Garage Tragic - Joe Soucheray

Garage Tragic - Joe Soucheray is one of the more original personalities on the radio today. If you're from the Twin Cities, you're probably heard, or at least heard of, "Garage Logic" on KSTP-AM.

At it's best, it's wonderful. Soucheray, the mayor of the fictional town and anti-PC colony after which the show is named, lampoons pomposity and overweening PC in government, the schools, and society. His producer, "Rookie" (so dubbed by former KSTP morning guy Jesse Ventura) used to grate on me - I don't think ignorance about math or current events is entirely a "bit", and sometimes it leaves me gritting my teeth on the rare occasions I get to listen. But he's a talented impressionist and a great foil for the acerbic but crusty Soucheray.

At its worst, it's like sitting in the back lot at Garrison Keillor's studio. Guys calling in to describe their new garages at length. Old fellas calling in to start their cars on the air, revving them up over the phone (note to all of you: Chevettes and F15s sounds pretty much the same through a phone line). Simplistic snap judgements about complex issues of the type that'd make Dr. Laura blanche in horror. Old guys calling in to declare "I think [fill in subject] is a bunch of crap...", or to re-iterate Soucheray's own conclusions for an hour at a pop.

Such was Tuesday's show. Soucheray joined a crowd of pundits questioning the government's advice to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting, against a potential nerve gas attack. One caller asked "where the hell does this come from", a question Soucheray jumped on himself, ridiculing the whole notion of building a safe room against chemical attack.

I had to ask - do they also make fun of keeping blankets, candles, matches and Snickers in the trunk when going on a winter trip? Of keeping candles and flashlights around the house in case an ice storm knocks out power? Of course not.

It's the notion that it's the government giving the advice that stuck in Soucheray's craw, from what I heard. Which in many areas is a perfectly OK reaction. But this one...

Where did it come from? I'll anwer that - the idea came from Israel. There, where terrorist attacks have been a way of life for 35 years, safe rooms are pretty much a fact of life.

Many pundits have attacked the whole idea - the Chicago Tribune article quotes Presdiential hopeful Gary Hart, of all people (carrying his criticisms of the administration without noting he wants the job, incidentally):

Hart said. "So that's why they're down to duct tape . . . It's almost back to the duck-and-cover days of the nuclear exchange in the '50s, kids ducking under desks," he said, referring to the civil defense rehearsals that were common in schools during the Eisenhower administration.

"We look back on that now and think it was a joke," Hart said. "I think 10 or 20 years from now, we'll look back on the duct tape as a joke." He acknowledged, however, that it was important for people to make an emergency checklist for themselves, including keeping some cash on hand as well as important papers.

Hart is an idiot, as are most of the people who criticized Civil Defense in the fifties - and many of those criticizing the "Duct Tape" suggestions. In each case, the recommendations, from "Duck and Cover" to "Safe Rooms" were prudent response to an immediate threat, similar to telling people to get into a ditch or basement in the event of a tornado; the advice doesn't, and can't, answer "what if there's a propane tank next to the ditch, or if the tornado is sooooo huge it sucks out out of there anyway? Or if the house collapses in onto the basement? Or there's a big box of scorpions that get blown into the basement with you? Huh? HUH?"

First things first; A duct tape and plastic "safe room" doesn' have to protect you indefinitely. Chemical weapons generally disperse fairly quickly - if you're more than a few miles from the source of the gas, it can be a matter of minutes to hours. Your plastic sheeting only has to hold the gas off for a little while.

Biological attack? Even more so. If you're not at the epicenter of the aerosol distribution, the odds are much better that you'll be exposed by an infected person.

Nuclear attack? If it's a ground burst, and if you're beyond the range of the thermal pulse and immediate blast effects (which, with a small nuke of the type most likely to be used by terrorists, is a matter of much less than a mile, sometimes hundreds of yards), the plastic sheeting will keep out the particles of fallout, while being in a basement itself shields you from ambient radiation.

Will rolls of plastic and duct tape guarantee your safety against every eventuality? Obviously not. The only thing that will do that is complete victory over all terrorists and nations that'd do us ill, and putting all domestic wackoes in jail.

But while we're waiting, it's the simple, prudent measures that'll protect most of the people, most of the time - if they need protection at all.

Soucheray's skepticism is usually on target. But it can also be misguided - and in this case, just a little bit complacent. You'd think he, among everyone, would know better.

It Ain't Easy Being Green - Joschka Fischer is Germany's foreign minister. He's also a longtime leader of Germany's Green party, helping to lead it to the electoral surge that put him in the governing coalition.

But it's his past that's the most interesting part, according to Mike Kelly:

In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman, in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, ``The Passion of Joschka Fischer'' (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a ``gruesome beating'' on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: ``Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him ...''

As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, ``refrained from nothing,'' including ``kidnappings, bank holdups, murders.'' You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer?

In 1976, to protest the death in prison of Baader-Meinhof founder Ulrike Meinhof, you planned and participated in a Frankfurt demonstration in which, Berman wrote, ``somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail at a policeman and burned him nearly to death.'' You were arrested, but not charged. In 2001, Meinhof's daughter, Bettina Rohl (who gave those damning photos to Stern) told the press that you were responsible for the throwing of that firebomb. Other contemporary witnesses, Berman reported, said that you ``had never ruled out the use of Molotovs and may even have favored it.'' You denied it, for the record.

In 2001, the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground ``soldier'' in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary Cells helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed.

Kathleen Soliah was hardly alone in having a dirty, violent past. I suspect there's some skeletons in the closets of a lot of leftist leaders that are wearing Che Guevara t-shirts...

Posted by Mitch at February 13, 2003 07:46 AM