Like it or not, we are, collectively, a culture...

It was one year ago that Phoebe Prince, the beautiful and tragically unstable teen, took her own life in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In the year since, evidence has come to light of a young girl dislodged by emotional damage who was prone to cutting herself in order to “transfer the emotional pain to physical pain where it’s easier to deal with.” It appears the young girl’s problems extended beyond the circumstances that will constitute the criminal prosecution set to continue in the new year. I don’t think it’s a great stretch to those who’ve known depressives, or those with other, more violent, psychological ailments, to assert that there is little that can be done, once the darkness takes hold, to halt the intentions of the disturbed. However, that does not excuse the six teenagers who will face charges of violating the civil rights of Ms. Prince with their cyber (and other-wise) taunts of “whore” and “slut”. While this hateful vitriol (to overuse the phrase of our week) did not kill the girl, it successfully promoted a culture of hate and division.

Nor is Sarah Palin in the clear. Let me state this emphatically: Sarah Palin is in no way to blame for the tragedy in Tucson this week, will never face charges, and there is little to be said for those on the left who would use the suggestion to promote their own agendas (though I actually can’t name anyone who has actually blamed her). But the disingenuous manner in which Palin has reacted to this situation leaves, again, much in her character to be desired. In the days that followed the shooting in Tucson, Palin simultaneously denied that her ‘target board’ was in any way an influence as she removed it from her PAC website. Her aides took to the radio waves, one incredulously suggesting that they were not gun sights, but surveying targets. Now, she comes forward to denounce her critics of ‘blood libel’ for suggesting that she’s done a thing in the wrong with her ‘don’t retreat, reload’ language. Blood libel? Sacre’Poutine! Does that crazy thing even know what that means? Plain language: You don’t get to run around the theatre yelling fire and then act astounded when some nut job actually starts one.

And this goes especially for Sharron Angle, who comes out to defend her ‘second amendment remedies’ comedy. It is a FACT that she was using no metaphor. The quote, taken in it’s FULL context:
“...the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways?... That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?”

I don’t know, Ms. Angle, but if it has anything to do with the fact that Arizonan’s have, in the last week, doubled their purchase of the weapon Jared Lee Loughner used to murder a nine year old girl, a federal judge and four others; used to wound fourteen more, including a United States Congresswoman, I am very afraid.

Hey Sarah, how’s that hatey, killey, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?

Settle this business for Johnny...

White House Chief Counsel, Tom Hagen, cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said with another cough. “What did you say?”

House Speaker John Boehner, stood from the table where the top Republicans had come to meet with the President and his staff Tuesday afternoon. He spoke emphatically, coffee muddled spittle flying.

“Now you listen to me, you smooth talking son of a bitch! Let me lay it on the line for you and your boss. Obama will never get that second term! I don’t care how many federal pay freezes and pleas for bipartisanship come out of the woodwork! Obama never gets the economy running again. It’d be perfect for him; it’ll make him a big star. And we’re gonna run him out of the business, and let me tell you why. Obama is trying to ruin one of the GOP’s most valuable franchises. For eight years we had tax cuts for the top 2%, we had the Democrats in our back pockets, we could start a war without a by your leave! We spent trillions of dollars! And let me be even more frank, just to show you I’m not a hard hearted man, and it’s not all dollars and cents. The American people; they were young, they were innocent. They were the greatest piece of ass I ever had, and I’ve had ‘em all over the world! And along comes Obama, with his olive oil…”

Alright, so that didn’t happen. Not exactly.

What is happening is that the GOP is hell bent on keeping this economy in the dumps, or worse, for as long as possible in the pursuit of their one true goal, as stated by Mitch McConnell, “The single most important goal we want to achieve is to make Obama a one-term president”. While they may throw a Christmas bone out in the form of extended unemployment benefits (which two weeks ago they fought against tooth and nail), they remain twisted and hell bent on renewing the tax cuts for those who make over $250,000, look forward with salivating maws at the approaching spring’s potential government shutdown, sucking the life’s blood out of the new health care bill, or vehemently objecting to the Feds proposal to buying $600 billion in government bonds (which, while it will lower the dollar, will improve the sale of American goods abroad, providing jobs on our shores meantime). All in the service of making Obama look no better than a Herbert Hoover come 2012, at which point they trust their work will be sufficient to elect even a Palin on their ticket. More likely, a Romney. But, either way, it would be important to note, if they are successful, you can bet the GOP will start using these very tactics to revive an economy they seek to starve solely for their hunger for power. It’s desperate and ugly. I don’t wish for McConnell to awake with Khartoum’s head bloody in his bed, but it’s time now for Obama to sound the wake up call and fight before the new Congress comes to session in January.

I didn't have the heart to ask her if she voted...

The sight of Margaret, dressed in gray, pulled at my emotions. I don’t think she’s worn yellow in two years. It’s true, there have been great moments for her; she was solemnly pleased when her beloved HRC became Secretary of State, tears ran down her bony cheeks when health care passed, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave her spirit a warm sense of retribution. But I had not seen her for some months before the mid-terms and now, and finding her in the darkened study of her upstate home, watching her grandchildren play on the lawn, gave me pause for concern.

“Ma puce,” I said, taking a spent drink from her hand. “Is it really that bad?”

She looked up; her strong strong face had aged and aged.

“You’re kidding me, Pierre, tell me you are kidding me. Jim fucking Boehner is the Speaker of the House! They killed us, they absolutely killed us. A ‘Shellacking’, he called it! We lost eleven governorships, the control of nineteen state legislative chambers, nearly the majority in the Senate and they took away sixty-odd seats in the House! McConnell and Boehner are hell bent to leave Obama to one term; that’s all they have ever wanted from the start!”

I refreshed Margaret’s drink at the bar, then rethought the matter and kept it for myself, sitting down at the piano bench across the room from her.

“That is where the hope begins, my dear,” I say softly. “Orangezilla and Gamera haven’t got now and never had anything but fight. They, like most of the GOP, are monkeys at the ready to fling poop with or without reason. Two years ago, the party was a crumble and on it’s last legs. You are familiar with the phrase ‘Dead Tiger Bounce’? It’s a financial term for a declining stock that experiences and inexplicable, yet short lived bump. I’m telling you, Margaret, this is the twitching of a dead animal. Let me explain.

“In 2008, over 130 million Americans went to the polls. Last week? 75 million. Where in 2008, the youth vote was counted at over 23 million, the vote of the elderly at about 16. Last week, those numbers flipped. These mid-terms found white numbers up, especially among the over sixty set, no harm meant, while Latino and Black voting was down.”

“You see?! We’re giving in! We’re laying down and letting the Teahaddists win!”

“Not at all. If anything, the Tea Party crimped the GOP style in places like Delaware, Nevada, and probably Alaska, of all places. In fact, nationally, Sarah Palin came out smelling like those grizzly mommas she so admires.

“You see, this was no rebuke, this election was about a volatile and impatient public living, admittedly, in some very hard times. I’m afraid an irrational public as well. Forget what the Tea people think about birth certificates and Islam; people want to lash out and the Dems are the ones they see, mostly because the Right is hiding behind them pointing fingers. They believe that Health Care will increase the deficit, you and I know it will cut it by 1.4 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimate). They believe that eliminating tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% is in some way to their advantage, when we know that Obama signed permanent tax cuts for the middle and lower classes. They believe that the party that turned our budget surplus of the Nineties into the massive deficit will be able to cut spending without increasing taxes, this the party that also drug us, dishonestly, into a multi-trillion dollar war. They just aren’t thinking straight.”

“And that’s going to make me feel better?”

“It will, eventually. The only thing the GOP is going to be able to do is just what they’ve been doing for two years. They haven’t got what it takes to repeal anything, they haven’t got the sense or organization to pass anything of their own. It will give Obama the time he needs to get the mojo back, to re-mobilize the base he left behind when he decided to play Washington Insider. If he’s smart, if the Democrats can grow a pair, this thing should come out alright.”

How I learned to wake up and love the Tea Party...

Sacre’ Poutine! Such dreams that awoke me and shook me to my very hara! Wretched yet strapping Hillbillies, bent on violence raped the land, led by spine-curled witches; there was a fat, naked old woman on a gray sheeted bed twisting and speaking in tongues, her eyes fixed on some unseen horror, her maw smeared with what I believed was blood not her own! I was wrenched from sleep like one might pinch a bedbug from her mattress, with a tight, zit-popping squeeze.

Quite possibly, it had been my weekend’s heavy diet of AMC gore movies, laced with commercials for Jackass 3D, a soupcon of memory of having watched those Rand Paul supporters bludgeon what appeared to be Rachel Maddow’s cousin in Kentucky. It is said that this process of dreaming is to consolidate the memory, but less than 20% percent of dream content is attributable to any specific memory. In fact, the mind is acting through the night preparing to be awake; the leading emotions are elation, anxiety, and anger and we are relieving ourselves in sleep, so that we might go on the next day.

This, even though the dream had given me much trouble, soothed me as I stretched in the bed, cold blue morning light seeping into the room. Of a sudden, I was no longer living in fear of the Tea Party.

Nom Dieu, I’m aware of the Fear: a Rabble of Rubes descending on Washington from the hills, tethered to their corporate leashes, with agendas designed to turn back the clock on our education systems, our social safety networks, and the very Constitution itself; hellbent on repelling Mexicans and their Anchor Babies; fixed on deconstructing not only the safeguards that keep the rich from taking more than is their right, but to abolish the laws which keep the laboring family from utter destitution and their wish to foist on us a backward and misconstrued concept of Christ through a gross entwining of unholy doctrine with the law of the land.

I know; Sharan Angle (Nev) would see a child to term through the womb of a girl raped by her own father, perhaps on account her TP pal, Glen Urqhart (Del) who has dear friends who were the product of rape (He also doesn’t believe Jefferson favored the separation of church and state, I think claiming that was Hitler). Bill Flores (Tex) and Joe Miller (AK) find The National Endowment of the Arts as something foul and unconstitutional, David Hermer (CA), who would abolish public schools at large; all products of a century of American Progress, who would see it turned back until someone of their background would more than likely not have the education or opportunity to climb out of the fields to find a microphone for their mindless musings. Ken Buck (CO), Mike Lee (UT), and Joe Miller would see the repeal of the 17th Amendment, so to say the American people can no longer directly elect their Senate (this after they’ve taken power, of course); Sharon Angle and others would see the demise of the 16th Amendment and the inimitable Rand Paul (KY) would very much like it if the 14th Amendment were not in the way of the good business people of his state picking whom they would not allow in their establishments (wink!). They would all jump at the chance to repeal Health Care, and some fear invasion by China by insidious plot (Christine O’Donnell (Del)), or Terror Babies planted for evil some twenty years down the line (Louie Gohmert (Tex). They decry the oppression of the U.S. government over corporate institutions like BP (Mike Lee, Rand Paul). They rail against the current administrations policies while they, in turn profit from them, like Scott Rigell (VA) who railed against Cash For Clunkers, while his car dealership reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars, or John Raese (WV) whose business has taken in almost 34 million dollars in Federal and State funds since 2000, and then says “I cannot think of very many times a government agency has helped me.” Or Vicki Hartzler (MO.) who says she “just wants the government to leave her alone.” Ms. Hartzler is a farmer who has taken Federal subsidies totaling $744,000.

Merde Sainte! Yes, it looks like dystopia is one dangling chad away from realization, but wait, my cuddly friends… let’s look again at the numbers. Let’s start with the average Tea Party member, one who will go on record as being committed to the concepts of smaller government (except when it comes to legislating morality): They are disproportionably white men, disproportionably over forty, disproportionably of a higher income than most Americans. These are the John McCain voters and some of them are actually committed to their political agendas. However, elections aren’t won by people who actually read and form well thought out political opinions (Karl Rove and President Obama both know this (Obama now only too well, as the tide of “I want to Believers” have receded back to The Jersey Shore). They are won by beleaguered soccer moms, and minions of hillbillies who respond like Pavlovian jackals to the prodding of their moneyed masters (the Koch brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), and when they hear guns and Jesus are on the ropes, they come barreling to respond!

But… in this age of instant samizdatian call to alarm, I believe the Republicans have hung their hat on the most slipshod of racks, their desperation not visible to the eye for all the moaning and hand wringing and backpedaling of the Democrats, a looser group of nitwits you could not find, where it not for their counterparts. The base of the Tea Party movement is built on a population with no interest in politics until of late and while, yes, a couple of the above whack-jobs will find a seat in a government they despise, politics will go on as usual in Washington. And there is the hope. In two years time, when Obamacare is still intact, when the godless Mexicans are not run from this country, when the economy has taken step after stronger step towards full strength, and fear is gradually replaced with the concept of an America moving forward, this Tea Party base will itself recede back into the Wal-Marts from whence they came and I can sleep peacefully again.

Nom D’Guido! I eye the panel sitting before me here in Los Angeles on the eve of Christmas as I prepare my first question. I will not lie, I am intimidated.

“Early today, the Senate passed health care legislation that, with the House bill, will provide sweeping and fundamental changes to the American health care system. What are your thoughts? Snooki?”

“Well,” said the fat thighed Italian-American girl with the long, black hair. “I keep thinking about when I got hit in the face by that frat boy at the club and I was on the ground crying. What if I had lost one of my teeth, or my face had been cut? What if I lost more than one tooth? My gawd, would Obama be able to help me?”

“Michael,” I said with a tight cough. “The Republican opposition to health care reform took the shape of a fractured party almost desperate to undercut the new president’s administration. From deceits such as death panels for your grandmother and loss of existing coverage; it was an opposition completely in the face of their own constituent’s desires, yet it’s impossible defeat became their sole obsession. What will Republicans focus on now that the historic legislature has become a fait accompli?”

“I mean, all we do is, when we go out at night, is focus on girls. I’m with my boy, Paul D, and you know, we work that shit, you know. Everybody knows by now that any time I can get my shirt off, there’s a Situation, and if you want to talk about Health Care, take a look at this shit.” The mook with the big nose stands up from his chair and pulls his Ed Hardy t-shirt over his neatly trimmed guido haircut. “This is fitness. You want health care, you should come out for a workout session with me and my boy, Ronnie. You may never get abs like this, yo, but you might not be crying so much about what’s covered. And if you’ve got it working, if you’ve got a little booty… the Situation has you covered. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, yes, I see,” I say, turning to the last member of the panel. “JWoww. Women’s groups are protesting and are expected to continue efforts to expand abortion coverage in the legislation, making it one of the hot button issues with conservative Democrats, to say nothing of the religious right. How important is it that these group’s see immediate advances in abortion coverage when, in all likelihood, as we build on National Healthcare… how shall I say… these things shall come? Wouldn’t they be best advised to get through what they can and hope to do more in the future?”

Wearing a blouse cut to present maximum cleavage, the girl’s breasts cut a strange figure, almost as though they were caught in a wind tunnel, though they were most certainly surgically augmented. Her face turned solemn.

“I had my first abortion when I was seventeen. Tommy took me to the clinic and put up almost half of the $350 and I got the rest from my uncle. I got to say that, that’s not a lot of money, so my heart goes out to girls that don’t even have access to the care that I got. I don’t know… if I got pregnant tonight, and you know, who knows? That’s possible, right?” She winks at the Situation. “What would this bill do for me? I don’t know.”
“Yes, wrong question, wrong panelist. Alay… that’s all the time we have for now. Thank you for joining me here today for this round table discussion. Next week, we ring in the new year with the Jonas Brothers and America’s need for reinvesting in manufacturing and infrastructure! Joyeux Noel, bitches!”

The Return of Pierre Bertrand Lafitte!

Putt.
“So, you’re out here looking for the American Dream?”

The ball rolled up the rise of the green and dropped into the cup with a metallic ‘plop’.

“Mmmm, what’s left of it, I suppose,” I bended at the knee behind my own ball, putter in hand, eyeing the line over the cool morning grass at Augusta.

“What makes you think sumpthin’s happened to it,” says my companion, Sully McDaniel, bending to recover his Titleist.

“Or was it ever there to begin with, no?” I stand to address my Maxfli Noodle, line my putt and clap the ball across the green. “Americans, real Americans, rallying with images of their president as a Hitler, or a Nazi; working class Americans servicing their corporate masters, blissfully unaware of the nuances of the moniker ‘teabagger’. I mean, mon frere, what is happening here?”

It was a rare, good putt and sank into the hole with that satisfying hollow sound. We gathered our clubs and made for the thirteenth hole, the Azalea, a wicked par five. Sully is quiet until we begin to cross the green felted bridge over the creek.

“Now, see, I think old Clint Eastwood has it right,” he tells me, brushing a bit of grass from his plaid trousers. “What this here country needs is an ‘Invictus’ moment. I think he’s trying to make an analogy, or a metaphor. You got your Morgan Freeman standing in for Nelson Mandela, whose kinda standing in for Obama. And then there’s Matt Damon standing in for… well, I guess standing in for Matt Damon, but the rest of it, the image of a whole nation coming together, building a new identity out of the ashes of a dark past. Well, it gets a bit tricky, working the whole apartheid as the Bush years thing, but it’s pretty close and old Clint had to use what was there to work with.”

It’s in the low sixties on an overcast morning in Georgia in the middle of December. The course is mostly empty and there is no wait for us at the tee for the 13th.

“I have to admit, Sully, I see flaws in your theory. Number one, the team USA does not look good to get past the quarter finals next summer and Joe Leiberman just came out against buying into Medicare early and hopes to quash the public option single-handedly.”

“Goddamn Joe Lieberman.” Sully sullenly drew his Calloway driver.

“And yet, isn’t that so quintessentially American? The rogue individual, the man who makes a difference?”

“The preening goddamn ego that calls all the attention to himself?”

Sully blasted the drive in a high-soaring arch.

“Sacre’Poutine! That ball needs a stewardess!”

“We don’t need no galldang soccer game, the country can rally round gathering a pile of pitchforks and good rope and head up to Connecticut and lynch that no good Yankee! It’s a goddamn conspiracy to spoil Christmas, that’s what the hell it is! I don’t mean that in any kind of anti-Semitic kind of way, Pierre, you know that.”

“Sully, we’re all friends here,” I say, pressing my tee into the grass. “I think even Wild Bill would share your sentiment.”

I take my stance in front of the ball, look out at the far off, left turn of the dog leg. The American Dream. I’ve come back to find it.

Shank! The ball hooks violently and kertwangs off the footbridge over the creek, half mercifully landing in the rough under the shade of trees just off the fairway.

“Goddamn Joe Lieberman.”

Tough Titty said the Kitty, the Milk Tastes Good...

Stately, plump Robbie Jackson passed the tub of his grandmother’s fried chicken round as we sat around our picnic blanket on the lawn outside Independence Hall on the afternoon of the Fifth. Margaret, in her signature yellow suit, was mixing relieving cocktails of bourbon with chamomile tea (which Robbie took iced, no bourbon). Frank Belloc, combat psychologist, had procured some fantastic, pink-ribboned brisket from Lucy’s. No one talked about politics.

I spent the morning making cipaille, the famed layered meat pie from my homeland, and, how could it be otherwise, poutine. Yeah! Fried potatoes and cheese curds, with brown gravy! Seriously!

Margaret and I exchanged knowing glances; Podesta and Emanuel. The Beanpole Elect was still making the sharp, incisive decisions.

We supped and lolled. The weather was a touch cooler, the skies a little grey, but there was a human electricity that could not be denied; between us friends, between each and every passerby, a connection, and understanding. I was jealous. Even as I was accepted that day, in this moment, for the first time in my adult life I wished I could be a proud American! Nom Dieu!

Bertie Ernesto appeared, coming round the hall from Chestnut Street, striding across the great lawn with a contagious spirit, two giant thugs behind him, between them all sacks of Geno’s cheesesteaks, which they handed out to any and all comers. There were still plenty by the time they got to us.

So much work to be done. But for today…