PUTIN'S HARD HAT OF INDIFFERENCE

BALLOON PAYMENT FOR SOCHI OLYMPICS

INVADE NOW FOR BEST FINANCING TERMS

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

     Remember when the worst thing we had to fear from Vladimir Putin was another garish bare-chested, bareback photo opportunity?

     There had come a time in the career of President Putin when he was even taking flack from Pussy Riot band members and seemed destined for irrelevance.

     Not any more.

     The erstwhile and current president always wanted us to look at him as a tough guy (what’s a former KGB guy supposed to do?) hence the pictures of him in black belt karate gear, on horseback as a half-suit Lord Godiva and supine in the snow with his big dogs and guns.

     Putin wasn’t eligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2008, so he did the next best thing, put in a puppet (Dmitry Medvedev) to run for president and win in his place and then have him appoint himself (the former president) as “Prime Minister” for the next four years.

     Vlad the Deplaner put up with Pussy Riot’s taunts in the days leading up to his coming out party at the Sochi Olympic Games this year – because he wanted to appear statesmanlike in the international press – and because he knew he was planning something even bigger at the conclusion of the sporting contests.

      Four days after the closing ceremonies of the $50 billion Russian-sponsored Olympic games, Putin marched his troops less than 300 miles away from Sochi into Crimea and seized 233,090 square miles of beachfront property and 45 trillion cubic meters of strategic gas reserves – it’s the kind real estate deal that you won’t see on Million Dollar Listing.

      At the beginning of the year, Putin was on the verge of going the way of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but the patina of a successful Olympic games put his name back in the news rundowns as a bear claw to the rainbow community and possible exterminator of wild dogs.

     Now, the parallels to Adolf Hitler and the appeasement that the 1936 Olympic Games represented – seem ominous – you don’t have to look twice to see Putin’s Yeti-like cojones. Vlad had to pay for the Olympics somehow – how else are you going to raise $50 billion in five months?

     The question is: what are we going to do about it? President Obama was out front on stepped up economic sanctions against Russia when he got the news live via telephone from his presidential peer that “someone” had taken down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. Sanctions have never kept any nation from doing what it felt it was autonomous to do.

     At the beginning of the year Putin faced political oblivion with a trending loss of support at home. What he needed to keep ordinary Russians from wondering if their lives had improved under him was a wag-the-dog-type diversion. He’s definitely got that and more now.

     According to Gallup polls, Putin’s popularity rating had sunk to an all-time low of 54% last year. In April of 2014, after the Olympics and Crimea – his popularity had tied for his highest ever mark at 83 percent approval.

     Meanwhile, the EU leaders who are doing everything right by international law standards have seen their popularity ratings fall beyond low into single digit numbers. And President Obama’s Gallup poll numbers have also tied for a notable mark – in his case a low point of 38 percent approval tying him with August 2011 polling numbers – and a recent Quinnipiac University poll that rated him the worst American president since 1945.

     It’s OK to keep talking about increasing economic sanctions against Russia in the summer of our discontent, but when winter approaches, there are 18 nations that get five to 100 percent of their gas from Moscow. Thirty percent of Europe depends on Russia for oil.

     Ultimately, the international community must galvanize one and all to oppose Putin in a way that not only hurts his bank account – but most importantly – his pride.

     No amount of black market Viagra will be able to lift his swelling pride if it is unmistakable to his people.

     That means the international community should call on FIFA to take away the World Cup Games from Russia in 2018.

     Failing that, a boycott of the upcoming FIFA World Cup Games is in order for all nations that value the rule of law – just as the United States did in 1980 with the Moscow Olympic Games.

     The Carter and Obama administrations have been tagged with the “malaise” label, it’s time we passed the uneasiness buck to where it belongs – back to Putin.

     Right now he’s riding high on his horse and preaching to the choir. A national tide of rising pride is not likely to diminish in the next four years if the status quo is maintained.  People who supply irresponsible people with surface-to-air missile systems and then train them to shoot down passenger planes must pay a meaningful price.

     Photo ops never showed if Putin plays an instrument.

     It’s time we teach him how to play taps on his home turf.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is a reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

A GENERATIONAL SLAP IN THE FACE

BETTER THAN THE TWINKIE DEFENSE

THE COBB COUNTY CRUCIBLE ON HLN

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

TMV Columnist

If the O.J. Simpson trial was the crime of the last century, then the “hot car death” of Cooper Harris is the “alleged” murder of the new century.

H.L. Mencken called the kidnapping and murder trial of the Lindbergh baby’s killer in 1932 “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”

The trial of 33-year-old Justin Ross Harris promises to not be all that, but it may be a bag of chips for the cable TV news networks and their endless 24-7 cycle seeking to replace Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 as the new “go to” story.

The differences in the three crimes of the last two centuries are telling: 1) Charles Lindbergh was the biggest celebrity in America at the time his 18-month-old child Charles Jr. was stolen from his home in East Amwell, New Jersey. 2) “OJ” was a known AVIS rental car spokesman and ABC sports commentator, but merely part of the ensemble casts in “Towering Inferno” (1974) and “Airplane” (1980). His alleged victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were not celebrities. 3) Harris is a web designer for Home Depot by trade and only came to prominence with his arrest last month in Marietta, Georgia.

If the national news media builds the Harris Hot Car Death into the “Crime of the Century” it will give Andy Warhol’s fabled “15 minutes of fame” even more credibility because neither Justin or his son Cooper were celebrities before Cobb County Police identified Mr. Harris as a cold blooded killer. German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann became a celebrity when he was arrested two years after the Lindbergh baby disappearance and was then executed by the electric chair two years after his conviction.

In modern-day America, O.J. Simpson was released after his double murder trial ended in a not guilty verdict so that he could commit other sports memorabilia felonies in Las Vegas 14 years after his initial arrest, including armed robbery and kidnapping. In 1971 (three years before “Towering Inferno,” Charles Manson was convicted for masterminding the Tate-LaBianca murders. But a year later the California Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment.

The Cooper Harris murder trial represents the constantly shifting paradigms of American society, from West Coast to Southern industrial dominance; and geographically America’s population is moving westward and southward, just as the trial of OJ was in LA, the new showstopper is in ATL - which is known affectionately as "Hot-lanta." We have gone from Baby Boomers on ordinary trunk land lines in 1994 to Generation Y, the so-called “Millenials” sex text messaging, or “sexting” in 2014.

The current group, Generation Z, aka the “Homeland Generation” or “digital natives” not only are too young to remember the Lindberg baby kidnapping, but likely don’t even know who Johnnie Cochran was, after all – they weren’t even born when Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered in Brentwood. And the generational gap represented by these three or four Crimes of the Century was never more obvious than when watching Headline News network last night.

The cheerleading style of nightly justice outrage was stoked to a fever pitch by “Nancy Grace” who used a full-screen Chyron graphic to illustrate not only that Harris was sexting six women at the same time he was supposed to be watching his son, but that one of them was only seventeen years old. The opening act for Grace is Jane Velez-Mitchell’s show. Velez-Mitchell came to prominence as a commentator during the Michael Jackson sexual abuse trial and apparently developed an affinity for Jacko’s style of plastic surgery following that 2003 media circus.

Velez-Mitchell emphasized almost as many times as Nancy Grace, that when Harris was texting his six sextuplets, he was sending along pictures of his “erect penis” to his chosen few. Grace, who was thrust into national prominence first on Court TV as a reporter when ratings soared on the glovetails of the O.J. Simpson trial, mentioned “erect penis” at least five times during her hour-long show.

Grace, in her visibly-angered persona looking scarier than Bruce Nauman in full “Clown Torture” video mode, showed that the 22-year age difference between her and the accused is significant. Because that generational gap was never more apparent than when she and near sexogenarian Velez-Mitchell were gagging on the “erect penis” pictures that they said Harris was including in text messages to his “friends with benefits.” Presumably, the two women would have been equally upset if Harris had jaywalked with his child – but sexted at the same time.

The voice of reason came when the 55-year-old Dr. Drew Pinsky was included in a telephone beeper on Velez-Mitchell’s “Issues” show. Substance abuse expert Dr. Pinsky stated that if Harris had gotten drunk and run over Cooper, everyone would have understood it as an accident. “Dr. Drew” said the line of reasoning that best fits Harris’ crime is that the Alabama-born father is a “sex addict.”

And the sexual perversion angle is not just important to Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell and their respective shows' ratings, it was also important to Harris before going to court yesterday. Because Mr. Harris chose Maddox Kilgore as his defense attorney, a lawyer who has never before represented a murder defendant - Kilgore has typically defended sexual predators and people accused of harboring child pornography in the past.

As the prospect of a Justin Ross Harris capital murder trial is dangled in front of a federal grand jury, prosecutors must now come to grips with the fact that it is inconsistent to argue on the one hand that Harris was distracted by titillating pictures of six women other than his wife – while at the same time saying the negligent father coldly, analytically plotted to kill his baby son by leaving him unattended in that hot car.

The balding, pasty-white, morbidly-obese Cobb County Chief Magistrate Judge Frank R. Cox told his standing-room-only courtroom that there was not only probable cause to bind Harris over for trial, but that sufficient evidence might exist for the death penalty to come into play.

Cobb County Police Detective Phil Stoddard had argued that Harris’ sexting suggested that the defendant was living a criminal “double life” and should not be set free on bail. Prosecutors also said that Harris researched hot car deaths on the Internet just five days prior to Cooper dying of hypothermia.

Court testimony revealed that the Harris’ purchased a $25,000 life insurance policy on Cooper in 2012. An additional $2,000 life insurance policy was included in Harris’ compensation package as a Home Depot employee.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will be able argue whether or not Harris intended to kill his son on that fateful 18th day in June.

What is not debatable is that cable TV news networks see the case only as a distraction until they can cut to more commercials. 

 

AN ANIMAL SLURRY OF ACTIVITY

GAGGING ON THE G.O.P.’S AG-GAG BILLS

MUCKRAKING DIGS UP ANIMALS BURIED ALIVE

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

TMV Columnist

 

Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Utah already have ag-gag laws.

Now 18 other states – roughly half the country – also want to use legislation to keep investigative journalists from using undercover videos to expose animal cruelty.

All of the bills – which seek to take cameras out of the hands of photojournalists or impose criminal penalties on activists who try to hide their intentions on job applications – have been proposed by Republican lawmakers.

Prince Poultry near Raleigh, North Carolina had one poultry worker burying live chickens in a pit with dying and decaying birds. In one scene shown on OutFront with Erin Burnett, the farm hand is asked by the undercover intern whether he plans to first kill the chicken before he puts it in the burial pit.

“No, we’re going to drop them in the pit just like they are,” the worker told CNN. “You dump them in there and then Mother Nature takes care of the rest. You go in there in the summertime, and it smells real nice over there. If you look down in there, it’s like a gravy that’s simmering and squirming.”

The television report also played an undercover video shot by a PETA employee depicting lame and sick pigs on a farm in the Midwest owned by Babcock Genetics in which the animals’ insides were left hanging outside of their bodies with no veterinary care. The Holmen, Wisconsin-based company has as its motto: “bigger pigs, bigger profits.”

If animal farms are left to their own devices – with no oversight by government or private concerns – the question becomes: will the public good be served as well as it might with the occasional surprise inspection by amateur videographers?

“These investigations have exposed not only animal abuse but also food safety, workers’ rights, environmental issues,” Matthew Dominguez of the Humane Society of the United States said. “These ag-gag bills should scare every American because Americans have a right to know what’s happening with their food. They have a right to know where their food is coming from.”

How Americans find out where their food is coming from has become the issue to these G.O.P. representatives. They say it is unfair to businesses to have animal rights activists pose as interns to surreptitiously gain access to animal farms in the United States.

One could argue that animal cruelty could be exposed without the help of video documentation, but in the age of TMZ, CNN and YouTube – if it doesn’t exist on video – it might as well not exist at all. Undercover journalism has been practiced since at least the beginning of the last century when Sinclair Lewis became famous with “The Jungle.”

“The Jungle” not only exposed the health hazards of early 20^th Century meatpacking plants, but also cast a jaundiced eye at human rights abuses by corporations that Jack London said engaged in “wage slavery.”

When told that his North Carolina farm was burying chickens alive, the owner of Prince Poultry, Tim Prince, initially denied the allegations. But when confronted with the video evidence, Prince acknowledged that some mistakes were made.

“She's taken six weeks of work and narrowed it down to a few bad things I’ve done,” Prince complained about the intern. “And I’ve done it. It's obvious. She took just a few very minute little things that we’ve done wrong.”

And it is these kinds of “minute little things” that Sen. Brent Jackson (R-NC) and his Republican colleagues hope to remove from public scrutiny with legislation. The politicians are responding to big farming’s interests in having as little oversight as possible of their operations. But the question is why?

“I don’t have anything to say to CNN,” state lawmaker Jackson told the Atlanta-based news source when asked for comment.

Meanwhile Dominguez said that recent undercover investigations were key to exposing chickens being buried alive in North Carolina, pigs left with their intestines hanging out in Wisconsin and cows being sexually assaulted in Idaho.

"At the heart of the matter, it's unconstitutional," Dominguez said. "It says a lot about an industry that wants to criminalize someone for simply taking a picture of their operation."

As Kristen Rasmussen of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes, at least one of the proposed laws would prohibit any person – including a non-journalist – from snapping a photo of livestock in a public place.

"For example: a photograph taken from a public road of a farm animal grazing in an open field would expose the journalist to up to a year in prison or a $1,000 fine," Rasmussen said.

If Republican lawmakers hold sway nationwide, the food producing industries of America will be subject to watchdog public inspections when pigs fly.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

 

Increasing Frequent Flyer Mileage Vs. Increasing Understanding

THE CAMEL TOW APPROACH TO JOURNALISM

HOW ERIN BURNETT STOOPS TO CONQUER

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

To say I’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup soccer games is a bit of an understatement.

I’ve watched all of them. At least all those broadcast by ESPN/ABC.

What I’ve learned is that The Netherlands (Holland) came up with the world’s first national anthem.

And like most groundbreaking things, it remains one of the best. By contrast, Chile’s national anthem sounds musically like a Big Band version of a traveling circus’ “Here Comes The Clowns” siren’s song.

Good team, bad theme.

Which brings us quite naturally to what this column was supposed to be about: Erin Burnett’s visit to Qatar to confirm her assertion that the average Qatari “doesn’t care” that they now have “Al Qaeda” in their midst.

This after the United States swapped five Haqqani Network prisoners from Guantanamo Bay for American prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

The fact that the Haqqani Network has never tried to attack U.S. interests outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan was not mentioned in Ms. Burnett’s report.

Nor was it mentioned that the United States probably would have released these five prisoners when it ends its operations in Afghanistan in 2015 anyway – and taken nothing in return for so doing.

But the fact that the national media has not pointed this fact out – is not Erin Burnett’s fault alone. Most in the national media – including some of our vaunted elected leaders and our most celebrated prisoner of war [John McCain (R-AZ) seem to be confusing trading terrorists for hostages with redeeming enemy combatants for prisoners of war.

What President Ronald Reagan did in 1986 was trade U.S. arms for hostages – not prisoners of war. I think even Sen. McCain would admit that there is a big difference in our national moral hegemony between extracting civilian hostages and making sure no American serviceman is left behind.

What Erin Burnett hoped to prove by blowing into Qatar for one day and disingenuously trying to find one Qatari citizen to say that they don’t mind having five “Al Qaeda” among them is perhaps not even known to her or her CNN producers.

Forget the fact that the five prisoners were Haqqani – and not Al Qaeda. Ms. Burnett seems to pride herself in pulling up stakes from New York and running off half-cocked to the trouble-plagued Middle East at the drop of her high hat.

The fact that her premise was wrong from the start didn’t seem to bother her any more than such reasoning bothered President George W. Bush when he used flawed intelligence to bolster the argument for invading Iraq after 911.

And if Qatar had been free enough (and spendthrift enough) to fly a Qatari TV reporter to a Boston pub in the 1970s or 1980s – they could have done a similar report about Americans not caring whether or not Massachusetts had IRA terrorists in THEIR midst.

What Erin Burnett’s OutFront production team from CNN did in Qatar had the same journalistic significance as what Geraldo Rivera did in opening up Al Capone’s Chicago vault on live TV – absolutely none.

The most intelligent thing in the CNN report was a sound bite from the First Lady (and second wife) of the Emir of Qatar, when Sheikha Mozah told Burnett that even if everything she was telling her was true, if the United States and Qatar did do as she said they did, it probably “benefited all parties involved.”

Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Maybe if Erin Burnett stayed longer in the places she was visiting journalistically-speaking, she might stop doing her level best to prove Twain wrong on this account.

It is hard to say what journalistic benefit people who regularly watch “OutFront With Erin Burnett” are getting, she is an investment banker by trade who is most famous for accusing Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of “camelcide” and for heckling Occupy Wall Street protestors on camera when the “greed is bad” protests first began in 2011.

If CNN hopes to beat Fox News in the ratings wars, it needs more news programming like Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” – and less programming like Erin Burnett’s – where just the points are unknown.

CNN’s ratings were buoyed by the nearly 24-hour-per-day coverage of the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in the Spring, but now that Summer has arrived the Nielsen Ratings have returned to their natural order.

That order has Greta Van Susteren’s news program getting 5.6 times as many viewers as her competitor Erin Burnett.

And if Ms. Burnett’s inattentive handlers continue to allow her to manically go off on wild goose chases all over the Middle East, OutFront might be as hard to find on TV as that ill-fated airplane is to find in the Indian Ocean.

In TV as with anything else, you can’t lead from behind, and OutFront needs to show that it “gets it” if it wants to grow its market share.

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

E Pluribus Unum Factor

 

http://themoderatevoice.com/195603/e-pluribus-unum-factor/

 

Word Fight At The OK Corral

A Rose By Any Other Name

View From The Virgin Islands.

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

I spend a lot of time thinking about words.

Kind of goes with the territory if you consider yourself a writer.

And if you know your Mark Twain you know that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Le mot juste is what the French call it – and for my money that’s the best way to say what I’m getting at – and that is partly the point, when it comes to words, the English language is the most generous foster family the world has ever known.

Albert Camus may have been ribbing Gustave Flaubert when he made one of his characters in “The Plague” so word conscious that he was never able to write more than the first sentence of a planned novel.

So if your duty calls for words, having more than one million words at your disposal certainly makes for a palette of “colors” that even the greatest artist would find daunting.

This column was supposed to be about the words that I see catapulting themselves into contention for most used high-end words of the year – and if you know me – you know I don’t like the adjective “high-end.”

Nearing the half-way point of the year, the words “traction,” “muddle” and “whiff” are near the top of “new” old words that are most used – to good and bad effect – in 2014.

I had brilliant examples of each word being used in Associated Press news articles, box office busting movies like “Django Unchained” (which I say spawned the current “muddle” fascination and even current ad campaigns for drugs such as Zyrtec “Muddle No More” is the drug’s new tagline.

But as much as I sought out the late William Safire’s “On Language” column in the Sunday New York Times, I also remember – as good as those pieces were – how they were often a struggle to finish.

As I tried to write that column what seemed even more important was keeping up with all of the new words that are coming off of today’s scrivener assembly lines. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM) English got it’s millionth word “web 2.0” at 5:22 on June 10, 2009.

And GLM says a new word is created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day. By contrast, the French language has about one-tenth the amount of words as English – weighing in at about 100,000 words.

The scientifically minded amongst us always told me English had the most words – and GLM seems to bear that out. When I did a “Word Power” quiz in a Reader’s Digest a few years back and got such marvels as “bling bling” and “beater” as the words I needed to identify with definitions – I realized that the language is constantly changing [“labile” to a word-o-phile (“logophile” for purists)] – and I needed to do more verbal calisthenics if I hoped to keep up.

The most recognized word on the planet is the brutally efficient “OK” which no one seems to agree on how to spell or its word origins in English.

Some say it goes back the newspaper printing process in Boston spelling out “oil korrect” in 1839 – others say U.S President Martin Van Buren was nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” when the campaign slogan “Old Kinderhook is OK “swept the nation – others say it is from the native American word “okeh” in the Choctaw language – and still others go further back to ancient Greece where “ola kala” means “all is well.”

But if you think “American English” is only used on this side of the pond, you only have to watch your favorite British TV show to wince through a few “don’t go there’s” and other typically U.S. urban words and expressions that have been appropriated anachronistically for use by our so-called language-conscious Redcoat cousins.

One of the most disappointing moments of my life was when I first purchased a copy of the Sunday London Times only to find out that instead of getting the deep dish and lowdown on what Mick, Keith and the Royal Family were doing – they instead had articles on Sylvester Stallone and Eddie Murphy.

So it’s not just our words that are being exported – but, as witnessed by “Big Bang Theory” being the number one TV show in America (and China) – it’s also our culture. People around the world want to know what Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Hillary Clinton are doing – maybe in THAT exact order.

The British gave birth to America – and thanks to the two things we do better than anyone in the world (TV shows and new word order) – we now instruct THEM in the proper use of the English language. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Having spent several months in a Spanish-speaking country last year – I know first-hand that many cultures and languages actually resent the would-be intrusions of English into their respective languages. English, however, does not share that compunction.

Still, in that Spanish-speaking country I noticed that the word “OK” has been adopted into their language as one of its own. I asked Spanish speakers about this at the time and they just sheepishly shrugged their shoulders in embarrassment – knowing that I had caught them in an Americanization of their hallowed language.

With the advent of social media, I didn’t want to be the one to tell them that that uber-efficient word had evolved to being one letter less – because whether you text msg, instant message or email – OK is now “k.”

OK?

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

A NEVER-ENDING TAIL

http://themoderatevoice.com/195149/a-never-ending-tail/

 

FROM THE DON’T TELL RICHARD GERE DEPT.

TOKYO GOES GAGA FOR HAMSTER BUTTS

VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist
 

     This column went away for a few days as I tried to wrap my head around the Japanese fab fad of “hamuketsu.”

     Jean Michel Basquiat became famous as a graffiti artist by writing “Plush safe, he think” all over Manhattan in the 1980’s.

     Only in the land that spawned green Godzilla could the plush rear ends of hamsters be set up on a pedestal worthy of praise.

     Obviously Tokyo’s national culture is a visual one because cartoons in the form of anime serve as virtual porn for the Samurai set.

     Considering I live in a country where “Meth,” “sniffing glue,” “raccoon hunting” and “butt implants” are at the top of Google searches on a state-by-state basis, according to Estately – I won’t be quick to judge the Japanese and what constitutes their eye candy.

     Times are tough in the United States – money is tight – I started calling it “The Great Depression II: The Sequel” (sequels are always worse than their predecessors) in 2008 only to be drowned out by the national media who called 2008-2013 “The Great Recession” which is considered more PC.

     About 62 percent of American households have a dog or a cat as opposed to 25 percent of Japanese households – where interior living space – and cultural differences (pets have to be well cared for in death there) make owning a pet more challenging.

     Japanese artist Takashi Murakami coined the term “superflat” to explain his country’s Pop Art preoccupation with the anime arts, so it seems only logical that the latest thing added to their pop culture appreciation would be 2-D pictures of “hamster buttocks.”

     “The great thing about hamuketsu is that it is delightfully cute,” Takeshi Takahashi told The Wall Street Journal. “I can’t stop smiling when I see those butts.”

     Takahashi’s company Basilico recently published a 96-page book about “Hamuketsu” trying to explain the trend. It was released on March 12 and has already sold 7,000 copies. A like-minded book, “Kawaisa-ni Monzetsu Hamuketsu” or “Hamuketsu-So Cute You Could Faint” was released on April 19 and has sold 30,000 copies so far and is already in reprints.

     Sekai Bunka Publishing Inc. spokesperson Yukako Minami says the pictures of hamster butts “sooth the hearts of readers.” The Japanese people say the plush tail pics are “kawaii” or “loveable and cute.”

     Which makes me wonder how the Great Depression II is affecting the Japanese – the Great Depression (The Original) did not affect Japan but the great recession hit Tokyo in the second quarter of 2008 like a tsunami.

     A friend of mine who was born in middle Europe and raised in Israel and Canada (and is also a transplanted Californian and a bona fide world traveler) when he told me that he considered Japan to be the most civilized place on Earth.

     Meanwhile, stateside, Maine googled “Cat pics” more than anything else on the Internet while New Hampshire searched most for “Free Kittens.”

     There was no listing for how United States territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands scoured the Internet – the Estately record is a blank slate – which may be a blessing in disguise for those areas so dependent on tourism – although “nudist colonies” flourish in the Caribbean – and “Nudist Colony” was the subject that piqued the interest most of all people living in South Carolina.

     Massachusetts was desperately seeking “Canadian men,” Rhode Islanders are interested in “Beer Pong,” Alaskans in “Mail Order Brides” and New Mexicans in “UFOs.” The fifty states represent an Area 51 of unaccountable interests nationwide – but what nobody seemed to notice is how different each state was from the next when it came to what to obsess over.

     So what I take from this perfect storm of information age trivia is that all people – all over the world – look to animals, or representations of animals – in order to feel more calm about a cataclysmic world that is out of their control.

     About 80 percent of America is wired for the Internet, so this compilation by Estately should represent people who are better off during this dread spectacle of the Zombie Apocalypse, but some of the online queries could have come from Internet Cafes, Starbucks and public libraries nationwide.

     According to a popular art book, Richard Gere was given an Andy Warhol painting and had it proudly displayed in his home. One day when Gere learned in part how it was produced and what essential bodily fluids may have been brought to bear on it – he burned it in his fireplace in a fit of rage and disgust.

     I think when the Officer and Gentleman finds out about this latest rodent craze in Japan he is likely to have more terms of endearment for it than not.

 

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

IT'S ANY SOMEBODY'S HORSE RACE IN 2016

Why Jeb Bush Won’t Run 4 The Triple Crown

A Clinton Always Beats A (round) A Bush

The View From The Virgin Islands

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

The skull and bones have been rolled.

The die has been cast – and Jeb Bush is definitely running in 2016 – or is he?

And even if he is, as Ronald Reagan once said: “you can run, but you can’t hide” (from your brother and your Dad’s record, that is.

So the question two and a half years before the election becomes: which American political family are you most nostalgic for?

The people transplanted from Hope, Arkansas to Chappaqua, New York are betting that Americans want to re-live those moments when we were all movin’ on up to “the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky” rather than the current “income inequality” flatlining in Hoboken.

Soviet-style, President Clinton I is rewriting his history with a series of speeches around the country arguing that his campaign for the highest office in the land was really about “income inequality.” And whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, the math behind the Clinton Mystique is inarguable: Ronald Reagan created 77,000 new jobs: Bill Clinton created 7.7 million new good jobs.

While the Great Communicator (formerly of Bedtime for Bonzo fame) was arguing against “welfare queens” and in favor of ketchup as a school lunch program vegetable, Slick Willie was ordering pepperoni pizza at 3 a.m. and trying to devise new ways to tweek the American economy.

Meanwhile, while Clinton I is making the rounds stemcasting, George II is giving interviews to CNN saying that Jeb should run and that “if you need some advice, give me a call.” call.” The Bushes believe Jeb’s biggest obstacle to the White House is his own mother’s quote about “we’ve had enough Bushes.” “I think this is a great American country, and if we can’t find more than two or three families to run for high office, that’s silly.”

But I think Jeb’s biggest obstacle might be how America perceives him, if you saw the Oliver Stone movie “W.” you know quite well that George II was a fighter, whereas his father George H.W. was a fighter pilot. So if you know only one thing about Jeb it is that he is a lover, not a fighter, as evidenced by H.W.’s (George I’s) controversial reference to Jeb’s “brown babies” which was a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that the Bushes are a multicultural family because Mrs. Jeb is from Mexico and mother, father and children are bilingual.

But the dark horse in the campaign is likely to be Mitt Romney, whose family has hedged its own bets in the G.O.P. multicultural sweepstakes by Madonna-esque adopting their own child of color. MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry nearly lost her job after joking that Romney’s African-American grandson might one day marry the future child of Kanye and Kim, maybe thinking that Washington, D.C. is north by North West of Salt Lake City?

But Mitt says he won’t run if Jeb runs, and if Chris Christie runs and Jeb doesn’t, it opens up the possibility of an “anyone but Romney” campaign against (since the Supreme Court is currently split on the issue) a haven’t-got-a prayer-since-somebody-closed-the-Bridgegate campaign. And if Jeb does go for the glory, after several years of inactivity, he might want to know the price of a gallon of milk – and be careful not to wear a watch in any televised debates.

Everyone knows that Hillary is a fighter and not a lover, so as a progressive she comes off hawkish until talk dovetails to Benghazi, after which there was talk that Clinton II bio-engineered Chelsea’s new addition (and we’re not talking about the Clinton booming economy Bill). Republicans will get to test Hillary’s recovery from an aneurysm (and her doctor’s excuse) when talk shifts liberally to Libya.

The talk of low poll numbers, which President Obama himself acknowledged this weekend at the White House correspondent’s dinner, made me think about President Jimmy Carter, who had until now, been left out of this column, but not forgotten as I wondered if Barry is embroiled in a new form of high anxiety “malaise.” And if he is, is it HIS fault, or ours?

The one resounding piece of news to come out of today’s news cycle was that Americans by and large favor Hillary Clinton for President over President Jeb Bush (no George in the name at all – might be problematic if you are a betting person) by a margin of 53-41 percent, a political landslide, according to a poll released today by NBC/The Wall Street Journal.

After Barack Obama resoundingly won a second term as President, Rush Limbaugh said postpartum that his re-election was again a referendum on President George W. Bush (George II). If another Clinton is elected to the highest office in the land, it might well be a referendum on President Bill Clinton’s legacy in the Oval Office.

In a country where traditionally father has always known best, perhaps a Hillary Clinton candidacy represents a change for the better, with a nostalgic return to 1990’s-style prosperity for all.

But it’s all water under the bridge until November 2016, in the meantime, there are two more legs to be won this year if a horse is going to win the Triple Crown. For the Clintons, that eventual victory represents a double crown. But it is still far from a foregone conclusion.

  

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

 

 

When It Rains, It Snowdens

WILL MITT RUN AGAIN OR JUST HIS MONEY OFFSHORE?

TURNING TURTLE IN TORTOLA, BVI:

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

MODERATE VOICE COLUMNIST

 

Mitt Romney made offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands household words.

But even Willard might blush at how much money the BVI took in last year.

That’s right, while I was eating cheese and bread, my neighbors 40 miles to the north were raking in $92 billion in 2013.

That’s more than Brazil and India combined, but less than the United States, China and Russia did individually.

In fact, little old Road Town, Tortola, where the fresh smell of the Caribbean Sea is around every corner – lost the bronze to Russia by only $2 billion – making them a close fourth in “foreign direct investment” worldwide.

In case you’re wondering, Brazil brought in $63 billion and India netted $28 billion. The world’s biggest economy, the United States, took in $159 billion last year, while China took in $127 billion and Russia got $94 billion.

The BVI government says its country is not a tax dodger’s paradise. But with 500,000 shell companies established just last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) said it discovered “clear evidence of financial fraud” in 2,500 documents it examined.

At least 60 percent of the British Virgin Islands’ revenues come from offshore account fees, so there is little wonder why that Caribbean dependency is seeking to crack down on journalists who publish leaked confidential financial information.

Shell company registrations fell by 23 percent in the final quarter of 2013 after the ICIJ made its disclosure. Le Monde newspaper reported earlier this year that the BVI was concerned it would lose its confidential clients to Hong Kong and Singapore.

 Now that a bill has passed the BVI’s House of Assembly mandating that people who leak or share the names of secret investors face a sentence of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine – it only needs the signatue of British-appointed Governor Boyd McCleary to become law.

This Freedom FROM Information Act from a country that only made incest a crime in the 1980s – and is now proposing to make child pornography illegal in this The Year of Our Zombie Apocalypse – 2014.

The United Nations and the Group of 20 Leading Economies (G20) say they want to put pressure on “non-cooperative jurisdictions” like the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands because they say such notorious tax havens have sucked an estimated $20 trillion out of the world economy.

The lack of transparency in Tortola made it easier for jailed fraudster Achilleas Kallakis to pull off the biggest mortgage con in history – worth an estimated $750 million. Kallakis used BVI shell companies to hide his fraud from lax British and Irish banks.

The BVI government’s clients also include Scot Young, a London property magnate and “fixer” for deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Dundee-born Young is in jail for contempt of court for concealing assets from his ex-wife.Young's lawyer, to whom he signed over power of attorney, appears to control interests in a Road Town company that owns a potentially lucrative Moscow development with a value estimated at $100 million.

India, Pakistan, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states are also in the running in the BVI shell game lottery. The Cayman and Cook Islands are represented in the 2,500 documents, but most of the offshore accounts are in Road Town, Tortola, BVI.

Since the 1980’s, the BVI has attracted more than one million offshore entities. Here is a brief list of the main offenders:

• Denise Eisenberg-Rich of the United States, the former wife of commodities trader Marc Rich, who was controversially pardoned by President Clinton on tax evasion charges. Eisenberg-Rich put $144M into the Dry Trust, formed in the Cook Islands.

• Dictator's daughter Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, a provincial governor in the Phillippines, is the eldest daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos, known for deep pockets of corruption.

•A senator's husband in Canada. Anthony “Tony” Merchant, a Saskatchewan lawyer, deposited more than $800,000 into an offshore trust. Merchant paid fees in cash and demanded that written communication to be "kept to a minimum.”

• Jean-Jacques Augier of France was Francois Hollande’s 2012 election campaign co-treasurer. Augier set up a Cayman Islands-based distributor in Beijing with a 25 percent partner in a BVI company. He says his partner is Xi Shu, a Chinese businessman.

• Spain's wealthiest art collector, Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, a former beauty queen and widow of a Spanish steel billionaire. The Baroness uses offshore accounts to buy paintings and avoid a VAT.

• The wife of Russia's deputy prime minister. Olga Shuvalova. Her husband Igor Shuvalov has denied charges of wrongdoing about her offshore accounts.

• Mongolia’s former finance minister, Bayartsogt Sangajav established “Legend Plus Capital, Ltd” with a Swiss bank account while he served as finance minister from 2008 to 2012. Sangajav says he goofed in not declaring the money and says he is considering “resigning” from his position in the 19^th largest country in the world.

• The president of Azerbaijan and his family. A local construction magnate, Hassan Gozal, launched paper entities in the names of President Ilham Aliyev's two daughters.

The result of the BVI’s boom in offshore accounts is that the government there has sported an upscale “glass elevator” for several years so that visitors and officials alike can travel indoors in style. It has been the source of envy for U.S. Virgin Islands legislators for donkey years.

Although it has been known for decades that the BVI provides safe harbor for the “ethically challenged” investment community, the Financial Secretary in Tortola, Mr. Neil Smith, denies wrongdoing on the part of the government.

“Our legislation provides a more hostile environment for illegality than most jurisdictions,” Smith said.

Meanwhile the British Foreign Office is able to subsidize the costs of running an empire based on its cut of the $92 billion Tortola took in. Lawyers and accountants based in London also heavily benefit from these offshore accounts when they act as intermediaries.

Tortola means “land of the turtle dove” and certainly most contributors were safe and sound when the ICIJ looked under the turtle’s shell.

Secretary Smith promises that the BVI will act “swiftly and decisively” if any of “legitimately private” companies are implicated in illegal activity.

In the meantime, if Mitt really is running again in 2016 as Bob Schieffer first reported, he might be wise to move his money from the Cayman Islands to the British Virgin Islands.

Maybe by then Tortola will have turned completely turtle – locked up all the journalists who sought to expose corruption – and made the only money there that is visible the bills that drop into the ocean at the Soggy Dollar Bar.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

 

 

 

UNDER A BLOOD RED SKY

THE WORLD IS YOURS, KIDS!

COOKIE MONSTERS EAT BISCUITS NOW

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

The Moderate Voice

     On the eve of the blood moon, 31-year-old Steffen Lange was arrested for distributing neo-Nazi leaflets in a Brandenburg school.
     Easily not the first time a far-right activist in Germany has tried to recruit youngsters to the racist cause.
     But what made Lange different was that he was dressed as the Cookie Monster – from Sesame Street – not Sesamstrasse.
     Police arrested Lange because it is illegal to belong to a neo-Nazi organization there. A search of his Senftenberg apartment showed that he was also in possession of neo-Nazi paraphernalia that was propagandistic rather than historical – also a violation of German law.
     Computers in the Lange residence had photoshopped the image of the Cookie Monster with Adolf Hitler and admirers Forrest Gump-like under the caption: “Who ate my biscuit?”
     British newspapers speculated that the answer might be “immigrants," like the swarthy Turks who come to Germany seeking a better way of life through menial labor.
     A German police spokesman described the use of the Cookie Monster’s image as an attempt to make neo-Nazism seem “harmless and everyday and perhaps something a bit fun and a bit rebellious.”
     News photos showed neo-Nazis on a German street dressed in blue Cookie Monster suits and red Tickle Me Elmo suits handing out racist pamphlets to children.
     Meanwhile, on Easter Sunday in Henrico County, VA – not far from the state capital of Richmond – some American racists had pre-loaded plastic eggs with racist propaganda messages.
     Brandon and Jackie Smith were supervising an egg hunt with their three-year-old when they saw that some of the eggs were different than the ones they had placed near their suburban Virginia property.
     “My husband noticed the last Easter egg and I knew it wasn’t one that we put out. We opened it and it’s got the white supremacist stuff in it,” Mrs. Smith told the local ABC affiliate.
     Inside the eggs were small papers with slogans like: "Diversity = white genocide” and “Mass immigration and forced assimilation of non-whites into our lands is genocide” messages that had been shared in the social media by participants of a poorly-attended “White Man March.”
     The Nazis prized youth participation in political activity from a tender age. Hitler Youth organizations actually existed prior to Adolf Hitler assuming power in Nazi Germany.
     The question becomes why? The NSDAP wanted children to get military-style training in weapons and assault tactics from an early age – and keep them out of church and Bible groups that they thought distracted from their message of German uber-nationalism.
     One such girls group of the Hitler Youth had a yearbook entitled: “Jungen eure Welt” which loosely translated means: “It’s Your World, Kids!” An important message for budding Nazis to learn – especially in the wake of what’s happened in the Ukraine –
instructing future Nazis that international borders are mere arbitrary lines on a map –
that can be erased with a simple blitzkrieg of tanks – or as in Putin’s case – by feint of force.
    If you want to set the bar on your beer hall putsch high – telling children that the world is theirs to conquer and giving them pre-training in specific arms and marine reconnaissance is a good start. The template the neo-Nazis are using now is nothing new.
     Children get used to a fat white man with a big white beard and a red suit who promises presents in Wintertime, so the fact that brown shirts and brown pants have been traded for one-piece blue furry suits is not really a stretch. But if the Nazi-expropriated Nietzschean blond beast had the fair hair and blue eyes of a “pure Aryan” – it is difficult to see how a cloth puppet with an insatiable desire for pastries figures into their fascist plans.
     What is different is what is the same. Because in America racism has gone troll-stealth on the Internet and in private groups: in Europe the underground is composed of skinheads disguised by costume. Whereas in the 1960’s the underground were easily identified by their Bohemian long hair and beards – now the clean-cut kid sitting next to you could be a dangerous neo-Nazi.
     It’s not exactly “The Boys From Brazil,” where a fictional Ira Levin account of a surviving Dr. Josef Mengele sought to clone Hitler and recreate his life experience among 94 Stepford sons in nine different countries – even down to the age difference between Adolf’s mother and father (23 years) and the exact age his father died when he was growing up in Austria (13 years old).
     But it is something to keep an eye on. Stuttgart mayor Manfred Rommel, former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the late Prince Consort of the Netherlands Claus von Amsberg and Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) were all members of the Hitler Youth – and they turned out OK – after Nazism was rejected.
     If your idea of conquering the world by stealth involves using six-foot-tall skinheads dressed in clown costume on a public street – you might want to think again.
     Although propaganda and show of force is a powerful one-two punch – be careful when you do it – you might just end up being hoisted by your own Putin-petard.
     Which if you know your Shakespeare means: you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 
John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

Suicide By Capital Punishment

KANSAS CITY KILLER KILLS 3 IN KKK PLAY

YET ANOTHER POINTED VICTORY FOR THE NRA
THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS


By JOHN McCARTHY

THE MODERATE VOICE


     I used to be a competitive tennis player.

     The thing about tennis – being an individual sport – is that you are not only battling your opponent – but your own head – meaning your own desire to succeed.

     I found that if you let up – even for just one point – a snowball effect of losing points was often the result – making the Sisyphean task of rolling the boulder up the mountain almost impossible.

     Which brings us quite naturally to the hate crime in Kansas City. 

     My sense is that America has just given up when it comes to gun violence. Yet we haven’t tanked just one point - but the whole game, set and match. Before we even step onto the court - we have already lost.

     The First Amendment allows all United States citizens to hate whomever they wish.

That Frazier Glen Cross spent the first 73 years of his life hating people he considered different than him – then woke up one Sunday and decided to shoot three people in the upscale suburb of Overland Park – is almost incomprehensible.

     As a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Cross professed to hate Jews and miscegenists, but after he allegedly killed one 14-year-old boy, one 53-year-old woman and one 69-year-old man outside a Kansas Jewish community center – it was later learned that none of the three murdered were Jewish.

     In what might qualify as the first case of suicide by capital punishment, Cross had a right to bear arms and a grudge – law enforcement and the Southern Poverty Law Center had been keeping tabs on "aka Glenn Miller” but were hamstrung by the fact that he had never acted upon his racist rants.

     In America it is easier to pull out a gun – than a cigarette. The Second Amendment was created by our Founding Fathers for a young nation that did not yet have a police force or an army – the right to bear arms was an insurance policy against tyranny – in the form of the British crown.

     The real tragedy – besides the three innocent people whose lives were extinguished for no reason – is that the national discussion will not naturally shift to the 33 gun-related deaths that happen every day in the United States. If 2016 Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin could accuse President Obama of trying to “exploit” the tragedy of Sandy Hook to promote gun control – then the mini-massacre in Kansas is not likely to take her attention away from "Duck Dynasty."

“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.” So said British novelist Martin Amis who finds it strange that America was founded by Europeans, but when it established itself as an independent country it didn’t understand that one of the rules of nationhood is: the police and the military get the guns: not the people.

     Even the Yakuza in Tokyo – the Japanese organized crime syndicate – don’t dare use a gun in that island nation of 127 million people. About as many people die from gun-related violence in Japan – on a yearly basis – as the number of people who die on a daily basis from gun violence in the United States.

     Since 1968, more Americans have died from gun violence than all those who have died in our country’s wars. There have been 1.4 million firearm deaths compared to 1.2 million in war. (The number of gun-related deaths includes suicides.)

     In football they used to tell us: “no pain, no gain.” In the Virgin Islands, they have a saying: “Who knows it feels it.”

When it comes to gun violence in America – the question then becomes who is feeling the pain?

     Certainly not the gun manufacters who rack up $11.7 billion yearly ($993 million in profits) or the gun lobbies like the NRA that fight to ensure those manufacturers' rights to make that big money. Make no mistake: the NRA is about the money.

     Perhaps another British writer, William Shakespeare, said it best when he said: “Why so large a cost, having so short a lease, does thou upon your fading mansion spend?"

     We only have one life to live – and with non-peace officers carrying death in their hands in the form of pistols, rifles and machine guns – the life we have to live may be shorter than we had planned.

     You can foot fault in tennis and live to serve again – but a hand fault in illegitimate gun violence often brings a reckoning few bounce back from.

     The question is: when did we stop playing points in favor of making points?

     Thanks to the NRA, guns may always rule the roost in America - but it is a hollow-point victory.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

The More Things Change ...

http://themoderatevoice.com/193429/the-more-things-change-3/

 

OLD SCHOOL IS THE NEW SCHOOL IN TV:

AN UNBLINKERED LOOK AT THE FUTURE:

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

MODERATE VOICE COLUMNIST

 

     In the movie “Truth or Dare” we got a glimpse into the future of TV.

     Only we didn’t realize it when we were watching it in real time.

     “There's nothing to say off camera," Warren Beatty complains in the 1991 film. "Why would you say something if it's off camera? What point is there existing?"

     Beatty’s irony seemed spot on then – but although he’s a gifted writer, director and actor – he couldn’t predict the future of television any more than he could figure out whether or not he should take the lead in a Quentin Tarantino flick (Kill Bill) – (he may have been right on that, though.)

     It seemed outrageous at the time to think that a celebrity – in this case Madonna  – would choose to exist only when the cameras are rolling. In a way it was contrived –

 but in another it was cinema verite – the good, the bad and the ugly of her on and off-stage life would be revealed for what it was.

     So as we are “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” we realize that 23 years later – the Material Girl had a crystal ball into the boob tube – just like the Wicked Witch in “Wizard of Oz” trying to pick up Dorothy on early GPS.

     Andy Warhol is given credit for saying that: “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But in 1968 who could predict the future? Not Bobby Kennedy.

     Just a year after “Truth or Dare,” reality TV was born as major network television tried to stay one step ahead of the writer’s strike. We have all been survivors of the launch of Paris Hilton’s career (not the one on videotape) – and the resuscitation of a rock star who by all counts should have died before Keith Richards – Ozzy Osbourne.

     I would not have know that the Kardashians’ show even existed were it not for a stay at my sister’s house a couple years ago. Eye candy might be the answer to the question why so many of us are fascinated by the ersatz dramas dreamed up by Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall and Kylie.

     But Honey Boo Boo and “Duck Dynasty” prove that you don’t have to be beautiful or rich to be successful in the modern-day ratings wars – but with a parallax view of the future have we reached the saturation point of reality TV? The good people among us hope so.

     If reality TV began when Madonna was at her apex, the real good stuff came about ten years after we were introduced to “Big Brother” and MTV’s “Real World” –

maybe as a reaction to what we are already feeling today – that as more and more desperate housewives get ready for their close-ups – hopefully more and more well-written series like “Lost,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “House, M.D.” and “Nurse Jackie” are in the works.

     In the entertainment business, it used to be the ultimate put-down to say that a film was shot “in real time.” They were the kind of movies that made you regret spending two hours of your life stuck in a movie theater.

     Let’s hope that we have reached the point of no return when it comes to America idolizing shows that allow you to vicariously dance with the stars or show that you have talent – even though when the show’s over the majority of the contestants are still poor and not famous. Anybody can upload to YouTube a bear falling out of a tree onto a trampoline – but how many times do you want to “just press play” and watch that?

     Madonna, at the height of her career following “Truth or Dare” released a coffee table book of herself with other women in various states of undress in “Erotica” – an electric, vibrant and sometimes shocking personality reduced to an age-old still life just didn’t fly with the public – and her career stalled. Warhol, at the apogee of his fine art career turned to films and showed us where the future really lies with reality TV.

     The eight hours of a moving pictures of a static building in “Empire” demonstrates where this is all going. Do you have the patience to wait several hours for the lights to go on at the Empire State Building in New York City? (Andy also said that his movies are better talked about than actually seen.)

     As we sit riveted to our iPhones and tablets while pretending to watch what’s on TV, maybe that’s all we are doing – keeping one eye out – or an ear, so that when someone asks us about it at the office the next day we can say: “Yeah, I saw that. It was cool.” When we all know it wasn’t.

     Everyone remembers where they were when Tony Soprano blinked off on the TV screen. Our JFK moments can now happen in riveting television dramas. But they have to be good ones, not collages of sound bites that are cobbled together by editors in a production booth.

     Warhol’s artworks covered up the warts and moles of the celebrities we all know and love. His pancake makeup silkscreens told us that Leo Castelli had good bone structure – and Liza Minelli, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn were still relevant. But his “screen tests” revealed when Dennis Hopper got nervous or Bob Dylan was bored. Dan Rather said “the camera never blinks.”

     As we get closer and closer to a type of TV that Andy invented, where the filmmaker simply turns on the camera and walks away – what will that reveal about us as human beings?

     Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

     Just like The Sopranos ending.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com