Murder One

“Behind the veil of Oz, there is nothing but bluff.” Christopher Hitchens

My wife is watching the Oscars. Of the nominated films, we only saw Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook; I enjoyed the former and thought the latter was so-so; Jennifer Lawrence, sorry, I don’t see the reason for all the hype about your performance. Queen of Young Hollywood say the industry parasites and celebrity gawkers.

Whatever.

Chelsea Football Club lost to Manchester City today, 2-nil. My boys played poorly, conceded too much space, and lost the battle for midfield. I can’t stand interim manager Rafa Benitez – he’s an arrogant poser, a walking travesty who should never have been given the reins of Chelsea Football Club.

But the trials of Chelsea FC is not what preoccupies me tonight; I’m thinking about technology, all the fabulous gizmos and gadgets at our disposal: tablets, smart phones, super thin laptops, flat screen TV’s, wireless access points, social media, instant this, real time that.

Back in the day we thought technology would liberate us from drudgery and tedium, increase our leisure time, but it’s obvious we missed an off-ramp on the way to the Promised Land. Americans have technology galore, but what we don’t have is the leisure time to enjoy it. 

Americans are work beasts. We put in more hours on the job than any people on the planet, take fewer vacation days and, when we do get away, we remain tethered to the office by cell phone, e-mail, text message or social media. We listen to voice mail messages while standing in line for the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; tap out e-mail responses on the beach at Cancun; become apoplectic if the Wifi service at the Red Roof Inn doesn’t work.

Ironically, all this frenzied labor isn’t making us richer, at least not those of us stuck in the lower middle class where more often than not we walk a paycheck-to-paycheck tightrope.

Woe to the family that makes a misstep.

We’re still clawing our way back from the financial meltdown of 2008 and the millions of jobs that vanished like morning fog; unemployment remains persistently high, wages stubbornly flat. Not surprisingly, fewer people doing more work pushes productivity off the chart, but the spoils of our bounty flow to the owners and investors, the financiers behind the velvet curtain, who win when we lose and profit by our misery.

The wages of American workers have remained stagnant for decades and the employer sponsored benefit plans we once counted on have either disappeared altogether or become so paltry as to be meaningless; we’re on our own in ways our parents never were. 

How did it come to this? When did working people lose the war of ideas, and by that I mean the idea of shared prosperity in the workplace. The Fat Cats and their media mouthpieces and lobbyists flipped our world on its head, seized the national narrative and made it their own; capital, they declared, is more important than labor; wealth is more valued than work; the rich are more deserving than the poor. They bought the politicians and judges and rigged the system so perversely that the more workers produced, the less reward workers received.

It seems to me that the revolution started with Reagan, but it was a revolution of the velvet variety because there was little sustained protest from the working class; while the Fat Cats and money-changers picked our pockets, we argued about gun control and abortion, evolution and creationism, Monica Lewinsky and Bubba Clinton, and we swallowed enormous quantities of 100-proof Kool-Aid that made many of us believe that the answer to a better tomorrow was to look out only for ourselves and our own interests.

In this diminished and heartless era working people – when mentioned in the national debate at all – are considered disposable, bought at the lowest possible price and dumped when cheaper versions are found. Money is mobile and corporations have no loyalty to anything but profit.

It’s a class war pure and simple, rich and super rich against the middle class and working poor, and the numbers on the big scoreboard don’t lie. To use a football analogy, the rich are like Manchester United and the poor are like Queens Park Rangers – in other words, no contest. Police, firefighters, nurses, teachers, postal clerks and food inspectors are treated as parasitic drains on state and local governments, grossly overpaid, underworked dolts who contribute nothing to the common good.

That’s the lie repeated over and over by lazy reporters and corporate shills.

Our great nation can afford to spend more on its military than all other developed countries combined, but it can’t afford to pay workers a living wage or provide them humane benefits. We can afford to cut taxes for the wealthy again and again and again, but when it comes to the huddled masses, we bow before the Austerity gods. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers demand the destruction of public employee unions; we must slash their pensions, suppress their wages – or face Armageddon.

As the Oscars drone on in the background, I’m thinking, with a mixture of wonder and disgust, that the greatest transfer of wealth in human history and the premeditated murder of the American Dream happened during my lifetime.

Rusted Knight

“History is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires.” Victor Hugo

Why do I care if the government of the United States uses unmanned drones to murder human beings it suspects of being terrorists? What does it matter to a middle-aged guy living on the coast of California, on the margins of the American Riviera no less, where the sun shines most days of the year and the real estate is more valuable than gold, and where famous people come to escape the rigors of their success? What does it have to do with the price of bread or a decent bottle of single malt scotch?

I don’t know, but it bothers me, the same way a sliver of glass in my shoe would bother me. I think it’s the hypocrisy more than anything else. Cut the crap already, tell the truth; our country passes itself off to the world as the good guy, the knight in shining armor, protector of the weak and poor, a force for justice and liberty, but a few people in the White House, and the president himself, working in secret, decide who lives and who dies and they don’t seem to care if innocents are killed or maimed in the process.

What would happen if Turkey or Iran decided to build a fleet of attack drones and use them to take out any man or men – anywhere in the world -- they deemed a threat to their security? Would the US stand idly by and let them? Hell, no. We would scream “violation of international law!” and “convene the UN Security Council,” and, “this is a grave threat to world peace!”

The only country in the world the United States allows to kill with impunity is our ward, Israel. Like its more powerful mentor, Israel only murders people as a last resort, and only based on irrefutable evidence that it alone can verify.

Are we as barbaric as the terrorists with whom we’re locked in endless war?  Have we adopted their tactics? Have we become them, willing to shed the blood of innocents if it moves us nearer our political or economic objectives? Willing to torture, detain, disappear? Willing to abandon our principles, the rule of law, due process?

Our hysterical response to 9/11 has poisoned our national soul. At home by virtue of the Patriot Act and abroad with invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, we have become a nation more fearful and less free. Not that I believe the United States was a paragon of virtue prior to 9/11; we supported an all-star collection of tyrants and dictators in the name of fighting Communism, and swung our military stick in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East when it suited us.

I suppose what 9/11 did was remove the restraints, the inclination to avoid the use of force; now we bomb first and establish guilt second, and every time we do, Dick Cheney smiles with pride.

Illusions, Myths and Fables

I’ve just finished reading a collection of essays by Gore Vidal covering a span of nearly six decades. I don’t think we will see a writer of Vidal’s erudition again; it seemed he had read everything from Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams, and that he was personally acquainted with every important thinker, writer and political figure of his time.

Vidal was at his best when lacerating our government for hypocrisy, or puncturing the windbags who dominate the public airwaves on Sunday morning.

My progress through the essays was slowed by frequent pauses for note taking and reflection. Vidal reminded me that issues that appear peculiar to our time are in reality not new at all. For instance, forty years ago Vidal wondered why “we allow our governors to take so much of our money and spend it in ways that not only fail to benefit us but do great damage to others?”

Great question. Why indeed.

In a number of essays Vidal pointed out that American politicians have, since the beginning of the republic, created illusions and called them facts. Illusions galore, like claiming from every rooftop that our national debt is the direct result of overly generous entitlement programs rather than a national security state run amok; and that the only path to enduring solvency is not to raise taxes on the wealthy or drastically scale back our national security apparatus, but to take a sledgehammer to “wasteful” social programs.

Another grand illusion, and a core tenet of the idiot wing of the Republican Party, is that tax cuts for the wealthy produce jobs for the middle class. The wealthy have enjoyed more than a decade of tax “relief” and the middle class is still waiting for jobs.

Or like our president at the Commander’s Ball thanking our brave warriors in Afghanistan for protecting our freedom. Really? Our freedom is imperiled from the frightful military capability of a relatively small, rag-tag, loosely knit group calling itself Al-Qaida or the Taliban? The president failed to mention that America is entering its twelfth year of waste and futility in Afghanistan; the greatest, most expensive military force in human history has failed in spectacular fashion, but, naturally, our political leaders claim that the occupation has been a brilliant success and has prevented evil terrorists from attacking our homeland.

And now, of course, the Al-Qaida threat has sprouted in Africa and the prevailing wisdom is that we fight the terrorists there or fight them in Florida, California or on the shores of Lake Michigan.

America has itched to get a foothold in Africa and now, courtesy of the endless War on Terror, we have a pretext.

Yes, we are awash in illusions and to those I would add fables and myths; the fable that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave; the myth that we are inherently better than people of other nations and that our lives are more valuable; the fable that we are a force for good in the world.

Primarily what we have that others do not is louder and more persistent PR.

Vidal was also bemused by America’s relationship with the state of Israel and the way this small nation manipulates our foreign policy. Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, was grilled the other day on Capitol Hill about the sacred topic of Israel, and of course he promised undying fealty to Tel Aviv, no matter how many innocent Palestinians the Israeli army kills or how many settlements are built on confiscated and disputed territory.

In the 1980’s Vidal wrote, “I would stop all military aid to the Middle East. This would oblige the hardliners in Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. We have supported Israel for forty years. No other minority in the history of the United States has ever extorted so much treasury money for its holy land as the Israeli lobby.”

The extortion has now been going on for 65 years and we are as far from peace in the region as ever. Israel is more militant and recalcitrant, always making threats to bomb Iran or launch another assault on Gaza.

My favorite Vidal quote has to be this one: “Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.”

The electorate becomes apoplectic, rabid and sometimes violent over the rights of a fetus or the teaching of creationism and the Ten Commandments in public school, but when the financial syndicate mortgages our future and turns millions into paupers, the electorate falls silent.

Unfortunately that’s not an illusion.