Mitt's memory

I heard the story of Mitt Romney and his memory lapse at an incident of bullying. The story is he and some fellow high school classmates held down a boy with longish blond hair, and Mitt cut the boy’s hair. Mitt says he doesn’t remember the incident. I'm the same age as Mitt and while I never assaulted a classmate in such a physical fashion, in those unenlightened days I mocked an effeminate boy, which made others laugh at his expense. I carry the guilt to this day. I’ve never forgotten a cruelty done to me, nor any cruelty I did to another. They tend to stick in my mind. I’ve even had to purge myself to a therapist about the ones that cause me the most guilt.

So Mitt “doesn’t remember that specific incident.” Maybe it’s because his life was so full of such “pranks” that the haircut assault was just one in a long string of acts committed against others, and having no conscience he has dismissed it from his memory. As for lying about it, I understand why he wouldn’t come out and say, “I was an asshole, I admit it.”  That would go against the holier-than-thou, purer-than-pure image Mitt tries to project of himself: family man, husband and father, businessman, ruthless when need be, but always aware of the bottom line. “I enjoy firing people,” he once said, to which he can now add, “I enjoy bullying people.”

When I remember back on things that make me feel guilty I tend to remember them as if I’m looking at myself from outside my body. It's a false sense of memory, perhaps a way to deal with the guilt. There are many things I don’t remember at all. My brother is good at telling me things I said years ago that I can't remember in any shape or form. Maybe I don't remember those because they didn’t make me feel guilty.

I’ve groped for a way to explain the ways of memory, but came across a perfect example in Ben Hecht’s 1963 collection of essays, Gaily, Gaily, about his time as a cub reporter just before World War I:

“. . . remembering is a shifty process. Since memory is my collaborator in these pages, I pause for a look at it. No more illogical and evasive co-worker exists. It is not to be coaxed or scolded into action. Although memory is as much part of me as the features on my face, it has seemingly divorced itself from me, and retired to some lonely attic, without a stairway leading to it. It is odd that so common an experience as memory should be mysterious. . . . I remember things mistily. There are sometimes brightly lighted little areas, like a well-kept playground. But more often, events stripped  of words signal in a denuded landscape, ‘Here we are, the proofs of your existence. Come have a look at us again.’”

Unless Mitt hit his head or took a memory-blocking drug like Versed before his press conference I wouldn't think he’d forget an assault. It may be an embarrassment to him, a memory that he'd rather not admit to, like mine of taunting a gay classmate, or most likely, it’s a lie to prevent having to own up to it. He might not be embarrassed. But I'm sure an advisor or two told him that in 1964 holding a boy down and cutting his hair may have been considered a prank, but in 2012 it’s gay-bashing. At any rate, he gave a sort of half-assed apology for pulling pranks, which means he remembers some memory that had been put in the “lonely attic, without a stairway leading to it.”

Happy birthday, Jack Bruce and David Byrne

Jack Bruce of Cream is 69 today.



David Byrne is 60 today.



Happy birthday to both!

More Fotonovel: City on the Edge of Forever

A couple of weeks ago I showed an excerpt from a Fotonovel, a paperback book set up like a comic book with photographs, overlaid with speech balloons. The excerpt was from a  Mork and Mindy volume I found in a thrift store. Today I went back to the same thrift store and found another, this time a Star Trek Fotonovel, a 1977 version of Harlan Ellison's acclaimed "City on the Edge of Forever," broadcast.

I couldn't scan the whole book, so I selected the sequence where Kirk and Spock appear in 1930, and meet Edith.

Within a few years of the publication of this book the VCR became widely used. Star Trek episodes became available on tape for home use, dooming the Fotonovel forever.

Happy birthday, Donovan and Dave

Both Donovan Leitch and Dave Mason are 66 today.





Happy birthday!

The glam that am

The new issue of Vanity Fair came in the mail today, and I was disappointed. Lawrence Schiller's outtakes of his nude Marilyn photo shoot is the cover feature, but what skin there is is so covered it would get about a PG-rating in a movie. We've all seen Marilyn's famous calendar picture, and the photos in VF don't come close.

The idea behind the photo shoot, according to Schiller, is that Marilyn was trying to get Fox to pay more attention to her, and quit giving all the resources to Elizabeth Taylor. By coincidence, another magazine arrived yesterday with a cover and photos of Taylor. Lifestories is brand new. This is the first issue, sent to my wife as a sample to get her to subscribe. It's kind of thin, but has some good pics.

The cover photo is of Taylor from 1973. A fantastic portrait of the young Taylor is below, from the February 21, 1949 issue of Life, photographed by the one-and-only Philippe Halsman. The thing that amazes me about this picture is that Taylor in the caption is said to be one week shy of her 17th birthday. So when this picture was taken she was 16-years-old! Throw the cuffs on me, sheriff...there's jailbait in the area. Hell, this is practically child porn!
 

Life was on top of the glamour world, with many covers and interior cheesecake and pretty girl photos, starlets, models, movie stars...they liked the pretty ones (they sold magazines, after all.)

These two pictures of Rita Hayworth are some sexy photos that show virtually nothing beyond some leg. But Hayworth is posed provocatively. In both she's on a bed, in both wearing lingerie. They were popular with servicemen during World War II, and Life at one point called Hayworth “the love goddess.”

 1945

 1941 

 Life even considered the 1941 picture the great pin-up picture of all. Maybe it isn't the greatest, but it definitely holds up, even after 71 years.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from the Life website, offering up these previously unpublished photos of Marilyn Monroe from about 1950, where she's wearing more clothing than she is in the Schiller pictures. (They were probably inspired to show them in answer to the Vanity Fair hype surrounding their own unpublished pictures.) Even though Marilyn is in the very early stages of her movie career it's obvious from these photos that whatever that "it" is that movie stars have, she had "it." Despite her star status Marilyn was never really taken all that seriously during her career. Elizabeth Taylor had the meaty dramatic roles, but Marilyn was considered a sex symbol, not a real actress. I don't know about that. I'm sure the two wouldn't have ever switched jobs. Can you see Elizabeth Taylor in Some Like It Hot? Or Marilyn in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Maybe Marilyn didn't care for her being categorized as a sex symbol, but sex symbols come and go all the time, and yet there's only one Marilyn Monroe. It's too bad she died young, but her legacy is assured; forever young, forever sexy.

 

Copyright © 1941, 1945 , 2012 Time-Life

Stolen valor in Utah

My home state, Utah, has had a couple of recent incidents of what is called "stolen valor," where people claim military honors that are undeserved. The latest is with a man named Dave Groves,* 67, who claims to have been a POW in Vietnam. He said he was with an airborne unit, captured and held captive by the North Vietnamese for six months after his unit was ambushed. He said he escaped and hid in the jungle for two weeks before being rescued by a Marine patrol. Groves was part of a dinner on April 13 held for ex-POW's, which got a lot of local media attention.

The Salt Lake Tribune did a search through the Freedom of Information Act and got Groves' service record, which showed he was not in Vietnam during his time of service. He spent his two years in the Army in the United States. Groves denies the newspaper's findings. He says it's a mistake, but if we believe the official record then he's been outed as another liar who is trying to puff himself up as a hero.

Do guys like that think they won't get caught? If so, they haven't heard the story of Douglas Stringfellow, who was a one-term Congressman from Utah,1952-54, who was also busted for stolen valor.

From the Utah Historical Quarterly Fall 1967 by Janet Burton Seegmiller:

“. . . Douglas R. Stringfellow . . .had won the First District seat in 1952 largely through his stirring tales of heroism during World War II. Stringfellow had become paralyzed while serving with the U.S. Army Air Corps in France, but he began embellishing his war story as he retold it to Scout groups and young people's gatherings until he had invented his participation in a dangerous Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission behind enemy lines, an officer's commission, and several faith-promoting incidents in which his life was saved. Not only did Stringfellow share his story at dozens of meetings but the stories were also repeated by Mormon Church leaders and written into church lessons for young people, and he was honored by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the top ten young men in America. His election to Congress in 1952 showed the strength of his popularity, but during the 1954 campaign his fabrication unraveled, and under pressure from the leadership of the LDS church and the state Republican Party, he confessed and withdrew from the campaign.

. . . In reviewing Stringfellow's career, political scientist Frank Jonas wrote, "If anyone had dared to attack Stringfellow either on his war story or his veteran status, the anger of the electorate would have turned on the accuser and not on the accused..." The congressman had evoked considerable sympathy not only in Utah but also wherever he spoke across the nation.

Recognizing the situation, the Democratic Party had been gathering evidence of Stringfellow's hoax for many months; members of labor unions and veterans' organizations and a few newspapermen were also heavily involved. The party and [Stringfellow's political opponent Walter] Granger did not want to take the initiative to expose the congressman but were willing to assist others. Granger wrote to a Gunnison [Utah] party member on September 13, 1954, ‘We have definite proof that Stringfellow's heroic story is a fabrication of his own mind and he did not do the things he has taken credit for--I am giving you this information in order that you may be able to meet some of the arguments in his favor that you may run into.’”

After being exposed Stringfellow went into broadcasting (using pseudonyms), a job he'd held for a couple of years after the war. He died young in 1966 at age 44.

Jason Chaffetz, who is one of Stringfellow's successors as a Utah Congressman, is hot under the collar over what he sees as himself being made to look a fool by publicly pinning medals on an 86-year-old former U.S. Air Force colonel, Myron "Mike" Brown, who presented him with papers saying he deserved three prestigious medals from his service sixty years ago.** Sometime after the ceremony, held in front of the media, The Salt Lake Tribune found out the documents were fraudulent. Chaffetz called congressional hearings on stolen valor, and is angry because when it comes to medals the military is sloppy in its record-keeping.

The military isn't too concerned, at one point saying that these cases surface rarely, and to put together a database of all its award winners would be a big chore, and costly. Chaffetz, who was one of the first Tea Party candidates to get a congressional seat, normally squeezes a government nickel. He touts his fiscal conservatism, but is apparently not worried about running up costs when it comes to this issue.

Both Groves and Brown deny their stories are false. They claim they are right and the records are wrong, but most everyone (including me) believes both of them have been caught in bullshit lies that are now being exposed.

However, despite our righteous anger, do we really need yet another law? If guys lying to make themselves look important get arrested then you'll put more than half the men in the world in jail. If a man does it to gain medals or acclaim he doesn't deserve it shakes out, mainly because he has a better-than-even chance of being caught. I believe that what happened to Douglas Stringfellow is happening right now to these two men who appear to have lied about their war records. Maybe they have told these stories for so long and so often they believe their own tall tales. They chose their military service to exaggerate and fabricate their personal history because of Jason Chaffetz's complaint: it's hard to check up on this sort of thing. (Not hard enough that they weren't exposed, but maybe they thought they'd never be found out because of the clusterfuck that is military record-keeping.)

I've known people who went beyond simple lies to extravagant lies. Like Groves and Brown those other liars got called out for lying. But both Groves and Brown must be pretty good at it to have gotten away with it for so long with family, friends and coworkers. If I knew them, and had believed their stories, then found out their records proved them liars I'd wonder what other lies they'd told. But it doesn't mean they need to go to jail, especially if they didn't do it for financial gain. Since humans are by nature liars, and we lie all the time for one reason or another, from little fibs to big whoppers, I'm reluctant to make lying for the purposes of self-aggrandizement a crime.

I also believe the humiliation they and their families are going through over these revelations of lying are a very real punishment, just like they were for Douglas Stringfellow almost sixty years ago.

* Article on Groves

**Article on Brown

First crush

My son held up the May issue of Vanity Fair. "I think Julianna Margulies and Sofia Vergara are gorgeous," he said. I agreed.

Of course, I also think Claire Danes and Michelle Dockery are gorgeous. But I look at them like I would look at anything unattainable, nice on the eyes, but no emotional involvement. That wasn't true when I was a kid in love with Anne Jeffreys, who played Marion Kirby on the sitcom, Topper, with her husband, Robert Sterling as George Kirby, and character actor Leo G. Carroll as Cosmo Topper. (Oh yeah, mustn't forget Neil, the St. Bernard.)

But enough of the men and the dog. I was totally loopy for Anne. I would lie in bed and scheme ways to be with her. First of all, magic would make me a man, all grown up. I wondered how old Anne was. Maybe she was 21...? She was actually in her early thirties in the mid-1950s (born in 1923), but 21 sounded old and mature to me when I was a nine-year-old boy. If I had some magic, like how Billy Batson, a boy, shouted "Shazam!" and became Captain Marvel, a man, I could move right in. Of course there was the problem of that pesky husband, Robert Sterling, but maybe she'd divorce him for me, or better yet, he could be a car crash and die. Morbid as that was, I felt it was probably the best course of action. I probably got the idea from the show; George and Marion were ghosts of people killed in a car crash.

 

Since I was a kid with a kid's short attention span I'm sure the crush didn't last long, maybe a few weeks, a month or so, and I moved on to some other obsession. But I remember it as being the first and only time I ever fell in love with a grown woman who starred on TV or in the movies. I remember thinking a lot of women on TV were cute or pretty, but didn't have crushes on any of them. Only her. To this day I still love the name Anne. Anne Jeffreys had started her career in B-movies, and until she got her hit television show, that was pretty much her career. I didn't know anything about a Hollywood pecking order, "A"-list stars and "B"-listers until much later. If they were on TV or in movies they were privileged, and I lumped them all together. Here's Anne all tied up and at the mercy of Bela Lugosi in Zombies On Broadway. I don't know if this was even a B-movie. Maybe lower.

A few years ago I read that Anne Jeffreys had attained great age by living a very healthy lifestyle. So I was surprised that at one point in her career she advertised cigarettes. Did she smoke? Probably not. Even professional athletes advertised cigarettes. They probably didn't smoke, either. But tobacco money was as good as any in those days, when celebrities endorsed products they didn't use.

Anne Jeffreys is 89 this year.

She looks pretty good for being almost 90, don't you think?

My crush on Anne has long been over, but I haven't forgotten how she was my first and only big television heartthrob.

Silent treatment

Some of the best gag cartoons have no captions. The New Yorker co-founder and original editor Harold Ross insisted on the one-line punchline. Before then cartoons could have more than one character speaking. The rule that Ross imposed on the magazine isn't observed all the time nowadays, but is still more common than dialogue between characters. Less common now was more common in the golden age of gag cartooning (in my opinion roughly the 1930s through the 1960s) the caption-less cartoon, which lets the picture be a visual punchline.

Copyright © 1951, 1952, 2012 The New Yorker

Happy birthday, Kate

Kate Pierson (B-52s) is 64 today.





Here's a video with Iggy Pop.



Happy birthday, Kate!

Happy birthday, Carol, Bobby and Gary

Carol Burnett is 79 today. Here's a classic sketch from her '70s show.



Bobby Rydell is 70 today. This song was Bobby's last hit, late 1963. The Beatles came to town and took over the charts. This is my favorite by Rydell, though.



Gary Wright is 69 today.

Before the video recorder, the video novel

Every Sunday night I record some programs on my DVR, and watch them later in the week. It seems I've had this ability forever, but it's really been just about thirty years. I bought my first VCR in 1980, a huge RCA with manual controls (no remote), hooked it up to my broadcast-only television (no cable), and taped programs I could watch later. It was at least a couple of years after that before I was able to rent movies from a local video store. We have a whole generation of people who don't know what it was like to be at the mercy of television schedules. If you wanted to catch a program you'd better be in front of your TV when it was on or it would be gone forever...or at least until it was rerun.

Today I found a book that's a sort of precursor to video recording, the "video novel." I remember there were others of this type, but this is the only one I own. Mork and Mindy was a cute sitcom, and I watched it occasionally, but I doubt I would have spent $2.75 for this book when it came out in 1979. This is the second printing so apparently there were enough fans of the show to sell out the first.

I've just taken a section of the book, which is from the Mork and Mindy Hour Special, to show you. In 1979 it wasn't unheard of on TV to show unmarried couples living together, but it was still frowned on by society in general. They made it easy in the show by making Mork an alien. Or at least I guess that made it easy.

I may not be sure of that, but I know one thing for sure, the sly scriptwriters slipped one by the network censors in Mindy's line to Mork, "It's not nice to sit on your face."

Na-nu, na-nu!

.

War without end, amen

The Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, Housing and Urban Development are all in the Republican sniper crosshairs, with their itchy fingers on the triggers. When I hear Republican candidates talk about getting rid of government departments I wonder why they never include the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I have an opinion, though. I believe it's because the federal departments they want to get rid of impact their fellow millionaire/billionaire friends, and eliminating such bureaucracies would make it easier for them to completely destroy the air, water and wilderness in the pursuit of profits.

But with the Drug Enforcement Administration the targets aren't businesses (unless the businesses are illegal), and not the Republican family of incestuous rich folks. People incarcerated for using illegal drugs are mostly black people, even though, as pointed out by Leonard Pitts Jr in this editorial, white people do most of the drug abusing. If there is anyone Republicans like to drop-kick into prison it's blacks, the poor and homeless, and those addled by substance abuse. Forget about spending public money on treatment for addiction, it's too hard to quantify results. Republicans would much rather pour strained financial resources into courts, police and prisons, and yes, the Drug Enforcement Administration, using weapons and technology in a 41-year War on Drugs. A war that has so far been a failure. If the United States had fought World War II like they fight drugs, right now we'd all be speaking German and Japanese. The need to punish, especially those who "aren't like us," is strong with Republicans, and unlike rehabilitation, where you can't tell if someone is truly cured of addiction or not, with prisons you can at least count how many drug users and dealers are behind bars.

Harry Anslinger was really the first drug czar, appointed in 1930 to the Bureau of Narcotics. He hated marijuana. It was probably because, as he put it (and I'm paraphrasing), weed helped Negroes invent blues and jazz music, and listening to that evil music and puffing reefer is why marijuana-crazed blacks crave white women. Anslinger was good with terrifying whites with his anecdotes, but used no science as a basis for his claims. He depended on yellow journalism (courtesy of his friend, William Randolph Hearst), along with fear and scare tactics.

When I see a page like this one I took from a 1946 issue of Detective Tales, a pulp magazine, I recognize that it is right out of the Anslinger anti-marijuana propaganda manual.

(Make sure you click on it so you can read it.)

In his editorial, which I linked to in paragraph three, above, Leonard Pitts Jr is upset with President Obama for not advocating legalization of drugs. I don't blame Pitts, who sees drug laws as excessively harsh, biased and racially motivated. I'm more forgiving of Obama. The reality is he would be in an untenable position if he called for decriminalizing drugs. The public has been told for at least 80 years that drugs are always bad, drugs are used by mental defectives, criminals and minorities like African-Americans and Mexicans. You can see why asking Congress to legalize illegal drugs would be for the president a fast track back to civilian life.

Prohibition against alcohol did not work. There was plenty of alcohol during Prohibition, but to buy it customers lined the pockets of criminals. People are still doing that, only this time it's for cocaine, meth and marijuana, as well as the usual potpourri of other illegal substances in which people like to indulge. And the people whose pockets they line are some very nasty types with armies of killers and drug runners.

As Americans we have to take a long, hard look at ourselves and figure some things out. The reason Mexican drug cartels exist is because the American demand for their product makes it so ridiculously profitable. Americans are slow and often unwilling to give up their vices. Millions still smoke, millions drink and sometimes do stupid things. Since tobacco and alcohol are legal there are laws regulating both. Americans apparently don't see, or just ignore, the correlation between a war being fought between drug cartels and Mexican authorities and us. Even totally putting away the basic moral problems of drug users funding terror, and dead bodies piling up, we have to weigh the cost of this never-ending war on drugs and ask ourselves if it's worth it to keep throwing money at it with no real or permanent result.

I'd like to be in a question-and-answer period with Mitt Romney and ask why he never advocates for shutting down the DEA. I'll bet his answer—if he has one, or if he's even thought about it for more than a millisecond—would be firmly with the status quo: Continue spending billions to fight a war we can't possibly win, continue spending more billions to build more prisons (keeping America's record as the country with the most prisoners per capita), paying for more police, never trying to address the cause of the problem, just the symptoms.

I don't take illegal drugs, and I do not encourage people to take illegal drugs. What I'm doing is calling for some sanity in an otherwise insane situation. .

.