Downsizing might be wave of future

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
-- NORMA DESMOND, Sunset Boulevard

Welcome to America 2009. Like it or not, we're on the verge of becoming the Norma Desmond of countries.

We've been living large for so long, and the bills are coming due. We've got our Hummers in the garages of our McMansions, and the kid from Domino's is about to deliver the 2-for-1 pizza special so that our chubby little kids can get even chubbier.

Where do we go from here? The CEO of General Motors basically got fired this week because he's the guy who took GM out of the electric car business in 1999 and put it into the Hummer business in 2001.

All together now -- "Americans don't like small cars."

That's true, but is it true because we like to live too large or because we are too large? Don't answer yet.

The 25-year-old son of a friend of mine is in the hospital right now -- without insurance -- basically because he caught a virus and the fact that he was about a hundred pounds overweight exacerbated its effects on him.

I don't want to be critical, but a 25-year-old kid who's 5-foot-10 should never weigh 290 pounds. I know he's working on it, and more power to him, but my son's friend is hardly the fattest kid in America. What's really terrible is that there are real kids -- 10, 11, 12 years old -- who look like they're mainlining Ho Hos.

If you're a family man with a wife and 2.3 kids, it's tough to fit them into a small car.

What drives me crazy is that we can't get any honesty from the folks who are leading us. There are basically two things everyone running for office -- left, right or middle -- are required to say. One is "God bless America" and the other is that America's best days are still ahead of us.

Now I'm not saying they're not.

I'm not that pessimistic. But what if, at the least, we have to adjust to a world of lower consumption, a world where we don't always supersize every order and where living in a smaller house or driving a smaller car might be more sensible.

Maybe we don't need to be quite so big.

Does politics really matter? Yes it does

I really wish I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about politics.

Even though I never cared for George W. Bush, I admired one thing he did when he first took office. Despite the fact that he had lost the popular vote, despite the fact that the whole Florida thing cast a major shadow on any "mandate" he might have had, Bush set out to govern as if he had won by a landslide.

He knew he wasn't going to get much out of the opposition, so he set out to do what he planned to do.

After all, our politics have been so toxic for the last 20-30 years that both parties spend more time thinking about the next election than about what they're doing in the current term. It's why President Obama can't get much Republican support; the GOP is afraid that if they help him accomplish things, he'll win even bigger next time out.

There have been many times I've been tempted to forget politics. When I named this Website, I intended to write about everything but politics. Unfortunately, politics does matter in our daily lives. I'm collecting an extra 13 weeks of unemployment checks because the stimulus bill passed Congress. So I can't say the stimulus bill didn't matter; my job loss in the catastrophic cuts by American newspapers in the last year and a half hasn't hurt me as much as it might have.

Admittedly, there are those -- Rush Limbaugh comes to mind -- who see what Obama is trying to do as anti-American, but it seems to me that unless you think the most important thing about our country is free-market capitalism, it's tough to make that jump.

French President Sarkozy thinks one of the priorities to be addressed at this week's G-20 meetings is reforming capitalism. I don't know if that will happen -- I sort of doubt it, in fact -- but when I see that 70 percent of American families are doing no better than just getting by, I think it's a question worth asking.

Our economy did pretty well from 1933 into the 1980s with a government-regulated free market. Plenty of folks got rich. I'm not sure that what we needed to do under Reagan, Bush and Bush was to repeal the New Deal.

So here's my question.

Is capitalism the most important freedom we have in America?

I'd love to hear what you have to say.

A serious search for a viable middle

Editor's note: About two years ago, on a previous Website, a group of 30 or so of us tried to put together a manifesto for what we thought would be a sensible start for a political party that would work for the betterment of society and protect the middle class. It's a little long, but I hope you'll read it.

There are times in history when groups established to further the aims of people either become unresponsive to those aims or inconsistent with the legitimate objectives they were conceived to pursue.

This has happened before, but few have become so distorted or misdirected as in the modern two-party system. We believe both the Democratic and Republican parties have been corrupted to the point where their only real value is to the large contributors who finance their operations and those who hold office under their banners.

We are convinced that while there are good people in both parties, the organizations themselves are corrupted beyond redemption and utterly unsuited to serving as vessels for change to benefit society at large.

It is because we as Americans are guided first and foremost by love of our country that we seek to find a middle ground where all men and women of good will can work for the common good.

We do this in the belief that in a successful political system, whether broken or healthy, no one is exempt from the effort to find common ground.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We recognize today, as Jefferson did in 1776, that men and women cannot choose to surrender these rights, and that as Benjamin Franklin said, people who would yield their freedom in hope of gaining security deserve neither. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens, but it must do so in a way that respects our rights as Americans.

We have no complaint with the American system. Our "experiment in Democracy" that began in 1776 is the wonder of the civilized world and an example to all mankind. It is only the ways in which our current political system perverts that experiment that we intend to change.

We know that the ability of government to solve problems is far from unlimited. We believe that while there are few problems for which government action should be the first option, there are equally few in which it should never be considered as an option of last resort.

First and foremost, America relies upon individuals and groups taking positive action. We admire those individuals whose priorities include personal sacrifice for the greater good, those who willingly share their bounty with the less fortunate and work to improve the lives of those people with whom they come into contact.

We believe that government must not stand in the way of an individual's legitimate drive to succeed, that intelligence, determination, hard work and the entrepreneurial spirit are all positive qualities that should be encouraged. But we also believe that no one succeeds more nobly than when he or she improves the lives of others, particularly those who are less capable or less fortunate.

We recognize that most Americans are neither so rich that they never require assistance or so poor that assistance is always necessary. Most people consider themselves part of the middle class, needing help at times and giving help at others. There should be no actions taken by the government except in times of dire emergency that hurt the middle class to benefit others.

We encourage the behavior commonly known as the Golden Rule, stated in one form or another in almost every religion known to man, that actions toward others are best when they are those we would not object to others doing to us. Human improvement, love, respect for others and sharing other people's suffering are qualities agreed upon by people of good faith everywhere.

We understand that religion is an important part of life for many Americans and we believe that government must never stand in the way of religious practice in appropriate situations. We are disappointed that government often becomes bogged down in attempts to prohibit relatively innocuous displays of faith that offend only the most fanatical and believe, for example, that Christmas displays not supported by public funds should be allowed. Yet we also understand that America is a nation of many different religions, and we respect whatever peaceful, life-affirming ways people choose to express their faith in God.

We believe America stands tallest in the world when it stands for American principles. Those principles include working peacefully with friends and allies, standing up for human rights and helping other nations improve the lives of their citizens.

We have no desire to impose our system on anyone, but we gladly encourage those who wish to emulate our freedoms.

We insist that our government perform its fundamental responsibility or defending our territory and borders from outside invasion, whether that invasion is for the purpose of damaging America or simply of entering the country illegally.

We believe that those people who come here from other countries seeking better lives must do so legally, but they should not be scapegoated for political reasons or used by unethical employers looking to keep the cost of doing business down.

We demand that our government make efficient, effective use of the money provided for national defense. We reject sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts and believe that the so-called "military-industrial complex" is often a counterproductive force in the critical task of national defense.

Public service is an honor, and a career in public service should never be undertaken as a means for enriching oneself. While we do not expect political figures and government employees to take a vow of poverty, we recognize that corruption has added dollars to the national debt and subtracted from the public's trust of the people who serve it.

We recognize that all Americans have rights stemming from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and we believe those rights should include basic health care, basic sustenance, basic shelter and the opportunity to get a free education that will help them compete in the modern world.

We hold no brief for those who have the ability to provide for their own needs yet choose not to do so, but there are too many times in recent memory that innocent children have paid for the shortcomings of their parents. That any children should go hungry, become ill or die because of lack of wealth is an abomination in a wealthy society.

We recognize that the problem of providing health care is a difficult one, and we believe that a society that spends one of every seven dollars on health care is dysfunctional in that area. This is a problem that must be addressed by people of good faith. As an intermediate step, however, we insist that no child be denied the right to basic preventative or remedial care, and that vaccinations and other such care be readily available to all Americans.

We know that our educational system has become dysfunctional and that too much money is being spent for purposes that are not productive. As parents and as community members, we demand that a way be found to better educate our children.

We believe that a system based on test scores only encourages "teaching the test" at the expense of other subjects and a system that discourages the natural desire of a child to learn is a complete and total failure.

We believe that bad teachers should be encouraged either to improve or leave and that good teachers, teachers who make children love learning, must be rewarded.

We accept that learning is a lifelong progress and we expect that our culture will encourage rather than ridicule that process. Although we respect the profit motive in entertainment and understand the goal of reaching the most people possible, we do not approve of a culture that exacerbates the problems of society and plays to our worst instincts as human beings.

We recognize that race should play no role as a determining factor in modern life, and that far too often, programs intended to encourage the integration of racial or ethnic groups into the mainstream have served exactly the opposite purpose. We encourage the efforts of immigrants to become part of the mainstream of American life.

We demand an end to discrimination, but believe that set-asides and most affirmative action programs no longer work. If such programs are to continue, they should be based economically rather than racially or ethnically.

Even those who argue for a limited system of government agree that the infrastructure is the responsibility of the government, and that one of the greatest domestic successes of the last half-century was the building of the Interstate Highway System. We have been living off money spent on our infrastructure in previous generations, and roads, bridges and tunnels from Maine to California are crumbling. We support a reasonable public works program to rebuild America for the needs of the 21st century.

We support a healthy respect for responsible, peer-reviewed science and are critical of those who attempt to twist facts to suit their political agenda. While there are certainly issues on which people of intelligence can disagree, not everything in this world is a matter of opinion. We support sound environmentalism and reject extremism on both sides.

We understand that both within our country and our world, there are a plethora of troubling issues on which Americans have not been able to compromise. Many of those are so-called "moral issues, and rather than take a stand on issues that really no have more than one side, we ask only that people come to their conclusions for reasons that exalt our common humanity rather than abase it.

We reject the politics of fear and hatred.

More than a thousand years before the United States of America was founded, a great philosopher was asked if there was one word that could serve as a principle for life. Confucius replied that the word was "reciprocity."

"Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."

We accept this as a guiding principle for our efforts, and it is in that spirit that we establish the Western Independent Party.

Anonymous is just so ... anonymous

I'm happy to see that there are people responding to these posts, even though I sometimes think I've come across some right-wing coven.

But never mind. I know some of you are just trying to make me argue more rigorously, and it's only a few of you who worship the ground on which Rush Limbaugh stomps.

My problem is with "anonymous."

That's how most of you label your comments, leaving me to wonder whether they came from someone I know, from someone I would like to know or from Karl Rove or one of his minions. Seriously, I can understand why you don't attach your real name. For all you know, I would wind up on your doorstep asking to borrow money.

But the way I set up the response thing is that you can make up a name. You can do the "Penthouse Letters" thing and call yourself Horny in Harrisburg or you can call yourself Angry Conservative, Dave in Dubuque or just Mom. It would be so much more pleasant if along with your thoughts, I could get some idea of who was sharing them.

The guy who called me "comrade," for instance. It would really help to know if he was the regional president of the John Birch Society.

Yes, yes, I'm kidding, and I would rather have you stay anonymous than not comment at all.

But think about it.

After all, what's in a name?

What if they weren't allowed to lie?

"Fairness Doctrine? We don't need no stinkin' Fairness Doctrine!"

Lots of folks these days are urging the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, which disappeared during the Reagan years and resulted in the growth of talk radio. They think if balance were brought back, the Limbaughs and Hannitys, the O'Reillys and Savages, would just fade away.

I've got a better idea.

It's fair, too.

I've got no problem with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity saying whatever they want, whenever they want. It's called freedom of speech, and it's important. But so much of what they say is so outrageously untrue, and there's no one on their shows to call them on it.

For example, Limbaugh always has enjoyed treating three different words as if they meant exactly the same thing -- liberalism, socialism and communism.

Of course they're not. Imagine how he would howl -- like a stuck pig, perhaps? -- if we treated the words conservative, authoritarian and Nazi as if they meant exactly the same thing.

Ditto with Hannity, who had Rep. Michelle Bachmann (I-Minn.) on his show this morning. (She's a Republican; the 'I' stands for insane, or for idiot, you choose). Bachmann told Hannity, and he lapped it up, that she wanted to lead an "orderly revolution" to keep President Obama and the Democrats from turning this into a "Marxist state."

Now of course there are some folks who feel that anything that detracts from laissez-faire capitalism is a big step toward communism, but realistically the worst that could be said about some of Obama's plans is that they are steps toward a European-style social democracy.

Foolks in Europe aren't oppressed. They just pay higher taxes and get more in return from their government than we do. They've bought into the belief that it's up to the state to take care of the poor, the infirm and the elderly.

But listen to Bachmann:

"This isn't a game. this isn't just a political talk show that's happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I'm going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind."

Now she's allowed to say that. She's also allowed to say, as she did during the campaign, that Barack Obama's friendships show that he hates America.

Even it it's completely untrue.

That's why I would like to see a Truth Doctrine. If somebody's on television, or on the radio, or speaking in public, they get hooked up to an electrical source. When they say something that's a blatant lie, like Limbaugh equating liberalism and communism or Bachmann saying Obama is a Marxist, they get a jolt.

With each further lie they tell, the jolt doubles.

They're got a choice, either to shut up or to tell the truth. I recognize that there are obvious obstacles to overcome. You can't put someone like me at the controls with Limbaugh. Whether he was telling the truth or not, I would enjoy seeing him jumping around and eventually crapping his pants way too much.

But put good, nonpartisan people in charge, and I guarantee you -- public discourse would improve tremendously. An awful lot of annoying liars would either start telling the truth or stop talking at all.

Both work for me.

Still fun to take my best girl to the movies

My wife Nicole and I had a fairly whirlwind courtship.

We met on Sept. 12, 1992, and on our first three dates we went to the movies. We saw "Bob Roberts," "Gas Food Lodging" and "Hero." The Geena Davis/Dustin Hoffman one, not the Jet Li one.

We went to the movies a lot back then, and at one point during a fight in our first year of marriage, my wife said to me, "I didn't want to get married. I just wanted someone to go to the movies with."

That's the kind of thing that happens when the wedding follows the meeting by only 51 days, but we have stayed together and are now in our 17th year of marriage. I don't have much doubt that we'll be together till death does that old parting thing. I love her, she loves me -- forever.

The only sad thing is that we don't go to the movie much anymore. In fact, I think we've been twice in the last year. We saw Meryl Streep in "Doubt" a couple of months ago and we finally got around to seeing "Slumdog Millionaire" Saturday.

We're sort of pushing to try and go a little more often, but it's tough. There are a lot of movies in which our tastes don't really coincide, which is mostly my fault. She likes intelligent movies that ask important questions, and I like movies with laughs, nudity or action, or sometimes all three.

"Slumdog" surprised us. We knew it was good, but I don't think we were expecting the level of violence and action in it. They also made a big deal out of 20 million rupees, but it was kind of a Lire situation, if you remember the old Italian currency; 20 million rupees is less than $400,000 American.

But nothing's perfect. We went, we had a good time and we'll go again soon if I can get motivated. It's not as big a deal as it once was anyway; our 37-inch HD television is pretty nice to watch movies on and I don't care where I am as long as I'm with her.

We'll see "Australia" tonight.

Earmarks aren't always wasteful 'pork'

Let's talk about earmarks for a few minutes.

Republicans are going on and on about how evil earmarks are in bills coming out of Congress, with former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twittering away gaily at how humorous some of them are. Of course the most famous earmark ever was former Sen. Ted Stevens' "bridge to nowhere" for Alaska, but not all earmarks are stupid and not all are pork.

Remember the Republican response to President Obama's speech last month, when Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal tried to ridicule the idea of volcano monitoring.

Bad move, Bobby. Governors who need monitoring for one kind of natural disaster shouldn't make fun of the other kinds. Volcanoes matter to the Pacific Northwest, hurricanes matter to the Gulf Coast.

The GOP had a lot of fun with an earmark that actually was cut out of the final stimulus bill; $150,000 for "honeybee insurance." Let's ignore the fact that $150,000 is chump change in a budget that measures in the trillions. It's probably less than the Pentagon budget for toilet tissue.

But let's think about those honeybees for a minute.

I know it's tough for Republicans, many of whom believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old and Jesus and his disciples used to ride dinosaurs to Sunday school, to comprehend real science. They seem to have no idea how crucial bees are to our ecosystem. Bees pollinate plants, making it possible for them to grow.

And plants ... food, right?

There seems to be a great debate over whether Albert Einstein actually said the famous quote that has been attributed to him, but a pamphlet distributed by the National Union of French Apiculture (a country that respects science) quoted him.

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!"

Whether you're aware of it or not, an amazing number of honeybee colonies have been dying for unfathomable reasons. Seems like spending about as much as Bernard Madoff would spend on a weekend in the Hamptons on studying the problem would be a pretty good idea.

If we spent one tenth as much on science as we do on tax breaks for people who don't need them, we'd be a lot better off than we are. As it is, we're stumbling along at a time when we ought to be racing ahead.

So yeah, there's pork in government bills. But just because somebody says something in a funny voice doesn't mean it's funny.

It just means they think you're stupid.

For we lived so well so long

"I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease ..."

I haven't always enjoyed Peggy Noonan's writing, but I seem to agree with her a lot more than I once did.

Noonan's book "Patriotic Grace" opined that we should all try to be a little nicer to each other, because all of us really are in this together. That's not the consensus either on the far left or the far right, where folks tend to think more about ovens, guillotines or firing squads for their political opposites. It is, I think, where most Americans fall, though.

Of course Noonan didn't write the lines that open this column; they're from the wonderful 1973 Paul Simon song "American Tune." But her column in the Wall Street Journal today sounded a lot to me like Simon in the late Nixon era. Titled "There's no pill for this depression," the Noonan column says basically that whatever "depression" we're going through right now is as much a crisis of spirit as it is of finance.



Simon's song -- which you really ought to listen to if you've got 4 minutes -- was pitch perfect for the way we felt in 1973, with Vietnam winding down, Nixon fighting to stay in office and economic stagflation that had lasted for three or four years by that point.

Yet now it's easy to look back on that period and think of it as the "good old days." Gas was still cheap, most of what we bought was still Made in America and the Reagan/Clinton/Bush attack on the middle class was just a gleam in some baby neocon's eye.

Of course I'm romanticizing it. Of course I was only 23 then, believing that possibilities still stretched out before me. But I'll tell you one thing. I knew very few people in the mainstream who worried that they would lose everything they had.

Noonan writes:

The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, "We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time." We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings.

I think she's absolutely right. We lived very well for a very long time, and we are coming to the end of something. I don't think it's necessarily the end of America or anything like that, but I think it may well be the end of the time when it matters what kind of coffeemaker you have or how many expensive pairs of shoes are in your closet.

I think we're coming to some sort of testing, a testing of not only our intelligence, but also of our guts and our hearts.

I pray we pass.

Some folks have forgotten basic civility

I don't know whether to pity Meghan McCain or to admire her.

Maybe I'll do both.

The former Republican presidential candidate's daughter went on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC the other night and talked about how negative some talk radio is and how that hurts the GOP in terms of its appeal to young voters.

Today talk radio struck back in the form of Laura Ingraham, who I had often found to be rather reasonable but lately has turned into Ann Coulter Lite. Ingraham went all out ridiculing McCain, calling her "just another Valley Girl gone awry" and referring to her as "plus-sized."

Of course that's PC-talk for "fat," and McCain is only fat in comparison to some of the Skeletor wannabes out there like Ingraham and Coulter.




First of all, McCain did something folks like Limbaugh and the rest of the talk-show crowd never do -- she put herself in position to be questioned by an intelligent liberal. Maddow is the new star of the broadcast left, and she is smart, quick and funny.

All she got from Ingraham was snark. Is there one right-wing talk show these days with a host that isn't mean as a snake? Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage -- they're all acting like a government in exile. They don't seem to get that the country rejected their brand of conservatism.

We ought to at least demand that they be civil.

Ingraham acted like a seventh-grader Thursday.

"She's f-a-a-a-a-a-t!"

Thanks for that contribution to the public discourse, Laura. Now eat a sandwich.

Are newspapers really dying ...

... or is it murder?

I don't read Time magazine anymore, but a friend sent me an article that coincided with the folding of the Rocky Mountain News, listing 10 other major papers that were in danger of folding before the end of the year.

It didn't surprise me that there were papers in trouble, but I was shocked by at least a few of the ones on the list. The Boston Globe, for instance. The Globe is one of the finest papers in the country, but it's reportedly losing $1 million a month.

The Miami Herald, for another, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Both are the dominant papers in their market and have been for a long time. When I see papers like that in trouble, I really find myself wondering if journalism has a future.

It doesn't help that most papers now aren't owned or run by news people. Big companies looking for big profits scarfed up a lot of papers in good times, when profit margins were running 25-30 percent.

Now that profits are down, and in some places gone completely, there's no sense of mission to keep them going. A newspaper losing money is just like a department store losing money to these people -- something to be sold or closed.

The San Francisco Chronicle, another disappearing newspaper, was the flagship of the Hearst empire for the better part of a century. I would have loved to have worked there; it was one of my dream destinations.

Now of course some will say that print media itself is obsolete, that with the Internet we really don't have to kill all these trees. Yes, I can read the news on my BlackBerry. It isn't the same, though, and they'll never be able to monetize the Internet as effectively as they did when they sold copies of papers. There are just too many people who believe with all their hearts that content on the 'net should be free.

So they'll survive in Web editions with much less revenue, which means fewer reporters and less investigative work. Fewer malefactors and miscreants will be exposed, and those who work in the shadows will have a much easier time of it.

I've said for several years that newspapers should not be operated as for-profit businesses anyway. Their constitutional protection via the First Amendment makes them far too important. Maybe it's time we got serious about finding a way to save newspapers before they're all gone.

Time for America to grow up a little

Why is it I have a feeling that if our Founding Fathers were to look at us, they would laugh?

Or worse, be ashamed of us.

We have become a country where the loudest voices tell the biggest lies, where much of our effort goes to protecting the wealthiest of us.

We have reached a point where something like one of every seven working people is either unemployed or underemployed, yet efforts to help them in any other way than discredited trickle-down economics is decried as "socialism."

Indeed, if you listen to the loudest of their voices, socialism morphs without difficulty into "communism" and "Marxism," as if the discredited, long-dead commissars of the old Soviet Union were running America.

Well, pardon me, but that is such a load of crap.

Economically, the middle class in this country is no better off than it was in 1972, when far more families lived on only one income. Individual debt is staggeringly high; too many people have bought into the "he who dies with the most toys wins" philosophy. Got a 37-inch HD-television? Hey, look at this 52-incher.

Meanwhile, one of every eight homeowners is either in foreclosure or more than a month behind on mortgage payments. Of course, we're more concerned about whether gays are allowed to get married.

And if you think this downturn in the economy will somehow even things out, don't kid yourself. During the Great Depression, the rich got a lot richer, picking up distressed properties for 10 cents on the dollar.

Ever since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the share of America's wealth controlled by the top 1 percent has increased. We're now at the point where 1 percent of our people control about 25 percent of money, property. etc.

Meanwhile, the "American Dream" of upward mobility, that any boy or girl can become rich through intelligence and hard work, has become almost impossible for many. George Carlin put it best when he said, "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Well, I think we could do with a little more socialism in this country. For all the right wing says about European socialism being a failure because their economies are 30 percent less productive, well, so what?

I think if you asked people in this country if they would be willing to have significantly higher taxes in return for guaranteed health care, free education for their children through college and an assured retirement, you might be surprised how many would say yes.

We are on the verge of a massive disaster in this country, the likes of which we have never seen. The Baby Boomer generation is approaching retirement, and it's a good bet that something like 70 percent are totally unprepared. Remember, most Baby Boomers will not have pensions. All they'll have is Social Security and whatever they've managed to save.

Quite a few of us have been counting on selling our houses for big profits to finance our golden years, but housing prices have plummeted the last two years.

What you're going to see is older workers staying on past 65 -- if they can.

The American Dream?

It's time to start creating a new American Reality, something we can do by shutting off talk radio and the screamers and realizing that we may not know the guy next door, but we are all in this together.

We need a little less Calvinism and a little more Socialism.

I'm beginning to understand how Ochs felt

Phil Ochs was one of the great singer/songwriters of the mid 20th century, a man who believed that his songs ought to say something and mean something.

He was a folksinger, seen by some as the poor man's Bob Dylan, and he killed himself at the age of 35 because he could no longer sing. I saw him at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., a couple of years before his death, and it was one of the most memorable nights of my life.

His voice was awful; he had been strangled in Tanzania in 1972, damaging his vocal cords. He growled out most of his songs, but the audience was packed with people who loved him and we kept calling him back for encore after encore.

I think it was 1974 when I saw him. I would have been 24, still filled with the enthusiasm of someone who thought he could get it together and really accomplish something. Believe me, it took enthusiasm. I had flunked out of college three times by that age and I was working the graveyard shift at a fast food restaurant.

I'll be 60 this year, and there are a lot of times I feel I've lived too long. For all intents and purposes, my career in journalism ended 14 months ago, when a corporate flunky with a Napoleon complex set me up and fired me. Since then I've been working on a book, but the closer I get to finishing it the more I wonder if it will ever be finished.

It's a look back, of course. I always find myself looking back.

I always find myself wondering what might have happened if I hadn't fucked up my life when I was young.

I'll never kill myself. It's too hostile an act, and there are too many people who love me and would be badly hurt by it. But I find myself sympathizing with Ochs, and understanding why he did what he did.

I set this site up to update it frequently, but I have been doing a horrible job of that lately. I suppose I'm depressed, suffering from empty-nest syndrome. The only thing in my life I ever did really well was be a father, and my two children are grown and gone. These days I stumble around trying to be a good husband and pretending I'm not counting the days till ...

Well, till whatever.

Something has got to change.