Bad American

Where it began. . . I can’t begin to knowin’

(Oh man, the UPS guy just caught me listening to “If You Know What I Mean” and I find out HE’S a big fan too - we’re all coming out now!)

Some good news today if you’re a Sirius radio subscriber and you like Neil Diamond. And even more good news if you live in Cleveland.

Starting at noon today on Sirius channel 3 - Neil Diamond Radio!

And Monday morning tickets for Neil Diamond’s one night only Cleveland performance August 3 go on sale.

New CD out as well.

Tickets? Yikes! - not cheap. Tickets start at $55 and go to the stratosphere from there.

OK, I don’t know if this OK to admit now but I was a fan when it wasn’t cool for someone at my age to be a fan. What critics hated about Diamond I always liked - his overwrought, emotional, bombastic style (of the 70s I should add) which showed up in albums like “September Morn,” “Beautiful Noise,” “Serenade,” and the ever-reviled “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

I loved them all. It’s a schizophrenic thing to be such a hard ass realist on one hand and have such a sappy romantic musical side on the other. Perhaps it’s the hope side in me, I don’t know. If I ever need cheering up, I know who to listen to.

I last saw Neil Diamond at the old Richfield Coliseum back in 1984. Great show, especially the wonderfully bombastic “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.”

I know some of you are shaking your heads in disbelief right now - HE likes THAT? Yeah. I guess it’s the wonderful thing about being 45. You don’t have to worry about being cool anymore.

One of my earliest radio memories was hearing “Cracklin’ Rosie” on my dad’s transistor while waiting to go to school one morning back in 1970 on the old WKYC Radio 1100. And the vacation to Florida in 1972 hearing Song Sung Blue about fifty times.

And at old Municipal Stadium they’d play “The Good Lord Loves You” among other pre-game selections.

Eighth grade - Beautiful Noise; freshman year in high school - September Morn, a favorite of Larry Morrow in the morning on the old 3WE. And on and on. “Cherry, Cherry:” one of the quintessential songs of the sixties. And Neil Diamond wrote “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone” and “I’m A Believer” for the Monkees, in case you didn’t know.

I spent about the same amount of money to see Bruce Springsteen. Neil Diamond is one of my few ‘bucket list’ artists and I guess I’ll take my shot Monday morning.

In the meantime, one hour to Neil Diamond Radio.

Note: this piece was tacked on to the end of the Whitney/Hedges story originally. I felt it best to make it a separate post.

I had a talk with a friend in my store the other day. The subject centered around the entire mental health industry in this country and what was a reliable definition of mental illness.

Of course, many say that the definition of being looney is when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results. I think of that every time I go vote in a national election. I think I finally get it.

I told my friend that, generally, people with low intelligence and skills rarely seek mental health help unless the state forces it on them. In general terms, it seems to me that the more aware you are - of yourself, your surroundings, your history and culture - the more likely you were going to be diagnosed with some form of depression or other condition.

Think about it.

My theory is that once people have figured out that the cultural, economic and sociological facets of our society are insane, they can no longer mentally function well within it.

You keep looking for things to make sense and they stubbornly do not. Those in authority do not act morally or responsibly. The economic system doesn’t reward honest work but rewards those with the morals of snakes. Organized religion offers platitudes designed to keep you happy in your station while reliving you of extra income. A country that was founded on high-minded idealism fails to follow through throughout it’s history. Good people are cashiered while assholes are rewarded with money and fame.

And over and over again you’re told, no ordered, to worship this system as the best, fairest and most lucrative on the planet.

And if none of that works, out comes the “life isn’t fair” rationale. Yes, we all know life isn’t fair. But why does it have to be so goddamn unfair? And why do we seem to celebrate its unfairness as a moral good?

And the more intelligent and sensitive people ponder these questions, the more disturbed they become.

One of the things I used to say on my radio show on WJBC in Bloomington which no doubt endeared me to many in my audience is that to remain sane, one must give American culture the middle finger.

And six years later, I still stand by that assumption.

Why is it then that we have so many people working themselves into the ground to die with the most toys? And why do they seem to have to work so hard at convincing themselves that they are happy? And why do they treat other people like shit?

We are told, as Hedges writes in his column, that money is the way we keep score. Jesus Christ, in the words of the New Testament, said it  is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. But our churches only give the real words of Jesus lip service while they preach the prosperity gospel.

So many disconnects and contradictions in American life. One could co crazy trying to rationalize them all out.

And that’s the point with this quadrennial fallacy known as the national elections.

Hedges is right - no one gets here without passing muster with Corporate America and their house organ media. And Americans do what they’re told and believe what they’re told.

More and more online, I read of people who have found some measure in happiness by giving up watching the corporate news channels or by giving up television all together. I think it’s an excellent way to save a lot of money in these times - disconnect your cable. If you have the Internet, you can watch most of the shows you want the next day or week anyway. And you can get far more reliable news and commentary.

I think the other thing we need to realize is that as long as we’re trying to play the American Game of keeping up with the Joneses, we’ll always be unhappy. This is not a great thought - others have said the same thing for decades, but it bears repeating. Stuff doesn’t make us happy. Believe me, I know - I’ve had stuff and not had stuff and I was no more happy either way.

I think the next thing is to stop participating in our rigged and fixed national elections or at least not holding any hope at all that voting within the system will change things. Reliance on our sham democracy to bring meaningful change only keeps people looking ahead and hoping for a miracle that never occurs rather than working within our sphere of influence to make things better.

I see good people like Jill Zimon over at WLST keep banging her head against the Chris Redferns and Marc Danns of the world as if heartfelt and reasoned appeals to the better angels of our nature will force power to concede anything. I like Jill, but I think the lesson to be learned is that America, power is it’s own reward and need rarely to justify itself.

At what point will your head start feeling better when you stop banging it against the wall?

I’ve been banging my head against this wall for 30 years and nothing will change unless the American people wake up and break the back of corporate power in this country and try a different way of living. And that isn’t going to happen because the people have been taught to love their slaveowners and believe, with a fervid faith that one day, they too, can aspire to being a slaveowner if only they follow the rules and work hard enough.

And revolutions are just too messy and inconclusive. Better to just get a little for yourself, enjoy your toys and keep your head down and your mouth shut and maybe they’ll leave you alone.

What do people do?

Many lose themselves in alternative realities - everything from drugs to yoga to Scientology. Call it what you want, it’s still an understandable attempt at creating alternative semi-autonomous personal zone where we can believe in a higher power or order that will bring us peace and contentment - separate from the everyday madness of the real world.

In truth, we play a lot of mind games with ourselves. We believe that perhaps we can tap into other consciousnesses or powers that will guide us through our lives and protect us and give us the personal power that we lack in the real world.

But every April 15, reality kicks back in. We’re slaves in real life (Morpheus’s battery) - only free in our own minds. And for many of us, if that’s the best we can do, then that’s the best we can do.

But I also think that only works if you limit your mind’s exposure to all of the crazymaking that comes out of the idiot box and the other forms of popular media and popular entertainment. This is very hard for many of us.

For me, I have an almost neurotic obsession with being informed 24/7 for no other reason than I want to be prepared for whatever disaster is in the offing. So I parse the MSM like people read tea leaves, trying to read between the propaganda for the real story. It gets exasperating and often leaves me with a vague sense of nausea.

In many cases, I think those of us who believe we may have figured out that maybe it’s not us but the society that’s insane wonder if we have to live as the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar in the movie The Matrix?

I don’t have the answer to that because there isn’t one. Those of us who understand have to find their own methods of remaining sane. All I know is for myself, the longer I live the less I care about the ‘things’ of this world, what people think of me, what I own, and what I do to make a living. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. If so, it’s blasphemous in modern life.

Nothing I write here is anything new or profound. I know that. A big part of my own blogging experience is therapeutic and, in this case, it’s free therapy. Take it for what it’s worth.

I’m checking my online accounts periodically today to see if the money has been deposited into it.

And I hate it.

I hate the fact that business is so bad in my little town among other places, that this check will actually help me pay my bills for the upcoming month. Believe you me, I work hard at making my store a success despite the economy. It almost seems like a admission of failure to be counting on this money.

Sure, I have a business line of credit like many small businesses. But I hate the idea of having to depend on a credit line. I offer a good product at a great price with a sound business plan. And I strive to pay my debts off as much as possible every month.

But I can’t make people part with their disposable incomes in these times when it might be gas or food over a particularly interesting book. And believe me, I understand that completely.

Things are tight and getting tighter. I hear it and see it every day right in front of me.

Last week, in another blow to the local small business culture, the bakery attached to my store, literally at the hip, gave up the ghost after less than five months of operation.

And that hurts my traffic as well. In a small town business climate, everything rolls downhill or, perhaps, a better analogy, picture dominos falling — down a hill!

And yet, our local Chamber of Commerce, of which I am a part, is concentrating a new business retention program on larger employers. I have held my tongue on this, but as the little guys go, so goes the big guys. I guess there are people here who view the moms and pops as expendable. As the situation with food and fuel gets worse, it will be the local mom and pops that will service the community while the Wal-Marts abandon these towns and leave large hulks of empty building and parking lots in their wake.

Back to the ‘windfall,’ I also hate the fact that it’s merely an advance against next year’s tax liability any way. It’s not ‘free money’ falling like manna from the sky in any way.

But a lot of us need it and need it far worse than I do.

And that’s why I also hate it because I know this is putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound - the American economy - and will NOT have the overall stimulus effect the White House is advertising. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll take it, but ask the average person you know to put a figure on how much money it would take to really offer them some relief. Tell them to be reasonable, yet honest.

For me, that would be about $5,000. That would put me back on my feet and give me a sound shot at getting back on my feet and possibly expanding my small business while catching up on my credit debt load.

The $600 I will get will be thrown at the debt load, NOT on spending on any baubles.

But, of course, I hope that maybe some people will use their reimbursement check to buy a few books. But for most people, the best thing they could probably do with their money is to try and get back on top of managing their debt.

Click. Check. No, not yet.

You know what’s the saddest thing in not having the Plain Dealer delivered to my store since April 1?

I don’t miss it at all.

Seriously, I’m not just saying that to be cute, in the grand scheme of my daily life, I just don’t miss it at all.

And the REALLY sad thing is that, after 30 plus years of having a daily newspaper delivered to me, whether it be in Ohio, Illinois or Iowa, I don’t miss not having it delivered at all.

f you had told me even 10 years ago that I would feel this way, I would have thought you didn’t know me very well.

After all, I was the kid who would run outside on a cold February afternoon to retrieve The Cleveland Press from a snowbank and bring it back to the warmth of our family living room to read from page to page, front to back.

And I was 11 years old.

Sad, really.

While on one hand, I do miss the reliability of having something to read with coffee and cereal, this laptop (not TV) has taken the place of the newspaper. And I do not miss all the garbage space taken up by discarded newspapers every week.

And I don’t have to even try to miss Kevin O’Brien’s weekly vomit in the Plain Dealer (or Ted Diadiun’s weekly excuse for that matter). And I don’t miss all the “lifestyle” crap that has all but crowded real in-depth news from most of America’s daily newspapers. No more having to see LeBron James on the front page. If aliens came from another planet and all they had to go by was the Plain Dealer, they’d have to assume that LeBron James was the King of Cleveland or some kind of local deity.

I saw the Plain Dealer at the local Wal-Mart the other day desperately trying to give free copies of the paper to people leaving the store. Poor guys: there were so few takers.

I have tried and tried and tried and tried for many years to get the editorial barons of the newspapers I have worked at lately - The Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Peoria Journal-Star especially, to do what was necessary to make their newspapers read and relevant again. But the people who are promoted to high levels in the field are not real journalists anymore but corporate hacks. In Diadiun’s case, he always WAS a corporate butt sucker - while I don’t know O’Brien’s history, one can reasonably assume he was never a friend to ordinary working people.

But hey, they have nice houses, decent cars and probably fun wives and isn’t that what people get into the business for anyway?

Professionalization. Send junior to J school and pretty soon he’ll be reporting the daily government news from the Green Zone in Baghdad like he/she actually believes it! All you have to do is be willing to sell your soul and life can be pretty good in the biz.

Oh hell, why bother? Roldo Bartimole has been writing the same things I do here only better and for over 30 years and exactly nothing has changed. And as long as the money men treat newspapers and media outlets like Wall Street profit centers, nothing will ever change. Because in our country and culture that’s all that matters.

So it’s essentially the useless ravings of a crank (in this case, me) who made the supreme mistake of falling in love early and hard with journalism just as it was becoming more of a business than a craft. Just before the First Amendment became a quaint anachronism of an America that probably never existed anyway; where now anything and everything is a marketable commodity and we don’t ever pause to think perhaps life might have meant more than that.

But if the corporate denizens that run newspapers and media outlets keep wanting to make the payments on their summer homes, they should heed well the reality that I am by no means, the only person who doesn’t miss their daily newspaper at all.

The text of the e-mail I received from my Canadian podcasting partner-in-crime, Matt Adams:

hi,

Matt

You have to hand it to the Chinese - there must be hordes of functionaries constantly combing the Internet for any sign of “Western decadence” or some such that the Chinese people must not be allowed to hear.

And they found our little podcast. I am so honored to be singled out as a National Security Threat to the Chinese Quasi-Communist Government. At least give the Chinese credit for that - they’re pretty overt in letting people know they’re a threat. The US and Canadian governments keep you guessing whether you’re on some such list or another - or not.

This leads me to the whole Olympic issue which I’ll deal with briefly.

I pay no attention whatsoever to the Olympic Games. Never have, never will. As long as sport is used in way that encourages jingoistic nationalism - ours or anyone else’s - I could care less about it. Hitler in 1936 was just the most overt example of the trend. The Communists and the US used the games as some sort of sick showcase - if our athletes were better than yours, than our society was better than yours.

Count me out.

And the fact the IOC gave the games to the Chinese is about as odious an example as you can get. The ought to ring the running track with the bodies of dead Tibetians (?) if the Chinese are so proud of what they have done.

The Chinese state is a brutal and repressive regime that the US (also a repressive regime in other ways, more subtle but still effective), plays footsie with due to their slavish devotion to the almighty dollar.

Again, count me out.

When they have an Olympics in a truly neutral site, say Switzerland, and the athletes compete without having to wave their country’s flags and mumble their national anthems at award ceremonies, then I might care.

Back to the original subject - if you want to strike a blow for freedom of speech, listen to our podcast, highlighted twice above. It’s entertaining AND informative - wow, what a concept!

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away, to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

– Supertramp, The Logical Song

I am drawn to stories and posts like this one on Pam’s House Blend.

It may surprise some of my readers that I was once quite the conservative. I do a lot of self-analyzing (not common among cons) and I am pretty sure that the reason I swung to the right side of the political spectrum in my young adulthood was a psychological desire to be accepted by what was then thought of as the dominant social group. This was in the age of Reagan and the ascendancy of Rush Limbaugh, who I wasted many hours I will never get back, listening to.

I know what was wrong with me but it was quite understandable when considered now. I had come from a background of being a from a working class family that, bless my parent’s hearts, always strove to launch themselves into the upper middle class with middling success.

It’s hard to claim working class roots when your dad (in what I will forever call “Ed’s folly”) installs an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard. What did my dad do? He sold carpeting for Sears. My mom was a public school teacher. This was the 1970s when people who had those kind of jobs could aspire to the Great Toys of the Upper Middle Class. And dad wanted to give his family the best of everything whether he could really afford to or not. Try doing that nowadays with similar jobs.

Sure we had that damn pool. It wasn’t heated (that would have cost nearly as much as the pool itself), so in this climate, and shaded by large maples, the swimming season ran from early June to late August. It had its moments which I will fondly remember. It died in the 1985 earthquake. Long story.

Yes we had the pool. But I would come home and find the phone disconnected for non-payment. Occasionally the house would grow cold in the winter when the ‘rents had to scramble to find cash for the oil delivery. And we actually had a memorable vacation to Wyoming in 1970 - paid for by a loan by Sun Finance.

One of the ‘luxuries’ my ‘rents went into serious hock for was to send me and my sister to a local Catholic grade school where we were, quite frankly, among the lower earning families.

At Notre Dame, the nuns clearly favored the kids of families who paid by Plan A. That was the plan where you simply paid for the tuition all at once at the start of the year. We were Plan D people - monthly payments which I dutifully carried to school when I was old enough to be trusted with them. Early on I was well aware of the differences in treatment. Some kids got all the cushy parts in the plays and positions of authority. Some kids, despite all their best efforts, didn’t have a prayer. And I mean that quite literally.

Even though dad did his best to provide us with the American Dream ™, it was quite clear in my 8-1/2 years of incarceration at Notre Dame Elementary that my ‘rents were rank poseurs next to the attorneys, doctors, business executives and such whose kids surrounded me. Add to the fact that I was bookish, fat and had a funny last name, you can imagine what I endured for years. Not nearly as bad as the kids referenced in the House Blend post, but for a sensitive boy, the imprint was deep and long lasting.

I think the reason my dad would so often get mad at my attitude was that as hard as he was trying to give us “the good life” I could see how far short we fell in relation to the kids we went to school with and I let him know it. I never forgot going over to Jimmy C’s house to pick him up for a play date and having the door be answered by their maid. Why can’t we have a maid, dad?

I can understand why he would be mad at me for that. But he didn’t have to build the pool or send us to a pricey Catholic school. I really wanted to stay in the public school I had started kindergarten in. To this day, though, I wondered if I would have been as sensitive to class if I had stayed there. I might have been happier overall. More on that later.

In any case, I do believe that I had a deep yearning to finally be accepted by the country club type Republicans I went to school with (remember the TV show “Square Pegs?” I could relate. It hurt). And that spilled over into my young adulthood when I went against most of what I truly felt inside of me to try, one last time, to ‘be felt as acceptable; presentable.’

To make a long story short, without the requisite breeding in both money, status and religiosity, it wasn’t going to work. There were a few moments of clarity that brought home the fact that I was trying very hard to be accepted in a social group of people I inherently despised. Call it leftover Stockholm Syndrome or whatever, but I felt I had to try to fit in.

One time was during the debates over Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. I went with the rest of the Young Republicans to a public forum where we listened to the ’sob stories’ and then one of the members of our group got up and lectured the poor women whose daughter was refused care at a local hospital about the necessity of genuflecting before the free market capitalist system of America because it had been given to us by God through his prophet Adam Smith.

The woman responded from her heart and gut with a ferocity that perplexed poor Joe (the oberfuhrer of our YR group) who sat down muttering to the rest of us about being ‘attacked’ for merely reciting Biblical economic truth.

A light went on. I instinctively felt sorrier for the woman and her daughter than I did for Joe.

Yeah, I know, muddle headed liberal commie bastard not recognizing the wisdom of his betters. If the goons from Lone Star Times, Free Republic or any other Modern Fascist sites read anything more on my blog or even this entry, they probably have their rope hanging fingers itching about now. Yeah, I should have been strangled in the crib.

I think, though, the reception we had for visiting YRs at the Bond Court Hotel in downtown Cleveland was the tipping point. Here I was in my ill fitting suit sitting on couches around all these trust fund babies actually smoking these big fat cigars (again a Limbaugh affectation brought to us courtesy of the YRs from Dayton) and it just hit me: what the hell am I doing here with these people?

And so the recovery started. As is my won’t I made a very wide and pronounced swing from one extreme to the other. But then again, I WAS Jimmy Carter in a student debate back in 1976 at Notre Dame. So I was returning to my original roots and basic human impulses, just more so.

In fact, I’ll never forget the aforementioned Jimmy C who led the Gerald Ford debate contingent, mention that Carter’s modest health care proposal of the time was “socialism” and seeing most of the other sons and daughters of medical professionals visibly recoil in horror at the mention of that dreaded S word.

But the one common thread that ran through all of my close encounters with the right wingers throughout my life has been one very undeniable (at least to me) salient fact - they were all bullies of some sort or gravitated to bulling types of people or behavior.

And of course, they grew up and continuing their bullying ways in business and politics or wherever they found themselves planted. They gravitate toward the aforementioned right wing sites or start their own (like Captain’s Quarters or Little Green Footballs or insert your favorite here:). You can see a rhetorical string running through all of the writing and commenting on these sites that go right back to the playground: America was good to me - if it wasn’t good to you or you didn’t make it, it was probably your own damn moral failing and you should probably have the shit kicked out of you for it.

After all, ask yourself - how many bullies do you know who espoused liberal politics or social theory? ALL of the bullies I have ever met or known were conservatives. It’s the natural outgrowth of a basic belief system that rests upon the premise that ‘might makes right’ and those that are the successful players of the game of social Darwinism both deserve everything they were able to get AND that it proves that God loves them more.

And having observed these people up close and personal for many years, if they were truly honest with themselves, they’d admit it. In most cases, the arrogance comes out over fine Scotch among the table talk of trusted people. The odd thing happens once and awhile when one of them forgets they’re in front of an open microphone and makes a racist joke (like Earl Butz) or a funny about nuking Russia (Ronald Reagan). After the requisite public apologies they go back to their clubs and make the same remarks all over again. I know, I’ve heard them - the racist, sexist, homophobic table talk. And I have to say that now I AM ashamed at myself for trying to suck up to these people. Perhaps my vociferousness today is some kind of psychological ‘make good’ for those days. I am truly sorry for having supported people like that in my past. I often wake up remembering these incidents and hating myself for them.

Yeah, I can hear the cons reading this thinking: ’self-hating liberal white guy’ and ‘you were truly unworthy of us.’

Yeah, I know.

When you spend your entire life feeling like you were dropped here from outer space as some kind of grand cosmic mistake, you second guess yourself a lot.

It also helps if you raise a son who is autistic and see the way even our so-called enlightened American society treats these kids. It humanizes you beyond what any book or speech could ever do.

So when I read stories like the ones in the Pam’s House Blend post about kids who were persecuted at school by the ‘herd’ because they were gay, appeared effeminate or different in some way, my blood begins to boil. Yeah, sue the bastards. But that plays right into the cons’ view of liberals as ‘momma’s boys’ who run to the court when they get hurt.

I have always said that the proper response to bullies is a well swung baseball bat to the chops, complete with the flying teeth and blood splatter. It’s one of the reasons, as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment (yes, THAT one) that I support groups such as Pink Pistols (because armed gays don’t get bashed - for real). If anyone needs to arm themselves in America, it’s liberals and those of us who are ‘different’ some way from the ‘norm.’

I have no doubt (because I’ve heard too much of the table talk in person) that many, if not most of these conservatives, if they really could run the country the way they wanted, would start building concentration camps for the people they hate. Oh, in public, they’d strongly deny it, but you’d be surprised (perhaps not) at how many of these people actually are, at core, real live fascists.

It’s one of the reasons I urge my fellow lefties to stop with the nice talk and realize that people like Sally Kern really, really, really, viscerally hate you and, if they had their way, would be herding you into extermination camps. Stop being nice and playing Marquis of Queensbury rules with the language. Call a fascist a fascist. Call a hater a hater. Don’t let people like Jonah Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly get away with it. If you have to start swinging fists and being impolite on television or radio, do it. If anything, you’ll get more respect from average Americans who generally only understand violence as a way of solving everything.

I know a lot of liberals still believe they can reason with and change bullies. They feel that by ’stooping to their level’ they will somehow become that which they hate. I wonder if the folks at Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership would buy that rationale vis a vis 1930’s Germany? In the Unitarian Universalist church I used to belong to in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I would ask these people if they’d be the first ones to politely board the boxcars to their own destruction? They didn’t care for the analogy. I didn’t care.

After awhile even a beat dog with little to lose starts to contemplate one last satisfying bite into their tormentor before getting the last bullet. Until this species reaches a different stage of evolution, we are still faced with the stark fact that if we want to be allowed to live in some measure of safety and respect, the only language that the bully understands is force.

Harlan Ellison wrote a great short story in the Approaching Oblivion collection (1974) tited One Life Furnished in Early Poverty, where, as a grown adult, he went back to his youth (strangely enough in nearby-to-me Painesville, Ohio where I lived once) and meet the kid he had been. A kid who had been mercilessly bullied for being Jewish.

If you’ve never read it, you should. It may bring tears to your eyes. It did to me. Ellison, as Gus Rosenthal, fights off the bullies and befriends the young man that was him as a youth. But then something unforeseen happens. Rosenthal sees the kid becoming too dependent on him and realizes that for better or worse, the child he had been needs to go through these trials alone in order to grow up as the guy who would later feel deeply enough to write these stories.

But Ellison’s description of the bullying he endured in Painesville, which really bordered on the calculatingly cruel, cut very close to the bone for me. But where I fall is that I very vividly remember, even after 30 years, all the kids we, quite literally, bullied completely out of the school - people like Greg A and Chris H.

And yes, I said we. For to distract attention from the reasons I was bullied, I joined in the torment. If I could pull an Ellison in real life, I’d love to go back as an adult and kick the shit out of Jimmy C, Harry N, Robert L and some of the others who tormented these innocent kids.  Wherever they are, I hope that Greg and Chris aren’t as fucked up as I am from elementary school. Even now when I think of them and others, I feel sadness and shame for what I didn’t do. Yeah, the nuns, by turning their backs to these scenes, taught us well what life would hold.

No, some of us CAN’T quite move on. Ellison never really moved on - his experiences in Painesville formed the leitmotif of his work- he turned his angst into a body of literature. Not being as talented (I can’t write fiction for shit), I guess the other parts of my remaining life are some kind of make-good for either standing by silently or joining in those taunts.

I have always hated bullies and being bullied. Read from that what you will.

I went to bed last night not feeling well at all. I had a bad sinus headache and wasn’t feeling too well overall. So perhaps that has something to do with a very long and vivid dream I had. Since it could possibly be an omen of some kind, I will write it down here.

I am living in the future in some city. While there was a faint perception that it might be downtown Cleveland, it didn’t look like it. But the gist was that some kind of disease had wiped out generally half of the population of the country. The figure I got was 125-135 million people in the US had died.

Anyway what that meant in the dream was that parts of the civil infrastructure, as well as business and residential areas, were untended and uninhabited. There were signs posted along downtown streets for people to avoid walking under window washing platforms and other scaffolding and things variously hanging over streets from various high rises. I consciously walk around some of these areas in the dream. Why the survivors don’t go up and bring these hazards down is beyond me, but that’s a dream for you.

I am reminded in the book Warday that an abandoned Manhattan suffered from untended cornices, windows and other building adornments falling into the street. Perhaps that is the memory that fuels this.

The virus that killed so many people has almost apparently run its course but not completely. Affected people still walk around and are occasionally spotted by people who examine the inside of their mouths. If their tongues are spotted, off they go. But the interesting thing about this dream is there is no fascist infrastructure. There is fear, plenty of it, but the people are led off humanely and the thing about the survivors is that they take great pains to go about their business as if everything is normal when it clearly isn’t.

Again, there are no flying tribunals or jackbooted police or anything. In fact there is a noticeable lack of any authority structure.

I live, with a group of people, in a very nice modern downtown hotel. Why I have no idea. I clearly have a room on the 9th floor. I am in an elevator and I know I must press the “9″ button. When I arrive at my floor, I go into a very well appointed (but not luxurious) modern room with a nice bed and other accoutrements. There is a woman with me sort of tangentially. I don’t see her but I feel a presence occasionally - not sinister or anything.

The thing about being on the ninth floor is that for some reason I get the feeling that this is desirable to be somewhat well above street level so you can see your surrounding area. There is a fear of people with the virus. The poor people only suspect they may be ill but don’t know for sure until diagnosed on the spot. They wander into the hotel lobby and people try to avoid them. Somehow their physical appearance is a tip off. I’m not sure how.

Again, there is a palpable sense of fear in this dream but not terror. It’s hard to explain. I place a chair under the doorknob of my room, ostensibly in case one of these wandering virus holders tries to get in. Locks on the door apparently aren’t a concern.

We are served meals in the lobby. The food is nondescript.

Later, our group organizes forays into the surrounding area. Why I am in this group and why they must live in this hotel I cannot say. We walk (yes walk) to a local mall.

Here’s the thing about the mall. It seems like any one level American shopping mall with the requisite stores. This mall seems to be in a horse shoe shape with either ends of the horse shoe lit and busy but the interior bend of the mall is dark and it is implied that this is for the same reason other parts of the city are uninhabited - there are not enough people or resources to keep the entire thing lit and active.

But people stroll through the mall with their kids in strollers and such and behave as if their is nothing amiss. I find it somewhat incredible in a way as I observe. People stroll through the darkened part to get around to the other side of the mall. There are stores selling consumer doo-dads as if nothing has happened. One store is selling in house spas like the ones people replace their bathtubs with and also put outside on decks. As I pass, the sales men are standing by these spas as the water merrily bubbles away. I find it all a bit fantastic.

If I remember more about this, I’ll post it.

Parts of this dream may have indeed been influences by recent re-watchings of The Matrix and Soylent Green. That may explain some of the ideas and imagery but this was one of those rare dreams were the scenes and story are consistent and the images vivid enough for me to recollect them here. That is very unusual for me.

John Dolan in Alternet

I’ve only been saying this on this blog for how long?

I’d like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.

Why, for example, not popularize slogans that mock the Bush loyalists as “suckers”? Something like, “There are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires and suckers.” Put that on a few bumper stickers and I guarantee a lot of “South Park Republicans” will quit the GOP. They just smirk when you tsk-tsk at them for being disrespectful. They want to be disrespectful; every normal young male wants to be.

And this, of course, brings up a big issue: At some point liberal writers are going to have to decide if it’s OK to be young and male at all. For better or for worse, millions of American men hold on to playground ethics long after they leave elementary school. For most of them, the 2004 election came down to a classic playground scene: Would John Kerry defend himself when attacked by bullies? Liberals, still stunned by the way a legitimate combat vet like Kerry was beaten by a combat-dodging spoiled brat like Bush, never understood that for millions of voters, the question wasn’t how well Kerry fought in Vietnam but whether he would fight in 2004.

A LOT of Alternet readers got stuck right there. One poster said they read the part about playground ethics and then refused to read the rest of the article. Although I have commented quite a bit on this thread (as kegbot1) I refrained from answering that poster but the problem is: Dolan is right.

Many, many, many American men do NOT evolve from the basic playground bullying stage and it doesn’t prevent them from becoming very prominent players in out society. And they vote AND they also influence the coverage of issues in the media.

So implying they are suckers and not backing down may indeed have a better long term effect than trying to play nice and reason with them.

And if nothing else, making your opinions heard on local politically neutral boards gets your message out rebutting the repugs as I did with the insufferable Joe Amschlinger here.

Silence is no longer an option when everything good and decent about our society and planet is under dire threat.

Now a lot of women readers also stopped and complained about that playground mentality analogy as well. I understand their objections but the vast majority of the shot callers on the right are male both in the media and in the political structure. There are only a few Ann Coulters (thank Goddess) and Laura Ingrahams. We have to deal with the world as it is, not always as we would wish it to be. Yes, testosterone gets us into these messes but it is exactly the testosterone that needs to be confronted.

I’m often reminded of the Woody Allen line in the one movie (I can’t remember it now) where his friends (like many of the posters on Alternet) kept telling Woody that Nazis need to be met with biting sarcasm and ridicule. Woody kept saying: no, no with Nazis you have to give them a punch in the face.

And that is it exactly - at least a rhetorical punch in the face.

The Keith

The girlfriend enjoying her college roomies. 

Sigh. Looooonnnnnnggggg sigh.

So I drove my son down to Ohio State this afternoon to start a new quarter in school and maybe I should have had this conversation with him.

First, son, I’m so glad your not following your old man into journalism. At least in computer science engineering, having a great rack and attracting the sexual favors of powerful older men aren’t a prerequisite for the fast track to media stardom.

And second son, try not to have anyone you would ever loosely admire or even (gasp) call a hero. In this society they will ultimately disappoint you.

Which brings us to this and this.

Keith Olbermann is 49.

Katy Tur is 24.

This would be akin to me (age 45) boffing one of my son’s female roommates at OSU.

As Hank Hill might say, that’s just not right.

And what else just isn’t right is Ms. Tur getting the job in the first place. Read the comments following the New York Observer story (second link above). Tur actually giggles “this is exciting” during coverage of the tragic crane accident in New York City.

People, um, died Katy. Gravitas, you know? Look it up.

But its not like this should be any surprise. It’s an unfortunate fact of life in the media that career shortcuts are often found in the journalistic equivalent of Hollywood’s casting couch. Perhaps that’s life, but maybe we should be upfront about in J-school and communications schools. And it’s not just a female issue - Tur may have been leapfrogged ahead of far more qualified males for the job as well.

I know I shouldn’t feel this way but Olbermann was practically a hero of mine and now, while I’ll probably still watch his show, it will be with a far different feeling.

I know I’ll probably annoy my regular commentator “K” with this observation but what does a 49 year old have in common in any real sense with a 24 year old? What do they talk about after ‘the act?’ Yeah, I’m just an ordinary guy and perhaps I just don’t understand what’s it like in the ‘big leagues.’ I’m too into old fashioned morality, I suppose. Real men of middle age don’t shag women 25 years their junior, period. Again, I look at the students in my son’s college dorm - same age diff. It’s just not proper.

But even if you put that aside, it’s a debasement of journalism for Olbermann to have pulled strings to get his girlfriend a job she really didn’t deserve.

Yeah the world’s unfair, I know that very well. But people I formerly admired shouldn’t go out of their way to debase their craft and make it more unfair than it is.

Keith Olbermann, tonight you are my WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD!

. . . is brought to you by Soylent red and Soylent yellow, high energy vegetable concentrates, and new, delicious, Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.

Drudge links and headlines the MSNBC First Read news blog which I wasn’t aware of until this morning. Not a bad compendium of things political and much to comment about. The “bad week” entry is already a few takes down the list.

The First Read headline refers to the three campaigns but probably could be broadened to many Americans due to the imploding economy and its effects on Main Street which I get a ring side seat to view every day from my window.

The Pain Dealer reprints an article about the troubles at Borders book chain, linked here from the London Telegraph.

Borders, which has racked up losses of more than $300m in the past two years, has appointed JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch to find a buyer or strategic investor.

The business, which has seen its shares fall from $23.41 last May to hover above $5, has a current market value of $313m in spite of annual revenues in excess of $3.8bn.

There’s some speculation that Barnes and Noble or even Canadian chain Indigo may swallow Borders but good luck getting the deal pulled off in what is fast becoming a very soft market for full price retail booksellers.

Which is, of course, somewhat music to my ears and yet my business is also off.

America isn’t awash in readers anymore and while people may not be willing to shell out $29.95 for a new hardcover, would they be willing to pay $7-10 for that book at a reseller? Or is $15 at Sam’s club enough?

It’s news like this that makes me hang in there. Who knows where we’re going? When people can no longer easily afford cable movie channels (or cable) or other forms of entertainment, perhaps they’ll discover the cheap thrills from a good book, bought at your local book reseller and buyer.

At least we know books and reading will not die in the way Ray Bradbury envisioned in Fahrenheit 451. Not from repression, but from ignorance and boredom.

But discretionary spending does seem to be going into the toilet at least from where I sit. Other retailers are also biting big bullets this quarter and the expectations only seem worse as the year goes on. Everyone from Sears to Wal-Mart is hurting as the cost of getting goods to market rises inexorably, payrolls shrink and the dollar’s buying power implodes. Wal-Mart will survive the year, Sears, which at one time helped my father raise a family, may not.

For the luckless soldiers of the empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a new number coming up on the very near horizon, perhaps this week - 4,000 deaths in five years. And no one wants to be casualty number 4,000. Dying in a useless war for geopolitics is bad enough but who wants to be singled out as special for being the 4,000th victim of George W. Bush’s legacy?

This seems to be a very sad Easter holiday coming up all over the world. When you think of the real pain real people are experiencing in this economic downturn, the obsessive coverage of candidates and celebrity continues to take on a more odious tone. Nero supposedly fiddled while Rome burned; it seems that most Americans continue to rather follow the exploits of LeBron James and Paris Hilton than turn their needed attention to the wreckage of their country.

I visited my mother this morning who continues to recover from her foot amputation in a local community care facility. Due to complications in recovery, she’s been there since just before New Year’s Eve. Hopefully she’ll finally be coming home next week.

It’s hard to be in an ‘up’ mood after visiting one of these facilities which are scattered all over the country. Most of the time, when I get there in the morning, the staff has wheeled several of the inmates into the middle hub area where the hallways intersect. There they sit for no discernible reason other than, perhaps, to get them out of their rooms for an hour. Many are suffering from Alzheimers or other mentally degenerating illnesses. Others are simply beyond depressed. Often they reach out and call to me for help as I pass by.

It’s heart wrenching. I am often reminded of what Sister Mary Harriet, my junior high match teacher at Notre Dame Elementary used to make us pray for - a happy death. Being 13 at the time and with no real view of our own mortality, it seemed like a loony thing to pray for. Now I see the wisdom in her intercession.

I once saw one of the inmates (that’s what I call them for they do try to escape and are foiled by staff and security systems) being gently harangued by her family who had put her in a place she did not want to be. The woman’s son, his wife and their kids were huddled around grandma’s wheelchair trying to convince her that this was as nice as any place to be brought to die. After all, it’s what we do in our capitalist society. We could pay for in home care assistance for everyone, but how would the entrepreneurs that run the lucrative for-profit convalescent industry make their Wall Street sales projections?

Anything else would reek of socialism and we can’t have that.

Of course sonny and his wife probably did a pretty thorough job liquidating everything grandma had ever worked for in her life so that Medicaid could shovel enough money at the care facility to keep the old woman out of the way of her family until she kicks off. No one needs the downer of a momento mori hanging around in a culture that worships youth, beauty and material success.

I often wonder if, when things get really bad, we’ll see the ‘ethical suicide parlors’ from the movie Soylent Green so people who are no longer able to turn a buck and stimulate the economy can do their patriotic duty to capitalism and off themselves. I suppose when Medicaid finally suffers Grover Nordquist’s dream of drowning it in a bathtub and quits paying the for-profit death housing industry, we may see those parlors.

I want scenes of amber waves of grain and something nice by Roxy Music playing when I’m strapped to the gurney. Remember the old man telling Charlton Heston - “Why, in my day, you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs they had, real butter! Fresh lettuce in the stores. . . “

Actually no. I’m not going to die in one of capitalism’s death houses nor am I going to burden anyone with wiping my ass. When I look at these literally godforsaken people sitting there in the morning in various stages of confusion, pain and distress, I reserve the absolute right to check out at a time and place of my own choosing before I get anywhere near that stage.

And I bet a lot of you feel the same way but you wouldn’t dare talk about it around any of your good Christian relations.

Look, I know its a downer but you never know when you’re going to land up being impaled by a bus and saved by our miracle medical system which will save your life as a paraplegic and then bill you out of everything else you’ve ever earned as a result.

Remember Richard Dreyfus in Whose Life is it Anyway?

And isn’t it funny how we hardly ever see either Soylent Green or Whose Life is it Anyway on cable movie channels or broadcast TV?

Such downers. Or prescient. Take your pick.

Ok, I’ll stop. It’s funny what kind of musings can run from a title seen on Drudge. I’ll try to find something ‘up’ later in the day.