The Magical Mystery Tour

Questionnaire for Potential Participants in a Town Hall Meeting
With President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney

SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY

Dear Community Member:

As you are probably aware, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney will be visiting your community soon to discuss the Bush administration’s revolutionary plan to reform Social Security.

In order to insure a lively and provocative exchange of ideas, the President’s advance team is conducting this survey to weed out malcontents, terrorists, drug abusers, gay marriage advocates, unattractive butch lesbians, and any others deemed a security risk to our great leaders.

Please answer all of the following questions completely and truthfully.

From which of the following media outlets do you get the bulk of your news?

A. Fox News B. Wall Street Journal C. National Review D. Al Jazeera

Who do you consider the greatest American president since Ronald Reagan?

A. George W. Bush__ B. George W. Bush__ C. George W. Bush__

Do you believe that Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed a grave & imminent threat to the security of the United States?

A. Yes__ B. Yes__

Do you believe that President Bush shamelessly panders to the Religious Right?

A. No__ B. No__


Did you weep when Richard Nixon died?

Yes__

For corporate CEO’s only: How many American jobs have you outsourced to India during the past year?

A. 1-100__ B. 100-500__ C. 500-1000__ D. 1000 or More__


Is America the best and most moral country on this planet?

Yes__ B. Yes__

Thank you for your participation. Depending on the outcome of an FBI and CIA background investigation, you may be contacted by a member of the President’s advance team. At that time you will receive further instructions and will also be required to submit to a polygraph test.

If chosen to participate in the town hall meeting, you must be willing to provide urine and blood samples at your own expense.

Sincerely,


P. Ignacio Garnicke
President’s Advance Team

The Magical Mystery Tour

They think we’re morons. They think we’re asleep at the switch. They think we’re not watching them or if we are that we could care less.

I’m talking about George W. Bush’s handlers – his brain trust – the men and women who plot his political strategy and gauge public opinion and plant stories in the media, on Fox and Rush Limbaugh’s EIB radio network.

George and Dick are on the road, sixty cities in sixty days; it’s your basic magical mystery tour during which they will make their pitch to dismantle Social Security.

But unlike a rock band or troupe of Chinese jugglers from Peking who perform before whoever wants and can afford a ticket, George and Dick only do their thing before carefully selected audiences. Heaven forbid that some puckish student or inquisitive truck driver ask the Prez or the VP an unscripted question that might prove embarrassing. No, no, Bush’s handlers have taken that possibility out of the equation.

In Bush World – to borrow a phrase from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd – the folks who ask the Prez questions are chosen in advance and carefully prepped by his handlers. In other words, the questioners are saps, fakes, mouthpieces, who do nothing more than read from a script so as not to upset the Prez’s delicate mental equilibrium.

Sweet Jesus! Has our democracy come to this sad pass? What amazes me about this sham is that the Prez’s people don’t even bother to hide the fact that the whole damn tour is a farce, an exercise in the cheapest PR. George and his people have the balls to call these gigs “town meetings.”

You have to love the GOP for calling a bird a monkey and a dunce a genius. Town meeting? When only a select few are invited?

The Prez is so slow on his feet and his mind so scrambled that the only way he can appear half-way Presidential is to know in advance the questions that are coming down the chute.

Bush, the blind Messiah, is leading our country’s mad dash to the bottom. I have this image of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, standing over one of those long piss troughs you find in the Men’s room at Dodger Stadium, puking their guts out. They can’t believe what they see from their digs on high, the basic hypocrisy and perfidy of Bush and his gang, the criminal stupidity and hubris.

Fuck it, bring on the clowns, the jugglers and the lady with three heads.

Arizona Journal

I recently spent three days in the Phoenix, Arizona area with my buddy Erol "Bubba" Mustafa and made these running notes.

Steve Lavin: "He shut their water off." We assume this means that a player did a great defensive job on the other team's top scorer.

Players with unprouncable African names. "Alakazam Obouti takes it strong to the rim!"

David Wells on Bud Selig: "He's an idiot. He can kiss my ass." Wells is right -- Selig is a fishface, a former used-car dealer with no business being the commish of Major League Baseball. "I'm not aware of rampant steroid use in our sport," Selig told Congress the other day. "We're as clean as a hound's tooth."

Watching ESPN on HDTV. It's like these jabbering fools are right in the room.

We decide that Steve Lavin's head is enormous, like a watermelon.

A bird is shrieking outside on Lantana Lane. I have yet to hear any human sounds, not even a car backfiring or a mother screaming at her kids to leave the neighbor's poodle alone. I joke that this whole master-planned area is nothing more than a Potemkin village. But maybe it's quiet because it is Sunday and all the locals are in church, praying for our troops in Iraq, the Republican Party, and the Gods who control Finance.

How many miles would I have to travel to find a Liberal around here? Or someone who advocates the legalization of marijuana, assisted suicide, and an immediate pull-out of Amereican troops from Iraq? The Nation doesn't sell well in these parts -- in fact, only about 1% of the locals have even heard of it. No, these people read the AZ Republic and agree that Social Security must be reformed -- NOW!

Jesus. I just came over to see a couple of Spring Training baseball games, drink some beers with my buddy Mustafa, play ping-pong, and forget about politics for a few days.

Bubba's house is so spacious and quiet that I would lose my way here. I wonder what his monthly nut is...ten grand? What's it like to live in a suburban mansion with three bathrooms? How long does it take Annika to clean this place?

The most striking aspect of spring training is the proximity of players and fans. At the Maryvale complex where the Brewers train, you can get very near the fields and bullpen areas. The players are huge up close, big boys, and also very young. The atmosphere is festive and the players seem relaxed, just another day of work at the yard, except I suppose, for the players who are fighting for a roster spot. The established major leaguers are working on specific skills or conditioning without that pressure.

Speaking of large boys: we saw Prince Fielder up close, Cecil's boy, and he is enormous, huge shoulders and forearms. Erol says he is a top prospect in the Brewers organization and a possible replacement for Lyle Overbay at first base.

I finally saw signs of life in Bubba's hood. One of his neighbors was working in his yard, another was hosing off her truck. Real people living in this suburban Potemkin village. We played a couple of furious games of ping-pong. My boy Bubba is very competitive and likes to win, which explains in part why he's good at business.

Before dinner we watched Supersize Me, a film about McDonald's and the fast food industry by Morgan Spurlock. I hated Mickey D's before, mainly because the golden arches are a blight on our cities and towns, but also because everytime I walk into a McDonald's and whiff that familiar odor, I feel sick to my stomach. Morgan went on a strict Mickey D's diet for 30 days and gained about twenty pounds and totally fucked up his liver. With the help of a professional nutritionist, he estimated that he consumed thirty pounds of sugar during the experiment. He felt like crap most of the time, experienced headaches and mood swings and fatigue.

Glad my children don't have more than an occasional Mickey D's thing.

Today the sun is shining and we are off to see the Giants-A's. I feel like I've been away from home and family longer than two days. I miss Terry and the kids, their energy and presence. In fact, and this is weird, I miss being on top of one another in our matchbox apartment on Milpas Street. How typical. When I'm there I piss and moan about the lack of space.

Fuck! Everything I just wrote got zapped.

Heading home today. The sun is shining again. The Potemkin village is quiet. According to the Arizona Republic, Bush and Cheney will be in Tucson today to promote the destruction of Social Security as we know it. Meanwhile, the conservatives in Congress have created a law which will allow the parents of Terry Schiavo to file suit to overturn a Florida court's ruling. Conservatives are so drunk with power that they think it is their right to overturn the rule of law when it doesn't suit their ends. They are groveling before the Religious Right on the Schiavo case, though it's an odd position to take because Conservatives usually guard states' rights and get very ticked when anyone tries to violate those rights.

XBox boxing when twisted on beer...I can see the popularity of the system now, the realism, especially when one is playing on a sixty inch HDTV set. Yikes. Erol's command post is wired and he could live in here for days.

Either I have the beer shits or the meal I ate at the Rustlers Rooste last night is responsible for my turbulent stomach. Panoramic view from the hilltop where the RR is located, and inside there is sawdust on the floor and other Old West decor. The special appetizer last night was fried rattlesnake. We passed on that, probably a wise choice. Erol said his T-bone was crummy. I'm hoping I don't soil myself on the airplane. Gurgle, gurgle from down below.

The Downward Spiral of Arnold

It's official: the Governor of the wealthiest and most populous state in the union is a certified lunkhead.

The Guv's new line is that he doesn't loathe nurses or teachers -- just the unions that represent them. Hmmm, so who does the peabrain think make up these unions? Capitalists? Martians? Chinese industrialists? North Korean peace activists?

Sweet Jesus, you'd think Maria would do her hubby a favor and buy him a dictionary so he can at least appear to be semi-intelligent, rather than just a third-rate actor mouthing second-rate lines. Carrying this out further, you'd think someone on the Guv's staff would pull him aside and say, "Excuse me, sir, but before you do this interiview I thought we might define some terms...just so that you don't confirm your political opponents' worst nightmares."

Let's cut to the bone: Schwarzenegger isn't the sharpest blade in the drawer but he does have a salesman's native cunning. He sold himself as a bodybuilder and fledgling actor, then sold high-concept movie ideas to producers and other Hollywood money handlers. Along the way he probably hawked Amway soap and discounted vitamins and latex sexual aids. Who knows what people like the Guv are into or capable of? As any right-wing Christian moralist will tell you, Hollywood is full of devils, horrible people who take drugs and stage orgies and corrupt our youth.

What kills me is that when this ill-fated leading role as Governor is over, Arnold will probably hoodwink enough California voters to elect him to a senate seat. He'll set himself up in Washington D.C. and immediately make friends with wonderful folks like Tom DeLay and Chuck Grassley; he'll shoot spitwads through a straw at Senator Clinton and challenge Ted Kennedy to arm wrestle. Congress will still be investigating steroid use in professional sports by then, and Arnold can regale his colleagues with stories of how his pal Danny DeVito shot high-grade juice into his buttocks. Yeah, baby, Arnold will take his place in the Congress of Freaks.

In the meantime, however, he's got to develop a masterplan for dealing with five foot two inch nurses who scare the bejesus out of him.

Gray Day Money Blues

The marine layer is two thousand feet thick today if it’s a foot. Dull gray sky overhead since early this morning, not even the weakest hint of sunshine, a perfect day to put three new shoes on our Ford – although this unexpected expense led my sweetheart to painful ruminations about money, or more accurately, our lack of jack.

We had a small nest egg, the result of a legal settlement Terry was involved in. When the case wrapped, Terry’s attorney pulled down more dough than she did, though for Terry the issue was always the principal involved in the case, not the money at the end of it. But for a couple that has never had much of a cushion, the money was a welcome relief from constant financial worries.

We don’t have extravagant tastes, so for the most part the money has been sitting in our active assets account, earning modest interest. We never ran out with the dough burning holes in our pockets and bought large dollar items. We have the same junker second car, a blue 1983 Honda Civic, nicknamed the Blue Zephyr; the same Magnavox television set; the same washer and dryer; the same computer. We do own a new digital camera and video recorder. Last summer Terry and I made a short trip to Phoenix, and earlier this year, we took a family trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As I said, nothing extravagant and yet, today we have about half the amount we started with and tax liabilities of around $1400 due on April 15.

Damn it all to Hell, poverty stinks, particularly when you live in a place like Santa Barbara where even salespeople at Nordstrom boast a net worth of two and a half million and make real estate deals in the employee lounge. OK, maybe that’s exaggerating a little, but you get my drift. We are surrounded by wealth and sophistication but can’t seem to corner any for ourselves.

It’s a bitch being stuck in the working-class. How does one get on the fast-track to becoming a card-carrying member of GW Bush’s “ownership society?”

Sweet Jesus, I’m doomed to a tangent now that I’ve mentioned that nitwit’s name. I saw the evil weasel on CNN the other night, in the bar of the Hilton Burbank, where I had no dominion over the remote. When I’m home and Bush’s mug appears on the tube I immediately change the channel. Better to watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island than to get annoyed listening to Bush…Anyway, there I was, nursing a Heineken when Bush appears in front of some hand-picked crowd, every person rigidly screened to weed out any ideological deviants or potential malcontent that might leap up suddenly and scream, “You lying bastard!,” to pitch his half-baked plan to fix the Social Security system. The President tried to control his trademark rich kid’s sneer but couldn’t quite pull it off. You could see the disdain in his face when he said the words, “social safety net,” as if a government program designed to insure that senior citizens don’t wind up starving on America’s streets is a terrible thing. I felt my BP shooting skyward and I wished for the balls to hurl my beer bottle through the TV. Or to at least demand that the barkeep turn the fucking thing off.

It’s a double whammy for me, with Dubya in DC and Arnold in Sacramento, both of them singing from the same twisted privatization songbook:

“We will starve the public sector to feed the private sector,
We will destroy the unions and roll the law back to 1899,
We will protect our friends, punish our enemies, and leave no CEO or right-wing millionaire behind.
We are the right, the glorious and righteous right, hear our song and heed our call.”

Amen. Arnold is racing around the nation raising cash with both hands at lavish dinner parties where wealthy sycophants cough up $50,000 for a chance at a photograph with the action star turned politician. Arnold has the PR moment down cold, and makes his money pitch with the detached cool of a professional madam. “Can you imagine,” the Austrian-born actor says, warming up for his stump speech, “the audacity of these union workers, these special interests, demanding decent pensions and working conditions. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous? I will terminate these special interests and blow up all their comfortable boxes!”

We are locked, as Hunter S. Thompson said, in a “Downward Spiral of Dumbness,” and it doesn’t look like the ride will stop any time soon. I wish I could pull the cord and get off at the next stop, long before the bus careens off the bridge and plunges into the Abyss.

White Flight in Fat City

Editor’s Note: This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed do not represent those of this Blog or the editor. This piece started as a “What If?” exercise and matured from there. The editor takes no responsibility if individual readers or an entire class of readers cannot spot a flight of fancy when they see one….

From the Office of Bruno K. Harshman, Superintendent, Fat City Public Schools

To: Worried White Parent

Inre: White Flight

Recent news reports about white flight in Fat City’s public schools are grossly exaggerated, the product of an overzealous and biased beat reporter trying to stir things up and cause commotion.

While it is true that the ethnic make-up of our schools is roughly 70% Latino, this figure has not budged in the past three years, so there is no cause for immediate concern. While birthrates in the local Latino community continue to rise, at a rate some whites consider alarming, there is no indication that Latinos will soon overwhelm our white students.

Rest assured that if you place your precious white child in one of our schools, he/she will see other white faces and not be lost in a “sea of brown” as was reported in the press.

In the interest of candor I must admit that running the public schools in Fat City can be a dicey proposition that makes one think of early retirement. The yawning gap that divides the super wealthy from the merely rich, and the merely rich from the desperately poor, contributes to a wickedly complex socioeconomic brew. Naturally, whites who shell out a million dollars for a rundown tract house in a marginal neighborhood don’t want to confront the rude reality of a local elementary school stuffed to the gills with underachieving Latino students.

Generally speaking, white folks feel entitled to top-notch public services, even if they are unwilling to pay the taxes to pay for such services.

Trying to please every constituent group leads to sleepless nights, bleeding ulcers, and heavy consumption of booze and Rx drugs. (A 500mg Vicodin makes one almost impervious to even the most obnoxious parent.) If we focus time, effort and resources on little Chloe or Dylan at the expense of Juanita and Carlos, we are accused of blatant racism, and if we do the opposite and try to raise Juanita and Carlos’s test scores, white parents storm my office and accuse me of pandering to the “minorities.”

Frankly, I sometimes shake my head and wonder if the money I’m paid is worth the headaches. But…that’s another letter – or perhaps a book -- after I’m safely retired. Yes, after my pension is safe I’ll tell everything I know.

If I can again speak candidly…white folks like us are not accustomed or willing to accept minority status. There it is, I said it and I won’t take it back. Hang me from the highest rafter, see if I give a hoot! The demographic trend is against us and all our money and power can’t reverse it. All we can do, really, is build more gated communities and establish more charter schools, keep ourselves segregated from the masses.

My office door is open and I have a reliable supply of Vicodin. Please stop by and say hello!

This is Not a Fan Letter

I'm no fan of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was appalled when the voters of California elected him and I remain so today. Arnold has a shrewd understanding of Power but he's totally out of touch with working people. He's currently on a quest to screw teachers and schools workers, and since I'm one of them, I have to hit back any way I can:

March 1, 2005


Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814

Inre: Fund Raising

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:

A week ago or so I saw a piece in the Los Angeles Times in which you were reported as saying that only the press cares about the fund raising orgy you are currently locked into, or something along that line. Your central point was that the people could care less that you are dashing from one end of the state to the other like some sort of entry level mafia bagman.

Let me set you straight, Governor: there are a lot of people out here who think your big dollar dinners and photo parties with the rich and famous are obscene, though maybe not as obscene as your comment that just because people give you money doesn’t mean you owe them anything.

How stupid do you think we are? Even though the people you cultivate can chip $20 or $30 grand into your campaign coffers without batting an eye, and maybe in rare cases do so without a thought about what they might expect in return for their largesse, the majority are looking for some edge, some advantage, some inside track to a fat state contract, a timely veto of a thorny piece of legislation, or maybe just a phone call from one of your people that opens a door long closed.

The whole perverted American political system turns on money, which is the reason you find corporations doling out checks to both sides as a way of hedging their bets. Those of us who follow the political game know that the easiest and quickest way to find a rat is to follow the money.

You know the old saying, Governor, you can fool some of the people some of the time…

Indeed.

Sincerely,