The Dark Side of the Moon 1998-2003: Observing America

By Jim Freeman

About The Dark Side of the Moon Series

The Dark Side of the Moon series is a chronological collection of observations on social, political and occasionally even personal subjects.

Jim Freeman's views of the American scene are salted with irony and lightly peppered by humor, a relief from the unending rants of the far left or far right and reasonably balanced by common sense. They're here as Freeman wrote and published them at the time, unedited and without the benefit of hindsight.

These books are food for thought and Freeman encourages readers to cut into them - use and abuse these books, dog-ear the pages, mark up with highlighter and write in the margins. Make them relevant, make them yours to refer to content that particularly pleased or infuriated you.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a time-machine that brings the blur of events into focus and context. Mark Twain said "Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." Jim Freeman uncovers that dark side and strives to shine light on it.

About the 1998-2003 Book
(Volume 1 of the 5 Volume Series)

This first 1998-2003 segment of The Dark Side of the Moon moves from the death of Princess Diana to Shock and Awe, the years that led America from its version of a fairy-tale princess to what Saddam Hussein would have called 'the mother of all fairy-tales.'

What else was going on when Bill Clinton took time away from balancing the budget and paying down the debt to embarrass his family and supporters? Much of the writing on the wall for what was to come appeared before 9-11? What were the scattered concerns of the nation while all that war-planning was going on from an undisclosed location? The Dark Side of the Moon brings context to those events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937674243

Book preview

Timing Is Everything

From 1997, but included here

Well, Princess Diana will be missed, a young woman of great charm and an icon of her times if there ever was one. But having said that and having read and re-read every detail of her last month among us, I am left with musings that speak more to the timing of her death than the fact itself.

For, having been snatched from us in her thirty-fourth year and prior to rather than after her remarriage, the princess has assured herself of an immortal place in our memories, alongside John Kennedy, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon. We needn’t watch her grow old, remarry badly and perhaps for a number of times, in essence do the things that most of us are bound to do given enough time. The lessons are there. Jackie Kennedy gleamed ever so much more brightly than Jacqueline Onassis and there was something of those long-lens shots among the Greek islands that smacked of a national heritage being dragged around by its hair. It didn’t last all that long at any rate, but Jacqueline was a long time winning her way back to Jackie. Even so, she found the price was seclusion, a lifetime behind darkened limousine windows and sunglasses.

When speculating on the mystique of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall made the observation that we were never forced to watch him grow old. There are those who do that beautifully, Bacall among them, but it’s tough. Tough to live up to a Jimmy Stewart or Katherine Hepburn, we like our icons to match their billing and are merciless when they fail in the human ways of human lives. Liz Taylor and Marlon come to mind.

Princess Diana has had her mountains to climb as well, what with eating disorders, un-marrying a man very nearly impossible to un-marry, raising her sons with values that were her own rather than institutional and, in the meanwhile, living a life that brought her satisfaction. By all accounts (and accounts are all we’re allowed), it was beginning to work for her. We are told that this man with whom she died made a difference in her life, that his family welcomed her with warmth she had never known in family life, not as a child or a princess. We needn’t be told that she was fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as the queen of hearts of her nation, for the evidence is there.

But then what?

The then what could only have been an endless struggle with reality in an unrealistic world. Her every win would have had to be taken, as none would be allowed and each in some small or large way must find itself posted at the expense of the crown. One can argue long and hard about the relevancy of the crown in a modern world, but it is there and public patience is not for the long battle. The long battle was sure to ask a price too heavy for either side.

Diana is gone, gone a winner with flashing smile intact, with her credentials impeccably and almost unbelievably in order, with her life perhaps for the first time firmly and satisfactorily in control. Timing is everything. She will be missed, but the young princess need never be an embarrassment.

Bill Clinton – When Good Men Are Silent

March, 1998

The evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when opinions must be voiced. Men as in mankind, rather than not women. An American writer in Prague, I watch our president twist in the wind---a breeze perhaps of his own making, but still merely a breeze, a zephyr of his humanity and yours and mine as well. I wish above all things, not to be a good man fallen silent.

It seems we have become a trap-setting nation, of kitchen mice and presidents. We are as well a media-led nation of followers, not the hounds on scent we believe ourselves to be, but sheep following whatever Judas-goat is provided for us and no matter its credentials. The current model, with too many years and too many millions on his hands, failed to find the crime he was sent for and settled for whatever his mousetrap provided. Mr. Starr parodies the song, ‘when I’m not near the crime I’m sent for, I send for the crime I’m near.’

He finally has what he needs, a president gut-shot with a bullet that will bring him down. What a nightmare. For Clinton? Yes certainly, but far more for us as a nation.

‘We have a right to a president who tells the truth,’ bray the sheep. Indeed we do and yet we are a nation of the small lie, the half-truth, the carefully worded, and we clothe our misstatements in smugness. We are after all, faithful to our wives, honest with our children and truthful on our resume’. Bloated from our own dinner-table and unable to shelter the homeless or feed the hungry, the big issues confound us and we fall like slathering dogs on the small issue that tripped up our fallen president. Yes, I know he’s a faulted man. So am I.

Diane Feinstein recently declined to run for the governorship of California, unwilling to put herself or her family through the unending scrutiny of running for and then holding the office. Lee Iacocca and Colin Powell, both considered to be men who could have had the presidency for the taking, said no for similar reasons. Where will our future statesmen be found in such a climate? It takes guts to be a politician and courage to be a statesman and these may well be times of all guts and too little courage. Perhaps these times of our own manufacture will prove the presidency takes more of both than any credible candidate is willing to offer.

I hope not. I pray not, but the good men among us are silent.

Bill Gates, Hand-Wringing and Soul-Searching

March, 1998

My grin begins to broaden when I read of the hand-wringing, soul-searching and committee-meeting going on over my good friend Bill Gates. I say ‘good friend’ in the same way I might call to mind Thomas Jefferson or Henry Ford, a friend in the metaphoric sense of someone who has done me well. Let me hasten to add, I own not a single share of Microsoft, darn the luck.

Congress has put him in the investigative chair between two of his competitors, to disprove if he can, that he is the reincarnation of John D. Rockefeller. Congress likes to do these things between flights back home to raise money from all three companies represented at the table. Picking on the largest is good ‘home folks press,’ the pointed finger and arched eyebrow is very senatorial. But they’re not all that likely to fiddle with a good thing and Bill’s running a good thing.

Roll back with me to those exciting days of yester-year, the early days of automobiles, the last invention with anywhere near the impact of the computer age. Those early Packards and Peerlesses all had different ‘operating systems’ as well. They steered with levers, tillers or steering-wheels located left, right or center. Powered by steam, electricity, gasoline or kerosene, they drove with gears or belts or chains if they drove at all. Just like my tinkery, blinkery computer, they often left you by the side of the road.

Finally, after twenty years or so the ‘standard’ developed. Steering wheel left and a uniform brake, clutch and accelerator layout as well as transmissions that shifted similarly. Car sales took off with this standard configuration of ‘operating system’ and automobiles went on to change our nation and our lives.

We harried computer owners have been too long in the same ‘horseless carriage’ phase of technology, our desktops and laptops so proprietary in their operating systems that they all speak a language foreign to one another. Manufacturers made sure we were chained to their product and severely punished should we wander. Levers versus wheels and it would still be levers versus wheels if Gates hadn’t given us common language.

‘Apples and oranges’ you say and you are right. The parallel is not exact and yet it suffices. No single company owns the configuration by which we steer and run our cars, licensing it to the manufacturers. But my friend Bill gave me what Apple and IBM and the rest refused to give me, and I suffered and my business languished and my success with girls all but dried up because of it.

‘Enough,’ I cried and Bill heard me.

Microsoft didn’t grow to make Gates the wealthiest man in the world by subterfuge or monopoly. It grew because you and I were desperate for a system that would put the Compaq and Dell and IBM and Hewlett Packard steering wheel on the same side. Windows allowed us beleaguered consumers to drive the machine we bought, out of the dealership, with some degree of confidence and we slapped down our money for the pleasure. It’s the American way.

Apple ignored that opportunity, opting to go it alone with a unique operating system that users loved and upon which Windows was based. But they wouldn’t share, wanted to make sure their buyers couldn’t drive another model. Stamped their foot and took their toys on home. The cost to their long term survival of that proprietary decision is still an open question.

There will be more winners and losers, more Microsofts and Apples in the coming years, but the man we’ve yanked so gleefully before the congress has drawn the ire of his competitors the same way Henry Ford did. Gates produced a better product at a better price in a time when others in the industry thought arrogance could carry the day. And like Henry Ford, he’s driven the price of his product lower every year. What a monopolistic thing to do.

The path the world beat to his door may take still another direction in a year or two, an unexpected left turn that could yet come out of someone’s garage or from a competitor. But in the meanwhile, grinning from the sidelines and cheering them all on, I’ll still be typing these thoughts on my Macintosh Performa and winging them off on Netscape Navigator.

Car Alarms in the Night

March, 1998

It went off at two-thirty in the morning, a car alarm somewhere on my block and I woke, rolled over and tried to get back into the dream I was having, but no luck. They’re supposed to have a timed shut-off, but perhaps this was an old model, perhaps I didn’t care, perhaps wanted to go out and demolish the offending car with a baseball bat, perhaps, perhaps and I finally got up to make coffee. I’m weary of the noise that doesn’t come on little cat feet, but bursts at me from car alarms, amplified music outside stores and the scream of ambulance drivers on their way to Dunkin’ Donuts.

The coffee led me to my ‘follow the money’ theory of things that make my life less agreeable and there’s money in stolen cars. Not only the money the car thief or chop-shop makes, but the really big dough made by allowing them their trade.

I sketched in my mind the winners in this absurdity; the sellers of those colorful steel rods stretched across steering-wheels, of car alarms, auto insurance, auto-glass shops, car-radio retailers, banks and loan companies, perhaps even the drug dealer a couple neighborhoods away. But primarily the auto dealers and manufacturers, those guys for sure. It’s a chump-change deal for the retailers, mere tens of millions. A little more, probably hundreds of millions for the insurance companies, allowed as they are to fix rates to loss ratios. But it’s billions for the automakers and maybe that’s why they don’t have an interest in theft-proofing their product.

A stolen car sets in motion a renewable resource of profit as loans are paid off by insurance and new cars are purchased at ever increasing prices. Their owners load them with safeguards, looking worriedly over their shoulders on the way into the grocery store.

The losers are a much shorter list, just you and me. But we pay for it, all those billions have nowhere to come from but our pockets.

I have a friend with a car that customizes itself for any of four drivers, just by the touch-code buttons after the key is inserted. Ain’t computers great? The seat and steering-wheel position, inside and outside mirrors, even the desired temperature return to memorized preferences for the short wife, tall husband and intermediate kids. How come a similar device can’t lock the transmission, freeze all the brakes and deactivate the entire electrical system until a magnetic card and pin-code are registered in a slot in the dashboard?

Your and my bank card and credit cards have had this system for years, but perhaps that’s because there aren’t so many winners in bank and credit card fraud. Is that too cynical, a little too wired on this should-be-sleeping-hours coffee?

If it seems I have painted the winners in this scenario as co-conspirators in some dark scheme, perhaps they are by virtue of benign neglect, looking-the-other-way when fixing a fixable problem removes billions from the sales sheets. The quiet lobbying of the winners quite easily accepts that it’s technologically beyond their ken to manufacture theft-proof cars. We poor old individual losers, the folks who put up the money, don’t have much lobbying power and merely pound our pillows when the alarms go off.

But the day will come when Toyota or BMW or some other foreign manufacturer will solve the solvable problem. They will offer the theft-proof car as a sales incentive and I’ll be among the first in line to plunk down my money. Then you watch how quickly the industry catches up and maybe we’ll all sleep better.

Hands in Cookie Jars

March, 1998

It seems sometimes if we can’t toss the drug dealer in the slammer and throw away the key, we unmercifully clobber the common thief. Frustrated by real crime, we lash out at what is hardly crime at all. Two items from my paper set me off in that philosophical direction and it’s a great ocean in which to sail---the wind seems always to be up.

The first is the infamous ruling by Judge Jean Cookie Rheinheimer, upholding a 26 year to life in prison sentence that Kevin Weber picked up under California’s ‘three strike’ law. Life for stealing four chocolate chip cookies. The judge’s nickname isn’t really Cookie, I laid that on her myself and apologize right now for my lack of proper respect for the bench. Many two-time losers have been packed away for life for the most minor of crimes by the likes of Judge Rheinheimer. So many in fact, that the Supreme Court in ‘96 held that judges were allowed ‘leniency’ in the enforcement of three strike sentences.

In the spirit of that leniency, the judge held that Weber was ‘typical of the defendant the people and legislature had in mind’ when they drafted the law. The prosecutor at Weber’s hearing to reduce his sentence added the incredible statement that If we wouldn’t have had an audible alarm, we probably would have found money stuffed in his pockets. Well, Al Capone probably was the head of the Chicago prohibition mob as well, but in those days we didn’t sentence for ‘probably.’

The second item catching my eagle-eye was the revelation that our late president, Lyndon Johnson, bugged the office and phone of his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. It seems ol’ Lyndon was scared to death that Hubert would part ways with him over the Vietnam war---most everybody was at the time. Land o’goshen, that Hubert was a wiley critter and might use it to run against him and that was reason enough to bring in the FBI wire-tappers.

The lovely part of that story is that the FBI went ahead and did it with nary a ripple of conscience over law. It takes a judge’s order to tap a phone and ol’ Lyndon could probably whistle up a passel of judges on even his worst day, but he didn’t even bother and J. Edgar Hoover didn’t trouble himself either. Those are crimes, either one of which, by (take your pick) the President of the United States or the Director of the FBI, outdistances stealing chocolate chip cookies by a country mile. Even in a fixed horserace, illegal wiretapping comes in first.

So it seems we’re overfed these days on paranoia. California becomes so outraged at criminals who get off time after time after time, that they enact well meaning but flawed law, in order to pack away for life any three-timer, poor idiot and seasoned criminal alike. And I grant, you Kevin Weber may have been seasoned as spicily as any. But the Supremes (the judges, not the singers) thought too many cookie thieves were being put away and gave judges some leniency. For some reason they preferred the word ‘leniency’ over ‘sanity.’ A bunch of convictions came up for review after that ruling and Kevin’s cookies were upheld.

Largely because presidents like LBJ and Nixon ran over so many citizens, the Congress came up with its version of ‘three strikes,’ a way to get the guys who couldn’t be got. They called it a Special Prosecutor and it runs neck and neck parallel to the California example of the wrong law for the right reason or at least close to maybe the right reason. As a result, too many cookie thieves are being hounded from the party that’s in by the party that’s out. But neither side wants to admit the flaw, because it will be their turn next time and then just watch the fun.

In the meanwhile, we are subjected to an unending national agony while Starr looks for Clinton’s cookies, or at least some crumbs, or the intent to keep flour in the cupboard, or …

Pope John Paul In-a-Box

March, 1998

It is irreverent to allude to Pope John Paul II’s address marking International Women’s Day as a Jack-In-The-Box response. But why not? Irreverence helps the medicine go down. It seems he spoke without the merit of serious thought and Popes aren’t supposed to do that, yet what are we to think? The anomaly leaps off the page and an anomaly can’t just be returned like a backhand down the line.

In his weekly address to the pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square His Holiness said women in many parts of the world were still hindered from playing a full part in social, political and economic life. Gee whiz and gosh, what a breakthrough thought! The fact that this Pope has several times reaffirmed the Church’s unwillingness to allow women the priesthood seems not to embarrass him in the slightest.

It may be that he sees a difference between ‘politics’ and ‘religion,’ deeming the female half of the human race well suited to prime ministries and presidencies, okay as mayors and astronauts, pretty cool as surgeons and downhill ski-racers, yet lacking whatever essential ingredient necessary to achieve priesthood.

I wouldn’t jump all over this if it wasn’t such a two-faced position and Jack-In-The-Boxes are traditionally double-imaged. Separation of church and state is an okay thing, but separation of church and the reality of half the planet’s population is a no-no.

Directly quoting, How many women have been and still are more valued for their physical appearance than for their personal qualities, their professional competence, the fruits of their intelligence, the richness of their sensibility and the very dignity of their being, he said. Well that’s a mouthful and covers almost all the bases. One wonders how those lines were delivered without a serious flush and blush suffusing the Papal countenance, given the Papal position.

As for hindrance from a ‘full part in social life,’ that might be seen as an unfortunate remark directed toward the Muslim portions of the planet, at least if one were Muslim. ‘Political life’ is a laugher if it was meant to carefully sidestep the obvious inclusion of ‘religious life.’ Doesn’t work for me as I try to find anything on this toiling and troubled globe that is possibly more political than the Catholic Church? ‘Economic life’ it seems is where women are doing the best these days and could be because this is the area of women’s lives least fettered by religion.

Any religion, I’m not singling out the Catholic Church, the Pope has done a far better job of that than I, by his incredibly insensitive statement. There is not a religion in the world today that isn’t male dominated, with the possible exception of Christian Science and men have generally made a botch of it. God love us though, we men always do our injury with such seriously flawed rhetoric and all the banners flying. Religious persecution has cost more lives and wars than any other act of man. What was the Holocaust but a religious war? Serbia, now Kosovo and the list goes on and on, but of course that’s an entirely different subject.

Or is it? Whose sons and daughters and husbands are clubbed and stoned and shot and gassed into submission? It’s the women of the world who suffer the indignity of being second-class and until men such as Pope John Paul II have the courage and justice to stand up and welcome them truly as equals, they would be better advised to speak with the single face of their prejudice.

C’mon John, let’s try this one again.

Ken Starr – I’ll See You in My Dreams

March, 1998

Answering the doorbell had me all out of sorts, a mere nine in the morning and I wasn’t all the way awake. Lacking one slipper and with my hair in that strange updraft that sleep does to it, I grumbled and padded my way down to the front gate to sign for the proffered envelope. A subpoena. Ken Starr was ordering me before the grand jury because he’s been monitoring dreams and caught me with what he thinks may be a pertinent fact or two.

Pretty scary.

A week ago---yes, I think it must have been just a week ago, on a Tuesday I had gone to bed about two in the morning after fretting my way through the evening newspaper. I mean to be more careful about that sort of thing because today’s news too often leads me into a certain amount of tossing and sleeplessness. But what the hell, it’s what I was up to and there’s no denying it. A glass of wine was also involved as I recall, a rather dry red.

At any rate, I dropped off amazingly well into a deep and restful sleep, one of those pillow-huggers that allow the most mysterious of dreams, the Technicolor ones, the few that are remembered when you wake instead of dissipating like smoke before you’ve got your shoes on. In this first-rate dream of mine I found myself walking up and down the halls of the White House, the carpeting a brilliant green as I walked up them and dazzling blue coming back, but a lovely vibrant shade in either direction as I recall. As I said, it was that kind of dream and required no further proof that this was indeed the White House than my sure knowledge of the fact. Such is the manner of dreams, you know it as well as I.

The doors along those halls were beautifully detailed, the frames and paneling painted in a luxurious off-white that had the glossy eggshell look of just-melted ice cream. Not strangely at all (for nothing seems strange in dreams), the doors that were open each had a brass plate lettered Bill and all those closed were identified by a gracefully scripted Monica. It seemed natural to me then. Actually, it doesn’t seem all that strange to me even now.

But there were other people than myself in these halls and all of them, with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger, were asking each other and me as well, Have you seen Bill? Instead of an answer, the other person would invariably respond Have you seen Monica? That might have been a better response for me as well but, like the fool I sometimes am in my dreams, I said to one questioner, Maybe you should ask Hillary and to another, I may have seen him with Monica, but never alone. I hardly expected that a subpoena would follow. Which of us would dare to dream if the consequences were binding in the daylight?

The dream ended without my actually spending time with the President and that’s too bad, because it’s not likely I’ll ever get that close to real power again. Not unless I can weasel myself into a dream that includes Bill Gates and he’s not apt to have me, now that I’ve been subpoenaed.

So, according to the papers served I’m to show up at the Grand Jury, the biggie in Washington and not that mostly failed little old original in Arkansas. But main show or side show, I plan to come clean. No lawyer climbing those steps by my side, no ducking away from the press to play fast and loose with Meet The Press and certainly no later plea for a legal-defense fund. No taking the 5th, I plan to expose every detail of my dream, no matter the cost to my credibility and esteem among friends of both political parties. Let the chips fall where they may.

This is after all, a serious inquiry into issues that are fundamental to our essential constitutional framework. This is a measure within which our great nation presents its standards to the rest of the world. Damn the demands of the office and damn the smirk on Boris Yeltsin’s face, this is serious stuff. Oral sex ought not to be tolerated and if my dreams need to be monitored, it’s a small price to pay. Furthermore, to actually deny oral sex when confronted with it before your wife and nation, is for sure a high crime.

At least in my dreams.

Commentary – Not Speaking Czech

April, 1998

I dunno, it’s different for everyone and I lay no