Culture Shock

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all...

"I have three little kids and I drive all the time - to the doctor's, to the grocery store, to school," said Anna Pelletier, 36, of Pottstown. "If you live in the suburbs, you don't have many options."

We've spent the last half-century or so building a society (and to a certain degree, an economy) based almost entirely on cheap gas. We ridiculed every politician who even suggested that this was a bad idea or that maybe we ought to complement our highway system with rail. We had no problems giving our tax money to oil companies and airlines in the form of subsidies, yet screamed bloody murder when we try to use the money for some sort of public transportation.

One of the reasons I moved here to Chicago was because even at $2 a gallon, it was getting too expensive to drive everywhere I had to go, and Atlanta doesn't give you much of a choice. Their public transit is atrocious for a city that size, MARTA gets no state funding, and all of it is cheered on by assholes like Neil Boortz with his stories about people peeing in subway elevators. Yet now they're paying about $3.60 a gallon there (more here: I saw it at $4.35 at one station), most of it wasted sitting in traffic on Hwy. 400 or wherever. We bitch about the CTA here, but at least we take it seriously.

It didn't have to be this way, either. There were so many things we could have done over the last fifty years or so to change our habits, but we would have none of it. So you just better get used to it, because the price is never, ever, going to go down again.

Never

Ever

Regardless of how many brown people we kill in the Middle East. Regardless of which President is in office, or what political party controls Congress. You will never again see gas prices go down to where they were before Mr. Bush was installed.

Never

EVER

Now there are still things we can do. For one we can have a national transit project like the federal highway project we began in the fifties, combining good safe roads with rail service, and coordinating it with air travel; If you live in Chicago and want to go to Indianapolis, for example, you can lay out as much as much as $185 for a plane ticket and wind up spending more time going through security than you would on the actual flight. But what are your other options? You can drive there in maybe three hours and spend nearly as much on gas, or pay about $30 to $40 for an uncomfortable 4-hour bus ride, or an even longer train ride (why is the train ride longer? But at least it's more comfortable). What if there were a bullet train that got you there in an hour or so? For say $20? That wouldn't be such a bad thing, would it? I mean, why fly such short distances?

And in the meantime we can build more fuel-efficient cars or even seriously research other forms of individual travel. Maybe we'll even find something to get us back to the days of cheap gas, who knows? More telecommuting and otherwise working from home. Community development that makes it easier for everyone to get around. There's no reason in the world that this can't be done.

Well, that's not exactly true.

There's no sane reason it can't be done.

Cars are part of our culture. They define our "independent" spirit. The idea that public transportation is for losers and smelly Europeans has been drilled into our brains from day one. And let's face it, the auto and oil industry have a lot of influence over our government, far more than they deserve, as I see it. We need to do more than just make changes in our infrastructure, we need to re-think our entire way of life, and that is not going to happen any time soon. What we need are leaders courageous enough to tell the truth about this situation, and citizens willing to face the reality that the days of cheap gas are over. I think we'll come to that, eventually. The question is, how long?

Jones!!!

Indiana Jones and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald from CornPoneFlicks on Vimeo.

Looking for Work

Japanese doctor:
Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him looking for work in six weeks.

German doctor:
That's nothing; we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks.

British doctor:
In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half of a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks.

Texas doctor (not to be outdone):
You guys are way behind. We took a man with no brains out of Texas, put him in the White House and now half the country is looking for work.

(thanks to an anonymous e-mailer)

Love Gods Of The Far Right

Never heard of these guys until today, but this is pretty good

See also Allah In The Family

Greed

John Cleese discusses it with Dennis Miller. At the time of the interview, John had a film out that dealt with greed called Fierce Creatures, a kind of sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, which is what prompted the question in the first place:

For those of you who can't watch the video, here's a relevant excerpt:

Dennis: I hate to get Gordon Geckonian on you, but is, in fact, greed good?

John: (very seriously) No, it's absolutely insane. If you knew someone who liked chocolate, and you were in their house and you went to the refrigerator and you opened the door and there were a couple of bars of chocolate, you'd think well, that makes sense, but if you then discovered they had seventeen warehouses of it in the suburbs, you'd think this man is a nut!

This was from back in 1998, and Miller was already well on his way towards becoming batshit crazy (9/11 pushed him way over the edge), and he might have been taken off-guard by John's comments: after all, Cleese is a guy who, according to other members of Monty Python, would do almost anything for a buck (according to the guy posting the video, John was, at the time, "acting in a commercial for Icelandic Bank Kaupthing which are the epitome of greed in Iceland").

Were you this insightful about it when you were poor? Dennis asks defensively, trying to make an issue of the fact that John certainly does have a lot of money. But how much money you have isn't the point. Some of the greatest figures on the left were very wealthy: no one would ever accuse FDR or JFK of being working class, nor would they Obama or Hillary. The point is, what do you do with the money and power once you have it? We know what the Republicans do with money and power- they try to use it to get even more, regardless of the cost to the society around them (a society designed in great part to make such wealth possible), and regardless of what might ultimately happen to them if they piss off too many people. FDR and JFK understood that while having a lot of money was a good thing for them, it was also a good thing for others, and they worked to make policy that would help people become, if not as rich as them, rich enough to be able to live their lives without fear of poverty. While it certainly wasn't as true for some (blacks, mainly) as it was for others back in the days of the New Deal, it was still a huge leap from the days before.

As with many people, I would be perfectly happy with allowing the rich, idle or otherwise, to play their little games and pretend they're "motor of the world" or whatever little sobriquet they come up with to pretend they're better than everyone else. But their problem is they just can't stop. If they had a hundred million, they'd want two hundred. If they had five hundred million they'd want a billion. If they had two billion, they'd want four. If somehow one person managed to own or control 99.9 % of the world's resources, they would push to get that last one-tenth of one percent. That's how they are, that's how they've always been. We can't stop them thinking that way but we can stop them from making it a reality.

And don't let them fool you, they're miserable. The money is all they have: they never even give themselves the chance to really enjoy it. So while I certainly would like to have more money than I currently do, I could never imagine myself living like that, even if I did have the kind of skill it took to make that kind of money in the first place. This is what I wrote to a potential employer about a job that really is beneath the skills I have:

I realize that I seem overqualified for [this position] and it's possible that you may be concerned that I'll bolt at the earliest opportunity, but truthfully I am just looking for a job I know I can rely on being there, that pays well enough to support my minimalist lifestyle, and that doesn't give me a great deal of stress. If [the company] can offer me that, you can rest assured I will stay with [them] for as long as you need me.

And that's the long and short of it. All I want out of life right now is to go to work and come home and play on the computer or watch some TV, and go out to eat every now and again. I don't have any great ambitions above and beyond that. I don't want to be a "playah" and I'm not a "playah hater", as long as they don't interfere with what I'm doing.

I'm not going to pretend to understand why greedy people are the way they are, though I certainly think such an analysis is important. I just want to build a world where they can do their thing and we can all do ours. So to answer Dennis' question, no, greed is not good. It's not good for those of us on the bottom, it's not good for the ones on top. If only their money gave them the good sense to realize that.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

The Army has apparently removed a soldier from Iraq and relocated him to Kansas because of threats he was getting from other soldiers due to the fact that he's an atheist. And according to US Rep. Monique D. Davis, who I am ashamed to say is a Democrat from right here in Chicago (from the South Side), atheists have no right to participate in a discussion about religious freedom because they "hate God" (which begs the question how do you hate something you don't even believe in?), and went so far as to say that it's dangerous for our children to even know that [that] philosophy exists!

Of course, it seems to me that if you really wanted to get out of the hellhole of Iraq, atheism and/or homosexuality are your best bets. After all, we released a few valuable Arabic translators because somebody somewhere, well several somebodies, decided that their homosexuality was a greater threat to the military than the terrorism they would have helped to fight. Now, apparently, you're a threat if you don't believe in the same God as everyone else.

The atheist in question didn't begin that way:

Specialist Hall came to atheism after years as a Christian. He was raised Baptist by his grandmother in Richlands, N.C., a town of less than 1,000 people. She read the Bible to him every night, and he said he joined the Army “to make something of myself.”

“I thought going to Iraq was right because we had God on our side,” he said in an interview near Fort Riley.

In the summer of 2005, after his first deployment to Iraq, Specialist Hall became friends with soldiers with atheist leanings. Their questions about faith prompted him to read the Bible more closely, which bred doubts that deepened over time.

(emphasis mine).

People use the Bible and other religious texts as a Chinese menu: taking whatever from column A and column B, cherry-picking the parts that support what they want it to support and conveniently ignoring any annoying contradictions. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I make no claims to any greater truth above and beyond what we see and feel here in the "physical plane" (for want of a better phrase). But it became clear to me years ago that organized religion of any kind actually prevents you from seeking whatever greater truth might be out there. Obviously Spec. Hall, once he decided to see a little more for himself rather than relying on a priest or minister to translate things for him, began to have doubts.

My only question for Spec. Hall is why isn't he thanking the Army for getting him out of Iraq rather than suing them? Having had an epiphany concerning religion, a realization that he was only being used as cannon fodder isn't that big of a leap. OK granted, being stuck out in Kansas, while safer perhaps, ain't exactly a reward, but at least the summers are better.

I don't understand what the Army, and others, are afraid of, anyway. No agnostic or atheist ever flew an airplane into a skyscraper, or exploded a truck outside of a government building, or shot a doctor for doing something you didn't like because they felt that they would be rewarded for it after they die. And as with the homosexual translators, whose value for military intelligence (yeah, yeah, I know) was far greater than the contributions of any individual soldier, I just don't understand why you're doing this when you so desperately need as many soldiers as you can get. Convicted felons OK, but atheists and homos bad? I don't understand the priorities.

My personal beliefs, and whatever there is between God (whoever and whatever God is) and I, is my business and my business alone. I respect everyone's right to believe what they want (regardless of how stupid I think it is) but as always I draw the line when it comes to making laws that say those who disagree with whatever belief happens to be in vogue at the time are second-class citizens, or worse, sub-humans who need to be marginalized or killed. Are we fighting religious fundamentalism, or merely trying to establish our own fundamentalism over someone elses? I think the actions of the Army speak volumes.

Phyllis Huster, D-5th (WA)

Phyllis is an old friend of mine, and this week she officially launched her bid to run for the State Senate in Washington's 5th district. It's a heavily red district, but like so many red districts, it's vulnerable because the Republicans have screwed things up so badly and for so many people, even many of those who are hardcore Republicans are having second thoughts about the Grand Old Party.

I want to tell you about Phyllis, and why you should support her.

Some years back, during my long and continuing fight with financial security, back when I was with Cathy and two of her kids, we were being evicted from our apartment, because I had lost my job and fell behind on the rent. We didn't know her at all, and she had never met us. She was just one of many who were supporting Howard Dean during his run, and when she was asked if she could help, she stepped us. Phyllis let Cathy and I stay with her for a few weeks until I found a new job and we could move to a new place. And ever since, she's been like a big sister to me, and an aunt to Cathy's kids. Now, I'm helping her a little with her website in a small way, and I'm happy to do so.

Phyllis represents the true spirit of liberalism, the idea that we're all in this together and that we should all help each other out in time of need, whether that means through government programs, private charities, or individual acts of kindness and generosity. As a representative, she would do her best to make the lives of her constituents better, not just the well-connected few.

If you want more information about Phyllis and her campaign, you can visit her website. If you want to donate to the campaign, you can do so here.

Billy Bob '08

(How Americans think about voting, according to the millionaire press corps)

Well, gas is almost 4 bucks a gallon, my health insurance costs just tripled, my mortgage just doubled, I haven't had a raise in five years and I may get laid off at any time. And the only one who can fix all of this is someone I can have a beer with down at Charlie's Bowl & Brew.

Then again, maybe they're right:

Robotic Beer Launching Refrigerator - video powered by Metacafe

(via here and here)

All About Me, Kinda

A lot of my anger over the way things are going in this country has to do with how things are going for me personally. So while I'm happy to read articles like this that seem to portend a huge win for the Democrats in 2008, my optimism for the future is dampened when I still struggle just to make the rent month after month, with no end in sight, and with a great deal of skepticism that things will change very much if that comes to pass.

And that's what it's all about. It's not about how good things are going for your candidate, or your party. It's about what kind of a role the government is going to play in your life, whether it exists to help all of us or just the well-connected few. What good is it to me and to the millions of others who are in a similar financial situation if Clinton, Obama or McCain is President and our lives stay the same? What does it matter to the soldier in Iraq which party controls Congress if he or she still has to patrol the streets of Baghdad?

If the Dems win big, and nothing really changes for us, what then?

Update: In the comments, My good friend and fellow blogger demeur writes:

I don't want to piss on your parade Joe but even if the Dems win it's going to take a while to straighten this mess we call a country. Remember George had 7.5 years to screw it up. Be patient though things will get better. Just take it one day at a time. We're all in this together.

True enough, it's going to take a long time to dig ourselves out of this hole even if the Dems hit the ground running, like Roosevelt and the New Dealers did in '32. My concern is that they'll dither and screw around and whatever momentum they might have had after the election will be lost. And they will do that if we don't push them from day one.

This is about more than just defeating Republicans. It's about reaffirming some of the the ideals we supposedly believe in this country: that hard work should be rewarded, that how far you go in life is based upon what you do rather than what your connections or who your parents are.

And yes, it's about us being in this together. The multi-millionaires and billionaires that have pushed the country in this direction don't care about you or me, except to the extent of how much richer we can make them. Yes they deserve to be able to live their lives and earn what money they can, but not at the expense of turning the rest of us slowly into wage slaves or swindling us out of our homes or letting us die when a natural disaster hits us or sending us off to war to protect their interests.

It can be done, and sooner than we think, but it has to begin with rejecting the corporate-induced ideology and CEO personality cult mentality we've been fed for the last forty years or so. As long as we buy into the notion that corporations are people and deserve not just the same, but more rights than humans, nothing will change. As long as we continue to believe that nothing the government does is any good while private industry is always competent, then nothing will change.

And yes, those attitudes take time to form. The corporatists didn't get where they are overnight, and neither did the New Dealers. Winning this election is a beginning, not an end. As I've said before, winning only means we can start the work that needs to be done.

How We Do Things

This is the country we now live in:

No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

What’s at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers -- just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects -- is the question of intent.

I've felt for a long time that telemarketing ought to be completely and totally illegal, but that's really a different story. Bad enough we have a President who admits that we torture people, which is immoral and illegal and the country gives a collective shrug. But now, in America it seems, the only way people make good money these days is by being the best at suckering others out of their money. Waterboarding your sales people as a means to motivate them is a logical conclusion if your purpose is to squeeze blood from a stone. What's next, I wonder? Make your quota or we shoot your kid? Third place, we burn your house down?

And people wonder why I get pissed off.

Same Old, Same Old

With all due respect for Glen Greenwald and his new book about the vapidity of the Washington Press Corps, and to the bloggers who are hoping to spread that message to a wider audience, let me lay it out for you: you're still just preaching to the choir.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. The right certainly does it well enough. But the right also spends huge amounts of money investing in communications infrastructure in order to reach a much wider audience. Combine that with their ongoing, equally successful attempts to turn the government into a tool for corporate interests by scaring people into voting for Republicans, filling the government with people who hate the very idea of government and whose purpose is it make it easier for them to catapult the propaganda, and you get an idea of what we're up against.

I tuned out the so-called "professional" media ages ago, when it was apparent to me that the news was all about their egos and salaries, and judging from some of the ratings info I see, a lot of people are doing the same. But the propaganda is very effective because I hear these memes every day from people. It doesn't matter to me who wins the Democratic nomination, or even if they manage to get elected, the machine will be as strong as ever.

But this is something I've been talking about for ages, and my regulars know how I feel. Best I can do now is to just keep hanging on: going to my classes and finding a better job, so I can pay the rent and bills and maybe, and this is a big maybe, make my life a little more comfortable. So congrats on the book, and my best to the bloggers. I and most of the rest of the country stand in agreement, but we still have to go to work in the morning.

Nothing To See Here

So Put Down The Duckie!

Celebrities (in order of appearance)
Yosh Schmenge (John Candy)
Edith Prickley (Andrea Martin)
New York Mets Keith Hernandez & Mookie Wilson
Jane Curtin
Madeline Kahn
Joe Williams
Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens)
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Wynton Marsalis
Celia Cruz
Ihtzak Perlman
Angus Hudson and Rose Buck (Gordon Jackson & Jean Marsh)
Paul Simon
Jeremy Irons
Pete Seeger
Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman
NY Giants Sean Landeta, Mark Ingram, Karl Nelson and Carl Banks

Common People

The only thing worse than millionaire/billionaire assholes who think they're above the law and above whatever other rules the rest of us have to live by are the same people who also seem to think they're "common people" like me.

You know what my problem is? I don't identify or fit in with either group. I'm far too "common" to fit in with the professionalista but I'm not one to go out drinking with the boys, either.

And what pisses me off even more is how many truly important things aren't being talked about while we're obsessing over this bullshit.

Anywhere here's the lyrics to a song. Listen if you want.

She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College, that's where I caught her eye

She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said "In that case, I'll have rum and coca-cola"
She said "fine"
And then in 30 seconds time she said

I want to live like common people
I want to do whatever common people do
I want to sleep with common people
I want to sleep with common people like you

Well what else could I do? I said "I'll see what I can do"

I took her to a supermarket.
I don't know why, but I had to start it somewhere, so it started there.

I said "pretend you've got no money"
But she just laughed and said "oh you're so funny"
I said "Yeah? Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here"

Are you sure you want to live like common people?
You want to see whatever common people see?
You want to sleep with common people?
You want to sleep with common people like me?"

But she didn't understand, she just smiled and held my hand

Rent a flat above a shop, Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend you never went to school
But still you'll never get it right, when you're lying in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall, if you called your dad he could stop it all yeah

You'll never live like common people!
You'll never do whatever common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view and dance and drink and screw
because there's nothing else to do

Sing along with the common people!
Sing along and it might just get you through!
Laugh along with the common people!
Laugh along although they're laughing at you, and the stupid things that you do because you think that poor is cool

Like a dog lying in a corner, they will bite you and never warn you
Look out, they'll tear your insides out, 'cos everybody hates a tourist,
especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh
Yeah and the chip stain's grease will come out in the bath

You will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control and with nowhere else to go
You are amazed that they exist and they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why

-Pulp, Common People

Listen Here!

Absconde Obeseri Illegitimo*

Saw here that the Pope apparently doesn't want to hang out with you know who** in the White House. Maybe he knows something we don't. But that's not what I really want to talk about.

I've been told by several people lately that I need to make more posts on what's going on, but really I hardly even see the point any more. I know some of you out there like my insights into things from the point of view I have, but it's one of those situations where there's just so much going on I think that if I really started to be more active I wouldn't be able to stop, like eating that first potato chip. And since, unlike some of the other dirty fucking hippie bloggers, I can't make a cent off this, I just can't afford to start, because once I do it will begin to dominate everything else I do. And the hard truth is, however good my insight, it simply has no monetary value, and I just can't afford to waste so much precious time on it when I'm still this close to being homeless. I have enrolled in an A+ certification course (IT and networking) at Wright College (a Chicago City College) so as to improve my employment opportunities., and since the shop where I work is closing at the end of the month I need to find a new job. I have to prioritize. Maybe when I pass the course and get a little more stable financially things will change. Maybe.

Don't get me wrong, I still read a few of my regular blogs, and keep up with the news as best as possible. I'm not turning into a hermit, after all. But I try not to obsess about it. But to summarize my feelings on current events, I just don't know any other word for what the current administration, the Republican leadership and their financial backers are doing than evil. If we define good as sacrifice, compassion and selflessness, and evil as selfishness and indifference to suffering, then I think the description fits. I feel as I have felt for many years, they should be removed from office, placed under arrest, put on trial for numerous crimes against America and humanity, and, if found guilty, imprisoned or even executed if warranted.

Meanwhile, the financial wizards who scream bloody murder at the very idea that government should in any way tell them what to do come crawling to that very government to bail them out when their schemes fall apart. Remember, as you pay your taxes, that your money isn't going to help rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, or to try and establish an affordable health care system for everyone, or to help the guy who lost his job because some beanhead CEO wants to make $10 million a year rather than $9.999 million. It'll go to the beanhead CEO's who created the problems to begin with, and to politically connected companies whose function is to bleed the government dry so they can steal even more money. Both of these groups, of course, love wars as long as someone else fights them, and love the soldiers who do the fighting as long as they're willing to pose for PR pics, keep their mouths shut and don't try to vote or anything subversive like that.

Then there's the useless and self-absorbed "progressive" movement, which is really all about them: well-paid radio show hosts and bloggers concerned with their own personal wealth and fame who have forgotten that the liberal ideal is to make a positive impact on people's lives. Real liberals like Jane Addams and Upton SInclair took their millions and put them into action helping people out. Even corrupt political organizations like Tammany Hall remained popular because they really did make a difference in people's lives. Certainly the New Deal did.

And finally, the so-called "professional" media obsess over lapel pins, bowl