And then there's the one about Saint Peter...

This is a wonderful Saint Peter I photographed in a local gallery in the high Miranda hills to the south of Caracas. The lady who takes care of the exhibits puts different things in the hand that holds they keys to heaven. This time it’s some kind of branch; sometimes it’s a flower or even a feather: a bit of humor for such a serious subject. I think the Saint has the trace of an ironic smile. Or maybe it's a wry grimace.

Republican hypocrisy

Source of Ben Sargent cartoon, from the NY Times


Democratic members of Congress act as though they need the Republicans to tell them it’s ok to act. The Republicans didn’t need that kind of approval when they were in power under Bush’s presidency. It’s time for Democrats to be on TV explaining the health bill to the public and to be in regular contact among themselves doing the same thing.

After that, those congress members who are prepared to deny health care to the nation should renounce their own very complete and comfortable coverage.

Also, all the complaining about how much health care costs is hypocrisy: nobody complained in the Bush years when cash was piled onto ships with bulldozers to be shipped off to Iraq, and nobody demanded accountability for its later use. And the disaster that came from years of unsupervised banking and stock-market practices certainly has not been not cheap to remedy. When Republicans recommend thrift and belt-tightening exercises they really mean they want to continue their highly questionable free-access to limitless resources. I do not want to give the impression that I think previous profligate economic practices justify present ones. Rather, I believe it is important to uncover the lie behind Republican fiscal posturing.

Bipartisanship is not dead; it never existed. The Republican message is based on fear-mongering and outright lies. If the gentlemen and gentle ladies from the other side of the Congress don’t become more aggressive they will be destroying a unique opportunity for inclusive action and history will not be kind to them.

Nominal presidents

am listening now to an interview that Charlie Rose is conducting with the historian Garry Wills.

The interviewee is reviewing the history of executive secrecy that developed in the States after WWII that came out of the invention and use of the atomic bomb. With that secrecy, came huge potential for presidential power. In fact, after armistice in the middle 1940's, Congress never again exercised its constitution right to declare war (or to deny the President’s request to wage one); since then it has always been a personal, presidential decision.

The United States are very close to having a consecutive succession of temporarily elected monarchs. Remember that old TV program “Queen for a day”? Well there are now nominal, four-year kings.

Mr. Wills remembers how Congress didn’t even know that the States was bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. Present-day members of Congress deny knowing about the Bush-era “extraordinary renditions” and the astonishing violation of human rights that happened in Guantanamo.

But the President’s power is, as mentioned, largely nominal, sort of like that Queen Elizabeth II. He is a front-man for a huge and controlling apparatus of hidden decision-makers. The President may come to power with a reform agenda, as in fact Obama did. But once in his four year term he has to face unelected career-men like military and intelligence personnel who are very hard to contradict. Presidents come and go; the generals and agency heads often stay on for the next term.

So election promises fade away and the professionals keep a tight hold on the ship of state. As Mr. Wills commented in his interview, if Obama pulls the soldiers of fortune out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and if he puts limits on agencies like the CIA, they might start to open closets where they keep their skeletons. And since the States depends on them now, what if he needs them later, before he can reassemble a proper citizen army? (And imagine the uproar if he would ask more Americans to die in these undeclared wars for just a soldier’s wages!)Not even the Roman emperors dared to do that.

References:
Ornate letters: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

A praying mantis visits me....

There once was a lady from Mantis
Who used computational tactics
She climbed to the screen
Deep meanings to glean
And to gain additional practice.

St George and the dragon

Fuente of Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon

I just saw a wonderful movie on Film and Arts that was new to me: The Ebony Tower with Laurence Olivier, Roger Ress, Greta Scacchi and Toya Willcox.

Olivier is an aging painter, Breasley. I must admit I sympathized more with his character than I did with Ress’, in which he assumes the personage of a younger artist and art critic called David. The young man visits the old one at his country house somewhere in France. I won’t go into the inevitable romance because the interesting part of the film was the encounter and contrast between Breasley, a figurative artist and the much younger and abstract painter David.

Breasley is totally non-intellectual, and his work seems to flow from the French-Celtic woods he chooses to live in with his two young nymph-muses. The movie representations of his work were in fact interesting. I didn’t recognize them, but they may have really been pieces taken from someone’s work. (It didn’t occur to me to check for that in the final credits.) David cannot understand Breasley; he even prudishly disapproves of his rakish fantasy life.

I had the feeling I should have sided with David, but I couldn’t. I rather understood Breasley’s sarcastic comparison of his house guest with Uccello’s St George where the knight seems to charge courageously at the princess’ over-large house-pet that she holds on a leash. His attempts at “liberating” her become ridiculous. The dragon is, of course, Breasley and the supposedly enslaved princess is Diana, one of the girls who accompanies the old man.

Helen Thomas, again

Helen Thomas, my heroine, has again published an important article: Obama, The War President (Published on Monday, February 8, 2010 by The Albany Times-Union, New York). View this link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/08-10