Poem I Wrote Five or Six Years Ago

Vanished Girl

The westering sun decomposes on the asphalt of Grover Street,
pools in windshields and the glass fronts of stores,
searching for somewhere permeable to fall

Old woman - prisoner in the throes of growth on the prairie's edge -
steps from the faux brick mouth of the Four Seasons Apartments:
Four seasons, maybe; but all four four of them Autumn:
all descending steadily towards winter

In and out of the postage stamp sunset she moves,
turning towards the bus stop, carrying the gaunt
austerity of her shoulders and the fallow poverty
of her hips, ilea jutting akimbo like the skeletons of horses
bleaching in the desert sun

Startling blue veins twist across her forearms and hands
like back highways in an atlas,
her papery skin in the last stages of a backward alchemy:
transmutation of living gold to a pale leaden grey

Her colorless gaze drifts above the town homes down
Fiftieth Street; she avoids in her exile
all communion with shoppers, mothers and
the cruising proletariat

In the utter loneliness of bustling Middle
America she waits alone, and accepts without
question the injustice of invisibility

------------------------------------------
In the sere lines of her face are mapped years
of such silent stoicism - centuries since youth
and usefulness were exhausted
-------------------------------------------

She recalls, though, in the grass-green days of spring,
the hot breath and rough hands of man;
damp Julys before the bowl of her hips fell barren,
was once filled to bursting with sunrisesexlilac
and foggy river valley funk

Farmers' and ranchers' sons drowned in the flood of her:
in the pendulous weight of her breasts, heavy
with the life of this place: in her warm belly and
eager hips, milk and honey rhythms and August evening
cherry pits
and the nameless eyes falter for a second,
overtaken by memory and loss
so long - an ocean since that touch of heat –

What man would now reach his hand to the vanished girl,
her hunching shoulders and wasted hips,
withering skin and arid lips slowly
folding in upon each other

Too long - too far for a forgotten woman in the
invisible twilight, where the sibilant wind cannot be heard
through the switchgrass and little bluestem,and
the tides no longer roll up the wide Missouri

So, in the failing light, her eyes resume their practiced vacancy
and she waits alone, in the chill of early evening,
staving off memories of warmth

(Copyright 2002, Thomas J Burbach)

Much Peace,
tjb

White People Should Not Attempt to Play Jazz

Am I racist? A little bit against white folks, I think. I really like this coffee shop. The baristas are pretty and sweet, and the drinks are well above average. But Holy Mary's sweet untouched tits, I am going to go insane from all the lily white self-styled jazz musicians tap dancing around the downbeat with all the soul of a corpse bled dry and washed up and washed out on the banks of the Elkhorn after a spring flood. I mean, it's as bad as Stevie Ray Vaughn playing variations of the riff from Red House over and over and styling himself a blues artist. What is it with white people trying to find soul in places in which it just isn't accessible for them? It's the same stink as Frank Sinatra (the Chairman of the Whitey) and Tony Bennett singing the same old shit that cost them nothing, NOTHING, to trot out. For chrissake, does anyone really think Jack Benny and his ilk could even play fluffer to Charlie Parker?

Don't get me wrong, white people have soul. Walt Whitman, Thomas McGrath, The Who, Michelle Shocked, Steve Earle, U2, me, the list goes on.... White people should just not play jazz or blues, unless, of course, they're sitting in with black folks.

Anyway, I have to endure another month+ of inane Christmas music pretending to be jazz. I will try very hard to avoid proselytizing to my fellow white people in this small-city cattleyard, but I may well end up on a street corner in full beard spreading the word of God, otherwise known as John Coltrane.

Much Peace, and a Love Supreme
tjb

"Nothing's the same, the whole city estranged, and restless since you've been gone." (Thomas J Burbach)

Kids are out of town with their mom and I am purposeless, on my third cup of joe and staring at the world in squigglevision.

Forty-eight degrees: warm enough that my surgically-repaired and recreationally re-destroyed knee does not ache. This shoulder, though, is one more avatar of encroaching age, along with the hints of grey in my beard and the slow retreat of my voice from its upper ranges. Knee, shoulder and vox: all three need surgery, for ligaments, labrum and nodes, respectively. Who the hell has time for crutches, slings and silence, though? I can't imagine hobbling after my soldiers for 12 weeks, then only using one hand and no scary voice to keep them out of the street.

Enough self-indulgent bitching. I am still young and charming enough for any 10, well, six people. Here's the deal with Obama (I voted for him, by the way):

1) He has to do what he said he would do during the campaign and his acceptance speech: Audit Government. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep the social safety net and cut ridiculous expenditures like a pedestrian bridge across the Missouri and dueling atomic clocks in the same town square. There are billions to be saved. Obama has to draw a clear distinction between being being liberal/progressive (which I am) and being an enabler for pork barrel slush funds. He won't make any friends cutting billions in pet projects, but there's no other way to fund the things that need funding.

2) Absolutely veto the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Look, right-wing talk radio is ridiculous, dishonest, anti-intellectual crap. It flees from facts like kids from a turd in the pool. Studies have shown that folks who get their news from talk radio (or Faux News) are just horribly misinformed. I listen to Hannity, Beck and O'Reilly to find out what's NOT going on in the world (then I go read the Christian Science Monitor for real news). There's a reason George Will isn't guesting on Limbaugh (George Will is very smart). If you take talk radio seriously, I probably think you're a troll whose parents should have considered birth control; but you CAN'T legislate it away. First Amendment. Period. Progressive radio failed because folks that tune in to radio didn't want to listen. You wan't people to listen, craft a more radio-friendly presentation. Passing something like the Fairness Doctrine is an effective admission that we can't spread our message on its own merits, which is clearly not the case given the last election. Let the truth-defiers have their antebellum circle jerk and let's get on with the honest business of revitalizing America.

There will be more to come. As I am something of a midwestern circle jerker (when it comes to football, anyway), I gots to git along and watch the game.

Much Peace,
tjb

The boys and I were up well before dawn this morning to take their mom to the airport. We drove back in the early cold, stopping to get coffee, and I directed their attention to the methodical advance of light in the east. I saw the color and shadow over the abandoned grain elevators, their bases overgrown with rough weeds and rougher trash, and I was reminded of thousands of mornings in hundreds of places...

-over the battered, scarred bluffs in Gering, NE

-avatars of sun from over my shoulder, past the guides on my fishing pole to touch the surface of the poor, abused Caloosahatchee River

-through weariness and terrible sorrow, cajoling my failing car to find my Friend in Ames, IA

-from Omaha to the Northern Territories; unbroken prairie, wind and song

-bourgeois sun over bourgeois snow and a decidely un-bourgeois blown knee in Silverthorn, CO

-febrile with caffeine and exhaustion rolling into a party in Austin, TX

-light cold, pale and intense, and me mostly dead from altitude sickness at 17, 000 feet in the Andes

-innumerable bicycle rides through empty Omaha streets, shirt and tie in my backpack, wondering at my good fortune

-everyone but the horses asleep on Mike and Mary's farm inAberdeen, SD; I sneak to the lake in the early dark to catch a fat catfish not two feet from shore

-making insane love for hours with Jennifer on the big red couch...six years of want sated...She left at sunrise, the last time I saw her alive.

-down, down, forever down, via an old ramshackle bus with one headlight out, down at unsafe speeds on narrow mountain roads, my Friend wisely asleep from a Valium...racing the sunrise from Huaraz to the coastal city of Chiclayo.

-cowboy coffee, bracingly bitter, brewed in a saucepan over a butterfly camp stove in the Boundary Waters. Oyster Lake shines like a pure shard of the sun.

-eyes itchy and frustrated...driving back and forth between Squaw Lake and Deer River in the Chippewa National Forest, trying to find the goddamn turn to reach Campbell's Empty Bar

-my big brother Max and I leave the less-dedicated anglers wrapped in their blankets, and we throw buzzbaits and Hula Poppers into the weedbeds of Sand Lake

-Pembina, ND, and dawn falls like honeyed poison through the trees in the churchyard; even the sun fears the violence remembered here

-16, torn with love and sociopathy, pacing all night; morning finds me awake on my knees and hopeless in the absence of prayer

-stoned: really, really stoned and seven solid hours of video game football. Keyshawn Johnson had over 10,000 receiving yards

-a little light seeps through a gap in the blinds; Max and Will are only a few weeks old, tiny, curling aginst each other asleep on my chest

-men and boys from 10-50, playing soccer at the crack of dawn on a basketball court in Lima...an enormous staircase from Alejandro's flat to the beach below


...and sunset on that same stretch of Peruvian sand: my Friend and I standing together, but quite apart, looking out at the endless Pacific. The boys still sleep in the back seat in Omaha, but I am taken. I remember in my body that which I have never known, have always remembered. The ocean: ages of restless harmony and dissonance falling into me, briny and cold. Somwhere past brother and Friend, beyond lovers and sons...in the rhythmic depths is my undiscovered home...rest from this unbearable restlessness.

Ouch

"... The very financial companies that tried to prevent individual Americans from having some kind of an opportunity to bail themselves out from their individual financial troubles are now rushing to the government to assist them in their financial troubles. " (Amy Goodman, 2008)

Remember a few years ago when the big fat bottoms in Congress bent us all over for the financial industry and made it more difficult for Joe Schmo to file bankruptcy? Those same pimp politicians are again helping screw you in the ass by rewarding that same industry's criminally irresponsible behavior with $700 billion of your money. We're just a pimper's paradise, to quote Bob Marley, more than happy to give our hard-earned cash to banks and finance companies who charge us interest for our patronage, or to put it in 401(k)s that assure us of nothing but richer CEOs moving farther away from we unwashed masses. We meekly submit to the entire credit bureau gulag, where someone checking your credit immediately hurts your credit, but removing a credit bureau mistake or an instance of fraud is virtually impossible.

And for what? So we can buy shit RIGHT NOW! IMMEDIATELY! that we cannot immediately afford without giving economic handjobs to Visa and American Express. That's really it, peeps. We enable the most predatory individuals and entities in the world so we can buy things for which we don't have the ready cash.

So don't be fooled. This "bailout" is not necessary to preserve the health of our nation. Quite the contrary, it is a desparate (but predictable) attempt to perpetuate the current fundamentally diseased credit-based economic paradigm, with the added purpose and result of redistributing income from you and me to the already obscenely wealthy.

"...the poor stay poor and the rich get rich/that's how it goes..."

Is anyone at all surprised that we are bailing out the richest and whitest guys at the heads of some of the most irresponsible corporations, while poor and multicolored folks (some certainly with eyes bigger than their pocketbooks) face foreclosure? If you are surprised, you shouldn't be. Most of the economic infrastructure in this country is in place to funnel wealth to those already possessed of great wealth. Most of our "law enforcement" is in place to protect the haves from the have-nots and the want-to-haves. These structures are working quite well in the manner in which they are intended to work.

"Roughly 60 percent of the economic gains in our country went to just to the top .05% of taxpayers. When comparing gains overall throughout the taxpayer base, the so-called middle class had economic gains of just 10% from 1979 to 1997 while America’s wealthiest rose 157% (after taxes). When factoring in the cost of inflation, a 10% gain over almost 20 years actually translates into a loss." (Paul Krugman, NYT, 2002)

Contrary to Saint Ronald the Second Coming of Holy Jesus H. Christ Reagan and his Kool-Aid-drinking Branch Davidian Scientologist-I'll-hook-you-and-Katie-Holmes-up-to-a-fake-machine-followers, that shit does not trickle down; nor is it intended to do so. When Reagan and his circle-jerk Democratic congresses passed legislation deregulating S&Ls, Reagan said "I think we hit the jackpot." Ask John Keating McCain about who cashed in. It sure as hell wasn't the majority of Americans. The same ethic, or lack thereof, holds true with the recent bailouts. Royalty gets their asses saved, the offending CEOs retire with tens of millions, and poor folks get the shaft. To talk about those numbers, of course, is to engage in class warfare or "the politics of envy." Facts are anathema to the Plutocracy. They want us to get all pissed off about queers and abortion while they wage true and effective economic warfare against the rest of us.

So what do we do? It will take a major shift of perspective. The problem is, most of us decry the imbalance now, but would quickly shut up about it and enjoy being part of the Plutocracy if we just had the coin. So we work our fingers to the bone, neglect our kids, and "invest" (which means giving your money to those same rich irresponsible CEOs to play with and lose), all in the hope that we might acquire some of the same expensive, shiny and unnecessary crap that Bob Nardelli acquired through the literal blood and sweat of his employees.

I don't claim purity; I do compromise and buy my boys the slightly more expensive cereal with dried fruit in it, and I do occasionally replace my guitar strings. but I can honestly aver that I have no interest in a BMW or a chic condo. I am perfectly happy with a roof, food, and my used Ford Focus. Hell, if I hadn't totaled it, I would still proudly be driving my 1999 Chevy Prizm. Should I ever get married (admittedly an unlikely proposition), it will not be with an overpriced and blood-soaked little rock.

I don't really want to preach, but the only way to effectively counterract the wholesale redistribution of money from you to guys like Ken Lay, John McCain and Barack Obama is to spend less of it. The Plutocracy wants, in fact desperately NEEDS, you to be in debt, because they own the debt and, by extension, you. The same CEO shipping jobs from Nebraska to China laughs all the way to his summer home when some Nebraska kid goes into hock for a huge truck he can't afford. So spend less. Keep your money and quiet that laughing asshole down. Don't buy a bigger house than you can afford and pay off Ass-boy's yacht with your interest payments.

Much peace

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you and I..."

I am weary of talking about unions, but I can't let regurgitated Hannity propoganda go unanswered.

Much like the consistently intellecually dishonest right-wingers who claim that real wages have gone up, but casually skate over the fact that they're not speaking in constant dollars, Maury plucks out select pieces of my argument for the necessity of organized labor and dissembles. Acting on the pretense that his argument is honest and not just more sophomoric Karl Rove spin, I will grace it with serious answers.

Q) "Are you trying to tell me if an employee at Wal-Mart, which abhors unions, were to lose their arm in an accident, they would have no recourse?"

A) No, I am not. I have no doubt that a worker permanently crippled at a WalMart would be compensated (I am less certain he or she would be set for life.) ... right now. Because of the threat of work stoppages, i.e.: because of the rise of organized labor, the government stopped supporting and joining in the abuse of workers and passed laws to meet some of the workers' demands. Every one of those laws was fought tooth and nail by Management, and by much of government. Let's be clear: the Oligarchy/Plutocracy didn't and doesn't give two shits about the health or safety of its workers. The laws in question were passed not because of any ethical or moral code, but only because organized labor held the power to delay and diminish profits; because workers organized and said enough. Should the threat of work stoppages and the accompanying threat of delayed or diminished profits disappear, we would without question see workers' protections diminished and ultimately go by the wayside. It could take 10 years, or 20 or 50; but without the real threat of an organized workforce halting production, Walmart or Home Depot, and the politicians in their pockets, would happily let an employee bleed out on the back loading dock. Don't kid yourself otherwise. Furthermore, Walmart and other non-union corporations provide benefits solely out of fear that their workforce could unionize. I have sat through the anti-union screeds at some big box retailers, and it's easy to see the cause and effect.


Here's the real deal: Maury and wingnuts like him are offended by the pinko commie idea that workers might get together and try to snag a bigger piece of the pie. Their position is inherently contradictory crap, of course. Management constantly colludes in an attempt to depress wages and benefits. In the wingers' bizzaro world, it's considered Capitalism for management to use the resources gained on the backs of workers to organize and hire lawyers and create committees to figure out how best to decrease compensation for those workers; but it's considered anti-American Communism for workers to organize in an attempt to increase their compensation. What a load of selective, anti-competitive crap. Management can organize and try to get the most out of isolated employees, but workers can't organize to try to get the best deal that they can. Hmm...Suppressing competition: sounds pretty anti-Capitalist to me, but there you go. The nuts don't really want a free market where EVERYONE can pursue their own best interests. They want a market where the bottom 99% pursues the best interests of the upper 1% (The truly disgusting thing is that Maury and Co. want you to believe the two are the same thing). Should unions go away, you'll see Maury's World reinstated as quickly as the police goons killed the preacher in the Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, and John McCain is as much a maverick as I am a saint.

Much Peace

"Tepid disinterest. I guess I expected fire or ice."

So an old flame looked me up on Facebook and got in touch with me a few weeks ago. Not being sure of her motivations (but knowing something of her current situation from a mutual friend), I answered her correspondence with pleasant, if somewhat terse, aplomb. Her response is above. Her no nonsense assessment, and our ensuing conversations, left me wondering about the same things she did.

Let me be clear: this woman was a flame back when I still knew what fire was. Ours was not a casual relationship, and neither of us were casual individuals. In our youth and foolishness, we managed to break both of our hearts, but I thought until quite recently that said phenomenon had no lasting effect on me.

Also to be quite clear: she is now very happily married with a child and contacted me only with the (conscious) purpose of catching up after 14 years.

Through the course of our back and forth, I was reminded than this chic was not only wicked smart, but that she was, as always, bold, direct and uncomfortably perceptive. It has been many long years since I looked at a woman with an idea of long-term discernment; since I have reflected upon the necessity of passion in myself and my peers, and actively searched for it in another person. To be quite honest, in the last decade or so I have consciously preferred a sort of detached and world-weary warmth in my associates.

Our correspondence was a serious splash of cold water in the aforementioned warmth. Given our history (I up and moved to Chicago for her), and the tumultous nature of our separation 14 years ago, I owed her something more than just clever rejoinders, and I soon found myself drawn into actual real (and revealing) communication. Just like old times, sort of; but with some boundaries. Nothing inappropriate, nothing I would worry about her husband reading; just real remembered intimacy resurrected in the here and now. I was a little unsettled by the ease with which I gave up the goods, and by the fact that she apparently still operates with an openness and intensity I lost (or at least eschewed) a long time ago.

Whether or not she was someone with whom I could have shared my life is not the central question (though I did allow myself a moment or two of self-indulgent regret for what might have been, and it might have been extraordinary, if I had had the maturity or awareness to see it). What I find disconcerting is the conspicuous day-today absence of the intense and open person I used to be. My correspondence with my ex reached a natural and necessary conclusion, but I find myself hungry for that level of communication and intimacy, and I wonder at the habit of resignation (she called it being placated) I have chosen. I wish her all the happiness she can manage; I am left wondering how much I myself can handle.

Much peace,
thomasj

Thank Goodness for Amy Goodman

I know, I know....lazy post; but not enough people follow Democracy Now! We hate independent media in this country. Check this story.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/5/maverick_author_paul_waldman_on_free

"...and the amber fields all laid to waste, and the revolution failed....at your coming forth..." (from "Salinas," copyrighted 2008 by this blogger)

It's easy to rant about politics or unions or religion. Even though the things I say (unskillfully) are without question my own, it is less costly to be honest (even with myself) about things and issues external than things true to me. See, there are variables I cannot control, and facts of which I can comfortably claim ignorance, that influence U.S. foreign policy and even Omaha leash laws. Not so in my own mind and body, where I am solely responsible for content and editing. No press releases for me to miss, no fair and balancing act; just a question of how much accuracy will be allowed.

So I am a father of 28-month-old twin boys, and I am not in a romantic or physical relationship with their mother. I am, however, as involved as possible in my son's lives, by which I mean that I am with them a large portion of their waking hours. I am imperfect, to be sure, but I am not a sperm donor or a child support check. I make breakfast and lunch, we practice our letters and numbers, we go for long walks and learn the names of different bugs and flowers. Last week we learned the word gravity, and the accompanying physical law (water goes from the top of the fountain to the bottom because of gravity. So saith my beloved sons). I give them tons of hugs and kisses, and I sing to them (poorly) before their midday nap. In short, I do the things a dad is supposed to do. I don't say this to garner any credit, but simply to provide an accurate description of my daily life and priorities. My sons come first, period.

First place is decided and is not negotiable. When I am not with my sons, however, I am by all rights single and reasonably attractive, certainly not without some rough-hewn charm. So given the fact that making love (or whatever you call it) is a healthy and necessary function of human behavior, why am I so reluctant to take part? Some of it is time, I suppose. I definitely don't have the time to invest in a relationship with a woman. I guess another part is the emotional fatigue inherent in raising a couple of energetic kids. At the end of a long day of fatherly attentiveness, my emotional beer mug is just mostly empty. Anyone doing it right, though, will argue correctly that sex for its own sake is rejuvanating to body and spirit. I also don't think the act necessitates marriage or even a commitment, as long as all parties involved are open-eyed about the situation.

I think, right or wrong, it feels as though I would be alienating attention I owe to my sons. That sounds weird, I know, but I know for a fact that I have never felt a visceral sense of duty to anyone or anything before my boys were born. Sure I respect my parents and feel some attachment to my family and a couple of friends, but this is different. I have no problem not getting married for my own selfish reasons. I don't want to deal with the passive-aggressive behavior that is the hallmark of every relationship I have ever seen. I won't resign myself to either a total loss of sovereignty or to the alternative stupid and underhanded struggle over who gts to be in charge. I don't want to have to cater to another grown-up's irrational neuroses for the next 50 years. With my sons, though, it's different. They don't have a choice and neither do I. They are mine and I am theirs, writ in letters plain as day. I therefore have to be as broad and as deep, as sharp and as soft, as they need 100 percent of the time. I find it difficult, therefore, to move from that uncompromising fealty to simple enjoyment in my life apart from theirs. It's a problem.

Much Peace,

thomasj

"Sweat Combustion Engine"

Whether it's called reducing overhead, streamlining, or "operational excellence," it is managment's goal across all industries to get the fewest number of people to do the greatest amount of work for the lowest possible wages. That's not a secret; it's almost invariably a stated business goal. In the bad old days BEFORE unions, this deliberately adversarial (and often murderous) approach by management was simply accepted by a workforce with no recourse. The adversity was all one way. If you lost an arm working for the railroad or the mills, then by God you just gave an arm to the cause of the great American Elites. Fuck you and your starving family, you were just a tiny cog in the blood-drinking machine that built the Rockefellers and Mellons and DuPonts. The American Oligarchy (or Plutocracy, whatever you want to call the moneyed folks who ran and still run the show) was not answerable to anyone for their abuse of men women and children in the workforce. If someone thought two cents per bushel of tomatoes or artichokes was a little low, the machinery of law enforcement would simply be brought to bear against those "agitators" who posited that five cents and a water break might be more humane. That machinery, of course, was quite simple: guns and clubs.

Then slowly, like ripples presaging a tsunami, workers started calling bullshit on their overseers, and doing so in numbers. The barons running the show still had cops and national guard beat the fuck out of and murder folks crying for something approaching a living wage, but enough workers were abused and desperate enough that production began to be affected. Let a field of artichokes begin to rot, and management would finally put down their lobster forks and take notice. Organization. Fraternity. Solidarity. The highest of human virtues. Abused and beaten people coming together for the good of the whole. Anyone who thinks the murderous fucks of United Fruit would have responded to anything but a kick in their wallets is hopelessly (and possibly deliberately) naive. Anyone who thinks that management today would treat workers like anything but cattle without the continual threat of a work stoppage is hopelessly (and possibly deliberately) naive. The Oligarchy has no conscience or goal beyond making money and sharing that money with as few people as possible. I make a living wage in humane working conditions ONLY because workers before me stood up and folded their arms. What the organization of workers did was create an opposition to the adversity visited upon them by their owners and operators. It is unfortunate that said relationship has to exist, but to pretend, as Maury does, that it doesn't exist, and that workers should just take what's offered and shut up, is, again, hopelessly naive. Let the unions dissolve and the threat of work stoppages disappear, and you'll see how fast wages drop and workers' protections go away. To posit that our ruling merchant class would act in a fashion other than predatory is to ignore the whole of American business history.

The logic that says workers should not organize and fight for wages or pensions or health insurance ultimately ends in slavery. Of course it is vastly more efficient to just own slaves, stop paying wages and give them just enough bread and water to keep them alive and working. Very low overhead, no regulation, and you can just beat or shoot problems. Maury and folks like him should just follow their logic to its conclusion and advocate the legalization of slavery. At least they would be intellectually honest for a change.

Much Peace.

"I find it very, very easy to be true/I find myself alone when each day's through." (Johnny Cash)

Horrible, wracking, crashing waves of child-abandoning guilt. Preparing to begin the pilgrimage North towards our annual fishing trip. Ely, MN this year, and the Boys are too young to go. They will be in daycare all day this coming week, and I am a terrible, rotten, faithless father because of it. This biological imperative results in temporary amputations; but I desperately need some time in the North and on the water.

More on why my attachment to my kids keeps me from getting laid, and on the absolute necessity for workers to fold their arms and organize, when I return.

Much Peace

Glacial Change

So I was asked for whom I am going to vote in this year's presidential election. The factors I am (or am not) considering are as follows:

The Economy. To be frank, the economy barely figures into my decision-making. For one thing, the President has little practical effect on the economy, regardless of what the spin doctors say. We have become a petroleum-based economy, and our major recessions are inextricably linked to the cost of petroleum, the deflated housing bubble notwithstanding. That is not going to change until we as consumers make it change, or until there is a significant collapse due to a worldwide shortage of petroleum. There are a few regulatory positions with which I generally side with the Democrats (such as requiring banks to be honest and careful with people's money), but in general, I believe that there's not much government can do to change the economy.

Abortion. There is not a politician at the national level who is going to seriously attempt to criminalize abortion. Enforcement would be impossible, given the number of providers, and it would be political suicide to try. While I personally think abortion is just one more way for folks in our culture (particularly men) to avoid responsibility for their actions, I am forced to consider it a political non-issue.

Religion. I don't think we have, as our Monkey-in-Chief posited, "a mandate from beyond the stars." If people find comfort in the belief that a sentient and benevolent overlord cares about them, and if that encourages them to treat their neighbors well, then I am all for it. If, however, they think their religious identity gives them the right to wage war, or to commit genocide, or to diddle kids, or to fly planes or drive trucks into buildings, well then they and their respective bearded sky fairies can go fuck themselves. Religious arguments effectively end debate. How can anyone advance a practical position against the infallible holy word of the gods? So I guess I could care less to what abstraction our President prays, as long as Christ or Jehovah or Allah isn't informing his or her policy decisions.

(In answer to a previous query, I suppose I am atheist, if I am any -ist at all. I would need to see the pillar of fire or put my fingers in the nail holes.)

The Environment. I am almost exclusively sympathetic with Democratic policy positions in regard to the environment, as those positions are absolutely more conservative than those of the right wing. It just makes sense to conserve, look down the road and have back-up plans should things go awry. Any energy policy that does not begin with the acknowledgement that fossil fuels are a finite resource is just plain silly. The whole idea that we can drill our way out of high gas prices or foreign oil dependency makes zero sense. Let's allow for the sake of argument that there is significant recoverable oil off our shores or in the Arctic. When Texaco extracts that oil, are they somehow going to sell it at discounted prices exclusively to U.S. consumers? Only if we nationalize our oil industry, which is something we've overthrown other governments for doing. Truth is, Texaco and Exxon would sell that oil on the world market at market prices, and there is simply not enough extractable oil to make an appreciable dent in those prices. Beyond the short-term pricing concerns, it is fact that we will ultimately run out of oil, whether it happens in 20, 50, 100 or 500 years. Rather than desperately freebasing the last of those supplies, why would we not devote our money and energy to conservation and innovation? I mean, Jesus Christ, have we lost our fabled American ingenuity?

Foreign Policy. I'm not like that college professor who called the folks who died on 9/11 "little Eichmanns," but I am also not an anti-fact Hannity drone who thinks 9/11 happened in a policy vacuum and was the work of folks who hate us for our freedom. If our foreign policy is fundamentally exploitative (as it has been for over a century), those who are exploited will eventually do whatever they can to strike back. Does this mean that the people in the WTC deserved to die? Absolutely not. It does mean that 9/11 was predictable. Drawing correlations or positing causation btween U.S. actions in middle-eastern countires and terrorist attacks by middle-eastern men on U.S. soil is NOT unpatriotic. Quite the opposite, it is responsible and necessary. It doesn't mean, as the right wing would have you believe, that we have kumbaya moments with militants, or that we stop fighting terrorists. It means that we should consider the repercussions of our actions in Muslim countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. I love my country, and I am pretty goddamn pissed at some of the things being done with my flag and in my name. Again, I lean towatds the Democrats here because I think a thoughtful considered approach is more conservative and effective than the current shoot from the hip and devil take the consequences mentality. Everybody is going to spend a shitload on defense and security. That infrastrucure is not budging (see Eisenhower's farewell address). I think Obama represents a micro-departure from previous administrations, and a broader and longer-term view of what really constitutes "U.S. interests."

Both of these candidates are owned by special anterests and lobbyists, whatever their arguments to the contrary may be. You don't reach that level of politics without being beholden to a bunch of people, both good and slimy, so don't kid yourself that these guys are free of slime. They're not. I am voting for Obama because of the differences in environmental and energy policy, and because I think he will be smarter and more deliberate in regard to foreign policy

Here's the real thing, though: Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain are going to visibly change the direction or dynamic of our culture. As a people, we are driven not towards freedom or harmony or love, but towards luxury. By luxury I do not mean an abundance of food, water and shelter. Every culture since the emergence of Homo Sapiens sapiens has striven for secure food sources and safety from the elements. Our pursuit of luxury does not end with plenty. It's not sufficient to have enough to eat and clean water to drink, or to have different clothes for every day of the week. It's not enough to have shelter from the elements and soft beds in which to sleep. This belief that more things will improve one's life is the fundamental crisis of our culture, and is addressed, generally, by neither left nor right. So if you want change, if you really want to create a healthier and more sustainable world for your kids (or for my kids, who are ridiculously smart and funny) than we're going to have to do it our own goddamn selves.

Much Peace,
ThomasJ

Your Kids Are Not Special

600,000 Iraquis are dead because you spoil your kids, or more accurately, because several hundred years worth of western Europeans, including you, have spoiled their kids. The fundamental dynamic of these European United States is not freedom or opportunity. It is still Manifest Destiny. Just like a spoiled little child, "waaaaah...Saddam kicked out BP and Texaco," we throw a tantrum until we get what we want. Rather than beating our heels against the floor and crying, though, the physical effects of our national tantrum are cluster bombs and widows and orphans. Like a pampered 3-year-old in high dudgeon, we simply cannot comprehend the fact that another nation may have the right to control their own natural resources. So we overthrow Allende and install Pinochet. At the behest of British Petroleum, we overthrow a democratically elected Iranian government and install the Shah. Through military and economic force, we make certain that a populist uprising in Cuba will fail. Our goal is not (and has never been) to spread freedom. Our goal has always been to make sure that all significant economic markets and natural resources are open to our exploitation. Was Pinochet's government democratic? Was the Shah's? Democracy is cosmetic in our corporate war on people that want to live differently than us. Sure, they can determine their own destiny and establish their own governments, as long as those governments put European-American economic interests first and their people a distant second. The threat of a Euro-American napalm tantrum is enough to keep most of them in line. Unfortunately, over a century of slash and burn foreign policy has resulted in our current day to day terror threat.

....and it all comes down to you spoiling your kids, teaching them that they're "special" and instilling a sense of bottomless entitlement. Kids are mammals and, contrary to the teachings of most Eastern and Occidental religions, part of the large and interdependent community of carbon-based life forms. Feed them, protect them, take care of them, but for chrissake don't teach them that they're little gods. I have a biological responsibilty to my boys, a genetic imperative simplistically labelled "love," but I hold no illusions that they deserve more than anyone else because of their race, nationality or baptism. If they grow up thinking they're better than the kids they meet at the playground, then I will have utterly failed as a father. I will also have passed on, in the most fundamental and binding way possible, the Western European ideal of imperialism, the concept that through some inate function of identity divorced from action or rationality, we have the entitlement to whatever we want, even if sating our want means taking its object by force from those who lack the might to stop us.

Much Peace

Civil War

“ …in every one of us..there’s a civil war going on….every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you…every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things…something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and spread evil gossip…..we end up crying out with St. Augustine “Lord make me pure but not yet.” (MLK - Unfulfilled Dreams)

I'm a white guy from a white family in a white neighborhood. I guess I was fortunate in that my parents and some of my older siblings were literate about race. I got smacked twice for bad language when I was a kid: once for calling my brother a cocksucker, and once for telling Mom that Anthony and I had gone nigger-knocking (In my defense, I did not, at age seven, know what either of those words meant). While I have used the first term a time or two since then, my education was such that I have not used the second since. I'm not pretending to empathize with the African-American experience; but I do try to be conscious of my thoughts and knee-jerk reactions, and I make an honest effort to root out the prejudices I find in myself.

So why the bullshit introspection/disclaimer? I reckon if a white guy is going to start a blog post with a quote from MLK, he'd best be honest about the ground on which he stands. This post isn't about race, though. I don't have the perspective or the chops to start that discussion. I was listening to NPR today, and they were playing excerpts from some of Dr. King's last sermons and speeches. The quote above is taken from a larger context in which Dr. King stated that, "life is a continual story of shattered dreams." He referenced Gandhi's ultimate heartbreak over a divided India, and he of course masterfully framed the concept in the arena of the Civil Rights movement. What struck me, though, was the blatant and almost illicit personal narrative occurring in Dr. King's voice and delivery. The NPR narrator speculated that King could have been drawing from his own purported personal struggles with adultery, but I don't know that the specific sin matters. I think he was saying that ain't nobody all one way, and that nobody is free of the capacity for destruction and debasement, self or otherwise. It's not a clear cut struggle, either. Some days it feels like all the things you do right are made false by the miserable and compulsive joy of entertaining wrong. Lust, rage, meanness...If somewhere in my brain it's considered, then it's as surely me as any good I may ultimately do. I'm not religious. I am, in fact, allergic to religion. As a non-religious white guy from a white family in a white neighborhood, though, I would, almost, follow whatever abstraction this black preacher told me to if it illuminated a way through this struggle. Too bad the fuckers had to kill him.

Much Peace.

Saturday Interlude

Max and Will (my twin two-year-olds) are lingering over their english muffins, eggs and juice while I make plans for the day. It is not so unbearably moist today, so we will likely pack a lunch and go survey what damage last night's storms did to one of the nearby state parks. The boys will be fascinated by the rarity of a full and fast-flowing Platte, and I will be glad to head outside and absorb light not produced by a computer monitor. Obviously, I am getting off the damn compter now.

Much Peace

Who's Going to Shoe His Holy Little Feet?

I suppose I should begin with a correction from yesterday's post, wherein I questioned his Grand High Holiness' credibility, in small part due to reports that he flaunted red Prada loafers as part of a Papal ensemble. A Vatican newspaper set the record straight, assuring us that the Lord High Brownshirt "does not wear Prada, but Christ."

Jesus forgive me, and all of us, who would for one minute believe that this model of simple living would ever succumb to the lure of worldly goods. Excepting, of course, his red fur-lined hat, his gold-embroidered robes and gold plated cups, and the long red velvet cape trimmed with ermine he wore to a recent event. As I recall, the poor carpenter from Galilee (who generations of Popes and other less exalted Christians have failed miserably to emulate) didn't go in much for ermine. I think Nero did, though, and probably Caligula. Given (then) Cardinal Benedict's attempts to cover up his corporation's widespread kiddy-diddling (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/24/children.childprotection), Caligula is the more accurate comparison.

Pit Bulls and SUVs

Pit Bull Terriers and Hummers send the same message to me: “My owner has a small penis and a tiny brain.” The two beasts may seem unrelated, but their genesis and proliferation are children of the same junkie whore mother.

Another pit bull attack in Omaha and another kid loses a portion of her anatomy. This time it was a 15-month-old baby with her scalp ripped off. The owner, a stereotypically unwashed, undereducated woman with obvious life issues, told television reporters she was sorry for what happened to the kids. 20/20 remorse. It would be nice if these short-sighted troglodytes considered the possible ramifications of keeping their killer “pets” in an urban area with children. Are there not enough documented cases of kids getting their faces or genitals bitten off by noble Staffordshires to pierce the fog of terminal adolescence that surrounds the owners of these dogs? Seriously, how self-absorbed does a person have to be to put his own misanthropic desire for a big mean dog ahead of the safety and well-being of his community?

… about as self-absorbed as the cases of arrested development who drive Hummers and other big SUVs during an energy crisis. Just pop some Extenze, for chrissake, or better yet, get over yourself and realize you’re still a selfish, juvenile, strutting little peacock no matter what you drive. Sure, sure: we have the Divinely granted freedom to engage in whatever self-and-socially destructive behavior the Gods of Oligarchy deem profitable (provided it’s nothing so benign as marrying whom you want or smoking weed), and I am not suggesting we ban SUVs. I would, however, like to bitch-slap some perspective and self worth into the bitches hogging the highway and the resources in their rolling self-esteem chambers.

These are just two lurid examples of what is really the fundamental and basic compulsion of our entire culture and economy: the Holy Pursuit of Unnecessary Goods. The more extravagant and nonsensical the purchase, the more negative the fallout elsewhere, the more valuable it will be seen by you and the Joneses.

For example, women want diamonds because, like ravens and crows, they like to line their nests with shiny things. Pathetic men purchase these overpriced shards of coal in the hope of a consistent date less efficient than their own right hands. Both parties in this blatant bit of prostitution ignore the well-publicized fact that folks half a world away are being raped and murdered to supply hooker and john with their trinket of respectability. Again: It’s not a secret that many of us were married with conflict diamonds. It just doesn’t matter to us. Those little things are just so damn pretty; a few dead kids in Africa are a small price to pay to stroke our fancy and our egos.

It’s all of a piece. We define ourselves by what we own, setting a baseline of narcissism and materialism. I don’t believe the Superstitious Right when they preach about Christian values in their $1,000.00 sweetwater suits and 3000-square-foot homes. I don’t believe God’s Pit Bull, the current Catholic Pope, who rails against vague materialism while strutting in his red Pradas and blessing fleets of Ferraris.

I don’t believe the purportedly socially and environmentally conscious left, whether D.C. or Hollywood, who talk a pretty good game, but who zip back and forth in private jets and fuel the most banal brand-minded consumerism. When push comes to shove, neither Barack nor Hillary will actually alter their lifestyles or consumer habits for the greater good, any more than would Bush or a Saudi prince. There really isn't much difference between the illiterate troll who keeps a pit bull, the preening suburbanite getting 10 mpg in his Hummer, and the middle class consumer who pays no attention to where his diamonds, shirts or coffee come from. The underlying attitude is, "we gots to get ours, and screw the consequences."

Much Peace