Agent Dina Meyer works for the FBI and has a corner office, which suggests she’s high up in the FBI hierarchy. The crime involved is committed during the day and is public.
While Agent Dina is on a transcontinental flight, her seat mate is unusually chatty. That doesn’t raise alarm bells for FBI Agent Dina. Talk and chats draft to a shoe dropping: Agent Dina’s family has been kidnapped in their Los Angeles home and obviously Agent-Dina is supposed to supply, delete or deliver the goods so her family will be released. I assume Agent Dina is familiar with FBI procedures during a kidnapping and when they are public; they can end tragically.
What’s Agent Dina do in the movie? She goes along with the kidnapping plot, following all instructions of the chatty seat mate. It’s a big drama about Agent-Dina’s predicament and the fate of her family. In the end Agent-Dina gets a gun and shoots bad guys for another sappy movie where characters are witless until a gun can be drawn.
Imagine the same movie based on reality. Agent-Dina hears of her family’s kidnapping and immediately silences the chatty seat mate. Agent Dina calls the stewardess while she restrains and secures the chatty seat mate. Agent-Dina identifies herself, FBI Agent, and issues commands: All communications between the jet and the ground cease; the plane has a mechanical problem and is returning to LA; using the plane’s radio Agent-Dina calls the FBI; on alert, the Bureau send out swat-teams to Agent-Dina’s house which is not far from the FBI offices in the radiator building in Westwood. [Agent-Dina’s house is an upscale westside landmark with an expansive million dollar kitchen – one wall of big matching stainless steel appliances useful when holding a party for hundreds].
The remainder of the real story is how the FBI unravels the plot which extends to Agent Dina’s work at the FBI. Bad guys are killed or arrested.
The end of the film is a party in Agent-Dina’s kitchen which substitutes for the movie’s wrap party.
Written in a journalistic style, this history supports the notion of Los Angeles becoming a city by accident. Primarily, there was no law enforcement. Crime rates were high. For a long time Los Angeles Police were paid off by various sorts of law breakers: Gamblers, smugglers, white slavers; and white collar criminals – rule breakers, favor-for-favor enthusiasts, and rich or influential persons taking advantage. Los Angeles seemed a city (and county) which was unmanageable and unpoliced. Counting the population growth was a feat, let alone policing with an undermanned police department.
Robert Parker became a Los Angeles policeman in the 1920s. He was thoroughly incorruptible. His primary focus was overcoming organized crime coming from eastern cities: Mickey Cohen. Cohen was elusive and laws were not enforced, like paying taxes to the IRS. Cohen died owning the federal government more than $500,000, yet he was in and out of prison (mostly out), living the high life (people gave him gifts). His attributable income for a year exceeded the amount of taxes he ever paid in taxes for a decade. He never ratted. He was smilingly approachable to the press but vague with answers to committees and to courts. During a Congressional hearing Cohen was accused of threatening a man “to put his lights out.” Cohen’s response: “Look it, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not an electrician.”
Parker like many crusaders was blind to the changing population and to social forces. 1950s Los Angeles was not white as it was during the 1920s when Parker joined the force. World War Two brought in hundreds of thousands of African-Americans; the Mexican-American population grew as rapidly. Parker did not change his views of either minority and their criminal ways. NOTE the book only mentions organizational shifts in the Police Department from 1930 to 1970. So Parker’s management abilities are difficult to evaluate.
From 1910 to 1960 the book gives enough detail to tell the foregoing story (pages 1 – 300). But three events – Watts Riots 1965 – Kennedy Assassination 1968 and Rodney King and those riots (1991) are presented in 46 pages. The point the author tries to make is Parker’s ordinances and regulations isolating the Police Chief from the whims of the Los Angeles City Council were changed in 1992. Thereafter, Daryl Gates (presented as incompetent but scored well on texts) was removed.
The American Civil War in Missouri, 1864-1865, did not end in 1865. Violence spread across the center of the country and west, and ended later. Most of the behaviors held by Americans in 1865, resulted in quick resorts to violence, arising from unsettled conditions.
An explanation of why this occurred is told in The Collapse of Price’s Raid, Mark Lause. Along with a prequel, that book tells of battles in Missouri during the Civil War. Every word is as accurate as can be stated. The biggest drawbacks are (1) the numbers of players – who led these men in each skirmish or raid, (2) what they were thinking or what they believed, and (3) where each encounter happened and (4) the sense of the battle. Specifically, there are no maps and no diagrams indicating where attackers and defenders were. From the words of the book alone, the Confederate forces were wastefully expended; captured Union fighters might be executed. Of course, the Union prevailed.
The most telling statement about Missouri of those years and afterward was in the last paragraph of the book:
…the peace that settled over the western border also required peace among the Confederates and peace among the Unionists as well. And that mandated was, for most whites, a blessed forgetfulness about the real issues and experiences of the Civil War. (emphasis supplied, p.194)
There was NO HISTORY. If men who did the fighting kept everything untold for 40 or 50 years and died with those experiences, without challenging, discussing and coming to some sense of what actually happened, little was learned and nothing was gained from the Civil War. What passed to succeeding generations were made up stories and fantasies about feats, deeds, glorious times and burdensome oppressions and phantoms that the fighting men generated and reenforced years after the fighting, and told to succeeding generations. The Collapse of Price’s Raid is a book which explains why the Confederacy did not succeed. Divisions among Confederate soldiers and raiders were as deep and rank, as those with the enemy, or between the rich and poor today.
Today, on the Left in America made up facts and stuff from LBJ’s Great Society plus the Vietnam War (largely forgotten) form the basis for what proponents envisioned that America should be today. These people are satisfied with benign neglect. Anyone proposing change like Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton are villains. (Clinton less so.) Their moves to get people away from comfort zones, and country going forward were significant during the 1980s and 1990s.
On the Right appears a more ludicrous set of facts and thoughts. Some of the proposals want to take America back one hundred years, to the years of jazz, partner dancing and snappy band music and movies, but no pensions and no social programs. Those years left Americans distrustful and suspicious of their neighbors. Americans were identified by the country where
their parents or grandparents came from, e.g. Irish, Italian, Swedish, German, Greek, Pole. Minorities were a smaller part of the population and marginalized. Today minority populations, put all together, constitute a sizable minority.
Who wants to wonder today about a person’s country of origin, if living here and being productive is the outcome? Returning to the thinking of the 1920s ain’t going to help America go forward.
For the United States having its population thinking diverse things about supposedly accepted facts and incidences makes governing more difficult. Americans seem to chose the course of the Missouri soldiers after the Civil War – not at peace with one another and forgetful of the facts in the past, and facts going forward. It is the role of politicians to rectify and smooth differences about facts, not trumpet and promote every erroneous interpretation of facts or documents. Wrong facts are not so cherished when they become principle and can never be changed – and ideas can never be changed? – and nothing can ever be changed?
The value of books like The Collapse of Price’s Raid is to set out facts, so everything can be changed and considered. Learning and collection of facts present circumstances, plus time alone forces thoughts and attitudes of human beings to change.
Congratulations to Cybill Shepart, James Brolin, Pam Grier, the writer and the producer.
Being Rose portrays fairly and accurately end of life-elderly issues from the perspective of the dying person (the character of Rose, Cybill Shepard). The movie suggests to Americans elder care responsibilities, intervention but more independence. At the start of the movie Rose is outside her home, and she disdainfully says, “This is my life,” meaning the emptiness of materialism. She tries to make up with an estranged son in a distant city; he is a self-centered jerk. She wants to avoid burdening a new love interest in her life, a short life ahead: “I have nothing to give you,” she tells James Brolin. The audience gets the impression that she dies on her own terms after she feels water of a mountain creek on her feet.
Europeans have been lying to the world – green this, green that, save the planet, prevent heat from CO2, we’re following the Paris Accords, on, on and on, etc, etc. and etc. The Europeans are hardly advanced in preventing the heating of the planet.
The News of 2022 supports this view. The Europeans don’t seem to have done, do-do. Nuclear power supposedly produces clean electricity, no harm except the rosy glow of radiation, and deconstruction costs of very hazardous waste. Natural gas is supposed to save Europe. Burning it produces far fewer emissions than almost every other abundant fossil fuel. People disapprove of natural gas because the means of attaining it, and it still produces too many emissions.
So the energy-hungry Europeans are supposed to use natural gas from Russia, unacceptable supplier, but now might not meet their pollution, CO2/climate goals. The Europeans are slackers while proclaiming their virtues. Their energy sources should be more secure and more available, if the Europeans had followed their-own advice and met their promises: The so-called energy crisis in Europe over the upcoming winter would be less alarming.
California is on a hurried path to a green economy, but the Europeans provide a poor example. California will not build a bullet train soon of any functionally. That train is scheduled to make all the stops the Amtrak currently makes. As time goes on it, seems Americans will rely on petroleum products for most energy until 2050. e.g. there will not be sufficient recharging stations on highways; there will be inadequate electrical storage facilities in remote locations. In California much of the electric grid needs replacing. Current solar panels are not as efficient as advertised. Reinvestments in solar panels bought today will have to be made again in ten or fifteen years. And, unfortunately in the United States and other countries, going green means crime – criminals attack and dissemble green equipment and sell the materials individually.
As the Europeans have proven, expecting the world to be green soon will be delayed. Europeans will use Russian natural gas when it becomes acceptable; apparently the cost of going green prevents people of choosing green. And next the Chinese. They don’t give a hoot about going green. They burn all fossil fuels and have already poisoned their land so thoroughly that China is unable to feed itself.
muymue 