Item 1 (of 2): Death by Disease, Death by Choice. Two prominent Americans died yesterday. Sandra Dee (that's Sondra, not Saandra as some blonde twit of a newsreader on CNN pronounced it), an actress who played iconic wholesome teen girls Gidget and Tammy, and married Bobby Darin, died yesterday of kidney disease after four years on dialysis. I wonder why she didn't get a transplant. She was 62.
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Hunter Thompson, a self-obsessed political writer, shot himself dead the same day. He was 67. It's too bad that unhappy loser couldn't give his extra five years to Sandra Dee, who would probably have appreciated them a lot more than he did.
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The AP story on the drug-soaked, alcoholic Thompson says:

The writer's compound in Woody Creek [Colorado], not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons [perhaps he took his name, "Hunter", too literally]; in 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property. * * * He later became a proud member of the National Rifle Association and almost was elected sheriff in Aspen in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner.

The NRA claims another victim. It insists you have the right to have a firearm at hand when you fall into a bad state of mind, so you can choose a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and blast your brains out. If you happen to shoot other people by accident from time to time, well, that's tuf.
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Society must reject such disordered thinking. "Freak Power"? That is indeed what the NRA has.
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Sandra Dee was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is about 11 miles from me, and married Bobby Darin in Elizabeth, about 9 miles from me. Like too many New Jerseyans, she had to leave New Jersey to reach the top of her profession (she was the fifth biggest box-office draw at her peak). Perhaps her career would have gone better if after the California studios dumped her she had returned East to do Broadway theater and independent films. But maybe she didn't like the snow. (I actually hope there's some snow left on the ground tomorrow, because I'm planning to take pictures of Christo's "The Gates" in Central Park, and the saffron fabric against snow would be more dramatic than against gray tree branches alone.)
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Snow apparently didn't bother Hunter Thompson. One television obituary showed him walking thru the snow in his bathrobe and pajamas. He was always trying to get attention. Now he has apparently killed himself, but left no suicide note. I suppose he wants us to spend time wondering why he did it. I have better things to do.
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Item 2: Lebanese Ingratitude, Lebanese Democracy. In the past few days there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon on both sides of the question of whether Syria should withdraw its army from that troubled country, a country that plunged into civil war despite having been a democracy. Democracy, you see, is not a cure-all. We are soon to see if democracy can do more for Iraq than it did for Lebanon.
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Americans are told endlessly that Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. The CIA World Factbook, however, says plainly:

Since the end of the [civil] war [in 1991], the Lebanese have conducted several successful elections.

So Lebanon, right nextdoor to Israel, has long been a democracy. (For this discussion, we will ignore the fact that Israel maintains an antidemocratic military occupation over millions of Palestinians and discriminates against those Palestinians it is forced by the world to grant Israeli citizenship to (and who are magically transformed into "Israeli Arabs", not "Palestinians"), so doesn't really qualify as a democracy.)
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How is it that American media continue to toast that old Israel's-the-only-democracy chestnut right in front of Lebanon? It's not as tho Lebanon is impossible to see. It's small, yes (almost exactly half the size of Israel), but not tucked away in some remote mountain valley in the Himalayas. It's only a few dozen miles from the center of U.S. media attention in the Middle East. So the assertion we hear all the time about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East wasn't a simple, honest error born of ignorance. It was a lie.
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The recent history of the tiny, multireligious nation Lebanon, which most Americans came to have fond feelings for thru identification with Danny Thomas, has been filled with violence caused in no small measure by the establishment of a Zionist state right nextdoor, a state that has repeatedly attacked, invaded, and occupied that sad country, exacerbated interreligious frictions, and co-conspired in mass murders at the Sabra and Shattila refugee camps. While Israel was doing everything in its power to weaken Lebanon, kill Lebanese, and set different Lebanese factions at each other's throat, Syria stepped in to stop the violence and restore civil society. It worked, but Lebanon regained internal peace only because of Syria.
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Now the Lebanese want to pretend that Syria is a foreign occupier, even tho historically Lebanon has for centuries been considered a region of Syria. Would a Syrian withdrawal leave Lebanon intact and peaceful? We can hope so. But hope is feeble. It is no match for armed militias and impassioned mobs. If Lebanon explodes in intercommunal slaughter again, who will restore peace?
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In what may be his most cynical display of chutzpah yet, Dubya dared suggest in Europe today that Syria should end its occupation of Lebanon. Huh? Syria, a "brother Arab nation", should withdraw from Lebanon, where it ended a war, says the President of a country that occupies Iraq, where it started a war! Is it any wonder that almost everyone on Earth holds George Bush in profound contempt?
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(The most recent U.S. military death toll in Iraq (for Zionism), as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,482.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM