Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Penn Kemble, a political activist who kept himself in intellectual fighting trim by engaging in policy tilts with adversaries on both the left and the right, died Sunday of brain cancer at his home in Washington. He was 64.

A former acting director of the U.S. Information Agency, Kemble was in recent years senior scholar at Freedom House, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy think tank.

Kemble believed in a robust internationalism in the tradition of former Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.). He also had an affinity for organized labor, which was, in his words, “the balance wheel of democracy.”

During his career, he helped found or lead a number of advocacy groups, including the Coalition for a Democratic Majority.

A friend and former colleague, Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that Kemble’s political and intellectual journey traversed a path from democratic socialist to social democrat. It was a journey similar in its rightward arc to that of many prominent neoconservatives. Although he occasionally took such positions, Kemble stopped short of leaving the Democratic Party and never considered himself a neoconservative.

He believed, for example, in building a democratic Iraq but sharply criticized the Bush administration’s approach on the country. “The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments, was an idea never understood by the administration,” he told the New Republic last year.

Richard Penn Kemble was born in Worcester, Mass., and grew up in Lancaster, Pa. His political activism began at the University of Colorado, where he helped establish the Colorado chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1962, he moved to New York and took a job as a copy boy at the New York Times. His journalism career ended shortly afterward when the typesetters went out on strike and he refused to cross the picket line.

He stayed in New York and immersed himself in socialist politics, seeking to resurrect the youth section of the Socialist Party, famously led earlier in the 20th century by Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas.

He was one of the few whites among the leadership of the East River chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, once staging a sit-in that blocked the eastbound lanes of the Triborough Bridge during rush hour. The aim was to force commuters to ponder the plight of Harlem residents before arriving back at their comfortable homes in the suburbs.

In 1967, he founded Negotiation Now!, which demanded an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a negotiated end to the war.

In the early 1970s, Kemble moved to Washington, D.C., and plunged into Democratic Party politics. After the party’s 1972 presidential debacle, he helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. Associated primarily with Sens. Jackson and Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.), the group sought to move the party back toward the center and refocus its reliance on a traditional blue-collar base.

Kemble served as executive director of the group from 1972 to 1976, when he joined the New York senatorial campaign of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was Moynihan’s special assistant and speechwriter until 1979.

During the Reagan administration, he founded the Committee for Democracy in Central America. He caused consternation among many fellow Democrats by advocating support for the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. He sought a democratic middle way between communist Sandinistas and former supporters of rightist dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Rediscovering American labor (Looking forward)
Kemble International Report on Slavery in Sudan

NY Times
Leo Bogart, a sociologist, author and marketing specialist who was known for studying the role of the mass media in culture, died Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause of death was babesiosis, a parasitic disease that is transmitted by ticks, said his wife of 57 years, the former Agnes Cohen.

Dr. Bogart, who also studied advertising and public opinion and wrote nearly a dozen books, argued that market forces should not be the sole determinant of media content. He decried the increasing presence of violence and sex in film and television, asserting in his most recent book, “Over the Edge,” that advertisers degrade content through their desire to capture the youth market.

He was an influential figure in the marketing and advertising industries. He served for many years as the executive vice president and general manager of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the sales and marketing organization of the newspaper industry.

He taught marketing at New York University, Columbia University and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a senior fellow at the Center for Media Studies at Columbia and a Fulbright research fellow in France.

At his death, Dr. Bogart was a director and senior consultant for Innovation, an international media consulting firm, and wrote a column for Presstime, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America.

Dr. Bogart was born in Lwow, now Lvov, Poland, and moved to the United States with his family at age 2, eventually becoming fluent in seven languages. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1941, he joined the Army Signal Intelligence Corps. Fluent in German, he intercepted communications in Germany during World War II. He chronicled that experience in his memoir, “How I Earned the Ruptured Duck: From Brooklyn to Berchtesgaden in World War II.” He earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago.

After checking into Mount Sinai on Aug. 7, Dr. Bogart learned that he had babesiosis, a malarialike infectious disease that destroys red blood cells. It is typically found in coastal islands of the Northeast, and Mrs. Bogart said her husband might have contracted it on a trip to the couple’s home on Long Island.

We are a Social Democrat. No, wait, make that We are a Democratic Socialist. Er, what? What’s the diff?

Social democracy is a political ideology emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from supporters of Marxism who believed that the transition to a socialist society could be achieved through democratic evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. It emphasizes a program of gradual legislative reform of the capitalist system in order to make it more equitable, usually with the goal of a socialist society as a theoretical endpoint.

Democratic socialism is an broad political movement propagating the ideals of socialism within the context of a democratic system. In many cases, its adherents promote the ideal of socialism as an evolutionary process within the framework of a parliamentary democracy. Other democratic socialists favor a revolutionary approach that seeks to establish socialism within a non-parliamentary system, usually based on workers councils or similar organizations.

Wait a minute, we’re still chewing…

Penn Kemble labeled himself a democratic socialist first only to evolve into a social democrat later in life. Supposedly that evolutionary route is rightward and follows many a neoconservative. Egads! (Do you want the red pill or the blue pill Neo?) Yet another stop in the idealogical roulette wheel. All Aboard!

My oh my aren’t we just having the week then? Anarchists. Nilhists. Peristroika. Neoconservatives. And now Social democracy. We are feeling just about as Leftist as possible. Anyone up for a trip to Paris?

(Ok, so we admit it: we’re not really sure that peristroika is a leftist thing, rightist thing or just a thing thing invented by the KGB to fool the West into thinking the Cold War was over. But just go with us, ok?)

If you’re ridin’ ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it’s still there. ~ Will Rogers

LA Times
Vivian L. Brunner, who with her late husband John operated the Popcorn Theater Marionettes for three decades, has died. She was 79.

Brunner died Sept. 24 of natural causes in North Hollywood, her son Paris Brunner announced.

Born in Downey, the former Vivian Hypes studied mathematics at Stanford and in 1947 married John David Brunner. In the mid-1950s the couple moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and often enjoyed watching puppet shows in the city’s parks.

After returning to Los Angeles, Vivian Brunner worked as a dress designer and her husband was an art director for an advertising agency. But neither was happy.

They quit their jobs and founded their touring marionette show in 1962, with John Brunner making the puppets by hand and his wife fashioning the costumes.

Their versatile cast included about 100 marionettes, some valued at $1,000. The most detailed puppets took as much as 600 hours to carve, paint, costume and string. When they were not performing, maintenance consumed most of the couple’s waking hours.

“The marionettes are a labor of love,” Vivian Brunner told The Times in a 1968 interview, “and a 24-hour-a-day job.”

The first year was financially rough, and it took three years before they matched their former income. The couple wrote their own shows and sang the songs as they pulled the puppets’ strings for about 200 shows a year throughout Southern California.

In one show in Santa Ana in 1977, they presented their musical version of “Ben Franklin’s Dream” with 19 marionettes not only acting out the play but jumping off the stage and interacting with the audience.

Although most of their productions were aimed at children, they also created a popular show for adults based on Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

In the 1980s, the Brunners utilized their marionettes to create special effects for motion pictures and television shows — including many unsuitable for their former child fans.

Vivian Brunner was credited on the special effects crew for the 1985 science fiction vampire film “Lifeforce,” starring Patrick Stewart. She also provided the special effects for the murderous dolls in the 1987 horror movie “Dolls.”

LA Times
Alexander N. Yakovlev, a strong advocate of democracy and human rights who crafted many of the perestroika policies instituted by former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, died Tuesday in Moscow. He was 81.

Hard-liners blamed Yakovlev, the philosopher-ideologist of Gorbachev’s reforms, for the Soviet Union’s 1991 disintegration and for the defeat of Marxism-Leninism in its global struggle with capitalism.

During the 1990s, he worked to awaken the Russian people to the crimes of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and in recent years he accused Russian President Vladimir V. Putin of rolling back democratic reforms in a drift toward political authoritarianism.

Yakovlev’s death, of an unspecified illness, “is a great loss for all those devoted to the cause of democracy and freedom in Russia,” Gorbachev said in a statement released in London, where he is on a visit. “He stood by the choice we made together — in favor of freedom, democracy, human dignity — to the end of his days. No obstacles, no accusations, succeeded in forcing him to change his position.”

Yakovlev was born in a small village of the Yaroslavl region northeast of Moscow, near the Volga River. He fought in the Red Army in World War II and was badly wounded in 1943. He studied history, joined the Communist Party and began rising through its ranks.

Working with Gorbachev, Yakovlev had hoped to help navigate the Kremlin leadership through the huge transformation he felt was necessary to reform socialism as a political and economic system and to hold the Soviet Union together as a state.

But he found Marxism so flawed that he argued the Communist Party leadership must end its political monopoly. After alienating party conservatives, he was finally edged out of Gorbachev’s inner circle. He left the party just days before a failed August 1991 coup attempt by a group of hard-line Communists. He quickly joined the country’s democracy movement.

Yakovlev had been a party maverick for decades. He first offended party bosses in the 1970s and was exiled to Canada for a decade as the Soviet ambassador. It was there, in the early 1980s, that he and Gorbachev met and discovered they were kindred souls.

Yakovlev later described how he and Gorbachev opened up to each other while in Canada, which Gorbachev was visiting as the Soviet official in charge of agriculture.

“At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn’t touch on serious issues,” he recalled.

But one day, they took a long walk on a farm. “I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs,” Yakovlev said. “And he did the same thing…. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish.”

After Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, he promoted Yakovlev to key posts. Yakovlev became a full member of the Politburo in 1987, with responsibility for ideology.
The Fate of Marxism in Russia

The literal meaning is said to be ‘restructuring’, yet ‘perestroika’ is typically understood to mean the economic reforms introduced in Russia in 1987 by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. And unless you’ve been hiding out in Samye for the past 20 years you likely have your own opinions about how those ‘economic reforms’ turned out.

Anarchists yesterday, Peristroika today. Oh what will the morrow bring?

Now since we’ve been speaking of manipulation please consider Vivian Brunner who with husband John ran the Popcorn Theater Marionettes for some 30 years. That’s a lot of dolling about, eh? Do read her obituary and take notice that an awful lot of maintenance was involved with those marionettes.

Naturally after your dolling about you’ll want to pickup a copy of Team America: World Police. We read that someone quoted another source that discussed an overheard conversation about an article in an obscure magazine that made reference about a rather intriguing sex scene in said movie.

And Marion if Team America sounds a touch too risque, then maybe stick to Being John Malkovich or the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

“How ridiculous I was as a Marionette! And how happy I am, now that I have become a real boy!”

LA Times
Ba Jin, a giant of 20th century Chinese literature and a staunch anarchist whose writings inspired a generation of youth to join the Communist Revolution, died Monday of cancer in Shanghai, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. He was 100. Ba made it his life’s goal to speak his conscience, but failing health left him unable to speak or write in his last years. His strong anarchist convictions were anathema after the Communist takeover in 1949.

“He was the longest-standing, most influential of China’s anarchists,” said Nanjing University anarchism expert Lu Zhe.

Although he denied it, Ba Jin reportedly was a pen name formed from the Chinese transliterations of the names Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, the seminal Russian anarchists whose thought deeply influenced his life.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, anarchism captivated China’s intellectual avant-garde, eclipsing even Marxism. Despite debates between the two schools, anarchism helped pave the way for communism’s rise by radicalizing China’s intelligentsia. In talks with U.S. journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, Mao Tse-tung said anarchism had played a profound role in his intellectual development.

Ba’s real name was Li Yaotang. He was born Nov. 24, 1904, near the end of the Qing Dynasty, into a large wealthy family in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. His mother died when he was 10 and his father died when he was 13, and Ba escaped from his sadness into the world of books, memorizing Chinese literary classics and studying English.

At 16, Ba discovered anarchism in Kropotkin’s writings, which he later translated into Chinese, and those of radical feminist Emma Goldman, with whom Ba corresponded. He called Goldman his “spiritual mother.”

Those influences launched his career as a propagandist for anarchy. Though Ba’s writings expressed his genuine convictions, they were standard anarchist fare. He called for revolution and the abolition of private property. He saw patriotism as the root of war. He advocated the use of Esperanto, the universal language, and supported the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union known as the Wobblies.

He rejected Marxism, saying that its dictatorship of the proletariat was “at its marrow just the dictatorship of a small number of Communist Party members.” He also wrote: “We oppose the Communist Party because it is not communal, not radical and smacks of class compromise.”

Ba’s commitment to anarchism led him to Paris in 1927, where he translated anarchist works into Chinese, published propaganda pamphlets and participated in anarchist activities, including the movement to free Italian labor organizers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from jail in Boston. The two were executed in August 1927.

Back in Shanghai and Sichuan Province in the 1930s and ’40s, Ba wrote his most influential works: the novels “Spring,” “Autumn” and “Family.” The semi-autobiographical “Family,” about a young man’s rebellion against his stiflingly oppressive feudal family, spurred other youths to similar action. During the time they were hiding in the caves of Yanan, Communist officials asked young idealists why they had joined their cause. Many replied that it was because they had read Ba’s novels.

Selected Works of Ba Jin
Autumn in spring and other stories (Panda books)
Ward Four : A Novel of Wartime China

LA Times
Charles Rocket, an actor and former “Saturday Night Live” comedian who gained notoriety almost 25 years ago for uttering an unscripted obscenity during a skit on the NBC show, has died. He was 56.

Rocket was found dead Oct. 7 in a field near his home in Canterbury, Conn. His throat had been cut, and the Connecticut medical examiner’s office has ruled his death a suicide.

“Our investigation at the scene determined there was no criminal aspect to this case,” State Police Sgt. J. Paul Vance told The Times on Monday.

Rocket joined the “SNL” cast in the fall of 1980 and let an expletive slip the following February during a spoof of the famed “Who Shot J.R.?” plot line from the CBS night-time soap “Dallas.” Viewers complained and NBC issued an apology.

The former television newscaster was fired soon after along with other cast members and writers on the show, which had tepid ratings.

“I’m not proud of the fact it slipped through,” Rocket told People magazine in 1989 of the single word that derailed his early career. “But that’s all it was — a slip.”

He went on to appear in many television shows and to provide voices for animated series.

Rocket portrayed Bruce Willis’ brother on “Moonlighting” (ABC) and was featured in recurring roles on “Touched by an Angel” (CBS) and “Max Headroom” (ABC).

In film, Rocket was the philandering husband of Geena Davis in “Earth Girls Are Easy” (1989) and an obnoxious campus administrator in “How I Got Into College” (1989).

His movie credits also include “Dumb & Dumber” (1994) and “Dances With Wolves” (1990). His last movie role was in the 2003 Sylvester Stallone film “Shade.”

Born Charles Claverie in Bangor, Maine, he attended the Rhode Island School of Design and was influential in the Providence arts scene.

He spent much of the 1970s as a news reporter and anchor, using the name Charles Kennedy. His network debut was on “SNL,” where he anchored the “Weekend Update” news parody.

As an accordion player, he performed with many bands and played on a tribute album to composer Nino Rota, who scored a number of Federico Fellini films.

An anarchist (think rejection of authority) isn’t a nilhist (think the world is without meaning or purpose), but the quote gave us a route to connect extremists to bowling just so we could bring you these links: Anarchist Bowling League and RABL History. Isn’t RABL a clever (and perhaps very fitting) acryonym?

Now that we have today’s ODDconnection out of our collective systems we’ll do our level best to move on a touch. Anarchists are the topic today because of one Ba Jin (or Jin Ba if you prefer). Ba Jin was a long time Chinese anarchist and was heavily influenced early in life by the writings of the Russian anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Ba Jin called the radical feminist Emma Goldman his “spiritual mother”. Ba Jin was caught up in the Chinese revolution, but rejected Marxism and opposed Communism. Interestingly Mao Tse-tung said anarchism had played a profound role in his (Mao’s) intellectual development.

While we’d love to spend countless hours spinning about anarchists, punk and rap bands and video games there is a second guest today to consider - Charles Rocket. Mr. Rocket came to an untimely end by his own hand according to the medical examiner. Mr. Rocket was a Saturday Night Live cast member from the fall of 1980 until the following February. In February he let slip a wee bit of an expletive and all hell broke loose. He was fired (amongst many others), but he carried on and found work in a variety of movies and television shows.

Is God Dead?