The NY Times showed extreme contempt for readers June 6 with a front-page story hedded “US Officials Detect Signs of Kyiv’s Counteroffensive.” Why pretend that US officials aren’t involved in major strategic decisions? Who do they think they’re kidding?
A subhed used a similar false pretense: “War Crossing Border No Longer Worries Administration.” It jumped to page 6 as “Attacks Build in the East, and US Officials Detect Signs of Kyiv’s Counteroffensive.”
Also on page 6 was a story hedded “Kyiv Walks Fine Line as Fighters Embrace Use of Nazi Symbols.” The facts seem to substantiate Putin’s claim that Russian troops had been fighting against Nazis. Thomas Gibbons-Neff did his best to minimize the implications of Ukrainian soldiers wearing insignias “made notorious by Nazi Germany.” The patches, he wrote, “highlight the complicated relationship of the Ukrainian military with Nazi imagery.” As if imagery was the problem, not the soldiers’ political point of view! “Ukrainia” was a German satellite/ally during WW 2, with Hitler on the postage stamps. A large segment of the population preferred him to Stalin.
The fact that the US goaded Putin into the invasion doesn’t mean that he isn’t a murderous villain, a reactionary KGB man presiding over a priest-ridden country.
• Ross Douthat weighed in with an op-ed May 19 hedded ”call me Square, but Facts Show the Error of Legalizing Weed.” The column was illustrated by a square graphic showing a skeleton sitting on some yellowing marijuana leaves. Harry Anslinger would have loved it… You are square, Ross, but that’s not why you want to reimpose prohibition. You’re a neo-probe because you’re a Catholic Action fascist of the William Bennett - Sam Alito type.
• Some 20% of Democratic voters want Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to get the nomination for President, which baffles and dismays the owners of the Times. A June 5 piece by Reid J. Epstein, Alyce McFadden and Linda Qiu dropped the pretense of objectivity. ”Mr. Kennedy, 69, is a longtime amplifier and propagator of baseless theories,” they stated as if it was a simple fact. ”He has used his campaign platforms and his famous name to promote misinformation.”
They quoted an example: “Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people,” said Mr. Kennedy, who noted that both his father and uncle were killed by guns.
This was not an opinion piece but a news story with a proper hook: “For more than two hours Mr. Kennedy participated in an online audio chat on Twitter with the platform’s increasingly rightward-leaning chief executive, Elon Musk. They engaged in a friendly back-and-forth with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman turned right-wing commentator...
“Asked during the discussion by David Sacks, a top DeSantis donor who is also close to Mr. Musk, ‘what happened to the Democratic Party,’ Mr. Kennedy spent nine uninterrupted minutes attacking Mr. Biden as a warmonger and claimed that their party was under the control of the pharmaceutical industry.
“‘I think the Democratic Party became the party of war,’ Mr. Kennedy said. ‘I attribute that directly to President Biden. He has always been in favor of very bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive foreign policy, and he believes that violence is a legitimate political tool for achieving America’s objectives abroad.’
“The event, which at its peak had more than 60,000 listeners, according to Twitter, at times felt as if Mr. Kennedy were interviewing Mr. Musk about his stewardship of Twitter, a platform that has lost more than half of its advertising revenue since the billionaire acquired it in October. For more than 30 minutes at the event’s start, the presidential candidate interrogated the tech mogul about releasing the so-called Twitter files, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.
“These are really interesting topics for people, but I think a lot of the public would like to hear about your presidential run,” Mr. Musk said to Mr. Kennedy.
Anywhere I Wanda
• TR Factor’s obit in the AVA inaccurately described my role in compiling the letters of Wanda Tinsasky and my exit from the project in the summer of ‘95. Alex Cockburn and I had intended to compile and publish an AVA anthology to promote the writing of Bruce Anderson, who we thought was on a par with H.L. Mencken and deserved millions of readers. (Anderson was too modest to sanction a collection of just his own stuff.) Marc Gardner started reading through back issues from the time Anderson acquired the AVA in January of 1984, in search of the best material. He was struck by the Tinasky letters, which Anderson thought had been written by Thomas Pynchon while he was living in Northern California and writing Vineland. We decided to publish the 47 WT letters as a stand-alone book.
The letters were full of local references that readers outside of Mendoland would not understand, and arcane references that we ourselves didn’t get. I asked friends and acquaintances to help annotate them. Although there were many witty and erudite contributors to the AVA letters page, Anderson doubted that any of them were Wanda Tinasky. My idea was to frame the book as a literary who-done-it, with a chapter quoting from and identifying the local suspects. One of them was a woman who had written as TR Factor and CO Jones and had since moved to Oregon. In June I drove up to Silverton to visit family and took two side trips, one to call on TR Factor and one to to check out the Pynchon collection at the Oregon State University library in Corvallis. When I described the project to Factor, she said “Be still my beating heart, Thomas Pynchon has read my prose!” I invited her to help with the local annotations and she readily accepted.
In the Pynchon papers at OSU I was astonished to come upon something that convinced me I had to withdraw from the Wanda Tinasky book project. While writing Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon had been living rent-free in a New York apartment owned by his close friend Harrison Starr. Given that Pynchon was tight with Harrison Starr, if my name was on a book consisting of letters that he, Pynchon, had written to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, I figured he’d do everything in his power to snuff it out. And his power in New York publishing circles was considerable. His wife, Melanie Jackson, was an A-list agent.
Harrison Starr had been the executive producer of Zabriskie Point, the terrible movie directed by Michelangelo Antonioni at the end of the ‘60s on which I’d been given a writing credit although every line I wrote had been rejected by the actor and actress for whom they were intended. I blamed Harrison Starr for encouraging Antonioni to cast them, and for enabling some of his other bad decisions. Google “Counterpunch Antonioni” for the sad and sorry details.
Even worse, by the spring of 1970 I was living in Starr’s former apartment on 11th St. in Manhattan with his former wife, a writer named Sally Kempton. Starr undoubtedly blamed me for their break-up, although Sally had turned on him long before our affair began. She had even mused in print about bashing his head with a frying pan.
TR Factor had hurried down to Boonville in July and convinced Bruce Anderson that my plan to make the authorship of the Tinasky letters an open question was cowardice. If she were editor, she said, she would boldly attribute the letters to Pynchon, as per his wishes. I was about to quit when I was summoned to Boonville for a miserable meeting and replaced by TR Factor. That got my dander up and broke off our friendship and our working relationship. It was a costly and ridiculous spat that, as Anderson said, “brought out the worst in all of us.”
BTW, I think Thomas Pynchon did write two brief letters to the AVA back then, signed “General Newcomb” (or Newcombe). I can’t say fersure, but I’d put money on it.
Sticks and Seeds
• It must be the Year of the Soft Sell. The Alameda Market is carrying a line of snacks called “Lesser Evil” and a bottled water called “Overachieving H2O.” There’s a barber shop on Santa Clara Ave. called “It’ll do.”
• Caption under a photo in the San Francisco Chronicle June 8: “Longtime KRON anchor Pam Moore is retiring after a decade that spanned more than three decades.” Why pay copy editors when you have spell check?
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