Mistakes Have Been Made

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.