Jeff Andrus RSS Feed

It's Not America, Eh?

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-08-26T06:51:21-07:00

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Escape from California

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-07-08T23:26:00-07:00

The Interstate system benefits the lives of all Americans, regardless of whether they drive cars, because it is almost impossible to receive goods by land, sea, air, rail or dog sled without some point of the distribution requiring road transport that is facilitated and made more efficient by an Interstate. ...In his first year in office President Barak Obama and his Congressional allies committed to spend more tax dollars than went into the Interstate, but don't hold your breath waiting for returns, either in revenue or lasting jobs. ...Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was head cheerleader for the legislation, saying, "We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.” ...Questioned about the make-it-up-as-you-go-along procedures and lack of promised transparency during the reconciliation process between House and Senate versions, Pelosi's factotum, Representative Alcee Hastings, recalled Thomas Edison's experimental technique of endless trial and error. ... ...Doubtless, the government will need lots of bureaucrats to create red tape for any new doctors and nurses who may be trained and to provide loopholes for insurance companies that already control the health care system. ...Prognostications were pinned on the 2010 stock market briefly stuttering upward, compared to the dumps of 2009, as well as in a slight increase in consumer spending that is quickly abating and in a portion of the unemployed being rehired by businesses—approximately 170,000 workers compared to a total of about three million who lost their jobs after the stimulus kicked in. ...The rest is thrown at studies of bugs, marijuana and the sex life of female freshmen, a bar for a steakhouse, new golf carts for a country club, etcetera and so forth, with teacher benefits shoved into a military appropriations bill. ...

Visit msnbc.com for ...For every one of them there are 100 to 150 voters eager to OK bond issues with no thought to how they will be paid. ... When unemployment benefits run out, when being on welfare means more difficult access to over-extended aid programs that offer fewer services, it is doubtful that the disgruntled will wait patiently in soup lines, cloth caps in hand ala the 1930s. ...The choice of sanctuary wasn't as much about physical location as about values—a place where most people most of the time honor God and country without coercing anyone else to follow suit; where there are fewer entitlements and people who believe they deserve them; where crime is less and prisoners don't have to worry about being raped; where schools expect students to read and write; where politicians have to know constituents. ... But unless our move at least pointed to place where our grandchildren might be better protected, there was no point to leaving the joy their lives had given us. ...She would have taken breakfast at one of the clumps of fast food joints along Interstate 5, but I was driving, so we took a jog into Winters, a farming town in the Vaca Mountains. ...To the gunsole at the other end I toyed with asking if he had ever seen The Dam Busters, the 1955 film about the Royal Air Force's destruction of Ruhr Valley dams during World War II. It was a black and white movie, so he probably hadn't seen it and therefore would not know the impossibility of a pleasure boat's carrying enough explosives to destroy Shasta...oh, perhaps crack the top of the wall a bit...but a British Lancaster with a 6,800-pound bouncing bomb would create enough concussion lower down to breach the wall and flood 160 miles of the Central Valley. ...On the way back I was thinking about how I should have done my bit for the War on Terror by keeping security forces educated, as I have done during my last eight flights when I was pulled aside to be patted down, or as now when another Pinkerton in a pickup slowly passed and gave me the once over. ...The pundits (educated but far from wise) seemed to think people such as myself would get confused by "War on Terror," assuming as it does that terrorists need killing, but begging the question, What is a terrorist? ...There are, you see, many good Moslems, and people in Washington think we ordinary folk can't sort out the good from the bad, and the most grievous crime of all would be to try and therefore prove we are racists at heart. ...Says, "Hi," when he thinks, Sure, we've embarrassed and humiliated prisoners of war (and, yes, sometimes water boarded them), but that is nothing compared to the systematic maiming and rape of civilians who disagree with the towel-headed dictator of whatever shit hole country the U.S. supposed to be equal to. ...A hurricane in New Orleans isn't abnormal, but Katrina was worse than most, and one of the indelible images was that of cars with full tanks of gas running out of fuel stuck on the on-ramps to freeways. ... Finally, I had a thought I sensed came from the Lord: "I don't want you in it, I don't want you of it, I want you out of it." ... With upcoming films like Machete promoting race war, garnering name actors to star in it and a mainline company like Fox to distribute, coupled with the usual standbys of pornography, rap music and the occult indoctrination of children, I felt as though I was surrounded by angels gathering for the last days. Even if I were not a corruptor of the innocent (which is debatble) and even if I could escape being thrown into the sea with a millstone around my neck, I might drown in the splashing all around. ...Liberal fascists abound in the industry, and they have messages they want to spew to the public: one of them is that people like me are dangerous fanatics. ...She was reading the Bible when a passage suddenly grabbed her attention: The LORD our God said to us at Horeb, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain. ...She looked mean as a snake as she came out of a coffee bar, threw down a gum wrapper and continued for about four paces before she stopped, turned around, picked up the wrapper and put it in a trash container. ...We bring tolerant ways, laid back ways, feel good childish ways that are based on ideas that don't require much thought and with hardly a second thought can be transformed with a vengeance. ...In the last three years the state racked up a $1 billion deficit, lost 40,000 private sector jobs and added 25,000 new public employees. ...A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care programs...thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollar back and forth.

Hi There, Sports Fans

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-06-29T22:16:20-07:00

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Obama-omics at Work

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-06-28T07:47:02-07:00

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The lesson of a Jewish Cemetery

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-06-20T04:37:49-07:00

Through a blizzard of flies, I can just about make out the plasma TV up in the corner on which Jimmy Carter, dubbed into Arabic, is denouncing Israel. Al Jazeera doesn’t so much cover the Zionist Entity as feast on it, hour after hour, without end. So here, at the western frontier of the Muslim world (if you don’t include Yorkshire), the only news that matters is from a tiny strip of land barely wider at its narrowest point than a rural Canadian township way down the other end of the Mediterranean. Notwithstanding saturation coverage of the “Massacre In The Med” (as the front page headline in Britain’s Daily Mirror put it), there are other Jewish stories in the news. This one caught my eye in Canada’s Shalom Life: “No danger to the Jewish cemeteries in Tangiers.” Apparently, the old Jewish hospital in this ancient port city was torn down a couple of months back, and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora back in Toronto worried that their graveyards might be next on the list. ... The Jewish cemetery on the rue du Portugal is perfectly safe. “Its sanctity has consistently been respected by the local government that is actually providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.” ...Being in the neighborhood, I thought I’d swing by and check out the “current grooming.” It’s kind of hard to spot unless you’re consciously looking for it: two solid black metal gates off a steep, narrow street where the rue du Portugal crosses the rue Salah Dine, and only the smallest of signs to indicate what lies behind. On pushing open the gate and squeezing through, I was greeted by a pair of long underwear, flapping in the breeze. In Haiti, this would be some voodoo ritual, alerting one to go no further. But in Tangiers it was merely wash day, and laundry lines dangled over the nearest graves. If you happen to be Ysaac Benzaquen (died 1921) or Samuel Maman (died 1925), it is your lot to spend eternity with the groundskeeper’s long johns. ... Azancot, there is no sense of “sanctity” or “community”: as the underwear advertises, this is no longer a public place, merely a backyard that happens to have a ton of gravestones in it. I use the term “groundskeeper” but keeping the grounds doesn’t seem to be a priority: another row of graves was propping up piles of logs he was busy chopping out of hefty tree trunks. Beyond that, chickens roamed amidst burial plots strewn with garbage bags, dozens of old shoes, and hundreds of broken bottles. It’s prime real estate, with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean, if you don’t mind the trash and the stench and the chickenshit, and you tiptoe cautiously around the broken glass. ... In one isolated corner, six young men—des musulmans, naturellement—watched a seventh lightly scrub a tombstone, as part of a make-work project “providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.” ...By 2005, there were fewer than 150 Jews in Tangiers, almost all of them very old. ... Whenever I mention such statistics to people, the reaction is a shrug: why would Jews live in Morocco anyway? ... Today some 3,000 Jews remain—i.e., about one per cent of what was once a large and significant population. That would be an unusual demographic reconfiguration in most countries: imagine if Canada’s francophone population or Inuit population were today one per cent of what it was in 1945. But it’s not unusual for Jews. There are cemeteries like that on the rue du Portugal all over the world, places where once were Jews and now are none. I mentioned only last week that in the twenties, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. But you could just as easily cite Czernowitz in the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting the city in 1937. ...You can sense the same process already under way in, say, London, the 13th-biggest Jewish city in the world, but one with an aging population; and in Malmö, Sweden, where a surge in anti-Semitism from, ahem, certain quarters has led Jewish residents to abandon the city for Stockholm and beyond; and in Odense, Denmark, where last year superintendent Olav Nielsen announced he would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school. The Jewish presence almost anywhere on the map is as precarious as, to coin a phrase, a fiddler on the roof. And Israel’s enemies are determined that the biggest Jewish community of all should be just as precarious and prove just as impermanent. In 1936, during the Cable Street riots, the British Union of Fascists jeered at London Jews, “Go back to Palestine!”, “Palestine” being in those days the designation for the Jewish homeland. Last week, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, jeered at today’s Jews, “Get the hell out of Palestine,” “Palestine” being now the designation for the land illegally occupied by the Jewish apartheid state. ...North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.  ...Because Israel is supposed to be up for grabs in a way that the Congo, Sudan or even North Korea aren’t. Only the Jewish state attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence, and insisting that, after 62 years of independence, that issue is still not resolved. Let’s take a nation that came into existence at precisely the same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of postwar British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift, and in Canada a “human rights” complaint or three. The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. ... Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. ...That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople. To this fierce Islamic imperialism, the new Europeans, post-Christian, post-nationalist and postmodern as they are, nevertheless bring one of their oldest prejudices—that in the modern world as much as in medieval Christendom Jews can never be accorded full property rights. On a patch of the Holy Land, they are certainly the current leaseholders, but they will never have recognized legal title. To be sure, there are a lot of them there right now. But then there were a lot of them in Tangiers and Baghdad and the Bukovina and Germany and Poland, for a while. Why shouldn’t Tel Aviv one day be just another city with some crumbling cemeteries and a few elderly Jews? ...Because, as long as it’s unresolved, then Israel’s legitimacy is unsettled, too.

Malibu Palms Available as an eBook

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-06-01T10:25:00-07:00

My most recent book, Malibu Palms is now an eBook. In the next few months it may be purchased as an eBook at Amazon.com, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Sony’s Reader Store and Kobo (formerly Shortcovers). It is also available today in Kindle (.mobi), ePub, PDF, RTF, LRF (for Sony Reader) and Palm Doc (PDB) formats, and in HTML and JavaScript for online reading. Now you have a choice: you can buy it as an eBook or as a printed book. Either way, just buy it!

Tracer Joins the 21st Century

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-05-31T08:01:39-07:00

In the mid-Ninties I wrote two novels about a laid-off middle-manager named John Tracer who decides to persue his childhood dream of becomig a private eye. His wife is sure that dream is a mid-life crisis. His new career and their homelife merge in what one reviewer characterized as “family cuteness combined with sociopathic slaughter.” The books were published by Scribner in hardover and were well received by critics and readers with twisted senses of humor. They came out in an era before anyone knew what an eBook was. Well, technology has finally caught up with the Tracer Family. They still live in the last century, but you wouldn’t know it. Their depressed financial circumstances are more relevant today, and crime is just as bad. But they have morphed from the printed page to bits and bites, having been re-released in eBook form. In the next few months Tracer Inc. and Neighborhood Watch will both be available at Amazon.com, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Sony Reader Store and Kobo (formerly Shortcovers). Today they may be purchased in Kindle (.mobi), ePub, PDF, RTF, LRF (for Sony Reader) and Palm Doc (PDB) formats, and in HTML and JavaScript for online reading. Click on a book cover above to get the eBook version of your choice. I recommend you start with the first one and move on to the second, which starts one day after the first one ends.

This and That

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-05-17T13:30:52-07:00

My friend Todd, with whom I once partnered in the making of The Proverb, kept after me to make the changes. He hates doing this kind of work, but without his expertise this site would look like a washed up actor’s gaming the Internet to sell Amway. Hard to imagine some bleary eyed, unshaved loser greeting the new day with a shot of Old Crow then writing with the style and grace of Yours Truly, but that’s the impression some people had of my old site. Maybe the picture of me at my computer in my bathrobe with mussed hair and a shot of... ...Todd has just come back from relief work in Haiti. A contemplative hike on Pikes Peak had him slipping off the trail. Leg damaged and night falling, he would have died in a snow bank if it weren’t for his cell phone. ... Be prepared and follow the instructions on the back of the packet. ...Other news of friends is bitter sweet and downright tragic. Mark Young, writer/director of The Least Among You, has picked up Lionsgate as distributor. ...Sylvan Markman died after a valiant struggle with cancer. Struggle was what he knew best. His parents were killed in the Holocaust, and he lived out the Second World War incognito as the “son” of a Catholic couple in Belgium. Afterwards an aunt and uncle in New York adopted him. He attended college in Ohio and went to work for The Agency for the Performing Arts in New York City. His first APA assignment was to accompany Roger Williams on tour and make sure the pianist had a chicken sandwich waiting after every performance. He went on to work for The Chisolm Group in New York City and Ogilvy & Mather in Los Angles, producing and directing television commercials. He was promoted to Vice-president and Executive Producer at DMB & B of L.A. His clients ranged from General Motors and Mattel Toys to California Avocados and the Australian Tourist Commission. In other venues Sylvan produced a Stanley Cup Championship for NBC, was a CBS segment producer, and for PBS produced, directed and co-wrote of Beyond The Year 2000 . He has consulted for CBN in Virginia Beach, the Army at West Point, and back in L.A. was a segment producer on the Don Mischer special, The 50th Anniversary of ABC. His marriage to the mystery writer Sophie Dunbar brought him to a book store where Sophie and I were scheduled for a joint signing. After she died, Sylvan got hold of me to partner on fourteen reality and dramatic series, for which we knocked on doors and gave pitches to a vast assortment of Hollywood cretins during a four-year stretch that forced me to realize my career was as dead as Marley’s ghost. ...I left Los Angeles just as he was beginning to look starry eyed as he talked about Magdalena, a wise and wonderful lady born in Argentina. They married and did several videos together for Hispanic ministries in the Los Angeles area. She was with him, comforting, until the end. Sylvan was always trying to teach me Yiddish phrases. ... This is the best I can do, pal: ...Besides being a chicken sandwich, I’ve been laboring over an essay for months, tentatively titled Escape from California. I still have on the back burner Three Weeks in Another Town about my wife’s leaving me to face a winter of discontent all by myself. ... Enough time to develop a boil on my heel that ballooned my foot to the size of one of Bozo the Clown’s shoes. ... Sometimes I think women don’t care about anything but themselves. Speaking of women, I attended the Empire Classic in Spokane—a body building, fitness and figure competition. Earlier, I had interviewed a contestant who said something that took a couple of months to explode into an ephinay. ... If you’re a couch potatoe or think the world owes you a break, you won’t get the fact that the narrow way is the only way. Restricting choices to focus on a future goal, whether it be getting up early to excercise or to learn a new language, leads to freedom. The hard work is worth it, becomes a joy, if you love where you’re going. ...So was the prospect of visiting a former girlfriend after nearly four decades of each of us not knowing what had happened to the other. In the morning we took my grandson to the park. ... We left the restaurant when the dinner crowd began trickling in. Then we went back to my daughter’s to talk some more. Her life was like listening to the audio of a best selling novel. Most of the time we have some contact with distant friends, if only an occasional phone call, and thus have landmarks to their lives. The filling-in doesn’t take more than hour or so. Take away any contact and you have non-stop conversation. I would have never guessed any of her accomplishments and trials, but the sense of humor I remembered was alive and well. Better yet, the stuff in my life that can get only a yawn from my wife and a, “Dad, that’s not funny,” from the kids, suddenly had a new audience. Appreciative, I hope, but hell, when it’s about me, as this site so often proves, I really don’t care. Have to move again, so I probably won’t be back on line for another month. In the meantime catch a clear explaination of the National Debt and write if you get work.

Journey to Canadaland with Forays to Miscellany

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-24T16:33:09-07:00

With the party of the welfare state in charge south of the border, maybe it is we Americans who are pretty much like the Canucks. ...I used to own a square inch of Yukon Territory, possibly right over a vein of gold, the deed registered and sent to my by Quaker Oats, Sergeant Preston's sponsor. ...When I was older, I was more into the gunshots and horn blasts of Spike Jones and his City Slickers than into the serious swing of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. But it's always fun when Canadians forgot they're Not Americans, as what seemed to happen when Guy and boys cut loose with "Sioux City Sue." ...Since I’m not a wine bibber, I kept ordering gin-and-tonics that didn’t need to be turned back and was quite enjoying conversation with the lady next to me. I allowed myself to think it might be mutual, that we were building bridges of understanding, following in the footsteps of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and President Eisenhower, or President James Monroe and the mythical Canadian volunteers who weren't with the Red Coats when the British burned Washington. ...That was a quote from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer regarding the Bible, after which she launched an attack on the Bible for leaving out the Di Vinci Code. ... ...Due to a very generous gift three years ago, my wife and I took our last trip to Canada, flying First Class from Los Angles to Vancouver, BC. I thought I had a fear of flying, but when seated up front with lots of leg room and the stewardess murmuring, “Oh. ... I hope that’s OK,” I realized fear was really distaste for having peanuts tossed in my general direction when squeezed among the huddled masses. ...Well, Bongo, if there were a sudden stop against what barnstorming pilots used to call a solid cloud...you know, the kind with rocks and trees..then, yeah, we're all just part of the same splatter of humanity. But frankly, if that's how it's going to end, I'd rather be a millisecond or two ahead of the pack. ...I used to have an obsession about trying famous hotdogs, hamburgers, tacos, anything, and especially if they were “world famous.” Like that robot kid in Artificial Intelligence who waits thousands of years underwater for his mother to come back, I used to hope as I stood at a flyblown counter in the middle of the San Joaquin that a real movie star would come in and give a signed photograph to the proprietor who would then put it up next to the yellowing one of Rory Calhoun. ... I came to learn that "world famous" food is pretty like “The Banana Belt of Washington State” or “Lebanon, the Switzerland of the Middle East.” ...I have nothing to compare whether there were more bits and pieces of bivalves than before, but pushing them from one side of the cardboard cup to the other helped while away the two-hour crossing of the Strait of Georgia. ...Although this was my first time on that choppy blue-brown stretch of cold crosscurrents, I had used the Strait of Georgia as a story setting. ... Her life, you mindless turnip; but this was the kind of producer who always wanted, “Something bigger at stake,” which boiled down to a Doomsday device ticking away somewhere. ...In a scene before the husband demonstrates divided loyalties, I showed his wife swimming in an Olympic-sized pool, sans suit or with sprayed on Lycra depending on where we were hustling the financing. ... Thus after she is forced overboard, it is not a complete surprise when nightfall finds her dragging herself from the sea and crawling onto a small island’s craggy shore. ...In the real Strait of Georgia she could be Johnny Weissmuller and the Marks combined (Spitz and my nephew Warkentin) and she would drown in twenty minutes. ...Then we descended into the Pacific Rim National Park where, my God, the end of the world is at stake! ...For the next four days I feared for my life in the rustic luxury of the Wickaninnish Inn south of the village of Tofino on Vancouver Island’s western shore. ...There were surfers out there, not many but daily, and sometimes I mistook the black hoods of their wet suits for seals madly trying to escape some horror coming in from Japan. ...Even after all these years in the New World my wife thought it should be bald like the vultures where she grew up in Africa. ...He said that the bears were still dozy that time of year: they’d be fat and sassy on insects and berries by the end of the summer. And eat grass, I thought, when they wanted to throw up that arm or leg from a stray hiker. ...That's embarrassing because the proprietors treat you like some kind of god who will feed the family, and you have to pretend that you care about a local artist's environmentally sensitive rendition of whales. ...I don't think he shared the same gushing pride as fellow citizens when the United Nations declared Clayoquot Sound an exemplary World Biosphere Reserve. Most Canadians respect and trust the United Nations, demonstrating a certain gullibility, but I think my man with gun and dog represented the tougher shrewdness of bygone generations. He would have rather kept the saw mills going because they provided real work, not the toading required to sell Indian handicrafts. ...Look, the Wickaninnish is not the kind of place that would appreciate the following analogy, but I am decidedly not its normal guest who books massage and pedicure at the spa before swaning in for dinner in a change of underwear, and this is what I say about the grub: ...Our room had a fireplace, a deep-water tub that allowed you to stretch out and a view of cold waves crashing on dark volcanic rock. If you got tired of tramping the hard packed sand of Long Beach, or of putting on slickers and Wellingtons supplied by the inn to slog through the rain forest, a cozy warm bed beckoned. ...“We’re committed to persevering ...”yadah, yadah, yadah, “.. so even though your room is $400 a night, we’re not going to change your damn sheets.” ...Speaking of home, I was a day late on the news but a quick check on the satellite TV for what the weather would be like if we were to go tramping the next day made me realize that Hell never takes a holiday. At Virginia Tech a Korean immigrant majoring in English and known for harassing coeds fatally wounded one woman in her dorm then gunned down the resident advisor, Ryan Clark, who came running to investigate. The gunman skulked back to his room, left a written rant and mailed a pre-recorded video diatribe to NBC before slaughtering thirty more people at Norris Hall. ...They lamented that he had a speech impediment for which he was bullied since he was a child, oh, two or three times at least. ...He had survived some real bullying by real racists called Nazis, with more of the same from the Communist thugs who took over Romania. ... Close on his heels for honor was a senior survivor in a second classroom, Zach Petkewicz, who led two other students in barricading the doorway as the crazed Korean tried to shoot his way in. ...The mass murderer finally did everyone a favor by killing himself, but bleeding hearts, not understanding what a blessing that was in saved court costs, added his carcass to the victim count. ...The message was global warning threatens the planet, and all the bravest and smartest young people must get their parents to forego electricity and driving, then teach them how important it is to close down smelly factories and mills. ...So with the sun slowly sinking in the west, we come full circle about this magical land known to many an enchanted visitor as "The Tropics of the North." ... Home at that time but for not much longer was a balmy beach city in the County of Los Angeles, State of California. The 405 Freeway bordering the airport was being expanded, and there was hardly a yard of construction that wasn't covered in gang graffiti put there by Not Canadians.

One Big Ass Mistake America

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-22T14:28:55-07:00

What we can expect is what we already see. Chaos and waste, mismanagement and mendacity. After Lyndon Johnson became president in 1964, he was able to rally bipartisan support to pass Medicare, a program providing health care to the elderly and disabled. The cost of the first year of implementation was 3 billion dollars. Backers estimated that by 1990 the program would grow to 9 billion. In fact it ballooned to 67 billion. According to the CBS muckrakers on 60 Minutes, last year's budget was about 90 billion, with two-thirds of that being paid in fraudulent claims. Plenty of room for reform in what the government was already squandering of our money, not only to Medicare but also to Medicaid, Social Security and certain iffy community activists. But the government we have elected is not interested in reform. It would rather increase the ceiling on the national debt. That is to say, increase the amount of money the government allows itself to print when it doesn't have money. That's what happened with Bush the Younger and the Republicans were in charge. Now with Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at the wheel, the deficit has been quadrupled, and that doesn't count the extra trillion added on Socialist Sunday. Admittedly, there have been some noises to half the latest increase in ten years, to slow the inevitable inflationary and job killing effects. This will be done by... well, by... by pulleys and incline planes and carefully placed mirrors. Suppose you had a kleptomaniac shopaholic in your family who had a wallet full of maxed out, full-interest-and-penalties due credit cards. You probably wouldn't let him apply for more credit even though he might intend to buy some good things, things that you may want yourself. But you can't trust him to be prudent, and prudence is what we need when it comes to electing our government officials. So vote the bastards out.

If Jesus Came to San Francisco

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-15T23:12:32-07:00

Salter champions the cause "a courageous Jesuit priest" who holds up the banner of a "more inclusive, Christ-like faith." That sounds like a Good Thing until she gets to the courageous priest's specifics. Among the not-so-Christ-like things Father Black Robe rails against is the Church's 2,000-year misunderstanding of the role of women. ...The article continues to set up boogie men and blow them away, provoking emotions in the way of discussions in a high school civics class. ...I've not even asked the cutie pie in the next aisle to give me the rundown on the chapter everyone else read. Finally, I have no intention of looking things up or going to original sources. ... Come to think of it, it's not the way of post-modern journalism, either. ...Salter, Father Black Robe is a member of the Chicago-based dissident group Call to Action. At a Call to Action convention on the West Coast, he delivered the homily in the closing Mass, in which he imagined Jesus arriving at SFX, then going on to challenge the smug ideas of the conservative powers that be. I admit to some confusion about whether Black Robe is talking about San Francisco, a town hardly known for its conservative leaders, or another planet. But I am used to this and with low cunning act as if I'm on the same page. In Black Robe's homily Jesus responds to "Deepack Shupra"s charging $25,000 a head to hear the guru speak on "Peace of Mind." I'm pretty sure Black Robe is making a play on the name Chupra. Being an inclusive kind of priest, he doesn't want to knock snake charmers or whatever it is the real Chupra does to get the big bucks. Jesus simply tells him what to do with the money: "Go and disperse it among the poor and homeless in the street." Verily, that sounds almost like an update on what Jesus said to the rich young man who kept all the commandments and wanted to know what else he had to do to inherit eternal life. As recorded someplace to the right of Malachi, Jesus ascertained that the young man hadn't committed adultery or borne false witness or broken whatever the other Commandments are. ... Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. ...The phrases "eternal life," "treasure in heaven" and "follow me" may have been cut from Black Robe's parallel because he was delivering a homily, not a full-blown sermon. ... If I were a gambler, I'd bet that the fuller biblical story was simply inconvenient. Nevertheless, we are invited to imagine, so we might assume that “Shupra” upholds the Ten Commandments, doesn't want to go to Hell, and is willing to become a disciple of Jesus so that he can have eternal life in Heaven. Otherwise sticking the money up his ass would do as much good for his soul as a tax exempt charitable donation to the homeless. Jesus real message is: to get saved you need him, and in him comes the grace to let go of the piggy bank or anything else you think is more important than God. Black Robe's Jesus then refuses an invitation to attend a dinner with all Frisco's religious leaders. Instead, he rocks up at a Castro District bistro to be "with some friends from the gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender community." ...There Black Robe goes again, saying we're on Earth when he's really talking of Uranus. I mean, there have been at least three decades of San Francisco clergy supporting gay life styles and/or living them, campaigning for gay officials and officiating over same sex weddings. Black Robe's Castro café would have been chock full of clergy on the prowl to show their solidarity. Again, it is possible that the shorthand of a homily necessitated Black Robe's leaving out what he must know of Jesus: he was always up for a party—either with winos and corrupt tax collectors or with his mom and the disciples— but never was he satisfied with a quick glad hand and hearty, "Hey, slick, you're ace in my book. ...Since God doesn't change, Jesus reminded sinful men and women that they needed to. The God Jesus preached is quick to accept everyone as they are, to show mercy, to forgive them...but now the unpopular part...to help us change our wicked ways. Dealing with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus drove off her accusers, then told her, "I do not condemn you. ...That is quite a bit different from it's OK to go whatever you want with your genitals. ... The likeliest scenario at the café is that Jesus would ask his fellow revelers to repent whereupon most would call for his crucifixion. Some, though, would recognize that their lives are in disorder and would ask to be healed. ... And some of those would either backslide and need to repent repeatedly, or would courageously carry their burden and not act on their impulses. ...Black Robe's Jesus continues his Bay Area odyssey by visiting prisoners at San Quentin. There he talks about the sanctity of human life "from the unborn child in the womb to my humble friends on Death Row." ... Whether against them or violent narcissists, the Church teaches that capital punishment should be used only in the most exceptional cases. I don't agree with that teaching, but I suspect both the real Jesus and Black Robe's would want execution abolished. ... What I'm more sure of is this: the real Jesus wouldn't do today what he didn't do during his crucifixion. ...As the homily grinds on, we go back to women. ... The scripture, "In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female," is used to bitch slap those in the Vatican who contend that Jesus is really calling women to the priesthood. It's the Pope and his cronies who are holding them back from their true calling. Except for the odd heretic, never in the first nineteen centuries of Catholic history did anyone in the Church think woman should be priests. ... None of the Saints from Mother Teresa and Elizabeth Seton, to Catherine of Sienna, that magnificent warrior Joan of Arc and Mary, the mother of God herself. The plain fact is, no Pope or College of Cardinals can ordain women to the priesthood because it goes against Cannon Law and ecclesiastical tradition, both of which are based on what Catholics have for centuries believed is the proper biblical understanding. In recent times Protestants have allowed women to go from ministries like evangelism, healing and prophesy to take over as heads of churches and at times of full denominations. Obviously, some churches do modify themselves to fit post-modern views of what should and should not be. I would suggest that Black Robe and Call to Action look into joining those churches, rather than wasting time complaining about the Pope's unwillingness to be trendy.

He Ain't Heavy, He's Tom Hanks

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-13T05:13:00-08:00

"...it really represents a war that was of racism and terror and it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to I'm sorry-- kill them all,” Hanks told MSNBC. “And does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today? So it's-- is there anything new under the sun? It seems as if history keeps repeating itself.” A cursory reading of the subject matter that Hanks pretends to know something about would contradict him on nearly every point. Culturally, the Japanese believed that all foreigners were sub-human. They didn't think any better of Koreans and Chinese than they did of Americans and Australians. The Japanese hated without prejudice, and some today still believe that foreigners are just a cut above monkeys. The word for foreigner requires a facial contortion similar to the reaction of stepping in dog you-know-what. When Imperial Japan was spreading its "Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" in the 1930s and early 40s, political and military strategy included the wholesale rape and murder of civilians, and the draconian subjugation of cities like Nanking and Shanghai, Singapore and Seoul. Americans called them Japs and Nips and little yellow bastards, and undoubtedly harbored prejudices, but we did not go to war because of racism. We were forced into hostilities because of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. "Those small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere" referred to by Hanks had names ennobled by American blood—Guadacanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. We didn't "seem' to kill all our enemies on those islands and others. We came pretty close to doing it and weren't sorry because the Japanese had been ordered to fight to the last man. Only a few dishonored themselves, their ancestors and their Emperor by surrendering to the American dogs. They expected the same treatment they had dished out to Allied prisoners, treatment that made the Nazi SS in charge of POWs in Germany look like choir boys. On 22 April 1943 Japan made reality official, announcing that Allied pilots would be given "one way tickets to hell." Months after the atomic bombing of Japan forced her warlords to do the unthinkable and surrender, camp commanders were ordering prisoners to be beheaded or burned alive. After the war Lord Mountbatten who served in the Royal Navy and knew Japanese atrocities all too well had a codicil in his will: when he died, no Japanese official should be allowed to attend his funeral. Tom Hanks feels (I almost used the word "thinks") that what happened in the Pacific is similar to the War on Terror. Kind of. But not in any way that someone so politically correct and historically ignorant can imagine. Islamic fascists started the current war. They think all infidels are dogs, and make no distinction between killing soldiers and civilians. They are hell bent on converting us, by the sword or otherwise, and then expanding Sharia law so that... ... Well, the star of Philadelphia Story wouldn't be given long to finally grow up. _______________ Warning: The following is a sickening look at fact. In degrees it has been repeated elsewhere, like in Rwanda, Burma, Iran and Iraq. Mr. Hanks has at least one point right but only because people like him forget history or choose to ignore it.

Headaches

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-09T22:53:50-08:00

I don’t remember being hurt in the dusty fall. Being bucked off the back of my grandfather Doberman pincer (Ari he was called) and hitting my head on the floor, that’s what gave me the first pain I remember. Physical, I mean. The psychic undoubtedly started before I was conceived. “Jerk its fool head off!” was the way Grandpa told other people how to raise their dogs. He was a doctor and a member of Rotary. He had been elected to the high school board. If people didn’t follow his advice, they at least listened to how patience and the choke chain had taken Ari to the working dog competition at the Cow Palace in San Francisco where he won the gold cup. From having been yanked to the heel as a pup, Ari could sit on his haunches forever, balancing a hot dog on the end of his nose, drool running down his massive jowls onto Grandma’s floor, until Grandpa said, “Now Ari." Then with a flick of his head, the hotdog would somersault in the air, slobber doing cartwheels alongside. At full arc jaws snapped the hotdog from sight. Ch-chu-chump. Ari seemed hardly to chew it: the chomping came from licking up his own drool. Grandsons and nephews were put on his back at parties. Ari didn’t really buck so much as whirl like one of those devil duster bulls at the rodeo that the riders can’t get good times on. So we’d fly off quickly, one by one. After my dad moved our family to Boston, Ari proved that The Choke Chain Method of Obedience could take a dog only so far. He had to be exiled to Idaho where he got run over. What touched off this unfortunate turn was my little cousin Kirk's fascination with the rosebud under Ari's bobbed tail. Kirk put his finger in to explore. Ari turned his head to investigate. Kirk still has a scar on his forehead. As with Lady, I was three when I was thrown from Ari's back and hit the floor. Subsequent headaches would touch off a picture in my mind. From the inside out, my forehead was really made up of bars, with tiny prisoners swinging ringing hammers to smash out of them. The picture wasn’t worth sharing with anyone because my great aunts had worse headaches that they more graphically painted. They were Grandma's five sisters, all of whom were born in Utah. Two of them lived in town, and the other three made pilgrimages to California once or twice a year. One spent some time strapped to a table for electro-shock treatments. They said she was depressed, but she was the kindest to be around. Her husband sat in a chair mostly, with two tall green bottles of oxygen nearby for his emphysema. He talked about his days with Jack Dempsey, growing pale until he would strap the mask to his face and bring back the pink to his cheeks. Another aunt was twice married, producing three sons, two of them convicted felons. She was the most fun to be around, full of life, dating this soldier and that cowboy well into her senior years. By the time I was nine I was back in California, noticing things that I didn't know what to make of. When my aunts were all together with Grandma, they would sit around the table at dinnertime, swallowing back burps. Then in mornings at breakfast they would discuss who had a bowel movement and who had not. It was debated whether prune juice, stewed prunes, All Bran or all three would be an appropriate remedy because without a remedy a headache would surely ensue. A gray-haired head would be crooked to the side, eyes tightly knitted, while a liver-spotted hand traced the trembling course of pain from temple to back of the neck and up to the crown and across to the other temple. Because I was never constipated, my headaches were mere riots in Cell Block 3. Theirs were full breakouts, guards and bloodhounds chasing them through the fields. One had a headache that took over a farmhouse and held the family captive. The siege lasted a whole week. When she finally passed a stool and “they uncoiled it,” it measured four feet long. To this day I don't know who uncoiled it, why anyone would uncoil it, and whether it was a tape measure or a yard stick used to determine length. As a boy I just knew that life is full of unanswered questions, and some questions you need to keep to yourself.

Ménage à Weird--Louis, Murrieta and Me

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-06T01:43:08-08:00

Murrieta had done a Ph. D. thesis on the marketing ethics of art galleries and museums, to her mind very low, and was in the business of collecting and selling to them nonetheless. When I knew her, she was interested in tracking down paintings by Louis Daguerre. The Frenchman was better known for having invented the first photographic process to gain widespread use, but apparently there were ten oils that predated his photographic experiments. They would have great historical value, of course, and monetary too if only they could be removed from newly liberated Czechoslovakia. To test the market, Murrieta wanted to offer one of the paintings for sale to a respected museum in the United States. ...Let's call it The Getty. But the photography curator knew her, and she wanted someone else to make the phone call. She thought that I would do quite well. I had never set eyes on the painting and had only a Trivia Pursuit knowledge of the father of photography, but that didn’t seem to bother Murrieta at all. Maybe she thought that I would sound more like a rube who could be easily taken. ...“Yes, sir, what we have here is a signed Daguerre. A study in light, as you can imagine.” “A church,” whispered Murrieta, who hovered over my shoulder. “A church.” “With a figure,” she prompted. “A church and a priest.” “No, no." “Or a monk.” Murrieta rasped, “A woman!” “He’s got robes. Maybe a woman. ...“In the foreground,” she said. “She’s in foreground of a church.” I got reckless and added some movie magic. “An exterior shot.” ...“Actually, sir, I only look out of one eye. I don’t see so hot. But I can see now this is an interior. A very nice interior.” And so it went for about three insane minutes, after which Murrieta abruptly departed for Prague. For months I did not hear from her; then I got a note from a hospital ward in the States asking if I still had the drawing she had stashed under my couch because she needed to sell it pronto. I had no idea what was under the couch except corn chips, dust bunnies and maybe a discarded beer bottle. You try to shove the vacuum cleaner under as far as it will go, but things do get left behind. What was left behind was a sheet of blue paper with a charcoal sketch. It turned out to be by a Renaissance master and was worth ten grand. Up until then I had the romantic belief that art experts handled their wares with kid gloves. ...A friend of mine once introduced me to Phillip Mould. Besides being an advisor on art for the British Parliament, Mr. Mould is author of Sleepers, a very readable chronicle of his adventures in search for lost old masters. In Sleepers Phillip Mould talks about using spit and the old thumb to get an idea whether a dusty painting belongs in the attic or is worth something. The last I saw Murrieta, I was with three pals helping her move her things from The Athenaeum, a residence for visiting professors at Cal Tech. Each one of us had been told exactly what he wanted to hear. We weren’t sure why she was directing us out the back way, but it turned out she hadn’t paid the rent. The last I heard Murrieta’s voice was a phone call in which she wanted me to go to Panama and report on the impending secret invasion. She said that she could get my dispatches published in The Wall Street Journal. Besides being a coward, I didn’t believe she could know any government secrets, so I said no, and that’s how the world missed my first hand reporting of President Bush the Elder’s sending in the troops to arrest Noriega. ...I’ve heard of Murrieta since—from a table full of investment bankers I met at a dinner party, from a Russian émigré who was a famous artist’s rather spectacularly built nude and from a French film producer. Eighteen years ago she was either married to a preacher and distributing bibles in Mexico or hitching a ride with an Italian truck driver. Peace to you, Murrieta, wherever you are.

Drop Your Pants and Say, "Ah," to Obamacare

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-03-03T06:47:39-08:00

John Fleming, a physician and Congressman from Louisiana, has a petition going that at least would make your views known on that issue. If you want to add your name to the simple Yes or No email, Check it out, but be willing to wait to get onto the site because it is jammed. In case you're puzzled about what the "nuclear option" is to get Obamacare passed, take a looksee at the website for First Things. Then listen to what Senators like Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton said five years ago. Hugh Hewitt has a strategy for dealing with these hypocritics. In the meantime, some humor will help the medicine go down, and if you watch with scotch, the lady begins to sound like Charlotte Church.

I've Just the Word. Kee-rap.

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-02-24T10:51:55-08:00

In college I took a blind date to The Friday Night Flicks. We saw The Fly. The first one. It was made ten years earlier in 1958 and starred Vincent Price as a figure of stability (given the Prince of Horror's credits, the movie was already getting off to a pretty kinky start) for a woman whose husband does a low budget run-through of Jeff Golblum's character in the 1986 remake. Tens of millions were poured into the second one, but the first one wins the Integrity Medal with RVB Cluster for Really Very Bad. Happily, my date turned out to be a twisted little vixen who enjoyed the show as much as I did. Afterwards if one wanted to make the other break into insane laughter, all that had to be said was: "It's turned into a whole stream of cat atoms." Sure, you had to be there (and it helped if you ate something at the Student Union), but for what's below, you don't have to be anywhere but here. When I saw Two Weeks in Another Town in 1962, I was too young to appreciate the sheer awfulness. Where I grew up, you went to The Reel Joy Theater and tock the shows as they came. After loading up from the candy wagon in the alley outside, you paid 25 cents for a regular seat or 75 for one of the roomier loges at the back where you could smoke. Miss Hobbles patrolled the aisles with a flashlight, breaking up couples who were kissing. This forced you to pay attention to what was on the screen--Kurt Douglas playing a washed up alcoholic actor in Italy. His character is named Jack Andrus. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. ... My last name. Never before (and I don't believe since) has my last name been given to the leading man in a movie. As this point in my life I had heard my first name once before. It was in a black and white western that has a sod buster drive a wagon into town. He's not riding a horse; he's not totting a .44; he's in suspenders. As he's loading up with supplies, a bad guy guns him down, sort of like Jack Palance shooting the dog at the beginning of Shane, the difference being the dog has more of your sympathy. Then there is someone running and shouting, "Jeff's been kilt! They kilt ol' Jeff." ...You can see how the self esteem problems began. I started having dreams in which I was a cowboy hero about to save the schoolmarm on a run away buckboard. Everything would go fine as I galloped alongside, but as I dove off to grab the traces of her team, my pants would fall off, showing that I was wearing baggy polka dot underwear like a circus clown. Ol' Jeff had been more than kilt. He was traumatized for what would have been life if it hadn't been for Jack Andrus. Sure, ol' Jack was a has-been alkie, but just two years before he was the lead in Sparticus. Two Weeks in Another Town was therapy. Like most therapy, it was all self-centered, which made me susceptible to overlooking so much crappiness. Perhaps there was another subliminal effect, namely the seed of a career idea: if this is the best of what Hollywood can do, why not ol' Jeff when the time comes? But enough negatives. Two amazing things happen in a scene I used to have on this site until it was pulled because of copyright enfringment. The first is a young man and a young women done up in 19th Century costumes sitting in rocking boat to argue and exchange slaps, and then standing to abruptly kiss, the actress at first resisting before giving into passion, at which point they lower themselves to a more comfortable position. The balance and co-ordination required war with natural clumsiness and choppy water, neither side quite winning. If there were a special Oscar for weird, this would have taken it. The second is like unto it. Once the director (played by Edward G. Robinson) yells, "Cut!," the actress does a scripted I'm-a-free-spirit turn by stripping off her dress, then balancing on the gunwale of the rocking boat before doing a combo swan dive/belly flop into the canal. Yup, that's what a pro would do. A couple of hours in makeup, costuming and hair before dawn, then blow it all for a cooling dip into what has to be germ-and-trash infested water. Finally, there is a line almost as good as "....a whole stream of cat atoms." The young man kissing the girl wants to know how he did. "Any word for me?" "I've just the word," responds Robinson. ...P.S. The following trailer may have to be pulled too, but it does give a sticky sense of what the Edward G. was talking about.

Why We Fight

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2009-12-30T17:18:00-08:00

This is what I wrote six years ago, on Tuesday, September 11th 2001, or the following morning's National Post in Canada and that week's Spectator in Britain. ...For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful Presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do. And, for those on the receiving end, that “money shot”, as they call it in Hollywood - the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill – represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the west generally. ...But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with inconsequential initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors, government “lock-boxes” for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities. ...If you drive around Vermont and Massachusetts and California, you spend a lot of time behind cars with smug bumper stickers calling for more funds to be diverted from defence to education, because this would prove what a caring society we are. Tuesday was a rebuke to those fatuities: the first charge of any government is the defence of its borders – and, without that, it makes no difference how much you spend on prescription drug plans for seniors. From the moment Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad and ended the Gulf War, the world’s only superpower has been on a ten-year long weekend off. It loaded up the SUV, went to the mall, enjoyed the good times and deluded itself that in the new world politics could be confined to feelgood initiatives – big government disguised as lots and lots of teensy-weensy bits of small government. Yesterday’s atrocities were a rude awakening from the indulgences of the last decade, with some awful stories to remind us of our illusions – disabled employees in wheelchairs, whom the Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive. ...She was one of the “blonde former prosecutors”, which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment – she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton Administration. She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband Ted a happy birthday on Tuesday morning and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. ... He told Barbara what was happening –that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. ...I’m sure Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. ... This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including some who are, officially, our “allies”. ...Many others might do it for, oh, $20 million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. ... We should acknowledge that at the very least it requires a kind of mad courage, a courage 99% of those of us in the west can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson’s phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, perhaps even trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. ...By “we”, I mean “the west”, though in truth these days that umbrella doesn’t cover a lot – the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any useful sense. ... Is it because the US has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance – satellites, telephone interceptions - and virtually eliminated human intelligence – the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? ... Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental network of killers can find four fellows who can fly a jet willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton Doctrine tells the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer has the stomach for a single body-bag. ...The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the west were in Durban holed up with the smooth, bespoke emissaries of thug states and treating with them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how grovelling the west’s apology for past sins should be. Yesterday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward: they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word. ...Instead of an empire, the US belongs to Nato, a defence pact of prosperous western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab, a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognizable sense have militaries. The US taxpayer’s willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America’s so-called “allies”, freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned. ...I wasn’t catching a flight a couple of weeks back, just meeting one, but it was delayed and I wanted a coffee and newspaper and discovered I had to go through to the “secured” area to get them. ...This is, as the German government put it, an attack on “the civilized world”, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. ...I was wrong, too, about the “courage” of the suicide bombers: I was not yet sufficiently immersed in the psychosis of Islamism and its perverted death-cultism, in which before committing mass murder one carefully prepares one’s genitals because paradise is a brothel. ... But the images and stories of the disabled were among the most heart-wrenching of the day, including that of the able-bodied man who stayed – and perished - with his wheelchair-bound friend because he could not bear to leave him and let him die alone. I don’t understand why we sue small mom’n’pop businesses because their general store in a remote rural town has no wheelchair ramp, but we cheerfully encourage the disabled to work on the 80th floor of skyscrapers whose first move in an emergency is to shut down the elevators. ...But as we ponder this achievement of the Greatest Generation that helped lead to the surrender of Nazi Germany less than a year later, we should remember that the entire campaign was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a near-run thing. ...Some in the American government began to worry that a war started over freedom for Eastern Europe might end up guaranteeing its enslavement - Stalin's storm troopers merely replacing Hitler's. ...By any historical measure, our forefathers committed as many strategic and tactical blunders as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq - but lost tens of thousands more Americans as a result of such errors. ...Of course, World War II was an all-out fight for our very existence in a way many believe the war against terror that began on 9/11 is not. ...Not long after I picked up the free Saudi book, Mahmoud Shalash, an imam from Lexington, Ky., stood at the pulpit of my mosque and offered marital advice to the 100 or so men sitting before him. ...The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: "Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him"; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. ...CHICAGO - A Muslim convert who authorities say talked about waging violent jihad is in custody after federal agents say he tried to make an unusual trade: two stereo speakers for a 9 mm pistol and the grenades he would need to pull off his alleged plot. After being tipped by an acquaintance of Derrick Shareef, the FBI says it taped the 22-year-old planning to use hand grenades to blow garbage cans into clouds of flying shrapnel in a crowded mall the Friday before Christmas. ..."He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday ... because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure," said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office. ...I'm always happy to look for a silver lining, but these days, every silver lining contains several clouds, and that is when you look at their approach to Iran, it is almost beyond parody. ... I would be in favor, I would be in favor of actual direct negotiations between the United States and Iran, rather than having us all together on a support group that also includes all five permanent members of the Security Council, also includes the European Union, also includes the Secretary-General of the United Nations. ...RIYADH - Saudi King Abdullah opened the annual summit of Gulf leaders with a warning that the Arab world was on the brink of exploding because of conflicts in the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Lebanon. "Our Arab region is besieged by a number of dangers, as if it was a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode," he told the rulers of the oil-rich monarchies gathered in Riyadh for a two-day meeting to the backdrop of mounting sectarian violence in neighboring Iraq. ...But "most dangerous for the (Palestinian) cause is the conflict among brethren," he said in a reference to the differences between Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas movement that have blocked the formation of a unity government. ...Abdullah also warned that Lebanon, which was rocked by civil war in 1975-1990, risked sliding into renewed civil strife as a result of the current standoff between pro- and anti-Syrian camps. ...The heads of state of Gulf Cooperation Council members Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were present alongside the Saudi monarch, the first time in several years that all six rulers have attended the bloc's year-end summit. Gulf Arab leaders are also concerned about Shiite Iran's growing role in Iraq and its standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program, although GCC Secretary General Abdulrahman al-Attiyah said the GCC states do not feel threatened by the Islamic republic.

Dubai Detour

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-02-13T21:22:16-08:00

At San Francisco International, the counter clerk for Emirates Air asked whether I wanted to check my rucksack all the way through to Baghdad. I asked how he was going to do that if my connecting flight was with another airline. ..."I'll pick it up in Dubai and check it through to Iraq myself." ...We chased the sun for sixteen hours, never caught up and landed half way around the world in at 7:30 PM. The 777 Boeing had enough empty seating to allow for lying down, but even with a Xanax, I couldn't sleep. ...In spite of the early evening hour, Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport felt like an empty Vegas casino: there were few people but acres of crystalline-bright flooring that sprouted at intervals with composite pillars, huge glass sculptures and real palm trees. ...I followed passengers to baggage claim where I grabbed my rucksack from the carousal and strapped my smaller backpack to it. I moved on to customs, looking all the while for a smoking sign, but all writing was in Arabic squiggles. The few people out and about sounded like they were in Team America speaking Derka-derka. ... I thought I'd find my connecting flight better if I had some tar and nicotine first. ... To the left were a baggage scanner and a group of security guards in green jump suits. ...I patted my heart, "Anxiety," and thought, Camp Habbinyah was built by the British in 1938, taken over by the Americans during the Second Iraq War, and turned over to the 1st Iraqi Division, fine soldiers every one, or they damned well better be if our new President made good on his campaign promise to abandon the country. ...Shorty took my passport and gave it to a taller and fatter guard. ...I opened my toiletry bag and gave Shorty the plastic vial from Longs Drug Store. ...I had been told by my new boss that credit cards were useless where I was going; I should bring a thousand dollars in cash; and I'd have to try really hard to spend it before the year was out. If the one patting me down felt the wad of bills in my pocket, he didn't say anything. ...I had heard a lot of Rap, and the brothers seemed to be speaking from experience, so I said, "Do you want me to bend over?" ...When I straightened, I could tell they were overjoyed they wouldn't have to extract a condom crammed with cocaine. After I dressed, they escorted me to where Fat 'n' Tall had taken my passport, a much bigger space. Garage sale desk, green carpet, crappy blinds, paint chipping from the walls and a poster of the President of the United Arab Emirates framed in cheap plastic frame made me have second thoughts about Terminal 3's glitzy design elements. Two men in white robes--Lawrence and Arabia--now took charge of the proceedings. ... Arabia alternated between ordering coffee, exchanging chit-chat with uniformed guards who came in and out, and texting messages on his cell phone. Between them, Lawrence and Arabia had the English vocabulary of my three-year-old nephew. ...He got a lot of hand waving with Derka-derka that didn't sound like positive feedback. ...Do a McGiver and take them all out with a letter opener, then disappear in a puff of duct tape? ...Later, the kids read what had been typed, and later still I was told to follow them. ...They were going to dump my body someplace in the desert where, if my parents were lucky, in a year or two jackals would find the remains and the folks would have closure. ...(I discovered later that it is close to the airport, but my boys were just your typical teenagers who liked to see what the family car could do.) When we got out of the Jetta, one handed me metal handcuffs and the other said, "You put on." At the front desk, they turned me over to an older guy, a traditionalist in a robe, his lined face grizzled with whiskers. For men who sported beards in the United Arab Emirates, there were two basic styles. ... Or the wrap around it's-my-party-and-it-can-grow-where-it-wants-to. I didn't see anyone in the police station wearing a uniform, but the guy in the robe looked like he could inflict serious pain on any man and the camel he road in on. Dirty Harry took my cuffs off and ordered me to pick up my bags so that we could store them in a closet. ...We went back to the front desk where I was told to sit down. ...This pleased Dirty Hairy, and after the dignitary left for good, I didn't have to wear the cuffs. This made it easier to roller ink across each fingertip, then my palms, then the sides of my hands. ...Curiosity, a twenty-ish cop who spoke broken English and insisted on knowing how much "policemens" in America made. ...I though about saying yes, but I didn't want him to get jealous and immigrate. ...He told me, "Everything OK, not long now," and led me to a cell in which three men placidly waited for it not to be much longer. ...The UAE is a Moslem nation that prides herself on religious tolerance, and offers up her charms as a Mecca for high end tourists. A Switzerland of the Middle East, the boosters would say, but with no greenery or mountains, and summertime mean temperatures that would turn Heidi into one big skin cancer. Drinking is taboo for devout Moslems but allowed in most hotels, casinos and restaurants, and in a special area of the airport. Caught outside of those areas with alcohol or exhibiting the effects thereof, and you would be locked up with the notorious Xanax taker, Neil Mackay. ...God being God, I was sure he could pull strings so that I could continue to have most of my life my way. I prayed that the Lord would allow me to catch my connecting flight to Iraq. As if in answer, the two kids fetched me and took a high speed detour back to the airport. ..."Yes, yes, no worry," I was assured, so I didn't worry too much that I was put in a long room with a two snoring men, a Pakistani and an Indian. ...In American prison movies there's always a rape, and in research I once did in college, if you take into account the number of men raped in real prisons, a higher percentage of the U.S. male population is sexually molested than the percentage of females.

The Hurt Locker

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-02-04T09:02:08-08:00

I've known Nick since he was twenty-three (my wife says nineteen) when he first came to American from France to write screenplays and had dinner with us. Other dinners followed, one at his house during which I gouged a scar into his newly refinished floor that cost him $1,200 to repair. I am not reciprocating here either for friendship or for Nick's review of my book. I am simply stating my reaction to a finely wrought movie. The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal and directed by Katheryn Bigelow, is one of the greatest war films I've ever seen, more about suspense and character than blood and gore. My wife who hates war movies was absolutely riveted the whole time as it peeled back the lives of a bomb squad. There was a foreshadowing of the subject matter in Danger UXB, a 1979 British miniseries about the nerve racked lives of bomb disposal experts during the Blitz. Ten or more years earlier there was a black and white movie, The War Lover, in which Steve McQueen played a sociopathic B-17 pilot. But to say The Hurt Locker is like anything that preceded is like saying Tombstone is just another Western. The central character of The Hurt Locker loves the adrenalin high of his job, but he's no sicko and remains a very human hero in the business of saving lives. I've known a couple of combat veterans and at least one firemen who thrived on danger like a drug. They are unusual men. We need them. And one is much safer acting as back up as they so blithely lead the charge. The Hurt Locker brings an uncompromising perspective to the Iraqi war that isn't the usual shrill anti-American crap Hollywood has cranked out in the past. It's up for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Nick's mom is flying in from France to be with him in the audience. A lot of times nominees are in the bar with stand-ins dressed in tuxedos filling the seats until they stagger back. But Nick doesn't drink, so he'll be there cold stone sober until the winner is announced. He deserves the Oscar. I pray he gets it. But regardless of that outcome, people reading this who haven't seen the movie would be doing themselves a favor to rent the DVD or download it or take it in at a theater. You won't regret it.

Parental Advisory - This Is The Way News Is Made (and There's Some Adult Language)

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-01-30T15:16:19-08:00

What's so Bad about Wrath?

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-02-23T09:29:00-08:00

When I was an atheist tilting toward Zen, I thought everyone believed in curses and blessings and good old-fashioned judgment. ...If you study hard for an Organic Chemistry exam and get over 95% of the questions right, you should receive an A. An A looks good on your transcript, and might be the very thing to get you into graduate school and from there come up with a cure for stuff. ...Whether I should have been blessed with a good grade or cursed with a bad one was dictated by an academic discipline that I didn't care to understand, and left in the hands of an instructor who, as far as I knew, objectively applied its principles for judgment. I didn't like his Doomsday edicts, but the process seemed very fair to me and put me in lockstep with the hippie commie freaks who were my contemporaries. ...How and why an individual is targeted for other things in life that curse or bless is a usually a highly subjective matter, different for me and for the freaks and probably for you. What is absolute is that every one of us has been in situations in which we've felt royally screwed. ...Wrath is a term usually used in religious contexts, but it is as a good way of describing getting screwed as saying we've been dumped on or punked, or got the shaft or the short end of the stick. These situations are predicated on what might be compared to disciplines—methodologies, manners, expectations, misunderstandings, sheer craziness—that aren't as cut and dried as Chem 103. ...If you've worked in Hollywood, if you've stepped outside what is politically correct, if you've dealt with the Internal Revenue Service, if have been fired without cause, if you have ever gambled at love and found that the object of your desire has scrawled your phone number on the walls of every public restroom in town, the plain fact is, the pinball machine of life has rung "Tilt" and you are a loser. ...A very bad day is to find "Gas guzzler" keyed into the paint job of your new Escalade (by an environmental whack job) or across the roof of your Kia (by someone who has a sense of humor, but yes, OK, is sick). Even so, you have to admit that that other people have it a lot worse. ...If you think about it, you can predict that really, really bad things are going to happen to otherwise good people, certainly when they are an already exploited people reeling from one mishap to another, and maybe to a lot of them if certain conditions prevail. ...Outsiders felt so bad about the collapses of law, sewage systems, power grids, health care and virtually everything else, they poured in massive relief, some of it getting waylaid from Swiss bank accounts to actually help the poor. Among the latter were subsistence farmers and mom-and-pop entrepreneurs who could no longer make a living because what they did for meager profit was given away for free. ...Many post-moderns do not believe in God, at least not in the ways their fathers and grandfathers did. ...I keep meeting people who persist that authority is always individual unless it deals with a pet cause—legalize marijuana, ban cigarettes. The tendency for all of us is to tolerate only that with which we agree. ... Global Government with a billion laws and a cop on every corner to make sure everyone else toes the mark. ...(This is somewhat akin the psychological theory that, if you beat a kid mercilessly throughout his childhood, the adult is going to be one messed up mofo and likely to produce little mofos.) ...Come to think of it, though, those secular curses might be due to looniness that springs from spiritual roots that are rotting in the occult. ... I would add buying into Keith Oberman's rants or thinking that the cute midget on the barstool next to you in Vegas is really interested in your life story. ...More precisely, they don't like the antithesis, a religion that is absolute about what is pure and what is defiled. They can choose what they will, but no longer can they pretend that it is irrelevant to God. ...One might hope all this is harmless, but whenever people believe fire isn't hot, they tend to get burnt very badly. ...What Einstein's Theory of Relativity couldn't do was make falling in love obsolete. Some would like to pretend that the science of an Einstein and later of a David Hawking prove that morality is relative. ... Thus we can have mind-boggling discoveries about atoms and stars that are just that, mind boggling, but tell us nothing about our souls. An all-powerful, infinite God might illuminate some religious understanding through science, but science can't get into the ballpark to determine whether God exists or not. ...California legislators, who have already pushed the state to the brink of bankruptcy and are never at a loss for screwy ideas, talk seriously of policing carbon footprints by finding means to control household thermostats. ... Home invasions by Brother Government aren't likely, but then, who would have thought an Austrian body builder would become Governor? ...Both men are far from alone in taking junk science into such high flights of fancy only religion can offer safe landing. ...Ten if you count, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual," which translates to, "Hey, I don't want to talk about anything serious. ... A variation is, "I don't believe in organized religion," which sounds a lot less stupid than, "Yeah, I'm into disorganized religion." ...The reason is that I'm going to parse only the monotheistic ones here and probably piss everyone off in the process. ...The other biggie is Judaism, of which there are three strains—Jews against bacon, Jews for and Jews who are really Unitarians. ... The heretical sect of Judaism called Christianity, of which there are the Catholics and the break-always, otherwise known as Orthodox and Protestants. Most Protestants claim their sole authority is the bible and are divided into about 60,00 denominations that disagree about what the bible means. ...There may be a place for wife beating, but so far no one has suggested it has anything to do with conditions in Haiti. ...1) God created the heavens and the earth, including creepy crawly things, and made man and woman to stomp them flat, or anyway, to be in charge. For sure he wanted the characters of humans to reflect his own, and as long as they did so, they lived in a paradise called Eden. 2) God keeps his own counsel, so no one is quite sure why he gave them free will to do anything they wanted, but there was just one thing that he told them not to do. Of course, that was very thing they did, and having pooped in the punch bowl once, showed themselves capable of crapping on everything else. Because they chose their course, God had no choice but to kick them out of Eden and send them to Dodge City, Kansas. ...If he is, he works behind the scenes; his powers are limited; and he has only so many masked pistoleros to make life miserable. ... Most have forgotten after so many generations that they are genetically and spiritually connected- and therefore alike- those ancient kinfolk who were run out of Eden. Hence the good citizens of Dodge have to put up with saddle tramps shooting up the town from time to time and longhorns stampeding down Main, trampling women and children. ...Compassion is the understanding that your brokenness, those things that curse you, may not be visible to anyone, but that doesn't make you less needy than a cripple in a wheelchair or some poor sod trying to read the future in chicken guts. Mercy is doing whatever you can to help, and God is so rich in mercy he doesn't care whether you do so in his name or not. ...You may not have the means to be as generous as Pat Robinson usually is, even to people he believes are cursed, or as the government of Venezuela that is braving U.S. secret weaponry and sending over a shipload of supplies.

The Oregon Trail (to Ruin)

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-01-24T06:31:19-08:00

Since then I've cleared more, but my career yo-yoed between feast and famine. In the best of times and in the worst, I always wanted more. That was the compelling reason for me to never envy the people who did earn more by the sweat of their brow or who by luck of the draw were golden sperm babies whose money came from inheritance. No matter how it was made, if someone else had big bucks in the bank account, there was the possibility that ol' Jeff could too. Even though I am now retired, I haven't given up my dream of having a money bin, like Scrooge McDuck, but unlike him, blowing it on prostitutes and dog racing. Good. Now I have your attention. Oregon's month-long, mail-in balloting on Measures 66 and 67 is over. Misinformation and greed are the victors. The measures' cheerleaders said that taxing rich people would pay for education and the necessary services of other public employees. What they didn't say was that public workers in Oregon average incomes of $83,000 a year or about 30% more than private sector counterparts. In the last three years the state racked up a $1 billion deficit, lost 40,000 private sector jobs and added 25,000 new public employees. This year the Democratic-controlled legislature gave public workers a $259 million pay raise, then backed Measures 66 and 67 so that Oregon's infrastructure wouldn't go kaput. Targeted to fix it all up were fat cat corporations headquartered out of state. The loudest tax-the-rich cheerleaders were unions for teachers and for other public service employees, both within the state and all across the land. They spent $6.5 billion, two million more than business and tax payer groups. The same money was 61/2 times more than would have been needed to wipe out the state's deficit. Instead, the unions launched media blitzkriegs and hired community organizers to help the elderly and prisoners fill out ballots. The appeal had greatest affect on the Medford-Portland corridor of the state. There the left-of-center populous is far more numerous than in rural areas and much more open to looniness. The out-of-state fat cats may be less numerous than initially claimed. Regardless, they will pass on increased taxes by upping the costs for goods and services, pushing consumer prices up in Oregon, as well as killing jobs. Individual Oregonians who make a $125,000 a year have to retroactively pay higher taxes. If a mom-and-pop business—say, a corner gas station with some pumps and service bays, a tires and parts inventory, maybe a convenience store and certainly big tanks of petrol underground—has more $500,000 in gross assets, it too must pay higher taxes. Or cut costs by firing people like my fellow volunteer. Finally, public service employees, particularly teachers who work only nine months of the year, will retain retirement packages that are some of the highest in the nation. Measures 66 and 67 weren't so much about fixing anything as allowing public workers to continue living very high on the hog.

The Hun Revisited

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-01-09T21:58:30-08:00

Anyone who knows the screen trade, knows that can't possibly be true of any American script writer, but I don't believe in bursting people's bubbles, or as the narrator of Return of the Hun would say, "I try to reinforce Mr. and Mrs. ... Within hours of my putting on an enigmatic smile and shrugging modestly, another new acquaintance, fresh from the opening pages of my novel, Malibu Palms, said, "You and the drunk guy who's telling the story, you're really the same people, aren't you?" ...Ten years of ever-dwindling paychecks went by before I realized I had to do what my agent at the time implied he wasn’t: “Resurrect your own career.” ...My agent Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers said I was a Wooly Mammoth that needed to adapt to the new order and change the perception people had of me. ...I was willing to share most of my good ideas, but she’d have to do the typing and take second billing afterwards because, hey, a ghetto girl should kiss my derrière for giving her a break, excuse my French. ...I was trying to tell him how happy I was about my progress when he cut me off with,“You mean no one wants to be your partner?” ...I kept after it day after day, casting my pearls before swine, or if you will, chundering like an Australian into the Pacific and going right back for another Foster’s. ...There must be psychological reasons for this mixture, but we’re happy-go-lucky guys either way and wouldn’t understand if you told us. ...I couldn’t remember whether his last name started with a C or K, which was one reason to get fictional, but the accidental email that sparks the story really did appear on my computer one day. ...The only reason truth takes a dive in any of my writing is that there are some people on this earth that even Toxic Jeff wants to protect because they could beat the crap out of him. ...Of course in thirty years I’ve had number of agents, many of them exceptional human beings, and Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers is a highly exaggerated compilation of the very worst traits of a mere handful. ...As such he knows he depends on The Real Me for his very existence, so he steps aside from time to time when I want to get serious, as in The Wedding, The War and The Speech, An Unknown Soldier and Berkeley Baboons. ... ...Contributing to why The Real Me will never work in this town again, I slammed my fist on the table at a dinner party and declared, “Anyone who voted for Bill Clinton a second time might as well have been sodomizing the Devil!” ...It is the film the narrator has written, and if it is to get made, he must satisfy a certain starlet named Tawny Golightly with revisions. ...(By the way, when the narrator of Malibu Palms, tries to put words around what great acting is, he was inspired by my watching Chris in a play, stunned that whomever that lady on stage was, she couldn't be the neighbor I took walks with.) ... The Hidden is a cult film for which kids in the hood always recognize him on the street and say how great he was as a police chief taken over by an alien who kills for kicks. ... Clarence’s TV credits are as long as an orangutan’s arm, and because he had co-starred with Ritter in a short lived series called Hooperman, we were in the office of Ritter’s manager, smiling and nodding and pulling at our forelocks. ...He was a car mechanic, a Maytag repairman, the founder of a Lake Tahoe writer’s conference, a clerk in photocopy store in New York City, roommate of a nobody actor named John Hurt, and co-founder with Oakley Hall III of Lexington Theater Company in the Catskills. ...I was visiting Michael during one of his thrice weekly runs at Hoag Hospital when we hit upon the series idea of two assistant professors accidentally bringing the Scourge of God from the Sack of Rome and planting him in a southern California college where he fits right in. ...But this time, as we were shown the door, it was certain that Clarence would not be playing The Hun to Ritter’s post-modern Professor Higgins. The second fact is that I once spent an evening with an actress who really did have fifty-four pages marked for revisions in a script I had co-written. She asked me if I would modify scenes that had her lying down because, as she fetchingly explained, she was of an age when she no longer looked as hot on her back as she once did. ...SURE, AS A PRO I was curious about how Tawny Golightly might act in one of my screenplays, but when she actually agreed to co-star in Return of the Hun, I fantasized like your average Joe with three bucks left over from the unemployment check and no bar nearby, just the Quick Sale bin at the local video store and Ms. ... She would be so grateful for the role of her life, she'd want to take in the moonlight at Malibu, on her back, with hearts-and-flowers music swelling as we made sweaty love on the cool Pacific shore. ...Not that there's anything wrong with Days of our Lives and a couple of episodes of Power Rangers, but I'm as human as Shylock, and it hurt to have one or two movies for television under my belt and not get credit for it, the sons of bitches. So even though Return's budget was so low it would make Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Waterworld and Sheldon my producer didn't have a contingency for even street permits, I figured the picture would have that cinema verite feel the critics love, like a propaganda film shot by rebels just before they seize the capital. ...Bruno learned the ropes as a kid under Leni Reifenstahl, but, hey, in my opinion Bruno was one gay who got passed over during Hitler's purge of party undesirables, and I'm sorry, the world isn't better because of it. ...With Return two days from shooting, I knew I was boarding the Success Express and might be forgiven for imagining that Tawny Golightly would want to join me for cocktails in the observation car. I should have realized that when a lady actor invites the writer to her house, husband there or not, it generally means one thing. ...We're about two hours into bonding: it's nine o'clock at night, and her first costume fitting is at seven in the morning; I know that if I have to really make all the changes she's hinting at, I'm not going to be able to hang out and see how she looks in bra and panties, which is how Shel and I envisioned her first scene. See, she plays a Tustin typist who's into survival and thus lures The Hun into a war games date, which is when he takes a yellow paint pellet to the groin and begins to have grave doubts about his macho past life, the hinge to the entire picture. ...But if you suggest to an actress that you're going to stay up all night, it means puffy, red eyes the next day, and the camera takes 'em in like open cans of Sterno. ...Two hours I'd been in Tawny's kitchen, and I could feel the holes opening in my head, which needed filling with nicotine before I called the wife to tell her maybe she should hold dinner. ...Enough to loosen my tongue and talk about myself for a change, not Tawny and what she thought the script needed "from an actor's point of view." ...Then she said some other stuff, as if she'd been into Dianetics or Zen, or maybe just a lot of Oprah, mentioning with emotion that she believed a person could transcend dependency and co-dependency. I don't know where it came from...the truth, I mean; from the heart, I guess...but I said, "You know, Tawny," I let my eyes swim with sincerity, "I've never heard those two terms defined by anyone I trust." ...Tawny jumped on the cue like a pro and asked what was I trying to say in Return of the Hun? ...This is what two assistant professors without tenure discover when, during a period of unusual sunspot activity, a scientific experiment goes awry, yanking The Scourge of God from The Sack of Rome and dropping him in the middle of UCLA. The Terrible Tartar didn't get off the steppes by not being adaptable, so he immediately attracts a horde of admirers and enemies who keep trying to make him fit their preconceptions of who he should be. ...I was breathing in her second hand dope like it was hair spray on a prom date during a slow dance, and as if looking for another partner, I was going through her cupboards because, well, it's a simple fact of life. ... I had my tape recorder spinning too, because now I really was creating speeches for her, like some kid harmonizing "I Honestly Love You" into the ear of his high school steady. I had Tawny's character telling The Hun about Greenpeace and Save The Whales, trigger locks and The Right to Choose; beautiful stuff, all there on cassette, with Tawny's voice repeating my words, smooth as warm honey, making me fall in love. ...I had figured, maybe thirty-six, and she was looking younger by the minute, and now without batting an eyelash, Tawny Golightly was confessing that she's entered mid-life hell just a few years behind me. ...I suspect I was true to my word or else Tawny did have it out with Bruno because there was never a close up of her lying down in the final cut. ...The reason I'm not quite clear is that I more or less had a blackout about the time I knew I was falling in love with the woman behind the star. ...They do that from time to time, and I'm not one to speak ill of a lady who didn't ask for alimony. ...I don't think it's because of the item she caught me feeding to the print media about our being the new millennium's Miller and Monroe because, first, I gave her age as twenty-nine, and afterwards I offered, "Hon, I'll call back and give you top billing." ... Seeing how she married Shel after her divorce and as he's in Lompoc for a while, he might go nuts wondering whether the flame still flickers between Tawny and me. ...That sounds goody-goody, I know, especially from a guy who's had his nose bent in this crazy town, but Show Biz folks really have a heart for people, and I for one am not ashamed to say how big it is.

Why I Believe in Purgatory

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2009-12-19T19:24:06-08:00

Suppose I were to be caught up in some sort of cosmic soul, stripped of whatever I was when alive, then spit out again as, oh, I don't know, a cockroach with vague memories of being a crown prince, or vice versa, because karma begets karma. I'm sure I don't want to be reincarnated to go through it all again, like having an erection just when you're called to the board to work out an Algebra problem. ...Or suppose the nothingness is just that, no-thing. ... I could have a monument to honor my accomplishments bigger than Mount Rushmore, but so what? Because no thing will matter afterwards, there is nothing here that matters now. I understand how that might give license to have fun for a while. But to not give a damn about what others think and to do what you want whenever you want is a very hard game to keep up. You get either as jaded as the Marquis de Sade or bored out of your skull. You must long for something more unless, of course, you're a sociopath or drugged to the gills. ...The third alternative is Heaven as a Fantasyland of vanity and insecurities. God is so far removed, like on another planet, that he doesn't bother me once I'm in the gates. I can be my own god and get whatever I wish for, like an antebellum mansion and a Cadillac car. It doesn't take much psychology to figure why some men would want a bevy of virgins around the swimming pool: there’s no danger of being unfavorably compared with the crew of the Starship Enterprise. ...One must live interminably in what we already know of the worst of this world but multiplied thousands of times over. ... The likes of viscous psychopaths are in charge, but they are so much, much better at destruction than their pale earthly counterparts. Hating each other and themselves, such pleasure left to them is to literally tear you limb from limb. ... Some rock stars say they want to go to Hell, but the only music is hideous laughter at their screams. ...My sins undoubtedly deserve all of that, but subjectively I don't think I'm that bad, which means only that untruth constantly entices me and as often as not I choose to believe lies. I don't think God sends people to Hell, but there can come a point at which we've accept so much junk, what is beautiful and pure seems ugly. We become repulsed by God and foolishly choose to be where he isn't. ...Sensing that, I don't want God to be fair and just and allow my freedom to push me to perdition. I want him to save me from my foolishness. That leaves me longing for Jesus because he took the punishment for my wrongdoing. ... The best I've heard it explained is in Robert Duvall's movie, The Apostle. ... In his last service, police surrounding his clapboard church, he takes a baby from its mother and talks about what it means to be innocent, the only innocent one in a small roomful of people who know they are sinners and hope they are forgiven. Then he caresses the baby's chubby hands and small feet, describing how driving nails into them is the terrible cost of forgiveness. ...To even appreciate a little of the cost or its need requires God's unearned favor. ... We understand because he permits us to, and he prepares us only for so much because hearing it all it once would probably drive the weaker ones like me away. The old hymn sung at Billy Graham Crusades has him taking me "Just as I Am." ... He wants a makeover, a complete makeover, not a nip here and a tuck there with a scalpel, but surgery that requires a cleaver and a meat grinder. Then there is the rest of my life for him to form the hamburger however he wants. That process of grace still requires my response, my helping, my striving to become more charitable, more kindly, more loving, to be more like him. Getting close him, therefore, is a combination of grace and works, and I don't think I've worked hard enough or, as I've said, even wanted to very much. ...I can be saved but still need a lot of fixing--a little trip through Purgatory. I once heard a Protestant pastor, Jesse Duplantis, talk about his supernatural visit to Heaven. Did it really happen or was he experiencing a bad case of indigestion, I have no way to determine, but I did pick up a distant echo of Purgatory. There are in Heaven, I remember Duplantis saying, people who constantly need to refresh themselves by eating leaves from the tree of life. The closer they get to the throne of God, the more they need to eat just to keep going. Others whose lives on earth were holy, need only the escort of Jesus, but when they get very close, they all feel drained by the immensity of God Most High. ... It is his divine manifestation in Jesus that keeps the holy ones up. ...What that means to me is that perfection wants nothing less than perfection. Because I fall short, Purgatory offers a place to change what I refused to change on earth, to give me the nourishment and discipline to keep moving closer to the heavenly throne. I can't say as I want Purgatory except, given the alternatives, I accept the need to be cleansed as through fire, maybe with physical pain, maybe not, and maybe "in the twinkling of an eye," whatever a twinkling means in terms of an eternity that has neither beginning nor end. ...Thinking this way makes me want to drink heavily and have sex with a 19-year-old who has space between her thighs and not a lot of backstory. In other words, I'm not very good at thinking this way. I'm not very good at all. That's why at night, before I go to sleep, I have a simple minded prayer. ..."Jesus, if this is my time, please be the one to take me. No fooling with angels who might be demons and tunnels of light or relatives who kicked the bucket. ... If it's you, then I know whatever's next will be OK."

Killing Fields

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2009-08-29T04:38:00-07:00

Over the years I've heard Christians blithely say, "Satan can only deceive." It's the "only" I find fatuous. Deception in the Third Reich led to the murder of six million Jews and the destruction of Germany. In America since the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, deception has led to the murder of over forty-five million babies. Throw in America's figures with the rest of the world's, and last year's global body count was about forty-two million. I'm not objecting here to medically necessary abortions, or those after rape and incest. But those numbers are infinitesimal compared to all the rest. Of the handful of women I know who have had abortions, none of them were protecting their health. They didn't want to be tied down, didn't want to interrupt their career tracks, didn't want to get married, already had too many kids or were embarrassed. The figures vary, but let's say one in six of every woman who attends church has had an abortion. Some aren't sorry for their decision and are actively pro-choice. Others felt overwhelmed by shame and grief (sometimes years afterwards), and sought forgiveness. Of these, many are sure that God does forgive them and that He has not abandoned their unborn babies. A few still fight residual guilt because of the enormity of the act. Abortion kills a live human being, something small and helpless, yet even when microscopic, having the potential of becoming a Barack Obama or a John Lennon, both of whom were born out of wedlock. All of us need to contemplate the wasteful enormity that gets glossed over by media, politicians and feminist double-speak. I once had a young secretary who proudly spoke of her teenage abortion as it were a rite of passage into womanhood. I had sense enough to feel shock, but in those days not the kindness or wisdom to offer anything useful. Heaven help us that we are a people who do not act as if God exists, that in the infinite wholeness of his life, he created our lives. He knows our every causal thought, keeps track of all our selfish desires and is repelled by our indifference. We survive only by his mercy.

Suicide Pill

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2009-01-19T09:47:40-08:00

The Pill is partially responsible for the population decline in Europe that Prof. ..."(There is now) no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." Focusing on the land of his birth, he continuted, "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete." ... Djerassi described families choosing against reproduction as “wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it,” and predicted national suicide because young Austrians refuse to have children. ...I'd like to be the first to point my finger at good will. Imagine living in almost any 19th Century European city--Victorian London for example--or in New World counterparts. ... In the landed, merchant and artisan classes, the overwhelming majority of household breadwinners are men who can support their issue. At the advantaged end of familial life, there is often an inheritance. At the poorer end, there is just enough left from wages to provide a modicum of education for the children. But among the lowest classes, life yo-yos between a tenuous grasp on barest necessities and a Dickensian nightmare. ...They are expected to isolate themselves from the reproving eyes of their neighbors. At times they are cast from the affection of their families. It is easy looking at all this to make two assumptions. One is that poverty is either the root cause of- or contributes greatly to- the misery seen round about. Hence people of good will support laws to abolish child labor, curtail working hours, mandate wages and improved working conditions. They donate to foundling homes, do volunteer work for aid societies and involve themselves in political reform. ...A readily available means of effective birth control would result in fewer children and thereby free household income from mere subsistence. ...Equally important, girls of all classes who succumb to temptation could be saved from the consequences. How beneficial this would be when a applied to a poor girl! She is far more useful to society cleaning someone's house than taking care of a snot-nosed brat. As we know from our perspective today, political and labor reform advanced to the point where people of good will largely gave up private beneficence and let government take over, allowing more good to be done for more people, and for good people to have more time to kick back and enjoy themselves. To some degree, every country in the West is a welfare state that assures a minimal standard of living for all citizens, or at the very least, attempts to make sure that the poorest of the poor don't starve and that addicts have clean needles when they want to curl up in the parks. The notion of birth control was a trickier proposition to sell to the public and then turn over to government. For the first half of the 20th Century, voters in the western democracies didn't think government should interfere with the consequences of sexual behavior. Nowadays, of course, it is taken for granted that tax money is set aside to fund abortions, to pass out condoms and to support unwed mothers so that the state, in effect, becomes an old fashioned, bread-winning papa. Before these matters became politically normative, there were people who didn't want you to fool around under any circumstances, making condoms a moot point and in some localities illegal to buy. In progressive folklore these people were Christians mainly of the Catholic persuasion. Although there were (and continue to be) nutters of that persuasion, it is more precise to say that the Church taught reverence: ...Its primary purpose is procreation, fulfilling God's first command to mankind, "Go forth and multiply." God bless you if you find the process pleasurable, but engage in the pleasure only with a willing spouse and the knowledge that children could result. ...Protestants, having spent approximately 500 years as Catholics, brought some of those precepts with them when they split off. My-mother-in law, a devout Protestant who bore six children, gave my wife a book of sexual advice before we were married. A member of the Church of England authored it, offering to the public council given to young Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her marriage. The basic message was enjoy sex and let children come as they may. ...By the time Protestants got to the part of the 20th Century when I came of age, they increasingly bought condoms, diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, the Pill and abortion to remove the chanciness of will power, sudden withdrawal and the rhythm method. Today the most successful aspect of ecumenicalism is between nominal Catholics and secular Protestants on sexual matters. ... They are encouraged by scores of priests and ministers seduced by modernity and/or someone in the choir. Liberal Jews love them, and they all zealously believe they are motivated by good will. ...Margret Sanger advocated birth control in order to clean up the population. She was convinced cleansing could be done by weeding out Negroes. By her lights, it would be a good thing to prevent them from producing "human waste." "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." Planned Parenthood evolved from its beginnings, becoming something quite different than what was intended. These days it doesn't pretend to make a religious appeal to any segment of the population. ...If good will is not founded on absolutes, it is subject to the whims of fashion and ultimately succumbs to what anyone feels at any give moment. ...The Pill could never contribute to reproductive suicide without a tidal shift in values. The teen angel longed for plaintively in Mark Dinning's 1960 song had to become a promiscuous bitch. ...They had to be thought of as human waste.

The Righteous Gentile Who Became Hitler's Pope

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-12-15T13:37:00-08:00

"Devil's advocates were supposed to be fair-minded, and in the past Mr Cornwell, a prolific writer on Catholic matters, has at times been anything but. ... 'I would now argue,' he says, 'in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.'" ...To them Pius XII was either a moral coward or assented to Hitler's policies, but more that that, they see a parallel with the unbending defense of dogma made by Pius' successors. ...Daniel Goldhagen is a Jew who may not care about any of those issue, only that the Pope turned on Jews when they most needed Christian allies. His book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, published in 2002, portrays Pius XII as part of a wider Roman Catholic anti-Semitic tradition integral to the very "genesis of the Holocaust." ...His book, Three Popes and the Jews, published in 1967, describes the Pope's state of mind when he was merely Cardinal Eugeno Pacelli, the Vatican's envoy in Germany. "Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler’s doctrines. . . . ...Joseph Lichten, a Jewish academician and former Polish refugee from the Nazis, wrote a lengthy 1963 essay called A Question of Judgment: Pius XII and the Jews. ... German bishops requested that Cardinal Pacelli urge the Vatican to start an emigrant organization, to which Pius XI readily agreed and on behalf of which his Secretary of State wrote to all American bishops asking for their support. ...Shortly before Pacelli became head of the Roman Catholic Church world wide, he appealed to the world's governments to throw open their borders to persecuted Jews. ...After a harangue about the inevitability of a Nazi victory and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Third Reich, "Pius XII opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing...precise details of each crime. ...During the war Adolph Eichman wrote in his diary that efforts to exterminate Jews were being thwarted by the Pope, and he wished he could prove Vatican involvement. The proof wanted was hard evidence that the Pope was inciting subordinates in Occupied Europe to thwart the round up and deportation of undesirables; was behind the procurement of valid and forged passports, of medical clearances and post-dated Baptismal certificates; and used the Vatican treasury to finance much of the enormous cost of these endeavors, including bribes to officials and payoffs to extortionists. ... Mussolini's foreign minister complained that Pius was "ready to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do anything against his conscience." ...The lack of proof that aggravated the Axis is the so-called silence that all anti-Catholic writers today use as their core argument that Pius XII was morally corrupt. ...Silver understands the horns of a dilemma, the very sharp, deadly horns ready to gore the Pope's domain of 110 acres, the smallest state in the world, that could field an army of twenty-two spear chucking Swiss guards. ..."But my question is this: Does it take a rocket scientist to figure out why there is no paper trail? Rome was occupied by the Nazis, there were German spies in the Vatican, so what would have happened if they had found physical evidence of the pope's actions? ... If you don't want to give credit to the pope because there was no paper trail, you can't blame Hitler for the Final Solution, because there was no paper trail there either." ...Vanity Fair published an abridged version of Hitler's Pope, leaving it to smaller periodicals like The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard to publish contrarian articles by Rabbi Dalin. ...The fate of Italian Jews has become a major topic of Pius's critics, the failure of Catholicism at its home supposedly demonstrating the hypocrisy of any modern papal claim to moral authority. ..."But the fact remains that while approximately 80 percent of European Jews perished during World War II, 80 percent of Italian Jews were saved. "In the months Rome was under German occupation, Pius XII instructed Italy's clergy to save lives by all means. ..."Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, then assistant vice rector of the Seminario Romano, hid Michael Tagliacozzo and other Italian Jews at the seminary (which was Vatican property) for several months in 1943 and 1944. In 1985, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, honored the cardinal as a righteous gentile -- and, in accepting the honor, Palazzini stressed that 'the merit is entirely Pius XII's, who ordered us to do whatever we could to save the Jews from persecution.' ...Fascist documents published in 1998 (and summarized in Marchione's Pope Pius XII) speak of a German plan, dubbed 'Rabat-Fohn,' to be executed in January 1944. ...Lapide estimated that the number of all Jews spared in Europe by Pius XII's throwing the Church's weight into the struggle was "at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability it is much closer to...860,000." Lapide calculated that Pius XII and the Church he headed constituted the most successful Jewish aid organization in all of Europe during the war, dwarfing the Red Cross and all other aid societies. ...The Pope speaks to everybody--asking the soldiers in fluent German from which part of the Reich they come and whether they have a special wish. ... Afterwards the Holy Father gives his benediction and hands over the petitions to his retinue: cardinals, bishops and other high dignitaries of Mother Church, officials of the Vatican Government, secretaries and diplomats. ...I report about the shipwrecked Jewish refugees, saved by Italian warships in the Aegean Sea and now starving in a prisoner of war camp on one of the islands. The Pope listens carefully to my explanations of how to help these poor people either by taking them to Palestine or by bringing them back to Italy to avoid epidemics and further starvation. ...And the Pope raises his voice that everybody in the hall can here it clearly, "My son, whether you are worthier than others only the Lord knows, but believe me, you are at least as worthy as every other human being that lives on our earth! And now, my Jewish friend, go with the protection of the Lord, and never forget, you must always be proud to be a Jew! After Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations asked for silence to mark his passing, then Golda Meir said: "We share the grief of the world over the death of His Holiness Pius XII.... During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people passed through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims." ..."With special gratitude we remember all he has done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods in their entire history." ...In the July/August 2006 issue of The American Spectator, Sir Martin Gilbert, another Jewish historian, Winston Chruchill's official biographer and author of ten books on the Holocaust, kicks off a favorable review of Rabbi Dalin's book with these words: ...Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, 'did nothing' during the Holocaust to help Jews." ...It is soundly debunked in Rabbi Dalin's book which also gives the genesis of the distortion, an eight-hour German stage play called The Deputy. I was a junior in high school when the New York Times, TIME magazine and others gushed praise over the 1964 debut of the shorter English language version. Rolf Hochhuth, the playwright, has said since then that he thought the Pope was timid for not speaking out, but he does not doubt the Pius' actions materially helped the rescue of Jews. ...What the playwright doesn't say is that his work was conceived in the Kremlin, and require the theft and editing of Vatican documents to create the impression that Pius was a vicious anti-Semite. ...Why hard-headed dialectal materialists would want to smear a man who believed the kingdom of God is not of this world is probably similar to the the reason liberal-minded Western secularists need to believe the lie. Attributed to Goebbles and others in the Third Reich are versions of the statement, "If you repeat a big lie often enough, people will believe it." ...On Friday night last, I read the above with some modifications to a group of people who meet to deliver papers on religion, politics and history, and from time to time whatever else rings their chimes. After I read my paper, I was questioned about the concordat that Cardinal Eugeno Pacelli negotiated with the Third Reich in 1933. Critics characterize the future Pope's involvement as a greedy and self-serving way to preserve Church hierarchy in Germany at the expense of denying the legitimacy of any group, Catholic or non-Catholic, that opposed Hitler. ... Cornwell in Hitler's Pope foams with the assertion that Pacelli's Faustian impulses were honed by his work on the Vatican's concordat with Serbia when he was a young diplomat. ... These are good Catholic boys, but if you want to read bull, it's all over the internet.

Why I Will Not Vote for Obama

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-10-31T16:28:14-07:00

In that time you will be asked, "What did you do?" The question will be in reference to babies yet born, who are helpless, who cannot speak for themselves. "What did you do for them?" In the United States there are more parents eager to adopt than there are babies to place in their care. But abortion advocates are louder, and profit gives motive to the clamor to look at the unborn as so much extraneous tissue. On the supply side, the technology is cheap, and the economy of scale lowers overhead. All the consumer has do is put an average of $275 on her credit card, get the typically short procedure over with and get on with her life. Often, however, doubts arise within women who have had abortions. At times shame and guilt hound the men who have urged them. This is the kind of haunting remorse that touches God's heart. God wants to forgive and heal. Because he is Love, he cares for the parents who decide to kill a child no less than the poor baby that has been killed. But Infinite Love is always holy, unerringly just, and has established absolute right and wrong. It is all-knowing about consequences of sin to the individual and to the nation. Once we have done wrong, God desires with all His being to be the help we need to mend the brokenness. In the overwhelming number of cases, the person hurting has to ask Him to do something. If he is not asked, he usually does not intervene. Therefore most of the time in most circumstances, your choices become your judgment, and God has no choice, come the reckoning, but to throw one of our most crucial choices back at us. "What did you do for My little ones?" You do not have to have had an abortion to be complicit in the killing of babies. To be charged as an accomplice, you merely have to vote for politicians who advocate for the death of those who have done no wrong and are totally defenseless. To offer other grave maters--the collapsing economy, health care, war--as more important than the slaughter of little ones will not be accepted as an excuse. Catholics should know this for the sake of their immortal souls. An unprecedented number of priests and bishops have publicly chided so-called Catholic politicians such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joe Biden, Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, because of attempts to pretend the issue is still up in the air for the Church. An October 26th letter to The News Journal of Delaware by Bishop W. Fransic Malooly is but one of many official warnings to the faithful. For the Catholic Church, truth cuts across all boundaries, applying to other faiths and even to "the fool (who) says in his heart there is no God." In my last two posts, I have implied that there is no heart to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for President. Obama is the most radical pro-death politician on the national scene. He claims to be a Christian, but his unwavering work to kill babies even after they survive abortions points to a Godless secular humanism that most pro-abortionists would shrink from. The link to the Catholic.org video showing actual abortions is profoundly disturbing. If we can watch and not be moved is to demonstrate gravely seared conscience. If that is the case, God have mercy on us because we condem ourselves.

Now You Can Say You Know

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-10-28T19:36:54-07:00

Obama on Babies

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-10-27T18:10:19-07:00

If (my two daughters) make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. Senator Barak Obama In other words, the Senator is willing to permit his grandchildren to be killed. "Killed" is a strong word, but when you are responsible, directly or indirectly, of ending the life of a human being, killing is what you're doing. If the human being is helpless and done nothing to you, murder is the better word.

Obama, his Worshippers and the Lovelorn

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-10-18T11:51:41-07:00

Following is an excerpt from "Barack Obama's Search for Faith" by Jodi Kantor, an article published on April 30, 2007 by The International Herald Tribune, a subsidiary of The New York Times. ... Obama's convictions under the mentoring of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Mr. ..."I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won," he wrote in his first book, Dreams From My Father. ...Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. ... Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. ... He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. ...Trinity has 8,500 members today, making it the largest American congregation in the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology. ...Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. ...Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith's power to inspire underdogs. ..."Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones," Mr. ...Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him "embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound," said Ms. ...Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright's sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church. ...Test," with questions like, "Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?" Thankfully, in the twenty years that Obama was a parishioner, the outward harshness of the Reverend did not become the public demeanor of the Democratic Presidential Candidate. ... ...By the end of May 2008 the Senator declared himself no longer a member of Rev. ... However, when Senator Obama was a member three years earlier, he was not in the least critical about Trinity United's celebrating Lous Farrakahan as the church’s "Man of the Year." Although Senator Obama keeps saying he has no truck with radicals like Farrakahan, in the first week of October the Honorable Minister Farrakahan of the Nation of Islam called him the Messiah: In an earlier blog, Lord Obama, there are youth acting pretty weird for their hero, but they may not be "the instruments" that Farrakahan is talking about. So far no one has made much of a foreign supporter, Mu'ammar Al-Qudhafi, who, unlike Obama's Chicago crony Bill Ayers, at least paid retribution for his terrorism against the United States. ... Senator Obama can't control who's for him or against him. To balance the bad boys cited, I'd like to reprint what an American college girl, Maggie Martens, wrote about her Presidential pick in the October 8, 2008 issue of the Smith College Sophian: ...And I'm not saying that because he's black - I'm saying that in reference to those Urban Outfitters t-shirts from a couple years ago that said, "Jesus is my homeboy." ...While you may be overtly religious and find this to be idol-worshipping, or may be overtly politically correct and just know that everything in that sentence could be found offensive, I'm afraid it's true anyway. ...The innocent, idealistic world of politics that had shaped my childhood, the one that taught me how the president is a good guy, one who makes you feel safe, gives a speech on TV every once in a while and one you'd feel honored to shake hands with, had been slowly whittled into a deep rooted cynicism to anything politically related. The crush of the Bush victory over Gore was only the first mar on my previously consummate ideal of the American administration. And the tragedies just kept continuing: Bush's response to the Sept.11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq, the tax cuts for the rich, the downward spiral continued squashing my scant hope that the political world and state of our country could be saved. ...Stumbling through my hopeless world, afraid to turn to anyone with my political questions of morality, my concerns about the afterlife of the country I called home, a voice spoke to me. Barack Obama bore to me his testimony in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention, a testimony that included believing in concepts as simple and wholesome as the Constitution; a belief the current administration had done away with entirely. I was 17 and my antipathy for politicians was already in place before I had even reached the age to legally vote for one. ... I believed however, that my discipleship would lead me on a much longer path to political change than was true. He was much too young, not white enough, not rich enough, not jaded - the country certainly wasn't ready for this, maybe in 12 or 16 years he would be able to run in the Democratic primary, I thought. My interest was piqued, but the dark time lived on until my faith in others was renewed on Jan. 4 in the Iowa state primary. Obama had beat out squeaky clean southern boy John Edwards and former first lady and next in the line of political succession Hillary Clinton. ...I followed every primary with bated breath, and muttered my prayers to the political gods while proselytizing the miracle of my new prophet. I got a car magnet, I bought a t-shirt; a pin and bumper sticker are on their way to my campus mailbox. ... Guess what those "Jesus is my homeboy" t-shirts were replaced with at Urban Outfitters? ...After all, would I have ever bought a t-shirt with Al Gore's face on it? ... I questioned my newfound faith - was it all only a phase, like the time I thought I was Baptist in junior high? But my inner dogmatic struggle only helped cement my beliefs as I followed politics more closely than ever before. Obama's mere presence, knowledge and enthusiasm in the political realm inspired my own desire to understand what exactly had gone wrong, what exactly he could do to remedy the mess we'd made. Then I began to realize I wasn't the only one trying to buy a WWOD bracelet and spending my weekends scouring CNN.com. The rock star-type love for Obama wasn't just because he was pretty and in the media. Others too, had seen him as a shining light, heard that mythical voice boom out over the mountaintops; people were wearing the t-shirt because they would rather wear something representing a politician than a pop star. ...I've officially been saved, and soon, whether they like it or not, the rest of the country will be too. I will follow him, all the way to the White House, and I'll be standing there in our nation's capital in January 2009, when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America.

Lord Obama

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-10-07T07:31:31-07:00

P.J. Gladnick offers more analysis. The only issue I take with him is "disturbing" hardly touches the children's video he mentions in the first paragraph. Take a looksee and judge for yourself. Obama Youth Junior Fraternity Regiment By P.J. Gladnick October 2, 2008 - 19:45 ET In some ways, this video is even more disturbing than the video of the children singing a tribute to Barack Obama. In [newer] case, we see a bunch of kids dressed in paramilitary uniforms ritualistically shouting out their praise for Obama. Yes, according to the chants, these kids are supposedly inspired to enter various professions all thanks to a certain Chicago Machine politician. This is reminiscent of North Korean kids chanting out their praises for the "Dear Leader." And is this performance by students of Urban Community Leadership Academy of Kansas City, MO even legal? Here is what the information box says next to this YouTube video (firsts shown above): I called and spoke to Bernard, who said he was the assistant Dean. He was very gentlemanly and when I voiced my concerns about the video, he told me that this was taken at the school last year when Obama was beginning his campaign. He assured me that they stopped this "regiment" because they felt the person who was organizing it was pushing his political agenda.  Duh.  He assured me that he didn't know it was on YouTube. I gave him the link to where to go for this video and when he found it he said, "Oh this is not good. I had no idea" I told him I'd take his word for it. He then asked me, nicely, "what's the main concern? Because I want to understand where you're coming from so that I can figure out how to handle this."  Nicely, I told him that the video looked militant. I told him about the Colburn School video and how it resembles propaganda films from Communist dictatorships. I told him that the US military is frowned upon for going to high schools trying to recruit potential grads into joining their ranks. Why shouldn't we frown upon those who come to a school like yours to encourage kids to worship a politician? One who is not even a president.  I also said that if this was done to make kids feel better about themselves, why do it in the name of Obama? Why not encourage kids to believe in the power of themselves?  He assured me that he would get to the bottom of the situation, thanked me for my call and we hung up. Apparently this Obama paramilitary video has also made others uneasy as you can see in these YouTube comments: Blind ideologue sycophants for Obama! This should scare the hell out of any freedom loving American. The Democrats, their accomplices in the media and the schools, are producing the next generation of Hitler Youth. Welcome to the People's Socialist Republic of America. Why does this scare us? Because of the "because of Obama" line, repeated over and over. This cult-of-personality shit is scary... Obama is a POLITICIAN. Understand that? He's a politician, with all that implies. Look, it is commendable that these young men want to become doctors, lawyers, mechanics and engineers but why the cultist devotion to Obama? And why are they reciting Obama's health care plan? What has that to do with their plans to excel? Imagine the reaction from the mainstream media if there were some paramilitary youth group in a public school chanting ritualistic praise for John McCain. However, since the "Dear Leader" in this case is Barack Obama, all we get from the MSM are the sounds of silence. —P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.

Smells like...

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-09-13T21:16:24-07:00

The Canadian website Free Dominion still smells something rotten, gives a fuller version of the story and a more appropriate response: Sarah and Todd Palin's decision to complete her recent pregnancy, despite advance notice that their baby Trig had Down syndrome, is hailed by many in the pro-life movement as walking the walk as well as talking the talk. But a senior Canadian doctor is now expressing concerns that such a prominent public role model as the governor of Alaska and potential vice president of the United States completing a Down syndrome pregnancy may prompt other women to make the same decision against abortion because of that genetic abnormality. And thereby reduce the number of abortions. Published reports in Canada say about 9 out of 10 women given a diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate the pregnancy through abortion. Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa, worries that Palin's now renowned decision may cause abortions in Canada to decline as other women there and elsewhere opt to follow suit. He says not every woman is prepared to deal with the consequences of Down babies, who have developmental delays, some physical difficulties and often a shortened lifespan. Wider use of blood screening and amniocentesis during pregnancies can now accurately predict the presence of Down syndrome. Lalonde says his primary concern is that women have the.... ...choice of abortion and that greater public awareness of women making choices like Palin to complete a pregnancy and give birth to their genetically-abnormal baby could be detrimental and confusing to the women and their families. "The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada," Lalonde tells the Globe and Mail. In her widely-viewed acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention and a TV audience of some 37 million last week, Palin did not refer to her baby's birth as a decision or choice. "In April," she said, "my husband Todd and I welcomed our littlest one into the world, a perfectly beautiful baby boy named Trig. "From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That's how it is with us. Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys. "Sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge. And children with special needs inspire a special love. "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House." Others in Canada, which has just begun its own national parliamentary election campaign, see the Palins as positive parental role models who could help reduce the tide of Down syndrome abortions. Krista Flint is executive director of the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, which says its goal is to foster "a climate of understanding and mutual respect for the dignity, worth and equal rights for ALL people." The society now displays a photograph of the happy Palins with their baby on its homepage and offers to provide "positive and factual information" for an open discussion of Down syndrome. However, Flint says doctors usually give couples very dark messages about life with a Down syndrome child. "We know overwhelmingly the message families get is 'Don't have this baby, it will ruin your life,'" Flint says. "And I don't think people would loo Lalonde says giving women detailed information on the consequences of their decision is not actually encouraging them to seek abortions.

September 11th

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-09-11T07:11:05-07:00

(null)

Really Inconvenient Truths

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-10T09:49:35-07:00

This Ugandan child is most likely dead by now. Author Ian Murray (The Really Inconvenient Truths) explains why in an April 28, 2008 C-SPAN broadcast of Mr. Murray’s presentation at The Heritage Foundation. It is 50 minutes long, with Mr. Murray calmly unveiling cherish myths held by environmental activists and preached as fact to a gullible public. What follows is a Mr. Murray plugging his book:

What Tomorrow Brings

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-16T20:52:33-07:00

If you take that Scripture seriously, much more innocent blood is crying from the ground. Since the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1972, over 48 million babies have been scraped, sucked and ripped from wombs. The overwhelming majority of those killings has been for the convenience of parents. If you believe in an eternal, never-changing, all-powerful God, He does hear, and He does act. He acts with mercy and forgiveness until such time as a people refuse to repent, and then the nation comes under His judgement. That's why I'm not so concerned about tomorrow's rush of gays to altars and registry offices in California. In March four justices of the state Supreme Court overturned an eight-year-old referendum passed by 61% of the electorate that banned gay marriage. The recent ruling also overturned more than a century of state law that defined marriage as a between a man and a woman, not to mention shrugging off millennia of global tradition. In a country under judgement, you won't see democracy at work. There will be no recognition of authority except that of force and fear, so as conditions worsen, every man will become a law unto himself. Everyone will rationalize whatever he does to meet his comforts and desires. We already see this in an increase in crime and a decrease in civility. Divorce will become rampant; the abandonment of children, commonplace. Sexual activity will start at lower and lower ages. That's only the beginning. It gets really bad after that--natural disasters, wars, plagues, famine. Although people will be shocked by these things, they will be so used to either denying God or mocking Him, the only godly solution left to them is to blame Him for the troubles. Then it gets worse. What tomorrow does bring is another indication that we have lost our way. As we sense sea changes all about us, as we fret about things we can't yet see, we cling ever more tightly to the false hope of values that are founded on nothing more than fad and fancy. We want to believe, if we just tolerate everything and everyone, there will be no reason for anything to ever come after us. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 3And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. (Romans 1: 18 -32, KJV)

Hell Hole

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-10T22:23:05-07:00

Myanmar used to be called Burma when it was a British colony. Independence came in 1947. A leftist military coup in 1962 instigated "The Burmese Way of Socialism," kicking off more than 40 years of steady economic decline and periodic outbursts of ethnic cleansing. In 1989 the ruling generals changed the name of their killing fields to Myanmar. The current strong man is General Than Shwe. After refusing foreign aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis, Shwe's State Peace and Development Council allowed show displays of humanitarianism. Among them was a tent city put up and supplied by the United Nations. When the reporters left with their sound bites and footage, the refuges were sent packing and the food distributed to Shwe's soldiers. I know two people whose names I can't mention because they are returning to Myammar to continue whatever they can do. In the past they set up home churches and brought money to buy food and medical supplies from the regional thugs. Bringing material directly into the country is vorboten because there is less chance for profiteering. The churches they help shepherd no longer exist. The people fled to a town above water. There the military conscripted males over the age 12, and put the elderly, women and children into boats. They boats, they were told, would take them to a refugee center. None arrived. A medical missionary has video of the bodies that floated. They were bloated and pierced by bullets.

I Explain God, Part 1

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-07T12:09:41-07:00

Let's examine the most important issue. I do not want to be in your bedroom. Honest to God, unless you lead with a 36 double D rack, own a chain of liquor stores, can yodel and have invited me with a fetching jingle of your handcuffs, I don't even want to be in your house. I'm not asking what you do in your bedroom, so please don't tell me. Don't tell my children. Don't bring a cucumber to elementary school as part of the syllabus for an anti-pregnancy prevention program. In case you haven't noticed, in spite of increasingly detailed sex education, illegitimate babies are on the rise while the age of unwed mothers is spiraling downward. I'm sorry. I take that back. There are no illegitimate children in God's eyes. But I think that fathers who abandon their children and girls who keep having babies to get more welfare are on the road to Hell. In fact, I think most people I know are on a superhighway to Hell. H-80 I call it, and good riddance I say. If you had my neighbors, friends and family members, the point would not have to be discussed. As it is...and here's the rub...if I get the chance, I'm supposed to talk them out of it. I'm not supposed to nudge them there in any way. For some people there is confusion on this point. Christian fundamentalists are lumped in with Islamic fundamentalists. Islamists think most people are going to Hell too, and if you lived in their countries, you could understand it. But the worst you'll get from a Christian is some foamer on a street corner giving you a little comic book. For the Moslem, it's strap explosives to a kid and send him into the local pizza parlor. For you seekers after Truth, look here again for when I give more apologies. My wife says that should be apologetics, but what does she know? She's Catholic.

Your Money or Your Life

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-03T13:33:47-07:00

Contention: There are people who want you to be afraid. They will hold a gun or some such to your head. In your fear you are apt to believe you will survive only because of their good pleasure. That's the power they want over you. ...Never for a moment think they are aware of being wicked or bad. To their minds their good is everyone's good. ...For example, yesterday Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) kicked off a Senate debate on global warming. He believes greenhouse gasses will fry us all. ... Reid says Science backs him up. ... A former Vice President says we're goners too. So, we the people need to be punitively taxed on energy use, and in some instances prosecuted and jailed. This will boost the cost of everything, will kill a lot of jobs and force you, if you haven't already, to use mass transit. Then there will be pressure on government to fix food prices, extend jobless benefits, and expand public transportation and continue to subsidize traveling graffiti shows. That's the short list. All of these cost money, and will require increasing taxation and very tight bureaucratic controls to bring about. The restrictions, however, will be for our own good. We won't survive without them. But suppose we can't do anything about the gun at our heads. Two weeks ago I saw an astronomer with a telescope and heard him tiredly explain to concerned civilian who was passing by: "Yes. ...Or suppose the gun isn't loaded. Or what if there isn't a gun at all? A large body of expertise on global warming is contrary to the consensus Mr. ... In a May 19th WoldNetDaily story, reporter Bob Unruh takes on one the more famous Greenies for being full of the ol' Shinola. I have excerpted the article below, but it deserves a full read. More than 31,000 scientists across the United States, including more than 9,000 Ph. D.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign. Now a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of consensus." Project spokesman and founder Art Robinson Petition explained, "Mr. Gore's movie asserting 'settled science' conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. ... Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse." WND submitted a request to Al Gore's office for comment, but did not get a response. Robinson said the dire warnings about "global warming" have gone far beyond semantics or scientific discussion to the point they are actually endangering people. "The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," said Robinson. The late Professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and winner of the National Medal of Science, wrote in a letter promoting the petition, "The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds." "This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful," he wrote. Accompanying the letter sent to scientists was a 12-page summary and review of research on "global warming." Steitz wrote, "The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries." Robinson said the project targets scientists because, "It is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice." But you can bet not one of them will be invited by Senator Reid to testify before his Congressional cronies. So some are taking matters into their own hands.

Reverand Oprah

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-05T18:46:03-07:00

This shouldn't be too hard. Imagine a world in which God is in you no matter what you've done. There is no sin; your salvation comes only from within; all ways lead to harmony and therefore you don't have to apologize for your way. Then imagine someone who puts your beliefs into action. But it just so happens that his way is to despise you, to lust after your spouse, to poison your dog and to refuse to pay back a debt. Without an absolute God Who is just and Who is jealous of His justice, broaching no other ways but His way, you end up with a lot of demigods at each other's throats. An observable fact of life is that there are few Janusz Korczaks, Deitrich Bonhoeffers or Mother Theresas in our midst. Most of us have secret thoughts we don't want out in the open, and at some time or other we have done crappy things that we know were bad. That should be cause for a bit of humility. Unfortunately, the more money and power a person has, there's the temptation to believe those blessing indicate that everything is OK. You're not like the herd; your motives are more pure. Humility need not apply. People answer to you, not the other way around. Thus someone like Oprah Winfrey is not likely to square her life to any standard except her own pleasure, her own will. She's thinks she is doing a noble thing by proselytizing her doctrine to people who watch television, don't do much thinking and are consequently as gullible as children. Her ideas ultimately will make them either very unhappy or so self-righteous that they won't know how close they are to Hell.

Obama Unmasked

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-21T11:29:50-07:00

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them? Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?" But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others? "I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma. Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? (b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course. This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination. But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend? letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Sowell Gets It. As Usual.

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-13T09:57:21-07:00

Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn't have any case with which to convict them of anything. Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business left idolized him, just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because he attacked General Motors. What Eliot Spitzer did was not out of character. It was completely in character for someone with the hubris that comes with the ability to misuse his power to make or break innocent people. After John Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Attorney General Spitzer's handling of a case involving Maurice Greenberg, Spitzer was quoted by Whitehead as saying: "I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done." When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and social rules that apply to other people. For someone with this kind of hubris to risk his whole political career for a fling with a prostitute is no more surprising than for Michael Vick to throw away millions to indulge his taste for dog fighting or for Leona Helmsley to avoid paying taxes -- not because she couldn't easily afford to pay taxes and still have more money left than she could ever spend -- but because she felt above the rules that apply to "the little people." What is almost as scary as having someone like Eliot Spitzer holding power is having so many pundits talking as if this is just a "personal" flaw in Governor Spitzer that should not disqualify him for public office. Spitzer himself spoke of his "personal" failing as if it had nothing to do with his being governor of New York. In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be "non-judgmental," one of the corollaries is that "personal" failings have no relevance to the performance of official duties. What that amounts to, ultimately, is that character doesn't matter. In reality, character matters enormously, more so than most things that can be seen, measured or documented. Character is what we have to depend on when we entrust power over ourselves, our children and our society to government officials. We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou. Currently, various facts are belatedly beginning to leak out that give us clues to the character of Barack Obama. But to report these facts is being characterized as a "personal" attack. Barack Obama's personal and financial association with a man under criminal indictment in Illinois is not just a "personal" matter. Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language. The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives. Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His "personal" character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer's "personal" character matters -- and just as Hillary Clinton's character would matter if she had any. --------- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Knee Deep

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-29T22:14:24-07:00

Mel Tari says he walked on water, but the fact is, he was only knee deep in a miracle. Some skeptics would say that negates the whole thing, but I'm one who wishes I had the same fire in my belly. Have a great Sunday.

Yo, Gargoyle

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-07T14:39:47-07:00

Originating in idol worship was not good for their reputation, but the 7th Century Bishop of Rouen, later canonized as St. Romaine, reputedly believed that there is some good in every one of God’s creatures, including a forest dragon that terrorized folks who wandered too far beyond the city walls. Beguiled by the Bishop’s tenderness, the dragon turned to helping the citizens of Rouen, and in honor of him they carved the dragon’s likeness to adorn the cathedral and let water off the roof. ...The one I like has the Bishop hooking up with a condemned prisoner to subdue the monster. It was called Gargouille, a derivative of the French word for gullet and progenitor of our modern word gargoyle. Gargouille thrashed around in the Sien, was part human, part demon, and had a tendency to spew water all over the countryside, causing vast flooding. ...Tonto always come back to camp, sometimes blooded, once with rope burns around his neck, but with vital signs almost as good as Kimosabe’s and full useful intel. So, as the felon showed himself to be as quick on the get away as Tonto would have to be, the Bishop formed his fingers in the sign of the Cross. ... Or like Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness and again in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. ...It’s clear that a crucifix couldn’t kill Dracula, but in the Bishop’s day there was no profit to be made from a sequel. ... Gargouille then inspired likenesses that were sweat hog ugly, carved in stone and stuck on the roofs of medieval cathedrals to show evil spirits what fate would befall them if they wandered too close. In modern times sleeker gargoyles in stainless steel were placed atop the Chrysler Building in New York City to ward off Ford motorcars. Take the gargoyles of yesteryear, mix New Age thinking into their post-modern stories, and they become misunderstood, sort of like King Kong, or downright heroic, like Mighty Joe Young. Disney produced a kids’ animation series followed by a knock-off, direct-to-video movie in the mid-Nineties that made gargoyles superheroes lazing about an ancient Scottish castle. ... Feeling needed again, the gargoyles ward of “modern threats to humanity”— judges who let murderers walk free, black pimps who beat up their ho’s, greasy white tweakers, a couple of U.S. ...Don’t you wish Disney could imagine some real and present evil, like media companies that flirt with the occult and then sell it to the kiddies? The gargoyles Bob and Rick introduced to television a quarter of century earlier just wanted to be left alone. But when they were disturbed, it was like stepping on green mambas. ... The monsters lived in the desert, so there wasn’t much water spewing; but they were bad ass when that used to mean something. ...As they pack it up for further investigation, they unwittingly disturbed the gargoyle equivalent of an Indian burial ground, and if you ever saw Jeremiah Johnson, you know what that means. They are driving back to a university when monsters dive down off the hot rocks and give them a bad time, denting their car and such, and clearly wanting to tear the occupants limb from limb before they retrieve the ancestral bones. ...A long day at Wolper, a couple of scotches, a pretty good warmed over dinner and I was ready for bed, or more correctly, the snoring nap you take before the wife yells, “Turn off the TV and come to bed!” ...I just never associated it with the Bob and Rick I met two years later and worked with off and on for the next fifteen. ...Further, although entertainment professionals incorporate socialization in their dealings, and that may include chitchat about past projects or past lives, the work at hand always hangs over them like a Sword of Damocles. Whether there is a lull, a meal or a party, the talk always comes back to the present work. ... When I am socializing, I’d rather fill my mouth with food and drink than my head with the details of other people’s lives. ...When I’m in a Greyhound Bus Depot and people find out I’m a famous Hollywood writer, I’m swamped with stories of murder, extramarital affairs, Jesus saved me from drugs, let me show you something in the alley, and you should write the screenplay ...Neither Bob nor Rick struck me as the kind who cared whether you could get half off on a can of Spaghetti-Os, but you never know when eccentricity will come screaming forth, so its best to keep one’s guard up. ...Bob came out of the Marine Corps, and then, I don’t know, he sold space ads for The Hollywood Reporter or Variety. ...Meanwhile Rick was the assistant to Jerry Bresler, producer of Major Dundee, a 1965 film starring Charlton Heston and directed by Sam Peckenpa. By 1969 Rick was an associate producer on The Reivers, a film that put Steve McQueen in an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel. McQueen introduced Rick to Bob, or it could have been the other way around. Regardless, secretaries and development assistants over the years led me to believe that Chris-Rose Productions was the result of Steve McQueen suggesting the two should get together and put on their own shows. Whether that’s true or not, it brings us back to the early piece called Gargoyles. I was at a party at Bob’s house a dozen years after its making. There was either another writer or a director present who knew one of the best inside stories I have ever heard. ...At the time of Gargoyles making in 1972 the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” had become “Black Power” with a clenched fist. California appellate courts overturned murder and assault convictions against the Maoist leadership of the Black Panther Party, freeing the leaders to fight off kidnapping, embezzlement and more murder charges. For reasons that are an enigma to me, intellectual and media elites began to accept the Panthers in the romantic revolutionary light in which radical leftists bathed them. Co-founder of the Party Huey Newton was in prison for killing a prostitute and addicted to drugs when the University of California, Santa Cruz, awarded him a doctorate. Eldridge Cleaver, the self-confessed rapist of white women who said he practiced on ghetto girls, was lionized for jumping bail and fleeing to Algeria. Angela Davis, a middle class woman turned Communist, feminist, university darling, Panther and owner of the shotgun used to blow off the face of a judge, inspired a worshipful song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In this climate the assassinated hero of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was considered passe because of his non-violent policies. ... Maluena Karenga’s whole cloth invention of Kwanza as a uniquely black holiday, with pseudo roots in African animism, gained wider, unquestioning acceptance. ...A person who needed his consciousness raised was a racist, patriarchal, probably a Republican or a Christian fundamentalist, a person in some way spiritually and mentally deformed. ... Therefore they already knew that The Man was the problem and did not need their consciousnesses raised. ... Hence when faced with a radical spewing hate or just a misguided fool spouting nonsense, most blacks and whites kept their opinions to themselves. ...He and Rick had a movie to get and only twenty-one days to do it. On the second or third day of shooting the lead gargoyle stepped out of a scene and took Bob aside. “Some of the bros are saying that my dialogue makes me sound like an Uncle Tom.”

Funny Girl Meets Her Equal

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-04T11:44:50-07:00

The reason is that people have a tendency to mistake my tastes as an insult when I refer to anything seemingly outside the bounds of those preferences. I know “Back In The Saddle Again” by heart, believe that Elvis could beat the Three Tenors all to heck, and think the best film music ever is a toss up between “Men of Harlech” from Zulu and Frankie Lane singing the theme from Gunfight At The O.K. ... As far as hymnity is concerned, if a church spent a whole year repeating “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” for the processional, offering and recessional, I’d be warming a pew more frequently than at Easter, and I’d put a damn sight more than a dollar in the collection plate too. That I can prefer all the above yet find this singer extremely talented is true musical appreciation, a rare and wonderful thing, but as with so many treasures in this fallen world, expansiveness of taste is often overlooked or totally misunderstood. Suppose for a moment that I am a student of human anatomy, and that my double-wide is packed with works by Doctors Galen and Gray, paintings by Rubens, L’trec and Vargas, every DVD Kyla Cole ever appeared in, plus a collection of almost new Hustler magazines published before Larry Flynn was confined to a wheelchair. Then suppose I am heard shouting something nice about the neighbor lady, the sweetness of her nature, the kindness of her spirit, that sort of thing. ...So here I am with Kip Attaway playing in the background, trying to keep everyone off my tail by calling this real life songstress.... ...When Linda L’stesso and I were freeway close in L.A.’s biological sink, a songwriter and mutual acquaintance kept telling me how funny Linda was, and vice verse, each of us being assured how much chuckling, thigh-slapping amusement would come from meeting the other. ...As far as I’m concerned, that’s good in a gospel artist, so as I got to know more about her, I have to admit to some disappointment. ...This sad event took my current wife out of the country, depleted our bank account and forced an abrupt cut in telephone service just hours before an expected phone call from a producer. ...No, she couldn’t put me through because he was in a meeting. What was my number again so that he could get back to me at some other time? ...Every drug dealer in Los Angeles had a cell phone, so they were catching on fast with the Hollywood crowd. ...I peddled to the nearest gas station, filled the tires and used the ARCO courtesy phone just outside the executive dinning room of AM-PM Entertainment. ...By now I was down to my last dollar, hungry from all the cycling and pretty well convinced that the producer and I would never connect. ...Food was on the agenda because people whose last names started with A through E were supposed to bring drinks. Usually such affairs—save the whales for Christ, feed the hungry for Christ, teach ghetto children to put some art into their graffiti for Christ—are very much like the secular counterparts from which they copy their concerns. ... Therefore you hear a lot of “Jesus Christ”s, first name or last name, but never thrown together as in the secular world to introduce a strong, negative opinion or as an exclamation of surprise, like when you accidentally wander into a ladies restroom whistling “In The Navy.” Either way, these occasions are attended by a few of the rich and famous, the odd true believer and a whole mass of folks looking to network their way to a higher place on the socio-economic dung heap. ...There was a story, reputedly about someone the likes of Norman Lear or perhaps the great one himself, the television producer and social activist who founded People for the American Way. He was supposed to have jumped whole hog into environmentalism, but most greens in the Hollywood branch of the movement were a scruffy, unemployed lot. Hence he proposed an executive committee of his peers that would control the whole group but not have meet with them. ...That makes you a special brother or sister, often called “Prayer Partner,” and puts you on the invite list for an intimate dinner of 100-plus with the pastor, during which he asks you to prayerfully consider giving more money so that you can become a member of Sea Org, the super tight inner inner ring. ...Groups that are just staring out can’t afford the snobbery, which is doubtlessly why I got my invitation to the Malibu shindig. ...Like, I am going to open my Rolodex and give you the names of people I’ve been cultivating so that you can bamboozled them with your superficial charm and flash-in-the-pan talent, making my ass creeping yesterday’s news. ...I never had time to cherry out the Caddy, but as our good Lord would have it, I ran out of gas near a family of farm workers needing shelter. ... Friends who weren’t really friends joked that the Century is always driven by an old woman you can barely see except for the blue tint of her hair. ... But it is equally true that, if your daytime soaps are interrupted by local coverage of a car chase and the guys with no shirts have been lucky enough to mug an old lady in a Century, you will not see cops stopping them on the 405, the 5 or the 14. ... No, that Century is going to take two bullets through the engine block in Inglewood, shred its tires on spike strips west of Lancaster, blow the radiator at Apple Valley and only stop when it runs out of gas east of Barstow. ... B was a muscle car, and even with only two-and-half gallons of hoochy mama in her tank, she could take me to Hell and back. With a dollar to my name, bringing drinks to Malibu would be a cinch because, praise God, most show biz folks either are strung out on drugs and alcohol or have turned their lives over to the Higher Power of a 12 Step program. If I paid for the 99-cent special for a litter of Ralph’s house brand orange soda—“Get the second one free”— I could bring relief to the reformed drunks who would show up. ...Some people think that Christians don’t drink, or if they do, it’s only in the closet. ... Tee totaling cultists like Southern Baptists are no about everything whereas Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans let it ride as a matter of personal conscience, which I've always found easy to tame. Unless it’s a very small private gathering, you won’t find Ketle One or Glenlivet, but I have seen a lot of Christians on their knees with wine, and that’s what I was willing to settle for in Malibu. ...The last time I had a view like that was on the beach with Larry Hagman and a former C.I.A. agent, the three of us pretty well plastered. ...As I plunked my orange sodas on a bare buffet table that was about half the size of a tennis court, I gave her a wink and smile, and said: ...My being a cheapskate would be understood in a Third World Way, as merely the cards I had been dealt by El Señor in the great Lotería of life, and by the way, should remain our little secret. ...Sometime later an Hispanic friend pointed out that heuvos can be a colloquialism for testicles, and the way I pronounced his native tongue could make the unwary think I have the balls of a chicken. ...There were a few guests milling in the palatial living room, and the event’s host and hostess hadn’t yet appeared on the massive marble staircase. ...I began to mix to keep my mind off my hunger, find out what all the idealism was about, show some empathy for seal pups for Christ or whatever. As more and more people arrived, it was clear there was general vagueness about what precisely we were doing together. ...The organizers were about to ask for volunteers to pound nails in Honduras, work a soup kitchen downtown, pass out tracks on Santa Monica Pier, the possibilities were endlessly horrifying. Any networking to my advantage would be for a lackey position at Trinity Broadcast Network, what I secretly called “The Crying Channel.” The only thing to do was to eat and run, so I weaved and dodged my way back to the dinning room, muttering, “Praise the Lord, excuse me, bless you, gimme back my resume.” ...The majority of their sodas and sparkling waters needed but one thing to make them palatable, which was no where to be seen, and after Jim Jones who in his right mind would touch a punch bowl of Kool-Aid? I wasn’t in my right mind, and the Kool-Aid wasn’t spiked with anything except the block of ice watering it down. ...What was clear was that they were at least working professionals because none of them had time to bring anything except bags of stale cookies from the convenience store down the road. ...By the time I got to Phoenix from the Chicago Fire of my life, she and the Mister had moved to a ranch two thousand miles away. ... I still see Linda huddling with another woman, their glancing prettily in my direction and starting a wave of tinkling laughter that rippled around the room.

Krumline To The Rescue

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-08-10T09:06:22-07:00

stoked my curiosity to read more, and usually I’m a sucker for a woman, which was what writer was if the sign off, “Wish I had stayed with acting, xoxo, Jasmine,” meant anything. Apparently she was a financial analyst who had an important decision to make for some Daddy Warbucks, and was asking friends, presumably in the money game too, if they would reply to four questions. ...Should I go short or long on Countrywide Mortgage? ...When do you think the Fed will decrease interest rates? ...Is this distressed market a giant opportunity, or am I delusional? ...Any opinion on small caps? As I brooded on how unfairly I’d been graded in economics and other college classes, causing my dad to cut off tuition and me to go to work to pay off gambling debts, one thing led to another, and after a cocktail or two, I fired off a reply. ...I have a unified set theory of the universe that might be helpful to you. I call it “The Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge” after W.S. Krumline, Head Hasher 7AM shift, Troy Hall, University of Southern California, 1967. First, recall all the courses you took in college, and don't worry that most were probably unrelated to each other and had nothing to do with your present career. Second, think of them as pancakes, some doughy, some overcooked, all plopped willy-nilly onto a cold plate by an individual who resents the fact that you are going through the food line of life while he's stuck behind the counter working for minimum wage. Third, drop the plate on the sticky linoleum floor of your imagination. Step back because it won't be neat. Some pancakes will be touching; others will not. Regardless, go to the fourth step, in which you imagine a large turkey baster that you ram through as many pancakes as you can. ... Whatever is sucked up into the baster is the wondrously interrelated core knowledge of everything you learned. That core can be then applied to anything...well, almost anything...that goes on in your life. You might think that a bit of anthro, econ and chem have nothing to do with each other, but suddenly you're up for some R & R in Bangcock, and it's a big Greek Eureka moment when your loose change comes together with a girl named Suzy and some Tai Stick. Or Boyle's Law, you say, what's that got to do with Ricardo's Theory of Rent, much less Spanish? Well, if you have ever been freezing cold in a bed-sitter in Earl's Court, the Pakistani landlord is going to explain exactly what that has to do with London power authority, and you’ll undoubtedly find yourself saying, “Hey, Cisco, how about trying that again in español?” ...I can't tell you how many times I have used the Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge to bring grace and order to my life. Your email asking for investment predictions had the turkey baster in my mind gushing forth like Krakatoa on Pompeii, namely— Should you be long or short on Countrywide? Everybody needs a roof over his head, right? But defaults are at record high, right? Well, two rights don’t make a wrong. I don’t know what that tells you about buying a particular stock, but Krumline told me that his theory can’t cover everything, depending as it does on a single vector unique to etc., etc. Look, I was asleep a lot. Why can't you settle for a little mystery in your life? When will the Fed decrease rates? When Alan Greenspan wants to. Or is he retired? I know he’s married to Andrea... ... It’s Ben Somebody. Ben Stein, Ben Cartwright, who cares? Just picture the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank putting pantyhose on one leg at a time, making him as human as you or I, and that’s how I can offer the second part of my answer. ... If nothing else, it’s a great conductor of electricity. Is the distressed market a giant opportunity or are you delusional? Well, that's easy. Finally, I know this for sure: small caps don't grab the eye like BIG CAPS. Check it out with The Wall Street Journal. And watch for Mr. Murdoch putting in a Page 3 Investment Vixen feature. There’s going to be nothing small about her assets, believe you me. ...I got a reply just this morning. Miss Jasmine thinks my serendipitous response was as sound as any from her experts, and wants to know where I hang my hat on Wall Street. Maybe we can have lunch. Far be it from me to burst a lady’s or the market’s bubble, so I won’t explain that I’m “between pictures” as we say here in sunny southern California, and usually don’t offer financial advice unless I’m swearing at my creditors. But it does feel good, knowing I can change careers any time I feel like it, and the sun will still go weaving round the earth just like Gallo said it would.

An Unknown Soldier

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-06-18T13:03:47-07:00

Does she worry about him? “Yes, I can’t help it. But God keeps showing me that I have to give my worries to Him.” Phone calls from the young man are bounced around the globe so that they appear to come from anywhere but Iraq. Web mail is very slow because it is censored. But they have a code worked out. The family home is Baghdad; the two-lane highway nearby, the Tigris; and, “I wish I could look toward the hills and see the ironwood in bloom,” denotes east or west, with other hints for north and south. Thus the parents generally know where their son is tasked with an Iraqi unit that once served the Saddam regime and is now involved in counter-terrorism. He wrote once to his parents, “Most of these men have probably committed atrocities. But they are brave soldiers and very skilled. I do not question their loyalty. I put my life in their hands everyday.” More recently he described the loss of a buddy who was killed in Afghanistan. “I wanted to get away, just be by myself. But after a while my men were all around me. One of them said, ‘We don’t know why you Americans fight for our freedom. But your grief is ours. We are with you.” The Iraqis sat quietly with their comrade and mourned for the loss of a young American they did not know, who was killed in a land they had not seen.

Identity Used To Matter

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-06-09T16:33:24-07:00

This is a clip from the 1964 movie Zulu starring Stanley Baker and co-starring Michel Caine in his first film role. It commemorates the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 when 140 Welch engineers and other British soldiers held off an attacking force of 4,000 Zulu impi that had just wiped out a British column of 1,000 men and handed Great Britian its worse defeat by native forces ever. The proud but exhausted Zulu knew who they were. And so did the defenders of the tiny mission station at Rorke's Drift. They won the battle and received more Victoria Crosses than have been awarded in any single action since. Today our enemies know who they are. We have forgotten.

Ripped Off

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-03-10T08:39:32-08:00

That marital arts trivia came to me as gospel from one of the two writers of the episode. ... Something Spooner (hey, cut me some slack: it was 34 years ago)...offered to get a spec treatment I had written for Kung Fu to the Warner Brothers brass because, as Mr. SS put it, “I’ve been promised a favor, and if your treatment grabs ’em, we’re co-writers. ...My new partner and I submitted the treatment a month or so before the middle of the second season. In the third and last season we had heard nothing in response when I caught a bit of an episode in which Caine is trapped in a cave where he has hallucinations of Aztec demons. The scenes I saw generally looked and sounded like they came from the treatment SS and I had turned in. There was the usual water-downed Zen that was supposed to infuse new thematic blood into the Western. At best those Shaolin Temple imitations were reworked Love Generation slogans from the ’Sixties. “Just as war hurts flowers and children and other living things, so too, Grasshopper, does the Colt .45 single-action Frontier revolver.” “But Master Poo, is it not also called Peacemaker because it kills tyrants?” Sometimes the series wove in Carradine’s input that his character shouldn’t wear shoes or ride a horse because.... ... But Aztec hoodoo in a cave couldn’t have been spontaneously conjured by someone else. ...His name was on the treatment, but he was so used to producers saying they owed him a favor but never coming through, he ate humble pie as if were cherry ala mode. I think he went on to be an unaccredited script doctor whereas I, young as I was, sought justice. I was acquainted with a lawyer who had been agent but was now back plying his wiles in the Legal Affairs Department of Warners. I telephoned him, and told him what was in the treatment and what I had seen on TV. ...Even if you win, it will take years to settle. So, we end up paying court costs and your lawyer’s fees, and you end up with what? ... I say you move on to something else.” Pausing to think about that, I remembered having a few after work scotches with Warren Bush, the Executive in Charge of Production for the David L. ... Warren had hired me for a staff position in the Research & Development Department. Although we had our ups and downs, he was as much of a mentor as I ever had in the entertainment industry, as well as something of a father figure. I enjoyed hearing him talk about his experiences as a B-29 navigator in World War II. After doing his bit to fire bomb flowers and children and a lot of murderous thugs, Warren got a job in the CBS News Division in New York. He talked amusingly of his California exploits, taking up gliding and acrobatic flying, and of some recent craziness regarding the Jacques Cousteau specials. In the editing wing of our building, a cutter had pasted a sign to his door. The sign played off the title of the movie about Depression Era marathon dancers, starring Traitor Jane and Gig Young. The sign expressed sentiment about what it was like to make the happy crew of The Calypso appear so sober, so scientific, so proto Al Gore. ...Warren claimed that when he first met Jacques Cousteau, the former French Navy captain was fixated on using television only to sell tickets to his Queen Mary museum. It took some talking to convince the inventor of the aqua lung to get behind the environmental impact of Warren’s hype, “The poet of the sea.” Alex, who worked with me in R & D, used to do a great faux French accent, which I can’t come close to recreating, so imagine Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau saying, “Suddenly, I had to leave pressing concerns in Tahiti and helicopter to The Calypso anchored off the Aleutians. In my year long absence the poor, motherless seal pup had mysteriously died.” On this evening, however, the talk was not about Captain Cousteau and the merry crew of The Calypso. It was about me! To me that’s always a headliner. Number One on the charts with a bullet. ... Anyway, Warren drew on his cigar, having given up Merits, and said philosophically: “In this business you can’t worry about having your ideas stolen. ... But you have to get them out there, and if you’re any good, you’ll always have more.” Suddenly, I left the Papua, New Guinea, of my memories and choppered in to the sordid Calypso of the present. “Yeah, you’re right,” I grudgingly said to the lawyer. After we hung up, I muttered what Dean Goodwin, another cohort from the Wolper days, always said before he killed himself, “F___ it if you can’t take a joke.” Years later I channel surfed into a rerun of the Kung Fu episode in contention. I could hardly believe my eyes it was so awful! I didn’t remember anything in the treatment about some snotty Imperial Prince poisoning young Caine. I thought the prince was supposed to be a rattlesnake. I vaguely recalled an Indian maid taking care of Caine as he suffered from severe flashback. Finally, I concluded that all that junk clinging to the plot had to be SS’ work. He deserved to be ripped off. I still had plenty of good ideas left waiting to be stolen.

The Sporting Life

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-02-02T12:23:44-08:00

The East West Game airs weeks before football’s de facto national holiday and involves college all stars playing for charity; whereas the Super Bowl throws big bucks at pros who are presented as if contestants for American Idol. ...Still, the Super Bowl could use a little ribbing for the teen keen MTV graphics, the gaudy Vegas half time show, and all the pre-, post- and in-between hyperactive announcers, including at least one woman to prove how the network isn’t all butch. Forty years ago when the hype was a lot more primitive, there were two independent football leagues, the National and the American, and their top teams first played against each other on January 15, 1967, in what was billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship of Football. ...But there was a time before, when the likes of John Wayne and Gary Cooper were just plain stars, and football was more about playing on spotty grass than having the Rockettes high kicking on Astro Turf. ...By the second week we were still starless, but we were now a team very much aware of who was in charge—the last man in America to field a single wing offense. ...I knew that as soon as I snapped the ball there would be two defensive guards all over me, and if the opposing team had done any scouting at all, a linebacker would be attending the party. ...Whoever ultimately had possession then ran behind a wall of bodies—a pulling guard, sometimes two, the blocking back, the wing back and the strong side end—as they cleared whatever territory they could at the line of scrimmage. ...If you are used to playing only against teams whose quarterbacks stand directly over their centers, and the line of scrimmage is steps away from any handoff, the single wing would look as strange as something from the Jurassic Period, “terrifying” in the sense that you had not prepared for a Brontosaurus to come lumbering onto the field. But in the time period in which I played, every high school in the central coastal region of California, had about ten years’ worth of preparation, making the Mustang offense something like a pre-Cambrian infestation of blue-green algae. ...What they couldn’t do was sustain momentum against a bunch of gang-tackling crazies who were worried that Granny might show up in the showers and shame us all. ...That way I know who and what not to vote for, and when I go into an election both, it is with warm and fuzzy thoughts for my high school coaches. ...I suppose it’s OK to retain a few things from the past, but you should stick them in same shoebox in the attic where you’re pretty sure your Boy Scout knife is too. ...What was important to me at the end of he ’64 season was knowing that I wasn’t good enough to play college ball, and that I didn’t have he charisma to cajole twenty-two guys to come over to the back yard someday to thump around. ...When I was in California, I came home one evening and told my father a tall tale about doing something so spectacular in practice Coach was moving me from the defensive line to the offensive backfield where I could better score touchdowns. ...That night as I lay staring at the darkened ceiling of my bedroom and listed to the damned leaves blowing into the yard I would have to rake, I vowed that someday somehow I would intercept the pass from center and run the ball for a tie-breaking TD. ...One way, due to the fact that blocking another player is illegal, is to offer yourself up for being tackled as a replacement for a back’s having to dirty himself. You do have to be in possession of the ball for a short time before the fall, but usually a back is coming up fast to grab the glory. ...If you happen to be tackled while in possession of the ball and it doesn’t “knock on,” i.e, squirt forward, curling over the ball with your body will allow an impromptu ruck to form. ...Once the infracted is carried from the field on a stretcher, the forwards from each side grab each other in the most impolite ways, keep low to the ground in order to have spinal problems for the rest of heir lives and push en masse against each other to gain advantage over the ball tossed between them. ...If their side of the scrum is overwhelming the other (and they are clawing and biting mightily to make sure their version of Planet of the Apes never lets Chuck Heston off the space ship), then the hooker can more easily heel or hook the ball to the back forwards. ...Whether a lock is gaining forward momentum or being screw backwards into the ground like a human tent peg, his head is meant to be firmly wedged between the pelvic girdles of one prop and the hooker, lads who won’t be taking showers until after an hour of nearly non-stop running. ...Jock straps are the only protective gear in rugby although some forwards would sport linen headbands to keep their ears from cauliflowering with scar tissue, which is bound to happen if your head rubs against enough moving butts and hairy thighs. ...Throwing the ball forward is illegal in rugby, so there are a lot of laterals, the backs swaying in fluid lines from one sideline to the other, a lovely sight to behold when done well. ...I think the ball had to go out of bounds, and a player from the team not responsible got to throw it back in bounds. ... At 4,000 feet above sea level other forwards played smart, took the time to catch their wind, think about past mistakes and ways to improve, and waited for the ball to come down on its own. ...I went to Hartnell Junior College in Salinas for a semester and let a friend talk me into playing basketball for the King City town team. ...I never made the cut from junior varsity to varsity, but I did set a school record for the Mustangs by fouling out in one minute and thirty seconds. ... Within the same period I was fouled twice myself and got a chance at two free throws, both of which I missed, making for some very bad play within a very short period of time. ...Of course, I didn’t have much court time representing the City of King, but I would suit up, do the warm up drills and watch the stands for two fifteen-year-olds to show. ...In Stanford’s math placement test I scored second lowest of the 1,200-plus students in my class, so I had re-learn everything I took in high school, going to bonehead math five afternoons a week for no credit. ...After books were added, I didn’t darken the doors, but if someone in my dorm had a stack of books for a Western Civ paper, I’d borrow a few to come up with my own topic. ... I can’t remember whose books I used for my paper, either the friend’s or someone else’s in the dorm, maybe both, but while they went on about the Ancient Mastodons losing their prettiest woman to Odysseus or somebody who wouldn't use any protection, I culled the same material to get a better grade with “The History of Torture.” ...In other words, I went into my sophomore year with a plummeting GPA and as a rah-rah boy just when radicalism carpet-bombed campuses across the land, throwing out pot, free love, LSD and anti-war sentiment as shrapnel, and hitting traditional values everywhere. ...I thought I could look forward to at least boosting a female cheerleader to my shoulders and looking up her skirt, but that sort of thing was suddenly regarded as sexist and ultra double not cool. ...Rhino’s massive body did not move a scintilla, but as he stood where Best Man had left him, he looked down with a mixture of bewilderment and pity to where Best Man had bounced off. ...My arm came out of sling within a couple of weeks, a laugh riot compared to, say, heart surgery or being fired so that the project executive can hire her boyfriend or having a few martinis for lunch and arriving back at the office only to discover a presentation has to be on the five o’clock flight to New York. ...Today the university throws males and females together in the same rest room facilities, and tells parents to buzz off if they want a looksee at their precious one’s grade transcripts or any STD lab results from the Student Health Center. ...Because I had just discovered club rugby and, like déjà vu to Michaelhouse, was playing for the Indians’ 2ndXV, I’m pretty sure I didn’t promise to quit everything. ...The 2ndXV played against other Pacific Eight colleges, but more fun was being mismatched against rugby unions around San Francisco Bay, clubs like the Olympic and the Ramblers and the Didn’t Make Junior Partners. ...That’s when I realized there is a huge difference between being physical fit for sport and medically unfit for getting shot at, a topic I’ll cover in a future essay, God willing I should live so long. ...The day he changed my life, he was on the 1stXV scrimmaging against the 2nd, and we were facing each other as opposing forwards in a lineout. ...Sadly for the world, I cannot validate my theory that the Stanford Linear Accelerator has nothing to do with subatomic particles but is really a giant pinball machine set up to hustle extraterrestrials in games of chance they can’t possibly win, what with their Venusian crab claws and all. ...God may have known, but in Drama Departments from Palo Alto to London, no one else knew what Harold Pinter was going on about, so any interpretation would do. ...I saw him in his last fight when he was 70-plus years old and had to let go of his cane to bloody the nose of 60-year-old whippersnapper who had said something disparaging about one of his sons. ...Thanks to a friend who tutored me for free every single day until the final (we took only Friday afternoons off for bar hopping), I squeaked out of my fifth try at Calculus was a “C-.” By the next day I awoke from a celebratory hangover, my mind completely wiped clean of any knowledge of the subject, which makes me more sure that some ticked off alien was trying to get back at humanity for being suckered at the so-called “Linear Accelerator." What I knew for a certainty was that from Second Grade on I had no intention of becoming a doctor, a fact I just wasn’t used to broadcasting too loudly around my family. My dad kept saying, “You can do anything you want once you get your MD,” thus underscoring his fear that going straight into the arts would turn me into a homosexual or a drunkard. ...(Preparing for Brutalization) when I was but a bright-eyed college junior who knew that my volunteering to live in Stanford’s first coed dorm was a really bad idea. It was especially bad for feminists because guys like me always knew we were never the equal of women, and to insist that we were did not make us better men.

The True Meaning of Christmas

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2007-01-05T09:42:29-08:00

I conducted the 6 AM feedings, during which I would contemplate the upbringing of my generation. When we were in utero, many of our mothers were throwing back G & Ts before dinner. Our emotionally distant fathers were off working and having the odd nightmare about killing Japs and Krauts. Need I say they were racists? When we became viable fetuses, we had to suck down that goby white formula forced on the world by Big Pharmaceutical Companies, and horror of horrors! this often was in the midst of secondhand smoke brought on by Big Tobacco. Sure, we got Roy Rodgers and Captain Midnight on television, but those weekly shows could hardly mitigate the daily effects of cigarettes and gin in our formative years. Then we went to college, and got thrice weekly- and sometimes- daily doses of what might be compared to the anti-depressant Welbutrin, changing the label to Zoloft and marketing it as a stop-smoking aid. Call it History, Sociology, Comparative Religions, Theater Arts, even Engineering, it was all just an excuse for most of our professors to preach Marxism mixed with hedonism. So what did we do? Burned bras and draft cards, and for a lot of us boys, we looked for what we had missed as infants--bare Triple D mammaries. We were victims. It was terrible, just terrible.

Riding the A List

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-12-13T16:04:59-08:00

Then I fired up my burnt orange, two-door Cadillac with the brushed steel and padded vinyl roof. The Caddy was a classic, made when wetlands were still called swamps. It had an audio system just waiting for an eight-track tape of the Bee Gees, and you could almost land an airplane on the hood, under which came the careless hiss of the fuel injected, four-barrel carb sucking in natural resources like a vampire with hemophilia. I lived in an oceanfront apartment building, on the wetlands side, and as the Caddy angled up out of the underground garage, blocking my view of everything save hood and sky, a blue heron screeched. ... Small children who had never been driven to a play date in anything bigger than a Saab stood agog. ...Nine months earlier when I still had some dregs left in my career, I had been invited to the conference. At that time my agent Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers called every six months or so to let me know that he was alive but still too busy to talk about any work for me. With a call now three months overdue, I was sure that one of us was terminally ill. Driving up the 405 North, I wasn’t sure what the future would bring, whether I’d be able to pay overdue rent, but I certainly wasn’t going to chance having to pay for parking. That was one reason I nosed the Caddy into the service parking lot of the hotel and left it for the help to stare at. I slipped through a hedge, put the smell of Dumpsters to my back and sashayed up to the main entrance like I was a citizen of he greatest country on earth and everyone else was an illegal alien. ...Then I found the foyer to the main ballroom where other citizens were milling. The Road To Success session had 45 minutes before start time I could feel butterflies gathering in my belly, and before 45 minutes were up, they all would be skittering off the flight path. ...The bright lights of the panel were a writing team fresh from a hit feature and a three-picture development deal at hundred grand a pop, more if their scripts made it to the screen. ... The other two panelists were producer/writers, one of whom had a couple of hit series listed in the program notes. A rule of thumb about entertainment incomes is that producers, directors and series writers own real estate. ...Say my name with some progesterone behind it, and you’ve got my full attention. ...Christine Foster headed the Research and Development Department at Wolper Productions where I cut my teeth in show business. Before I met her, she had been a noviciate in a nunnery in Florida, jumped the wall for Hollywood but remained a devout Catholic. ... Now I was telling her about my conversion and giving her the straight dope about my circumstances. ...She told me about becoming a literary agent and how hard it was to get work for any writer. She said some nice things about Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers. She asked me if I knew that she was moderating the upcoming panel. ...I hadn’t finished reading the program notes posted in the foyer outside the ballroom. If they’re not broadcasting your license number and asking you to move your car, or requesting that you step out of the aircraft for a full body search, hearing your name on a public address system can be rather pleasant. ... I was talented, I was a gentleman, I was watching an audience of 300-plus begin to believe that I was the star of the panel. ...She asked other panelists questions, but a lot of them were tagged with, “And, Jeff, what do you think?” ...Christine had work to go to, and panelists were ushered to separate tables where conferees could line up for face time. There was a black man who kept waiting off to the side until the very end of the time allotted for one-on-one. He was a reporter for a major daily, meaning that it wasn’t in California. He told me matter-of-factly that he could put a call into The White House and expect President Clinton to either pick up or get back to him within an hour or so. The thing was, he kept wondering whether he would rather be a screenwriter. I had said some things that, when he read between the lines, made him uneasy about switching careers. ...Besides girls, that was all we seemed to talk about in college, and at times recreation could be deadly serious too. ... It was my turn to fold, call his bet or up the ante. As I fingered what was left of my chips, he said very kindly, “Don’t play any more. ...To Bill I owe the fact that had some money left for other aspects of my misspent youth. There was no way I could pay Bill back for seeing that I was a horrible gambler and relaying the truth as best he could. ...I told him that nine months ago my Honda had been repossessed. ... It sputtered into the service lot of the hotel like a consumptive checking into a sanatorium. ... I was praying that it wouldn’t seize up on the Sepulveda Pass when I went home. I added that I was at least as talented as any other writer on the panel. I had a good agent who worked his tail off for me, but because he hadn’t been able to scare up any business lately, he was too embarrassed to call. ...I had planned to go home but I stuck around for the dinner that the sponsors were giving for the weekend’s panelists. I drank too much wine, my least favorite of adult beverages, but I wasn’t going to pay for drinks at the bar. I danced too long with a woman whose name and story I have both forgotten. ...Not long afterwards my wife said, “We’ve had our ups and down, but all this time you have provided for me and the children. ...I still work occasionally for relatively low pay but can thankfully report that my wife drives off every morning in a Lexus SUV. Left alone, I sometimes recall when I was an A List writer and a so-so human being. Whenever the conference comes to mind, my being any kind of writer doesn’t matter.

The Gospel According to Johnny Carson

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-12-10T15:47:55-08:00

Before Johnny Carson became the “King of Late Night Television,” he took over from Edgar Bergman in hosting an afternoon quiz show, Who Do You Trust? Perpetual sidekick Ed McMahon would occasionally correct the grammar. “It should be ‘Whom.’ Whom Do You Trust?” Whichever way you put it, it’s a good question. It began rattling around my mind last week as I read a book published in 1953 by a scholarly pastor who was head of a high dollar church in Washington, DC. His thesis used the relatively new discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reveal that Jesus was probably not historical and definitely not divine, but if such a man existed, he was brainwashed by the end times messianic propaganda of the Essens, members of an extremist sect of Judaism, who were guardians of the scrolls. If gospel writers held contrary opinions to the pastor, it was because they were hawking a myth. The First Century Jewish historian Josephus had described the Essens, but if his description didn’t back up the pastor’s claims about the sect, it was due to Josephus selling out to the Romans. Besides, José had ever been near the Dead Sea. Maybe he hadn’t. I sure haven’t. What I’ve seen of the photographs of the scrolls, their writing might as well be chicken tracks. I have no idea if it is correct, the author’s assertion that most scholars of the Old and New Testaments think the scriptures are irrelevant to modern life, present a crock of nationalistic stepped-in-what? and rehash folklore clearly stolen from surrounding pagan cultures. Maybe. Just as easily, it could be that Jimmy Carter’s assertion of being a Christian is another case of stepped-in-what? The man hammers nails in his retirement, does some writing; that’s all I truly know. I am aware of- but have never met- biblical scholars who thoroughly disagree with the pastor who wrote the book. Allegedly, they’re not all fundamentalists, but they do start with the assumption that the biblical texts don’t have to be wrong. As a lowly, untutored hack, I see vast difference in at least the English translations of pagan creation stories and the Genesis account. Maybe if I spent time in seminary and learned Hebrew and Greek, I could find a few more examples. Depending on the seminary, of course. In the meantime the only side I can count on regarding Jesus or Moses, or a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with the bible, like automobiles causing the “Little Ice Age” of the Fourteenth Century or whether the Holocaust really took place, is who do I trust? Sorry. Whom. About the same time the pastor’s book on the scrolls came out, C.S. Lewis addressed a conference of Anglican clergy in England. He stated that the laity did not know what most Anglican priests truly thought of traditional doctrines and popular beliefs. Then he warned, if ordinary people did find out, the clergy would be addressing empty pews. He wondered in an essay on the subject: why people so adamantly non-Christian still wanted the label? Psst, Clive! Can you hear me? The money. Those boys couldn’t attract an audience unless they had collars on. Who else but the church was going to pay them to billow and squeak? The American pastor was beyond warning. He was being very daring long before the Sixties made controversy comfortable. Although he died and went to God knows where, his church looks to be thriving. According to the internet site, it is planning to celebrate Kwanza right after Santa Claus comes. With a few notable exceptions, the Church of England also seems to be navigating the post-modern waters with some success. Her architectural landmarks attract hordes of tourists and make for great echo chambers.

Erratum

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-30T12:19:53-08:00

The blog below... I love the way that sounds...the blog below behooved a reader of PoliticalMavens.com, where the Peter Baldwin story also appeared, to suggest that I might have been thinking of Vladimir Horowitz. I can hear Peter imitating the stage mother, "....will you finally listen to the great Horowitz?" My problem is with Vladimir. Don't like the name. Never have. My Spell Check always underlines it in red. I'm sure there may be one or two Vlads who play piano, but the great majority are in Lubyanka Prison pulling nails out or in the Kremlin ordering worse. Speaking of prison, I am currently editing a book against a looming print deadline, which feels something like being in an isolation cell next to the lethal injection room. There's even a chaplain, as it were, checking in every day to listen to my comments and confessions. For example, he reads this site, and it really upsets him when he sees a new blog entry. The main reason is that he is the author of the book, and related to that is the fact that a new blog entry means that I'm not... .... OK, so the book's on hold while I think for a moment. I could be playing a computer game. No thoughts there. Zero. Or I could be looking at pornography. Lots of thoughts there but confusing. How can three people actually do that? And where do you find a telephone booth these days? But that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the transition between Chapter Five and-- There's the phone. It's ringing. Betcha it ain't the Governor calling in a reprieve.

Whatshisname Transforms a Young Life

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-28T21:56:55-08:00

So there Peter was seated next to Jascha Heifetz, Ferrante & Teicher, Segovia, it doesn’t make any difference. Somebody who could play the piano, and I mean good. They got to talking about what they did. Directing, tinkling the ivories, fending off wannabes who begged to be hired, blessed, referred to whomever could get them a ticket on the Success Express. “I’ve made it my policy,” said the great pianist, “to turn them all away. If someone plays horribly, maybe they are just having a bad day. How can I judge that? Or if they are great, what can I say? You know as well as I that talent doesn’t necessary get you a job or make you a living. How can I play God and encourage someone into a life of poverty? “Ah, but it was on this very same airline, the very same flight number. Four and half, five hours, it felt like twenty. At first sight she seemed like such a nice Jewish lady. But as soon as the wheels were up and we had exchanged pleasantries, she was the Stage Mother from Hell. Her son, her son, I must listen to her son. On and on, and for just a moment’s peace I finally said, ‘Yes.’ “We arranged an audition for ten o’clock the next morning in my hotel suite. I went to bed that night, dreading the dawn. She arrived on time with her son. A wholesome looking lad. I gestured to the piano. I held my breath as he sat down. Then he began to play. “What relief! He wasn’t having either a good day or a bad day. He simply had no talent, and it was clear that happened every day. “When he was finished, I said to him, ‘Young man, you have a great gift. A love of music that will be with you all the days of your life. You can entertain your friends, fill in the hours of solitude. But I am afraid you should never think of a career— ‘“You see!’ his mother cut in. ‘You see! Your father has tried to tell you! I’ve tried to tell you! Your teachers have tried to tell you! You’re no good! Now, for God’s sake, will you finally listen to the great....?’” Jimi Hendricks, John Philip Sousa, I wish I could remember his name.

Election Special: George W. Bush, anti-Christ

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-06T21:11:16-08:00

• Jane Fonda posed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery while Ramsay Clark ass-creeping for the folks responsible for killing G.I.s. But at home a Republican Administration did not prosecute them for aiding and abetting the enemy. • Naval lieutenant John Kerry returned from Vietnam, threw his purple hearts away and testified before a Congressional committee about all the rapists, baby killers and mass murderers with whom he served. He had never reported those atrocities to his superiors while there, and while here he was never charged with dereliction of duty. If you can believe what he said, it is possible he was an accomplice to war crimes. But he’s still running around, pouring vitriol on our troops. • Republican President Gerald Ford was Commander-in-Chief of our cutting and running when the North Vietnam broke the Paris Peace Accords. We left our South Vietnamese allies to be killed or forced into Communist re-education camps. • President Ronald Reagan said he was going to retaliate for the terrorist bombing of our Marine Barracks in Beirut. What he did was order all American forces from Lebanon, essentially inviting terrorists everywhere to have another go at us. • KGB documents show that, while Reagan was calling the USSR an evil empire, Senator Ted Kennedy offered to help the Soviets with their public relations in America. But no one in the Administration brought him up on charges of treason. And he’s still free! Republicans must believe there is one law for the average guy and another for celebrities and alcoholics. • Remember, “Read my lips”? Lying about tax increases was nothing to letting the foreigners of the United Nations dictate how far we could go in the First Gulf War. • So now we have the Second Gulf War and George the Younger unable to understand that Islam is not a religion of peace. He is unable to understand that you are not a racist if you think Moslems in the Middle East (and Europe) aren’t ready for democracy. He is unable to understand that getting shot at from a mosque or an apartment complex should be the signal for that structure’s becoming a useful parking lot. And he is unable to understand that if Time-Warner through CNN embeds a reporter with an enemy sniper team, the CEO, bureau chief and the reporter all need to face charges of murder. • Don’t get me started on illegal immigrants. People say they are tired of the Iraq War. Most of the time most of those people haven’t lifted one finger of effort, haven’t fought or sacrificed or lost a loved one, haven’t sent a single letter to a soldier, haven’t prayed for the protection of strangers who are neighbors; have pretty much taken it easy with their pleasures and complaining. What I'm tired of is supporting a President and donating to a party that doesn’t seem to take serious things all that seriously. They might as well be Democrats. This country is headed for a train wreck. Some Republicans are yanking the whistle cord. Other Republicans and most Democrats are shoveling coal into the boiler as fast as they can. My friend Michael in Oregon puts it this way: "It's a choice of suicide or maybe squeaking by till old age." That made it a no-brainer when I confronted the Touch Screen Voting terminal in Culver City last week. Rs all the way through. But, boy, I am pissed and can hardly wait for the party primaries. That's the time to vote the bastards out.

A Naked Monk Solves Christmas

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-10-16T00:48:18-07:00

With Christmas looming, copies of A Monk’s Alphabet make for easy gift giving, and recipients probably will remember the giver long after they’ve forgotten where the Argyle socks or cashmere sweater came from. ...A Monk’s Alphabet is subtitled Moments of Stillness in a Turning World. The moments do wind down your inner clock and dampen some of the brain chatter that comes with modern living. But there could have been another subtitle--A Man of the Cloth Gets Naked. The author has lived a quarter of a century as a Benedictine monk and an ordained priest. He spends part of the year living at Mount Angel Abby in rural Oregon and the other part in bustling Rome, teaching seminarians theology. I’ve met Father Jeremy at Mount Angel on two, possibly three difference occasions, for maybe six hours total. I met his mother who is rightfully proud of her son. But until I read his book, I had no idea that he used to be a cowboy. Or that he’s known as Je in a coffee house and bar where noisy Italian patrons expect straight-forward answers to rudely formed metaphysical questions, questions that we all ask in our own ways. That he can be disarmingly honest about his own doubts and fears regarding God, Christianity and his calling. He wears a habit but doesn’t hide behind it. He honors all things and manner of men with dignity and innate modesty. His “nakedness,” then, is not of the Sixties variety, “Let it all hang out.” ... It is how most of us would like live, rather than behind masks and under expectations. Thus as Father Jeremy shares himself, his writing radiates a kind of universal blessedness, making all readers a bit holier no matter what they believe. The following excerpt is but one taste of the many flavors of A Monk’s Alphabet. ...When I was five years old, my brother and I burned our garage down. ...In the small town where I grew up in north Idaho, the fire department was volunteer. This meant that a loud siren had to sound in the town to call the volunteers from their scattered posts so that they could go rushing to the firehouse and then to the fire. The local radio would announce without delay where the fire was. This was so that, hearing the news, some volunteers could go directly to it. But the announcement was also made to satisfy the immediate curiosity of all in the town; for, of course, we all cared about and were interested in a fire. My brother and my sister and I were having lunch with the babysitter when the siren began to blow. My brother jumped up and ran into the kitchen to turn on the radio and learn where the fire was. From the kitchen he could see the garage, which was a separate building from the house. He cried out, “It’s our house!” ... Running to the window with my sister and the babysitter, we saw huge flames leaping out of the roof of the two-story building. ... Someone had seen the smoke and leaping flames and had reported the fire. A crowd gathered on the lawn to watch the drama unfold. It was a stunning scene for a five-year-old boy under any circumstances, but the effect was ten times the stronger for it being “our house.” This effect would be further intensified later when in my young mind I finally put two and two together and realized that what my brother and I had been up to in the garage earlier in the morning was the likely cause of this blaze. But in the first phase, that awareness had not yet dawned. During this same period of my life, there was a girl in my kindergarten group whom I liked, and she liked me. I noticed I felt about her something different from what I felt about the other girls whom I also liked. I suppose it was a sort of first love, though I didn’t know to call it such at the time. But the fire provided evidence of my unique feelings for her. I saw her in the crowed gathering to watch the spectacle, and I remember thinking, “Oh no! ... Just then she saw me and came running over excitedly. She grabbed my hand and held it as we both gazed toward the blaze. She was thrilled and asked in solemn wonder, “Whose house is it?” I realized in the midst of my panic that she didn’t realize it was mine. So, trying to match in the tone of my voice her own pleasure at the flames, I said, “I don’t know.” But I could bear the pressure of this lie only momentarily. I snatched my hand from hers and went running off in a panic down the street to the house of my aunt and uncle. It was never the same between us after that. Our love could not survive a lie. ... I learned also another classic lesson at this moment of my life: not to play with matches. ...A Monk’s Alphabet: Moments of Stillness in a Turning World was first published last year by Darton, Longman & Todd of London, was printed this year for the North American market by New Seeds of Boston and is distributed by Random House. The list price is just short of 20 bucks American, which, for Sergeant Preston of the Mounties, translates into 26.95 Canadian.

Sixth Anniversary of The Proverb

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2010-02-22T10:20:00-08:00

O Calcutta! (posted Oct. 2006) Two days ago fifteen news services from the The Seattle Times to The Hollywood Reporter featured articles on The Proverb, a ten-mnute film that I wrote for Todd Albertson, the producer and director. We pulled in all favors to get our friends and their friends to pool their talents to give us a free day of shooting. After a week of editing and post production we entered The Proverb in a local film festival in 2004, placed in the top category (which really meant that there were twenty-plus entries topping ours), sold less than a dozen DVDs, and watched our work languish in obscurity until this year and a film festival on the East coast. There it rolled over and died. The judges couldn't make up their minds whether it was the acting, writing or directing that made The Proverb a stinker. They said that they didn't know whether it was meant to be a comedy or a drama. Perhaps that had something to do with the ability to read. The Proverb purports on its disk cover and in all of its promotional material to offer chuckles and thigh-slappers. But then, this supposed humor is aimed at religion and journalism in contemporary America, which are serious subjects per se, and maybe that's where the confusion lay. Then came howling from an Indian. It was a glowing review that I thought Todd had made up. I offered to re-write it with some genuine-sounding Tontoisms: "Me like-um heap much. Kimosabe like-um too." But Todd said, "No! This is an Indian from India. His praise is genuine." We suspect but don't know that the reviewer then entered the film in a festival in Calcutta. (Apparently Calcutta is spelled with a "K" these days, but Beijing to me is always going to be Peking, and I don't care what whose continent we're talking about.) I never heard of the festival, but it seems as if The Prover hit like a Jerry Lewis movie in France. I now quote from: Kolkata International Spirituality Film Fest LOS ANGELES, Oct. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- In garnering Grand Prize honors at India's annual Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) International Spirituality Film Festival (KISFF) on Oct. 7, 2006, short film The Proverb had to break a few barriers: In the festival's three-year history, no other English-language films, short films, Western-made or Christian-themed films had won the coveted award. The festival, held October 5-7, 2006 in Kolkata, had over 800 participants this year--an impressive 21% increase over last year's entries. Prior to being named Grand Prize winner at KISFF, The Proverb was a finalist in the 2004 168 Hour Film Project in Los Angeles. "The Proverb has, in the past, been more popular overseas than in America," stated director Todd Albertson. "I attribute this to a trifecta--it was short, used wry humor, and would only be funny if the audience had strong knowledge of geopolitics, history, and religion." The Proverb, a ten-minute mockumentary that takes on contemporary journalism and religiosity, easily draws in the audience with its spot-on send-ups of media figures that take themselves too seriously and the oh-so-pious folks for whom the appearance of being spiritual displaces true faith. Completed in 2004, the experimental piece was produced and directed by Todd Albertson and written by Jeff Andrus, the late Pope John Paul II's screenwriter. The Proverb was shot in just one week and stars Tony Award winner Scott Waara (The Happy Fella), Nancy Stafford (Matlock), Lauren E. Roman (All My Children), Christopher Prizzi (Law & Order), and newcomer Anna Michelle Wang. "On behalf of all those involved in The Proverb, I'd like to thank the organizers, judges and participants of KISFF for recognizing The Proverb with their Grand Prize award," Albertson said. "I'd also like to thank whoever went to the huge effort of subtitling into Bengali and Hindi as well as submitting our film to the committee." To learn more about The Proverb visit IMDb.com. So now we have our fifteen minutes of fame. Where Mother Terresa started no less. Todd actually used the word "trifecta." And what was that about only educated and sophisticated foreigners?! I could have made him sound more proletarian, but no, ignore the writer, overshadow him with the Pope and make a statement that isn't accurate. That's the way it is in show biz. The director says, "Action," and, "Cut," while the cameraman is doing the real work and I'm shoveling dog crap off the lawn and handing up props out of frame. That's what really happened. Hey, Todd, why didn't you thank "all the little people behind the scenes?"

Why Spread Democracy when Fallout Is Qucker?

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-10-09T10:12:54-07:00

He is fond of torturing dissidents and has forced millions of his subjects into starvation, taking resources they might have used to live and redirecting them for a nuclear weapons program and delivery system. He has just touched off his first successful underground A-bomb, and although it’s big and unwieldy, he’s working on getting it small enough to missile into the wild blue yonder. He says the United States is the enemy and has forced him to act the way he does. Japan and South Korea understandably are worried that he regards them as friends of his enemy. That probably should give pause to Australia and New Zealand because once Nut Boy begins pushing buttons, who knows where the missiles will come down? Solution: Make Pyongyang, where Kim and most of his handpicked generals have their mansions, one big smoking hole in the ground. Adios, MF. RIP a lot of innocent people. But that’s better than death to you and me and lots and lots of our neighbors. Of course, there would be international outcries and saber rattling from the Chinese, but maybe we could work a deal beforehand. Not a deal with the United Nations: it bows to Arab oil money and never lifted a finger as genocidal regimes from Africa to Asia did their bits to imitate North Korea. Hence Greenpeace would be billowing and squeaking, but maybe the Commie Chi would be reasonable. “We play the bad cop,” we say. “You take over what’s left.” The alternative is to keep talking. We can blame President Bush for insisting on six-party negotiations when he should be sitting down with Kim for some one-on-one face time. For crying out loud, treat him like a human being! Or maybe it’s Madeline Albright’s fault for when she was President Clinton’s Secretary of State and waltzed with the madman. He’s short! What do you think that did to his self-esteem? Maybe if we treat him better or differently or something, Tinker Bell will fly, and Kim Jong-Il will stop laboring away.

Satan's Girl and the Flaming Mexican

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-10-09T08:51:13-07:00

My friend’s car is a secondhand but classy model. I like it better than his brand new car that was destroyed several months back by what we have taken to call The Flaming Mexican. Actually, it was the van the Mexican was driving that was aflame. The Flaming Mexican drove the van down Van Nuys Boulevard then veered into a nearly empty parking lot. Of all the spaces he could have stopped, he picked the one just behind my friend’s new car, whereupon he leapt out, made a quick call on his cell and beat cheeks. My friend was watching a matinee when cops entered, calling out his name. By then his car was black and smoking. Witnesses were able to ID the Mexican, and wouldn’t you know? He was an illegal alien who didn’t have insurance. As events transpired, the investigating officer discovered where The Flaming Mexican lived but said, “I got a thousand of these cases on my desk already. Nothing is going to happen.” When I first heard this tragic story, the only thing I could think to say was, “Other than that how did you like the show?” In the heat of loss that didn’t go down well, but the friendship survived. Thus there we were, getting a late start, waiting for documented workers to fix the replacement car that hadn’t been fixed properly the day before. Afterwards we had to take my friend’s dog to a horse ranch outside of town. We took a wrong turn and needed to get back on the freeway. It was at the intersection to the on-ramp where we spotted a teenage girl wearing a pullover. There was a stop sign but no light. More notable was the pullover: it was decorated with a sequenced pentagram cut nearly in half by a zipper pulled low. I’m not really attracted to teenage girls, but whether feminists want to admit it or not, men do notice what females wear, and most of us process the information sexually. So I made the editorial comment, “No tits.” When my friend turned to look, the girl started to wave us through the intersection with a casual flick or two of the hand, like she knew what she was doing. The driver of the car in the adjoining lane must have thought so too because, as we went straight, he turned left. We exchanged bumpers. Everyone was a gentleman about it, including the motorcycle cop who was right there to take it all in. Four men, one girl. We didn't stand a chance. Once we were on the open road sans dog, my friend mused, “Do you realize how many instances, changes in plans, traffic patterns led up to that one girl being at that exact spot the same time we were?” It has been over ten days since the incident, and it occurs to me now there had to be some free will involved. Rather than focusing on the zipper, I could have more clearly thought about the significance of the pentagram and prayed for the girl’s immortal soul. My pal could have picked a different repair shop. Heck, he could have spent a few extra bucks and taken in the six o’clock show.

Tramp Stamps

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-09-19T14:25:14-07:00

"Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. ... A superficial reading tells me it might be wrong to do your own inking but OK for someone else. Less facile thinkers say that the passage was meant to admonish ancient Hebrews to set themselves apart from the savage idolaters round about them. Not having a tattoo in those days would be like modern Israel not having a totalitarian government. Christians who have tattoos argue that, if salvation comes from grace, i.e., the free gift of Christ's getting nailed to a cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, then many works of Jewish law do not apply, like eating Jimmy Dean Pork Sausage or having a few saints and Harley logos indelibly impregnated in your skin. Liberal Jewish commentators don't buy the part about Jesus but don't see the need for sackcloth and ashes if someone sports a tattoo, while the very orthodox, who have no use for tattoos at all, will let a tattooed person at least get buried in consecrated ground, presuming, of course, that he's dead. Almost everyone has problems with the "cutting" part of Leviticus, which they agree is the modern equivalent of body piercing. Liberals are twitchy because secular psychology suggests a connection between self-loathing and mutilation. Personally, I've never seen a pierced nipple I didn't like, and a spike through the tongue brings back nostalgic memories of cleft pallet jokes told in elementary school. Those, however, are not reasons to bring the lady home to Mom. My scruples are mostly aesthetic, and that's why I recommend, if you ever think about having a lover's name or the myth of Quetzalcoatl emblazoned anywhere on your body, remember what a moving man said to me while bobbling a box marked "Fragile" in arms sleeved in fading rainbows of color: "I hope you don't judge a book by it's cover." ...I am sure there are tattooed CEOs of international corporations. Their tattoos just don't show above the collars of their shirts. Put that moving man in a suit, keep him standing on one side, and he could have passed. For all I know, he had more integrity. What bothers me is how many tattooed people I've run across lately and how comparatively few seem to have considered that some...this is a hard word for me to say...that some "artists" are better than others. Tattoo aesthetics appear to be a matter of dumb luck, like picking any old inmate with a bottle of India ink and hoping the sewing needle didn't last prick "Born To Die" on a con with hepatitis. An attractive, pious young lady of my acquaintance recently moved to the Midwest to do good works. Not long afterwards she emailed friends to half-apologize, half-brag about having a butterfly inked to her ankle. ... To my mind it was television’s Miami Ink, not scripture or upbringing, that inspired the butterfly, but I mostly wondered about the phrase, "little one." If you belong to the 18th Street Gang, is just a little tack to commemorate your first drive-by better than a big one? Then I had a fit of charity as I remembered a sweet young thing I recently saw in Target, a wonderful chain store in which I always feel vindicated as a cultural commentator and arbitrator of taste. ... But my God, she was blessed in other ways! She was sashaying about in a very short pleated skirt, and unlike most shoppers, was built for it. You hardly noticed the sunburst coming up from the low-slung waistband, but when you did, it was like, "Morning has broken like the first morning." Before blackbird could speak like the first day, there came another shopper's stage whisper: ...My mind came back to earth and down to the ankle butterfly, which was meant to commemorate the metamorphous of a new life. What it will commemorate all too soon is that everything new gets old. Skin wrinkles; colors fade; an in-your-face motto looses its rebellious punch by age 40. I once helped escort some loonies to a concert celebrating sobriety in a park across from the VA Hospital in West LA. Sitting on the grass near us were two middle-aged women who were French kissing. ... What I'm sure is that they were wearing tank tops that showed lots of sagging cleavage and large swaths of color across chests and backs. One look to be tinted in snot-green, and the other was hued in battered-wife blue. ...Last year or so he had the company logo tattooed across a shoulder because the older tattoo didn't stand out enough to his liking. Now he has two sort of purpley-reddish blotches, and I for one can't read what either says. That goes triple for anything inked to dark skin. I've watched Lakers and Clippers whose tattoos look like massive bruises and make you wonder what unspeakable things go on in the locker rooms. ...Freeman, but his movie persona always struck me as a fatherly figure who spoke deeply and of deep wisdom, who knew trouble, had overcome it and could get you out of it. ... Maybe just a middle-aged man desperate to be young again and letting adolescent groupies decide how that is supposed to look. ...Understand that I don't equate earrings for men with body piercing (unless there are more than three per ear), but they are like shoulder pads for women. Looking like a football linebacker wasn't feminine in the Forties, and hey, it didn't get any better in the Eighties. The currency of grown men wanting pretty ears like Latina girls taking first communion is merely an indication of how we all in our degrees are slaves to fashion. We look into mirrors and hardly perceive what's reflected back. Some of us are crazy with self-esteem and can't see that the barn needs painting. Most are crazy like adolescents, anorexics and body builders. ... We don't want to look like our parents or the folks down the street. We want to glitter like celebrities made up for the screen and air brushed for the pages of magazines. ...And so we wear clothing better suited for other body types, maybe something in camouflage so that we can pretend to be like Marines, a spike or two to prove we're just as tough, and if we can afford it, we'll get a plastic surgeon to cut away any signs of age, individuality and wisdom. ... A stroll down Rodeo Drive shows a range of skills just as vast in the tattoo parlors of Venice Beach.

Moslems Are Just Like Everybody Else...Most Of The Time

jeff@jeffandrus.com — 2006-09-11T04:09:32-07:00

Most Moslems are like secular Christians and cultural Jews: they are not familiar with their scriptures; they are ignorant of dogma; they are mostly influenced by media and the people around them. In America it is TV, not the mosque, that infects the lives of young Moslems. Islamic volunteers for military service number about ten thousand and stand for the United States against all her enemies. There is nothing to worry about from the wannabe rocker or brave solider. A whack job soldier is another matter. As are sociopaths in jails, to whom Islam gives legitimacy. America, unfortunately, is a country that lets a lot of psychos (regardless of race, creed or national origin) back into our neighborhoods. Our State Department keeps giving visas to radical mullahs who preach hatred from Dearborn to Dallas. In Washington, DC the Council on American-Islamic Relations makes polite talk out of foreign terrorist diatribes. Yes, they say, the World Trade Center shouldn't have been attacked, but then, U.S. favoritism to Israel is really at the bottom of all the world's wrongs. The American Civil Liberties Union treats it all like free speech. The press lavishes publicity and lobs softball quetions. Dan Rather's bizarre broadcast from pre-war Iraq might well have been called The CBS Evening Stooge With Saddam Hussein. And things haven't changed. The major networks remain what Stalin called "useful idiots," those in the West who just didn't want to know about the communisms reign of terror or were covering up. I hope there is something going on in secret because government at all levels appears most reluctant to probe the depth of freelance jihadism. That's when an individual who has been to the Middle East or has an Arabic last name happens to run over folks on the sidewalk outside a Jewish center, and if there's time, take out other infidels in the next block. Within minutes of this happening in San Francisco the Mayor became a psychiatrist and declared the perp mentally ill. The real fear of politicians, bureaucrats and opinion-makers seems to be that ordinary Americans will become intolerant if faced with facts. Or worse. They'll become patriotic. As any of our bettors on university campuses will tell you: nationalism is the problem. Or is it the environment that's the problem? I'm sure Jerry Falwell is in there someplace. Regardless, think globally, think peace otherwise the ozone will come falling down. Overseas where the Arab Street snakes from Marseilles to Mecca and on to Manilla, there's a bearded imam at one end shouting the odds. At the other end lots of oil money flows. In between the average guy is a billion or so strong. Typically, he wants to read his smuggled Playboy, not the Koran, but he's got a head full of crazy ideas put there at his mother's breast and in his schools. They boil down to: Jews are subhuman; the Bible lies about the Israelites ever governing the Holy Land; there will be 72 Centerfolds waiting for him in heaven. Well, waiting for a martyr anyway. And maybe not Centerfolds but virgins who should look pretty good if they're in heaven. Jews, therefore, have to be exterminated. Americans probably should be killed too, but they might come right under a caliph. Ditto for the Europeans. Maybe for everyone else who doesn't yet agree. After all, we invented the zero. In spite of a mentality that weirdly combines Nazism and repressed sexuality with centuries-old grudges and arrogance about the accomplishments of others, most Moslems just want to conform to their neighbors' expectations--put their butts up five times a day for prayer, maybe riot after a particularly good sermon--but they don't want to become suicide bombers or get killed in a war. That leaves a couple of hundred thousand who do and upwards to a couple of million more who would cheer them on. It makes no difference anymore how or why we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we don't set our face to win those wars, take a long look at the junior high kids around you. When they grow older, it will be their blood flowing in our streets, with no guarantee they can finish the job.