Deep in the Heart of Myopia and Cowardice

In these United States, the bad guys are relentless and have unlimited funding.  The good guys dislike the smell of their own sweat and still believe that virtue has amorphous power to prevail against all odds.

No wonder the democratic republic founded on a thesis of checks and balances died a dozen years ago and nobody noticed.

Illustrations abound.  Nay, they inundate us daily.  They flood us, overwhelm us, numb our senses, beat us into a miasmic mass of helpless resignation.

A microcosm: southern New Mexico is blessed with public lands whose unique characteristics are less spectacularly beautiful than, say, the Grand Canyon; whose historical importance is less obvious than, say, Mesa Verde's; whose archeological value is less self-evident than, say, the great pyramids; whose thundering silence, unchanged openness, vistaed hopes and majestic instancy feed only souls hungering after solace, not not egos bottomless with greed.  They deserve preservation, these lands; protection from the predations of the land-rapers, a license of passage to generations unborn. 

I came to live here because of these lands.  They are my church, my place to recover from wounds, to think, to simply be.  I want to share them with anyone and everyone who will respect them, cherish them, leave them simply to be.

Of course I joined the movement to protect them in perpetuity from from human abuse.

Proposals were written, hearings were held, viewpoints were aired, money was spent, alliances were formed, lies were told, facts were presented, "stakeholders" were asked to comment, experts were called to pontificate, ignoramuses were allowed to prattle, legislation was written and more hearings were held.

At the last of these, the same old well-funded prevaricators, distorters and transmogrifiers turned out in force, spewing the same old bilge that had been refuted many times before.  Sen. Tom Udall, the junior of New Mexico's senators, both of whom supported the wilderness legislation, played prosecuting attorney.  His skilled cross-examination stripped each of the nay-sayers of any remaining vestige of credibility.

The legislation, which had already passed the U.S. House of Representatives, seemed headed toward passage by the Senate and signature into law by the President.

But the corporate and private interests that control us do their real work not in public hearings; they work behind the closed doors of the inner offices inside the Beltway.  There the pressures were brought to bear upon our gutless public servants that caused the wilderness bill to languish unvoted on.  The lame duck congressional session ended and  decades of dedicated citizen legwork within the system died.

The lemmings of Teabagistan are chortling with glee in the usual venues of ignorance: call-in radio and ungrammatical letters to local rags that purport to be newspapers, bumper stickers and bill boards, church message boards and crude trade association pamphlets. 

By the time a new people's movement of enlightened conservationists can be formed -- IF such can ever be re-formed --  the lands will have been devastated, raped of their historic, cultural and natural beneficence.

Just on the matter of public land management alone, similar dramas of dreams deferred are playing out in Utah, Idaho, Montana and throughout the west.  Take Utah:  some of our most precious heritage lands have long been coveted by the Midases of extraction and the Huns of off-roading.  A death-bed sell-out in the last days of Bush II gave the destroyers license to do their worst; it has taken nearly two years for the Dr. Kidglove administration to reverse the Interior Department rules that allowed their criminal acts.  But without supportive action by the whores of Congress, this will come to naught.

The bad guys will win, as they always do in these United States, simply because they do not relent, and they have unlimited finances. And because they really don't have any opposition.

No sweat, right?

Stuck Like a Dope With a Thing Called Hope

Chris Hedges, a journalist, has emerged as one of the most important writers in early 21st Century America. He speaks the truths Americans are entitled to know, but do not want to hear.  His anti-war speech in 2003 touched off an infamously hostile reaction at the commencement rites at Rockford (Ill.) College -- whose most famous alumna, ironically, was the Nobel Prize winning peace advocate, Jane Addams. A Yale Divinity School graduate, Hedges became one of the finest war correspondents in American Journalism. His employer, the New York Times, staunch defender of two reporters who peddled government lies to justify invading Iraq, refused to stand by Hedges after that speech.  Now Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute,  a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and an author of important books.  What follows is a transcription of a speech he gave to the assemblage of anti-war veterans and activists preparing to be arrested for civil disobedience at the White House gates on Thursday, December 16. As a new year dawns, it is imperative that all Americans begin to understand its message. -- T.W.


                    By Chris Hedges

Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It will not be realized by chanting packaged campaign slogans or attempting to influence the democratic party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions-- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today, keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this nation, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.

Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state which saturates our airwaves with lies seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress.

They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandehar or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation's capitol diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, enthralled by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics.

Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful. But hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

(from Auden)

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Oliverian Twists in Washington: Glee Over Gruel

The gleeful din in the dingy outposts of leftish television has been deafening.  Obama lives!  Days of triumph!  Democratic legislation passes!  Don't ask, don't tell repealed!  Benefits  approved for for 9-11 first responders! Nineteen new judges confirmed! Unemployment benefits extended!

Give a starving man a loaf of stale bread and he'll consume it with relish and gratitude.

Alas, democracies cannot and do not thrive on stale bread.

The ecstasy of getting a few watered-down paps to the liberal conscience signed into law is supposed to compensate us for the agony of two years of extension of the worst Bush policies on abuse of executive privilege, human rights, civil liberties, government secrecy, war, corporatocracy and social justice -- all of it crowned by the most criminal sell-out of an entire people since Peter Stuyvesant "bought" Manhattan island., the so-called tax "compromise."

The devil, as always, is in the details.  The first responder benefits, for example, passed only after the funding was reduced to such a pittance than even the most misanthropic of right-wing Republicans could accept it.

The judges who were confirmed, when put under a microscope, are closer in judicial philosophy to John Roberts than Louis Brandeis. Those whose histories disclose even the slightest hint of progressive understanding of the profundity of our Constitution are deemed "controversial" by the lemming media and held hostage by the neanderthal Senate, even though most of them were unanimously recommended for confirmation by the Senate judiciary committee. (After two years, 59 Obama judicial nominees have been confirmed, the lowest number in almost a century.)

Pre-passage tinkering by the corporate-owned right-wingers who control the Senate created modifications and amendments -- those old devil details -- that made milksops of what Dr. Kidglove so ornately signed into law. As one savvy Senate-watcher remarked the other day, "Before the days when every routine bit of legislation required 60 votes to even be considered, this entire lame duck docket could've been taken care of in one random week of the regular legislative session."

How right he is!  The 60-vote canard is the great ugly duckling behind which Dr. Kidglove has hidden his worst shortcomings, deceptions and surrenders.  "Tsk, tsk, it's too bad that I couldn't even suggest true health care reform -- single-payer -- because those nasty people would threaten to filibuster and I don't have the 60 votes required io. . ." 

"Well, I had to give up the public option because there weren't 60 . . ."

"The stimulus bill isn't perfect, but since we didn't have 60 . . ."

Bovine excrement Doc, Rachel, Keith, Larry, Harry, Nancy. . . . It still requires  51, not 60, votes to enact legislation in the Senate.  Dr. Kidglove's party controlled that many votes, and more than enough votes in the House, to pass truly progressive legislation on matters of enormous importance to all Americans.

I applaud the extension of civil liberties to a small minority of members of the military.  I applaud the provision of assistance, however minimal, to first responders in the terrorist attacks.  I applaud efforts to improve the safety of our food -- although the details of the actual legislation don't make me feel any safer. 

But despite all the happy, happy happy talk on lefty TV these days, these facts remain:

The DREAM Act is a pipe dream; Dodd-Frank financial regulation cannot be enforced; we have no climate bill, no immigration reform, no budget, and no hope of improving, rather than dismantling, the health care law.

And unless Julian Assange turns up some documents with the devil details in them, we have no way of knowing what secret sell-outs Dr. Kidglove and his gutless henchmen made on future votes, just to get  the pablum people have been cheering this week.

How green is my mold?  Never mind!  Bread is bread when you're starving.

A Christmas Carol for The Year That Was

Silent night . . .

Before they can be hired, Fox News "journalists" have to pass a beliefs test designed by the network's top boss, right-wing Republican Roger Ailes, to prove their political conservatism.  Recently, a management memo ordered  all "news" employees  not to mention "climate change"  or warming temperatures without immediately stating that critics dispute the data on which these notions are based.  They are not permitted to state that climate change data are peer reviewed by other qualified scientists; or that their "critics"  either lack suitable scientific credentials or are bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil and other major extraction industries  with an implicit understanding that their "science" will produce company-friendly conclusions.

Holy night . . . .

On Christmas Day, a child-soldier, who has never been convicted of a crime, will be held in solitary confinement for 23 hours, and not permitted proper exercise for the hour outside his cell  in a military prison.  This will mark his seventh month of such confinement, which physicians and experts in international law have defined as torture. Acting  on his belief that every citizen has a moral obligation to shed light on immoral actions of his government, Pvt. Bradley Manning  allegedly gave electronic data to WikiLeaks that the government wanted to hide. Manning is being force-fed anti-depressant medication in the hope that it will prevent his committing suicide. He has not been tried on any charges; he has not even been granted the pre-trial hearing that is mandated by  Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is neither uniform, nor just.

All is calm . . .

The Justice Department has acknowledged it plans to increase the number of its Gestapo-style raids on the homes and offices of peace activists and critics of government policy. Such raids allegedly were legalized by the 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.  It held that speech and advocacy otherwise protected by the First Amendment was a crime if government agencies found it to be "coordinated with or under the direction of a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as 'terrorist.'"

All is bright. . . .

As of Dec. 16, at least 293,685 people have been killed in warfare around the world this year. The United States incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be among the leading killers of civilians, along with the civil strife in Somalia and the Sudan, and the drug cartel wars in Mexico.

Round yon Virgin, mother and child . . .

One in six Americans will go hungry this Christmas, or have to forego other necessities such as heat or medicine, in order to buy food.

Holy infant so tender and mild . . .

For eight years our government has held detainees at Guantanamo without charge or prospect of trial, while administering to them a dangerous drug that an Army doctor characterized as "pharmacological waterboarding." 

Sleep in heavenly peace . . .

While gloating Republicans watched, President Obama signed into law legislation that provides:
 $1.1 million in personal tax cuts for the heads of five banks that required $142 billion of taxpayer bailout money;
  $1.3 million in personal tax relief for Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who owns Fox "News" and other media cash cows;
   $400 a year tax increases for America's poorest workers;
    tax cuts totaling $35.41 billion for the 400 wealthiest Americans;
     slashes in funding for Social Security and Medicare, the only sources of income and health care for millions of elderly Americans;
      and massive tax cuts for the corporations that ship American jobs overseas.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Americans bought 1.2 million greeting cards this holiday season that contained images of polar bears.  That's about five times as many images as there are living polar bears in the entire world. The bears are an endangered species whose habitat has been reduced more than 21 per cent by the global warming that Rupert Murdoch's media empire denies is happening.  Now the wealthiest corporations in history -- American energy companies -- are about to begin massive drilling in the Arctic Wildlife refuge, which will destroy a critical habitat of the bear.

Silent night, holy night . . .

Nearly 20,000 people have been killed in the last five years in Somalia, many of them with some of the 40 tons of weapons the United States has shipped into the country.  Somalia  has not had an effective government since 1991.  This year, the warring factions have begun exporting violence to neighboring countries like Uganda, where a series of July bombings killed 70 civilians.

Shepherds quake  . . .

In the Darfur region of Sudan,  more than 1.5 million people will spend Christmas lacking the outside assistance they need for basic survival -- food, shelter, water and sanitation facilities.  Several hundred thousand have died either as the result of combat between rival insurgents, or from starvation and disease caused by the fighting.  International aid agencies have been expelled.

, , , at the sight . . .

In April an explosion at a British Petroleum drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 men,  injured 17 and set off the worst oil spill in American history.  The environmental damage was incalculable; the extent of despoilation of marine and wildlife habitat may never be known.  After months of accepting at face value BP's propaganda about the leak, the U.S. government finally filed a lawsuit on Dec. 15 against BP and eight other companies involved in the disaster.

Glories stream from heaven afar .  .  .

Already one of the poorest, least developed nations in the world, Haiti was struck on Jan. 12 by the worst earthquake in the hemisphere in 200 years.  More than 300,000 people died.  Port au Prince, the capital, was virtually destroyed.   International aid has largely failed to reach the people who need it, many of whom are homeless refugees, because of crime, corruption and inept management.  Later in the year a cholera epidemic killed at least a thousand more Haitians.

Heavenly hosts sing hallelujah . . .

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that corporations are people with unlimited powers of free speech, including the right to spend whatever it takes to rig elections and put only corporate-friendly hacks into office at every level of government.   Sixty-one per cent of the Roberts court's rulings have been pro-business, as opposed to 42 per cent for all of the courts that preceded it. 

Christ the savior is come . . .

June of 2010 was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record globally. Temperatures were 1.25 degrees F. above average, 2.2 degrees F. in the northern hemisphere.  In Moscow alone, 11,000 people died of hyperrthermia, edema, or other heat-related causes. A consensus of scientists held that these weather events could not have taken place if atmospheric carbon dioxide  had been at pre-industrial levels.

Christ the savior is come.

In 2010, The State of Texas required sweeping changes in textbooks for the state's schools.  They will reflect that no Hispanic American ever achieved anything worth recording in history texts, but Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association did.  That the civil rights movement was rooted in the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers, not the non-violence of Martin Luther King.  That the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian country.  But because Thomas Jefferson, a leading Founder, coined the phrase, "Separation of church and state," his name has been stricken from the list of "figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century," replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. And science teachers must teach the creation myth as an alternative to real science.

Merry Christmas!  God bless us, every one.

Oh Newcomer, Oh Autocrat! Oh Unbounded Joy!

Lois and I are in training.  Brandi seems to deem us reasonably quick studies.

We have learned:

--The poopin' ground is NOT the place we suggested; it's over there, between the goldfish pond and the cholla.

--Always leave the crate door open.  His lordship does not approve of being locked in, yet must have quick and easy access to it and his toys when he returns from his constitutionals.

--Kibble is not a meal until it has been supplemented with a little boiled chicken and rice.

--The playpen fence is the puppy equivalent of those rock-climbing walls you see in human sporting stores.

--All burrs must be swept up along the path of the daily walks Outside in The Big World.  His excellency gets very upset by burrs lodging in his footpads.

--Every living thing should be awake no later than 6 a.m.  Breakfast is immediately after play time which is immediately after the morning constitutional, which is RIGHT NOW!  Lunch is immediately after the late morning nap.  His lordship likes fresh water with his meal and that means NO spilled kibble going all squishy in there.

--The preferred post-prandial activity is chewing on a shoe -- preferably one that cost over $100 a pair only last week.

--If one is tempted to be vexed by some of his excellency's demands, one will be subjected to lavish canine kisses on the nose and behind the ear.  These not only drive away vexation, but probably can cure cancer, gout and jungle rot.


--His wonderfulness places one foot inside the food dish to hold it down because that's what his great-to-the-tenth power grandfather did to hold down HIS food, which he obtained by hunting.

--Hopping about like a little wallaby is his worship's way of telling us that he wants to go outside and play -- RIGHT NOW!

--Nap time is whenever and wherever his directorship ordains it to be.  We might think that draped over the floor mop is a curious way to sleep, but we're not puppies. Just as there is no such thing as too much oregano, so also there can never be too many naps in a day.  His high cuteness is not to be disturbed during naptime.

--All visitors to the household are understood to have come for the exclusive purpose of playing with his excellency.  They should come prepared for that role and should understand that all those puppy nips will leave not scars, but badges of honor.


--Don't tug at the leash.  His perfectness is obliged to sniff, taste, tug, paw at and, in extreme cases, urinate upon every new thing he sees.  Since everything he sees is new to him, walks and other quotidian tasks might take a while.  Be patient.

Brandi the boxer-shepherd, born Oct. 8, 2010, has succeeded the late Saxon the rottweagle as Lord of our Manor.

The king is dead.  Long live the king.

The Day Utter Irrationality Led to the Right Conclusion

Federal District Judge Henry E. Hudson of Virginia may have called it right when he ruled the individual mandate provision of the new health care law unconstitutional.

He showed his true colors, however, when he went on to prate about "unbridled exercise of the federal police powers."  The SCOTUS Gang of Five, which is better at rewriting the Constitution than understanding it, will uphold Judge Hudson's verdict when the appeals process reaches them. They will also applaud Hudson's obiter dictum even as real Constitution scholars hold that he came to the right decision for the wrong reasons.

His fellow Republicans have been condemning what they call Obamacare for all the wrong reasons ever since the first House draft of the proposed legislation became public.  Why should they change now?

The fault is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we allowed our overlings to sell their souls and seal our fate.  The entire mess of pottage called health care reform cannot work without the requirement that everyone must buy insurance.  If that is unconstitutional, then the entire law falls apart.

This was inevitable from the very moment that Dr. Kidglove decided not even to try to enact the only true health care reform: government, single-payer health care for every single one of us.  Having thus capitulated to the devil, he then compounded his crime by giving up without a whimper the one compromise that might have produced a decent health care bill: the public option.

Like the committee seeking to build a horse and producing a camel, the Democratic geniuses in Congress came up with the individual mandate provision that has now been struck down. My fellow Merkins, we are  back where we started, stuck with the worst health care system of any nation outside of the Third World. 

David Leonhardt,  one of the lead whores in the New York Times's growing stable of corporate  propagandists, recently wrote that the opposition to health care "stems from the tension between two competing traditions in the American economy. One is the laissez-faire tradition that celebrates individuality and risk-taking. The other is the progressive tradition that says people have a right to a minimum standard of living — time off from work, education and the like.

"Both traditions have been crucial to creating the most prosperous economy and the largest middle class the world has ever known. Laissez-faire conservatism has helped make the United States a nation of entrepreneurs, while progressivism has helped make prosperity a mass-market phenomenon."

Where has this guy been for the last 20 years?  On the moon?

When Uncle Henry dies because he can't afford the surgery that could save his life, or the medicine that could prolong it, console his survivors by reminding them that he was part of "the largest middle class the world has ever known."

When Tiny Tim starves to death because Daddy got laid off by a firm that shipped his job overseas, and now his unemployement benefits have run out, reassure the grieving father about the greatness of American entrepreneurship.

David, take your mass-market phenomenon and shove it up your crass-market rectum.

We have opposition to real health care reform in this benighted land because (1) our electorate is  ignorant beyond compare and (2) the richest 2 per cent of us and the corporations they own are greedy beyond Midas. People -- real, breathing, bleeding, helpless, hapless, hurting, jobless,  hungry, foreclosed, debt-drowned, naive, trusting, clueless, deprived, deceived, powerless people -- aren't even on their radar.

Buy insurance stock, if your conscience allows you to profit from the misery of your fellow man.  You, too, can be part of the falsest prosperity , the most rapidly vanishing middle class in the history of the world.

And you won't be bothered by "federal police powers." 

Unless you're one of "them."  We  know who "they" are, don't we Judge Hudson? Tea Party People?  Dr. Kidglove?  They are us.

Reflections on the Return of a Cooper's Hawk

Every year for six or seven years now, a Cooper's hawk has set up his command post on my backyard gate.  He arrives within 10 days on either side of the winter solstice and departs shortly before the vernal equinox.

He is one small part of the natural rhythms of our planet that fill me with awe and curiosity about the universe.  I welcome his annual visit for many reasons, even if his diet consists largely of the songbirds whose warbles, trills and tintinnabulations bring me joy. He also hunts small mammals and rodents whose presence is less pleasant.

Just today the hawk reclaimed his hunting grounds for another winter season. I believe it is the same hawk, who established his hunting rights as a fledgling and has now grown to maturity.  If this is so, the actuarial tables for birds of prey tell me that unless disaster strikes him down, he'll be hunting from my back gate for another five to seven years.

There are those of humankind who would bring disaster upon him.  In Pennsylvania, where I once lived, the Kittatinny ridge of Blue Mountain overlooks one of the world's busiest migratory flyways for raptors.  Once, every fall, the "sportsmen" of the area would gather on Kittatinny's slopes with their arsenals and slaughter thousands of the "varmint" birds as they flew the gauntlet their genetic codes sent them to.  Many of the shooters believed the myth that raptors were  killers of livestock, poultry and game birds. There are photographs of 15-foot high piles of dead raptors  on the Blue Mountain valley  floor.  Now the magnificent predators are protected along a 13,000 acre preserve of public and private lands.  Some 20,000 to 40,000 pass safely through the corridor every Aug. 15-Dec. 15, or winter safely in its forests and crags.

In 2005 there was a decline in population of the voles and other prey of the great gray owl.  The owls expanded their territory southward in quest of food.  The great gray is a solo diurnal hunter; a few strays wandered from the northern Rockies as far south as the Organ Mountains of southern New Mexico.  Two or three times, along a wide arroyo on a high desert mesa, my dog Saxon and I spotted a great gray on its early morning hunt.  What an awesome sight!  Statue-still, it surveyed the open desert for a lizard or rodent; when it spotted one a hundred or more yards away it rose silently with a single flap of its great, six-foot wingspan.  Airborne, it glided down the arroyo, perhaps four feet above the ground, until it pounced on its pray.  With the meal clasped in its talons, it sat silently for a few minutes, wings slightly spread to shield its kill from other predators. The great bird vanished within a week of its appearance, never to be seen again in that locale.  I hope it flew back home  to Colorado or Montana.  I would hate to think some "sportsman" shot it.  Diurnal raptors cannot be legally hunted, but illegal shooting is widespread.

Man, the greatest predator, takes it upon himself to rid the world of other predators.  Shooting gray wolves, or lobos, is illegal in Arizona and New Mexico where the nearly extinct animals have been reintroduced.  The packs are back on the brink of extinction, thanks to the illegal shooting of pregnant females and alpha males. 

Man, arrogant and short-sighted,  is the only mammal on Earth who meddles with Nature's scheme of things and willfully causes great mischief within the natural order.  Often his ignorance is self-destructive. For example, carnivores are  vulnerable to pesticides, insecticides, and other human-made toxic chemicals. In a process called  bioaccumulation. chemicals passed up the food chain from plant to plant-eater, and from plant-eater to meat-eater, become more and more concentrated in the tissues of each succeeding animal. At the top of the food chain, we are poisoning ourselves.

In our greed and hubris, we do this malevolence to our planet and its living things even as we disparage the science that illuminates our guilt.

A moment ago I glanced out the window.  My hawk lunged from his hunting lodge atop the garden gate and darted off in pursuit of prey.  He's part of a kill-or-be-killed segment of the natural order, and he does what he has to do to survive, to bequeath his genes to another generation of beautiful predators, to keep the cycles turning. He does not deny what he is; he simply is.

Man, like the hawk and the owl, compulsively seeks gratification, but not because the preservation of the species requires it.  Mankind changes at its whim what is and has to be in a blind pursuit of immediate profit or  or short-term satisfaction, never mind the ultimate cost or consequences for generations to come.

What fools these mortals be.

Fly, my hawk.  Fly.

A Non-Debate Using Non-Facts to Stir Up the Ignorant

Here in Amerika we swim in a cesspool of sanctioned criminality.

It  reaches its apex of absurdity when we demand prosecution of those who show us evidence of how we violate our own laws, our own Constitution.

And even as these perversions worsen, our media are complicit in a companion crime: the abuse and corruption of our very language into an Orwellian tool of doublespeak.

All of this is manifest in the Wikileaks "debate" -- which is not a debate at  all, but a manufactured hoo-haw in which the media  cheerlead the excuses of a government that has been caught with its pants down.

What's to debate? 

The documents are authentic.  No one disputes that.

If they expose criminal acts by our government and those acting on its orders, DO NOT PROSECUTE the perpetrators.  Instead, muscle a friendly government into trumping up rape charges against the messenger, tracking him down, and jailing him without bail or formal charges. These are criminal non-justice procedures that constitute the New American Way, like reserving to the executive branch the authority to order the  extra-judicial assassination of American citizens. "Gimme an A," the cheerleaders shout.

Contributing financial or other support to points of view that are not popular is a facet of free speech, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment.  If PayPal, Visa and MasterrCard close off the means for Amerikan citizens to exercise that freedom, arrest those who protest their actions. "Gimme an M . . ."

If the government issues Official Lies to refute the facts, do as Time magazine and other propaganda outlets do: publish the lies as fact.  When enlightened citizens challenge the media by showing them the truth, do as Time magazine and its sisters in sin do:  report the facts as a "side" in a "controversy."  Manufacture a "debate." "Gimme an E . . ."

Ron Paul, a conservative, libertarian, outspoken, Republican from Texas, of all places, has captured the nub of this situation.  It  came in the form of nine questions for Americans, at the end of a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives.  His nine questions are:

• Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
• Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
• Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
• Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
• Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
• Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
• Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
• Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
• Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

To imagine that today's United States is a moral force, an influence for good in the greater world around us is utter self-delusion.  Intelligent people all over the world are laughing at us, laughs of derision, as we flounder like Keystone Kops, chasing figments of imagination and slipping on moral  banana peels.

Answer the nine questions.  Think especially about the answer to No. 9.

Just Supposin'

Do you suppose you could eke out an existence on $2.5 million a year?  Let's say you could manage.  But then let's say Uncle Sam suddenly required you to pay another $84,000 a year in taxes. Bet you'd squeal.

Dr. Kidglove's tax sell-out to the right wing is going to cost the poorest of our working poor about $400 a year in additional taxes.  Read that again: the poorest of our working poor will pay $400 in additional taxes -- withheld from their earnings, money they will never see -- under the latest Obama crime against the common people.

Proportionally, that's the equivalent of deducting $84,000 from the paycheck of a $2.5-million a year member of our wealthiest two per cent.

It's really, really important, according to Dr. Kidglove, to continue the obscene tax cuts George Bush gave to the richest people among us because . . . . because . . . well, it's really important, that's all.

And as for the really, really poor guy who's going to see his munificent income cut by another $400, well, if he's any kind of a patriot, he'll stop whining.  We have a deficit to reduce, y'see, and that means sacrifice. 

     *   *   *

You don't suppose the CIA had anything at all to do with the  rape accusation agrainst WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's being held without bail in England on behalf of Interpol which put the finger on Assange on behalf of Sweden which has yet  to file charges or even put forth probable cause? 

Assange's principal accuser, Anna Ardin,  reportedly has left Sweden and may no longer be cooperating with the criminal investigation of her own charges.  Anna is said to be in Palestine working as a volunteer with "a Christian group." 

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, authorities have arrested a 16-yer-old boy on charges of "being involved in" the hacking of MasterCard and Visa websites after the credit card companies refused to process donations to WikiLeaks. 

   *   *   *
There's a grocery chain named Giant Eagle that has union stores and non-union stores.  Debbie Weiloch worked, at one of the non-union stores, for 36 years.  Recently, in the company cafeteria, while on break, she chatted with a fellow employe about union issues with Giant Eagle.  The store manager called in the police, who put her in 'cuffs and filed trespassing charges. You don't suppose that store manager ever read a thing called the First Amendment, do you?

   *   *   *
Some tax-and-spend Democrats sponsored a bill to pay the health care costs of rescue workers who suffered toxic effects from the smoke and debris after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers.  It has passed the House.  Republicans won't let it come to a vote in the Senate.  I suppose that's called Compassionate Conservatism.

   *   *   *
Time to watch a nice Christmas movie.  How about, "It's a Wonderful World?"

Poet's Corner

ODE  TO THOSE IN CONGRESS
WHO, LIKE  DR. KIDGLOVE,

ARE COMPLICIT IN THE LAST, WORST
BETRAYAL OF THOSE WHO VOTED FOR THEM

Breathes there a man with soul so numb
He still doth march to Obama's drum?
Who sees his own, his native land
Seized by the rich and the hateful few
Who'd milk it dry just to accrue
Wealth and power as contraband?

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him there is a special hell.
High is his treason, vile his name;
He calls himself a Democrat
But brings to that party just shame.
He is a wretch, concentred in self
Lusting for power, privilege, pelf.
And ere he dies his fate shall be
To witness the death of Liberty,
Abominable gift to his progeny.


(APOLOGIES TO SIR WALTER SCOTT)

Open Letters

To: FBI Director Mueller
       Sec'y. of Defense Gates
       Gen. Petraeus
       Atty. Gen. Holder

Gentlemen:

I donated Euro 40 to WikiLeaks last week.

But you already knew that, didn't you?

So what'll it be?  The no-fly list? (I don't fly anyway.  I'm, er, touchy about my junk.)  Gitmo? Rendition to a black hole?

In 1984 the Big Brother government had ways of determining a political prisoner's (was there any other kind?) worst fear so they could torture him or her with it.  I'll save you the trouble: bamboo slivers under the fingernails.

TW

PS - I hope you and your gaggle of allies don't get hold of Assange.  Pretty forlorn hope.  If you do nail him, maybe we could share a cell.  He'd be a great interview.  But don't think the exposures of all your dirty little secrets will stop with his apprehension, or persecution of those of us who have supported his work. Always, somewhere, there will be someone willing to take risks on behalf of truth, freedom and justice.

      *   *   *

TO: Catalog publishers

Money-wasters:

This year I weighed the catalogs I received in the mail before pitching them directly into the trash bin.

Do you realize how much paper you've wasted?  Not to mention the ink, design work, printing and production costs, postage.  We'll get to postage later.

Just from my mailbox alone: 611 pounds, 9 ounces.  And the ho-ho season hasn't even ended yet. Do yourself a favor.  Take me off your mailing lists.

Fa la la la la la,

TW

        *  *  *

TO: Postmaster General

Dear Downholder:

When there are no more costs to be cut, try this:  Raise the rates on the catalog mailers tenfold.  Et voila!  No more deficit.  No more penny-pinching.  Six-hundred-plus fewer pounds of refuse in our local landfill next year.

TW

     *   *   *

TO: Political Lemmings

Damn Fools:

Try to get it through your thick skulls that "earmarks" are necessary.  From time to time, Congress is actually asked to appropriate funds for something worthwhile, necessary and important.  If they don't earmark the funds, some dingbat bureaucrat,  or a crooked (is there any other kind?) pol somewhere along the line will simply misuse, abuse or diffuse them.

Helpfully,

TW

   *   *   *

TO: Santa Clause

I said "puppy," you idiot, not "guppy."

Tommy

  *   *   *

TO: My three devoted readers

Thanks, Mom, Sis and Mort.  Sorry you couldn't persuade Dad to sign on.  I guess he never did get over that old whooppee cushion incident.

The Pianist

  *   *   *

TO: President Obama

Oh, never mind.  It's too late anyway.

TW

There They Go Again! Fry Him! Shoot Him! Whatever!

The trial was over and the only question remaining was if the scoundrel deserved the death penalty.

"Fry him," an editorialist advised, and won a journalism award.

It's the American way of death.  Vengeance is ours, saith Amerika, and sometimes the blood lust runs a bit hotter  than usual.

This is one of those times.

What  else to expect when you have a president who, hoping to prove that he can be even more bad-ass macho than his predecessor, anointed himself with the authority to order the assassination of American citizens without judicial process?

Each time WikiLeaks turns over a new batch of real documents verifying what many of us already suspected about United States policy that frequently amounts to criminality and worse, the "fry him" chorus grows louder. The antecedent of "him" being Julian Assange, an Australian who created the website called WikiLeaks, and various individuals who in some way or other abetted his acquisition of the materials.

Aside from its barbarism, the blood lust is bizarre because United States laws defining treason apply only to United States citizens, which Assange is not.  But that's a  quibble the fry-him crowd ignores.

The previous batch of WikiLeaks documents, released in October, prompted the eminent moralist, Jonah Goldberg of National Reivew, to wonder publicly why Assange was still alive.  Surely some patriotic Amerikan should have assassinated him long ago.

Bing West renewed the Journal's blood lust after the latest WikiLeaks dump, this time of diplomatic cables. "Whoever provided  the material to WikiLeaks should be prosecuted under the death sentence, regardless of his of her alleged motivations or mental worries," West wrote.  I haven't completely deciphered the code in that last clause, but the main message is clear.  Fry them.

My favorite voice in the killer choir is Machine-Gun Mama Palin, former governor of Alaska.  We should go after Assange, she says, with "the same urgency" we pursue al Qaeda.

The truth really hurts these people.  Or perhaps it's just a sort of menopausal bitch by a woman who misses her favorite perk as governor: gunning down wolves from helicopters, then posing with their bloody carcasses.  Because of the crop of the photograph, it's hard to tell for sure if the bright-eyed glint in her eye is post-orgasmic.

The chorus is also eager to hang or fry or otherwise terminate a 19-year-old Somali student who is a naturalized citizen and was set up as a terrorist by the FBI in a monumentally clumsy sting operation on the West Coast.

"Shooting's too good for him," a Tea Tweeter twitted. By "good" I presume the twitterer meant "humane." Indeed, another Foxie, Mike Huckabee, don't want no humane justice in his Amerika. "Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty," he told an interviewer.

Don't put away the knitting needles just yet, Ladies.  Dr. Guillotine assures us that his device can be made less humane simply by letting the blade rust and go blunt.

Laissez le bon temps rouler! Que leurs têtes rouler!

Or, as the journalist Jimmy Breslin once wrote, "Some guys can't stand the sight of no blood."

Look Who's Back from the Dead, and Making Magic Again

All's well with the world -- somewhere.

Somewhere flags are flying, and somewhere children smile; life's worth living somewhere, and somewhere toil's worthwhile.

For a few brief shining moments Sunday, somewhere was London and what was well was tennis.

On the banks of the Thames, in a big muffin of a building punctured with toothpicks to see if it was done, they staged a world championship of significant sorts, a round-robin shoot-out among the ten best players on the planet to see who'd be the last man standing at the end of the year.

Appropriately, the No. 1 ranked player in the world stood on one side of the court. His name is Rafael Nadal and at 24, he's as boyish and naively charming as he was when, at 19 and wearing knickers, he first burst on the scene beating men many years his senior and supposedly many points his better.

Even more appropriately, the man on the other side of the court was named Roger Federer, and this was the real Roger Federer, the man whose grace and gifts had transformed tennis from sport to art form.  This was not the shabby impostor who had sunk  to No. 3 in the world during a dismal 2010.  Some angel, it turned out, had rolled back the stone sealing his crypt and from it had emerged, after the U.S. Open, the man who floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee and did things on the tennis court that no man had done before him. These things included winning more Grand Slam  championships than anyone and doing so while pulling off on the fly shots so improbable that neither names for nor descriptions of them existed.

In a tense, important Grand Slam match against a Top Five opponent, he ran back for a lob so deep that not even the world's fastest human, Usain Bolt, would have tried to run it down.  Federer not only got there, but hit a shot back between his legs.  A shot that not only cleared the net, but did so with enough pace, spin and accuracy to score a clean winner.  He did this in a tense, important Grand Slam match not once, but twice -- in successive years.

Once I watched him practicing on a side court at Indian Wells, CA.  He was playing points against a favorite practice partner, Gustavo Kuerten, himself once one of the top three players in the game.  Kuerten, still no slouch, ran down a penetrating Federer approach shot to the backhand corner and launched a good defensive lob.  At what seemed like the last second, Federer decided to try something I had never seen before, and have not seen since, which I can only describe as an overhead drop shot. Rather than kicking into the stratosphere, as most good overheads do, this one struck the court and died a quiet but brilliant death.  Neither Kuerten, nor Maria Sharapova, who was waiting  to take the court next, nor any member of her entourage, nor any of Federer's, nor any of the tennis aficianados watching, nor I, had ever seen anything like it.  Shouts of amazement ensued, catcalls at the audacity of this unheard-of trick,  challenges that not even Federer could repeat such a phenomenon.  Roger called upon  Kuerten to serve him another lob, whereupon Federer hit exactly the same shot with exactly the same result.

Early on in London, though he never lost a set, one could not be certain if one were watching an impostor -- albeit a very, very good impersonator -- or the real Roger.  In one match he was winning points launched by 88 mph first serves, causing his opponent to break several racquets in frustration, but suggesting either an impersonator or a refabricated Federer who used wile and spin  rather than matchless skill.

Turns out it was the real Roger, but one with wile and spin and tricks the younger Super Roger  may or may not have had, but never needed.  Like the drop overhead.

The real Roger won the championship match, 6-3, 3-6, 6-1, granting the world's best player a glimmer of hope in the second set, then slamming the door with forehand winners, backhand winners, Edburgian volleys and Samprasian serves -- the kind of performance that only the maestro of the most complete game in tennis history could have mustered. Once, after breaking to win the second set, Nadal would have attacked Federer's backhand with massive topspin forehand drives until Roger's weaker stroke broke down.  Nadal chose exactly that strategy again Sunday.  Federer met the nuclear energy of Nadal's attack with topspin backhands even stronger than the missiles Nadal launched against him. 

"This," the rueful and ever classy Nadal said afterward, "was Federer at his best on his favorite surface.  Not much you can do against that, no?"

No. The ruling young monarch of tennis was only second best this day. The once and possibly future king has made it a rivalry again.

We need them both. Each is magnificent in his own way.  Nadal's youth and raw power.  Federer's grace and mastery of every nuance.  Both of them gracious and charming in victory or defeat.

And oh, such tennis.  Such wonderful, wonderful tennis.

 Welcome back, Roger.

"I cannot have spoiled Rafa's vacation today, " Federer said when accepting his trophy. "He has had a year most players only dream about."

One more very important tournament fast approaches: the first Grand Slam of 2011, the Australian Open.

Bring it on.

Can We talk Turkey About Big Oil and Our Military?

A most pleasant holiday in the company of the journalist who covers Oil, Big and Small, for a major news organization set me to musing.

Is there such a thing as Small Oil?

Having proved his mettle as the journalist covering the industry that extracts methane gas from coal beds, our Thanksgiving guest had been recently immersed in learning how his new field works.

Fortunately, he didn't talk much shop over the turkey and stuffing.  If he had, it would have been like having Stephen Hawking across the table talking quantum physics.  A bit over my head.

I know, for example, that a barrel of crude today costs $82.34 US, down 21 cents from the day before. But that's about it until the stuff, having been refined into fuel for my old pick-up truck, reaches the local gas pump, where it costs $2.61 per US gallon.  These things I understand even if they do involve numbers.  Everything else is a mystery and involves other, bigger numbers; enormous numbers; staggering numbers.  I do not handle big numbers well, which is one reason why I have never invited Stephen Hawking to dine with me on Thanksgiving Day.

My clumsy musings after our guest's occasional remarks about the Awl Bidness raised a plethora of questions.

The United States military is by far the world's largest consumer of petroleum.  The largest by so far that if you stood on the flight deck of the USS George Washington in the Yalu Sea and looked  toward the second biggest user, you'd need the Hubble telescope to see it as a speck in a nebula dwarfed by a black hole.  U.S. military consumption of oil is a very big number indeed.

Now, if you consider that each barrel consumed by the U.S. military  costs  $82.34, and do the multiplication, the result is a number so large that. . . . oh, my, that what? I suppose if you transmogrified the dollars into inches and imagined a coil of rope that long, you could dangle it from the tops of all the peaks in the Himalayas and still have enough rope left over to dangle from the highest building in Texas, which happens to be where our journalist friend works.

What kind of contracts do they have for all that military oil?  They must have contracts.  The captain of the George Washington doesn't just park next to a pump off the coast of South Korea and fill 'er up.  Somebody, probably in the Pentagon, has worked up a contract with somebody, probably in Texas, to determine how much of our tax money will be involved in filling up the aircraft carrier, and all the other things the military uses that run on gas, not to mention the oil to lubricate them and generate the energy that lights the Pentagon, and all sorts of other stuff.

What are all those contracts worth?  Who, if anyone, oversees the guy who negotiates them?  What relationship do they have, say, with the kind of money that Texicans like Tom DeLay launder?  Does Texas have a secret laundering process that cleanses money without leaving it all soggy and yukky? Or is this all funny money, like derivatives and toxic assets and Monopoly? Sometimes in places where lots and lots of money is involved, some people are tempted to do things that are, well, you might say, a wee bit shady.  Might that happen every now and then with military oil contracts?  Just asking. Then there's the entire matter of our foreign policy and whether there's a sort of Tinker to Evers to Chance connection between, oh, pick one . . . launching wars in the Middle East and the quantity of oil our military uses.  Just meandering, not even asking.  Back to smaller matters and numbers I can deal with.

I have concluded that there is such a thing as Small Oil, but it's relative.  Small Oil is  the gas that I pump into my pick-up.  I used to pump it from a place on Highway 28 near the Interstate.  It was the highest-priced gas in town but it was convenient.  Then a discount outfit moved in down the block and began selling gas 20 cents a gallon cheaper than my station.  Now my station has the cheapest gas in town, always beating the price of the discount guy down the street by a penny.

The company that makes the gas for my station had profits -- profits, mind you, not sales -- of 600 million dollars last year, which is Small Oil.  Big Oil doesn't even begin counting profits until they reach a billion or so.  Yet my station didn't even flinch when it cranked down its prices to match the discount competitor's.  What's 20 or 30 lousy pennies per gallon among friends?

If Small Oil has that much pricing leeway, and still makes a tidy profit (the CEO got a huge bonus last month), how much pricing leeway does Big Oil have?  Exxon Mobil is, after all, the most profitable corporation in the history of profit. As certified patriots with Support Our Troops stickers on all their tanker trucks, does Big Oil knock 20 or 30 cents a gallon off the going price for their military customers?  Probably not. 

Oil contracts must be different from other military contracts. Buying three or four hundred Stealth airplanes that will be obsolete in 10 or 12 years is one thing. You can always recycle the scrap metal, or whatever they're made of.  Sure, you get the occasional $1,000 hammer or $10,000 toilet seat but who, other than Russ Feingold, ever blinked an eye?  Small spuds, bud.

But when you talk about the biggest consumer of petroleum products on the whole bloody planet, and you're talking about $82.34 per barrel at the wellhead, you are talking serious money.

How serious?  Maybe our journalist friend will explain it next Thanksgiving.  Or the one after.

Wherein Dwells the Last Smidgeon of Hope for America

Hope springs eternal.  Could 2011 be "our" year?  I feel like a fan of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, who could reach the World Series but not win it.  "Wait Till Next Year" was a headline the Brooklyn Eagle published every October.

Now we have an historic opportunity to end the two-party system that has failed us so miserably. Not only should we form a true party of the left in the United States, but our liberal class should rally around its perfect choice to run for president: Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.  Russ, like millions of other Americans, needs a job and he's a perfect fit for the one in the Oval Office.

The only non-millionaire in the U.S. Senate lost his seat in the craziness  that we called the mid-term elections. The only potential Presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy who can't be bought, Feingold has the experience, integrity and temperament not just to be President, but to to be very good at it. When Kennedy stoked up his Presidential ambitions, he was so rich in his own right that no outside interest could afford to try to buy him.  Feingold, like Guernica, simply isn't for sale.  Don't even bother trying. Not that anyone would.  The richest, the most powerful, the most greedy among us are already devoted to bringing down Barrack Obama. No serious money will go to any other cause. Under the two-party system, all those dollars mean that the Republican nominee will be elected in 2012, even if the Republican nominee is someone as spectacularly ignorant, arrogant and unqualified as Sarah What's-Her-Name, the machine-gun Mama, wolf-killer and Murdoch-made TV star.

And so the last, best hope for reviving democracy in America is to form a third party now, nominate Russ Feingold and then put together something nationwide that clones what Russ did on his first Senate run. He had no money. He wasn't for sale to raise any. So he walked all over the state of Wisconsin knocking on doors and introducing himself to real voters.  If they elected him, he told them, he would be beholden only to their best interests.  Sometimes, like a parent, he would he would have to give them medicine that didn't taste very good, but it would always be in their best interests. Always. Alas, after the planes flew into the twin towers, Americans lost all sense of decency, logic and fairness.  They stopped swallowing Russ's good medicine that tasted bad and booted his ass out of Washington.

Perhaps Wisconsin's loss will be the country's gain.  Perhaps a handful of wealthy progressives like George Soros will put up the seed money to create a new political party, then bow out and turn it over to real people to build upon, doorbell by doorbell and penny by penny. Perhaps all those little people, real  citizens who unlike most of their fellow Murkins have retained the capacity to think, folks who realize that it's not the taste of the medicine but its healing powers that matter, individual and marginalized and near terminal frustration with their impotence against corporate wealth and  greed, the jobless, the millions still without health care, the recent graduates staggering under a load of student debt and the flesh-pecking of decadent lenders, the once middle-class workers whose homes have been plunged into foreclosure by the very bankers who ruined the economy, betrayed by both political parties and weeping with no one to hear, cynics now who once believed in something called The American Dream, bled dry and impoverished by endless war that endangers them rather than making them safer, aggrieved and angry with no one to tell their stories to,  homeless, helpless. . .

Perhaps these millions of little people will decide not to take it any more, to join the doorbell-ringers for Russ, to squeeze nickels and dimes out of already thin budgets for food and medicine and essentials, add them to the pennies  in the treasury of the new party of the left, and stage one last desperate populist movement to save American democracy.

Perhaps.

I tried the other day, in vain, to remember where I first saw the Zen-like slogan whose perspicacious ambivalence I have treasured for more than half a century.  "There is no solution," it said.  "Seek it lovingly."

Now I remember.  It was on a bumper sticker.  In Wisconsin.

Why Ol' Doc Randall Is Suing Janet Napolitano

Cousin Lige hadn't been out of Haysi in 15 years, nor out of sight of Big A mountain in more than 40.

You could wait another 40 and hitch up wild horses and you still couldn't drag Lige back into the outside world again.  Lige gets the hives when he's greatly agitated and Doc Randall says the current case is the worst Lige has ever had.

Blame Cousin Rhett, whose idea it was to haul Lige to the airport to fly out to California for Cousin Henry's funeral.  Lige and Henry were best friends growing up together over on Skillet Branch.  Which is the only reason Lige would even consider getting into an airplane, since his favorite form of transportation is Grandpa''s old haywagon with his grand-niece, Bethandra, driving the team and Lige consoling himself in the back from a Ball jar of "recipe."

But I digress.

"He's your best friend, Lige!" Rhett said over and over again on the way to the airport. Lige grumbled a lot at first, but finally clammed up and settled for silent sulking.  When they entered the terminal the first sign of hives showed up on his left forearm.  ""What the dam' hell is all these folks lined up fer?" he demanded.  "They givin' away free chickens up there?"

"They're lined up for the security check, Lige," Rhett said soothingly.  "Gonna make sure your airplane is safe from tare-ists."  Since Lige has no photo ID per se, Rhett had arranged for Sheriff Prosper to use his brand-new pre-owned Xerox machine to create a letter bearing Lige's image and Pros's signed statement that the Lige pictured on it was the same Lige who wanted to fly to California for his cousin's funeral and please let him pass even if he don't have a driver's license for the good and simple reason that he don't drive. After only a brief hassle with the first security officer they encountered, Lige and Rhett were allowed to continue to the next step in the security procedure.

"Put yer satchel on that there movin' belt," Rhett said.  "What fer?" Lige asked.  "So's they can take a pitcher of it and make sure there's no tare-ist weapons in there."  "Why don't they jist ast me?" Lige said.  "I know dam' well what's in there and what ain't."  "It's gummint rules," Rhett said.  "My Great Grampaw fit with Warshington at Valley Forge!" Lige sputtered.  "If the dam' gummint can't trust the word of a Sunderman, what the hell KIN they trust?"

A female security agent scuttled up to Lige with a little tray. "Please empty your pockets and place the contents on this tray along with your shoes," she said mechanically.

The hives busted out all over Lige's arms, face and neck.  ""I'm going to a goldam' funeral," he barked, "and I ain't gonna dishonor Cousin Henry by goin' there barefoot.  Besides, these costed $16 from the Sears catalogue and I ain't trustin' 'em to no damned stranger!"

The woman blew a whistle.  Four male security agents, each of whom looked like a first-round draft choice for the Steelers' defensive line, appeared from nowhere.  Soon they were joined by three soldiers armed with machine guns, hand guns,  night scopes, day scopes, radar, hand grenades, walkie-talkies, riot masks and batons.

Turns out one of the soldiers was from Abington.  "Let me handle this," he said, and helped Lige to his feet.  "This-here stuff," he told Lige, in a conspiratorial tone of voice, "is sort of like the new rules about no guns in the tavern over to Clinchville." The soldier winked.  "Gotta humor them if you wanna sip the 'shine. Now, let's see what's in them pockets."

Reluctantly, Lige emptied his pockets: 42 cents in coin, jacknife, sharpening stone, the key to the rusty gate at the family cemetery on Buck Mountain. . . .

"Oops," the soldier said, taking the knife.  "They don't allow knives on airplanes no more, old-timer," he said.  "Jes' like no guns in the tavern."

"What the Sam Hell am I gonna do on that airplane if I can't whittle?" Lige asked the soldier, but his voice lacked conviction. He knew they were outnumbered. "Take a long nap," the soldier advised.

"Good idee," Lige said.  "Kin I git on the dam' airplane now?"

One of the security guys answered: "You still have to pass through the metal detector, have your security photograph taken. . ."

"Y'all just seen my pitcher on Sheriff Prosper's letter!" he bellowed.  Meaning to be helpful, the Virginia soldier explained, "This here is a special picture, Old Timer.  It shows you without clothes so they can be sure you ain't smuggling tare-ist weapons on board."

"BUCK FUCKIN' NEKKID!!" Lige screeched.  "What kinda preeverts are you!"  Now his hives had hives.

"Calm down," the soldier said.  One of the security hulks spoke up. "If you don't want an x-ray picture, we can do a hand search."  He grabbed Lige's crotch with his NFL-sized hand.

You could have heard Lige's scream all the way back in Haysi.  "Get this goddam queer offen me," he bellowed, over and over again.

They set his bond at $10,000.  Rhett finally met it by letting them hold the title to his brand-new Buick.

Doc Randall doubts he'll ever completely cure Lige's hives.  Problem is, just about the time they start to clear up, somebody asks Lige about his airport experience.

"You know, Medicare don't cover this," Doc keeps reminding Lige.  "Don't pester me about it," Lige comes back. "Pester them damned preeverts at the airport what started it."

How the Democrats Killed Democracy

With the death of the political left in the United States, the death of democracy became inevitable. Democracy, after all,  is not just a liberal idea, but a radically liberal one; it cannot  endure absent a viable political left.

Twenty-five centuries ago, governments were by dynastic monarchies, shamanistic religious dictatorships or warlords.  The Athenians came up with the radical liberal notion of government of, by and for its citizens. Even this revolutionary improvement on previous systems was not without  flaw.  When  Rome succeeded Greece as the dominant power in the civilized world, it replaced direct democracy with another radical liberal concept: representative democracy.

Guided by the Enlightenment philosophers they so admired, the founders of the American democracy sought to establish a republic in which the spectrum of political thought could endure not just as a system of checks and balances upon themselves, but also one which inherently militated against the excesses of power that could plunge it into anarchy, oligarchy, monarchy or military dictatorship. It was a system that borrowed much from Rousseau's Social Contract, which itself can only function under a rule of law.

The two-party system that evolved within the republic of the founding fathers mandated a left, a right and a center of fluctuating but roughly equal strength.  The balance of power would always lie with the center, but balance could exist only if both left and right remained viable.

But the Democratic party deserted its base on the left and the base failed to reassemble around a new political organization. (The fatal weakness of a two-party democracy.) Today, the dwindling handful of liberal Democrats holding public office are not merely powerless within their party; they are treated with contempt by their party and its man in the White House.

The man in the White house wears a different party label than his predecessor, but his presidency is merely a continuation of most of the worst of the far right policies of the Bush II administration.

When the Republican House of Representatives has finished with Dr. Kidglove and the Timidocrats of the Senate two years hence, perhaps even the American electorate will realize that the democratic republic of the Founding Fathers is no more, its Constitution reduced to the status of, say, the Oath of the Tennis Court.

The democratic rule of law  began with the Athenian shift from law as something "imposed" --thesmoi -- to something rooted in the people's social traditions and ideals -- nomoi . It came to us through the Enlightenment via the Magna Carta and our mother country's system of common law.  Talk about radical liberal documents! The Magna Carta, as Winston Churchill put it, gave us "a law which is above the King and which even he must not break."

In the United States, the framers passed on to us the idea of a "Supreme Law of the Land," which was above everyone -- President, Chief Justice, member of Congress. It brought us, directly from the Magna Carta, the supreme laws of habeas corpus, posse comitatus and, enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, due process.

But the Democrats of Congress, most of whom had long since abandoned the liberal principles of government in which our republic was born, ceded to George W. Bush powers that even the King of England doesn't have: superiority over the law itself.  Now the president could order warrantless surveillance  of citizens; detention without charge or trial (due process), and criminal torture of detainees.  He could boast about it in print without fear of being brought to justice.  His successor could take his imperial presidency to new extremes and arrogate to himself the right to order the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens.

Dr. Kidglove has, in the name of "compromise," extended many other violations of the Social Contract in both domestic and foreign affairs.  He will permit continuation of tax policies that favor the very rich over the other 98 per cent of the citizenry.  He will allow further corruption of an already bad "health care reform" law.  He will preside over the devastation of Social Security, further empowerment of huge corporations and the elimination of only those "earmarks" that help people rather than business, supposedly to reduce the government's fiscal deficit.  He will continue to fight the illegal wars that caused the deficit and will ask for more and more funds to fight them and more and more American toops to bleed and die in them.

He will do all of these things, and more, because there is no political left in the United States to contest him.

There is no democracy here.

Iowa, Apple Pie, Heroism and a Book of Lies

George W. Bush is making the rounds of talk shows peddling his book.

On Tuesday, Bush's successor will place the Congressional Medal of Honor around the neck of Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, the first living American to receive the nation's highest award for valor since the Vietnam war.

What webs we weave.

As for Bush's book, I can only endorse a friend's suggestion that we all go into a local bookstore and move a copy or two from its display shelf to the place where it belongs -- the crime section.

I don't know Sgt. Giunta but I know his grandfather, Bob Judge.  Someone had to coin the phrase "as American as apple pie" just to describe Bob Judge.

High school football hero, married a cheerleader.  Worked his entire life at the absolutely typical American middle class occupation -- barber (just like the father of "Charlie Brown" of the comic strip, "Peanuts.")  Loved baseball, steak, riding horses (in blue jeans across dusty roads next to cornfields and apple groves, not the fancy-pants kind of riding that's called "equestrian.") 

Bob's a lung cancer survivor, like me.  He wasn't a smoker.  What, I asked, when I called to wish him well, caused the cancer?  "The doctors don't know," he said.  "They're intrigued to find out.  Personally, I think it's from all the ribs I've broken falling off horses in my lifetime."  Tough guy.  What would you expect from someone who was an all-conference tackle -- on offense and defense -- in high school?  Guy who lifted weights to stay fit and loved to play "burn out," and if you didn't grow up in the midwest half a century ago, that's a version of "having a catch" where you throw the ball back and forth as hard as you can, trying to make the other fellow's hand sting like hell  when he catches it.

Bob is a lifelong resident of Clinton, Iowa, a town that, like Bob, is apple pie American. His wife, Molly, was the town's women's tennis champion in her younger years.  Won the tournament on the old high school courts before the high school burned down.

Bob and Molly raised six fine kids, worked hard to educate them.  Rosemary, Sgt. Giunta's mother, is a school teacher in Hiawatha, Iowa, although Salvatore was born when she and Steven still lived in Clinton (1985).

Just over three years ago, in a place in Afghanistan nicknamed "death valley," Sal Giunta ran through a hail of gunfire to rescue two wounded comrades. One of the men he rescued, Sgt. Joshua Brennan, and another comrade, Spec. Hugo Mendoza, died in the action.

"I didn't try to be a hero," Sal told an embedded reporter with his unit.  "I ran to the front because Brennan was there.   All of my feelings are with my friends.  I have sweat more, cried more, bled more in this country than in my own."

"Death valley's" real name is Korengal.  "These people," Sal said of the Korengalis, "will never leave this valley.  They were here long before I could even fathom an Afghanistan."

The war George Bush started had been dragging on for seven long years when Salvatore Giunta did the deed that won him the nation's highest military honor.  Now, more than three years later, American forces have withdrawn from the Korengali, but elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan other young Americans continue to sweat, to cry and to bleed.

Brennan. Mendoza. Giunta. Cunningham. Gallardo. Eckrode.  None will ever hold high office in this land.  But it's their tears, their sweat, their blood that fuels the wars Bush started.

And it's the taxes of Bob Judge, Steve Giunta and their children and their children's children that will pay down, ever so slowly if at all, the enormous monetary debt of these wars, still dragging on in their 11th year.

Somebody paid George Bush $9 million in advance for his book.  That's probably more than the combined lifetime earnings of Bob Judge and Steve Giunta.

But not enough to pay for the tears, the sweat and the blood of Sal Giunta and his comrades in arms. Not even the Medal of Honor can pay that toll.

Pay No Attention to the Tacky Draperies

There's a lot not to miss about the ol' whorehouse.  I look in on it every now and then to make certain this is still true.

It is.

Take the Old Gray Lady herself, the one that boasts about having all the news that's fit to print.

Here are the headline and first paragraph of the lead article in her Sunday national edition:

      While Warning About Fat,
       U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales

       When sales of Domino’s Pizza were lagging, a government agency stepped in with 

       advice: more cheese. This is the same government that, for health reasons, is advising

       less cheese. 

Is this the weightiest issue you could find for Page One?  The next couple of paragraphs read like a commercial for the pizza chain. 

 C'mon man!

* * *

The other big flap in the media for the last couple of days is the suspension, without pay, of Keith Olbermann by MSNBC. The suspension was imposed ostensibly because, by contributing to the campaign funds of three Democratic candidates in the recent election, Olbermann violated a policy of NBC News. I never for a moment believed that what Keith Olbermann does (or Rachel Maddow, or that matter, even though I am a fan of both) is "news."  What they do is provide an antidote to what Fox News does --which isn't "news" either. All of these people are entertainers with propagandist agendas.  Contemporary events provide a framework for their entertainments.  It's all in good fun and some of the opinions expressed by Olbermann and Maddow, in particular, have merit intellectually and ethically.

But it strikes me as unrealistic to try  to hold propagandists to the same standards as journalists. When I was reporting or editing news, I made it a point of pride in my craft not to donate to politicians, political parties, or special interests.  I honestly don't recall if such donations were prohibited by the organizations I worked for.

Some of my colleagues went so far as to refuse to register by party affiliation; some even refused to vote.  But we were doing our best to do real journalism, which virtually nobody on television even attempts any more. So what's the fuss?  Are we supposed to be surprised and shocked to learn that Keith supports Democrats?  Or that what Fox offers as "news" is pure Republican propaganda?

C'mon man!

* * *

The news columns of the Wall Street Journal once contained some of the best print journalism around, as if to compensate for the distortions and dishonesty of the paper's editorial and op-ed pages.  But in the days before this election, the Journal's news department joined those of the New York Times and other media in serious treatments of the Tea Party as a spontaneous grassroots movement.  Unlimited funding by the Koch Brothers (big oil), and a blueprint drawn up by Frank Luntz and Fred Malek (big lies) -- this is grassroots?

C'mon man!

* * *

One of the Sunday talk shows featured a discussion, presented as "journalism," with Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of what the GOP calls "tax reform."  Under this plan, the taxes of the 20 per cent of Americans with the lowest incomes would increase 12.3%.  The 20% of Americans with the next-lowest incomes would increase  by 7.7%. The next  20%, in ascending order, of American incomes would be taxed at a 4.5% higher rate.  The next 20% would see see their tax rates rise by 2% (people in roughly the $50,000 to $90,000 a year bracket). Got that? The eight out of ten Americans with incomes under $100,000 would have their taxes increased.  But the next wealthiest 5% of Americans, who average $148,000 per year income, would have their tax rate cut by 1.6%. The four per cent of Americans who earn between $178,000 and $400,000 per year, would get a 4.2 per cent tax cut.  And the wealthiest one per cent of Americans, whose average income is $1.4 million per year, would receive a 15% tax cut. Nobody on the panel of "journalists" talking with Mr. Ryan found anything exceptional in all of this.

C'mon man.

The Mother Country Raises the Bar

My London correspondent reports that a recent election for a seat in Parliament has been invalidated and will be re-run.  The reason is that an investigating commission found that some of the things the winning candidate said about his opponent were untrue!

Your Pianist and a band of co-conspirators have begun their own investigation to determine how many of the recent election contests in the United States would pass such an honesty test.

Apparently the same question about the colonies came up in England, too, because our London correspondent suggested looking at a city council race in Minneapolis, where it was rumoured that neither candidate had lied about the other.

That contest, in the city's 11th ward, was won by a former marketing services consultant named John Quincy.  Your Pianist is skeptical that anyone trained in American marketing techniques could go an entire day, let alone an entire election campaign, without uttering a falsehood.  However, the investigation continues and no smoking gun has yet been found.

Later reports from London hinted that it wasn't Minneapolis but Cleveland that had a city council race in which no lies were told.  Once again, however, skepticism is in order.  A centerpiece of the Cleveland council's 2010-2011 programme is to expand the city's automated trash collection system to another 25,000 residents.  In a city with that much trash to collect, surely it's likely that at least some of the waste would be leftover lies from the electioneering.  Political billboards alone could account for the excess garbage.

If not Minneapolis or Cleveland, then where in American might there have been an election in which the candidates uttered only truth about their opponents (or themselves)?  We can immediately rule out Chicago, Detroit and the entire state of Texas. (In El Paso they even falsified the wording of an initiative question.) Add Iowa, where they tossed out three judges who ruled that gay and lesbian citizens have the same rights as heterosexual ones.

As a resident of New Mexico, I can attest that no lie-free race took place here.  And since the prevailing winds are from the west, the foul odors prior to Nov. 2 erased any doubt about Arizona, as well. 

As word spread of the Pianist's Diogenes Commission and its hunt for an American election free of falsehoods, tips from citizens poured in.  So far the most promising one is that an election in Murdock, Neb., took place without  so much as a fib being uttered. Our investigators will look into this as soon as they find Murdock, Neb.

Lawyers for party organizations in several states have issued challenges to the findings of the Diogenes Commission even before there are any findings.  "One man's lie is another man's Texas textbook," a Little Rock Republican lawyer said. "We're splitting etymological hairs here. Politicians in Arkansas can't even agree on what the definition of 'is' is."

You can see what we're up against.

Pacifying a Disputatious Tummy -- Up to a Point

The late Satchel Paige, baseball pitcher, was perhaps better known for his aphorisms than for his considerable prowess throwing baseballs.

One of his rules for living went something like this: "If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts."

I've had a sour stomach since Tuesday.  It's sunny here on the patio and the chaise is a right comfortable place to lie down.

So here goes:

Chocolate ice cream.

Sea breezes.

Mountain streams.

Brubeck, Mulligan, Baker . . . .

Federer' s fluid style.

A real martini. (One olive.)

Montana's grace under pressure.

Kennedy's White House parties.

Sondheim lyrics.

Real vichyssoise.

The cubism of Picasso, Braque or Feininger.

Key lime pie.

Chicken at a pre-concert picnic on the grass.

Ansel Adams photographs.

Symphony orchestras playing Beatles music, especially Hey, Jude.

Barefoot in the sand at evening.

The Maine coast.

Porter.

The Oregon  coast, especially on the last good surfing day in October.

A president who doesn't sweat, once again extending the hand of compromise to. . . .

Jessie, fetch me the Tums!  Ol' Satch should have stuck to baseball.

Alas, Prof. Fehring, We Still Play the Same Sour Notes

Prof. Rudolph Fehring of the University of Cincinnati music school was a perfectionist.  If, say, the oboe hit a particularly bad clunker, he'd hold his head in his hands to fight back the tears. "And they shot men like Lincoln!" he would wail.

The professor came to mind after all these years as I reviewed the election returns this morning.  No particular surprises. "And they defeated men like Feingold!" Same idea.

Not much will change in Washington, D.C.  There'll be a tide of clunkers, and not just from the oboes.  The names in the roll call will change, especially in the House, but the same people are still running the country and none of them received a single vote yesterday. They simply bought the election and the candidates who won it.

We still have a kakistocracy; it is simply a bit stronger now.

I leave it to the historians to debate  exactly when we crossed the line from republic to kakistocracy.  That would be important only if we were a people who learned from history rather than dooming ourselves to repeat it.

As the shrug du jour in the losers' locker rooms of American sport puts it, "It is what it is."  We are what we are.

You think the Bush Bust was bad?  Soon it will be 1930 all over again.

Think the Bill of Rights has been heavily trod upon?  Soon it will be 1984 --the book, not the year.

Thought it was a real kick poking fun at Obamacare?  Wait till you get a taste of Boehnercare, Grandma.

After ten years of spilt blood and spiraling debt, are you a wee bit tired of war?  Try forever on for size.

The very rich will get very much richer.  The poor will get poorer.  Our kids will sit in the rickety rocker on the front porch of their sagging shack and ask, "Remember when there was a middle class?"  Millions of Americans will die needlessly because they couldn't afford basic health care.  Our teeth will rot and so will our society. 

One nation, under surveillance.  Don't even think about building a new mosque . . . anywhere.  Love it or leave it.  Support our troops.  Taxed enough already. Climate change?  "Them ain't facts.  Give us facts."

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Thoughts After Thanking a Road Knight Not Named Vladimir

Even when I was a relatively strong and healthy whippersnapper, tire-changing wasn't my strong suit.

Now as a geezer recovering from hip replacement surgery, it seemed like an impossible task.  I'd have called for road service assistance but my cell phone was dead and the charger was in another vehicle.

So I took a deep breath, rummaged around for the jack and tire wrench, and set about loosening the lug nuts on the wheel with the damaged tire.  This was not on the list of recommended activities for new hip rehab.

And so when a big rig stopped in front of me on the shoulder of the Interstate, and the driver approached me with a big smile and "Need help?" I was ready to believe in Santa Claus and guardian angels.

He was husky, happy and obviously foreign-born: his limited English was heavily accented with what sounded to me like Eastern European overtones. 

He finished the task at hand in no more than 10 minutes.  I proffered a thank-you payment.  He recoiled from it.  "No!  No!" he said.  I thanked him profusely and asked his name.  I could not repeat, let alone spell, what he said.

For some reason I cannot articulate I'll always think of him as "Vladimir."  But the name he said didn't sound like that, either.

Saved by an immigrant.  I hope he's legal.  In this part of the country, that's no better than a 50-50 hope.

I got to thinking about the fierce anti-immigrant sentiment around here, especially during this electioneering season. 

I've been close to some of the Tea Party ugliness about immigrants, particularly in the wake of the infamous new Arizona law.

It occurred to me that one"Vladimir" is worth more to this country in terms of human values than 20 or 30 of the placard-carrying bigots in the Tea Party Crowds.

But that's a hasty judgment.  After review in the replay booth, make that read 50 or 60 bigots.

Real Life in the U.S.A.: One Big Tea Party

Let's talk about numbers:

Rank of the United States among nations of the world: No. 6 in "innovation-based competetiveness," but 40th in rate of change in the last ten years.  Eleventh among industrialized nations in high school graduation rate.  Sixteenth in college completion rate.  Twenty-second in broadband internet access.  Twenty-fourth in life expectancy at birth.  Twenty-seventh in college degrees in science or engineering.  Forty-eighth in quality of K-12 science and math educational achievement.

More numbers:

One of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned NOTHING in 2009.

In that same period, 74 Americans earned more than $50 million; their total income increased from $91 million in 2008 to $519 million in 2009.  These 74 Americans earned $10 million a week; their total earnings alone equaled the total earnings of the lowest-paid 19 million Americans -- one in eight of us.

At least 22 million healthy, employable Americans are without work.  Unemployment benefits for more than half of them have run out.  Republicans refused to allow a vote on extending their benefits before the congressional recess.

Write these numbers down.  Take them into the voting booth with you next Tuesday.

Now consider some real people.

B., the son of a disabled worker without a job, worked two jobs and took out loans to get his college degree.  He graduated cum laude in 2009 with two majors.  He has been unable to get a job in either of his major fields.  He's selling paint.  His student loan promissory notes have been "turned over" twice and are now in the hands of one of the leading contributors to the economic meltdown of 2008-2009.  Each time he's late with a payment he's socked with a17% late fee.

J. who made a decent living for 30 years operating a little motel on the waterfront in a resort area sold out to a big-time developer.  He received $40,000 cash and three units in the new high rise the developer was putting up on his valuable oceanfront property.  He moved into one and took out mortgages on the other two, which he intended to sell to help meet his obligations as sole support of a widowed daughter and two toddler grandchildren.  The units didn't sell.  He's been foreclosed.  He's penniless and so are the daughter and grandkids.

M. quit the corporate rat race five years ago to start his own small business.  There was no credit available for his venture; he raised capital by mortgaging his home and borrowing his 401(k).  Working night and day, seven days a week, he and his wife gradually built the business.  He had 27 employees and a good lifestyle when the Bush bust hit.  He has lost his business and his home; his 27 employees are long gone.  He and his wife and stepchild were healthy when business was good and he had health insurance for himself and his workers.  After the crash his wife required surgery and costly aftercare; his stepson was hit by a drunk driver with good lawyers, who are successfully warding off a trial in his lawsuit to recover medical expenses and lost time from work. 

These are real people.  I know them personally.  They are good people.

Better people than, say, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, or any other multi-millionaire genius on Wall Street, or the fool CEO of BP who was given a golden parachute after his monumental display of incompetence during the Great Oil Spill.

American exceptionalism.  Ain't it wonderful?