Lee Heidhues – August 31, 2021

Chronicle Letter to the Editor 

Subject:  Censorship of The Great Walkway Advocates on Opinion page

The blatant censorship displayed on The Chronicle editorial page towards advocates of The Great Walkway is appalling and a total disregard of journalistic norm.

Thousands of people have demonstrated their advocacy for The Great Walkway to be designated a permanent site for the sole use of pedestrians, runners and cyclists of all ages.  This advocacy is well documented in the public  record.  An undeniable fact of which The Chronicle is well aware having published several pieces since The Great Walkway was opened in April 2020.

Since The Great Walkway has once again become a polluting auto thoroughfare The Chronicle has been loath to publish any letters submitted by advocates of The Great Walkway.

The Chronicle, which seeks to pride itself on representing diverse viewpoints, is contradicting its own values by continuing to give a free ride to the motorists who blithely continue to destroy  the environment in this time of Climate Change and unending wildfires setting California ablaze.

There has been so much reporting as the US exited Afghanistan and ended its so called War on Terror after 20 years. It’s been a slog trying to find a piece of reporting which sums up the disaster which America allowed itself to be sucked into. The following sums it up succinctly.

Excerpted from The Daily Beast 8.30.2021 –

Adrian Bonenberger

The last American plane left Afghanistan on Monday after more than a decade of lazy showrunners letting self-proclaimed experts go on about how the Afghan government was making progress and the nation’s security forces were building capacity and securing the country.

If the truth had been widely known—that after 20 years, the country we called Afghanistan was totally and essentially dependent on the U.S. military, and could not survive a single month without it—it would have prompted deep soul-searching and some reasonable calls for accountability.

The collapse of Afghanistan demonstrated that the country I imagined when I was deployed here was also a lie, just another storyline. It has been extraordinary to watch how in the intervening weeks, rather than facing up to the delusion that we entertained for 20 years, nearly everyone with a hand in this mess has done everything they could to shift the blame elsewhere.

Now, it turns out, that what we called Afghanistan was always a fiction—a proxy of the United States, dependent on our military and doomed to failure without it.

And because the show is a ratings hit again, however briefly and terribly, the war is ending with those same “experts” jamming the airwaves with malarky since they’re the only people the TV news bookers and assigning editors know to call. Fulminating against how the withdrawal has been carried out, they slake their anger and hide their embarrassment at having been so wrong for so long with brazen half-truths and outright falsehoods.

Every Picture Tells a Story – Masks Required edition

Liz and Lee Heidhues 8.26.2021  

This is your Blogger at the de Young Museum before viewing the Judy Chicago exhibit on Members Only Day. Standing with a daughter and her boyfriend. I had just pulled down my Mask to give the full frontal view to the photographer.

In the next shot I struggle to pull my Mask over my chin as the daughter rolls her eyes and the boyfriend rivets himself to the unfolding drama on the left. A museum Minder, who had been setting up for a presentation, screeches her trolley cart to a halt and rushes over. She busts me with a stern admonishment. 

I don my Mask quickly. With the mask now fully in place, the witnesses to my transgression put on their faces the Alfred E. Neuman expression: “What, me worry?”

The de Young Minder had targeted me in her cross-hairs and rung me up for being un-Masked 10 seconds in the indoor venue.

Top artwork – Judy Chicago – Wolves in the cross-hairs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Chicago

Masks and Vaccines continue to be controversial no matter where and in which venue. Even cartoonist Gary Trudeau finds the Controversy worthy of Lampoon.

Doonesbury 8.29.2021

The refusal of people to comply with government mandates to mitigate the spread of the Covid-19 is a world wide case of People Behaving Badly.

Such absurd and dangerous personal behavior is not limited to the luddites in America who continue to oppose the common sense advice of health officials and government agencies.

The resistance to good health practices is widespread in Europe as the rallies in defiance of Court orders in Berlin clearly prove.

Deutsche Welle 8.28.2021

Marchers rallied through the streets of Berlin, with thousands of police officers on standby in case of violence. A court had allowed only one rally to go ahead.

A total of 4,200 police officers were on standby, including officers from Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Saxony who were deployed to the city to support their Berlin colleagues.

Last year, around 10,000 protesters against coronavirus restrictions took to the streets on August 29. The marches, which included far-right elements, tried to break into the Reichstag building that houses the German parliament after overpowering guards at its entrance.

This year, the authorities were taking no chances, keeping the Querdenker and anti-vaxxer groups well away from the government area of Mitte.

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Berlin on Saturday to protest the German government’s coronavirus policies. 

Riot police walked alongside protesters, most of whom were unmasked, as helicopters watched from the air.

Large but scattered crowds of protesters across Berlin waved German flags and anti-lockdown slogans of the Querdenker group — a movement which includes coronavirus skeptics, far-right activists and anti-vaxxers. Berlin authorities banned nine planned demonstrations, including a rally by the Querdenker group.

However, one of the demonstrations successfully challenged the police ban in court and gained permission for a gathering of an expected 500 people on Saturday and Sunday.

“Experience has shown that a large number of people do come to the city and do not follow the ban,” said a police spokesperson before the demonstrations.

“The police will enforce the assembly bans, be present accordingly and protect the government quarter in particular,” the spokesperson added.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-thousands-march-in-berlin-against-covid-rules/a-59012238

Lee Heidhues 8.27.2021

Granting parole to Robert Kennedy’s assassin would be a tough pill to swallow.

Robert Kennedy’s murderer has spent most of his adult life incarcerated. He’s been imprisoned 53 years.

I was 21 and completely devastated when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968.

At a deep psychological level I never recovered from the shock and trauma of his murder. I had campaigned actively on Robert Kennedy’s behalf as a college student throughout Spring 1968 and knew he would be elected President in November 1968. My life’s path headed in a totally different direction in the aftermath of his assassination.

Robert Kennedy’s murder influenced my political perspective and personal life in ways I did not forsee or realize at the time.

Robert Kennedy lay dying – June 5, 1968

Excerpted from The New York Times 8.27.2021

California parole commissioners recommended on Friday that Sirhan B. Sirhan should be freed on parole after spending more than 50 years in prison for assassinating Robert F. Kennedy during his campaign for president.

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Kennedy gave a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles following his victory in the Democratic primary in California. As Kennedy, a senator from New York, walked through the hotel’s pantry, Mr. Sirhan shot him with a revolver. Five other people around Kennedy were shot as well, but they all survived.

Kennedy died the next day, less than five years after President John F. Kennedy, one of his brothers, had been assassinated.

The recommendation from the two commissioners does not necessarily mean Mr. Sirhan, 77, will walk free, but it most likely puts his fate in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat facing a recall election that will determine his political future. A spokeswoman for Mr. Newsom declined to say whether he would approve the recommendation, only that he would consider the case after it is reviewed by the parole board’s lawyers.

The parole hearing was the 16th time Mr. Sirhan had faced parole board commissioners, but it was the first time no prosecutor showed up to argue for his continued imprisonment. George Gascón, the progressive and divisive Los Angeles County district attorney who was elected last year, has made it a policy for prosecutors not to attend parole hearings, saying the parole board has all the facts it needs to make an informed decision.

At the hearing, which was conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Sirhan said he had little memory of the assassination itself, but he said he “must have” brought the gun to the scene.

“I take responsibility for taking it in and I take responsibility for firing the shots,” he said. Mr. Sirhan, much of his short hair turned white, was seated in front of a computer and was wearing a blue uniform with a paper towel in his chest pocket.

Mr. Sirhan, who is Palestinian and was born in Jerusalem, said in a television interview from prison in 1989 that he had killed Kennedy because he felt betrayed by the senator’s proposal during the campaign to send 50 military planes to Israel.

Top photo – Robert Kennedy speaks to cheering crowd after winning California primary June 4, 1968 at Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was asssassinated a few minutes later.

Here is today’s example of People Behaving Badly – Missoula Montana edition.

Either these so called adults don’t read the news or are totally oblivious to the Pandemic, now nearly two years running, which continues to leave its imprint on planet Earth.

Sadly, it’s the children who will ultimately suffer for the parents selfishness and stupidity.

Excerpted from The Missoulian 8.26.2021

https://missoulian.com/news/local/parents-sue-3-missoula-public-school-districts-over-mask-mandates/article_ca6295b8-577e-5072-9f80-0b8d5c57a993.html#tncms-source=login

Some famous people spend their entire lives under the radar even though their work has impacted a large segment of society.  Such is the case of  Ursula K. Le Guin, the acclaimed author who died nearly four years ago.  Now she is getting some late recognition. It is coming from the United States Postal Service which undoubtedly transported much of her work through the mail to libraries, universities, book stores and individual readers.

Peoples World 8.19.2021

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has honored the cross-genre writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author, with the 33rd stamp in its literary series. The stamp was released on July 27 in Portland, Ore., the author’s longtime home, where she died on Jan. 22, 2018. The stamp is a “Forever” issue selling for $.95, designed for use on 3-ounce mail. It will retain its value even if USPS rates for this weight increase.

A political nonconformist, she probably would most accurately be described as an anarchist. Author Michael Chabon referred to her as the “greatest American writer of her generation.”

In 2009, she resigned from the Authors Guild after it endorsed Google’s book digitization project, claiming that the Guild had abandoned “the whole concept of copyright” and had given it up “to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.” Speaking in 2014 at the National Book Awards, she criticized Amazon’s oligarchic control over the publishing industry. Le Guin was a longtime member and advocate for the National Writers Union.

Le Guin authored a long catalog of award-winning speculative fiction works, including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Earthsea Cycle. The stamp features an illustration of Le Guin based on a 2006 portrait. The background of the stamp is a scene from Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969. It was designed by Donato Giancola.

In conjunction with the new stamp release, USPS Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Joseph Corbett was quoted saying, “Ursula once said she wanted to see science fiction step over the old walls of convention and hit right into the next wall—and start to break it down, too. She felt the ideas represented in her fiction could help people become more aware of other ways to do things, other ways to be and to help people wake up.”

Le Guin’s writings have been translated into numerous languages throughout the world, and in 1997 she herself published a translation of the Tao Te Ching, motivated by her sympathy for Taoist thought.

Ursula Kroeber was born on Oct. 21, 1929, in Berkeley, Calif., to author Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979) and UC Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960). In 1961 Theodora Kroeber published the highly influential book Ishi in Two Worlds, an account of Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi people of Northern California after the rest of its members had been killed by white colonizers. Alfred Kroeber had befriended and studied Ishi between 1911 and 1916 when Ishi died.

Le Guin was educated at Radcliffe College, and later received a master’s degree from Columbia University. She began exploring the potential of science fiction and fantasy through writing in the early 1960s, publishing her seminal first novel, Rocannon’s World, in 1966.

Her literary career extended over a span of nearly 60 years and included over 20 novels and over 100 short stories, as well as poetry, criticism, translations, and children’s books. Thematically, she explored gender identity, androgyny, sexuality, feminism, race, coming of age, and alternative political structures, such as in the 1974 utopian novel The Dispossessed.

A writer of high principles, in 1977 Le Guin refused a Nebula Award for the story “The Diary of the Rose” to protest the Science Fiction Writers of America’s revocation of the Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s honorary membership. She attributed the revocation to Lem’s criticism of American science fiction and willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc, saying she felt reluctant to receive an award “for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance.” The organization tried to explain that his honorary membership had been revoked only after he had begun to be published in the United States and was thereby eligible for paid membership.

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/new-u-s-stamp-honors-principled-sci-fi-and-fantasy-writer-ursula-le-guin/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin

40 Years is a long time for someone whose involvement was being at the scene of a Murder.

Ex-cop Dan White received a 5 year sentence for MURDERING IN COLD BLOOD San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978.

Excerpted from New York Times 8.23.2021

David Gilbert, who was serving a 75-year sentence for felony murder in the notorious Rockland County crime, will now be eligible for parole.

In the waning hours of his final day in office, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo commuted the prison sentence of one of the members of the gang behind the infamous robbery of a Brink’s armored car in 1981 that left two police officers and a guard dead, a politically motivated ambush that continues to reverberate 40 years later.

David Gilbert is serving a 75-years-to-life sentence for his role in the crime as a member of the Weather Underground, which stole $1.6 million in cash from the armored car outside the Nanuet Mall near Nyack, N.Y.

The decision does not mean he will automatically be released from prison. Mr. Gilbert will be granted a parole hearing in the weeks to come, according to Monday’s announcement.

Mr. Gilbert is the second member of the group to seek relief from Mr. Cuomo. In 2016, the governor commuted the 75-year sentence of Judith Clark, praising her “exceptional strides in self-development” as an inmate. Mr. Cuomo’s actions also granted her a parole hearing, and she was eventually released.

Mr. Cuomo cited Mr. Gilbert’s work in AIDS education and prevention while in prison, and as a teacher and law library clerk.

“He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer,” Mr. Cuomo wrote on Twitter on Monday evening.

Mr. Gilbert’s upcoming parole hearing follows a campaign for his release that included his son, Chesa Boudin, who was an infant when his mother, Kathy Boudin, and Mr. Gilbert were convicted in the attack, and who in 2019 was elected the district attorney of San Francisco. Ms. Boudin was released in 2003 after receiving a 20-year sentence as part of a plea deal, and went on to become a professor at Columbia University.

“I am overcome with emotion,” Mr. Boudin said in a statement on Monday night. “My heart is bursting, and it also aches for the families of the three victims. Although he never used a gun or intended for anyone to get hurt, my father’s crime caused unspeakable harm and devastated the lives of many separate families. I will continue to keep those families in my heart; I know they can never get their loved ones back.”

Killed in the robbery were Sgt. Edward O’Grady, Officer Waverly Brown and Peter Paige, a Brink’s guard. The commutation of Mr. Gilbert’s sentence, like Ms. Clark’s before him, outraged the law enforcement community in Rockland County.

“It’s absurd,” Arthur Keenan Jr., a retired detective with the Nyack Police Department, who was wounded in the shootout, said on Monday. He said Mr. Cuomo “is stabbing all of law enforcement in the back, and when I say all, I’m talking about federal, state, local — all across the whole country — because he’s a traitor.”

San Francisco has lost an original. I used to see Jack Hirschman frequently at Cafe Trieste where I spent time sipping a cappuccino while reading a book or writing in my journal. Jack  an integral piece of the North Beach ambience, was known by every local. His passing is a sad day for San Francisco. His memory will live on.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 8.22.2021

Jack Hirschman, a scholar and translator in nine languages who threw over a career as a college professor for the life of a proletarian North Beach poet, died Sunday at his home on Union Street in San Francisco.

A former San Francisco poet laureate, Hirschman enjoyed a publishing career that lasted more than 50 years and more than 100 volumes, though half of them were translations.

“The most important thing as a poet is that I worked for the Communist movement for 45 years, and the new class of impoverished and homeless people,” he said in a 2018 interview to inform this obituary, while laying on his double bed on the fourth floor of a walk-up, overlooking Columbus Avenue.

With his push-broom mustache, weathered face, wild hair and outlandish hat, Hirschman was what you looked for in a bohemian, and he lived the part in a single room in the old hotel above Caffe Trieste. Even after marriage upgraded him to a cottage behind an apartment house, Hirschman still came to write every day in his room.

Hirschman was 87 and had given a reading at Foreign Cinema on Wednesday before coming down with a cold, his wife, Agneta Falk, a poet and calligrapher, said Sunday. Cause of death is undetermined.

“It is devastating to the local community because Jack was a friend to everybody, ” said Beat Museum founder Jerry Cimino on Sunday. “Jack was too young to be considered a Beat but he knew them all, and his reach and influence went far beyond San Francisco and California. He was always approachable, and a word of recommendation from Jack could launch a poet’s career.”

Much of his work was put out by small publishers, often as small as Hirschman’s room, outfitted with a copy machine and stapler, and a print run of 150 copies. “One of my presses,” he said, “is this room you are sitting in.”

If he was not in that room, Hirschman was usually around the corner in Caffe Trieste, his face hidden beneath a floppy hat and behind a double espresso. It was here that he wrote his first San Francisco poem, in the early 1970s, not long after he’d been fired from the faculty of UCLA for antiwar activism.

He wrote a poem in Russian, then translated it to English, as follows. “You are not a slave/And I am not a machine/And this ain’t no opium den, comrade.”

On the success of that, he wrote a poem a day in Russian for 12 years, in addition to two poems in English as his daily output. The poems piled up. His best known work, “The Arcades,” was published in two volumes of 1,000 pages each. At the time of his death he was 450 pages into Volume 3.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Jack-Hirschman-Marxist-poet-and-North-Beach-16404434.php

The Defeated is a gripping  and disturbing drama. At times it is difficult to watch as the storyline is violent, enthralling and absorbing. The acting performances and cinematic recreation (actually filmed in Prague) of postwar World War II Berlin in 1946 are excellent.

At certain moments it makes me think of the classic 1992 film by Lars van Trier, Zentropa.

Excerpted from Ready Steady Cut 8.18.2021

Nazis are the quintessential villains of all popular culture, and indeed of history.

Anyone after a more lighthearted experience will be better looking elsewhere since The Defeated isn’t interested in giving you an easy ride, but it does provide a relatively unique and welcome slant on the Second World War – and it’s a gripping thriller for as long as it lasts.

What’s unusual about The Defeated, a new eight-part German-Canadian collaboration now streaming on Netflix is that it frames its setting of a bombed-out post-war Berlin within a specifically German perspective, despite its classically handsome American protagonist.

There’s a pulpiness to all this that stands in stark contrast to the pitch-dark themes and a convincing simulacrum of a decimated Berlin that has been brought to life with impressive production design.

It isn’t trying to engender any sympathy for the Nazis, you understand, but to point out, often very effectively, that there was an entire country full of people who were forced to live under their rule and exist in their wake. 

One such person is Elsie (Nina Hoss), a former schoolteacher turned head of a fledgling police force that Brooklyn detective Max McLaughlin (Taylor Kitsch) is sent to whip into shape. It’s the smallest department in the American Occupied Zone, staffed mainly by teenagers and entirely by civilians, but it’s caught in the middle of rivalrous factions that include the Allied occupiers, a serial killer, a crime boss, former Nazis, and those just trying to make do without antagonizing any or all of the above.

Everyone is looting to survive, many are killing for pleasure, and American GIs are raping the local women with enough frequency that a local crime boss, the enigmatic Engelmacher, or “Angel Maker”, is using the promise of backstreet abortions as a recruitment tool.

If this were all Max and Elsie had to worry about it’d be quite enough, but they’re also besieged on all sides by the nebulous motivations of Max’s superior, Tom Franklin (Michael C. Hall), and his flirty, often drunk wife Claire (Tuppence Middleton), and the exploits of Max’s missing GI brother Moritz (Logan Marshall-Green), who went AWOL after being among the American division who discovered the first German death camp at Dachau.

It’s part earnest historical drama and part pulpy mystery; that it does both things really rather well is a bit of a welcome surprise, especially since it manages to do them at the same time. 

https://readysteadycut.com/2021/08/18/the-defeated-review-netflix/

Excerpted from The Prague Reporter 8.21.2021

The Defeated was shot entirely in the Czech Republic, under the title Shadowplay, for about four months from April to September of 2019 at a budget of about 750 million crowns ($35 million).

A largely-abandoned former sugar factory was used to recreate the dusty streets of bombed-out Berlin. Prague’s Invalidovna complex was converted into a Jewish hospital in the German capital, where an action scene takes place.

In addition to production in Prague, The Defeated also filmed scenes in Doksy, Karlovy Vary, Kladno, Lenešice, Mladá Boleslav, Ploskovice, Slapy, and Ústí nad Labem.

https://www.praguereporter.com/home/2021/8/17/prague-shot-post-wwii-drama-the-defeated-premieres-on-netflix