Monday, March 28, 2011

Rant: May the Sun Never Set

Occasionally, and to my detriment, I try and wrap my head around the news. This is always a humbling experience. My old brain can’t keep up when one of the talking heads on ABC or CBS darts from the problem of spent nuclear fuel rods to Charlie Sheen’s latest antics without stopping for breath.

Here’s what I know for sure on this fine March day: America is a wonderful country because we treat our largest corporations like superstars.

First of all, thanks to some scary characters in black robes who call themselves the Supreme Court, corporations have the same free speech rights as persons, meaning they can spend tons of cash to influence the political process in their favor. When it comes to buying legislators, the old adage is true: you get what you pay for. And since many American corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, they can buy a bunch of goodies. Think of the Capitol as a Costco or a Wal-Mart superstore. If it helps, you can also think of it as an upscale whorehouse.

Second, we’re really, really generous to our corporations when it comes to taxes, so much so that we allow the majority to pay no tax whatsoever; zero, zilch, nada, even when, as in the case of Bank of America, they have been recipients of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. Full benefits, no give back; Midas himself would definitely approve.

General Electric is another happy passenger on the no-tax gravy train. GE makes super-sized profits from our endless foreign wars and from outsourcing its manufacturing to low-wage nations. When all is said and done, and an army of CPA’s and lawyers finish their chores, GE pays nary a nickel in US taxes. Even better for GE, its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, serves on the President’s Economic Recovery Board. Wink. Wink. I’m sure the welfare of working Americans is one of Immelt’s chief concerns. Wink. Wink. Giggle.

Thanks, Mr. Obama, for your undying support of the ruling elite, the status quo and CEO’s. We love you, man.

What else is wonderful about the red, white and blue? Let’s see, Detroit, once the 4th largest city in the land, home of the Big Three US automakers and good paying jobs with benefits and union representation for thousands of middle-class workers, is dying. Grand office buildings and sprawling industrial plants sit empty, rotting from within and without, pillaged for scrap metal and copper wire. In the name of corporate efficiency and global competitiveness, we allowed our 4th largest city to become a landscape fit for ghosts and feral dogs.

We’re #1! Who can deny it?

Ah, this land of the free and home of the brave, this blessed fruited plain where all things are possible for our corporate masters in their glass towers and secure residential enclaves. The richest 400 people in our land control more wealth than the bottom 150 million people – combined. Let’s hear it for meritocracy!

We are edging ever closer to achieving Ronald Reagan’s wettest dream. Dutch’s political heirs – real and imagined – are well on their way to gutting our best institutions, cannibalizing our states, and getting an oppressive, overreaching government off the backs of the people. Woo-hoo!

Hell, yes, our cup overflowith with God’s bounty. What other nation can simultaneously wage two and a half wars against Muslim nations? Can the French pull off this impressive hat-trick? No way! The Brits? Impossible! The Russians? Laughable! Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Who’s next? What band of ragtag revolutionaries will dare challenge the military might of the US of A? As Mr. T was fond of saying: “I pity the fools.” Cross our line in the sand and we will rain death and destruction upon you. Shock and awe, hammer and tong, cruise missile and cluster bomb!

Hey, Gaddafi, this next cruise missile is brought to you by General Electric. We bring tin-horn dictators to their knees. Booyah!

Hot damn! May the sun never set on the American Empire.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Fiction: Unstable

At the moment a surge of water lifts Hiroko Kobayashi’s house from its foundation in Sendai, Japan, Jack Mintz exits Del’s bar on Chapala Street in Santa Barbara, California.

After four hours of solitary drinking in a corner booth in Del’s, Jack’s mind is still riveted on Jeremy’s trial. What drinking couldn’t a long walk might, so Jack heads east on De La Guerra Street, past Starbuck’s, past an empty storefront with a For Lease sign in the window, past darkened City Hall where a lone homeless man sits on the lawn smoking a cigarette. A gentle on shore breeze rustles the palm trees. It’s a lovely SB evening in early spring; Jack barely notices.

Jeremy will be convicted, there’s no doubt about that: only his punishment is unknown.

I can’t control what he does, Jack tells himself for the fiftieth time, though he still feels as if – somewhere along the way – he failed his son.


Hiroko lives alone in a house about a mile from the river. She recently turned 82 and is recovering from hip surgery. The pain medication prescribed by her physician makes her sleepy. When the earthquake hits she’s taking a nap, and at first the shaking feels like part of her dream, but then she realizes that real plates and tea cups and dishes are falling off the shelves in the kitchen; a lamp tips over and a bookshelf topples, a painting falls off the wall, the windows rattle. The floor pitches and rolls like a dinghy in a rough sea. During her long life Hiroko has experienced hundreds of earthquakes, enough of them to know that most last thirty seconds, a minute tops, frightening to be sure, but in the end harmless. This one is different. She hears a dog barking and what sounds like planks of wood snapping.


Before settling in at Del’s to drink his worries away, Jack drove out to the County Jail to ask Jeremy one more time. The elemental question is driving Jack mad. Maybe this time Jeremy will give a different answer, one that makes sense; Jack needs it to make sense. On his way through the main corridor that leads to the Visitors Center Jack takes note of red warning signs and carefully placed surveillance cameras, the smell of disinfectant and the shine on the floors. Metal doors clang shut. The finality and hopelessness of this sound rattles Jack’s nerves more than anything else; he will hear its echo for hours afterwards.

Jeremy has nothing new to say. Father and son stare at one another from opposite sides of shatterproof glass, just like in the movies. Jeremy wears standard issue, bright orange County jail coveralls, white sneakers without laces, and a weary expression on his face. His shoulders slump with resignation. Unlike a movie, however, Jeremy isn’t an innocent man falsely incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. Photographs form in Jack’s mind, line up in chronological order: little league, guitar lessons, junior high graduation, high school baseball games, graduation, the day Jeremy left for his freshman year at UCLA. Milestones and markers for the passage of time, all in a neat row, success following success. Now as he stares at his son and tries to keep his emotions from overwhelming him, Jack wonders where he went wrong. What was the tipping point for Jeremy and why didn’t he come to his mother and me for help? Why did I learn of his crimes on the 5:00 news?

Why? God-damn why?


The front end of an Isuzu truck crashes through Hiroko’s window, followed by a surge of brown water that smells of gasoline, sewage and salt. A dead cat floats in next, followed by a child’s doll, a broom, a magazine, a soccer ball, clumps of seaweed and a washing machine. This can’t be happening, she thinks, it has to be a hallucination, a side effect of the medication, but almost as soon as this thought crosses her mind water is swirling around her knees, cold and dirty, and her house – home for fifty years -- is being carried away. She doesn’t have time to think of her deceased husband or her children and grandchildren because the house is jerking this way and that. This is the Big One local authorities have warned about for years. Be prepared. Have a plan, supplies, water, flashlights and food. But how does one prepare for a truck to come through the window? I am going to drown, Hiroko thinks, a split second before she loses her footing and slips under the water.


Jack can’t stop the loop of thoughts running endlessly in his head. He walks as far as the armory before turning back. His mouth feels dry and he is developing a dull headache. By now Jeremy is back in his cell. The gates and doors have all slammed shut.


Hiroko fights to the surface. As a girl she loved to swim in the river with her sisters, float on her back and stare up at the blue sky; it was a way to forget the war, Japan’s defeat, the unspeakable damage caused by American incendiary bombs in Tokyo and Osaka and Yokohama, not to mention the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has never forgotten the privation in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender, the toll it took on her parents, and as she pulls herself onto a pile of floating debris and catches a glimpse of the devastation, it’s 1945 again. How is it possible for a boat to be perched atop a house; for two train cars to be nearly a mile from the nearest tracks; for the rooftops of her neighbors’ homes to nearly be submerged; for fires to burn on the surface of the water? Only this morning everything was normal in the world: she ate her breakfast, drank her tea, watched TV, made her bed, folded clothes and washed dishes. Only this morning the houses, trees, boats, cars, and trains were in their proper places; now all is surging water and chaos.


Jack walks on, ruminating on all he and his wife have done over the years to make a stable life for their only child. Hard work and non-stop planning for contingencies: life insurance, property insurance, health coverage, earthquake and flood insurance, retirement annuities, IRA’s, a modest stock portfolio, six months of living expenses tucked away in a bank account – even small college funds for the grandchildren they don’t have yet. He and his wife are steady, sober, cautious, careful, conservative and methodical -- in every way exemplary citizens of the American republic, the kind who play by the established rules.

And they earn their just reward for all this rectitude until Jeremy decides the best way to get the money he needs is to embezzle half a million dollars from the university. The speed at which everything changes boggles Jack’s mind; one minute the foundation of his life is solid, the next it’s collapsing. Friends call but after saying things they think are helpful, there’s nothing left except awkward silence. Jack wonders how many years Jeremy will serve in prison and what kind of man he will be when he gets out? Why does this cement sidewalk feel like it’s made of dough? Why am I sinking?


Hiroko floats on the debris pile for twenty-six hours. Two soldiers pull her to safety and drape a blue blanket over her thin shoulders; one of them offers her a bottle of water – she’s too weak to open it. Looking at the destruction all around her she’s not sure being alive is reason for celebration.


Jeremy is sentenced to twenty years in prison; with good behavior he could be released in seven.


On the second night after being rescued, Hiroko passes away in her sleep. The last thing she sees is the face of a little girl sleeping on a cot next to hers.


Three days after Jeremy is sentenced, Jack’s wife finds him hanging from a rafter in the garage. Methodical to the end, Jack’s coat and tie are draped over the back of a chair, and he even thought to remove his shoes and socks.

He didn’t need to leave a note.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Advice from the Good Doctor

I was due a phone call from Dr. Duke and surprisingly it came at what for him is a reasonable hour, 12:30, on Wednesday night. I had only been asleep for two hours.

“Where you calling from, doc?”

“I prefer not to say. I’m on the run from a woman who is formidably crazy. She has powerful friends.”

I took the phone into the living room and sat on the couch.

“How you been, Doc?”

“Wrong question, man. It’s not how I am – it’s WTF is the matter with you? The Balcony is a disgrace. There’s no political writing, for one thing, and for another you haven’t posted anything new for weeks. What’s the deal? Don’t tell me that the school district is keeping you so busy that you have no time to scribble? You must scribble, do you hear me?”

I didn’t bother trying to explain the trials and tribulations of holding down an 8-to-5 job, raising kids, helping with homework, refereeing endless sibling squabbles, doing laundry, grocery shopping, and all the other domestic chores that need to be done.

“How about the Middle East? The US of A is behind the curve on this one, of course, but that’s to be expected from a dying empire that can’t see beyond its asshole. Unless the west intervenes militarily, that insane bastard Gaddafi will probably survive; nonetheless, a very loud message has been sent to the rulers. I bet the Saudis are wetting themselves. I know you’re not caught up in the Charlie Sheen circus, so what the hell have you been doing?”

“Reading. Working on some fiction. You really should get married and settle down, doc. Do you good.”

“Only way I could be married is if I could have a harem. You bummed about Japan? Astonishing devastation. When did you live over there?”

“1977 to 1983. It’s very sad, doc. The suffering, the loss, the potential for nuclear catastrophe; I wonder if the world is being told the truth about the extent of the damage – and the risks. I keep seeing these tiny old Japanese women staring blankly at what used to be their homes.”

“Governments lie, particularly to avoid scaring the bejesus out of their citizens. Assume the worst is my advice.”

“I looked at some photographs of Chernobyl today,” I said. “The restricted area is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. Chilling stuff. Abandoned buildings, empty villages and schools, ghastly photos of deformed children. The only living thing thriving there is the forest; it’s taking over.”

I thought I heard Duke sigh, though for all I know he was taking a hit from a bong.

“Mankind is determined to destroy this planet,” Duke said. “And it will. What are you reading?”

“Absolute Friends, John LeCarre. You?”

“Plato, the Republic. I keep searching for answers. I thought I had something with this one, but she turned out to be a psycho. She knows we’re friends so if she calls you – and she might – tell her you have no idea where I am.”

“I don’t have any idea where you are, doc.”

“Let’s keep it that way – for your own good. “Write something, will you? Get something on the Balcony soon or you’ll lose all your readers.”