We all hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, except that it’s already here.

I picked this up from a post by Dave Neiwert at Firedoglake. (You need to read the whole story at CNN.) It’s about homeless middle class women [Note: see comments] in Santa Barbara, California, sleeping in their cars:

Harvey now works part time for $8 an hour, and she draws Social Security to help make ends meet. But she still cannot afford an apartment, and so every night she pulls into a gated parking lot to sleep in her car, along with other women who find themselves in a similar predicament.

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police.

These aren’t crazies pushing shopping carts full of junk. These are people like you and me who fell on hard times and don’t have spouses, families, or government agencies to take care of them. Too poor to afford rent and too “well off” to qualify for assistance (assuming there is any), they sleep in their cars in parking lots set aside for them in one of the richest, poshest communities in California. Author Neiwert suggests calling these lots “Bushvilles,” after the infamous “Hoovervilles” of the Great Depression era.

What happens to your job when gas hits $10/gallon, and if you still have a car, where will you park to sleep?

Nice little country we got here. Holy Mother of God…

Dubuque is a fascinating old city with lots of character perched high on the limestone bluffs overlooking the mighty Mississippi. (The river is quite high now, too.) In the image below, you’re looking north from Eagle Point Park. The opposite bank is Wisconsin. While we were standing there, we saw three pelicans fly by. Yes, pelicans. They migrate through here, and on other visits I’ve seen large flocks of them.

That is one BIG river, folks!

The only “incident” of the day occurred while I was out to dinner with my wife, her sister and brother-in-law (the superintendent of schools in Dubuque), and her brother and his wife, who’d driven up from Atlanta. In response to a perfectly innocent question from the brother about whether “Santa Fe is still growing” — he works for Georgia Power loves to go on about such things — out of my mouth came:

“GROWING?! Growth is OLD. It’s finished. Growth is so… so 20th century!!!”

[silence]

No one said a thing for a good 20 seconds, I swear.

Maybe I was speaking in tongues, receiving a communication from the Universe, or maybe it was the alcohol. I’m not even sure what I meant, although I admit that the frequent references to how this or that place has “grown” so much tends to drive me bonkers, because they’re never delivered with regret. I can’t help it, I guess. Whenever conventional wisdom starts looming over me like a giant wave about to break, I just snap and have to fight back. He didn’t mean anything the least bit aggressive or argumentative by asking me that, of course, but my buttons got pushed. THE COLLECTIVE IS INSANE, you understand, or maybe you don’t. More power to you, though, if you’re immune to the perception — living with it all the time as I do is something of a chore.

My own fault, ultimately, but this came after a detailed discussion of my wife’s nephew’s new home in Georgia. Why any two people need a two-story, four bedroom house is none of my business, but it grated on me. It’s always a shock to get out into the world (America) and find that normal people think nothing of living in homes the size of aircraft carriers. At this very moment I’m sitting in a living room with three big sofas, four upholstered chairs, a baby grand piano, desks, coffee tables, and I don’t know what all. I swear it’s bigger than our entire house in Taos. Hell, the storage room here in the basement is bigger than where we live. I’m not jealous or envious in any way, but it seems so crazy.

The awkward moment at dinner was very telling, of course, because I violated orthodoxy. How dare one utter a dark, sarcastic word about the American Way! No harm was done, fortunately, and I soon regained control. But welcome to Dubuque, you might say.

(I really do need to get out more, too…)

Oh that Hillary (addressing the topic of Iran)… Some words should never be uttered, not even in the heat of a national political campaign. If you like that kind of language, though, this is what you’re signing up for:

Post-blast corpses in Hiroshima, Japan

This photo and others like it were only recently released. They’re from August, 1945 — when I was born, coincidentally — and the entire series is available here. Be advised, however, that the close-ups are extremely gruesome. So too is the very idea that the U.S. would do this to a nation of 70 million people because someone jumped on Israel, which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons of its own.

Personally, I would like America to take an entirely different direction than more of the above. For some reason, I’d rather help people than kill them, and I wish our politicians would do the same. Great God Almighty, are there no grownups running for president these days?!?

Why yes, actually. One, to be precise.

I think it’s time for this again. I first used this image (which I created) on March 14, 2003…

Over one million human beings dead!

The singular moral and political event of the last eight years. From this crime, so heinous, widespread, corrupting, and ongoing as to defy comprehension, comes the present state of America: hated throughout the world, bankrupt, and crumbling into irrelevancy. We who live here can no longer govern ourselves honestly or speak our minds freely. And still the unelected government beats the drum for yet another war against a much greater nation that has likewise done us no harm whatsoever. The consummate national tragedy of my lifetime could be eclipsed in very short order, all because the criminals were never impeached.

Absolutely nothing good, on any level, has come from the machinations of both Republicans and Democrats (Clinton!) who supported these outrages and continue to do so. To hell with every last one of them forever. The only mission that’s been accomplished is the mission of the terrorists. We’ve lost our freedom, our treasure, and our moral foundation as the country staggers to the edge of the cliff.

The American people are better than this, and it was never supposed to be this way. If we have any spark of decency remaining, we need to act now and vote for CHANGE. I believe we will.

(McCain, incidentally, doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of becoming president…)

We will likely be spending the night there shortly. There are several things about Kearney you should know, one of which is that we will not be lodging at the “Americinn.” Yes, that’s an actual motel (”america inn,” I suppose) — reads like the name of a red-white-and-blue weed killer, doesn’t it? Neither will we be staying at the “Kearney Inn 4 Less.”

[sigh]

Hungry to learn more, I also went to a website named Kearney.net. I clicked on the link for “Area Attractions,” and the page hung up for a long time. My browser said “2 of 3 items downloaded,” which I thought made sense, and then finally I found this, a fine and wondrous thing. I’ve seen it before. It looms over Interstate 80 like a bridge to nowhere.

Where Nebraska is concerned, however, think of the Platte. There’s more American history tied to that river than most of us will ever know: Mormons, the Pony Express, and hundreds of thousands of poor bastards from Ohio with their families in covered wagons, on the way to California to pick gold nuggets off the ground.

Americinn. My God.

A few days back I wrote in the comments:

Before this election season, I was in a psychological/spiritual space where those things didn’t affect me in the same way, and then I got sucked in again! Damn, damn, damn. Now I have to go back and do it all over again, just so I can function. Ultimately a good thing, however. I’ll be sure to report if I find a way out.

“Those things” being collectively the vicious madness all around us, of course. That’s one reason I haven’t been writing much here lately: I went too deep into the affairs of man and had my head rung like a bell. You could also call it “shocked into temporary submission,” which I’m sure affects a great many more of us. But this presidential campaign has hit me harder than any I can remember — while they must have been awful in the past, this year I’ve never been aware of so many failures of human virtue in public life. Our national dialogue, such as it is, contains so much ignorance, hatred, and brazen lies, I can hardly cruise the blogs for half a day without incurring serious damage. Maybe it’s always been that way at the core, but the Internet makes it easy to refine the evil brew and get a straight dose. (I go here sometimes, but please be careful: some of the links are very unhealthy.)

Truly, I can’t remember a time in my own life when we seemed to care so little for each other — and I came of age at a time when policemen were siccing snarling dogs on civil-rights marchers, forgodssakes. It simply boggles the mind. Hardly anyone in public life seems to have any self-awareness at all, either (except my man).

UGH. RETCH. GOO-GOO PUCKY.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned something morbidly fascinating as a result of watching a National Geographic documentary on PBS. This one was all about strange things happening on planet Earth, except every topic was ultimately reducible to “and then we ate it.” We did, people did. Humans did. Disappearing wildlife in Africa? Simple: THEY ATE THEM. (It’s called “bush meat.”) No fish in the sea? WE ATE THEM. And on and on and on.

Somewhere along the line we must have eaten our own souls. Today I visited a worthwhile site that shall remain nameless and read a breathlessly upbeat post about how New York City is getting rid of hundreds of old subway cars by dumping them in the ocean — and did you know, why, there’s nothing toxic about them at all (very different from any NYC subway cars I’ve ridden on), and just look how much the fishes love them, etc. etc. But every time I read about some godawful piece of wreckage being sunk to “provide fish habitat,” I want to scream. It may be quasi-ecological to a lunatic, but it’s certainly immoral: we should be taking things out of the ocean, not putting them in. If there wasn’t sufficient fish habitat before we dropped subway cars into the briny deep, it’s because one way or the other, we ate it!

When a mindless planet-eating disease decides to hold an election, what else does one expect, I guess? Right. And you know what? This is strangely comforting. Just more evidence that the whole thing is our own damned fault, which means if we succeed (i.e., fail), the Earth wins.

Yay, I think.

(This probably means everything is sort of all right, but check back with me later to make sure.)

[No doubt another time when I just shouldn't write, but here goes anyway...]

I belong to a certain Macintosh-oriented email list. Earlier yesterday I read about how Qwest is now offering 20 mbps DSL — the fastest available in this country — in a few selected areas. Then last night I encountered a blog post about how one can have 100 megabyte-per-second DSL in France, plus long-distance phone service and TV channels included, for about $85. Infuriated, I posted a message to my email list asking the following:

…how in the HELL does America innovate its way out of three dozen different potentially fatal fixes with a freaking stone age telecommunications infrastructure??? (Never mind that we got bridges falling down…) How do we compete with anybody? Hello??

A German list member commiserated with me. A guy in northern VA was sympathetic. And then a third person — a very dear soul who reads this blog — responded with a list of links to U.S. military photo galleries, adding that “these are not just cool (well some of them), but they have great meaning to us over on this side of the world.”

Um…

Disregarding for the moment that I live here too, we get the following:

1. Our telecommunications infrastructure sucks.
2. People in Europe can get TEN TIMES the bandwidth for less dough.
3. Yeah, but just look at these Navy fighter jets!!!

I hardly know what to say. The problem is that a similar dynamic operates in many areas of concern. Sometimes it seems as if the light just keeps getting dimmer, no matter what one does.

This morning the sadness is overwhelming. Perhaps this is partly so because of what I sometimes feel about myself, having been raised not to aim too high, not to dream too great (lest one suffer disappointment), not to believe in happiness, etc. etc. I constantly conflate the nation’s psyche with my own, of course. Probably most of us do, and it’s a trap. There’s only one reason to fear criticism, because it resonates with suppressed belief. Whether the belief is false or not is immaterial, because it never sees the light of day.

What, me bitter? How we used to love to travel…

But dear God, the euro is now worth $1.596! Good thing we went to Europe in the ’80s and the ’90s. We could never go there now, even if permitted to board the Flying Flammable Sardine Can from Hell.

They trashed our Constitution. They trashed the environment. They’ve murdered millions in foreign lands. The president endorses torture! And now they’ve trashed our currency and impoverished us all. Republicans, Democratic cowards, Wall Street bankers, neocons, rich idiots — what a great bunch of patriotic criminals and traitors we let run the show, so it’s our fault too, ya know. And now if I want to take a little trip to get away from it all and remember what it feels like to be in a free country where the government works, I’ll have to live like a goddamn refugee because my money’s no good.

Money changers in Amsterdam aren’t even taking dollars any more.

(USA! USA! USA!)

Geez.

We don’t have dollars, we have feathers. Tokens. Monopoly money. Why even CALL them “dollars” any more? Time for a new name: how about fazools? I dunno, it just came to me. Might just ease the pain. Hey man, got change for a fazool? The pursuit of the almighty fazool. Another day, another fazool. Etc., etc.

There’s a very important lesson here. When I finish grinding my teeth, I’ll think about it!

I’ve had it with the Chinese. They don’t deserve to have a single American attending or participating in the Olympic games. If you have a VERY strong stomach, take a look at these Tibetan protest photos. (That page has links to even more.) WARNING: dead bodies and lots of blood. This is not a joke.

Pass that link on to everyone you know. This is serious business.

Having been singularly impressed by the higher qualities of Barack Obama’s mind and spirit, I remain whole-heartedly convinced he will be the next President. Obama is coming at this project from an entirely different perspective, and people feel that. He appeals to reason and intelligence. There’s an intuitive connection to the unconscious. What resonates is the inherent sense of fair play in all our souls. Shoot, even if I’m imagining all this, he’s still the one because of what he can elicit.

I have to think humanity’s best impulses are stronger than the worst. Otherwise, I’d be dead already. (Those words are not written lightly.) But our political and cultural leaders are, for the most part, hopelessly mired in outdated, fear-drenched conventional wisdom. Who would not despair of healing them, and should one even try? Just walk away and live your life the way you really want to, I say to myself.

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Maybe everybody should!

UPDATE: I just watched a great video of Obama at a labor rally in Pennsylvania. I could post these things all day. Damn, he’s good.