NEWTOWN, TEAR IT DOWN AND YOU'LL SOON FORGET

Published as Op Ed & Lead Opinion Article: "OPINION: Don’t Erase Pain of Sandy Hook Lest You Forget; Look to Paris for Guidance”, The Litchfield County Times, The Housatonic Times, The Connecticut Bulletin, Tuesday, May 14, 2013

The choices facing Newtown’s task force deciding the fate of the Sandy Hook Elementary School were daunting. They chose the one with a financial costs to the town of $57 million for a tear down and new school on the present site. That plan was approved last Friday and now awaits approval by the School Board and a town referendum, a hard choice in these austere times.

There was the choice of a tear down and a new building on a new site, requiring condemnation, eminent domain and dislocation of existing homes and businesses. All of the choices had attendant emotional issues with no easy solutions. Do you want closure or do you want to never forget? It’s damned if you do and damned if don’t propositions that face Newtown voters.

The cheapest alternative but emotionally least emotionally attractive was to repair the school, suck in your gut, and just keep on trucking, living with the memory and the pain. As insensitive as it may sound I hope the community votes for the least attractive and cheapest alternative, repair the old school building. Keep on trucking, keep on remembering.

I do not live or vote in Newtown so my comments count little. I was born in a country [ex-Yugoslavia] at a time when many children died in World War II. After that war, that country made a conscious effort to forgive and forget only to have history repeat itself some 50 years later in Srebrenica, Bosnia. I voice my comments from that vantage point alone.

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RALPH NADER, YOU ROCK, BUT NOT ENOUGH

Last month on the Editorial/Opinion page of The Litchfield County Times Ralph Nader asked America to regain control of “our runaway, unilateral presidency”, specifically the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and others who preceded them. Who would have thought that Ralph Nader had morphed into a later day Caspar Milquetoast? I would have liked from him a more robust call to arms, a far reaching demand for change, a declaration of war, war without quarter until “constitutional accountabilities” are restored.

I have no quarrel with his views. In fact I wholeheartedly support and embrace them. But they are half measures; they do not go the distance. They address only some of the symptoms of the maladies that ail us.

In fairness, Mr. Nader’s comments were addressed to the immediacy surrounding the Boston Marathon Massacre, the “blowback” and “boomerang” results of our failed policies of “lawless wars and military [mis]adventures”, of “terror … from drones that hover … ready to fire missiles” and “special U.S. killing teams” ready to strike at any time. He concludes that it was the President’s command of “high-tech buttons … pushed by drone operators” that control foreign skies, but that “low-tech buttons can now be pushed … against gatherings of innocent people” and wreak havoc on American soil.

The policies of past Presidents, including George Bush’s drone strike assassinations, were continued and expanded by the present administration, unchecked by Congress and American voters, resulting in mayhem of civilians in Boston, with more to come unless we change course.

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BOSTON MARATHON MASSACRE: AMERICAN FEET IN AFGHAN SHOES

There is nothing more galling than having someone come at you with an “I told you so” or a “Shoe’s on the other foot” comment. It’s infuriating because it proves the other person right and you wrong. On the other hand the verbal jab can make you rethink, reconsider your earlier ill advised course of action.

The Boston Marathon Massacre is a reminder that things that explode in daylight or go boom in the night have foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences. A monstrous event, an explosion in a crowded urban space that kills civilians, the elderly, adults and innocent children, and maims, severing limbs and shattering bones, is a despicable cowardly act whether it takes place in Boston, Massachusetts, Kandahar, Afghanistan or Mogadishu, Somalia. The only difference being the nationality of the victims and the geography of the place.

The wanton crimes that were visited on the citizens of Boston, on American soil, were met with rightful and justifiable outrage. The actions of two foreign born young men, 19 and 26 year old, who had been given refuge and safe haven in our country, deserve the death penalty, one having been already administered.

As an aside, who in the world would have thought that I, of all people, would be advocating the death penalty? Emotionally I do, but in reality a lifetime of solitary confinement is a far more brutal sentence. So that is what I wish to be visited upon Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber, for his crimes.

Our justifiable outrage is geographically confined to the United States, to us and ours. Our outrage does not travel well to distant people and strange foreign lands. It should. If it did, we would stop this Administration’s unchecked and indiscriminate murder by remote control using drones.

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PORNOGRAPHERS ARE PEOPLE TOO

Margaret Ashley Porter, a good old Texas country girl, a stunning larger than life, close to 6 foot tall model made a splash in the New York social scene in the ‘70s. Her size kept her from model stardom but did not stop her from exuding raw sexual sensuality.

Her face, with those smoldering eyes set her apart and landed her on the cover of Viva, The International Magazine for Women, edited by Kathy Keeton, Bob Guccione’s wife and main squeeze. By then Viva was no Penthouse, it was a class act. It had graduated to a higher plane having added Anna Wintour as Fashion Editor who went on to New York, House & Garden and still edits Vogue. But then it was still part of Guccione’s Penthouse porn empire.

Her appearance on Viva’s cover, a head shot with veiled mysterious eyes, had a serious flaw – it was used without her permission and without compensation in violation of New York’s Right of Privacy Law. With that she became a plaintiff with Viva and Penthouse the deep pocket defendants in Supreme Court, New York County.

There was no defense, a case lawyers dream about, shooting fish in a barrel. The Court was asked to order Viva to immediately stop using the photo and to prohibit its use in the future. That’s when the Mob stepped in.

I was having a drink at the Berkshire Place bar when my cousin Bosko Radonjic stopped by. Bosko ran a bunch of parking lots and garages in New York’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen. He was Allenwood, Class of ’82, having spent two years in that Federal country club penitentiary. While not a “made guy” he was close to the Westies, Irish mobsters and killers, and John Gotti and the Gambino crime family guys, people whose connections ran deep.

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LARRY FLYNT, THE SUPREMES AND SAME SEX MARRIAGE

Updated on Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by Deyan Brashich

Larry Flynt, the publisher of the porno magazine Hustler and owner of the Hustler strip club joints, is a despicable character with few redeeming qualities. I personally loathe the guy but he remains one my long revered heroes, a staunch but obnoxious defender of the 1^st and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution.

As plaintiff and defendant, Larry Flynt has played a prominent role in constitutional litigation reaching the Supreme Court. Extra judicially he has weighed in with blunt, sometimes obscene, criticism of public figures in Hustler’s “Asshole of the Month” columns. The “Asshole” column has been subject of litigation reaching the Wyoming Supreme Court and the Supreme Court as well as being the subject of a number of law journal articles including one in the Brigham Young [University] Law Review.

Starting with the Burger and Rehnquist courts, Flynt has found the Justices sadly wanting. He has savaged sitting Presidents, senators, congressmen, moguls, celebrities and men of the cloth, most notably Jerry Falwell with the bogus Campari “first time” ad controversy that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. But he has reserved his most scathing opprobrium for the Justices, recently for Scalia, Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia.

His most virulent and intemperate attack on the “Supremes”, which earned him a contempt citation and a threat of jail, was when he called them “nothing but eight assholes and a token c—t”. After reading the transcripts of this week’s oral arguments in the Proposition 8 and Defense of Marriage Act cases, I tend to agree.

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