We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent...There is no logic...The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike... Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game.
~Tristan Tzara
I have a horrible disease, which is this desire to know the why of things. Desire isn't really the right word; it is an addiction, a craving urge that demands that I ask why, and attempt to satisfy myself. They say of addicts that their addiction is never to the high, or the win. Compulsive gamblers aren't in it to win; coke addicts aren't in it to get high. It is the loss, the crashes, the lows which compel. The sensation of watching it all fade away without destroying us, that sense of alive in spite of it that drives.
I don't know that there is anything that I know (and I ain't saying I know much) that has made me any happier. It satisfies the need to know. It feeds my pride, my ego. It grants me the pretension of believing that I understand.
It is not without reason that pride is among the seven sins and ignorance is not.
I sit here and I write as if I have something smart to say; something wise I can tell you. And maybe I do. Maybe this tiny bit that I know and can express is what passes for wisdom in this life. I hope not; I had hoped it would be something more. Wisdom seems so impressive when you are too young to possess any of it. It seems like the province of heroes, of Merlin and Gandalf, of Athos and Hector.
If we are heroes, what kind of story are we in?
These are the facts: Marijuana is at the least America's #4 cash crop (Eric Schlosser believes it is #1). The results of Plan Columbia, a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to defoliate Columbia to prevent coca cultivation, has left the price, quality, and availibility of cocaine in the United States unchanged. What unchanged means is that you can still fit half a billion dollars of uncut cocaine into a single eighteen-wheel truck. In an age when we are spending untold amounts of money on `Homeland Security', we still have approximately fifty thousand undocumented sex workers in this country. They are held essentially as slaves, earning their `employers' about five hundred thousand dollars a year according to the INS, while our government pretends that it has the ability to round up guys mowing lawns and picking fruit. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world; one out of every thirty-seven adults in the US has been or is currently in prison. New York City alone has 37,038 sworn police officers, which is fifteen thousand more than the total American troop presence in Afghanistan today. Meanwhile, across the country, towns like Spokane and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, are spending a quarter of a million dollars each purchasing Bearcat Armored Personel Carriers for their police departments.
I'll bet you five bucks (and be investigated by the FBI for illegal internet gambling) that not one candidate from either major party mentions a single one of those facts this election year.
And what of the things we do speak of? What of the poor and working Americans, whose cause we claim to bear the standard of in the Democratic Party? Will we speak out against State lotteries? Which pay out twenty percent less of monies waged than the average casino game; whose odds are worse than those of being hit by lightning or killed by flesh-eating bacteria? Upon which blacks and hispanics spend over twice as much as whites, and from which in states like Maryland and Kentucky half of ticket sales are to households earning less than $20,000 a year? Of which thirty-four cents on the dollar go to the state as taxes? Meanwhile, the Democratic Governor of New Jersey wishes to raise the sales tax to cut the property tax, despite tremendous evidence that the sales tax is extremely regressive, resulting in such inequities as citizens in Washington State, one of the most liberal states in the nation, taking 17.5% of the income of the poorest 20%, while the top 1% pay only 3.3%. I'll bet a flat tax looks pretty good to poor Washingtonians right now. And after hitting the poor with lotteries and sales taxes, we can add sin taxes to the list. In New York City, cigarette taxes are now $3.39 a pack, costing a pack a day smoker $1200 a year, equal to their Medicare taxes taken out of their paycheck. Governments love sin taxes, particularly since they are both a soft sell and that they are taxes on addictive products whose demand is inelastic. 32.9% of people living below the poverty line smoke, according to the CDC, ten percent higher than the national average. The recent two dollar tax increase on a pack of cigarettes in New York City has failed to bring the city's smoking rate below 18%; recently the City Council has proposed increasing the tax even further in hopes of reducing the smoking rate, a proposal to which the mayor enthusiatically agrees.
I suppose the poor of this city realize we're only beating on them for their own good. After all, if we didn't care, we wouldn't hit.
But I don't see much promise in those becoming electoral issues either. Helping the poor that way isn't what we're about. In other words, we ain't about much.
I shouldn't be saying any of this, and I know it. I want the Democrats to win this November, so that the next time elections roll around, we all still have a few rights left. I want the Democrats to win so that there is at least some kind of check on the gross incompetence of this very expensive government which cannot even salvage the lives of thousands of Americans from a meteorological event we all watched coming on television for days, and which cannot send aid as quickly as three kids from Duke in a used car.
I suppose that is what made Merlin and Hector heroes; they were wise enough to see the doom fate had in store for them, and were able to go forward striving anyhow. I hope I have that strength within me. But I cannot stop myself from saying, at least once before carrying onward, that I am making a choice about who will be my tyrants and despots.