The CTM Chronicles - Orlando

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Arnold came to Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Letter to Yankee Owner George Steinbrenner

Dear George:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crack in the Edifice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dubya's Erector Set

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

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

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

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

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

Wake Up, Dems

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Bob, The Only Disconnect is in Your Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stench

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

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

Katrina, Color Blind?

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

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

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

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

The Greatest Mystery

“Fish or cut bait.”

“Stop whining.”

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

“Cut the pissing and moaning.”

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

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

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

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

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

An August Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunderheads & Crashing Waves

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

Man Child and the Supremes

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

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

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

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

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

On A Cool Foggy Morning

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

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

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

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

THE CTM CHRONICLES - GUAM

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

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

Women will kill me, no doubt about it.

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

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

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

GO FIGURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CTM Chronicles - Bar Row

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trivial Seriousness

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

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

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

Serious about the trivial
trivial about the serious

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

They might get
angry
and
do
something

The CTM Chronicles - Tokyo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you guys doing here?”

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

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

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

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

Shock & Outrage

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

June 2, 2005


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

Dear Senator Boxer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where oh where oh where

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, the Balcony will be screaming again soon.

World in Crises: Paris Breaks a Nail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Early Morning Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"News" You Don't Need

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CTM Chronicles - San Antonio

I met Chuck T. Miller on a bus rumbling from the San Antonio, Texas airport to Lackland Air Force Base. It was June and miserably hot, a suffocating kind of heat I never experienced in coastal Santa Barbara, where the on shore breeze keeps the temperature mild. Chuck was sitting three rows in front of me, talking loudly to a big black guy across the aisle from him. Nobody else had the nerve to say a word for fear of ticking off the sullen looking Staff Sergeant perched behind the driver.

But Chuck was jawing away and I found his voice and manner annoying. I assumed he was talking so much because he was just as apprehensive as the rest of us about the major life change that awaited us when we passed through the front gate at Lackland. We’d already had a taste of the strange new world we were about to enter when the Sergeant cussed us out for moving too slowly to the bus.

The real abuse started the minute we got off the bus and formed a ragged line in front of a diminutive Tech Sergeant named Garcia, who whacked a clipboard against his thigh to emphasize the orders he was shouting at us. Garcia’s job, of course, was to scare us shitless, and he had a knack for the work. There was this pudgy kid from Ohio named Joe Grassley that Garcia started picking on the minute the poor sap stepped down off the bus, and he didn’t let up for the next six weeks. The way Garcia saw it, Grassley couldn’t wipe his own ass properly.

Garcia played no favorites. He made it clear that he hated all of us equally, regardless of where we came from or the color of our skin, though I think he reserved special disdain for Californians; he claimed we were all radicals and dope fiends. Every guy in our flight was degraded by Garcia at least once. When my face broke out near the end of the first week Garcia took to calling me “Pizza-face.” He caught a kid named Davis jerking off in one of the toilet stalls and thereafter Davis was “Jack-Off.”

One of Garcia’s favorite tricks was to pop in on us around one or two A.M., just to see if the airman on guard duty was at his post, awake and alert. It was on one of his nocturnal visits that he nailed Chuck, sound asleep in the bunk he had dragged clear across the barracks and wedged into the guard station.

The difference between Chuck and the rest of us was that Chuck honestly didn’t give a shit about anything. He actually started laughing when Garcia lit into him. Even the heaviest sleepers among us shot out of our bunks when Garcia’s voice boomed off the cinderblock walls. Garcia ripped Chuck up and down, calling him every name in the book, even tossing in a few choice phrases in Spanish. And through it all Chuck laughed, and the more he laughed the madder Garcia became.

By the time I worked up the nerve to slip out of my bunk and tiptoe closer to the action, Garcia’s wrath was losing steam. The sergeant wasn’t used to anyone defying his authority, let alone a stringy kid from California who seemed to have a real problem understanding that here he, Garcia, was God.

I’ll never as long as I live forget what Chuck said or how calmly he said it: “That was a weak rant, Sarge. I know you can do better. Tell you what, retool the act and come back for another try.”

It was vintage Chuck, a verbal broadside that knocked Garcia for a loop and sent him reeling out the door cursing at the top of his lungs. After that episode Chuck was the undisputed leader of our flight. But don’t get me wrong – Chuck paid a price for mouthing off like that – KP duty for the duration of basic training, a shit job, though Chuck made the best of it. When asked how he could stand four or five straight hours in the sticky hot kitchen, Chuck just smiled. “Boys, there’s women in that kitchen, and I hereby promise you that I will screw one of them before this is through. Next time you go through the serving line check Maria out.”

Chuck claimed that he banged Maria no less than a dozen times in a storage closet, though we had no way of verifying if it was true or just one of his many tall tales.

And that was Chuck in a nutshell – a born bullshitter. During that long, hot six weeks of basic training, and later, eighteen weeks of technical school in Wichita Falls – another of Texas’s garden spots -- I heard Chuck tell many variations of his story, the details morphing depending on who was listening.

Version 1: His father wrote for TV shows and his mother was an artist. The marriage was tempestuous and marred by excessive drinking and violence. Chuck was an only child.

Version 2: His father was the business manager for a “world famous rock band,” while his mother worked as a professional mystic in Hollywood, reading the vibrations and auras of A-list movie stars. Chuck had a younger brother named David who had perished in a flash flood at the age of four. Pressed for the name of the rock band his father managed, Chuck would say, “Think Hotel California.”

Version 3: His father worked for an “agency” of the federal government and was out of the country for months at a time; his mother was a homemaker who took in sewing to make ends meet. Chuck had a younger sister named Kasandra who was born with only three fingers on her left hand.

Version 4: His father was MIA in Vietnam, shot down over Hanoi. His mother was a mentally unbalanced emergency room nurse who spent more time with her boyfriend than with her son. Virtually on his own from the age of five, Chuck was forced by cruel circumstance to cook for himself, do his own laundry, and bandage his own wounds.

Version 5: His parents were dead, killed in a car accident in Peru when Chuck was only a baby. He’d been raised by his maternal grandparents on a ranch in Wyoming which he hated and had fled when he was thirteen. He had hitchhiked from Wyoming to California with the clothes on his back and a few possessions in an Army knapsack. He drifted from Denver to Vacaville and from there to San Francisco where he lived with a family of anarchists and dope peddlers with ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army.

I’m sure Chuck had two or three or seven more versions reserved for contingencies.

The CTM Chronicles-Phoenix

From time to time I'll post stories about Chuck Thompson Miller, a deranged and degenerate man I consider my alter ego. These stories contain sexual debauchery, foul language, domestic violence, and basic criminality. These are not for the prudish or the faint of heart. Be warned and beware!

My old Air Force buddy, Chuck T.Miller, called at midnight the other night, from Phoenix, where he is shacked up with the wife of a dog track mogul. The last time I heard from Chuck was in February, when he called from Olympia, Washington to wish me a Merry Christmas. At that time, Chuck was hooked up with a woman who owned a matchmaking agency, though she herself had neither boyfriend or husband. It was a quirky story, full of bad luck, odd twists, and serious male-female conflict – in other words, par for the course.

But let’s stay on track. It’s midnight and Chuck is calling from Phoenix. He launches right in as if we’d seen one another that afternoon: “Yo, T-man, what up? as all the young dawgs say. Shit, there’s nothing more pathetic than a white dude trying to act black. How’s it hanging, T-man? Listen, you would not believe what I’m into here. I’m betwixt and between two people who make my most tumultuous relationships look like a fucking picnic. They are up to their butts in lawyers, accountants, and private detectives, each doing their absolute best to inflict maximum pain and suffering on the other. Rachel’s got the big house and the daughter, Bob’s got the idiot teenage son, the condo and the Mercedes SUV. You know what Bob’s license plate says? Buzzsaw. How do you like that shit? Buzzsaw. That’s what his business associates call him. Rachel says he’s tied in with the mob, but she’s probably just bullshitting.

“These two really need to load up a couple of .44 magnums and have a duel. The local cops and the neighbors would dearly love to see one of them dead. Let me give you a quick example of how volatile the situation is. Last week me and Rachel had tickets to see Rod Stewart – a big fav of Rachel’s -- so Buzzsaw was supposed to pick up his daughter and keep her overnight. About ten minutes before we have to hit the road he calls and says he’s tied up in an important business meeting and will be late, how late he doesn’t know. Now Tania, the daughter, is seventeen going on twenty-eight and can certainly hang out by herself for an hour or so, except that Rachel doesn’t trust her not to invite some guy over to do the big nasty in the Jacuzzi. Tania is too fucking sexually developed for her own good and the little nympho even comes on to me once a week or so, which really tests my resolve not to slip into total degeneracy and show her what it’s like to be fucked by a man.

“Anyway, Rachel goes berserk. ‘Listen to me you disgusting toad,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘Get your fat ass off the golf course or off whatever whore you’re porking and get over here and pick up your daughter! Yeah? You think you’re man enough? Bring it on, you limp-dick piece of garbage.’

“After slamming the phone down so hard it cracked, Rachel tore through the house looking for God-knows-what, cursing and screaming, her eyes like a wild dog’s. Meanwhile, Tania is downstairs watching MTV and smoking a joint as if her mother’s behavior is nothing new. I’m thinking to myself that I’ve finally been consigned to the madhouse. Anyway, cut to the chase, Rachel comes running downstairs with a silver pistol in her hand. She’s waving the thing around like Calamity-fucking-Jane, her finger on the trigger. I’m about to shit myself because I’m convinced that one of us is about to get shot in the heart. You know me – I’m a fucking coward.

“By the time Buzzsaw pulls into the driveway, almost an hour late, Rachel is insane with rage. Not only does she have the gun, now she’s got a nine-inch carving knife. I don’t even bother trying to calm her down; it’s too late for that. She runs outside in her bare feet and I’m certain somebody’s about to get killed, and I’m imagining the cops coming, then the coroner, and all the questions that will ensue. I look over at the kid to see how she’s absorbing all this and she’s still glued to the tube, as calm as can be. When she senses that I’m looking at her she winks at me.

“Buzzsaw is either the bravest man I’ve ever seen or the dumbest, because instead of backing out of the driveway at top speed, he gets out of the car and walks toward Rachel with his arms akimbo. I can’t hear what he’s saying, of course, but I can read his lips: ‘Go ahead, shoot. Pull the trigger, Rachel. Shoot me dead.’ Now realize that Rachel is less than ten feet away in a shooter’s stance, both hands holding the pistol and the carving knife clenched between her teeth. The last thing I would have said in that situation is, Go ahead, shoot.

"But Buzzsaw obviously knows his wife better than I do because two minutes later the confrontation is over and the two of them are talking as if it never happened. Tania gets her backpack and goes outside and gets in the car without saying a word to her parents. I’m watching this scene through the kitchen window, dumb-fucking-founded. This is too weird – even by my screwy standards.

“Rachel comes back in the house, all smiles. She puts the knife and the pistol on the kitchen counter and says to me, ‘Why aren’t you dressed? We gotta’ get going.’

“How do you like that shit, T-man? We are a doomed species. It’s only a matter of time. By the way, can you see your way clear to loaning me a few bucks?”

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,