PROBING THE JUICERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monkey-Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Years In

Three Years In

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

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

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

I’m not down with that
Are you?

Baste the Hog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sad State of Affairs

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

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

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

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

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

Sad state of affairs.

Our President Lies, the Constitution Dies

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

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

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

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

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

Mountain of lies, mountain of bones

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

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

In the Stream (of consciousness)

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

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

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

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

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

3 Rounds with John Stossel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not In Our Backyard

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

February 9, 2006

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

Inre: Funny Business with School District Properties

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,


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

MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanfare for Failure

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

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

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

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

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

///

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

You're a Pig, Yes, I Am

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

Oink, oink.

Martin Luther King and Lab Mice

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

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

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

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

Who's Up, Who's Down

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

A Bowl of Dead Roses and other Thoughts

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

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

Anyway, peace out everybody!

2005, Goodbye

2005, Goodbye

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

Poem - Apology to Mother Earth

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

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

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

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

One Day Real Soon

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

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

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

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

Lucky buggars.

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

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

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

Sing, a Poem

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

Bush Lays Out Plan, Sort Of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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