Filoi mou!

Happy Ides of March, and welcome back! Haven’t seen you since Christmas. Boy, are my arms tired.

Springing forward, but when am I not? My life has become a perpetual motion machine, and no matter how many spanners I toss into its rackety maw, it never slows. I keep lapping myself, but I never catch up. To sleep, perchance, to wake and start over…am I meant for anything better than tattering at whims, than the dread of bills, than my thickening middle, than my Dayrunner pages, than the storm of dross that seems to flutter about me like the swirling snow that, it seems, will never come again, the Earth in a fit of fever that will not break…

Ah, me…as always. I came in like a lamb and I’ll leave like a dog, wet and sad, ears clipped, tail cropped, sniffing at whatever’s left, the junk heaps and recycling bins, the city asleep and dreaming of spring. I am an eighth of a ton, a density, a propensity. Spring will arrive, it will strain and struggle, it will press its hardest, but it will be unable to lift my heart. 

As my BMI soars and the fat around my organs chokes the life out of me, I am still the master of the poorly-drawn page, the illegible bon mot, and thus, brimming with piss, vinegar and sundry other fluids, I present my latest Homeric comic strip, Tales of Dietary Madness. It’s a howling wind, baby.

In diet:

http://www.oliosonline.org/Olios/stickboy/dietary_madness/stickboy_dietarymadness.html

or regular:

http://www.oliosonline.org/Olios/stickboy/dietary_madness/dietary_madness.pdf 

As always, should you wish to forgo the misery of my excessively-researched, naïve and tendentious rant against the glowering capitalist, war-mad storm about to destroy God’s green Earth, please click on one of the links above and whisk yourself away to the delight, the edification, the erudition, the knock-down, drag-out excellence that is Pretty Sure. I should be knighted, were I not already a princess.

For those of you unafraid of a little desperate, under-informed humanism, climb aboard! The water is lovely and, of course, rising…this is really long, and I’m sorry. It’s winter. I’ve been spending a lot of time alone, in my apartment. Wearing slippers. Vacuuming. Getting weird.

Did you read the news from Sydney, Australia, last month? The Australian Parliament apologized to the Lost Generations, the First Australians (also known as Aborigines) who, as recently as the 1970s, were taken from their families by the Australian government and raised in foster homes (up to 30% of the children of all First Australian families). In addition to the past violation of their families, the experience of many First Australians in modern Australia is one of poverty, illiteracy, abbreviated life expectancy, substance abuse and higher infant mortality rates than white and immigrant Australians. Sounds like home!

On February 13^th, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized, on behalf of the Australian government, to the Lost Generations. He stood before the Australian Parliament and told the Australian people of his and his party’s dream for the future of Australia:

“We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity…A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country…There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future. Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time. 

According to Phillip Coorey’s February 14^th article in the Sydney Morning Herald, “Building a Nation Together,” the current Federal Government of Australia and the opposition have agreed to form a “war cabinet” for indigenous policy: “Mr. Rudd set his Government the following tasks: to provide every indigenous four-year-old in a remote community with early childhood education within five years; to halve the gap between white and black Australia in literacy and numeracy within a decade; to halve the infant mortality rates within a generation; and close the life expectancy gap…”

“None of this will be easy, most of it will be hard, very hard,” Rudd said. “But none of it is impossible. It’s not sentiment that makes history, it’s actions. The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and elevate at least this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.”

This is nothing short of a victory for humanity and a victory for politics, in an era where both are perpetually abused and debased, the former often destroyed by the failure or success of the latter. It’s a tiny slick of hope upon a sea of devastation.

Imagine if an American president stood up before Congress, after much debate and deliberation, and announced the formation of a “war cabinet” to rescue our neediest, our marginalized, our suffering. Let’s use these terms as a blanket description of many American blacks, Hispanics, poor whites and Native Americans, and let’s review some current statistics – all of them disheartening, some of them harrowing – in a loose alignment with Rudd’s brief list of life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

According to The Economist, the US is the world’s largest economy, by GDP and by purchasing power. However, we aren’t among the top 20 nations for education expense as a percentage of GDP (Cuba is ranked first), nor are we listed among the 25 nations with the lowest infant mortality rates. According to the National Vital Statistics Reports (Vol. 47, No. 28), life expectancy for blacks is 70.2 years, compared to an average of 76.5 years for all Americans. Black men have a life expectancy of 66.1 years, compared to the national average for male Americans of 73.6 years. And what of our aboriginal population, Native Americans? According to 2006 data from a journal titled PloS Medicine, the average life expectancy of a Native American residing in South Dakota is 58 years. I don’t have the statistics to support my contention, but I doubt it’s much higher in the other 49 states. 

I don’t have all that much data with regard to “educational achievement,” but the bulk of my information concerns economic opportunity, which, as we know, is directly tied to education. We have become a country where the quality of your education is quite often dictated by your family’s income, its net worth and perhaps its annual property taxes. While it seems, for my generation, almost laughable to pound the pavement without a Master’s degree, in 2004 only 30% of non-Hispanic whites, 17% of blacks and 11% of Hispanics had Bachelor’s degrees (www.census.gov). Returning to The Economist, it seems we’re more excited about putting kids in prison than we are about putting them in college. We have the largest prison population in the world, approximately 2.2M incarcerated persons – we incarcerate about 737 people out of every 100,000, the highest percentage worldwide. According to Human Rights Watch, as of 2002, blacks and Hispanics are 62% of our incarcerated population, although blacks and Hispanics combined only account for 25% of the US population. But don’t worry, as soon as they get their possessions back and a bit of gate money, it’s straight to the Ivy League. 

It’s poverty, of course – (rampant capitalism, actually) – and its trail of union busting and offshore domiciling and environmental devastation and layoffs and overpriced benefits and untethered greed and utter disdain for basic human needs – that underpins most of what’s amiss in the US. As Donleavy wrote in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. “it is the rich what gets the prunes, and it is the poor what gets the shits.” According to Paul Krugman’s February 18^th editorial in The New York Times, “Poverty is Poison,” Lyndon Banes Johnson’s War on Poverty reduced the poverty rate for American children from 23% in 1963 to 14% in 1969. However, as of 2006, 17.4% of our children live below the poverty line. Today, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50% chance of remaining in the bottom fourth – almost a two-thirds chance if they’re black. Pretty soon, Save the Children and Plan are going to ask you to sponsor a child a few zip codes away. Bangladesh and Egypt? Fuck ‘em, we got our own problems.

What we often disregard when we discuss poverty in America is abject poverty. According to Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier of Poverty in America (http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/), in her 26 February 2007 article, “The Nation We’ve Become,” the population of Americans considered “severely poor” or “abjectly poor” has reached a 32-year high: “For a family of three, two adults and a child, the level of income is $6,922; for a family of four, $10,222. This level of poverty in comparative terms is only slightly above the poverty line originally set in the 1960s…in 1975 the severely poor were 30% of the population in poverty. Today a dismaying 43% of persons in poverty are severely poor by national standards.” In her April 3, 2007 article, “Only Those at the Top Enjoy Significant Income Gains,” Dr. Glasmeier writes, “in 2005 there was a very large increase in income concentration: the top 1% gained 14% in real terms from 2004 while the bottom 99% gained less than 1% (when including capital gains)…other than the top 1%, the rate of change for the rest of the nation’s income earners stagnated.” In other words, if you’re in the middle or, God forbid, at the bottom, it’s getting worse, and there’s no way out.

You can also check with the Bureau of the Census, which reported in 2005 that about 38.25 million Americans, or 13.3% of the US population, were living in poverty. In Economic Apartheid in America (2000), Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel of United for a Fair Economy (www.ufenet.org) parse the skewed concentration of wealth in the US: “…the top 1% of households now has more wealth than the entire bottom 95%...” Between 1989 and 1995, “the relative share of wealth owned by the bottom 90% of the population declined from 51% to 28%.” Chapter 1 of Economic Apartheid in America begins with a quote from author, jurist and Zionist Louis D. Brandeis: “You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.”

Those living in abject poverty of course include the homeless, of whom there are possibly 3.5 million people; 1.35 million of them are children, as families with children comprise about one-third of the total homeless population (the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007). The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans estimates that on any given night in the US, there are about 271,000 homeless veterans, and we want them to know they can count on our support. 

Returning to The Economist, it seems we are ranked first in the world in defense spending, with $495.3B in annual expenditure, about 4% of our GDP. Bob Herbert’s March 4^th column in the New York Times, “The $2 Trillion Nightmare” speaks to this absolute madness by highlighting the testimonies of Columbia economist (and Nobel Prize-winner) Joseph Stiglitz and Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Robert Hormats at the Joint Economic Committee’s recent public examination of the “overall costs” of the war in Iraq. According to Stiglitz, Social Security could have been “on a sound footing for the next half-century or more…for a fraction of the cost of this war.” Hormats reminded the committee of its own calculations from Fall 2007, which determined that the amount of money spent each day on the war is enough to enroll 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, to make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low income students via Pell Grants, to pay the annual salaries of almost 11,000 additional border patrol agents or to pay then annual salaries 14,000 additional police officers. Stiglitz, the author of The Three Trillion Dollar War (with Harvard economist Linda Bilmes), told the committee, “…this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits…by 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

We are a nation gone mad, it seems, destroying ourselves in the throes of a capitalist, war-mongering seizure. Greed is killing us, and you can be sure our sin will find us out. Our time here will be brief, with no promise of Heaven or return in some other form. You can only get so far. In the meantime, aren’t we all entitled to a house, a ride, hooded sweatshirts, wool socks, Jamba Juice all-fruit smoothies, Lexapro, clean water, arthroscopy, Bossa Nova, literacy, the last week of August in the Hamptons, B-complex vitamins, a passport, vaccinations…a shot and a beer? Shouldn’t every kid start kindergarten, regardless of where his parents or his single mother lives, with a guarantee of juice, cookies and literacy? A hot lunch and clean toilets? Doesn’t everyone deserve a level playing field, a real shot at the title, bright lights and a big city – maybe even more than once? Peace and prosperity? Fuck ‘em.

And what, or who, pray tell, will ameliorate any of this? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Let’s just put McCain in the White House and get this silly, Wolf Blitzer halftime presentation over with – at least we’ll be neither surprised nor disappointed when it’s another eight years of war, poverty and despair, of unabated obeisance to a master race of Chief Executive Officers. We’ll ransack the churches, replace every bible with a copy of Jack Welch’s Straight From the Gut. We’ll bring them death from the air. 

Coming soon, My Jewish Museum and Story Hour, among other stick figure delights, including Dogbert vs. Mothra. I am off to hell in a hand basket, and I am of course taking you with me. Buckle up – next stop, Sydney!

I know nobody reads this stuff: I’m not crazy, you know. But if you’ve made it this far, can you believe how brilliant this is? And you’re getting it for free!

omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. But why, always, for the worse? I am keeping my soul manicured, like a white man’s lawn. In the hope of…what? I’m nearly 40 and quite uncertain. A clean and peaceful death, perhaps.

“curtains drawn and everyone waits. for spring to blow the big grey clouds away.”

Donleavy. ibid.

no, no, it’s fine. I’ve been sitting all day.
Stickboy