacturers sell electric cars. [2]

I’ll wager that Lynne did not contradict Dick on these matters.

Question: who was the guru in this relationship? Saul or Lynne?
Here’s Saul in the New Yorker of March 7, 1988,
“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

What kind of nonsense is this?

Those are the asinine things you’re bound to say when you hang out with the likes of Lynne and Dick.

Pray, Saul! Where did one of the major the influence of our great Picasso stem from? And what about the music Duke Ellington termed “American folk music?”
While Saul was at it, he could have kissed Henry Kissinger’s kiester!

 

– Herbert Kuhner

[1] Maureen Dowd: “Cheney axes that ‘70s show,” The Int. Herald Tribune, Dec. 29, 2005, p. 6.
[2] Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, Oct. 10, 2002.

-Hitler’s Inverted Racism

von am 5. Juli 2018 um 17:55
Veröffentlicht in: Jazz, Polemics, Politics

There Are Moments

Yes, there are moments. But between those moments there are long, long periods.

I’ve always had nostalgia for the days of railroads as you see them in the films of the Thirties and Forties. Adding to the atmosphere are the Redcaps in the great metropolitan railroad stations and the Pullman Porters of the sleeping cars. These men are probably all gone now, but when they were around, I’m sure nostalgia wasn’t anything that touched them.

The view from the outside is always different from the view within.

Pullman Sleeping Car sounds wonderful. The word Pullman conjures up luxury and cushions. You’d think that George Pullman, the initiator of the Pullman cars, must have been a swell fellow. He wasn’t. The situation of those elegant black men was deplorable. They had to pay for their uniforms, their food and there were no benefits. While the passengers, they served, slept on comfortable beds, they had short naps on a cot behind a curtain in the toilet. There was no such thing as relaxing.

Our Founding Fathers were great men with vision, but the splendid documents they authored did not apply to all the inhabitants to the Thirteen Colonies. It took the Civil War and the 13th and 19th Amendments for those documents to apply to all Americans.

Let’s jump to 1942! That year the Tuskegee Program was initiated by the Democratic Party for Negroes, which was the term of the time for blacks. It was one of the steps that led to the Civil Rights Bill of 1965.

Let’s jump to 1942! That year the Tuskegee Program was initiated by the Democratic Party for Negroes (which was the term of the time for blacks). It was one of the steps that led to the Civil Rights Bill of 1965.

There’s a film about the men who first joined this program titled The Tuskegee Airmen. In a scene pilots in training are forced to land on an Alabama highway, where a chain gang happens to be working. The guards guide the chained blacks from the highway with their rifles to make room for the aircraft. When the pilots emerge and remove their goggles, the astonished guards gasp. “They’re niggers!”

The camera then pans to an old black prisoner, who says: “Our boys are pilots!”

I don’t know if that particular scene took place in reality, but others like it have taken place.

One of the Tuskegee airmen was the great bassist Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who left us in 2005. And of course, many great jazzmen and -women played their part in breaking down racial barriers. It’s really hard to look down on someone whose abilities you admire.

White musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa were among the first to integrate bands and John Hammond, the great jazz impresario and critic, was the man who first had blacks on the stage of Carnegie Hall and integrated the audience of the Hall.

I am a jazz buff, and I’ve followed up and written about this subject, but I’ve never been a baseball fan – or a sports fan, for that matter.

I’m not one of those guys who’d sit for hours in a stadium, a ballpark or in front of a TV-set watching a game. It was all a foreign language for me. And it still is. But I did like listening to Bill Stern tell stories about athletes on his radio show. I had a pocket book of those stories, but unfortunately, I lost it years ago. What I’m saying is that the individuals interest me, not the game they play.

I guess I’m not really one to write about baseball, but here’s an interesting fact: in the days when there were white teams and black teams, there was an annual white vs. black game, and guess who invariably won? That’s right, it wasn’t the white team. And the losing team very seldom took the loss as gentlemen.

Isn’t that sad? I like to think that in the old days there was chivalry among athletes.

Well, as we know, Branch Rickey the Dodger coach broke through the racial barrier with Jackie Robinson back in 1947. Most of Jackie’s teammates didn’t buddy up to him. Imagine, they got up a petition to keep the black out! One man, shortstop Peewee Reese, a Southern boy, didn’t play along. He refused to sign and quashed it.

The petition was stopped, but not the attempts to block the black player by the Dodgers, the fans, and certainly not by players of the other teams.

There was a game when the insults and catcalls were particularly loud. I quote from an editorial of The Washington Post in 1997: “Mr. Reese called timeout, trotted, over from shortstop and just stood there with his hand on Mr. Robinson’s shoulder for a long moment, looking steadily into the crowd. Never a slugger, he hit the equivalent of five home runs that day.”[1]

So, it seems there is some hope for us.

Racism Reversed

The Harlem Globetrotters invariably defeated the all-white teams they played against.
And while they were at it, they did circus tricks and played the buffoon, nine times over for the audience.

After the doors of basketball were opened for blacks, the winning streak of the Trotters
came to an end. They played against blacks and were beaten. They didn’t have to play the buffoon and the circus tricks backfired.

Ah, those good old days!

The Star of Olympia

In 1935, the year the Nuremberg Laws were initiated, Leni Riefenstahl directed Triumph of the Will at the location where the Laws were passed.

This epic starred a gesticulating little man in a brown uniform with a swishing cowlick, a toothbrush mustache and a coarse voice. That paunchy homunculus ranted and raved while a cast of thousands marched, saluted and shouted in unison.

Riefenstahl’s second propaganda film was to feature representatives of the Master Race sweeping to victory at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but something gummed up the works. Or rather someone undermined the thesis of the film. That someone in question was Jesse Owens, an American black. Jesse outran and jumped higher and farther than the baggy-pantsed, spindly-legged competition. The Teutonic representatives were left behind panting and gasping as an unbeatable black god ran and sprang his way to four gold medals. Jesse won with ease and his pants did not hang.

Those four gold medals were four insults to Nazi Germany and had torn four jagged holes in the Nuremberg Laws. In spite all the “scholarly” tracts by Hitler, Goebbels and Streicher, the black man’s victory was fact and history. The cameras weren’t blind and film didn’t lie. Celluloid can be doctored up, but there are limitations for every lens and movieola. Riefenstahl may have been dazzled the Nazi ethos, but she was also a cinematographer and female. The static white nudes of the prologue were surpassed by the mobile black, who ran like a racehorse and sprang like a gazelle. Riefenstahl, in spite of herself, was more fascinated by that reality than the lie she had been hired to film.

The star of Triumph had pasty white skin and a five-o’clock shadow. The star of Olympia was a beaming black god.

Hitler’s Inverted Racism

Jesse Owens, an American black, stole the show in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia by winning four track gold medals and broke 11 Olympic records. Cornelius Johnson got gold for the high jump, as did Ralph Metcalfe 4×100-meter relay. They proved beyond doubt that Hitler’s Master Race was not master in the art of sports. Germany did win more gold medals than any other nation. However, there were 13 Jewish medalists and 14 black American medalists in all.

According to Balder von Shirach, Hitler said, “The Americans should be ashamed of themselves, letting Negroes win their medals for them. I shall not shake hands with this Negro…do you really think that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?”

Josef Goebbels called the victories by blacks “a disgrace.” And here is his reaction in the Nazi Newspaper Der Angriff : “If the American team had not brought along black auxiliaries…one would have regarded the Yankees as the biggest disappointment of the Games.”

Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich describes Hitler’s reaction: “He was very annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens.” Hitler said with a shrug, “People whose antecedents came from the jungle have physiques that are stronger than those of civilized whites, and thus they should be excluded from future Games.”

In other words, the Master Race was inferior to the Negro race in physique and athletic prowess. Thus the latter should be banned from competing with the former in athletic contests.

– Herbert Kuhner

[1]Herald Tribune, April 2,1997, from The Washington Post.

– The Advisor in the Sky

von am 4. Juli 2018 um 17:10
Veröffentlicht in: Polemics, Politics

 The Advisor in the Sky

In Iraq I, George Bush, père encouraged the Iraqi Shiite majority
to revolt against the Sunni minority who were running the  country.
Then he left them in the lurch. They were massacred.

Iraq II, George Bush fils invaded and attempted to correct
his father’s mistake.

Bush fils, concerning the Sunni and Shia Muslim divide,
“I thought they were all Muslims.”

Asked whether he had consulted his father,
he replied, “There is a higher father that I appeal to.”[1]
“God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them,
and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”[2]

The Invasion of Iraq
ousted Saddam and his Sunni crowd,
bringing the Shiite majority into play,
which got even for massacres with massacres.

After thousands of American dead and wounded,
not to speak of the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties,
the buffer to Iran was cancelled out
the Middle East was ignited and ISIS filled the Iraqi void.

Bush got advice from above, but who advised
such liberal icons as Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria
and Peter Beinhart and did Hillary Clinton?

– Herbert Kuhner

[1] The Financial Times, June 11, 2004.
[2] George W. Bush, Ha’aretz, June 27, 2003.

-This is too much

von am 3. Juli 2018 um 20:21
Veröffentlicht in: Polemics, Politics, Text

The Meaning of Life to Our Chieftains

Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign undermined Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to initiate peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in order to improve his chances of winning the election.[1]

Just to be fair, Kennedy initiated the war, Johnson escalated it, but Nixon prolonged it.

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan, initiator of the Iran-Contra Affair sold the Iranians weapons and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, formerly Samosa’s National Guard, a marauding soldateska whose mission was to free Nicaragua. Their pillaging and raping was exemplary. Another Reagan Administration gambit was the mining of Nicaragua Harbor, a country we were not at war with.

Ronald Reagan’s assessment: “The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” Guess our founders, according to him, were coked-up mass murders, rapists and torturers.

Question: What does human life mean to those aspiring to gain power or to retain it?

Answer: Not a whit!

No matter how good the governing system, and the Founding Fathers established a damn good one, it cannot cancel out human iniquity.

And no system is foolproof.

 
The Undoing of Richard Nixon

Nixon explains how he undid himself:
“Always remember, others may hate you,
but those who hate you don’t win
unless you hate them,
and then you destroy yourself.”

Wise words from a prime hater.
Here he is to Henry the Kiss (of Death):
“You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians,
and I don’t give a damn.”

And Henry, not to be outdone chimes in:
“Why should we flagellate ourselves
for what the Cambodians did to each other?”

Those wise words were said
after the fact.

Nixon had pulverized George McGovern
in the ’72 presidential election,
but instead of using his mandate to govern,
he went about trying to pick off his opponents
and to finish off the vanquished political party.

However, Nixon’s negative emotions
brought humiliating disgrace for the former victor.

Land Mines, Cluster Bombs and the Clintons

The Clintons favor land mines and cluster bombs.
Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
That year President Bill Clinton refused to sign that treaty.
After his election, President George W. Bush declared that the United States
would never sign.

In 2006 Senate Amendment No. 4882 would have banned the use of cluster bombs
in civilian areas. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois voted in favor of the ban.
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York voted against the ban.
Congress rejected the amendment.

 

Saying it

Sometimes those who have not learned the art of rhetoric can say it best.
There can be such an eloquence in words that are spoken by those
who do not have the lingual finesse that a formal education can bring.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, alleged anarchists, were condemned to death for robbery and murder
in a rigged trial in South Braintree, Massachusetts in August of 1927.

Vanzetti: I did not spittel a drop of blood, or steal a cent in all my life….I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, all. I am an innocent man. I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me…..If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words – our lives – our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us – that agony is our triumph.

Police: Do you believe in this government of ours?
Sacco: Yes; some things I like different.

A poor man can become a star in Spanish-speaking nations by goading and killing
an animal in a ring. The animal does not volunteer for battle.

Elsewhere a poor man can become a star by defeating another poor man in a ring.

 

School in the Art of Torture

What‘s all the fuss about torture? Haven’t we been training South American surrogates in the art of torture for decades on American soil? “The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians.”[1]

 

Conservative Pundit

Here’s Ann Coulter on treason: “During the Vietnam War, New York Times scion Arthur „Pinch“ Sulzberger told his father that if an American soldier ran into a North Vietnamese soldier, he would prefer for the American to get shot. „It’s the other guy’s country,“ he explained.[2]

I would prefer no one to get shot, but Pinch is right about whose country it is. Yes, we were the invaders. We had no business being there.

Ann takes a jab at wiseacre ladies:
“Feminists don’t care about Saddam’s rape rooms.”[1]

It’s nice of “non-feminist” Coulter to be concerned about rape. Remember the four nuns who were raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980!

And dear Ann, the United States supported a bevy
of Right-wing Latin-American rapist dictators,
mostly under Republican administrations.

Reagan’s Secretary of State Al Haig explained it in Congress this way:
“They drove through a ‘legitimate’ road block.”(!?)

Saddam the Middle-East rapist used to be our friend. And if a woman is raped in the lands of our present-day friends, she’s lucky if she ends up in the clink. Some of our friends in that area think nothing of rape, flogging, amputation and stoning.

Ann Coulter is a best-selling author. If her columns were not so outlandish she’d be nowhere..

– Herbert Kuhner

[1] BBC Prime, History.
[1] School of the Americas Watch Online.
[2] Human Events, Jan. 3, 2007.