Campaign Song

Review of previous themes:

From Black Rain:

Masahiro: "Now -- music and movies are all America is good for."

From Lost in Translation:

Charlotte: I just don't know what I'm supposed to be.
Bob: You'll figure that out.

From The Devil and Wallace Stevens:

"Stevens pays ironic tribute to Aphrodite Pandemos, the fleshly passion, and then his respects to

Aphrodite Ouranos,
the philosopher's passion...."

From a midlife crisis:

Select the best John Kerry
campaign song from this classic
Top 10 list of Nov. 7, 1964.

To see if you have made the
right choice, click on

Campaign Song.
(Requires RealOne Player.)

The Script

Hollywood Writers, Producers
 Fail to Reach Agreement

Some scripts just write themselves.

Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse

The Siege, 1998

Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:

"My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin.... He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties....

Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.

The New Yorker,
online images

'Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,' he said. 'For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.'

I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: 'Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.' ”

See, too, The New Yorker's press release for

 May 1, 2004 — Law Day —

on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:

"Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. 'I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,' Kerry says, 'and I realized I just didn't want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn't do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.' "

Recall the conclusion of Devil's Advocate:

"Vanity is definitely my favorite sin."

Trinity Test

Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird....

A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:

"This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura's BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura's film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase 'black rain,' used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon."

For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03).  The phrase "holy man" there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.

Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time.  This holy man died on April 26, 2004.  A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.

Honorable Bird

Tonight at 8:00 PM on BRAVO:

Black Rain

Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are New York detectives caught up in a gang war in Japan. Masahiro: Ken Takakura.

Masahiro: "Now -- music and movies are all America is good for."

From yesterday's entry Library:

"... this is the Idea that is put forward for our response. There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. It offers itself freely for meditation and discussion; but it is desirable that we should avoid the bewildered frame of mind of the apocryphal Japanese gentleman who complained:

'Honourable Father, very good;
 Honourable Son, very good; but
 Honourable Bird
     I do not understand at all.' "

See, too, Inscape (4/22/04), The Proof and the Lie (11/30/03), and Hatched (4/21/04), and recall that the theme of Black Rain is counterfeiting.

For a related meditation on the color black, see Kawabata's The Old Capital, quoted in an entry of Aug. 1, 2003.

Fallen from Heaven

On today's stories:

Recall, gentle readers, the reference to Lucifer in last midnight's story, "The Devil and Wallace Stevens," and the reference in yesterday's story, "Notes," to the film "2010" (1984).  Here is a quote from a review of the story behind that film:

"If the coming of Lucifer in this story doesn't set your pulse racing and your mind whirring, then I don't know what will."

For some of us — students of Stephen King and Malcolm Lowry — the coming of Lucifer is not such a surprising event.  See

Shining Forth.

Readings for Law Day

Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life; 

Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century;

plus 1001 Arabian Stories!

    (Google News, ca. 7 AM EDT, May Day 2004)

Law Day

See The Devil and Wallace Stevens.