The rotten barrel

The football fan in me is simple-minded. It’s us – go, Giants! – versus the bad guys. Just win, baby. Drill, drill, drill. The surge worked. It didn’t. Happily – or rather, unhappily – I have also noticed that the world is not simple. In fact, the closer I look, the more complex it gets. A few observations after putting eye to microscope:

• We’re hearing a lot about greed. When they start talking about morality, the powerful divert attention from the systems they exploit. Searching for bad apples, we ignore the barrel.

• I bump into people who extol personal responsibility and in the same breath explain they shouldn’t pay taxes. Ronald Reagan was likeable but he popularized that awe-full contradiction.

• It’s everywhere – the dire warning that we must improve our math and science education or else! But neither Bush’s follies nor our nation’s loss of democratic virtue may be traced to algebraic incompetence. They are rooted in our (Americans’) ignorance of self and of history. The humanities, that is.

• Notable exceptions exist, but most of what passes for business journalism isn’t – it lacks skepticism.

• If prices rise where great demand chases limited supply, why should oil companies want to bring more product to market?

• “Responsible” politicians (read the Sen. Pete “I’m an innocent bystander” Domenici interview, Albuquerque Journal, Sept. 28) and the “responsible” press (clueless Thomas Friedman, NY Times Oct. 1.) will pass the Establishment bailout plan. This is evidence that while we think horizontally (liberal, conservative, blah-blah-blah) we act vertically. Even when the powers on the top rungs of the hierarchy bring us near ruin, we ask them (!) to rescue us. Naturally, they impose a top-down scheme using our money to prop up the system they’ve gamed. It’s ever thus – names change but not the narrative and when the curtain comes down, positions on the ladder haven’t changed.

• Speaking of curtains, this miserable Presidential campaign saddens me but Albuquerque’s Vortex Theater will soon offer a happier perspective. Having seen rehearsals of “Electoral Dysfunctions”, a bill of 10-minute plays opening Oct. 10, I can attest that local playwrights find laughs in the spectacle. (Full disclosure – I have a role in one.)

• The best investigative reporters are moralists. They perform the service of fingering bad guys but the system doesn’t change. For that, we need more journalism about how power works.

• John McCain’s Iraq policy clearly rests on what Vietnam taught him – that a nation’s political leadership can “lose” a war the military might “win.” Having lived through (and reported briefly from) Vietnam, I derived these lessons: We had no business shouldering France’s colonial burden. Defining victory is tricky. Experts often aren’t. Bipartisan agreement on war should scare us. Listen to the grunts; Presidents and generals lie a lot. Foreign wars kill democracy at home.
PS The surge? Yes it’s reduced violence but no, it hasn’t produced a political solution.

• I know where the WMD are – deep-sixed in the Gulf of Tonkin.

• In New Mexico, corrupt Democrats steal vulgarly – jobs for in-laws, junkets, even cash in paper bags. Republicans mostly shovel public money toward private enterprise; thus, when Republican Governor Gary Johnson privatized Medicaid, a brand-new company arose to share the riches…er, burden. Classy.

• Didn’t the ballpark organist used to play “Three Blind Mice” when the umpires showed up? Insulting. Funny. At Isotopes games, though, they play some Prokofiev that’s neither. This is sensitivity run amok.