Confronting the Terrace Menace

Cafe Socializing: New York City above. Split, Croatia, below.

Note the difference.

Cafes Harbor Socialization Threat
The Congregational church cater-corner from our house in West Tisbury specializes in ice cream and strawberry socials. Surely, those are not the socializations stirring a storm this summer. The coalition of the ignorant and inane appear instead to have their pitchforks out for European socializing. You can’t surf past Fox News or saunter in the environs of a town hall meeting without hearing some yahoo warn that American politicians are secret agents of Euro socializing and that they plan to infect us with it.
What exactly is this menace? I decided to look into it--at some risk, I may add, to my waist line. Early in the summer I surveilled subversive socialization sites along the Adriatic. This is my report:
Euro socializing consists in the main of sitting in cafes and not worrying about doctor bills, college tuition or scuffling for silver in your golden years. Instead, you schmooze with your friends about soccer, sex and the stupidity of Americans. As in: “Juventus looks great this season, Monique has a new boy friend, and I get a kick out of those dumb Americans paying through the nose so that their doctors can sail their gaudy yachts to Frejus and rent villas in Poggibonsi. Tee hee.”
Europeans are able to accomplish all of this socializing because they have vastly more outdoor tables and chairs under awnings and umbrellas than Americans do. In other words, there’s a cafe gap. Unlike the notorious missile gap from the 60’s, when American worried that they didn’t have enough rockets to blow up the world as many times as they wanted to, the cafe gap is real. And it’s not just patio furniture. Europe has an overwhelming lead in high-tech, multi-spigot expresso machines with awesome latte steaming capabilities.
Crewing these marvels are not just all-thumbs nerd grad students, but professional baristas versed in every trick in the book from infusions to spremutas. They’ve got your pastis coolly clouding on a coaster while their American counterparts are still asking, ‘”like what kind of drink is that, dude?”
It gets scarier. While America’s few socializing spots are relegated to malls or old neighbs turned trendy, the Euro ones have Roman ruins, castles, medieval plazas, and perfect seascapes providing the eye candy.
Can America breach the cafe curtain and deal with the terrace threat? It’s going to be hard. Socialization is anathema in many parts of our country. And cafe crawling is regarded by many as a waste of time more properly spent studying bankruptcy law or mortgage refinancing.
There may be hope. I was having a drink the other night with a right wing friend. As usual, he was damning government as the mother of all evil and private property as the father of all virtue. I was allowing that across the ocean in Christendom, government was regarded more as a comfortably off uncle who’s around to pick up the bills when mom gets sick or Hans heads off to college. He fumed that the welfare state was abomination. Then he thought a minute, perhaps recalling his last toke in Amsterdam or the taste of tomatoes in Taormina, and a small smile broke over his face as he offered, “Yeah, but I have to admit, those Euros know how to live.”

Law Limiting Third Parties Thrown Out

Greens Get a Break
Democrats, as I’ve long noted, are just one party away from believing in a one party system. Certainly, no one has worked harder to eliminate third parties from the ballot. The Dems have successfully used courts and legislatures in virtually every state to throttle Greens and other practicioners of small d democracy.
Well, they finally lost one. A federal judge in Hartford ruled last Friday that the state’s recently enacted campaign financing law “imposes an unconstitutional discriminatory burden on minor party candidates’ exercise of fundamental rights for no compelling reason?”
If there are five people making political speeches in the park, and the government gives two of them megaphones, that unfairly drowns out the others, said U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill.
Mike DeRosa, co-chair of the Connecticut Green Party, a plaintiff along with the Libertarian Party, said the law was aimed at leaving no Democrat or Republican behind. He welcomed its repeal. So do I.

Fact (1) and Fiction(2)

1. I Should Have Gone to Vegas

OBSERVATION INITIAL MOD COMPLE 99219
COURTESY FILE-NONPAR
The Sarasota Memorial Physician Group SMPG Hospitalist/Geriatrics has been dunning me for two years for $168 for performing the above whatever it was. Apparently, that particular charge got eaten by the dog in the paperwork purgatory that characterizes our health care system. It is currently “undergoing review” and will likely go on to “appeal.”
A nice woman in claims guided me through this and a thick list of other charges resulting from my overnight at Sarasota Memorial Hospital after experiencing chest pain in a movie theater. No angiogram was performed and tests were limited to x-ray, EKG and blood work. The bills, I was told, totaled between four and five grand--enough to rent the best hotel suite in Vegas with complimentary champagne and blond. Happily, my discomfort was not as serious as it felt. Also on the bright side was a heart pill recommended to me by one of the Florida docs that has all but eliminated my bouts of chest pain since then. But still, five grand!
Specialite Cardiaque
Those two words, handwritten on a bill, were sufficient to cover the totality of the room charge, meals, medications, angiogram, x-ray and other tests performed on me several years earlier at the Hopital Cochin in Paris. On leaving the hospital after a 24 hour stay also occasioned by chest pain, the cashier stamped it paid and returned it to me along with my credit card chit. In Yankee dollars, the charge was $1,323. Had I been a citizen of France, my taxes would have paid for that hospital stay just as our taxes in America pay to protect Iceland from an attack by Persian missiles.
I related the French experience in an earlier blog and even wrote a contemporary op-ed about it in the Hartford Courant headlined, “Getting Sick in a Healthy Country." I revisit it because I keep hearing morons moan that we can’t afford a government health plan. They’re oblivious to the fact that government plans, including our own Medicare/Medicaid, are far simpler, more efficient and cheaper than our idiotically complex corporate pay-or-die system. Such people don’t deserve health care. They deserve to be locked in a room with nothing but a manual of medical insurance codes to keep them company.

2. A Parable
Mom, I’m out of my asthma medicine.
Sorry, honey, but we can't afford to pay for more?
Dad’s got money.
Not for that. He’s got to pay for that expensive new hunting rifle and his trip to the Sierras.
Why does he keep going out there?
To protect us from the mountain lions, honey.
But there are no mountain lions in Cleveland.
Yes, honey, but dad says that if we don’t stop them in California they could come to Ohio and bite us. Remember how one bit dad?
But that was in California, and he was trying to take a cub from the lion’s den.
Yes, but don’t you remember that an alley cat bit little Jimmy down the block and he died from an infection?
But that was a Cleveland tabby cat, not a California mountain lion.
Dad says they’re all the same family. We can’t trust any of them, even the baby kittens.
Does dad have to to rent a Porsche SUV and stay in that super-expensive hunting lodge?
Of course, honey, you wouldn’t want him to skimp on our protection.
Did he have to buy that $10,000 rifle with all the fancy scroll work and engraving on it?
Yes, honey, that’s to produce shock and awe among the mountain lions and make them easier to hunt.
Hack. Hack. Mom, I think I’m having an asthma attack.
Just say a prayer and breathe as best as you can, honey.

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.