I saw Jaws when I was eleven and I had nightmares for weeks. I lived a mile from the beach but I still thought I was going to get torn to bits in my bed. I wasn’t the only one.

The officers’ radio crackled with an urgent warning: He could be coming your way.

It was around 5 a.m. in Torrance on Thursday and police from nearby El Segundo had seen a pickup truck exit a freeway and head in the general direction of the Redbeam Avenue residence of a high-ranking Los Angeles police official, which was being guarded by a group of LAPD officers . .

Law enforcement sources told The Times that at least seven officers opened fire. On Friday, the street was pockmarked with bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs. Residents said they wanted to know what happened.

“How do you mistake two Hispanic women, one who is 71, for a large black male?” said Richard Goo, 62, who counted five bullet holes in the entryway to his house.

Margie and her elderly mother Emma somehow survived. Only three bullet wounds.

Photographs of the back of the truck showed at least two dozen bullet holes. Neighbors, however, suggested there were more shots fired . .

Kathy Merkosky, 53, was outside her stucco home pointing out the six bullet holes in the bumper and grill of her silver Acura MD-X. She knew her truck was damaged when she spotted it on television and “saw fluid flowing into the street.”

Her Ford Focus was hit as well — a bullet shattered the windshield and another flattened a front tire.

25 minutes later Torrance cops gunned down a bunch of mirages, or flying utensils or something. It’s only luck the police haven’t murdered more people than the monstrous Christopher Dorner, post-modern Geronimo. I think our imaginations are more dangerous than our sharks. I’m having flashbacks from the Daryl Gates era, where the cops were the cowboy crazies in the neighborhood.

First, it was the end of President Ben Ali in Tunisia. Next, it was . . seemingly everybody . .

Have the people of Tunisia changed the face of the Middle East?
Xavier Zapata | BBC | Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Last month an unemployed young man set himself on fire in Tunisia, and the flames appear to have engulfed a region. Officials wouldn’t let Mohamed Bouazizi sell vegetables without a licence, and his desperate act triggered an upsising that toppled the government of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Since then we’ve seen a dramatic chain reaction, as people across the Arab World have protested against what they see as authoritarian and oppressive rule. Events have been moving at breathtaking speed . .

In Egypt:

Mubarak Says He Will Not Run for Presidency Again
Reuters and AP with CNBC.com | Tuesday, 1 Feb 2011

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Tuesday he would not leave Egypt although he would step down from the presidency at the end of his term, due to end when the country holds a presidential election in September . .

He also said pledged to implement a series of reforms, including calling on the judiciary to combat corruption, one of the complaints of protesters who have pushed him to announce an end to his presidency later this year.

In Jordan:

Jordan’s King Dismisses Government Amid Protests
By HASSAN HAFIDH and FARNAZ FASSIHI | Associated Press | Feb 2 2011

AMMAN—Jordan’s King Abdullah II fired his government and named a new prime minister who he said would be responsible for enacting “true” political reforms, the latest in a handful of moves announced Tuesday across the region that appeared aimed at tamping down growing popular anger at political and economic malaise.

On a day that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak faced hundreds of thousands of angry protesters with a pledge that he wouldn’t seek re-election, leaders around the region took steps to hold on to their own power.

In Yemen:

Yemeni president vows to step down after term, as protests spark changes across Arab world
Haretz | 2 2 2011

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a key U.S. ally against Al-Qaida, said on Wednesday he will not seek to extend his presidency in a move that would end his three-decade rule when his current term expires in 2013.

Eyeing protests that swept Tunisia’s leader from power and threaten to topple Egypt’s president, Saleh also vowed not to pass on the reins of government to his son. He also appealed to the opposition to call off protests as a large rally loomed.

The unrest grows in Syria:

Syrians called to join in anti-government protests
Peter Cave | ABC.net | Mon Jan 31, 2011

Syria looks set to join the growing list of Middle East regimes facing mass, anti-government demonstrations . .

Organisers have begun circulating leaflets and messages on the internet demanding freedom of speech, human rights and economic reforms and they are asking demonstrators to rally outside parliament house in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

The strict authoritarian government of Syrian president Bashar Assad has already broken up attempts to rally outside the Egyptian embassy and has begun deploying troops in the northern city of Aleppo ahead of planned protest rallies there.

. . and in Algeria:

The Revolution Continues – Unrest in Algeria, Jordan
Erin | Africana Online | January 31, 2011

Algeria, another northern African nation, has also been inspired by neighboring Tunisia and is seeing massive protests. More than 10,000 protesters marched against authorities in Algeria’s northeastern city of Bejaia on Saturday in the country’s largest rally yet. Demonstrators marched peacefully in the city, chanting slogans such as: “For a radical change of the regime!” RCD leader Said Sadi, whose group organized the rally, said, “The protest gathered more than 10,000 people.” The police were out but the protesters dispersed peacefully. In Algeria, as in Egypt and Tunisia, residents are growing frustrated with rising costs and unemployment. Three-fourths of Algerians are under 30. Most of them do not have jobs or apartments, despite the fact that the state assets are full with money from oil and gas exports . .

After riots broke out earlier in the month that left five people dead and over 800 injured, Algiers responded swiftly by reducing the prices of oil, sugar and other basic necessities which had risen sharply. The government also assured citizens that subsidies on essential goods like flour would continue. But, longtime President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is supported by a corrupt circle of military officers and secret police and his assurances did little to calm the unrest in the country. Similar to Tunisia and Egypt, more residents are using public suicide in an effort to protest the government. Within the past two weeks, eight people have set themselves on fire, most jobless and desperate.

Isn’t that Dr. Laura a wise woman? Yes, she is — just listen:

You can feel her intelligence oozing out of the radio. Can’t you?

Wow. You know who else is real, real smart? Sarah Palin:

Thx 2 Sareh 4 de wurdz. Sure — do it again, Doctor N-Bomb:

. . now u, GuVern3r:

. . shackles of civility. More of this, please, without the pointless sensitivity:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you.

This is a strange one. There’s some satire, and then there’s someone who merely skims it to criticize it on its face. Strange enough. Except the purpose of the piece was to point out the hopelessness of vital satire in an environment that’s over-wrought and partisan. So Michael Barone fell right into it.

It begins with Rochelle Gurstein writing in the New Republic:

The Baby Lottery
A rational redistributive plan.
Rochelle Gurstein

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let’s face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn’t always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Every child is finally given a fair shot at the ‘good life’ in the greatest country on Earth. Races caring for each others’ babies creates a colorblind society. Knowing your ‘familial’ child lives with somebody else makes sectors and strata of society genuinely interested in the well-being of the once ‘outsiders’ — you don’t know where your kid ended up, so it’s important for everybody, rich and poor, to do well. You fight for the other because that’s probably who’s raising your own.

Yeah, it’s insane, nothing is more coveted than your own flesh and blood. And your family and your heritage are the first things you are, and that’s fine. And, certainly, forcing the well-off to submit their children into perhaps poverty (there’s plenty of that) would be mind-numbingly, tyrannically cruel. But, then, no one deserves it, right? That’s how satire goes: it’s to expose essential truths by way perhaps of a wild ‘proposal’.

Michael Barone, he of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, took only a moment to read a few words, sniff a liberal rat and crank out a column:

She is kidding, isn’t she?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

I’ve been reading the New Republic for decades, even though (or perhaps because) it’s a wildly uneven publication. It can publish as thoughtful and intellectually rigorous a figure as William Galston, whose every word is worth serious attention. And it can publish some real garbage. In the second category (I think) falls what the website calls “Our New Columnist’s Rational Plan for Redistributing Babies.” The “new columnist,” Rachel Gurstein, writes, “how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?”

That’s right, not even close to her name.

It turns out (I think) that she’s kidding; her citation of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is one tipoff. But her proposal has some roots, as she notes, with the famed and in some liberal quarters revered political philosopher John Rawls. He argued that all public policy proposals should be assessed from the perspective of one who does not know into what station of life he or she is born. It turns out that when you do this you end up opting for a cradle-to-grave welfare state (or at least Rawls did). The problem with this, I have long thought, is that we aren’t born this way, we are born into families (or some other child care situation), we are raised in a particular milieu which is only part of a larger society and at a particular point in history.

In other words, “While I recognize this proposal is a satirical one, I would pause to add this: life simply doesn’t work this way. So this is a bad idea.”

Cough. Or: “Yes, yes, it’s satire. But it’s bad politics, you know.”

Stupefying. Well, to sharpen all the 90-degree vertices of his analysis, Barone adds:

So while Rachel [sic] Gurstein isn’t really suggesting that babies should be redistributed at birth, it seems that the idea is in some way appealing to her—even while she presumably understands that it will sound appalling to the very large majority of Americans. There are clues here to why the Democrats’ health care policies are so unpopular with the American people.

Amazing. Just brilliant. But it gets better, if that’s possible: the point of Gurstein’s piece wasn’t the utopian gambit or comedy. It was that in this wholly bizarre and hyper-partisan political world, the preceding satire seems to have become pointless ( . . and perhaps Barone should have read the whole thing?).

The lack of a common reality, of universal up and down, has rendered hyperbole almost impossible to detect and compass:

. . well-meaning friends have repeatedly cautioned me against it, for fear–baseless, no doubt–that my intentions will be misunderstood. The more I protest that my scheme is as clear as the night is long –the old New York lottery slogan “You gotta be in it, to win it” at last made universal; Rawls’s theoretical “veil of ignorance” finally put into practice–the more insistent and stern and dour these same friends become: “You’ll see, they will think you are trying to destroy their precious idea of the American family, the bedrock of society.” “You’ll see, they will accuse you of being a fascist, a Nazi.” . . Have we now come to the point, I wondered, that our shared sense of reality is so tenuous that something as outrageous to common sense as my big baby lottery will not immediately be recognized as political satire?

. . you are kidding, aren’t you?

. . Like Tina Fey mimicking Sarah Palin, what passes for satire today plays on our incredulity, presenting us with an exact replica of something real but at the same time so absurd that it beggars our belief. It gets a laugh, but what is missing is the wild, inspired, visionary flights of imagination that masters of satire like Jonathan Swift so excelled at. Through caustic hyperbole, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to raise Irish babies like cattle and sell them to Englishmen for dinner in order to eliminate overpopulation and poverty in Ireland made his first readers–and us, too, almost three centuries after them–see and feel how the world appears from the standpoint of common decency.

And, for me, that’s it. When there’s no “common decency”, satire becomes hopeless, doesn’t it? There’s no one beating heart to it, no bullseye to hit. Communication becomes a crapshoot, like trying to squint and see one of those fractal space shuttles behind the multi-colored chaos. Did you get it — can you see it?

And when one side of the political world, as a matter of policy, becomes so mechanically bent on taking an axe to the other, no matter what’s said or done, the fragments are all that’s universal. As in: “Bringing down deficits is the decent thing to do, but if you proffer a pay/go rule before we do, not one of us will vote for it . .”

Nobody writes like that any more and I could not help wondering if the extinction of satire that attempts to shame people into recognizing that there are things higher and worth striving towards than what merely happens to exist was a sign of just how poverty-stricken our moral, political, and literary imaginations have become.

And there is the point. She could have paid Barone to write his post, but he did it for free.

So, it’s been a strange week or so of famous people acting like Big Jerks and then tossing off hollow mea culpas. I won’t profess to know what it all might mean (well, at least until the last paragraphs, and only some of it), but it is an odd collection of a-hole moments.

What, yet another internet post on our ever-coarsening public behavior? Well, yeah, sort of. Perhaps more like a look at the ever-coarsening public behavior of the American powerful, important and heroic. And the spreading inability of the same to offer any sort of apology that is remotely meaningful. Why they seem to be clinically incapable of apologizing is a mystery.

MTV video awards, Kanye West decides to take the stage and grab the mic out of the hands of 19 year-old Taylor Swift, winner of Best Female Video. “Thank you so much!” Swift began. “I always dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these some day, but I never actually thought it would have happened. I sing country music so thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA award.” Cue Kanye:

How’s that for self-centered? If you don’t agree exactly with the Entertainer Known As Kanye, especially if you’re a loser in his eyes, well, he’s gonna storm the stage during your big moment and tell everybody who the real winner–the Kanye Winner–is. Taylor of course, was crushed.

This was Kanye’s apology, on the internet, of course: “I’m sooooo sorry to taylor swift and her fans and her mom. I spoke to her mother right after and she said the same thing my mother would’ve said.

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