I got an email asking me if I wanted to sign a petition requesting that the Nobel Peace Prize committee give this year's Peace Prize to Bradley Manning. It's group called "Roots Action" but I imagine their thinking and their sentiment about Manning is echoed by a great many others who remember the stories of the "Good Germans" during World War II.

That story is that even people who regard themselves as patriotic, perhaps especially people who regard themselves as patriotic, owe it to their countrymen, and the rest of humanity, to tell the truth when they see injustice and cruelty done to others- even if these evils are sanctioned by their government.

This was a frequent theme during the Nuremberg War Trials. I'm fairly certain that a large core of the American population who grew up after that war assumed that those war crimes trials established a code of decency more generally thought of as an essential element of "human rights".

I wrote a short blurb to go with my petition signature as follows:

"It is especially the conscience and commitment of a human being- who has something to lose- that make peace and transparency of moral purpose possible. If we do not come to the aid of and celebrate people like this, what are we really doing that matters?"

Here is the organization- or at least one of them :

http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612

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Still no place to move to. I have a basic optimism about this- as does PLC. In fact PLC says not to say anything negative because it's too stressful. We've been on a sort of two-track approach. PLC is looking for rentals and I have been looking for reasonably inexpensive mobile homes that I could afford to put a down payment on and, I'd hope, continue to make payments on for a couple of years at least. But it is an uncertainty as to how viable being in Santa Cruz is. It's just that we don't have a more realistic alternative.

Well, anyway, looks like it's time to make that a one-track approach as a rental would certainly be our best option. We've had at least two friends say they are sure something will turn up for us that will make our pains worthwhile. Of course we hope so too, but I'm reminded of a birthday card one of PLC's brothers gave him some years ago. On it are three stern-looking nuns with their hands in prayerful posture. Inside the card says, "The good news is that we are praying for you. The bad news is there are only three of us." 

That's almost as funny as the bumper sticker that says in big letters, "JESUS LOVES YOU!!!" and in tiny print at the bottom says "Everyone else thinks you're an asshole."

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Johnny Weston who plays  Jay Moriarity (left) and Gerald Butler who plays "Frosty" Hesson

 

PLC and I watched the 2012 film "Chasing Mavericks". It's about Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarty. Jay was not only from this area but we actually live in the basic neighborhood he grew up in. For years we seen "Live Like Jay" and a cross-shaped logo with "Jay" and "Moriarty" as each axis of the cross. From all accounts Jay was a person who was gifted with lifting others up by the force of his presence and personality. He died tragically in a free diving incident near the Maldive Islands which are in the Indian Ocean about 600 miles southwest from the tip of India and Sri Lanka.

"Chasing Mavericks" is the story of the adversity he had to overcome to surf. His surfing reputation was probably established as the youngest person to ever surf the huge waves of Northern California's "Mavericks" near Half Moon Bay. Moriarty was from a broken family and a sort of "latchkey" kid due to his single mother's alcoholism at that time. A neighbor, nicknamed "Frosty"- a sort of crusty character bur caring guy who'd had his own tough luck early in his life developed into a surfing guru and a surrogate father for Jay.

The film isn't  a stand-alone great film but it is a type of inspirational story of the type that is less frequent than at an earlier time in "Hollywood". The best known actors are Gerald Butler- a very good actor maybe best known for films in the action genres but definitely an excellent dramatic as well as comedy actor, and Elizabeth Shue - who won an Oscar for lead actress in "Leaving Las Vegas" (with co-winner Nicolas Cage) play's Jay's troubled mother.

 Santa Cruz aerial view

 Jay Moriarty is played by Johnny Weston who's a relative newcomer in film.

The "specialness" of Jay Moriarty was about more than his skill or precocity- it was about his warmth and openness to those he knew and didn't know. He was someone- I could tell from the bumper stickers, hand written tributes and designs I'd seen casually around the East Cliff neighborhood but more generally around all of the Santa Cruz area since his death in 2001- who inspired people as much as his loss saddened them.

The real "Frosty" and Jay

 There are a fair amount of shots of the East Cliff and the Santa Cruz general beach area in the film that are immediately recognizable to PLC and me- though there are also shots done in distant locations that stand in for the local terrain. It all made for a very different film experience for us especially as PLC has been doing surf photography around here in his healthier times since 2001.

I told PLC I'd had a dream about a tidal wave that very morning. We did see this the night of my previous post but I hadn't mentioned the dream to PLC until we had watched the film.

Sometimes things are just sort of in the air I guess.

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Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir in Yosemite

 I'm reading "Theodore Rex", the second in the Teddy Roosevelt book trilogy by Edmund Morris I'd mentioned last post and I am thoroughly enjoying it. It certainly is a good way to gather a perspective on the uncertainties and vagaries of political trends and how people rise or fail to rise to the challenges they pose. President Obama's latest concession about cutting Social Security and other so-called "entitlements" is a good example of failing to rise to a political challenge. Now a few months after  the election it's clear the White House will never be ahead of the political wave that demands that the government invest- spend money, not limit it- to create jobs for our future.

This is not a simple-minded request. A majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents -  whoever these people really all are, or whatever that has come to mean -indicate large majorities showing that they are in agreement that the government needs to spend. The "debt crisis" has a number of automatic adherants in the general population who are habituated to declaiming in any available public forum (think strongly here of "comments" sections of web sites) against anyone who says that spending by the government is specifically necessary when individuals, neighborhoods,  cities and states cannot accomplish this task of investment independently and on their own without a radical realignment of the corpporate nature and status of our current economics.

 It's even clearer when reading about the OTHER Roosevelt that the issue of corporatocracy has been an ongoing danger at its several historical apexes in the American history.

Bankrupting the middle-class through wage stagnation. Check!

Bankrupting the middle-class through off-shoring and down-sizing domestic jobs to achieve lower wages. Check!

Reversing the progressive tax structure which bolstered the middle-class after World War II but notably accelerating this process to favor the very few at the expense of the general populace after Reagan was elected in the US and Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain in the late '70s and '80s. Check!

Knocking down the "public service" requirement for broadcasters as part of deregulation. Check.

Deregulating what was left of legal restraints against multiple  broadcast ownerships and mergers to insure that news is another "economy of scale" victim even though the ideals of freedom of the press and "economies of scale" are not "equals" in almost any moral or economic sense. Check!

Demanding an increase in the numbers of immigrants with the high-tech "skill sets" to take jobs Americans are unwilling to take and pretending it's not just a shell game to keep wages lower when there in fact are OVER-qualified Americans willing to work these jobs. Check!

And so, my fellow Americans, and my horrified neighbors it is increasingly clear that the "debt crisis" is a construct of the so-called "beltway" pundits and folks who are obtaining their knuckle-dragging etiquette from the oxygen-deprived scribes of Fox News or whatever will be financed by the Koch Brothers and their ilk in its place once that format is finally also as disposable as the needs and wants of the general American population. Clearly gerrymandered congressional districts, and the nauseatingly wealthy among us controlling the mass media are the obstacles to what should obviously be a consensus regarding the direction the United States government needs to go in search of a viable future that's not "too big to fail".

Well, I could go on and on. And I certainly have in the past, haven't I?

Rather than belabor these themes anymore I would direct you to this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=youtu.be   I submitted a couple of posts ago.

There is some simple math that's been afoot for some time now. It looks as though decades of comparative analysis may finally be bearing fruit now that many of us have acclimated ourselves to starvation rations when it comes to food for thought.

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   Mad Men promotional shot and Don Draper (actor Jon Hamm, right)

 Just to show that I haven't given up circuses to emphasize bread at all costs  I have to share with you all that PLC and me are looking forward to tonight's two-hour season six premiere of AMC's "Mad Men".
We've been talking it over quite a bit and while there have been television programs whose art has enthralled and amazed us upon occasion we seem to have reached a consensus that the writing, direction, editing, certainly acting and overall presentation of "Mad Men"  add up to everything a lot of folks have been saying. Is it the best program ever produced on American television? Maybe. It should certainly be in the running for the title- that seems sure. To be sure, and even in support of my preceding paragraphs NOT of a television show-themed nature, there are many things that matter more than entertainment. But we are hard-pressed to find a more substantive guilty pleasure even so.

We/I know that the latest entertainments that lean heavily on what must be seen as a current Boomer fascination with the eras that led to our current predicament must necessarily indict our much-complained about narcissism as a generation, or two. But we must also maintain that there is revelation and thoughtfulness reflecting on our current reality that we are grateful for even while we acknowledge that "Mad Men" is a comedic drama which compresses many a dull, anxiety-ridden, regressive, anti-human and tedious moment into an unrealistically diamond-like brilliance which is rarely encountered in real time or life directly but which is more common in our mass media version of our collective rear view mirror. And yet, having said and affirmed that, we still have found ourselves bedazzled by the characters and circumstances of the fictional Don Draper, Peggy Olson, Roger Sterling, Joan Harris, et al. .

We're ready to chow down on this particular circus that doubles as our bread for the evening.