[NYTr] Alexander Cockburn on the Amerikan Nightmare

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Dec 29, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12292007.html

CounterPunch Diary

Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Time made Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Chalk it up as nostalgia
for the cold war, when America was great, and a working man in a state
like Michigan had two cars, a nice house, a country cabin, a health
plan, a pension and a wife who stayed at home, canning fruit and
batting her eyes at the postman. These days he has two lousy jobs, she
has three and they have negative equity in their home, no health plan
and no pension.

A couple of indices of how down many Americans are feeling about the
future: The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has reached its
highest point in at least 25 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention recently reported.

The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S.
residents ages 45 through 54 ­ far more than among younger adults,
whose own suicide stats are also on the rise.

In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in the
45-54 cohort, the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such
rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982, a year when
there was a terrible farm crisis in the Mid-West.

These days it's the health care crisis. People can't even afford to get
finished off respectably by a doctor or a hospital, so they have to do
it themselves.

The second index of desperation is a sudden spike in teen pregnancies,
particularly among young black women. As R.F. Blader wrote a few days
ago here on this site, "When we believe in our opportunities, we
safeguard our futures. Conversely, we behave self-destructively when we
have no hope. For many teenagers in America, the options aren't
heartening. In a society where opportunities are scarce and life is
getting harder, getting pregnant puts a positive spin on a vote of
no-confidence." Indeed some argue that having babies early is a very
rational choice for a young black teen, since her support network of
kin are still alive, and her own body not wasted by the toxins
associated with low income neighborhoods.

In less than a week America will start trudging through the endless
months of Campaign 2008. Worthy Iowans, their quadrennial season in the
limelight at its apex, will cram into the caucuses and kick off the
horse races. In all the torrents of rhetorical hot air thus far
expended, it's hard to find a single sentence from any politician that
could give any comfort to that suicidal 50-year old or the teen with a
toddler as her only solace. There are gestures to populism by the
Democrat John Edwards, but I've not met anyone who believes that there
is the slightest chance of substantive reform of health care or a
reversal of soaring trends in inequality. The bad guys have a lock on
the system.

The default option these days is fantasy ­ a trend in American politics
kicked off in this epoch by Ronald Reagan. Reagan knew how to keep
things simple. When Reagan died a Pentagon official told me that when
Ron became president in 1981, and thus "commander in chief" the Joint
Chiefs of Staffs mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for
him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them
in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and
dozed off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by
cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible
caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing
on their launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their
bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint
chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect
that "we need more money". Reagan really enjoyed the shows and
sometimes even asked for repeats.

Reagan set the bar for the level of national political debate. They
called him the Great Communicator and no one has moved the bar since.
So who cares if his great contribution to the national fantasy "missile
defense", aka, "the strategic defense initiative" aka "Star Wars, is
now scheduled to consume 19 per cent of the defense budget even though
it's well nigh universally admitted the system is useless. The system
is impregnable to reform and everyone knows it. 

[...]


Democrat Found in Republican's Corpse

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A partially mummified hadrosaur discovered by a
teenager in North Dakota may be the most complete dinosaur ever found,
with intact skin that shows evidence of stripes and perhaps soft
tissue, researchers said on Monday.

They also found a second fossil. The clawed foot belongs to a species
of crocodile that may have been dining on the hadrosaur soon after it
died in a riverbed.

"It could have crawled up the back passage of the animal, went to get
the guts and ended up stuck," said paleontologist Phil Manning.


So Much for Second-Hand Smoke

They Died in 2007: Vincent Sardi Jr., 91. Consummate host of Broadway
watering hole Sardi's. Jan. 4.