Peter Krupa

One nice thing about living in New York is that you get to see all those limited release movies that you used to just read about. So Sunday night, Ona and I went to see The Bridge, a documentary about the folks who take the plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was good… good, but flawed. This is the problem with limited release movies: Often, the release is limited for a reason.

I say it was good because I liked the way it highlighted the quotidian details of suicide. For example, should you take your sunglasses off? Your backpack? And once you decide to kill yourself, fine, but how are you supposed to haul your fat, middle-aged, failure of a body over the rail so you can jump?

It also illustrated that suicide, and the way we think and talk about it, doesn’t actually fit into neat, emotional, and poignant narratives, no matter how much documentary directors want it to.

This was one flaw: The director seemed to want his subjects to utter profound and meaningful things, but over and over again we were reminded that human beings are not typically profound or meaningful. One guy who jumped off the bridge and lived compared it to an alien bursting out of his body, then mumbled something about the soul. “Huh?” you ask.

Exactly.

My personal favorite part of the movie - and I wish I had the exact quote - was an interview with a friend of one of the jumpers. The narrative had drawn to a close, and there was a brief contemplative pause, when she added that, and you know what? That job he’d applied for at the video game store, well, they left a message on the answering machine the morning he killed himself, and they wanted to interview him. And it would have been a management position! So it’s tragic, because he didn’t have to kill himself after all.

The moral being, if you ever plan to kill yourself, wait one hour longer, just in case that life-changing call from the video game store comes through. On second thought, never mind, go ahead and kill yourself.

My main complaint, however, was that in a movie made famous for videotaping a year’s worth of footage of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers, there was disappointingly little plunging and screaming.

This wasn’t because of cautious editing. There was plenty of footage of the jumpers queuing up, hauling themselves over the rail, taking deep breaths, and stepping over the edge. But once they stepped over the edge, the camera simply lost the person. There was nothing gruesome about it because all we saw was a camera man trying frantically to frame a falling body before finally settling solemnly on a spot in the water where the body may very well have landed.

What did I want, a snuff film? Well, yeah, sort of. Admit it, if you walked into a documentary about strippers, you would be a little disappointed if there were no tits. For all the highbrow motives of the genre, there is always an element of voyeurism, and at least I can admit that I kind of - sort of - wanted to see tits.

And really, I think some of the jumpers may have wanted it that way. Seriously. After sitting through all the interviews and footage and swelling music, it became clear to me that there are two kinds of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge: jumpers who are clinically depressed, hopelessly chemically imbalanced who just need a blessed way out; and jumpers who want to go out with flare.

I think that second category would have been proud that their final moments in this life got splashed all over movie screens somewhere in Midtown Manhattan. If only that damn camera man had done his job…

The BBC just made a content sharing deal with Telesur. Telesur’s start-up fund was 70% Venezuelan oil money, and today it is owned by Venezuela (51%), Argentina (20%), Cuba (15%), Uruguay (10%), and Bolivia (5%).

The BBC seems to be under the impression that all state-owned media companies are like them: critical of their own government. I personally wouldn’t trust the Cuban 15 percent, but then again, maybe generic footage of happy brown people dancing is all the BBC wants anyway.

The headline had me all a-flutter: “Money trails lead to Bush judges.” Oh what new evil machination could this be? Dreamed up by Karl Rove, no doubt, or possibly Dick (shudder) Cheney. The subhead cried out from the highest mountains: A four-month investigation reveals that dozens of federal judges gave contributions to President Bush and top Republicans who helped place them on the bench.

“Holy shit!” I said to myself. “People are buying judgeships!” And so I read:

At least two dozen federal judges appointed by President Bush since 2001 made political contributions to key Republicans or to the president himself while under consideration for their judgeships, government records show. A four-month investigation of Bush-appointed judges by the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that six appellate court judges and 18 district court judges contributed a total of more than $44,000 to politicians who were influential in their appointments. Some gave money directly to Bush after he officially nominated them. Other judges contributed to Republican campaign committees while they were under consideration for a judgeship.

“Holy shit!” I said to myself again. “I need to get in on this!” Because the crazy thing is, I actually could! I mean, hell, a measly $44,000 for 24 judgeships? That’s like, what? Less than two G’s per spot? I could put two on my credit card! Shit, if bought judgeships come that cheap around here, Mexico should start outsourcing.

And the Republicans must be in a desperate financial situation to risk their party, their careers, the careers of 24 professional jurists, and the foundation of the country’s judicial system for the price of a decent luxury car.

Oh wait, but isn’t that strange, Republicans have out-fundraised democrats this cycle $419 million to $304 million (pdf), and $44,000 is pretty small potatoes in comparison. Maybe it was illegal? But no, whoops, right in the third paragraph: “There are no laws or regulations prohibiting political contributions by a candidate for a federal judgeship.”

Could it be - could it possibly be - that Salon was planning an investigative-report sucker punch on Republican misconduct, but turned up nothing? And printed it anyway?

I guess the moral here, for all you aspiring ma-gah-zeen editors out there, is that if your audience hates Republicans irrationally enough, they’ll swallow whatever rabble-rousing piece of horse shit you feed them.

Remember: Not ideas. Tribes.

Arkansas wants to ban smoking by pregnant women because it hurts that thing that’s in the womb, whatever it is. The woman’s obvious defense: “I was going to abort it anyway.”

The political spectrum continues to eat its own head…

Some Cuban refugees have filed a civil suit under the Alien Torts Statute against a Curacao dry dock, alledging that they were used as slave labor to clean and repair ships. The Cubans say (full court complaint here, in PDF) they were forced by the Cuban government to travel to Curacao and work ungodly long hours under harsh conditions for $16 a month (about 3.5 cents per hour).

For those of us who follow Cuba, this is nothing new, and it’s part of the reason the US keeps its trade embargo in place. In its efforts to collect hard currency, the Cuban government - in all of its revolutionary, anti-capitalist grandeur - regularly rents out its labor force to foreign businesses and pockets the proceeds.

It would be hilarious, the irony, if it weren’t just horribly sad.

Venezuela recently got smacked down pretty hard in its run for a two-year seat on the UN Security Council. Aside from one tie early on in the 41 rounds of voting, Venezuela stayed consistently behind Guatemala, and in the end could only muster an average of 80 votes.

This is sort of a big deal. Chavez spent a lot of political capital (and oil money) lobbying for this seat, and for the world to reject him so explicitly is quite a set-back. Add it to the other set-backs of this year and one can’t help but conclude that the Bolivarian Revolution is on the rocks as far as its international popularity.

Three more important events are left for this year. First, Nicaragua has presidential elections coming up on Nov. 5, in which it looks like Chavez buddy Daniel Ortega might finally pull out a win. (Some analyists, however, don’t think he’ll be able to screw things up as bad as he did last time.)

Second, Chavez is up for re-election in December, which he will win handily, because of a combination of shady dealings, genuine popularity, and incompetent opponents. Keep an eye out for violence after the elections - Rosales supporters will protest the loss, crying foul, and Chavez supporters, emboldened by the victory, will beat them about the head. It’s a typical Cuban tactic - sending a loyal, faceless mob to silence protestors - and given the preponderance of Cuban political advisors kicking around Venezuela these days, we shouldn’t be surprised at the emergence of such things once Chavez is comfortably in power for another six years.

Third, and speaking of Cuba, the deus ex machina this year could very well be the announcement of Castro’s death. I say “the announcement” because it’s a pretty good bet he’s already dead. No one’s seen him in months, and Raul is keeping a very tight lid on things. Chavez may want to make a move to cast himself as the savior of Cuba’s revolution, but Raul may not be too keen on that, which could be one of the reasons he’s holding back news of Castro’s death. But who knows? Revolutionary dick-swinging is just so hard to predict.

Anyway, that’s the run-down. Chavez will enter 2007 deep in the red (really, no pun intended). With the global - and even regional - stage slipping beyond his grasp, it will be interesting to see what he turns his ambition to next.

I’m good and sick of hearing about Barack Obama. I swear, in the last two weeks he’s been featured lavishly in every major publication in the country, and you could almost feel the tremble of the media’s collective orgasm when he hinted he’s considering running for president in 2008.

I’m sick of the hype for two reasons: First, it’s way, way too early for magazines to be wasting my time with fawning 5,000-word profiles. Every time the media does this they get burned - Powell, Dean, McCain, take your pick. But they still do this, every election season.

Second, the premise of all the hype is that Obama is super-popular, a winner, a black American who beat the odds, etc. But the exhaustive biographical profiles of him tend to skip over one very, very important detail: his US Senate seat was handed to him.

Way back in 2004, Obama’s opponent for the US Senate seat was Republican candidate Jack Ryan. Lucky for Obama, Ryan’s problems from a rough-and-tumble primary followed him into the election, and after a judge ordered the release of his steamy divorce proceedings, he dropped out of the race. It was six months before the election, sure, but the Republicans kept their thumbs deep up their asses for a while before finally putting someone up against Obama, and by then the race was merely symbolic. (Not helping the Republicans any was George Ryan’s earlier corruption indictment, which just recently sent him to jail for the rest of his natural life. Illinois Republicans have since stayed away from people named “Ryan.”)

So basically, all Obama has done so far is not screw up. This does take some talent in Washington politics, but if he were to become president, he would have a lot of pre-made screw-ups handed to him upon inauguration, and I’m not confident in his ability to fix them.

My gut feeling is that Obama will fall off the radar sometime during 2007, and by 2012 he will have finally screwed up, or the media will be busy chasing some other crush. And people will say, “Remember when everyone was crazy about that one guy, what was his name? Barama?”

So much of conservative Islam feels like American history on replay. Consider the following:

Australia’s senior Muslim cleric Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali has apologised for any offence caused
by his comments that immodestly dressed women provoke sexual attacks.

Sheik Alhilali drew widespread condemnation for likening scantily clad women to uncovered meat eaten by animals in a sermon to 500 people last month, The Australian reported today.

Anyway, he seems to have quite a talent for vivid analogy.

There’s an interesting series starting up over at DefenseTech.org on how civilian technology will affect the future of the US Military. Today’s post is on radar, and an emerging technology called multi-path radar.

The gist is that the US Air Force structures its tactics assuming conventional radar defenses: conventional radar sends out an easily-detectable signal which is supposed to bounce off an aircraft and return to the base unit. This type of radar can be defeated by using stealth planes designed to absorb or deflect the radar signal, or by using radar-sniffing missiles that follow the radar signal back to its source, thus destroying it.

Multi-path radar, however, creates what appears to be a network of radation and reception points that exist in separate locations and all work together to create a picture of what’s in the sky. It therefore renders stealth technology completely useless (since the radar signal can reflect back to sensors in a variety of directions) and it disperses the infrastructure to such a degree that anti-radar missiles would be minimally effective: “…simply blowing up the transmitters destroys valueless targets and an adversary could simply build more $500 transmitters than the US has anti-radiation missiles.”

And the really interesting thing is that the equipment needed for such a radar system is readily available in the commercial market. It’s the same technology found in computers, cell towers, and a variety of wireless receivers. Basically, any country with a tech industry and a few bright engineers could set up something like this, and suddenly, our latest $30,000,000 plane would be hanging up there in the sky, quite naked, for anyone to take a shot at.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m awfully curious about something. A whole lot of stories have come out recently about the growing gap between the rich and the poor in America. The growth of the gap is generally chalked up to overseas outsourcing, and the debate moves on. Meanwhile, there are a whole lot of other stories popping up about how women have overtaken men in college admissions in the United States.

But there seems to me to be an obvious connection between the two stories.

See, when women were emancipated and whatnot, it had the theoretical potential to instantly double the size of the American workforce. Obviously that didn’t happen right away because of various social factors, but today it looks like women have caught up (in qualifications if not in wages).

My thought is, mightn’t this have created a glut of qualified, middle class workers, which - assuming their numbers grew faster than the number of available jobs - would for the moment hold middle class wages down? Market forces, you know - the more qualified people there are, the less everyone gets paid. (Adding to this hypothesis is a statistic cited in the September 2006 Atlantic which notes a particularly small growth in median income between 1966 and 2001 - just when working women were joining the workforce.)

I say “for the moment” because if this were, indeed, the cause of the current phenomena of stagnant middle class wages, it would be a temporary effect, and once the market adjusted itself to the new, bigger labor force, all ships would continue to bob upward with the rising tide. Or maybe they wouldn’t…

I’m sure someone smarter and more-qualified than me has already thought of this possibility and studied it, using data and whatnot, so I’m wondering if anyone out there in my audience of 2.5 readers who have made it this far know of any such studies. Thanks, and good night.