Hope

A friend of mine told me that having no Hope can be a liberating thing. He claimed that with no Hope, you can never be disappointed, like you were in the old days when you thought you lived in a better, more hopeful, world than you really do. He seemed content with this, almost happy, because he's an intelligent, compassionate human being, and he came by this conclusion honestly. I'll explain.

For many years he made his living driving truck, until he passed out at the wheel of his own car after taking “Spice”. The reason he was doing “Spice” was because he was a lifetime pot smoker, and he drove truck for a pee-testing company. He had over a million transcontinental, accident-free miles under his belt, but the pee-testing company that he worked for made all of their employees—including my friend with his immaculate record—sign a contract in which the employee agreed to a pee test whenever the company felt like giving them one. After several years of holistic and homeopathic attempt to curveball the pee test, after much worrying and looking over his shoulder, he started experimenting with “Spice”, which was supposed to be a very similar high to marijuana yet didn’t show up on a pee test. And here's were we get to Hope.

Many folks who currently reside in the Ron Paul quarter of our 21^st century Universe ardently believe that if we would only eliminate all the rules of society except the ones that allow the Biggest Lawyer to win, we will have a society so free that babies will be issued their “m-cards” at birth. This is called "libertarianism"--by them. 

But those of us who are old enough to remember the Eighties, when corporate fascism, marketed to us Plebes as "libertarianism", started its steady rise under Reagan. We remember that, back when pee testing was born, the drug war was simultaneously birthed and foisted upon us from that very quarter of the Universe--and by the very same corporate interests--from which our current tea-soaked “libertarians” reside. We remember that the Drug War, and pee testing, was not about "freedom" at all. It was about control, foisted upon us by an earlier crew of self-described "libertarians" who had just been caught illegally selling arms to terrorists in Iran and funneling the profits to terrorists in Central America. The Reagan team needed two things immediately; control and distraction.

An emerging technology allowing public agencies and private corporations to detect trace amounts of THC in your pee up to a month after you’ve taken a hit provided the Reagan team with its excellent answer. Never mind that allowing such an Orwellian search-and seizure technology to be foisted upon law-abiding citizens was patently unconstitutional. The Reagan team decided to ramp up the drug war by simultaneously making marijuana so illegal and allowing pee testing to become ubiquitous that kids would turn their parents and teachers to the government (which some did) and that deep-pocketed interests could hold an employee’s pee over their head and threaten them with jail time if they don’t just shut up and do what they’re told. 

Voila! The new, improved Drug War was declared simultaneously as the Reagan-era "libertarians" were getting exposed undermining our Constitution and common decency etcetera, etcetera (etcetera, etcetera). With just a tiny tad of smoke and mirrors—so to speak—the first sweeping techno-invasion of our privacy, the first of many to follow, was granted to those public and private entities by the very Team-in-power dry-casting desperately for distraction and control lest they soon become the Team-out-of-power. And that, to say the least, was a serious business for the government as well as for Corporate America, who naturally took it seriously. 

So it happened that from the day my friend signed a contract that should have been declared unconstitutional on the face of it by any insect let alone any judge, whenever he allowed THC to pollute his pee, which he did on a semi-regular basis, he risked losing his job and possibly having criminal charges filed. Naturally he started doing "Spice".

Ironically, he may have been able to pass a pee test if one had been given him during this brief period of his life. But they never gave him one, and he passed out instead, while driving, and he lost the job he was trying to save by switching to “spice” in order to dodge a "libertarian" policy that, if you were to believe contemporary tea-ranters such as Ron Paul, had outlived its "libertarian" purpose. 

To be fair, my friend was close to retirement, and the company wasn’t run by bad people per se. They didn’t really care if their drivers smoked pot. They were just doing what they felt they had to do to stay in business, which they thought included being a pee-testing company and not retaining drivers who had a record of passing out while driving. Pretty reasonable, they thought, and they gave him a desk job to mark out his time until he qualified for Social Security. He still works under the same pee-testing contract, but the company doesn't give their office help pee-tests as a general thing. 

“See!” he told me. “No hope. It’s a good thing.”My friend seemed content, almost happy, which, to be fair, he generally is anyway.

I can’t prove or coroborate any of this of course, except that my friend is an professed atheist who basically practices the core precepts of true Christianity. But as far as pee-testing goes, this is an accurate description of how I saw it in 1986 and, allowing for some minor adjustments for inflation and other minor details, is how I see it now. The Reagan team showed us all what a "libertarian" skirt looks like, and we just didn't pay attention. Know thyself by the company ye keep, and all that. 

That's my story and I’m sticking to it. 

Reading Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cracked Pot; The Dregs from the 2013 Montana Legislature

Nancy Ballance, Bob Lake, Rick Hill and the bullet-riddled “Obama Presidential Library”   Ravalli County Memorial Day Parade, 2012

The 2013 Montana Legislature is over and there are lessons we can learn, especially if you’re a fortuneteller, like I am.

It’s easy to be a fortuneteller, or at least it’s not rocket-science. I can teach you how to do it. 

Here’s how. Just look for clarity. You can find it anywhere, but in this case let’s look for it in the bottom of the the 2013 Montana Legislature, the cracked teapot where the dregs that passed for reasonable debate in Helena this year settled. 

Clarity in the dregs, you ask? Of course. Simply observe how the various strands of tea settle on top of each other, which strands dominate, which submit. Use your intuition if you wish, but you don’t have to. It’s pretty damn clear in the case of the 2013 Montana Legislature, which is what we fortunetellers love. Clarity. It makes us look good.

Are you ready? Let’s give it try. Any cracked teapot will do, but let’s do use the 2013 Montana Legislature, since it’s so handy, and they’re done with it anyways. No argument there? O.K. Now give that glop at the bottom a good, thoughtful look. It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Look at which strands float to the top and dominate, and which strands submit. Think, but don’t think too much. They didn’t. Are you ready for your fortune, Montana. Here it is:

Paranoia Strikes Deep.

Look at the strands. They're like animal tracks. They don't lie.

• We must have more guns, but we must have less healthcare
• We must preserve our god-given right to self-preservation through firepower, with no correlating god-given right to self-preservation through affordable healthcare.
• We must preserve our sacred right to own enough massive firepower to kill and maim hundreds of people at a whim, but we must not have any correlating sacred right to heathcare.
• If you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve it. It's quite clear, this maxim applies to both guns and healthcare, and is god-given.
• A gun shop owner’s feelings are more important than the feelings of a mother whose six-year-old child was gunned down in school by a card-carrying N.R.A. member with an assault rifle that his "sport-shooting" mom had safely tucked away in her closet.
• We have the right to preserve our personal selves with guns and more guns, but the planet that preserves us all can bloody well go to hell.

Look across the mountains this morning into the next day and your kids’ futures. If you still believe that Montana is the best place to raise them on the face of the Earth you’ve seen so far, you’re right.

But consider, as you read the dregs of the 2013 Montana Legislature, the severe fault lines separating reality from the wicked ideology displayed in Helena this session and how that thoroughly-avoidable crack is going to shape your kids’ futures along with our Big Skies.

And take heed the warning gifted us by the majority of Montana’s state legislators who, with due diligence, said the following to you and yours:

"Your kids matter less than our guns."

Paranoia strikes deep. That’s your fortune, Montana. You’re welcome.

The Koch Machine and the True Cost of Jingoism

                                                                                  Cheshire Regiment, The Somme, 1916                             Photo by Ernest Brooks

I was reading an article in Common Dreams about Koch Industries’ bid to buy up major news outlets[i] when I came upon a term that piqued my curiosity and gifted me with a hunch. Here’s my line of thinking.

The author of the article, Robert Parry, used the term “entrenched power” to refer to today’s uber-rich elites who don’t appreciate the fact that, for a brief time in our modern history, major media outlets occasionally reported actual facts that embarrassed and even threatened to disempower them. They yearned for “the good old days” before the “liberal media” afflicted the nation with the “Vietnam syndrome” which made Americans allergic to nationalistic propaganda that preceeds all violent foreign adventures known as “wars” to us lucky Americans whose last military conflict on our native soil was during the 19^th century. 

But the term “entrenched power” is a modern phrase, my hunch went, and says something more than what most people intend or infer.

Whenever my curiosity is piqued by a word, I look it up in my antique set of Funk and Wagnell’s, where I didn’t find any mention of the modern political usage of the word “entrenched”, which is why I love my Funk and Wagnell’s. It's history. The "good old days”, back to the 40s,  when the word "entrenched" was all about trenches, as in trench warfare.

As any American school kid should know, World War One was fought mostly in trenches. And as most American school kids should also know but probably don’t, it was fought yard by bloody yard by boys and men who were put in those trenches by the “entrenched powers” of their day, using the jingoistic propaganda methods from what our contemporary Entrenched Ones now term “the good old days”. Sixteen million people were killed in World War One. Twenty million physically-wounded and untold millions pschycologically-so, which set the stage for World War Two, when almost 60 million people were killed. The wounded from that war set the stage for the Cold War, from which we will apparently never recover.

We try to put numerical costs on various wars, which we hope helps us a little. For example, America’s Afgan-Iraq adventure, brought to us by our modern “entrenched powers” using jingoistic propaganda methods that date back to their “good old days”, will run about $4-$6 trillion[ii]. “Horreurs!” we say to that, and then we move on. It feels a little better to at least have a number to work with. “Whew!” we say in place of approaching War’s true reckonings, and we move on. But as most people in the world know, and as we Americans are really just learning, that number just scratches the surface of the tip of the iceberg. Sure, the iceberg’s melting, but it’s still a big iceberg, and any dollar amount is just a tiny scratch on it in terms of reckoning the true cost of jingoism.

One statistic from World War One that should give pause to those of us who seem so gullible to the various distractions our elites deploy against us is that there are still hundreds of pounds of unexploded, still-deadly ordinance for EVERY SQUARE YARD along that war's hundred-year-old front. If you add up the unexploded ordinance remaining from World War Two, this grim statistic literally skyrockets. And that’s just in Europe, where the word “war” means a bit more than the mere lack of a “syndrome”, n'est pas? Speaking of which, the French still employ bomb disposal units, who gather up the century-old ordinance from the farmers who find them when they plow their fields. They will continue to do so for decades into the future, at huge cost. For unexploded bombs. From World War One.

My hunch is that the word “entrenched” didn’t start getting used for politics until well after World War Two, and I further hunch that at least some of the original evolvers of the word had that iconic trench war--World War One--in mind when they were stretching our language for a phrase to describe the corrosive all-powerful entities inhabiting the inner circles of our modern corporate states. I can't prove it. It's just a hunch. But I can literally visualize the aptness of using a literary relic like "trench warfare" to describe the toxic blend of 21^st century elites employing 19^th century propaganda that’s occurring on our watch. In the context of the modern definition, the trenches are always where "entrenched powers" put the rest of us, to fight yard by bloody yard for their priorities, not ours. For nothing, in other words, and at great cost to ourselves and our great-grandchildren's' futures. Visualize Global Warming. We're fighting--literally fighting-- each other in the trenches to prove or deny THAT? For who?

We worry much about economic monstrosities such as the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch running amok through our nation’s always-fragile news outlets, as well we should. But we shouldn’t worry about whether the kind of propaganda these “entrenched powers” want to entrench us with are anything new unto the face of the Earth or more ominous than what we’ve seen in the past. They're not. And as always, we can either deal with it through our still-breathing democratic mechanisms, as the New Dealers did when they declared our spanking new airwaves "public domain" and limited its control by corporate powers. Or not, and let Koch and Murdoch, Beck and Limbaugh define our terms for us. What price Enfotainment? 

As any American school kid should know, some few folks made a lot of money in World War One. Some of the same made a killing in World War Two, and the Iraq-Afgan conflicts have been veritable cash cows for for the Zombies of War who kill but never die, the deep-pocketed reality-shifters who wear the face of the Koch brothers today, to whom “entrenched powers” is a most apt, modern and meaningful description.

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[i] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/28-2

“It was that resurgence of participatory democracy that was the real fear for those who held entrenched power, whether in the segregationist South or inside the wood-paneled rooms of Wall Street banks and big corporations. Thus, there developed a powerful pushback that sought to both hold the line on additional (and possibly even more damaging) disclosures of wrongdoing and to reassert control of the channels of information that influenced how the American people saw the world.”

[ii] http://costofwar.com/