One of the wonders of the internet is the explosive speed at which interesting, crazy, important, weird, sick, brilliant, and boring information, data, propaganda, minutae, and bad jokes make it around the village.

There’s plenty of junk for everybody, step right this way.

For one thing, we now have decent access to information which the major corporate media can’t find the time for, what with the American culture’s need for gossip and depravity. Thus, it is possible, despite media blackouts, to learn details of global warming even before Al Gore made a film about it; to discover that the last two presidential elections have been electronically rigged in key states such as Ohio and Florida; to run across disturbing, unanswered questions about 9-11, CIA operations, and the wholesale destruction of government documents. On the whole, I regard this as a good thing.

We are also subject to widespread libel, the nutball brigade which spreads stories about presidential candidates, e.g. Barack Obama is a radical Muslim, schooled in terrorism, with a scheme to turn the U.S. into a Muslim country. In this category, we can find tales of Hillary Clinton’s lesbianism, black helicopters preparing the final United Nations’ assault on the nation, and a vast array of spurious, idiotic quotations ascribed to people who didn’t say them. Sometimes, I find this horse pucky amusing, provided the level of viciousness falls short of the Ann Coulter neo-Nazi standard.

But what seems to intrigue me most are those items which invite real thought about America, its recent history, and its political, cultural, and philosophical identity.

One such, which I’ve seen before, just arrived from an old friend and current denizen of the snows in Vermont. It’s a “flashback” on growing up in an earlier time. “Our Childhood in Black and White” seems to me a useful foundation for further exploration.

Here it is:

Black and White

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE .. and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option. even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

***

Well, yes, I remember that stuff, even the rabbit ears and the snow on the monochrome television screen. We did indeed have a lot of fun even without Nintendo, and we survived pretty well without being drugged-up for “attention deficit disorder,” a diagnosis which might also be termed “inability to fake interest in what older and more powerful people consider important.”

Nobody had to wear seat belts and nobody had to wear motorcycle helmets, and there were presumably a few more casualties, and I am sure the government has paid for studies proving it.

But now we are an increasingly regimented culture, each new rule or prohibition or “remedy” intended, or at least sold, as a safety measure. And when we take a look around – I mean a REAL look around – we’ve got to wonder why our national health and individual safety seems more compromised than ever before.

Maybe one of the building blocs of a paternalistic, FDR-era liberalism, the take-it-on-faith assumption that the government ought to be centralized and that it ought to make rules, has outlived its usefulness. Maybe we don’t need more rules but less.

My childhood and early adulthood took place in a period of enormous political and cultural upheaval. There was a struggle between two domestic forces over what sort of nation America was to become. You can see who won by the history of American politics over the last forty years.

One of the most important features of the civil rights struggle was the liberal belief that the federal system, the federal government, must enforce the meaning of the Constitution against barbaric practices which were shameful then and shameful beyond belief today. There is no question that federal intervention, beginning with Eisenhower’s use of federal troops in Little Rock, accelerated under John Kennedy’s brief time, saved lives and forced some decent change in the treatment of blacks in America. The Voting Rights Act, alone, with enforcement, changed the entire culture of some Southern states.

The problem is, my fellow Americans, that structural shifts in nation-states, designed for any very good reason at the time, inevitably bring the use of those shifted powers to bear in additional, unforseen, sometimes calamitous ways.

The federal government now, effectively, runs state elections; as such it is in a unique – and abusively powerful – position when it comes to matters such as honest vote counts, sanctity of the ballot, the right to vote itself, the ability to purge voting rolls, the use of undisclosed, privately-owned code in the voting itself. As we now have ample reason to know, federal control may mean fixed elections, just like it has in all of those other countries we Americans used to dismiss as ‘backward’ when it came to democracy.

Quick quiz: in thirty seconds, name three dissimilarities between modern day America and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Time’s up.

The Democrats campaigned against the Iraq war in 2006. They won a majority of seats in the House. The war continues. The Congress cannot or will not stop it.

Fifty years ago, liberals struggled to expand the powers of a “liberal” federal government in order to advance civil rights and the rights of unions to organize. These powers are now being used to cripple the states’ attempts at higher car emission standards, health care insurance, or medical marijuana. Reagan used the federal powers to crush the Air Traffic Controllers’ Union, thus signalling an increasingly successful assault against working people and the rights of people to unionize. Successive Presidents, from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush, have used increasingly dictatorial power to hammer down the political rights of the states, the municipalities, and the individual.

There have been conversations over the past few years with friends, what’s going on and what might be done about it, if anything. I can’t recall who used the term, it’s a sailing word, trim tab, maybe that’s two words. Trim tab. I’m told that that’s what shifts direction, and that that is what we’re all looking for, the trim tab on this fucking Titanic.

Maybe here’s where it lies: in a political movement which honors the rights of the individual and of the communities to care for themselves and each other. As the City of San Francisco is learning right now in its battles over power with the state and federal governments, that is where the next American Revolution will come from.

One town standing alone, other towns will see. Others will stand. The more who stand, the harder it will be to stop. It has nothing to do with the dying ideologies of “liberals” or “conservatives” because those appellations have no meaning now. Maybe it is about freedom. That sort of thing is appealing to Americans.

Happy New Year. As a crazy-assed American poet once said, take care of your health and get plenty of rest.

When I consider it, I know that I’ve seen this before, many times, I think, over what comes to forty-five years, give or take short interregnums – or is it interregni? Did we get that far in Latin? – this connection with something especially deep and inviting the realization or invention of remarkable truth.

I don’t know if one may peel this onion forever, but I do feel sure that it’s at least a very, very big onion.

We were not making love. I think in the past this kind of sight would visit that way, and perhaps that made it easier for me to dismiss. But not this time. Talking, that’s all, but very comfortable and relaxed with each other, familiar after a lot of years.

There have been times, looking at a woman’s face, in special circumstances or under special conditions, when I’ve seen her to be the most beautiful woman on earth. Her face is completely ageless, regardless of how many years she’s counted and regardless of how closely I’ve looked. I don’t regard these experiences as hallucinations. I regard them as a way of seeing.

I suspect that this experience is not unique to me, nor limited by gender. I suspect that men’s faces also morph, under the same special conditions, and become glistening archetypes, indistinguishable from a deeply-recognized perfection we might call beauty.

When we take something in, and it is beautiful, what are we seeing?

Are we seeing something which exists also on a different, likely higher level of reality? Are these the images from which we incarnate?

Maybe we really are beautiful, every last blinking, stunningly simple-minded one of us. It shows best when we are at peace, when we are happy, when for however long it lasts all of the silly preoccupations and material distractions of an otherwise ordinary day have melted away.

We are never beautiful because we have perfect features, but many people seem to think so. Could it be this way: we know the archetypes; we may suspect that we come from them; it’s just that we mistakenly believe that the way to get there is a mechanical process which smooths out wrinkles or reshapes a nose.

Think of the cliches about beauty, the Shakespearean lines and the Hallmark homilies, and some of them are certainly knocking at the door. “Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and that is all ye... need to know.”

The stuff we need to strip away is not flesh but the distractions and insecurities of day-to-day mortality. We’re already beautiful. There isn’t much we can do about it. If we want happiness, the trick is to let it shine as much as possible, even in the circus of our amazing lives.

Couple of weeks ago I had an instant message conversation with an old friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years and told her I was writing a webLog. “Bet it’s political,” she said.

Last week I got an email from my favorite aunt of all time, in Madison, where when they have winter they really have winter. I grew up there, and I loved it at the time, but I do not understand how they do it. As my aforementioned old friend might say, “it’s frikkin’ cold.” My aunt said she read my posts but not always. “You’re so angry all the time,” she said.

I’ve been thinking about these messages because the juxtaposition struck me as significant, and there comes a time even in the lives of slow learners like me – and I may qualify for at least a few votes for the Slow Learner Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio – when it is evident that there are sometimes meanings in juxtaposition.

Politics, yup; angry, no shit.

Well, as the bumper sticker goes, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. Thing is, anger is boring. I mean, it’s one thing to be fired with a sense of justice and go after toxic political situations when you’ve got a plan, and quite another when you have no frikkin’ idea what to do about anything.

There’s an interview/story with James Taylor in today’s Chronicle Datebook section. I still enjoy the Datebook, despite the fact that Neva Chonin, who wrote “Live! Rude! Girl!” no longer graces its pages with maybe the most insightful commentary to be found in a newspaper.

Taylor said that largely because of the song “Fire and Rain,” which was his first and maybe biggest commercial success, people think that he’s a fairly depressed man. He clearly isn’t.

People who write invariably show something of themselves. There’s always an intention. There’s always choice. Whatever is being written, there are worlds of things not being written. I’m not an angry politico, but from the long line of screeds I’ve polluted cyberspace with over the past ten months a reader might well get that impression.

Writers have choices. In my case, it sometimes feels easier to fire buckshot at Dick Cheney than to talk about the other things on my mind.

I started to write an entry a few months back about something scarier than politics and far more intimate. I not only couldn’t post it, I couldn’t finish it. It was about faces – women’s faces, actually, since that’s the form this comes to me in. I thought it would piss people off, what I had been thinking, and be misunderstood – not due to any failure in your perception, dear reader, but solely to my own failure to communicate. Those are both good reasons.

Not good enough, though.

I could continue to write about politics and how American culture is sliding off a cliff, but the fact is all I’m doing is dragging stories off the web, from such great sites as Buzzflash.com and TruthOut, and using them as a kind of Snide Remarks Springboard. Well, hell, you are certainly able to provide your own snide remarks, if you want any, and you’re perfectly capable of getting all of these stories yourselves since you are reading this.

The main task of this webLog as it careens into 2008 is to justify its existence. That can’t be done without a few risks. I’m sure I’ll have a few joyous runs at the political circus in the year ahead; after all, how can anyone resist? But maybe I can get away with some other sorts of observations. We’ll see.

So, have a good Christmas and remember to smile, wherever you are, even whoever you are. And as the great Scoop Nisker once famously signed-off on San Francisco insurrectionist radio, if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.

Next: Women’s Faces, Archetypes, and the Nature of Beauty. Might as well say it.

As promised at the end of a recent political harangue, this space would return shortly to more serious matters, such as the upcoming hanging of one Barry Bonds, who is very possibly the greatest player in baseball history.

Here at Lookingglass, we keep our promises. And so, on a gray, rainy day at the tail end of yet another bizarre year, we offer this to our vast readership: Barry and the Weasel, a Strange Tale of Drugs and Money.

Once upon a time, there was baseball, a genuinely American pastime, a unique frontier invention whose brilliant symmetry afforded the children of illegal Anglo immigrants an opportunity to test their physical and mental abilities, their skills and character, in mostly non-violent combat, on a playing field in the sunshine.

No less a giant than Walt Whitman praised its virtues and declared that baseball would restore our spirits and save the national soul, or something like that, I forget, but you can hear the real words spoken by the magnificent Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham”.

But in an imperfect world, even special things – perhaps especially special things – are seen by some not merely as matters of wonder but as matters of commerce and profit. And thus it came to be that baseball, along with every other object of interest in this whole bleeding country, was more and more about money.

Professional baseball, like the media, is a closed system. A limited number of franchises exist, and each is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars; as someone once observed about another subject, add it up and you’ve got real money. Thus, so long as people kept their mouths shut, the owners beheld a paradise.

But occasionally, there was trouble. For one thing, the players themselves were often a nuisance. After that troublemaker Curt Flood had broken the “Reserve Clause”, which bound players to their “owners” contractually for life, athletes were getting paid a lot of money and demanding more. They got unionized. This did trouble the mighty rulers, but not overly so, since there was a ton of money rolling in and times were good.

But then, sadly, came The Strike, wherein the players and their union leaders refused to perform without a contract and the owners, being kingly and mostly assholes, locked them out.

Eventually, after much acrimony and the observation that public interest as well as cash was sliding off the table, The Strike was settled, but not without harm. The public, the customer, was not as charmed as before. Attendance was down, even revenues were shrinking... What to do, what to do? cried the Lords of Baseball, and then, as two beacon lights from heaven, there came Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, pounding home runs at a pace which threatened to eclipse the all-time record, and, lo, the fans returned and revenue was piling up.

Again, life was good, but there was a small problem, the pea in the princess’ mattress: a lot of people inside the game, including the owners and the Commissioner, knew or suspected that McGuire and Sosa – and many others – had become pharmaceutically creative. The Rulers whispered this among themselves but spoke not, for they did not wish to interrupt the sweet music of the cascading cash registers. Players, meanwhile, seeing that the practice was being ignored by Selig and the princes, and knowing that a few needles in the ass might make the difference between a multi-million-dollar contract and a bus ride to Triple A (does anyone remember Marvin Benard?), got themselves prescriptions from doctors, vets or dentists, or found locker room connections.

It may well have been that Barry Bonds, as great a player as has graced the modern era, and perhaps any era, watched McGuire and Sosa and thought, “Fuck this, I can hit a hundred.” It may also have been that he was aging, susceptible to injuries, and willing to do anything to hasten his physical recovery. We don’t know. Neither do those punks at the Chronicle.

All rumblings from the working class were diverted or cleverly sunk. When Giants trainer Stan Conte complained to General Manager Brian Sabean that Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, might be peddling steroids in the clubhouse, Sabean hilariously suggested that Conte take it up with Anderson or Bonds himself, thus ensuring both that he had future deniability and that nothing would be done. When Giants assistant trainer Barney Nugent made what the Chronicle termed “an impassioned plea” to the Chief of Major League Security, as early as 2001, it went nowhere.

It gets worse, much, much worse. What has generally not been made clear to the public are the following items:

* steroids taken by most players, as alleged in the Mitchell Report, were neither banned by baseball nor illegal at the time they were used. Say it again: not banned, not against any laws.

* there is substantial evidence NOT found in the Mitchell Report which shows that the Rulers of baseball, as well as the players, knew about steroid use in the game as far back as 1988. Say it again: 19-fucking-88!

The entire subject is overflowing with hypocrites and liars. The truth is: everybody knew. Nobody did anything about it. For more than ten years.

Consider this:

There is a man named Larry Starr. Mr. Starr was a trainer for the Cincinnati Reds and Florida Marlins before getting out in 2002 to become a university assistant athletic director. Mr. Starr was interviewed by Mitchell four times, however his name does not appear in the lengthy Report.

Starr told Mitchell the following:

“I have notes from the Winter Meetings, where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and the team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We’ve got a problem here if we don’t do something about it.’ This was in 1988.”

Do not hold your breath waiting for some member of a congressional committee to ask the former Senator, Mitchell, why Starr’s name and his claims are nowhere to be found. The reason is obvious. The owners are far too lofty, far too important, far too well-shielded, and far too Caucasian to get into much trouble over this. Nail a few players, including a big name or two; prosecute Bonds, whom the media hates anyhow. Then we can all get back to the true meaning of the game, which is how many bucks can be squeezed out of the public using every marketing gimmick imaginable.

Ignore the self-serving horseshit about “I did it in order to not let my teammates down,” the actual reason was more often likely the Marvin Benard fairytale. Benard was a journeyman outfielder. His alleged use of these drugs coincided with one wonderful season. The wonderful season led directly to a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract. The drugs were not then banned, nor were they illegal if prescribed by someone with a license to do so. Baseball players are human. They have limited, injury-endangered careers. Baseball is a highly-competitive profession. Few make it to the top; few last very long. Why not cash in? And, so, it came to pass that the players were tempted.

Fifteen years ago, with drug rumors already circulating in board rooms and locker rooms, the baseball owners forced their Commissioner, Fay Vincent, to quit. He was evidently too independent, not compliant enough to their wishes. They would find a replacement. Instead, their “interim” selection, the man who was to fill the role on a temporary basis – and who had a sensational conflict of interest in that he was also the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers franchise – turned out to be permanent. Thus, we have Commissioner Bud Selig, who is a weasel.

It is Selig’s ugly face you will find when you Google “hypocrite”.

This is the guy who talks about the “sanctity” of baseball, while simultaneously ensuring that World Series games will be played in November, often in freezing conditions, and always at night to accomodate television. It is Selig who forced the break-up of the Montreal franchise and its relocation to Washington, D.C., not to mention engineering several deals in which other franchises were swapped as though they were trading cards.

The Mitchell Report is lengthy and full of names. I haven’t read it and don’t intend to. From press accounts, it seems that most of the names were derived from a small number of sources, that nearly all players contacted refused to speak with investigators, that nearly all of the naming involves hearsay allegations, and that the Commissioner’s blatant negligence and hypocrisy on the issue is totally ignored. Indeed, we’re already hearing Selig talk of punishing those responsible, sounding eerily like Richard Nixon going after the Watergate burglars.

Selig, the protector of the game, has proposed selling advertising space on players’ uniforms. I am not making this up. Well, hell, I guess he thinks it’s fucking NASCAR.

There is a great film written and directed by John Sayles, called “Eight Men Out.” It is about the “Black Sox Scandal” when several players on the heavily-favored Chicago White Sox were bribed by gamblers to throw the World Series. At least two innocent players – innocent of throwing games but aware of the fix – were banned from baseball for life, including Joe Jackson, arguably the greatest player not in the Hall of Fame. The owners, especially the Sox owner, Comiskey, got a free pass from newly-appointed Commissioner Kenesaw Landis.

As Vonnegut is probably still saying, somewhere, “and so it goes...”

I know, I know, in the fast-moving, cell-phone-welded-to-one’s-ear, multi-tasking modern universe, pretty much everything is old news in a hurry. Things happen, we stare, they fade, we stare at something else. As Adam Duritz has observed, that can’t be what a life is for, but never mind.

This is not about life in general, and certainly not about yours or mine. I don’t know much about yours, naturally, being that the readership for this webLog has grown to include people I have not actually met – including employees of our very own government, but that’s a subject for another day.

This is about Katrina. You remember. Think.

That’s right, the hurricane, couple of years ago, wiped out New Orleans. There was a flurry of concern, various organizations formed to help out, a lot of name-calling, and our Congress lurching awake long enough to send a few bucks. You remember, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

In the aftermath, there’s been some deeply evil shit going on.

For one thing, the public school system has been systematically taken apart to the extent that it actually took a lawsuit to force the government to retain at least a single public school. The poor, you may not be surprised to learn, got totally screwed. There were a few cries of outrage over the internet, several pointing out that the feds were using the tragedy to experiment with privatizing public education.

Now the federal government, your government, the one which steals your labor in the form of the income tax, is on the verge of wiping out public housing. You may not know about this. You can find considerable discussion of this on TruthOut for December 3rd, and via Buzznet, if you’re interested.

Basically, it comes down to this. The flood destroyed quite a number of affordable rental units in the city. FEMA, whose stunning malfeasance, some of it arguably criminal, cost human lives in the immediate aftermath, is currently forcing out the remaining 50,000 victims living in trailers. And HUD, which subsidizes public housing, is about to send “teams of bulldozers” to demolish 4,600 units and replace them with 744 units. This 82% reduction will cost you and me, the taxpayers, $762 million.

There are currently 12,000 homeless people who have set up small tents across from City Hall and under a nearby freeway overpass.

You do know that one of the largest, no-bid contracts let by the government “to rebuild New Orleans” was to Halliburton, don’t you?

There is really no other way to look at it. Our government is engaged in a systematic exploitation of the Katrina tragedy designed to enrich its crooked friends, experiment with depriving the poor of the most basic of services, and find out whether the public cares.

Other than John Edwards, I doubt that any major presidential candidate is even talking about the misery in New Orleans. Most Democrats seem to have adopted the lead of people like Nancy Pelosi, who figure to let these things continue because they’ll make great campaign issues next year.

Along with impeachment of Bush and Cheney for the commission of felonies, I guess Pelosi and the Dems have “taken” Katrina “off the table.” Where will we find the leaders who will speak for those who have no one to speak for them? When will we as a people remember those qualities that have always been the best of America?

If the bulldozers do their work on schedule, the government will have made thousands more people homeless in time for Christmas.