There was a time when Americans believed this advertisement.

There will come a time when . . .

—We will no longer believe we have the best health care system in the world.

—We will accept the fact that we have the 37th ranking health care system in the world, as well as the world’s most expensive.

—Americans will understand that refusing to help the unfortunate will turn us into a Third World country.

—The idea that wealth will trickle down from the top is seen as the bunk it was the day Ronald Reagan so charmingly articulated it.

—New York voters will understand that far from draining the state’s coffers, New York City pays more than its fair share.

—Voters will understand that a Congress bribed by corporations and lobbies will never serve the common good, in fact will never get the business of the people done.

But not yet. First, more of us will have to eat lard, get sick, get poor, scapegoat government, exonerate the crooks and dance to the tune of the vulture class.—Djelloul Marbrook

And they don’t want the government standing in the way of their insurance company getting fatter. In fact, they don’t want anybody telling their insurance company not to stand between their doctor and them. I get that, too. Fat is good. Fat and dumb equals happy. Happy means “To hell with you, I got mine.”

Corn syrup is making us fat and dumb. It’s not that we don’t know a lie when we see one, it’s that we prefer lies to the truth. The truth is like razor wire. Lies are comfortable, like a doughnut or another little drinky-poo. I get it. Addicts are on the con. They learn the con fast and early. Ask a cop.

But what I don’t get is what I should do. I’ve never liked politics. I regard most politicians the way I regard bartenders; they’re not my friend, but as long as I behave and plop my money down they’ll pretend to be my friend.

My decision about what to do is based on what I think I do best. I’m not a newspaperman any more. I never was a great one, but I was a good one. I don’t miss it. I always wanted to be a poet, but I never believed I’d earned the right to call myself one. Now I don’t care. I know I can get closer to the truth with a poem than with any other tool in my box.

But truth isn’t the right word. It’s pretentious to talk about it. For me, talking about the truth is like joining the ranks of the family values coots who think it’s okay to lie and cheat as long as you do it from a governor’s mansion or the White House or Capitol Hill and don’t get caught.

Truth is a far reach for me, but each poem, if it has any good in it, is an algorithm that enables me to comprehend something I didn’t before. Better than that, it helps me become the sort of person I might have become—had I not made so many accommodations with people and institutions that have disappointed me as much as I’ve disappointed them.

With each poem—some work for me when they don’t work for others—I close in on my essential self, I become the person I would have liked to be before the squalid compromises and surrenders.

And yet I know that had I lived up to the poems I might have become dust long before now, ground up by my decisions.

I’d like to say each poem is a lamp in the darkness, but that’s presumptuous as well as facile. It might even be better to say that each poem reminds me of the dark matter that is the matrix of the stars and our ideas. All that is bright and discernible is held in that dark matter, and I have no trouble thinking a poem a proton of it.—DM

In recent months, as our note-taking has proceeded, we’ve taken to calling the United States of America Disputatia for short. Sometimes we just say D. We take it as a good thing that the inhabitants can’t agree on the time of day because it saves them from agreeing on the method of their annihilation.

They seem to have chosen an endless round of disputes to distract themselves from a handful of facts we hardly needed our scientists to identify:

—Their food products are designed to poison them, encouraging diabetes, obesity and a variety of cardiac and mental problems.

—They can’t afford the education that might enlighten them concerning their plight.

—Their health is in the hands of what they call insurance companies, which rely on the inhabitants’ ill health and prey on those least able to pay for health improvement.

—The inhabitants insist they have the best health care in the world while all the available data say otherwise.

—They have an information industry bought and paid for by the businesses whose interest is in deceiving the inhabitants. This industry is bizarrely called the free press, but its purpose seems to be to press the inhabitants into staggering debt.

—Government is paralyzed by the refusal of the inhabitants to agree about anything. The free press, as they call it, disguises its real purpose by aggravating whatever issue is at hand, inciting one ideologue after another to say things that have no relevance to the facts. Facts are held in disdain in Disputatia. Beliefs are the preferred currency.

—Disputatia seems to have two central industries, war and the orderly transfer of money from the less fortunate to the obscenely fortunate. These two parasitic industries strive to keep the population of young adults under control by periodically killing them off in storms of patriotism and rage at enemies, real or imagined.

—When the inhabitants of Disputatia aren’t fighting foreign wars they infuriate each other, and often they succeed in doing both at the same time.

—Harmony, moderation and respect for differing views and cultures are deemed to be sissified, unworthy of individualists. The logical consequence is that the inhabitants of Disputatia find it increasingly difficult to respect anyone. Hence, we conclude that their free press, which they say is failing, is in fact an immense success in its role of poking vipers, irritating rashes, and gassing up elephantine egos.

We’re eager to know what the other landing parties on the Blue Marble are reporting. We’d hoped to provide a more optimistic account of our observations. Sometimes, sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium in New York, or watching babies arriving in Chicago, we think there’s hope for the Disputatians, but then the Sunday talk shows come around and we long for home.—DM

When I was a young man I fell in love with a young woman who was attending that school in the early 1950s and I can attest that by then Balanchine’s anatomical preferences had been fully expressed. So, contemplating those women in the window, it occurred to me that American culture has developed schizophrenia in the matter of body mass.

On the one hand, the advertising and entertainment industries have presented us with the ideal of fencing-foil bodies that verge on the anorexic, while the food industry encourages us to consume as if our sole ambition is to become dirigibles. We’re caught in a commercial vise. We’re asked to idolize thin people while turning ourselves into blimps. It’s not unlike the television advertisements still cajoling us to buy SUVs while we’re implored to save gasoline. It’s even more like the dilemma of being urged by feckless politicians on the one hand to save while at the same time being urged to spend more to rescue the economy.

The paradoxes are many. We tell pollsters we want good schools, roads, bridges, health care and social programs, but we also tell them we want tax relief. Nobody bothers to ask us where we think the money will come from. We gaze at thin fashion models and gorge ourselves with doughnuts and greasy burgers. We’ll leave the discipline to the models and dancers and actors; that’s the price of their popularity, but we don’t have to pay that price.

Of course we do pay it, in higher medical costs, sickness and premature death, just as surely as we drive up medical costs with our alcohol consumption while blaming the problem on every other disease.

I live in the mid-Hudson Valley, where the farmers and orchardists can’t find labor while at the same time communities are fretting about not having jobs for their young people. When I look at young people waddling out of fast food joints and convenience stores it’s a wonder to me that the high schools can find athletes. No wonder these kids eschew farm work. Many of them could not do the farm work to which I was accustomed as a boy in Suffolk County, NY.

But the American way is to try to have it both ways—good services, low taxes, thin performers, fat fans, rich pols, poor soldiers: the politics of prestidigitation, economics by sleight-of-hand. It’s not working. It was supposed to work only for those who plan to get rich off the backs of the rest of us. For the country to work, I think we will have to slim down, get fit, and stop trying to have everything both ways. If we care about each other, as we say we do, we must give each other a hand, and that doesn’t mean promises of tax breaks from cheap politicians who’d say any damned thing to get elected so they can feed at the public trough. American individualism never meant to hell with everybody else, but we’ve been voting for a long time as if it did. —DM
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Note: The Eisenstadt photograph appears in Balanchine Then and Now, a collection of essays edited by Anne Hogan (128pp., Sylph Editions/American University of Paris).

We’ve tried a quarter century of free-market, trickle-down sleight of hand. It has done more for India and China than us. It was always code for transferring wealth from the poor and middle classes to the very rich. It was always globe-hopping greed disguised as the American Way. It was, like the Southern Strategy, meanness wrapped in the flag, just as electoral reform is now disguising voter disenfranchisement. Privatization of government services has turned into a license to cheat and steal, and political bad-mouthing of the civil service has damaged the best civil service in the world.

The market has deregulated itself into a disaster for everybody but its manipulators. The fox has had his feast. Even the stodgy American Medical Association, once famously reactionary, has seen that a single-payer health care system would take the insurance industry off welfare and relieve business of onerous burdens.

The sub prime mortgage crisis, which has turned the market into a dizzying roller coaster and threatened the entire world’s economy, at very least ought to have proven to us by now that without government oversight and some degree of regulation the people suffer at the hands of high-flying pilferers.

Where do the presidential candidates stand? Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The press blathers about flip-flopping, a phony issue the press has itself created and perpetuated as an excuse for its failure to pursue the issues, and when it’s done with that momentous discussion it treats us to another about which candidate is being given a pass.

The press issues the passes, and the only recipient is the press itself, which gives us talk for news, punditry for investigation, and adolescent posturing for discourse. A press that can’t produce literate crawls or even spell well can hardly be expected to heighten the level of political campaigning. What should be an exchange of intelligent ideas has become a ping-pong of silly slogans . For every Pew, Poynter and Annenberg family spending its wealth on the exploration of ideas and the interpretation of data, we have a hundred rabid swift boaters and other feckless ideologues. —DM

We assume everybody secretly wants to be like us. But we never ask ourselves: does this mean that everybody secretly wants to be a dupe of high-flyers who confuse capitalism with larceny? Peak Oil and other crises don’t bother them because they’re getting theirs now. Their talk about victory in Iraq, which nobody can define, is a cover-up for the fact they’ve already won: they’ve ripped off the taxpayers for billions of dollars.

Savor for a moment the flabbergasting chutzpah of insisting everyone else wants to be like us when we have the most expensive health care system on the planet and it ranks only 37th in quality. But, hey, the insurance industry loves it, and the guys who bad-mouth social welfare and “socialized” medicine think nothing of socialized welfare for insurers who already get huge
tax breaks. The American Medical Association, once its adamant foe, is now for single-payer health care, like Medicare, because doctors are sick of spending so much money and time fighting insurance companies to get paid, which in turn drives up overall costs.

How can a society such as ours, unfathomable in its contradictions, assume that it’s the standard from which everybody else diverges or to which everybdy else aspires? When we were indignantly renaming French fries Freedom Fries we weren’t thinking about France’s better and less expensive health care. No, we were upset because the French didn’t support our mendacious Iraq policy.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are landmarks of human progress. They have inspired our visionaries in every generation. We mention our founders at the drop of a hat, but we abuse their advice just as our nation’s leaders abuse statistics to prove their convictions. For example, George Washington warned us against foreign entanglements. How did that turn out? Thomas Jefferson warned us against the power of corporations to corrupt society. The Pentagon can’t even account for the money it has lavished on private businesses in Iraq. Dwight Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. Maybe that’s why we praise Ronald Reagan: he didn’t bother us with any advice about greed. To hear the White House tell it, our founders would have approved of our invasion of Iraq.

The cult of the blonde with the gold circle pin should have taken notice of the other pretty girls, the ones with fine minds, the athletes, the caretakers, the girls who would never get to represent their home town or state in a bathing suit, the ones whose skin color differed from our phony norm. And we should take notice of societies that don’t think like us, and have every right not to think like us.—DM

Duh?

The press has a special passbook for John McCain, but it’s pretty hard to hide this stink bomb in plain sight. Here you have a guy who is too busy to conduct Arizona’s business in the U.S. Senate running around saying he’s the best man to conduct the nation’s business. What assurance do any of us have he won’t be too busy to take care of the daily crises that confront a president?

Here’s a look at his non-voting record for the last three months.

Sometimes the most crucial questions in politics are hidden in plain sight. Defending John McCain on this omission—remember he has just called Medicare a national disgrace—is going to be about as easy as defending New York Rep. Charles Rangel’s four rent-stabilized apartments. Nothing unusual about that, says the congressman. Okay, name me the other New Yorkers with four rent-stabilized apartments.—DM.

The Social Security Administration can’t process disability claims fast enough, the Border Patrol can’t seal the borders, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have enough controllers to assure air safety, the Food and Drug Administration can’t protect us from toxic food and drugs, our health care system is killing people, our schools have created a booboisie, and we can’t afford the life style the politicians tell us we’re entitled to. And oh yes, they want us to buy more with less.

Most Americans agree none of this is good. But are they willing to pay the taxes to redress these problems? Are they even interested in a debate about who should pay the additional taxes? Or are they content to keep on living in a funny-money society in which politicians bamboozle them into believing we’d have enough money: a) if we cut government waste and civil service corruption , and b) if we keep on giving the rich and the corporations tax breaks in the expectation that their prosperity will trickle down to the rest of us?

We do not have a corrupt civil service. We have a good civil service beleaguered by politicians of the right, the left and the middle who scapegoat it. They come to Washington blaming the civil service they need to do anything and then they reform it by demoralizing it. Tax breaks do not trickle down to the rest of us, they whoosh to private accounts in the Caymans and Zurich. We’ve had thirty years of this trickle-down bunk—are we better off?

There is no magic about public service. If we want it, we have to pay for it. If we should happen to prove that we’re willing to pay for it, then we have to ask how the burden should be apportioned among us.

But these are not even questions being asked in the current election campaign. Stories about disgraceful service are being published and aired, but nobody is connecting them to taxes. If we keep on electing politicians who relieve the tax burdens of the rich and their corporations and disguise it as phony tax relief for everyone, we’re going to keep on hearing horror stories about federal and state agencies.      —DM

How much of such news as theater can we take?

Perhaps our traumatized soldiers are coming home to a society unprepared to care for them because the homeland too is traumatized by the sheer weight of importunate news. It’s true that the homeland can switch off the bombardment, but it seems also true that we are addicted to our celebrities and their fecklessness, our lying, money-grubbing politicians, our smiley air-head anchors, and all the disturbing imagery and dissembling that is called the news.

We are bombarded by reminders of our inhumanity, indifference, greed, and failure to rise to principle, and yet we ourselves struggle to be principled, to be decent, to treat each other respectfully, but the media are not interested in this daily heroism of ours, however much they may occasionally toss it a bone. We are a mass to them and individuals only when we behave badly.

It’s not unlike Iraq. Our men and women know there are places not as
terrifying and dangerous, but they are over there, for better or worse, bombarded, bombed, ambushed and sniped at. And so are we. Different kinds of trauma, to be sure, but traumatizing nonetheless.

Child experts will tell you that verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse, if not more so. Verbal abuse is slow poison. The child never gets it out of his system. It deforms and dements his life. Why should it not be so, then, that our steady diet of trivia, ugliness, mendacity and pettiness also gets into our systems and poisons us? If it is true in medicine, as the medical community is now saying, that attitude plays a profound role in recovery, why should it not be true that our emotional and even physical state is not affected by the news?

If this is so, then we should question how we define the news. What passes for news is the result of corporate greed. It is trivial, condescending and shallow because to do a better job would cost more money. To intelligently explain issues, to expose malfeasance, to explore complex issues is costly. It cuts into cheap, quick profit. You need smart people and time for good reportage, for real edification, and that translates into money, money shareholders and CEOs would have to forfeit for the public good, which they don’t give a damn about. So we get what we get, and I have a feeling it is traumatizing us in ways we don’t understand, just as our returning heroes don’t understand how they can look healthy and yet be so emotionally battered.

The so-called news frustrates us because, lacking in depth, intelligence, respectfulness and vision, it provides us with no ways out of our common condition. It gives us no tools to build a better society. This is its real failure, and it is not merely a failure, an omission; it is a betrayal, and like all betrayals it wears the face of helpfulness and concern and honesty.—DM