My Grand-niece

Twenty Years Old

Fiery Crash Kills Two, Injures Eight In San Jose

(CBS 5 / AP / BCN) SAN JOSE Two people were burned to death and eight more were injured in a fiery multi-vehicle wreck when a speeding pickup truck launched off a freeway exit embankment and slammed into a line of stopped cars, triggering a series of explosions, authorities said.

The Ford F-150 became airborne while exiting Interstate 280 about 8:30 p.m. on Monday night, plowing into a Nissan Frontier pickup, a Mazda minivan and a Volkswagen Bug waiting side-by-side at a stoplight at 11th Street in San Jose, said Officer Steve Perea of the California Highway Patrol.

The driver then reportedly lost control of the Ford, veered left up an embankment, and overturned onto its right side.

As the Ford pickup overturned, it hit a traffic signal, Perea said. The series of impacts with the other vehicles ruptured at least one of the vehicles' gas tanks.

The cars crunched together "like an accordion," and the Nissan burst into flames, killing both occupants, a 20-year-old female driver and a 20-year-old male passenger, Perea said. The pair, both San Jose residents, were trapped inside and "tragically...succumbed to the impact and the fire," he said.

The cornor's office had yet to release the victims identities as of Tuesday afternoon.

"The house and windows were shaking," said neighbor Allen Velton, who heard the collision inside his home and witnessed the explosion. "It sounded like a war, a bomb going off. We heard one, two, three explosions."

The Ford F-150 driver, John Mayfield, 51, of Paso Robles, remained hospitalized Tuesday with burns, lacerations and moderate head injuries, Perea said. He was not arrested but investigators were looking into the cause of the crash.

Perea said it was not yet clear why Mayfield lost control of his truck. It's possible he could face charges for two counts of vehicular homicide.

The passengers of the Mazda and the Volkswagon were hospitalized with minor to moderate injuries, Perea said. In all, he said the crash sent eight people to local hospitals.

According to San Jose Fire Department Capt. Jose Tuerrero, two San Jose police officers were among those injured as the fire was being extinguished.

The two officers were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation and were expected to be released soon, he said.

Though investigators initially had believed that an infant had died in the crash, those reports were found to be inaccurate a short time later, Perea said.

The accident closed the 11th Street off-ramp on Monday night. Road crews on Tuesday were still working to clear away debris remnants from the crash.

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

The Scenic Route

Gaza
I don't know about the "It was a splinter group we can't control" dodge. They used it for years under Arafat, until in 1993 they decided briefly to appear to deal, then suddenly they could control the splinter groups. It became clear after a while that the "splinter groups" were being created ad hoc for each terrorist operation to shield the PLO. It was a political ploy to provide a fig leaf for the PLO, now for the PA and Hamas, to continue to receive UN and EU money.

You are however quite right about the Palestinians being unable to even agree to tolerate the existence of Israel, let alone surrender to her. I fear the only solution, until they collectively have a change of heart, is for them to live behind walls away from other people and to be kept away from weapons and sharp objects. The walls are being built and the IDF is currently doing what it can to prevent the use of sharp objects. Gaza is a mental asylum for the pathologically xenophobic and assaultive.

Los Angeles

According to the chart here http://www.zillow.com/Charts.htm?chartDuration=1year&zpid=20786143
the median house price in Los Angeles reached $200,000 at the end of 2003 and is now at $593,000. In two and a half years. Unlike the Zillow estimates for individual houses, the medians are real and exact because they are based on sales. Bubble?

Suspicions

Of Foul Play
The world contains drugs which can do very complicated things like make a good baseball player into the best player of all time, and still remain undetectable. What are the chances that there are drugs that could achieve the much simpler task of making Ken Lay dead and remain undetectable?

The Danish Cartoons

And Harper's Monthly

I have just read the article you sent me by Art Spiegelman. Thank you for sending it. I think Spiegelman illustrates the contradictions and follies that liberals seem doomed to fall into in trying to deal with Muslims and the reactions to Muslims. The basic liberal stance always seems to be "Let's not be so patriotically insistent on the rightness of our side. Let's give a sympathetic hearing to the other side. They have a case and a point of view, and we should be making concessions to them. Let's be open-minded and try to see how this problem is also our fault."

In the past this point of view led the liberals into some really atrocious, indeed criminal, follies. Within our time horizon, it was the British left (Liberal still meant and means something else there) which felt that way about the understandable resentment the Germans felt about their defeat in World War One and the onerous terms the Allies had imposed on them at Versailles. So they were more than just sympathetic, they were openly supportive of Hitler and the Nazis. It was not until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War that a split developed within both British and French Lefts. The split came when the Communists in both countries took a clear anti-Fascist position, literally on orders from Moscow. Orwell writes about this in "Homage to Catalonia", which is a wonderful book on a number of levels. Even when the war and the blitz came, the British Left shut up out of prudence, but never recanted. The French Left, having subverted French rearmament, found themselves under German occupation.

Similarly when the Cold War came the American liberals were consistently conciliatory toward Communism and the Soviet Bloc, both at home and abroad. For example it has become a fixed truth that Joe McCarthy was an opportunist oppressor and a wackjob, which may well have been true. But it has never been answered whether he was nevertheless right that there was a coterie of Communists in the State Department. There is both some direct evidence and a lot of indirect evidence that there were.

Liberals sneered at the Truman Doctrine as "imperialism". It became a given that anti-Communism and democracy were opposites. As late as the presidency of Jimmy Carter, liberals were conciliating the Soviet Union in spite of it being a senescent police state. When popular anti-Communist movements sprang up in every Communist country, the Berlin Wall fell, and finally the Soviet Union itself dissolved, largely from public disgust with it and all its works, the liberals prudently shut up but did not recant.

The Muslims are an even harder sell for the left and liberals like Spiegelman. Spiegelman in the Harper's article you sent me is witty and affable and self-deprecating and concedes a bit in order to ingratiate himself and appear reasonable. But his case is clear. It is the Danish editors' fault that the Muslims rioted and boycotted and threatened and denounced and fatwa'ed and generally made fools of themselves in response to the Danish cartoons. After various goings and comings, the thrust of the article is the assignment of a given number of bombs to each of the cartoons. In the end he finds the problem to have been the cartoons, rather than the response to them. He refers sympathetically to the "double bind of the Danish Muslims in first being insulted by the cartoons and then told they didn't understand Western freedom of speech." Poor them.

He also misses no opportunity to characterize everyone less sympathetic to Islam than he is as "right wing" or "national front".

Spiegelman, like all liberal Muslim sympathizers, finds himself stuck with the thinnest of thin arguments. They have to find ways to defend undisguised intolerance and bigotry, oppression of women, gratuitous violence, terrorism, social narcissism, and rejection of secular values including democracy and personal freedom. But, like Spiegelman, they are undeterred. Evasion and smearing opponents may not be much of an argument but they are all Spiegelman's got, so that is what he uses.

Reflections on the Jews in France

The Jews have been both central and instrumental to the polarization of French society. The 20th Century started with the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus was a Jewish army officer who was falsely accused of espionage for Germany. Even though it was realized that the charge was not only not supported by evidence but untrue, the army went ahead with the court martial rather than face the embarrassment of withdrawing the charge. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island in Guiana for life. Like Watergate the case began to unravel and in the end Dreyfus was exonerated. In the course of it the novelist Emile Zola wrote "J'Accuse" which implicated everyone in power up to and including the premier.

It was a crisis for France and a trauma for the Jews. It split France into two factions, the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards. The issues between them were by no means limited to Dreyfus. The Dreyfusards stood for liberalism, tolerance, freedoms of speech and press, separation of church and state, and so on. The anti-Dreyfusards were the right, the peasants, the army, the church and the religious, the upper classes. The divisions either created or revealed by the Dreyfus affair persisted for generations. For example, Accion Francaise, the French fascist party, specifically arose from the anti-Dreyfusards.

In 1936 the Popular Front, a collection of leftist parties, won the elections and elected the head of the Socialist Party, Leon Blum, Premier. Under the Third Republic the Premier had far more power than now under the Fifth Republic and was much more like the British Prime Minister. Reactionary anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusard military officers like Petain were aghast that a Jew should rule France. It is not polite to mention that DeGaulle sat on the same general staff as Petain and his opinions were almost certainly no different. One should not mention that fact to anyone of French nationality under any circumstances, no matter how friendly or well-disposed.

When the Vichy regime was established under Nazi oversight, anti-Dreyfusards like Petain saw it as an opportunity to get even for the slights and indignities they had suffered under Dreyfusard rule, and having had progressive Dreyfusard policies shoved down their throats for a generation. Because of the conglomerate origin of the anti-Dreyfusards, anti-Semitism was a unifying policy for the right. Vichy consistently cooperated with the Nazis in arresting and deporting Jews to German death camps.

The French Jews were the most assimilated in Europe in 1900. They believed that anti-Semitism was a waning relic of the middle ages like feudalism, superstition, religious fanaticism, serfdom, ignorance, and illiteracy. This was not mindless reactionary Tsarist Russia which had only just freed its serfs, but liberal enlightened republican France. If widespread anti-Semitism appeared here, a century after the Revolution of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, then the "waning medieval relic" theory was wrong. If Jews were not safe in France, where could they be safe?

Among the journalists sent to cover the Dreyfus affair was a young Viennese Jew named Theodore Herzl. In reaction to what he saw in France (and also in Vienna) he wrote a book called "Die Judenstaat". It is generally regarded as the founding document of the Zionist movement. Israel was founded not only because the Jews were not safe in Russia and Poland, but also because they were not safe in France.

The shock of Jews being arrested and turned over to the Nazis by French police acting on orders of the French government has never gone away. There is a plaque on every elementary school in Paris commemorating the arrest and deportation of Jewish children by French police acting on behalf of the French state. Those plaques started being put up in 2004, sixty years after the fact. That delay is significant in that it shows not only the resistance of the French to acknowledging what they did, but also to their delaying until no one could be held to account for it. The plaques give a Gallic shrug to accountability.

Under the Fourth Republic, which had a large Dreyfusard influence, relations between France and Israel were excellent. Both countries had suffered under the Nazis and after 1954 both were at war with the Arabs, the French in Algeria, the Jews on all fronts. The famous victory in the Six Day War of 1967 was won with French-built Mirage fighter planes.

Then came DeGaulle and the Fifth Republic. DeGaulle made anti-semitic remarks in public (the infamous "stiff-necked domineering people" remark) and began a rapprochement with both the Arabs and the Soviets. Israel turned to the United States for both support and arms. The Gaullists have continued that policy to this day.

I do not know enough about France to say whether the Dreyfusard - Anti-Dreyfusard dichotomy could be said to still exist as more than a metaphor. But there is certainly no moment of discontinuity when one could say it died. The legacy of DeGaulle in the ruling Gaullist parties certainly suggests that it is not gone.

My impression is that few French Jews live outside big cities, particularly Paris. French Jews are even less observant than American Jews but are somewhat less assimilated. Those who are observant are more observant than their American counterparts. There is substantially no French equivalent of the American Reform and Conservative movements. What little there is consists of American ex-pats and their French spouses. It is my impression that many or even most of the small pret-a-porter distributors on rue Saint Denis and around Place de la Republique and rue du Temple are owned by Jews. None of the big haute couture places in the Seventh seem to be.

I should add that when I was in Paris in 1977 I was told that the overt anti-semitism encountered by French Jews came not from the Arabs but from the French. Whether that is still true I do not know.

Immigrating to

Canada

Interesting angle on immigration in the 'Wenatchee World', the subhead of which describes Wenatchee as "the buckle on the Apple Belt". An editorial strongly supported keeping free access to immigrant labor as absolutely necessary to the survival of the apple and cherry industries. A supporting letter to the editor observed that before there was an adequate supply of immigrants the local orchardists had to rely on "hippies and transients" to bring in the crops. The editorial acknowledged that there are indeed machines that will perform much of the work, but thought they were not acceptable because they are more expensive than cheap labor. Would anyone like to speculate whether the slimeballs at the 'Wenatchee World' selling out the national interest in favor of their own parochial interests are Republicans or Republicans?

An interesting sidelight is the fact that the apple-growing Okanogan Valley in Washington is directly continuous with the apple-growing Okanagan (sic - the spelling changes at the border) Valley in British Columbia. Through some economic miracle Canadian apple growers are able to harvest their apples without immigrant labor. Maybe Canada has a larger supply of hippies and transients? Also miraculously, though we are assured daily that it is physically impossible to seal the US- Mexican border against illegal immigrants, Canada has successfully sealed its border against them. Being unwilling to mar their lovely landscape with walls and border patrols, they have used employer sanctions instead. Jobs are not offered to illegals, which keeps them out. Could it be that someone is lying to us about why there are eleven million illegal immigrants in the US and what can and should be done about it? The likely candidates for perpetrators of this big lie are the Republicans and the Republicans.

We don't have to deport anybody. If we have serious employer sanctions that are enforced, there won't be any jobs for illegals and they will go home voluntarily. But this won't happen under the Republicans because their business owner constituents are making money hand over fist off the illegals. It won't happen under the Democrats either because they need the Hispanic vote to carry California, Texas, and by now several other states.

Immigration

Considerations
Shouldn't we be spending less effort keeping out guys named Jesus and more keeping out guys named Mohammed?

Chicago Politics

and Cats
My father used to say that in Chicago a dishonest politician was one who wouldn't stay bought. Cats are like that. You can bribe them and pamper them and they still don't give a damn about you.

Stuck Inside Wenatchee

with the Memphis Blues Again
In Wenatchee I saw "Angels in America". Contrary to what I expected from the DVD box, Meryl Streep has only a few (brilliant) cameos, as does Emma Thompson. Al Pacino plays the endlessly loathsome Roy Cohn - or rather he plays the endlessly loathsome Al Pacino.

The rest of the acting is done by a bunch of justifiably unknown actors, with two exceptions. Jeffrey Wright and Mary-Louise Parker justifiably won Golden Globe Awards for best supporting actor and actress in a mini-series.

One thing I liked immediately is that Tony Kushner, who wrote both the screenplay and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play it is based on, calls the people involved "homosexuals". "Gay" is both slang and a euphemism. If, as claimed, there is nothing wrong with it, it doesn't need a euphemism. If there is, a euphemism won't help.

Similarly I have no use for being a "Member of the Tribe",
nor even "Jewish". I am a Jew.

So too, are all too many of Kushner's characters, as it is set in New York. Though the movie opens with an above-the-clouds shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, it pans across the country to a lovely shot of a bronze statue of an angel in Central Park. Which moves slightly.

This is disconcerting. One of the things one hopes for in a movie adapted from a play is reliance on dialogue, acting, and story, and a relative freedom from car chases and special effects. Such hopes are dashed repeatedly in this thing. Floors and ceilings erupt with imaginary visions, ghosts of ancient ancestors wearing whiteface makeup appear in smoke and disappear in flames, and Emma Thompson appears in winged radiance suspended from wires like a summer stock Peter Pan. This movie may not have as much computer graphics as "King Kong" or "Jurassic Park", but it is in the chase.

I suspect what has happened is that as electronics have made special effects cheap enough to produce on legitimate theater stages, playwrighting has come to depend on it, and playwriting has begun to decline correspondingly. One thinks of the special effects in "Amadeus" and "Phantom of the Opera". O tempore, o mores.

Clearly Kushner had such things available and used them when "Angels in America" was a stageplay, and director also Mike Nichols also showed no restraint in using them. And not without reason. I kept wondering when this thing would end, as it began to descend into soap opera. It ran 5 minutes short of 3 hours. When I put the disk back in the box, I discovered that what I had seen was Part One. Of Two. According to IMD, the Internet Movie Database, there is another 3 hours of snooze to go with what I already saw.

Maybe it would have been more engaging if I had seen it in several episodes conveniently punctuated by commercials during which to pee or snack. But now that it is no longer being broadcast, DVD presentation as a movie is all that is available.

IMD's blurb says the play and movie are a political tract about the AIDS epidemic, as seen from the 1980's. I didn't see that it was. Various characters get sick, they go to hospitals and get sensitive, competent medical treatment. Unless there is some objection to the medical care or the amount of pharmaceutical research, and there wasn't, I don't see the political content. That theme may have been developed in the second, iron-pants, Part Two that I mercifully did not see.

I wondered about the characterization of homosexuals as angels. If it was intended as an upgrade from fairies, who are also supernatural winged persons, then it is witty and appropriate. If it is intended as an idealization then it is merely the latest in a long series of reversals of group bigotries. African-Americans went from Stepin Fetchit and Amos 'n' Andy to sexless, pious Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. Women became nurturing overworked saintly victims. Any even vaguely brown-skinned person who could by any stretch be called a villager became incapable of self-interest, prejudice, or ignorance. All of these are the same bigotries as before, transformed from hostility to condescension.

Homosexuals, like heterosexuals, are people who act on their sexual impulses. So are adulterers and people who open their raincoats to old ladies. There is nothing special about it, and nobody's impulses are any nobler than anyone else's. One is not made an angel by one's choice of orifice.

Wimping Out - Again

Stuck in Wenathcee
I had been stuck in Ellensburg more or less flat on my back for a week with an excruciatingly painful disk or nerve pinch or whatever physically happens when my back "goes out". Then I had recovered enough to travel and left Ellensburg. Ellensburg is Chico, but in a different state.

Alas, the ride to the next town proved much more demanding than it looked like it would be on the map - straight roads through farm country are not necessarily level as I had assumed. Though not as dramatic as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the gorge of the Columbia has a half-mile-wide steep sided picturesque inner canyon, but it also has an all-but-invisible-to-motorists outer canyon which is a fun, quick six miles down followed by six slow strenuous continuous miles back up to the plateau. And then one crosses the endless up and down of the Frenchman Hills. I arrived in George, Washington (much to no one's surprise, a major local crop is corn) at evening, barely hanging on.

There I learned I had been misinformed and there is no motel at George, not even a campground. Though beat, I was obliged to ride 10 miles to the next town, Quincy. When I got there it was after dark, almost 10, and I was exhausted, more so than I have been on this trip. Having been all but motionless the previous seven days was not an advantage.

I began to get painful cramps in my back, feet, and hands, but passed out on the bed before I got to savor them.

The next day was to have been a shorter easier one, but I began cramping even before I got to Wenatchee. In the motel room they spread all over my back and were accompanied by all but unendurable spasms in my legs. Not good.

With alte kocker-hood staring me in the face, I decided that I had over-taxed myself after the near atrophy of Ellensburg and that I would rest a few days and continue. Which is what I am doing.

A Major Change

In Plain Sight
but seemingly invisible to all, has happened in our understanding of Iraq. It has been a staple of the opposition to the war to argue that there was no connection between the secular Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein and the religious jihadis of Al Qaeda who perpetrated 9-11. The death of Al-Zarqawi proves otherwise. He is described as "a prince of Al Qaeda" and a lieutenant of bin Laden. No one seems to dispute that he was the leader of those fighting against the US and the Iraqi government.

No responsible person questions the legitimacy of the American campaign to destroy Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda either directly or indirectly have been responsible for 9-11, for the bombings of the Madrid subway, of the London tube, of the Bali nightclub, of the USS Cole, and for many other atrocities, entailing literally thousands of murders. The overthrow of their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan has not been questioned.

The argument that there was no connection or complicity between Al Qaeda and the Ba'ath regimes was not based on intelligence, only on assumptions. It is as though one were to insist that secular republican Italy could not have common purposes with the religious monarchical Vatican. Now we see, among the few facts that can ever reach the light of day in a war of covert organizations, that Al Qaeda leads the coalition of the remnants of the Ba'ath and the Sunni sectarians.

There is a significant silence on this subject coming from the opponents of the war. Perhaps because, without it, their argument that the war is unjustified crumbles.

The question becomes, "What should a president - any president - do whose country has been attacked at home? Should he wait for a second and a third and a fourth blow? Or should he use the armed forces to destroy the attackers before they can strike again?"

The recent arrests in Canada make clear that these are not idle questions.

Here I Am Again

From Ellensburg
When I stopped at Chico on the bicycle ride up here, Harvey wondered aloud whether bicycling long distances was not "a young man's game". I sardonically thought to myself, "So when should I do it, if not now? Later maybe?" Those remarks come back to me now here in Ellensburg, Washington where I am laid up in a motel with a bad back. I have lain here a week now and I hope to leave tomorrow. But the discouragement of being transformed from a sturdy adventurer to an enfeebled little old man is palpable.

Stupidly the harm to my back has again come not from bicycling but from sitting in a straight backed chair obsessing on the keyboard and screen at a hotel lobby internet connection at Yakima. That is precisely how it has happpened three times before. I am a screen junkie. It sounds cute, but compulsive behavior carried to self-destructive extremes is not amusing. I have gotten a little notebook computer shipped to me, which will not cure me of surfing endlessly, but will enable me to do it lying safely on my back.

So now I will be able to attend to this blog again.

Our Time

Our Lives

Ross: Hatikvah means "the hope"

Jack: I know, but how could one have the strength to hope for anything after Bergen-Belsen? I don't think I could have maintained a frame of mind to care about life. There were those who threw themselves on the wire.

Ross: and those that survived to fight again.

Jack: I remember the line attributed to Admiral Halsey at Midway as his pilots were taking off to fight superior Japanese forces, "Where do they find such men?"

Maybe even ordinary pishers like us are capable of great things when confronted with immensities. As Boomers, we have never really been called on to protect anything more serious than our standard of living.

It is strange to have lived a life devoid of both hardship and heroism.

The Stock Market

My Seven Figure Income
I did pretty well in the market last year. I had an income in seven figures. Of course four of them were the cents, the dollar sign, and the decimal point.

And sure enough...

Eighteen years later
It has become a long time ago and it is not the least bit romantic that it has.

At Edible Complex

Here is a note I found in a notebook dated June 29, 1988, a year after Patty left
How did I get here? My life is like a singularity compressed out of time and space by my own collapse, utterly cut off from the universe by an impenetrable horizon of my own thoughtless making. I am so invisible that you could stare right at me, talk to me for an hour, and never see me. Still I am here. I glow so faintly that I can only be seen with one's eyes and reason turned aside.

I am a cliche of alienation. Literally a government clerk, a cinder of a failed marriage - burnt to a fine ash of solitude and indifference, an orphan, a former life, hoping for nothing, expecting nothing. So much has been lost and forgotten that even anger fails me. I may metamorphose at any moment.

My evenings have become so empty that I haunt coffee shops meant for student lesbians and lesbian students - the Rockridge in the summer of 1988. Just to write it so, in hopes of it sounding romantic and a long time ago, chills me with the near prospect of when it will be a long time ago.

Flash Fiction

The Divorce
I sat on my unmade bed, longing for something but not knowing quite what. I began to cry. In the evenings there was a dull ache where she used to be. I have to get out of here, I said to myself, I have to go home. Then I remembered that I was home.

Sincere Translation?

The Starry Banner
Is there a reason the Spanish version of the national anthem is called "Nuestro Himno" rather than "La Bandera Estrellada"?

In Pendency

Still Here
As so often in my life I am on hold, waiting to resolve minor matters before I can get about the serious business of my life. For me that is bicycling. I mean to ride far and wide.

But first I have to go to the pharmacy and the post office and to REI and the optometrist and the bank. I have to put asphalt on the sidewalk so passing litigants don't fall over a tripping hazard my redwood tree, Gus, has created. And on and on. But my day will come.