There ain’t any healthcare debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance, and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn’t in ole Jim’s impoverished purse. The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of healthcare to human beings. It’s simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need — health.

Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state’s purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long they’ve been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one third of the cost of healthcare, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to healthcare providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all? Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved). Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the healthcare industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:

• Franklin Roosevelt wanted universal healthcare.
• Harry Truman wanted universal healthcare.
• Dwight Eisenhower wanted universal healthcare.
• Richard Nixon wanted universal healthcare.
• Lyndon Johnson wanted universal healthcare.
• Bill Clinton wanted — well we can’t definitely say because he made sure that if the issue blew up on him, which it did, Hillary would be left holding the turd. Is it any wonder that woman gets so snappy at the slightest provocation? First getting left to hold the bag on healthcare, then the spots on that blue dress.

So why did American liberals believe Obama would bring home the healthcare bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It’s a big neighborhood, a very special place where “Your vote is important,” and “by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation.” Most of America lives in that neighborhood, even though they’ve never personally met. It’s a place where the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as “values” and “hope” bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can affect “change.” Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, “Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

The slaughter of the innocents by the healthcare lobby has pretty much extinguished the political usefulness of the word hope. Nobody, especially Obama, uses it now.

The first on-stage scuffle of the Obama administration, government assured healthcare, quickly settled down into the accustomed scenario of very rich and powerful people in expensive suits “finding middle ground,” otherwise known as the status quo. Single payer healthcare soon became “a consumer government alternative to private insurance,” and is now “a system of health cooperatives. Next comes “slightly better health insurance (but not medical services) than before, from the same insurance companies but at twice the price; don’t worry though, we’re increasing your tax load so you can afford it.”

The televised screaming matches, having served their purpose, are over now. The presidency and the nation have settled back into the normalcy of the officially sanctioned state consciousness and its curious non-language, one modified and shaped daily by corporate and government symbiosis. Over generations we’ve come to internalize this imagistic language, which is quite theatrical when heated up for public consumption and dully bureaucratic when attention is to be avoided. But always it is void of content and any sort of truth. In the corporately managed theater state, it’s not whether a thing is true that matters, but how it sounds and looks and what you call it. Call end of life counseling a “death panel,” and you’ve just turned mercy and choice into one more Great Satan.

In the end though, healthcare American style comes down to the preferences of two elite castes, Congress and corporate powers, neither of which can exist without the other. Corporations need the government to sanction their methods of extracting wealth from the public. Congress needs corporations to finance its campaign chariot races. Right now members of Congress have an excellent chance of putting the arm on healthcare industry lobbyist for some real cash:

Senator Smedley Heathwood: “Oh, I dunno, I’m sort of liking Obama’s alternative.”

Godzilla Healthcare Inc.: “Here, take this suitcase full of gold bullion, call me if you run short. And remember, we’ve got that ‘Life is a pre-existing condition’ bill coming up in the Senate soon.”

Siamese twins, joined at the hip, they share the same goal, preservation of control — the government’s social control and the corporations’ economic control. And you cannot have one without the other.

Obama got elected on hope of reform, despite that one cannot reform a mafia, only pay increased extortion moneys. He’s fortunate that it was not a genuine demand for reform, just hope. We’re fortunate we did not demand reform because we’re not going to get it. Obama doesn’t have to reform the healthcare industry mob. All he has to do is look like he took a shot at it, and hope it’s convincing enough. What we’ve seen is probably his best shot, too. Why not? There is always the off chance it might work, in which case his “presidential legacy” would be assured. And if it doesn’t, well, the serious progressives who are screeching mad at him now will still have to vote for him as the incumbent in 2012. Or learn to love somebody like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum (take your pick) or some as-yet-unknown the GOP drags out from under the hen house and ballyhoos as a “new face.” Luckily, Dick Cheney is out of the question, barring a coup by the far right wing of the schizophrenic GOP. But still, after Palin, one shudders at the prospects.

Whatever happens, we will not see Congress stand up against the extortion of its people by the healthcare industry. We will not see even the most ordinary kind of healthcare declared as a human right, as it is in so many other nations. We will see, however, greater access to the public treasury by the insurance corporations.

Every nation in the world is now party to at least one treaty that addresses health as a human right, including the conditions necessary for the delivery of health services. Healthcare is a right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hell, even Saddam Hussein provided healthcare.

That Americans cannot grasp this fundamental aspect of human rights (but then we cannot even get child nutrition, or limiting the number of times you can taser an old lady in an airport, out of the starting gate) and join the civilized world and assure its people of such things is testimony. Testimony that we live in a vacuum exclusive of the accepted standard of mercy and decency common to civilized democratic nations elsewhere. Testimony that even we the citizenry would rather maintain and spread lies than accept truths such as most people in countries with universal healthcare would not ever give it up in favor of the U.S. system.

Most of all though, it is testimony that we live under an induced mass hallucination where spectacle replaces fact, information and common sense. In place of actionable information, we are served up screaming red faces — angry mobs manufactured for TV protesting “government interference in the people’s healthcare choices.” One must wonder what inchoate anger is really being tapped by the organizers of these strange “citizen protests.” As usual, the straw boogeyman of socialism is once more invoked. “Oh my god! I’ll have to give up my $1,100 a month insurance bill, which only pays 80% of my insurance costs AFTER I pay the initial $5,000 of those costs! If that ain’t Joe Stalin all over again, I don’t know what is!” We get the false media drama of “death panels.”

And being captives of spectacle and hyperbole, we friggin love it. The idea of death panels plays to our childish attraction to the extreme and entertaining. Killing Grandma is far more entertaining to our imaginations than say, guaranteed access to chest screens and blood pressure medicine. Two generations into this national infantilization, it’s now the only national life we know — the ideological spectacle made real.

To steal a page from Guy Debord, society has become ideology. We live in an antidialectical false consciousness, imposed at every moment on everyday life as spectacle. We are held in thrall. Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other. Anyone who lives in meatspace with his or her fellow Americans could not deny 57 million of them health. In this society no one is any longer capable of recognizing anyone else. Instead, we see others as the screamers at the town hall meetings, or as communists who want to give free healthcare to illegals and establish death panels. Or as Christian fundamentalists, or as liberals or conservatives. Or as celebrities or as nobodies.

But most importantly, whenever we must reach any significant agreement as human beings, whether it be about something as globally insignificant as U.S. domestic policy (we are only 6% of the world population, and though it hasn’t soaked in yet to most Americans, we’re also broke and owe the Chinese loan shark a wad) or as significant as global warming, we immediately cede the field to ideology. We simply don’t know how to do anything else.

Ideology has utterly triumphed. It has separated us from ourselves and built itself a home inside our consciousness, from whence it operates now as our reality. There is no going back, only forward. Given that we are a nation of children who prefer to close our eyes and make a hopeful wish with Tinkerbelle, rather than give hope the piss test, then let us hope to high hell. We may as well go for broke. So let us hope that, in going forward, new and unforeseen developments in the national consciousness occur. Developments that offer an escape from this one so deeply colonized by the corpo-political machinery we created — and which in turn recreated us. One that will break us loose from enthrallment. Maybe collision with a giant asteroid. Or that Garth Brooks will be barred from making a fifth comeback tour. That’s one hope. A consciousness shattering event by American standards.

Another hope is for an absolute and total collapse of the system.

At this point, I’ll take what I can get.

Well, for starters, the above title is a damned lie, since this little screed is not a history. It’s just rumination on the tilting point at which Americans started the slide into the deepest sort of cultivated consumer consciousness — which is to say our corporate managed engorgement and swinedom at the service of the rich.

Very rich families and corporatists, to whom, as in earlier articles, we shall refer to as “the bastards,” have always been with us. Even Tom Jefferson thought periodic revolution against wealth and authority was desirable to keep these bastards in check. Which implies that he figured they would inevitably get us by the throat down on the floor from time to time.

But the bastards scared the hell out of later presidents too. Abe Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering during the U.S. Civil War — the military industrial complex of the day — easily constituted the greatest threat to the American republic. Being president and all, he couldn’t call them what they were, and settled for the term “money power,” and predicted that, “money power will … work upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

And as everyone knows, Dwight Eisenhower famously feared the same military-industrial complex was busy taking over the nation. What we never hear about though, is that Eisenhower’s definition of the complex included among the bastards, not only the military defense industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media and the university and private research establishments.

If nothing else can be said for the bastards, we must admit they do plan far ahead, (or seemed to anyway, before the latest meltdown) even if only to screw us blind, which is usually the case. Since the early robber baron era of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, just after the turn of the century, the bastards understood that the key to national domination was oil — creating an economic culture based on petroleum — and planned toward that end. Big corps such as E.I. DuPont had invested heavily in the oil industry since the turn of the century, and especially since the 1930s creating synthetic materials such as plastics, in which the public was decidedly uninterested in buying. Then World War II came along, creating big demand for synthetics such as nylon for parachutes, tires, tents, ropes. DuPont and similar bastards had drawn a royal flush.

SCREAMING MAN HERE!: RIGHT! IT’S THE ONLY SURE RACKET. ASK ICE MAN CHENEY. YOU MAKE STUFF, SELL IT TO THE PENTAGON MOB AND RAM THE PRICE CLEAR UP THEIR ASSES. THEN THEY BLOW THE STUFF UP, INCENERATE IT, AND COME BACK FOR MORE AT DOUBLE THE PRICE BECAUSE NOW THERE’S A SHORTAGE! FOR A FAST DEPENDABLE BUCK, YOU CAN’T BEAT INDUSTRIAL SCALE WARFARE WITH A GODDAMNED STICK!

(Ahem!)

Unfortunately all good things end, no matter how bloody profitable. But those super-expanded wartime corporations that had cranked out planes and tanks were not going to downsize just because we had run out of Dresdens to bomb. They intended to remain dominant and even expand. With the war drawing to a close, and with fewer burning jeep tires on the battlefields and fewer parachutes left dangling in the trees of Belgium, American citizens were going to have to eat the slack. The bastards would have to stuff’em fuller than a Christmas goose; make them eat petroleum based synthetics, if it came down to that. Which it eventually did of course, in the form of petrochemical agriculture, food dyes, etc.

SCREAMING MAN: YOU GOTTA A FUCKING PROBLEM WITH NUMBER TWO RED DYE OR SOMETHING, ASSHOLE? DON’T BULLSHIT THESE PEOPLE, YOU FLAMING OLD FRAUD! I’VE SEEN YOU EAT A WHOLE BOX OF PINK HO-HOS BEHIND A BOTTLE OF JAY DEE AND SOME COLUMBIAN BUD! AM I GONNA HAVE TO TAKE MY NEEDLE NOSED PLIERS TO YOUR LYING ASS?

Plastics, heralded as durable and everlasting (and today lamented for the same reason) eventually gobbled up nearly every other material market, in the from of jewelry, dashboards, dishes, clothing, napkin rings, perfume bottles, knickknacks, flooring and carpeting, resin building materials, vinyl raincoats and boots, molded furniture, radio sets … America was remade in the image of open chain hydrocarbons. That nine tenths of what was produced and marketed was unnecessary, and downright shitty did not go unnoticed by the American public, which had been deeply distrustful of plastics and synthetics from the time they were first ballyhooed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. People were just not buying the sales job. But the combination of wartime shortage frustrations and massive industrial public relations delivered the one-two punch, and the consumer knuckled under. Or perhaps they were just worn down by industry PR, which enlisted the help of trusted figures such as Frank Capra and Walt Disney, among others, along with in-school industry propaganda for the next generation: “Our story of the miracle of plastics starts with an oil well in a faraway place by the Persian Gulf … ”

AND IT GODDAMNED WELL IS GONNA END THERE TOO! IN ABOUT 15 MINUTES, IF IT HASN’T ALREADY! DOES ANYBODY REALIZE THE NUMBER OF SARAH PALIN BLOW-UP DOLLS SHIPPED TO THE TROOPS IN IRAQ? IF THAT’S THE KIND OF ARMY WE’RE SENDING TO KILL OFF THE PALM VERMIN, THEN WE’RE GONERS ALREADY!

As I was saying, the bastards not only created an economy by and for themselves, based on the black sticky stuff, they also built a civilization. From the tallest building right down to the petrochemical soaked dirt in which the food supply is grown, and all along the chain through processing and plastic packaging and distribution, The black stuff was cheap and it was plentiful, so long as the bastards were willing to buy off the top dog sheiks like ibn Saud, who would in turn keep the dusky peasantry in line through good old perennials such as beheadings and public stonings.

SCREAMING MAN MISSES THOSE POST 9/11 BEHEADING VIDEOS, DON’T YOU? IT WAS SO EASY TO TELL WHO AMERICA’S ENEMIES WERE THEN. BUT AT LEAST WE’VE STILL GOT BEN BERNANKE AND BILL GATES.

During the 1940s AND ‘50S while ibn Saud was fathering some 60 children by 22 wives in Arabia and dishing out corporeal punishment to the far flung wretches of his kingdom, here at home the corporations were doing their own hit jobs on the this nation’s peasantry — the farmers. Petroleum based synthetics, with legislative help, wiped out one quarter of the domestic cotton market in the first few years following the war, along with flax for linen, and hemp fiber, replacing them with ugly but profitable synthetic nylon and polymer textiles. Not to mention replacement of literally hundreds of farm produced natural organic materials for medicines, cosmetics, milk by products such as casein for glues and paints, with synthetic petro-based commodities, all of which were mercilessly hammered into the populace as “miracles of modern science.”

Kings may croak, but cash lives forever

The fact that the bastards were corporate entities made them more powerful than any robber baron’s best wet dream, because their power and reach extended beyond human mortality. Deathless corporations and trusts replaced the mortal thieves such as Rockefeller and Morgan; and despite the advent of income taxes, capital continued to aggregate in the bastards’ coffers, particularly financial bastards, at what was seen then as an unimaginable scale. “Money for nothin’ and chicks for free …”

Powered entirely by balance sheets, and existing for the sole le purpose of wealth accumulation, parting with any assets was antithetical to their very purpose. Not to mention the logic of the wealth based stockholders. The majority of assets were held by elite, whose main accomplishment was then and still is coming from families that commandeered some substantial portion of the public medium of exchange in order to derive more wealth.

WHOA THERE FATSO! WHOSE FAMILY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE? PARIS HILTON’S? OR MAYBE ALICE WALTON’S? PARIS HILTON HAS EARNED EVERY JEWEL ENCRUSTED THONG IN HER CLOSET! FROM TUSH TO TITTIES, WE’VE SEEN EVERYTHING PARIS HILTON HAS TO OFFER. AND IT’S WORTH A FEW BILLION TO KEEP HER IN CIRCULATION. GIVES THE MEN OF THIS MISERABLE WORKHOUSE NATION SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. SOMETHING TANGIBLE. SOMETHING THEY CAN ACTUALLY SEE AND WHACK OFF TO. HER DIRTY FLICK, “1 NIGHT IN PARIS” WAS A GIFT TO ALL MANKIND. LET THE LESBIANS FIND THEIR OWN PARIS HILTON … BUT ALICE WALTON? SCREAMING MAN WOULDN’T FUCK HER WITH YOUR WHANG, BUSTER! THAT MISERABLE DRUNKEN BITCH RAN DOWN AND KILLED A FIFTY YEAR OLD WOMAN IN TEXAS. WHAT’D SHE GET? A $925 FINE! SHE HAS 20 BILLION DOLLARS AND GETS OFF FOR LESS THAN A THOU. AND WHAT DOES ALICE GIVE US? CHINK MADE FLIPFLOPS AND GODDAMNED PLASTIC PATIO CHAIRS THAT BUCKLE LIKE OBAMA AT A BAILOUT PARTY! GIVE THE SCREAMING MAN PARIS HILTON ANY DAY. NOW, FATSO … YOU WERE SAYING?

Hell, I can’t remember. Oh yes, the bastards. Once you are born into the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Bastardy and are issued your caviar spoon, no further effort is required to amass capital. You simply keep on withholding capital from those who had create it — the working masses — keep captive the economic lifeblood upon which all others depend. Observe, for instance, the banking industry’s present refusal to unass any money for credit, despite the hundreds of billions handed to them as a taxpayers’ gift, a bailout AFTER they’d ripped off their shareholders and customers, and looted their own institutions from the inside.

UPSET ARE YOU, FATSO? LET THE SCREAMER TELL YOU HOW IT REALLY IS. IT WAS ALL AN ACT. THE FED WAS JUST PRINTING AND HANDING OUT WORTHLESS WALLPAPER — WHICH THE BANKING BASTARDS, WITH ALL DUE APLOMB, WILL PAY BACK IN KIND. THEN THE BASTARDS WILL BE DECLARED SOLVENT, FAT AND HEALTHY AS A BUNCH OF PARK BEARS. MEANWHILE, YOU GODDAMNED PEASANTS WILL CONTINUE TO ANGUISH OVER THE BAILOUTS LONG AFTER THE REAL RIP-OFF IS IN. THE ONE YOU NEVER SAW AND CAN’T EVEN WRAP YOUR SORRY POINTED FUCKING HEADS AROUND. THE REAL DOUGH IS SPREAD ACROSS DUBAI, MONACO, LONDON, AND FOR SAFETY’S SAKE, BEIJING. WHILE YOU ANGUISH, PATE OF UNBORN VEAL CALF IS BEING SERVED TO THE REAL BASTARDS UP ON THE 50th FLOOR. THEY POUR ANOTHER GLASS OF 1999 PERRIER-JOUET, AND CHORTLE AT THE DISMEMBERMENT OF A NO-TALENT HACK LIKE BERNIE MADOFF. THAT HAPLESS SMALLTIME JEW GREASEBALL WHO CAME INTO THE GAME WITH $5,000 IN PENNY STOCKS THAT HE BOUGHT WITH MONEY HE MADE INSTALLING SPRINKLERS. NEVER A REAL PLAYER LIKE US, EVEN WITH HIS BULLSHIT WALL STREET TITLES. JUST A DUMB FUCK FROM QUEENS WHO DIDN’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT A SCAM. LET THE SERFS GNAW AT HIM. KEEPS ‘EM BUSY AND OUT OF OUR HAIR. LOOK, THEY’VE PULLED ONE OF HIS ARMS OUT OF ITS SOCKET. CHRIST, NOW THEY’VE RUINED LUNCH.”

THAT’S WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON, FATSO.

The bastards. Why have they lasted this long? Purely on their own merits, most American corporations probably would not have survived the 1930s. By then our wildly fluctuating economy was already demonstrating the folly of overly concentrated capital and power. What was needed, said the big players who’d wrecked the economy with their uncontrolled speculation and greed, was, lo and beshit, a controlled economy! One even more controlled by corporations. Problem was, the only entity capable of such control was the government. And unfortunately, the Constitution of the United States was founded on a separation of business and state to the same degree as that of church and state.

If the bastards were to run the economy, if Americans were going to be pistol whipped down the road to “prosperity through unprecedented consumption,” then government authority by Constitutional law would be necessary. As a 1937 shareholder’s report of the E.I. DuPont Company “the revenue-raising power of government [taxation] must be converted into “an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas” and a “social reorganization.” Uh oh! Just whose sudden new ideas? And what kind of social reorganization?

The report stated bluntly that to realize further extensive profit from its wartime investments, the U.S. government “must be the primary tool.” While their plans to use the government were put into the shareholder’s report, they were never publicly discussed.

FDR saves the bastards’ bacon

The chance to pull it off came ironically or maybe not so ironically, with Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR was, contrary to the subsequent hagiography that has grown up around his grave, was first and foremost a capitalist and was determined to save capitalism. Given his affluent background and times, he, like everyone else, could not imagine anything but capitalism as the nation’s economic system. Yet nowhere in the Constitution is capitalism specified as America’s preferred economic system. His lifelong circle of friends and associates consisted entirely of the elites of family and corporate wealth, which meant that it also included some of his enemies. But together they created a host of “emergency legislation,” in much the same fashion as 911 let George W. Bush get away with so much under the excuse of a national threat. Even allowing for the resistance of some wealthy elites, FDR favored the bastards’ plans toward a thoroughly corporatized national economy.

The Supreme Court, however, a stickler for details such as the U.S. Constitution, did not see things Roosy’s way. It would take a rewriting of the U.S. Constitution for the government to crawl into bed with the corporations. So every piece of legislation FDR and his cohorts created got snagged in Supreme Court and just kept piling up.

The key for FDR and the Princes of Bastardy turned out to be taxation. To control society means to control individual behavior. The Constitution prohibits that, except for those few powers granted in the Constitution, such as the coinage of money or declaring war. Throughout the 1930s the public watched FDR and the corporatists duke it out with the Supreme Court. While the public was engaged in the debate over FDR’s threatened stacking of the court, FDR and the bastards managed to accomplish their agenda in controlling opposing social behavior — taxing it to death. The government is granted the power to tax by god! And the Roosevelt era saw the art of behavior modification through taxation perfected.

Now in changing American social behavior through taxation there are two rules. The first tax must be a very logical one. And the second must be one created of whole cloth, a manufactured one to counter a manufactured threat. So after the Supreme Court knuckled under to FDR’s threat to divide up the judicial limelight by appointing more justices, a more compliant court happily passed a $200 tax on machine guns — the equivalent of $3,000 today — the same tax, incidentally, that allowed the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division) and the FBI to invade the Branch Davidians at Waco. It was unconstitutional as hell. But the court understood public relations. What kind of deranged fucker needed a machine gun anyway? Well, there was There was John Dillinger (whose penis was 14 inches long, according to folk legend of the day, which was either threatening, or vastly intriguing, depending upon one’s sex or moral perspective on life). There was Seymour “Blue Jaws” Magoon, Bonnie and Clyde, Pittsburg Phil, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone, Bummy Davis. And if there was any further doubt, there was also the fact that the members of Murder Incorporated were Jewish, Italian or Irish. Ah ha! More proof to the then-majority Anglo Americans of naked immigrant depravity. So two hundred bucks per tommy gun it would be under the 1937 Machine Gun Tax Act.

The second tax the court upheld was the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Most Americans had never heard the word marijuana. The tax act had adopted a little known Mexican street term as a name in order to demonize it, and differentiate it from the thousands of acres of government hemp being grown for naval ropes, etc. Never mind that in the entire previous year only a couple of pounds of the stuff were seized by border police. A $200 an ounce tax had worked on machine guns, so a $200 tax per ounce was placed on hemp cultivation without permit, and no permits were issued. And so as an added bonus — or maybe intentionally — the synthetic fiber industry and the plastics industry saw its most threatening long term competitor, hemp, eliminated.

And for the first time in the history of the United States the bastards could use the government to tell farmers what seeds they could put into the earth. In short order by way of the New Deal, through various agricultural acts, corporatists, through government policy, had control over the land even though they did not own it. The chief competitors to industrial food giants and synthetics industry, the small farmer producers of thousands of natural goods and raw materials, were eventually taxed or regulated out of existence. At the same time, subsidies for big-time agri-biz producers started snowballing. A nation of consumers of synthetics was cultivated in the next generation. The result we see around us, obese Americans willingly wearing the bastards’ brands on acrylic clothing … and guzzling synthetic soft drinks, Americans who’ve never once considered that the pizza crusts they gnaw at start out with a grain crop called wheat.

Ten thousand years of agriculture was synthesized into money. The soil-to-city chain of small farms, villages, and towns to the great city markets was destroyed. Those ever more profitable compressed gobs of humanity in the cities and suburbs could be cultivated for maximum productivity and profit as the bastards increased their domination of the needs hierarchy. If you made a movie of this, swapping out the humans for some sort of large intelligent rodent or insect, and left everything else as it really is in American life, people would call it chilling science fiction.

Long story short: The bastards won.

This distillation of how they won, this little piece of feral scholarship, is sure to be disputed by hairsplitting pinheads in political science and history departments. The “Oh but …” crowd. Which is OK with me. Everybody needs a job, I suppose. But that’s the view from here in the cheap seats among the non-players, the fuckees in the great fuck-the-proles game of bastard politics and ever bigger money. Call this a pulp comic summary of post war history. It’s not a very damned funny history. Maybe that’s why we choose not to remember it. Here in the United States of Amnesia. We cannot retain what happened last week, much less history. But I’m trying here folks. I really am.

SCREAMING MAN: BULLSHIT FOLKS! DON’T BELIEVE A WORD FROM THIS GODDAMNED BEER SOAKED, REDNECK WHO CAN’T SPELL AND THINKS HE’S A GENIUS BECAUSE HE KNOWS HOW TO BRING UP WIKIPEDIA ON HIS BROWSER. IF AND WHEN HE’S SOBER ENOUGH. THE SCREAMING MAN HAS BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE BAGEANT’S BLOATED, DISEASED CARCASS FOR SIXTY TWO YEARS, AND THE SCREAMER CAN TELL YA THIS: IF BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE BAGEANT WOULDN’T HAVE ENOUGH POWER TO BLOW OFF A GOOD FART. YOU’VE JUST WASTED TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES OF COMPANY TIME. NOW GO TAKE UP SOMETHING USEFUL, LIKE NARCOTICS. FOR CHRISSAKE GET A LIFE!

Daddy was making more money than he’d ever made in his life, about $4,000 a year. The median national household income at the time was $5,000, mostly thanks to America’s unions. After years of moving from one rented dump to another, we bought a modest home ($8,000) and felt like we might at last be getting some traction in achieving the so-called “American Dream.” Yup, Daddy was doing pretty good for a backwoods boy who’d quit school in the sixth or seventh grade — he was never sure, which gives some idea how seriously the farm boy took his attendance at the one-room school we both attended in our lifetimes.

This was the golden age of both trucking and of unions. Thirty-five percent of American labor — 17 million working folks — were union members, and it was during this period the American middle class was created. The American middle class has never been as big as advertised, but if it means the middle third income-wise, then we actually had one at the time. But whatever it means, one third of working folks, the people who busted their asses day in and day out making the nation function, were living better than they ever had. Or at least had the opportunity to do so.

From the Depression through World War II the Teamsters Union became a powerful entity, and a popular one too because of such things as its pledge never to strike during the war or a national emergency. President Roosevelt even had a special designated liaison to the Teamsters. But power and money eventually drew the usual assortment of lizards, and by the mid-fifties the Teamsters Union had become one corrupt pile of shit at the top level. So rotten even the mob enjoyed a piece of the action. The membership, ordinary guys like my dad, was outraged and ashamed, but rendered powerless by the crooked union bosses in the big cities.

My old man was no great follower of the news or current events, but he tried to keep up with and understand Teamster developments. Which was impossible since his reading consisted of anti-union Southern newspapers, and the television coverage of Teamster criminality, including murders, and the ongoing courtroom trials.

All this left him conflicted. His Appalachian Christian upbringing defined the world in black and white, with no gray areas. Inside he felt he should not be even remotely connected with such vile things as the Teamsters were associated with. And he sometimes prayed for guidance in the matter. On the other hand, there was the pride and satisfaction in providing for his family in ways previously impossible. He’d built a reasonable working class security for those times and that place in West Virginia. Being a Teamster certainly made that possible. But for damned sure no one had handed it to him. He drove hi s guts out to get what he had.

There were rules, and log books and all the other crap that were supposed to assure drivers got enough rest, and ensure road safety and fairness for the truckers. Rural heartland drivers saw it for the bullshit it was, but it was much better paying bullshit. For a little guy hauling produce from Podunk USA to the big cities, it still came down to heartburn, hemorrhoids, and longer hauls and longer hours than most driver’s falsified log books showed. And sometimes way too much Benzedrine, or “bennies.”

Bennies were a type of speed commonly used by truckers back then because of the grueling hauls. As a former doper who has done bennies, I can avow they are some gritty nerve jagging shit. Their only virtue is making you wide awake and jumpy, and after you’ve been awake on them a couple days, which many drivers were, crazier than a shithouse rat. Nearly every truck stop sold bennies under the counter. Once while hallucinating on bennies, Daddy nearly wiped out a roadside joint. He recalled “layin’ on the jake brake, down shifting, and watching hundreds of the witches like in The Wizard of Oz come down out of the sky in the dark.” Somehow he got 30,000=2 0pounds back onto the road while several folks inside the diner were pissing themselves in the windowside booths.

My daddy ran the eastern seaboard in a 12-wheeler — there were no 18-wheelers yet. It had polished chrome and bold letters that read, “BLUE GOOSE LINE.” Parked alongside our little asbestos-sided house, I’d marvel at the magic of those bold words, the golden diamond and sturdy goose, and dream of someday “burning up Route 50″ like my dad.
Old U.S. Route 50 ran near the house and was the stuff of legend if your daddy happened to be a truck driver who sometimes took you with him on the shorter hauls: “OK boy, now scrunch down and look into the side mirror. I’m gonna turn the top of them side stacks red hot.” And he would pop the clutch and strike sparks on the anvil of the night, downshifting toward Pinkerton, Coolville and Hanging Rock. It never once occurred to me that his ebullience and our camaraderie might be due to a handful of bennies. Yessir, Old 50 was a mighty thing, a howling black slash through the Blue Ridge Mountain fog. A place where famed and treacherous curves made widows and truck stops and cafes bloomed in the tractor trailers’ smoky wakes. A roadmap will tell you it eventually reaches Columbus and Saint Louis, places I imagined had floodlights raking the skies heralding the arrival of heroic Teamster truckers like my father. Guys who’d fought in Germany and Italy and the Solomon Islands and were still wearing their service caps these years later, but now pinned with the gold steering wheel of the Teamsters Union. Such are a working class boy’s dreams.

I have two parched photos from that time. One is of me and my brother and sister, ages ten, eight and six. We are standing in the front yard, three little redneck kids with bad haircuts squinting for some faint clue as to whether there was really a world out there, somewhere beyond West Virginia. The other photo is of my mother and the three of us on the porch of that house on route 50. On the day my father was slated to return from any given run we’d all stand on the porch listening for the sound of airbrakes, the deep roar as he came down off the mountain. Each time my mother would step onto the porch blotting her lipstick, Betty Grable style hair rustling in the breeze, and say, “Stand close, your daddy’s home.”

And that was about as good as it ever got for our family. Daddy’s heart later gave way from a congenital defect and he lost everything. He was so scrupulously honest about debts he could never recover financially. Unable to borrow money, uneducated and weakened for life, he set to working in car washes and garages. After his union trucking days were over, we were assigned to the margins of America, a million miles from the American Dream, joining those people never seen on television, represented by no politician and never heard from in the halls of power.

Now it was only a little house by the side of the road with not enough closets and ugly asbestos shingle siding. But it was ours, just like the truck and the chance to get ahead that it offered. And we had felt like we were some small part of America as it was advertised. All because of a union job during the heyday of unions in this nation.

It was also a period of Teamsters Union corruption, replete with criminal moguls such as Dave Beck, George Meany and Jimmy Hoffa. Yet the history of the few top lizards on the national rock of greed is not the history of the people.

If a few pricks and gangsters have occasionally seized power over the dignity of labor, countless more calculating, bloodless and malevolent pricks — the capitalist elites — have always held most of the cards

Which is why in 1886 railroad and financial baron Jay Gould could sneer, “I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” And why a speaker at the U.S. Business Conference Board in 1974 could arrogantly declare, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” And why that same year Business Week magazine said, “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow — the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality.”

The new reality is here, and has been since 1973, the last year American workers made a wage gain in real dollars. Hell, it’s been here so long we accept it as part of America’s cultural furniture. Only about 12% of American workers are unionized and even with a supposedly union-friendly Democratic Congress, unions are still fighting to exist (although government employees are unionized at 36%, because the Empire allows some leeway for its commissars). In fact, things are worse than ever. Employers can now force employees to attend anti-union presentations during the workday, at captive audience meetings in which union supporters are forbidden to speak under threat of insubordination. Back in 1978 when I was working to organize the local newspaper, the management was not even allowed to speak to the workers on the matter until after the union vote results were in.

Then there’s President Obama, the guy softheaded liberals think is going to turn this dreadful scenario around. He talks a good game about unions, when he is forced to. But Obama is working on the things that will “create a legacy,” such as health care (which is simply a new way to pay the insurance industry’s blackmail) or the economy (by appointing the same damned people who fucked it up to fix it), and immigration reform, a nicely nebulous term that can mean whatever either side of the issue wants it to mean. Obama’s not going to publicly ignore the unions. But he’s not going to sink much political capital into this corporatized nation’s most radioactive issue either. For him, union legislation is just a distraction from the “legacy building” of a very charming, savvy, and ambitious politician. That is the assessment of Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most anti-union institutions in America. (Many thanks to Washington writer Ken Silverstein for publishing Spencer’s astute observations).
Things are changing though. Union membership climbed 12 percent last year. Twelve percent of twelve percent ain’t shit, but at least it’s forward motion. At that rate it will only take us 21 years to get back to the 1956 level of union membership. We can expect no miracles; top union leaders are still among the Empire’s elites. And they are still technically accountable to whatever membership will still have jobs when the 2012 elections roll around. The least they could do is make it harder for Obama to lick off those millions of hard earned union support dollars from the top of the campaign contribution ice cream cone as he did in ‘08.

But who can be sure? Because the new union elites and their minions are lawyers and marketing professionals. They’ve never come down off the mountain with both stacks red hot, or gathered on the porch of a crappy but new roadside bungalow, proud because they owned it, and stood up straight because, “Boys, your daddy is coming home.”
I’m not going into the current brouhaha about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) or the “card check” bullshit here. Because what it’s gonna take to restore dignity to laboring America ain’t gonna be more legislative wrangling. What it takes won’t be pretty, maybe not even legal in this new police state, and sure as hell won’t be “within the system.” Because the system is the problem.

So it will be up to us, just like it always has been . . . the writer, the Nicaraguan janitor, the forty-year-old family man forced to bag groceries at Wal-Mart, the pizza delivery guy, the welder and the certified nurse . . . the long haul trucker and the short order cook. And they will snicker at us from their gilded roosts on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Some people are bound to get hurt in the necessary fight. In fact, people need to be willing to get hurt in the fight. That’s the way we once gained worker rights, and that’s the way we will get them back. The only way to get rid of the robbers’ roost is to burn the fucker down.

Anyone got a match?

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope in one of the few free activities in this society. We don’t even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.

But the fact is that when we encounter in-the-flesh examples of any merciful movement – even through television — we blanch and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to support that thing. Consider how the American public and the media (is there a difference?) responded to Rachel Cory, who willingly died under the Israeli bulldozer protecting the home of a non-partisan Palestinian village doctor. The U.S. media all but ignored her. What small public knew of Cory’s sacrifice was at first nonplussed, then deemed it a bizarre and stupid act. But even most Americans who did know joined the Larry Kings of the world in backhandedly mocking her. Moral conviction scares the hell out of us. Hope is effortless.

Thus, hope is still the order of the day. Obama’s election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama’s victory is a national rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror. Which is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless war making — recovery of one small bit of the immense ground we have lost. Or simply the next thing to do, now that we have tortured, terrified and leveled an entire people for the hell of it. Take your pick. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.

Meanwhile, Obama takes charge of a bankrupt nation collapsing under late stage capitalism. “Not good, say Chief Thunderthud! White men manage to fuck up even under good presidents.” Right, chief. Indeed, there are many destructive forces far larger and more longstanding than a president and his powers. We can start with Congress. But our planetary ecocide probably trumps Congress.

Now if you will allow me a temporary lapse into theological seizure here: When it comes to those larger forces at play, none is larger and more enduring than the spirit, regardless of whether you call its presence God, the laws of physics, eternity, the Buddhist “great void,” or the governing principle of the universe. And it is mature and ever greater truth seeking that connects us with that force. Not hoping someone else, an Obama perhaps, is connected to it, and will exercise it toward the common good.

Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings or religion, would not recognize the common good if it bit ‘em in the ass. We have no genuine concept of common good. We really don’t. Tocqueville observed that 170 years ago. He said that in America, no man owes another man anything. Nor is he owed by any other man. Where does that leave any movement toward the common weal requiring the cooperative efforts of more than one man?

We all know the answer — The gubbyment. Which leaves the common good to greaseball politicos, banking and mortgage sharks, and a private cartel of behind the scenes hustlers called the Fed. Nevertheless, we have lived under the myth of rugged individualism so long we think we are in charge of our destiny — which in our utterly monetized American system, means our financial fate. No matter that we let unseen elites own and manage our hard earned dough over quail and cognac on the 45th floor. They’re of the sort who know what’s best. You can tell them by their arrogance and their good looking trophy wives. And by their big limos. Americans know the superior man when they see it.

Meanwhile, thanks to the doctrine of no man owing another, this doctrine of not being our brother’s keeper in any important way, we are left with the social ethic of “every man for himself. Damned all social taxes and collective effort, I’ll claw down my own share, and let the devil take the hindmost. Hell, maybe I’ll even end up there on the 45th floor among the quail eaters with a blonde waiting in the sack. Land of boundless opportunity, right? ”

Or on a more mundane level, as countless Americans have told me, “Why should I pay for someone else’s health care? Let them buy their own, just like I did.” Consequently, we’ve not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn . . . in the lack of nuance in the national character, in the childlike and clichéd thinking of our electorate, in our satisfaction with a deluge of technological toys instead of meaningful work and leisure, or intellectual and spiritual substance. Nor is there assured food and shelter for the poorest among us, despite that it is in the common good that all children be raised in a secure environment . . . because over generations that produces an ever nobler community and nation. “Each generation better than the last,” as the saying goes.

Now, that is moreover a pretty good description of the American Dream, at least as it regards fairness and justice. And halting as it has been, we have made progress in fairness and justice — civil rights and women’s suffrage being two examples. And we could have achieved more, had we been fixed upon the most fundamental sense of what is just. We did that collectively as American citizens.

But conceiving of one’s self as a citizen of our republic is the poorest way to do so, given that it acknowledges us more as property of the state than of the planet. Especially considering that we have a far larger responsibility to our common planetary home, than to any armed and squabbling, ambitious nation state. That we managed to overcome such obvious inequities as slavery and the oppression of women is no great accomplishment at all. Just two small acknowledgements of justness. Yet we wallow in those small expressions of human and national decency as if the advancement of humanity were all but accomplished (one more civil rights documentary rammed down my throat and I’m gonna drive over to PBS offices in D.C. and shoot out their latte machine).

At any rate, once we made these advances, we felt free to haul off and kill as much of humanity as we deem necessary to keep the oil flowing and our capitalist masters in a permanent state of dominance and caviar flatulence. We’d banned slavery and let women vote for the same scallywags as men. Lettin’ the queers get hitched however, is one we’re gonna have to think over for a while Hoss, because there’s still political mileage in being agin’ it!

Still, despite our sorry-assed condition as a citizenry, not to mention so much outward evidence to the contrary, as individuals every one of us can recognize what is just and right. In fact, when it comes to the private, inward self, it is harder to avoid fairness than it is to justify unfairness, though we manage to. Regardless of our deformation by capitalism’s relentlessness, and its accompanying materialistic mediocrity, we know there is such a thing as balance, such a thing as justness, and equity for all people, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. This, thanks to the “eternal scales” inside us all. And the fulcrum of these scales, this always-present, wordless inner preference, if not action, toward just balance, is, I believe, the spirit.

Scientists may yet reduce all human behavior, thought and emotion to neurochemistry. That’s their bag — reducing the universe to impressive displays of tinker toydom so The Discovery Channel will have grist. But the most sublime expression of humankind is nevertheless more than the sum of its parts and must be called spiritual. I don’t have any lofty language to explain that. I’m as “ignernt as the next feller,” as my old man used to say. Either we can feel, or can learn to feel the common soul … that essence coursing in all sentient things (and I for one, include trees, rivers, amoeba and the atmosphere in the count) and feel joy and unity in that, or we cannot. Either compassion enters our awareness and experiential reality through suffering and contemplation of the suffering of others … or it does not. Either way, it would seem incumbent upon each of us to try to bring about a world in which that occurs for the maximum number of our fellow men. Given that we all share a common grave, compassionate action may well be the only human action of any value. Compassion for all living things on a living planet. In that resides the equilibrium of the world.

Not that we’re ever gonna see equilibrium in the world. Or even come close. The ungilded truth is that the planet, at least as regards its sustenance of mankind and thousands of other species, is irredeemably fucked. Toast. And we cannot fix it, only slow down the inevitable, and hopefully settle out at some level which, though desolate by today’s standards, we are still in a breathing and shitting state of existence.

To actually grasp catastrophe on this order of magnitude leaves us numb with shock. Or sends us in search of some better notion of our destiny than Mother Nature flushing humankind down the crapper. “What the hell, bitch? Don’t you know we are made in the image of God!” “Which one? Mother Nature cackles, then reaches for the lever. “But wait, wait! I’m gonna make better consumer choices from now on…”

“Oh spare me!” moans the grand dame of the trees and waters.

“Consuming was the problem, dickhead.”

Nonetheless, there will be a helluva lot more consuming, this time centered around consuming “consumer alternatives,” such as burning of corn in vehicles and “Going green with Monsanto!” before our folly is complete. I see that now even our dogs can “eat green,” though I doubt they like it much.

Most people reading this understand that we can never again be what we once were … a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of unsustainable growth through resource depletion. So no matter how much we hear about political change, no politician can save us. Because no presidential candidate can run on the promise that “If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don’t mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there.”
Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice: Accept the truth and act upon it. We can at the very least say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. That in itself can be called embracing the spirit. It won’t accomplish shit, but it is nevertheless the right thing to do. Because it’s the only just thing left to do. Too late, for sure, but better than remaining a dysfunctional moral cretin. My inner scales tell me so.

As long as we are cataloguing pointless acts of moral common sense, we may as well turn off PBS’s Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we’ve eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature — though a case might be made for stupidity — but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things. One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. And we can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.

You might be thinking: If those are the facts and there’s really little I can do, why not just indulge myself and enjoy the life I have left? Sit and order a pizza? Well, those are the facts. And most people choose to do just that. So do I sometimes. Fortunately or unfortunately, my sense of indulgence is so repulsive it scares even me back onto the path.

Living more simply is a prerequisite to right action — but it’s no solution at all. Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine, but no solution. The problem is too far out of hand now. “Solutions,” are over too. I’m sure by now, assuming you got this far, you’re thinking, Bageant, you’re a negative, gin-addled old toad. So be it.

But you might also ask, “Now that you’ve eliminated all hope in this screed, what does one do about all this? I’m sure that what you’re gonna suggest will be unpleasant as hell, and if it involves enemas or rubber gags and leather straps, I ain’t gonna play. But to humor you, I’ll ask. Do I renounce materialism or what?”

My own wife asks me this shit, so I think that’s a fair question. And a fair answer is: I don’t know. But I do know what has worked for me. And since we are all arguably of the same species (I have my doubts about Adam Sandler fans and Dick Cheney) obviously at the very least, consumer renunciation is called for, strivance for a genuinely simple and essential life. Which is completely impossible in this country. But we can and should try.

In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: “You fat fuckers don’t need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven’t seen your dick in ten years.”

But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they’re too consumeristic, too materialistic doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).

Our relationship with the physical/material world is not only holistic and ecologically interwoven . . . it is also the source of our spiritual essence. Which is why monolithic production, monetization, and commodity fetishism destroy our essence. We must think through that. We must look around us at its proof, and learn it for ourselves. If you don’t pick up on that, you’re screwed. And if you do you pick up on it, you get to fester on real questions. Such as “How do I accept responsibility for my life?” (which I never the hell wanted in the first place…) We can ask, “How do I leave the world a little better than I found it? And the answer is, who the hell cares? Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine … but it’s no solution. The problem is too out of hand now for that to be any kind of solution. But we should try, because we have a lot of time on our hands yet.

We can also ask ourselves: are my living actions more contributory, more effective than, say, drinking a can of Drano? Don’t laugh. If we really think that through, we will be surprised how hard that is to do. Not fuck things up worse, I mean. Life really ain’t sacred in and of itself. You get born, you eat, breathe and shit, and you fuck things up. You start out with a negative balance in the ole karmic account. Then you start doing serious payback without even an inklng of the total amount due. No wonder babies come into the world with a squall of protest. Theologians tell me that this is called redemption, and that it gives life meaning. Maybe so, but it sure as hell makes things harder.

Perhaps we should all “dialogue on this” a bit? Nope. This thing we are facing, this thing we must do, is not just another topic for more “dialogue.” And besides, this is a cyber monologue, and one of the nice things about the Internet is that you can’t be interrupted while you’re offending other people’s sensibilities. In any case, regardless of who’s doing the dialoging, Earth First, the Dalai Lama or the ghost of Reinhold Niebuhr, let’s not kid ourselves that if we only yak some more, the world and mankind will somehow heal themselves. It’s easy for the wealthy of the earth such as you and I (especially if one has an Internet connection) to want to believe that. After all, we had breakfast this morning and we not only have clean potable water to drink — which 2.2 billion people do not — but also shit in the stuff. The real solution — not to the problem, which is unsolvable in the long haul, but to balancing those eternal scales inside ourselves — begins with a more contemplative and reflective life, and the care of the soul. Both of which are necessarily thwarted by the wasteful daily busyness of our materialism and technology. Jesus did not text message his truth, and the Buddha never had a single friend on Facebook. Yet we hear their truth across millenniums. They simply practiced compassion. Only by eliminating suffering among sentient beings, do we create the spiritual soil in which peace can flourish. That takes conviction. The real stuff. It pisses me off that the Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were right about one thing — the value of conviction — but that’s the way it is.

And as long as we are still breathing and passing water, choice remains available, even superior choice: Accepting the truth and acting upon it. Thankfully, we can do individual positive action. It starts with getting in touch with higher intelligence: Our own. After that, it’s soul work.
We can, at the very least, deliver our bodies to the halls of power and say: “No more scorched babies in Iraq!” We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can remember and contemplate the example of Rachel Cory. Or even follow that dogged neocon mantra of “taking personal responsibility,” but doing it for real. All of which can be considered voting for the spirit.

It will take an entire lifetime of commitment, and the world will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of public glory or reward during our lifetimes, not if we are doing it right. And if we turn a buck on it, we can be assured that we are playing the same game as the earth’s wrecking crew. Which is called irony, I guess.

Yet the reward lies right there before us. Knowing and observing the spirit in all things . . . even above life itself. It is the first fearful step . . . the first stone on the path to liberation. Anyway, that’s my take on things.

Much has been written by political pundits in their attempt to explain the unexpected victory of Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton in this year’s Democratic Presidential Primary.
When looking at the results of this race, none of the conventional political math that would help one handicap the outcome would make one conclude that Senator Obama would win this contest.

Inside a Democratic Party primary there is no demographic or political reason that a male first term African American senator from Illinois with an unorthodox name should come any where close to beating a white female senator, who happens to be the wife of the last Democratic President whose approval ratings are still above 70% with Democratic voters and who also happened to earn the endorsements of the substantial parts of the Democratic Party establishment.

The conventional analysis focused on the poor quality of the campaign run by Senator Clinton, her vote in support of the Iraq war and her advocacy of the cynical center-right triangulation policies of her husband, which soured her campaign to many primary voters and especially to Democratic Party activists. Senator Obama’s on the other hand was credited with running an innovative and inspiring campaign that excited primary voters and brought many new and especially younger voters into the electoral process.

There is some truth to this analysis, but as a whole it misses the underlying social change in society that had already laid the groundwork for a possible Obama victory. To get a clearer understanding of the results, we must better understand what this social change is and how its impact is far more significant than the dynamics of the two respective campaigns.

The underlying social change that led to the Obama victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.

The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age.

The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture. To such an extent that there exists today a seamless web between our political, economic, media and consumer cultures wherein the modes and values of one are completely integrated and compatible with the others.

It should not come as a surprise that the dominant ideas and mores of popular culture have become the dominant ideas of our society. Popular culture is the breaker of customs, prejudice, tradition and relevant historical knowledge.

It is a result of this dynamic that the two consistent winners in American politics over the last 30 years have been the cultural left and the economic right. Despite the massive organizing drive of the religious right over the past three decades, they are further away from reversing the cultural liberalization of American society than when they started. On others side of the ledger, organized labor outside of a few urban pockets and industries is no longer a relevant force in American life. The ever greater electoral activism of both of these groups is generally misunderstood as a show of strength; in fact, it is the exact opposite. It is the desperate fight of the losing side of the American economic, cultural and political scene.

In essence the same forces that make it possible for the rapid acceptance of ideas such as gay marriage are the same force which can create a society that will accept massive social inequalities.

In the post political world and the candidates who can best thrive in it have tremendous appeal to the economic elites, a system that does not dwell on issues and will never ask the question, “who has power and why”, but simultaneously creates a social and media environment of stupefying distractions while destroying traditional social mores (under-credited as a source of much social solidarity). This can only benefit their continued rule of that society.

In such a setting our political choices like our consumer choices, regardless of the product, are primarily about what makes us more fulfilled and feel better about ourselves.

Senator Obama’s campaign understood much better the impact of these changes on our electoral system than any of his opponents’ campaigns. In the post political world, the campaign that is less political and less issue-based but is savvier in using new modes of communication technology will be the campaign to win the greatest market share of the electorate. The candidate in this case, Obama, was not a political entity but, in essence a product, an ornament that made his supporters feel better about themselves.

One of the most telling facts about the Obama’s constituency outside of African Americans (whose support needs no explanation) is that it is a coalition of people who need or demand the least amount of social benefit from our government. They are the under politicized younger voters and upper middle class whites. The two groups, coincidently, are the ones most influenced by trends in consumer popular culture and have the greatest of ease using the latest technologies.

In commercial advertising it is the poor commercial that lists the seventeen functions of the product being marketed. The best commercials are based on image associations entirely unrelated to the functions of the actual product. In the post political world, when the same principle is applied to the political realm, it makes complete sense how Barack Obama no longer is a black man with a strange name but the iPod to Hillary Clinton’s cell phone. In the world of toys it is the one that stands out the most is the most marketable.

The reality of the post political period is best highlighted in the failed themes and ideas of Barack Obama’s two primary opponents. The Clinton campaign was based on pushing two concurrent ideas: the inevitability factor of her candidacy and the other was her supposed experience. The only thing inevitable in the post political period is ceaseless change, which she could hardly offer while running against the candidate of “Change”. How valuable of an asset can experience be in a culture where knowledge, wisdom and history are frowned upon?

John Edwards campaign on the other hand was dead on arrival. His theme and emphasis was America’s ever widening class differences, a platform as truthful as it was irrelevant. The use of the word “class” will end any political career in America. That truth violates the primary narrative that our elite use to justify their legitimacy, which is the supposed meritocratic nature of America society. While the post political constituencies have absolutely no interest in class, whose very acknowledgment are the bases of all real politics and whose acknowledgement would only lead to an existential crisis in its ranks. In the post political period the only differences allowed can be in style and modes of consumption.

Given all this as the background, what are we to make of the campaign of the candidate of hope, audacity and change? The answer lies in understanding Senator Obama’s appeal to the brighter sections of the economic and political elite, and more importantly in the lack of any organized opposition against him, of the kind that within a matter of days destroyed Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004.

At the precise moment that the intellectual underpinnings of conservative free market ideas that have dominated politics for the past 30 years are crumbling across the globe. Obama calls for a post ideological and partisan world.

At the time when the American military industrial complex is despised around the world, he is a front man out of central casting which will buy it more goodwill and new room to maneuver in the first 15 minutes after being sworn in that John McCain could in the next 100 years.

His very presence, the color of his skin, the very strangeness of his name is the best guarantee of his betrayal of the expectations of the constituencies that will vote to elect him. Barack Obama is in short order a far more reassuring prospect for the continued dominance of the financial elite than another four years of neo-conservative rule which in an almost historically unique combination of greed, ill will, incompetence and stupidity have brought the country to the edge of disaster.

Audacity yes, change hardly.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison), got caught by police in a, shall we say, “a vehicular sexual incident” with a married woman. They were both drunk, big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by the time they got to court, the lady’s testimony was that it was all against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender while his public defender all but slept through the trial.

To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I’d be willing to bet there are more unregistered handguns guns than registered ones around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people down here in the southern climes of our great nation. Not to mention common nationwide to many thousands more cab drivers, night clerks, hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god only knows how many others. At any rate, thanks to the gun which he never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual purposes, and did ten years.

He’s been out for years now. But he was released into an entirely different world than he left — one which seems scripted by Adam Smith and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been released from prison to serve a new sentence … to serve time as a profit center for our economy. In truth, he has been one from the day he was charged.

First off, he was a profit center for the prison where he served his time. Now it is fairly common knowledge that America’s burgeoning system of privatized prisons, “super jails,” and related services has been a boon for corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp.) and their investors. Prisoner leasing programs such as Florida’s which rents out prison labor for less than 50 cents an hour to private industry in the name of “job training,” make building more prisons an attractive option for state governments and investors. It also makes recidivism desirable, since it assures the prison labor pool. Somewhere between 1% and 2% of Americans are behind bars, locked up at any given time, and as many more on probation or under state monitoring, obviously capitalist style punishment is a solid financial investment.

Now I am not about to screech here that our prison system is anywhere near that created by Uncle Joe Stalin. We do not have nine million people in it and we do not get sent there for being late for work at the factory, our factories having been outsourced. However, after 1929 Stalin’s prison camps were transformed to an economic machine. And in order to fulfill the camps’ economic goals, more and more prisoners were required, just as more prisoners are required to fulfill the investor goals of Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group. In any case, convictions are profitable and the more of them there are the more money both private interests and the state take in.

That in itself is way the hell past just being strange. But throw in the term sex offender and get on the registered sex offender list (which seems to be mostly filled with Johns who solicited prostitutes, though you’d never know it by the way they name the offense) and it all gets really weird. Chilling even. This is partly because of the taboo and stigma associated, but mostly for the bizarre monitoring rules, and the money involved in enforcement. For example Stokes, must pay a couple hundred a month for counseling, group therapy and so on, until they tell him he can stop doing so. This therapy mainly amounts to listening to the stories of more serious offenders such as child molesters even though he is not one, but being treated by law as if he were. Such is the fate of being legally shackled to any of dozens of types of “certified sex offender treatment providers,” an ever expanding industry they tell me.

He also must pay for registration as an offender, blood, saliva, fingerprints, palm prints, police registration of his internet address (within 30 minutes of obtaining it) and so on with the Department of State Police and the Sex Offenders Registry, providing a new photo, address, etc., for 10 years, effectively the rest of Stokes’ life, not to mention registering with the local cops wherever he lives. After five years he may petition the court for relief from having to re-register monthly. He cannot leave the state. He is supposed to inform employers of his status as a sex offender. So he cannot get a normal job and subsists on handyman work. In the end he generates about $400 a month for one post-incarceration entity or another, whether he has a job or not.

Stokes’s designated handlers tell him that the system would smile upon him if he would get more formal 8-5 employment, something that could be more easily tracked and taxed. Would that it were so easy for a 66-year-old man in this country. So he replies, “I’m retired dammit. I got the same right to live on my social security, if I can manage to, as anyone else.”

Yes, but it’s not much of a life for someone who once worked a skilled job setting up lights and stage gear in large arenas and performance venues. Now he lives in a basement workshop of an overcrowded apartment building/rooming house, in a space that is supposed to pass for an apartment but doesn’t even come close. For that privilege he pays $600 a month, and is allowed to work off part of it off by the landlord as a handyman.

Stokes tells me he could get out from under much of this by, and here’s the legal wording, “satisfying the court’s criteria for clear and convincing evidence that due to his physical condition the person no longer poses a menace to the health and safety of others.”

“You could cut your dick off,” I suggested.

“Sometimes I wish I had,” he sighs.

In any case, I am pretty dammed convinced parole is a racket, just like incarceration has become a racket, just as everything in this whole goddamned country is a racket in disguise, from home mortgages to health care. If it is vital to ordinary citizens, it’s a racket. But fear is the biggest racket of all. Even our rightful fear of sex offenders gets harnessed to the objectives of the corporate and political elites, woven into the weft and warp of the national delusion we call “the fabric of our society.” The freedom loving one that currently has 2.2 million of its own citizens locked up and another 2 million walking around under strict post-incarceration supervision and monitoring.

At this writing there are supposed to be 117 registered sex offenders in this burg of 24,000 from which I write, Winchester, Virginia, yet only 61 in the surrounding county which has a population of 73,000. Let me make a wild speculation here and say there may be a difference in the way justice is administered in the two localities.

As if Stokes’ needed to catch any more bad breaks, Stokes’ situation got worse. It seems he had the outrageous gall to get himself a dog. Stokes came upon a rather large black female mutt recently, who looked like she had a little retriever in her, according to Stokes, though I could never see it. She was bone skinny, partially blind and being neglected and abused by an old alcoholic woman down the street.

That dog, named Beulah, just loved Stokes. He lovingly fed he, and she stayed by his side constantly and obediently. But she kept getting skinnier and skinnier no matter how much he fed her. For a while we speculated it was worms, but I’ve seen enough dogs to know something worse was at work. Stokes spent money he didn’t have on expensive worm medicine. But he surely did not have $150 for a vet and tests and in a nation where uninsured folks are let to die slowly because they cannot pay cash, there was damned sure no more mercy for dogs. Mercy too has been privatized and costs money. Meanwhile old Beulah is hanging out in the back yard in a friendly fashion, wreak and sick as he is, sniffing and getting petted by all who come her way. Dogs are like that. Uncomplaining and decent unto death. I’ve had several who passed that way. She was old and getting ready top die, sure as god made little green apples. Broke as Stokes is, this was certainly was not going to be a veterinarian administered death, with a canine Kevorkian attending. And being a paroled felon, for damned sure Stokes was not going to produce a gun and shoot her, which is the way old dogs such as we saw animals put out of misery back in our day.

A situation like that is bound to draw the animal control officer’s attention and rightfully so given the outward appearance of the situation. So Stokes was busted. An examination showed that Beulah had diabetes. Seems they’ll get a vet to examine a dog to get a conviction but not to save a dog’s life. Whereupon Stokes was charged with animal abuse by the animal control office of our city police department. “You should never have let that dog get in this condition; you should have taken her to a veterinarian!” Now Stokes has a court appearance on the docket for animal cruelty. And of course no money for a lawyer. That’s where the compassion of a lonely old man for another sentient being will get you. Smack dab in the jaws of our justice system.

I hold middle class America responsible for this deformed thing we now call justice. And I’ve wanted to write an article about the sex abuse crime industry scam in this country, and proposed it to several magazines. Every one of them said that sex abusers are too unsympathetic as characters for them to publish. I pointed out that these are real people, not characters in a fictional work. The editors added that they were afraid the public might mistake such a story as being supportive of real sex offenders.

Governments and states exist to control people, and for no other reason. If justice is achieved somewhere in the process, it’s an added bonus. But control above all else is necessary for modern civilization to exist. Population grows by the minute, increasing social pressure on humanity. More rules and more control are required to keep order. Order is defined as the way we think others should behave — or imagine them to misbehave. We support the state’s police machinery and massive incarceration of our fellow citizens, so long as they are being imprisoned for the right reasons. They should pay. Every action in a capitalist world must produce money. So they should pay in cash.

Last week I was in Minneapolis, and spent a couple of nights getting drunk with a friend, an apartment building owner, who in his younger years did hard time for burglary. Things were somewhat different then, he avowed. In the fifties and sixties a prisoner may or may not have worked off his “debt to society.” But in these times, he says, “The system demands that you just deliver payment in cash. It’s more efficient. But not fundamentally different. Back then, the rich still profited for our crimes more than we did. We stole $10,000 worth of stuff. Next day in the paper we found that the guy we burglarized claimed it $30,000 worth for insurance purposes. Getting robbed was a winning situation for him. He made 20-K on us.”

It’s also is a wining situation for the 20 percent of Americans in what we call the middle class — those actually living the middle class life as advertised by the commercial and financial state’s marketing department. It works well for Stokes’ psychologist, his piss tester, his lie detector service contractor, the people with the sex offender website contract, and all good citizens with investments on Wall Street. The psychologist needs money to send his kid on the private school trip to Italy this summer. The contractor providing the sex abuser services just built a summer down on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The state police officer running the sex abuser monitoring program will retire in six years – his investments need to earn another $50,000 in that time…

But hold on!

Honest to God, as I conclude writing this — and I swear on a stack of friggin Bibles — a police prowl car and two of the department’s animal control officers in a police truck just parked in front of Stokes’ place across my driveway. They get out and rifle through some papers on a clipboard and talk on cell phones.

Now they have walked over to Stokes’ back door. He comes out and they sit him down in a lawn chair while they stand over him, hands on hips, lips moving under dark sunglasses. And the neighbors are all peeking out their blinds, watching the cops accost the registered sex offender (once he was on the internet registry, word got around here fast). They are probably looking at the animal control officers’ truck and thinking: “Oh my gawd! Bestiality too?)

Anyway you look at it, this cannot be good. Not for Stokes, not for you or me or anyone else less than enamored with the idea of a police state.

And Stokes? As he told me only yesterday, “I’m a goddamned magnet for bad luck.”

No he’s not. He’s just one more anonymous human profit center to be squeezed, one more grape to be crushed in a grotesque blood and money press that has no mercy.

To quote Obama:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

So what the hell else is new?

Then Obama adds: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

While not precisely correct, it’s a good enough generalization for an American audience not really listening anyway. Obama’s remarks were not in the least controversial and just plain boring in terms of content. Certainly not newsworthy.

Yet he had no sooner closed his mouth than this media manufactured hell broke loose. “Oh my gawd,” they screamed. This guy has the unmitigated gall to suggest that there might be some bitterness out here in the lily-white realms of Grant Wood, grange halls and Methodist church suppers! Right here in River City!” . . . where the combination of God rhetoric and Chamber of Commerce boosterism have managed to ban the word from public discourse. Even the mention of it can be explosive, simply because there is so much of it stuffed inside working folks, inside the lockbox of denial that comes with being the citizen of a culture in collapse.

Put more simply, the self-serving “blogger-reporters” and Hillary Clinton media machine had managed to kick Obama in the balls from behind.

Along with the bitterness charges came the guns-and-God stuff. Well, we Red State rubes out here in the working world do own a lot of guns, though very few of us “cling” to them in the desperate sense the speech implied. As to what Obama described as our clinging to religion, we do not so much cling to it as it clings to us . . . as a vestige of our heritage. It’s neither a good nor bad thing in and of itself, but mighty damned useful to fearmongering politicians and the screen writers of television crime shows. Hell, even I made a few bucks writing about its nastier side in my book Deer Hunting With Jesus.

For me, listening to politicians talk, then listening to the media talk about politicians talking, rates right up there with swapping spit with a gingivitis victim. I do not like, nor trust, nor much listen to Hillary, McCain or Obama. And I wouldn’t vote for any of the three even if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a bottle of Jack Daniels. However, after hearing Obama’s March “race speech” in Philadelphia, I can understand the Obama cult a little better. Although his speech was full of national clichés and meaningless soaring rhetoric, somehow it was still a goddamned good one, and right on in my opinion. Maybe I liked it because, like the poverty victim he brought forth in typical Democratic Pity Party fashion, I too have eaten mustard and relish sandwiches growing up (or when lacking those condiments, plain sugar on white bread.) I loved the speech. But I still ain’t drinking the Kool-Aid. In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

I’m from Winchester, Virginia, the very kind of place and people Obama was talking about when the rotten tomatoes started hailing down. So allow me to say this: we white members of the sweating class have been working alongside laboring immigrants, legal and illegal, for decades and have not been killing them with our personal arms in a rage of antipathy, in so far as I know. The reason, near as I can tell, is that we do not give a happy shit one way or another because most of us do not have interest or knowledge enough to fester on the topic. Nor the time. When we fester on stuff, it’s about making car payments and trying not to default on our mortgages. Working two and sometimes three jobs per household does not leave much time to develop political opinions, much less informed ones. I’d be willing to bet there is not a working class person within four blocks of where I now sit who has even heard of this media manufactured Obama fracas. Yesterday Smokey, the apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama thing.

“Huh?” he said.

He spoke for millions.

Nobody out here that I know particularly “hates niggers,” blames Mexicans, or is willing to use their personal firearms against any of those people, unless they find one of them crack crazed and coming in through a bedroom window at 2 AM, in which case there will be a loud boom, and the perp is gonna look like a pizza splattered up against the wall. Otherwise we just stand before the incompressible system that fucks us blind. And in that there is certain bitterness.

Let’s get to the nub of this thing here: Obama, Hillary and McCain are farting through silk while playing out their roles in our theatrical state’s false drama called presidential elections, while smug and media sanctioned pundits snark from the edge of the proscenium arc of politics, each hoping to draw enough attention to have his or her own proscenium in that national cathedral of the American consciousness — television.

Before too long this earth shaking “incident” will be drowned out by the accumulating noise of the election year. Then even the election’s hoopla will all be wiped away when Oprah Winfrey, in one of her ever grander spectacles of televised largess, gives away the city of Detroit to the sixth grade author of the most heart rending essay on black poverty.

November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand, much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn’t know any other way of life.
One of these days, when it comes to the thundering non-controversy of Obama’s remarks, the blogosphere and the media may start asking the right kinds of questions. The kind Smokey asked me after I explained the Obama controversy to him: “Who the fuck cares?”

So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers — a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.

Immensely energetic and a lifelong activist for literacy and informed thought, this cigarette voiced Northumberland librarian has built the county’s new little library, and even managed to coax enough money out of the local government for two employees,. In a county with a population of 12,000, that’s no small political feat.

At the moment though, politically speaking, the Obama-Hillary dirt fight is in full fury, so I asked the obligatory question of the week, “Who will you vote for?”

“Oh, Obama, I guess. It’s so hard to get excited over the elections. Lately I’ve been just plain depressed,” she said.

“About what?”

“Oh just everything. It seems to have become so pointless in America, as if we are entering a Dark Age. I’ve come to wonder why I do anything at all.”

On that melancholy note, we return to the lounge to join my wife for that last drink. The next one always of course being the “last one,” in the early stages of these situations, before all pretense is dropped and people start taking off their clothes or falling off those infernal high stools that replaced good old fashioned chairs — the kind where your feet reach the floor at all times and with arms you could grip if the room starts spinning.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had hundreds of encounters with reading Americans — and by encounters I mean conversations, not falling off chairs — which is to say book loving, thinking people like the Northumberland librarian, people of every stripe. They have ranged from the good ole boy Texas electrician who took me to a real smoke choked pool-table-and-concrete-floor joint to professors of literature and Washington policy wonks who actually use the little red cocktail napkin that accompanies their martinis.

During this period I have noticed a change in the nature of discussion with these previously unmet readers. Four years ago, much of it centered on the outrageousness of the Bush administration, the stomach turning criminality of the Iraq War, Cheney The Fanged Man of Wax, with a little rage at our planetary ecocide thrown into the mix. In other words, about what you might expect from a baby roasting alien commie readership such as mine, made up of such folks as school teachers, union members, sociology profs and other congenital malcontents, the sort of people who resent things like student strip searches in public high schools (HR 5295, The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006, which, to its credit, at least bans cavity searches by faculty. You gotta be a cop to do that in our public schools) and other subversive types.

Lately though, I don’t hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called “rage fatigue.” Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it’s true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I’m no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the “American lifestyle,” is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely “the entertainment branch of industry.”

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned “Hope” of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it’s too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: “If we fucked everything up so bad tryin’ to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave’er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much.”

More Band-Aids for the trained chickens, please!

Virgil may be popping open a Keystone Light lager somewhere in heaven, or in maybe a much warmer venue. I dunno. But people are thinking about it more than ever. Among sentient people everywhere there is a deep, visceral unease, and among those most aware there is genuinely acute suffering. I hear this expressed quite articulately not only in places such as this Omni Hotel “writers’ lounge,” but in working and middle class living rooms and in emails from Americans and around the world.

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign “plans for change.”

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

We now live as the technoculture’s subjects, not its masters and will from here on out as viral technology mediates, homogenizes and monetizes human experience worldwide, in ever more remote corners. I watch it regularly in the Third World, where the power of gadgets such as cell phones is wiping out the core foundations of indigenous or longstanding cultures within a decade or two. The global machine’s technological nervous system and production musculature, the techno grid now embedded in the world, grows in quantum fashion to control every aspect of our lives deeper and more thoroughly than is imaginable by the folks living those lives. It’s so pervasive we don’t feel it at all.

For instance, I just hit the ATM machine in this hotel for forty bucks. And in doing so I joined the Manhattan book editor, the black Carib village fisherman in Dangriga, Central America and the taxi driver in Capetown, South Africa in performing the same activity. We all stand submissively before the global ATM machine network like trained chickens pecking the correct colored buttons to release our grains of corn. Freedom, and to a large extent joy, as we understand it in our common technoculture, is mostly just the grid’s monetized consumer offerings, each with its own type of packaging, its own technologically produced overlay of commercial skin. These choices, by the way, do not include the non-uniform products or experience, unauthorized products or joys such as hashish or deviant sex. Not officially at least, but perhaps when technoculture solves the uniform packaging and delivery problem …

If anybody solves that problem, it will be the Japanese. There seem to be no bigger suckers for technoculture than the people who have given the world plastic dirt (”half as dense as and a thousand times cleaner than real dirt”) the UFO-detecting keychain, the online lie-detector and the hydroelectric toilet, which “assesses what variety of waste you’ve just put into it.” Technoculture is stressful enough, but obsessing over how clean or dense dirt is, and assessing the varieties of you bodily waste (last time I looked there were only two) well, there may be a certain justice in the Japanese suffering the highest levels of anxiety, stress, and depression. It’s so bad that according to Dr. Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family Planning Association, “Japanese people simply aren’t having sex, and the suicide rate has been rising rapidly.”

Personally, I am not having much sex either, but that has not yet pushed me to toward suicidalism and probably never will. After age sixty sex became perhaps my fifth highest priority, just below the availability of cheap beer or maybe even a double bourbon after six PM, which of course has a helluva lot to do with that fifth priority and its likelihood. All of which is more than you cared to know, I am sure.

Sucking the cuff in Totoland

“Eventually the system will reach a point… where the social cue is ‘integration’–where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society.”

– Theodor Adorno

In other words, Teddy boy, a totalitarian society. Not a nice word, according to our Western Civ instructors. An ironic one too, considering that Americans and Europeans sowed so much of its original seed. But the reality is that totalitarian society (dubbed “Totoland” in my household in a grim effort toward mockery: Dear Dorothy, fuck you and your little dog too! Signed, Bill Gates) is already here. And most of the planet accepts that as long as nobody next door is getting beheaded and at least some grains of corn keep dropping out of that ATM machine. Such is the belief in technology’s supposed production efficiency in dealing with the supply and demand problems of this world’s six billion.

That belief will remain because the technology will remain. Until it collapses along with the corporate aristocracy that make and own it. Otherwise, it cannot be dismantled without dismantling the world as we have made it and we cannot undo our own evolutionary species trajectory. Regardless of what the New Agers and Earth worshipping goddess cultists believe, we cannot haul six billion people back into pre-technology or support them in any natural sustainable fashion. Most of the world’s common people accept this, however unconsciously, thus the lack of protests and counter efforts on any meaningful scale. The new totalitarianism is its own justification, and nobody in America or Europe is going to kick up much sand so long as the Darfurs and Haitis remain on the goddamned TV screen where they belong.

At the same time, those empowered to do what little can be done, the world’s aristocrats, do what they have always done: surf the crest of power and wealth with their dicks pointed into the sunset of their civilization and their heads up their asses. A delighted nation cheers as a brunette corporate aspirant sucks on Donald Trumps pant leg on the Donald Trump Show. (”Ya gotta really want it baby!”) As a hobby, the guy owns The Miss Universe Organization, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants. He’ll never want for pants suckers.

Meanwhile, I’ve got forty ATM bucks that have to last me two days at this book bash.

A new Dark Age? Hell, why not?

“A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new kinds of poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul. Massified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the actual control program of modernity. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did.”

– Jean-François Lyotard

I’ve painted a grim picture for sure, made worse by claiming that hope is a sucker’s game, even a religion for millions of “people of faith” who believe hope and faith are the same thing. Ah hope! That fuzzy hearted Hallmark world of mass produced sentiment and emotions, even about “bereavement,” a world where thinking is regarded as a rat in the larder of bourgeois smugness. Thinking gnaws away at everything so relentlessly, until it finally breaks a tooth on one truth or another. And one of those truths is that the technology enabling those digital greeting cards that play “Happy Birthday” is systematically destroying nature and toxifying and maiming the millions of drudgery filled souls whose sole purpose for existence is industrial.

I’m convinced we are watching Lyotard’s illiteracy and impoverishment of language and merciless remodeling of opinion by media and “massified” standardizing in action. I could be wrong — my wife and kids assure me I am wrong about most things. But I have at least one scholarly author type on my side, Dr. Morris Berman, who argues that we are indeed seeing the approach of a new Dark Age. I’m willing to bet that the tens of millions living on less than a dollar a day or any of the women and children sold into the world’s multibillion-dollar sex-slave trafficking (including those under American auspices of Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiaries like KBR) feel that it’s here already. Not that anyone is asking them or anyone else in the Third World.

Living as I do much of the year in a Third World village, watching daily the cost of the American lifestyle on the village’s people, the technocultural cheapening of their lives, physical hunger, I feel guilty even being in such a posh hotel as the Omni. I should be back in Central America finishing up the water and sanitation project I recently started there (and probably would be if I were not out of money). Yet, through the patio’s glass door I can see then people round my table, the Northumberland librarian, the writer Tom Miller whose moving testimonies of Latino immigrants open up worlds unseen by white Americans, my own good wife who brings to life the truth of slavery by excavating memories in an amnesiac America … These are people who understand that human life is short and history is long, and that their humanly elegant efforts will not only go unheralded by that history, but mostly go unacknowledged in their own darkening time, and be all but eradicated by the sheer impoverishment of language and literacy in their native country during a New American Dark Age that comes cloaked in glittering technology instead of a coarse woolen cowl. Such unassuming and dedicated people are among our best.

This sordid American drama, the one I am calling a Dark Age, will in all likelihood not be completed until well into this century or the next, with a slew of increasingly nasty episodes along the way. Everyone here in the hotel lounge will say goodbye to this world long before America says the Big Goodbye.

Until then, we are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity’s side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy – those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization.

E. M. Forster described them as, “Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. … Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them… But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart’s Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world.”

In this they are deathless.

Like periwinkles.

What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about grades unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race. They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both ever in human history.

Most families here have five or six kids and their kids will have a similar number. I’ve yet to meet a native of the village who does not think half a dozen is not a nice round number of offspring. My adopted family has six kids and four adults living on a 100×300-foot lot. This does not include the Guatemalan family of five living in a rented cabana at one corner of the lot. Assuming all the children reach adulthood and procreate, the tally in ten years will be about 50 people of all ages trying to exist on this square of sewerage soaked sand.

But oh, were it that bright a future. As adults with families, these kids won’t even have this spot on which to live at all, much less live as well as they live now. The resorts and condo rackets out of Canada, South Africa and the U.S. are buying up these small plots. Unschooled in western financial concepts and janked by the developers’ offers of more money than they have ever seen in their lives, locals sell. Usually they are broke within a year. In any case their semi-literate children will join the next generation’s issuance of dispossessed poverty stricken young adults headed for elsewhere. Just what the world does not need, not here in Central America, not in the Middle East, not in Latin America or the U.S. But that’s what we’ve got and that’s what we are going to get a lot more of.

Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our approaching eco-disaster that no one honestly talks about. On the left we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore’s advice, which somehow never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets feel-good electric car ads — buy your way out of the problem, or at least your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, “You can’t run a hundred head of cattle on half an acre.”

Most of the developed world remains clueless as to how all this will affect their own lives. But Americans in particular cannot get their head around the impact these billions will have on the lifestyles they are driven like rats in hell to sustain. About half of Americans

SCREAMING MAN: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. “LET’S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL FUCKING YES, LET’EM ALL IN!” YEA, RIGHT. LET EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A FUCKING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD AMERICA. HELL, IT’S ALREADY STARTED. THEY’RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS BECAUSE THEY CAN’T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY’RE KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY CAN’T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.

Meanwhile, both camps of a nation with no sense of history beyond its own state sponsored founding fathers mythology hasn’t the slightest notion of how population migrations from areas of scarcity to areas of plenty have shaped human history perhaps more than any other force, including war (war is just more dramatic when it happens and more entertaining to read about when it’s over.) The Vikings were a population shift from the limited arable land resources of the north around the British coast to Normandy (and then back to England by way of William the Conqueror, a Viking descendant.) The Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Irish in America, Chinese into Tibet

SCREAMING MAN: WELL BUBBA, LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU IN CRAYONS. IT’S GETTING RIGHT BROWN OUT THERE IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. ALL THOSE SAWED-OFF LITTLE DARK HAIRED FUCKERS HAVEN’T COME UP HERE TO BE LAWN ORNAMENTS. AND SINCE THEY EAT AND SHIT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT AS YOU DO, THERE’S GONNA BE SOME REDISTRIBUTION OF THE GOODIES. YOU’RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF AMERICAN BLUBBER PARKED IN LINE ALONGSIDE SALVADORANS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS FULL OF WORTHLESS GREENBACKS WAITING TO BUY BLACK BEANS AND MASA HARINA IN BULK ­ THEN HITCHING A RIDE HOME ON A FLATBED TRUCK LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD SOUTH OF LOREDO DOES. OR MAYBE TAKING THE CHICKEN COOP FIREWOOD EXPRESS SURPLUS SCHOOL BUS BACK TO THE SAVAGE ARMED SUBURBS. A LITTLE TIP FROM THE OLE SCREAMING MAN: IF THERE IS A BILLY GOAT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, RIDE UP FRONT. IF THE DAMNED GOAT IS UP FRONT, RIDE ON THE ROOF. THERE IS USUALLY SOMEBODY OR SOMETHING UP THERE TO HANG ONTO.

Hungry but still humpin’

Meanwhile, the truth stays buried in the crapola. According to the UN’s newest report on the planetary condition, crop production has improved but has not kept up with population. World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since been decreasing. We have over six billion people now — there were far less than half that when I was born — and there will be roughly nine billion people by 2050. But the UN, being a world organization that has to please a couple hundred governments, each beating its own national drum to its people, pretending there is a long term solution other that to eliminate two thirds of the world population within the above mentioned kids’ lifetimes. Thus, the UN issues “millennium development goals.” This neatly sidesteps the fact that if the present six billion mouths and assholes running the world’s resources through their gullets like shit through a goose is unsustainable, then nine billion of the same are waaaaaay beyond sustainable in any way worth calling human life.

For starters it would take a doubling of world food production to (A-) feed the current victims of hunger, and (B-) to feed the additional three billion. Theoretically, we’re going to cut back. We’ll feed the nine billion by some unarguably admirable means, like cutting waste, not overeating, biofuels, and ending meat consumption. Small problem here Jackson: We’re pretty much out of the phosphate fertilizer that is the foundation of world agriculture. The soil itself collapsing in terms of human nutrition, as we use up its finite reserves of vital elements ­ iodine, chromium salts and other complex materials our six billion collective bodies need to function. And farming has already sucked down the world’s water supply to the danger level. Yet somehow, we are going to come up with TWICE the water we now use by 2050, global warming and drying be damned. The whole time we are fixing global warming the population climbs.

Old Tom Malthus said something like this was gonna happen, although he got some of the details wrong, which a person just might conceivably do in predicting the fate of human civilization a couple hundred years in advance. Call me a softie here, but I tend to give the guy a break for getting it 90% right.

But then I’m no scientist. Supposedly sophisticated American scientists have been pissing on the grave of poor Tom at least since I was a kid in school. All my life American capitalist economists have proclaimed they’ve licked the population problem by using the world up faster. “A failed prophet of doom,” I believe my high school teacher called Malthus. Even commies kicked Tom’s dog around. Engles called him a barbarian. Marx couldn’t handle Tom’s action, either. Nor practically anyone else, from John Stuart Mill to Allen Greenspan. And we still get the stale argument that “This planet isn’t crowded; it is just mismanaged.” Even the greens seem to believe that we can manage our way out of this fatal mess, if we just recycle, wear hemp and vote for the candidate on the bicycle with the Celtic tattoo. The alternative geeks swear nanotech is gonna pull us through. But last I heard pandemic viruses were still smarter than carbon nanotubes. Something about rapid adaptability. Those little fuckers seem to be fast on their feet, so in a title match between nano tech (or any tech for that matter) managed in the ring by nerds, and natural evolutionary biology — which not only has mother nature holding the towels in its corner, but also calling the fight — I’m damned sure betting on the biology.

At any rate, when it comes to the planet, now under the new global corporate management, it looks to be managed to death, dirt, people and all. The new management, kings and feudal lords of corporate finance to a man, peer down happily from the forty-fourth floor at six billion potential slave wage employees and wonder if you can feed’em on dirt and kudzoo.

Malthus must be thrashing inside his lead lined English coffin right now, cackling, “Do the math, you fuckers!” But they won’t. With the world’s geet presently being loaded into their yachts bound for the Caymans, they don’t have to. Not just yet, anyway. As for they guy on the bike with the Celtic tattoo, if he peddles long enough he’s bound to run into some of those 49,671 human beings born while I was writing this.

SCREAMING MAN: AND WHILE HE’SPEEDING HE CAN CLOSE HIS EYES AND MAKE A FUCKING WISH WITH TINKERBELL! THAT NINE BILLION WILL BE HUMPING AWAY TRYING TO CRACK THE TWELVE BILLION MARK. WHEN WE ARE ALL LIVING IN RENTALSTORAGE LOCKERS AND EATING PURINA PEOPLE CHOW, FUCKING WILL BE ONE OF THE LAST FREE PASSTIMES LEFT, OTHER THAN LISTENING TO THE 24/7 ADVERTIZING PIPED IN THROUGH OUR NECK CHIPS SELLING TEENSY STRAP ON YOUR ASS RUBBER BAND POWERED CARS. SO WE’RE GONNA HAVE EITHER HOMELAND SECURITY FUCK POLICE, OR FORCED STERILIZATION BY ICE PICK.

Actually, THE SCREAMING MAN is not so far off the mark. Human sterilizing crops are being researched, and I’m not entirely sure I’m agin it, partner, so long as they make the white people eat the stuff first.

In the meantime, the air is getting rather balmy in places it shouldn’t. Such as the North Pole. So the corporate and financial lizards at the top of the world rock, in a last ditch effort to milk out a few bloody trillion dollars more, has come up with a plan: carbon emissions trading.

Just as in a Mafia handshake and kiss on the neck “business agreement,” there are no escape clauses in the laws of physics. In either case the rules cannot be bent, though you ass may well end up worse than bent if you try to escape the debt you have racked up, be it in greenbacks or the green life supporting stuff of our planet. Both are finite and vital. Which means you get killed if you try to scam the game, and you certainly don’t get to write yourself an escape clause after the fact. But that doesn’t keep the high rolling carnie hucksters we call legislators from trying.

Naturally they like carbon trading. To my mind at least, making a profit off the fact that you did not piss into the community drinking gourd is the kind of logic only obsessive, property based western world governments and corporations could come up with. It assumes that (A) poisoning everyone else in the human fishbowl is a right to start with, and (B) that right is a property which can be bought and sold between corporate poisoners.

Traded or not, there will be plenty of carbon around, so don’t worry about not getting your fair share. In fact, we could park every car on the planet and be assured of a nice steady supply of carbon pollution for our great-great-great grandchildren. Turns out that, decades ahead of an already grim global warming schedule, biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release enough of the stuff to tide us over so our progeny can gasp for breath as they skateboard piggyback to and from their barracks at the Manpower gulag. Anyway, we can monetize pollution, and trade our commonly shared hemlock back and forth, and we can call it a “partial solution and a progressive step forward.” But it’s still hemlock. Yet, economists assure us that it makes good sense propertize, then buy and sell catastrophe in the market of calamity.

SCREAMING MAN: LOOK HERE SPORT. THEY’RE POLISHING A TURD SO THEY CAN SHAKE DOWN THE YOKELS. AND THE DUMB MAMMY JAMMING PUBLIC BUYS IT! HELL, AN ECONOMIST SAID IT AND AN ECOLOGIST AGREED, SO IT MUST BE A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT? BUT WHEN ALL THOSE MOOKS WITHOUT ECONOMICS DEGREES FIGURE OUT THAT TURD IS NEVER GONNA SHINE, THE GAME WILL BE UP. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BEGIN TO ASSOCIATE POLLUTION WITH THE FACT THAT THEIR KIDS ARE BEING BORN WITH 177 TEETH AND AN I.Q. OF 33.

The Great Commons Shell Game

Civilization’s most fatal folly was monetization and propertizing of the natural world that is humanity’s great common. In fact those two things ­ monetization and propertization — have come to mean civilization from the perspective of most ordinary people over the increasingly brutal centuries they have enabled. If modern cumulative civilization is not perceived as being very brutal by, say, the average hedge fund manager or Russian oligarch with a cell phone jacked into one ear and hurtling through the earth’s commons in a new BMW toward either the Outback Steakhouse or an appointment with is mistress, well, theirs is certainly a minority perspective. Ask any indigenous person.

“Commons” may be the current precious little term embraced by environmentally concerned American writers and activists ­ including me ­ but it rests on old European “ours together and my own private” concepts of the earth. That green foliage stuff whizzing by our windshields is more than commonly shared space. It is our commonly shared oxygenic and chlorophylic blood. And the “dirt” scraped and hammered into sterility and smothered under the asphalt is the armature, the bones of our existence. It was never possible for anyone to “own” any part of this so-called common, a word that only exists so someone else –usually a less than nice fellow surrounded by thugs in armor and whatnot — could call a piece of it his private property. You dared kill and eat one of my grouse! Die peasant motherfucker!

But once the delusion set in, and the peasants were allowed to scratch out a living on “their own” miserable designated little square, there was no turning back. Especially if you were European or derivative thereof, and ultimately ended up on the winning side of the delusion, otherwise called empire. But there never was a “mine and theirs,” when it comes to breathing clean air or drinking clean water. It only appeared so to propertized minds and cultures busy conquering and killing and pillaging other people’s natural world. And thanks to feudalism’s greatest shape shifting trick of all, capitalism, there ain’t much left to pillage.

For Americans this is particularly ironic, especially in terms of politics. Just as we started ballyhooing the triumph of America consumer capitalism over communism, the world’s ecology started backing up like a redneck septic tank. And Castro’s Cuba, of all places, emerged as a beacon of relatively petroleum free eco-enlightenment, organic farming and clean air, thanks to our 45-year embargo and the Ruskies turning off cigarland’s oil spigot in 1990. And now, despite it toxic track record, we find China, the same goddamned anthill people who flat out starved 30 million people (there’s population control for ya) to make weight for a great leap forward, are running the two largest eco-reclamation projects on earth — the Natural Forest Protection and the Sloping Land Conversion Programs. These are admirable efforts in the world’s eyes, even if the air over the cities is still so foul buzzards fly into it and drop dead. It certainly beats the U.S. refusing to stop in at the Kyoto Conference, not even for the hors d’oeuvres. Or going to the Bali Eco Summit just to pick fights with the French. George Bush might claim to be from Texas, but he plays global poker like a drunk. Meanwhile, the Chinese are still reaping the benefits of offing those 30 million because, voila! They never reproduced. Are those guys inscrutable or what?

So we what’s an all-American guy to do but drive around the suburbs looking for fried chicken, watching the weeds grown up on the foreclosed lawns, and slobber into our cell phones regarding our geographic location, having lost all sense of historical and moral location. “I’m going down Shirley Drive. Where are you?” “Me? I’m eating a pizza and watching some hot blonde on Animal Planet smootch upon bonobo chimps. It’s educational. Kinda sexy too, in a weird way.” Now this folks, is called our “socio-economic environment.” It may be social, and it may be economic, but it sure as hell ain’t much of an environment. Unless you happen to be a chimp. Of course like the chimps, we are “prime apes.” And as such, we’re supposed to have big brains that account for our “success as a species.” We’re gonna have to rethink that one. I’m not seeing much success here, hoss. Are you?

Let somebody else fix it while I grab a salad

Sad lot that we are as a species, not everyone is a moral pig. Millions of individuals, some governments even, are unnerved by what is happening. In America the best among us are outraged, and protest that officialdom has failed us. Unfortunately, we are officialdom, indirectly as that may be. Because we are mankind and mankind is all inclusive, organically and forever ­ forever having turned out to be rather shorter than we thought. If officialdom has failed us, it is because we have failed ourselves, and in many respects, our official governments provide us with a collective excuse not to act personally.

Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days, programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the “cheap oil fiesta” that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it’s now. Not by protesting ­ which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport — but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon — sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It’s the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you’ll be just one iPodless, and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you’re still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we’ve all been administered for past 40 years, I’ve got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on Jabba’s corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he’s alive and yank the feeding tube?

Scoffers abound, those lurching, undead cud chewers whose best lick is: “Aw, if things were really that bad somebody would be doing something about it.” Asked who that somebody might be, they usually come up with “the government.” Or science or the stupidest of all, the Free Market Solution. In other words, they haven’t the slightest fucking notion other than that there is some great governmental or commercial force that governs their destiny ­ one so vast that, like god, they don’t have to understand it, just swear by it and trust it, even if they don’t know exactly what the hell it is. What it is of course is good old fashioned pillage. But Even Alaric the Goth limited pillage to three days ­ with an extra day of rape thrown in if it had been a particularly good siege.

The gun and cheeseburger ethic

In Hopkins Village, one can find examples of everything that is both destroying the world (scarcely a villager here would not live the America lifestyle given half a chance) and good about the world (this morning I took a bath in the sea at dawn, then ate fresh papaya with one of the kids now supervising my pedicure.) Americans constitute 5% of the world’s population but consume at least 28% of the world’s resources. This is a primary contributor to the fact that the kids around me, Kirky, Lian, Ebony, Dennis and the rest have no future. Is that out fault? You and I are but two of 280 million Americans. Yet just because one’s contribution to global misery seems small, it does not mean exemption from responsibility. If I took part in the mass stoning of a child, would you be less guilty because the stone I threw was a smaller than the rest?

Compassion figures somewhere into all this. Or is supposed to anyway. Without it, we are lost. Being born America, I have as little as anyone else. Last week a young Garifuna woman in our village, a neighbor and friend, lost her baby son in a terrible truck crash. That night, with neighbors gathered round her in the dim light of her shack, her grief was beyond grief. Unable even walk, she lay on the bed issuing a low feral gurgling howl. And as I stood there packed in among the black faces I felt nothing, except a strong sense of looking at a National Geographic documentary. Exotic dark people mourning in a strange setting. That’s what American media does to human consciousness. Provides inhuman reference points in the brain/mind to replace experience and feeling. As a people who demonstrably show no guts and even less compassion about the rest of the world, we are in real trouble.

Comfortable as we have been in our plentitude, and confident as we have been in our providence—or perhaps because of these things—we Americans are now at the most critical and terrible moral and ethical juncture in our history. Do we care at all about anybody but ourselves? Is the reader, who has never met Ebony, Lian, Kirky or Dennis, responsible for accommodating any kind of future for them? Are we responsible that they be fed adequately full well knowing that the world has far too many babies anyway?

Not many Americans would eat a cheeseburger in front of a starving African child. But is it OK to eat the cheeseburger behind the child’s back, out of sight of the child? How far must we get from the starving child to make it OK? What if we worked very hard to buy that cheeseburger? Does hard work justify everything? What is our responsibility? Or are we just helpless in the face of such things?

That we look to other people, politicians, police, and supposed experts to solve our problems demonstrates that we have learned to be helpless — learned helplessness. None of us is helpless. The fact is that at any given moment in any given day, we can do something to help eliminate world misery and disparity. As any Third World priest can tell you, this is done mostly face to face, people helping people one at a time. But America’s strictly enforced and fearful class lines prevent us from even associating with those we can actively help. The single mother, the felon just released from prison, the Mexican with four kids who empties your office waste basket at night

Americans and people of the developed world are in an unusual position. We can help by doing nothing. Simply by sitting on our asses and not buying stuff, not driving to the Gap or the organic market, not turning on our televisions, which is the ultimate act of protest, since it both denies access to our minds by corporate interests, and denies media monoliths that all important sea of eyeballs. We can refuse to consume. By not consuming we can create our own economic cutbacks. Otherwise, economic cutbacks are not going to happen and endless war is the inevitable outcome. People will be killed so others survive, advanced nations with sophisticated weaponry will kill off the people from weaker nations so as to grab their land and resources. It happens. And if we let it get that far (well, much farther, since we’re already doing it) Americans will be in favor because we live here and not in a poor country. Evil as it sounds, we will have no choice because it is human to prefer to see others die and our own families survive. Morals never get in the way of ultimate survival. In the end, there is no other way, except universal legislation to push our bloated material standard of living back three generations. Clearly democracy cannot make this happen. Unless it is the democracy of the human heart, that internal thing that seeks justice.

Overcoming our worst instincts is hard enough. But we also have an array of genuine enemies lined up before us, many but not all of our own making. Being the toughest kid on the global block, we long ago chose a geo-strategic struggle for dwindling energy resources rather than conservation. Simply because we could. The richest, strongest among us, the global schoolyard bullies, the ones with the power and holding all our national wealth (they hold the wealth, we hold the debt) are seeing the same thing coming down the pike that we see, and are building their forts around the planetary neighborhood, consolidating as much wealth and power among as few people as possible.

Yet no one is much alarmed by this because they are incapable of being alarmed by anything except what the state message tells them to be alarmed about, mainly terrorism, which is a form of chickens coming home to roost. America is moreover a nation of state supervised zombies. This used to scare the piss out of me, but now they have so long been the national furniture, they are merely depressing. Especially considering that, despite the Republican historical rewrite of the era, we, meaning my generation, had a real crack at turning this thing around during the Sixties. And we failed. We failed ourselves, failed our children. And as if that were not enough, we failed the planet and humanity itself. Fucking up doesn’t come bigger than that. I spent at least a decade nailing the bling. The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t know any better. And I didn’t. But somehow that seems so lame.

I’m trying to atone. Yes, that is the right word here ­ atone — for my part in this unholy mess. I try to live on about $4,000 — $5,000 a year and come close to pulling it off. I share the rest with the world’s needy, almost never drive, refuse to own a cell phone or anything else that requires earth killing batteries other than the laptop that now provides my livelihood, yada yada you know the drill. Lest I sound holier than thou, let me confess to my continuing part in fucking up the earth’s food chain due to a love of pork. But on the whole, I’m not too ashamed these days of my role in the ongoing disaster called America, though there is more I could do. Almost weekly I seriously consider refusing to pay income taxes as an act of personal resistance. But I ain’t Joan Baez and this ain’t the Sixties, and I’m scared shitless of going it alone. (Work with me here people!) Besides that, my wife is unenthusiastic about the idea of her geezer playing dressups in the Big House. The relatives would talk.

Thus, I am moreover just waiting it out. Either I’ll watch my sorry assed species will walk right off that cliff, or I will croak first. Crappy set of choices. Meanwhile, on a good day I realize that I’ve still got horses to break, ball games to fix and beer to drink.

Stay strong.

“I wan too hunred an feefty dollah for my vote,” Marie declares as she chops up bananas to make tapo for dinner. I got feefty for my vote las’ time, but some people got two feefty.”

“Well you’re not gonna get any more than fifty, babe,” I tell her. “You gotta be more important to get two fifty for your vote. Did you bring anyone else to the polls?”

“No. Le’ dem get dey own money.”

“End of story then. If you’d brought along some other voters, you might have been up to two fifty by now”

“Den I no vote jus to spite dem.”

Belizean politics works that way. Next February 7 Belizeans will cast their ballots in the national election for candidate of either the liberal People’s United Party (PUP) or the conservative United Democratic Party (UDP). Between now then the People’s United Party will hand out a lot of cash and pay off a lot of voter’s outstanding bills. Once every five years it’s payday for the poor, who consider their ballot a net cash asset worth $50-100 Belizean dollars (USD$$25-50) or more. Here in Hopkins, fifty Belizean dollars pays the village utilities water bill for a year. Then too, voters here often feel that their “vote money” is likely to be all they’ll ever get from what they consider an unresponsive government. It’s hard to argue against this “one in the hand is worth two in the bush” reasoning if you live their lives. There’s certain pragmatism, even ironic fairness in vote bribery here. On the other hand, it’s a sorry system in which the actual voters are monetarily corrupted by the politicians. I’m more accustomed to the American system, where voters are corrupted morally and intellectually by media. In either case, free market politics is the handful of corruptive mud thrown into the fishbowl. We cannot see a damned thing but what is closest to out noses, usually put there by a politician.

It ain’t the Mayo Clinic, but the needles are clean

Indeed, the Belizean government is fucked up, misled, inefficient and corrupt. All things taken into accord however, in some respects Belizeans get back more than Americans get in return from their government, considering how much Americans work and pay (15 times more than Belizeans), beginning with health care. Belizeans at least have free health clinics in the cities and villages, and dirt cheap higher education, about USD$15 a credit hour. These systems may not be as glossy as their profiteering American equivalent, especially the public hospitals here. But it ain’t China, where hospitals do blood transfusions out of Pepsi bottles (according to American media, anyway) and it’s not rural India where poorer patients often sleep under the beds of more heeled patients. In any case Belize does not have 47 million people with no access to health care at all, and a not-so-good hospital beats no hospital. In fact, a not-so-good hospital beats even Johns Hopkins if Johns Hopkins won’t let you in because you cannot pay the freight.

Same goes for public schools. The school system is a wreck. But so is the American system. Both graduate kids who can’t find their own country on a map, the main difference being that Belizean kids don’t demonstrate it on YouTube. As an underdeveloped country, we are also way behind in school shootings, and sexual assaults, and have yet to install a metal detector anywhere, so far as I know, even in airports, much less schools. Hope remains of catching up: U.S. Bloods and Crips moved into Belize City last year and have been shooting up the joint.

As for the Belizean trade school and higher educational system, my wife and I are helping a Garifuna boy through one, and I cannot say it is inferior to ours, just less plushly equipped. In fact, I’d say on the average the Belizean kids work much harder once they are in college, simply because it’s harder to get there in the first place. Our guy in trade school over in Dangriga Town, James, is making perfect grades, while working uphill against hardships such as an arduous daily bus ride and seldom even having lunch money. In the end though, American or Belizean, it all depends on the young person’s grasp of reality. James grasps that studying computer science has removed him from the village streets where so many of his peers now languish, and probably will for the rest of their lives ­ or at least until the gringo resorts hire them as slave wage gardeners and maids. Meanwhile, his mom’s $50 vote bribe buys a fair slug of lunch supplies. Once every five years during national elections.

Buy mi vote, but don’t tief it, mon

The people’s democratic voice may be bought and sold at the voter level, but on the other hand, as a Garifuna friend Harry pointed out yesterday, “This is not the United States. It is impossible to “tief” (steal) an election here.” Which is sure enough true. Combined forces of international and party monitors intensely watch the utterly countable and recountable paper balloting process like frigate birds circling over a pile of fish guts. Voters may arrive at the polls for less than savory reasons, but the vote count, at least until Diebold gets into Belize, is secure as hell. Until then the only way to undermine the power of the vote is to buy it.

When Belize gained independence in 1981 optimism ran high; Election Day was a jubilant one of national pride. Vote bribery was rare if at all, and politics, though yeasty with its own intrigues, was fairly uncorrupted and diverse as hell. Crazy, yes, but straight up as the sick game of politics goes. Before the International Monetary Fund, the DEA, the foreign “investors,” foreign banks, cruise ship lines, and everybody else got Belize by the short hair, there was a leftist vitality not possible today. You had political activists declaring solidarity with the American Black Panthers, indigenous peoples of the planet, human rights and Cuba. Malcolm X and Che were not yet media trivialized into $10 posters and $19 tee shirts. Most of that days’ young Belizean radicals are now silver-haired PUP politicos buying votes today. But back in 1968, even current prime minister Said Musa (a Palestinian blooded Belizean native) was a young firebrand lawyer organizing protests against American imperialism, capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam War. Along with Assad Shoman, who would later become foreign minister, he struck blows for black nationalism in a wary, conservative, British colonial Belize. Which is why it is so disheartening today to hear that over seven million is missing from the passport receipts, which are directly under Mr. Musa.

Both of Belize’s main parties are crooked as a dog’s hind leg. The only difference is where they toss the swag they do not mismanage or steal. A billion dollars seems to be missing from the national kitty as the shadier elements of both parties in the government scam Belize’s oil, tourism and retirement/leisure condo development bucks. (To give some idea of scale, a billion dollars would every household in this tiny country $100 a day for over 140 years.) The PUP party tosses more money to the people, recently instituting a social security program worth about USD$40 a month, and most of all, schools. When it comes to throwing money at the nation’s education problems, PUP gets no better results than the U.S. Democrats. After building 1,100 classrooms and improving teacher training, and funding college education for teachers, the country’s student failure rate has jumped to an all time high — 65%. The dropout rate keeps climbing. The conservative UDP, which resists money for education doesn’t miss the opportunity to say “I told you so.” Meanwhile, word is the UDP is coming up with a No Child Left Behind clone. Left behind whom? Where are these public school children who are ahead?

As with the U.S. Democratic Party, PUP is the party of immigrants, and presently that party is rushing to naturalize as many Latin migrants as possible so they can vote PUP. Among the shit storm of problems involved here is that the HIV rate is high among these immigrants, many of whom are single young men of migrant labor. They constitute an increasing strain on the nation’s rickety health care system, which is fighting, rather successfully so far, to stave off a full blown epidemic. Many also feel the immigrants take away too many Belizean jobs. Moreover, immigration issues stew the same as in America, and like America, it’s politics as usual, but with a few different twists.

One twist is that Belize has some fighting, if partisan, newspapers such as America or Great Britain has not seen in at least 60 years, if then. The newspapers, however partisan, are loaded with the voices of common citizens, not made up of quotes from powerful officialdom like U.S. papers. Whatever can be said about the lack of libel laws here, it enables citizens to name the bastards out loud. And they do. Sadly though, little comes of it unless some big dog in the government wants it to. But the bastards have not yet worn all of the people down.

Whoa hoss, this just in! Marie’s shot at that $250 just got better. Hugo Chavez has dumped $10 million into the PUP government, ostensibly for development, but much of which is being passed out to voters as I write this. That’s a lotta lunch money and water bills. When choosing between such political bullies, best to go with the one who gives you lunch money instead of beating you up and taking it. Go Hugo!

Not being the majority party at the moment, the UDP cannot get its hands into the coffers deep enough to spread around the geet even if it wanted to (nor is Uncle Hugo likely to open his wallet for them in an act of solidarity with their hard liner capitalism). Which makes them somewhat less corrupt for the moment than PUP. This makes some poor voters see them as being more honest. Many poor people vote the same way working class Americans vote Republican, and see the UDP as a force for stability, evidently, like their North American counterparts, mistaking meanness and transference of wealth for stability. The bad news here is that much of the fiscal talent and administrative skill rests in the UDP, a party in which, in violation of Belizean law, every elected member flat out refuses to declare his or her assets and business connections and gets away with it­ now that’s solidarity.)

In any case, the UDP is counting on high powered U.S. style media paid for by the Bush administration to do the job on February 7. All TV and radio are owned by the parties or party interests, and while biased, between the two camps you get the real dirt on everybody if you can sift it. Nearly all electronic media here is owned by the parties or their associate interests. Thus the UDP’s Channel 7 mouthpiece has been showing news footage of voters lined up at PUP representative’s offices to get their vote money. Strangely, they do not show the nationwide burst of road improvements, free televisions, deeds and even a few trucks that get distributed. In all likelihood, if they showed the free refrigerators, the PUP lines would stretch from here to the Mexican border.

The news footage of the vote bribe lines flickers on the TV screen at Kibby’s Cool Spot (taverns are “cool spots” here) where I am sucking down Beliken Stout with a small group of older Garifuna plus a few mixed race Creoles and Mayans ­ Belizeans all. Some for damned sure are paying for drinks with vote money, given that they said so. Yet they are incensed at the vote bribery the lines shown on the screen. The Belizean TV anchor person looks piously concerned as she delivers her script. Now call it a cultural bias if you want, but I have a hard time taking seriously black women with brightly bleached and straightened blonde hair cut like Katie Couric and wearing heels in these soft sandy palmetto scrub lands. But it seems to work for Belizeans. Anyway, the drinkers are indignant about the news of such widespread vote bribery. Am I missing something here?

“Huh? You sell your votes, right?” I ask.

“Jah.”

“Then why is it so bad they do?”

They just laugh knowingly.

“So are you going to vote PUP?”

“Jah.”

“Why?”

“Because dey paid de moneh for my vote.”

Thus followed an absolutely serious discussion regarding how it is every person’s patriotic obligation to vote, for the sake of the nation and our village. “In wi hans de fuchah.” Something like that. Caribbean and Creole syntax comes hard for me. Do these people know something I don’t know? Do they care to know anything at all, at least in the way I think I know things?’ Obviously not.

Outside the open doorway of Kibby’s, silhouetted against the glaring subtropical light, three Garifuna girls float by, tall and crane like, a mirage of brilliant headscarves and parasols, all Giachometti elbows and necks, seemingly without feet. They nod and bob, as if in suspension over the deep purple black spots that are their noon shadows. The oldest cannot be more than 18, and already they are as inscrutably African as the Mother Continent herself.

From Malcolm X to MasterCard

Looking back on earlier visits to Belize, I think it’s safe to say there was a time here when a common man’s vote directly affected national policy, what there was of it, and directed the nation’s finances, what little there were. Perhaps in America too. Almost nobody believes that today. Not in Belize or America. Oh sure, “national progress” has been made here, roads are sort of better, folks are healthier, there are more “jobs.” The people are swimming in knockoff symbols of affluence, Chinese made duds, styrene plastic washing machines that fly apart after a couple of months, crappy cell phones that sort of work and. In fact, for most Belizean citizens, everything is “sort of.” There is a sort of middle class emerging, based mostly on the Chinese bling and sort of usurious home loans. But the majority of citizens are poorer today in real quality of life terms. Most of the housing stock, especially in Belize City, consists of the rotting structures of the British slave era. Bank credit cards, hawked night and day in the media, are causing people to lose the free land granted to them as citizens of Belize ­ particularly if it has beachfront. The kids are getting dumber, quick payday loan offices are springing up everywhere, and even with gas now at $12 a gallon, more people are driving. We are all Americans now.

In Belize or in the U.S., the business of local and state politics is the business of turning virgins into whores. The business of national politics is polishing up whores to look like virgins. Of course some whores are nicer than others, but in the high stakes back room poker game of power politics one does not get to play by being nice. One comes to the table with a lot of dough, a good cover story and a knife stashed in the boot. And even if you win, the really big guys running the game still own the country where it is being played. In Belize it’s the shadow governments such as land development, tourism and drug trafficking. In the U.S. it’s the financial corporations, Big Pharma, the war making industries, energy companies, etc, who don’t even have to do the shadow government act; they run the joint openly and if you don’t like it and refuse to pay taxes to support them, well, they are in the privatized prison business too, buddy! Hence, while a guy like Obama, who presumably does not take corporate campaign dough, may win, you’ll never hear him call for the complete dismantling of the rapacious big health care or financial corporations, or big media corporations who own our consciousness and awareness of our nation and the world, and upon which he must ultimately depend to gain access to the public at all. In America every player has some smaller player by the balls under the table. In Belize they just divvy the money up without even dealing the cards.

“In America, there is food to eat,
No more runnin’ through the jungle scuffin’ up your feet
— Randy Newman, Sail Away

Belizeans love the hell out of Obama, mostly because he is black, or somewhat so. When I remind them that nearly all their own politicians are black, they are not impressed. Poor Belizeans follow the U.S. presidential race more as entertainment than anything else. And so as long as Obama can buy TV ads and deliver greeting card platitudes that have a sort of righteous sound, he has entertainment, emotional and dramatic value here, as well as to liberal couch taters up there in the Nembutal Republic. As for Hillary, entertaining she ain’t. (”A hard an’ sour wooman,” agree the Kibby’s drinkers, “like de green orange.”) Frankly, I’d like to see Clinton wear Lewinsky’s blue dress on American Idol and sing “A Man Ain’t Nothin’ But A Man” as a campaign ad, or maybe deliver Lady Macbeth’s “Out damned spot!” lines in an episode of American Housewives. But I suppose that’s asking too much, even from the rancid freak show of American politics.

As Lady Macbeth quipped, “Hell is a murky place.” Politics is even more so. The capability for any president to make big progressive changes has become nil in the U.S., and maybe here too, although the capability to fuck things up remains boundless — to wit, Sparky the Chimp. If all of the U.S. Congress cannot effect change because they are owned men, no candidate sucking down corn soup on the Iowa campaign trail is gonna either. And besides, America is dead broke and in hock up to her eyeballs. Even little changes in America country cost big money because there must be big profit in it for Big Corp or big dough to slosh around inside the gullet of big government bureaucracy. For instance, a Katrina victim reader of mine, who happens to be a cost accountant, tells me that it cost the U.S. government $38,000 NOT to get his family into one of those emergency FEMA trailer homes, hundreds of which are still sitting in storage areas unoccupied. He moved to Panama and swears the quality of life there is much cheaper and far better, and that despite inefficiencies and fixes, it is more bearable. Which is rather the way I feel about this tiny country.

I dunno. Come November ‘08, assuming I can find the stomach for it, I will vote. My choices are not even as good as in Belize, where the candidates are flesh and blood people, not holographic media illusions. In November I can cast a vote for the manufactured candidate of my manufactured choice, vote Democratic as they vote PUP, on the grounds that at least some of the national swag will land in poor people’s laps, after it passes through the innards of bureaucratic waste, the fraud of government contractors and privatization. I can write-in vote my conscience as I have traditionally done, which would necessarily mean Kucinich. That’s assuming I don’t get cut from the voter list through fraudulent voter caging tactics (not too likely, since I am white and few felons are likely to be named Bageant). I’ll be punching a touch screen voting machine with no accountability because no recount possible. And my vote will legally be reduced a set of digits that instantly become the undisclosed intellectual property of Diebold.

Neither a Ron Paul, nor a McCain nor a Huckabee nor Obama or anybody else going to blow the trumpet and have the walls of Jericho’s corporate gulag/surveillance state fall down. They’ll fall down as the walls of empires always do, when the rot inside them becomes too great, when it is stretched too thin and runs its course. Until then, if a single righteous candidate ever does make it through the bullshit to get close enough to throw a Molotov cocktail over the walls of power, I’ll light the goddamned wick. But maybe it’s the sub-tropical heat. Maybe it’s the distance from the fray. But right now, when it comes to voting, I’d take five hundred for my vote and head back to Kibby’s Cool Spot.

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

– Thomas Manthus, 1798

As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I’d guess that it was the lack of water that finally got ‘em.

But the most interesting thing in retrospect — if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting — is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper’s grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.

Now you’d think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, “Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off.” Never mind that Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99% of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism.

Lovelock also convincingly argued that, due the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles.

As to be expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: “This guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types,” both of which number among my favorite kinds of people.

Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize about the earth’s condition, and those scientists who did not require computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the most challenging of times in human history, “challenging” being a polite term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.

But not much later, in light of the brief span Homo sapiens hath shat, frolicked, killed and exceeded their MasterCard limits upon the earth, which is less than a second in geological time. Already we are on the way out because we did not have the common sense of lizards, which lasted tens of millions of years longer without so much as a calculator, much less computerized eco models.

A bunch of DNA molecules gave us this aberrant evolution of brain and consciousness that enabled us to dominate everything else and get into the totally fucked situation in which we now find ourselves. The monkey got so smart he took over everything, ate most of it, drove over the rest, then stuck the roadkill on its own dick as a nuclear warhead, and after having threatened what was left around him, set out to destroy even that small remaining scrap of his ruined earthly turf. Is this God’s cruelest joke?

Global Warming as Mange Medicine

If mankind were discovered on a dog’s hide the owner would give the dog a mange dip. Or if the earth were a Petri dish, we would be called pathology. Problem is though, mama earth tends to shed pathogens off her skin, which for us pathogens, is the ultimate catastrophe.

When forced to look at catastrophe on this order of magnitude, we either go numb in shock or look in delusion to something bigger, or at least something with more grandeur than Mother Nature flushing humanity down the toilet. Otherwise, one must accept the both ugly and the weirdly beautiful prospect of oblivion. Meanwhile, we begin too late to “make better choices.” Grim choices that do nothing but postpone the inevitable, which are called better ones and sold to us to make ourselves feel better about our toxicity. Burn corn in your gas tank. Go green, with the help of Monsanto. But not many can be concerned even with the matter of better choices. Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its entirety. The tadpole cannot conceive of the banks of the pond, much less the wooded watershed that feeds it. But old frogs glimpse of it.

Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice — the moral one. Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted to rationality and embrace the spirit. Rationality simply turns back on itself like a mobius strip. Too much thinking, too much cleverness on the monkey’s part leads it to believe it can come up with rational solutions for what ration itself hath wrought.

All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot fix what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the ruination slightly more bearable. Species gluttony is nearly over and we’ve eaten the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature (though a case might be made for stupidity) but because the existence of consciousness necessarily implies each of us as its individual center, the individual point of all experience and thus all knowing. The accumulated personal and collective wounds fester and become fatal because there is no way to inform the world that we must surrender our assumptions, even if we wanted to. Which we do not because assumptions are the unseen cultural glue, the DNA of civilization. If we did so, the crash would be immediate.

So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has always worked — empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away thorough insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and political parties and pretend the whole of American life is not a disconnect. Hell, all of Western culture has become a disconnect. Somebody needs to tell the Europeans too; progressive Americans give them entirely too much credit for the small positive variation in their cultures and ours. We both get away with it only so long as the oil and the entertainment last.

The front page of today’s newspaper tells me that 41 million motorists will gas up and hit the road today, July 3rd. Another five million will sip drinks and read magazines while zipping through the stratosphere in 747s that burn the day’s oxygen production of a 44,000 acre rainforest in the first five minutes of flight just getting off the ground and gaining altitude, adding to the more than 110 million annual tons of atmosphere-altering chemtrail gasses, some of which will remain to hold heat in the upper atmosphere for almost 100 years.

Below it all are the spreading pox like blotches of economic and ecological ruins of dead North American towns and city cores, such as downtown Gary Indiana, Camden, Newark, Detroit . . . all those places we secretly accept as being hellish because, well, that’s just what happens when “blacks take over,” isn’t it? Has anyone seen downtown Detroit lately? Of course not. No one goes there any more. Miles of cracked pavement, weeds and abandoned buildings that look like de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Hell, for all practical purposes it is uninhabited, though a scattering of drug addicts, alcoholics and homeless insane people wander in the shadows of vacant rotting skyscrapers where water drips and vines crawl through the lobbies, including the Ford Motor Company’s stainless steel former headquarters. (See the works of Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara.) It is the first glimpse of a very near future, right here and now for all to see.

The hearts of even our most avowedly thriving cities are just dead, reduced to nothing more than designated spending zones, collections of bars and banks and overpriced eateries lodged at the center of a massive tangle of overpasses and freeways designed for a nation of soft people hurtling themselves through the suburbs in petroleum powered exoskeletons in search of fried chicken, or into the city for the lonely monetized experience called urban nightlife. Which is no life at all, but rather posturing in lifelike poses amid simple drunkenness and engorgement.

We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one we have known. Is it not true that our entire understanding of courage as we know it is about braving some unknown? About making the socially unaccepted and dangerous choice? Stepping forward in the face of the wars and evil mechanics of our own particular time?

Empire and its inevitable permanent state of warfare flourishes not because evil men are at the helm, but because the men at the helm are even weaker and more in denial than we are. (Look at Dick Cheney. The guy is a nervous wreck wrapped in arrogance and denial.) And so their uninformed and crude confidence is assuring to both them and us. We elect the worst among ourselves in increasing avoidance of ourselves and they are validated by our endorsement. Evil men seeking empire did not make us or the world this way. We made their existence possible through our denial, love of ease and non accountability.

The most dangerous question in the world

Yet, I dare say that comfort is not the most important thing in most American lives. It is just the only thing we are offered in exchange for our toil and the pain of ordinary existence in such an age. Consequently, it is all we know. Meaningless work, then meaningless comfort and distraction in the too-few hours between sleep and labor. But we settled for that and continue to do so. The day will never come when we stand around the office water cooler and ask one another: “Why in the hell are we even here today?” It’s the most dangerous question in America and the Western world.

Some few of us are in a hellish limbo, simply waiting for total collapse because it is easier to rebuild from nothing than to change billions of minds not even remotely concerned with the looming catastrophe. A minority of the world, the six percent called America, suffers the mass self-delusion of endless plentitude. A much larger portion is less concerned with the moral aspects of consumption because they are brutally engaged in trying to find enough to eat and a drink of clean water. So plentitude on any terms looks damned good. Escape to America because those fuckers over there don’t seem to be suffering at all.

Manifesto of the Damned

I thank the stars for younger men, writers such as Derrick Jensen and Charles Eisenstein. They say what we cannot yet say to ourselves and what the media will never say because media survives by the corporate numbers game. Consequently, the iron rules of being allowed to communicate with significant numbers of people within our empire tend to call for glibness, fake optimism, and the wide net of inclusion of even the silliest sorts of people. Fuck only knows I’ve participated in the sham over the years. But the truth is never politically or socially correct.

What’s left of my own aging hippie optimism dies hard. And as an older guy who has seen both interior and external horror in this life, I often assure those who will deal with this world after I am worm chow that “to have seen a specter is not everything.” I’ve often repeated this theme because it is important to know that many more specters lie ahead of the next generation, the survivors of which will be the new “brave happy few,” links in the chain of reason tempered with art. No one yet knows with absolute certainty the outcome of our terrible common plunge toward truth. But even in the worst of times, there is glory in the sheer electricity of life, the expression of its juiciness, those moments when the eternal fecundity of the flesh struts by in a tight skirt, or perhaps sporting the perfect unshaven jaw, offering everything and nothing. Life is never completely joyless.

Younger men and women will live to rule or rule the day. So seize it for god sake! And listen to the cellular wisdom of the flesh. I did and do and am damned glad of it. Despite what a police court Jehovah, Yahweh or Allah may have told us, the only holy thing existent is this the flesh in which we now walk. It leads us toward both good and evil, but it leads, and most probably will bleed if we are on the right path. Yet, what could be better than a meaningful life during meaningless times? Which is everything, whether we be artistic, queer, altruistic, an unheralded ox in the fields of labor . . . or one of the invisible ones out there with a stone cold determination to kill the supposedly deathless machinery in which we are expected to supplicate daily and call that a life.

I am not a wise man, but I dare say that’s about all you can hope for. A splash of small glory, or perhaps even a canteen filled with meaningfulness in the desert. It is no small thing.

So here we are. You and me. Let us hang all our laundry out to dry in this tiny corner of cyberspace. I think it is entirely possible that we can be honest cybernetic bards in an unpromising age, possibly even noble amid the ruins.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation.

— Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales.

— Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out with heated pliers than go with my wife to an allegedly cultural event, which in our still quite Southern town of Winchester, Virginia, usually means attending yet another local history or genealogy lecture. And I’d rather have the late Uday Hussein personally administer the ball shockers to me than attend one of our town’s many commercial events such as First Night, First Friday, or any “celebration of” (pick your own noun), such as Winchester’s spring festival of the apple blossom, downtown days, historic main street or any of the other thinly masked events which I call “Chamber of Commerce coordinated purchasing opportunities.”

But when my wife Barb pointed out, rather firmly I thought, that main street Winchester’s “First Friday” celebration was tonight, and given that I have not been outside this house for most of the month since returning from my shack in Central America, I knew that I’d better show a bit of enthusiasm.

And so I find myself standing here holding one of those ubiquitous caterer’s plastic wine goblets in the middle of a boutique whose theme or purpose, as near as I can tell, is cool looking weathered outdoor stuff brought indoors, then matched up with expensive new china and linens. Immediately, that high whine of hysteria in the back of my head starts its klaxton: Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! Ooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeee…. Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! I call it the “Dead Man Shopping” siren. Or “Rod Serling’s Lost Potpourri Zone.”

On the face of it, First Friday, which is “celebrated” in thousands of American downtowns on the first Friday in June each year, seems mainly an opportunity for merchants to give away wine and cheese and crab salad cracker spread in large amounts. Almost none of the attending crowd purchases. And when they do it seems to be one of those reflexive small token purchases one sees only in America: as in, “I am occupying space and breathing inside a retail establishment and the owner greeted me, so I must buy something. Especially since I ate a piece of his cheese.”

If First Friday is purely a cheese giveaway, they might do well to emulate our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, who let a 1,400 pound block of cheese age in the hallway of the white house for two years. Then in 1837 the President, on his way out of office, invited the public to come and eat it. It was gone in two hours. But the stench in the White House lasted well into the following presidency of Martin van Buren in much the same way our current president has crapped upon the carpet of American history for the next president to clean up. Jackson knew he had caused the oncoming economic crash through over extension of what we would now call sub-prime credit, leaving Van Buren to campaign on a platform of “Everybody gets a helluva lot less from here on out, so get used to it.” Not an enviable campaign position, to be sure. But at least Van Buren stood against the idea of allowing Texas to become a state, which, if he had been successful, might have saved us all much subsequent political grief. Earth to Bageant: Snap out of it! Someone is talking to you.

And indeed someone is. A well dressed woman, one of our many Yankee transplants, stands nearby gabbing about why she chose a certain artificial condo development called “Creekside Village,” a development more or less embedded in a shopping center at the edge of town, as opposed to others as far as a mile from a mall. What more could a person ask for in life than to be within walking distance of Jos. A. Bank, and Ann Taylor? (Banning the local atmospheric release of the 328,000 pounds of toxins annually by two local factories would be nice. But hell, you cannot have everything in this life)

Creekside is certainly the best looking of our developments and even has a few trees left standing. And it’s far from the crumbling old malls of the ‘70s where immigrants and white trash shop. No Salvadorians or Guatemalans (who are rumored to keep chickens in wire cages under their kitchen sinks) out her way. Sure, it sits in the middle of a permanent traffic jam, but you can actually walk to the mall! Now to my Luddite mind the trick would be escaping FROM the mall, but these things are a matter of perspective.

I supposed there is still a creek at Creekside Village somewhere. One wandered along there when I was a kid, though I can see no sign today of what I would actually call a rippling creek in the dragonfly, tadpole and darting minnows sense of the word — although that open concrete storm drain alongside the pavement may well be it. Anyway, Mall Locked Village would have been too obviously accurate a name, so the pretense that a creek once filled with crawdads is still there was probably a better choice. I cannot help though, but remember the old wetland where the red winged blackbirds perched on the cattails and sumac branches, piercing the muggy stillness of summer, issuing their crystalline cry before lifting off to nudge the sky with their bold red shoulders.

Cattle Mutilations on Main St.

On our main street, Loudoun Street, there was once a J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, hardware stores and movie theaters. Its sidewalks were clogged with working class shoppers, especially on weekends when folks came into town from the outlying counties to buy shoes for the kids, groceries and perhaps a secret bottle at the liquor store. That was when J.J. Newberry’s and Woolworth were considered massive because they had six aisles. But with America’s main streets retailers now left desanguinated — rather like those strange cattle mutilations of New Mexico — by the big box stores and suburban malls, the buildings on Loudoun Street are broken down into small boutique spaces selling “handcrafted” whatnots, small “galleries” of every sort imaginable, antiquish shops, the obligatory Starbucks knockoff, pub-like drinking establishments with dark paneling, and a few high end (for Winchester anyway) restaurants with iron tables and chairs under umbrellas out front. But on any given day the street is nearly empty, as if there has been a permanent bomb threat announced for the downtown area. Boutique business owners sit waiting to pounce on out-of-towners, mostly summer tourists visiting the surrounding civil war battlefields. After Labor Day, they look for an advertising connection between Chinese made desk organizer and Thanksgiving, the day after which they put up Christmas signage and begin the long grim march toward holiday sales on a street where gross sales have been in decline for years.

The first in our state of Virginia, the Loudon Street pedestrian mall, and hence the First Friday event, centers around an 1840 high columned courthouse, complete with Confederate statue in front, gun in hand and bronze eyes eternally vigilant for the next attack from up north. Loudoun Street is named for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun a Scottish nobleman and supposed military leader who managed to lose his entire regiment during the Jacobite Rising of 1745. As punishment, Loudoun was sent to the American colonies as Commander-in-Chief, where he could do less harm. However, he managed to do so, losing the frontier to the French and Indians, for which he was promoted and sent to Spain. Shortly afterward, a local land speculator and small fry militia officer named George Washington — who quite understood the value of property protection — built the largest earthen fort of the French and Indian war, now reduced to a hill overlooking our First Friday celebration. In fact, the house from which I write this is located on what was once the fort’s parade ground. If real estate values and American history had anything to do with one another, the For Sale sign would not still be sticking up in my front yard lo these many months.

Strange as it may sound to some, there have been moments when our main street pedestrian mall has brought tears to my eyes. My childhood lives still somewhere between it dank old alleys and its refurbished colonial buildings, and haunts the shadowed side streets as that one of those ancestral ghosts old men are so hesitant to let go of. One of my direct ancestors opened a leather smith’s shop in 1781 on this three-block stretch that still constitutes most of our main street commercial activity. Having seen the letters and optimistic advertisements of John William Bageant, Revolutionary war veteran and former indentured apprentice turned saddle and glove maker, it saddens this crusty old heart to see that many, if not most businesses here, are struggling to stay open while others are just the expensive hobbies of developers and doctors’ wives. And so walking Loudoun Street, with its numerous empty “commercial spaces” is a melancholy experience. Two hundred and twenty five years of the ordinary history of hopeful toiling freedom loving craftsmen, men with fingers bloodied by the cordwainer’s needle, the wheelwright and gunsmith’s toil vanished into the ether. All that cumulative effort reduced to trinketry and much very bad art — small watercolors of flowers that looked like they were done by a six-year-old, framed in gilt and on sale for $350, most of which were painted by hobbyists wives and daughters of the already rich. Ten generations of craft, toil and small town mercantilism reduced to brass wind chimes with colonial motifs made in the Confucian capitalist gulags of the new industrial China. In the new globalized America, having deep roots in a place sooner or later comes to be painful. In all likelihood, the guy in Dongguan, China who made the wind chimes weeps at the memory of some remembered village street too.

Gimme a Sixer of Bud Light and a Wedge of Pont-l’Evêque

Now that the artificial prosperity of the Clinton years is over, and the current administration has completed the looting of the national kitty, downtown boutiquers find themselves unable to sell local Southern specialties, such as those $550 framed Mort Kunstler prints of that most cold blooded of Civil War killers, Stonewall Jackson, who sucked on lemons while condemning his men into unimaginable slaughter. In the most famous of these prints Stonewall Jackson on bended knee asks for “Divine Guidance” while his men look on reverently. This famous (to Southerners at least) print is based on no actual event, but is a simulacrum — an image of an image of something that, in this case, never happened. It is derived from a fictional scene from the worst Civil War movie ever made, “Gods and Generals.” Jackson’s Civil War headquarters, now a museum restored with the help, of all people, Mary Tyler Moore, is located maybe 50 yards from my backyard fence. In the past few years Stonewall Jackson has become the number one heroic figure of a fundamentalist movement called “Christian Manliness,” there is an eerie reverence about the visitors pouring from the tour busses outside my window to visit this shrine with its Confederate flag and cannon out front, rather symbolically pointed at Winchester’s black neighborhood.

Anyway, except for a few business owners who’ve owned their downtown buildings for a long time, things are slowly and inexorably drifting down the crapper. The fact that we have a Dollar General store plunked down amid this his mélange of historical buildings and boutique businesses speaks volumes about our downtown economy. One very honest boutique merchant says, “After tonight I am closing down. I’m just plain tired of sitting around waiting for nothing.” Watching the public pretense of doing business in an economy rotting from the inside out is almost Kafkaesque in its interior grimness and exterior smiling and polishing of goods. Another downtowner tells me he/she hasn’t made a sale over $15 in two weeks, mostly art bookmarks, stationary and similar doodads.

It just could have to with the fact that this walking mall is surrounded on three sides by low wage semi-slum dwellers who, after coming home on a Friday dead tired from the loading docks out there at the pasta plant, would prefer to spend eight bucks on a 12-pack and chill out, rather than come down here to figure out what to do with a heated brie knife or taste a South African cab from a thimble-sided plastic cup. In the pedestrian mall’s 35-year existence, it has yet to occur to the town’s owning class leadership that, walking distance or not, it might be nice if the walkers were prosperous enough to actually buy something, and that it might also be nice if that something were actually useful.

In the end however, it’s about class distinctions that have to do with some imagined sense of taste — Care Bears and Doritos casseroles vs. the $500 latte/espresso maker and Chateau Larrivet-Haut-Brion. It’s about the tasteful and the unwashed, which here in the South somehow manage to pass one another at the juncture of kitschy Stonewall Jackson worship. Yet class distinctions have little to do with money and how much of it you make, whether it be 20K a year or 200K. The owning classes, and business and corporate classes will always accept your money, whether you willingly spend it a some mall, or have to be hypnotized into doing so through television, or they have to beat it out of your ass when push comes to shove. And it matters not one fritter the color of your skin or whether you are a Mexican laborer getting a usurious payday loan, or the bimbo wife of a doctor shopping at Saks. Class is about power over others, both perceived and real. You can be whiter than the inside of one of Grandma’s biscuits and still be a caste untouchable and cultural nigger. For example . . .

Are These Wind Chimes Biblically Correct Ma’am?

Sitting on a wicker bench outside a gallery I watch a 50-ish guy with a whitewall haircut, who probably drifted downtown from the lower working class neighborhood three blocks over. He is a fundamentalist Christian and is discussing whether First Friday is a “Biblically sanctioned Christian holiday” to an uncomfortable lady with a beautiful Virginia Tidewater accent, a tight-for-fifty butt well presented by expensive trendy Capri pants; clearly she is the victim of too much exercise, healthy food and full medical coverage. Now Whitewall is not preaching to anyone, just doing what would pass for making conversation in his lower working class white Christian Virginian caste. He is probably not a hardcore Christian fundamentalist because if he were, he would not be down here where they are not only drinking alcohol, but giving the damned stuff away for free. Capri Pants is uncomfortable as hell just being near Mr. Whitewall and he can feel it and he can feel that there is a class wall between them four hundred feet high and made of kryptonite. One of them is a piece of shit and it ain’t her.

If Capri Pants had simply taken the man seriously as a human being, and maybe opened the discussion toward the difference between religious and secular celebrations, they might have actually had a conversation. One in which Mr. Whitewall — who I’d bet a bottle of good gin never graduated from high school — would have learned something he didn’t know and wouldn’t have minded learning it at all. Obviously he wasn’t there to argue with anyone, but just to see what this First Friday stuff was all about. So he remains in a white cultural ghetto three blocks away bounded by religion and ignorance. And she remains in a white cultural ghetto circumscribed by recreational boutique shopping, the severe capitalist indoctrination certified by her college degree, and the Oprah Book Club. You can be very damned white and middle class in this country and be living in a ghetto.

According to the US census, we’ve got 789 black people and 4,000 Hispanics living within walking distance of this Friday night purchasing opportunity. Not a one of them seems to be here this evening. (Although three large, out of town black men wearing Washington DC sports team gear huddle by iron post supporting mall’s antique clock, observing the scene from behind sunglasses. I’d kill to know what they are smiling and chuckling about). Yet the whiteness of First Friday is not — contrary to what an outside liberal observer might think — a racial thing. Race has been ever used and very effectively in America to hide class issues. And besides, the good merchants get mighty tolerant when a debit card or cash is exposed. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago I walked down to the pedestrian mall wearing wrinkled flannel pajama bottoms, house slippers and a beat up, sweat-stained fishing vest and sporting a week’s growth of beard — my basic ensemble when I am holed up writing. Old Southern men can be ornery for the sheer fuck of it, so I just got up from the keyboard and walked downtown to get a few things. As long as I was filling my shopping bag all I got were smiles (to my face at least.) If you are spending money in such an outfit, even smelling mildly of bourbon and B.O., you are merely eccentric. Had I been dressed the same and pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans, I’d have been told by the cops to move on, or maybe arrested for theft of and deadly possession of a shopping cart.

The Party That Just Won’t Die

Times may be thin for small retailers, but it was a good week for the grim reaper and the stock market (Why do they always seem to be holding hands in the financial news?). At least 123 Americans and fuck only knows how many Iraqis were killed this month defending the edges of the empire and the flow of oil and goods. And of course Darfur continues to sow the earth with skulls. Today a US warship started bombarding Somalia. Yet more skulls predicted there too. Also today the US, in a friendly act of cooperation with the Laotian government, busted ten men in California, “terrorist” members of Laos’ Hmong mountain tribe whose male members are being executed and whose women are systematically being transported from military base to military base and gang raped, as punishment for cooperating with American forces in the Vietnam War thirty 35 years ago. President Bush says we may be fighting in the Middle East for the next 50 years. And Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke assured the public that the US economy will rebound in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Meanwhile, here within the inner bastion of the free wheeling market capitalist economy, the party never ends. Every day we get something for nothing, by god! If it isn’t free cheese or free airline miles, or timeshare trial offers, then it’s a free service or free special event. I see in the Winchester Star that tomorrow offers yet another special event and service balled up into one: a “Privacy Day” sponsored by American Background Services. “Powerful in “data resource exchange” according to its corporate self-description, ABS is owned by the Control Risk Group or CRG, a global company that provides criminal histories, personal credit and driving records, and something called “U.S. Treasury enforcement” to anyone willing to pay. And tomorrow — oh joy of joys! — American Background is offering free shredding and destruction of personal or business information to anyone who delivers his or her own private records into the hands of CRG at a drop off point.

Something about that smells stronger than the most pungent cheese being spread on the retail communion wafers of First Friday. But after watching people pretending to do business with people pretending to be shopping, well, delivering your most private matters into the hands of people who are paid to spy on your personal life doesn’t surprise me one bit.

But even the little fish who voted for Bush are starting to squirm. My neighbor, Big Larry, who is usually ecstatic here at the beginning of baseball season, and never gives politics the slightest thought except on Election Day, is rather glum now and starting to grumble about the state of the republic. This time last year he was pulling down good dough “driving truck” for Toll Brothers, complaining about his ‘roids a bit, but was otherwise the same sort of more or less unquestioning and nonpolitical working guy one finds just about anywhere in America. Now his driving hours are half of what he was getting last year and look to get slimmer yet, even as unemployed carpenters and electricians, casualties of the collapsing housing construction bubble, come knocking at our doors looking for handyman work. How can it be that the newspapers say the economy is booming?

And so now, after the deepest sort of political meditation, Larry has concluded that “This Iraq War thing just might spell trouble for us in the long run.” Not, mind you, because of the war’s sheer bloody folly, but because “It has run up the price of concrete and plywood so much that people can’t afford to build houses anymore.” Some people will add two plus two and get five every time. So when it comes to Larry, it’s pretty easy to resist a discussion of the subprime mortgage rate implosion.

And it’s not only Big Larry, who actually made some good bucks these last few years, but a lot of working class grunts who never made any dough and never complain much at all — certainly not of the kind who are complaining about paying off their college loans (which is admittedly a banking racket) or about who got the nicest parking spot at their office campus complex. They do not complain about their troubles and risks in life, such things as getting a hand cut off in a bark chipping machine, or not having health care, or soul grinding shift work year after year with little opportunity to ever be promoted, much less become management.

Not that promotion and advancement doesn’t happen for working puds. The manager at one of our fast food franchise joints is nineteen years old, owns a sports car and feels pretty successful. The owner is a millionaire small businessman with a little political influence who issues his employees only one shirt per year. I know for a fact that he grew up taking stale cornbread and cold pinto beans to school in a molasses can lunch box. And wore his daddy’s shoes to school when his pop was sleeping off his nightly drunk. So I don’t fault they guy for having a tough view of the world.

On the other hand, sixty-six year-old Thelma has worked there three years and works solely to pay for her diabetic, COPD husband’s health care. She’d had three fifteen cent per hour raises in those three years, last time I talked to her. The kid, the owner and Thelma have remained hard right-wingers, though for different reasons, all of them having to do with American toughness.

In any case, they are doing their part for god and a free market economy, as are their relatives in the area’s 3 116th National Guard unit preparing for its third deployment in Iraq to defend our right to gobble Big Macs from the safety of our usury financed Ford Super Duty trucks to the accompaniment of quadraphonic pop country music.

But now even they are starting to edge around the topic saying things such as, “Well, I know we cain’t cut and run, but I dunno about this Iraq war thing. There’s lots of stuff right here in this country we could’ve used the money to fix.” And by that they mean paving more of the county connector roads so they could get to work faster — which is leads to more development out their way, higher taxes and even slower traffic, but they cannot make the connection. Thanks to the housing and unacknowledged economic bust, they’ll never get their wish. The rest of us liberals may be suffering from rage fatigue, but this is about as close as my people get to political dissent. Mumbling, and then backing off.

But they do know there are two political parties in America and tend to put all the blame for anything that goes wrong in a big way on one party. I’m pretty sure that attitudes extend into the voting booth. Here in Virginia there is evidence that a populist can reach them if he can get their attention. Jim Webb did it. He may be a little patriotic for most Yankee liberals, but at least a thin margin of folks down here because, even though he might be a military brat (and we’ve seen plenty of ’em being this close to the Pentagon), he at least went to Nam and knows how to sound like he’s caught a few catfish, even if he never held a pole or cut bait in his life. And wearing his son’s Iraq War army boots in a meeting with the president went a long way, believe me. It’s that Scots Irish warrior spirit thing. We don’t mourn our own killed in battle nearly so much as Yankees think and out own press describes — we’ve been in every war the republic ever fought and know that somebody you know is gonna die. But we do pay great homage to the symbols of the warrior spirit, be it a 300 year old Scottish dirk or a pair of desert combat boots worn by one of our own in the latest slaughter the royalty has managed instigate. “Bring’em on.” And we mean it.

We mean it berceuse we know life is struggle and that “Bring ’em on” is the cry and attitude of a true survivor. The rest is just politics and rich people. Now lordee knows I’m no political strategist. But I’ve been all over heartland America and I know that Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota and Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota ain’t all that different than Virginia when it comes to working people’s sentiments.

If the Westchester Country Club posing as the Democratic Party would get it into their heads that they could elect a smart man or woman who has actually changed a tire or gotten behind in a house payment, instead if the mocha rich boy or the woman who wants to prove she has more balls than any man, they could bring home a populist vote they don’t even know exists. But then, from the third hole at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club, you cannot see Thelma when she goes home and night and soaks her feet in hot Epson salts water. And you cannot see into the warrior hearts of a people ever kept blind by a hopeless class system, but would understand true populism if they were shown it just once in their lives.

Meanwhile, Hillary and Obama, Biden and McCain all shake the hands of pharmaceutical, Citibank, and energy lobbyists, totally unaware that Big Larry, who simply trusted that the government was being ran by better men than he, had his house go into foreclosure last week. The announcement was among an ever increasing number of others in big outlined boxes on the back page of the local paper.

No matter what liberals may think, it’s no crime to be dumb and unaware in this world. Otherwise most of this country would be in prison. So when I saw Big Larry mowing his lawn yesterday, probably for the last time, I just waved and pretended that everything was hunky dory. Both of us knew everybody in town saw that foreclosure bock ad on the back of the paper. We have come to watch for them of late, like the obits, to see if anyone we know has been axed by fate. But sometimes you show a working man respect by giving the A-OK sign — a sign that, bad as it may be now my brother, you’ll be back to fight again for the feudalistic delusions and promises America has ever offered to working class suckers like us, because there has never been any other choice. There have just been the good times and the bad times allowed us, according to the American financial syndicate’s needs at the time.

Sure, they may kick a lot of Republicans asses out of office next election. Big friggin deal! For my people, the same feudalist deal is on the table as ever: work hard, kill when you are told to, trust your betters, and everything will be all right. Plenty of highly politicized leftists and their meeker kin, the last hopeful Democrats, came up as hard as anyone I’ve described here. The Democratic Party definitely doesn’t want them showing up like bikers at a cocktail party and talking real populism. Because there ain’t no big money campaign contributions behind populism.

Look at it this way: Black America suffered lynchings, police dogs and fire bombings just to shit on the same toilet seats as white Americans like you and me, and ultimately waste their lives in front of computer monitors next to us on the same electronic plantation of the gulag global economy swallowing America and the rest of the world.

And so, still I ask (and who am I to ask anything?): Are there any progressives or leftists willing to come out here into the hinterlands and offer the first step. True populist hope? Spell it out in “see-spot-run” language? Talk about our bad teeth and why our elderly parents are rotting in pisshole nursing homes owned by ex-car dealers and attended by imported Asian physicians who barely speak English? Or the dynamics of hopelessness that drive the meth epidemic out here?

It will take an entire lifetime of commitment amid a crumbling world. And it will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of glory or acknowledgment or public reward. But it lies there before us, the first fearful and questioning stone on the pathway to the liberation of mankind.

True populist politics could give us a quarter turn in the right direction. Genuine socialism could put us on the approximate path to justice. Eco-politics cannot save us from the inevitable, but at lest it can teach us to deal with our limitations as a species upon this earth. But one begins the journey at the start if the path, not the promised land at its end.

Can we quit talking and start walking?

But it’s sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age, it’s surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban, self-important horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just around too many bland American “sluburbs” for too long before I skipped the country.

Old men see a lot of phantoms when they revisit the scenes of their youth. Philly is like that for me. I was stationed at the now defunct South Philly Naval Base in 1965. And it was in roaming that city during off-duty hours that I experienced my first intellectual awakening, or at least the first one that had other human participants. I hung out at places like the Artist’s Hut or the Guilded Cage off Rittenhouse Square, learned of the folk music and peace protest movements and heard poetry read live by real poets for the fist time. The people introducing me to those things had a strange similarity, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on. So one night during a very stoned conversation with Rachel, my newly acquired girlfriend, I asked just what the hell that similarity our circle of friends had was. “We’re all Jewish, silly!,” she replied. Until then, I’d thought Jews were some extinct people from the Bible. And so an intellectual life and scene was opened up for a country boy who was used to reading and thinking alone in a musty small town library, wondering if people like Marcuse and Genet were for real. But in 1965 America still offered my generation a world full of promise and growth. We drank cheap Chianti by candlelight, then stuck candles in the empty bottles and talked of Bertrand Russell and world peace and played Odetta and Charlie Parker records. And I got my first blowjob. Not in her student artist’s apartment, but under an alcove of Penn Center on a warm night in June. There was no telling just what might happen, even to a fundamentalist Christian raised redneck kid in 1965, in a sensual world so full of art, belief and promise.

Anyway, it is early April 2007 in Philly and I am copping a smoke in Philly’s Italian Market with 66-year-old Fredo “Freddy” Vento. Freddy, like about half the older men folk of the Italian Market, resembles Danny Aiello, but in work clothes. A butcher, Freddy sells everything from veal to “turkey parts” and whole skinned goats with the eyeballs still in the sockets. “The Latins like it that way and the tourists always stop to stare at ‘em,” he laughs as he spits the stub of his filterless Camel onto the sidewalk. We are talking about the fight game because in places like Philly and Kansas City you can still do that with no PC police to jump your ass. Philly is a real fight town. I’ve always liked boxing (though I watch the Latin American lightweights these days on Belizean TV, fighters with real moves, combinations and artfulness, none of the heavyweight tanks crashing together stuff) partly because I learned to like it from my dad, partly because it was the only athletic thing in the U.S. Navy I seemed to be good at — I’d watched a lot of combinations, footwork and moves with my dad, and practiced in the coal shed behind our rented dump in Winchester, Virginia. But also because it distills the most primal human struggle, skill under pressure, and sheer graveyard will. Boxing is life in the raw, and yeah, yeah, I know it causes brain damage. But so does nearly everything else I’ve enjoyed in my life, drugs being one, but divorce being the worst.

It’s never a good idea for a writer or reporter to open conversation with a serious question. So I bait Freddy for conversation with the most cliché question I can come up with.

“OK, who’s the best fighter to come out of Philly?”

“Well, no matta whatcha think of the guy, Sonny Liston was right up there, until he took that dive for the mob in the Clay rematch. Made a lotta mob bookies big dough. But Smokin’ Joe was the best this town ever saw. Frazier took on Clay three times, beat him in the first bout and woulda beat him a second time if they’da let the fight go on. Even Ali said Frazier fuckin’ near killed him in that fight, and Ali didn’t give nobody credit fer nothing. But now we got Chazz Witherspoon over in Sout’ Philly. So look out!”

The Ventos have been living upstairs in the row houses over their shops or pushing carts on Ninth Street since the turn of the last century, when Tony Palumbo first brought Italian immigrants to what was then the outskirts of a city of brotherly love, which much preferred Quakers to wops. Freddy still lives in a condo a few blocks from where he was raised and went to St. Paul’s school, and claims he has no beefs about the way America has treated him. He can remember when South Philly vocal recording groups practiced in the tile bathroom of the rec center for their appearances on American Bandstand, and even sang on one that never made Dick Clark’s cut. “We came outta St. Paul’s and went to work makin’ maybe $55 bucks a week. On Friday you paid your bills, and then took your girl out for a date. It was a good enough life. Nobody was complaining about not getting a contract.”

And today? “It’s just about the same except that it’s more fuckin’ expensive and I don’t get laid as much. But who does? I got two kids through college; I sold my house and moved into a condo. So what the hell?” Guys like Freddy don’t festoon the American marketplace with moral pieties about “ethical” capitalism and such crap. He says, “This country’s been good to my family.” He figures the war in Iraq is just a war in Iraq. “If they blew up Penn Center I’d ‘a felt the same way as New Yorkers.” He was all for the war until we started losing. Now he has his doubts. “We got Soddom Hoosane. So let’s just pull out and let ‘em kill each other off.”

He considers himself and his family among America’s hard working small businessmen who helped, and continue to help, build this country, and he is right about that part (but then, so did slaves and so do Mexican ditch diggers.) But he is also an important prop for the Republicans’ tax cuts for the rich and the elimination of the estate tax for wealthy elites. Freddy doesn’t want to see the government take away the family business for taxes after he dies. Which was never likely anyway because even if his meat business were worth a million bucks, which it ain’t, the tax would only have been on anything above that million and he would have 14 years to pay it off anyway. Ninety-eight percent of small businesses were exempt from inheritance taxes even before the tax was repealed, and you can guess who the non-exempt two percent were and still are. In fact, if I am reading the chart right, the two top brackets are now effectively eliminated from estate taxes. Freddy understands none of this; he just wants to pass the family business on and so, remains a staunch member of the Republican base on a “better safe than sorry” basis. The truth is that Freddy’s business is the same as it was when his grandfather was whacking up veal cutlets on the same street: modestly profitable and unstable as hell during many years. But pure Italian Catholic guts and survivability (and I’d guess no few under the table dealings) along with the DNA of the immigrant dream of owning one’s own business, keep vendors like Freddy getting up at 4am to work like dogs to keep the Italian pork roasts moving along Ninth Street on a cold morning such as this one.

Conservative as Freddy is though, he figures global warming is real: “Fish are expensive because they must be getting scarce,” and he’s “pretty sure it ain’t because we ate ‘em all. There’s a lotta fish in the ocean.” Then too, his daughter is a marine biologist. And on morality and capitalism, “Hey, you make money, you spend money. The big guys get first cut. What’s left you get a little piece of after the crooks are done counting. Same as ever. But there’s still plenty of oppatoonity for anybody who wants to work. Look at the Vietnamese and the Dominicans around here. They ain’t hurtin’ none.”

Brokedown Moon Over the Nelson Algren Hotel

After a cold day at the Ninth Street market, I called and asked one of the town’s literati to suggest an old hotel with some character. On her advice, I ended up at the Lowe’s, a gorgeously restored art deco period place — at $200 fucking dollars a night, plus $10 a day for a wireless connection. How much money do such people think writers make, for Christ sake? Anyway, it was too late to be probing Philly by cab for a different hotel. So, with the idea of knocking down a stiff belt before bedtime, I hit the lounge at Lowe’s, where a bunch of the Empire’s manicured Hugo Boss drones were buying $12 martinis and seducing perky blonde corporate bean counters on their expense accounts to the accompaniment of a fake jazz ensemble, whose every song sounded like Guantanamera, either speeded up or slowed down. Oh yes, now I remember why I left this country — unstomachable blind affluence.

Next day my luck changed. While freezing my cod off in Love Park trying to find a wireless connection on my laptop, I asked a Nation of Islam brother just where a poor writer might stay for under a hundred bucks, under fifty if possible, preferably close to downtown. He sends me to a hotel on Spruce Street, a mostly black place, a real Nelson Algren wet dream. Forty-five a night for the best room in the place, check out time is officially noon but as long as you don’t stay into the next night no one cares. And if you do, nobody will probably notice because they only clean the rooms after you’ve signed in and paid up front. A couple of old jazz men share a room here permanently; they played with Philly’s own Trane and have the record jackets and clippings to prove it. Hookers run in and out day and night. A big mama cooks pigs’ feet and red beans on a hot plate, and a sad-eyed fortyish white woman is stuffed into a crummy little room with her two kids, piles of blankets and toys and pizza boxes and a TV that actually works. She’s dressed nicely in that cheap way of a working class woman either looking for a job or trying to pass for middle class at some workplace with no idea of her story, which, whatever it is, can’t be very damned pretty. Then there is the gay couple living on the top floor jointly writing a romance novel, and whose wireless connection runs my laptop for free. Despite the crackheads screaming at each other outside on the street all night — I saw two of them kicking the living shit out of a guy just before I crapped out for the night, but he managed to get up and run before they finished the job — the hotel is completely safe inside, thanks to a 300-pound black dude in the lobby who keeps order, patrolling the halls all night with a baseball bat and a cell phone. Too bad there is no heat in my room.

So now it is 3:30 AM during my second night at the Algren, after more than a few drinks at the Pen and Pencil Club, Philly’s oldest and only real press club. The old school kind of club that’s open until 5am, where Danny, the P&P’s bartender, doesn’t get that concerned look when you knock back your ninth shot of vodka and your voice raises a dozen decibel points. “Hell,” he says, “if you’re still around at 4 am you’ll see everybody here turn into werewolves.” Nevertheless he has a guy stationed at the front door to see that you get a cab home if you need it, which I did. But until then I experienced more journalistic camaraderie than I’ve had since I was a reporter in the 1970s. Unfulfilling as our low carb, meatless media is today, there are plenty of real reporters and photogs, both old and young, who agree with you and me and the rest of the world about what is happening to America. They just can’t get the truth into print these days and the only reason they still have jobs at all is because of their unions. As in: “I shot all day, froze my nuts off and got some really good local stuff, just so my 30-something boss could dump it and buy a generic photo from the AP for fifteen hundred bucks!”

Which is exactly why I got out of the newspaper business — because of its phantom objectivity, the digitized and telephonic ghost coverage (almost no newspaper reporters get out of their desk chairs nowadays), all those cloned photos of real events digitized into empty holographic commodities, then sold to the public as the truth about society and the world. Is it any wonder the American public doesn’t have a fucking clue about reality? Given the sheer crushing density of the mass hallucination assaulting our brains twenty-four hours a day, we’re lucky we can even tie our own damned shoes in the morning.

But I did manage to do so, and when I checked out of the Algren I rode down the elevator with the guy who got the shit kicked out of him by the crackheads. He was dressed in what appeared to be a neatly pressed hotel doorman’s uniform, or maybe a chauffeur’s, and really didn’t look too bad, considering what I’d seen happen to him the night before. “How ya doing, my brother?” I asked. “Fine. Happy to be alive on this great day our Lord has given us!” And I’ll bet he was. But still, it ain’t no way to live in what is supposed to be the richest, safest country in the world, the one that Freddy says has plenty of opportunity for a guy willing to go to work every day.

Providence and Prostitutes

Now I look in the mirror and see myself for what I am in this declining age where the virtual passes for the vital and Oprah is the national arbiter of American literature and morality. I’m a fucked up old guy from a generation caught between the Beats and the hippies. So I over-romanticize the gritty side of life. But Algren is dead, Bukowski is dead, Kerouac didn’t hold up as real literature, and providence doesn’t smile on America or Philadelphia like it did in 1965 when a lonely hillbilly sailor was introduced to live, fire-breathing poets in Rittenhouse Square and shared cheap wine and Trotsky’s vision with an artistic Jewess on a June night. I never loved my country more than I did in those times of utter belief that change was possible, inevitable even.

And I still I love my country and the very soil presently beneath my feet that hold the bones of my Virginia ancestors, who came here believing in an agrarian based liberty that would eventually become my inheritance as artistic freedom.

But I’ll tell ya right now and I’ll tell you straight up. If I could get a divorce from this country I would. And I’ve tried. But an American will always be an American, even if he or she escapes what is proving to be our terrible undoing, learns to be an honest citizen of this crumbling world which we alone did not destroy, and even learns to care with all his heart for the rest of humanity, starting with our own people. It’s like loving the most cutthroat whore on the planet, one whose tits are bunker buster bombs and whose heart is in the Chase Manhattan bank vault. Her high crimes may have driven me to a foreign shore, but even from the grave I expect to be scanning God’s black canopy for the ghosts of dead poets and Jefferson’s dream of peaceful oat crops.