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A few weeks ago I took a trip with my girlfriend to lovely, lovely Julian, California — a lovely little mountain town where there are lovely, lovely wine tastings and just the most lovely apple pies you’ve ever eaten. The town has a lovely gold-rush era feel with a small, but dense main street and plenty of lovely open space. Just outside of town there are lovely fields of lovely tall grass filled with lovely, lovely ticks that latch on to my genitals.

It was a lovely time.

Actually it was. Julian is a beautiful, reasonably priced alternative to Napa, charming romantic and all that. But a tick to the balls has a way of putting a damper on a perfectly good trip – especially when you don’t have health insurance.

I’m from Boston, where Lyme disease is a real problem. Friends and acquaintances that have come down with the disease suffered months upon months of misery, and in some cases permanent neurological damage.

Coming from Boston, I also happen to know that tiny deer ticks are the ones that carry the greatest risk of spreading the disease, and that the longer the tick stays attached, feeding, the grater the chance of infection. My tick was definitely tiny, with the exception of his blood-engorged body. He’d been feeding on me for two days before I caught him.

Not good.

They say the obvious sign of Lyme disease is a telltale bull’s-eye-like rash that appears on the site of the bite after the tick is removed. Now, trying to remove a tick that has its head buried fairly deeply inside your genitals is neither an easy nor pleasant task. By the time I got the sucker off, lets just say there was some carnage. Impossible to tell whether what I was looking at was a bulls-eye, a scab or Godknowswhat. It’s not a particularly pleasing aesthetic canvas down there.

It seemed like I didn’t have a bulls-eye, but I couldn’t be sure. And on top of that I was getting headaches and a wickedly stiff neck – two of the 5 billion signs of Lyme disease.

So much for self-diagnosis.

The disease is treatable if caught early. But, to catch it and treat it I would need a doctor. But how does one do that without health insurance these days? Well, there are three things a person could do in my predicament: go to the emergency room to get an immediate test for Lyme disease, but that struck me as a bit excessive and potentially costly; I could schedule an appointment with a private doctor and pay out of pocket; or I could go to a free clinic and get checked out. If it looked bad, maybe my lab results would even be covered. I went with option number three. Trust me, if you make what I do you’d take door number three as well.

In my relatively large LA County city there is only one free clinic, run by a local church. It meets once a week in the church’s upstairs offices. It’s open for about three hours after working hours. I got there five minutes early and was the fortieth person in line.

The bureaucratic task of processing us was left to a handful of geriatric volunteers. They were slow as could be, but let me tell you, those of you out there who don’t respect your elders better recognize these people are the only ones willing to volunteer to help you out. When they go, so goes a whole lot of earnest people willing to help others for free. The generations that came after them don’t seem to have it in them.

That said, the nurses that volunteered their services were all young, and man were they caring and earnest…and hot. Seriously, guys, girls, it was ridiculous. If you were trying to cast a wildly vapid reality TV show about sexy nurses living and working and Los Angeles, you could just set up shop in the free clinic. No need to look anywhere else.

I waited for about an hour before I was brought from a waiting room to the treatment room and was processed by one of the kindly geriatrics. 15 minutes later one the nurses came to interview me about my situation. She was very polite and smiley as I described the situation with my tick-mauled genitalia. She said she’d get me one of the doctors.

The place was now absolutely packed, and it took several minutes for a doctor to become available. There were several private nooks carved out in this room with drapes hanging in front of them for private examinations. By the time a doctor did come to see me, none of these spaces were open. “So, what can I do for you?” he asked. “Oh” he replied curiously after I told him.

He led me down a long hall to the church reading room, the only empty room on the entire floor, which just happened to have no doors. Just a massive open space that anyone could storm right into.  Statues of Jesus in various states of terror and pain on the cross were the room’s primary decorations.

“Drop your pants,” he said.

Now, I’m definitely not Christian, never have been, but there’s something strange about presenting another man your testicles for inspection in front of stigmata-stricken Jesus.

Anyway I dropped my pants and the doctor immediately began to look confused. He seemed to have no clue what he was looking for. Something tells me Lyme disease isn’t a common ailment people bring to the free clinic – especially in Southern California.

After about five minutes of genital inspection by both the doc and Jesus, he finally said he needed to consult the head doctor of the clinic. The doctor said this, not Jesus.

Anyway, we left the church reading room and headed back to the main treatment area. The doctor sat me at a desk while he conferenced with several other doctors nearby. They were laughing quite a bit and drawing pictures.

Several minutes later, three doctors came over and showed me a clipboard with two pictures of ticks – one round and robust the other tiny. I pointed to the tiny one.

“Well, that is the type of tick that carries Lyme disease in this area,” the head of the trio told me.  “I can give you the anti-biotics and you can take them preemptively. But that’s gonna cost you.”

Getting a lab test would be even more expensive. Back where we started.

The doctors assured me that the bulls-eye is very noticeable, even painful, when you’re afflicted with it. They didn’t think I had the disease, but I should come again if any kind of rash developed. I said I thought I’d be fine.

I haven’t noticed any rashes or advanced neurological damage yet. At least no more than usual.

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On July 3rd, 2009 a piece I wrote entitled “Mommy the Gays are Coming” was published on the GLBT magazine The Advocate’s website. The piece detailed the major advances in gay rights in the ultra-right-wing, Catholic nation of Colombia, and included original photos from Bogota’s gay pride march — the largest gay event in Colombia’s history. The piece was 600 words and included six photos (not to mention international reporting in a country that can be fairly dangerous — I was mugged at knifepoint days before the story was published) for which I was promised $175.

Fine.

I completed my piece, it went up on the site, I sent my invoice, W-2 and signed all the relevant contracts. Months went by and no check came. After a couple of months, I wrote the relevant parties at The Advocate and their parent company Here Media to see what was going on.

“Thank you for contacting our office,” I was told. “Your paperwork is being reviewed and processed at this time. A payment will be issued a.s.a.p.”

No payment came. Still more months went by.

Making matters worse, at the time I wrote this story I had just lost my job at the LA CityBeat after that paper folded. 175 bucks might not seem like much, but I really needed it at the time. I personally financed my trip to Colombia, hoping I could dig up the kind of stories that would allow me to establish relationships with new and different kinds of magazines. My plan worked, but little did I know I’d be starting a relationship with a mag that doesn’t pay its writers.

On December 16, 2009, after sending off multiple tersely worded emails demanding payment, I received a reply from Michael W.E. Edwards, Director of Editorial Operations for Here Media.

Matthew, first off, I’m sorry that you’ve probably been getting only “form letter” types of statements from our Accounting department in regard to your due payment. That’s why my department is hoping to do a better job at communicating with the contributors and vendors that Editorial works with.

And second, I want to thank you for the extraordinary patience you’ve shown us as we at Here Media recover from an economically difficult 2009.

Our sales team, on all fronts, is reporting that 2010 will be a much better year. That said, we are working hard at catching up with all our valued freelancers and other vendors, and I know that you will be paid in the near future. We are making progress and look forward to fulfilling our obligation to you shortly. I wish I could give you a specific time line for payment, but I simply don’t have the insight for when our Accounting team will be able to complete its catch-up task.

I know this isn’t the news that you were hoping for, especially now that the holidays are here and since your payment is so many months past due. But I do hope that you will bear with us, because we are committed to making good on payment to you and all of our contributors.

Thanks,
Michael

So the promises of payment I’d been receiving were simply form letters, presumably sent to a bunch of other freelancers The Advocate had been stiffing.

Nearly eight months have gone by since that letter and still no check. I recently emailed Edwards again and he referred me to the company’s finance department. They checked their computers and saw that, indeed, I was owed $175. They provided no rationale for this negligence and apologetically promised to pay me. Nearly four weeks later the check has still not been mailed. I have called the office of Here Media’s CFO repeatedly over the past few weeks. Each time I receive more promises of payment that go undelivered.

In short: The Advocate owes me money, they know they owe me money and have refused to pay me for over a year.

A slightly modified version of the piece originally appeared on Fishbowl LA

Some of the most interesting guerilla street art I’ve seen in quite some time — a mini-gum mural on a palm tree in Glendale.

Anatomically correct too.

Tasty.

This is just too amazing not to post. Better than Girltalk.

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I went to my first socialist happy hour last Saturday. What is socialist happy hour, you ask? It was a fundraiser at a bar for the San Diego chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Ten bucks got you a dollar off your beers all night. Not a bad deal if you feel like drinking. An even better deal if you’re curious about the state of alternative political representation in America.

Even the Tea Partiers have figured out the two-party system is a failure. But what else is out there? Ron Paul is consistently sane, but I don’t know anyone who would actually want the majority of his ideas put into practice. Everyone (wrongly) hates the Greens since Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign helped put Bush in office.

So what are the socialists up to these days? With the country stuck in two interminable wars, the economy a mess, Wall Street bathing Scrooge McDuck-style in swimming pools of tax-payer money, you’d figure there might be some underground drift towards socialism. Southern California has plenty of Latin American immigrants after all. They haven’t been conditioned to hate socialism on principle like the rest of us Reagan-brainwashed American dolts. Immigrants both legal and illegal come over here, are generally exploited, subject to police harassment and deportation at any moment — socialists should be making huge traction in these communities, no?

As it turns out, not so much. About 10 people showed to socialist happy hour. This despite the fact the event was listed in the San Diego CityBeat, the local alt-weekly rag. Publicity was not the problem.

The folks who showed up were perfectly nice and earnest about their causes. They were mostly white; educated; well-spoken enough, but not compelling. What was their political platform? Aside from generically believing in the need to restructure the American economy, their main issues were supporting social justice, immigrants’ rights, banning-offshore oil-drilling and rallying against the Arizona immigration bill. The closest thing to a local issue was protesting budget cuts to the public university system. Oh, they didn’t like Prop 8 either, which for those of you out there living in a hole, constitutionally bans gay marriage in California.

All well and good, but I failed to see how any of these issues differentiated the socialists from any other casually liberal Californian. Practically every Democrat in the state supports the same things. And most of this stuff was national politics – how are a tiny band of socialists in San Diego going to make a dent in political consciousness of a nation talking about the same things everyone else is? Wouldn’t it make sense for a socialist organization to start small – keep their platform hyper-local? Or at least regional?

“With all that’s going on with Wall Street and political corruption in both parties,” one of them told me, “we think can capitalize on the public outrage by embracing national politics.”

Ummm, no, you can’t.

People are assuredly pissed off about the state of our national affairs, but they’re perfectly capable of expressing their impotent rage without your assistance. What possible immediate real-world impact could the American socialist party have on containing the ills of Wall Street?

If California socialists really want to score political points with a disaffected public by fighting a dead-end cause, they should go after Prop 13 –– which caps property tax rates in California. The state is broke because of it, our public institutions failing. But Democrats are too terrified to touch the measure for fear of being accused of raising taxes. Prop 13 basically has no chance of being repealed anytime soon, but at least it’s a dead-end cause no other party is touching. There’s enough anger over it that it could win someone some political traction.

Worth a shot in my opinion, but Prop 13 was a non-starter at socialist happy hour. No one really knew what it was.

Sitting around with these folks – intelligent and well-intentioned as they were — it started to dawn on me why socialism has absolutely no traction in America. Because socialists don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Contemporary socialism is all about Mumia and Palestine and aforementioned impotent rage.

So I spent some time thinking about it and here’s my socialist game plan. The following is meant for a local ISO chapter of about 10-15 people. It involves ditching Berkley identity politics and getting back to Little Red Book basics.

First, establish a home base – preferably in the poorest most disenfranchised neighborhood in the city. The socialists in San Diego didn’t even have an office – a space people could physically visit and associate with the movement. No good. Try to find a compound with some land. You’re going to need it. For reasons to be explained later, this home base should not have any formal affiliation with the political wing of your party: but, make no mistake, it’s your headquarters.

Found a spot? OK then, time to move in. All of you.

You say you want to nationalize industry and strip the country of our ill-gotten free-trade consumer crap. Then prove it. Collectivize. Any socialist organization that isn’t living collectively really isn’t serious about revolution. You’re posers. You don’t have to share bank accounts — but living and working together proves you’re actually serious about your stated political goals. Not only that, collectives also happen to be the greatest possible grass-roots political advertisements out there for your cause. They don’t even have be particularly well run. Contemporary America offers virtually no culture, no community and no assistance for people who are in need. Collectives can offer all three.

I lived in New Orleans after Katrina where I would occasionally volunteer at Common Ground – a hippie organization that set up collectives across the poorer regions of the city to help folks recover from the flood. As far as achieving their stated mission of helping people, Common Ground was a miserable failure. I think I saw them gut two houses the entire time I was there. They didn’t do shit: there was no central leadership, no organization. Their collectives however — houses they refurbished and lived communally in — became neighborhood cultural hubs. It was like Zion from the Matrix – without all the leather and techno-sexy. Asian math PhD’s teaching little black kids how to hack into computer networks. Geriatric illiterate men cooking group meals alongside the white, upperclass, hairy-armpitted, lesbian children of the ruling class. Everyone eating together, playing music together, hanging out together.

Common Ground would throw parties in the ghetto, (and I mean GHETTO) bring dozens of the liliest, organic-chickpea-salad-toting-white-folks you’ve ever seen, and no one ever had any trouble. If that doesn’t sound like that big a deal to you, I dare you to wait until the next disaster inflames racial tensions in New Orleans, when people are broke and hungry, then park your car outside an Algiers housing project and take a stroll after dark. 50 Cent wouldn’t make it.

My point is that collectives can capture the attention of a community in ways shallow political rhetorical and generic, angry ideology never can come close to achieving.

I generally despise people who use the cliché “be the change you want to see in the world.” No problem with Gandhi, but when you hear this phrase these days it’s usually uttered by vacuous liberal scum who think driving hybrids and bringing reusable grocery bags to the farmers market are the end-all-be-all of a responsible, sustainable existence. This is why people hate Democrats – because they’re fucking hypocritical bourgeois turds. Ariana Huffington can talk about environmental responsibility all she wants, but I’ve been to her house and seen how she lives. It takes armies of 10-year-old boys and girls around the world mining and sewing and fighting and burning the rainforest to keep Ariana’s Greek revivalist mansion in proper order. Sustainability is not a bourgeoisies nicety.

But I digress.

For all the socialists out there, I’ll throw the Gandhi cliché your way. Be the change and whatnot: collectivize.

Now the real work starts.

Solar panel your compound up. Start an organic garden. Raise chickens and goats and whatever other animals you can. Build a cistern for rain water capture. Get your compound off the grid. Show people the wonders of socialist collectivity. It’s possible to live a borderline subsistence lifestyle in an urban environment. Show people how to reject the capitalist infrastructure. Apply for environmental grant money. This is why your collective shouldn’t be formally affiliated with the party. Campaign finance laws would probably interfere. No formal party affiliation, no problem. That’s the best part about this whole idea. Get the government and industry-funded non-profits to pay for your revolution.

Next, start a breakfast program — every day of the week if possible. Invite the whole community into your compound to eat before work and school. Straight of the Mao playbook. The Black Panthers pulled it off perfectly in the 60s. Feed people and they will come back – whereupon you can eventually propagandize them. Feed them from your organic garden and you’ll be eligible for all kinds of environmental grant money.

Next, set up a tech room. Libraries across California are closing. Free Internet access is an invaluable commodity. Set up computers, find some geeks to teach the neighborhood how to surf, hack, job search – whatever. As they say, information is power. Give people access to that power, and they will be appreciative.

It wouldn’t hurt to leave a few copies of “The Jungle” laying around this room for people to read either.

See if you can find a doctor to live with you and offer basic medical care to people on weekends. Stitch up the neighborhood kids if they fall off their bike. Write prescriptions for anti-biotics if someone needs it.

Once people in the neighborhood get to know you, start throwing block parties. Become a cultural institution. Put the social in socialism (wocka wocka wocka!). Show people that your way isn’t all work and sweat and Ivan Drago from Rocky IV.

As you garner goodwill and word of your deeds spread, start more collectives throughout the city, replicating your original model. This will win you good favor in all corners of the city and will eventually lead to the creation of (duh-duh-dah!) a political base for you to run candidates off of. Those tech rooms can double as campaign centers, and, since you’ve been training folks how to use the computers, you’ll have no shortage of community campaign volunteers.

Replicate this model in every city, in every state and then, maybe then you’ll have a shot at politically capitalizing on America’s national discontent.

Or, by all means, continue your ineffectual support for social justice and freeing Mumia.

Image by soylentgreen23 via Flickr

A strange thing happened to a friend of mine the other day. She was at work when she noticed a coworker looking rather sullen in the corner of the office. She went to ask what was wrong, when suddenly her coworker broke into fits of wailing and sobbing. The woman’s shoulders convulsed with such force as she cried, that my friend assumed there must have been a death in the family, or that someone close to her was sick or dying. My friend immediately tried to comfort her and ask what was wrong.

This is what she was told:

FEMA was building camps to round up and annihilate Christians. The roundup would start soon, but it would move slowly and quietly. Whole families would disappear and not be heard from again, but it would be made to look like they simply moved out of town. Christian children, her children, would be gassed and put into plastic coffins. Two of the woman’s friends had already moved out of the country. Others were following soon. She intended to join them as soon as she could save up enough money. But finances were tight and it might be too late.

What made this incident especially strange for my friend was that her coworker was not unintelligent or incompetent. She spoke three languages, was good at her job, and had managed to raise three children, by herself, at a relatively young age. The whole FEMA camp thing is pretty 2008, yet the woman’s fear was so palpable that she still called me to double-check.

Putting aside the obvious questions about why the government, composed of Christians, run by Christians, largely for the benefit of Christians, would round up 90 percent of the country and put them into camps, the online FEMA camp rumors were debunked ages ago, most thoroughly by Popular Mechanics – who then sent their editor-in-chief on Glenn Beck’s show twice to set the paranoiacs straight. One of the supposed U.S. government concentration camps is actually a North Korean prison camp. The other is a train yard in the Midwest somewhere, while the third is a National Guard base in Michigan. This information isn’t hard to look up. The Popular Mechanics piece is among the first things to pop up when you search for FEMA camps. Yet the rumors and paranoia still persist.

As soon as my friend told me this story, I had to know how much FEMA-fear was still out there. I posed the question on the social networking site Reddit, which is known for having a fairly sophisticated readership, and received more paranoia in reply than I would have expected.

“There is a lot of info on the net about this. Believe it or not at your own risk. The camps appear to be real. The powers of the government under an emergency are infinite. This is a very scary situation. You can do research about it on the net if you are interested in it. It seems that all of the crazy people aren’t so crazy after all. A lot of it is about information control, money, land, fear, sheeple control, etc.” “While improbable that such an event will occur, it’s not beyond possibility.”

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999 allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.”

In this time in our nation’s history, a conspiratorial mindset is certainly not unreasonable — even justifiable. But what possible rationale would the government have for putting people in camps — aside from the state of Arizona, which I’m sure wouldn’t mind hauling in all of Mexico if it were possible — there’s absolutely no incentive.

We have completely legal institutionalized bribery in the form of the campaign finance system. Corporations pay off politicians to do their bidding and then give them jobs in the private sector when they retire from government. The government takes our money, hands it to the financial industry and goes a year without even addressing the prospect of any significant regulatory changes.When they finally bring Goldman Sachs up on charges, civil, mind you, not criminal, half the country is cheering for Goldman.

The government can rob the country blind, shift the nation’s wealth to the elite, while cashing in themselves, and no one does a thing about it. Why would anyone corrupt enough to benefit from that system want to screw it up by building concentration camps and drawing international scrutiny? It makes no sense.

This is all obvious, of course. But it has to make one wonder how can there still be people shuddering in fear of FEMA camps when the conspiratorial reality is so banal and right under their noses?

Image by AFP via Daylife

After reading all the fallout on Yahoo! Sports from the Anderson Silva/Demien Maia fight, about how Silva is a disgrace to mixed martial arts and how UFC fuhrer Dana White is at his wit’s end trying to figure out what to do with the guy, I finally took the time to sit down and watch the fight. And you know what? Dana White and Yahoo! Sports are full of shit. Plain and simple.

The obvious fact was that Maia was simply outclassed from the start. He couldn’t touch Silva. In the second round, Silva stood directly in front of Maia with his hands at his sides, head motionless, for seconds at a time. Maia didn’t even throw a punch. Silva basically took the last three rounds off and Maia’s face was still a bloody mess by the end of the fight.

And people want to blame Silva for the bad fight?

Look, I don’t blame Maia either. He didn’t belong in the ring with Silva. He was terrified from the start. Twice I saw him fall to the ground in anticipation of punches that never landed.

This fight was Dana White’s fault.

White and his fanbois at Yahoo! say Silva should have used his killer instinct to finish Maia like Tyson used to do to his opponents in his prime. But this isn’t boxing. Silva is one of the most dangerous men on the planet, in a sport where he’s punching his opponents in the head with practically his bare hands. Does White want Silva to kill somebody in the ring? Is that what he means by killer instinct? Because when you place two fighters so wildly unmatched in the same cage, there’s a distinct possibility that could happen.

Silva has made it abundantly clear from previous fights he will not finish people who don’t belong in the ring with him. And, you know what, I don’t blame him. Demien Maia is a great fighter and would absolutely destroy me if I ever crossed him in a dive bar, but putting him up against Anderson Silva would be like sending Bobby Fischer to play the local YMCA champ. Or sending Paul Pfeiffer to beat up Wayne (All you kids out there need to look that reference up if you don’t get it. Hours of great television in store for you).

Silva may have clowned Maia, but he’s a warrior. He’s clearly got a code. He wants to fight the best. He doesn’t want to bully people who can’t stand with him. And he’s shown repeatedly he’ll only bring his game if he’s fighting someone who challenges him. This shouldn’t be that hard *Dana White* to figure out.

Yes, the Maia fight only happened because Vitor Belfort pulled out. Chael Sonnen was too beat up from his last fight to make this card. So why not set Silva up with a heavyweight if there’s no one else? Why should Maia get a title shot just because he’s the only middleweight healthy enough to fight? Silva has said he he’d like to take on Brock Lesnar one day. Put him in with a big guy and see how he does. How about a fight with Cro-Cop or Nogueira? How great would that have been? Heavyweights past their prime, but still great tests for the smaller Silva.

Instead we got the fight with Maia, the results of which anyone could have seen coming.

“The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers,” Brooks wrote, “want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.”

Actually, they don’t. The true foot soldiers of the Tea Party  want to deport Mexicans, not pay their taxes, crack some liberal skulls and make sure our next president is white, and preferably airheaded. The dregs of the Tea Party movement don’t seem intelligent enough to realize they’re dupes in a cynical political ploy to paralyze the government so the robber barons in our midst can continue sucking the national coffers dry. Using the rhetoric and methodology of the peace and justice movement gives them the illusion of legitimacy — at least for the time being — which is exactly what Rick Santelli, Freedom Works and the rest of conservative think tanks and media players who planned the Tea Party Movement had in mind.

If there is any doubt about just how cynical the wealthy can be in adopting these techniques for their own ends, take a look at 51-year-old real estate developer Henry Nunez. Following in the tradition of civil rights leaders like Gandhi and King, Nunez has gone on a hunger strike. For the better part of a week, in advance of a city council election in his home city of Arcadia, California, Nunez claims to not have eaten a thing.

“I’m not a freak,” he told the Pasadena News-Star. “I’m an educated man. I’m not a radical. I’m a conservative.”

He’s also absolutely shameless. What is Nunez fighting for, you may wonder?

To put his chosen candidates on the city council — so they can change the city density code to allow for five-story buildings instead of the current three. Yes, this man is hunger striking over the zoning code.

As you could probably guess, Nunez isn’t some kind of eccentric architectural advocate — he stands to make a killing from such a zoning change.

From the Pasadena News-Star:

Nunez, who has developed housing projects in cities such as Upland and Monrovia, admits, too, that he has a personal interest in his election goals. Nunez, who is an executive officer and past chairman of the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, would love to be the primary developer of multi-million mixed-use projects between Colorado Boulevard and Huntington Drive.

The funniest part is that Nunez, who weighs 245 pounds, is subsisting on Mountain Dew and protein shakes. He’s probably going to put on weight by the time he’s done.

What isn’t funny is the long term effect of people like Nunez and the Tea Partiers. There aren’t that many effective non-violent techniques out there that have been successfully employed to affect social change. Using them in service of the elite renders them completely useless for the rest of us. Not only does the cynical appropriation of these techniques allow their users to borrow the legitimacy of the past, but it renders these techniques completely ineffective in the future. Do snowboarding, skateboarding, skydiving ect. really seem that EXTREME anymore after all those friggin’ Mountain Dew commercials? Once the counter-culture is hijacked, there’s no going back.

Can you imagine what would happen now if a few hundred anti-war activists went on a hunger strike to pull the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq? The media will trot out Nunez to appear on every talk show in the country. Tonight on CNN: “Is hunger striking really a big deal?”

And, of course, Blackwater, KBR and the other companies that make killings off the wars, will probably rally a counter pro-war hunger strike — with hundreds of people surviving on Mountain Dews and protein shakes.

The non-violent techniques of the social justice movement are now effectively useless. The EXTREME movements of Gandhi and King have “Done the Dew.” Which strikes me as a far more serious consequence than any short term plans to undermine the health care bill.

H/T LA Daily

Image by Brian U via Flickr

I blew a tire in Orange County the other day. It exploded going 85 on I-5, leaving me stranded for several hours at a freeway adjacent mini-mall. It was fairly a harrowing experience. Not the actual car accident, which was actually fairly benign – more the unwanted time spent in the O.C.

Waiting to get my tire fixed, I found my way to an upscale mall-restaurant, overlooking a bleached gray parking lot with the interstate beyond. A sleek but generic Asian/Hawaiian theme pulled the place together, and ambient corporate rock covered up the sound of cars whizzing past us at 80 miles per hour.

A group of businessmen sat next to me at the bar, Fox News on the TV in front of us, drinking wildly expensive fruity cocktails and talking shop. There’s something deeply unsettling about people willing to pay twelve bucks for a designer cocktail in a freeway adjacent corporate lei lounge. These guys were clearly filthy rich. All the world’s resources marshaled in their favor and this was the best they could do?

This thought swirled over and over in my head and left me strangely terrified.

Staring out the tinted front window of the restaurant into the blinding parking lot, rows of chain stores and packed freeway beyond, I suddenly realized something important: I have seen the apocalypse and it looks like Orange County.

I’m not being snarky. I mean this quite literally. Imagine, if you will, what kind of existence humans would live after a nuclear holocaust — people using hermetically sealed vehicles to transport themselves to hermetically sealed, corporate-controlled living, working and commercial environments. Little nature, little unmediated social interaction, little activities that don’t require cash.

Sounds a lot like Orange County, no? Orlando too, which just so happens to be the other “city on the hill” of the American conservative imagination.

This is the complete opposite of the environmentally friendly liberal elite, who want to preserve pockets of the natural world so they’ll have something pretty to look at from the bay windows of their sterile, glass and steel modernist palaces.

But the O.C. reactionary elite really doesn’t give a shit. They seem perfectly happy shuttling from one controlled, generically bourgeois, environment to the next. Need food? Rick Caruso and the Grove have shown you can stick Baja Fresh next to wildly overpriced Katsuya in a mall and people will pack both. Need culture? You’ve got Disneyland. Need some fresh air? You’ve got the food court at the mall.

None of what I’ve just described is particularly revolutionary. Rants against beige, chain store-controlled suburbs are ubiquitous. But I think my observations do go a long way to explaining why American conservatives don’t give a crap about global warming.

There’s a snarky liberal barb that likes to posit that conservatives want to usher in the apocalypse so Jesus will come to rain hell-fire on the non-believers. I disagree. For conservatives, a post-apocalyptic life won’t be much different from their current ones. In fact, it will be better — wiping petty annoyances like illegal aliens and the poor.

And thus, I get to the ultimate lesson I drew from my unwanted stay in Orange County — the importance of colonizing Mars.

The best, and perhaps only, way to prevent global catastrophe, is to create an extra-terrestrial paradise for people who don’t give a crap about, and would be barely affected by, the death of the natural world on Earth.

Basically, we need to send American conservatives to Mars.

I can’t think of anyone more fit for Martian colonization. No pests or vermin to deal with, quiet, solitude, no illegal aliens (that we know of), plenty of real estate to pave over and develop. A human colony on Mars would require a completely controlled environment, constant supervision to make sure everyone is following the rule of law, and an abundance of starchy, chemical-laden foods that can survive inter-planetary transport – or, better yet, can be manufactured on site in a laboratory. A day on Mars would consist of lots of time at home; perhaps some work at a centralized office space, and plenty of human engineered leisure options. An amphitheatre could easily be constructed to host mega-church functions. Epcot Center, the Grove and other monuments to fake experience provide substitutes for culture on earth – I don’t see why it couldn’t be the same on Mars. Corporate food chains, lowbrow, aspirational and upscale, would surely be willing to contract their services.

The one caveat is golf. Conservatives fucking love golf. Which makes sense. Golf is like a nature prison: perfectly trimmed grass, truckloads of chemicals to keep the pests away, terra-scaping to make sure things aren’t too hilly, and strict, often asinine, rules that regulate your behavior on the course. Figure out how to duplicate that experience on Mars and you’ve basically got an American conservative paradise.

In some ways Orange County and Orlando are already replicas of actual human existence. Replicate the replicas and put forty percent of the country on a spaceship. They’d love it.

Once you eject the folks who have absolutely no vested interest in preventing global catastrophe from the planet, the rest of us can work things out down here. After all, it’s the conservatives who have all the scrap in them. The liberal elite are too cowardly to fight back. We could strip-mine their mansions, redistribute their wealth and build a global society we could actually sustain. Meanwhile, Martian conservatives could have their Orange County in the sky, free on Mexicans and Godless, whiny liberals.

We all win.

So come on Applebee’s and Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson. Let’s get crackin’ on this idea. There’s plenty of money in it. A whole planet to strip. Because if you don’t, the apocalypse is neigh, and it will be as beige as Gap khakis.

Image by vmiramontes via Flickr

Learned this one the hard way the other night.

Out at the pub in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, I found myself unable to choose between a pint of Guinness or the house lager, both of which sounded spectacular at the moment.

The solution? Whiskey of course. Instead, I stupidly ordered a Black and Tan.

An Irish friend immediately turned to me and said, “Calling a drink a ‘Black and Tan’ would be like calling a drink ‘Gestapo’ in Israel.” He then explained the “Black and Tan” were a brutal English police force in the early 20th century, that terrorized the Emerald Isle. To hear him describe it, the English basically found the most shell shocked WWI vets they could dig up, paid them a few shillings, gave them new uniforms and sent them to Ireland to do as they pleased.

Here was the basic attitude of the force, as told by a divisional commander at the time:

“If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks already occupied is not suitable, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there – the more the merrier.

Should the order (“Hands Up”) not be immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching (a patrol) carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious-looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you nopoliceman will get into trouble for shooting any man.”

Lt. Col. Smyth, June 1920

Lesson learned.

So what do the Irish call a Black and Tan? A “Half and Half.” And if for some reason you can’t remember that, better just to stick with whiskey my friends. Stick with whiskey.