Part Two. Growing up poor & orphaned but happy. Stumbling into acting & catching the bug. Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud.
Part Three. Garbo. His journals. Writers. Bogart & Bacall & John Huston. Spencer Tracy. Hubris. Elizabeth Taylor. His own films. The Bogey stories are fun.
Part Four. Demon Rum. His wife Susan. A taste of Camelot.
And throughout: the slings and arrows of acting and life and other arts, from one who learned most of what he knows out of school.
Bravo, PBS. And Mr Cavett, who fields a number of short-hoppers with thoughtful aplomb. Noticed him about town some months ago, looking spry.
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Camelot on Broadway, with Julie Andrews, 1960-61
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Alan Jay Lerner and director Moss Hart adapted Camelot from T.H. White’s rejuvenation of the King Arthur legend, The Once and Future King. Frederick Loewe came grudgingly aboard to write the music.
Burton and Julie Andrews were the original headliners, the latter as Guineviere, fresh from her smash in My Fair Lady, also by Lerner and Loewe. Robert Goulet got his first break as lovelorn Lancelot. Broadway’s advance-sales records were broken.
The show had been five hours plus in out-of-town trials, with Loewe and Hart seriously ill and Lerner suffering marriage trauma. The latter in later years was keen to credit Burton’s “faith and geniality” for holding the production together.
It opened on Broadway in early December 1960. Senator Kennedy had defeated Vice President Nixon four weeks earlier.
Twenty years later, it’s between performances of a Camelot revival at Lincoln Center that Burton sits with Cavett. Exhausting exercise, at age 55.
Weeks later Burton had radical back surgery. The pain or a certain constriction can be seen in his eyes.
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Night of the Iguana, with Sue Lyon, 1964
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Talking at frank length about alcohol, Burton credits his wife Susan with likely saving his life.
Four years later he was dead. At 59.
I remember my mother grieving a bit, not for having lost a star, but something closer to the bone, bearing on early deaths of her oldest brother and father, the latter whom, like Burton, died in his 50s of a brain hemorrage.
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With Liz Taylor
Life in bloom.
He met Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, while filming Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive film in history.
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They were married twice, from March 1964 to July 1976, taking sixteen months off in June 1974.
Was it Nixon’s resignation …?
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It’s generally thought that they acted out private life, with encouragement from Mike Nicholls, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966
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Six years after the last divorce, he speaks of Taylor as a good friend.
And argues she was a great screen actress, underrated because of beauty, but due for rediscovery and immortality.
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Asking about his diaries, Cavett suggests that Burton is in essence a writer.
The actor allows he’s had ten or so extracts from his journals published — but merely in places that pay well. Ladies Home Journal. Cosmopolitan.
Then offers that he admires writers above all other “craftsmen,” and prefers their company, among artistic types, finding painters “inarticulate” and actors wont to tell stories rather than converse.
Throughout, comments about acting and the business focus on scripts and mention authors.
Post mortem, a book was carved out of his journals, and published to rave reviews.
Seems the thinking man’s world found itself shocked to find he was not a gigolo.
He speaks of his father, Richard Jenkins, as a genius coal miner. The stories are laced with alcohol and affection.
But elsewhere he spoke of the man’s violence. And when the father died in 1957, his namesake son, 32 and famous, did not attend the funeral.
His mother had died when he was two, giving birth to her thirteenth child at age 44. He says he has no memories.
At some point the state made master Richard Jenkins a ward of Philip Burton, one of his schoolteachers and a scholar of the theater. The lad’s passion for rugby was channeled elsewhere.
“I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic,” the actor later said. (So reports biographer Melvyn Bragg.)
It’s curious that he speaks at such length about his father with Cavett, yet so briefly — but with honor — of Philip Burton, whom he reports alive and well and living in Key West.
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The Longest Day
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The photo at the very top here is also from The Longest Day, where Burton stands out — in a huge top-drawer Hollywood ensemble, and among the work-hard-play-hard Yank soldiery — as a quiet, hard-drinking RAF pilot on the verge of losing his nerve.
One imagines he cherished the role, having served in the RAF for three years during the war.
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He came home intending to return to Oxford, but found the town so crowded at that moment with veterans that his chances to make the rugby squad were deemed poor.
So, instead, with Philip Burton’s aid and comfort, he answered an ad for an acting job …
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His last film was magnificent: Michael Radford’s 1984, shot in the spring of Orwell’s year.
John Hurt was an obvious and indeed perfect Winston.
Less than obvious was Burton as O’Brien, the Ministry of Truth officer who watches then arrests Winston, methodically interrogates and breaks him, then washes his brain. A fierce minimalist perfect performance.
He died months later. August 5.
The 1984 now seems a bookend to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, from John le Carre’s breakthrough book. Another great minimalist characterization in an important film about secret police.
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The cold spy, with celestial Claire Bloom. 1965
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HOWEVER …
I hadn’t realized, knowing only his post 50s films, that Burton’s roots were so wide and deep in the English theater
More than once he tells Cavett that he doesn’t watch movies at all, work aside, and suspects only ten or twelve of his 60 or so are worth preserving from fire.
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His Hamlet here, in New York, in 1964 was much remarked upon.
There’s a filmed rehearsal run-through available on CD, which became the basis, two summers ago, of a revival extravaganza on a big screen in Central Park (if memory serves) and then the Public Theater.
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I missed it. But do have the CD, which is always a bit disappointing, because the actor is indeed running through the text.
Watching the erstwhile rising rugby star run, however, one can imagine the fearsome athletic power he brought to the role. An Achilles of a Hamlet.
Able to snap Claudius’s neck with a hand.
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Burton speaks highly of Gielgud, who directed him in Hamlet but also later remarked that Burton was, indeed, too rough for the role. Meaning, perhaps, nothing more, or less, than that he was a Welshman.
Toward the end of their chat, Cavett notes that his (Cavett’s) wife had performed with Burton years before in Munich.
The actor responds with a taste of Hamlet’s second soliloquoy in German.
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The passing of Paul Newman a year ago left me feeling similarly bereaved.
Is it only in context — contrasted with the luminaries and prospects of our day — that Burton seems so remarkable here, chatting with an urbane fellow traveler of the cosmopolis, as Reagan’s presidency, which just a few months before had seemed as always a ludicrous long-shot, so lugubriously dawned?
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February 8, 1966
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Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot
The Camelot company did an original cast album in 1961. Burton refers to the lovely royalties with a smile, and replies to Cavett’s request for a piece of his quality by noting that viewers may yet buy the record.
The music had caught on inside the Kennedy White House. Mr Richard Burton had been invited to dinner.
And after the state murder, Camelot inspired Jackie to compare her husband’s administration to the court of young Arthur, who after innocently pulling a sword from a stone had found himself king, and gone on, legend goes, to do noble things.
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February 6, 1968: Bobby, Liz, Richard and Ethel. Four months later a dream fully died.
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JFK, incoming, was not much like Arthur: His progress to the White House was long planned and well contrived, and he’d been working in town, in Congress, for twelve years already, and had been raised in a family that traded at the highest levels.
Nevertheless, his odyssey once arrived at the big house was indeed that of an Arthurian ingenue, quick on his feet, able to sniff rats, and change course, intent on nobler things.
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Burton was banned from the BBC for speaking of Churchill as a mass-murderer and quasi-fascistic racist in his conduct of the war.
He spoke of himself as a socialist, life long, and his pride in honest labor is the steady note in the tales he tells Cavett of his father, and the sisters who raised him, and his six brothers all of whom went to the mines.
Yet to avoid the King’s tax man, the escape artist resided in Switzerland, from the 50s onward.
And is buried there, in Celigny, on the shores of icy majestic Lake Geneva.
The East German colonel who opened the first portal.
Nice to see Gorbachev on the streets today in Berlin.
But his partner, willy nillly, in peaceful disassembling, Lech Walesa, offers only backhanded compliments.
Here’s Gorby’s successor, the young Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, as to how the Wall’s fall “united us again.”
“Again?” one might wonder, thinking of the Teutonic Knights battling Alexander Nevsky, and of course the recent war.
But Germans and Russians were indeed allies (of a disorganized sort) against Bonaparte. And for much of early modernity German royalty and high footmen ran the Russian state. That famous equestrienne Catherine the Great, to begin …
I recall Alexander Zinoviev, during a wondrous six-hour chat in Munich in March 1990, suggesting I beware a renewed bonding of Germany and the eastern colossus:
ZINOVIEV: What do you think, the possibility of world war does not exist? It would be a very big simplification to consider the situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union only from just one point of view. …
TNC: Assuming that the states involved want peace — perhaps that’s a large assumption — what’s the best solution of what they call the German Question of reunification?
ZINOVIEV: Best solution? For who, the Soviet Union?
TNC: For peace.
ZINOVIEV: For peace ?!
TNC: To prevent a world war.
ZINOVIEV: It is too abstract an approach. The unification of Germany from my point of view will increase the danger of a new world war. Germany can destroy the balance in Western Europe and the world.
TNC: What about NATO and Warsaw Pact? Should Germany be neutral —
ZINOVIEV: Warsaw Pact doesn’t play a very important role. The East German army is ready to be destoryed, to join the West German army. The Czechoslovakian army is nothing, the Hungarian army is nothing — Warsaw Pact?! What is the Warsaw Pact?! it is the Soviet army! The Soviet army and Western Europe.
From the military point of view, for the Soviet Union, it is no longer necessary to keep its army in Eastern Europe. Today’s weapon is of such a kind that the Soviet Union can send its rockets to the United States, you know, and if it is necessary to occupy Eastern Europe, the Soviet army is able to make that in two days.
Gradually, it seems to me, there is going to be a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union wants to push the Americans from Europe. I thought some years ago that it was ready to betray, to sell, East Germany, under conditions that the Americans would leave Europe.
Together with Germany, the Soviet Union can control Western Europe completely. It lost East Germany, but it can win the whole Germany. As a partner. Not only a trading partner, but a military partner, perhaps. It is senseless to divide the different aspects of life.
Gorby & Erich Honneker, Oct 6, 1989, as Raisa looks on.
And then, for elaboration but also pleasure, Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb.
One comes away with a clear picture of not only what we did to Italy in the postwar era, but prudent guesses as to what we are doing to ourselves, having seen the enemy …
Perhaps the best tickets I ever scored on the fly outside the gate were at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, an amphitheater, for Rickie Lee Jones in 1991, near the end of the summer’s FLYING COWBOYS tour.
Third row. Most memorable was an exquisitely theatrical “Something Cool.” June Christy’s signature tune. The sad song of Blanche DuBois.
Days later, a similar score in San Diego. And then, the tour closer, in Santa Barbara — where I danced in the grass before the stage with the Celestial herself during “Ghetto of My Mind.”
Earlier on, closer to home, I once got into Madison Square Garden for Springsteen without a ticket of any sort, by paying a brazen snappy fellow, reminiscent of Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson, whom I — and four others — simply followed past an elderly black ticket-taker, a distinguished looking gent with grizzled lambchops, who granted entry to each Vandal with a sober nod, summing, I imagine, his piece of the action.
Dem was the daze.
But dose days are gone.
This past Sunday, this veteran of Gotham — and a visiting friend, under his aegis — walking south for John Hammond and The Blind Boys of Alabama at City Winery in the Village, were taken for fools and parted from their money by a pair of slicky boys hocking bogus Van Morrison tickets on 33rd and Seventh.
Marx warned us about technology. Advances in home printing have brought us to the pass where none but a box-office expert may now distinguish false ducats and the real thing.
But surely, you wonder, would even the most credulous of chowderheads not have balked at the $300 face?
Well … That’s what the high-ends were going for at the Box. Van is cashing in his chips with this Astral Weeks extravaganza. And this wasn’t the Garden’s basketball arena, but the former Felt Forum, a sideshow theater with about seventeen hundred seats.
Even so, you may wonder if something less than a perfect putz might have at least nosed a whiff of suspicion when the sellers agreed to $80 per.
Well … The thought was that showtime was ten minutes off and the boys were happy, at that point, to dump at any price, eighty bucks being better than zero by multiples indeterminate.
Imagine my humiliation …
An insult all the more peccant and piquant when perceived piling on my unemployed back.
With a friend on my arm.
Under my aegis.
Her first time in New York for anything more than business affairs.
Oh it burns. It burns. The city’s red face, and my red ass.
The fish rots from the head. Bear Stearns and Lehman. AIG and Goldman Sachs. Bernie Madoff and …
And now one can’t trust the local scalpers.
I imagine, indeed, they no longer exist — the honest brokers, I mean. For the falsifiers have burst the bonds of trust and surely none but a ditzy dunderheaded diptstick would dare, henceforth, to buy tickets off the street.
Dem daze indeed are done.
Whither hence, my friends?
Theyre selling postcards of the hanging
Theyre painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
Theyve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad theyre restless
They need somewhere to go
As lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row …
Most of what the film has to say is familiar. But the last two parts (on youtube) have revived basic despair about not only our owner-operator class but the young soldiers, who seem as alien and rabid as the teen zealots of 1917 did to so many Russians.
It’s only a few baby steps from shooting civilians for fun in Iraq to the same in American cities. I guess we will see this sooner than later, perhaps even before election day 2016 if Romney beats Obama in 2012.
And of course I don’t mean to imply that it’s okay in Iraq. It’s so NOT okay that … words elude.
And thoughts of leaving the country intrude.
I mean only to gauge the degradation of our people — our enemy met that is us — raised on video games and patriotic television. We mirror the owner-operators with gruesome fidelity.
And have deprived ourselves of sound basis for complaint should one day a city of our own go up in smoke.
Frank Schaeffer was the son of a famous right-wing Christian preacher-activivist. Became one himself. But then saw the light and went Left.
His simple scorn for the movement is bracing.
But his certainty as to its essential violence — that violence itself, born of long resentment within a civilization that passed it by, is its aim — is ominous.
There has been good solid journalism about this threat throughout the decade, of course. This is a quick, sharp reminder.
And when one considers the black boy who was beaten to death in Chicago weeks ago — that horror that seems to have largely escaped notice …
One realizes how difficult the tightrope this President must walk shall be.
Ed Note: See comments below to follow events post Baucus Bill as the legistature turns to reconciling its five drafts. And who will bell the 800 pound gorilla?
The only question re the mediocre Baucus Bill was whether Olympia Snowe, the Republican from Maine, would vote yes. She did.
Interesting tidbits from the pre-vote chat:
– The Dems are mad as hatters at the insurance companies re the report they put out over the weekend defaming (donkeys say) the reform effort. Perhaps sleeping dogs have been kicked and will bite. Ie perhaps positive, heading for the floor.
– Hatch, the arch GOPher of Mormonland, says the Baucus Bill will not even be the one that is voted on the Senate floor. Says the REAL bill is being written behind closed doors.
Interesting indeed. Does that mean the real, final Senate bill — which must deal in some fashion with the draft coming from Ted Kennedy’s old committee — will lean more leftward and include a public plan? But Snowe by voting yes has likely roped the Donkeys in about the center.
– Jay Rockefeller of West Virgina, whom I admire: “The misleading and to me harmful claims made over the weekend by the profit driven health insurance companies are politicking for corporate gain at its worst.
Nevertheless there’s value — during these weeks when the Pakghanistan policy hangs in the balance — in his assessment of the President and the Pentagon.
When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head.
“He’s twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He’s absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them.
He hasn’t done anything. … You have to go by what people tell you. He’s like that. He’s not ready for prime time and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.”
Very much my worry during the interregnum last year, when it became clear that Obama would retain the Bush-Cheney Pentagon leadership in its entirety.
It’s been a slippery slope since the spring of 2008, when Obama, the apparent Democratic candidate, was briefed by the Apparat on Pakghanistan and (like McCain) responded, “Sure, anything you guys say.”
He might have said No then, rejecting the Briefers (which is hard to do and dangerous if done).
‘We’re getting out of Afghanistan if I’m elected!’ he might have told the crowds all summer. But it would have been harder to be elected. He chose to go along.
Next Opportunity: Post election. The best opportunity. And the way to seize it was to replace the uniformed leadership atop the Pentagon, perhaps retaining Gates as Secy of Defense.
Next Opportunity: The “thorough review” of the policy in January and February — out of which the President dashed cheerleading Petraeus’s Pakghanistan Surge like it was summertime 2008.
Even when Europe and NATO greeted the roadshow with lip service while setting Stausbourg aflame, the President would not be swayed from pledged loyalty.
As a result, 2009 has been the costliest year (in US lives) of the eight-year war.
NS Advisor James Jones, once a general, is against the Surge.
Secy of Defense Gates is not speaking in support of the Surge.
Former everything Colin Powell is agin it.
Joe Biden (whom I respect on foreign affairs and constitutional law) is agin it, even if he betrays Kennedy-like hope in focused “counterinsurgency” ops. Rahm Emanuel is agin it. And Biden has a lot of influential pals in the Senate agin it, starting with John Kerry atop the Foreign Relations committee.
The President should take Kerry’s words to heart, and then gird his loins like a wrestler:
“John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said after the meeting that “it would be irresponsible” to send more troops until it became clear “what is possible in Afghanistan.”
The Persians of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. Alexander the Great. The early modern Brits. The Soviet Union. Everybody knows what’s possible in Afghanistan. Desultory defeat.
No one has voiced in public a coherent War Aim. Neither the various forces labelled Taliban nor the meeting of minds labelled Al Qaeda can be defeated with guns. The War on Terror is a propaganda war. Trying to win it with guns enhances the enemy’s power.
Obama in his heart knows this. The Cairo speech and his September UN speech.
What he has lacked is precisely what Gore Vidal points to: The wherewithal to get from what he knows in his heart to an effective policy.
This is the last opportunity to get out without losing a second term. Surge another 40,000 troops, tell the Pentagon to Go Get’m, and the resultant gorey mess will leave the next election to Romney.
The dice have been rolling about the table for two weeks now. If the current debate ends in a decision to send more troops, then Obama has backed down and the future is clear.
If it ends otherwise, then a turn has been accomplished, and the future’s a mist.
Mist is the best the President can hope for at the moment, after endorsing for eighteen months an Aimless war.
Ed Note: See comments below into 2011 as the whirling Credit Crisis brings the European Union and its currency to the brink of … Rescission? Dissolution? One might hope.
Well. Ireland has voted 67-33 in a referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, which would pretty much create a United States of Europe centrally governed by the EU apparatus in Brussels.
It seems to me a sad day, despite a recent half-apology for dem Bilderbergers.
Last year, of course, the Irish rejected the treaty/constituiton, drawing the ire of the continental powers. This time around, the Times story suggests, fear born of the current economic crisis and a media blitz did the trick.
Sad news today. The normally intelligent people of Ireland capitulated to a fear-mongering propaganda campaign, and voted for the Lisbon Treaty, 2:1.
National sovereignty in all of Europe is now a thing of the past. The “Treaty” is in fact a constitution, and all European national constitutions are now subservient to the terms of this self-amending Treaty.
‘Self-amending’ is all important: it means that the Brussels bureaucracy can add add new amendments to the Treaty at any time, and those amendments also supersede national constitutions. The Irish people were told that the Treaty “does not bring in military conscription”, “does not affect taxation”, and many other things that people in Ireland are not in favor of.
This was all lies. True, the Treaty itself does not talk about those specific items, but because of self-amending, those specific items can now “be brought in” at any time in the future. And Ireland’s voting power, in opposing measures, is very greatly reduced by the Treaty.
If the Treaty were a ‘good’ constitution, all of this might not be a bad thing. But it’s not. The structure of the EU government is very much less democratic than any of the current European governments.
Most of the power is vested in the EU Commission, none of whose members are elected. It’s like a Politburo, with lots of power and no accountability. And its polices are very much oriented around neoliberalism, globalism, privatization, and deregulation – the very things that have brought the global economy to a standstill and accelerated unemployment in Europe.
Both Holland and France had voted against the constitution, when it was openly called a constitution. So the bigwigs repackaged the very same thing and called it a “Treaty”. They did this so the people of France and Holland wouldn’t get another chance to vote it down. The “Treaty” could be passed by the legislatures – except in the case of Ireland.
The people of Ireland, God bless them, voted against the “Treaty” the first time they were given a chance to vote. But they weren’t able to keep their heads in the face of the overwhelming media blitz about how the world would fall apart if Ireland voted No a second time.
Europe is now under the firm control of a handful of unaccountable elitists in the EU Commission. Where they will take Europe is anybody’s guess, and there will be no democratic voice present in setting that direction.
Today will live in infamy, as its consequences become visible.
This is one more reason Obama will be lucky to have a second term and live to tell of it.
Personally I agree with the Times. But any hope of getting serious reform passed will founder on this if it’s pushed.
If Obama is LBJ, then Romney taking office in 2013 would be Nixon in 1968, with the mess in Vietnam/Pakghanistan nowhere near settled, the country and the Democratic Party utterly at odds with itself, soldiers shooting college students (see Pittsburgh, directly below), etc.
It’s in the script. Hard to see how Obama can re-write on the fly.
I love him for what he thinks and the spirit he has brought to politics. But more and more I fear that Hillary would have been more effective meat at this moment to feed to this sausage grinder of a Union.
Media talking points by a person named Perry at NewsMax, which feeds Fox News — re the bright side of a military coup to solve the “Obama problem” — were published on the NewsMax site this week.
Then taken down Wednesday (two days ago).
Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:
# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized …
Goes on at some length.
First thought: a hoax.
But the crudeness of the language, screwy thoughts about the Constitution, were reminiscent of totalitarian hoplites that populate literature from behind the Iron Curtain.
And soon a Spokesvolker for Newsmax acknowledged the memo, telling TPM (where the text has been salvaged, linked above) that Perry was an “unpaid blogger.” The NewsMax site itself says he “contributes a regular column.”
What’s most important about the NewsMax piece is that it is not an isolated incident out standing in its field.
Rather, it’s surrounded by a bevy of high-brow generals who came out of retirement or obscurity in September to counter the Rumbling Thunder of the Miserable Media Tour of Dick Cheney, who should be history but apparently isn’t.
The Huffington Post dismisses the NewsMax memo as lunatic fringe. Um-hmm. Beer Hall Putsch … And again — but at least makes clear that, yes, the author is an ass raised on Age of Reagan television. Let’s see …
Associated Press – A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word “fed” scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.
Some people have been guessing in the past two weeks that this is in the works.
Might explain some of the strange things happening with stocks and bonds and gold and the universe.
The strange things, in a nutshell: Bonds are saying the world is mired in deflation and not likely to change soon, and US bonds in particular — where the short and medium and long term Treasury yields are low (showing no worries about inflation) and the inflation-protected Treasury bonds (called TIPS) are stagnant.
Bonds in short are saying things are bad and going to get worse.
But the US stock market has been rallying since March, and refusing to go down despite a world of traders expecting it to do so. As if things were much improved and going to get better.
The dollar is crashing thru what some had hoped as late as a week ago was short-medium term support. And gold is rocketing, thru the $1000/oz psych level. These (like the bonds) would seem to say things are cruising for a bruising. So why are stocks rocketing?
And why are people buying US bonds (driving those yioelds down) if there is a panic underway with the dollar (which when devalued hurts bonds denominated in dollars)?
A scenario which makes sense of these apparent broad contradictions is a sudden revaluation of the Chinese currency (some call it Yuan, some REmimbi) against the dollar.
The chinese for a long time thru their Great Industrialization these past years held the Yuan fixed against the dollar. This Peg was relaxed a bit a few years ago but the chinese government still holds the Yuan low vs dollar with stern intent — by buying dollar-denominated bonds with the great influx of cash (in many currencies) it enjoys as the world’s sweatshop manufacturer of choice.
But at the same time, of course, Peking has been moaning and groaning as first Bush-Cheney and now Obama pursue policies that have broken all prior restraints on the US national debt. For the future here is clear — inflation. Which devalues that trillion in Treasuries Peking holds.
So the chinese are floating down river with a leg in the Buy Dollars boat and a leg in the Sell Dollars boat. (They want the Yuan low against the dollar to continue to fertizlize their industirial growth — but they see and fear the inflationary future of their dollar denominated holdings.)
If Peking does allow the Yuan to rise dramatically vs the dollar, gold would likely go to the moon, Chinese stocks in general would suffer, the dollar would tumble against all the major currencies, and everything one buys with dollars (eg oil, US Treasuries) would cost more merely as a matter of exchange, regardless of fundamentals.
It might trip off, sooner than anticipated, the Great Inflation / Dollar Devaluation that everyone sees on the horizon as the only way out of the great debt hole Uncle Sam has dug for himself since the 9/11 attacks.
The cure always begets another disease. Greenspan took us down to super low interest rates to try to keep things going post Tech Bubble Pop and 9/11.
Those low rates begat the credit and real estate bubbles.
Their popping begat the meltdown of the New York-London-based high-tech global financial system.
That has begotten this Depression, to treat which Washington a year ago went banannas with new debt.
Which leaves the Chinese with a foot in each of two boats, which the tides of history are pushing apart. They’ve been jawboning about the Dollar and reducing their dollar assets for several years now.
Perhaps the moment for the big move — allowing their currency to float — ie, CEASING to buy tons of dollars/dollars assets to keep their currency down — is upon us.
Here’s the last 18 months of the dollar. The DXY index.
Bottoming circa 78 or ready to revisit that 72 level??
This profile of the former Cigna exec who fell off his ass on the road to Damascus and has since become an advocate of relatively radical health care reform — answers all the questions again ludicrously in the air now that inbred ill educated assholes are showing up at Town Hall with machine guns.
Hillary — during the election campaign last summer — knew and warned that the health care battle would be a war. And she insisted that if you gave the insurance companies an inch they’d take a mile. She was ready for the war.
Obama, accustomed to charming people, seems to have thought Washington would like him so much that the institutional enemies of reform would cave in. This particular kind of naivete aside, he’s typical of his cohort — people who were impressionable still, ie teenagers, during the Reagantime and view the world thru the frame of corporate television that was born in the 80s.
The health care question is an aspect of the class war that the corporate class reignited during the 80s to found Globalization. It is called war for a reason. If Obama fails — with this astounding majority in the Congress — to get a public health care system up and running, then he will confirm fears of a year ago that he was not ready to be president.
He has the values, but may not have the vision. Hillary and Edwards both saw farther and deeper, into the deep ugly heart of what the USA became in the final quarter of the 20th century.
When News Corp reported quarterly results two weeks ago, Murdoch announced that all websites under the umbrella would convert to paid subscriptions.
No more free lunch.
What will this world be like in 5 years? The affluent will have something like journalism and the rest will be entertained?
The silcon-and-software revolution has been destroying the business of culture for twenty years. Music. Books. Now newspapers.
News Corp now dominates business news in the USA. Perhaps Murdoch’s move will blaze a trail, show the rest (and more worthy) how to survive the onslaught.
1. The long-term trend in American foreign affairs detailed in Chalmers Johnson‘s must-read SORROWS of EMPIRE — the trend of Pentagon aggregation of policy-making power in Washington via the simple step-wise business of building more and more bases …
The trend, of course, continues. Something like thirteen “permanent” american bases have been built in Iraq since 3/19/2003. And recent reports tell us that the Pentagon :
– has decided to pursue not only Terrorists but Drug Lords in Afghanistan. Support Your Local Sheriffs. Build them each a base.
– is negotiating the lease of seven army bases in Columbia from the Bogota government. The obvious policy worry here is re Venezuela (as the Times headline over the AP story makes clear).
If Obama allows Gates-Mullen to start a public war (as opposed to the meaty tenderizing in progress since early in the Bush-Cheneytime) along the Columbia-Venezuela border …
I find I have nothing to append to that “if” aside from a repeat of a repetition:
The shrinking portion of Washington policymaking that one might deem Discretionary more and more is made by the Pentagon. This uptrend began with the world wars, has never significantly corrected, and Obama for the past 18 months has shown no inclination to curb the Pentagon’s enthusiasms whatsoever.
Sorrows of an empire nobody needs.
2. The stark choices ahead of every major power on the planet are to cooperate as the resource and climate problems escalate, or to revert to the romantic nationalist philosophy of war of the early Modern centuries. That romance died in 1914, was buried in 1945, but rose again (in accordance with scripture) circa 1991, when the Soviet Union fell.
Most americans of our time were raised to believe in cooperation, the obvious exceptions being the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and baby Bill Kristol, who with their ilk daydream of Israel and the USA taking on all comers six-guns ablaze, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The view has some basis perhaps in Tel Aviv. Where one stands is a function of where one sits, by and large.
But why Washington has fallen in love with world war remains something of a mystery here. Profound and near perfect despair, one guesses, must underlie it. The Likud Lobby alone does not seem to have the punch.
3. OR:
Perhaps when presented with the grim spectacle of a Nation (i.e., a people) pulling itself apart — as the American people have been since Reagan was installed to jumpstart Globalization — perhaps a self-destructive, incoherent foreign policy is precisely what one should expect.
3(a) The incoherence might be superficial. Might make perfect sense from an eccentric and very unpatriotic point of view held by Owner-Operators.
3(b) Or the incoherence might be deep, reflecting fundamental differences among factions of Owner-Ops — a covert struggle of the sort that erupted into the public space in the assassinations of the 60s. Watergate. The Iran-Contra octopus (which may well have included the murder of Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme).
On the home front, the governmental reaction to Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Again: what one might expect as the Owner-Operators cut ties to the body of the Nation.
And: An EPA director telling New York firemen and steelworkers on September 12, 2001 that the air over the smoking pile of the Trade Center is fine. Keep digging for gold, boys.
3(c) In either case — 3a or 3b — Joe Sixpack and Soccer Mom are not part of the conversation, or likely of the solution.
Which only feeds the anti-political, antisocial atmosphere where everybody’s hustlin’, Working Hard and Playing Hard, to leave the nine of ten hindmost behind.
A vicious downward spiral. Diagnosed in excellent eccentric books across the decades …
The Spoiled Child of the Western World, by Henry Fairlie, 1976. The Honey and the Hemlock, by Eli Sagan, 1991. Losing Our Souls, by Edward Pessen, 1993. A Nation Gone Blind, by Eric Larsen, 2006.
Obama is certainly the best chance to break the trend since Kennedy. Perhaps given the constellation of events, his chances are better than Kennedy’s were. But …
Chalmers Johnson concludes his little talk (video above) by suggesting that for Americans with a little cash on the side a condo in Vancouver — Canada — might not be a bad idea.
4. OR:
Let’s blame the whole mysterious mess of American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union on my favorite martians — shall we?
Watch this episode — “The Warlord” — from I Spy, the late 60s show, then please comment as to whether it may have inspired (along with the Conrad) FF Coppola’s masterpiece a few years later.
The credits say that the episode was written by Robert Culp — the actor sharing the spotlight with Smokin’ Bill Cosby.
And at the very end one discovers the name of the actor playing the Warlord …
Also please comment on how it could be that television departed from this place circa 1969 (when The Name of the Game was airing “The White Birch” about the collapse of the Prague Spring) and ended up where it is today, where international affairs are treated in comic-book video-game fashion on the vile 24.
An American in Ireland, Richard Moore, worries often aloud about the world in articulate, informed style — at the moment about the Bilderbergers. Just now I dashed off a reply email that without trying hard encapsulates a view of the world (if not a Worldview):
The Bldbrgers are good and useful to consider. They don’t Run the World but they give insight into some of the people involved in the high level struggles to operate and endure the world.
They express a more European point of view than, eg, the Davos gatherings, which are more technocratic and global and American influenced. This European view is caught in our time in the middle, and I tend to sympathize with it.
I mean — the world today is dividing in a new way:
1. Russia and China, among the major powers, are still nation-states. Their owner-operators are still wed to their Nations (ie People). These powers can be read fairly easily as to what their interests are and how they are likely to behave to protect and forward them.
2. The US since the advent of the bomb has been ceasing to be a nation-state (if indeed it was ever a good idea to consider it as such).
(The bomb brought pressure to control events globally and to do so without major-power war; this pressure has been bending the minds of the people who run the National Security Apparat since the end of the war 1945. This is one big reason why the Apparat has grown so strong in Washington while the Congress has almost ceased to exist as a policy making body and the White House careers back and forth, with presidential heads more often than not winding up on platters.)
The owner-operators of the US began to reassert themselves behind Reagan’s smile and broad shoulders, having gone to school on the lessons of Vietnam (an educated working class is not a good idea, reliable pensions are not a good idea, fairly free and balanced mass media are not a good idea) and having realized that the technological revolution meant (re capital) that Globalization was the ticket.
To be extremely brief then: The US since the war has been morphing from something like a nation-state to a thing bestride the globe with two primary interests: to float the National Security Apparat (chiefly the Pentagon but also the mature so-called intelligence agencies) and to float the large globalizing corporations. Responsibility of the owner-operators for and to the Nation (ie People) has become almost neglible.
(Even the most Progressive voices among the American owner-operators are corporate-centric, as if someday Google may just blast off into space, Silent Running with Hughie, Dewey and Louie … )
3. Europe occupies too a rather new and strange space — having undertaken the Euro Union. But the traditional bonds between the component ruling classes and Nations (Peoples) — born of millenia of strife and tight geography — are still rather strong.
The Bilderbergers convey this uneasy place in the middle — between the brute classico Russian and Chinese nation-states and the global military-industrial enterprise based in the U.S.
Europe: Trying to “compete” with the run-amok North American colossus, while trying (as always) to survive the “Asian Hordes,” while trying to maintain the distinctly European take on the Individual-in-Society.
For my money, Europe’s approach to Modernity (the technological civilization that in the West succeeded Christendom) is superior to the American, the Russian and the Chinese. European societies seem to me superior.
So then — even though my own feet are rooted in the Working Class, I don’t find the Bilderbergers as alarming as some. (And I have always valued the reports from the chamber that Mr Estulin has been channeling for some time now.)
Rather, I find the entire careering planet alarming. Chiefly the unbridled advance of science these past two centuries, which has created monstrous wealth, technological processes and weapons that have left us and the earth at the mercy of forces I think NO one or one body of people has a chance to control, let alone govern. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart, as Paul Simon noted circa Watergate.
My view of Europe’s “superiority” doesn’t mean, of course, that if one had to bet on the Last Man Standing he should bet on the European Union. Indeed, many have been writing that the current financial crisis may ruin it.
Would Europe survive the Union’s disintegration? In some fashion, surely. Might that seismic de-centralizing move actually, despite costs, show us something of the way out of Modernity’s disaster? Too much to hope for, I suppose.
