News From A Parallel World

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

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

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

It’s all over now. Guess why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are a nation deeply afraid of its own people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a suggestion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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