The Dark Side of the Moon 2004-2005: Observing America

By Jim Freeman

About the 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 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. Each book in the series is in some ways a time-machine that focuses the blur of events and gives them context.

Mark Twain said
"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."

Jim Freeman looks at that dark side and strives to shine light on it.

About the 2004-2005 Book
(Volume 2 of the 5 Volume Series)

Volume 2 of The Dark Side of the Moon moves from Howard Dean's 'excellent chance of becoming the next president of the United States' to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the evisceration of Medicaid and the exposure of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

But what else was going on while Howard Dean opened the door and stood aside for John Kerry? All the frantic rhetoric of a presidential election year played out against two wars not going all that well, super-charged profits driven by rocket-fueled debt and the beginnings, the first itchiness around the American collar that all was not well deep down in the state of the union. What was on the national mind as Hurricane Katrina formed in the Gulf?

Volume 2 of The Dark Side of the Moon frames the state of national disconnection, observing America within the context of those events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937674038

Book preview

Howard Dean Dream Team

January, 2004

Howard Dean has an excellent chance of becoming the next President of The United States and, a week before the Iowa primary, I hereby throw my punditry into the bull ring of pundits. Dean’s success depends upon the following events falling into place, any single one of which could sink the effort:

Obviously, he has to carry the majority of primaries and be selected at the Democratic National Convention. Given that as a necessary first step, I would hope for the following:

Shortly thereafter, he will have to pull Wesley Clark onto the ticket as Vice President. Clark fills a role no other can match and Dean will need to use him as a close advisor if he wins the national election. He’s too important to be presiding over the Senate. Clark has said he wouldn’t accept the slot, but that’s what any viable candidate must say while his hat’s still in the ring. I think he’d accept, because he believes in himself, his ability to contribute and because it positions him well as a future presidential candidate.

Next, Dean must make some accommodation to Ralph Nader. Nader has said he will not be the 2004 candidate for the Green Party and one can only assume he feels some responsibility (as he damned well should) for paving the Bush road to the White House. He represents a large constituency of voters---enough to have put Gore solidly in the Oval Office in 2000.

Additionally, Howard Dean ought to make known his primary Cabinet choices and set these people loose in his behalf on the campaign trail. Reaching back into the Clinton administration for at least two choices would make a great deal of sense. Madeleine Albright was an astute and highly respected Secretary of State; Robert Rubin knows no equal as Secretary of the Treasury. Each of them know their way around the territory, able to hit the road already running, without taking precious months to learn the cast of characters. Eliot Spitzer, NY Attorney General would make a dandy Attorney General of the United States. Take your best shot on the rest, but these are key positions that would immeasurably strengthen Dean’s chances if they were announced in advance.

Finally, and this goes for any Democratic candidate, Howard better polish a relationship with former President Bill Clinton. Many (myself included) feel that Gore’s distancing himself from Clinton lost him the greatest campaigner of modern times. Bill Clinton is a weapon of prodigious power, which is another reason to bring Clark on board, as Clinton is very much on Clark’s behind-the-scenes team.

Wow! Now that would be a Dean Dream Team of landslide proportion.

Thomas Jefferson, One More Time

January 2004

Please, not again. We’ve been inundated with Jefferson and books about John Adams and they’re really, you know, so passe’ and last year’s news.

Well maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to believe that in this summer-rerun society of ours, a remembrance of some of the men who fashioned this unique country would be amiss. Besides that, I want to approach Tom from a slightly different angle; not from his legacy, but his concern we would piss it away. Foreknowledge is always spooky, but an accurate prediction 228 years into the future is downright scary:

…it can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.

He was talking about that sliver of time during the arguments over the Constitution.

From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. Jefferson knew that ongoing government is a messy operation, that seldom goes back or even looks back to sweep up after itself.

They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in convulsion.

That comment may well have referred to slavery and the founders unwillingness to deal with it. But this particular un-knocked-off shackle did indeed convulse the country into civil war before half a century was gone.

But it’s the Forgetting themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money that’s most worrisome to me, the Never think to unite to effect a due respect for our rights that sends a chill up my spine. Are we there? Have we arrived at Jefferson’s worst fear? Is it really passe’ and last year’s news to consider that?

James Madison had a word for us as well; The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad. Fetters is a little old fashioned, but it means restrictions. Restrictions on liberty at home is something to think about.

And, lest this sound too partisan, just another rant at a conservative president by a wild-eyed liberal, let me quote yet another president on presidents. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. That came from the lips of Teddy Roosevelt.

I blush to admit that I have lived in eight decades, under twelve presidents. We complained about them all. It’s not necessary that they leave us quotable quotes, nor is it expected they’ll please us all. We’re a diverse society and hard to please in the best of circumstances.

But it is necessary that they not tear down the foundations of our heritage, not play a shell game with the ideals of men in whose shadows they dare not stand. It is necessary that they not so denigrate our principles as a nation that the world comes to see us in a lesser light, as a lesser hope. This nation, our nation, has never fought a war of aggression until this presidency. This nation, our nation has never so broadly set aside constitutional rights until this presidency. This nation, our nation has never so completely squandered the welfare of present and future generations, using the weapon of fear, the subversion of truth and the expediency of ignorance.

I leave you with a final quote, this one from a New York Times columnist named Thomas L. Friedman (yet another Thomas);

We have to find a way of defending ourselves from others’ weapons of mass destruction without losing our own weapon of mass attraction.

Kerry and the Contribution Thing

February, 2004

John Kerry is getting a lot of heat for bringing to our collective attention the abuses of business registering offshore to avoid taxes, while taking contributions from business in his campaign. Sort of like criticizing the oil industry and being shellacked for filling up your car.

We are a society that will trivialize almost anything in order to avoid looking at the issue. Depending on who’s cooking the books, best estimates of tax revenues lost by American-based business claiming that it’s actually headquartered in a dusty second-floor office in the Caymans, is between fifty and seventy billion a year.

Well, a billion just isn’t what it used to be. Washington hands out a billion here and ten billion there like it was chump-change. Maybe it is. Maybe the citizens are the chumps, because it all ultimately comes out of our pockets. The same pocket in the pants or skirt of folks who declaim that Kerry can’t point fingers while taking the cash. For me, it’s an absolutely mystifying point of view.

On that strange mental compartmentalization, no candidate could claim that any change was useful because change is… well, let’s call it what it is… change. Mailing a letter would prevent criticism of the postal service. Serving in the army would prevent any questions about the Pentagon, as walking through airport security would stop dead any questions about John Ashcroft’s constitutional conscience.

Kerry has made a brave and long overdue statement about a crooked and well camouflaged tax evasion---not an illegal evasion, because it’s perfectly legal, just distastefully structured. Kerry’s calling it what it is shows courage because it’s going to cost him some business contribution in a race where the incumbent already out war-chests him at least three to one. It probably won’t cost him any votes, ‘cause most of those practicing the off-shore game are already going to vote Republican.

But it just makes me nuts to see someone raked over the coals like that. John McCain took all the dough he could ever legally lay his hands on, yet was lauded (as he should be) for co-authoring the McCain Feingold campaign limit legislation. No one questioned his right to do so. We could use fifty to seventy billion in the tax coffers. The question is whether we’ll wake up and listen.

We are not much of a listening society.

Alan Greenspan’s Got a Plan

March, 2004

It’s been a month now since Alan Greenspan sat down in front of an awed House Budget Committee, so it’s long since become yesterday’s news and what else is new? House and Senate committees are always awed by Alan. Part of it is they seldom understand what the hell he’s talking about and take it for profundity.

Al’s been around a while.

Anyway, in case you missed it in between flash news reports about Paris Hilton falling for this guy or off that horse, Alan peered through his bottle-glass spectacles and told the House and the world and whoever else happened to be listening that they better trash Social Security for the good of the country.

Talk about falling off a horse! But no one even walked over to nudge Social Security with a toe, see if it was hurt or maybe needed a cigarette. Just nods at the profundity of it all, just chins rested on steepled fingers, brows knitted in concentration as they took in the Guru’s prescription. Or tried to take it in, but you know it’s hard when he uses these compound sentences, throws in a little tricky syntax. All that financial stuff can make a senator or representative sleepier than a four-course lunch.

Now, for sure, Alan’s not going to need his Social Security and that probably makes it a bit easier to watch it sprawled all over itself, lying there in the dust, a leg in each corner, pupils dilated and ears pinned flat against its head. Easier to shoot it and call the glue factory than ease it back to its feet. If you don’t need to ride, who gives a damn? If the Boomers aren’t out in the street (and they’re not), it’s easy to step into the limousine and drive around those poor bastards on horseback.

So, let’s see. Who’s likely to need a horse, any horse, even a lame horse in this fast track society of ours. Probably not anyone who matters, at least not to Alan. The only people who come immediately to mind are cleaning ladies, who scrub floors in those office buildings at night. Thirty or forty years of scrubbing floors and trying to feed a family at the same time isn’t likely to build much of a retirement nest egg. Next time you work late and the cleaning lady shuffles by, ask her about her 401-K. She’ll probably think its an office she forgot to clean and ask you where it is.

A few others who might be damned glad to get what little Social Security provides, are holding down jobs that don’t have pension or health benefits and pay minimum wage, or a wage that’s so close to minimum that they’ll never own a home or get ahead of their MasterCard debt. Probably forty million or so. But I’ll tell you something. Alan Greenspan doesn’t know a single one of them.

Blowing smoke off the barrel of the gun he had pointed at Social Security, Al paused to praise the president’s 1.5 trillion tax break to people like himself. People that actually count, people you can talk to and have drinks with at the club, maybe hang out with on the yacht. A million bucks is pretty hard for us regular folks to visualize. A billion is a thousand million. Whew! A trillion is a thousand billion. Damn, buddy, down at the old union hall, that’s a lot of money. I can see right off why they’d have to cut the hell out of the retirement for forty million of us in order to do all that good for the top few. That Alan Greenspan must be a pretty smart feller.

What was it old Joe Stalin said? "A single death is a tragedy, but a hundred thousand dead is a news event." I guess it’s the same with getting old and having nothing when you can’t work anymore. A single old person without a safety net is a tragedy, but forty million of them are a committee meeting.

Freedom of the Press---Try Explaining That to a War-Lord

July, 2004

The Bush administration is in trouble for lying about the justification for a war in Iraq.

The Army and the Pentagon are in deep trouble for interrogation procedures.

Those are facts that set the Muslim world dancing in the streets and make various other anti-American hearts beat just a little faster. One can imagine Jacques Chirac stifling a smile over his evening cognac, Gerhard Schroeder wagging a knowing German finger and various Arab governments nervously wondering where events will take them from here. Just what we deserve, they crow and are joined in that by a substantial percentage of the American public.

And it is just what we deserve. Not only what we deserve, but what we have self-inflicted and that, in fact, is the wonderment of it all and what makes us unique from all but a very few governments of the world. The salient fact is that, in both situations, the truth came from inside rather than outside America.

Muslim hatreds didn’t bring us to our knees. The Arab street, however you define that, had little enough effect. The United Nations, European Union, NATO, Chirac and Schroeder combined hadn’t the power to modify our intention. You can argue that they should have, and you probably are right, but the fact is they didn’t.

What may well cost this administration another term is the uniquely American constitutional protection of our citizens’ right-to-know. Powerful stuff, this freedom of the press. More powerful than presidents, than misleading by the CIA and FBI, it’s the air in the top of the American bottle that always (eventually, usually slowly, almost always painfully) allows our nation to float cork-up.

I don’t know how we explain that in meaningful terms to most of the world, let alone the warlords and dictators of this planet’s darkest corners. It is inexplicable, other than in our own nation, where we take it for granted. Americans are known for a kind of naïve optimism. It’s our inherent trust that The truth will out that shapes our character and keeps us from our own worst excesses.

Merk and VIOXX, Blind-Siding the Back-Ache

October, 2004

A couple of days ago a Washington Post article about the withdrawal by Merck & Co. of their flagship painkiller VIOXX caught my eye. Reason being, I’d written a column just a little over two years ago that questioned the sanity of advertising drugs like they were luxury automobiles and the VIOXX ad was my target. All glitz and a Dorothy Hamill endorsement graced the four-color page, followed by the grim reality of the small print on the turnover side.

Consumer marketing of drugs? When has the consumer ever been capable of evaluating his personal health choices? Consumer marketing brought us fast-food obesity, heavy metal ‘music’ and Paris Hilton. How could anyone, much less the Food and Drug Administration, agree to allow pharmaceutical companies to directly approach the public with complex drugs that have byzantine side-effects? Merck ponied-up $195 million in advertising.

A Google search of VIOXX brings a paid placement for a legal firm seeking class-action clients. Ah, the greed of the drug creator is so quickly overtaken by the greed of the litigator. The user it seems has been abandoned by both except as a target.

Interestingly, the Post article appears empathetic toward Merck. Now their wonder drug was suddenly under a cloud and Merck officials faced a difficult decision about how to handle the catastrophe. Further into the article, a Cleveland cardiologist is quoted as estimating that, among its 20 million users, VIOXX may have unnecessarily caused as many as 30,000-100,000 heart attacks and strokes. Thirty thousand to one hundred thousand ordinary citizens also Faced a difficult decision about how to handle the catastrophe. My scorecard reads, Merck one costly misadventure, the public a personal disaster of huge proportion. In fairness, a very high percentage of VIOXX users probably got reliable pain relief without problems. But it was certainly a roll of the dice by consumers who hadn’t the vaguest idea of how the game was played.

Where have all the physicians gone? Abdicated to leave the drug companies in charge? Cowed by their insurance premiums, overwhelmed by paperwork, no longer with personal knowledge of their patients, the medical community has to a very large degree left us to the wolves at the watering-hole. The AMA ought to get off their asses and put doctors back in charge of health care while there still are doctors. The small print that Merck uses to assure consumers they ought not to use VIOXX without consulting their physician doesn’t count.

The AMA needs to come down four-square against:

The advertising of drugs directly to consumers

The use of Infomercials in health care

Kickbacks to doctors prescribing drugs

Any medical article, endorsement or opinion that hides a financial incentive or interest

That would be a start. Then they might take up the deplorable national conditions that have allowed the insurance and legal lobbies to so screw up our access to doctors that we are left to blindly flail around among the pages of slick magazines, looking for Dorothy Hamill’s health advice.

Nothing personal, Dorothy---I loved you as a skater.

Nobel Prize Takes a Giant Step Up

October, 2004

Wasn’t all that long ago that Nobel Peace Prizes were handed out to the likes of Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela. At least two out of those three are deserving men who have done much to advance the causes of peace throughout the world.

But they were easy choices, perhaps too easy. Already famous, already known worldwide, and one wondered if the prize was yet one more accolade or was founded to mean more, to be a catalyst rather than a mantle. Surprisingly, in that context, Gandhi never won one.

There were some strange choices as well. In 1994, Yasser Arafat shared the prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, a selection that may have been based more on optimism than experience. Few people in this world have backed away from peace more consistently than Yasser Arafat.

Year by year, the parade went by. Mother Teresa? Who could possibly quarrel with that? Kofi Annan? Yep. So, like many such awards, the Nobel has been up and down as it made the obvious and not-so-obvious choices, but one way or another they seldom raised eyebrows.

Until last year. Last year the committee chose an Iranian woman little known outside her country, Shirin Ebadi, for her lifelong work promoting democracy and human rights in Iran. A lawyer, judge, lecturer, writer and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly in Iran which was never an easy or safe choice under either the Shah or ayatollahs. Who is this woman? was the immediate question and thus the question became the celebration, which in my mind is a giant step up for the award.

Confirming that last year’s choice was no fluke, the committee this year selected Wangari Maathai, at age 64 one of Kenya’s and Africa’s first modern women. Read up on this special woman while she’s still fresh in the news because if I get started, this column will go to forty pages. There are of course hundreds and perhaps thousands of people out there like Wangari, who use their lives and risk their lives to make a difference within the circle of their influence. They are the true internationalists, knowing in their gut that the world must be changed first down the street and then one town over. Last year was a home run for the Nobel Peace Prize and this year, their first chance to step to the plate again, they hit another.

The Nobel committees are a secretive bunch, as well they should be, and I doubt they talk much among themselves. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if this current direction of the Peace committee were to seep under the door at economics. The Nobel Prize for Economics has long gone to academics, my personal favorite being Milton Friedman in 1976. But there are others who till in the fields of economics and some among them who have left theory behind to raise bumper crops. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank come immediately to mind. A Bangladeshi economist, you can read about his astounding Bank and the trouble you take to learn about him will reconstitute your faith in humanity. Not a bad bargain for a few minutes time.

Maybe someone at the Nobel will check it out as well.

Our Lemming Side

October, 2004

Becoming as a species ever better-informed and lesser-educated, our increasing similarity to those furry-footed rodents is apparent and Darwin be damned. My Thursday Washington Post carries an article by Julia Eilperin Worldwide Report Says Amphibians Are in Peril, ecology may be taking toll.

Ho hum, that old ecology again. 32 percent of all amphibian species face extinction, compared with 12 percent birds and 23 percent mammals. Canaries in the coal mine scientists call amphibians because their permeable skin makes them particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Well, coal mining has always been a nasty business. The article goes on to say that "This has taken the scientific world completely by surprise."

Oh, come on. Pissed them off, made them frown perhaps, in some rare cases made them collectively tap their fingers, but hardly took them by surprise. There are no surprises left. There are merely consequences and on our collective headlong rush-for-the-sea we are barely able to glance over our shoulders as the consequences blur by in fast-forward. A polar ice cap melts here or there, a larger Dead zone in this or that fishery. We are able to measure the precise percentage of air pollution America supplies globally compared to its population (24 to 4), but are we surprised? Hardly. Bored perhaps, maybe annoyed, but only at the constant harping and dreary finger-pointing, never at our god-given freedoms to fuck things up.

The following day, another staff writer by the name of Jonathan Weisman marks the moment the U.S. hit its debt ceiling of 7.4 trillion dollars. And it turns out (are such coincidences never-ending?) that that moment coincides with the worldwide amphibian dilemma. Been a busy week, but you gotta admit that the Washington Post has some first-class staff writers. Unfortunately Weisman’s article was another of those ho-hummers, ‘cause neither of these ghastly occurrences is going to put the gun to our head by next Tuesday. And, if it were, we wouldn’t begin to get nervous until Monday afternoon.

That’s the way it ought to be. It’s our heritage, our right as Americans to put off the future. We invented putting off the future and we’re damned proud of it. Just as Europe is known for never forgetting the past and has let it cripple them, America is known for never worrying about the future, their major strength. Consequence is a word in the dictionary. We invented futureless consumption as a Yankee concept, nurtured it in our schools while discipline gave way to chaos and polished it in the glamorization of everything from no-money-down to reality-TV in place of reality. On a whole psychic level, from government to daily life, if we don’t choose to admit it, it doesn’t exist. Yeah! At long last, the unsinkable ocean liner.

And, of course it may well be true. We haven’t yet tested the theory that all these disappearing life forms may change for the better. The icky stuff that spoils camping trips may just go away. It hasn’t yet been put to the test that unending and galloping national debt finally comes to a reckoning. No entity on earth has yet accumulated 7.5 trillion dollars in debt, so how could we really know? And it’s someone else’s job anyway to monitor all that stuff.

Isn’t it?

The Supremes Robe Up for Round Two

October, 2004

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the waters of the next presidential election, the Jaws soundtrack thrums in the background. We may wake up screaming. In any event, we will surely wake up the day after the elections litigating. The Supremes brought us here, that frivolous judicial nine, tap-dancing their way into the 2000 election from stage-left, robes flapping and rolling their eyes.

In that vote-along-party-lines flight of fancy with which they seated an unelected president, they promised us a One-off decision that would have no bearing on legal precedence. Sure! Here we are, a couple weeks ahead of the 2004 election and chaotic circumstances abide in several of the swing states, with Florida once again leading the pack. The European Commission is sending observers to an American election as if we were a banana republic.

Perhaps we are. At any rate, lawyers from both parties are zeroing in on approximately 30,000 precincts that one or both sides consider opportunistic to fraud, deviant behavior, racial grievances, petulant attitudes or some other form of the black arts. Jimmy Carter, who has some experience world-wide in the observance of rigged elections, speaking of Florida, says The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely, even as many other nations are conducting elections that are internationally certified to be transparent, honest and fair. Carter goes on to say It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation. It is especially objectionable among us Americans, who have prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure democracy.

I lay that blame directly at the feet of the Supreme Court. Had the court allowed the Florida recount to proceed, no matter if it took two or three months, we would have retained the confidence we deserve as citizens in our electoral process. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, those who would interfere in elections would have found no profit in the activity.

Now it’s open season, the trust factor in our most cherished constitutional right has been gutted and tossed in the street to profit the quick, the devious and the clever. Republican or Democrat, what has always been healed by faith in the process is torn by charge and countercharge, stripped of its legitimacy and left to the devices of our worst political instincts. We choked it down four years ago because we are not a nation of anarchists and the unelected-but-seated president seemed, on the face of it, not that distinctively different a choice. But it rankled and it really began to sting when the president, acting as if he had a landslide mandate, turned each of his campaign promises on end. Still, merely an annoyance. As a nation, we survive and even thrive during lapses of presidential popularity.

The Supremes no doubt thought they had made a relatively benign and abridged decision, but bad law is bad law and seldom lies down in the corner to snooze. No one suspected that this anomaly would have to withstand a trial-by-fire and, as if the gods were indeed punishing bad law by the highest court, the tests just kept coming. Terrorist attack, war, a wounded economy, blinding debt and failures of leadership all conspired to bring us---the left, the right and the center---eyeball to eyeball in a polarized environment of distrust and blame.

Well, we are all to blame. Our blame is that we shout rather than come together. Our blame is we have too little compassion for another point of view and not enough interest in hearing a minority voice. Our blame is allowing a climate that advances the politics of fear and the institutionalizing of retribution within our government. Our blame is that we sue the hell out of everyone because we are too intellectually lazy to work through problems to reach common understandings. Our blame is our rage and the transfer of that rage to the driver in the next lane, the homeless man on our street, the delay of our flight to Houston and being out of coffee on Sunday morning. Our civility within the nation is unraveling at the hem.

We’ve always been a litigious society because our founding principle is equality under law and it is the law (at least in part) that civilizes us. But the law takes away as well as gives and we have lost our right to pray in public to the lawyers, as if we were too poor of spirit to be allowed that freedom of individual choice. The law has given our schools a poverty of discipline from which they may not recover and has made us unresponsive to the small civil courtesies that lubricate a society. It may well take from us our ability to elect a leader within a time frame that allows him (or her) to lead. The law may cloud the public trust that the choice by ballot is truly ours in a fairly counted majority.

I pray for an election that is not close, but this doesn’t seem likely. We need an undisputed election, some breathing space, a world that, if it is not normal, has at least some aspects of normality. We need to grin, punch one another on the shoulder, watch Boston play St Louis in the world series and thread our way back to being American again.

Otherwise, the Supremes may find themselves once again on stage for a second act no one expected or desired.

Arctic Horse That’s Long Left the Barn

October, 2004

Today’s lead Washington Post editorial, Arctic Thaw, reaffirms a point of view that has been meaningless for three decades, that moves must be made by the industrial world to slow, prevent and reverse global warming.

Sorry, globe, but that horse left the barn a way long time ago and what was once opportunity galloped away in hot pursuit.

Even the strictest enforcement of the Kyoto Protocols, which we as Americans don’t belong to anyway, would merely hope to freeze greenhouse gas production at turn-of-the-century levels and those levels are already melting the planet’s ice. So, we are left with the world as it is instead of the world as we would have it. No blame here, no shaking of fists, no screaming across police barriers, just a realization.

Those realizations are going to have a profound effect on nation-building and the real estate and construction industry in all its forms. A new nation will certainly have to be constructed for Holland, a.k.a. the Dutch, a.k.a. the Netherlands as their nation becomes some of the best bass-fishing in Europe. The world population’s propensity for building cities along the shores of various oceans will have vast populations tippy-toeing to higher ground and thus the realtors will slap ‘ocean-front’ designations on properties upgraded from their old ‘ocean-view’ status. Florida will mostly just disappear and who can possibly deserve it more? Ditto Wall Street, Trump Tower and a thousand kosher delicatessens (the deli’s will be missed). All in good fun and profits to be made, so we’ll learn to cope and roll with the punches.

A punch not so easy to roll with is the inundation of seawater way, way, way upstream in most of the world’s important rivers and the corresponding overpowering of a large percentage of freshwater aquifers. Agricultural resources may be halved.

George Carlin once said "I'm tired of all this bitching about the planet being in trouble. The planet is not in trouble, the planet is just fine. People are in trouble." And of course George is absolutely right. That line, which once brought a sort of gotcha-moment of revelation, now brings sort of an oops-look and oops, as we all know, is the past tense of oh-my-god-I-think-I'm-about-to (spill this coffee, drop this ice cream cone, get really wet feet). Anyway, too late to close this barn door.

It all happened on someone else’s watch, during someone else’s presidency and in the endlessly current quarters of someone else’s annual report. It had more scientists shouting and pointing, more experts witnessing and giving testimony and more Greenpeacers driving up and down the oceans in inflatable boats than the public memory could hold in its excitable mind. And thus it became that dreary old scolding with which we soon lost interest. But it’s nice to see the Washington Post drag it out again and put it at the head of their editorial page.

Kind of like waving flags at an army long departed.

My Daddy Knew an Uneven Fight

October, 2004

Sigh! Paul Bremer, the ‘Duke of Iraq’ recently said that the Bush administration was clearly right to invade Iraq. Though no WMD was found, he said there was a ‘real possibility’ that they might be and that Hussein might give such weapons to terrorists. There’s also a possibility that I might be syndicated in 800 newspapers one day, but don’t bet the farm on it.

Bremer went on to say that the ‘status-quo was simply untenable. Reporting in on another of the Axis of Evil candidates, North Korea, our ambassador to South Korea recently warned North Korea not to ‘wait for the election’ before coming to the bargaining table. It’s a little late at this writing---four days before the election---but Ambassador Christopher Hill said I think they need to understand that whoever is elected president, there is absolutely no tolerance for dealing with a country that maintains nuclear weapons programs."

Oh, come on, Chris. What are countries like Iran, North Korea and, until lately, Libya to make of our snuggle up to Pakistan? Pakistan not only has the bomb, they’ve tested it three or four times and are crawling with Muslim extremists. You and Paul make us sound like a Marx Brothers government.

Bremer and Hill are both guilty of neo-con speak in the first degree. It should be a hanging offense. It’s become endemic this bushwhacking and, unless something absolutely liberating-but-unlikely happens four days from now, we’re in for yet four more years of an administration that says anything it likes, labels it as true and walks away. Orwell would be very much at home in this neo-con political environment.

So, as nearly as I can tell, we bought off Libya and their embryonic nuclear program with a normalization of relations. Good deal, very American and no lives lost except Lockerbie. We blundered into Iraq knowing there was nothing there, but Bush did it because he could do it and old scores needed settling. This is a president who remembers old scores, but he’s put us up against the Muslim world and they have two or three centuries on us in the remembering old scores department. Neo-con speak insists that we’re winning but no one puts much value in that oversold stock these days.

I remember some very good advice from my daddy about venturing into bad neighborhoods. First of all he was against it, but second he advised never to initiate a confrontation because it was sure to be an uneven fight. Daddy’s view was that his son was too middle-class-comfortable to put it all on the line in a face-off and that the people one confronted in bad neighborhoods hadn’t much to lose, thereby holding an advantage. Daddy’s views might not have been politically correct to voice in today’s society but they were dead-on, accurate and words to survive by. No neo-con speak from Daddy.

So, this saying-it-makes-it-true thing the administration does seems to be working on middle America, if one can believe the polls. One has to wonder if the ‘con’ in neo-con refers to conservatives or merely con-artists and con-men, but nevertheless it seems to be working over here, where we’re middle-class-comfortable and unwilling to put anything on the line, even taxes to finance the war. Out there in the ‘bad neighborhoods,’ the streets of North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and on and on and on, it’s far less a sure thing, this saying-makes-it-true. Those are the folks Daddy had in mind, who haven’t much to lose and we’re eyeball to eyeball with them on very uneven philosophical and grounds. The perspiration under our armpits is showing. Neo-con speak isn’t hacking it outside of this country.

But the neo-cons are more than war and terrorists, these are complicated guys and gals. What of this decade’s three and a half trillion dollar surplus that’s turned into a neo-deficit five trillion? What of the embarrassment of Russia---Russia---the world’s most egregious polluter ratifying the Kyoto Treaty as America pursues its neo-environment? What of No Child Left Behind turning so quickly to neo-child unfunded? Neo-con stands for ‘new conservative,’ but can anyone tell me what is even slightly conserving about the squandering of our money, our future, our reputation, our young men’s lives, our safety and the civil society we enjoyed before being set upon each other like pit bulls? We are nationally exhausted, lying in the dust glaring at one another, our country painted red and blue as the pollsters and pundits play us for suckers.

But we’re not suckers. We’re made of better stuff than that. We’ve always been made of better stuff than our politicians and from time to time when they’ve thought different they paid the price for that arrogance. Americans are tough sons-of-bitches and they take a long time to move, sometimes too long. But they’re not all that crazy about anything neo and you con them at your own risk.

My Daddy used to tell me about that as well.

Alan Greenspan---It’s Not Always Better Late than Never

November, 2004

Alan Greenspan is warning us now about the dangers of the growing deficit, when three years ago he supported the Bush giveaway of trillions to the rich. Uh huh, way to go Alan. Similarly, but in a different arena, Colin Powell caved in as the one remaining voice of reason in the Bush cabinet when he went along with the assessments of Iraq as a threat to our safety.

Both men knew they were shitting in the wind, yet both went right ahead and sold their integrity down the river. Now Powell will no doubt write a book about how hard he fought against the forces of evil within the administration and it will be a best-seller. Greenspan will console himself about the coming financial meltdown that he "Warned the congress, even though his warning came three years late and after an astonishing loss of courage over the tax cut issue. What could I do? they will whine, It’s all so complicated and no one but me knows what I'm up against."

For starters (although it’s time now only for enders) they could have each stood up to the moral test of telling their country what they know to be right, when it’s personally painful and when a resignation might be the only way to underline the importance of a stand. That takes guts.

The Army PFC who should have stood his ground and refused the order to mistreat prisoners is mirrored at the very top, by a general who became a diplomat and still felt the military binds to obey his Commander-in-chief. If that PFC goes to jail and is dishonorably discharged for a "moral failure," what is the appropriate judgment for Colin Powell, who’s moral failure penetrates the very core of his honor? Yet he will write that book, it will sell like hotcakes and he will make inspiring pronouncements about how difficult is the world of diplomacy. That’s crap, Colin.

The new guy on the desk at Price-Waterhouse or (name your favorite sleaze-firm) who cuts a corner here or delays a sale there to advantage his client or himself---and goes to jail for it, is mirrored at the very top by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve who cuts some slack for a tax break he knows to be injurious. Greenspan, a man who mumbles about "bubbles’ but never points out the one about to burst. Yet we revere this man and stand in awe of his incomprehensible language before Senate committees. That’s crap as well, Alan.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. That’s a Mark Twain quote and, like so many of his words, bears a constancy of truth that is timeless. It’s no wonder that the courage and conviction of our founders is so greatly revered and little enough wonder that our present-day leaders so thirst after that reputation. They talk about their legacy in an age of expedience. The fact is each man, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan alike, had the opportunity to stand in honor and both men knelt instead to expedience.

A fact does not cease to exist because it is ignored. That’s Aldous Huxley and remains as true today as when he wrote it.

Irony (def) the incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

November, 2004

U.S. Warns Ukraine About Elections

by Jim Heintz The Associated Press

Friday, October 29, 2004, 5:01AM

Kiev, Ukraine – In a sharp statement of dismay over abuses and official interference before Sunday’s presidential election, U.S. officials say Ukraine could face punitive measures if the vote is not free and fair.

Well, I’ll be damned. Ukrainians in Florida, messing with our election. What the hell will be next? No, wait---it’s their presidential election that U. S. officials are all huffed-up about. The United States, not three days distant from its own presidential election (which will for the first time have European Union observers and which election-watcher Jimmy Carter says is totally out of control) is actually threatening another sovereign nation with sanctions over electoral irregularity.

It just boggles the mind. Consider me boggled. Irony brought to a new level of definition---it’s always been one of those dicey words to actually define, although we all think we know what’s meant when someone says that’s ironic or isn’t it ironic that the only afternoon I can get away to the post office they close at noon? I foresee irony ever-after-today defined by example in the new and updated Webster’s Collegiate as: America threatening Ukraine with electoral misconduct in the midst of its own election scandals.

The U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a mouthful in its own right, said If the election fails to meet international standards, a variety of measures to hold officials responsible for electoral misconduct accountable will be considered. Wow! A variety of measures. Bilateral relations and integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions will suffer. Tough words, but