News From A Parallel World

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.

Your call is very important to us. Please hang yourself with this line and we’ll cut your body down as soon as weather permits.

You know, there’s an aspect of the national idiocy surrounding ‘health care’ which the left ought to take a hard look at. We can dismiss the rantings of the ideologues and their “socialism” rhetoric, and the nauseating million-dollar television commercials which urge us to all ‘work together’ while accomplishing nothing. But there’s something else, and it’s a matter which will plague any attempt by Obama or any future administration, if there is a future administration, to confront corporate power in America.

A lot of Americans just plain don’t trust the government to run anything. We believe that even though the ‘private sector’ is out to rob us, it does so efficiently. It may toss our concerns down the rathole, but it still has something to sell. The feds, on the other hand, are not only useless but completely unreachable.

Your call is, of course, of no importance to anyone, public or private, unless you can back it up with military might or cold cash.

I’ve been looking for my mail for five days now. I know it’s out there somewhere because people have sent things to me in it, including two checks from an unsurance company in Pennsylvania which my clients are counting on to pay their bills. For five days, my business office has gotten no mail; this is not possible in the ordinary scheme of things. I get junk every day. You know what I mean.

But for five days it is at zero. Yesterday, I telephoned the U.S. Postal Service. These are people ready and able to service you on a moment’s notice, often when you don’t even request it. The fellow I spoke with explained that the route carrier was gone for the day, his supervisor was gone for the day, and the matter would be checked out on the morrow.

Comes the morrow and guess what?

No mail. No checking out. The carrier’s gone again. The supervisor’s gone again. The man I spoke with suggested that I call again on Saturday morning. Evidently, screw-ups are a fact of life at the Postal Service and my dilemma is simply another source of amusement for bored or intoxicated employees.

By the way, forget the ‘rain or sleet’ thing, it’s not even overcast. It’s a bright, sunny day in paradise. My office building has an elevator.

There is deep-seated antipathy in America for anything which looks as though it might be run like the Post Office, or the FBI, or the Department of Education. It’s not the result of right-wing propaganda, though there’s plenty of that as well. It’s the result of life experiences. We all know you can’t count on the government to deliver anything, and we know that if we inquire or complain we will be shipped instantly, as my old friend Iain would say, to the back-ass end of nowhere.

See, nobody’s really accountable. That’s the deep-seated poison that infects the culture, the society, the economy, and the body politic. We instinctively do not want to cede power over anything to these people because they have removed themselves from our reach. It is, in fact, Big Brother. We’re already there.

Personally, I would turn over the nation’s health care delivery system to amazon.com, but not to Harry Reid, because amazon.com gives a damn whether the package arrives.

The Obama health care ‘proposal’ or ‘package’ or whatever noxious expression is being used these days for that one-legged chicken being dragged through the public forums of the nation, is doomed, and it was doomed from the beginning. Any serious attempt to deal with health care would start with dismantling the insurance racket, and that is not going to happen so long as most members of both parties get paid off, which they are right now.

A while back, the Democratic Party, being corrupt and cannibalistic, had no idea how to handle “social issues”; it promptly lost several elections. Unless it figures out how to handle the “government is useless” issue, it will go under again, and be dumbfounded as to why.

It was a fellow named Hugh Romney who said, “if you can’t laugh, it’s just not funny.” Or something like that.

Mr. Romney, who is known as Hugh to maybe a dozen friends and as Wavy Gravy to maybe forty million others, knows whereof he speaks. I’m trying to keep these words alive in my mind. As another hero of mine, Robert Mitchum, hopped-up and pissed-off in the remake of “The Big Sleep” says, “I’m in a rare mood tonight.”

Got a friend who’s a lawyer, thoroughly decent guy, really, really good lawyer, who just found out that a former client who ripped him off a couple of years ago has filed a suit against him for malpractice. My friend did a great job. He doesn’t really have to worry about the suit for several reasons, including that he cannot lose.

But if you’ve ever been sued, not to mention pissed on by a (former) client, then you know what it feels like. It’s the sort of experience which makes you sick to your stomach. Being right doesn’t matter.

Got to laugh, as Wavy says. Otherwise, you’re down at the corner bar with a hundred bucks in cash, trying to recruit three guys you don’t know to pay somebody a visit. Not a good idea on so many levels.

Have you noticed that people are acting even crazier than usual these days? I have.

Guy was arrested off a Southwest plane bound for St. Louis last week when he groped a fellow passenger whom he did not know, exposed himself, and finally punched her in the face. The astounding part of this story is that after he did all of that, flight personnel simply moved him to another seat.

Really. Did they think he was a Republican governor?

The malefactor, one Darius Chappill, 21, was finally subdued and arrested after he began shouting incoherencies, according to the FBI report, and disrobing. His charm was captured, partly en flagrante, on a passenger’s phone camera. Darius is a burly fellow; in the photo he does not look happy.

The moral of the story: in America, if you put your hands on a stranger’s thigh, try to grope her, then punch her in the face, you will be offered alternative accomodations. If you take your clothes off it’s a federal offense.

The story reminded me of another one from maybe ten or twelve years back, which was the subject of the funniest high school exam ever not given, at least I don’t think it was given because the teacher would’ve otherwise been exiled to Kenosha. It, too, involved behavior aboard an aircraft. The exam consisted of numerous multiple-choice questions and was entitled a “Values clarification,” and centered on the activities of one Captain Busboom who urinated upon a sleeping passenger.

If I could find the damned thing I’d print it here because it always deserved much wider circulation, and it’s somewhere here in my workroom, but I’m too tuckered out right now to find it and you’d excuse me if you saw this place.

Anyhow, there are people in each of these airplane tales to whom the incidents were not at all hilarious. But I don’t know them, and I may laugh without penalty. The more recent one, with the punching, is not too funny, but the times are like that. Fifteen years ago, probably Darius would’ve been content to simply pee on his victim.

Caught the last twenty minutes of “Wonder Boys” on television, that amazing film, and the music over the credits, Dylan’s “Things Have Changed”, which is one bitter, cynical song with lines such as, “Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose; any minute now I’m expecting all Hell to break loose...”

If you can’t laugh...

Come on, you know the world’s upside down.

I’m feeling defensive, maybe. Ted Kennedy’s dead and since there is internet access available now to anyone, including those who are otherwise indistinguishable from tree stumps or rabid badgers, I’m expecting the worst. There’s also the continuing saga of Barack Obama confusing history with myth about Abe Lincoln and ‘compromising’ himself out of power.

And there are the various popular retrospectives, too. Forty years since Woodstock, the stunning human success it exemplified now fed back to us in sanitized, disfigured forms, brought to us by Pepsi, with the aforementioned Dylan’s song, “Forever Young”, reminding us that youth is about commerce.

No, I’m not going to see the Ang Lee movie, no matter what it is.

But if you can’t laugh...

It’s a small case, at least in the great scheme of things, but it’s a great example of the Big Lie. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s ‘Back-To-School’ time, with lots of sales of the exciting crap, new and old, with which every child is supposed to be armed before venturing to educational glory. Except for the financial strain some of this nonsense puts on plenty of ordinary families, the mania is nearly harmless.

The Big Lie, as it’s generally understood, comes out of Orwell by way of Adolf Hitler, whose propaganda minister frankly explained that people could be brainwashed en masse simply by repeating a lie. The bigger the lie, Joseph Goebbels said, the more it would be believed.

I periodically rant on this blog about various mechanisms used by people to control public policy, including political assassination and the destabilization of various governments around the world, not exluding our own. Because these manipulations and shootings occur as manifestations of agreements among these people, they are, by textbook, conspiracies.

It is but one hilarious aspect of the Big Lie in America that those who raise troubling questions or point to inconvenient facts are dismissed across the mainstream media as “conspiracy theorists” –– the meaning of which is not in the term but in the ridicule it’s meant to incite. The public is thus predisposed to ignore these things. The murder of an American president, to cite one example, is popularly regarded as equal in significance –– and as mysterious and unknowable –– as such matters as the existence of space aliens or whether George Bush the younger is really Nancy Reagan’s love child.

Talk about anything of real import and you will be dismissed as a nutcase. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has not been incarcerated.

As Vonnegut might have said, since he said it all the time, and so it goes...

School, though, specifically public schools in the U.S., they’re good or bad, we like ‘em or we don’t. Teachers are underpaid, or not. Teachers unions are positive or negative, depending. Students go to classes and, after a while, they get pieces of paper which permit them to go on to the next school, and eventually they turn into accountants or worse.

But the failures of the school system, whatever they may be and however vague our own interest in or knowledge of particulars, hey, it’s hard to get it right. Our educators, the ones who emerge from graduate programs where any remaining sense of humanity has been leeched from them, are well-meaning, fine people who know what they’re talking about so that we don’t have to. Right?

Well, no, no, and no. Not fine, not well-meaning, and know what they’re talking about like Sarah Palin understands health care. You’ve got to admit, it takes real genius to help lead a populist movement which seeks to shaft the people.

If you think educators are better at running the school system in America than Palin would be running Health and Human Services, you are wrong. It’s that fucking bad.

When it comes to education, we seem to have been enveloped in a weird, gossamer fantasy; the rot could be seeping right up through the floorboards and we think it’s roses. I’m not sure what it is, this fantasy, maybe we think educators are intelligent and though we don’t like or trust intelligence we are ready as hell to turn over the structural mechanism to it because we’re too busy doing important things ourselves.

Public schools in America are in serious, serious trouble. More accurately, the students are in trouble.

Once upon a time, it was generally accepted among educators that the best schooling was that which invited inquiry, which involved students in the rather significant work of learning to think critically. Public education in the U.S. exploded in the aftermath of World War II. Schools were built and teachers recruited, and the baby boom generation was on the way. There is near-universal agreement that the public schools reached their peak in the early 1960s. America was in a race to the moon by this time, and there was great excitement about careers in science and mathematics.

The new teachers and even some new administrators just went hog-wild wherever they could get away with it, and there was money for the arts, lots of money, and courses in logic or philosophy. High school students read Plato and Aristotle, and talked about it.

There was also widespread agreement among educators, and in the society at large, that students, especially high school students, needed a balance between academia and the other parts of their lives. Adolescents were permitted to be adolescents; they were afforded time and space to develop socially and emotionally as well as academically.

There was a recognition that Learning involved an array of pursuits. Schools were expected to provide intellectual resources. Students were expected to ask questions, try things out, make mistakes. It was, in retrospect, a golden age. And, no, I am not forgetting the fact that during this time many schools and districts in the country had fewer financial resources than others, that there was widespread segregation, de facto if not de jure, and that girls did not enjoy comparable athletic or academic opportunities to those available to boys.

So if you want to talk about increased equality of opportunity, fine, but that’s another conversation. Because while various mechanisms have been used to broaden and democratize opportunity, the opportunity to which they apply has been evicerated. In other words, now everybody gets a slice of pie, the only problem being that most of the pie has been eaten by others and what remains is dried-out and probably poisoned.

There is today an enormous difference between the quality of instruction theoretically available from brilliant and dedicated teachers and the quality of instruction finally delivered to students by the system and its ruling assumptions. In these differences lies the key to seeing what’s wrong and why.

Before we begin that scary exercise, consider this: should not the quality of our public education be at least roughly equivalent to the quality of the teachers we’ve got? One can use the best ingredients and still turn out a meal which is somewhere between inedible and fatal if actually ingested. To any sane person, this would indicate that the cook got the recipe wrong. But in America’s educational kitchen, the response is quite different: kick out some ingredients, try a few other brands, use ever-more-precise measuring devices, and reassure the vaguely-uneasy diners that the next meal will be just terrific.

In the last stage of the disintegration of the industrial age, we are seeing the limits to which that form of ordering our universe can bring us. We have become the cultural manifestation of that expression about the person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. We can measure the shit out of any detail, and thus have come to uncritically accept the ludicrous notion that only that which can be measured is of value.

You know what can’t be measured? Learning. Know what can be measured? How many factoids can dance on a pinhead.

Once this became the central focus –– for political reasons as much as for any other, but that’s the subject of a different writing –– it was off to the races. Schools were turned into testing factories, education reduced to a common denominator devoid of inquiry, thought, passion, curiosity, and intellectual engagement.

In order to pull off something this damaging, a Big Lie was essential. After all, when you’ve got waves of high school graduates who can’t seem to manage elementary logic nor locate Afghanistan on a map, people begin to notice. Thus, in the 1980s, by the time the failures manifested in ways too obvious to ignore, the politicians and educators had to come up with something that looked good.

In California, with our astounding escalation in encarceration –– America jails a higher proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world, with a wildly disproportionate percentage being black and latino, nearly all of them poor –– prison construction gobbled up the spare cash not already siphoned-off by other schemes, the educational system wasn’t going to get real money. But the public was clamoring, newspapers were editorializing, realtors were getting restless, and something had to be done.

Into the breach rode the testing companies, a sort of Readers Digest consortium of fake experts and second-level intellects. What they promised, and subsequently delivered, was a cheap mechanism for calming down the voters. Thus came the era of unending standardized tests, the claim being that with these tests the educators could fix whatever was broken (and weed-out teachers whose students could not raise their scores).

It is a recipe for failure to demand increased “productivity” of people to whom you do not allocate increased resources.

What ensued was predictable. Pressures for academic numbers forced the perversion of the schools’ curricula; fewer and more expensive openings for college admissions drove high school students toward depression and suicidal ideation; teachers had less time to devote to inquiry because the system required memorization of what testing companies declared to be important ‘facts’; students routinely found themselves with three and four hours of homework every night, and the simultaneous demand that they bulk-up their resumes with athletics and/or community service.

Because college admissions had become much harder, a fifteen-year-old sophomore finds herself taking ‘advanced placement’ courses in order to score a grade point average higher than 4.0. I know what I’m talking about. I met more than a hundred of these kids while serving my sentence on the local high school board.

While the testing mania continues to serve as a smokescreen for the utter vacancy of the system, it causes enormous damage to the adolescents –– and, now, pre-adolescents, because the pressures have followed the obvious downward spiral and now infect elementary schools everywhere –– it claims to care for.

California administers a week of testing in the spring called STAR. School ratings are published and comparisons made with previous years, and for a while, until the cash ran out, there were monetary awards to spur-on the troops. STAR is comprised of norm-referenced tests, which is to say they record outcomes by comparison. This means that for every school whose numbers ‘improve’ there is another whose numbers ‘get worse’. It is not necessary to be Einstein to figure out why this renders the entire enterprise useless.

And then there is the nature of the testing itself. We are concerned not just with the decisions about which facts are important and which aren’t or, as it actually is, the inclusion or exclusion of what is worth knowing. That alone is a crime against learning. But we had better acknowledge that any test, regardless of who wrote it, cannot help but contain the cultural perspectives of its creators.

Check out this recent Chronicle headline: “Gaps in test scores remain wide”. Guess what? Hispanics and African Americans have not managed to “close the gap” in testing with their white fellow students. The Chronicle, in its unconscious idiocy, captioned the scores with the term “Achievement gap”.

Yup, those blacks and latinos just ain’t as smart as us crackers. Unless it turns out that the test-makers, being us crackers, albeit intellectual crackers, are of the same variety as the fresh-faced boys and girls in white suburbia high.

Oh, the wailing and rending of the garments among educators.

And now we have something else to hammer the kids with: the exit exam. In California, it is not sufficient to have passed your classes for four years in a public high school. You must also now pass a grand final exam, dreamed up by educrats and other moral failures, and if you don’t you will be denied a high school diploma.

Predictably, there is a steady stream of kids who don’t pass and therefore are denied graduation with their peers. Add to this the growing number now who drop out before that. What do you have?

You have a guaranteed low-income work force for the nation’s corporations –– Starbucks thanks you, the Gap thanks you, McDonald’s thanks you –– and ready ‘volunteers’ for the all-volunteer army.

Consider for a moment the obvious: if you give high school students an ‘exit exam’ which they all pass, then the exam was too easy. Thus the exit exam is inherently calibrated to fail a given percentage of students, regardless of their grades, their records, or their true level of education.

By the way, bet you can guess who’s seated on California’s state Board of Education, the folks who dream up this great stuff... that’s right, Donald Fisher of the Gap. Just another liberal trying to help out the kids.

Do not look for help out of Washington. The complete collapse of “No Child Left Behind” hasn’t shaken bureaucratic and political support for its poisonous central tenets, and Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan of Chicago, is a proponent of standardized testing as the organizing foundation for educational policy.

The reason I keep talking about the Big Lie in this context is that, while we have sometimes selectively applied it to cover Bush policies, we as a society show zero awareness that it is routinely used by damned-near everybody. Because people are gullible, because the mass media has been totally prostitited, and because it works.

The machine rolls. That’s the point. It and its mechanisms are now ubiquitous in American life. Men and women in business suits sit around polished boardroom tables and discuss the ways and means of empire, and they act on them.

When the public’s business is run, directly or indirectly, by corporations, it is run by the wealthiest and most powerful. We are not to be entrusted with the truth about it.

Recently, it was disclosed that the CIA under George Bush had instituted a program in which Navy Seals and other special ops personnel worked as death squads, going into other nations with lists of people to be killed. Then came the disclosure, yesterday, that Blackwater assassins had been used as well, with plenty of killing farmed out to a private contractor.

The cover story for this latest astounding revelation contained the assurance that the program never actually got implemented; nobody got murdered, according to the government. However, the people who initially leaked the story of the death squads to famed journalist Seymour Hersh did so because they were “sickened” by the systematic executions of people they thought were probably innocent.

Does anyone reading this believe that with the election of Obama and the appointment of a new CIA director this program will be discontinued? No, it has simply been driven further underground.

The reason the education scandal is so bad is that we are systematically ratcheting-up the rat-in-the-maze pressures on our children. The results of this are predictable. And most of America remains dangerously ignorant.

On March 27th of this year, the Corte Madera branch of Bank of America, in Marin County, California, was robbed by a man who handed a stick-up note to a teller and made off with $22,000.00 in cash.

One week later, on April 2nd, police arrested 60-year-old Stuart Silman at his home and charged him with the crime. The evidence was pretty strong: Silman had been at the bank’s ATM shortly before the robbery, looked like the guy on the surveillance video, and was picked out of a photo lineup by bank employees. Also, according to the police, he wore similar clothing to that worn by the robber, drove a smiliar car, and was of similar age, weight, and height.

But Silman wasn’t the guy.

Silman is a lawyer. I recall him a little bit. I’ve had a case with him or against him at, or maybe he was part of a bench-bar settlement panel I appeared before. Or he was one of the counsel involved in a case where I was an arbitrator. In this business, and in this relatively small community, everybody runs across everybody sometime.

Well, as we know by now, lawyers are just like the rest of us, no better but, despite popular opinion, no worse. There are crooks with law degrees and some of them wind up in the U.S. Senate. It was inevitable that, in hard times, one of them would find himself desperate enough to go into a bank with the idea of a mass withdrawal.

But Silman wasn’t the guy.

And Silman’s been cleared of all charges not because he is innocent but because he is a professional with access to resources, the wherewithal to hire private investigators, the knowledge to go after exculpatory records, such as Golden Gate Bridge videos, and a nice slab of honest-to-God luck. Without these things, he would be trying to work out a plea bargain to keep from dying in prison.

And Silman wasn’t the guy. He just looked like him.

Fortunately, he was able to hire people to conduct the kind of investigation the cops should have conducted but didn’t. His cellphone records had him in San Francisco at the time of the robbery. The bridge camera got him going through.

It was while prosecutors were ‘reviewing’ the evidence he gave them that Silman got lucky. The bank was robbed again, on July 25th. On August 6th, police arrested a suspect. Presumably around this time someone –– perhaps a bank employee or two –– noticed that the August 6th robber was the same guy who’d run off with the cash four months earlier. A few days later, charges were dropped against Silman.

Interestingly, the police captain whose people had initially busted Silman, one Todd Cusimano, said there were “striking similarities” between Silman and the new suspect, one Scott Hall, but declined to release photos or say why Silman had been targeted in the first place. The eyewitness “identifications” had apparently been made on the basis of the photos. Even now, Cusimano insists that Silman “was a viable suspect until the evidence showed or proved otherwise...”

Let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. Let’s say that the person wrongly arrested and charged for the April heist had been someone without the money to hire an investigator and without an alibi backed-up by cellphone records. Let’s say the perp had been latino and the wrong guy had also been latino. Let’s say the perp had not returned to stick-up the same bank but had moved operations south and was now robbing banks in Bakersfield.

We all know how that scenario would have played out.

The problem with torture, it turns out, is not torture per se but the uncomfortable possibility that somebody will find out about it. That appears to be the position of the Obama presidency, you know, change you can believe in.

Once again the Justice Department has gone into federal court to argue against disclosure, this time of photos which depict some of the fun and games our boys and girls on the front lines, and some in the dungeons, have been amusing themselves with.

According to Obama, the public should not see any of these materials because it might inflame the sensibilities of some of those against whom the tortures were, and probably still are, directed.

When it comes to crimes against humanity, including murder, we have been told we need to “turn the page,” presumably because the criminal acts of the state occupy a special place in the law.

No one, for example, is talking about “turning the page” when it comes to John Walker Lindh, the scapegoated poster boy for Bush’s phony “war on terror”. Lindh remains in federal prison for, probably, evermore. And no one with any brains at all would argue that his ‘crimes’, if any there really were, were greater than the routine horrors visited upon often completely innocent “suspects” by our military and secret police apparatus.

The response of the Obama administration to the existence of gruesome photos like these, and its consistent legal support of censorship, secrecy, massive spying on American citizens, and the vitiation of the right to trial, differs in no material respects from the response of the Nixon administration to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo. Forget the crimes. Locate and suppress the source.

Reminds me of a great joke from the Lyndon Johnson era. Guy says: “They warned me that if I voted for Goldwater, I’d get a massive military budget, and the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, and sure enough...”

Let’s see: abandonment of the constitution and Bill of Rights for purely expedient purposes, growing federal power and secrecy, a widening, escalating war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantanamo stays open, people held in prisons without charges or trial and subjected to torture. Did Bush cancel the elections?

Oh, that’s right: we got a moderate instead of another crackhead on the Supreme Court. Well, big whoop.

I don’t know what the reason is for the present rancid state of national affairs. I don’t know if Obama’s secretly JFK, walking a fine line between changing the world and trying to stay out of the crosshairs. Or if he’s Jimmy Carter, well-meaning and so far over his head he’s on his way to irrelevancy. Or if he’s LBJ, fast after some devil’s bargain or other, give the bastards what they want in exchange for...something...

As the American right was once so fond of reminding everybody, during the height of the fake “Cold War” which preceded the latest one, it is a great lesson of history that appeasement is a mistake. But history’s lesson is not about one nation appeasing another but of otherwise mindful, empathic people, occasionally political leaders, appeasing those internal forces which traffic in fear and use their powers to control the whole damn system. That’s what happened in Germany. That’s how liberty was destroyed and the door opened for the holocaust.

I’ve some news for the “the troops keep us free” crowd: no military has ever kept a nation free; they have all too often been the mechanism for killing freedom on behalf of the financial oligarchy, c.f. Honduras right now. America’s kept what freedom its got because there have been a sufficient number of ordinary people willing to fight the power. That’s it. Without them, without a muckraking press, or a populist candidate, without exposés and leaked, disgusting photographs, we’d be in worse shape than we’re currently in.

Any country willing to bury the truth about itself is risking burying itself as well. I hope to God Obama knows this and starts acting on it, because if he doesn’t, all the feel-good initiatives and White House pep talks and faith-based volunteers won’t keep us out of the ditch, and it’s a deep fucking ditch.

And that’s the way it is...

There was a bumper sticker years ago which read: “Eat Wyoming lamb. 20,000 coyotes can’t be wrong.” Or something like that.

I thought of it when I noticed that the pageviews of this blog had exceeded 40,000. That wouldn’t be too bad if it was a daily average, or even the average per new entry, but since it covers more than two years and counts the total number of pages seen by all visitors combined, including the bizarre traffic spikes whenever I wrote about the CIA’s less than benevolent activities, the actual popularity of Lookingglass.blog.co.uk ranks well below that of Wyoming lamb and probably doesn’t go down any better.

There have been 12,681 visitors over the past 28 months, which counts each time a reader returns for more. A given article attracts roughly 100 people. Not much for cyberspace. Not much for a neighborhood. I could probably bring in 100 by writing in a private journal and then leaving it lying around a government building.

I’m not whining, you understand, and I have no complaints. Even though I’m as filled with the great melodies of my own voice as the next egoist, I do not take it personally that the multitudes have not flocked to my site; the multitudes have much else to do and have no great need for erratic and often barely amusing commentary, especially when they have so much of it shoveled at them each waking moment.

In case you missed the news, everything you thought you knew about the human race and its future on planet earth has been utterly wiped out.

We are living in an age defined by irrelevant archetypes. We can’t help it. The entire mechanism by which we have communicated with one another for, well, all of history, has been supplanted by something new, something whose bare outline is just now beginning to take shape. It is changing everything. Everything. That is not hyperbole.

I’ve written a bit about Marshall McLuhan before and it’s tiresome to repeat myself. Check out what he was talking about in the 1960s. “War and Peace in the Global Village”. He was the first to figure out what was happening, the electric age and what it might mean. He was at the time widely lionized by students and widely criticized by liberal intellectuals who hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was talking about.

If you read him today you will probably be stunned at how prescient he was.

The way in which human beings communicate with one another is primary to the evolution of the species, much the way communication among brain cells is primary to the evolution of the mind. McLuhan’s first sensation-causing publication was of “Understanding Media: the extensions of man.” He saw the end of industrial culture, economics, politics, and the beginning of the Electric Age.

McLuhan was not wild about what he saw coming, which puzzled the aforementioned students as much as it confounded the aforementioned intellectuals. It would be in many ways a return to a tribal sensibility, he said, but that in itself was neither good nor bad. We would find out how we felt about it along the way.

One of my peculiar jobs is as a plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer. Over the past ten years I’ve seen an escalation in accidents caused by somebody talking on a cell phone; lately, the space-case drivers are texting at the time of the accident. We apparently can’t help ourselves. We are driven to ‘stay in touch’ with pretty nearly everybody we know, it looks like. At the same time, public transit riders and cyclists are traveling in a sealed environment of ear buds and MP3s. What can this mean? That we want to wire ourselves to those in our chosen circle –– which for an amazing number includes, evidently, tens of thousands of total strangers –– while ignoring, ‘tuning out’, people in our immediate vicinity?

Are we enmasse (re-)designing our own psychological spaces?

If so, what does that portend for our culture?

In what people refer to as the ‘sixties, the first electric age generation danced free-form as though inhabited by Isadora Duncan, passed pipes among themselves of shared new sacrament, loved music with drums, drums and electrically-amplified guitars, grew their hair, and otherwise behaved in a manner which scared the piss out of our elders. We were just the beginning, and we knew that, but we didn’t have any idea than did our elders of what was to come.

I get it about the tattooes, and I get it about the inter-dimensional stuff, and the music is not a surprise, nor is the greater tolerance for differences among us when it comes to race and gender and sexual identification. The young are aware that it is a single planet.

I get it about pot smoking; since marijuana is the perfect drug for an electric age tribal culture, its popularity will continue to grow and its legality is a foregone conclusion.

But what I don’t get, what I don’t come close to getting is the twitter thing. It’s a stretch to manage the notion of FaceBook and MySpace, but okay, you want to amass enormous numbers of pretend ‘friends’ for reasons I don’t understand and am afraid to. But twitter??? I mean, what the fuck?

We are living in a relatively small historical window where the most amazing and tumultuous changes are manifesting, and in which the earth is being suddenly ‘lit-up’ electronically, as though we are each a cell in the human mind and these cells, after forever being slow to communicate with each other, are now talking instantaneously. The enormity of this for humanity is impossible to exaggerate.

So I’ve got my blog, and occasionally toss some shit into the vast, vast story being written out here. I know I would reach more readers by contributing to ‘The Bohemian’, a great community paper on the Pacific Coast, but there is something nice about running this into places where the paper is not delivered.

Explain twitter, somebody.