DEADLINE

Both the House and the Senate have passed funding bills for the war in Iraq. While the bills are slightly different, they both demand an absolute final date for pulling out. The administration is totally pissed.

Their argument – the exact same argument made by Richard Nixon during the Viet Nam war – is that if we announce a deadline for departure the enemy, those clever bastards, will simply sit back, wait till we leave, then pounce on the helpless population. Sounds pretty reasonable, eh?

Here’s where that argument goes south. It doesn’t matter whether or not we announce a pull-out date. It doesn’t matter if we pull out in March of 2008 or September of 2009 . . . WE’RE LEAVING - SOON! We know it, they know it, everyone knows it. What are the chances we can trick them into thinking we’re staying forever by simply not announcing an absolute date of departure? Do you think these guys are stupid? They probably watch Hardball and You Tube.

The deadline isn’t for them, it’s for us. It’s a political tool to try and force an irresponsible, childish president to face reality. Get the job done or don’t, but on this date the war is over.

And by the way, when we do pull out of Iraq, there is about as much chance of terrorists following us home as there was that my desk in grade school could have protected me from a nuclear attack. It’s all part of one, incredibly big lie.

a foot on either side

GANGLAND

L.A.P.D. officer Will Beall’s article in the Current section of the Sunday Times was a bleak account of reality in certain L. A. neighborhoods. His insider view focused on the uncomfortable truce between black and Hispanic gang members, brought about by their co-dependence on the illegal drug trade. He offered no solution, which is bad enough, but he completely ignored the even more chilling conclusions to which his facts point.

Beall says that most of the 39,000 gang members in Los Angeles survive by selling drugs. If that’s true, it means that the L.A.P.D. (and, by extension, the City of Los Angeles) either permits the sale of illegal drugs, or is incapable of stopping it. I suspect it’s a little of both. It also means there are 39,000 law breaking, heavily armed combatants roaming the streets of our city. The smart choice for unarmed, non-affiliated citizens would be to head for the hills, and I do not mean Beverly.

I’d like to offer a solution, if only a partial one. It seems obvious to me – legalize drugs! Before you laugh, I would remind testosterone-challenged lawmakers that, Homeland Security aside, this is still a free country. I doubt that legal drugs would have every gang member in L. A. hitting himself in the head like a V-8 commercial and saying, “I could’ve had a construction job,” but still, the benefits would be varied and immediate: gangs would lose almost their entire source of income; police would gain hundreds of thousands of man-hours for use in fighting real crimes with real victims; government would gain a modicum of respect for dealing with a serious social problem in a forthright and non-political manner.

Legalizing drugs is not the same as recommending drugs. It is simply an admission that some people are going to ruin their lives, no matter what. Using community resources to try and stop them is a waste of resources and a denial of individual freedom. Facing reality is a matter of helping the ones you can, loving the ones you can’t, and moving forward.

a foot on either side

Bart Braverman

SLIMY BUT EFFECTIVE

Ann Curry interviewed the President of Sudan this morning on TODAY. This is the guy who, it is generally agreed, is responsible for the genocide in Darfur we keep hearing about, hundreds of thousands of deaths. If you missed the interview, you missed one of those moments that is likely to show up all over the TV for the next few days: on the news, on The Daily Show, SNL, wherever. This is just an early heads-up.

Ann Curry has her own style. It isn’t very journalistic – cold, dry, just the facts – it’s more maternal, as if a concerned soccer-mom were talking to heads of state. You know, she cares.

So she sit across from this guy who practically has blood dripping off his suit, pulls out some pictures and says, “I got these pictures at the Stat Department. They show where (x amount of people) were killed and that your troops killed them. What do you have to say about that?”

Without batting an eye he replies, “Collin Powel went before the United Nations and showed them pictures of weapons of mass destruction. What do you think of that?”

It was slimy, but effective.

JUST BENEATH THE SURFACE

There are two stories floating around at the moment. They seem to be quite different, but if you look just beneath the surface, they are quite similar. One is about truck speed, the other is about political news coverage.

The first story concerns the increasing number of highway deaths caused by excessive truck speed. These are the big-rigs I’m talking about, the 18-wheelers. The strangest part of the story was the revelation that most big-rigs are equipped with speed regulators set to 68 mph. But they can be, and often are, simply ignored . . . which would seem to make them almost pointless.

The second story goes back a couple of weeks. David Geffen threw a fundraiser for Barack Obama (He’s a Kenyan, he’s a Kansan, he’s all American) and then insulted his old pals, the Clintons, in a print interview. Obama was asked by reporters to comment on Geffen’s remarks.

How could these two stories possibly be related? The key lies in Deep Throat’s admonition to Bob Woodward to, “Follow the money.”

Truckers put themselves (and everyone else on the road) at risk because the less time they spend driving the less money it costs the shipper, which increases profit. Even with higher insurance rate, the shipper makes more money. If a few people get killed along the way, so be it.

Reporters pressed Obama for a response, not because they give hoot what he thinks about Hillary, or Geffen, or politics, but because they were hoping he would call Hillary a bitch, or a lesbian, or a Republican, anything that would give them a lead for the evening news. That pre-fabricated controversy attracts more viewers, which ups their ratings, allowing them to charge more for commercial time, which increases their profits. If the public gets duped into thinking this is real news, so be it.

Surprisingly, money may not be the root of all evil, but you can sure as hell find it at the bottom of most stories.

a foot on either side

Bart Braverman

WEDDING PICTURES

Pan Pacific Park, which stretches for several acres between 3rd St. and Beverly Blvd just west of Gardner, replaced three L. A. landmarks: Gilmore Field was a long-time home of local minor league baseball; Gilmore Drive-In ran the latest movies for families and lovers; and Pan Pacific Auditorium hosted everything from the Ice-Capades to the Circus. All gone now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice park. It has rolling green hills, a soccer filed, a baseball diamond, and a huge sand-box for kids. Scattered around the park are a couple dozen benches, tables, and barbeques. The whole thing is surrounded by a walking path, dotted with strange little exercise stations. Plus, there is a small community center where young boys play basketball and old men play gin.

Tucked away in a small corner of the park is a stark reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. A set of stairs leads up to a Holocaust Memorial where six, triangle-shaped, monolithic slabs of black granite rise perhaps thirty feet in the air. Etched into the granite is a brief history of the NAZI rise to power and their near-genocide of European Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill. The memorial is surrounded by a tall fence of black bars and barbed wire. I suspect that most people who use the park are unaware of the memorial, but for those who take the time to look, it is a powerful presence.

The other day my wife and I were walking through the park when we noticed a large group of people standing on the stairs of the memorial. It was a wedding party. The best man and half a dozen ushers wore purple tuxedos, the maid of honor and bride’s maids wore identical lavender gowns, while the bride wore white. As we approached, it became obvious that a professional photographer was taking their official wedding pictures. The group was Hispanic, spoke entirely in Spanish, and was blissfully unaware of the meaning of their wedding picture backdrop.

Aside from the humor of the moment (for us, not for them), I think the incident says something about America’s immigration policy. Non-English-speaking immigrants are nothing new. At the turn of the 20th century there were vast neighborhoods in New York where if you didn’t speak Italian or Yiddish, you couldn’t function. But when immigrants ventured outside their neighborhoods then, they were forced to speak English if they wanted to survive. Now, we seem to accommodate everyone.

The ballot in Tuesday’s municipal election was printed in six different languages, which strikes me as an oxymoron: You have to be a citizen to vote; attaining citizenship requires a functional knowledge of English; so, why should ballots be printed in anything but English? American policy should be simple - if you don’t care enough about this country to learn its language, you don’t get to vote.

America’s strength comes, in large part, from being a nation of immigrants. No one here is a native American, unless they happen to be a Native American. We all come from someplace else. But here we are now, all together, for better or worse, and the language is English. Those who wish to be full time residents should learn the full time language, and those who refuse should not be offered the benefits of citizenship.

a foot on either side

Bart Braverman