Sarah Palin and Sponge Bob in 2012

Here's a picture of our neighbor's truck. His Bush/Cheney '04 sticker makes me sad and mad every time I see it (we go to work and come home at about the same time). And I noticed this morning, when he stopped at the little neighborhood cafe, that he has a brand new sticker:

This guy, not the Bush/Cheney/McCain/Palin neocons, not the economy or climate change or immigration, is THE top problem in America. We have the power and the wealth to become a pretty cool country ALMOST OVERNIGHT if half of our people weren't morons. The average American car sits unused 22 hours a day and the average American commute is 16 miles. GM had a production ready electric car in 1999, the EV1, yet after testing it and leasing out about 1,000 of them, they took them all back and crushed them and sold the battery technology to Exxon/Mobil. The drill-baby-drill mentality prevailed.

I do, however, realize it's not that simple. I've finished Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father, and I'm halfway through his second, The Audacity of Hope, and I'm learning from him that by focusing on what tears us apart rather than on what binds us together, "conservative" and "liberal" adversaries push one another to extreme positions.

I'm actually kind of a Republican at heart, and I do understand where these guys are coming from. If we "liberals" were given free reign, the world we'd make might not be a utopia at all, but more like a communist nightmare. Capitalism works great when you have a gigantic almost-virgin land mass you can rape, while communism seems to go very, very bad very, very quickly no matter what.

But now that the whole world is in peril, and since there are no more virgin continents to settle and rape (unless we want to make Africa the new America and kill off those pesky Africans like we did the Native Americans), we Americans really need to find a brilliant amalgam of capitalism and socialism. There are literally millions of possible permutations of human economic activity possible, but it is morons like our neighbor who put it all in terms of only two choices, rather dead than red. And it is morons on our side that make a more socially responsible world seem so goofy, weak, and corrupt, e.g., teaching Ebonics as a real, viable language. Our neighbor, who might have some valid insight about the potential horrors of socialism, digs his heels in even more and becomes almost clownish in his politics.

On some level he knows that his new Palin sticker makes him look stupid. But just as rap and hip-hop music have made the ghetto (a sad and tragic place if there ever was one!) seem cool, somehow, with the popularity of shows such as "Jackass," "Sponge Bob," and "The O'Reilly Factor," STUPIDITY has become cool!

This neighbor is unteachable. However, if he had to experience terror and extreme physical hardship due to the policies of his capitalist masters, he might completely change his tune. He may soon have the chance to go through just such hardships, thanks to his voting against himself (and against me and my children and you and yours) during the last few election cycles. If I sound a little self righteous, it's just that it's very hard for me to abide people who think it's OK to hog the supplies on a lifeboat, that they're somehow better than the other passengers, especially when they call themselves "Christians."

Can You Believe This Bumper Sticker?

A few days ago I saw this bumper sticker on the back of a Corolla in Dixon, California, and took a picture of it. You may ask yourself, "How could such a sticker exist?" The short article below offers a possible explanation.

America the Illiterate

By Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. 

Read the rest of the article here! And please leave a comment for me by clicking the "comment" link below.

The Jerry Springer Show

I had a good letter published today in my town's newspaper. (I live in California and my town has 145,000 people.) They kind of messed it up by leaving out a key paragraph about Sara Palin. And they changed "a million" to "millions" regarding deaths caused by the American occupation of Iraq, which kind of blows my credibility all to hell. But still, it's a pretty radical letter and I'm happy they printed it. If you are interested, you can see the actual letter I sent them (scroll down past the scanned letter below)--the parts they messed up I've put in red. I hope by now everyone knows about McCain singing "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boy's "Barbara Ann."

Click on this scanned letter to make it much larger and easier to read:

Dear Editor,

We have a simple binary choice to make in less than two months. We have the power to win what is potentially a huge military victory without firing a single shot or spilling a single drop of blood. Thanks to our Founders and our American ancestors, we have a system in place that will allow us to stop a potentially devastating enemy of America. We have the power to stop a national emergency much bigger than Hurricane Katrina from happening. We can stop McCain from becoming president by simply voting for Obama (the only password, like it or not, that can be keyed in at this point in time that will prevent the McCain virus from running). 

That is the task at hand. Since statistically it's obvious that McCain can easily win the election if we don't get enough people out to vote for Obama, then this simple understanding of reality points to where our focus should be. 

The choice of Sara Palin as future VP by the government that has broken our army, robbed our treasury, and destroyed our alliances throughout the world shows just how blatantly disrespectful the Bush/Cheney/McCain neocon government is towards We the People, especially disrespectful to the Republicans whose votes they expect to win. 

In this bizarre episode of the Twilight Zone, we are sitting in a studio audience watching the Jerry Springer Show, when the strangest thing happens. Everything outside the studio where the show is being taped turns into the Jerry Springer Show as well. Our whole nation becomes the Jerry Springer Show. But instead of lasting for a half hour, this special episode combining the Twilight Zone and the Springer Show lasts for four years, and millions of people get killed. Bush's illegal, costly, unending occupation in Iraq has resulted in over a million deaths and over five million people driven from their homes and home towns plus hundreds of thousands of orphaned children. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! How many people will McCain/Palin kill in our name when they bomb-bomb-bomb Iran?

Sincerely,

Jeff