Mission Trails in a fog

Taco in Mission Bay Park

Evan and Elian

The story of Evan Scott (White?) is much in the news today -- particularly the Today show which has covered it two days in a row. It's a custody case between "biological" parents and "adoptive" parents, and the law's preference for the former, allowing a 3-1/2 year-old boy to be removed from the married couple who raised him (the Scotts) and placed with an unmarried, separated couple (Hopkins and White) who gave birth to him.

To me, this issue illustrates what happens to children and parents when long-term guardians are unable to complete adoption proceedings. (The impregnator, initially withheld notice of the pregnancy and birth, refused permission.) To many others, including Matt Lauer, it illustrates the law's inflexibility in providing for what's "best for the child". It's truly heart-wrenching when a child is removed from the people who provided him a home. It's even worse when the people given custody, appear (at least on TV) to be of a lower social class than the losing couple.

But I can't help seeing the parallels between this case and the Elian Gonzalez case of five years ago. Remember that one? Does it seem that those who felt Elian should go back to Cuba are in now in favor of allowing the Scotts to keep Evan? Isn't this contradiction glaring enough to cause temporary blindness?

Juan Trippe, the Aviator

I saw The Aviator (Martin Scorcese's biopic of Howard Hughes) this weekend, and though I enjoyed the movie, I would have enjoyed it more if Scorcese had resisted his urge to continue to make villains out of America's businessmen (those who don't make motion pictures).

I'm not referring to Howard Hughes, who was given a romantic, rose-colored treatment by Scorsese as an enigmatic visionary who suffered from mental illness somehow related to his mother bathing him with lye soap and teaching him to spell "quarantine" as a means of avoiding the typhus epidemic.

I'm referring to Juan Trippe, the world's greatest innovator in commercial aviation, who is depicted in the film as a greedy capitalist who attempted to monopolize transatlantic passenger routes. (Even the scenes of him -- played by Alec Baldwin -- in his opulent Chrysler Building office had a simplistic evil genius comic-book quality right out of Batman.) Many viewers of the film, especially younger ones who have never heard of Juan Trippe or even Pan American Airways, will come away with a grossly distorted image of a truly great American and commercial aviation genius.

In fact, a truly interesting biopic would be one on Juan Trippe. It was Juan Trippe who took on the International Air Transport Association (a price-fixing cartel of national air carriers) to offer cut-rate "tourist class" fares (which he invented) to open air travel to the common man. (If Juan Trippe was such a powerful influence-peddler, why couln't he get his buddies in Congress behind him against the IATA?)

It was Juan Trippe who put into service the Pan Am Clipper, a fleet of flying boats to carry passengers and mail to exotic destinations in South America, the Pacific, and Caribbean, as the industry delayed building large aircraft and long-runway land-based aerodromes.

It was Juan Trippe who influenced Boeing's design of the 707 to reduce per-passenger costs (allowing lower fares) and the 747, with its upper-level flight-deck configuration for cargo loading and more seating.

In contrast with Trippe, Howard Hughes was the true influence-peddler and a small-time developer of costly, boutique aircraft. Among his eccentricities and illnesses which may fascinate Scorcese and his public, Hughes was also a friend of McCarthyite congressmen, a point which Scorcese ignores.