Chaos: Theory and Reality

by Theron Dash

Could it be that the terrorists who created the 9-11 scenario were prophetic theorists in the application of chaos theory to politics and society? Did they foresee that without years of warfare, and huge quantities of blood and treasure, or even devastating weapons to wipe out millions, they could destroy the United States of America? Did they realize that they could do it with just a single day of dramatic horror, much as the well-placed, well-timed flap of a paradigmatic butterfly's wing could eventually cause a hurricane?

We are well on the way to providing their descendants with the material to support such a boast. The dominoes are still falling, but the pattern is clear: America is well on the way to destroying itself.

The events of 9-11 emboldened the hot-wired fanatics and coolly arrogant overseers of ruling class interests populating the Bush administration and their corporate (including media) and Rabid Right support system to manipulate the more infantile instincts of the public to power their apparently self-serving but dangerously delusionary agenda into consequential reality.

Now those consequences are being felt in virtually every home, in every corner of this noisy but numbed republic. With the federal purse closed to every institution except the military, and with prospect of federal poverty and inaction for years to come, the states and local governments are now facing destruction they can no longer hide. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the states cannot fund programs to lend a life-giving hand to the poor, the sick and the old. They cannot lend a life-changing hand to poor and middle class children in the form of good schools and affordable higher education, or in support for the arts and other preposterously inexpensive ways of transforming lives with benefit to all.

And that's just the beginning. Local governments are facing the kind of decisions appropriate to nations mired in poverty or devastating warfare. Because people are being fired and infrastructure support is being neglected, there will be homes that burn down and people burned to death inside them because America cannot afford adequate fire departments. There will be people who suffer and die when earthquakes and storms wreak havoc because America cannot afford to provide timely assistance. Very quietly and individually, there will be people who suffer and die because America cannot afford to provide basic medical care to those who need it, especially now that even emergency room doors are often closed to those without enormously expensive insurance.

No one knows who the victims will be of ordinary but increasingly dangerous misfortunes. We will all soon be forced to understand that few homes, very neighborhoods, and no cities or regions will be as secure as they were just a few years ago.

Each state and locality has its particular layers of additional responsibility for their plight: bad laws, bad governmental practices, bad corporate behavior, bad politics. But since these situations are being repeated throughout America, there is a national responsibility.

Where is America's wealth going? It is going to the wealthy, partly in the form of enormous tax cuts. It is going to the military industrial complex, and it's going down the drain of misconceived warfare and occupation in Iraq. The Bush administration is responsible, and the media and the American people are complicit, however unconsciously or mistakenly.

Consider the blood lust exhibited at the news that Saddam's sons were killed. Consider the rules of engagement there, in which any returned fire permitted total destruction and killing of everyone---in this case, the sons (whose brutality and sadism had been visited on Iraqis, not Americans, who presumably have the right to set their own priorities) and a fourteen year old grandson. Consider that a few million dollars would make a huge difference in many American communities right now, and that the informant who led American troops to Saddam's sons will be paid rewards totaling some 30 million dollars. The current wave of triumphant preening and prediction that these killings spells the end of Iraqi resistance to America's criminally confused occupation will likely prove to be the usual wishful thinking, as it is the same kind of willful blindness and imagery-will-make-it-true so consistent with this delusionary policy as well as the fundamentalist mindset of much of the Rabid Right.

Our Dash in California
by Morgan Dash

California is a nation within a nation, large and wealthy enough to go a long way to solving many of its own problems, yet for that same reason feeling the ups and downs of the America to which it is appended more powerfully than almost any other state.

California's state budget crisis is having effects as severe as anywhere in America, and more severe than many other states. Layered on the national insanity is a political system that often bypasses both the barriers and institutional consistencies of representative government with single issue ballot measures that reflect the natural if moronic desires of Californians (as expressed in a recent poll) for lower taxes and more government spending.

Now mandated through the similar petition process, California will hold the first recall election of its governor in history. This comes when the California budget is still not passed, while millions of people are directly and indirectly affected by the expected cuts that have not yet been officially made (and thousands who are paid through the state are facing dramatic loss of income if the budget isn't passed very soon.)

The recall petitioning and politicking by the rabid right has already diverted attention and serious engagement in the process of dealing with the realities of state income and outflow. The upcoming recall campaign will mean much more politics and much less government, and therefore more chaos and neglect.

The recall campaign also offers governor Gray Davis the opportunity to go on a dramatic offensive, to talk sense about the total political system in the state, and to propose comprehensive reforms. The seeds of this approach are in his budget document itself, which catalogues the absurd and contradictory mandates of the ballot measure system. He has the opportunity to be heard on what the state really needs to do to make the state government work for California's people: To propose needed reforms of the system, to talk in graphic detail about the responsibility of the Bush administration for this crisis, and to propose how California can take advantage of its size and wealth to institute solutions to its people's most pressing problems, regardless of what the federal government does. At the top of this agenda should be a state financed comprehensive health insurance program that guarantees coverage to all Californians.

Gray Davis is widely believed to be excessively political, self-serving and insensitive to the needs of Californians. And that's just among his supporters. He may believe that he can survive a recall election with relative ease, but that may not be the case. If Richard Rioardan is his chief Republican opponent, he is in for a very tough fight. Even Arnold S. has the potential to draw enough votes, especially if he comes out strongly for support of the arts and adds that constituency to those who would vote for him because he's a Republican or a "non-politician" celebrity.

So Davis may decide that the best political move is to shatter his gray image with bold analysis and proposals. If he does and if he can do it with some effectiveness, California and the nation will benefit from the ensuing debate.

By the by, in the interest of family unity I remind you that brother Gabriel continues his archival verse project over at http://gabrieldash.blogspot.com.

Reaping

The United States of Bush was going to crush the Great Saddam, with his weapons of mass destruction and U.S. equipped army and CIA trained terror squads, and bring democracy to Iraq. It granted other less powerful and morally clarified nations the privilege of participating but when they balked, well fuck em. We don't need them. We'll see who gets the damn contracts when the dust settles and the oil flows again. Pass me some of them freedom fries.

So the U.S. of B. figured to get in, wipe out the bad guys, be conquering heroes, scare the shit out of other countries, get the contracts and get out. Couple of months, and on to Iran, or Syria maybe. Get the whole Axis of Evil by Christmas.

And it all worked great until it all started falling apart. The same folks who foisted such an obvious B-movie story of the Heroic Private Lynch onto a tabloid-brain media whose idea of a literary genius is Tom Brokaw, got caught crossing their fingers and telling a little white whopper in the State of the Union. Iraq turned out not to be a self-winding watch you took off a dead soldier; once you owned it you actually had to run it. Costs $5 billion a month just to keep the place in soldiers. Or some say $4 billion. The difference in the estimates could change several million lives back in the states, where the poor, the sick and the children would be paying for all this with their lives, but that's another story...or is it?

Well, turns out the U. of B. S. could use some help after all. How about some soldiers to replace the ones who are falling down with exhaustion and being picked off in the public market? Or a few bucks anyway, can you help us out here? Hey France? Germany? But oddly enough, nobody is lining up to volunteer. What do you mean, we're out of freedom fries?

Now that Bush Nation is showing how easily overwhelmed it is in that one little test case country without much in the way of even weapons of fairly big destruction (but still with lots of automatic rifles), those other Axis of Evil countries are no longer quaking in their boots. More like they're laughing up their nuclear weapons suitable aluminum sleeves.

Turns out those contracts aren't worth much without a government making sure the trains run, not to mention the water, and that there's a law or two, and some people to make them and enforce them, so you don't get picked off climbing the oil rig.

It's all very funny isn't it except for the Iraqis dying, the American dying, the Brits dying, and here at home when the house catches on fire it goes on burning because there's no firetrucks coming and you can just burn in America, and if you get sick or an infected cut and you've got no insurance even the emergency room doesn't have to take you anymore so you can just suffer and die in America, and if there's an earthquake or a terrorist attack you can call homeland security or you can call your momma in heaven for all the good it will do you because nobody's coming and you can wait and starve and die of thirst and exposure in America, and if you're looking for a future and some hope don't look to the schools, don't look for your arts programs your theater teacher who told you yes your life does mean something, you can do something well, there were people who suffered before and found out things, we can at least all sing together but don't bother because all that's unaffordable in America, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history and can't afford anything except an army for the 99% and everything else for the one-tenth of 1%, the gated ones, them of the royal coup, the supreme coup, the corporate backscratch club of the U.S. of Bush.