Salinger is Dead; Long Live His Writing!

Anyone who has ever read J. D. Salinger’s work knows that the author behind the words was somebody you would like to know, but he would never be somebody you would want to associate with his writing.  Why?  Because the author’s “message” in his fiction was this:  “Were all your stars out when you wrote this?”  That was the writing advice that Seymour Glass gave to his little brother, Buddy, the budding author.  It means that writing is a cosmic act, and that the reader’s authentic relationship with the author is only meant to be shared on the written page and not in “real life.”

I realized this fact when I finally understood the nature of true creativity and the role of the artist.  Like the artist filmmaker, Akira Kirosawa who said, “The artist must never avert his eyes,” we must show our inner vision of the world as we see it, warts and all, so to speak, and this is where it gets dicey with the “critical public.”  The public always wants to expose the author and connect him with his art.  As Salinger wanted to prove by his isolation:  The artist is separate from his art!

For Once, Let’s Question Authority

Major Nadal Malik Hasan was born in the state of Virginia, but he was of Palestinian descent.  His parents were immigrants and he was a Muslim.

Before all the conspiracy folks get started and revenge plots get hatched, I wanted to discuss the fact that the United States Army may be at fault in this scenario.  Why?  Major Hasan was given a commission by the Congress of the United States as an officer.  Not only that, but he was also given the responsibility as a Doctor of Psychiatry to counsel PTSD “survivors” coming back from war in the Middle East.  If one adds all these ingredients together, then one can begin to see why the officials in charge should be questioned and perhaps the policy of the military should be changed to prevent such disasters in the future.

Not all governments do things the way the United States does.  The British, for example, did not send ethnic Jews in the military to fight in the Palestinian uprising in 1948 because they would be forced to kill their own kind.  This is called “respect for ethnic identity.”  Why would the U. S. send a man with roots in Muslim culture to a theater of war against his own people?

In addition, Major Hasan was a specialist in counseling PTSD soldiers who came home from that war.  He had to use drugs and hypnosis to allow these soldiers to “confess” the horrendous acts they committed, often against women and children, and this all must have worked on the Major’s subconscious.  It is reported that he argued regularly with fellow officers about how we should not be in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Shouldn’t this have been a “red flag” to his superiors that this doctor was not processing information correctly?  No, he received his orders, and he was all set for deployment to this “nightmare” of his mind.  This seems completely ironic to me.

Instead of looking for conspiracies and terrorist cells, maybe we should be investigating the policies of the Army.  Look at all the suicides coming out of these wars.  Dr. Hasan had to face these kids every day and listen to their stories of killings and mayhem.  There has been no investigation of why and how men in battle have committed acts of atrocity on Muslims.  Even though we know there were memos circulated in the Bush Administration to the effect of giving combat military all kinds of “torture and search and destroy discretion,” not one member of congress has begun a hearing on why this happened and if “free fire zones” are still permitted in Iraq and Afghanistan and if soldiers are being forced to kill civilians by their superiors.

If Dr. Hasan lives, I hope his confession will shed some light on this problem.  Perhaps leaders will finally see that ethnic identify goes much deeper than patriotic fervor and that we should not be forcing human beings to go against their own moral principles for the sake of blood, glory and oil..

More People Die from Prescription Drugs than from Car Accidents

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently reported that people are “accidentally” dying from drug overdoses more often than by car accidents.  If I can wrap my small mind around this properly, this means that even with the new technological distractions of cell phones and texting in the cars, drugs are still getting the upper hand on the human species.  Why?  Simply put, people are trying to turn their brains off (or, at least minimize the pain), so they “mix and match” a wide variety of totally legal drugs.

The most monstrous effect, of course, is that the person who dies from this overdose was simply trying to “ease the pain” of 2K life.  This is a life where 1% of the wealthiest Americans control over 95% of all the wealth (and the folks who foolishly make it for them).  Michael Moore’s latest documentary, and his best, Capitalism:  A Love Story shows just how depressing it has gotten in this sorry country of ours.  Can you imagine if 32,000 people died of some virus in a year?  There would be all hell breaking loose trying to provide some vaccine to stem the “world pandemic.”  However, just because people are “buying” their drugs legally and then killing themselves, everything’s just right as rain.  Could it be that the drug manufacturers are part of the one percent of the wealthiest?  That’s right!  With nearly seven million people in America who abuse prescription drugs (Michael Jackson included), you simply add the 20 million practicing alcoholics and you have a really sick society on your hands.

Watch TV today and you will see a multitude of pain medication ads.  Many doctors are literally on these drug companies’ payroll, and if/when you ask for this drug, they are more than happy to prescribe it for you!  In fact, they’ll get a kick-back that’s totally legal and hassle-free.  Pay attention to those long “disclaimers” in the ad.  They are there to protect the doctor and the drug company for when you overdose and don’t die but decide to sue them instead.

So, don’t believe that the evil “druggies” are your pot-smoking teens and gang-banging ghetto types.  No, they are your next-door neighbor, who’s a lawyer, a housewife, a teacher and a policeman.  Their numbers are increasing every day because it’s all legal, it’s all condoned by the capitalist system, and nobody’s doing anything to address the problem because, as Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Two Released from North Korea, but What about the 30,000 in the U.S.?

Despite the chance for humor on the Daily Show, as we see Bill Clinton escorting two young Asian reporters back to the United States from North Korea, there are serious issues that aren’t being addressed right here at home.  Isn’t North Korea supposed to be the bad guy?  Well, in case you didn’t know, our Homeland Security incarceration facilities house over 30,000 people who were trying to escape countries like North Korea to come to what they thought was the “land of the free.”

However, ever since the establishment of the Patriot Act and the implementation of Homeland Security, the rights of people have been disappearing each day.  Did you read the report by Amnesty International?  This report gives specific cases of keeping immigrants incarcerated without a trial and without bail for up to four years!  Illegal immigrants are no longer being deported, they are being thrown in jail–at taxpayers’ expense.

I think we should “clean our own house” before we make such a big deal about two journalists who were admittedly in a country illegally.  If Al Gore and Bill Clinton spent as much effort freeing immigrants to this country who just wanted “freedom,” then perhaps our country would be looked upon more favorably by the world community.  Right now, all we seem to be doing is invading countries, taking pot shots with killer drones and arresting anybody who tries to enter this country to seek refuge.  That doesn’t sound like the “land of the free” to me.

The Diagnosis: Dire

Okay, I’m going to give my “last gasp” lecture on why we should have a single payer health care system or face dire consequences in the near fture.  I am going to use logic in my argument, so I hope it does not offend my American audience.  We seem to have lost our ability to reason when it comes to emotional issues like health care for human beings, due to the naked truth that we, as a country, seem to philosophically stand on the idea that public health care should not be “public,” that is, government-run, and that health care is a privilege not a right.

I believe health care should be a right because, quite literally, bad health care affects us all.  For example, what if, God forbid, we were to experience an outbreak of mammoth proportions that was killing millions of people?  With our present health care system, the government control over how and when any kind of vaccine, cure, or large-scale ability to assist the public in such a disaster is almost nil.  That’s because “big government” has become an anathema in this country.  Nobody trusts “gubment,” as Ronnie Ray-gun used to call it.  Well, guess what?  Microbes, bacteria and viruses don’t care which health care system we have.  However, they are able to spread and kill much easier if we are separated and into our own money-making schemes.  I hate to tell all of you, but that’s just the way our so-called health care is today:  separate, money-making schemers who only care about where they get their money and not about if people are healthy and “cared for.”

With socialized medicine (there, I’ve said it!), any national epidemic could be much more easily coordinated and treated because we would all be working “on the same page,” so to speak.  Government control (hey, I was in the military, and my father, a Pearl Harbor survivor, worked for the Fed for 30 years) gives one the ability to keep a consistent supply system and focus on health care, not health profit.  For example, China (even with their human rights violations) was able to assist its earthquake victims much faster than, say, California (my home state) would be able to.  God forbid that we in California get the “Big One” any time soon!  I can see millions of people dead in our California cities because of the screwed-up priorities in Sacramento.

So, government control provides the much-needed focus and consistency that our present “profit-centered” system does not.  How can Obama and other congressmen want to slip a “little government plan” into the mix of other profit-making insurance company plans to choose from?  My liberal friends think people will “rush to join the public plan.”  Well, get a clue!  If we don’t all support a major public, socialized plan at the outset, no kind of teenie-tiny public plan will ever work!  Why?  Let me give you a little analogy.  Let’s say I’m a country doctor who runs a clinic in a small American town.  If a “big profit-making medical hospital” comes to my town, all they have to do is use their insurance company friends and pharmaceutical company buddies to lower their costs to patients long enough to run me out of business (kind of like what Wal-Mart has done in the merchandizing business).  Then, when I have either joined their “cause” or moved out of town, guess what?  The prices will creep back up to where they’re again making their outlandish profits at the public’s expense.

In America, right now, it’s the public hospitals and emrgency treatment centers, like Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital in Los Angeles, that are getting shut down because they can’t make enough money to serve the “poor” clientele.  The big profit hospitals, however, just keep getting bigger and richer, however, at the public’s expense!

The costs will keep rising, we’ll keep spending on war, and our health will keep getting worse, not better, unless we all get on the same page for once in our lives.  Oh.  I suppose we all go to the same grave, so what’s the difference?  Pay now or pay with your life!  That’s right.  I’d pay the taxes of Sweden if I thought we could get what they have.

Change as Future Shock

Prez Obama, when asked about investigating former President of Vice, Dick Cheney’s possible illegal and top secret campaign to “send out hit squads of CIA to execute Al Qaeda operatives” (he never even told Congress about it), recently said,”We should look forward and not backward.”  This statement reminded me of one of the best non-fiction books I ever read, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (written in the 1970s).  Actually, his old book really explains what our politicians have learned to sell us all the time now, and Obama is also the ”high priest” (perhaps in more ways than intellectual) of this kind of Tofflerian “change”:

“‘The future as a way of life’, which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase ‘future shock’ as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture”

In other words, as long as we stay “shocked” by always looking for futuristic “changes,” then politicians can have their way with us.  It’s when we do what Santayana proscribed and “learn from our past mistakes” that we begin to get in the politicians’ think tanks and begin to create a little real history of our own!