Border Crossing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smiling to Extinction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saved by the Blues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clowns and Zealots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cruz Missile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daddy's Girl

Nobody ever said parenthood would be a cakewalk, or even much fun. My son, who just turned 17, is finally beginning to walk, talk, and act like a human being. My 12-year-old daughter, on the other hand, has overnight turned into a she-devil. One moment she’s calling me “Daddy” in her sweet little girl voice, and the next she’s screaming, “you’re a sonofabitch” and trying to kick me in the groin.

Before slamming the door to her room, my daughter has this to say: “All you and mom care about is my education!” Guilty as charged, kid, guilty as charged. The child is upset because her math teacher recommended her for an after school math class. Instead of taking this recommendation as an offer of help, my daughter takes it as a form of punishment, like being drawn and quartered or tied to the back of a mule and dragged through a field of cactus. “Don’t you want to get better at math?” my wife and I ask. “I don’t give a crap about math!” shouts our daughter.

Behind the locked door of her room my daughter wails. To escape the noise I go outside to the deck, but I can still hear the kid; I’m sure everyone in our neighborhood can hear the kid, and half of them are probably dialing 911 to report a homicide in progress. By agreeing, happily and with gratitude, to place her in the after school math program, we have sentenced her to an extra hour of school, every day for two excruciating weeks.

Why can’t we understand what this means?

We are tyrannical parents, unfeeling brutes, though I’m pretty sure the kid will thank us later. Our son is finally coming around, proving that there is hope. For several months I feared the boy was lost to us, as if aliens had swiped his soul and replaced it with their evil spawn. I swear he was barely recognizable. Every time I saw him I wanted to ask, “Who are you and what are you doing in my kitchen?”

If our experience with our son is any guide, we have approximately four years of hell ahead of us. We can expect to be second-guessed, insulted, slighted, ignored and blamed for everything wrong under the moon. When our daughter forgets to pull her overripe gym clothes from her backpack until Monday morning, three minutes before she must leave for school, the fault will lie with us for not reminding her.

This isn’t the saccharine stuff of Hallmark cards. Some nights I look back with nostalgia to the days when it was my wife, our Jack Russell terrier, and me. The dog ate a couple of pairs of shoes, devoured one fine fountain pen, and shredded his share of carpet, but at least he never called me a sonofabitch.

LIFESTYLE

I’ve been very remiss about the Balcony of late. No urge to write in the past month or so, even though there are plenty of outrageous things happening in the world. It’s the end of summer here on the Platinum Coast, land of red tile roofs and chic restaurants. Seems as if the foodies are taking over, fighting tooth and nail with yoga studios and wealth managers for retail space downtown. The rich and beautiful people who call SB home need to be in tip-top physical shape in order to fully enjoy the fabled “Santa Barbara” lifestyle, whatever the hell that is. I’m just a working-stiff with a full-time job, no trust fund, and no BMW in the driveway; on the rare occasions when I flip through the glossy pages of Santa Barbara magazine in my doctor or dentist’s office, I get the feeling that I’m looking at a foreign country. Where are the brown people, the homeless, the loons, the panhandlers, the street musicians, the grizzled surf rats? Look in vain, boy, look in vain; you won’t find any trace of misfits in the sanitized pages of Santa Barbara magazine.

***

Hot yoga, baby: that’s the newest way to physical beauty and spiritual clarity. Rev up the heat to 99 degrees and strike the downward dog pose. Hold it, hold it, feel the burn, the fat melt away as the stress of trying to decide which trendy SB restaurant to have dinner in flees your neck and forehead. Count the sacred drops of sweat tumbling from the bridge of your surgically sculptured nose. This is the good life and you are now untouchable; you’re drinking fine wine produced by your new best friend, and eating organically grown vegetables blessed by a Tibetan monk. No doubt about it, you are a chosen one -- you will live to be 110, without a wrinkle on your face, without experiencing erectile dysfunction or menopause, psoriasis or toenail fungus. SB is magical – if you’ve got the coin.

***

The new iPhone 5S is out – stop the presses and hold back the dawn. Nerds were lined up outside the Apple store early this morning, slurping coffee from Starbuck’s and hoping their bladders hold out until they get through the door and to the front of the line. Apple dangles the cheese and the mice lose their minds, run headlong into plate-glass windows and cinder-block walls.

***

Another mass killing in the US of A, this time right in the belly of our nation’s capitol. President Obama will take another star turn as commiserator-in-chief, bemoan how easy it is for mentally ill Americans to obtain Glock’s and go on a killing spree; Obama will say Americans are better than this, more compassionate, and it will sound great and be totally meaningless by the next morning. If only Congress would do the right thing and approve some mild reforms…but no…the NRA and the gun-happy Right has nothing to fear. The 2^nd Amendment is a sacred cow, like Prop 13 in California, perpetual foreign wars and the War on Drugs. How many days will it be until the next big killing? Some kook is stockpiling ammo this very minute; the manifesto is written and ready for posting; his few friends don’t suspect a thing.

***

Life is the number 1 killer of people. Life breaks bones and hearts.

Turning a Blind Eye

“The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”  Federalist Papers

It’s reassuring to see the American public push back against President Obama’s itch to bomb Syria. After more than a decade of continuous wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, plus lesser skirmishes in Somalia and Yemen and Pakistan, with no end to the War on Terror on the horizon, the people have soured on war.

This doesn’t mean that gun-slinging politicians like John McCain or swaggering diplomats like Secretary of State John Kerry have lost their fascination with Shock & Awe military operations, and I expect my own senator, Dianne Feinstein, to jump on the bandwagon and beat the war drum with both of her manicured hands.

As usual, the hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. When Iraq employed chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980’s, we didn’t bat an eye because Iran was by then our sworn enemy. We helped Iraq’s dictator acquire the materials needed to produce chemical weapons, with full understanding of who he intended to use them against.

Nor should we conveniently forget – during the media barrage to convince us that the US has no other option but to attack Syria -- that the US is the world’s foremost arms dealer, purveyor of fine cluster munitions, land mines, drones, fighter aircraft and attack helicopters. Quite often these weapons wind up in the hands of autocrats; today’s ally can quickly turn into tomorrow’s enemy. The US clearly has the military power to act as the world’s constable, but when it comes to moral authority, it has no standing whatsoever.

If President Obama’s full-court PR press works and Congress authorizes military action against Syria, and the cruise missiles fly, and the Smart munitions zoom at their targets with much-hyped precision, what will be the result? By “degrading” the Assad regime’s military capability who will the US be aiding? The rebels? But who are the rebels and what are their aims for Syria? Will they be more or less aligned with the evil regime in neighboring Iran? More or less hostile to Europe and the US? Does anyone have any idea?

After the blatant lies and propaganda that preceded the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the revelations of widespread domestic spying by the NSA and other arms of the national security apparatus, the attacks on journalists and their sources, the killing of innocent civilians in Yemen and Pakistan, after all this I can’t see how any sober person can believe any pronouncement coming from the US government. President Obama talks about transparency at the same time he shuts out the lights and locks the door.

The use of chemical weapons is barbaric, and the world is right to condemn Syria, but there are other ways – diplomatic and economic – to punish Assad.

Assembly Required

In my next incarnation, if I don’t return as a cricket or a gopher, I will be a carpenter or mechanical engineer, the kind of guy who can build a fence on a Saturday afternoon or dismantle an engine and put it back together. Hand and power tools will consider me a kindred soul rather than a dangerous imposter.

The other day we bought a new desk chair from World Market. It’s called a “Konrad” chair, made in Thailand from teak wood. Assembly required, of course. As I unpack the carton on the living room rug, I consider the long journey this chair has made from where it was produced to where it will be used. Trucked from a factory somewhere in Thailand, (what kind of factory, what kind of working conditions and wages?) packed into a sea container and loaded on a ship for the voyage across the ocean, perhaps stopping in other ports along the way to collect more cargo. World trade is a web of faceless factory workers, middlemen, transportation conglomerates, freight brokers and wholesalers, and a product moves through many hands before it lands on the floor of a store like World Market.

When I embark on a home improvement project anything can happen, and when all is said and done it’s more likely than not that there will be parts leftover. It’s also certain that at some point I will unleash a torrent of curse words and become cross with my wife and kids. (They have learned to give me plenty of space). The written directions and assembly diagrams for the Konrad chair make my head swim. Nuts and bolts, washers and screws; attach part A to B and B to C, tighten with Allen wrench. Sounds simple enough, in theory, but I am mechanically challenged and the damn Allen wrench keeps slipping from my fingers.

I’ve long thought that two people who are considering marriage should first attempt to build a piece of furniture that contains many pieces and parts. How they go about it is sure to be revelatory. Many years ago, my wife and I assembled a large computer hutch, and by the time we finished we despised one another. Every negative aspect in our respective personalities was on display that day.

Thankfully, I succeeded in assembling the Konrad chair without my usual histrionics, and when I sat on it for the first time it didn’t collapse beneath me. The pride I felt was disproportionate to the difficulty of the task, but given my mechanical incompetence, I still felt a sense of accomplishment.  

FOOTPRINT

It’s Sunday and we wake up to discover that we have no coffee in the house. We hop in a rented Chevrolet Cruze – my beloved 1998 Honda Civic is in the body shop for repair, the result of it being backed into by a delivery truck – and drive across town to Ralphs on Carrillo. The streets are quiet, a few people walking their dogs. The plaza in front of the public library is deserted, but in a few hours the homeless will begin congregating, some to sleep on the grass in the shade of a tree, others to hold court.

Inside Ralphs workers are restocking the shelves and arranging fruit and produce; others sweep the floors and rotate jugs of milk, containers of cottage cheese. I like this store because of its downtown location, and because here I see people I don’t see in Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods or Tri-County Produce – the elderly who live nearby, students, Mexican families, drifters and homeless. Each day a tide of human beings move through this store.

We locate our brand of coffee and a package of doughnuts for our son, and move through the self-service checkout, scanning our purchases and placing them in a reusable bag. No human interaction required, efficient yet impersonal; I swipe my debit card, enter my PIN, a receipt is automatically printed and the machine reminds me to take it.

Back outside I notice the grime on the red bricks and concrete, blobs of chewing gum, sticky stains from soda and juice spills, a single shoe imprint captured in this accumulated muck. NIKE, I think, though I could be wrong. This single imprint will last longer than a footprint on wet sand at the beach. 

NSA: Our Hero in a White Hat

Big news, breaking news. The NSA has intercepted or overheard Al-Qaeda terrorists “chattering” about an imminent major strike on American or European targets. High alert is ordered, and as many as nineteen embassies or American outposts in the Mideast or North Africa are shut down as a precaution. Among other claims, the major news media says the threats are specific enough for caution, yet still somewhat vague and nebulous. Hmmm, that’s crack reporting – specific yet vague. 

A new, younger generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists are said to be even more diabolical and fanatical than their forebears, going so far as to surgically implant explosives in the bodies of suicide bombers.

(This new generation may have a chip on its shoulder because the U.S. has killed or murdered so many of its fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, mothers, sisters, and so on. You kill us, we kill you, forever and ever, amen.)

Yemen is the epicenter of this Al-Qaeda upsurge. The U.S. has a long history of intervention in Yemen, with clandestine boots on the ground, CIA agents skulking around the capitol, and drones soaring through the sky. We’ve killed so-called militants in Yemen, as well as a fair number of innocents, plus one very well known American named Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son. Boom, dead: father and son. The Americans went to great lengths to make it appear as if the kid was a budding terrorist, though as Jeremy Scahill reported in his recent book, Dirty Wars, the younger al-Awlaki wasn’t a terrorist at all – he was just a teenaged boy who wanted to spend time with his father.

Is it my growing paranoia or is the timing of this heightened security threat unbearably convenient? The political class and the public have responded to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures with anger directed against the Obama Administration and the national security state.

Suddenly, people are talking about the NSA’s domestic spying program, the agency’s insatiable appetite for trivial information, and how government officials have been forced to admit – grudgingly, of course -- that they have been lying to the American people. The U.S. government is pissed off, and making threats against countries from China to Bolivia, and the spying program is under intense scrutiny. The NSA is in dire need of some positive press – and what do you know -- just like that the NSA has used its awesome technological powers to foil a devious plot by the evil terrorists.

You don’t think, nah, no way, that the heightened alert is a pile of steaming horseshit cooked up by our best and brightest in the corridors of power…our government wouldn’t lie to us, would it? They wouldn’t use their powers to concoct some phony-baloney terrorist threat and make the NSA look like a cowboy in a white hat, riding in to protect us from the bad guys, would they? Our honorable government wouldn’t exaggerate the threat from a ragtag force that the Obama Administration has repeatedly told us has been decimated by JSOC raids, assassinations, and “surgical” drone strikes, right? 

Right?

What’s that fishy smell hanging over Washington D.C?

The New Normal is Creepy

A lot of creepy people want to get into politics or return to politics, even if this means airing the dirtiest, smelliest laundry from the dank recesses of their closets.

Anthony Weiner. What to say? The media probe the connection between Weiner’s suffering spouse, Huma Abedin, and Hillary Clinton, breathlessly wonder if Hillary is giving Huma advice and counsel. Hillary knows a thing or two about philanderers. Her Bill was the undisputed champion of the game – no skulking around cheap motels for Bill, oh no, he got himself sucked off by an intern right in the Oval Office.

Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego, is a seasoned groper of women. But not to worry, San Diego! Filner is going to change his wicked ways in only two intensive weeks of therapy; he promises to rise from the therapist’s couch a new, improved man.

Meanwhile, President Obama has woken from his dream of a bipartisan orgy and re-discovered the Economy and the middle-class. In a speech the other day, Obama said that since 2009 the richest Americans have sucked up 40% of income gains. This can’t continue, Obama said, because it’s tearing America’s social fabric. Tearing? Mr. President, dude, the Levi’s of the American body politic are in tatters, and your administration bears culpability – not as much culpability as John Boehner’s jihadist GOP – but, man, your hands are covered in the blood of the expiring middle class.

Of course the elites are partying hard, and why shouldn’t they? Everything is pretty much as it was when the economy tanked in 2008. CEO’s are raking in huge salaries and bonuses, the stock market is ticking along, private sector honchos move effortlessly between boardrooms and the hallways of regulatory agencies, corporations are still considered “people” for purposes of campaign donations, and Big Media still reports the Talking Points of the powerful like gospel truth. What’s changed?

Jobs and wages? Too boring for prime time. Help the poor? That’s socialism, and in America we only do socialism for the wealthy; for the poor and needy it’s tough love, self-reliance, moral hazard. Besides, we need a permanent underclass to provide clients for our for-profit prison-industrial complex. Gotta’ feed the money machine what it needs.

The hour is too late for Obama to find his long lost inner populist or to score a major legislative victory. The U.S. Congress is gerrymandered and captive; Obama may honestly wish to move forward, but the GOP is determined to move back to the 18^th century, no matter how citizens suffer. Power matters, people don’t. In case you haven’t noticed, this is government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite. Before we know it, Larry Summers will likely be the Fed chairman. Welcome back to one of the primary architects of our one-sided economy. The gilded revolving door keeps turning.

Maybe this explains why twisted personalities like Anthony Weiner and Bob Filner subject themselves to the media rack; for a place at the golden trough, they will sacrifice everyone around them and endure any indignity.

Sick, twisted, and creepy. Welcome to the new normal.  

Black Detroit, White Wall Street

I listened to President Obama talk about the Trayvon Martin trial. As usual, Obama said all the right things, sounded the right notes, but at the end of the day it’s unlikely that his administration can or will do a thing to change the dynamics that put Trayvon Martin in the ground long before his time.

Obama said we must give young African-American men options, pathways to opportunities to improve themselves. Ironically, a few days before the president’s speech, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Detroit is the poster child for urban deindustrialization, job flight, corruption, poverty, mismanagement, and crime, and the face of contemporary Detroit is black.

How many Trayvon Martin’s are trying to survive in Detroit?

The Detroit that lives in the American imagination perished a long time ago, destroyed by monetary, tax, and trade policies pushed by every administration from Reagan to Obama. Obama has continued the new American tradition of slavish fealty to finance at the expense of working people.

For African-American men to have opportunities, they must first have a shot at decent jobs at living wages -- the sort of jobs that existed in the old Detroit – otherwise they will never set foot on a path that leads out and up.

Flipping hamburgers and dunking French fries in grease for minimum wage won’t do the trick, and it’s ridiculous to expect large numbers of African-American men to become entrepreneurs, though some certainly could, given a helping hand. Obama said not a single word about manufacturing jobs or union wages, though it is manufacturing jobs that are needed, and not only in the African-American community.

We honor finance, the buying, selling and trading of pieces of paper with the same fervor that we dishonor our inner cities. If there is an urban policy in place in the Obama administration I have no idea what it is. Perhaps, like almost everything else, we’ve left urban policy to the whims of the invisible hand of the market god.  

Working people have felt the back of that hand for three decades, but for African-American men it has been more like blows from the back of a fist. Detroit is but the most glaring example of the downward spiral: jobs flee, companies close, non-whites decamp to the suburbs, the tax base erodes, infrastructure decays and public services decline; the big money boys swoop in like vultures over carrion, and turn whatever public assets are left into commodities. 

I don’t think this country cares much for people like Trayvon Martin. Fear the Trayvon’s? Yes. Stop and frisk the Trayvon’s? Yes.  Criminalize the Trayvon’s and lock them away at rate disproportionate to the rest of the population? Yes.

But if we cared about people like Trayvon Martin, the president and the Congress would be doing for black Detroit what they did for white Wall Street. 

GULAG

One can only imagine the backchannel maneuvering going on in Washington D.C. and the corridors of the NSA and FBI and CIA and State Department over Edward Snowden. It must be frantic, a race against time to determine what information Snowden has beyond what he has already disclosed.

“I want to know everything this motherfucker Snowden has ever done in his miserable life! I want to know how many times he has jerked off! I want to know what kind of porn he looks at! I want to know about his mother, his father, his siblings and his fucking cat. I want information, and I want it now.”

Yeah, I imagine it’s hyper damage control mode driven by intense pressure from the White House. I imagine daily progress briefings held in secure conference rooms. Diplomatic conference calls with Russia full of pleas that Snowden be turned over to the US, and veiled threats of serious consequences if Russia refuses to comply. Quid pro quo deals are proposed.

Any nation that may be thinking of granting Snowden political asylum is put on notice; go ahead, Ecuador, but you’ll never see another nickel of US economic and military aid. No trade favors for you, Bolivia.

Comply with Uncle Sam or be crushed by our naked power.

The world’s foremost bully uses all its juice to isolate Edward Snowden, choke off his escape routes and reduce his options to zero.

The bully is unnerved by the young man living temporarily in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, afraid of the data on his laptops and thumb drives, what he may have stored in the cloud or transmitted to others. Countless operatives are working around the clock on the Snowden affair, staring at computer screens until their vision turns fuzzy. Meanwhile, the bully uses all his power to discredit Snowden in the media, to call into question his motives, to claim that Snowden is a delusional narcissist bent on damaging the vital interests of the US.

One vital interest is that the US, and only the US, has the ability to eavesdrop with impunity on its citizens, allies and enemies. What we would not tolerate from others (except Israel, of course) we demand as our divine right. 

From every available pulpit the bully claims that Snowden was involved in espionage against his own country, land of the incarcerated and home of the Big Mac.

For his part, Edward Snowden has good reason to fear being extradited to the US; the example of another whistleblower, Bradley Manning, must never be far from his thoughts. Manning has been in the military wing of the American gulag for several years, facing multiple charges for leaking information to WikiLeaks. Manning acted out of conscience, too, and his one-way ticket to life in a cage got punched. If the US gets its bloody hands on Snowden, he’ll spend months or years in solitary confinement.  

Along with spectacle, incarceration is now an American specialty.

Easy Money

I feel the pain in my forehead again, the result of reading too much news and listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Did the abysmal US Congress – that pathetic body of whores – actually allow federal student loan rates to double to 6.8%?

Big banks borrow money from the government at 0.75%.

6.8% for students, 0.75% for banks.

If this travesty is not emblematic of everything wrong with the United States of America in 2013, I don’t know what is.

Do you need any more evidence that this nation is ruled by the finance industry? We may as well anoint Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase King of America and jam a fork in our democracy, once and for all. Fuck this corporate takeover of every facet of American life by dibs and dabs, just kill us quick and get it over with.

The pain is growing more intense, as if the jaws of a vice are closing; my eardrums feel as if they will burst.

Even Democrats have the austerity virus and tell us the nation simply can’t afford to help our students. We can, however, afford fighter jets and Hellfire missiles and drones and cruise missiles; we can afford to piss away billions of dollars chasing evil terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; we can afford to transform the US-Mexican border into one of the most militarized in the entire world, rivaling that of North and South Korea; we can afford to give resource extractors like Exxon-Mobil millions of dollars in subsidies…

And the list goes on and the pain in my head worsens, and the greedy motherfuckers who rule this nation don’t even go through the motions of pretending they give a rat’s ass about the great unwashed masses. They know they have nothing to fear from Americans – this isn’t Egypt or Brazil or Tunisia, places where people get pissed off and flood the streets to demand redress of their grievances. Americans watch TV and stuff their faces with potato chips, and go right on believing in the red, white and blue, go right on electing pinheads, pederasts, and pissants to public office, where they rape us over and over. 

Maybe we deserve to be turned into paupers or serfs, since, after all, we vote for the gangsters who rob us blind, take what was public and make it private, for profit, for those who can pay; nothing is sacred, everything can be reduced to a commodity, valued in the marketplace, traded, bought, sold: education, health care, drinking water, crude oil, soybeans, corn, houses, manufacturing jobs, condoms, cow shit, horse shit and pig shit.

Remember how free trade and free markets were going to set us all free, make us rich? Remember Ronnie Reagan when he intoned that government was the problem? You still believe that bullshit?

0.75% for banks, 6.8% for students.

Nothing but easy money for the rich and this searing pain in the center of my working class forehead.