Twilight of the American Empire

If anything can be said to characterize this period in the history of the American Empire it is the faint sweet smell of decay, the aroma of something barely nosed out behind the curtains of our public and private lives. It is the way an Empire in decline begins to smell.

As a people we have become spiritually feverish and anxious, only dimly aware (if at all) that we are sick yet, somehow, responding to that half-sensed odor by questing after distraction and emotional excitation. Thus we hide ourselves from the truth.

Americans have never been a particularly introspective people; our thought has always been directed outward, toward the world. We have been engineers, pragmatists. At least by the myths we employ to understand ourselves and others it is the French to whom we attribute the inward turning of thought: Think Descartes.

When I look about today I can’t help but think of Rome: Bread…circuses… and Caesar’s royal circlet sold to the highest bidder; political destinies sold to the corn merchants.

Some weeks a go a friend looked up from his coffee and after a pause in our conversation said, “There is no honor any more.” Then just a few nights ago someone turned to me and asked, “Don’t we care about facts anymore?”

If there is a public life without honor anything is thinkable; and in a public life in which facts are less important than emotions and attitudes, the thinkable becomes attainable.

The Rodeo Clown

Progressive Blogospherians would be well served to remember the true function of Sarah Palin in this campaign. Only in part is she the Republicans’ attack dog…a pit bull in petticoats. Her major function is to be the Republicans’ Rodeo Clown. While we are busy chasing the clown we miss the opportunity to put a horn in our true enemies

Palin is not an important issue. She is what she is…so move on. (Correct her lies when and where necessary, but without mentioning her, her religious beliefs, or her mothering skills.) Neo-Conservative Republicanism is the issue and the continuing threat.

Warning: Mixed metaphor ahead!

The Progressive Blogosphere reminds me of a nest of scorpions surrounded by a ring of burning straw. They thrash around stinging themselves in a frustrated fury, but they are not attacking a real enemy and they are not breaking out.

We lefty bloggers have a tendency to preach to ourselves when we should be out in the streets. Or, if revolutionary action is not your cup of tea, at least have a coffee for some of your friends and neighbors and remind them of the ways in which neo-conservative Republicanism has been a catastrophe for America.

You’d be surprised how many of your neighbors do not realize the true dimensions of our nation’s disaster.

Precinct 56 Report

I got up early this morning to celebrate Primary Election Day by actually going to the polls. I have no sympathy with voting by mail. I believe in the secret ballot but I also believe that the act of voting should be public.

I like to walk up to my polling place, say hello to my fellow citizens, and “witness” my belief in the system by actually being there. Voting by mail is too much like renewing a magazine subscription by mail---it trivializes the act of voting; no one knows if you actually care.

I walked into the Orange Grove School gymnasium shortly after 7 o’clock.It was empty. Oh, there were voting booths and tables with bright eyed election workers—there just weren’t any voters. Everyone was being very careful slowly to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ This was a good dry run for November. It was probably needed.

I voted. I was the third person today.

Tucson Foothills Annexation

The folks in the Catalina Foothills just love living in Tucson…so long as they aren’t actually part of Tucson; never understood it, myself.


I’ve lived in the Foothills for thirty-five years and I think it would be nifty to be able to elect representatives to the Tucson City Council. I’d like to be able to have a vote in water issues, too. I’m okay with city police and fire protection; and the city’s solid waste fee is cheaper than what I pay for garbage collection.

There must be peristaltic waves of “annexation” anxiety sweeping through the lower reaches of the Foothills. I spotted these signs along River Road. What’s up?

Here’s the City’s annexation site: click
The sponsor of one of the signs is at: Bobbaker2@gmail.com

Palin's Wikipedia Entry Gets Overhaul

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!

The Palin candidacy is going to be an innocent source of merriment and mirth. Let me offer for your consideration the tale of the miraculously revising Palin biography. Did they think no one would catch this? NPR did!

“All Things Considered, August 29, 2008 · If you happened to check Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry Thursday, you might have had a good tip about today's (Friday’s) announcement. Someone — and apparently it was just one person — felt like the existing biography wasn't appropriate for a vice-presidential candidate.”

Arizona Legislative District 26

There are plenty of registered Independents who are really closet Democrats. I’m one of them, although as a very public old lefty I haven’t seen my closet for some time.

Some of us dropped Democratic registration because we were annoyed with what we perceived as the spineless behavior of the current crop of Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen; others left because they just wanted to get the full burden of every party’s mailings and robocalls; some like the opportunity to dip into a Republican primary and take a shot at warping the outcome.

If any Data Port reader is a District 26 registered Independent, or if you know one, let me suggest you or they vote (ugh) Republican in this primary.

Let’s help Democrat Cheryl Cage in her run for the state senate by giving her the weaker of two possible Republican opponents, Pete Hershberger and Al Melvin. Let’s help bump Pete and elect Captain Al.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Hershberger is moderate and has been good on a variety of social issues. But if he is elected his very first vote will be to hand leadership of the Senate over to the Republicans.

Cheryl will attract moderate Republicans who will prefer her to the very conservative Al Melvin; and Hershberger Democrats, who might otherwise split their vote, will be solidly pro Cage.

Cage campaign video here.

Return To The Fray

Two-and-a-half months out of the blogosphere! Well, almost. I did dip in just enough to note that Matt Foraker had played gadfly effectively and goaded the sluggish AzStarbeast into paying attention to cloth rooting about in the public trough. Good work, Matt!

I paid very little attention to anything political and spent a lot of time on the road. It was motorcycle heaven. How heavenly it was will be made clear in a few days over at the other blog: Data Port Two.

Here’s a picture of the divine one loading the hack after a glamorous night in Page, Arizona.
Of possible political interest is a comment about ethanol. I keep very careful gas mileage records on my bikes. I have found that the addition of ethanol to gasoline reduces gas mileage by a bit over 5%.

I was amused by a sticker on a BP gas pump that proudly announced that BP fuel was “enhanced” with ethanol. It was like going into a fish market and seeing a label proudly announcing that the salmon was enhanced with mercury.

C’mon, guys. If you must make alcohol out of corn, make bourbon and don’t pour it in your gas tank.

Why I'm Voting Republican

Just in case you missed this.

Remembering My Father

The old man had been an actor all his life and that was a rare thing. What was rare was that he'd never done anything else. He’d never sold shoes, never waited tables while he was “at liberty,” never driven a cab.

Unlike some of his pals he hadn't hung around New York waiting for a big part; never waited to be 'discovered' by some critic or producer who would pick him out of the crowd as Broadway’s newest star. He simply went wherever the work was.

As a young man he was told it wasn't clever career management to leave the center of the theatrical world and go careening around the sticks with some wandering repertory company. Why not pick up some cash waiting tables and bet on the big break?

He'd think about that for a moment and say, “Given the chance I'd rather just go acting.” And that’s what he did, moving across the country to wherever there was work for a journeyman performer with a decent wardrobe and the knack for learning his part quickly.

When acting jobs weren't available he’d direct. He’d go wherever there was a little theatre, community group, or church pageant that needed to be put in order. He taught acting at a museum theatre school, and acted in radio soap operas. But whatever he did he was always a creature of the theatre, a man for whom the practice of his craft was more important than the conditions under which he practiced it, or the fame of the place he did his work.

He lived in a Volkswagen van in the parking lot of a Texas theatre one boiling hot summer because he wanted, he needed, to “go acting.”

As the years rolled by and the casting calls became less frequent he had pretty much decided that he was no longer “at liberty” but simply retired. And that was why, the Christmas season of his seventy-second year, he took a job as a department store Santa Claus. It was another chance to go acting.

He was glad of the work but now the old actor had a problem. He’d been doing a favor for a lady friend and the new job would mean he’d have to stop doing that favor.

The lady had a son, a rising star in the banking business. A nice enough ‘kid,’ as the old actor always called him, but as articulate as a barrel of hair when facing any group greater than one. The actor had volunteered to be the kid’s speech coach and over the weeks a polite distance between the two grew into the closeness of mutual affection.

The young man was sad to think the actor’s new job would interrupt their sessions together, but he was happy for the old man. The job was a nice Christmas present.

“So what’s the part, Coach?”

“It’s a character part. I’m going to do Santa Claus at Bulloch’s department store.”

The kid was well and truly knocked down by this. He was embarrassed for the old actor; at his taking what seemed like a humiliating end-of-the-road job.

“How can you do that?” he asked. “You’ve spent your entire life as an actor, you’ve never driven a cab or waited on tables, or sold socks ...and now you’re going to play Santa in a department store?”

“Ah, kid, it’s a pretty good job. Costume and makeup are provided and I get a private green room. Think of that! Besides, there are no lines to learn, I’m only on for about a half-hour at a time and I get one free meal a day in the employee cafeteria. Best of all, I’m making better than Equity minimum.”

“Well, I think it’s humiliating,” said the kid, who didn’t realize until that moment how much he loved the old man.

“It’s humiliating to think that someone like you who’s worked in the theatre with some of our finest actors has to play a department store Santa. Good Lord! Imagine stuffing a pillow in your costume, wearing those awful fake patent leather boots, the phony beard and ...and...that ridiculous red suit! How can you do that?”

The old actor thought about this for a while, just a little hurt that the kid was raining on his parade.

“You know, I want to give you a little advice. There’s a lesson to be learned here that’ll do you more good in the long run than anything I can teach you about speaking in some bank board room. It’s advice about life, and it’s just as good for bankers as it is for actors. It's all about what you call that ridiculous red suit."

The old actor leaned into the young man until they were practically nose to nose and in a sotto voce growl said…

“Listen, kid, if you want to play Santa Claus, you gotta wear the red suit.”
…………………………………………
My father died two years after the Santa Claus gig, his last chance to go acting. The young man is the vice president of a southern California bank.

Originally published in The desert Leaf

Formula One!

It was a little little bit of Sunday heaven yesterday watching Formula One racing.
If you're unfamiliar with F1, take a look at the official web site.

The greatest cars and drivers in open wheel racing compete in Formula One, an 18-contest season on road courses. I watch Indy Car of course, mainly following Danica Patrick and Tony Kanaan, but oval course racing seems to lack the challenge and excitement of the road courses and the IRL broadcasts are overloaded with commercials.

NASCAR? I've never been able to get on with it.....Round and round and round and snore.

Yesterday Polish driver Robert Kubica driving a BMW-Sauber car won the Canadian Grand Prix. BMW cars are now first and second as BMW-Sauber closes in on the Constructor’s Trophy just 3 points behind Ferrari.

Two Pieces of Really Bad News

I've taken up my bicycle again...just in case.

A Sweet Deal for US Sugar

I guess the Mott family really needs the money.

CLEWISTON, Fla. — Thousands of workers at U.S. Sugar thought they were getting a good deal when the company shelved their pension plan and gave them stock for their retirement instead. They had a heady sense of controlling their own destiny as they became the company’s biggest shareholders, Vic McCorvey, a former farm manager there, said.

Now that many U.S. Sugar workers are reaching retirement age, though, the company has been cashing them out of the retirement plan at a much lower price than they could have received. Unknown to them, an outside investor was offering to buy the company — and their shares — for far more. Longtime employees say they have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars each and millions of dollars as a group, while insiders of the company came out ahead.

Corporations loved these plans (ESOPs- Employee Stock Ownership plans) if for no other reason than that they allowed them an alternative to defined benefit plans. There were corporate tax breaks as well and owners could sell their otherwise illiquid stock to the plans. US Sugar took its stock off the public market when the ESOP was created in 1983.

Nearly 95 percent of the country’s 10,000 ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) are now at privately held companies, like U.S. Sugar. Because their shares are not publicly traded, there is no market price. So workers cash out shares without knowing what the price would be on an open market.

You can read the whole story by clicking here.

American Fascism and The Corporate State

While you’re waiting patiently for the official announcement that our Primary ordeal is over, let me suggest some reading: “America’s Democratic Collapse,” by Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges.

Here are some excerpts:

We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries, or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority. They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry, which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity.

The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called "near poverty." Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can't afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year. But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox's celebrity gossip program "TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network's "700 Club" as "bona fide newscasts." The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse "participatory fascism."

How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation -- the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy.

End excerpts

We are the victims of a slow motion coup d’etat.

Top Down, Bottom Up

I’m fairly sure that when primary postmortems are held that simple phrase, “Top Down, Bottom Up,” will summarize the difference between the Clinton and Obama campaigns. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that, here in Arizona at least, the Clinton campaign passed over some canny local pols, preferring out-of-state organizers.

Whether that was true and whether, or to what degree, that was the case at the national level will have to wait for scholarly analysis.

Another expression, “That was then, this is now,” pretty neatly summarizes another mistake by Clinton campaign strategists: The nature of political action and political organizing has really changed since 1993. It’s not perfectly clear to me that the campaign understood the power of Web 2.0, and the nature of bottom up campaigning that makes possible.

The Obama campaign clearly did---not too amazing in a campaign run by and for a seasoned community organizer.

What Makes Clinton Run

There are two fairly obvious emotional engines driving Senator Clinton’s continued scramble for her party’s nomination: She desperately wants the job and she fervently believes that Senator Obama can’t beat McCain.

Only a political naïf would fault her for wanting the job and devoting herself passionately to its pursuit. If you don’t believe you deserve to be President, if that desire isn’t the hot center of your emotional life then you probably shouldn’t run. Passionate ambition is the sine qua non of a political life.

The Clinton problem, however, (and the reason so many people dislike her without being able to quite say why) is that her ambition is so painfully obvious. We much prefer our candidates to appear at least a little reluctant to shoulder the awful burdens of public service---but willing to do it, of course, out of devotion to the public welfare and as the result of a great spontaneous groundswell. Oh, Yeah.

On the question of Obama’s ability to beat McCain I can only comment that he was able enough to beat one of the cleverest political families of recent times. In my judgment he will be more than able to handle McCain.

Did the Clintons misjudge how good a politician Obama is? You bet. Far from being some sort of misty-eyed novice dreaming an impossible dream he was (and is) a political street fighter and community organizer trained up by some of the wiliest attack dogs in Chicago Democratic politics.

It makes those of us who learned our politics in the Chicago wards of the Daley organization smile .

For a revealing backgrounder on Obama click here.

Vote Yellow Dog

Be a Yellow Dog Democrat!

A Yellow Dog Democrat is someone who would vote for anyone, even a yellow dog, if he she or it were running on the Democratic ticket. A Yellow Dog Democrat will even vote for a Blue Dog, or Hillary, or Obama. Follow the Yellow Dog!

The Data Port is back.

How Tucson Drives

Badly. Badly, that is, for a town whose drivers are beginning to whine about the high cost of gasoline. Well, I’m sorry---okay, not very--- but didn’t you see it coming before you bought your wheels? Never had an inkling? Oh.

We’re all stuck with the choices we made until we can trade down or get our Albatross Eight paid for; but that doesn’t mean we are helpless.

I regularly ride the Ina Road, Skyline Drive, Sunrise dog-leg. When the light I’m at turns green I shift up through the gears as soon as my engine speed allows. I do not jack-rabbit off the starting line. Invariably the car behind me snaps to my left, barrels past and pulls in front of me so that he can be the first guy at the next red light. He’s there waiting for me when I arrive.

Driving this way I can actually increase my gas mileage by almost three miles per gallon.

For the record my two personal vehicles are a 1990 BMW K75 with sidecar (my pickup truck) and a BMW F650 CS single cylinder solo bike. Riding as I have described I get 40 MPG from the hack and nearly 60 MPG from the solo.

I can’t believe the laws of physics are such that what works for me won’t for work you, whatever you drive.

Tucson’s Rio Nada

The best job of local journalism is not being done by any of the local journals; it’s being done by blogger Matt Foraker over at Sustainability, Equity, Development.

The latest installment (Tuesday, May 6) of his devastating analysis of the Rio Nuevo disaster can be read here.

I particularly relish this paragraph:

I've never met Greg or Hecker, but the cloth alarm is screaming. I have met Snell. I speak with confidence that if you asked these three to team up and bake a pizza, they'd drop fifty grand on an oven study, twelve grand to fly to Greece and watch them, $40 grand to consultants to study 1) dough, 2) sauce, 3) ingredients, 4) cheese, 5) baking temps, 6) pizza size, and 7) crust thickness policies. After extensive meetings and interviews, Snell would drop 75 grand for glossy pamphlets no one will read because everyone's already left for Pizza Hut, where it takes 20 minutes and costs about twelve bucks.

Love it!

Another Note From The Sidelines

There’s a story in today’s Huffington Post that I find particularly depressing.
Here is the lede:

"In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the Obama campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the message -- that Obama is a likely loser in the general election -- that Hillary and her allies have been promoting for the past six weeks."

Does this mean that in order to win the Democratic Party must become the party of the Reagan Democrats and people in whose hearts the N word still governs their political choices? I have always hoped that the Democratic Party would turn out to be tougher and more aggressive than this capitulation would suggest.

Based on the Party’s performance over the past 8 years I’m not going to bet on it.

A Note From The Sidelines

Well, I’ve just been standing on the corner watching all the blogs go by. It’s been restful to take a break. Besides, my fellow Lefty Bloggers have been doing such an excellent job of keeping us focussed on the disasters and disturbances of the current social and political scene that I've simply had nothing to add.

X4mr has raised some interesting questions about the dark underbelly of Tucson society and you can always count on Tedski’s political memory to put local political events into an historical context.

In addition to standing on the political corner I have spent some time standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona; and making plans for a Spring and Summer of motorcycling.