My Calliope Blew Hot Air in My Mind
But the Hoi Polloi Was a Cool, Refreshing Breeze to My Soul
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
July 19, 2009

I went to my ancient Calliope for inspiration and got blown away by the hot air from her calliope. It was hard to miss the message as her steam puffed away my presumptuous facade. I knew I deserved it, so I humbly resorted to journalizing the day’s journey instead. The following is what I learned, partly from the earth children closest to Mother Nature’s Bosom and partly from retracing the crooked paths of history. From ancient paths through a fulcrum of time in early twentieth century America, these fateful divergences have led us, tragically, into our modern matrix of freeways to madness.

I seldom leave my apartment these days save my twice weekly ataxic moseying to the mailbox and my wild and crazy outings to the grocery store. The latter, . . . a bit of poetry in motion, at least to me. I know that must sound weird to the younger set.

Today is my once monthly venture ‘out on the town’ spurge of going to the Mall and getting a haircut, taking in a movie, and getting a special hamburger. Walking to my second bus stop, I sat down beside an attractive thirteen-year-old Hispanic girl. While I heard her mother speaking with the expected moderately Mexican accent, the girl answered my question with regard to what she was reading with flawless English. She was reading the latest Harry Potter book. She had recently seen the movie and volunteered that she had seen them all and read each book in the series. As I was remarking about how amazing J. K. Rowling was to have written so many Potter books so quickly, an elderly Hispanic man had appeared in front of us. He looked a bit shaky on the feet. There was not quite enough room on the bench but the girl and I squeezed out almost enough space and he wiggled and wedged in between us. Ah, a new conversational prospect.

Next to me now was this elderly Hispanic man, obviously becoming decrepit, who addressed me with a "Gracias." Exchanging the weather update, which was a 100-degree, cloudless, still day; I happened to mention that, though I was seventy-six, the heat did not seem to bother me as much as it is supposed to for the elderly. He said in barely comprehensible Spanglish that he was seventy-years-old and recently retired from twenty years of hard manual labor and sub subsistence wages that had left him worn out and barely able to get around. He said I looked younger and must have had a good job and made, rubbing his thumb and fingers together, "mucho moola." I laughed and in broken Spanish told him I had been a psychologist. He looked quizzical and so I put my finger to my temple and twirled it saying "Trabajo con locos y los criminales." He exclaimed "Ah, mucho dinero." I laughed again and said, "No, estoy pobrecita." He said, "Porque?" I said, "Los politicos fire me mucho tiempos cuando por bueno trabajo. Politicos no le gusto." We struggled with our communication gap for a while but finally he seemed to understand. Before the bus came, we shared a few more bits of our life histories, me in my broken Spanish and him in his broken English. We got another laugh or two in just before the bus arrived. We both struggled to stand up. As I ‘attempted’ to get up he assisted me from his seated position and then I returned the favor. From the way we looked at each other, I felt that we shared a mutual recognition of our resignation to the fact that, eventually, age will begin to pitilessly exact its toll on, and inflict its grievances upon, our bodies in spite of our desire and efforts to cheat time. Then, with a huge smile, he said, "Me help you and you help me." When the bus reached his stop and he was on his way off, I touched his hand and said, "Buenos Suerte!" He reached back and quickly shook my hand and then departed saying, "Buenos Suerte, Good Luck to you too, amigo!"

I de-bused at the Mall and headed straight for "Great Clips" to rid myself of my shaggy dog look. My barber was a forty-year-old semi-attractive white woman. Of course, to be au courant, she was a hairstylist in a unisex hair styling salon. We babbled all through the shedding of my shaggy dog tail. As an haute couture coiffeur, she was also a good stand-in for a Rogerian psychotherapist. It was "Yes" and "Mmmm hmmm" and repeating what I had said all through the ‘session’. Oops again, I mean hair styling. At one point, she offered a bit of personal information. She said that as a young woman she had wanted to get a motorcycle and be aggressive, like the Hell’s Angels. I chuckled and said, "Well, maybe not the Hell part, just the angel part. You are too empathetic and kind. Not the aggressive type at all, right?" She laughed and agreed. She was the most agreeable, attentive, and bubbly barber I have ever had.

I told her so much about me in those brief twenty minutes. I bored her with my theories on the un-necessity of wars. I told her my theory of how I thought Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War and still ended slavery. I, also, told her how I laughed a lot; especially laughed at my silly jokes as I rambled alone around my junk-heaped apartment. Then, I told her I was seventy-six. She asked, "How come you don’t have wrinkles if you are seventy-six?" I told her it was because I had so much sex. I guffawed as I said that. Then, I kidded about my non-existent sex life but my great fantasy life. I said, "Good imagination, bad memory." and laughed and she repeated what I said and laughed with me. I told her I cry a lot. I said, "Want to know what makes me cry?" "What?" she said, with a sound of genuine interest and comforting sympathy. "I cry when I see beautiful things." Finishing up, she had me feeling almost giddy, but she seemed a bit giddy as well. Well, after all, had we not just had a virtuelle affaire de cœur?

While paying bill, I sensed someone behind me and turned to see what appeared to be a mother and son as there was definitely a family resemblance. For some strange reason, giddy me said, "Oh, twins, I presume." They both beamed and the mother said, "Yes, except he is quite a bit taller." And I retorted, laughing, "And different hair color." The mom’s good looks, svelte manner, and her responsiveness were getting me even more revved up. Not to make the new customers wait any longer, I turned back and said, "My god look at all that shaggy dog hair on the floor! I must say you are the first to give me exactly the haircut I wanted. For some reason they all refuse to cut it as short as I request. I don’t care how pretty I look; I just don’t want to have to come back until winter. And, by the way, what was your name again?" She said, "Liz, it’s on the receipt." I left practically waltzing like Fred Astaire on air out the door, plus feeling jazzed up like I had just scored a hottie. Wow, Hell’s Angels eat your heart out! Walking away to see a movie, I thought, ‘Cheeze, it doesn’t take much to put a spring back in my step.’

I had chosen to see the movie about John Dillinger, "Public Enemy." I was not enthusiastic about seeing it but I wanted to make the most of my once monthly big outing. I usually choose movies that I know the writer and director had an angle and a twist toward intelligent socio-political commentary. On the face of it, it seemed like a typical crime thriller but based on a historical crime figure from the Great Depression era of early 1930s. However, as the movie reeled out, I saw some significant scenes whereby the writer and director were making some poignant points.

Not far into the movie, it became clear that Dillinger’s girlfriend, the raven-haired beauty Billie, was going to provide the second major theme in the plot. There is nothing like a pretty girl to make up for what otherwise might have been just another of today’s overly abundant Shoot ‘Em Up thriller movie stereotypes. Billie had come from a boring small-town, had suffered poverty’s shame, and had had an unloving and belligerent family. Now, in Chicago, she was longing for her chance at the American dream that was so ostentatiously displayed about her in the exclusive restaurant where she worked as a ‘Coat Rack" girl. Dillinger recently had seen her at a nightclub and been stricken with her. He danced with her to the song "Bye, bye Black Bird" and that became ‘their’ song. Later, he tracked her down and found her at the restaurant. She at first reluctantly and then timidly complied with Dillinger’s brusque but single-minded designation of her as his girl as he made an avowal of loyalty and promise of protection, but also a "wild ride." The viewer could infer that, though she gave off a demure and passive aura, there might be a touch of vicarious outlaw ambition in Billie. At Dillinger’s first demonstration of brutality against a customer who harassing her, one could sense a tinge of fear but, more importantly, a curious second hand sadism and awe at his raw, impetuous, manly violence. Her psyche was to become a symbolic representation of the ‘public mind’ that ensued when a newly invented dog-eat-dog competitive media created the art sensationalizing the news.

In the 1945 version of John Dillinger, he was not so much the folk hero as he is in the current version. Whereas the G-Men were the heroes back then, now Michaels Mann’s "Public Enemies" made Dillinger a charismatic folk-hero while the FBI was portrayed as bumbling, anti-heroes. Why has this change of attitudes taken place? As the movie unfolded, this question was in the back of my mind the whole time I was watching the film. Bryan Burrough had written the book on which the movie was based, "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34". While I had not read the book beforehand, I now suspect that his social commentary had been embedded in the movie. This, and not the quality of the film itself, was what was gripping my attention.

In a way, watching "Public Enemies" was like taking a time machine back to witness a plethora of amazing engineering innovations. These were functioning as a fulcrum that was shifting the culture into high gear and rapidly transforming history. The nation was at the dawn of a new era. It was to become an era of outlandish, surreal, discombobulation, which would only get worse from then on. Factories with assembly lines for mass production were springing up everywhere. The automobile was mass-produced by the 1930s. Asphalt highways for interstate travel were beginning to wind their way between all the major metropolitan cities. Merchant ships were also being mass-produced and international trade was booming. The telephone now had PBXs that were making communications between businesses, government, law enforcement, and even moderately well off individuals easy and rapid. All of these developments were making many people richer than they could ever have imagined. This required big banks to safeguard their money. A major part of this surge of affluence was the Stock Market. The Stock Market rose based on the ability of a few brokerage houses to play the game of Monopoly well since it, basically, is a matter of educated guessing and betting. Professional investors and their brokers were able to consistently outwit and profit off the naïve, inexperienced investors who were baited into putting their life savings into the market. Consequently, many were becoming millionaires for virtually doing nothing but play with other people’s money. While prohibition was over by 1933, the country now was becoming more intoxicated from sudden wealth and the new marvels ushered in by these feats of engineering. All of this led to the excesses and ostentatious displays of the "Roaring Twenties."

All of these forces had fostered a ‘mass production’ of faux fortunes and a dizzying infatuation of the winners with themselves. They were like children let loose in a candy store. Unfortunately, the tides of fortune flowed out as quickly as they had come in. Just at the pinnacle of their wealth, the Stock Market Crashed in 1929 and the Dust Bowl that began in the 1930s devastated our agrarian economy. The mass production factories making heavy equipment and the construction industry that had been struggling to keep up with the ambition for bigger and better were suddenly shutting down. The desire for conspicuous consumption that had possessed the nouveau riche during the roaring twenties still lingered for a lucky few. However, not only those who had grown up in poverty now saw the gap between rich and poor becoming a gulf, but a massive number of stock market losers were reeling from it as well. Does this 1929’s boom and bust scenario sound familiar? The big banks became a symbol for what was now seen by many as the rank injustice of our economic system. Hard times that had hit families hard in turn caused parents to take it out on their needy, hungry, vulnerable children. Being mere children, many a child of the Depression did not understand the source of their suffering. They did see the descent into despair and rage of their parents. The stage was set for these children to wage an easily rationalized revenge directed toward the rich and their banks as symbols of a growing, unfair, disparity in wealth.

All of the technological developments up to this point were to join forces with the festering rage of the people. These technological developments, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the people’s rage just incidentally coincided with the creation of the FBI with a man who had a uniquely elitist mindset to be its director, J. Edgar Hoover. Those whose rage had been entrained by this pitiless confluence of nature, economy, technology, and government were driven to target the rich and their banks and become modern day Robin Hoods. They were to be blessed with the perfect weapon for the job. That weapon was the Tommy gun, another product of the genius of engineering and mass production. Another product of the times that was destined to bring on a complementary unintended consequence was the flash bulb camera. The newspapers of the day were in full competitive mode and fell in with the vengeful Robin Hood mentality of the populace. They were driven by their editors to print pictures with stories of the daring escapades of men like Dillinger and his gang. Dillinger did not disappoint them.

Somehow, Dillinger had developed a cunning and acumen that made him a great leader of his gang and a great diviner of the public mood. These abilities combined with his personal charisma, his unflinching brutality, his gift for logistics, and his stealthy fox-like wariness paved the way for him becoming not only the obsession of the newsmen but an almost worshipped champion of the demoralized and poverty stricken people, even while being one of the most dangerous criminals in the annals of crime. Dillinger knew the newspapers were making him an object of worship and he knew, as well, that he was a cash cow for them. Radio, another invention new to the modern scene, had people sitting with ears glued to the speaker waiting for the latest reports of the audacious exploits and wily, seemingly miraculous, escapes of their folk hero avenger. They were waiting to hear the exciting tales of another of his death defying dastardly deeds as he turned the tables on their wealthy oppressors who were living in opulence while they were jobless, suffering humiliation, penniless, and starving. They were waiting to cheer as they learned of his latest survival from shootouts with the G-men. Of course, this did cause them to live out their retributive justice vicariously and harmlessly just as it did Billie.

All of this glamorous notoriety was a source of humiliation to the government and particularly to the fledgling FBI, and Hoover. The Congress had given Hoover a stern directive to end Dillinger’s crime spree, or else. Local and metropolitan police departments had long been the covert partners of the rich and powerful who entrusted them with controlling the exploited masses and their mob uprisings, most particularly the revolts of labor unions. Yet, they were losing in this dramatic fight against crime. Now, due to turbulence of this period of history, and as result of the success of Dillinger and others like him, we see a nationalizing of the populace controlling function of police departments. In a sense, the extreme difficulty of catching Dillinger and his success at stealing money from the rich could be credited with giving birth to forensic science.

Ironically, the press, which had also been the darling of the elite, had found itself in an oddly compromising position. With Dillinger, they were sort of acting like his promotional agents. Odd how free press operating under the principles of free enterprise can sometimes put their rich and powerful, free enterprise espousing, patrons in the crossfire. One final irony is that, since Dillinger’s rampages had crossed state lines to make it more difficult to be caught, the congress had passed the interstate crime law. This had the effect of backfiring on Dillinger. A sometime criminal associate, named Frank Nitti, who had moved up from bank robbing to using the Stock Market for interstate crime was now furious at Dillinger for bringing this about. Now he was vulnerable to the FBI, and, for retribution, he provided information that would lead to the killing of Dillinger. What tangled webs our complex and lethal coalition of a crooked acquiescent government and corrupt corporations do weave as they practice to deceive.

Since the movie so far, aside from its embedded negative commentary on our culture, was no memorable classic, I was unprepared for the emotion-evoking ending. Dillinger, of course, was shot in front of the Biograph Theater, as expected. However, there was a strange incident as he lay dying. The G-man who shot him bent down to listen to his last words. The last scene had him mysteriously visiting with Billie in prison. When she asked why he said that Dillinger’s last words were to "Tell Billie, "Bye, bye Blackbird." I am somewhat ashamed to say that that scene brought tears to my eyes. Later, I thought, well the director had to inject something at the end with gut wrenching, tear-jerking sympathy or the film would definitely be panned.

I left the movie and was enjoying walking in the sunshine, in spite of the heat, but I was also resonating from the poignant glimpse into such a momentous period of our history. Being a ‘structures and systems’ man, those telling tidbits were something worth munching on. As I was walking, my mind was simmering over the awesomeness of the power of the state back then. I was shaken by the realization what was going on in that era foreshadowed the even more ominous, contemporary, character of our government. I was also feeling a sense of pathos over recognition of how cleverly and thoroughly the people had been defeated. Yet, I also had a sense of consolation that the G-man, Melvin Purvis, who had been put in charge of the Dillinger project, quit the FBI after Dillinger had been killed and not long after had committed suicide. In what may be a Pollyanna way, I speculated that Purvis had somehow acquired a depth of insight into the fiendishly Machiavellian, oppressive nature of our culture. I wished myself into believing that he had recognized that he had unwittingly been one of many pawns in a vast, grand, and somehow ‘legitimately’ rigged game to dominate and defraud the masses against which Dillinger had been the most bombastic protester.

As it was mid afternoon, I headed to the nearby Country Market. I was starving for one of their juicy hamburgers. At the Country Market, I approached the counter and asked for a hamburger. I noticed that the young, attractive, cashier’s red hair was extremely close cropped just like mine. The cashier’s nametag said "Rebecca." I, perhaps inappropriately, said that her haircut was just like mine. Her face turned bright red. Her embarrassment gave me a perhaps unfashionably male unwarranted hunch that she might be ‘butch’. I quickly tried to make up for what might have been my indiscretion by being especially nice and ending the transaction by saying as sweetly as I could, "Thank you so much, Rebecca." at which point she beamed with a gleaming smile and I felt redeemed.

This must have been my day for indiscretions as shortly thereafter a somewhat stout waitress with very gaudy mismatched socks walked by and I pointed out the mismatch to her. Knowing I had probably crossed a line again, I was relieved when she laughed and said she must have put them on in the dark. She walked pass me several times after that and each time she gave me a big cheeky smile with coquettish gestures that, I think, we both enjoyed. How delightfully surprising life can be.

These were my people. The ordinary, delicious, fellow humans scraping out a living and getting their kicks out of simple, spontaneous, harmless fun. To me, they are the plain, unadorned, beautiful, well some not so much beautiful outwardly as inwardly, uncelebrated ingénues making their ways across town to unrewarding, menial jobs; jobs that keep the nation thriving. They make me happy to be a human in spite of the tiny coterie of plutocratic, impeccably refined and poshly attired but greedy moral grunges residing far above and away from their servant populace in their gated lofty, luxurious, gargantuan mansions.

Having savored a people’s hamburger, I left for the bus stop for my return trip. As I approached the bus stop shelter, there was a black man who, even though the bench was empty, was squatting on the ground, barely shielded from the sun under the shade of shelter. The man had his head down and looked exhausted. He looked up at me and smiled a partially toothless smile and said, "Hot day, isn’t it." I said, "Yes, but the heat does not bother me much like it does most people my age." He asked how old I was and when I said seventy-six, he said you sure don’t look it. I asked how old he was and he said "Fifty-three, but I think I look as old as you, at least I feel that way." I said, "You waiting for the 331 too?" He said he was and had just gotten off work and was tired and could not wait to get home and go to bed. It was Saturday at 4:30 in the afternoon and partly out of my usual curiosity and partly because of the odd hour he had gotten off work, I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a maintenance man at a motel nearby.

Since he seemed sort of eager to talk, I asked more questions and found out that he made minimum wage and that his bus ride was two hours each way so it was really like a twelve-hour workday. I asked if was married and he yes, his wife is a nurse and with their two jobs they still were barely able to make ends meet. He said they have little time together and when they do, they are both exhausted. With that, he stood up, seemed to have come back to life, and was enjoying talking with me. He asked what I did for a living. In a roundabout way, I told him I had been retired for eleven years now but that I used to be a psychologist and a reformer of correctional institutions. He looked at me with disbelief so I told him that I used psychology on the guards and inmates and even though I was not big nor looked tough, I had a knack for getting those big, tough guys eating out of my hand. He laughed. I said, yeah, it actually was fun. At one point, we got off on the topic of war and both agree that it is so sad that young men are so easily conned into joining the military, not realizing that the reasons for the wars were ‘pure’ crap trumped up by the fat cats.

Somehow, we turned the conversation to the weather again and began to tell stories about strange weather we had been in or knew about, like tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, heavy rains, and floods. He seemed fascinated with the weather, but then I, too, have that fascination. He brought up the subject of the big flood, Katrina, in New Orleans. He said, since that happened he never wanted to go there again. We both decried the government’s treatment of the New Orleans situation. He said he thought it was awful how the government treated New Orleans and those people so badly. I agreed and mentioned Bush’s publicity stunts like saying he had flown over and surveyed the aftermath of the flood but reporters found out that that was a hoax and that it never happened. That triggered more disparaging remarks about Bush and the government in general. I was impressed, with both his range of knowledge and his insights on how corrupt the government had become.

Our bus came and we got in and sighed about finally getting out of the heat. We had to sit too far apart to talk but our conversation had caused me to reflect on the fact the he might be representative of most poor, non-white people, well, poor white people too, many of whom feel disenfranchised, even if they are not, because, I surmise, that with respect to the government, they really do not know what is going on and feel pretty much impotent to do anything about it anyway. I thought, the poor may be being fed bogus information, but, nevertheless, they get the drift that all things are not well in the pretentious and lavish ivory and marble halls of state. On getting off the bus he said, "It’s been nice talking to you." That left me with an unexpected feeling of warmth in my heart. Even fleeting contacts with strangers often serve to strengthen my bond with humanity.

I next de-bused at HEB to do a little grocery shopping before the last leg of my journey. While was shopping, an Hispanic man in his mid thirties, I think, walked past with what I assumed to be his two daughters, one looking to be about fourteen and her sister about ten. The girls were lagging behind their father. The fourteen-year-old girl and I happened to lock eyes and smile momentarily. I was picking out some chips when I looked in their direction and the older girl was looking back at me and gave me a big grin. I thought nothing of it but shortly thereafter, the girl and sister were coming toward me, sans father, and she gave me another big grin and I reciprocated. As she walked on, I turned and watched and she looked back, giving me a brief smile again, and then walked on, but I noticed a distinct wiggling of her fanny. Again, I smiled to myself but thought nothing more of it until this happened three more times. I also noticed that on these subsequent, accidental, encounters, she always bent over and whispered in her sister’s ear and then they both looked back and smiled. I was now quite amused and thought to myself that this cute little Hispanic girl was in some sense flirting with me. Well, being the old dog that I am, I was very flattered and got quite a little buzz out of it. Finally, I saw them leave with their father.

Now why do I mention this? Well, I had sized up the father as most likely being an illegal immigrant. My assumption is probably valid, since my apartment complex, subsidized as it is for the poor, is about ninety-five percent Hispanic and I am quite certain that the majority of them are illegal’s as they either speak very broken English or none. Now, one thing distinct about them is that they are uniformly neatly dressed, though inexpensively so, polite, and friendly. Considering what had transpired with the girl, I mused how times had changed. In the past, I had noticed, and the research backed me up on this, that Hispanic illegals did not look you in the eye or speak when passing on the sidewalk. The girl’s father also did not look at me even though we had almost been face to face. Yes, times had really changed. Here was a young Hispanic girl of illegal parents, nonetheless, who not only looked me in the eye but also flirted with me and seemed to be getting a really big kick out of it. Yes, times had wonderfully changed!

The everyday people I was meeting today were my people and I was their people. Socio-economic status, ethnicity, none of this was beginning to matter anymore and, this may just be me, it seems like more and more people for whom this was not so in the recent past were now, in fact, delighting in it, in a sense celebrating it. I wonder if I am right??? I hope so!

Finishing my shopping, I caught the next bus for home. De-busing again, I wearily trudged the last few blocks home carrying my too heavy load of groceries. When, exhausted, I enter my apartment; my skin is singing alleluia as it is bathed in the cool air from the air conditioner. I wondered, did my transitory Mexican amigo, my tired elderly fellow traveler on the bus, escape into a cool haven as well?

And that was my day. My day! My happy day, my ‘alive’ day! At home and with eyes drooping, I sink into my meager, proletariat futon, eager for sleep. Then sleep, dear sleep, must have swept me obliviously into its tender bosom.

I awaken hours later, groggy but blissful. How wonderful are the little things of life. How wonderful the fleeting encounters with the innocents of street life. Thank you, dear strangers. Thank you for anchoring me in the earthy, variegated, kindred world of everyday people.

Meanwhile, I am here, back in my coven, and begin brewing this, my next textual potion. You, my fellow travelers, have made me poignantly conscious of the fateful funnel forming between two increasingly alien spheres. I must address this issue.

Everyday earthen people, the ‘dumb’, are unaware of the orchestrators, the ‘blind’, of the globe-encompassing, socio-economic stratosphere, and vice versa. Like our polluted and turbulent atmosphere, mediating between these two spheres, and yet ignoring, or oblivious to, the gravely perilous realities of the other two is the media, the ‘deaf’.

Muckrakers’ histories of the mainstream media make it crystal clear how the mainstream media creates icons out of dubious and eminently undeserving celebrities. The middleman, mainstream media, flashes ephemeral sound bites about such atrocities as Nike shoes being made by child slave labor in foreign countries. By briefly noting these exploitations and the swiftly passing on, they avoid recrimination by the genuine investigative reporters, a vanishing breed, by the way. The mainstream media fails to cover how US manufacturers created the Maquiladores on the Mexican border only to abandon them, leaving behind a toxic, impoverished wasteland, when they find greener human pastures to exploit elsewhere. They pull out all of their devious Madison Avenue style publicity gimmicks to obfuscate the damage done by the movie "Blood Diamonds" in exposing how the diamond corporate barons were and are responsible for mass enslavement of Africans to mine for diamonds, leaving their country starving and diseased, a virtual rape of a continent. They avoid examining how American and European gun manufacturers, colluding with the Diamond barons, trade guns for diamonds and foment African civil and tribal wars resulting in mass murders and genocide just to increase their guns sales and prevent the possibility of Africans rising up against them. They refuse to investigate and expose the way the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund use loan-shark-like loan policies that end in impoverishing countries like Jamaica, Haiti, Venezuela, and many other South American and African countries. They avoid ferreting out and dramatizing how the CIA collaborates with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to blackmail these countries leaders into submitting to be exploited by the US under credible threats of assassination.

The mainstream media provides reports about the Pentagon that are innocuous, tangential, and that are incomprehensible to the man on the street. The public rarely hears about the stealthy progress being made toward making America into a new, worldwide, imperialistic tyrant. The mainstream media avoids like the plague discussing the obscenely large and totally unwarranted budget of the Defense Department. There are reports in little known journals and on the internet that present the records of all of the bases the US has in other countries and how many troops are stationed there. In fact, we have military bases in a large percentage of other nations, whether they are welcome there or not. They report the total numbers of military troops maintained by every nation and the size nations’ defense budgets. The entire rest of the world’s military budgets are not as large as the US military budget and forces. You rarely hear about the seven thousand, more or less, nuclear missiles the US maintains just as we protest the miniscule numbers in the rest of the world. Occasionally the media mentions that US has not signed the Kyoto accords while screaming about the possibility of other nations might engage in nuclear weapon proliferation. There are detailed reports about how modernized our arsenals of weapons are, but how much do you know about that. Some relatively inaccessible reports describe the extraordinarily advanced state of our weapons research. They describe what I call tele-weapons that are somewhat like video games only the computer operator is controlling lethally equipped ground vehicles from miles away. There are also tele-weapons that are airborne, lethally equipped, and virtually undetectable. There are virtually indestructible robots that function like human soldiers. There are many devices that can spy on enemies close up, both seeing and hearing what is going on, without being detected. Some spy devices operate miles above the earth and can still visually detect targets no more than a square yard in size. It sounds like we are preparing for war with some extravagantly equipped attack by some planet like those described in science fiction.

Huge sums of our tax money are being spent on the research and development of these weapon systems and global militaristic strategies. I, personally, love engineering, but I have to ask why is our nation putting so much money into these offensive and defensive weapon systems and far flung military bases? The mainstream media is not exploring these developments and questions and not putting them before the general public for us to decide whether this is the direction that we want our country to go in. From Tommy guns to tele-weapons, the path may seem disjointed and convoluted, but I suspect it has been a rather steady, planned, methodical march along the skylines of power, far beyond the knowledge of the innocent, malleable, common man. They view our young men as sheep that they will recruit, lauding them as patriots, to execute their designs of destruction. They will gloat over being so deftly able to manipulate the young men they so callously and cavalierly refer to as their cannon fodder. In other words, the mainstream media is collaborating with a stealth, a shadow, government that has far more control over our fate than does the ostensive government so sensationally, simplistically, and appealingly presented on the TV (TriviaVision) to their naïve, their gullible, public and, of course, to people like you and me.

The mainstream media avoids highlighting the story about the 10 Downing Street memo in order to ward off a public outcry and demand for our leaders to be hauled before the International Court for War Crimes. They obscure, mislead, and conceal the actual story about how and why Vice President Cheney outed Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent. In fact, this was retribution for Joseph Wilson, her husband, having announced to the world that the document claiming Nigeria was negotiating with Saddam Hussein to deliver material for a nuclear bomb, one of the pretexts for the Iraq war, was a hoax. And now, the media is avoiding recounting the history of the US interference in Iran’s government for the last century. They fail to emphasize how the US, before the 1991 war, had been supplying chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein that were used on the Kurds. On and on go the mainstream media’s lies, omissions, spins, downplays, and cover-ups.

The mainstream media is committing lies of omission by not reporting the facts involved in the universal single-payer healthcare Bills proposed by Representatives Kucinich and Wierner that would include a thirty-one percent reduction in healthcare costs.

The mainstream media downplays the way international syndicates are engaging, openly and easily, in human trafficking of girls for sex and others for slave labor. Yet, it has been confirmed that this is a secretly condoned part of the globalized economy.

These citations above about the dire state of our world are a mere skosh of the whole story of how the mainstream media is a silent partner collaborating with the inhabitants of the stratosphere in the new climate of global corruption. The middleman, mainstream media, is performing well for the stratospheric, white-color, criminal, ruling class atop their skyscrapers or hallowed edifices of our Capitol.

And so, I awaken from my deep sleep, and intellectually awaken to the plight of the hoi polloi at the mercy of the ruthless elite as well. I stir up my caustic message to penetrate the seemingly impermeable mental blockades separating the deaf, dumb, and blind. I hope to reawaken their senses and minds to reclaim the common bond of humanity and head off the rush over the gloomy cliffs of doom that lay just over the horizon. A feeling of resignation comes over me as I think, "Fat chance!"

This missive may not be inspired poetry, but I hope, and may it not be in vain, that at least you are convinced of the validity of my portrayal and perspective on this state of the world and henceforth will refuse to be deceived, refuse to surrender to the vicarious experiences of catharsis provided by the media’s pseudo retributive justice. When called upon, do your bit, however seemingly small, to stand up to that megalomaniac stratosphere that is devoid of regard for the earth, nature, and its species, including the rest of humanity.

Remember, these earth children closest to Mother Nature’s Bosom are your people, your family, and you are theirs. There are myths perpetrated by that stratospheric world that are meant to polarize the earthen people. Their rancorous slogans are ringing in my mental ears even now and they must be routed out. They try to divide the world is into ‘us and them’ and make us create pseudo distinctions and fabricate opposing group identities or teams with the mindset that you are either ‘with us or against us’. They perpetuate the false idea that Darwin’s theory of evolution means survival of the fittest. That is supposed to justify competing to survive and demolishing your competitor. They surreptitiously try to make all of us think that the world is divided into takers and taken and you must strive to be a successful taker. They try to make us think that it is natural for people to be ranked and we all must strive to outrank each other. They try to make us think that some people are better than others are; some are genetically superior; and some are genetically inferior or defective. They try to make us think that people should be judged by their money and possessions rather than their character and devotion to our common humanity.

I have heard it said that conscience is self-eliminating. That is only true for those who believe in, live by, and perpetuate these myths. For the earthen people closest to the Bosom of Mother Nature, it is most natural to join with the universal human family. We must raise our children to strive for personal maturity, wisdom, and a belief that we are here for mutual support and love. We must train them to use their own judgment and resist undue influence from others. We must train our children for intellectual maturity and particularly train them to learn to question authority and the media. We must train them to learn to detect when the structures and systems of our institutions are evoking and shaping negative attitudes and behaviors and to work to try to change and redesign these negative structures and systems.

These paths will help them to become citizens who take responsibility for the quality of life of their community and all of its varied people.