In today's pages: Fidel's slow fade, progress in Pakistan

Tim Rutten writes up Mayor Villaraigosa for pandering to the media at slain LAPD SWAT officer Randal Simmons' funeral, and New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson shares a personal account of living in Fidel Castro's Cuba:

Inevitably, during the three years we lived in Cuba, Fidel became both a familiar figure and a totemic one to my children -- half grandfather, half God. With his deeds and aphorisms the stuff of daily fare, and his face and voice omnipresent on nightly television, they came to understand that El Jefe Maximo was the ultimate guiding hand that controlled their lives and those of everyone around them. He represented the past and the present, and the future too. Fidel, somehow, was Cuba.

The editorial board breaks down Blu-ray's trouncing of HD DVD, and worries that the surge in foreclosures could turn California exurbs into "sunnier and warmer, but in other ways equally bleak, slums." The board also watched with satisfaction as Pakstanis threw the bums out in Monday's parlimentary elections:

Pakistan's previous civilian governments have proved corrupt and incompetent; this one will need help in improving the country's dreadful health and education systems, generating more than a few hours of electricity a day, boosting living standards for the poor and instituting anti-corruption programs.... Halfway decent governance is an indispensable element in quelling the rage that feeds extremism.

Readers rethink agriculture in the wake of the largest beef recall in U.S. history. James Montgomery writes:

Old McDonald had a farm, but he was put out of business by large factory farming operations and a complicit USDA that put profit above all else. There is a more sustainable, humane way to farm, and many of us are choosing with our dollars to support organic foods locally grown by small family farms.