LET'S MAKE HAPPY (& HAVE HEALTH CARE, TOO!)

Okay, I'm going out on a limb, here. My good liberal friends tell me you can't reason with people who treat facts like the plague, who rank our President alongside the anti-Christ. But. . .gosh darn it, somehow, I just feel a grudging respect for those brave souls who have planted their sabers for a principle: to stand as one against government-funded health care.

Yes, you heard me correctly. I believe the raging minions have a right to be heard. They're Americans, too, God bless 'em. Including the ones with guns strapped to their legs. Why, they don't mean any harm. They're just marching to a different drummer, that's all.

So, this goes out to you, all you townhall protesters—you ”teabaggers,” “Birthers,” and “Glenn Beckers,” whoever you are. Wherever you came from. Listen, I'm not half the man you are. If I were lying in bed in pain and somebody offered me free cancer treatments or an open-heart surgery, why I'd chuck my pride and take the charity so fast it'd make your head fly. That's how lily-livered I am!

But not you, not the Birthers and Beckers. You've taken a stand, by golly, even if it's to your own detriment. Don't we usually equate that with heroism? Most of you are just an illness away from utter ruin. Half the foreclosures are the result of sky-rocketing medical bills. Yet, you Patriots (even some who are on Medicare!) are willing to stand up and say, “No! I will not take one thin dime of your filthy government money! Not even to save my own children if they should fall ill!” Now, that, my friends, is bravery!

Show me one banker, one measly CEO, who would have done that during the bailout!

So, in the interest of fair play, in the spirit of Obama, who seems to want nothing more than for everyone to just make nice and try to get along (he did win the Nobel Prize, after all), I offer this modest compromise. Please, hear me out:

First. I agree with my friends on the right: no one should be forced to carry health insurance. I call this the “Survival of the Fittest” Option. If you get sick and die, well, that's the breaks. Like Grampa used to say: “Some days it's chicken, and some days it's feathers.”

Second. The Public Option should be available. After all, a clear majority supports it, don't they? Around 72%. Assuming we're still a democracy, assuming Congress and the President haven't been bought off by the insurance corporations, the majority should win, right? At least that's what I was taught in fifth grade Civics class. Well, we'll see.

Third. Now, get this: Those fine Americans who still believe in free and unfettered private enterprise will be allowed to sign a waiver, stating their intention to refuse all government assistance. That's right—with a stroke of the pen, you can kick those stinking government boys out of your lives forever!

And it will be business as usual for the health insurance companies! Their doors will remain open! You teabaggers, Beckers, and others, will be allowed to purchase all the insurance you can afford.

Now, let's be clear on this. Let's be fair. Signing this waiver would be a one-time option. You can't come back later and change your mind. Make no mistake—the Devil will tempt you. When you see all those crazed liberals getting free checkups and free colonoscopies, you may be tempted to back-slide on some of your hard-won principles. Don't succumb! Think how unfair that would be to the insurance companies for whom you fought the good fight—not just the CEO's struggling to maintain a minimum level of prosperity in these hard times, but--dear God!--think of your hard-working agent, the one who looked out for you through thick and thin, through all the price increases and rising deductibles; the times you may have been justly denied coverage; the good—dare I say it?--family friend, who sent you all those birthday and Christmas cards through the years. You owe him something.

(And, of course, by signing the waiver, you also agree that you will no longer require the services of public schools or libraries, you'll haul your own trash to the dump, and should any emergency calls issue from your home, they will not be answered by police or fire departments.)

There, you see? Everyone wins! I believe this plan is workable and fair to all parties concerned. A few may sicken and die, but at least, it will be their choice!

POLICE HIT STUDENTS WITH BATONS AND TEAR GAS ON PITTSBURGH CAMPUS

Yesterday numerous cops in heavy riot gear entered the University of Pittsburgh campus, after dark. RAW STORY, among others, has offered early reports on the heavy-handed dispersal of a peaceful protest at the university. What is clear from a host of video coverage is that the five-hundred students who were voicing their opposition, as well as passers-by and spectators, were dispersed by police in riot gear. Some were arrested, some tear gassed; and a few policemen pursued students into the foyers of their dorms.

The outdoor assembly was called to express solidarity with G-20 protesters in the city who were suffering rough treatment at the hands of police. Students reacted with disbelief to the police invasion, but did not panic, even while in a state of shock and dismay.

Accusations of anarchism were sometimes sent flying here and yonder, through the city of Pittsburgh and in mainstream media; but it is a stretch to call the G-20 protests themselves an example of anarchy. The massive looting of the US Treasury by engineered chaos of credit default swaps, overseen by the Federal Reserve, facilitated by lawmakers who abolished financial regulations, is most like anarchy; and the demonstrators who have had to wear protective clothing and helmets to lessen their chance of being seriously hurt by police, are not so much the anarchists. Besides, it is an ugly example of American journalism when pundits take the low road and describe these demonstrations in Pittsburgh as riots.

The police did proceed methodically on campus. Officers weren't out of control, for the most part; but to the astonishment of the students, the rough treatment, which resulted in bloodied heads and arrests, was completely uncalled for. The Pittsburgh Chief of Police issued a declaration that called the gathering an "unlawful assembly". Since when are peaceful demonstrations monitored by campus security overruled by city authorities?

But the atmosphere has changed during the past few years, over the rules regarding citizen rights to have peaceful demonstrations. So-called non-lethal riot projectiles, beanbags and rubber bullets are being used by cops; and hits to soft tissue, or the neck and head, sometimes result in death. It was recently revealed that the FBI wants to quadruple its electronic surveillance capacities; moreover, federalized police and a multitude of new police entities are infiltrating the most innocuous peace groups and fielding provocateurs to incite or even commit violent acts at demonstrations.

A fundamental danger to our liberties is growing in the enhanced police powers we are seeing; and these are especially visible in the increasingly harsh policing which arises more frequently, at a lower threshold of provocation. A more brutal array of crowd control weapons is also being readied to deal with unrest. The ear-splitting sonic weapon is already in use against crowds at the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh; meanwhile, some version of this device is being used by the Micheletti Junta in the Honduran capitol, targeting the Brazilian Embassy, where the ousted President Zelaya is staying under diplomatic protection, as the Golpistas with their armed goons are savaging the president's supporters on the other side of the gates.

It should be noted that right-wing "teabaggers" and the nitwits who travel (some with sidearms) to US Town Hall meetings on the insurance companies' dime--and others among them, who muscle their way into overcrowded venues and beat on the windows--miraculously don't get tear gassed or have police batons batter their skulls. You'll never see one of those ultra-conservatives taking a rubber bullet in the neck for the cause.

One of the Pittsburgh students is overheard asking a policeman about the rough stuff and the cop invasion of campus. Amid other public objections to the G-20's economic cabal, the bankers' bonanza, and the globalization agenda with its worst foot forward in Pittsburgh, students wanted to voice their objections, on their own campus, and let it be known that they didn't like the way police have been abusing demonstrators in the city. Well, on Friday night they had one hell of an object lesson, to the effect that if you protest against some things (and not others) the police in their heavy riot uniforms will give naysayers something to think about. A student is heard to ask why. He asks why and why again. But no answer was offered Friday night.

Οι Δικοι Μου Χενοι

The beautiful Haris Alexiou

WILDFIRES BURN THEIR WAY TOWARD THE CITY

Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

The scene is of wildfires burning at night, of smoke and flames on the outskirts of Athens, making a ring in the distance around the Acropolis. In an account by Guardian reporter, Helena Smith, there's a sense of the scale of destruction:

Environmentalists said that the blazes had caused "biblical damage" to an estimated 120,000 hectares of virgin fir and prime forest.

This is enough to awaken prophetic vision, or at least it should call to mind something of the Ancient Greeks' interpretation of "the cycle of history", at the very least. Climate change is making this part of the Mediterranean world drier; and there are periodical reports and suspicions that developers set some fires during this dry season, in the countryside and along the coasts, to make tracts of land available for more hotels and resorts.

The piecemeal burning of civilization is what we notice more and more on this side of the ocean: the undermining of civilized conduct, the ubiquitous propaganda that spreads paranoia and delusion, and the busy corporate takeover of government, and the normalizing of endless war. And each of these is like a shower of sparks and embers, its own hand of arson, of social damage and upheaval, which has set wildfires that spread across the land. We are engulfed gradually as the smaller and larger fires converge.

The fires are at the gates of the city. Governments that do the bidding of corporations have the arsonist's hand, helping along the inferno. Like those who sold junk mortgages on Wall Street, they are piling wealth into the hands of the few; and if disaster capitalism is not separated from the organs of government, and cannot be closely regulated, it will surely push this world backwards into slavery, where children are once more in the workhouse, forced to stand on treadles all day.

Bush and Cheney's torture chamber is finally being opened for public inspection. They took the United States to the late stage of empire, represented by sadism and circumvention of law, and corruption of office holders. The mistreatment of people held in custody is one measure by which a country is condemned as uncivilized.

CIA and military interrogators threatened prisoners with imminent death, and made horrors of drowning on waterboards; stripping men and boys and leaving them in freezing cold, beating them and threatening their mothers and children with harm. However, the new president is not sure we should dwell on the past.

There must be a line between advertising and indoctrination that has blurred. Corporations are now backing charter schools in the US, where they can control the curriculum. The civic institution of public school will be all that the poor have left; and rundown schools and rundown neighborhoods will go together. The corporate charter school idea uses gentrification by real estate development to push out the unsightly poor.

And it will be an uncivilized state of affairs; if fires such as these make their way to the city. It is also sad to say; but the very last thing this government will give up is its expeditionary army, and its fortified bases overseas, and its military adventures. And these things are unsustainable. They cannot or will not see that the tether will break; for those who rule us cannot imagine what peace is. Their civilization might outlast them; but they insist on their delusion of power, and govern according to that.

Members of the US Congress who have sold out to insurance companies have flung the most incredible fantasies into the public debate over health care. A bland paragraph in the bill that concerns having a doctor reimbursed for an elective discussion with families, about living wills and end-of-life decisions, is distorted into some template for euthanasia. It's hard to relate to this level of dishonesty.

In Canada, people cannot be denied medical help because they have "pre-existing conditions" and they use their health card in any part of the country without worrying about paying out of their own pocket. In Canada, the government can cover every individual, without exception, on 7 percent of GNP. In the USA, the HMO system eats up 9 percent GNP; and fifty million people are still uninsured. The delusion is rampant that the status quo system is not in the business of rationing care and denying certain medical procedures to those who have the insurance.

There is a difference between living in error and living in delusion. A person living in error can get new information, grab an olive branch if one is handy, and beat out a fire before it spreads; but a person in delusion is putting a match to a wildfire.

Homer is clear about the delicacy of Ate, goddess of delusion, when he says,

"her feet are delicate; for she steps not

on the ground, but walks upon the heads of men."

--The Symposium, Dialogues of Plato, (trans., R.E. Allen)

copeland morris THE RACHEL AND THE PEQUOD

For Ahab it counts. The monumental water conceals
Moby Dick, the tempo of nightfall, and the drowned.
Leave us to our melancholy as we sail onward.

We find the Pequod and we pursue it; and that speck
On the forecastle is him. The sea stabs at us; and a cry
Is heard, "Have you seen the white whale?" The others
Become men, our discovered country, as the Rachel leans
In their direction. We have also run hard on the whale,
Upon the plundered ocean. Ahab, help us.

Do not hurry us to the end of time, going to seed
In rooms full of rag dolls without our lost children,
Or escaped to some such tattooed island, weeping
Beside the stumps of trees in a burned orchard,
Unrecognizable. We are not unreasonable.
But it is not in Ahab's nature to help us.

How can we leave our lost children? You who rage,
You won't help us? You with your elbows on the maps?
Whereas we have only your Ishmael now, who alone
Survives; let his charmed life be enough.

Leave us to our melancholy as we sail onward.

Our seaworthy Rachel means what to us? She resembles
The good ship the Argonauts took up on their shoulders
When Jason reminded them that they must carry the mother,
She, who once carried them. A wave, an inscrutable sea,
Almost a dream, lays us out on dry land.

grayson harper CHENEY

Cheney comes on the talk shows
and talks about the good old days
when he and his buds were the big
kahunas who ran the show
and told everyone to kiss their ass.
Sometimes they'd drop
firecrackers in a cocktail glass

and watch the wait staff lose their wits.
And they were always hiding the gardener's tools;
they'd make him climb the roof
to retrieve a shovel or a rake.
The maid opened her thermos one morning
and found a snake.

Warm nights
they threw off their clothes
and ran naked through the sprinklers.
George pounced on a frog
as it hopped through the grass.
Cheney pinned it to a wall and called it fate.
They sat around throwing darts
while it twitched and scraped.

Now and then a cat would appear
in the library or the Lincoln bedroom.
Someone—he can't remember who—
tied an orange tabby to a curtain rod
then poured water down its throat
just to see what it would do.

They dumped a keg of gin in the goldfish pond one time.
They blindfolded a goose, then hung it from a clothesline.

Cheney says they had a thing for dogs.
Someone would bring them over in a van
and drop them off at night,
dogs of every shape and color:
poodles, retrievers, borzois, beagles,
foxhounds, otter hounds, red-bone
coonhounds, border collies, beaucerons,
old english sheepdogs,
welsh corgis, tibetan spaniels,
pekingese, chihuahuas, great danes,
dobermans and pugs.

They hung them from a pipe
and beat them with clubs.

Cheney's voice is quiet and bland
like a clerk or a sexton.
The reporters nod and smile
and ask him gentle questions.

When he's finished with the scene
he's carried off in a limousine.

WE HAVE SEEN THE DARK PATH AHEAD

Artwork: The Sower, oil paint on wood by anna missed

BLIND POWER

Our President in Africa: "No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers."

Really? Is he talking about their country? Or ours? Isn't he describing what happened on Wall Street? Where's the investigation for all that? Why are bankers being rewarded for thievery instead of punished? Why are the folks who were in on the fix now entrusted with the repair work? And we certainly know that our entire government, from the President on down are bought by the corporations, the banks, the health industry, the whole works.

Obama: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. . . No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery."

And even as he utters these words, Mr. Obama's Justice Department has sought to throw out Habeas Corpus at Bagram Air Base, and is arguing for the right to detain individuals without the benefit of lawyers or trials--even if they have been acquitted of all crimes! And, despite what this president may say, torture continues.

Yet, without even a hint of irony, Mr. Obama winds up saying, "That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. Now is the time for that style of governance to end."

Oh, Really? So I can't help but wonder: is hypocracy now simply a part of the equipment of being President of the United States? How is it possible for us to be parading around the globe telling everyone else how to live, how to make a "democracy" when the mote in our own eye is as big as a battleship?

What makes us think that we're not laughing stocks when we do that?

The world is watching us. The world is watching Mr. Obama. I hope he doesn't blow it.

BULLWINKLE R.I.P. (ALASKA GOV. PALIN TO RESIGN OFFICE)

Gov. Sarah Palin, channeling Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spun her fabulous fable in front of cameras, for her true believers. Resigning from the office of governor, with the blood of the world's most beloved moose on her hands, she behaved as if nothing had happened. Alaska would take care of itself; and in her view the sky was the limit, and she could free up her schedule to pursue the most powerful access to killing machines that presently exists, in Washington DC.

The bootheels of our civilizing force and the stamp of America on everything, is what Sarah is about; and the rest of the world is just a fresh kill, dressed out like poor Bullwinkle. Palin is worse than Boris Badenov and his sidekick Natasha, put together. Palin is the ammo queen, the absurd pinup for our shoot 'em up, militarized culture: a demon-banishing, burn-them-at-the-stake alternative; if President Obama should prove inadequate in his increasingly deceptive and secretive mission of "change you can believe in".

A dishonest leader will be exposed in good time. Before long the witnesses will strip him of his mask. Look at the struggle in Iran, where Iranians find themselves transfixed by the martyrs' blood; it's obvious that the spellbinding effect of their solidarity remains with us, as we are moved deeply; and these images stay with us long after the screen has gone dark. To witness the bravery of protesters in the streets, recalls the indignation that brings such strong resolve to the young. And when Iranians of all ages march in profound silence in their millions--even without words--they inspire us to understand something deeper in their history.

Bush, our former president, continually waged low level, covert war against that country; and his legacy builds on past interference in Iran's history, continuing the hope some have, of sowing social discord there. In America, those who take to the streets have been neatly blacked-out in the mass media; the parent corporations and their boards of directors, and their masters, control television and have drawn down a curtain, effectively screening off dissident behavior. We are so saturated as a nation with disinformation and propaganda, so dulled by a deadened, phony political life, that the minute we see something halfway real, it's not surprising that we feel somewhat more alive, as we watch these events unfold.

As a child, it was fun to watch The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. At the end of their comic escapades the two friends managed to frustrate the cranked-up scheming of the fumbling and somehow funny villains, Boris and Natasha. Usually at the end of the show the friends ("moose and squirrel") would reflect on what had happened, and sometimes would come up with an unexpectedly touching lesson, or moral of the story. So we're on our own. It just gets harder to explain the moral now that Bullwinkle is dead, so to speak. If you know what I mean.

I've been searching for what to say to Iranians for whom I feel great respect. I suspect there was foul play in Iran's election; others contest that I am naive. But repression is a language unto itself, and the exaggeration of violence, which is then added to the wearing down, the erosion of what sovereignty the people have, is expressed in the people's sense of loss and injustice. This is an indictment of any government that takes advantage of its people. Along with the issue of fraud is the politics of a cosmetic democracy.

The moral of the story is not just that a veneer of respectability covers some religious people, and a few of them are not worthy of that respect. Palin in our country represents people whose religious and ideological convictions confer rights to do the meanest things to those who are not like them, for as long as the believers can feel no remorse. This has been going on since the beginning of our country. They believe God blesses them when they look down on others, when they take without asking. The underlings are reduced to slavery and the slavemasters feel entitled to the forced labor.

No, my Iranian friends, the real moral is that we are fighting for the same things, under the eyes of those leaders who scowl at us, in our cosmetic democracies.


Happy 4th of July! I wish there were more ways to make Sarah Palin look funny.

AFFAIRS OF STATE

Maybe some day this country will grow up and realize that sex is a fairly routine activity, and what people choose to do in private behind closed doors, whether inside or outside their marriage, should have no bearing on one's ability to govern. At that point, maybe we will be able to get over it and laugh it off when the Bill Clintons and Governor Mark Sanfords of the world go out and screw around. Big f'n deal. Who the hell cares? And maybe, just maybe, we can skip the charade of the philanderer making these overtly tearful public displays of mea culpas; here it is going on, what?--two weeks?--and Sanford is still blathering on about it, while insisting that God wants him to stay on as governor of South Carolina. (It truly becomes a gut-ache when the God card is played.) Wisely (for once) Sanford's wife has chosen to stay in the background rather than expose herself to the usual public disgrace and humiliation of the "good" wife doing the "we-will-weather-this-together-I-will-stand-by-this-schmuck-no-matter-what" routine. John Edwards' wife has written a book about his affair, for Godsake, and is now making the talk-show circuit! The whole thing is so ridiculous and absurd and sickening, and it's long past time that we threw it overboard as a cultural event, as we have mostly already done with public hangings and lynchings. I keep waiting for the one guy among all these idiots who will actually stand up to the press for once and say the very thing that may put an end to this childishness once and for all. I would have thought Clinton was smart enough to say it, but no, he fell in the same trap as all the others, and tried to lie his way out of it. At which point, everyone on the planet who wasn't born yesterday knew what the sonofabitch was up to. So what should the answer be when asked that deadly question by the press?, i.e., "What were you doing with that girl?"

Simple. "It's none of your damn business." Now, what's so difficult about that?

copeland morris THE HERON

The heron stands where the lily was.
He makes himself visible with a slight
Movement, where his feathers were drawn
On undisturbed water, pond and marsh by
Shadow, canals connecting rows of houses.
Unreal before he was real; it was as if
Vertical lines could cast no shadow.

Just as harvest is the moon's omen
And the sun whispers when it's time to die;
The art of magic expresses something else.
Even ones and zeros can break the handcuffs
Of sheriffs. The heron places his stillness
In each of us; and he in his beauty is greater
In tall grass and still water where he disappears.