Enough is Enough - Trump Needs his Fanny Smacked

Post presidential debate w/Clinton: 

I've had about all I can take of Donald J. Trump. He keeps hammering his assertion that President Obama "founded ISIS."  He bases this ridiculous assertion on the facts that:

• On the date agreed to by the George W. Bush administration, 
• At the troop levels (0) agreed to by the George W. Bush administration, 

President Obama executed the agreement negotiated by the George W. Bush administration, and withdrew American forces from Iraq.

Senator John McCain, among others, opposed that agreement, especially the "date certain" part. It was an issue in the 2008 campaign. Then-Senator Obama wanted to get the US out of Iraq, McCain believed troops should be left behind.  They debated it. Obama won the election. Americans wanted the US forces out of Iraq. President Obama, when the date arrived, withdrew them.  

In his typical armchair-quarterback fashion, Trump calls this "a disaster," a "bad decision."  He believes President Obama should have 'decided' not to honor the agreement between the sovereign, democratically elected government of Iraq and the George W. Bush administration. He believes the United States should have reneged on its agreement, and unilaterally overruled Iraq's sovereignty. He believes that option was open, and that President Obama could have 'decided' (when the issue had already been decided, by President George W. Bush) to trash the agreement and refuse to comply. 

He would. 

It's the way he thinks, and it's the way he conducts his businesses. To him, contracts aren't worth spit--you simply break them, stiff your contractors, and unleash your army of lawyers to wear down those who sue you for their rightful payment (after you have their work product in hand, naturally), forcing them to give up and either take pennies on the dollar, or nothing. This is how the "brilliant negotiator," Donald J. Trump, conducts his "business as usual." It's how he "brilliantly" brings in his projects "under budget." He just reneges on the very contracts he's so "brilliantly negotiated," as soon as it's too late for his contractors to withhold services--as soon as there's nothing left for them to bargain with. 

I'm also disappointed in Secretary Clinton, who started to explain the above facts but stopped short of bringing the argument home. To be fair, the question asked by Lester Holt was about another topic, and Trump's rant was tangential, as was his wild-eyed assertion that the U.S. should have "taken the oil."  He thinks the U.S. could just "take the oil."

He would.

It's the way he thinks, and the way he conducts his business--and his campaign. He cheats, lies, obfuscates, and bullies people. The rules don't apply to the great and powerful Drumpf. He uses his leverage to crush honest brokers into dust, then deflects all criticism onto THEM, using the media as his personal bullhorn, drowning out all dissent, denouncing all criticism, boldly and repeatedly lauding himself for his dominance, his "savvy," his "radiant magnificence," taking advantage of the free media time to run a campaign-length commercial for his business interests--time other businesses have to pay (a lot) for, but not Donald J. Trump. Why, the cameras are pointed at him because, well, he's "The Donald"--every little thing he does is magic, CNN shows up just because he's so compelling, magnetic, entertaining, "newsworthy." Just by being Donald.

How do you "take the oil?" It's not a brown paper package tied up with string. It's a heavy, slimy substance you suck out of the ground, at great expense, with great effort--and you have to BE there to do that, and have trucks or trains or pipelines or some sort of large-scale method of getting it out of there.  You don't just slip it into your briefcase on the way out of the boardroom, on your way to dinner at Sardi's.

Especially when it's not yours to take. Especially when it belongs to another sovereign nation and its people. Trump apparently thinks the Iraqis "owed" it to us, and perhaps there could have been some "negotiation" to extract some of their oil as payment for "giving" them their democracy--but that would have had to be negotiated by President Bush's team, and it wasn't.

UPDATE, 01/26/17: Trump did it again. In his remarks at CIA Headquarters on Saturday, Trump once again said we "should have kept the oil."  Like it was ours to "keep," like it was ever ours in the first place. Only this time he said it as President of the United States. So now it's not a campaign slogan, it's (hypothetical, but stated) US policy.

This little boy needs a spanking.

How Frank Luntz is Destroying American Democracy

Now, don't get me wrong—I admire Frank Luntz. He's brilliant, driven, a thorough and meticulous researcher, and his services are highly sought-after for good reason—he works hard, and is very good at what he does. His appearances on television (which I've followed since he was a newly-minted Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, appearing at 3 am on C-SPAN) are always fascinating and informative, and those who heed his counsel are politically successful more often than not. I'm sure he sincerely sees himself as an empowering force in American populist democracy. In effect, however, he's more like Goldman Sachs—the CDO/credit-default-swap packager of politics.

Click on his website, theworddoctors.com, and you are treated to a video barrage of blazing images and pounding drums, boldly announcing that Frank Luntz has given rise to a new voice-- “The People!” We see auditoriums full of voters, reacting in real time (with hand-held “preference dials”) to presidential speeches and debates, giving him precise reactions, in-the-moment, to single words or phrases, or even, as he points out, “facial expressions.” His clients include “Prime Ministers and Presidents, Fortune 100 CEOs and Hollywood creative teams,” and he describes his company as “a powerhouse in the profession of message creation and image management.” He's right. It is. He is. He's THE titan of the industry, no two ways about it. And he's completely honest about it—he doesn't try to hide what he's doing, in fact he spells it out for everyone (most importantly potential clients) to see. He's proud of his work, and has every reason to be. He's the best.

But the very service he sells has been proven, time and time again, to be valuable not to “The People,” but to those whose interests lie in manipulating public perception to their own advantage. When he gathers people together into rooms to hear their opinions, there's no doubt he listens intently and with respect, but what he's really doing is aggregating data—lots of it—and that data isn't used to get the people what they want—it's used to help politicians custom-tailor their words to evoke a Pavlovian response, and get themselves elected. When people twist those little dials, they aren't “making their voices heard.” To the contrary, they're spotting for the enemy. Dr. Luntz tests and re-tests peoples' reactions to specific words and phrases, then sells that data (along with his spot-on advice on how to use it) to powerful interests, giving them precisely the ammunition they need to destroy their competitors, win elections, and stay in office once they're there.

So in effect, Dr. Luntz takes the individual voter (like an individual mortgage) bundles him/her, and others like themselves, into “Opinion-Tranch Securities” (like CDOs), and sells the “investment data” to “sophisticated investors” (major politicians and parties). He then creates “risk management instruments” (like credit-default swaps)--scientifically-engineered words and phrases designed specifically to minimize the risk of loss, and to maximize political gain by targeting the exact emotional responses most likely to result in positive outcomes for his clients (and/or negative outcomes for the opposition). And just like Goldman and their ilk, he, and the politicians who succeed with his help, profit regardless of whether the people win or lose. The people are only voters, after all—Dr. Luntz pays them an honest fee for their opinions (fair enough) but their interests are not what is at stake—they are like a like an index against which the value of a synthetic investment instrument is derived.

If that were the extent of the damage, that would be bad enough—it's hard enough to get politicians to speak honestly about their intentions, and give the voter enough information with which to choose, without the ability to purchase custom-crafted obfuscations, disguised as “positions on the issues,” from Luntz & Company. But the real damage happens after the elections, during actual debates about actual legislation, policy agendas, and specific solutions to real problems America faces.

When the founders of our country gathered in 1787 to hammer out our Constitution, they brought widely varying opinions, convictions, and principles to that debate—a debate which raged on for weeks and months before consensus could be achieved, and that carefully reasoned (though, self-admittedly, imperfect) document could be signed by all the parties involved. They created something great—about that much, no matter how polarized we may be as an electorate, we can agree.

But the difference between then and now was that those disparate, erudite voices came together and debated the issues at hand using their own words. Each convention delegate came to that convention with a different background, different experiences, and a subtly (or even radically) different vocabulary with which to express his point of view. Those subtle differences, phrased and re-phrased over endless hours of intense debate, helped each delegate to evolve and solidify his position, and also to move toward consensus—to compromise intelligently, and recognize those positions which were best softened or even abandoned in order to serve the greater good, “In order to form a more perfect union.”

Today, we have C-SPAN—a wonderful public service which gives every cable-wired American the opportunity to watch, firsthand, the “great debates of our time.” But those debates are now homogenized, tightly-scripted theater, triple-distilled and devoid of creativity or inspired language—or even any real arguments. Instead we hear the same Luntz-tested, safe, trite-and-true phrases, repeated enough times that most of us know the major sound-bite phrases by heart. When congressional leaders step in front of those banks of microphones on television, we already know what they're going to say, word-for-word, before they say it. We can easily identify the party affiliation of elected officials and their surrogates, just by the phrases they reflexively drum into us like a pounding headache. No wonder we're disgusted with political rhetoric—there's no nourishment in it, only empty calories. It's like handing a starving person a stick of chewing gum.

Dr. Luntz's slogan is “It's not what you say—it's what people hear.” And what people hear, by and large, is whatever reinforces their already-galvanized beliefs, unless new and different words can foster new understanding, and highlight areas of agreement. So when the debate, whether in public or within the halls of Congress, consists entirely of micrometer-tested phrases repeated ad infinitum, there is no room for consensus building, no method of building an argument based on open-minded, creative discussion. The entire conversation is reduced to Newspeak. On our plasma-screen HDTVs, capable of faithfully reproducing millions of colors, our politicians give us two—red and blue—and they stubbornly refuse to risk any other hue or tint. They dogmatically “stay on message,” to the point that it's pretty obvious their brains aren't even engaged—like robotic “message-delivery-systems,” they are distinguishable from one another only by their faces and voices—not their minds. And even more unbelievably, they are ridiculed when they slip up and actually say what they're thinking, by a broadcast news industry whose economic interest lies only in the conflict, and not in any constructive solutions to our nation's problems.

Without honest communication, reasoned argument, and thoughtful compromise, there is really only one possible outcome when disagreements persist, and fester to the point of rage: war. And that's what democratic government was, in part, invented to avoid. We need the subtlety, the nuance, the fine gradations—the clumsier-but-more-authentic language that emerges when people say things in their own words instead of mindlessly parroting focus-tested phrases. We need it now, more than ever—but we're moving in the opposite direction, toward greater homogenization, more and more “message” without illumination.

It's not fair to put the blame for all the canned rhetoric we hear from Washington in Dr. Luntz's lap--there are spin doctors in every nook and cranny of that town. But he's made a science of it, devoted years to collecting data on word/phrase preferences, and is probably the most visible and recognized authority on the subject. As such, he's one of the architects-in-chief of the whole "message discipline" movement--and that movement, in an era where there is more air time than ever available for political discourse, is helping to make that discourse more empty and meaningless than it's ever been.

Democracy isn't a joke, and it didn't come into existence easily. Turning it into a fabricated reality-TV show isn't the path we should be taking.

On Second Thought...

This morning I suggested temporarily revoking taxpayer-funded health insurance for members of Congress.

I've thought about it for a few hours. I think we should make it permanent. Let Orrin Hatch, John Behner, and Ben Nelson fend for themselves in the individual market, permanently. I'll bet the individual market will become much more user-friendly in a matter of days.

While we're at it, let's yank those benefits from under Tom Delay, just for having the gall to say that recipients of unemployment insurance don't want to find jobs.

How to "Start Over" on Health Insurance Reform

Okay, we give--let's "start over" with a "clean sheet of paper" on health care insurance reform--but with a catch:

Effective April 1st, we the taxpayers rescind all health care coverage for all members of Congress, all members of the Administration, and all Congressional and Administration appointees and staffers and their families.

All of these people will then required to purchase private insurance in the individual market--that is, unless they decide not to insure themselves (or their families)--that's their choice.

All insurance policy negotiations, as per Republican demands, must be conducted with "transparency," and subject to independent oversight, to prevent any sweetheart deals--in other words, Mr. 70-year-old Senator, Ms. 63-year-old Representative, any pre-existing conditions you have will not be covered, any more than they would be for any other American. Premiums must must be computed using the same formulas as for any American. If you're as sick as any average American who can't get private coverage now, you can't get it either.

...you can have your taxpayer-funded insurance back just as soon as you pass Universal Health Care for everyone else. In the mean time, I suggest you don't get sick.

So--there you go--clean slate.

I predict you'll put a bill on the President's desk by April 15, and it will have full bipartisan support.

Follow the Money

The Left has a serious focus problem. Which cause is the nearest and dearest to us? Global warming? War profiteering? Social injustice? Education? Health care? Glushawn Limbeckity? Seriously. We're like chickens with our heads cut off. Not only are there bogey men in every direction, but we're shooting at phantoms--we don't really know who to blame for these problems, and though there are identifiable benefits to solving them, the payoff is always deferred, and difficult to measure--like eating your spinach or lowering your cholesterol count. Statistics abound (the Left loves them) but how do you define "a better world?" Furthermore, since just about every Liberal cause depends upon money for a solution, (and money is the Right's department) you have to go through the Right to get there, and the Right gets very annoyed when you raid its coffers trying to pay for stuff it cares little or nothing about.

The Right, on the other hand, has a clear focus--making America a hospitable environment for making boatloads of money. Yes, there are the social agendas, but even those are clear as vodka--get rid of abortion, period...bring (Christian) religion into the schools, and get everybody to conform to a strict set of behavioral guidlelines that are easy to define (even though the Right has as much trouble behaving as anyone...lately it seems like they have more). Get rid of rampant crime, etc.

Now, the last of these isn't easy--crime is a moving target, but the Right isn't concerned with eliminating the root causes. The Right would simply remove offenders from the street--isolate, capture, quarantine. Fairness isn't a concern--the Right just wants "undesirables" eliminated, taken out of sight, buried. That's not hard, really. The only thing standing in the way of the Right achieving THAT goal is the Constitution of the United States. The "evil government." It galls the Right that criminals have rights--as far as the Right is concerned, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to identify, apprehend, and incarcerate the troublemakers. It's just those pesky "technicalities," like the 4th and 5th amendment, the right to counsel, etc, that keep what should be, in their eyes, a fairly straightforward task from being swiftly and thoroughly "taken care of." And as far as most of the Right is concerned, if you get rid of anybody of non-Caucasian, non-European descent, the problem is solved. It's easy to identify the "others," and isolate, apprehend, incarcerate. Or simply send them to Australia (it's still a prison colony, isn't it? Or maybe we can develop the Moon as a place to dump the people we don't want around).

The goals of the Right are easy to identify, and, in their eyes, easy to accomplish. In order to stimulate economic growth, you cut taxes to the bone and get the government out of everything. Simple, easy-breezy. Since they're all about money, and the best of them are very good at accumulating it, they've got the resources on their side. Can any of the same be said for the left?

How do you stop Global warming? We've identified some causes of it, but it's a goal that requires cooperation among all the peoples of the world, many of whom aren't even speaking to one another, much less agreed as to the best direction for the world to take. How do you define "social justice?" Who gets to decide what's fair, and how does it get paid for? Sure, there's a vast wealth disparity in our country, but there's something to be said for the idea that if you have to suck away the gains made by people who are successful in order to fund the lives of people who aren't, the end result will be unsustainable--without an engine, it's kind of irrelevant how well you take care of your tires. So that's a balance, and how does one achieve a balance where the engine keeps running, when its incentive for doing so isn't in its own self-interest? We could go on and on with the analogies, but the point is that the Left is, for all intents and purposes, swimming upstream.

Therein lies the rub--human nature is to take care of ourselves and our own. Altruism is a part of human nature, but it's pretty low on Maslow's hierachy--and once you've taken care of the food, clothing and shelter (which are so expensive in the United States that for most people it requires more than one job to make ends meet) people are exhausted--that 52" plasma screen TV seems a hell of a lot more important than feeding some orphan in a 3rd world country that you'd never even see if her face wasn't plastered all over your screen while you're trying to watch "Lethal Weapon 16."

Are the causes of the Left worth working for? Yes. Are they achievable? Not by organizing demonstrations, no. The Right simply classifies that sort of thing as a nuisance, "civil unrest," and calls out the militia to squash it.

Nope. You'll never get the Right to care about anyone other than itself. So in order to pursue the Progressive agenda, there's really only one solution: follow the money.

That's not easy. The Right makes it as difficult as possible, by obscuring the pathways through which money travels, and hiding ownership (read: control and power) of the more obvious targets. Is your local bank a free-standing entity? No. It's dependent on larger and larger fish in the food chain, leading up to the giants in lower Manhattan. Without the approval of the big fish, your local bank can't do diddley to assist YOU. You can't get a loan if your local bank doesn't have capital to lend, and the savings accounts of a few middle-class yokels isn't going to cut it. They need big infusions, and they get them from people farther up the food chain.

Still, if the Left hopes to accomplish any of its objectives, that's what's going to have to happen. You fight fire with fire--research like hell, find the money pathways, and (and here's the hard part) organize the masses to make choices (often at the expense of their own hard-won comforts) which hurt the big fish in the only place they truly give a damn about--their own wallets.

In the end, even the biggest fish need customers, and though a few of them are able to cater only to wealthy clientele, where do these wealthy clients get their fat bankrolls to spend? Big businesses depend on economies of scale. Wal-Mart makes its billions by selling trillions of trinkets at $12.34. We could bankrupt them in 6 months if we simply stopped shopping there.

The problem is we, most of us, can't do that. We are dependent on discount retailers simply for survival, because we don't have the resources to wait them out. We can't survive the winter without heat, and I wouldn't be typing this without electricity to run my computer (and an internet connection to spew this forth to the world) so utilities pretty much have us by the short and curlies.

So we implore the government to help. Is it any wonder that the Right sees the government as the enemy? It may not actually BE an enemy, but it represents the collective will of the enemy, which is US. The Right doesn't want to share. And it's pretty easy to buy off politicians, since we are all, at our cores, creatures who crave comfort (and comfort is bought with money, big piles of it).

The bottom line is that as long as the Left continues to resort to organizing verbal protests, the Right wins. We can shout all we want--the Right can just close the windows, call the SWAT team, deploy the sound cannons and the tear gas, and get back to its business of dismantling the U.S. economy (at least that part of it which provides an income for the middle class), opening up overseas markets, and providing goods and services using cheap labor from countries where the population is huge (like China) and poverty is widespread.

The only language the Right understands consists of five words: Franklin, Grant, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington. Those are the only words we can use to bend its collective will toward solutions to the myriad, unfocused, ill-defined problems we face. Any collective action must be VERY focused on making those words a problem for the Right if the Right doesn't pay attention to the goals of the Left.

Don't be distracted by the Bible, or Gay rights, or the Gun lobby. Those are red herrings. The more we shout about those things, the easier it is for the Right to keep our eyes off the ball. The Right uses those things to energize its base, which it uses for one and only one purpose--to provide enough of a base vote that, with a little arm-twisting, it can recruit enough swing voters to achieve its agenda. As heinous as those concepts may be to us (and who doesn't want to see Gay people happy and prosperous, or the shooting war on our streets brought to a minimum?) they are distractions, if there's really any will on the Left to achieve lasting change.

The attack needs to be two-pronged, and both prongs are extremely difficult to realize, which makes it all the more important to focus. One, the Left needs to become more economically empowered in its own right. Two, the agenda of the Right (making the most money possible) must be used against it. Both goals have to pass through the Right in order to be achieved, unfortunately. As Willie Sutton famously said, "that's where the money is."

Wanna talk about a "Long War?" This makes "The War on Terror" (our struggle against a verb) look like a 10-second sound bite. We've been fighting The Long War for centuries, with little success--little victories here and there (America was supposed to be one of those, before democracy became a tabloid joke).

If there's a hope for the Progressive movement, it lies along the money pathways.

I'm no expert (far from it), but I can see that much. No amount of energy expended on shouting at the rain will stop it from falling. I don't know how, (wiser heads than mine will have to provide the research and the ammunition) but I do know that it will only be possible to affect lasting change by focusing collective action in the one place where it will have any effect--follow the money.

"Spelling Counts," and other quaint lies from childhood

DILLIGAF? OMG, ROTFLMAO!

When I was growing up, we had spelling tests--every week or so, you'd be given a new list of words to memorize and regurgitate. Most kids found this a complete waste of time, and railed against it. For the most part, none of us actually studied this list--everybody "winged-it" on the quizzes. I liked to read, so most of the words weren't a big problem for me--I'd seen them often enough in print that I could picture them mentally, so I did fairly well at spitting them back out on command.

Spelling, and its rhetorical cousin, grammar, were considered essential to success in the world of work--in fact, the ability to remember correct sentence construction (and, at the sub-folder level, word construction) served as an indicator of class, a tool for discriminating between those whose parents valued "correctness" in communication, and those who weren't so lucky. We were constantly admonished to make sure the spelling was accurate in term papers, on resumes, on job applications, etc. Fluency in English was considered important to a person's ability to secure higher-income employment, and also as a means of survival in an increasingly divided social environment--who you were, and by extension who you were allowed to associate with, were in part determined by whether or not you could remember certain rules, such as "don't end a sentence with a preposition."

At least that's the line we were fed. As I got older, owing to the fact that I'd been primed by my father to be extra-sensitive to errors in grammar and usage, I began to notice that not only did my contemporaries pretty much abandon any pretense of caring about spelling or construction, so did famous people from "high" walks of life. Senators, Representatives, corporate CEOs...you name it, they make all sorts of elementary grammar errors in their public discourse. I started to notice embarrassingly weak construction in newspaper articles, advertising copy, even business letters sent by companies whose employees represented the supposed "cream of the crop" of the expensively educated. Lately I've begun noticing dozens of spelling errors in published books (not the online kind, I mean the ones that are printed and bound, that you hold in your hand). It drove me to distraction--weren't those people paying attention in third grade? How did they manage to graduate from places like Harvard and Yale, and go on to hold responsible, high-paying jobs, without applying the rules we'd been taught in the elementary grades?

It turns out, in practice (especially since television has become so pervasive in our lives, and the number of networks long ago exceeded the supply of fluent English-speakers) that none of it matters. We don't value language. I've begun to wonder if we ever did.

What IS our language, anyway, but a mish-mash of colloqialisms that found their way into our dictionaries and our rhetoric through endless repetition? English is constantly evolving, and it's like the body of law in the United States--constantly being amended, new rules being written to account for variations (as opposed to the variations being reined in to fit the existing rules), and new standards of acceptability being formed in order to accomodate common practices that, despite the frustration of grammarians, have achieved critical mass through sheer gravity--"everybody says so," so the rules are changed to coincide with the mass consciousness.

Now, you could follow all this if you cared to (and some people DO make a study of language in that level of detail), but the number of rules and exceptions, just like the number of federal laws and regulations, has become so large and unwieldy that no single person could ever really hope to assimilate it. In truth, that threshold was reached long before I was born, and our language has become exponentially more complicated since. So why was it forced down our throats in school? Nobody follows the rules, and precious few but the most erudite and eloquent ever did. Even Senator Edward M. Kennedy, child of American royalty, Harvard Law graduate, and recent subject of dozens of television retrospectives (one of which contained the error that caught my attention) couldn't quite muddle through without screwing up every so often.

The conclusion? It was a scam. A well-meant one, to be sure. Our parents and teachers attempted to give us rules to enhance our chances of survival and achievement in society, and at the time we were taught those rules, we had no way of knowing that, like the tenets of the "Pirate Code" in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, "they be more like guidlelines, really."

And it's not just spelling or grammar. All sorts of rules fall under the umbrella of the time-honored phrase, "do as I say, not as I do." As we are constantly reminded, the most exhalted among us are often those whose adherence to time-honored codes of morality, ethics, law (and yes, grammar) is the LEAST exemplary. Those who pontificate most loudly about biblical principles are as likely as not to be the ones publicly caught with their pants down, having blatantly disregarded three fifths of the commandments they battle so fiercely to have chiseled into the granite of our public buildings.

They blather on about the ills of our society, blaming all on the "loose morality" of our times, yet when publicly disgraced for having set the worst possible example for America's youth, they stick to their guns, refuse to resign, refuse to apologize, and in so doing expose, for all to see, their utter contempt for the rules they expect everyone ELSE to follow.

The difference, of course, is that these hypocrites are rich and powerful (which, in their eyes, exempts them from polite codes of behavior). But that's an all-too-familiar tangent, one I'll avoid for the moment so that I can pursue my admittedly long-winded, circuitous route to the point: The kids are LTAO (laughing their asses off) at us right now.

When we (and I'm referring to the pre-internet, pre-IM, pre-text-message generation) were growing up, our elders were the source of most of our information. We didn't watch Huntley and Brinkley (nor did we care to), we didn't know a tenth of what was actually going on in the world, and we actually believed that the rules our elders drummed into our heads were "carved in stone," that bad behavior would result in negative consequences, and that, in essence, spelling counted.

Then we grew up.

Our parents, before us, had grown up, too. They'd discovered that the Ten Commandments were "more like guidelines," and that the Eleventh Commandment, the really important one, the one we were never taught but which everyone eventually learned through bitter experience, was "Don't Get Caught."

But our parents (and the instinct persists in our generation, as likely it will in generations to follow) feared for us--for our safety, our cognitive development, our world views, and our ability to survive. So they sheltered us from the harsher truths, and did their best to provide a firm ethical, verbal, and educational foundation for us to stand on, in the desparate hope that they wouldn't wake up one morning to find our pictures in the paper--lifeless, tongue hanging out, lying on the floor of a flophouse with a needle still protruding from one arm. They wanted to protect us from the predators of the world, and clung fast to the illusion that by sheltering us from the worst of human behavior, we would grow up to live in places where that kind of horror didn't affect us.

Now our kids are able to circumnavigate all that--they are able to find out for themselves, in every gory detail, what actually happens in the world--or at least what appears to happen, according to their myriad electronic information sources. They may not be interested in politics (and who could blame them, given the spittle-laced vitriol that passes for "news" today), but they're very aware that the highest-ranking politicians are among the most profligate adulters, liars, theives, and murders in the human race. They're well-"schooled" in the idea that honesty is for suckers, that treating people fairly and with good will gets you nowhere (but that perpetrating the worst kind of evil can make you famous, rich, and powerful). They see 20-year-old millionaires in sports, film, music, and even in online business, and as far as they can tell, the best fortunes are made quickly--that there's a "secret," and if they can just google it, they'll be able to bypass all the work, the study, and the tedium their parents tell them is necessary, and live the high life, consuming as if there were no tomorrow.

The examples we provide them don't point to virtue, or even to competence. They point to sly, underhanded dealings, to manipulating and changing the rules to fit their own agendas, and to taking advantage of the ignorance of others to make a better life for themselves. Our media add mega-gallons of fuel to the fire, by exhalting those who've achieved the three virtues of American life--wealth, fame, & power.

So--why are we suprised when we hear about "The Family," the secret society associated with "C Street," and their contention that certain people are above reproach, that "gawd's work" is best left in the hands of a chosen few whose wealth and power is pre-ordained by a "higher power," and whose shit doesn't stink? Every bit of available information tells us that it doesn't matter HOW you do it, what's important is that you "get yours NOW," and leave the consequences to somebody else. Do we punish those who are caught cheating? No. We give them millions in free publicity, buy their "tell all" books, and make them even richer (and by extension more powerful) all by virtue of their notoriety, no matter how it was achieved. If the story is REALLY juicy, we turn it into a TV mini-series (and pay them millions for the rights). By the time their cases get to court, they've already drunk all the Chivas, driven all the Lamborghinis, snorted all the blow, and diddled all the pussy their bodies can stand. So it's "worth it."

And if they "don't get caught," the Chamber of Commerce will build a statue in their honor.

So no, Virgina, spelling doesn't count. Grammar doesn't count. Honesty is for suckers. Go to the right church, say the right things, stick to the Right wing, kiss the right asses, learn the right tricks, and you can "succeed" in America, the land of opportunity.

The current generation is wiser to the ways of the world than we are--we may not "get it," but they do, and they're moving so fast that we long ago lost any hope of following their thought patterns. I don't know where that will lead us, but it's out of our hands now. The home-schoolers may think they can wrench the barn doors shut, but the horses are long gone, never to return.

It's time we dealt with reality as it exists, and quit trying to pretend it doesn't. In so doing, we only hurt ourselves--our kids will take care of themselves, it seems. Who's going to take care of US?

"The U.S. Economy" Craps Out

Over the past several weeks, Congress and the Department of the Treasury (while that guy, that...what's his name..."Tree?" "Shrub?"...oh, never mind, he's irrelevant...watches it all on the teevee) have been engaged in a drama so absurd you'd think you were watching a Monty Python skit: a bread line for the Armani Elite. Men so obscenely wealthy that a single one of their lunch tabs for a work day would break the average families food budget for a month are lined up at the trough of government largesse, sucking up our great-grandchildren's money as if they were starving. This is the great "Wall Street 'rescue'" of 2008-2009 (and who knows how much longer?). It's all been billed as a means of "loosening up credit," the lubricant which our economy needs to run smoothly day-to-day. Let's set aside, for a moment, the fact that, some $200 billion into a $700 billion bailout, we're still not seeing any results (duh...the fat cats are taking the money, saying "thank you," and putting it in the bank). If we're dumb enough, as a country, to hand huge sums of no-strings money to dishonest, incompetent men in hopes that they'll suddenly develop a conscience and "do the right thing," we deserve to be swindled.

What is most distressing about the current crisis isn't the larceny going down as we speak, or even the rash of irresponsible, reckless decisions that lead to the current mess. What's most distressing is that we're calling this a bailout of "The U.S. Economy," as if the term is exclusively defined by the activities that go on inside a Gordian knot of networked computers in one small corner of a small island just off the east coast--and not by the actual businesses, employing actual people and producing actual products, which span the continent and feed that gamblers' Mecca its stake money.

David Brooks, in his column today, describes a recurring "pattern of decay and new growth" in which companies like Pan Am and ITT wither away and provide the compost for new ventures like Southwest Airlines and T-Mobile. That's all well and good--the "circle of life," Kum Bah Yah, yada yada, let's all break out the marshmallows and sing some capitalist-campfire songs. And if the "capital markets" provide a faster composting method, well, I guess that's alright too--the money to finance real businesses has to come from somewhere. Selling off newly-obsolete custom-designed factory robots one at a time on eBay would be sort of slow and tedious, and breaking them down to their (more easily liquidated) smaller component parts would be even slower.

But make no mistake--Wall Street has become so full of itself, so convinced of it own indispensibility (and we've bought into the mythology with such fervor) that you'd think IT was "The U.S. Economy," and not merely a giant crap table where the most well-heeled of the pinstripe set whoop it up with our money, our jobs, our lives, our futures, and our national security.

If a Wall Streeter holds a big position in a company like Pan Am, and that company shows signs of weakness, he simply sells his position, moves that money to some other company, and continues his pursuit of The Armani Dream. The employees of that company, if they're lucky enough to collect unemployment, live in a state of mounting panic for as long as it takes to find somewhere else to work, where yet another set of highly-paid executives (who never miss a gourmet meal, no matter what idiotic or criminal decisions they make) works them like marionettes in the next act of the perpetual anxiety-dance that constitutes 21st century middle-class life. And that's the best an employee can expect--she might not be able to find new work at all. The downward spiral from "fully employed" to "homeless" can be frighteningly quick if you're a middle class family.

But the moneyed class is so completely divorced from the day-to-day realities of life in America that their moves resemble the Universal marble-game from the end of the movie Men in Black. And the richer and more powerful they become, the more they chafe at government restrictions, regulations, and impediments to the construction of ever-bigger, higher-stakes casinos with which to scratch their adrenaline-fueled, hedonistic itches. For all the dice-rolling they do with futuristic, high-tech "financial instruments," it's ironic that when they crap out, they so quickly reach for the violins, as if somehow "circumstances beyond their control" caused their "oops, my bad" moment--cue Sally Struthers--"won't you please help these poor, hard-luck cases pay their private tailors?"

It's amazing what a shortage of casinos we must have--every state has 75 different scratch-off lottery tickets (ever have to wait in line in a convenience store in a poor neighborhood?), Native Americans are building new casinos at a fantastic rate, and Wall Street, a.k.a. "The U.S. Economy," has followed suit in style. Credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, etc, etc, represent the new Monte Carlo, right here in the good 'ol U.S. of A.--and yet, still, the executives with their hands out for the the biggest taxpayer charity go on overseas junkets to slake their insatiable thirst for more.

The U.S. economy, at the top end, will likely bounce back. The yacht-hugger class won't miss any meals. Out here in the flyovers, though, in "real" America, (where the real economy slogs it out in the mud), things are looking dark. It's unlikely that the American middle class will continue to exist as we know it now--labor is cheaper in China, and brainpower is cheaper in India. None of this matters to the Wall Streeters--it doesn't matter to them who builds things, or makes the collection calls, or runs the credit checks.

I wonder if they understand, though, that in order for them to have their billions in Monopoly money to play with, somebody has to BUY something? It seems as though that's a slight flaw in their gambler's dreams. Somebody has to put up the stake money, or the game's over. It was bad enough when the dandies were playing with their own money--worse still when they started gambling the life-savings of Americans who actually had to work to earn their money. But now they're playing with the future earnings of people who haven't been born yet. When that pool of money dries up, I suppose they'll do what any self-respecting massive enterprise does, in this day and age--they'll borrow from China. And when that pool dries up, India--and when that dries up...

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