Probably the first time I saw Barry Bonds play was in the summer of 1993, his first year with the Giants. The club was still imprisoned at Candlestick Park, where the bad lighting, glass-strewn parking lot, and lunatic winds had created a less than accomodating atmosphere for the locals and a hell-hole for visiting teams and any tourists from Minneapolis unsophisticated enough to wear warm-weather clothing.

The Giants were good that year, so good that they were deprived of the western division title only because the Braves won 103 games. The game I remember was against those Braves. We were down the right field line that afternoon and thus had a near-field view of several long home runs crushed into the stands by players on both clubs. I don’t remember whether Barry hit one of them, nor whether the home team won. I do remember that the traffic jam getting out after was sufficient to bring my companion to the point of claustrophobic terror, which pretty much ended any thoughts I might’ve had of her joining me for any more games.

The division championship came four years later. By then, Barry Lamar Bonds was the most dangerous hitter in the major leagues. They still pitched to him, though, and he was still young, and when he leaped onto the top of the dugout and led the fans in wild cheers at the victory it was evident that both he and they were in for a lot more pennant chases to come.

By the end of the century, Bonds was smashing home runs at an alarming rate but it took until 2003 for that team, finally in a new ballpark at China Basin and with the legendary Dusty Baker at the helm, to reach the World Series.

I remember a game that year, July 24th against Houston. The Astros were good that year, tough to beat. In the top of the ninth, with the score knotted 2-2, and the lead run at second base, a Houston batter rifled a single to left. Bonds swept it up and threw, one graceful motion, firing home a throw which nailed the runner and kept it tied. Then, in the bottom of the ninth, Barry hit the first pitch over the wall to win the game. It was his 39th birthday.

Less than a month later, Bonds, who spent his non-baseball hours with his dying father Bobby, won two extra-inning games in three days with home runs against Atlanta. This time, he carried the team to the pennant.

Only four years ago. Last night, on legs that could barely support him, Barry Bonds played his last game for San Francisco. He went 0-3, his last swing sending a Jake Peavey fastball 400 feet and into an outfielder’s glove.

I read the stories in the local press. Every one of them, save a nice piece by John Shea in the Chronicle, managed to describe a controversial figure, his skills deteriorated, his name prominent in grand jury steroid investigations, his achievements regarded as suspect. Many baseball writers loathe him.

Across the nation, on this last campaign and chasing that most holy of records, Henry Aaron’s 755 career home runs, Bonds was greeted, at least at first, by torrential waves of boos. There were death threats. The team was in the toilet, and he had no hitters surrounding him in the lineup, no reason opposing pitchers had to give him anything.

He was 43 years old and his star theoretically falling, he had missed an entire season from three knee operations and infections, and still he was intentionally walked again and again. He did it anyhow, caught and passed Aaron, while the Lord High Commissioner of Baseball, that sorry excuse for a human being Bud Selig, stood with his arms crossed, refusing to honor him or even what he’d accomplished.

Here’s the deal: during the period in which Bonds is alleged to have used steroids, they were not illegal. For some reason, this point is omitted from “news” stories. Also omitted is this: the owners and the Commissioner knew all about steroids. They knew that some players were taking them, and they suspected that steroids had assisted both Mark McGuire, a large, otherwise unexceptional white first baseman for St. Louis, and Sammy Sosa, a demonstrative, outgoing black outfielder for Chicago, in the “race” to break Roger Maris’ one-year home run record of 61. They knew about it and they elected not to do anything about it. The sport had been recently shaken by a strike; attendance was down around the leagues. But the McGuire-Sosa struggle was a compelling drama and the fans returned.

If Bonds used steroids, he was not the first, and he used in an environment which turned a blind eye to it for business reasons. Maybe he watched McGuire yank those liners down the left field line and thought, fuck this, I can hit a hundred. So, folks, if you want to play with asterisks, you can slap them on every World Series winner between about 1995 and 2003.

Just a couple of other points. Drugs have been around baseball from, maybe, Abner Doubleday. It was born as a rough sport. Pitchers threw 95-mile-per-hour fastballs at the heads of dangerous hitters. Ty Cobb used a file to sharpen his metal spikes, then slid into second with one foot straight at the infielder’s face. In the fifties, the era of Henry Aaron and Willie Mays, many players gobbled speed before games. Helped them get it going afternoons after night games.

A contemporary of Mays and Aaron, one Edwin “Duke” Snider, legendary center fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers, had this to say about the argument that Bonds’ records were compromised: “Steroids cannot help you hit a major league fastball.”

Here’s what I remember: a man who could be intentionally walked three times in a game, then drive a slider into McCovery Cove to win it. A man who, in the season following his stunning record 73 home runs, would manage to win the batting title and a third (or was it fourth?) consecutive Most Valuable Player Award at the ripe age of 40 (or was it 41?). A man who could steal a base when everybody in the park, including the kid in line for Nachos at the stand behind the left field bleachers, knows full well he’s going.

Over the last few years he guarded his strength and was criticized for it. He didn’t do exercises with teammates. He used three lockers and had his own easy chair. He often blew-off the media before or after games. He also didn’t suffer fools gladly.

You can say whatever you want to about Barry Bonds but I know what I saw. I was lucky enough to grow up in Madison, Wisconsin, when Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to a World Championship over the Yankees. My Dad used to take me to games at County Stadium. When we moved to the Bay Area in, I think, ‘58, I got to see Mays at Seals Stadium and then at Candlestick.

So, thank you Barry, for the great privilege of watching you for fifteen years. You are the best I’ve ever seen.

I read the San Francisco Chronicle most mornings, for amusement only. You’re not going to get much real news out of the print medium anywhere these days, but with the Chron there’re some great comics, an occasional Mark Morford column (when he’s not just using up space by repeating himself), and the baseball box scores in season.

The Chron’s got a “Washington Bureau,” from which are printed dispatches by one Carolyn Lochhead, which rhymes with Rockhead, and this morning’s offering was a front-pager headlined “Why Democrats can’t end the war.” It was total horseshit.

The Democrats, according to Rockhead and, one presumes, the party’s overheated public relations hacks, just “don’t have the votes” to stop the war. Or, it seems, to do much of anything to impede the Bush/Cheney march to national oblivion.

“Democrats lack the 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a Republican filibuster on just about any measure to force a change in Bush’s Iraq strategy (sic), much less the two-thirds majorities in both the Senate and the House to override a presidential veto,” Rockhead writes.

According to Diane Feinstein (D-Calif), “We...follow certain rules and procedures which have been set. People don’t like to hear this, but it is the real world in which we function. To close debate on anything requires 60 votes. We have 50 votes on Iraq.”

Let’s consider Feinstein’s “real world.”

First, she is lying. It does not take 60 votes, or even 50, to stop this war, because just as the Democrats do not have 60 votes to stop a filibuster, neither do the Republicans. If the Democratic Party wanted to stop the madness, it would need 80% of its Senate number to prevent passage of any more appropriations bills. And without constant infusions of cash, the war cannot be continued.

Second, the Democratic Party does not want to stop this war. Why not? Because the continuation of an unpopular war is perceived as an issue which can gain them an electoral advantage in 2008. And that’s what the party cares about: not war, not the horrors being visited upon a civilian population, not the dead and maimed Americans and Iraqis.

What passes for ‘leadership’ in this joke of an opposition party is already staking out a “safe” position on the war (and on every other issue where fear is being used to manipulate public opinion). Its intellectual functionaries, fools such as Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, and Charles Kupchan, who worked in the National Security Council under Clinton, are providing the ‘talking points’ for this morally reprehensible bilge. Here’s what they are saying:

Panetta: nearly all Democratic candidates “have recognized that almost under any scenario, there’s going to be a U.S. presence in Iraq. How big a presence obviously is the question mark” (question, Leon, not question mark – Jesus, isn’t literacy a requirement in public service anymore? Just wondering), “but clearly there isn’t any Democrat I know of who thinks that we can just simply pick up everybody and leave without ensuring that there is a force there to try to continue to help provide some stability.”

I guess this means that Leon doesn’t get around much. There “isn’t any Democrat...”? Maybe not at the cocktail parties where he gets his information. And, of course, Leon buys, seemingly without irony, the stupid premise that the United States military is “provid(ing) some stability,” when it’s obvious that American military operations, including the Wild-West antics of the Blackwater mercenaries, is the central cause of the instability.

And Kupchan: there is “a sincere belief that we can’t pack up and go home... a view that is congealing among the party’s leadership... There’s a palpable fear that Iraq will come apart at the seams and turn into a wider war. There’s a palpable fear that Iran would use instability in Iraq to further its regional ambitions. So I think responsible Democrats are wary of the view that ‘this didn’t work, let’s go home.’”

Dear Charles: you are as big a liar as Leon.

Democrats are not worried that “Iraq will come apart at the seams.” Iraq already has come apart at the seams, thanks to us, and especially thanks to the bonehead jerks in the Democratic Party who voted to give Bush and Cheney the okay for this invasion. As to Iran and its “regional ambitions,” so fucking what? Ever hear of Saudi Arabia? Hell, everybody’s already using “instability in Iraq” to further their own agendas, Iran included, and whether we stay or leave that won’t change – except, of course, that our continued presence hands every middle eastern nutcase a terrific target around which to organize: us.

At least tell the truth, boys: we are not leaving Iraq because we want its oil and because we intend to establish mammoth, permanent military bases there as a means to control the entire region. No one can stop us. And the Democrats intend to continue the Bush policies after 2008 because their leading presidential candidates are just as committed to U.S. hegemony as the guys now in power.

Don’t believe me?

Well, today – maybe yesterday by the time you read this – the Senate handed Bush a resolution authored by that disgrace to the human race Joe Lieberman which can be taken as authorizing military strikes against Iran.

This was not done over the objections of the Democrats. It was done with the complicity of the Democrats.

Majority Leader Harry Reid voted for it. Hillary Clinton, that champion of women’s and minority rights, voted for it. Barack Obama, true to his everything-to-everybody philosophy, did not vote. Diane Feinstein, who lectures us about the “real world” she lives in, voted for it. It passed with 76 votes, only 22 in opposition, including 2 Republicans.

This is the same Democratic Party whose members voted, almost unanimously, for the so-called “Patriot Act” which strips us of the critical freedoms Americans had fought to secure over more than two hundred years, without actually reading the legislation first.

I recall a time when the Democratic Party meant something besides cynicism and corruption. I recall that during the Viet Nam War, and with a Democratic President named Lyndon Johnson – who was a lot smarter and tougher than Bush – great numbers of Democratic Senators stood up for the truth. I remember Wayne Morse and J. William Fulbright, RFK, Proxmire and Nelson, Al Gore’s dad, Mike Mansfield. Real Senators, not the phony, self-serving light-weights shaming us today.

George McGovern, whom RFK once called “the most decent man in the Senate,” once stood in that great hall and said, “the walls of this chamber reek with blood.”

They reek no less today, but there are no McGoverns, no Mansfields or Morses, to say so.

There’s been a lot of trash-talking in the Congress lately and more is on the way. These are dangerous times. And the various permutations of the tactics employed by the pols is both revealing and terrifying in its implications for the nation.

To tell you the absolute truth, which I suppose is regarded as stupid these days, I would far rather be taking a nap or watching a helpful instructional segment at The Golf Channel than writing this. Anyone acquainted with American reality has plenty of reason to be depressed, and depression doesn’t feel good. Not only that: winter’s coming, rain and standard time.

We all know more than we need to about George W. Bush and his smirking lunacies, and Dick “Better Things To Do” Cheney and his use of firearms while drunk, and the court appointments, the martial law threat, the wiretapping and e-spying, Halliburton, I mean, just look out the window. The strategy of the Republicans is hard to discern, since even these guys know they’ve made a mess of everything.

It’s the Democrats we ought to be worried about. Very, very worried.

It is now the party of corrupt, self-serving cowards. I mean that in the nicest way.

They can’t stop the war, they say. They also cannot stop any other aspect of the rape of the nation, surrendering every issue because they are worried about how it might look if they were to act as patriots. Today 22 Democratic Senators voted to condemn a newspaper advertisement from MoveOn which appeared in The New York Times.

Barack Obama, the presidential candidate who speaks of “hope” all the time, did not vote on the resolution.

You might think that the Senate ought to have other, more pressing concerns than the content of a single newspaper ad. If so, evidently you would be wrong. And why is that?

Well, because the Democratic Party is in complete agreement with the Republican Party as to the rules of their game. It involves a mutuality of understanding based on the universal interest of all of these jokers in one thing above all else: power, the gaining of it and the keeping of it. No one wants to find him/herself “out of position” when the next election rolls around.

Consequently, there are few Senators willing to simply speak the truth or do what is plainly right. Most are instead committed to staking out public positions which may gain them power or at least limit the damage they may incur.

The war is an obvious example. Most of them own IQs at least marginally above room temperature. They know, therefore, that the war is lost. They know that our troops are tied down in a bad situation, a great many of them victims of a euphemism – "stop loss" – which means slavery, sent back again and again to a country whose people don’t want us there and where they cannot even readily ascertain who among the civilian population may be dangerous to them. It is Viet Nam all over again, in a different guise, and worse than the original.

But the Democrats won’t stop the war. They are afraid that a filibuster against funding would leave them wide open to the charge of abandoning the troops. The fact that this is a stunningly false argument does not matter. The Bush regime has hidden behind it for years now and most Americans buy it. Since everyone knows that Bush himself is poison – he may be the least popular President in American history by now – they’re free to blame him. But because they are cowards, the Democrats will not do anything meaningful to stop the senseless killings. They are instead hoping to use the war’s unpopularity for electoral advantage in 2008.

Presumably these Democrats figure that the dead and mained and ruined lives which affix to a continuation of this horror will be worth it when – maybe if – the votes are counted thirteen months from now. Ya gotta break eggs, right?

Although they have a putative majority in the Senate, crazy Joe Lieberman, the horse’s ass from Connecticut, can blackmail them anytime at all, and everyone knows it. Even when they can grab a majority – today they got 56 votes on a measure to address the misery of “stop-loss” – they can’t get 60 to evoke cloture. Therefore, they can’t end the debate and will not be able to win.

Thing is, if this party has any integrity at all, it has at least 41 votes on something. And when it does, it can use those 41 votes to prevent the lunatic fringe majority from pissing away any more of our Bill of Rights, if there are any left by now, or from naming another racist judge, or maybe even handing no-bid government contracts to the same corporate criminals who can’t account for the “misplaced” billions – that is not a misprint – in Iraq.

But the Democrats do not have that integrity. And in playing electoral games, in worrying more about what something can be made to look like than about what it is, they’ve become too corrupt to govern.

A long time ago, in the midst of another stupid, horrible war based on presidential lies, a United States Senator, one George McGovern (D) of South Dakota, stood on the floor of the Senate and said, “The walls of this chamber reek with blood.” Many others agreed with him. Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader from Montana. William J. Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee from Arkansas. Wayne Morse and Gaylord Nelson and Bill Proxmire.

I am still waiting for this generation’s George McGovern to tell the simple truth in the United States Senate, but Paul Wellstone is dead and Barack Obama is absent.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you ought to, the video of cops “subduing” that kid who had the nerve to ask John Kerry about the documented, systematic disenfranchisement of black voters on election day in 2004. Hearing about it, especially through the stupifying filter of the mass media, is not enough, my fellow Americans, oh, no. Because there are elements here the mass media would miss even if it were not run by lying swine.

I’ve received an email from Cynthia McKinney demanding to know “What is happening to us? How much more will the people accept?” McKinney is the brilliant black congresswoman from Georgia, temporarily out of office for reasons related directly to the enmity of George Bush and Dick Cheney. McKinney, just as the student who was dragged from an open microphone to the back of an auditorium, thrown to the floor, handcuffed, and then tasered, has had the bad taste to raise serious questions about the theft of the last two presidential elections.

McKinney was struck, as I was, by this singular fact: that while this student was being electronically tortured into “submission” on the floor at the rear of the room, Kerry continued to speak as though nothing had happened – and the students visible in the video are ignoring this event even though it is happening literally right next to them.

What is happening to us, indeed.

There are numerous references to this incident on various internet sources, including alternet, buzzflash, and everyone else. Track one down. Not having a ready answer to McKinney’s questions is not enough reason to avoid being informed.

Chokin’ Freakin’ Dogs

For reasons too boring to go into here, I was awake at six in the morning the other day and, in order to remain in a generally peaceful state, turned on the Golf Channel for live coverage of the Solheim Cup tournament in Sweden, Europe against the U.S. in the backyard of Annika Sorenstam who, among other things, is arguably the best golfer of her gender in the world. (Friends of Lorena Ochoa will claim the distinction for her, and with plenty of reason; it’s an enjoyable debate).

In the tournament, various combinations of pairs from their respective teams play against one another in various combinations of scoring systems over two days, then face-off one-on-one on the final day. To those among you who are not golfers and about to doze off, It’s really a very simple and sort of elegant system, but I needn’t describe it further.

Anyhow, this was evidently during day two. Sweden is, as I learned, nine hours earlier than I am. A Golf Channel commentator, one Dottie Pepper, herself a former star who had played for the U.S. against European teams, was offering her on-site comments for the edification of, well, me, along with whomever else was watching at that hour from wherever.

Pepper and the rest of us saw a European player momentarily blow, a show of anger, and suggested that that sort of behavior would never make the newspapers or television reports but that when she, Pepper, had occasionally lost it in competition the European media had not treated her with kindness.

Moments later, a couple of American players missed a couple of shots and Europe’s teams had managed to tie two matches they might well have lost. And as the network thought it was breaking for commercials, Pepper’s voice, without a trace of irony, called the U.S. players “chokin’ freakin’ dogs.”

I’m sure she was pleased to learn that it made all of the television and print reports, so it turns out I didn’t hallucinate it.

Of course, it brought to mind Lennon’s song, “Instant Karma.” Whenever I get handed one of those lessons I hope to God I learn from it fast, and I hope the same for Pepper. Instant Karma seems to carry a subtext of intention, at least to me. It’s as though God looks over and notices, “for heaven’s sake the guy still hasn’t got it,” and so then the message is a little bit louder. We’re supposed to learn.

Meanwhile, there’s the case of one Woody Austin, a decent, journeyman golf professional who’s made a good living on the P.G.A. tour for quite a while. Mr. Austin captured some attention recently by contending in some tournaments and by his remarks about Tiger Woods, of whom you have heard even if you are from Andromeda and do not know of this ‘golf’.

Mr. Woods is, to keep this brief, the best player of all-time and a very decent man. He’s been fortunate both in parentage and in the counsel he’s received from wise friends. Mr. Austin, for reasons known only to himself, has recently said a number of fairly stupid things about Mr. Woods, which we don’t need to go into here. Mr. Austin also mentioned that Woods could be easily beaten, although he mentioned it a little before he found himself paired with Woods at the final FedEx Cup event in Atlanta.

Many players who are paired with Woods in any day of an important tournament greet the opportunity with grace and smarts, but not all. Some go to pieces. The crowds are huge and they are not there to see you. They cheer lustily for Tiger. They are hushed when he rolls a putt and fidget when you do. It is obviously an experience that can unnerve a player, depending on the player.

In the case of Woody Austin it appears that he was not really learning much from this golden opportunity. His mouth was still running a little. And so Woody suddenly found himself with a test, a public test, of his character.

I don’t hate Woody and I’m sorry about what happened, but the man had a great chance to elevate himself and he turned it down.

Please bear with me here. I’m not trying to drag this out but I need to say something here to the non-golfers about the game of golf. It is special for many reasons, but one of these is the practice that violations of rules are to be called by those who commit them. Many sports accept, at least in practice, whatever anybody can get away with.

But in golf, it is understood that there are moments when something occurs, something which attaches a penalty to a given player, but which only that player really knows about. There is one such in Redford’s film, “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” where a ball is inadvertently moved by something the player has done. The movement has not really meant anything; it’s been by pure error; it has not assisted the person who initiated it in any respect. And no one – no one – has seen it. Except, of course, you.

It is a litmus test. Something like it happens to every golfer, probably more than once. In purely social games, or in circumstances which do not adhere strictly to every rule, it may have a different meaning. But in competition, in serious golf, professional or amateur, these rules are not flexible and are not meant to be. You must respect the game if you want the game to respect you.

And there was Woody Austin, pissed off at himself for missing another putt, striding across the green to knock in the remaining five-incher. He reached out with his putter and carelessly jabbed at the ball... and MISSED. Almost immediately, he recovered and tapped the ball in, but the first movement had been detected, not only by a very large number of people watching on television but also by the commentators, including Johnny Miller who was himself a great player in an earlier time.

Austin was asked. Did you write down a ‘6’, the number of strokes if the whiffed putt was recorded, or a ‘5’, Mr. Austin? He wrote down a ‘5’.

Later on, PGA officials reviewed the tapes and issued a statement in which they said the video was “inconclusive,” which meant this: we know you did it but we can’t prove it, not without a loss of blood. But we’re not issuing any acquittals, either.

The next day, Austin’s game went to hell.

Several months ago, there was an incident during a tournament in which a player’s caddy blurted out information on the tee box which might’ve been of utility to an opposing player. It was of course completely accidental since passing any information that might help an opponent would be crazy. No one outside the player and the two caddies heard it. It was something innocuous about the degrees of loft on a hybrid club, if that helps. It was in technical violation of a rule against “giving advice.”

Anyhow, the player called a penalty against himself. He didn’t hesitate. Not only that, he didn’t blame his caddy. We all make mistakes, he told the press afterwards.

The player fell behind on the final day. It appeared that he would lose the tournament by the margin of the penalty he’d called on himself. But something odd happened: on the final hole he sank a sensational putt to move into a playoff. And then he won.

I know, I know. Life is not that simple. Three examples, not anything near a valid sample. Yeah, true. However. Doesn’t it seem to you that this is so: that when we fuck up, especially when we fuck up and we ought to know better, the message will simply find another route for delivery. And sometimes, sometimes, if we actually get it, the world winks at us.

That’s been my experience.

Senator Larry Craig (R/Imbecile–Idaho) can explain how a simple misunderstanding in an airport men’s room got him into hot water: he has a very wide stance.

The arresting undercover cop, who apparently spent so many hours sitting in a toilet in the Minneapolis airport that he was able to finish reading the unabridged version of “My Pet Goat,” has a different opinion, and so did the district attorney who convinced Craig to plead guilty without advice of counsel.

Larry, Larry, Larry: you ought to know better. Isn’t the Golf Channel available in Idaho? Don’t you know that a wide stance inhibits your backswing?

The nation, naturally, is entranced by the drama. Will he resign or maybe not after all? Will Mitt Romney’s campaign deny that Larry was a co-chairman? Will Guiliani’s office issue a statement declaring that he’s never used a wide stance in his life?

True, the (Vice) President himself got drunk and shot a man in the face, but everyone has a right to carry firearms and get shit-faced in America. That’s what the War of Independence was all about. What a man does with his wanger, on the other hand: not in the Constitution.

Yes, I am aware of the startling discovery that many right-wing homophobes are themselves closet cases. Wow, that had never occurred to me!

So here we have an administration denying that it practices torture while issuing secret protocols for what it terms “enhanced interrogation techniques." We have a somnolent Congress comprised of Republican degenerates and Democratic cowards who have “taken impeachment off the table” in order to secure what they figure will be electoral victory in 2008. There are more dead and maimed every hour in Iraq, and we are titillated by Larry Craig.

Where is the leadership in America that has the simple courage to declare that sexual orientation and practices among consenting adults is no one’s business but their own, and certainly not the business of any government?

When a government is in trouble, there is always a growing disparity between public proclamations and personal acts, because to keep one’s job in such an environment requires an ever-deepening surrender to corruption and cynicism. Under these conditions, the culture itself needs crazier and crazier distractions.

My advice to Larry: take some time off, work on your wedge shots.

I pretty much gave up on television about thirty-five years ago. I mean, there are a few things – sports when it’s interesting, films without commercials – but mainstream TV, I’m sure we can all agree, is the sort of slop farmers feed to pigs when the subsidies have dried up and the table scraps have been gobbled by the goats.

So I haven’t seen many commercials. I credit this excellent circumstance with some part of whatever clarity of mind I’ve been able to retain in the face of the warping of the national soul. We have an American Religion now, which is: Consume, All Ye Who Would Be Saved.

Like you, I am a good American, or at least would aspire to be, and therefore partake of the great corporate bounty, the gadgets and hoo-haws On Sale Now, but I try to be selective. I can usually spot a hosing. I am not rushing out to grab my “Limited Edition” sandwich at Burger King, for example, because: a) a sandwich may be many things but it is not an edition; and b) there is nothing limited about it.

I am also unconvinced that the miracle drugs being peddled directly to ‘consumers’ – “ask your doctor about” – would fix any or all of the ailments I am told I have. I am not one of those impressed by the hilarious pitch for Progressive Insurance (the sucker sitting there awed by having been given internet rate comparisons with more costly carriers: “They actually gave me the rates of other companies. I was not expecting that. I mean, that kind of honesty...”). I do not believe that AT&T will “deliver (my) world” except to Homeland Security.

But I am stunned, finally, at the criminal audacity of one of the world’s most toxic enterprises. I speak now of Boeing.

Boeing, as you may know, manufactures airplanes. Not just any airplanes, mind you. Special airplanes. War machines for the Pentagon. The stuff of nightmares.

The Boeing television commercial is all over the airwaves. It begins with the swelling of strings, the music of romance and drama, and the fatherly voice intoning, “We know why we’re here...”

And why is Boeing here? As images flash across your retinas, people of color, smiling children in foreign lands, brave U.S. pilots, a Red Cross delivery, we hear other voices. “To stand behind all who serve...” “To deliver the technology vital to freedom...” “To ensure our forces are safer and stronger...” “To bring a message of hope to those in need...” “For the dreams of generations to come...”

I am not kidding you. And, “Around the world, the people of Boeing are working together... (dramatic pause)... to make a difference.”

Well, there’s the obvious. Among other things, a Boeing subsidiary operates as a CIA shell-company which provides the aircraft used in the government’s “rendition” program, “rendition,” being a euphemism for kidnapping people and flying them out of the country to locations where sadistic tortures may be carried out without messy legal questions or public awareness. Now, that’s what I call bringing a message of hope to those in need.

But there’s something else here, something more troubling to me than the bloody hypocrisy of some mega-corporation whose dealing in death is dressed-up like Miss Teenage America, complete with impressive hooters and a fresh coat of crimson lipstick. Much more troubling.

Boeing, you see, does not want you to hurry right down. It does not wish you to use its product for pennies a day. It does not invite you to bring your wife or husband, your pink slip and your checkbook. It does not require that you ask your doctor for a prescription. Boeing wants only the never-ending flow of your hard-earned tax dollars pouring into its coffers so that it may bring hope to those in need, namely its shareholders and stinking-rich executives.

And in order to secure this, it has launched an expensive media campaign to convince an alarmingly stupid public of its virtual sainthood. It protects us from our enemies, even the imaginary ones, and it gives selflessly to people even more fucked-over than you.

So this is the situation:

A major corporation launches a media blitz, using your money; it not only spends your money, it deducts the expense from its taxes. It needs to convince you to buy into a world in fear, a world threatened as never before, a world which can keep you safe if it spends all of its wealth on weaponry.

And if you do, you will also buy into draconian national policies. You will elect cretins who vote for horrors such as “The Patriot Act” without actually reading the bill first (this really happened, you know. The bill was given to Congress a couple of hours before a vote was demanded. Few members, if any, read it). You will not question your leaders. You will do as you are told. You will swallow whatever bilge they pump into your water supply and agree that it tastes just like champagne.

I know. You and I are immune. We protect what’s left of our minds. We don’t believe the peddlers and we don’t hunger after their products. We bought a Prius, maybe. We saw Al Gore’s movie. We voted for somebody other than Bush.

But we’re not immune. We live in a spritually unwell environment. It is not merely a political system which has been poisoned but a culture. To change that, to fight against that, we will have to do something more than improve our gas mileage, and also something more than write entries in webLogs and dispatch them across the net.