July 2002

In the United States today, the wealthiest one per cent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 per cent…. In the last quarter of a century…American workers made no gains. None. The wages of American workers have, since 1978, been flat or declining….  Over the last four years, a total of 2 million factory jobs have been lost – ten per cent of the manufacturing workforce, which is the best-paying sector of the American economy…. Since 1979 the minimum wage, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has dropped 21 per cent. – Huck Gutman, “Economic Inequality in US,” Common Dreams

Bush’s tax cut: 

The wealthiest one per cent of the population will rake in 52 per cent of the tax benefits when the cuts are fully operative. In the next ten years, the new tax plan will divert an astounding $500 billion out of federal coffers and into the bank accounts of those who earn over $375,000 a year. – Gutman

Michael Moore says he is currently getting nearly 8 million hits per month on his website.  His book Stupid White Men is number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.  I think it was Bob Dylan who wrote, “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

The anger now leveled at Nader seems so personal, so intense, from Baby Boomers who blame him for Gore losing the election (he didn’t lose). I look at these individuals in their forties and fifties and I wonder why Nader seems so personally threatening to them. It’s taken a while, but I think I’ve got it figured out: Nader represents who they used to be but no longer are. – Michael Moore, Stupid White Men

Humans are world processors.

Quaker Oats, it says on the box, "Warms your heart and soul.Ô" Good of them to think about my soul.

Someone told me that fiction is about "character changed by action."

George Bender is a pen name. I didn't want mobs carrying torches coming up the hill to the castle at night. I hate that.

Since its peak in 2000, the technology-laden Nasdaq has lost three-fourths of its value, the worst decline for a major stock average since the Depression. The S&P, a benchmark for the overall market, has fallen 40 percent over the same period. – Ben White , Washington Post, “Market Fearing 'Capitulation’”

In politics, “left” and “right” refer to distribution of the goodies – economics. People on the left believe in a more equitable or even distribution. People on the right believe you should be able to hang on to what you’ve got, and they support big business. By making rules in its favor.

Retirement: I took the clock out of the bathroom.

It’s sad that so often husbands and wives have so little in common. They may love each other, be very used to each other, but not share many interests.

Dreams are ghosts. They’re about things that can’t be fixed.

One thing I’ve learned about writing, it doesn’t do any good unless I publish. I think this goes for any kind of creativity. You have to put it out into the world or it festers. When I don’t publish is when I get jammed up and things turn to shit.

If nothing flows out, nothing flows in.

I’ve been staying up to 3 or 4 in the morning, chain-reading crime novels. Not good. Crime novels, at best, are a kind of weeping for the corruption of our culture. How far we are from who we meant to be.

It’s just as easy to leave the computer off as the TV, right? One black screen is much like another.

They used to say that we should live in the present, but I think it’s better not to. The present is too much with us. The present is so superficial. A political book with history is much deeper than a newspaper. You get some perspective.

The Democratic party, for example, has a history. And everyone is trying to pretend it doesn’t, that nothing has changed.

In Monty Python terms, the left are the knights who say no.

Women really are interested in cleaning products.

Men really are interested in gadgets. Today in the cancer clinic waiting room – regular three month checkup, no problem – one man was explaining to another how he can infrared zap data from his PDA (personal data assistant, a miniature hand-held computer) to his desktop computer. “What’s the range?” asked the listener.

Do you suppose there’s some alternative universe somewhere that isn’t full of bullshit?

TV ad for Paxil, in the middle of Pleasantville. Funny how we think that all our bad feelings are abnormal. Even though we have them all the time.

Pleasantville is still with us, it just looks different.

Politics is even more bizarre than love.

Yes, everything is just as weird as always.

Maybe the problem is that we’re concentrating on the patterned rather than the patternless. That sort of gives you a distorted view of things.

I keep trying to establish patterns. They have short runs and then peter out.

“At one point today the Dow dropped 400 points. At 11.”

Meanwhile, back in 50s TV Pleasantville, the wheels are starting to come off.

“Honey, I’m home. Where’s my dinner?”

“No dinner?”

Remember the fat kid in Lord of the Flies: “Aren’t I going to get any?”

“People change.”

“Can they change back?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s harder.”

It’s what didn’t happen that matters.

I’m torn between trying to change things and leaving everything alone. We were taught that the “river flows by itself.” And then the country went to hell.

Pleasantville is about what happens when total ignorance gets corrupted.

Briefly: A teenaged brother and sister from the present get sucked into a 50s black and white TV sitcom. Which I don’t remember. My family didn’t have a TV. It’s like I’ve gotten it second hand over the years.

“There is no right car. There is no right house.” No right life.

Maybe we could appreciate the patterned and the patternless, at the same time.

It’s funny how people think politics is highly technical. Political science. Lying is not that complicated.

I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. – Stephen King, On Writing

Boys are afraid of weakness in themselves, so they attack it in others.

I think I’m staying up reading until 3 or 5 in the morning because I’m making up for lost time.

Night is more magic than day.

My writing is a series of popouts.

King:

“Writing is refined thinking.”

“Writing is seduction.”

I let other people’s problems, the seriousness, all the fury and mire and complexity, pull out of my grasp, in the same way that you finally tire of grief or guilt or a bonegrinding ongoing contention with the world. – James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

Democrats vs. Republicans. It’s archaic, like a 50s sitcom on black and white TV.

“Honey, I’m home.”

“So, what shall we do tonight?”

“Oh I don’t know, why don’t we vote for a Republican or a Democrat?”

Circular logic: They do it because they’ve always done it. They have no idea what is really going on, so they stick with the imagined security of the familiar.

The establishment is conning you, because you want to be conned. You want to vote and forget it, turn politics over to someone else, anyone else. Just so they sound ordinary and say some of the right things.

Everything fed through the reduction valve of the corporate news media. Please don’t ask me to think. Had enough of that in school.

If you’re an activist you have to see the funny side, the galloping absurdity that’s always there in the background.

I’ve read that you could drive to space in a few hours, if your car could drive straight up.

Men don’t like women telling us what to do. Too many years taking orders from bosses, to come home and get more orders. Hard on women, who really really want us to do what they want us to do. They want it just as much as we want sex.

At some point, I think, wives just give up and go their own way.

I guess when the fighting stops the marriage isn’t far behind.

For a man to give in, to say “Oh all right,” is to become smaller.

If I could be younger…thrift store furniture. The paraphernalia of poverty.

Sometimes I wish we were young and pretty, hard to get used to the old look, but no, it’s been too hard to get here.

We age from the outside in.

How about zero tolerance for conservatives?

You shouldn’t read crime novels. But if you must, and apparently I do, try James Lee Burke’s dark vision of America as a slightly supernatural hell. He is one of the few crime writers whose names I remember after I put their books down. The Louisiana books are much better than the Texas ones.

Burke’s heroes are always fighting against their own dark side, the beast that just wants to kill their enemies. And usually does.

One of the perils of retirement is that you can start feeling useless. It helps to have some socially useful activity. But then that tends to take over my life, and I start wanting some air. I didn’t retire to do for free what I used to do for money.

Part of our problem with politics is that we’ve divorced it from the rest of our lives, so it seems like an obscure hobby. It’s not. Politics is woven together with everything else we think or do.

One of my nieces, when she was small, asked my sister, “Mommy, how come when I hi people they don’t hi me back?”

A writer told me she’s emerging from years of sleep. I know the feeling. It’s so easy to become numb and withdraw.

I’m going for long walks in southeast Portland, trying to wake up.

Yes, I’ve got to do something to wake up. I know: I’ll drink a lot of wine, get drunk and finish my crime novel.

Check my email.

It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you lose.

Oregon is beautiful in the sun, mystic in the rain.

13 Conversations About the Same Thing: One of those rare movies I walked out of feeling more human.

State programs in Oregon…have reduced teenage smoking in a remarkably short amount of time: a 44 percent drop among eighth graders and a 30 percent drop among 11^th graders between 1996 and 2001. – Willamette Week, July 10, 2002

Maybe it’s a good thing investors are getting screwed. No one paid any attention when it was just the workers.

Brownian motion is the random movement, caused by heat, of small particles suspended in a gas or fluid. Organizing is like that, only the particles are people, each with a different idea as to what the group should do, bouncing around. Until they line up, the group goes nowhere. Rather than drive myself crazy trying to line them up, spending hours every day on email, I’ve decided to just wait.

You have to know when to quit. Do something completely different for awhile.

Organizing is like a play, and sometimes the only way it works is if you walk out in the second act.

Paying attention to somebody else was also a way to give your mind a rest…. – K.C. Constantine, Blood Mud

In Ralph Nader’s book, Crashing the Party, he describes the slow, suffocating process by which the Democratic party became a whore for the corporations (my words, not his).

The computer is like a black hole. Must not turn it on. Must not check email.

America is a country in which education has removed all taste for learning.

On actor Warren Beatty:

It was said in the eighties of his close friendship with Senator Gary Hart that the reason they got along so well was that Hart wanted to be Beatty and Beatty wanted to be Hart. – Nader

When I had chemotherapy the first time, about four years ago, my sister drove to Portland once a month to take me to the treatments and back home. We would sit in the waiting room at the cancer clinic, me tense, her telling me about something horrible she’d heard about on TV news. I would say, “I just don’t have room for that right now on my worry list.”

Yesterday I realized I hadn’t paid this month’s rent. Two weeks late. I’m getting really spacey about everything except politics. I wondered why I was doing so well financially.

Reminds me of a T-shirt I saw in Berkeley, early to mid 80s, comic book style crying woman: “I can’t believe I forgot to have children.”

The falling value of the dollar makes American exports cheaper and more affordable in other countries, which should boost manufacturing, which is good for the working class. It will increase the cost of imports but so what? We can’t afford to buy anything anyway.

In my family, when I was young, we called the refrigerator an “icebox.” I write “butter” on my grocery lists, although I buy margarine.

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. – Stephen King, On Writing

I stay up late as an all-purpose rebellion against everything.

Everything has failed me.

And, I suppose, vice-versa.

We should resist the impulse to change our lives. The new one won’t be any better.

Instead of that, just do what you do.

You know.

All my life I’ve wanted to be extracurricular.

More than one-third of adults say they have no money saved in any kind of retirement account….

In 1990, Social Security benefits replaced 43.2 percent of the pre-retirement income of the average worker. That will slip to 36.7 percent by 2030.

 – USA Today, July 19-21, 2002

Stephen King says that “our lives are largely plotless.”

The chilling reality for many buy-and-hold investors is that they have made almost no money in stocks for the past five years…. The return on the S&P500 since mid-July 1997 works out to about 1.5 percent a year. An investor would have been far better off buying a five-year U.S. Treasury note in July 1997: That risk-free security would have paid 6 percent a year in interest since then. – The Oregonian, July 20, 2002

Somewhere I read, for the stock market it’s as if the 90s never happened. The gains have been lost.

If middle-class folks, the 50-60 percent of Americans who own stocks, have to go back to making money by working, maybe they’ll take another look at their wages.

Someone wrote that the electronics industry has proven no more stable for Oregon than the timber industry. Well hello, it’s all manufacturing.

Those who can afford it have enough stuff. Now they want services. Fries with that?

The underclass grips one out of three full-time workers in the United States.

…

The economy has more than doubled in per capita output since the sixties, yet the working poor, the working near-poor, and the just plain destitute are everywhere. – Nader

Corporate CEO compensation, according to Nader, as a multiple of entry-level wage:

1940            12x

1980            42x

2000        about 500x

A risk factor for depression is rumination, or dwelling on a memory and reviewing it time after time. – USA Today

Remember to forget.

After all, as Cicero said, freedom is participation in power. – Nader

Right. No power, no freedom.

We’re so dishonest in this country that when people hear working-class anger expressed they don’t know what to make of it. It’s like I just landed from Mars.

But gee, no one says anything like that on TV. They say “asshole,” but not that.

John Q is the only movie to tackle the subject. Critics panned it. Too simple and too over the top for them. But it made the point.

Not hip.

It’s hard to tell people I’m into (nonviolent) class warfare. They look at me as if I’ve just revealed a passion for necrophilia.

Time for the working class to come out of the closet.

No one thinks of themselves as the bad guys. Corporate leaders actually got their feelings hurt when Clinton would occasionally uncork the populist rhetoric. Even though he never followed through. (Bob Woodward, The Agenda, 1993)

Gore also talked get-big-business in his campaign. Democrats called corporate leaders and told them Gore didn’t really mean it. Which he didn’t. (Nader)

William Least Heat Moon, travel writer, said the secret of good writing is “really shitty first drafts.” He rewrote his book about traveling across the country by water 11 times.

If I were an academic I would write something like, “The function of the personal explosion in political activism.” I often do it, usually towards the end of a public meeting  run by some government agency, when I’m totally frustrated because I feel like they’re not talking about the real issues, I’ve built up a full head of steam, and it has to go somewhere. If you’re willing to eat shit they will keep feeding it to you.

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