Killing Kasztner

I have a habit, when my wife goes out of town, of selecting Netflix discs that I like to call "boy movies." My wife calls them my Hitler Channel movies, because as much as time goes by, the quantity and quality of films about that peculiar moment in history doesn't diminish; it seems to increase. A case in point at the Tropic Cinema they are showing a documentary (my wife hates documentaries so I scored two points with one movie) called "Killing Kasztner." It is a fascinating, impossible story of no human logic and dreadful inhumanity. I was riveted to my seat.There is, it seems a well known documentary film maker called Gaylen Ross who decided to discover what she could about the life and death of a Hungarian Jew known as Israel Reszo Kasztner. He emigrated to Israel after the war and got a job with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's government and was murdered in front of his house by a right wing Israeli terrorist called Ze'ev Eckstein, who was caught and sentenced to life in prison for the deed.

Ross interviews Eckstein, free these forty years, about the murder and he spills the beans. She interviews Kasztner's daughter and her daughters and they spill the beans. It is amazing stuff. But get this Krasztner saved more than 20,000 Jews from the Holocaust and he was branded a collaborator and hated by everyone. He got Adolf Eichmann to agree to save 1845 Jews and put them on a special train, Schindler style and they eventually got to Switzerland via a detour to the Bergen Belsen camp outside Berlin. Additionally Kasztner got SS Colonel Kurt Becher to agree to send 20,000 Hungarian Jews to Austria instead of Auschwitz and there they survived the war. Every single one of them. Yet Kasztner came out of the war loathed and labeled a collaborator. He was the only person to save any of the almost one million Jews in pre-war Hungary. One of the children seated in front in this picture, of the train en route to Switzerland is interviewed in the movie.

However the film reinforced my own prejudices against people in general, and the saying that no good deed goes unpunished is liberally illustrated here. Kasztner comes out of this amazing detective story as a true hero, unsung, unappreciated except by those he saved and not all of them even! There is an astonishing moment when a survivor dismisses Kasztner's efforts to save her own life, by blaming him for getting her sent, briefly to Bergen Belsen! This is an astounding movie.

Put it on your Netflix list. I think even my wife may be ready to see it. When we toured Auschwitz together she got enough Nazi anti semitism to put her off even discussing these things. But I think Kasztner's astonishing story piqued even her interest when I told her about it.

Lost Part I

I was driving north up Key Deer Boulevard on Big Pine Key with a vague destination in mind somewhere around the Blue Hole possibly when I spotted a dirt road heading west.We parked at the baseball diamond (possibly the site for a planned dog park) and took off to check this road out. It had possibilities not least because it was unpaved. The other good news was that I could see no mail boxes at the side of the main road and there were no power lines, which told me there was no one living down here.I was enjoying a bright sunny day with alight wind out of the southeast and no humidity. Finally we were getting some proper winter weather, at 75 degrees (22C) no need for socks at last.I am noticing a lot of colors in the mangroves and I'm not sure why. I don't recall such glorious reds and oranges and yellows all at once in years past and I was wondering if perhaps our recent bout of cold weather had done more than kill off a great many fish. It was looking like New Hampshire in the fall (I'm told not ever having been to New England).It was perfect riot of colors though considering all the dead pine trees i trust the mangroves will recover from whatever is making them change colors all at once. You can't swing a cat in the back country around here without hitting some defunct household appliance abandoned to save the former owner $11 in fees at the dump.

Even the most crass vandal can't destroy the beauty of these places.
I did spot this sign buried deep in the bushes. I rather think they have probably given up hope of closing a sale...The colors were splendid, of leaves and sky:

The street, unnamed as far as I could tell, wound on most alluringly: And Cheyenne was busy doing her usual snuffling act:As rural as these places look they are never complete silent, there is almost always a backdrop of human activity depending on the direction of the wind. One can generally hear an engine or two on a roadway, or a plane overhead, or even a helicopter from time to time.

The black turkey vultures are silent and quite graceful as they crowd the air this time of year:I am of course no botanist (my perpetual disclaimer) but I seem to recall a bark beetle was responsible a few years ago for doing in many of the pine trees that give the island, the largest in the lower Keys, it's name:

And what nature doesn't trash humans will. What the point of this apparent bull dozing was, we'll never know:

The presence of a non native palm tree indicates possible human activity in the wilderness:And there it is, a roof line among the clump of trees:

No sign of any actual people, or roads yet. But we were only half way across at this stage.

Happy Japanese

There was a time in Key West, when greed and concupiscence ruled over common sense, when Benihana closed to accommodate the landlord's greed. The bubble burst, the land wasn't sold and miraculously the chain Japanese restaurant re-opened. This is I believe the red safflower symbol that gives the Doral-based chain it's name:It flourishes today in a space that to my mind warps the time/space continuum. Enter Benihana and you have slipped out of the Florida Keys and have stepped back into 1950s Cleveland or some such place. This chain that has outlets around the world was apparently started in 1964 in New York city and now earns it's bosses three hundred million dollars a year. Cheyenne is statistically speaking, an anomaly as she takes her own chow with her when she plans to be away from home during dinner hour.
Key West has it's own traditional Japanese restaurants but for some reason this is one of the chains that has proved to be durable in this town. Taco Bell closed recently much to the distress of some people (not me) and there is only one Burger King left in the city after the downtown store closed a couple of years ago, to be replaced by a chain surf(!) shop. Friends took me to Benihana for the first time after it re-opened and I was mildly amused by the schtick but I am not of the type that enjoys dinner as theater. I look at my hands and wonder how they train the chefs to fling their knives around so gracefully. In this instance, Robert, the master of the freebie figured out that if he made a reservation far enough in advance Benihana, like Denny's gives you free grub on your birthday. An opportunity not to be missed.We were party of five so we waited briefly top be seated and I had the rare chance to observe the regular Benihana customers in their element. We shared the table with three others, from Pennsylvania I believe, and they showed me how one interacts with the chef as he spins knives and chops food on the heated slab ("teppanyaki table") in front of you. Our master comedian was Jose from Puerto barrios in Guatemala, a journeyman chef who played to his Pennsylvania audience like a master. The idea at Benihana is to enjoy a touch of theater with the ingredients which are brought to the grill already chopped. Everything is carefully measured out and all ingredients for each dish are prepared before they arrive. The chef throws them on the grill in the correct order, swirls them around and serves them up With banter. Robert is about as good with banter as am I, Dolly his wife, watched the knife:
The menu offers assorted chicken and steak and scallops and lobster in various combinations. Most cost between 20 and 45 dollars a dish though Benihana advertises, rather crassly that complete dinner start at $15.50. I took them up on that and tried the tofu dish and it was good, my wife giggled that I probably got the most fat of all of us in the crusty wrapper then tofu came in. It was also easy to pick up with chop sticks. Plus it came first, I suspect as a way to avoid contaminating a vegetarian meal with meat on the same grill.
They also brought me all the green tea I could drink and I drink a lot of tea so I enjoyed the constant ebb and flow of teapots, and kept mine hot on the grill. And like I said I was spared the banter as the trip from Pennsylvania took up the slack.He was a salesman so he started out well by asking us where we are from and the fact that we were locals didn't faze him. He offered us a low cost pharmaceutical card and gauging our ability and willingness to play his game turned the brilliant smile on Jose who played along gamely. The wife brayed like a donkey as she sucked up the plonk and the daughter got more fluent in Spanish, she thought, as she sank the pink zinfandel. It was a complete Benihana experience, except that no one stuck chopsticks up their nostrils which I am told is common practice among Benihana cognoscenti.

The portions are American sized, not Japanese so as a matter of course a busboy comes out with the dreaded Styrofoam (non recyclable!) and my wife took home chunks of her excellent tuna steak. I really liked my tofu and figured it would not do as well reheated so I woofed it.We five were at Benihana for what was for us an unusual "dining experience" but the other three apparently make a habit of it. My wife said (I wasn't paying attention) they rent a room at the Galleon resort for a month and I did hear him say he's been coming back every year to Key West for 23 years, a creature of habit it seems, and Benihana draws them in far more than say one of Key West's homegrown places to eat. Perhaps the fact that making a sale at dinner is frowned upon, would be enough to put him off the other establishments.It was a cold night by Key West standards but we repaired to a local joint for what my wife promised would be the best chocolate cake ever. She was right, we had a table to ourselves and we talked our backsides off late into the night.I would never have imagined having dinner with Robert and Dolly in this place, and it is a unique memory I shall add to all the others I have accumulated over the years. You have to try Benihana once if you never have. You may not have the pleasure of stepping out into Key West afterward, but watching the knives fly is priceless.

The Great Game IV

What strikes me as odd about the posturing over Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Israel, is how unnecessary it all is. When US oil consumption dropped last year by ten percent, oil producers were thrown into chaos. Tankers around the world were sitting idle, loaded with crude waiting for someone to buy. There was more oil to be refined than any number of refineries could cope with. Just a ten percent drop in consumption by the US caused massive, unsustainable over production. Imagine what would happen if we got serious about alternative energy.

The argument goes that alternative energy is a socialist tree hugging plot to ruin the economy and pave the way for the End of the US As We Know It. Well, yes, in a sense that's true, but it could actually be for the better. In seeking independence from oil we would at last be seeking independence from foreign energy markets. Not since the 1970s has the US produced all the energy it needed. And ever since then energy independence has been a political catch phrase with no substance to back it up.

There is market in this country for alternative energy, and that market would provide jobs and light industry, which can't actually be bad for the US. It would be different for sure to make our own solar panels, our own windmills and our own gas and bio fuel plants, but in feeding those industrial dreams Americans would be working for their own benefit not for shareholders in the world wide oil bonanza.

The biggest issue I have with opponents of alternative energy is that they impose their own blinkered limitations on any proposals to move away from oil dependence. firstly there is no rule that says it has to be done all at once. Secondly we don't have to replace our oil obsession with any other single replacement. Liquid propane gas is a commonly used substitute in Europe and it produce one third less carbon than equivalent consumption of petroleum. Hydrogen technology can still be studied, and bio-diesel projects can also be implemented. There's no reason we can't increase the number of windmills and solar panels. Pickens has abandoned his plans for wind power in the Texas panhandle saying energy is too cheap to justify it, yet one wonders why subsidies aren't worth considering to make them worth while. If your child was off to fight an endless oil war in Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran a wind power subsidy instead might look cheap, and worthwhile.

And yet, even though these ideas have been kicked around for years, and none of them are particularly radical we live in apolitical atmosphere where sensible debate has become impossible. Politics used to be known as the art of the possible. The recent health care reform proposals which were shot down uniformly by the Party of No, illustrate clearly how far we have moved from the days of partisan bickering and back room deals and public unity. Nowadays a unified proposal for energy independence could never be more than a pipe dream. The Democrats would never have the nuts to propose it and the Republicans, funded by Big Oil even more than the Democrats are, would never even agree to begin to think about it. I'm just glad, selfishly, I have no offspring to donate to the cause of Big Oil and the Great Game. Because if we are to continue to be consumers and not citizens someone has to die to get us the fuel to feed the American Dream in it's current incarnation.

Fire On Upper Duval

In the early hours of this morning we received a call that flames and smoke were to be seen on the 1200 block of Duval Street.It was a big blaze from what we in dispatch could gather. All the city's fire units responded and the US Navy Fire Department kindly stood by in case of further calls for service across the city. Police officers evacuated the surrounding buildings including one guard dog in a business who was housed safely in a police car until his owner came to pick him up.

It is unclear at the moment exactly why the fire started or how much damage it caused but several buildings in the middle of the 1200 block are reported to have suffered damage, some severe . This is the second major blaze on Duval Street in less than a year. I guess this very wooden town, with buildings thrown up very close together is lucky, or sensible, to have the Fire Department it does. What a crappy night. The hole created by the fire last March on the 500 block is still there; and now this. It's like Duval Street is becoming gap toothed.

South Sugarloaf

On the southern side of Sugarloaf Key we find a road that parallels the sea, and dead ends here. This is old County Road 939 or State Road 4A that turns west at the bottom of Sugarloaf Boulevard and many years ago used to run along the south side of the islands. These days, all that's left of the old road is a trail that disappears into the bushes at the dead end of the modern roadway:It's a wild and woolly place this trek through the mangroves:The road bed is quite narrow these days though you can see where the surface used to be wider under the bushes. There is also evidence that vehicles of some sort travel the old road, possibly all terrain vehicles or something that leaves tire marks:

The trail runs alongside a body of water to the south for quite a stretch. barely visible through the trees:One is never far from water in these islands and the difference between wet and dry can be a tide or a just a few inches in the rainy season:Even though the islands have the appearance of rolling greenery, it is somewhat deceptive as the trees are much shorter than they may appear, and if they are red mangroves they are actually growing out of the salt water.

The Keys are a mixture of mud, rock, tree and water: And birds, let's not forget herons and stuff flying around looking for dinner: The evening Cheyenne and I walked the sky was overcast with a promise of cold or rain or something nasty. The breaks in the cloud cover never seemed to want to amount to much:The day seemed washed out of all colors:Cheyenne was new to this place and busy finding whatever there was to smell. She treats these walks as a vacuuming exercise snorting and snuffling her way to the end and back:It seems there are people who come out here for a good time and very enterprising I think it is too, with signs of a splendid bonfire and no visible trash. I can only imagine how pleasant it must be in company with chairs and roaring fire far from the cares of the world in the dark of night.I fiddled with my camera and Cheyenne found something disgusting and appetizing and disappeared into the bushes. I only found out after I nailed a couple of still lifes that she was snacking on something smelly.At first I thought this discarded commercial fishing float had a series of letters printed on the side ESL, but as I ruminated, wondering how this artifact of the sea got here I figured I was looking at it upside down and it was really numbered 753. I really should be a detective.I heard a rustling in the bushes and before we knew it we were set upon by a graybeard on a bicycle which required deft footwork by yours truly. Cheyenne doesn't do well around wheels so I lunged for her collar and let him by. "Twice a week" he replied over his shoulder, not stopping when I asked him if he had got to the end of the trail. Which by my calculation is 3.5 miles end to end.We had ambled for an hour and it was my executive decision to head home. The light was failing anyway, not that a dog would care about such trifles.

It wasn't much of a sunset but it made a pretty picture nevertheless. Water and mangroves always help in these situations. I'm lucky to have them to hand.