Not Everything Was For Sale This Christmas

He uncovers a rare gem and shares it with the artist

By Jerry Crowe, Times Staff Writer
December 25, 2006

Not everything was for sale this holiday season.

A Claremont man, for instance, discovered in an old box a rare, vintage recording of an immensely popular and critically acclaimed artist, spent hours digitizing it to improve the sound quality and transfer it to CD, ignored advice from friends and co-workers to auction it off to the highest bidder and happily handed it over to the company that signed the artist more than 50 years ago.

He did this, he said, out of respect for the artist and the artist's equally revered subject.

"I just wanted to do what was right," he said.

His name is Jim Governale and the recording is of word-painter extraordinaire Vin Scully's over-the-air description of the final inning of the Dodgers' 5-0 victory over the New York Mets on June 30, 1962, at Dodger Stadium, the only known surviving audio account of the first of Sandy Koufax's four no-hitters.

The recording was made by Governale's uncle, Dave Fantz, who was 14 years old and sensed Dodgers history in the making when he fed a tape into his father's reel-to-reel recorder. About 40 minutes long, it picks up in the bottom of the eighth inning and carries through Jerry Doggett's postgame interview with Koufax.

The Dodgers were thrilled to receive a copy last month.

"This is really, truly a gift he's giving to the club," team historian Mark Langill said. "The magnitude of this is monumental, historically and emotionally."

No commercial video recordings of Koufax's no-hitters are known to exist, and no audio accounts of his second and third no-hitters have surfaced. Scully's poetic description of the final half-inning of the great left-hander's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs in 1965 was preserved only because Scully phoned the radio station in the eighth inning and suggested that it record the ninth.

As Scully is well aware, Governale's recording could have wound up just as easily in an online auction as in the Dodgers' hands.

"Some of my canceled checks from 40 years ago are up on EBay," Scully said. "It's really a joke."

Up to his neck in holiday preparations — he has 16 grandchildren — Scully had not heard Governale's recording when contacted for this article.

But he planned to listen and was touched by the gesture.

"I have it and I will treasure it," he said of the recording. "What will be the highlight for me is that Jerry Doggett, whom I loved, is on the CD. I've heard me, so that's that. But to be able to hear Jerry is really precious for me."

The Dodgers, Langill said, plan to post excerpts of the recording on their website starting this week.

Governale, a 40-year-old father of four and an on-air personality at a Glendale radio station, discovered the recording 16 years ago, after his grandfather died. His grandmother gave him a box of old tapes, and a newspaper clipping on the outside of the box indicated that it contained a recording of a Koufax gem.

Though a self-described "huge Dodger fan," Governale also is a procrastinator. He said he didn't actually listen to the recording until about 10 years ago, when he brought it into work, cleaned it up and burned it onto a CD.

"It was a real special recording and one of the first things that came to my mind was, 'I really want Vin Scully to hear this,' " he said. "In the back of my mind, I thought, 'One of these days I've got to mail this to Vin Scully.' "

But he didn't realize it was a rarity until about five years ago, when he contacted Cooperstown and was told the Hall of Fame did not have a copy.

That's when Governale's friends and co-workers weighed in.

Sell, they said.

He thought about it.

Through a co-worker, he contacted a copyright lawyer.

In the end, though, he believed that profiting from the recording would be unseemly and diminish his joy in sharing it.

"I just wanted to do what was right by the Dodgers and Vin Scully and Sandy Koufax," he said. "It would mean more to me to honor the two of them by just doing the right thing, rather than just to sell out. To me, it seemed like a way of cheapening the recording and cheapening the find if I were to sell it."

His co-workers, he said, thought he was "a little nuts."

But his uncle, who had been consulted, was not surprised.

"That's just the way Jim is," Fantz said from Denver, where he is an executive at a healthcare company. "He talked to me about it and I think it took me about a nanosecond to agree with him. It's just a stroke of luck that I happened to turn on the recorder that day, and that the recording has preserved all this time."

Also fortunate, the Dodgers might add, was that it wound up in the hands of Jim Governale, a true-blue fan and an honorable man.

National Debate - Who Needs It?

Martin Kaplan is associate dean of the USC Annenberg School, where he directs the Norman Lear Center (learcenter.org) questions whether we really need a "national debate":

But what would a national debate on anything really look like? How would it be any different from what we're already doing now? Imagine the elements of a national debate on Iraq, and then ask whether what's going on today fits the bill.

• Analysts offering opposing views on television shows?
• Dueling Op-Ed pieces?
• Senators and representatives making floor speeches?
• Presidential candidates staking out positions, and critics taking them on?
• Magazines and journals offering thoughtful, conflicting takes?
• A take-no-prisoners brawl in the blogosphere?
• Public opinion polls? You can't go to the restroom without tripping over a new one.
• Thousands of people in the streets? Well, it's not like the Vietnam era — without a draft, it won't ever be — but plenty of cities have seen plenty of passionate marchers.

We have that right now, right?

So why, despite all appearances of actually having a national debate right now, do people keep insisting that we mount one?

Perhaps it's because the mainstream media are too timid to declare the difference between right and wrong. Imagine if journalism consisted of more than a collage of conflicting talking points. Imagine the difference it would make if more brand-name reporters broke from the bizarre straitjacket of "balance," which equates fairness with putting all disputants on equal epistemological footing, no matter how deceitful or moronic they may be.

There's a market for news that weighs counterclaims and assesses truth value. It just hasn't kept up with demand. No wonder Jon Stewart has such a loyal audience: He has a point of view, and it's rooted in the reality-based — not the ideology-based — world.

Anyone who's watched a presidential debate knows how useless they are for deciding our country's direction. The coming presidential primary season, which will stretch for more than a year, will be the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages, spring scripted attacks, ignore interlocutors' questions and declare inevitable victories.

The debates are also useless for finding common ground. There are no points to be scored with nuance. We're a nation of 300 million, which means there's one political party for every 150 million points of view. Politicians behave the way they do for a reason: Wedge issues work. Bipartisan consensus is a mug's game. The base is what counts. Swing votes win elections. Food fights win ratings.

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson. The actual Lincoln-Douglas debates drew huge crowds and galvanized public attention; Newt's would make C-SPAN, and maybe Fox, but most people would get them in 12-second snippets. Besides, it's tough to imagine Newt and his opponent (John McCain?) actually coming up with anything that they haven't broadcast in the news-and-gasbag venues to which they already enjoy full access.

Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in. National debates nicely fulfill the circus part of the bread-and-circuses formula of modern public life. Like psychoanalysis, national debates are basically interminable. And in our postmodern era, they do a nice job substituting for the hard work of actually figuring out what's true and what's good.

L.A. Times

Carol Shea-Porter

A Member of the Posse of Reformers

Congresswoman-elect set her own terms. No one thought had a shot. The Democratic Party chairman didn't know her name. And then …

DOVER, N.H. — Someday, some brainy PhD student will probably examine the unlikely 2006 campaign of New Hampshire's first elected congresswoman and identify its lessons something like this:

• Ignore pollsters and pundits. Real people are the real experts.
• The best focus group is coffee with six smart friends.
• Listen carefully, even in a gathering of only three people.
• Never underestimate the tenacity of a determined network of middle-aged volunteers, most of them women.
• Always play nice and always send thank-you notes.

Indeed, no sooner did she defeat Republican incumbent Jeb Bradley on Nov. 7 than Democrat Carol Shea-Porter fired off an e-mail expressing gratitude to a particularly devoted campaign worker. A response immediately flashed back from the constituent in Shea-Porter's new southern New Hampshire district: "That's very nice. But I did it for my country."

Shea-Porter, 53, said her reason had been much the same when she took on what most analysts assumed would be a losing battle. Her goal, she said, was to represent the "bottom 99%" in her state and her country — those Americans who do not worry about the vagaries of the stock market or whether they can afford a bigger yacht, but "whether they will have pizza money for their family on a Friday night."

The former social worker and community-college politics teacher takes her place in a 53-member freshman congressional class that Shea-Porter describes as a "posse of reformers." In a House election when the average winning campaign cost about $1 million, she ran hers for $206,000. Campaign manager Sue Mayer, a volunteer, is a medieval historian.

Shea-Porter ran all of two TV ads. One featured her 82-year-old mother, a rock-solid New Hampshire Republican. Rather than renting expensive offices, the campaign relied on supporters who provided space in their homes.

Shea-Porter said she realized things were getting bad at her house when the stove turned into a campaign literature storage unit.

"I thought, What have I done to my family?" said Shea-Porter, the mother of a college-age daughter and a son in high school. Her husband, Gene, works for the federal government.

She received little attention from the national Democratic Party. The day after the election, which she won with 52% of the vote, party Chairman Howard Dean could not remember all of her last name, though he knew it was hyphenated.

Dean praised Shea-Porter's win as "an entirely grass-roots effort without support from the party, including us."

Her opponent painted her as a wild-eyed liberal whose sole issue was opposition to the Iraq war. Shea-Porter made no secret of her disapproval of the U.S. presence in Iraq — a position that she said put her in the mainstream of American thinking. She once was ousted from an appearance by President Bush in nearby Portsmouth; she was wearing a T-shirt that read "Turn Your Back on Bush."

But Shea-Porter stressed that her objection to the war was only part of what compelled her to challenge Bradley. She said of her desire to end the Iraq war,

It is absolutely upfront and central. But there is also the deficit, healthcare, the economy and the danger of privatization of Social Security.

The constant financial struggle of everyday Americans is a perpetual theme that she hears, Shea-Porter said. Just before the election, she and Mayer, her campaign manager, made a nighttime run to the mall because neither of them had anything left to wear, and their saleswoman turned out to be a teacher who made ends meet for her family by working a second job in retail. Shea-Porter says,

People like that get where this country is going economically. They get what is happening to the price of gas, the price of cereal, the price of milk. The people are way ahead of the politicians on this one.

In New Hampshire, Shea-Porter worked on the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign of Gen. Wesley K. Clark. After Clark pulled out, she and Mayer took it upon themselves to start watching Bradley more closely.

They began attending his New Hampshire town meetings, challenging him on his defense of the Iraq war and his support for Social Security privatization. As active members of a political discussion group, both women agreed that the Democrats needed to find someone to run against Bradley.

But Shea-Porter put partisan politics aside to make two lengthy visits to the Gulf Coast area as a Red Cross volunteer after Hurricane Katrina, sleeping in a shelter at night, handing out food and water bottles by day. Said Shea-Porter: "There's no way to describe what the government did not do."

Her disgust with government inaction before and after the hurricane cemented her decision to run for office.

Bradley also visited the devastated areas. "The difference was, he never talked about it again," she said. "And I could not stop talking about it. Not only did the government abandon people in the Gulf Coast, they abandoned people in every community in America."

With no high-priced consultants, her campaign relied on what George Washington University political sociologist Elizabeth Sherman called a "net roots" combination of networking and grass-roots politics.

This is a real payoff for women's social and political networks. It has been building for a long time — maybe 15 or 20 years. Women used to complain about the old boys' network. But the time has come now where women recognize the force of their own connections.

In the long year of her campaign, Shea-Porter said, she and Mayer "completely trusted" her loose but loyal army of supporters to carry her message of reform. She paid no attention to polls, even when days before the election, prognosticators pronounced her defeat a done deal.

"I always thought I would win, and that if I did, that would be a wonderful thing," she said. "And if I lost, I would go home and introduce myself to my husband and my dog."

Her family, she said, helped her keep a sense of perspective throughout the race.

"Having teenagers is the secret," she said. "Teenagers will always remind you that you are still the person who should clean the sink. They are not awed by me. I am not awed by me. I haven't been awed by me for the last 53 years, and I don't plan to start getting awed now that I'm going to Washington."

By Elizabeth Mehren, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 26, 2006

IRS Still Persecuting Pasadena Church?

This is an update on my previous post.

The IRS still questions a Pasadena church's tax-exempt status after an antiwar speech before the 2004 election that some saw as politicking.

The sermon, delivered Oct. 31, 2004, by the Rev. George F. Regas, was framed as a debate involving Jesus, President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

In September, the church announced that it would not comply with an IRS summons demanding that All Saints turn over materials with political references, such as sermons and newsletters, produced during the 2004 election year. The current rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon, did not obey a summons that ordered him to testify before IRS investigators.

The church continues to set a defiant tone. On Sunday, All Saints will sponsor a conference called "The War, the Pulpit and the Right to Preach." It will include workshops on conflict resolution, tax law and "Prophetic Traditions and Free Speech." Regas and Bacon are scheduled to speak.

But did Regas' speech violate federal laws? The answer, mostly likely to come from the courts, hinges on how one defines campaigning and interprets his remarks.

An extended excerpt from the sermon published by the Los Angeles Times yesterday, appears below. It represents about a third of the text. The complete address can be found here.

Good people of profound faith will be for either George Bush or John Kerry for reasons deeply rooted in their faith. I want you to hear me on this. Yet I want to say as clearly as I can how I see Jesus impacting your vote and mine. Both Sen. Kerry and President Bush are devout Christians — one a Roman Catholic and the other a Methodist.

Against the teachings of Jesus, listen in as Kerry and Bush debate three hugely important issues this morning: ending war and violence, eliminating poverty and holding tenaciously to hope.

Sen. Kerry and President Bush are engaged in a titanic battle for the White House. Central to their race for the presidency is the quest for peace. How deeply the world longs for peace. President Bush has led us into war with Iraq as a response to terrorism.

Yet I believe Jesus would say to Bush and Kerry:

War is itself the most extreme form of terrorism. President Bush, you have not made dramatically clear what have been the human consequences of the war in Iraq.

More than 1,100 U.S. soldiers dead, 8,000 wounded — some disabled for life — and now the latest figures say 100,000 Iraqi fighters, women and children are dead. Oh, the cost of your war.

Your fundamental premise for the massive violence of this war is that it is the proper response to the terrorist attack that took place Sept. 11, 2001. But remember: The killing of innocent people to achieve some desired goal is morally repudiated by anyone claiming to follow me as their savior and guide.

Jesus, looking at the United States, the most powerful nation in the history of civilization, disavows any path that affirms grief must lead to war; Jesus refuses to accept the violence of war as the necessary consequences of our tragic losses on Sept. 11.

Maybe you are calling Jesus naive, but he points us to the truest reality in the universe:

Mercy brings mercy and revenge brings revenge. Tragically, your world refuses to learn this truth even after so many bitter experiences in every part of the world. Mercy brings mercy. Revenge brings revenge.

How Jesus mourns the deaths of those 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11. But Jesus also mourns the death, devastation and loss in Afghanistan and Iraq and Sudan and Israel/Palestine and in so many other parts of the world. They too are part of God's precious human family.

Jesus would say to us:

Yes, mourn the deaths of those closest to you who have died; yet it is troublesome that you in America could get so caught up in the tragedy of Sept. 11 without ever noticing all my children who have been blown apart by this war, and the 30,000 children under 5 years of age across the globe who die every day of malnutrition and hunger. My heart can hardly bear it.

Jesus confronts both Sen. Kerry and President Bush:

I will tell you what I think of your war. The sin at the heart of this war against Iraq is your belief that an American life is of more value than an Iraqi life. That an American child is more precious than an Iraqi baby.
God loathes war. At the time of the trauma of Sept. 11 you did not have to declare war. You could have said to the American people and the world: 'We will respond but not in kind. We will not seek to avenge the death of innocent Americans by the death of innocent victims elsewhere, lest we become what we abhor.'

Jesus continues:

Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. It will take years for the widely felt hostility in Iraq and around the world to ebb. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into America's memory forever.

President Bush, Sen. Kerry, will you save us from all this suffering? But God's only hands are yours and all who call upon my name. In the midst of great suffering, I call out to you: 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.'

Jesus turns to President Bush again with deep sadness.

Is what I hear really true? Do you really mean that you want to end a decade-old ban on developing nuclear battlefield weapons, as well as endorsing the creation of a nuclear 'bunker-blaster' bomb? Are you really going to resume nuclear testing? That is sheer insanity.

This only encourages nations to build their nuclear arsenal in defense against you. This is morally indefensible.

Jesus grows more insistent.

The development of battlefield nuclear weapons and threatening their use against 'rogue' nations and willing to strike first is a dangerous change of policy. Talk of winnable nuclear war is the greatest illusion. I am indignant when I hear people in your government saying a nuclear war could end for anyone as a victory.

Everything I know about Jesus would have him uttering those words. From my own study, prayer, reflection and dialogue, I say that nuclear war is the enemy. Anyone who can avoid seeing the horror of that has lost his soul. The political reality that nuclear war still remains an option for America and other countries is the paramount horror of modern existence.

The nuclear bomb is the most outright evil thing that human beings ever created.

What does it say about the moral values of a nation that puts its security in nuclear weapons that are morally outrageous? I believe that Jesus calls us to be nuclear abolitionists through the political process. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."

When you go to the polls on Nov. 2, vote all your values. Jesus places on your heart this question: Who is to be trusted as the world's chief peacemaker?

Show me, gentle reader, where in this text is there a recommendation for a particular candidate?

A Crowded Sewer

O.J. Sewer Leads Right to Murdoch by Tim Rutten

A review of recent history:

This week the Fox television network announced that it would air a two-part interview with O.J. Simpson as part of the publicity campaign promoting a new book, "If I Did It," in which he offers a hypothetical account of how he might have killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman outside her Brentwood condominium in 1994.

Simpson was acquitted on murder charges but was subsequently held civilly liable for both deaths and ordered to pay an as-yet-uncollected $33.5-million judgment to the victims' families.

"If I Did It" is the product of the former football star's collaboration with an unnamed ghost writer and will be published at the end of this month by ReganBooks, the euphonious shock-and-schlock imprint Judith Regan runs for the HarperCollins publishing house. Fox, ReganBooks and HarperCollins all have something important in common: They're owned by the predatory Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who has devoted his life to making money by making sure that news and entertainment are as coarse and vulgar as can be imagined in as many places as possible.

In fact, if there is a single compelling argument for restrictive immigration policies, Murdoch is it. It is one of history's inexplicable perversities that this avaricious antipodean has been welcomed into this country while honest Mexican workingmen are walled out.

Part of Murdoch's dark genius is that he never settles for having things both ways when he can have them every way there's a buck to be made. Thus, while Regan and various Fox broadcasting spokesmen were shrilly defending the book and interview, a couple of the stars on Murdoch's cable news network were in full-throated denunciation mode.

Fox News' biggest draw, Bill O'Reilly, called the project "simply indefensible and a low point in American culture," then went on to note piously, "For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel."

Nothing, except for the fact that both are personally run by the same Murdoch functionary, Roger Ailes.

Meanwhile, Fox News' Geraldo Rivera had this to say about the book and interview:

I think it's disgusting. I think he's a murdering liar. I think he's demonstrating that he made a fool of the jury in Los Angeles and all of the black community across the country that supported him. This sleazy, low-down murdering dog who killed his ex-wife, the mother of his children as they slept upstairs…. I think it really is the most appalling thing I've ever seen.

Pretty strong stuff, especially when it comes from a guy with the gag reflex of a turkey buzzard.

So let's see here … Judith Regan publishes Simpson's book. To whet the buying public's appetite for it, Regan herself interviews Simpson and the results are aired on Fox Broadcasting during the sweeps week, which is critical to the network's advertising. To build buzz and controversy, which means audience, the commentators on Fox News denounce the whole thing as a cultural low point, something they'd recognize more easily than most. Keep in mind that both networks report to Ailes, who once created a talk show for Regan. Ailes, Regan, O'Reilly and Rivera all work for Murdoch, who ultimately profits from both the outrage and the outraged.

This is the sort of thing that keeps conspiracy theorists up at night, but there's a more practical result. According to publishing sources, the first printing of "If I Did It" is 400,000 copies, and all this week advance orders on the Amazon.com list soared.

Everybody in this whole unsavory arrangement is satisfied except Regan, who mysteriously seems taken aback by criticism of her decision to publish this gruesome book. As she told the New York Times on Thursday, "The book is his confession. I would have no interest in publishing anything but that." However, as Edward Wyatt reported Friday, Simpson inconveniently refused to confess and "did not say directly in the book or the interview that he killed" his ex-wife or Goldman. "Rather, he spoke about the murders in the hypothetical sense, a stance that admits nothing and could be viewed as a denial."

Regan, however, doesn't believe any of that matters because … come on, guess … and, no, it's not because she's in rehab — it's because she's a victim herself! That's right, domestic abuse. In a rambling, semi-hysterical statement distributed Friday, Regan said she was unsurprised by Simpson's acquittal because she was disbelieved when battered by her husband more than 20 years ago. According to the publisher, he was "tall, dark and handsome. A great athlete. A brilliant mind. He was even a doctor, with an M.D. after his name and a degree that came with an oath: 'First do no harm.' He was one of the brightest men I'd ever met. And he could charm anyone. He charmed me. We had a child. And then he knocked me out, with a blow to my head, and sent me to the hospital. He manipulated, lied and broke my heart."

Simpson's acquittal, Regan insisted, was "a seminal moment in American history" and, recalling her own experience going to confession as a Catholic schoolgirl, said that she "made the decision to publish this book and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. Amen."

Really.

Like shame, the indispensability of privacy is one of the things that's often hard to recall these days. But even now, sacramental confession is done in private and held as an inviolable confidence. Priests give absolution, not multimillion-dollar advances, and they don't plan on profiting from the exercise.

Regan says that when she "sat face to face with the killer, I wanted him to confess, to release us all from the wound of the conviction that was lost on that fall day in October of 1995.

"For the girl who was left in the gutter, I wanted to make it right."

The only gutter at issue here is the one where Judith Regan does business and, when you consider all the help she's getting from the rest of Rupert Murdoch's minions, it's a very crowded sewer.

Who Was Jim Sterkel?

Jim Sterkel played for USC for two seasons in the 1950s, but the impression he left as a player was nothing compared with the impression he left as a friend. As a tribute to his former college roommate, a USC donor gave $5 million to have the court at the Galen Center bear his friend’s name.

Floored!

Running for office?

Better run from Colbert

Most politicians are as likely to pass up free TV face time before an election as they would be to refuse a campaign check.

Then again, there's a price to be paid for looking stupid.

That's what members of Congress have learned recently about "Better Know a District," a sarcastic weekly skit that is part of The Colbert Report, a nightly half-hour on Viacom Inc.'s Comedy Central network hosted by comedian Stephen Colbert,

Politicians covet them too for their votes. So, many lawmakers initially played along with the segments in which Colbert interviews a member of the House of Representatives, with few checks and balances on his proclivity to make fools of them.

But after a couple of House members stumbled badly on the show, some incumbents decided that the dumbest thing to do with Colbert's offer of free TV exposure was to take it.

One who did appear, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), discovered the pitfalls when Colbert asked him about a bill he co-sponsored requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in the U.S. Capitol.

"What are the Ten Commandments?" Colbert asked matter-of-factly.

"What are all of them?" Westmoreland said, taken aback. "You want me to name them all?"

The June segment showed Westmoreland struggling to name just three.

A Bible Belt conservative, the embarrassed Westmoreland has been trying to live down his Commandments performance. No Republican has appeared since.

Negative phone calls from around the country poured in to Westmoreland's office, mostly from liberals charging hypocrisy, Robinson said. Several clips of the segment are posted on the YouTube website, and Westmoreland's Democratic opponent, Mike McGraw, put the video on his campaign website.

Los Angeles Times

Bush's IRS Cracks Down on Pasadena Church

A liberal Pasadena church facing an IRS investigation over alleged politicking sounded a defiant note Sunday, with its leaders and many congregants saying the probe amounted to an assault on their constitutional rights and that they were inclined to defy the agency's request for documents.

At the pulpit Sunday, Bacon got straight to the point, eliciting loud laughter from the congregation:

I want to begin my sermon by once again expressing my gratitude to the Internal Revenue Service. Those brothers and sisters really know how to shine a spotlight on a struggling church and swell the number of worshipers.

Bacon told the congregation that, although he recognized that the church could not endorse or oppose a political candidate,

neither could it remain silent in the face of dehumanization, injustice and violence. . . History is shamefully littered with the moral bankruptcy of people who were Christian in name but not behavior

Neutrality and silence in the face of oppression always aids the oppressor.

When he was done, Bacon received a minutelong standing ovation.

Read More

How 'Truthy' Replaced Truth Following 9/11

Tim Rutten reviewing The Greatest Story Ever Sold The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina by Frank Rich.

My excerpts:

Rich writes what is surely American journalism's smartest and most original newspaper column

He also has a genuine relish for popular culture and has almost single-handedly made the word "truthiness," first coined by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, an indispensable political term of art. As Rich defines it, "truthiness" describes a situation in which it doesn't matter whether something is true: "What matters most is whether a story can be sold as true, preferably on television."

That describes precisely the stories George W. Bush and his surrogates told the American people to induce them to support war in Iraq, and Rich lays out these evasions, exaggerations and outright lies in "The Greatest Story Ever Sold."

According to Rutten, Rich recently told an interviewer:

There's certainly tremendous overlap, but the fact is, when you're writing a column, you don't see the larger picture. I really wanted to write a narrative more than an argument. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, a lot of stuff was hiding in plain sight. Some of it I saw at the time, some of it I didn't.

Rutten continues by saying that the book includes,

All of the stuff that counts . . . marshaled in a narrative that unfolds with the cadence of a well-paced newspaper column. There's also a shrewdly observed and reasoned explanation of the motives behind all this horrifically destructive deceit — and Rich is clear in his belief that one of the casualties of the ill-considered war in Iraq has been the real war on real terrorism, which is as serious and avoidable as a fight can be.

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz and the rest of the neoconservatives who came to Washington as intellectual props for a stunningly ill-prepared and "incurious" president brought with them an ideological belief that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, needed to be remade. Karl Rove, Bush's political prop, brought with him a single-minded loyalty and an unparalleled mastery of campaign — which is to say, media — technology. Those qualities converged in the run-up to the first midterm elections following Sept. 11 and the failed attempt to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

As Rich puts it:

For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons that predated 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons."

The story was better than true; it was "truthy."

. . . . If our public conversation still were capable of making any distinctions but partisan ones, the sheer moral force of Rich's argument and the logical weight of his evidence would lay to rest the casual conservative canard that he is, somehow, an avatar of rarified Manhattan liberalism, writing in a language that is foreign west of the Hudson. As this book so clearly demonstrates, the very heart of his project as a writer and public intellectual is nothing fancier than a rugged old American belief that facts matter and a fierce old American resentment at being conned.

It's hard to imagine values more traditional. It was, after all, a Republican president from the heartland who once mused,

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial

Patrick Goldstein published a column five days after 9-11-01 in which he said

The terrorist attacks may have brought to a close a decade of enormous frivolity and escapism.

Maybe Hollywood will recognize that Americans suddenly view the world as a more serious place. There's a new moral gravity out there.

Today he admits that he was then

blissfully unaware that it would take more than a horrific catastrophe to quench our thirst for the madcap antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Star Jones Reynolds, Jessica Simpson and all the other bobble heads bouncing around our celebrity universe. When it comes to frivolity, escapism and a lack of moral gravity, we haven't lost a step, have we?

. . . . But the truth is that the trauma of Sept. 11 did not change us, not so much because we live in a culture of superficiality as because we are imprisoned in a culture of hyperactivity. We're so inundated by juicy bites of information — both serious and tawdry — that we don't have the psychic attention span to emotionally involve ourselves in much of anything. What we're really good at is denial.

In this atmosphere it's hardly surprising that Sept. 11 has the sound of distant thunder, treated with great solemnity but rarely given a thought in our daily lives . . . .

The events of Sept. 11 have been anointed in heroic balm, its victims sanctified either for their ordinariness (as in "United 93") or for their stouthearted stoicism, as in "World Trade Center." The subject is still too sensitive for artists to have any dramatic free rein — we've had authenticity, but precious little poetry. The rest of our culture is awash in irony, sarcasm and the self-flagellation of reality TV, but the respect for the Sept. 11 dead prevents artists from exploring the blindness, delusion and foolish human behavior that make for great drama . . . .

Trying to see shades of Sept. 11 in our fragmented pop culture is something of a fool's errand . . . .

You could also argue that historic events today don't pack the wallop they once did, since they are so quickly chewed over and transformed into cheesy cliché by our voracious media machine.

The world of new technology, which in many ways is the most strikingly different part of our post-Sept. 11 universe, has made us so over-connected that we have trouble processing real, traumatic tragedy. It quickly becomes so over-analyzed that it loses its potency by losing its singularity . . . .

This fragmentation is just a fact of life in our world, which has so many hundreds of niche channels and radio formats that we rarely get to share a common reaction to a cultural event.

Goldstein concludes by citing writer-director Paul Weitz, whose "American Dreamz" was a cheeky satire about the convergence of politics, terrorism and show business:

There are so many different venues for entertainment that you don't have to be exposed to any serious thoughts if you don't want to — there's no one guy like Walter Cronkite to watch.

The sheer proliferation of media makes it hard to make judgments or really be engaged in the world. You wonder — if Watergate happened today, would people really all be irate or would they just be watching some other channel?

Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial

A.B.C. Stands for Always Bash Clinton

ABC Follows A Path To Shame

I'm racheting up my hero, Tim Rutten's, article. He's been away too long on vacation, and he's coming off a little as Timid Timmy. Given time, he'll get back up to speed. In the meantime, here's how I would say, what he has to say. (We catch this in mid-program.)

.... For most of the week, ABC rather haughtily attempted to characterize itself as the victim of philistines, or self-righteously as a champion of free speech or, more pathetically, as just plain misunderstood by people who just don't understand how television is done.

It is none of those things.

It's an opportunistic and self-interested organization that somehow thought it could approach the most wrenching American tragedy since Pearl Harbor with the values that prevail among network television executives — the sort of ad hoc ethics that would make a streetwalker blush — and that nobody would mind.

That part of this whole shabby sequence of events is the hardest to fathom. It's well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they're basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters' names. You simply appropriate the names of real people, then make them do whatever attention-getting thing fills the allotted time.

But did the people who run ABC Entertainment — the network division directly responsible for this mess — really believe that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger would watch themselves on television doing and saying thing they never did or said and not object? When these fictional incidents were portrayed as contributing to the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people, did they think that the former Clinton administration officials and others so caricatured simply would shrug and say, "Well, that's dramatic license for you?" Did they really expect anyone to accept the preposterous notion that — as some at the network argued this week — the film's facts were wrong, but its "essence" was true? These people really need to get out more.

What's easier to understand is what ABC thought it was up to with its marketing of "The Path to 9/11" and why it thought a successful marketing campaign might lead our politically polarized nation to feverishly overlook the network's irresponsibility toward history. After all, why should the many thousands of Americans still grieving for loved ones lost five years ago care about an accurate account of the governmental decisions that may have contributed to those deaths when they could get a good dose of "essence"?

Over the past weeks, the network flooded the country with advance copies of its film. Some sources put the number of DVDs in circulation at 900. An ABC spokeswoman, who demanded to be "off the record" said Friday that she couldn't confirm 900 copies, but that the number "certainly was more than 500." She promised to e-mail back an accurate count; she never did. Many of those copies were directed at right-wing talk show hosts and, some, to Republican bloggers, who long have argued that — however complacent the Bush administration may initially been concerning radical Islamic terrorism — Clinton and his people overlooked far more signs of Al Qaeda's lethality for a far longer period of time. These commentators were delighted to see that ABC's docu-dramatic version of events supported their view. So, for weeks they've been talking the film up on their radio programs and analyzing its merits on their blogs. . . . .

. . . . However, with that many copies in circulation, interested Democrats and former Clinton administration officials soon saw the movie and began picking its ludicrous inaccuracies apart in protests to ABC and — more important — directly to Robert Iger, the chief executive of Disney, the network's parent company. By Friday, even the film's star, Harvey Keitel, was telling an interviewer:

You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected.

So ABC began re-editing a film that already had been scrutinized by hundreds of people with long memories and access to publication. Democrats remained skeptical that any version of the film could be made credible; GOP partisans were angry and some said they felt used. Most were disgusted with what they deemed Disney/ABC's cowardice in the face of Democratic criticism. As conservative columnist Mark Steyn put it on one talk show: ABC

...supposedly spent years working on it to get it absolutely right, to get the absolute truth, and then they're frantically staying up late the night before it broadcasts snipping out 10 minutes here and there, because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger and various other Clinton apparatchiks object to this or that line here and there. I mean, that makes them look pathetic, it makes ABC, I think, look ridiculous, in fact, because there's hundreds of these tapes out there. People are going to know exactly what lines were cut and what weren't cut....

One of the most unfortunate consequences of all this was that most of the news media completely overlook a stunning affront to 1st Amendment freedoms that occurred when the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate sent Iger a letter Thursday appearing to threaten the network's licenses unless "The Path to 9/11" was altered or killed:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest ... ," the lawmakers wrote. "We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program."

We've all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it's divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats — but this was a thuggish new low. If we were inclined to dramatic license, the guys with thick necks in "On the Waterfront" would come to mind, though it's doubtful even Harvey Keitel could plausibly play Harry Reid as threatening.

WTF!!??

Here's where I part from Timid Timmy. What is wrong with him? This is not thuggishness. If this is thuggery, I say you haven't seen nuthin' yet, city-boy.

Come November.

In Verbal Chess, Who's Appeaser?

Again - Sorry Los Angeles Times - I feel compelled to print most/all of Tim Rutten in his original (almost) form - my formatting and emphasis has been added:

Political rhetoric is a never-ending chess match that gathers intensity as an election approaches.

The successful players know that the best way to win is to dominate your opponent by forcing him or her to contest the game on your terms and that the way to do that is to think as many moves ahead as you can.

Whatever else it can or cannot do, the Bush administration plays major league electoral chess. So, it's the proximity of November's midterms that made this week's speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld — and the coverage they received — matters of more than passing interest. Essentially, all three attempted to draw a parallel between the debates over how best to resolve the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and the pre-World War II controversies over whether or how to confront rising fascism.

In this instance, the terrorist adherents of Islamic fundamentalists become Islamofascists and those who oppose a continuation of the Bush administration's military policies in Iraq become … well, more on that shortly.

In his address to the American Legion, the president was careful to say that "many" of those who oppose his conduct of the Iraqi war are "sincere" and "patriotic" but "could not be more wrong." It was a shrewd bit of calculation, since not even Karl Rove could convince anyone that George W. Bush can tell the difference between a fascist and a frankfurter.

When he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Cheney was slightly less restrained, calling "a vigorous debate on the issues … part of the greatness of America" but going on to argue that "there is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism."

That set the board for Rumsfeld, the administration's designated tough guy, who told the American Legion that the years leading up to World War II were "a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, and rise of fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed and ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem…. I recount the history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism."

The Defense secretary went on to synopsize what he alleged were media distortions concerning the war in Iraq and its abuse of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and urged the American Legionnaires to adopt a watchdog role. That, he said,

is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global scale, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge, so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegation we see…. That is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

In an op-ed piece published by The Times on Friday, Rumsfeld was given the opportunity to make many of the same points in almost precisely the same language employed in his speech.

Today, some think that World War II and the Cold War were black-and-white affairs: good versus evil. But there were always those who thought that we should retreat within our borders.

In an effort to avoid repeating the carnage of World War I, much of the Western world tried to appease the growing threats in Europe and Asia in the years before World War II.

There's the word this whole rather clumsy bit of rhetorical choreography really is all about: "appeasement."

This sequence of speeches with their carefully chosen audiences has nothing to do with fascism — Islamo or otherwise — and everything to do with introducing the word "appeasement" into our domestic debate over the war in Iraq.

So far, of course, no elected lawmaker or official has proposed negotiating with Osama bin Laden or any other Islamofascist terrorists, as the historical appeasers did with Adolf Hitler. Rather, the entire debate so far has been about whether the war in Iraq has advanced the struggle against Islamic radicals. That's the ground the administration is hoping to change with this sequence of moves in the electoral chess game.

If opponents of Bush's military policies in Iraq can be made "appeasers," it gives the administration's partisans a way to attack them without questioning their patriotism — something against which polls show Americans instinctively recoil. The real "appeasers," after all, weren't unpatriotic — think Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax — they were dreadfully, almost fatally mistaken.

Think folly so complete that it carries the whiff of treason.

What's doubly interesting about all this is that we have a recent — indeed, ongoing — example of what happens when the administration is allowed to dictate the rhetorical terms of debate. In the forthcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, former Slate columnist Eric Umansky compellingly documents the American news media's generally lackluster performance in reporting the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy. It is failure rooted in the acceptance of the government's euphemisms for its conduct — "coercive interrogation," "extraordinary rendition" and the like.

As Umansky writes:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without a handful of reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. . . . when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down or ignored — a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

Umansky notes that the media's tentative and frequently timid approach to covering the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy began with senior editors' reluctance to accept the evidence of their own reporting and was abetted by "long-standing journalistic shortcomings; for example, the tendency to treat both sides of an issue equally, without regard to where the facts lie."

It is a disregard that continued this week in the generally matter-of-fact, news-story-as-usual treatment most of the media gave the portion of Rumsfeld's address in which he attacked alleged distortions by the press and Amnesty International of the events at Abu Ghraib and of conditions at Guantanamo. (According to Rumsfeld in The Times on Friday, the biggest problem confronted by prisoners in America's Cuban gaol is whether to interrupt their reading of "Harry Potter" for soccer, basketball or another serving of halal meat.)

None of the accounts of the Defense secretary's speech bothered to point out something from the public record that Umansky includes in his piece: The general

who had overseen the report on FBI allegations of abuse at Guantanamo later testified that Rumsfeld had been 'personally involved' and was given 'weekly updates' on the interrogation of one detainee, who was kept near freezing and led around naked on a leash. Interrogation logs later showed that the detainee's heart rate became so slow during his 'cold' treatment that he nearly dies. Another prisoner in CIA custody in Afghanistan died of hypothermia.

The confusion between callous indifference and evenhandedness is a form of moral blindness that begins in the fog of euphemism. You cannot recognize things for what they are when you've forfeited the ability to call them by their real names. As Umansky's report clearly documents, much of the American press was so cowed by the Bush administration and so crippled by its unexamined inhibitions that it badly failed in its obligation to report this government's embrace of torture.

That failure began when the news media uncritically adopted the government's vague new labels for what it was doing to its prisoners. If the administration now is allowed to recast the critical debate over the war in Iraq into a spitting match between farsighted anti-fascists and cringing appeasers, it will be worse than tragic.