News From A Parallel World

“When there’s blood in the streets, buy property.” So says Jodie Foster to Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s heist thriller “Inside Man.”

Now that there’s blood in the streets of America –– metaphoric, perhaps, in most cases, but ugly nonetheless –– the buyers are hitting the bricks. There’s money to be made out of the suffering of others and this is a great time for it.

Ran into a friend in United Market this afternoon, a Marin County realtor who’s seeing the carnage up close. “Everybody’s trying to hang on,” she said, “but there are sharks in the water.”

Have you noticed that’s how it always works? The guys with the assets, or with ready access to yours, wait for the bottom. Often, they’ve had a hand in creating the mess to begin with, e.g. the federal reserve bank and its owners, but that’s a detail. The important thing is that they can capitalize on the misery or loss of others; that, let’s face it, is the main engine of capitalism.

Along with the inherent nature of wealth and privilege –– that it multiplies itself –– is the ability to cash in on cycles of boom-and-bust. And although some among us wish not to know it, that is one of the main ingredients in monetary cycles in the first place.

For example, the stock market. The cover story is that the market reflects success and failure in commercial enterprises, that one ‘invests’ in this –– bets on the winners and losers –– and hopes thereby to grow one’s own wealth. Certainly, those with inside knowledge, I’m talking real inside knowledge, not the kind they made an ‘example’ of with Martha but the kind where you have the information because you manipulated it in the first place, those guys win. When you buy stocks, you’re hoping you can ride a trend better than the average schmuck. Maybe you can. But most investors are average schmucks, and they will surely lose when the gang at the top decides to rock the market.

The federal reserve bank, which is NOT, repeat not a governmental body, and which is in fact far more powerful than the government when it comes to money and the economy, helped engineer the greatest theft in world history over the past year, and nobody is going to prison. They are going to resorts in limos on the inflated ‘retention bonuses’ they paid to themselves and using the trillions extorted from the people to ‘consolidate’, i.e. buy up weaker enterprises.

And so Bank of America, Citigroup, and Chase are taking over Wachovia and Washington Mutual, and other lesser players with the money delivered to them without serious national debate by a Congress at once corrupt and stupid. It was an ‘emergency’, we were told by everyone, from Bush to Obama, and that the trillions would be used to loosen-up credit and get the economy moving. Only the money isn’t being used that way and there’s nothing the suckers can do about it now.

What we are witnessing, not to mention being run over by, is a calamity artificially-induced for the purposes of monopoly.

Don’t believe me? Try answering a few questions.

Why would the Congress pass the bailout legislation without actually reading it? As with the ‘Patriot Act’, it ran to thousands of pages and was not available to members of Congress, let alone the media, until within an hour of the vote.

Why is everything a bait-and-switch situation? As with the invasion of Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan), the ‘explanation’, the rationale, changed wildly after the fact.

Why is no one accountable? As with the criminal wiretapping of millions of telephones, the interception of e-mails (both of which are ongoing under Barack Obama), and the illegal detention and torture of innocent people, we are told to ‘turn the page’ on the prosecution of perpetrators.

These are not great riddles, elusive of understanding. They are merely dangerous questions. We can solve them ourselves –– substantial information and documentation is available online; check out sites such as thirdworldtraveler.com or brasschecktv –– or continue to ignore them. We have such a choice. But either way we cannot be easy of heart and mind.

To pursue the deeper truths of America and how it is governed, and by whom, is to rattle our own crockery. Yet, to go the other way is to condemn ourselves to a nightmare become real, an Orwellian world in which everything we believe is palpably false. Such is our circumstance, the inevitable result of a citizenry which has forgotten ‘eternal vigilance’.

The war on drugs, like the war on terror, is a systemic invention necessary for the accumulation of wealth and power. It’s therefore phony. And whatever you’ve come to believe about it is probably corrupted because there’s no way to get at the truth.

It’s an old subject, usually discussed along ideological lines. That is, the left, many of whose members smoke pot, want to legalize its favorite drugs; the right, many of whose children smoke pot, want to jail everybody responsible.

The government, meanwhile, carries on a ‘war’, which is the politically-safe thing to do, even if it’s a fraud. Government and fraud, two things which go together like ham and eggs.

The fraud part is: they’re not really trying to stop the drug trafficking. I know, I know, all that money, the DEA, the FOX News specials, the santimonious speeches. All horseshit. Sorry.

For too many years to count, Mexico’s government was controlled by a single party, and that party was on terms with the growers and dealers. Everyone understood that the conversion of this particular cash crop to real cash was a deal too lucrative to mess with, especially if the boys at the top were getting their cut.

The U.S. government has known this for a long time, and you can bet every President knew it, too. And so presidents from FDR to Barack Obama have paid homage to the ‘drug war’ while countenancing its failure.

It’s just one of those dirty little secrets that the pols know and nobody talks about. But the fact is that if the DEA and border patrol folks stopped drug trafficking at the Mexico/U.S. line, the economy of Mexico would collapse. First cousin to this is the traffic in illegal immigrants. Although there is some effort on the part of federal cops to catch and expel them, most of the North American power structure needs the present situation.

Not only do illegals help suppress wages, thus enriching businesses, they compete for low-end jobs, thus increasing the rate of military enlistment, which is a hard sell these days due to crazy wars and the probability that a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq will be maimed (an estimated 40,000 so far). And illegals send a lot of cash back home. That is also a critical value, for the U.S., having created massive dislocation and unemployment in Mexico via NAFTA, cannot afford to have a revolution just south of Arizona.

In one of the most revealing comments ever offered by a U.S. President, Richard Nixon once said that “the American people are like the children of the family...”

It was revealing not because it exposed Nixon’s attitude but because it reflected the attitude held by just about everyone in Washington, including the leaders of both major parties. And it helps explain how this country, in the midst of banking and insurance scandals and wholesale thievery, can print enormous sums of money and then hand it over to the worst perpetrators. It’s like giving bank robbers zero-interest loans.

What the pols all know and fail to share with the rest of us is this: they have secrets about America, about who runs it and how decisions are made, and the actual power of a legislature or, indeed, a President, is severely circumscribed by the reality the rest of us are not to be trusted with.

That’s why it makes no sense, the junk they hand us. There’s the reality of it, what the ‘grown-ups’ are so sophisticated about, and the fantasy we’re given because we’re just ‘children’ in America’s family.

When examined, the cover stories on pretty much everything fall apart, but we don’t examine them. We’re aided in our ignorance by the unending circus of American culture, the spinning balls and colored beads, the ‘entertainment’ and the officially-sanctioned drugs. We are in fact what Bill Hicks called the puppet people. History has shown that we can be convinced of anything.

We are not a family. We are of course the most powerful empire the world has ever known, and we act like it. The U.S. has troops in 177 countries around the world. Why? It has today the greatest disparity between rich and poor in its history. Why? Its system of public education no longer teaches critical thinking. Its criminal justice system encarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other nation. Its monetary system is an operation presided over by the Federal Reserve, which is a private board of directors comprised of the largest banks.

Why? Most of us don’t ask. We don’t want to know. We are complicit in our habits and docile in our politics. We know the government lies to us, yet we believe what it says.

The entire health care ‘debate’ has been about trivialities and invented ‘issues’. The only serious way to fix health care is a universal, single-payer system, yet this was ‘taken off the table’ by the President right from the start. We do not hear intelligent discourse from the pols or in the media about the nature of the health insurance industry and whether it makes any sense to have one.

The health insurance industry is, of course, a protection racket. Thanks to the trumpeted ‘health care reform’ about to be adopted, the government has turned it into an extortion operation.

An estimated 50 million Americans without access to health insurance, most of them unable to afford it. The government’s answer is to require them to buy insurance.

I don’t have any answers. I have some hope, however.

My hope is based on two things. One is the internet.

It is frequently complained of that we can’t rely on the information flying through cyberspace. It is ‘unreliable’. I am happy about this. When people can no longer trust what they read and hear, they are presented with the chance to use their noodles for something beyond keeping their ears apart. Whether we do so, and then act on what we learn, or slip deeper into intellectual coma, that’s yet to be decided. But there’s a chance, and that leads me to the second thing:

There’s a new generation out here which is in many ways smarter and hipper than any which has preceded it. Despite the never-ending bombardment of junk, a lot of kids have evolved ways of filtering which facilitate rather than impede understanding. I know some of them and they are not happy about what they’re seeing. That makes them the direct lineal descendents of another generation which also didn’t buy –– for a time, at least –– the lies peddled by a corrupt cultural structure.

I offer this small fragment of optimism in the face of the deep disappointment I and many others already feel about Barack Obama. I don’t need to recite the litany of Bush policies continued and even expanded under the new President. Change, my ass.

Yet, there are always people. You know, people. Real people. You, me, our friends and families, the folks we know or run across in the world. Yes, there are some shits, no question. There’s a guy at WestAmerica Bank in Marin County, USA, for example, who is truly a flaming asshole. But most people I know are quite different: they are generally honest, caring, honorable folks. They try to do the right thing, they try to learn, help one another, appreciate life, even love. That’s pretty cool.

Readers of this blog have gotten a break recently because my computer and its keyboard got watered, and I haven’t been able to write anything without unrequisitioned letters popping up in the text, a lot of ‘a’s and ‘q’s for some reason. I tried a couple of cures but they did not work. So I brought the thing in to the local mac store –– not the big Apple thing at the mall but the guys in a storefront in town –– and resigned myself to bad news.

I can’t afford a new mac; I can’t afford not to have one. The guy at the mac place at first said it’d be three days, diagnostic tests, he couldn’t tell. Then he softened a little, checking the thing out. Not enough memory left for yesterday’s box score. He advised replacing the original G4 chip with a one gig. Suddenly, the text flew from the keyboard.

Turned out the mac guy had a keyboard he could scavenge from another machine. He cleaned it, popped it in, no charge.

No charge. No charge for a customer who clearly didn’t have a clue, was somewhat desperate, and willing to pay whatever the going rate just to get this thing back and operable. No charge (except for the memory) and no waiting three days.

Couple of weeks ago, a guy in San Francisco thought about how people are going hungry more these days and how that bothered him. He decided to feed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to those who could really use them. And he put the notion on facebook. Now there are groups of people not only in San Francisco but in Austin, Texas, and on the east coast, and in London doing the same thing.

Obama wasn’t the dream. The dream was the dream, and it still is. It’s the same dream a lot of us have carried for a long time, keeping that flame lit through some hard fucking times, and it doesn’t belong to Obama, it belongs to me. Anyway, Obama himself doesn’t want it. Remember what he said? We are the people we’ve been waiting for. We. You and me. The faces in the mirrors. Us.

We can argue, and I can write these vitriolic screeds on my blog to air-out my brain and release a little pent-up anger, but whatever the ‘real’ state of things, bankers or no bankers, insurance whores or no members of congress, it’s always been up to us.

Dear Barack:

I feel as though I can call you Barack since we’ve been associated on a great, successful political campaign, and together we found our way through cynicism, doubt, racism, and apathy. I should add that for me, not having my candidate shot was an unexpected bonus.

I’m writing to you because I think you may be overlooking something in the trouble you’ve run into trying to arrange health care for the forty-five million who can’t presently afford it.

Of course, the legislation you are apparently willing to sign these days actually won’t do much to help the poor; in fact, by requiring that everybody buy insurance from the corporate thugs who are already peddling it, it mostly imposes more burdens on those least able to support themselves right now.

I mean no disrespect, Mister President, but what the fuck happened here?

I do believe that you’re a nice guy. I think you’re really smart. Those are welcome qualities in a chief executive, and we haven’t had the two in one President since Jimmy Carter, and look what they did to him.

Smart isn’t enough. Check the histories of recent U.S. Presidents. Never mind that Lincoln obsession thing Doris Kearns Goodwin cooked-up and you bought into. This isn’t 1860 and you’re not Abe. Abe came to Washington before the bankers owned everything and before a massive secret police apparatus , as these things inevitably will, turned on its creator. Also, Abe did not have good bone structure.

Look at FDR and Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon... those guys. It’s instructive.

Which of those guys changed the country and how did they do it? FDR had a huge majority and a country willing to be led; he also had some friends who knew where the bodies were buried. Still, FDR only managed to survive because General Smedley Butler refused to join in the conspiracy to depose him.

The President who stands out is, of course, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Lyndon was a son of a bitch, it’s true. That helped some. He also had some decent Senators, including a majority leader who didn’t need GPS to find his own ass. There were honorable people on both sides of the aisle in both houses, something which I suppose seems like a dream to those too young to remember.

Nonetheless, in order to get Medicare passed, and the Voting Rights Bill, and Head Start and the other ambitious ‘Great Society’ programs, Lyndon was known to knock heads together. The Burton brothers, one of whom was the Democratic House whip at the time, tell the story of the President kicking the Speaker of the House in the shins –– literally –– to make his point, and he was not above political blackmail and naked threats about people’s careers, not to mention whatever treasures he got out of the FBI wiretaps Edgar Hoover shared with him.

Johnson was a bastard. But he got the thing done. Other things he may have engaged in, including the worst felonies one can commit, are not the point here. It is not necessary to have anybody killed. But it’s necessary on the national stage to run people over if you have to.

Stop playing nice, Barack. It was a smart approach to the ‘black guy running for President’ thing. It nearly disarmed half the racists. But this is no longer a campaign thing; it is a President thing. It’s running the country, not running for office. And if you really want to work some change we can believe in, you will have to start kicking some ass.

You can’t make a deal with the insurance corporations. They are half of the problem. It’s about money. They will do anything not to have to lose any of it. They’ve paid off most of Congress and nearly all of the mainstream media, and they’ve stirred-up the most shameless horseshit since the red-baiting of the 1950s.

If you want to change this rotten system, then go after them. Expose the liars. Tell those Senators like Baucus and Nelson to back universal care or expect the party to starve them for re-election cash. That ought to get their attention, the weasels. You don’t need the photos and the hooker affidavits. Just mention their liquor store bills and their tax returns.

Dirty politics? It’s called hardball. Nothing of substance has ever been enacted in Washington, D.C., without it. Lots of damage has been done in its absence, c.f. James Earl Carter, previously mentioned.

As for the insurance hustlers, who says that medical care has to be solely a private endeavor? If they want to operate in competition, let them. Or quit. We won’t miss them.

You’re not Abe Lincoln, my friend. You’re not John Quincy Adams or JFK. No, you’re not LBJ, thank God. You’re the President. You’ve got a little over three years left on a first term. You have a majority in both houses and you won election by landslide.

So, stop flirting and get serious. If you lose, we all lose, and we can’t afford to.

Look. We’re on the side of warlords, drug dealers, and crazies in Afghanistan. Explain to me again how it’s not like Viet Nam in 1964. We’re running airstrikes against civilians pretty much every day, and the only dispute which reaches the media is the finger-pointing over ‘mistakes’ when the bodies really start piling up.

On Friday, September 4th, U.S. fighter jets attacked about 120 villagers who had gathered to siphon petrol from a couple of stranded tanker trucks the Taliban had stolen in the northern province of Kunduz. More than seventy were killed. The dead were not “enemy combatants”, “militants”, “insurgents”, or any of the other charged euphemisms the Fatherland media uses to deflect a victim’s humanity. They were just ordinary people caught in a war zone.

To the top U.S. (and NATO) commander, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, this was a public relations problem. Smith blamed German troops for letting too many hours pass before visiting the bombing strike. He said that it was important to “hold the ground” after a strike and “determine what happened before the enemy comes out with its own version of events,” according to an AP article out of Kabul.

I’ve got my own version of events, and I haven’t even seen the carnage on YouTube yet.

Meanwhile, the Afghani government we’re backing, led by Hamid Karzai, is in the process of blatantly stealing the presidential election. The votes have not yet all been counted, we’ve got about 80%, according to press accounts, and Karzai “leads” with 49% to his nearest rival’s 32%.

I say stealing because, well, here’s part of the New York Times story:

“Afghan election workers loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted yet still registered hundreds of thousands of ballots toward the president’s re-election, according to senior western and Afghan officials here.” Wow, sounds worse than Ohio.

“The fake polling centers, as many as 800 in all, existed only on paper, said a senior western diplomat on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the election results. But local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Karzai in the election last month came from each of these places. ...Besides creating the fake sites, Karzai supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Karzai, the officials said.”

In some provinces, again according to anonymous Western sources, the number of ballots reported in favor of Karzai exceeded the number of people who actually voted by a factor of 10. ‘We are talking about orders of magnitude,’ the senior Western diplomat said.”

President Obama has deployed more than 68,000 more troops to Afghanistan, probably on advice from Gates and the generals. Evidently, that will not be enough.

As Lyndon Johnson escalated in Viet Nam, he raised the American troop presence from 15,500 to over half a million. Each new deployment was announced with promises that thye sacrifices were ‘worth it’ and that ‘victory’ was near. There were coups and counter-coups, and there were ‘mistakes’ and atrocities. And in the end, the United States wasted billions of dollars for nothing, lost fifty-five thousand young soldiers for nothing, killed a million or more Vietnamese for nothing, poisoned the landscape, wrecked families and ecosystems, all for nothing.

Well, not quite for nothing. The U.S. paid for construction of enormous air and coastal facilities, dredging Cam Ranh Bay. Brown and Root of Houston, the lineal precursor to Halliburton, made a great deal of money. U.S. weapons manufacturers got richer. The CIA established a source of untraceable funds through the heroin trade, much of it processed at a converted Pepsi-Cola plant in Vientiene, Laos, and flown on Air America planes.

Last year, despite the international financial meltdown, the U.S. and U.S.-based corporations sold a record amount of weaponry to the rest of the world, and the American ‘share’ of the market is now about 70%. In second place? Italy at about 5%. We are unquestionably the greatest producers and users of weapons of mass destruction in world history.

The U.S. is at war right now against Afghanistan and Pakistan –– what else would you call it when thousands of innocents are being killed by our bombs? –– but we have armed forces stationed in one hundred seventy-seven countries.

177 countries. I didn’t know there were that many.

Ask yourself what for.

To fight ‘terrorism’?

As a result of the events of September 11, 2001, the American people gave the government and its security apparatus authority to ignore the United States Constitution. In its wake came the Orwellian “Patriot Act”, adopted by Congress without even reading it. The President has the power now to arrest you and hold you indefinitely without a lawyer and without charges being brought against you. The spy agencies have the power to intercept your mail, your phone calls, and your e-mail, and you have no legal recourse.

The Obama presidency has continued the Bush policies on these deeply dangerous programs and has maintained in federal court that it need not disclose whether groups or persons have been illegally wiretapped. Guantanamo is still open. The American Red Cross estimates that 75% of the people still held prisoner are innocent of any crime.

Afghanistan’s civil war has complex and tangled roots. There are no ‘good guys’ here. Once we backed and helped arm the Taliban. Now we back and arm the warlords and watch the Karzai regime blatantly steal an election. This cannot end well.

The college football season has begun. I know this because a player for Oregon has been thrown off his team for cold-cocking a player from, I think, Boise State following the latter’s narrow victory in the opener.

I’ve seen the video, players from both teams milling around, some with helmets off. The Boise State player, one Byron Hout, grabbed the Oregon player, star running back LeGarrette Blount, and appeared to follow a few brief remarks with a smirk just before Bount knocked him on his ass. It was a really terrific punch, a right cross, I think it was. Boom!

According to the AP story, it happened like this:

“Celebrating the victory on the Broncos’ trademark blue turf, Hout yelled in Blount’s face and tapped him on the shoulder pad. Before Boise State coach Chris Petersen could pull Hout away, Blount landed a right to Hout’s jaw, knocking him to his knees.”

Perhaps Hout, a defensive end, was reminding Blount that Boise had held him to minus-five yards on eight carries, rubbing it in a little. Perhaps Blount, his pride wounded and now having to endure some smart-ass lines from that burr-head cracker, just snapped. Maybe it was playing on blue (!!!) turf. It adds up.

Blount will never play for Oregon, or probably anyone, again. Hout will get a good “talking-to”. Violence is not acceptable from football players once the whistle blows. Before that, take the fucker’s head right off, you get featured on one of those “Play of the week” videos.

Look, it’s the nature of the endeavor. High-stakes football, as in war, requires a serious course of desensitization. Most people do not easily jump at the chance to decaptitate someone; if they’re going to do the program any good, that fussiness has to be excized. In boot camps and training camps, the mental object is the same: bring the recruit past the point where he or she has any reluctance to inflict pain, injury, and even, in the military, death.

Certainly we all know this. We’ve got a highly-militarized society, and that came about because we’ve been sold on the regrettable necessity for official violence. Therefore, when a 72-year-old motorist in Florida is hit with 20,000 volt taser shocks because she objected, verbally, to a traffic stop, we shake our heads but we move on.

Move on. Nothing to look at here.

Right now one of the major under-reported scandals involves the staggering suicide rate among Iraqi war veterans; an even bigger scandal: returning vets who kill others, including their own spouses or families.

The reason that nobody wants to talk about it is that the implications are evident. Teach millions of young people to objectify and assault, and in the case of the military, to kill, and you’ve got to figure some of them will keep right on going.

Violence may be a tactic for military commanders, politicians, and football coaches, but it’s not something human beings can turn on and off like an electrical switch. Therefore, recruits have to be brainwashed. It is necessary that this be so; you cannot run an army if your troops hesitate in combat situations.

Military psy-ops have long realized that most people have ‘triggers’ which can elicit violence, and various programs employing psychological testing have been used to locate ‘special’ people who are both unusually agreeable to inflicting pain and unusually susceptible to modes of programming.

The disclosure of some of the tortures engaged in by American forces in the fake “war on terror” was accompanied by the careful explanation that these were the acts of rogue personnel. Indeed, soldiers have been prosecuted. Yet the programs which make torture possible are intentionally devised by military and political planners, and the administration of torture is a conscious policy.

It’s a long way from a football program at a major university to Guantanamo and the other hellholes America now operates around the world, yet there is a formulative link.

What we have elevated as important in the U.S., what has come to represent ‘success’, has necessarily created a culture of violence and predation. We are seeing its effects in every area of our lives, from the great bank heist to drug wars in our streets. We are seeing it in hate radio and in staged or incited incidents at supposed town hall meetings on health care.

LeGarrette Blount is one guy, a black running back from Mississippi playing at Oregon, who snapped, not without some provocation. But these days most of the nails are not being pounded down.

It is passing curious that quite recently another football sucker punch, one that sent the victim to the hospital, has been swept under the carpet by mutual consent among the perpetrator, the victim, the police, the city powers-that-be in Oakland, and for that matter the state authorities. The head coach of the Raiders, white, incidentally, caved-in the face of an assistant coach; witnesses told about it. But nobody’s talking now. It’s an “internal” matter.

If you’re important, it’s an internal matter. Criminal outfits such as Bear Stearns handle their own problems, no need for the government to bother. If you did what Citibank executives did, you’d be in prison.

The culture of violence never helps the poor. It never helps anybody on the lower end of the scale because violence is used most effectively by those with the wherewithal to command it and the juice to get away with it. That ain’t you. It’s Monsanto and Chevron, and Boeing, and whoever hires Blackwater Security, which has changed its name to “xe”, presumably because the old name was too closely associated with murder.

The culture of violence doesn’t help most people. It’s pervasive now because it has paid off so far. We’ve let it happen, maybe even invited it. We are now inured ourselves to the infliction of pain, boot camp recruits by proxy. Cops taser an old woman in her car, we notice but are moved only for an instant. The old woman, we didn’t know her. What’s on television tonight?

Like you, probably, I’ve got this enormous email address book. Not like you, probably, I have developed the habit of passing on to those I regard as like-minded others various bits and pieces of internet stuff –– articles, cartoons, references.

The lucky recipients are mostly close friends and political types. I don’t send to clients. My clients already have enough to worry about.

Every once in a while I strike a nerve. Not the good kind. The kind where someone goes batshit. This I truly regret but, as Presidents like to say, “mistakes have been made.”

Like you, probably, I have opinions. Not like you, probably, I am impelled by whatever curse is attached to it to express these opinions as forcefully as I can manage. Florid imagery, for example: not really necessary. But one should have fun with words. All children enjoy words until they’re told to shut up. I was never told. Blame my folks.

So I write this blog, and even call it that now, though the practice is entitled to more elegance, or at least should strive toward it. I write about things that interest me. Yippee! You can drop your subscription but you can’t fire me. You can yawn and keep silent. You can post comments (but I can erase them if I want to, just like The New York Fugging Times).

But a lot of stuff doesn’t make it to the blog. Stories in the net about pot studies, or U.S. policies and practices in Afghanistan, or off-the-wall curiosities in fringe physics, these get passed on to relatively small numbers of friends and acquaintances via email.

Once in a while, someone fires back.

Yesterday, I distributed to a handful of lucky readers the latest cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, which I get to see at Salon.com. My opinion of Mr. Tomorrow in general is that someday he ought to receive a presidential freedom medal, or whatever that thing is that they gave Frank Sinatra.

Among the traits I value in Mr. Tomorrow is this: he does not blink.

Yesterday, a non-blinking Tomorrow evicerated the Obama administration’s dismissal of any inquiry into war crimes (ours), which happen to include at least a hundred captives who appear to have been murdered while in custody (International Red Cross), and he indicated his opinion that we endorse what we permit and that in failing to hold responsible the monsters who did these things we become monsters ourselves.

Then he channeled the late Bill Hicks.

Bill Hicks, for the uninitiated, died young, in 1993, but while he was dangerous while he lasted. Hicks, like Tomorrow, was not shy about hellish truths, especially when people didn’t want to hear them. He got plenty of abuse. “You’re goin’ to Hell, boy!” the crowd shouted in Tulsa. “I’m already in Oklahoma,” he said. “I thought you were going to tell me my return ticket was cancelled.”

Hicks talked about the sort of things most of us would prefer to ignore, then followed it with: “Go back to bed, America. Everything is under control. Here’s a hundred episodes of ‘American Gladiator’...”

We are in love with our distractions. They protect us from having to confront what’s going on in our country. Besides, as John Kaye observed forty years ago:

“there’s nothing you and I can do, you and I are only two; what’s right or wrong it’s hard to say, forget about it for today, just stick our heads into the sand, pretend that all is grand, and hope that everything turns out okay...”

So I forwarded the Tomorrow cartoon and got this by reply mail:

“...I just don't know what message you are trying to send with this crap.  I know you always have to buck the system . . . is that just any system?  You know what    . . . . maybe I'm just too "trying to make my life work while at the same time trying to help where I can and realizing that I'm not fucking god!.”

Interesting. This particular friend is one of the best, most generous people I’ve ever known, someone who thinks of others and acts on it. But the letter’s tone was of anger. The writer was taking this very personally. But why?

If we have reached a level of consciousness beyond that of, say, the ordinary garden slug, we are aware that our lives are governed to an incomfortable extent by systems –– social systems, political systems, economic systems, and so forth.

It should be evident that the system in America is barely hanging on. It’s fucked-up even more than usual. Some folks, what the Greeks would have called ‘citizens’, believe that it is an obligation of free people to something about it, especially when they’ve been given the favors of a good life. I buck the system: that’s my job.

We all feel limitations. We all at some point shuffle off this mortal coil, which is about as limiting as you can get.

Right now in America there are widening gaps –– between what we see in the streets and what we’re told, and between what we’re told and what we sense is the truth. America’s afraid of the mirrors these days.

On a deep level, we’ve reached a moment of disillusionment even “American Idol” can’t quite fix. A society in decline contains numerous signposts, and these are visible, and we don’t know what to do about it.

The worst is the helpless ambivalence of the Obama administration in the face of brute force.

We were counting on his election, counting on it as though it was the rescue ship come for the survivors of the past forty years.

Watching Obama now, and what is being done to him by forces beyond his control, is a painful exercise. He has taken what he thought would be the likeliest path to fixing the disaster of health care in America, and he’s going to lose. The only real chance for actual reform, universal, single-payer care, was abandoned at the start; what remained, weak though it was, is being picked apart by the whores in Congress on instructions from their corporate sponsors. The media is useless, as usual.

Health care is the least of his problems. The United States is now tied down in a war we cannot ever ‘win’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where troop levels are being steadily increased, casualties are rising, and the resemblance to Viet Nam in the 1960s and 1970s is striking.

The government is still spying on everybody, without warrants, in flagrant dismissal of the Bill of Rights, and arguing in court that illegal government behavior cannot be prosecuted or tried in a civil case because the documents which would prove the case are confidential and we don’t get to see them for reasons of ‘national security’.

The money’s all gone. It was illusory anyhow, but the American people have no idea what the Federal Reserve System –– the ‘Fed’ –– does, nor how it is run and by whom. Most people think the Fed is part of the government, answerable to Congress. The Fed is of course a private bank. The Bank, as it were. It’s really monetary policy determined by the members, which are the world’s largest banks, in secret.

We have witnessed, in broad daylight, the biggest crooks in the country loot the public treasury, then construct a ‘bailout’ which would further enrich them and permit consolidation, i.e. the big banks eating the smaller ones. The bailout money, the largest expenditure of public funds in history, is not accounted for; there is no audit trail. The money was appropriated without oversight on its use.

We’re living with a big case of cognitive dissonance. We know Obama’s a good man. We know it’s too big for him. It’s too big for anybody. As a disappointment, that’s pretty real. We could hose ourselves during the Bush years with the fantasy that it was George and Dick and those neo-Nazis in disguise who were the problem. Get somebody decent in the White House and it would all change.

It was a fantasy, people. Electing Barack Obama was the one thing, probably, which could at least slow the momentum of this hell-bent rush to totalitarianism, but it doesn’t seem to be working out so far. Perhaps that accounts for my appreciation of critics such as Tom Tomorrow, who get past the willful ignorance of America’s inhabitants if only through cartoons.

Obama said that we are the people we’ve been waiting for. If that’s true, we have to insist that our government face the truth about itself, and that’s not going to happen if we’re not able to do the same.