GOT MANIFESTO?

“Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders.”

So wrote Lewis F. Powell to the Chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce Education Committee in August, 1971, when Powell was still a corporate attorney.

A bright colleague of mine who is well-versed in American history, and particularly the history of the American Labor Movement, mentioned the Powell Memo during a conversation, and while I knew Lewis F. Powell as a Supreme Court Justice, I was not familiar with the Powell Memo or its role as an ideological linchpin of the “Conservative” revolution.

Revolution is a charged word, but when you consider the corporate dominance of our nation in 2007, the word fits better than any other.

Thirty-six years ago, Lewis Powell, along with many others in the American “establishment,” believed the United States was in imminent danger of being taken over by Leftist, Communist, or Marxist revolutionaries. The country was mired in an unpopular war in Vietnam, the young questioned institutions and values, banks burned and the Weathermen plotted. To people like Lewis Powell, it seemed that armed revolutionaries would soon fill the streets of Washington D.C. Powell also believed that the government, media, and universities were bursting with people hell bent on the destruction of the American free enterprise system and every principle that Powell and people like him held sacred. If you weren’t alive then, or old enough to clearly remember the social turmoil of the mid-to-late sixties, the “Law & Order” rhetoric used by Richard Nixon, the very idea that the American “system” was in any jeopardy at all seems ludicrous.

Here’s another quote that seems risible now: “One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

Today, it is average, working-class American citizens who are forgotten. Corporate lobbyists purchase the services of politicians of both major political parties and craft much of the legislation that eventually becomes law of the land; corporations own all the significant American media and corporate viewpoints dominate the airwaves (for instance, almost every news broadcast includes a report on the stock market, even though the information is totally irrelevant to the majority of Americans. By reporting stock market migrations, the media legitimizes the stock market as an important indicator of our national economic health); through relentless advertising and PR flim-flam, corporate influence penetrates every nook and cranny of our lives; the steady drumbeat is so effective that empirical evidence is ignored. For example, we accept as unassailable fact the myth that the private sector always delivers services better than the public sector, and that the “free market” is the only answer to every major problem we face.

How did this total reversal of fortunes happen? If Lewis Powell were alive today, what might he think of the revolution he is given credit for helping shape? Would he look at Wal-Mart and pronounce its business practices good? What would he say about the deliberate fraud that triggered the Enron and Worldcom scandals? Would he applaud or condemn the regulatory laxity, legislative chicanery, and judicial ideology that has squeezed the middle-class into near extinction and widened the gulf between the wealthy and everybody else? Would he be pleased to see states turn to legalized gambling for needed revenue rather than increase taxes? And finally, would Powell approve of the corporate chieftains who have outsourced America’s manufacturing base to China -- along with thousands of jobs -- in return for record profits and staggering increases in CEO compensation?

I wonder. Lewis Powell was intelligent enough to peer into a darkening sky and recognize a gathering storm. America stands at the crossroads where great powers become has-beens; the days of American dominance are coming to a close, and how we deal with that grim reality is a critical question for the future. We are adept at moving money around the globe, swapping credit, trading debt instruments, but when it comes to producing tangible products the world’s consumers might want to buy, we are a shell of our former selves. As Kevin Phillips notes in his sobering book, American Theocracy, nations that forego manufacturing in favor of “financialization” soon find themselves on the down slope of prosperity, influence and power. If you don’t agree that our decline as a manufacturing power has serious long-term consequences, look at wages and our unsustainable trade imbalance. America is drowning in debt, overextended militarily in Iraq, and dangerously dependent on Asian creditors. If you sense unease in the land, you’re in good company. Economic anxiety weighs heavy as we cope -- mainly by plunging deeper into debt -- with stagnant or falling wages and the rising costs of housing, college tuition, health insurance, fuel, and food.

I don’t think Powell was advocating for these excesses or for the complete abdication of public responsibility on the part of American corporations; nor do I think Powell was arguing for a society that champions greed as its dominant value; nor do I think he would consider the wholesale buying of political favors healthy for our democracy.

In fact, I can easily imagine Lewis Powell standing before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in the lavish ballroom of a beautiful hotel, and saying, “Gentlemen, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind in 1971. You’ve gone overboard.”

Powell believed that free enterprise and personal freedom were joined at the hip. Near the end of his memo he wrote: “But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private property, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.”

Had Powell been bent on total corporate hegemony, labor unions and collective bargaining would not have made his list of essential freedoms. Ronald Reagan and the conservative think tanks that advised the GOP obviously skipped over that part of the manifesto. Since 1971, American corporations, aided and abetted by money-grubbing politicians and impotent regulatory agencies, have engaged in rabid union busting. Wal-Mart stands as the most notable example, but there are hundreds more companies who squash organizing drives by violating the legal rights of workers. And the companies get away with it. Every year, thousands of American workers are intimidated, harassed, or fired for union organizing activities. As a result of this imbalance of power between Capital and Labor, workers are consigned to the last row of seats on the bus – the seats with torn fabric and exposed coil springs.

If he were alive today, Lewis Powell might very well worry that capitalism’s excesses pose a greater threat to the enterprise system than a million campus socialists. Clearly, those excesses pervert and undermine the values Powell held sacred. Why should Americans believe in free enterprise when that system renders their lives difficult, demeaning, and debt-ridden? For three decades the national conversation has been dominated by the notion that corporations must be free to do whatever they feel necessary to compete and profit. The flip side of the conversation, the need of citizens to be free from economic insecurity and material want, is rarely given voice.

We need a new manifesto, one that restores balance between corporate privilege and public responsibility, between Capital and Labor, and between the glory of individual wealth and the perils of social poverty. But we had better hurry because our long neglect of domestic industries and human capital allow us only the slimmest margin for error.

Don't Be Surprised

Once again, President Bush has vetoed Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, even though polling data shows that an overwhelming percentage of Americans support such research and its potential for life-saving cures.

The public shouldn’t be surprised by Bush’s action – he has never represented the values or aspirations of the American majority. No, Bush and his cronies serve the religious right and corporate clients, and they do it exceedingly well.

Upon vetoing the stem cell research bill, Bush was quoted as saying, “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical.” This is an interesting statement from a man who frequently sent death row inmates to the lethal injection chamber when he was Governor of Texas, and is directly responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq. Then again, hypocrisy and unethical behavior is the Bush Gang’s stock-in-trade.

In his new book, American Theocracy, author Kevin Phillips provides a sobering account of the negative effects of, among other things, “militant” Christianity on our country. When people who believe in Biblical inerrancy assume power and impose their beliefs and values on the rest of us, atrocious things happen, such as imperial military actions cloaked in crusading religious garb, disregard for scientific inquiry and rational argument, and wholesale attacks on an already tattered social safety net.

Who needs science when the secrets of life are contained in the Bible?

Who needs a social safety net when Jesus is standing by, ready to provide material sustenance?

These are sad times, here at the busy intersection where religious fundamentalism meets unfettered corporate power. We cross the intersection at great risk to ourselves and the people we love, particularly if we believe that the Bible is a work of mythology, that scientific inquiry is essential to our survival as a species, or that dissent is patriotic.

Hail Albania!

ABC News interrupted its coverage of Paris Hilton’s comings and goings long enough to report that President Bush received a “hero’s” welcome in Albania, and fresh from that happy experience, felt emboldened to visit Capitol Hill to stump for the federal Immigration bill.

I’m glad there’s a country in this world that Bush can visit and feel the love because he sure as hell doesn’t get that in America, but then, unlike Albanians, Americans have never taken to totalitarian leaders. Even though the “rule of law” is frequently perverted beyond recognition in this country, the “principle” that the Law means something in the land is as ingrained in our minds as the Pledge of Allegiance.

That Bush consistently “disses” the Constitution doesn’t trouble the average Albanian. Perhaps in Bush Albanians see a kindred, a link to the Roman, Ottoman, or Communists who once ruled the land.

But how pathetic is an American President who feels emboldened by a state visit to Albania? Not the UK or Germany or Japan or Australia, places where American heads of state usually receive a friendly welcome, but Albania.

The irony of this was lost on the talking mannequins at ABC. America has slipped so low in the eyes of the world, the Bush record is so dismal, full of error, hubris, and failure, that an inconsequential visit to a marginal nation is given the same gravity as a visit to a country with some juice on the world stage.

We will be rid of Bush in less than 600 hundred days, but his twisted legacy will live for decades. The sad but incontrovertible fact is that the damage Bush has wrought is largely irreversible.

Paris Hilton is in the slammer, crying for her mommy; the New York Yankees have won nine of their last ten game to climb above the .500 mark; and the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are contorting themselves to prove their religious “faith,” a clear recognition that none of them can win unless they pull in a decent percentage of “religious” voters. Hillary Clinton: “When my husband was getting serviced in the Oval Office by that woman, Miss Lewinsky, my daughter and my faith were the only things I had. Without deep and abiding faith we would not have survived those dark, troubling days. What Bill and that woman, Miss Lewinsky, did was wrong, but my faith made it all turn out right.”

Sweet Jesus! Bush, Paris, Hillary – the inmates are definitely in control of the asylum. The rest of us own the ticket and have no choice but to take the ride.

Holier Than

Holier than you, Infidel;

Holier than you, Muslim;

Holier than you, Buddhist;

Holier than you, Roman Catholic;

Holier than you, homosexual;

Holier than you, secular humanist;

The Jesus of love-thy-neighbor has become the Jesus
of persecution;

The Jesus of turn-the-other-cheek is now the Jesus
of vengeance;

The Jesus of tolerance is now the Jesus
of intolerance;

The Jesus who chased the money changers from the Temple is now the Jesus
of greed;

Remember these names – Falwell, Robertson, Dobson – mortal men who high-jacked
the Bible;

Beware anyone who claims to speak for God;

Follow the power that flows from the money raised in God’s name;

And when someone claims to be holier-than-you,

Run

A Mother's Courage

Mothers pay a high price in wartime. Mothers send their sons and husbands, and nowadays, daughters, to foreign lands and wait and worry and hope and pray that they come home alive and intact.

War is hell. A man said it, but mothers know what the hell of war feels like, down deep where it hurts all the time.

She was an ordinary woman from California, with a son in the military, subject to the orders of a president hell bent on imperial overreach under the guise of revenge for September 11th. The President said the invasion was necessary for the security of the United States, he said it was about “regime change,” and finding weapons of mass destruction, and bringing freedom to the long suffering people of Iraq. The President denied the most plausible explanation for the adventure: to secure reliable access to some of the largest proven oil reserves on the planet for American oil companies.

The President claimed the mission was accomplished, but the woman from California breathed no easier. Wars are sometimes waged in stages and on shifting battlefields. The “victory” of Shock & Awe – televised and trumpeted like a Super Bowl game – deteriorated into a stalemate, then defeat, but by then, the woman had already received the call and the news.

Her son was dead and her life would never be the same. She had to find meaning in her boy’s death, answer the searing questions, why and for what and for whom? In past wars, answers to those questions might have come easier, but in this new brand of war, a war of choice, pre-emptive and open-ended, based on shifting rationales, all of which unraveled as events on the ground unfolded, meaning came hard, if it came at all. The dead returned home in flag-draped coffins under cover of darkness and secrecy, as if the sponsors of the war were ashamed.

The only constant was Oil. How else to explain why the United States is building permanent military installations in areas with proven oil reserves, or why it is constructing a massive embassy complex on 104 acres in the Green Zone, or why the “Hydrocarbon Law,” drafted to force privatization of Iraq’s oil resources and give foreign oil companies long-term access to Iraq’s oil, was reviewed by the oil companies long before it was seen by Iraq’s parliament?

Imagine the dissonance in her brain, the uneasiness in her soul, forced every day to confront the emptiness and the questions, the constant reminders of her dead son. She was living in the hell of war.

Some women might have retreated inward, suffered in silence or self-imposed exile, but this mother felt the need to act, to communicate her grief and outrage, to challenge the rationale for continuing the military occupation that had claimed her boy. She tried the most direct route, to the Commander-in-Chief himself, and spent the better part of a month camped outside his ranch, hoping for an audience. Media arrived, curious then insatiable, she became renowned, the face of the anti-war movement. Soon she was marching, and speaking, telling her story on prime time media. It’s unlikely that she ever imagined herself in the role she was now playing, but life comes at us hard sometimes, wrenches us from comfortable patterns.

After a time, when her criticisms became too pointed and her face and name over-exposed, the media machine that had thrust her into the spotlight turned on her. The Talk Titans from the Right questioned her patriotism and her motives, called her an “attention whore,” and soon it was all about her and not her dead son and the misbegotten war that took his life.

But mothers like this one don’t give up easily. She stayed in the fire, kept speaking out, marching for peace, and in November 2006 the country came around, voted Democrats into power with an explicit charge to do something about the mess in Iraq.

That they didn’t reflects our sad, dysfunctional political reality, cowardice, and calculation. Too many Democrats lacked Cindy Sheehan’s heart and courage. They should be ashamed. Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, mother and patriot, has no reason to feel shame.

Overcoming the Reign of Error

Those of us who knew a twisted lie was coming when George W. Bush first linked Iraq with 9/11, those of us who marched in the streets to protest the mindless run-up to the Invasion and then the Occupation, and those of us who felt a glimmer of hope last November when the Democrats regained control of Congress are bitterly disappointed today.

The Democrats became spineless wimps again, and instead of standing on principle they adopted convoluted justifications for why many of them voted to authorize more of our tax dollars for Bush’s Iraq misadventure. So much for Democracy. The people spoke loud and clear and our elected representatives blew us off. Again. Business as usual in Washington.

As the days and months of the Bush Reign of Error roll on, the words of old Bob Dylan ring clearer and truer: “People are crazy and times are strange.” How else can a thinking person explain this cursed era?

While Bush and his cronies lay waste to Iraq, sentence more Americans and countless Iraqis to death or injury, add to the considerable hatred that many Muslims feel toward the United States, plunge our Treasury into massive debt, transfer even more wealth to the wealthiest citizens, deny scientific knowledge and ridicule rational inquiry, prize ideological purity and personal loyalty above ethics and competence (Alberto Gonzalez), and ignore the plight of the poor and the struggles of the shrinking middle class, while all this goes on -- and on -- those of us who are awake and grasp the scale of the catastrophe that Bush and his posse have visited on this nation, can only wonder why more people aren’t as pissed off and disgusted as we are.

Is the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans rebuilt and thriving, has all the dirt and debris been removed, are businesses open for business, are flowers blooming in windowsill planters, and have all the displaced people returned to continue their lives as they were before Katrina hit and our country failed them? Must be, because the mainstream media has stopped reporting on the great Gulf Coast rebuilding project. Given the choice between reporting on Katrina’s displaced and Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic life and death, any media exec worth his stock options will choose Anna Nicole every time. Or Paris Hilton. Or Lindsay Lohan. Or Dancing with the Stars. Or American Idol.

Our capacity for political and social policy discourse is so degraded that we can’t even have a rational, fact-based discussion about any serious topic. If it isn’t entertaining we can’t be bothered.

For example, while most Americans struggle to make short ends meet split ends on stagnant wages earned at mindless jobs, the media reports that interest rates are low and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is robust – as if those measures mean a damn thing to the average wage slave American. Interest rates and the migrations of the stock market mean something only to those who own property or stocks. For the beleaguered working class struggling to stay even, it’s just more American myth being shoved down our throats.

Perhaps George W. Bush, reformed party boy and habitual screw-up, really believes that he is a holy warrior for Christ, and that all the misery he has created in this country and the world is part of God’s master plan to bring about a Christian paradise on Earth.

This is a desperate, but not necessarily hopeless, time in the history of this nation. As Dr. Martin Luther King said many years ago, “The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them.”

When shall we begin to overcome?

Cheapskate Society

My son’s Thursday folder from school contained the usual announcements as well as the usual request for money; my daughter’s Thursday folder, from a different school, implored parents to buy $25 per person tickets for an upcoming silent auction, the purpose of which is to raise money for the school.

It’s a rare week that passes without a plea for money, pencils, paper, tissue, paper towels or art supplies from our public schools. Along with mastering the state-directed curriculum, standardized testing, Federal, state and local funding requirements and restrictions, the latest pedagogical techniques, school principals must also master Fundraising 101. Average fundraisers get the basics; extraordinary fundraisers get new science wings, computers, digital projectors and other high-tech gadgetry, out-of-town field trips, guest speakers and so on.

The State of California spends in the neighborhood of forty percent of its budget on K-12 education, or roughly $60 billion, and it’s nowhere near enough. You’d think that public schools in posh areas like Santa Barbara would be awash in cash from property taxes, but it’s not the case. Instead, the public schools hold bake sales and rummage sales, jog-a-thons, silent auctions, Bingo nights, on and on endlessly throughout the year.

What’s going on here? Is this the logical legacy of Proposition 13, the 1978 voter referendum that slapped a one percent cap on property taxes and effectively cut revenues for local governments and schools? Or is this part and parcel of the Reagan Revolution, which, coming hard on the heels of Prop 13 and Jimmy Carter’s impotent reign, declared government the problem and the marketplace the solution? Reagan believed that no government entity (including public education) could function as efficiently as a private, for-profit one. In Reagan parlance: government robbed and the market liberated.

It was an effective narrative and Reagan was an unparalleled messenger. With a prepared script and a patriotic, American Pie backdrop, Ronald Reagan recited his lines better than any American president before or since. The public bought Reagan’s message and government at every level began to wither. The Conservative assault on the middle-class, and the upward transfer of wealth, had begun. The American Left and the Left leaning wing of the Democratic Party was bereft of ideas and could come up with no narrative to defend its values against the onslaught. Economic justice, civil rights, equal opportunity for all – down the toilet. It was Morning in America. The Dems offered Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis and watched them get crushed. It was an age of corporate efficiency, massive downsizing, tax cuts for Big Business, Small Business, and the Wealthy; personal greed was canonized and shared sacrifice was ridiculed. The individual, mythic American, left to his own drive and initiative, unfettered by government interference and regulation, beholden to no one but himself, became King. Government, with its power to equalize and balance, was shoved out of the way, knocked to the turf, trampled. Reagan and his acolytes made it clear that they meant to eradicate every last vestige of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society; they knew it would take time, a few decades at least, but they organized for the long haul.

And make no mistake, the Conservatives organized the game brilliantly, culminating in the reign of Bush II, where for a time the GOP controlled all three branches of government. Meanwhile, thanks in large part to the “marketplace” genie that Reagan let out of the bottle, and with a big assist from the corporate-controlled Congress, the GOP’s supporters and allies had taken ownership of the mainstream mass media, which enabled the Conservative side of the GOP to shape and promote its message, stifle inquiry, and ignore inconvenient subjects such as the growing divide between wealthy and poor, the demise of the middle-class, environmental degradation, and the millions of citizens without access to affordable health care.

Connect the dots. Reagan declared government bad and the market good. The surest way to make government institutions inefficient, ineffective and irrelevant is to take away their funding by slashing taxes. And once you get started, why stop? Why not “starve the beast,” as conservative icon Grover Norquist famously remarked, until it croaks? Pour billions into national and homeland (wasn’t the term “homeland” frequently used in Nazi Germany?) security and let the rest ride. And even as tax rates are being cut, continue the media drumbeat for more tax “reform.”

Since Reagan, politicians of every stripe know that the surest way to commit political hari-kari is to call for new or increased taxes. Give the Conservative movement credit for taking that option off the table, making it completely taboo.

But we still have government and citizens (even wealthy ones) who need government services, like fire and police protection, courts, roads, bridges, highways, schools, and so on. How do we pay for our common needs when for nearly thirty years we’ve been conditioned to believe that we have no common needs and that taxation is theft? Sleight of hand accounting gimmicks, state-sanctioned gambling, pension fund raids, user fees – anything without resorting to the most direct and efficient solution -- raising taxes to invest in the programs and services society needs to remain decent and humane.

Perhaps the tide is turning. Perhaps it’s beginning to dawn on citizens that we’ve been bamboozled, played for fools by Conservatives and their policies. The wealthy can only isolate themselves from the great unwashed to a degree, but the wealthy must still move through society, drive the roads and highways, drink the water, breathe the air.

Until we come to our senses and rewrite the rules of the dead-end game we’re playing, my children will continue to come home from school with pleas for money, crayons, paper, and almost everything else students need to receive a basic American education.

POEM - Sub-Prime

Give me a payday loan and a sub-prime mortgage,
another Visa card to run to the max;

Cancel my health insurance, dissolve my pension, slash my hourly
wage; ship my job to Bangalore;

The more we owe the more the banks are willing to give,
it’s good business – for them;

We chase middle-class illusions and leave
the tab for our children;

Anyone with eyes can see the big hurt coming,
the bills coming due,
the millions who bought the fantasy of spend without end
will feel the pain first;
but no one is immune –
how can we sustain a consumer economy if consumers
can’t afford to consume?

We share the blame -- you, me, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones, even old John Doe --
complicit in our own indentured servitude,
MIA and ignorant of history, battles and blood spilled;
what became of our willingness to take to the streets and stand for
justice?
have we forgotten how to say NO or that to receive
a fair share of the harvest we must demand it?;

Shame on us for allowing them to silence our collective voice,
revoke our citizenship, marginalize our American concerns;

We’ve been weaned on snake oil, played for fools, sold out for
campaign contributions, luxury hotel suites, first-class passage to St. Andrews,
by lawyers and legislators beholden to nothing more than the corporate
bottom line;

We mixed the toxic Koolaid that is poisoning the American Dream;

Give me a payday loan and a sub-prime mortgage,
another Visa card with a low introductory rate,
I can’t lose;

Can’t win either

Dirty Balcony

The Balcony is dusty, cluttered, unkept, a mess. It’s a few weeks since I climbed these stairs and the place has an unfamiliar look. There’s an empty Coors can that I can’t remember drinking, newspapers, a half-finished crossword puzzle, a solicitation from the Republican National Committee, an appeal for money from the ACLU, a tattered copy of the Nation; the War on Terror is endless and unwinnable, we’re killing the planet but it’s not politically or economically feasible to do anything to mitigate the damage, houses cost too much, schools teach too little, too many Mexicans stream across the border, professional athletes are overpaid, TV reinforces our collective stupidity, I don’t get why Paris Hilton is a celebrity or why anyone gives a fuck about Britney Spears, all the good poets are dead and not even rock & roll can save us; somewhere in America a child is born in poverty, somewhere else an elderly person is dying alone, the ghost of John Steinbeck is playing poker with the ghost of Tom Joad, while in central Baghdad another car bomb explodes and more innocent humans die, the wind rips at the trees, the side of the 101 freeway near King City is littered with discarded shoes, baby bottles, queen-sized orthopedic mattresses, beer bottles, pipe fittings, oil filters, pots, pans, and a bird feeder; what does it all mean? We are what we dispose of? Where is our Martin, our Malcom, our Gandhi? We are spoon-fed the Myth of Ronald Reagan, treated like children, denied the cold hard truth that might set us free, told that our only duty as citizens is to SPEND, SPEND, SPEND! Has the world always been this nuts? When was the Golden Age? Or is that another myth, like the one about the Immaculate Conception and the Easter resurrection? Don’t know, these questions are beyond me, I’m a simple man in a complicated age, an age where lies become truth and petty people hold positions of power, an age where five men can rule over how women use their own bodies; let the fuckers get pregnant, carry full term – then they can talk about reproductive freedom and the sanctity of the unborn. It’s Sunday. A church bell tolls in the distance. My children are drinking chocolate milk.

Speeding Downhill on a Dark Night

Hold on, folks, because this one will veer all over the place, like an 18-year-old kid high on Wild Turkey behind the wheel of a Hummer H2 on an icy downhill road in the black of night.

Yeah, this week felt that perilous. The shootings at Virginia Tech were horrifying enough when the story first broke, and as more details emerge the picture gets worse. Despite laws, good intentions, security procedures and evacuation plans, one armed and determined crazy willing to lose his own life can’t be stopped. That’s no solace for the families of the dead or the kids and faculty who survived, but it’s essentially true. I heard some radio talk about the shooter’s Korean ethnicity, and how discrimination – real or perceived – might have played a role in pushing the young man over the edge, but I’m not sure ethnicity had much to do with it; mental illness crosses freely between and among ethnicities, and this young Korean-American man was certainly ill.

Another eerie aspect of the VT shootings is the way digital technology – cell phones and laptops -- allowed the rest of the country, and the world, to witness the events almost as they happened, and to record those events from a variety of angles and perspectives. The number of sources and the sheer volume of information make the whole effect more chilling, though even with the benefit of all this information, we will never know with total certainty what made the young man go off. Was it a particular event, a look from a classmate, a rejection from a girl, or just the steady accumulation of perceived slights and injustices that snapped the camel’s back?

Rush Limbaugh blamed American Liberals for the massacre, though I’m hard-pressed to understand how that is possible in a society where Conservative ideology has been ascendant for nearly thirty years. Limbaugh is a pill-popping hypocrite who should join Don Imus in retirement.

The New York Times reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said, “I can’t recall,” fifty times during five hours of sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It always amazes me how men and women trained in the law, graduates of our finest universities, torture the truth once they are sworn in and placed on the hot seat. Gonzalez is clearly a lying little weasel trying to save his ass. In the same breath he accepts full responsibility and denies ever doing anything improper, and asserts that he’s in charge and completely unaware of what his subordinates are up to. "Senator, I don't have a recollection of not having a recollection about that specific meeting or any other meeting about which I have no recollection." I wonder if he can remember what he ate for breakfast yesterday morning or the last time he had sex with his wife. Does Gonzalez suffer from amnesia all the time or is his affliction merely situational?

Moving to more local issues…this will not be a restful weekend for members of the Santa Barbara School Board, faced as they are with slashing millions from the District budget next Tuesday night. The Board bought the ticket when it struck a multi-year salary agreement with the Santa Barbara Teachers Association, and now it must take the ride; the only problem is that most of the reductions on the big board suck and are sure to piss off one interest group or another. The Board’s standard fall back position – defer and delay, hire consultants and study – isn’t an option this time around, unless the Board wants to repudiate the agreement with the teachers that they approved on April 10. If you’re interested in watching a five-ring circus, check out the Board meeting at 7:00 P.M. on the 24th.

Bob's Big Night

The folks backing school board member Bob Noel’s brainchild, the American Charter High School (ACHS), came out in force Tuesday night, among them former board member Ray Franco, dapper Das Williams from the City Council, Frank Schipper of the eponymous construction firm, a UCSB professor whose name I didn’t catch who also happens to be a Nobel laureate in Physics, and a horde of lesser luminaries. All in all, it was a very impressive and organized bunch, all united in their desire to break the iron grip of educational bureaucracy and create a school that will keep kids interested in learning. Noel’s band arrived on the heels of Op-Ed pieces in the News-Press that claimed that the Board and Superintendent Brian Sarvis stood in opposition, even outright hostility, to the ACHS proposal – a position that none of the other Board members or Dr. Sarvis was willing to own. Twice Sarvis denied ever calling charter schools “economic parasites.”

As one of, if not the prime mover behind the ACHS idea, Bob Noel was expected to be in rare form, and old Bob didn’t disappoint. As a member of Noel’s posse noted, what else is a 77-year-old PhD going to do with his ample free time if not dream up solutions to the many dilemmas facing public education in Santa Barbara? Noel was geared up for combat from the start, jousting with Assistant Superintendent Jan Zettel over various aspects of vocational education, debating fine points of charter law with the District’s legal counsel, and ardently stressing that he, Bob Noel, had no financial interest or official capacity in the ACHS hierarchy, and therefore no conflict of interest as a sitting board member poised to cast a vote. That position appeared to be a helluva stretch, but when it comes to questions of basic ethics, Bob’s a triple-jointed kind of guy.

Like most Board meetings in the wacky world of the Santa Barbara School Districts, this one offered moments of delicious weirdness. I sat up and paid attention when my all-time favorite wing-nut, Kenneth Locke, inter-disciplinary guru of the emerging avant-garde, took the microphone for another installment in his long-running series of three-minute lectures. Somewhere in this great land of ours, the padded cell where Locke once resided stands empty; the walls of that cell are no doubt covered with squiggles, arrows, triangles, rectangles, mathematical formulas, grocery lists, koans and runes. Following Locke as he darts and skips from Aristotle to Jackson Pollock to Arthur Ashe is always a mental trick: “The abstract of the 20th century is that yoga is related to painting and painting is related to tennis, and between painting and tennis is pumpkin pie. Without a paradigm shift, young people will never understand what this means! The only way they can find themselves is through this paradigm shift! What I’m referring to is recycling, like when you take a milk carton and turn it into art, glorious art! In other words, the non-object object, the process by which something becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything!”

Watching the audience watching Locke is half the fun. Mouths fall open, eyes bug out, heads are scratched, earlobes are yanked, some folks cough nervously, some laugh, many whisper “What is that guy saying?” to the person next to them.

Yes, strange weirdness abounds in the Santa Barbara School District. Issues that pass unnoticed in other school districts are subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in SB, along with much hand-wringing and tears. Take Laura Baker for example. Ms. Baker teaches at La Cumbre Junior High and is waging a one-woman crusade to save La Cumbre from an invasion of elementary students from the Santa Barbara Community Academy, who may soon be housed on the La Cumbre campus. Ms. Baker has made dire predictions, sounded warnings, voiced numerous complaints, and advanced visions of mayhem during public comment at something like eighteen consecutive Board meetings. Tuesday night she asserted that the “Eastside” Academy kids would stir up resentment among “Westside” gang-affiliated kids, and who knows what terrible consequences might result from such an ill-conceived co-mingling of students. Ms. Baker would have the Eastside kids move to Cleveland – where they will be among their own kith and kin, safe from the predations of the Westsiders. Rumor has it that Ms. Baker’s true intention is far more personal and pragmatic: she stands to lose her private bathroom if the Academy kids move to La Cumbre.

The ACHS gang trooped to the microphone, one after the other, to express their unqualified support for the new charter school, asserting that it would provide a place for kids who fall through cracks in the pedagogical floorboards, for potential gang-bangers, for misfits with hidden potential, for English learners, for 8th graders reading at 3rd grade level, and for nascent mechanical geniuses under-served by the traditional curriculum. Not only that, the ACHS would flood the local labor pool with highly-skilled, employment-ready kids prepared to earn big wages framing buildings, policing the streets, and extinguishing fires.

After the Nobel Laureate whose name I didn’t catch spoke and was enthusiastically applauded, it was clear that the ACHS was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the plastic ice tray, and Botox and Viagara combined. Former Board member Ray Franco clinched the deal in a ten-minute rant that began in Spanish and concluded in English, describing his own immigrant success story and quoting Thomas Jefferson for good measure. Seven times Franco said, “Finally,” and then took off on another tangent. I looked at Bob Noel as Mr. Franco was speaking and finally understood what people mean when they say, “grinning like a Cheshire cat.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Bob had a hard-on, perhaps the biggest stiffie he's had since he became eligible for Social Security; he was basking in the light of his own brilliance, his soaring intellect, his organizational ability, and his “juice” in the community. To his fellow Board members and Superintendent Sarvis, Bob’s countenance seemed to say, “You can’t stop me, you can’t touch me, I am King of the World! My brainchild will be born and it will thrive!”

An Echo Forty Years Old

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King made a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City that was heralded as historic by some and something of a crime by others, but either way, much of what Dr. King said that day sounds eerily familiar in light of the economic, military and political morass the United States finds itself in today.

One parallel between the observations Dr. King made forty years ago and today is how little we understood or even considered what the Vietnam War meant for the millions of Vietnamese in the North and South who were just trying to live their lives. America’s focus was on our troops, our strategic interests and on propping up the US-installed government in Saigon.

Fast forward forty years to the American Occupation of Iraq. The plight of ordinary Iraqis is almost completely ignored by the American news media, as is any comprehensive coverage or explanation of Iraqi society, culture and history; most Americans couldn’t explain the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite if their home and hearth depended on it. It’s next to impossible for Americans to understand what it must feel like to live in an occupied country, to see foreign soldiers on street corners, to hear fighter jets and helicopters thundering overhead day and night, and to be reminded, every day, that your destiny rests in foreign hands rather than your own.

Forty years ago Dr. King quoted a Buddhist leader who wrote: “Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instincts. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.”

Same in Iraq today. The folly of our invasion and occupation has created enmity in the hearts of Iraqis that will last at least a generation if not longer. We could “surge” forty or sixty thousand troops into Iraq and not come close to eradicating the hatred Iraqis feel for America and Americans. Dr. King feared for American troops in Vietnam, feared that we had placed them in a situation that was not only brutal but cynical: “…for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”

I wonder how Dr. King would feel if he could see how many steps backwards America has taken in the forty years since he spoke at the Riverside Church. The militarism he feared is still alive and well; the economic and social injustice he spoke and marched against is as strong as ever; the racial intolerance he dedicated his life to fighting is alive and well. The words Dr. King spoke echo down the years, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and down to the Gulf of Mexico, through the ruined streets of the 9th Ward in New Orleans, through small-town churches and big-city synagogues, through the halls of government and the plush offices of corporate titans; the words echo and fall on ears gone deaf.

Notes on the March

I marched on State Street on March 17th, marched against war with an enthusiastic crowd, many young, many more my age or older, Vietnam-era folks, who have deep and lasting memories of another failed war, another lying Administration that widened war on false pretenses. Many of the same people, myself included, marched back in 2003, when President Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and a compliant, lazy national press were beating the drums for the invasion of Iraq. We marched as Shock & Awe unfolded on Fox and CNN, and retired generals gushed about the supreme firepower of the United States military. Predictably, the US rolled over Saddam’s pathetic forces, our tanks rumbling largely unimpeded all the way to Baghdad. We found no weapons of mass destruction, of course, no chemical stores, no missiles pointed at Washington or Tel Aviv. Saddam never posed a threat to the United States – and millions of protestors around the world knew it. We knew that Iraq was a third-rate military power at best, even as Bush and Cheney were comparing Saddam to Hitler. Pure fear tactics, a shell game.

Now that we’re mired in a civil war, the talking heads and Administration mouthpieces tell us that we cannot up and leave; disaster will result, enormous bloodshed, the US will lose all credibility (as if we have any left to lose), our vital national interests will be irreparably damaged. The same false choices were offered during the Vietnam conflict, but lo and behold, none of those horrible predictions came true. Yes, the Communists overran the south and forced the US to evacuate, and unleashed a flood of refugees, but today the US has nearly normal relations with Vietnam; we sell the Vietnamese Coca-Cola and iPods and GAP jeans and financial services and god knows what else. Vietnam is not a threat to its neighbors.

What the anti-war protestors knew in 2003 the majority of Americans know now – that on the basis of trumped-up intelligence and fear-mongering, the US invaded and occupied a sovereign nation that posed no military threat to our country. We knew the Invasion would not be a cake walk, and that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were wrong; we knew that Iraqi children would not throw flowers at the feet of American soldiers; we knew that age-old sectarian hatreds, bottled for decades by oppression and suppression, would erupt.

Millions of us knew that history was about to repeat; our political leaders refused to listen, and now, we are doomed to suffer the consequences of their vanity and ignorance.

FEAR WITHOUT LOATHING

Bet on Fear, it’s a sure thing
Renewable and inexhaustible
The moving shadow at the edge of our campfire
The unknown sound in the middle of the night

If it’s not hate-filled Muslims
Child predators
Catholic priests
Male-pattern baldness
Impotence
Germ-laden hotel carpets
Identity theft
Credit card fraud
Computer viruses
E. coli
SARS
Avian flu
Arthritis
Discolored teeth & foul breath

It will be some old Fear made new
Trumpeted on the Tube
Echoing on the radio dial
Be afraid
Very afraid

Second-Rate Power

I was listening to Noam Chomsky on KPFK today, good leftist radio, and Chomsky was talking about Iraq and the results of a US-sponsored poll that revealed that 87% of the Iraqi population wants the US to end its occupation on a set timetable.

Of course, the US regime could give a shit about this poll, even though Bush and his posse are committed to fostering democracy in Iraq. Democracy? Isn’t democracy concerned with the will of the majority? Not in Bush’s twisted Universe. Let’s not forget that Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000, but got bailed out by the Supreme Court and installed in the White House.

Chomsky went on and on, detailing US misdeeds, crimes, schemes, machinations, lies, mostly in connection with the Middle East and control of oil, the liquid that makes the global economy go round. If the US loses control of or access to oil, it could easily become a second-rate power, little better than Italy or France or Portugal; and how would Americans, encouraged by decades of official myth-making, deal psychologically with second-rate status?

That will be a hard pill to swallow, but it certainly seems that we are headed that direction. Sooner or later we will lose our ability to call the shots and rig the world for our own benefit. Then we’ll be like the San Francisco 49’s or the Oakland Raiders, once iconic teams that have fallen on lean times and can’t rise out of the cellar. Other nations will heap ridicule upon us the same way we have for decades heaped ridicule upon them. Hugo Chavez will drop his pants and piss on the White House steps.

Comeuppance is a terrible thing.

When did JFK’s New Frontier become this shit-train run and ruled by Bush and Cheney? What happened to our idealism? Or was all that stuff a hoax, a smokescreen, a big fucking lie? Camelot will not rise this time, not from the nuclear dust. Bush has set us on a collision course with disaster, and if you think there’s a savior in the wings, forget it. John Edwards is a fag, remember? Hillary has bigger balls than Barrack Obama. John McCain is a wingnut. Rudy G is impotent.

Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky drones on. I wish more people were listening.

Everywhere

The bastards are everywhere
Like lice or locusts
They come and go
In swarms

Chop off their heads and three more grow back
They are indestructible
Immune to poison gas and cyanide
To reason and moderation

Is there peace?
Or solitude?
Or silence?
A moment to commune with God or the Big Dipper?

Does anything we do matter?
To what do all the tears and agony amount
When we’re dust in a box in the ground?

The bastards are everywhere,
Turn around,
You’ll see

The Best the OC has to Offer?

We don’t watch a lot of Tube on the Balcony. Incessant Tube chatter drives the Proprietor mad, makes him irascible, and somewhat dangerous; he’s been known to throw empty beer cans at the screen, particularly when he sees the ghostly image of George W. Bush or Deadeye Dick Cheney. “War criminals!” he screams. “Asshole-motherfucking-shithead-bastards.”

It can get pretty ugly. American Tube fare mirrors the emptiness and vacuity of the nation. The average, unthinking, moronic American is captivated by crap. Just last evening the Proprietor, after reading the latest edition of the Nation (depressing news about inequality and official indifference to the rule of law, genocide in Africa, etc.,) was channel-surfing in search of Mexican League baseball or highlights from Spring Training, when he happened upon the Real Housewives of Orange County on BRAVO. Within twenty seconds he was muttering, “Sweet mother of Jesus, what the Hell is this?” His instinct for self-preservation told him to switch the Tube off and flee, but his feet disobeyed his brain and his eyes remained fixed on the absurd, pointless spectacle.

Orange County? Since when does anyone give a fuck about Orange County? And if these shit-for-brains women are the best the OC has to offer, if they are the poster ladies for the good life, then we are doomed to stand outside the Gates of Hell with our brains on fire. Talk about taking the trivial to a new level! Word up, OC housewives: excessive use of Silicon and Botox and hair care products can stunt your intellectual growth and turn you into a pathetic excuse for a human being. Your daily comings and goings are simply not that interesting, and filming them doesn’t make them more dramatic or arresting. Should I brush my teeth or take a crap? Wow! Should I shop at Nieman Marcus or the GAP? Corn flakes or granola? Should I get a Brazilian or have my asshole bleached – or both?

Up in Heaven, in a dark corner of the All Saints Bar & Grill, Charles Bukowski is laughing, Henry Miller is saying “I told you so,” and Hunter S. Thompson is filling a bong and placing a bet on the Knicks-Pacers game.

Liberal Forms of Torture

Wouldn’t it be funny, not to mention appropriate, if old Teddy Kennedy bent Ann Coulter over a chair and fucked her from behind? Would Coulter consider being fucked from behind by an old Liberal a form of torture?

Interesting to contemplate, though I don’t give people of Ann Coulter’s ilk much thought, except to wonder why anyone with a moderate IQ gives what she says or writes any credence. Do they give her the benefit of the doubt because she’s thin and blonde? How do they know she doesn’t spend her evenings sucking on a crack pipe?

Coulter is the poster-girl for this dumbed-down, sound-bite age. If you read newspapers or listen to radio broadcasts from other countries, the world looks completely different than it does from the commercial perspective of the American corporate media. The American media treats citizens (consumers) like morons, too stupid to consider the many sides of an issue.

Instead of background and context, we get the carnival life & times of Anna Nicole Smith. While the world around us burns, we get American Idol. While George W. Bush and his criminal posse rape the middle class and invade other nations, we get frantic over Dancing with the Stars – all of whom happen to be has-beens. We get Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts fawning over one another breathlessly, like a couple of teenagers who recently discovered that they are attracted to members of their own sex.

Now, suppose Dick Cheney got to feeling frisky and decided to bend Ann Coulter over a chair and fuck her up the ass. Would that be OK with Ann, even considered an honor? I don’t know and don’t particularly care. As Bob Dylan so aptly put it, “People are crazy and times are strange.”

Amen, brother.

Poem - She's Dead

They know the contents of her stomach
Speculate on her state of mind
The father of her child
As if her death is the last piece of news
On the last day of life on Earth
They interview old friends, ex-friends, bartenders and cab drivers,
Attorneys, photographers, manicurists, and hypnotists;
Her image clogs the Tube night after night
Platinum hair and ruby lips
Blowing kisses for the cameras
Sad and tragic and dead
Her body cold, cold, cold

Why can’t they leave her alone?

Poem - What He Left

A pair of reading glasses
Gold-plated cigarette lighter
St. Christopher medal
Shot glass from Niagara Falls
Nail clippers
A key to an unknown door
Twelve one dollar bills
Two yellow golf tees
One miniature screwdriver
Expired drivers license
and a W-2 from the Golden Peacock Bar

What he left fit in a shoebox
The stuff rattled around;
His life was an open book,
In death he became a mystery

I split the money with my brother;
We ordered a round and raised our glasses
And did something we’d never done before –
Toasted our old man

A Classic 70/30 Split

The phone rang at 3:30 A.M., an hour of the morning ripe for bad news. As I stumbled for the phone in the dark my first thought was that someone in the family had died.

“Hello?”

“I saw your speech. You have a future as a Baptist preacher.”

“Dr. Duke?”

“Of course it’s me. Who else calls you at this hour?”

Duke had been out of touch for four months, off, I assumed, on one of his periodic excursions to Thailand or Outer Mongolia or gallivanting through Prague with an underage heiress.

In fact, as he was now telling me, he’d been in Kona, Hawaii, attending to business interests. Cannabis cultivation, I assumed, though, given the proclivity of the Bush Administration to eavesdrop on ordinary Americans, I had no intention of asking on an open telephone line. The trip had obviously gone well because he was sober and in high spirits, eager to incite revolution and mayhem.

“Not running for school board was a big mistake,” Duke said. “Those people desperately need someone with my peculiar talents. The foundation is crumbling and they stand around like shell-shocked sheep waiting for a miracle to save them. And whoever’s doing their PR needs a public flogging. Sweet Jesus, what kind of morons extend the big boss’s contract before taking care of their labor force? The first principle of leadership is to take care of your people. How the hell can a PhD not know that? Is the Superintendent that arrogant or that dense?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe a little of both.”

“Looks like a classic 70/30 split to me,” Duke said. “If the man had a shred of moral decency he would have told the Board to delay extending his contract until after this mess with the teachers was settled. And then, for good measure, he would have refused any salary increase until his people got what they deserved. What kind of car does he drive?”

“A Lexus SUV, I think.”

“Yeah, that figures. Lexus, the official vehicle of elitist greedheads. Be that as it may, the Board put its collective foot in a steaming pile of walrus shit and the teachers will never forgive them or forget. Whether they meant to or not they made it abundantly clear that they value the Superintendent more than the people who do the heavy lifting. You don’t extend the contract of a man leading you to state receivership.”

“That’s the general consensus,” I said.

“Well, the Superintendent may have a contract through 2010, but he’s effectively washed up. His reputation is shot and his legacy will be one of failure and ineptitude. Amen.”

Mud-Brain

I need to write something witty for my blog, but I’m too damned tired. Brain feels like it’s drowning in river muck…slow and sticky and hard to get rid of. The more you rub it the worse it gets. Has President Bush or H. Clinton or B. Obama done anything stupid today? Sold out some group or another, sucked the ass-end of the defense industry in search of campaign cash? I’d like to see a good, old fashioned fist fight in the United States Senate chamber, the kind of fight you often see in Korea or Taiwan, where elected officials go ape-shit and beat each other senseless. I’d like to see John McCain and Hilary Clinton in a fist fight. That’s a fair fight, don’t you think? Hil’s had Bill by the scrotum for years. You think she’s a pushover? Or Teddy Kennedy duking it out with Trent Lott. Everybody enjoys watching old, wealthy, white, overweight, tight-assed lawyers fight like street dogs. It helps the rest of us remember that the fuckers are no better than we are. We’re all losers, if you think about it deeply enough. We’re born, and we croak, only we don’t know when it will happen, and some of us think we can prevent it and live forever…we take vitamins and guzzle green tea…we visit ancient temples and run our fingers across sacred objects…we pray to icons, to virgins, to volcanoes, to Billy-goats…

That’s what I mean by a tired, empty, mud-sloshed brain. It’s not sharp or quick; it’s cranky and petulant. Somewhere Tom Waits is laughing and beating on a garbage can with a table leg. This life is funny and twisted, especially when you get caught in this web or that rat hole. And none of it makes a bit of sense. It’s like fitting a grain of sand through the eye of a needle at the bottom of a toilet in Madagascar…Yes, that’s right and I dare you to deny it.

But what’s the cliché, “this too shall pass?” OK, when might that happen?

View from the Bubble

The view from President Bush’s bubble is always rosy. Wonderful things are happening all across our great land. The economy is growing and robust, unemployment is low and incomes are rising; our millionaires are happy, and our billionaires think everything is just ducky; ok, we’ve hit a speed bump in Iraq, but if we remain resolved and inject 20,000 more soldiers, we can right the situation and turn Iraq into a flower of Democracy, a beacon of hope in the Middle East; we’ve got a minor addiction to fossil fuel, but hey, with “clean” coal and a few new nuclear power plants, everything will be hunky-dory; health care is a teeny problem that can be easily solved by taking away people’s health insurance rather than making health care more accessible; the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina fixed itself with the help of a few charity concerts and a heckuva job by FEMA; our budget deficit can be erased with another round of tax “relief” for the wealthy.

Is this a great country or what? Because we love our freedom we don’t feel any need to invade weaker countries and threaten those that disagree with us. We’re way cool, and people around the globe know it. The bright side with W is far better than Daddy Bush’s thousand-points-of-light. Americans got it going on, dude. We’re kings of the scrap heap and sitting atop the dung hill. The rest of the world wishes it were in our sneakers, camped in our Lay-Z-Boy with a six-pack of Bud and a giant bag of Doritos, watching American Idol.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the State of the Union speech, though from reading press reports and pundit comments, I gather Bush tried to dampen his mad-dog instincts and project a reasonable image. The White House staff seems to have made Bush aware that the Democrats won the mid-term elections and control both houses of Congress. Further, Bush finally accepts that Nancy Pelosi is a woman and a Democrat. Yes, I think we can confidently say that Bush is beginning to hit his stride as our chief executive. In two years he’ll be trained and ready to take on the job of Mayor of Crawford, Texas. The folks in Crawford are already preparing for the return of their favorite transplant, planning an inaugural parade down Main Street. Bush will ride a white stallion and fire his six-shooter into the air when he arrives at the courthouse for the swearing in. It’s going to be a big deal, that’s for certain. The Saudi royal family has already promised to foot the bill for the whole shebang. Ambassadors from Togo and Poland – staunch US allies in the Iraq conflict – have rsvp’d. The Comfort Inn down the street from the courthouse is sold out. The Rocking Horse Saloon out on the Lone Star Parkway is swapping its old Sony for a 50” plasma screen.

Only seven hundred and twenty-five days to wait.

Tale of the Smart Globe

My son has a “Smart Globe.” It’s an interactive globe filled with something like a million facts. Press “Angola,” and the smart Globe will reel off facts like a madman in church on Sunday. Fact after fact: “Uganda’s population declined 66% last year.” The thing is, you can plug the Globe in and download facts from the Internet, new, updated facts all the time. Touch Washington D.C. in the present day: “The majority of the American public finally woke up and realized that George W. Bush is an idiot who high-jacked the United States from its citizens. Almost all its citizens except those fortunate enough to have a trust fund, a big-ass inheritance, or a smart-fucking stockbroker. Most of us have sucked dry tit since Bush and his Junta overtook the country, way back when, in quieter times, before the Dogs of War went chasing innocent Iraqi’s. But that’s an oil story, baby, big business babble, share prices and Wall Street mega-deals, instant wealth, almost out of thin air, future predictions based on insider-information, a rigged game. But hey, why are you complainin’? it’s a level playing field, Bubba, the same for everyone regardless of race or creed or Heaven Forbid, sexual orientation. Dog-eat-dog-eat-chicken-eat snapper-eat-octopus-eat-lion-eat-polar bear-eat my obnoxious next door neighbor…The American food-chain. Big got bigger got biggest, until they had all the power in their hands and called all the shots. It was relatively easy. Citizens were stressed out, arguing about abortion, about gun-control, about “reverse discrimination,” and suddenly, before they really knew what had happened, they looked around and their entire town was changed; gone was anything organic -- good-bye street corner market and the little farm where they sold fresh peaches in the summer. Lemon orchards, avocados, walnuts. Quieter times and all that shit…

My son plays with his Smart Globe by the hour. At his age, all I cared about was sports. He’s way smarter than I was at that age. His access to information has increased, shit, math isn’t my gig, 500%? It’s a big number, that’s for sure. It’s just astonishing, mind-blowing, to sit back and think about all the technological gadgets that have appeared in your lifetime. The information, entertainment, news, advertisements, images, sounds, and speed with which it all comes, is mind-boggling.

But anyway, I drift off-point like a tired working stiff on Friday night. Nancy Pelosi, history-making Nancy Pelosi, she of the San Francisco values, whatever the fuck that means, talking with that blonde dingbat, Diane Sawyer, indescribably obnoxious, vacuous, someone you’d abandon all pretense of sensitive manliness and just smack upside the head. “Shut the fuck up, bitch. Your voice makes my head ache. One more word out of you and I’ll fling you off that balcony. That’s fifteen stories, in case you’ve lost count. One-Five. A long fast drop, first step on your journey to becoming a full-blown self-hating cockroach. Or something like that.”

Ye gads, my mind has gone off the rails…violence…eerie thoughts…why is that vicious dog creeping up behind me…who are these people and why are they x-raying my mail…It’s like being scrutinized and ignored in the same instant. Modern life. We all scurry like rats in the proverbial maze. Some run faster, some slower, and some croak by the roadside. Is it really hard and cut and dried like that? Fuck, where was I, and why? I started off with a point, a single point of light, and now it has gone up in crimson smoke.

Ah yes, Nancy Pelosi, talking with Diane…about the War in Iraq, which, if you start with that term, “war,” dooms the dialogue to spin down BS Avenue because, well, the US never declared “War” on Iraq, did it? An inconvenient fact, perhaps, but a fact nonetheless. We Invaded, Poland and Togo at our side, and then we Occupied. And all kind of terrible shit happened, so many young dead, so many more maimed, and for what? The Bush people said it was WMD and Al Qaeda and bringing the light of Democracy to the besieged and despot-ridden Middle East. When none of these justifications held water or made sense, this president -- who slavishly clings to his illusions, like a drowning man to a ball of twine offered from the deck of a cruise ship -- and his brain trust simply created another reason, another justification, another grand cause, when underlying every inch of every ruse is our thirst for that liquid gold buried beneath the sand. We need it, they’ve got it; our beautiful system of wealth concentration runs on that dark, sticky liquid, and we’ll lose millions in the intermediate run if we don’t figure a way to control it. This is heavy, top shelf raging Capitalism; immorality justified by the end game, the Grand Objective of the Powerful. And the young people and the Reservists go over and get blown apart, and there’s not much discord on the home front, no angry mob at the White House gates, no laws you need respect or obey, not even the Big One, the Great One, the majestic United States Constitution, that amazing, flawed document that guided us far and in relative peace, no, you don’t even need to lose sleep about trampling all over that.

When there’s no sheriff in town, there will be mischief.

And Nancy Pelosi sits there chatting with Diane and states in all sincerity that our soldiers haven’t died or been disfigured in vain. What have we gained, Nancy? Tell me, and be real, remove your political mask and speak from your heart. Has Iraq made us better morally, stronger militarily, and more secure economically? Is our standing with the other nations that we are doomed to live on this planet with higher? Is the bottom line that Conservatives always yammer about better now than it was in 2003? Better fundamentally? Better strategically? You stretch the parameters far enough and twist the truth long enough and our dead might seem not to have died in vain…

I go over to my son’s Smart Globe and touch Iraq. The Smart Globe says, “Lost cause…”

Surge of the Idiot-in-Chief

I promised myself that I wouldn’t click on the Tube and watch Bush attempt to justify sending more American kids to Iraq. As an American citizen I feel a duty to watch, but I can’t bring myself to punch the remote and bring up the Spider-Monkey-in-Chief. Bush is a fool who long ago burned all his credibility as a leader. He didn’t have the chops in 2000 and he sure as hell doesn’t have the chops now. He’s probably not as dense as he comes across during his speeches and press conferences, but why should anyone give him the benefit of the doubt at this point in the game? After all the lies, the hubris, and the “Mission Accomplished” grandstanding; after all the carnage and rising body counts; after all the corruption and miscalculation.

Iraq is a moral, political, military, and financial debacle. Not only has the Bush Gang butt-fucked the Iraqi people for at least a generation, they have also fucked America by pissing away billions of dollars that could have been put to use here on our own soil to provide decent medical care for American taxpayers, educational and training opportunities for our young, retirement security for our elderly, and sorely needed investment in alternative energy sources.

Instead, Bush has squandered billions of taxpayer dollars in a failed fantasy. We’ll be paying the bill for years to come.

Clinton got a blow-job from an intern and Congress impeached him. The Republicans investigated that deal to the hilt. Remember the frenzy, the horseshit about a constitutional crisis, Kenneth Starr acting like the Grand Inquisitor? They wanted to know the length of Clinton’s erect cock and the volume of his ejaculation; they wanted to know if he smoked the cigar after jamming it inside Monica.

Bush mortgages our future, condemns our young to die for a lie, lays waste to Iraq, and strolls across the White House lawn like it’s just another day at the office.

Americans should be outraged, incensed, marching in the streets in protest against the stupid, criminal acts perpetrated in our collective name.

At some level, Bush knows that Iraq is lost. His aim now is to salvage his ass for the history books. This surge bullshit is Bush’s Hail Mary pass, his last ditch effort; he’s ninety feet from the basket with one second on the clock... As it goes tonight, Bush stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the worst Presidents in our history: Polk, Harrison, Hoover, Nixon. There’s a closet-sized space next to these clowns and it’s got W’s name stamped on the door.

We can surge troops until the geese fly south but it won’t change a thing. Iraq must fight its civil war, turn the sand crimson, and hope that what emerges is a government and society that can begin to rebuild what the United States so effectively destroyed.

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Unlock the door, remove the velvet ropes, the Balcony is open for business for 2007! Ho hum! You can wander over to YouTube and watch real people star in their own movies, so why the hell would you want to climb my creaky stairs, sit in these smelly old seats, and read the ravings of a rehabilitated madman? And hey, doesn’t the new season of American Idol begin soon? Can’t miss that. Or Gray’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty, 24, Dr. 90210, Rachel Ray, Oprah, or Dr. Phil. Lots of choices in this entertainment wonderland, this Kingdom of Distraction. The world hisses and burns as it always has, blood and tears run in the gutters, toilets clog with the excrement of kings. Saddam is hung, Jerry Ford’s in the ground, reunited with Tricky Dick Nixon, two-headed mermaids row leaky boats while ghost cloud ships sail past the moon and Captain Fantastic swings from the Big Dipper. The faces on Mount Rushmore come to life and belt out a rousing rendition of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

No matter what, we’re all bit players.

But the clock ticks and our hearts beat, the phone rings, the dog yelps, the garbage men arrive on schedule, the Post Office brings the bills.

Take a couple of poems and call me in a week…the Doctor is in every day except Wednesday afternoon when he plays billiards with a Cantonese midget. Ciao!

FAST TRACK

More, more, bring me more
Put it on the fast track, strap it to the wheel
No second to lose
Hyper-evolution
Here at sunrise, gone by sunset
Out of date, obsolete, ancient at birth

BlackBerry tyranny
Wireless chains
Multi-task madness
Digital delirium

We’re running blind, with Starbucks
Sloshing in our guts,
Ephedrine tickling our brains
Slow down, world
The race is to the wise, not the fast
And the finish line still reads:
D
E
A
T
H


REMINDER

Midnight
Full moon
Stars
My 5-year-old daughter wants to know
Who hung the moon
why the Earth spins
And what happens if it stops?

The genius of small children
Is to remind grownups
Of forgotten mysteries

Poem - A December to Forget

Xmas lights are hung,
the moon is down
Santa’s on his way

Think he’ll skip Baghdad and Darfur
New Orleans, too
no safe place to land the sleigh
what’s the use anyway?

Broken vets slump in crooked doorways,
already forgotten, worse off than brothers in flag-draped coffins,
living dead;
Shock & Awe meets disgrace under pawn shop glass
Purple Heart medals alongside rusted .38’s
Swiss Army knives,
money clips, harmonicas, GI watches

Lives stolen by immoral cowards
who sleep at night in warm featherbeds
and celebrate their failure

The tunnel is dark, the shelves are bare,
the last train has departed, the fire’s out;
no cookies on the plate for Santa, no turkey
in the oven

Remember the reason for the season,
son of God, born in a manger
three kings on his trail, guided by a star
seeking something to believe in

Same need now as then -
to believe in angels
and a savior; in an unseen hand
and a well of mercy

Santa’s on his way

Bush the Befuddled

That voice. That snide voice. That jeering, wasted-Yale-education voice, that lifetime of upward failure voice, shamelessly breathing new life into dead and discredited ideas, into failure and shame, into torture and death. It was too early in the day for that voice.

“Turn it off,” I yelled to my wife. “Please.”

Bush the Befuddled, holding another useless press conference, and insisting, despite graphic evidence to the contrary, that the “war” in Iraq is worthwhile, winnable, and key to protecting American citizens from those horrible people who ascribe to an “ideology of hate.”

If Bush believes his own bullshit he’s insane. Iraq was unnecessary, a waste of young lives, a waste of tax dollars, a waste of American moral credibility – and that’s just for starters from a provincial American perspective. It’s the Iraqis who have lost big time, Iraqis who fear for their lives in outdoor markets and office buildings, on street corners; Iraqis who are without basic human services, due in large part to American arrogance, ignorance and greed.

For Bush to stand there and state his belief that the majority of Americans don’t want US forces withdrawn, to stand and say that we don’t understand the consequences, is crazy gibberish. Bush is the one trying to beat his dead, maggot-infested horse to life. The people get it. Iraq is a lost cause no matter what we do, and has been since we toppled Saddam and unleashed bottled up sectarian strife.

US miscalculation placed Iraq on the path to civil war. The US is responsible for destroying a country that never posed a credible threat to our national security. Thanks to Bush and his cronies, the average Iraqi now has ample reason to distrust, despise, and discredit any move the US makes in Iraq.

Bush talks a lot of nonsense about liberty and freedom for Iraqis while he systematically dismantles Constitutional protections here at home. Enough already.

This unarmed, lower middle-class American citizen, an Air Force veteran, is sick of the bullshit, lies, posturing and criminal behavior of Bush the Befuddled and his cronies. I’m sick of Wolf Blitzer and Tim Russert and Brian Williams, just to name a few of the many blabbermouths in TV land who blithely lend Bush Administration fantasies credence.

The America that lives (only barely) in my imagination is a country with a moral reservoir deep enough to admit failure and make amends for its misdeeds.

Bush was a fraud from Day One and he remains a fraud now; he was unfit from Day One and he’s even more unfit now; he was an embarrassment to our country from Day One and so he remains.

APPLE PIE - FICTION

Fell face first into his apple pie, dead, still holding my hand when his heart stopped. Strangest thing I ever witnessed. What a time for his time to come! Would it have happened if he hadn’t been home when I brought the pie over, if I had just left it on his porch with a note, which was what I intended all along. Ed insisted I have a piece with him, wouldn’t hear otherwise. I sat in the little dining area. Ed only had two chairs, which I took as a sign that he got as many visitors as I did. I noticed there were no pictures in the living room, no frames with smiling faces in them. No wife. No kids. Not much furniture. Ed seemed shy and a little more nervous than he was the day he drove us to the hospital. He admitted that he wasn’t used to visitors. Other than Mensa, a chubby stray cat he’d taken in, he had only himself to worry about, and since his tastes were simple he didn’t need much. As I watched him brew coffee and pull plates from the cupboard I got a solid feeling about Ed, like if a flood or a hurricane hit Crystal Springs he’d be the last resident standing. He was everything Steve never could be, everything Steve never bothered trying to be; Ed was the kind of man who kept his trailer neat, who voted in every election, who took care of his pets, who changed the oil in his truck every 3,000 miles, who owned insurance. Solid, responsible, dependable. I imagined that he was sweet to his late wife, brought her flowers for no reason, fixed her tea with honey when she was sick, stuff that never in thirteen years crossed Steve’s mind to do for me. Only thing I could ever depend on Steve for was losing his temper and making a complete mess of things. Ed had kind brown eyes, like the eyes of those dogs you sometimes see outside the grocery store, waiting on their owner, as calm and patient as can be. The years had etched some lines on Ed’s forehead and around his eyes, proof that his days hadn’t been all sugar and daffodils, but the lines didn’t mask the kindness in the man. Ed sliced the pie and served me first. Still wore his wedding band I noticed. Took his coffee black, chewed his pie slowly, like he wanted to wring every drop of flavor from it, and again I thought of Steve, the caveman way he ate, all slurps and grunts and mess, as if eating was a competition. When Ed said my pie was the best he’d ever tasted, I felt fire on my cheeks. I didn’t know what to say, it had been such a long time since a man paid me a compliment, but I was happy to be sitting here. I was even more surprised when Ed put his hand over mine, and held my eyes with his, as if he was searching for something he’d lost, and I felt my heartbeat speed up; it felt weird, to be honest, I’m not your touchy-feely type of person, no time for that, but something passed between Ed and me in that moment, not love or even physical attraction, it was more like connection, clear understanding, human being to human being. When he smiled I smiled back, and then he squeezed my hand and his throat clutched like he was choking on a bone, and before I could say or do anything he had collapsed face first into his pie, dead. Left me stuck with his cat.

Word From On High

Judging by the froth in the mainstream media, you’d have thought that the Iraq Study Group report was coming directly from the pen of Jesus, a document that would deliver us from our own evil and set beleaguered Iraq on a path to peace and brotherhood.

Wrong. It’s always hard for an imperial power to apologize, even harder for it to admit defeat and flee the scene of the crime. Word to Bush/Cheney: the Invasion/Occupation was a mistake based on lies, your regime is responsible for a calamity, and you two, as principal architects and shills for the fiasco, should be sitting in Leavenworth Prison in orange jumpsuits.

Iraq is fucked, whether the US sticks around for a year or two or folds its tent and retreats as soon as possible. The screwball dreams the Bush/Cheney junta had of a “democratic” Iraq and free-flowing oil opened a Pandora’s Box filled with death and misery.

The US will be washing this blood from its hands for fifty years.

We reap the consequences of a mentally-challenged commander-in-chief, a wicked Vice-President, and a complacent, rubberstamp Congress. It’s a dangerous thing to try and remake the world in your own corrupt image. You’d think our Bible-toting leaders would know better, but all they had in mind was power, and the wisdom of the good book flew straight over their heads.

The anti-war protestors who filled city streets all over the world in 2002 and 2003 were right, though it didn’t take a crystal ball to predict the bloody outcome.

We’ve done enough damage. It’s time to go.

The Earle of Tatum

Gary Earle, President of the Coalition for Sensible Planning, an organization which sounds like, and probably is, run out of a Goleta PO Box, brings to mind an image of a slick, smarmy, slippery, slimy used-car huckster, willing to employ any means necessary to sell a twice-wrecked, cosmetically-restored Plymouth with an Earl Scheib paint job to an unsuspecting sucker for top dollar.

Ever since the Santa Barbara School Districts announced it was conducting a feasibility study of options for making sorely needed cash from two unused parcels (Hidden Valley & Tatum) of land it owns, a study that included the idea of building affordable housing for teachers and staff, Earle and others of his sort have come out of the woodwork, the shadows, out from behind adobe walls and from under goosedown comforters, to protest, bray, sputter, smear, and malign the study, the School Board, and the District Administration.

Before the ink on the contact with UniDev LLC – a firm with expertise in building “workforce” housing for non-profits – had time to soak in, before any projections on the number of homes was released, before a stitch of research had been accomplished, Earle’s posse of NIMBYs were standing outside Vons on Turnpike, passing out home-made fliers decrying the District’s intent to erect some four hundred homes, smack in the heart of their precious suburban “neighborhood.” Where Earle’s Coalition got that number is anybody’s guess, but it’s not even in the same area code with the number proposed in UniDev’s final report.

From the outset, Earle called UniDev’s motives into question, claiming the company was steering the study toward the workforce housing option so it could make major league money as the ultimate project developer, a claim not tethered to the reality of the UniDev contract, but what the hell, who’s paying close attention to meddlesome facts? Taking his cue from modern masters of mendacity like Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Hannity, Earle stretched and kneaded the truth to suit his own ends, which are, apparently, to keep anybody else from calling this Promised Land home, especially teachers and school workers, who, to be sure, carry meaningful water for the community, but must accept their impoverished servitude and move to Lompoc, Oxnard or the shitty end of Salinas Street.

After the final UniDev report was presented to the school board on November 28, Earle, decked out in a pin-striped suit, hair coiffed and tanning booth glow in place, got face time on KEYT, where he was quoted as saying that the District hasn’t cooperated with the Tatum community, and that, “the District just wants to make as much money as possible.”

The first statement is flat wrong and the second just plain stupid. The District held a number of public meetings about the feasibility study, accepted public comment for a month, gave community members ad naseum opportunity to speak at school board meetings, and so on. Claiming the District has been uncooperative with the local community is like claiming the U.S. Army never tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We got digital photos, dude!

As to the money angle, well, Duh! Mr. Earle, squeezing these vacant assets for every dime they will surrender is THE POINT! What’s wrong with the school district exploring every revenue-enhancing option at its disposal? People like Gary Earle don’t piss and wail when a private individual seeks to earn obscene amounts of coin, so why get your Grigioperla boxers in a wad when a school district seeks to exercise the very same capitalist imperative? Good old American money-grubbing, baby! The school district’s got something that’s as good as gold in these parts, and its anemic financial condition demands that the school board do whatever it takes to bring more coin into the coffers. It would be a colossal failure of the school board’s fiduciary responsibility not to seek the biggest score it can haul to the bank. The taxpayers from whom the prized booty came in the first place should expect no less.

In Death give Thanks

The floor of the Balcony is littered with empty cups, swizzle sticks, sunflower seeds, ticket stubs, expired ID cards, a ball of yarn, a baby’s pacifier, a grocery list, a dime, half a business card, (left by one Jeff Norton, a financial services salesman from Utah), popcorn seeds, a twisted straw, a discount coupon for a health club, a red playing card (eight of Hearts), and a cocktail napkin with this note, printed in block letters with black lipstick: “I never loved you!” The janitor is on strike, picketing on the front sidewalk, angry and determined to stay out there as long as it takes. “Hey ho, the Balcony has got to go!” The owner is sitting in a dark room contemplating his own death, and how it is unwise to attach too much to any thing, place or person. He’s thinking of his place in the world, the long line of humanity stretching before him, miles and miles of the departed, most with a story to tell. It’s a sad thing when people go to their graves with stories yet untold. The stories die with them. We build the future on the past’s bones. There’s no business on Thanksgiving Day anyway, only the lonely and the young and the crazy walking State Street; the Metropolitan Theatre is open, Blue Bee Jeans is closed. The mannequin in the Blue Bee window is stunning, a Paris Hilton type with a lascivious smile. “Boys, I know you want to do me!” The Rescue Mission is doing brisk business for the down and out, the forgotten and the eternally lost, the unlucky; a wealthy family from Montecito works the serving line to absolve the guilt they feel for having so much while others have so little. The Faulding is full to capacity. Starbucks is open, ready and willing to serve the few foreign tourists out wandering. A Belgian couple peers in the window at Joe’s Café. The afternoon light fades. The steady chant of “Hey ho, the Balcony has got to go!” brings the owner back to his own reality, the contemplation of losing every thing, every person, and every place one has ever loved. The city of his youth is dead, replaced by a theme park, a “destination” reviewed and pimped in travel magazines and Auto Club brochures. Come and play on the American Riviera! He feels like crying but no tears will come. Strangely, contemplating his own death makes him thankful.

Saturday Night, Santa Barbara

What are the wealthy doing in those grand homes
on Alameda Padre Serra and Arbolado Road?
on Dover Lane and Mission Ridge Road?

With those multi-million dollar views of the city and the ocean?
sophisticated isolation and pearl-plated prestige

Diamonds on the ground, diamonds in the sky,
stone and red tile, Mediterranean arches, 30 foot high windows

Are the men smarter than those of us on the north end of Milpas? Better looking?
Are the women hotter? Better at the erotic arts?
Are the children impeccably behaved, less prone to the shits, tonsillitis, lice, asthma, bronchitis, RSV, warts?

Do they have the same trouble finding matching socks
or the remote control?

Is the sex better?
Is the conversation more interesting?
Is the beer colder?
Is the food tastier?
Is the air different?

Do the men lie and cheat?
Do the wives fuck around?
Do the men suffer from Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia?
Do the women have high blood pressure?

Is someone up there rolling a joint?
Is someone up there burning dinner?
Is someone up there telling a lie?
Is someone up there lending a helping hand?
Is someone up there plotting murder?

Are the people up there happier
because of all the splendor
or does the splendor make them happy?

Anyway, it’s Saturday night and the clock is ticking for us all.

"The Republic is Dead," Cheney Claims

Life around the White House has been glum this past week. President Bush offered up Donald Rumsfeld to satisfy the Democrats need for bleeding red meat, but in fact Bush still believes that Rumsfeld is a military genius and he misses his old friend terribly.

Bush has no desire to work with Democrats, but his father explained the new reality on November 8th and demanded that Junior extend an olive branch to the inbound Democratic leadership, and do his utmost to make it seem that he’s eager to work in a bipartisan spirit, even though Junior can’t stand to be in the same room with Nancy Pelosi. “For six years I had no use for those people,” W said. “I didn’t give Democrats the time of day, didn’t invite them to the White House, didn’t pay attention to their concerns. I enjoyed calling them traitors and wimps, and I got a big kick when Cheney told various Democratic senators to go fuck themselves. Dad gummit, I miss those days already.”

Sensing that his son wasn’t getting the message, Bush Senior seized his wayward, half-wit spawn by the shoulders and shook him, hard. “You listen to me, boy, and you listen good. Your swaggering, ‘Mission-Accomplished’ days are over. You’re one of the most unpopular Presidents in the history of the Republic! Sixty percent of the American people think you’re a raving idiot! Look at me, dimwit! You’ve got two years to think about your legacy! Do you want to be remembered as the most incompetent President in American history? Ah, shit, boy, don’t start crying, for crissakes.”

Nobody in Washington has taken the Republican meltdown harder than Deadeye Dick Cheney. Always a terrifying figure, a cross between Ted Bundy and Heinrich Himmler, even when the tide was breaking his way, Cheney has been in a black mood since Election Night, snarling at his staff, his wife, his dog, and even his old and loyal friends from Halliburton. “It’s the end of the Republic,” Cheney keeps saying out of the side of his mouth. “We might as well open the gates and let the terrorists come right in, hand them the keys to the White House, the Pentagon and the FBI.”

Only target shooting at the Secret Service range brings Cheney solace. The Veep demanded that the Secret Service provide him with three hundred life-size targets of Nancy Pelosi, seventy-five of Barney Frank, forty of Teddy Kennedy, and one hundred and twenty-five of John Murtha, which Cheney blasts away at with his Glock 31, one after another. “Keep ‘em coming,” Cheney growls. “And bring me a hundred of that fat fuck, Michael Moore. I’ll show that leftist bastard what I think of him!”

Now that the Democrats have subpoena power, Condi Rice has been busy in her office, shredding documents, notes, cocktail napkins, phone logs, and credit card statements, anything that might implicate her for her role in misleading the American public into backing the needless and senseless invasion of Iraq. The same scenario is playing out all over official Washington and those on-site document destruction outfits are making a killing. Low-level functionaries, lobbyists, congressional aides, pages, and the hookers and call girls (and call boys, of course) who have serviced the Republicans for the past twelve years, flock to the Northern Virginia woods where they douse massive piles of documents with jet fuel and set them to burning.

After moping around for two days in an Oxycontin daze, Rush Limbaugh bucked up his courage and played miniature golf with Newt Gingrich, only to be recognized and ridiculed by a pack of Catholic school kids on a field trip. “My God, Newt, this can’t be happening. We were going to rule for one thousand years!”

Yeah, it has been a rough week in DC, and the Democrats haven’t done a thing yet.

Election Night, November 7, 2006

Verbatim notes while watching the returns…unedited…impressions of impending doom…which spin will win?

My favorite leftist radio station, listener financed KPFK, reported earlier that there were widespread glitches with electronic voting machines in Ohio, leading to long lines for voters and the intervention of a Federal judge who ordered that polls remain open an additional two hours. It was much the same story in Virginia. KPFK noted that the mechanical problems in Ohio were occurring in predominantly African-American areas. Shades of 2004, when the national GOP stole the election for Bush.

C-SPAN, CNN, Fox, PBS, ABC – there’s so much information out there that it makes my head swim. What I fear is another stolen election; the Republicans will not relinquish power willingly, so all their voter suppression tactics make perfect sense -- Robo-calls to voters who lean Democrat, bullshit demands for ID, eligible voters purged from the rolls as if by magic -- these people will stop at nothing.

KPFK also reported that 10,000 lawyers are on duty across the country tonight, watching polling places, challenging edicts issued by Republican Secretaries of State, challenging or correcting decisions made by stressed-out poll workers, harassing voters, or just standing around in cheap suits and scuffed shoes, checking their Blackberries every two minutes, speaking from the sides of their mouths like their hero, Dick Cheney.

I suddenly have this sinking feeling that turn-out doesn’t matter, Iraq doesn’t matter, the piss-poor, rigged for the wealthy economy doesn’t matter, because at the end of this day, the GOP will have engineered massive vote theft and retained their death grip on the nation’s testicles. I can’t help thinking that we are fucked, no matter what, and that Karl Rove is sitting in the White House, enjoying a massage from a Korean prostitute. “That’s nice, baby, but can you move a little lower.” Rove is a pig masquerading as a man. He should be conscripted into the US Army and sent to Iraq where he can experience the wonders of our glorious Occupation, first-hand. Hell yes, issue Rove an M-16 and some defective body armor and send him out to meet and greet the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Rick Santorum, a scary Republican senator from Pennsylvania, appears to be headed for an ass-kicking. One less Bush soldier to worry about.

Results roll across the bottom of the TV screen. Bill Bennett is a guest commentator on CNN, though he doesn’t seem to know jack shit about particular races. I wonder what kind of action Bennett has riding on these outcomes. Old gamblers never lose the itch.

W and Laura voted this morning. I wonder how much trouble W had filling out his ballot. That Yale education isn’t worth much, but I’m sure Laura explained the more difficult nuances and made sure W checked the correct boxes.

Over on MSNBC Tom Brokaw is jabbering, trying his best to bring some gravitas to this sordid Tuesday night affair by offering his years of wisdom and experience. What a star-studded line-up: Brokaw, Williams, and Russert. It almost makes me wet my shorts with excitement. MSNBC projects that the Dems will control the House, but that the GOP will retain a slim margin in the Senate. We’ll see if that holds. The polls closed in California fifteen minutes ago. I’d bet my son’s piggybank that Schwarzenegger just fired up a fat cigar. Four more years of Arnold is like being forced to watch Kindergarten Cop over and over. Bad to worse and back again.

I’d like to see the phrase, “God Bless America,” banned. Every politician, no matter how immoral behind closed doors, no matter how criminal, no matter how psychotic, utters “God Bless America,” at every opportunity, as if this will absolve all sins and make people believe the politician is a good guy or decent gal, no different from any of us. What a crock. In my experience on this planet, the people who bring God into every conversation, or drop their church-going habits and activities the way others drop names, are generally the most sinful. Why don’t you stop talking about Jesus and start acting like Jesus? Novel concept.

If the Dems do take the House and either take the Senate outright or at least increase their number so that real debate is possible, will they act like Democrats or hew to the Bill Clinton tactics that screwed working people (NAFTA), destroyed local media (the Telecommunications Act of 1996), and tossed welfare recipients (Welfare to Work or whatever it’s euphemistically called) on the street? All you Hillary fans should remember that this Republican Reign of Terror began with a mid-term landslide in 1994, well before Monica and Bill began playing hide-the-cigar in the Oval Office.

I’m going to bed where I hope to dream of Dick Cheney on the witness stand, naked, with a black hood over his head, shackles on his wrists and ankles, and electrodes clipped to his old nipples. Give him more juice!

Poem - November 6th

One more day
Maybe the beginning
Of the end
For Bush and his cronies

All their corruption and criminality
The blood-soaked lies
Gross cynicism
Criminal manipulation
Fear-mongering
Malevolent neglect

You can almost feel the country
Hold its breath
Deep down citizens know
How far off track we’ve wandered

Away from cherished values
Away from self-evident truths
Away from the dream sustained through generations

Into a barren land that resembles
Places we always deplored

The reign of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove
Many times worse in the long run
Than that shocking September day
Bush milked for all its political worth
Casting a shadow across our
Collective soul

To beat the terrorists we became terrorists
Adopted his methods
His blind arrogance
His indifference to reason

Cloaked in Old Glory and Christian righteousness
We ignored the law
Unleashed the dogs of war
Now our rap sheet is longer and bloodier
And our misdeeds will not be forgotten

Will tomorrow spell the beginning of the end
Or the end of the beginning
Of hope?

Stay the Course

President Bush tossed a pork rind into the air and caught it in his open mouth, took a sip of Coors Light, and winked across the Oval Office at Condi Rice. “Betcha’ I can do that again,” the President said. He lofted another rind, a tad off course and to his left, but he recovered by shifting in his chair, the rind bounced off his nose and into his mouth where it was crunched with tremendous satisfaction. “See what I mean, Condi? Learned that at Yale. Booyah!”

Karl Rove cleared his throat. “Stay the course,” is all he said.

“Bingo,” said the President. “Never said it. Never even intimated it. Hey, that’s a big word, ‘intimated.’ Where’s Bobby Woodward when I need him? I can use a ten dollar word when I feel like it.”

“Never said it,” Condi Rice said, “even though it has been documented 748 times.”

“A minor, insignificant detail,” Rove said. “If we say the President never said ‘Stay the course’ who’s going to argue with us, the national media?” Everyone in the room burst out laughing. “We own the national media,” Rove said, clearly enjoying himself. “The Democrats? I eat Democrats for breakfast!”

“And they taste pretty good,” the President chimed in, “though not as good as these pork rinds. Yummy!”

“I’m not 100% comfortable,” Condi Rice said. ”We’re saying that our policy in Iraq is not our policy. In my opinion, Mr. President, we’re skirting perilously close to the line here. Domestic and international opinion – “

“The truth is what we say it is,” Rove said dismissively. “If we say the President never said ‘stay the course’ in regards to Iraq, then he never did, despite what any objective and impartial evidence may indicate. Those that disagree are traitors or anti-American liberals. We play this the same way we’ve played global warming. Even though it’s absolutely clear scientifically that human activity has altered the global climate, we simply deny the science and question the scientific community’s competence and patriotism, and the entire issue goes away.”

“Listen to Karl, Condi,” the President said. “He’s the man. No problema here.”

Vice President Cheney entered the Oval Office through his private entrance. Cheney was dressed in Army fatigues, a camouflaged hunting vest, paratrooper boots polished to a brilliant shine, and slung over his shoulder was a double-barreled .12 gauge shotgun with a pearl butt. “I heard that last bit,” Cheney said out of the side of his mouth. “We’re in power and it’s our prerogative to define the truth. The average American is stupid and easy to lead around by the nose. If we can convince some shit-for-brains in Middle America that gay marriage is more important to him and his children than bread and butter economic issues, then we can convince him that the President never said ‘Stay the course.’ I’m going duck huntin’. Anyone want to join me?”

“Have fun,” Bush said. “Don’t kill anyone, OK? That might be hard to deny!”