Reelpol

OBAMA'S TAR WOLF WAR WITH FOX NEWS

Published in the November 11, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star.

If I were to say that President Barack Obama’s feud with Fox News is proving to be a “tar-baby” situation for him, I could find myself at the center of an excrement storm of such intensity, I might be forced to forfeit my position as a journalist.

During the 20th century, however, the term, which was popularized by author Joel Chandler Harris in the second Uncle Remus tale, simply meant, according to Words@Random, “an inextricable problem or situation” or “something used to entrap a person.”

In the Journal of American Folklore, Aurelio M. Espinosa examined 267 versions of the “tar-baby” story, which ranged in origin from West Africa to Mexico to South America. Joseph Campbell, likewise, mentions a similar Buddhist myth in his landmark study, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

Unfortunately, in the United States, the expression is also employed as a derogatory term for young African-Americans by whites or as the designation of a particularly dark-skinned person among blacks. As a result, most folks now avoid employing the term in any context, especially political.

The late Tony Snow found himself in the proverbial Briar Patch when he used “tar baby” to describe his feelings the first time he faced down the Washington press corps.

In 2006, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took considerable flak for employing “tar baby” while addressing a group of Iowa Republicans in a reference to Boston’s problematic Big Dig highway project.

In 2007, Sen. John McCain was forced to apologize for saying: “To declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren’t treated fairly in court; we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don’t know how you get out of that.”

In 2008, Sen. John Kerry, who used the slur to attack McCain for attacking Obama, stated: “I think John is trying to throw that big tar baby out there of course, Barak Obama wants America to be successful.”

Last April, as Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., was lambasting Democrats for their plan to ban bonuses for executives of corporations that took government bailout money, she quipped: “I thought about just a common-sense way to describe this to people: The Democrats have a tar baby on their hands and they simply can’t get away from it. They are stuck on this problem.”

It’s no surprise that a “tar-baby” connection sprang to mind for Foxx, Kerry, McCain, Romney and Snow. Not only did Disney’s “Song of the South” arrive at movie theaters five times between 1946 and 1986 but its simple moral teachings were also reinforced through Little Golden books, phonograph records and Dell Comics.

Yet, although the NAACP acknowledged “the remarkable artistic merit” of “Song of the South,” (Academy Awards to James Baskett for Uncle Remus and “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” for Best Original Song), the organization decried the “impression it [gave] of an idyllic master-slave relationship.”

OK, nobody strives to be deliberately offensive, so how about this? Let’s take a page from the legend of the “tar wolf” (James Mooney’s “Myths of the Cherokee”) that differs little from the Uncle Remus account. Isn’t going to war with Fox News like throwing Roger Ailes et al. into the thorny thicket where they grew up?

The dust-up between FNC and the president continues to be a boon for the network, which set records in October and, while currently in fourth place, is positioned to become the most-watched cable channel. An off-year election night of Republican victory speeches from New Jersey and Virginia gave Fox News an breathtaking 84 percent boost in viewers, year to date.

Now, there is no question that FNC is far more conservative than other news outlets, especially with respect to the “talk” or opinion-based shows hosted by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. But this right-wing bent also explains why FNC audiences have burgeoned so dramatically since the network went on the air in 1996. Fans tout “fair and balanced” Fox News as an antidote to what they perceive as a left-leaning mainstream media.

In addition, FNC keenly cultivates its David status, especially when Goliath resides in the White House. “We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News,” senior political analyst Brit Hume told the Los Angeles Times. “This is tremendous fodder for us. My lord, we’ve been living on it.”

White House communications director Anita Dunn said of FNC: “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”

Somebody please tell Dunn and her like-minded friends in the West Wing that Obama won the presidential campaign. It’s now time to govern.

The problem with going to all the trouble of creating a “tar wolf” is that the only foe you end up trapping — is yourself.

Published in the October 28, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star

Cocky aircraft captains might find this tee shirt stuffed into their Christmas stockings this year. It reads: “Q: What’s the difference between God and a pilot? A: God doesn’t think he’s a pilot.”

While it takes self-confidence to get behind the yoke of an aircraft, there really isn’t any room for hubris in the cockpit.

We watched him grow from a winsome toddler---pulling his starfish fingers into a salute at his father’s funeral---to the super-confident publisher of a trendy political magazine. The tabloids brimmed with titillating exposes of his drug use, his fiery temper and his weakness for superstar companions.

We nursed the hope that he might, one day, actually step into his charismatic father’s shoes. John F. Kennedy, Jr., however, was not only heir to the family legacy but also to its “curse” as well.

On July 16, 1999, Kennedy’s single-engine Piper Saratoga, bound for a family wedding, took off at dusk from a quiet New Jersey airport.

Suffering from the sniffles and with his ankle in a cast, JFK, Jr. was edgy and short-tempered. His high-strung spouse, who demanded that her manicurist keep reapplying nail polish until it matched the exact color of her new outfit, didn’t arrive at the airport until daylight had faded.

Despite the self-assurance that comes with the Kennedy name, John’s limited flying experience put him at a distinct disadvantage. In addition, although he lacked the five miles visibility that flight rules require at night, he opted to “kick the tires and light the fires” anyway.

Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board now believe he became critically disoriented in the inky gloom. Without knowing it, his plane slipped into a downward spiral, and he eventually crashed into the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.

Instead of believing what his instruments had been telling him, his ego convinced him to trust senses muddled by cold pills.

With respect to five separate decisions, Kennedy turned out to be dead wrong.

“Hubris” is defined as “the excessive pride or arrogance that leads to one’s downfall.”

Kennedy should have realized that no pilot should expect to sleepwalk through the task of flying an airplane. More importantly, he should have known that a change in the weather transforms blue skies into a life and death-testing nightmare---even if you are an American icon.

Hubris, however, is an equal opportunity employer. The opening of the much-anticipated biopic, “Amelia,” starring Hillary Swank, has re-introduced Amelia Earhart to the American public.

In May 1937, “Lady Lindy”---who even physically resembled Charles Lindbergh---embarked on the grandest and most hazardous flight of her career: an attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Six weeks later, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished without a trace.

Without question, Earhart was a remarkable aviator. She set women’s records for speed, distance and altitude; founded the Ninety-Nines; was the first woman---and second person after Lindbergh---to fly solo across the Atlantic; the first person to fly solo across Pacific (Honolulu to Oakland) and the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea. Their ill-chosen destination was Howland Island, a flat sliver of land (6.500 ft by 1,600 ft) poking out of the South Pacific some 2,556 miles away. The US Coast Guard cutter Itasca was assigned to guide Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E to Howland’s primitive runway.

“We must be on you, but cannot see you,” a totally exhausted Earhart radioed, “But gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.”

To make room for additional fuel on the long flight, Earhart had opted to jettison a pile of communication and navigation instruments that meant nothing to her. Instead of taking time to bone up on the new technology that might have saved her life, she allowed hubby George Palmer Putnam to fill her schedule with a plethora of personal appearances and promotional tours.

Finally, licensed ship’s captain Noonan was not only experienced in marine navigation but also, as the navigator who established Pan Am’s seaplane routes across the Pacific, in flight navigation as well. Yet the two shared a history of butting heads over directional issues. Noonan, who was invariably right, put his faith in his instruments. Earhart, who answered to Captain, trusted her intuition.

Various experts believe that while approaching Howland Island, the pair must have tangled again, with Earhart vetoing Noonan. The plane, headed in the wrong direction, sputtered to a stop before sighting land.

With respect to five separate decisions, Earhart turned out to be dead wrong.

Q: So what’s the difference between an airplane and God?
A: An airplane, especially when confronted with hubris, fails to forgive.

CONSERVATIVES WILL FIND THE RIGHT PATH BACK

Published in the Wednesday, October 14, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star.

‘In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism,” writes Sam Tanenhaus in the New Republic, “defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory.”

In 1954, redbaiter Joseph P. McCarthy’s blatant disregard for the truth and his censure by his own Senate colleagues supposedly consigned conservatism to the political ash heap.

Yet, a year later, William F. Buckley Jr. cleared away the stink and paved the way for conservatives to hash out hypotheses in his prestigious .

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson trounced (486 electoral votes to 52) Barry Goldwater, the college dropout whose book “The Conscience of a Conservative” sold more than 3.5 million copies.

To add insult to injury, the GOP also suffered a staggering setback when scores of seats in both houses of Congress went Democrat. In fact, James Reston, New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, concluded: “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election but the conservative cause as well.”

Yet, Goldwater’s supporters, who, post-election, found themselves large and in charge of the GOP, set out to inspire “forgotten” and “silent” Americans “who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving.”

Although Goldwater would never be president, his botched campaign still managed to raise social and moral issues that would prove fundamental to coming conservative coups.

While Ronald Reagan, esteemed for his “A Time for Choosing” convention introduction of Goldwater, succumbed to incumbent President Gerald Ford during the 1976 presidential primary, his supporters would live to fight another day.

After four years of doom and gloom, the nation was more than ready for Reagan’s upbeat message of peace, prosperity and patriotism. The next dozen years began with Reagan’s Inaugural observation, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” and the release of 53 American hostages.

“After George W. Bush’s two terms,” Tanenhaus adds, “conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive ‘culture war’ waged against liberal ‘elites.’”

But is conservatism actually “dead,” as Tanenhaus claims, or are reports of its demise, as Mark Twain once quipped, greatly exaggerated?

It is telling that the most widely accepted brand of American conservatism today is not classical conservatism, ideological conservatism, neoconservatism, or even paleoconservatism.

It’s Reaganism — not only because Reagan is the standard by which all other contenders are measured, but because many of his conservative ideas have also served as the source, without attribution, of planks in the Democratic platform as well.

Conservatives cheered when Bill Clinton pronounced: “The era of big government is over.” Indeed, the contention that Reagan’s election in 1980 inaugurated three decades of rule by the right doesn’t get much opposition in political science circles today.

“Reaganism has survived,” argues John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the Wall Street Journal, “because it went with the grain of American culture, tapping into many of the deepest sentiments in American life: religiosity, capitalism, patriotism, individualism, optimism.”

Reaganism has survived because our 40th president, like the 18th century politico Edmund Burke, based his philosophy not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on a distrust of all ideologies.

As Burke, who would have vigorously approved of “The Great Communicator,” once wrote: “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

Tanenhaus bemoans the triumph of “movement conservatism” over the Burkean variety. In “Death of Conservatism,” he argues that “the paradox of the modern Right” is that “its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative,” and that has finally led to electoral disaster, political irrelevance and “rigor mortis.”

Yet, if the origins of modern conservatism can be traced to the philosophical clashes among the myriad dollar-a-year men who came to power during the New Deal, then the seeds of future victory for conservatives just might be found in Barack Obama’s formidable crush of conservative John McCain (365 electoral votes to 173) during the last election.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives who put their faith in the less-than-charitable hope that Obama’s policies will flop.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives who allow Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin to speak for them.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives defined by what they oppose (“socialized medicine,” “big government” or “activist Supreme Court justices”) — but rather by what they support.

Those who yearn to “conserve” individual liberty, traditional values, personal responsibility, limited government and strong national defense will return to power.

They always have.

LOW TECH BALLOTS STILL THE SAFEST WAY TO VOTE

Published in the September 30, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star

Thomas Alva Edison, arguably the most prolific American inventor, managed to amass 1,093 patents during his 84 years.

While you may recall that his various gadgets impacted fields as diverse as mining, telecommunications, cement, electric power, sound recording and motion pictures, you may not know that Edison, who campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, also tinkered with voting machines.

Patent No. 90646, filed on Oct. 13, 1868, was not only the first for the 21-year-old genius but could also have been, had he given up, his last.

What the legislative world needs, thought young Edison, is an electric vote recorder, a device that tabulates “yeas” or “nays” with the flip of a switch.

While Edison’s invention performed flawlessly, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Legislature responded, “no sale.” The last thing these gentlemen wanted, when it came to tallying votes, was speed.

While manual tabulation sucked up a great deal of time, lawmakers from the Bay State put those hours to good use. Not only did they lobby their colleagues at the back end of the alphabetical roster, but they also availed themselves of the opportunity to make deals before a majority position was known.

If the total arrived all at once, as would have been the case with Edison’s vote recorder, the minority would have been left out in the cold — with every single ballot.

Although Edison was disappointed to learn that no market for his first patented invention existed, he immediately grasped the life lesson: “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others. I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”

You see, the world didn’t need Edison’s high-tech device. Until the mid-19th century, results of balloting for various elected offices by the general electorate were publicly displayed — a practice that left voters vulnerable to intimidation and/or bribery.

To remedy that situation, Henry Chapman of Melbourne, Australia, hatched a simple, yet elegant solution in 1855. An official ballot, which was to be printed at public expense, would list the names of all candidates and propositions. Not only was this ballot to be distributed exclusively at polling places, but it was also to be marked in secret — anonymously, as it were.

America converted to Chapman’s “Australian” ballot by the time of the hotly contested 1892 presidential race between former President Grover Cleveland and incumbent President Benjamin Harrison. Today, the right to a secret ballot as a protection against corruption and coercion is accepted as the cornerstone of every democratic state.

The 21st century version of Edison’s flip-of-a-switch technology can be found in the direct-recording electronic voting machine, which may or may not include a touch screen. While the high-tech device is cost-effective, kills no trees and accelerates vote counting to warp speed, it, unfortunately, leaves no paper trail.

After the 2000 hanging/pregnant/dimpled-chad fiasco in Florida, activists made a big push to replace older, mechanical voting technologies with DRE voting equipment. To that end, Congress OK’d a multibillion-dollar “Help America Vote” modernization bill, but as Joseph Stalin once pointed out, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”

By 2008, Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of state, was so troubled with the rumored lack of security and reliability in Golden State voting machines that she hired an investigative team led by UC Berkeley computer scientist David Wagner to study the problem. The results led her to decertify voting machines in 20 counties — a mere six months prior to Super Tuesday.

Only two months ago, computer scientists from UC San Diego, University of Michigan and Princeton demonstrated that a criminal could hack into an electronic voting machine using programming that hadn’t even existed when the DRE was invented. They found that “an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code that could steal votes undetectably and could spread automatically and silently from machine to machine.”

Team member Hovav Shacham added: “Based on our understanding of security and computer technology, it looks like paper-based elections are the way to go. Probably the best approach would involve fast optical scanners reading paper ballots [as well as] statistical audits.”

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has introduced a bill that would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections.

It’s time for Congress to step up and just say no to the direct-recording electronic voting machine.

Here’s a bouquet of bromides to sniff as you decide: “Everything old is new again.” “Trust but verify.” “Speed kills.”

Edison said it best: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

DO PHONE PUSH POLLS STINK: YOU BET YOUR BIPPY

Published in the Wednesday, September 16, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star

On this very date in 1968, in the midst of a presidential campaign, Richard Nixon managed to appear on Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh-In.” Employing a vocal inflection that expressed excessive incredulity, he turned toward the camera and inquired, “Sock it to me?”

An invitation to appear was also extended to Nixon’s opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but Humphrey politely declined.

According to the show’s creator, George Schlatter — whose politics lean unswervingly toward the left — “Humphrey later said that not doing it may have cost him the election while Nixon said the rest of his life that appearing on ‘Laugh-In’ is what got him elected. And I believe that. And I’ve had to live with that.”

Nixon was neither doused with a bucket of water nor bopped on the noggin during his few seconds on “Laugh-In” but he should have been. He was one of the first politicos to employ the push poll.

As Dick Martin would have said to Dan Rowan, “I didn’t know that.” Then he would have screwed up his mouth and added: “What’s a push poll, anyway?”

Rowan would have responded: “Look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s.”

These days, it’s quicker to consult Dictionary.com: A “push poll” is “a seemingly unbiased telephone survey that is actually conducted by supporters of a particular candidate and disseminates negative information about an opponent.”

Even you, yourself, may have been on the receiving end of one of these phony phone surveys. Only seconds into the questioning period, however, as you found yourself being assaulted by the smell of excrement being hurled toward one particular political candidate, it would have dawned on you — this is no different from those mudslinging spots that glut the airwaves at election time.

But, wait, weren’t you asked to participate in a poll? Instead, you participated in a malicious whisper campaign, courtesy of Ma Bell.

In Nixon’s very first race (1946), he ran against Democrat Jerry Voorhis, who represented the 12th Congressional District in Southern California for five terms (1937 to 1947). Democratic voters throughout his district reported receiving telephone calls that began with the words: “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Then the unidentified caller hung up.

Although no documents were ever produced linking the Nixon campaign to the anti-Voorhis push poll, at least one former employee of the call center did come forward. Apparently, the $9 she made each day was not enough to procure her silence.

Washington, D.C.-based negative phoning entrepreneur Mac Hansbrough wrote in Campaigns and Elections that push polls are “the single most important and cost-effective communications tool a campaign can employ.” If Hansbrough had uttered that remark on “Laugh-In,” Wolfgang (Arte Johnson) would have emerged from behind the potted plant purring, “Verrry Eeen-ter-es-ting!”

To find an example of push-polling at the “all-politics-is-local” level, one need gander no farther than Ventura, where John Snowling, president of the Ventura Police Officers Association, admitted his union had commissioned a “poll” but refused to supply a copy of questions asked.

That’s not surprising. Push polls leave scant trace evidence. The hundreds of firms engaged in that sort of sleazy enterprise make it a policy not only to safeguard the identity of clients but to also guarantee that scripts will never see the light of day.

It is only when a citizen has the presence of mind to record such a call that exact words can be parsed to determine legitimacy. You see, the push poll is related to the opinion survey in much the same way as a road apple is related to the piece of fruit that supposedly keeps the doctor away.

At the national level, the pesky First Amendment seems to present the paramount obstacle to anti-push-poll legislation. Furthermore, not only is the California Fair Political Practices Commission sorely underfunded/understaffed but state election law can only nibble away at the edges of the problem by requiring telephone polling of more than 500 respondents to identify the sponsor.

While there will be no “here come de’ judge!” for the Ventura Police Officers Association, the union leadership seriously underestimated the intensity of blowback coming from the largely fair-minded Ventura electorate, which holds nasty smear campaigns, especially financed by their own law-enforcement officers, in considerable contempt.

Perhaps victims of push polls cannot expect protection via national, state or local laws but they have a friend in the Association for Public Opinion Research. These legitimate pollsters — who blitz the media with valuable information, man hotlines, conduct investigations and “out” scruples-challenged politicos and the money-grubbing push-pollers they employ — are socking it to ’em with the ultimate weapon available: the truth.

Edith Ann would be so proud.

A POSITIVE ATTITUDE COUNTS: WHETHER ONE IS SHAPING SAND OR SHAPING A LIFE

Published in the September 2, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star
According to the Dalai Lama, “Happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors.”

On Aug. 22, the Toni Young Hueneme Beach Festival featured its very first sand sculpture contest. Donna Breeze hatched the novel idea while brainstorming various strategies to keep Hueneme Beach Park from remaining “the best-kept secret in Ventura County.”

The event attracted six teams and kept onlookers entranced all afternoon. More than 125 individuals voted for the People’s Choice Award.

The prospective leader of a seventh team arrived an hour late. She hadn’t bothered to register or read the rules. She did, however, express her decided displeasure with the site selected by the event’s organizers. In fact, she demanded that her contest plot be relocated at the water’s edge. When she couldn’t get her way in that regard, she peppered a contestant’s mother with four-letter expletives.

Contrast her behavior with a happy-go-lucky Seabee who agreed, along with three of his buddies, to come to the aid of two damsels in distress. It seems the girls’ sandcastle crew had turned up AWOL at the last minute. This fair-skinned sailor from South Dakota — who slyly submitted to being slathered in sunblock by the lovely ladies — spent the afternoon baking in the Chamber of Commerce-ordered sunshine as the foundation of a merman sand sculpture.

According to the official rules, contestants could incorporate anything picked up on the beach into their creation — and this young man was so delighted at being picked up by two Port Hueneme beauties, he uttered nary a discouraging word when informed there would be no exercise or bathroom breaks during the 3.5-hour sand sculpture construction and judging period.

Why, given identical circumstances, do some folks choose nasty and some folks choose nice?

In addition to adopting an upbeat attitude, positive people are more willing to admit they don’t have all the answers. It’s no secret that the key to piling up sand and convincing it to remain in place long enough to be fashioned into something fabulous is the right ratio of compaction and moisture.

Yet, while most of us grew up creating our silicon works of art within a few steps of the surf, there are alternative methods for bringing seawater to sand. Even though the 14-by-14-foot plots were located 25 to 30 yards away from the ocean, digging down a mere 12 inches yielded so much water that one team actually incorporated dual rectangular reflecting ponds in its creative design. Had the prospective leader but inquired, she would have discovered that more informed heads than hers had grasped the geomorphology of Hueneme Beach.

Besides plenty of H2O underground, the proximity of the site to the seaside park propelled oodles of Beach Fest attendees into becoming sand sculpture spectators. There was also a legal advantage to being covered under the festival’s Coastal Commission permit.

One should consider Hueneme Beach Park itself a 20-acre sand sculpture, varying in size and shape from year to year. When the Navy built the east jetty at the harbor, it interrupted the flow of sand to Hueneme Beach while also creating a corrosive eddy current that scours away 1.25 million cubic yards of sand every year. The Army Corps of Engineers is mandated by law to replenish the sand, which is usually pumped out of a trap west of Channel Islands Harbor, every two years.

This year, the width of the seashore doubled — not only due to the usual two-year cycle allotment, but also to sand recovered from a special harbor-deepening project. In fact, in some places, beachgoers are forced to hike across nearly 50 yards of hot, white sand to reach the water’s edge — a far cry from the late 1990s, when the mighty Pacific threatened to wash away the picnic corrals located near Surfside Drive. In fact, next year after the winter storms, the same sand sculpture plots will probably hug the shoreline, courtesy of erosion.

Finally, positive people are less likely to harden an expectation — such as a shoreline plot or potty break — into an entitlement. When some folks discover they can’t dictate the rules, they refuse to play. Others rise to the challenge. Perhaps the words of Carlos Castaneda might prove instructive here: “The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”

If the negative woman had stuck around long enough, she might have learned that happiness is a choice. Not only did the others opt for fun in the sun, but in selecting nice over nasty, they also played a critical role in making this first-time event an unparalleled success.

To that end, all six teams ended up big winners.

JULIA CHILD'S FOOLPROOF SECRET RECIPE: JOIE DE VIVRE

Published in the August 19, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star

Apparently, Julia Child, who resided just up the road in Montecito until her death in 2004, was not a big fan of Julie Powell or her online journal, “The Julie/Julia Project.”

Although more than 4 million food blogs clog the World Wide Web today, it was Powell’s e-chronicle of her triumphs and travails in attempting each and every labor-intensive recipe in Child’s landmark “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (1961) that elevated her to Internet celebrity.

As Powell initially blogged on Aug. 25, 2002: “365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer-borough [Queens] kitchen. How far will it go?”

As we discover in the film “Julie & Julia,” with Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, Powell made it all the way through Child’s 752-page magnum opus.

Judith Jones, Child’s book editor at Knopf, claims that Child refused to endorse Powell’s project because Powell didn’t seem very passionate about cooking.

Jones also allowed that Child, who ordinarily proved enormously supportive of anyone with a serious interest in food, might have been put off by two glaring generational differences: Powell’s liberal use of four-letter words and her “all-about-me” focus that, in Child’s view, took the spotlight off the real celebrity — the lovingly prepared dish calling seductively from the sideboard.

Although the blockbuster film is being credited with boosting enrollment in culinary schools, reservations at French restaurants and sales of Julia Child cookbooks, a bulge in the demographic of 20- and 30-something lovers of all things gastronomic has been noticeable for at least two decades. In fact, the word “foodie” was coined in 1981 by authors Paul Levy and Ann Barr (“The Official Foodie Handbook”).

Two additional indicators of the swelling sophistication in American home chefs can be found with the sudden spike in the number of farmers markets nationwide, as well as the variety of heretofore strange spices or peculiar produce now stocked regularly in suburban supermarkets.

In the film, Madam Brassart of the Cordon Bleu in Paris informs Child that she hasn’t any talent for cooking, but it doesn’t really matter since Americans wouldn’t notice the difference.

Apparently, then, in La Belle, France, the United States was considered a nation of fast-food fanciers or frozen-dinner diners, while today, millions of American viewers are rabid-to-the-max fans of at least 57 different television programs featuring the culinary arts. In fact, with respect to the Food Channel, it’s all food, all the time.

Child demystified cooking for me in 1964. The French Chef burst into my kitchen, courtesy of KPBS, and divulged such secrets as employing generous amounts of clarified butter in just about everything, drying meat thoroughly before browning, and sautéing mushrooms in small batches to keep them crispy and light.

It was Child who convinced me that I could, indeed, master an omelet — all it took was the fearless flick of the wrist and fresh eggs. Soon, I was impressing friends and family with mouth-watering boeuf bourguignon, succulent coq au vin and even a lumpless hollandaise.

I didn’t go as far as to sport a “What Would Julia Do?” bracelet, but when mishaps occurred, and they did, on a frequent basis, I took great comfort in Child’s immortal words: “If no one’s in the kitchen, who’s to see?”

Even though she may have been secretly embarrassed by Dan Aykroyd’s caricature on “Saturday Night Live,” during a 2000 interview with Larry King, Child stoically maintained, as “sort of a ham” herself, that high-pitched hyperbole was the name of the game.

The 1978 SNL performance of “Save the Liver,” which is reprised in “Julie & Julia,” features Aykroyd in drag attempting to debone a chicken. He ends up severing a finger and bleeding to death — but not before shrilling Child’s traditional send-off “Bon appétit!”

So why didn’t Child champion Powell? The truth be told, Child probably sensed that Powell was more writer than cook.

The book “contains no biographical information,” Powell observed in Harper’s Bazaar. “Julia was much too concerned with her passion for teaching the ‘servantless American cook’ how to create fine French food to indulge in personal chatter.

“Yet somehow it comes shining through in the book’s pages that this was the sort of woman who could plunge her bare hands into boiling water or stun a live lobster with one decisive whack,” she added. “A woman who had no use for words like inappropriate and impossible.”

And that’s the lesson the emotional, meltdown-prone Powell and the rest of us learned from the sensual yet sensible Child. It’s not about how perfectly the dish is prepared. It’s about infusing the best of nature’s bounty with love and serving it up with a dash of wit and a soupon of joie de vivre.

In fact, to me, it sounds like a recipe for life.

DIE-HARD BIKERS STILL FEEL 'HASSLED BY THE MAN'

Published in the August 5, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star
Peter Fonda, in a role not unlike his Captain America character in “Easy Rider,” played Heavenly Blues, the leader of a chopper chapter from Venice, Calif. “The Wild Angels” (1966) was screenwriter Charles B. Griffith’s only foray into the zen of maintaining a motorcycle lifestyle, yet enthusiasts can quote, chapter and verse, from Heavenly Blues’ paean to libertarianism: “We wanna be free. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man!”

Speaking of “The Man,” only a few months after “The Wild Angels” was released, the Air Quality Act mandated that the federal government conduct extensive ambient monitoring studies and stationary source inspections. A few years later, the Clean Air Act of 1970 required the Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations to protect the public against airborne contaminants considered hazardous to health.

California, which continues to develop more stringent standards than the feds or to fast-track them into existence ahead of EPA deadlines, remains a special case. According to a recent American Lung Association report, nine of the nation’s 10 worst cities for smog can be found in the Golden State. Furthermore, although California’s existing programs halt 400 tons of smog-forming pollutants daily — primarily from light-duty cars, trucks and SUVs — California is mandated, by 2023, to save several hundred more tons of pollution per day to meet federal clean-air requirements.

The California Air Resources Board estimates that 5.2 tons of pollutants would be prevented from entering the atmosphere daily if smog checks for the 841,081 registered motorcycles in California were required.

According to the CARB comparison of emissions-compliant vehicles, while on-road motorcycles and scooters make up 3.6 percent of registered vehicles and 1 percent of vehicle miles traveled, they account for an alarming 10 percent of smog-forming emissions. To paint the picture in other words, the average motorcycle is about 10 times more polluting per mile than a passenger car, light truck or SUV.

How can this be? Aren’t motorcycles and scooters, on average, about twice as fuel-efficient as four-wheel vehicles? Can’t some get more than 60 miles per gallon? Isn’t mpg the reason, during this disastrous downturn, so many folks are trading their gas-guzzlers for motorized two-wheel transportation?

You bet.

Even though internal-combustion engines housed in compact, lightweight vehicles such as scooters and motorcycles more effectively convert gas into go-power, the major problem is that 14 times more hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen (two of the three pollutants measured by CARB) come with the astonishing mpg scores. To meet California vehicle-emissions standards in 2008, 87 percent of motorcycles had to be factory-equipped with catalytic converters. Unfortunately, they didn’t stay that way.

A Motorcycle Industry Council survey reports 38 percent of all motorcyclists replace or modify their exhaust systems. A more recent CARB study found the figure to be a distressing 85 percent. While state law prohibits modifications that increase emissions, unfortunately, it doesn’t specify catalytic converter removal.

To that end, state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, who represents parts of Oxnard and Port Hueneme, introduced SB435, which initially required motorcycles to undergo smog checks every two years. “As they came in for a smog check, the idea was you could check to see if they had a catalytic converter at the same time,” Pavley told The Star.

The California Senate, along party lines, approved (22-17) her legislation June 1, but only after Pavley agreed to drop smog checks and settle for merely ticketing and fining owners who “customize” by jettisoning catalytic converters. Enforcement, however, should be easy — that ear-splitting varoom, varoom coming from the back end of the bike is a dead giveaway.

“Motorcyclists,” Pavley told the Los Angeles Times, “perhaps don’t realize that those catalytic converters are absolutely critical to improving our air quality.” Don’t realize or don’t care? Just like Wild Angels, don’t these bikers just “wanna be free to ride [their] machines without being hassled by The Man”?

After all, as bike riders and dealers argue, motorcycles account for a trivial portion of vehicle miles traveled, significantly effective pollution-abatement technology doesn’t yet exist, and CARB’s wrath should really be raining down on high-polluting diesel trucks, construction equipment and noncompliant made-in-China vehicles instead.

It might surprise you to learn that not only was “The Wild Angels” nominated for a Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, but the cast also includes such Tinseltown luminaries as Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd and Michael J. Pollard.

The only missing cinematic easy rider seems to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Should Pavley’s bill make it to his desk, it’s even odds he’ll terminate it with his veto pen. Although Schwarzenegger wants to be known as a green “Governator,” he’s also been busted for driving his motorcycle without a license.

That’s a libertarian for you.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DOCUMENTARY GOES WRONG? IT'S BANANAS!

Published in the Wednesday, July 22, 2009 edition of the Ventura County Star

Sept. 27, 1981, “60 Minutes,” the pre-eminent investigative television program, took a chance and took an hourlong look at itself — especially with respect to its questionable journalistic practices.

During the show, Executive Producer Don Hewitt quickly batted away allegations that the “ambush interview” makes the subject look guilty, even when simply saying, “no comment”; that the “gotcha moment” invariably focuses on minor players rather than the head honcho protected by a phalanx of lawyers; and that the “sting operation” requiring reporters to misrepresent their identities in order to entrap “the bad guy” takes a number of ethical shortcuts.

The question that gave Hewitt pause, however, was: “If an investigation ends up exonerating a subject, why don’t you broadcast that?”

Although Hewitt hedged that such stories regularly aired, he couldn’t come up with a single example.

That question has returned some 28 years later with “Bananas!” a complex courtroom documentary by Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that chronicles a 2007 class-action suit against Westlake Village-based Dole Foods for sterility allegedly suffered by workers exposed to the worm-killing pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP).

The 87-minute film opens with the funeral of yet another plantation worker from Nicaragua, where it is commonly believed that cancer, miscarriage, birth defects, sterility and infertility are inextricably linked to bananas.

The film centers on a stogie-smoking, Ferrari F430-driving Los Angeles attorney, Juan J. Dominguez, who provides the occasional boast about championing “the little guy,” but is much more interested in making history — “the first-ever claims by Third World farm workers in U.S. courts” — and making money. The jury awarded $1.58 million to five out of the 12 plaintiffs in the case Gertten filmed.

Granted, Gertten had finished “Bananas!” and entered the documentary in the Los Angeles Film Festival months before discovering that Dominguez had been recruiting and coaching Nicaraguans to perjure themselves for profit as well as providing them with fake work histories and bogus medical lab reports.

Yet, on April 23, 2009, when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney dismissed two subsequent lawsuits as fraudulent, not only did Gertten refuse to edit his documentary to reveal the reality that Dominguez had been systematically executing a massive extortion plot against Dole Foods, but also refused to remove his unedited documentary from public view.

It was Los Angeles Film Festival officials who opted to boot “Bananas!” from competition in favor of screening the film twice as a “case study” to explore responsible documentary filmmaking. Dole Foods attorney Scott Edelman strenuously objected — to no avail.

“It’s a phony, fraudulent story that was made up in one of the worst frauds that I’ve ever seen in a court in 25 years of practice,” Edelman told the Los Angeles Times. “Our position is, even if the filmmaker didn’t know this at the outset, he knows it now, and the film should not be screened. It needs to be entirely rewritten to reflect the facts.”

To that end, Dole went back to court July 8, filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that not only seeks a preliminary injunction barring Gertten, who plans a worldwide release in October, from further screenings, but also accuses the documentarian of slander, libel and “actual malice” in knowingly including “patent falsehoods” in his film.

In a statement distributed at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Gertten defended his portrayal of the 2007 trial: “Everything I filmed is the truth: It’s what my cameras captured and how this all played out during this trial,” Gertten wrote. “Having ‘Bananas!’ now in the public arena and being able to discuss and defend my film will be a great thing for all of us involved.”

On the other hand, the Dominguez scandal threatens to unravel hundreds of related cases involving more than 10,000 plantation workers throughout Central America.

Making its debut on Sept. 24, 1968, “60 Minutes” was hosted by Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace. The first program featured a segment exploring the relationship between perception and reality. While in Wallace’s opinion, the magazine show aimed to “reflect reality,” Reasoner acknowledged that individual perceptions of reality might differ.

Somebody should pay if people are being poisoned with pesticides, and it’s not difficult to believe the wrongdoer to be a mammoth, moneymaking, multinational agribusiness. Yet, testimony before Chaney proved that Dominguez’s plaintiffs, supposedly rendered sterile by DBCP, were not even plantation workers, much less employed by Dole. In fact, all these folks are just a perjury trial away from prison.

Definitions of “documentary film” include such words as “factual,” “nonfiction” and “objective.” The documentarian provides, as it were, “a window unto reality.”

Gertten’s window, however, needs a good cleaning — and then perhaps he can get a better look at both himself and his work.

SUSAN BOYLE: FINALLY, CELEBRITY STATUS HAS BECOME SO LAST YEAR

Published in the Wednesday, July 8, 2000 edition of the Ventura County Star

Is there anybody who isn’t aware of Susan Boyle, the shy, stout spinster from Scotland, whose “Britain’s Got Talent” audition — she chose “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables” — left the judges, especially the eye-rolling Simon Cowell, open-mouthed with astonishment?

The prime directive for online videos is that they be mind-boggling. In fact, that’s the major reason folks forward a particular link to their entire e-mail address book. Boyle’s stunning performance eventually went viral. More than 100 million have already taken a look.

Boyle, who lives alone with her cat, Pebbles, was not the first frump to trump Cowell. In fact, Boyle’s 2009 clip almost duplicates, frame by frame, tubby Welsh tenor Paul Potts’ heart-tugging operatic aria, “Nessun Dorma,” from 2007.

Yet, alas, Boyle’s Cinderella saga did not come, as did Potts’, with the requisite fairy-tale ending. Even though she sang flawlessly in the finals of “Britain’s Got Talent,” voters awarded the competition’s top prize to Diversity, a multiracial, 11-member dance troupe.

As speedily as the 48-year-old songstress shot to fame and fortune, she found herself floundering under the weight of exhaustion, anxiety and depression — ending up in a private rehab clinic for behavior unbecoming a second-place superstar.

Sara Nathan, an editor with The Sun told ABC News: “I don’t think anybody actually understood the far-reaching implications of Susan’s learning disabilities. I don’t think people realized just quite how difficult she was and the extent of her problems.”

Potts, the erstwhile mobile-phone salesman now worth $8.2 million, was not the show-business neophyte that was Boyle, who had never performed outside her home or church.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Boyle admitted that the death of her mother had inspired her to enter the TV talent competition.

“I wanted to show her I could do something with my life,” insisted Boyle.

On the other hand, with winnings from several minor-league singing contests, Potts was able to pony up tuition for voice lessons that included performances with six amateur opera companies in Italy as well as the Royal Philharmonic. In fact, serious questions were raised with respect to his amateur standing.

So why didn’t the 20 million watching the “Britain’s Got Talent” finals propel Boyle into fortune and fame, as they had Potts two years earlier? Perhaps, while “BGT” figured it was enough to send in the clone, Brits have come to expect (and demand) the unexpected.

On the fateful night Boyle’s world fell apart, Cowell predicted, win or lose, “stuff (would be) coming your way in America.”

Cowell was cognizant of the fact that YouTube had laid the groundwork, stateside, with millions already rooting for the woman of a certain age with the Einstein ’do. America invariably gathers any underdog to its collective bosom.

The powers-that-be at “America’s Got Talent” found out the hard way that failing to discover a hinterland housewife with the “SuBo factor” would cost them dearly. Not only did “AGT” suffer its lowest-attended premiere in four seasons, the show itself also slipped 14 percent in the ratings. The reason, according to entertainment bible People magazine: “There was no Susan Boyle moment.”

Americans have come to expect (and demand) the expected.

Have you noticed the “back to basics” philosophy that is presently pervading the zeitgeist these days? Television commercials — that’s right, television commercials — are admonishing viewers to forego fancy labels for deals at discount stores, to embrace personal responsibility and to give gifts made by their own loving hands.

Furthermore, almost all those polled in the latest Nielsen Consumer Confidence Survey vowed to maintain these life-changing changes even when the economy recovers.

“People are more concerned about community values and social connection,” reports demographer Bernard Salt, “over the promotion of individual interests seen during the boom and epitomized in celebrities such as Paris Hilton.”

He further argues that the retreat to “real values” evident in consumer behavior not only extends to celebrity but also explains the American fixation with the plain, middle-aged yet talented Susan Boyle, who is the veritable antithesis of Hilton.

“No longer engaged by suburban materialism,” Salt adds, “we see beyond outward appearances to the beauty of Boyle’s voice.”

Finally, we are more than ready to jettison our reputation as a society willing to sell out its most fundamental values in order to be famous for being famous. Celebrity is so last year.

David Hasselhoff, a judge on “America’s Got Talent,” told the Boston Globe, Boyle’s story “shows us we’re stuck up, judgmental and sometimes full of ourselves” when we could be so much better.

While the Brits may have become bored with “I dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living,” it seems we Americans may possess good reason to pay special attention to the words.