Tag Archives: Writing

FLIGHT 192

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Dina Meyer

AVOID

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.

L.A. NOIR

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John Buntin

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.

NO HISTORY

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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.

H.L. Mencken

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MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR

Salient in the life of this journalist with a name is asking what type of American he was. Mencken came from Germany and during World War One and World War Two he was pro- German and pro-Hitler. He lost his newspaper job with the Baltimore papers in 1941. Apparent German actions again other peoples were dismissed because they were not Germans. Carrying on with that antiquated thinking (feudalism or before) into the Twentienth Century makes Mencken an unexplained throwback, and given the quality of writing in the book, a throw away.

The book presents an autobiography of part of Mencken’s life. I have no idea how much he drank, womanized, or contributed to established art and literary politics. The book describes some of this editorial activities, but does not set human beings in business except to say this happened that happened and the reasons for any disagreements – the other person was Jewish, or was a woman, or would not do what Mencken advised. Mencken dismissed film and California completely without realizing it dramatized American short stories many times better than the writer could put it on a page.

The book was Mencken’s final writing effort with time qualities reflected in the writing. It tells its story sloppily, if at all. It appears Mencken chained himself to a typewriter and merrily typed. There is no sense a wordsmith was at work, edited or believed the manuscript needed further work. The book’s editor, Jonathan Yardley did his best, but elementary flaws flow throughout the writing.

A few observations early in the book should be noted:

“…I am convinced that writing verse is the best of all preparations for writing prose.
I makes the neophyte look sharply to his words, and improves the sense of rhythm and tone-color – in brief, that she of music which is at the bottom of all sound prose…” Page 5-6)

“Under the influence of my father…I emerged into sentience with an almost instinctive distrust of all schemes of revolution and reform. They were…only signs and symptoms of a fundamental hallucinations…the hallucination that human nature could be changed by passing statutes, and preaching gospels – that natural law could be repealed by taking thought.” (page 34)

“…my interest in Roosevelt 1 was always born of delight in the mountebank, not of belief in the prophet.” (page 34)

Work at home: “We … wondered why none of our colleagues had hit on the device of staying way for their offices…we escaped the burden of listening to countless visitors who infest such places – mainly authors trying to sell their manuscripts, not on the merits

thereof but by selling talk. Virtually all our business was done by mail, and it was thus possible for us to do it at our own convenience, and with expedition. On my trips to and from New York I read more manuscripts than the average editor could get through in ten times the time in his office. It was not until long afterward that I discovered that a number of English magazine editors had practiced keeping clear of their offices before we thought of it.”(Page 50)

Paying writers: The Saturday Evening Post’s “…editor…not only paid much higher prices for manuscripts…but he also paid off once a week. As a result [he] got first whack at virtually all the better fiction of the time…” (page 51)

Personal responsibility/memory: “After [Zoe Atkin’s] removal to New York, she let it be known that [Reedy] had not only discovered her but also seduced her, and in the course of time she pushed back this catastrophe back in time until in the end he was depicted as her undoing when she was but sixteen years old. This, if true, put it in 1902, when Reedy himself was forty.”(Page 68)

1920’s Greenwich Village: “…the Village, like the Paris Left Bank, was much less literary artistic than sexual, and most of its male denizens lived on women. The typical menage consisted of a widow or spinster from some small-town in the Middle West, come east to spend her dead husband’s or father’s money and see life, and a bogus painter or pulp- magazine fictioneer who let her feed, clothe and love him.”(page 95)

Any sort of writer putting together an autobiography would have given thought to organization. Little does Mencken’s story at the typewriter evince such expansive thinking – just put together antedotes loosely. What lacks is the potential for an authoritative description of the literary artistic scene on the East Coast i.e. the market Mencken was involved with. Mencken should have stepped back to write the Big Picture. But he could not escape his profession, journalism and its need to advance facts (and Mencken’s opinions) in detail without describing the setting, or telling any reasons. Influences (other than getting drunk), the environment (Mencken did not believe important) and competition (society) – did not writers know one another? As an editor did he not know writers talked and exchanged ideas, concepts and reactions?

So this book falls short in its organization and in its writing.

TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF THE SUPREME COURT

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Sammy Alito’s draft opinion to overrule Roe vs. Wade argues, “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision including the one on which defenders of Roe…now chiefly rely – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

God help us! And God Bless the Founding Fathers! The 1788 Constitutional Conventions of the states reveal the legislative intent and legislative history about enumerated and unenumerated rights and freedoms, according to James Madison. Madison was a complete, recognizable authority of the Constitution in 1788. In 1789 Madison wrote what became the Bill of Rights.

The Virginia Constitutional Convention is the most complete record. A Bill of Rights came up in June 1788. Opponents of the Constitution used every argument to block the paper: Should there be a constitutional ratification conditioned on a Bill of Rights being adopted? Or should there be ratification plus recommended supplementary amendments? Madison did not like either proposal. He disengaged ratification from conditions, and he diminished the value of the subsequent amendments.

Enumerated and unenumerated rights were hot topics, cooled by the best judge/justice in America and in the English speaking world. Edmund Pendleton knew the American people were the sovereign and that every freedom and right could not be enumerated – too many situations, too many people living over a expanded land of liberty. Pendleton recommended the negative: “Declare the principle as more safe than the Enumeration.”

James Madison did so in the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Rights and freedoms enumerated in the Constitution stay with Americans, the sovereign. No Congress and not the Executive, and no Supreme Court justice can “deny or disparage” unenumerated rights “retained by the people.”

So boys and girls, study the 1788 Constitutional Conventions. Americans have enumerated and unenumerated rights. References follow:

10 Doc His of the Rat of the Constitution, Virginia, vol. 3, St His Soc of Wisconsin, Madison, 1993, June 24, 1788, p. 1520, Madison at ratifying convention: “If an enumeration be made of our rights, will it not be implied that everything omitted,
is given to the General Government? Has not the Honorable Gentleman [Patrick Henry] himself, admitted, that an imperfect enumeration is dangerous?” David John Mays, Ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, Uni. Press of Virginia, Char., 1967, vol. 2, p. 533, Pendleton to Richard Henry Lee; Oliver Ellsworth, Landholder VI, 3 Doc His of the Rat of the Const, Connecticut, St His Soc of Ws, Madison, 1978, December 10, 1787, p. 481; PJM, vol. 10, Uni. Chi, Chicago, 1977, p. 315, 317, George Lee Tuberville to JM, December 11, 1787, make sure enumerated rights not listed not “surrendered.” House Annals, August 17, 1789, p. 783-784.

Next write another draft opinion and submit it to the sovereign, the American people, for their ratification.

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BEGAT

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DAVID CRYSTAL – RECOMMENDED

This book attempts to tell how various editions of the Bible influenced the evolution of English. It is incomplete; the text could be longer, much longer.

The text introduces the reader to the subject, succinctly refreshing readers/writers to the subject matter and its sensitizes writers to the contents. The book is organized by idioms, phrases and verses, like it is a guide explaining business or management practices. [Robert Townsend, Up the Organization was one of the first types of this book.] Hence Begat becomes a valuable quick resource for references to Biblical idioms, phrases and verses, sometimes from the original usage to the present.

There are omissions. Before 1559 the English Bible was in prose and paragraphs. Thereafter, the Bible was in verse. Its style was greatly influenced by poetry and the playwrights of Elizabethan England. Prose and poetry obviously differ. Modern prose stresses the verb; poetry has always been about using and associating nouns and sometimes using specific forms and linguistic devices. Prose seems much more accepting to change of grammar, use of words, shifting words and odd word order.

The original language of the Volgate Bible, in the fourth century from the Greek, was Latin, with its five declensions. Modern day English has three declensions – subjective, possessive and objective. Most modern English speakers nail the subjective declension but botch or ignore the other two. Miss declensions in Latin, German, Russian or languages stressing nouns and get the word order wrong, and the student fails!

In Begat there is nothing about the prose/poetry shifts in English, when the Bible was being translated and through time to today.

WARLORD

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Carlo D’Este

This excellent history/biography uses Winston Churchill as a model to show British ways of war, the British mindset during war and British systems of making war. This biography is enlightening yet unsympathetic to Churchill and British diverting methods as World War II dragged on. The book overall tells the World War II perspective of the British.

For a long time before D-Day Churchill was against any landings in Northern Europe. He proposed and applauded Anzio in Italy which was greatly pared down (five divisions to one and reduced logistics and supply). {Politicians have long been deceived by U.S. Grant’s amphibious landing south of Vicksburg in May 1863 and eventually surrounding and obtaining the surrounding of that river town.] Churchill devised and held to the idea that taking over Greek islands in 1944 in the Aegean Sea was the masterstroke that would end the War in Europe. He insisted Rome be taken in June 1944 rather than attack and weaken the German army. Churchill opposed the American invasion of Marseilles in August 1944, opening a second supply route for American armies: Forty (40) percent of the supplies for those armies came through Marseilles.

Meanwhile, the British used Montgomery (seemingly the best general the British could produce). Churchill did not like other generals and summarily dismissed them. Between August 1944 and November 1944, Montgomery lengthened the war by losing opportunities to destroy German armies at Falaise Gap in Normandy; he did a risky, men-wasting incursion of Belgium and Holland called Market Garden – supplies had to go up one long road; he failed to open the Scheldt Estuary, depriving the allies of using the port of Antwerp for three months.

So the British fought World War II using men expensively, and Winston Churchill was a Warlord, not a cabinet position of the British government, but akin to Warlords of yore commanding armies, promoting strategies, wanting to join the fight, always in political control, urging actions leading to non-profitable military measures, sanctioning incompetence from military underlines, and craving compliance from the British people and every person in government for each of his decisions.

MORGAN

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Jean Strouse, AVOID

This fat, prolix book suffers from the weight it carries. It is the Life And Times of JP Morgan, meaning that the world JP Morgan knew and grew up into should be told in this volume.

Immediately, the times of JP Morgan are misrepresented and erroneous by relying on cliches. Cliche #1 is Alexander Hamilton prepared to use government spending to support industry. Jefferson and Andrew Jackson disliked government and government spending and tried not to do that. Note the national debt under Jackson nearly disappeared, but canals and roads were built. Observe also that the United States had more miles of railroad track than Europe by 1855.

Relying on Hamilton/Jefferson-Jackson distinctions when writing about the 1850s misses issues, points and the whole political and social situation. This biographer is a complete novice about writing history. Either that or the times of JP Morgan, indeed, allowed him to know nothing of issues giving rise to the American Civil War. That is a too secluded life for America’s foremost banker.

GENESIS OF QANON

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Hunter Thompson originated QAnon. He advanced the Thompson Report concept in a book or periodical proposal to his publisher in 1968, The Gonzo Papers, Vol II, p. 15-16. Thompson called it root-hog journalism:

[15] “We have to keep in mind that various outrages are in fact being planned, and that I probably wouldn’t have much trouble getting a vague battle plan…but of course that wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to mix up fact and fantasy so totally that nobody could be sure which was which. We could bill it as a fantastic piece of root-hog journalism – The Thompson Report, as it were. This courageous journalist crept into the sewers of the American underground and emerged with a stinking heap of enemy battle plans – and just in time, by god, [16] to warn the good guys what to watch for. Oh, I would have a ratlin good time with it…I could even compost a fictitious interview with Guru Bailey, the Demo chieftain, during which I try to warn him of this impending disaster and he reacts first in anger, then with tears, throwing down hooker after hooker of gin during our conversation. And a private chat with Johnson, who heard of my dread information and summoned me to the White House for a toilet-side interview with two recording secretaries – a bracing fag and a nervous old woman from New Orleans – taking notes on a voice writer(s) – echoing my words, and Lyndon’s, for the private record.

…(The Case of the Naked Colonel…did you ever see that? A fantastic story and absolutely true..a Pentagon colonel found naked in his car, passed out on the steering wheel with a pistol in each hand… no explanation.)

…Richard Nixon… calls me at my Chicago hotel, during the course of my research and offers me $20,000 for my information…then a meeting with Nixon and his advisors, they want to exploit the freak-out…but an argument erupts when one elf Nixon’s aide makes a crude remark about his daughter – undertones of drugs and nymphomania, Julie, caught in the 14th green at Palm Springs with a negro caddy at midnight, the caddy now in prison, framed on a buggy count.”

It is shameful that the Republicans can originate nothing of their own. The Reps have to reach into the 1960s and Hunter Thompson’s prowess for their journalistic ideas to produce fantasies. The Nixon fact might be raw in 1968, but today anything goes, do your own thing, I have freedom. Every Rep. believes that. They bare all and welcome any overt violence by fragile white people, exhibiting truly hippy behaviors like those manifested during the 1960s in San Francisco., and later elsewhere. Indeed, most of the participants of January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC looked like hippies – unshaven, unclean, sneering, uncontrollable, likely on meth…

Thompson’s media proposal is being used by the Reps today.

DAWN OF BELLE EPOQUE, TWILIGHT OF BELLE EPOQUE

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MARY MCAULIFEE

These books tell of a completely defeated France (1870), loser of the Franco-Prussian War, and for the next 44 years France’s imagination became culture and industry reinventing its thinking, culture and society, and somewhat its politics. Those achievements in the Arts, in literature, education and scientific endeavors (Pasteur, Pierre, Marie Curie) drove France into the Twentieth Century.

The innovation of this history is an original telling in its approach, beginning in 1870 and year after year going through 1918 (end of World War One). Culture enters the story and artists, including industrialists, struggle for recognition, succeeding as years pass. Politics and foreign affairs are included but not emphasized. Georges Clemenceau, a friend of all the painters and writers, gets the most attention.

The text is easy to follow. Its argument builds with humor, and terrific antidotes, while the Art, society and politics progress. One wonders how Paris was livable. Of the many histories I’ve encountered, this is a brilliant survey presentation. Its style gives the essence of France and the French in a studied, flippant, and charming manner.