Shouts from the Balcony

Rise of the Toad

2012-01-24T05:40:00.000-08:00

I’ll be damned if the Human Toad (Newt Gingrich) didn’t win the South Carolina GOP popularity contest, easily besting Mitt “Easy Money” Romney. Now the Toad is atop this sad heap of would-be rulers and heading to Florida with what the politicos like to call the Big Mo’.

If the Toad appears capable to a segment of the Republican base it’s only because Easy Money is so incredibly wooden on the campaign trail, and so totally out of step with the people of this country. Referring to more than $350,000 in speaking fees (nine speeches in all) as chump change -- not that Romney said it quite like that, but the way he brushed off the income as almost not worth counting, like finding a couple of dollars in quarters between the sofa cushions -- is damned insulting when millions of Americans are struggling to put enough food on their tables.

Romney clearly doesn’t get it, and neither does the Toad -- the Toad is simply better at appealing to the baser instincts of his audience.

An egomaniacal crackpot without peer, the Toad treated his marriage vows like political promises, and did his best to have his cake (an open marriage) and eat it too (keep his mistress,) and now passes himself off as a righteous man, a reformed and rehabilitated philanderer, bathed in the light of the Catholic faith.

Make no mistake, the Toad is no stranger to hypocrisy and if the adulterer’s loafer was on Romney’s foot, you can bet the Toad would be howling about “character” from every rooftop. He’d quote Churchill, Gandhi and Rabbi Hillel on the dangers of backing a leader with questionable character.

More amusing still, Gingrich makes the incredible claim that he is a Washington DC outsider, the only candidate with sufficient independence to disrupt the culture of corruption in our capitol. Thieves, perverts, and con artists beware! Sheriff Toad is coming to town.

The claim strains credulity to the breaking point. Word to those of you not paying attention: Gingrich served in the House, and was in fact Speaker of that body, around the time P.J. O’Rourke dubbed it a Parliament of Whores. What P.J. meant was that almost every one of those so-called “public” servants was on the take in one way or another, doing political favors in exchange for campaign dough, plum private sector jobs, or sky box seats for the Super Bowl.

Not much has changed; the whores still have the run of the place.

When Gingrich left government covered by a shroud of disgrace and failure, he became a shill for private interests, using his contacts and knowledge of the political machinery to enrich his corporate clients and himself. Basically, the Toad graduated from common streetwalker to high-class hooker. Instead of servicing clients in the Men’s Room he began entertaining them in luxurious boardrooms. But let’s not split hairs here -- a blowjob is a blowjob no matter where it is administered. You can dress it up, call it fellatio, but it’s still a blowjob.

OK, glad we got that out of the way.

It doesn’t require any genius to see that the GOP is in disarray, tearing itself apart from within, lurching so far right that the party faithful would reject Dwight Eisenhower if he were running today. Gingrich is banking on naked fear to carry him along, and by that I mean the fear white people have of blacks, Mexicans, lesbians, gay men, skateboarders, transsexuals, vegans, and any person who drives a Prius.

Romney, on the other hand, believes that his business background qualifies him for the Oval Office, the theory being that he knows how to grow the economy and create jobs. While this may sound logical, it’s utterly batshit. I ask you this: after the colossal failure of corporate America during the first decade of this century, why would anyone trust a businessman?

Today the Toad may be rising, but we can take comfort in the fact that gravity is on our side.

American Mishmash

2012-01-18T19:01:00.000-08:00

It’s been a number of years since Bob Dylan made the claim that “people are crazy & times are strange,” but the claim remains valid as ever. Here’s a case in point: according to the latest Harper’s index, today more Americans believe that human activity isn’t a cause of global warming than did so a decade ago. That’s a tribute to the power of massive PR from corporations and their media flacks and political allies. The more conclusive the science, the more industry -- and its vocal mouthpieces -- call science into question. BP is particularly masterful in this game of smoke and mirrors, having restored the Gulf of Mexico to its former condition less than a year after one of the worst oil spills in US history. What, you doubt BP’s sincerity? According to BP’s chirpy TV ads, the Gulf’s beaches are pristine, restaurants are open, restitution has been paid to anyone with a valid claim, and fish harvested from Gulf waters are free from deadly contaminants...enjoy your meal.

Moving on to more corporate manure...of late I’ve heard and seen many commercials for Anthem Blue Cross, all pumping the theme that Blue Cross is made up of kind and caring people who only have your health in mind; they have kids of their own, dreams of a healthy retirement, grandchildren and dogs, exotic birds and horses, so therefore they understand your needs. Clearly, none of these kind and caring people work in Anthem’s underwriting department, where denying care to patients is an art form. Your personal physician may possess sound medical reasons for ordering an MRI on your ailing knee, but if the underwriters at Anthem happen to be in an uncharitable mood, you can forget the MRI. Despite the self-reverent advertisements, Blue Cross is only in it for the dough. Nowhere does the average American get hosed more thoroughly than when it comes to health care. But we plow forward with our absurd, inefficient and wasteful for-profit system, paying more for treatment and medications than any other industrial nation. Bow and pay homage to the Free Market God and the angels from Big Pharma.

How many times did Madonna refer to “my film” on the Golden Globes the other night? She was nominated for a song she wrote, but in Madonna’s mind the song was an afterthought; she wanted only to talk about her film, her creation, her baby, her pride & joy. Good to know that Madonna’s ego is still intact after all these years, even though on her best day Madonna had as much talent as Lady Gaga on her worst. Lady Gaga with a wicked hangover, menstrual cramps, and an out of tune Steinway is still better than Madonna ever was. I can see why Sir Elton John was aghast, but then again, it’s the Golden Globes.

By the way, is it just me or does Angelina Jolie resemble an alien from a galaxy far, far away...?

Finally, a moment of levity from the campaign trail. Newt “The Human Toad” Gingrich’s presidential hopes were bolstered yesterday when Todd Palin, husband of Sarah, endorsed Gingrich. Wow! Talk about a seismic shift...Todd Palin is such an important political figure that his endorsement just may propel the Human Toad right to the top of the GOP heap. Perhaps Todd and the Toad will hit the campaign trail together, wow patrons of roadside diners and VFW posts with their wit and charm. I can see the reality TV show now...it will air right after My Strange Addiction...

Race to Nowhere

2012-01-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

Mitt and Barrack. Romney versus Obama. Rich white guy against rich mixed race guy.

There’s your presidential sweepstakes match-up come November and everybody knows it, even the nitwits on Good Morning America. Gingrich and Huntsman and Ron Paul and Santorum will hang around a while longer, but when push comes to shove, Republicans will hold their noses and select Romney. Evangelical Republicans will demand that Romney throw them a bone, so Romney will come out in support of one or more of the Bible thumper’s pet issues. He will say that he has always supported this or that, even if his past statements or actions contradict his assertion.

It’s going to be a long year of political blather, and you can bet the farm that neither Obama nor Romney will say jack shit about the real issues facing our country. Persistent high unemployment. Continuing foreclosures. State budget deficits. Income inequality. Rising poverty. With Romney it will always be morning in America, while Obama will claim that if not for his crack team of ex-Clintonistas, things would be much worse than they are.

My wife watches our local ABC affiliate every morning and by default we are subjected to the GMA team -- George, Robin, Josh and Sam -- not to mention the hacks they habitually turn to for “expert” commentary and analysis. Top flight journalism it’s not, unless you happen to be a believer in corporate media, and extremely gullible to boot. I will give this group credit for being sunny and upbeat, but I can go no further than that. Most mornings they incite my inner crank and make me want to hurl a shoe through the TV.

Don’t expect Obama or Romney to challenge the stranglehold that corporations have on the country, or the fact that “predatory” capitalism doesn’t work worth a damn -- unless the goal is to enrich the few at the expense of the many. For doing that, predatory capitalism is unbeatable, and Republicans – and far too many wimpy Democrats -- have supported this atavistic version of capitalism since Reagan. But if the goal is to create a vibrant middle class, with decent jobs at living wages, with reasonable access to medical care and higher education, with due respect for the fragility of the environment, predatory capitalism isn’t the answer.

Romney claims that his experience running a venture capital firm makes him uniquely qualified to create jobs. This is one of those Republican tropes that sounds good on the morning news but means absolutely nothing in the real world. At the heart of the claim is the belief that the private sector can do no wrong, and that government is always wasteful, inefficient, and inept. The answer, of course, is to kneel before the all-powerful, infallible Market God.

There’s nothing left in the Republican economic playbook. The pages are torn and yellowed, stained with bourbon and blood. In a nutshell here’s what they’ve got: tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, privatization of public assets, massive military spending, further deregulation, and a never-ending assault on “entitlement” programs. These ideas have failed. If you don’t believe me, look around.

Obama is vulnerable on the economy, but Republicans conveniently forget that Obama inherited an economic calamity from George W. Bush. This doesn’t excuse Obama – he’s governed far too timidly – but it does place his four years in the proper context.

Romney’s focus group tested attempts to pass himself off as a regular Joe are risible. He can roll up the sleeves on his plaid shirt all he wants, trot his wife and kids out for the obligatory photo, and eat corn on the cob with the yokels, but it cannot erase the fact that Romney is a man of privilege with a limited sense of what life is like for average folks.

The race is on, but it’s less a race to Pennsylvania Avenue than it is a race to nowhere.

Too Many Questions, Not Enough Answers

2012-01-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

God doesn’t climb up to the Balcony very often. I figure the Lord (good Lord, bad Lord? I don’t know) has better things to do than visit an obscure man living quietly with his family on the California coast. But since I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchens, religion is on my mind, and I can’t help but ruminate on my own religious background and experience. Not that I can identify the year, month, week or day when the notion of a God, benevolent or otherwise, became impossible for me to accept. It must have been the moment when my questions about religion far outnumbered the answers religion offered.

I don’t believe that religious faith is a prerequisite for ethical or moral behavior in the world. Quite the contrary, some of the most unethical and immoral people can easily quote scripture, wear religious medallions, cross themselves for no particular reason or bow their heads in prayer at the dinner table, and then proceed to lie, cheat, steal and kill. Look at all the sexual scandals and child abuse episodes in the Catholic Church for a perfect illustration of my point. Priests known to the church hierarchy to be dangerous and predatory were protected rather than prosecuted.

My mother was raised a Catholic and so, carrying on the family practice, my brother and I were baptized into the faith without being consulted beforehand or given any other option. This seems cruel and unusual to me now, and is the reason my wife and I didn’t baptize our children. Having stood in the delivery room when they came into this world, all purplish-blue and covered with blood and fluid, it was perfectly clear to me that they arrived completely innocent, with no proverbial sin to pay for. When they’ve had an opportunity to consider the notion of religion for themselves they are welcome to adopt a faith and practice it. I will no doubt be disappointed if this should happen, but I won’t stand in the way or try to change their minds. If they choose to put faith in biblical fables like Adam & Eve or the Ten Commandments or Moses and the burning bush, that’s their choice, though I would obviously be far happier if they choose to believe in reason, skepticism and rational inquiry.

Religion is most obnoxious when it comes to sex. I was poking around a website called Catholic Answers and found this gem regarding contraception and procreation:

“Contraception is wrong because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, often referred to as "natural law." The natural law purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God, intended to offer the possibility of new life while strengthening the bond of intimacy, respect, and love between husband and wife. The loving environment this bond creates is the perfect setting for nurturing children.

But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, and even harmful to the spouses, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. God’s gift of the sex act, along with its pleasure and intimacy, must not be abused by deliberately frustrating its natural end—procreation.”

Well, isn’t that nice? Infantile, but very nice.

First of all, I don’t buy the proposition that God was involved in any way, shape or form in the design of the human species. Forget the six days to create the universe and everything in it; forget as well that humankind was forged in God’s image. Only humans, operating under the delusion of following God’s will, would place absurd and impossible prohibitions on something as pleasurable as sex. More often than not humans fuck for pure pleasure, not procreation, and I see nothing wrong with this. More marriages run off track because sex isn’t pleasurable rather than the other way around. How many times have you heard a married person complain that his or her sex life is too good?

I often see the unfortunate and inevitable result of religious indoctrination like that promulgated by the likes of Catholic Answers on the side of Santa Barbara where I live, near the eponymous high school or on the corner of Milpas and Cota streets. The sight is common: a Hispanic mother in her early to mid-20’s, pushing a baby stroller, with two young kids trailing behind and another in her belly. Quite possibly poor to begin with, she becomes poorer still every time she has another child. Perhaps she believes the tripe that bearing a lot of children is her duty and renders her rich in the eye of God, and that foregoing birth control scores her piety points and punches her ticket to heaven, but when it comes to feeding and clothing and educating her brood, she will receive no practical help from God.

Christopher Hitchens liked to say that religion was necessary when mankind was in its infancy, unable to rationally explain the workings of the physical world. When a volcano erupted or an earthquake rattled the ground, the explanation that the gods were angry made some sense. But just as children outgrow their fear of monsters hiding in the bedroom closet, our species matured and invented complex methods of scientific inquiry and rational analysis to explain the mysteries of the world.

I have no axe to grind with believers as long as they refrain from imposing their faith on me. I don’t appreciate having a posse of Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on my door, but neither do I run them off with a pitchfork. Faith and atheism can coexist. What really boils my blood is watching American political aspirants – regardless of party affiliation – pander to and grovel before the Christian faithful. Every candidate tries to out “Jesus” his or her opponents, clearly forgetting Article VI of the Constitution. Adding God to the corrosive cocktail of money and influence peddling only makes our political process more of a travesty.

Atheist and Rebel

2011-12-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

It’s probably not wise to read Christopher Hitchens on religion during the holiday season, as doing so can create intense cognitive dissonance. I mention this from harsh experience. While Andy Williams croons in the background about this most wonderful time of the year (always a debatable assertion no matter how many times it’s repeated), Hitchens -- in his polemic God is Not Great -- shreds cherished religious traditions and pokes huge holes in dogma doggedly held by millions of believers. An equal opportunity atheist, Hitchens skewers Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, and for good measure tap dances all over Joseph Smith and his Mormon tribe. While the lights on our tree twinkle, and Bing Crosby replaces Andy Williams, I find myself thinking about Almighty God, though I focus less on his (her?) supposed generosity and benevolence than I do on his darker utterances. For one supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing, he wasn’t very kind to women, children or skeptics. The eternal question enters my consciousness: if God created the universe and everything in it, who created God? Turn that question around any way you want, as many times as you want, and the logical answer is that we did, “we” being mankind.

If one is interested in an honest Christmas tune try The Rebel Jesus by Jackson Browne:

And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

No surprise that Hitchens and Christmas are not a jolly mix. Mindless piety and crass commercialism collide head on, like two tanker trucks laden with jet fuel. Even though I take the silly season with a boulder-sized grain of salt, it’s next to impossible to ignore the general anxiety as Christmas Day approaches. People in the mall are grim and determined, focused on their shopping tasks, underpaid workers in the stores are sick and tired of dealing with demanding people, children are antsy, UPS drivers are harried, and nearly everyone who must attend one dreads the annual office party. There’s endless chatter on the radio and TV about happy families coming together in peace and harmony, and of course the obligatory stories about the holiday homecomings of brave American military men and women. There’s no harm in any of this, except when it reaches the saturation point, as it inevitably must, and then December 26th cannot arrive fast enough.

After the 18th the man who runs the Christmas tree lot in the County Bowl parking lot knows the jig is up, and that he will sell no more trees for $10 a foot. Optimistic to the bitter end, the man keeps the lot open morning till night the final week before Christmas, but his big red and white banner no longer entices passersby, and his giant inflatable Santa leans to one side in weary defeat.

For convenience sake we buy a tree from the man every year, no earlier than the 10th, no later than the 15th. As I write this, my wife and daughter are taking ornaments from the tree and packing them away in storage boxes. See you next year. Tomorrow I will saw the tree in two and place the pieces by the curb. We’ll pick pine needles from the rug for the next week or so.

And so it goes. I certainly have little to complain about, living here on the Platinum Coast, where the temperature on Christmas Day was in the mid-70’s, with blue sky overhead and a clear view to the Channel Islands.

Although I began with Christopher Hitchens I’ll give Jackson Browne the last word:

Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgment
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and earthly toil
There’s a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus

Big Crazy

2011-12-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

Would the American electorate choose a man named Newt for its president? Never mind that the Newt in question is an ethically and morally challenged blowhard, a fat toad despised by most members of his own party.
President Gingrich? Have we fallen so far so fast?

I don’t think this can or will happen – but then America in 2011 is a bizarre, unpredictable place. Look at the GOP presidential field and tell me we’re not in the middle of Big Crazy. Newt, Mitt, and what’s his name – the womanizer – ah, yeah, Herman Cain – though the Pizza King has been silent since dropping out of the race. Throw in Rick “I’m dumber-than-Bush” Perry and it’s no wonder that a pall of despair hangs over GOP headquarters.

But when one wing nut drops out another rises to take his place. The other morning Donald Trump was proclaiming that he might have to run for president after all – for the good of the nation, of course. How is it possible for one human ego to metastasize so grotesquely?

President Trump?

Every time Good Morning America does a segment on Jerry Sandusky, the alleged pedophile from Penn State, the more Sandusky looks like a man guilty of buggering young boys in the locker room shower. Once that suggestion is planted in your mind it’s not easy to let it go. No matter what clip of Sandusky GMA shows – walking from a black SUV into the courthouse, tossing footballs on the sideline, shoveling snow from his driveway, dropping coins in the collection basket at church – the man looks creepy, just the type to lure impressionable young boys into a dark, sound-proof basement.

And then there’s Tim Tebow, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, a strapping lad who thumps his Bible at least as well as he runs a 2:00 offense, a fact which captivates people and makes them say ridiculous things. When I heard Diane Sawyer on ABC News talking about Tebow and God I was sure she wet herself. Calm down, Diane, God has nothing to do with it.

Tebow for President? Tebow and Jesus!

While all this nonsense goes on something far more insidious and dangerous is happening in Washington D.C., where the House has passed legislation in the Defense Authorization Bill that would classify the American “homeland” as a battleground in the Global War on Muslim Terrorists. So what you say? The ramifications are chilling, and could lead to US citizens being detained indefinitely by military forces without formal charges, due process, or any of the protections set out in the Bill of Rights. If you’ve never heard of “indefinite detention” you might, soon enough.

As a commentator on KPFK radio put it: the distinction between dissent and terror is collapsing. A country that can’t tell the difference between the two, or have the confidence in itself to allow the former, is on the express lane to fascism.

On that cheery note…

The New Barbarians

2011-11-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

How does the classic Christmas carol go, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year…” Not for me. Not when the TV and the radio are jammed wall-to-wall with commercials hyping Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and all the news anchors talk about is the great deals down at Best Buy. Not when it’s all Christmas all the time before the Thanksgiving turkey is even cold. The season has been elongated and stretched, expanded and super-sized by retailers in search of customers. Before the last scream of Halloween fades, up go the Christmas decorations, and the faux cheer spreads like a river of sewage across the land.

Never mind that the unemployment rate is high and holding steady or that banks continue to foreclose on delinquent mortgages or that every day more Americans slide below the poverty line; everybody is a potential consumer and if they have a pulse, however faint, and can walk, however unsteadily, then by all that is holy about American-style capitalism, they must have the latest LED flat screen TV, a new toaster, an iPad or a Kindle Fire.

It doesn’t make a whit of difference that many of the people lined up twelve hours before the stores open should be buying food for their children, not the latest electronic gadget.

Did you see the video footage of the human herds stampeding in search of Black Friday bargains? Did it make you want to hang your head out the window and puke? Fighting over an iPod dock? Slugging it out over a pair of boots? Putting other customers out of commission with pepper spray? What kind of nuthouse has America become? The mindless hoards are goaded and prodded and prepped and primed all week long, tantalized with promises of deep discounts on today’s must have products, mesmerized by visions of gain, and by Black Friday people have lost all contact with reason or common sense and descend on the local mall like the barbarians of old.

If Macy’s or Target advertised a one-pound block of cow dung at a 35% discount, some fool would stand in line for an hour to buy it. Yes, I know, people have free will and critical thinking capacity, and shouldn’t be manipulated so easily, but isn’t that what happens every November? Why else is Old Navy in downtown Santa Barbara open for business on Thanksgiving Day?

Bah humbug. Bah fucking humbug. The reason for the season is buried beneath a pile of gaudy sweaters from H&M, crotch-less panties from Victoria’s Secret, and Black & Decker power tools from Home Depot. Baby Jesus rides the escalator up and down all day long, unrecognized, ignored, pushed this way and that by caffeine and Red Bull addled shoppers. “Outta’ my way you little fucker.” Recognizing a lost cause when they see one, Mary, Joseph, the three wise men, the camel and the donkey have already fled for their lives.

Black Friday and Other Tales

2011-11-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

New York City cops in full riot gear drive peaceful protesters from Zuccotti Park. Much the same thing happens in Portland, Oregon and on the campus at UC Berkeley. The powers that be in other places follow suit, citing concerns for safety and sanitation. Motionless, peaceful students at UC Davis are doused with pepper spray. Many protesters are arrested. Real democracy is messy and at times uncontrollable. The Occupy movement vows to continue.

Herman Cain, former pizza magnate, can’t keep his mitts off women. Sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger all over again, and we know what happened to Arnold. Herman’s candidacy was doomed to begin with, so it will be no surprise when he drops out of the race for the GOP nomination. Cain’s name recognition is higher than it was when he began his quixotic quest for the White House, and this will help him sell books and keynote speeches on the rubber chicken circuit in the near future.

Have you noticed that the media never mentions Cain’s race or demands that he answer questions about race? None of the “Is he too black?” or “Is he black enough?” questions about Herman. In the corporate media, race disappears as an issue once a man passes the conservative litmus test.

In the meantime, that bloated toad Newt Gingrich is rising in some polls, though nobody understands why. Gingrich was a blowhard when he was Speaker of the House and has done nothing in the intervening years except suck up to corporate donors. As a self-styled “historian,” Gingrich should know that a blind, three-legged dog has a better chance of being elected president than he does. The American electorate can be dumb, but not that dumb.

All Mitt Romney has to do to secure the GOP nomination is avoid a total mental breakdown, like what happened to Rick Perry recently – or be sideswiped by some long forgotten scandal. Everybody has a skeleton or two in the closet. Hard to say what that might be in Mitt’s case, but candidates who piously preach family values and the sanctity of marriage (only between a man and a woman of course), are generally tripped up by a skeleton of the sexual variety. Who knows, maybe Mitt had a homosexual dalliance as a curious undergraduate or dabbled in cross-dressing.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama wanders around the White House late at night wondering what became of the magic. Liberals can’t stand him. Environmentalists want his balls on a platter. Labor leaders feel betrayed by him. Young people who worked their butts off to get out the vote for Obama in 2008 now fully understand how it feels when a politician fools them into thinking he is something that he is not. Those voters are likely to stay home in droves come 2012, a possibility that contributes to Obama’s late night strolls through a silent White House. Every now and then Obama is convinced that he hears the ghost of Richard Nixon whispering in the corridors. Though for different reasons, Nixon often felt hated and trapped.

But to hell with all that political garbage. What really matters in America at this moment – beside the fact that legendary football coach Joe Paterno has been dislodged from his pedestal and Demi and Ashton are calling it quits -- is that Black Friday is drawing nigh. All over the land shop-a-holics are polishing their credit cards and planning for that magic moment when the glass doors finally swing open at Wal-Mart or Target or Best Buy, and they surge forward with the rest of the herd, trampling security guards, unattended small children, elderly ladies, and sales clerks. There will be casualties on Black Friday, brawling in the aisles, fistfights in the parking lot, and many hospital emergency rooms will be forced to turn patients away. Serious Black Friday shoppers accept the risks of bodily injury in the same way a mountain climber on Everest does.

Benign Neglect

2011-11-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

I have neglected the Balcony of late. Life interferes with my scribbling. Excuses? Well, there is the job, kids, homework, dishes, bills, laundry, Halloween, errands, grocery shopping, stuff that needs to get done or else the wheels fall off. Try letting your toenails grow for a few weeks and you’ll see what I mean.

The days here grow shorter. In the evening fog rolls in off the ocean, dense in some areas, wispy in others, and in the night we hear the warning beacon sound in the harbor. A waning crescent moon rises above the pines on Anapamu Street. The County Bowl concert season is over, closed out by Deadmau5. It’s been a while since we’ve heard coyotes howl from the canyon that runs west of the Bowl.

Bob Dylan sang that people don’t come and go as much as they float, and sometimes people float to places and positions they don’t belong. Sometimes circumstances and dumb luck conspire to produce an outcome that leaves you shaking your head. Trying to understand is fruitless; it’s like trying to penetrate the meaning of a Zen koan. Whatever and whoever, it just is, and the decision you must make is to fight it or go with it. Life or death it’s not. Worse comes to worse you say, “I’m done” and hit the road. Some windmills are not worth tilting at; they will keep turning no matter what.

The illusion of control, of making sense, of logic and pattern, of rationality, of cause and effect, of being the master of one’s own fate, of being the guiding hand on the cosmic tiller. It makes no sense and perfect sense at the same time. It’s cream in your coffee and sugar in your tea; it’s a trout on the end of your line and a clear mountain stream at the end of the trail. It’s a homeless woman giving birth in a cemetery under a full moon. It’s the smartest man in the room doing the dumbest thing imaginable. It’s a beloved preacher fornicating behind the church with an underage whore.

My son is watching a rerun of Gray’s Anatomy. The show has an MD for everyone: African-American and Asian, lesbian and straight, dashing and dorky. The voice over by the actress who plays Meredith offers canned wisdom: “No matter what’s going on, a surgeon must have a steady hand.” OK, no argument with this obvious observation. My son tells me that I’ve reached an age where I cannot suspend my disbelief, and for this reason I’m incapable of enjoying the TV dramas he finds so intoxicating. Gray’s Anatomy is apparently the best show ever…my loss for not watching it.

In the world but not of the world, wandering with the people who float, beyond the point where sense is made, past the place where we cease to be what we think we are.

Under the Influence

2011-10-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

Every now and then Barack Obama opens the mini-fridge in the Oval Office and removes a mason jar left over from the Bush Administration. The jar contains the elixir first brewed by Bill Clinton but not perfected until Bush and Cheney moved into the White House to begin their long reign of error. It’s rumored – but only rumored, you understand – that the secret formula for this elixir resides in a slim silver tube that Dick Cheney slips into his rectum every morning after his bowel movement.

This morning, before being interviewed by Jake Tapper from ABC News, Obama unscrewed the lid and took a quick sip, just enough to take the edge off for a couple of hours.

The elixir is a potent concoction that induces politicians to make statements they don’t believe with total conviction. For example, when Bush claimed that tax cuts for the wealthy would produce an economic bonanza for the poor, he really believed it. Cheney was totally addicted to the elixir and for eight years ran around Washington D.C. making all manner of bizarre claims. Illicit substances are not for the faint of heart or those with weak constitutions. Bush and Cheney, two alpha males who enjoyed boasting about the size and hardness of their testicles, believed they could handle the stuff in small, consistent doses.

This was hubris at its best.

By comparison, Barack Obama is a weak-kneed wanker who shouldn’t mess around with toxic substances under any circumstances. Case in point: Obama telling Tapper that the Occupy Wall Street movement has many similarities to the Tea Party. Deeply under the influence and obviously out of touch with reality, Obama claimed he understood both points of view.

WTF! OMG! Is our president serious? All one has to do is follow the money behind the Tea Party to understand what it’s all about.

Obama was serious, in the moment, but don’t forget, he was crocked to the gills. A few hours later, after the elixir wore off, Obama realized the magnitude of his gaffe and called Dr. Drew Pinsky, the reality TV addiction guru.

“Dr. Drew, this is the President of the United States. It’s very possible that I have a problem.”

“I can help, Mr. President. What is it, crack cocaine, Oxycontin, booze, hash, smack, Internet porn?”

“It’s the elixir.”

“Holy shit,” said Dr. Drew. “That’s bad, very bad. I’m afraid you’re screwed, sir. The only thing worse than being addicted to that stuff is trying to kick it. Makes kicking heroin feel like a long weekend in Barbados. Ever been to Barbados, sir?”

“What does it mean, Dr. Drew?”

“Well, to be frank, Mr. President, it means that you will continue to make indefensible statements about movements you know nothing about, continue to put the demands of bankers and hedge fund managers above the needs of ordinary people, continue to insist that the way to put more Americans back to work is to export their jobs to low-wage countries. In short, for the rest of your presidency you will think and act, well, like a Republican.”

*Expert conjecture about the formula: Combine two drops of Newt Gingrich’s blood, four strands of Ayn Rand’s hair, one cup of Alan Greenspan’s urine, three teardrops from John Boehner, a pubic hair from Eric Cantor, a teaspoon of Ann Coulter’s menstrual blood, six drops of ether, four packs of Splenda, eight ounces of Kool-Aid mix, a generous splash of Jack Daniels, an ounce of high fructose corn syrup, and a tablespoon of water from the Hudson River. Mix thoroughly and serve chilled.

Awake, At Last?

2011-10-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

I’m a fan of the Occupy Wall Street movement. What started as a small encampment has grown and migrated to hundreds of cities, and is now too large for the mainstream media to ignore, though that massive house organ for the corporate status quo has done its level best to downplay, denigrate and ridicule the protesters.

This is the way powerful elites react when threatened.

The next tack the elites take is to call on the Law.

But having seen in other parts of the world what can happen when the masses become aroused, you can bet the American political and business elite -- which is now one and the same thing -- are beginning to comprehend that their long run of privilege and prerogative is nearing an end.

That end can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned. The Ayn Rand philosophy that seeped into the political system like toxic sludge over three decades has now poisoned that system. All the talk about producers and parasites, the inherent merits of the wealthy and the inherent imperfections of the poor, the evils of taxation and big government, immigration and equal rights, has proven to be pure, stinking, steaming BS.

America is a weaker country today, a more divided and polarized country, and a country that has misplaced its mojo and is in danger of chucking its soul – primarily because of the unfettered and unaccountable corporate power that drives the economy and controls the political system.

The people camping on Wall Street and marching on Bank of America and Wells Fargo branches in other cities understand, even if they struggle to articulate their feelings, that something has gone terribly wrong in this country, and that it hasn’t happened overnight; they realize that the country has tipped off its axis, that too much power rests in too few hands, and that this arrangement severely limits the options of ordinary people. You can’t graduate from college toting $25 or $30 grand in student loan debt, work a wage slave job for $9 an hour because that’s all you can find -- sans benefits or health insurance, of course -- and expect to prosper. No matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead under those conditions.

The Wall Street protestors and the diverse group calling itself the Other 99% understand that the working class and the poor are held accountable, while the wealthy absolve themselves of all responsibility. The people also understand that American-style capitalism is prone to choke on its own excess, and that we are living in one of these periods now.

Where is it written that ours is a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy?

One of the brighter aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has shown staying power and resilience. This alone is reason for cautious hope that the movement – if it isn’t co-opted along the way -- might actually budge the status quo back toward the moderate middle. The lesson is clear as can be: when ordinary people decide they’ve had enough and take to the streets, they must be prepared to remain in the streets until the power elite sees them, hears them, feels them and, most critically, is bothered by their presence.

If you listen closely you can hear the faint stirrings of the American people – the real American people -- not the mythic people right-wing conservatives repeatedly invoke in their speeches. Listen, that’s Joe Hill stirring in his grave, and over there, Woody Guthrie is dusting off his guitar. Cesar Chavez is moving, Martin and Malcom and Medgar are moving, John L. Lewis is moving, Walter Reuther is moving, up toward terra firma and the light of day where justice is found.

A Strange and Savage Land

2011-10-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

“He was born in a vat of snake oil.” Hunter S. Thompson on Bill Clinton

Well, that seems to aptly describe ninety-nine percent of the politicians in Washington and most state capitols. Honor is rare in politics these days, and most politicians wouldn’t recognize honor if they tripped over it. This is partly because the pols are constantly in fund raising mode, prostrating themselves before trade associations and industry groups, grubbing for cash and leaving their ideals and ethics at the door. The system is bought and paid for and the deals go down under a shroud of secrecy.

There was a time in America when we depended on print and TV journalists to expose political corruption and, for the most part, they did a decent job keeping the politicians somewhat honest. The corporate takeover of the mainstream media destroyed the muckraking tradition. Reporting now is sanitized and trivialized and delivered by friendly lightweights or -- in the case of Fox News -- shouted by rabid partisans. No average American can make sense of it all, a fact politicians from both parties use to their advantage. Confusing the hell out of the American electorate is relatively easy.

The US is now involved in several armed conflicts in the Muslim world, but most Americans are as clueless about that as we are informed about Amanda Knox -- former resident of Italy’s prison system. We know Amanda’s parents, her sisters, her lawyers (US and Italian), her minister and her childhood friends; we know her state of mind and what she ate on the plane coming home from Italy.

The Knox story is like a Lifetime network movie, replete with all the things we love: sex, drugs, murder and mystery. In comparison, our wars against Muslims are merely grim and depressing, endless and hopeless.

Dark times, Hagrid said to a young Harry Potter, dark times.

Indeed.

The forces of repression and stupidity are loose in the land, running amok, and growing stronger against feeble resistance. Mexicans in Alabama are running scared, packing up, pulling their children out of public schools, fearful of being persecuted by Alabama’s tough new immigration law. Mexicans, Arabs, Pakistanis, Ethiopians -- no arms wait here to welcome you and yours. America is pulling back, electrifying its fences, and screening undesirables like never before.

Dark times, scary times. Who will hold the line against these forces? Barack Obama? No, he was born in the same vat of snake oil that Clinton sprang from. Any of the crop of GOP presidential hopefuls? Sweet Jesus, no, those people are unhinged, as dangerous as starving jackals, and they pray to a wrathful God who doesn’t believe in redemption or forgiveness. If you’re poor, it’s your fault. If you get sick, too bad. If you get deep into debt and can’t crawl out, you will find no relief.

All our heroes sleep in the grave. We’re on our own, stumbling around in a strange and savage land where the customs of the locals are unfathomable and intruders are burned at the stake. The rich wall themselves inside environments they can control and hire private security guards to fend off undesirables; the poor are driven into shantytowns where raw sewage flows in the unpaved streets. At night the tolling of the mission bell is drowned out by the howl of coyotes.

Who's Next?

2011-10-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

Good Morning America led with the news that the America-born terrorist mastermind, Anwar al-Awlaki, had been killed in northern Yemen. George Stephanopolous and Brian Ross were beside themselves with excitement, and if you didn’t know they were talking about the assassination of a man never charged with a crime or tried in a court of law, you might have thought they were reviewing a particularly exciting Super Bowl game.

I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki was as diabolical as he is being portrayed in the American media, or if he is just being used to justify the American War on Muslim Terrorists.

The Obama Administration speaks with the same certainty about Awlaki that the Bush Administration spoke about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons and the direct threat they posed to America.

Let’s not forget that the Bush gang cooked the intelligence books to buttress their justification for the invasion of Iraq; let’s also not forget that the American intelligence community frequently gets it wrong.

Osama bin Laden. Anwar al-Awlaki. Who will be the next terror czar to be taken out by the United States or its proxies? Who will be the next to die because of his “potential” threat to the United States?

I’m not making apologies for terrorists, but there is something deeply disturbing about the United States ceding to itself the power and authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, wherever and whenever it wants. How do such actions make the United States safer? Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, and Anwar al-Awlaki is dead, but in killing them, how many additional martyrs has the United States created?

I felt a little sick to my stomach as I listened to George Stephanopolous and Brian Ross, watched as ABC’s slick graphics simulated how the American military’s technological wizardry tracked al-Awlaki’s every move. GMA’s infatuation with wizardry overshadowed any need to raise larger questions about the threat al-Awlaki posed or the legality of killing him without evidence or trial.

The website www.costsofwar.org estimates the monetary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions at $3.7 trillion. Six thousand two hundred and thirty American service people have died, thousands more have been maimed or scared for life. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan is routinely underestimated by the United States, and a reliable count of the number of wounded or displaced human beings is almost impossible to come by, though after a decade of continuous war, it stands to reason that the number is very large.

And as the War on Muslim Terrorists drags on year after year with no end in sight, as the number of innocent victims grows, so does distrust and hatred of the United States.

POEM - Bones

2011-09-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

Not sure why, but tonight I’m thinking
About bones
Bones buried deep in Central Africa,
Eastern Europe,
Bones between the Tigris and the Euphrates
Bones in the highlands of Vietnam
And the Mississippi Delta
Bones beneath the Vatican
Bones thirty feet below bustling avenues
Stacked in orderly rows in the catacombs
Of Paris
Mounds of femurs and ulnas, metatarsals and tibias
Bones with stories, bones with secrets
Bones blessed, bones cursed
Broken bones, misplaced bones, mismatched bones
Infant bones
Bones with memories of war and famine
Pogroms and purges
Revolutions and riots
Bones from the earth, of the earth
Bones yet to be discovered

Lessons from a Monarch (Butterfly)

2011-09-20T19:58:00.000-07:00

I watch a monarch butterfly float over our deck in the sunshine; it flutters and weaves, circles a purple flower and lights for a moment before taking flight again.

The light is lovely this afternoon, here on the Platinum coast of California, the American Riviera. The morning marine layer burned off early and now it’s a postcard day, a day tailor-made for tourists. I wonder where the tourists get the money to travel, which leads me to wonder how residents of this glorious city make the nut every month. What do they do or own that pulls in the big sums needed? Unemployment is high in California – higher than the official numbers suggest – but here the beat goes on as if the economy is humming.

If well off residents of the American Riviera have taken a hit, they manage to disguise the fact with relative ease.

It’s less easy for the working poor, but then everything is less easy for the poor.

When the monarch returns for another pass at the flowers, I ponder my fate if my job were to suddenly disappear. I have no illusions that it can’t happen to me because it can; no job is safe today. In less than a minute I have created – in my head -- a doomsday scenario full of desperation and degradation. In a blink my family and I are on the street, another charity case, another casualty, another statistical entry in a government database. Homeless. Destitute. Doomed.

It’s not class warfare when the wealthy and well-connected rig the political system to rob working people and the poor – it’s only class warfare when workers and the poor push back, speak up, make demands; then the rich mobilize talking heads and pliable journalists and the airwaves fill with slogans: “We can’t create jobs by taxing the producers.” “Tax cuts are the answer. Slash tax rates and jobs will appear, like mushrooms.” The truth makes no difference – it’s the slogan that matters, the crisp sound bite, easily and often repeated.

The news I read argues that more and more middle-class folks are losing their grip on the ladder and falling into the abyss where the American Dream becomes a nightmare. These are the stories that never make Good Morning America or the CBS Evening News – stories about a generation destined to fare worse than the one before.

All this from watching a butterfly? All this from pondering how people make the monthly nut? Shouldn’t I be thinking of something else on this sun-splashed day? Why can’t I understand that tax cuts for the rich mean jobs for the poor? It’s so simple. Wealth equates to virtue. The eye of the needle is a hindrance no more.

In flight the monarch appears to be playing, like a child on a playground, floating one way for a while, then abruptly altering course as the mood strikes. Happy butterfly. The reality, of course, is that the butterfly isn’t here for leisure or fun: it’s programmed to lay its eggs and die. Every egg doesn’t produce a caterpillar, and every caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly. The monarch fights for life and continuance like every other species.

The monarch dwells here and now, and maybe that is all I can learn from watching it dance across my deck.

A Day to Forget?

2011-09-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve never believed or felt that the horrible events of September 11, 2001 changed the world: what happened that day changed our perception of the world, and our perception gave birth to a mentality that has ensnared our country in a trap beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest dreams.

I never bought George W. Bush’s assertion that 9/11 happened because Muslim terrorists hated “our freedoms”; my reading of history and geopolitics told me that the policies of the United States angered some Muslims to the point of fanaticism.

I don’t personally know anyone who died or was directly affected by 9/11. I can imagine, however incompletely, the sense of shock and loss; I can imagine the fear and grief; on an intellectual level I can understand the desire for revenge. If my wife or child had died in one of the towers that day, if I had lost a friend or colleague, a brother or sister, I’m sure my feelings about 9/11 would be different.

As it is, when I think about 9/11 I tend to focus on the American response to what was essentially a crime – diabolical to be sure -- but still a crime. Instead of engaging the world’s police resources to solve the crime, we launched a war in Afghanistan that at first succeeded and then became a failure; Bush and Cheney, along with a craven Congress (and let’s not forget our disgraced national media), compounded that error by abruptly invading Iraq on the flimsiest of pretenses. Thousands of innocent people died in these invasions; hundreds are still dying.

Iraq is a fragile and corrupt state and Afghanistan is even worse.

In between the wars, our hysterical political leadership behaved according to the script penned by Osama bin Laden and enacted the Patriot Act – a monumental assault on the civil liberties that set America apart from other nations.

The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security it spawned still frighten me more than a hundred Osama bin Laden’s.

And while I appreciate the heroism of policemen and firefighters and EMT’s, and respect the bravery and compassion of ordinary people suddenly caught in an extraordinary event, I find endless memorials to them unsettling, in the same way I find endless references to our “brave men and women in uniform” unsettling. In my case, repetition of this message distracts and detracts. Yes, some members of our armed forces are brave and heroic and believe that what they’re doing protects America, but to hang the hero label on all of them is like saying that all public school teachers love kids.

We can’t let 9/11 go even after a decade of war and mourning, a decade of looking over our shoulder and around corners for humorless men in turbans, a decade of security scans and pat downs and warning messages boomed over loudspeakers, a decade of cowboy rhetoric.

We can’t forget and we can’t heal. We’ve locked ourselves into a war that can’t be won or brought to a close. And if we are any safer today than we were on 9/10/01, it’s only marginally so.

Hard Labor

2011-09-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

The official unemployment in California is 12%. 14 million people are estimated to be out of work nationwide. The “real” unemployment rate is much higher. Job growth in August was flat.

Private sector labor unions are weaker this Labor Day than last, continuing their long decline, and public employee unions and their members have sustained fierce attack from Republican governors bent on solving fiscal emergencies by pushing government workers into the wage cellar with their private sector brothers and sisters.

Happy Labor Day.

After wasting the summer bickering about deficits and austerity, the political class has finally acknowledged the one issue that Americans actually care about: jobs.

And not the low-wage, no benefits, part-time jobs that Rick Perry boasts of creating thousands of in Texas – Americans want real jobs at living wages that will allow them to buy what they need, send their kids to college, see the doctor without needing to take out a second mortgage, and maybe even salt a little money away for their golden years.

President Obama will make a big policy speech about jobs this week though we’d be wise not to get our hopes up; Obama will hit the right notes as he always does, but action will not follow his rhetoric, and in any case the austerity mandarins of the GOP will immediately crow that we cannot afford to extend unemployment benefits or launch a second stimulus package. For a few days, maybe a week, the subject of jobs will sit front and center on the media stage and then be replaced by the usual economic reporting: the ups and downs of the stock market, whether or not investors are feeling confident or cautious, and how much dough CEO’s are taking home.

Most Americans are unaware of how much blood was spilled by labor activists to put a more humane face on American capitalism. Sweatshops, child labor, sixteen-hour shifts and dangerous working conditions were once the norm; workers were expendable, tossed aside when used up. No paid vacations, sick time, pension plans or overtime pay was offered until working people, men and women, took to the streets to demand a fair share and a seat at the table. This required guts and courage and determination and organization, a willingness to be bloodied today and come back for more tomorrow, to never back down, no matter how ruthless and hostile the mine and factory owners were.

Grit of that kind has disappeared.

I see them at 5:30 in the morning when I’m on my way to the gym. On foot or pedaling rickety bicycles, they carry backpacks and wear hooded sweatshirts as they make their way to jobs that I imagine are physically demanding, unpleasant and low paying. They are Hispanic or Latino, legal immigrants, maybe a few undocumented immigrants among them, here to work and make better lives for themselves and their families. That desire is immutable, crosses generations and cultures, motivates people to cross oceans, deserts and militarized borders; motivates people to make long commutes on crowded freeways; motivates people to get out of bed day after day.

Desire for something better lies at the heart of the American Dream. Work hard, play by the rules, take care of your family, and don’t expect something for nothing, and you can make a decent life for yourself. The implied promise of America, drilled into generations, and then slowly eroded by the failed ideology of free trade agreements, union busting, tax cuts on top of tax cuts, and corporate takeover of the political system.

14 million people unemployed. Millions more underemployed. Untold thousands who have given up all hope of ever working again.

Happy Labor Day, America.

Everyday Madness

2011-08-25T05:46:00.000-07:00

Ordinary everyday madness, the DOW is up, the DOW is down, investors are wary, investors are jubilant, the recession is over, the recession is just beginning, racism is a relic of the past, racism is embedded in our DNA.

The eagle cries and the raven squawks, a caterpillar must run a gauntlet before it becomes a butterfly, water wears down rock, stupid is as stupid does; Texas Governor Rick Perry has a nice head of hair but before long his Jesus shtick will wear thin. Mitt Romney believes that every dime a corporation earns (steals, siphons, extorts, you decide…) ultimately returns to the people – yeah – Mitt said that on one of his campaign stops. Which people? How much dough does Wal-Mart return to its grunt line employees, the very same ones, mainly women, who are encouraged by Wal-Mart to apply for food stamps and any other government assistance for which they qualify? How slick is that? Are those the people Mitt is talking about? Mitt wants us to think he’s a regular guy, a can of Bud and a ballgame Everyman, but he’s a millionaire like most American politicians and his view is marred by gilded glasses. Mitt thinks the rich deserve everything they have no matter how they got it, just as he believes the poor are responsible for their own fate, their own poverty, their own ills, their own health care, their own college tuition.

In gleaming glass-enclosed Christian churches God wants you, me, every body, to be rich and blessed with a nice head of hair. But many are poor and many are balding, so there is a difference between what God wants and what God delivers. Money on the table, blood in the gutter, Woody Guthrie is trading his guitar for a pistol and Mother Theresa is sharpening a machete. Tempting fate yet again, the armadillo sets off across the two-lane blacktop, just another crapshoot, another turn of the deck, another roll of the dice. Few win, most lose, ageless, timeless, back to the garden and the fall, the primordial swamp, the Big Bang, the meteor shower. Don’t forget, Mr. Bigshot, that you lost your virginity to a 300 pound whore in Tijuana. You’ve come a long way since college: house, luxury car, stock portfolio, purebred dog, trophy wife, young mistress, lovely children and a cholesterol reading below 200. You the man! America has been very, very good to you and the gifts keep coming. Generous tax cuts and free airline miles, the complimentary first class upgrade with champagne and strawberries. Hotel maids earning minimum wage pay more Federal tax than you do. You’re one of the winners.

Ordinary everyday madness, garden variety, as common as bird shit on a statue. A woman in Florida drowns her infant in the bathtub; a man in Texas rapes his daughter because Jesus told him to; ordinary and mad, mad and ordinary, madness from the pulpit, madness from the judge’s bench, madness in the maternity ward and the Governor’s office. Only the graveyards are calm and serene. The captain of the cruise ship has gone AWOL in port and the ship is drifting on the outgoing tide. The passengers are oblivious and the entire crew is below decks, drinking pilfered booze from paper cups and dancing to Lady Gaga.

Summer is almost over.

Poem: The Elusive Lady

2011-08-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

My muse is on vacation tonight
Or maybe she’s dancing close
With someone else
She comes and goes
Here today, gone tomorrow
The biggest tease I’ve ever known
I reach for her
My need urgent
The well is almost dry and the words
Refuse to cooperate
I need an idea that will grab me
And hold tight until the demon is exorcised
By words on the page
Come back to me, elusive lady
Play fair for once

Burning

2011-08-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

London burns for three nights running
Bottled anger and frustration spills into the streets
Sirens wail, smoke billows, broken glass sparkles
In the firelight
Hopelessness is a powerful thing

Standard & Poor’s passes judgment on Uncle Sam
And the DOW freefalls
Why S&P is given any credibility after the role
It played in the mortgage fiasco of 2008
Is a mystery no one bothers to explain

All eyes focus on traders in Wall Street’s casino
Which way will they lean when the bell rings and
It’s gambling time again?

Sirens wail, smoke billows, broken glass sparkles
In the firelight
Hopelessness is a powerful thing

China – America’s banker -- lectures the US on austerity
The way the US once hectored Mexico, Brazil and Italy
To make “structural adjustments”
And let the market rule
Ironic advice from Communists

The proverbial banana has found a home in our crumbling republic
Land of the indebted and indentured
Students buckle under college loans and a low wage future
Families choose between medicine and food, clothing and gas
The long-term unemployed pray to a God as deaf
And indifferent as the politicians in Washington

Sirens wail, smoke billows, broken glass sparkles
In the firelight
Hopelessness is a powerful thing

Poem: All Guns, No Butter

2011-08-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

America is all guns and no butter
Big, bad and broke
But never too broke to spend more money
On guns and bombs than China,
Russia, France, and England -- combined

We’re masters of the remote-controlled drone,
The F-14 and the A-10, the Apache attack helicopter,
And the Tomahawk cruise missile;
Under the banner of freedom and security
We kill “suspected militants” and deny civilian
Casualties

Here at home deliberate neglect is our weapon of choice
Roads and bridges and schools and libraries
Are allowed to go to seed
Another sign of government’s failure and
Incompetence;
The public pond is systematically
Drained
Then handed to profiteers as political
Payback

Captive children of the Market God
We would rather self-destruct than pay taxes
For services the rest of the civilized world
Takes for granted

We’re an empire in name only, a swaggering thug
Living off past glory and hoary myths
Repeated endlessly by a corrupt, gullible
And cowardly media:

“Tax cuts for the rich equal jobs for the poor.”
“The free market will regulate itself.”
“Social Security causes budget deficits.”
“The Taliban is a threat to America.”

While the clock winds down and the sun sets and
Night falls on the American experiment
Imposters and posers, fakes and frauds
Make a mockery of representative democracy
Under the majestic capitol dome
Common ground for the common good
Is trampled beneath the jackboot of ideology

And our more perfect union
Is dying a perfect
Death

The Eloquent Ankle Grabber

2011-08-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

The news is full of details about the debt ceiling compromise reached in Congress and my BP is moving into dangerous territory. Breathe, baby, breathe. Most of the reporting in the mainstream media is sloppy, warmed-over BS passed along as truth or wisdom, neither of which can be found in Washington D.C. today. Let’s be clear: this manufactured crisis is a new low point in American politics, an insult, a slur, an epithet against the people. Today the New York Times repeated the fantasy that economic “catastrophe” has been averted, even though the deal was based on extortion from extreme members of the GOP. The Times also stated that no deal might have triggered a new “recession.” Huh? New recession? The only people who think we are not now mired in a recession are the big shots at Goldman Sachs, a few nitwit economists on the payroll of right-wing think tanks, and maybe the hacks President Obama takes advice from.

I have written several times before about Barrack Obama’s weak spine and teeny-weeny testicles, but this man of empty eloquence has outdone himself this time. To put it in blunt playground terms: Barrack Obama is a pussy. In the face of extortion, he caved; in the face of overheated rhetoric, he capitulated; in the face of a terrible plan that will have dire consequences for the country, he channeled Jimmy Carter and at the same time moved right of Richard Nixon. How the fuck he managed this bizarre contortion is beyond me, but he did. The cause of the deficit is inextricably linked to Republican policies of tax cuts for the rich, a stupid, endless global war on Muslim terrorists, and the financial implosion orchestrated by Wall Street bankers and speculators. Instead of mounting a ferocious counter-argument from the biggest bully pulpit on the planet, Obama meekly bends over, grabs his ankles and begs for more of the same: “OK, boys, give it to me harder this time. Ram it up there. Harder. Faster. Make it hurt so good.” My grandmother once told me that Richard Nixon had the instincts of a Mafia don; as much as I despised Tricky Dick, I have to admit that he would never willingly bend over and take it up the ass.

Obama is John Boehner’s bitch. Obama allows congressional Republicans to line up and piss in his face. This isn’t the hope and change I voted for in 2008. Obama has moved far beyond being a mere disappointment; he’s now a joke and a disgrace. Candidate Obama bears no resemblance to the serial coward and habitual capitulator that occupies the White House. Might as well elect Sarah “Shit-for-Brains” Palin or Michelle “Homosexuality-is-a-Sin” Bachmann in 2012 and crash the republic all at once rather than bit by bit. Watching Boehner and Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell bitch slap Obama whenever they wish is painful. Why won’t the man stand up and fight? Does he really believe that there’s nothing he can do because the GOP controls one house of Congress – or is he, at bottom, a fellow Kool-Aid addict who believes that Republican prescriptions for the economy will help put people back to work?

Now that the burning question of the summer – will Harry Potter finally vanquish Lord Valdamort, save Hogwart’s and hook up with Ginny Weasley – has been answered, we need to find out who stole Obama’s soul and how we can get it back.

Voice Mail from Dr. Duke

2011-07-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

July 24, 4:30 P.M. PST

Tanguay, answer the God-damn phone. Where the hell are you? I think I know what’s missing from your blog: sex. Think about it. What do people use the Internet for more than anything else? That’s right, sexual titillation. I’m talking porn, man, in every imaginable variety -- boy on boy, girl on girl, two boys and a girl, men abusing goats, women pleasuring themselves with dildos the size of baseball bats. Get the idea? Give people what they want. The Balcony is too fucking serious. Life is full of dire news, famine, war, pestilence, drought, murder, slavery, scandal, child abuse, earthquakes, tidal waves, death, death and more death. Why do you think reality TV is so popular? Because people need to escape the stifling confines of their boring lives by becoming absorbed in other people’s totally dysfunctional lives. Give up writing serious shit about serious subjects and become a porn impresario – that’s my advice. In case you’re wondering, I’m half in the bag. OK, more like three quarters. OK, three and a half. For the past hour I’ve been drinking tequila shots in the airport bar with a professional poker player. Least that’s what he claims. Weird, pint-sized guy, oversized head, small hands, very dark eyes, but a helluva drinker! Anyway, I’m in Vancouver, on my way to San Francisco and then Maui for a week of R&R. We’ll catch up when I get back. Do me a favor and stop by my house and check for squatters, particularly of the female variety. If you see a dark-haired woman who looks like a gypsy, run like hell. And remember, people want porn. Amen and good luck.

Downward Spiral

2011-07-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

Deep into summer here on the Platinum Coast, long evenings with clear skies and the day’s heat finally abating, diffused sun falling through the eucalyptus trees. Tonight I am thinking about Hunter Thompson who put a pistol to his head six years ago and pulled the trigger. Dr. Thompson wrote – a full three years before Sarah Palin thudded on the national stage and proved his point beyond any reasonable doubt -- that America was locked in a downward spiral of dumbness.

All you need do is switch on the TV and watch the news for three minutes, white noise on every channel about the debt ceiling and the potential default by the world’s leading debtor nation. President Obama stands on one side, his weak spine barely holding him upright, while John Boehner and his Nazi lapdog, Eric Cantor, stand on the other. Nobody mentions that the debt ceiling crisis is wholly contrived and manufactured, a faux crisis if ever there was one, nothing more than blatant opportunism on the part of the GOP to further emasculate government, continue the rollback of basic entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and score political points with anti-tax ideologues ahead of the 2012 presidential election. The BS is so thick and noxious on both sides that only a policy wonk can begin to understand the deal, but maybe all you need to know is that the debt ceiling was raised at least a half dozen times – without debate -- during the W. Bush junta.

For all their disdain of government and praise for “free markets” as the cure for every human problem, from toe fungus to cancer, I haven’t heard Boehner or Cantor offer to relinquish their government salaries, gold-plated health benefits, or guaranteed pensions as a symbolic gesture of austerity. When public servants in Wisconsin or Ohio or Indiana are demonized as the cause of budget deficits, stripped of their collective bargaining rights or forced to accept unpaid furloughs and pay cuts, Boehner and Cantor have nothing to say. Austerity is fine when it happens to someone else.

Slice it any way you want, hypocrisy is hypocrisy and Washington DC is brimming with it. The poor and the elderly and the unemployed must sacrifice, you see, lift themselves by their own shoestrings and learn to stand on their own while those with the most are exempt from any and all sacrifice.

The tables are rigged and the game is fixed. In America, the wealthy always get out of jail free and always pass GO on their way to the bank.

Downward into the swirling vortex, twisting, turning, spinning through icy air, past common sense, past moderation, past compromise, past empathy for the less fortunate, past sympathy for the unlucky, past forgiveness for the damned, past overflowing jail cells, past cemeteries, past toilets clogged with shit, past troughs filled with piss, past denuded forests, past polluted lakes, past windowless factories, past the truth, past popes and cardinals and bishops, and past corporate chieftains perched on golden thrones.

What does it mean? Everything. Nothing. The sun drops behind the eucalyptus trees. The smell of lighter fluid drifts on the evening breeze. A man and a woman argue in Spanish. Far off a Southern Pacific freighter rumbles through town.

Short Fiction: Last Call

2011-07-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

Repko’s wife drained her wine glass and gestured to him for a refill.

Take it easy tonight.

Fill. It’s the only thing that dulls my pain.

What pain is that?

Being married to you, for one thing.

Really?

It’s not what I dreamed about when I was a little girl.

You think you’re a picnic?

Fill.

I wanted better for myself, too, you know? I had dreams, aspirations even.

The only dreams you ever had were wet ones. Fill ‘er up.

You’re a mean drunk, Valerie. You used to be a kind person, but now you’re just mean. What happened?

What happened? Shit happened, that’s what. You happened. My crummy job happened. More shit happened. Shit, shit and more shit. It’s all shit, a great big stinking hill of shit.

You’re very negative, Valerie.

Well, I have reason to be.

Your aura is cloudy.

What do you know about auras?

I know more than you give me credit for. Believe it or not, I’m connected to my spiritual dimension and I know a cloudy aura when I see one. Yours is cloudy, like there’s a dust storm swirling around it.

You’re full of shit. Shit’s coming out of your ears. I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous in my life. Fill!

Repko started to uncork the bottle but then thought better of it and smashed it down on Valerie’s head, something he had fantasized about doing for years. The sensation that ran up his arm was even more satisfying than he had imagined. Surprisingly, the bottle didn’t shatter. Valerie fell backwards. Her eyes rolled up in her head and her mouth opened as if she had one final thing to say, but nothing came out except a grunt. Rivulets of blood rolled down her face.

Repko uncorked the bottle, filled Valerie’s glass, and offered a silent toast to his now dead wife.

Star Spangled Nightmare

2011-07-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

It’s the 4th of July and part of me feels compelled to write something high-minded about America. Land of the free, home of the brave, 1776, beacon of liberty -- all that stuff. Yes, take the exalted path and pen something in praise of the birth of a free nation, steeped in the principles of the Enlightenment. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock, a few of the fabled founding fathers that Michelle Bachmann always refers to in her speeches to Tea Party faithful – as if to say: if we only return to the time-tested values of our white fathers, all will again be well.

Today the star spangled banner will play from thousands of loud speakers, Gob Bless America will be sung in ballparks and arenas, hot dogs will hiss on BBQ grills, bands will march…

Damn it! Why is a vision of a leering George W. Bush slipping across my mind? Why is Dick Cheney sinking his teeth into Jefferson’s neck? Why is that skinny bitch Ann Coulter flashing her insipid tits at John Adams? Am I losing my mind? Am I having a waking nightmare? Is this what psychosis feels like when it finally takes hold?

Wow! Where did that come from? It was like 2003 all over again, when Dick and W ran roughshod over the Constitution and lied through their teeth about the need for America to invade and occupy Iraq. But it’s better now, right, and if the Founding Fathers are gazing down on this fruited plain, surely they are smiling?

OK, maybe not. Washington is teary-eyed and Jefferson is livid with rage, John Adams can’t believe what has become of America, and John Hancock simply mutters, “Bastards, bastards, bastards” over and over. The venerable Founders look at the current Congress, aghast that a single great leader cannot be found beneath the dome. Instead they see a house filled with clowns, idiots, shysters, fools, pederasts, homophobes, morons, perverts and criminals, all of them grubbing for money from corporate lobbyists and shilling for wealthy donors. Of the two political parties, one is in thrall to a failed ideology and the other is craven and intellectually bankrupt. Meanwhile, the president is a serial coward who repeatedly raises the white flag and flees the battlefield before the first shot is fired.

And the people, the good, decent American people that Mitt Romney and Bachmann and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are always droning on about, how are they getting on? Not so well. Many are running scared in the face of a bewildering economy that serves the few on the backs of the many, swimming in debt or waiting to lose their homes to the maw of a pitiless foreclosure machine. The cost of living rises but decent jobs at living wages are harder to find than a moderate Republican, and the playing field that once made sense and held promise is now tilted against wage earners.

Washington, the military hero, cannot fathom how easily the nation commits its sons and daughters to murky wars in distant lands, and how little sacrifice is asked from the people, and how these wars go on without end, long after the rational for them expires. The military generals cow the politicians and in turn the politicians frighten the population with predictions of dire consequences should our soldiers come home before the mission is complete. The huge footprint left by the American military colossus on the globe – particularly in places where oil is found -- tells Washington that something besides national security is in play…

Whoa, man, this is getting heavy. Don’t be such a downer. What about fireworks and cold beer, juicy hamburgers, and American flags snapping in the breeze? Don’t stress about the economy, distant wars, political gridlock or the fact that the FBI and the NSA spy on us. Forget all that dark stuff. Crack a cold Budweiser and stick your head in the sand. Now you’re behaving like a patriotic American.

Fly, Redux

2011-07-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

Note: Fly made his first appearance on the Balcony on April 15, 2011.

Greetings. Fly here, still stuck in our nation’s capitol where the people are truly cuckoo. After my experience in John Boehner’s office, all I wanted was to return to the suburbs of Northern Virginia and the simple joy of stalking backyard BBQ’s.

One thing I’ve learned about DC: it’s easy to get in and hard to get out, which might explain why some of these political hacks remain for decades.

Anyway, I was buzzing along K Street, waiting for a prevailing breeze to carry me to the burbs, when I passed an open window in a nondescript office building where the odor of junk food was overpowering. I ducked in for a quick peek and saw this rotund gentlemen (OK, the truth is, he was a fat slob, at least 290 pounds) eating lunch at his desk. And what a feast it was: two Big Macs, French fries, king-size Dr. Pepper, a half pound bag of peanut M&M’s, and a vanilla shake. Nirvana! I dived, flew a tight loop around the shake, and then made a perfect landing on the French fries. The fat man paid no attention to me because he was looking at porn on his computer.

I dined slowly, savoring every delicious morsel, while the fat man gobbled his burger and watched two Asian women do things to each other that I dare not describe. And people think my kind dirty and disgusting! When the fat guy began fumbling with his belt buckle I flew to the far side of the room… As much as I love French fries, there are some acts I can’t be witness to.

My host quickly minimized his computer screen when there was a knock at the door and a man poked his head into the office. “Wassup Greg? Hey, French fries!”

“Help yourself.”

The newcomer’s name was Mark and he was as skinny as Greg was fat. Mark helped himself to a handful of fries and settled in a chair, all arms and legs, elbows, and an Adams apple the size of a golf ball.

“Is that a Dr. Pepper? I’m thirsty.”

“Mitts off. What time are you meeting with Senator McConnell?”

“Three-thirty. What you got for me?”

Greg cleared space on his desk. “OK, first thing is to remind the Senator that American Millionaires for Fair Taxation support the GOP’s efforts to revive the economy by cutting spending on wasteful entitlement programs – “

“No,” Mark interrupted. “The first thing is to remind the Senator of all the dough we’ve contributed to his re-election campaigns and those of his pals. OK, proceed.”

“Right. AMFT also supports further tax cuts – corporate and individual – because everyone knows that Americans are overtaxed. We’re encouraging our contacts at the New York Times, the TV networks, and the business press to print or air stories about the struggles of wealthy Americans. Average people don’t appreciate how stressful being fabulously wealthy can be. It’s not easy to maintain seven houses, a private plane, a helicopter, a fleet of BMW’s, a string of polo ponies and a private petting zoo.”

“Absolutely correct,” Mark said, stretching his long legs and helping himself to more fries. “Not to mention how hard it is to find decent domestic help. The wealthy are carrying the burden of jump-starting the economy and should therefore be rewarded for their heroic efforts. Good angle. I’m sure Senator McConnell will be happy to carry our message to his colleagues. Can we book him on Face the Nation?”

“Piece of cake, buddy. We control that agenda. M&M’s?”

OK, my friends, I’m on the wall thinking, OMG, WTF, again with this Kool-Aid? Is everyone in this town insane? Do they ever get outside the bubble and rub shoulders with real people? When have tax cuts for the rich ever produced jobs for the poor? I’m just a common, insignificant fly, but if I can understand how spurious that idea is, why can’t you?

“We’re also launching,” Greg continued, “an aggressive billboard campaign in selected cities. Check this out: photo of a man with blueprints tucked under his arm in front of a new office building, with the caption – ‘I’m a producer. I’ve earned my tax relief. Have you?’”

“Brilliant,” said Mark, helping himself to more M&M’s. “What else?”

“’Entitlement programs only produce debt.’ We’re thinking the photo will be of a fire hydrant spewing red ink.”

“Hunky-dory,” Mark said, unfolding his long body from the chair. “Keep producing this wonderful crap. God help us if the voters ever wake up and realize they’ve been fleeced. It will be like Greece, only ten times worse.”

“No chance,” Greg said. “Voters are irrelevant. Fist bump, dude!”

Before I flew out the window I crapped on Greg’s French fries. Take that, fat man! I should have jumped on the wind and gone straight to the burbs but I wasn’t through with DC yet. Somewhere in this former swamp there had to be someone who understood that the American people were being mugged by their elected representatives on behalf of plutocrats and vicious ideologues, and I was determined to find that person.

Fly will be back!

Satire: War is Hell

2011-06-16T19:11:00.000-07:00

Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing Room, Washington D.C.

Members of the Committee file in and take their seats behind the dais. A few moments later, David Petraeus, incoming CIA Director, sits down at the witness table. Although he will soon be a civilian, Petraeus wears his dress uniform.

Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, Chairperson): Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us, General.

DP: No problem. War is hell, ladies and gentlemen, but our brave warriors carry on.

Saxby Chambliss (Republican): Amen, General. How’re things going in Afghanistan?

DP: We’re taking the fight to the enemy, hitting him hard where he lives and breathes; we strike fear in his women and children and make his animals cower at our feet. I think it goes well and I believe we can secure the country by 2024.

Daniel Coats (Republican): That’s fantastic news, General.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): General Petraeus, I don’t mean to rain on the parade, but we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and you’re telling us it will have taken 23 years to secure the country by the time we’re done.

DP: You’re not a military man, Senator. You’ve never tested yourself on the field of battle against an enemy intent on blowing your brains out. You’ve never eaten MRE’s for weeks on end and crapped in an open latrine in a hailstorm. Al Qaeda has a foothold in Afghanistan, and is aided and abetted by the Taliban. Together, they are a formidable enemy, as cunning and merciless as any fighters in the world.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): How many Al Qaeda fighters do you estimate are in Afghanistan, General?

DP: Last time I checked there were 12. We may have taken one or two out since that point in time.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): Do you mean 1,200 or 12,000?

DP: No, I mean 12, as in a dozen, although, as I said, we may have taken one or two out during night raids.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): Let me make sure I understand…in all of Afghanistan there are maybe a dozen Al Qaeda operatives? How many US troops does it take to contain 12 Al-Qaeda fighters?

DP: A minimum of 100,000, not counting contracted support forces, CIA agents and private mercenaries. Don’t look so surprised, Senator. As I told you, these Al-Qaeda fighters are devilishly clever. I’m convinced some of them have invisibility cloaks like in the Harry Potter movies.

Daniel Coats (Republican): Let’s shift gears for a moment and talk about President Karzai…what’s you impression of the man, General?

DP: Well, it’s clear that most Afghans despise him and his family, and that he’s up to his eyeballs in the opium trade. He lies, he schemes, he cheats. He’s hopelessly addicted to smoking opium, totally unreliable when the going gets sticky, in short, the kind of tinhorn strongman the United States has always supported. Karzai can be sanctimonious when it comes to civilian casualties, but overall, not a bad guy. I’m encouraging him to take up golf.

Daniel Coats (Republican): Shifting gears again…what about Pakistan?

DP: A nation of two-faced liars and thieves. They take our military aid with one hand, support the Taliban and Al-Qaeda with the other. I curse them all. I’d like to put 150,000 combat hardened troops on the ground in Islamabad and teach those lying rag-heads a lesson they will never forget.

Saxby Chambliss (Republican): Well said, General, my sentiments exactly.

Dianne Feinstein (Democrat): General, some Americans have expressed concern about the cost in lives and money in what seem to be perpetual wars. How do you respond to these concerns?

DP: I don’t. War is hell. Get used to it.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): Give us a sense of what is going on in Iraq.

DP: The flower of Democracy is definitely taking hold in Iraq. When necessary we take the fight to the enemy, hit him hard where he lives and breathes; we strike fear in his women and children and make his animals cower at our feet. If the current trend continues, our troops can come home in 2085.

Daniel Coats (Republican): That’s fantastic news, General.

Ron Wyden (Democrat): Out of curiosity, what duties are American forces in Iraq performing?

DP: Our brave warriors stand on guard against undesirable elements in Iraqi society. Other than that, they spend their time playing softball, tennis and soccer, all indoors in air-conditioned comfort, of course. We’ve spared no expense to make our brave warriors comfortable.

Saxby Chambliss (Republican): Would you also call them gallant?

DP: I would. OK, ladies and gentlemen that’s all the time I can spare for you today. If you’ll excuse me, I have a lunch engagement with Sarah Palin.

Confidants

2011-06-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

Huma Abedin is standing by her husband, Anthony Weiner, while Weiner battles to salvage his political career, though unlike many other political wives in recent years, Huma’s not standing anywhere near Anthony. Her support is of the low profile variety.

Huma works for Hillary Clinton at the State Department, and is said to be one of HC’s most trusted advisors. When it comes to dealing with a lying, cheating, scofflaw husband, who knows better than Hillary? One can easily imagine the older more experienced Hillary offering solace to her shell-shocked aide.

“Men are pigs,” she might say. “Especially men who also happen to be politicians. They treat their marriage vows like campaign promises: easy to make, hard to keep.”

“I feel stupid,” says Huma. “He swore he was done catting around on-line and I believed him. I believed him! I was clueless!”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Huma. Now, now, shhhh, don’t cry. Our men are of a particular breed. Like Bill, Anthony can be charming, persuasive, suave, and sincere. Oh, the sincerity! I knew Bill was messing around on me long before the Monica story broke, primarily because he was skipping around the West Wing with a permanent hard-on, but even though I had seen that telltale energy many times before, I believed him when he looked me square in the eye and denied there was something going on. I know what you’re going through, it’s a terrible blow, but you can survive it. You will survive it.”

“How did you do it, Hillary?”

“First of all, I exacted revenge, that’s very important. Don’t listen to any BS about forgiveness and putting the incident in the past. My past with Bill was littered with cocktail waitresses, secretaries, interns, hotel maids, other men’s wives, etc. Lewinsky broke the camel’s back. I told Bill in no uncertain terms that my support came with a high price tag. I made that man crawl on his knees.”

“Can I ask you something? If it makes you uncomfortable you don’t have to answer… “

“Huma, dear, after what I’ve been through, nothing makes me uncomfortable except being in the same room with Newt Gingrich. It’s about the cigar, right?”

“How did you know?”

“Woman’s intuition. Yes, the little bitch rode that Montecristo like it was a stallion, up, down, in, out. I’m sure Bill was fascinated. It was like going to Bangkok and watching the whores shoot ping-pong balls from their VJ’s.”

“They really do that?”

“Oh, Huma, you’re so sweet and innocent. Take my advice, go home and treat your husband like a dog for the next eighteen months. Exact ten pounds of his flesh.”

“Thanks, Hillary.”

“OK, I’ve got work to do. The Libyans are pissing me off. Dictators are complete assholes.”

“That’s because all of them are men,” says Huma.

Control Thy Weiner

2011-06-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Enough already, Good Morning America. Weiner-Gate is a non-story that you and your breathless correspondents keep dressing as a major “scandal.” It’s not, except as the details pertain to Mr. Weiner and his wife. OK, granted, the congressman from New York might be a little weird and a lot lacking in self-control and common sense, he might be an inveterate pussy-hound or an incurable narcissist, but his offense is hardly as egregious as sending young Americans to fight and die in unnecessary foreign wars or using taxpayer dollars to host orgies with underage hookers in the Presidential Suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Are Weiner’s constituents – the people who voted him into office – the ones clamoring for his resignation? No. The clamor is coming from talking heads and the Democratic Party power structure and Weiner’s colleagues who are now petrified to associate with him.

Nobody wants to hang out with a leper.

The Democrats are afraid of being embarrassed by one of their own, when they should be embarrassed by how cravenly they act and how quickly they cave in the face of right-wing pressure.

Of all the shit going on in America at this moment, why is our media totally absorbed with this pedestrian story? Husbands cheat on wives every day. Porn is a multi-billion dollar business. Sex sells cars, beer, cell phones, deodorant, shampoo, yogurt, clothing and jewelry. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are the next best thing to sexual carnivals. Hey, ruling class, let’s get fucking serious here. Do something about the devastating foreclosure crisis that shows no signs of tapering off; do something about the scarcity of full-time jobs at better than McDonald’s wages; do something meaningful about climate change; do something about the grotesque disparity in wealth that is making America look like a Third World country; do something to bring the endless treasure-sucking American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to an end. Stop jabbering about “deficits” and “tax relief” for the wealthy; at this point, deficits have no business being the country’s number one priority. As for the very wealthy, they’ve been sucking at the public trough long enough.

But most of all, gilded and out of touch rulers, stop masturbating over Anthony Weiner and get down to real business before the unemployed and the hopeless surge into the streets and what remains of the National Guard is deployed to restore order.

This Bud's for You

2011-06-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Watched Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Dallas at Miami, Dirk Nowitzki and friends against the Dream Team with the Big Three: King James, D-Wade, C-Bosh. Hometown fans in white t-shirts, courtside seats occupied by attractive women, an overblown introduction of the home starting five just before tip-off, with pyrotechnics and pumping music.

Broadcasters for ABC/ESPN hype the game from all angles. Can the Maverick bench respond and contribute? Will Dirk’s finger injury be a factor? What should we look for from the Heat Magic Johnson?

The Heat dominated for most of the contest, James and D-Wade slicing, slamming and jamming to a big 4th quarter cushion, but the gritty Mavericks refused to fold and in the end, found a way to win.

Sandwiched between the B-Ball action are the commercials, targeted for consumers of beer, cell phones, cars, fast food. One Budweiser commercial showing a young soldier in fatigues coming home to a surprise party in an old barn ran several times. This Bud’s for you, glad you made it home in one piece. A hug from a brother, a kiss from a teary-eyed girl – cue the music, yank the heartstrings; this is what America is all about. Support our brave troops – run out and buy a six-pack or two.

Yesterday was a day for it, I guess, hard on the heels of Memorial Day. Standing in line at the post office in the morning I saw an ad about special mail rates for military members. Later, when I tuned in to watch the game, two soldiers were being feted by the Miami Heat – two more heroes, home from the wars; one female, one male, both black.

In the commercials and the pre-game ceremonies our soldiers are always heroic paragons of self-sacrifice who fight long wars in far away countries against implacable enemies so that the rest of us can sip beer, upgrade our cell phones, buy new cars and eat fast food. No mention, of course, is ever made of those soldiers who return maimed, broken, psychologically destroyed, or crippled. Nor is any mention made of civilian casualties in the countries where our heroes have been deployed.

Dress a pig in army fatigues and most Americans would stand up and salute. As our politics has become more and more corrupt, and our economy tilted in favor of the haves at the expense of the have nots, as we deny the logic and evidence and consequence of climate change, as our infrastructure crumbles, as high unemployment persists, the more we celebrate our warriors, the power of our killing machines, and our inherent right to unleash the dogs of war whenever and wherever we see fit.

This national obsession with military might is common to dying empires that refuse to recognize that they are dying. To prove to the world that we are still as bad-ass on the battlefield as Lebron James is on the hardwood, we manufacture new threats, new enemies, new rationales for invasion and occupation, and, tragically, we devote more and more of our resources to these foolish efforts.

And our most renowned corporations cloak themselves in patriotic garb as they sell us stuff we do not need.

Graduation Day

2011-06-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

Sunshine all over the American Riviera, sea glittering sapphire, roses in bloom, grapes hanging heavy on the vine.

It’s graduation day for hundreds, sixth grade to junior high, junior high to high school, high school to college. White chairs in neat rows on the grass in Peabody Stadium. Anticipation for the march in cap and gown, for one’s name to be announced over the PA system, for the cheer to rise up from friends and family, anticipation for the next step, for the beginning of the road, for the class trip to Disneyland, anticipation for the long days of a carefree summer, for liberation from mom and dad, duty and convention, rules, restrictions.

Mylar balloons, still and video cameras ready to go, house full of relatives all itching to freeze the moment in time, something the kids can’t yet understand. Hold onto to seventeen, eighteen, fleeting youth and unbridled optimism, that sense of invulnerability, as long as you possibly can. Listen to Lady Gaga, respect your youth, be yourself, love who you are. Don’t listen to the old farts yet; they had their shot – now it’s your turn. Claim your inheritance no matter how minor. Play, goof off, slip into a new identity every other week, sing at the top of your range, trace your beloved’s footprints in the sand. Sleep under the stars as often as possible. Skip stones across lake or stream, jump in puddles, eat pancakes for dinner.

The world is out there, waiting for you. You’ll find no shortage of windmills to tilt at, though take the road anyway, see where it leads, leave home and come back, run to stay in place, chase whatever mirage makes you happy. The world is patient, time masquerades as an ally when you’re young and your heart is invincible and your teeth are white and your skin is supple.

Read the great philosophers, read billboards, read comic books, read and save every fortune from every fortune cookie; plant flowers; swim naked; ride your bicycle with no hands; party all night; remember mother’s birthday.

Milestones and markers, signs and portents, omens and premonitions. Claim it. Own it. Your turn and time, Generation Now, speeding through the galaxy, where the fake, the staged and the contrived might be more real than the real thing. Find out, return to tell the tale, conjure a memory of places you’ve never been.

What did Paul Simon say? “Every generation throws a hero up the pop chart.”

It’s evening now and a gusty wind asserts itself, whipping across the empty stadium, where the white chairs are folded and stacked; the graduates have scattered.

Fiction: Legal Tender

2011-05-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

In the money universe I am a grunt, common and run-of-the-mill, printed by the millions, cut, stacked and bundled, sent to Federal Reserve banks and then dispersed into the world. I doubt very much that you have ever given me a second thought or considered that I might have feelings, dreams, desires and hopes. I don’t blame you for this.

The single. The buck. My life expectancy? Eighteen months, on average. But let me assure you that a month in the life of a dollar bill passes like a year. My kind travel non-stop, hitching rides in pockets, purses, wallets and backpacks, never in one place for long. As crisp, clean freshly printed dollars many of us dream of cozy piggybanks where we can remain in one place, conversing with our metallic cousins -- pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters and the occasional half dollar – as well as the fives and tens and twenties received from relatives in birthday or Christmas cards. That’s the life. Calm, routine, predictable, but mainly, stationary.

Imagine life without the $1 bill. I see that you’re beginning to understand and view my kind in a more appreciative light. Listen now as I tell you how I came to be here, in this silk purse, under this pillow.

My first glimpse of daylight came in New York City when I was handed to a Norwegian tourist – a big boned blonde woman with blue eyes -- by a sidewalk vendor. The woman had a habit of biting her fingernails, and in general seemed nervous and high-strung, traits not normally associated with Scandinavians. For reasons I never understood, she hid me and my kin from her husband, a heavyset fellow who took hours of boring video, mostly of street scenes; he was particularly fascinated by taxi cabs and their drivers, most of whom were sullen looking Hindu or Pakistani men. Ending up in the pocket of one of these men, wrapped in a greasy wad, frightened me, but that was my fate and fate is inescapable. After a visit to the Empire State Building I was unceremoniously wrapped around a bunch of soiled tens, fives and fellow ones – none of them as new as I -- and held captive by a thick rubber band.

The cabbie’s name was Humayun. He smelled of stale cigarettes and onions. When he wasn’t making change for his fares, Humayun kept us in his coat pocket, alongside lint, salted almonds and scraps of tobacco. His cell phone rang constantly and in his native tongue he barked at whoever was calling; more often than not he hung up while the other person was still talking. Humayun grumbled about his customers and made it very clear that he thought goats far superior to people. Into the pocket and out, in and out, until I was peeled off the wad and handed to a woman on her way to JFK and then Philadelphia. She carefully folded me in half and slid me between a snooty twenty and a tired, dog-eared ten. The twenty was talkative, arrogant, and boasted of his recent travels in Atlanta and New Orleans; the ten was weary and morose. I didn’t converse much with either of them.

Sue was the woman’s name, plain, vanilla Sue. After flipping through the airline magazine in her seat pocket she spent the entire flight to Philadelphia working on her laptop. My impression was that she had been jilted recently, her heart crushed and left to wither; now she was immersing herself in work in order to block her pain. Tap, tap, tap on the keyboard, rapid fire, words and numbers, lines and columns, but I was not fooled: her fingers were full of sorrow.

My time with Sue was short and uneventful and, to be honest, I was happy when she traded me for a Diet Coke at the airport and went on her sad way. After a short trip to the night deposit I landed in the hands of a man named Reed who was visiting Philadelphia from Santa Fe. Reed owned an art galley with his wife but I soon discovered that Reed had a secret life with a man named Peter. Reed and Peter. There were monogrammed towels hanging in Peter’s bathroom and fuchsia sheets on the bed. Egyptian cotton. Yes, it was a cozy love nest that Reed and Peter shared, full of books and paintings and delicious smells because Peter was a remarkable cook. They knew many people in Santa Fe and were openly affectionate with one another, which led me to assume that Reed’s wife knew about Peter. Understand that I make no moral judgments – I’m just a lowly $1 bill.

I rode in Reed’s expensive wallet for more than a week and thoroughly enjoyed myself and the ambience of the art gallery. Well-dressed tourists ambled through the gallery, admired the paintings and sculptures, chatted with Reed about color, perspective and style, the attributes of particular artists, up and coming talents on the Santa Fe scene, and enjoyed wine and cheese set out by Peter. This life suited me very much and I wanted it to continue forever, though I knew my hold upon it was tenuous and fleeting. To circulate is the destiny of a $1 bill.

And I did circulate, in places low and high, hand to pocket, pocket to hand, until a wannabe gangster known by the nickname Bobcat scooped me off the counter at a Taco Bell.

Bobcat had seen too many music videos. He wore a baseball cap sideways on his shaved head, a thick gold chain around his neck, a Kobe Bryant jersey, baggy jeans, and new Nike’s. How ridiculous he appeared swaggering around in this getup! The fool boy carried two hundred dollars in worn bills and three ounces of marijuana into an area of Albuquerque controlled by Calderon, a dealer with ties to the Sinaloa cartel and a deserved reputation for vicious retribution on his rivals. When Bobcat, all of seventeen, crossed West Alvarado Street to meet his customer I noticed that my fellow bills, even the $20’s – usually so boastful – had fallen silent, as if they knew something awful was about to happen. I have to tell you that a chill swept over me even before Calderon himself stepped out of the shadows with two henchmen behind him.

Have you ever heard a young man beg for his one human life? It’s not pleasant, believe me, and Bobcat’s tearful pleas for mercy only amused Calderon, who toyed with the boy the way a cat toys with a cornered mouse. In a calm, casual voice Calderon explained how he couldn’t afford to let Bobcat slide. It would damage his reputation and invite others to poach in his territory. He had a business to protect, after all. You’d do the same thing if you were standing in my shoes, right? A man’s not worth shit if he’s unwilling to protect what’s his. Nothing personal, see, just the nature of my business. Shaking his head as if human nature was beyond understanding, Calderon told Bobcat that the tragedy here is that he, Bobcat, has nobody but himself to blame for his current predicament. Who forced you to cross the wrong line with the intent of upsetting the order of things? After ordering Bobcat to hand over the contents of his pockets, Calderon made the trembling boy kneel before a cinderblock wall sprayed with graffiti. If you think it will help, say a prayer, Calderon suggested. Hail Mary, Lord’s Prayer, whatever, and don’t mumble because God won’t understand you, and right now you need him to hear you. Laughing at his own gallows humor, Calderon pulled a pistol from his coat pocket and calmly pumped two bullets into the base of Bobcat’s skull.

We Treasury notes, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America, home of the free and land of the brave, witness more suffering than we deserve. Bobcat’s brains were splattered against the cinderblock wall and this grotesque fact meant nothing to Calderon; he had solved a problem in the same way a plumber solves the problem of a clogged drain, and now that it was resolved he was taking his girlfriend to the movies.

And that is where I parted company with the murderer and found my way to the shirt pocket of a hard working, God-fearing janitor named Luis Valdez, born in Mexico and now making a meager but much appreciated living in Albuquerque with his wife and daughter, Maritza. Luis once worked in an electronics factory in Ciudad Juarez so he was no stranger to exploitation and suffering, the unfathomable cruelty that human beings inflict upon one another without a moment’s hesitation. I felt comfortable in his simple hands and the chill that had gripped me finally abated.

On the day that Bobcat lost his life, Maritza lost a tooth. After Maritza fell asleep that night Luis placed me in a silk purse and slipped me under her pillow, and it is there Maritza found me when she woke. Her gap-toothed smile was as beautiful as any painting in Reed’s gallery. Like her father, Maritza possessed the capacity to be thankful for small gifts.

Rant: Road Rage

2011-05-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

The most useless freeway sign in California is the one that reads, Slower Traffic Keep Right.

The major problem with this dictate from the State is that few motorists in California – at least the section of the state between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles that I normally travel – use their rearview mirrors. Of all the accessories on an automobile none is more under used. How do I know this? Because every time I head out on the highway I find myself behind some motorist cruising in the fast lane at 60mph, who, if he or she would simply look in the rearview mirror, would see my car on their tail and change lanes.

Just the other day I was driving south on the 101 in the fast lane when I had to slow for a Toyota Camry doing about 62mph. I had been doing a steady 70mph until I caught up to this joker. I wanted to move into the near right lane and scoot around, but no break in the traffic presented itself. I speeded up to get closer to the slowpoke blocking my way, hoping that he or see would notice me and move the hell over, but this was wishful thinking. The driver of the Camry was oblivious.

I flashed my headlights. Nothing. I tapped my horn twice. Nothing. I let out a string of curses: “Jesuschristassholemotherfuckingpinheadlimpdick.” This made me feel better but did nothing to remove the Camry from my path. I wished my Honda was equipped with a laser beam that could project a message in foot high letters on the offender’s rear windshield:

MOVE…THE…FUCK…OVER.

I hit the turn signal and hoped someone would give me room to pass this jackass, but my fellow motorists were not in a charitable mood.

“Look in the rearview mirror, asswipe,” I screamed.

After a few more minutes of this irritation I had space and made my move, swinging to the right and quickly back into the fast lane in front of the Camry. As I shot by I looked at the Camry’s driver and prepared to salute with my middle finger. “Don’t do it,” my wife said, mindful of the fact that there are a lot of unhinged people on California’s freeways, some of them armed to the gills.

But how could I flip off a white-haired woman who looked like a dead ringer for Mary See? She was hunched over the steering wheel, hands at ten and two o’clock, totally focused on the road directly in front of her.

Nine hours later on a northbound stretch of 101 outside of Ventura it happens again. 9:30 p.m., traffic sparse, I’m doing 75mph with the cruise control on, anxious to get home after a long day at Disneyland, and I’ll be damned if a Jeep Cherokee is in the fast lane doing all of 60mph. Another codger, I thought, a fugitive from Shady Acres nursing home, out for a late night joy ride along the ocean. Though I could have passed easily enough, I stayed on the Jeep’s ass for a mile or two, determined to make a righteous point about the rules of the road. More wishful thinking. The Jeep's driver was yet another California motorist with no use of a rearview mirror and no regard for Slower Traffic Keep Right.

Enough being enough, I veered right and jammed on the gas until I pulled even with the Jeep; old or not, armed or not, I was giving this idiot driver the finger.

Except the driver wasn’t old at all, and neither was the woman sitting beside him. Twenty-something’s by the look of them, sharing what appeared to be a joint, laughing uproariously and taking no notice of me whatsoever. What’s the point of flipping off a couple of stoners who are feeling blissful and at peace with everyone in the world?

I hate it when the joke’s on me.

Gloriously Ordinary

2011-05-06T13:25:00.000-07:00

Parenthood is said to bring many joys and immeasurable satisfaction.

I know a few people who hold this opinion, though I am not one of them.

Heartache and worry, maybe, but not so much on the satisfaction scale.

Every day when I take my daughter to school, I see parents doting on their offspring and it reminds me of David Sedaris, who I saw at the Arlington Theatre recently. In a riff on his childhood Sedaris pointed out that he was born before the creation of self-esteem, so his parents put him and his sisters to bed the old fashioned way: “Lights out, shut up. If your father hears any chatter he’ll be back with his belt.”

Contemporary parents, on the other hand, feel derelict if they fail to read a bedtime story for half an hour, then spend another twenty minutes assuring their child that he or she is special, exceptional, gifted, a living miracle and without doubt the center of the universe.

I love my kids, don’t get me wrong, but I tend to think we – my generation, I mean – act insane when it comes to our children. Take play dates, for instance, a concept that absolutely staggers me. When I was a kid – in a society that was as full of dangers and predators as our current one – we’d give our parents a general idea of where we were going and what we intended to do and with whom, and dash off, into the neighborhood, out of touch for hours. We didn’t have cell phones or GPS tracking or picture ID cards with a DNA sample embedded in them. Today our kids’ schedules are so jam-packed with wholesome, supervised activities that we must schedule time for them to play with their friends. “Can Sophia do 3:30 on Tuesday or is 4:00 on Wednesday better? Oh, she has ballet on Tuesday and gymnastics on Wednesday and chess on Friday and Advanced Mandarin on Saturday morning. Wow, when does Sophia sleep? Does she sleep?”

Once in a while, as my daughter and I are waiting for the custodian to unlock the school gate, I’ll overhear other parents, almost always mothers, talking. “Tyler’s doing exceptionally well in his GATE (Gifted and Talented) classes, and I definitely think he has a predilection for medicine. He loves science, and he’s always watching medical shows on The Learning Channel.” “You let him watch TV? We only allow Brianna to watch the Disney Channel for one hour each week – provided she executes all her homework perfectly, of course.” “Tyler will probably attend Stanford or Harvard – he’s such a bright child.” “I see Brianna at USC Film School. She’s very creative.”

I glance at Tyler, expecting to see him reading the Physician’s Desk Reference on his iPad, and instead see that he is picking his nose with reckless abandon, twisting his index finger up and in until he extracts a juicy green mass, which, after long inspection, he proceeds to wipe on his jeans. Definitely Harvard material.

Is it just me or do we put too much pressure to perform, succeed, strive and accomplish on our children? Is it acceptable for them to daydream and goof off, to occasionally stare slack-jawed at the TV or the computer, or climb a tree without parental supervision and a safety net below? Is it OK if our children don’t acquire a foreign language and proficiency on at least one musical instrument by age seven?

The other morning my daughter marched into the living room and announced that she wanted to ask a question about sex. OK, we said, let’s have it. “Can you get pregnant from kissing a mirror?” No, we explained, kissing a mirror won’t do the trick, there’s a mechanical component to it, the joining of a female’s egg with a male’s sperm... We can go into more detail if you want. “No, that’s OK, I just wanted to know about the mirrors.”

We learn later that our daughter’s classmate Elena is fond of kissing the mirror in the girl’s bathroom at school. Each to her own.

Play dates, questions about sex, neurotic parents on the school steps planning their child’s college experience ten years in advance – this is what kills the rapture for me. Childhood comes once and is all too quickly gone. My kids are gloriously ordinary, which is just fine with me.

Our Booyah Moment

2011-05-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

We got bin Laden.

High five in the streets. Fist pumps in the bar. Crank up the ticker tape parade. Dispatch six F-14’s to do a flyover above New York City.

We got the big bogeyman.

Finally.

Killed him dead they say. Tested his DNA to prove it.

It only took ten years and thousands of deaths and casualties for the US to kill the world’s most wanted man.

This is a triumph for our crack intelligence community and intrepid troops.

Even if it took ten brutal years.

Now what? Does Al Qaeda fold its tent and slink off into the dusk?

Doubtful. It’s likely there will be reprisals, somewhere, for the killing of bin Laden, just as there will be Pakistanis and Afghans and Iraqi’s willing to die as long as their friends and relatives are being killed by US drone strikes or occupation forces. When it comes to death, people have long memories. Bin Laden may be gone, but Al Qaeda will be with us for a time yet.

Killing begets more killing, but we are blasé about it now, as blasé as bin Laden acted after 9/11. Bin Laden indirectly plotted to kill in spectacular fashion; we kill systematically with our powerful weapons, our eyes that see in the dark and through thick walls.

This really is an amazing development on one level. No, I’m not talking about the breathless reporting from Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams, or the sound bites from Uncle Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton; I’m talking about the fact that the US cedes to itself the authority to assassinate a man on foreign soil. If any nation in the world except Israel – which plays by a different set of rules -- granted itself the same authority, the US would be screaming about the rule of law and sovereign rights.

Hypocrisy is unpleasant. Do as I say, not as I do.

But it goes without saying that the US only kills with the purest motivation and in the name of the highest ideals. Right? Our cause is always righteous, though I wonder what the back-channel traffic on this operation looks like, the secret cables between spies and soldiers, diplomats and politicians. And I wonder what the US had to promise Pakistan in order for the latter to cough up bin Laden? Why now? Why not five, six or ten years ago?

But hey, why be skeptical of the US government and its motives? After all, this is the finest government money can buy and it can be depended on to do the will of its benefactors. This is a “feel good” story, frontier justice meted out to the mastermind of 9/11.

The only surprising thing thus far is that Donald Trump hasn’t claimed responsibility for killing bin Laden.

Footnotes

2011-04-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

Almost a year since the Deepwater Horizon blew up, killing 11 men and spilling an estimated 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion and spill were riveting news for nearly 2 months. The major American networks broadcast live video of oil gushing from the wellhead along with non-stop TV commercials from BP, a PR assault designed to show how concerned the oil giant was for the welfare of the Gulf ecosystem and the people who depend on it for their living.

BP pledged to make it right. Of course, pledging to do something and actually doing it are quite different things. Like any self-serving corporation, BP ducked and dodged as much responsibility as it could, blaming Transocean, the rig owner, and Halliburton, the oil services giant for being the root cause of the disaster. Not to be outdone, Transocean blamed BP and Halliburton blamed Transocean, and Republicans blamed Obama, and the Democrats blamed Republicans, and the dish ran away with the spoon, and the cow broke a leg trying to jump over the moon.

Meanwhile, oil continued to gush into the sea.

On the ground, the United States Coast Guard and BP kept journalists away from beaches and out of the airspace above the spill area. It was odd to see a government agency conspiring with a multinational corporation to limit access to a disaster zone. It was equally odd to see President Obama cheerleading for Gulf seafood and tourism – as if the spill was nothing more than a minor inconvenience, a blip that should not deter business as usual. Obama talked tough, as he always does, about accountability and oversight and stricter regulation of the oil industry, but then left the clean up to BP.

Once BP finally figured out how to cap the well, the story slowly vanished from the airwaves, which is no doubt what BP and other oil industry giants had hoped for. To be sure, BP took its lumps in the media, smarmy CEO Tony Hayward proved to be a train wreck, and the claims process BP created worked as designed, paying out as few claims as possible in the longest amount of time possible, frustrating Gulf residents.

Claims are still being paid slowly and research efforts on the effects of the spill are tied up in red tape.

In other words, standard procedure on this fruited plain. Kid gloves for the powerful, tough love for the powerless, along with years of court cases, motions, denials and appeals – a lawyer’s dream, a plaintiff’s nightmare.

Yes, it’s perverse.

12 months later. What became of those 5 million barrels of oil and the thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants deployed by BP? Are we to believe that the Gulf is undamaged, as good as new, back to normal, healthy? According to Sam Champion of Good Morning America and research done for ABC by Texas Tech, yes, the Gulf is once again fine.

Would you eat Gulf seafood or feed it to your children?

And what of the 11 men who died? Why are they little more than a footnote to this tale? Is it because working men and women in America are disposable?

Happy Meals

2011-04-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

Is McDonald’s an exemplary American corporation or what?

In this time of economic hardship for millions of American workers and their kith and kin, McDonald’s has done what Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs could never do: hire 50,000 workers on a single day.

Amazing. What a powerful gesture! Why should Americans build cars, trucks, airplanes, refrigerators, gas ranges, microwave ovens, flat screen TV’s, computers, skip loaders, cell phones, furniture and toilets when we can put people to work building Big Macs!

Let the Chinese build cars and computers and leave the re-heating of apple turnovers to Americans. While the Chinese are erecting bridges and constructing highways and high-speed rail systems, Americans will be building millions of fillet-o-fish sandwiches! I’d like to see the Chinese do the same! Nobody on this planet can handle a busy drive-through window the way Americans can. “Would you like fries with that? Can I interest you in a delicious vanilla milkshake? How about a super-sized ice cold Coke? Do you need ketchup for your fries?”

Think of what this generous deed will do for our fellow Americans. All the prestige of wearing the famous McDonald’s uniform and working in the shadow of the Golden Arches, along with a minimum wage guaranteed by the federal government. And – don’t worry – even after a 40-hour week you will still qualify for whatever poverty programs remain after Congressman Paul Ryan finishes building his Path to Prosperity. Health insurance is way overrated, and who really needs a retirement plan? McDonald’s hires elderly folk, too. Start young, work hard and who knows, in ten years you might move up to night shift supervisor.

Yep, it’s about time a major American corporation stepped to the plate and delivered for the average American working person. While the financial giants are hoarding their cash and paying out titanic bonuses, McDonald’s is walking the talk, investing in the little people.

Fly in the Ointment

2011-04-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

I am a common house fly, Musca domestica for you scientific types, and I like to hang around garbage cans, but the other day I got blown off course by a gust of wind and through the front doors of the U.S. Capitol. Nice place, very dignified and inspiring, but far too clean for my liking – I prefer a nice backyard BBQ on a muggy DC day, with Cole slaw and potato salad and lots of chicken grease.

Anyway, down gleaming corridors I flew, this way and that, until I detected a promising odor coming from this huge, ornate office. Zipping in for a closer inspection, I saw four men sitting around a long conference table, eating Chinese take-out off paper plates. Nirvana!

Now, being a common housefly, I don’t pay much attention to the doings of humans, unless, as I said, they happen to be having a backyard BBQ on a hot summer day, but in my line it’s next to impossible not to pick up information from discarded newspapers and TV screens and computers.

The man sitting at the head of the long table had an orange tinge to his skin and I immediately knew he was John Boehner, Speaker of the House. Sitting to Boehner’s right, looking like an overeager altar boy, was the one and only Eric Cantor. The third man was harder to identify as he was stuffing his mouth with mushu pork, but then I recognized him: Paul Ryan, the GOP’s budget Wonder boy.

The fourth man was a mystery until Boehner said, “Hey Grover, try this beef broccoli. It’s delicious.” Well, even a housefly knows that Grover was none other than Grover Norquist, anti-tax champion and political strategist.

After flying a quick recon around the table I took up a position on the wall where I could both listen and keep an eye on the egg rolls.

John Boehner: We’ve got that skinny bastard back on his heels. You gotta’ love the way he concedes his position before negotiations even begin. If Obama was a used car salesman he’d give the damn things away.

Eric Cantor: Our message of austerity is resonating with the American people! We’re putting government back in its proper place! Low taxes, small government, minimal interference in the lives of people, these are the ingredients for a strong economy.

Grover Norquist: No tax increases, ever. Gentlemen join hands with me and swear that you will never vote for a tax increase of any kind, ever.

Paul Ryan: By killing entitlement programs we instantly shrink the size of government. A few seniors might be inconvenienced, but if the result is a sound economy and a thriving business climate for our corporate allies, it will be worth it.

John Boehner: I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, and if I can do it, by God, anyone can. Did I ever tell you about my dad’s tavern? I put myself through college unloading kegs of beer for my old man... (Sniffles, begins to tear up.)

Fly: Boehner’s skin really is orange.

Eric Cantor: We know, John. It’s a great story, an American story, but let’s focus on keeping the pressure on the President. The debate over the debt ceiling will be his Waterloo. Politically, the only thing he can do is move toward our position.

Paul Ryan: Voters understand that the deficit is a ticking time bomb.

Fly: Boy, that fried rice looks delectable.

Grover Norquist: Big government is the cause of big deficits.

Fly: Funny, I thought a decade of irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy and pointless foreign wars caused huge deficits, but apparently I am misinformed.

Paul Ryan: The deficit is a noose around the necks of our children and grandchildren!

Fly: At least two Nobel laureates in Economics believe otherwise, but apparently they too are misinformed.

John Boehner (Laughing): Damn, it was easy to get Obama to buy into deficit reduction. He swallowed that hook like a fat bass and ran clear to the middle of the bay.

Grover Norquist: Obama has no balls.

Eric Cantor: But he makes a lovely speech, I’ll give him that.

Grover Norquist: Empty eloquence is no eloquence. The man will not fight for what he believes in once he encounters the smallest amount of resistance. In practical terms, the President is a pansy.

Eric Cantor: What we must do is lower tax rates on the producers and entrepreneurs, on small business owners and venture capitalists so that they can invest and grow an economy that will lift everyone up.

Fly: I’m just a fly, but haven’t you people been drinking this trickle down Kool-Aid for like, I don’t know, 30 years? How’s it working for you? Is your boat rising or sinking?

Paul Ryan: We will end the welfare state because we must end the welfare state.

Fly: Does that include corporate welfare – or are you just going to pick on senior citizens and single mothers?

John Boehner: Shoo fly, get out of here.

Just for jollies, I buzzed Eric Cantor’s nose, considered a kamikaze run up his left nostril, then changed my mind and landed on Grover’s ear where I took a satisfying crap. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, year after year, and expecting a different outcome than you’ve been getting, then these guys are ready for the rubber room. No wonder your country is teetering on the abyss. You elect complete idiots to do your civic business!

Satire: Looking for Mr. Lincoln

2011-04-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

A few days ago my wife and I took our kids to Disneyland, happiest place on Earth, home of Mickey and Minnie and overpriced food and souvenirs. After twelve hours and eighteen attractions, we stopped to take in Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Uncle Walt had a deep, if somewhat uncritical love for Abraham Lincoln, and the short show with the animatronic Lincoln is a paean to an America that likely never existed. As I watched the show I thought of Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, William T. Sherman and William Seward, and it struck me, as I sat there listening to the stirring theme music -- that there are more great men and women in our past than in our present – at least in the political realm.

Nowadays our politicians are moral and intellectual pipsqueaks who spend all their time jockeying for legislative power and the upper hand in the next election cycle, currying favor with corporate donors, and spouting total nonsense to journalists who take down their BS without question.

The nitwits in DC would rather play ideological chicken and shut the federal government down than act like grown-ups and do what’s in the best interests of the nation.

We’re far down the rabbit hole now and I don’t think our chances of crawling out are good. Business as usual won’t cut the mustard. It’s time for the United States to go whole hog nuts and to this end I make the following suggestions:

Suspend the 2012 presidential election season and have the Supreme Court declare Michelle Bachmann President and Glen Beck Vice President;

Mandate that the Democratic and Republican parties merge. Leadership positions in the new party will be decided by duels with Glock 9MM pistols at a range of no more than 10 paces for male members and 12 paces for female members; duels will be televised live on the Fox television network and be hosted by Ryan Seacrest, with celebrity judges Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin;

Enact a special tax on fast food workers to reimburse the major networks for advertising revenue lost during the suspended Presidential election season;

Abolish all taxes on the 500 wealthiest Americans and all corporations with a minimum valuation of $50 million;

Institute military conscription for any able-bodied man or woman less than 55 years old and with a working IQ above 85 and with an income at or below the Federal poverty level;

Invade and occupy Libya and Yemen;

Assume direct control of all poppy cultivation and heroin manufacturing in Afghanistan and task Donald Rumsfeld with increasing the sale of American heroin in China and India; profits from this venture will be distributed equally to the 500 wealthiest Americans;

To avoid the cost of long-term health care for military veterans, all injured, disabled, maimed, wounded or psychologically unstable personnel will be sent to Cuba where they can receive free, comprehensive health care. If the Castro Regime refuses to provide such services, Cuba will be carpet-bombed until a capitulation is achieved; should Cuba prove unable to handle the caseload, the U.S. will invade Canada;

Privatize all U.S. military services under a single umbrella called the Fossil Fuels Protection Corporation and appoint David Petraeus head of the FFPC at a guaranteed annual salary of $150 million;

Enact a tax on domestic beer sales to raise funds for the FFPC and the intelligence community, but also exempt domestic brewers from federal income taxes and provide them tax credits so that no profits are lost;

Abolish the Federal minimum wage and institute slave labor at a daily wage less than the prevailing wage in China;

Ban all labor unions, including the Screen Actors Guild;

Re-train unemployed teachers, firefighters, and police officers as domestic servants for the wealthy, and pay them five cents per hour more than slave laborers;

Relocate, by force if necessary, all homeless people in the U.S. to the under-populated city of Detroit;

Destroy the Lincoln Memorial and erect a new memorial to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Rant: May the Sun Never Set

2011-03-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, and to my detriment, I try and wrap my head around the news. This is always a humbling experience. My old brain can’t keep up when one of the talking heads on ABC or CBS darts from the problem of spent nuclear fuel rods to Charlie Sheen’s latest antics without stopping for breath.

Here’s what I know for sure on this fine March day: America is a wonderful country because we treat our largest corporations like superstars.

First of all, thanks to some scary characters in black robes who call themselves the Supreme Court, corporations have the same free speech rights as persons, meaning they can spend tons of cash to influence the political process in their favor. When it comes to buying legislators, the old adage is true: you get what you pay for. And since many American corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, they can buy a bunch of goodies. Think of the Capitol as a Costco or a Wal-Mart superstore. If it helps, you can also think of it as an upscale whorehouse.

Second, we’re really, really generous to our corporations when it comes to taxes, so much so that we allow the majority to pay no tax whatsoever; zero, zilch, nada, even when, as in the case of Bank of America, they have been recipients of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. Full benefits, no give back; Midas himself would definitely approve.

General Electric is another happy passenger on the no-tax gravy train. GE makes super-sized profits from our endless foreign wars and from outsourcing its manufacturing to low-wage nations. When all is said and done, and an army of CPA’s and lawyers finish their chores, GE pays nary a nickel in US taxes. Even better for GE, its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, serves on the President’s Economic Recovery Board. Wink. Wink. I’m sure the welfare of working Americans is one of Immelt’s chief concerns. Wink. Wink. Giggle.

Thanks, Mr. Obama, for your undying support of the ruling elite, the status quo and CEO’s. We love you, man.

What else is wonderful about the red, white and blue? Let’s see, Detroit, once the 4th largest city in the land, home of the Big Three US automakers and good paying jobs with benefits and union representation for thousands of middle-class workers, is dying. Grand office buildings and sprawling industrial plants sit empty, rotting from within and without, pillaged for scrap metal and copper wire. In the name of corporate efficiency and global competitiveness, we allowed our 4th largest city to become a landscape fit for ghosts and feral dogs.

We’re #1! Who can deny it?

Ah, this land of the free and home of the brave, this blessed fruited plain where all things are possible for our corporate masters in their glass towers and secure residential enclaves. The richest 400 people in our land control more wealth than the bottom 150 million people – combined. Let’s hear it for meritocracy!

We are edging ever closer to achieving Ronald Reagan’s wettest dream. Dutch’s political heirs – real and imagined – are well on their way to gutting our best institutions, cannibalizing our states, and getting an oppressive, overreaching government off the backs of the people. Woo-hoo!

Hell, yes, our cup overflowith with God’s bounty. What other nation can simultaneously wage two and a half wars against Muslim nations? Can the French pull off this impressive hat-trick? No way! The Brits? Impossible! The Russians? Laughable! Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Who’s next? What band of ragtag revolutionaries will dare challenge the military might of the US of A? As Mr. T was fond of saying: “I pity the fools.” Cross our line in the sand and we will rain death and destruction upon you. Shock and awe, hammer and tong, cruise missile and cluster bomb!

Hey, Gaddafi, this next cruise missile is brought to you by General Electric. We bring tin-horn dictators to their knees. Booyah!

Hot damn! May the sun never set on the American Empire.

Fiction: Unstable

2011-03-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

At the moment a surge of water lifts Hiroko Kobayashi’s house from its foundation in Sendai, Japan, Jack Mintz exits Del’s bar on Chapala Street in Santa Barbara, California.

After four hours of solitary drinking in a corner booth in Del’s, Jack’s mind is still riveted on Jeremy’s trial. What drinking couldn’t a long walk might, so Jack heads east on De La Guerra Street, past Starbuck’s, past an empty storefront with a For Lease sign in the window, past darkened City Hall where a lone homeless man sits on the lawn smoking a cigarette. A gentle on shore breeze rustles the palm trees. It’s a lovely SB evening in early spring; Jack barely notices.

Jeremy will be convicted, there’s no doubt about that: only his punishment is unknown.

I can’t control what he does, Jack tells himself for the fiftieth time, though he still feels as if – somewhere along the way – he failed his son.

Hiroko lives alone in a house about a mile from the river. She recently turned 82 and is recovering from hip surgery. The pain medication prescribed by her physician makes her sleepy. When the earthquake hits she’s taking a nap, and at first the shaking feels like part of her dream, but then she realizes that real plates and tea cups and dishes are falling off the shelves in the kitchen; a lamp tips over and a bookshelf topples, a painting falls off the wall, the windows rattle. The floor pitches and rolls like a dinghy in a rough sea. During her long life Hiroko has experienced hundreds of earthquakes, enough of them to know that most last thirty seconds, a minute tops, frightening to be sure, but in the end harmless. This one is different. She hears a dog barking and what sounds like planks of wood snapping.

Before settling in at Del’s to drink his worries away, Jack drove out to the County Jail to ask Jeremy one more time. The elemental question is driving Jack mad. Maybe this time Jeremy will give a different answer, one that makes sense; Jack needs it to make sense. On his way through the main corridor that leads to the Visitors Center Jack takes note of red warning signs and carefully placed surveillance cameras, the smell of disinfectant and the shine on the floors. Metal doors clang shut. The finality and hopelessness of this sound rattles Jack’s nerves more than anything else; he will hear its echo for hours afterwards.

Jeremy has nothing new to say. Father and son stare at one another from opposite sides of shatterproof glass, just like in the movies. Jeremy wears standard issue, bright orange County jail coveralls, white sneakers without laces, and a weary expression on his face. His shoulders slump with resignation. Unlike a movie, however, Jeremy isn’t an innocent man falsely incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. Photographs form in Jack’s mind, line up in chronological order: little league, guitar lessons, junior high graduation, high school baseball games, graduation, the day Jeremy left for his freshman year at UCLA. Milestones and markers for the passage of time, all in a neat row, success following success. Now as he stares at his son and tries to keep his emotions from overwhelming him, Jack wonders where he went wrong. What was the tipping point for Jeremy and why didn’t he come to his mother and me for help? Why did I learn of his crimes on the 5:00 news?

Why? God-damn why?

The front end of an Isuzu truck crashes through Hiroko’s window, followed by a surge of brown water that smells of gasoline, sewage and salt. A dead cat floats in next, followed by a child’s doll, a broom, a magazine, a soccer ball, clumps of seaweed and a washing machine. This can’t be happening, she thinks, it has to be a hallucination, a side effect of the medication, but almost as soon as this thought crosses her mind water is swirling around her knees, cold and dirty, and her house – home for fifty years -- is being carried away. She doesn’t have time to think of her deceased husband or her children and grandchildren because the house is jerking this way and that. This is the Big One local authorities have warned about for years. Be prepared. Have a plan, supplies, water, flashlights and food. But how does one prepare for a truck to come through the window? I am going to drown, Hiroko thinks, a split second before she loses her footing and slips under the water.

Jack can’t stop the loop of thoughts running endlessly in his head. He walks as far as the armory before turning back. His mouth feels dry and he is developing a dull headache. By now Jeremy is back in his cell. The gates and doors have all slammed shut.

Hiroko fights to the surface. As a girl she loved to swim in the river with her sisters, float on her back and stare up at the blue sky; it was a way to forget the war, Japan’s defeat, the unspeakable damage caused by American incendiary bombs in Tokyo and Osaka and Yokohama, not to mention the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has never forgotten the privation in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender, the toll it took on her parents, and as she pulls herself onto a pile of floating debris and catches a glimpse of the devastation, it’s 1945 again. How is it possible for a boat to be perched atop a house; for two train cars to be nearly a mile from the nearest tracks; for the rooftops of her neighbors’ homes to nearly be submerged; for fires to burn on the surface of the water? Only this morning everything was normal in the world: she ate her breakfast, drank her tea, watched TV, made her bed, folded clothes and washed dishes. Only this morning the houses, trees, boats, cars, and trains were in their proper places; now all is surging water and chaos.

Jack walks on, ruminating on all he and his wife have done over the years to make a stable life for their only child. Hard work and non-stop planning for contingencies: life insurance, property insurance, health coverage, earthquake and flood insurance, retirement annuities, IRA’s, a modest stock portfolio, six months of living expenses tucked away in a bank account – even small college funds for the grandchildren they don’t have yet. He and his wife are steady, sober, cautious, careful, conservative and methodical -- in every way exemplary citizens of the American republic, the kind who play by the established rules.

And they earn their just reward for all this rectitude until Jeremy decides the best way to get the money he needs is to embezzle half a million dollars from the university. The speed at which everything changes boggles Jack’s mind; one minute the foundation of his life is solid, the next it’s collapsing. Friends call but after saying things they think are helpful, there’s nothing left except awkward silence. Jack wonders how many years Jeremy will serve in prison and what kind of man he will be when he gets out? Why does this cement sidewalk feel like it’s made of dough? Why am I sinking?

Hiroko floats on the debris pile for twenty-six hours. Two soldiers pull her to safety and drape a blue blanket over her thin shoulders; one of them offers her a bottle of water – she’s too weak to open it. Looking at the destruction all around her she’s not sure being alive is reason for celebration.

Jeremy is sentenced to twenty years in prison; with good behavior he could be released in seven.

On the second night after being rescued, Hiroko passes away in her sleep. The last thing she sees is the face of a little girl sleeping on a cot next to hers.

Three days after Jeremy is sentenced, Jack’s wife finds him hanging from a rafter in the garage. Methodical to the end, Jack’s coat and tie are draped over the back of a chair, and he even thought to remove his shoes and socks.

He didn’t need to leave a note.

Advice from the Good Doctor

2011-03-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

I was due a phone call from Dr. Duke and surprisingly it came at what for him is a reasonable hour, 12:30, on Wednesday night. I had only been asleep for two hours.

“Where you calling from, doc?”

“I prefer not to say. I’m on the run from a woman who is formidably crazy. She has powerful friends.”

I took the phone into the living room and sat on the couch.

“How you been, Doc?”

“Wrong question, man. It’s not how I am – it’s WTF is the matter with you? The Balcony is a disgrace. There’s no political writing, for one thing, and for another you haven’t posted anything new for weeks. What’s the deal? Don’t tell me that the school district is keeping you so busy that you have no time to scribble? You must scribble, do you hear me?”

I didn’t bother trying to explain the trials and tribulations of holding down an 8-to-5 job, raising kids, helping with homework, refereeing endless sibling squabbles, doing laundry, grocery shopping, and all the other domestic chores that need to be done.

“How about the Middle East? The US of A is behind the curve on this one, of course, but that’s to be expected from a dying empire that can’t see beyond its asshole. Unless the west intervenes militarily, that insane bastard Gaddafi will probably survive; nonetheless, a very loud message has been sent to the rulers. I bet the Saudis are wetting themselves. I know you’re not caught up in the Charlie Sheen circus, so what the hell have you been doing?”

“Reading. Working on some fiction. You really should get married and settle down, doc. Do you good.”

“Only way I could be married is if I could have a harem. You bummed about Japan? Astonishing devastation. When did you live over there?”

“1977 to 1983. It’s very sad, doc. The suffering, the loss, the potential for nuclear catastrophe; I wonder if the world is being told the truth about the extent of the damage – and the risks. I keep seeing these tiny old Japanese women staring blankly at what used to be their homes.”

“Governments lie, particularly to avoid scaring the bejesus out of their citizens. Assume the worst is my advice.”

“I looked at some photographs of Chernobyl today,” I said. “The restricted area is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. Chilling stuff. Abandoned buildings, empty villages and schools, ghastly photos of deformed children. The only living thing thriving there is the forest; it’s taking over.”

I thought I heard Duke sigh, though for all I know he was taking a hit from a bong.

“Mankind is determined to destroy this planet,” Duke said. “And it will. What are you reading?”

“Absolute Friends, John LeCarre. You?”

“Plato, the Republic. I keep searching for answers. I thought I had something with this one, but she turned out to be a psycho. She knows we’re friends so if she calls you – and she might – tell her you have no idea where I am.”

“I don’t have any idea where you are, doc.”

“Let’s keep it that way – for your own good. “Write something, will you? Get something on the Balcony soon or you’ll lose all your readers.”

The Road to Forgetting

2011-02-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

“The struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera

We’re Americans. Our specialty is forgetting. History is what happened five minutes ago. History is gaudy spectacle – the Super Bowl halftime show, Lady Gaga arriving at the Grammy Awards in an embryo – and we need it big, loud, and flashy, and the faster the better. 4G fast. Trivia is our lifeblood and we demand instant access to the latest from Hollywood, the doings of the Kardashian conglomerate, quick updates from the Jersey Shore, tweets from Sarah Palin. We create reality. Information that doesn’t fit is discarded. George Orwell is dead. The Ministry of Truth manufactures lies. Ignore the truth and you will be rendered powerless by lies. They say the economy is staging a recovery, yet millions of homes sit empty and millions of people cannot find decent jobs to afford those empty homes. “Imported from Detroit” is an ironic advertising slogan. Reality contradicts spin, but who cares? Verizon now has the iPhone. This is important. Demand for Botox is tremendous. This is newsworthy. The struggle to remember, the need to forget. How did we get from there to here, from peasant and serf and disposable industrial laborer to the golden age of the middle class and then to this era of never-ending anxiety? The cognitive dissonance is as loud as a screaming F-14. We can afford tax cuts for those who don’t need them; we can afford foreign wars that go on for decades; yet we can’t afford to help the less fortunate, young or old, the infirm, the indigent or the unlucky because austerity is what we do now. The poor must sacrifice so the wealthy don’t have to. This is the new fairness doctrine. Cut to the bone, slice to the marrow, a penny saved on the backs of the poor today can be handed to the plutocrats tomorrow. But who cares? We have spectacle. We have shopping malls. We have 3D television. What happened in Egypt already seems like ancient history, as dusty as the Great Pyramid. One less toothbrush in the stand, one less towel on the rack, one less plate on the table, one less voice on the phone -- one more stone in the cemetery. The powerful count on us to forget. Entire political campaigns are built on false myths and fairy tales of a time that never was. Sarah Palin is the new Reagan; once again it is morning in America, a happy time. The road to forgetting is paved with negotiable facts.

Fiction: A Refined Gentleman

2011-02-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

In early September Kelsey dragged me to a wine and cheese back-to-school reception at her daughter’s school. I owed her for accompanying me the month before to an incredibly dull company BBQ where we found ourselves seated at a table with two guys from the Accounting department. Talk about heavy, uncomfortable silences.

Making chit-chat with strangers gives me the willies and I felt my anxiety level rise as soon as we entered the school courtyard, crowded with parents milling around tables loaded with cheeses, olives, bread, vegetables, pasta and dips donated by the owner of a well-known local restaurant; an adjacent table was loaded with wine bottles, all local varieties, served in clear plastic cups by a late 40’s woman who radiated an aura of established money. I pegged her for the wife of a surgeon -- one of those energetic types with unlimited time to devote to worthy causes while her spouse repairs arteries or snips out brain tumors.

“Red or white?” she asked, holding a bottle of each.

“Both, though not at the same time. Start me off with white.”

The woman gave me a disdainful look when she handed me the cup. I often have that effect on people though I don’t know why.

“Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a minute for the red,” I said sweetly.

Kelsey punched me on the arm. “Behave, OK? Let’s mingle.”

“How about you mingle and I drink my wine. This definitely isn’t my scene. Can’t you feel the neurosis in the air? It’s so thick it’s choking me. Every one of these people thinks their child is destined for Harvard, Yale or MIT.”

Kelsey warned me not to get started. “I’m going over to say hello to Amy,” she said. “If I leave you alone for five minutes can you stay out of trouble?”

After assuring Kelsey that I would remain on my best behavior, I sat on a low wall and watched a fluffy cloud slip across the sky. There was just enough of a breeze to stir the flag flying over the courtyard. Lincoln Elementary is a landmark on the prosperous side of our seaside town, built in the early 1920’s, and now surrounded by multi-million dollar homes with red tile roofs, manicured lawns, wrought-iron gates, balconies and curving driveways. Kelsey had explained that the school district bussed kids in from lesser parts of town to achieve a modicum of socio-economic balance. Brown Juan and Juanita meet lily-white Ethan and Emily.

I could see Kelsey and Amy talking on the other side of the courtyard, Amy gesturing with her cup, Kelsey listening intently, her head cocked to one side. It hadn’t been easy to get Kelsey’s kid into Lincoln, and without Amy’s knowledge of the school district’s policies it might not have happened – as Amy frequently reminded us.

I meandered back to the wine table for a refill. A striking brunette in curve-hugging jeans and an off the shoulder t-shirt had replaced the surgeon’s wife; her eyes were green and luminous and on her finger rested the largest authentic diamond I’d ever seen. Her make-up was flawless, her teeth dazzling. I figured her for the wife of a finance or real estate wheeler-dealer, and I’d of bet my last twenty bucks that she drove a Mercedes SUV and did Pilates or yoga three times a week.

The brunette asked what grade my child was in and if he or she liked her teacher, and before I could reply launched into a spiel about the PTA and the Lincoln Foundation. “Fundraising is so important,” she said. “We want the best for our kids, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Nothing but the best. I promise to make an appropriate donation. Thanks for the wine.”

Three guys had taken my spot on the wall so I sat a few feet away, sipped at my wine and eavesdropped. One of the guys was talking about a remodel on his 7,500 square foot home, the problems he was having with a local contractor who had come highly recommended but was proving to be a disappointment. His companions listened, nodding from time to time as if they too had experienced similar frustrations with hired help. I noted their expensive jeans, loafers and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, casual elegance courtesy of Banana Republic and Nordstrom. I smelled money and entitlement. When their talk turned to parasailing in Costa Rica I got up for another refill.

“Back so soon?” the brunette asked. “Are you one of those people who just show up for the free wine and appetizers?”

I leaned across the table. “Can you keep a secret?” She said she could. I glanced over my shoulder and lowered my voice. “I’m an undercover vice cop, here on a case. I don’t mean to alarm you, but everything is not what it seems at Lincoln Elementary.”

“Are you serious?”

“Afraid so. Don’t blow my cover, OK?”

“OhmyGod. Of course. OhmyGod. I won’t say a word.”

Feeling pleased with myself, I resumed wandering around like a cultural anthropologist on a field expedition. Moving on the periphery of conversations about all sorts of subjects, the mundane small talk and polite courtesies that fill adult days and nights, I made mental notes to share with Kelsey later. While I may not enjoy making small talk, I do enjoy listening to it.

On my second lap around the courtyard Kelsey joined me.

“Sorry for deserting you. Amy’s going through some hassles at work and needed to talk. Are you behaving yourself?”

“I’m a shining example of restraint and rectitude. I have stories to tell. Tidbits of juicy gossip.”

She kissed me on the cheek and told me I was full of crap. She was happy, having a fine time, thrilled that her child was at Lincoln.

“What’s the protocol for these shindigs?” I asked. “How much time do we need to put in before we can bail? I refuse to share you with these people for more than an hour.”

“Fifteen more minutes? Let me finish with Amy, say hello to the principal and the PTA president, and we’ll go.”

I continued my walk, thinking of Amy, a tolerable woman -- in small doses -- but an incorrigible drama queen whose life careened from one crisis to the next: if the problem wasn’t her ex-husband, it was her hair stylist or her auto mechanic or her mother and on and on. I hated to see Amy take advantage of Kelsey’s natural empathy.

The wall was free again so I sat down and closed my eyes and listened to the echo of voices and laughter.

“Excuse me, is this wall taken?”

The voice belonged to a man with a Clintonesque head of silver hair, pale blue eyes that looked right into mine, and skin tanned as if the man it covered had just returned from two weeks in the Yucatan. He wore a beautifully tailored navy blue suit, a white shirt and gold cufflinks.

He extended his hand. “James Casso. New parent?”

“Yeah, my lady friend’s daughter just started second grade.”

“Welcome to Lincoln. It’s a great school. What kind of work do you do?”

This is my least favorite icebreaker question. I detest being defined and categorized by my job, and if I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t do what I do; I’d much rather be a professional magician or a blues guitar player or a rodeo clown. Hating the occupation question as I do, I make a point of lying when it’s directed at me. At a wedding once I concocted three different occupations while moving down the buffet line.

“I’m a casualty of the great American casino economy,” I said.

Casso laughed. “I take it you’re unemployed?”

“Hard core unemployed, a grim statistic.”

“How long has it been?”

“Thirteen months, four hundred and seventy-six resumes, two interviews, no job offers. What’s your line, doctor, lawyer, CPA?”

“I’m a private wealth manager.”

“Sounds impressive.”

Casso shrugged. “It simply means people entrust me to take calculated risks with their money. All in all I do pretty well for my clients and myself, even in a sluggish economy like this one. It’s not rocket science: good fundamentals and a long term outlook are the keys.”

He sounded like a TV commercial you see during golf tournaments. Trust Charles Schwab. Grab a piece of the rock, etc. I admired the suit, the tan, the manicured fingernails, the gold cufflinks, but James Casso and I had as much in common as an armadillo has with an egret. I was about to get up and move on when Casso turned the conversation in a completely different direction.

“One of the marvelous things about this school,” he said, “which I’m sure you’ve already taken notice of, is the crop of trophy wives, many of whom are not above a bit of extramarital activity. Take the woman who served your wine. Brittany Lancaster Taylor, former swimsuit model and sometime jewelry designer, twenty-six years younger than her husband, restaurant impresario Randall Taylor. Randy boasts a net worth, conservatively speaking, of thirty million dollars. He’s also without doubt one of the most perfect bastards I have ever met. Cutthroat. Pitiless. No qualms about cutting a legal corner or two. You either love him or despise him – middle ground is out of the question. I never understood the attraction. Like most people, I assume Brittany married Randy for the lifestyle he can provide her, but perhaps I’m being narrow and cynical. I suppose it’s possible that Randy is the love of her life and treats her like a princess.”

Casso paused and smiled. “I’ve been trying to get into her panties for some time now. No breakthrough yet, but I’m a persistent man and sooner or later I get what I want.”

“Does your wife know about this quest of yours?” I asked, lightly.

“What wives don’t know never hurts them,” Casso said. “I’m on my third, so I feel myself something of an authority on the subject.”

I sipped my wine and held my tongue.

“You disapprove?” Casso asked.

“Not at all. Whatever puts air in your tires.”

“Are you telling me the idea of straying never crosses your mind? I find that difficult to believe. Do you share everything with your girlfriend? No secret, inner life for you?”

“Being raised Catholic left me susceptible to guilt.” A lie. I was raised a Methodist.

Where the hell was Kelsey? This is the reason I have an aversion to social functions. Of all the people to be stuck in conversation with I had the misfortune to get this serial philanderer in a thousand dollar suit.

“Your ethics come from being raised Catholic?”

I told him that I hadn’t set foot inside a church in thirty years, which was true; in fact, I said, it was my firm and abiding belief that God was the single most destructive myth ever created by the human race. This amused him.

“Under what circumstances do you lie?” he asked.

“When it’s convenient, of course.”

Casso smoothed his tie. “Lies are indispensible. Many years ago I discovered two sources of endless pleasure: making large sums of money and having a variety of sexual experiences. Boredom is man’s natural enemy. For me, money and sex keep boredom at bay. I’ve never lied to my clients -- that’s the truth -- but sex is another matter. If I have to tell a lie or two in order to have sex, I do so without hesitation and no guilt whatsoever. Some men collect antique firearms or vintage cars; I collect women. I remember them, too, every one of them – the feel of their skin, the smell of their hair, the sound of their voices.”

Golf or tennis at the country club doesn’t do it for you, huh? I thought to myself.

But Casso wasn’t finished. “Not to brag, but I have something of a gift when it comes to women. I can look at a woman and instantly know if she’s the type who takes it through the back gate. For example, see that woman over there, the one on the left? She doesn’t.”

I was on my feet and felt the blood rushing to my face. My empty cup fell to the cement. “That’s my girlfriend,” I said.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. How boorish of me. Do you want to punch me?”

“I’d hate to ruin your shirt.”

“I appreciate that – it’s Armani.”

“Mine’s Ross Dress for Less.”

My last fight was in the sixth grade against a bully named Chris King and consisted of a couple of shoves, a wild open handed slap and a headlock; it ended in a draw and three afternoons of detention in the principal’s office. I desperately wanted to feel my knuckles crash against Casso’s jaw, watch him fall, and then finish him off with a kick to the ribs. What I felt was so primal it scared me. Blood lust. The overwhelming need to inflict pain, see my victim suffer, hear him beg for mercy.

“Awfully stupid of me,” Casso said.

I said nothing. My heart was still racing when Kelsey mercifully appeared at my side. I didn’t bother introducing her.

“Good luck with your job search!” Casso called as we walked away.

Kelsey linked her arm through mine. The sky had turned deep blue and a few stars were visible. “What job search?”

“Never mind. We were just shooting the breeze. Money, politics, baseball, the usual stuff men talk about.”

“You hate baseball. I bet you were talking about sex. Some of those mothers are hot.”

I pulled her close. “Would I talk about sex with a refined gentleman like that?”

Under the Cobalt Sky

2011-01-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

Most of the country is snowed under or enduring freezing rain, but here in Santa Barbara it’s a balmy January evening with a full moon rising over the Lobero Theatre. My wife and I are walking down State Street toward the beach with no particular destination in mind, out mainly because we don’t have our kids and the evening is too lovely to spend indoors. Tourists and pods of young people pass us by, a panhandler plies his craft without much success, and a street musician strums a beat-up guitar.

We stop before a vacant storefront and struggle to recall what had occupied the space. I think it was a jewelry store but my wife remembers it as a place that sold imported bric-a-brac. Not often being in need of bric-a-brac, imported or domestic, I can’t say if she’s wrong or right. We move on, enjoying the air and the cobalt sky. The recently shuttered Borders book store looms before us, hollowed out and empty, outlines on the carpet and walls where display shelves once stood. Across the street Barnes & Noble has also closed, so except for the venerable, cozy Book Den on Anapamu Street, downtown Santa Barbara is without a bookstore. I know my wife is also contemplating the demise of downtown bookstores; over the years we spent many, many pleasurable hours browsing the stacks in Borders and Barnes & Noble and it’s hard to imagine our downtown without a major book retailer.

“Our downtown” is perhaps overstating things because, in my opinion, downtown SB hasn’t belonged to locals like us in a long time. SB was a town but has been transformed into a travel destination, hawked in glossy magazines and on the Internet in the same way advertisers sell soap or beer. Brand recognition. The American Riviera they call it. Santa Barbara Magazine makes it all look beautiful and refined, clean, safe, a charming paradise where life is fulfilling and rich, and unpleasantness has been forever banned.

I’m old enough and have lived here long enough to remember JC Penny, the White House, Lerner’s, Lou Rose, OTT’s, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, the Earthling Bookstore and the Copper Coffee Pot – all relics of memory now. My wife reminds me of the many banks that lined State Street in our childhoods, which brings to mind Crocker Bank, where my mother once worked as a teller. How long ago did Crocker Bank close its doors? Twenty-five years at least, perhaps longer.

A hazard of living in the same place for many years is watching it change. Whether the changes are good or bad depends on one’s sensibilities. Businesses and people come and go, landmark stores and eateries close their doors, slip into memory and become fodder for conversations that start with “Do you remember…?”

We continue strolling as the moon climbs to mingle with the stars, lost in reverie and nostalgic feelings for childhood and a bygone era, and the trance holds until our senses are assaulted outside Abercrombie & Fitch by pulsing music and the overpowering smell of men’s cologne. Abercrombie, Juicy Couture, Old Navy, Macy’s, Nordstrom, GAP, Betsy Johnson, Restoration Hardware and Banana Republic, big name retailers that have displaced locally owned mom & pop stores. Some might call this progress, and they would be right, of course – cities either change or perish—but it leaves me feeling alienated from the main street of my hometown.

At Cota Street we cross to the other side of State and head back uptown, past the fountain near the Metro Theatre where a kid with matted hair and a dragon tat on his chest asks for change. He smiles politely when we decline to aid his cause; I’m sure he has no idea that Crocker Bank ever existed or that SB boasted a Woolworth’s with a lunch counter. He may not even realize how quickly the present becomes the past.

But his moment will come.

C-Minus

2011-01-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

I’m looking for the joys of parenthood in all the usual places but would settle for far less, an IOU of gratitude from my teenage son or one day without a screaming meltdown from my daughter. I would settle for an hour without bickering. I might do a back flip if my kids’ soiled laundry was placed in the hamper rather than back in the dresser to mingle with the clean clothes, dirty socks jive talking with clean boxer shorts.

I’m not their butler. I’m not their valet. I’m not their maid. If I repeat this mantra one hundred times a day it might manifest in the real world.

My son earned a C- in Geometry. Not the end of the world, of course, though I’m bothered (actually kind of pissed off) because the C- is due to laziness not lack of ability. In his other classes the kid is earning A’s and B’s. I don’t like math my son says, as if this explains everything and ends the discussion. OK, fine, the mysterious world of mathematic concepts doesn’t put flame to your wick, but with a little more effort on your part – and effort is all this comes down to – you could earn a B. There are all kinds of tutoring opportunities…

That’s as far as I get before I see him slip behind his impenetrable wall of teenage arrogance and angst. The drawbridge goes up and slams shut. He dares me to talk until my face turns blue-green. I don’t understand. High school is different now. This isn’t 1955. He turns his back on me, slips headphones on, cranks up Florence and the Machine and disappears into his interior world. I imagine ripping the headphones off his head, spinning him around in his chair and going Tony Soprano on his scrawny teenage butt. My superior adult knowledge can be forced into his brain, right?

The C- rankles me. Why this acceptance of mediocrity when a fraction more effort would have earned him a B? A couple of sessions with a peer tutor and he could have cruised to a decent mark. It makes perfect sense to me; none to him, and this is, I think, the essence of being a parent. I can’t live my son’s life for him, make decisions for him, do the right thing for him; he is destined to be the proud owner of his own mistakes and more times than not all I will be able to do is stand by and watch him stumble over his ego, his temper, his arrogance, and his fears.

Perhaps it’s not as bleak as all that. Perhaps as Bruce Springsteen wrote many years ago, one day we will look back on this and it will all seem funny.

Teenage Liar

2011-01-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

Politicians lie to constituents. CEO’s lie to stockholders. Police officers lie to District Attorneys. Husbands lie to their wives. Con artists lie to their marks. Doctors lie to nurses. Salespeople lie to customers.

In no small part, lies make the world go round.

My son lies – to me, to his mother, to his grandmother. Fourteen and he’s already an accomplished spinner of lies. Small lies. Big lies. Stupendous lies. How much homework do you have tonight? None. None at all? No, I did it at school. Geometry? Finished. Biology? Done. English? Just reading. He answers quickly and with complete conviction.

Around bedtime the boy is in his room working on his Biology homework and stressed out over the Geometry problems that he did not, in fact, finish at school. The reading for English has over the last few hours morphed into a five page paper the first draft of which is due tomorrow, not a line of which is yet conceived or written. He can’t explain why he lied about his homework any more than he can explain how the vase in the living room – a wedding gift -- mysteriously developed a crack. If I press him on the vase he’ll say his sister did it. If I ask his sister she’ll say her brother did it. Maybe our beta fish is the culprit.

A tangle of lies. Did you, I ask my dear son, eat the last container of Greek yogurt and leave the empty container in the refrigerator? He regards me as if I have no right to ask such a question. He has no idea, no clue, can’t even make a guess as to who ate the yogurt; I should ask his sister.

Lies atop lies. Only a phase that will pass, I hope, otherwise the boy will one day wind up on the wrong side of a Federal indictment. Mendacity is an unattractive trait. I can’t remember when all this lying began or when an occasional white lie became a lifestyle. It’s astonishing that my son claims no responsibility for anything that happens around here. No matter what happens, he’s as innocent as a newborn ferret. Having a baby sister provides a built-in scapegoat. Plus he can always blame the beta fish if his sister happens to have an airtight alibi.

The homework crisis has passed and we are sitting in the living room, the four of us, enjoying a peaceful family moment of the kind that is rare within our walls, when a foul odor wafts across the room and settles above our heads like a toxic cloud. I look at my son, his serene face, bearing no sign that he is aware of the horrific stench that is threatening our nasal passages. You farted, I say. Not me, he says. I bet it was my sister. No, this is your work. Your fingerprint. It’s thirty-nine degrees outside but we fling open doors and windows, stand gasping in the rush of fresh air. You’re totally overreacting, my son claims. I don’t smell anything!

Ironically, this is probably true.

Short-Short Fiction

2011-01-13T05:44:00.000-08:00

A Spoonful of Medicine

She won’t take her medicine.

Why not?

She hates the taste.

Does she enjoy having pneumonia?

Let me ask her. Hold on. No, she doesn’t. She wants to play handball.

No medicine, no school, no handball.

I’ll see what I can do.

You’re the adult. Keep that in mind.

I’m the adult. This is important.

Very important.

I could resort to force, hold her mouth open and pour the stuff down her throat.

Oh, that’s elegant.

She just locked herself in the bathroom. How’s the conference?

Scintillating. Threaten to take her Nintendo away. That might motivate her.

Didn’t work. By the way, I played Brain Age and discovered that, brain-wise, I’m 60 years old. You have no idea how disconcerted this makes me feel.

The next session’s about to start. Please get her to take her medicine. Love you.

I’m not sure I’m cut out for fatherhood.

Several years late for that revelation, sweetie.

Girl’s Best Friend

Would you rather a man be a retard in the kitchen or the bedroom?

Depends on what stage the relationship is in. Early on I want great sex, adventurous sex, impulsive sex, frequent sex, inspired sex.

When physical passion fades a well-cooked meal is almost as good as sex. Penne pesto with chicken. Green salad. Decent bottle of wine. Something homemade for dessert.

Custard or a chocolate mousse.

Regular sex is a bonus when you hit that stage.

Be thankful your sex life isn’t thwarted by erectile dysfunction.

The dreaded ED.

Cialis. Viagara. Levitra.

Call your health professional if you experience a 4-hour erection.

Sudden drop in blood pressure.

Blurred vision.

Irregular heartbeat.

A vibrator is more reliable.

Completely dependable.

And immune to pharmaceutical complications.

Re-chargeable batteries help.

They’re a necessity.

My husband has no idea.

Neither does mine.

Men are retarded.

Hopelessly.

Daddy Duty

2011-01-06T19:04:00.000-08:00

It is morning, a school day, and the house is in chaos. The kids fight for the bathroom. Fists pound on a closed and locked door. Dirty dishes linger in the kitchen sink, beds lie unmade, and in the hallway I see some pajamas and a damp towel that were not there ten minutes ago. Messes follow children the way flies follow dung. The pounding on the bathroom door continues until the door opens a crack and a red slipper flies out, missing its intended target and coming to rest under the dresser, where it will remain, gathering dust.

My daughter is standing in her bedroom, stock-still, stark naked; she’s supposed to be dressed and brushing her hair. Her socks are on the bed, next to her underwear, but where is the outfit we laid out for her last night to avoid confusion and consternation this morning? The logical place to look is in the hamper, and of course that’s where I find them. I toss them on her bed, command her to get dressed, add an exasperated “for God’s sakes!” for good measure, and move to the next room to check on my son.

He’s back in bed, burrowed under three heavy blankets, moaning about how tired he is, how boring school is, how stupid his teachers are, and how there is nothing to eat in the refrigerator. Will I make him Cream of Wheat? Sure, when world peace breaks out and Californians embrace mass transit. How about oatmeal? Pancakes? Bagel with cream cheese? Cinnamon toast? No. Hell no. Never. Get out of bed, now!

My wife is in the kitchen, packing our daughter’s insulated lunch box with sliced kiwi, tortilla chips, a carton of apple juice, a bag of green grapes, a box of raisins, a granola bar and a ham and cheese sandwich. She is meticulous, my wife, and her lunches are masterpieces, though it’s a rare day when our daughter eats much, if anything; most days the lunch box returns in the exact condition it left in the morning.

My daughter hasn’t moved one inch. It’s as if she has been cast in bronze. I gather up her socks, underwear, jeans, shirt and sweater, push her toward the bathroom. Her hair is knotted, her teeth are funky and I know from long, hard experience that the minute she’s dressed she’ll make the announcement: I have to poop. This entails that she completely undress.

The clock in the living room is ticking without mercy. I hear a thud from the bedroom and know my son has slid out of his loft. When he appears in the living room he seems taller than he was last night, more of a mystery. How can my flesh and blood, my DNA, be so totally alien? He rushes past me humming a tune, opens the refrigerator and stands before it, as if a complete meal will fly out, occupy a plate and land softly on the dining room table. When nothing happens he settles for frosted flakes. Filling the bowl he spills cereal across the kitchen counter; he ignores the mess, sits down to eat. Why does he chew so noisily?

Miracle of miracles my darling daughter emerges from the bathroom, hair combed and teeth brushed, fully dressed, with no need to move her bowels. I’m pleased, but suspicious. We’re in the home stretch, nearly out the door, only a few minutes late, and then it happens, the last minute crisis – she has forgotten something without which she insists she cannot get through the day. What? An eraser, but not any run-of-the-mill eraser, a yellow eraser shaped like a Siamese cat that her grandmother brought back from San Francisco: very rare apparently, imbued with magic powers and valuable for trading on the playground, though she would never trade it away in a million years. Please don’t open your backpack is what I’m thinking as I see the meltdown coming. If she opens her pack we’re doomed to be tardy. If she opens her pack everything will come out in a tsunami -- books, folders, papers, pencil box, tissue paper, notebook, ruler, calculator, paperclips. Daughter begins to wail as if the end of civilization has arrived. I make the mistake of saying that it’s only an eraser -- that she has plenty of erasers to use until we locate the cat eraser, but I may as well have suggested that she cut the head off her American Girl doll. Wail grows louder. The backpack is open now.

We will be tardy.

Fiction: Cold Turkey

2010-12-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

My cell phone chimed at 3:00 a.m. on Christmas morning. I knew it was Duke.

“Where are you, doc?”

“Morocco. Long, complicated story.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Bah. I read your blog. I don’t believe you’re done with politics.”

“It’s true.”

“Temporarily, maybe; I give you four to six weeks. You need politics as much as I need illegal substances. It’s who you are.”

“Too depressing, doc. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You going cold turkey?”

“That’s the plan.”

“No more Alternet?”

“No.”

“Democracy Now?”

“No.”

“New York Times?”

“No.”

“TruthDig?”

“No.”

“Huffington Post?”

“Done. E-mail lists, too. Move On. Democracy for America. Color of Change. Courage Campaign. All of them.”

“Cold turkey?”

“Cold turkey.”

“I repeat: you’ll last four to six weeks. What else are you going to write about?”

“Dunno yet. My wife thinks I should write about raising kids, parenthood, that sort of thing.”

“Borrrring,” Duke sang.

“When are you coming back, doc?”

“My house is let for another month. Landscape painter. Lady on the run from a knucklehead husband. Paid in cash. I told her she could paint on the ceiling if she felt like it.”

“You’re full of surprises, doc.”

“Surprises. Shit. Sanctimony. Sentimentality. Spite.”

“What’s her name?”

“The painter?”

“No, the woman in Morocco.”

“Why do you assume it’s a woman?”

“When isn’t it a woman?”

Duke laughed. “You know me well. Allahu Akbar, boy. Give me a call when the jones for politics becomes overwhelming.”

I switched the Christmas tree lights on and went back to bed. Right before I drifted off to sleep I reminded myself to cancel my subscription to the Nation.

Done with Change, Over Hope

2010-12-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

I’m done with politics for a while.

I’m disgusted, dejected, and discouraged.

I’m done with change and over hope.

No more will I respond to e-mail alerts from well-meaning but underfunded progressive organizations, no more will I e-mail or phone the people who are supposed to represent my interests in Washington D.C., no more will I pull my hair and gnash my teeth over the latest Obama capitulation.

I can’t do it, at least not without driving myself crazy or into a prolonged depression. I thought the Bush years were aggravating – and they were – but to watch the candidate I voted for bend over and spread his ass cheeks to appease the GOP, well, that’s beyond what I can tolerate. The latest tax giveaway to the rich was the straw that snapped the camel’s spine. I called, I wrote, I signed petition after petition, yet the package went forward just the same, pushed by Obama, to the delight of the wealthy; they received the goodies their campaign contributions paid for.

If I keep writing about politics I’m going to become a crank, like the one Philip Roth describes in Exit Ghost: “Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper.”

I’m not naïve. I expected a limited resemblance between candidate Obama and President Obama, but I didn’t expect that Obama would become the second coming of Bill Clinton, surround himself with Clinton-era apparatchiks, and take economic advice from the likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner; I didn’t expect that he would bow and scrape and become Wall Street’s lackey.

I never thought that President Obama would endorse the Bush era economic plan: endless tax cuts that largely benefit the rich and endless foreign wars that benefit no one. But endorse them he has, putting his presidency and the Democratic Party in a box come 2012.

For a man blessed with such eloquence, why does Barack Obama find it so difficult to articulate a coherent vision of who he is and what he stands for?

Obama has taken to spinning the truth like a run-of-the-mill D.C. PR flack, calling the tax giveaway the product of compromise with the GOP and an economic stimulus package that will grow the economy. The truth is that the tax deal will exacerbate the federal deficit, add fuel to Republicans who want to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, and do little to promote job growth.

In Afghanistan, Obama claims things are on-track and that some American forces may depart next summer, though naturally this depends on conditions on the ground and how prepared the Afghan military is to take over. If the Afghan Army isn’t ready now, after nine years and billions of dollars, why should we believe things will be any different by mid-2011? Or by 2014 for that matter? Obama is selling us a fantasy at a time we cannot afford a costly and unwinnable foreign war. Strip away all the military-speak and the fact is that a few hundred al-Qaeda forces have effectively tied up 100,000 American troops – the sophisticated forces of an empire -- at a cost of $120 billion a year.

The war continues and the tax cuts continue and the calls for spending cuts continue and the tone deafness of the ruling class continues, and the people are impotent, far more interested in American Idol and the Kardashians than they are in how their children’s prospects are being diminished by a political and economic system owned and operated by plutocrats for the benefit of plutocrats.

Time to back off and think about something other than the death spiral of the American Dream.

The Last Straw

2010-12-15T19:56:00.000-08:00

It’s only a matter of time before House Democrats pass the President’s tax giveaway to the GOP. Nancy Pelosi must be feeling pressure from the White House, the right wing echo chamber, the corporate media and any number of spineless Democrats. When it’s all said and done, signed and delivered, the President will claim victory for bipartisanship, but this claim will be as empty as the one Obama made the other day when he said that most economists think this absurd gift to the GOP will stimulate the economy.

Here’s what’s more likely to happen.

First, the federal deficit is going to get worse – much worse.

The gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us will get wider – much wider.

The temporary payroll tax holiday will hurt Social Security in the long run, exacerbating fears that the trust fund will not be able to meet its commitments; this will fuel calls from the GOP to reduce benefits, raise the retirement age or, at long last, end Social Security as we know it by privatizing the program.

The “temporary” tax cuts will become permanent because no politician of either party is going to suggest letting them expire in 2012. No matter what’s happening with the economy, the cuts will remain, starving the government of the revenue it needs to function. This is precisely what right-wing Republicans want to happen.

What argument will Obama fall back on when this middling “stimulus” fails to jumpstart the economy? What will he say when the official unemployment rate remains stuck between nine and ten percent and the true rate is up around seventeen?

The Democrats allowed themselves to be boxed in by the GOP and now they are stuck with what will be. This is Obama’s recession now.

The GOP offered one economic policy during the Bush reign, one policy prescription for every situation, one policy rain or shine, fire or flood, earthquake or tsunami: tax cuts. And how did that singular policy work out? The rich reaped the vast majority of the benefits, economic growth was anemic, the federal deficit ballooned, real wages for working people stayed dead flat or declined, and household debt exploded.

That’s the legacy of the GOP’s obsession with cutting taxes. It didn’t work last decade and it won’t work in this one.

If You See the President's Spine, Please Call

2010-12-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

President Obama is wandering around the White House, looking under sofas and behind doors and in closets for his spine.

I’m sitting here in disbelief, having just watched the President’s press conference on the deal he “negotiated” with the GOP on taxes. Obama defended the deal and slammed liberals for being sanctimonious purists, and even said that he was willing to take John Boehner at his word.

Take John Boehner at his word? The Sultan of NO, the Lord of Obstruction, the King of Corruption?

It’s clear that Obama is feeling the pressure because he’s talking complete gibberish, like when he compared the tax debate to the debate over the public health care option. He can’t be serious…the public health insurance option was pushed off the table and buried before one word was said about it…right about the time the health industry lobbyists came in to write the damn bill.

The Republicans gave up nothing and got more than what they asked for from the President. There was no reason to couple extension of the Bush tax cuts with an extension of unemployment benefits. None at all. The issues should have been considered separately.

Obama can spin it any way he wants, send the Vice President out to do the same, dispatch David Axelrod to jaw on Good Morning America, rev up the Obama for America machine, but the fact is that he allowed the GOP to box him in, knock him on his butt and then rub his face in the dirt.

As a percentage of GDP, Americans are not heavily taxed, so all this talk about taxes, taxes, taxes is bizarre. In point of fact, tax rates have fallen for years, particularly for high income people, which is a key reason why the gulf between haves and have nots in America is so dramatic.

The tax cuts will have a minor stimulative effect on jobs and consumer spending and a major impact on the size of the Federal deficit. Two or three years from now, the GOP will claim from every rooftop that America will default, implode or collapse unless spending is slashed to reduce the deficit, and the first programs the GOP will go for will be the same ones they always zero in on: Social Security and Medicare. Not defense spending. Not corporate tax rates. Not farm subsidies. Social Security and Medicare. Got to gut or kill those entitlement programs or the sky will fall.

President Obama is an intelligent man but he’s behaving like a captive. He talks about fighting back, but if he was ever going to roll up his sleeves and get his knuckles bloody, this was the fight, this was the issue, and this was the time. Instead of fighting, the President walked to his corner and sat on his stool.

The presidential spine is on the lam. If you see it on a street in your city or town, please call the White House immediately.

POEM: Rogues Gallery

2010-12-05T08:47:00.001-08:00

Palin
Paul
Murdoch

We’ve turned the country over to fools, liars and con artists
At a time when we need our best and brightest
Our bravest and boldest
To rescue the nation from disaster

Boehner
Bachmann
McConnell

Our economy is a shambles
The middle class is dying
The Chinese are kicking our ass
The polar ice caps are melting

Afghanistan is a needle in our arm
Iraq a noose around our neck
We can’t win, can’t withdraw
Might as well invade Yemen
Bomb the hell out of Teheran

Gingrich
Rubio
Armey

The fools call for tax cuts
Tax cuts
More tax cuts
Like an incantation for the damned
The defiled
And the doomed

Rove
Cantor
Roberts

Their America is not my America
Is it yours?

Better in the Morning

2010-12-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

The odds are strong that Julian Assange will wind up confined to a cell for a long time, possibly the rest of his life.

With the release of hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables, the founder of WikiLeaks has pissed off or embarrassed enough powerful people around the world to insure that those folks go to any lengths to punish him.

I imagine U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton screaming into her phone: “I want Assange hung by his balls. I don’t care how you nail him. I don’t care where you nail him. Just snuff him out!” Other world leaders painted in an unfavorable light in the cables would hardly object if Assange and WikiLeaks suddenly vanished.

Blame the leaker who exposes bad actors rather than the actors themselves.

Assange is wanted in Sweden on sexual assault charges, an accusation that came hard on the heels of a WikiLeaks release of thousands of documents about the Afghanistan war. It may be that I have become paranoid or that I have read too many John Le Carre spy novels, but when the news of the sexual assault charge first surfaced, my immediate thought was: Assange is being framed by the CIA.

Why would the CIA do that? Because even if the charge proves false, as Assange insists it is, the smear attached to his name won’t be easily removed or forgotten. And that’s the point. Discredit the source and you discredit his information; whether or not an accusation is true makes no difference at all.

Maybe. I am certain the clock is winding down for Julian Assange.

Meanwhile, here at home the GOP is standing strong for millionaires and billionaires, pledging to thwart every Democratic proposal unless the Bush Era tax cuts are extended for all income groups. The price tag for these cuts is something like $700 billion over a decade, at a time when millions of Americans are either out of work or stitching together part-time jobs to stay afloat; while money to extend unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed simply cannot be raised without exacerbating the deficit; while the Iraq and Afghan occupations continue without end; while the President’s bipartisan Deficit Commission proposes Draconian cuts to social programs along with – surprise, surprise -- corporate tax cuts; and while the President cannot seem to locate his spine.

It’s all disheartening and frustrating.

Perhaps it will look better in the morning.

The Point of No Return

2010-11-28T19:32:00.000-08:00

I don’t want to believe it, even though I suspect that Chris Hedges, who writes regularly for the website Truthdig, is probably right: we can’t win. By “we” I mean political progressives, liberal Democrats and independents of good will. We’re so far behind the power and influence curve that we have no hope of catching up. But if we have lost who has won? That’s easy. The oligarchs and plutocrats who own and operate the corporate state, their hired hands in Congress and the Supreme Court, and their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream commercial media.

If the recent mid-term elections proved anything, it’s that money is murdering our democracy and real debate no longer exists in this country. The commercial media sets the parameters, dictates subject and slant, and draws from a shallow pool of “experts” and “insiders” to explain, or more often, spin, what is going on with the burning issue of the day. Dissenting voices are seldom heard in the major broadcast media. Without real debate and dissent, democracy cannot exist except in name, which is exactly the way the plutocrats and oligarchs want it.

We are trapped in a zero sum game waged between left and right, blue and red, liberal and conservative. And with the rise of the Tea Party and its political purity tests, it’s certain the GOP will tilt further right, and the Democrats -- petrified by their losses on November 2 -- will follow, as President Obama appears resigned to do on the Bush tax giveaway to the super rich.

So, we can’t win, but on the other hand, the stakes are so serious that we can’t afford to capitulate. Instead, like all outgunned and outnumbered armies, we have no option but to fight asymmetrically, locally, on a smaller scale.

Speaking of asymmetrical warfare, it looks like our commitment to the Afghan sinkhole just got extended to 2014. No public debate required for this decision, and no discussion of how we will pay for it. Nine years ago our target was Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda – now it’s the Taliban.

Though scattered by American firepower in the early months of the invasion, the Taliban regrouped and launched a reinvigorated campaign to rid Afghanistan of foreign invaders. Nine years, billions of dollars and thousands of killed and injured later, President Obama makes upbeat pronouncements about progress, improved security and increased recruitment for the Afghan army; the American media repeats these fabrications almost verbatim – when the media bothers to cover the war at all. For any sense of perspective one has to turn to the foreign press and independent, un-imbedded media, and there one learns that the war that isn’t going well.

For those of us old enough to remember, Obama’s statements have a definite Vietnam-era ring to them. LBJ and Nixon repeatedly assured the American public that we were turning the corner toward victory, securing territory, killing or capturing more Vietcong, and winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

The truth in Vietnam was dramatically different from official pronouncements, just as the truth in Afghanistan is different.

In Vietnam, the US attempted to prop up a corrupt, illegitimate regime; in Afghanistan, our purported partner, Hamid Karzai, is both corrupt and unreliable, and to make matters even worse, our supposed ally, Pakistan, plays both sides of the game for its own strategic advantage.

Governments routinely lie about the need for war and the reasons for keeping wars going. Polls show that most Americans are sick of the Afghan war and realize that it’s a dead end, but – and this is where we return to Chris Hedges and his thesis that we have lost – public sentiment has no impact on policymakers. Why? Because this war, unlike Vietnam, carries no obvious domestic political cost. The only people affected by Afghanistan are soldiers and their families, plus 100,000, give or take, employees of for-profit war contractors. No sacrifice is asked of the larger public – no higher taxes, no war bonds or resource rationing, and no draft.

I think this is the real lesson many American leaders learned from our Vietnam experience: the best way to marginalize domestic anti-war sentiment is to keep the costs of war hidden and citizen sacrifices at a bare minimum.

Of course, there is a huge domestic cost to our economy as the wars drive up the national debt, but this cost isn’t immediate or visceral enough to seize the attention of the public. For policymakers, our war on terror is sacred ground; instead of looking at the dollars we’re pouring into Iraq, Afghanistan and the bloated military-intelligence-security complex, key Republican leaders, and Obama’s bipartisan Deficit Commission, propose to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits, eliminate tax breaks for the remnants of the middle-class and, naturally, reduce taxes for the wealthy.

It’s a strange time in America, perhaps even a point of no return. The status quo works great for the very wealthy, for big business, and for the political class, and they will not relinquish their power and prerogatives easily. Average citizens seem to understand that something is fundamentally out of whack, but have no idea where or whom to turn to for a way out of this morass.

POEM: Pipe Dream

2010-11-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

I want to live in a country that considers a state of permanent
War
Abnormal

I want to live in a country where the prison population declines
Rather than increases

I want to live in a country that cares more about meeting human needs
Than meeting the corporate bottom line

I want to live in a country that doesn’t torture people
Under any circumstances

I want to live in a country where young black men
Have the opportunity
To become old black men

I want to live in a country that respects international law
All the time
Absolutely

I want to live in a country where the distance between rich and poor
Is a narrow creek
Not a wide ocean

I want to live in a country that reveres the natural world
Instead of treating it like a 7-11

I want to live in a country that recognizes the difference
Between
Fact and opinion

I want to live in a country that prosecutes the crimes of the wealthy
As vigorously as it does the crimes of the poor

I want to live in a country that appreciates the contributions
Of women
Enough
To pay them the same as men

I want to live in a country that tells the truth
About itself
Instead of hiding behind false myths

Don’t wake me up
I don’t want this beautiful dream
To
End

Poem: Sometimes

2010-11-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you must wait for Spring to banish
Winter

Sometimes you must wait until the caged bird
Sings

Sometimes you must wait for the water in the kettle to
Boil

Sometimes you must wait for the planets to
Align

Sometimes you must wait for the divorce to be declared
Final

Sometimes you must wait until the last child leaves for
College

Sometimes you must wait for the game to come to
You

Sometimes you must wait for your enemies to hang
Themselves

Sometimes you must wait for the past to repeat
Itself

And sometimes it all falls into place
Like magic
The words crawl across the page
Effortlessly
And this has nothing
To do
With
You

Prayer and Strong Drink

2010-11-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

The lunacy is just beginning. Strap yourself in and be prepared for a very rough ride, with thunderstorms and heavy turbulence from takeoff till landing. Pray, if you’re so inclined; drink heavily if you’re not.

Sarah Palin is crazy, fucking-certifiable-rubber room-straitjacket crazy. A recent CBS News poll found that 48% of respondents view Palin negatively. Among people in the sample group who identify themselves as political Independents, 44% took a dim view of the former Alaska governor.

Palin’s boy, Joe Miller, lost to a write-in candidate in the Alaska senate race.

Let’s recap: Palin has huge negatives and her personal support failed to put Joe Miller over the top on her own turf, but this doesn’t stop her from appearing on Good Morning America and insisting, without a hint of self-doubt, that she can beat President Obama in 2012.

Granted, Barack Obama is not the transformational politician many people thought he might be and many of his core supporters are deeply disappointed. Many expected Obama to challenge the status quo, but the man turned out to be the status quo’s staunchest defender, a fact that cost him and his party on November 2. Timidity and caution – on jobs, financial regulation, health care reform, state sanction of torture, and the never-ending wars – far more than the Tea Party, is what doomed the president in the mid-term elections. Stand for nothing, give ground on everything, and you will go down.

Thus far, signs that Obama learned his lesson from the mid-terms are not very encouraging. The president’s ball sack is still shrunken and his spine is as flexible as Gumby’s.

All things considered, however, it’s unlikely that American voters – dense and juvenile as they may be -- will abandon all reason and elect Sarah Palin president. Unlikely, yes; impossible, no. Weird shit is happening in American politics – check Michele Bachmann out if you doubt this – because the bar is set so low that a self-proclaimed witch could easily slither under it, and because the national economy is liable to remain in the doldrums until 2012.

So weird and perverse is the political zeitgeist that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hardly merited mention in the mid-term elections. No mystery as to why: both parties are totally complicit in these cock-ups and there was no advantage to gain by reminding voters of how much money and blood, for so little gain, has been poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. At a time when Americans are hurting for jobs and America is in dire need of rejuvenating social investment across the board, we’re dumping millions of our tax dollars into two countries where the population despises our presence. What’s astonishing is how little Americans seem to care. Obama’s 2011 troop drawdown in Afghanistan is in the process of being pushed back to 2014, solely because the US cannot stabilize the country in the next seven months. Hamid Karzai knows it. Mullah Omar knows it. David Petraeus knows it.

By 2014, the US will have been in Afghanistan for thirteen years and we will be no closer to victory then than we are today.

But swing back to Sarah Palin, the crazy lady who would be queen. If she does capture the GOP nomination, she’ll campaign on tried and true conservative tropes like tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, along with mushy ideas like “freedom” and “free markets.” God will play a front and center role in Palin’s game plan, as will “personal responsibility” and “small government.” Palin will talk incessantly about the common sense of ordinary folks and the moral turpitude of Democrats and liberals and queers and university eggheads. Faith will be a constant theme.

Thinking Americans will be appalled and mortified that someone so ill-suited for any national office might actually fool enough people to win.

Here’s a thought that chills me to the bone: Palin is so ignorant that she makes W look smart.

Say another Hail Mary or pour another shot of whisky. Hold on. Here we go.

Poem: 5:00 to a Fool

2010-11-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

Good Morning America gave all of :30
To a story about Jewish settlements in Jerusalem
Offering no context or perspective
Before pivoting smartly to a 5:00 segment about Sarah Palin
Showing video footage of the ex-governor
As she spoke to friendly audiences
In her down-home, folksy style
Hung with Todd in Alaska
Watched Bristol dance

:30 to one of the most contentious issues in the world
5:00 to a woman who mistakes ignorance
For a virtue
And reduces complex issues to nonsensical sound bites

Is it any wonder that most Americans
Can’t tell fact from fiction
Matters of consequence
From trivia?
That they fall for the same false promises
Time and time again?
Hold contradictory beliefs?
Follow fools off the edge of the
Cliff?

No wonder whatsoever.

POEM: The Wrong Interview

2010-11-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

W is back
Hawking his memoir
With the same self-satisfied certainty
The same smugness
He had when he declared “Mission Accomplished”
Now he re-tells facile lies about the threat Iraq
Posed to the U.S.
Insists that invading was the only option
That it wasn’t a mistake
Because Saddam is gone and 25 million
Iraqi’s are free

The American media is interviewing the wrong
Man

Ask an average Iraqi citizen about shortages
Of water and electricity
Of neighborhoods destroyed
Of families and friends gone
Of lives forever upended

Ask an Iraqi widow if life is better for her now
Than it was before America unleashed its fury
Find out how she feels about her freedom
As she maneuvers around concrete blast walls
Security checkpoints
Shootings
Bombings
Carnage

Ask questions that matter of people
Who suffer the consequences of W’s monumental
hubris

Ask Iraqi’s who languish in prison
How they feel as days become years
With no charges filed or due process
Allowed

Instead of talking to W
Go deeper with people who cannot
Walk away from the war
Settle into a quiet retirement on the ranch
Down in Texas

Ask the American mother whose only son
Was killed in Fallujah
If W’s invasion was worth it
Ask the American father whose only son came home
From two tours of duty
A ghost of his former self
If W’s occupation was worth it

For W it’s all about talking points
Spinning a tale
Burnishing his image
Convincing us that we are safer now
Better off
Never about the death and suffering he unleashed
On thousands of human beings

End of the World? Hardly

2010-11-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

It’s all about 2012 now.

Forget reaching across the aisle and working together in harmony for the good of the country – the sole aim of John Boehner and his pal Mitch McConnell from now until 2012 is to make the Obama Administration look inept, corrupt or any combination of the two.

Watching the midterm election returns was excruciating and not just because the Democrats took the beating every political expert – and American history itself – predicted they would. ABC News gushed that it was a Republican “tidal wave.” The New York Times called the results “historic.”

Not really. With few exceptions the party in power gets thumped in the midterms. In 1958 Ike Eisenhower’s Republicans lost 48 House seats and 9 Senate seats; in1992 Clinton’s Democrats lost 54 House seats and 9 Senate seats and watched control of both houses pass to the Republicans.

Obama’s Dems lost 60 House seats but retained narrow control of the Senate despite the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. Given the terrible economy, which, please remember, was brought to us by almost continuous Republican misrule during the last decade, the Dems should have taken an even worse drubbing.

Watching the Republicans and the Tea Party nuts the other night was no less side splitting than a Saturday Night Live skit. From Christine O’Donnell calling utter defeat a victory to Crazy Carl Palladino wielding a baseball bat to John Boehner weeping as he described how he worked his way through college, it was hilarious theatre. (Side note: Is it just my twisted perspective or does Eric Cantor from Virginia look like he was sent from central casting to play a diabolical Waffen-SS colonel? That dude scares me – he’s got neo-fascist written all over him. Outfit him with jackboots and a riding crop and he’d happily stomp the shit out of gays, lesbians, illegal immigrants and union members.)

John Boehner, let’s not forget, is one of the most corrupt members of a corruption-ridden body, a man who boldly handed out checks from tobacco industry lobbyists on the floor of the House and was shocked when the propriety of his behavior was questioned, a man who has been in the breast pocket of Corporate America since he was elected to the House in 1991, and a man who wouldn’t know a small business owner if he tripped over him on his way to the tanning salon.

Euphoric with victory, one Republican after another mouthed the same old tropes: tax cuts, small government, free enterprise, capitalism, founding fathers, the American people have spoken, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah – like 2000 and 2004 all over again. The GOP sings one tune and one tune only but give them credit for mastering that one song and convincing voters that people like Boehner, McConnell and Cantor care as much about average people as they do about their corporate benefactors.

Though Republican fingerprints are all over the current economic mess, voters took their frustrations and fears out on Barack Obama and the Democrats. This is the way the political game plays in America. Media barons and leading talking heads are making full-throated unanimous calls for Obama to move toward the political center, as if he has been living on and governing from the extreme left edge since 2009. This is pure hogwash, of course; is it possible that many Obama supporters from 2008 stayed home because their man has operated too far to the right?

Obama hasn’t helped his cause much over the past twenty-one months: he ceded control of the all important narrative to obdurate Republicans and Tea Party fruit loops, reacted too timidly and tardily on the economy and jobs, surrounded himself with Wall Street flunkies, failed to explain why health care reform was critical and how it would make the lives of real Americans better, and time and again tried to make nice with Republicans who had no intention of reciprocating. Obama clings to the hope that he can persuade the GOP to compromise the same way a cheetah clings to the throat of a gazelle.

It will get ugly now. Come January House Republicans will rule Congressional committees and have subpoena power – and you can bet they will not hesitate to use it. What will Obama’s Whitewater be? How much time, effort and taxpayer money will the Republicans piss away chasing every whiff of scandal?

Election night was long and dark and the forecast for the days and months to come calls for more of the same.

Poem: Headlines & Breadlines

2010-11-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

LA Times, October 29, 2010
Front page headline – “GDP grew at weak 2% rate in 3rd quarter.”
Another headline in the same edition proclaims:
“Stocks edge up to close strong October.”

I guess this explains why people are so confused
And angry
Fearful of the future

No matter how much people suffer and struggle
In this broken economy
Stock speculators in the Wall Street casino
Still make money
Hand over fist

In the time it took to write this poem
Some poor soul in these United States
Lost his job
Another lost her house
And someone else received a hospital bill
It will take a lifetime of toil to pay

And the richest 1% became even richer

Fiction: Beggar's Kaleidoscope

2010-10-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

In April I saw a man standing on the steps of city hall, dressed in grimy Army surplus fatigues, waving half a soiled American flag and chanting, “Dee-troit is the future of America. Dee-troit is coming to this city.” He kept on chanting until two police cruisers arrived and removed him.

In June four banks were held up in the space of three days. The perpetrators were white, Mexican and African-American. The white guy hit two different banks on the same day. The police determined that the holdups and perpetrators were in no way related. The Mexican crook made off with more loot than the African-American.

I felt like I was living inside a kaleidoscope of images and sound, information, voices and pulsing neon signs -- or that I was permanently high on powerful hallucinogens. Everything was chaotic and haphazard, unsure and uneasy – the streets were alive, and dangerous. I couldn’t get over the thought that my life and all the lives being lived around me had been reduced to its price in dollars, its perceived value on the great market, no different from rice, corn, oil, soybeans, prescription drugs, condoms -- everything had been turned into a commodity.

For the rich it was the best of times, a heyday, a non-stop XXL extravaganza, even while the number of poor swelled to a degree that was becoming difficult to ignore. I saw this with my own eyes and from inside the poor’s ranks. It became commonplace to see senior citizens carrying bags and boxes into the food bank. As more homeless people appeared downtown, local merchants bombarded City Hall with complaints. “They’re killing my business,” one storeowner told the local newspaper. “I wish they’d go someplace else.” But there was no place else any better, and most places were worse. To quell the complaints of the merchant class, the police chased the homeless from public benches and public parks, and made life untenable for people who had resorted to living in their cars or RV’s.

On the 4th of July, as I watched fireworks arc over the waterfront, I remembered the protests against the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, how along with 5,000 others I marched up the main street of town, while millions worldwide did the same, to the sound of chants, drums, horns and whistles. Overwhelming public sentiment against the invasion was brushed aside by Bush and Blair like lint brushed from the sleeve of a suit; the Coalition of the Willing, which, I now remember, included the nation of Togo, was unstoppable. Calling it a “war” even though Iraq had never attacked or threatened American soil, fear mongers and liars at the highest levels of the government had decided on a preemptive strike and no amount of public protest could dissuade them. During the days of Shock and Awe I learned that language is one of the first casualties of war, that civilian deaths become collateral damage and that the meaning of the word “enemy” changes as needed to fit circumstances. Iraq was destroyed, thousands were killed and no WMD were ever found.

Time spins forward to the fall of 2008. The world financial system is on its knees, reeling after years of unregulated high stakes gambles on derivatives, CDO’s and other exotic financial instruments nobody really can explain. Without so much as ten minutes of public debate, billions of taxpayer dollars are handed to the Secretary of the Treasury – a Wall Street alum and a man of stupendous personal wealth – who demands and receives a blank check to operate as he deems fit, meaning few rules and limited oversight. Scared witless, Congress accedes to this demand. Banks and investment houses that should – by every holy law of the great, infallible market – have lost their shirts and been allowed to die are made whole by the taxpayers. Once again language is a casualty, as the transfers are called a “bailout” rather than more pejorative terms like welfare, assistance, the public dole. Had someone proposed that a billion dollars be devoted to end poverty or homelessness or provide jobs for the unemployed, there would have been a revolt among the ruling class.

For more than a month the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dominates the news, but once the well is capped, the story disappears. Worst oil disaster in US history, unknown long-term ecological damage, and it’s right back to business as usual as if nothing happened. Where did all that spilled oil go? Is Gulf seafood safe to eat?

Free market myths permeate every facet of life, from the corridors of government to the classrooms of public schools. Standardized test scores become the benchmark of learning and schools make no excuses for teaching to the tests. Educators stop talking about critical thinking skills, the curriculum narrows, focuses obsessively on math and language arts; schools that fail to meet mandated targets are singled out for sanctions. Teachers and their labor unions are excoriated. Aspirants for high political office are compelled to promise to run government like a business.

I sense that the center is collapsing, pulling apart. I sit in the small park across the street from the building where I once worked, on a low wall at noon, watching people I once bid “Good morning” to come and go, thinking about the job that kept me on the lower end of the middle class for seventeen years. Until the economy tanked I was a low-level public servant with a salary, health insurance and a pension. First came forced furloughs, then pay rollbacks, and then a dozen of us were released, separated, terminated on a Friday afternoon just before close of business, escorted to the front door by the personnel director. Fiscal austerity.

American-style capitalism has run amok, turned on itself as it does periodically, and now gnaws its own bone and marrow. Marx rolls over in his tomb and smiles. Sensing a potential tipping point, the wealthy class goes on the offensive, using all the machinery of power at its command. While average citizens lose homes and jobs in droves, every major American newscast includes a stock market report, as if the stock market and citizens hold a common stake, as if the stock market and the economy are one and the same. The Supreme Court reinforces whom it really works for when it rules against the Federal Election Commission in the Citizens United case. Predictably, anonymous millions pour into the campaign coffers of candidates pledged to defend and advance the Big Business agenda. The wealthy and well-connected manage the terms of public discourse, keep the focus tight on budget deficits and tax rates at a time when state and local governments are slashing services for the poor and unfortunate, slashing public education, slashing health programs for the young and elderly. I think the country has lost its soul, its heart, and its compassion. As I dumpster dive for bottles and aluminum cans I decide that I don’t give a fuck about budget deficits. Nobody I know does either. I want a roof over my head, heat, and a refrigerator, but what I want most of all, more than anything in fact, is my old bed, my blankets and pillows. I could sleep for twelve days straight.

Madness passes for sanity. The cost of the country’s foreign wars go largely unmentioned, and the budgets for the wars are sacrosanct. Iraq takes its place alongside Germany and Japan and Guam and Spain and Iceland and Italy and South Korea as hosts to permanent American bases. I hear a cost estimate related to the Afghan debacle: a million dollars per soldier per year. Only a hedge fund manager can wrap his head around such numbers.

All across the country people are furious, raging, but their temper is misplaced, directed at the government when it is corporations that are culpable. Why can’t people see this? Don’t rant about tax rates, I want to scream, rant about the horrible waste in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sprawling, costly, out-sourced Security-Intelligence apparatus that grew out of 9/11. Rant about tax subsidies to Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. Follow the money from your wallet, through the laundering operation that is the United States Congress to the clients of powerful lobbyists. That is the root cause of your economic pain, the death of your American Dream, the reason your children face a future of diminished expectations.

Ask why the income gap between rich and poor is so wide.

But nobody listens to street people. We are glanced at but not seen; some of us are assaulted, even murdered, our bodies left by the railroad tracks for days. No one mourns for us.

Capitalism and heroin junkies can never sate their need. The rules of the game demand more, more, more, no matter the cost to people, communities, or the environment. More, more, more -- drill deeper, grow bigger, cut corners, whatever it takes to get more, more, more. Satisfy the beast.

A bearded man in a black suit two sizes too small, wearing a crown of thorns fashioned from aluminum foil, stands on the corner by the museum, screaming at the top of his voice: “It’s the end of the world.” The man seems to be the only person within a hundred miles not in total denial; he has walked in the valley, studied the dust, read the signs and portents. “They own your soul,” he screams at passersby. He will not be the least surprised when the sky darkens and the sun goes out for good.

Poem - The Winner and Still Champion

2010-10-21T14:05:00.001-07:00

I’m not afraid to die
I’m not afraid to die
I’m not afraid to die

That’s not true
Nobody wants to die
But death is what every one of us has in common
Death is coming and unlike
Life
Death plays no favorites

The end is known at the beginning
But very few people posses the courage
To give the end much thought
We think we will live forever
Outwit
Dementia
Cancer
Shingles
Toe fungus
Kidney stones
Arthritis
Impotence
Depression
Osteoporosis
Outwit every calamity and spend eternity
In heaven
With our loved ones
Old friends
Pets
Happily ever after
Forever and ever
Amen

Death laughs at our conceit
And bides its time
We are stone and death is water
And we know who wins that fight
Don’t we?

Broken Promises, Bitter Tea

2010-10-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

Is it November 2nd yet? I can’t take much more of the lies and misinformation that clog the radio, the TV and the Internet, the silly assertions that candidate X will, like a superhero, single-handedly reform Sacramento or Washington D.C.

One small blessing this season is that there hasn’t been a deluge of direct mail pieces.

There are many things about American politics that I don’t understand. Sarah Palin’s popularity has baffled me since John McCain jettisoned reason and tapped her as his running mate. Palin struck me as a stone idiot in 2008 and my opinion hasn’t budged one centimeter since. Palin’s pronouncements are as absurd as her grasp of American history is weak, though I grant that she is clever and opportunistic and has imbibed the code words of the far right: “government” run health care, socialism, freedom, liberty, free markets and so on. Getting back to good old American values and Christian faith makes for pithy sound bites, but poor public policy.

In Palin’s world, as in Orwell’s 1984, ignorance is strength and lies are truth.

The Tea Party is another. Where was the Tea Party during the reign of George W. Bush and Uncle Dick Cheney? Bush and Cheney didn’t exactly shrink the role of the federal government, but as far as I can recall, angry white people didn’t flood the streets demanding the abolishment of Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Education during Bush’s eight years of misrule.

It was only when a moderate, inherently cautious black man moved into the White House that the Tea Party flared to life, powered by secret financial donors and far right front groups. The mainstream media can’t get enough of the Tea Party, covering its rallies and whacky, incoherent proclamations, all of which make the Tea Party seem stronger and more ubiquitous than it actually is. Tea Party candidates who should be muzzled and locked away in padded rooms are treated like prophets, fawned over by the talking heads on the major network news programs.

The government that the Tea Party and far right conservatives excoriate and blame for our ills is the only force capable of reining in runaway corporate power.

How did we get into this mess?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 shattered America’s psyche, and the reactive military response launched by Bush – first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq – contributed to the breaking of our national treasury, not to mention vividly demonstrating the limits of brute force. We can bomb the hell out of a country with our high-tech weapons, murder thousands of non-combatants, and -- when the smoke clears and the dust settles -- find ourselves in a quagmire from which there is no easy escape.

Add the financial meltdown of 2008 into the mix and it’s no wonder that the United States has become the Kingdom of Fear. Americans are fearful that our best days are past and that the economic, political and environmental problems facing us are insurmountable; Americans sense that the way our economy is organized is deeply flawed and that money has corrupted our politics and rendered the wants and needs of average citizens irrelevant.

Whenever fear takes hold, the need for scapegoats increases and reactionary forces rise up and attack anyone who seems different or dangerous: gays, immigrants, Muslims, atheists, liberals, dissidents. Fear breeds polarization between those who want to break from convention and those who want to hold onto it at any cost. Every moderate and sensible idea that surfaces is drowned out by the caterwauling of extremists and ideologues.

November 2nd will come and go but these dark and dangerous times will remain.

Poem: Age of Snooki

2010-10-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

American life is riddled with
Contradictions;
We claim to want peace
While arming ourselves to the teeth;
We claim to be ruled by law
But break the law whenever it suits
Our purpose;
We obsess about education
How our kids score on standardized tests
Compare to the Germans and Japanese
In Math & Science
Wring our hands over the decline
Of basic literacy;
We demand better teachers
More accountability
Less bureaucracy;
But ask us to pay a dime more
In taxes
And we’ll spit in your eye

Night after night on TV
We celebrate people who strut their stupidity
Boast of having read one or two
Books in their entire lifetimes
Happy know-nothings
Like Sarah Palin
Who
In a normal country
Would be laughed all the way back
To
Alaska

Stupid can make you famous
And famous can make you rich
At least until someone more outrageously
Stupid
Comes along

Right Snooki?
Right Kim?
Right Heidi?

Poem: AARP Has My Number

2010-10-06T19:53:00.000-07:00

For $16 a year I can become
A card-carrying member
Of their club
(even though I’m not retired)
They promise discounts on rental cars and Rx drugs
A monthly magazine featuring folks like me
Sort of

They entice me with the possibility of joining a local chapter
Mingling over watery instant coffee and stale pastries
With other old farts
Sharing photographs of grandchildren (I have none)
Gripes about Social Security
Complaints about our ailments

You make me feel old, AARP
Like a fossil
Where did the years go?

How did you get my number?
And now that you have it
Will you ever leave me alone?

I’m not one of you
Not yet
Anyway

I don’t give a damn what the calendar
Says

The Real Obama

2010-10-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

I didn’t recognize the fiery guy speaking to college students in Wisconsin. He looked like President Obama but spoke like candidate Obama – the man I cast my vote for in 2008 -- and watched take the oath of office on a cold January day a few months later.

Hope was in the air. Bush and Cheney were no more. A fresh wind was blowing across the country. But then a strange thing happened – or perhaps it wasn’t strange at all. When Obama moved into the White House he lost his mojo and began behaving like a typical corporate Democrat.

Now Obama chastises the very people who worked their tails off to get him elected.

That’s what I call audacity. It takes large balls to hector your political base, particularly when your party stands an excellent chance of being shellacked in the mid-term elections.

It’s one thing to ignore the concerns of your base for a year and a half while surrounding yourself with Clinton-era apparatchiks, Goldman Sachs alumni, the likes of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, and quite another to accuse your base of apathy.

Hey, Obama, who betrayed whom here?

But OK, let’s be fair. Barack Obama began his presidency in a hole filled with stagnant, foul-smelling water. Generally speaking, Americans have the collective memory of a goldfish and most people have forgotten the mess George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left the country in; those cretins handed Obama the keys to a ruined country and beat it out of Washington D.C.

On the other hand, Obama didn’t do himself any favors by stocking his team with the very people who planted and nurtured the seeds of our financial meltdown. Let’s not forget, amnesiac America, that it was Bill Clinton who passed NAFTA and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Bill Clinton who made happy with Robert Rubin and the moguls of Corporate America, and Bill Clinton who triangulated the Democratic Party so far toward the center that at times it’s indistinguishable from the GOP.

For a year and a half all we’ve seen is the passionless version of Obama, a cerebral, cool-headed, fair-minded fellow who allows himself to be maligned by right-wing radio hacks, Tea Party nut jobs, racists, and limp dicks like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Obama has spent more time defending himself against charges that he is a closet Muslim than he has pushing an agenda that might help working Americans.

Obama squandered his political advantage (deep public support and Democratic control of the House and Senate) on tepid financial system reforms, a gutless health care overhaul, a failed program to assist homeowners facing foreclosure, and a sucker bet on Afghanistan. He bought in to deficit hysteria and the trumped up Social Security crisis. He hasn’t done squat on the environmental front except spew misinformation about “clean” coal.

On a progressive report card, Obama gets a D-minus.

But more egregious still is the way Obama and his team completely misread the economic hardship that has hammered average Americans since 2009. The Wall Street-centric advisors surrounding Obama bailed out the banks and made sure the financial sector was protected, while leaving the working class to fend for itself at a time when only government can provide jobs in sufficient numbers to start a real recovery.

When bold proposals were needed, Obama offered half measures. When the situation demanded a coherent narrative of what Democrats stand for and whose interests they represent, Obama remained aloof, speaking in nuanced terms and reaching his hand across the aisle only to have the GOP spit in his palm.

When it was time to come out of his corner swinging, Obama came out holding a wilted olive branch.

Now, with his poll numbers sliding toward oblivion and John Boehner measuring Nancy Pelosi’s office for new drapes and carpet, Obama hits the campaign trail to fire up the base and the last of the believers. The man still makes a stirring speech, but hope and change are hard sells now, with the gap between rich and poor Americans wider than at any time since the Roaring 20’s, unemployment high and holding, and more Americans living in poverty than there have been in 50 years.

The audacity of hope has morphed into cowardice, the promise of change into protection of the status quo.

Will the real Obama stand up and remain standing before it’s too late?

Sweet & Sour Poets

2010-09-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

The handbill plastered on the lamppost
Advertised a reading by a local poet
The poet had full lips
Sensitive eyes
Thick hair
Gentle features
A warm smile

His new book of poems was just out
And for $5 I could listen to him
Read
In a coffee house
All proceeds destined for the Food Bank

I’m sure the poet loves his mother
And gets along with his siblings
I’m sure he drives a hybrid car
Casts his ballot in every election
Takes in stray cats
I’m sure he pays his taxes
And recycles aluminum cans

I’m sure he’s never slapped a woman
Cursed a cab driver
Stiffed a waiter
Embezzled money
Or puked in the gutter after a long night
Of bar crawling

His poems are probably sweet and uplifting
Lyrical
Celebrations of beauty and truth
The glory of sunsets and the magic
Of a harvest moon

In other words he’s full of
Crap
A pretender
A liar
A charlatan

He’s blind to the grimness of human existence
The cruelty and suffering inflicted on the powerless
By the powerful
On the poor by the rich
On the weak by the strong

I slipped a buck to a panhandler
And walked on;
I despise poets
Except
Of course
Old
Chuck Bukowski

So Long, Labor Dog

2010-09-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

All victories for working people – no matter how small – are hard won.
Anonymous

My friend, colleague and mentor Bill Millard passed away a few days ago. If anyone knew how difficult it is to win gains for workers it was Bill because he was an old “labor dog” who had been in the thick of many tough fights on behalf of working people.

In Bill’s case those people were carpenters and accounting clerks and bus drivers and instructional assistants and plumbers and bakers and cooks and groundskeepers and purchasing agents and custodians – all of them employed by public school districts in California – unseen and unheard for the most part, those that work behind the scenes; Bill gave these people presence and voice.

Bill once drove a school bus for a living, and I’d wager that he was good at his trade and took pride in doing the job well because that’s the way he was wired. He got started in the labor movement as an active member in a local and became a professional labor relations representative. He negotiated and wrote contracts, filed and settled grievances, counseled employees, and agitated for legislation to protect workers.

Most of all, Bill taught working men and women to seize responsibility for their own fates by banding together and looking out for their common benefit – a concept that seems utterly foreign in this era of “me-first” greed.

The labor movement was more than a vocation for Bill – it was an intense passion more demanding than any woman, requiring the stamina and grit of a marathon runner, the patience of a Buddhist monk, and the mental toughness of a prizefighter. The battle for decent wages and safe working conditions, for respect and dignity, for basic fairness, has always been uphill against formidable odds.

Bill was a Liberal’s Liberal and proud of it and we immediately hit it off. Even though he was a decade and a half my senior, we shared an intense dislike for Ronald Reagan and William Jefferson Clinton as well as a belief that unchecked corporate power and influence was antithetical to democracy and detrimental for working people. Injustice ticked us off.

I shared The Nation magazine with Bill and he shared Mother Jones with me.

Love of language was another thing Bill and I had in common. When it came to writing Bill was a craftsman – careful, exacting and meticulous. He’d work a sentence the same way a sculptor works a slab of granite, chipping and shaping until it was flawless.

Whenever Bill and I went into a disciplinary meeting or contract negotiations the only thing I’d want to know is whether or not he had eaten beforehand. On an empty stomach Bill was ferocious. The hungrier Bill was the shorter his temper became – and I could tell with one glance when his cork would pop. I made it a practice to have a granola bar handy, just in case.

Like all people who work in close contact with one another over a long period of time and in tense situations, we developed a shorthand method of communicating. Bill knew the word or thought I was searching for just as I knew what question he wanted to ask next. This kind of connection is rare and wonderful.

One case we worked on together revealed Bill’s character more than any other. We were representing an employee who was clearly on the wrong side of the contract, of common sense, and of every policy on the school district’s books. The man had cooked his own turkey and deserved what was coming to him – or at least that was my take. Bill didn’t disagree with my assessment but the humanist in him saw deeper, saw that this man was a damaged soul, no danger to anyone but himself, seriously flawed, no doubt about it, but still deserving of empathy.

“He doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” Bill said. “But if we don’t help him walk away with at least some dignity we’ll both regret it.”

Quintessential Bill Millard. Die-hard, hard-boiled, realistic, pragmatic and idealistic, but most of all a man who never let his professional role rob him of his humanity.

You gave me courage, old dog, courage and hope, and I know how unlikely it is that I’ll ever have the good fortune to cross paths with your kind again. Long may your spirit run.

Can't Fix This

2010-09-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

Another political season, another flood of misinformation on the TV and the radio.

Back in 2003, Californians were urged to “Join Arnold” and reform our dysfunctional state. The wealthy, charismatic and perpetually optimistic actor promised to “blow up” the boxes of state government and rub the tarnish from the California Dream.

Seven years later we know how that worked out. No need to run through Arnold’s many missteps and the mess the state is mired in.

Now voters are urged to “Join Meg” in refurbishing the dream. Meg being Meg Whitman, multi-millionaire former EBay CEO, who promises to bring corporate know-how to Sacramento and make California hum like a Fortune 500 business.

Sounds familiar, right? Republicans are fervent believers in corporate efficiency and the magic of “free” markets. Business can do no wrong, government can do no right; business is sleek and lean, government is bloated and clumsy.

I find this comparison amusing, given the recent record of Corporate America. Think of the renowned corporate names that would have destroyed the global economy or gone belly up without an infusion of taxpayer money or loan guarantees: General Motors, AIG, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs.

I don’t have any particular love for Jerry Brown but at least Brown understands that government is as different from business as an albatross is from a manatee. Governors are not autocrats and elected legislators cannot be bossed around like corporate underlings. Whitman may think she can snap her fingers and demand that assembly members bend to her will, but if she is successful in buying the governor’s office – and it appears that she has a real shot in November -- she will learn on Day One how limited her powers are.

Remember Schwarzenegger’s big tent on the grounds of the state capitol, the cigar fests he threw for legislators and key members of state government? The tent was a cornerstone of the new governor’s charm campaign but the bloom dropped off that rose in no time. Once Schwarzenegger had a taste for the way the lawmaking game really works, once the written and unwritten rules asserted themselves, the big tent came down, never to be raised again.

California doesn’t have a business problem, California has a political problem, which is why Meg Whitman -- should she fool enough voters on Election Day -- is destined for the same ignominious ride experienced by Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Like New York State, California is virtually ungovernable, paralyzed by gridlock and partisan posturing. The two-thirds super majority required to enact a budget or pass even modest tax increases, term limits that drain the assembly and senate of experienced legislators, gerrymandering that guarantees election of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, and the perverted initiative process all contribute to making the state the subway wreck it has become.

Meg can’t fix that.

Poem: Standing in Line

2010-09-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

The unemployment line snakes around the corner
Curves
Back upon itself;
Hope is in short supply here,
Nerves fray
Tempers flare;
One guy lost his job
Then he lost his house
His boat
And his wife
His Harley goes next
Friends got tired of hearing him complain
About his troubles – they have their own.

People are running scared
Holding on
Waiting for the economy to turn
Housing to bounce back
Or the politicians to finally do something
Most know that the odds are long
Stacked against them
Bailouts are for big banks and political insiders -
Truck drivers
Carpenters
Plumbers
House painters
Teachers
Nurses
Stand alone.

Welcome to the new Dust Bowl
People here avoid each other’s eyes
Ashamed for crimes they did not commit
Believing in magic was their only mistake
Now they pay the cost and bear the burden
Suffer the indignity of foreclosure,
Bankruptcy
And this slow-moving unemployment
Line
That curves back upon itself.

For the Laborers

2010-09-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays, neck and neck with the 4th of July and Martin Luther King’s birthday. On Labor Day we remember the men and women whose toil and sweat built this country, and we celebrate the very idea of work.

Names from the past roll across my mind like movie credits: Walter Reuther, George Meany, Joe Hill, John L. Lewis, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Studs Terkel, A. Phillip Randolph -- people who dedicated their lives to improving the condition of workers, to building a strong middle class, and to insuring that labor was valued and had a place in the national conversation, a seat at the table.

Today the “Labor Movement” is like a terminal patient on life support. Union membership in the private sector is almost non-existent; meanwhile, as state and local governments continue to reel and stagger from the sluggish economy, union members in the public realm are forced to take pay cuts, furlough days, and watch as a backlash develops against pension plans that are always described in the media as “generous,” “lucrative,” or “Cadillac.”

Rough times for wage earners today, not much hope for improvement tomorrow. The mainstream media obsesses about stock prices and quarterly earnings forecasts, as if these are the only economic barometers that matter; CEO’s that boost earnings by dumping workers into the deep end of the pool of the unemployed are rewarded with bonuses.

There is a stark disconnect between the economy described by CNBC and the reality on the street that can no longer be glossed over or ignored. The nexus between worker productivity and reward is long gone – compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations, Americans work longer hours per day and more days per year than anyone. We’re a nation of workaholics, driven by need and the fear that we are falling behind. Our productivity rises year after year but our reward – our wages – remain the same or fall.

The American economy is ass-backwards, upside down, off kilter and out of whack. We need John L. Lewis and Cesar Chavez and A. Phillip Randolph. We need their spirit, their sense of moral outrage and their determination for justice, equity and dignity. We need to pay more than lip service to people who wake up every single day and go to jobs and put in an honest day’s work building, maintaining, restoring or repairing; we need to honor those who serve, teach, or care for others; we need to honor those who clean, scrub and polish; we need to resuscitate the tacit agreement between capital and labor, bosses and workers, that once rewarded hard and honest work, reliability and fidelity, with pay scales that are not insulting or disgraceful.

On this Labor Day I think of John Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath because it seems to me that it is those grapes we are destined to harvest unless we wake up and face our delusions. Steinbeck wrote, “The great owners…know the great fact: when property (or wealth or political power) accumulates in too few hands it is taken away.”

The Somber Smorgasbord

2010-09-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

ABC News described Obama’s Iraq speech as “somber,” and that’s certainly a fitting tone for a Commander in Chief calling an end to combat operations after seven years and more than 4,000 American soldiers killed and thousands wounded.

But it was also a carefully crafted speech that offered a little something for everyone. For military folks there were the standard platitudes about bravery, sacrifice and honor; for those who see the Iraq invasion and occupation as a colossal blunder based on fabricated evidence and false justifications, the President made the nexus between the cost of the war and the dearth of domestic investment in jobs, infrastructure and education that has millions of Americans facing a uncertain future. For the hawks and imperialists Obama promised to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and transform that ravaged land into a bulwark against the terrorists. For the benefit of Republicans, Obama even mentioned George W. Bush, the man who enthusiastically pushed the button that unleashed the horror of war on Iraq.

Call it a somber smorgasbord.

Missing from the speech was any mention of Abu Ghraib or the thousands of Iraqis who were killed during the shock and awe invasion and the long, bloody occupation. The New York Times reported that number as 100,000 dead – independent observers have pegged the number as high as 600,000. Americans should not forget the thousands of Iraqis displaced from their homes – either by the invasion or the sectarian strife that followed. I wonder if we have any idea of the number of Iraqis maimed, deformed or crippled as the result of our effort to free them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, find Weapons of Mass Destruction or give Iraq the gift of democracy.

Obama referred to the Iraqis as our “partners” and noted our common interests though he didn’t elaborate on what those interests might be. Obviously, the United States has an abiding interest in Iraq’s oil reserves, though American multinationals didn’t fare well in the oil contract sweepstakes. The United States would love for Iraq to check Iran’s power and influence in the region, but that’s unlikely to happen given that Iraq cannot even form a government six months after holding elections.

50,000 American troops and thousands of private contractors remain in Iraq, housed in gargantuan bases that resemble small American cities. If the tables were turned, the world upended, if Iraq had occupied America, how would Americans feel if the end of combat operations meant that 50,000 Iraqi soldiers would remain on our soil?

Truth is a casualty of war, and in the years ahead America’s imperial adventure in Iraq will be spun and revised and retold as a heroic, altruistic campaign, undertaken with pure motives and the noblest of intentions. This won’t be a difficult undertaking since many Americans already believe – despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary – that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Myth will become history and history will become truth. In a few short years it will be as if none of the horrible things ever happened, as if the Iraqi people greeted our soldiers with flowers and cheering, just as Donald Rumsfeld promised they would.

Victory was one thing Obama could not claim the other night because there was never anything to win by invading Iraq.

Looking for Mr. Jones

2010-08-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

You don’t know what’s happening here, do you, Mr. Jones?

So sang Bob Dylan way back when, in a different American era, one that almost seems like an age of innocence now, even though it was anything but innocent. Still, I get the feeling that nobody knows what’s happening in America anymore – or more accurately – nobody in power knows. People on the street know well enough, even if they can’t put what they know into words. Not that they need to describe what they are living through, day after day.

The Fear that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about so often is upon us and we can’t shake it. The good Doctor saw it coming. What is the Fear you ask? Fear that the American era is over, that our global hegemony is untenable, and that the American Dream is finally and forever DOA. Fear that undesirables with dark skin, speaking in unfamiliar tongues or praying to an unfamiliar god are poised to overrun the country. Fear that our own government is a threat to freedom and liberty.

It’s a strange time, no doubt about it. The will of the people doesn’t seem to hold much sway in the scheme of things, but how can the will of the people compete with the buying and lobbying power of Corporate America? Plutocrats own the machinery of power, the airwaves, the courts, and the Congress; they write the rules and rig the game for their advantage and, judging by the obscene gap between the super rich and everybody else, their success can only be described as spectacular.

Take away the military power and the United States is a model banana republic.

Irony is everywhere. It takes a legislative slugfest to appropriate a relatively modest amount of money to extend unemployment benefits to idled workers, but billions of tax dollars are funneled into corporate bailouts, undeclared foreign wars and tax cuts for the wealthy with little or no debate and no cries for “fiscal austerity.” The Deepwater Horizon explodes and sinks, killing eleven workers and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean. We hear next to nothing about those eleven workers or their survivors while BP spokespeople assure us that BP is doing everything in its power to make the Gulf right again. If this is true, why is so much of BP’s work shrouded in secrecy? Why won’t BP share its data with independent scientists? Our president tells us that Gulf beaches are open and that Gulf seafood is safe. If that’s true, why do locals refuse to eat the stuff?

Welcome to Oz. The Yellow Brick Road is due south. Keep walking.

Former senator Alan Simpson, co-chair of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, is a crusty old fart who derides Social Security recipients as loafers, while he collects a generous taxpayer funded pension.

Glenn Beck, an unhinged right-wing demagogue, co-opts Martin Luther King Jr. and insists that he, Beck, is the man to restore America’s honor. Only a man with no honor could make such a bizarre claim.

A proposal to build a Muslim community center near Ground Zero in Manhattan that drew little attention when it was first announced suddenly becomes a lightning rod of controversy and vitriol that exposes a dark side of the American psyche. The deeds of a small group of fanatics from Saudi Arabia condemn an entire religion and its adherents as terrorists. Fear trumps common sense. Religious tolerance is jettisoned in favor of demagoguery. Hysteria tramples reason. All Muslims are guilty by association. All Muslims hate America. All Muslims are hiding explosives and looking for something or someone to blow up.

Where are you, Mr. Jones?

The United States invaded Iraq, destroyed Iraq, occupied Iraq, and is leaving (well, not really, not now, not ever) Iraq in a terrible political, economic, social and environmental mess. We call this victory.

Has everyone gone mad? Is there an antidote for this KoolAid?

Afghanistan is a military, monetary and moral sinkhole. Many of our allies have seen enough and are unwilling to ante up more coin or blood for a cause that is certainly doomed. The war in Afghanistan belongs to the United States, lock, stock and killing field. The war cannot be won under any circumstances, and the United States cannot exit without looking weak and emboldening the terrorists. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The Afghanistan sinkhole will ruin us, despite General Petraeus’ promises to the contrary. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose the war but does this fact sway the politicians and generals?

Come back here, Mr. Jones. I want to talk to you, man.

The Democratic Party cannot tell a coherent narrative about what and who it stands for, and the Republicans do nothing but sing a chorus of No, No, No. Rigid ideology triumphs over pragmatic flexibility to the detriment of citizens from Maine to Oregon. How long can we continue this way?

Mr. Jones isn’t talking. Mr. Jones has nothing to say.

Dog Days Potpourri

2010-08-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

We’re in what they call the dog days now, that part of summer when lassitude replaces energy and the baseball pennant races take definite shape. My Yankees are still in first place but I have an uneasy feeling that the defending champs had better watch out for an ambush from the Red Sox.

Flooding in Pakistan and China, record setting heat and raging wildfires in Russia. I heard a meteorologist on Democracy Now say that seventeen different nations have recorded all-time high temperatures this summer. Is this evidence of a planet simmering in greenhouse gas? What other explanation is there? Europeans get it; Latin American nations do too.

But not on the fruited plain. America is the land of make believe, where people like Rush Limbaugh froth and fulminate for hours every week about liberal plots to weaken this great nation, turn it away from the hallowed ground of capitalism and individual freedom. If you believe Rush Limbaugh, global warming is nothing more than a liberal ruse designed to rob decent Americans of their birthright. I can hear Limbaugh’s voice in my head: Don’t worry about the extreme weather you see around the world – get in your car and burn all the gas you can afford. Car-pooling is for liberal sissies! Bicycles are for Europeans! Mass transit is for socialists! You’re an American and it’s your divine right to buy toilet paper, dog food and laundry soap in bulk and drive all day and night if you damn well feel like it.

American denial. It’s going to nail us in the ass. Reality is a terrible thing to ignore.

As the dog days drag on, here are some things I find annoying:

Baseball players who cross themselves or point skyward after knocking a base hit or a home run, as if God is paying a whit of attention to them. I don’t think God is watching. Frankly, I don’t think God give’s a shit about baseball or any other sport for that matter. OK, maybe God follows the World Cup every four years, but that’s it. I’m certain God doesn’t root for any one team or any particular player; if God did, the Chicago Cubs would have won a World Series at least once during the past century.

Baseball announcers who talk about pitchers as if they are a weak sub-species of professional athlete. “Oh, I wonder if having to run the bases is going to take something out of Roy Halladay’s fastball. He was out on the base paths a long time last inning and we’ll see if that affects his velocity.”

Give me a break.

Sports fans who slap high fives in the stands. That’s almost as lame as the wave.

Any television commercial hawking fast food, though I reserve particular malice for Carl’s Junior: “Don’t bother me, I’m sucking down enough fat, sodium and cholesterol to stop an elephant’s heart.”

Gag.

I just remembered another annoying thing about baseball players: jewelry. What’s the deal with baseball players and the junk they wear around their necks? St. Christopher medals, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception medallions, barricuda teeth, wolverine testicles, strings of garlic, strands of twisted leather, and gold chains that look hefty enough to pull an Abrams tank from a ditch.

Oh, sweet Jesus, ESPN’s camera just stopped on the face of George W. Bush, worst president in American history. W and Laura are sitting with Nolan Ryan at the Yankees-Rangers game in Arlington. Ryan appears to be doing all the talking, no doubt trying to explain the mechanics of throwing a split-finger fastball in a 0-2 count. “What you want to do is bounce that pitch about six inches in front of the dish, make the hitter go down and get it.” Laura is smiling as if genuinely interested (I’d bet heavily that she’s bored out of her skull) while her husband shoves peanuts into his mouth. I wonder if Bush, now that he’s retired, ever thinks of all the human beings who died violent deaths while he resided in the White House. Probably not. Bush was never one for introspection. Shit happens. War is messy. Hell, most of them were Muslims anyway. Our God is better than their God.

These dogs are too tired to bark, and even the approach of an intrepid Jehovah’s Witness can’t coax them off the shade porch. I guess the dogs will eat when they get hungry enough.

Duke Meets the Flatfoots

2010-08-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t seen or heard much of Dr. Duke since his botched suicide attempt. Aside from a postcard from Maui, a cryptic e-mail that alluded to a baby shower, and another postcard from Portland, Maine, I hadn’t had a word, and the one time I went by his house he wasn’t home.

For once the call came at a reasonable hour – 6:15 a.m. – and that alone should have put me on alert.

“Two FBI agents just left my house,” Duke said.

“I’m about to read the New York Times,” I said.

“The hell with that lying rag,” Duke said. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Talk,” I said.

The agents rapped on Duke’s front door at 3:30 a.m., perhaps hoping to catch him off-guard, clearly unaware that Duke is a nocturnal creature – more alert at 3:30 a.m. than he is at high noon. One agent was named Connors and the other was named Stevens -- both from the National Security Branch of the Los Angeles field office. Badges and credentials were scrutinized carefully and found to be in order. Connors, the older of the two, wore wingtips and a Brooks Brothers suit and reminded Duke of a CPA; Stevens was new to the trade and wore a Hugo Boss suit and shiny new loafers; Duke disliked him from the jump. It was the fresh out of college gung-ho attitude and the Oklahoma accent.

“Good thing I wasn’t smoking a joint,” Duke said. “That would have been awkward.”

More curious than alarmed, Duke showed the agents into his living room, offered them coffee, and got himself a Corona. He didn’t have anything better to do as he was between romantic entanglements, and sparring verbally with a couple of Federal agents broke the monotony and promised mental stimulation.

The agents made it clear that Duke wasn’t being charged with any crime, nor was he a suspect. Specifically, he was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation.

‘That’s mildly reassuring,’ Duke said. ‘On the other hand, the FBI is sitting in my living room at 3:30 in the morning. What are you investigating and how does it relate to me?’

‘It’s purely routine,’ Connors said.

‘Routine,’ Duke repeated. ‘But ongoing you say. What should I make of that?’

‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ Stevens said. ‘This is a dangerous time for the United States. The War on Terror is real – more real than most Americans understand. We want to know why you support radical groups like the NAACP and the ACLU?’

‘Since when is the NAACP and the ACLU considered radical? You have something against the Bill of Rights?’

‘I love my country,’ Stevens said, ‘which is more – ‘

‘What Agent Stevens means,’ Connors said with a smile, ‘is that the security terrain changed drastically after 9/11. Large amounts of information come into the field office and the Bureau is duty bound to investigate some of that information. I’m sure you understand, Professor Duke. Political Science, wasn’t it?’

‘You got a file on me? Should I be insulted or honored? This is becoming more interesting by the minute. OK, so you guys are just here doing your sworn duty by asking a retired poly sci prof about the non-profit groups he’s a member of. Of course you must know that I’m also a member of the AARP and a supporter of the March of Dimes. I assume you also know that I subscribe to the Nation, Mother Jones and Penthouse.’

‘You travel quite a bit, don’t you Professor?’ Connors asked.

‘I’m retired. I get bored easily and need stimulation. Travel is rejuvenating, not to mention an excellent way to meet women.’

‘Do you have any Muslim friends or acquaintances?’ Stevens asked.

‘Is your partner serious?’ Duke said to Connors. ‘Doesn’t the FBI put recruits through a rigorous training program? Obviously, a reject slips through every now and then. Where’d you go to school, Stevens?’

‘Texas Tech,’ Stevens replied with pride.

‘College Republican?’

‘All four years. How’d you know?’

‘Just a wild guess. You admire Newt Gingrich, don’t you?’

‘I think he’s a great American. Do you believe in a Christian god, Professor?’

‘How is that relevant, Agent Stevens?’

‘What about the Bible – do you believe that the Bible is the true word of God?’

Duke looked at Connors, who shrugged, as if to say, ”Hey, he’s just my partner.”

‘As a work of fiction the bible is OK,’ Duke said, ‘but the Good Book is too riddled with contradictions to be taken seriously. The concept of God – just, loving or vengeful -- has never worked for me.’

Stevens furiously jotted notes while Connors rubbed his chin and asked Duke about some academic papers he had written about the Black Panthers ten years ago. Connors wanted to know if Duke believed that violence was a viable political tool.

‘With apologies to Dr. King and the Mahatma, the use of violence can’t be ruled out. Sometimes there is no other way to influence the prevailing order to change. It depends on the context, on the opposition, and on the capacities of the people involved. I’d like to think that non-violent tactics always work, but I know they don’t. I don’t believe that non-violence alone would have changed the apartheid government in South Africa, for instance. Mandela said much the same thing.’

‘Do you consider yourself a radical, Professor?’ Stevens asked.

‘Define radical, Agent Stevens.’

‘A person intent on the overthrow of the existing social, economic or political order.’

Duke laughed. ‘Hell, as far as I’m concerned this is a golden age in this great country of ours. I like my democracy perverted by corporate money; I love it when my country invades other countries on false pretexts; I enjoy watching the gap between rich and poor widen every year; and I think the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex is working beautifully. I won’t even mention our glorious police state, of which you two are upstanding representatives. Of course I’m a radical – in the true sense of the word. Look it up, junior, when you have some free time.’

“It went on like this for two hours,” Duke said. “I still don’t know what the hell they were after, but I suspect the FBI isn’t the crack agency it was when J. Edgar Hoover was at the helm by day and wearing a bra and panty hose at night. Better watch your back, my friend -- you might be next. Some of that stuff you write is inflammatory.”

“If they’re worried about me, we’re in trouble.”

“Oh, we’re in the deep shit,” Duke said, “make no mistake. Deep, waist high excrement. Even Albus Dumbledore couldn’t help us now. I should have dispatched myself when I had the chance. It’s hopeless, Tang, absolutely hopeless. We had a shot, and then Obama lost his nerve. The window opened for a brief moment but instead of acting boldly, Obama veered to the safe, predictable center and lashed himself to the status quo. I knew he’d disappoint his supporters, I just didn’t think it would happen so fast. Ah, well, we will reap as we sow, and the coming harvest will not be bountiful. Keep in touch, brother.”

Poem: Saving the Temple

2010-07-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

The game went like this:
Lower taxes (for corporations & the wealthy)
Let Big Business regulate itself
Turn all things public
Private
Acquire, merge and consolidate
Create monopolies
Crush organized labor
Move jobs overseas
Keep wages low
Buy politicians

The fable went that the rich would invest & innovate
And the “free” market would provide
For the common good

Prosperity for all was guaranteed
Once the heavy hand of government
Was lifted from our shoulders

For the fortunate few it worked
Better than Merlin’s magic
Wealth attracted wealth
Like ants to honey

For the many it’s Dante’s Inferno
The Grapes of Wrath
A foreclosure notice & the unemployment line
The divide between haves and have-nots
Has widened
And widened
Like that of any banana republic

We are two nations living side by side
The United States of Fabulous Wealth
The United States of Shameful Poverty
No in-between
No middle ground
And it’s unstoppable now

The unaccountable money men who make the rules
And rule the world
Never explained how wage slaving masses
Could keep the consumer economy humming
Once credit cards were maxed and the ATM
In the living room
Spit out its last dollar

When the bubble burst and the men behind
The silken curtain were exposed
As Armani clad liars and thieves
Our government rushed to their rescue
Pledged our money
To save the Temple of Greed

We the many pay the cost
We the many make the sacrifice
We the many watch the common good
On which our lives depend
Vanish

Wrong Color, Wrong Place: The Murder of Oscar Grant

2010-07-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

What was your crime, Oscar Grant
Other than being born black
In Oakland, CA?

Face down on the cement
Handcuffed
Harmless
Shot in the back by a white transit cop
While witnesses recorded on cell phones

Born black in Oakland
Born black in America
Wrong color
Wrong place

47 years after the 16th Street Baptist Church
Bombing in Birmingham
18 years after Rodney King
Look at how far we have not come

Another white cop walks away
After murdering a black man

Though not scot free
Officer Merserle may serve less time
For killing Oscar Grant
Than Michael Vick served for killing a dog

That’s perversity not justice

Oscar Grant was killed twice
Once on that station platform in Oakland
And a second time in an LA
Courtroom

At the Expense of the Many

2010-07-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

My family and I watch the fireworks arc over Stearn’s Wharf on the 4th of July. The beach and waterfront are jammed with people and the air is heavy with the smell of a hundred BBQ grills. Traditional American rah-rah music plays from a loudspeaker on West Beach. Most of the people sitting on the sand around us are speaking Spanish. Cameras flash as the sky overhead bursts into bright green, red and gold; I see faces illuminated by the light from cell phones.

Happy birthday, America.

On this holiday night I want to think about what is right with our country, but so many things are out of whack that I can’t focus on the positive – two wars dragging on, the long term implications of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the tanked economy, the largest prison population in the world, and the perils of climate change. This is what I’m thinking about as the fireworks rise up and explode.

How do citizens change a system dominated by two political parties who tap dance to the same corporate drummer? How do we restore a healthy balance of power between capital and labor, government and big business, domestic needs and geopolitical realities? How can we fight against the enormous power wielded by corporate lawyers and lobbyists?

Under the guise of taming the Federal deficit, President Obama’s blue-ribbon deficit commission is mounting a rationale to reduce Social Security benefits, raise the retirement age (again) or both. The campaign is built on fabrications since Social Security is actually a program that pays its own way and does not contribute to the deficit, but don’t bother telling that to the commission members who have concluded (in advance) that reducing Social Security will send the right message to the financial markets. In other words, it’s once again more important to place the perceived needs of the financial sector over those of millions of average citizens.

Are we going to stand for this?

There are far better ways to reduce the Federal deficit than eviscerating Social Security, which, by the way, has been the Holy Grail of GOP conservatives for decades. How about cutting the bloated defense budget, reducing the number of U.S. bases that straddle the globe? How about eliminating subsidies for Big Oil?

Our society is structured for the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many. For the most part, the people we elect to do our business make a mockery of representative democracy. There are, to be sure, some bright, committed people in Congress, but they are overshadowed and out numbered by mediocre partisans. It took many years to bring this society into being, and it figures to take many years to unravel it in favor of something more just and sustainable.

If you want to know what a nation values, you need only watch where it spends its resources. As the fireworks soar through the summer sky, I ask myself how this country can always find money for war but rarely for peace; I ask myself why taxpayer subsidies for profitable corporations arouse little or no ire, while help for the needy or a dignified retirement for senior citizens drives the political right into a self-righteous frenzy.

The finale has begun. Boom, boom, boom, red, green, gold, star bursts and molten streamers, and the voice of Lee Greenwood singing Proud to be an American echoing on the loudspeaker. I don’t feel that pride. Instead I feel a sense of loss, of wasted opportunities, and I wonder when the people will say, “Enough.”

The Malaise

2010-06-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

(I began writing this piece before the flap over Stanley McChrystal hit the media.)

Something is terribly wrong with the American occupation of Afghanistan.

It’s not working. The Afghans are unwilling partners in the game we are playing with their country.

The world’s lone superpower appears lost and confused as it blindly chases shadows across one of the most backward countries on the planet.

Longest “war” in U.S. history.

Let that fact sink in.

Longer than the Civil War. Longer than WWII. Longer than Vietnam.

President Obama claims the U.S. will withdraw some of its combat forces in mid-2011, but in reality the U.S. has no intention of fully withdrawing from Afghanistan – not after pouring billions of dollars and at least a thousand American lives into the country. Bases and outposts are being built for a long stay by U.S. forces and private contractors, and it’s time – years past time – for American voters and taxpayers to ask why.

Why are we in Afghanistan almost nine years later? Who are we fighting? What is our primary strategic objective, and is that objective realistic? Are we in Afghanistan so that a long sought after oil pipeline can be built and then secured through the western part of the country? Are we simply after Afghanistan’s plentiful mineral reserves?

But perhaps the most important question is the one least asked by the American news media and American politicians: how many Afghans have been killed or wounded since we invaded in 2001? What’s the body count?

And let’s go further and ask another basic question: what is the will of the Afghan people? Do they want American and NATO soldiers in their country?

Time stands against us in Afghanistan, as does history. The language spoken today by the American military and political establishment is eerily familiar to that spoken during the Vietnam War. Our military firepower is unmatched, but the conflict in Afghanistan, like Vietnam, can’t be won by firepower alone.

Stanley “Poor Judgment” McChrystal is gone and David “The Miracle Worker” Petraeus is taking command, but something remains terribly wrong in Afghanistan, not to mention in Washington D.C., and Albany, NY and Sacramento, CA and Detroit, MI and Phoenix, AZ.

Call it the superpower malaise. The case might be terminal.

Iraq. Afghanistan. The BP oil hemorrhage. An economy that won’t recover for any except the wealthy. Stubbornly high unemployment. State budgets in disarray. People suffering. The national political system paralyzed, polarized, bought and paid for with campaign bribes.

I have the sense that the world’s lone superpower is like the proverbial Potemkin village – a façade, an elaborate charade – all polished surfaces perched on a rickety foundation very near total collapse. The confidence and élan we once carried as our American birthright has been replaced with apprehension and fear – fear of Muslims and Mexicans, fear of decline, fear of change, fear of the future, fear of taxes, fear of death, fear of life, fear of the dark, and, most of all, fear of the truth about our situation.

In the years following 9/11, Hunter S. Thompson referred to the U.S. as the Kingdom of Fear, but the sort of fear I’m talking about here penetrates even deeper.

We are now a nation living on borrowed time and paying the bills with borrowed money. Our politicians and their corporate masters hum the same hackneyed tunes while the shining city on the hill burns.

The Lost Highway

2010-06-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Strong-Arm – a & v, Physically powerful; (of a criminal) using violence; a thug; a bouncer. Oxford American Dictionary

The reporter for ABC’s Good Morning America program asserted that the Obama Administration has strong-armed BP into speeding up the claims process for those affected by the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Interesting choice of words.

When it comes to oil, it’s generally not the government that engages in strong-arming – it’s the oil companies, their lobbyists and legal firms – that shake down the government and taxpayers for direct subsidies, tax breaks, sweetheart deals to drill and extract on “public” land, royalty relief, and on and on and on.

But these are the days of the Tea Party movement – if one can call it that – and the corporate media is influenced by the stirring, though nonsensical, sayings of Sarah Palin, and images of angry white folk who want to take our country back – and the language of the movement advances the notion that the government is evil, profligate, intrusive and hell bent on strangling the free enterprise system. In that context, of course the Obama Administration is strong-arming poor BP and its hapless CEO, Tony Hayward, who simply and sincerely (at least he appears sincere on those TV spots) wants to make things right for all the people who live and work along the Gulf.

Well, sure, except for one minor problem: oil company CEO’s like Tony Hayward are paid huge money to do one thing -- find oil and extract it. End of story. Hayward and members of his tribe are not paid to protect the environment or even give a rat’s ass about it; when something goes wrong, CEO’s are expected to minimize the damage in any manner possible, shift the blame to others and fend off calls for increased regulatory oversight. The eventual legal outcome of the Exxon Valdez spill is a classic case in containing, deferring and reducing the financial exposure produced by a major oil spill.

BP has an abysmal safety record and evidence has recently surfaced that the company ignores safety concerns in order to lower costs and increase profits. That’s hardly a surprise. When profit is all, safety will always be a secondary concern.

The Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, is on record as saying the Obama Administration should have had contingency plans in place for a major oil spill. Perhaps. I’m no fan of Obama when it comes to energy policy – he’s far too timid, prone to siding with Big Oil by continuing his predecessor’s industry-friendly protocols, and fond of spouting absurdities about “clean coal” and nuclear power – but I wonder if Pawlenty was in hibernation during the Bush-Cheney regime. In case there is any doubt here, two terms of Bush-Cheney were a boon to Big Oil -- an absolute run of the table, keys-to-the-kingdom, party-all-the-time, raid-the-cookie-jar, oil industry love orgy.

How was the Obama Administration supposed to unravel a decade of incestuous relationships between oil company lobbyists and regulators – not to mention all the Congress critters of both parties who are addicted to Big Oil campaign contributions -- in less than half a term? How many Republicans might have supported legislation calling for improved safety systems on deep-water oil drilling rigs or increased regulatory oversight of the drilling permit process?

Drill, baby, drill.

This isn’t to acquit the Obama Administration of blame; there’s more than enough to go around. Big Oil is guilty, our government is guilty, our campaign finance system is guilty, and so are we, the American people, for our stubborn insistence that we have the right to burn all the gasoline we can afford to buy. We love our cars, our suburbs, and the freedom offered by the open road, even as that false freedom imprisons us.

Ye Shall Know Them by Their Sacrifice

2010-06-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush led and misled the nation into two wars and charged the costs – enormous costs – on the national Visa card. Barack Obama took office and continued the practice, racking up more millions in debt for future generations to deal with. The wars continue. After nearly seven years, Iraq has settled into a mire of internecine and sectarian conflict that could flare up at any time, but at least the death rate for American soldiers has declined.

We should celebrate that fact, right?

We don’t tally the Iraqi dead or dislocated. It’s their country but they don’t matter enough to count how many have died or fled since Dick and Junior unleashed the hounds of war.

Afghanistan is another story. We stormed in full of retributive rage, kicked Taliban ass, relaxed and congratulated ourselves while the Taliban regrouped; when it became clear the Taliban wasn’t going to fold, we found ourselves in a fight in a very inhospitable land. Obama has doubled down, sending in more troops, investing more money, changing tactics…

But the costs of the war are still out of sight and mind, off the radar of most Americans because no sacrifice is required of us; we are not asked to change our lifestyles to support the war effort, we are only asked to salute the “brave men and women who stand in harm’s way” on Memorial Day and the 9/11 Anniversary. No draft to frighten the wits out of suburban kids and make them think – really think – about the realities of war, about what constitutes a real threat to the nation’s security, and about what justifies sending American men and women to distant lands to fight and die.

No general sacrifice. No war tax to pay the costs. Business as usual with the wars as minor inconvenience, a remote event to check in on every now and then. No images of dead Americans on the tube every night. No protests on college campuses. No riots. No sit-ins or teach-ins.

Same tale in the energy sphere. As oil bleeds from the Gulf of Mexico I remember Jimmy Carter in his sweater, in the late 70’s, solemnly telling Americans that we had to change our profligate ways and learn to conserve natural resources. Thermostat down, sweater on; smaller, more fuel efficient cars; mass transit systems; regulations on polluting industries. To show how serious he was about energy conservation, Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof. Carter was right but perhaps too far ahead of his time, too honest with an electorate rattled by the Arab oil embargo and a dragging economy to accept that even America, the chosen nation, had to face limits.

When Reagan had the solar panels removed politicians everywhere took note of the political lesson: don’t dare ask Americans to sacrifice – those JFK ask-what-you-can-do-for-your-country days are over. Promise the people small government and low taxes, cheap gasoline, easy credit, and, above all, preach non-stop the inherent beauty of the free market. Happy days are here again and will stay forever as long as Big Business is allowed to operate unfettered by Big Government.

Reagan had the lines and the delivery, the actor’s ability to make us believe in an impossible dream. One of the worst things we did was to allow the oil companies to consolidate and become bigger and more powerful than ever, with economic and political clout unseen since the days of the Standard Oil trust. Unfortunately, we do not have a Teddy Roosevelt in our midst to restore order.

We want cheap, plentiful gasoline and a clean environment, but the two are incompatible. Oil extraction is messy, dangerous and damaging to the environment no matter how much commercial time ExxonMobil or BP or Chevron buy to convince us otherwise. We can burn oil or have a semi-livable planet, but not both.

No sacrifice at the national level, no sacrifice on the local either. We demand good schools, smooth roads, fire and police protection, clean air and water, parks and open spaces, but we don’t want to pay the price for these things. We fall victim to talking points and mantras spoken by charlatans and posers: taxes are evil, government can do nothing right, privatize everything, leave the wealthy alone and the poor to fend for themselves.

The point of no return went by in a blur.

We are the United States of No Sacrifice.

Unholy Blockade

2010-06-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

Leave it to the Israeli government to open a locked door with an American made sledgehammer rather than a key. I wonder if Israel’s rulers have finally done something so heinous that the world will not allow it to fade away.

While most of the world condemns Israel, the US is doing its usual contortions, mumbling when it should speak loudly and clearly, calling for an “investigation” that might take months or years to conclude, and come to nothing.

Israel is spinning the story of its assault on a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for besieged Gaza, downplaying the death of at least ten and perhaps more people, and acting as if Israel was only retaliating against a direct attack by some of the world’s most notorious and heavily armed terrorists.

Among those in the flotilla were a member of the Israeli parliament, an ex-US Ambassador and a clergyman. Tough bunch, hardened in battle. Sure.

For Israel it’s the same tired and outrageous story of disproportionate response. Eighteen months ago Israel launched a blistering three-weeks-long attack on the Gaza Strip, purportedly in response for Hamas rocket attacks, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians and wreaking total havoc on a defenseless population. Liken it to shooting fish in a barrel. Cluster bombs, white phosphorous, Hellfire missiles, artillery – some of the deadliest hardware available, a good deal of it supplied by the US government – were employed to punish Gazans for supporting Hamas.

Never mind that Hamas won election in Gaza in 2006, fair and square. The Bush-Cheney junta found the outcome unacceptable and refused to recognize the new and legitimate government -- because, you see -- the US only supports democracy when it produces a result the US approves of. Hamas was not supposed to win the election, and even today the CIA makes no mention of the election, instead insisting that Hamas seized power by force.

But back to the flotilla and Israel’s latest outrage: 700 passengers of conscience, young and old, men and women, representing forty nations, determined to deliver desperately needed aid to Gaza, knowingly sailing into the teeth of the Israeli blockade, and probably not surprised when gunboats and helicopters appeared, hell bent on stopping the flotilla right there in international waters. Not that Israel gives a damn about international law: no nation on earth flouts international law more frequently than Israel, except perhaps North Korea.

Not that I’m linking Israel to a charter member of the Axis of Evil. No, I support Israel’s right to defend itself as much as I condemn Israel for its brutal, inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. The problem seems to be that Israel can no longer discern a mild threat from a grave one. As Noam Chomsky recently wrote -- after being denied entry into the West Bank city of Ramallah by the Israeli government -- “It (Israel) has become far more paranoid, defensive, irrational and ultranationalist.”

Yes, starving a population of 1.5 million people is irrational, as is attacking a flotilla of vessels carrying aid to those people. Definitely irrational, possibly illegal, certainly inhuman, but Israel acts as defiant as ever, secure under the protection of the American umbrella and armed to the teeth with American military hardware.

Imagine if the tables were turned and ten Israeli civilians were murdered while on a humanitarian mission; I doubt the United States would sit idly by, parsing words.

Endless War Memorials

2010-05-31T07:04:00.000-07:00

Nine years fighting in Afghanistan, seven years of occupation in Iraq, a trillion dollars spent, thousands killed, wounded and maimed, and the lives of hundreds of thousands forever changed.

Happy Memorial Day. Slap another burger on the grill, crack another beer, pass the potato chips.

Counting private military contractors paid for by the American taxpayers, and UN personnel, there are upwards of 150,000 foreigners in Afghanistan. In the middle of this onslaught, Stanley McChrystal, the American commander, claims that the safety of Afghan civilians is his top priority.

Memo to Stanley: Civilians are the first casualties of armed conflict. The more of them you kill, the more their survivors will want to kill you.

Iraq is now a “democracy,” but so fractured that a government cannot be assembled. The weakness of the government leads to anger or opportunism among the populace, which leads to shootings and car bombings and suicide attacks, which leads to calls for increased security. U.S. “combat” forces are due to depart Iraq this summer (wink, wink), but don’t fret, the Americans aren’t going anywhere – not with billions of gallons of proven oil reserves under their semi-permanent and permanent military facilities, not to mention the largest embassy complex on the planet.

As author Kevin Phillips said, the U.S. military is now an “oil protection force.” Spread your world map out and notice where U.S. military facilities or rapid deployment resources are positioned, and the correlation between oil supplies and America’s “strategic interests” become sickeningly clear. “Strategic interests” is a euphemism the U.S. employs to give itself the right to use force wherever it deems appropriate.

In other words, where there is oil there are U.S. forces. This is the true fight for freedom and the American way of life.

Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are undeclared. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war. Dick Cheney still laughs about how easy it was to get around that minor stipulation.

Nine years in Afghanistan, seven years in Iraq. Do you feel safer? Has the sacrifice in blood and coin been worth it?

Meanwhile, the source of much of the conflict between the Arab world and the west is ignored: Israel and the Palestinians. Today, in fact, Israeli defense forces attacked a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, killing between ten and nineteen people depending on what news sources you believe. Naturally, the Israelis claim they were fired upon by the civilians in the flotilla, or battled at close quarters by humanitarian activists armed with knives and clubs. Right. We’re expected to believe that a group of humanitarian activists would choose to take on the Israeli army.

World leaders – with the exception of the U.S., of course -- have been quick to condemn Israel’s latest actions as disproportionate. This is the same condemnation that was leveled when Israel launched a brutal attack against Gaza in 2009. More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed and much of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed during that campaign – the point of which was to demonstrate to the people of Gaza the futility of siding with Hamas.

Israel has since blockaded Gaza, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis that the world would not tolerate were it happening anyplace else, but when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, all bets are off, and the political and diplomatic justifications for saying and doing nothing become as contorted as the lengths taken to ignore all moral questions.

Poem - Flag Burning

2010-05-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

I sat with my buddy Dave
In his manicured back yard
The Weber grill smoked and our New York steaks
Hissed and dripped

We drank our bottles of Corona in silence
A dove cooed and the wind danced in the
Chinese elm above our heads
And old Vin Scully called the Dodgers-Cubs game

Dave used to talk a lot, laugh a lot
But that was before Jimmy joined the Army
And got posted to Iraq

Jimmy was a decent kid, tall and skinny
With his father’s strong hands and his mother’s green eyes

Dave was against Jimmy joining
I remember him saying,
“There’s no reason for this war.”

Twenty-seven days after he landed in Iraq
Jimmy got blown to bits by an IED
They found his dog tags and a bloody boot

The Army major that came to Dave’s door
Said the nation owed Jimmy a debt of gratitude
Dave told the man: “Get off my porch.”

And then Dave quit talking and started dying
His grief eating him the same way we ate our steaks
One bite at a time, chewing slowly

Dave soaked the folded flag the Army gave him
With gasoline and put a match to it
In his peaceful American yard
On Memorial Day

Poem - Calamity

2010-05-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

Caused by the greed of man
The insatiable desire for profit
At any cost

Millions of gallons of oil
Flowing
Oozing
Seeping
Toward the pristine marshes
Along the Louisiana coastline

BP talks
The US Government talks
The media tries to explain
A golden chain of deceit stretches from one corporate
Boardroom to the next;
The best lawyers in the land seek
To minimize the damage;
PR flacks spin like ice dancers

The oil keeps flowing
But even staring down disaster
The oil barons seek to drill and pump and destroy
And our cowardly government can’t say no

The barons and the government regulators
Have slept in the same bed for too long

We the People and our planet
Are treated like pawns
In their great game

Kill the Golden Bear, Once and for All

2010-05-20T05:11:00.000-07:00

Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are slugging it out in California with fistfuls of cash and platoons of campaign consultants.

At stake is the GOP nomination for the Governorship of a state that is reeling under the weight of a $19 billion budget shortfall – and zero new ideas for how to close that stifling gap. All the Schwarzenegger administration can muster is a plan to slash health care services for children and shut-ins, and continue to fund public education at a level where it can only produce Mississippi-type mediocrity – ideas that are sure to be stymied by the Democrats.

Meaning the state budget will be held hostage as it usually is, with much posturing, lies, fabrications, wild speeches and threats of IOU’s and shuttered parks, all through the hot summer and probably into the early Fall.

While that goes on, Whitman the political neophyte and Poizner the nerdy wannabe, argue about who will be tougher on illegal immigrants, who will tame the evil “unions” that pull the Democrats’ strings, and who will create thousands of new, green, good paying jobs. Both candidates harp on their experience in the private sector – as if the for-profit arena is the Holy Grail. The logic goes something like this: “If I can run a company like E-Bay then I can surely run the State of California, and I promise you I will run it like a business.”

Business, you see, is always efficient, cost-effective, fair, just, color blind, mindful of the environment and focused on delivering the products and services people want at a price they can afford.

Government, in contrast, is slow, wasteful, inefficient, unfair, bloated and populated with slackers who can’t cut it in the free market.

That logic is fatally flawed, of course, but truth is elusive on the campaign trail, and in a 30 second TV ad almost anything goes. So Poizner claims that Whitman supports Obama’s immigration policies (which are, what, exactly?) and Whitman claims that Poizner is really a closet liberal who once voted for – hold on here – Al Gore!

Every time I think politics can’t get any dumber up pops some Tea Party spokesperson yammering about taking our country back. I still don’t know whose iron grip the Tea Party folks want to break. I think they mean Barack Obama, but that’s so nonsensical given the Obama Administration’s limp policies that it can’t possibly be true.

But back to California, the steadily expiring Golden Bear. Republicans will fall on their swords before supporting tax increases of any kind. Democrats, on the other hand, face ostracism if they dare support cuts to social services. Talk about stalemate. The state’s structural deficit will never be addressed, Proposition 13 will remain the most sacred of sacred cows, and the oil industry will continue to extract oil from California without paying a dime in severance taxes. The more the state flounders, the more desperate voters become, with the end result being that wing-nut politicians, professional or novice, begin to look attractive, even reasonable.

The Golden Bear is blind in one eye, minus a hind paw, and lame in its front leg; it can barely shuffle along let alone run as it once did from the high sierras to the coast, from the redwoods to the desert. Nobody messed with the Golden Bear back in the day, but that day ended a long time ago.

Goliath vs The Pygmies

2010-05-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

Glory to the French and the Greeks. May Americans learn something from our feisty European friends.

When the governments of France or Greece try to screw their people with austerity measures and unravel the social safety net, the people have enough gumption to pour into the streets and make some racket.

By contrast, Americans display all the fire of tree sloths. We’ve been getting screwed for decades, and for the most part have taken our screwing silently and on our knees. Oh, we get exercised about abortion and illegal immigration, make no mistake about that, but when it comes to having our pockets picked clean by corporate greed heads, we can’t be bothered to lift a middle finger in protest.

As the crime goes down we listen to fools like Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh and O’Reilly, swallow the rot they spew about the evil federal government; we watch network news anchors who rarely connect the dots between economic policy and the fate of average Americans; and we routinely vote against our self-interests because we believe the “free” market gibberish peddled from the corporate media.

Our problem isn’t too much government; our problem is too little government. Ever since Ronald Reagan rode into Washington D.C. determined to restore America’s faith in its own myths and fables, corporate power has grown while the countervailing power of government has declined. The results are visible in almost every industry: energy, food, telecommunications, transportation, banking, and finance, health care. Corporations are bigger and more economically and politically potent than at any time since the Gilded Age and the heyday of big trusts. Tea Party faithful constantly evoke the Founding Fathers, but what that rabble conveniently forget is how wary the Founders were of power – particularly power concentrated in too few hands. This is one reason why we have (or had until Bush Jr’s imperial presidency) three co-equal branches of government. Each branch has certain powers along with limits to those powers, all designed to check and balance one another.

Balancing power is the same reason we had anti-trust laws and the Glass-Steagal act.

But the anti-trust laws that helped crack Standard Oil and other trusts have been systematically weakened ever since Reagan set his jellybean jar on the desk in the Oval Office. Regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor have been systematically gutted or neutered, tilting the balance of power in favor of the wealthy and corporations. Size and capital equate to political power, lobbying power and campaign contribution (bribery) power. Corporations are not only too big to fail, they are also too big to regulate and control.

It’s not David vs. Goliath anymore – it’s Goliath vs. an unarmed pygmy.

This revolution of power happened right in front of us and with our silent consent. Trade and monetary policies eliminated our jobs and sent them to Mexico, Thailand and China; tax policies favored capital over labor; labor laws were diluted, overturned or ignored without penalty, and our entire economy became dedicated to the enrichment of corporations, investors, speculators and stockholders. Government services that were designed to help ordinary people live better lives were outsourced to corporations who always place profit first and people second. In the brave new universe of the infallible free market, the inherently fair and just free market, the efficient free market, wage earners no longer mattered, and neither did the public’s interest.

The Greeks and the French take to the streets; Americans retreat to the safety of their living rooms, hunker down in front of plasma TV’s with a bucket of fast food and lose themselves in trivia. The corporations and the wealthy have nothing to fear from us; they know how accustomed we’ve become to living on our knees, pygmies in Goliath’s shadow.

Voices: Chet Walker, Escondido, California

2010-05-05T18:19:00.001-07:00

My son is all into politics. Campaigned for Obama, plastered his Toyota with bumper stickers, the whole bit. I’m getting old and cynical. I tell him not to waste his time trying to make the country better. The only way to clean a cesspool is to drain it, know what I mean? Jeff complains that the whole system is corrupted by money, well, no kidding, Sherlock! I’ve been a plumbing contractor for 38 years, never spent a minute in a college classroom, and I know that money talks – and big money talks really loud. Jeff seems surprised that congressmen and senators and judges are bought every day. It’s like he believes these people get into politics for pure motives or something, or that once they get elected or appointed they become saints. Jeff’s educated, but he’s not smart, know what I mean? Understand the difference? Brains, yes, smarts, no. Jeff wants me to call my congressman about this, my senator about that, as if those people give a rat’s behind for my opinion. I tell him to put himself in their place. Are you going to listen to some schmuck back home or the corporate lobbyist who pays for your TV ads? No brainer, right? Might as well vote for Donald Duck. Rich people own this country, always have and always will. Don’t get me wrong, though – Jeff’s heart is in the right place – it’s just that his head is buried in the sand. You want to know what politics does? I’ll tell you. When you get right down to it all it does is make robbery legal. What the hell do I need it for? Like I don’t have enough aggravation in my daily life? What I care about is whether or not my Mexican crew will show up tomorrow, on time, sober, prepared to do a day’s work. Dumb as posts, some of these Mexicans, but in the plumbing business that’s what you work with. Jeff says I’m racist, but it’s not true. I could pay my guys less, squeeze them a little more, but I don’t and never have. Give me the choice between a Mexican and a white redneck, I take the Mexican every single time. I care about customers who don’t pay my invoices on time and don’t seem concerned about it, like I’m some sort of charitable organization. I care about sub-contractors who cut corners and make me look bad. Yeah, I got plenty to worry about without taking on politics. My son’s a bleeding heart, just like his mother, my first wife, who slept with my partner and screwed me but good in the divorce. Don’t get me started. Politics, OK, that’s one thing, my ex-wife’s a whole different story. I’d rather spend a day digging a trench in hell than talk about her. Know what I mean?

It's Just Brown People Dying

2010-05-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Imagine for a moment that in the last three years the murder rate in Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver, Canada had shot up 300%, and that by official government statistics more than 20,000 people had died at the hands of drug traffickers, small-time drug dealers, run-of-the-mill thugs and corrupt local, state and federal police. Imagine that Canada’s army now patrols the streets of the three cities, but despite the presence of armed troops, the murder rate continues at the same relentless pace. Some citizens claim the army itself is implicated in the killings. The government insists that the police and the court system are turning the tide, winning the war, but few arrests are ever made, even when murders happen in broad daylight on a crowded avenue. Everyone seems to know who the killers are, but nobody ever sees a thing.

If this were happening in Canada, what would the response be on this side of the border? Would the American media devote some precious airtime – say a quarter of the time devoted to Tiger Woods and his many mistresses -- to report on the killings? Would Diane Sawyer from ABC News or Katie Couric from CBS jet across the border for a hard-hitting interview with Canada’s Prime Minister? Would Anderson Cooper report live from the scene of a killing?

If this were happening in Canada, would it merit more than passing attention from the politicians and pundits in Washington D.C.?

Not to worry -- Canada is as peaceful as ever. It’s Mexico, our southern neighbor that is awash in violence and death and at a risk of becoming a completely failed state, though if you depend for information on the American news media, you’d hardly know it.

Why the selective myopia? Is it because most of the people being murdered are brown-skinned? Is this simply racism, writ large? Given the draconian law recently passed in Arizona – and let us hope the courts strike this perversity from the books - one wonders about the racist bent in the American character.

According to author and journalist Charles Bowden, the U.S. gives Mexico around a half billion dollars a year to fight the drug war. The money is used for training and equipment, logistics, and so on. Half a billion dollars in annual aid, but the war goes on and the murders continue at a pace that makes the U.S. death toll in Iraq look frivolous by comparison. The major drug cartels battle one another for control of territory and routes. Local, state and federal police are supposed to stop the cartels, disrupt supply lines and make arrests, but the “authorities” seem bent on capturing a piece of the business rather than shutting it down.

And, of course, drugs continue to flow across the border, arriving on schedule for those that want or need them.

Everything related to Mexico and the drug business is upside down, Alice in Wonderland style. The cartels are as well armed as the Mexican army, the police act like drug lords, the courts never convict anyone, and trust is the scarcest commodity in the country.

The drug trade has replaced foreign factories as the employer of choice for young Mexican men. Why slave in a maquiladora for peanut wages when you can make real money in the drug business? What’s the incentive to lead a virtuous life when everyone around you is living on the dim side of what law and order remains? The desire for a long life might lose currency when all seems destined to get worse, never better.

What is behind all this death and suffering? Sure, the American appetite for illegal drugs has played a supporting role, but isn’t it more systemic than that? What role has NAFTA played in changing Mexico’s economy? The trade treaty obliterated small farmers and sent thousands, perhaps millions, of people in search of work. When manufacturing jobs began to dry up because production moved to China – whose workers were willing to slave for even less than Mexicans -- millions of Mexican workers had little choice but to make the trek to El Norte. Hard to blame them: on one side, unemployment, drug killings, lawlessness, endemic official corruption, failed institutions; on the other, the unknown in a country that has grown increasingly inhospitable to Mexican immigrants, even though the economies of border states depend on a steady supply of Mexicans willing to do difficult, dangerous, dirty, tedious and low-paying jobs.

Today in Los Angeles it’s estimated that 100,000 people will march to protest Arizona’s new immigration law. Will this demonstration and others like it lead the U.S. to begin asking deeper, more fundamental questions about Mexico?

Don’t count on it.

Boiling Point

2010-04-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

If you’re an average American who works for wages you should be madder than hell, and if you’re not, well, maybe you’re deaf, dumb and blind, comatose from habitual drug use or just too damn busy trying to earn a living to pay attention to the heist that has been perpetrated on you for the last thirty years or so.

We’ve been bottle-fed poison Kool-Aid.

I’m talking the Reagan Revolution, supply side economics, union busting, disdain for the environment, and a steady expansion of corporate power at the expense of wage earners, consumers and, in some cases, stock holders. Ronnie rode tall in the saddle and spouted platitudes about the American Dream, hard work, pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps, the glory of capitalism, shining cities on far away hills reserved for the very rich and fair skinned.

Nothing’s been the same since that seismic shift in the political landscape. Democrats panicked and moved rightward, closer to Reagan’s long shadow, and in the process abandoned their historical constituencies. Today, once you sift through the hyperbole and the posturing and the disinformation talking points, it’s impossible to tell a Democrat from a Republican; both take money from Big Business and worship at the crooked temple of crony capitalism.

We’ve been lied to.

Working people should be furious, steaming, bursting with rage, and these feelings should – unlike those light-skinned Tea Party whack jobs who are mainly pissed off at becoming a demographic minority and rail against liberals and phantom socialists because at least doing so gives them a target -- be directed where they belong and where they might make change possible.

We’ve been lulled to sleep by fairy tales and folk tales, myth and fantasy.

Here’s the truth: Goldman Sachs recently reported its first quarter earnings, a tidy sum of $3.5 billion. Not bad for a firm that was on the ropes and might have expired save for Henry Paulson and an infusion of our dollars; not bad for a firm that may soon be under investigation from the SEC, though that possibility is unlikely to keep the politically-connected folks at Goldman awake at night. They’ll take a hand slap for their pals in the financial services industry, if they have to, but then it will be back to business as usual. Goldman knows this, and so does the government. But the charade is useful on the off chance the public wakes up and realizes how thoroughly it has been deceived.

Timothy Geithner, Wall Street alum and current Treasury Secretary, was on ABC’s Good Morning America the other day, spinning his tale of financial industry reform. According to TG, legislation now worming its way through Congress will make future bank bailouts unlikely, prevent banks from growing into behemoths (too late, TG! the handful of major banks left are already behemoth-size and get to stay that way), and bring derivatives and other esoteric financial instruments out of the darkness and into the light of day. Oh, and TG also advanced the laughable fiction that the American economy is growing stronger. Yes, TG of Wall Street said that. He could just as well have claimed that white is black, black is white, nicotine isn’t addictive and Oxycontin is good for the soul.

Stronger? Cities, counties and state governments are broke, cutting back essential services that primarily benefit the poor, laying off workers, bitching about pension obligations, demanding wage concessions, firing teachers and shortening the school year. Unemployment is still sky high and the pace of home foreclosures isn’t slowing. Where except on Wall Street and K Street in Washington D.C. are these signs of strength? Get with the program, sucker: Wall Street investors and speculators are feeling optimistic, and what else matters in America but how the investor class feels? Our entire economy is organized to make the investor class happy.

Fuck Main Street.

Yeah, raging mad, short of breath, heart banging in the chest like a piston gone berserk. Every industry is too fucking big to fail: banking, insurance, telecommunications, energy, food. Under the banner of “capitalism” and “free enterprise” the corporate honchos and their lobbying firms wrote the rules that became the laws that allowed them to create profitable monopolies. And guess what? They have no intention of giving up those monopolies. CEO’s talk a good game about competition and how it brings out the best in people and companies and weeds out the weak, timid and slow, but it’s all bullshit. Like Russian mobsters, CEO’s want a rigged game and a reliable revenue stream. Why compete when you can acquire your competition and grow, grow, grow, free from anti-trust hassles?

We’ve been molested, like deaf altar boys.

Reagan’s homilies and Clinton’s betrayal of working people with NAFTA sent American jobs out of this country like roaches running from ultraviolet light; first it was Mexico, and after that Taiwan and Thailand, Vietnam, and then the Promised Land of cheap, exploitable labor: China. China, the corporate CEO’s wet dream. Cheap labor, no unions or pesky EPA regulations to grapple with, no OSHA headaches or wage disputes. China and Wal-Mart gave us low prices for people who make peanut wages – and this was, is, touted as a miraculous thing, that though you toil 40 hours a week for minimum wage at a dead-end job, you can still buy the latest crap at Wal-Mart. Thank you, China and your exploited workers. Then Bush Jr’s complete and total fucking of working people, the environment, and the constitution.

The campaign money, the lobbyists, the buying and selling of politicians, judges, regulators, pollsters and journalists that is now part and parcel of our political system have produced a bumper crop of social injustice.

Aren’t you sick of it?

Might as well get used to it because it’s probably here to stay.

Our rectums are bleeding, swollen, torn from the abuse we’ve taken at the hands of crooked politicians and criminal corporations. Take a good look around with your eyes wide open: note the devastation made possible by our collective passivity.

Who Are These People?

2010-04-15T19:43:00.000-07:00

Let me make this clear at the outset: the Tea Party does not speak for me. I prefer to think for myself, speak for myself, and not be swayed by the worst excesses of a mob mentality.

Who do these people want to take the nation back from? Do they really think Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are socialists or are they just flat stupid, like their heroine, Sarah Palin? If Obama, Pelosi and Reid are socialists, I’m a fascist. The problem with Obama is not that he leans too far left but that he’s too wedded to the center. Putting Obama on a poster with Chairman Mao is like putting Adolf Hitler on the same poster with Saint Francis of Assisi – it just makes no sense.

Here’s another thing: I don’t mind paying my fair share of income taxes, as long as the money is used to enhance the common good. I like smooth roads and highways, safe airline travel, national parks, clean air, drinking water and oceans, and sensible regulation that prevents too much power from concentrating in too few hands.

What I don’t like is watching public dollars siphoned off for private gain or wasted on wars of choice or for maintaining a gargantuan military/security/intelligence apparatus. Although I’d like to keep more of the money I earn, I’m not in favor of abolishing the federal income tax, as the Tea Party faithful advocate at every turn. That’s a ludicrous idea in a complex, interconnected society, but then again, most of the ideas parroted by the Tea Party are ludicrous.

But, OK, it’s a kick to mass in the streets with like minded folks, carrying a picket sign, chanting slogans (even totally goofy slogans), and making your opinion known.

Where was the Tea Party when Bush and Cheney were raping the Constitution, fabricating a rational to invade Iraq, torturing detainees, and giving the richest Americans generous tax breaks?

We're Back, Baby!

2010-04-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

The segment on Good Morning America began with the obligatory shot of the trading floor on the New York Stock Exchange, and a breathless voice over about the surging Dow Jones Industrial Average, now above 11,000 points for the first time in more than a year. “U.S. Economy on the Mend” read the caption.

If you reside in the real world of work, wages and debt, mainstream media coverage of the economy never ceases to amuse. The network one watches doesn’t make a difference because they all report the same way, with the stock market portrayed as the Be All, End All, harbinger of the U.S. economy. If the market is up it must mean that the economy is sound. The corporate frame around the story is fitted so tight that it makes the report virtually meaningless.

The surging Dow’s impact on consumers follows the rosy stock report. No mention of jobs or wages, just a straight leap to a prediction of consumer behavior, whether or not more homes and cars will be sold, now that the economy is vibrating again and our woes are behind us. Break out the champagne, in short, because happy days are here again.

Except happy days are not here again, at least not on Elm Street and Main Street and Patriot Avenue – no, on those streets, and hundreds more like them, a hundred or a thousand miles from Wall Street -- jobs are still scarce and homes are still being foreclosed, many sit empty, and broken dreams lay strewn in the street like autumn leaves; city and state governments are broke and cutting services to the poor, leaving streets in disrepair, furloughing employees and letting school teachers go -- though there’s no mention of these cold truths from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS or CNN. The networks have adopted the feel good narrative and facts aren’t allowed to interfere. Say it with us, America: happy days are here again. America is back!

So, how’re things on your street? When was your last pay increase? How’re you making out with the rent or mortgage, food and fuel costs, college tuition, your IRA, insurance premiums, doctor bills, car payments and other household expenses? You feeling optimistic, now that the Dow is above 11,000? Does that piece of news lift your spirits and fill you with hope?

I didn’t think so. We live in the real world.

Liar, Liar

2010-04-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

I hate to be lied to, whether by one of my children or the President of the United States.

Our president was in Afghanistan recently, meeting with our corrupt surrogate, Hamid Karzai, and then, clad in his Air Force One jacket, giving a pep talk to the troops. I certainly wouldn’t expect the president to create a somber mood by telling the troops the truth about our situation in Afghanistan, but on the other hand I don’t expect him to outright lie.

But the fact is that all American presidents lie at some point. Perhaps Obama honestly believes that our Afghan adventure wasn’t a war of choice, and that invading the country in 2001 was the only option by which we could punish Al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps Obama also believes that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are one and the same, interchangeable parts, with identical aims and ideals. Perhaps Obama was expressing realistic hope when he said that our presence is paving the way for a golden age of peace and prosperity in a country that has experienced neither in decades. Perhaps Obama knows something that most Americans don’t, some secret that will allow us to “win” this war and one day soon bid Afghanistan fond farewell, with a ticker tape parade through the streets of Kabul.

And perhaps Obama believes in Santa Claus, leprechauns, and the Easter Bunny.

After 9/11 the United States had options besides launching an invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, but the public needed vengeance to dampen its shock and fear, George W. Bush needed to look tough, so in we went. Recall that American forces routed the Taliban in 2001 and early 2002, though the rout didn’t stick. If we couldn’t defeat the Taliban then what makes our chances any better today? Why do we need more troops in 2010 than we did in 2002?

The Taliban and Al-Qaeda are allies of convenience, not a united bloc moving in unison toward world domination though characterizing them as such works effectively for manipulating American voters.

What Obama didn’t say the other day is that this war of choice is unwinnable and will continue for many more years, through shifting strategies, changes in command on the ground, ultimatums to the Afghan government and half-hearted promises to NATO. The U.S. will prop Karzai up until he does something so stupid or outrageous that he leaves the U.S. no choice but to remove him. (You can be sure the CIA already has contingency plans drawn to topple Karzai and install a successor.) American forces and contractors will lumber around Afghanistan, chasing the Taliban, counting the dead and wounded, and causing collateral civilian deaths and casualties that will insure the Taliban always has a fresh supply of recruits. Kill one, recruit six is a sure-fire recipe for endless war.

Obama’s dream of an Afghanistan at peace and enjoying prosperity is preposterous. The President is intelligent and knows very well that Afghans have been at war almost continuously for thirty years; peace and prosperity are not on the horizon.

How will this war play out at home? Coupled with the forever occupation of Iraq, the Afghan war will drive federal budget deficits and create political pressure to slash Medicare costs and “reform” Social Security, in addition to blocking efforts to stimulate the economy and put Americans back to work. Such pressure is building now, with major media outlets like the New York Times sounding dire warnings about Social Security. Cutting entitlement programs is promoted as the only way to control the deficit, because, you see, we cannot cut funding for war and occupation and homeland security while our brave troops are in harm’s way.

History is replete with tales of powerful nations that get in over their heads and then find it difficult, if not impossible, to get out. When a nation sinks blood and coin in a foreign adventure the last thing it can accept is departing empty-handed, in disgrace and with its flag in tatters. President Obama knows we’re headed for that fate in Afghanistan, certainly, and possibly in Iraq as well, but for now he plays his commander-in-chief role, distorting the truth in order to exhort the troops.

Several years hence, when Obama writes his memoirs, he’ll assert that he had no choice but to carry the torch handed him by his predecessor.

That will also be a lie.

Mad As Hell in the GOP

2010-03-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

The health care bill passed by a narrow margin late Sunday night, with every member of the Republican party voting nay. Afterwards, while the Democrats were hooting and hollering to beat the band, slapping one another on the back, dancing in the polished corridors, jabbering into cell phones and sending out Twitter messages to their supporters, a group of Republicans including John McCain, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Tom Coburn gathered in McCain’s cavernous office.

“How about a beer, John?” McCain asked Boehner.

“Hell no!” Boehner snarled. “Gimme scotch, straight up.”

“I’ll take a club soda if you have any,” Senator Coburn, an M.D. in his previous incarnation, said.

“Kentucky sour mash,” Mitch McConnell said, dropping on the sofa. “I’ve got two words for Barack Obama: Tea Party!”

“Gay people are tearing apart the moral fabric of our nation,” said Senator Coburn, bowing his head in silent prayer.

McConnell looked at his colleague, shrugged his shoulders, and raised his glass in mock toast. “With this bill, socialism has come to America. There’s no going back, my friends.”

“Hell no!” Boehner said. “I will not let Democrats slap a tax on tanning salons or on decent Americans who want the freedom to stay tanned year round.”

McCain’s cell phone rang. “Oh shit,” he said, “it’s that dingbat, Sarah Palin. What the fuck can she want? Hey, Sarah, what’s up? Yeah, the bill passed. Why? Well, the other side has more votes than we do. Yeah, sure, I hear what you’re saying but we couldn’t refuse to vote on the bill, it doesn’t work that way. We’ll do our best to tie it up in the Senate with procedural moves, but at the end of the day, the lefties have the votes. What’s that? No, I haven’t looked at your FaceBook page. OK, OK, I’ve got to run. Talk to ya’ later.”

McCain snapped his cell phone shut. “Crazy fucking broad. She’d still be a nobody if it weren’t for me.”

“And you might be president if you’d picked a different running mate,” said Mitch McConnell. “Oh, well, water under the bridge.”

“Hell no!” Boehner said, slamming his glass down on McCain’s desk. “The people of America are angry, I’m angry, my mother’s angry.”

“Is your mother on Medicare, John?” McCain asked with a wink.

“As a matter of fact she is,” Boehner said. “Are you calling me a hypocrite?”

“Who will join me in prayer?” asked Tom Coburn.

“May all Democrats go straight to hell,” said McCain.

“Amen,” said Mitch McConnell.

“Amen,” echoed John Boehner. “Another club soda, Tom? I can’t believe you don’t drink. How the hell can you stay sane in this commie town without a stiff drink now and then?”

“I lean on the Lord,” Coburn said.

Mitch McConnell rolled his eyes. “Where was the Lord tonight, Tom? Why did He sit by and allow the Democrats to shove this terrible bill down the throats of the American people?”

“Ah, shit, Mitch,” Boehner said, “you know as well as we do that the Lord works in mysterious ways. C’mon, how we going to repeal this piece of crap?”

McCain refilled his glass. “We’re going to obstruct, delay, reject, and refuse to ratify anything the Administration proposes from this day forward. We’re going to get back to our core values – protecting the American people from terrorists, exploiting natural resources, and providing tax relief to the wealthy.”

“Hell yes!” Boehner said. “And when we regain control of the House and I become Speaker, I will wreak terrible vengeance on the Democrats.”

“Amen,” said Tom Coburn. “I raise my glass of club soda to that.”

Health Care Flim Flam

2010-03-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

You’d think the end of the world is nigh the way President Obama and the Democrats are talking about the health care bill. “Now or never,” they say, or “a flawed bill is better than no bill,” and “if we don’t pass a bill now, we won’t have another chance.” Much of the jabber is of a political nature, with the Democrats focused on the implications of failing to pass a bill rather than passing a bill that will really qualify as “reform.” Obama is campaigning for the bill as if his political future depends on it, framing his talk as the American people against the special interests, which is about as dishonest as it gets if you examine the history of this legislation over the past year.

The special interests -- insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospital lobbies, the American Medical Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce – controlled the debate from the outset. The first thing they made sure of was to sweep real reform from the table by dismissing Medicare for All as unrealistic, even though a majority of Americans support expanding Medicare. Average people understand that a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system is efficient and cost-effective.

If the bill about to emerge from Congress becomes law, some citizens will be forced to buy health insurance from the very companies that have been reaping profits by denying care, dropping the sick, and creating a gauntlet of barriers that only a team of corporate lawyers can decipher.

What will this “historic reform bill,” as the New York Times describes it, do for you and yours? As far as I can tell, it won’t do squat to reduce my employer’s $10 million annual premium, which means that cost increases will continue to be passed to employees. Another two or three years of double digit premium hikes and it won’t surprise me one bit if my employer is forced to drop its health insurance plan all together.

Politics is said to be the art of the possible, but what can one hope for when what is possible is limited from the opening bell? Regardless of what happens with this health bill, the United States will still have a dismal health care delivery system that is expensive, inefficient and unfair. Sick people, be they young or old, will continue to die unnecessarily because to treat them appropriately would cut into insurance company and Big Pharma profits, and that’s a no-no in a country dominated by corporate interests.