1. The majority of the people who trumpeted the "children's prison" story will not feel bad about circulating what turned out to be misinformation, on the grounds that Saddam's regime did a lot of other bad things and, besides, it says here that conditions at the orphanage were pretty lousy anyway.
2. Despite that, almost none of them will cease to bash us folks on the other side of the war debate when we cite stories that are believable when they first appear but then turn out to be untrue. That's the way these things work. Everyone makes mistakes; everyone focuses all their attention on the other crowd's mistakes; everyone gets all self-righteous and declares that they'll never believe anything they hear from The New York Times/the BBC/The Wall Street Journal editorial page/InstaPundit/whatever again; no one makes the same declarations about the erring organs on their own side.
I actually believed the children's prison story myself, and I'm a card-carrying dove. So what does that make me? Open-minded, or just a more catholic sap?
CHAN IS MISSING: The Fox Movie Channel says that it "will discontinue the broadcast of the Charlie Chan mystery films. Originally restored to meet the requests of mystery fans and film preservation buffs, Fox Movie Channel scheduled these films in a showcase intended to illustrate the positive aspects of these movies such as the complex story lines/ characters and Charlie Chan's great intellect....However, Fox Movie Channel has been made aware that the Charlie Chan films may contain situations or depictions that are sensitive to some viewers. Fox Movie Channel realizes that these historic films were produced at a time where racial sensitivities were not as they are today."
By contrast, my favorite cable channel, Turner Classic Movies, broadcasts these films frequently and without excisions. One of them actually had Charlie Chan onscreen with Steppin Fetchit, which I suppose is the racist's equivalent to teaming up Superman with Batman, Dracula with Frankenstein, or Domingo with Pavarotti.
Was it offensive? Yes, but it's also part of our history, and I'm glad it's available to those of us who happen to be interested in the past. Besides, one or two of those movies are actually pretty good, if you can get past the racial stereotyping. I recommend Charlie Chan on Broadway, a surprisingly well-crafted piece of pulp. Don't worry: It isn't the one with Steppin Fetchit.
"I guess your opinion is all that really matters. So, go ahead, celebrate. You are finally able to put it where you have always wanted it and no one can say anything to make you feel guilty about being a freak of nature. I'm happy for you and your kind. May every evil of your preference be granted you, with my blessings."
I thanked him for telling me that my sexual preference is evil and informed him I would change my ways immediately: From now on, it's nothing but gay buggery for me. The Christian Right has made another convert!
Recent articles in the NY Times, the Wall St. Journal, and elsewhere have noticed the apparently sudden resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the national beer marketplace. The articles all credit PBR's comeback to an apparently instantaneous spike in the product's young-adult hipness factor, or to a stealth-marketing campaign to create such a hipness factor. None of the articles tells the real story:
In the '80s, both Pabst and Stroh bought up dozens of second-tier mass market beers across the country. They included Heilman's, Lone Star, Iron City, Hamm's, Schmidt, former national powerhouse Schlitz, and all of the Northwest's onetime Big Five (Olympia, Rainier, Heidelberg, Lucky Lager, and Blitz-Weinhard). Pabst bought Stroh in 1998 and decided to retire or de-emphasize all these legendary names. The plan was to use the strong distribution networks of these local beers to relaunch Pabst Blue Ribbon as a national major. Bars and taverns were given deep discounts and promotional incentives to switch from Pabst-acquired local brands and make PBR their principal swill on tap.
With the former Olympia brewery, the last of the Big Five, having closed last week, it's clear at least around here that PBR's comeback has little to do with street cred and nothing to do with the movie Blue Velvet. It has everything to do with the familiar themes of corporate consolidation and the homogenization of regional cultural landmarks.
Clark is being a bit myopic here: The boom in microbrews is an important countertrend, and while Iron City may be symbolically important to Pittsburgh and Lone Star to Texas, the fact remains that both beers taste like donkey piss. Still, if Humphrey's tale is true, it's amazing that none of the mainstream reporters covering the story picked up on it.
ISLE OF THE ROSES: One last note on Rimini, from the Footnotes to History website: "In the early 1960s, engineering professor Giorgio Rosa constructed a platform eight miles offshore from the Italian city of Rimini. After a storm swamped the platform, another was erected in 1965. The 4,000 square foot platform boasted several businesses. The Italian authorities took little notice of the platform, since it was in international waters at the time, until May 1, 1968, when Rosa declared the platform an independent nation. Two months later, the platform was illegally occupied by the Italian Navy, who then illegally removed Rosa and proceeded to illegally destroy the entire country with dynamite. The Isle of the Roses is therefore, along with Carthage and New Atlantis, one of the few nations to be utterly removed from the face of the earth by military action."
Rosas then returned to the mainland where, according to Erwin Strauss' invaluable How to Start Your Own Country (Loompanics, 1979), he took to darkly declaring, "This country is all Mafia."
Also: my recent review of All the Rave has apparently been reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, the Pittsburgh weekly Pulp, and a paper in Virginia Beach. And possibly other places, too; please let me know if you spot it someplace new.
The Tempio Malatesta had been built, in fact, to honor the last and best loved of Sigismundo's mistresses, Ixotta degli Atti, whom he had finally married. It had not one Christian icon in it, but contained a monument proclaiming Divae Ixottae sacrum -- sacred to the Divine Ixotta. When Ixotta died, Sigismundo Malatesta entombed her there, under a plaque saying "Ixotta of Rimini, in beauty and virtue the glory of Italy." The rest of the temple was dedicated entirely to the gods of ancient Rome.
If you can imagine a Barbary ape with pepper up his nose, Uncle Pietro said, you can imagine how Pope Pius II, the reigning pontiff, jumped and howled and screamed when he found out about this heathen temple....
"[Malatesta] supervised every tiny detail, even writing long letters to the artists when he was away serving as mercenary general to other princes, when he wanted to raise more money to make the tempio even more outrageously stupendous," Uncle Pietro said. "All the tracery, you will notice, consist of variations on the intertwining of his initials with hers -- S and I."
Sigismundo loves Ixotta: it resonated from every lovely statue and erotic painting to every soaring arch and illuminated column.
Wilson is taking some artistic license here. Everything he writes above could be true, was widely believed to be true in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but is not necessarily regarded as true by most historians today. The entwined S and I, for example -- it looks like a dollar sign, and to some eyes might suggest a church built by a mad Objectivist -- does not likely refer to Sigismundo's love for Ixotta, if only because her name was usually spelled Ysotta or Yxotta while she was alive. Wilson has picked the historical interpretation that worked best for his novel, a perfectly legitimate thing to do -- but misleading if you're given to taking things literally. Lord knows (and maybe Ixotta does too) that the people who come to the temple to worship today do so in the name of Jesus, not some long-forgotten mistress to a Renaissance warlord.
Rimini is also a short bus ride from San Marino, a city-state bounded on all sides by the Republic of Italy. Long ago, it had to fend off Malatesta's armies; today it remains independent while Rimini is a demilitarized beach town.
For the most part, San Marino is an ordinary city surrounded by ordinary sprawl, notable mostly for an overabundance of car dealerships, but at the center of the statelet is a trio of stone towers, surrounded by shops, museums, mediocre restaurants, and modern-but-medieval government buildings. There's a Grand Fenwick quality to the place that I like, reinforced by the admirably low-key plaques in the museums. A set of archeological finds are described as "more or less important." Artifacts from a monastery are "not very high quality objects." And then there's this charming sentence: "No one knows what the original building actually looked like, but it must have been somewhat different to this." Someone in San Marino is either very honest or very bitter.
I had read that communists as well as anarchists were involved in the social center movement, but I had assumed that these were eccentric communists -- "autonomists," say, or maybe some Rosa Luxembourg types -- not Stalinoids. Nope. There's even a picture of Lenin inside, in place of the Gaudi-like art that apparently decorates other social centers around Italy. ("Betrayer of the revolution," Leslie mutters when she sees old Vlad's portrait on the wall.) This particular project was once more philosophically diverse, I'm told, but the communists eventually kicked the anarchists out. One consequence is the Castroites gathered outside. Another is that the squat is now self-managing in name only.
I could see why anarchists would want to build D.I.Y. alternatives to the welfare state. But why communists? Seems there's a tradition in this country of civic virtue among the Reds. Antella contains a casa del popolo, a community center sponsored by the group previously known as the Communist Party. The party's name and politics are now more social-democratic, but the casa is still there. Young people see concerts and movies there; old folks come to play cards.
We were going to get a tour as well of Controradio, a formerly (and maybe still?) unlicensed radio station that I'd written about in my book Rebels on the Air. But this fell through: I walked by the station, took a couple pictures of the front door, but never got to go inside.
I don't mind that. Back at the villa, the electricity flickers off and on. People light candles, pour wine, pass around tomatoes and bread and Pringles. ("Even revolutionaries like Pringles.") The rain slows and we climb into the car; and then, with water and mud, we slide down the road to Florence.