Yeah, those other two are off trying to write a book like two right hands with one pen between them. No word yet how long they’ll be.
And I wish them luck, of course. Writing a story is a daunting task if you want it to be even remotely readable, let alone good. For me, though, the great and all untouchable novel is an animal I’d rather not have to deal with no matter how much coffee I drink. I can’t imagine taking on that amount of work voluntarily.
So they’ll be gone a while. But that doesn’t stop the ugly and the weird from showing up in the world of government, politics and economics. And shit, that’s my turf. So let’s get started.
First of all, I’m not talking about Haiti. I’m certainly not talking about John Edward’s illigitimate child, and god-damn you if that’s what you wanted to read about. You know what’s happening in Haiti by now. You know what the problem is. Poverty. Destitution. Inequity. Unfair extortion from France, and a general disinterest from the rest of the world. A lack of roads from the airport is just a symptom, as are the riotous crowds that form whenever someone tries to distribute supplies or food to those dying from things much worse than crumbling buildings. You don’t need Anderson Cooper showing you these things over and over for ten days; what you need is to know what policies have been in place that supported these conditions, who enacted those policies, who might have benefitted from them and which of these people are still running for re-election? And if they’re appointed, who appointed them or might reappoint them or someone similar? You need to know how you can vote to avoid these kinds of conditions. That’s political free speech, and that’s what runs a Democracy.
In any case, I digress. Or do I? What I really meant to talk about here is how our leaders don’t really work for the left any more than they work for the right. If you don’t see this, you’re probably getting your news from exactly where they want you getting it from. You’re probably watching CNN, or reading without thinking, maybe even wondering where you could possibly find the time to learn about any of these big issues enough to take an intelligent stand on it, assuming you had time to do that.
But that’s exactly the problem.
Look: after what happened this last week in the Unite States Supreme Court I was all ready to vituperate the general voting public. I was nonplussed at first, struck dumb with disbelief at the blatant criminality of what I’d just heard. It can’t be true, I thought, this must be left-wing spin. My sense of irate disgust kicked in and I wanted to set the internet on fire. But I couldn’t get it all down before my reason got the best of me and the next thing I knew I was scouring left and right wing news sites looking for details, as well as noting which sites didn’t mention the damn thing at all.
To be fair, I suppose there are just too many indirect leads into the roots of the causes of this latest bit of very grim news for me to berate everyone but people like Howard Zinn for not seeing this outrage coming…especially given the standards to which I typically hold the general public. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about, and all you do is vote for the guy who would appoint one or two of them. And they have to be confirmed by…oh, right — the other people you get to vote for. But, man, that’s a lot to consider when all I’m trying to decide is whether this person agrees with me on major issues.
Yes, being a citizen is hard work, eh? But maybe if people who’d voted for a pimp like Bush could’ve considered more than just what he was like to have a beer with, such as what dangerous things might he do in office, we wouldn’t have decisions that endanger the very foundation of what makes a democracy made along a corner of the government that gets almost no attention.
But this is, after all, the year of the Rat. Maybe not on the chinese calendar, but certainly in the US Congress where the scurvy bastards on both sides have been doing nothing but stalling for the better part of a year now, on pretty much everything they touch. No leadership, no leader, and no action. And down the hill at the courthouse, Kennedy, Scalia and Roberts, along with the other two — who I’m daring you to look up yourself right now — are carrying on the pro-business agenda almost in the dark.
I say almost because yes, it is in the papers that the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling overturned about a hundred years of legislation preventing corporations from deciding between them the results of the Amerikan “democracy”. It is in the papers that the court ruled that money is a form of free speech and that corporations too, have a right to it, amazingly. It is in the papers that purely legal entities, while still prohibited from giving directly to candidates to further their own agendas, can now spend unlimited amounts on television ads and radio time, or any other form of public influence. But aside from a couple of pundits here and there that are pointing out how much this limits any individual’s ability to make a voice heard over the billions that oil and insurance companies will certainly pour into campaigns now, there is very little noise made about what this ruling means. The urge of a few people to scream their fiery hearts out into the black empty abyss made wider by corporate money now amounts to a fart in a hurricane.
But this is and always has been the logical progression of things. When the voting public participates in the political process only enough to claim as much, people with actual interests will surely win out the disinterest of the masses, even if they are the majority. And when those few people aren’t people at all but legal entities with all but unlimited cash, the interests of the disinterested won’t go forgotten, or ignored…they’ll simply cease to exist.
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I put my drink back down on the little plastic foldaway airplane table. In the dark of the cabin, the thin golden liquid disappears into the blackness, which is enriched and deepened by the contrast of the bright screeen staring back at me. I’ve sifted through hundreds of channels beamed in via satellite, live voices telling me things, none of which carry even a whiff of importance, a mild fart of novelty.
The sky beneath us was distant. A falling ocean, a waterfall of plumes and sprays, with murderous roars muffled by the thick glass of the airplane windows.
Crazy vibrations in my head, but not from the airwaves. And no, not politics, I’m tired of politics. It’s the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Healthcare and the Republicans putting it down and the Democrats sitting on the sidelines jacking off as they always do…they just took 8 years to replace Clinton with Obama, and the results couldn’t be more similar…no, I don’t want to talk about politics.
The noise coming at me is of a different type, filling me with anxiety and a paralyzing fear. There is possibility on the horizon again; the scent of purpose within my grasp, like the smell of warm apples you can tell are coming from a pie in your oven.
There is the new apartment, of course, a new skyline to call my own, and the city will be my canvas. No strings like bookdeals come attached, but there is whatever potential I can draw from it, I suppose. Lurking around the bend there are also new whispers of employment, direction, maybe even academia again…
That’s enough, I thought. There IS no news, and there will never be any again. It’s time to get back to the project on which I’ve fallen so desperately behind. It’s time to write. And it may take a while.
So be it.
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It doesn’t matter what you think of MSNBC or Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or their sometimes annoying little band of political correspondants selected to agree with them on the air. It doesn’t matter that they use the same news show equations as Fox News or that they have their own moments of embarrasing journalism, no different from Bill O’Reilly’s or Sean Hannity’s except that the left is a bad comeback to the right and tends to be more infantile and less condescending.
But never mind all that. What we have to deal with now is that ugly little rodent of journalism, gnawing on words like a skunk under your porch. That inconvenient liability that facts are — after all — facts, and that by the last period of any story, nothings stands on its own without them. To wit, the myriad facts presented by Olbermann and Maddow since August of this year have been well-checked, their investigations have been conclusive and relevant and their message has been clear and consistent. Not to mention cohesive and sane, with a touch of intelligence not seen on most other networks.
Mind you — in fact, BEWARE! I make no defense for network news. They are all of them feeble and vapid wastes of time, a sickly portal for information, constipated and obtuse. The 24-hour news cycle does for relevant information what a swollen prostate does to a stream of urine. And nobody likes to get up five times a night to barely squeeze a trickle.
Why the hell do we put up with this shit?
But as we’ve seen with the two-party system in this country — which is really just a one party system that is, before it is anything else, pro-business — facts don’t always go hand in hand with reasonable reactions. And sometimes the strategies on the white board must simply be turned upside down.
It was odd to watch Olbermann, the newsman turned poet writhe and pulse with tones of anger and a menacing darkness about his gaze, filling the airwaves with his own pitch for health care, his own story. It was weird to be moved by a journalist’s pitch, to have his bias slap me in the face like a clown beating a piñata with the small end of a baseball bat. Using his father’s battle with age and infirmaments, he spoke of every one’s fear and resistance to death and pain. Bias be damned, he implied, if I can’t reach you buffoons with the logical progression of facts and guided journalism, by god, I’ll reach into the pits of my own desperation, my own human battles if I have to. And not in a pathetic and phony plea like that idiot, Glenn Beck, who would, if he were any kind of decent, at least take acting lessons before attempting to stir my pity.
And, he continued, if it doesn’t satisfy your need to be entertained, then fuck you, because this is about action, not rhetoric. If the facts won’t stir you, and the poetry won’t touch you, well, then I’ll spell it out for you. And whether mindless viewer or devoted activist, I WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.
And then he did.
A call to action. An honest-to-god initiative by the left, something not seen since Vietnam, and even that might be a little naíve to consider. Hold free health clinics in the states of the 6 or 8 democrat senators who are seemingly siding with republicans on the public option issue of the health bill. Hold those dogs accountable for what you need from them. Show those miserable pro-business miscreants giving advantage to the health-care giants at the cost of human pain that what we want is possible, and that we know it is THEY that stand in our way. And then, goddammit, vote accordingly when the time comes, eh?
And with that, he returned to the regular programming, of filling up the airwaves with another 24 hours of informatioin, and we, the viewers, the citizenry, were left to do with that message what we will. I only mention it because it was weird to remember just how much inane chatter is out there in the ether to spill into our minds if we’re not selective of what we bother wasting our time with.
I was moved by Olberman’s near soliloquy on MSNBC. Well, not on TV, and not that night since I watch and read my news on the internet, when I damn well please, and in a way that I can spend the time to form my own opinions, on my own terms, without having Lexus, Jack Daniels and Boeing commercials splashed at me with ridiculous fervor, without having my thought processes constantly interrupted by by a jangle of clowns. I’m sure that the darkness and the settled air of 8pm prime time generates its own air of propriety for his words, but what the hell? One in the afternoon was good enough for me.
In any case, it stirred me. For a moment I even considered that there might still be cogs within the machine that are acting on behalf of the very principles they claim; our principles — the ones that serve that almost mythical creature, the citizen. It was a weird feeling, to be honest.
…though it fades just as quickly.
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The trouble is mounting on something already too twisted and cold to grasp without gloves. Much like yanking thick ivy off a wrought iron fence on a cold morning, finding any trace of actual public service under the hack and filth of the new health care bill will be a job no American will want to take. Truth is, even before the votes are all in it’ll be just as heavy. Chances are, of course, that it won’t fall on you, and you’ll be able to safely ignore the damn thing without looking odd and out of place like a sexless jack rabbit in spring. Soon enough the congress will round up to vote on the health care bill they’ve been talking incessantly about and we’ll answer once again that old question: if a politician votes no on a necessary piece of legislation and no one from his state has been paying attention, will the affair make any noise at all?
Despite the activists, despite the motions, the small contributing calls to action here and there that might have been producing some sort of momentum, when the vote comes down we will hear very little about it, and not because of the mainstream media’s usual complicit tactics with the men on the hill. No, we won’t hear about it because it will no longer be news; there will no longer be any story worth telling as we’ve all known for some time now that this is and has always been the same story we’ve heard before, just with a different illustrator. And in the world of 24-hour news, grief is a very expensive line item.
Of course, it’s not really a vote for or against anything we wanted in the first place, which is the right to not worry about how we, as human beings, will pay for our health. What they’ll be voting on won’t even bother trying to offer single-payer health care. It will feign to be reform in the sense that it will offer a weak and unenforceable version of a mandate that everyone be insured, but all this will really do is provide many new unwitting clients to an industry rolling with the fat of peoples’ suffering.
It will not regulate the prices those fat cats can charge, allowing insurance companies to inflate them as much as they can get away with. And when you’re lying on an operating table with a lump the size of a golf ball in your breast, or a grown man’s finger up your rectum saying, “uh-oh, mister Johnson, it looks like things are about to get uncomfortable for you,” you’ll consider just about any price they start throwing in your direction.
Assuming they’re willing to pay for it at all. Shit, in the light of this mess it’s come out that insurance companies won’t even promise to cover their own emlployees…what chance do you think YOU have?
Instead, the new plan might offer the states the Right to offer a state-level option for health care as a token of show, a shiny hood ornament, or something just as functional. It will be ravaged by the insurance company executives and lobbyists in the much weaker state legislatures which — conveniently — is where the whole process will become easier to ignore, because who the hell is paying attention to state legislatures? Not to mention creating the potential for fifty different health care organizations, all doing more or less the same thing and doubling up on all of the same administrative tasks, wasting more money than necessary and dooming the projects to the critics years before it’s even time to bury the thing.
And when the impotent thing passes — which it will…no politician today can afford the political capital of not passing SOMETHING — we will hear all kinds of applause for a few days before the whole thing vanishes under cloaks of appeals and unsexy subcommittee talks. Nothing for the national press, I’m afraid. Unless I’m much mistaken — and I’ve never wished so badly that I was — we will hear President Obama laud it as his success at bipartisan health reform, just like Clinton did for his own inadequate failure. Democrats will pat each other’s backs and shuffle out the door to discuss “Don’t ask don’t tell”, while Republicans grumble behind the camera and shout on the radio about repealing what the democrats shove through.
And who cares? They’re not going to repeal anything any more than you’d notice if they did. Health care as a topic will fizzle, probably until the next time a “hope and change” candidate runs and we’ll go through the whole futile exercise again. Maybe we’ll still have journalists like Maddow and Olbermann, and we’ll still have lunatics, pimps and jackasses like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck. And we’ll fuck that up too, and move on to the next juicy topic, be it Afghanistan, or gays in the military, or Rush Limbaugh’s failed attempt at buying the St. Louis Rams. Whatever. It’s all been done before.
And in 2010, with Obama’s new Nobel Peace Prize for…something, and the Democrats’ most epic failure since George McGovern’s loss in ‘72, Republicans will slowly gain more and more seats again, until finally, when they’ve found a voice sober enough to silence idiots like Sara Palin and Bobby Jindal, someone with more temporal coherence than Michael Steele to stay on point and lead their party in some kind of direction, the vicious cycle will return us to a Republican President again.
Don’t mistake my anger for pessimism. It’s just that…well, I hope to be halfway to Mars by then.
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“What $550?” I asked Shane, who had called me from some shit hole in Wyoming.
“$537, actually,” he corrected me. “Direct. Barcelona to JFK, round trip.” His voice was covered in static through the mobile.
“That’s incredible. Truly increíble, man. Did you know a ticket from Amsterdam to Barcelona would cost me just as much?” I didn’t believe it when I was looking for a ticket to go meet up with him, and it still didn’t make any sense, even two days later.
“I know, right? That’s a €50 ticket. It’s extortion!”
“Well, it’d be extortion if there was a rhyme or reason to it. The fact that Jeff flew to Madrid on $200 and you can fly to JFK for 500 while I’m paying $1600 to go to Brasilia is just plain chaos. Who prices these things?”
“Well, use your head. You and your friends fly internationally every week — what’s a typical transatlantic ticket going for these days?” He asked. A reasonable question on the surface, pointed as it was. But even with all my flight time and miles logged, I sure as hell couldn’t come up with an answer.
“Granted, they placed me in business class last week,” I said, remembering the over-rated and definitely over-priced €1500 1A seat I had on that 747. Anyone who says it’s unnecessary but worth it is selling something. “But for me, it varies on any given week from €300 to €900. I’m starting to suspect they have a big wheel-of-fortune prop in a hangar somewhere and every day the airlines take turns placing an iguana on it and spinning it until the thing lands on a number that doesn’t hurt their bottom line.”
“I see,” he said, his voice carrying a sound of concern. One thing is sure — coming up with a reliable number is not as straightforward as it should be.
Air travel has become far, far too complicated. We all know this, of course, and we all love to bitch and wail about our own anecdotes of terrifying and sometimes weird horror. We make a lot of noise about the cramped seats, the shitty food, what they did to us at airport security and so on… experiences that are valid, sure, but small. These are the obvious infringements against our comfort, our timeliness and our privacy and the tales carry with them great weight when told to a friend, or bored co-worker. But look around any discussion board on the internet. Listen over the long term. These are not unique. These stories are common place; boring almost. Change is not effected based on boring statistics, no matter how real or rational they are.
It’s the encroachment into the space lacking common sense that we should be watching. The steps in that direction carry the real danger of the industry, but more importantly, they carry the juicy sweetness that any story needs to properly captivate the public for long enough to make a difference.
And I warn you in advance: if healthcare, a deeply important issue that is central to the self-preservation of the economy, every corporation which employs people and just about every living person — and all of the dying ones — is struggling to keep that attention, I wouldn’t give much hope to anything less ridiculous than Scrubs…
But that’s negativity and we don’t need that. Not here, where we’re about to make a point. Which is important if you’re going to be a writer, or at least if you’re going to be a journalist. Which is, for the record, and definately for the moment, out of my hands.
“Amsterdam to Nice is €30 for the weekend,” he told me over the static. I could tell he was sitting in front of a computer, randomly looking up flights. What the fuck did I care about Nice?
“Which weekend?” I asked. I thought it was important.
“…doesn’t matter,” he said, “You’d have to leave in two hours. But if you go next weekend…” he trailed off, probably waiting for the search to finished running.
“…next weekend…it’s…€320.”
“That’s more than ten times the price!” I yelled at him, though I’m certain he could do the math. “Are you kidding me? In NO OTHER INDUSTRY are prices this elastic. Why do we, as consumers, put up with this?”
There was silence on his end of the phone.
“Are you still there, man?” I proded.
“Yeah, yeah,” he came back, sort of stumbling. “But are you sure that’s the right economic term? I don’t think that means what you think it does.” I could tell he was smiling. “I thought an elastic commodity was something where the demand is reduced by an increase in price.” Some of it was still struggling to get off his face.
“Don’t get all Adam Smith on me, you nervous ape,” I started. “I said the prices are elastic, not the commodity. Damnit, I’m a writer, not an economist. I’m being descriptive, econometrics be damned. Don’t be a douchebag.”
“Really.” He’s an enigma, especially over the phone. “But, yeah, you’re right. I have no idea why we put up with that though, except that I don’t know how else to react.”
“That says something, doesn’t it?” I asked him. “If other inelastic things such as beer, or advil — depending on who you are — fluctuated in price by a factor of ten every week, what would we do? Not nothing, right?
He thought about it for a second. “Is that even the right example?” He asked. Seriously, this time, I could tell. “Really,” he emphasized.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m not sure. Maybe not. But what’s the score here, you know?” I pushed it. “What’s this lead to?”
He thought about it, and I could tell I was getting some of my frustration through to him. I continued. “Take, for example, reservations,” I said, leaning into my thought. “The other day I booked a train ticket from Boston to New York. I booked it online, everything done without so much as a conscious human knowing about my purchase but me.”
“…and the CIA,” he said.
“You rotten bastard,” I scowled at him. “You know those pigs monitor international calls coming into the US. You keep mentioning the CIA every time I call you and I’ll be lucky to be allowed back in the country instead of shipped off to some unknown forest in Eastern Europe or Siberia.”
“Get a grip, man. You sound like those paranoid delusionals on FOX News when you talk like that. Besides, they’ll keep you out of the country for much less than that.”
“True enough, eh?” I said, knowing full well that I’ve got other things to worry about. “Anyway, so I had this ticket I’d booked online, and I realized a couple hours later that I’d have to catch a train sooner than that. Like, in the next two hours.”
“So?” He asked.
“So…can you imagine if it’d been a plane ticket? Can you imagine the possibility of changing a reservation like that? Airline reservations are treated like they were more fragile than babies with osteoperosis. You can barely talk about it, and even if you can, you’ll have problems that strike the kind of bureaucracy only found in the real estate industry and hospital adminstration.
“First the new reservation would have to fall under the same category of ticket class. You knew that there are varying kinds of price classes even within First Class and Business, right?”
“Yeah, there’s like, two or three, I think.”
“Well, I’m not sure how many kinds there are for Economy, but they use most of the letters of the alphabet. So the chances are already grim.”
“Yeah,” he said, following my logic.
“Then you’d better hope that the ticket you purchased was flexible, where changes are allowed for a $100 or $200 fee. If not, and most ‘affordable’ ones aren’t, then you can’t change it at all. Sometimes it’s cheaper and less of a headache to just buy another ticket.”
“Are you saying they do this on purpose?” He asked over the mobile line.
“Do I have to?” I exclaimed, throwing my hands into the air and forgetting that one of them held my phone. Or was holding my phone that is, until it flew out of my hands and across the pavement as I walked from my car.
Fuck, I thought, and walked over to fetch it. I bent down to pick it up and my messenger bag slipped off my back onto my side. I hate it when that happens.
Thankfully I’ve always been into sturdy little phones that don’t have all the other bullshit like cameras, GPS, iTunes, and copies of Shakespeare’s entire works. I saw that the call was still live and heard Shane’s faint little voice, as if he were a tiny little man in my stupid phone saying, ‘Hello? Hello? Hey, are you there? Did the call drop?’
“Yes, I’m here,” I said, annoyed that I had to fix my shirt that was now all crumpled onto one side.
“What the hell happened?” He asked.
“Nevermind,” I told him. “It must’ve been the CIA trying to cut my line, you reckless prick. Watch what you say on international calls, damnit. You know better than that.”
“Whatever, get back to your point,” he said, “…you were going somewhere interesting with that.”
“The point, Shane, is that the system makes no sense at all in its current form and yet we foster the status quo without even thinking about it. It’s like health care.”
“Like health care?” he snided. “No. Don’t start giving me another long-winded schpiel about your most recent political moment of insight. Airlines are nothing like healthcare. They have planes.”
That made me smile.
“Hey,” he said, “you know where the problem with healthcare begins?
I humored him. “Where, Shane?”
“Sick people.”
“Jesus, man…” I started to say, but he exhaled loudly and continued his thought.
“…airlines are like health care — what the hell does that mean?”
“Yeah. It’s not a system that exists to do what it should be doing. It exists because that’s how it’s grown. That’s what men — mostly rich, white, powerful men — have wanted it to be. Ripped and patched, sabotaged and staged, the legislation and regulation that defines it is constantly open to make room for more profits for — well, somebody. More and more seemingly ridiculous policies that make a few people very rich are put in place over the years in spite of its customers’ woes.”
“Seems to me like a damn fine business model for these fat white guys you seem to dislike so much…”
“Yeah,” I said, “and it’s better than you think. Because it doesn’t matter that the business is going in the tank…CEO’s never lose money.”
“Huh,” he said, and thought for a second. “Then I’ll tell you what I’m NOT.”
“What?” I humoured him. “A CEO? In the right business? Is the liquor store clerkship not paying huge dividends and bonuses this year?”
“…going to get my knee surgery paid for.” There was no mirth in his voice; he sounded serious. “The insurance my parents had bought when I came back to the United States after losing my job in the Netherlands says it was an old sports injury and therefore a pre-existing condition. Fifteen thousand dollars.” I didn’t know what to say. “And if you’re right about airlines that are out to fuck us while barely serving us peanuts, I don’t think I have any hope of nursing my knee back to health without forgoing the next ten years of expenses.”
The line was quiet for a second. One of us swallowed.
“Wait, are you serious?” I asked him.
“Yeah.” He said.
“Really?” I asked him.
“Really.”
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