where I've been

Second cold this year.

And I haven't been too impressed with the news cycle.

• U.S. Port security? There ain't none. Fellow anti-Fascists boiling down this issue to one of race are oversimplifying. Why should the logistics of any American ports be controlled by a foreign company? We are told over and over again how fucking superior everything is when it's papered in red, white & blue -- yet there's not one American company qualified to oversee operations in U.S. ports. Bullshit. This is about parking aircraft carriers in a hostile part of the world. And a thousand levels of cronyism. Always, with the cronyism.
  
  
• Hopes of avoiding civil war in Iraq? There ain't none. It's been a foregone conclusion since the decision was made to invade & occupy Iraq.
  
  
• Women's rights in South Dakota? There ain't none. This is the shape of things to come, soon to be rubber-stamped by our post-Constitutional "supreme" court (which, as we have seen time and time again, has nothing but the greatest respect for states rights... unless decriminalizing marijuana is involved).
  
  
• Backlash to Bush's Spy-O-Rama? There ain't none. Russ Feingold talks tough on Bill Maher's show, but Russ Feingold is essentially a man without a party. Dems could own '06, but anyone who believes the Democratic Party has enough dignity and courage to effectively challenge the Dictator-In-Chief on this or any other issue is a fool. We are in this rotten position precisely because it doesn't.
  

And on that merry note, there's a couple of Nyquil shots callin' my name.

Miscreants & Politics

Nevermind war lies, torture or treason. What follows is the brownshirts' idea of a scandal:

Houston Chronicle

DALLAS - A Dallas Democrat seeking election to the Texas House of Representatives has acknowledged that he once worked as a prostitute and does not regret his past.

Tom Malin, a salesman and actor, said he no longer works as a prostitute but was aware that his previous life could cost him the nomination in the March 7 Democratic primary.

"I've made mistakes in my life, and I've stood before my creator and I've accepted responsibility for my behavior," Malin told the Dallas Morning News for its Friday editions.

"I've also accepted his grace and his redemption and his love and his forgiveness," and that's what is important, he said.

Archived versions of defunct Web sites advertise the services of a male escort identified as Todd Sharpe. The phone number listed with Sharpe belongs to Malin, the newspaper said.

Malin, once a member of the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board, has worked as a Mary Kay salesman and performed in Dallas-area theater productions. His candidate Web page describes him as a managing director for the marketing arm of a Dallas electricity provider.

Malin faces retired salesman Jack Borden in the Democratic primary. The winner will face incumbent Republican Dan Branch in November in a race to represent a district covering much of central Dallas.

Never ones to shy from the absurd, Bush bootlickers are comparing Malin's story to that of gay prostitute, fake journalist and accomplished White House operative, Jeff Gannon - federal government, harm to the Republic, and paid propaganda not being factors in their comparison.

A friend suggested Democratic Party officials should encourage Malin to withdraw from the race. In terms of business-as-usual politics, I understand reasoning behind the suggestion, but this is what primaries are for. Voters need greater input, not less. (Personally, I would be more concerned about voting for a Mary Kay-hawking thespian than a prostitute, but that's just me.)

Not to go all Chairman Mao on your ass, but considering the impressive academic and corporate credentials boasted by the majority of candidates to state & federal office - all of whom appear to be seeking fifteen minutes of fame and a freshly updated Rolodex - I'm left wondering whether an MBA, a flawless curriculum vitae and a clean arrest record should preclude one from holding elected office.

Perhaps those of us who agitate for greater civic participation don't fully appreciate how radical a proposition it really is.

the human toll

Not Coming Soon to a television near you:

The Forgotten Wounded of Iraq
by Ron Kovic

It is so difficult at first. You return home and both physically and emotionally don't know how you are going to live with this wound, but you just keep trying, just keep waking up to this frightening reality every morning. "My God, what has happened to me?" But you somehow get up, you somehow go on and find a way to move through each day. Even though it is impossible, you go on. Maybe there will be a day years from now, if you are lucky to live that long, when it will get better and you will not feel so overwhelmed. You must have something to hope for, some way to believe it will not always be this way. This is exactly what many of them are going through right now.

They are alone in their rooms all over this country, right now. Just as I was alone in my room in Massapequa. I know they're there--just as I was. This is the part you never see. The part that is never reported in the news. The part that the president and vice president never mention. This is the agonizing part, the lonely part, when you have to awake to the wound each morning and suddenly realize what you've lost, what is gone forever. They're out there and they have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and children. And they're not saying much right now. Just like me they're just trying to get through each day. Trying to be brave and not cry. They still are extremely grateful to be alive, but slowly, agonizingly they are beginning to think about what has really happened to them.

A truly gut-wrenching essay.

Not much fun for victims who live in Iraq, Afghanistan and the like, either.

Yet Bush's cheerleaders have the audacity to bleat on about the dearth of good news from Iraq. The only good news for them - besides the billions of dollars being looted from the public coffers in the grossly fraudulent name of "fighting terrorism" - is that the most immediate victims of American policy are largely silenced and forgotten. Their suffering, particularly when marked by criticism of American policy, threatens the moo cow complacency demanded by consumer culture.

Our collective insistence on ignoring the consequences of our aggression will haunt the American public for many years to come. We are in for a world o'hurt.

Massachusetts Action

From Jen at
where the revolution's gonna begin

Exciting new direct action scheduled for Massachusetts re: Wal Mart and EC (emergency contraception):

On Saturday, February 25th, volunteers and activists from all over the state will be flooding Wal Mart pharmacies with prescriptions for EC. And, yes, I will be one of them.
We're well aware that Wal Mart stores in Massachusetts do not carry EC, and will refuse to fill these prescriptions. The point is to make it abundantly clear that EC is a "commonly prescribed" medication, and therefore, by Massachusetts state law, all pharmacies, including places like Wal Mart, must carry it.

Read more about this issue and direct action at Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.

I'm sick of major issues like this one being relegated to the feminist ghetto. This is about freedom, pure & simple. That is, unless you don't have a problem with the alabaster corporate dicks at Wal-Mart creating public health policies for you and your family.

Resignation != Justice

inspiration o'the week

Rev. Joseph Lowry, memorializing Coretta Scott King, speaks truth to power.
At least someone still does.

Harrison Ford Returns

And, with any luck, he'll be going away again soon.

I wasn't gonna mention my lack of regard for the overripe Mr. Ford, but since Hotmail beat me over the head with an obnoxious Flash trailer to hype his latest film, Firewall, I can no longer remain silent.

There's something less than admirable - okay, pathetic - about actors like Ford who feel compelled to portray heroes over and over again. Few things could be more excruciating than watching Mr. Volatile simmer and stew and wail on bad guys in another tired DON'T FUCK WITH MY FAMILY flick. A meticulous plaque-scraping sans nitrous would be preferable to enduring five minutes of that predictable, spastic bullshit.

Ford should reconsider his compulsion for bludgeoning audiences with his slow-burning righteousness film after film. Maybe he could appeal to Jim Jarmusch, Wes Anderson, or David Cronenberg. Or go crazy and play a character who does something besides fuck his wife, hug his kids and Kick Villain Ass.

Short of a creative gestalt, we can surmise what Harry's future holds:

The American Experience of Mona Prince

I copped the following story from bell hooks: Black Looks and wanted to share it here for its unique perspective.


An Egyptian woman writer, traveled to America full of hope and excitement. But what she found forced her to stand up for her rights and resist the silences. Before returning home she had a chance to hear the voices against the war, against the erosion of what is great in the American system, against homeland security as a pretext for silencing other voices.

Witness to an erosion of soul:
An Egyptian woman travels to the US

By Mona Prince

In a climate where the United States is seen as an aggressor enforcing her way and will on the rest of the world, I found myself excited last summer to be heading to America after being chosen as part of the International Writing Program (IWP) in Iowa City. My excitement stemmed from the fact that I refused to believe that the US, with one of the best constitutions in the world, where individual rights are cherished and defended, has lost its soul. Rather I wanted to believe that its current policy is an aberration that came to pass as a result of fears arisen after 9/11, and not a true reflection of what America is all about.

I could not think of a better bridge to mend the widening gap between the image and true face of the Arab "other". As an Egyptian woman writer and academic, I wanted so much to show the true face of the other, transcending the stereotype that has been propagating in the US lately, wanted in my own small way to unveil that thick veil of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

I was officially invited by the US Embassy in Cairo and funded by the US State Department to participate in the IWP, an invitation I wholeheartedly accepted. I was delighted to be part of a programme that fosters mutual understanding, cross-cultural communication, and tolerance; to share and exchange ideas with, and learn from, the other international writers as well as our American counterparts in an academic institution setting at the University of Iowa where the programme resides.

I arrived in Iowa City and my first two weeks in the program was all I would have hoped for. I felt energised, thinking of many things I want to do -material for my writings that would benefit from my stay in the US within the IWP. One of my major interests and ideas for a writing project was to visit an Indian reservation, get in contact with Native American traditional storytellers and learn about their spiritual practices. What unravelled after those two weeks was so much telling of the extent of the erosion of the American way as a result of the current administration's policy and how deep it has affected even the best of sanctuaries and defendants of individual rights, transforming academics and poets into big brothers driven by homeland security to charter the handling of their programmes.

I informed the programme director of my interest in visiting an Indian reservation and explained to him the reason behind my interest. His initial response was positive. So I took it upon myself to search for potential places I could visit and found one in a neighbouring state. I informed the director where I would be heading - a short visit to Minneapolis to visit an Indian reserve.

The e-mail response that I have received from the director was a total shocker in both language and content. I was threatened with homeland security law, informing me that I could not leave Iowa City and if I did I would be expelled from the programme and the United States. I was made to feel like a prisoner at best, a criminal at worst. At no point before or during my visit was I made aware of any rule in the IWP program restricting the movements of international visitors. Additionally, an immigration officer confirmed that there were no such rules. This incident and what followed thereafter made me think whether this response from the director was an isolated and petty exercise of power or was symptomatic of a bigger picture where homeland security and what it entails is starting to seep into the American system, reaching the gate of institutions that are traditionally viewed as strong voices for the preservation of the individual rights, voices against stereotyping and labelling of the "other". Are the fences of Guantanamo Bay slowly closing on academia, indeed on all of us? I abided by the director's decision and did not go to Minneapolis. Elation and excitement were quickly replaced by feelings of failure and depression. Guantanamo seemed just around the next corner.

After a few e-mail exchanges with the programme director, and a fruitless effort to get advice or help from the US embassy, I decided to break my silence and to speak out against the intimidation and abuse. I wrote several statements against the unprofessional and undiplomatic handling of my situation, while demanding at the same time an official apology, as well as to be provided with the governing laws by which writers should abide while in the programme.

I sent all the official correspondences between the programme director and myself to all parties concerned, as this matter impacted upon all the members of the IWP programme. Not only was I severely criticised for speaking up against this injustice, I was repeatedly intimidated, offended, and threatened by the grave consequences that would be directed at me if I do not put an end to my vocalism, which I took to mean, "Shut up and take the abuse."

The programme director, eventually, decided to terminate my participation in the programme because of the public statements I made, as clearly stated in his official letter. I was removed from all my scheduled public cultural activities and my funding was cut, leaving me with two days to evacuate Iowa City. The termination letter cited a US State Department decision that I have yet to receive.

After my deportation from Iowa City, I joined a group of African Americans who were evacuated from New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane. I felt for them and in some way felt part of them. What those evacuees told me in an interview is a counter- narrative that expressed their concerns about how America was, to their minds, disintegrating from within, which has resonated very well with my own experience in Iowa. A different form of "homeland security" had been imposed on them, and their human and constitutional rights had been violated.

During the current administration they had more than ever been marginalised, made to feel like they belong to a second-class America. They looked at the breach of the levy that flooded the city, their homes, as a symbol of the neglect of the current administration that is preoccupied with the "unjust" war in Iraq. They were forced at gunpoint - fully loaded M16s - to leave their houses while affluent white Americans were extended all necessary assistance and did not have to leave their homes. They told of being searched several times for weapons, as if they were terrorists in their own country. They were shipped in a plane, guarded by armed soldiers, without knowing their destination, to finally land as refugees in Omaha, Nebraska.

Before I flew back to Egypt, I was able to finally arrange a meeting with Native Americans. I met one of the five elders of the Dakota nation who still speaks the Dakota language and performs the spiritual ceremonies of his tribe. Contrary to what I have heard from the IWP administration, I was unreservedly welcomed by the spiritual elder and his family. I was offered a sweat lodge ceremony that is meant to purify the soul, mind and body, which was attended by other non-Native Americans. We were a mixed group of all colours and ethnic backgrounds.

The ceremony began with an ancient Indian saying "we are all relatives." Following the instructions of the spiritual elder, we all prayed in our different languages for the good health and happiness of all people. The ceremony ended again with the same wise man iterating that "we are all relatives." After the ceremony was finished, all of us had a collective dinner at the house of the spiritual interpreter. Before I left the reserve, I asked if I could have an Indian name. They agreed, and a special ceremony was held for me the following day. The name that was given to me from the spiritual world was "Good Eagle Woman."

I flew back home empowered by the immense knowledge and experience I gained in the US. In spite of having the misfortune of leaving the programme earlier than planned, and being subjected to such unjust and unfortunate treatment from the IWP director, I remain enriched by the whole journey, by finding it in myself to stand up for my rights, to refuse to be intimidated into silence. When I was about to leave the US, I witnessed the emergence of voices that started to speak out against the war, against the erosion of what is great in the American system, against homeland security as a pretext for silencing "other" voices. I will always remember the people that came to my defence; the refugees in Nebraska that hosted me when I was deported from Iowa City, and my spiritual enriching encounter. As my journey came to a close, I came out of it flying like an eagle having broken free, resisted being bullied into submission, even under the pretext of "homeland security". I can't think of my journey to the US without thinking about the "Good Eagle Woman" as a symbol for resisting silence.

*This article was first published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM.

the envelope, please...

Longtime Carnival-goer Jonathan Versen aka Hugo Zoom has been nominated for a Koufax Award in the category of Most Humorous Post.

Jon, as returning marks know, is raising funds for IraqDoc 2007, a documentary he plans to film in Iraq next year. Any publicity is swell as long as the scribe gets your name right, so, in that spirit, you might consider making a contribution in the form of a Koufax vote as a means of helping Jon promote the project. Better still, if you have a few bucks to spare in support of independent journalism, you can also contribute directly to IraqDoc 2007 by way of PayPal or credit card via Amazon Honor System -- see sidebar links at Jon's blog, Hugo Zoom.

Oh, and, by the way, he really is a funny guy.

Looking For Love

Thrashing about in the quagmire of isolation and illusion, Joe Bageant finds living remnants of our lost ideals in an unlikely place.



Welcome to middle-class lockdown
—now shut up and buy something

By Joe Bageant

Take away America’s Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them.
—James “Mad Dog” Howard

When I was a boy on my grandparents’ farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads…One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible---or at least was at one time in this country. And if I ever doubt it I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail. They are passing quickly now and I drive by more than a few of their graves in the old Greenwood Cemetery when I visit to that place where there are still old men who know how to plow with horses and the women who can chop a live copperhead snake in half with a hoe then go right on weeding the garden. “Yew kids stay ‘way from that damned dead snake, ya hear me?”

Fifty years later nobody cans peaches any more, or depends upon a neighbor to cut their hair or get in the hay crop. And fifty years later I found myself in the middle class and softening like an overripe cheese. Given my background, I never guessed I’d see the day when I would be bitching because I could not get Hendricks gin or fresh salmon delivered to my door. (But when you’re too drunk to drive or even walk to the supermarket…) Such is the level of self-insufficiency to which some of us weaker souls devolved.

Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. We live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facade (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick) which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we “order out.” Or go shopping for it at the mall. Beyond the need to get laid, there is little real reason to be together with other thinking, feeling adults. We do not need each other to do anything important in our lives, because all those things are performed by strangers, often as not thousands of miles away. Including the sex, if your are an internet porn fan. Which leaves us strangers to the natural human community. After all, what can we really do together? Consume. Drink. Consume. Talk. Consume tickets to entertainment. Consume. There is little else to do with other human beings in America than consume. So most of our primary life activity is solitary. We drive, do housework, pay bills, watch television… When we do “get together with friends,” there is little to talk about, other than one form or another of consumption, consuming music, or movies or whatever. We can not tell each other anything new because we all get the same news and information from the same monolithic sources. At the same time we try to fill the loneliness for a real human community that we have never experienced by calling any group of people who come together in any way a “community.” Online community. Planned community…

As writer Charles Eisenstein, says in The Ascent of Humanity:

“…It is a mistake to think that we live ultra-specialized lives and somehow add another ingredient called "community" on top of it all. What is there really to share? Not much that matters, to the extent that we are independent of neighbors and dependent on faceless institutions and distant strangers. Real communities are interdependent.”

Never in all history has there been such a lonely, inauthentic civilization.

This leaves those few fleetingly concerned Americans alone to momentarily stew over the condition of the world, fester upon national moral issues like squishing brown desert people under tanks … or building offshore gulags so the sight of naked prisoners being tortured in wire cages will not dampen the consumer confidence index. But ultimately somewhere between the seven o’clock showing of “Law and Order” and the third cocktail, or perhaps after that bracing evening trot around the block in your Land’s End shorts with the dogs, the mind settles down to the more relevant issues such as “Do I need a Blackberry, and if so, should I wait for the next generation of technology?”

Still, what about those cages in Gitmo? Or global warming? You and I may presently be yammering our asses off in cyberspace (talk about inauthentic!) about such topics, but most Americans, if they dialogue about those things at all, conduct the dialogue with that voices inside our heads, the one that says: Things cannot be as bad as the alarmists say. They cannot be as bad as I often suspect they are. If there really were such a thing as global warming they would be starting to do something about it. And besides, even if it were true, science will find a way to fix it. If there really were genocide going on in so many places far more people would be concerned. At the same time, every commercial and piece of sports hoopla, every celebrity news item leaves us with the impression that, if we have time and money for such things, then matters cannot be all that bad, can they? If the earth were heating up we would surely notice it. If our soldiers and government agencies were torturing people around the world it would make the news. If millions were being exterminated, it would be more obvious, would it not? Look around. Nobody seems worried. Look how normal everything is every day. Look at your wife and your own family. No one is worried. Things cannot be that bad.

Joe Bageant’s little inner voice is like everyone else’s. Whenever I shudder at the condition of the republic, whenever I feel its utter absence of community, it scolds me and tells me I am crazy: Nothing is wrong. This is merely the way things are. It has always been this way. You cannot change that. You expect too much. Look at your wife. She’s not upset. She wonders why you cannot just go ahead and be happy. What you see around you is normalcy. Take care of your own family. Relax. Buy something. And I do too. Which is why I own nine guitars, though I can only play one at a time, and even then not very well. The voice made me do it. I was bored. Bored plus anxious. Hell, I could lose my job. I could lose everything. And if I lost my job I would indeed lose everything. Social status, family, the accumulated net worth of a lifetime. Which, believe me, ain’t much after two divorces and a run-in with cocaine.

Adding to the anxiety is the lack of evidence that the world needs you or me at all. In this totally commoditized life we are dispensable. Everything is standardized. It really doesn’t matter who grows our food or makes our clothing. If we don’t make it, it someone else will. If we don’t buy it, someone else will. Some other faceless person will step forward to fill in our place. The same goes for the engineers who created this computer and the same goes for your own job. The machine rolls on. With us or without us. Naturally, we have our loved ones and our friends. But increasingly even these relationships are monetized for all classes. Family and leisure activity has become intensely commoditized. Never has there been such a lonely and inauthentic civilization as the American middle class.

Now it took me one helluva long time to claw my redneck self into the middle class and it took me even longer to figure all this out about its inauthenticity. Always one to fuck up right in front of the whole damned world, I loudly declared American middle class life to be a crock of shit and vowed to kiss it off. Go someplace simpler. Run nekkid in the surf in Saint Kitts or smoke pot in Belize. Catch my own damned salmon on the Galician Coast. But whoaaa hoss! This bad news just in: Not only do you have to buy your way into the American middle class through forceful consumption of the lifestyle, but you have to buy your way out of it. I’m serious. Buy your right to live in poverty. Let’s say you’ve managed to get your kids through college one way or another, usually via a second mortgage and loans, and you decide like I did to say: Fuck this. I’ve done right by my family. Now I’ve got high blood pressure, a bad back, and a million other stress ailments. I’m overweight and have terrible lungs. Now I want to escape the ever rising cost and stress of playing the game, the grinding chase after enough net worth to feel safe about such things as health care and a safe place to shit. Spend a few years in some warm place blinking at blue, unpolluted sky before I go tits up. To my mind, these are completely understandable sentiments for any reasonable person. But, alas dear hearts, the American middle class is a lockdown facility. One that takes a lot of cash bribes and blackmail payoffs to break out of.

Making complicated plans just to croak has always seemed rather excessive to me. Millions manage to do it without much planning or the need for highly paid experts. I don’t care about financial planners or plans for elder care and such crap in my old age. I’m willing to die wretchedly and maybe even unnecessarily, if doing it the right way means blowing a couple hundred thousand dollars I do not have to buy few extra months drooling and talking out of one side of my mouth following that stroke I so richly deserve, given my debauched life. To hell with health care as we know it in America, which is to say as a tool used to blackmail every working person in this country. Better to work less, own less and escape the plague of blackmailers.

You would think owning jack shit and expecting nothing would allow a guy slightly more freedom from toil, would you not? Yet, even though I never wish to own a car again, or ever own another house, don’t care about clothes, could easily live on grains, fruits and vegetables, and am willing to work maybe 20 hours a week at some mindless occupation so long as it does not contribute to the world’s misery and doesn’t require heavy lifting or good memory, and willing to live in the tiniest of rooms, it’s still impossible to do so inside this nation, once you’ve signed the middle class blood oath. Even if I managed to talk my wife into such a life, this is the one thing I am not free to do in the good old land of the free. In this country buster, you keep paying the going rate, even if you don’t care about going. Like the Cajuns say, you will know when you are dead because the bills will quit coming in.

And so about a year or so ago I swore in print and on the net that I was going to buy a cottage in some warm and simpler place abroad. Someplace VERY cheap that I can go and write and make music with these hands and this tired but willing voice. And I am getting closer to that goal, despite the blackmailers. For starters, I have gotten over the American fetish of ownership — I can rent a place from some deserving poor native family who needs the income. Maybe build an addition onto their house for them for free. Maybe we can go into business together, a small bodega on a dusty street, mango stand, take in laundry or whatever. I will be the old white guy who lives in the back room, plays banjo and guitar and writes. This is the one promise I intended to keep to myself. I still do.

But I never in my life imagined it would be so hard to escape the various American forms of institutionalized extortion and blackmail. Becoming debt free was the least of it. And having everyone you know and love believe your have slipped your moorings is just the beginning. Meanwhile, you become a Kafkaesque character wondering if you’ve gone nuts, as you simmer in the ambient wrongness pervading American society and watch the futility of our vast life-consuming program of intense management and control of everything, the money, the bombs, the roads, the retirement fund, the communications, the propaganda, the entire buzzing tower of bullshit so massive as to make Babel look like a chicken coop. And you ask every passing stranger in the shopping mall “Is all this fucking necessary?” Only to discover that you are in an isolation chamber, a vacuum, a void in which no one can hear your voice at all. They are sleepwalking. They are shopping. Shhhh….

The loss of our human kinship identities has left us to define ourselves by what we own, where we live or what sports teams we support. But even more insidiously, our lost stories of community and kinship are replaced by the work of unseen professionals over the distant horizon. TV and movie producers, the news media and educational establishment… They provide the answer to the most important spiritual kinship and identity question we will ever ask ourselves: Who are my people? Some of the worst people on the planet are ready to answer that question for us in a way that serves their own ends. They stand ready to answer other questions too, such as, where did we come from? Why are we here? They are the cadre of empire’s paid professionals who write the history and the news stories that fill the deep need for a “story of the people.” The most horrific events of history have nearly always been set in motion by manipulation of this national story.

After a while, it does not matter that the story was manipulated. Deep need for a national story drives most to come to love and accept the story over time. It is the only one they have. And if the story is sufficiently intolerant and mean, we don’t care about Iraqi deaths. And we come to love empire and capitalism. Beyond that, many would have become bullies anyway, without any help from the national storyline. They don’t value democracy, or the ecology or liberty, but they do believe in authority and discipline. Aw common! It ain’t just Dick Cheney and his pet president Sparky doing all this. At least half the country is loving the queer bashing and the bombing and the god rhetoric. We should quit pretending that a very large portion of Americans are not degraded human beings. They are. Skeptics are welcome to visit me here in the armed and inbred environs of Winchester, Virginia. It no longer matters what or who degraded them. Much time has passed and this is how many Americans have become. Fundamentalist cults abound, both religious and economic. Millions upon millions of Christians live in hermetic worlds of their own, with their own books stores, schools, media…. Millions of middle class Americans both conservative and liberal live in suburbs and condos and brownstone row houses completely surrounded by their own kind, all of them worshippers in the American value cult, commodity fetishists. They are differentiated mainly in their own minds and the narratives they have made up for themselves. And of course in their consumption.

After 35 years of inattention to these not-so-nice Americans among us (in another time they would have been called fascists, but now they are considered merely a political “base,” which is in itself a strange sort of national acceptance of cruelty as part of the national character) we are now watching them consolidate power. For the time being they control the Presidency, the Congress, the Media, the Supreme Court, the Federal Courts, most Governorships, and most State Legislatures. And if their manipulation of congressional districts stays put they could feasibly stay in power indefinitely.

Do these people, this half of our population which cheers on unprovoked wars abroad, spying on the citizenry and demonizing of the poor truly hate democracy? Fuck if I know. But after generations of brainwashing and psychological molding and exploitation of their fears, I suspect they never really knew what democracy was.

If anyone is going to turn the ship of the republic around, put us on a course more in the direction of liberty and openness, it will require the navigational help of those among us who can still remember what it was like before totalistic capitalism took such grip. People who can remember that genuine good will and intent was once alive in the hearts of most people even if it never has been in the halls of Congress. Remember when at least some human and social progress was evident around us, thereby giving reason to hope.

And these sorts of people are indeed still with us, though quiet, perhaps out of insecurity. Only last Saturday I saw them at the Jiffy Lube. Sitting in the waiting room with our little Jiffy Lube paper coffee cups, waiting for our cars to be finished, we were watching on CNN the placement of the casket of Coretta Scott King in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol. To my right there was the huge black lady with corn rows and two bright eyed children hanging on her ankles. There was the thin young 30-something half-black dude who had just got off his cell to his wife (Yeah honey, it’s on CNN. Bye.) There was the very straight suburban blonde yuppie woman with her sculpted pony tail sticking through the back of her aubergene Eddie Bauer ball cap. And as those Georgia state troopers on CNN, looking so much like the very same kind who once struck fear into the Martins and the Medgars of the South, were climbing those marble stairs under the gray February Georgia sky, one step at a time, then a pause, then one more step… There was not a dry eye a dry eye in that Jiffy Lube waiting room. It was not just the cheap emotionalism of televised pandering. Everyone there remembered, by God! Remembered or found reason to believe in, an America that at one moment in history at least, rose from its stupor to struggle forward toward something higher. Something better. And yes, noble even.

And when I was finished blubbering inside, I thought to myself, “Well, that small room in St. Kitts, or the tarpon fishing in Belize, they can probably wait one more year.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book from Random House Crown tentatively titled: DRINK, PRAY, FIGHT, FUCK: Dispatches from America’s Class War, due out next year. A complete archive of his online work may be found at http://www.joebageant.com. He may be contacted at joebageant@joebageant.com Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant.

More Compassion, GOP Style

Bush's plan to avoid the cost of caring for those least able to care for themselves is wreaking havoc on - brace yourself - those least able to care for themselves.

Patients who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid are the ones most likely to see their drug regimens rudely interrupted by the money-lovin' bureacracy springing forth from our plagued public health system like a thunderbolt from the side of Zeus. Of those six million so-called dual eligibles, two million are mentally ill and vulnerable to interruptions in their drug treatment.

Since the prescription program made its debut Jan. 1, some of the estimated 2 million mentally ill Americans covered because they receive both Medicare and Medicaid have gone without the drugs that keep their delusions, paranoia, anxieties or stress in check. Mental health service providers and advocacy organizations nationwide say they worry that scores are at high risk of relapse. Numerous people have been hospitalized.

"The continuation of medications is absolutely critical to keep them in community living," said Steven S. Sharfstein, chief executive of the Shepherd-Pratt Health System in Baltimore and president of the American Psychiatric Association.

This was, of course, entirely predictable. Changing the Pill-ocracy would've been disruptive enough even if every mentally ill patient in America had an advocate, but in a patchwork healthcare system lacking patient advocacy, it is nothing short of disastrous. Those who need the most assistance navigating the healthcare system are the ones least likely to get it.

Luckily for the malAdministration, the diagnosed mentally ill - particularly those on Medicaid - are fringe folk in our society, citizens rendered invisible thanks to their murky status as consumers. They don't make much of a voting bloc, either. Don't contribute to PACs. Don't have "news" media celebrities looking out on their collective behalf. Their stories - tales of frustration, incompetence and indifference; tales of despair, suicide and, in all likelihood, homicide - will go largely untold.

By this time next year, George W. Bush have another State of the Union address behind him, no doubt having bragged that his hallowed prescription program healed the sick and raised the dead. Republicans will stand and cheer, and the claim will come and go without criticism from the sychophant media or weak-kneed, apathetic Democrats.

In the interim, The Script be damned, Dr. Sharfstein anticipates major problems:

"I really don't know what the future will bring. . . . I have a very deep concern that psychiatric patients will suffer disproportionately," Sharfstein said. "If by the end of February or March, if [federal officials] haven't figured this out, we could have an epidemic on our hands."

Birth of a Death Squad

This is how it starts:

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

For all the press emphasis on George W. Bush feeling the sting of his failed, blood-drenched policies (they are legend now, no list necessary), our supreme leader should be, and probably is, happier than a pig in shit.

Below are just a few examples of terrorists as described by the Fascist Right:

• Seymour Hersh
  
  
• National Education Association
  
  
• Anti-War Protestors
  
  
• Everyone in San Francisco's Coit Tower
  
  
• NSA Whistleblowers
  
  
• PETA
  
  
• Liberals
  

And so on.

We are quickly moving toward the point at which eliminationist rhetoric becomes eliminationist policy. This is Fascism's natural course and no one should be surprised, though we will be, when that knock comes at the door and we are escorted away never to be seen or heard from again. Those of you who are really important might even get the Cliff Baxter treatment. When it happens to someone we love, we can write letters to the editor, beg our Congressional representatives for redress or - that ole liberal favorite - start a petition.

"Oh, but they're just talking about the extent of presidential authority," you say. Problem is, Bush, Inc., doesn't "just talk" about anything. It acts, and it does so with impunity.

See, I can say it and say it and say it but, with the rarest of exceptions, people flatly refuse to believe what has happened to this nation. This is what post-Constitutionalism is: Lawlessness. You have no protections, no legal rights; only privileges arbitrarily granted by the State as it busies itself spying on the All The King's Critics.

Our political representatives are now totally unencumbered by even the appearance of upholding and defending the United States Constitution. They - and we, by our relative silence and inaction - paved the way for the 21st Century American Police State. That we couldn't be bothered with stopping it says much about our prospects for recovering what has been lost.

Australia's Regression

Australia further recedes into a mire of drug-phobia and disinformation.

10 years' jail for growers of hydroponic marijuana

Imre Salusinszky and Tom Richardson
February 04, 2006

THE NSW Government has introduced Australia's first laws specifically targeting the cultivation of hydroponically grown cannabis.

The new laws include 10-year jail sentences for people growing as few as five indoor plants, and give police the same powers to raid cannabis houses as they currently possess for premises where they believe heroin and amphetamines are being sold.

Hydroponically grown cannabis is five to seven times as powerful as normal cannabis.

A spokesman for NSW Attorney-General Bob Debus said yesterday the new laws would be the first in Australia to impose specific penalties for the cultivation of cannabis by methods that enhance the yield and the potency.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma linked the growing popularity of hydroponic cannabis to the prevalence of mental illnesses including depression and schizophrenia...

I find it amazing any newspaper in a free society can get away with proclaiming "Hydroponically grown cannabis is five to seven times as powerful as normal cannabis" when such an proclaimation is a flat-out lie. There is no such thing as "normal cannabis." Potency is overwhelmingly determined by genetics, not growth medium such as water or soil, and there are literally thousands of hybrids and pure strains grown all over the world.

My regard for Australia has slipped considerably in recent years. Given the festering racism, rising nationalism, and an increasingly fearful and repressive political culture -- all with rightwing asshole John Howard stirring the pot -- it appears neoconservatism has been successfully exported there.

Many Australians naturally balk at that conclusion, but I've seen the American version and in a few short years (or sooner if they're cursed with a major terrorist attack), there will be a lot of people in Oz wondering how they slept through democracy's demise.

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POST SCRIPT: For more depth the dreaded hydro, check out this story at Stop The Drug War. Thanks to MB for the tip.

Thursday Stuff

Still busy but thought you might enjoy the following stories:

1. King of Zembla is on fire.

2. MSNBC - "Extreme Victory":

The radicals are learning how to massage their message. Nashat Aqtash, a communications professor at Birzeit University on the West Bank, has been tutoring Hamas candidates on the language of modern politics. He says he learned one of his most valuable lessons from watching Bush's spin doctors: replace hot-button words with polite equivalents. "We don't need to 'kill people'," he says. "We need to 'remove occupation.' Both are the same, but the meaning is totally different." And aim your pitch to attract swing voters. "People tackling social issues get higher votes," he says. "When you kill, don't say you're going to do it. Just do it. And then say you're sorry."

3. Capitol Police = Brownshirt Scum

4. David Neiwert's The Orca Killers describes an ugly nexus of corporate avarice and public policy:

The Building Industry Association of Washington is an organization that not only is ruthless to the point of consciencelessness, it also has become an extraordinarily significant player in Washington state politics. They are, in fact, one of the most powerful funders of the conservative movement's agenda here.