May 25th, 2006 by Hoopleton

I’ll come right out and say it: there are too many of us in the world. No? Didn’t hear me over the chatter of so many idle conversations? I’ll say it again. There are too many people in the world.

First let me say this — as someone who was trained in Anthropology, loves to explore cultures from around the world and generally finds people agreeable most of the time — I am certainly not speaking in terms of mass sterilization or Biblical plague. No, those things — if the crazier ones among us are right — will happen in due time anyway. I love many of the people I come across (oh, what a blatant lie!) and would like most of us to continue on. I simply mean that the world has gotten crowded. Too crowded.

How crowded?

Mount Everest. The tallest peak in the world! One of the most remote places on Earth! Is also the biggest tourist trap in Nepal!

Yes, as another climber died on Mt. Everest this week, a local sherpa who has done the climb almost a dozen times has said that the tallest mountain in the world is becoming dangerously over-trafficked. In fact, local authorities have said that the amount of frozen human waste and garbage left behind by climbers is destroying the natural wonder of the experience. Again, we are talking about Mt. Everest!

Let me try and make this point another way–

Recently, when a descendent of Henry Morgan Stanley filmed a documentary retracing the steps of the famous search for Dr. Livingston, he found not the vast emptiness of which his departed relation wrote in his journals — where another human being would not be glimpsed for weeks at a time — but instead was inundated with people to the point of having to switch his camera off because the crowds got in the way of the taping.

When you can’t even travel to a “remote” point on the Earth without having to exchange hearty greetings with at least a hundred people along the way, or when there are so many people around you that you don’t even notice that the person sitting next to you has died — as happened on a recent flight from Florida to Utah where no one on the entire plane even bothered to see that a passenger was dead — you know that there are just to many of us around. I’m not even going to go into how hard it is to get a reservation in a restaurant on Friday nights…

And perhaps this is where our current global problems begin. Resources, space issues, dining options, etc. And what is most troubling, perhaps, is that we all know that this little blue planet on which we all reside cannot sustain us all forever. Don’t forget, there’s more and more of us coming every single day.

May 24th, 2006 by Hoopleton

Urban Dictionary suggests a ‘Hoople’ is: -

a)A person who frequently drinks alcohol to excess; to the point where it becomes his or her defining characteristic.

b)Someone not responsible with money.

c)Comes from the book, “Mott The Hoople” in which the character is a lazy, preferring to work as little as possible, earning money on the side by running every scam going. He’s also a gambler and not a very good one at that.

All of these are correct to understand what Hoopleton is.

I will add to this that Hoopleton has a fourth definition that you might not find anywhere else. Hoopleton is the name of a town that I once created. It never existed, and does not exist, at least in name. Although the type of town that it is, you can find on any drive through Middle America. Crumbling. Dying. A place that people have left and only remember fondly.

May 17th, 2006 by Hoopleton

On April 22nd I wrote an angry letter to Ira Glass in which I commented on his insulting comments about Poles in his This American Life segment entitled, “Pole Vault” aired on NPR. I won’t get into the details, but I will say simply that I took issue with Ira’s way of equating World War II Poles to Nazis and condeming Poland for a genocide that it did not commit. I still stand by what I wrote and I still think an apology is appropriate.

You hear me Ira? I’m waiting! As a side note, if you’re interested, my letter was passed on to Ira directly, but whether he ever bothered to read it remains a mystery.

Anyway, while digging through news headlines today, I came across an item that makes me feel even more justified in my growing resentment of Ira Glass. You see, why would you have to invent things to make Poles look bad when they do it so damned well themselves.

As reported in various news sources, Polish soccer hooligans, who are planning to disrupt this year’s World Cup in Germany, have taken the bold step of organizing — and get ready for this — an International Hooligan League. That’s right, your eyes are not deceiving you. This Hooligan League will be run by a regular who’s who of the world’s most violent soccer thugs and will attempt to organize pre-arranged fights with other traveling hooligans, most notably the English hooligan contingent — isn’t hooligan a great word — due mainly to their reputation for being the toughest hooligans in the world.

The Polish thugs organizing this Hooligan League will reportedly be armed with knives, axes and 3 ft truncheons — 3 ft trencheons? — and they don’t plan on taking no for an answer. They have already warned English hooligans that if they do not schedule a bought, they will be attacked anyway. And boy, don’t you hate it when you’re ready to beat other soccer fans with a 3-foot trencheon and no one shows up?

On a more serious note, violence committed by Polish soccer hooligans has erupted to levels never before seen in Europe. But what is most frightening is that the groups involved are reportedly demonstrating fascist overtones. This new attempt at organization, some human rights groups in Poland feel, may be a dangerous first step toward a more regimented movement. Personally, I think the situation isn’t helped too much by Poland’s current right-wing government, which has formed a coalition with the radical religious fringes, whose rhetoric is heavy on morality and light on equality.

This is not too surprising of course. Fascist overtones seem to be swelling all over the world. Religious radicalism in the Middle East and in the United States. Right-wing nationalism in Western Europe.

I tell you, reading this story I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Ira? You taking notes?

May 17th, 2006 by Hoopleton

It was reported in the Independent today that in the southern Iraqi city of Basra a person is being murdered on an average of one per hour. The city, which is under British command and was once exemplified as a success story of the invasion, is now coming completely unglued. The security situation is so bad, in fact that the Basra police have not only stopped investigating the thousands of assassination and murder cases, but also rarely even bother to show up at the scene of a crime for fear of being attacked. One official described it as a complete breakdown of the government.

Speaking of the Iraqi government, there still isn’t one. As the week’s pass and violence in and around Baghdad force the Iraqi parliament (referred to as the Puppet Regime among locals) to stay imprisoned in the fortified Green Zone, the highly divided assembly has yet to form a cabinet or pass even one lick of legislation (sounds oddly familiar). To give you an example of how bitter the divisions are, last week the Iraqi Assembly was recessed after a brawl broke out because one representative’s cell phone went off, the ringtone for which was a Shiite Muslim chant.

And if the Iraqi “government” wasn’t fragmented enough, one needs only to look to the Iraqi “army” for even more chaos. You probably already know about the events of earlier this month when during an Iraqi army graduation ceremony (which was much touted by the White House) the class of mainly Sunni Muslims tore off their uniforms and started to resign their newly gained commissions. This angry demonstration was triggered right after the troops took their oath of service and it was announced that they would be deployed in a mainly Shiite region. Apparently the soldiers, who were later calmed, are still on strike today.

This is probably a good thing, as reports are coming out from across Iraq that Sunni soldiers are terrorizing Shiite mosques and vice versa.

But if even this is not bad enough, then a story reported on Monday shows just how messy Bush’s venture into nation building has become.

Apparently, last Friday, a gun battle erupted between two units of the Iraqi Army, one Kurdish and one Shiite. It all started when a roadside bomb exploded as an Iraqi army convoy carrying Kurdish troops was passing near the town of Duluiyah (about forty miles north of Baghdad) that has long been a center of armed resistance to the occupation. Four soldiers were killed instantly in the blast. The Kurdish soldiers, panicked and probably paranoid, began rushing their wounded to a local hospital in the nearby city of Balad, using machine gun fire to clear the streets, and in this way managed to kill at least one civilian. At this point, going by the police account of the incident, another unit of the Iraqi army, the 3rd battalion of the 1st Brigade, this time consisting of Shiite troops, rushed to confront the Kurds. Probably assuming that the Kurds were going to retaliate against the local Arab population. A gun battle erupted resulting in the death of one Shiite soldier.

But wait, it gets better.

The Kurds, now under attack by the second Iraqi unit, decided to remove their wounded from Duluiyah hospital, fearing it wouldn’t be safe for them to be left there. But as they tried to leave the town, a third unit of the Iraqi army set up a roadblock, preventing them from escaping. Apparently the major problem was that the Kurdish soldiers, carrying their wounded and unable to speak Arabic, ran into the checkpoint run by the Shiites, who were unable to speak Kurdish (when creating a military shouldn’t a common language be rule number one?). Anyway, another gun battle ensued and the situation only ended when American troops from a nearby base intervened.

Wow…no wonder we don’t really talk about Iraq anymore. You know, I’d like to think that these reports are overblown. That the media focuses only on the negative. But seriously, how overblown could the reports really be?

May 16th, 2006 by Hoopleton

Today the death toll of American troops officially hit the 2,500 mark. The official number of Iraqi civilians killed hovers somewhere around 50,000 (although no exact figures are kept and some estimates put the number much higher).

The other day I was chatting with an army ranger about to start his second tour in Iraq. The body count came up in our conversation. At first he began to say to me what most soldiers do. He was talking about how things really weren’t as bad as people thought. How they could still win this thing. And then suddenly he surprised me by saying, “Though my dad says the same thing about Vietnam.”

I looked at him a bit surprised. He was a big guy. A Sergeant. Dark features and almost steel solid mass. He was one of those soldiers you’d expect to be capable of winning a war all by himself. I don’t know if it was his mention of his dad, or the sudden realization that he had followed in his footsteps, but all at once his demeanor changed.

“We’re good people,” he said, “we really do try to help. I think something’s changing though. I think the situation is getting fucked.”

I asked him what he meant and he told me that when he got to Iraq he liked the people he met there, but now things were turning ugly for him. That now he hated almost everyone there.

“But things still aren’t that bad,” he said. “I really want ‘em to get better.”

All I could think to say was that I hoped things got better too. All I could think was that the tragedy of it all was that the Iraqis and the people we send to fight/help them, are not at all different. They are just ordinary men and women caught up in power plays that should probably not concern them in the least. But that’s the price for waving flags, isn’t it?

A moment of silence please, for the 2,500 dead, the thousands still there, and the Iraqis who die everyday.

May 15th, 2006 by Hoopleton

It hasn’t been a good time for our political leadership in the US of A.

President Bush finds his poll numbers sagging to lows not seen in decades. Allegations are now also surfacing that Bush offered “protection” to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff as his corruption probe began. If that weren’t bad enough, new revelations that the NSA spying program is larger, much, much larger than previously thought, has put the White House into defensive overdrive. The Senate has announced it will hold inquiries into the NSA’s phone database, and also into the constitutionality of POTUS’ signing statements (see May 10th below). An NSA whistleblower scheduled to testify at the eavesdropping hearings has been quoted as saying that the latest revelations about the agency’s secret phone database is only the tip of the iceberg.

In Congress things have gotten from bad to worse. The stalled immigration bill still hasn’t gotten through the logjam, and with Republicans promising new amendments, it is doubtful that it will anytime soon. Long discussed ethics legislation is a no-go, as yet another prominent GOP congressman, Jerry Lewis of CA and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has been implicated in a growing corruption probe. An investigation that started with indicted Congressman Duke Cunningham and has also reached into the CIA, quite possibly forcing the resignations of both Director Porter Goss and Executive Director Dusty Foggo (whose house was searched by the FBI on Friday). In the meantime the leadership is considering raising the debt ceiling to $10 trillion and making recent tax cuts aimed at the richest Americans permanent.

While all these sad dramas are playing out inside Washington, Iran is sticking firmly to its decision to develop its nuclear program. The President of Iran (and I use the term loosely) sent an 18-page letter to the White House this week stating his intentions to do so. In Darfur a genocide continues. Famines rage across the globe. Instability spreads.

In the background of all of this is Iraq where bombings and kidnappings have become a daily occurrence and 12 more Americans died this week, bringing the total of US deaths to almost 2500. The financial cost of the war also continues to grow, and has ballooned into the hundreds of billions, estimates that were originally rejected by the Bush White House.

Iraq remains the backdrop, but only as the backdrop. And because of Iraq our hands are now tied everywhere else. Although Iran is becoming a nuclear power, and Iranian troops are amassing at Iraq’s borders, it’s militias actively participating in the shaping of daily events within Baghdad and other cities, we are powerless. But we don’t talk about that. US media is nearly completely silent on the subject of the country that we invaded and occupy still.

It almost goes without saying that in the weeks to come the corruption scandals will unwind and more of our elected leaders will be implicated. New revelations about NSA spying will rock the country. Bush’s increased authoritarianism will become more and more stark as his approval ratings plummet further and further. The dollar will continue to fall. Gas prices will also, if only before they start climbing to record highs. Immigration and ethics legislation will probably pass, but will be ineffective in solving either problem. The United States, the economic engine of the world, will move deeper into debt. Iraq will destabilize further and Iran will grow bolder. Many more Americans will die.

It is clear that if something isn’t done soon Americans will lose complete faith in the current government and punish those currently in office at the polls come November. If allegations over corruption and NSA spying being even more intrusive then currently reported are true, then such a punishment is not only certain, but necessary. Whatever future revelations come, it is also clear that Bush needs to go. His legacy as a War President is now likely to be forever disgraced replaced by a record of spying on Americans, disregarding checks and balances and ballooning the deficit.

For my own part I hope that Americans rise up and create real change in this country before even greater abuses of power and incompetence are revealed. Hopefully then, it will still not be too late to undo all the damage that has already been done.

May 10th, 2006 by Hoopleton

President Bush’s poll numbers have fallen to new lows. How low? According to a NY Times/CBS News Poll just a measly 31%. Lowest poll numbers in decades. Woohoo! Congrats Mr. President. But things could be worse, he might have to veto something soon. It does make you want to say, “I told you so” to a lot of people who actually thought that reelecting this guy was a good idea.

Still don’t feel too bad for POTUS, I doubt he realizes that his poll numbers are so low anyway. That would, after all, require having to actually watch the news on a daily basis. And even if he has heard about the numbers, I’m sure he’s convinced that they are not accurately representative of the general population.

So what’s next? Impeachment? Popular uprising? Public stoning? How low can the numbers go? And if they do go low enough, and if impeachment takes place, would Bush even leave office? No, I’m serious, would he? There were fears Nixon might turn the military on Congress after Watergate broke, and the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is much more delusional, or to put it even more bluntly, corrupted by power.

This is the same man who, as first reported by Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, has written over 750 signing statements – Presidential interpretations of laws written during a signing of a Bill (technically a set of instructions to the bureaucracy on how a law should be implemented). So, in other words Bush has “reinterpreted” or altered over 750 laws, in which he has claimed all sorts of powers and privileges for himself. Some examples include: stating that only the President has the right to decide what information is presented to Congress; that only the Pentagon has the right to oversee the Pentagon; that only the President has the right to regulate the armed forces. No wonder he’s never vetoed a law. Why veto it when you can just alter it to suit your needs.

What amazes me is the shortsightedness of the man. The arrogance. Wartime powers for a wartime President in a time of perpetual war. You know, not that I’m equating the two, but Adolf Hitler was elected by a complacent public that dismissed him (in large part) as a harmless country bumpkin. Now, if Bush doesn’t grab power himself, he is certainly setting a dangerous precedent for future leaders who would be less crippled by a low IQ.

Again coming back to Nixon, it is worth noting that Dick Cheney has stated that the Watergate scandal “went too far” in crippling the office of the President. Yes, that was the lesson to learn from Watergate. God, it really does keep coming back to Nixon. The Bush family’s political start. The corruption of power. Hopefully it will all have a similar end, if at least a better legacy.

May 6th, 2006 by Hoopleton

Of course it makes perfect sense that Washington is now locked in a battle over who will spend more. After our fiscally responsible President Bush (God, is he still there?) requested $94 billion in emergency spending for the war that wouldn’t end and Katrina Relief (wasn’t that last year?), the Senate decided to up the ante by passing a $109 billion emergency spending bill instead. Bush has threatened to use the veto if the extra $15 billion wasn’t removed.

Lawmakers (and I use the term loosely) in the Senate are ignoring Bush’s threat, citing the fact that POTUS hasn’t vetoed a single bill since he took office in 2001. The White House responded by saying that the President really means it this time. To which the Senate further replied (essentially), “go suck on an egg!”

Now why exactly Bush has never used the veto is open for debate. Some would say that he has as yet found every single spending measure passed by the Republican Congress essential to the governance of the United States (multi-billion dollar Alaskan bridges to nowhere included). Others might be prone to think that Bush’s business philosophy in the private sector, which is to essentially run every company into the ground, is alive and well in his political life. Others still might argue that POTUS just doesn’t know that as a conservative he’s supposed to prefer small government.

My personal inclination is that Bush hasn’t vetoed anything because he doesn’t know exactly what a ‘veto’ is.

“Is that like bug? Cause I don’t like bugs. Sounds like a Mexican bug is what it sounds like.”

Maybe after someone shows the President that one Schoolhouse Rock video he’ll start vetoing anything he can get his hands on. Yes, like a child on Christmas morning with a new executive privilege.

Whatever the reason for Bush’s refusal to use the one power that the Constitution actually grants him, he seems to mean it this time and the battle lines in the Senate are already being drawn. As to show support for the President, 35 Republicans signed a letter supporting the veto. Then 13 of the Republicans who had signed the letter — including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Majority Whip Mitch McConnell — killed an amendment that would have removed a $700 million project to relocate a private rail line in Mississippi that had been inserted in the bill by two top Republicans.

Not to be outshone as hypocrites, the Democrats, who overwhelmingly voted in favor of the additional $15 billion, began to deride the Republicans for their lack of fiscal responsibility.

To which the Republicans responded, “We’re rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of us and sticks to you.”

May 3rd, 2006 by Hoopleton

Okay, I’ll come right out and say that the publishing industry is choking on its own manure.

The year started out with JT Leroy, the author of such critically acclaimed, best-selling works as Sarah (which I doubt I will ever read), being unmasked as a fraud for the sheer reason that he/she/it did not actually exist. Yes, JT was a phantom. A marketing tool used by a team of authors to sell memoirs that were deemed, well, unmarketable as novels. This incident was especially scaving because the author had acquired many friends in Hollywood and the industry, played part-time by an actress who would cross-dress for the part.

If this wasn’t enough, within weeks, James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, pissed off millions of readers (as well as the all-powerful Oprah) when it was discovered that much of his critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir (which I know I’ll never read) about drug addiction and redemption was actually made up. Yes, the autobiography was more fiction than fact. Poor James. And no one saw it coming, even though the now reclusive author had first tried to sell the book as a novel, before deciding that a memoir would be easier to market.

This week, a third massive scandal has rocked the literary world (and it’s only May), as it has been revealed that Kaavya Viswanathan’s book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, “borrowed” much of it’s material from at least one other novel by Megan McCafferty. The case of plagiarism by the Harvard student (shocking!) has prompted publisher Little, Brown, to cancel all future printings of the book and withdraw Kaavya’s contract. The once-was author apologized for any similarities and there is no word yet on whether she will keep her six figure advance.

Yes, yes, another red letter day in the publishing world. Maybe if they weren’t so busy constantly putting out the same formulaic, life-altering, memoir crap and actually took some risks on new material and new talent, then maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t get burned so often. Hey, I have an idea! Instead of just crucifying writers who have to come up with increasingly less than honest ways of getting published, maybe a few of the agents, editors and literary executives responsible for putting out this work should be fired. I mean, could it be, perhaps, a systemic problem?

What amazes me about the literary world today is that it seems that the industry is taking its cues from the Enron school of business. Get in by any means necessary. Do whatever it takes to sell and get out before the shit hits the fan. Hopefully if all turns out well, you won’t lose more than your winter cabin in Aspen.

All I know for certain is this: for all the crap on the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble, and there certainly is a lot of crap, even potential scandals in the making I am sure, there are at least as many good unpublished authors out there struggling to even be noticed. Perhaps the lesson here is not to be more skeptical of emerging authors, but of the people who prepare their contracts.

May 1st, 2006 by Hoopleton

Today is May Day, an international holiday of worker’s rights that began right here in the Windy City to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket Riot. And I suppose it’s fitting that a day meant to celebrate labor should be the anniversary of four innocent men sent to the gallows. Heavy handed, I know. As a side note, the Chicago Police department still refuses to allow a proper memorial to be built at Haymarket Square (I guess we don’t have that short of a memory after all).

So, today is a day of strikes and protests. As I write these words, thousands of immigrants, legal and otherwise, are filling up the streets of Chicago, and other major US cities, in opposition to proposed laws that would make illegals into fugitives (or perhaps bigger fugitives?). They carry signs that read, “We Are Americans.” They carry flags, mainly the red, white and blue. They chant old civil rights slogans and sing protest songs. These people protest not because they are against what America is doing, but because they want to be part of what America is.

So what makes an American? That would be a logical question.

Is it paying taxes (which all Americans hate)? Is it voting (which few Americans do)?

What makes anyone an American?

Is love of country enough? Because if it is, aren’t those protesting today more representative than the majority?

It speaks volumes that millions of people are trying to be a part of this nation when most of the world would gladly see us burn. At a time when the United States is more hated than China, or Iran, or even North Korea, it seems unthinkable that there are people in this world that want to be Americans. And yet, here they are. All around us. Singing songs and carrying flags.

On Saturday, an auto mechanic told me he wants to see “all of them sent back home.” Of course three of his employees are illegal immigrants. As is his landscaper. As was his father.

It does amaze me how these people could love America so much. With so many of us wanting them out, and yet happily exploiting their cheap labor. These immigrants are doing the jobs no one wants to do. They are getting paid almost nothing. They work hard. They work honestly. They receive resentment in return.

Is that what an American is? Is that what these people would hope to become?

Back one hundred and twenty years ago, when anarchists and labor leaders gathered at Haymarket Square, their main concern was an eight-hour workday. At the time politicians and business leaders rejected such outlandish ideas as ridiculous. Insulting. Anti-American.

Just as the immigrants of today, those protesters over a hundred years ago, saw the United States as a land of opportunity. A land of hope that they wanted to be a part of. They fought and fought to belong not to the society that existed, but the society they wanted to create.

And perhaps that’s it. Maybe what America is, is not what Americans are. Maybe the best of this country is brought out in those people who fight for what they want America to be.

Happy May Day.