News From A Parallel World

Fifty-five years back, the federal government started a big-time scam. It began delivering the letters of children addressed to Santa Claus to a town called North Pole, Alaska, population 2,100, where resident volunteers opened and answered them. These replies, signed by Santa’s elves and helpers, thus had ‘North Pole’ postmarks.

Imagine the joy that’s brought to, literally, millions of kids. Imagine the fun of being one of those volunteers, dispatching smiles to little strangers.

In North Pole, light posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have names such as Santa Claus Lane.

It’s all over now. Guess why.

Last year, a Maryland postal worker recognized a local ‘Operation Santa’ volunteer as a registered sex offender. The U.S. Postal Service then decided that letters to Santa would no longer be delivered to North Pole. It doesn’t want any volunteer to have access to any kid’s name and address.

When paranoia becomes institutionalized, what do we suppose happens to us?

In Marin County, California, there is an upscale enclave situated on the Tiburon peninsula overlooking San Francisco Bay. The towns of Tiburon and Belvedere can be accessed by two roads only, Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive. The town council of Tiburon just voted unanimously to purchase and install six special cameras, at a cost estimated at between $140,000.00 and $200,000.00, which will photograph the license numbers of every vehicle entering and leaving.

The photographs will be run through various databases. Tiburon’s police chief said, “I think it makes the community safer.”

At the council meeting, residents spoke in favor of the project. One Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor, said she was not worried about violating anyone’s privacy. “If you’re driving on a public road, you gave up your privacy already. If you want to be private, stay at home.”

I suppose so, although thanks to the Patriot Act the government can already enter your home without your permission and without a warrant, and search the place. I don’t think agents are allowed to fix themselves a snack or watch television, but it’s possible that’s in the fine print. If you want to be private, kiss my ass.

We are a nation deeply afraid of its own people.

We are afraid of the first ten amendments to our own constitution. We do not have freedom of speech but “free speech zones” and a closely-controlled mass media. We do not have the freedom to assemble and to petition the government for redress of our grievances. We are no longer secure in our persons and effects from unwarranted searches and seizures. We are losing the right to bear arms.

Our public schools have been turned into factories and our children into unpaid, underaged, corporate trainees whose forced workload exceeds that of the adult population. If you think that is an exaggeration, you do not know what is going on in our schools.

It matters that the empire is cracking down on anything which resembles genuine freedom, even the simple freedom to interact with one another without fear.

We have to fight back. The best way to achieve freedom is to behave as though we already have it.

Remove the warning labels. A simple, elegant approach to elevating overall human consciousness and accelerating the evolutionary process.

One of my grandsons proposed this notion during a dinner table conversation on the state of things in general, which is a topic of some interest to him.

The notice on chain saws: do not try to stop this machine using your bare hands or genitals.

Attractive as this image may be, there are problems. There are the people who don’t read the labels anyhow. And the ones for whom Warnings do not register.

Was a time in America when the cigarette manufacturers ran commercial ads on the television, product endorsements for Camels and Luck Strike with doctors saying how smooth the smoke was. I am not making this up.

Then came the righteous who actually believed that banning the tobacco gang from advertising would fix everything and, indeed, it probably helped avert consumption of a lot of cigarettes, which we can pretty much agree is a good thing.

But now, saved from the predations of that particular plant, the television audience is favored with a tidal wave of drugs, legal and backed by the pharma boys, the biggest drug pushers in the world.

There’s a drug available for women which simplifies their contraception regimen. No more taking the pill all the time and remembering and using one of those little wheels, no. The new product is taken only once a month. What could be better?

The lilting background music, the woman depicted smiling, living a carefree life, and the hard-to-hear, fast-talking voiceunder which mentions the possibility that the drug would cause blood clots, heart disease, organ failures.. Don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot worse to me than “dry mouth.”

Legal. And because it’s legal, there are lots of people who figure, hey, it must be okay; otherwise, my government wouldn’t let them sell it. Perhaps it’s better if we leave the labels on. There are those who won’t read them anyhow, and there are those among us who know better than to trust them entirely. If the ad is compelling and the voice soft and reassuring and the music pacific, I’m gonna ask my doctor about it.

And the doctors, asked by enough patients, begin supplying the drug because, hey, people want it, and there are the warning labels, and the pharma people dropped off the free samples...

In one of my former lives, I had the occasion to give a short campaign speech to a group of ‘liberal’ movers-and-shakers in a home in the Mill Valley hills, which, if you know Marin County, explains the situation. In answer to a standard question, I alarmed the attendees by saying that most federal regulatory agencies –– the ones founded with the idea that somebody had to keep tabs on the corporate thugs who ran things –– ought to be abolished. I’m not sure whether I really believed that at the time. Probably I sort of believed it, which is where I’m at thirty years later. My reasoning was this: any structure you want to create to regulate stuff will be inevitably corrupted by the people it’s supposed to regulate. When this happens, we get the worst of both worlds: the population gets poisoned six-ways-come-sundown and doesn’t even know it. We think the Food and Drug Administration will cover us around the stuff we ingest, inject, or otherwise use on or in our bodies, and meanwhile those babies are having sex with Eli Lilly and Merck.

Everything is now trending toward ‘natural’ and ‘green’, and is generally neither. Just words to sell things, and meanwhile everywhere you want to look it’s like the Fed guarding the bankers.

In that sense, maybe there’s a larger benefit to removing the warning labels than the likely removal of a few more Sarah Palin voters from the rolls. People might, against our wills, be forced to take better responsibility for what we believe. Lazily trusting the guardians of our public health has gotten us into this mess in the first place. It is pure folly to expect them to help us out of the hole.

And meanwhile, as conversations with my grandsons confirms, the human family has reached one of the most revolutionary times in all of history. The radical alteration of the form of the mechanism of communication has implications we cannot even begin to imagine at this point.

The planet may be seen as kind of “earth-human brain”, its consciousness held back by the relative rudimentary means by which one earth-human brain cell speaks with another, and so on. Hell, we didn’t even locate literacy as a general premise until fairly recently (and in some places in America, evidently, it’s still missing). The internet lights up that “earth-human brain” like suddenly plugging-in the biggest Macy’s Christmas tree of all time. Whhhhaaaaaaaammmm!

Basically, I’m betting on evolution. For some reason best known to a laughing God, the Law of Unintended Consequences keeps us alive and fighting back. It was the Pentagon which invented the internet; now they’re trying desperately to figure out how to control it, censor it, and spy on everyone who uses it. It was the Pentagon which began using LSD-25 in mind-control experiments that, I think I can safely say, backfired all over the place.

Those who would destroy people for their sick purposes, who cannot be entrusted with the stewardship of the planet and yet control it, have seemingly every power at their disposal. They have the guns and the money, and they own the networks and the newspapers. And yet...

They don’t know what to do about the internet and instant communication. They are terrified that all of the deepest, ugliest secrets will escape, and they are right.

In the early 1970s, a guy who worked at RAND, a golden boy of the Defense Department named Daniel Ellsberg, made an illicit copy of a study he had worked on, later known as the Pentagon Papers, and tried to get someone to make them public. Senators wouldn’t touch it: it was classified secret. Regardless of how horrible the crimes it might reveal, perhaps because of that, it was “Secret” and could not be seen by the American people.

The New York Times, after much waffling, decided to publish it, an act I feel sure that paper would not engage in today, but that’s not the point. There was an attempt to get the Supreme Court to enjoin its publication. And its publication helped turn the public against the war against Viet Nam.

Today, Daniel Ellsberg would not have to take the Pentagon Papers to any Senator. Thank God; there are so few these days worth a bucket of warm piss, to paraphrase the late John Nance Garner about the vice presidency. No. And he wouldn’t have to plead with the Times or any other media whore.

He’d post it on the internet. Game fucking over.

Federal government outlaws free speech except in “free speech zones”, and it’s too late. The world’s a free speech zone now. They’ll try to stop it. But they might have their hands full.

It’s a problem mainly of public relations. As the Obama administration continues to implement many of the Bush regime policies, critics of Bush have begun to comment on this unpleasant continuity. Since the right wing hated Obama’s administration even before it had become one, the defection of the left prospectively leaves him without allies in a vicious town headed into winter.

I have a suggestion.

As purveyors of modern language through its commercial application have noted, it’s all about something called “branding”. After all, Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the other neo-Nazis of the previous executive branch were able to get away with torture by calling it “enchanced interrogation”.

For example, even though the Red Cross study (and, reportedly, a secret Pentagon study) of the inmate population at Guantanamo indicates at least 3/4 are completely innocent of any criminal act, and although Obama promised to close it, the prison remains open. Some of those held will be brought to trial at last, it seems, in New York City, a venue sure to afford them an unbiased jury. Others –– presumably those against whom no evidence exists –– will have their trials in military courts and without the presence of the media or civilian observers.

This public relations nightmare has to be contained. How about this: call it the Guantanamo Bay Refugee Resettlement Program. Has a nice ring to it. Everyone, surely, favors resettling refugees, so long as they’re not being resettled in our own towns.

If that works, and it might, Obama can try out some other ideas. He might shrug-off criticism of America’s continued kidnapping of people by the CIA –– and the torture it outsources to places like Egypt –– by renaming it “The Extraordinary Rendition Weight Reduction Plan”.

Assassination of foreign leaders would become merely a “realignment of American interests abroad”. Sounds a lot better than cold-blooded murder, doesn’t it?

Look, I’ve got my squirrely theory about Obama, why he’s doing the horseshit he’s doing, and probably I’ve written about it before. Nobody believes my theory and I may not even believe it myself, but who knows? It’s a cinch he’s aware of who really runs the country and much of the world, as well as the limits placed on any President by the lesson of Dallas, still quite pertinent after 46 years. Damned right he knows.

So perhaps it’s a question of what’s possible. Perhaps, as usual, it’s up to us. In the meantime, we’ve got The Rendition Diet to keep us amused. Somewhere, Vonnegut is laughing his ass off.

Last week, Giants’ ace Tim Lincecum, a kid with one Cy Young Award already and likely to grab a few more, got popped for speeding in Washington State, before seven in the morning and with the distinct aroma of marijuana in his vehicle. Several grams and a pipe.

Timmy, known as “The Freak” in Sports Illustrated, has invited comment by his long hair and his perpetually-relaxed countenance. Other pitchers look grim. They wear a “game face”, a hard stare that does not waver from first pitch to last. Not Lincecum, who can be seen grinning and even laughing between innings. Now we know why.

They’re gonna legalize it pretty soon. Yeah, I know, the Sarah Palins of America will be aflame with indignation and jealousy but they won’t stop it. It’s finally a settled matter that lots and lots of folks, ordinary folks, celebrities, pols, judges, punks, astronauts, Olympic swimmers, and so forth, lots know how much a few grams is, what it looks like, and what happens when you put a pinch in the bowl of Tim Lincecum’s pipe and take a puff.

In the same newspaper which trumpeted Tim’s arrest, a news column on page C4, the juxtaposition of the surge in pot arrests nationwide since Bill Clinton began the crackdown in ‘92, and the increase in the number of those who partake of it. In other words, criminalization is not exactly working.

And nobody much cares. That’s the thing. And there’s the money. Lord, the money! In taxes it would collect from Mendocino and Humboldt Counties alone, California could wipe out the deficit. Legislators could start buying stuff for their districts again. Pressure’s off. Pass that joint, will ya?

So the World Series is over. Four months until the boys of spring, summer, and fall converge on Florida and Arizona to prepare themselves for the 2010 season. That’s a lot of days to trade stories and speculate about the future around the hot stove in the general store.

Personally, I was rooting for the Phillies, as was most of the American sporting public, largely because the Yankees are a team more purchased than developed and also, maybe, because a lot of those pin-stripers seem like such assholes. Maybe I’m wrong about that part.

But at least there are some good things about skipping a seventh game, not the least being I don’t have to hear Tim McCarver run his mouth before next September. Also: the incessant camera shots of ‘celebrities’, at least a few of whom belong behind bars instead of the camera railing at Yankee Stadium. Kate Hudson had an excuse of sorts, being the amorous partner of New York third baseman Alex Rodriguez, but who is Kurt Russell dating? And then Donald Trump, and that putz Rudy Giuliani, you see what I mean by the prison reference.

And the commercials, even with the sound muted I know what those sleazebags are saying, the insurance companies like Allstate and State Farm, not to mention the dingbat for Progressive, all of these being people you might want to shoot just because they’re so offensive to humanity. Sigh. Hell, I don’t really want to shoot them, although, to paraphrase what Mort Sahl once said about Woody Allen, I’d like to slap that Progressive ditz silly except it looks like someone already has.

As my friend JBD is fond of noting, the guys who run the major league game have done what they can to ruin it. It used to mean something, the World Series. Hard to credit now.

The Yanks and Phillies were worthy participants, that’s something. Not like one of those seasons, 162 games where the best teams are eliminated in fluke ‘playoffs’ by ‘wild-card’ teams and we’re treated to bad exhibitions with squads like Colorado, no, at least not that.

But thanks to the Lords of baseball, Bud Selig and his boys, what was once a final, ultimate showdown, a clash of cities and personalities on a great stage, has been reduced to just another corporate product, a game as the draw for selling shit instead of a main event.

Baseball is meant to be played in the sunshine. That is its nature. Before the greedheads got their paws on it, when there was still a real Commissioner who took only limited shit from the owners, the World Series was played between the best teams, in the sunshine, the first week of October.

Once in a while, it rained. Hard as it is to visualize for those of us living in paradise, it sometimes rains in early October back east. That’s okay. A game could be postponed to the next day. It did not snow or sleet. Players’ lips were rarely blue. Under these conditions, one could say it was a fair test of skill, a match played in an arena and in weather which respected the game.

But thanks to Bud Selig and the other toads who run professional baseball, those days are gone, literally.

When rot sets in it’s usually incremental. At first, there were a few night games, during the week. Weekends remained daytime affairs. The argument ran, it gave working people and kids a chance to see games on television they’d otherwise miss.

However, it was not about the children. It never is when you get right down to it (memo to the trustees in the Tam Union High School District: go fuck yourselves). It was about money.

It was about money, too, when it was decided that weekend games should be played at night; can’t have broadcasts competing with football, can we? It was about money when the seasons were extended, when interleague play was begun, when everything became about licensing and contracts.

It was about money when the playoffs were not the World Series but ‘divisional’ matches, and there were more rounds invented to “keep it interesting”, although baseball never did need gimmicks to “keep it interesting” for people who cared about it. Even the promos now, the slogans that Major League Baseball runs at us, claim that it is about “more than baseball.”

Bulletin to Selig: only an ignoramus would devalue baseball by claiming it needed anything more.

Walt Whitman once said that baseball was a blessing which could redeem the national soul. Don’t know if it’s still true... it’s a magnificent game, but we’ve got a serious deficit in the redemption department. Last time I checked, the kids still played it with joy, the stuff the grown-ups have clearly traded for cash. Might be a close call.

Assess this you dumb fuckers.

Yes, I have an attitude problem today. Good time for you to close the page and move on to other, more acceptable sites. There are clowns on bicycles on YouTube. Of course, living as I do in Fairfax, Marin County, there are clowns on bicycles right down the hill from me.

It’s other sorts of clowns who elicit feelings of homicide in me today.

Two items:

The local high school has sent warning letters to parents this week. If your child has missed any classes, or been “tardy” more than once to any class, or to all classes combined, since the school year began in August, you, the parent, may be reported for possible prosecution under section of the

I am not making this up. Not only that, your child’s problem absenteeism or habitual ‘tardiness’ may be used to delay him or her from obtaining a driver’s license, presumably under the theory that a child who is late to class may be late going through an intersection.

The second item, in the Chronicle: “State’s math scores near bottom.” Must be the ‘tardiness’ problem. More on this hilarious circumstance in a minute; I haven’t finished the tirade I’ve been working up to.

The letter from Drake High, allegedly written by an assistant principal, is a stunner. It is written in the classic edu-speak style, the use of words to conceal and manipulate. Just reading it was sort of an exercise in nostalgia for me, because I once served a three-year sentence on the board of trustees of the very Tamalpais Union High School District in which Drake is located –– the original term was four years but I busted out, and because the nausea it induced had that too-familiar quality.

God, those people were assholes.

Back to the letter. Here it is, with translation for humans:

“The...high school staff wants to foster communication between families and the school. This letter represents one of the ways we can communicate with you about *’s attendance.” [We want to let you know that we can cause trouble for you and your child].

“This letter has been sent to you because our records indicate that * has at least two unexcused absences or tardies in one or more classes this semester, as shown below, and that he has been identified as truant according to Education Code 48260.” [We are not kidding. There’s a law that we can use against you].

Thereupon, the ‘record’ is printed. In *’s case, he is said to have ZERO absences or ‘tardies’ in the following periods: 0, 1st, 2nd, AT, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, AFT, IS, and N. No, I do not know what the acronyms mean and am sure I don’t wish to know.

* apparently has TWO such absences or ‘tardies’ in 3rd period. That’s it. Two, since August.

Now comes more specific threats:

“In addition, it is important for you to know that the state’s education policy (Education Code 48260.5) requires the parent/guardian to compel the student to attend school. Parents/guardians who fail to meet this obligation may be guilty of an infraction and subject to prosecution pursuant to Article 6 of Chapter 2 of part 27. Your truant student may also be subject to arrest under Education Code 48264, and can be subject to suspension, restriction, or delay of his driving privilege pursuant to Vehicle Code 13202.7.” [If your child is late to class more than once, we can have you arrrested, and the kid, too].

Now, that’s how to “foster communication.”

There follows a couple of paragraphs about how you have no chance of changing what “the records show” and that you had better read the school’s voluminous Parent/Student Handbook for details on how absences or ‘tardies’ automatically reduce a student’s grade, just in case the other threats haven’t scared the shit out of you.

The parent/guardian is then advised to “Contact his assistant principal to discuss strategies to improve his attendance and/or alternative educational programs... We want to work with you to make sure your child attends regularly and benefits from the rich and educational (sic) opportunities at Sir Francis Drake High School.” [I think we already know the nature of such a “discussion.” We may push your child out of Drake].

Most parents are not conversant with the California Education Code. Perhaps their child has been late to a single class twice in the first six weeks. They are suddenly at risk of arrest, and their child is at risk of suspension.

You may well ask yourself, what the fuck is going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Under the blantant falsehoods of “communication” and “rich educational opportunities” the educrats of the Tam District are throwing a grenade through your front door and pretending it’s a bouquet. I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I find this form of fascism to be the worst, the guy smiling as he sticks in the knife.

I’ll tell you what’s going on. For at least forty years, the schools have been filling up with students who are quite at home in the electric age. They/we are emphatically post-industrial people. But the education system has –– after a brief flirtation with reality in the 1960s and 1970s –– has become more and more industrial in design and function. It should surprise no one that the system doesn’t work anymore. But that has not prevented its increasingly harsh imposition.

Back East, a six-year-old was suspended for bringing a ‘spork’ to school. Another child was expelled for bringing a serrated knife along with a birthday cake. Childhood is over. The education system does not want students to have them.

The “rich opportunities” students enjoy, in grades one through twelve, include more than an entire month of standardized testing. There are ordinary tests, of course, and AP tests in high school, and federal tests for the “National Assessment” program, the ‘STAR’ tests in California, and numerous others, including an ‘Exit Exam’ which by definition prevents some students who otherwise passed every high school class from graduating.

All of these tests are “snapshots” in the words of the idiot who ran the curriculum in the Tam District when I was there. The more, the merrier. We have embraced a mania for measurement as a substitute for real learning. One cannot measure learning; one can instead measure memorization. And because the public (and the real estate lobby) are demanding “results,” those void of imagination have built a system which punishes it.

The Chron story on California’s math scores is, like all such stories, loaded with comments from bewildered educrats and utterly bereft of even a pass at explanation. Across every race and ethnicity, English-language-speakers and non-speakers, low income and high, California’s fourth and eighth graders –– the groups tested –– scored below the national average. In fact, California’s scores exceed those of only two states: Alabama and Mississippi.

Yea! We’re number forty-eight!

High school students in the Tam District are routinely facing four hours of homework every night. That’s about eleven hours of compulsory work a day. Including weekends and most holidays –– when students ‘catch up’ with their work –– people between the ages of eight and eighteen (although you can legally leave school at 16) spend around seventy hours each week performing school-related tasks.

It’s easy to see where this is going. When I was on the Tam board, one counselor told me that she believed half of the students were ‘clinically depressed.’ There was widespread incidence of self-destructive behavior, including cutting, eating disorders, and attempted suicides. The district didn’t want to deal with it; the board refused to hold a hearing. When perhaps seventy-five students sacrificed their homework time in order to attend a board meeting to ‘testify’ about conditions in their schools, the board used a two-minute egg timer to cut people off in mid-sentence.

At least two of those creeps are still on the board, having nothing else to do with their lives and deeply dependent upon the interconnection between self worth and being introduced at basketball games.

The language of the threatening letter to the Drake parent brought back the crippling reality of edu-speak. With a smile, they will say they wish to ‘communicate’ with you when clearly this ‘communication’ consists of their orders and your obedience to same. We are working hard for your kids, and in the event that they are late to class a few times, we can suspend them and arrest you.

It would surprise me greatly if American high school campuses don;t become, within a relatively short period of time, staging areas for massive civil disobedience. Even though many teenagers are being kept relatively docile by way of moronic mass media, constant academic pressure, and pharmaceuticals for their depression and anger, that kind of shit won’t work forever. Kids have a desire to learn, and it’s an ignorant system which thinks it can stifle that. And they have iPhones and PDAs galore.

And not only that. Because what is being done now to children, elementary school through high school, is not only antithetical to learning but antithetical to the sensory reality of an electric age generation. It is therefore historically doomed. The only real question is how much crockery will be broken in the process.

I haven’t seen a pro football game in maybe twenty years, so out of touch that I was surprised to learn recently that there are teams I’d never heard of, lots of them. And although I don’t plan on watching any games now, I’ve become a big, big fan of the Indianapolis Colts.

The Colts are owned by a fellow named Irsay, a family deal that goes back to before they left Baltimore.

When it was announced that a group of prospective buyers for the Cleveland franchise included Rush Limbaugh, Irsay declared that he would do whatever was necessary to derail the sale. Limbaugh, Irsay said, was not the kind of person who ought to own a football team.

If you share my view that life affords us all interesting opportunities to overcome our own character faults, then the decision by the ownership group to dump Limbaugh was another in his thusfar unlearned lesson, which is that we’re all human, including people we don’t agree with, and that when you treat people unfairly you can expect the same in kind.

Remember his drug bust? He had somebody carry bagloads of oxycontin for him, obtained through another name. He had a serious addiction and got caught breaking the law. Had this happened to any other public figure on the other end of the political spectrum, Rush would’ve been calling for his head. It would seem that a major course in Irony, maybe Irony 101, is on his curriculum, but he is not doing his homework.

Now the free market he pretends to worship has shown him a dark side. Hey, if you want to exclude people from opportunity because you don’t like them, that’s the American Way. Isn’t it? Will he get it this time?

Here’s what fascinates me about Rush. He’s being given a grand cosmic education, some of it in full view thanks to his love of publicity, his arrogance, and his unwillingness to look deeply into the mirror, and we all get to watch his progress or, sadly, lack of same.

It will almost certainly get to him if this keeps up. Everything he does, seemingly, coming back on him, and eventually he will just stop coming up with excuses. Or, as John Lennon said, ‘sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun. If the sun don’t some we’ll get a tan by standing in the English rain...’

Ah, Willie Brown. In the words of the great country standard, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

I suppose it’s kind of petty of me to complain. I live in one of the great magic places on the planet, and if we have to suffer the intrusive presence of the sort of public personage who makes Donald Trump look dignified, that’s a rather small price to pay.

Plus, I can always stop reading the newspaper and watching television, and given the fare available with each of these I’m likely to be better off. Still...

I remember Willie from a long time back, the early sixties, in fact, when he and the notorious Burton brothers ran the statewide Young Democrats out of San Francisco and my friends and I tagged along as the Marin County contingent. We learned plenty, watching those guys operate, and it was a pleasure. They were good.

I once saw Willie raise cash from a large audience of party faithful by calling on people by name and turning them upside down until all the money fell out. It was the most impressive fund-raising evening I’ve ever witnessed.

In the early eighties, I’d just opened a law office when the phone rang from Willie’s chief of staff: the Speaker wanted me to run for the Assembly again and could send a quarter of a million smackers my way to smooth the road to Sacramento. I had to turn him down for a variety of sound reasons, but I retain a fondness for the generous offer.

I do not have a great ideological beef here. There are, as many have noted, lots worse guys running around. True, Willie’s great causes have morphed over time from the poor and dispossessed to the rich and possessed, but he’s got expensive tastes in clothes, cars, and female companions and its takes a whopping bank account for that sort of frivolity.

I’d prang the sucker for peddling his talent to the highest bidders except that these days even that doesn’t raise anybody’s hackles. Jesse Colin Young’s recording of Chet Powers’ “Get Together” is being used to sell disposable diapers, John Lennon’s work is promoting telephones and PDAs, and Bob Dylan has turned his catalogue over to, well, evidently every commercial enterprise he once made fun of. I suppose I’d sell out, too, but nobody’s offered me enough.

No, Willie’s become unbearable because he cannot permit his public persona to fade away. He’s doing sports commentary for Comcast, God help us. He shows up everywhere, invited or not. And he writes a Chronicle column called, swear to God, “Willie’s World.”

In “Willie’s World” everything is, naturally, about Willie. In Sunday’s column, he led with the observation that Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Prize for one thing only: being black. Then he wrote:

“I expect an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer will all follow, and all will be equally deserved. The Nobel is great news for Obama and for America, but bad news for the Rev. Al (Sharpton), Jesse (Jackson), and me, as the prize committees have now met their quota.”

Whew. Willie, I can smell it from here.

When somebody gets famous, especially over a long journey, there is the risk that he or she will begin to leak resentment. Note that Sharpton and Jackson, both black, both ministers, ran for President. Brown never ran, but he was Assembly Speaker of California and Mayor of San Francisco. The presidency certainly ran through his mind once or twice.

Willie is still running for something, for the confirmation that he is important. How sad that a man this talented and carrying undoubted past accomplishments now so publicly bemoans his falling status and so reflexively grasps at whatever flies by. The world is in some sense no longer Willie’s, and he is afraid he will disappear.

Hey, Willie, I share your pain. We’re hitting the last decades, you and I, too old to be king no matter how deserving and increasingly aware of our own mortality. We had aspirations, and then shit happened. Someone in your circumstance, you might wonder whether anyone really loved you or it was only the power and your ability to command it. That’s a bad thought at three a.m., no matter how much your wardrobe cost.

Recently, Bay Area Democrats held a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in the City. If you live out here, or are onto the politics of Governor Schwarzenegger, you know there are extreme tensions in state government. California, as most others, is facing budgetary holes it can’t fill without either increasing taxes or gutting programs.

Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has refused to sign any legislation whatever –– on any subject –– until Democrats give him what he wants on a water bill. Really. If you want to know why a governor would freeze the entire state government over water, see “Chinatown” again. He ‘unfroze’ himself only today, but hadn’t at the time of the gathering at the Fairmont, and anyway extortion doesn’t sit well with some people.

Into the Democratic dinner, the aforementioned Willie Brown ‘introduced’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was and is the equivalent of bringing Dick Cheney to a meeting of the ACLU steering committee. You can imagine what then transpired.

But in “Willie’s World,” the discourtesy with which the Governor was received (there was considerable booing, and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano invited him to “kiss my gay ass”) was equivalent to the interruption of President Obama’s State of the Union address by whacko Joe Wilson. Seriously.

Then he writes, “After the dinner I went to the bar and got a tap on the shoulder. It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed... The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, ‘Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?’”

A better question would be, what are all those crazies doing with Willie Brown?

My guess is that Willie never developed any healthy hobbies. This has left him bored now that the power has passed, and desperate to keep his dick swinging. That he has been thereby rendered easy pickings for a marginally-clever manipulator like Arnold Schwarzenegger has not dawned on him.

Of course, in the grander scheme of things, we ought to share the responsibility for this parody of Willie Brown. For reasons likely discovered by opening up the... uh... darker psychology of the modern American, we shower ridiculous praise on celebrities; and the celebrities nearly always thereupon turn into false gods, worthy only in delusion, and in the approval of total strangers.

Welcome home, Roman Polanski.

We’re glad to have you back. We know it’s been a tough thirty years or so, what with the travel restrictions and this thing hanging over you here in California, U.S.A. Hey, look, if she’d been a couple of years older you’d be in the Senate by now, instead of being flown-in courtesy of the government, but it’s better late than never.

We show your movies all the time on American television. Chinatown, of course, and those Oscars. By the way, do you still have the statuettes? The Academy asked me to ask you.

If you’d been in Tennessee and she’d been your cousin, you could’ve married her and everything would’ve been cool; just ask Jerry Lee Lewis.

We don’t want you to think we’ve ignored you. I know it probably seemed that way pretty often, since the U.S. government didn’t make much fuss over you through six administrations, if you count Ford, but we’ve gotten a progressive into the White House, change we can believe in, and one of the changes is that we take care of old business.

Actually, you might feel honored that you’ve been invited back. After all, we’re now “turning the page” on every criminal enterprise from illegal wiretapping to torture, but we think enough of you to make an exception. No more turning the page so far as you’re concerned.

A cynic could believe that this is simply a great way to sell ugly cars and cowpiss beer to the viewers on F*X, that sex plays, as they say, especially the kind that Republican members of Congress fantasize about when they’re ostensibly reading the bailout legislation.

But don’t you believe it. We’re bringing you home because we’re a nation of grace and forgiveness, a beacon of justice and the rule of law in the world.

So I was standing there on the court floor of the Marin County Hall of Justice, holding up my pants with one hand while trying to slip my belt back through the loops, and thinking about the state of things, which is personally fine these days but collectively dismal if it’s the country I am thinking about.

People adapt. This is both our blessing and our curse. If the human race did not adapt to its earthly environment it could not make it, yet it is our collective ability to adapt to craziness which, eventually, can sink us. This is what philosphers think of as ironic and what I think of as God’s sense of humor.

In this particular lifetime I have seen us adapt to the metric system, Sammy Davis, Jr., fast food, and the nuclear arms race. Politically, what used to be a lie is now “spin.”

They have a metal detector, along with security personnel, waiting for everyone who seeks admission or has been summoned to the courtrooms at the civic center. John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced Attorney General, once observed, “this country is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”

We’ve adapted to metal detectors everywhere, especially in public buildings or places where masses of people congregate. We’ve been told that ‘heightened security’ is necessary to protect us from vague but powerful forces known as ‘terrorists.’ We are surrendering freedom in increments. We will, if we fail to change course, one day awaken in a country which no longer has a meaningful Bill of Rights.

I’m all in favor of adapting to the natural environment. The human race has no practical alternative if it wishes to survive. But what exactly such adaptation consists of is a dangerous question and we don’t seem to have an answer just yet.

People lie to us about public matters. They wish to scare us into buying whatever it is that they’re selling, and it works. When it’s pop music or television shows, the damage is not so great; there are alternatives. Genius often rises anyhow. But when it’s public policy, when it’s wars or economic measures, the penalties are more severe and harder to reverse.

When I was a kid, there were strawberries. Today, except at farmers markets and the occasional health food emporium, there are these things they call strawberries but aren’t. They appear to be strawberries. However, beneath the gassed-to-red skin the flesh is white, watery, faintly metallic.

Retaining the terms, eviscerating the meaning, what we’ve got left is not what we thought we had and not what we’d been promised, once upon another time. It’s something to consider when you find yourself standing there next to a metal detector and holding up your pants with one hand because somebody said we had to adapt to a fictitious, post-something world.