Can It Be Fixed?

Just how corroded is this country?

Last night I started working on a spreadsheet to demonstrate how easily someone like the Space Nazi could buy off this country. But it’s been a while since I put together a complicated spreadsheet and this one is complicated. I will finish it, maybe even today and when I do, I’ll write up my results and you’ll see them here. But after I gave up on it and went to bed, I started thinking about how damaged this country has been from Republican actions over the last 45 years, starting with Reagan or, really, starting with Nixon. And that thought stuck with me all through the night, until I woke up this morning comparing the sad remains of the United States of America to my history of abandoned cars because of rust damage from living in the Midwest.

If you’ve never lived in one of the rust belt states you might not have any idea how unrecoverable a car can become in a surprisingly short period of time. A friend of mine, who is a wonderful mechanic in Truth or Consequences NM always remarks on how much rust damage there is to my vehicles, even to the cars that I think are holding up pretty well. If you live in a Rust Belt state and you drive older vehicles, no matter how much work you put into a vehicle trying to keep it alive, sooner or later you’re gonna have to put it down because of rust. 20 some years ago I bought a late 90sFord Taurus station wagon for my wife as a surprise gift. She loved that car and took care of it as well as she'd ever taken care of a mechanical device. Like all Ford Taurus’es, eventually her station wagon needed major transmission work at about 160,000 miles. She really wanted to have the work done, it would have been about $3000 for the repairs. But the back hatch was rusted all along the bottom, the front and rear wheel wells were rusted out, there was major corrosion every place the body attached to the frame, and I made the decision for her to have the car scrapped.

In my 60 years as a car owner, I’ve had to make this decision around two dozen times. Between 1970 and the early 80s, I think I owned at least a half dozen Volkswagen Beetles and I was pretty good at keeping them mechanically maintained. But I lived in Kansas, northwest Texas, and Nebraska during those years and almost all of my driving was through heavily salted roads. I had to make the same decision that we made with that Taurus with every one of those vehicles. Because I’m an audio guy, I often had installed stereo systems in my cars that ended up being worth more than the car and I always removed those stereo systems before scrapping the car. During our lean years, that sound system might have moved from one car to another three or 4 times before it ended up being obsolete. In fact, I have the sound system from my last Ford Escort in one of my garages as the sound system for that work area. That car was also scrapped because of rust.

And now we are at a similar point with the frayed, beat-up, corroded and likely unrepairable remains of the United States of America. Just from my spreadsheet work last night on figuring out how easily Elon Musk could buy the entire Republican Party with his spare change, I have come to the conclusion that this vehicle/Constitution is not repairable. It is too corroded from within and without. We can fight to try to hang on to the good parts, but with 76 million Americans being foolish enough to take careful aim at their own feet and empty their weapons the fight is pretty hopeless.  As reported by Forbes Magazine and confirmed by several sources, “the wealth owned by the top 1% of Americans as of the fourth quarter of 2022, according to the Federal Reserve, was $43.45 trillion, compared to $4.16 trillion by the bottom 50% of the Americans during the same period. (Forbes reported in 2021 that the top 1% that year comprised about 1.3 million households making more than $500,000 per year.) Within that that top category, the top 0.01% alone controlled $17.6 trillion in the last quarter of 2022.” Lucky for the “top 1%” literacy and numeracy in the majority of American adults is practically 3^rd world (Trump’s “shithole countries”) levels.

The men who founded this nation knew these problems are likely insolvable. They warned against inherited wealth, wealth so great that it would overwhelm the power and contributions of the general population, an uneducated general population, and many of the faults we currently find ourselves mired in. Those same men were also mostly wealthy slave owners and they were afraid that democracy was an unwise (for their wealth and power) experiment. So, they built a “republic” that kept power in the hands of the idle rich and working people have been struggling to wrestle a democracy from a poorly designed republic ever since. Today that struggle is over and oligarchy has won, more than enough American citizens are so easily misdirected and uneducated that they willingly submit themselves to servitude. What happens next will be an example to the world and very well could spell the end for what remains of human civilization. The first week of the new Republican Administration indicates, to me, that this vehicle is rusted beyond repair and will either have to be abandoned or will end up stuck on the side of the road leaving its passengers stranded.

The “Havin’ Stuff” Handicap

The first kid I ever knew who “had stuff” was a guy I’ll call “Andy” (because that was his name) who had a lot of stuff, probably from the day he was born until he died. (I am assuming he is dead. Unless there was an outright miracle, he almost certainly is.) Andy’s father owned the local rural telephone company and, by the standards of the day and place, Andy’s family was rich. Even better, Andy was an only child. Our neighborhood was mostly 1950’s middle class white, but it was the “new” end of town and there was some diversity in the houses that were being built and Andy’s family lived in one of the more upscale homes in the area.

I knew Andy was “rich” because he always had stuff that nobody else in the neighborhood might ever get to see if he didn’t have it. To the point that, for a few days after the Xmas holidays the other kids in the neighborhood would sneak a hike through Andy’s alley to check out what his parents had made him throw out to make room for the toy store they’d emptied under the tree that December. To you that might sound like some serious low-life scavenging, but to us it was just good sense. For example, one winter I salvaged a non-functional go-cart from Andy’s Xmas trash. For a while, I managed to hide that cart in the weeds of an empty lot across the street and I’d drag that thing up the neighborhood hill and coast down it, over and over, until I could barely stand. I don’t remember what became of it, but I suspect my father found it and made me take the cart back where it would have either been picked up by the garbage collectors or snagged by another kid who might have made it run again. At that time, my father so effectively squashed my budding interest in all things mechanical that fixing the motor wasn’t even a consideration for me.

Andy was two or three years older than me and when he was in high school he not only had a car, but it was a British sports car (MG, Triumph, Austin-Healey, etc.) and it was brand new. He treated that car as carefully as he had the go-cart. One of the last times I hung out with Andy, he drove the car on to the practice football field, burned a few donuts in an end-zone, and tried to sneak off through a path that led from the field, past the tennis courts, along a very steep ledge that, eventually, led to the maintenance building’s parking lot. The path along the tennis courts turned out to be seriously compromised by a previously undiscovered drainage path under the courts. Andy discovered the erosion by dropping his car’s front end several feet into the collapsed path. We abandoned ship and ran for it. Andy called his dad. I did everything but calling my father and put as much distance between me and Andy as possible. Being a rich kid, there were no apparent repercussions from the public property destruction, but his father took away the sports car . . . and replaced it with a sedan or something that might be harder for Andy to squeeze on to the football field.

A decade later, visiting my parents for some holiday, I ran into Andy at the local bowling alley. He was still a rich kid, still crashing cars his father bought for him, and still “trying to find myself.” A few years later, Andy piled one of those cars into an immobile object and discovered that he was a stoppable force. At least his friends and relatives discovered that Andy was stopped, because he spent the rest of his life in a coma.

Andy is a relatively extreme example of someone who suffered the “havin’ stuff handicap,” but I have known a lot of kids who grew up with plenty and ended up with not much of a life. These days, I think I’m seeing a lot more kids who are being handicapped with stuff than those who are expected to figure some stuff out for themselves. I admit that I’m old and, maybe, I’m even wrong. However, the expectation that a 10-year-old “needs” an iPhone and unlimited phone and browser and texting time seems excessive to me. The fact that so many parents “gift” their teens with a car that is more expensive than anything I’d consider buying for myself seems irresponsible. Kids have always bawled “I wanna [something or other]” and parents have always either been able to afford to buy off the squalling brat or knock the snot out of it until it shuts up and waddles back to the assembly line to keep cranking out widgets of crawls back into the chimney and finishes the job. Today, parents seem to be inclined toward always buying off the noise-maker and I’m not convinced that is the right approach based on 60-some-years of observing outcomes.

My spouse often says “discipline is a kindness” and she is not talking about corporal punishment or standing a kid in a corner without supper. She means that instilling some sort of self-discipline in a kid is the same kind of parenting task as teaching reading and writing and other life-skills. In our small, mostly-middle class, white and privileged village, I have seen an astonishing number of kids (people under 50) who went out into the world, post-high school, failed miserably and returned to their parents’ basements to live out the rest of their days. All of these kids grew up expecting their parents to provide them with anything their shriveled little hearts desired: cars, cell phones, computers, musical instruments (yeah, I'm jealous), exotic vacation trips, private lessons and tutors, and everything that caught their attention on television or YouTube. Those expectations were relatively easy to meet when the kid was 0-18. Post-high school and college failure, those quasi-adult expectations were economically impossible for the parents to provide as they aged and their incomes declined and the kids had to settle for pretending to be music “producers,” video game “influencers,” authors without a book or publication in sight, or just underachievers waiting either for inspiration or to be recognized for their unrecognized genius. Odds are good-to-infinite that they will be disappointed for the rest of their lives and once you fall that far behind your contemporaries you are unlikely to ever catch up.

And who are they consistently falling behind? The kids who didn’t get immediate gratification from “I wanna” and had to make do with what they could make, find, or earn from their own efforts are more often than not the ones actually changing the world, starting businesses and industries, creating video games and applications and selling them to Apple or Microsoft for a few billion $, kids who are actually working musicians or artists or writers and making a living from it, and, probably, screwing up their own kids by responding to “I wanna” with stuff.

The Wrong People Are Giving Up

When Barak Obama became President in 2008, morons like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, and the Marching Morons who listen to their chin dribble all threatened to leave the country; as if some other country would want them. Obviously, those people went no where and whined like the fluffballs they are for 8 years of economic recovery and mild attempts at restoring economic equality and an even milder form of justice in this declining nation. Who were they kidding? What 1st world country would want our no-talent, hate-jocks? In fact, unless you are among the rapidly shrinking minority of Americans with actual marketable talents, no other country wants American immigrants at all. Even our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are becoming picky about who they will take from their overly violent, uneducated, and clearly insane neighbor.

However, since none of those people contribute anything irreplaceable, most everything carried on as if nothing had changed. Other than carrying out the garbage and doing work better performed by immigrants, legal or otherwise, it’s not like Trump’s fans are big economic drivers or scientists or doctors or anyone who makes a useful contribution to the GNP or the national character. The only money behind Trump comes from the worst people in the world: trust fund brats and hedge fund gangsters and actual mobsters. The people who voted for Trump are, literally, the dumbest people in the nation, making a contribution to the nation’s GNP that is so insignificant that if they were to leave the United States, the country left behind would be greatly improved and the new nation formed of Trumpetes would be a large, powerless Bangladesh. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015.  By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.” Trump likes to speak in terms of “winners and losers,” but he and his followers are classic losers by any standard of measurement and have been at least since G.W. Bush’s “victory” in 2000: Al Gore’s 659 counties contributed 54% of the GNP while Bush’s 2397 only kicked in a 46% share. Red states are consistent non-contributors to the nation’s economy in every 21st Century measure. In fact, the only area where red states have an advantage is in resource extraction. In other words, red states on their own would be competing on a level footing with South Africa, Russia, the Arab states, and parts of South America. The only criteria that matters in those economic activities are price; the lowest price/margins win.

The unemployed and/or completely dependent alt-right characters have definitely done damage to the people who have, traditionally, supported their enemies with everything from Social Security, Workman’s Compensation, Medicare/Medicaid, healthcare in general, and the science that has driven the nation’s economic success since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now that everything from the National Park System to healthcare to bankster regulation to the environment is being attacked by the goons in the White House, a lot of people are wondering, “Is this actually my country?”

Those who have come the US with the hope of joining a thriving economy are definitely questioning that decision, “Technology companies across the country said they did not support the travel ban, and the mood is dark across the California tech sector” It’s not like the whole country is attracting high-tech talent. The red states are giant antigravity zones, not just repelling non-white, non-native talent, but driving out homegrown high performers. Not only is the Trump immigration policy driving non-US talent to more welcoming nations, US talent often feels compelled to “immigrate” to the only place in the country that is overwhelmingly driven by innovation: Silicon Valley. Now, you have to wonder if home-grown talent will be looking for a “better world” elsewhere. It could just be who I know, but in the last month I’ve had conversations with two Boomer families who have to go overseas to visit their grandchildren: a pair of physicians permanently immigrated to Ireland and an engineer and a physician now calling Australia “home.”

A good reason for the fear generated by Trump is his promise to “make American great again.” The people who are energized by this promise couldn’t make a contribution to make their own backyards “great.” The only job they could possibly imagine Trump creating for them would be as members of the Gestapo. The far right loves Trump, but they are otherwise useless, non-contributors to the nation’s economy or future. What else could they be hoping for?

At the other end of this high-output vs. low output America conflict will be both the people who leave and the people who decide to quit fighting for people who don’t appreciate the effort. If Trump saps that energy, you can safely assume the country will experience another economic crash, as the banksters and hedge fund gangsters leverage themselves into oblivion and the Marching Morons pretend to keep up by borrowing every penny they can borrow for their new cars, boats, big screen televisions, and the rest of the crap they can not afford and don’t need. This time, there won’t be a Barak Obama standing by to bail out the morons and regulate the criminals. In fact, the young people who might have been the people to take on that job, might just be watching the “fun” from Toronto, Sydney, London, or Berlin.

#155 Making Death Personal (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

This month death got personal.  On the scale of suffering that people experience, I admit my experience may be trivial.  My dog died.  I didn't lose a child, my wife, a sibling, a parent, or a dear friend.  Just a dog. 

I've suffered losses before, more substantial losses, but not more personal ones. 

When I was a kid, my mother died; after a year of suffering the failures of the American medical system that were typical of 1957.  Not long after that, my father's father, my grandfather, died.  During the Vietnam years, two close friends died in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  A decade later, a young dear friend died of massive heart failure, thanks to a short life of tobacco abuse and poor diet and genetics, less than a year after I'd moved to California.   My youngest daughter was nearly killed in a terrible car accident and my wife and I clung to each other for support for four awful, long days, until we had some assurance that she would survive and we could imagine our lives restarting again.  I've survived death and near death of those close to me and it was painful, heartbreaking, and bits of me left with those spirits.

I've hunted and killed animals.  I've witnessed strangers' deaths so first hand that they took their last breath within sight; once, within range of my touch.  Death isn't something I fear, particularly.  I'm not religious, superstitious, or inclined to believe that a painless death is a bad thing at the end of a well-lived life. 

My dog died within minutes of my coming home at the end of a work day.  He, Puck, had been sick for a few weeks, noticeably.  I don't think he suffered much, except for loss of mobility in his last couple of days of life.

Puck was a pound dog.  He came into our lives at a pet store, a few weeks after our first dog had been killed when she escaped our yard and found her way into traffic.  I had no intention of replacing her, but my wife somehow thought we needed to fill that hole in our lives with another life.  Puck looked like a wild dog, we have no idea what breeds he came from, but he was the gentlest of souls ever to grace the earth.  His only fault was that he loved children uncontrollably.  Any excuse, any tiny sound of children laughing, and Puck would find a way to escape his leash, his fenced yard, or just slip away when we weren't looking to find the source of child-sound and be loved by a kid.  Kids all loved him, too. 

Adults were sometimes afraid of his wild eyes, his huge teeth, and his giant grin, but kids figured him out instantly.  My baby grand daughter's first word was "Puck" and that is still her favorite word for "dog."  She lavished love and abuse on him for a year of his life.  Not that she would even think about hurting him, but she loved him so much she leapt to hug him when he'd come into the house and, sometimes, she'd practically crush him to the floor. 

There were a few, quite a few, times when I was less than a big admirer of that dog.  Puck would take off, any time we weren't paying perfect attention, chasing down the sound of kids or other dogs.  I spent too many afternoons and evenings stalking our neighborhood looking for "that damned dog" and I vowed, more than once, to beat him into a pulp when I found him.  I always found him playing with kids and he'd be so happy to see me that my anger would dissolve into something closer to disappointment.  Disappointment that he wasn't satisfied with our company, that he so desperately need to be around children, that two old people who cared for him weren't enough to keep him happy.  It wasn't his fault. He just wasn't our dog.  He was a kid's dog.

So, finally, we saw the light and my daughter's family adopted him.  He flourished, only running away a couple of times in the year he lived with them, with two in-house kids to love.  In the last couple of months, he developed a urinary problem.  My wife and daughter took him to a vet, who gave him antibiotics and said it was either an infection or something much more serious.  The bleeding cleared up and he did well, except for slowly dropping weight while appearing to have a good appetite, in the next month and a half.    Suddenly, one morning, my daughter discovered that Puck couldn't stand and was dragging his hind legs around the yard. 

She called us, my wife and I, for advice.  We aren't particularly wise about sickness, death, or doctors.  We both lost our mothers to cancer and we're fatalistic about death.  Still, I didn't want the kids to watch their pet die, so I offered to bring him back to our home, to what we still called "Puck's yard," to see if a change in place might help. 

For a day, it seemed to.  Puck couldn't walk down the porch steps, but he did take some tentative steps in his old yard and found his way up to the deck in his yard, where his dog house used to be and where he'd spent many hours listening for the sound of neighborhood children playing.  He was with us for two days and, the morning he died, my wife had spent a few moments with him before going to work.  She thought he seemed tired, but he didn't show any signs of being in pain.  I left for a department meeting that morning and didn't get out of the house in time to look in on him before I left for work. 

When I came home, about noon, I went out to see if he'd eaten.  It was starting to rain a little and Puck hated being in the rain.  If he was not in his dog house, I planned to carry him into our sun porch, where we had a mat and some blankets laid out for him.  I found him, slightly warm but stiffening, at the edge of the deck. He was probably trying to crawl under the deck, where he'd spent a lot of warm or rainy days when he lived with us.  His wild eyes were still open, his huge tongue was out, but cold and unmoving, and his constant grin was replaced by something lifeless, something not at all like the dog I'd known for almost eight years. 

Puck and I had something different than "love" between us.  He frustrated the hell out of me, running away and being the most incredibly "lazy" dog I've known.  He didn't chase balls, catch Frisbees, or play tug-a-war.  Puck didn't particularly like going for a walk and wouldn't run if you chased him with a pitchfork.  He hated water and cowered like he was being beaten when we took him to the lake to swim with the family.  He just wanted to lay in the shade and be played with by children.  Not a bad life's goal, obviously. 

Some folks will probably say we abused him by not taking him back to a vet to be prodded, probed, poked, x-rayed, hacked open, and experimented on.  Maybe.  He might have lived longer if we had.  He might have died miserably in a vet's cage or on an operating table.  Puck hated his visits to the vet, even when he was there for a few days while we traveled.  The women who cared for him on those occasions said he was "the best dog" and gushed over him like he was a baby, but he desperately wanted out of that place and acted as if we'd abandoned him for few days after he got back home. I'd have to carry him into the vet's office for his annual shots.  He was passive, didn't try to escape, bite me, or struggle, but he wouldn't walk into that building on his own power. 

I know how he feels.  I worked in medical devices for a couple of centuries, one decade.  I met lots of greedy, careless, arrogant, uninformed, unskilled doctors.  I also met a few dedicated, incredibly skilled rare exceptions.  I found that hospitals are soulless, heartless, unhealthy places to die, even though a wonderful facility (Denver General Hospital) and its amazing surgeons gave my daughter's life back to her and my family.

All I want from the medical business, when I'm dying, is whatever it takes to live as comfortably as possible for however long I have to live.  No chemotherapy, no radical surgery, no radiation, no messed-up pharmaceutical experiments, no funky plastic replacement organs or bone parts, no electronic cardio-stimulation crap, and no time wasted in a hospital bed.  Tell me how long I have to live, give me whatever I need to squash the pain, and get the hell out of my way while I finish up the days of my life. 

That's how I hope to finish this mortal coil (whatever that means).  I may fail.  I may lose courage and wallow in false hope while I make my family miserable caring for my gutless butt, but I hope to do better than that.  Besides, I'm a lousy patient. 

Puck died well.  I can only hope to die as untroubled. 

When I found him in the yard, I sat with him for a few moments, remembering how vital and loving he'd been.  Just the night before, I'd sat in the yard and talked to him while he rested his head on my leg.  We made some kind of peace with each other and I couldn't find any sign that he was in pain.  I rubbed his neck, he licked my hand, and we watched the geese in the lake and the trees waving in the wind.  Leaves were budding on the trees, it was a warm, sunny day.  I left him outside that night, thinking he'd be more comfortable in his yard, in his dog house, than on the tile floor of the sun porch. 

Now, he is dead. 

I closed his eyes, wrapped him in a sheet, carried him down by our lake, and buried him in the rain.  While I dug the hole, I put a tarp over him, to keep him dry.  Puck hated the rain and I stupidly thought he'd be "more comfortable" under a tarp than getting wet under a sheet.  When I put him into the hole, I was amazed at how small he was.  He'd lost a lot of weight, but that wasn't all.  He seemed so much larger in life than he was in death. 

Today, I'm working in the attic and it's raining again.  When I took a break and looked out the window, I had a perfect view of "Puck's yard."  I remembered him wandering the yard, looking up to see if someone was watching him, hoping someone would let him out to go look for kids to play with. Then that recollection vanished and was replaced with the memory of that dead, furry shell he'd left for me to bury.  I don't think I've yet shed tears for Puck.  Maybe I didn't love him as much as he deserved.  Maybe I'm old enough that a dog's death won't make me cry.  Maybe I'm an asshole who doesn't care about my own pet's life and death. 

What I did think about, looking out that window, was all the people who've lost more this year, this month.  Parents who've lost sons and daughters to war, terrorists, criminals, disease, and accidents.  Those who have lost a spouse, a friend, or someone or something dear to them through no fault of their own.   I thought about the people who had to bury or burn the bodies of their loved ones, because there was no one there to do it for them.  I compared that to my shallow experience burying my grandkids' dog. 

I thought about those pampered assholes in Washington and Wall Street who are so immune to human feeling; greedy rationalizing men and women who callously bomb innocents who had the gall to get between the oil coveted by the Texas Mafia.  I pictured myself as one of my fellow Americans trapped inside of nature's fires, hurricanes and floodwaters, ignored by those soul-dead bastards.  My dog's death didn't compare.  Nothing I've ever experienced compares.

What can it feel like to be treated that badly?  How much can you hate someone who causes that kind of misery?  How far would you go to "get back" at someone who dropped a bomb, carelessly and viciously, on someone you loved?  I think I feel a little of how far I'd go and it scares the hell out of me.  It scares me that this government is making that kind of enemies for my family and my country.

April 2006

#136 Gonzo is Dead, Long Live Gonzo (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

"Doctor" Hunter S. Thompson, the King of Gonzo Journalism, died by his own hand this week.  The eulogies and anthems and homilies began the moment Thompson's son discovered the body and reported it to the Aspen City Police.  This rant has been a bitch for me to write.  I've written it, posted it, removed it, rewritten it, and re-posted it at least four times.  I usually don't rethink my thoughts all that often.  The Doctor made me rethink my thoughts often throughout my life. 

One of the best reviews of Hunter Thompson in life was an article written for, of all places, the Wall Street Journal by Tom Wolfe.  Wolfe and Thompson attracted major league attention to their writing through books about the same general crowd; the Hell's Angels and the freaks who ran with Ken Kesey's Cool Aid Acid Tests.  Wolfe went mainstream almost as soon as he recovered from his Acid Test hangover.  Thompson couldn't find a mainstream with a map and a guide and GPS and a well-marked path.  Hunter Thompson was so completely polarized to oppose the mainstream that he was magnetically drawn off the worn trail, away from conventional wisdom and "common sense," and into the middle of tributaries that ordinary men considered too ferocious and uncivilized to be useful. 

Even in death, Thompson went his own way.  At 67, he apparently shot himself with one of his many weapons.  "Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head," was his son's statement to the local press.  The Doctor had a long history with guns, explosives, fast motor vehicles, drugs and alcohol, and life on the edge of a long, deep, dark precipice.  Recent portraits show a man who put a lot of miles into those 67 years.  Some photos illustrate a man who looked nearly twice his actual age.  He was recovering from complications of a fall, including back pain and a broken leg, which would be enough to make a lot of 67-year-old folks cash it in.  His friends and family saw a collection of warning signs that Thompson was depressed and considering a final exit.  Still, part of me wants to believe that Thompson wasn't as selfish and egocentric as his final moments appear.

Part of me wants to be convinced that The Doctor was something better than human.  This is the age of paranoia and I have yet to see a depth that the neo-Nazi-conservatives won't fall.  Maybe I'm seeing the Gestapo under every unhappy event, but I think the Bushies would torture and kill Christ, Santa Claus, Mother Theresa, Ray Charles, and the Easter Bunny to fatten their portfolios and increase their power.  So far, there hasn't been a report of a suicide note, which seems a bit odd for someone so chronically inclined to write about everything that crossed his mind.  If you do a web search on Hunter Thompson, you'll find articles on everything from politics to the XFL to assassinating rabbits that dared to venture into his "compound" to an in-depth analysis of the Bushies and their sycophants; Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.  Thompson was eternally interested in practically everything that happened in his world.  And he wrote about those things constantly.  Why he wouldn't choose to put down a few notes about his final thoughts is, at least, curious.  That's what I'd like to believe.

Whatever the final story of this benchmark in American literature, I'm going to miss him as much as I miss George Harrison, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Bertrand Russell, and the growing hoard of people who have changed my world and left it with increased knowledge and wisdom.  Because of Hunter Thompson, I have a different definition of "evil" and "terrible" than the simple concept my father provided for me.  I don't know who has the true fix on those values and terms, but I know which one works for me and I have my experiences enhanced by Hunter Thompson's words to thank for that.

But, man, the thought that the great Hunter Thompson could blow his brains out so that his son and six-year-old grandson would hear the shot and find him and his residue splattered all over the room is beyond distain.  Thompson tended toward egomania more often than not.  He spent most of his life posing as a little boy waving his arms, yelling "Hey, look at me!" He was one of the few people who could control the center of attraction by claiming that he didn't want to be the center of attraction.  Like many dope-inspired artists, Thompson had delusions of worlds revolving around his center of gravity.  At the end of his life, he gave up wrestling with the devil and became one to the family members who cared the most for him. 

For a man who hoped to be so familiar with courage and honor, he failed to die to his own standards.  I have a lot of respect for those who go down in flames, but you have to drag demons into the fire not the people who love you.  Gonzo may have just been ego and that may be the legacy that Hunter Thompson leaves us when all the weights and measures are balanced.

Killing yourself is a bitch, though.  Anyone can talk about doing it, only the truly desperate can do it.  I doubt that Thompson had any fantasies of "crossing over to a better world," so he was giving up on life.  I suspect, that when life becomes so painful that he could make all of the moves necessary to end his life, he had to seize the moment regardless of how inconvenient the moment was for those around him.  Thompson's life was all about seizing moments of all sorts and his death was probably just another such moment.

June 2005

#103 They've Always Relied on the Votes of Fools (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Tennessee William's Stella always relied on "the kindness of strangers."  Republicans have always relied on the incredibly short memories, small attention spans, and the general foolishness of middle class voters.  So far, it's been a good strategy.  With the Bushies attack on the public education system, the increase in adult illiteracy, and the near complete lack of investigative journalism in major media, the future must look bright to Republican strategists.  There will be no shortage of stupid, uneducated people.

Remember six years ago, when the House and Bill Clinton were arguing about the definition of "sex?"  Leno and Letterman had a field day with almost-funny jokes on that subject.  Today, the Bushies and the world community are debating the definition of "torture" and the right wing comedians are missing in action.  So is the American press, Congress, and the American public.  That situation pretty well sums up Republican morals; sex among consenting adults is bad, institutional torture of randomly selected Arabs is good. And it works for them, because they're getting away with it and the odds are pretty good that Bush and CRAP will be re-elected in November and they'll get away with even more.  Get it?  They're relying on good old American stupidity.  Make a big deal out of nothing, ignore the really big stuff, and hope nobody is bright enough to see the contradiction.

You have to wonder what sort of moral behavior you would have seen from GWB before he was "reborn."  If he's this evil under the guidance of his god, how awful did he behave when he was on his own?  I guess, if you're an Alfred E. Newman look-alike, you have buckets of inherited cash, and your oily smirk convinces the average moron that you're a "nice guy," you can get away with treason, murder, theft, and any number of national and international crimes.  Now that's an inheritance!

The Republicans ran on a platform of conservative economic magic and they promptly put the country into a tailspin of debit spending, unemployment, and social manipulation.  In a few years, they'll be blaming all of their misdeeds on Clinton and the Democrats and the sheep who wear Republican buttons and plaster bumper stickers on their rusting pickups will be parroting that line in bars around the country.  Like Nixon said, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes fact.  That only works if you are lying to fools, but there is no shortage of that commodity. In fact, they reproduce like rabbits and their children are usually dumber than the originals.

Does it not seem like degeneration to you when the country's leaders move from arguing whether a blow job is "sex" to arguing if stripping, humiliating, beating, physically and psychologically intimidating prisoners is "torture?"  That pack of Washington Republican neo-con wimps would break down and give up every national secret they know if they were deprived of limousine drivers.  But the Bushies and Rush and the other right wing pussies pretend that their untrained, unsupervised, scared-shitless prison guards are just enjoying college "pranks" and their pet sheep voters buy into another Big Lie.  Obviously depending on the stupidity of others is a fairly safe bet. 

One of the two last great Republican Presidents (Teddy Roosevelt was the other), Lincoln, miscalculated when he said "you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  You don't have to fool all of the people, you just have to fool the majority all of the time.  These days, you can do that.

Seriously? Someone is surprised at this?

"It's like having 26 kids that I have to watch after . . . Who's smoking hashish around here?" This YouTube video is an interesting insight into how the war in Afghanistan is going for the men and women on the ground. While Congress and the President pontificate about "winning," the people responsible for "building the Afghanistan army" are wrestling with a corrupt local government and derelict material with which to build a puppet army that will hold up long enough for Obama to escape with some pretense of "winning" Bush's war against the Taliban.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2F80llZ5F4

Empire-building is frustrating work. When the people who want to liberate their country are all on the other side, what you get work with is pretty poor material. We have been here in the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, and we're there in Afghanistan. The "advisers" in Vietnam made the same kind of comments about "training" the ARVN.

"They've recruited the wrong kind of men. They're all stupid and ignorant. These young men are a bunch of delinquents." Big surprise. What sort of men did the British manage to recruit to fight against American revolutionaries? Benedict Arnold, for one. Even the British didn't think much of the Tories they had to repatriate after losing that war. In the US, our record of honoring the Vietnamese who served our side has been less than stellar.

You don't win civil wars, especially by foreign intervention. Hell, we can't honestly claim to have won our own Civil War, since a substantial portion of the southeast consistent elects representatives (and Presidents) who fight against the ideals of this nation and who support only 1 of 27 2nd amendment) of the Bill of Rights. Further, their only reason for supporting the 2nd amendment is that they still have dreams of resurrecting their lost secession by taking arms against the United States government. If we can't create democracy, promote civil rights, protect working people from abuse by international corporations, or protect civilians from invasion and terrorism by foreign terrorists, how do we plan to create that kind of democracy in the places where racial hatred, religious superstition, and inequality is ingrained in the culture?

Capitalism and Invention

I'm facinated by a lot of the uninformed argument about health care, relative to technology. Without Medicare and Medicade, the profitibility of the major medical device companies would be so slim that they wouldn't exist in any recognizable form, but those corporations are fighting "the public option" as hard as the more obviously self-interested insurance companies.

People claim that our capitalist system "produces" innovation and it does seem that many of the more socialist countries are less inclined to develop new drugs and devices. On the other hand, we're consistently generations behind in surgical procedures and preventive therapies and our physicians often go to Europe, Japan, India, and Singapore to learn the newest surgical tactics.

Being the traditional "ugly American," I have absolutely no personal experience anywhere but here and Canada. So I'm only getting what little I know from the media and second-hand reports and experiences. Still, it seems to me that trying to work both sides of the capitalist-socialist boarder has created an expensive, sluggish, marketing-based system that works pretty poorly for the majority of citizens. The link between capitalism and technical advances doesn't seem particularly tight.

A friend and I, about 6 years ago, came up with an invention for which he inisisted on applying for a patent. I was more convinced that we should build a product, first, and worry about the legal crap later. He went ahead, with his money, and dumped a load of cash into a New York patent law firm. The patent is still in the system, but another company is making exactly our product and selling it. They aren't making much money from it, as I suspected would be the case for our production. The whole process really made me thing about how I feel about invention, innovation, and business, though.

I've had about two dozen experiences with the patent process, in and because of my career. I invented a mobile electronic scale in the 1970's. I applied for a patent with that product, about six months after a company a friend owned went into production with the product. I did not follow up on the patent and the concept, as far as I know, is public domain now. It's also obsolete and went that way about 2 years after it went into use. I made some money. My friend got his company off of the ground with the product. I learned a lot about how corporations breech individuals' patent rights. I ended up in another industry and decided to keep my weight measurement ideas to myself. I wrote many of two companies' patent applications for a decade. I worked with patent lawyers and still communicate with one them, as a friend. The more I know, the less I want to participate in that system.

An engineer who worked for me in the 1980s had a common experience in lighting design in his own business. A Chinese company started copying his product designs and he ended up getting a consultant's fee for helping them steal his design. The feel-good stories and movies about inventors ending up rich after fighting off the corporations are mostly myth or massive good luck. My friend still creates some pretty amazing lighting controllers, but he submerges them in artwork and his customers could care less how he does what he does, so he's not as likely to get ripped off. The more he learned, the less he wanted to contribute to the corporate intellectual property theft system.

Just looking at my own experience, I don't think everyone invents and creates to get rich. I do think people might stop being publically inventive to avoid being robbed by corporations. I know people who create some incredible things for their homes and hobbies who will die with those secrets rather than lose them to some corporate scumbags. The Open Source computer world is a terrific example of that "look what I did" attitude and its disconnect from the profit motive. Moore's Law appears to be in stall-mode for the last near-decade. I wonder if the legal system has an effect on that?

Energy is an area where practically anyone in any area of technology and science could find the critical breakthrough that would save us all. Energy is probably the most tied-up-in-corporate-shell-games areas of invention law. Oil companies control Washington DC. They have the lawmakers, the lawyers, and paid technology thieves lurking around every corner looking to snag every invention that relates to their profits. Anyone foolish enough to announce "I've found the solution" to any energy problem is going to be sucked into a blackhole of corporate lawyers. Anyone smart enough to find the solution is probably going to be too smart to talk about it.

The founders of this country knew that the future belongs to invention and innovation. They created a patent office in 1790, George Washington signed the amendment. The office called itself "Commissioners for the Promotion of Useful Arts" or the "Board of Arts." Today, we talk about "intellectual property" and the associated rights, but that concept ought to be renamed "property of the powerful." Instead of protecting the rights of inventors, current law protects the corporate owners of concepts that were invented decades earlier. While stifling invention, our "property of the powerful" laws make sure publishing companies retain profits from art that was created decades ago, while ensuring that current artists are screwed multiple ways before their first fan experiences the art. The "property of the powerul" laws give priority to those with the most lawyers over those with the clearest claim to invention. The overall effect is to encourage inventors to stay out of the system, to keep their ideas to themselves.

Product design, today, closely reflects this constraining of mass participation in invention. Medical devices, for example, move in baby steps. New ideas find their way into products so rarely that you'd think human creativity had dried up. A friend described aeronautical engineering as "sued out," meaning that every new idea got so entangled into patent lawsuits that the industy has agreed not to do anything new. For an industry that is so dependent on the price of oil, you'd think that agreement would be the kiss of death. It probably will be. Auto manufacturers seem to have made a similar agreement. The movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" depicts an auto industry that is so connected to oil interests that the industry sabatoged its own best ideas to keep the oil companies happy. Today, every car company is offering exactly the same solutions to alternative energy and high efficiency vehicles. That ought to be proof that invention is not a significant part of those company's culture.

How do we fix this? We probably won't. If "necessity is the mother of invention," we're most likely going to be forced to wait for necessity. As it has taken a world-wide depression to force finance to mildly reform its corrupt practices, it will probably take a world-wide energy crisis to force industry to consider reforming creative property rights. Until then, we can enjoy the incremental, baby-stepping stutter-step of progress that we've learned to expect from our existing system.