Turning Down the Heat

This is turning into a long hot summer for America. The East Coast just went through a record-breaking heat wave; La Nina is forecast for the Pacific which usually fries the Midwest; collars are hot all over the Gulf Coast, thanks to the man-made oil-gushing disaster; Main Street is still hot about Wall Street; Republicans are hoping the country will remain hot about bailouts through November; and the Democrats are hot about the blame they are getting for unemployment stagnation, even though the paternity of the Great Recession is easily attributable to the previous administration. Cleveland is hot that Lebron James did not turn down the Heat and remain in Cleveland; and hurricane season is heating up.
Summer is a time of betrayal and intrigue, usually limited to beach novels. Not this summer. Starting with Lebron’s betrayal of Cleveland (but not his dreams and friendships), tossing in the spy exchange just orchestrated by the Russians and the United States, adding the development of the “Spy Pigeon” Drone our military now has available, plus the report that Google Street View has been spying “inadvertently” on American citizens, (no wonder China has agreed to restore its license), Fox should be working on a new reality program called: “Can You Trust a Fifth Grader?”
“Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. The McCarthy witch hunt for communists had a lot to do with encouraging our country’s leaders to adopt the phrase. Clearly, we could not trust our neighbors to be fully American and not communist, so we came up with an ironclad theocratic phrase to confront the Iron Curtain. Today, given the economic uncertainty of the times, we have become suspicious of anyone and everyone, especially government. We expect government to solve our national problems, and yet we want it to be less intrusive in our lives. We want it to be effective, but when it is not, we want it smaller. Our trust in ourselves as a nation is so low, we want to get rid of or blame the latest wave of immigrants who always, over time, add to rather than subtract from the growth and goodness of our nation.
The spies we just rounded up accomplished nothing while they were here, except that they integrated themselves so successfully they had their neighbors and co-workers completely fooled, but not the FBI or CIA. Those are government institutions, by the way. Want to shrink those agencies now?
Just maybe it is time to renew our trust in our government, and our trust in ourselves to be generous, positive, hopeful, and adaptable. Maybe it is time to put all the anger, mistrust, and misunderstanding aside and renew our pledge of allegiance to the idea of America, not as it is but as it should be: inclusive, magnanimous, and moving in a positive direction. Yes, government should be more efficient and less costly, but I would rather have it strong enough to ferret out spies in our midst as well as put corporations and banks in their place when they start serving only their own short-term interests instead of the greater good. Rather than limit the institutions we can with our vote, we better think twice about what power they can wield on our behalf in the face of spies, BP, and Goldman Sachs. Making government less powerful will only play into the hands of those who would control it if they could and let loose a limitless concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few, rather than spread among the people.
The heat is on, and it is time to cool our heads and warm our hearts, rather than letting the reverse rule the day.

The Force

(with apologies to Dylan Thomas)


The force that through the hedge funds drives the bet
Drives my car’s wheels; that blasts the I.E.D.
Is my annuity.
And I am dumb to tell myself
My soul is lost to the same hungry fever.

The force that spews the oil from the pipe
Drives my blood cold and coats the coastal tides
Is my slick slave.
And I am dumb to mouth unto its slime
How at the gushing well we all suck.

The hand that casts the vote pumps the gas
Dials the broker who buys the BP stock
That drills for more
And I am dumb to tell the tarball force
How it rolls on from sea to slippery sea.

The soaring eagle becomes the tar-draped pelican
The sanctuary is made a mortuary
All life destroyed.
And I am dumb to tell the lusty marshy life
How it is lost to human greed for profit margins.

And I am dumb to tell the womb turned tomb
How through my hair goes the same oily comb.

Dick Cheney: Go to Guy By

With all the head-scratching BP executives and the federal government have been doing about the Gulf Oil Disaster (G.O.D.), I wonder why no one has called for the former ace oil executive/clandestine way paver Dick Cheney. No one combines the skills of back room deal-making and oil drilling expertise better than the former CEO of Halliburton and ex-VP of the United States. Even if he has not been called to duty, it is surprising he hasn’t contributed his expertise by joining Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, with practical solutions to this blip on the screen of an otherwise error-proof and risk-free industry. Dick and Bobby could be a great team, bad-mouthing the way too cautious deliberations of the White House while they roll up their sleeves in front of the TV cameras and get to work saving the Louisiana coastline.
Dick Cheney, even when he is after small game, can bag a big game trophy with his fire-ready-aim approach. He has shown that skill while quail-hunting. As VP of the United States of Halliburton, he was able to acquire for his former company a no bid contract for a substantial part of the non-military support needs in the Iraq War. If he can do that, he surely can plug a little leak in the Gulf. After all, it is only a small hole in the floor, and with all that oil going to waste, which nobody seems to be focused on, something ought to be done and done now.
Therefore, I nominate Dick Cheney to be head of a federally appointed task force to solve the G.O.D. damn problem. Why, he probably would come up with a solution that would not only plug the hole, but take care of reducing another expensive and deteriorating inventory, namely nuclear stockpiles and waste. Instead of spending all that money on dismantling nuclear missiles and burying atomic waste under Yucca Mountain, why not plug the damn hole with some really heavy stuff, not just so-called “mud” that has nothing more than some classified chemicals in its composition. Send a nuclear missile or two down that hole or pump some really heavy mud down in there with some real density to it and then sneer at those hapless environmentalists who have the TV networks all worked up about a few pelicans. Hell, you can’t even eat pelican!
I just can’t understand why we haven’t heard anything on this one from Dick Cheney. He has thrown in his two cents on a number of other issues since he left office. Why would he hold back now when the issue is one he should know more about than say how Obama is soft on terrorism. Maybe he’s off hunting somewhere. Or maybe he’s lying low because of some deals he hatched back in 2001 with the oil and gas industry that enabled a reckless oil drilling culture to develop that led inevitably to the G.O.D.

Myth Rules America

America is a nation of believers. Americans may not always be right, but they are seldom in doubt. The current mood of the country is that experience is nothing; change is everything. If at first you don’t succeed, try something else. We are now like men on Christmas Eve, which today means pushing the various buttons on electronic toys until we get them to work. It is all trial and error. It is a wilderness to conquer, not a manual to study. The first time politicians displease us because they have had to make a tough decision, off with their heads.
Tolerance is a product of good times; impatience is a product of bad. Belief strengthens in the face of uncertainty; doubt subsides. We are a decisive people who take action, often before we have thought very hard. Intellectuals think hard, and that leads to nowhere otherwise known as complexity, like that bridge Sarah Palin referenced throughout her VP campaign. We don’t trust complexity, because it smacks of obfuscation. It is a brier patch that no lawn mower can make into a green carpet. We want our lawns spotless; we want our universe well-ordered.
Americans know what is right, and nothing Washington does is ever quite right. Instead, it is mostly or completely wrong. Everything congress puts out looks like a Trojan horse or Mark Twain’s definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee. A congressional “horse,” no matter what, is never a winner. It is mostly a construct that is disdained by the minority members and passed with held noses by the majority. The recent health care bill was a Trojan horse to both extremes: one group would not even look the gift horse in the mouth and the others were focused on how much the other end produced.
All of this is the product of mutually opposing myths: government can and should steer the American people; government can and should get out of the way of the American people. The libertarians think they have the answer by calling for as little government as possible. Liberals believe that government can serve the people well if only the lobbyists would go away.
As David Brooks pointed out on the News Hour Friday night (May 21, 2010), the centrists have no discernible platform; the moderates have no place. Compromise is corruption. Purity is all. If you’re in the middle, you are merely indecisive. Both sets of extremists insist you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem. A pragmatist, by definition, prostitutes principles.
America seems to default to principles, even if the principle of by the people, for the people turns out to be by the rich, for the rich. And our principles are faith based, not rooted in actual fact. Libertarians trust self-interest as the governing principle; liberals trust community. We’re either all batters at the plate, or we’re all rowers in a boat. Either the parts are greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
No one is right on this, except the folks somewhere in the middle, who see life as a balancing act between individual needs and the greater good. We would surely perish as a people if we all became Gandhi or the guy whose operating principle is: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Just as a good marriage depends on compromise, not do or die, so does a good society.
Let’s get back to the middle ground where the meeting of minds takes place, rather than trying to live on the wilderness edge of extremism where self-destruction lurks and people shout of freedom out of fear of losing what they have rather than striving for a greater goodness. That means electing and supporting people as our representatives who will do the next right thing, disdain personal gain, and serve the people, not the lobbyists and the corporate giants.

The NRA: A Deflection

The stars must be aligning. The constellations are achieving greater resolution. And there is a new one to be seen through our telescopes, or better yet sight-scopes mounted on our high-powered rifles. In honor of the National Rifle Association’s annual conference, I felt the need to offer a theory.
The constellation is not the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era or the healthcare-insurance-lobby or the real estate-sub-prime mortgage-derivative-credit default swap complex of 2008. No, it is the “Can’t–afford or can’t admit- I-need Viagra-thanks to hormone-injected meat –gun lobby called the NRA.
Here’s how the theory works. Manly men seldom admit to needing a sexual performance enhancing drug to enable their “pistol” to operate effectively, so they deflect their frustration at the government who, they believe, might take away their right to bear arms. Some of them choose to depend on firearms (notice the term and its components: fire-implying heat and arms suggesting appendages) for reliable firepower because their natural firepower appendage no longer works properly. A manly man needs to be able to count on his tools, and when the most precious one fails, he turns his focus to external ones that he can always count on. The most symbolic are those that have the power to destroy (gun) which are the opposite of those that procreate (penis). If he has not lost the biological capacity yet, he is fearful of losing it and therefore stockpiles weapons against the day he actually does find himself “softening.”
One of my favorite sayings is from Oscar Wilde: “All criticism is autobiographical.” When I see the NRA folks hooting and hollering about the 2nd Amendment and how the government is going to take away their guns, I now see this phenomenon as another example of Wilde’s observation. What the gun folks are really mad about is their own loss of sexual virility.
My theory about this epidemic loss which has resulted in one of the most lucrative products in the history of the pharmaceutical industry (Viagra, Cialis, etc.) is the growth hormones pumped into commercially produced meat in the United States. Unless you are buying hormone-free meat products or going Vegan (which manly men never would consider) and you are a man, be prepared to see yourself developing female-like breasts growing on your chest and limpness where you wish there were salutes at attention. These are the same hormones that are causing young girls to mature prematurely. Clearly, what gun owners need to do is eat more of what they shoot, so long as they stay away from aiming at very large cattle and people who eat them.
Therefore, the USDA is tacitly approving the emasculation of the American male which results in his compensatory accumulation of firearms and surrogate firepower. Not only is it embarrassing to admit impotence, it is more expensive to buy Viagra than ammunition. Typically, Viagra pills cost $20 a piece whereas you can get a whole box of live ammunition for that amount of money.
Now some population control fanatics might argue that we need to let well enough alone. We may have to begin shooting people just to keep the lid on exponential population expansion, not that we don’t do that already in the name of promoting peace and prosperity around the world. If the USDA starts banning the use of growth hormones in meat, we might have to actually start taking the idea of birth control seriously. But I digress. This was about trying to explain why the NRA folks are so angry.
Now you might say, well, what about the women of the NRA. The Viagra-impotence argument doesn’t hold any water with them. All right, you asked for it. The answer, of course, is penis envy. There is no better symbol of penis envy on the part of women than a picture of a woman holding a gun. Some women wish they had that natural appendage and the privileges of power that go with it, strange as it may seem. They want to be just like men. Their sense of impotence, however, derives from their traditional historical status as second class citizens; and, like those who suffer from any sort of inferiority complex or actual inferior status, they want to compensate for it somehow, and nothing symbolizes power more than a gun, except, of course, that natural and fully functioning appendage attached to a man.
Therefore, that new constellation we can witness if we look long enough through our scopes is the one I mentioned in the first paragraph, which I won’t introduce again here except to say that the NRA could stand for No Reproductive Activity or Never Really Adjusted or No Reasoning Ability or Never Read Anything or Not Rational Americans….

Neanderthals Discovered in Arizona

I just returned from visiting a family member in Arizona over the past weekend. I felt safe from harassment by police enforcing the new laws declaring undocumented folks criminals and human-animal hybrids illegal because I entered the state from the north and confined my stay to the Flagstaff area. As far as I know, I am all right in the documented department but after last week’s announcement by some researchers who have decoded the entire genome of the Neanderthals and found that most folks of European and Asian stock probably have from 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal genes floating in their systems, the second law on hybrids makes me feel a little uneasy. After all, we are not quite sure Neanderthals are classified as humans or merely as some sort of advanced apes, but the combination of the new Arizona law (SB 1307) and the new genetic discovery that most of us white folks carry some percentage of Neanderthal blood in us presents this new hybrid law with something of a challenge.
Of course a further study, say of Democrats and Republicans, might reveal that one party might carry a greater percentage of Neanderthal blood than the other, in which case, a proposal could be made to outlaw the party with the greatest percentage of Neanderthal blood, thereby keeping the human population from being subjected to counter-evolutionary forces that might retard or even reverse human advancement.
My bet is the party with the most Neanderthal blood would be the Republicans. The irony would be that they are the ones who are busy making sure that our blood remains as pure as possible by questioning the legitimacy of Latino presence in the state of Arizona (SB1070), the legitimacy of the U. S. President’s birth certificate (SB 2937), and the close proximity of animals to human fertility labs (SB 1307).
Speaking of President Obama’s pedigree, he undoubtedly carries less Neanderthal blood than any other former president because half of his ancestry is African. According to the Neanderthal genome researchers, Africans contain not even a trace of Neanderthal blood, making them the purest of the purely human.
What the Arizona Republicans really want is for the whole state to become a gated community by spending billions of tax dollars building a wall across its southern border. Only a Neanderthal could come up with such a preposterous construct, so I assume, based on that evidence, that the Republicans have already broken their new SB 1307 law and are therefore no longer qualified to be residents of their own state.

What History We Remember Determines All Our Institutions*

The Arizona legislature and current governor are acting as if their new immigration law is predicated on an almighty firm foundation. However, what they should fear the most is not the undocumented worker but the lawyer who decides to pursue the larger justice of restoring what is now the State of Arizona to its rightful heirs, the ancient tribes of Native Americans who historically roamed that mostly desert territory. Yes, the U.S. won Arizona as part of the settlement with Mexico after the Mexican-American War of 1848 and it justified fighting that war and taking that territory in the name of Manifest Destiny, a doctrine that said it was God’s will that we mostly white U.S. Protestants take that land from the perceived “lesser beings” who occupied it at the time.
The Arizonians who are behind this new illegal immigration law are starting from the premise that they are the rightful owners and legitimate citizens of what is currently called the state of Arizona. However, their legitimacy is based on the rather shallow roots of relatively recent history. That land was first “owned” by various tribes and then occupied by Spanish and eventually Mexican people. Since the U.S. has broken more treaties, especially with Native Americans, than it has ever kept, a long tradition probably carries more moral weight than a U.S. treaty in the larger scheme of things.
To complicate matters further, our Social Security system would probably be bankrupt right now were it not for the contributions to the SS system by undocumented workers who use phony or borrowed SS numbers with no hope of ever receiving a benefit. They, as it were, are keeping the system afloat as we the people sort out how we are going to finance that benefit in the future.
So rather than having law enforcement confront every suspicious Latino it sees in Arizona, it might be wise to count the blessing of the rather dubiously obtained privilege of Arizona citizenship on the part of Anglos and leave sleeping dogs lie. Or maybe count the number of lawyers you have and start worrying which one will find it lucrative enough to go after your historically questionable ownership.
*Modified from Emerson’s English Traits which said, “How man views nature determines all his institutions.”