December 31st, 2008 by Hoopleton

2008 leaves us tonight, and 2009 takes its place.

At least according to Christian tradition.

For Jews it’s the year 5769. For Muslims, 1430. For Hindus, 1930. For the Mayans, 5121.

And the list goes on and on…

We mark these years and the memories we’ve accumulated, the lessons we’ve learned. We look back and of course we look forward. We wait for time to stop and we struggle against its unmerciful passage.

2008 has been a hard year. Disasters of every sort have plagued us. It was the last full year of the Bush Presidency. The fifth year of the war in Iraq. The seventh year of the war in Afghanistan. It’s the year that the economy collapsed. The year that a Communist totalitarian state was allowed to use the spectacle of an international sporting event to rebrand itself across the world. That a former Communist empire began to reemerge from its hibernation. 2008 was a year of pirates, unspeakable terrorist attacks and assassinations.

Just as every year before it, 2008 saw the loss of film and literary legends, of singers, statesmen and rising stars.

But in 2008 we saw some small rays of hope in an otherwise dark horizon. A new kind of President. A new commitment to forward thinking. A general consensus that we’ve all had enough of the way things were.

So what will 2009 bring us?

My wish is for new beginnings. My wish and fervent hope is for a new world, one in which we can finally let go of the paradigms that we accept as being so natural, but are in fact the shackles of our self-imposed misery. My wish for 2009 is that it will be a year in which we transcend even this.

But looking at the whole expanse of human history, it’s difficult to be optimistic. 2009, may be just as hard as 2008, if not harder. So instead of praying for world peace and a new spirit of humanism, I will instead only wish you the very best.

Know that even though I don’t know you, or perhaps don’t know you well, I love you. You are my brother. You are my sister. You are my friend.

Happy 2009.

December 27th, 2008 by Hoopleton

It’s the mid-point of the holidays and we stand on the brink of a new era. As we say goodbye to Christmas and prepare to welcome in 2009, we await with baited breath the arrival of a new administration in the White House, and what we hope will be a reinvention of America. We’re all struggling these days. We all want to shed this burden from off our backs. We’ve waited so damned long.

The truth of it, the truth we’d rather not face, the reason why the air is so stifling, is that we are not a community anymore. Those values that some would claim to be our mandate have over the years dissolved. We have become what our founders feared and our enemies rallied against. We are not a nation, we are a munitions factory. A concrete strip-mall from sea to shining sea that exports bombs wrapped in the empty rhetoric of freedom. Merchants of death and high plunder scribbling recipes with a peacock feather.

Someone once asked me if I believed in God, to which I replied, “I believe in God, but I don’t believe in religion.” In my mind the lie that is the dogma of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and countless other belief systems shares the same perverted morality as what America has become. Good, honest people, whose will has been broken on the alter of self-serving self-interest. What was true about who we were has been lost in meaningless ritual and the empty embrace of our profit-driven high priests on Wall Street and on Pennsylvania Avenue. Where once good works and love of thy neighbor was enough to ensure the blessings of eternal happiness, now we thrive only off consumption and petty tribalcentric concerns. Whereas once we exported aid and trust and hope, we now pawn an arms industry that outspends every other sovereign nation on earth by a thousand times.

If God is for us than who be against us? If we continually divide the globe between us and them how can we every be citizens of the world? Sartre once called terrorism the atom bomb of the poor. Is there still room enough today, in this place, for that kind of understanding?

The reason why I hate the holidays is because it is a time when our hypocrisies become all too apparent. We sing songs and celebrate our communal love, while we increasingly isolate ourselves within the alters of holy shrines and under the banners of nationalism. We purport to embrace all mankind, while we elevate personal needs above the concerns of our shared humanity.

The economy has been raped and pillaged by the upper class. Thousands of decent people kill or are killed every single day. We destroy our planet with every trip to the gas station. We live in and support the business of war. We are the arms industry. We even celebrate the fact. And yet come Christmas we exchange presents, sing hymns to world peace and feel good about ourselves if only for an instant. We cannot find the strength to rise up, especially against ourselves.

My hope for 2009 and the coming of a new era in American politics is not that we will suddenly change our ways. It is that we at least begin to examine what we’ve become. Truth and reconciliation. Introspection and analysis. The rebirth of humanity. Perhaps we can again talk about living in a world where everyone is a neighbor, where religion and place of conception have as little meaning as the amount of sugar added to a cup of coffee. Where I am everyman, and he is me.

Such is my wish for all of us. Such is my hope for all mankind.

December 13th, 2008 by Hoopleton

I walk down the street, where a thousand, maybe a million, maybe a billion, where a billion people have walked before. It’s raining. The wind chills me through my coat. Passing faces. Passing glances. I pause before I go inside. I look to the cars all going somewhere.

I’ll disappear one day. The faces I’ve seen on the street today will too. Those cars won’t exist in five, ten, twenty years. The rain that’s falling won’t fall again.

I remember seeing the grave of St. Peter, twenty feet below the floor of the Basilica in Rome that bears his name. On the cracked stone that housed his bones was graffiti dating back almost two thousand years. All of it, no matter the language, had the same message, “I was here.”

I was here.

Do we live on in the people we’ve touched? In the children we’ve had? In two thousand-year-old graffiti we etch on a gravestone? Will the people I passed on the street today remember my passing glance? Will the street remember that I walked here today?

December 9th, 2008 by Hoopleton

The most amazing thing about the state of Illinois is not the incessant scandals exposed on a near daily basis by the media, nor the massive corruption so transparently obvious at every single level of our local government, not even that an alarming number of Illinois governors, Rod Blagojevich being the latest addition to this infamous list in grand style, have faced any and all sort of criminal charges (former Governor George Ryan is sitting in prison at this very moment). No, what’s truly amazing about the shit-laden swamp that is Illinois politics is that the people who toil daily in this mire of greed and corruption have as yet not staged a popular uprising, and in fact have actually refused repeated efforts to empower themselves.

Today, Rod Blagojevich, the Governor, was arrested on corruption and conspiracy charges. He is accused of trying to extort bribes in state funding deals, enriching himself and his family, and possibly worst of all, selling off the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Obama to the highest bidder. The evidence against him is staggering, coming in the form of recorded phone conversations and wiretaps, as well as, eyewitness testimony and bank transactions. But the best part about all of this, beyond the massive national implications stemming from the election of Barack Obama, is that everyone and their mother knew that the governor was being investigated by Federal authorities, and he did it anyway. Let me make this clear, when I say that everyone knew the Governor was being investigated I mean that even the Governor knew he was being investigated. It was in the goddamn paper. It was on TV. For months. He was even asked about it, but the idiot did it anyway. Like George W. Bush in a china shop, he just couldn’t help himself.

I have to say that in today’s political world it’s a good thing that stupidity and incompetence aren’t criminal offenses because we’d never be able to build prisons fast enough.

The sad part about all of this of course is that Blagojevich, just like his soon-to-be bunkmate, former Governor Ryan, is just the tip if a very large iceberg. For example, Illinois pays some of the highest fees and taxes in the entire country. In the city of Chicago, residents pay more in property taxes and transportation costs than in any other Midwestern state. With every year there are budget deficits, deals to close the holes, while fees and taxes rise constantly. Good times or bad, there’s never enough money, while on an almost daily basis the papers are filled with stories of billions going into the pockets of mobsters and corrupt city bosses. In Illinois and in the state’s premier city it’s political dynasties that rule, such as the Daley family, or the Storgers, both placing hundreds more relatives and friends on the roles with every election cycle (even I was once given a patronage job in the State Treasurer’s Office thanks to my connection, or as the man highering me for the position that didn’t actually exist yet, told me: “We get hundreds of applications in this office every month, but because your friends with [name withheld] yours got to the top of the pile.”). But the stench gets even more pronounced the further in you go, as beneath the layers the rich and powerful of Illinois not only steal from the poor but then exchange their ill-gotten wealth for sex and all manner of other vices right under the noses of the reporters and watchdogs keeping tabs (speaking once again from personal experience, it was my connection to such a secretive sex parlor that got me my patronage position in the first place – the biggest scandals are often those unseen and unknown by the public).

Despite all of the overwhelming, obvious and plain evidence that we are being fucked on an almost continuous basis by those in power, we continue to vote down constitutional changes that might provide relief, we reelect the purveyors of our own misery, and we sit in silent compliance, seemingly unable to offer any defense against the ravages we endure.

The state of Illinois has been a corrupt snake bed since the days of Lincoln, but today, as exemplified by the comic tragedy that is Governor Blagojevich, things have only gotten worse. Blago was an idiot, but he was also supremely arrogant, convinced that he’d never be prosecuted, little alone arrested. Partly, this is because politics in this state is just that corrupt, but I suspect that the main cause for this flawed perception of invincibility has more to do with the Governor never realizing that what he was doing was illegal. How could he know? Extortion, conspiracy and theft are just business as usual in Illinois. In most other parts of the country the mafia disappeared, here, in the Land of Lincoln, it went into government instead.

And what of us? What a shame, we’ll say, and elect the next crook down the line.

December 2nd, 2008 by Hoopleton

During my brief absence from these pages I’ve decided on a few things, and the most important of these is that the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) are indeed run and operated by a pack of retarded monkeys. I say retarded monkeys as monkeys in full control over their mental faculties would obviously have done a much more competent job of managing America’s automotive industry than the collection of drooling morons that is doing the job now. This is quite a shift from the maniacally evil, albeit somewhat intelligent assholes who drove the Big Three until recently, harming this nation over the last hundred years not by their massive idiocy but by good old-fashioned greed and shortsightedness.

In its history the Big Three have been responsible for the destruction of America’s urban centers, lobbying and bribing away electric trolley systems from New York to Los Angeles so that city governments would invest in buses and fueling this nation’s addiction to automobiles. The most direct example of this effort to undermine the nation’s urban infrastructure is Detroit, a city barely alive today, thanks in part to the efforts of GM, Ford and Chrysler to do away with that city’s entire public transportation system. The Big Three have also undermined America’s national security and helped stoke the fires of global warming by successfully lobbying against raising CAFÉ (fuel efficiency) standards since the 1970s, ranking the United States below even China in terms of fuel inefficiency and car pollution. The Big Three have for decades gone out of their way to suppress safety standards and alternative fuel technologies. The Detroit automakers have forced local and Federal governments to invest billions in more roads and highways, despite all the evidence showing that more cement would not alleviate traffic congestion patterns. They have been found to engage in price fixing and conspiring against consumers. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, most recently, after taking so much from the people of the United States, they packed up most of their factories and moved them overseas, settling on the manufacture of gas guzzling SUVs when all indications showed that smaller cars such as hybrids were the way to the future.

Now to be fair, not all the blame rests in the boardrooms. The United Auto Workers union, a collective that has not displayed one iota of competence in forty years and that continues to prop up an industry that should have died eons ago, certainly has its share in the fiasco that is America’s automotive industry. What is the salary for a UAW factory worker? If you take into account base pay (starting at about $28 an hour), overtime, benefits and pension, the average UAW employee costs on average about $65 an hour. I fully support collective bargaining and good wages, but $65 an hour? This is at a time when starting pay for a teacher in Chicago is in the mid 30s? But the worst crime here is not the ungodly amount of money, and unfair wages, it’s the very real fact that it’s the UAW’s own lobbying efforts that have helped keep this corrupt, inept industry alive for so long.

It’s a simple principal: if something is inefficient and bad for this nation it should be allowed to die. People are concerned about the damage to the economy, but in the wake of the Big Three’s collapse something new, something better would take its place (see: Tucker). Capitalism, although as flawed as Communism in its utopian declarations, can only truly operate when there is real competition, but how are new industries with new ideas supposed to come about if corporations like GM, Ford and Chrysler have a strangle hold over the entire sector of the economy? In my mind the monkeys need to be put out of their misery.

What will happen instead? Pressured by the UAW, the prospect of Midwestern electoral votes and corporate lobbying efforts, GM, Ford and Chrysler will receive their revised $34 billion bailout from Congress. There will be strings attached. The automakers will make promises. The UAW will make some concessions. But in the end the shortsighted idiots that are the Big Three will be allowed to continue. Continue to undermine America’s best interests. Continue to stifle new ideas. Continue to drain our financial reserves.

Sadly, in the end we have no one to blame but ourselves. Not because we may drive American cars. Not because we may work in the industry. Not because we won’t write Congress to let the bastards fall apart. We are to blame because in our local communities we continually put self-interest above national and global interest. Because we do not stand up and call for the abolition of the Electoral College, a system that unfairly empowers unions in Michigan, coal miners in Pennsylvania, ethanol subsidy dependent farmers in Iowa, war hawks in Florida and factory workers in Ohio. Just as we support a dangerous corporate entity that has caused us nothing but harm, we support an election process that propels colloquial concerns to the national stage. There’s a reason why certain states are swing states and Presidential candidates speak of clean coal and saving incompetent industries instead of looking the future.

In America’s obituary I have no doubt that one line will appear at the top of the page: the collapse of the United States was facilitated by it’s people’s inability to reform a broken system. We have become a petty mob unable or unwilling to see the bigger picture, too busy wasting our outrage on the personal choices of people we don’t know or will ever know to notice that we are being slowly smothered. Too divided and self-absorbed while the rats that govern us from their corporate offices retreat back to the upper crust that they represent. Isn’t it about time we did something about it?