Quarter rat remembers New Orleans, the city care forgot

Once I lived in the French Quarter. I had rooms by Chartres and Ursuline. Throughout the day, like lazy clockwork, the horse drawn carriage drivers came by, each time intoning to the tourists, how "Over thea' is the Ursuline Convent. The first one burnt down, 'cause the nuns were sworn to silence and wouldn't speak when fire first broke out." (photo credit: www.inetours.com/New_Orleans/
images/FQ/history/Ursuline/Chartres_Ursuline.jpg)

I must have heard that ten thousand times that year, sitting in the courtyard in front of my two low-ceilinged rooms, once slave quarters. Now, I must speak about the lesson New Orleans taught me then, and showed me now. I apologize for interjecting myself into the conversation. But, as I am not a nun, I really just can't sit silent while the convent goes up.

I have sat patiently and watched TV and surfed the 'Net in silence while my fellow girlie-men journalists sitting ringside talk about what the guys fighting are doing right and wrong.

Likewise, I have watched my fellow draft-dodgers run the battle in both military and emergency operations, foreign and domestic, with elan, gusto and repeated strategic and tactical failures, now with evacuation efforts for Katrina, and still with Iraq (try a ride to B-dad airport).

I've also watched a typical old, familiar French Quarter carousing type, on the wagon now, still get pushy, proud, and foolish, ("I can drive, dammint") just like I would see him back when I was a Quarter rat, living off tourists.

I see a different image when I see flooded New Orleans, the city that care forgot! One I will try to remember, but that I will most likely forget, again, in time.

I will try to remember seeing that people, and citizens of a democracy, pretty much on their own, mostly got out, no thanks to all the "in-chiefs" and tourists who come to mock our corruption and incompetence. We are all dry now, barely, and there's a bar in the Quarter, which never closed, still open to ride out the latest situation.

This situation of confusion and disaster is not entirely unfamiliar to most Quarter regulars: waiters, writers, drinkers, painters, strippers, tap dancers and general loons, like Ruthy the duck lady, way back then. She trained her brood of pet ducklings, Konrad Lorenz-style, to follow her down the sidewalk in a row.

I also try to remember Ruthy's point, at least to me. That imprinting haunts our species, too, just like we were ducks, though rarely so charmingly. Hence, "Child is father to the man." Most of us ended up in the Quarter because we kept doing things the same, imprinted, way, hoping for a different outcome. This is also a definition of madness.

This point would be easily driven home in any bad Quarter bar by midnight. Then the imprinting takes serious hold mid-bender, leading to frequent fights. And from fights, things might progress quickly to a state of everything going wrong.

Yet there is hope, to conclude with that corny journalism hack. Now, though news of the cost of destruction worsens (surprised at the big bar tab?), reports of each regrettable death, rape and battery seem to show that the total numbers may turn out remarkably low for such a governmental free-fall, considering the hysterical outbursts of those in charge, top to bottom, and the emotion-frenzied coverage of reporters cut off from their google and hip deep in actual shit.

Welcome to New Orleans. We put on a nice Mardi Gras every year, somehow, doin' it our way, don't we? Damn' tourists have such a great plan, let 'em go home and straighten it out back where they come from.

That's what I hope to remember when I look at how it is now in the Big Easy.

It was really Big, and people down there, the regular people, actually made it look pretty Easy. Right, it flooded the whole place. But that's property, and protecting it is the government's damn business, for which we pay our taxes. The people took care of the people, down there, in the end. Not perfect, but not as horrid as possible, either. Down there people are real democrats, which means in the end it's about people, if it gets down to a choice.

And pretty much everyone got through it somehow. Of course, the rich easier than the poor. No kiddin.' What fool livin' in New Oyunz wouldn't have already figured that out?

But also, we all live below sea level in New Orleans, so no matter how much we hate each other, what the class and race differences, we all party together and know we can all drown together, too. Always have. And we all know that in a flood, you mostly help each other out. Families been living next to each other for five generations.

And survived despite the corruption, incompetence and weakness under pressure shown by the big shots all around. Fools forced to see themselves hung-over next morning, reflected in dark, dirty windows of the bars they're just leaving. Their shock of humiliation is enough, almost, to bring a rueful smile to the face of any mid-drunk Quarter rat.

And I hope to remember it all with a bit of pride. In New Orleans, people, no matter what, just helped each other out. Even while calling each other fools, or worse. Any self-respecting looter will still grab a few bottles of water for the old lady nearby, back to her house after a hellish night in the convention center. After all, what person, even a thief around here, wouldn't do that?

I finally hope to remember that most survived by being self-reliant and through the kindness of strangers. A line from a New Orleans writer.

The rest of this country, so proud of what it would do, and will do, I am sure, would still do well to try to remember the vision of citizens struggling to survive together, without any visible government help.

You got a week of drinking water, as they say in New Orleans, 'where y'at?'

¶ 11:03 AM

  The Great Debates

Five weeks from E-day and the first debate is about to air. On to the debate as “event!” Even as theater.

Flop sweat. Stage fright. Preparation and acting skills will be the crucial ingredients. Ironic that reason should give way to the dramatic arts at this awful crossroads in History. Just as WMDs, most specifically, nuclear bombs, warheads and artillery shells are “trickling down,” like tax cuts, from strategic war to terrorism in daily life.

Thursday, then, the big show will begin. Each debate an act. Best let the TV critics review the first contest between those two who would rule the world. Not to trivialize “policy,” but rather to acknowledge that these respective media campaigns are extended job applications to be “President,” like competing on “the Apprentice.” You run the campaign, like you tackle any problem. It’s a metaphor for how you would run the Presidency, itself.

And run is the operative word. Today, debates that once went on for hours, now have been reduced to one-liners. Call it a massive productivity gain (although I fail to see what exactly has been gained by all this speediness). Like decisions in general in the world today, and in the Oval Office, itself, each of us, at our appointed station in life has moments, not hours, to analyze and make life-altering choices.

And it is how we decide, fellow viewer/citizens! In a moment, just like we were picking our breakfast cereal! Here, then, a few “reviewer” notes about the two stars of the show so far:

The President is channeling Reagan, of course. He embodies the John-Wayne-cowboy so popular with American TV viewers. And viewers are the voters now.

Dark Horse and fellow Skull n’ Bonesian, the Senator, is at this moment playing it a bit bigger, more Broadway. Not the musicals, Theatre…Unfortunately, this approach is not translating as well to the small screen. A bit arch, too Sir Larry Olivier and not enough half-naked contestants dunking for maggots, like you find on all the channels these days.

Styles make fights, they say. Make debates, too. Just imagine Laurence Olivier winning over a modern American audience up against John Wayne. Larry is just too old school, too big, too long-winded, frankly. Shakespeare is dead. Long live advertising slogans and slang.

No, Kerry has to ditch the Olivier and channel the only actor I can think of who could possibly stand up to Bush channeling Reagan. That’s right. I’m talking about another great, a man who made hardball long-odds politics come alive as Mr. Deeds, Jimmy Stewart.

He could populist like no one’s business. And if Bush represents the ownership society, which is just fine, somebody has to, then Kerry must be the unlikely representative of the non-owners. The borrower, the renter and the worker society. Not at the expense of owners, but it has to be equitable for those without much capital, too. They need a chance to get along. After all, everyone needs to wet his (or her) beak.

Kerry can stutter and come from New England, that’s very um-shucks (vs. the Texan aw-shucks) Stewart. Just keep the speech short, like the damned Gettysburg address, only just one sentence, OK?

Today that’s “the message.” One sentence. Kerry has to be able to tell his answer to anything in ONE sentence. How are you different from Bush on Iraq? On health care? On taxes? (Wanna bet on how many one sentence answers Kerry coughs up Thursday?)

The key moment will come, of course, when each candidate is asked about Iraq. Bush, with a laconic texas drawl will basically lay out his all-Texan, gun the varmints down until it's a quiet peacable little cow town strategy: punish them until the Iraqis cry uncle and become a secular democracy. Personally I am less than optimistic about this approach (although I certainly hope it works!). And Kerry? He says what? In one sentence, please. That, fellow followers of the thespian arts, is the question.

If he doesn't come up with a clean, one-sentence answer, he's failed. Just as surely as whoever becomes President in November will have failed if we are still in Iraq four years from now.
¶ 1:38 AM

  What Would Jesus Do?

More to the point: What would Pontius Pilate do, if the Romans were in Iraq, as they pretty much were. Short answer: Much grief. Washed his hands of the decision. Left it to proxy forces to settle things.

Gee, that’s what we are trying to do: palm it off on the locals, take a tax and hold it to a minimum. Before you say this didn’t work remember how long it took for Rome to fail. Kinda makes all other Empires in that part of town a one-night stand by comparison.

Was P.Pilate Right? Dunno. Not the point. Point is: Let’s do something different. America, great inventor of government, Great promoter of democracy, Let’s not come up with just another variation on the Centurion’s Square.

What other options could there be? We all know the stupid "institutional change" lingo. The presently invisible Condi Rice likes bureaucracy speak, let her facilitate.

All distain aside for the dismal lack of imagination in the plan for Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, the tax cuts, health care, etc., etc.…can’t we put our efforts into some solution other than war or peace, some new cold war with the new whackos? What matter the ideological details, there’s a new oppressor in town. Oppresses women. Oppresses Christians (Given the chance). A movement, just as they all are: an idea. It will have to be dealt with. But don’t get your knickers in knots. There are always ways to contain, wear down, defeat. DMZs, tactically defensible strongholds (I’ve been on this before).

Perhaps something new in the lines of a NATO for more progressive Muslim countries. Support them? Arm them?

Well, here’s the thing, we have no way of gathering real intel on the ground unless we work with the people who are actually on the ground. Rather than letting OBL and the radicals destroy the bureaucracy that keeps chaos in check, maybe we should work with them. Forget getting the real NATO to pitch in. They are as alien and out of the loop as we are. Let’s work with those who have a vested interest in making joints like Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, etc. work. Sure they hate us. So what? The quiet prejudice of redlined neighborhoods and cultural slurs is far preferable than the slaughter of innocents. Only those who desire a peaceful, albeit non-Christian (even hostile to Christian) society can keep their brothers and sisters in line. The alternative is all-out war and if that’s the way we are going to play it, then we are wasting time dancing around that painful, bloody fact.

The good news is that our strange bedfellows seem to be awakening to the facts. There seems to be some growing nervousness through all their usual rage. The Pakistanis, now the Saudis, are certainly making it clear with their crackdowns on extremists that while they may support, or have supported, in their hearts, such religiosity as displayed by the Taliban or OBL, they certainly don’t want their neighborhoods to look like Najaf, etc. And they don’t want their economies to fall into chaos, either. They must make an accommodation with the modern world, and stop scaring people who have plenty of nuclear bombs. That’s why they’re cracking down; nihilistic chaos is not their idea of a good-time Muslim society, either.

Of course, the liberation of many in these societies will take time. But would you have preferred a second Civil War here to give women the right to vote? Wasn’t one bad enough? War is not the last resort because it is bad, but because it is inefficient, dumb, a waste of blood and treasure, and only the last desperate measure after diplomacy and trickery fail. Just like real life, kids, it’s always cheaper to settle.

So why haven’t we Americans, so inventive and clever, come up with something better than the sorry failed policies of Empires past? Can’t we rise to an occasion anymore? I say yes. I say stand tall, be proud, let go of the false choice between oppression and assimilation. We do not need to agree to get along, to do business in an aggressive but peaceful way. And to influence, one hopes, for the better. After all, look at our dealings with the French.

I think it might be because we’ve forgotten something from those dark and dusty historical times, like say 100 years ago when the industrial age and the first steps towards globalization made intercontinental (both meanings) transportation a reality. We’ve forgotten what drove the great explorers, inventors, and the like the Wright brothers. In many cases it was because there was a large cash prize for doing it. Plus fame and fortune.

Maybe we should have a prize now, just like back them. It was a pretty common thing to offer a big amount of dough for the first to do something. Helps fund the folly.

So let’s offer $25 million for a way to get our troops home, or at least safe, and deal with the terrorist issue that has sprung, unanticipated, like 527s from McCain-Feingold. Let’s invent a new business model, a new diplomatic model, to deal with this outbreak of anarchy.

After all chaos at the fringe of the Empire is not a new problem. And chasing banditos endlessly will not quiet things down. Locals, alone, keep the peace in their neighborhoods.

So let’s take a deep breath and figure out a new, hopefully graceful, way to help them to manage the discontented, to isolate or integrate, using tactics that make sense to regular folks, just like they always have to if you want something that will actually work.
¶ 11:01 AM

  Sect’y of Def. Jammed

One step, two steps, a misspeaking blogged all over the internet and you’re there. It’s almost time for the Secretary of Defense to scram.

The Abu Ghraib jam is a sword that must claim an Administration victim, and like the good captain, it could well be Rumsfeld. It might just be the big October Surprise and Kerry would be well advised to get ready to get what he wished, and just called, for.

These latest war-prisoner “atrocities” are most ironic, hovering between piquant and bittersweet, to all the old Vietnam protesters. It’s the week when the Right is about to attack Kerry, demanding that he own up to the terrible things he said to Congress, recounting the true stories he had been told of atrocities that took place in his war, as they do in all of them. Just as they do so today, in Iraq.

What would anyone expect of men and women put into a war zone? Not everyone, don’t be dim. But look on either side of you next time you’re on a bus or in a bar. Everyone there look like they’ll handle combat stress to you, bucko?

So the Swifties practice their denial of the weakness “all” flesh is heir to in combat passed, simultaneously with videotaped reality today (and the evidence for atrocities in Vietnam is there in dusty books should you want the real, not swiftly deceitful, truth). Truly a cognitive-dissonance whose pastiche tickles the tongue.

But enough of the review-speak. This is not a movie or a restaurant or a social event. This ghastly mess is about reality.

This is about whether the same old hypocrisy will get us that got the ones got stuck with the Empire before us. The hypocrisy of thinking that we can stem the ebb that follows empires flow any better than the last guys tried it. Xerxes commanding the incoming tide to halt (he was actually making the same point: that there was a limit to his power). Half-dozen Crusades. World Wars, ethnic slaughters.

Some were for nothing. Most, lamentably, were for causes that made sense, things having gotten to the state they had by that time. But how did this species, the “thinking one,” decide that this was the way to sort things out?

But to the present: Rumsfeld will take the fall. He was the gunsel, like in the Maltese Falcon. All tough, straight ahead, not a man capable of making a nice distinction. Captain of the ship. Last spot to stop the buck before it gets to the President.

We need someone who is tougher without a gun. The gumshoe-knight who can be hard, without being tough. Whose violence is a force that motivates others without degenerating into brutality, cruelty or even, most times, much physicality at all. Just tough talk, tough on the plan and how it’s best for everyone this way.

Or else…The velvet glove, we forgot it! Perhaps we were blinded to the whole glove thing because Michael has kinda made gloving so iconic for his celebrity brand.

Geopolitically, however, the glove around the fist is a far, far better way to be. Cheaper, too. The American way. Spare, direct, economical. Spoken softly.

And about that stick. Not spared, but used sparingly. You can spoil someone with too little. But beat a dog too much and you wind up with a junk-yard dog.

Which is fine if you want to run a junk yard. If you want to run a quiet, little, prosperous main street, mean dogs mean trouble. So it’s best not to train one, as they will maul someone eventually, unless you’re prepared to hunt, trap, catch and put them down.

Which is a lot of trouble. Plus, of course, plain mean and just wrong. Even a working dog deserves a life with some compassion.
¶ 6:15 AM

  Neo in the Matrix

neo con, neo lib. I want pragmatism. I am a neo-pragmatic, a neo-prag.

I am tired of ideology. Not mine, mind you. Yours. In my face...and in the law.

I want pragmatic non-ideological solutions from government. Ones that recognize the single great truth of our country and of freedom itself. Namely, that each of us lives surrounded by horses’ asses whose ideas are tragically wrong and will land them in hell. But, that aside, we are all here to get along by getting along, and leaving our cherished beliefs out of the common arenas of the Nation and the Law of the Land, whenever possible.

To achieve this peace through mutual distaste, our forefathers wisely separated church and state…In my heart I think they meant beliefs in general. We can agree to get along by leaving alone, and unpleasant as it is, that is how it must be…unless you want the streets of America to resemble the streets of Iraq.

And speaking of Iraq, how about religious war over the control of sacred sites…? Just imagine how that would play out here. Waco was bad enough. But take a pitched battle into a religious shrine? Don’t think so. Sure it’s awkward. But if there is any limit to government, it’s the front gate of a church. So how does a neo-prag address foreign affairs?

Recognize that the other guys know they are right just like you. However foolishly. Work for change, but through persuasion and control. When you have to push back with force, do so very temporarily. The news cycle and access to the means of information distribution (and distortion/interpretation/spin) make it important to manage the perception as well as the reality on the ground. In fact, in terms of sheer body count, today's battles don't measure up to the slaughter of full-sized battles. Pragmatically speaking that's good. But in place of astronomical body counts there are the public perceptions…and symbolism and the polls.

TV is a major reason why too many people dislike this country. We need to deal with that pragmatically. Bombing them will not make them happier with us. That’s a pre-information age 19th and 20th century idea of empire. We need to return to an older model, one where differing tribes can still agree to order, peace and trade, détente most often brought about by largely symbolic raids, rather than all-out war.

Today, the US has the manpower, but fails to understand that this enemy has values that are older than the old Russian bear. These tribalists see the bullet that martyrs them as a symbolic gesture. They will only be beat symbolically. To cut them down to the last man wins the battle but loses the media war...That's pragmatic too. Of course we need to defeat the forces of repression and oppression for moral and practical reasons. But what strategy?

Not the pure moral agnosticism and nihilism of real politick. But the neo-pragmatism that says that the means must also be the ends...when carnage is broadcast live.

Let’s next acknowledge, we brave neo-prags, that you can not spend more than you got forever. Fiscally conservative. Likewise, liberal: that you must spend enough on the worst off and the great bulge in the middle to keep civility in the public arena and desperation in check. Otherwise the revolution of rising expectations, or sinking economic capabilities, will overturn the delicately balanced social contract. Desperation, just like money, makes men do what they wouldn’t necessarily do otherwise.

As for the wallet, let’s take a page from the President’s playbook. Like he wants to do with Social Security, let’s privatized our tax code. Let’s create private “accounts” for foreign adventure, domestic welfare programs, corporate tax breaks and the like.

As I am a neo-prag and not a tax expert, I would suggest that a commission to privatize taxpaying should be able to come up with a plan where the American consumer can also “vote” on where the taxes they pay go. Usurping the rights of the Congress and the President, you say? I say, let’s be pragmatic. No one paid income tax when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution. So who really knows what they would have said about the idea?

Finally, we neo-prags need to be heard now. Nothing makes the need clearer than the present devolution of the political debate, courtesy the 527 fiasco. Specifically, the recent downturn in content in the modern multimedia forum where attack ads have equal time with serious public debate about the issues.

Whose fault, then, the present state of demagoguery and sloganeering? Not the stars, of media, politics or in the heavens. But ourselves. The information consumer is to blame. We need to assert the values of pragmatism in our votes and with our wallets. The platforms, the real issues of this campaign, are in peril of being overwhelmed by distortion and maneuvering unless neo-prags rise up to insist that real issues be addressed. The present course of the Presidential campaigns are a matched set of poster children for “Not pragmatic politics.”

And in the present world nothing could be more derelict, ideological and unpragmatic. While we foolishly waste time playing dirty, negative politics, there are real gorillas in the room no one is making plans to deal with.

And they are very pragmatic guerrillas indeed.
¶ 10:13 AM

  The Gums of August

Today we must be on alert at all times. Color-coded, headline-grabbing, the fear crawl along the bottom of the TV screen. But all the time? That’s a teeth-grinding isometric recipe for a nervous breakdown. And to what end? Should we all carry guns, like they do in Baghdad?

Panic may lead us to stash water and food and gasmasks...these are largely sensible, but also ridiculously overdramatic, responses, given the odds you’ll be hit with something for which such preparations will be the difference between life and death.

So while I recommend martial alertness and emergency civil defense in all its forms, there are also sensible steps we can take as a society that are longer range--and more important. These are steps to strengthen the social and economic fabric of our society…steps that need to be addressed by our government now.

Take, for example, the recent discussion of the employment numbers the dramatic difference between the traditional manufacturing employment and household survey numbers. The meaning of their difference is not elusive to normal folks, although it does seem to mystify both politicians and economists. They show that more people are starting “businesses” in their homes out of hope born of desperation and the lack of jobs with any benefits in the traditional workplace.

The odds of these so-called businesses succeeding are small. Most startups fail. But they show up in the household survey as new jobs. And each time the same person starts a new business on the ashes of an old one…why that’s a new job in the household survey.

We must do better than that. Because these entrepreneurs are also swelling the numbers of the medically uninsured and of the credit overextended.

When this house of cards collapses, sometimes called the middle-class squeeze, acts of entrepreneurial desperation will lead a small number to antiestablishment sympathies and even antisocial acts of anarchy.

This is not speculation, just a simple reflection of one of the truths of history. Wise leaders and smart empires take note of the swelling ranks of the disaffected and act to alleviate that suffering before it blows up into revolutionary fury. That’s why, beyond any humanitarian impulses, we send foreign aid to countries in collapse.

Argue if we must with the precise details of our social safety net, but we need to thrash out exactly how to address this matter now. Just as surely as we need to tighten up security on our borders.

To hear millionaire pundits and privileged politicians opine about being an entrepreneur is a mockery in the face of the reality of our basic capitalistic system. This country has no more open range. It has a tax structure that requires expensive advice to deal with. No man is an island anymore and the concept of the lone individual mastering his fate is a laughable construct in a world of big corporations and big government.

Start a computer company in your garage? About 5 guys succeeded starting out that way out of the thousands and thousands who tried the same thing. The odds are about the same as winning a lottery.

Besides, you’re violating local zoning and business laws by manufacturing or doing business in your garage. So you’ll probably get busted if your try it and actually start doing enough business to succeed.

My point in this long summer of our discontent is that together both the Right and the Left are managing in their conflicts to create the class war they both argue over the existence of so vehemently. Some eat cake today, some only bread.

That’s not enough to start riots in the streets. But when the bread runs out, trouble will go from brewing to ready to drink. Shouldn't we consider some better manner of strengthening our country now? Isn’t it time to ensure that American citizens get security from desperate want over basic things, like food and health-care and education and shelter? Somehow. Don’t we have the expertise to work out some plan that makes unemployment a transition to employment, not to the slums and poor houses of the 19th century…that gave rise, by the way, to Marxism and a long struggle between democracy and totalitarianism?

I know, you say this smacks of socialism. Well our present system, so rife with corporate socialism, already straight-jackets the individual (unless you can afford really good lawyers and accountants). I say that paying for an army that does not protect my neighborhood smacks of socialism, too. I say sticking your nose into my bedroom is socialism, too, big time.

But guess what, everything is a combination of the common good and individual freedom.

One final note on how to we create a class war. When folks fall through the cracks they end up in prison. And prison is, bar none, the most significant arena in which conversion to radical Islamic (and Aryan) terrorism takes place here in America.

And, just a thought, we are putting more folks, some violent psychopaths and many others just the social debris that fell through those cracks, in prison every year.

That’s a real smart strategy to combat the rise of anti-American and anti-democratic forces, isn’t it?
¶ 7:06 PM

  Hail and Farewell

Like any self-respecting gray-hair battling a case of WMD (widening midlife diameter), I joined a gym. It’s my New Year’s resolution, aptly exercised in July.

Not just any gym, mind you, but a boxing gym. My knuckles are now red and puffy (from hitting a heavy bag). But that’s the least of it.

The other day, I had some “schooling” as they like to say in the square circle. My jab was snapping. My footwork fancy. I felt pretty good. Then my more experienced “colleague” got annoyed at my antics and decided to show me his hook. I repeatedly never saw it coming as he snapped my head around, through the gear and the 16-ounce gloves.

Later, while recovering, I had a flash of, if not mortality, at least reality. So naturally my mind turned to our present politics and the Democratic convention.

Old boxing rule: you can’t lose if you knock the other guy out. All that tapping and fancy footwork won’t win fights, especially in the other guy’s hometown. For the purpose of metaphor, “hometown” means “incumbent” in this political context. And that’s what the Democrats need now to stop the Republicans, and as the rounds tick off it’s starting to look like they won’t turn it on soon enough.

The time grows short. Especially when the incumbent has already drafted plans to “delay” (read: suspend) the elections, should some “attack” by alleged “terrorists” just happen to occur right before November—and the polls show there’s a real threat to the incumbency. Franking privileges used to be as bad as it got in politics. No more.

Especially if millions of dollars have been spent to show that a man who volunteered for combat, and came back disgusted by it, is somehow more cowardly than one who dodged the draft with five deferments and another who flew obsolete jets that guaranteed he wouldn’t ever see combat (like that was just a lucky break).

But I digress. The Democrats need to understand this level of mortal political combat, and it is unclear that they do. Hope? Strength? Tap, tap, tap. Clever boxing. Trying to woo the public with fancy footwork. There are real differences between the candidates, and not just on the matter of personal bravery.

For example, the “liberal” is for fiscal moderation and a balanced budget, libertarian values of personal privacy and a return to the law of habeas corpus and relief for the middle class. The liberal is for a true global war on terrorism (with real allies), not a unilateral push to rule the world (always an ambition that fails, just ask Alexander the Great or Napoleon or Hitler…the list goes on).

The “conservative” is for free-spending, record budget-busting, big government programs (it’s growing, folks, despite the spin). He talks about “values” that include the abrogation of the Bill of Rights (forget facing your accuser, having legal representation, freedom from the imposition of someone else’s religion on you or protection from illegal search and seizure). And as for our Imperial ambitions…That shining city on the hill has turned into a bunch of fools on the hill, if you ask any experienced military strategist. (They now are of one of two opinions: Critical of our failed strategy and war planning, and formerly employed in our military, or working and silent.) Who ever thought “Don’t ask, don’t tell” would devolve to this?

But clever political boxing always favors the incumbent (just watch the spinmeisters of the right disguised as journalists interviewing what they laughably call, on Fox, the “Republican truth squad”). And then there is the Right’s dubious position that these trespasses on our personal freedoms are the only way to protect “Freedom.”

The differences are stark, confusing, even embarrassing. Conservatives spend big, support a 600,000-plus mercenary army controlled by the Vice President and his “military contractor” cronies. They support illegal search and seizure, arrest without charge, bail or legal representation, and, of course, cooked elections with new electronic voting gizmos that are unreliable and leave no audit trail, a situation far worse than those notorious “hanging chad” paper ballots.

Liberals, on the other hand, seem downright conservative by comparison. That’s what I mean by confusing.

Unfortunately, like in boxing, the only sure way to decide this November is by a knock-out. And that isn’t going to happen, is it? Perhaps the Supreme Court will even get to pick our next President, again. So mark these words on your calendar. Come November 5, 2004, Imperial America begins. Hail Caesar! Hail Halliburton! Hail and farewell to the little country where middle class citizens once ruled. That city on the hill.

Me, I am gonna learn how to throw and block the hook. Next time I get schooled in the gym, I’m gonna school right back.

Kerry would be well advised to do likewise, to toughen up and school right back…and go for the knockout.
¶ 9:11 AM