Breaking News: Forest Reopens

Our private fishing guide, Taylor Streit, reports that the U.S. Forest has re-opened. But he’s a fish-tale teller and we could use some independent confirmation. Is it time for hikers to return to their favorite trails? I shall go this afternoon and report. Later…My dogs and I rejoined our anonymous colleagues, hikers, in the forest on Yerba and it was good.

Murdoch is thy name; Scandal is thy game!

From Fleet St. to Downing St. in London to Albuquerque’s Metro Court in New Mexico, the name “Murdoch” has been besmirched. We need a conceptual cultural analysis to understand the pain of the powerful slipping into the political–moral morass. Power injudiciously applied corrupts the powerful. Murdoch is now the metaphor for scandal.

Today, the Times quotes former employees at Rupert Murdoch’s News International, who say Young James, scion of the family who have terrorized a generation of Brit politicos and celebrities with exposure and compromise, has lied to lawmakers in London about when he knew about a “hacking” scandal. As one journalist said on Amy Goodman yesterday, “we’re in the cover-up phase.”

The Murdochian movidas were originally found out because the second most powerful organization in England, the Rupert Murdoch clan, who boss the cops and government, stumbled, when they applied their tabloid instruments to the phones of employee—members of the No. 1. most powerful organization in Britain i.e. the “Royals.”

A gentleman does not listen in on  Queen Elizabeth II and her family members. Along with Winnie and Father George, the once and future Queen saved the Brits from the Teutonic barbarians in WWII.

“Don’t be doing her thataway, Rupe, you dog!”

Here in the “Land of Entrapment,” Judge “Pat” Murdoch, well-respected jurist, has been arrested on the bench due to allegations of “rape” and “intimidation of a witness” according to Albuquerque Journal accounts. The diminutive judge was all tears because of the support garnered from family and friends in his hour of need. The accused judge “Is the victim here,” say his attorneys and the headline gracing the story. A 23-year old prostitute is being attacked for having made the allegations of rape, after visiting with the judge on some 8 occasions (for professional reasons).

The graphic accounts of oral sex are not something one often sees in a family newspaper like the Albuquerque Journal. Lost in the spin and heartfelt responses uttered in defense of the “well-respected” judge is the rule of law or ethical principles.  As I understand the statutes, prostitution, both the proffer and the reception of the favor, are illegal. One wonders if the Judge himself has sentenced prostitutes and “Johns” to jail for what many consider a (no longer?) victimless crime.

Until I listened to yesterday’s news reports, I didn’t understand the full extent of the Rupert Murdoch take-over of the British government during the last decade. Rupe never liked being considered a “second-class” Aussie in Britain. Call it a case of envidia. Apparently, he’s has been visiting, privately, with Prime Ministers at Downing St. beginning with the Maggie Thatcher era. But they make him come in through the back door.

Murdoch owns the “we report you decide network” that created the “Tea Party” i.e. Fox TV in America—the right wing’s favorite TV entertainment. Rupe is an American citizen and immigrant from Australia, who owns as well that paragon and voice of American capitalism, The Wall Street Journal, whose publisher recently resigned due to his involvement in allegedly hacking phones, and who knows–bribing cops in Britain.

It seems Rupe, James, and “Roundhouse right” Wendi, the octogenarian’s glamorous 42-year old wife, and clan are competing with Italy’s own media—magnate and Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi’s sexcapades and appointment of well-endowed lovelies to positions of influence are the stuff of legend in Rome. But then Silvio has probably fallen under the influence and example of the Vatican, representative of the most powerful two thousand year old politico-religio organization in the world. There the grandest of all cover-ups re: pedophilia has continued to unravel during the last twenty years like an hour glass running out of sand.

Who’s your Daddy now?

Here at home, where Judge Pat and a plethora of other enchanted jurists have made headlines for drinking while driving or playing “pay to play” or disobeying the law they swore to uphold, we New Mexicans are getting a lesson in worldwide and local visual aesthetics. Quite simply, neither the priests nor the police (Darren White, Sheriff Solano), neither the judges nor the emperors of politics and religion, are wearing clothes. The costumes of office bear the signs of scandal. It’s like Halloween run amuck.

Don’t blame technology. Cell phones and the Internet are merely tools—like alleged “democratic” elections in the west. Video cams are everywhere. Garbage in, garbage out, as the geeks say. The newsmakers have gotten their taxonomic categories mixed up and forgotten that Charlie Sheen is just a harmless actor in a sit com. But he, like Tiger Woods, also got lost in the gray area, where life begins to imitate art.

In Taos we know that we live in a John Nichols novel or an unpredictable community where karma and kitsch compete in the crap game of life. Now, Rupe and Pat Murdoch are getting their own Taos lesson writ large. When government and media merge, or the corporations and the courts stand together, we have what the classic commentators call “fascism.”

Since we citizens have little say so, we are reduced to enjoying the pain and misery of the powerful, as they fall and become the victims of the tools they used to destroy others. The meek may not inherit the earth but they sure as hell can read about those who do.