AS CLEARLY AS I CAN

1. THE ECONOMY

Republican administrations deregulate which causes financial institutions to disregard fundamentals and gamble with others’ money racking up huge profits until they lose a lot or everything. Then some Republicans want to bail them out at more expense to others (including us taxpayers) while other Republicans want “the market” to work it out, which means those without means will have to suffer through very hard times, losing jobs and homes and health care and money for food and necessities as the economy bottoms out.

Democrats believe in regulations and oversight, and if anyone is going to get bailed out, they believe it should be, or at least must include, those who suffer the most from corporate and/or financial institutions mistakes, or actual criminality, working people and the poor.

It’s not the Great Depression again—yet. Even though that collapse of the world economy that began with our stock market crash in 1929 has some similarities to recent events, like occurring under Republican administrations that don’t believe in regulating and overseeing the banking industry or insurance companies or mortgage or brokerage firms until it’s too late and continue to spout “the fundamentals are fine”, “the economy is strong” bromides in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, until it’s too late and then they want a handout from the rest of us.

But even if it were to become that bad, which is doubtful given the effort of some of the world’s strongest economies to avoid it by any means at this point—which is more apt to cause inflation or even hyper inflation with the printing of so much money and the accumulation of even more debt, which means the declining wages of the past eight years under the Republicans would continue even more so—

the good news is some of our parents and grandparents got through The Great Depression okay. They may have lost their houses and their jobs, but they didn’t starve to death or die—unless they jumped off a building out of fear and shame at having caused or contributed to the financial wipe out of so many working people’s homes and savings and livelihoods etc. Nowadays those guys just take their golden parachute and jump out of the pilot-less plane. (Here’s a link to a pretty good take on some of this.)

2. THE WARS

It’s not World War II, the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century, much more violent and destructive than anything we’ve seen since. And some of our parents and grandparents survived that too, though not many without knowing personally someone who didn’t. It was a sad and difficult time, but everyone, or almost everyone pitched in to help defeat some of the most evil movements the world has ever known. And while they did it, others wrote songs and movies and made other kinds of art to inspire them and make them laugh and give them a break.

Bin Laden is not Hitler and the Iranians are not the Japanese. But our military is overextended and McPalin’s statements (they both do it) about wars they might want to fight if elected do give one pause, if one is thinking clearly. A larger conflict sure is possible if you have leaders who believe in military action as a solution to the world’s problems. (And here’s a link to show why that isn’t just a possibility but a probability, made before Palin was chosen, but one could be made showing her being even more militaristic than McCain.)

3. THE ELECTION

It took a Democratic administration, FDR’s, to create the programs that provided the oversight and safety nets to insure that we didn’t have to go through a financial collapse like 1929 and the Great Depression ever again, and that could mobilize a nation to enter a war that our enemies were winning, hands down, at the time and to defeat them and eliminate the evil they were purveying.

But Republican administrations ever since have done everything they can to undo FDR’s programs that created the regulatory agencies and safety nets that kept financial institutions and corporations in line while protecting working people and the poor (the corporations and financial institutions still made plenty of profits, but they paid a fair share to the government to fund the agencies that oversaw their practices making sure they didn’t risk so much that working people could lose their savings and pensions etc.).

Reagan was particularly successful at it, until Junior got in almost eight years ago and outdid him. Under Reagan’s deregulations, we not only had weaker unions—meaning corporations and businesses can get away with hiring part time help with no health insurance at lower pay and so ons—but we also had the last giant collapse of financial institutions that had to be bailed out by us taxpayers, the deregulated Savings and Loan debacle (that McCain was a part of but was let off the hook by his fellow congress folks).

Once again Republicans have gotten us into a financial and military mess that they created and want the rest of us to not only bail them out and pay the price for their losing gambles and destructive mistakes, but they want us to vote them back in for four more years! It’s a no-brainer, for most of us.

But I have members of my extended clan who, like a lot of our fellow citizens, live in areas of the country (and again, no accident they’ve become Republican strongholds) where they don’t have access to NPR or even MSNBC. They get a steady diet of Rush and O’Reilly and Fox News (has any show on Fox News run footage of Palin lying about her response to “the bridge to nowhere” by showing her standard stump speech where she claims she said “no thanks” to it against earlier footage of her speaking in favor of it when she wanted the money or pointed out that she still took the money for the project and has been spending some of it on plans for a, you guessed it, bridge to the same “nowhere”) (oh, the answer is no of course) and the only alternative is mainstream media, the big three networks, which pay more attention to personalities and the horse race aspects of the campaign than to the issues, and when they address the issues they bend over backwards to try and be balanced but often end up just avoiding the objective facts of McPalin lying about Obama raising taxes on most of us (they say raising “your taxes” to crowds full of folks whose taxes would actually be lowered under Obama’s plan) etc.

So those folks aren’t stupid, any more than I was before I went to college on the G.I. Bill where I learned facts that I’d never seen before about Viet Nam and how we got into that war and who was profiting from it and how our government deceived us. We need more “teach-ins” like in those days, not only on college campuses but in high schools and communities the way so many college students and professors went out and did during the Viet Nam War that led to a turn around among those “middle Americans” from being blindly supportive of a failed policy to being against it.

Unfortunately the divisions among Democrats and on the left led to Nixon’s election, helped by voters who believed him when he said he had a plan to end the war, even though the details were sketchy at best and mostly non-existent, and in fact turned out to be a lie, much the way McCain now says he has a plan to straighten out the economy and win the war(s) but the details are sketchy at best and mostly non-existent and he has already been proven to lie about those things over and over again. (See this link for confirmation.)

THREE QUOTES

"While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light." —Jack Kerouac from THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do." —Willa Cather (can't remember where I got this one from)

"Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses." —Willaim Carlos Williams from KORA IN HELL

[I may have posted these before, but today they seemed relevant and useful to me so here they are]

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MCPALIN

Obviously, I haven’t been posting about the momentous financial and political (interconnected anyway) events of recent days.

To keep my head and heart as sound and sane as I can, I’ve been spending more time than I even usually do with the arts—poetry events, music performances, movies, books, (hopefully soon a few galleries and museums)—and making my own.

It helps, I recommend it. I’ve received a lot of calls and emails from people who are angry, disturbed, disheartened, and all the other forms fear takes including just plain frightened, over the events on Wall Street and in the presedential campaign.

I’ve also been bombarded, as I’m sure you have, with all kinds of emails and links and articles etc. with ever more emerging facts about more lies from Palin and even more disappointing reversals and denials and flip flops and lies from McCain.

The fact that the BIG LIE technique works is obvious or Junior wouldn’t have been able to steal two elections, they would have been landslides in favor of the other guys. And the polls would be showing another landslide for Obama and Biden.

But we know it works. It’s working right now in China, where the younger generation has no political freedom but still feels the Chinese so-called “Communist” system should not be questioned or criticized and has become one of the most nationalist generations in China’s history. The same can be said for Russia, two places that mastered the BIG LIE technique.

Palin has said in her one interview in the weeks she has now been running for vice president, that Georgia, the country, should be protected by NATO even if it means a fighting war with Russia.

Somehow we were able to avoid a nuclear holocaust with Russia over their missiles in Cuba aimed at our cities, but we can’t avoid it over a country on their border they have a dispute with. Nor can we avoid the hypocrisy of Cheney claiming no civilized country can be allowed to invade another country, um, except if its us and we’re invading Iraq.

At least China has been smart enough to not start any wars outside its borders in the past fifty years and so has been able to husband its recent financial gains (much of it thanks to our gluttonous consumerism and debt) in ways that allowed it to rebuild Beijing, a lot of it in the last months before the Olympics, turning it from part ancient ruin and part “Communist” blocky utilitarian but ugly 20th Century city into a 21st century architectural wonder with an efficient mass transit system etc., while the USA under the Republicans who supposedly put “country first” can’t even rebuild a couple of small neighborhoods in New Orleans in the years since they failed that city in the first place.

Or the fact that Palin is seen as an emblem of patriotic and Christian rectitude, but we all know if Barack and Michelle had a seventeen-year-old daughter who got pregnant by a black teenage boy who bragged on his MySpace page that he liked to take guns and “shoot shit” and that he liked lots of ladies and didn’t want to get married—wait a minute, didn’t a black boy the same age, who didn’t brag about philandering or shooting guns but in fact was a local well-loved football star, get sent to jail for getting his steady teenage year younger girlfriend pregnant? Yep.

It’s a disgrace that a lot of people don't understand or even know all this and more, but it’s a result of a public educational system (and unfortunately in terms of colleges a lot of private educational institutions as well) that does not teach logic and how to reason and to think for yourself and how to avoid being manipulated by propaganda (whether corporate or political party or government generated), let alone history (a friend of mine taught his first college art class a few days ago and told me when he started talking about the Middle Ages he saw blank expressions on their faces so asked if anyone knew when the Middle Ages were, and only one student raised her hand, and when he pointed at her said “Back in the caveman times”) etc.

This is partly because of the lack of respect for the teaching profession and the underpayment for their services, which began under Republican administrations (as I’ve pointed out before by Nixon’s and his hatchet man Agnew’s relentless attacks on the “elitism” of the well educated and the rightwing anti-tax proposition 13 in California that led to property taxes not being used for public education there anymore—which reduced their public educational system from one of the finest to one of the worst, it’s no accident that where the rightwing Republicans are most actively supported is in states with public educational systems that rank near the lowest) that began classifying teachers as a “special interest” as if paying the people who teach our children is the same as giving oil companies that were doing just fine on $50-a-barrel days giant tax breaks even when they’re making over $100 dollars a barrel.

For those who consider themselves “liberals”—which despite the rightwing Republican propaganda means to be in the center in terms of political movements and beliefs—part of the reward is in living a life based on humanist principles, like the golden rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” including people whose styles and accents and ethnicities and looks and sexual orientation and jobs and etc. are different from yours, and even animals and all living creatures as well.

That’s actually the revolutionary idea that Jesus introduced into his own society and times and others have into theirs over the centuries. To live by that as best we can is its own reward. And that includes exposing Palin as the kind of hunter that believes its good sportsmanship to shoot defenseless animals from a helicopter and to deprive polar bears of their habitat if it will enrich oil companies even more, etc.

But it also means not calling Palin dumb or people who support her stupid, like Bill Maher has a tendency to do.

Palin didn’t get to where she is just on her smile and sarcasm. She understands the power of that smile and her looks and her image as a “hockey mom”—but she also understands politics, at least as its practiced in Alaska, and she understands maintaining power, replacing competent professionals in most of the top jobs in the state with loyal friends who have no experience for those jobs or understanding of democratic governance and therefore never question her orders—sound familiar?

Like “Brownie” and all the other incompetent political hacks Junior appointed to head government agencies that in most cases was a deliberate attempt to make those agencies impotent so that they wouldn’t be regulating the products and practices and industries they were created to, but instead would give them a pass so that people will die as a result and no one will be held accountable, and financial institutions will crumble and no one will be held accountable—was anyone at Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae fired? Let alone fined and/or jailed? Etc. etc. etc.

No she's not dumb, she’s politically and instinctually savvy about power, as Junior is, they’re just not intellectually curious. They have their beliefs and they understand their party’s politics and how to intimidate the media and even the Democrats into backing off any criticism or attempts to put any restraints on or try to control their drive to gain and maintain power.

Palin isn’t frightening because she doesn’t know zip about foreign policy or government or even obviously the Constitution or Bill of Rights or our country’s history, she’s scary because she knows how to get power and keep it, like Junior, but is even more to the right than he and Cheney on many issues and like Junior and Cheney doesn’t care to involve herself in a lot of important issues or even to ask experts but prefers to take the direction of handlers (Rove and now his minion in McCain’s campaign, and others even further to the right) otherwise there wouldn’t have been that quote from Westbrook Pegler in her speech, a man that despised any aspect of democracy that allowed anyone to the left of his neo-facist theories not just to govern or influence government but to even be allowed to live!

Robert F. Kennedy says it better: “Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.”

Pegler also wanted to see FDR and Harry Truman and even Ike suffer and die for not living up to his rightwing theories.

That’s who she, or according to all accounts, her handlers chose to quote, and if elected and she ascends either through the next election or through replacing McCain if anything happens to him, that’s who will be directing her in office. And McCain is even worse because he knows better, or once seemed to. But he too will be beholden to the furthest rightwing of his party and either through his own defects or failings or just through the pressure of needing them to stay in office and keep not just the party faithful but the party rightwing oligarchy satisfied, he has proven during the course of this campaign and before, as Palin has, that they will do whatever it takes to gain power, including misuse the power they already have.

FROZEN RIVER

Incredible.

My old friend Michael O’Keefe is right, Melissa Leo’s performance is Oscar worthy. And so is her co-star Misty Upham’s. But so is everyone else’s performance in this film, including Michael as the state trooper.

In fact, this gets my first nomination for best ensemble of the year. Even the not yet walking baby was perfect! (The only exception might be Mark Boone Junior who has a couple of moments when his bad guy is too over-the-top for me.)

The story had me guessing where it was going and holding my breath half the time. Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, it has that little independent movie edginess and reality that can sometimes seem precious but in this case just seems true.

The performances are so compelling, and the story so satisfying despite the sometimes hardened perspective of the characters, the movie opened my heart and gave me that satisfying kick of a great flick on top of the pleasure of watching great film acting.

If it’s anywhere near you, I’d check it out, or rent it as soon as it’s available on DVD. FROZEN RIVER—in my Oscar picks.

ANOTHER RELEVANT QUOTE

"So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" —Garrison Keillor

"COLLECTED" COUPLETS

A hot and humid couple of days around here. Made it a little difficult to fall back asleep after being wokeN up by the usual weekend bar closing arguments and laughter. So, still mindful of my recent post on Joanne Kyger’s collected poems, it occurred to me how many “collected” works I’ve read and dug and continue to re-read and get much pleasure from. Couldn’t come up with an alphabet list, so used couplets to remember them, matching books with something in common, some obvious, some maybe not:

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA
COLLECTED POEMS, JAMES SCHUYLER

THE WORKS OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUME I THE COLLECTED POETRY
THE WORKS OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUME II THE COLLECTED PROSE

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, VOLUME I 1909-1939
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, VOLUME II 1939-1962

THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, JEAN RHYS
THE COLLECTED NOVELS, JEAN RHYS

ABOUT NOW: COLLECTED POEMS, JOANNE KYGER
RING OF BONE: COLLECTED POEMS 1950-1971, LEW WELCH

THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE 1929-1989, SAMUEL BECKETT
ALL: THE COLLECTED SHORTER POEMS, LUIS ZUKOFSKY

THE FARMERS’ DAUGHTERS, THE COLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
THE COMPLETE STORIES, ZORA NEALE HURSTON

THE COMPLETE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE
THE PROSE AND POETRY OF WILLIAM BLAKE

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN
COLLECTED POEMS, TOM RAWORTH

NEW COLLECTED POEMS, GEORGE OPPEN
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT CREELEY

COLLECTED POEMS OF W. B. YEATS
COLLECTED POEMS, T. S. ELIOT

COMPLETE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN
COMPLETE NOVELS AND STORIES, KATE CHOPIN

THE COMPLETE POEMS, STEPHEN CRANE
COLLECTED POEMS, EMILY DICKINSON

THE COLLECTED STORIES, HENRY JAMES
THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

COLLECTED POEMS, DYLAN THOMAS
THE COMPLETE PLAYS, BRENDAN BEHAN

POEMS 1918-1936, VOLUME I OF THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CHARLES REZNIKOFF
COLLECTED POEMS, Ed Cox

Did I leave anybody out? Definitely. But had to stop somewhere.

REGINALD SHEPHERD AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE R.I.P.

Two writers:
one "white" (Wallace) one "black" (Shepherd);
one a "poet" (Shepherd) one a "novelist" (Wallace);
one died "by his own hand" (Wallace) one not (Shepherd).

But both voices unique in this world of endless media, including more books published each year than ever before.

Both "died too young"—in their mid-forties—Wallace born in '62, Shepherd in '63.

Both will be sorely missed by not just their families and friends, but their many fans.