Eugene Weekly : Views : 09.02.04

Anger Management

Get ready to grit.

BY DAN CARROL

George Bush accepts the Republican Party nomination tonight and I assume he will have a punchy speech with some forward-thinking ideas and a good sound bite or two, fresh from the focus groups. Also look for lots of talk about how it's "sunrise in America," in a thin retread of Ronald Reagan's 1984 Morning in America. In short, get ready to grit your teeth.

I definitely expect to be annoyed because when I really think about it, if it was morning in America 20 years ago, and now Bush is telling me it's still sunrise, maybe our country isn't moving forward — at all? I mean, shouldn't it be lunch or something by now?

I'll get aggravated no doubt, as Bush will claim credit for various things he calls reform, like his prescription drug program that rips off seniors and doesn't take effect until 2006. A big "grrrr" to that, with a special shout out to Ron Wyden for helping to make the Medicare Mislead possible with his misguided vote last December.

Let's not forget how flummoxed and frustrated I'll feel if Bush actually does something inspiring and hopeful, like call for a national youth corps or something that invokes JFK or another famous Democrat, another old Reagan trick. A big Homer Simpson "doh" will fly from my lips if he pulls this off — or should he dramatically dump Dick Cheney for Rudy Giuliani or John McCain.

Boy oh boy, that will sting.

However, because I am a "think ahead" kind of guy, I have invited a bunch of friends to my house tonight so we can commiserate in a group rather than seethe alone. But we'll also be doing more than getting angry — we'll be signing up to get busy in the weeks ahead.

As for you, well, sorry, you are not invited to my house. Maybe another time. But if you're still reading, I do have a bit of advice about how to harness your anger effectively. And I can name that tune in three notes, rather than 12 steps.

#1: Mantras to STOP saying to yourself

Do you find yourself muttering that Bush and his crew of draft-dodging chicken hawks like Cheney are shameless and scurrilous cowards who are nonetheless getting away with murder on this Vietnam issue … while shaking your head at how lame the Kerry campaign is responding …. or grumbling that the whole darn campaign is too negative on all sides, again?

Well, you're right — but none of this will change in the next 60 days. So anger management, step one, is to lose this mantra.

#2 Hit the road instead and have a little fun

One of my favorite people is Jim Hightower, and one of his favorite slogans (coined to launch a new grassroots Chautauqua movement a few years back) is "we've got to put the party back in politics". So if you are feeling grouchy, why not take a ride north on Sept. 18th and hit either Farm Aid (just outside Seattle) or Punk Voter's Rock Against Bush Tour, launching in Portland the same day (www.punkvoter.com).

If you have more time to spare, check out www.drivingvotes.com. It's a cool site serving as a volunteer ride board for folks who want to band together and organize in swing states.

But don't forget there's plenty of essential work to do here at home.

#3: Peer to peer politics

Study after study shows that face-to-face, door-to-door, retail politics is the new coin of the political realm. So invite your friends over to get busy — and get how-to tips on holding house parties at sites like MoveOn's www.greatpublicschools.org.

Your house a bit too messy for guests? Talk to your neighbors instead. But don't come empty-handed; bring your own documented research in support of the candidates and issues you care about. One group, The League of Independent Voters (www.indyvoter.org)will soon launch a nifty "make your own" voter guide kit online for do-it-yourself canvassers. Expect similar fodder from my pals at the Oregon Bush Project in the weeks ahead. Don't worry about having cute graphics when you make yours — worry about sharing the best facts and the arguments.

Besides your reasoning for "Not Bush" and "No Sore Losers, Vote Kitty," don't forget to include your brief recommendations for how to vote on those nasty, hard-to-explain-let-alone-understand initiatives on our state's ballot. As I recall, most of the measures this year are numbered in the 30s (35, 36, etc.) and would take us back to that era — the 1930s.

Pinko Black Oregonian

Few of us know what we really are.

BY JERRY HARRIS

I'm no political animal. If there were an election for water meter reader I would lose hands down — and that's the truth. But my friend Richard disagrees. "It's not true. What you call non-political is nothing more than your pinko Oregonian views," said Richard at his home in Mountain View, Calif. He is a George Bush black Republican and every summer I visit him and his family. If one didn't know him, one might think that he had an exiguous mind — not at all. He just hates Jessie Jackson liberals.

"So, how are those tree huggers up there in Eugene doing?" he asked me.

"I think that they are using the birds to send subliminal messages to George W," I said.

"Just what I thought," replied this old buddy of mine.

Richard and his Portuguese wife have four children. One son is in college and the other just joined the National Guard, taking special training so that he can save our troops behind enemy lines. "So what do you and the Eugene peace brigade think about the war?" he suspiciously asked me.

"Well, my friend, if I really thought about this war, I would turn pink, or pinko if you like, but I'd rather enjoy a corned beef sandwich."

"You're passive man and have spent too many winters in Sweden."

"Yeah, you're probably right again."

"It's too bad that you never went into the Army. It would have been good for you."

"Well, Richard, I am too tired to get into that. It was a long trip down from Eugene. I'll see you in the morning."

"OK, but if you can't sleep, here are a couple of books you should read." The Art Of War for Executives: The ancient wisdom of Sun T'zu's classic text — interpreted for today's business leader. The other one, Basic Economics, A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell, the conservative black economist. I'd read later.

As the days passed in the California sun I wondered how this new label — the old Joe McCarthy one — would stick in Eugene. I had enough problems in the Emerald City just being a black man, whatever that is. We spent the Fourth of July with friends of his wife. They were a couple that managed a condo in Los Gatos.

"Isn't Eugene the city that has all of those anarchists?" asked my female host.

"No, they only have one resident anarchist, John Zerzan," I said. It was funny I thought — little Eugene is perceived as an anarchist cell.

It's quite different down here in Silicone Valley where a snow cone will cost you a fortune, and the only anarchists are the young ones at Google shooting down buckets full of dollars. "Bobby Bonds lives right up the road," said Richard as we drove from Los Gatos back to his home.

"God, will you look at that! There must be 20 of them living in there," said Richard's wife, Sid, as we drove past a house in the barrio. They were Mexican workers hoping for a piece of the California peach pie.

"Hey Rich, turn on the TV," I said when we came into the house.

"I guess you watch PBS?" asked my homeboy.

"Every day dude. Where's the beer?"

I sat there watching The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "Man, how can you watch that bullshit?" asked Richard. "And I bet you read the New York Times too, and all of that pinko garbage."

"Sometimes I do, but I also read Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper, The International Herald Tribune, the Times of London, and Die Welt.

"Good night Mr. International. I'll see you in the morning."

I knew that I was bugging him. We both knew that we could only do this once a year. I was having a ball with all of this Eugene pinko business. The closest that I've come to meeting any pinkos (and certainly not any black ones) in Eugene were old hippies hanging out at Max's bar, or Taylor's around happy hour — gulp! Pass the weed, dude.

Calling me pinko black or whatever, as the young say, brings me back to this name game, which is amusing but fundamentally irrelevant: One is defined by what one does. The kids at John Henry's are called Goths and they don't seem to be doing anything but having fun. The "happy" hour crowd at other downtown watering holes are called boozers — nothing wrong with that except that they are anything but happy, and sometimes when I am drinking in those bars I feel like I am trapped in a lunatic asylum filled with catatonics, obsessives and friends of Jerry Springer. Few of us know what we really are; most of us present a persona to the world. We are all, in a sense, actors. This is quite evident in Eugene.

So ends the summer that I called red hot.

Breaking Three Hearts

Part III: Public ownership

BY MARY O'BRIEN

I heard Laura Bush talking recently on public radio about how she enjoys restoring native grasses and flowers on parts of the Crawford, Texas land she and her husband purchased in 1999. She said country in that region of Texas had been damaged historically by livestock grazing, so recovery is slow, but promising.

"There's something in a way that is reassuring about being outside," Laura Bush told NPR, "and that is … that all of us, everyone who lives here on Earth, has this beautiful Earth to live on and to seek solace with when we're outside."

The irony seemed to escape her: Her ranchmate is actively degrading the public's solace in similar Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands throughout the West by slashing public input into private livestock permit holders' practices; bulldozing oil, gas, and mining leases past community objections; and encouraging nightmarishly increasing webs of off-road and snowmobile industry-spawned routes. Not surprisingly, Terry L. Anderson, Bush's public lands advisor, is principal author of a Cato Institute Report titled "How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands."

Privatizing public lands is the tip of the iceberg. My Aug. 18 Google two-word inquiry, "Bush privatization," yielded 188,000 entries. Scrolling through the first 30 or so newspaper articles, analyses, and reports produced an astonishing diversity of Bush administration initiatives for privatization of Social Security, half of all federal jobs, Medicare, welfare, government information, Iraq, Latin America, interrogation, prisons, water, the military, and public schools.

Presumably this is what Bush is referring to when he promotes the concept of an "ownership society."

"I understand," Bush has stated, "if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America."

Bush figures he doesn't need to say the word "private" in front of the word "ownership." He assumes it. One heart of America he intends to break is public ownership, the only ownership that includes all Americans as partners with an equal stake in America's future. When public lands, education, information, military activities, health care, welfare, prisons and water are privatized, they become the property of corporations and individuals and are effectively lost to public oversight and governance. Loss of public governance is the loss of the single most vital stake in the future of America: it is the loss of democracy.

It's not that the Bush administration is against all public ownership. National debt; corporate bailouts (e.g., of savings and loan institutions and airlines); industry subsidies (e.g., for public lands logging, cattle grazing and mining; tobacco; sugar); and war tabs will surely continue to be owned by the vast majority of the public. But this is the ownership characteristic of feudal serfs, not of a public, self-governing society.

Given that the top one percent of American households own almost 40 percent of the nation's wealth; the top 10 percent of Americans own over 70 percent of the nation's wealth; and the bottom 40 percent (i.e., almost half) of households own 0.2 percent (one-fifth of one percent) of the nation's wealth, privatization of public assets would be expected to accrue in the same proportion. The Bushes, Gates, Enrons, and Halliburtons are gaining; 90 percent of the rest of us are losing.

Ultimately, the problem arises from the fictional constructs that any physical action can be "private" (i.e., without public consequences) and that Earth can be privately "owned" by individuals of the human species simply by amassing a lot of human-invented money. Private ownership tends to float free from social and environmental objectives such as affordable water, power, health care and sanitation services; worker safety and dignity; bus service in poor areas; freedom of information; protection of native biodiversity; and broad access to courts, quality education and natural amenities. Witness Laura Bush's delusion that all of us, everyone on Earth, has beautiful Earth in which to seek solace, right outdoors.

Laura's husband is correct: If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America. After the past four years of Bush privatization, fewer Americans now own something; and after four more years of a Bush administration, a lot fewer will own something, including their government.