Food For Thought

Okay, I'm old. Not ancient, mind you. Just been around the block a time too many to be called cute, innocent, bursting-on-the-scene, or any other youthful descriptor you might want to apply to a biomass of energy exposed to all the universal elements for over fifty years.

I shave, but jeez  all those little lines seem to be bunker trenches that follicles dive inside of to hide from the artillery blast of the electric razor, and then spring back after the scheduled shock-and-awe of the morning routine to stubble the whole face.

Problems are like those damn hair follicles, just when you think you've mowed them down for good they are back at you scratching your sweetie's face, or maybe some other sensitive areas of bliss, and ruining the whole night.

People and problems are inseparable. Some have a few more than others, but problems are an experience we all share. The biggest problems have always been our own, and were ones that close friends and family got to hear repeated on a frequent basis. What are friends and family for, after all? 

Our daily problems could include being short on cash for the rent, the car payment, credit cards, school supplies, a doctor's bill, drugs, or food. There might have been a relationship problem with a significant other, friend, coworker or family member to chew over regularly. We might fret over deadlines at school, or on the job, or stacked up work with no end in sight and these all heap themselves on the problem pile.

All of these were enough to keep the headache medicine business booming, but now when the macro problems of the credit markets, the job markets, unemployment, the housing crisis, the health care system, the education system, the never-ending wars at home and abroad, the energy crisis, global climate change, and with every-other-disaster-waiting-to-be-broadcast-into-your-home life today seems to be all about problems, which must be what all those anti-depressant scrips are all about.

Why can't we solve problems today? It feels like our petty little individual problems now seem like small droplets in the ocean of problem scum. The government today has no power over the forces that have made a ruin of the economy and our total society. We live under giant corporate rules where the decision makers are loyal not to people, not to governments, not to any religious or philosophical tenet but only to the word money. Money emerged these past three decades as the reigning theology for the world.

There is a fascinating documentary on the subject of corporations and this new religion, or fierce devotion to all things money.  The Corporation is a documentary of extraordinary breadth and intelligence, and is based on the book by Joel Bakan. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. It has a Who's who cast of major thinkers and protagonists that range from Milton Friedman to Michael Moore and every point of view in between. The DVD comes not only with the excellent documentary, but also includes on a second disc a fabulous interview collection with all the major people who spoke in the film.

Problems need to be understood in order that we may solve them. We have been misled for too long on the nature of our biggest problem, and we must start to retake our culture and our rights back from those who truly have co-opted them under the guise of a legal system the people now cannot afford to participate in as advocates. What the big companies never told the world was that when they cut out the middlemen they cut  out most of  the people. The Corporation is truly essential viewing for anyone who seems perplexed by our rapid loss of personal liberty amid a dysfunctional and impotent set of governments. 


 

"Clever, Classless and Free"

Our house sale closes this week on John Lennon's birthday. My mind shouts that this date might be a bad omen.

Nervous energy this week keeps me up late and makes me get up early. The escrow countdown does that to my feeble constitution. Four days to go and the sale will be complete. All issues have been resolved so there should be nothing to worry about, but being the stew-kettle I am the pervasive nagging dread drips all over my plate of possible outcomes.

Took in a movie Sunday to try the two hour escape route and ponder different scenarios of someone not trapped in my bubbling cauldron, but even Michael Moore's excellent new endeavor, Capitalism: A Love Story , couldn't get the noodle-of-nagging-doubt off the noggin.

The movie differs a bit from other Moore efforts. I'll say straight out I am a big fan of Michael Moore, and will never understand the vehement vocal histrionics that mercilessly attack a guy who tries to help and educate the common man. If this were one hundred years ago he might have been locked up for sedition like Eugene Debs was by the Wilson Administration. Still, the vitriol from people who disagree with Moore's point of view shocks the sensibilities. And what is truly discouraging is that those who disparage his films rarely have seen them.

There is one small fact found in the nearly two-hour examination of capitalism that hits at the core of our economic crisis. The fact that 1% of the US population has more combined wealth than does 95% of American citizens. The fact that this does not outrage everyone in the 95% feeble bracket of American economics also hits at the core of our financial problems. You cannot change things if people refuse to change.

When did America become a rut nation? Stuck between the muddy sidewalls of lies for several generations now people seem trapped within deep grooves of bitter denial to thwart any effort to try something different.

Talk to anyone about health care and every one will agree the system is failing too many people. The vast majority of citizens believe our system should be changed. Nothing gets done this year, just as nothing has been done since Harry Truman tried to take one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 2nd Bill of Rights and make it his own in 1945 with a proposal for universal health care for all Americans.

A few months back when the market was truly in the tank, with the Dow-Jones index hovering in the mid 6000 range, I was hopeful that we would actually get some legislation done that would effect new directions to break the hostile status quo of economic slavery perpetrated by the wealthiest on the most vulnerable. But as stock portfolios have begun to improve the grooves of repetition rise again, and those who have dug in seem to have convinced themselves their grip on the wheel is once again secure, nothing of substance happens to make any difference.

Michael Moore posits a number of ideas on why so many working Americans of every stripe continue to buy into an economic system that only rewards the very few. Is it because so many aspire to a spot where they can become one of the privileged few and live above the peasantry? There are some very shocking bits of news, that never made it to big media pundits or headlines found in Capitalism: A Love Story. A memo from Citigroup puts into plain language what the top financial tier thinks of all those not in the inner sanctum of wealth, and how they should best continue to shake the losing class down.

It is ironic to hear little bits of fear creep into print and other media about the perception that so many liberals hate the rich, and through language are trying to perpetrate class warfare on America. The irony finds so many of the politically conservative actually waging the class war today with the Bush Tax Cuts, the drive to privatize Social Security, the unrelenting war against organized labor and the benefits formerly won but now in peril for American workers, and the outsourcing of manufacturing and jobs to Third World countries (who have failed to see their standard of living rise over this period).

The film was good, but also did nothing to settle my worried mind. I tried putting on some Lennon music but got stuck on "Working Class Hero." We really have been stuck in the same place for a long time. Sure hope the house closes and everyone can move on.

Columbine: The Nation Did Go Bowling

It's been seven years since the release of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Moore a few times in my previous life, and know him to be a stickler for getting the facts straight. On IMDB.com a small point is made that Eric and Dylan did not go bowling the morning before marching into madness on their high school campus. That could be true, but Michael Moore did get corroborating reports from eyewitness who had been interviewed by the police, the FBI and the local District Attorney's office. He also framed his argument on the image of bowling by asking a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

But, the small point entirely misses the bullet hole of accuracy.

Sunday April 20, 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary for the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and a teacher shot dead. The two killers shot themselves as well. Total body count fifteen people dead. A lot of people on April 20, 1999 were horrified at the violence on the high school campus, just not that horrified to change anything in the ten years that have elapsed.

In 1965 with race riots across America, Junior Walker and the All-Stars rang on radios "Shotgun, shoot 'em fore he run." Shotgun, big hit.

1968 was a big year for America in terms of gun violence. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated that year. The same year The Beatles released their White Album, which contained Happiness is a Warm Gun and Bungalow Bill. The two songs contain two very radical and opposing looks at the American preoccupation with guns. The Rolling Stones had Street Fighting Man come out in 1968 with "I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Jimi Hendrix took off on Hey, Joe and Machine Gun for audiences that year.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse came with Down by the River in 1969, and a few years later would pen Ohio with his other group of friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. Even Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Saturday Night Special implored in song some sanity regarding the gun. Nothing changed.

Over the years thousands of songs have been recorded about guns and gun violence. Violence, and our fascination with the ultimate period maker, sells.

Even though gun violence is highly marketable, it is tough making sense out of the continual carnage, tougher still finding a way of reducing the arms race in America. Barack Obama gets elected as an agent of change for America. Americans flood gun stores to stock up thinking one change might be limits on guns.

Remember the crazy girl who didn't like Mondays? Big hit for the Boomtown Rats and Bob Geldoff.

That incident would barely register today. It barely registered in 1993 when Colin Ferguson, deranged but armed boarded a Long Island Rail car at Penn Station and decided some people had to die. Six people died and nineteen were injured that December evening. The wife of one of the dead victims, Carolyn McCarthy, ran and was elected to Congress due in part to her son's amazing recovery from the wounds suffered and her tenacity in putting together a campaign to stop senseless gun violence. After twelve years on the job Representative Carolyn McCarthy has learned guns are a much larger third rail than even Social Security. The only legislation of note Representative McCarthy can show for twelve years in Congress was a fairly watered down background check bill passed last year. In fairness this was the first gun reform legislation passed in Congress in over fourteen years. It came on the heels of the Virginia Tech slaughter that claimed thirty-two lives. We still remember that one, but the memory has softened over the two year fade of time.

How could it not? After all, in this era of the gun let us just recount the brutality of American existence from the growing list of death. In September of 2008 on the roads of Skagit County, Washington six people shot and killed before the shooter turns himself in to authorities. For celebrity sake, we have in Chicago, Illinois Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother shot and killed in their home in late October of 2008. In Arkansas, two days after the Hudson killings two people are killed and another wounded on the campus at the University of Central Arkansas. November 2008 saw an eight year old in Arizona shoot and kill his father and a family friend with a rifle at close range. Right after Christmas in Covina, California Santa Claus shot and killed nine people (family members and friends) before killing himself. Outrage? Not in 2008.

Thus far 2009 we have witnessed a real ramp up of gun carnage. An eleven year old boy shot his father's pregnant fiancee in the head while she slept and then took the bus for school. Seven people were shot, but amazingly no one died at a Mardi Gras parade in February this year. March in Samson, Alabama saw a man shoot and kill nine people before killing himself. According to reports there were ten crime scenes for the Alabama rampage. Also in March, bullets flew into a nursing home where eight people were killed by a middle aged man. And in Oakland four police officers were slain along with their killer in a shootout. This April we have already gotten thirteen dead innocents at an immigration help center in New York state plus the shooter dead from a fatal suicide shot. And two more dead college students at a community college just west of Detroit. Three police officers died this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It's hard to get press in Iraq and Afghanistan these days when we're in the middle of bowling people down with carbines.

"Have A Nice Day."

Night time for the Car Biz

Rick Wagoner steps down from GM this week. What a long strange trip it has been from the post WWII heights, where the phrase "What's good for GM is good for America" defined the company, and the nation, to the depths of these past six months.

General Motors is the company that was behind the great American train robbery. I mean by that phrase that GM systematically removed from US cities our public transportation rail system line by line from the 1930s through the 1950s. This was uncovered in a 60 Minutes story that aired back in 1986, and spawned a seldom seen but important and riveting documentary, Taken For A Ride, written and directed by Jim Klein.

This is the company Michael Moore earned his documentary film chops covering in the still pertinent Roger & Me. Today all Americans can now share the pain and frustration exhibited by those seen in Flint, Michigan twenty years ago, which were captured by Moore's film crew.

How does a company create an electric vehicle and then have management decide to destroy the model in less than a decade, and expect any sympathy from the car buying public today? If you're interested you can check out Chris Paine's documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car? on Google video.

I, and I'm sure everybody else today, feels terrible about the many workers losing jobs, homes, health benefits and all traces of former dignity with each successive mismanaged turn this conglomerate has undertaken for the past forty years. John DeLorean left because the company was so unwieldy. The book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, offers his recollections about the company. DeLorean was really GM design for the entire decade of the 1960s, the last decade the company had real relevance as an automaker. It became a bean counter's company from the 1970s until the last bean counter, Rick Wagoner, signed off.

Good night, and good luck, General Motors.