April 2008

years ago i read the first two volumes of solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago, horrified by how the evil USSR treated human beings, grateful and relieved that my country would never dream of setting up a concentration camp. chalk it up to youthful idealism.

today, detainees at guantanamo bay are held for years without charges, trial, visits, telephone, books (other than the occasional koran), radio, TV or direct human contact with anyone other than the guards. spending 22 hours a day in a cell about the size of my bathroom, some prisoners go months without glimpsing the sun. many have gone insane from years of this climate-controlled isolation and now, finally coming up for trial, cannot participate in their own defense.

it is against US law to hold anyone in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, but guantanamo officials claim that this isn’t solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells”.

we know better than to trust our government now, though, don’t we? new yorkers certainly do, and if we needed any more reasons for it we all got a big one this week.

even those of you far from NYC are likely to have heard of the sean bell “incident”, where a young man was killed by police outside a strip club on the night of his bachelor party. police claimed they saw a gun and fired in self-defense. no gun was ever found, nor bullets from any gun othat than the cops’. one of the officers fired THIRTY bullets at the boys.

their crime, it seems, was drinking while black, since sean tried to drive away when the undercover cop approached his car. i’d drive away too, if one of them stepped to me at 4am — do you know what these undercovers look like? the worst of the worst of street thugs. sean pulls out, drunk, hits another undercover’s car, one cop thinks he sees a gun and starts firing, the other officers follow suit and soon nothing in the car is moving. maybe just a little blood dripping off the dashboard.

did you know that starting salary for NYPD officers is $25,000 a year and maxes out at $70,000? did you know that the starting salary for administrative assistants at the dot-com where i work is higher than what a NYC street cop with 10 years on the job earns? no wonder christian torres, a rookie NYC transit cop, was just arrested for robbing three banks (he confessed).

the sean bell cops opted for trial by judge rather than jury, as is everyone’s right. the predictable not guilty was delivered yesterday morning, and al sharpton vowed to “shut this city down” in protest.

here’s how they played it: the prosecution (regular NYC district attorneys, you know, they guys who usually work WITH the cops to convict the bad guys) mounted what is already being called one of the worst prosecutorial cases ever seen, a “defense attorney’s dream” according to one lawyer. when questioned about the most obvious of the mistakes the DA replied “It is what it is.”

right. a way to let the judge off the hook and guarantee the officers would walk, which they did, though luckily for us they may not get their jobs back.

so solitary confinement isn’t solitary confinement  because it’s really just a single-occupancy cell, and recklessly mowing down unarmed men in the street isn’t reckless.

where are the fucking emperor’s clothes?

david byrne said, “and you may ask yourself, how did i get here?”

every day, man. every single day.

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i spent a very entertaining morning on CNN and other political sites that analyze via exit poll the voter makeup in these contests. hillary won with gun-owners, undereducated low-income whites, and retirees. in other words, she brought them out of their trailers to vote against the nigra.

and now, after this fantastic, this amazing, this world-changing triumph, she only trails obama by six fewer delegates.

meanwhile, the democratic party is in a state of mayhem by this second-runner’s refusal to accept the reality that she is losing. “i’m a fighter,” she keeps saying, assuring us that a fighter is what we want in the white house.

actually, that’s exactly what we don’t want at this point: another mudslinging, bickering, pro-war, same-old same-old politician with more baggage than paris hilton. and as much as i loved bill clinton as a president, the idea of him as first-man-with-own agenda is pretty frightening. whatever will he get up to after he’s run through all the interns?

hillary has lost all sense of proportion and balance here. she should have started negotiating with obama some time ago to begin the more realistic campaign of becoming his running mate. that seems, thank god, to be out of the question at this point, after all the screaming and fingerpointing. and i can’t forgive her for, as CNN put it, “being the first candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 911″ as a campaign tactic (rudy giuliani aside, of course — he doesn’t have any other shirts to wave).

i believe that hillary has a very private agenda, and that agenda is the reason she will not listen to reason. not too long ago, she was the most humiliated woman in the western world, as repulicans expanded the lewinsky incident into laughably epic proportions. in political terms, bill’s carrying on with the cigar and whatnot really wasn’t so extraordinary. but as a woman, an ivy-league educated lawyer who went from the top of her class to the top of the american political pyramid, for such a one as her to be publicly cuckolded by a husband who preferred unattractive thong-wearing semi-morons and to have that fact repeated in headline after headline in every country of the world (i even saw a copy of a paper from beijing with a full-page lewinsky photo on its front page) month after month for — how long? a couple of years, wasn’t it? sure seemed like years at the time.

so her husband narrowly escapes impeachment charges after getting the blowjob that changed the world and there stood hillary, jaw-muscles twitching but still smiling, holding chelsea’s hand, at his side, understanding.

she was going to show him. she was going to show us ALL. that’s what this election is really about for her, it’s got very little to do with a desire to serve the country. what is happening now is playing out as the second-biggest humiliation of her life, and she simply can’t believe it, she won’t LET it happen, this WILL come out her way. no matter what. no matter what’s better for the democratic party. no matter what’s better for the country as a whole.

i wonder if she’s listened much to what obama has to say, or studied the profile of his voters to glean the underlying meaning. i think it should matter to her that the younger and more highly educated a voter is, the more likely they are to have voted for obama. because it’s true what he said about pennsylvania, that the economic collapse of this country has made people broken and bitter. and it’s the younger people, the people with more energy and more resources, that have the ability and enthusiasm to start the rebuilding that is so urgently needed here. not the gun-toting unemployed fundie christians who are content to wait until jesus comes to save them.

and that’s exactly who voted for hillary.

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yesterday i refilled a prescription for chantix, the anti-smoking drug. (it really works! more on that later.) first time i cashed that script, i got a bottle of pills. like, you know, regular medicine that you would get when you bust a script.

so when the clerk handed me an Rx bag so full it seemed about to tear, i thought they’d made some mistake. but no, the price — $117! no insurance! — while not what i would call “right” was the same as last time. so i shoved the package in my bag and headed to Macy’s for moisturizer. (don’t ask what that cost. but i am “of a certain age” and doing more than my share of air travel in the next two weeks. additional wrinkles are not an option.)

what i found in my magically expanded bag of chantix when i finally got home was half a pound of unnecessary packaging. seriously, a ratio of something like 1000:1 of pills to paper.

this is a one-month supply. chantix is taken twice a day, and each one of these fourfold cardboard wallets holds just 14 pills, helpfully marked with a little sun icon for your morning dose and i suppose you can guess what they cleverly chose to indicate evening.

note to pfizer: anyone trying to quit smoking is unlikely to FORGET that fact. since they are thinking of cigarettes every five minutes, there’s little danger that they will miss a dose. you did the research, you already knew that, didn’t you? then what the fuck is all this packaging about?

it outweighs the product by a substantial margin. this kind of idiocy makes me want to scream (or smoke!) because the waste is so eminently avoidable. prescription drugs don’t sit out on shelves in their bloated turquoise costumes, inviting you to buy. people don’t decide to quit smoking because they ran across the interesting chantix boxes and said what the hell. you don’t even SEE the packaging of a pharmaceutical until after the script is filled.

the marketing practices of pharmaceutical companies are as evil as marketing practices come. first, they buy detailed reports of exactly what doctor prescribes which drugs and then send battalions of polished drug reps directly to those doctors to get them to write more prescriptions for high-margin, profitable medicines and to eliminate the word “generic” from that doctor’s written vocabulary. mind you, no one’s doing any data-mining on what that doctor’s patients might need, no sir. it’s all about the benjamins.

then, as any of you tv-watchers already know, they blast consumers…um, i mean patients…with slick, million-dollar advertising campaigns that encourage you to ask your doctor for drugs by name. this kind of advertising is against the law in every country on earth except for the US and New Zealand and should be illegal everywhere.

so, while we are dutifully using both sides of every sheet of paper (you are, aren’t you?) and unplugging every appliance in the house before stepping foot outside, pfizer is trucking tons of purposeless cardboard to the stores, to fill the recycling bins of the nation. as i am going to fill mine right now.

and pfizer has the BRASS BALLS to include a whole “responsibility” section on their website, complete with a child in a garden and peaceful music playing and a bunch of hollow words about sustainability.

as soon as this blog is posted i’m sending it to the media relations people at pfizer. and then i’m going to call them. and then i’m going to write them a good old-fashioned snail mail:

it’s the perfect way to help pfizer to celebrate earth day.

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i liked the old name better, “TV Turnoff Week”. maybe that’s because it was easier for me — i don’t own a television, don’t want one, don’t miss having that box full of idiots in my home. then adbusters, originator of TV Turnoff Week, went and changed the game on me. during Mental Detox Week we’re supposed to turn off not only the TV, but the computer, cell phone and iPod as well. i can live without the phone and the pod. but the computer? email? my everloving BLOG? i’ll keep the iPod turned off in my TV-free environment, but maybe next year i can go whole hog for a computer-free week. now? i’m not even going to try, there’s just too much going on.

for years i had a photo from some magazine on my wall. a family of four — totally ozzie & harriet white american suburb types — sits comfortably together in a living room, staring like zombies at something not shown in the picture, though you know what it is from the flicker of shadow across their faces. a cozy roomful of wholesome american zombies. it was horrifying, a wordless embodiment of all that’s wrong with television as a national pastime, and it didn’t take a few hundred pages to explain the way jerry mander’s book (excellent though it is) did.

but now, artists are using the “fight fire with fire” technique against TV, though if adbuster’s concepts around electronic mindfucking are correct, this is akin to shooting yourself in the head to protest the gun control unlaws. nevertheless, in the spirit of TV Turnoff, if not Mental Detox, week, i offer you a brief but very powerful video from my best youtube friend, Decentralized Tommy.

now turn it all off!

till next week…

(also see “our daily insanity“, a my last kill the television post)

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angel irizarry, a fifth grader from the bronx, was bitten on the shoulder by a teacher last week and now says he’s afraid to go back to school. the teacher was arrested, and has been suspended pending the outcome of the case. his mother plans to sue the school.

nothing out of the ordinary here, right? just another day in the infamous nyc public education system.

but.

irizarry told the reporter that the biter is “a very well-liked teacher who sometimes bought pizza for kids”. doesn’t exactly sound like the type to go around attacking the students.

on that day, the teacher had brought in some pizza not for the kids, but for her own lunch. not the kind that angel likes, he said, it had “cottage cheese and stuff. It was really nasty.” nevertheless, he jokingly asked her: “Can I have a bite?” and the teacher leaned over and bit him on the shoulder, through his clothes.

in the context of “teacher bites boy!” of course we are looking at the very face of evil and imbalance.

in the context of a witty and well-liked teacher responding to a joke from a student (one who wasn’t even in her class) we are looking at repartee gone wrong. she likely bit a little harder than she meant to, as the kid has a bruise on his shoulder, but if you take the interaction as whole, this is not quite as bizarre as it sounds.

the article mentioned nothing about what kind of student angel is: good, bad, always in detention, an honors boy, the perpetual spitball-thrower in the back of the room. no real way to tell, but from the way he described her “nasty” pizza i get the impression that he might be something less than a charmer. that his joking may have been that very in-your-face, aggression-couched-as-humor type of move not uncommon in 11-year-olds with shitty attitudes. i’m not saying that’s what the boy is like, only that this is one possible background scenario — one which makes the return bite even easier to understand. even, perhaps, to applaud.

but we live in a contextless world now, a black-and-white world where background and style do not count. while it was inevitable, in these litigious days, that the teacher would be suspended, that she was also arrested seems way over the top to me. and she will have no choice but to deny this charge (in a contextless world, you are guilty or not; guilty with an explanation still means guilty, there is no space for humanity in the courtroom). angel’s mother said, “In a couple days he might get over it, I’m not sure.” well, the boy getting over it won’t get the teacher un-arrested and, regardless of the eventual verdict, there’s little doubt that her
career is over.

does anyone else find this a bit extreme?

no, i don’t think teachers should go around biting or hitting or hog-tying their students, but i do think that the kind of creative improvisation that this seems to be an example of deserves some room not only the educational system, but in our society. yet the funnel keeps narrowing, narrowing… how far will it go? to the point where we only speak and act in accordance with approved formulas in order to avoid arrest?

personality is becoming a social liability. a prosecutable offense. so much has been lost, already.

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with all possible pomp, the pontiff has arrived. no popemobile for him here, nope, he’s getting the same level of taxpayer-funded security that the president of the united states gets when he visits nyc. so much for the separation of church and state.

as all experienced politicians do, the pope primed the pump of this visit by apologizing for all those pedophiles serving in his organization (if only i could say “served” instead of “serving” but no, it appears that raping little boys isn’t grounds for excommunication, the way getting a divorce is). the pope is “deeply ashamed” of that, as he told george bush at the airport.

he should also be deeply ashamed of the way women are treated in the church, and i’m not just talking about the fact that they aren’t allowed to become priests. catholic nuns take a vow of poverty and every dime they earn their whole life long goes straight to the church, which in turn gives their convent allotments for clothing and food. numbers are hard to come by, but it’s dead certain that the nuns’ living expenses are a hell of a lot lower than their contributions, which go…where, exactly? to rome? most likely, considering the degraded state of most parishes in the US today.

i
could care less myself that the parishes are degrading — i say let the whole roman catholic system collapse and let’s be done with it: it’s a bloodsucking, manipulative, deceptive, twisted thing still grounded in medieval thinking and morality. but i do care about the suckered nuns, women who’ve been virtual galley slaves for 40, 50, 60 years, who work until they are physically unable to work any more and then… and then? well, if they’re very very lucky, their convent has put a few dollars aside for their retirement. because most convents don’t, nuns became eligible for social security back in 1972. this was basically the government giving charity to nuns, who don’t pay taxes on their earnings. and i don’t begrudge them that pittance (not enough to live on in any event), but i DO have a problem with the fact that WE, our GOVERNMENT had to pick up the tab to take care of these women who have taken care of church business all their lives long. where’s the fucking CEO, er, i mean, the pontiff, THEN? where’s a piece of the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars those nuns have donated year after year over their lifetimes. one of the pope’s OUTFITS likely costs enough to keep an old nun in rosaries and porridge for a year. why isn’t rome taking care of these women? there are plenty of funds for priestly retirement (not that they aren’t facing some challenges, because they are, but priests do still get guaranteed stipends and things like use of a car that put them way ahead of the nuns, many of whom are now on medicaid and faced with having to go into the equivalent of welfare old-age homes: in other words, hell on earth).

yet nyc forges dutifully ahead, squandering my money on a pompous and useless message from this old bigot. and don’t believe all the hype that visits like this “bring in millions” for the city, which is something we are told anytime someone comes to use us in this way. the “millions” mostly go to hotels, airlines and small businesses like hot-dog vendors. usually knick-knack vendors get their share as well, but that won’t happen this time, since the pope has hired his own marketing company to create and sell “official” pope gear at his events. can you even imagine this? pope baseball hats and t-shirts and official pope-visit rosary beads. and the millions that are spent? it’s all overtime for police, traffic and sanitation workers, things like that — that comes straight out of my pocket, and i’m not getting any revenue from the gimcrack sales.

and these visits absolutely CRIPPLE the city. i got an email yesterday about streets that are closing courtesy of the pope, and i’ll append it to the end of this blog. anyone who’s familiar with nyc’s layout and traffic patterns will immediately see the chaos that we are stuck with all weekend long.

state-sponsored mayhem and chaos on the taxpayer’s dime to bring a the leader of a corrupt religion here to preach while his withered female servants languish in a cockroach-ridden shambles.

have we no shame? because the pontiff clearly doesn’t. let’s just put him on the next non-private plane out of laguardia and call it a day.

street closings:

72nd Street from Madison Avenue to 5th Avenue will be closed from midnight Friday, April 18 through 11:30 pm Sunday, April 20.

There will be closures in the vicinity of the United Nations on Friday from 4:00 am to 3:00 pm, including First Avenue from 42nd Street to 48th Street and 42nd Street to 47th Street from Second Avenue to First Avenue. 67th
Street and 68th Street from Lexington Avenue to Third Avenue, and 87th Street from First Avenue to York Avenue, will be closed from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.

On Saturday, 50th Street and 51st Street from 5th Avenue to 6th Avenue will be closed from midnight to 3:00 pm.

The following streets will be closed from 5:00 am to 3:00 pm: Madison Avenue from 47th Street to 53rd Street, Fifth Avenue from 47th Street to 73rd Street, 47th Street to 53rd Street from 6th Avenue to Park Avenue. Pedestrians may cross Fifth Avenue at 47th Street, 53rd Street, 55th Street, 57th Street and 59th Street.

On Sunday, there will be closures near Ground Zero from 5:00 am to 11:00 am on the following streets:
West Street from FDR Drive to Murray Street; Church Street from Barclay Street to Liberty Street; Barclay Street from Broadway to West Street; Cortland Street from Broadway to Church Street; Dey Street from Broadway to Church Street; Fulton Street from Broadway to Church Street; Liberty Street from Broadway to Church Street; Trinity Place from Liberty Street to Rector Street; Vesey Street from Broadway to Church Street.

Also on Sunday, the following streets in the vicinity of Yankee Stadium will be closed from midnight to 8:00 pm:
Jerome Avenue (Major Deegan approach to 162nd Street including Macombs Dam Bridge); River Avenue from 149th Street to 162nd Street; Ruppert Place from 153rd Street to 161st Street; 153rd Street from Ruppert Place to Major Deegan Extension; 157th Street from Major Deegan Extension to Rupert Place; 157th Street from River Avenue to Gerard Avenue; 158th Street from River Avenue to Gerard Avenue; 161st Street from Jerome Avenue to Grand Concourse.

Additional closures may be ordered by the Police Department as conditions warrant. Call 311 for updates.

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i’ve been trying to figure out how i feel about what’s going on with the FLDS group in texas. after reading a long article on alternet that was filled with praise for the legal actions and condemned polygamy repeatedly, i was a bit confused because i thought the children had been removed from the compound because of sexual abuse, not their parents’ marital status. and i couldn’t quite make sense of it — polygamy (nasty word, ain’t it?) is practiced in many different cultures, and doesn’t necessarily (or even usually) result in schoolrooms filled with raped, pregnant 14-year olds. i just wasn’t understanding the link.

so i did some more reading and also watched a very sad video of the mothers that had been separated from their kids.

polygamy is clearly not the problem here. we’re looking at a cult that was, by some reports, building a crematorium to dispose of the remains (all of them, DNA included) of sinners whose throats were ritually cut in retribution, where perhaps little boys (less desirable than little girls) would also be baked out of existence, where there is a bed beside the altar for instant, public consummation of marriages performed in the temple. seems like an awful lot has gone wrong over there without anybody needing to marry extra people — just one old man getting hitched to a teen who doesn’t want him then fucking her onstage is quite enough wrong for me.

but we have to focus on the polygamy because in our society there’s no other way of addressing a religion gone wrong. saying almost anything against any religion at any time in this country is taboo. and that is the real problem, that is what allows cults such as FLDS, and the branch davidians, to flourish. just put a jesus christ in there somewhere, the way sun myung moon did, and it’s hands off until someone pulls a homicide.

there is no conduit where we — whether as a community or through the legal system — can say hey, this is not a religion, this is a sick fucker using the language of religion to do sick fucking things.

and there is ALSO no good way to intervene once things have gotten as far as they did at the YFZ ranch. cult or no cult, those kids are likely a lot more traumatized right now than they ever were inside their closed community, particularly the youngish ones. being herded into a coliseum and forcibly separated from your mother(s) is not something a 7 or 8 year old is ever going to forget. perhaps something they’ll never quite get over.

not that i think they should have been left at the ranch, because i don’t. and i’m not exactly saying that texas botched the job — the job sure was botched, but there are no resources and no system in place to do it any better. you work with what you have. my point is that the evacuation and confiscation of children at such a massive level might not ever become necessary if we get a little more sane about our approach to cults. take off the white gloves. stop tiptoeing around just because someone claims that it is their “religious belief”. maybe religious beliefs aren’t and shouldn’t be inalienable (boy, i’m gonna get shit for that one). when religion is allowed to trump everything — law, decency, common sense — that trump card will be used any way that people want it to be, not always and maybe not even mostly for the common good.

religion is routinely used as a front for sexual predation as well as a whole host of financial schemes. we need to rethink all the laws that supposedly protect religious rights. they go too far, and they let animals like Jeffs go too far, while the neighbors stand around, wringing their hands.

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my 95-year-old grandmother had a stroke on Easter morning, characterized by the grim-lipped doctor as “massive”. 80% of her brain erased in a wash of blood.

she had a horror of hospitals, and all the requisite paperwork was in place: living will, no feeding tubes under any circumstances, a DNR order. she could swallow and grunt, her eyes opened every now and then, her left (unparalyzed) hand fluttered the edge of the frayed hospital blanket. visitors could sort of convince themselves she knew they were there without it being too much of a stretch. but 80%…all the brain left to her was engaged in breathing, swallowing, grunting, blanket-grabbing and a few meager trickles of piss down the catheter.

everyone — family, nurses, doctors, lawyers — agreed that grandma was, for all practical purposes, dead. all over but the shouting, the only thing to do now is wait. on friday, 3/28, she was disconnected from the glucose IV. the technical term for this is “discontinuing hydration”.

she’d already gone five days without food. cutting off the fluids would let “nature take its course” more quickly, as hydrated stoke-havers have been known to last for quite some time. a month, even. or longer.

what an effective vocabulary of camouflage has been developed around the uncivilized practices of this over-civilized lawsuit-terrorized society. waiting for an old woman to starve to death is nature taking its course. glycerine swabs for her dried and cracking mouth and under-the-tongue squirts of morphine are comforts.

grandma

she died on april 2nd, ten days after the stroke. my grandmother, feeder of everyone, cheesecake-maker extraordinaire (who took that cherished recipe with her to the grave), a woman whose apartment you could not leave without a meticulously wrapped “care package” of savory homemade food for your no-doubt-barren (correct, in my case) refrigerator, was starved to death in a hospital bed while friends and family came and went, while hospice workers came and went, while nurses and interns came and went, while the bitch in the next bed screamed at my brother for serenading grandma with his mandolin.

she’d gotten a pacemaker installed a couple of years ago and it occurred to us that, what with nature taking its course and all, it should be turned off. you know, the same way they turned off the water. but no, the doctor refused to do it, his only reason being “the pacemaker won’t keep her alive”. well we pretty well fucking know that, don’t we, what with her being starved and dehydrated, we’re not idiots here doctor. but what if her heart stopped right about now and the pacemaker didn’t force it to start up again — could that maybe be what people call a blessing in disguise? maybe save her old body a few days of starvation?

but no. the “technicians” don’t like turning off these devices. it’s contrary to everything they’ve been taught. we can translate that one pretty easily: if they shut down the pacemaker (which is apparently done by waving some sort of a magnet above the device, nothing invasive about it) and grandma falls dead with no heartbeat the next minute, the technician will have “killed” her. we can’t have any killing with magnets around here now, can we, when the nature of starvation can take its bloody fucking time and leave everybody’s demagnetized hands squeaky clean.

every few hours (and more often, if asked), nurses squirted liquid morphine under grandma’s tongue to keep her “comfortable” — just in case, you know? they’re absolutely sure that the pain-feeling brain parts are long gone but you never really know and it might probably hurt to starve to death so just in CASE we are going to drug her up.

WHAT’S EVERYBODY SO AFRAID OF HERE? could it be…horrors…blame?

she’s dead, she’s ready to be dead, she’d RATHER be dead than suffer an extended stay as a force-fed vegetable, it’s all down there in writing in her very own hand. the woman, for chrissake, was 95 years OLD and had long lost the ability to do any of the things she truly loved (baking, knitting). the eskimoes get to pick an ice floe and float off with a little dignity. but here? a week and a half to starve your withered old body (which is dutifully TURNED every little while, TURNED do you understand so that she should not get bedsores, we are preventing BEDSORES in someone who supposedly can’t feel any pain and has already been fully measured for her coffin).

i remember the tylenol scare back in the seventies, where some lunatic laced a few bottles with cyanide and a few other people dropped dead on their living room floors minutes after taking a little something for their headache or their cramps. cyanide is colorless, tasteless, odorless and apparently instantaneous. so how about a little cyanide under her tongue, nurse? wouldn’t that be a bit kinder than morphine, starvation and bedsore-prevention? the family could serve it to her with a silver spoon, get some frankincense burning and find a cooperative priest to sprinkle holy water and draw invisible crosses in the air over her head for the minute or two it might take. she wouldn’t have died alone then (as she did, at five-something in the morning — no way a family can be there round the clock when nature needs a frigging month to take its course), she wouldn’t have gotten any bedsores and she damn well wouldn’t have felt any pain. but no, that’s assisted suicide and it’s against the law.

the law is wrong. it was a cruel thing, letting my grandmother starve to death. and it was just as cruel for my mother, who had been her sole caretaker for years, to watch her die in such slow motion, inch by thirsty inch.

rest in peace, grandma.

Mary D. Torres, 8/13/1912 - 4/2/2008

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i just watched one of the most obtuse (though mercifully brief) activist videos i’ve ever seen at We Can Solve It. it starts with an astonishing pro-war image (normandy), then goes on to say “we didn’t wait for someone else to start civil rights.”

this is true. the country that invented lynching and the crime of DWB didn’t wait for “someone else” to start civil rights. what the fuck does that mean, anyway? bravo america, it didn’t take foreign troops storming the beaches of long island to get our schools desegregated?

the next astonishing allegory is that we didn’t wait for someone else to put a man on the moon. what a useful social achievement that one turned out to be — just think what life would be like today if we hadn’t gotten up there with our pathetic metaphor and our flag.

and we can’t wait, wecansolveit.org tells us, for someone else to solve the global climate crisis. would somebody please tell these people that we ARE the global climate crisis?

yesterday i went to bed, bath & beyond to buy a small storage locker. it was drizzling, and there stood the security guard, forcing long umbrella-shaped plastic bags upon every incoming shopper, said bags to be placed, condom-style, over the unseemly dripping appendages. the umbrellas were hardly even wet yet everybody (except me, earning a nasty look from the guard) took one of the bags and dutifully slid it up the shaft. there’s a garbage bin at the exit for throwing away the used ones, and it’s clear the bags aren’t being re-used. may as well be a bin full of brand-new oil, poured straight down the nearest drain.

but why even quibble about umbrella bags in a store brimming with excessive packaging, in a city brimming with similar stores, in a country brimming with store-filled cities? i shouldn’t be so hard on bb&b when just a mile away times square squanders a billion watts (guesstimate) a day on halogen neon incandescent throbbing brilliant blasting 24×7 illuminated ads that absolutely no one reads. i’m pissed off about umbrella bags when the store’s cafe puts a simple sandwich into a molded plastic sandwich container (after wrapping it in tinfoilized paper) then puts the container into a plastic bag that also contains a sealed plastic bag filled with plastic utensils, none of which are needed for sandwich-eating but which you get, according to the clerk, because of the micronapkin that is also tucked inside. yes, virginia, we even package napkins now.

yesterday was al gore’s birthday. Happy Birthday, President Al! i bet i wouldn’t be writing about umbrella bags and fortressized sandwiches this morning if we still had fair and free elections in this country, but we don’t. everything is rigged. and i’m afraid that we can’t solve it. very afraid.

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