Patt Morrison

Comic Con 2011: like a long and meandering metaphor for something far worse

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:24:41 -0700

The most effective way of describing the foreign is by comparison to the familiar. Comic Con is a huge event and because of its scope, there’s a lot to compare it to. Let’s start by saying it’s a recipe: what’s in it?

1. A heaping portion of writers, artists and filmmakers.
2. A smattering of retail giants.
3. Flambéed (French for “to cook”) with a large helping of Hollywood funding.

Now take that product and then obfuscate it entirely by using masses of glassy eyed models and in quantities so large as to prevent one from looking elsewhere, ever. Now splay this abomination out like a carcass for feeding. Who will come?

In a metaphor: the entire planet.

In Mazda’s, Scions and other affordable Japanese automobiles, 125,000 guests descended like vultures to feed and feed they did - upon a painstakingly crafted and barely clothed spectacle of a triple C[1]. I’m guessing the sight of those remains would turn the stomach of even the most experienced morgue technician. Autopsy report: too many good times.

Alternatively to a corpse: maybe Comic Con is like Mardi Gras (Brazilian for “Festival of Comics”). But instead of revelers wearing basically nothing, everyone dresses like homeless Batman. Homeless Batman is like regular Batman, but is down on his luck and could just use a few bucks to make it by. Or really anything, man. Remember that movie “Pay it Forward?” Anyway, the models aren’t accounted for in this literary flourish, because they are consumed in an alternation between two modes of emotion: shamelessness and empathetic embarrassment.

How about this: Comic Con is like a mason jar stuffed to the glass with tadpoles, meandering in a very lazy circle. The feeble and packed-in creatures are swimming just fast enough to stir a gentle maelstrom which, far from a regular (non-mason jar/tadpole maelstrom), is very tedious to watch. Further mocking the natural majesty of a non-metaphorical natural phenomenon – this one contains a group of tadpoles dressed as Voltron.

The boring really begins to sets in when one realizes that 80% of these tadpoles aren’t even dressed like a super hero and are instead dressed like a total dweeb. Still, some are able to tolerate the jar’s confines by queuing up for 3 hours to see a screening of the “Big Bang Theory.” Another crowd might be waiting in line to get some tadpole food like kelp, algae or edible mold (these would represent the human foodstuffs that were ACTUALLY being sold like churros, pizza and edible mold.) One might think “I would definitely pay 175 dollars to see this!” Well you’re out of luck, because this is a metaphor. Save that cash and take a boat to Saltsraumen Norway: home of the world’s largest maelstrom!

So who was running the show? Were they too dressed like unkempt super heroes? No. But they did act like alligators. So I gave them the title “Los Cocodrilos” (Spanish for Los Crocodiles). Instead of using their teeth, like regular crocodiles, (which they are not - they are “Los Cocodrilos”) they would instead snatch up their prey with bargains on exclusive Dr. Who memorabilia and X-Men reprints. Our vultures and tadpoles are lucky if they got away with their necks, by which I mean wallets, by which I mean money.

To those of you familiar with Comic Con - the only surprises you might interpret are the great liberties I’ve taken with implied comparisons. Yeah, maybe there’s a chance I’m over-cooking these obvious beefs. Maybe. But we’re not done, so find yourself another plate and grab a seat at the bistro “SCPR Patt Morrison Blog” and get ready for more and watch out because it’s hot. In addi- and save room for dessert. In addition to being overcrowded and overpriced (this observation is original and good) the space could not accommodate. It felt like I was in a cattle bin packed hoof to hoof - with other cows (I’m also a cow ((I’m not above comparison)) in this scenario). Cows to be processed - processed into obvious beefs(teaks) and I think we’re about well-done.

For most of the patrons I spoke with, Comic Con seemed to have been a bitter-bite, but for others, it was an acquired taste. I’ll be honest that I used the words “hellish nightmare” in my four-hour long Grumble-Con (which was a “con” I was holding during and in the middle of Comic Con) but I’m guessing I am not in their target audience.

The moral is that clothes actually DON’T make the man, because a woman wearing a Batman costume is in reality, still a woman. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Another thing I learned is that metaphors can liken people to things that aren’t people and because of that, I don’t feel so mean. You see, I’m not doing anything to a person anymore –It’s like I’m only being cruel to a horse or a dog or something.

Check out the montage I put together at the bottom and remember: this entire piece is really just a metaphor for a well-written story published in The New Yorker.

[1]

It can blow up things, so please -- some respect for ''nuclear''

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:33:47 -0700

Not to be schoolmarmish about this, but just as E does not equal mc to the third power, neither is the power that this equation helped to harness [or unleash] to be trifled with -- or mispronounced.

In our segment today about whether Japan's domino-effect disasters of quake, tsunami and nuclear breakdowns could derail nuclear energy projects, the word came up a lot.

So, repeat after me:

Nuclear: NEW - klee - your.

''Klee'' rhymes with ''glee,'' as in the popular TV show. Easy mnemonic device.

Nuclear family. Nucleic acids. Nuclear Rabbit [the band, not a radiated hare]. A whole host of fabulous uses await you.

And now you know my ears' particular fingernails-on-a-chalkboard susceptibility.

In our next what-peeves-Patt installment: the ghastly attempts to modify the word ''unique.''

Stephen Hawking and me

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:42:40 -0800

I've interviewed so many renowned people over the years that I don't get very impressed any more. So naturally, it's the one man I can't interview who impresses me the most.

Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist and monumental thinker whose mind still takes him to places that his body -- and our bodies -- can never go, into the depths and abstractions of space, was at Caltech a couple of weeks ago, speaking through a voice generator to hundreds inside Beckman Auditorium and hundreds more outside, watching the proceedings on a big screen. [Students had lined up for hours to see him -- 13-year-old Evan Hetland of Valencia told the LA Times that ''it's like seeing the nerd pope!''

And a few of us, the very fortunate, got a private audience with this exceptional man. Hawking has had Lou Gehrig's disease -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the same disease that killed my father -- since he was a young man. The profound limitations to his body are in inverse proportion to the unfettered luminousness of his brain.

Unlike a lot of the Caltech people in that auditorium, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what Hawking's mind, his abstractions of black holes and quantum matters, has conceived and thought through. I did tell him that I try to read his best-seller, ''A Brief History of Time,'' once a year, and intend to keep doing so until I finally understand it. [I am told that, in his turn, through his great Caltech friend and colleague Kip Thorne, Hawking flirted with me, which is one of those moments you put in your memoirs.]

Hawking's speech at Beckman Auditorium was more personal than scientific; he called it ''My Brief History,'' stories of his English childhood and his Cambridge education, droll and self-deprecatory -- and delivered in the American accents of the speech synthesizer that long ago supplanted his own voice.

Perhaps it's not a paradox that the man whose life has been composed of decades of borrowed time should spend so much of it contemplating the very concept of time itself; As he said at Caltech, the possibility of an early death "makes you realize life is worth living.''

Stephen Hawking and yours truly

-- photo by Michael Shermer

Lewis Black, Justice Ginsburg -- and You

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:22:45 -0800

As we launch into the loving-your-public-radio-station-means-never-having-to-buy-a-tote-bag season, I thought a little reminder was in order. It’s a reminder of the kind of programs and the caliber of guests that my team and I put before you every weekday.

Here are a couple of recent ones that have moved me beyond words.

There was Lewis Black, the humorist whose sardonic book, ‘’I’m Dreaming of a Black Christmas,’’ doesn’t begin to sum up the man.

He and I talked for more than a half-hour last week; he and his Comedy Central compadre Stephen Colbert are among the comics who have performed for troops in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and Black is set to do so again in December.

There were two moments in our interview when he was so impassioned that he dropped the professional humorist role: one was when I played a cut of former Arkansas governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee mocking the Obama health care reform plan requirement that people with preexisting conditions not be denied health insurance because of their conditions.

Huckabee likened it to trying to get insurance on your house after it’s burned down; Black, who had just performed at a benefit for kids with cystic fibrosis, was livid. He invoked the ailing kids who’d been born with CF, and he called Huckabee a ‘’schmuck’’ – for want of a stronger term, because we were on the radio, after all.

The other moment came when I mentioned that Black was going back on a USO tour in December, making him a kind of Bob Hope with edgier humor, performing for military men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we talked, Black went on about these young, young kids in difficult, dangerous circumstances, and how politicians’ posturings and tributes can’t begin to describe what these young Americans go through. As he talked, he got a bit choked up – again.

And then there was my interview with Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman on the high court. She speaks so softly I sometimes had to lean in to hear her well. At one point she reached into her handbag, a little red and white woven affair, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why – until she brought out a well-thumbed and well-marked copy of the Constitution and other significant federal documents, including Article IV, and the Fugitive Slave Act.

After our interview, we talked a little longer about elements of Article IV and the slave act, which the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution rendered moot by outlawing slavery.

The Constitution didn’t use the word ‘’slave,’’ but that’s what the Act was about; any ‘’person held to service or labour’’ in one state who managed to escape still ‘’shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.’’ In other words, a slave was still property and had to be returned to the slave owner, under the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, which requires one state to honor the contracts of another state.

Justice Ginsburg told me that novelist Herman Melville’s father-in-law was a Massachusetts judge and abolition supporter named Lemuel Shaw. In the turbulent years before the Civil War, that full faith and credit clause came into conflict with abolitionism and the underground railroad smuggling of slaves to safety and freedom.

In the notorious 1851 court case of an escaped Georgia slave named Thomas Sims, Judge Shaw ruled that he was bound by the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, and had no legal choice but to return Sims to his slave-owner.

All this, Justice Ginsburg was telling me, left its mark on Melville, and on American literature. When Melville wrote his novella ‘’Billy Budd,’’ he modeled Captain Vere in part on his father-in-law, for Vere, too, was forced into an agonizing choice: as Melville described it, ``We are not talking about justice; we are talking about the law.’’ Vere had to condemn the angelic Billy Budd to hang for accidentally killing a shipmate.

Wow.

This is just by way of reminding you of some of the phenomenal guests you get to hear here, thanks to … you; in guests and programs like these, you get back every dime you put into these programs – and then some.

Thanks, and keep it up.

Bell Dude Gets the Charmin Treatment -- and Help for Phone Bill Hell?

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:45:59 -0700

After the authorities swooped in early one morning recently and arrested that bunch of Bell city officials, I had to wonder whether some of them might find jail a teeny bit less stressful than the prospect of showing their faces in public again.

There’s plenty of righteous anger that’s justifiably erupted among the residents of Bell, whose millions of dollars in hard-earned taxes, as the LA Times reported, were financing CEO-sized salaries and benefits for city officials.

So here’s one response:

Just a few days after onetime Bell city administrator Robert Rizzo posted $2 million bail and got to walk out of jail, his Huntington Beach house got garlanded in toilet paper.

About which tp-ing I have just one question –

Was it used?

Now, remember the lively talk we had earlier this week about the infuriating complexity and opacity of cell phone bills, and how they make the U.S. tax code look like a model of clarity? Well, the FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, wants to make them simpler, and he’s here to explain how – and even whether – it can be done. What I want to know is, can he read his own cell phone bill?

And the Republican and Democratic candidates for California lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado and Gavin Newsom, will be debating why it is they want the job – and what exactly the lieutenant governor does.

David Lazarus is in my chair on Friday – be kind!

Richard Dawkins, science star and atheist poster PhD, and Philip Roth on polio

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:11:11 -0700

Love him or hate him -- and millions of people do just that -- Richard Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist and a compelling polemicist for atheism. In this very religious country, where atheist billboards generate protests, Americans tell pollsters that the last candidate they'd ever vote for is an atheist.

Nearly 60% of Americans have told pollsters they believe in creationism -- right along with a few presidential candidates; shouldn't atheism also be part of the discourse? Dawkins argues yes, and then some. He is going to be right here on Thursday's program with his new book about evolution, ''The Greatest Show on Earth.''

I would listen to Richard Dawkins reading the phone book -- is there still a phone book? -- so you won't want to miss this one.

The envelope for the Nobel Prize for Literature gets ripped open Thursday morning; one of the names that's usually high on the list of possibles is Philip Roth, the renowned American novelist> I interviewed him on Wednesday's program about his new novel, ''Nemesis.'' Few Americans now remember when polio was the terror and dread of every parent, and a vaccine was just a phantom hope. Roth crafts a story of a summer outbreak in a New Jersey neighborhood, and how it altered the life and character of one young man.

This is a fine and heart-breaking book, and as I told the author on the air, I turned each page with dread -- the same feeling that American parents must have awakened to on summer mornings when a child's play day could end in crippling disease and death. The book is all the more important in evoking the devastation of diseases that vaccinations can prevent, especially when some parents now refuse to get their children vaccinated.

Your turn to play ... me!

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:20:58 -0700

Next week's hour-long U.S. Senate debate between Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and Republican challenger Carly Fiorina promises to be a barn-burner -- right here at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, September 29.

And if you've ever fancied yourself sitting in my chair and asking the questions, now's your chance to have a shot at it, virtually.

We're hoping to be able to mix in some questions for the candidates from you, in your very own dulcet tones. Think of a policy question you'd like to put to the candidates and call our Patt Morrison message line at 626 583 5250. If your question is a winner, we might play it on air for the contenders, so be sure to leave your name, where you're from, and contact information so we can verify that it's not your stunt double doing the calling!

We've had some remarkable interviews this week, so if you missed any of them, do go to the Patt Morrison page and have a listen. Mel Brooks on Tuesday! Neil Sedaka on Monday! And the Great Typo Hunters on Thursday, two men who traveled the nation with [the lamentably misspelled brand-named] ''Wite-Out'' to correct orthographic solecisms -- including one on a particular historic sign at the Grand Canyon. That one got them haled into federal court, on a federal complaint that contained -- you guessed it -- misspellings.

Hasta Monday.

Patt Morrison

Why to Vaccinate Your Kids, and Some Everyday Irritations

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:54:55 -0700

Far and away the most calls today, and the most dispiriting calls, were about childhood vaccinations – how students entering public kindergarten are supposed to have them but how often, very often, parents exercise a ‘’personal belief exemption’’ and don’t vaccinate their kids.

That ‘’belief’’ used to be about religious convictions; now it’s about the fear, fed by the fact that anyone can say anything at all on the Internet, that vaccinations are dangerous for children and even trigger autism.

If you heard the exasperation in my guests’ voices, it’s for good reason. The New Yorker’s Michael Specter wrote a chapter about this in his book ‘’Denialism.’’ He and pediatrician Peter Shulman are stupefied and alarmed by some of the claptrap being peddled as vaccine science on the Internet – and believed by otherwise educated, rational people who wouldn’t credit a back-fence rumor but buy into the same quality of ''information'' they find online.

Polio, measles, diphtheria – these killed multiple thousands upon thousands of American children just a few decades ago. They still do kill millions of kids around the world. Vaccination has been the single biggest instrument in defeating these communicable diseases – and yet as more parents choose not to vaccinate their kids, we’re endangering a young population growing up with no immunities to killer diseases, not because there is no protection, but because their parents choose not to avail themselves of it.

Without a doubt we’ll talk about this again.

Now I’m going to go on a small double-barreled rant about two irksome practices – and it occurs to me that a lot of you may already be converts on this.

The first is killing my ears. In English, when you use the word ‘’the’’ before a word that begins with a vowel, like ‘’the extra’’ or ‘’the opening,’’ the ‘’e’’ in ‘’the’’ is always pronounced wih a long ‘’e,’’ as in ‘’thee.’’

Try it yourself, right now. THEE extra, THEE opening, to distinguish where the article, ``the,’’ ends, and where the word after it begins.

Now, when the word – noun, adjective or adverb -- begins with a consonant, the ‘’e’’ can be short, as in, ‘’THUH blue house … THUH calendar … ‘’ But not when the word begins with a vowel.

The laudable pop culture example I can think of this rule comes courtesy of Jim Morrison, in the Doors’ seemingly endless song, ‘’The End,’’ when he’s singing, ``This is THEE end, my only friend, THEE end.’’

Amazing but true. I'm using rock-and-roll to teach pronunciation.

What I now hear constantly -- sorry, Gen Y, but this especially means you -- makes me cringe: ``THUH end.’’

I had to listen to a repeat-loop of a phone recording today: ‘’Your call will be answered in THUH order it was received.’’ And overhearing a conversation at a market: ``I was watching THUH Open,’’ meaning the tennis tournament.

That it is incorrect is only lamentable. But the ‘’THUH’’ phenomenon commits the far great offense of being ugly. The lyricism of English is one of the joys and glories of the language. How did this awful clunker get started, and how do we stop it? Tell me THEE answer, please!

The second irksome practice is something that ISN’T happening. Fewer people seem to be know, as the cliché goes, ‘’which way is north’’ [a cliché that used to mean knowing the obvious].

At least a half-dozen times in the last month, I’ve called a business to double-check a location, places like a chain store, a restaurant, a wireless phone shop.

We’re at the corner of X and Y, the clerk – associate – says. Which corner? I ask. Northeast? Northwest? Just the corner, I was told. There are four corners, I say. Which one is it, so I can figure out logistics?

The associates don’t know what side of the street the business is on. East or west? North or south? ‘’Next to Starbucks’’ one offered – which doesn’t help if you’re trying to plan a route. Or they’ll simply say, ‘’I don’t know,’’ in a tone that lets me know that I’m snotty for even asking, as if I’ve posed a question about quantum mechanics. One woman just handed the phone to her manager to answer me.

One associate was completely flummoxed when I asked, I’m heading west on Sunset, so which corner are you on? She asked, which way is west?

Is this a consequence of the Mapquest/GPS generation? Isn’t there a compass in the iPhone?

Are Taxes the Same as Charitable Donations?

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:30:23 -0700

Some pretty startling content to Thursday’s program – and I’m not talking about just the news that the military is refusing to award Purple Hearts to some veterans who have concussion trauma from explosives, a story investigated and reported by NPR and ProPublica. There’s a link on the Patt Morrison page.

What took me aback even more was an argument put forward by a caller and a couple of commenters on the blog. A UC Berkeley researcher had found that poor people -- those earning under $25K a year -- give a higher percentage of their income to charity than do people earning above $75K. And not by a small margin, either -- 4.2 percent for the have-nots against 2.7 percent f or the haves.

There were of course lots of ways to slice and dice these numbers, like how much of this giving goes into church collection plates as compared to arts and cultural organizations, and whether the more prosperous are more likely to give to ''vanity'' nonprofits, like colleges or other institutions that have bigger ''bragging rights'' among some.

One caller objected to the guest's use of the word ‘’class,’’ as in ‘’upper class’’ and ‘’lower class.’’ We like to think of this country as class-free; here, ``class’’ ranks right up there with some four-letter words as a very filth noun indeed. But although we are a very aspirational and mobile society, we do have classes in this country, socially and economically. Paul Fussell’s fabulous book ‘’Class’’ nails a lot of this down. While we like to think of ourselves as classless and always use the example of Abe Lincoln, log-cabin-to-White House, the income divide has been getting larger, drifting toward more of a Gilded Age profile than the flattened class system we like to see in the national mirror.

But I was brought up short when a caller argued that the prosperous already give big dough to charity. It's just called by another name -- taxes.

Seriously??

I know we Americans don’t like paying much for anything – evidence the Internet – but to suggest that taxes are a kind of forced charity? Some people might find that argument almost un-American. One of them would be the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He said that ''Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.'' More specifically, they're what we pay for the roads that take employees and suppliers to and from work and shopping, for police and Social Security, for fixing potholes and for public health programs. It’s what we pay to be able to flush the toilets, and have safe drinking water come out of the tap [and in my case, to call the county public health inspector to come out on a Saturday when my neighbor’s sewer line broke]. It’s what we pay for poor people to afford food so their kids – who sit in public school classrooms alongside everyone else’s kids – can concentrate and learn and grow up to be responsible neighbors and hire-able employees and consumers and taxpayers, and, just maybe, self-made millionaire entrepreneurs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who grew up in a country that provides a kind of tax-supported universal health care program that he admired so much, was way off the mark when he was running for governor seven years ago. Here is what he said, and here’s my rejoinder in the LA Times.

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/26/local/me-patt26

Glenn Beck and Me -- Not What You're Thinking!

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:15:33 -0700

For a moment there, I was really jealous of Glenn Beck.

At his rally in Washington, D.C. the chat show host told his fans that he had gone to the National Archives, the sanctum sanctorum for the nation’s most precious documents, and actually held, in his own two hands, ``the first inaugural address written in his hand by George Washington.’’

Oh my. To put your own fingers where George Washington’s were – a matchless, priceless experience, no? Anyone would be jealous of Mr. Beck’s privilege.

But it didn't happen. As politely as possible, the National Archives said so.

Beck, granted a VIP tour of the Archives, was simply allowed to gaze upon the extraordinary document, the speech delivered by the cannot-tell-a-lie Washington [the cherry tree story itself was a fabrication of Washington’s adulatory biographer Parson Weems]. But as for laying hands on it, or on any of these documents, ‘’those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained archival staff,’’ said archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

Staff who wear gloves and other protective gear and doubtless work in an environment so immaculate that your average operating room is probably a teeming landfill by comparison.

The founding documents that are on public display in the Archives – the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence – are in bulletproof, helium-filled bronze cases that are lowered into a bomb-proof vault every night.

And now here’s where Glenn Beck can be envious of me.

There were perhaps 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence printed up hastily by a young Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776. Fewer than 30 of those are known to survive, and only five of those are in private hands.

And I got to see one of them. Not from behind a red velvet rope. Not from ten or even five feet away, but nose to nose.

Thanks to the good offices of good friends, I was invited to see one of those privately held copies in one of those brief periods when it wasn't on tour. It lay in a climate-controlled sealed case, on a low table. To get close, I had to kneel, which was the right impulse anyway. Reverence was entirely in order; this is one of the great documents, the great moments, in human history.

I put my hands on either side of the secure case and looked long and closely at the Declaration of Independence, in the same way you’d hold a loved one’s face and look back into that pair of eyes.

I’m always practically moved to tears by these conjunctions of the then and there, and the here and now. To stand within the same walls where Shakespeare once stood, for example, or to sit in the same restaurant where Thomas Jefferson dined, places me, through the thin conceit of time, in their company.

So to lay my own eyes on such a momentous object as this was to stand at the fulcrum of history. Whose eyes had, like mine, also beheld this ``Dunlap broadside’’ when it was fresh off the presses 23 decades before? Thomas Jefferson’s? John Hancock’s? Was this the copy that was dispatched to General Washington in the field, or to the capitals of one of the 13 colonies?

Think of how a fan is thrilled by some small, fleeting contact with an adored movie star. To the movie star, it probably makes no difference, no impression at all. But to the fan, it is a moment of a lifetime. My small moment with this document, which existed for centuries before me and will survive long after I’ve vanished, gives me some tiny claim on its venerable history – and this country’s.

Speaking of venerable, James Ellroy -- who, like our first president, is quite the dandy dresser -- has finished his magisterial trilogy of modern American history and how brings us his own story, his mother’s murder and his life with and without and about women. ‘’The Hilliker Curse’’ and James Ellroy, both here on Tuesday.

The Iraq War: Cost Plus, Years Plus, Lives Plus

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:09:25 -0700

What a difference seven and a half years make. In the spring of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, nominally to suss out weapons of mass destruction being amassed by the killer-dictator Saddam Hussein.

No such weapons turned up. Saddam Hussein was toppled, then hunted down and hanged. And the United States slogged through its long and costly commitment to Iraq: early three-quarters of a trillion dollars, nearly 5,000 American lives, and the lives and livelihoods of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

U.S. combat troops have just left Iraq, as President Obama’s Oval Office address noted, but today we talked about what the United States and Iraq have gained from this. Not much, is what most of you think.

Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker agreed that it would be a long time until Iraq can achieve a recognizable and stable democracy and the United States can reap any benefit from that – years in which the U.S., as the Washington bureau chief of Al Jazeera International pointed out, has lost standing and much of whatever support it had in the Mideast.

Do please go to the Patt Morrison page and read the many comments there, sad, skeptical and dispirited, for the most part, over a war that to your way of thinking cost so much and netted so little. The good-versus-bad casting of Saddam Hussein is out of synch with the West’s nuanced history when it comes to his longstanding and bloody tyranny in his own country, a reign that nonetheless sometimes provided a counterweight to Iranian ambitions and to Muslim extremism, like banning most Sharia courts. Those were among the reasons the U.S. had a rather a cordial relationship with Iraq during some of the 1980s.

Many of you questioned why, if the United States was committed to defeating murderous tyrants, it didn’t try to oust Pol Pot in Cambodia, or Moammar Qadafi in Libya -- and why the coup attempt the United States had urged Iraqis to stage against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf war was not backed to the hilt by the U.S. government, and failed.

This week’s departure of combat troops is not, as has been so widely pointed out, an occasion for high-fiving or ‘’mission accomplished’’ declarations, but a somber watershed in the history of a war whose costs are immediately obvious but whose benefits to this country leave much still to be understood, much less realized.

I’m still being buttonholed by listeners who were tickled at our coverage last week of the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution – by one vote, cast by a young Tennessee Republican who said doing what his mother asked him to.

The 19th Amendment meant that American women finally got the right to vote almost 150 years after the Declaration of Independence. It’s hard for women now to imagine the legal status of women in the 19th century – which is to say, virtually none. Not being able to vote was only one of many bars. Women could be denied legal rights to property, to contracts, even to their own children; husbands could abuse them with virtual impunity, control their comings and goings.

Women who crusaded to get the vote were mocked, reviled, arrested and tormented in prison – and while nowadays American women are as negligent about exercising the franchise as men [GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s lackadaisical record of not voting in the state she wants to govern is a contentious campaign point], women’s suffrage has meant [hello again, Ms. Whitman] that women have been elected to public office in slowly – very slowly – growing numbers. Still, women hold fewer than 20% of the seats in the United States Congress, where California Democrat Nancy Pelosi holds the powerful speakership of the House of Representatives.

The Prop. 8 Recipe: Hold the Rice ... and the Prof and the Barista

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:47:36 -0700

Let's begin with a rule and a caveat: never, ever insult the Starbucks barista.

An English professor was, according to the New York Post, escorted off the coffee house premises by New York's finest, reportedly for yelling at and then potty-mouthing a Starbucks employee; the prof told the Post that "linguistically, it's stupid" that Starbucks expected her to specify no cheese or butter when she ordered a multigrain bagel. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese,' " is the way she put it to the Post. ``When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want."

She lost it, the story goes, and wound up yelling an anatomical epithet at the barista.

Well. For one thing, you'd expect a professor of English to have many more vocabulary options. And for another, there are so very many reasons not to holler at these hard-working service folks, not the least of which is that we may all just be one more economic downturn away from working on their side of the counter.

That being said, I am in the prof's corner when it comes to her expressed dislike for the "venti, grande" size labels Starbucks uses. McDonald's or Starbucks can deploy whatever focus-grouped, marketing-driven labels they wish, but when you sell three sizes of anything, they are, by definition, small, medium and large, which is how I order my coffee.

Americans' resistance to anything in a "small" except in dress sizes, lest we feel we're not getting our money's worth, has resulted in a small Starbucks coffee being called a "tall." I haven't been to a fast-food places in a while, but I don't remember seeing "small" on the menus.

Still, I'll only be seriously worried when someone rewrites the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to describe the ursines as "Large, Super-Sized and Big Gulp."

Now, on to real news: on today's program, UCI law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky walks us through how it is that judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided to say "don't" to a renewal of same-sex "I dos," and ordered more legal groundwork in the Prop. 8 case -- and why same-sex marriage supporters aren't altogether displeased with that.

Prop. 8 Ruling is Coming, and Zsa Zsa's Husband is Going

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:08:52 -0700

I can predict right here, right now, what Wednesday’s big news will be --

The long-awaited federal district court judge’s ruling in San Francisco on California’s same-sex marriage ban. We'll announce it right here on the air on this program.

The same-sex marriage ban has been brewing in a number of states for a few years, and in California’s state courts for ten years, as far back as the Proposition 22, California Defense of Marriage Act in 2000.

In 2008, Prop. 8 amped up the argument, and the case went from being a state to a federal matter when opponents of Prop. 8 took it to Judge Vaughan Walker’s courtroom.

Judge Walker has been hearing and weighing evidence about Prop. 8 for what seems like ages now, and however he rules, this one really will – as you always hear people threaten over a traffic ticket – go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Whatever you have to say about the ruling, you’ll be able to say it on the air on this program – and blog it on the Patt Morrison page, too. I can’t remember running into anyone who’s lukewarm on this subject.

And ... no kids? No problem! Compared to thirty years ago, twice as many women are choosing not have children at all. Are you among them? What are the reasons, and the pluses and minuses to being child-free? Sure want to hear from you about this one.

You know, I pride myself on being politically au courant but I didn’t even know Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband was running for governor of California – until now, when he decided not to run for governor any more.

The health of his wife, says Prince Frederic von Anhalt, dictates that he drop out of the race, which he had entered as an independent, on a platform of legalizing marijuana, prostitution and Cuban cigars.

[Herr or HH von Anhalt, your choice – he was the son of a German cop but took his title when he was adopted at the age of 37 in a business transaction – had already made his candidacy otherwise notable as far as I'm concerned. California has for decades been laudably progressive about banning the sale and importation of products made from imperiled species, from polar bears to exotic cats and reptiles. In January, alligator and crocodile joined the verboten list. The would-be gov announced his candidacy wearing alligator-skin cowboy boots.]

If by some weird chance he had been elected, at least California voters would already have had their ears attuned to a governor with a Mittel-European accent.

Why we're not laughing [when Comedy Congress isn't on]

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:46:43 -0700

No matter how bad the week has been, Comedy Congress perks everyone up -- if you didn't hear it during the program, go online. Go ahead -- give yourself a treat, and a laugh! Alonzo Bodden, Ben Gleib and Greg Proops make magic when they make mock.

And, truth to tell, it has been a pretty bad week; a Pew Center poll shows that Americans are pretty cranky about virtually every institution, from government to business to the news media. This is the worst siege the economy's had since the Depression, and the latest economic numbers don't show things getting much better any time soon. Do we have good reason to be disaffected with all of our institutions, or are we being, in the words of a Slate article, ''American hypocrites,'' who've come to expect and demand a comfortable, good life and government goodies as part of it -- but don't like to pay for any of it, and are outraged that we're being asked to?

Believe me, it's a topic we're not done with by a long shot. We'll talk about it again on the air soon, and in the meantime, inveigh away here on the Patt Morrison page.

November's getting closer, and a man named John Marcotte hopes to close in on getting the million or so signatures he needs to put on the ballot an initiative to ban divorce in California. Don't go get new glasses -- you read it right. Ban divorce in California. He's leveraging off Prop. 8 with the idea that if we truly want to protect the institution of marriage, we should go all the way -- not just prohibit same-sex marriage but see to it that married couples stay together. Dozens of you had plenty to say about this on the air and now on the Patt Morrison page. If this riles you, go online and say so. We'll update you as his initiative moves closer -- or not -- to a ballot in a polling place near you.

Be sure to listen to me with Brendan and Rico on ''Dinner Party Download'' this weekend talking about diagnosing Americans' degrees of happiness via Twitter.

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/dinnerpartydownload/2010/07/weekly-dinner-party-downloads.html

Some of you may have seen the Peabody-winning documentary on PBS earlier this year about the Chandler family dynasty in Los Angeles, founders of the LA Times and almost as powerful a shaper of the LA landscape as a seven-point earthquake. I moderated an event at the Central Library recently about the documentary, and if you didn't get to be there, here's the next best thing: a podcast of it!

Library event about the Chandlers of LA

Rave reviews -- mixed ... and John Yoo and you? Hoo boy.

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:53:58 -0700

''Rave on,'' sang Buddy Holly.

Not so fast, says LA County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

A 15-year-old girl died of an evident drug overdose after the Electric Daisy music festival at the Coliseum. The doctor in charge of the California Hospital Medical Center emergency room is Dr. Marc Futernick, who had a lot of sharp criticism of rave events on the program today.

Raves, music festivals -- whatever you call them, he says, they always send far more people to the emergency room than other music events. Listen to him online on the Patt Morrison page, describing the human damage he saw in the emergency room -- including a festival-goer who had been trampled and left with spinal injuries. She still bore shoe-marks when she came in.

Drugs like Ecstasy circulate at these events, and one caller we didn't have time to get on the air agreed with Dr. Futernick about the dehydrating effects of such drugs. The caller said water bottles aren't allowed into the events, and inside, a bottle of water costs $7 -- probably not where partying teenagers would spend their money. Indeed, Dr. Futernick said one patient had swiped a water bottle from someone else -- it was spiked with drugs.

Supervisor Yaroslavsky wants a moratorium on future raves at the Coliseum, but a lot of you stuck up for them and said it's about individual responsibility. But still -- why do raves, call them what you will, send more people to hospitals proportionally than other concerts do? Got any ideas? Set them down here.

And some of you really blew your stack at us for having John Yoo on today with conservatives' reasons to oppose Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Folks, here's the point: not only did he write about this very topic in the New York Times, but like him or not, agree with him or not, he was a major architect for years of Bush Administration policy about presidential authority and the ''unitary executive'' idea of broader presidential powers. What he did then is still influencing constitutional theorizing now.

Next time, the ''beauty bias.'' It's illegal to discriminate on the grounds of religion or race, but the fat, the short and the unattractive feel discrimination every day -- in the workplace and in their paychecks. Can the law look out for them, too? Should it? That's what we'll want to hear from you about, so make those phones ring like a Salvation Army volunteer standing at a Christmas kettle!

-- Patt Morrison

Getcha hot props, right here! And myth-busters, arachnid edition

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:51:01 -0700

C'mon, you know you love it. Initiatives, baby! The people's hands on the steering wheel of state!

We gotcha some doozies for November, like legalizing marijuana and a big water measure just in time for Arnold Schwarzenegger to leave office [and maybe go off to bust up some dams, or build 'em?]. Tune in today, ye masters of California.

And summer is arachno-season; I see new webs every morning when I trudge outside for my newspaper. I've never read any messages in them like the yowza adjectives in the webs spun in the charming book ''Charlotte's Web,'' but the bigger message is ''spiders are cool.''

They kill unhelpful insects. We smash them way, way too often, and we have way, way too many urban legends about them. On yesterday's program, our arachnid expert from the LA County Museum of Natural History shot down all the myths about violin spiders and brown recluses here in Southern California. No such thing, he declared, and like Joe DiMaggio at bat, he kept swinging at every caller's tale of such spiders and knocking it out of the park: Did you see the spider? Did you see the spider? There are spiders with a nasty bite but the only one that can do serious damage to your health around here is the classic black widow.

Not convinced? Go the Patt Morrison page and have a listen.

Me, I am not a squasher. I get a glass and a slip of paper and escort said arachnid out of my house to do his or her useful work somewhere other than my bathtub.

-- Patt Morrison

World Cup or no, do we still hate soccer?

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:34:47 -0700

I got a teeny glimpse of the passion that fuels soccer fans around the world when we examined the premise: Does soccer ... oh, what's the technical word? Right: Does soccer suck? [Even if you missed the segment, you can listen to it online, and tap out your opinion here.]

Ferocity on both sides, the lovers and the haters. NPR commentator Frank Deford has been vicious in his assessment of soccer being, like swimming, a sport people do, not a sport they watch. A goodly number of you actually agreed, though perhaps not so acidly as Mr. Deford. Every four years, we seem to toy with soccer's affections during the World Cup, and then dump it to go back to our old ''steadies,'' football [American-style] and baseball.

And on that point of nomenclature, football vs. soccer, be sure to read what Landon Donovan told me about it in my recent Times column; he's the So Cal soccer sensation who's saved the U.S.'s bacon in the World Cup already.

TGIF, TGIC - thank goodness it's Cortines, our semi-regular session with the LAUSD superintendent. The summer's just a breather to gear up for the new school year's dispiriting budget news. What else is up in Classroom Chalkland? [Do they even use chalk anymore?]

Los Tigres del Norte, the renowned norteno band [sorry, I don't know how to do tildes in this corner of the blog universe], is playing at Disney Hall on Friday, and sabes que? [again, apologies for no upside-down question mark]: Jorge Hernandez, the band's frontman, tells me what this gig means for the brothers and cousin who are ... Los Tigres!

George Carlin remembered, and genetically modified foods -- yum, or bum?

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:07:53 -0700

Burning up the phones about this one! The idea of raising money for the state coffers by selling electronic ad space on license plates went over like a lead Hindenburg.

The man behind the bill to study the idea, state Sen. Curren Price, was a good sport to come on the program today, because pretty much everybody bashed on the idea [although we didn't hear from body-shop owners, who may be thrilled at the work coming their way from all the fender benders that may result.]

The ads would only blink on if a car had stopped in traffic or at a red light, but even so, do we need more things to take our minds off driving? One of you blogged that it's ridiculous to require hands-free cell phone calls and ban texting at the wheel but go ahead and put flashing images right in front of drivers' eyes. And if you're close enough to actually see what's being advertised -- you're too close.

Steve Hymon, the former LA Times transpo guy and now author of the transit agency Metro's blog, didn't think too highly of it either -- the distraction factor first among other considerations. Me, I don't like the idea of my car as a rolling ad for things I might not even approve of. BP ads, anyone?

And imagine election season on the freeways. Would Meg Whitman be spending her tens of millions on ads on the car bumper ahead of us? An invitation to political road rage??

The money for the study is coming from the bumper-ad industry, not from taxpayers, Sen. Price reassured us, but I'm always wary of any study funded by the industry that's the object of study. Prediction: the DMV will find that this is not in the interests of Californians.

The Supreme Court lifted a ban on Monsanto using genetically modified alfalfa seeds, but the actual sowing of them will have to wait until the USDA gives the green light. The larger topic of Frankenfoods -- genetically modified food -- got a lot of you angry and you didn't hesitate to call to say so, both as growers and eaters of food.

I'm thinking we need to talk about this more, and beyond just this court case. For example, there's the subject of so-called Terminator or suicide seeds. Imagine growing a tomato plant from seed, but the seeds of that tomato are deliberately sterile, because a company ''owns'' that plant, and if you want to grow more, you've got to buy more seed. It rather upends 10,000 years of human agriculture and summons scary scenarios of barren fields and hunger ... do you agree? Or not? Here's where you say so.

We remembered comedian George Carlin two years after his death with a pair of comedians, Greg Fitzsimmons and Comedy Congress' own Ben Gleib, who said that he became a comedian because of George Carlin. Many of you had actually met him -- Tony, in a liquor store, dropped to one knee in front of Carlin and told him, ''I'm an atheist, and you're my god.'' And caller Jean met him in a grocery store, and by happenstance was right there in the hospital when Carlin was admitted and died. The silence that fell over the place, she remembered, was striking and sobering, and she cried to remember it. I choked up right along with her, and so did Ben Gleib.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Carlin.

I'm at the ALOUD series at the Central Library tonight, talking about the PBS documentary on the Chandler family and its immense influence over how Los Angeles grew and changed.

Next time, why the middle-aged have overtaken the elderly as the most suicide-prone age group, and Sebastian Junger on his documentary about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Could a Supreme Court ruling send an 80-year-old USC prof to prison?

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:54:01 -0700

The Supreme Court just ruled that human rights advocates can be prosecuted for advising members of a foreign group the U.S. declares to be a terrorist group - even if that advice is, "Stop fighting, sit down and talk."

Could this mean than an 80-year-old USC professor, a man who was a Freedom Rider in the 1960s south and got beaten in jail by white supremacists, could go to federal prison for giving legal advice to Kurds to help them sit down and negotiate their disputes with Turkey rather than pick up weapons?

I interviewed Ralph Fertig about the pending Supreme Court case for my Los Angeles Times column earlier this year. Here it is: Fertig interview

And you can hear Fertig's reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on my program today at 2:30 p.m.

A ''Toy Story'' Story, and War Stories On the Air

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:56:11 -0700

You know how Hollywood slices and dices box office numbers – Tinseltown’s magical bookkeeping can even make ‘’Titanic’’ look like it lost money. But any way they spun it, ‘’Toy Story 3’’ came up aces over the weekend, and I put in my own ticket-window spondulix to make it so.

The film reinforces what makes cartoons succeed: that they work on a grownup level at the same time they appeal on a kid level, from the sly cartoons of the 1930s to the winking wisecracks of Bullwinkle and beyond.

Film lovers especially can find more to love in ‘’TS3’’ than the contents of a toy chest. The Pixar screenwriters delivered moments of homage to ‘’Cool Hand Luke,’’ the ‘’Raiders of the Lost Ark’’ trilogy, pinches of ‘’The Great Escape’’ and dollops of Hitchcock and even Tennessee Williams.

Yet what ‘’TS3” put me most in mind of is the wonderful tale ‘’The Velveteen Rabbit.’’ The book’s subtitle is ‘’How Toys Become Real,’’ and it was written in 1922, well before movies could talk, but when every child absolutely knew that toys could.

When I was little, I read and re-read my copy until it grew as shabby as the Velveteen Rabbit himself. If you’ve read it, read it again, even if you think you’re too old for it, and if you haven’t read it, however old you are, do yourself a favor and read it.

Do yourself another favor and listen to our program on Monday to the stories Megan Stack is telling. She’s my LA Times colleague who’s covered the conflicts from Afghanistan to the Mideast almost since 9/11. She ‘s put together some astonishing and moving tales in her book, ‘’Every Man in This Village is a Liar.’’ Good title – and the stuff between the covers is just as good.

We’ll also explore the law about illegal immigration – is it a crime to be in this country without the right paperwork, or a kind of code violation, or something else? It’s evidently more nuanced than you think, and with the Obama Administration about to challenge Arizona’s law, it’s time we found out more.

I’m told the event is sold out, but on Tuesday evening, I’m at the LA Central Library for another in the Aloud series, this one about that Peabody-winning PBS documentary about the Chandler family and how it shaped the Los Angeles we live in to this day. I’ll be talking to filmmaker Peter Jones and Bill Boyarsky, author of the companion book. I know a good bit about that family and this city and even so, I learned even more.