Seventy! I Can't Believe It

Happy Birthday to Me

I was born in St. Clare’s Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan on August 21,1939. It was a hot, back-to-work monday. Europe was a week away from war. On that sunday some poor devil named Frank Goesch died when a tree branch fell on the open top of the Fifth Avenue bus he was riding in. He was going as I was coming.

The snapshot above is dad and me on the roof circa 1940. I wonder what happened to that snazzy carriage?

I’ve seen amazing changes over my life. We used to have a phone that had to be plugged in all the time. Now I have a small one that I plug in only to charge the battery. And my car has an automatic transmission, meaning no clutch pedal. Society is also very different. Girls are a lot easier--or so younger men tell me. You can’t get Trommer’s Beer anymore. The Dodgers left town in 1957.
When I was born, the prevailing pols were:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the U.S.

Herbert Lehman, governor of New York
Robert F. Wagner, senior senator from New York
Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City
If those guys were around and trying today what they did 70 years ago, they would be slagged as whacko socialists or even Canadians. They initiated things like Social Security, minimum wages, the right to join unions, unemployment insurance, and public housing. Roosevelt’s “stimulus” packages gave us countless bridges, highways, rural electrification, flood control and irrigation projects, and the Astoria pool, where we used to dunk girls and snap towels at each other all summer long. Good thing we already have those assets, because they would never pass nowadays.

When I was 12, President Harry Truman, another weird lefty, was ticked because Americans were paying as much as $12 a day for hospital rooms. He called for the equivalent of a single payer health system, such as most Dems disavow 60 years later as being too radical. Truman failed, beaten by the same corporate crowd now making countless billions a year off $1,000 a day hospital rooms and health insurance so expensive it makes you sick.
We had an empire even then, but at least presidents gave us reasons for going to war. Obama is plunging us into Pakistan, a nation of 170 million people who are said to be particularly anti-American (i.e., disobedient), without even bothering to shill it. Our wars don’t need rationales anymore; just no-bid contracts.
I brood on such things because I was a red diaper baby. My parents were part of the radical upsurge in the 30’s and paid for it big time in the 50’s (but that’s a story too complicated to tell here). I lived in a world of pinko political palaver and picket line protest. It primed me for the 60’s, when America--or at least me--enjoyed its last radical upsurge.
Back then, folks called me an extremist because I wanted to change the world. Now, when I’m willing to settle for the norms of the People’s Republic of Eisenhower, they still call me an extremist. The country keeps moving to the right faster than I can adjust to it. It won’t be long before they’re branding Ronald Reagan a red.
Seventy years on, there are lots of great gizmos in the world. I love the jets that let me depart Bradley in the morning and gobble swell seafood at Swan’s in San Fran at lunch. I love the computer that gives me access to almost everything I want to know and just about everyone I want to trade info, ideas and jokes with. I like not having to shift gears in traffic.
On the down side is that my compatriots have become stupider and ever more self-destructive. Older generations have been saying that about younger ones since Socrates. Obvioulsy, they weren’t always right because, despite plagues, pestilences, wars and Rush Limbaugh, civilization has advanced.
But we seem to be in a regressive phase. We Americans locked onto the notion that money cures everything. That as opposed to the French view that a month's paid vacation at the seashore and good food work even better. The pelf panacea was arguable when we actually had moolah but it’s moronic now that we’re in hock. Lately, we’re trying to see if debt solves everything, but that’s an even dumber idea.
Being a lefty in a righty culture is a downer. My government disappears people of my ilk in countries in which it has "vital interests." Let's hope they don't get interested in my vitals. The worst is that we lefties seem to have lost the optimism that made the 60’s a gas. History helps me stay sane. If you keep track of it, it reminds you that despite the fact there’s nothing new under the sun, the world somehow gets better--if you’ve got a couple of centuries to spare.
On the sunny side, I’ve got a great family, a fascinating world to wander, and a good health plan. What's more, my finances are as un-American as my politics: I don’t owe a dime to anyone. I guess I’ll try to hang around as long as I can. Atheists like me don’t have much choice.

Don't Be Disillusioned

A Solution For the Dems' Quandary

Our two parties have different political styles. The
Reps start with combat and advance to conquest.
The Dems start with compromise and retreat to capitulation.

The worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party was to win the presidency, house and senate with big majorities. It's stripped them as naked as a Perdue chicken.
When they were out of power or had minimal majorities, the Dems could claim that they really wanted to do good things for ordinary Americans but couldn’t because they didn't have the votes. Alas, all they could do was reluctantly tag along while the Reps did good things for rich Americans.
Now, with Obama’s crumble on health care, his war-mongering and his reiteration of the Bush-Cheney brand of human rights, everyone can plainly see that he and the Dems are full of it. There’s no one they can blame stuff on but themselves. But of course, they’re not going to do that. The iron law of politics is that when you screw up, you blame everyone else and create distractions.
If the Obama-Dem nose dive continues, don’t be surprised to see war clouds gathering, either in the already well-bombed Middle East or in pristine Latin America, where Caracas, La Paz and Quito offer juicy targets. What red-blooded Dem or Rep wouldn’t salivate at the chance to pop the disobedient Hugo Chavez, grab all that oil, and, for a change, trash a country where beer and babes abound? We’d forget about health care and recession in a Manhattan minute.
If Dems don’t want to die of disillusionment, I recommend they vote Rep the next time around. With the GOP back in power, the Dems could go back to lying about how they’re really for the little guy but don’t have the juice to do anything but grovel before the likes of Chuck (“Am I dead yet?) Grassley and John (How’s my tan?) Boehner.

The Angst of the Anglos

No, You Can’t Have Your Country Back
From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until the post World War II era, these United States were ruled and largely owned by white Protestant males. The advertising of their accomplishments is ubiquitous and needs no further celebration here. Far less bruited is that they made a series of historically disastrous decisions, the results of which their crestfallen progeny cannot bear.
They imported millions of Africans to toil as slave labor. They brought in tens of millions from other lands to keep down the price of wage labor. They grabbed a great chunk of Mexico and became the overseers of Latin America. They created a global empire whose upkeep and expansion requires not only constant wars but the inhaust of millions of the empire’s subjects. And, in the modern era, they were among those chiefly responsible for shifting our economy from production to peculation, erasing millions of jobs and plunging the nation into insolvency.
Taken together, these historic decisions turned Anglo-Saxon Protestants into a fading and falling minority in the country they once regarded as theirs alone. Because of the actions of the leaders they had freely chosen, they found themselves on the outside looking in at an increasingly diverse and money-centered America where globalism rather than patriotism is the password and where, unimaginably, the dread sin of miscegenation is rewarded by the accession of Barack Obama to the White House.
These ‘real Americans’ see themselves retreating while those with darker skins and funny foreign names are advancing. They are made heartsick and apoplectic at the sight of former thralls in positions of power, hometown storefronts with unreadable signs and alien wares, and a mass culture that mocks their piety and provincialism.
It matters not that their forebears had devised and that they had acceded in their own downfall. Even if it's self-induced, the pain is unbearable. To relieve it, WASPs have become the base of the fundamentalist right, joining together to demand that their country be taken back from the blacks, beaners, ragheads and liberals and returned to them.
But no matter how many town meetings they bust up, how many guns they store up, how many Palins they put up, they’re pissing in the wind. Even the completion of the corporate fascism whose interest they serve would not make their noxious nostalgia real nor restore their
superiority. Too much has changed.
No puede ser hecho.

Beaching and Moaning

Sour Grapes from the Vineyard

West Tisbury, MA

Having written some less than flattering things about our new president’s policies, I doubt I’ll draw an invite to his dilatory domicile down the road at Blue Heron Farm or to any of the soirees the local swells are eventing up for the Obamas. Well, that’s no peel off my sunburn. Not to be blase, but been there and done that. I was also snubbed by the Clintons back in the 90’s when they helped to transform Martha’s Vineyard from a quiet glen for the arrived to a gaudy glam for the arrivistes.
One of the nicer things about this island--introduced to me 35 years ago by my ever loving--is that it was an offshore holdout from the pelf pandemic. There were always big bucks down the dirt roads and along the private beaches, but they dressed themselves in old jeans, got around in battered pick-ups and made island-wise small talk with the locals while waiting patiently in line at Alley’s to pay for their morning Times and Wall Street Journal.
Such inconspicuousness has become far less conspicuous. Nowadays, like my former chum Bobby Zimmerman sang, money doesn’t talk, it screams. Cruise Main Street in Edgartown and you will no longer be able to see the pretty preppies at their window shopping because the roofs of the parked Escalades and Navigators rise nearly to the second stories of the cutesy boutiques that were once grocery and hardware stores.
Blue Heron Farm, on the border of Chilmark and West Tisbury, used to be actually agricultural. Then some moneyed folks bought it, yuppified it, and died in a plane crash. It’s had several developers since and some faceless corp now rents it in the $50,000 a week (yeah, week) range. It is said to be adorned with every luxury known to Joan Rivers--but in a proper New Englandy rustic mode, to be sure.
Sitting on a Vineyard porch and watching a presidential vacation extravaganza is a sure way to disabuse any sentient human of the lies we Americans like to tell ourselves about ourselves. Like the one about us being down-home, small d democratic folks with a government that cares. With our close-up seats, we note that to travel even a short distance from Washington for a short time, our leader requires a vast pomposity of toadies and toughs kissing his ass and kicking ours. It makes Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra resemble Rose the scullery maid in Upstairs Downstairs.
If Clinton’s visits to the Vineyard are any indication, the White House will be renting dozens of houses and scores of hotel rooms at top dollar. The skies will darken with the squadrons of C-130s and exec jets flying in the limos, the monstrous black Jimmies, the com gear and all the other ruck required by the royalists.
Air space will be restricted, boats diverted, roads blocked. People living or working in “sensitive” spots will be prevented from going about their daily business. For the duration, cops of various stripe will be free to exercise at least as much arbitrary power as they did in Henry Louis Gates’ living room.
There are two likely reasons for the ever escalating ambit of presidential protection, neither of them encouraging. Either, our leaders really need it, meaning we are constantly accreting new and violent enemies. Or, it’s just another appalling manifestation of “shock and awe,” designed to both exhilarate and intimidate the empire's subjects.
Of course, there’s another reason: If you take all the security stuff our government will be doing on the Vineyard in the next couple of weeks, but remove the presence of Obama and his family from the effort, what you have, fellow Americans, is little more than a mini rehersal for the imposition of fascism.

So far, So bad

Nothing Personal, Mr. President
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama--but it was nothing personal. I’m a Green and a lefty and always vote for candidates whose politics are closest to mine. That way I don’t get confused.
I knew Obama was a business as usual Dem with a gold card from Goldman Sachs. But he was smart, personable and a fresh breeze. I hoped he might just try to repair our real economy rather than reinflate its collapsed bubbles. He disappointed me in that regard--but still it wasn’t personal.
He super-sized our war on the medieval Pushtuns of Afghanistan and commenced a new one in Pakistan. He’s currently spreading that fight from the Northwest Frontier down to Baluchistan to provoke the adjacent Persians, whom he apparently wants a piece of (the piece with the oil in it). In other words, he’s become Queen Victoria II, rumbling his elephantine echelons down exactly the same imperial ruts that led Kipling to pen,

At the end of the fight is the tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
and the epitaph drear,
a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east.

Still, his targets are religionists with their heads stuck in the 8th century. So I don’t take it personally.
At home, he’s pitching every marketer’s wet dream: mandatory consumption. He wants to force us to buy intangible products called health insurance peddled by the same financial hustlers who, if you recall, took themselves and this country broke just a few months back. Still, no skin off my nose since I’m already on Medicare and have backup coverage from an elite institution that provides the equivalent of socialized medicine to its own people.

Then he started going macho south of the border. He’s on board with the reconstitution of a World War II era naval fleet to patrol Latin America. (Imagine if--or should it be when?--the Chinese send warships to maintain the peace up and down our east and west coasts!). Obama’s beefing up our bases in Columbia, a country where rightwingers regularly win elections mainly because leftwingers regularly catch bullets behind the ear--if they’re lucky.

Then a month back he and Hillary gave the go-ahead for the fascist coup in little Honduras. The local death squads we created back in the days of our Nicaraguan and Salvadoran sallies swung into action, killing, torturing, disappearing and jailing people with the same politics as mine. What put them in the cross hairs and testicle pliers was supporting the legitimately elected president. Apart from smashing the weakest link in the continent-wide drive for real democracy and independence, the coup was a warning to the Chavistas and all the other progressives in Latin America that Uncle Sam would be coming for them with blood in his eye. Not only had Queen Victoria recrudesced in the person of Obama, but so had her contemporary, Teddy Roosevelt.
Jamming folks whose ideas and ideals I share! I have no choice but to take that personally. I know that, living in a land where the foreign policy consensus is “kick their ass and take their gas," few will join in my personal pique at the cruelties Obama is visiting upon a democratic people in a tiny country. We haven’t had an anti-imperialist movement since the Philippine Insurrection, and our small generic peace movement seems to be peacefully dozing.
But I hope more and more of us are taking those other issues above personally. Certainly, they’ll have conniptions when they finally experience Obama’s health fraud (assuming it gets enacted). Our new president will discover that, like lots of other things in our crazy culture, his popularity is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Gall in Gaul

Job Blows
The newest fashion in France is threatening to blow up your work place. It’s all the rage--or should I say outrage?
France, a very capitalist country no matter what our yahoos fantasize, is suffering from capitalism’s current crisis just like us. Layoffs and rollbacks are rampant. People are hurting--but not so much as here since unemployment payments are generous and no one loses health care or pensions when they get the boot.
Nevertheless, they’re pissed. But instead of getting boozed or beating the wife and kids, they wax militant and take it out on the people who are actually to blame, their patrons (bosses). In several factories and work sites around the country, workers have wired gas cylinders in place and vowed to set them off if their demands were not met. Here in the states, such militancy is unimaginable. But if it somehow occurred, it would be no big deal. The masked ninja cops would be sicced to destroy and devour the dissidents. The media would scream terror. Public opinion would cheer the cops.
Unlike the moderate Barack Obama, France’s conservative Nicholas Sarkozy doesn’t have the option of simply blowing away troublemakers. Sarkozy has to deal with not a dumb and docile but a sharp and refractory populace. A murderous government attack on the working class would bring millions of Frenchies, who have a gene that stores 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1968, into the streets. Or, at any rate, that's the French establishment's fear.
You know what happened? Capitalism, which is overwhelming even in France, wins--but not totally. The workers get the bum's rush. But they also get the equivalent of 40 grand each in added severance--and amnesty for their violent threat.
Yeah, we’re all capitalists now--though alternatives are beginning to bubble. But we poor Americans, largely thanks to our attitudes, live in a capitalist country where the workers fear the bosses. The French live in a capitalist nation where the bosses fear the workers.
Until we change our attitudes, we will remain the patsies of the planet.

Honduras Won't Go Away

Death Squad Democrats
I‘ve been promising to alarm you about the threat of European socializing, which has millions of people sitting in outdoor cafes and schmoozing with each other when they could be working three jobs and otherwise prowling the malls like we do. But I’ve been sidetracked yet again by the increasingly interesting news wafting up from central America, now by way of Clintonville.
The fascist coup in tiny Honduras at the end of June had all the teethmarks of the empire. It would have been the fifth time since 1907 that Washington felt itself obliged to rearrange the politics of that impoverished backwater. But, still harboring a vestige of Obamania, even this crusty old lefty thought maybe we should slip the new guy an inch of slack. So I ventured, improbably, that the coup might have been an insubordinate sally by the Honduran oligarchy or even an effort by some cabal among our spooks to set up or embarrass Obama. Surely, our new president, with all his fine talk at the Latin summit about a new day for democracy and respect for sovereignty, was too smart to pull a stunt that would mock his words and remind the 500 million souls to our south that the monster to the north was as nasty a neighbor as ever.
Naive, wasn’t I?
Latin Americanists of left and right are still stirring the ashes for clues to the coup’s creators. Meanwhile, the coup’s continuers have come out in public to advance the cause of democratic government by death squad. The NY Times tells us that Roberto Micheletti, the designated gorilla now in charge in Honduras, travels with an American advisor with Clinton ties who travels with an interpreter since he can’t deliver his advice in Spanish. The Times also reports that “every proposal that Micheletti’s group presents is written or approved by the American.”
If it’s still not quite clear, note that Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s personal and very plugged-in lawyer, has become chief Washington go-fer for the golpistas. As Doonesbury pointed out in his excellent coverage of Bizerkistan, you can’t be a bloodthirsty tyrant nowadays without a retinue of American lobbyists, flacks and coverts at your elbow.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration, unlike the whole rest of the world, has kept its ambassador in Tegucigalpa and is sidestepping laws that supposedly interdict intercourse with putchist regimes. No need to mention that the dad and lad coziness between the Pentagon and its murderous Honduran cadets continues as usual.
The estimable James Petras, who knows more about Latin America than anyone, sees the Honduran coup as an opening element by Obama to rollback the powerful anti-imperialist wave across the continent. But it’s a weak riposte and not likely to endure, he says. The Latinos have tasted real independence and are not about to surrender it because the White House is now home to a cool rather than clutzy imperialist. Anytime Obama uses the word democracia south of the Rio Grande, he’ll be subjecting himself to a big fat reir a carcajadas.

Selective Outrage

Hypocrisy on Honduras
Back in May 2007, the Venezuelan government declined to renew the expiring broadcast license of television station RCTV for, among other breaches, taking a direct part in the failed 2002 coup to overthrow the elected government. The purpose of the coup was, as usual, to establish a fascist dictatorship, wipe out the left, restore the old oligarchy, call it democracy, and thus make kissyface with Washington.
The decision merely meant that RCTV would no longer be able to to use the public airwaves to diffuse its daily dump on the government. Its ever more colorful claims that President Chavez was a monstrous lunatic guilty of every imaginable crime and perversion known to man and God would remain available on RCTV’s cable and internet outlets.
That decision caused a great brouhaha in our media about the crushing of press freedom and growth of populist dictatorship in Venezuela. Nowhere was it mentioned that the Venezuela’s media was not only free but indulged by a government that let it get away with shit that would have landed the execs of ABC, CNN or NBC in the hoosegow had they, say, kept suggesting that the country’s leaders be tortured and killed in bizarre ways.
I imagine a lot of liberals felt righteous about standing up for press freedom in a supposedly repressed land. They certainly took up a lot of media space and time prating their pique.
Perhaps that incident exhausted their outrage.
On June 28, the Honduran military pulled off a successful coup, ousting the elected president at gunpoint and opening fire on those who took to the streets in defense of lawful, representative government. The golpistas didn’t bother waiting for tv station licenses to expire. They simply shut down the stations and newspapers that had supported legit authority. They also roughed up and expelled whatever foreign media they regarded as less then supportive of their thuggery. A particulary target was the crew of Telesur, a new Latin news network that has dared to compete with CNN in Latin America.
This morning I listened to an hour’s discussion of the Honduran crisis at On Point, an NPR gabfest hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, who filled in the yawning gaps in his of knowledge of the subject with lies.
There was lots of criticism of the imagined excesses that the overthrown president might have possibly committed had he been allowed to serve out his term. But there was no mention, let alone concern, at the media crackdown. So far as I know, only Journalists Without Borders, a Paris-based free press protagonist, has raised a stink about the erasure of press freedom in Honduras.
The stunning silence of supposed liberals on not only censorship but also on the brutal repression of democratic legitimists in Honduras reminds me of George Orwell’s quote about a similar outrage decades ago:
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Empire Entropy

How How How Honduras

Obama [meeting last wednesday with Chilean president Bachelet] did manage a chuckle at U.S. expense — over the old joke that there’s never been a coup in the United States because it has no American Embassy.

The Honduran military is a farm team of the Pentagon. Its ranks, from private to general, are trained, equipped and advised by Uncle Sam. In recent times, Washington has organized it into death squads to keep down the population of leftists in central America.
On Sunday, the Honduran army overthrew the country’s democratic government, sent the elected president packing in his pyjamas, and disappeared the foreign minister, among other outrages.
Sunday was supposed to be the day for a national referendum to create a new constitution emphasizing human and social rights. A few days earlier U.S, ambassador Hugo Llorens opined that "we can't have a constitution that allows the 'people' to elect members of the supreme court and allows the 'people' to be involved in government."
The coup was immediately condemned by the European Union, the UN and every other country in the western hemisphere. Yes, every other country but the United States. Here, the Obama administration merely noted its “concern” and advised “calm.”
Speaking from Costa Rica, where he had been dumped by the plotters, Manuel Zelaya, the legit president of Honduras, said he interpreted Washington’s weaseling as support for the coup.
Finding itself utterly isolated on the fascist flank of the diplomatic front, the Obama administration began urging negotiations, presumably between the plotters and their targets, and then let the word out that it, in fact, favored restoring Zelaya to office. By monday, Obama and Clinton were finally declaring the coup “illegal,” an obvious fact that the rest of the world had instantly grasped on news of the event.
The interesting questions are whether Washington was in on the coup, and if it wasn’t, why didn’t it have the juice to thwart it? Another even more interesting question is whether some cabal in the bowels of the national security apparat had pulled it off to set up or embarrass Obama in one way or another?
In any event, Honduras is a lose-lose for the empire. Either it underlines to the already alienated Latinos that we’re still up to our old tricks, or it advertises to the world that the Shock and Awe Imperium can no longer expect obedience from even its lowliest satraps.

Back in the USA

Carry On Blogage
I’ve been on the rove for the last couple of weeks assessing the growing threat to America from what we once revered as Christendom but now increasingly fear as Europe. My ominous forebodings will be offered in coming days. In the meanwhile, current events of various import have earned my two cents’ worth. Let’s start with the latest.

Never Too White or Too Young
The 19th century steel baron Andrew Carnegie is famous for being both brute and benefactor. He was ruthless at keeping his workers in penury but generous to education and culture with the millions that his meanness earned.
Carnegie believed that if he paid decent wages to ordinary Americans they would waste it on rum and ribaldry. Better, he thought, to build colleges and libraries for those open to knowledge.
The old Scotchman would not have been surprised by Michael Jackson, a working class kid from the steel town of Gary who, bubbling with talent and creativity, went wacky when he came into the big bucks.
Since his success at show biz was stupendous, Jackson's failure at life biz could be no less stunning. We provided an eager audience for both. We adored watching him in an arena or at an arraignment--or, even better, imagining his weird nursery games at the palace of puerility he built in the hills outside Santa Barbara.
Our rulers discovered long ago that an infantilized society is more easily fooled and ruled than an adult one. Jacko was the personification of this insight. He helped to turn growing up in America from an upper to a downer. He went from brown boy to golden youth to ghostly white to apparition. His life was all smart steps and wrong moves. We cry for him, like babies.

Watch Your Language
Though some of you may guffaw, I try to make this blog accurate and amusing as well as alliterative. In other words I use words carefully because I know what damage careless ones can do. Consider the sad case of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. People mistook him to say he was going on the Appalachian Trail when in fact he said he was going for Argentinian tail.* Though none of us are perfect, I make every effort to avoid such confusion.
(Credit to Stephanie Miller and the Mooks for that perfect line)

Persian Melee
Our ire over Iran, now overchadored by Sanford and Jacko, should be familiar to those knowledgeable of the M&M formula.
Rigged elections with riotous aftermaths repressed by reactionary regimes are standard practice from Fiji to Florida. We ordinary Americans are advised by our government and media to simply ignore the vast majority of these foreign franchise fracases.
However, there are some that take precedence among our pixels. They fall into two categories. There are election riots that break out in countries with U.S. military bases and McDonald’s outlets. These are the M&M nations that we favor. Demonstrators are portrayed as terrorist hooligan anarchist commies out to foment chaos.
Then there are those in countries that have opted to defend themselves with their own armies and feed themselves their own chopped meat specialties. When locals angrily take to the streets in these countries, we celebrate them as virtuous idealists striving for the freedoms that we Americans enjoy.
This inconsistency gives foreigners the idea that we’re more interested in spreading bases and burgers than in promoting democracy. I’m afraid they’re right. If the evil Iranians welcomed David Petraeus and Ronald McDonald to open for business in Teheran tomorrow, Ahmadinejad and the mullahs would soon be schmoozing on The View with Whoopi and Joy.