The Future Lies Ahead

by Dennis Green

The first decade of the Twenty-First Century will go down as the most shameful period in American history since the Sixties — the 1860s and our uncivil Civil War. Even Republicans cringe to look back on the past ten years, and wish they could will some sort of national amnesia to simply make it all go away.

(And yes, I know that the decade, technically, doesn’t start with zero, but with “01,” and those pedants who keep reminding us are so out of touch with the popular imagination they completely missed the whole drama of the Y2K millennial turnover.)

But, as President Dwight David Eisenhower famously said, and Mort Saul picked up in a comedy album title, “The Future Lies Ahead.” And there’s nowhere to go from here but up. So even though I’m not a congenital optimist, I don’t share the general pessimism abroad in the land.

I think we’ll find enough ways to cut “Defense” spending and corporate welfare to eliminate the deficit by the end of Obama’s second term. Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, those two sorry debacles, is just the beginning. The billions spent maintaining our huge nuclear arsenal might be next.

Coming out of the worst recession since Reganomics, we also have the opportunity to re-assess our values as a people. The lavish spending of the past decade — on credit cards and grossly-inflated real estate — may be a thing of the past. A “consumerist” society of material values may even give way to more spiritual and aesthetic concerns and pre-occupations. Since the late Sixties, we’ve been told that we can buy our way out of unhappiness, buy a fortress of security, and all it’s gotten us is default and foreclosure.

But we’ve also gotten some of the most vivid examples of what doesn’t work that money and votes can buy — from dysfunctional candidates and politicians to counter-insurgency strategies and invasions to uncover weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. We’ve also seen some of our most treasured values proven correct in the face of torture, suspension of due process and government snooping into our private emails and lives.

So perhaps all those National Security and CIA agents can find honorable work in other professions as the new century unfolds. Almost certainly, new industries and technologies will provide gainful employment for the many hordes of former auto workers now on the dole, along with all those bankers and day traders.

Green building and energy technologies will blossom, I suspect, in the old rust belt and coal mine country of America, and “the service industry” will come to mean far more than cubicle rats pushing papers around, but actually refer to people actively helping other people, as the aging Boomers fill the rest homes of the nation and all those new people covered by health insurance need more hospitals and clinics.

I predict that Google will compete so handily with Apple that prices of iTunes come down, and the more than 100,000 apps now available for iPhones becomes a million, putting all those software engineers to work. The new Apple touchscreen tablet will take the place of the printed book, the portable TV, the desktop and laptop computer, the mouse and keyboard, the newspaper and the magazine. Whoopie!

As the Boomers, in huge numbers, come to face their own mortality, I predict, further, that so many people will be pondering and exploring the Culture of Death that all our attitudes toward it will change. I hope to be in the forefront of such a re-thinking with my new novel, Mescalero City Blues. So don’t be blue. For the best, the very best, is yet to come.

©2009 Dennis Green

American Prisoners of War

by Dennis Green

In all the tightly-controlled news reports about American fighting, casualties and attacks, there are two kinds of events we rarely hear about, if at all — the taking of American troops as prisoners or their killing or wounding by friendly fire. The truth about Pat Tillman finally came out, after months of lies by U.S. officers — including General MacCrystal — and by civilian government leaders.

But the issue of U.S. POWs is a serious one, because of the way we have treated insurgents taken prisoner, at both Abu Garabe and Guantanimo prisons. We have used torture and many forms of humiliation to try and punish or break the spirit of these prisoners. Critics such as John McCain have expressed the fear and concern that American POWs could suffer the same fate, or worse, if we don’t honor the Geneva Convention ourselves.

At least one American reporter and other prisoners have been shown in videos taken by Al Qaeda being beheaded, and we’re left with the impression that the “enemy,” whomever he might be, doesn’t take U.S. troops alive, or leave them alive for very long. But of course this isn’t true.

The latest example is captured GI Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, featured in a Taliban video released on Christmas day denouncing U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a 36-minute tape. In the video, Bergdahl is wearing combat fatigues and a regulation helmet, seems fit and well-fed, and may even be sincere.

Bergdahl disappeared from his post on June 30, and is believed to have simply walked away, for unknown reasons. In the video, he is quite specific about why he believes that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is misguided, foolhardy and doomed to failure, sentiments expressed here at home by many, including Vice President Joe Biden.

The U.S. Army claims that he is reading from a prepared statement, speaking under duress and that such propaganda by the Taliban cannot be supported by fact. But Berdahl’s disappearance from his post in the eastern Afghanistan province of Paktika, and his subsequent capture, are mysterious to say the least.

I don’t know whether American captors of insurgent forces, Iraqi and Afghan POWs held at Guantanimo, or transported to prisons in other countries have ever been videotaped denouncing Al Qaeda or the Taliban or Iraqi mullahs, then shown on “Air America” or some other official Western propaganda outlet, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In fact, if we don’t use such tactics, I’d be disappointed. So far as I know, we don’t behead them, but probably make them wish we did.

War is hell, a dirty business, etc. blah-blah-blah. And the rules of civilized conduct have been overlooked and ignored since the first son of man raised his fist against his brother. We are a vicious and a quarrelsome species, and prone to get the upper hand, until we lose the next war, and then we retreat like a wounded puppy, as we did from Vietnam, hide under the house for a few years licking our wounds, and stay out of sight.

But obviously, if we are taking hundreds of prisoners on the battlefield, so is the enemy, no matter whom he may be. And those “journalists” taken prisoner in North Korea…the “hikers” captured in Iran… could they possibly be CIA operatives? Given the lack of transparency in our government, we’ll never know.

©2009 Dennis Green

Fighting the Last War

by Dennis Green

The U.S. Military is obsolete. You don’t fight terrorists with platoons, squadrons and brigades of grunts going out on patrol as bait to tempt the insurgents out of hiding. To begin with, insurgents and terrorists are not one and the same.

Terrorists fight alone, or in very small groups, and by stealth. They plant roadside bombs, or take explosives on board airliners, or send small boats filled with explosives to collide with warships. They attack subways with poison gas and bio-weapons, and used box cutters to take down four airliners on 9/11. They rarely repeat themselves.

If anything, you fight such actions with investigative security and police forces, as Israel does with its Mossad (The Institute) forces. But our own CIA has proven itself seriously incompetent, again and again, encumbered by bureaucratic procedures and American misgivings about the use of stealth and assassination.

But sending 30,000 MORE American troops into Afghanistan is sheer lunacy, and amounts to fighting the last war, not the one the terrorists are fighting. And we’ve been fighting the same war since our original Revolution, with armies and artillery and supply lines. Today, it takes many weeks simply to deploy those forces, and then costs the taxpayer one million dollars per year per soldier to keep them in the field.

And it isn’t that the generals don’t know any better, but that politics and economics weigh against the kinds of reformation of our “defense” forces required in the 21^st Century. In the run-up to the recent decision by Obama, it was made public that the great debate was between “Counter Terrorist” and “Counter Insurgency” tactics. But what strategy?

“Containing Al Qaeda” is not a strategy. Or at least certainly not a realistic one. Islamic extremists and terrorists exist all over the world, just as radical Christians do. Such religious sects or subsets are not confined to Iraq, or Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. They exist in Oakland, in Chicago, in New York, and even, as we just learned, within the U.S. Army at Fort Hood, Texas.

Right-wing paramilitary groups training in uniform in the woods of Idaho are not much different in methodology than Al Qaeda operatives training in camps in western Pakistan. Given the opportunity, they will attack the established order that they perceive as the enemy — whether it’s an abortion clinic or the World Trade Center or the Oklahoma City federal building. The mindset of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden is savagely similar.

Radical Islam claims that a colonial-minded America, siding unilaterally with Israel and hungry for foreign oil, interferes in the internal affairs of Muslim countries, that its occupying troops offend and insult their customs, especially the dignity of their women, and that the power of a post-Cold War America arrogantly threatens the sovereignty of every other nation on earth. Such claims, of course, may be unwarranted, but are taken to heart by millions.

So we’re not going to defeat “terror” or terrorists with force, or make friends by invading other countries and sending in grunts who don’t speak the language and haven’t even been trained to respect the local customs. “Counter Insurgency” employs far more military people, military advisors, military contractors and industrial workers here at home than “Counter Terrorism” does. We can’t fight unemployment and draw down our military forces at the same time.

But if we were as smart as we think we are, we would engage thousands of small teams of highly trained stealth fighters — not unlike the Navy SEALS — as raiding parties that could move quickly anywhere in the world, strike against Al Qaeda and melt back into the night. Small war parties like my ancestor Crazy Horse led against the Crow. They would be multi-lingual assassins who could kill without leaving a trace of their presence. The rest is obsolete nonsense.

©2009 Dennis Green

The Crotch Bomber

by Dennis Green

“Ah, 72 virgins, and I’ve just blown off my penis using an explosive taped to my groin! Allah has a sense of humor after all…”

And over half a million names on a “Suspected Terrorist” watch list? And only 500 of them have gotten into parties at the White House. I’m reminded why I haven’t been on an airliner since 1997. If God had intended humans to fly, he would have given us feathers.

Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah, whose name alone should have put him on such a list, suffered severe burns to his groin when the explosive chemicals he had hidden in a condom taped to his privates misfired, sending him to the hospital rather than all his fellow passengers to an untimely, Christmas-day grave. And Abdulmutallah had studied as a chemical engineer, but not long or hard enough, apparently.

Terrorist attacks, including the bringing down of the Twin Towers and the airliner crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, have changed our way of life in aspects we’re still trying to understand. Besides the obvious impact on the airlines, and travel, those attacks have changed American politics in ways historians will still be debating a hundred years from now.

Now Abdulmutallah joins Richard Reid, the infamous “Shoe Bomber” in the halls of infamy for trying, and failing, to use the plastic explosive PETN to bring down an airliner. Air passengers are now required to put their shoes on conveyor belts in airports to be scanned, so we can only imagine what this latest attempt will prompt in the way of security measures. “Drop your pants!” while standing in line?

Might be enough to get me back in the airports…

This guy, apparently, received training from Al Qaeda in Yemen, which gives me great assurance that such training camps are turning out incompetents as fast as CIA headquarters. Meanwhile, another Predator drone attack by the U.S. in Pakistan may or may not have killed extremists it was or war not targeting.

As Senator Joe Lieberman says, “9/11 happened because of a failure of imagination.” And that tells me that we should be employing more artists and imaginative types of people in our security forces, rather than lawyers and military or law-enforcement minded sorts. Former Disney employees perhaps.

And if, as we like to assume, the terrorists are all deranged Islamo-Fascists, perhaps we should employ more neo-Nazi skinheads and the certified mentally insane in our Homeland Security forces. Fight fire with fire.

My concern now is that the terrorists will find a way to combine those deadly chemicals inside the human body, inside the intestines and lower bowels of a suicide bomber. Cocaine mules, after all, often experience a near death experience, or even the real thing, when the balloons filled with cocaine that they swallow burst.

So what’s next? After the Shoe Bomber and the Crotch Bomber we might just get the Bowel Bomber, and even if the explosion is a minor one, contained and restrained by its surrounding tissue, nearby passengers will be splattered by some god-awful mess. Just don’t take a seat near the rest room, or over the fuel tanks.

©2009 Dennis Green

Can't Buy Me Love

by Dennis Green

In a materialistic society such as ours, the common assumption underlying all our other values is the notion that the more affluent you are, the happier you will be. All the other debates — about Wall Street bonuses, foreclosures, health care reform, deficit spending, and unemployment — rest on this one central, unavoidable supposition.

No one even questions it. And along with that assumption comes many about “poverty.” That ignorance, and a lack of education, is an inevitable side effect of poverty, for example. But as a sawmill kid, a child of the working class, I can tell you that if you have a thirst for knowledge, you will find a way.

I did that, earning my own degrees and even teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Westmont College, Hayward State and UC Berkeley Extension — but more importantly, I saw my own father, who was pulled out of school at the end of the 8^th grade to work in his father’s sawmill, become a self-educated and very articulate man, serving as president of the board of directors of the Eureka Chapter of the AARP.

And as a classroom teacher, I saw it all the time, kids from broken homes, impoverished backgrounds, ghetto neighborhoods, and even lives of crime and drugs — determined to become knowledgeable and educated and capable of realizing their dreams. But even education doesn’t guarantee a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

The Greeks believed that such a state of spiritual buoyancy comes from being in tune with Nature, and the natural order of things, living a just life in accordance with the laws of nature. “Nemesis,” for example, is the Goddess of Retribution, of the sorrow and unhappiness, the personal undoing that results from transgressing on these laws. Justice was as important to the Greeks as it is in the religion of Islam.

Many spiritual prophets have warned against the dangers of materialism, including Jesus’ famous dictum that it is more difficult for a rich man to get into a heavenly state than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Excess baggage? And will that be one hump or two?

Yet the hallways of the Vatican are filled with display cases packed with gold plundered from Pagan empires all across the world. And most American televangelists preach that wealth and prosperity are a sign of God’s blessing, not a curse at all. Some blame this twist in Right Wing Religion on Industrial Protestantism, even Calvinism, but those are not the tenets of God’s grace at all. It is gratuitous, a gift, unbidden and unearned.

Blessed are the poor, and in Buddhism and many other traditions, a life bereft of the trappings of affluence is something to be sought indeed. As the poet Gary Snyder tells us, “All I need is enough ground beneath me to sit in meditation.” Amen to that.

In my own experience, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I’ve been blessed by satisfactions wide and deep that have nothing to do with things. And some of the richest people I’ve known have also been among the least happy or fulfilled. The blessing quotients don’t always compute along with the balance sheet. The life of the spirit, like the life of the imagination, is not for sale. Not even on that credit card you just maxed-out.

©2009 Dennis Green

De Facto Power Shifts

by Dennis Green

[Fox News Now Special Report] Dateline Washington, D.C. Viewers may recall that in January, 2000, in a childish display of frat boy humor, Clinton staffers, on their way out of the White House, removed or disabled the “W” key on all the typewriters and computers they left behind. Some have speculated that in the early days of the Bush administration, in one of those “unintended consequences,” this prank caused a de facto shift in power to Vice President Dick Cheney, who began receiving all the more important memos.

[Show clip of Cheney cradling shotgun…]

Now, investigators from Fox News Now have discovered that Bush staffers, in a fair play turnabout, pulled off a similar coup by removing or disabling all of the “O” computer keys on their way out. They also re-programmed the “auto-correct” feature on the computers so that the personal pronoun capital “I” would always default to a “U” symbol. Jolly good fun.

[Show clip of George W. grinning broadly.]

But again, the unintended consequences of these merry pranksters’ mischief making are manifold. We believe the disabled “O” has led to a de facto power shift in the Obama White House — not to Vice President Joe Biden — but to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who appears to be calling all the shots.

And the disabled personal pronoun has created a curious rhetorical shift in Obama’s perspective. In his speeches, he says “we will negotiate with you, the Iranian people,” and that “we will empower each and every American with these protections…”

[Show clip of Obama speaking in Cairo.]

In fact, in his first 340 days in office, Obama has given 927 speeches and has not used the personal pronoun “I” even once. He has never said, for example, “I want this to happen or I will do that…”

This may account for the unusual diffidence or stand-offishness evident in the highest office in the land, the very opposite of that take charge, command presence, mission accomplished predecessor of his. It may, in fact, account for the slogans Democrats have just rolled out for the 2010 midterm elections:

“U Can Do It!”

And

“Status Quo U Can Believe In!”

Someday, perhaps, historians will ponder these little known facts uncovered by the dogged determination of your trustworthy correspondents and reporters at Fox News Now, and conclude, as we have, that even the smallest actions can have far-reaching consequences.

[Close on moderator, yours truly.]

©2009 Dennis Green

Jesus the Prophet

by Dennis Green

Jesus figures prominently in the Koran, is the subject of many verses, and he is one of the major Prophets acknowledged by Mohammed. In the Koran, he was born of a virgin, under a palm tree in Palestine, and was never crucified but was rescued from that fate by God, when he complained, “My God, My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” And then Yahweh/Allah relented, and spared his life.

In Islam, God is not a person, and it is in fact idolatry to try and describe him in human terms, such as “Father” or “Old Man with a Beard,” or anything not ineffable and numinous. And to posit a “Holy Trinity” or imagine Jesus as the Son of God and a deity of equal significance — that is heresy. They may be onto something.

Jesus is just one of many Prophets, from Abraham to Ishmael to Isaac to Moses, David, and the last Prophet is Mohammed. Many Christians are ignorant of other religions, as they are discouraged from taking an interest in any faith but their own, and probably no religion is more hidden to the average Christian than Islam.

But they are often, also, ignorant about their own religion. They don’t seem to understand, or appreciate, that at the very heart of their belief system, their theology, is human sacrifice. “Jesus Paid It All.” Indeed. His crucifixion is regarded as a propitiation, a satisfaction in abstentia, for the sins of us all, a Way for the anger of Yahweh to be appeased.

Likewise, when we are told that the communion wine represents His Blood, and the communion wafer represents His Flesh, (“Take, eat, drink, do this in remembrance of me!”), we are practicing a cannibalistic ritual as primitive and as ancient as any tribe on earth. Plain and simple.

But all these facts of cultural anthropology are glossed over in modern times. Whole congregations revere human sacrifice and practice a form of symbolic cannibalism without even giving it any thought. Religion is like that. Especially on Christmas day.

Prayer, ritual, sacrifice — these ancient traditions are alive with us today. But the Catholic Popes, and all those Spanish conquistadores and missionaries did their best to stamp out so-called “Pagan” religions because they couldn’t stand the competition. Mother Church is a lot like Microsoft.

Meanwhile, divination, Nature Worship, alternative medicine and healing, meditation, chanting, animal totems, human and animal sacrifice, the eating of the flesh, the drinking of the blood, all persist. The hunger for a spiritual life is eternal, and if the old religions become calcified and un-fulfilling, new ways will be found, or even older ways will be resurrected.

There is something so primal, so compelling about human sacrifice and propitiation that it has been practiced in Christendom for more than 20 centuries. Only in the Koran is Jesus regarded as so loved by God that, like Ishmael, by his father Abraham, he is spared.

©2009 Dennis Green

America's War Chest

by Dennis Green

This year’s “Defense” appropriation — America’s very own war chest — will total some $626 billion, including some $4.2 billion in earmarks, 1,720 little chunks of fat. It is the largest appropriations measure passed by Congress this year, and is expected to be signed by President Obama without a whisper of dissent from the GOP. These tightwads, who have blamed Obama for every penny of the deficit, including Bush’s $800 billion TARP measure of ’08, never saw a dollar of defense spending they didn’t love.

The measure also includes some $128 billion for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, although some Republicans say that isn’t enough. Why is their sense of “fiscal responsibility” so selective?

Well, it begins with ideology. Most conservatives in America are congenital war hawks, no matter what the cause or the mission. They are unquestioning when it comes to invading other countries, and even in bombing targets in sovereign, allied countries, such as the use of Predator drones in Pakistan, regardless of the legality of such actions.

These normally law and order advocates also turn a blind eye to defense spending because of very practical reasons. Many of those billions of dollars go to defense contractors in their home districts, or to Big Money corporations such as Halliburton, who donate many hundreds of millions to their campaigns. And in all fairness, this is also the motivation for many “Neo-Liberals” or “Corporate Democrats” as well.

Rogue states and failed nations exist all over the globe, of course, and we don’t target all of them, but we do have U.S. troops in 220 nations worldwide. In some instances, such as Japan and Guam, our military bases are a source of much anti-American sentiment. The expense of such bases makes the potential costs of health care reform pale into insignificance.

“Insurgencies” opposing American forces are many, and are often nativist groups resisting our occupation or presence in their homeland. Americans’ sense of world geography and sovereignty is malleable, according to perceived threats, imagined hostilities to American interests, more often economic, rather than security interests in particular.

To the average citizen, even one who has followed and attempted to study U.S. Foreign Policy, we might just as well, as Whitman says, “write upon the doorpost ‘Whim!’” because there is nothing consistent or predictable about it, any more than there is a solid, bedrock principle in the GOP about deficit spending. “Friend or Foe, come or go, just cross my palm with silver.”

And ultimately, it’s all about power politics. No entity in America is as powerful as the Pentagon, its generals, its advisors and its contractors — such as Blackwater, no matter what its name. No president, no committee of Congress, no critic has the power to stand up to that Military/Industrial Complex.

Only the ragtag Vietcong could defeat them, and for the past eight years, the Taliban in Afghanistan. None of these insurgents had a West Point, or nuclear subs, or Navy SEALS, or the hundreds of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry available to the U.S. military, and yet their determination and cunning is often superior to our best training and supplies.

A huge war chest is no substitute for fighting to defend your homeland against a foreign invader, and though we might coat it with glorious and elaborate rhetoric, unfortunately, that is our role, as it was in North Korea, in Vietnam and it is who we are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Imagine how you would feel if foreigners invaded your hometown. You might fight back.

©2009 Dennis Green

Neo-Liberalism in the U.S.A.

by Dennis Green

Even before Bill Clinton was elected President of America, the Neo-Liberalism Movement in this country held sway over the Democratic Party. This is the movement away from Progressive, populist, Jacksonian Democracy ideals toward a Democratic Party in league with Wall Street. Sometimes called “Corporate Democrats,” they are faux liberals, not ideological conservatives like the “Blue Dogs,” but willing to side with “Big Money” rather than the interests of the common man.

Concentrated economic power is a much bigger threat to democracy in America today than either the Religious Right or “Islamo-Fascism” abroad. It has blocked meaningful health care reform with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying, as well as any substantial movement away from dependency on foreign oil. And most recently, it has stymied any economic reform whatsoever. Congress isn’t just dysfunctional, it’s on the make and on the take. The fix is always in.

Armchair politicians who complain about President Obama’s “socialism” and his “radical” ways don’t have the slightest understanding of this shift in American politics that began after the defeat of Walter Mondale for president. That’s when Democratic strategists decided that they couldn’t depend on liberals groups, think tanks, labor unions and vox populi to compete with the Republicans for campaign funds. This was a purely pragmatic decision, and had nothing to do with ideology.

Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton’s chief political advisor, and he learned from the failure of health care reform in 1994 that you couldn’t go into the process cross-wise with the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So he assured these economic powers, known as the “medical/industrial complex,” that their perks and privileges would not be threatened, (such as exemptions from anti-trust laws), but also that their subscriber/customer bases would be vastly expanded through federal subsidies to low income Americans.

The trade-offs? No banning of patients with “pre-existing” conditions, no dropping of the very sick, some indefinite limit on lifetime expenditures — but the additional profits for Big Pharm and Big Insurance far outweigh these concessions. And there will be no “public option” let alone a “single-payer” plan, the only measures which would make reform of insurance and drugs really meaningful.

The line between “pragmatic” and “cynical” can be thin indeed, just as the line between my days as a “realist” and those as a “pessimist” are often blurred. Yet I think that being a ruthless pragmatist means that I have to accept most things as they are, the things I cannot change. And give me the wisdom to know the difference.

Real health care reform means bringing the hospitals, doctors and nurses to heel, eliminating “fee for service” reimbursement and payment plans, as well as all unnecessary tests and procedures shown statistically to make no improvement in outcomes. But that is a long way off.

In the meantime, the neo-liberal, corporate Democrats are just as corrupt as their Republican counterparts, and as corrupt as regimes we prop up in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s human nature, and that’s the way it is, goin’ out West young man!

©2009 Dennis Green

The Grinch is GOP!

by Dennis Green

Well, we’re getting some kind of health care reform, which many Americans may like very much. It limits how much insurance companies can spend on “overhead” such as marketing and high salaries; it prevents people being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; and it adds about 25 million Americans to the system. No thanks to the Republicans.

They bleat that President Obama’s approval rating has dropped below 50%, but it’s still far more than double theirs, which holds at 17%. And they have gambled on a very risky strategy: that Obama’s policies would fail to pass at all, or if they do that they will disappoint a majority of the voters in the upcoming midterms of 2010. Fat chance.

Meanwhile, not a viable candidate on the right in sight. Huckabee’s pardon of a vicious, unredeemed murderous thug cancels out his chances. And Sarah’s “misapprehensions,” (i.e., outright lies), pile up around her like a deep snowdrift. Death panels indeed. They’re meeting in the airline hanger of her bus tour even now.

The head of the GOP says that Democrats have just “Flipped the finger to the American public” by passing this bill. And such rhetoric reveals a mindset that may be, unfortunately, typical of his party. They mistake their own chronic chthonic view of life as the spirit of the American people.

And yes, Big Money controls the U.S. Congress, but every single Republican is bought and paid for, and only a majority of Democrats, perhaps 200 in the House and 40 in the Senate. There are still a few “Non-Corporate Democrats” left, and they voted for this bill rather than leaving 47 million Americans out in the cold.

So now the waiting, and the observing, and the carping begin. But if, nine months from now, a majority of Americans like what they see, the GOP will be forever a minority party, out of office and out of the running. The reasons for this are many.

They have lost the support of genuine fiscal conservatives by driving up the deficit during the last administration. They have lost the support of libertarians by catering to the religious right, which wants MORE government interference in our private lives and decision-making, not less. From abortion rights to gay rights to the civil rights of legal immigrants, the religious right wants Americans to be less free, not more free, of Big Brother, or is that Father McCoughlin?

And now they have chosen the strategy of Obstructionism to try and create gridlock in the Congress and block any progress by a president whose election makes them positively apoplectic. But they forget that such a strategy used by Democrats against President Ronald Reagan failed miserably and made him an American icon, prompting Spiro Agnew to call them “the nattering nabobs of negativity.”

Being a nattering nabob of negativity is just as silly, as burlesque, as it sounds. For Republicans, it’s like dressing up in black face and putting on a minstrel show to present an alternative to voters who have elected a black president. They need to remember the fate of the Grinch, and I don’t mean Newt.

©2009 Dennis Green

The Mad House

by Dennis Green

I’d been studiously avoiding the hit TV show, “Mad Men,” for all the right reasons. I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, worked in advertising for almost 30 years, and was partner and creative director in my own boutique ad agency for 20. The very notion of this replication made me cringe.

And then I caught a few scenes from the show late one night on Oprah, clips she showed when she had two of the stars as her featured guests. And sure enough, it was god-awful.

The most obvious hallmark of its in-authenticity, for me, are its fabled use of drinking and smoking, which permeate the show, and these characters’ work lives. As someone who started smoking cigarettes at the age of 10, in 1950, in the fifth grade — and shook hands with John Barleycorn a few years later — I know my way around a shot glass and a pack of smokes, I’ll tell ya.

(And I quit smoking cigarettes 20 years ago, but that’s another story…)

So what’s the problem? Well, in those “Mad Men” scenes, I saw that everyone — from the actors to the writers to the directors and the producers of the show — is just so damned self-conscious about the drinking and the smoking that they become stylized, little archaic rituals from a bygone era, and they’re not that, and never will be. People still smoke and drink, and in some countries do so at the office.

And back in the day, cocktails and a ciggies hanging off your lip were something we did unconsciously, something we took for granted, the way kids use their cell phones today.

But on that show, people are constantly flicking their ashes and blowing great clouds of smoke, like little girls playing “Grown Up” and serving tea. Likewise, they make a great show of the jiggers and the highball glasses, as if Prohibition is still in effect, instead of casually knocking back a few with lunch.

Consequently, I fear the show is designed to resemble a kind of archeological dig — “Oh, let’s work in a funny 1960 hairdo! How about an IBM Selectric TYPEWRITER! What a hoot! A museum piece..!”

Most of the actors on the show weren’t even born yet in 1960, so they can be forgiven, but somebody responsible for the look and feel of the series has to be a grownup of a certain age, no?

For let me tell you, 1960 was only 50 years ago, half a century, half a lifetime if we’re lucky, not a different era, not a time gone by. John Kennedy, whose peccadilloes far exceeded Tiger’s, was running for president, and the Beatles were playing those sessions in Hamburg. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were just revving up the bus, and Timothy Leary was turning on Harvard lab assistants to the joys of LSD.

We were on the cusp of a Cultural Revolution, but James Dean, Jack Kerouac and Brando had been at it for years.

And when James Dean smoked a cigarette, he didn’t flick the ashes off, but just let them fall where they may. So Mad Men, get hip, and stop being such a caricature of your times. Otherwise, you may be honored in the Old Fossils Hall of Fame.

©2009 Dennis Green

All About Eve

by Dennis Green

The tale of Adam and Eve is apophrical. A woman tempts a man into error, which leads to their mutual downfall. They are expelled from Paradise in nakedness and shame, and their two sons, who, so far as we can tell, mate with their mother, get into a brawl and one kills the other. The curse is then borne by Cain’s offspring, who are destroyed by the Great Flood, while the sons of Abel are spared. Whew!

Talk about your Hebraic Tragedy! The ancient Greeks never came up with anything more telling. But what does it mean?

We are told that Eve is tempted by the serpent to partake of the fruit of “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil,” duality perhaps??? And then she persuades Adam, with her fateful charms, to partake too. They have been granted complete freedom in the Garden of Eden, with this one prohibition, so when they break it, they feel immediate guilt, and hide their nakedness under fig leaves. God sees their newfound modesty, and knows what it means.

There has been much speculation over the years about the meaning of all this. Nakedness and sexuality, the duality of good and bad that doesn’t exist in a state of Innocence. But perhaps we have a situation in current events which may shed some further light on this ancient Mythos.

A young man succeeds in his chosen field beyond all expectations. He wins ten out of twelve consecutive contests. He is named spokesman for all sorts of products and services, from Nike to Chiclets gum. Soon, he is the first professional golfer to be worth a billion dollars.

And then he meets a woman determined to join with him in matrimony. But first, she must sign a pre-nuptial decree that limits her takeaway should they ever divorce. She signs it gladly, and coaxes, cajoles, caresses him into the marriage bed. All is bliss and they are set to live happily ever after.

And there is only one taboo: Marital Infidelity. The Tree of the Knowledge of Other Women, in the Biblical Sense. If that ensues, all bets are off. They are, as a couple, happy in public, happy to be photographed, happy to be together alone at last at the end of a long day or tournament.

And then, the blessed event, children! All that was missing to complete the portrait of perfect domestic bliss. And then…who knows..? But something went seriously sideways between them, our dark Adam and his blonde bombshell Eve. It may be that, as for many women post-partum, her libido simply up and died. It may be that he witnessed the birthing, and couldn’t quite look at…her…the same way ever again. Whatever it was, I suspect it produced some degree of frustration.

Cover thy nakedness! As Yeats writes, “Saint Joseph thought the world would melt/but liked the way his finger smelt…” And this: “Eros has pitched her tent/beside the place of excrement…” This from the poet who died after surgery to implant monkey glands to revive his sexuality!

So now the Mrs. Woods is saying that she is going to file for divorce, but that she’s going to wait until “everything has come out, because then I’ll have more leverage…” Now Tiger knows what Paul McCartney felt like. And also, perhaps, Adam the Heir to Eden. Or even me. Why is it that the adults always look so much worse than the kids?

Eve is not merely the archetypal First Woman, but also the First Wife. (I’d say “First Mate,” but that sounds too much like Starbuck…) And as First Wife, she sends a chill down the spine of any man who has one. If this were a nursery story, it would be a Grimm one indeed, enough so to warn little boys against those evil, scheming little Eves.

©2009 Dennis Green