Epidemic of More Hair

Here's a quote I find fascinating. It was in an opinion piece for Indymedia in San Francisco, attributed to an unnamed reader of Mortgage News Daily. "If we don't do something [about the foreclosure crisis] we are going to have an epidemic of homeless people who are fed up and commit crimes this winter begging to be housed in Jail."

First of all, it's good to see that we are now capitalizing Jail, just like we have learned to capitalize Mother, God, and the Right Honorable So-and-So. If you incarcerate a higher percentage of your population than any other country in the world, it's time to start paying Jail some respect, in the sort of way Germans respect Himmel and Heimat. We capitalize White House and only one family lives there, and all it means is "white house." More than one in a hundred of our adults live in Jail; that counts for something. I'm also in favor of capitalizing Toilet, for the same reason.

The thing that really fascinates me about the quote is the notion that as soon as good law-abiding citizen homeowners become homeless they will immediately give up on all that and start breaking laws, loving Jail and the lawlessness that gets them there. This view does not describe my own bouts with homelessness.

I was homeless for an accumulated total of three and a half years before I started to think breaking laws would be a fun change of pace. For the whole time up until that I was actually, amazingly, the same fastidious, conscientious, law-abiding person I had been in all my previous (by that time) 45 years.

When I finally did consider breaking a law, it wasn't me that had changed; it was the law. It had become against the law to sit down on a sidewalk no matter how tired you were.

But maybe today's homeless people are different. Today's homeless people were born into a different world than we were. They haven't had Eisenhower to ground them and give their lives meaning. They smoke better weed. They have more hair and faster reflexes.

I was thinking about all this when I found a story in an online Florida newspaper titled "Homeless man charged with exposure of sexual organs." Actually the man, "Jimmy," was drunk and had an extremely full bladder, and therefore it wasn't his sexual organs, per se, that he exposed, it was his bladder-relieving organs, properly speaking.

Jimmy's real crime, it turns out, was not sexual in nature, but being so drunk he thought the New England Cafe in Jensen Beach was the Toilet.

So, how drunk were the owners of the New England Cafe of Jensen Beach, Florida, when they decided they were in New England?

Next, how drunk was the reader of Mortgage News Daily, to think that having your house foreclosed will make you want to live in Jail and do all the things it takes to get there?

Whenever people use terms like "epidemic" or "chronic" in connection with homelessness they reinforce the idea that it's a disease you catch. It's no wonder, with the government using such language all the time, that housed drunks, like that reader, would think that if you catch homeless cooties your personality will change and all your principles will atrophy and fall off after one cold night in a doorway.

It never occurs to housed drunks that the Jimmies out there who are now homeless drunks pissing on cafe tables in Florida were once housed drunks just like themselves, pissing on the coffee table in their living rooms just before passing out on the living room floor, and just hours after writing a stupid letter about homelessness to a newspaper.

Exercises For Advance Credit

How drunk was the writer when he wrote this column?

Which of the following comes closest to the writers point? a) "We're all just people, everywhere," b) "We're all drunks, under the skin," or c) "I need to lie down."

Plato Was Right, Too

As I’ve often said, if you want to write stuff but you’re too drunk, or hung-over, or you don’t have any ideas, write about whatever it is that’s keeping you from writing. Today, for me, as I will explain shortly, that would be history.

History. It's like belly button lint. It happens when you aren't looking. One day you find a bush baby nesting in your tummy dock. You had previously forgot you had a tummy dock. Next, a strange glib man you've never met before is an expert on your belly button lint and he's teaching a course on it at the U. You audit his course without notifying the bursar and find out your lint was originally funded by the CIA as part of Operation BAJAX, aimed at world dominance, one belly at a time. Knowing this, or thinking you know it, never seems to make any difference to your life.

And yet, history, whether it's true or not, does affect you even when you can't use it to your own purposes. That's because history is about more than the truth of what really happened. It's about myth. Myth is a living agent. You don't use it; it uses you.

Myth comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “story telling,” but connoting “horse hockey.” Poets, like Homer, often tell historic myth. Seattle poet and editorial committee colleague Stan “Rail-rider” Burriss frequently illustrates his points at the committee table by reciting a history of Real Change. “It's like a dozen years ago when Tim Harris rode the rails into town with nothing but the shoes on his back, a song in his pocket, a computer strapped to his head, and 10 hungry kids tied to his toes. But Tim had a vision. Writing on the backs of unpaid bills in a cold wet cellar, and using his computer in some magical way none of us will ever understand, he pasted together the first Real Change, which he sold out of a friend's garage in downtown Seattle.” These tales usually introduce a motion to use the word “human” in a sentence. They also provide Stan with an opportunity to say “speaks to all of us,” again.

Pretty soon, though, people catch on to what the poets are up to, and they start to employ all the poets at writing satires and sit-coms, precisely to keep them from telling histories, because they only make crap up. People begin listening to the survivors of the history rather than the rhymers of it. Since the survivors are usually identical to the winners, this accounts for the saying, “History is told by the winners.” The correct saying should be, “History is told by the still breathing.”

Even though the survivors tell a truer story than the poets, the resulting history is still myth. Contrary to popular myth, myth is not less myth because it's true. In fact the most powerful myths are the ones that are unassailable fact. In the phrase, “Tell it like it is,” the truth part is the “like it is” part of the phrase. The myth part is the beginning, the “tell it” part. The “tell it” part is an essential component.

“So, Wes, What are you trying to tell us?” I'm trying to tell you I didn't accumulate the usual pile of news stories to comment on this morning because I spent all last night jerking around with the Real Change History page, a work in progress begun by Tim Harris on the new Real Change Wiki. There was a lot of stuff in there that spoke to me, stuff wrapped up with Real Change like homelessness in Seattle, homeless activists, and advocates. I was moved to speak back, because it was the human thing to do.

That's how it is with myth. It draws you into itself. As always, Stan is right, on the other side of my morning coffee.

Read About Sex Here

If you're like me (and pray to your favorite power source you aren't) you like to sit all day. And when you sit all day staring at a computer, like I do, you get tired of it just sitting there staring back at you with the same cute kitty picture in the background, or whatever. So you push buttons and try to make the screen do stuff.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the things I make my computer do is fetch news stories for me. This is how I, a man who hates to leave his chair even to collect free food, came to know a while back that a rooster in a town in New Zealand was suspected of carrying a bomb. I did not go to New Zealand. I simply read about it in a newspaper story, which I found on-line. I think I had googled "New Zealand terrorist chickens" during an extreme boredom fit. Or some such thing. ("To google" = "to use the Google internet search engine.")

This morning I did something similar. I tried to google "Downing St. Memo." I expected that a story of the magnitude of the Downing St. Memo story had been written up thousands of times, as would be revealed when I searched Google News from among their more than 4000 news sources. But only 27 stories popped up.

Let's put that into perspective. It has been less than a day since Russell Crowe threw a phone at some guy, and the story of his arrest has already appeared in over 300 news outlets.

So, I thought, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. The Downing St. Memo isn't really a memo at all, I thought. It's actually the official British Government minutes of a secret July 2002 British Government meeting called to discuss secret talks between a British representative and the Bush Administration in April of that year, concerning Bush war plans for Iraq, proving that he lied for months to the American people about his intentions, I thought. So I should drop the word "memo" and add the word "minutes", and google the phrase "Downing St. Minutes."

For just a few seconds it looked as though I was making progress! Instead of only 27 stories I found a whopping whole 49! A stunning improvement! Then I looked at what stories I really got and found that all of the new stories I had picked up were sports stories and one from something called "Boston's Weekly Dig" which had an article on 74 Things to Do This Summer. Number one: "Get drunk at Fenway Park." The word "downing" appeared in a passage that discussed the possibility of downing gallons of cocktails in the company of hairy gay men, the event described as "running with the bears." "Minutes" referred to minutes on a ferry boat ride, presumably also spent getting drunk.

OK, eventually Anitra "born to google" Freeman showed me that I needed to spell out "Street," finally getting me just under 500 hits. But, this is for a story that's had over a month to spread.

Googling "Michael Jackson trial" netted 13,300 hits! Even a story as recent as the coming out of Deep Throat got me over 5000 hits, and that's after googling "Mark Felt Deep Throat," rather than just "Deep Throat."

What does it take to get the world's press to take a story seriously? Evidently only six things matter: Sex, booze, sex, celebrities, drugs, and sex. Michael Jackson's trial has at least five of them. The Russell Crowe story has two of them (if he wasn't drunk that would be news), while writing about the Deep Throat story confers license to write "Deep Throat" over and over again, so there's your sex, sex, sex.

Question: Why does everybody know about Abu Graib and almost nobody knows about the Downing St. Memo? Answer: No one was naked at the Downing St. meeting.