by Dan Osterman
I’ve got the iTunes set to some ambient Detroit station. It sounds like steam rustling inside my ancient waterpipes. What I’ve been doing since July is basically lying to the American people. At least it feels like lying. I’m selling a dream. I raise money for the Democrats. Oh, those jolly Democrats. Last year’s rubber-stamp Congress’s got nothing on them. If the Republicans gave Bush everything he asked for, the Democratic leadership promises everything to the faithful, and a lot of them still want to. The people we call asking for money want to see some action – on the war, on the greed, on surveillance, on the lies. The heat is on. “Stand Up to Bush” is all I hear all day, when I call for the DCCC or the DNC or the DSCC. My rejoinder of course is a variation on “You Just Wait – We Will!”
I used to hear clicks on no one else’s phone but Dad’s. Now you hear them all the time. I imagine a fundraising call to my father going something like this:
“Hi! Hello! Good evening! I’m calling from the Democratic Gouging and Money-Grubbing Committee! Just because the Other Party has deep pockets doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get into yours! How are you today?”
They usually don’t know what hit ‘em, but Dad’s coy.
“That’s quite an introduction. I may have already given to you once in the past. Maybe $25, I think.”
“I don’t know. Maybe in 1964? Because of Goldwater? He was a nut, wasn’t he?” Pause. “Right?”
“Given the field, he wasn’t the stand-out. I think you were offering a Donkey-doll or other and that’s the only reason I gave –”
“Yeah, well, we don’t make those anymore. They weren’t cuddly enough. But you can go to our on-line store –”
“– And anyway, I’ve always been a Republican! How’d you get my name?”
“That’s easy. We cross-referenced you thru our special registered Republicans who are married to Democrats list!”
“You know, you squandered that twenty-five dollars. Johnson told us a bunch of lies about the Gulf of Tonkin and got us into Vietnam and you killed 52,000 men over there.”
“I’m sorry. You were a McCarthy man, Sir?”
“Feingold, McGovern, Kucinich, McCarthy? me? – no, no, no. I just want to know: what was the return was on my investment in the Democratic Party?”
“We turned it around didn’t we? Nixon, disgrace, impeachment. That’s all good right?”
“Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.”
Now, this might be the time for the “first ask”, though it might be dicey. It’d mean voting with his pocketbook against his better interest – his pocketbook.
“Well Sir, you do take a calculated risk by giving to the Democratic Party, but I’d like to ask if you’d consider giving again…”
(The disposition of this fictional audit remains unclear. The magic eightball says the picture is cloudy, come back another day.)
Sometimes I wonder about other people’s fathers. Mr. Hess, Mr. Pennypacker, Mr. Stoeffel, how did they fall off the radar, so to speak? Just the other day, when I mentioned what I do for a living now, Dad said he himself got a call not long ago from a man he used to work with who now fundraises for political and charitable causes like I do.
Bob?” Dad said. “You don’t know who I am do you?” I guess they had a conversation, I doubt Bob got anything out of him.
Bob, like the other engineers mentioned, got laid off. I talk to a lot of Bobs who’ve been laid off and can’t afford to give to the ACLU to stop the President’s illegal wiretapping programs or whatever. Sometimes I know it’s just a story so I throw them back to give another day.
“Zero Defects.” That was one of the work mantras Dad had to survive at RCA, and he wasn’t making televisions. We always owned RCA hardware but Dad worked on the cool stuff. I made the whole family go to Kubrick’s “2001” for my 14th birthday – nobody got it, certainly not me; but Dad made us all watch the first moon-landing together in 1969. Now that was better than any old movie, you could really escape into something like that, but then, dag!, back to the war… Our radios were always tuned to the Apollo missions. We were invested. Then NASA slowly folded up and Dad was picked for a different team. RCA was handed over to the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex to be gobbled up in mergers and acquisitions and absorbed into what’s now called Lockheed-Martin (also one of the corporations that do a hefty chunk of the telephone data-mining for the Pentagon, when it spies on American citizens. Remember it’s the DOD that invented the Internet…). Dad loves to say he’s never been on the Internet.
Let’s see, when did the U.S.S. Cole bombing happen? 1990? It was so obviously a grudge match, although I don’t remember anyone in the news media talking about it with any context. It was an AEGIS outfitted destroyer at the port of Yemen and two terrorists in a rubber raft blew a hole in its side.(1) Why grudge match? Because the only time Dad’s invention has been used in a situation even close to which it was designed for it misidentified a commercial airliner for an enemy plane. The place? The Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran (2) in July of 1988 and 300 men, women and children lost their lives on a flight during the annual Hejira to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.(3) Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig said they were all dead anyway, he could tell cause they were partially nude in the water. Dad even happened to be visiting me that week and we watched it together on the evening news. I wanted to confront him but not a peep between us. We looked the other way. The United States never apologized for the incident. If Reagan had, a lot of grief might have been averted later.
Then of course there are the theories of Elaine Scarry and Pierre Salinger on TWA 800 that mysteriously went down off Long Island in 1989, during an alleged Naval training exercise, involving again the AEGIS system.(4,5)
Those are the theories for who’s at fault, who did what, when and who made out like a bandit. They are just a few clues on the road to the future. If we can heed these early warnings we might be able to open some hearts and ears. Will the “New” Democratic Congress continue the sideshow of the present non-debate debate on a non-binding resolution on Iraq troop withdrawal? Will it discover for themselves what the American public already knows is a “clear and present danger”: that President Bush’s authorization of two fleets in the Persian Gulf off Iran poses a threat to the world?(6)
The public is incensed about Iraq, because 3,050 and counting of our willing men and women have died, but you might not know it except in private and on-line. The new Defense Secretary has signed onto intimidation, harassment and the threat of a new unprovoked “pre-emptive” war against Iran. Donald Rumsfeld and his inane “unknown unknowns” have been given the hook and taken offstage. The Democratic leadership thinks the American public can only handle one stooge Defense Secretary at a time. They don’t get the message I’m hearing from the folks back at the homestead.
“We’ve heard all this shit before.”
Two weeks ago there was a demo in Washington, D.C. for immediate removal of our troops from Iraq.(7) Many people didn’t go because they can’t make the time. I’ve talked to a few people on the phone who are furious with Bush on the war but don’t believe we should leave immediately. It seems they only go to demos with people who want out but are undecided on how to achieve that. Is there a rally for that somewhere? We’ve got to clean it up first, they say, which, not surprisingly was John Kerry’s position in 2004, although he’s changed it a couple times since. I’ve got an idea. We have a rich folks’ draft, instead of a poverty-draft. We send all the Congresspeople’s kids and the Korporate Ivy-League kids 18-22 over there with the same amount of money and let them clean up the place. Ok?
Defunding the war was the outstanding message we wanted to put out there at that march, although I myself carried a decidedly off-topic sign that indicated that our vaunted civil liberties were hanging by a thread because of Bush/Cheney’s sucker-punching the Constitution.(8) How did we get to this place so heavy with dread? The message is always the same. The deadheads at the top smile – bring it on or we’ll bring it to you, whatever the orders are, we don’t care. We like our sports, our guns, our beer and our oil. We’ll read all about it tomorrow, we’ll shake our heads in empty empathy and wonder how it ever got that way in the first place and I’ll take a double latte with cream and sprinkles.
That we have not been sufficiently engaged, nor seen any reason to change our arrogance and sinful nature, we ask your forgiveness O Lord. It may be too late, but let’s get enthusiastic anyway. Resolutions abound on getting us out of Iraq, but there is another way: cut the funding. If the House refuses to pass the 100 Billion Supplemental Bill for 2007, the President cannot veto it and it can’t go further.(9) It’s done. There’s tons of money already in the pipeline to get them home. Contact your representative and ask him to stop the funding and by the way sign onto the non-binding resolution against the war, too. Visit their offices during their recesses next week, call their staffers. Like I tell people when I call for contributions, it’s not all about the money, it’s also about holding your representative’s feet to the fire. If they’re against the war, prove it. Otherwise it’s just politics.
2 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/342008.shtml
3 http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000471.html
and
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/weaps/aegis.htm
4 http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001119mag-scarry.html
5 http://www.flight800.org and http://www.serendipity.li/more/goddard2/salinger.htm
6 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHGKPk0enVI&mode=related&search
8 http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/terrorwar/liberties/libertindex.htm
9 http://vcnv.org/q-a-2007-supplemental-spending-bill