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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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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Nothing behaves as irrationally as a cornered beast. Believe me, I know. At the moment, I am one of them.
There are few things as dangerous as a mammal that has lost all other options and is faced with no choice other than the grim and vaguely disturbing idea of fanatically hopping a four-hour train along the coast of New England at two in the morning. To do so after twenty hours of no sleep and going the next 72 on less than three — well, there are people that would say that’s just plain stupid. And I would agree with them, if there had been any element of choice in the matter whatsoever.
It was one of those calls that you hate to get, especially late in the day after ten or twelve of those very focused hours of work where you get up and are dizzy just from rejoining reality and feeling almost human again.
I need you need to be in the office in New York at two in the morning so we can get started here in Europe on time.
Fuck. I was still in Boston at the time.
And after the four-hour train ride, and after another full bore, ten-hour work day, I still had to catch a flight to Europe.
I am now completely out of my mind. To make matters worse, the drink cart on the flight across the Atlantic has just rolled down the aisle. The New York red-eye to Amsterdam is normally packed with Dutch men and grungy boys, which means they overload on Heineken and almost nothing else. Tonight, for some inexplicable reason it’s been filled to the brim with noisy Italians and free scotch. You can see where this might go, right?
Awry.
Italian men are noisy on their own, and love nothing more than to fucking talk. Pair them up with the gambit of Slovenian women that were going to Amsterdam and the place goes all to pieces. The Italian man in the seat in front of me was singing on about what must have been futbol to the pretty blond next to him. A dude, I think, but Italians are all very pretty.
At the rate that Michelangelo or whatever was talking, the other guy might have litterally had an anyurisim had he not been Italian himself. His eyes might have swollen up with the build-up of blood from the ruptured vessel in his brain, just behind the sockets, and the veins in his neck would’ve started sinking in, pulling the skin tight around the adam’s apple and exposing the grainy texture of the malnourished cartilage. Other things happen too, and I’ve even heard of bursting capilaries at the fingertips and in and around the oral cavity. Had he been of any other nationality, things might have gotten that ugly, but thankfully Italians can ingest quite the wordcount per minute.
On the other side of the plane, about five rows back, seven or eight hollering whoops exploded when the drink cart rattled by. They went crazy on the whiskey, begging the flight attendant for more. When she tried to tell them they could only have one each they went berzerk, climbing over seats, taking the microwaved ziti marinara from the other passengers, screaming about their mothers and proposing marriage in sonnet form to random Slovenian women right in front of their husbands. It was awful. When one of the younger kids went for his football I watched as the flight attendant scurried down the aisle towards first class, covering her head and neck with her arms and screaming for mercy from the degenerates. The Slovenian girl at the window seat next to them, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, had her feet up on the seet, her arms clutching her knees at her chest in a fetal position, rocking back and forth and mumbling something no one could hear.
Things didn’t quiet down until we passed the tropical storm we were flying over, and then they all seemed to run out of electricity and pass out. I can only stipulate that the electrical disturbances below the plane had something to do with it but that’s not based on anything other than highly skewed empirical evidence.
I missed more than half of what the Italians said, of course, but not even the blind deaf can miss the sheer volume of word output these guys produce. The levels of noise pollution alone are cause for local statutes to be put in place where severe noise disturbances can have drastic consequences. I bet no Italian man has ever heard the little safety schpiel early in the flight, which probably explains the alarmingly high statistic put out earlier this year by the FAA, wherein it was shown that 48% of deaths in airline accidents are Italian men, or men of Italian decendancy. It went on to say that the majority of Italian men who perish on flights are found in positions that suggest they were desperately trying to undue their seat-belt buckle or else leaning over to the seat next to them with their own oxygen mask in hand, either asking to put it on or else discussing the latest fashion show in Milan.
Thaese numbers are true. I absolutely did NOT make them up*. Would I lie to you?
—
And, yeah, I had plenty of scotch too, but that’s not what I’m getting at or why I’m out of my mind. I wish my craziness was due to something fun like the electrical problems of the Italians, endorphins, philosophical astrophysics, rum, or mescaline. Even scotch. But alas, it’s just rage. Pure, disgusting, over-the-top, angry, furious, unreasonable rage.
Bear with me — I started this whole thing meaning to get political but like the Italians, things got a little out of hand. Trust me, it’s better than many of the alternatives. House bill 3200: allow me — ’cause, you know, I’ve read it…
What? It was a long flight and I felt like reading some law…
First it was the town hall meetings, those already ridiculous stages wherein members or the ruling class, with the media’s help, get to look like they give two hoots of a damn about what YOU think. More on this later.
Then the town halls started getting nuts. And not, you know, normal nuts like Michelle Bachman or Orin Hatch nuts. Not Sarah Palin nuts or even Robert Bork nuts. I’m talking about people showing up at Presidential rallies armed with automatic assault weapons with shirts that indicated quite clearly what their intentions might have been and the secret service just standing there as if they had been cupcakes on parade. I’m talking about people showing up at meetings where the agenda is health care while brandishing their second amendment rights like that’s what was at stake. I’m talking about a new path being walked by the insane, the uneducated, the misinformed and the stupid of this country, and they’re being led by the same evil jerks that keep trying to bring you such debocles as the flat tax and the privatization of social security.
Now we’re seeing that there is little coincedence in all of this madness. Indeed, there is little chance of chance at all, seeing as unreasonableness has been the plan all along. Thanks to reporters and journalists who are doing real work instead of catering to the American portrait of the stupid and the lazy jackass in an easy chair listening to Fox News trash, we’ve now had painted for us a chart connecting the dots, laying the truth out in front of us as graphically as it gets. Never mind that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman ask questions that cater to their leftist agenda using the same formula that Bill O’Reilly uses to show his condescending and insane version of reality. Never mind that their network is indeed the left-leaning MSNBC, responsible for their own sets of idiotic stunts and ventures.
They’re still right.
See, we’re now finally dealing with FACTS, and it’ll come out in the public’s eye soon enough. It better, or the way things are going someone might get shot first. But for the first time since I can remember, it’s not just obvious — it’s provable that our society is not having a discussion about differing opinions but rather one of differing realities. Facts themselves are being debated right in front of philosophers’ eyes as they stare on in disbelief.
This is not Newtonian physics. At least half of this debate is WRONG.
And that’s important to remember when the shit hits the fan, because someone’s going to be responsible. And I don’t want to have to fish out records saying it wasn’t me, or I told you so or anything else that crass.
—
Speaking of crass, what’s her name, Betsy McCaughey, that ideology pimp who started the whole Death Panels discussion with a flick of her inarticulate tongue and a nod of her ugly face, finally found a wide-reaching audience. Again, never mind that it took a host guaranteed to be making fun of her, that was the only venue she could find that wouldn’t already be packed full of crazies and unthinking, guilt-plagued jackasses. It was all she could get at this stage in the game. On the Daily Show, trying desperately to convince anyone in the studio audience who would look at her that she had a point, Jon Stewart litterally tore her evidence from her as he tore up the rest of her argument as sheer nonsense to the applause of millions. That must have been a good day to get those free tickets, eh?
But the people in the studio didn’t have to watch the ironic Yoplait commercial at the break, the one where strawberries are dropped into the thick splash of the creamy yogurt substance, and then bounce off of it when it’s frozen. The sexy voice comes on to say their new (new? really?) yogurt can be had both ways: in the fridge as a mousse, or in the freezer as a…frozen treat. They didn’t know, I guess, what to call it. Frankly, I don’t either.
And then I realized why the whole debate is so aggrevating. Anyone who reasons at a five-year-old level can see the obvious; you just have to be paying attention in order to see it.
—
And now again, as always, the Democrats seem desperate once more because the brain tumor that took Ted Kennedy’s life might make the sixty seat majority irrelevant for another 5 months. Assuming they don’t do what the Republicans want and make it an 85 vote requirement just because, you know, they want it that way now that they’re not a barely-fifty-one majority. Not that any news outlet still making a profit even remembers the health care debate, spending a third of the day covering the location of Ted Kennedy’s body, much like Michael Jackson’s a few weeks ago. Maybe they’ll make a diamond out of his hair too, though I bet someone will find a way to make something more fitting out of Ted Kennedy. Maybe they can regrow Winston Churchill from his pubes.
What? None of that now, eh? It’s way too soon for something that ugly and I’d hate to see it derail the very thing that the old Lion stood most for, besides booze and sailing, which, as a matter of record and disclosure, I’m all for. I mean, talk about conflicting agendas, right? Here you have MSNBC, dying to promote universal health care in any way possible, going to such lenghts as actually investigating and actually reporting the evil conflicts of interest in the parties rallying against the most common-sense initiative since they repealled prohibition with the 21st amendment. And the man that fought most ardently for it, whose whole 47-year-career revolved around it, the guy whose last efforts as a senator a few days before his death included an attempt to immediately replace himself with an appointment by the Democratic Governor in order to ensure action on health care while it still has a dying breath left in it…
But, well, they’ve got to have their ratings, so forget the forged letters to government from Insurance and Coal companies purporting to be from average citizens. Never mind hidden and private funding into anti-health care initiatives coming from the very people who would lose power and wealth were such an initiative to pass…
It’s off to the hearse we go. Talk about pulling the plug on grandma, eh?
—
Christ. I still haven’t really gotten to the point of mentioning how Olberman and Maddow are right. I really did start this thing meaning to get there, to discuss the recent study done on viewership of major news stations. Fox News, whose viewers are over 90% republican and can’t find Iraq on a map or hear the insanity coming out of their own asses came in at more than MSNBC and CNN combined.
Shit. No wonder we’re in such a… ah, you finish it.
* I might have made that up.
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The gentle burning of the cheap DeWars they serve on transatlantic KLM flights reminded me of the sun I’d felt on my skin not six hours ago in the Old South of Amsterdam. I’d been sitting on a comfortable cushion in the open courtyard, sipping a typical Dutch latté while I waited for an old friend at the College Hotel near the museumplein of the old Dutch Capital.
But for whiskey to feel that way you have to drink it right. And it’s complicated. Draw half a breath, and then take a sip. And remember, it works best with the middle to low tiers of whiskies, or any scotch younger than ten years. Twelve is too old, too smooth for the right effect. You need the harsh stuff for the right kind of burning. When the liquor is in your mouth, swirl it a bit, but not too much. It’s not wine, dammit, and isn’t activated by oxygen, but rather by settling into itself. So swirl it in your mouth just enough to coat the interior of your oral cavity with the liquid gold and then open your lips and take another slight breath, stopping just before it burns to the point where your cough instinct takes over. Don’t let that happen — that’s bad form and you’ll look like a freshman jackass, so avoid it at all costs.
As soon as you feel yourself reach that burning point, stop inhaling and begin slowly letting the air out. If you can, simultaneously begin swallowing the whiskey, or rather, letting it fall down your throat. You’ll think of the sun on your skin right away, and you’ll know what I mean.
You’ll feel hairs tingling as your skin cells expand from the sudden warmth. Comfort will set in on your exposed arms first, and then your face. As the warmth penetrates your clothes, your core will begin to equalize, and if it’s summer in Amsterdam, you can go from chilly to too hot as quickly as a cloud can roll past the sun in high wind. It’s a frightening show of how fickle and dependant our bodies can be on the planet. But for those first five or ten seconds, it also feels damn good.
Which is how I felt in that morning warmth, just before it got too hot and my back started sweating against the courtyard cushions. I’d been sitting there for a while, drinking ice water while I waited for 10:30 to come. That’s when Vera, my agent and lead in Amsterdam, had agreed to meet me. She preferred that kind of setting, an open courtyard in a classy hotel in the chic part of town by her office, where you can have a fresh morning drink to interrupt your work and “feel as if you’re abroad,” as she put it. Or maybe she’d meant ‘a broad’, which is accurate too, I guess, for her.
Me, I prefer dark old pubs and bars with aged oak railings that carry the names of their proprietors’ grandfathers. Places where the floor sticks if you don’t step in the right places and where coffee is served only to water down the bourbon.
But I guess at 10:30 in the morning, this place was more appropriate — yeah, I can see that.
Unmistakable, whether from a distance or from across a few empty tables on a Friday morning, Vera loves to wear yellow. From brights to dulls, she has yellow blouses, skirts, shoes, gold bracelets, pendants, earings, purse, car and on colder days, leggings. She loves it. Even her credit card is yellow. She wears a grey scarf and red sunglasses, which disturbs me in terms of continuity, but suffice it to say, I didn’t miss seeing her in that empty gravel courtyard and waving her down towards my table.
I’m not a fan of that kind of attention, of course, and I prefer for my leads to be slightly more conspicuous. Those of you who know me know that my profile is kept low for reasons that involve contact identity protection issues, statute of limitations in certain countries and a general sense of paranoia which, despite its social inconveniences, has kept me in business all these years. So keep your comments to yourselves.
We started off with the usual chit chat about the Dutch and our mutual dislikes for some of their habits, such as waiting tables and actually bringing you what you ordered. See, Vera is no more Dutch than I am, and atheist Israelis of Polish heritage have a warmth about them that I just can’t ignore, and actually identify with. As if she were the Jewish Grandmother I never had, only younger. Our common distaste for the often obtuse mannerisms and cold tact of the Dutch had brought us closer together than either of our companies had meant for us to be. It was supposed to be all business. But there we were, a year after our last official dealing had gone down, two friends just meeting for old times sake and a fix for caffeine.
But instinctively, we gravitated towards our most common aim — Politics.
“What’s this deal I’m hearing about MSNBC and FOX news?” she asked me, after our chatter had subsided. “I’m hearing all kinds of gibberish from ThinkProgress about some kind of truce between those two networks. As if that can be good for anybody.”
“ThinkProgress?” I chuckled. “Why the hell do you still read that stinking hippie tripe?”
“Oscar, are you drunk? It’s 10:30 in the morning. Are you not sleeping enough?” She asked me, with a very straight face.
“I never sleep enough,” I told her. “You know that.”
“You also drink too much, and I’d put an end to that too, if I didn’t think it’d affect your writing negatively,” she said. “I swear you get off on it.”
I didn’t respond, except with a tight-lipped shrug of the shoulders.
“Hippie tripe…” she trailed off, and then snapped at me from across the glass of water I’d been drinking. “ThinkProgress is just about the most reliable way to get a lead into a story the main press will likely ignore these days. Where do you think I get half my ideas for followups?” I stared into the ice in my water.
“Christ, I’m glad I got out when I did, then,” I said.
“Got out?” She asked. “What, ‘got out’? You didn’t get out. You’re neck deep in this nightmare, probably worse than me.”
I sighed after she’d finished. “Tell me about it,” I said, leaning back on the cusion in my woven bamboo chair. “No — I mean, got out of this local scandal shit and into the global scene,” I said, pausing, “you know, business dealings in Africa, socialist policies in the EU, Labor conditions in the MercoSul, humanitarian issues in China, real ground conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and who’s profitting from it…that kind of thing. The real news.”
She grinned at me with tightly pursed lips and then burst out into a hearty laughter, a heartfelt glee I hadn’t witnessed in quite some time. She belly laughed for a quarter minute or so before she became coherent enough to stammer a reply.
“You’re daft!” She chuckled, raising her hand and waving down the waiter. “‘the real news…’ — listen to yourself. You know who you sound like? You sound like those tikes from Rolling Stone, idealistic as if they still wrote for their school newspapers.” She put her hand on her chest and recovered, “Oh…my,” she sighed.
“What?” I protested. “You’d rather I be wasting my time covering what Rupert Murdoch wants me to spread about MSNBC and FOX news being civilized to each other?” I drew a breath.
“First of all, like you said, it’s gibberish. More importantly, it’s self-serving. Who benefits from that? People who like drama’s who. There’s no drama as good as quarreling lovers, and a peace accord is just a sign of a larger battle to come. Who knows…maybe Murdoch is planning on buying MSNBC as well. It doesn’t server the people at all.”
She was still laughing. I accepted it, and toned down my rhetoric.
“But who cares, right?” I said, sort of giving in. “Nothing does anyway… but that’s not news, it’s theatrics. That’s show business.” I thought about it for another moment. “And what’s wrong with being serious about journalism for a change?” I asked her, still feeling somewhat challenged.
“No,” she said, “It’s politics.” She took a deep breath. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with writing it, I guess,” she finished chuckling. “Just keep your expectations of your readers low. Nobody reads that stuff, Oscar. Nobody cares.”
“Fuck caring,” I snapped, “they just need to know. Then they’ll care.”
“Sure,” she said, “why not? But in the meantime they’re too comfortable in their routines to be outraged by ‘the real news’, as you so astutely put it. Enough of them haven’t been near enough to real oppression for some time now, I’d say since — oh, I don’t know…Carter?” She looked at me as she flagged down the waiter again. “I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
“Carter?” I coughed. “Why Carter?”
“Well, I’d say Clinton, because he didn’t do anything, but then I’d be tempted to go back to Bush Sr., since he got away with that ridiculous war in the Gulf on the same repeated premise of Vietnam, not to mention Panama and his involvement with Reagan in the Contra affair. But then I have to go back to Reagan since he got away with much more than the Contras, like Nicaragua and Guatemala and the effective elimination of taxes for the upper classes, pretty much dooming everyone into the world we have today by creating the conditions for the drug war the US has with Central America and the Religious war the US has with the Middle East.”
I was eying her hard now.
“From there I have to bounce back to Carter, who needed to flex his muscles for the business world as the new Democrat. Did you know that in spite of running on the Demoractic platform, he actually raised military spending from what Nixon and Ford had set during their regime, as has every administration since, regardless of the need or mandate?”
Now I was just impressed at her reservoir of deplorable historical knowledge and smiled coyly at her. “No Vera, I did not know that.” I loved how pointed she could be with her facts, which is, of course, why she was my main lead for stories on this kind of issue.
“So I’m tempted to go back to Ford and Nixon, but that seems not only obvious since they were republicans in the middle of the Vietnam War but they also got their share of protesting in that day and age, when people still had it in them. So I bounce back on Carter, who had the chance to change it all, to bring real democracy to that land of yours and instead kept the same old system that serves the rich by means of many avenues, most pointedly, the military industrial complex, while keeping the population from rebelling, revolting, protesting or even just paying attention simply by giving them enough crumbs to keep them more interested in solving their petty problems while ignoring the larger ones that cause everything else in the first place.”
“Fascinating,” I said to her, smiling.
“My point, Oscar, in all seriousness, is this: no reporter, newspaper, network or any other agency has been able to break through the public’s disillusionment with the establishment for well over thirty years. And even disillusionment is not enough to cause revolution…”
“Just a coup, probably,” I interrupted.
“Right. For a revolution you also need outrage, which comes from desperation, from passion, from the inhibition of the human condition. The desire to break free. If enough people have enough desires satisfied, or at least, enough of what they think are desires satisfied, then you’ve crumbled that people’s ability to rise together, where their numbers matter, where their opinion counts for something. The civilized world of the US has lost its ability to outrage,” she eyed me, glaringly now.
It made me a little uneasy.
“So tell me, world traveler; what the hell do you mean by ‘real news’?” She asked me. “Get a grip, man.”
The waiter finally came over and took our orders. Vera ordered a triple espresso, to which I raised an eyebrow before deciding to make it two. Fuck it, I thought. It’s business as usual, I guess.
“So what else did ThinkProgress say?”
—
Several hours later, in business class seat 1A of the 747 bound for JFK, I smiled as I thought of what we’d said. With Amsterdam safely behind me and all caught up with the latest headlines from my several sources, I sipped my scotch and coffee, without mixing the two. That’s another trick I’ve learned about staying focused when you need it. Irish coffee, which is fun and comes at you easily and curvacious the way the continental shelf around Ireland does from 40,000 ft, is not a drink for focus. You have to keep the coffee and whiskey separate, much like your style and objective.
And if we can have both style AND objective, there would seem to be no limit to what we can reach when we drink enough whiskey and then put pen to paper.
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