Greedy Teachers & Crazed NIMBY's

Ever since Wendy McCaw bought it, the Santa Barbara News-Press has lumbered downhill, becoming more of a rag than ever. The paper is nearly unreadable now – unless you enjoy constipated pundits like Randy Alcorn and Travis Armstrong. And if what Nick Welsh recently wrote in the Independent is true, the News-Press brass is devouring its own and spitting the bones on the sidewalk.

So, when folks ask me if I saw this or that piece in the News-Press, I usually tell them, “No, I don’t subscribe,” which is the reason I didn’t catch a story about teachers or housing for teachers that got one SB resident fired up. I read this resident’s Letter to the Editor, and was as shocked by its vitriolic tone as I was by its inaccuracies.

The guy lit into teachers for working only nine months a year, for being the beneficiaries of lavish health and retirement benefits, and for earning salaries as extravagant as $62 grand a year.

If only teachers had it so easy and so good. Word up to the ticked off resident: a career in public education isn’t the laid back gig you seem to think it is. First of all, starting pay is around $35,000 a year, hardly a king’s ransom for someone just out of college and more than likely saddled with student loan debt. Moreover, teachers work their butts off, particularly at the elementary level, where they must adapt or create lesson plans to meet the needs of students with varying degrees of fluency in English. Most teachers put in far more hours than they are contractually obligated for – a testament to their dedication and commitment. And with the trend toward “accountability,” meaning high scores on standardized tests, teachers are under more pressure than ever.

As far as those lavish health insurance benefits go, well, for the past several years in the Santa Barbara School District the ride hasn’t been free. Due to soaring costs caused by our broken health care system, and the loss of revenue from declining enrollment, a decline sparked by the South Coast’s exorbitant cost of housing, teachers who subscribe to the District’s medical plan have contributed monetarily toward that benefit.

This resident also expressed outrage at the possibility – and all it is at this point is one option among several – that the District might develop one or more of its unused properties into workforce housing for teachers and support staff. He’s not alone: a simple “feasibility study” has NIMBY’s pouring from the woodwork. While some NIMBY’s attack the concept and the process, others excoriate teachers for being greedy, for wanting even more from the public purse. Huge salaries, lavish health benefits and pensions, and now, housing too! For shame! How dare teachers want to live and work on the Platinum Coast without paying full freight! The hell with them! If they can’t afford to pay a million-two for a run-down tract house, too bad! Let them move to Oxnard, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Guadalupe!

Of course, with their McMansions the NIMBY’s desire top-notch local schools staffed by experienced and dedicated teachers, but not if that means building “workforce housing” in their precious neighborhood; not if that means altering the dynamics of supply and demand that are currently tipped so handsomely in their favor. The traffic! The noise! Our property values!

We contradict ourselves at every turn. As a society we are fabulously wealthy and fabulously stingy. We can’t see what is dividing us and exterminating any notion of the common good – when the common good is all we’ve got.

As Bob Dylan aptly put it: “People are crazy and times are strange.” Amen, brother, amen.

Poem - People Talking

Think of all the people talking
On cell phones
Right
Now

Talking about nothing
That matters
Or everything

“Bring home Chinese food.”

“Our daughter failed Algebra.”

“Did you pay the electric bill?”

The philosophy of bullshit
The metaphysics of lies

Too many words
Too many nights

We need more silence
Fewer
Proclamations
Decrees
Opinions

We’re not as great
Or as bad
As we think

Not as cruel
Or as benevolent

Not as greedy
Or as generous

Just ordinary people
Talking
While Stumbling
Toward
Transformation

Poem - Musing on the Muse

I’ve loved her long enough to know
That she answers no summons but her own;
Coming and going like woodsmoke
Like a dream
Where and when she pleases

Indifferent to my need she’s with someone else tonight
Making another’s pulse race, afflicting another’s mind with fever
Stealing another’s breath

Is she in Peru?
Or a Dublin pub?
A farmhouse on the veld?
Or a methadone clinic in East St. Louis?

She’s wherever beauty and ugliness collide
Wherever forces seen and unseen scream for expression
Recognition
Acknowledgment
For life beyond death

My need is naked, raw, primal
But tonight she ignores my plea, toys with my devotion
Proving once again that she belongs to no one
Owes no allegiance to crown or coin
Plays no favorites

Every cell in me wants to hate her
Yet tonight, once again
I await her arrival

Into the Real in a World Unreal

Illegitimate president
Illegitimate “war”
High crimes
Misdemeanors
Premeditated mendacity
Sanctioned corruption
Political perversion
Democratic subversion

One can only take so much
Of this folly of fools

Think I’ll go to the backyard
See if the snapdragons are blooming
Listen to the sparrows
Study a worm
Wait for a swallowtail

Come back inside
Hug my wife
Kiss my kids
Sink into the real

Truth in Whoring

Give the Republicans credit for sticking to the Party line, no matter what. When it comes down to a choice between average citizens and their corporate, well-heeled, business-lobby constituents, the Republicans choose the latter every time. The decision is a no-brainer. Whoever lines their pockets gets their vote, pure and simple. It’s the best Democracy money can buy.

Yesterday, by a near straight party-line vote, the Republican controlled senate killed an amendment that would have increased the minimum wage for the first time in a decade. During that decade, Congress raised its own pay by about $35 grand.

Working people on the low end of the economic ladder can’t catch a break. If you toil at minimum wage for forty hours a week, you will languish below the Federal poverty line. You won’t make it, pure and simple.

It’s about time we have some truth in labeling from our Congressional representatives. Therefore, I propose that every member of the House, and every member of the Senate, be required to sport the logo of his or her corporate sponsor(s). Like NASCAR race cars, let’s plaster the suit coats and trousers and blouses of Dennis Hastert and Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton with corporate logos so that we can easily identify the constituents they serve. Forget the pretense of representing citizen interests -- let’s call a diamond a diamond, a spade a spade; if you serve Exxon in Congress, wear the Exxon logo. If you shill for Wal-Mart, wear the Wal-Mart logo on the seat of your trousers, if you’re in bed with CitiGroup, wear their name.

Let’s mark the people’s “representatives” for who and what they are: corporate whores.

Distract & Conquer

I dipped my toe in the mainstream entertainment media this morning, checked out a few minutes of Good Morning America, found it more tolerable than usual because Diane Sawyer was on vacation. Diane gives me a pain in the ass, though she doesn’t irritate me as much as Katie Couric.

Anyway, this morning Bush was on, jabbering to the press about his recent trip to Baghdad, and how great things are turning out over there. Yes, Bush checked into the Green Zone – the only territory in the entire country that is reasonably safe – and met a few hand-picked Iraqis, posed for photo-ops, and generally did his level best not to make a fool of himself. After all, this is an election year and Bush’s approval rating is hovering around 37%. Most Americans have finally woken up to the fact that the Iraq Invasion/Occupation is a total failure, with 2,500 Americans killed, thousands of Iraqis killed or maimed, and billions of dollars poured down the shithole.

Never one to stress about inconvenient facts, Bush was still beating the dead dog, mouthing “stay the course,” and “remain until we succeed,” and so on. In short, the usual unconvincing blather.

The sputtering heads at GMA then announced the results of a recent poll which indicated that those Americans surveyed are concerned about Iraq, immigration, gay marriage and abortion, though not necessarily in that order. That a fairly large number of Americans list immigration, abortion and gay marriage as their chief concerns is testament to how thoroughly the Right controls the agenda and debate on our fruited plain.

Why should the average American give a rat’s ass about abortion and gay marriage when the wages of working people are stagnant, when health care is a disaster, when gasoline prices are at record highs (at least in this pampered nation; Euros have paid even higher fuel prices for years) and official government policy is to transfer as much wealth upwards as it can? The answer is that gay marriage and abortion are simply distractions.

Distract and conquer, that’s the Rovean mantra. The people are ignorant, so busy scratching for the crumbs left by the wealthy that they don’t realize how thoroughly we’re screwing them. While they argue about gay marriage we steal them blind! If that’s not pure genius I don’t know what is! He He He He. They don’t call me Bush’s brain for nothing! I am the man! All we have to do to manipulate those dipshits is raise the specter of legalized gay marriage and willy-nilly abortion on demand. It’s like taking cookies from a toddler. And when a few of them start to see the rough outlines of our grand scheme, all it takes is repetition of our mantra, like “small business,” “tax relief,” and “American competitiveness.” It’s so easy that it should be illegal. He He He He.

And the Democrats, the supposed champions of the working class, well, they can’t find their asshole with both hands. It’s as easy to hoodwink them into playing by our rules and debating in our language as it is to fool the “people” into thinking that abortion is more important than the economy. Yes, distract and conquer. I live for this!

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich

Got nothing that important to say. Who has anything important to say? Hasn’t it all been said, by poets and writers and mystics and seers? Henry Miller, where are you now? Watch the NBA Finals on the tube or the Daily Show or some dry-ass government access program that features white right-wing Republicans pawing over thirteen-year-old Thai virgins. Vapid, no wonder millions of Americans take anti-depressants, sleeping pills, bladder control pills, blood pressure pills, etc. A nation of pill-poppers and Bible thumpers, and no hypocrisy anywhere in sight. We babble for hours about gay marriage, how immoral it is, how dangerous to the national moral fabric, but it’s perfectly acceptable to drop 1000lb. smart-bombs on innocent Iraqi civilians. Morality, American style. What a country! It’s a wonderful place to be really, really rich.

Sorry, been reading Barbara Ehrenreich again, and while she stimulates my mind, she always depresses the hell out of me. Are we fucked, Barbara, royally fucked? “Definitely, my friend! Definitely!” Yeah, I know, I was just hoping for a light in this cave, a way out of and beyond the Wasteland of Bush Jr. It’s a carnival house of mirrors, with two-headed clowns and men with three arms roaming about with scythes and loaded pistols. Hear ye, hear ye, if you are not white like Tom DeLay, and worshipping with Pat Robertson, and banging Ann Coulter on the side, forget about making it here. We will eat you alive if you’re lucky, or let you die slow if you’re not.

Right, this is the American Dream, to roam the landscape freely and without official interference, to own the freedom to break the law from time to time, drive a little tipsy, puff a fat joint at a Neil Young show, perhaps engage in an extra-marital affair, and still live to tell about it. Christ, these days there’s some addled Christian avenger at every turn. Smoke some dope? Fifteen years. Drive drunk? See you in the lethal injection chamber. Covet another man’s wife? Death by dismemberment. Yes, this is our age in all its perversity. And that’s only the bad news from the social front, wait till you see what we have in store for you on the economic side. Oh, boy, we are going to ream you so thoroughly that you will beg for more. We will shut your factory, outsource your job to India, beat unions into submission, and oh this is great, transfer the maximum amount of risk from the shoulders of government to your shoulders. Oh, baby! Health insurance…gasoline…four walls and a roof…you know what? You’re going down to the bottom rung of the ladder. We’ll preach the gospel of self-reliance and free trade and global competition and rig the system so it’s You’re Own Your Own, Dude, all across the land, and then watch you slink your poor, stupid ass down to the corner Wal-Mart to buy some shit made in China by a twelve-year-old kid who is chained to the fucking machine, with a cup of water and a bowl of rice to eat. Yeah, you’ll forget all that harsh reality when you come into our Hall of Bargains. You’ll gasp, you’ll drool, you’ll beat your chest, you’ll jump up and down, you’ll scream, you’ll pass gas, you’ll belch just like your Uncle Clem does after every meal. Your pig eyes will pop out of your head and your teeth will rattle in the gums.

America. America. America. Can you hear me now? You’re in Good Hands. In God We Trust. (And in his holy name we steal, maim, destroy, rape, violate, penetrate, eviscerate, you get the picture.) Yeah, it’s just another night in the burbs, middle-American bliss, staring slack-jawed at American Idol – or some hyperactive couple in the midst of remodeling a ski lodge in eastern Wyoming. Doug, should we vault the ceiling or demo the living room? Brought to you by Chevrolet! Ask your doctor about Cialis. Old men in retirement homes, amped on Viagara, chasing male nurses down the brightly-lit halls, pawing underage volunteers sent over from the high school. Seventy-nine-year-old man with a hard-on that lasts four hours. Hard as when he was seventeen! It’s a miracle. How do them smart people do that? Make a limp dick rise like a skyscraper. Maybe it’s God’s will. You remember what Tom Waits said about God and the devil, don’t you? “There ain’t no devil/that’s just God when he’s drunk.” Thanks for clearing that up, Tom. You’re probably right. God on a bender and messing with his little invention, the human race. I’m drunk and angry and I think I’ll pour some molten lava on ‘em, just to see what they’ll do. He he he. Laughing when he snaps his fingers and makes it happen. Sound of steam hissing from the Earth.

Barbara, baby, this is all your fault.

Another Night with the Doctor

The Doctor summoned me to his house for another strategy session. I arrived just after midnight and found him in the den, performing the half moon pose while listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at ear-splitting volume. An episode from the third season of I Love Lucy was playing on the big Plasma TV, also at full volume.

The Doctor is getting very serious about this school board run. The rectangular table along the wall was heaped with California Department of Education publications, pamphlets on school funding and standardized testing, a large map of the school district with boundaries outlined in red, books by Jonathan Kozol and several thick reports from the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The Doctor came out of the half moon pose and turned the music and TV volume down. “Immigration,” he said.

“What about it?”

“Molly Ivins.”

“Columnist. What about her?”

“She wrote a piece. I quote: “You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as police? Make it illegal to hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.” Smart lady. She also said the president is insane. No surprise there. Back in the day people who lived in fantasy land got locked away in state mental hospitals. Now the nutcases are running the show. I bet the Feds have a permanent tap on Molly’s phone. I bet Bush and Rove have an enemies list so long it makes Nixon’s look like the work of a two-bit amateur. Bush and Rove are vindictive, spiteful bastards – not that Nixon was a creampuff. Nixon would have turned on his own mother if it suited his purposes.”

I pointed at the table. “Homework?”

“A bit of light reading. Tell me, is there anybody in this state that can explain school finance? Christ, it’s like trying to unlock the genetic code of a spider monkey. I’ve read a lot of total gibberish in my time, including Marx, Engels, Chairman Mao and Susan Sontag, but school finance takes the cake. How do you deal with this stuff every day and keep your sanity?”

“I stay as far from any accounting function as possible,” I said. “I’m a word person.”

“Words are weapons,” said the Doctor. “Use them wisely, use them well. When we get into the heat of the campaign I will need you to be on your game, sharp as a tack, firing on every cylinder. We will attack the rat bastards where they live and make them rue the day they were born. We will beat them like a drum and leave their bones to rot in the sun. Indeed! We will take no prisoners and leave no witnesses to testify against us. Once we get a decent head of steam there’ll be no stopping us, and any fool with the cajones to get in our way will be crushed!”

I had no idea what the Doctor was talking about and in fact I felt unnerved by the demented look in his eyes, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to contradict him. In case you haven’t noticed, the Doctor is one of those hypercompetitive people for whom mere winning isn’t enough; he has a gladiator mentality and needs to destroy his opponents in the bloodiest manner possible. I suppose no man can survive for long in the cutthroat drug trade without a psychopathic streak.

The Doctor opened a pill bottle, extracted half a dozen yellow pills, and popped them in his mouth. Within thirty seconds his facial muscles went limp, and the craziness left his eyes. Smiling at me, he resumed the half moon pose and launched into a long monologue on the arcane subject of Equalization funding in public schools.

Look Both Ways Before Crossing the Street

Recent interaction with Dr. Duke has made me more paranoid than usual. I suppose this is par for the course when one is dealing with a man who has for years been a target of local law enforcement agencies. The Doctor is filling my head with crazy schemes and wild ideas about “reforming” public education, a subject he knows little about – not that his lack of knowledge will change his mind about running for school board. The Doctor keeps telling me that he is a quick study with a steel-trap memory for theories, dates, and names. To prove it he rattled off the names of every SBSD Superintendent dating back to 1886.

While the Doctor immerses himself in the minutia of public education, I’ve been reflecting on the steep decline in civility and competence on Santa Barbara’s roads and streets. Just yesterday, while crossing Anacapa at De La Guerra, right across the street from City Hall, I was nearly flattened by a young blonde woman in a gigantic Nissan Armada, executing an erratic right turn while yakking on her cell phone, oblivious to my presence two feet from her front bumper, oblivious to the world outside the Armada’s windows, oblivious to everything except the overriding importance of her phone call. What was the call about, life, death, a pile of money? Or was she demanding a refund from Spa Medicus for a pedicure gone bad?

We will never know because after I leapt out of the way she gunned the Armada down Anacapa Street, damn near side-swiping a UPS truck.

It seems to me that one can draw a direct correlation between the steep rise in real estate prices in Fat City (Santa Barbara) and the steep decline in the competence and courtesy of drivers. As the price of dirt around here rises and hefty equity windfalls roll in, the well-heeled feel entitled to break the rules of the road any time and any where they desire; thus it isn’t unusual to see some joker in a luxury car whip a U-turn on Santa Barbara Street, between De La Guerra and Canon Perdido, and drive half a block against traffic. In Fat City today, pedestrians stroll at their own risk, and even sidewalks provide no safe haven. Jittery LA-types in gargantuan SUV’s could care less about jumping the curb and mowing down a pack of school kids or an elderly person with an aluminum walker. That’s collateral damage, nothing to lose any sleep over. A decent attorney and the Ambien defense will take care of any legal issues that might arise. What matters is not only that LA-types roll unimpeded to where they need to go but also locate a perfect parking space when they arrive. Nine times out of ten that “perfect” space is a handicap spot or fire zone, but here again, the well-heeled feel a strong sense of entitlement to those very convenient spaces, directly in front of Starbucks or Lucky Brand Jeans.

Another thing I notice is that few motorists in Fat City bother with turn signals. Apparently, the new wealthy don’t feel it necessary to inform other motorists of their intent to turn; the rest of us should simply know, and stay out of the way.

Amen. As Tom Petty said, “It’s good to be King (or Queen).”

The Duke Campaign Takes Form

It began as a wicked joke but the Duke for School Board campaign is gathering steam of its own accord. Within two days of posting about my visit with the Doctor, several strangers called to make inquiries. At first I thought it was the usual bumbling DEA agents, fishing for the sliver of a lead that would help them nail the Doctor, once and for all. In case you haven’t guessed, Duke is no stranger to the criminal justice system. He’s been arrested several times, hauled into Superior Court to face bogus charges of drug possession for personal abuse; possession with criminal intent to distribute; assault with a moderately deadly weapon etc., etc., and every single time he strolled down the courthouse steps a free man.

But the folks who called checked out: they legitimately wanted to know more about the possibility of a Duke run for School Board; they were tired of at least one fifth of the status quo and wanted a change in style, substance, and most all, tone. I referred all the callers to Betsy, Dr. Duke’s latest personal assistant, a seventy-two-year-old organizational dynamo who lived in a double-wide in Goleta. Betsy could set the record right for the curious. At that point I still believed the Doctor was just bullshitting me. No way in Hell was he going to make a run for an entry level political position like School Board.

Much to my consternation, not to mention a rude interruption of my sleep, the Doctor called at two A.M. the very next night to inform me that he was “seriously contemplating” a run for school board, and that he wanted me to run his campaign.

“Look, Tanguay,” he said. “I got to thinking and came to the conclusion that it might be fun to sit on the Board, make some waves in the local education community. I decided that it’s about time I added some public service to my long and distinguished resume. Now, I haven’t the disposition or patience to plot strategy with some twenty-four year old PolySci major. In politics victory is the only objective. You understand this, and that alone qualifies you to be part of history.”

Duke was talking quickly and somewhat incoherently. I tried to bring him back to Earth: “You’ve got a few things working against you,” I said. “Want me to list them?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “I can take it.”

“OK, first and foremost, you have no standing or connection with the education community. You’re not a teacher or administrator or a parent with an axe to grind. Second, you’re an X factor, an unknown quantity in the law-abiding, tax-paying, traffic-signal respecting world. You know ten times as many drug dealers as you do public movers and shakers. Third, your CV is going to scare the crap out of many voters. Fourth, I don’t know more than basic nuts and bolts of running a political campaign. You need to hire a proven professional. “

“That’s a fine load of crap,” Duke said, his tone measured and reasonable. “I can deal with reality, even though I do my level best to escape its clutches. The reality is that if I get in the race I’m going to find myself running against a Libertarian crackpot with a corncob stuck in his ass, or some privileged parent of a so-called gifted student, or some community crusader looking to make a name for herself. As our Dingbat-in-Chief would say, ‘Bring ‘em on.’ Indeed, we’ll wage a campaign that will send the establishment reeling. Our model will be Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 Freak Power campaign. That’s why I need you, Tanguay – you know as much about Hunter’s twisted political mind as anyone.”

This was true, though I don’t want to toot my own horn. Freak Power, right. Politically, HST’s 1970 campaign for Sheriff of Aspen is light years away from Bush & Cheney’s America. Hell, in 1978 a man could walk into Bob’s Big Boy with a lit joint dangling from the corner of his mouth and a bunch of counterfeit twenties in his pocket and nobody would raise an eyebrow. Today some misguided cretin would call for a SWAT team and the Fox News helicopter. I think it was Hunter who always asked this rhetorical question: where were you when the fun stopped? These are not happy times for people living on the fringes of society. The government not only tosses thousands of mild offenders in prison every year, it also listens to their phone conversations and monitors the silly e-mail messages they send to their cousin in Indiana. Osama bin Laden has never been sighted in Indiana, but if you’re a member in good standing of George W. Bush’s security state, it’s as reasonable a place to start looking as any.

But the state of our personal liberties is neither here nor there and I don’t know how or why I slipped off on that tangent. The point I was trying to make to the Doctor, the one he refused to listen to another word about, was that guys with baggage as explosive as his didn’t run for any public office.

“Don’t be a wimp. Where’s your sense of challenge, of flipping the middle finger to Power? Have a shot of tequila and get a grip. We’ve got heavy brain work, grasshopper.”

THE CTM CHRONICLES - JAN'S HOUSE

Chuck followed Alice through the disaster-area front yard, past General Lee, who seemed very melancholy, and up the steps to the front porch. The dog began howling before Alice knocked. They heard the dead bolt slide, the tinkle of a chain being unlatched, and then the door swung open and a large, mannish woman in a lumberjack shirt and paint-splattered overalls appeared. She was nearly Chuck’s height and at least fifty pounds heavier. The Great Dane was at her side, barking its head off. After taking in the dog’s huge head, Chuck noticed that the animal only had three legs.

“Well, well,” Jan said, her voice a whiskey and cigarette rasp. “Look what the wind blew to my doorstep. What the hell are you doing in South-fucking-Carolina, Alice?”

“Running away from the ruin of my life, sister dear. What happened to Milo?”

Jan slapped the dog on the head to shut it up. “My asswipe neighbor ran him over, on purpose. The SOB thinks I poisoned his precious cat. What he refuses to accept is that his precious cat died of purely natural causes. I had no part in it. If I wanted to kill his cat I would have slit its throat and left it on his doorstep.”

Alice cocked her head at Chuck. “This is Chuck Miller, a fellow runaway. Picked him up in Florida. He’s got a good line, though it sounds like a load of crap to me. Claims he’s running away from the circus, but he’s obviously hiding something. He’s a natural born liar, not unlike my husband. Why are men so terrified of the truth? What have you got to drink, Jan?”

They followed Jan into the house. When the Great Dane bumped into the tattered sofa, and then banged against a floor lamp, Chuck realized the dog was blind as well as crippled. Not that a blind dog could do much damage to a house that looked as if it had been the site of a month-long party for a thousand frat brothers. Chuck was no stranger to sloth, but as he related to me several years later on one of his rare trips through Santa Barbara, Jan’s house was in a league above and beyond anything he’d ever seen.

“Tang, there was dog shit on the rug, empty tuna cans, moldy cottage cheese containers, pizza cartons, newspapers, magazines, cancelled checks, empty beer bottles, cereal boxes – it was like the woman had never seen a friggin’ trash can. The joint smelled like a cesspool. Now you know me, I’m a first-team all-world slob, a pig to the core, but this place stretched my tolerance for filth. No way was I going to sit down. Hell, it was all I could do to keep from stepping in dog shit, particularly when the damn dog comes over and starts sniffing my crotch. He smells like piss and liverwurst, and even worse, he’s got a boner the size of a Dodger dog. If Jan hadn’t been built like Mike Tyson I’d of clocked the dog with a bottle.

“Anyhow, Jan comes out of the kitchen with a bottle of peppermint schnapps, takes a belt and passes it to Alice, who takes an even bigger belt before handing it to me. Alice is already tipsy and it occurs to me that unless I keep my wits we’re going to spend the night in this shithole. I take a wee sip and hand the bottle to Jan. ‘Pussy,’ she says to me, pulling a Sherman from behind her ear and a Zippo from her pocket. She’s eye-balling me as if I’m some kind of alien. Of course I’m thinking that she’s certifiable, a nuthouse refugee. I’m a tolerant guy but I can see why the neighbors want to run Jan out. She’s the classic neighborhood freak, the crazy lady that all the kids avoid. She looks at me through a cloud of smoke and says, ‘You planning on sleeping with my sister?’ I say, I’m just trying to put some distance between myself and a bad situation. ‘Why should you be any different,’ she says. ‘Every last one of us is in a bad situation called life. Death is the only happy ending.’ ‘Oh, Jan,’ Alice says, ‘you’re so dramatic.’”

They polished off the schnapps. Alice passed out on the sofa, her head thrown back, mouth parted. Jan ordered two large pizzas with everything on them and told Chuck to run down to the street when he heard the delivery boy honk. None of the boys would come to her door. Bunch of wimps, she called them, every last one. Piss-ant boys afraid of their own shadows.

It was almost an hour before the pizzas arrived, an hour that passed for Chuck like the last hour of life on Death Row. When she wasn’t ranting about men, her neighbors, her ex-husband, lesbians, white trash, the government, Chinese-Americans, African-Americans, Serbs, Muslims and soccer moms, Jan bitched about Alice and how their father had always favored her.

Milo followed Chuck out the front door and down the walk, much more at home outdoors than in. The pizza man was a young Hindu with dark skin and wary eyes. Chuck handed the kid a $20 in exchange for a ride to the highway. “Ten dollars more for the dog,” the kid said. “I wasn’t planning on bringing him along,” Chuck said, “but what the hell. Let’s go.”

Five minutes after the pizza boy dropped them beside the Interstate, a faith-healer and self-proclaimed mystic driving a Ford station wagon with Kentucky plates picked Chuck and Milo up.

IN THE COMPANY OF SAVAGE CAPITALISM

Working people are getting ass-whipped in this country, losing ground and falling backwards, and unless you happen to subscribe to the Nation or belong to a labor union, you probably don’t even know why or how this mugging has happened.

Productivity rises continuously, but American workers don’t share in the fruits of their production. No matter how much more efficiently we produce and deliver goods and services, our corporate masters parrot the same old line: in order to compete in the global economy we must slash wages and benefits and close plants, blah, blah, blah. Off the working class trots to the salt mines to diligently produce more for lower wages, with nary a complaint about vanishing benefits or government policies that fatten corporate coffers for exporting labor to low-wage countries. The Federal minimum wage hasn’t been adjusted upwards in eight or nine years; rarely a week passes without a news story about another profitable corporation running away from its pension obligations or dumping thousands of workers on the avenue.

“Trickle down” economics gained traction during Reagan’s presidency, and has loomed large ever since “Dutch” read his lines from cue cards. Make the investor and owner class prosperous, the tale goes, and every American will eventually share in that prosperity. Sure, and bet your money on the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series. Trickle down is a suspect idea with a lousy track record. How much extra dough is trickling down into your household? Thanks to corporate-friendly monetary, labor and trade policies, the investor and owner class hasn’t been this pampered in years. They’re running the world, calling the shots, buying Congress and the White House, profiting from war, trashing the planet, living high and large at our expense.

But what of the paradox of France, a nation -- albeit a much smaller nation than the US -- that made the decision long ago to erect a stable social support system, with short work weeks, boucoup vacation time, health benefits, and employment protections. By America’s savage, dominate-at-all-costs capitalist standards, France is a wreck, a decrepit “socialist” state that simply can’t deal in the world economy. Why then does France boast one of the more successful economies in the world? Somehow, the French take care of their people and hold their own in the international marketplace.

Savage capitalism as practiced on this fruited plain works beautifully for the privileged few. For the broad majority, savage capitalism means struggle, uncertainty, and hardship. I’m not arguing here for a cradle to grave welfare state; what I’m advocating is that we grind the sharp edges off the system and restore the balance of power between owners and workers, Business and government, the pursuit of profit, and the pursuit of justice.

And just in case anyone assumes I’m against individual responsibility let me say that I’m not. Individual responsibility and initiative would still be in play in a kindler, gentler capitalist America. The central problem is that the balance of power has shifted grotesquely in favor of corporate interests and the owner class, to the point where the game is rigged in their favor. All the individual responsibility and initiative in the world is for naught when one is playing the game at a rigged table.

Dr. Duke for School Board

Dear Reader: this is a work of fiction. Don't overreact to the content or jump to inane and baseless conclusions.

I was feeling blue over the weekend and figured it was time to pay Dr. Duke a visit. I found him in the late afternoon, sitting on the porch of his rambling, termite-ravaged house, a margarita and a bong on the round table next to him. He was plunking sparrows with ball bearings shot from a homemade slingshot. “These friggin’ birds are disturbing my peace,” he said, taking aim at an oak on the edge of his lot. His pupils were dilated and there was no telling how much tequila he’d consumed. He generally woke around noon, roused himself from bed by one, did two lines of coke, drank six cups of black coffee, ate three Texas grapefruits, read the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times front page to last, checked his stock portfolio and called his eighty-nine-year-old mother, who lived in Florida and was still convinced that the Republicans stole the 2000 presidential election. He meditated two hours every night. He’d once owned a pawn shop.

Duke laid the slingshot down and fixed me with his stoner eyes. “Tell me your troubles, grasshopper.”

“Just fighting the same old shit, Doc. The grind, the rut, the choking routine.”

“Not to mention the fascists running this once great republic. Why isn’t Dick Cheney in a prison cell with a bunch of unwashed homeboys, getting his bell rung every hour on the hour? It’s damn hard to keep the faith with Dick and W running the show. That’s one reason I consume as many illicit drugs as my system can handle. Don’t suppose you want a hit? Good shit, man, guaranteed to clear the BS from your head, get you back to a place of clarity. No? OK, more for me. Hey, what’s the deal with those people you work for?”

“What people?” I asked.

“The school board. The governing body of the local schools, the five duly elected representatives of the people. I caught a few minutes of the last board meeting and couldn’t decide if I was watching a kangaroo court, a freak show, or a farce. I learned more about the Brown Act than I ever wanted to know. Was a crime committed or was it simply an act of pure ego on the part of one board member? Christ, what a waste of time.”

“I read about it in the newspaper,” I said.

Duke pointed a butane-powered BBQ lighter at me and pulled the trigger. A two-inch flame shot out. He laughed and applied the flame to his bong.

“A hundred and one pressing issues and they spend hours yakking about the Brown Act, who said what, who disclosed what, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but didn’t it seem like every freak, fanatic and fruitloop in the community came out for two minutes of fame? Sort of proves the case against Democracy, against giving too much say-so to the ignorant masses. No wonder the oligarchs rig elections and pull shenanigans to hold onto power. Public education is all well and good, if the public could only be excluded.”

Duke loaded another bearing and let fly.

“That may have been the impetus behind the exercise,” I said.

“So, one member violates the law to dramatize the importance of adhering to the law. Sounds like Karl Rove’s playbook.”

“Dramatize might be the key word there. Some people have a Jones for the spotlight, for seeing their byline in the newspaper, for acting as a lone crusader, always holding back the tide of a corrupt system.”

“I’d rather modify my brain chemistry with illicit drugs,” Duke said, “although my regimen isn’t for the faint of heart. According to my personal physician, I should have died twelve years ago. Hey, here’s a thought: perhaps I’ll run for school board, give this fine community the benefit of my experience and hard won wisdom. Dr. Duke for School Board. Has a ring to it.”

“You got some platform in mind?”

“Of course not, but something will come to me, something simple and catchy. It doesn’t take that many votes to win a seat and I can mobilize an army of miscreants, former felons, crooked real estate agents, reformed drug dealers, retired pimps. Hell yes, I can see it now. We’ll scare the bejesus out of the establishment. And if push comes to shove, I can quote the Federalist Papers just as well as the next old goat!”

Where's the Outrage?

“Years ago, there was a theory on the American left that someone – maybe it was me – termed Worsism: the worse things get, the more likely people will be to rise up and demand their rights. But in America, at least, the worse things get, the harder it becomes to even imagine any kind of resistance.”

That’s Barbara Ehrenreich, writing in the May issue of the Progressive. I post it on the Balcony because I have wondered of late why Americans appear so passive these days. Consider what we tolerate. An illegal and costly foreign invasion/occupation, government intrusion into our private communications, tax policies that favor corporations and shareholders over working people, a healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured, stagnant wages, environmental degradation, outright government corruption, and so on and so on with hardly a whimper of protest.

Why are we not in the streets demanding our rights as human beings? Why are we not out there demanding fairness and equity? Why are we not on the avenue demanding that our president be impeached?

The only folks with any fire in their guts are Latinos, immigrants, who flooded the streets and walked off public school campuses to protest a House bill on immigration. Good for them. Perhaps the rest of us can learn something about organizing from our Latino friends and neighbors.

Why are Americans so passive? Is it because we are distracted by consumer culture, the endless accumulation of goods; by the fact that many in the working class need two jobs to stay there; by mass media that rarely report stories that matter to us. I suppose the answer is a combination of all these factors.

In the Labor movement (what remains of it) we are often reminded that power concedes nothing without a demand. Demand implies action, organization, focus. People often ask me why I donate time and energy to my labor union, and I think the simple answer is that I recognize that power in this country has shifted too far in favor of Capital over Labor, of moneyed interests over human interests, of the powerful over the powerless. Working people deserve better, and our country as a whole can do much better.

But until we show the powerful that we are fed up to the point where we refuse to lay down and take it any more, they will continue to drive us down, and out.

PROBING THE JUICERS

So, at long last, Major League Baseball is going to conduct an investigation into illegal steroid use by players such as Barry Bonds. If the book Game of Shadows had not been published it is unlikely MLB would have taken this step.

Game of Shadows details with some precision steroid use by numerous professional athletes, among them Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and the biggest fish of all, Barry Bonds.

It certainly doesn’t take a chemist or a positive drug test to realize that something was up with Barry Bonds. If you look at photographs of the young Bonds next to the Bonds that emerged in 1998, you almost wonder if you are looking at the same man. Bonds transformed himself from lean, even scrawny, to mammoth – at an age when men typically lose muscle mass. Bonds claimed he never “knowingly” touched illegal substances and earned his fabulous physique through hard work in the gym.

Game of Shadows makes Bonds’s claim look ridiculous. In the book Bonds comes across as surly, arrogant, egotistical, petty, jealous, tyrannical, in short, a real asshole, coddled and tolerated his entire life because of his immense talent. His on-field achievements the last several seasons are other-worldly enough to warrant a full-scale probe. How does a player who never hit more than 49 homers in a season suddenly smack 73? How does a player reach a peak of excellence never seen before at a time in his career when most players the same age are slowing down or in outright decline?

Henry Aaron never hit more than 50 homers in a season. Aaron’s remarkable offensive numbers accumulated over the years of his career, never spiking way up or trending way down. With Bonds it’s the opposite. From 1998 on, the year it is suspected he began using steroids, Bonds’s statistics went through the roof, past above average, past great, all the way to immortal.

I love the game of baseball and I want to know if the numbers put up since 1998 – the year Sosa and McGwire dueled for the single season homer record – are the result of talent or talent plus performance enhancing drugs. No single player, no matter how great or how surly, should stand above the rules of the game. Major League Baseball’s steroid testing policy to this point has been laughable, a sham, and Bud Selig and Donald Fehr have acted like wimps. If players are dirty, they should be fined, suspended or banned from the game.

It’s past time for Major League Baseball to step up on the steroid issue.

Monkey-Man

All doubts have been dispelled. The need for debate is over. All that’s left is for some qualified mental health professional to make it official.

George W. Bush, supreme leader of the so-called free world, is a moron. Forget the fact that he looked like a spider monkey amped on meth amphetamine during his press conference yesterday. Bush appears stupid because he is stupid. You can’t fake that.

The press conference format is now so watered down and choreographed that it’s nearly meaningless. Karl Rove and Company give Bush a chart showing which reporters are sitting where, so that when Bush calls on them he can say, all folksy, “Yes, Jim.” The only reporter in the room with any balls is a woman, the venerable Helen Thomas. Thomas asked sharp questions which the president ducked, and when Thomas tried to bring Bush back to reality, Bush said, “Let me finish,” and continued with his inane answer.

“People want to know what’s on my mind,” Bush said at one point. Really? I could care less. What’s on Bush’s mind is pretty clear; continued destruction of America as we know it. How many times did Bush repeat, “We have a plan for victory.” Wow, that’s so reassuring, given that the architects of the plan are the same fools whose lies and exaggerations got us into Iraq in the first place.

Bush was at his lying best when he stated, “They made Iraq the central front in the War on Terror.” No, George, you did that all by yourself. Iraq had little or nothing to do with September 11. You and your cronies saw in Iraq what you wanted to see, and it has cost us dearly.

The Bush communication strategy is simple: repeat the same message over and over and don’t fret if the facts contradict the message. For instance, Bush laid most of the blame for the exploding Federal debt at the doorstep of “mandatory spending” increases, specifically Social Security and Medicaid, two New Deal-style programs that the GOP has tried to gut and kill for decades. Is he daft? The so called War in Iraq is the driving force behind the debt, not social entitlement programs.

What other outrageous, disingenuous things did Monkey-Man say? Well, he refused to characterize the chaos in Iraq as civil war, even though Sunnis are Killing Shiites and vice versa. Bush used the word “sectarian” several times and actually pronounced the word correctly. Obviously, Karl Rove has done some intense tutoring with Monkey-Man on his elocution.

Bush also refused to criticize Donald Rumsfeld, even though it’s abundantly clear that Rumsfeld is a bumbling dingbat who would have had trouble overseeing the invasion and occupation of Fiji. I noted too that Bush made a big deal about going to the UN prior to unleashing the dogs of war; but Monkey-Man forgot to mention that Colin Powell lied through his teeth. In addition, now that I think of it, Bush said Saddam Hussein ruled by Fear and Intimidation. Golly, isn’t that exactly what Bush has done here at home, whipping up our fear of another 9-11 style attack, of anthrax, and of dangerous foreigners crossing our borders? When it comes to playing the role of dictator, Bush is a natural.

Five and a half years of Monkey-Man. Sweet Jesus! And Congress impeached Bill Clinton for a harmless blow-job! What a country!

Three Years In

Three Years In

George and Dick tell us things are fine
(not really, ask Cindy Sheehan)
Democracy is on the march
(though the wrong party won)
The insurgency is on its last legs
(but growing stronger every day)
Average Iraqis are better off
(except they can’t leave their homes for fear of getting killed)
That our sacrifice in youth and blood and money is worth it
(how so?)
And all we need do is resolve to stay the course
(how long, how many dead?)

This is the fog of war
The fog of denial
The fog of fantasy
The fog of arrogance

This is our leaders out of touch
Out of common sense
Out of common decency
Committing folly in our name

I’m not down with that
Are you?

Baste the Hog

I feel like a slacker for not keeping the Balcony updated with new material, but life intervenes, union business intervenes, and my beautiful children intervene. The sun is peeking in the window, though I also hear rain pattering on the roof. Weird weather on the South Coast of late, with snow on the mountains last Saturday, rain and wind, colder temperatures, a full moon at night. No matter, the price of real estate continues to rise and the gilded residents of Fat City are as happy as the proverbial hog in the mud.

Amen. Baste that hog and pickle his ears, eat his feet and spread his liver on saltines.

Listen carefully. Hear those war drums? That’s the Bush Junta, drumming up war fever against those wicked Iranians, who may or may not (probably not) have a nuclear device with which they can level Israel or strike southern Florida. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? It seems we had an opportunity to support moderate elements in Iran, but let that pass because we had our head buried in Iraq’s sand.

And will someone explain the logic of W’s decision to give nuclear know-how to India – a nation that refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty? W agreed to help India advance its nuclear program, and a day or two later denied Pakistan’s request for similar help, even though Pakistan is our staunch ally in the great, open-ended, War on Terror. Huh?

Can anyone remember an American administration as hostile to science and the scientific community as the Bush Junta? Bush and Co. can’t give enough research dough to the military establishment, while at the same time swinging the budget axe and cutting medical and environmental research. Aspects of science that they disagree with, or that get in the way of commerce, are simply ignored. When a country loses its soul it often becomes militaristic, and sees every problem through a military power prism. If America isn’t to that point, we are close, very close. We rampage around the globe, bullying allies, threatening friends, issuing ultimatums; the values that made us a decent nation lay strewn in the dust behind us.

Here in Fat City, at Noon on a Wednesday, the homeless, the disaffected, the mentally disturbed, the lost, the left behind, and yes, the lazy, cluster on State Street near Blenders in the Grass, talking, smoking, panhandling passersby, and generally sending shivers through the spines of the merchant class. The juxtaposition of this group and the well-to-do shoppers who stream along State Street, is a stark reminder that all is not well, even here on the Gilded Coast.

Amen, and now let’s get back to that hog.

Sad State of Affairs

Children show us our limitations and weaknesses, hone in our Achilles Heel and exploit it for all its worth. My pair of offspring get me every time. I can be as calm as a Zen master, right up to the moment they start screaming at one another over something trivial. Miranda, darling daughter, is as cute and as headstrong as they come, and when she gets into a frothing tantrum her endurance is incredible. A week ago she set an American record for an in-the-car tantrum. She was wailing when we left Lake Cachuma and still wailing with the same intensity when we pulled into the driveway here at Hacienda Milpas. By then my nerves were frazzled and my brain felt like it was trapped in a pinball machine, and I had forgotten what got the child so riled up in the first place. My patience was shot, my reservoir of kindness was bone dry, and once again I felt whipped.

Been reading about the mess in Iraq, how the country is teetering on the brink of civil war, and how Bush & Co. continue to declare that things are progressing fine, right on schedule; the fact that Sunnis and Shiites are at each other’s throats is just a blip on the radar screen. Sure, and Dick Cheney is a crack shot and a stand-up guy. Christ, how dumb can our leaders be? Civil war was the only possible outcome of the US invasion/occupation. The genie shot out of the bottle the minute we toppled Saddam. Minus the iron control enforced for decades by Saddam’s thugs, Iraq’s ethnic and religious enmities and hatreds were destined to bubble over. The question was never If – the question was When. A lot of bright people warned Bush & Co. that toppling Saddam would be a cakewalk compared with governing Iraq afterwards. Of course, the warmongers in the White House paid no attention to anyone who knew what they were talking about.

Here’s something to think about: the last time Congress raised the Federal minimum wage was back in 1997. Since then, Congress has raised its own salaries seven or eight times. Who’s working for whom? And Congress members have a cool package of health insurance benefits, too.

And W is in India, inflicting himself on that poor but up and coming nation. And why not, since India is a prime outsourcing spot for American CEO’s determined to improve the corporate bottom line at any cost. Let’s lift poor Indians while pushing American workers to the bottom of the economic heap. At any other time, such national policy would be excoriated, but this is the time of Bush so it makes perfect sense.

I wonder if Americans are suffering from “scandal fatigue.” Iraq, Katrina, rampant cronyism, Cheney’s hunting mishap, and all the rest. As the media brings the sanitized versions to our attention, as the talking heads on Fox spin the truth around on its ear, as the White House spokesperson shrugs and says, “We did nothing wrong,” the American public sighs, shakes its collective head and switches over to Dancing with the Stars or Lost. It’s like, “Oh, Bush and his team lied again, cheated again, rigged the game for their cronies again. So what’s new? Honey, what’s for dinner?”

Sad state of affairs.

Our President Lies, the Constitution Dies

Our President lies
Sons and daughters die
Sacrificed for a senseless Occupation
Our President lies
brothers and sisters drown
forsaken in the storm
Self-righteous fools have a hammer-lock on the wheel

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

We’re short on truth of the simple variety
The info machine attacks the truth-tellers
Discredits them but not their story
Destroy the messenger
Ignore the message

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

Where to turn, who to turn to?
God, maybe
Jack Daniels, maybe
Krishnamurti, maybe
Dr. Phil, maybe
L. Ron Hubbard, maybe

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

Where’s Woody Guthrie? We need his kind now
Where’s Joe Hill and Malcolm X? We need them too
At this point I’d settle for Emma Goldman or FDR
Anyone who can revive our revolutionary memory
We came into this world of nations kicking and screaming
Protesting injustice, the whims and greed of a distant
King

We marched together, fought together, stood up together
One day soon
Before it’s too late
I hope we march again
Up the slope of this mountain of lies
Down the other side, trampling the bones
into
dust

In the Stream (of consciousness)

Sometimes I need to go Gonzo and get it out of my system. The lies, the BS, the rigged game that is this American life in the time of Bush is simply too much to handle. How did these people gain power and keep it? They lie, they cheat, they steal – and we can’t hold them accountable. Cheney shoots a hunting partner, the media goes into a feeding frenzy, and still that two-faced, side smirking SOB sits in the White House, counting his Halliburton earnings. It’s a sick and twisted nightmare without end.

We pile into the car and drive south to Ventura. Target is our destination, new bedding is our goal. We just finished painting the bedrooms in our apartment, and one thing we discovered while moving the furniture around is that our bedding sucks. It’s old, tired, torn, and ratty. The other thing we discovered lacking in our material existence is the size of our television sets; our big one is 19”, and the small one in our bedroom is 13”. That averages out to 16” per TV – a number that must be well below the national average. Americans dig big TV’s, flat screens, Plasmas, HD ready out of the box. Americans love TV at least as much as we enjoy our military toys. We watch damn near anything the networks and cable giants put before us, the more vapid the program the better. I have to believe my family can do better than a household average of 16”. We are, after all, Americans, and every American family with a decent credit rating deserves a big-ass TV.

The kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes, Miranda is whining, Gabriel wants ice cream, my wife is singing an Irving Berlin song, just another evening here on the farm. There’s a Sponge Bob marathon on the tube. “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” Crazed laughter from an animated salty dog. Where’s my margarita? Where’s my silver spoon? Where’s the Holy Grail? Should I be more afraid of George W. Bush and the arrogant dingbats he surrounds himself with or a bearded Islamic fanatic who hates the way the United States behaves itself around the world? At this point, Bush is the clear winner. Junior has laid a hurt on this country that will take decades to heal. Junior is a Fascist.

Anyway, where the Hell was I, ah yes, driving south on the 101 to Target. Besides new bedding and a respectable TV, we need the following stuff: a vacuum, a Black & Decker dustbuster, a garbage can, towels, window treatments, lamps, and an area rug for the kids’ room. Sweet Jesus, how did it ever get this bad? Maybe I should get a second job, just to pay for the basic material needs most Americans take for granted. How can we call ourselves Americans without the requisite Stuff? Indeed. We are first world rejects.

Salt on the rim, salt on the table, snow on the mountain, snow on the roof. Lucinda sings. She knows a thing or two about sadness and sorrow, wounds of the heart, big lies and small fibs, men that leave, men you wish would leave, pick-up trucks and dirt country roads. Alone again, seeking no distraction, a man sits beside his campfire, watching embers float and die in the night air. He pulls his coat around him as the darkness closes in, thinks of a beautiful girl he courted in Kansas City many years ago. Is there more to all this than flesh and bone, coin and currency, stocks and trust deeds, power and control? The sky gives no answer tonight, never has, probably never will. Dead planets tell no tales.

3 Rounds with John Stossel

When did John Stossel become an apologist for Wal-Mart, HP, and every other American corporation that chases cheap labor around the globe like a pit bull in heat? Is Stossel serious – a serious journalist – when he claims that outsourcing jobs to India and Mexico actually benefits Americans, or is he little more than a paid propagandist with a massive bully pulpit?

Frankly, the man strikes me as unhinged, caught up in his own myth. On ABC’s 20/20 last night Stossel was trumpeting the virtues of outsourcing – how it lowers prices for goods and services for American consumers, and even better, how outsourcing creates jobs in America!

What Stossel failed to explore is the sort of jobs that outsourcing creates, how much these jobs pay, or whether or not the jobs come with employee benefits. It seems fairly obvious that many people in America today are cobbling two or more part time jobs together in order to earn what they once made at a single job. And how many part-time jobs come with benefits like health insurance, vacation allowance, or a pension? Now that the biggest players in corporate America are following the Wal-Mart model, I’d guess the answer is very few.

So sure, outsource one decent job and create three low-wage, no benefit, part-time jobs, and the statistics on job creation might look peachy on a chart or graph. A rum-addled dingbat might look at such statistics and get the idea that it’s morning in America, the best of times.

What Stossel the corporate apologist misses is the zero sum nature of the global economy. Except for the economic elite, most Americans are treading water, an accident or a misstep away from destitution. It doesn’t take much insight to see what has happened during the past thirty years: we’ve trapped ourselves in a downward spiral. Corporations export jobs to cheap labor havens and import products. Yes, goods from China and Mexico and Sri Lanka are cheap and plentiful, but if this weren’t the case, how would American consumers – whose wages have been stagnant for years – be able to afford them?

How would average working Americans forced by corporate and government policies to shoulder more and more risk for their own health care and retirement afford anything but the cheapest goods in the world?

We’re screwed because our economy is based on an endless cycle of spending and consumption; we’re screwed because we’ve been conditioned by an endless corporate drumbeat to accept a failed ideology.

I don’t want to debate John Stossel as much as I’d like to get him in the ring for three or four rounds with 14oz. gloves. The only way he’s going to understand my working-class outrage is through a serious ass-whipping.

Not In Our Backyard

I don't know if the Libertarian junta at the Santa Barbara News-Press will publish this letter to the editor, so I thought I'd best take matters into my own hands. Viva the 1st Amendment!

February 9, 2006

Letters Editor
Santa Barbara News-Press
PO Box 1359
Santa Barbara, CA 93102

Inre: Funny Business with School District Properties

Mr. Gary Earle, President of the Coalition for Sensible Planning, which could also be called, “I-Have-My-Piece-of-Paradise-You-Can’t-Have-Yours,” accuses the Santa Barbara School Board of failing basic math.

In fact, Mr. Earle seems to have ditched a remedial semester or two. First of all, Mr. Earle and his NIMBY coalition have every right to protect their neighborhoods from development, sensible or otherwise. On the other hand, it would be refreshing if – instead of employing scare tactics and wild exaggerations of fact – Mr. Earle and his group would get a grip and realize that all the School Board has hired UniDev to do is perform a feasibility study; of the four options being considered, only one involves workforce housing.

Instead of whipping up fear over the prospect of the school district developing workforce housing for its employees – a concept, and at this point only a concept – that could stabilize district revenues and provide a powerful retention tool for teachers and staff, about seventy-five percent of whom earn less than $65,000 a year (juxtapose that with the cost of housing around here, Mr. Earle) – Mr. Earle should be more concerned that the District might instead choose to sell the properties to a greedhead developer. Frankly, that would be the simplest course for the Board to take.

In regards to UniDev’s contract, which was granted after an open, public, competitive bidding process, Mr. Earle might take the time and trouble to go back and read the numerous, public documents detailing the compensation arrangement (which was built into the District’s procurement process before any proposals were submitted); there’s no smoking gun or inherent conflict of interest to be found in the proposal, no density figures, and no guarantee, explicit or implied, that any future contract will be awarded to UniDev.

Sincerely,


Brian Tanguay
President, Chapter 37, California School Employees Association
Santa Barbara

MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD

Depending on your party affiliation, the State of the Union speech is either a highpoint of American political life or a sick joke. I’m not looking forward to W’s rendition tonight, and I’m ninety-five percent sure that I won’t bother watching.

Bush will tell us that the Iraq Occupation is going just great, thank you; that the air and water are cleaner in America than ever, the trees and wildlife flourishing; that the massive tax cuts for the wealthy are spurring an economic recovery that is the envy of the civilized world; that his Medicare drug plan is the best thing to happen to our senior citizens in at least half a century; that the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast is proceeding according to plan; and finally, that we are safer because the government is keeping watch on the bad guys in our ranks.

Morning in America, all’s well, if you don’t believe it just ask Karl Rove.

Bush will spin like a top, and if that means calling white black and black white, well, who’s keeping score? What is truth but spin, and who spins better than the Conservative machine? Bill O and Rush L, and all the rest of the blowhards will echo the president’s assertions across the land, lending credence to the exaggerations and outright falsehoods, but like I said, who’s keeping track except a few powerless Liberals out on the fringes?

George Orwell, wherever he is, will not laugh tonight; Martin Luther King won’t either; Robert F. Kennedy will flop around with angst; Tom Paine will scream. A society that cannot tell truth from fiction is in trouble. A society that is so easily led around by its nose is doomed. A society that allows its laws to be trampled cannot long stand.

Osama bin Laden may chuckle tonight. Osama and perhaps Dick Cheney, sitting in different locations on this spinning planet, chuckling because doing what they do is so damn easy.

Fanfare for Failure

According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, Ford will slash 30,000 US jobs and close or scale back operations at 14 of its plants. Ford chairman Bill Ford says this scheme will put the once-revered automaker on track for profitability. Wall Street ate the news whole, bidding up Ford’s stock.

As usual, blue-collar workers will bear the brunt of the cuts. Goodbye to decent wages, benefits, and pensions. In his statement to the press Bill Ford said, “We will be making painful sacrifices to protect Ford’s heritage and secure our future. Going forward, we will be able to deliver more innovative products, better returns for our shareholders, and stability in the communities where we operate.”

Not a word in there about the working men and women of Ford. I guess their well-being isn’t worth consideration. Five or six years from now, when this plan, like all of Ford’s previous realignment plans, fails to turn the company’s fortunes around, you’ll hear Bill Ford or some other lavishly compensated chairman declare that what the company needs is more sacrifice from the blue-collar work force: more wage cuts, more health insurance cost-sharing, more pension concessions. Wall Street will swallow that story, too.

What’s amazing to me about these sad tales from once great American companies is how infrequently the lavishly compensated chairmen admit that much of the fault lies in the executive suite, where mediocre designs are approved and green-lighted, where accounting sleight-of-hand is encouraged, and where executive pay and perks rise even when the company is losing money hand over fist. It’s so much easier to blame the United Auto Workers.

It’s all of a piece, when the puzzle is disassembled and put together again, three decades of legislation and regulation favoring capital over labor; three decades of transferring risk from corporations to individual workers without a corresponding increase in the means to cover that risk; three decades of chasing cheap labor around the globe. It won’t be much longer before the average Ford line worker will be unable to buy the cars and trucks he plays a part in building.

///

Ownership society, no thanks. The Bush Medicare plan is an unmitigated disaster, yet another scandal, yet another example of how Bush and his pals serve their corporate constituents to the detriment of average citizens. Democrats didn’t have the numbers to prevent the GOP-controlled Congress from passing this horribly convoluted and unjust plan, so its failure sits at the feet of the GOP.

You're a Pig, Yes, I Am

My wife says to me, “Who the hell do you think you are?” I say, “What are you talking about?” She says, “That garbage you wrote in your last blog, about how stupid the Golden Globes are, about how stupid I am for watching them!” I say, “I never said you were stupid, I said that whole red carpet entertainment parasite feeding frenzy, that inane gushing over the stars is stupid.” She says, “No, you were implicitly calling me and anyone who watches stupid. You sounded like an arrogant snob, a pig, though I noticed you had no trouble pulling yourself away from ‘Literature’ in order to gawk at Scarlett Johanssen’s breasts!” I say, “Well, they were right there, damn near exploding through the TV screen! You said yourself that her breasts arrived thirty minutes before she did!” She says, “You’re a cultural snob, case closed. You think you’re better than me because you read Philip Roth and I watch the Golden Globes. Want to know something? I think Philip Roth is a pig, too! Oh, he may be the greatest living American novelist, a genius, but that doesn’t make him any less of a pig! A smart pig is still a pig!”

Oink, oink.

Martin Luther King and Lab Mice

Behind me my wife is watching the stars and near-stars walk the red carpet to the Golden Globes. This is one of the stupidest rituals in pop culture -- this red carpet stroll, with airhead entertainment parasites asking inane questions that some of the stars seem exasperated to answer. "Who are you wearing?" "What did you eat for lunch?" and so on. It's like a competition to see which talking head can ask the lamest question.

This is particularly difficult for me to take, after lying on the sofa this afternoon, finishing Philip Roth's magnificent novel, I Married a Communist. Roth has written some stunning novels about 20th century America -- the Human Stain, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist -- novels which detail our contradictions and hyprocrisies, our fear and paranoa, our weakness and confusion. Roth writes about flawed characters -- human beings, in other words, who strive, who fail, who seek revenge, who lie (for all sorts of reasons), who hate, and on and on, the full human panorama. What a pleasure it is to read Roth's sentences, the perfect cadence, the pitch, the blinding intelligence and insight, the powerful narrative drive. I was disappointed when the novel came to an end.

My children tested me today, as only they can do, with their arguments and fights, their screaming and whining, their demands for immediate gratification, their smiling obstinancy. I separate them like a referee stepping between two prizefighters, point them toward neutral rooms, only to hear them going at it again as soon as I turn my back. They know how to push my buttons, and far too often I respond like a mouse in a laboratory experiment; my kids make me perform for bite-sized food pellets. C'mon, Dad, stand on your head, one more time!

As the afternoon turns to evening, I wonder what Martin Luther King would say if he could see America, circa 2006. Would he still express hope for social and economic justice? Would he look at what Bush & Cheney have done to America in less than half a decade and still feel sanguine? Could he listen to leading Democrats without declaring the whole shebang a hopeless mess? We give Martin sainthood, but of course he was merely a man, human, as flawed as any Philip Roth character.

Who's Up, Who's Down

I'm dog tired
from boxing and beer
a shot to the head, one to the gut
Don't care who's up or who's down
which Hollywood star is pregnant
or suffering the pain of betryal or struggling to kick an eating disorder
don't care about the Dow Jones Industrial average
my wife's got a pain in her hip and I worry about that
I'm flying to San Diego in the morning, through friendly skies -- but only after
I remove my shoes for the TSA, take all the stuff from my pockets,
show my boarding pass and ID, just another decent American, boys,
law-abiding, no threat to anyone, you got nothing to fear from me
I got Philip Roth in the bag, an iPod in my ear, clean underwear, pictures of my
family
I can't help but think of these fleeting moments, the pang of mortality
jab, jab, duck and cover

A Bowl of Dead Roses and other Thoughts

75 degrees in January. this is why we live in Fat City, on this Platinum Coast. to the asswipe who read my last poem and hypothesized that I'm just a rich snob who has never worked a day in his life, I say, bite me. for your information I've been working since I was 17 years of age; I was in the Air Force in Japan serving my country at 18; my net worth is a joke, though I live a solid, happy life that is full of love. tell me where your "shop" is and I'll gladly come down and give you a hand with whatever it is you do. in an effort to further educate you, I'm an aging Idealist who still clings to a shred of belief that this tortured world can be made better, that people can set aside their differences and cooperate, that justice is possible, that teachers are heroic souls, that women are the salt of the Earth, that public service is noble, etc. o.k? I'm sure you are a decent person, whoever you are.

Texas didn't win the Rose Bowl game last night, USC lost it. Too many mistakes for the Trojans, from Reggie Bush's inexplicable lateral in the first quarter to a defensive unit that forgot the fundamentals of tackling. It was a terrific contest, and for Vince Young, perhaps the greatest individual performance in college football history. I don't watch football or profess to understand the game particularly well, but when SC failed on fourth and two I knew the Trojans' goose was baked. The only way they could have stopped Vince Young was with an elephant gun loaded with depleted uranium ammo.

Anyway, peace out everybody!

2005, Goodbye

2005, Goodbye

Tsunami
HST R.I.P
George W. Bush, “Stay the Course. We’re Winning!”
Katrina – There are poor in America, who knew?
Gas $3 a gallon
Warning: The NSA might be spying on you
Scandal masters: DeLay, Scooter, Abramoff, et al.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the overreaching Austrian
The price of real estate
Warning: The NSA is spying on you
Milestone – 2,000 killed, and counting
Fact: Global warming is real – someone tell W and Dick
Rent, the movie
Bird flu
Intelligent Design (Translated: ignore science)
Brad & Jen, Splittsville
Chicago White Sox Sweep
Devils & Dust, “Got my finger on the trigger/but I don’t know who to trust”
The delicate soul of a good woman
The lies of a hopelessly flawed man
The unfiltered joy of two healthy children
Thoughts
Dreams
Fantasies
Nightmares
Loss, pain, destruction
Life
Shirtless in December, sky perfect blue
Leaves from the tree of life cut loose and soar

Poem - Apology to Mother Earth

Sorry about the methane gas rising from our
Garbage dumps
The dead and dying coral in the seas
Clear cutting & “Mountain Top Removal”
Sorry about the benzene in the ground water, acid in the rain
The radiation buried near your heart

When the meek inherit they will find a wasteland
A lonely place destroyed by indifference
Collective greed & arrogance
The insane notion that you were ours to subdue
And enslave

Despite clear signs & warnings
We keep slashing & burning, drilling & pumping
Lured, driven, goaded by profit, profit, profit
Our true God
Entitled to waste what we can afford to buy
Or so we think in our twisted way

We can’t leave well enough alone, let it be;
I ask the question I know the answer to:
Are such fools to be forgiven?

One Day Real Soon

One of these days, swear to God, I’m going to write something light and amusing, and stick it on the Balcony, but for now, the best subject in town is G.W. Bush and the Reign of Terror.

Bush is on the PR circuit, trying to persuade Americans that great and magical things are happening in American-occupied Iraq. That’s a tough sell these days if the latest polling numbers are accurate; the majority of Americans aren’t buying the Administration line, no matter how much the Bush people spin.

And those folks must be getting dizzy, their fat heads about to explode, spinning at the rate they are, supersonic speed.

Bush and Co. are also trying to convince Americans that the economy is percolating just fine, with job growth and rosy profit predictions, and plenty of people in the shopping malls, plunking down cash or plastic. That may be true when it comes to the American elite, the ownership class, but it’s absolute fantasy for the rest of Americans. GDP may be up, but workers are staring at stagnant wages and continued erosion of employer-paid health benefits. One segment of our population is happy as pie because everything is going their way – their pal Bush and his enviable Congressional majority gets huge tax cuts passed, so they are keeping even more of what their investments earn.

Lucky buggars.

The majority of us are struggling, sinking, or holding on for dear life, up to our ears in debt, one uninsured illness from ruin. We’re getting by but going nowhere near the hallowed ground where the American elite dwell. They segregate by wealth, buying distance between themselves and the great unwashed, stinking rest of us.

The problem is that Bush’s numbers don’t add up, doomed by an overpowering combination of huge budget and trade deficits, the massive expense of the Iraq Occupation, and the incredibly generous tax cuts for the elite. Bush has maxed out the American charge card. We’re tapped, and the Chinese are raking it in, getting our money front and back, from the purchases of goods and services to the cash we pay them in the form of interest. Does anyone get the funny feeling that we’re sinking while the Chinese are rising?

Yeah, one of these days I’ll get around to writing something optimistic and upbeat.

Sing, a Poem

Our lord
My lord
King of Kings
Prince of peace
Sing for the dead & deformed
Sing for the Last of the Mohicans
Sing for the lost loons
Sing for December
Sing for pale afternoons
Sing for the broken-hearted
Sing for the babies & the old
Sing for this tri-tip sandwich served by a blonde bimbo
Sing for shapely ladies talking on cell phones
Sing for the souls of the Armenians
Sing for the Jews
Sing for the Tibetans
Sing for Saddam & his victims
Sing for Dick Cheney (then crack the whip on his flabby white ass)
Sing for the rain forest & the tundra
Sing in a falsetto, sing in a baritone
Sing over the sound of tolling bells
Sing in protest
Sing in praise
Sing over flag-draped coffins
Sing for the residents of Skid Row
Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing

Bush Lays Out Plan, Sort Of

Stay the course. Vital national interests. The front in the War. Total victory.

George W. Bush must be crazy, delusional, disassociated from reality. All this gibberish spewed to a captive crowd of Naval cadets, some of the best and brightest of our privileged youth, with the blood of more than 2,000 US soldiers on Bush’s hands, and despite a mountain of evidence, the President continues to believe this “war” can be won.

Won, how? First of all, Bush has it wrong – what is happening in Iraq isn’t a war, it’s the back end of an invasion, an occupation of one nation by another of superior military might. Iraq never posed a credible or imminent threat to the US, never attacked the US, and was most certainly not in cahoots with Al Qaeda.

And note to George: Iraq wasn’t the center of the War on Terror until your deluded policies made it so.

As the political winds blow, Bush’s rationale for the Invasion/Occupation changes; in the beginning it was all about WMD, anthrax stockpiles, mustard gas and whatnot. When the WMD failed to turn up on cue, the rationale changed to creating democracy in Iraq, giving the long-suffering Iraqis the magic power of self-determination.

Guaranteeing US oil interests access to Iraq’s reserves never enters into the discussion, though OIL hovers in the background of every purported reason for our spilling blood in Iraq in the first place.

Bush is right to say that a war cannot be won on a timetable, but wrong to make this assertion regarding Iraq. An occupation can most certainly be ended on a predetermined timetable.

As long as the US maintains a military presence on Iraqi soil, there will be fighting, car bombs, suicide missions, and strife. When and if we depart, Iraq may descend into civil war or its various factions will figure out a way to coexist, either in a democratic framework or something else.

W has got to stop channeling LBJ and Nixon. The Occupation is not going well, the American citizenry are fed up with the human and monetary cost, and the longer the US remains the worse this wretched deal gets.

Sometimes the greatest act of leadership is to stare reality in the face, admit error, and call for a retreat. This takes guts and wisdom in equal measure, traits that W doesn’t appear to possess.

GIANT NO MORE

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I saw an editorial cartoon in the Santa Barbara News-Press (often referred to around here as the Snooze-Mess), syndicated from the Orange County Register, that depicted a vehicle emblazoned with the General Motors logo, an engine labeled United Auto Workers, and an exhaust tank which read, Revenues.

The exhaust tank was festooned with cobwebs, clearly rendering the meaning of the cartoon: GM’s money woes are the fault of the United Auto Workers.

All I can say to that notion is Bullshit. GM’s problems are bigger than its unionized blue-collar workforce, and to lay the blame for the decline of this American industrial icon at the feet of the men and women who assemble GM cars and trucks is to miss the larger picture.

GM has been lurching into irrelevancy for nearly two decades. Remember Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s 1989 film about the effects of a GM plant closing in Flint, Michigan? From the mid-80’s on GM was struggling to compete with Toyota and Honda, Japanese manufacturers who built high-quality, fuel-efficient, front-wheel drive vehicles. GM still held the title of world’s biggest manufacturing company, but every passing year saw Honda and Toyota chip away at GM’s market dominance.

How did giant GM respond to the threat from abroad? First, CEO Roger Smith pushed through the acquisition of Hughes Aircraft Company, a defense contractor, ostensibly to milk Hughes’s hi-tech expertise. Smith and other GM honchos thought a dose of space-age technology could help GM build more appealing vehicles.

The only problem with this billion dollar experiment was that GM never quite figured out how to harness Hughes’s strengths and marry them with its own.

With great fanfare, GM then announces the creation of a brand new car division called “Saturn” that would not only revolutionize GM but the American auto industry as well. Saturn, Roger Smith assured the Wall Street crowd, would operate completely outside the GM box; in itself, this boast was a backhanded indictment of GM’s bloated processes. Saturn wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, just one that came to fruition too late to halt GM’s slide.

GM’s core problem was never entirely its blue-collar workforce. Bloated and inefficient management lay at the center of GM’s woes. Year after year the giant reorganized and restructured, closing a plant here, shifting production to Canada or Texas, tinkering with its supply chain, but nothing could stem the tide. The cars and trucks coming off the GM drawing board simply paled in quality and style to those imported from abroad.

At one point it got so bad that GM entered into a joint venture with Toyota to build the Corolla, Toyota’s flagship vehicle, in Fremont, California using Japanese manufacturing processes and UAW represented labor. Soon, Honda was building cars in the US using the same framework.

GM was so dominant for so long, with far flung operations so massive and intimately connected to the fortunes of the US economy, that the company – management and labor – grew fat, happy, and complacent. Toyota and Honda were mere upstarts way back when, nothing to worry about.

By the time GM realized it was in a fight for market share with savvy adversaries it was too late for the giant to shake its behemoth mindset and change for the future.

Sure, the blue collar workforce represented by the UAW bears some of the responsibility, but don’t lay the whole enchilada at the feet of working men and women.

Anniversary of the Balcony

As the calendar turns and the crow flies I see that Shouts from the Balcony is a year old this month.

The blogosphere is full of crackpots, and I am certainly one, sitting here week after week – day after day in some instances – writing to a worldwide yet largely invisible audience. This still seems self-indulgent and screwy to me, a loon on a street corner shouting into a gale force wind.

Folks trip across the Balcony by accident, stay for less than a minute, on average, and split in search of something more interesting.

A couple of readers have asked why I write about external things like national politics and very little about my family. Basic privacy is one reason, point of view would be another; sometimes it’s easier to draw a bead on a far off target than one nearby. Another reason for my choice of subjects is that the current national political scene pisses me off and compels me to add my voice to the din. When you look at your country, even from afar, and don’t recognize it, that’s cause for alarm.

Interest in the Balcony spiked after I posted a rant against a local school board member. I had no idea that the piece would be referred to in the Santa Barbara News-Press as an “angry” blog, or that the blog address would be printed in the paper. Lots of people visited after that.

But like I said, now it’s the occasional day-tripper, my in-laws, my mother, Bubba who lives in Arizona, a few colleagues from the school district where I work. I started this thing on a lark and never expected much. Writers are notorious feedback hounds, however, and it’s gratifying when someone posts a comment, reports that something struck them as funny, insightful or even downright pigheaded.

Whether or not the Balcony will see a second anniversary is an open question. Time and events will tell, but for now, I thank all those who have visited.

THE CTM CHRONICLES - On the Road with Alice

Alice DuPont lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of an old one, passed Chuck a bottle of Old Parr scotch, and stomped on the gas, pushing the Corvette up to ninety miles an hour. “That’s good stuff,” she said. “Aged twelve years. My soon-to-be-ex-husband distributes the crap. Go ahead, have a pull. There’s more in the trunk.”

Chuck took a drink and passed the bottle back. He wasn’t sure if Alice DuPont was tipsy or flat-out crazy, but for the moment, his fate was intertwined with hers and there was nothing to be done about it except settle back and watch South Carolina flash past. On the one hand he felt happy. With every passing mile he was putting distance between himself and Patricia. On the other – and that’s the problem with the other hand, it jumps in at inopportune moments – he was nagged by a vision of her lying in the bathtub with her wrists slashed. (Years later when her book came out he would learn that Patricia had indeed tried to do herself in by swallowing forty-seven aspirin tablets.)

Alice looked to be in her early 50’s though it was hard to be certain because her face was puffy from crying. Her hair was reddish-brown and naturally curly. Her eyes were blue, sad, and bloodshot. Even before she started talking about the tangled mess her life had become, Chuck sensed her sadness and pain; the story was etched in the lines around her eyes and in the furrows between her eyebrows.

Alice began by saying, “My husband is a miserable, duplicitous bastard, a liar, a cheat and a thief. He stole the prime of my life from me. Twenty-four years of marriage and only this morning do I discover that the sonofabitch has a second family, in Scotland, where he spends half the year on business. Can you believe that crap? Pretty young wife, two small kids, a house, a dog, the whole nine yards. In Scotland. I’d kill him if I thought I could get away with it, I really would. I’d slice his dick off and feed it to his dog. That stuff about a woman scorned is true, though I suppose you’re too young to understand. But you will and I’d bet my last dollar that one day you’ll do the same damn thing to some poor, unsuspecting girl. Men are no better than pigs! Here, have another drink!”

Chuck had another swig and handed the bottle back.

“What are you running away from?” Alice asked.

“The circus,” Chuck said. “I’m a high-wire man but the gig was getting to be a drag, so I asked the boss if I could try my hand at taming the lion. He said no, so I split.”

“Sounds like a load of crap to me,” Alice said. “Don’t most people run away to join the circus?”

“Not me.”

Alice grunted. “You travel light. Looks like you left in a hurry. Maybe the fire-eater was chasing you?”

“It was the bearded lady, all three hundred and ten pounds of her. She wanted me, I wasn’t into her, it was an awkward situation that affected my concentration and when your job is the high-wire, the last thing you need is a distraction like that. It was time for me to bail.”

“Aren’t you a clever one,” Alice said dryly. “I can see why she was hot for you.”

“What can I say? People who defy death for a living have a certain aura about them.”

“Christ. What a load of crap. You’re a born bullshitter, aren’t you?”

“What’s in New York City?” Chuck asked.

“My brother, Sam, the only sane member of my entire family. He lives in the Village with his wife and daughter, plays the sax for a living. Sweet, big-hearted Sammy, who managed to escape the genetic madness that plagues our family. Now Jan, my sister, who I’m on my way to visit if I can remember where she lives, is as eccentric as the day is long. Even when we were kids she was off. She got married right out of high school, moved to Oregon, decided one day that she wanted to be a lesbian, divorced her husband and moved to Manitoba with her new lover. That lasted four or five years, until Jan decided that being a lesbian wasn’t for her after all. She moved to Seattle and met a Chinese engineer by the name of Hai Le Chang. Chang was about five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds soaking wet, a computer geek who designed software for Boeing. Hai had some sexual issues, liked to be spanked, dressed in a diaper, that sort of thing. Oh, we’re a colorful dysfunctional family all right. You want to jump out?”

“Not yet,” Chuck said. “Where are we?”

They were driving in the suburbs now, in a town called Goose Creek, past modest homes on generous lots, tree-lined streets, all-American, picket fences and bicycles in the yard, RV’s parked alongside the houses.

“Do you know how Jan decided to move here?” Alice asked. “She threw a dart at a map of the United States and without a second thought packed her things in a U-Haul and came here. She keeps a Great Dane for protection. She also has a python named Monty that lives under her bed.”

Chuck spotted Jan’s house before Alice did, not that it was hard to pick out. Sweetwater Street was neat and orderly, spilling over with middle-class pride, until suddenly one house ruined the entire mosaic, Jan’s place, of course. There was a 1962 VW Bug in the driveway, sitting on its rims, dented and splattered with bird droppings, speckled with rust; a life-size bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, saber drawn and ready to defend the Old South against all comers, stood on the front lawn. General Lee was surrounded by the weirdest collection of stuff Chuck had ever seen: wrought-iron birds, clay jaguars, a toilet sunk in a flower bed, a claw-footed bathtub full of bicycle tires, a lamp post, golf clubs, aluminum baseball bats, lobster traps, a full-size trampoline; a male mannequin with a noose around its neck hung from a tree; another mannequin, this one headless, sat in a rocking chair on the porch pointing a toy gun at passers-by.

“She’s a junk collector?” Chuck said as Alice parked.

“No, just a crazy woman. The neighbors have been trying to boot her out of here for years, but Jan won’t budge. Annoying people gives her pleasure. Steel yourself, young man. Have another drink. We’re about to enter the Twilight Zone.”

Mishmash

I was getting the kids ready for school yesterday morning when I overheard Charlie Gibson from ABC ask someone from the White House about President Bush’s trip to Asia. I didn’t catch the entire statement, but would swear on a stack of Bibles that the White House mouthpiece said something close to, “The president is going to China to represent the interests of American workers.”

The interests of American workers! Holy cow! In China, no less, the home of thousands of manufacturing jobs once held by American workers. What “interests” could the president possibly represent? I can see Bush now, standing before a hand-picked, sanitized crowd of average Chinese factory workers, flashing his best monkey sneer while lauding the workers for doing a “heckuva job” as corporate America’s low-wage workshop.

As far as George W. Bush is concerned, things are just peachy for American workers. Wages are stagnant, health and retirement benefits have been slashed, what’s not to be happy about? Wal-Mart is always hiring, various shifts in a friendly atmosphere, not to mention that the Gulf Coast will need thousands of carpenters, plumbers, and roofers once the reconstruction effort shifts into full swing; workers can go down there and enjoy the benefits of low wages, now that the president has suspended the Davis-Bacon Act.

Bush wouldn’t recognize an average working American if one walked up and smacked him in the forehead with a rubber mallet. Bush serves one constituency and one only: the wealthy. Look at the record, the lavish tax breaks and corporate giveaways, the fat no-bid contracts given to well-heeled political supporters.

Responding to Charlie Gibson’s question about the president’s plummeting public approval rating and the cloud of scandal hovering over the Administration, the White House mouth said – and again this is a rough paraphrase – that it is irresponsible for Democrats to continually raise questions about the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, the validity of pre-invasion intelligence, or whether or not the Administration tweaked that intelligence to justify the invasion.

Let’s see, the Congress of the United States was duped into supporting an invasion/occupation that has turned up zero WMD, become a rallying point for terrorists, violated the sovereignty of a nation (yes, even a despotic one), and cost over 2,000 American lives and maybe fifty times that many Iraqi lives, and put Iraq on course for a bloody, protracted civil war. It would seem that Congress has an obligation to find out what went wrong and who is responsible so that such folly cannot be repeated anytime soon.

The Administration believes that such questions are irresponsible and give comfort and aid to our enemies, not to mention a terrible inconvenience.

I’m just a simple guy, an average American citizen trying to raise children and get along in this great land of ours, but for the life of me I can’t understand why George W. Bush is not in the midst of an impeachment trial. For lying about Oval Office hanky-panky, Congress went after Bill Clinton hammer and tongs, fangs dripping blood; but when it comes to Bush, a president who plunged the country into a useless and disgraceful invasion/occupation, Congress sits on its hands.

The Day After, and the Day After That

November 8, Election Day, was a great day for unionized public workers in California – we beat back a power grab by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Simple hubris played a big role in Schwarzenegger’s defeat. The fire that eventually engulfed him began with his State of the State speech in January when he essentially boasted that he would play his trump card – popularity – and take his case directly to the voters if the legislature refused to play ball his way.

One can’t completely fault Schwarzenegger for over-confidence. Any pol with a 60% approval rating would likely feel invincible.

Schwarzenegger won the recall election on star power and the fact that the recall campaign was brief. Instead of talking about ideas and vision and mixing it up with voters on bread and butter issues like health care, education and public safety, Schwarzenegger merely smiled and tossed T-shirts to adoring fans. Running for the top office in the state seemed like an easy, pleasant gig.

And it continued to be so until early this year when the Governor ticked off organized nurses. That mistake snowballed until it eventually mobilized a broad coalition of peace officers, firefighters, public workers, school employees and teachers.

Rhetorically, Schwarzenegger suffered from stunted development. His campaign was all sound bites and one-liners and references to action movies rather than solid reasons for his initiatives – initiatives which bore the fingerprint of the Grover Norquist wing of the Republican Party. The idea that the numerous problems facing California could be solved by tinkering with teacher tenure, redistricting along Texas-Tom DeLay lines, granting a sitting governor extraordinary power over the budget, and making it difficult for unions to throw money at Democrats, was at best laughable.

Going to the mat, rhetorically and via ballot initiatives, with a number of public employee unions simultaneously was a tall order, even for a popular Governor, and the decision to plunge ahead exposed Schwarzenegger’s rookie status. More than that, it called into question the wisdom of his inner circle.

Considering the magnitude of Tuesday’s defeat, it’s a sure bet that Schwarzenegger will shake up his team of advisors, with significant input from wifey, Maria Shriver. Look for more moderate figures to join the Governor’s team. After all, Schwarzenegger has a lot of ground to make up in the trust department if he’s going to be re-elected in 2006.

For the moment, the power dynamic in Sacramento is altered. Schwarzenegger has little choice but to moderate his rhetoric and reach across the aisle. No more can he threaten to bypass the legislature. That should make things very interesting in the months ahead.

And what of the victors? Tuesday’s outcome proved that the union movement is alive and kicking in California, and that despite the AFL-CIO fracture, unions can still work together toward common aims. Labor should take a moment to celebrate this success, but then get back to organizing new members and educating current ones.

For those of us fortunate to be members of public employee unions, it’s time to get back to serving the public that pays our wages, proving day after day that unions are not only good for workers, but good for the commonwealth as well.

Judgment Day for the Terminator

It has been a long slog up a steep slope, but here we are, on election day. For many of us, this campaign began in January when the Governor laid out his “Year of Reform” plan during his State of the State speech. Schwarzenegger was riding tall in the saddle then, with an approval rating in the mid-60’s and enough hubris in his tank to mount an assault on California’s caretakers.

Arnold has talked a lot about greedy union bosses in this campaign, but much less about the influence of corporate money. If the Democrats are in the pocket of public employee unions, then it’s fair to say the Republicans are in the same boat with insurance, finance, and drug companies.

All along most level-headed folks have said that this special election is unnecessary, a perversion of the initiative process, a sideshow that does not come close to addressing the real issues facing Californians. Only in Arnold’s (and maybe Petey Wilson’s) mind is this a true “Year of Reform.”

We have talked, telephoned, walked precincts, turned out at the Governor’s invitation-only staged events, survived the barrage of TV and direct mail advertising from both sides, and now it’s time to mark the ballots and tally the votes.

By late tonight or early tomorrow morning, the political landscape in California will be changed, one way or another.