Down With The Lifeless*

[* Lifeless = Dead, NOT Tired.]

More and more laws now target the homeless. There’s the Las Vegas ordinance that prohibits feeding anyone who even looks homeless in public parks. There’s also a Sarasota law that lets non-homeless people sleep on public land if they’re neat and tidy and don’t dig holes, but makes it a crime for homeless people to do the same, no matter how good their behavior.

These laws are based on the governing principle that even if we can’t get rid of the homeless people we have, we can at least make them miserable in order to make examples of them and so discourage others from joining them.

As always, the organization behind this gutless, bleeding-heart, liberal rag is so opposed to such laws that I wouldn’t dare support them in this column. That’s why I want to change the subject and talk about another class of wastrels out to get a free ride at the public expense: the lifeless.

It’s time we decent, hard-working, voting, living people stood up to bone-headed, do-nothing liberals who always want us to mollycoddle lifeless people and who constantly apologize for their good-for-nothing behaviors. Or, I should say, non-behaviors. That’s the trouble with the lifeless: they’ve taken non-behavior and turned it into high art. You could call them “ne’er-do-e’er-agains.”

Come on, people, do you really buy the liberal line that lifelessness is almost always involuntary? These lifeless people may not enjoy being lifeless now that they’re all up in it and they’ve found out it means they can’t watch Survivor anymore, or eat pâté de foie gras, but I guarantee you, every last one of them got that way by means of their own bad lifestyle choices.

Even if a lifeless person is housed underground and out of sight, it still sickens me to know that I’m living in a city that lets them lie about in padded boxes every day and all night too, never lifting a finger to help themselves or to contribute to society. They may not be watching TV, shooting heroin in front of my kids, or taking up space on my sidewalk, but they’re sure as hell also not taking baths, working, paying taxes, or making America great, like the rest of us do.

Oh, wait; they do pay taxes, don’t they? For now they do, but they won’t be paying taxes when those liberal do-gooders, George Bush & Company, get their way. Here’s a population that pays not one cent of income tax or sales tax, and George Bush and his buddies want to relieve them of the one significant tax they do pay. Why? You know perfectly well they’re not going to use the break we give them to pull themselves up out of the holes they got themselves into. They’re not even going to use it to fly themselves to France and get out of our lives.

I first realized what a drag on society the lifeless could be a few years ago when comedian Bob Hope became lifeless. Instead of presenting him to our children and our feeble-minded as an example of how far a once-good man can fall, our liberal media spent an entire week praising the man and giving his current condition a complete pass. Sure, he was a great comedian years ago, but now he’s lifeless, and whose fault is that? It sure isn’t mine. I didn’t tell him to get 100 and die.

What we need is a law like Sarasota has, for the lifeless instead of the homeless. Say a person who isn’t dead lies in a box and decomposes. That should be legal. But if a person lies in a box and decomposes because he’s incapable of doing anything else, we should fine that person $500 and/or jail them for 60 days.

That may not end lifelessness, but it would show our impressionable children, and our feeble-minded, that being lifeless isn’t “cool” and it isn’t going to be tolerated. And that’s worth doing.

Potatoes Don't Grow On Trees

Last week my copy of the American Civil Liberties Union 2006 Workplan arrived in the mail. Having experienced something of a windfall last year I had dished out some cash to the ACLU in order to fulfill a 13 year old wish to be a “card carrying member” of the organization, just like Dukakis. So now I’m on their mailing list, and by the way I’m also on the mailing lists of countless other organizations seeking money to correct societal ills, because for all their talk about rights to privacy the ACLU apparently doesn’t mind sharing my name and address with the whole world.

But I’m not going to whine (anymore) about that. After all, it hasn’t been so bad. The begs for money just fill my mailbox and there’s a wastebasket right below it, so I don’t have to carry them too far. Plus I find some opportunities that I appreciate. For example the NAACP offered to make me a card carrying member for a price that I thought was quite reasonable, considering that I could use the card for fun things, like convincing dumb people that I’m an honorary Person of Color. Oh yeah, and I like some of the work they do.

Of course you can join organizations without liking everything they do. Believe it or not, even though I’m on the board of this rag-plus-do-good entity, I don’t agree with everything they do. For instance, I think vendors should be able to get papers on Sunday. Or, to take a better example, I think I should be paid for writing this. I would accept the Calvin Trillin /Village Voice deal: one column, one baking potato. Taking into account the fact that Washington grown Russets are now hovering near 30 cents per pound and that single potatoes average less than half a pound, I think that would be eminently reasonable. But, “no, if we paid you a potato, we’d have to pay everybody a potato,” is all I hear.

Anyway, when I got my ACLU 2006 Work Plan out of my mailbox, Anitra Freeman was there. Ms. Freeman happens to be a Raging Granny, so she is under surveillance by the FBI for such things as singing parodies that might or might not hurt politicians’ feelings, wearing silly outfits, and lying down on city property, pretending to be dead. So she appreciates a lot of what the ACLU does, but when she saw my mail she complained “the ACLU doesn’t see homelessness as a civil rights issue.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” I thought. “Of course they do,” I thought. For instance they’ve fought LA’s version of a No Sitting Ordinance, not just because they care about the right of ordinary citizens to sit down on sidewalks, but specifically, they care about the right of homeless people to do so. Or, there are the lawsuits in a number of places to stop police from confiscating homeless peoples’ property. Or, there's work that could prevent homelessness, like lawsuits to stop wrongful evictions. A recent case took a landlord to court for trying to evict a battered woman. The landlord didn’t want her out because she was battered. He wanted her out because she called the police. She was supposed to just take it. So the ACLU got involved. So there, Anitra.

But then I read the Workplan itself and could not find homelessness addressed in all 8 pages.

Would it have taken too much ink to mention, somewhere among the ten paragraphs under the heading “Defending the Right to Vote,” for example, that the right of homeless persons to vote has been increasingly under attack in this country? How about mentioning somewhere that the work to protect the right of homeless people to their property is barely begun?

After that I set myself down with pen and paper to think of how many ways homelessness is a civil rights issue, and in two minutes I had two pages of notes on the subject.

Hey, ACLU, you could do that too.

Bored Silly

Looking on page two of this rag you can learn a lot of things. Like for instance that Real Change is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, that we don't consider publishing libel, that we have hotshot friends, and that in addition to being on the "Editorial Committee" I am also a Board Member. Or as we like to say, a bored member. Ha.

What does being a Board Member mean, you ask? It means a two hour meeting every month that almost always runs two and a half and feels like eight. It means sheepishly agreeing to man the phone banks periodically and then begging Anitra "talkmama" Freeman to go in my place. It means licking stamps. It means always having to be reminded which way is "in the red" and which way is "in the black." Port, starboard, port, starboard, how should I know?

It also means obeying the law. It turns out that Board Members have to not only NOT break laws themselves, but they have to keep the organization that they board legal too. What a pain! This is why, during Editorial Committee meetings I am always a dorky loser saying, "we can't say that."

Back before we got the 501(c)3 status we could endorse candidates. Those were good times. They would have been better if we really were high like people said, but we had fun anyway. Remember when I endorsed myself for mayor? If only there were a loophole in the law that lets us have that kind of fun again…

Maybe there is! I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and I have been comparing the situation vis-à-vis various other federal rules. Let's consider the Prohibition of Assassination.

When it was learned that the CIA had planned to assassinate Castro, Jerry Ford issued an executive order that said, "No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This order made no freaking sense whatsoever, since murder was already illegal, but Ford wasn't interested in making sense, he just wanted Castro to play nice in return.

But now George W. wants to say that Clinton screwed up by not ordering the assassination of Osama bin Laden when he had the chance, even though Bush himself didn't get around to modifying the Prohibition of Assassination to exempt Osama until Oct. 21, 2001.

What's interesting here are the grounds given for the exemption. One: we're at war. This justifies, apparently, not only murdering political leaders, but also murdering innocent people (AKA collateral damage) and imprisoning people (AKA enemy combatants) without trials, indefinitely.

Another reason that has been put forward is that Osama bin Laden is said not to be a political leader in the sense that Ford had in mind. They are actually saying that it is OK to engage in political assassination if the political figure in question doesn't rule over territory! The assassination by Israel of three-quarters blind quadriplegic Sheikh "not a real Sheikh" Ahmed "the Bomb-ed" Yassin has been offered up as an illustration of this new principle. He was leader of Hamas. Hamas wanted to control Palestine, but didn't. Ergo Hamas is not a government. Ergo the murder of Yassin, a political leader, is not political assassination. It is something else.

So there's the key. Maybe I can beat this 501(c)3 prohibition against endorsing political candidates by being very careful to only endorse people who aren't technically political candidates at all.

At first I was toying with the idea of endorsing a dead person. I've always had an appreciation of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. How about a Thomas/Debs ticket? (I'd put Thomas first to draw the youth vote. He's been dead less long. )

But now I'm thinking that any non-candidate will do, even if they're alive. And I was thinking, it's about time we had a female president.

For that reason, and because I feel like it, I hereby endorse Anitra "I'm Alive!" Freeman for president of the US. I have just informed her of my endorsement and she says she would like Alice Walker to be her running mate. So there you have it: Freeman/Walker. They're something else.

Second Happ'nin

Last year we here at Real Change celebrated our seventh year of putting out this rag. We did this for two reasons. One, any excuse for a party. Two, "seven" has Biblical significance. You've got seven days of creation, seven years of feast, seven years of famine, seven seals of the Book of Judgment, stuff like that. We wanted to plug in to that kind of action, 'cause the Bible is happ'nin.

Of course the feast/famine scenario did concern me at the time. I wondered what the next seven years could bring, given that the first seven went reasonably well. I thought, uh-oh, the second seven just likely may be reasonably rotten.

So far my fear has been realized. Seven years of Real Change was followed within the month by 9/11/01 and the ensuing economic downturn and social paranoia.

You'd think that as more people face poverty there would be more appreciation for those who have already been poor, but it doesn't work like that. You'd think that when someone earning, say, fifty thousand a year, has had to take a five thousand dollar annual pay cut, the hardship might help her/him identify with the guy who gets next to nothing on GAU, but NO. Instead, he/she blames the guy on GAU for the missing five thousand.

Many times this past year, lying awake at night, spinning the wheels in my brain, I have wondered what would have happened if all the victims on 9/11 had been homeless. Suppose, instead of flying planes into those towers, the same terrorists had managed to simultaneously bomb and obliterate twenty or thirty fully occupied homeless shelters all across the US. I hate to say it, but I don't think we would be in a recession now. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think we would be talking now about eliminating Saddam Hussein. I don't even think we would have attacked the Taliban or pursued Osama to the edge of the world. I think the general American public would have shrugged the whole thing off the way they shrug off famine in Somalia.

The good news: war with Iraq will probably only last a few weeks. The bad news: nothing good will be accomplished by it. Oh, some weapons of mass destruction might get destroyed, but only by means of mass destruction. An evil dictator will lose power, but the resulting turmoil will grow new evil dictators. The American economy will not benefit from the brief war; it will only serve to raise expectations in time for the November elections. In fact, if the war doesn't happen by November, it will probably be postponed altogether until 2004.

Don't get me wrong. Real Change itself is doing OK in its second seven years. But our environment has taken a noticeable turn for the worse. I wouldn't call it famine yet, but I wouldn't exactly call it feast either. Knock on wood.

So you all should understand why I haven't been too terribly eager to admit that this column just passed its own seven-year mark in August. "Anniversary? What anniversary? Look! Isn't that Osama bin Laden over there in the rugby shirt and jeans? (Columnist runs and hides.)"

Yes. I have been doing this for seven years, and the thought of that puts me in the mind to run away to Bora Bora. What could the next seven years be like? Will I again succumb to duck-licking? Will my muse, Cindy Holly, stick with me? Will I ever write in iambic tetrameter again?

Looking back at the last seven years is hard for me, because there are so few successes. OK, so we didn't end homelessness. I don't know how, but we screwed that one up. We also didn't end poverty. I kick myself every day for that.

On the other hand, we have had our victories. Or we can pretend that we have. For instance, this is the second column in a row in which we have used the word "happ'nin". But we are most proud of convincing the Seattle Times that "Dilly Dally Alley" was an icky name for their comics page (see "induced retching", this column, May 16, '02.)

In seven years, the Times comics page. In fourteen years, who knows? Maybe something pretty good.

News I Can Lose

So. Do any of you people out there read this paper? How about a show of hands?

OK then, what have you thought of that graphic at the top of page four, the News You Can Use graphic? What's been up with those guys? Why have they been reading the Dallas News all this time? What do you think they're up to? I think the guy on our right has been showing the other guy a personal ad he wrote about him. I think they're a hip, swinging, Texan couple. But we're in Seattle, which is nowhere near Texas, so why has the caption below them always said "Close to Home?"

Being on the editorial board of this august rag, I am part of the very body of individuals who has decided each two weeks to continue using the graphic of the hip, swinging Texan guys. I would in fact be the individual who insists most loudly that we keep it. I think the hip, swinging, Texan guys are cool. But the voice of Dissent grows ever louder with each issue we print. The voice of Dissent will eventually get her way, if not in this issue, then in the next, she'll get so loud. So consider those guys history.

All of this must be a metaphor for my mood. After all, all events everywhere and at all times are metaphors for the moods of me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning. This particular event, the change of the News You Can Use graphic, is specifically a metaphor for my specifically current mood. I know this, because I am a Poet, and that's how we Poets are. This is one of the things I have learned from many valuable conversations with Cindy, Muse of Other, my Muse of Few Words.

I would be sitting around, just like now, with a deadline in two hours, whining that I didn't feel like writing. And Cindy would ask me what's going on and I'd tell her the first thing that would come to mind. Like right now I'd say that the graphic for News You Can Use is changing, and she'd say "Ah." And I'd say, "What do you mean, 'Ah'?" And she'd say, "So you've been reading News You Can Use." And she'd be right. What a smart Muse.

Of COURSE I don't want to write with all that depressing news tumbling down around me. Especially lately since we've been printing news from all around the US and Canada. Yeah, that's it. I don't want to write because the news reports I have to work from are getting too disgusting. I mean, I'm supposed to be lightening things up, that's my job, but how do you lighten up a fleet of Sherman tanks, you know? (I'm speaking metaphorically again. Get it? Sherman tanks are really heavy.)

Just to pick one example: last issue we carried a story dealing with the video "Bumfights: a cause for concern." The video is said to depict actual homeless people, "bums", engaging in drunken fights among other things, in return for such things as food and clothing. How do I lighten this up? Now you know why I'd rather go on about the Texan couple.

What we ran in the story was only a hint of how disgusting the video is. According to a report by the BBC, in addition to showing homeless people fighting each other, there are scenes of people induced to injure themselves, scenes of people pulling their own teeth out with pliers, others of a man ramming his head against walls.

Other homeless advocates have been condemning the video on the grounds that it exploits the people depicted. As an ex cab driver and former teacher, I know from personal experience that you don't have to be homeless to be exploited on this planet, and I worry a lot less about the condition of the "stars" of "Bumfights" than I do about the part of the public that considers such garbage entertaining. It's the ignorant, bored, brain dead audience that's most being exploited.

Well, that wasn't very lightening of me, was it? Still, I feel lighter for having raised the subject. I've gotten a Sherman tank off my chest.

Yo Military Tribunal Is A Finger

Being a member of the editorial board of this august rag, I periodically meet with other editorial board members to do editorial board stuff. For example the other day we all sat around a table eating pizza. But right now I'm thinking of a time when we were not only eating pizza, we were thinking. We were thinking about stuff that we could put in the paper.

Usually I'm not any good at that kind of thing, because I don't know anything. So I keep quiet while other people talk. But this time I had a cool idea. I said we should write about this military tribunal business.

Then one of our editors, Michele "Process! Process! Process!" Marchand, said something positive and encouraging about my idea. I think she said, "Why don't you write about that in your column, Wes?"

Unfortunately, now that I sit down to write I am high on Nyquil and my brain is telling me that what Michele said was "Why don't you stick your finger in a lamp socket, Wes?" This has triggered the following flashback.

It was just about forty years ago, 1961. I was 12 years old. My parents had hauled my ass to Guadalajara to live in an apartment building in the suburbs next door on one side to an escaped Nazi, and on the other side to some self-exiled former American commie. We were just there to take advantage of the inexpensive low standard of living. Eggs rancheros! Two cent bus rides! A free nacho with every martini!

But I digress. On this particular day, I was home alone, reading, when the light in the lamp burned out. So I unscrewed the bulb and got a new one. Then I thought, "Hey, I wonder what it would feel like if I stuck my finger in the socket?"

I probably wouldn't have even considered it for more than a second if I was in the US. I mean, we've got REAL electricity here in the US of A. But I was in Mexico where the electricity was probably made by rubbing a thousand balloons on poor people's heads or something like that. So I did it.

Don't try this in your own homes, kids. I stuck my finger all the way into that lamp socket. It immediately felt like a big whomping firecracker went off in my arm, concentrated in my elbow. My whole arm jerked violently, which was probably really good because it pulled my finger out so my finger wasn't fried. It just burned a little.

But the cool thing was that now all the lights were out in the whole apartment. So I went out to find the building manager, to get the fuse replaced. Then I found out that all the lights were out everywhere in our building. By the time I found the manager, he had replaced the burned out fuse, but it didn't get the lights on, BECAUSE ALL THE ELECTRICITY WAS OUT IN OUR WHOLE END OF GUADALAJARA.

The grid was down, and it stayed down for two hours! It was so awesome! And I did it all by myself with my own little index finger!

Of course I had to tell everybody how it had happened. And then after I told everybody about my adventure with the light socket, I realized I could be in big trouble. What if the Mexican police found out an American 12 year old was sabotaging the city electrical system? I could have experienced puberty in a Mexican prison, learning a Spanish vocabulary of a sort that would be of absolutely no use to me in a career as a botanist.

It occurs to me now, with the hindsight of forty years, that sticking my finger in that lamp socket was a mistake. Sure, it looked good at the time, and there were some thrills associated with it, but all in all it wasn't worth the risk, now that I look back on it.

And that's what I think we'll all feel about military tribunals, in a few decades down the road.

Homeless, Again

Hallelujah! I'm a Bum!

It's official. As reported last month I am a lazy jobless penniless homeless bum, again. Send your donations c/o this rag - send mountains of money - and I will promise to spend it only on beer and cigarettes, while I sponge off the system and camp out nightly, 'cause that's the way I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.

I have already received many sympathetic responses from well-wishers. For example Doug Hogsstutter, of Rat's Tail, WA, who writes:

"Dear Lazy SOB

I used to enjoy the high intellectual caliber of your monthly contribution to the Real Change, but since you were laid off last fall you do nothing but moan and whine. What you really need is a good swift kick to the stratosphere. But instead here's a poem that might `lift your spirits' -

Your intellectuality

Is disappearing constantly

Each day and night

Each word you write

And you already probably

couldn't end this poem for me."

You sure got that right, Doug - but thanks for that inspirational call to excellence. You have obviously been following my progress religiously!

Speaking of excellence, it's about time that I used this space to pay my respects to one of the great poets who inspired and influenced me during the malleable years of my youth. I am referring of course to Percival Dovetonsils, but as I don't have a poem to suitably honor Percy this month someone else will have to do. So let's see, who should it be? I want to be intellectual but I don't want to have to think too much - how about Dylan Thomas?

One flask of Scotch and a half hour alone later,

Camping Out on Fern Hill

An Homage to Dylan Thomas

Now as I am old and stiff upon the clover field

About the lilting dumpsite and happy as the grass is red

The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Also digs a root into my spine

And am I dumb to tell the dingle starry

And am I dumb to tell the synagogue of the ear of corn

When only the moon rages and the citizens lie abed

And have TVs at elbow and feet?

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head,

And pretend a rock is a pillow?