Just Motoring Along

Dearest Senator Fill-in-the-Blank,

I realize that in the heady atmosphere that is Washington D.C. it can be difficult to get the proper air and perspective that most of the rest of the nation enjoys, but allow me to proffer a simple request: Please do not give the automobile manufacturing industry the free money that they are requesting.

Oh yes, I do realize that it is being called a loan, a secured investment, an insurance policy for American manufacturing and the economy at large, but let's us not lie to each other here in private.  These companies have been playing with huge salaries, silly designs and obsolete thinking for as long as I have been aware of automobiles, say, 35 years.  That they now come limping to the United States taxpayer to pull their collective pants up for them is nauseating.  The UAW and the entire salaried management ought to be taken to the National Mall and flogged for stupidity, then sent home with no dinner.  These people have been instrumental in bringing about their own current straits, and should be allowed to get a nice large portion so they can savor the flavor, and perhaps, hopefully, learn not to do it again.

This is as much the fault of the United States government, as well.  After all, they encouraged this idiotic behavior by handing Lee Iacocca his little satchel of money back in the late seventies instead of letting a poorly run corporation end its sad life in the way that all failing businesses should, by closing their doors and becoming a byword for those who might learn a lesson.  The fact that Chrysler is again back with its hand out is telling enough.  They didn't learn anything back then, and to assume that they will learn anything this time is pure foolish silliness.

But why do I sound so grievously uncharitable, you may wonder?  What causes me to be so harsh in my assessment of the potential benefits that this free money scam might provide?  Allow me to refresh your memory of recent events, events all of two short months ago.  For it was just two months ago that the corpulent financial houses presented themselves before the United States government and threatened dire consequences if they were not allowed to suckle long and deeply from the taxpayer wallet.  The Stock Market would Crash! Financial Ruin would be Loosed Upon America! Savings would be Wiped Out! Confidence in American Institutions would Fail!  Lo!  Congress, led by the Sages of the Senate, bowed low, and calmly decided that they had 900 Billions of Dollars sloshing about with no useful moorings that could be funneled into well-deserving pockets.  The outcome?  Well, it seems that the stock market went ahead and plummeted over 1000 points, financial ruin is rumbling around in a jolly way, many bystanders savings have somehow lost a tremendous amount of what used to be there, and there is a decided lack of confidence currently floating about in the ether.

Thank You Congress!  We humbly genuflect toward the land of pandering politicians, and thankfully hope that there are no further blessings being meted out this holiday season.  Yes, I am requesting that the automobile executives be politely told to permanently drop a few zeros off their paychecks, and learn how to not be so stupid in the future if such large risks are at stake.  If all three of the major automobile manufacturers are allowed to die, there will, no doubt, be some silly dreamer or two who will decide that they can build a car that Americans will buy, and PRESTO! American automobile manufacturing will once again rise.  Of course, that PRESTO! may take a while to come about, but there is no rule that unbounded desire has to be met before the end of the next quarterly earnings report.

In Fall

This fall was particularly beautiful, to me at least, and one day I decided to put some words together to try and paint a word picture of what I was seeing.

In Fall

In fall
the lowering golden light
seems to warn
the last green leaves
that their time is nigh.

They too
must exchange their verdant hue
for the kaleidescope of color
that lies hidden within
and join in the bright dance of autumn.

The earliest
have already loosed their hold
on the towering old soldiers
and fallen to their lower berth
in fretful repose banked by the wind.

Still clinging
yet colored in regal splendor
the middling throng sing their praise
as chevroned sleeves on upraised arms
of the old soldiers saluting their Creator.

They wave
in a last ovation before the coming cold
strips them for the winters dormancy
and hail the onlooker with a cheery glance
of riotous beauty and splendor.

©2007

March Madness?

I am thoroughly angry and disgusted as I sit to write this. One can hardly have any other feeling after hearing the froth and bluster pouring forth from Washington D.C. surrounding the bill to set a date for beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Costs to United States taxpayers contained within it are reported to be over 100 Billion dollars as if those amounts were comparable to next month's dry cleaning bill. One feels the need of a good wet and soapy cleansing after listening to the amounts being larded into the bill. March Madness isn't just limited to basketball. It runs year round in Washington D.C.

Yet this is just another news cycle, one of any number that will regularly come and go with the requisite amount of ballyhoo and near rote response from all quarters. All will be forgotten next week in the wake of the coming Headline Story that will gently elbow this shameful mess into also ran status. Here we see America, once the shining example to the world, reduced to squabbling, grunting and tortured logic as she tears out her entrails in a spectacle of banal congressional wrangling. Here we see America's Congress, a collection of pandering posturing salesmen, itching to auction off our national heritage, our children's futures and our military's blood in a never-ending quest for the next election smooch.

Were there anyone in Washington with a spine instead of a floating barometer for political tides, there would be a simple bill advanced, stating plainly the intent of congress to demand specific requirements for continued financing of the military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan. This brave soul would succinctly point out America has grown weary of the constant reauthorization of funds for continuing an effort which is producing few tangible results, and far too many casualties. It is exceedingly clear that the purpose of these piecemeal appropriations bills is to skirt Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 12, of the Constitution which clearly states: “[Congress shall have the power] To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriations of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than Two Years;”. This business in Iraq has been grinding along for over 4 years now, with no discernible end in sight, so it is simple to see that any and all appropriations have been approved for an enterprise that is exceeding the two year limit. To try and wiggle out of responsibility by parsing that any individual appropriation was for less than a year's time is to be disingenuous to the point of being seen an idiot.

There need to be clearly delineated goals that we are looking for, which, if not met, will cause all American forces to be immediately withdrawn. To deliberately link U.S. involvement in Iraq to Iraq's internal safety is a senseless exercise in futility, as they seem to lack any spark of interest in maintaining conditions that are conducive to no bombs blowing up daily. There are historical divisions and hatreds in that area of the world which date back hundreds of years, information the average American has neither the time nor interest to study and learn, and it is the average American who is doing the fighting and dying there.

It is also simplistically dishonest to blandly state that if we don't fight the terrorists “over there”, they will follow us home and attack us here. The United States' borders are basically wide open for any and all to wander across at any time, with even less chance of being shot by a U.S. military patrol, making us a much juicier target, for those so inclined, while U.S. forces are occupied overseas.

No, the only reason that this debacle continues to drag on, consuming American resources and lives, is the simple fact that there are political careers to be made. So long as the sleepy American populace is lulled by the constant drone emanating from their televisions, so long as the gluttonous American consumer is content to trade their children's futures for cents on the dollar, so long as corporate America is pleased to sell our heritage to the lowest bidder, we shall continue to slide ever faster into the yawning void of third world status, and this nation's government will have been as complicit as the voting taxpayers who contentedly pulled the lever to keep sending the same stuffed suits back to Washington over and over again.

 

Howling Monkeys

Last week much was being made of the fiftieth anniversary of Alan Ginsberg's poem, Howl. Having never taken the time to read it, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

OK, now I've read it.

It annoys me when folks get their shorts in a knot over bothersome situations of their own concoction. It seems to me that Mr. Ginsberg and his compatriots might have lived life a bit less recklessly, and thus saved the need for carrying on so. Being somewhat irked at his ravings, I decided to introduce his cast to the twenty-first century. Herewith, too many words of my own.

2006

I

I have seen a generation of howling wastrels, madmen tearing at their own scabrous countenances, frothing and writhing in ecstasies of self induced loathing & petty malcontent,

gluttonous spendthrifts greedily ogling the remnants of yesterday's devoured carcasses, wolfishly demanding ever increasing attention while urgently and parsimoniously berating honest stewards of thought and action,

who eat the bones of charity and suck the marrow from virtue in the name of tolerance and paste crude stick figures cavorting in portentous license over long dusty memories of freedom past,

who feverishly invent sordid wallows of cruel malice and drudge to bind the future with the ill conceived git of failure & misery while boastfully beating their chests in primitive mockery and sallow minded pride,

who vomit putrid swellings of unfettered self and demand tribute for the long decayed failure of iconic corpses,

who stumble in the blindfolded midnight of twisted logic and callous rhetoric, hollow shells of humanity denying their own source and sustenance,

who gnash at honor and gape at propriety with the unflinching eye of callow empiricism, secure in a sinecure of personal ignorance,

while declaiming their ascendancy in thought and wisdom as though they had themselves strung the spangled heaven together and cast it abroad with their own hand and caused it all to whirl and glow through the ages like some giant sparkler burning, burning, burning and popping with bejeweled colors and monstrous gaseous clouds and whizzing comets and outer spiral arms flung wide in a universal embrace,

with no thought for the consequence of truncated reasoning, arrogantly whispering to the future of their own abbreviated learning as though three score and ten years were long enough to encompass the entirety of earthly knowledge, crammed in to a too tight pair of shoes, pinching and squeaking as they limp down the corridors of history,

empty husks, vainglorious motes, puffed up tatters of shoulder standing charlatans, elbowing one another aside for the next grant, cheek to jowl at the trough and squealing their dismay as another crowds them aside for the most trivial offal to be gulped down and passed out as a shining example for humanity to behold and marvel at,

titans of credit, titans of governmental grist wheels, titans of human misery, titans of microscopic excess, trading and selling human suffering in an endless chain of make work effort, plotting & planning the next fiscal year's profits, searching for the remotest sliver at which to grasp and clutch, fists clenched too tightly to open to even their own distress,

who grimly trudge in search of the next slave to make, the next soul to ensnare, the next havoc to wreak, squint eyed, hunch shouldered, cold hearted in soul and spirit and purpose, able to trade an ounce of example for a pound of fame,

whose larders overflow with hoarded rust and treasured dust and guarded lust, while interest accrues in compounding fractures of mind and soul,

empty bowls, dry springs, withered vines, lost in a desert of mangled intent, searching without hope of finding, but content to blaze trails of futility & frustration,

these call themselves all names, answer all calls, name all answers, and depend on the benighted condition of all to be certain of their own condition,

having no faith save the faith of unbelief they steal certainty from those in search of hope and exchange solace for the nihilistic ashes of self destruction.

II

What siren of seduction and enticement has latched its claws into their souls and leadened their hearts to all but more of anything?

Mammon! Profit! Filthy lucre! Unquenchable gain! Desire for all but contentment.  Unrequited demand for additional everything to be tallied and added and amassed until the ledger sheets are black with the crabbed scribblings of entries beyond accounting.

Mammon! Mammon! The Franc Yen for a Dollar. The percolating, seething urge to forge chains of ever increasing entrapment for bargain basement prices.

Mammon! Whose glint has blinded the visionary, whose power has emasculated the strong, whose easy credit terms have bound the consumer

Mammon! The god of organized religion, the mandate of the corporation, the foundation of trusts, the extortioners rudder that guides the ships of state, the love of which is the root of all evil.

Mr. Kempthorne Goes to Washington.

Mr. Bush has advanced Idaho's governor, Dirk Kempthorne, as his nominee for Secretary of the Interior. "What has that got to do with me?", you ask the wind. Not much, except for the level of shenanigans that the whole process reveals.

It seems that when the high and mighty get together to be fabulous, they like to see who's bigger. Poor Mr. Kempthorne seems to be something of a guppy swimming in the shark tank, but that's beside the point. What is instructive is how his financial business is massaged in a manner that would most likely have you or me sitting in a small, rather shabbily furnished cell with a room mate named Moe. According to a Salt Lake Tribune article http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3794946, Mr. Kempthorne has a net worth somewhere between $36,000 and $345,000. Hey, what's $300,000 between friends, right? I mean, once you get past three or four zeros, they get hard to keep track of.

Never mind those zeros, though. We've got plenty more fun where that came from. See, Mr. Kempthorne has a bit of land, 14 acres of it, up in Valley County in Idaho. This is commonly known as God's country, rather picturesque with its mountains and reservoirs and tall trees and rivers and scenic views and such. This 14 acres is valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $250,000. That's all well and good. Property values can fluctuate a bit, what with skittish investors and bankers. What's interesting is the minutia. Prior to a tax loophole being repaired this year, Mr. Kempthorne's land was valued at $1000, as "agriculturally exempt land". Dang if those zeros don't keep popping up. It was during this aforementioned loophole period that Mr. Kempthorne seemed to be having trouble settling his tax burden. He got a bit in arrears, and was two months late paying the first half of his $19.46 tax bill.

Right. Twenty bucks. Two months. Maybe it's because it's such a small amount that it got overlooked? Sure, that's the ticket! When you've got so many zeros caroming around the room, one or two of them can get lost in the crowd. Maybe we give our governors too much to have to do in any given week to be able to keep up with all the personal bookwork. But isn't that why they have accountants?

Hang on, we're in the home stretch. Mr. Kempthorne, sartorial genius that he is, is also wont to enjoy the services of a quality barber. As such, it would appear that he let a few more of those pesky zeros get away from him, bouncing a couple checks in the direction of his hairdresser in October of 2004 and May of 2005 for $76 and $35 respectively. I would have to question whether the governor is getting his money's worth out of a 35 or 76 dollar haircut. He doesn't seem to have enough growth to warrant 76 dollar's worth of attention. Maybe that's the point, the less one has, the more one needs to spend.

This, however brings us to a rather troubling fork in the road. If one is given to being a trifle too lax with one's own personal funds, how can one be expected to be responsible with the publics money? This seems to be how all excessive government spending takes hold, and it grows exponentially from there. Being off by a few thousand dollars is nothing compared to the billions that will be at his disposal as a cabinet level director. I would posit that it's well past time that you and I began holding all these sultans and poobahs accountable for how deeply they are spending you and me and future generations into debt that can never be hoped to be repaid. All those zeros have a way of adding up in the end.