2005, Goodbye

2005, Goodbye

Tsunami
HST R.I.P
George W. Bush, “Stay the Course. We’re Winning!”
Katrina – There are poor in America, who knew?
Gas $3 a gallon
Warning: The NSA might be spying on you
Scandal masters: DeLay, Scooter, Abramoff, et al.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the overreaching Austrian
The price of real estate
Warning: The NSA is spying on you
Milestone – 2,000 killed, and counting
Fact: Global warming is real – someone tell W and Dick
Rent, the movie
Bird flu
Intelligent Design (Translated: ignore science)
Brad & Jen, Splittsville
Chicago White Sox Sweep
Devils & Dust, “Got my finger on the trigger/but I don’t know who to trust”
The delicate soul of a good woman
The lies of a hopelessly flawed man
The unfiltered joy of two healthy children
Thoughts
Dreams
Fantasies
Nightmares
Loss, pain, destruction
Life
Shirtless in December, sky perfect blue
Leaves from the tree of life cut loose and soar

Poem - Apology to Mother Earth

Sorry about the methane gas rising from our
Garbage dumps
The dead and dying coral in the seas
Clear cutting & “Mountain Top Removal”
Sorry about the benzene in the ground water, acid in the rain
The radiation buried near your heart

When the meek inherit they will find a wasteland
A lonely place destroyed by indifference
Collective greed & arrogance
The insane notion that you were ours to subdue
And enslave

Despite clear signs & warnings
We keep slashing & burning, drilling & pumping
Lured, driven, goaded by profit, profit, profit
Our true God
Entitled to waste what we can afford to buy
Or so we think in our twisted way

We can’t leave well enough alone, let it be;
I ask the question I know the answer to:
Are such fools to be forgiven?

One Day Real Soon

One of these days, swear to God, I’m going to write something light and amusing, and stick it on the Balcony, but for now, the best subject in town is G.W. Bush and the Reign of Terror.

Bush is on the PR circuit, trying to persuade Americans that great and magical things are happening in American-occupied Iraq. That’s a tough sell these days if the latest polling numbers are accurate; the majority of Americans aren’t buying the Administration line, no matter how much the Bush people spin.

And those folks must be getting dizzy, their fat heads about to explode, spinning at the rate they are, supersonic speed.

Bush and Co. are also trying to convince Americans that the economy is percolating just fine, with job growth and rosy profit predictions, and plenty of people in the shopping malls, plunking down cash or plastic. That may be true when it comes to the American elite, the ownership class, but it’s absolute fantasy for the rest of Americans. GDP may be up, but workers are staring at stagnant wages and continued erosion of employer-paid health benefits. One segment of our population is happy as pie because everything is going their way – their pal Bush and his enviable Congressional majority gets huge tax cuts passed, so they are keeping even more of what their investments earn.

Lucky buggars.

The majority of us are struggling, sinking, or holding on for dear life, up to our ears in debt, one uninsured illness from ruin. We’re getting by but going nowhere near the hallowed ground where the American elite dwell. They segregate by wealth, buying distance between themselves and the great unwashed, stinking rest of us.

The problem is that Bush’s numbers don’t add up, doomed by an overpowering combination of huge budget and trade deficits, the massive expense of the Iraq Occupation, and the incredibly generous tax cuts for the elite. Bush has maxed out the American charge card. We’re tapped, and the Chinese are raking it in, getting our money front and back, from the purchases of goods and services to the cash we pay them in the form of interest. Does anyone get the funny feeling that we’re sinking while the Chinese are rising?

Yeah, one of these days I’ll get around to writing something optimistic and upbeat.

Sing, a Poem

Our lord
My lord
King of Kings
Prince of peace
Sing for the dead & deformed
Sing for the Last of the Mohicans
Sing for the lost loons
Sing for December
Sing for pale afternoons
Sing for the broken-hearted
Sing for the babies & the old
Sing for this tri-tip sandwich served by a blonde bimbo
Sing for shapely ladies talking on cell phones
Sing for the souls of the Armenians
Sing for the Jews
Sing for the Tibetans
Sing for Saddam & his victims
Sing for Dick Cheney (then crack the whip on his flabby white ass)
Sing for the rain forest & the tundra
Sing in a falsetto, sing in a baritone
Sing over the sound of tolling bells
Sing in protest
Sing in praise
Sing over flag-draped coffins
Sing for the residents of Skid Row
Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing

Bush Lays Out Plan, Sort Of

Stay the course. Vital national interests. The front in the War. Total victory.

George W. Bush must be crazy, delusional, disassociated from reality. All this gibberish spewed to a captive crowd of Naval cadets, some of the best and brightest of our privileged youth, with the blood of more than 2,000 US soldiers on Bush’s hands, and despite a mountain of evidence, the President continues to believe this “war” can be won.

Won, how? First of all, Bush has it wrong – what is happening in Iraq isn’t a war, it’s the back end of an invasion, an occupation of one nation by another of superior military might. Iraq never posed a credible or imminent threat to the US, never attacked the US, and was most certainly not in cahoots with Al Qaeda.

And note to George: Iraq wasn’t the center of the War on Terror until your deluded policies made it so.

As the political winds blow, Bush’s rationale for the Invasion/Occupation changes; in the beginning it was all about WMD, anthrax stockpiles, mustard gas and whatnot. When the WMD failed to turn up on cue, the rationale changed to creating democracy in Iraq, giving the long-suffering Iraqis the magic power of self-determination.

Guaranteeing US oil interests access to Iraq’s reserves never enters into the discussion, though OIL hovers in the background of every purported reason for our spilling blood in Iraq in the first place.

Bush is right to say that a war cannot be won on a timetable, but wrong to make this assertion regarding Iraq. An occupation can most certainly be ended on a predetermined timetable.

As long as the US maintains a military presence on Iraqi soil, there will be fighting, car bombs, suicide missions, and strife. When and if we depart, Iraq may descend into civil war or its various factions will figure out a way to coexist, either in a democratic framework or something else.

W has got to stop channeling LBJ and Nixon. The Occupation is not going well, the American citizenry are fed up with the human and monetary cost, and the longer the US remains the worse this wretched deal gets.

Sometimes the greatest act of leadership is to stare reality in the face, admit error, and call for a retreat. This takes guts and wisdom in equal measure, traits that W doesn’t appear to possess.

GIANT NO MORE

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I saw an editorial cartoon in the Santa Barbara News-Press (often referred to around here as the Snooze-Mess), syndicated from the Orange County Register, that depicted a vehicle emblazoned with the General Motors logo, an engine labeled United Auto Workers, and an exhaust tank which read, Revenues.

The exhaust tank was festooned with cobwebs, clearly rendering the meaning of the cartoon: GM’s money woes are the fault of the United Auto Workers.

All I can say to that notion is Bullshit. GM’s problems are bigger than its unionized blue-collar workforce, and to lay the blame for the decline of this American industrial icon at the feet of the men and women who assemble GM cars and trucks is to miss the larger picture.

GM has been lurching into irrelevancy for nearly two decades. Remember Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s 1989 film about the effects of a GM plant closing in Flint, Michigan? From the mid-80’s on GM was struggling to compete with Toyota and Honda, Japanese manufacturers who built high-quality, fuel-efficient, front-wheel drive vehicles. GM still held the title of world’s biggest manufacturing company, but every passing year saw Honda and Toyota chip away at GM’s market dominance.

How did giant GM respond to the threat from abroad? First, CEO Roger Smith pushed through the acquisition of Hughes Aircraft Company, a defense contractor, ostensibly to milk Hughes’s hi-tech expertise. Smith and other GM honchos thought a dose of space-age technology could help GM build more appealing vehicles.

The only problem with this billion dollar experiment was that GM never quite figured out how to harness Hughes’s strengths and marry them with its own.

With great fanfare, GM then announces the creation of a brand new car division called “Saturn” that would not only revolutionize GM but the American auto industry as well. Saturn, Roger Smith assured the Wall Street crowd, would operate completely outside the GM box; in itself, this boast was a backhanded indictment of GM’s bloated processes. Saturn wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, just one that came to fruition too late to halt GM’s slide.

GM’s core problem was never entirely its blue-collar workforce. Bloated and inefficient management lay at the center of GM’s woes. Year after year the giant reorganized and restructured, closing a plant here, shifting production to Canada or Texas, tinkering with its supply chain, but nothing could stem the tide. The cars and trucks coming off the GM drawing board simply paled in quality and style to those imported from abroad.

At one point it got so bad that GM entered into a joint venture with Toyota to build the Corolla, Toyota’s flagship vehicle, in Fremont, California using Japanese manufacturing processes and UAW represented labor. Soon, Honda was building cars in the US using the same framework.

GM was so dominant for so long, with far flung operations so massive and intimately connected to the fortunes of the US economy, that the company – management and labor – grew fat, happy, and complacent. Toyota and Honda were mere upstarts way back when, nothing to worry about.

By the time GM realized it was in a fight for market share with savvy adversaries it was too late for the giant to shake its behemoth mindset and change for the future.

Sure, the blue collar workforce represented by the UAW bears some of the responsibility, but don’t lay the whole enchilada at the feet of working men and women.

Anniversary of the Balcony

As the calendar turns and the crow flies I see that Shouts from the Balcony is a year old this month.

The blogosphere is full of crackpots, and I am certainly one, sitting here week after week – day after day in some instances – writing to a worldwide yet largely invisible audience. This still seems self-indulgent and screwy to me, a loon on a street corner shouting into a gale force wind.

Folks trip across the Balcony by accident, stay for less than a minute, on average, and split in search of something more interesting.

A couple of readers have asked why I write about external things like national politics and very little about my family. Basic privacy is one reason, point of view would be another; sometimes it’s easier to draw a bead on a far off target than one nearby. Another reason for my choice of subjects is that the current national political scene pisses me off and compels me to add my voice to the din. When you look at your country, even from afar, and don’t recognize it, that’s cause for alarm.

Interest in the Balcony spiked after I posted a rant against a local school board member. I had no idea that the piece would be referred to in the Santa Barbara News-Press as an “angry” blog, or that the blog address would be printed in the paper. Lots of people visited after that.

But like I said, now it’s the occasional day-tripper, my in-laws, my mother, Bubba who lives in Arizona, a few colleagues from the school district where I work. I started this thing on a lark and never expected much. Writers are notorious feedback hounds, however, and it’s gratifying when someone posts a comment, reports that something struck them as funny, insightful or even downright pigheaded.

Whether or not the Balcony will see a second anniversary is an open question. Time and events will tell, but for now, I thank all those who have visited.

THE CTM CHRONICLES - On the Road with Alice

Alice DuPont lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of an old one, passed Chuck a bottle of Old Parr scotch, and stomped on the gas, pushing the Corvette up to ninety miles an hour. “That’s good stuff,” she said. “Aged twelve years. My soon-to-be-ex-husband distributes the crap. Go ahead, have a pull. There’s more in the trunk.”

Chuck took a drink and passed the bottle back. He wasn’t sure if Alice DuPont was tipsy or flat-out crazy, but for the moment, his fate was intertwined with hers and there was nothing to be done about it except settle back and watch South Carolina flash past. On the one hand he felt happy. With every passing mile he was putting distance between himself and Patricia. On the other – and that’s the problem with the other hand, it jumps in at inopportune moments – he was nagged by a vision of her lying in the bathtub with her wrists slashed. (Years later when her book came out he would learn that Patricia had indeed tried to do herself in by swallowing forty-seven aspirin tablets.)

Alice looked to be in her early 50’s though it was hard to be certain because her face was puffy from crying. Her hair was reddish-brown and naturally curly. Her eyes were blue, sad, and bloodshot. Even before she started talking about the tangled mess her life had become, Chuck sensed her sadness and pain; the story was etched in the lines around her eyes and in the furrows between her eyebrows.

Alice began by saying, “My husband is a miserable, duplicitous bastard, a liar, a cheat and a thief. He stole the prime of my life from me. Twenty-four years of marriage and only this morning do I discover that the sonofabitch has a second family, in Scotland, where he spends half the year on business. Can you believe that crap? Pretty young wife, two small kids, a house, a dog, the whole nine yards. In Scotland. I’d kill him if I thought I could get away with it, I really would. I’d slice his dick off and feed it to his dog. That stuff about a woman scorned is true, though I suppose you’re too young to understand. But you will and I’d bet my last dollar that one day you’ll do the same damn thing to some poor, unsuspecting girl. Men are no better than pigs! Here, have another drink!”

Chuck had another swig and handed the bottle back.

“What are you running away from?” Alice asked.

“The circus,” Chuck said. “I’m a high-wire man but the gig was getting to be a drag, so I asked the boss if I could try my hand at taming the lion. He said no, so I split.”

“Sounds like a load of crap to me,” Alice said. “Don’t most people run away to join the circus?”

“Not me.”

Alice grunted. “You travel light. Looks like you left in a hurry. Maybe the fire-eater was chasing you?”

“It was the bearded lady, all three hundred and ten pounds of her. She wanted me, I wasn’t into her, it was an awkward situation that affected my concentration and when your job is the high-wire, the last thing you need is a distraction like that. It was time for me to bail.”

“Aren’t you a clever one,” Alice said dryly. “I can see why she was hot for you.”

“What can I say? People who defy death for a living have a certain aura about them.”

“Christ. What a load of crap. You’re a born bullshitter, aren’t you?”

“What’s in New York City?” Chuck asked.

“My brother, Sam, the only sane member of my entire family. He lives in the Village with his wife and daughter, plays the sax for a living. Sweet, big-hearted Sammy, who managed to escape the genetic madness that plagues our family. Now Jan, my sister, who I’m on my way to visit if I can remember where she lives, is as eccentric as the day is long. Even when we were kids she was off. She got married right out of high school, moved to Oregon, decided one day that she wanted to be a lesbian, divorced her husband and moved to Manitoba with her new lover. That lasted four or five years, until Jan decided that being a lesbian wasn’t for her after all. She moved to Seattle and met a Chinese engineer by the name of Hai Le Chang. Chang was about five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds soaking wet, a computer geek who designed software for Boeing. Hai had some sexual issues, liked to be spanked, dressed in a diaper, that sort of thing. Oh, we’re a colorful dysfunctional family all right. You want to jump out?”

“Not yet,” Chuck said. “Where are we?”

They were driving in the suburbs now, in a town called Goose Creek, past modest homes on generous lots, tree-lined streets, all-American, picket fences and bicycles in the yard, RV’s parked alongside the houses.

“Do you know how Jan decided to move here?” Alice asked. “She threw a dart at a map of the United States and without a second thought packed her things in a U-Haul and came here. She keeps a Great Dane for protection. She also has a python named Monty that lives under her bed.”

Chuck spotted Jan’s house before Alice did, not that it was hard to pick out. Sweetwater Street was neat and orderly, spilling over with middle-class pride, until suddenly one house ruined the entire mosaic, Jan’s place, of course. There was a 1962 VW Bug in the driveway, sitting on its rims, dented and splattered with bird droppings, speckled with rust; a life-size bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, saber drawn and ready to defend the Old South against all comers, stood on the front lawn. General Lee was surrounded by the weirdest collection of stuff Chuck had ever seen: wrought-iron birds, clay jaguars, a toilet sunk in a flower bed, a claw-footed bathtub full of bicycle tires, a lamp post, golf clubs, aluminum baseball bats, lobster traps, a full-size trampoline; a male mannequin with a noose around its neck hung from a tree; another mannequin, this one headless, sat in a rocking chair on the porch pointing a toy gun at passers-by.

“She’s a junk collector?” Chuck said as Alice parked.

“No, just a crazy woman. The neighbors have been trying to boot her out of here for years, but Jan won’t budge. Annoying people gives her pleasure. Steel yourself, young man. Have another drink. We’re about to enter the Twilight Zone.”

Mishmash

I was getting the kids ready for school yesterday morning when I overheard Charlie Gibson from ABC ask someone from the White House about President Bush’s trip to Asia. I didn’t catch the entire statement, but would swear on a stack of Bibles that the White House mouthpiece said something close to, “The president is going to China to represent the interests of American workers.”

The interests of American workers! Holy cow! In China, no less, the home of thousands of manufacturing jobs once held by American workers. What “interests” could the president possibly represent? I can see Bush now, standing before a hand-picked, sanitized crowd of average Chinese factory workers, flashing his best monkey sneer while lauding the workers for doing a “heckuva job” as corporate America’s low-wage workshop.

As far as George W. Bush is concerned, things are just peachy for American workers. Wages are stagnant, health and retirement benefits have been slashed, what’s not to be happy about? Wal-Mart is always hiring, various shifts in a friendly atmosphere, not to mention that the Gulf Coast will need thousands of carpenters, plumbers, and roofers once the reconstruction effort shifts into full swing; workers can go down there and enjoy the benefits of low wages, now that the president has suspended the Davis-Bacon Act.

Bush wouldn’t recognize an average working American if one walked up and smacked him in the forehead with a rubber mallet. Bush serves one constituency and one only: the wealthy. Look at the record, the lavish tax breaks and corporate giveaways, the fat no-bid contracts given to well-heeled political supporters.

Responding to Charlie Gibson’s question about the president’s plummeting public approval rating and the cloud of scandal hovering over the Administration, the White House mouth said – and again this is a rough paraphrase – that it is irresponsible for Democrats to continually raise questions about the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, the validity of pre-invasion intelligence, or whether or not the Administration tweaked that intelligence to justify the invasion.

Let’s see, the Congress of the United States was duped into supporting an invasion/occupation that has turned up zero WMD, become a rallying point for terrorists, violated the sovereignty of a nation (yes, even a despotic one), and cost over 2,000 American lives and maybe fifty times that many Iraqi lives, and put Iraq on course for a bloody, protracted civil war. It would seem that Congress has an obligation to find out what went wrong and who is responsible so that such folly cannot be repeated anytime soon.

The Administration believes that such questions are irresponsible and give comfort and aid to our enemies, not to mention a terrible inconvenience.

I’m just a simple guy, an average American citizen trying to raise children and get along in this great land of ours, but for the life of me I can’t understand why George W. Bush is not in the midst of an impeachment trial. For lying about Oval Office hanky-panky, Congress went after Bill Clinton hammer and tongs, fangs dripping blood; but when it comes to Bush, a president who plunged the country into a useless and disgraceful invasion/occupation, Congress sits on its hands.

The Day After, and the Day After That

November 8, Election Day, was a great day for unionized public workers in California – we beat back a power grab by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Simple hubris played a big role in Schwarzenegger’s defeat. The fire that eventually engulfed him began with his State of the State speech in January when he essentially boasted that he would play his trump card – popularity – and take his case directly to the voters if the legislature refused to play ball his way.

One can’t completely fault Schwarzenegger for over-confidence. Any pol with a 60% approval rating would likely feel invincible.

Schwarzenegger won the recall election on star power and the fact that the recall campaign was brief. Instead of talking about ideas and vision and mixing it up with voters on bread and butter issues like health care, education and public safety, Schwarzenegger merely smiled and tossed T-shirts to adoring fans. Running for the top office in the state seemed like an easy, pleasant gig.

And it continued to be so until early this year when the Governor ticked off organized nurses. That mistake snowballed until it eventually mobilized a broad coalition of peace officers, firefighters, public workers, school employees and teachers.

Rhetorically, Schwarzenegger suffered from stunted development. His campaign was all sound bites and one-liners and references to action movies rather than solid reasons for his initiatives – initiatives which bore the fingerprint of the Grover Norquist wing of the Republican Party. The idea that the numerous problems facing California could be solved by tinkering with teacher tenure, redistricting along Texas-Tom DeLay lines, granting a sitting governor extraordinary power over the budget, and making it difficult for unions to throw money at Democrats, was at best laughable.

Going to the mat, rhetorically and via ballot initiatives, with a number of public employee unions simultaneously was a tall order, even for a popular Governor, and the decision to plunge ahead exposed Schwarzenegger’s rookie status. More than that, it called into question the wisdom of his inner circle.

Considering the magnitude of Tuesday’s defeat, it’s a sure bet that Schwarzenegger will shake up his team of advisors, with significant input from wifey, Maria Shriver. Look for more moderate figures to join the Governor’s team. After all, Schwarzenegger has a lot of ground to make up in the trust department if he’s going to be re-elected in 2006.

For the moment, the power dynamic in Sacramento is altered. Schwarzenegger has little choice but to moderate his rhetoric and reach across the aisle. No more can he threaten to bypass the legislature. That should make things very interesting in the months ahead.

And what of the victors? Tuesday’s outcome proved that the union movement is alive and kicking in California, and that despite the AFL-CIO fracture, unions can still work together toward common aims. Labor should take a moment to celebrate this success, but then get back to organizing new members and educating current ones.

For those of us fortunate to be members of public employee unions, it’s time to get back to serving the public that pays our wages, proving day after day that unions are not only good for workers, but good for the commonwealth as well.

Judgment Day for the Terminator

It has been a long slog up a steep slope, but here we are, on election day. For many of us, this campaign began in January when the Governor laid out his “Year of Reform” plan during his State of the State speech. Schwarzenegger was riding tall in the saddle then, with an approval rating in the mid-60’s and enough hubris in his tank to mount an assault on California’s caretakers.

Arnold has talked a lot about greedy union bosses in this campaign, but much less about the influence of corporate money. If the Democrats are in the pocket of public employee unions, then it’s fair to say the Republicans are in the same boat with insurance, finance, and drug companies.

All along most level-headed folks have said that this special election is unnecessary, a perversion of the initiative process, a sideshow that does not come close to addressing the real issues facing Californians. Only in Arnold’s (and maybe Petey Wilson’s) mind is this a true “Year of Reform.”

We have talked, telephoned, walked precincts, turned out at the Governor’s invitation-only staged events, survived the barrage of TV and direct mail advertising from both sides, and now it’s time to mark the ballots and tally the votes.

By late tonight or early tomorrow morning, the political landscape in California will be changed, one way or another.

Scooter, We'll Miss You

Scooter’s history, now we need to get the rest of Bush’s posse, starting with Rove, then Cheney and Rumsfeld, all the players who had a hand in duping the country into believing that invading and occupying Iraq was both justified and the next logical step in the “War on Terror.”

It’s about time someone in this criminal administration is sanctioned, called to task, held accountable. Thousands of people have waited a long time for the monkey smirk to be wiped from W’s face. We’d love to see Cheney drop his trademark sneer, but that won’t happen even if the VP is perp-walked down Pennsylvania Avenue at high noon. No, Cheney is too hard-core to change his ways; W is simply too dense.

All in all, this was a banner day for those of us who have felt like we lived in an alternate reality the past four years, Bush-World, a dim and awful place where truth is meaningless and criminal behavior goes unpunished.

Note to CA GOP: Leave Me Alone

October 25, 2005


California Republican Party
1903 West Magnolia Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91506-1727

Inre: BS Mailing for Arnold’s BS Agenda

Dear Republicans:

You miserable bastards.

How did my name get on your freaking mailing list? For your information, I am a registered Democrat with a decidedly Progressive outlook, and a union member active in the political arena. In fact, I just returned home from an Alliance for a Better California phone bank that was calling voters to urge them to reject the Governor’s ridiculous “reform” agenda.

To open my mailbox and see a photograph of our doofus Governor nearly made me keel over -- first with anger, then laughter.

Schwarzenegger is a joke and a disgrace to our state. The man is utterly clueless and his slate of initiatives will do nothing – NOTHING – to address the problems facing California.

I wouldn’t join Arnold for a walk across the street let alone in his misguided effort to screw public school teachers, silence union members, and give the Governor’s office extraordinary powers over our fiscal future.

I don’t know where you bought my name and address, but kindly remove me from your database. I don’t believe I could stand the shock of seeing Arnold’s face on a piece of mail addressed to me again.

Sincerely,



Brian Tanguay
Progressive Union Activist

Land of Wonder

Sometimes you start to wonder what’s happening in this world.

A school principal in some East Coast city cancelled prom night because the kids had a history of getting hammered on booze and drugs, staging orgies, and spending too much money on parties and limos.

Damn, you think, that’s horrible. But then what do we expect. We wean our kids on glitzy celebrity shows, tales of the rich and famous, the Paris Hilton’s, the supermodels, the actors and athletes who make more in a week than the average working stiff in America makes in two or three years. We show kids the glitz and gilt-edged world that some lucky folks inhabit, dangle it in front of them like diamonds hanging from a perfect earlobe.

In LA’s Skid Row, a permanent underclass lives on the streets in the shadow of ongoing gentrification. Thousands of people – some of them mentally ill or physically handicapped or both – make their way through rat and roach infested streets, past dealers and pimps and whores, boarded-up buildings and rusted cars. Maybe it’s one city, but it’s two completely different worlds.

Same in other cities, of course. The past twenty-five years haven’t been easy for the working class, with wages stagnant and jobs leaving for China faster than you can say, “So long manufacturing base.” Call for decent jobs at decent wages with decent benefits and people think you’re crazy or naive.

Capitalism, man, free enterprise, though when the going gets sticky Capital likes a hand from Government, a tax break, a subsidy, a guarantee; Capital likes to steal from the public and then make the public pay the tab.

So you see multi-million dollar condos going up alongside Skid Row, glitz and luxury above and beyond Third World poverty and hurt. Don’t look out the window and you won’t see it. Nobody’s fault, right, just the way it is, there have always been rich and poor, and hey, maybe them folks on the street deserve their sorry lot.

We fashioned this deal by placing capital over labor, profit above people, private gain above public good. It came like a wave that just kept coming, surging, washing away everything in its path. For the fortunate minority, this big wave ushered in the best of times; the rest were left to pick through the waterlogged rubble.

America.

The CTM Chronicles - Orlando

I haven’t written about Chuck T. Miller lately though my old friend has been on my mind. The cell phone number he gave me the last time we talked has been disconnected. He may be in Phoenix still, waist deep in domestic difficulties, though I’d bet he ditched that scene in favor of a quick run to Cabo San Lucas or Cozumel. He’s no doubt hooked up with another woman by now. For years Chuck joked that all he wanted was a young, sexy trust fund baby, preferably a natural blonde with a forty-DD chest and long legs, with limited emotional baggage and free of psychotic ex-boyfriends or overprotective parents. “She’s out there,” Chuck always said, “and someday I’ll find her.”

An advertisement in the Independent about Patricia Simmons is what made me think of Chuck. Patricia Simmons, renowned psychotherapist and author, frequent guest on Oprah, and a hit on the lecture circuit, was appearing at UC Santa Barbara to promote her new book, The Canine Prophecy: A Field Guide to Training Men. Patricia’s first book, the one that made her reputation, was called, Breaking Chains: A Woman’s Guide to Escaping Bondage. Years ago, before fame and fortune, when she was known as Patricia Capriati, Patricia was Chuck’s main squeeze.

He met her in Orlando, Florida, where he was managing the Gypsy Rose Funeral Parlor and Family Fun Center, an oxymoronic combination of enterprises that fit Chuck perfectly. Out back of the funeral parlor was a nine-hole golf course and water park, both owned by a mysterious woman from New Orleans – a bonafide “voodoo witch” in Chuck’s words – whose motto was, “The dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living you have to watch out for.” You could bury your dead at Gypsy Rose’s, then go out back and improve your short game. Chuck handled the grieving customers, sold them deluxe coffins and overpriced flower arrangements, mowed the fairways and greens, repaired the water slides, while Patricia, only a few months out of high school, answered the phones and kept the books.

Patricia was a refugee from a sadistic German-born mother and an ex-GI father who walked out with a fishing pole on his shoulder and never came back, never wrote, never called, just vanished from her world, leaving her with unanswered questions and misplaced guilt that his disappearance was her fault. How we battle the wounds of childhood! We heal, but the scars remain, reminders of unhappy times. Breaking Chains was a stunningly specific account of a life gone off the rails, of abuse, neglect and sadism. Chuck figured prominently in the book as well, the portrayal less than flattering: “In the heart of this man, as in all men, lurks an evil streak.” Chuck’s version of his time with Patricia was very different -- the moment he hooked up with her he knew he had made a grave mistake, and then his problem became how to cut her loose without sending her over the edge. She was his “beautiful psycho” and the “barnacle on my back.” Unhinged, unpredictable, and possessive to the extreme, Patricia rarely let Chuck out of her sight and stuck by his side like a seeing-eye dog, going so far as to follow him into the Men’s room of the McDonald’s down the street from the funeral home. She talked about them being one spirit and destined to be inseparable forever. She showered with Chuck and insisted that they hold hands during meals. One day Chuck was fixing a busted lawn mower in the maintenance shed and accidentally sliced his finger open. There was Patricia, not with hydrogen peroxide and band aids, but with her tongue, lapping up his blood, ecstasy on her face and a drop of blood on her lovely chin.

Over the years Chuck has had more than his share of violent episodes with women. They’ve thrown plates and butter knives and bottles, stabbed him with keys, forks and safety pins; they’ve threatened him with Mace and pepper spray, burned his clothes, slashed his tires. Patricia added her own chapter in Chuck’s tortured relationship history. When Chuck insisted that Patricia give him some breathing room and privacy, allow him to pee and poop in peace, take a few links out of his chain, she wigged out, took it to mean that he no longer loved her. Then, to prove how much she loved him, she tried to run him down with a golf cart.

Chuck never loved Patricia, but he was fond of her and cared for her and worried about her. The more he struggled to get away, the tighter Patricia clung to him. Chuck became a prisoner in his own life. Whatever he did, wherever he went, Patricia was right there. She was a preternaturally light sleeper who woke at the slightest sound. Chuck said Patricia slept with her eyes open. They fought constantly and even got themselves banned from McDonald’s.

In the end, Chuck did what Patricia’s father had done, picked a spot and made a break for it. He slipped away from Gypsy Rose’s in the owner’s decrepit Datsun pick-up, with $50 to his name, a change of clothes, a harmonica and a Bible, and a pint bottle of whisky. The Datsun died in South Carolina. Chuck stuck out his thumb, headed nowhere in particular as long as it was away from Patricia. He wasn’t on the highway ten minutes before a woman in a red Corvette slowed down to give him a look. Her name was Alice DuPont and she was traveling to New York City.

When Arnold came to Town

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger came to town yesterday, ostensibly for a “town hall” meeting, held, strangely or perhaps appropriately enough, in a huge garbage processing facility. The peculiarity about this “town hall” gig was that you had to be “invited” to attend -- invited and presumably screened for ideological purity. In my imagination I see a humorless man in a black suit asking questions like, “Do you hate unions and think they should be banished from the face of Kahlifornia?” “Do you like Governor Schwarzenegger’s style?” “How about his tan?” “Do you think Arnold should run for President, if the Constitution can be amended to allow it?” And so on down the line.

Like George W. Bush, and perhaps more so given his background, Arnold specializes in these staged, controlled events. Heaven forbid that he engage in an honest back-and-forth with real workaday folk, members of the lower classes, the great unwashed; much better to see the adoring white faces of well-to-do Chamber of Commerce types, not an apparent freak among them; no risk of citizen outrage or brash acts of civil disobedience inside the cavernous garbage facility.

And all that noise outside, the whistling, the chants, the drums, pounded by college kids and off-duty firefighters, union members, students, a few elderly souls, well, according to Arnold, that’s just the braying of the status quo that is strangling the Golden State.

Shades of the surreal, shades of George Orwell, shades of make-believe.

Arnold blames “union bosses” for California’s ills. Union bosses? What do these men or women look like, Jimmy Hoffa? The character Kathy Bates played in Misery? Who is Arnold talking about, exactly? He makes it sound as if union members have absolutely no say-so in how their dues are used; that’s a fabrication. Or maybe it’s just politics, twenty-first century style, the age where unfortunate truths are ignored or twisted until they no longer resemble a truth at all.

We made noise the day Arnold came to town. The man and his people figured they could take on all the state’s caretakers at one time and succeed. They misjudged, then they mismanaged, and now they’ve got Arnold running east and west to sell a skeptical public on his pet initiatives.

Arnold is running hard and hoping an apathetic public will stay home on November 8th.

A Letter to Yankee Owner George Steinbrenner

Dear George:

Well, I’m sitting here on October 10, 2005, watching your Yankees choke in another postseason contest. They trail the Angels 5-2 in the sixth, and there’s no hope for the boys now because the Angels bullpen is tougher than a foot thick cement wall. Your guys had their chance in the top of the fifth, but took a powder with two on and nobody out. What is the team hitting with runners in scoring position? .220? .190? I don’t know and looking the stat up now would be a waste of energy.

It’s the same tired story with the Yanks – a dearth of clutch hitting from some of the highest paid players in the game. This garbage happened in 2003 when the Marlins took the Yanks down in six games, and it happened last year in games four through seven of the ALCS. Remember that, George? Of course you do because it was the most complete collapse in MLB history, a smudge on the ledger of the greatest franchise in professional sports.

And while we’re speaking of Yankee futility, let’s not forget that in the 2001 World Series the Yanks scored a total of fourteen runs. In seven games.

But I could live with that defeat because Clemens pitched a strong seventh game and Mariano Rivera had the ball in the ninth with the lead. You can’t whine when you lose with your best guy.

That was the last high water mark. Ever since 2001 the boys have stumbled around like blind badgers on a frozen lake. A-Rod is hitting a dazzling .143 this series. Mike Mussina lasted a whopping 2 2/3 innings after his much ballyhooed West Coast stay. Face it, George, Mussina is a pampered wimp, an embarrassment to professional athletes everywhere. My four-year-old daughter has more guts.

And as if more proof was required, how about Hideki Matsui, who through seven innings has stranded six base runners. The Yanks have had chance after chance after chance to score runs and put the Angels away, but can they manage a squib single, a bloop double, or even a lazy pop-up that drops between fielders when it really counts?

Hell no. Do you ever sit back in your luxury box and think that a lot of these boys are vastly overpaid? Like by $8-10 million a year? Jesus, it must just get your goat to pay all that cash for such dismal results. Maybe you should ask A-Rod and Matsui and Bernie Williams for a sub-par performance refund.

If nothing else, at least Randy Johnson pitched some strong innings tonight, partially redeeming his horrible outing in Game 3

K-Rod is about to punch out Ruben Sierra…no, ol’ Ruben actually tapped out to short. Inning over, Yanks on the sad end of a 5-3 score. They’re toast, George, blackened, inedible, wasted. This must be killing you. Watching the boys lose these big games is excruciating. So many Yankee fans nearly passed out last year watching the Red Sox roll to four straight victories.

Damn. The nimrod announcers on Fox, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, just asked this rhetorical question: Who in our listening audience didn’t give the Yankees a huge advantage when Bartolo Colon had to exit the game in the second inning? Ah, I didn’t. I know better. For the past four or five seasons the Angels have had New York’s number, beating the Bombers like a gong at home and in the Bronx. In fact, before this series began I predicted that the Angels would prevail in five.

I hate being right all the time, but it didn’t take a baseball genius to figure the outcome. The Angels have more ways to beat the Yankees than the Yankees have to beat the Angels. Take note, George, it’s not just about big money and home runs – it’s about speed, defense, and timely hitting; it’s about moving runners into scoring position by laying down a bunt or hitting behind a runner; it's about moving from first to third on a single.

For the record: Matsui stranded eight base runners tonight. A-Rod killed a potential ninth inning rally by hitting into a double play. A-Rod had a marvelous regular season, but when it comes to these pivotal do or die contests, he never comes through. In this series, A-Rod, Sheffield and Matsui were a combined 13 for 57, a .228 average. Three RBI’s between them.

Game, series and season over. Start rebuilding, George.

The Crack in the Edifice

You can see the cracks forming in the GOP edifice. Everywhere you look another scandal or example of glaring incompetence and outright indifference. They were on an amazing run, in control of all branches of the federal government, most, if not all, of the corporate media, a majority of statehouses; their corporate allies and benefactors were pleased with the services they received in exchange for beefy campaign contributions.

They could do no wrong it seemed. George W. Bush won reelection despite a record of failure and deceit unrivaled in American history. Bush told us that white was black and black white, and if we couldn’t see it, well, that meant we were unpatriotic or anti-American, against free enterprise and individual initiative. Bush gave us his monkey sneer and cowboy strut while Karl Rove stood behind the velvet curtain pulling on the strings.

They mastered the political game with message discipline, quick retribution against those that wavered, and slick spin. When the news refused to fit their vision they created their own. “It’s hard work,” Dubya said during one of his debates against John Kerry, but Dubya never worked that hard, preferring the solitude of his Texas ranch instead, hunkering down with Laura while Iraq burned and New Orleans flooded.

Calling oneself a Liberal or Progressive hasn’t been easy during the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime. The thunderous right-wing media machine ridicules everything we believe in, and the Democratic Party stumbles around like a blind man in a dark room, looking for its soul and passion in all the wrong places. Sorry, folks, but Hillary won’t get us where we want to go. She’s part of the ruling apparatus. Ditto Joe Biden. Those folks play the center and tinker around the margins.

But all along our values were right. We knew the Iraq invasion was a disaster before it happened; we knew that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would only make the gulf between rich and poor even more grotesque, concentrating wealth and power in so few hands that even our democracy would be threatened; we knew that the crony capitalism practiced by the Bush junta would lead to wide-scale corruption; and we never bought into the failed lie that government is inherently incompetent and therefore incapable of playing a moderating role in society.

There are millions of us, and we’re fed up. We look around the country and wonder where we are. Is this America? Is the almighty greenback and what it can buy the only thing that matters anymore? What about justice, equality, widespread prosperity, and social responsibility? Don’t those things matter?

We believe they do. There’s a crack in the ruling edifice. This is our chance.

Dubya's Erector Set

I didn’t watch Dubya’s speech the other night because his vocal cadence and facial expressions make me crazy. I read about it instead, detecting in the text the hand of Herr Karl Rove. For the first time in his presidency, Dubya admitted responsibility for failure. What a moment, what a concept, what a breakthrough for our man-child president. He’s human! He even mentioned poverty and racism, although he failed to note how the hard-hearted policies of his administration have contributed to the perpetuation of both.

I saw on the TV news a day later footage of Dubya with a bullhorn, exhorting rescue workers or was it a small crowd of hand-picked supporters, thoroughly screened for ideological purity? Hard to say with Rove & Co. They’ve elevated political spin and fakery to an art form during the past five years. Anyway, Dubya promises a massive rebuilding effort on the ravaged Gulf Coast, all to be accomplished without raising taxes or revoking his tax cuts for the wealthy.

In other words, more of the same “starve the beast” policy. How in the hell can the federal government lead a massive reconstruction effort on the cheap? Dubya says wasteful or unnecessary government spending will be cut in order to fund reconstruction. Is he serious? Does he think people believe that crap? He’s already slashed millions of dollars from public health, environmental protection, education; the list goes on for a mile or more. I didn’t hear Dubya pledge to end our disastrous and money-sucking occupation of Iraq.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times calls Dubya “Incurious George.” Dubya claims not to read newspapers or watch Fox News, and he frowns on his staff bringing him unpleasant news, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance that he’s unaware of the massive federal budget deficit, debt which is currently being financed by China and Saudi Arabia. Note to Dubya: Get Over Your Failed Ideology and Raise Taxes so all Americans share the reconstruction sacrifice.

Considering how badly Dubya and his cronies fared in the reconstruction of Iraq, it’s difficult to imagine them succeeding on the Gulf Coast. This administration is good at corruption and cronyism, not so good at construction.

Wake Up, Dems

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina offers the Democratic Party a historic opportunity to show the country what makes it different from the Republican Party, and not just in terms of capping on George W. Bush's piss-poor leadership. Bashing W. isn't enough. What the Dems must do is offer Americans a sweeping vision of what this nation might become if we adopt different political principles.

This is the time for the Dems to step forward with a vision of a nation dedicated to promoting the welfare of all its citizens, not just those who can afford to pay; a nation dedicated to fairness and equality of opportunity, civil rights, and a prudent, cooperative foreign policy; a nation that understands that we're all in this together.

Unfortunately, I suspect the Dems will only offer the usual platitudes. The party is cowed, wimpy, unsure of what it stands for, alienated from its traditional base, afraid of Karl Rove and the Republican PR machine. Kerry, Clinton, Biden, none of them have the vision or the language to move beyond business as usual or mount an ideological challenge to the GOP.

Democrats onced believed that Government had a role to play in the everyday lives of citizens, that Government could be a factor in achieving greater good for more people. But that ideology has been discredited by a savvy conservative apparatus which tells us that Government in almost all its guises is bad -- bad for the economy, bad for individuals, bad for entire classes of people. Paradoxically, conservatives are quick to use Government to further their own agenda, lavishing subsidies on their corporate allies, fat contracts to political cronies, and tax "reform" for the wealthiest citizens.

Freedom, opportunity, equality, fairness, a sense for the collective welfare that can only be achieved through Government investment in roads, highways, bridges, schools, public safety and public health, these are all traditional Democratic values that should be revived in the face of a horrible tragedy that was made worse by the ideology of, "You're on your own, man."

Oh, Bob, The Only Disconnect is in Your Head

Bob Noel has made his share of inane, outrageous and self-serving statements during his tenure as a school board trustee, but to claim that the school board was out of the loop when critical decisions were made about Measure V projects is classic Noel gibberish.

Who was really in control? Bob asks in a long op-ed piece in the September 4, 2005 News-Press. A better question to ask is: where the hell was Bob Noel when all those projects came before the board for approval? Surely he was on the dais with his fellow trustees, scowling his trademark scowl as he pored over charts and graphs and tables and other minutiae of the public education game; surely he realizes that the district has a bond oversight committee whose membership includes at least one trustee. If Bob was so concerned about the morality of using Measure V money for softball scoreboards and swimming pools, why didn’t he raise his hand and sound the alarm before significant dough was spent?

It might be informative to dig into the record and see how old Bob voted on the many projects that came before the board. Being the contrarian voice on the board gives him a thrill, not to mention a photo and byline in the News-Press from time to time, but I’d bet the record shows that more often than not he voted with the district administration.

Even with state matching funds, the amount of the Measure V bond was never going to be sufficient to fund all the needs of the high school district. Unless he was sleeping through board meetings, Bob had to grasp this essential fact. Did he expect the chronically understaffed district administration to make all the decisions about Measure V projects without consulting principals, parents, and other interested parties? If they had, Bob would now be bitching about the lack of “input” from stakeholders.

Maybe the reason Bob sees a “disconnect” between plans and reality is that many school board meetings run long into the night, into and beyond the Letterman and Leno hours, testing the endurance and attention span of men and women much younger than Bob. Perhaps old Bob was simply too pooped to pay attention when important issues came up for vote. All I know is that the man is definitely a head trip, the kind of dude who participates in a decision and then claims amnesia when the deal goes awry.

That’s the definition of a weenie in my book.

The Stench

If there was ever a doubt that George W. Bush is an incompetent completely out of his depth, it has been dispelled by his lack of leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Where’s the cowboy swagger now, W? I guess mobilizing resources to save American citizens – many of them poor and African-American – is different from duping the nation into a deadly invasion and occupation of a country that posed a limited threat to the United States. I guess it’s different from landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and prematurely and inappropriately proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished!” I guess it’s different from crowing, “Bring ‘em on.”

W should go down as one of the lamest Presidents in American history, right up there with Hoover and Nixon. He was a peabrain when the Supreme Court placed him in office, a peabrain up until 9/11, a peabrain while he was lying about the need to invade Iraq. He has slavishly served his wealthy base and the religious sots who think he’s their Messiah. He’s cynical and corrupt, a blithering idiot clueless to the concerns of average Americans, those not born with gold-plated political connections and silver spoons sticking out of their assholes. The stench of failure and death hovers over this White House.

Katrina, Color Blind?

People of color, that's mainly what we see when we look at the images of devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Nobody in the media, as far as I know, has mentioned it yet, but sooner or later some columnist or reporter or public official is going to wonder if the slow response by the Federal government has anything to do with the fact that the majority of victims are African-American, poor and working-class.

I don't want to believe that race has anything to do with the Fed's failure to mobilize, but with the Bush regime in power, you never know. If Katrina had slammed into a largely white, Republican community in Florida or Texas, I wonder if aid would have arrived on the scene faster. It's well-known that the Bush regime values American lives more than Iraqi lives, so much so that we don't even bother to count Iraqi killed or wounded, so it stands to reason that Bush and his people might place a higher value on white Republicans than poor African-Americans.

But perhaps the real culprit here is our foolish Occupation of Iraq and the billions of dollars we've poured down that gopher hole -- money that might have been used for myriad other purposes, like homeland security, adequate funding for FEMA, public health programs and public works, like flood control. And wouldn't it be beneficial to have fully staffed and equipped National Guard units on the scene to lend assistance to our citizens, rather than deployed in Iraq? Bush's lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans haven't helped either. Those cuts come at the expense of public investment, and now, at the time when Government can make the biggest difference in people's lives, we find ourselves short of resources.

Sooner or later people are going to wake up and realize how much damage Bush & Co. have done to our vital public infrastructure. The people devastated by Katrina already get it.

The Greatest Mystery

“Fish or cut bait.”

“Stop whining.”

“If you don’t like your situation, do something to change it.”

“Cut the pissing and moaning.”

“Why don’t you count the blessings you have instead of moping about what’s missing?”

Sometimes we need a swift kick in the ass to get us moving again, to look at the white walls and decide that they don’t need to stay white forever. The sides of this rut are smooth and high, but there’s someone topside throwing a rope down, and tying the end around a thick oak tree. Take hold of the rope and pull yourself out, man. One hand over the other, left, right, left, inch by inch until you can see the light of morning again.

For the first few minutes after climbing out of the trench you dug you’ll probably stumble around some. Don’t worry, that’s normal. It takes a while to get your legs under you again. Stand up straight, reach for the sky. Decide then and there to suck it up and create the conditions you imagine. Suck the cool dawn air into your lungs and get started. Take a step, then another, it doesn’t take much courage and it gets easier the more you do it.

If you can’t believe in anything else, at least believe in the power of renewal. You can break any physical habit or turn of mind if you focus on it while you’re doing it. When Buddha was sitting under his tree, with that serene smile on his face, he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, nor was a dialogue raging in his head. No, man, Buddha was controlling his mind, patting his thoughts on the head and sending them to bed. If you want peace, you’ve got to get quiet inside so you can hear the calm, compassionate voice of your higher self, rather than the incessant braying of your lower self. Think of it this way: the lower self is like Bill O’Reilly; the higher self is like Thich Nhat Hahn.

Humans can explore outer space and dive to the bottom of the sea, but the greatest mystery is still the self.

An August Update

Time is racing. This is a fast-paced age of electronic devices, smart automobiles, wireless signals; the airwaves crackle with information; teens send text messages to friends sitting two feet away; phones moonlight as cameras and video recorders, game stations. We beat boredom over the head with our electronic clubs. We obliterate silence. So busy without, we no longer recognize the quiet voice within. We become strangers to ourselves.

Well, that's some heavy, depressing stuff for a Sunday morning, with a thick marine layer hanging over Fat City. I have not posted on this blog for some time, but with Summer quickly slipping past I thought I should write something and zap it into the electronic universe.

Gabriel, my dear son, spent the first few weeks of his summer vacation in theatre camp -- Santa Barbara Summer Stock -- and did two performances of the Sign of the Seahorse. He learned his lines well and delivered them clearly and in character. Since camp ended, Gabriel has been hanging out with his Nana & Tata, drawing, watching movies, doing some 4th grade level math to keep his brain sharp. The breathing issues he had for most of the last school year have vanished.

Miranda, dear daughter, just completed her first ever camp experience at the Santa Barbara Zoo. Considering that she has never been in an organized nursery school or preschool setting, she did great, trotting off with her fellow campers and counselors as if leaving Mom and Dad was no big sweat. Miranda still pitches wicked tantrums, though she's slowly learning that screaming and stamping her feet do not persuade us to give in.

Terry, dear wife, is the consumate mother, still working part-time at Magellan's Travel, then shifting gears to take charge of the kids in the afternoon. What she does is amazing, and the kids reflect her effort and devotion. There is no gig as challenging as the parent gig; it's constant, every minute, all-consuming.

I was in Las Vegas the first week of this month, serving as a delegate to the California School Employees Association annual conference. I'm not a Vegas person and six days there -- even staying at the comfortable Paris hotel -- was more Vegas than I could handle. I read somewhere that Vegas is the American city that most accurately reflects our society at this time, just as New York and Chicago reflected where we were in the past. Vegas is a city built on vice, a shimmering illusion in the desert, with pyramids and pirate ships, gondolas and knights. Over the past two decades, no city in the nation has grown as fast or as steadily as Vegas. The city is a money machine, churning day and night; visitors pour into the city by car and plane -- they come from California and Manilla, Arizona and Denmark. Strolling through the Paris casino I saw people sitting transfixed before slot machines. It was the same at Bally's and Treasure Island, lights and noise demanding attention and cash.

I spent most of my free evenings in my room, reading Naked, a very funny book by David Sedaris. I had a couple of workouts in the hotel "spa," paying $25 for the privilege.

The CSEA conference passed smoothly, with the election and installation of new state officers, and a lot of discussion of the political challenges facing working Californians in this November's special election. Our celebrity governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has shown no inclination or interest in legislative horse-trading, preferring instead to take his causes directly to "the people" in the form of ballot initiatives. Unfortunately, none of the initiatives address the fundamental, structural problems facing the state, like traffic congestion, illegal immigration, education funding, or the legacy of Prop 13.

It will be a busy fall for all union activists as we work to defeat the governor at the polls, and hopefully send him back to Hollywood. We will be out walking precincts, phone-banking, and talking to fellow members at our work sites. A lot of people are still unclear about the special election or the measures that will appear on the ballot.

Well, that's the quick and dirty. My beloved, high-priced New York Yankees are playing decent baseball but still find themselves 5 games behind Boston in the AL East, and a few games out of the wild card chase. New York has suffered all season from a lack of pitching talent and depth. Randy Johnson has showed his age, Carl Pavano and Jared Wright have spent time on the DL, and Kevin Brown has been injured, as always, and ineffective. The middle relief corps is shaky, at best.

Thunderheads & Crashing Waves

A strange couple of days, weather-wise, warm and muggy, altocumulus and altostratus clouds in the sky, with thunderheads billowing over the mountains. It feels like fire weather, like the day the Painted Cave fire broke out, when the air was heavy and still. To escape the heat of the apartment, we take the kids to East Beach. There are tourists on the sand and sailboats in the water, a group of kids splashing in the shore breakers. The tide inches up the sand, washing away castles and filling holes dug earlier. "Don't get soaked," we tell the kids, but of course that is precisely what they proceed to do. Watching them race around together I am caught up in their joy and tears fill my eyes. This is the essence of Summer, and we are fortunate to live so near the ocean. Miranda takes off her dress and runs around in her princess underwear; caught with his back to the surf, Gabriel gets soaked. I take photographs, trying to capture and freeze the moment. My heart is full, ready to burst; up the beach a ways I see a grandfather wading into the surf with his grandchild clinging to his shoulders, a beautiful ritual, one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Man Child and the Supremes

As a citizen-activist I'm supposed to care about President Bush's supreme court nominee, John G. Roberts, but I could not bring myself to watch W make his little statement on TV. It occured to me that it's a sad day when a citizen would rather watch a rerun of Seinfeld than his president, but that is the spot I find myself in. When I see W's goofy face a red light flashes in my brain and a shrieking warning siren sounds; my fists ball up and every muscle in my body tightens.

Of course the nomination of Judge Roberts is momentous -- for women's reproductive freedom, for the environment, for labor laws, for privacy rights -- and I'll have to get back in the game and read about this man, study his record, and hope he's not just another of Bush's ideologues. For Roberts is young, only fifty, and has the potential to be around for a very long time.

Bush cited Roberts' record of "fairness and civility," which struck me funny since W's reign has been anything but fair or civil. Bush and his boys have exacerbated problems at home and abroad, dividing our country and making the world a decidedly more dangerous place.

So, while W was jabbering on, I watched Seinfeld, the episode where George pretends he's a marine biologist and saves a whale by pulling a golf ball from its blowhole. "The sea was angry that day my friends," George said.

I know what you mean, Costanza, I know what you mean.

On A Cool Foggy Morning

I love summer mornings when the city is covered by a blanket of marine fog. The air is cool and the noise of the day has yet to begin. A crow squawks and wrens and finches twitter, but man-made noise is still absent. By noon, the marine layer will burn off and the warm sun will caress the red tile roofs and white stucco walls that make this town famous and desirable. Everybody wants a piece of Paradise; the sun will caress the tourists wandering up and down State Street, and the tourists on the beach. Enough money is spent to keep the great wheel turning. But there is a different feel to all this for someone born and raised here, memories tied to certain streets, certain roads, certain houses. The kid working the counter at Sears probably has no idea that once there was a working dairy on the very spot on which he is standing. We need people to remember how then differs from now; how what was gave way to what is.

After fifteen years together, light still dances in my lady's soft brown eyes. There is joy when the heart of a man opens and he lets his secret thoughts spill out, one by one, a few beautiful and transcendent, a few ugly and mean, but taken together they make the man, give a picture of who he is and what he's all about. Maybe not for others, but for me it has been a long struggle to become comfortable in this skin of mine, and I know it's a work unfinished, that no matter how far I've come, there are still miles to go. But this I know: without her constant love and giving, I'd be stuck not far from where I started.

So, on this cool foggy morning, there is peace in my soul, my angels sing and dance while my demons slumber.

The key to achieving happiness is knowing when you are happy.

THE CTM CHRONICLES - GUAM

Chuck didn’t last long at Yokota. He got off on the wrong foot with Captain Lesley Madison, commander of the Armed Forces Radio & Television Service, and compounded his troubles when he got involved with Wendy Sawaski, the base commander’s underage daughter. It was common knowledge to everyone but Chuck that Wendy Sawaski was a first-rate cock tease. Three weeks after our adventure on Bar Row, Chuck was gone, transferred to Andersen AFB, Guam. I received the following letter – one of only a handful Chuck has ever written me – about ten days later.

(Scrawled in pencil on Hilton Hotel stationery) Greetings from Andersen AFB, Guam. I’m wiped tonight man, stuck on this slab of rock out here in the middle of the ocean. The Fascists fixed me good, and all because of that little tramp, Wendy Sawaski. I don’t know what you heard, but I didn’t fuck her; I got as far as unsnapping her bra before the curtain came down. Had I fucked her, this shithole situation might be tolerable, but as it is, I can only imagine what she might have been like in the horizontal position. No fifteen-year-old should have a body like that.

Women will kill me, no doubt about it.

Pussy is a scarce commodity down here. Most of the local ladies are lard-ass fat and surly; the ranks of the dependent population are thin. In my previous incarnation I must have been a real asshole because I sure am paying for it now. What’s ironic is that the local tourist spot, Tumon Bay, is crawling with Japanese chicks. I met a pair of birds yesterday afternoon on the beach by the Pacific Star Hotel, Tomoko and Hiroko from Osaka – or at least I think that’s where they said they were from. Tomoko was the better looking of the two, but a lousy, uninspiring fuck. We ditched Hiroko in the gift shop and went up to their room. It took a lot of work before I finally got it in, and then the chick hardly twitched. I dumped her in the lobby and tried my luck with Hiroko; I’m pleased to report that I fucked her properly without a lot of preliminary antics. She blew me, and even fingered my bunghole, which I thought was adventurous of her. I may see her again before she boogies back to the Land O the Rising Sun. I have half a mind to see if I can get Tomoko and Hiroko involved in a three-way. The idea has some interesting possibilities.

One of these days I’ll grow up and treat women like human beings instead of pleasure objects, but for now I’m still a satyr, constantly on the lookout for the next harbor in which to park my dick.

Well, man, that’s about it from this atoll. What the fuck am I doing here, 5,000 plus miles from home? How was I supposed to know that Wendy was only fifteen? Whyohwhyohwhy! I hear a B-52 accelerating at the end of the runway. When one of these lumbering beasts flies over the barracks the windows rattle and the water in the toilet sloshes around. It’s not the end of the world, it just sounds like it. I’m beat up and bruised and my pride is wounded, but I’m hanging in against Uncle Sam’s Air Force, still coming off my corner stool to throw combinations. What was it Hemingway said, “Man can be defeated but never destroyed.”?

GO FIGURE

Go figure, though give a guy credit for trying, and since it has worked in the past, why not trot it out again?

George’s people know how to frame an issue, even if the information enclosed by the frame is wrong. So it makes sense that Bush once again evoked 9/11 when talking about the need for the US to stay the course in Iraq, even though facts, not to mention events on the ground, belie his assertions that we are making progress and that the conflict is winnable.

The conflict is probably not winnable, not this year or next or five years down the road. Freedom and Democracy cannot be imposed from without. Freedom and Democracy must be earned from within. In the case of Iraq, with its historic ethnic and religious divisions, civil war may be the only way to earn freedom and Democracy.

I wish I knew what Bush means when he states that the invasion/occupation is “worth” the sacrifice of thousands of human lives. Worth it to whom?

How can we call our fallen, wounded or maimed for life heroes if their cause is not heroic?

Go figure. Whatever happened to the great California energy crunch? It was a major issue in the Davis Recall Campaign, a sure sign of Davis’s incompetence, but once Arnold swept into office, the crunch seemed to evaporate. Perhaps the real culprit was Enron and weak oversight by the Feds. Perhaps the crisis was manufactured by Republicans to wrest control of the state from the Democrats.

Go figure as well the national terrorist threat system of color-coded alerts. We heard plenty about that prior to the November 2004 election, but little since. Are we to conclude that the terrorist threat is lessened?

Hmmm. Somewhere, George Orwell is saying “I told you so.”

The CTM Chronicles - Bar Row

The streets outside the base were dark and deserted. Narrow houses flashed by, small shops, a gas station, a shuttered convenience store where a neon sign blinked green and red. Chuck drove fast, like he knew where he was going, but when I asked him if he did he said this was his first sortie outside the base.

We bumped over two sets of railroad tracks and down a hill. Here and there a street lamp threw a pool of light. We passed a man pedaling a bicycle and one lone guy walking by the roadside.

As if following an internal homing signal, Chuck whipped the Toyota through the narrow streets, a sharp left turn, a hard right, then through an alley at white-knuckle speed and across an intersection in front of the Fussa train station. At this hour the trains were idle, but a line of taxi cabs waited outside the station, the drivers passing the time sleeping or smoking cigarettes.

Another right and we found our destination: Bar Row, as GI’s called it, a place that came alive when the sun went down, a place of shadow and mystery, a place prowled by American boys for thirty-five years, ever since the Japanese surrendered. By day Bar Row was completely unremarkable; only when night fell did the Row look like a place where any pleasure was possible, for the right price.

I didn’t know all this then, of course. That night, what was left of it anyway, I didn’t know a thing other than that I was dead tired and afraid that Chuck was going to kill us both.

Bar after bar, the symmetry broken only by an open air noodle stand or tea house: Sheba, the Golden Cock, the Spur, the Last Peacock, the Pink Pussycat, Nikita’s, Charlemane, Mespotamia, Bogart’s, and the Snowy Mountain Cabaret. Most of the bars had shut down, but the noodle stands were open and serving; I caught a quick glimpse of men in business suits hunched over steaming bowls.

We cruised slowly up one street and down the next. Garish neon light reflected off the wet street. “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Chuck said. “Hey, here’s one that looks promising.” He parked in front of the Purple Rose.

Before we reached the door a short, tired-looking woman of indeterminate age was jabbering at us in Japanese and waving both arms. She pointed at Chuck, then me, then the Toyota, making it clear by her vehement gestures that we weren’t welcome and that the Toyota was parked in a No Parking Zone.

“OK, OK,” Chuck said. “No sweat, I’ll move it. But then can my friend and I get a beer?”

The woman shook her head. “No Americans,” she said in English.

“What do you mean, ‘No Americans’?” Chuck said. “My money’s good and I’m extremely thirsty.” Chuck towered over the woman by a foot and a half, but when he tried to go around she blocked his way. Looking right in Chuck’s face she said, “I call the police. You get trouble, big trouble, mister.”

Chuck stepped back and pulled a wad of American dollars out of his pocket, mostly singles, but he held it under the woman’s nose as if it represented a small fortune. “I want beer,” he said. “Here’s my money.”

Just then the door of the Purple Rose swung open and two beefy Japanese guys with flushed faces came out to see what was going on. Three other men were sitting at the bar. The guy nearest the door had a thin, unfriendly face and I interpreted the look he gave us as one of pure hatred.

“No Americans,” the woman repeated. “Japanese only.”

Chuck looked at the woman, at the two bouncers, and then, smiling broadly, raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, people,” he said. “It’s cool. No reason to create an international incident. We’ll boogie.”

We got back in the Toyota and pulled away. Chuck waved at the woman and the bouncers, all nice and friendly, while muttering, “You ain’t seen the last of me, motherfuckers,” under his breath. “No Americans. What kind of twisted bullshit is that?” Chuck turned down an alley and parked. “Be right back,” he said. While he was gone it started to rain again. My head felt as if it was about to explode; my eyelids scraped painfully across my eyeballs. A cat scampered down the alley. Rain drummed on the hood of the Toyota.

Chuck returned, soaked from the rain, and handed me a flower pot. “What’s this for?” I asked. “Just hold it,” Chuck said, jamming the Toyota in reverse. He stopped on the street opposite the Purple Rose and got out with the pot. “Bad idea, Chuck,” I said, knowing exactly what he was about to do, and that no word from me could stop him. He fired a perfect strike that shattered the opaque plate glass window. As we sped away I saw the man with the unfriendly face framed in the broken window.

Trivial Seriousness

Another day
the heads on the tube
tell us what
we need to
know

The jury’s out on Michael;
the Runaway bride
returned home;
Angelina has the hots
for
Brad

Meanwhile,
Africa burns
glaciers melt
our tuna is
laced with
mercury
and our beef might
make us
sick

Serious about the trivial
trivial about the serious

Don’t trouble the masses
with the blunt
hard
ugly
unsettling
truth

They might get
angry
and
do
something

The CTM Chronicles - Tokyo

Near the end of the third week of technical school in Wichita Falls, we were handed surveys that asked us to list all the places in the world where we might want to serve. It was a bullshit exercise, of course, because Uncle Sam was going to deploy us wherever he damn well pleased. The joke went, “If you select Germany you’ll get sent to Korea, and if you select Korea it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll wind up in Germany.”

Chuck ranked his bases this way: Greenland, Guam, Turkey, Alaska, North Dakota, California, Italy and England.

I chose England, Italy, California, Spain, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Maine.

On graduation day, sixteen weeks later, I opened my orders and learned that I was being sent to Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo, Japan. Due to an unexplained snafu in the mammoth Air Force bureaucracy, Chuck’s orders were delayed, as were the orders of my roommate, Michael Webb. Nonetheless, Chuck hosted a raucous “Freedom” party in his room that night. Around two in the morning we moved the party up on the roof of our dorm, where we took turns throwing empty beer bottles at a statue of some long deceased Air Force general. The Security Police rolled out after two rounds and we scampered back to our rooms, drunk and exhilarated.

I flew home to California the next day, fairly certain that I would never see Chuck T. Miller again. I wrote him a letter during my thirty-day leave, but never expected, and never received, a reply.

The days of my leave passed in a blur, and before I knew it I was in San Francisco, boarding a Pan Am flight to Tokyo.

It was evening and raining when I arrived, a steady drizzle that made the streets glisten. The Tokyo skyline was ablaze with neon signs advertising familiar names: Canon, Minolta, Fuji, and others that I would get to know soon enough: Kirin Beer and Suntory Whisky. The chartered bus crawled through heavy rush hour traffic, long lines of black taxi cabs, snub-nosed HINO delivery trucks. Pressing my face to the window I saw trains packed with passengers running on elevated tracks; I saw road signs that I could not read. The bus passed blocks and blocks of tall, narrow apartment buildings. Despite the steady drizzle, I saw men in suits peddling bicycles home from the train station.

By the time we arrived at Yokota Air Base it was late and my sponsor, Airman First Class Arthur C. Lee, the guy who was responsible for getting me settled in my new dorm, was no where to be found. At the newcomers center a sullen Senior Airman named Jenkins directed me to Temporary Housing. Handing me a base map, Jenkins said I’d have to walk because the shuttle busses had stopped running. I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder, picked up my suitcase, and went into the rain.

Around three o’clock in the morning I was awakened by someone pounding on the door of my room. Startled as much by the unfamiliar surroundings as the pounding on the door, it took a full minute before I got out of bed and staggered to the door. “Who is it?” I called.

“Security police,” a gruff voice said. “Open the door or we’ll kick it down.”

I unlocked the door and stepped back, just in case. Chuck and Michael Webb pushed through the door. Michael gave me a big hug, shook my hand, and fell across my bed and passed out. Chuck slapped my shoulder and handed me a can of beer. “Get dressed,” he said, “and I’ll show you the lay of the land. I’ve got a car.”

“What are you guys doing here?”

“Mike’s on his way to Okinawa and I’m here to do my duty for the Armed Forces Radio & Television Service.” Laughing, Chuck saluted. “Mikey’s been drunk for two days,” he said, pulling off Webb’s shoes. “Actually, we’ve managed to stay drunk for the past three weeks. C’mon, the engine’s running.”

The car was a Toyota Cressida with a crunched left front fender, the result of an accident Chuck had got into earlier that night behind the NCO club. The steering wheel was on the right side. The back seat was littered with empty beer cans, an American flag, and the latest edition of Playboy.

“Don’t mind the mess,” Chuck said, jamming the gear shift into first. “And before you ask I’ll tell you that a. I do not have a license to drive, and b. we are prohibited from leaving the base until we’ve been officially briefed on local customs, laws, and assorted regulations -- in other words, the same old Air Force BS, which is precisely the reason I am taking you for a whirlwind tour of downtown Fussa. By the way, the car belongs to your sponsor, Art Lee. The guy’s a winner. He’s going to be pissed when he sees that dent. But what the hell!”

Chuck slowed as we passed through the main gate, waved to the guard as if they were old pals, and asked, “Beer and women, which way?”

Shock & Outrage

Of late I've felt impotent as a citizen of the United States, a taxpayer, a voter. It troubles me deeply that the corruption and deception practiced by the Bush Administration goes on, unpunished. It sure as hell wasn't this easy when Clinton was president. Remember Whitewater and Lewinsky? -- those "scandals" dragged on and on, and Republicans talked like it was the end of the world. But very few Republicans seem troubled by the near daily deaths of Americans in Iraq. I can't tolerate the hypocrisy...

June 2, 2005


Senator Barbara Boxer
United States Senate
112 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Senator Boxer:

Inre: Bush Lies…Downing Street Memo…Lack of Outrage…Congressional Hypocrisy

I may be slow on the uptake, but if my memory serves, the United States Congress impeached President Clinton for lying under oath about a sexual dalliance with an intern. National security wasn’t threatened by the affair, and as far as I know, no one was killed, wounded or maimed by Clinton’s indiscretion.

Those of us opposed to the invasion of Iraq knew the conflict was bogus from the start, and now the Downing Street memo appears to confirm our suspicion that President Bush flat out lied to Congress and the citizenry.

And yet, in a display of hypocrisy and cowardice that will surely stand as a low point for Congress and the Senate, neither body appears to have the will to investigate the President’s lies; the cost to the United States in terms of soldiers killed or wounded; taxpayer money wasted; lost international prestige and trust; not to mention the horrific cost to Iraqis.

Despite the cheerleaders on the Fox Network, Iraq is headed for a protracted civil war and years of instability.

The decision to take the country into armed conflict is the most serious decision a president and congress can make and deserves rigorous, unbiased debate and an honest assessment of aims and ends based on verifiable facts. Any violation of this strict standard should hold serious consequences for the nation’s leadership.

The Bush Administration clearly lied about the need to invade and occupy Iraq. Why can’t we hold them accountable? Why is President Bush able to strut around, consequence free? Why are Rumsfeld and Cheney virtually untouchable?

Where oh where oh where

Have the days gone? Summer is nearly upon us, the days are longer, and here on the Platinum Coast we are begininng to see our typical June weather pattern, with foggy, moist mornings and sun splashed afternoons.

Due to the raging battle between our celebrity Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and public employee unions over a range of issues, I have been up to my eyebrows in politics. Yesterday I was in Pershing Square in Los Angeles with over a thousand of my union brothers and sisters, participating in Action Day. We bussed in from all over the Southland, determined to make the voices of working Californians heard. Did we succeed? Only time will tell the tale. Arnie's poll numbers are falling and most Californians agree that the state is barking up the wrong palm tree.

Now we wait and see if the Governor calls a special election for November -- an election estimated to cost around $80 million. My gut tells me that Arnold will call it -- he's too much of an egomaniac to back away from the threat he's been making since January. I can hear the wheels in his mind turning from here: "If I don't call the special election the people will think I am weak, and I must prevent that at all costs!"

Instead of staying in California and working with the Legislature to craft a budget that protects education, public safety, and the poorest among us from the high cost of prescription drugs, Arnold has been on a fund-raising tour, holding out his hand to well-heeled Republicans in Texas and Florida.

I suspect that Arnold dislikes the nitty-gritty, mundane details of everyday politics and is far more comfortable in the spotlight in carefully controlled locations in front of friendly crowds. When he swept into office, Arnold had it all going his way. A lot of people loved his style and energy, his celebrity aura and swagger.

That bubble has burst and it's unlikely to come back.

Anyway, the Balcony will be screaming again soon.

World in Crises: Paris Breaks a Nail

Voiceover: Live from Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center, this is the Today Show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer.

KC: Good morning, everyone. It is Wednesday, April 20th, 2005. I’m Katie Couric along with Matt Lauer in New York City. Our lead story this morning is the condition of Paris Hilton.

ML: That’s right, Katie. Supermodel, actress, and hotel heiress Paris Hilton fell in Beverly Hills yesterday and split a fingernail on her right hand. Correspondent Michelle Abernathy is in California to give us a report. Michelle…

MA: Good morning Matt and Katie. Yesterday afternoon at approximately 3:00 P.M., supermodel and actress Paris Hilton was injured when she tripped and fell on the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Ms. Hilton was rushed by ambulance to UCLA Medical Center and treated for a split nail on the ring finger of her right hand.

KC: Michelle, are we sure it was the ring finger? I understand that the Los Angeles Times reported that it was the middle finger.

MA: Katie, I spoke to Dr. Pashtun Madras Rimpali at UCLA and he confirmed that the split nail was on Paris’s right ring finger.

ML: Michelle, is Paris right handed? How will this terrible injury affect her busy career and is there any possibility of permanent damage or disfigurement?

MA: Matt, as far as I know, Paris is right-handed. Two renowned specialists are being rushed to Los Angeles this morning to consult with Dr. Rimpali. For the moment, Paris Hilton is in stable condition, shaken, but reported to be in good spirits.

KC: Thanks, Michelle. For more on the Paris Hilton story we turn to Diane Diaz of affiliate KNBC in Los Angeles.

DD: Yellow caution tape marks the spot where Paris Hilton fell. Investigators are examining the sidewalk for clues as to what caused the hotel heiress and fashion model’s fall. One source close to the investigation told me that while the sidewalk looks perfectly safe and level, there may be minute variations that could cause a supermodel in high heels to trip and fall. A crack or a small hole could catch a stiletto heel -- with devastating consequences. Matt and Katie, back to you.

ML: Thank you, Diane. We will have more on this tragedy in our next half hour, including a statement from Nicole Richie, Paris’s co-star on the Simple Life, but first a quick look at other world and national news.

KC: That’s right, Matt. Though all eyes are riveted on UCLA medical center, there is other news this morning. First from the Vatican in Rome, we have a new Pope, some authoritarian German cardinal who promises to move the church backwards a thousand years…House Majority Leader Tom Delay blames Democrats and Liberals for destroying the moral fabric of the country…and in a move sure to spark controversy among its millions of customers, McDonald’s is downsizing its super-sized beverages from 46 to 40 ounces. Matt.

ML: Thanks, Katie. I’m sure we’ll hear much more about McDonald’s in the coming days. Turning back now to our lead story…Nicole Richie co-stars with Paris Hilton on the Fox show, the Simple Life. Nicole, of course, is the daughter of pop singer Lionel Richie. We wanted to get her reaction to Paris Hilton’s injury and find out what it might mean for the show. Susan Dawson from our affiliate KPHX in Phoenix, Arizona has more.

SD: Nicole Richie was in Sedona for some R&R when she heard the news that her Simple Life co-star had been injured in a fall. Reached by cell phone, Ms Richie would only say that she was concerned enough for Paris to cut her vacation short and fly to Los Angeles immediately. “It’s like, ummm, you know,” Richie said, “we’re not friends exactly, but we do kind of work together, so…” Matt and Katie, back to you.

KC: Susan Dawson reporting from Phoenix. We turn now to one of the truly burning questions in the Paris Hilton accident. When a hot celebrity goes down on a sidewalk in Beverly Hills, people naturally want to know whose shoes she was wearing. For the answer to that question we turn to Today fashion expert Stephen S. Samplestyx. Good morning, Stephen S., What can you tell us?

SSS: Good morning, guys. Everyone knows that Paris Hilton is a big fan of Manolo Blahnik. She wore Manolo’s to the Oscars and the MTV Movie Awards and has said she wouldn’t be caught dead in any other shoe. Well, fashionistas, not so fast! My sources tell me that Paris was wearing Jimmy Choo when she fell in Beverly Hills. Ooh La La, this is going to be juicy.

KC: I think you’re right about that Stephen S. We’re going to take a short commercial break. When we come back, we’ll have an exclusive interview with Paris Hilton’s personal assistant’s assistant. Wow, that’s a mouthful. More, right after this…

An Early Morning Rant

Sometimes the general stupidity and injustice of this crazy world of ours is too much to fathom, and all a thinking person can do is launch a rant to purge the system and restore some perspective, compassion and humanity.

A line from a song sticks in my head -- “I want a reason for the way things are…” -- or something like that. It’s quarter to six in the morning and I can’t pull the precise quote from my tired brain; it’ll come later, rising from my subconscious when I don’t need it. I’ve got Springsteen’s new album, Devils & Dust, playing at low volume, and a cup of java at my elbow.

Indeed, give me a reason for Tom DeLay, a morally corrupt sonofabitch who rose from exterminating vermin in Texas to leadership of the House of Representatives, where he employs his awesome powers to service the whims of wealthy campaign contributors.

Give me a reason for the stark disparity of wealth I see when I stroll past Santa Barbara High School on my way to the job; Mexican kids pouring off the MTD bus while their white peers swoop into the parking lot in sparkling VW Jetta’s BMW’s, Range Rovers, Volvo’s, and Mercedes SUV’s – sixteen and seventeen-year-old kids coming down from the high ground off APS and Sycamore Canyon or the super exclusive private lanes of Montecito. Life is good in those locales, money no problem, possibilities almost endless, college a near certainty. Daddy will provide. Daddy will rescue when the trail turns rough or the world strikes back.

With no wealthy relatives to call my own, or any money to speak of now, a twenty-three year old rattletrap Honda in the driveway, I have trouble understanding where the money comes from. How do the parents of those fortunate kids make the jack in the first place?

And then there’s Arnold, the celebrity Governor of California, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s conservative echo chamber the other night to denounce the evil “special interests” who have our state in a death grip, failing to mention, of course, the millions of dollars he has taken from Big Business, millionaires, car dealers…Arnold is either stone stupid, delusional, or a better actor that most of us have given him credit for. To sit there and claim to be the “people’s” Governor with a straight face…Jesus…

When will we learn to see through the celebrity flash and dazzle and pass when people like Arnold decide to leap into politics? Such people are ill-equipped to handle the rough and tumble that politics entails. It requires mental agility to make the switch from the movie racket, where a bankable star is fawned over, pampered, served like a pasha, and deferred to at every turn; where the media offers nothing but cream-puff questions about trivial bullshit, and nothing you do really affects people’s lives.

Arnold’s a doofus, out of his depth in Sacramento, out of ideas, reduced to ranting about greedy public employee unions and incompetent teachers. You know damn well he longs for the days when his crowds were happy, adoring, and eager to “Join Arnold.”

Hey, pal, those days are gone. Welcome to the real world.

"News" You Don't Need

It’s a typical day here in the coastal Paradise, sun coming up and birds chirping. As 8:00 A.M. approaches, traffic on Milpas Street picks up, parents and students heading for the high school. The Mexican man who lives in the apartment complex behind us coaxes his battered blue GMC truck to life; one of these days he’ll get around to replacing the muffler.

I’m standing at the kitchen counter, eating oatmeal and reading the latest Vanity Fair, marveling at how fake the cover photo of the chicks from Desperate Housewives appears. Vanity Fair is filled with photographs of impossibly beautiful people one rarely, if ever, sees in everyday life.

I finally find the article I want to read, an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy JR’s book entitled: “Crimes Against Nature,” that laments, among other things, the decline of American journalism and the consequences for Democracy in this country.

This is a topic I’ve long been interested in, particularly the standard characterization that the American media has a “liberal” bias. The charge is absurd on its face, a creation of the right-wing of the Republican Party. A quick examination of media ownership in this country disproves the accusation. Rather than a liberal bias, the American media has a “corporate” bias, and anyone who claims otherwise is a pinhead.

The Right dominates the public airwaves, both radio and television, to such an extent that what most Americans see and hear resembles Journalism about as much as a miniature poodle resembles a Great Dane. Limbaugh, Hannity, Liddy, et al echo the Party line and one another. Meanwhile, the once formidable major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – have gutted their news divisions in order to transform them into profit centers. They are driven not by what’s important news for citizens to know and grasp, but by what attracts the largest possible audience in a given time slot.

One of the major networks had a slogan a few years back that went something like: News You Can Use from People You Can Count On.”

The slogan should now read: “News You Don’t Need from People Who Don’t Care.”

Frankly, I don’t know how ol’ Charlie Gibson gets up every morning and puts his happy face on and goes into the studio and reads headlines like, “Does Peanut Butter Cure Hiccups?” America wants to know.

Jesus, you spend your professional career in the journalistic trenches, working on stories of real significance, and in the twilight of your career find yourself reduced to reporting on the nexus between peanut butter and hiccups. If Gibson had any integrity or self-respect, he’d tell his corporate bosses to fuck off and retire.

Not to be outdone by peanut butter and hiccups, or the strange, isolated case of a severed finger showing up in a can of chili, the Today Show on NBC played Infotainment with this earth-shaking query: What Do Garden Gnomes Protect?

That question has troubled me for years and I’m glad NBC finally put the issue to rest. Thank you Matt and Katie.

I think what RFK JR. was trying to say is that we are royally Fucked, and if you need proof, look no further than the last election. Dubya’s record of incompetence and failure was a mile long and should have qualified him for an early retirement to his Texas ranch – and if not for the Right’s media machine, that’s exactly what would have happened. Bush supporters voted as if they were blind, deaf, and dumb, believing for instance, that WMD had been found in Iraq, believing that there was a verifiable tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, believing that Bush is an honest man with a big heart, who takes direction from Jesus and is not in the pocket of Big Business.

Consider Ohio, a state battered by Bush’s disastrous tax and trade policies, where large numbers of voters marched to the polls and voted against their own economic interests.

The Right has the upper hand politically and economically, the two sectors feeding and supporting one another, backed by an efficient propaganda machine to spin their point-of-view to the easily misled dunces in the heartland. The Left is disorganized and has no competing philosophy or message to offer, so for those of us who consider ourselves liberals or progressives, it’s a bleak time with only occasional flashes of light.

But sooner or later, when the economy is completely in the toilet and the Chinese are buying Euros instead of dollars, and the Republicans have fouled the air and raped the land – or invaded another Middle Eastern nation – people will wake up and run the Right wingers back into the cellar where they belong.