Shoot that Duck

The new Will Ferrell film, Anchorman II, is one of the silliest I’ve ever seen, but embedded in the gags and bits is a commentary about our popular culture, namely, that the dumber it is, the more people will clamor for it. When the major American media consolidated a couple of decades ago, and print, TV and radio outlets fell into fewer and fewer corporate hands, programming honchos figured out that dumbing things down was a sure-fire path to sustained profits, and in short order real “news” was ditched in favor of high-speed car chases, celebrity weddings and breakups, features about cuddly animals, salacious murders, fashion, kidnappings, and stories of survival. Television shows about television shows sprouted like mold.

I had never heard of Phil Robertson or Duck Dynasty until the recent dustup over comments Robertson made about homosexuality, when his bearded face began appearing all over the Internet, from Facebook to the New York Times. The A&E Network briefly suspended Robertson from Duck Dynasty, then, under pressure from viewers and right-wing luminaries like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, relented. Robertson will be back at the head of his clan.

Curious to see what I was missing, I watched five minutes of a Duck Dynasty episode on-line; that was enough -- celebrating rednecks, no matter how wealthy or colorful -- isn’t my idea of entertainment. I read a comment from one dedicated Duck viewer that he loved the show because the Robertson clan celebrates “Christian” faith and values. Well, that seals the deal for me.

My wife tells me I must reconcile myself to the fact that pop culture is a celebration of stupidity. She can watch an episode of The Real Housewives of (enter name of city here) with serene detachment; the inanity of the show doesn’t make her apoplectic or homicidal; I can’t muster anything but contempt and vitriol for rich, self-absorbed, Botoxed women, and the same goes for pawn shop owners, hoarders, real estate junkies, fashion designers and chefs. All they do is make noise and create drama where none exists. Why people care about Phil Robertson escapes me – honestly, I don’t get it.

It’s not surprising to me that a majority of Americans believe in miracles, angels, fairies, or that the earth is only 6,000 years old. We celebrate dumbing down at every opportunity and our appetite for crap and schmaltz is as insatiable as it is profitable for its purveyors; money is the only reason A&E executives put the Duck king back on his throne. They’re not going to slice off their nose to spite their face. The Duck man will be around until he says something truly over the top.

I was thinking I might write something uplifting and hopeful as we approach 2014, but I’ve succumbed to the blues once again. Sorry, folks. I thank all of you from around the world for reading this blog; I suspect some of you stumble across it purely by accident, but for those who step up and sit a spell, I thank you and wish you all the best in the new year.  

  

Working Class Scapegoat

You went to work for the City every day for thirty-seven years. You worked in the heat of summer, the bitter cold of winter, and every weather condition in between. Co-workers who were grizzled veterans when you started your career have long since passed away. Mayors and city councils have come and gone, some good, some corrupt and incompetent. Very few people now can remember when the City was flush with tax revenues, though abandoned office buildings, empty houses, and ghost factories speak of a more prosperous past. Your everyday reality for the better part of two decades has been cutbacks and reductions, layoffs and unpaid furloughs. Through it all, you kept reporting for duty, doing more with less when that became the new mantra. As the budget cuts slashed through the thin layer of fat and down to the bone, you watched the quality of services decline. No surprise, of course. Equipment designed to last twenty years was prodded and coaxed to last for 30 or 35; one worker now did the work of two, even three. Maintenance for the City’s infrastructure was deferred, deferred, deferred. Raises for you and your co-workers were also put on hold until some date in the future when the City was back on firm ground, when the pendulum swung and better times returned; next year, or the year after.

You saw the For Lease signs appear downtown, a few to begin with, one corner of a familiar block, but before long the disease spread and became an epidemic of entire blocks; plywood covered many windows. Broken streetlamps remained broken, potholes went unrepaired. Trash service became sporadic. Homeless people slept in doorways and on abandoned bus-stop benches. Still, you held on, this was your home, after all, and watching it die a slow death was painful. Although the politicians down at City Hall talked endlessly of attracting new businesses and sparking a renaissance with this or that initiative, it never came to pass. More and more people threw in the towel, packed their worldly possessions and set out for the suburbs or Florida or North Carolina or Texas; a trickle became a flood. It seemed like the only people left were those without the means to escape. You considered it, but your job and home and pension and memories were all here, in this declining city. Your fate and its fate were joined, for better or worse.

Local political bosses and Chamber of Commerce types laid some of the blame for what had happened to the City on the federal government’s doorstep, but they also blamed workers and their unions for setting the bar on wages too high for too long, and they made it seem as if paying a worker a middle-class wage was not only ridiculous from a business point of view, but morally wrong. Everyone talked in the language of the market now, nobody talked about justice or fairness.

Your turn to call it a career finally came. You were an old timer now; a survivor, and your co-workers said you were lucky to be getting out before it all went to hell. You put in your years, contributed to your pension, and it would almost be enough to live on if you were frugal and nothing went horribly wrong; the pension was your right, secured by your service to the City and guaranteed by the laws of the state. Nobody could take it away.

You were five years into retirement when the City declared bankruptcy. Once so proud, the City leaders were forced to kneel before an appointed Emergency Manager who was handed unprecedented authority to restructure the City’s financial obligations in whatever manner he saw fit. No clumsy, tangled democratic pretensions would get in his way. The Emergency Manager proclaimed that he was not bound by promises made in the past; the City was destitute and desperate and promises carried no weight. The pension you sweated for – and contributed to -- was fair game.

What got under your skin, beside the gross injustice, the broken promise, was how the power brokers hinted that the City’s collapse was somehow your own fault, as if, for each of those thirty-seven years, you had taken more than you gave in return. As if you were the greedy one. That you upheld your end of the bargain meant nothing to them; your pension was a liability on a balance sheet, an abstract number, and an obligation to settle for pennies on the dollar. You, and others like you, had ceased to matter.

Descent into Madness, Part II

 “The great and terrible irony of capitalism is that if left unfettered, it inexorably engineers its own demise, through either revolution or economic collapse.”            

Robert Scheer, author, The Great American Stickup

Business leaders became Gods. Lee Iacocca. Carl Icahn. Jack Welch. Ivan Boesky. It was a decade of relentless mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts. Remember Michael Milken, the junk bond king? In 1987, the Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street, came out. Gordon Gecko, the swashbuckling and utterly corrupt corporate raider, announced, “Greed is good” and ever since greed has been our ethos, and we have taken it to heights Gordon Gecko only dreamed about.

The rhetoric of the 80’s and early 90’s was all about Capital and the rights of investors. Labor was a drain on profit that had to be reduced by any means necessary. The assault on organized labor from right-wing think tanks and academics on corporate payrolls picked up steam. American workers were too expensive and demanded too many benefits. To be competitive with the rest of the world, American CEO’s needed the freedom to move production wherever cheap labor could be found. Taiwan. Malaysia. Mexico. Vietnam. Entire industries packed up and departed, abandoning communities and regions they had been tied to for decades. States began competing with each other to lure corporate jobs, offering enormous tax breaks and myriad other concessions if only Boeing or GM or 3M would locate a plant within their borders. States with right-to-work laws on their books did better in this zero-sum bidding war. Why pay union scale wages in Illinois when you can pay just above minimum wage in Alabama?

The American auto industry continued its decline, despite endless concessions from the United Auto Workers. That was the game – wage and pension and benefit concessions for continued operation of this or that plant. If workers refused, management said, fuck you, we’re moving the whole shebang to Mexico.

Compared to his dingbat son, George Herbert Walker Bush was a reasonable man; he spoke of a thousand points of light and a kinder hand. The first Bush was a typical Chamber of Commerce type Republican, a man who rode the family fortune and extensive political and corporate connections through the CIA and the Vice Presidency.

But come the election of 1992, George was ousted by the man from Hope, Bill Clinton, the “new” Democrat who bragged of a Third Way to govern the nation. In essence the Third Way was the recognition of which way the wind was blowing: it was money, not ideas, that won elections, and the place to find reliable sources of campaign money was in corporate boardrooms. With the right messaging and PR tactics and votes on legislation, Democrats could go after the same donors that historically supported Republican candidates and causes. Nobody was better at this shell game than Bill Clinton, the Ivy League educated good ol’ boy, skirt chaser and snake charmer.

Clinton signed NAFTA into law. Clinton pushed a brand of tough welfare reform that made Republicans salivate. Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, eviscerating the Glass-Steagall Act that had protected the financial industry from itself since the 1930’s. With a stroke of his presidential pen, and the enthusiastic backing of neoliberals like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Bill Clinton planted the seedlings that became the thorny vines that strangled the economy in 2008.

Of course, George W. Bush and the GOP tended those vines, watered and fertilized them, fed them Miracle Gro and steroids, while the right-wing machine flooded TV and radio and academia with its messages of “individual” responsibility, and a twisted mix of free market tributes, Christian fundamentalism and militarism. W and the people around him pushed a harder, crueler, and unforgiving vision – an American Nightmare built on the bones of the American Dream.  Every “public” aspect of American life has come under intense attack: teachers, firefighters, and public servants of every stripe are painted as parasitic drains on government treasuries. It is classic class warfare, and it continues to this day, with cries from Paul Ryan and his ilk for steep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and even food stamps for the neediest citizens, primarily children.  As in any authoritarian regime, the military budget and funding for the national security apparatus are sacrosanct.

The danger of any revolution is that it will go too far, lose sight of its initial aims, and gather a perverse momentum that spells its own demise. This is what happened with the Reagan Revolution: it created too much economic inequality and too many zealots eager to sacrifice common sense and moderation for their ideology.  The zealots speak of freedom and democracy as they toil to degrade both. Freedom must mean more than the freedom to shop, to consume, to acquire and accumulate worldly goods; democracy is hollow if it consistently ignores the will of the governed. 

Hyper social Darwinism, every citizen on his or her own, a gladiator in the economic arena, competing for survival against implacable foes that view mercy as weakness and moderation as a sin. As philosopher Alain Badiou has described our twisted age:

“Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don’t look after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but reduce taxes on the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety.”

Is this the ethos we want to organize our society around? If so, count me out. We can’t continue like this because it’s not sustainable for our society or the planet on which we depend. We desperately need new social movements and a new economic arrangement that tempers greed and establishes a multiple bottom line that takes the welfare of workers and the health of the environment into account.

Unfortunately, the hour is later than we know.

Descent into Madness, Part I

“Casino capitalism is the true religion of America and provides common ground for both major parties, in spite of their differences on the role of government and the welfare state.”          Henry Giroux

I started this blog almost ten years ago, when George W. Bush was President.  Dick Cheney was running the show and the United States was waist deep in its illegal occupation of Iraq, and three years into the occupation of Afghanistan. The War on Terror was in full swing. The creepily named Patriotic Act had been enacted with near unanimous consent of Congress. Bush’s tax gift to the millionaire class was working as intended, delivering big benefits to people who didn’t need them; just about any American with a pulse and the capacity to sign his or her name could qualify for a home mortgage.

Bush, a serial fuck-up, derided intellectual activity and passed himself off as a simple good ol’ boy from Texas who believed in a Christian God, America, Baseball, and Capitalism. His partner, Uncle Dick Cheney, swaggered like a neo-Fascist and muttered darkly about terrorist threats and the imperative to kill Muslims. Cheney believed that the only way to protect Americans from evildoers was to extend unlimited power to the Executive Branch.

It was a bad and embarrassing time to be an American, and I was always pissed off, fuming, and shocked about what my country was becoming. I wrote to save my sanity more than anything else. Fear hung over the nation and for a sense of security we willingly traded our liberties and our privacy. At the time I had no idea how bad things would get in the years ahead.

Sometimes when I consider the fundamental changes that have taken place in the United States in my lifetime my head spins as if I am afflicted with vertigo. I grew up believing that the country worked because it shared its unparalleled wealth with as many of its citizens as possible. The idea of sharing prosperity was valued. My father was a working class guy, a butcher by trade, and a member of a labor union; he earned a decent wage and we had a toehold in the middle-class. America seemed generous back then rather than stingy; kind rather than cruel; open rather closed, confident rather than fearful. Our government was a force for good, it could right wrongs and protect people from some of life’s vicissitudes. Our despicable racist history could be slightly ameliorated by passage of the Voting Rights Act, for example, and the plight of the poor was taken seriously enough to prompt President Johnson to launch a War against Poverty.

How times change. In 2013, under a Democratic president, we criminalize and punish the poor.

True, the government lied about our situation in Vietnam, insisting that victory was right around the corner when in fact we were on the long highway to defeat. College campuses across the nation were hotbeds of unrest. Young people wore their hair long, and many of them, particularly in crazy California, smoked marijuana, dropped LSD and set their draft cards on fire. Hippies made my grandmother nervous. Charlie Manson and his followers put the fear of Satan in Los Angeles residents. Black rage erupted in Detroit, Watts, Newark and Harlem because white America had too long ignored the cries of black America. Whites fled inner cities for the safety of the suburbs. The decade of the 60’s was terrifying and bloody. We buried two Kennedy’s, Martin and Malcolm, and our collective dreams. 

Richard Nixon was in the White House when the 70’s came along, and he made law and order the rage along with stoking the racial fears of southern voters.  Kent State happened on Nixon’s watch, unarmed students gunned down by National Guard troops, like a scene lifted from Argentina or Chile. Nixon eventually resigned in disgrace to be replaced by Gerald Ford. Saigon fell, the economy was ravaged by inflation, and the nation seemed to lose its mojo and its swagger. Our confidence wasn’t restored by Jimmy Carter’s single term, though Carter was a decent and, for the most part, honorable man. The overthrow of our man in Iran, the Shah, and the hostage crisis that followed made it clear that our power was limited. At the same time the Japanese appeared poised to dislodge us from our place at the head of the economic table. We began to hear about the Rust Belt.

Then Ronnie Reagan reappeared on the national political stage, with promises to restore America to her rightful place on top of the world. With a prepared script and his actor’s background, Ronnie was a formidable political force, playing the role of president as John Wayne might -- standing tall and talking tough, believing always in the essential goodness of the American people. According to Reagan, government was the problem, and if government would just step out of the way, the energy and productivity and moxie of the American people would flow like the Nile, all the way to prosperity for all.

A big fan of the economist Milton Friedman, Ronnie extolled, in his avuncular and winning way, the virtues of the free market. Forget John Maynard Keynes. Reduce the role of government in the economy, unfetter capital from costly and redundant regulation, and let the just, wise and infallible Market God deliver the bounty. The Reagan era changed the norms of the game, the language of debate, and ignited a war on organized labor, government oversight of business, anti-trust laws, and welfare queens. The market knew best how to reward the producers, the risk takers, and the entrepreneurs, those heroes of commerce who were the only people that mattered.

I was a callow young man back then, and a lot of what Reagan said made sense to me. Fortunately, with the help of experience and learning, I would outgrow Reagan’s oversimplifications.     

Tinder in Search of a Spark

“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairness’s that afflict the peoples – that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.”  Mark Twain

I desperately want to believe that Chris Hedges (journalist, author, rebel and anarchist) is right when he argues that the corporate elite who own and operate America are running scared, but I have trouble imagining a popular revolt in our future. If Hedges is right, a single incident could spark an uprising and put citizens in the street. I would hope such an uprising, if it happens, would be peaceful, but the powers that be are unlikely to sit idly by when they have militarized police forces at their disposal.

The Occupy movement, although short-lived and largely unfocused as to its political goals, made the corporate elites nervous because the movement made the problem crystal clear: the 99% were being shafted by the 1%, with ample help from courts of law and legislative bodies. Occupy embodied what millions felt and knew to be true because their personal experienced confirmed it.

The 1% drove the final stake into the heart of the American Dream, and as the dream lay dying in the gutter the moguls laughed; they laughed at how easy it was to engineer a corporate coup, to buy politicians wholesale, to crush labor unions, to send millions of jobs abroad, to eliminate or hose down regulations, and to seize de facto control of the legal system. The 1% laughed because even when they lost they won. They knew the asset bubbles they created had to burst, and when the day of reckoning arrived they strolled away from the smoking wreckage richer than ever. The 1% shrugged and said that free market capitalism sometimes worked this way, but the 99% recognized racketeering when we saw it. The federal government once enforced anti-trust laws and prosecuted mobsters, but that was before the death of the American Dream, when working people who played by the rules and tried to do the right thing had a shot at a ticket to the middle class. Today the government sleeps under a goose down comforter with the mobsters.

The Occupy movement gave us images and words to express what we felt but the forces of the state, working on behalf of moneyed interests, moved against Occupy in full riot gear. Sanitation reasons, they claimed. Necessary for protection of private property, they said.  Corporate media echoed these justifications. The usual pundits told us Occupy was way off base, out of touch with Main Street, a nuisance that deserved to be driven from private and public spaces.

What will the spark that ignites the tinder be? Another bailout of Wall Street gamblers? Another stupid war in the Middle East? Financial meltdown, Part II?  Or some other event that will open the people’s eyes to the reality that their government doesn’t work for them, or that American-style capitalism is a game for insiders. 

The insiders build walls and erect fences and invest in barbed wire.

As noted many times before on the Balcony, the American government no longer fears the people, as some European governments fear their citizens. The only sure-fire way to ignite the outrage of average Americans is to take away their access to TV; do that and the people will pour into the streets, armed to the teeth and determined to spill blood. 

Camelot Remembered

The “holiday season” is well under way here on the Platinum Coast, with endless TV commercials for Best Buy and Macy’s and Target; the parking lot at our local Trader Joe’s already wears holiday garb. Buy, buy, buy is the implied message. What will this year’s hottest gift be? Black Friday looms on the horizon, our undeclared national holiday of consumerism and mass psychosis. Come one, come all, bring your nearly maxed out credit cards – unprecedented deals are waiting. Back at corporate headquarters, bean counters pore over sales data and plug numbers into Excel spreadsheets and report the trends to the executive suite.

There will be no holiday season in parts of the Philippines this year, and residents in or near Fukushima will suffer another winter of discontent and abject fear.

According to news reports this has been a bad week for President Obama. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act hasn’t gone well, and the President is being hammered because holders of cheap policies that don’t meet the minimum coverage requirements mandated by the ACA have seen those policies cancelled, even though Obama promised way back when that people who liked their crappy policies could keep them. Obama presses his lips together, as all politicians do when caught in a messy lie, and apologizes for causing a cluster-fuck. What he should apologize for is not pushing for a single-payer system.

I renew my call for a federal law to prohibit Christmas advertising prior to December 1. Let poor Thanksgiving bask in her own glory.

Popular TV shows: Scandal, Revenge, Betrayal. Do these titles speak to an American Zeitgeist? We live scandal every day, the political class has betrayed us, and worst of all, the game is rigged so that revenge is impossible. The big crooks have big lawyers and big friends in very high places. We’ve arranged things so that the wealthy are virtually untouchable; they break the law with impunity.

Fifty years ago this next week JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I was four years old at the time, and therefore too young to remember what I was doing or where I was when the news came that Kennedy had been killed. Years later I would learn about what happened in Dallas through black and white photographs in a book I found in the hall closet. Camelot. Legend and myth, and endless speculation about what might have been if JFK hadn’t been killed. Before the decade was over, JFK’s brother Robert would be gunned down in Los Angeles, and Martin Luther King Jr., would fall to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis. The 60’s were a murderous decade, and many dreams were shattered. Our national innocence died in the 60’s. JFK couldn’t keep the US out of Vietnam.

Fifty years on, the US still maintains a pointless embargo against Cuba.

JFK’s candidacy and presidency ushered in the age of the image, the photograph and the video footage; use the image to shape public perception, and always include the children in the shot.

For all his personal flaws, JFK seemed to offer the best America had to offer – youth, energy, vision and grit. Strip the veils and the Camelot myth away and JFK might not seem such a towering figure, but measured against the trolls who run the nation in 2013, he was a giant.

Border Crossing

“American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world… Thomas Frank, author, What’s the Matter with Kansas

I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. “Hello,” I said.

“I’m sick and tired of lazy people expecting the government to guarantee them a comfortable life.”

Ever since he began collecting Social Security, Donny has been bitching about welfare, immigrants, and food stamps. We’re friends on Facebook and I see his posts, mainly flaming screeds from Fox News that he passes along. You know, baseless statements like, “America’s economic problems are the result of overly generous social welfare programs.” Yeah, six weeks of unpaid family medical leave is bleeding us dry.

Other than his weird politics, I consider Donny one of my closest friends. He’s got a heart of gold and a soft spot for animals, but when he’s downed seven or eight beers or a flagon of red wine, he slips off the rails and spouts total right-wing gibberish; he leaves his brain and making sense far behind. When I can get a word in, which is rare, I remind him that he’d be sleeping on flattened cardboard under a bridge if not for his pension from the State Teachers Retirement System and his Social Security check.

He says, “I was raised Catholic and I want to help people, but there’s no free lunch. If you want something you’d better be ready to work for it, just like I did. That’s all I’m saying.”

He’s drunk, I’m sober, and there’s no point in arguing. I know from experience that it’s only a matter of time before he starts complaining about Mexicans. In Donny’s view, Mexicans fornicate recklessly and take advantage of America’s big heart and generous nature by suckling at the public teat.

Right on cue Donny says, “Mexican girls need to close their legs. That’s the root problem. Don’t have five kids if you can’t afford to feed them -- that’s all I’m saying. Basic common sense is always in short supply. If you’re living in a converted garage with a hot plate for a stove and a bucket for a toilet, and you’ve already got three kids under the age of five, you keep your legs closed, am I right?”

Sure, Donny, I say. I can hear him slurping another beer, lighting another cigarette. He’s getting loose, building a head of steam; in the morning he won’t remember a damn thing about this call. He says Mexicans are crossing the border in droves, laden with drugs and guns and mean intentions. Never mind that under President Obama the US has deported record numbers of human beings. Donny hasn’t kept up with the doings of ICE.

About the NSA, drone strikes in Pakistan, criminal bankers, income inequality, unabashed support for Israel, and climate change, Donny has nothing to say. Compared to Mexican freeloaders those problems pale. Stop the Mexicans and glory days will be here again.

Donny reminds me of something I heard on the radio the other day about gun violence and terrorism. The probability of an American citizen being killed or injured on US soil in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, yet to protect ourselves from this threat we have a massive national security apparatus, militarized police forces, and invasive security screening at airports. Small threat, outsized response.

American citizens are far more likely to be killed or injured by a deranged person armed with an assault rifle, but we can’t protect ourselves against this threat because of the NRA and its deliberate misinterpretation of the second amendment. We can’t get background checks or stop the sale of assault weapons or high capacity magazines. This danger is real and constant, and our response is anemic.

My drunken friend worries about the wrong threat, and he’s hardly alone. 

Smiling to Extinction

It’s a normal morning. My son is wrapped in his blankets, dead to the world. My daughter, the pre-teen alien, is stirring in her bed but has not yet swung her feet to the floor. In the living room, ABC’s Good Morning America is on the flat screen, and George Stephanopoulos is running down the morning’s “breaking news.” I generally tune George and Robin Roberts and the rest of the GMA crew (the GMA website calls them a “cast”) out in favor of going about the business of getting ready for the day. After a report about the hot water the White House is in over the NSA’s reckless spying on foreign governments whom the US counts among its allies, and an interview with New Jersey governor Chris Christie (potential presidential candidate, mind you!) on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, GMA moved to its bread and butter -- a report (several minutes in length and complete with CGI graphics) about a foiled kidnapping in some god-forsaken American hamlet, followed by a report about a daring and brazen escape from an Oklahoma prison. Four devious and dangerous inmates on the loose! How can we protect ourselves?

Generally it’s just white noise while I nag my daughter to get into the bathroom, or beg my son to wake up, but on this late fall morning, as the GMA drivel droned on, I began to think about all the important stories that go unreported every day, or that get reported and are quickly forgotten, and all the voices we never hear on the networks. It wasn’t that long ago when North Korea posed a threat to the civilized world; for a few days the US media was on that story like white on rice, with dire predictions and plenty of saber rattling, but when North Korea failed to launch its missiles, the story fizzled and then disappeared.

The condition of the Fukushima nuclear site is another disappearing story. How can GMA spend four or five minutes on a ridiculous piece about a kidnapping, and devote no time whatsoever to a real, ongoing catastrophe? I have no doubt that the world is woefully ignorant of how grave the Fukushima situation really is, or how severe the consequences will be in the years ahead. The truth isn’t being told, but let’s not worry our pretty little heads about radiation; just keep eating at Taco Bell, buying the latest Apple gadgets, and believing in the righteousness of American style capitalism. Keep a smile on your face while you consume your way to personal fulfillment. 

Put another way: ignore reality and it might go away. Or: believe not in what you see, but in magic, fairy tales, myths, and legends.

Remember when more than a dozen US consulates and embassies in the Middle East closed down because of a “vague yet specific” terrorist threat? ABC News and its cousins were in full throat then, fanning our fears of evil Muslim terrorists and a repeat of Benghazi. Like North Korea, this threat never bore fruit, and quickly disappeared from our consciousness.

When my anti-bullshit force field fails and I actually tune in to GMA the word that comes to mind is infantile. While I understand that a network morning show is a banal mixture of news, celebrity trivia, fads, and pop culture, does the viewing audience need to be treated like morons, as if we are incapable of handling the truth about our economy, our environment, and our government? The “anchors” or “cast” members smile through human-made and natural disasters; they read their lines and laugh on cue, and never, ever, question the status quo.

As Neil Postman said many years ago, we are amusing ourselves to death. 

Saved by the Blues

“Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.” Hunter S. Thompson

The feckless mob that calls itself the United States Congress has kicked the battered debt ceiling/budget can down the road. Round Two of fiscal roulette won’t happen until after the holiday “season.” Republicans may be mildly chastened by their recent debacle and plummeting poll numbers, but the Tea Party nut-bags will return in force to tilt once more at the windmill. Come January, the same bogus arguments will ring out in the halls of the capitol. We must live within our means! Solution: slash Medicare and build another aircraft carrier. Entitlements are bleeding the federal treasury! Solution: reduce benefits and expand our military footprint in Africa. America is a welfare state! Solution: lower taxes on the wealthy.

It’s madness, pure and simple, lifted straight from the pages of George Orwell: black is white, war is peace, destruction is progress. Our government has divorced itself from the people in favor of political elites and wealthy interests, defense contractors and resource extractors, pharmaceutical companies, lobbying firms, and corporate-controlled media. Though we are called to the polls every couple of years, more and more our votes are meaningless; outcomes are decided in advance, by money and access to the apparatus of one of our corrupt parties.

No political leader will level with us about how bad things really are; we’re far down the road to third world status.

President Obama and the party he heads are faithful servants of the status quo. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress they behaved timidly, like a minority party, ever deferential to Tea Party kooks and neo-Nazis like Eric Cantor. Don’t look to the Democrats for bold ideas or a cogent, passionate explanation of what and who the party stands for. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do their best, but crackpots like Ted Cruz control the big megaphone and the headlines.  

Near the end of his life Hunter S. Thompson called the US the Kingdom of Fear. That moniker may have been true in the aftermath of 9/11, but a dozen years on the Kingdom of Fear has become the Kingdom of Stupidity. We play the same cards again and again and expect a different outcome: cut taxes on the rich and expect jobs for the poor; do nothing about climate change and act bewildered when the floodwaters rise; murder innocents with drone strikes and wonder why we are despised in the Muslim world; offshore US manufacturing to China and wonder why our tax base has eroded and the dollar is looked upon with suspicion on world currency markets.   

What is to be done to halt this insanity? The next financial meltdown isn’t far off, and I fear it will be even worse than the 2008 version. Our leaders engage in magical thinking, rely on myths and the pronouncements of false prophets, while spasms wrack the body of the American empire. The gulf between rich and everyone else inexorably widens, ho hum, and our leaders shrug, as if to say, it’s just the way it is.

It’s not the way it is; it is the way corrupt Money has made it. The American people have been played, duped, and robbed.

I was feeling low about all this, pessimistic about my children’s future, losing hope, until bluesman Kelly Joe Phelps came to town with two guitars and his voice; that voice and the way Kelly Joe worked those guitars for an hour and a half restored some of my faith in the human species.

For the time being, I’ve been saved by the blues.

Clowns and Zealots

“The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems.”  Tony Judt

The circus is in town, settled in tents and trailers on the low road at the edge of the swamp. At night fires burn in oil drums, and shadowy figures come and go through clouds of smoke. An unseen violinist plays a mournful tune on an out of tune instrument, hour after hour, the same tune. Sometimes the crack of a whip can be heard, or the shriek of an animal. Bad tidings. Local kids and feral cats avoid the encampment. The bearded lady bears a strong resemblance to John Boehner; the human cannonball might be Paul Ryan’s twin; and the sadistic ringmaster, torch in one hand and Bible in the other, looks like Ted Cruz.

Just a bad dream, right? Maybe not. Look around.

Zealots and nut-bags whose only goal is to stick it to the black guy in the White House hold the federal government hostage. With the exception of the armed forces, the national security apparatus, and the courts that uphold the sanctity of property rights, these zealots claim to hate everything about government. Every ill faced by the nation will be remediated if we return to the

moral clarity of the 18^th century, when women, laborers, children, slaves and indigenous people knew their place. 

Ironic that people so rabidly opposed to government raise and spend millions of dollars to run for office, and once in office invest an inordinate amount of their time begging money from donors so they can win re-election. After seeing that government works for their patrons – tax breaks, direct subsidies, exemptions from law -- the zealots take every benefit government has to offer: pensions, healthcare, paid vacation, sick leave, goodies that lie miles beyond the reach of most Americans. Food stamps for the poor we can’t afford, gold-plated benefits for lazy legislators we can. Like the hypocrites they are, the zealots hate the golden goose but covet its eggs.

Who was it that said, “The last American president who feared the people was Richard Nixon.” Chris Hedges? A large part of the problem in this country is the absence of mass opposition. Unlike France or Greece or even Italy, Americans fear the government, not the other way around. Look what happened to the Occupy Movement. It didn’t take the State long to stamp it out, shut it down, and shut it up.

Is the Affordable Care Act really the cause of all this angst? Have the zealots forgotten that the ACA is a law concocted by right wing, corporate-friendly think tanks and written by lobbyists for insurance and pharmaceutical companies? Have they forgotten that the sanest and most cost-effective medical insurance option for our nation, the “public” option, or Medicare for All, was murdered in the womb?

The debt ceiling and the shutdown, the national debt and the frothing over the ACA is a sideshow to keep the people distracted from the real problems facing the country: jobs, income inequality and the environment. Our corporate masters don’t speak about these subjects because the status quo is working just fine for executives and shareholders, investment bankers and hedge fund managers. A week into the shutdown ABC News is focused right where you’d expect a propaganda organ to be: on how the shutdown is affecting the stock market. As if the market is any indicator of the economic health of our nation, as if the market can alleviate the woes of working people whose wages have been flat or declining for years. 

Tax, trade, and monetary policies enacted and followed over the past four decades have jammed a fork between the shoulder blades of the working class. Venal, sociopathic dimwits abducted the soul of the Republican Party, and the Democrats –from Barack Obama down – are pussies. Both parties are owned and operated by corporate donors and plutocrats who don’t give a rat’s ass for the people. Everyone forgets that Bill Clinton jumped into bed with every corporate titan who offered the Democratic Party campaign cash.

The corporate coup has been ruthless and breathtaking; almost every facet of American life has been transformed into a commodity and judged by the price it can fetch in the marketplace: public education, health care, criminal justice, you name it. Our brand of capitalism is out of control, devouring itself, and we keep on extolling its virtues.

Cruz Missile

A Harvard education isn’t what it used to be, if Senator Ted Cruz is the yardstick of that fabled institution’s efficacy. How can a Harvard law school graduate say so many outrageous and stupid things? More astonishing is that anyone takes Cruz seriously, though the hacks in the mainstream media hang on his every whacky pronouncement, and the big network talking heads have already determined that crazy Cruz is definitely presidential material.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Senator Cruz really believes the crap that pours from his mouth, but it’s more likely that he is simply the latest in a long line of ambitious politicians who will say and do anything to grab and hold power. 

The American political landscape is like Chemical Alley down in Louisiana – a deep cesspool of toxic chemicals that is slowly killing everyone who comes into contact with it.

The extremists in Congress want to defund the Affordable Care Act, and in order to accomplish this perverse objective they are willing to cripple the entire federal government. Obstruction and destruction is what passes for politics in this country now.

Are things any better on the vast frontier of the American empire? Not really. American drones still hover over the tribal areas of Pakistan, and American soldiers continue to chase shadows in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan. Our failed colonial experiment in Iraq left that nation wrecked, unstable and dangerous. ABC News reports that “Iran is America’s most formidable adversary,” keeping alive the shibboleth that Iran is the next Bogeyman that must be contained, confronted and conquered. American military outposts may surround Iran, and Iran may live in the same neighborhood with nuclear-equipped Israel, but Iran is the dangerous nation with nuclear ambitions that must be checked.   

But getting back to Ted Cruz…I wonder if what Cruz and his Tea Bagger followers are really afraid of is that the Affordable Care Act might work, in the same way Medicare and Social Security have worked for generations of Americans. Cruz and Co. believe in market solutions to every problem, not government programs, and if the Affordable Care Act succeeds in making it possible for more Americans to gain and keep medical insurance coverage -- and slows the increase in the cost of care -- it might undermine their ideological certainty that the free market is the only solution to social problems.

But what do I know? I’m just an average citizen watching this nutty spectacle from afar. To me Washington D.C. is like a giant lunatic asylum where the padded doors have been ripped from their hinges, freeing the inmates to run wild in the corridors and recreation room, loot the infirmary, and smash every window in the institution. When the crazed ideologues find the matches and the gasoline they will burn the place to the ground – in the name of liberty for the American people, of course.

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: Hunter S. Thompson was right -- we are locked in a downward spiral of dumbness.