Pretty bizarre to hear McCain complaining about the media and how they treat him. It’s kind of like grousing about your family or your best friend. For chrissake, they freaking love the guy. Why else would he be running nearly even with Obama in the polls? His campaign is amazingly flat-footed and visionless, he gets details (Czechoslovakia, for instance) wrong repeatedly, he has yet to demonstrate any awareness of our economic crisis, and he thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan. Speaking of Iraq, he has been as phenomenally wrong and boneheaded as the administration he has so frequently embraced. His pronouncements about the “success” of the “surge” reek of desperation, like an arsonist telling the judge he helped put out the fire he started after the building had already burned to the ground. The mainstream press challenges almost none of his positions, blithely passing along the campaign fiction that he is an expert on foreign and security policy. They hold him responsible for neither his words nor his work as a senator. And yet he complains – go figure.

Part of what the press is doing here reflects their usual subservience to power (something that puts them in the same boat as McCain). Those who hold economic and political sway over national affairs would prefer to see McCain elected, and so the press rides along. (If the Earth were taken over by space aliens, I’m sure the press would serve them, too.) but another component of their somewhat forgiving attitude towards McCain is a reflection of the general lack of an effective opposition party in the United States – one made up of working people and the poor, consistently representing their interests in opposition to corporate power and an expansive (and expensive) American empire. The liberal-left in this country has given ground on issue after issue, conceding where no surrender was necessary. They’ve allowed the right to canonize Ronald Reagan and, by extension, his disastrous policies. They let reactionaries re-write the history of the 1960s and 70s into something utterly unrecognizable to anyone who was alive then. Small wonder the press plays along with the G.O.P. – the Democrats do, too.

One other thing. We live in a time when military service has become such a rare and exotic experience that politicians and the press are positively in awe of it, rhetorically speaking. When I was a pre-teenager, I was surrounded by people who had either been in the armed forces or were about three inches away from being conscripted. Today, very few middle class folks could say the same thing. As that experience recedes into history, McCain’s campaign can get away with ads like the “Summer of Love” TVC that appears to portray 1967 America as a nation divided between a) hippies who chose to stay home and party, and b) patriots who chose to fight for freedom in Vietnam (!). Spoiler alert: Those freaky kids they show – the young men, anyway – were mostly all on the draft rolls and probably self-medicating as a result of the terror of that circumstance. Not only was that situation frightening and dangerous, but those who were inclined to resist had almost no support. Today it’s not hard to imagine saying no to a draft (if any such thing existed). Back then, it was pretty much unprecedented. That’s part of what made those years so gut-wrenching.

Here’s my point. If the press doesn’t at least try to remind Americans of their own history, what the hell use are they?

luv u,

jp

A few weeks ago, we saw the Democrats cave on the revised FISA law, voting with the administration and congressional republicans on a bill that would grant the co-conspiratorial telecom giants retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits while underwriting Bush’s claim that the president can break pretty much any law any time he wants to (as well as spy on any of us who happen to communicate with people beyond our national borders – see Sen. Feingold’s appearance on Democracy Now! ). Now we can watch in disgust as the party of Jefferson caves on the question of opening vast wilderness areas and the continental shelf to drilling by the obscenely overfed oil companies. Clearly Harry Reid and company have one beady eye on opinion polls that suggest a majority of Americans favor this giveaway in the misguided belief that it will bring down the price of gas. When I say “misguided”, I mean actively so not only by a shameless political leadership but by an industry with more money than any industry has ever possessed in the history of this planet – money that buys a lot of misleading and utterly nauseating marketing about drilling “more respectfully” and tapping “the power of human energy.”

When I started seeing the airwaves saturated with this bullshit, I thought it was mostly defensive on their part. They were making ridiculous amounts of money off of us, fueling climate change, while we were losing our shirts… so the image needed a little burnishing, let’s say. Now I’m convinced this is more an offensive strategy. (Naomi Klein has talked about this a bit lately.) This lease deal is an enormous wealth opportunity for them, and they surely saw it coming. Continental shelf oil is well worth drilling for when oil is at $140 a barrel, so why not get the politicians to open up all those federal lands? They can build support by spreading the lie that drilling will reduce the price of oil. And the oil companies can buy all the influence they need, filling campaign coffers and hiring the best lobbyists in town, so enlisting our politicians’ cooperation (Republican and Democratic) shouldn’t be a problem.

Apologists for congressional Democrats who are leaning toward supporting increased drilling argue that they are responding to public opinion. But any public sentiment in favor of this policy is the product of some pretty serious demagoguery. Seriously… how hard would it be to articulate a convincing argument against drilling off the coast of Florida or in ANWR? For one thing, it will only benefit firms like Halliburton, which is already making a fortune off of electrocuting our soldiers in Iraq with their shoddy workmanship. And as Klein points out, this type of capital intensive oil production is already taking place on a massive scale in western Canada, which has become the biggest supplier of petroleum to the U.S. and one bound by NAFTA to provide us with oil even if it means sacrificing their own energy security. And yet, this massive supply of oil from a highly reliable neighbor has not exactly brought the price down, has it? Why should we think developing much smaller reserves off shore and in Alaska would make the slightest difference (especially when industry experts say it won’t)?

Fact is, the oil companies want the price high. That is, in fact, what makes these domestic leases particularly valuable – they’re not worth shit if oil drops below $80 a barrel. So… why aren’t Harry Reid and company saying that every day and twice on Sunday?

luv u,

jp

Okay, what have you got? Mildred… Fitch. Mildred Fitch, 1429 Mulberry Lane, Aurolias, NJ. Got it. Who’s next? Get… Get… Stuffed. Get Stuffed. And where does “Get” live? Up… my… HEY!!

Oh, hi. Okay, good enough, how are you? Great, great. What are we doing? Funny you should ask. We’re working on our mailing list. In fact, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and I were just compiling names when you logged on. Frankly, it could use a little work. We haven’t released a full-length album in almost nine years – that’s NINE YEARS to those of you who are hard of hearing – and our list has kind of gone to seed in the interim. Truth be told, we sent out a little teaser message to the folks on our 2000 Years To Christmas list, and it bounced back so hard the sucker hit me square in the face. (I think it loosened a tooth or two, actually.) It’s been a rough nine years on our constituency, friends, and a lot of them have moved on to bigger, greener pastures. C’est domage.

Okay, well… that experience was a little unnerving. So we took it up with our label, Loathsome Prick, and they put us in touch with their Marketing V.P., Gertrude Al-Kabar, who suggested (no… fairly demanded) that we build a new list. “What the hell,” I said, “most of our most loyal fans are beyond the orbit of Saturn. The post office doesn’t ordinarily deliver to rural routes in that zone.” She was, however, insistent on this point, and we decided to at least appear as if we were doing something about it. Matt took the opportunity to sit down with the two Lincolns and ask about their presidential campaign experiences, direct mail appeals, that sort of thing. (Not a lot of help there – in point of fact, they got into a fist fight. Something to do with Steven Douglas.) John and I spoke with Mitch Macaphee, but he has nothing but contempt for the social sciences and would never associate himself with something so crude as a direct mail campaign. (Now handbills he might agree to, but not direct mail.)

You get the drift. Once again, we are left to our own devices. So with nearly two names on our mailing list (call it one), one of which resides at our own address (man-sized tuber), we set ourselves to aggressively expanding our database… by swiping names from the phone book. Foolishly simple, isn’t it? Don’t know why I never thought of it before. All we do is send junk mail to people at random. In fact, that’s such a wildly adventurous idea, we should try to sell it to other bands. Hey, Coldplay! Hey, Captured By Robots! Here’s a great way to get heard by strangers! Send them shit in the mail! (Shouting across the internet? Another new communications strategy! Get Gertrude on the phone!)

Okay, so we’re pulling names at random from the phone book. And Marvin is getting kind of surly after an hour or so. Fatigue? I don’t think so. He’s a little sore about his credits on the new album. Marvin claims to have mixed no less than four of the sixteen songs on International House. I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, but… frankly I don’t remember who mixed what at this point. And what’s the name of the band again? Can’t say. Can’t … say….

Man, it has been a long time since the last one. We need more names, damnit!