California Screamin'

I'm heading towards Hollywood and Vine to close down an un-airconditioned office a few stories above the walk of fame for a client. I'm waiting out tough times underneath a palm tree, waiting for the stop light and economic shoots to turn green as a cunningly bleached blonde sits up high in an onyx Porsche Cayenne Turbo SUV. She crosses our path in front and dawdles to turn left while a little white dog nestles on her breast looking down at me and nervously at the cars, the kind of dog that's not good for much but luxuriating or tossing up in the air to punt over a fence.

The girl's wearing goggle-sized sunglasses and maybe she'll turn 20 years old while she waits for oncoming traffic to clear and my friend, an L.A. resident, who has been fielding my questions about the Governator's budget crisis follows up with, "They just announced they're cutting summer school and child care programs for migrant workers." "Oh, yeah," I sigh. "Now that makes a hell of a lot of sense. That's really cutting the fat out of a budget! Bold leadership. Political courage!"

To my right, a sun-baked caucasian man, fiftyish, drags down the sidewalk like a grimy, dessicated crustacean with about an hour to live, trailing a torn t-shirt devoid of color, dust in his hair sticking up in the air ike free beauty parlor product, greasy gray jeans hanging off him obscenely. No one at the bus stop sees him, he's magic, he's an invisible man. So I'm sitting there thinking, look pal, it's right here, the future is being spelled out in front of your face on a big mind-reading neon sign just like with Steve Martin in LA Story. Stop for a minute and read.

California's got it all. It's the #1 Death Factory and it's the #1 Dream Factory in the US and the world. Tops in arms production and entertainment. 8th biggest economy on the planet, huge wine producer, agribusiness, no slouch in the ganja department. Companies like Apple, Google, Disney, Miramax, and YoYodyne are all in California. It is the most fungible entity imaginable.

Yet it's bankrupt, its bonds are junk, it is now paying state worker in scrip and its population is shrinking for the first time since the conquistadores brought the plague. Now, I'm thinking at the stoplight, we must be suffering from a philosophical conundrum. A triumph or failure of Reaganomics, of scientology, of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, trickle down Wysocki, trickle down. If you can keep your income inequality when all around you are losing theirs then you will be a man my son.

America has never viewed its working classes through the sentimental fug of an Edwardian music hall, but when treated well one time they promptly payed back with the greatest explosion of prosperity and technology in known history. But that's a bygone era, constantly memorialized and milked for every last drop of hope in repeating a Greatest Generation. California, particularly its coastal southern cities, provides a juxtaposition of glittering got-it-made success and violent squalor, with pernicious polarizing influences and taxes that keep regressing. It's the Big vs. the Little Lebowskis, and it's actually hard to tell who's winning--half the time the plot's entertaining, half the time it's frightening, and half the time it's disastrous. Because it's California, the halves add up.

But uh-oh. Cali's attached. It's kind of attached to the US like a skull, in fact. Am I looking at the future of my entire country? Well, it was America's bellwether state of the 20th century, so yes, it would seem so. Reading Will California become America's first failed state?, a competently researched and interviewed article in the Guardian, triggered the above memory of a recent trip to L.A., and the upshot of it is that public services will be shut down to reduce the budget gap, that's not going to be enough, and people will think of something because Californians are innovative.

Metaphorically, to take California's lead, the United States has a case of brain cancer, and it's not ready to start dealing with it in any serious way. Delusion is the order of the day. The recession is over, I'm sure you've heard. Tide's still up, sky's still blue and the myth of the California Dream is going to die hard, like a butthole surfer screaming "whooaaa, duuuude," as he bashes up repeatedly against the stony crags of Monterey.

To end on a glass half full, as required, California dreamers hang it out innately, they don't know any different, which means America's problems tend to crop up first and most prevalently in that state. Presumably, so will solutions.

Insurance Industry Set To Reap Bonanza

Given the curious advantage, one rather akin to time travel, of writing the health care reform legislation before it even gets inspected by the elected Congressional representatives who vote on it, what's going to happen is hardly a surprise. But it is a disappointment, especially for people like me and my wife and at times like this we are quite capable of sounding like anti-government Republicans. Because we share their opinion of a process gone horribly, irrevocably wrong.

We're both self-employed, you see, and our combined insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs total up to more than $20,000 per year. In fact we still owe nearly $4,000 for our second son's no-complication, no-epidural birth, which took only two hours of delivery room time.

Like Obama, we were naively hoping for a little competition to be injected somewhere into the insurance "industry" processes, so a claim can't be denied retroactively six months down the line with no explanation, so the yearly premiums don't go up by an arbitrary 8, 13, 11, or 15%. Couple that cost into our boxcar of $27,000 per year in child care expenses (note: we chose two of the better day care values available in our neck of Seattle) and an 8% higher tax straight off the top for the temerity of having a small business (known as the "self-employment tax"), and it adds up to one dream sail boat or Porsche worth of cash per year. Something has got to give, and it will almost certainly be us.

To the insurance companies, combine 40-some million uninsured folks with the right wording and it's Bring On the Dancing Nurses for a long, long time. There's an article in the LA Times detailing the mechanics of how a "strong public option" will fleece taxpayers and subscribers who don't meet at-need limits:

Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

Some insurance company leaders continue to profess concern about the unpredictable course of President Obama's massive healthcare initiative, and they vigorously oppose elements of his agenda. But Laszewski said the industry's reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: "Hallelujah!"

The insurers' success so far can be explained in part by their lobbying efforts in the nation's capital and the districts of key lawmakers.

The bills vary in the degree to which they would empower government to be a competitor and a regulator of private insurance. But analysts said that based on the way things stand now, insurers would come out ahead.

"The insurers are going to do quite well," said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "They are going to have this very stable pool, they're going to have people getting subsidies to help them buy coverage and . . . they will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide -- plus their administrative costs."

One of the Democratic proposals that most concerns insurers is the creation of a "public option" insurance plan. The industry launched a campaign on Capitol Hill against it, grounded in a study published by the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm that is owned by UnitedHealth Group. The lobbyists contended that a government-run plan, which would have favorable tax and regulatory treatment, would undermine private insurers.

Opposition increased this month when boisterous critics mobilized at town hall meetings held by members of Congress home for the August recess.

The attacks, supplemented by conservative critics on talk radio and other forums, drew national attention.

Leading insurers, including UnitedHealth, urged their employees around the country to speak out. Company "advocacy hot line" operations and sample letters and statements were made available to an army of insurance industry employees in nearly every congressional district.

Some insurers supplemented the effort with local advertising, often designed to put pressure on specific members of Congress. Late in the spring, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina -- the home state of several conservative Blue Dog Democrats -- prepared ads attacking the public option.

Leading Democrats have fought back, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) last month calling the industry "immoral" for its past treatment of customers and suggesting insurers were "the villains" in the healthcare debate.

Still, recent support for the public option has declined, and the stock prices of health insurance firms have been rising.

Undermining support for the public option wasn't the only gain scored by insurance lobbyists.

In May, the Senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders' medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients' healthcare bills. According to a committee aide, the change was being considered so that companies could hold down premiums for the policies.

Most group health plans cover 80% to 90% or more of a policyholder's medical bills, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Industry officials urged that the government set the floor lower so insurers could provide flexible, more affordable plans.

"It is vital that individuals, families and small-business owners have the flexibility to choose an affordable coverage option that best meets their needs," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's Washington-based lobbying shop.

Consumer advocates argue that a lower government minimum might quickly become the industry standard, placing a greater financial burden on patients and their families.

"These are a bad deal for consumers," said J. Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner who works with the Consumer Federation of America.

Meanwhile, companies would probably see a benefit by providing less insurance "per premium dollar," Hunter said.

"It would be quite a windfall," said Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna insurance company who has become an industry whistle-blower.

Consumer and labor advocates acknowledged the industry's lobbying success.

In the first half of 2009, the health service and HMO sector spent nearly $35 million lobbying Congress, the White House and federal healthcare offices, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

With more than 900 lobbyists, that sector -- whose top spenders are insurance giants UnitedHealth, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna -- was poised to spend more than in 2008, a record lobbying year.

UnitedHealth spent the most, $2.5 million in the first half of 2009, and hired some of Washington's most prominent political players, including Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who served as an informal health policy advisor to Obama.

"They have beaten us six ways to Sunday," said Gerald Shea of the AFL-CIO. "Any time we want to make a small change to provide cost relief, they find a way to make it more profitable."

The Schoolyard Of Forever

I'm not sure exactly when it dawned on me in conscious words, when its virtual 12-point type scrolled across the frontal marquis, but it did so. Most people never mature emotionally beyond who they were at 17 or so (I haven't) and many freeze earlier. If you find yourself talking to a roomful of executives, for example, assuming they're rational adults is a huge mistake. We may be experts at hiding it, but in the electric assemblages which our neurons fire, including the envelope which stretches from back to front and in which we perform name-calling, we're still children.

In that roomful of professionals there is a boy like the one you slammed your head into on the playground your first day of kindergarten; there is the poor speller who still feels dumb about it; there's the girl whose primary objective is to maintain a clique; and sooner or later, there'll be the guy who's been held back a couple times, the pissed-off terror who is going to rough you up and try to establish a protection racket. Boardrooms are classrooms, politics are schoolyards. Dick Cheney and Rummy are still out there, holding people up against the anchor fence, we're still beating up the maladapted kids from the bad homes.

The title above is a poem by Charles Bukowski. In it, he picks up the regimented brutality of a Prussian-designed compulsory school system, turns and examines it, telescopes it up then declaims it down into what's lacking in a country's soul. An awareness of it. A resistance to it. Apparently his grade-school nemesis was named Herbie Ashcroft; one of mine was named Alan Pabis, who has a facebook page. No hard feelings, Alan, hope you're well. Can't think of you without feeling that spot on my right hand, the 4th metacarpal. Where the bone thickened after the teachers privately came up and thanked me for hitting you. Here is the beginning to The Schoolyard of Forever:

the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the dragons, the
freaks

the beatings against the wire fence
the eyes of our mates watching
glad that they were not the victims
we were beaten well and good
and afterwards
followed
taunted all the way home to our homes of hell
full of more beatings

in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well, and in the restrooms
at the water fountains they owned us and disowned us
but in our way we held
never begged for mercy
we took it straight on
silently
we were trained within that horror
a horror that would later hold us in good stead
and that came around
as we grew in several ways with time
the bullies gradually began to deflate, lose power

grammar school
Jr. high
high school
we grew like odd plants
gathering nourishment
blossoming
then the bullies tried to befriend us
and we turned them away

(for those who would go on, here's the rest from bukowski.net)

2008 Holiday Retro-Prospective

Schools closed in Seattle on Wednesday, December 17th because of predicted snow. None fell until the morning of the 18th, and by that evening accumulation began to close the airport. I drove my delayed-arrived mother-in-law home through a welcome slide-o-matic. Snowstorms here are an excuse for ataraxy because we are ill-prepared, and they usually pass quickly. But it kept snowing, snowing for days straight, and the holidays became compulsory. Lord Running Boy got a birth-cousin on the 20th, so we housed the newling's two brothers, aged 1 and 4, for 76 hours. At one point 14 snow-bound souls were in the house, and I contemplated fleeing to a Motel 7. Schools were closed for 16 days, and Santa's other reindeer, FedEx and UPS, first started delivering on New Year's Eve; and the packages are still straggling in.

As a city and a nation, circumstances dictate what we don't really don't want to face. By common and unspoken consent, we were determined to have one last great holiday season, and reined things in as little as possible. Let us not consider the foreboding vagaries of Christmas Futures, but revel in our rituals, our instinctive motions, and perpetuate the myths of beneficence from a North Pole. I had to explain multiple times to the #1 son that such a destination is impossibly remote, impossible to drive to with our car. That no runways for a plane exist there, even a helicopter lacks a fuel payload to reach it, and besides, it's a secret place, with casual visitors, particularly the fathers of strong-willed yearning boys, forbidden. He's still ruminating on letters of introduction and the journey's mechanical means.

Weird weather here. At one point, a wind gust picked my 20-foot aluminum extension ladder clear off its hooks on the fence and threw it down by the side porch, sheared a neighbor's tree limb off and cast it 30 feet east to shatter over the stones of the back patio, and blew the firewood clear off the porch. It must've been near a hundred miles per hour, and it knocked the power out to a few thousand homes and businesses, but we stayed lucky. Even more strangely, 'It's a Wonderful Life' was nowhere to be seen on cable on Christmas Eve; given that its plot centers on financial ruin and the contemplated suicide of a well-meaning banker, you'd think it would've been topical this year, but it had been supplanted by the more glib, BB-gun focused 'A Christmas Story,' which ran for 24 hours on TBS. (Jimmy Stewart's legacy was on nationally, according to Time magazine, but was out-rated by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.) Perhaps an age has passed, I thought while pressing through the channel menu, hopefully not mine.

I came across a television interview with Seattle's mayor and Grand Jowl Master, Greg Nickels, who gave his own road maintenance efforts a "B." Hmmm. To my knowledge he has yet to be assassinated, true, but if the faculty of a law school had been tasked with keeping roads open while debating the environmental impact of snow-plowing and graded each other's performance on a curve, it would've been progress. Seattle's 13 snow plows (Portland, to the south and nearer to the Pacific, has 50) use rubber plow-blades which compacted the flakes down into icing 3-6 inches high, enshrining tire-ruts for the duration. They spread sand on top, spewed an ineffective salt-free de-icer, never cleared side streets, and simply gave up after a few 12-hour shifts.

Therefore, the conditions were absolutely perfect for four-year olds waiting for Santa, for youths butt-surfing on garbage can lids down the steep streets near our house, for the way purple, green, blue, red and yellow lights shine in the dark above the illuminated crisp and crunch, and for playing with the inflowed largesse of elves when you have nowhere to go for days. With the aid of tire chains, rally-style driving, egg nog and extra liquor, a great Christmas was achieved. It was fun, it was infuriating, it was memorable. Due to the needs of high-energy boys cooped up in palaces of Ganesh, to fatherhood, the feeding of people and building of diaper pyramids, it was the near-death of blogging for me.

They picked up the garbage can today for the first time in three weeks. The streets are clear. The stacked cardboard, the bags of gift wrapping, and the mounds of recycling tentatively sidle up to a New Year. Welcome, 2009, and we are wary. Hail Mary, full of grace: help us win this stock-car race.

Aledo High Seniors Pick Classmate With Down Syndrome As Homecoming Queen

From the Dallas Morning News...

Never has the selection of a homecoming queen sent so many tears falling so freely.

Kristin Pass, an 18-year-old senior with Down syndrome, became Aledo High School's homecoming queen Friday to a joyous standing ovation and the flutter of a thousand tissues on a remarkable night for an amazing young woman.

Her grandfather, Dr. David Campbell of Corsicana, escorted her onto the field and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as Kristin joined eight other young women in the Homecoming Court to await the results of the vote, cast by the 360-plus members of Aledo High's senior class.

Then came the announcement ... and pandemonium.

"Oh my gosh! I was sitting in the student section and everyone stood up, crying and cheering for Kristin," said longtime friend and fellow senior Meaghan Geary, 17, who first met Kristin in the third grade. "It was great!"

The vote may have been a surprise, but no one who knows Kristin doubts her popularity, her mother said.

"Kristin has a lot of friends – she likes everyone. It doesn't matter if you're tall or short, pretty, not pretty, smart, not smart – she likes everybody. She has great friends. And Aledo is a great community."

"She's just the neatest kid in the whole wide world," added her aunt, Chari Hust of Houston, "and everybody sees that.

Clay Gilmer, who works in the stadium press box, running the scoreboard and clock, said people pushed toward the windows as the young women were introduced.

"They were all pulling for Kristin," Mr. Gilmer said.

When she won, he was thrilled. "This has been such a special time, a special week for Kristin," he said. "And I was really taken by the maturity and the love shown by her friends, her peers, her classmates.

"That makes this a double blessing."

Kristin pronounced the evening "exciting" and "awesome."

She was so thrilled, her mother said, that she took her crown to bed with her. Her selection as homecoming queen was a wonderful surprise. But Meaghan seemed to have an inkling that it could happen.

"Everyone loves Kristin," she said, "and I didn't know for sure, but in class everyone was like, 'Who are you voting for?' and everybody was like, 'Vote for Kristin, she's so good.' "

Kristin doesn't care what's on the outside, Meaghan said. She's friends with everyone, and everyone admires that. "She's the person we all want to be," Meaghan said.

(via Brother Tim:) And you young people at Aledo High School are the people we all want to be.

These kids at Aledo High School have put a beefsteak on the black-eye George W Bush has given to the State of Texas. They have proven by example, that putting love, compassion, and caring, before one's self, is the best way to go.

It is for this reason that Barack Obama will most likely become President. The young people of today care not about a person's skin color, religion, or handicaps; they look to what's most important: the heart. It is incidents such as this that give me hope for America's future.

Thanks, and a tip 'o da hat to: the Senior Class of Aledo High School.

The Case For American Mania

On one morning when my wife and young son were to go on a trip, I woke up at 4:02 AM, having had almost 5 hours of good sleep. My son was right next to me, covers thrown off as usual, his feet digging under my shins. At 5:30, I tried to steal away downstairs to grab a laptop and work before taking them to the airport. Halfway down, a wooden stair creaked in the dark, and my beloved child sat bolt upright and demanded: "Who said that!??"

He is an American. That is to say, he shares behavioral features commonly described as distinctly American--he has a high degree of "get up and go," all curiosity packed intensely into a burning ball of energy. These qualities are blessings, to be sure, but ones not unalloyed on a personal level. If scaled upwards into larger organizations, they would be recognizable, pronounced, and always looking for trouble.

At this very moment, off the top of your head, you could certainly recite at least 5 ongoing whacked-out things about America. And why is this so? A far more homogenous nation, Japan for example, which I assure you is completely insane, is only so on a few dimensions. Ditto Germany. And England, oh, you're definitely a rival, England, culturing your eccentricities like yeast strains in Public Trust, but can you really hope to compete on our scale of self-aggrandized Special Ness? I think not.

Maybe it's not an accident that my son (aka Lord Running Boy), his mom, and to a lesser extent, me, share a newly studied condition called Restless Leg Syndrome, which is associated with growth factor genes MEIS1, BTBD9 and MAP2K5 and is 5-10 times more common in populations of Northern European descent than of Asian, African, or Mediterranean. There's no effective cure. Many Americans I've known have something of this "movement urge" quality, for example a longest-term girlfriend always fidgeted while waiting in line, same as me. Whereas I've not much run across that in distant habitudes. In myriad Old-World queues, I've stood and noted how they form wordlessly, by automatic consent, its members then exhibiting the patience of cattle, the posture of glaciers. Americans, by contrast, must frequently be told to form lines, then reminded. We find the word "queue" repellent, and therefore employ it only when conversing in Latin.

I've begun to suspect that we and I, along with millions of our fellow citizens, share a genetic mutation--and that there exists a biological, self-selected basis for the crazes of our nation. If you live abroad, you will eventually recognize Americans strictly by their walks: aggressive, rolling, forward angles, lots of arm/shoulder movement. Europeans walk possessively, far less arm movement, posture further back with a tendency to glide. Asians, well, they almost vanish at times, and could probably walk unnoticed through an Alice in Chains mosh pit. Generally, where nature leaves off and nurture takes over is mysterious, but Americans can be spotted when not walking, too. I've been sitting mutely in foreign coat, clothes, hat, haircut, and shoes, reading a foreign book or drinking a foreign drink when people approached to ask me a question in English. They could have been reading behavioral signatures, true, but Germans have also reflexively decoded my ancestry, a good part of which is from there, while correctly noting a Czechoslovakian influence.

Jack Kerouac perfectly captures American cultural distinctions throughout 'On The Road,' a book he wrote in 20 days using benzedrine and a 120-foot roll of typing paper. It explores America, criss-crosses its essence, and revels in restlessness while an archetypally manic Neal Cassady searches for "it." Cassady isn't alone. In one anecdote, two big farmboys from Minnesota pick hitchhikers up on their flatbed Chevy truck on the way to California. Blonde Swede-descended bats out of high-decibel hell, they drive through the night, eight unmuffled cylinders banging the air for speed, wooden planked bed kicking up violently over bumps following characters who would hot-rod Southern California. In other forms of wildlife, new traits are expressed quite rapidly as environmental pressures draw out mutations. Humans have shown varieties of imaginative and remarkable knowledge-based adaptations to environmental circumstance, but in the migratory magnet of the American Experiment, have we unknowingly bred a hyper-culture? It would explain much, so let's take a crack at it.

Freud believed all psychotic disorders are forms of narcissim; with mania, one becomes the anointed, the savior, the One with ecstatic insight and a license to redeem everyone and everything if they can only be made to comprehend, to see, to agree. With dementia praecox and depression, one is singled out for crucifictions, is helotized, degraded, paranoia transforming politesses into Parthian shots. Dr. Ronald Fieve, the psychiatrist who pioneered lithium treatment for patients with bipolar disorder, gave us a clue. Years ago he noted that 90% of North Americans who come under treatment are diagnosed as manic-depressive, only 10% schizophrenic, remarkable in that the percentage of these clinical pathologies is reversed in Europe.

I'm not a geneticist, but as an observer of human history, I'm well aware that even in the face of war, persecution, and famine, for every 2 people who flee, 98 stay put; only prolonged starvation causes mass migrations. This is entirely consistent with primate behavior, where those most likely to migrate are the edge-dwellers, usually aggressive low-level males. They leave their tribe (the term is used intentionally) not because they're driven out, but because they seek opportunity and are optimistic enough to countenance risk, unattached enough to leave their loved ones.

The migrant monkeys and apes who make it through the meat gauntlet to seed a new troop are the smartest and most hardy, so in their new troops they often wind up on top, creating species-level evolutionary impacts. Some of my other forebears crossed the Atlantic in what were accurately called "coffin ships," and despite the Great Famine, despite the lethality of Black '47 and years to come, more of the Westies stayed in Ireland than ever left. Even under the worst circumstances, the ones who crossed the water were the most motivated and the most dissatisfied, traits which they passed down culturally.

Accordingly, if I were a geneticist, to prove my case for American Mania I would search for studies that look along mammalian pleasure stations, the dopamine receptors. Examples are readily found: "Dopamine D4 Receptor Exon III Polymorphism Associated with the Human Personality Trait of Novelty Seeking;" Evidence that the Dopamine D4 Receptor Is a Susceptibility Gene in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; and "Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor Allele Frequencies around the Globe."

Well, then. People who can get up and go, they echo or amplify a core human evolutionary advantage. We got the hell off the Savannah and went looking for the smorgasbords of our prophecies. Whether it was catastrophe, longing, or wild hairs, something made us leave behind the security of our lakes in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. The D4-7 allele is a comparatively young recombinant outlier which differs by 6 sequential mutations from the common DRD4 alleles, and the American population is full to the gills with it. To quote the team of the latter migration study above, "we propose that this (D4-7) allele originated as a rare mutational event that nevertheless increased to high frequency in human populations by positive selection." The optimisms which can shift into pitiless, uncontrollable ecstasies, the energies which can be encased in the painful thralls of ADHD, they are our birthrights.

There are a host of implied linkages about how our genetics shaped the American interpretations of commerce and capitalism, winner-take-all competition as tied to Smithian evolutions, and greater-sum game theories. But if I wanted to write a book about it, and someone will, I would no longer be a knock-about blogger, would I? Therefore I'll just climb up on de Toqueville's imposing back:

"Choose any American at random and he should be a man of burning desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator. The same bent affects all he does--his politics, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, his domestic occupations--he carries it with him into the depths of the backwoods as well as into the city's business."

(Democracy in America, Vol. I, Pt. II, Chapter 10)

That's still how Europe sees us. Like an aching knee foretells the storm, every day I stare down the ugly barrel of what I know is an epic, unfolding seizure in the American Experiment. Every week I give a thought to leaving, just like all my grandparents or great-grandparents did, just like the majority who have ever settled here, be they rapacious Vikings, religious nuts financed on a stock swindle, Scots-Irish Picts looking for somebody to shoot, huddled puking masses waiting to jump ship, economic refugees slaving over gourmet meals in L.A., or the elite and brilliant scions of India out to make a Silicon Valley fortune. Where else would we go? We have traveled the world, and it is not enough.

Many now argue for American post-exceptionalism, and I positively ache for it, but it's not that simple. That much must be confessed; I and my country-mates are genetic outliers. A collection of mutants, our bodies process the very pleasures of life differently, and we are a manic nation. Quod erat demonstratum, U+220E. At the very least, and more charitably, we are comparatively hyperactive and cannot alter our inner structures.

The next time we hear someone preaching crazy-ass moonshines from our national podium, there's a good chance they actually mean them, but require medication. Self-knowledge, after all, is a most valuable tool for managing temperaments, moods, reactions, selves, nations. We are Americans. Brown, yellow, black, red or white, we're crazier than thou and our genes went through serious shit to make it this far. We don't need an economist. We don't need an enabler-politician. We don't need a preacher. We need a good psychiatrist.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Someday Never Comes" Lyrics & Music

If someone were to ask, "What's the most American music?," a whirlwind of sound and images would jam through my mind, Robert Johnson playing his guitar and poisoned with lye, Roseanne Cash singing her high lonesomes, Louis Armstrong dealing effortless masteries, Julia Ward Howe getting martial. Flat and Scruggs, Wynonie Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly, Blondie, and Led Zeppelin dwell co-equal in the pantheon. Even if those last guys were Brits they did it right, and they did it good.

If someone says, "No, you can only choose one artist," the first one I'd think of is Creedence Clearwater Revival, the roots-rock band formed in El Cerrito High School, California. Most of the rhythms and chords they use are 200 years old if they're a day, their music is simple as grass and non-Americans simply would never have put it together. Americans are always going to listen to Creedence, and would always have loved John Fogerty's songs at first listen. His songs contain our core, and come from the geographies which define us.

Strong statement, I suppose. Yet you can imagine Revolutionary war minutemen absent-mindedly singing "Suzie Q" together as they trudge along a dirt road; you can see chain gangs cutting sugar cane, singing "Long as I Can See the Light," families would have fun around log cabin firesides singing "Looking Out My Back Door,"and lonely muleskinners hauling their loads west would no doubt sing "Molina" to empty plains. "Proud Mary" might just as well have been sung on the steamboats going up rivers and around the bends. In a Simpsons cartoon episode, Homer Simpson hears a panicked Marge ask if anyone knows how to perform CPR, so he looks up into the distance and sings, "I see a Bad Moon a-risin'--I see troubles on the way." I rest my case.

CCR remains popular in the YouTube age, with most of the tunes mentioned above having been downloaded millions of times. In their hay day, the band was so popular and prolific they released four Top Ten albums in 18 months. "Someday Never Comes" was one of the last songs they wrote before breaking up. Here are the lyrics:

First thing I remember
Was askin Papa, "Why!? "
For there were many things I didn't know.

And Daddy always smiled,
He took me by the hand
Sayin, 'Someday...you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Well, time and tears went by
and I collected dust,
there were many things I didn't know
and when daddy went away
he said, "Try to be a man,
and someday...you'll understand."

And then, one day in April
I wasn't even there
there were many things I didn't know:
a son was born to me,
and his mama held his hand
saying "Someday, you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Think it was September, the year I went away
for there were many things I didn't know
and I still see him standing, trying to be a man;
I said, "Someday, you'll understand."

Huckleberry Finn's Opus And Time Magazine's Feature Of Mark Twain

The editors of Time, buffered like the rest of us upon litanies of atrocity, searched last week for something we could be proud of, and they settled on Mark Twain, who they put on the cover. The main article, written by Roy Blount, Jr., opened like this:

What, if anything, about this benighted moment of American life will anyone in the future look back on with nostalgia?

The nostalgia is this: a country produced a humorist, thinker, and moralist who took the pen-name of Mark Twain. As a young man, the restless, traveling parent-less Sam Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri hitched a boat-ride down to New Orleans, where he schemed to go to South America for to make his fortune smuggling cocaine back to the US. Not finding a ship quickly enough, he signed on as a steamboat pilot's apprentice and went back up the Mississippi. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he signed up briefly for the Confederacy, and pistolled an innocent horseman down in the darkness by his nervous bivouac in the woods. He stood over the man's body, trying to yearn him back to life, and he left the service soon thereafter to light out for silver mining in the territories where he became a yellow journalist.

That's a common story we, all of us Americans as ancestral flotsam, come from. Sam was like any of our other over-reaching rough young opportunists who didn't fit, a printer, a digger, a Billy the Kid, an adventurer who was just another searching inconsiderate who wanted something better. But with this kid there was a twist, and somehow his glimmerings of conscience kept steadily growing, aided by an ability to embroider yarns, to write and observe and express himself in print.

Eventually, in 1884, he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a semi-autobiographical or imagined examination of his childhood. For its sublime, honest, between-the-lines treatment of the turbulent, existential relationships of race, space, and the roiling cultures of an emerging country--themes which haven't calmed down by a long shot--it is the crowning achievement of American literature. I'm not sure if I've ever read a greater work, more accurately plumbing and surveying, more celebrating, capturing and penetrating, including all of Shakespeare's.

I have some inklings of what personal introspections, meditations, and unsparing intellectual braveries it took to write it. Not surprisingly, Twain said it took him the longest of all his books to write. It called all the fundamental assumptions of his boyhood appropriately into question, yet in many if not most high schools in my country today, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a forbidden work. (It makes liberal use of the language which was common at the time of its writing and subject, and of a pejorative word referring to color and race.) Quite simply, this is a cultural crime. Banning such a masterpiece is like burning down trees because they might one day burn, for Huck Finn is nothing less than the secret code and avatar of our national salvation.

In the story, a desperate, regularly abused and abject Huck Finn spreads blood on the ground and makes it look like his father, the notorious vagrant drunkard Pap Finn has killed him and dumped him in the river. At the same time, Miss Watson's slave Jim escapes her ownership because he longs to see his family, and the two wind up on the same mid-stream island. They elude the search parties sent to find them, and then take a raft down the Mississippi. There are misadventures, and Huck is tormented now and again by the legal and moral questions of sheltering an escaped slave. On page 100, he considers the temporal and eternal consequences of going against social and heavenly conscriptions, and decides that he solemnly will risk Hell for harboring a slave.

We gradually begin to realize that Jim is a thoroughly wise and moral man, about the only one we meet in the book, and that he's the best father figure Huck has ever had. At the end of the story, we learn that Jim earlier shielded Huck from the sight or knowledge of his biological father's dead body in the wreck of a gambling house that was swept down the river on a flood. Jim tells Huck to great relief that he's not condemned to return to his father's wrathful fists in St. Petersburg (Hannibal), and Huck may live with Tom Sawyer's family. Jim, having reached a providential freedom, takes his leave to go see his his wife and children at last.

It was Twain's intention that Jim, a slave, was Huck's better father, and if you closely read the story of their journey down the central, massive, live-giving river of our country, their mutual regard for each other gathers steadily until it starts to get unmistakably loud and finally hints of something greater. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a beautiful story, but it was intended even more as an allegory, you see, about the people in our country eventually becoming equal, about the rightness of them loving each other without reference to ownership, poor circumstance, or color. Twain knew that respect and love could be shouted down by present and future crowds, but a beautiful story can't. He sheltered his meditations in impervious armor, and we can be proud of that.

(Note: this version edited for errors regarding points of plot.)

The Berlin Candy Bomber

A different sort of war hero lived just down the street from a family I was staying with, and he was old friends with them. He was not just a hero, really, more of a mythical creature or icon, a man perfectly tailored to fit America's post-Big War self-image, one of a beneficent powerhouse showering the globe with the blessings of its innovation, mass production, and cornucopic agriculture. The myth was real, as low-key as an old hardware store, and lived nine houses away; his name was Gail Halvorsen, and he was the Berlin Candy Bomber.

For those who remember, that phrase evokes a dim interval when the Cold War had not yet cooled into its unstable jello mold. Anything could happen, some did, including Soviet fighters crashing into passenger planes from buzzing them too close, and war was widely expected. In 1948, in response to the announcement of a separate West German currency, Stalin's planners figured an island of troublesome capitalism could be blockaded and starved out. With roads blocked off, air supply seemed logistically impossible, and capitulation would come by winter at latest. The Soviets kicked off their blockade in July.

My friends arranged the meeting. In his living room, I asked Gail Halvorsen about the unprecedented logistics required to supply the 2 million denuded residents of West Berlin with 7,500 tons of necessaries per day in the winter, about 5,000 per day in summer. An airborne conveyor belt was hastily suspended to send in the basics of coal and flour, then sped up, enlarged, and was finally perfected to send in over 2 million tons of everything by the time it was over. Every bit of it by air. The allies wiped the nose of communism in 2,200 glorious calories per day, and although the blockade ended in May, 1949, the airlift kept going until September for good measure.

West Berlin was 110 miles inside the Soviet Zone. Halvorsen and his C-54 crew would fly 3 or 4 supply missions into Tempelhof airport every day, leaving only 4 or 5 hours for sleep; touched down in Berlin, airmen were not allowed to exit their planes. An avid photographer, Halvorsen decided to forgo a night's sleep and hitched a ride on a buddy's flight so he could tour Berlin by jeep, see the Reichstag, Hitler's Bunker, the Brandenburger Tor. While waiting for his driver, he walked down to the end of the Tempelhof runway to take a picture of an infamous apartment block which had to be dropped over or dodged by overloaded C-54s on their landing runs, the cause of fatalities and lots of stress. Just beyond the field's barbed-wire perimeter were 30 or so German children standing in the rubble watching the planes come in. They came up to the barrier, stuck their hands through and begged him to come visit them.

Halvorsen talked with the children for some time, enough to deeply impress him and make him late for his rendezvous. The thoughtful questions, gratitude, and maturity from the pint-sized people flummoxed him. They thanked him for bringing food to their families. As he hustled away it occurred to the Lieutenant that none of the children had asked him for candy or chewing gum, as children everywhere else had so assuredly done, it being considered within their rights. He reached into his pocket, felt the two sticks of the Wrigley's gum he sometimes chewed against drowsiness, and reluctantly made a decision which would change the course of his life.

He turned around and broke the two sticks into halves, walked back and gave them to the children at the wire. At that time, three sticks of gum in Berlin would buy two week's worth of laundering, or greater favors; anywhere in West Germany, adults would immediately dive for a casually flicked cigarett butt, with ensuing wrestling and fisticuffs. But the gum was not fought over, and the children split the Wrigley's Spearmint wrappers amongst themselves to savor like frankincense.

Halvorsen felt bad for not being able to give more, so he decided to break Air Force regulations. He told the kids to look for the plane that wiggled its wings as it flew over the apartment the next day, and he would drop some chocolate bars. His apprehensive crewmates went along, using their weekly gum and Hershey bar rations, tying them to handkerchief parachutes and finally tossing them down the flare tube just as they cleared the apartment block.

The ecstatic kids mobbed the wire at the end of Tempelhof and cheered. After a few more runs, the press picked up on a mystery Candy Bomber, the whole thing snowballed and Berlin went wild. Rather than face disciplinary action, Halvorsen became a celebrity, and eventually many pilots were helping drop US-donated candy all over West (and sometimes East) Berlin. A firehouse in Chicopee, Massachusetts was converted into a packaging center to deal with all the private donations even before the Stateside candy companies got involved. The Soviets lodged a formal diplomatic protest over stray candy, but the food and supplies, the chewing gum and chocolate kept on coming, vital flourishes to go along with the flour.

It is difficult to put your finger on anything particularly special about Gail Halvorsen. Nice guy, constitutionally good-natured. Salt of the earth, like you'd expect of a former Utah beet farmer. Wholesome and unassuming, yet very much his own man. Twenty years after he first dropped Hershey bars to some rubble-rats, the people of Berlin demanded that he be made the commandant of Tempelhof Airport, which he became upon his promotion to Colonel. After his military service ended he was named Dean of Student Affairs at a large university. Amongst many other honors, he was chosen to carry the German national team's sign in the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Retired when I met him, sitting easy in his worn recliner, he was surrounded by pictures. Some were of his children and grandchildren, but these swam in a sea of pictures hung and piled everywhere, all of them bearing messages and smiles from grateful Germans.

The Beginning Of The World As We Know It (Part One)

Having gotten all the nice spiritual Rumi-stuff out of my system in the previous post, on to practical things; to the world's problems, and their solving. My ersatz leaders keep telling me how anything wrong is all my fault, so I thought, why not? Let's have a go and make it good. Our problems are only as big as the wind and the waves, as the sun and the rain.

At first, my working title was 'Why Democrats Are A Bunch Of Drooling Catamites.' You see, my case of Two-Party Immune Deficiency Syndrome (TPIDS) is late-stage, and the Democrats surely play their part as Complicit Mommy Government to perfection, as a companion and helpmeet to our Abusive Daddy Government. Whom it's our enviable task to either kill, beat sense into, or run away from. So, yes, let's start off with the Party of the Damned, or what I choose to call "the Dims." I changed the title above to something more active, with an eye to an ongoing series; by way of power law and microcosm, Dims are great projectors for our Big Problems. As the old military recruiting jingle goes, "what a great play-ace, it's a great waay...to start!"

Isabelita, the thoughtful cookie at Learning to Sequence, noted in the comments section of Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama that Hillary:

'seems like a "kinder gentler" form of the GOP, and Obama seems insubstantial. There's not a single Democratic candidate I'd vote for; wonder if we can outsource the leadership of this country to, oh, say, New Zealand?'

Iz sums up my sentiments well. If Hillary gets elected, we will be renting and watching "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" as en-masse comfort food. Paradoxically, though, the inmates of Casa Lord have given money to Obama and were invited to lunch with his wife. We have an Obama sign hanging in our window. Yet, something inside me still wants to crisply slap each side of the guy's face with a pair of wet leather gloves and bellow like George S. Patton, "Be a man, fer chrissakes!! There are brave candidates out there fighting and dying, and you're hiding in the make-up room like a coward!" Sigh.

But what else is left? I've considered supporting Dennis Kucinich, and even Ron Paul, because at least they take an unequivocal stand against The War. The obvious political lesson they, or any well-choreographed goose-steppers provide, is this: Take a stand, you existentially challenged boobs, take a stand! (Note: See goose-steppers.) So at least Kucinich and Paul "get" the basic prerequisite. Fortunately or not, however, neither can get "elected."

It all starts with The War. In the beginning was The War. The War is run by the War Machine, which now makes up most of the country's remaining manufacturing base...you know, just like it did for The Soviet Freaking Union back in 1984. That being the case, if the Democrats truly didn't want us to invade/occupy/eternally exploit Iraq, would we still be there, or ever have gone? Would Cheney still be President? Would Hillary Clinton have been the one who first used the phrase after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us? (Yep, she was first, and beat Dumya to it.)

The truth is, the Dims support The War Machine, and that's why they support The War. They're bending over, busy slurping at the Money River, looking up to carp threats occasionally and then backing down to slurp again at the life blood of this nation, this precious gift of governmental innovation, as it runs in rivulets and rills down into the scuppers of FACISM. The same ugly thing this country pulled out all the stops to defeat 60-odd years ago, bombing every major city full of evil German and Japanese people to smithereens, not to mention the Italians and French who got in the way. People keep wondering and marveling how craven, how caved-in and sold-out Congress can be, but it's really simple. It's as simple as buying and selling hogs. Fascists love hogs. [Sotto voce: And fascism's better, because run! Cower! Twitter like fluffy yellow chicks, and be afraid! (Looking left and right for spies.) The only alternative is so-cial-ism. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!]

To paraphrase the idiot son of an asshole, "Being an Empire is hard work." Yes...yes, Fearless Leader, you masturbatory imbecile, it is hard work. So here it is, the answer, the solution to our problems: smarter work. The only way to save what's left of imperial standing melting away like run-off from a denuded hill, and our domestic freedoms at the same time, two-birds-one-stone style, is to wise up. And make a big, hard, brave yet obvious choice. A choice which is ultimately necessary anyway. Amongst smaller hard choices, the Democrats have to not only renounce The War, they must renounce The War Machine. Nothing much other than a tack into the wind, merely risking political and physical assassination domestically and a heapin' helpin' of Humble Pie internationally. So how, other than fitting our alleged representatives with electro-shock collars and pumping them full of 100 mikes of LSD, do we work them up to the gargantuan tasks common to vertebrates?

Somehow I can't picture my Senators (Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell) driving that bus in Selma. Actually, I'm picturing it right now as they're dragged off the bus by police and savagely beaten with batons. Ha-ha! To be realistic, look, we're dealing with a government that told us with a straight frigging face to go out and buy duct tape in case of a nerve gas attack, and that kerosene can melt steel. (Mental Note: I suppose duct tape could be used as a way to cover your mouth and nostrils so as to induce a less painful death. Kerosene and jet fuel don't melt steel, not in my back yard.) A direct frontal assault on The War Machine won't work. It would simply send Terminators after us like Skynet and shoot us with plasmatic death-rays.

But what we can do is start small. An insurgency they don't see coming, an infiltration, a Rat Attack. It's already got plenty of foot soldiers, even investors. We can do things that my darling Senators, the Bobbsey Twins, will enthusiastically support. They just won't know the full implications, and when they finally glom, it'll be ok by them. Because they care about money. Every Constitution, every Estate, is based on money, on a currency. A currency is a metaphorical basis for storing power and wealth. We need to switch the fundamental basis of our power and wealth. The US has switched its currency basis at least four times in its history, and it will do so again.

Power and wealth. And beer! Mmmm. The focus of our big ol' technologized Teddy Bear, our throwing-candy-to-the-children-while-it-kills-them War Machine, is oil. Our currency isn't The Dollar. Our currency is oil. This is a VERY BIG problem. First, its worldwide production has begun to go into decline--9.5 million Saudi barrels a day wen down to 8.5 over the past year, but they "could pump more if we wanted to!," sure, and Iran, well, they're desperate for nuclear power because the mullahs know how wildly overstated their reserves are, and the rate at which their wells are declining--plus, we're losing control of the damned stuff anyway. That's why we're building military bases on top of wherever we can find new, relatively helpless sources of it. Even if that quixotic effort starts getting a lot cheaper or miraculously succeeds, well...we're still, for all practical purposes...Going To Run Out of Oil.

We need to switch our currency. This implies a future Manhattan Project, a huge national investment and roll of the dice, on sustainable energy. And that will, at some point, happen. But the Rat Attack doesn't have to wait for a Manhattan Project. It can germinate and advance incremental change. Its weapons are not just wind farms and solar panels, not bipolar Priuses and biodiesel Passats, but all manner of gardening, all sorts of ruminants (including ponies), tree-planting, urban bee-keeping, de-centralized heating, and simply giving a damn. Raising chickens on your patio, damn the Bird Flu, full speed ahead. This is how the Amish and most of the world survive on two bucks a day. We should probably do A-OK on forty thou per capita. And if a schlumpf like me can do organic gardening,anyone can.

This might be a good place to note that Exxon's corporate profits were bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen countries last year. Exxon and other distended, artificial, inhuman structures like it are The Enemy. These are the enemies who are stealing your money. By the way, they also want to kill you, slowly, so they can wring every last bit of useful output and consumption out of your body. They've calculated the calories, and want to turn the world into one big "Arbeit Macht Frei" concentration camp, their kapos as commandants, and they're succeeding. Every drop of oil you don't use and every ray of sunshine you do sends these monstrous mutants, and many of their large shareholders, into fits of depression and murderous rage. Because they know, deep down in their black insatiable selves, that no one owns the wind, the sun, or the rain. Although they've hired lobbyists to address that disadvantage.

We need to start an anti-oil insurgency, and it's going to be surprisingly easy. I belly laugh at the prospect because, you see, we're not going to have much choice. Soon enough, driving 40 miles to save five bucks on t-shirts made by slave labor fed by slop troughs in some distant Work Zone is going to look exactly like what it is: stupid. We're going to live in a world where you can walk, float, or teleport to bars and stores. I'm not speaking from high moral terrain here. It's simply going to be cheaper than going through violent machinations and invasions to coax flammable goo from under far-off ground.

"I feel that we have been lied to and betrayed by this Administration. A crime has been committed against the Constitution. It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war. How could I order men to die for something I believe is wrong?"

Happy Veteran's Day: Lieutenant Ehren Watada

A lieutenant from Hawaii stationed at Fort Lewis was the first officer to do it. He refused to go to Iraq, and when pressured to knuckle under, he made a public statement. The Army threatened him with jail time, and he said "OK." He accepted a 6-month sentence. The Army found that response unsatisfying, so it court-martialled him with full measures of wrath and bureaucratic mendacity, seeking to put him away for six years. Watada stood firm as a kangaroo court stooped to nonsense. Last Thursday, he won his case. I doubt the Army will pursue an appeal, and preferring to devote its energies to keeping the outcome quiet (if you've heard of this in the MSM, please let me know). Via Truthout:

On Thursday, November 8, Hon. Benjamin Settle, a federal court judge, issued a preliminary injunction halting any further court-martial proceedings of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada and effectively ruling against the Army on virtually every issue in the case. This injunction not only extends the stay until the conclusion of the habeas corpus proceedings, but also addresses the specific request for relief from further legal proceedings, stating, "the remedy sought by Petitioner, while rare, is appropriate."

Although the Army issued a press release claiming to "look forward to the opportunity to further explain to the District Court judge the full extent of the protections and safeguards that are afforded to a military accused," (Seattle Times, 11/9/07), anyone who glances at the court ruling will agree that the Army's only lingering hope is to appeal this ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Settle wrote "for several reasons ... it is likely that [Lt. Watada] will succeed on the merits of his double jeopardy claim" (Order, p. 22; a copy of the order is attached). The court held that the military judge acted "irrationally, irresponsibly, precipitately" (Order, page 31) in failing to consider feasible alternatives to a mistrial, and there was no good reason to stop the proceedings.

This ruling came after the repeated refusal of the military appeals courts to free Lt. Watada of the burden of a second court-martial. Lt. Watada's attorneys have consistently argued that the military should not be allowed a "do-over." The military judge halted the first court-martial in the wake of admissions by prosecution witnesses regarding Lt. Watada's integrity and statements that Lt. Watada's decision not to deploy was an act of conscience.

Read More...

It takes one kind of bravery to storm a machine-gun nest to save what's left of your comrades. It takes another to storm a hostile establishment to save what's left of a nation. A few people have both kinds. Thank you, Lieutenant Watada.

One Toke Over The Line, By Brewer And Shipley

In the spirit of the previous post's title. Brewer and Shipley got into a lot of trouble for the song, which many radio stations banned. Richard Nixon's VP, Spiro Agnew, denounced it as un-American, and the artists were dubbed subversives by the FBI. And they're still playing it. The lyrics:

One toke over the line sweet Jesus
One toke over the line
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line

Awaitin' for the train that goes home, sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line

Whoooo do you love, I hope it's me
I've been a changin', as you can plainly see
I felt the joy and I learned about the pain, that my momma said
If I should choose to make a part of me, would surely strike me dead
Now I'm one toke over the line sweet Jesus
One toke over the line
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line
I'm waitin' for the train that goes home sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line

I sail away, a country mile...
Now I'm returnin', and showin' off a smile
I met all the girls and loved myself a few;
Ended by surprise, like everything else I've been through
It opened up my eyes and now I'm--
One toke over the line, sweet Jesus!
One toke over the line.
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
(Don't you just know) I'm waitin' for the train that goes home sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line

Don't you just know
I'm waitin' for the train that goes home sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line

I want to be...
One toke over the line, sweet Jesus
One toke over the line
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line
Don't you just know I waitin' for the train that goes home sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over line
One toke, one toke over the line!

"There's so much more to flying than just flapping around from place to place! A... a... mosquito does that! One little barrel roll around the Elder Gull, just for fun, and I'm Outcast! Are they blind? Can't they see? Can't they think of the glory that it'll be when we really learn to fly?"

"I don't care what they think. I'll show them what flying is! I'll be pure Outlaw, if that's the way they want it. And I'll make them so sorry..."

Jonathon Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (h/t to Naj at Iran Facts, link on right)

Meet Michael Francis Wiley: American

While browsing through a Car & Driver magazine at the drug store on a prescription run, I saw a little filler-story about a triple amputee who led police on a chase through New Port Richey, Florida. Police claim thhey broke off pursuit of the white male's Ford Explorer after 8 minutes because "it could have put others in danger." Other sources say the chase ended because Wiley out-ran the chase vehicles. An arrest warrant is sought for one-legged, no-armed methamphetamine dealer Francis Wiley on charges of fleeing to elude. In 2006, he led police on a 120-mph chase down I-75 in a Corvette until one tire came off and the aluminum wheel rim began to burn. Here was the money quote:

"He is one of the best drivers I've ever seen in my life ," said Lee Michie, a longtime acquaintance. "But he's the worst person I've ever met."

Now...you just know there has to be more to that story, right? I put down the Car and Driver, vowing to follow it up on The Google later, and sure enough. There's more. More than can be casually communicated. I can't allow an inability to communicate to stop me. So. Imagine a crazily unequal triangle. On one point is abhorrence. On another is pathos. On the last is breakthrough. That's a triangle of Michael Francis Wiley's personality.

It is a felony for him to merely sit in a driver's seat. According to court records, Wiley, aged 40, is a felon capable of physical violence. He repeatedly assaulted his wife, decked a state trooper twice, and tried to attack others. He has a steady string of violations, 47 of them (most involving driving) stemming back to 1984, when he stole his first car, drove for the first time with no license, and got into his first police chase. And first crash. He has spent at least 3 years in prison, where he was so good at provoking detention officers he was beaten and sprayed with mace like an unwanted pole-cat. After he got out, fellow ex-con murdered a woman in his living room while he and his family slept. His mother no longer morally supports him, and his wife has left him.

As a child, Wiley's father was a mechanic for the Transit Authority in his native New York City. His grandfather was a mechanic, too. His first sentence was "Daddy fix car." When he was 13, while playing with other truants, he fell off an elevated train platform onto power lines, and, searching for a foothold to get down by, found one made of metal. His body made a temporary circuit-breaker for 12,000 volts before it was blown dead to the pavement 25-30 feet below. The impact revived him. Three limbs were damaged too badly to save, and were removed at Bellevue hospital. One month later, he escaped the hospital by hopping through a utility tunnel. Here is a report by Stanley Portnow, the forensic psychiatrist who treated him in 1981:

. . . classic post-traumatic neurosis:

. . . attempts to keep up a rather tough guy facade which is meant to say that nothing can really hurt him;

. . . not only out to prove that he is as good as but rather better than he was before the accident;

. . . his continued denial of his realistic state will produce more and more social adverse effects;

After the accident, his parents moved to Florida. He stole the car, then later bought a black-on-black Monte Carlo SS with the injury settlement he got. He starts cars by gliding the key into the ignition with his mouth, then turns it with his toes. He shifts with his knee, and bites the headlight switch and turn signals. He turns by jamming his left arm stump into the wheel spokes and whipping it around. He put 50,000 miles onto the window-rattling V-8 in one year, traveling all over the country while dreaming of becoming a race car driver. Needing friends to pop the tops of beer cans, he became popular, and went to a Halloween party as a shark attack victim. He got married. Had a daughter. Drove like a burning wounded bat out of hell. He piled up speeding tickets until his license was taken away. He keeps driving, police see him, and he gets into more car chases. Both his lawyer and mother believe he needs regular access to a private race track.

"I'm an excellent driver," he says. "If I could just get my license back, I'd never be in here again."

That is unlikely. His license is suspended for a considerable period of time. When a dog is hit by a truck, when a bug gets stepped on, when a reptile loses its fore-limbs, when a seagull breaks a wing, they die or do the best they can. They compensate. If they can crawl away, they do so. But they'd probably greatly prefer to drive. Even to fly. Asked what he'd do to get his license back, Michael Francis Wiley said this:

"I'd give my right leg."

MLK: Beyond Vietnam--A Time To Break Silence

(Update: I forgot to link a heavy credit to Zoey and Me at Cat In The Bag for their post on the coming showdown over the upcoming children's health care veto. But for them, it would have escaped my notice.)

The next appropriations bill is for roughly $200 Billion, about $50 billion lower than the last one. When Congress complains it will have to cut programs, like the one it wants for only half of the 8 million children without health care insurance, the Wite Hows will veto a bill to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program, and simultaneously accuse its Parliament of Whores of budgetary excess and of "spending like there's no tomorrow." All while insisting on increased war allocations. Never mind the $1 Trillion+ already appropriated for The Yee Ha War, and the $2.5-3.5 Trillion it's going to eventually cost even if it were stopped today. Assuming we don't cut VA hospitals and don't do away with Veteran's Benefits. (Oh, right! That's part of the plan, too.)

I didn't bother posting about the Great Senate Sleepover, figuring they wouldn't accomplish anything other than to hold a presser and act dramatically sleep-deprived. Question: what would happen if Congress actually passed an Act demanding the withdrawal of the US from Iraq? (Don't answer.) So, I felt like hearing something a lot more inspirational, something a lot more true. Someone who's willing to say war's expenses lead to a lack of domestic investment. That killing abroad is directly connected to not caring at home.

MLK's full Vietnam speech is available at American Rhetoric, which has audio and transcripts available of its picks for the Top 100 Speeches. Here's but one excerpt:

"I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

Speech delivered at The Riverside Church in New York City on April 4th, 1967.

Michael Moore Is Fat. Don't Listen To Him!

Moore is a documentarian who exploits issues, distorting them into rants which serve his purposes. He tells the truths we already know but don't want to hear, like some ruthlessly perverse anti-socialite who shows up at cocktail parties to show off a progressing cancer. His movies, 'Roger & Me,' 'Bowling for Columbine,' and 'Fahrenheit 9/11' all had the same signature in-your-face-give-me-answers approach. Despite that, some prefer to treat him like an overweight sahib criticizing the Raj or a drunken Eliot trashing high society in 30s Singapore. As someone who has become an insider, but really shouldn't be fully legitimated. Their best defense seems to be, "Make him look ridiculous," juxtapose the body of his work as lightweight against his too-great bulk. But Moore is no effete liberal, and neither is America media all that conservative, or deep.

Moore is a fellow Eagle Scout, a street fighter who doesn't realize he's not worthy. Rather, he realizes it, but he's pissed, on his home turf, and spoiling for a fight. He uses his appearance as a permanent feint, his leading questions like a bullfighter's cape. He is a patriot on a mission to avenge Flint, Michigan, and he doesn't really care if he looks perverse and ruthless. So when CNN ran a hit piece full of inaccuracies mouthed by the Spokes-doctor Sanjay Gupta right before Wolf Blitzer's interview, it was a pretty bad idea. By the interview's end, Moore had beaten Blitzer so bloody that he actually took pity on him, thanking him with a wry smile while thinking ahead to the proceeds of a coming libel lawsuit.

Lord Wife and I went to see Sicko last Friday night. Here's the short version. Pretty much all of us know the American system of health care is broken. I sure as #%$& do. If you don't know that yet, fall down on your knees and thank whatever god you should pray to for your good health. It's Lord of the Flies out here. I paid $1,420 a month for a top-notch COBRA plan in a state which has the most advanced health care research in the country. When my wife had an emergency appendectomy less than a month after our son was born, the plan refused to pay the surgeon who took out her appendix and saved her life. The operation took twice as long as standard, and the doctor wasn't directly employed by the hospital. So there was a loophole, you see. The surgeon's office came after us for his hefty fee. I could keep going way past there with many other anecdotes, some of which I have written about before. But by comparison to to others, me and mine are lucky, so I will stop.

Even so, before seeing 'Sicko' I half-believed people when they said, "Oh, Cuba is reporting false numbers, people have to wait forever to get seen there, Michael Moore is pulling a cheap Castro publicity stunt, etc." Uh-uh. Wrong. Wait until you see the lobby of Havana Hospital. It's more beautiful, efficient, and, for lack of a better word, thriving, than any hospital in the United States. This is not your father's communism. The Cuban doctors weren't faking their state-of-the-art MRI machines, CAT scans, dental implants, competent diagnoses and sterling bedside manners. The 9/11 volunteers who went there for treatment got it for free and were grateful to the point of tears. Because they sure as hell weren't getting their resultant pulmonary problems treated, or compensated for as promised, here. The kindness in Cuba may have been a publicity stunt. So what? It was also real. And for those of you who think Michael Moore is an ass...maybe he is. But he gives a damn, and unless you happen to be a robber-baron or a boot-licker, he's on your side, and he dishes highly effective counter-propaganda. All Americans are getting screwed by outsourcing. By guns. By resource wars. By blood-suckers. It's just a question of degree.

America is the only country in the world, the only prosperous country, which does not have universal health care. I've lived and worked in quite a few other industrialized nations, East and West. All of them have cheap, readily available and effective care that regularly treats foreigners and tourists at no charge. We all sense the US health care system sucks by comparison, and is getting worse. But it's hard to understand how great the differential margin is until you see it for yourself. Fewer still, of course, understand that America is running a gigantic social engineering experiment to see how much profit can be extracted via people's illnesses. The perfect economic satisficing strategy would be to keep a patient alive and/or in treatment until, like a depleted oil field, there's no easy money left in them. Then you cut them loose and wait for them to die or for conditions to change. As Michael Moore says on Larry King, "There's no mystery here. It's the insurance company's money, and they have a fiduciary responsibility not to give it to you. It's against the law for them to not put their shareholders' returns first."

There's the Crossroads of the Problem. In the movie, you'll see that the for-profit health care system goes all the way back to...Richard Nixon. (Hello darkness, my old friend!) Nixon approved a massive conflict of interest, a scheme by Fred Kaiser to "make more money by providing less care," and the moment is actually caught on tape. To see Moore's knock-downs of Blitzer on CNN, the clip is hosted on Crooks and Liars. The YouTube clip above is from Moore's far more amiable and informative interview with Larry King. Sicko's main value is in exposing how insurers operate. They kill as many people as they can get away with, and they're looking at you. Go see how.

A Message From The Irony Overload Broadcast System

Having worked at two of the involved companies, I thought this was pretty rich:

Several companies, including Yahoo, AT&T and Microsoft, are encouraging regulators to take a close look at Google's planned purchase of online ad company DoubleClick....
In a statement Sunday, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith called for regulators to give the deal a hard look. "This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns in that it gives the Google DoubleClick combination unprecedented control in the delivery of online advertising, and access to a huge amount of consumer information by tracking what customers do online," Smith said. "We think this merger deserves close scrutiny from regulatory authorities to ensure a competitive online advertising market."

Never try to con a con-man, as the saying goes. And never try to out-monopolize a monopolist.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

James Wright

The Super Bowl and Working Class Heroes

I cannot say that football was the vehicle of my escape from the depleting social environment where I grew up, which still simmers as a love-hate relationship. I probably could've left faster and gone further by remaining a bookworm. As a bookworm, though, it was easy enough to observe what people liked on a Friday night. And I know well the truths in the poem above, and when I heard it for the first time a few years ago on ESPN, it stopped me in my tracks.

Football was more a pursuit for normality and respect, and while it richly afforded those to me, it proved also to be a release. People cheered when I hit other young men hard, logically because they were opposing players from opposing towns out to steal glory. But there's something far more atavistic going on in both the players and the audience. Between a snap and the whistle, there is no need for moral delay, and what genuinely surprised me is that most players, even in the NFL, mentally hesitate.

It is the mind which leads the body, and one good lesson I took from football is the mind can compensate for average athletic ability. Football rewards organized mental savagery. Also, by the way, when linebackers or safeties say they never intended to hurt anyone, most of them are lying; what they mean is, they almost never intend to hurt anyone in a specific way. It is a sweet feeling to turn your whole body into a lever, and to knock someone else back and out. It always has been, and there should be no shame in saying so.

Good fathers teach their sons there's no easy way out, everything has to be worked for and sacrificed for. The Martin's Ferry of the poem above is where many poor sons of Polacks with their long beers went to colleges, and sometimes to professional teams, by either path to join the ranks of the wealthy. The ritualized violence of football is a perfect emblem of American capitalism's philosophical darwinism, and the fathers and sons were right enough to dream of heroes. In Martin's Ferry and the mill towns like it, though, it's important to recognize that form of capitalism produced far more losers than it did winners. I don't consider myself to be either, just lucky, but I'm from a town just like Martin's Ferry, where the blast furnaces no longer run. Unlike the Super Bowl, life is best in systems which don't believe in winner-take-all propositions.

Here is James Wright reading his famous poem.