Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

‘King of Pop’ is dead? Long live the king

As I write this, unconfirmed reports that Michael Jackson has died are coming over the radio.

Once you get past the freak that he became over the last decade, you have to acknowledge his musical importance — as a popsinger, songwriter and producer.

He is an icon of the '70s and '80s, who recorded disco's finest album
(Off the Wall) and the classic Thriller.

More later, after I get home.

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Gun nuts respond

This week’s South Brunswick Post includes a follow-up story to a recent item on a local home-invasion/push-in robbery in Monmouth Junction. The June 9 robbery, in which a homeowner and housekeeper were held at gunpoint as burglars ransacked the house, was a scarey event and local police issued a list of basic precautions that residents could take.

It was a straightforward list — or so I thought: install “quality locks” on entrances and windows; install motion-detector lights outside the home and leave lights on inside and avoid opening the door for strangers and ask for identification. Most important, however,

Police advise homeowners not to resist and to follow commands without offering additional assistance. They suggest being as observant as possible without looking directly at the robber, because doing so may be interpreted as a threat. Try to remember the robber’s physical characteristics and specifics of the car the robber was driving, if possible, police say.

After a robbery, residents are urged to call police immediately, write down anything that can be remembered about the crime and make a list of missing items.

Common sense, as I said. But not everyone agrees. Since the story hit our Web site earlier today, we’ve been inundated with comments, most following along the lines of this one:

Solid locks? Check,

Lights with motion sensor? Check.

Ask for ID? Check.

12 gauge loaded with 00 buck? Hmm, oddly enough, the police seem to have left that off the list. Citizens, start thinking for yourselves, be prepared, and act when necessary. Don’t rely on the police alone. In a situation such as a home invasion, their only role is to clean up the mess.

Huh? Our commenters apparently have been watching too many movies, especially old westerns in which everyone is carrying a loaded gun at all times. But aside from the obvious gun lust, there is a basic flaw in the self-defense argument, one that is more likely to get the homeowner or someone else killed than to stop any home invasion.

Let’s follow this logic to what should be its obvious conclusion: You are the homeowner and gun owner. You’re sitting in your living room on a Tuesday night watching the Yankees with your son and daughter. Your gun is in the closet. The doorbell rings and your son gets up to answer it. As he opens the door, two masked men packing handguns push into the house and take him hostage.

What do you do? The gun, as I said, is in the closet. Your son has got a gun being pointed at his head and the two men are now ordering you and your daughter onto the couch, where you’ll sit, gun pointed at you by one bandit as the other ransacks the house.

They steal some jewelry, your cash-filled wallet, etc., but no one is hurt.

The gun was kind of useless in this case.

What if you went for your gun? You better have been quick, because the two thugs already have theirs in hand, as well as your son.

There are other potential scenarios here — but few of them that I can think of involve the homeowner getting a shot off before all hell breaks loose. And the ones that do assume a level of paranoia that, frankly, scares the hell out of me (i.e., the homeowner answering the door with his gun out and pointed at the intruder, who could be anything from the aforementioned bandits to a neighborhood Girl Scout selling cookies).

My suggestion? Listen to the police on this one, be careful and don’t be foolish.

Death of an icon, whose image lives on

An icon of the 1970s has died.

Farrah Fawcett, whose poster graced the walls of millions of teenaged boys in teh mid-1970s, died this morning after a long battle with cancer.

Farrah was, for most men my age (I’m 46), our first celebrity crush. We had our poster (see on left) on our walls, watched Charlie’s Angels religiously and wondered what it would have been like to have been Tom Bosley.

Her post-Angels career was less than stellar, except for her role The Burning Bed, a shockingly well-acted performance as a battered wife. There were some other interesting roles, but her star faded again and she essentially disappeared.

In many ways, her trajectory matched her sex-symbol predecessors, most of whom had less acting talent but whose bombshell looks — which began as their entree into the limelight — ended up being the albatross that stalled their careers.

And yet, the bathing suit poster stands alongside the handful of iconic images of the pinup genre, permanently etched into our cultural memories in a way that few other sex-symbol images have been and, perhaps, few ever will be again.

Or, you could call it military socialism

This is a great Barney Frank quote that I read on Paul Krugman’s blog, but that originally came from Think Progress. Frank, a Massachussets Democrat, said during a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund that the Republicans were being hypocritical in their opposition to the Democrats’ stimulus bill, given the GOP’s consistent use of the military budget to prime the pump:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.

As with the family values schpiel, the GOP has been shown to have no clothes.

Against tyranny

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I’ve held off writing about the crisis in Iran because, as an observer following it via TV, newspaper and Internet, it just seems so distant.

But Madeleine Albright said something last night on Rachel Maddow (I heard it today on a podcast) that I think makes some sense to me, helping to structure my own response and sense that we need to support the protesters as fellow “small d” democxrats, but that our own national government’s involvement can only inflame the situation.

Maddow asked Albright whether there was “anything that the American people-not our government-but American citizens should do or could do” to help the Iranian dissidents.

Albright, who served as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, said that we are looking at a “two-level thing” and that “the U.S. government has to be very careful not to become the football, as we have been saying, and not to be the story.”

On the other hand, dissidents and those who protest around the world are always very encouraged when they know that Americans care. And through all this modern technology, it is so evident that we are always on the side of those who want freedom.

And for me, Rachel, what this shows is democracy is alive and well. You know, people question whether people want to make decisions about their own lives, and what you’re seeing out there on the streets is people want to be in control of their own lives. And democracy from below is something that is a very, very powerful movement.

I’m not an Albright fan — she, like everyone else who has run the State Department, is too beholden to that strain of “realism” that has left us on the wrong side of too many conflicts.

But I think she is right here. The specifics of our relationship with Iran — the mutual mistrust and our own sense of victimhood in this relationship tied to the hostage crisis and so incredibly ignorant of the history that helped create the conditions that led to the late-’70s revolution in the first place — make it important that our government stay out of things, that we not give the regime an opportunity to use the United States and a false sense of Iranian patriotism against the reformers. That would take steam away from the protests and likely drive a wedge between the more conservative poorer classes and the urban reformers.

It’s something we need to acknowledge — and then extend to other hot spots in the Middle East. “We are,” after all, as Chris Hedges wrote on Truthdig the other day, “the biggest problem in the Middle East.”

We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.

He goes on to say that “We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East.”

The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence.

Does that mean we should ignore what is happening? No. But it is not the government that should act. The Iranian people need our support, need us to speak up and speak out and to do the honorable thing and give the Middle East back to its people, to stop meddling.