revision99

My biggest problem with the Bush Administration’s bailout plan is the Bush Administration.

I don’t want the economy to collapse. I’m pretty cranky about the greed, dishonesty and outright stupidity that got us to this point, but I do agree that something probably needs to be done. I say “probably” because I don’t really understand the problem, and the more I read and hear about it, the more I wonder if anyone understands it. Certainly there’s no one on CNN who’s been able to explain it to me in anything better than third grade terms.

So, sure, let’s do something, but here’s the problem: I don’t trust the Bush Administration. Of course, I just generally dislike them for all the usual liberal reasons — I won’t go over them again. But the real problem is that they might be lying. I mean, after the selling of the invasion of Iraq, in which the administration simply made up a bunch of shit, spread the lies vigorously through compliant and supposedly “objective” media, and acted like it was a great big emergency and we had to hand over unilateral war powers to Rove/Cheney/Bush right away and don’t be asking any questions, why should I believe them now?

I can think of various reasons why they might be lying. They might be simply continuing their policy of destroying the federal government because neocons just don’t like the federal government. They might be trying to stall the collapse just long enough for John McCain to get elected. They might already know that John McCain can’t be elected and they might be trying to hand President Obama a big steaming plate of shit sometime next Spring. Hell, George Bush might actually be thinking about his “legacy,” as if he has a chance of salvaging anything there.

But after eight years of this administration playing fast and loose with the truth, why should I swallow their latest cries of impending doom and pony up my share of seven hundred billion dollars?  Somebody needs to convince me that Hank Paulson won’t just tuck it into his vest and apply for his old job at Goldman Sachs. You might think that’s pretty far-fetched, that such a thing couldn’t happen in the United States of America. I refer you to the “election” of 2000, in which a barely literate nincompoop got picked to be President despite not getting as many votes as his opponent. Things can happen, folks.

I don’t know exactly how this could be handled in such a way that we won’t have to wonder if it’s just a gigantic bank robbery, the equivalent of George Bush and cronies grabbing the silverware and the chandeliers on their way out of the halls of power. But until somebody smarter than me in Washington has an idea, I’m OK with this bailout not going forward.

OK, I’ll say it: John McCain is ridiculous.

His campaign is in trouble, and he wants to stop and . . . what? Go back to the beginning? Start over and try a different strategy? He never had a serious chance to win this election in the first place. God bless him, he’s too moderate for the right-wingers who now control the Republican party. When the current president has screwed up as badly as George W. Bush, it goes without saying that the next president will not be from your party. McCain was the sacrificial lamb, an expendable candidate that the party didn’t really like anyway, so who cares if he loses? After they threw him to the wolves they decided to get a little fundamentalist mileage out of the campaign by throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. She’s somebody they can use later, maybe in the next election, once they’ve established her “credentials” as an actual player on the national stage.

But McCain is just doing crazy shit now. He’s like a guy in a board game who — realizing he’s too far behind to win — spends the rest of his time in the game making unpredictable suicide plays, screwing everything up for those who are still serious about the outcome. Picking Palin was crazy. He’d be doing much better now if he had a running mate who knew his ass from page eight about. . . well, anything. But he wanted to spoil Obama’s convention, and the Palin choice did do that.

Then he essentially canceled the first day of his own convention, saying in effect that you can’t do politics during a hurricane. A hurricane a thousand miles away. As if the Republican Party is somehow in charge of emergency preparedness for the Gulf Coast. WTF?

And now he has “suspended his campaign,” so he can rush to Washington to help solve the current economic crisis. And he wants to postpone the long-scheduled first debate. Never mind that he hasn’t found anything in the Senate important enough to warrant his presence since sometime in April, or that in a time of crisis the voters might actually want to hear what the candidates have to say about it, or that ranking members in both houses say they’re doing fine without introducing presidential politics into the wrangling, or that (as Obama has said) it is possible to do two things at once. Never mind that McCain has solidified his place as one of the nuttiest major presidential candidates in history.

I probably live in a liberal bubble here in California, and I watch MSNBC and listen to Air America, but I can’t believe Middle America is going to think this latest move is anything other than proof that John McCain is just too volatile — or kooky — to be president.

A look at my personal bank account will quickly reveal that I am not a financial genius.

Still, even without a degree in economics or any investment track record, I want to go on record right now as saying that something stinks about this 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street companies. For starters, let’s all admit that the 700 billion is just… for starters. When has the government — no matter who’s been in charge — brought anything  in within budget? Say it with me now: Never. But that’s not my real complaint. Heck, 700 billion here, 700 billion there — once you get the numbers up in that category, what’s the difference, unless they’re literally trying to see if they can spend all the money in the world?

At first I had the typical knee-jerk reaction: “Who the hell do these assholes think they are? They’re making millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses, rockin’ and rollin’ all over Wall Street, operating with no restrictions or government oversight, and all the profits are private, and now that they’re in trouble — trouble of their own making — they want me to pick up the tab for the party, and put the empty cognac bottles in the recycling bin?”

But then I admit I took a pretty big pull from the “too big to fail” kool-aid. You know the argument: These financial institutions hold so much paper, and so many homeowners and business owners and banks and corporations are interconnectedly dependent on their stability that we must save them, just this once, and then we’ll figure out some new regulations and get back to business and this will never happen again and we’ll all be part of The Ownership Society and everyone will be happy.

But now I’m back to my original “what the hell?” position. Over the weekend, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson jotted down a three-page memo that he would like to have Congress pass into law. The law would give him a metric buttload of cash (see above, 700 billion dollars) to do with as he pleases. What he says he wants to do — I think — is buy a whole bunch of bad mortgages, which — I think — will ease the “credit crunch” (sorry, don’t know what that is really), which will in turn restore stability to the economy, and then everyone will be happy. I haven’t read the whole thing, but here’s my favorite part so far:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Nice, huh? No pesky legislators or — AARGH! — judges nosing around and asking questions. Every hedge fund manager knows those guys don’t know squat about money and shit. They’d have everybody in three-piece pin-striped suits, and reading credit applications all the way through before granting loans. How can you make any money that way?

Speaking, as I am, from a position of not really knowing anything for sure about this big money meltdown, I can only say that I am freaked the fuck out.

• Bear Stearns out of business.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalized.
• Lehman Brothers out of business.
• AIG bought by the government.
• Merrill Lynch sold to Bank of America.
• 4 million homes foreclosed (no one knows how many more are at risk).
• No one seems to know which lenders are holding whose loans and whether the borrowers are willing — or even able — to pay.

That last one is another way of saying that we haven’t seen the bottom of this plunge yet and we don’t know how far we are going to fall or even how close to the bottom we are. Don’t try to argue with me on that. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen next is bullshitting.

So if that’s true, what is Paulson going to do with the 700 billion, really? I think we can stipulate that it would only be a down payment on what is really needed. It’s probably enough to prevent total global economic failure at least until November 4, which might or might not help John McCain get elected. It seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it? I know it does to me. But if you estimate the world’s total global production at around 60 trillion dollars, which a lot of smart people do, it’s only 1.17% of that. Barely lunch money.

So who’s kidding whom? I agree that something must be done. Maybe the 700 Club is the way to go, maybe not. But not without some adults watching to make sure Paulson doesn’t just use it to help his friends on Wall Street, while stiffing everybody else. Hey, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was the Treasury Secretary, right? And guess where he’s going when he’s done with this little government job?

Bail all you want, Henry. But I hereby require that Congress amend your little memo to include some accountability to me, one of your bosses and one of the ones who’ll be paying the bills you run up. Also, I want those profligate CEO’s, hedge fund managers, investment brokers and other Wall Street ne’er-do-wells all to be given $40,000 a year jobs, and when they need a bailout, they can call their parents.

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For a nuts and bolts history of what has happened, check out this post, and thanks to Kathleen for the link.

I even bore myself.

Don’t even start reading my previous post about saving the court unless you have a full pot of strong coffee by your side, and don’t blame me if you fall asleep anyway and bump your head on your keyboard. I always start out with good intentions — I think I have an important topic to discuss, and I want to be pithy and punchy and quick and easy. You know: impactful, so as to actually have some effect on the reader. Alas, I don’t have that gift, and I end up meandering around the subject, bringing in side issues and going off on tangents. By the time I’m done I have to drag my thesis kicking and screaming back to center stage and make up some conclusion — which now seems artificial and forced and unsupported by all the stuff I’ve gotten into.

But there is one writerly thing I’ve figured out here at my crummy job in the past few months: how to sign an email to your fellow employees.

As I’ve reported here numerous times, I work for HugeCorp, a giant, heartless, marginally criminal organization. I wish I could be more specific, but they are probably logging my keystrokes, so I have to be vague. Someday I’ll start a new blog, anonymously, and really expose the doings of this company. But I digress, as always.

Because operational orders in a company this size (Fortune 100, you know) usually come from people you don’t know who work in some other state and don’t, in fact, know what you are doing or what they are talking about, you have to sort of make up your own work plan. This involves a certain amount of grudging cooperation between you and the other drones at your workplace. HugeCorp hires from the outside to fill the high-paying jobs, so nobody really cares at all about the good of the company, or doing things efficiently, or in any way trying to help anybody else with their daily drudgery, because it’s all about the paycheck and then going out to par-tay on Friday night.

Every now and then I think of some perfectly easy thing that one of my colleagues can do, some way they can file a report or make a journal entry or some damn thing that will cost them nothing in effort or time but might save me hours of spinning my wheels trying to get the same thing done two days later, after all the original data has been forgotten or filed away. To this end I have to sidle up to the colleague in question, open a “friendly” conversation, get down on the floor and roll onto my back, showing my belly in a display of submission, and make the gentlest possible suggestion that they might want to try doing this certain task this way instead of that way.

It’s just coincidence, of course, but most of the time my suggestions turn out to be for the good of the company. I couldn’t care less about that, but three months later, when no one has complied with my request and they are denying to the controller that I ever even mentioned it, I really wish I had made my request in an email instead in the humiliating groveling way described above. That way I could prove that I was a good employee with only the good of the company at heart, and get somebody else in trouble, to boot. Win-win, I say.

So now I email, and here’s (finally!) the insight I set out to tell you about.

Email can be impersonal, and folks can easily get an attitude about your email telling them how to do their job. Not that I am doing that, but that’s how it’s interpreted by my one-track nose-to-the-grindstone worker bee drone colleagues. I was getting nowhere at first with my emails. Sure, I was generating the evidence I’d need down the road when it was time to get people in trouble, but I wasn’t getting anything done right now, because, you know, that ‘tude thing.

Then I started signing my emails with an exclamation point! All of a sudden my garden of happy cooperation is flowering! I have no more affection for these people or enthusiasm for my crummy job than I ever did, but when I add that exclamation point, everything just warms up! People want to help me!

Dear Obnoxious Fellow Worker,

I know you’re so self-absorbed that you barely even know I work here with you, but I was wondering if for once in your life you could think of someone else and let me know right away when HugeCorp sends you a new Field Bulletin, so I can begin my compliance effort.

Thanks!
Larry Jones

You see how that works? No matter what tone I take, that friendly little “Thanks!” at the end makes everything all right. I admit, this example is a little extreme, but for the average email that I send around here, I find that if I just say “Thanks!” at the end nobody comes storming into my office to tell me that they just don’t have enough goddamned time to add one more task to their daily routine, no matter how much it would improve the workflow, or (more likely) just passive/aggressively ignores my email.

So I get action, and I get the documentation I’ll need in the personnel investigation when I’m accused of not being a team player. As I said, win-win!

I admit it: I’m a partisan.

I’ve been a Democrat since the 1960’s. That’s right — a liberal, a “progressive,” a left-winger. But I think I come to this place honestly. My mother was not political, and my father was a WWII veteran who voted for Eisenhower. I figured out for myself what I needed to know to make my decisions. You can believe me or not. That’s up to you, but I say this just to let you know that I’m not a “knee-jerk liberal,” that I have thought through my positions

Over the decades since my first Presidential election I have remained hopeful, although there have been times when I couldn’t stay optimistic. My basic belief is that we are all we have, and it’s crucial that we take care of each other, and that’s the measure I use when I’m deciding who to support in an election. I’m not pretending to be all that altruistic. It’s just the way I think. I’ve never been able to understand why warmongers get elected, or pompous hypocrites who wear their religion on their sleeve.

But high public office, it turns out, confers great power on it’s holders, and so the competition to gain these offices has grown ever more cutthroat. Men — and now women — are desperate to get this power, and I mean desperate. We won’t go into the reasons why, but they are desperate. And in their desperation they have turned election campaigns into elaborate, amoral displays of deception.

Techniques have evolved that can get anybody elected, no matter their background. Negative advertising, whisper campaigns, sabotage and outright lies about your opponent actually work. I mean, let’s just face it, it’s far easier to cast enough doubt in your mind to stop you from voting for someone than it is to inspire you enough to go out and elect that person.

This is why no one in this campaign is talking seriously about the war, the broken military, the crumbling economy, the failure of the healthcare system, the corrupt Bush Administration or any of the other real issues that face us. This is why we are talking about real or imagined personal slurs or sex ed for five-year-olds. That stuff works, unfortunately, far better than real (and boring) discussions of monetary policy or international diplomacy. Sadly, the introduction of a smear campaign instantly brings both sides into the muck. There is no way to defend against it. You fight dirty or you lose. (This is a corollary to Jones’ First Law of Social Interaction: Bullies always win.)

So every four years I think maybe we’ve seen the worst of the negative campaigning, and every time it gets worse. Fine. I can stipulate that this is how all elections will be run, now and forever. It won’t stop me and you from knowing about the actual issues, and trying to get someone elected who at least seems capable of doing something about them.

I’ve written in this blog that I am a one-issue voter in this election, and that issue is the war in Iraq. I hate it. I hate the fact that it was not necessary, that our president tricked us into supporting it, that it has destroyed my country’s credibility and good will throughout the world, that it is draining the U.S. taxpayer’s pockets to the tune of ten billion dollars a month, and that it has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of victims.

But the war has disappeared from our political radar, except for the candidates bickering over who was right and who was wrong about “the surge.” In the meantime, see the previous paragraph for a short list of all the stuff that is still going wrong with no end in sight. I accept the fact that we have made such a mess of things that whoever is elected will make almost no difference in the outcome. We’re stuck there for the foreseeable future. There is no honorable way out — as if anything we’ve done there has been honorable up to now.

So, while my Big Issue simmers on the back burner, here’s a little negative campaigning of my own: Last Sunday on 60 Minutes they re-ran a segment about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the 76-year-old right-wing “originalist.” Among his many smug responses, he was arrogantly impatient with interviewer Leslie Stahl when she asked him if he had any regrets about his part in selecting George W. Bush over Al Gore for President in 2000. Despite Bush’s disastrous presidency — the incompetence, the corruption, the stupidity — he said (paraphrasing) “That was so long ago — get over it!”

Get over it? I can hit my finger with a hammer and get over it. I have apparently missed my chance to get into Gwyneth Paltrow’s pants, and I’m over that. But I’m having a little trouble getting over the ongoing catastrophe that is the Bush Administration. And now it occurs to me that if John McCain wins this election, he’ll get to appoint a couple of Supreme Court justices himself, and what with his voting so often in agreement with Bush, and since he has actually said that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, I’m not feeling real good about the kinds of appointments he will make.

The Democrats, much as I love ‘em, have a bad habit of approving bad appointments to the Supreme Court, even when they have multiple methods of stopping said appointments, and plenty of good reasons to do so. So even though they will probably have a majority in both house of Congress for the next few years, I don’t trust them to block a possible wild-eyed nutcase from getting onto the Court and screwing up the whole country for 50 years.

These judges are there as long as they want to be. Their terms never expire, and they almost never retire. The impact of a heavily packed right-wing court will be felt for thirty years at least, followed by a couple of generations that will have to live with their decisions until such time as the Court gets around to hearing and correcting old decisions. They are likely to make abortion illegal in this country. They will probably approve laws requiring all of us to carry guns (just kidding). They will continue to make it easy for government to take your property and give it to developers, for, well, development. They will continue to uphold obstacles to equal pay for equal work, as they did just this year. They will be unchecked by any kind of liberal balance. The conservatives will simply be able to steamroll any opposition, because they’ll have an automatic majority in every case.

Let me put this bluntly: They will be very conservative Republicans. Republicans are the party of the rich. They will stand with their party in making sure that rich people remain the ruling class (and get richer), while the rest of us hope for something to trickle down. They will continue down the road of making the U.S. a Christian theocracy, with rulings against abortion and in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments.

If you’re sick of all the slimy campaigning and you just want politics to go away, or if you just can’t decide from among the candidates, think about The Supreme Court. They will have a much greater effect on your life and the lives of your children than the guy who sits in the White House for the next few years. This election is a chance to halt the Court’s slide to the far right and bring some balance back to this crucial branch of government.

It may be your last chance for a long, long time.

Well, we have finally met Sarah Palin.

I watched her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention this evening, and she is a snide, snickering, smart-aleck, not at all the sharp, ambitious stateswoman the McCain campaign has been portraying the past few days.

I can’t recall a more mean-spirited speech during this convention or the Democratic one last week.  There were so many low blows and so little actual content that it doesn’t require a rebuttal so much as a warning from the referee. This will definitely cost her a point or two with the judges.

Oh, sure, the speech was popular there in the convention hall. I think some of the attendees were starting to feel the Rapture. There was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on in Saint Paul, but Americans won’t be buying what she is selling, which seems to be mockery, smirking and smears.

The good news for the Democrats is this: Until tonight, there was concern that in the Vice Presidential debate, Joe Biden would necessarily have to go easy on her, because she has little real knowledge of world and national affairs, and she’s just a cute former beauty queen who’s gotten in over her head, and by forcing him to pull his punches in this way she could fight him to a draw and come out more or less unscathed. After her vicious attacks tonight, she can forget about anybody going easy on her. No doubt she will try to turn on the damsel-in-distress act when she faces Joe’s big guns, but I nonetheless predict Joe will shred her, and it will be no more than she deserves.

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I have to say something about John Edwards now. Don’t worry — this will be short.

I’m sad. The world we live in is fucked in so many ways. The longer I live (hint: It’s already been way too long) the worse it gets. Global climate change, the collapse of the world financial system, the rise and apparent superiority of authoritarian government (see China), peak oil, the unending appetite for war and more war, the closing of all the libraries, the Minnesota Vikings, the corrupt and inept Bush Administration, the destruction of Labor and the middle class in the U.S., and on and on.

But I still wanted to hope.  I still wanted to believe that we as humans have a better nature, and that with a little leadership and inspiration we can overcome our bad selves and work together to raise us all up to a higher level and create a happy, thriving planet on which we spend our energy and resources making things better, instead of simply stealing the better things from whomever already gots.

I thought that was the John Edwards message, and it appealed to my hopeful instinct.  I thought that if a guy with such a vision could even get close to competitive in our rigid two-party presidential system, maybe things weren’t so bad after all.

But even as he was putting forth his hopeful message he was, it now appears, sabotaging himself, and — if he had won his party’s nomination — wrecking the nation’s chance to escape the criminality and venality of the modern Republican Party. For surely his affair with Rielle Hunter would have been exposed, as it has been, and presto! — President McCain.

I supported Edwards, and when he dropped out I was disappointed, but the reality was that he was not getting the votes he needed.  I couldn’t see why, because Edwards seemed to be the answer to a lot of our wishes.  But you have to be practical.  I switched my support to Obama, and kept hoping that Edwards would either be on the ticket or in an eventual Obama cabinet.

I don’t really care about the infidelity.  I don’t know how it happened or why.  It’s none of my business.  But I do feel conned.  I’m mad at myself more than at John Edwards, because I was all pumped up and ready to buy the snake oil.

I was right.  Things are fucked.  There is no redemption.

I watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics last night.

I probably shouldn’t have.  I should have boycotted it, what with the bad human rights record the Chinese have and all, and the way they treat the Dalai Lama.  I mean, it’s a repressive regime, no getting around it.  Our president didn’t mind too much, though.  He was there in the front row, to see and be seen.  But then Bush seems comfortable with doing the bidding of others, as long as there’s profit in it for his family and friends.  The Chinese own so much of the U.S. that Bush might not have had a choice in the matter anyway.  What do I know?

But talk about keeping order!  The new Olympic Stadium, called “the bird’s nest” over and over again by commentator Matt Lauer, was filled with 91,000 spectators, and the government thoughtfully provided 130,000 cops at the venue, probably to give directions and retrieve lost children and stuff.  Oddly, no fights broke out.

I’m already sick of the Olympics, because I watch The Today Show every morning as I’m trying to start my day, and NBC — by virtue of a billion-dollar payoff to the Chinese Olympic Committee — is the exclusive purveyor of all things Olympian to the U.S. television market.  They started months ago with a daily “Countdown to Beijing.”  Daily.

Every morning they interviewed some jock or other, and showed an inspiring video about their struggle to be the best.  Then Ann Curry or Meredith Viera would put on a fencing suit or a pair of shorts and engage in a little swordplay or maybe some beach tennis (yes, it’s just like beach volleyball, only not) out on the street in front of 30 Rock, all in fun, until somebody fell down, and then “…this is Today, on NBC,” and cut to that glorious trumpet fanfare they’ve been using on NBC since the LA games in 1984.  Three months of this.  I don’t care to see the games, since they no longer include team handball.

But that opening ceremony - whoa!  Fifteen thousand performers.  An LED video screen 400 feet long, that you can dance on!  An epic pageant, displaying the history of a culture that is thousands of years old.  Who even knows when they started?  But I can tell you this: the Chinese invented paper and movable type.  They invented the magnetic compass.  They invented gunpowder, and the subsequent stuffing of it into rockets.  So they were able to sail safely to far off lands, shoot the bejeesus out of the natives, find their way back, and write it all up in the Sunday papers.

And what did we learn from the scene where a thousand or so invisible Chinese carried a dance floor the size of a basketball court around on their shoulders while a solitary woman danced evocatively on top of it?  That the glory of any achievement is possible only through the anonymous labors of many, many faceless laborers.  And what lesson from the part where the beautiful children carry the flag around the floor of the stadium (excuse me, the bird’s nest), smiling and waving, only to have it snatched officiously by uniformed soldiers and run up the pole, where artificial breezes unfurled it only at the very top?  That children may be the future, but it is The State that will protect and defend that future.  Out of the way, kids!

I really only watched to see the fireworks, and I have to say they were not disappointing.  At one point early on, the entire city of Beijing was used as a stage, as footprint-shaped explosions took place in the sky, 29 of them, symbolizing the 29 Olympiads of the modern era, each one a half-mile apart, pefrectly synchronized and marching to the bird’s nest.  Holy shit, you’d never get the permits to do that across all the districts and municipalities of Los Angeles.  And once the show started, there haven’t been so many rockets in the air since Bush took Bagdhad.  I mean, it wasn’t launch-boom! launch-boom! launch-boom!  It was more like the sky was on fire.  It’s amazing the kind of fireworks you can buy for a billion dollars.

Anyway, the Chinese wanted to show that they’ve arrived, and they really showed that.  They didn’t want any dissent, and by damn, there wasn’t any, that you could see, anyway.  They wanted to show that they can plan and pull off stuff with precision and on a gigantic scale, and there’s no doubt — they did it, big time.

I surrender.  There is no way to stop the Chinese.  They are alien (like, totally!), they are many, they are ancient, they are modern, they are clearly superior.  Learn the language, folks.  This will be the Chinese Millennium.

It’s a muggy August night in Los Angeles.

Humidity is around 60%, twice the normal level.  It’s been worse here, but not for a while, and I’m feeling it.

I’ve also got nuthin’.  I have lost my energy and my creativity, and I’m overcome by ennui.  Ennui and humidity.

But, to show that I’m still here and was once a real blogger, may I present an old post?  I doubt if any of the current Precious Few who occasionally read here have seen this one.  It was from my third month of blogging, and it received no comments at all, except for a fake one.  It originally appeared here on December 23, 2004, and it was titled “A Christmas Tale.” A Christmas story in August.  Maybe it will cool me off.

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I was the last one out of the office on Christmas Eve, and the holiday was pissing me off.

I don’t really celebrate Christmas anymore, but I have a soft spot for it — the wish for peace, the kindness to each other, the fresh kindled hope for a better future, blah, blah, blah. It’s sweet, you know? But of course we have done our best to ruin it. The buildup is so huge I am always let down by the reality, once it arrives. And I find that I don’t believe anyone’s holiday wishes. I think they’re just platitudes. I was sick of peoples’ hollow Xmas greetings, and feeling grouchy about the whole thing.

So it’s around sunset, it would be totally dark in fifteen minutes and a chilly wind was starting up. I was leaving the office, not smiling, grousing my way out the back door because the front was locked, and I get half way down the outdoor steps when I see her standing in the parking lot. She’s old now, and none of us knows how long she’s been living in and around our parking lot, but she’s been here longer than I have. Her grey and white coat is filthy and her body is impossibly scrawny. As I go down the steps, the heavy security door bangs shut behind me. She hears it and steps warily over to where she can sort of lean on the side of the building, her head cocked my way.

“Hey there, old girl,” I say. She is blind, or nearly so, and she turns toward the sound of my voice. We have seen each other around for years, but she has shown me recognition only in the past month or so, and even now some days she doesn’t. She hesitates, then takes a shaky step toward me. She recognizes me, and even though the office door has closed and I won’t be able to get back in to wash my hands, I know that I will have to pet her, and that her fur will leave a greasy residue that I will have to wear all the way home. I put my briefcase down and sit on the bottom step.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” I coax, and she walks very slowly toward me, until I can just reach out and touch her bony neck. I scratch for a moment, as she tries to make sure that I mean no harm. When she is satisfied that I am safe she comes all the way over to where I am sitting. I scratch her and amazingly, she purrs. She is so decrepit I am surprised that she can purr. My gentle petting rocks her whole body, and I can see that it is only with effort and concentration that she is able to remain standing.

“Poor old baby. It’s a tough life, isn’t it?” I ask in my gentlest cat-calming voice. She lifts her head and stares into my face with her blank, milky eyes.

Yes, it’s tough, she says, but look at me. I’ve survived. Her voice is a high-pitched croak.

Her frailty is so obvious I don’t want to discuss survival with her. “Well, that’s great,” I say, stroking her cheek. “Uh, where are you sleeping tonight?”

I’ll be here as usual, she says, and a shudder runs through her. Maybe under that pickup truck over there. Delicately, she places one skinny paw on my thigh. Do you mind? she asks.

My pants will have to be cleaned. “No, of course not. Come on up.” She needs my help to get into my lap, and more assistance to get comfortable, but at last she is lying there, more at less at ease. The effort has exhausted her, and she just lies there for a minute.

You know, she says at last, I’ve been such a fool.

“What do you mean?” I ask, surprised.

She sighs. For all these years I feared and hated you people. I hid from you, and I looked upon all of you with distrust and suspicion. She looked sheepish. I bit one of you once, a long time ago.

“Well, that’s not so foolish,” I say. “You’re feral, and we don’t have such a good reputation among your kind. It’s totally understandable.”

No, it was wrong. If I had known all along, that all you wanted to do was pet me and feed me… She trailed off. I mean, where did I think those bowls of food and water were coming from, right outside that back door? I was so blind – she smiled — I mean before I was blind, you know? I shifted a little, and we had to get rearranged. She spoke again.

My heart was closed. I couldn’t see the kindness that was offered to me. I had to do everything for myself. I thought everyone who approached meant to hurt me, or take something from me. I’m ashamed to say that I taught my kids to be the same way. All of them are gone now, bless ‘em, except for my youngest. I hope it’s not too late for her. She’s a pretty little thing, you know. Takes after her father. She coughed. You might not believe it, but I was pretty once, too.

The old gal in my lap — and this turn of conversation — was making me uncomfortable. “Well, I think you’re still pretty…”

She coughed again, and it went on for several seconds this time. Don’t kid me, sonny. I’m a foolish old hag, and I’m almost blind, but a girl knows.

I could think of no comeback for that. She wasn’t allowing any flattery, any platitudes. Overhead, the wind whistled through the wires.

“Look,” I say, “would you like to come over to my place tonight? It’s warm, and I’ve got plenty of food. You could take a warm bath, if you want.”

She stood up in my lap, and crept slowly back onto the asphalt at the base of the steps, stretching her arthritic limbs as she walked. That’s a sweet offer, sonny. A few years ago I would have jumped at it. But now I’m afraid I’m too set in my ways. I couldn’t sleep in a house. I’d be too nervous knowing I couldn’t run if I had to. Besides, I’ve got my Little One to look out for. She’s around here somewhere, and she won’t come out while you’re around. She still needs me, more than she knows. She doesn’t pay much attention to her old mom these days — you know how they get. She still has a chance, though. I hope I can show her that she doesn’t have to make my mistakes. I have to show her… she coughed some more, and I thought there was a catch in her voice. …I have to show her how to open her heart to the beauty and pain and love that is all around, instead of hiding in fear and suspicion. She gazed nowhere in particular and was silent for a moment. Before I go, you know?

I stood and picked up my briefcase. There would be no use inviting both of them — we lived in different worlds, and this parking lot was nothing more than the place those worlds touched. But I was glad we had met, and touched, this night.

Thanks for listening, sonny, and for petting me. It’s really what I’ve always wanted, if only I’d known. Crazy, isn’t it? After running and hiding all those years, now I can’t get enough of it. And thank you all for the food — the Little One and I, we appreciate it.

She turned and started to make her way along the side of the building, toward the alley. “Merry Christmas!” I called, and for the first time that year, I really meant it.

She stopped and turned. Merry Christmas to you, sonny. Now scoot. Go home and be with your wife. She’ll be waiting for you. Then she walked stiffly on, and around the corner of the building.

I could feel the dirt on my hands. I looked at my pants, and they were covered with her dirty fur. A perfect half-moon had risen and floated low over the buildings in the twilight. Traffic rushed by on the boulevard. I turned and walked to my car.

Anybody else tired of hearing about the “blood and treasure” we are spending in Iraq?

What’s that all about, anyway? Is that supposed to be some sort of euphemism, so we don’t think about the dead and broken bodies and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are swirling down the drain? What’s a little blood, after all? Everyone’s cut themselves. No big deal, right? And treasure.  Oooh, you mean like in “Pirates of the Caribbean” Yeah, pirate’s booty, not the pallets of cash, shipped literally by the ton in C-17’s, only to disappear down the Iraqi sinkhole. This happy talk is an extension of the U.S. policy of not showing pictures of military coffins as the dead are brought back, and the policy of not allowing cameras in the hospitals where the wounded are being treated. Sure it’s dishonest, but we’re talking about the Bush Administration, so what else is new?

And why is every military person, especially the grunts, now called a hero? Most of these kids didn’t know what they were getting into when they joined. They thought it was a good way to get out of their boring hometown, or they thought they’d learn a trade so they could later get a good civilian job (ha ha, the jobs are now in China), or they were packed off to the Army to get some discipline into their lives. Some of them were deluded into thinking they’d be defending freedom, or making the world safe for democracy, or liberating an oppressed people, or avenging the terrorist attacks on New York and DC, or [plug in the hyperpatriotic bullshit phrase of your choice]. Sure, now that they’re in, they’re doing a tough job and performing well, but who wouldn’t if the alternative was death or dismemberment? I’d like to see more of them stand up and say “This is wrong and I’m not going to take part in it.” That would be heroic. That would be taking a moral stand against overwhelming opposition.

In the sixties there was a bumper sticker that read “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” It was expressing the foolish idea that if we stopped lending our bodies to take part in the depraved militant fantasies of greedy old men, there would be no war, because there would be no one to fight it. We assumed that the politicians and generals wouldn’t do it themselves, and I don’t think we were wrong about that. And it recognized the reality that we — you know, The People — have the power to change things.  All it takes is unity, across social class and national borders.  If we stand up en masse and say “This is wrong and we’re not going to do it,” it’s over for the depraved, greedy old men who move us around on their chess board map of the world, “sacrificing” a thousand of us here, a million of us there, destroying whole countries, dislocating entire populations.

I’m not stupid enough to think anything like that is going to happen. I can’t say why, but it seems an impossible dream.  Most of us will say we want peace on earth, but we stand ready to join up and kill our enemies, even though most of the time the enemy is us.

(Click here   for the soundtrack to this post.)