Fiction: Beggar's Kaleidoscope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poem - The Winner and Still Champion

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

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

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

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

Broken Promises, Bitter Tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did we get into this mess?

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

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

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

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

Poem: Age of Snooki

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

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

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

Right Snooki?
Right Kim?
Right Heidi?

Poem: AARP Has My Number

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

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

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

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

I’m not one of you
Not yet
Anyway

I don’t give a damn what the calendar
Says

The Real Obama

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, Obama, who betrayed whom here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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