THE DAY AFTER

borrowed from piraro

It's been a rotflmao day. Was about as anxious over the health care vote by the corporate representatives as a presidential election. I'm not staying up late and tapping my foot hoping it goes my way. In the morning I'll find out. There is always tomorrow. If not, it won't matter. First words when I turned the radio on was Dems were cleaning up the party hats after last night's celebration. There it was. If I wanted to turn it off, I could. I loved it. Wanted to hear more. The Repubs were totally locked against it. That tickled me all the more. I wouldn't want it to have any of their support, even one. It would be like a dent on a new car. They're saying next election the Dems will pay. I laugh because it has an even better chance to turn out the other way around.

I've had a smile on my face all day. I've not seen anybody or talked with anybody. Just another day. A brief email exchange with a friend in Maryland. We see it differently. I keep at him to think for himself and let go of parroting Rush Limbaugh. I don't care if we go on disagreeing. I'd like to see him find his own interpretations, right or wrong being neither here nor there, because there is no right or wrong. It's politics. Illusion in illusion in illusion. A skyscraper built with bricks of lies on a foundation of lies. Still, I have a difficult time with people who take seriously a very well paid and protected propagandist with the 4th grade level of intelligence that journalism schools advise writing to. It might be more like 2nd grade now, after half a century of boob toob dumbing down. Effective propaganda has to reach way down there, and the minds behind Limbaugh have no limit to how low they'll go. Like Howard Stern, another stain in Uncle Sam's underpants.

The phone rang just now. "Hi. My name is Bentley. I'm a sophomore at the College of Charleston." I checked the impulse to say, Hi, my name is Scott Brown, I drive a truck. Click. Bentley wants money. I want money. It's my home, my telephone. Am I calling you at suppertime asking for money, Bentley? No. I'd like to send money, I really would. But I don't have any. I really don't. Bentley, in the summer of 1988, the last time I was in Hanes Mall, I recall a middle class man with an office way up in a skyscraper downtown, you could see it in his arrogance and his clothes, he was tugging on a 5 year old girl's hand, and said, "Come on, Mercedes." I continued walking, thinking, Better Mercedes than BMW, I suppose. Hi, my name is Hummer. That doesn't quite have the ring. Think of how many Velveetas there are living. You know there's at least one. And you know a lot of little Ronnies are going around with McDonald for a middle name. Not to mention M&M. "Come on, M&M." A little boy with a boggan pulled down over his face, "Daddy, I caint see." In my generation, dogs were named Prince.

I'm happy to see legislation occurring that has for its purpose the benefit of the American people at large, not just the ruling class on the take. I can't help but see that since the assassination of Kennedy the USA has been on a downhill course. Our government has been unresponsive to the will of the people, except superficially. People say get out of Vietnam. People say get out of Latin America. People say get out of Iraq. People say get out of Afghanistan. Lies steered us falsely into all these wars, documented, and lies keep the public pacified. It's a war economy. Government contracts where you can get a thousand dollars for a hammer keep the economy going. Without wars we wouldn't have reason to keep up the manufacture of missiles and helicopters and ships and planes and bombs in factories that pay fairly well. These jobs located in every state not only keep the economy going, but dependent on wars, not big scary ones, to be sure, but television wars where you can see buildings blow up on the evening news, bombs from the sky. They're poor. They don't matter. Throughout my adult lifetime there have been American wars on the evening news. Send a missile and blow up a drugstore in Sudan. Oops. They know to stay out of Africa. Africa will swallow them like quicksand. The middle east might yet. It will if they jump into Iran. There they will find the bottomless pit. Oops.

It's 31 degrees at 8pm. I looked outside. The wet leaves on the ground, everything on the ground wet, had already frosted. Might snow a little tonight. But it will go away by noon. Maybe. White frost in the curled leaves. I heard on the news just now a growing need for healthcare workers. That's a good thing. We need more. We need hospitals to be able to meet their expenses to keep going. We need more doctors and dentists in small towns around the country. In the Age of Narcissism professionals out of college would go to big city firms. They wanted money. Can't make good money in a country town. Because country people can't afford to go to the doctor. So they go to the emergency room for free, "at taxpayer expense." I get so tired of that ridiculous phrase. It always comes up around helping some poor people. It's penny pinching. It's tight lipped venality. Why can't we help people having a hard time of it with taxpayer money? We kill poor people several a day with bombs, guns, land mines, etc., made at taxpayer expense. Nobody has a problem with killing and spreading misery at taxpayer expense (except me). Good Capitalism. Honor. Glory. Money. We're Number One.

I'm moderately ecstatic inside today because I saw today for the second time a crack in that Berlin Wall that's been up between us and Democracy about as long as the original Berlin Wall was up. Our Berlin Wall hasn't yet fallen. But today I saw another crack in it. The people rising up, albeit gently, we really do want to avoid civil war again, is encouraging to see after all these years of the impotence of the American people politically. The only presidential candidate who had what it took to stand up to the war machine won overwhelmingly, and him black. Kinda says something. Then the Supreme Court announces loud and clear to us again, we're not having Democracy around here.

Another minor victory, if victory it is, for the people of this land, the American people who work for a living and have to pay taxes because they make so little. The incentive is to get rich then you don't pay taxes.

Pardon me going on like this. It's just that I like Democracy, radical as that is, and airy fairy pie in the sky the cow jumped over the moon as it can possibly be. I'm just nutty. I'd like to see people get along with each other, without it being the Truman Show, impractical as that is. I like it to be such that we see somebody over here having a hard time, let's help her out, get her back on her feet. If we had serious rehab centers reasonably funded in every city, even towns, and them run like hospices, not the way the medical community would do it, we'd have a lot less junkies, a lot less crime, a lot less danger walking from your car to your door.

Junkies don't want to be junkies. They want to get well, but can't on their own. I'd say serve them if they come back and come back. Like Jesus said, 7 times 7. 49 chances. I believe we are civilized according to how we regard our poor. The poor aren't even on the American ladder. The people on the ladder are looking up the ladder. The poor on the ground don't matter. And for some odd reason that is yet to be known, a fluke maybe, we have a president who sees the people on the ground. And today the people on the ground have been given some breathing space, as well as the people on the lower rungs of the ladder. Maybe we've had so much insanity the wheel has turned and maybe sanity is coming forward, though I dare not hope for it to be so. It still makes me smile. Not one Repub. What a coup.