Two Novembers

So now Michele Bachmann (by her own admission AKA Nostradamas) has taken the position of lead hound in the pack that are snapping at the heels of our President. Given the nature of the pack that she is currently the head hound of, I think we should try to remember two Novembers. This is an excerpt from my book Screen Saver.


A few days before my Thanksgiving departure for San Francisco with Jim, the not very stable world had wobbled even more precariously on its axis.

I was in my History of American Thought and Culture class. Someone had pulled the pull-down screen down far enough to allow a man’s hat to be tied to the pull. The class was allowing itself to be amused by that fact as we waited for Mr. Frazier our instructor to arrive. Time ticked by. Mr. Frazier was late. That was unlike him. Finally, just before the fifteen-minute limit that protocol reserved for late instructors he appeared. He came in, took one look at the hat and took a swing at it as if in anger. That was really unlike him. He was a laid back calm sort – a graduate of Reed College - who just didn’t let anything bother him. He had our attention. He turned around facing the class and said, almost accusingly, “well, I suppose you have heard that they shot Jack Kennedy.” As a matter of fact we hadn’t. We had been sitting there looking at the hat and waiting for him to show up. All I could ever remember about that moment, other than what exactly Mr. Frazier had said was wondering who “they” were. It turned out that we were never to find out who “they” were.

Taking what might have been an action of some significance, but as things were to turn out, apparently wasn’t, the first person I sought out was Barbara. We went into the Park Blocks, out of the buildings, into the open air and walked, hand in hand. Everybody was out there. There was some kind of device or there were multiple devices that were filling the air with updates on the president’s condition. We had stopped where a group had gathered, among them my fraternity brother Tom. The words “John F. Kennedy is dead” insinuated themselves into the air like a malevolent spirit. Barb dropped to her knees on the grass. We all stood, or knelt – there were others on their knees – frozen and looking like the statues of the victims of the Irish potato famine that I would see many years later in Christchurch. It seemed as if the world was in the process of fading to black. I had looked at Tom and said, “thank God Lyndon Johnson is Vice President”. Tom nodded his agreement.

Many years later another event occurred that had somehow seemed to be inextricably intertwined with John Kennedy. Mysti and I had gone around the corner to the Olympia Pizza Restaurant early so we could get back by seven and watch the election returns as the polls began to close from the middle of the country westward. We knew that the east would be closed by then and we knew that any bad news would begin to show itself - if there were going to be any - among those eastern results; but we had felt that there was still going be a story unfolding from St Louis west.

After returning from Pizza it looked as if no bad news had cropped up yet, but it was still anyone’s election. But good things kept happening and more states were turning blue than were turning red. There came a point where the electoral count was not 270 blue but it was close. I had looked at the map to try to get some kind of idea what might be going to happen. The entire pacific coast had no color yet. The obvious suddenly flooded upon me in a form that can only be described as joy. “He’s got it,” I said to Mysti.

A few minutes later the West Coast turned blue and the City of Seattle erupted. Everywhere people poured into the streets. We were on Capitol Hill. As we entered the courtyard we encountered people we barely knew or didn’t know at all. We all hugged one another and made loud joyful sounds. People were streaming into the streets and up to Fifteenth. The rest of the night was a massive party of people in and out of the bars and coffee shops to the street and back again. Cars full of joyfully shouting people with the windows down paraded up and down. I had never thought that the magic of having a leader that stirred a feeling of pride and joy at being an American would ever be given back to us; but it appeared on that night as if it had happened.

Good Work, Sarah

Back when Sarah burst on the scene in an aureole of ignorance and stupidity she just seemed pathetic. Now, however, she is being taken seriously by the most dangerous faction of the republican party: the assassins. Her current “crosshairs” promotion, involving a “call to re-load” with crosshairs on 22 Democratic members of the House of Representatives is frightening enough. But the fact that her preface diatribe against our President – which feeds the Tea Party Fascists’ view of a conspiracy of socialists trying to take over the United States is REALLY troubling.


If the Tea Party people – or Sarah – had ever been to France, or Germany, or Belgium, or Britain, or Ireland, or Spain, or Italy, or Poland or … they would have been hard pressed on the streets, or in the bistros or in the pubs to have found anything resembling the grey pall of socialism that they invoke without even knowing what some of the advantages of what Sarah calls socialism – others call it a social contract – might be. She is so taken up with killing members of the moose community from the air with a fool-proof, scope enabled high powered rifle that she doesn’t really have time, and for sure not the intellect to know about anything but her narrow little world of kids fucking kids and lying to the press.


But, back to the point. Sarah calls for “reload” complete with crosshairs.


I doubt not that some of her cretin cadre will take that as a command to kill.


My larger fear is that, since her Tea Party Movement followers have a well documented, as seen on national news, problem with “niggers” and “queers”, one of her “targets” - our president - may join the casualty list.


Good work, Sarah. I was alive the last time – 22 November 1963 – and I NEVER want to have to go through that again.


I especially feel that way if one of the greatest men we have had the privilege to call a fellow American is to be brought down by the inane bleating of a mindless cipher.

The Great Broadband Competition Hoax

Competition is great. That’s why we have such a good health care system. All the health insurance companies compete with one another and we all benefit by getting the lowest possible rates for the best possible health care. There are a few little aberrations around the edges: the health insurers have special anti-trust immunity, like MLB, so they can kind of agree to fair and reasonable rates. And just to make sure, we are not allowed to buy insurance from companies outside of our own state, but in general there is a lot of competition in the health care business. They all compete to employ the best lobbyists.


Broadband internet service is another good example of competition. For example, in the Seattle area there is vigorous competition between Comcast and Qwest. Both offer "high speed internet”.


You can choose 5mbps from Comcast or you can choose 2.5 mbps from Qwest. Comcast costs about $50 a month. Qwest costs about $25 a month. Since there isn’t a third choice – Qwest and Comcast say they couldn’t continue providing such good service at such competitive prices if they had competition - you need to choose between these two highly competetive options. Two are plenty competitive they say. Just look at our advertising campaigns. You can’t get much more competitive than a tortoise.


Does the math of this ménage à deux bother anybody? I have two choices; I can choose 2.5 mbps for $25 a month or twice that speed for twice that money? This is an equation that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner must love. It is nicely congruent with our competitive health care system.

At The Beach

Today on the local NPR station I heard an author being interviewed about his latest novel. Apparently the story is an indictment of war packaged as a replay of the Illiad with a – perhaps – immortal – hero named Hector, who is a janitor at a munitions plant. I was just thanking my good fortune that I was riding on my Rocky Mountain hybrid bike on a spinner and could allow the exertion to take me elsewhere. Just before going completely elsewhere, however, something the author said seeped into my fleeing conscious: “you read about explosions every day - they're just numbers..”; this was in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.


I had to react:


Really not.


I think all of us, especially those of us who will become or previously became embroiled at one time or another in one of our various "war efforts" have just given up. We used to think that we had some say about what our great deliberative democracy does, but we actually hear a constant and pervasive drum beat: "you don't; you don't".


Ultimately we just give up and go to the beach.

Financial Farce

A few weeks ago on Bill Moyers’ Journal he had as guests two correspondents from Mother Jones. He gave them an entire hour. The net of what they had to say was that, although at some point in the near future it might appear that legislation making a serious attempt at putting an end to the out of control nature of our banking system - including its periodic need to collect on its socialized risk positions - might be promulgated, anything that might appear will be a sham.

The reason for that fact, these two men said, complete with pretty detailed and compelling documentation, is the fact that it matters not which legislative branch one considers, which of the two parties one submits to scrutiny, or specifically which name of our elected representatives one might examine, one overarching fact controls what happens: if you are talking about anything to do with the financial system, that system owns the governmental apparatus intended to regulate it. That system also owns the human components of that governmental apparatus, lock, stock and barrel.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when today, the first day of the new law protecting all of us from the credit card industry, I heard on NPR that that new law is again, just a sham. Various obviously unacceptable practices - having been exposed over time in much the same way as the practices of the food industry were exposed several generations ago - have been made illegal. Even the fully owned minions of the Banks ultimately couldn’t stand up to the pressure and scrutiny that 24% interest and bank-induced penalty charges brought to bear upon them from the electorate.

But wait, I thought I heard someone say. The Industry, the financial industry cries, can’t sustain itself without those charges.

Where one might want to interpret that as the fact that the banks had a predatorily faulty business model, they assert that they have been unfairly singled out and denied their just and due pounds of flesh. And they are already way ahead of us.

NPR told me this morning to be on the lookout for a wave of new, capricious and most likely unannounced fees, much like the airlines various new fees.

Look for higher annual fees. Look for fees for inactivity. Look for fees for minimum acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for higher than acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for having been in a foreign country and not using your credit card. Look for fees, for sure, for having been in a foreign country and having used your credit card. Look for fees for having visited an airline web site that sells tickets for travel to foreign countries. Look for surcharge fees predicated on the fact that you have in a given time period (one calculated by a new variable time usage algorithm) accumulated an excess number (from the banks’ point of view) fees.

And there is no law against any of this, and there won’t be until the din from all of us who live in the mudsill of our society begin to make the lives of our “elected” (or is it “elect”) representatives uncomfortable enough to perpetrate another sham.

And so it goes.

Johnnie Reb

I learned this song from Lavine. I talked about all of that in Screen Saver. That also included some discussion of the Nick Manoloff chord wheel.

If the video is unavailable try this link to my web site. If you go to this link, you will need to hit "pause" on the player for a minute or two to let the download get ahead of the player.

One Thing Is Always Constant

In previous posts concerning the latest round of our national and ongoing air travel security debacle I have noted that those people who work for the intelligence apparatus – as was also true in the case of the project manager for the Columbia, who just didn’t want to hear that bad news one of her engineers was trying to tell her about the fact that the shuttle couldn’t get back through the atmosphere – are all getting their paychecks every pay period and are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

Now we have the Toyota accelerator debacle. I just heard some musing about “where was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its oversight of this problem?” The problem, after all, dates back to some Lexus cars in 1999. But until Toyota finally had to buckle in the face of an avalanche of incidents and 19 deaths, the silence has been deafening.

I think we can without a doubt say that those people – the NHTSA – have all been and are continuing to get their paychecks every pay period, are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

How nice.