Morford Time

It's simple: First we tax the booze. Then we legalize the pot. Done.

By Mark Morford

Friday, February 20, 2009

It is a time of strange bedfellows and bizarre contortions and extraordinary responses to extreme situations, all overslathered with gobs of panic and dread and oh my God, I might have to sell the Range Rover.

In other words, it is a time -- like you don't already know -- of plentiful alarmist rhetoric, resulting in weird outbursts of ingenuity and wanton ethics-loosening, all in a desperate effort to suck up some much-needed cash.

Translation: Money's tight, baby. City's in trouble. State's deep in the hole. Nation's broke.

Solution? Upend the system. Think differently. Get creative. Demolish Ye Olde Ways. And maybe get a really nice buzz on while you're at it.

Where to begin? How can the city/state refill their empty coffers and further gouge the populace to make ends meet? Increased bridge tolls? A new per-mile driving tax? Heavier parking fines? State parks abandoned and left to seed? Child's play, darling.

You want to raise funds in an instant? You want a sure-fire, double-barreled source of nearly limitless funds from a wary, burned-out citizenry? That's easy. Go after its biggest vices, its most beloved balms.

Up first: booze. Already local governments are quietly proposing jacking up the alcohol tax and loosening sales restrictions because, well, why the hell not? Aren't you, right this very moment, as you prepare your taxes and weep over your gutted portfolio and stare down one very bleak 2009, more in need of a drink or three than at any time in recent history except for the entirety of the last eight miserable, Bush-stabbed years? Well, there you go. Tax increases on cocktails, here they come.

But it's not just governments. Check out the happily shameless TV networks who, for the first time in a whocares number of years, are allowing ads for alcohol and K-Y lube during prime-time programming. Oh the outrage! Oh the debauchery! Who, pray who, will protect the children? Oh wait, the children are out buying daddy some more beer and applying for a job at Starbucks to help pay rent. Never mind.

New taxes on the other Great American vices: porn, gambling, prescription meds, pro sports, obesity, Mylie Cyrus? Watch for it.

Now, let's get serious. Because there are, of course, bigger fish to fry in the sea of potentially lucrative, all-American inebriates. There is a far more potent, obvious solution to the state's budget woes, a huge, untapped revenue source, and now might be the perfect time to, you know, light it up.

Really now, could there be a better time to decriminalize/fully legalize pot? Or, more fully, to decriminalize pot, and then spread respectable pot shops and vending machines and dispensaries far and wide, instill quality control and decent oversight and then tax the living hell out of the glorious, stress-reducing goodness, as we stop wasting billions fighting its grand ubiquity and instead sink into profitable pools of warm, hazy progress? Don't you already know the answer?

It's difficult to imagine that some intrepid legislator hasn't already walked into Arnie "Pot is not a drug" Schwarzenegger's office and said, "Governator, now is the time. Light it up. Inhale the new reality. Pot is, by a huge margin, the single largest cash crop in the state unless you count porn stars and celebrity rehab. It rakes in upwards of $14 billion a year -- maybe a lot more than that -- and that's just from five clever hippies and a couple intrepid grandmas in Ukiah. Imagine what we could do if we went all-in."

Are the discussions ongoing? Are they passing the bong of possibility around the state Senate chambers? You're damn right they are. What's holding them back? Probably the usual: the negative PR, looking "soft" on crime, encouraging permissiveness, pressure from prison lobbies, and so on. Don't worry, Sacramento. Everyone's already plenty drunk/high on prescription meds trying to alleviate fears of losing their job to care about that nonsense right now. Get to it.

There won't be much pushback from D.C. President Obama's already stated that his upcoming appointee to head the DEA is going to knock it the hell off with the insidious raids of harmless medical pot shops in California, and wants to quit using federal resources to bash hippies and circumvent state laws.

Look. Is there really anyone left who doesn't already know the "War on Drugs" is a pathetic joke, an abject failure and a taxpayer nightmare, and the only reason it survives at all is to fund the CIA and fellate the prison guard unions and support a shameful prison system, and to let politicians say they're "tough on crime" so they can to deflect all those uninformed parents who relentlessly whine about pot in public schools just before dashing off a wine-tasting party to snort a nice line of Bolivian coke?

Anyone left, furthermore, who doesn't know that pot is far safer than booze, less addictive, nonviolent, more transportable, easier to light, and generally won't interfere with your ability to crawl across the carpet and lick cookie crumbs from your lover's thighs? And sure, while heavy, daily usage can make you slow and stupid and rather useless to the world, well, so can a six-pack of Diet Dr. Pepper and six hours of TV every day. Gateway drug? That's on Channel 2, right after "Oprah."

And another thing. Maybe it wouldn't be merely tax 'n' puff. Maybe California, already the pot-growing capital of the nation, could become something more. A hub. A world-class research center. Pot education, study, medicine, import/export, the works. We could ship our crop to various nations in desperate need of chilling the hell out, like Israel. Palestine. Pakistan. Russia. The N-Judah on a Friday afternoon. We could become the largest research and manufacturing center in the world. How proud we would be. You know, sort of.

Let's phrase this grand scenario in another way: Why the hell not try it? What have we got to lose? What, we could go more broke? We could get more desperate and anxious? Fact is, economic nightmares need not breed only miserable stories of lost homes and lost jobs and shuttered businesses. They can also spawn creative solutions, innovative thinking, widespread munchies. Now is the time.

Let's not get carried away. Pot's only one little inebriate, one mild and -- let's just admit it -- relatively boring feel-good plant. California is $40 billion in debt and we're running low on water and we can't give away those hideous tract developments out in Stockton. Milking the pot cow for all she's worth might net us, at best, a few billion a year. To get out of this massive hole, we'd have to legalize Ecstasy too. (Someday, honey, someday).

But it's something. It's radical new thinking that's not the slightest bit radical, or new, and in fact the notion is now even more obvious than it's been for the past 30 years. What are we waiting for? A match?

Legalize It - Peter Tosh

Uno Mas

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All Hail Mark Morford (Again)

From today's S.F Gate:

I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?

I, of course, have an answer. Sort of.

Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.

Ready? It goes likes this:

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.

Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.

Let me be completely clear: I'm not arguing some sort of utopian revolution, a big global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie camp counselor. I'm not saying the man's going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.

Please. I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual. While Obama's certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn't hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.

Not this time.

Sigh...Mark nails it once more. Happy Friday!

My Man Morford

How To Hate Barack Obama

By Mark Morford~February 29, 2008

The name thing is just too damn easy. Childish, sophomoric, a given.

Of course, this doesn't mean they won't use it. A lot.

I mean, my God, his middle name is the same as Dubya's irrelevant little dead arch-enemy and his last name rhymes with that of the most-wanted terrorist in the world and this one's pretty much already in the can, nothing much for the right to do with Barack Hussein Obama's moniker except "accidentally" mispronounce it as "Osama Hussein" over and over again on Fox News and at McCain rallies and across Wal-Mart's loudspeakers so trailer park denizens across Bush's 'Merka will get even more confused and panicky and start loading up the bunker with Ding-Dongs and Coors just in case the Muslim radicals take over.

No, the problem for GOP strategists is not how to inflame the troglodytic, Limbaugh/Coulter-grade sects of the party who, assuming Obama goes the distance, are already hugely terrified of the notion of a black liberal president, given how he'll surely be a slippery slope straight to gay marriage and rampant lesbianism in schools and hourly shriekings to Allah as everyone's forced to give up their guns and drive a hybrid moped to the tofu store.

The true difficulty facing the GOP's henchmen in the coming months will be how to get those who are just a tiny bit smarter, calmer, less easily swayed, those on the right who might actually be a bit impressed and charmed by Obama's obvious intelligence and oratory power, to hate him, fear him, find his genuinely moving brand of hope and inspiration to be suspicious and problematic and even deeply dangerous.

It won't be easy. Because at the same time, they must make their own unlikely candidate, a feisty but fuzzy 71-year-old war hawk whose entire campaign is apparently now being fueled by a giant hunk of Cold War phlegm, the nauseating notion that not only is a perpetual state of war and aggression desirable for America, but is actually essential to a healthy and functioning nation, they must make John McCain's musty, patriarchal brand of regurgitated Republicanism seem fresh and visionary and not horribly regressive and embarrassing.

Wish them luck. Or, you know, don't.

So then, here's the fun little game all progressives can play until the election itself. Assuming Obama gets the nod, just how will they attack him, smear him, paint him as an evil and untrustworthy force for the nation, the way they did Al Gore and John Kerry? How nefarious, racist, draconian will they get?

We have a few hints, the first one allegedly (if you believe the Drudge Report, which you should almost never do) coming from the Hillary Clinton campaign. That old photo of Obama wearing a traditional head-wrap and robe while visiting Kenya, looking vaguely like a terrorist because as everyone knows, only terrorists wear traditional tribal garments? Not bad. That sort of thing has potential, something the right normally would hurl all over the airwaves as fast as possible, though it mostly just reeks of the same kind of ignorance-baiting as the "Osama Hussein" name game. They'll have to do better.

What about the shocking lapel-pin scandal, wherein Obama allegedly refused to wear an American flag button, causing a bunch of angry fat white men in the GOP to grumble and pretend to be outraged over his "lack" of patriotism? Sure, it was deeply stupid reaction. Yes, the minor furor was merely meant to enrage the gun-rack-on-the-pickup-truck crowd. But the patriotism angle might be something they can poke at. Hell, they just don't have much else.

See, unlike Hillary, Obama can't be effortlessly demonized. He doesn't have Hillary's infamous laundry list of faults and transgressions, the enormous built-in wall of hate the right already has for her, her gender, her husband, everything she represents and carries forward from the Bill Clinton era. Smart as she is, Hillary has truckloads of baggage. Obama has but a tiny carry-on.

At the moment, the McCain camp is spinning like mad, trying to find its footing and apparently basing his entire run on permanent tax cuts (the same ones he voted against, twice) and war war war. McCain himself ain't exactly the world's sharpest tack, and, given how he's the presumptive GOP nominee only through a rather astonishing series of flukes and lucky breaks, he has enough trouble of his own just trying to articulate a coherent message that doesn't offend the entire planet. He's far short of a master strategist.

What's more, he has yet to hire one. There's no true genius hate artist like Karl Rove around anymore to attempt to unify the racists and the white evangelicals and the Latinos and the war-lovers into one giant, seething, Obama-fearing voting bloc. Which might be impossible, but given the deeply fractured nature of the conservative wing, it might be McCain's only hope.

That, and attacking Obama. Will they go for his past drug use? Not available. He's already admitted to everything in his own book, and it's pretty tame. Major past policy errors? Doesn't have any. And what he has accomplished is remarkably consistent with his current vision. Lack of military experience? Nope. The Bush administration saw to it that military experience is considered useless, with Dubya himself running AWOL and even Dick "Go F- Yourself" Cheney saying he had better things to do than serve in Vietnam.

Which leaves us with the one true hot button, the ugly issue everyone expects: race. This is the card the right will have to play very, very carefully, as the slightest slip-up in demonizing Obama's skin color and playing to America's nastiest, deep-set racist tendencies will offend millions and only make Republicans look like the party of old, white, sexist, racist, classist warmongering men they very much are.

But rest assured, if the past eight years are any indication, play it they will. For one thing, the GOP is now counting on the cultural discord that's been simmering for years between the Latino and African American communities. While it's hard to imagine Latinos flocking to the Republicans, given the party's hateful, isolationist immigration agenda, McCain is immigration-friendly, and Obama is, well, black. Will it be enough to sway millions of Latinos McCain's way? Does the right even have the power structure in place to try?

Because here's the thing: When they stole two elections for Bush, the brutal, homophobic conservative machine was tightly organized, had focus, mountains of cash, Karl Rove, the backing of a very nefarious, deeply inbred team of ultra-wealthy war hawks hell-bent on taking over the nation and ruling with a flaccid peni- ... er, iron fist. But now, this monstrous machinery has collapsed, failed, fractured into so many warring factions. There is much foment. There is enormous discord. Iraq is a disaster. Amid the smoking wreckage, McCain stumbles.

Nevertheless, one thing seems certain: We have yet to see the worst — and most deviously racist — of the attacks on Obama. The sad news is, there are simmering pockets of racist hate in this nation that have never really been tested, pockets of such vehement intolerance and power that it's impossible to know what demons lurk, what sort of outrage will erupt. After all, there is simply no historical precedent for what we are about to get into. No one with Obama's uniquely appealing makeup has ever made it this close to the White House.

And hence, it's almost a sure bet that the remnants of Bush's Republican machine, mangled and disgraced though it is, will still struggle mightily to find a hugely shameful, pitiful pathway toward playing on Middle America's darkest fears. All puns, unfortunately, intended.

Life Is Short But Sweet

The man I'm growing OLD(!) with and Me~On the Hamakua Coast
September 2006

Time for another Morford outreach. I've linked it below. As one who is continually confronting the task of accepting late-middle age, this week's column soothed that savage beast. Like this part:

"My guess is it starts with the usual combination, a personally customized admixture of regular, vigorous exercise, conscious food habits and minimal reality TV and great heaping doses of travel and nature and mental stimulation and truly excellent bedsheets, combined with absolute refusal to be fixed in time and place, to shrivel and hunker down and cling, as so many do, to one set of rules, one ideology, one notion of How It's All Supposed To Be. It is the knowledge that real ecstasy has nothing to do with external accomplishment, and everything to do with internal awareness. Oh yes, also: Lots of regular sex and yoga and meditation and the best wine you can afford as you realize that this little blip of an eyeblink of a gift of a life races by just impossibly fast, and therefore staring too long at the future or the past, at expectation and longing, memory and regret only means you don't get to truly experience the moment you're in right now."

Click link to read-on...

Mark Morford & Mid-Life Crisis

Trouble Every Day

The 935 Lies Of George W. Bush

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.

Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.

Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.

After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?

Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance.

It has to do with matters of scale. It has to do with audacity, with sheer recklessness, with BushCo's stunning contempt for all national and international law and historic precedent and human decency. It is the sense that, at bare minimum, the most significant lies told by previous administrations were, by and large, not massive, calculated stabs to the very heart and infrastructure of the entire nation. They were not designed, as Bush's clearly were, specifically to pervert the entire American experiment, to violently shift us from peace-promoting and defense-oriented protector to an arrogant, insular, pre-emptive attacker, widely loathed and mistrusted worldwide.

See, BushCo rewrote the formulas. From WMD to tax cuts, AmeriCorp to Iraq, this administration has officially reset the bar to an all-time low as to what's possible for a truly dreadful, inept president to get away with without some sort of significant repercussion, impeachment, numerous lightning bolts raining down on his soft little monkey skull. Sure, it took leveraging America's most brutal and heartbreaking tragedy in a generation to pull it off, but does the fact the administration exploited 9/11 like a pedophile exploits a child take anything away from the astonishing depth of the abuse?

But maybe you still argue that, even at a whopping 935 calculated lies told specifically to lead us into a bogus war, it makes no difference. Maybe you argue that a lie is a lie and Bush is no better or worse than Clinton or Reagan and here is a giant cocktail of jaded, raging apathy. Let's all chug it together, shall we?

Fine. If it's a fact that all presidents lie anyway, if there's little we can do to stop them, then let us put forth a new hope. Let us now wish for the next president to lie just as passionately, as powerfully, as strategically as BushCo, and get away with it just as extraordinarily.

But let's make one significant change. Let's urge the new president to lie, well, in the other direction, to lie not in the service of horrific war or in the name of powermongering or so as to line the pockets of corporate cronies, or even to cover up stupid personal behavior, but rather in the name of sliding through an agenda of — oh my God can you believe I'm going to say it? Peace, nonviolence, international respect, humanitarianism, sex positivism, religious tolerance, progressive education. I know. Crazy.

Yes. Give us now a president who lies, calculatedly and strategically, straight in the face of the hard right neocons and the evangelicals and the corporate cretins. Let his or her army of lies lull these groups into a false sense of complacency and/or utter soul-deadening fear so they will keep their mouths shut while the rest of us get some real work done.

"As an angry, well-armed God is my witness, I will never push through a national handgun ban," would be a good lie for this new president, thus shutting up the NRA and assuaging the bogus American cowboy mythology, as his army of crazy hippies do the exact opposite and quietly work to make the nation safer and more humane. The horror! The outcry! Whatever.

Or how about this: "All foreign religions clearly hate and wish harm upon America, and therefore it shall be the policy of this administration to never, under any circumstances, attempt to understand other beliefs, to open our schools and textbooks to include honest religious information, or generally reeducate the absolutist, Christian-drunk American populace." And then begin a quiet, subversive national program to revolutionize the spiritual IQ of upcoming generations. The terrible lie!

"America must remain aggressive and antagonistic to all questionable nations who do not cower properly to our demands. We shall close our borders and police the Internet and maintain nasty vigilance on all citizens at all times. This is the only way to true national security." What's the direct opposite of such a promise? Do it, prez!

"And finally, I shall never abolish the death penalty, legalize marijuana, approve gay marriage, promote honest sex education for teens, honor habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention, or eliminate the insidious farm subsidy program. We shall never stop lying about ethanol or offer solar subsidies for every household in America. Our direct ties to horribly misogynistic, terrorist-supporting Saudi Arabian power regimes shall remain deeply corruptive and powerful forevermore."

Go ahead, Mr. or Mrs. Next President. Lie your tail off if you must. But this time, let's try to make it a real party.

He rules. Amid all the phony election year bickering, I think it's important to remember what's at stake this time around, and the issue most of us agree on. That is that the last seven- years (feels like decades) have destroyed a great deal, and we have to insure that the republicans are not given another chance to fuck up the world. Although the democratic candidates will never be all things to all people (not even close), we have to stop the madness.

The Girl Can't Help It!

She has to snag the Morford columns, and display them here. Sometimes they're just so... heartening!

Bush Death Watch: Countdown!
It's Official: Less Than One Year Until History Slaps Dubya To The Curb.
Can You Feel The Tingle?
By Mark Morford, S.F. Gate Columnist
Friday, November 16, 2007

It's just that kind of feeling, that sense of hesitant, embryonic optimism, the sense that says, oh my God, we as a culture and a smash-mouthed, war-hammered society really are fast approaching something possibly, potentially, heart-achingly new and different and — because it cannot get any worse — just a little bit better.

Here is my suggestion: Mark your calendars, set your watch, program a celebratory ringtone well in advance, because the countdown has officially begun.

It is now less than one calendar year until the next presidential election. It is less than one year until the country finally takes a deep breath and flexes its atrophied muscles and opens its bloody, Cheney-punched mouth and lets it be known to the world, to the universe, to its own numb and dejected soul just exactly how unwell it has felt, how much pain has raked its heart, lo, these past seven (eight, by then) years, by ushering in an entirely new political era, as we all exhale a massive sigh of long overdue relief that — praise Jesus, Allah, Buddha and the devil all at once — the long national nightmare of George W. Bush is finally over.

It is now safe to imagine. It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year's time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a "Mission Accomplished!" sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history.

You think maybe it's too soon? Too early to let the tingle of positivism and hope take hold? Far from it. After all, the signs of decay and utter GOP desperation keep pouring in. For example, it has now been officially recorded in history what everyone already knows: Bush is nearly exactly as unpopular as Richard Nixon was at his lowest point, and no president in history has had as long a streak at the bottom of the job-approval rankings as Dubya. Heckuva job, Bushie!

What's more, the glorious collapse of the evangelical Christian right marches on apace, as Pat Robertson, now a dejected, lonely widower after the death of secret boy-toy husband Jerry Falwell, has officially endorsed pro-choice, pro-gay, thrice-married, massively unbalanced moral pit bull Rudy Giuliani for president, which is a bit like a militant vegan endorsing Hot Dog on a Stick for the title of Lord of the Food Court. Desperate times indeed.

But wait, it gets better. While it's easy to focus on Shrub and Cheney and to gleefully, achingly imagine their dreary march out of office on that happy day, it is also vital and heartwarming to note that this time next year will also mark the demise of an entire army of toxic leaders, federal department heads, gay-bashing appointees and misogynist directors of every stripe and scandal and spittle, a simply huge array of right-wing Bushies who are still entrenched in all manner of powerful federal bureaus and organizations and policy-making bodies.

It's true. Despite how a huge hunk of hideous GOP policymakers lost their seats during the last congressional election, plenty more appointees are still around to poison the well. From Kevin Martin, the lackey who oversees the FCC, to noxious Idahoan and rabid anti-environmentalist Dick Kempthorne of the Department of the Interior, to anti-choice Republican Mormon knucklehead charity scammer and Department of Health and Human Services overseer Mike Leavitt, and on and on — in a year, all on their way out.

Oh, and one more deserves special attention. Because one year from now will also be the glorious political end of one Dr. David W. Hager, the rabid evangelical Christian gynecologist (I know, so wrong) who currently advises the FDA on women's health issues and who was largely responsible for delaying the approval of Plan B, opposed RU-486, is in fact against all contraception, stem-cell research, premarital sex, and (quite naturally) women's choice, and whose own ex-wife claims he anally raped her, over and over again, in her sleep.

Intelligent women nationwide still shudder that this man is allowed anywhere near a living vagina, much less permitted to touch and probe and offer advice. But there is one noteworthy aspect to Hager; he is the perfect incarnation of the Christian right's view of women as subordinate, lesser-intelligent sluts who cannot control their own bodies and therefore need men, God, and the government to do it for them. Hager is a deep shame to the male gender, and his return to the private practice of ruining the sex lives of unfortunate women in Kentucky cannot come soon enough.

But why write this column now, so far in advance of Bush's limp-tailed departure? Simple enough: Because it will take a full year to get ready.

It will take every month and every week and every single day from the moment you read this until November 2008 to compile, to gather, to list all the names and all the horrors and all the deeply entrenched policies that are still clawing at the face of America as a result of Bush's reign, to fully get your mind around just how deep is the disease and how widely it has spread, so we may begin to excise the policies one by one like the malignant tumors they so very much are.

What, too strong? Not even close. Go read up on Hager, and get back to me.

Ah, but perhaps you are one of the jaded ones, the non-believers, that certain type of political bitterball who says, oh please, what does it matter, they're all criminals and cretins and powermongers anyway, no matter which party or president they work for? Get rid of BushCo and a new slew of cronies and cretins take their place, and who can tell the difference?

To which I say, well, yes. But also, no. Sure, the system is corrupt and lopsided and full of backstabbing and backslapping and backroom deal-making. So what? Has been since the first cavemen voted to see who gets to run the mammoth hunt.

Truth is, it's just far too easy to let the ennui wash over and not give a damn, to lump all politics into a phlegmball of nasty negativity and be done with it, thus entirely disregarding the efficacious issues, the things that truly effect change and affect lives and improve or degrade the health of the planet. Outrage fatigue is simply unacceptable. Intellectual apathy is the refuge of the lazy and the spiritually malnourished. Do not let it happen to you.

Now is the time. The coming year will slide by rather quickly and the feeling of urgent change and upheaval will only build and it doesn't really matter if it's Hillary or Obama or Edwards leading the shift, because no matter who gets the nod, they will require — from me, from you, from anyone who professes to care — a roiling tidal wave of progressive momentum behind them to help them cleanse and haul away the overwhelming mountain of moral fecal matter Bush has left behind.

Mark your calendar. Set your ringtone. Take a deep breath, feel the wave build, and then dive the hell in. Right now, it's the only option that really matters.

Thank Goddess For Morford

It's Friday! Lots of applesauce to be made this weekend. And apple pies.

I love this season. It's been just grand.

Our new kitten has brought us great joy. We're thinking "Ella."

I know, it's wimpy to snag other's words and slap them up here. It's just... they say so much.
In Mark Morford's case, he goes where too few dare. That's necessary in my world.
I wish I could do what he does--- force us look at ourselves, warts-and-all.

The ever-present and understandable and yet still rather whiny complaint goes something like this:

Dear (SFGate/Chronicle/horribly biased corporate media outlet du jour): Hey, why the hell don't you people feature more serious news on your front page? Why do you always insist on highlighting the latest trash diva slut whore celeb meltdown rehab tale over more dire and heady and serious fare, like, say, the repulsive story of those BushCo-sucking Blackwater thugs killing innocent people in Iraq as the company's chief executive smirks at Congress and actually defends his reckless goon squads?

Enough with the pop culture trash! Enough with the Lohans and the Hiltons and Jessica Biel's admittedly amazing ass! Let's have some solemn news, real coverage of real events for real people because goddammit it's a serious world out there and we need serious stories so serious people can analyze them all and furrow their brows and scowl and by the way Britney was totally awful on the VMAs and I'm pretty sure she had a boob job. Thank you.

It is, I must say, a common refrain. And it is, I agree, a bit of a conundrum, one faced by nearly every media outlet in the world, given how (to use the above example) the Blackwater story is indeed fascinating and brutal and bespeaks of a particularly nasty, largely unreported aspect of Bush's bleak war machine, despite how only a handful of (very serious) readers bothered to click on that story to read beyond the headline as it sat atop the SFGate home page for much of the day, craving attention.

But then there's this: The moment the "Britney loses custody of her kids" story went up on our site, the mad swarm of clicks it instantly received made the Blackwater story seem like, well, like a Home&Garden feature on do-it-yourself mulch. Which is to say, the damnable thing was so insanely popular, so flooded with clicks, it nearly crashed our servers. So, you know, a big slap of hypocrisy all around, yes?

No matter. I am not here to engage in the intractable and rather futile debate regarding the importance of "serious" news versus pop culture chyme. I am not here to analyze the newsroom decision-making process, or talk about click-through rates or advertiser happiness or just how the hell modern media is supposed to survive/make any money/stay relevant in the new and meta-jaded millennium.

I am here to suggest an adjustment. I am here to suggest a flip of the lens, a torque of the perspective, a donning of the funky hat that lets you tap into, for lack of a better word, and at the risk of causing widespread sneering among the uptight and the rigid, the vibration of things, the energy output, the hum and thrum and light.

Let us step back one cosmic inch, and look again at these two lovely and happily repulsive examples of news drudgery that recently invaded your brain-space and stabbed at your wary heart: Blackwater and Britney, thugs versus trash, death and violence and war versus shallow dumb millionaire diva. Hmm. What a choice.

Let us hold them up to the light. Let us turn them around and see how they refract, how they feel in the palm, the weight and balance and heft and how they might match up with that otherworldly sensation you sometimes feel when you take a deep breath on a warm night and close your eyes and for just a split second feel you could actually lift off the ground.

Do you see? It turns out, from a purely vibrational and energetic perspective, these two stories are both almost exactly the same. Which is to say: Remove the sordid details and strip out the radically different aspects of the world they inhabit and look solely at the engines that drive them, and you will find they are of the exact same construction: bleak, and low, and mean, and happily lethal to your wary heart.

It's true. To wallow in the dregs and pain and misery of one is to be mauled and humiliated and deeply saddened by the other, and if your very soul was drugged and blindfolded and dragged into an alley and beaten senseless by both and then the blindfold was whipped off and they were both standing there, bloody and stupid and grinning like hyenas, well, you would have a hell of a time deciding which one did what.

Oh, oh, but wait, you might argue, the Blackwater goons actually killed innocent people, have done serious damage to America's already miserable military reputation, are adding a particularly vicious and unsavory dimension to a bogus war already riddled with so many lies and deceptions it makes Vietnam look downright clean and tidy. This is serious. People have died.

Yes, this is true. And it can all feel very dire indeed. But again, let us drop down. Get out of the head, slip into the heart, slip down to the soul, where (the poets tell us) the meanings are. War and violence are, without doubt, some of the lowest, least helpful vibrations on this earthly plane. To engage in them, to sit in them, is to actively devolve and be dragged back into the most primitive pits of human potential. Easy enough.

Can you very nearly say the same for the hollowness of the dregs of pop culture, especially when you consider how much time, energy, money and effort we as a culture spend on cataloguing and critiquing and obsessing over it? Is it fair to say they are both savage and silly poisons, and we are infatuated by both to a degree that our nation has lot a great deal of its identity to them? I am here to suggest the possibility that, hell yes, you absolutely can.

Let us be clear. This is not to say some issues are not more grim and dangerous and more deserving of attention, compassion, or even political response than others. This is not to say, on the scale of quick moral judgment, war is not somehow more depressingly profound than stupid pop singers and their horrible parenting skills. Nor is this some sort of suggestion that you disengage from the media world and throw your hands up in disgust and change your name to Rainforest and start a hemp farm in the Netherlands.

It is merely a reminder that there is more than one way to measure the weight and value and deeper importance of the stories we tell ourselves. It is merely a way to look at the headlines racing across the media landscape on a given day, and maybe, on occasion, let your eyes soften and your cynicism pause and your cosmic wisdom open wide, where you can see the great, often bleak, always curious cosmic circus of it all. Or, barring that, just try that breathing thing again.

A Toast To Bill Maher

...Not soon enough. Yay!

But wait there's more...

(Here's the latest Mark Morford diatribe)

I admit scattershot naivete. I admit to a strain of blind optimism, a sort of sporadic myopia, a weirdly sanguine tunnel vision that makes me somehow think that we as a species and a culture and as a mad gaggle of individual human souls who are coupled with functioning hunks of semi-rational gray matter, we must, at least occasionally, be learning something, ever-so-slightly advancing our awareness of those things on this planet that want to harm us and sicken us and even kill us, and therefore we can alter our behaviors accordingly.

I must be completely wrong. Because there it is, that violently obnoxious Wendy's burger commercial I stumbled across recently, apparently part of a larger and stranger ad campaign featuring the usual assortment of requisite sagging thick-waisted former frat dudes -- a group, by the way, that must be an entire category unto itself for Los Angeles casting agencies, given how many of them appear in all sorts of similar monosyllabic commercials for, say, trucks. Or beer. Or power tools. Et al.

These ads feature the same childish concept: All the dudes have bright red cartoon pigtails (a la the Wendy's mascot) where their receding hairline used to be, and in their thick fists they're maybe clutching a giant greasy burger and staring at it with a sort of desperate, animalistic lust you normally see from, say, secretly gay Idaho Republicans in airport restrooms. Or something.

But this particular ad offers something extra, something a bit more... extraordinary. The burger in question is something very special indeed. It is not your typical "value menu" item. It is not a Wendy's Single with Cheese, or whatever it's called down in noncomestible junk-food hell.

No, this insidious concoction is simply startling in its shameless toxicity, its ruthless attention to wanting you cancerous and morbidly obese and very, very dead as soon as goddamn possible, if not sooner.

The burger is this: two sickeningly brownish-gray, chemical-blasted 1/4-pound beeflike patties, intersliced with two slabs of neon-orange cheeselike substance, slathered with mayonnaise, all topped with the big kicker: six (yes, six) strips of bacon. Oh my, yes. It's like a giant middle finger to your heart.

This product's name? The "Baconator." You know, like "Terminator," only for, uh, a huge stack of cow/pig meat that celebrates your impending coronary/impotence/cancer with every bite. Genius.

Here is where I admit my confusion. Here is where a small but significant part of my brain (quietly, internally) explodes every time I see this commercial -- which, mercifully, isn't often, because I don't watch much TV and don't watch any weekend TV sports and therefore am never around when (I presume) this kind of product is target-marketed straight to their apparently very slovenly, apparently hugely unhealthy, largely illiterate audiences.

Wait, is that too harsh? Maybe. But as I watched this ad, a slew of questions flooded my naive brain and I found myself actually looking around my apartment, trying to find a sympathetic face, someone or something to share my stupefaction at what I was seeing.

Wait wait wait (I asked the wall), is this still legal? Do we still actually allow this sort of cultural tripe to be broadcast to the nation? Can fast-food companies still sell revolting chyme like this obesity-causing cancer-ready death-inducing product you shouldn't even feed to your dog, and no one is stopping them? Didn't we pass a law or something? Have the noxious fast-food titans not yet been forced to stop concocting vile products like this, or at least to dial down the garish marketing of their most ultra-toxic products, given how the vast majority of Americans have now learned (haven't they?) at least a tiny modicum about human health?

Put another, more pointed way: Haven't we moved past this by now?

After all, we've now had years -- decades, even -- of well-documented studies and health campaigns and even a handful of truth-in-advertising nutrition laws, endless media reports about the dangers of fat and chemicals and industrial feedlot beef, not to mention the launch of dozens of health magazines and the mixed-blessing triumph of the entire organic movement, right alongside pop culture hits like "Fast Food Nation" and "Super Size Me" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "Diet for a New America" and all the rest.

Hence, you'd think -- or at least, I thought -- something might have shifted by now. Alas, you would be, like me, completely wrong.

Yes, well do I know the brutish libertarian view of all this, which simply goes: If you're dumb enough to eat this garbage, you get what you deserve. Then again, such ideology doesn't stop us from passing laws -- or at least partially regulating -- vile corporations and products we know are hugely dangerous and stupid and which would happily kill us in our sleep. And, at least in some cases, we're better off for it.

Hell, we did it with telemarketing. One little much-needed law and boom, a national Do-Not-Call registry, and it actually mostly works and now all those vile cretins who used to call you during dinner to sell you carpet cleaning services now simply spam your e-mail account until it staggers and collapses and shuts down your e-mail server.

We did it with cigarette advertising, with booze, with seat belt laws, with gun advertising, with all sorts of products and services we know in our collective heart of hearts are either totally and shamelessly deadly and therefore should not be allowed free reign in the culture, or which we all agree really do need some sort of system of legal/ethical checks and balances (clean water, food additives, medicine, etc.) that the free market simply cannot provide on its own.

And yes, well do I know the cynical view, the one that says a law banning the creation or advertising of such deadly garbage like the Baconator probably wouldn't do much to stem the tide of willful ignorance in this country anyway, given our well-known epidemic of obesity and our proud, all-American culture of gluttony and excess. True enough.

But maybe I'll just stick with my original note of (blind?) confidence, that little bubble of ideological hope that progress has indeed been made and awareness of health and diet in this nation has indeed been nicely raised and the world is not, in fact, teeming with an army of manic Baconator-chomping frat guys.

Or better yet, maybe I should just stop watching TV altogether. Voila! No more Baconators! Easy.

I love it when he is disgusted by the things that also disgust me. He has a gift for such things.
When did we become a nation of ignorant, sloth-like fools? I am racking my brain to understand where it all went SO wrong on countless levels.

Bingo

In the neon graveyard, Las Vegas.


I clicked on humorzo this fine day. Always a wise decision. I then followed her link to last week's Morford column. Does anyone else cry when they read his stuff? Maybe it's because he so often manages to bring up things I've been pondering. Not that I have been thinking about life, love, death, or "success. " No way.

How To Get Your Love On
By Mark Morford
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

I am not married. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, been married.

I do not have any children of which I am right now aware. I am, in fact, recently single again for the first time in many years. Also: no mortgage. No debt. No daily array of behavioral meds (yet). No significant or particularly dangerous skeletons -- none that can speak or call the CIA or reveal the location of the photographs buried on my hard drive, anyway.

This, as you might imagine, is a weirdly fascinating position to be in, and not only because many of my long-coupled friends think I must've won some sort of amazing social lottery, with the prize being a debauched free-for-all of sybaritic adventure. Nor is it because I'm now apparently supposed to learn the skill that is pornographic text messaging or that I must now stock up on loathed condoms and certainly not because I have to practice sifting out all the women who insist on listing Dave Matthews and/or their five cats as their BFFs on Craigslist or Nerve personals.

No, when you're single and you've finally made it past the age when you've felt both love's deepest tongue probings and also its most random horror-flick slashings, past the age when getting moronically drunk every weekend and hooking up is the ultimate goal and you've had enough sex to fill a thousand porn movies and everyone around you is no longer on some sort of giddy, wide-eyed first-adult-relationship must-get-married must-have-babies track of impossibly optimistic utopian desire, what it means, at least for me, is that you get to become this odd sort of sounding board -- a blank slate of love's warped potential, a reason for others to extrapolate on the nature of love and life and sex and how goddamn difficult/wonderful/impossible it all really is.

Which is merely another way of saying, I am learning something. Or rather, re-learning. Or rather, having something everyone sort of knows but no one really talks all that much about because it's so damn obvious and also painful and fraught and wonderful, pounded back into my thick skull in a delightfully unexpected way.

Here is the big lesson, the thing that keeps coming at me, again and again and again: No one has the slightest clue how to make love work.

I know. Shocking. But truly, it's weirder that you might think.

See, singlehood at my pseudo-mature age can be a time of profound cleansing, of enjoying the moment as you ready for the new, of trying to figure out just what you're all about and what you really want and how to go about getting it, or not getting it, or letting it all go and not attaching to it so that it may find you, in the healthiest and sexiest and most honest way possible.

And so, you look around. And you ask. And you get feedback, comments, perspectives from all those in various stages of lovedom around you. (Very few of my circle are single, and if they are, they're almost certainly seeking that special one to make it all make sense.) And that feedback ain't what it used to be. If it ever was.

For every happily married couple I know (and I do know a few), there are three more who are confused and tense and battling all sorts of doubt and crisis and regret. For every wedding announcement, there are two more separations. For every guy I know who's tremendously happy to be settled, there's another who wishes he could've had "just one more year" of unbridled freedom.

It goes on. For every woman I know who simply can't wait to have kids and who tears up in front of a newborn and whose biological clock is ticking like Dick Cheney's pacemaker in a gay fetish dungeon, there's another who has quietly realized she should maybe never have become a mother. Or that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Or that it's wonderful and profound, but oh my God the changes and the sacrifices are just never-ending and it's insanely difficult and You. Have. No. Idea.

What, still too obvious? Oh, it gets juicier.

Couples you think were rock solid and perfect have fallen apart, screamingly. Couples you thought wouldn't last a year have made it to 10 and show no signs of slowing. Couples who got together in college and were miserably mismatched took a decade off and had lots of sex with other people and then got back together and it's now the perfect, true thing. More or less. Unless it's not.

See, at a certain point, all the variants become so astounding, so dizzying, so universal, that you finally realize (yes, for the 1,000th time) there is no rule. There is no pattern. The exceptions are the rule. There is no approach that, overall, seems to work for most people most of the time. There's not even a hint of a possibility of a whisper of a rule and anyone who deigns to tell you differently, be it a church or a parent or a relationship guru, is, to put it gently, astoundingly full of crap.

This is why God laughs. This is why the fates roll their eyes and belch. Because you think you know. You think you have this crude set of boundaries and guidelines that you insist you will live by as you head into uncharted waters of love and sex and attraction, and these silly notions grow and thrive and breed like happy Mormons all through your 20s and 30s, when all your friends are hooking up and all the marriages are fresh as squirted mother's milk and all the love is sweet and skittering and hot and everything seems aimed toward the positive, the perfect, the right.

And then, time happens. Fights. Breakdowns. Crisis. Fertility issues. Financial stress. Loveless marriages. Sexless marriages. Second marriages. Unwanted kids. Wanted kids who end up being the repository of all the angst of the loveless marriage. Divorce. Step children. Open relationships. Closed relationships. Polyamory. Experimentation. Sperm donation. Therapy. Also: Cancer. Disease. Accidents. Death. Rebirth. Morning breath.

Oh, and one more: Infidelity. Oh yes. Here is perhaps the most fascinating topic of all, the soul's dirty little secret, the hottest of love's hotbuttons. Because maybe you used to look at adultery and say, oh my God, no way, it's just so wrong, horrible, hurtful, dangerous. Maybe it was even your absolute rule. Unassailable. You simply do not cheat. Do not wander. Not ever. No no no no no.

Except, yes. Except when you get to know someone -- or perhaps multiple someones -- for whom, for whatever unexpected reason and unquantifiable mutation of love and body and life, it becomes actually understandable. Justifiable. Encouraged, even. Still painful, hurtful, dangerous? Yes. But if you're honest, your boundaries will shift. Your definitions will blur. And what's more, you realize that this is how it has to be.

Maybe it's simply a case of the more you learn the less you understand. Maybe it's all about the wisdom of aging. Maybe it's a big fat case of just when you think you might have some of it figured out, the world spins and spits and slaps your warily romantic little ass and makes you realize you're completely full of s--.

Me, I like to think it's simply because, for the most part, we're still just one big gaggle of spiritual infants, still love's little quivering carry-on Chihuahua: trembling and jumpy and sweet and trying like hell to work through the infinitely frustrating, cruelly painful, orgasmically delicious variants of how the human soul can get its love on.

And baby, from what I can tell right now, we've got one hell of a long way to go.

Speaking of (my) baby...

Taken (and posted previously) in September, 2006. It's G-man inside the shade house in Papaikou, Hawaii.

"You heart is like a diamond
You throw your pearls at swine
And as I watch you leaving me
You pack my peace of mind ."

M. Jagger/K. Richards



Younger daughter went with me to see The Simpsons Movie last night. (WooHoo!!) It far exceeded our dual expectations. Yes, I am an almost-fifty year old who loves cartoons. Especially Matt's cartoons. Ever since Life In Hell, several decades back. Laughing like mad was great therapy. A few tears fell during some key moments, but fear not-I won't spoil it. Two gigantic thumbs-up from me.


Back of the shack, in the late afternoon sun.


After the movie, I got a call from a friend and we laughed and chatted for a nice, long time. What a lovely surprise, and most therapeutic. Thanks, Miz B!

We Were Right. Imagine That!

If you've been here before, you know I love Mark Morford in ways I have trouble describing. It's clear to me that I am drawn to shit disturbers. Those brave souls that put it out there, whether it makes folks laugh, or think, or gasp in horror, he always has his say.

This particular column touches on a topic that has floated around in my head for years. Now that the mainstream has been coddled and coerced by our media to be more conscious of their impact on Mother Earth, or eating in healthful and sustainable ways, or the long list of things that lots of us lived decades ago. We were paying attention, and wanted to try living in more positive ways. Because we thought it mattered. Turns out that it did matter. But not to everyone. The majority of mainstream folks thought we were nuts... for wanting to eat organic foods, and have organic gardens, and recycle, and heal ourselves in homeopathic and alternative ways. Oh, and do yoga, meditate, and have our babies at home, and a million other things that the fine column below brings up. Don't get me wrong, I am glad that many have finally realized that we are destroying our planet and ourselves. I just worry that it's a little late. Too bad you didn't trust the hippies.



The Hippies Were Right!

Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's happening right now in the newly "greening" America and don't say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I'm talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the right thing to do" (read: It's purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don't start caring they'll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it's true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here's a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation -- has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation's incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you're really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there: Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane" and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that might be due to all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?