A Visit From The Past

Jujubi gave me my first matryoshka (nesting) doll as a birthday gift. I have ten sets, all but one with at least five dolls, including one that is the size of a seed. Most of them have a lot of detail and glitter and gold flake, but one of them does not. She is not a spectacular, fancy doll, like the others that stand over the fireplace. There are just three dolls total in this matryoshka.

I bought her while we were in Alaska, because of the label on the bottom.

The View From The Mountaintop

I read about this on SFGate's politics blog and want to spread it around.


In 1964, Dr. King told BBC News that he expected a "Negro President" in less than forty years.

Learning Something

I'm watching The War, which I think is the first Ken Burns documentary I've seen. I'm watching it on the DVR so I've only just seen the first two episodes. All of the people being interviewed seem to be remarkably healthy, especially when you know that they all must have been at least in their late 70s when they were filmed. They all look so handsome and beautiful to me.


I think I know a little more than your average bear about WWII but I've learned a couple things already from this documentary:

1) A German submarine blew up a fuel barge in New York City, and the East Coast was the most dangerous shipping lane in 1942.

2) There was a black market for rationed goods in the US. It makes sense, of course, but I've never heard anything about this before.

3) Now I understand where Saipan is.

The News On TV

Last night I caught most of American Masters, a series that examines "the lives, works, and creative processes of our most outstanding cultural artists." Last night's episode was a rerun about Walter Cronkite. I was mildly interested in the words about him, spoken by all kinds of people I've been reading or hearing for years, including two who have recently passed away, Molly Ivins and David Halberstam. I was much more interested in the news films, because of course Uncle Walter was reporting on everything, and they showed pieces of his reports.


Turns out Cronkite loved the space program and followed it everywhere. He gives a report about the astronauts practicing weightlessness, during which Cronkite is strapped down on one of those parabolic flights and four guys are flying all over the place, one of them even hitting the camera with his foot. The first manned Mercury rocket, with Alan Shepard in it, leaving the launchpad, with a glorious U-S-A running up the screen, and later, the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

(It is really difficult for me to believe that NASA got those people up there using slide rules and pencils. It's like the smart people then must have been a lot smarter than the smart people we have now).


I don't think I've ever seen the film of JFK getting shot. Knowing, now, that he'd been shot in the head, it was easy to see that the President had been terribly wounded, and surprising to see the First Lady, always presented as terribly gracious, climbing in fear over the trunk of the car. I've seen the film of John-John saluting his father's casket before, but it again brought a tear to my eye. Such a little boy, and he did exactly what he was supposed to do, the way he was supposed to do it.


There's interesting film at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which Dan Rather, in his late 30s, gets manhandled and eventually wrestled to the floor, and though Rather says he is all right afterwards, a clearly disgusted Cronkite basically says that the press is getting treated so badly that they want to pack up their cameras and go home. Not to mention the riot outside the Convention Center, which I've heard about but never seen before, police beating people and pulling them into paddy wagons while you can clearly hear the chant, "The whole world is watching!"


There's a short clip of Cronkite reporting before, during, and after bombing run early in the Vietnam War, and he hops out of the plane and says something like, "Well, that was a great run, right, Colonel?" Like, Whoo hoo! We dropped a bomb and flew really fast! Later, his opinion changed (one of the people they interviewed, and I don't remember his name, pointed out that at the beginning of a war everyone's supportive) and the reports became more critical, and there was film of women crying while soldiers set their homes on fire with lighters and flamethrowers.


It was interesting to see the films, most of them for the first time. And interesting to see Cronkite in action; he retired just as I started paying attention to world events, and I never watch TV news on purpose now. The important stories are too short... Something that Uncle Walter would not have found acceptable, I think.

Be Prepared

Even if you don't live here you may have heard that a gasoline tanker truck rolled and blew up on the highway at 3:40 this morning, and that the resulting fire was so hot and lasted so long that it caused bolts to melt and the ramp above to collapse. Miraculously, the driver survived with second-degree burns, and no one else was hurt, let alone killed. Whatever happens next to him, clearly his mission on earth is unfinished.


Really amazing video can be seen at YouTube, of course. A good map of the Maze can be seen here. There is a reason why that area is called the MacArthur Maze; those highways are like Pickup Sticks, one laid over the other. The part of the highway that collapsed affects eastbound traffic coming off the Bay Bridge going almost everywhere else in the east bay. I was talking to a friend today and explained that it would be like the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver collapsing.


Everyone who works in SF is planning to telecommute or working on an alternate route home tomorrow. Zirpu is planning to telecommute, not being willing to brave what will probably be intensely crowded BART trains for a day that doesn't include any meetings. I am still planning to drive to the food bank tomorrow, knowing that the ride home may be much slower than usual - and if it is much much slower, I'll plan to walk from the Lake Merritt BART station to the FB and back (about1.75 miles, some of which is through the Posey Tunnel) the next time I go. I don't expect my commute to the FB to be affected that much, since I get off well before the Maze and travel after the morning rush, but the afternoon will probably be affected as 880 is the only way anywhere until this gets repaired.


We live in an earthquake zone. I think CalTrans, the governator, and the legislators, as well as all the public transpo agencies, should think of this as a small rehearsal. There's been much made of the fact that if a major quake comes from the Hayward Fault (which runs through our neighborhood) it could break chunks of 80, 580, 880, and/or 980 freeways, any of which would affect the trip to or from the Bay Bridge, a major major artery in the miles of highways around here. They can observe and plan what to do, and hope that it doesn't happen.

Raven

I have finally finished Tim Reiterman's book about Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. At 580 pages, it's exhaustive, but very difficult to put down. I limited my time reading it though, because the material is so heavy. All through the book, I knew what was going to happen at the end, which made it hard to read.


Reiterman does a good job of explaining that Jim Jones held sway over his flock, and how. Did you know that they did not consider themselves Christians? They worshipped socialism and Jim Jones (though no one was supposed to admit to the latter).


I'm not a religious person and I am naturally rather skeptical. While I understand Reiterman's explanations about why people followed Jones into the jungle, let alone over the edge of the abyss, I still don't really "get" it. I don't understand why people send money to The 700 Club and similar shows, so I don't understand why someone would have sold their property and moved into Temple housing, which is described as almost always crowded and often substandard in other ways.


A friend said that she wondered if she would have gotten sucked in had she been in her late twenties when Peoples Temple existed. She said that she had been seeking, confused, disillusioned with traditional religion, and wanting to "belong" at that time. And since I too was seeking, and cut loose from a lot of the things I thought I'd known when I was in my mid-20s, I can understand that a little bit. But I still don't really understand why all those older people, middle-aged and elderly, joined up and tolerated that life. I guess I think that they would have been wiser somehow, even though Jones tricked educated, politically-savvy people such as Willie Brown, Angela Davis, and George Moscone (not to mention Rosalynn Carter and Harvey Milk).


We know why people didn't leave, but we'll never know why all those people followed Jones to Jonestown. I imagine that each person's reasons were different, and they took those reasons to their graves.

I realized that I have struck the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" from my speech.

"No one joins a cult. No one joins something they think is going to hurt them. You join a religious organization, you join a political movement, and you join with people that you really like."

- Deborah Layton Blakeley, who escaped Jonestown in June 1978



I watched "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple" the other day and it's really given me the heebie-jeebies, almost making me physically sick at times. I remember standing outside Saint Mary's Cathedral during George Moscone's funeral, but I remember nothing about Jonestown, which happened the same year. I think this is because at ten years old I didn't read newspapers or watch the news - and anyway I'm fairly certain that had I been a kid who watched the news my mother would have kept me from seeing the pictures from Jonestown.


Things I Didn't Know:

I didn't know that the Jonestowners knew what was in the Kool-Aid; I have always thought that most of them were tricked into drinking it. I didn't know that one person had questioned the plan for "revolutionary suicide." I didn't know that as many as eighty of the thousand people in Jonestown survived, most of them because they were not there that day. I thought only a few had lived through it by hiding under bunks or in the fields, like Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. I didn't know that elderly people went to Guyana because I didn't know that Peoples Temple had a lot of middle-aged and elderly members. I thought it was full of a bunch of young people from SF or new to SF, a city famous for seekers, who were sucked into Jones' church because they were looking for answers to their own questions and to social problems and he seemed to have answers for both.


I'm sure everyone made what seemed like (to them) rational decisions all along. It sounds like, though, that people's ability to think for themselves was usurped, through lack of sleep and through total involvement in Peoples Temple and Jim Jones' charisma. How do you know when you've allowed someone else to do all your thinking for you? If you can't think for yourself, how do you question it, especially if you are totally isolated by fear while surrounded by others who are equally isolated? How do you know when the leader is going crazy, when there's no one there to tell you so?


Every time the subject of Jonestown comes up my mother says that the butcher at Petrini's from whom she used to buy meat lost his daughter in Jonestown. When I was talking to her the other day about this documentary I'd just seen and about the Moscone/Milk murders, she said in a very sad voice still full of helplessness, "Jonestown was the last of the murders. That was a terrible, terrible time. A terrible time."