Not So Quiet Desperation

by Ryn Cricket

We all know that politicians and news reporters regurgitate statistics like a frat boy on Sunday morning.  We also know that statistics work for us to push our point or cause, because they are both easily manipulated and easily believed.  So the statistics for unemployment have gone down from 10.2% to 9.7% this month.  What that doesn’t take into account are people who have been out of work for more than six months (and therefore not collecting unemployment), people who have given up looking for a job, or people who are underemployed and therefore way below the poverty level –yet still employed.  If these people were included, I am sure the number would be staggering.

And then there are crime rates.  “Crime has gone down in the cities.”  (We swear!  Please don’t move out!) The politicians plead.  Ask any police officer if crime has gone down.  What has changed are the definitions.  Well, that and the number of first-time offenders.  Desperate times create desperate people.  A few weeks ago, a house blew up a few blocks from where I live.  This caused 10 families to be homeless.  The original house was abandoned and foreclosed.  Scavengers had taken all the copper piping out, and the gas company seemed to have forgotten to turn the gas off.  Which I find awfully ironic, because they are so quick to shut the gas off when you’re behind on your payment, but this house hadn’t been lived in over a year.  No one reported that theft, so thefts are down, right?  Actually, these foreclosed homes are often completely gutted from anything of value, but those numbers don’t fit in.

Here’s another, bit more personal example.  Last week, the night of my daughter’s third birthday, someone (or more than one) person broke into our home –while we were sleeping, and robbed us.  I am not going to go through the million “what ifs” that have plagued me for days now.  But the police officer, who arrived in amazing time, explained a few things to us.  We used to live in a district that they used to fight over because nothing ever happened.  However, according to him, it has gotten really bad, but he added, that it has gotten really bad everywhere.  He lives in a quaint little prestigious suburb and his building has been broken into three times recently.  He said they have been overwhelmed with first-time offenders who would never have done something like this, until they couldn’t feed their family.  That’s not who robbed us, but that is a reality.  The ones who got us were well-practiced.  The jails can’t hold all of these people, so the non-violent ones get off lightly, or no time at all.  Here’s the crux.  They won’t classify our type of break-in as aggravated anymore.  We were home.  A few years ago the charge could have been a lot higher but we don’t want to scare those city-dwellers away, so we don’t have violent or aggressive crimes.

The criminals know the laws probably better than we do.  They know what they can inevitably get away with.  Our visitors took around five hundred dollars worth of electronics (T.V., cell phones, iPod, camera).  They did not take our computer or credit cards.  Why? Because that classifies as identity theft and carries a much stronger charge.  In fact, they took my purse and left all of the cards in my wallet neatly stacked on the kitchen table.  They took things they could sell fast and easy.  With all of these second-hand game and music stores, there aren’t any questions asked and it’s legit.

But, here’s another misnomer.  If we claim it on our renter’s insurance, the premium goes up, and there’s a five hundred dollar, deductible, so we receive nothing anyway.  Therefore, even insurance companies can’t give accurate statistics; because I am sure so many go unclaimed.

We have gotten eight thousand pieces of advice since this happened, and almost all of them aren’t valid.  “I keep the lights on at night.” So do we.  “I make sure the doors are double locked before I go to bed.” They were.  They came in through the bathroom.  “I make sure I have security lights outside.” We live in an apartment building, it has all of that.  “I would get a dog or a gun.”  This happened to my brother while he was at church on a Sunday morning in broad daylight and they drugged his dogs.  A friend of mine had a gun, but it was also stolen.  I, personally, would rather pay for a nicer, new T.V. than be responsible for anyone’s death.

I’m not looking for advice,  given or received.  But the truth needs to come out.  Desperate times create desperate people and this economy is breeding crime on a much larger scale than anyone is really aware of.  And no politician or news reporter is going to tell you otherwise.

Editor’s note: We are not all rant and rave at On The Wing.  We are always intrigued by those very real and quirky things that happen daily to each of us. The strange and unusual occurrences that enrich the human experience. This is precisely why we love the personal essay. Essays showcase our vulnerabilities in a very personal and engaging manner. Told from an emotional place, the personal essay allows our readers to connect with situations that they might not otherwise have the chance to experience. That is certainly the case with Nicole Hadaway’s piece that follows below. A stranger in a strange land, she tells the tale of how even a pampered spa experience can be a real eye-opener.

European Spa, American Body

By Nicole Hadaway

Three short years ago, my husband, an engineer, was placed by his company on a project located in Monaco.  So we, hubby, kiddo (nine months at the time) moved to the French Riviera.

Wohooo!

I finally would use that French I’d studied for six years!

Funny thing – back when I studied French (in the late eighties/early nineties), they taught things they thought might be useful in trips to the Patisserie, the Train Station, or inviting your friends over for a sleepover.

The trip to the European Spa was not one of those things.

So Hubby’s company thought it might be a nice idea to treat all the wives to a great day at the spa, at the Monte-Carlo Thalasso, wherein they specialized in seawater treatments.

I went to book my appointments and picked out from the menu (written completely en francais): a mud wrap, the douche a jet (which, with my French I translated to mean “high-pressured shower”), and a massage under a shower of sea water.

Sounds great, huh?

Let me just say here that before I moved to France, I knew that there were different attitudes towards body shame, nudity, etc. I went to the spa with the mindset that I might be baring body parts I wasn’t used to in a spa setting. But I had no idea what awaited me.

I never had a mud wrap before, and they are not my thing, but I thought I’d give it a try – it was free, after all.  So I get to the spa, change into the fluffy white robe provided for me, and pull out my bikini when the lady supervising me shakes her head, “no,” and gives me a pair of paper underwear bottoms (the Brazilian kind. Oh yeah, and they’re white) and a shower cap to wear.

And that’s it – a white paper thong and a shower cap. Then I got coated with mud, all over.  I mean, everywhere.  After that, she wrapped me in a plastic sheet, just like they do before they kill people in mob movies! Then she belted an electric blanket around me, as if I were an enchilada, turning on the heat.  If you have any kind of claustrophobia or fears of cooking to death whilst tied into an electric blanket, then I can tell you — this treatment is not for you!

After 20 minutes of relaxing thoughts like, “What if they forget about me here and I bake down to a muddy, desiccated corpse?” The attendant came back, unwrapped me from my plastic corpse-bag, and then motioned for me to go over to the shower next to the table. She took the hand-held shower head and hosed my back, while I was allowed the dignity of doing my front all on my own – wohooo!

Next, after my oh-so-calming, mob-style mud treatment, I wrapped myself in my fluffy white robe and sat and waited in the waiting room for the douche a jet. Having been coated with mud by a complete stranger, I looked forward to standing by myself under several shower-heads as they massaged my body with warm, relaxing sea water.

Uhm, no.

So a guy – yes, a male – leads me to my next treatment. It’s in a long, white-tiled room, with a stool near the door, what appeared to be a fire hose (white) wrapped on the wall next to said stool, and handrails and a drain at the far end of the room. I’m thinking, “Oh, no. No, no, this can’t be right.”

The guy gestures to the stool, upon which is laid a shower cap and another set of white paper Brazilian underwear. He says to me, “Je vais retourner,” and smiles as he leaves the room. I’m thinking, when he said, “I’ll be back” that he meant “A lady will be back because you’re a girl and you’re going to practically be naked during this treatment and that would just be plain awkward even though this is Europe and we’ve got more liberal attitudes regarding nudity over here.”

Oh, how wrong I was! He comes back – the guy — and it’s me, my shower cap, and the white paper thong against guy with the fire hose. I kid you not. Have you ever seen that movie Silkwood, where Meryl Streep’s character gets contaminated and they have to hose her down? Yeah, people apparently pay good money for that treatment at a high-class Euro Spa!

If I closed my eyes and concentrated on the high pressured water massaging my feet, legs, arms, and back, it was nice and did work whatever kinks I had in my muscles out.

To his credit, the guy was nice. However, it was a man who was not my husband nor in the medical profession, hosing my nearly-nude body down as if I were a piece of garden furniture getting washed after a weekend of pollen.

The last treatment was actually nice – a back massage – by a girl, thank heavens!  Sea water gently cascaded down on top of me.  This was my idea of a cool spa treatment and I did enjoy it. Whew! Finally.

And that was my visit to the swanky Monte-Carlo Thalasso.  All in all, I was glad to have the experience, because it certainly makes for interesting (and funny) conversations and of course, it gave me something about which to write!

Editor’s Note: I love how the U.S. continues to allow for spiraling health-care costs to bankrupt not only hardworking middle class families but the entire nation.  People are going to get sick and need care REGARDLESS of whatever system we have. For all those opposed to reform, ask yourselves this question: What costs more, accessing emergency room docs and welfare clinics where the taxpayers foot the bill or having reasonable access to preventative care  where costs can be better managed and people can stay healthier? Don’t get me started on tort reform and the cost of malpractice – everybody sues everybody and the lawyers are the only ones who get rich. OK, I’m ranting. Ryn offers a better argument than I do, so read what she has to say.

Sick Over Health Care Reform

by Ryn Cricket

You want health care reform?  We’re not going to get it.  It doesn’t matter what the politicians say or what the public wants, we will never get a reformed health care system even comparable to many third-world or developing countries until we banish the idea of lobbying and lobbyists.  It’s not a political thing, it’s a greed thing.  The insurance companies’ goals are not to help us, they are the same goals of any and all companies –to make a profit.  We cannot get rid of the capitalist insurance system until we get rid of the legal bribing or the lobbyist system.

I live in Cleveland –home of the world-famous Cleveland Clinic which is in a neighborhood surrounded by government project housing, and rentals filled with people who can look at it, but never enter.  This past May, the National Association of Free Clinics organized a three-day free clinic at our county fairgrounds.  They had set up 300 volunteer doctors, nurses, dentists and ophthalmologists who would see people –no questions asked –on a first come/first serve basis.  IT was predicted that thousands of people would sleep in line for even more than a night waiting for the opportunity to see a free doctor set up in a horse stall or tent.  How is this better than a third-world country?  Who is fighting to keep this system?  (By the way, the clinic got canceled because of the H1N1 outbreak, which I find ironic, but there were other very successful clinics held all around the country.)

Let’s talk about “death panels” and all of those other stupid rumors that politicians, lobbyists and spin doctors created to push their own agenda onto what they thought were unthinking masses.  The reality is:  my parents wanted to get the H1N1 vaccine last fall, and they were denied at three separate places because they were over 64, apparently not a priority.  It wasn’t a question of insurance or money in their case, but unethical discrimination enforced by our “highly advanced” medical system.

I have classes full of international students who are shocked to know how much it costs to have a baby in America –even with insurance.  They don’t understand why it costs anything when in the majority of their countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, they get paid an average of $10,000 American dollars by their governments when they have a baby in their countries.  I won’t even get started on maternity leave, but I’m beginning to think that we are the only country in the world that does not support  people who want to have children and raise them well.

These same students also go through an interesting culture shock when they realize that if they are sick or hurt, they can’t just walk into any hospital or clinic, see a doctor right away, be given medicine and go home.  That’s how it is in their countries.  We may have the best doctors and best hospitals in the world, but they’re also the most expensive and inefficient.  What makes them that way?  Insurance companies.  Who keeps the system status quo?  Lobbyists in D.C. paying off politicians –on both sides of the aisle –to push their agenda.  And we could add that to our own apathy for sitting in our Lazyboys, drinking Pepsi, eating a Big Mac and not complaining.

So it’s nice that these government politicians with their five-star insurance and always enough money in their pockets for a damn co-pay want to pass a law that insurance companies can’t deny you if you have a pre-existing condition, but that’s not reform, that’s humane.  That’s sticking bubble gum in a crack on the Titanic.  Medicare for all –now that’s reform.  –But I also wouldn’t mind seeing the unemployment rate got up because a couple thousand lobbyists are out of jobs either.

At least one Congressman has got some balls. Pennsylvania Representative Patrick Murphy, the first Iraq War veteran elected to the House is clearly NOT homophobic. He has sponsored the only bill before Congress that would repeal the idiotic Clinton hold-over “don’t ask – don’t tell” policy that the US armed services currently operate under.

With no less than the Secretary of Defense, William Gates and President Obama’s White House behind the legislation, you’d think there would be a good chance that it would move out of the lower chamber. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the bill is just 32 votes shy of the 218 needed to ensure passage. In other words, 187 Congressmen and women are supporting this legislation and calling for qualified personnel, regardless of sexual preference to serve and support US interests as we fight not one but two wars currently.

Where is the rub? Like everything else in this grid-locked nation of ours, it can be found across the aisle in yet another decidedly partisan position of opposition.  Ike Skelton, (R)Missouri (isn’t that the “Blow-me state?) chair of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, is dead set against repealing the ban and has stated he won’t allow for a hearing of Murphy’s bill.

The beef? “Allowing openly gay ( I guess it’s OK if they stay in the closet)  would threaten the military’s ability to attract and retain talented soldiers,” says Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness. They bill themselves as a non-partisan advocacy group formed to take a “leadership role in promoting sound military policies.”

I guess The Bush appointed Defense Secretary and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, both apparently OK with a measured approach to removing the ban, don’t count for anything.

What about the deterrent effect in attracting and retaining talented and qualified individuals into the military who just happen to be gay? Does anybody see the ironies here? Fighting for Democracy, equal rights, freedom of choice?

We’ve got a military force that is being taxed and depleted to its very limit and Uncle Sam has been putting out the Not Welcome mat for too long to many who want to actively serve.

It’s not red, white and blue in America anymore. It’s just red and blue. I’m getting pretty tired of it.

mjs

Editor’s note: You have to really love your city to be critical of its evolution. Far too easily overlooked by the literati and the media is what happens west of the Hudson River. Seattle? Yeah doesn’t Bill Gates live there? Jeff Bezos and Amazon? Oh yeah them too. Is Washington a blue state?? It rains a lot in Seattle doesn’t it? Turns out there is quite a bit going on there, just ask Robert Crisman.

DRY ROT

by Robert Crisman

Sometimes Seattle’s the next thing to heaven. The sky’s diamond blue, the sun’s a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting’s about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray lasts a long time.

Still, things have changed…

Fifties Seattle was hidebound, provincial, surrounded by mountains and water and stuck upper-left on the map, away from the action. A hick Norwegian crew cut kind of a place, like stew without salt.

Culture was bush-league: hydroplanes, Seafair, Triple-A baseball, accordion players in bowties named Stan getting down with the two-step in lounges. The jazz riffs on Jackson were gnarls and mutters in dreams as the square-johns slept on.

Dads put on suits and went to the office or did what they did down at Boeing. Moms stayed home and took care of the kids. The kids were all fresh-faced and cheery and bright. The place was Leave-It-To-Beaverland North.

Or so went the story. Nobody spoke of the suicide rate, up there with Sweden’s. Or dad’s weekend binges and mom’s hidden bruises. Or Wally and Beaver, torturing cats in the alley to work off their blues. That stuff got swept out of sight like the date-rapes out on Frat Row at U Dub.

This was the deal: Seattle was “middleclass” down to the bone. See, what it was, a lot of the wage slaves thought they’d stepped out of the pits since the war. The U.S. was rich, the only rich country left on the planet. The factories and offices were humming, the money was rolling—war spending in peacetime could do that back then—and enough shekels fell into working folks’ pockets that many forgot that they were merely the means to make rich fuckers richer. Class in the ‘30s meant who owned the works and who slaved for nickels: capitalists, workers, that old commie shit. But after the war, McCarthy stormed in, the commies got rolled, and all their ideas got tossed out the window. Madison Avenue then sold the serfs a big line of bullshit, i.e., the notion that class just meant income. There were rich folks and poor folks, like always, of course, and then all those folks in the middle.

Just for a moment, pretend you’re Ward Cleaver. You’ve moved to Seattle, and this is your life; if ever a man stood smack-dab in the middle… You’ve got the house and the wife and the kids, and the nice, brand-new car. You’re thinking of buying a boat—easy credit!—and the Beav will make college no sweat. And when you retire, you’ll still have enough left for supper. Meanwhile, your lovely wife June’s like a chef in that kitchen! What’s not to like?

Sure, they sweat you down at the office, and, yeah, your boss just bought a new island so he can tryst with his bimbos in style—and then stacked your workload so he can catch up when he’s back—but so what? You get to wear a nice suit and tie, and the car’s almost paid for. It’s different these days. The sky is the limit! You too could be rich! You can get on a quiz show, any damn thing! Just stay in step with the program and you’ve got it dicked!

Hell, even Joe Six-pack down at the shipyards keeps change in his pockets. The man has a house and a car, the whole bit, almost. His union dumped all its commies, kissed up to the fat-cats, and worked out a deal: throw crumbs our way and we’ll keep our mouths shut, and stand for the National Anthem at ballgames, and send our kids off to shoot dinks in the war…

Joe went and wangled a middleclass lifestyle. Well, close enough. Life sure was good for most of the white folks, you know? And, all that working class bullshit? That class warfare shit that the commies and pinkos and fags were trying to stir up in the ‘30s? Deader than Edsels, my brother, way deader than Edsels…

Don’t misunderstand: some wage slaves got left way behind, in go-nowhere jobs or on welfare, or just, they fell through some crack. You know, like I said, there’s always the poor folks. But dig this about them: since you hit the middle, they seem to be mostly black folks or brown folks—with maybe some Okies and hillbillies scattered around from the ‘30s or something. You always knew you were different from them, am I right? Now, here’s more proof: your Ward Cleaver life! You never see them playing catch with the Beav on prime time TV! They’re just some statistics, the crime news and so forth…

Of course, there’s that civil rights stuff, and, well, you guess you support it. Hell, you’re a liberal of sorts. It’s just, well, tell the truth, you wouldn’t want a bunch of them living next door…

I mean, it’s okay, they can vote and get jobs and all that, as long as they’re kind of off to the side, out of mind…

Yes, out of sight, out of mind…

Old Ward was a trip. And, like I said, ‘50s Seattle was Leave-It-To-Beaverland North. Out of sight, out of mind all the way. Social Ills? Pardon? There’s nobody here but us white folks, soaking up ads for toilet bowl cleanser and trying to forget where we came from!

Okay then, but, hey—what about cops getting fat rousting gay bars in Pioneer Square? Or jacking up black kids for fun up on Cherry? Or Indians, ripped off and raped, lying stark puking drunk in the gutters downtown? Are you kidding? Blacks hadn’t yet started riots. Indians were day-before-yesterday’s news. Gays were deep secrets. Who gave a rusty rat’s ass? Besides them?

Those were the days. The Lone Ranger rode…

But then Kennedy got bushwhacked, the ‘60s revved up, and Seattle, like everywhere else, got plugged into politics and dope. The whole social bag got to shaking and baking. You could hear sphincters cracking from burbs to the boardrooms, and in white city enclaves as well.

And—poor old Ward! It wouldn’t be long before June would be burning her bra and Wally was brought up on heroin charges. The worst, though, was catching the Beaver in bed with some rough trade. Two of the fuckers! One of them had a spike through his dick!

You know Ward felt that one…

Don’t get me wrong. Rude shocks notwithstanding, life was still soft here compared with, say, Newark. You could work or not work and somehow still eat. Even a lame could keep change in his pockets. Rent was way cheap. Our riots here were popgun affairs next to Watts…

City fathers were more or less liberal. You could even blow dope on the sidewalks downtown in the daytime and nobody would sweat it. The square-johns were trying to get hip…

Then the ‘70s landed like green, toxic fog. Seattle crash-landed and woke up strung out. Boeing went tits to the sky. Aerospace workers learned to flip burgers at Wendy’s or boogied, or fought off the winos for space on park benches. The lights all winked out. Junkies crawled out of their holes then, and liberals went into “strategic retreat”…

You should have seen downtown. Ghosts bumming smokes in the doorways on First, running north out of Pioneer Square, up through Belltown. History, heritage, smothered in shit.

Take Pioneer Square, where Seattle popped out of the ground and got grabby. Where profits got rolling and Leschi got rolled. The thin, wintry heart of Seattle—until after the war when the last of the money fled uptown. Then the winos took over and the place slid into d-t’s. Nothing was left then but vomit and pigeons, gay bars in shadows, and Indian kids sleeping twelve to a room in the flops.

And so on up First. This street had been the honky-tonk playground for sailors and hustlers and chippies and hos through two world wars. By the ‘60s, however, First was a graveyard for shit-bums and drifters in piss-smelling bars and two-dollar rooms. Block after block, the brick and brownstone facades of the old office buildings blackened and buckled. “For Lease” signs in cracked, soot-stained windows turned yellow, fell over, and died.

The ‘70s ran like a nightmare down there, especially at night. Porno took over the corner where First runs past Pike Place. Tourists wandered the Market by day. By night, peepshow flotsam: dopers and skulks, low-bottom dick-snatchers, runaways selling their asses to sneaky-petes circling the block.

Imagine yourself on that street in those years with no place to go, shambling around like a zombie at four in the morning, when even the winos have clocked out for home, or wherever. No one and nothing but you—and creeps standing guard in the doorways, autistic wreckage in old army coats, and bad breath and werewolves. A miasma of dank, dark decay. Who’d ever have thought that hell was so empty!

Time marches on: In ’75, the street was a cesspool. These days, it’s cold, gleaming towers and cold, fast-track spenders. The bones of the ghosts have all been paved over. A blitzkrieg of progress: Ghosts, six feet under; the gelid indifference and bland, sneering laughter of mutants with money; dreams, sucked from marrow in gutters…

Ah yes, money, money. By ’75, Seattle in fact had already started to bounce its way back from the Big Boeing Bust that had punched out its lights at the start of the decade. Hot plans were drafted, to ride the wave of Pacific Rim trade to a place on the map with the west coast Big Dogs: L.A., San Francisco, like that. The nub of the plan was to rescue downtown and the central core city from going the way of those bombed-out craters and shitholes back east like Detroit. The real-estate monkeys who run the place saw that Seattle was still mostly white folks, a lot of them having disposable income and credit, who didn’t particularly want to move to the burbs. They liked what the cities offer in all those brochures: services, culture, excitement, and so forth, and a chance to work close and fuck the commute.

The real estate guys got together and cooked up a pitch to sell yuppies wet dreams, and thereby make millions. Hey, folks, downtown living! Condos on clouds overlooking the bay! Heaven on Earth for Men in the Fastlane and Women of Power!

The You-Belong-To-the-City crowd lined up like ducks.

What a wet dream it was! They ripped out the old shit and trucked in the new. Corporate greed-heads, lured by the bright lights of China and sweet deals with the in-crowd, moved in. Dot Com got launched. Skyscrapers—leeched beige or Antarctic silver or black black black black, like those in all the millennium’s cities—shot up.

Ten thousand hotel rooms got built. New shops, boutiques, a new art museum a couple blocks south of the old kiddies’ ho stroll. A bus tunnel, built to haul shoppers and gawkers and grunts.

They tore the place up. Mid-eighties downtown Seattle looked like Beirut in the wake of Israeli cluster-bomb runs. The old crowd got rolled, along with the low-income housing. Pensioners, old folks, certified crazies huddled in SRO doorways or stacked up like cordwood on sidewalks down by the Courthouse.

Skid row got spitshined. Out went the muscatel watering holes. Strip joints and pool halls and peep shows got skunked. The El Coco Tavern got leveled and up went the Watermark Towers. Indians used to get squiffed on this spot for five bucks. Now, lawyers and fixers chow down on scampi and steak while they carve up the rest of the town, and get nicked for $250.

Then came the ‘90s. Not all the homeless got broomed. You could still see some roaming the alleys, dining in dumpsters, and snuggling on grates for the night, or until the cops come. There were dirt-caked, ragged-ass young guys sitting on sidewalks with dogs and tin cups. You’d see blitzed-out young mamas with kids, or no kids, and no hope. The missions and shelters were packed to the rafters, at least till their leases ran out.

Who else? Bottom-rung dopemen—though some of the top dogs, whites mostly, who also own banks and your mother, stayed up in those condos on clouds overlooking the bay…

Down by the Courthouse and north up on Third into Belltown, young brothers slung rock. On Pike, by the Market, the vatos had the concession on smack. It wasn’t the open-air drug zoo it was when the Cubans were ripping and running some 10 years before, but you still could get loaded easy enough. Rock was the only thing downtown had that was cheap. But you wouldn’t want to get fried and then sit on the sidewalk to groove on the day. They’d ticket your ass for just sitting. You wanted to get loaded, well, okay, cool, but you had to keep moving…

Looking to land, you’d likely hit Broadway, a hop up Capitol Hill to the east. Here was the glitter parade, a near-promenade, the word-of-mouth mecca and watering hole for Jet City’s young hip-eoisie. Chock to the brim with rock ‘n roll airheads, punk porno bimbos, dog-collared brokers, weed-sucking rastas, and bald-headed Nazis with lip rings; Jesus freak, muscle fags, Mao-shouting nitwits; 12-year-old glue-sniffing mutants from Kansas; toe sniffers, whip lickers, junkies with trust funds; lithium babies, panhandling grandmas; all sorts of strays with pins in their clits and no roadmap home. And, last but not least, boatloads of slummers from Bellevue, with charge-cards and take-off tattoos, who kept the place running.

You might wind up in Broadway’s spiritual ass-end, the gauntlet bounded by Denny and Pike running west to the freeway. A huddle of densely packed, faded apartments, and houses chopped into rooms. Filled up with schitzos and skag freaks, tweakers, parolees, drool cases, pensioned-off old folks, professional students, lower-end wage slaves, a cluster of registered sex fiends on Summit off Howell, unclassified geeks up the ying-yang—the shavings and sweepings of 20^th Century life in the city. Could you dredge up the rent? Well, not for long; the yuppies were coming.

Till then, it was welcome home, baby…

Nineties Seattle! A cutting-edge city, the jump-off to 2001 and beyond! With the attitude sneering and bland, and a lah-de-dah shrug at the blood on the ground spilled by those who don’t make it.

The human condition? The haves and have-nots, all that shit? Pre-Dot Com dinosaur news!

Seattle was liberal, don’t get me wrong—and hip with a capital H to go with it. We knew about world beat, all that good stuff. The city used to be white-bread, but now, after Microsoft, lattes, that grunge shit, etc., we were, ah…well, white-bread…

But if ‘50s Seattle was Leave It To Beaver, 40 years later it was Birkenstock mamas and Superdads, trying to pretend that the Ma and Pa Cleaver act, tinctured a little with Gloria Steinem and New Age bibdribble, still made it. And maybe it did—if your income clocked in at six figures and mom didn’t have to stay home with the kids. She could if she cared to, of course…

Ideas in this town? People talked shop, relationship drama, the real-estate racket, the stock market, natch, nail polish gossip and updates, and, always, the Hawks and the Dawgs, blah-blah, blah-blah-blah. All the small change.

Along with rank bullshit from some other planet. You might stroll along Broadway and see some weedy professor in sandals and shorts that ballooned out in front and made him look pregnant or something. He’d be sitting there at the Café Septiem, sipping tea with his white bird legs crossed as the sun set on Broadway. A post-modern philosopher-dipshit, he’d be laying the moves on a young thing with cleavage, expounding the shopworn idea that ideas—the ones that seek to make sense of this world—are passé. Reality, he’d say, is your own little bubble, your fact is my fiction, life’s but a dream…on and on.

He’d allude he first read this in French in a sidewalk café on Montmartre. What a champ.

But real is real, n’est ce pas? That young thing had lungs, and hips that just wouldn’t quit. And that tuning-fork woody that dipshit had under his shorts there had weight, mass, duration, a short spitting distance—a monkey could have measured his whole philosophical interest, from prostate to foreskin, down to the last micro-inch.

How real was that one, sports fans?

Seattle was jumping with all kinds of real: Low dogs in high places, the war of the races… Check this one out: most of the folks in the King County Jail were black or some shade of brown, and still are. Now, as it happens, most all of the jailbirds were and are dopers. Yet seven out of ten of Jet City’s dope fiends back then just like now were as white as Prince Charles, or passing. So, why weren’t the white boys celled in? Were they out on a pass? Did the cops maybe lose them or something before they got booked? There’s an answer, I bet. But you sure wouldn’t find it by asking how come, or any of that stuff. What you’d get would be pasted-on blank looks, and maybe a feeling as if you’d broke wind in the middle of Tosca…

And so on.

Nineties Seattle. The 20^th Century’s swan song…

A whole lot of water has vaulted the dam since those days. NASDAQ pancaked. The WTO and Fat Tuesday riots tore the town up. Boeing flipped us the bird and split town without telling the mayor. Then Broadway tanked it and Seattle sort of fell off the map of hot places.

Some things stayed the same: rents kept on climbing. A sizeable number of people continued to sleep under bridges, the freeway, in alleys, tent cities, and so forth.

Yuppie ethos metastasized big-time.

The hurt just kept coming. The real estate monkeys recycled the yuppies’ wet dream of two decades before and renamed it “high-density smart growth.” Which meant of course, gentrify, gentrify. Tear down old housing and slap up the condos. Watch real estate prices shoot way past Neptune. Watch poor folks and blue-collar drudges flee town like Okies in front of a dust storm.

And now they’re going to tear the Alaskan Way Viaduct down. Condos right on the water at last! The real estate monkeys get well once again and we’re stuck in gridlock forever.

At least we can say that Seattle’s in step with everywhere else. A good chunk of the world economy has gone off the cliff. People are starting to wake to the fact that the check is not in the mail. Meanwhile, we’re still at war, for the eight-trillionth year in a row, with no end in sight. The 21^st Century is stone fucking drag time all over.

Purely local travail seems a bit of a chump-change concern.

How can mere dry-rot compare with the mess in Afghanistan, right?

Still, dry-rot is soul-killing stuff.

It sticks like a bone in the throat as the gray skies press down.

Editor’s note: Hazar Worth is a learned man. An angry man. A man with a conscious. A man with much on his mind. He tells a tale here you may not have learned in history class. Perhaps you were sick that day.

Ironically our own US history is inextricably tied to Haiti in a very significant way.  When Napolean met his earlier Waterloo at the hands of Toussaint L’Oveture, a self-educated Haitian and leader of the slave revolt in 1803, Nappy  gave up not only  interest in Haiti, but the entire New World to boot .

Mais Non? Sacred Chat!

OUI. The Louisiana Purchase itself was the idea of the little General. He wanted out of the New World in a big way and was only to glad to jettison out of the Carib and out of what would become almost 1/3 of the good old US of A. Maybe he saw Katrina and the earthquake coming???

Sex, Voudon, Death: How Capitalism WANTS YOU (Part One)

By Hazar Worth

‘Raindrops keep falling on my head / But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red / Crying’s not for me…..cause / I’m never going to stop the rain by complaining / Because I’m free……/ Nothing’s worrying…..me….’

-BJ Thomas, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head’

Haiti.

The images are blurred into our immediate synapses like a hungry nympho feasting before the fucking.

Many people have been moved, and shaken, down to their cores by the stories and images and emotional overspill of a small nation struck down by an earthquake that reminds all of us of a most basic and simple equation:

Like Death, Capitalism lurks around almost every corner.

‘Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal’. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.’ - Pat Robertson

On 5 December 1492, the European navigator (and original terrorist) Christopher Columbus landed on a large island in the region of the western Atlantic Ocean that would later be referred to as the Caribbean Sea. This island was inhabited by the Taino, an Arawaken people who referred to their island as Ayiti, Bohio, or Kiskeya. In the name of the Spanish Crown, who was backing Columbus epic sojourn, the island claimed and renamed by Columbus as La Isla Hispaniola (‘The Spanish Island), ergo Hispaniola. This became the birth of Haiti and the suffering of Haiti.

Establishing a small settlement, Columbus left Hispaniola but when he returned a year later, the settlers who numbered almost 40, were no where to be found and presumed murdered by the indigenous people of Hispanola. This prompted Columbus to leave brother Bartolomeo to create a new settlement as Christopher himself laid claim to the entire island.

This opened the door for the arrival of Europeans into Hispaniola. This also opened the door to the indigenous population of Hispaniola to suffer near extinction as the influx of Europeans to occupy the settelment overseen by brother Bartolomeno (and bankrolled by the Spanish Crown) exposed the indigenous population to diseases.

Only by setting up villages elsewhere were the Tainos able to survive and gradually rebuild their population size.

During this time, from 1493 to 1520, the Spaniards exploited the island for the gold and for the silver, mined chiefly by local Amerindians directed by Spanish occupiers. Those individuals refusing to work in the mines were murdered or sold into slavery. And while attempts to protect the indigenous people of Hispaniola were set into motion by the Laws of Burgos, passed 1512-1513, which also endorsed the ‘conversion’ of the indigenous people to Catholicism, the national government of the Spanish Crown found great difficulty in enforcing these laws from afar.

Since labor forces were destroyed by the infectious disease and malnutrition that were inflicted by the European occupiers, the Spanish governors to the Crown began the import of enslaved Africans to continuing the mining of gold and silver in 1517, as authorized by Charles V.

While this remained the status qua for almost nine decades, British, Dutch, and French pirates began to exert their influences on the abandoned norther and western coasts of Hispaniola as colonists were ordered by the King of Spain in 1606 to move closer to the capital city of Santo Domingo. By this time, the Spanish interest in Hispaniola had wanted tremendously in favor the gold and silver deposits being uncovered in Mexico and South America.

By 1697, under the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain would officially cede the western third of Hispaniola to France, who had established the colony Saint-Domingue under King Louis XIV and the newly established French West India Company. By this time, and under the encouragement of Louis XIV, planters would outnumber pirates and strong crops such as tobacco, indigo, cotton, and cacao became the new silver and gold grown and harvest on the fertile norther plain of Saint-Domingue. This prompted France to import still more enslaved Africans into the region.

During this time that saw frequent slave insurrections, the last generations of the Taino natives would die out ending the full-blooded Awarakan population in a little over 200 years since the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Prior to the epic Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), sugar and later coffee became important export crops to the gradually expanding economy of Saint-Domingue. After the war, rapid expansion occurred as 72 million pounds of raw sugar, 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton were exported by 1767.

By 1787 then, Saint-Domingue produced approximately 40 percet of all sugar and 60 percent of all coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony had become the richest colony in the French Empire. To continue meeting the demands by Europe for sugar and coffee, an estimated 800,000 slaves (which accounted for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade) were imported into Saint-Domingue. Poor and brutal conditions, as sanctioned in 1685 by Louis XIV ( under the Code Noir), created a situation where the natural population increased was hampered by French slave owners, which created a strong identification of slaves to their African culture.

A key leader in the Haitian Revolution , which won independence from France i n 1804 and elected as Haiti’s first true President, the personal secretary’s of Henri Christophe who had lived more than half his life as a slave described the crime perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:

‘Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside of barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?’

Such immense abuse and harsh maltreatment led many African slaves to embrace the very misunderstood tribal religion of Voudon, which arose from the synergy between aspects of Catholicism forced upon many African slaves, and the traditional spiritual beliefs practiced by African culture.Thousands of freedom seeking slaves took refuge in the practice of Voudon, and used Voudon as the basis for forming communities of maroons that were settlements created in the mountains and designed to exist independently from the white plantations and the white slave owners. As these maroons gained greater and greater strength, Voudon became a strong bond that united the free slaves into a powerful collective that sought to thrive against the harsh elements of raising foods and fighting against white attackers. One of the most famous of these free slaves was Mackandal, a one-armed slave originally from Guinea and a Voudon Houngan (priest) who escaped in 1751, he united many different maroons into an ongoing collective. Mackandal spent the next six years staging successful raids of plantation owner’s crops and homes while evading capture by the French. During this six year period, he reputedly killed over 6,000 white people while uniting the collective of maroons with a fierce Voudonic vision of the destruction of the white occupiers in Saint-Domingue.

In 1758, failing to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, Mackandal was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Francais. He was a sacrifice by white plantation owners to continue their strangleholds over the natural resources of the lands, and the natural resources of human labor who worked the lands to make profits for the white plantation owners. This would include the accepted practice of ‘placage’, where a white plantation owner could take an African woman as his concubine. As many French women were not predisposed to leaving France to make the travels to the colony of Saint-Domingue, many white plantation owners were apt to take their comforts and sexual pleasures with African women. This practice created a rather wealthy class of ‘gen de couleurs (‘People of color’) allowed to acquire and possess substantial amounts of land while being denied the same rights as denied to African slaves under the governing laws of the French rulers, such as taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, and attending social functions where whites were present.

However, the tipping point to Haiti occurred during the year 1789 when the Mother country of France underwent the ten year period of the French Revolution. Like a high school biology petri dish experiment of growing bacteria, the upheaval to the absolute monarchy that extended feudal privileges to the Catholic clergy and the aristocracy created a strong ripple effect that was felt in Saint-Domingue.

On 22 August, 1791, slaves from the northern region of Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest colony to the Mother country of France, inspired to take up arms by the Voudon priest (Houngan) Dutty Boukman, had cast the plantations of the northern region into the consuming appetites of flames. Though Boukman was captured and executed, the rebellion he had incited spread throughout the colony. From 22 August to 1791 to 1 January 1804, the soon to be former island of Hispaniola would be awashed with the brutality and complexities of civil strife that would inevitably unite the freed slaves with the ‘gens de couleurs’ against the French’s waning hold over Saint-Domingue, under the reclaimed Taino name of ‘Haiti’ which meant ‘Lands of Mountains’. But the price for independence occurred with a steep price: France refused to recognize the independence of Haiti until 1825 in exhange for 150 million gold francs, reduced later to 90 million gold francs. This fee was considered as retribution to the Mother country of France for ‘lost property’ that belonged to the former while colonialists who had lost slaves, land, equipment, and their valueable crops that made them profits at the expense of the freed slaves. Haiti agreed to pay this retribution fee in lieu of a crippling embargo imposed and enforced by France, Britain, and the United States.

To meet the demand for retribution by Mother country France, the Haitian government had to take out high interest loans, which saw the debt remaining on the books until 1947. Between the year of 1804 to 1934, Haiti witnessed a consistent state of small periods of relative stability and prosperity overturned by deep periods of political and social unrest, upheaval, and turmoil that witnessed the inevitable occupation by the United States from 28 July 1915 to mid-August of 1934 during a very volatile period that afflicted Haiti as continuing debts initiated by former governmental economic policies marred any real long-term sustainability of economic growth and development.

This brings us to a subtle but substantial subtext. If we now return to Mr. Pat Robertson’s statement of ignorance once more, and we shake his statement down along the trimming lines, we can witness the workings of that invisible but powerful Houngan:

Capitalism.

Hidden in plain sight – the driving need of Capitalism remains creating a fabulous fat fantastic fathomless final gravy line. People have bankrolled their money and time into seeing that awesome exit strategy. To make dollars on mere dimes and nickels; to make a 60% return on the time of a 10% down payment; to the get the lowdown on the upside to the next Big thing…..

Many would like to play in the same shallow emotional end of the small puddles. Many would like to play down these constant reminders that the ’system’ only seeks to favor the cabal of willing fools who will nurture and grow ice water for blood in their veins if that means they can score and bag that Big game of wealth and comfort, and absolute convenience. The images thrown about callously by media outlets re:  the devastation done to Haiti by the earthquake serves another agenda.

‘Give what you can, ignore the innate problems that keeps Haiti poorest, and be thankful that you live in a country that cares about you..’

Throwing more money at any situation and ‘crisis’ becomes akin to tossing seeds into a stone quarry and expecting those seeds to bear fruit. But Houngan of Capitalism continues to cast a powerful spell that seeks to capture and enslave the willing minds on both sides -

Those who engineer the play, and those who want to invest their intent and will to keep the play going, and going, and going, and going….

And at the very end of this equation: What will Haiti really come to mean to you..?

Editor’s note: OK. OTW is not your mama. But hey, have you looked in the mirror lately? I know me too. Plenty of extra poundage. Just exactly what is in the food we eat? Should we be following the government guidelines? I know – really a dumb question. What about our kids? Just when you thought it was safe to chow down, somebody who knows something like Kim Urig comes along and..well let’s just say you have fair warning.

Kim fancies herself a superhero like the pop culture icons of her childhood, Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman. Her life’s ambition is to save the universe (or at least her corner of it) from evil forces. After a successful career as a labor union negotiator, she opted to help change the world two people at a time as a stay at home mom. She still dons her superhero cape from time to time as a freelance writer and activist. Her superpower is healthy living through the mind, body and spirit. Her work is found on Fresh Daily Bread and Lifted on Eagle’s Wings.

A Food Pyramid

By Kim P. Urig

Every five years the government reevaluates what the American people ought to be eating and offers recommendations. Yet, the life expectancy of the US population is shrinking. The world has more advanced technology in the areas of medicine and safety, yet people are living shorter amounts of time, many with a reduced quality of life.

As the New Year starts, so do the vows to lose weight and get in shape.  Less than a month into the year, such resolutions are already beginning to slack for many Americans. Our government wrestles over a Health Care Bill that truly addresses little about our collective health, but rather how to pay for all our sickness.

From a personal place, I became very interested in nutrition and diet about 10 years ago.  I grew up on an organic vegetable farm in a small town. We did not really snack between meals, and if we did, it was whatever we were picking at the time. One of the most memorable moments of my childhood was a crazy zany Saturday night when we were watching television and a fast food commercial came on. The burger looked so delicious that we hopped in the car, in our pajamas, drove into town, (about nine miles away), and got a drive through burger. It was a true “Big Mac Attack”. It happened once. Fast food was nothing close to a staple of our diet, but a rare indulgence. I did not have to think about diet and nutrition; we just lived it. I rarely missed school and I had no weight issues.

Fast-forward 25 years, when my own children were young. A typical afternoon included a trip to a fast food indoor play land. It was a way for stir-crazy parents surrounded by concrete to entertain their children in inclement weather. What had been a special treat for me became routine occurrence for my children. Common sense overruled the temptation to wax poetic about “when I was a kid”. I knew I was responsible for the health of my own children.

With all the ever-changing information available about health and nutrition, making a vow to eat good food can be daunting. It is not enough to rely on the heavily lobbied Food Pyramid. Really.  Farm lobbies want to ensure a market for their crops. Our food pyramid’s design benefits whatever crops need sold. Food stamps and WIC programs are also highly politicized. For example, the colorful pyramid suggests 6-11 servings of rice, bread and or pasta, commodities that utilize our grain crops. Additionally, such carb-laden foods are often sweetened with hidden sugars that come from corn crops. Our amber waves of grain quickly turn into dimpled thighs and bellies of fat. The Food Pyramid also suggests a diet moderate in sugar, but never defines moderate.  According to the American Heart Association, no more than 100-150 calories a day should come from sugar.  That is the amount of sugar in one can of soda.

Each year, the media touts a new hot food or miracle diet to the point where we forget what is healthy and we just grow larger. We consume all protein diets, cleanses, and miracle smoothies. We look for a magic bullet to fix our size without truly acknowledging the impact it has on our health. For many, diets are a cosmetic issue, not a health issue. We equate thin with looking good, but we fail to consider the health issues associated with being overweight.

Since 1990, when no state had more than a 15% rate of obesity to 2008, when only Colorado had less than a 20% rate of obesity, the problem is truly epidemic. As our weight soars, so does our health care costs. Erik Finkelstein, author of the Fattening of America, outlines the economic costs associated with obesity in his blog,

Estimate of $78.5 billion ($92.6 billion in 2002 dollars), annual medical spending attributable to overweight and obesity (9.1 percent) now rivals that attributable to smoking, which ranges between 6.5 percent and 14.4 percent, depending on the source. Therefore, as with smoking, there is a clear motivation for payers to consider strategies aimed at reducing the prevalence of these conditions. Many health insurers (including Medicaid) include smoking cessation treatment as a covered benefit, and some private insurers (most notably life insurers and those in the individual market) charge smokers much higher rates. Although some insurers subsidize memberships to health clubs to promote physical activity, most do not include incentives to encourage weight loss.

Clearly, obesity (defined by 30 pounds overweight or more), has a tremendous physical and economic impact.  Unfortunately, eating habits are so deeply engrained and simplified by the prevalence of inexpensive convenience foods and busy lives that it is not easy to redefine what we should consume.

It takes 3500 calories to gain a pound. Most Americans consume 700 more calories a week than necessary, so 5 weeks accounts for a gained pound. One year accounts for 10 extra pounds. In ten years that easily could be 100 pounds. Scary numbers, but the numbers do not lie. In 20 years, we went from a nation of less than 15% obesity to over 20%.

The Food Pyramid does not make the best health recommendations. We ought to question the political motivations behind our diets. Thousands of years of humans thrived without diagrams and pyramids. Eating should be a simple, joyful pleasure.  The Price-Pottenger Foundation began to examine nutrition and disease back in the 1930s. Dr. Weston Price traveled the world to study bones and teeth in undeveloped nations. In short, his fascinating research concluded that processed foods, refined sugars, and convenience foods were nutritionally inferior and led to a host of health issues, not just immediately, but also over generations. Instead of improved health, people had declining health and bone formation. His work brings to light many of our current diet choices.

Noted nutrition author of Food Politics, Marion Nestle, (no relation to the chocolate baron), echoes the age-old advice to “eat less”.  While dietary advice may seem like a moving target, it truly comes down to calories consumed. Rather than isolate certain foods with a magic bullet effect, choose a variety of foods in small portions.

Remember that a supermarket’s job is to sell as much food as possible, so be wary of an apple display with vats of caramel dip next it. Question the carrots side by side with gallons of ranch dressing. Start thinking about each bite consumed in terms of true calories and health benefits.

Some of the most solid advice I ever received personally was to eat food that remembers what it is. Eat cheese, not cheeze curls; eat potatoes, not potato chips. Eat fruit, not plastic rolled fruit flavored roll ups.  Eat nothing that did not exist prior to 1900, when food processing began to explode. Consider the Slow Food movement of preparing food naturally. Take time to prepare food from scratch and consider it a trade off from time spent driving through a take out restaurant window. Eating a salad or piece of fruit is just as efficient as a greasy bag of French fries.  Reconsider diet not as a temporary cosmetic solution to tight clothing, but rather a lifestyle change.

We truly cannot afford to grow larger while our health diminishes. It is time to behave in a proactive manner and take back our health. Take our health out of the hands of the government and into our own pantries.  Our wallets, our clothing, our health and our future will thank us.

Editors note: What seemed a certainty less than a week ago, Bernanke’s confirmation to a second term as Fed Chairman, is a bit cloudy and muddy today given the uh-oh deer-in-the-headlight-eyes of some Dems up for mid-term elections come November. Needing someone to deflect blame upon for losing Kennedy’s Senate seat, Benji may be just the ticket for cowards like Boxer and her ilk. Our pal Robert Crisman has something to say about the whole de-reg mess that got us into the financial apocalypse in the first place. Can’t say we shouldn’t have seen it coming…

THE DEREG BAMBOOZLE? IT DIDN’T START THERE…

By Robert Crisman

Okay, here’s how it went: the sharpies pushed dereg to make credit easy so folks would get out there and buy. If capitalist gongos can’t sell their shit, the economy sinks like a stone.

But credit means debt. And, turned out last fall, a whole lot of people were short when it came time to pay.

All those banks, choked with shit markers. The economy sank like a stone.

Now, to revive it, those same fucking sharpies are saying we’ve got to get credit rolling again.

Talk about damned if you do…

Anyway, some history, for those who think the bill won’t come due one once again:

The whole story starts way back before plastic…

Remember old Marx, the guy you all thought went down for the count when Gorbachev bought it? Turns out he’s alive and kicking the lights out. Why not? This is the guy who had kapital covered, all the way down to the dime.

Okay, like I said, folks have to buy buy buy buy. Marx said that’s because a capitalist has to keep churning shit out, to fill up his share of the market, or some other gongo will step in take it, and he’ll wind up eating in dumpsters.

He called it overproduction—glutting the market till no one needs nothin’—which signals the kickoff from feast to capitalist famine. If no one needs nothin’, they ain’t gonna buy. If they ain’t gonna buy, then, crash, bam, boom, bam…

That’s where all this shit, dereg, etc., has its roots.

Economists these days would have you believe what Marx said is dinosaur shit. The gongos, they say, have found a way past that roadblock: ads, obsolescence, and credit up the yazoo.

First off, the ads, on TV and everywhere else in the world, 24-7 attacks on our frontals that tell us we’d all better brush, floss, and perfume our pits, then suck up the Bud and go test drive a Beamer, or we can forget getting laid for the rest of our miserable lives.

You think I’m joking? Everyone wants to get laid, except maybe Cheney who’d rather eat babies, and this has enabled the hucksters to turn us all into buy-or-die junkies for stuff. They spew it out, we suck it up. We shop till we drop as a matter of fact—and, all the more since a lot of shit that they sell us wears out or breaks in a hot New York minute, and we’ve got to hop down to WalMart or Target to stock up some more if we want to stay in the game.

Now—bear with me here—this ad slamma-jamma kicked off in the ‘20s, when we as a nation crammed into the cities. There we all were, yokels fresh out of the woods, without the first fucking clue how to make our way through the jungle. Ma, Pa, and the kids, who’d milked cows on the farm, had to learn a new game, i.e., go to work for The Man and buy all the stuff that they used to make for themselves. They’d grown their own food, for Chrissake! And now it came canned from Delmonte or something and they had to rustle up shekels to get it.

In ten fucking years, the ad guys turned Pa into Dagwood and Ma into Blondie, and Cookie and Al into,,,Dagwood and Blondie, the Next Generation. The old gods these folks had relied on to guide them had stayed in the woods or died off, which let the ad guys conjure up new ones, who spewed out their wisdom in magazine ads, and on radio and billboards—and then delivered the goods! Food, clothing, cars, the latest in gadgets, all sorts of cute trinkets—any damn thing you could think of!

These gods promised heaven on Earth for no money down with five easy payments, and you could get laid, starting now…

But get this: if you didn’t buy slices of heaven, well then, fuck you. You were one lame cocksucker. Your breath and pits reeked and you stole all your clothes off some dopefiend asleep in a doorway. They’d bury your ass in a landfill somewhere and forget that you’d stunk up the breezeway.

People bought shit like never before in the ‘20s. On credit. Their paychecks didn’t quite cover the spread. Businesses looking to wrap up the world paid later as well so they could grow bigger a whole lot more quickly.

Debt piled sky-high—and then the crash came at the end of the decade. Some big player didn’t get paid on a Tuesday, and couldn’t cover his bets on a Wednesday, and left guys he owed in the lurch and—Friday dawned with a whole line of corporate dominos sprawled on the ground like dead winos.

Came the ‘30s. It sure looked like rain. No one had jobs. The market was toast. The hucksters were eating those ads off the billboards so they’d keep from starving. Production of goods lay dead in the water. It looked like…The End…

Then John Maynard Keynes came along. A man with a plan! He told the government to print up some money, whole tons of money, albeit backed by nothing, to give to the gongos who kicked out the goods, so they could keep floating till people could buy stuff again.

Fuck the depression, Keynes said. We’ll paper it over with corporate welfare and the Big Boys’ll get this thing moving again!

Well, er, ah, not quite… We stayed in the hole. The market was hasta la vista. Caps have to sell and—who the fuck was there to sell to? Folks had no jobs and couldn’t buy squat—so why hire guys to churn the shit out?

Conundrum city! But hey, what the fuck. The war came along and spending to kick out the bullets and bombs put folks to work in a hurry. And after the war, the caps kept on churning out bullets and bombs, which kept people working—which gave caps a market once more, and thereby the chance to rev up civilian production and get fat as blowfish.

The Fabulous ‘50s! The ads, on TV now, told folks, buy buy buy buy, or lay down and die, alone and unmourned like a skunk by the side of the road.

Same psych as before. Folks bought, fed the monkey, and fell into the red zone like that.

See, as before, they didn’t have much cash. Inflation outstripped the wage gains like always. So the hucksters just mailed them plastic and turned them loose in the malls.

Buy now and pay pay pay later…

A seemingly infinite market was born! A sort of permanent overproduction took hold. Glut city for sure, but this was now a throwaway world—planned obsolescence!—filled up with buy-or-die junkies with plastic.

The glutters kept glutting and racking up bank and debt reached the moon. They all had to scramble to stay in the game but, hey, no prob, right? They just skipped abroad where labor comes cheaper so they could rake more bank—ensuring that junkies they’d downsized could not pay their debts and—

Those banks stuffed with shit markers…

The whole fucking world kept betting the check’s in the mail. It’d be here tomorrow…

In 2008, tomorrow showed up a day or a year or forever too late and—look at that, sports fans!

Bear Sterns, over a cliff, tattered and broke-dick like Wile E. Coyote!

All those ads, obsolesecne, the credit up the yazoo—all the shit that the gongos have so far come up with to end-around overproduction and—hey, what’s that sound?

Bones breaking on rocks down below.

And now they want to run the same movie.

My stockbroker told me last week, “The first chance you get, buy a parachute, man. Better yet, stay way away from high places….”

HHH

Editor’s Note: George Richard Tiller was an American physician and Director of  a clinic in Wichita, KS. The          Women’s Health Care Services Clinic was one of only three nationwide which openly provided abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy (known as late-term abortion.) In May of last year, Dr. Tiller was brutally gunned down by an extremist right-to-lifer  in front of his family and neighbors while attending Sunday church services in his community.

Ryn Cricket is the pseudonym of an accomplished fiction writer who got her start in radio journalism when she was 19.  Since then, she has written for various newspapers, magazines and journals in America and Thailand and traveled greatly through America, Asia, and Europe..  She currently teaches English (including Writing about American History, and Writing about Anthropology) at Case Western Reserve University, while attending her daily writing workshops in her dining room with her husband and their two babies underfoot.

And Now There Are  Four

By Ryn Cricket

Suppose you were five months pregnant and your baby died.  Devastated, depressed, and confused, you go to your ob/gyn who says that they are sorry, but you must continue carrying the dead baby until your body delivers it –whenever that will be.  In fact, every doctor you go to says the same thing..  Why? Because it’s considered a late-term abortion, and only 5 doctors in America could perform them –well, now there are four.

What if your ten year-old niece comes up to you can’t understand why she’s getting “fat.”  She has no idea about pregnancy, or how what her father has been doing to her has effected her.  By the time you realize what has happened, she’s past the sixteen-week deadline for an abortion.

What if you found out you had terminal cancer and you were going to be a single mom.  Maybe you didn’t even have health insurance.  What if you didn’t find out you had this cancer until 25 week into your pregnancy.  The doctors say you may die before you can give birth.

These are the cases that came to Dr. George Tiller.  They came from neighboring states, they came from hundreds of miles because there was no one else to go to.

Abortion has turned into both a religious and political issue.  It’s neither.  It’s a medical issue.  This is not a casual decision some woman makes as she’s walking past the clinic and thinks “Hey, maybe I’ll try that.”  This is an agonizing decision often made with the help of family and friends.  No one pickets outside of plastic surgery clinics when people elect to recreate their nose, or enlarge their breasts.  This was what God gave them, but apparently they don’t care.  Somehow, this is not an issue.

Although, I can’t think of a situation when I would decide to have an abortion, no matter how I am financially, and probably physically, but is it my right to tell a woman she must carry a dead baby inside her?  I had a friend go through that, and I wouldn’t wish her agony on anyone. It had taken more than a week from the time the baby dies until her body finally expelled him.  She was so scarred by going through the whole labor and then having to give birth to a baby boy who had been long dead.

Dr. Tiller was caring for his patients.  He believed in the rights of women.  He understood the gravity of their decisions.  Many of these fringe anti-abortionists feel that killing a professional man with a family, in a church, is somehow justifiable.  You don’t hear his patients complaining.  You don’t hear his friends and family talking about how evil he is.  Just total strangers thinking they are a greater judge than God in deciding what is right and wrong for other total strangers.

This is out and out terrorism.  No different than the Ku Klux Klan.  Lynch mobs terrorizing and killing a specific group of people they don’t like.  Dr. Tiller was a professional doctor, doing his job legally, and allowing his patients to exercise their legal rights.  We have freedoms with logical and legal foundations.  We need to protect those freedoms for everyone.

Editor’s note: I grew up with Formica TV tables and Wally and the Beaver. I know I’m dating myself but some days I can’t figure out how it all turned to shit so fast. What happened to American values? The term itself is practically repugnant. Who can  say any nation of 300 million can concur on a common set of morals beliefs and principles? But what about tolerance and willingness to at least listen? FOX News today announced that Sarah Palin is joining the team. Great. Now we’ll get a real objective and balanced take on the world.

If you want some real screed on Today’s America, look no further than Robert Crisman’s Rant below. Crisman has spent a lot of time studying American history, from around the time in the 17th Century when the European settlers first started salting blankets with smallpox and then selling them to the Indians, all the way through to today, when we bomb folks to rip off their oil.

THE SEWER

by Robert Crisman

Some dopefiend laughter stems not from horror, but from the fact that America, spewer of horror wherever you look, still paints itself as Walt Disney’s version of Heaven on Earth, where killers for God’s Greater Glory hold sway…

At 10:15 in the morning the red Escort pulled up and Rob jumped in. He slammed the door shut and Joey took off like a bat out of hell. This on the Ave in the U District, man, with 10 million cars all around.

They were going to see Edgar on Capitol Hill, twenty-five minutes away in this traffic. Edgar’d said a quarter to eleven. Be there or be dopesick.

Of course, Edgar might wheel his ass in there at noon, three, or midnight. He didn’t get dopesick.

Joey was a junkie forever. Rob was on-again, off again, and whenever he wanted to hop on the train, he looked Joey up.

They’d known each other since way before chiva. Downtown, the strip by the Market on Pike. Rob was mid-20s back then and Joey’d maybe hit 20. They’d liked each other right off.

Rob was one of those guys who get bird-dogged in malls by the gendarmes. A good-looking guy, but his mug belonged in a lineup. He stood 5’10”, weighed 170 or so, and had dirty-blond hair cut way short.

His grin let you know that he liked to run with the devils.

A good-looking guy. The next few years, though, would plane his face down and leave the impression that hard times had kicked him around some.

Hard times or no, he was funny. He made Joey laugh at his take on the squares, and the shape-shifting bandits who litter the mix late at night.

Joey, meanwhile, had brains in his head, could converse, and was pretty, with light-coffee skin, bright green eyes, boyish smile. He could’ve been on American Idol, all that.

He was the only black kid in the history of the world—the only kid period—who knew every word to every last song the Stones ever cut.

All this was climbing on 15 years back. They’d gone their own ways for most of that time, and now here they were, reunited and going to meet the connect.

Rob’s face was planed and Joey was chipped at the edges…

They were…friends? Well, not exactly; what sort of friend can a dopefiend really lay claim to, total creature of absolute need that he is? Still, though, they’d known each other since Jesus and—maybe this starts to get to it—they’d stayed in each other’s mind through the years. They weren’t just part of the flotsam and jetsam. They’d talked, shared perspectives, beyond all the day-to-day shit. Where most junkies drooled all those rock ‘n roll mumbles, Joey and Rob had talked politics, man, the social dynamic, cynically slanted of course—the world, they agreed, was pretty much shit and headed downhill all the way—but they both had sharp eyes and had read some, and knew a lot more than the potbellied nitwits who soak up FOX News and think they’re professors or something.

Joey and Rob, they weren’t just your scuts, am I right? They had opinions, like real-time folks. Dopefiends were outhouse; Joey and Rob were something other than that. And parsing and judging the world like they did brought alive a sense that they were somebodies, and not just two knick-knacks waiting to die in some dumpster…

They kicked it on up to Capitol Hill, a little of this and a little of that, and from there to the state of the union.

Their assessment: America, holocaust nation. Brought to you live and in color, with body counts climbing, blood in the gutters, and shrieks and screams for the soundtrack. The rapes and the murders, the beatings and stabbings and gunshots—a long-running circus on prime time.

Day after day after day after day. Babies shot dead by their gun-toting daddies in three states this week. An eight-year-old cub scout greased up and skewered in day camp by Scoutmaster Fred down in Texas. A whole girls’ soccer team groped by the coach. Altar boys reamed, steamed, and dry cleaned by priests. Twelve-year-old runaway Jenny, made pregnant by daddy and strung out on smack, beaten and kicked half to death by her pimp, and then butchered by some drooling trick at a Holiday Inn in Seattle.

Squares in their living rooms, shaking to slaughterhouse rebop: gangs and gang warfare; the od’s and homeless; autistic wreckage plowing through garbage for dinner; old women begging in doorways for nickels. Late-night disembowelments. Wars, wars and wars and more wars…

Slaughterhouse rebop…yet muddied and somehow made slightly unreal , squeezed in as it is among ads and more ads—non-stop, high-speed fantasias tricked out like Star Wars, and drumming the Dagwoods to buy buy buy buy, and keeping them dopesick for high-tech nirvanas.

Fly to the moon on your spanking new charge card and show God your muscles! Drive a new Lexus! Splash on Armani, wear blondes on your dick! And always remember—coitus goes better with Coke!

America, man! Where dreams all come true if you juice the right bandits.

Ah yes, the bandits: bone thugs in boardrooms who parcel out charge cards and run us like serfs to pay off the vig, whose pet banks have sucked up our money, hopes, futures, and tossed us right over a cliff.

Disaster, disaster, disaster, disaster! Enron, Bear Sterns, the Wall Street implosions; Katrina, Katrina, the war in Iraq; George Bush is a ratfuck; we’re doomed as a species, etc.

America, Potemkin Village, a filigreed sewer…. Rob and Joey laughed like hyenas.

And why not? Their stretch of the sewer had good rockin’ dope. Dope tamped the stink down and turned the rats into a movie.

Their lives, like a movie, at least for now. Budget house maybe, but still, a barrel of cold, nasty laughs.

They got with Edgar, then sat back and grooved as the rats did their thing…

Heaven on Earth. Pass the popcorn…