“Democrats have done nothing for . . . “

A friend recently claimed that “Democrats have done nothing for young people” and I began to question that person’s math skills. “Nothing” means zero, nada, no benefit whatsoever. It pains me to know that someone who should know better is as clueless about the meaning of zero as 3rd Century Mesopotamians. The Biden White House has published a web page explaining all of the things they have done for young people: “Fact Sheet: President Biden and Vice President Harris Are Delivering For Young Americans.” The list is impressive, but the media (right and left) also appears to be unable to decipher numbers. I’m not going to repeat that data and I’m going to take the wild chance that my readers are curious enough to follow the damn link, but “$117 billion in targeted relief for 3.4 million student loan borrowers, including borrowers with total and permanent disabilities, those cheated by their colleges, those in public service, and more” is a LOT more than “nothing.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of nonsense. A union welder acquaintance recent claimed “Democrats have done nothing for working people.” To be clear, this man was solely concerned that pipelines wouldn’t be built and he wouldn’t be raking in the usual “$36 and $52 an hour” building those infamous pollution systems. However, there are plenty of jobs for welders in infrastructure work and that doesn’t require decimating the nation’s fresh water supplies or contributing to the inhospitality of the planet to current lifeforms. Biden’s “Build Back Framework” could “add an average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.”

If not mismanaging the pandemic so badly that US cities were stacking up bodies in refrigerated trailers isn’t doing something for young and old, skilled and unskilled labor, and all of the rest of us, we’re in a pretty weird state of decline. This kind of faulty and deceptive hyperbola is not adding value to the national dialog. If supposedly educated people are unclear on what “nothing means,” we’re in big trouble; and, of course, we’re in big trouble. 

Lastly, but most importantly, the current Democratic Party offers something no other entity in the country can provide: a slight chance that the "great experiment" that the United States of America represents might, somehow, become a democracy.  There are no Republicans in office in the federal government who represent any of the ideals of democracy. From the despicable oligarchs hiding in the Federalist Society to the obvious spokesperson for Republicans, Donald Trump, and the deplorable rabble of voters and seditionists, Republicans are the worst of this nation's terrible worst and they represent the nation's decent into fascism and chaos. I challenge you to name a single Republican currently in office who is not in favor of demolishing the democratic structure of this country. There are no counterparts in the Republican Party for Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, and at least 15 other progressive and liberal Senators who are fighting for all of us, apparently, without much appreciation. In the US House of Representatives, there are a few dozen progressive and liberal Democratic members, apparently, going equally unappreciated. Again, there are no Republican comparables with any sort of claim to democratic values. The choice has not been this clear since the 1860s, you are either working to elect the most democratic Democrats or you are voting fascist. If that isn't "something," fuck you. 

What to Do, Where to Live?

In 1971, around the time my daughter Holly was born, I was working in Hereford, Texas for a small company mismanaged by a total nitwit as a division of a larger company that was headed for corporate oblivion. However, the upside was that I worked for one of the best supervisors would ever experience, although it was an industry for which I had absolutely no interest at all, and all of that was at the very beginning of what would become my career. One of the people I worked closely with was a WWII-generation machinist born and raised in west Texas, but who had spent a bit of his life sampling other parts of the country; especially during WWII. His name was Carl [forgot his last name] and he was a source of a lot of wisdom at a time when that was a rare commodity in my life. Late in my time in that job, he and I were talking about the difficulty of figuring out life’s big questions: like where do I want to live and what should I be doing to make a living? His simple-sounding advice was “If you want to live a happy life, figure out where you want to live and live there. Figure out what you want to do and do that.”

It might sound easy and it was for Carl. He’d grown up in a small farmhouse between Hereford and Amarillo in the early 20th Century. His brothers and he rode Indian motorcycles between the two towns when there were no roads, paved or otherwise. They fixed what they rode and anything else that needed fixing. Carl told me that when he was a kid there were no flies or many other flying insects in West Texas and they would hang a butchered steer from their windmill and carve off what they needed, leaving the sun to “cure” the open wound till the next time they needed some beef. When the WWII draft came along, Carl was told to apply his mechanical skills to the military-industrial complex and he moved to San Diego to do just that. He built machine and airplane parts for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation and when the war ended, he modified his Ford to be able to run on naphtha, since gas was in short supply and rationed, filled up the tank and put a 55 gallon barrel of the stuff in his trunk, and drove back to Texas. He got married, worked at a few different manufacturing companies in the area, and ended up in the ag industry company where I worked for a few years before he retired. That was what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

For most of us, those two questions are not so simple, but it’s mostly because we overcomplicate our expectations. We’re either looking for the impossibly perfect place or a totally-fulfilling forever job, neither of which is likely to ever occur. A good rule for most everything is “pretty good is good enough.” Perfect, on the other hand, is highly unlikely.

Carl was pretty clear in his instructions, though. The first step is “where.” Finding a great job in a rotten place will never be satisfying. In fact, a mediocre job in a great place (assuming it pays enough to enjoy the place) isn’t a terrible situation. Most of us have some idea about what kind of place we’d like to live. Some of us know exactly where we’d like to live because we’ve spent our lives in that place, our friends and family are there, and we are comfortable with the climate, culture, and opportunities. Some folks are so set on the place that they are willing to sacrifice everything else about their lives to live there. No matter how you picked the place, what to do comes next. If you never settle on a place, I think the odds are good that you’ll never be happy with what you’re doing with your life.

One thing many of us neglect or outright screw-up in our early lives is not taking some kind of career planning seriously early enough. All of the smart people I have ever known came up with career goals fairly early in life, at least by high school, and they let those goals drive their first 4-10 years of adulthood. They usually changed those targets several times over their lives, but when they did they set new goals and aimed for them. Some of us take half of our lives to figure that out, some never figure it out and just wander through their lives wondering “why nothing wonderful ever happens to me?” The only thing that is likely to ever happen to you is life, which will happen whether you make plans or don’t but making the attempt to obtain some kind of control and to maintain self-direction is pretty much the same as driving a car vs letting go of the wheel on a mountain road to see what will happen. You might get lucky, but you probably won’t.

You can catch up, if you don’t get started sensibly, but it’s a lot harder. Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's son, is my overwhelming favorite role model for late starters. He started off his adult life as a hippy commune holdout, after being diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and having been committed to Vancouver mental hospital for a time. After providing on his own cure (for what he later decided was bipolar disorder), he graduated from Harvard Medical School at 32 years old and started his pediatric Internship and Residency. That was a lot of territory to cover after being a non-starter in his prime learning years. Your mileage will most definitely vary from Mark Vonnegut’s. Still, my own experience might demonstrate that if you keep at it you might end up doing work you care about with people you love and respect, even if the business is run by self-destructive, selfish and narcissistic idiots.

The trick, as I see it, is to get started on deciding where you want to live, including the kind of home/apartment/tent/cabin it will be. That might include who you want to live with, but that is not critical. While you’re sorting that out, find some kind of mission for yourself because if you don’t someone will find one for you and you probably won’t like it.

#148 Coming to America (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

A lot of young, smart, hip, politically-alert United States citizens are thinking about immigration.  Some are considering the effects of uncontrolled, irrational over-population of an already resource-crowded nation, some are trying to find a sane political system, some are convinced that the United States is about to go on a fascist witch-hunt and don't want to be "the last Jew looking for transportation out of Germany."  Maybe more than any time since the Civil War, there are more good reasons to leave the United States than there are to stay.  These are terrifying times and most of the terrorist forces are internal.  The possibility of Orwell's 1984 becoming a reality have never been more likely. Vancouver is being overrun by immigrants from the United States and housing prices are reflecting the cash those immigrants are moving from this country to Canada.

The problem with Americans immigrating outward is that most of the countries we'd consider immigrating to don't want us.  Our limited educations have limited our options.  We only speak pidgin English with a variety of accents, only a few of which are intelligible to folks outside of our regional neighborhoods. Rarely does a US citizen offer the receiving country the advantage of competency in the local language.  Many of us are not particularly talented, technically, socially, or politically.  Our education system has short-circuited our natural abilities to learn complicated disciplines and techniques, which suggests to the immigrating country that we may be a liability on their carefully designed economic systems.  So, those countries design restrictive immigration policies that require huge non-interest-bearing bonds (the most desirable European destinations ask for nearly a million dollars in non-interest-bearing bonds), long periods of unemployment designed to prove self-sufficiency, and have installed a huge variety of minor violations that will result in instant deportation (and loss of those security bonds).. 

The simple fact is, even for the best of our best, as immigrants United States citizens are not particularly welcome anywhere outside of our own boarders.  An even more discouraging fact is that most nations would rather suffer Islamic fundamentalist immigrants with no skills of any sort, no interest in fitting into the local culture, and a tendency toward violence at the hint of any perceived slight toward their native superstitions.

On the other hand, our government is particularly interested in maintaining low labor costs.  You can jabber about cynical humanitarian reasons for maintaining high immigration rates until you are almost liberal, but we all know our government represents our ruling class.  That group of anti-patriots doesn't want to pay a living wage for the services they fancy.  Have you noticed how many wannabe high government officials have lost their jobs when someone found that they had hired undocumented house-help?  This isn't a trend, it's the way of our world.  Actually, it's their world; the rest of us just rent a space in an unwanted corner.

The cool thing, for the low-brow ruling crud, about wanton immigration is that they don't have to pay for . . . anything.  They can de-fund education, because there is no shortage of desperate mid-tech refugees from totalitarian third world nations who will self-educate themselves, to the point necessary to fill the shrinking technical requirements of US jobs. Instead of paying a living wage to current citizens, the management class can pay a subsistence wage to a desperate immigrant.  Better yet, they can pay a fraction of a living wave to an illegal immigrant under threat of deportation if the employee complains. 

I want be perfectly clear about this.  It is not rational to consider illegal immigrants as criminals.  In a moral society, it is irrational to criminalize an effort to improve your life, to attempt to ensure a better life for your children, to leave a corrupt political system to immigrate to a more democratic place.  We can only call this “illegal immigration” because it violates our laws, not because it violates natural law.  The most damning thing we can say to the immigrant is, "Sorry, you'll have to go back home, fill out the correct paperwork , meet the requirements of this country for immigration, and please try again.  Thanks for taking an interest in the United States.  Have a nice trip back to where you came from."

The real criminals, the only immigration criminals, are the United States citizens who hire these immigrants in a blatant, intentional, and treasonous effort to violate the laws of this country.  This specially protected group of traitors and terrorists can wipe out any services the government provides to anyone but them.  They'll convince the uneducated masses that these basic services are "welfare" and convince the drooling middle class that anyone accepting welfare from the state (even if that "welfare" was actually an insurance program paid for by that same group of people) is un-American.  Soon, the only job left for the government will be to suppress populist political movements, to invade foreign countries to obtain natural resources for corporations and their executives, and to manage the distribution of national wealth and resources to the ruling class.  Which, if you honestly analyze the former Soviet Union or the current communist Chinese state, is exactly the practical result of communism.  This class of criminals are our ruling elites; best represented by the current President and his pack of inbred hillbillies.

For the rest of us, the question of immigration should be very simple.  Immigration drives down wages, reduces the opportunities for our children, overpopulates our cities and nation, strains the capacity of social systems, damages democracy by diluting the acumen of the electorate, and increases the power of the elite.

While monkey-boy Bush chatters about "jobs that Americans won't do," it's pretty obvious that he won't work for a pittance.  Our elitist spoiled rich kid President seems to think that his government income barely pays for part-time employment, based on the dozens of extended vacations he takes every year.  The number of jobs that Americans won't do is rapidly on the rise, because jobs that used to be middle class occupations are quickly being shipped to China and India or handed over to third world immigrants at minimum pay or less.  We "won't do" those jobs because they don't pay a living wage.  Americans seem to be doing multiple jobs a lot more often these days. 

Even more obvious, Cheney, the hand that turns the hurdy-gurdy crank for incurious George's dance, won't even work for the hundreds of thousands in salary and perks the Vice President receives.  Cheney still has his fingers and wallet stuck in Halliburton and other corporate and political income sources.  He practically laughed at the suggestion that part of volunteering for public service meant that you have to stop draining the public cash register until your stint of "service" was finished.  Cheney has always had and eaten his cake, from years of employment in corrupt political regimes from Nixon to the Bush family.  If he didn't have to work for only a few hundred thousand in 1972, why should he suffer now?

The rest of us do the suffering for him.  Under the guise of keeping waves "reasonable," Cheney and Bush and the Republican part drag wages below the poverty line and suppress both the economy and our political system.  Hard times are a conservative's wet dream.  When people are scratching for survival and worrying about hanging on to their marginal jobs, they don't worry about fine points like justice, racial equality, the social net, public education, or their children's future. 

When times are bad enough, humans commonly bash in the heads of their youngest children to conserve resources for adults and older, more independent and productive children.  Conservatives seem to put a real premium on the ability to rampantly use capital punishment as long as the criminals are poor people.  Maybe that's the conservative ideal.  Actions always speak louder than words.

January 2006

#50 The Quality of Dialog (2001)

All Rights Reserved © 2001 Thomas W. Day

It's been an amazing century, already, hasn't it?  We start the century off with a President who was elected by a partisan Supreme Court, protected by a Florida state government that made 1950's Chicago politics look reasonable and fair.  The winner was the less popular candidate, among the minority of citizens who actually cared enough to vote .  In fact, most observers and non-whacko right wingers will even admit that it's incredibly unlikely that Bush even got the majority vote of Florida citizens.  But he's the first President of the 21st Century.  I hope the new millennium doesn't go downhill from here.

It's possible, maybe even likely, that the country will survive all this anti-democratic activity with some remnants of democracy left intact.  It's possible that we'll survive another Republican administration with a functional economy, although it would be the first time in a dozen or so generations .  What's not possible is that the next four years will be illuminated by dialog that should be recorded for posterity.

It's pretty obvious that George "Dubbya" Bush is a moron.  He quacks like a moron, he acts like a moron, and he represents all of the things that the parents of morons have traditionally tried to hide from a critical society.  He doesn't even have the good sense to hide his hillbilly Tex-Mex accent in public, although he gave it a fair shot in his acceptance speech.  Worst of all, Bush appears to be proud of the fact that he can't spell, enunciate, or link verbs to nouns.  If his election proves anything it's that America has worked hard to overcome a slight intolerance for fools until, now, fools can walk the halls of power in Washington D.C., unashamed and unafraid.  As long as they're accompanied by a few hundred Secret Service agents.  I guess that's some sort of progress.

What was, unfortunately, demonstrated to the world and the twelve remaining literate citizens of this really large country (great being as great does and the U.S. having fallen a long ways from doing great things) is that the quality of dialog has been universally reduced to the sort of language that talk show hosts have made popular.  Based on the questions asked, and answers given, during the Supreme Court's review of the Florida recount question, Jerry Springer might have been comfortable in a justice's robe.  To someone who grew up reading the incredible collection of great American documents issued by our highest court, the current Supreme Court is an embarrassment; but a predictable embarrassment. 

Not wanting to leave those boys-and-girls-in-black isolated with their words of inconsistency and incompetence, the rest of our government's squirrels and random nut gatherers joined in.  One after another, Senators and Representatives gave up their sound bites to the media. 

Deprived of even a competent phrase to quote, the news goons fell all over itself proclaiming Gore's concession speech to be "statesmanlike," whatever that word has come to mean.  Maybe it's a relative thing.  Compared to Bush's victory gibberish Gore did sound reasonably literate and mildly insightful, but so do those fuzzy dolls that squawk "you suck" on impact.  Gore did a fine job, presenting the lightweight drivel he'd  been handed, but he wasn't any more inspiring at the end than he was in the beginning.  Which must be why we elected a guy who would be the last kid to be picked on a grade school playground, for any kind of game.

The media, not having the common sense or grammatical standards to pick and choose the good from the bad, simply poured the words from their Washington sources into our ears.  The talking heads didn't present any great dialog among themselves, either.  I've seen better commentary during sporting events than we were offered in explanation for the most complex and, possibly, important political event in modern American history.  Personally, I feel like an outhouse at a Georgia barbeque. If any more aural crap is spewed in my direction, my mental plumbing is going to back up.

We voters separated the chaff from the wheat, during the primaries and sent anyone who might be able to carry on a sentient conversation back to academia.  Early on, at least two candidates tried to elevate the discussion in the two political parties that appear to matter.  If you wanted inspiration, Bill Bradley could have provided that at a level not seen at the national level since Kennedy.  If you wanted straight talk about complicated political issues, McCain appeared to be ready to accept that job. (Although he appears to have recanted his reformer attitudes, since Republicans are notoriously unkind to any sort of "reform" that doesn't result in tax reductions for the rich.)  And, depending on your political persuasion, there were several candidates who communicated competently right up until they ran out of money and patience with an ignorance-loving voting public.

It's been said that a democracy can not survive when a critical mass of citizenry is exceeded. They theory claims that, as the population increases, the cultural intelligence decreases until the concepts of a participatory government are overwhelmed by the weight of the common denominator.  This election may have demonstrated that principle.  If you gather enough people together and allow  them to pick the most acceptable person to represent that oversized group, there are two ways for the group to go: they can pick the smartest person in the group or the dumbest.  Apparently, we've made our decision. 

I suppose the connection between individual financial stability, the national economy, and the office of the President is too vague for most voters.  That relationship is complicated by evidence that a fool will bomb out at chess or Trivial Pursuit, but that same idiot can survive national politics for a half-century.  We've made a national pastime out of distrusting intellectuals and all things academic.  In this election, that habit has been taken to an extreme.  Still, I doubt that there is a person in the country who would choose either Bush or Gore as a personal stand-in on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"  I wonder why it's so difficult to understand that the voting game might turn out to be "Who Wants to Experience another Great Depression?"

January 2001

#36 Campaign 2000

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

As I write this, on March 7 just after Doomsday Tuesday, it appears that we're in for another Tweedly Dee vs. Tweedly Dum presidential election. I'd be willing to write Bill Bradley or John McCain's tossing-in-the-towel speeches for them.

It would go something like this:

"You gutless wimps. You call yourselves Americans, but you have absolutely nothing in common with real Americans, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or, even, John Kennedy. You're afraid of your own shadows. You're afraid of anything that isn't spoon fed to you by the grumpy old men who hold the power in this nation. Even American kids are freakin' wimps. All it would take to invade this puke of a country would be for someone to yell "boo" really loud and a third of you would dive under your beds for protection. The other sixty-some-percent could care less what the hell happens as long as your favorite television shows don't get cancelled.

"It's one thing that those pitiful old men want to hang on to the power they've had for so long. That's understandable, if a good bit disgusting. It's totally another that the average, working stiff is happy to give those inbred losers control over a nation that could be democratic, if it wanted to be.

"So, now you get to choose between Gore and Bush. Gore, a political hack who is the son of a political hack. A politician who lost the credibility war with Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush, the son of a pitifully lame ex-president, a spoiled rich kid of a politician who's owned by so many special interests that his butt is tattooed like one of those Beef Council diagrams of a fattened steer.

"The upside is, it doesn't matter who wins. They're one and the same. Or maybe that was what you wimps wanted, all along."

If I could choreograph this speech, I'd have my guy give the nation (especially the media) a single digit salute and call it a night.

There's so much going on in a major election that I don't understand. For instance, I'll never understand how the Republican Establishment gets a single vote from people who work for a living. I know, Republicans claim to be "pro-business," but they're really just pro-rich people. The closest the Republican Party ever comes to associating itself with the function of business is when executives give away their stock holder's money to promote special tax breaks for executives.

The list of "business interests" that Republicans have hustled on the rest of us is pretty amazing: the military/industrial complex, the savings and loan deregulation disaster, the sixty zillion tax loopholes that encourage international corporations to save money by moving jobs out of this country, a gigantic income tax break for the top tax bracket. And so on.

Sure, they throw the "pro-life" bone to the religious right, but they don't really mean it. After all, if the poor couldn't get abortions the welfare rolls would be increasing faster than they are now and that would, eventually, force the rich to pay higher taxes to support those not-being-born-and-not-wanted-by-anybody kids. Trust me, that's not gonna happen. Rich folks look out for their own interests like scorpions hunting for a warm boot on a cold night.

None of that lets the Democrats off of the hook, either. Different money interests for different folks. Without the support of the 80 million members of government employee unions, Gore wouldn't get noticed at a high school dance (until he started waving money). This crowd of union bozos have discovered that it is possible to vote yourself rich. They are the only thing separating Gore from Bush. Gore wants to keep spending tax money to support the unemployable in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed and Bush is willing to trash the country's economy by letting the ruling class make one last dash to the feeding trough. Both candidates represent the ruling class interests from around the world. Gore just gets some of his money from the government employed ruling class while Bush gets a much bigger chunk from the sort of con artist who really appreciates getting to take a poke at the national treasury.

Like the usual 70% who will stay away from this election, it just doesn't matter to me which of these morons wins in November. Kill me slow or kill me quick, I'm still dead.

It will never happen, because of the gutless character of what passes for today's "Americans," but now is the time for the NOTA movement. None of the above. Here's my version of this ballot entry:

The parties can submit their usual human refuse, for the election. But as part of getting to take a roll with these dice, they put up a bond, equal to the campaign funds, for that candidate. No soggy money. No non-candidate advertisements allowed. You're either part of a campaign or you're a spectator. If the voters "elect" NOTA for a particular office, the bond money goes to fund a second election.

None of the clowns from the first campaign can run again. The second campaign works just like the first one. Another bond gets funded for the next batch of mindless morons. And so it would go.

That's actually my second option. My first choice would be, if NOTA wins, NOTA serves. The office goes vacant for the term of the position. At the end of the term, if it is not obvious that we need someone to do that job, the office is abandoned. I figure in twenty years, there wouldn't be an elected government office in the nation.

March 2000

#21 There but for the lack of courage . . . (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

Today, right here in St. Paul, Minnesota, the local newspapers spewed ". . .the woman, married to a doctor, with two children, is Kathleen Ann Soliah, FBI officials told WCCO-Radio. Her neighbors know her as Sara Jane Olson . . ." The lady was stalked by the nation's internal spooks and arrested, this week, for kidnapping (Patty Hearst) and bank robbery that she supposedly committed twenty five years ago.

Pretty exciting stuff, and a lot less dangerous than chasing down criminals who carry guns or have political connections. Once the FBI finds the scent of a safe target, they almost never give up, unless the target becomes mildly dangerous. In the historic tradition of their cross-dressing founder, the FBI is patting itself on the back for spending a few million of the taxpayers' dollars searching for Ms. Olson-possibly-Soliah for these last twenty-five years. They even think there's some kind of high moral victory in wrenching this woman from her home, husband, and two children.

In the exciting and well-documented (lots of TV) takedown, they used enough manpower and equipment to disable a well armed militia. Of course, they'd never consider actually taking on a militia because, as they say in the Bureau, "those guys have guns."

Here's my real point, though. Even if Olson-possibly-Soliah had committed the crimes for which she's accused, I wouldn't be happy about her arrest. The fact that this effort has gone on this long irritates too many old wounds and revives evil memories of my country's poorest hours.

The warped lenses of the 90's don't give a decent perspective of the actions of the 60's. Our government was hell-bent on destroying a tiny agrarian country, using the excuse that it was "stopping the communist dominos from falling." What was really happening was a lot of cash was transferred, mostly from middle class taxpayers to the filthy rich (and generally filthy). Low-tech industrial executives, military executives, and a few general purpose criminals (like the CIA creeps who imported tons of high powered drugs into this and other countries to finance their murderous little schemes) promoted this dirty little war for their own fun and profit. While this scheme produced nearly two decades of social instability and recession, it made some miserable examples of our ruling class very, very rich and powerful. Our parents, the adults of the time, had their heads buried so far into the sand that you need to know where to dig to find tail-feathers.

During the war years, a lot of kids actually exercised their consciences and did whatever they thought was necessary to stop the war. Some went to jail, willingly, for their beliefs. When they did, the miserable scum who managed the government's "justice system" intentionally tossed them into cells with the most vicious criminals available, not wanting to pass up any opportunity to commit atrocities. A lot more kids (and a very few adults) staged non-violent protests where they were sometimes mercilessly beaten and, then, jailed by the kind of cops that Los Angeles still employs wherever non-whites happen to live. The 1968 Chicago Police Riots (during the Democratic convention) and the Ohio State Student Massacre were fine examples of our police state employees in action. A lot more of us, probably the majority under twenty-five, took every opportunity to disagree with our elders' version of "patriotism" whenever the Vietnam subject came up. Sometimes even stating opposition provided the nutcases with an excuse to commit violence. During this cultural mayhem, the prevailing pro-government population's primary argument was "love it or leave it." There wasn't a lot of middle-ground in those days.

On the fringes of the polarization, a fair number of kids believed that they could change the system by joining it. A lot of those types were immediately sent to the battlefields where their ethics got them killed or maimed (the fatal shots could have been fired from either side). A smaller group of kids believed that "The System," our society, was so corrupt that it had to be destroyed and rebuilt. Soliah was probably one of those kids. It wasn't hard to make a good argument for that proposition, especially after Chicago and Ohio.

Now, you'd think, twenty-five years after history had told the story of our sordid Vietnam-ish escapade, someone would have learned something ethical from history. It appears to be un-bloody likely. Not in this lifetime. The government is still after vengeance on those who practiced what it preached.

I'm not making excuses for an accused kidnapper/bank robber (although it's damn hard to feel sorry for banks and their investors these days or those days). But a country that slithered into a vicious, amoral war like the one we called the Vietnam War has damn little grounds for posturing righteousness.

To make a current reference, we have dramatically greater justification for participating in our current involvement in Yugoslavia's dirty little war. At least a reasonable number of the surrounding countries and the United Nations are on our side. Even with that, the right wing Republican wackos, currently squatting in the House of Misrepresentation, are chanting the exact same anti-war verses and melodies used by the radical left twenty five years ago. It's "dé·jà vu, all over again." If Kosovo is an immoral, no-win situation, Vietnam was totally unjustifiable.

The right-wingers still pretend that the dirty little war from which a Republican president bailed out (chanting "peace with honor" while we abandoned all pretense of an ordered retreat and ran like confused rabbits) was "a different kind of situation." It was, too. The bad guys were our allies during the last real world war and only became our enemies after the French got their butts kicked in a failed attempt to colonize Vietnam. We actually had to fake an "attack" in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify our military presence in Vietnam.

Whatever. It was as righteous as any excuse generated by morally bankrupt corporations living on government handouts who needed a justification to be able to sell machines of war at a dozen times the going rate to a government that couldn't spell "right" if they knew which hand it was.

Back to the present. (I'm easily distracted today.) Olson's neighbors expressed amazement that she was "the perfect soccer mom" all the years they have known her. I'm not amazed, not even a little bit. Today is completely out of context with the mood of the Sixties. Olson was not much different than at least half of her peers, in those days. Her friends were more radical. She made choices that were more unforgivable, by today's (and yesterday's) standards.

Somebody once said, "choose your enemies well, for you will become them." The Sixties radical left missed that point. Worse yet, Pogo's creator wrote "we have met the enemy and he is us." Soliah and her friends became the people they hated. They looked at the weapons our government uses to enforce "order" and preserve the social status of the ruling class and they saw something that wasn't there; an alternative, positive use for violence. It was a mistake that could have been made by a lot more of us in those times.

In context, in those awful days, most of us stood our middle ground out of cowardice. It's not that we didn't burn draft cards, pour blood on military records, or march the streets in protest out of conscience or a belief in the goodness of our country. We didn't go to those places out of cowardice. Lots of us pretended to believe that our government knew something we didn't. We skated by on the mistaken prayer that Uncle Sam knew best. We pretended that "the best and the brightest" directing the activities of the federal government weren't the lazy, brain-dead, arrogant sort of public servants that we ran into every time we had any dealings with the government. Today, a remains of that hope is the nearly universal American belief that all politicians are crooks and all government employees are lazy incompetents. We may never again make the mistake that our government knows what it's doing, even when it does.

The people most responsible for one of the United States' darkest hours made out like bandits. Most of the presidents, and their pet fools, literally got away with genocide, disguised as a "war of containment." Eisenhower, who got the country into the mess, warned the country that the "military-industrial complex" (his term, I believe) would destroy the country if they weren't kept under lock and key. Kennedy, who may have been deciding to get the country out of Vietnam while the getting was possible, paid the price for those who came before and after him. Johnson escaped with nothing more than the reputation of a failed presidency. Nixon received an official pardon and within a few years the goofier members of the U.S. media forgot his screw-ups so completely that they called him a "statesman" in the last years of his life. The various criminals who headed the corporations that profited from the mass murder of rice farmers and peasants were all given golden parachutes and retired to wherever super-rich, amoral monsters hang out.

I knew a lot of young men who went, unwillingly, into the military because they didn't have whatever it took to face down the well armed power of their government. Some of those men, now, suffer sleepless nights reliving the things their government made them do to a people whose major crime was wanting to manage their own destiny. Some of those men pretend what they did was heroic, so they won't have to examine their failure to take the stand they knew was right. Some died. As a nation, we've allowed most of those men to live with their decision as long as they suck it up and keep their doubts to themselves. Even the few who were symbolically prosecuted for wartime atrocities have been, mostly, forgiven.

Vietnam, that vicious enemy of freedom and truth, is now, practically, a most favored nation. The same people who we tried to bomb into molten biological blobs are courting American business investment and cranking out athletic shoes and other junk by the boat load.

It looks like the people who violently protested our national violence are the only people who are unforgiven for their part in that disaster. Maybe it's time to consider closing the door on both sides who made errors in judgment in those dark times.

June 1999

June 1999 note: If you actually managed to read through all of these pages, you clearly need something (like a hobby) to occupy your mind. But thanks for slogging through my work. I truly do appreciate the compliment, however it was intended. This is the end of the original series of Rat's Eye articles. From here until I published the webpage, I simply thought a lot about what I'd expected this column to be and what it turned out to be. I had hoped to produce a written version of Dilbert, in the style of Dave Barry or someone equally clever. I've been told that it more resembled grumpy old man meets technology and doesn't like it much. I can live with that. From here out, the gloves are off and I'm gonna be me. Like my hero, H.L. Menken once wrote, "Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow." It's not like I have a choice. I have to write somewhere, so this is going to be one of the places. Take good care of your self, gentle reader. There aren't nearly enough of you in the world.

#10 Revenge and Clear Blue Skies (1998)

All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day

Here in Minnesota, a lot of math-impaired citizens are celebrating Hubbie Humphrey's kid's defeat of Big Tobacco in one of our state's famous kangaroo courts. The numbers, at least, are impressive. Right away, a whole bunch of lawyers are getting a half billion dollars for winning this suit. Twenty years from now, when a billion dollars will buy a nice, slightly used, Nissan minivan, the citizens of Minnesota will finally have had the pleasure of seeing all of their share of the tobacco settlement sucked up and blown away by the usual state government incompetence and corruption. Whatshisname Humphrey is crowing about how this is a "blow for public health" and waving that flag in his bid for the Minnesota governor job.

I want to make sure you aren't being fooled. It's my job.

First and most important, nobody really cares about public health. That's a universal, unless you count the people who are already sick and stuck in hospitals where they can't vote. Since they can't vote . . . draw your own conclusions. If the public health were an issue, these government goofs would have made smoking against the law as soon as doctors and scientists told them smoking caused fatal diseases, thirty years ago. Instead of using tobacco sales to produce billions in "sin tax" revenues, tobacco would have just joined the long list of illegal drugs and its users would have gone underground. That didn't, and hasn't, happened.

The tobacco lawsuits aren't about reimbursing the public savings accounts for the medical costs of tobacco addiction. If they were, state and federal governments would have saved all the tax money they were collecting on tobacco to use for those costs. As usual, for the last fifty years, the government has been throwing a party for itself with that extra "revenue" (a bureaucratic word for money stolen from the public).

The public bans of smoking aren't about protecting public health from second-hand smoke, either. The fumes spewed by internal combustion engines, factories, and the smoke blown by the media and government officials has be at least as toxic as tobacco smoke. Nobody's getting sued for that. Non-smokers have been choking on second-hand smoke for a couple hundred years and, until there was money to be made, no one gave a damn about our discomfort or asthma attacks.

Get it straight. The lawsuits are about money. The militant anti-smoking activity is about revenge.

For almost 100 years, smokers have had the upper hand. I can remember going to concerts where the smoke was so thick that the stage lighting only showed you where you would see the band, if the air wasn't opaque. Smokers have probably cured more alcoholics than AAA, keeping non-smokers from being able to taste beer or mixed drinks weaker than Everclear. Smokers have driven non-smokers from political conventions, bars, public bathrooms, business offices, and their own homes. When you think about it that way, it's possible that smoking created independent politics, bottled beer, pissing in the alley, home businesses, and outdoor recreation. Anyway, non-smokers have been looking for a way to get even since the invention of the match.

It isn't easy to find a way to get even with a smoker. They're obviously suicidal, so most threats are empty. They were clearly born in a smoke-filled, carpet-burnt barn, so threatening to tell their mothers isn't going to carry a lot of weight. Anyone who smiles and says "excuse me" after burning a hole in your knee with stray ashes won't be affected by Ms. Manners' quotes. If you aren't afraid of being beat up by a revolting smoker, you have to be afraid of their revolting mouth odor. Personally, I'd rather lose teeth than inhale smokers' breath. There's nothing left for non-smokers to do but to bring out the heavy weapons: lawyers.

In my young, impressionable, dumb as a rock days, I believed that lawyers were "a bad thing." Not anymore. A year ago, a real estate lawyer saved me from having to live under a rock. Without lawyers, comedy would be dead. The only way to hear a politically incorrect joke, these days, is to make the victim a lawyer. In the medical business, no one listen to patients unless they talk through a lawyer. But best of all, my wimpy asthmatic lungs are being saved from premature mechanical replacement by a pack of multi-millionaire Minnesota lawyers with nothing but good intentions and God on their side. I've changed, see? Now I'm old, impressionable, and dumb as a rock. Change is good.

A few short decades ago, Libertarians, Republicans, and teams of business interests and personal freedom fanatics would have shouted down the anti-tobacco campaign. Not anymore. It's payback time. Smokers are outnumbered, almost 5 to 1, and non-smokers are taking back the air we breathe. We're saying, "To hell with your free choice. I want to go anywhere I want to go, without having to breathe burning tobacco. You are banished to the smoking section of the darkest alley in town." By the time this is over with, tobacco company execs will be moon shining Virginia hillbillies, hand-rolling cigarettes in back of tarpaper shacks. Smokers will have to find a way to spontaneously combust, seconds after stuffing a fag into their mouths, to keep from being arrested. Even then, the ashes will get a littering citation.

That's the way I see it. Change is good. Smoking is bad. It's a simple world. This is a "personal space issue" that has nothing to do with building a safer, kinder, gentler world. It's a good thing most lawyers are also fat people. Otherwise, I'd worry about being their next target. Ever sit next to a sweaty, fat guy on an airplane?

May 1998

Test Yourself

Here's a test worth taking. Political Compass. I found it oddly comforting to be left of Ralph Nader and more libertarian. I can't be embarrassed by the company I keep in this quadrant, either. After you take the test, I recommend you look at the analysis of other places and people. The chart that allows you to look at the politics of a variety of US states is particularly interesting.

The question of right and left has always seemed incomplete to me. The aspect of government that I oppose is authoritarian. The aspect of government that most wingnuts represent would have its sticky little hands and corrupt amorality placed right in the middle of all of our lives. The wingnuts would force their fake religion on everyone. Their phony brand of "liberty" would focus on corporate "freedom" to pollute our water, air, and food and to control any political discussion with floods of money. Whenever a corporation decided to send the nation into war, the wingnuts would do anything in their power to suppress dissent and discussion. Individual freedom would always be sacrificed for the corporate good. I don't care if the authority is the state or federal government or Walmart. Authority and money are moral standards for the pseudo-right and I have no interest in the world they would build.

Obviously, the authoritarian left has lots in common with their buddies on the right side of the vertical axis. I have never been able to tell the difference between Mao and Hitler or Nixon and Stalin or G.W. Bush and Lenin or Sarah Palin and Ayatollah Khomeini. They are all the same character.

Palin thinks Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, should be on a terrorist hit list. Disagree with the bimbo Führer and you're on an assassination list. Considering her idiotic interpretation of Christianity, Palin's resemblance to Ayatollah Khomeini and his hit on Rushdie is identical. I have no use for either of those authoritarian fools or the morons who chant "four legs are better than two" whenever their timid leaders raise the call.