Putting me in the movies?

 

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

 

The rain stopped finally, although like a bad horror movie, the beast keeps threatening to reemerge. Dark clouds hover over the New York skyline like a bomb about to drop.

For some reason, I’ve been particularly nostalgic lately. I think it may be the year. Every decade I get the jitters on the eve of the changing decade, as if I expect something dramatic to happen, which always does.

Perhaps I’ve created my own destiny by delaying major decisions until the very last moment so that inevitably the turn of the decade has to mean change.

Since every year that ends with nine has meant some major shift, I live with the expectation that 2009 means the same and the hope that whatever change transpires will be less dramatic than events of the past – such as my joining the Army and becoming a hunted criminal in 1969, my going back to college in 1979, my meeting with and marrying my second wife in 1989, and my coming of age as a reporter in 1999.

This is all foolishness, of course, since every day of our lives involves change, and we simply attach meaning to things we wish.

I heard Spielberg is making another Indiana Jones movie.

So I wrote him to volunteer to take part – although I made it clear that I can’t sing, act or play a musical instrument.

Although hardly the best in the series, I liked the last movie.

But it has serious flaws in trying to make the Soviets into villains, when many of us who grew up during those times had too much right wing American propaganda to really take such a premise seriously.

Stalin was a monster – perhaps as big a mass murderer as Hitler was, but the social order wasn’t the same. At the roots of the soviet state was the legitimate belief that people could not be trusted, that something more powerful had to oversee some of the key decisions and not leave them to mass hysteria.

Hitler and Marx both got their basic ideas from Hegel, who distrusted the cult of the individual.

Hegel went too far, however, in presuming that leaders were immune to the moral obligations ordinary people had to live by.

Plato was closer to the truth in that he believed that good citizenship required a basic level of education. In America, all votes count the same even if the person casting them is ignorant, arrogant or misinformed.

The only problem with educating voters is who does the educating? Who do you trust to help enlighten people?

Certainly not me. I’m too biased, and too worried about what my immediate future will be.

Perhaps Spielberg will take my letter seriously and I’ll change into an actor, living up to that old joke about the guy asking the doctor if he will be able to play the violin after an upcoming operation and have the doctor say “of course,” only to get the man’s response: “that’s strange. I can’t play the violin.”

*********

A subway crash in Washington D.C. dominates the news this morning, chasing away for a time the complaints about the elections in Iran.

The internet has become a remarkable tool for spreading misinformation as well as information, and we often hide the truth behind sensational headlines, the way sidewalk card sharks hide the ace so that you’re always picking the wrong card.

We like to think we change policies when we change presidents, especially when we elected a new one from a different party. But in truth, the policies of the United States haven’t varied much from administration to administration for several decades.

The job of a president is to preserve the status quo – to make sure that the government does not interfere with the America’s most basic purpose, which is control of the world’s natural resources and production.

In this Obama is no different from either of the Bushes, but is more insidious in that he seems to reflect new policies.

He is merely a step back from the extreme, a band aid  over the gaping wounds Bush and his predecessors caused – and in some important ways, Obama and other American presidents differ little from the policies Hitler espoused, giving lip service to human rights when it is corporate rights they are most interested in.

People these days use “Socialism” as a dirty word, because it essentially undermines the basic principals of capitalism – as to say, greed is not good, and we should not be building a society based on humanity’s worst attributes of individual selfishness, but instead build a society that emphasizes the common good.

America is not and never has been about common good, and historically it has always used the same methods as Hitler did for removing unwanted elements. Instead of the state doing the dirty work, we get developers and others burning out whole neighborhoods and  corrupt officials turning a blind eye to private interests.

The concept of America ghetto differed only in that we put blacks and other people of color in them, and later, when those places became desirable again to the white community, we threw them out again.

The famous Rockefeller Laws allowed us to turn our jails into concentration camps. The famous CIA importing of drugs from the orient became a pipeline for controlling the population when the ghettos threatened to revolt. It is no accident that the riots in Detroit, Newark, Watts and other places mysterious ended with the mass arrival of drugs.

With the exception of Dinkins, the last four or five New York mayors have been totally focused on recreating the city into a playground for the wealthy, allowing rich whites to push out poor of every color from their homes.

Bloomberg and other urban mayors all have the same problem that the Nazis did: what do you do with the bodies?

The sad part is that many of those bodies being dumped out of their homes voted for Obama believing he would change the culture, when his real job is to make it seem as if America has become more humane.

In the end, rich still push out the poor. The only real difference is that we don’t employ gas chambers these days.

********

My Indian neighbors keep parking on my sidewalk.

This is a well-to-do family with about five cars of which they can fit only one in their driveway, so they park the rest on the street with two wheels on the walk to keep any of the speeding cars from scraping the sides.

My right wing friends keep complaining about the illegal immigrants that come to America.

I complain about the legal immigrants, the greedy who are coming from other places so they can take their piece out of the streets paved with gold.

Some Indian families move back to India when they have gathered enough money and education to help their families back there. But we get stuck with those who never get enough, who think they are so special, so above the rest of us, they park their cars half on our sidewalks.

We never get rid of them. They will join up with our home grown greedy jerks and help create an even more world-wide-despised America.

But I already can hear some people in India laughing, glad to have gotten rid of this bunch and the rest of their kind so they can walk on their sidewalks without having to worry about bumping into this breed’s bumpers.