Chris Hedges's Blog, page 419

Training Kids to Kill at Ukrainian Nationalist Camp

KIEV, Ukraine — The campers, some clad in combat fatigues, carefully aim their assault rifles. Their instructor offers advice: Don’t think of your target as a human being.

So when these boys and girls shoot, they will shoot to kill.

Most are in their teens, but some are as young as 8 years old. They are at a summer camp created by one of Ukraine’s radical nationalist groups, hidden in a forest in the west of the country, that was visited by The Associated Press. The camp has two purposes: to train children to defend their country from Russians and their sympathizers — and to spread nationalist ideology.

“We never aim guns at people,” instructor Yuri “Chornota” Cherkashin tells them. “But we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim at them.”

The nationalists have been accused of violence and racism, but they have played a central, volunteer role in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia — and they have maintained links with the government. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Youth and Sports earmarked 4 million hryvnias (about $150,000) to fund some of the youth camps among the dozens built by the nationalists. The purpose, according to the ministry, is “national patriotic education.”

Ministry spokeswoman Natalia Vernigora said the money is distributed by a panel which looks for “signs of xenophobia and discrimination, it doesn’t analyze activities of specific groups.”

Cherkashin is a veteran of the fight against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine; he was wounded in combat and later came to lead Sokil, or Falcon, the youth wing of the Svoboda party. It is important, he says, to inculcate the nation’s youth with nationalist thought, so they can battle Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as “challenges that could completely destroy” European civilization.

Among those challenges: LGBT rights, which lecturers denounce as a sign of Western decadence.

“You need to be aware of all that,” said instructor Ruslan Andreiko. “All those gender things, all those perversions of modern Bolsheviks who have come to power in Europe and now try to make all those LGBT things like gay pride parades part of the education system.”

While some youths dozed off during lectures, others paid attention. Clearly, some were receptive.

During a break in training, a teenager played a nationalist march on his guitar. It was decorated with a sticker showing white bombs hitting a mosque, under the motto, “White Europe is Our Goal.”

Aside from the lectures — and songs around the campfire — life for the several dozen youths at the Svoboda camp was hard.

Campers were awakened in the middle of the night with a blast from a stun grenade. Stumbling out of their tents, soldiers in training struggled to hold AK-47s that were, in some cases, almost as tall as they were. They were required to carry the heavy rifles all day, and one of the girls broke down in tears from exhaustion.

At 18, Mykhailo was the oldest of the campers. The training, he said, was necessary.

“Every moment things can go wrong in our country. And one has to be ready for it,” he said. “That’s why I came to this camp. To study how to protect myself and my loved ones.”

Scientists: Wind, Drought Worsen Fires, Not Bad Management

WASHINGTON — Both nature and humans share blame for California’s devastating wildfires, but forest management did not play a major role, despite President Donald Trump’s claims, fire scientists say.

Nature provides the dangerous winds that have whipped the fires, and human-caused climate change over the long haul is killing and drying the shrubs and trees that provide the fuel, experts say.

“Natural factors and human-caused global warming effects fatally collude” in these fires, said wildfire expert Kristen Thornicke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Multiple reasons explain the fires’ severity, but “forest management wasn’t one of them,” University of Utah fire scientist Philip Dennison said.

Trump tweeted on Saturday: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”

The death toll from the wildfire that incinerated the town of Northern California town of Paradise and surrounding areas climbed to 29, matching the mark for the deadliest single blaze in California history. Statewide, the number of fire dead stood at 31, including two victims in Southern California.

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

In those earlier fires, Paradise was threatened but escaped major damage, he said. In the current blazes, it was virtually destroyed.

The other major fire, in Southern California, burned through shrub land, not forest, Dennison said.

“It’s not about forest management. These aren’t forests,” he said.

The dean of the University of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said Western fires are getting bigger and more severe. He said it “is much less due to bad management and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.”

Wildfires have become more devastating because of the extreme weather swings from global warming, fire scientists said. The average number of U.S. acres burned by wildfires has doubled over the level from 30 years ago.

As of Monday, more than 13,200 square miles (34,200 square kilometers) have burned. That’s more than a third higher than the 10-year average.

From 1983 to 1999, the United States didn’t reach 10,000 square miles burned annually. Since then, 11 of 19 years have had more than 10,000 square miles burned, including this year. In 2006, 2015 and 2017, more than 15,000 square miles burned.

The two fires now burning “aren’t that far out of line with the fires we’ve seen in these areas in recent decades,” Dennison said.

“The biggest factor was wind,” Dennison said in an email. “With wind speeds as high as they were, there was nothing firefighters could do to stop the advance of the fires.”

These winds, called Santa Ana winds, and the unique geography of high mountains and deep valleys act like chimneys, fortifying the fires, Thornicke said.

The wind is so strong that fire breaks — areas where trees and brush have been cleared or intentionally burned to deprive the advancing flames of fuel — won’t work. One of the fires jumped over eight lanes of freeway, about 140 feet (43 meters), Dennison said.

Southern California had fires similar to the Woolsey fire in 1982, when winds were 60 mph, but “the difference between 1982 and today is a much higher population in these areas. Many more people were threatened and had to evacuated,” Dennison said.

California also has been in drought for all but a few years of the 21st century and is now experiencing its longest drought, which began on Dec. 27, 2011, and has lasted 358 weeks, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Nearly two-thirds of the state is abnormally dry.

The first nine months of the year have been fourth-warmest on record for California, and this past summer was the second-hottest on record in the state.

Because of that, there are 129 million dead trees, which provide fuel for fires, Thornicke said.

And it’s more than trees. Dead shrubs around the bottom of trees provide what is called “ladder fuel,” offering a path for fire to climb from the ground to the treetops and intensifying the conflagration by a factor of 10 to 100, said Kevin Ryan, a fire consultant and former fire scientist at the U.S. Forest Service.

While many conservatives advocate cutting down more trees to prevent fires, no one makes money by cutting dead shrubs, and that’s a problem, he said.

Local and state officials have cleared some Southern California shrub, enough for normal weather and winds. But that’s not enough for this type of extreme drought, said Ryan, also a former firefighter.

University of Alberta fire scientist Mike Flanigan earlier this year told The Associated Press that the hotter and drier the weather, the easier it is for fires to start, spread and burn more intensely.

It’s simple, he said: “The warmer it is, the more fire we see.”

For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit that the air warms, it needs 15 percent more rain to make up for the drying of the fuel, Flannigan said.

Federal fire and weather data show the years with the most acres burned were generally a degree warmer than average.

“Everyone who has gardened knows that you must water more on hotter days,” Overpeck said. “But, thanks in part to climate change, California isn’t getting enough snow and rain to compensate for the unrelenting warming caused by climate change. The result is a worsening wildfire problem.

The Death Toll of California’s Historic Wildfire Continues to Climb

Truthdig update: The death toll in the Camp Fire in Northern California is now at 42, making the wildfire the deadliest in California history, The Associated Press reported Monday night. The Woolsey Fire in Southern California has killed two.

PARADISE, Calif. — The dead were found in burned-out cars, in the smoldering ruins of their homes, or next to their vehicles, apparently overcome by smoke and flames before they could jump in behind the wheel and escape. In some cases, there were only charred fragments of bone, so small that coroner’s investigators used a wire basket to sift and sort them.

At least 29 people were confirmed dead in the wildfire that turned the Northern California town of Paradise and outlying areas into hell on earth, equaling the deadliest blaze in state history, and the search for bodies continued Monday.

Nearly 230 people were unaccounted for by the sheriff’s reckoning, four days after the fire swept over the town of 27,000 and practically wiped it off the map with flames so fierce that they melted metal off cars. The dead were so badly burned that authorities brought in a mobile DNA lab and consulted forensic anthropologists for help in identifying them.

Increasingly exhausted and dispirited, friends and relatives of the missing called hospitals, police, shelters and the coroner’s office in hopes of learning what became of their loved ones. Paradise was a popular retirement community, and about a quarter of the population was over 65.

Tad Teays awaited word on his 90-year-old dementia-stricken mother, who lived about a mile from him in Paradise. And Barbara Hall tried in vain to find out whether her aunt and the woman’s husband, who are in their 80s and 90s, made it out of their home in a retirement community in town.

“Did they make it in their car? Did they get away? Did their car go over the edge of a mountain somewhere? I just don’t know,” said Hall, adding that the couple had only a landline and calls were not going through to it.

Megan James, of Newfoundland, Canada, searched via Twitter from the other side of the continent for information about her aunt and uncle, whose house in Paradise burned down and whose vehicles were still there. On Monday, she asked on Twitter for someone to take over the posts, saying she is “so emotionally and mentally exhausted.”

“I need to sleep and cry,” James added. “Just PRAY. Please.”

The blaze was part of an outbreak of wildfires on both ends of the state. Together, they were blamed for 31 deaths, including two in celebrity-studded Malibu in Southern California, where firefighters appeared to be gaining ground against a roughly 143-square-mile (370-square-kilometer) blaze that destroyed at least 370 structures, with hundreds more feared lost.

Some of the thousands of people forced from their homes by the blaze were allowed to return, and authorities reopened U.S. 101, a major freeway through the fire zone in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Malibu celebrities and mobile-home dwellers in nearby mountains were slowly learning whether their homes had been spared or reduced to ash.

All told, more 8,000 firefighters statewide were battling wildfires that scorched more than 325 square miles (840 square kilometers), the flames feeding on dry brush and driven by blowtorch winds.

The cause of the two biggest fires on opposite ends of the state was under investigation. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. told state regulators that it had a problem with an electrical transmission line near the site of the Northern California blaze minutes before it broke out.

In Northern California, fire crews still fighting the blaze that obliterated Paradise contended with wind gusts up to 40 mph (64 kph) overnight, the flames jumping 300 feet across Lake Oroville. The fire had grown to 177 square miles (303 square kilometers) and was 25 percent contained, authorities said.

There were tiny signs of some sense of order returning to Paradise and also anonymous gestures meant to rally the spirits of firefighters who have worked in a burned-over wasteland for days.

Large American flags stuck into the ground lined both sides of the road at the town limits, and temporary stop signs appeared overnight at major intersections. Downed power lines that had blocked roads were cut away, and crews took down burned trees with chain saws.

The 29 dead in Northern California matched the deadliest single fire on record, a 1933 blaze in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. A series of wildfires in Northern California’s wine country last fall killed 44 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes.

The VA Is Stiffing Countless Vets on Their Benefits

“I’m about to lose everything that I own and become homeless.” Those are the despairing words of Shelley Roundtree, a 29-year-old veteran of the war in Afghanistan currently living without his stipend guaranteed under the GI Bill. Absent these funds, he’s sleeping on his sister’s couch, often having to choose between marketing classes at Berkeley College in Manhattan and basic necessities. Many nights, he forces himself to sleep, still hungry.

According to NBC News, Roundtree is one of 82,000 veterans currently waiting on tuition and housing payments from the United States Department of Veteran Affairs—the byproduct of a backlog created by the Forever GI Bill of 2017. That legislation expanded benefits for veterans and their families but has failed to provide the necessary IT support for the department to meet its new requirements. As many as several hundred thousand have seen their payments delayed or not delivered at all.

Between a contract dispute over how new housing allowances would be calculated and the VA’s attempts to stress-test an outdated system, the department had delayed informing schools to begin enrolling students in classes. But many universities had waited anyway, believing they’d eventually have to re-enter their students’ veteran certifying information. The result has been a deluge of enrollments the VA is simply unable to process at once.

“This is—to be kind—a train wreck,” Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, tells NBC News. “It’s really frustrating the amount of money that Congress has appropriated for veterans, and this is the way VA has rolled it out. This discussion started over a year ago.”

Scandal has plagued the Department of Veteran Affairs virtually from the moment that Donald Trump was sworn into office. Earlier this year, the president forced the departure of U.S. Secretary of Veteran Affairs David Shulkin—a rare holdover from the Obama administration. That position is currently held by former Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Robert Wilkie. Trump had originally nominated his personal doctor, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, but Jackson ultimately withdrew his name from consideration amid a slew of allegations against him, including hostile work practices, drunken behavior and even medical abuse. (Several colleagues indicated that he had earned the nickname “Candyman” for his willingness to dole out prescription drugs.)

In August, an explosive report found that a trio of Mar-a-Lago members, Bruce Moskowitz, Marc Sherman and Marvel Chairman Ike Perlmutter, were secretly running the VA without any form of government oversight. None are elected officials, and their only qualifications would appear to be their proximity to the president. From ProPublica’s Isaac Arnsdorf:

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd [speaks] with VA officials daily, the documents show, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions. They [prod] the VA to start new programs, and officials [travel] to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense to hear their views. ‘Everyone has to go down and kiss the ring,’ a former administration official said.

Three months later, the department remains in disarray. NBC News reports that as many as 45,000 jobs within the VA have gone unfilled, and that it is yet to replace Chief Information Officer LaVerne Council, who stepped down during Trump’s presidential transition. (The department’s acting CIO, Scott Blackburn, resigned in April.) As for veterans like Shelley Roundtree, they’re unlikely to find relief any time soon.

“Right now Secretary Wilkie and Dr. Lawrence have only been on the jobs for months,” says Patrick Murray, deputy director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “People have been coming in and out of the VA like it’s a revolving door, and this is another example where a lack of consistent leadership causes these problems.”

Read more at NBC News.

Marvel Superhero Creator Stan Lee Dies

LOS ANGELES — Stan Lee, the creative dynamo who revolutionized the comic book and helped make billions for Hollywood by introducing human frailties in Marvel superheroes such as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk, died Monday. He was 95.

Lee was declared dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Kirk Schenck, an attorney for Lee’s daughter, J.C. Lee.

As the top writer at Marvel Comics and later as its publisher, Lee was widely considered the architect of the contemporary comic book. He revived the industry in the 1960s by offering the costumes and action craved by younger readers while insisting on sophisticated plots, college-level dialogue, satire, science fiction, even philosophy.

Millions responded to the unlikely mix of realistic fantasy, and many of his characters, including Spider-Man, the Hulk and X-Men went on to become stars of blockbuster films.

Recent projects Lee helped make possible range from the films “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Black Panther” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” to such TV series as “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Daredevil.” Lee was recognizable to his fans, having had cameos in many Marvel films and TV projects — his hair gray, his glasses slightly tinted and often delivering his trademark motto, “Excelsior!”

“Captain America” actor Chris Evans mourned the loss on Twitter: “There will never be another Stan Lee. For decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape, comfort, confidence, inspiration, strength, friendship and joy. He exuded love and kindness and will leave an indelible mark on so, so, so many lives. Excelsior!!”

Lee considered the comic-book medium an art form and he was prolific: By some accounts, he came up with a new comic book every day for 10 years. “I wrote so many I don’t even know. I wrote either hundreds or thousands of them,” he told The Associated Press in 2006.

He hit his stride in the 1960s when he brought the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man and numerous others to life. “It was like there was something in the air. I couldn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

His heroes, meanwhile, were a far cry from virtuous do-gooders such as rival DC Comics’ Superman.

The Fantastic Four fought with each other. Spider-Man was goaded into superhero work by his alter ego, Peter Parker, who suffered from unrequited crushes, money problems and dandruff. The Silver Surfer, an alien doomed to wander Earth’s atmosphere, waxed about the woeful nature of man. The Hulk was marked by self-loathing. Daredevil was blind and Iron Man had a weak heart.

“The beauty of Stan Lee’s characters is that they were characters first and superheroes next,” Jeff Kline, executive producer of the “Men in Black” animated television series, told The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, in 1998.

Some of Lee’s creations became symbols of social change — the inner turmoil of Spider-Man represented ’60s America, for example, while The Black Panther and The Savage She-Hulk mirrored the travails of minorities and women.

“I think of them as fairy tales for grown-ups,” he told The AP in 2006. “We all grew up with giants and ogres and witches. Well, you get a little bit older and you’re too old to read fairy tales. But I don’t think you ever outgrow your love for those kind of things, things that are bigger than life and magical and very imaginative.”

Lee scripted most of Marvel’s superhero comics himself during the ’60s, including the Avengers and the X-Men, two of the most enduring. In 1972, he became Marvel’s publisher and editorial director; four years later, 72 million copies of Spider-Man were sold.

“He’s become our Mickey Mouse,” he once said of the masked, web-crawling crusader.

Lee also published several books, including “The Superhero Women” in 1977 and “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” the following year, when he was named publisher of the year by the Periodical and Book Association of America.

CBS turned the Hulk into a successful TV series, with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno portraying the doomed scientist from 1978-82. A Spider-Man series ran briefly in 1978. Both characters were featured in animated TV series as well.

The first big-budget movie based on Lee’s characters, “X-Men,” was a smash in 2000, earning more than $130 million at North American theaters. “Spider-Man” did even better, taking in more than $400 million in 2002. A Marvel movie empire would emerge after that, one of the most lucrative mega-franchises in cinema history, with the recent “Avengers: Infinity War” grossing more than $2 billion worldwide. In 10 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe film shave netted over $17.6 billion in worldwide grosses.

“Black Panther” actor Winston Duke took to Twitter to pay his respects to Lee: “You gave us characters that continue to stand the test of time and evolve with our consciousness. You taught us that there are no limits to our future as long as we have access to our imagination. Rest in power!”

Stanley Martin Lieber was born Dec. 28, 1922, in New York. He grew up a fan of “Hardy Boys” adventure books and Errol Flynn movies, and got a job at Timely Comics after graduating from high school.

Within a few months, the editor and art director quit, leaving the 17-year-old Lee with creative control over the company, which grew and was renamed Atlas Comics and, finally, Marvel. Lieber changed his name, thinking Lee would be used for “silly little comics” and his real name would be reserved for novels.

His early work largely reflected popular movies — westerns, crime dramas, romance, whatever was the rage at the time. He worked for about 50 cents per page.

After a stint in the Army during World War II, writing for training films, he was back at Marvel to begin a long and admittedly boring run of assembly line comic book production.

Comics in the 1950s were the subject of Senate hearings pushed by the Comics Code Authority, which frowned on gore and characters that questioned authority. Major comic book companies adopted the code as a form of self-regulation to avoid sanctions.

Lee said he was also working for a publisher who considered comics as fare only for children.

“One day I said, ‘This is insane,'” Lee told the Guardian in 1979. “I’m just doing the same type of stories as everybody else. I wasn’t taking pride in my work and I wanted to quit. But my wife said, ‘Look, why don’t you do the kind of comics you want for a change?'”

The result was the first issue of “The Fantastic Four,” in 1960, with the characters, plot and text from Lee and the illustrations by famed Marvel artist Jack Kirby.

The characters were normal people changed into reluctant superheroes through no fault of their own.

Writing in “Origins of Marvel Comics,” Lee described the quartet this way: “The characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to; they’d be flesh and blood, they’d have their faults and foibles, they’d be fallible and feisty and — most important of all — inside their colorful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay.”

“The Amazing Spider-Man” followed in 1962 and before long, Marvel Comics was an industry behemoth.

Lee knew his work was different, proudly noting that stories were drawn out over several issues not to make money but to better develop characters, situations and themes. He didn’t neglect his villains, either. One, the Moleman, went bad when he was ostracized because of his appearance, Lee wrote, adding it was “almost unheard of in a comic book” to explain why a character was what he was.

Lee’s direct influence faded in the 1970s as he gave up some of his editorial duties at Marvel. But with his trademark white mustache and tinted sunglasses, he was the industry’s most recognizable figure. He lectured widely on popular culture.

Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1981 to head Marvel Productions, an animation studio that was later purchased, along with Marvel Comics, for $50 million by New World Entertainment.

As sales of comics declined, Marvel was forced into bankruptcy proceedings that meant it had to void a lifetime contract prohibiting Lee from working for anyone else. Lee later sued Marvel for $10 million, saying the company cheated him out of millions in profits from movies based on his characters.

In 2000, Lee agreed to write stories for DC Comics, reinventing Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other signature characters for Marvel’s one-time rival. DC Vice President and Publisher Paul Levitz had nothing but praise when the agreement was made.

“With his artistic collaborators at Marvel, Stan co-created the richest imaginary universe a single comics writer has ever built,” he said.

The dapper, friendly comic book genius continued to work into his 90s on numerous projects, including comics, films and DVDs.

In the late 1990s, he looked to capitalize on the Internet craze, offering animated “Webisodes” of comic-like action. Stan Lee Media also sought to reach out to Web-savvy youth through deals with pop artists the Backstreet Boys and Mary J. Blige.

The company went bankrupt, and three men were indicted for allegedly defrauding the business in a check kiting scam. Lee wasn’t implicated.

After that initial failure, Lee formed the successful Pow! Entertainment company to launch animated Internet-based projects.

Lee’s wife and partner in nearly everything, Joan Lee, died on July 6, 2017, leaving a void that made her husband, by then in mental and physical decline, vulnerable to hangers-on who began to surround him. Lawsuits, court fights and an elder abuse investigation all emerged in the fight over who spoke for the elderly Lee.

Lee is survived by his daughter, Joanie, and a younger brother who also worked in comics, Larry Lieber.

___

Associated Press writer John Rogers contributed to this story

House Democrats Plan to Restore Voting Rights, Ethics Laws

In 2013, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Shelby County v. Holder that Southern states with the most prevalent history of voter suppression no longer had to clear changes to voting rights laws with the federal government because “our country has changed.”

Today’s suspiciously missing and malfunctioning voting machines in Georgia, voter ID laws in Texas and North Carolina, and the thousands of voters purged from the rolls in Florida, however, suggest that perhaps the country has not changed. And now that Democrats have won a majority of House seats, their first goal is to restore rights that were gutted five years ago.

NPR reported Monday that House Democratic leaders say their first priorities in January are to “[r]emove obstacles to voting, close loopholes in government ethics law and reduce the influence of political money.”

These goals, combined in their first bill, H.R. 1, are “Three very basic things that I think the public wants to see,” Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes told NPR.

H.R. 1 would establish automatic voter registration, and restore the parts of the Voting Rights Act that Shelby County v. Holder eliminated five years ago. It would strive to overturn the Citizens United decision, which lifted caps on corporate spending for elections and took away redistricting power from state governments in favor of independent commissions.

The bill would also close a loophole in government ethics law that allows presidents to sidestep bans against conflicts of interest, and require that presidential candidates make their tax returns public.

The latter two actions have been previously accepted as “norms” of American government and elections, but were not previously codified into law.

Sarbanes admitted to NPR that a vote on this bill would be a small first step, given that Republicans, who hold a majority in the Senate, are unlikely to pass it, and that President Trump—the target of the tax return and ethics loophole closure—is unlikely to sign it. Sarbanes is looking toward establishing goals for 2020, saying, “Give us the gavel in the Senate in 2020 and we’ll pass it in the Senate. … Give us a pen in the Oval Office and we’ll sign those kinds of reforms into law.”

Unsurprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky brushed off this strategy, telling reporters that this approach amounts to “presidential harassment,” turning the bill into a referendum on the president.

Prisoners Fighting California Fires Make Less Than $2 an Hour

The nearly 4,000 incarcerated workers who are trained to fight deadly fires across California often make less than $2 an hour and are not eligible to be hired as professional firefighters after they are released from prison. The work is physically strenuous and, in some cases, fatal, and as forest fires ravage California the state has become increasingly reliant on the program as a cost-saving measure.

In August, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation tweeted that 2,000 incarcerated people, including 58 “youth offenders,” were working to fight fires. Bill Sessa, an information officer at the department, said that “all of the juvenile offenders [used to fight fires] have committed serious or violent felonies.” Adult incarcerated firefighters are often low-level, nonviolent offenders.

The incarcerated firefighters often carry out the grueling task of cutting firelines, using tools like chainsaws, axes and hoes to create a path of exposed soil to block fires.

The work is extremely dangerous. Shawna Lynn Jones, 22, died after she was injured fighting a fire in Malibu in 2016. A large stone fell about 100 feet and hit her head, knocking her unconscious. At the time of her death, she had less than two months left on her prison sentence.

According to The New York Times, incarcerated firefighters make $1 an hour while fighting a fire and up to $2.56 a day at the “conservation camps” where workers live. That is “lavish pay by prison standards,” Sessa said. Some program participants also are able to earn time off their prison sentences. The corrections department estimates that the conservation camps save state taxpayers about $100 million a year.

In 2014, lawyers for then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris argued that “extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” Harris said she first read about the court filing in the newspaper and that she was “very troubled.”

Supporters of the program emphasize that participants voluntarily decide to become firefighters—some participants have explained that life outdoors at the conservation camps is more pleasant than the other option: an overcrowded prison cell.

“Jobs for prisoners can be a very positive thing, but given the vast power inequality between prisoners and their employers, there’s a real potential for exploitation and abuse,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. And due to their felon status, most former prison firefighters are excluded from professional firefighting opportunities.

‘‘The pay is ridiculous,’’ said La’Sonya Edwards, a 35-year-old incarcerated woman who makes a little more than $500 a year. ‘‘There are some days we are worn down to the core,’’ she said. ‘‘And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do.’’

After Years of Repression, Iraq’s Climate Threatens New Miseries

Iraq’s climate stresses are worsening, raising the prospect of a hotter, drier future for a country which has already seen widespread devastation.

It’s been invaded and bombed, had a third of its territory taken over by terrorist groups, hundreds of thousands have been killed and much of its infrastructure has been destroyed.

Now Iraq and its 39 million people are facing the hazards of climate change; a prolonged drought and soaring temperatures earlier this year ruined crops. Swathes of land in what was, in ancient times, one of the richest agricultural regions on Earth are drying up and turning into desert.

Iraq is one of the Middle East’s most climate-vulnerable countries.

A recent report by the Expert Working Group on Climate-related Security Risks – made up of academics including members of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) – paints a stark picture of what’s happening in Iraq.

“Climate change is currently manifesting itself in prolonged heat waves, erratic precipitation, higher than average temperatures and increased disaster intensity”, says the report.

Its authors say that over the past summer Iraq suffered from its worst water shortage crisis for 80 years. They say flows of water in many rivers have decreased by up to 40% over recent decades.

The outlook is grim; the study says that due to climate change, average rainfall across the country is likely to decrease by 9% by mid-century, though the intensity of storms is set to increase. Temperatures in Iraq, which regularly reach more than 40°C [104 F] in the summer months, are set to rise further – by an average of 2°C  [3.6 F] by 2050.

Livelihoods at Risk

“Iraq is one of the Middle East’s most climate-vulnerable countries”, says the Working Group.

“The combination of its hydrological limitations, increasing temperatures and extreme weather events puts pressure on basic resources and undermines livelihood security for Iraq’s population.”

Oil revenues account for more than 80% of Iraq’s gross domestic product (GDP), but a majority of the workforce is involved in agriculture and has been hit hard by the drought and worsening climate conditions.

One of the regions of the country that has suffered most from shifting weather patterns and drought is the marshlands of the south, near the city of Basra.

Unique Community

The marshlands, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers which flow through Iraq meet and divide into dozens of channels, formerly covered an area of more than 20,000 square kilometres and were once home to up to half a million people – widely referred to as Marsh Arabs – with a unique way of life.

In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein, the country’s former ruler, dammed and drained the marshes after tribespeople in the area backed an uprising against his regime. After Saddam was toppled, locals tore down the dams and dykes and brought life back to the region.

Now, once again, the dense channels and waterways of southern Iraq are under threat.

Cross-Border Impacts

Reductions in rainfall and other climate-related events are only one part of what is a disaster unfolding in one of the most diverse and ecologically rich areas in the Middle East.

Misuse of upriver water resources by the Baghdad government and dams constructed across the Iraqi border, in Iran and Turkey, are severely reducing water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates.

As water levels have plummeted, salinity has increased dramatically, particularly in the south of the country, due to evaporation and saltwater intrusion from the Gulf. Often, because of salinity and pollution, there is little or no drinkable tap water in Basra, a city of more than 2 million.

During the drought last summer, thousands were hospitalised with water-borne diseases.

Corruption Threat

Buffaloes, bird life and fish are dying. Reeds and other plant life are being destroyed.

Several people have been killed as protests have erupted over government ineptitude and the lack of basic infrastructure and jobs in what is Iraq’s most oil-rich province.

The Working Group’s report says generally poor governance is exacerbating an already precarious set of circumstances. Civil unrest and terrorism could further destabilise the country.

Widespread corruption is a serious problem. “This factor severely reduces the Iraqi government’s capacity to address security risks and stabilisation strategies, including those relating to climate change”, says the report.

Crucifying Julian Assange

Julian Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules, including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno—who calls Assange an “inherited problem” and an impediment to better relations with Washington—is making the WikiLeaks founder’s life in the embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores.

The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British and extradited to the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes Assange’s current living conditions as “torture.”

His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, “Despite Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain—silenced in solitary confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of London. It’s the Ecuadorian Embassy.”

“Here are the facts,” she went on. “Julian has been detained nearly eight years without charge. That’s right. Without charge. For the past six years, the U.K. government has refused his request for access to basic health needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper dental and medical care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated. His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening. A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the embassy in London.”

“In 2016, after an in-depth investigation, the United Nations ruled that Julian’s legal and human rights have been violated on multiple occasions,” she said. “He’d been illegally detained since 2010. And they ordered his immediate release, safe passage and compensation. The U.K. government refused to abide by the U.N.’s decision. The U.S. government has made Julian’s arrest a priority. They want to get around a U.S. journalist’s protection under the First Amendment by charging him with espionage. They will stop at nothing to do it.”

“As a result of the U.S. bearing down on Ecuador, his asylum is now under immediate threat,” she said. “The U.S. pressure on Ecuador’s new president resulted in Julian being placed in a strict and severe solitary confinement for the last seven months, deprived of any contact with his family and friends. Only his lawyers could see him. Two weeks ago, things became substantially worse. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who rightfully gave Julian political asylum from U.S. threats against his life and liberty, publicly warned when U.S. Vice President Mike Pence recently visited Ecuador a deal was done to hand Julian over to the U.S. He stated that because of the political costs of expelling Julian from their embassy was too high, the plan was to break him down mentally. A new, impossible, inhumane protocol was implemented at the embassy to torture him to such a point that he would break and be forced to leave.”

Assange was once feted and courted by some of the largest media organizations in the world, including The New York Times and The Guardian, for the information he possessed. But once his trove of material documenting U.S. war crimes, much of it provided by Chelsea Manning, was published by these media outlets he was pushed aside and demonized. A leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008, exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and Assange. The document said the smear campaign should seek to destroy the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and blacken Assange’s reputation. It largely has worked. Assange is especially vilified for publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The Democrats and former FBI Director James Comey say the emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, by Russian government hackers. Comey has said the messages were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian “interference” rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the corporate coup d’état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not committed a crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material from WikiLeaks focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during my visits with him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, “an unwelcome guest” in the embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a publisher and a free press is ignored in favor of snarky character assassination.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges that were eventually dropped. Assange feared that once he was in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. The British government has said that, although he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden, Assange will be arrested and jailed for breaching his bail conditions if he leaves the embassy.

WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. He disclosed the conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed, ominously, that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is met with indifference and  sneering contempt. Once he is pushed out of the embassy, he will be put on trial in the United States for what he published. This will set a new and dangerous legal precedent that the Trump administration and future administrations will employ against other publishers, including those who are part of the mob trying to lynch Assange. The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this complicity.

Even if the Russians provided the Podesta emails to Assange, he should have published them. I would have. They exposed practices of the Clinton political machine that she and the Democratic leadership sought to hide. In the two decades I worked overseas as a foreign correspondent I was routinely leaked stolen documents by organizations and governments. My only concern was whether the documents were forged or genuine. If they were genuine, I published them. Those who leaked material to me included the rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN); the Salvadoran army, which once gave me blood-smeared FMLN documents found after an ambush; the Sandinista government of Nicaragua; the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence Agency; the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebel group; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the French intelligence service, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE; and the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosovic, who was later tried as a war criminal.

We learned from the emails published by WikiLeaks that the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton paid her donors back by approving $80 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, enabling the kingdom to carry out a devastating war in Yemen that has triggered a humanitarian crisis, including widespread food shortages and a cholera epidemic, and left close to 60,000 dead. We learned Clinton was paid $675,000 for speaking at Goldman Sachs, a sum so massive it can only be described as a bribe. We learned Clinton told the financial elites in her lucrative talks that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best-positioned to manage the economy, a statement that directly contradicted her campaign promises. We learned the Clinton campaign worked to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. We learned Clinton obtained advance information on primary-debate questions. We learned, because 1,700 of the 33,000 emails came from Hillary Clinton, she was the primary architect of the war in Libya. We learned she believed that the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. The war she sought has left Libya in chaos, seen the rise to power of radical jihadists in what is now a failed state, triggered a massive exodus of migrants to Europe, seen Libyan weapon stockpiles seized by rogue militias and Islamic radicals throughout the region, and resulted in 40,000 dead. Should this information have remained hidden from the American public? You can argue yes, but you can’t then call yourself a journalist.

“They are setting my son up to give them an excuse to hand him over to the U.S., where he would face a show trial,” Christine Assange warned. “Over the past eight years, he has had no proper legal process. It has been unfair at every single turn with much perversion of justice. There is no reason to consider that this would change in the future. The U.S. WikiLeaks grand jury, producing the extradition warrant, was held in secret by four prosecutors but no defense and no judge. The U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty allows for the U.K. to extradite Julian to the U.S. without a proper basic case. Once in the U.S., the National Defense Authorization Act allows for indefinite detention without trial. Julian could very well be held in Guantanamo Bay and tortured, sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security prison, or face the death penalty. My son is in critical danger because of a brutal, political persecution by the bullies in power whose crimes and corruption he had courageously exposed when he was editor in chief of WikiLeaks.”

Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press.

“We need to make our protest against this brutality deafening,” his mother said. “I call on all you journalists to stand up now because he’s your colleague and you are next. I call on all you politicians who say you entered politics to serve the people to stand up now. I call on all you activists who support human rights, refugees, the environment, and are against war, to stand up now because WikiLeaks has served the causes that you spoke for and Julian is now suffering for it alongside of you. I call on all citizens who value freedom, democracy and a fair legal process to put aside your political differences and unite, stand up now. Most of us don’t have the courage of our whistleblowers or journalists like Julian Assange who publish them, so that we may be informed and warned about the abuses of power.”

Pauline Kael Gets the Last Word in ‘What She Said’

If “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” had been made about any other film critic, I believe Kael would have enjoyed it. But it couldn’t have been made about any other critic.

The documentary directed by Rob Garver, which premiered Sunday, Nov. 11, at DOC NYC, hums along at a steady, pleasurable pace, combining snippets of interviews with Kael (the best ones with Dick Cavett on his television show) juxtaposed with snatches from films. The latter includes movies she praised and for which she helped create an audience (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Mean Streets,” “Carrie,” “Nashville,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Wild Bunch,” “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” “The Elephant Man,” “Band of Outsiders”) as well as those she panned, angering mainstream America (“The Sound of Music,” “West Side Story”) and offending college-educated filmgoers (“Blow-Up,” “2001: A Space Odyssey”).

Sarah Jessica Parker reads some of Kael’s prose and does an admirable job of replicating her idiosyncratic rhythms. Voices of contemporary critics attest to the enormous impact and influence of Kael, who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1967 to 1991 and died in 2001. Filmmakers—including Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, David O. Russell and Quentin Tarantino—talk about how her work shaped their own attitudes about film and its possibilities. Kael’s daughter, Gina James, brings a little salt to her recollections—it apparently wasn’t easy to be a child of a genius—and the late Brian Kellow, author of “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” (2011), adds nuance and perspective.

Garver, a New York-based writer and director of film shorts, loves his subject but knows when to keep his distance. His handling of the most famous controversies of Kael’s career is concise and even-handed.

One example of this is Kael’s famous essay in which she mercilessly diced Andrew Sarris’ interpretation of the auteur theory, particularly the part about the director’s personality being a criterion for greatness. Sarris’ widow, the film critic Molly Haskell, says Kael’s piece was “almost slanderous.” (For the historical record, I’d like to note that there was no feud between Kael and Sarris, that her notes on the auteur theory were the only negative things she ever wrote about his work, and in Francis Davis’ “Afterglow,” Kael is quoted as saying, “We both loved movies. We had that in common, and I enjoy reading him as I enjoy reading very few critics. He has genuine reactions to movies, and many critics don’t. He picks things up and points things out.”

And then there was the famous blast by Renata Adler in the New York Review of Books in 1976, reviewing Kael’s collection, “When the Lights Go Down”: “Jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, [it’s] worthless.” And this just two years after Kael won the National Book Award for her previous “Deeper Into Movies.”

Even worse, Adler saw Kael as symptomatic of something gone wrong in American life. It’s always fascinated me that Adler also once wrote, famously, “No essay becomes as quickly obsolete as an unfavorable review.”

In retrospect, “When the Lights Go Down” might have been Kael’s best collection and contains many pieces that have been anthologized over the decades, including “The Man From Dream City (Cary Grant),” “Fear of Movies” and “Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah,” as well as the famous reviews of “Taxi Driver,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Julia” (in which she anticipated Mary McCarthy’s later exposé of Lillian Hellman). What an irony if those negative lines Adler wrote about Kael prove to be the most enduring words she ever wrote.

In a snide piece for the now-defunct LOLA in 2011, a writer named Richard Porton said Kael “was, when all is said and done, just another working critic. And in a desperate attempt to be hip during her tenure at the New Yorker, she now seems much more dated than [Andre] Bazin, [Manny] Farber or [James] Agee.”  Well, I don’t know what film critics Porton is still reading, and I know people who still read Bazin, Farber and Agee, but more than 17 years after her death, I’m pretty sure that Kael is still read by more people than the three of them put together, and certainly more than any or maybe all the critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

And she’s certainly the only critic who still inspires biographies and documentaries.

As Gary Indiana wrote in a 2002 edition of Artforum magazine, “It is … the absence of any real sensibility rooted in any consistent method of analysis that makes Pauline Kael’s collections of reviews the kind of books I don’t like having in my house.”

I take it that “consistent method of analysis” is a fancy phrase for theory. But Indiana, like others who criticized Kael’s resistance to “theory,” never gets around to telling us what theories work for him, and the names of the authors of said books he has in his house.

As if in answer to Indiana, “What She Said” director Graver shows Kael saying in an old TV interview, “Only bad critics impose an academic formula. One does not need to rationalize one’s instincts. One’s instincts are the sum total of one’s mind and responses.”

It was precisely Kael’s antipathy to film theory and dogma of any kind that exasperated so many at the Village Voice in the 1980s. As Kellow wrote in his biography, by 1985—when the firestorm over Kael’s criticism of “Shoah” was at high heat—the Voice had become “her by now regular adversary.” I was there during those years, and scarcely a week went by when I didn’t pick up on some hostile remark about Kael or something she had written, often from arts editor Karen Durbin. David Edelstein told Kellow, “The reason the Voice hated her was that she wasn’t politically correct. It was as simple as that. … They were cultural commissars there.”

Kael’s dislike of the nine-hour film—“I found ‘Shoah’ logy and exhausting right from the start, and when it had been going on for an hour or longer, I was squirming restlessly, my attention slackening”—enraged the Voice’s J. Hoberman, who told an interviewer, “She didn’t see ‘Shoah’s’ worth because the movie refrained the violence to which she was so obviously addicted”—an odd complaint coming from a critic who was a stout defender of Clint Eastwood’s vigilante cop movies.

Kael was the most influential American critic since … well, I can’t think of a critic that influential before Kael. H.L. Mencken, maybe, but as someone said in a Hemingway novel, no one reads Mencken anymore (and that was in the 1920s). Edmund Wilson may well be the most admired of all American literary critics, but could he really be said to have been an influence on writers who followed him? Even if you could make that case, would it be argued that Wilson had a widely popular influence?

Writers who at one time or another gathered around Kael, joining her for dinner or drinks or just screenings, have been referred to under the pejorative title “Paulettes.”

It’s time to dispel the notion that somehow Kael’s influence on other writers was somehow bad. She once asked me, “Haven’t some of the writers I’ve tried to help turned out pretty good?” They sure did. The film critics most often associated with Kael—David Edelstein (New York Magazine/Vulture), Stephanie Zacharek (Time magazine), Michael Sragow (Film Comments, among others), Joe Morgenstern (The Wall Street Journal), Peter Rainier (Christian Science Monitor), Hal Hinson (The Washington Post), Carrie Rickey (Truthdig) and others, including David Denby, Charlie Taylor and Terrence Rafferty—would surely acknowledge her influence on their work. So too would playwright John Guare, literary critic Craig Seligman, author of “Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me,” theater critic Steve Vineberg, jazz critic Francis Davis (author of “Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael”), and Vanity Fair’s pop culture critic James Wolcott (who created a vivid and affectionate portrait of Kael in his memoir “Looking Out”), and cultural critic (and I hate that phrase) Greil Marcus.

Would anyone looking at that list of names think that they could be lumped together under the label “Paulettes”? I don’t think Wolcott and Marcus could sit at the same table and pass the salt without dropping it.

Let’s call one more witness. I don’t think anyone would dare call Camille Paglia a Paulette. To my knowledge, she never even met Kael, but she provides some of the liveliest moments in Garver’s film, talking about how much she enjoyed reading Kael “even while she was attacking the movies I loved.”  The Italian Stallioness of American letters gleefully quotes the title of a chapter in Kael’s first book, “I Lost It at the Movies”: “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: ‘La Notte,’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ ‘‘La Dolce Vita.’ ”

Paglia went into greater detail in Salon in her 2011 review of Kael’s collection, “The Age of Movies.” What especially impressed her was “Kael’s emphatic use of the colloquial American voice. … I despise the same fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions which have blighted academic film criticism for over thirty years. … Her voice, shaped by the American idiom, is still utterly fresh and dynamic. She is a superb role model for young writers.”

To paraphrase something Kael once said about Hemingway, she took the stuffiness out of fine writing. Here are some of my favorite Kaelisms:

—On “Love Story”: Erich Segal has “written the generation gap ‘Madam X’—this kind of schlock can only be written by the true schlock artists who can feel it all as true.”

—“West Side Story”: “Consider the feat: First you take Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and remove all that cumbersome poetry. Then you make the Montagues and Capulets really important and modern by turning them into rival street gangs of native-born and Puerto Ricans. (You get rid of the parents, of course, America is a young country—and who wants to be bothered by the squabbles of older people?). … The only difference between these two gangs of what I’m tempted to call ballerinas is that one group has faces and hair darkened, and the other group has gone wild by glittering yellow hair dye. … They’re about as human as the Munchkins in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

—On Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”: “It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of the new vision of heaven. ‘2001’ is a celebration of cop-out. … There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up … [The audience] can go to heaven in Cinerama.”

—On Woody Allen’s “Interiors”: “The people in … ‘Interiors’ are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. ‘Interiors’ has the beautiful, solemn, visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however, the eroticism of Bergman. ‘Interiors’ looks so much like a masterpiece and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death vs. life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: It’s deep on the surface. … ‘Interiors’ is a handbook of art film mannerisms.”

—Norman Mailer’s book, “Marilyn”: “Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turned her sickness to metaphor. I wish they’d let her die.”

—Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets”: “The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial. It is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion.”

—And on what she regarded as Scorsese’s excess in “Raging Bull”: “The tragedy in Scorsese’s struggles with the material … is that he’s a great director when he doesn’t press so hard at it, when he doesn’t suffer so much. He’s got moviemaking and the church mixed up together. He’s trying to be the saint of cinema.”

—On the Taviani brothers’ “Night of the Shooting Stars”: “It’s so good it’s thrilling. … [It] encompasses a vision of the world. Comedy, tragedy, vaudeville, melodrama—they’re all here, and inseparable.”

—On Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City”: “He uses his big, strong body so expressively that if this were a stage performance the audience would probably give him a standing ovation.”

—Satyajit Ray: “No artist has done more to make us evaluate the common place.”

—On Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”: “He has not acquired the polish of most famous screen actors, just the opposite—less mannered as he grows older. … He gives the story a legendary presence needed to raise it above gang warfare to archetypal tribal warfare.”

—“The Godfather Part II”: “The violence in this film never doesn’t bother us—it’s never just a kick. … Coppola controls our emotional responses so that the horror seeps through everything and no action provides a melodramatic release.”

—Faye Dunaway in “The Eyes of Laura Mars”: “She’s gloriously beat out, no Hollywood sex goddess ever presented so alluring an image of kinky Death herself.”

—Richard Pryor in “Live on the Sunset Strip”: “… a master of lyrical obscenity.”

—On Marguerite Duras’ “The Truck”: “There are some people who are too French for their own good. …”

—David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”: “Its vision isn’t alienating: This is American darkness—darkness in color, darkness with a happy ending. Lynch might turn out to be the first popular surrealist—a Frank Capra of dream logic.”

It’s the tragedy for American film criticism that Pauline Kael did not live long enough to write about “Mulholland Drive.”

In his “Poetry Notebook,” Clive James maintains that “[i]ntensity of language” marks the real difference between poetry and prose and that “Concentrated meaning should be what any poet was after.” It’s probably high-falutin’ to press an argument that Kael’s style was poetic, but I think one must concede that her prose shared some characteristics with poetry.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was interviewed for “What She Said” but didn’t make the final cut. So don’t go expecting to see me. However, the child interviewer asking Kael questions at the beginning and end of the film is my daughter, Maggie, who was 10 at the time. She was working on a fourth-grade assignment, and her Q&A was the last interview before Kael died. It was reprinted at Salon after my review of Davis’ “Afterglow.”

Finally, here’s an animated “debate” between Andrew Sarris and Kael on the auteur theory, with dialogue paraphrased from their writings and interviews: