Entering the Lion's Den, and Surviving, Bernie Sanders Style

BERNIE SANDERS HAS SAND. Whatever else you say about Sanders, that he is old, that he is a socialist, that he needs a hair cut, he has the true grit. He went straight to Liberty University, a bastion of religious dogma and economic neo-liberalism, and gave a good old fashioned stump speech.The speech, predictably, was well attended and lukewarmly received. Although the Christians damned Sanders with faint praise and near silent applause, they didn't, much to their christian charity credit, run him out of the joint. They seemed to respect him for being there, for having entered the lion's den, so to speak, and addressing America's grotesque economic inequality from a moral perspective. Good move, Bernie. Like everyone else on the right wing, the students and faculty at Liberty want the U.S. government to leave the economy alone, and to concern itself directly with the interior of the female pregnant body. They agree with Sanders that something ought to be done to help the twenty percent of America's children who live in poverty, but they do not agree that the central government should force people to do it. Before a child is born, its life should be protected by legislation, but after it is born, it should depend of free market forces to take it from there. The first church of Christ and Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism, for those who don't know, is what everyone in the world except American's calls laizzez faire, trickle down, supply side, Reaganonimcs, which is a philosophy long discredited by credible economists. Even Adam Smith, the describer of the free market's invisible hand, clearly stated that all government action to help workers is justified, and that government action to help business owners is never justified. The dirty little secret is that even the father of modern free market capitalism understood that the free market is a way of exploiting labor, since labor is a resource, available for exploitation. That lesson has been lost, it would seem, on the minions at Liberty, and the rest of the conservative community. But if people like Bernie Sanders keep showing up at conservative venues, it may well be that "render unto Caesar" will eventually sink in, the Lord's will will, at long last, be done.

Profiting From Modern Slavery

SLAVERY, which was once legal in the United States, still is. If in doubt, consult the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We transferred the institution of slavery from the cotton and tobacco plantations to the prisons, cleverly and conveniently. Abraham Lincoln was quite the tyrant, and after all, he always said that his purpose was not to end slavery, but rather, to preserve the union. He perpetuated both, the latter, by a hair. Our prisons, and the slavery within, have since sprouted prolifically across the fruited plain, and have largely become privatized, profit seeking businesses. It costs a lot to incarcerate a convict, something like thirty grand a year, but prisons incorporated, one can rest assured, easily recoups the investment, thus making it highly lucrative, and irresistibly tempting, to lock people up. In essence, we are right back where we started, with a significant portion of the population incarcerated, enslaved. Anyone who doubts that prison is slavery is welcome to consult any current or recently released convict. For those incarcerated, every moment of every day is lived under the direct control of the state. Slavery, legalized. First, criminalize as much behavior as possible. Criminalize recreational drugs. Criminalize sex. then, round up the "offenders", especially the poor with little or no legal recourse, and lock them away, minorities first. Although the U.S. prison population is now decreasing as we finally comprehend the insanity of imprisoning people who use or sell recreational drugs, it remains quite high, too high, among the highest in the world, per capita. Any endeavor which makes money is destined to flourish in America, so it well may be that the current trend of decreased populations is only temporary, and that we will soon return to our normal state of being: with millions of non violent offenders sitting in cages, making money for their owners.

Hatin' On the FBI

IN 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, my father, who had a law degree at the tender age of twenty two, and who knew that he was no military man, tried to join the FBI. Seeing through his scam, they rejected him. Their loss. He turned out to be a pretty good country lawyer. The years went by, I came into the world, and another war, this one, far less holy, this one instigated by the United States, commenced against Saddam Hussein, in 1990. As I marched down the street with five hundred other people, protesting with my "no war for oil" sign flappin' in the breeze, there they were, suits, ties, lapel pins, and binoculars, keeping a watchful eyes on us from far above, atop the roof of the hotel Hilton. I waved. They didn't wave back, unless it was with gun barrels. I was afraid to look that hard. Twenty years later, a good friend of mine became a "person of interest" in a string of serial killings in New Mexico, the one in which all the victims were Hispanic prostitutes. After a year or two of constant harassment, including twenty four seven surveillance of his home, and the dissection of his computer and photography equipment, he was releases from the cloud of suspicion, with great reluctance by the Fibbies, presumably. At one point I went striding into the local FBI office to protest the treatment of my friend, and was politely told to leave. I still feel fortunate to be been afforded that opportunity. When I became a fan of John Grisham and read all his novels, my aversion to the Bureau was reinforced by the lawyer-writer who seems to agree with me, and who knows whereof he speaks. The FBI was founded in 1908 as a response by the federal government to the incipient revolution that was brewing during the "progressive era". The agency's original purpose was not the apprehension of criminals, but rather, the control of the American lower, and potentially revolutionary classes. Then came J. Edgar hoover, and the rest, as we say, is history. The feud with RFK, the wiretapping of MLK, and all the thuggish activities we have come to know and, one assumes, despise. I despise the Federal Bureau of investigation, for good reason, methinks, and long for the day, which will never come, when law enforcement is once again the exclusive purview of the fifty nifty, and all a criminal has to do to evade capture is to cross a state line. Good luck with that.

Trumping Trump

DONALD TRUMP is the most exciting participant in the current version of our never ending presidential selection process, if only because he isn't a polished politician, and his lack of polish manifests in a steady stream of outlandish pronouncements by the Trumpster. it also manifests in an outrageously egomaniacal personality. The Donald does not divide society into liberals and conservatives, as most political animals do. Rather, he divides society into two classes, the stupid people, and himself. Trump's New York office is festooned with photographs of - Donald Trump. His name is stenciled on everything he owns; helicopters, golf courses, office buildings, CD players, and fancy cigarette lighters. it is almost as if Trump is a self adulator, and if we are fortunate, he will garner the G.O.P. nomination, and keep right on regaling us with outlandishness. There is, however, a common misperception that the Donald is a "good businessman". Actually, he isn't. In 1974, his father, Fred Trump, left two hundred million dollars behind, and Donald inherited about forty million of it. Over the next forty years, he proceeded to grow this wealth into several billion, with a few speed bumps and bankruptcies along the way, by speculating in real estate, sports franchisee, and assorted commodities, often in ways that defied common sense. he bought low, and sold high, but sometimes the low never reached a high. So be it. Risk takers never expect all risk taking to yield profit. however, had Trump invested all forty mil in a good, solid, indexed mutual fund, and left it there for the same forty years, he would now be considerably ahead financially of where is now. the market has increased in value many times over during this period, almost exponentially, while his real estate investments have had an uncertain and rocky ride. In essence, Trump would be considerably wealthier today had he done nothing at all, other than pick a stable fund and waited. but where would the fun be in that?

Kicking Out the Mexicans

BACK IN THE DAY, as we like to say, Mexican-Americans had an even tougher go of it than they do now, if that's possible. Exclusion, unemployment, discrimination, the whole package, always and forever the American way. Not only that, but during the nineteen thirties about a million of them were kicked out of the country, in a national frenzy of racism, which was called, not deportation, but "repatriation". Words mean things, an illiterate man once said, and the gentler term conveyed the illusion that the exodus was voluntary, and accepted by its victims as a positive step in the right direction. The great American depression led to the great American anger, and then the great American scapegoating and kicking out. When a society is in a state of collapse, the minorities are given the blame. No, history does not repeat itself; all events are unique, but, as they say, it often comes close, it often rhymes. A new book, "Decade of Betrayal", by, um, some Hispanic dude, clearly documents the relevant events. There emerged a popular consensus that "they would be better off back where they belong, back with their own people", where they could get jobs, and find acceptance among their own kind. The Attorney General of the U.S. endorsed the movement, as did every state government, county government, and corporate entity in America. One million Mexican-Americans, roughly, most of them United States citizens, loaded onto trains, and sent across the border, deep across the border, in the hope that their return could be prevented. Amazingly, nobody knows anything about it, because the fact of this disgrace is not taught in our whitewashed historiography. The United States is a racist, ethnically bigoted country, and always has been. A nation of immigrants, divided against itself, always closing the door behind itself. See: the Chinese exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1924, and Donald Trump.

Much Ado About Very Little

WE HAVE REACHED THE BOTTOM of the barrel, surely. Haven't we? Surely we can go no lower. We are now divided over the following question: do all lives matter, or do black lives matter, as an exclusive category? The blacks, versus the many shades of grays. The barrel's bottom is where we argue the matter, as if it were an issue. Instead of merely agreeing that both propositions have merit, we squabble, we interrupt speeches, we storm stages, and we bicker, and we write editorials, endlessly. Can we do no better? Can we at least try to understand both points of view? White lives, or rather, wealthy white lives, have always mattered, and that fact need not be emphasized now, goes the black argument. And since black lives have never before mattered, we must place special emphasis upon the fact that now, at long last, they matter, or should. All lives matter, and we must all be included in what matters, go the grey proponents. Always something to argue about! The fools would be humorous were they not in such deadly earnest.

Praising Millennials, and Running From One of Them

ANYONE NOW BETWEEN THE AGES OF fifteen and thirty three is a "millennial". They who reach the age of eighteen in the third millennium = millennials. Great bunch of folks, in spite of their incessant staring at smart phones and inability to comprehend a world without Facebook and Tweeter. Smart as a thump to the rump as well, those kids. My sister, another boomer, after touring a new high school, declared that she would be incapable of passing in today's world. I tried to assure her that a flute is still a flute, Spanish is still Spanish, and that anybody can read history from a computer screen - but it didn't work. Something she saw hanging on the walls spooked her, and she hasn't stopped running since. Yo! Sis! Ya gots a college degree! You can hang, girl. No go. Well, OK. Fine. Be that way. They outnumber us. Enough of my classmates have died that the millennials have us down by about five million, and teh gap is growing daily. But that's a good thing, because them kids are less racist, more progressive, and a darned sight better looking than we. Plus, many of them drive those cute li'l scooters around campus, and you got to love that; they want to save the environment, and they want to save money, which, they will discover all too soon, will never be possible for them. They are the generation which brought us gay marriage; the Supreme Court merely affirming the ruling by a higher court. And they are the generation which has the opportunity to not only save the world, but also to elect one of their to the nation's highest office, chairmanship of the national Chamber of Commerce, and to elect Bernie Sanders to a lower office, the American presidency. It is they who are turning Bernie's campaign rallies into popular uprisings. I went back to college recently at the age of sixty, this time as a journalism student, after teaching in the public schools interminably. There sat hundreds of millennials, row upon row in too closely packed classrooms, I pads open, screens filled with subject matter other than the subject matter. How cute. Take a few notes, read a few texts, take a few more notes. The professor neither knows nor cares. I sat there with archaic equipment: pen and notebook. I simply didn't have any emailng or texting to get done, and anyhow, I kinda like looking at the professor during a lecture. Call me crazy, or antiquated. No matter. I'll be off planet soon enough, and they can take over. One of the twenty year olds took a shine to me - didn't she notice my gray lack of hair? Hell, she pretty much invited me over. I can see it now. We awaken together in the morning, finally recovered, well rested, a few calories shy, and I say: "so, um..what are your plans?" Oh, she plans to save money as a waiter - oops, server - then, its on towards her college degree, and career. What about you, sir? Well, my current plan is to kick it around a few more years, all the while becoming extremely old rather than reasonably old, and then, well, I'll go ahead and die. That's why I didn't take her up on it. I hope she'll someday understand. Its flattering to be thought cute by a millennial chick. Most guys my age would have jumped at the chance. Not me. I don't want to go through the pain of reminding a young lover that I have no plans other than to die in a few years.

Facing Away From Facebook; No Text, No Chat

IN THE YEAR 2000, inspired by the new millennium which was set to begin in the year 2001, I bought a computer, or rather, my mother bought one for me. It cost five hundred dollars, and had an eight gig hard drive and sixty four megs of R.A.M.. Rather primitive, rather expensive. I was told that AOL was the only way to go, so I went, into the chatrooms, the social media of the day. For me that lasted about five years, during which time I, like millions of others, spent way too much time online. Chatrooms faded away beginning in about 2005, replaced by Facebook and others. Today chatrooms are somewhat of a relic, too bad in a way, because they were fun, or could be. People got tired of all the acrimony, just as they are now beginning to do with Facebook , Twitter, and all the rest. I am told that Facebook and Twitter are increasingly acrimonious, and I believe it. People will get tired of that. In all likelihood our current modes of social media are fads, and will fade away, to be replaced by some future fad. I never got involved in the current forms; the chatroom experience cured me. I sense that when people join Facebook they consider themselves to be "customers" of Facebook. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Facebook's customers are all multi billion dollar corporations who purchase from Facebook advertising space and personal information, primarily shopping preferences, about tens of millions of members. And what, if not customers, are the members? They, dear reader, are the product. They are the goods and services, sitting on the shelf, voluntarily awaiting their sale to the billionaires. I have been told by people that "the best way to contact me is through Facebook or text messaging." Although nobody who says this ever bothers to ask me, I offer in return that the best way to reach me is to pick up a telephone and press numbers with thumbs, or to use snail mail. Those who text do nothing else, it seems. I never get phone calls or letters on paper. "I tried to text you", people say to me. "Keep on trying", I respond, "and try harder". I'll wait for the next fad, then decide what to do about it. I might ignore it.

Pursuing, Obtaining, and Keeping Power

OF TWENTY THREE MILLION SYRIANS, four million have fled Syria, all because a tyrant refuses to relinquish power. A civil war lasting four years, with no end in sight, should surely be construed as a hint that the current regime ought to perhaps leave office. How would the situation be different now if Bashar Assad had called for an election four years ago, or stepped aside? Hundreds of thousands of people now dead would still be alive, and instead of Assad controlling twenty five percent of the country he purports to legitimately govern, a legitimate government would provide stability for the entire nation. Assad is not at all unusual. Tyrants almost never surrender power willingly, and those who seek power, seek to become tyrants, spare no effort in their pursuit of it. Power over other people is addictive, it seems. Every organism wants to be in control of its environment, a survival imperative. In the United States, one cannot fail to notice how desperately and persistently candidates for president pursue power. they spare no expense, no effort. The pursuit of power in America is often called "public service". Perhaps it should be called "self service". For tyrants, the bigger the environment, the greater the emotional satisfaction and sense of security. Every American president has been accused of being a tyrant. In some cases, notably Abraham Lincoln, the accusation has merit. It can be and has been argued that every American president has committed criminal acts. Noam Chomsky asserts that every American president since World War Two should have been hanged, or shot, as a war criminal. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty will, from time to time, require the nourishment of the blood of patriots and tyrants. We see this now in Syria, and, all too soon, we are likely to see it again, and again. As Einstein said, a long as there are people, there will be war. we can hope he was wrong. Jefferson also said that he liked a little rebellion now and again.

Media, For Better or Worse

THE FACT THAT AMERICA'S LATEST mass murder, the one which happened on live TV in Virginia, involved journalists, is, first and foremost, not a valid indictment of the media. The news media has a bad rap and a bad rep these days; how much of it is deserved is anyone's opinion. Sometimes the American people blame the media for things for which they should blame the American people. Media is, after all, just another reflection of the larger culture from which it emerges. Alas, we are not gifted at blaming ourselves. How long will it be before all the copy cats show up, dramatically staging some hideous shooting spree and posting it on social media? Fame seekers, desperate, and flaming out brilliantly and taking others along for the ride. Products, ultimately, of our culture. What we call "social media", the electronic mob, can indeed attract terrorism, but it also has the obvious virtue of having the potential to promote democracy and equality of all kinds, social, economic, political. Syrian refugees are showing up in Europe with I phones; the world is well connected, any good idea has a chance, but so do the bad ones. One must ignore the chaotic cacophony and see the big picture, of a world where we can all share one another's misfortune, and devise new strategies to eliminate them. The internet is the cat, out of the bag, the cow, out of the barn. The internet is the place where the revolution of the world's poor against rigidly established economic systems which favor the wealthy can gain traction and momentum. It would take an epidemic of mass murders in living color to offset the potential good that can be done with today's electronic media.

Rethinking Crime and Prisons

FOR THE FIRST TIME in a long time, America's prison population is actually decreasing. It had been on the rise for decades, and the United States became the world's leading incarcerater, per capita. The U.S. still puts more people in prison per capita than places like China, North Korea, and Iran, and that's impressive. But who knows? Before Obama is done, he may let enough non violent offenders out to substantially further decrease the prison population, and lower America's place on the lock up list. Obama appears to be a big pardoner; on his last day in office - watch out! True, Obama is currently building a huge new two hundred million dollar super max in Illinois, but hell, in Illinois they probably need the extra space to house all their felonious former governors and Chicago style gangstahs. Generally, however, Obama has us heading in the right direction, incarcerationally; turning fewer people into criminals, whether by bad legislation or enforcement thereof, locking fewer people up. Bad legislation is turning drug users and dealers into criminals, rather than letting them be the self medicators and business people that they in truth are. The sooner we realize that drug dealers and users are only criminals because we chose to say they are, the better. Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff in prison? Gimme a break. Shouldn't financial crimes result in financial penalties? The assets of such wealthy people would make good restitution. Let 'em clean the floors at fast food restaurants, or something equally productive and necessary. Someday our descendants will marvel at how barbaric we were, that we imprisoned each other so often.

Counting Trees

THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY three point four trillion trees in the world, according to scientists, satellites, and computers. This is a recent estimate, and far exceeds anyone's previous guess. Most folks probably would've said something like, oh, half a billion. This huge number is surprising to most people, including the scientists who discovered it. So we have more trees, many more than we ever thought, which means we're out of the woods, so to speak, relieved of any threat of a tree shortage. Right? No more worries about rain forests or suburban expansion. We'll always have enough trees. Except for one thing. Recent research also strongly suggests that human beings, during their short time on earth, have cut down about half the original number of trees, and are losing about ten billion a year, even as we speak, net. So, perhaps we're not quite out of the woods yet, and may in fact be heading ever deeper into them, what there is left of them. You have to figure that if we replaced three and a half trillion trees, and got back up to seven tril, a lot of excess carbon now in the atmosphere would be eaten up, wouldn't you? Well, who knows...but we do know that carbon is tree food, and that for humanity to add a little extra carbon to the atmosphere probably makes things grow faster, as long as you don't add so much that we burn ourselves up climatically. So should we plant a trillion trees now? There is a tree planting organization which originally set its goal at planting a billion, but has now amended that to one trillion, in light of the new information. They might need a little help.

Unbelieveingly Retrospecting

IF YOU'VE NEVER TURNED SIXTY, then gone back to college for free, give it a try. I heartily recommend it. You get to meet all the grandchildren you never had, or could have had, and after the first three days you're walking at their pace, barely and sorely, unless you happen to be wearing flappers, which I was. Flappers and a necklace. Hell yeah. Be modern. Be hip. The memories come cascading back. Forty years ago, the nineteen seventies, another campus, another time. Massive boxy immobile telephones, three television channels. All those history classes, the B.A., M.A., PhD., abd (sometimes, just to be rebellious, I tell people I have the degree. Hell, I damned near do.) Decades of short term teaching jobs and relationships, often enlivened by debates with administrators on the proper version of American History. Present the version wherein Thomas Jefferson is an atheist at your own peril. Ah, those halcyon days of hiding beneath our desks in third grade, withstanding every Soviet nuclear assault ever launched, unscathed. The Cuban missile crises made me more pacifistic, and more paranoid. The summer after I graduated high school I watched the Watergate hearings daily, and it radicalized me. Now,as I walk among the millennials, I feel thankful for forty years of sustained exercise. But all this computer stuff still rather frightens me, though of course it shouldn't. Hell, I have my own blog. Had someone told me in 1973,when I was 18, that in the year 2015 I'd be walking around a university campus wearing my high school class ring and a black and red lips n' tongue Rolling Stones T shirt, and that I would be a returning student, not a professor - I'd have rolled my eyes, beneath my long hair. I hope these twenty year olds aren't rolling their eyes at me. I know I can handle this, I know I can deal with this..somehow... Hell, I even got a couple of compliments on the shirt.

Playing Football As If It Were Rugby (which it should be)

EACH AUTUMN, all across America's fruited plain, high school football photographs festoon slender newspapers; youthful, innocent faces grinning confidently. The handsome high school player beaming from my local newspaper eagerly looks forward to the season, and to playing both offense and defense, because in both situations he'll be the one doing the hitting, he says. There was a time when American football involved blocking and tackling; now, it involves hitting. Hitting is blocking and tackling with as much brute speed and force as one can muster, the more the better. It is playing with a vengeance, playing to hurt people, tackling with the rock hard helmet instead of the arms and legs, and it is the way football is played at all levels. but it wasn't always that way. There was a time when we blocked and tackled; now, we hit, and hit as hard as we can. As our culture has become more extreme and violent, so has our most popular sport. The result is an epidemic of severe injuries to current football players, and mental and physical disabilities among retired football players. The way the sport is played now, its very difficult, and debilitating, to play very many years. Most players are done after high school, to the betterment of their health. The answer, of course, is to return the sport to its origins: rugby. And apparently football coaches across America are starting to do just that. They are, rumor has it, starting to study rugby, and to encourage the return to traditional body tackling, designed for efficiency rather than violence. In rugby nobody wears a helmet or pads, and the sport is sufficiently exciting and violent, but relatively free of serious injuries. Our American football, exciting though it is, has lost its way, and has become too violent, with way too many, way too hard hits, and, not coincidentally, too many missed blocks and tackles. When we do things in a reasonable way, we nearly always improve them.

Arguing Against Empire

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA maintains over eight hundred military bases in more than one hundred countries. Most of them were established soon after World War Two; many have been added since the end of the cold war. America has, however, been an empire, an ever expanding domain far beyond its starting point, since its inception. Most Americans, as usual, either aren't aware of this, or are, but don't care. The American people have never given their explicit permission for the global American empire, but, as always, permission by the people does not matter. And in any case, by ignoring the situation, we Americans are in fact giving tacit permission, just as we give tacit permission and acceptance of all manner of corruption. A new book, "Base Nation", examines the history and impact of the empire. Author David Vine concludes that the empire has cost the world and the United States in many ways, far more than any benefits derived. We would all, including the United States, be batter off without America's network of far flung bases. They are very expensive, and they no longer serve a useful or necessary purpose, since U.S. naval and air power guarantee that the U.S can strike anyone in the world from within its own borders. Vine argues that the United States can remain the world's preeminent military power without all the expense and volatility of empire. The possession of empire always increases the risk of foreign wars. America became an empire rather quietly, and easily, in retrospect, and each step along the way was accompanied by assurances given to the American people that the process was absolutely necessary, in the best interests of all Americans. It could be argued that the building of the American empire was not beneficial to those who died in wars securing it, but somehow, advocates of unlimited American strength and influence never mention them.