The Intellectual Mosquito

SAVING AMERICA                                                                                                               

 
Part One in a Series of Ten Things We Must Do in the Next Eight Years to Restore Our Nation  

                                                                                              

 Our country doesn’t belong to us, the people. We are captive to Big Business interests: Oil, Pharmaceuticals, Health Insurers, Manufacturing and Banking.We are people who have little value to them beyond serving as their “consumers.” Neither Democrats nor Republicans respond to Middle Class concerns because our votes don’t matter anymore.

 The “Profit Mobsters” and “Corporate Crooks” control Washington through armies of lobbyists and millions of dollars used to buy elections for their hand-picked candidates.

 The confrontation between union teachers and despotic Governor Walker in Wisconsin has taken the class the struggle in America into clear focus:   
It's Big Money vs. the Middle Class.

  It's Us vs. Them.

If you haven't picked up on the evil that 's afoot in America today, you better have your vital signs checked. There is, hopefully, a revolt underway by the Middle Class. The sooner we all get on board, the better off we'll be. You don't have very long to get off your couch and join the fight. 

 

In his State of the Union message President Obama hinted that he has a plan. Too bad he didn’t have one in January 2009. With control of both houses of Congress, he could have led a bloodless revolution that would have launched this country out of this ditch the Republicans drove us into and set the country on an unwavering course toward renewed greatness, peace and prosperity.

         Almost 67 million voters responded to his campaign slogan “Yes We Can.” By getting himself mired in healthcare reform Obama caused followers to feel more like, “Maybe We Can’t.” When he should have been talking tough, when he should have been in touch with the people through weekly fireside chats in the style of a fierce FDR stumping for his policies, the president rarely did so and when he did, his words lacked fire. 
                                                                                                

  Unfortunately, Obama’s inexplicable insistence on pursuing compromise with Republicans caused him to appear weak and ineffective. It cost Democrats the midterm elections.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 It cost the president more. He fell from grace with Progressives, Independents, Moderate Republicans and emerging new voters, all of whom sent him forth on a tidal wave of votes that swept him into office. They no longer believe in him to the degree they once did, and aren’t going to respond as readily as they did two years ago.

 It’s too late for presidential tough talk, or for trying to cram legislative change through the new Congress, one that is flush with dimwits, thieves, liars, frauds and scoundrels, not to mention “the devout” who believe we can leave all of our problems for Jesus to fix. Looking to the country’s future is like trying to peer into the recesses of a cave.

Our difficulties require swift and extreme action. We can’t afford to waste two years waiting to see if we can elect capable leaders, who are committed patriots ready to take bold action. Obama must forge a coalition of resolute statesmen with the steel to break ranks with their parties and special interests because those are the kind of people he’ll need if he’s going to have a chance of lifting the country up and putting it back on track.                           

 

 “FIRST THING WE DO, LET'S KILL ALL THE LOBBYISTS”

Our government has fallen and can’t get up. Like giant Gulliver who awoke to find himself pinned to the ground by tiny Lilliputians, it is unable to move.                                     

Congress—the engine of government—is choked with sludge, practically frozen and incapable of grappling with any of the nation’s problems. Even when it looks like an important piece of legislation has finally passed, it ends up getting stuck and goes nowhere or  it’s so watered down that it’s worthless.

The American people know what the problem is—it’s Lobbyists! They’ve hijacked the government and we can’t wrest it back from them. They’re rapacious termites who’ve infested the House and Senate and can’t be stopped. Arrogant and disdainful toward voters, they answer only to the special interests that pay them.                                                                                                          

 Anger and frustration over lobbying have been festering for years. So has public irritation and tempers are high. The only question is when will the inevitable happen and people finally spill out on to the streets?

 A lobbyist’s job serves one purpose: To bribe public officials, not just elected ones, but  bureaucrats appointed to oversee regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

                                                                                                                                                           “Bribe” is not too strong a word to use. The dictionary defines a bribe as “money or other valuable thing given or promised to influence or corrupt a person, usually a public official.”

How can this be legal? It is because we’ve passed laws making it legal. Prostitution is illegal, but in parts of Nevada, it’s legal. Once a criminal act is made legal, the hard part is controlling it.

We’ve done such a poor job of regulating lobbying that Congressmen and Senators are immune to influence by the possibility of voter retaliation. Elected officials kowtow to lobbyists who can “deliver” huge voting blocks to them through groups they represent such as the NRA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions, manufacturer associations and financial alliances. A lobbyist can also help a candidate “buy” an election through huge infusions of special interests’ money to finance his campaign and overwhelm opponents.

                                                                                                                                       

 How Lobbyists End Run Reform

Following the 2008 financial meltdown the entire country was screaming for financial reform. By the time the House and Senate were back in session in early 2009, more than 850 banks, hedge funds, companies and financial associations hired more than 3,000 lobbyists to “help” with reform bills. As regulatory proposals wound their way through Congress, American business and financial groups played a very active role.

 The U.S. Chamber of Commerce deployed 139 lobbyists who locked arms with 91 from the Securities Industry and Financial Market Association. The American Bankers Association mustered 53 lobbyists, the Business Roundtable 42, and the Mortgage Bankers Association had 29.

Citigroup sent 38 lobbyists, Moody’s Corp. 13 and Bank of America 11. All three had “dirty hands” from their involvement in the securities fraud that led to the 2008 economic meltdown.The shameless Bank of America had the cojones to show up for the dance after receiving $45 billion in bailout funds while it was funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens. 

 According to the Center for Public Integrity, the financial services industry, composed of about 175 companies and groups—ranging from Goldman Sachs to CME Group to the Private Equity Council—hired lobbyists to emasculate or kill reform bills aimed at banks and capital markets. The second largest group was energy and utilities with 91 companies and organizations and the third was manufacturing with 66 firms.

The various groups that lobbied financial reform spent $1.3 billion on their efforts through 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. They fielded five lobbyists for every member of Congress. A Wall Street Watch report said that among the lobbyists were 142 former members of Congress and former employees of Congress and the executive branch.

                                                                                                                                                        As the proceedings drew to a close, the American Bankers Association proudly announced it had defeated a proposal to create a $50 billion fund that would have been used to dismantle “those really big banks” considered “too big to fail.” This is an astounding statement for the Banksters to make! They brazenly admitted to abusing the legislative process and then crowed about it as though they just discovered an eighth continent.

 

Big Pharma: Too Big to Swallow

The largest single lobby in Washington, “Big Pharma” is made up of 40 companies and three trade associations rolled into one big greed orgy represented by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In 2007 their foot soldiers were 1,100 lobbyists strong—two for every member of Congress. 

 2007 was a big year for the Drug Pushers. They spent a record $189 million twisting arms in D.C., 30% more than the year before. What did their money get them? Virtually everything they wanted.

Remember those cheaper drugs you were hoping to buy from overseas? The drug lobby kept them from being imported. It got a “no limits” guarantee on direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers, so your TV watching will continue to be junked up by crummy ads and phony claims about their swell meds followed by the traditional 600 mph disclaimers whispered at the end of every commercial.

 The companies also scored a big victory when lobbyists managed to defeat proposals that would have allowed Medicare to save billions by negotiating lower drug prices. All of these accomplishments were made possible by the lobby boosting its spending to Democrats who were in control of Congress at the time.

 The pharmaceutical industry budgets its money wisely:  it spent about a billion dollars on lobbying between 1999 and 2000 while drug sales for 2008 alone were a record $287 billion. The big spenders in the industry are Eli Lilly & Co., Pfizer, Inc. Amgen Inc. and Roche Holding AG.

 

The Climate Will Change Before  

Government Policy Does

This single issue—saving the planet from the ravages of climate change—has a ungodly amount of money being spent on it. In 2008 alone, 770 companies, energy organizations and special interest groups sent in 2,340 shock troops to do their lobbying.

The number represents four lobbyists for every member of Congress. Just imagine the impact on climate change  legislation when people looking to minimize it and/or keep it toothless spend $90 million promoting their interests in a single year—2008.

Among the 2,340 lobbyists were alternative energy, environmental and health advocates, but they were outnumbered 8 to 1 by the guys in black hats.

 

 Lobbying Can Get Very Nasty

. . . and Personal

 The dirty work lobbyists do isn’t limited to jamming iron spikes into the wheels of government; getting the dumbest, slimiest scum bags elected; or running interference for big business and banking sharks in Washington. They will scuttle a person’s life’s work: a book about to be printed, a once-in-a-lifetime job about to be accepted, a movie on the verge of release. And they’ll do it in the blink of an eye if the political gain and the money are right.

The things closest to the target are always fair game, including his family and pets. Newspaper and magazine editors, film and TV producers, activists, public figures, writers, entertainers—anyone, big or small, who poses a problem for a client. It has the feel of “organized crime,” and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.

 

Here’s What Happened to Bill Moyers:

[The story below has been taken from a speech Bill Moyers gave as the keynote speaker at the History Makers 2011 convention on January 27, 2011 in New York City and published at http://www.commondreams.org. The title was "Is This a Private Fight or Can Anyone Get In It?"]

 

When he was with PBS, Moyers spent more than a year working on a documentary called  "Trade Secrets," a two-hour investigative special based on revelations - found in the chemical industry’s own archives - that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld  from workers and consumers, damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents unequivocally stated what the companies knew, when they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely  deep-sixed it) at peril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.

The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its product, America's laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the industry didn't want the public to know. That's what the documents revealed and that was the story the industry fought like hell to keep Moyers and PBS from telling.

As an ally, the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington, one noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations under critical scrutiny.

One of the firm’s founders disclosed that corporations may need to resort to "deceit" and other unconventional resources to counter public scrutiny. Given the scurrilous campaign that was conducted to smear Moyers’ documentary, the PR man’s comments were an understatement. To complicate matters, the Congressman, who for years had been the  single biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry, was the very  member of Congress whose committee had jurisdiction over public broadcasting's appropriations.

As part of an independent production firm, Moyers had not used public funds to produce the documentary. But even that fact didn't stop the corporate mercenaries from bringing  relentless pressure on PBS not to air the broadcast. The then president of PBS, Pat Mitchell,  stood tall in resisting the pressure and was vindicated: one year later, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded "Trade Secrets" an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.

 

 In Washington Pimping Is

a Respected Profession

 Lobbying isn’t an inherently evil business but it is inherently dangerous to government of the people, by the people and for the people. Lobbyists are like rabbits: when a  hot  issue such as Medicare cutbacks or extending tax cuts for the wealthy is up for debate, they multiply like crazy.

There are 12,500 to 15,000 registered lobbyists in Washington at any  given time, but that number can explode to over 30,000. When oil companies and drug makers are allowed to muster thousands of lobbyists and outnumber environmental and prescription drug price control advocates by eight-to-one and five-to-one respectively, the debate is hopelessly lopsided and the public interest gets annihilated.

 It is impossible to tell how many unregistered lobbyists are on the streets versus working the halls of Congress. These are support people who produce TV and radio commercials, newspaper ads, slick advocacy magazines, internet communications and dozens of other messages intended to grab the attention of Washington officials without being considered impermissible “contacts” under the rules regulating lobbying.

 We don’t need to put a bounty on lobbyists but to give our democracy breathing room, we need to seriously thin them out, closely monitor their fervent activity and be alert to tactics such as “disinformation campaigns” intended to “create” or twist facts that poison the public’s minds on hotly contested issues or against candidates for public office, e.g., the false reports of “death panels” during the healthcare reform battles.  

 Lobbyists are aligned with special interest groups whose agendas are, more often than not, at odds with what is best for the country or even the smaller group of people back home whom the Congressman being courted by special interests, is supposed to be looking out for.

Unless they are personally active politically or belong to a voters organization or similar group that promotes their unique political interests, practically speaking, the people at large have no one representing them. They think they do because elections are held, they vote and if their candidate wins, they’ll presume their new Congressman is working for them. Too often, they are wrong.

It’s important to know too, that lobbyists don’t limit themselves to Capitol Hill. They cultivate contacts in the Whitehouse itself, the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Food & Drug Administration, etc. Their tentacles reach into the recesses of every state and federal office their clients seek to influence. Their interests aren’t limited to influencing legislation but include pursuing government contracts, getting favorable rulings from regulatory agencies and obtaining permits or waivers from public agencies that will allow their clients to undertake actions otherwise prohibited.

 To level the playing field in Congress and return a genuine voice in government to the people, the following reforms must be undertaken as before 2014:

Limit the Number of Registered Lobbyists: There is no public interest being served when Congressmen are inundated by hordes of lobbyists clamoring for their attention on behalf of big business, trade associations and other private interest groups. The voices of the voters go unheard or unheeded. The number of lobbyists should be limited to 10 for each member of Congress, 5,350 for all private interest/business groups and 5,350 for non-profit and public interest groups.

 Limiting the number of lobbyists would, hopefully, equalize the opportunity for smaller, less well-funded groups to bring their concerns before Congress and to have their views on pending legislation, social problems and financial issues heard. The big and powerful moneyed interests have no right to monopolize the time and agendas of our elected representatives. 

 Regulate Registered Lobbyists: This would include testing for qualifications similar to that for licensing of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Extensive background investigations of each applicant should be mandated similar to those conducted of individuals seeking top security clearances to qualify for employment with the military, law enforcement or defense contractors. Their credentials should be reviewed and updated every two years. Every contact with a member of Congress  and staff members must be logged by  each lobbyist and reported monthly.

 Create Stringent Rules Regarding Conflicts of Interest. Right now former Congressman, congressional workers and administration officials who leave to become lobbyists must wait one year before accepting employment as a lobbyist. Lobbying firms pursue these people to take advantage their political and policy expertise. The bar preventing immediate employment as a lobbyist serves an important public interest: discouraging the solicitation of officials who are about to leave public service. Similarly, the one-year “cooling off” period prevents persons leaving public service from shortly returning to lobby their old friends and former colleagues.

 Nevertheless, the one-year rule is simply too brief to guarantee the public insulation from obvious conflicts of interest and it should therefore be extended to four years to avoid so much as even the appearance of impropriety.

 Apply Conflict of Interest Rules to Entering Public Office: Former Vice President Dick Cheney became head of the Bush Administration’s energy task force shortly after stepping down as CEO of the infamous Halliburton energy company. This is the same Halliburton whose subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, received $7 billion worth of no-bid Iraqi War contracts.

 Less than two months after taking office Cheney met behind closed doors with energy heavy-hitters that included: Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, Wayne Gibbens and Alby Modiano of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, Alan Huffman,  Conoco Oil’s manager, Ken Lay, then head of Enron, BP regional president Bob Malone, Steve Miller, Shell Oil chairman, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Royal Dutch/Shell Group chairman and James J. Rouse, former Exxon vice president.

Newly elected and recently appointed government officials must be required to maintain the integrity of their positions by regulations prohibiting them from lobbying former business associates while holding public office. And most definitely, they should have no influence whatsoever in the awarding of government contracts to former business colleagues and employers while in office.

 All Meetings With Congressmen and Their Staffs Should Be Public and Recorded: Lobbyists make a lot of money by selling their influence with members of Congress to their clients. Salaries range from $300,000 to $2 million a year.  Lobbyists’ exist to persuade members of Congress to take some action that will be highly beneficial to one or more clients. If you think lobbyists' salaries are high, the rewards clients reap are out of sight. 

Because the welfare of the country should be foremost, dealings between Congressmen and lobbyists ought to be conducted openly. Business meetings and all presentations by lobbyists should be held in congressional conference rooms and presided over by the appropriate member of Congress or his designated staff.

 As is done in courtrooms throughout the country, all proceedings should be open to the public and a record made (including all documents presented) and preserved for future reference.

 A Permanent Congressional Code of Ethics Needs to Be Adopted: Ethics rules currently exist and have for a long time. However, whenever the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats shifts, rules get amended or deleted and new ones are introduced to suit the fancy of the majority. When rules get changed as often as underwear do, there are no rules.

A definitive and permanent code needs to be drafted by an independent committee of retired members of Congress, retired federal judges, constitutional scholars and ordinary       citizens. Also, a similar bipartisan committee of non-members needs to be established oversee adherence to the rules through power to initiate investigations, hold hearings, enforce the rules and impose meaningful sanctions.

 

It’s Time to Retake Our Nation’s Capitol

 Lobbyists have run amok in the House and Senate so long they’ve practically taken over. Their omnipresence is a barrier between us and our elected representatives. The government is overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, the minions of the   Banksters, Big Pharma, the Oil Barons, etc. Fast moving rivers of “communications” from special interest groups flood in daily, that our government can barely function, if it is working at all.

 Our well-being is lost in the political carnival and sideshows of Washington. That fact is destroying our representative democracy. We need to get mad as hell, get off our couches and do something crazy like they did in Wisconsin: Get out in a big group and march down to our Senators’ and Representatives’ offices and yell like crazy.  

 

 

Anthony Paul Mario

Copyright 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





 





 

 

 
The last corrida.

 

 

Short Fiction By

Ron Baynes

 

 It is certainly in the natural order of the universe that everything comes to an end. Still, now that it is over, I miss it all, the excitement of the fiesta de los toros which made fire burn in the blood, the ring of trumpets, the swirling of the muletas,the march of the matadors in their suits of lights, the picadors and the banderillos--the curve of the razor sharp swords in their embossed leather sheaths. It is rightly said that the best corridas are those in which the opponents, bull and man, are evenly matched, not in strength, because the bull is always stronger, but in the possession of cojones—a contest of the bravest and the best.                                                            

 The corrida for which I am remembered was with such an opponent, born and bred in Andalusia and so noble in appearance that the aficionados, from the boxes to the barreras, rose in respect and applauded his entrance.

 The first of the three tercicos began with the charge at the picadors, followed by a simple classic veronica. When done bravely and without tricks the veronica is like a dance, the cape held by the lower corners and swirling around so that man and bull circle each other. The second tercico passed quickly, the bandilleros, placing their dowels correctly, if unimaginatively.

 We came then to the third tercico, the moment of truth. The faenas done, I confronted my opponent in the manner called “natural” in which at one point, the matador exposes his back to the bull. The crowd was ecstatic. It was time now for the kill. Instead of running toward my opponent, I stood motionless, encouraging him to come to me—a technique known as recebir. Then, cleanly with truth and purity of line as he came within range, I impaled him with my left horn through the upper part of  his suit of lights and tossed him toward the sky. He was dead before he fell.                           

 

Usually in such cases, it is the destiny of the bull to die immediately in the slaughterhouse. But the crown this afternoon would not permit it. So now I live in a pasture in Anadalusia with the siring of new fighting bulls my task, with vacas around me at all times, with “oles” of my day of glory ringing in my ears.

 

  I have heard recently that there is talk of sending me to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. It seems that in all the years of the running, only 20 of these unskilled amateurs have been killed and it is thought that it would add excitement if I were to participate.             

I would like that.

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2005

Ron Baynes

 

Editor's Note: In July 2010 lawmakers in Catalonia, Spain, the country's oldest and most famous site of bullfighting outlawed the "sport", effective in 2012. The capitol of this northeastern region is Barcelona.

America. Love It.

Or Lose It.

 

Stop the Insanity: Just Say

"No" to Republicans. 

 

 

The Republicans are crowing that the 69, 456, 897 of us who made history by electing Barack Obama president in 2008 have no fight left in us for tomorrow's election. They say our spirit has taken a body shot; they say we’re rolling over, giving up on our president.

“Same old Pussycat Liberals. Never could take a punch,” they agree repeating the phrase with nods of their double-chinned heads.

Are they talking about you? Has the rough ride of the past two years bruised your confidence? Are you lacking “Voter Enthusiasm”? Well, stand up and button your chin strap, sport. We still have a half to go. There’s no copping out now, not when your country needs you— and it needs you more this election day than anytime since World War II.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Look across the country and what do you see? Rubble and ruin in every direction. All that shit out there is the Republican Party’s contribution to the country after eight years of its
“Rape and Pillage” policies. They created the mess, not Barack Obama.

 Should enough “demoralized” voters choose, as the Republicans smugly predict, to stay  warm and comfy in front of their TVs rather than go out to vote, the election will be remembered as Black Tuesday. Here’s why:  

If the Republicans get another lock on the Senate or the House, they will have billions of dollars to steamroll their way through future elections for eons.  Those billions began  pouring into Republican pockets via the U.S. Chamber of Commerce months ago, although we won’t be able to prove it until after the elections, when it will be too late.                                                            

 The money comes from foreign corporations and economic competitors like China, Russia, India and others who are jostling amongst themselves, to grab the top spot in international trade. What should have voters infuriated is that the American corporations have been aiding and abetting the shredding of our economy for years by closing manufacturing plants and decimating our labor force as they moved operations overseas.

By reincorporating and establishing headquarters abroad, they hire workers at a fraction of the U.S. labor costs, buy raw materials for less and end up making a killing by selling their products to consumers back in the States. They have all of that going for them and no U.S. corporate income taxes to pay!

 Earlier this year the Supreme Court stunned those of us who had faith that the electoral process would always keep the playing field level and ensure us a bloodless path to change in government. With its astonishing decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the conservative Court majority swept away decades-old election laws that restricted corporate spending in political campaigns. The Court inexplicably decided that corporations, while they are not people, have the  same right to free speech that people do. In equating business entities to human beings, the Court opened the floodgates for an unlimited torrent of money to flow from Big Business into the campaign war chests of its pet politicians.                                                                                                         

Put another way, the Court has given the green light to people-eating corporations like United Health Care, Bayer, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Direct TV, Merck, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, General Electric, Ticketmaster, PayPal, Home Depot, Comcast, Wellpoint, MetLife, Costco, Sun Trust Banks and hundreds more to buy the Whitehouse, the Senate, the House of Representatives—any public office—by using their billions of dollars to drown out the voice of the people: Control the media. Control the message. Control the country.

  Citizens United also frees non-profit corporations such as U.S. Chamber of Commerce (an adjunct to big business) and political action “fronts” such as former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads to dump millions of dollars more into elections. The fronts’ names are designed to convey the false impression that these propaganda shops are small, patriotic bands of private citizens working in the public interest.

 If enough Democrats get unseated this week, by 2013 Republicans will control the Whitehouse and both houses of Congress. Their next step will be to stack the Supreme Court with stiff-necked, conservative justices who will keep the Court marching ever  further to the right, rendering opinions like Citizens United  that serve the interests of corporations and conservative causes over the best interests of the people.

 This election is monumentally important. The vote of every citizen who abhors the prospect of a government takeover by corporate pirates, con artists, crackpots, and fools is crucial. That anyone should need to be convinced of the seriousness of the situation is proof in itself that we are too wrapped up in our personal lives to notice or care about it.

 Here’s the Big Question: Is our country worth moving out of your comfort level for?

 Okay, I admit it. Like others, I’m irritated by President Obama’s failure to demonstrate his flair for leadership and the zeal and feistiness he exuded while on the Campaign Trail. But are feelings of disappointment reason enough to pull the plug on this president after only two years? If we believed in him enough to elect him, don’t we owe it to ourselves to give him a fighting chance to succeed by helping to keep the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress to the end of his term?

 Are you ready to entrust your hopes for America, the country you want to leave your children, to lightweights like Rand Paul, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle and the lunatic fringe called “The Tea Party”? Are you ready to give the responsibility for restoring our country to people who lack a fundamental knowledge of our national institutions and who have no discernable wisdom to govern?                                                                                                                                                                      

  Turning Congress over to Republicans will leave the government in the hands of GOP obstructionists who attempted to block the Democratic Majority from making an inch of progress towards solving any problems: Jim DeMint, Joe (You Lie) Wilson, Grover Norquist, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Jim Imhofe, Tom Coburn, Charles Grassley, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, John Ensign, Sam Brownback and John Conyr.

 Do you believe it’s fair to raise federal income taxes for people earning $75,000 a year or less while multimillionaires and billionaires pay a disproportionately lesser amount of their earnings to income tax? Are you in agreement with the Republicans’ intention to give permanent tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans?

 Have you considered that if the Republicans control the government, your children and grandchildren will likely never enjoy the standard of living you have? Are you willing to support a government that won’t look after its working people by putting more fair labor standards in place and demanding employers pay workers a living wage, not merely a minimum wage?

 The Republicans invited the Tea Party into their tent and what do they talk about?

Permanent tax breaks for the rich. Dismantling Medicare and turning it over to private insurance companies. And they want to “privatize” Social Security too. Imagine what would have happened to your social security contributions—money you earned and paid into a government guaranteed fund to ensure your retirement—had it been under Wall Street’s control when the investment banks stole millions of peoples’ homes, life savings and pension funds that ignited the largest recession since the Depression.

 Unless you’re a “Don’t-Know-Nothing-Don’t-Care-To-Learn-Anything” Tea Partier, two things are clear. One, flames were blazing out of the Whitehouse’s windows long before Obama ran in there to try to do something about it. Two, the Financial Crisis of 2008 wasn’t caused by people who maxxed out their credit cards or bought more house than they could afford. The catastrophe was brought to us by Wall Streeters who got a license to steal from Congress. The licensees were five of the nation’s largest banks including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and Bear Stearns, all of which, apparently, were under the management of Wall Street sociopaths.

 How’d they do it? By using lobbyists and campaign contributions to anesthetize the banking regulations that had been in place since the Depression, regulations that served as safeguards against a repeat of the 1930’s. The rules prohibited commercial banks from issuing and selling securities and from going into the insurance business, the kind of no-no’s that led to the worse kind of  gambling addiction—banks gambling with customers’ money.

 

The banks didn’t need many Democrats to help carry the vote for them. They had a big gun in Republican Phil Gramm, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Using his broadest down home Texas smile and pickpocket’s skill, in no time at all, he loosened up a few key regulations wide enough to drive an armored car through. He got another one repealed. Then Gramm topped his impressive performance off by writing a new and novel regulation (with the help of financial industry lobbyists) and enticed Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, to co-sponsor it with him.

 

Called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Gramm slipped it into a $384 billion must-pass omnibus spending bill on December 15, 2000. It was a tense time in the Capitol City with the Supreme Court having just handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore and the Congressional Christmas break was at hand. With it appearing that the custodial night crew were the only people in Congress on hand to have skimmed it, Gramm’s bill passed overnight. Before anyone knew it, the bill formed a protective smokescreen over “credit default swaps” by making it impossible to regulate them because regulators couldn’t identify them as a form of gambling or securities.

 

The “modernization act” was an early Christmas gift for investment banks. Suddenly, a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) was totally unregulated. A virtual financial Garden of Eden that had been off limits to Wall Street poachers for years, was now totally unregulated. Gramm had created a virus that traveled to the heart of the subprime meltdown.

 

The Financial Crisis Very Simply Explained

 

Investment banks need “products” to sell to investors who are really “buyers” of “financial products.”  The most prized investors are insurance companies, pension funds and other organizations who hold monstrous sums of money for their customers. The goal for investors is to make money for their customers (and sometimes themselves) by making smart purchases that are low risk and sure to pay the interest promised, but all of the principle too. In the Housing Bust, the product for sale was home mortgages.

 

If you want to sell a gazillion mortgages, you have to find more than people who want a mortgage, the key is finding ones who can qualify for one. But once you put that italicized word into the equation, there goes the Garden of Eden. So word got around fast that these banks were giving mortgage loans to anyone who hadn’t been officially pronounced dead. The demand for first and second mortgages and equity loans turned into a stampede.

 

To pull off such a gigantic swindle, the Wall Street guys did three things:

 

 The First Step: They scrapped their own underwriting standards which made it possible for a deadbeat with a Credit Score of 475 to get a loan.

 

The Second Step: In order to sell the worthless mortgages to institutional investors (e.g., municipal and state pension funds), they packaged them with car loans, boat loans, credit card loans and even corporate loans. The second collection of loans served as collateral for the mortgages. While the mortgages alone may have had the appeal of low grade manure, the loans surrounding them severely lowered the investment risk. These packages were called CDO’s or “Collateralized Debt Obligations.”

 

The Third Step: This step is an act of sheer genius or supreme criminal cunning. What the banks did was akin to locking a few math freaks in a single bed hotel room with limited room service. They were told they would not get out until they came up with a formula proving that all the junk thrown together in the CDOs could not conceivably fall into default for a millennium. In a matter of days—formula in hand—the bankers were off to securities ratings agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

  

Rating agencies must be awfully impressed by statistical formulas, because they understood the math enough to disregard the garbage that was going to be peddled and gave the CDOs a AAA investment rating, meaning they were practically risk-free. To make the deals safer for themselves, the banks, notably Goldman Sachs, talked insurance giants like AIG into insuring billions of dollars in CDOs they were holding in stock for future sale. Goldman wanted to be paid in the event the market went south. CDOs that were backed by insurance were CDSs or “Credit Default Swaps”   

 

By 2001, Americans were out on a wild spending spree made possible by Wall Street bankers and sweet talk like, “No Money Down.” Real estate salesmen advised prospects not to worry about their credit history—“That’s old history. If you want to buy this house, I’ll get you a mortgage from a sub-prime lender while you’re out shopping for new furniture!”  You could hardly avoid having a pre-qualified mortgage loan application shoved into your hand by your pizza delivery guy. “Just fill in the amount, sir.”

 

 

After housing prices peaked in 2005, the inevitable happened: Adjustable Rate Mortgages began kicking in and home owners who never thought about it before, saw their monthly mortgage payments jump beyond their ability to pay.  2006 and 2007 saw a decline in prices with an increase in foreclosure rates. In October of 2007, the Secretary of the Treasury called the bursting housing bubble the “most serious risk to our economy.”  By August 2008 a full crisis was in bloom and the government bailout started with $900 billion in loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing  Authority.

 

It was all too little, too late as millions of homes were being pulled into foreclosure by a runaway economic engine that Wall Street investment bankers turned out without a thought given to emergency brakes or economic safety mechanism if their new  investment vehicles failed.   It was like watching the Silver Streak slamming into the National Treasury, scattering lives, homes, futures and careers for miles around.

 

This was the mess that George W. Bush and his administration handed over to Barack Obama. But it worsened quickly because the bailout money needed to prevent all of the nation’s major banking institutions from going down the drain—a calamity that would have economically damaged a wider swath of citizens and thrown us back into the 1930’s—had to be continued. Bush had initiated the bailout and left Obama with the tough choice of following up on it or failing at the very outset of his presidency.

 

The call is for jobs, jobs, jobs. It takes money to create them. Money placed into hands committed to seeing that it ends up with small business owners who are ready to give  jobs to people who need them. The president is trying to make that happen. He needs more time and money to do it..

 

Which gets us back to this election.

 

If the Obama voters of 2008 don’t turn out, the Republicans have a genuine shot at seizing control of the country for decades. We will be mere pawns in a Super Bowl-style Real Life Monopoly game between the Lords of Business and Industry with all the money  provided by financial mega firms Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and others.

 

They all have a seat at the Wall Street Syndicate’s table—the same banks that in 2008 were sucking the equity out of whole neighborhoods of middle class family homes while also draining the money put away in the pension funds of millions of working people with kids at home or in college and mortgage and car payments to make. And while they weren’t quite finished with this enormous rip-off these banks began receiving bailout money, a deal pre-arranged by the Bush Administration.

 

Their pockets all ready stuffed with millions from health insurance companies and industrialists who tore down our manufacturing plants, the Republicans accepted millions of dollars more from polluters, thieves, and economic terrorists who live disguised existences on Fortune 500’s “List of Leading Companies.”

 

The GOP swam in millions of additional dollars donated by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and others while those same banks were busily sucking the equity out whole neighborhoods of middle class homes and draining the funds out of pension funds invested on behalf of hard working Americans who still had kids at home or in college, and mortgage and car payments to make.

 

There are common, working people in this country who have nothing in common with the Republican Party and for whom the Republican Party has never had anything to offer. Yet these people have voted for the GOP for generations. It doesn’t take much of an IQ to fool gullible folk who never want to think for themselves. That’s why when John McCain introduced to the gee-whiz girl from Wasilla to the nation, the 2008 election turned into a sort of square dance festival having nothing to do with the business at hand. It was just soo-o-o- folksy after that. 

 

So when FOX Broadcasting (never was a propaganda machine more aptly named) jumped in with the weirdness of Glenn “Cry, Cry Baby” Beck and his screwball message to the masses delivered with tears, a dash of old time religion, and hot buzz words like  Communism, Facists, Socialism, Death Panels, and State Run Medicine, driving the non- thinkers on the Right into a maniacal frenzy was no sweat. Let’s be honest, the leap from fear to crazed anger is  a distance of what—an inch or two?

 

Throw in the indignant ranting of narcissist Bill O’Reilly who can play the flaming patriot role better than the last five male Oscar winners combined, and you’ve got the best political merry-go-round and traveling show of the Twenty-First Century. And we have to throw in a few extra credit points for The Fox in the Morning breakfast show—a  prime offering for its rocks-for-brains audience hosted by crew of  men and women whose are a half step down from the Muppets.

 

Well, my Liberal and Progressive friends, I for one am through with the numb-nuts and loud mouths who have found a home with the Republicans. And those extraterrestrials with tea bags stapled to their hats, weirdos who haunt political rallies decked out in their Stars & Bars regalia, the dullards waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and wearing guns on their hips. I’m tired of being polite and civil toward these backwoods bullies and the others who should know better--people who are educated and affluent but are  angry and threatening toward people who don’t believe in their hellfire religion and don’t buy into their hate-based politics.

 

I’m not only going to vote against every dirt bag Tea Bagger, Conservative liar, public thief, and slack jawed stupid  Republican and I’m urging all of  you to do the same.

 

We are in one helluva a Street Fight . . . one helluva a Street Fight.

Tim Tebow:

 

The Can’t Miss Kid

 

  

What the experts missed and why he’ll

be the next great NFL quarterback.

 

 

 

Think you’ve seen pro quarterbacks? Here comes a young gunslinger packed   with speed, power, agility and a red hot passion for the game.

 

 

 

High in the Rockies at training camp in Dove Valley, the Denver Broncos and their future starting quarterback, are quietly going about preparing for a new season. Arguably the greatest quarterback in college football history, Tim Tebow is enjoying some peace—if not rest—away from the palaver of career prognosticators, nominal experts and pigskin pundits and doing what he’s been born to do: Molding himself into a NFL quarterback capable of leading his team to Super Bowls. 

 

Maybe though, something bigger is going on. Much bigger. It just might be the final stages of tinkering with and test firing the new prototype of an NFL quarterback. Time will tell, but it just might be that Tim Tebow represents a new kind of quarterback, one with a blend of speed, power and agility that none before him ever possessed and above all, a fiery passion for winning.

 

After witnessing Tebow’s blockbuster career at Florida—five NCAA, 14 SEC and 28 Florida records, 88 touchdowns through the air and 57 on the ground, two national championships, three bowl victories and a Heisman Trophy—reading forecasts bluntly  predicting his pro career will turn to ashes,was like reading Naked Lunch on drugs.   

 

 

 

 

 As soon as the college bowl season ended, when attention pivoted to the draft, more than a handful of football clairvoyants began writing Tebow off saying, “He was a good college quarterback, end of story.” Their assessments, as perfunctory as they were stupefying.

  

Serious fans of the game weren’t expecting Tebow to be the Number One pick of the draft. As awesome as he was at Florida, we knew he needed work before stepping behind center as a pro. “We watch the NFL on Sundays too, fellas.” We knew Tebow’s deficits as well as the guys who were being paid to tell us about them. But we saw the future in him.

 

What were the media types watching these past four years? Are they so locked into the stereotypical image of an NFL quarterback that they can’t see past it? Does being so far into the NFL game rob them of vision?

 

 No one knows if any of the 2010 quarterbacks will cut it in the NFL. But none is more likely to make history than Tebow.  A good place to start finding out why is with his college career. Here it is in a nutshell:

  

 
 

The first four quarterbacks chosen in the 2010 Draft, were Sam Bradford (Oklahoma), Tebow (Florida), Jimmy Clausen (Notre Dame) and Colt McCoy (Texas). Of the four, only Tebow and McCoy stayed on at their colleges for four years, so let’s start with a head-to-head comparison of their statistics.

  

 
 

McCoy played two games less than Tebow, yet threw for 3,967 more yards and 24 more touchdowns. In every other category, however, Tebow’s stats are better: His Pass Efficiency Rating is 17.75 points higher, he threw 24 fewer touchdowns, but ran for 57, crediting him with 145 TDs compared to McCoy’s 132. Plus Tebow had 31 fewer interceptions, throwing a mere 14 to McCoy’s 45.

 

 

 

Comparing Tebow’s stats to those of Sam Bradford and Jimmy Clausen is tricky because they played only three years of college ball. To balance the comparisons, Tebow’s numbers, when he was not a starter, were eliminated. Here’s how the stats play out:

 

 

	PER	Pas%	Int	Yds	TD	Rush	TD
Tebow	166.8	67.1	14	8928	88	2498	49
Bradford	163.9	64.3	16	8403	88	49	5
Clausen	132.6	67.1	27	8148	55	-  325	5

Place Tebow’s college stats next to those of  the Steelers' Ben Roethelisberger and the Titans' Vince Young, both with three years of college ball, and his draft stock rises.

 

	PER	Pas%	Int	Yds	TD	Rush	TD
Tebow	166.8	67.1	14	8928	88	2498	49
Roethlis-berger	151.3	65.5	34	10829	84	246	7
Young	144.9	61.8	28	6040	44	3175	37

 Eli Manning (Mississippi) and Philip Rivers (N.C. State) didn't play on power house teams but both have been in the NFL six years and one has a Super Bowl ring. Check out the four  year college statistics of all three, and Tebow remains a solid pick.

  

	PER	Pas%	Int	Yds	TD	Rush	TD
Tebow	166.8	67.1	14	8928	88	2947	57
Manning	137.7	60.8	35	10119	81	-141	5
Rivers	144.1	63.5	95	13484	95	115	18

 

  

Total Passing Yardage as a Factor 

  

A Clue Drafting For QB’s ? The totals for passing yardage show us that a quarterback who amasses 10,000+ yards in college is likely to move up in the draft even though his pass efficiency rating is substantially below 170.0 and his pass completion percentage is below 65%. Passing yards over 10,000 apparently reduce a draft  maven’s fear about picking a QB with an elevated interception rate, paper thin rushing yards and low scoring stats.

 

  

The NFL Combine 2010

  

Neither Bradford nor Clausen participated in the Combine. McCoy did, but he didn’t boost his stock. Of all quarterbacks who worked out , Tebow had the best performance, placing first in four out of six drills and second in one. He ran the 40-yard dash in 4.72 which put him in fourth place, .07 seconds ahead of McCoy. The best time was 4.54 by Jarrett Brown (West Virginia) followed by Dan LeFevour (Central Michigan) 4.66 and Zac Robinson (Oklahoma State) 4.71, .o1 ahead of Tebow.

 

  

How important is the 40-yard dash? As Vinnie Iyer of Sporting News put it on the mnbcsports.msnbc blog in February 2008: “. . . how often do running backs get a chance to run 40 yards down an NFL field unimpeded?”

 

Iyer points out that in 2005 J.J. Arrington (Cardinals) was the top major-college back with 4.4 in the 40. That same year Frank Gore (49ers), with his history of knee injuries, ran 4.65, finishing 54^th among all backs. But at the end of the 2007 season, Arrington had yet to break 1,000 yards from scrimmage, while Gore cranked out more yards from scrimmage than any runner in the 2005 class.

 

Marion Barber (Cowboys), had the most rushing touchdowns among the 2005 backs and finished 21^st in his pre-draft 40.

 

  

In four years with the Cardinals, Arrington gained 654 yards and missed all of 2009 after having microfracture surgery. He was traded to Denver this year and as of this writing is with the Philadelphia Eagles, but must still pass a physical. Through 2009, Frank Gore has 5561 rushing yards and Marion Barber has 3984.

 

  

If speed is important to you, be prepared to be surprised. Eli Manning (Giants) earned the nickname “SloMo” for his 2003 40-yard time of 4.85. I’m not saying that speed isn’t desirable, it certainly is, except most pro quarterbacks don’t have much of it. Of the first five quarterbacks in the 2007 Draft, two—JaMarcus Russell and Brady Quinn—did not take part in the Combine. The other three—Kevin Kolb (Eagles), John Beck (Dolphins) and Drew Stanton (Lions) all ran 4.75.

 

  

At the 2008 Combine, Matt Ryan (Falcons) ran a 4.95, Joe Flacco (Ravens) had a 4.86, Brian Brohm (Bills) ran a 4.83 and Chad Henne (Dolphins), a 4.92. They were the first four quarterbacks taken. To date Brohm has 164 yards passing, -3 yards rushing and a quarterback rating of 43.2 while Henne has 75 rushing yards, 2945 passing and a 75.2 quarterback rating.

 

  

The first four QB’s drafted in 2009 were the Lions’ Matthew Stafford (4.83 in the 40), the Jets’ Mark Sanchez (4.85), the Buc’s Josh Freeman (4.97) and the Dolphins’ Pat White (4.55). White was the 44^th player taken, Freeman 17th, Sanchez 5^th and Stafford 1^st.

 

  

The workout drill results for all quarterbacks who participated in the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Combines reveal that no quarterback turned in a better all around performance than Tebow  did this year and none dominated the quarterback results by coming up number one in four out of  six skills tests as did Tebow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT ANOTHER LOVE POEM

 I vowed never to write another love poem.

God knows the world has all the sonnets

it will ever need.

Why send off more art nouveau words only

to have them shattered

against twenty-first century hearts?

  

Alone I went to Paris last spring 

where accordions still sing

“ Le Vie en Rose.”

Voices of singers sounding like Piaf 

sang  pleading to me as I strolled  

alone along the Seine.

 

 

No question that love may be good for a day,

Perhaps a month, if every day is Sunday

wrapped in ribbons,

but certainly not more than a year.

Even the cosmos need planting every spring.

 

 

So I continue to write my love poems,

only now I wrap them round nasturium seeds

and  plant them late in fall,

just before winter comes to call.

 

 

Anthony Paul Mario

Copyright 2010

 

 

  

 

  

  

 

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

Do You Have What It Takes To Write Good Poetry?

As you read this, there are probably 100,000 aspiring poets scattered about the country chewing on pencils, staring at computer screens or scribbling in notebooks, all waiting for the magic of inspiration to cause words to leap out of their brains and come to order in the lines of a poem any of them would be elated to say, “I wrote that!”

Too bad there isn’t a test similar to the SAT, LSAT or MCAT to measure your potential for writing good poetry. By “good poetry” I mean poetry that won’t embarrass you if it falls into the hands of some jerk.  Poetry you’ll write that will stand a chance of seeing the light of day in a respected writers magazine. We’re talking about poetry that will hold you in joyful anticipation of the evening you are scheduled to read it to an audience. If only you knew whether or not you have “it”, then you could . . .  .

Here’s a chance to find out whether or not you have what it takes. Remember, this is a first for me, so don’t expect perfection. What you can count on though, is knowing if you’re lost in the forest or headed in the right direction. Also, I have studied and written poetry for a few years, so neither you or I are flying blind.

What follows is a twenty question self-scoring test.  You may wonder what relevance some of them have to measuring a talent for poetry. You'll need 45-minutes to an hour to finish. Afterwards, take an hour or so to enjoy a cup of coffee or a cold beer and discuss the test with others who have taken it.  You will find that every question you’re about to see is directly related to the question you want answered.

1. How many books have you studiously read on the art of poetry writing?

 2. Do you have a specific time and place set aside for writing every day?

3. Do keep a daily notebook or journal to preserve your ideas and experiences as "grist for the mill"?

4. When taking a walk or driving, do you sometimes write a poem or part of one in your head?

5. In this age of free verse, do you see any value in studying traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet, ballad, villanelle or pantoum?

6. Do you occasionally read a dictionary for the fun of learning new words or using words you know in a different manner?

7. Do you know the difference between a metaphor and a simile and can you write one of each right now?

8. Do you buy one or more poetry books a months just for your reading pleasure?

9. Can you compose a poem using repetitive or similar sounds within its lines that contribute to its meaning or create an effect or mood without resorting to rhyme?

    10. Do you avoid reading poetry from the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries because you find them dense, the language archaic or because your believe they lack relevancy in today's world?

    11. Have you taken any high school or college classes on poetry what weren't required?

    12. Would you look forward to attending a four or five day poetry workshop even if you had to pay the costs of tuition, meals and lodging yourself?

    13. Have you, from time to time, read the poetry of writers from other parts of the world such as Poland, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc.?

    14. When reading novels, history or biography do you occasionally pause to study how the author uses meter, color, sound, shape and images to relate a message, create a mood or reveal a character's personality?   

    15. Do you browse through art and photography books, go to arts and crafts shows or spend time to closely observe other art forms to expand your poetic vision?

    16. Do you like being alone -- indoors or out -- to take the time to quietly mull over life's big issues, to study other forms of life and ways of living to sharpen your perception or to teach you to see and hear like a poet?

    17. When you write, do you devote no less than two hours a day to it, five days a week?

    18. When you go on vacation or away for four or five days, do you always take books with you? What kinds of books?

    19. Do you belong to a poetry club that urges its members to have a new poem to read and discuss at the next meeting? Is the group a social gathering or is it one where the various aspects of poetry writing are discussed?

    20. When you read someone else's poetry, can you tell if it's good or bad and why?

This being my first go at putting together an exercise of this kind, I can't argue that it's comprehensive or authoritative. I did give it considerable thought and, among other things, brooded over several other questions that could rightfully be included. But I'm satisfied that the twenty we have here are sufficient to let anyone who dreams of becoming a poet-in-fact enough of a basis to know whether or not they are lost in the forest or doing enough of what it's going to take to give their dream life.

 

 

 
  
HOW MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH

THE BLUES ALMOST WRECKED

MY MARRIAGE AND MY LIFE

"I was just out for a little fun but before I knew it, I was disappearing from work, taking short trips out of town and burning through money like I just hit the Lotto."

 

I had it all. In the mid-70’s I graduated from law school at the University of Florida and went right into private practice by myself. My wife, two-year-old son and I moved to not-so-sleepy Cocoa on Florida’s east coast, not far from where the first Space Shuttle would soon be launched.

  

We didn’t know anyone other than my in-laws. Opening a law office in a town where no one knew me wasn't the stroke of genius it might first appear to be. Neither was leaping into practice capitalized by a $1,000 bank loan secured by my ‘71 Ford Mustang, a brilliant business plan.

 

 It was far from easy, but it all worked out. After thirty years of long hours, worrying myself sick over clients’ woes and routinely knocking heads with my colleagues in court, I was the head of a five-man firm. My wife and I were financially comfortable, our son had graduated from Harvard Law School and the soft dreamy years of retirement lay just ahead. All was right in my world.    

 

Then it happened. A hunger began gnawing at me. It became a day and night yearning for something new. I wanted to shake my life up, turn the clock back a few years, not a lot, just ten or fifteen. Okay, twenty if I could.

 

 I'd seen men with these symptoms before. A man has what appears to be a solid marriage, the kids are out of college, he's making big money and he has all the accouterment of success. But it isn't enough for him.  He has to have it all.

 

Pretty soon he's out doing stupid things: hitting the Happy Hour bars after work, flirting with young women, dressing like a thirty-something. All that and—god forgive him--coloring his hair. The next thing you know, it's Divorce City and he's sitting across from me at my desk writing me a big check.

 

 You think it’ll never happen to you. But it happens to clean-living people exactly like you all the time. This is how it was with me.

 

One blazing summer day, I was browsing through compact discs at a Borders books and music store in Orlando. (I’ve spent two-thirds of my adult life haunting book and music stores from Miami to San Francisco). I was minding my own business, had just slipped on a set of headphones for music sampling when I found myself becoming mes—mer—ized—by—a—black—man.

   

It was an old black man. He was wearing a paisley-patterned mauve vest across which hung a gold chain that looped upward and disappeared into his watch pocket.  He had a deep gray bowler on that forced his salt and pepper hair to billow out from the sides of his head like a pair of frothy ocean waves. His husky voice made it clear that he was super-energized as he belted out a blues tune called “Broke & Hungry.” In the middle of it he launched into a ferocious harmonica solo.  I closed my eyes and rode with him, tapping my foot to the rhythm. By the time the song was over, I was hooked.

This was the beginning of my love affair with the blues in general and blues harmonica in particular.   

  

The album cover said the man was Junior Wells. I snapped it out of the bin and hurriedly flipped through the rest of the discs looking for more Junior Wells recordings before anyone else could spot them. Not finding any, I rushed to the front of the store, paid the clerk and walked briskly toward my car, unwrapping the CD as I went.

   

The plan was to hit all the music stores on my way out of town and stock up on Junior Wells. I slipped into the driver seat, carefully slid the CD into the six-speaker Bose stereo system and cranked up the volume. My life was taking a new direction.  

   
For a week Junior and I lived and slept together. At home, in my car, at the office, my time belonged to Junior. When I turned in for the night, Junior was tucked into my walkman. When you love music and you make a discovery that lights you up the way Junior’s harmonica playing did me, it’s like the rush you get from a new romance. You know you shouldn’t be spending all that time in bed, but there’s nothing more important that you should be doing.

 

The following week, in a move I still maintain was a humanitarian gesture, I set out to buy every blues album I could find, even those with the least artistic merit, to pass on to my son with instructions to leave them to the Smithsonian upon his passing.

 

 Six weeks after hooking up with Junior, I owned some of the best “harp” (proper name for a blues harmonica) music that’s ever been recorded. I was happily lost in the blues. The Deep Blues became my passion and I was and remain heavily stuck on Chicago blues and bluesmen with roots in the Mississippi Delta.

   

In just three months I had a whole new bunch of friends: Big Bill Broonzy, Pine Top Perkins, T-Bone Walker, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, James Cotton, Bobby Bland, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann, Albert Collins, Big Walter Horton, Charlie Musselwhite, Billy Branch and B.B. King.

  

I had become the “Mad Curator of the Blues.” When I wasn’t confined to court or some other silly business. I was on mission. My preference was to shop in Orlando which, at the time, boasted the largest number of music stores contained in one contiguous land mass within a municipality.

 

When I couldn’t get to Orlando (and almost nothing could stop me), I’d sneak out of my office and shoot down to nearby Melbourne to hunt at Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and a few other places whose names I can’t remember because they closed their doors right after I quit shopping at their stores. If nothing else, I am a relentless son-of-a-bitch: I scoured flea markets and pawn shops.

 

One afternoon, on the way home from the funeral of an elderly woman I’d never met, I even persuaded my wife to let me stop at an estate sale for ten minutes.  They had nothing but a couple of 78rpm records of carioca music which I like, but not on 78rpms.   

 

Throughout this crazed adventure my wife remained her usual calm and patient self. With the exception of her occasionally pounding on the bedroom wall and shouting, “Please turn it down, the pictures are falling off the walls out here,” things were cool at home.

 

Have you ever noticed how people who are not in love with music keep wondering why those of us who are don’t wear headphones all the time? I don’t believe in them unless they are legally mandated or medically necessary. If good music (which is the only kind I listen to) isn’t played at a volume that will keep it bouncing off the walls ten minutes after the stereo is turned off, it cannot be appreciated for the great art it is. Turning down the volume is like looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the lights purposely dimmed.

 

My wife, who means every bit as much to me as Buford, my trusty bloodhound, has seen my nuttiness before. She’s hung in there through all of my otological affairs. My rock habit? She knew about it before we married. She saw how ugly it can get when I was heavily into bop and Latin jazz. She handled Hank Williams, Jr., David Alan Coe and other country rowdies like them. She’s heard “Jack Daniels If You Please” enough times that she knows the lyrics by heart but she'll never admit it. Classical music was fine with her, a relief really. We did a couple of weekend Bach Festivals in Winter Park and a Boston Symphony Orchestra gig at Tanglewood in the Berkshires.    

     

After taking  her and my son on my “Never-Ending Classic Samba Tour” in the mid-1980’s when we drove to Upstate New York and back listening to the same fabulous classical samba album over and over again, nothing scares her anymore.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI: HOT TURDS AND THE ART OF POETRY

  

Popularly called the Poet Laureate of Skid Row, Charles Bukowski was the voice of the Working Class poor. Calling them prissy and worthless,he tossed the conventions of traditional poetry and wrote about life in the rundown white neighborhoods using the coarse language and stark images he absorbed while growing up in East Los Angeles. .

You never knew what was going to come out of Charles Bukowski’s mouth. Most of the time neither did he. When you spend sixty percent of your days smashed, your brain gets scrambled like a computer with a virus. You’re talking while your retrieval system is still scanning for the right words to zip to your mouth. And “Buk” (rhymes with “puke”) was easily three sheets to the wind sixty percent of the time.

 

If you’ve never heard of Charles  Bukowski, the brightest star out of the “Meat School” or “Dirty Realist” poets, steel yourself with a shot and a beer before settling in with a book of his poems or one of his novels.

 

Bukowski’s writing isn’t quite the stuff you find on men’s room walls, but it is peppered with profanity, explicit sex and images of life in the poor lane. His language isn’t gratuitously obscene, though it can seem so, but his choice of words is most apt for an unflinching take on what it’s like to scrape by on the lowest rung of society.

If you know Buk’s work, then slam down two boilermakers just to get a touch of the groove he was in while slamming away at his typewriter. A shot of alcohol is the perfect prelude to a night with Bukowski.  

 

He speaks from his gut, using the coarse language he soaked up as a kid on the streets of Los Angeles, the bare knuckled jargon of working class people and the down and outers who spend their days and nights lost in workingmen’s bars.

 

Bukowski was one of them, having been a day laborer, dishwasher, factory worker, warehouseman, parking lot attendant and guard. He worked in a slaughterhouse, on loading docks, and in a dog biscuit factory. Once he held a “job” in a Philadelphia bar where he sat from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. earning drinks by allowing the bartender to beat him up for the entertainment of patrons.

 

Sure, other writers have escorted us through the bleak streets of white urban ghettos with their beaten-down houses, cheap hotels, flophouses, skid rows, tough-guy bars, lonely diners and dim corner restaurants. But none of them endured the squalor and hopelessness of life in those environs from childhood into their fifties. None knew the lay of the land as well as Bukowski did.    

 

Charles Bukowski was the archetypal outsider, not an outcast, but a man who chose singularity. He belonged to no literary movement or circle and railed against the literary elite, especially poetry’s traditionalists. He believed that poetry had wasted a couple of hundred years wallowing around in adherence to forms and technicalities—“We’re all tired of the turned subtle phrase and the riddle in the middle line.” Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me,” he told one interviewer. “That upper-crust shit bored me. I couldn’t relate to it.”

 

The formality of traditional poetry, with its stilted diction and affectations,

was “prissy” and emasculating.  As the unique voice of working class people, Bukoswski sought to strip poetry down to its bare bones to keep it accessible to the average Joe.

He used “free verse in a series of declarative sentences broken up into a long, narrow column giving an impression of speed and terseness even when the

language is sentimental or cliched. “Smashed, The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski,” Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, (March 14, 2005). For example,

 

 

you’re a beast, she said

your big white belly

and those hairy feet.

you never cut your nails. . . .

 

beast beast beast,

she kissed me,

what do you want for

breakfast?

 

When he became a living legend with the release of the 1987 largely biopic film Barfly starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, he made a solid connection with the young disaffected post-Beat generation, many of whom felt comfortable enough with his image to seek him out to talk about his writing and theirs.   

 

And he made himself surprisingly available, leaving his address and phone number listed, so it wasn’t unusual for fans knock on their cult hero’s door,  at 5124 De Longpre Ave in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, to chat with him. A few were welcomed in, offered a seat and even a beer. He thought nothing of answering his phone to commiserate with a young writer or to banter about his life on the road as a wandering bum and full-time drunk.

 

Knock or ring him up at the wrong time, and you might meet the other Buk, the one his one-time friend poet Hal Norse wrote about in the Small Press Review: “Hateful as he can be—and God, he can be so detestable you want to shove him up a camel’s ass—somehow the warmth and snotty charm of the bastard comes through so powerfully that he remains an attractive personality, ugliness and all.”

His readers can sense when he’s joshing, poking a friendly elbow to their ribs right after he’s jolted them with another outlandish line of his. At the same time he could be, well . . . poetic and serious, about writing as in this poem:

 

Writing

often it is the only

thing

between you and

impossibility.

no drink,

no woman’s love,

no wealth

can match it,

nothing can save

you

except

writing.

it keeps the walls

from

failing.

the hordes from

closing in.

it blasts the

darkness.

writing is the

ultimate

psychiatrist,

the kindliest

god of all the

gods.

writing stalks

death.

it knows no

quit.

and writing

laughs

at itself,

at pain.

it is the last

expectation,

the last

explanation.

that’s

what it

is.       

  from Blank Gun Silencer

 

Charles Henry Bukowski, Jr. was born in Germany to a couple of brutish child beaters in August, 1920. The family immigrated here when Buk was about three and settled in East Los Angeles. His parents were sadistic people who, in today’s world, would be pulling hard time for felony child abuse. The slightest infraction drew discipline in the form of ten or more lashes across the kid’s bare buttocks with a leather razor strop.

 

The parents were nasty in ways that obliterate the line between mean and evil. From childhood through his high school years they remained callous and indifferent toward him. At his high school graduation neither one was in the audience. 

 

One day a friend invited Buk down to the cellar of his home where he pointed to two huge wine barrels. His father, he told Buk, made wine. They took turns slurping mouthfuls of the dry red liquid from the spigots until both of them were nicely buzzed. Recalling his introduction to alcohol in his autobiographical novel, Ham On Rye ( Black Sparrow Press, 1982), Bukowski wrote: “Never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating.”  The warm, anesthetizing effects of the wine made a lasting impression on him: “. . . I thought, well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long long time to come.”

 

The summer before ninth grade his face exploded with a heinous form of acne. Boils “the size of apples” covered his face, traveled to his neck and crawled down his back. As they broke, the watery contents streamed down Buk’s face and neck, sometimes soaking through his shirt. All ready an economic outcast, the acne made him a social leper.

 

He related the condition to his life agonizing: “The poisoned life had finally exploded out of me. There they were—all the withheld screams—sprouting out in another form.”

 

There was one advantage to being an ignored teenager. Bukowski could roam about Los Angeles, doing as he pleased. He ambled into the Los Angeles Central Library one day and the event transformed his life. Reading had been one of his great pleasures. Now, any book he wanted was a few feet away in the stacks. The library stirred his innate intelligence and awakened a deep curiosity about life in him. The house of books became his retreat and place of learning.  It was a frequent destination where he read widely—history, biography, philosophy, poetry and novels. 

 

He enjoyed T. S. Eliot, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hemingway, McCullers and D.H. Lawrence, among many others. But his favorite was John Fante, author of the hard-to-find minor classic Ask the Dust. Commenting on these golden days Bukowski exclaimed, “I must have read a whole library!”

 

Following high school he attended Los Angeles City College with plans to launch a literary career. He took courses in art, journalism and literature. He wrote furiously throughout his time there, but not well.  Two years later, he chucked it all and headed for New York City to try his luck.

      

His time in the city got him nowhere. He’d slave away at menial jobs and write nightly, but five years later all he had to show for it was lint in his pockets and a bag full of rejection slips. Buk left New York and meandered west, partly by bus, partly thumbing, sipping pints of booze and stopping off in big cities to enjoy a few days bed rest, earn some money, meet a few floozies and get wasted in the local bars. That’s how he spent the next ten years after his bus pulled into L.A. -- wandering cross country and staying drunk.

 

Bukowski described his creative process as fighting it out with his typewriter,

not calling out his muse, but banging on the keys and demanding the machine cough up his poems. His muse was beer after beer through the night with classical music—the big guns Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms—playing on the radio.   

 

Back in Los Angeles, the anarchistic Bukowski signed on with the United States Postal Service, starting as a part-time letter carrier and working his way up to clerk. It wasn’t a likely choice for a man of his political stripe, but the money was enough for an apartment, a few groceries and all the beer and wine necessary to fuel his raging bouts with his typewriter as he punched out poem after poem.

 

Buk boasted he could turn out ten or fifteen poems a night. It sounds unlikely, but with over 50 books published—even though  there are several short stories and novels in the mix—it ‘s possible.  He claimed to have hundreds of poems stashed in a suitcase he kept hidden and ready for a quick exit if footsteps on the staircase signaled the approach of police or his unpaid landlord.    

  

By 1969 Bukowski succumbed to the petty rules and suffocating bureaucracy of the postal service and resigned. Within nineteen days of calling it quits he started and finished his first novel Post Office (1971) (first Ecco edition 2002), a sardonic look back at his years within the ultimate conformist institution, before “going postal” became an a figure of speech. The book became a best seller.    

The labor of all those nights pounding out poems and stories started paying off

for Buk about the same time. His poetry, with all its proletarian grittiness, had been appearing with growing frequency in Los Angeles’ underground journals while his column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” was featured in the subversive OPEN CITY newspaper. The weekly dissemination of his writing in OPEN CITY pumped up Buk’s reputation among the counterculture through his earthy social commentary:

   I don’t go with the Dos--CRIME AND PUNISHMENT—that no man has the right to    take another man’s life. but it might take a bit of thinking first. Of course, the gall is that they have been taking our lives without firing a bullet. I too have worked for dismal wages while some fat boy has raped fourteen-year-old virgins in Beverly Hills. I’ve seen men fired for taking five minutes too long in the crapper. I’ve seen things I don’t even want to talk about. But before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming hate horseshit in the public park.(From Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski, City Lights, 1969.)

Bukowski was a man pissed off at the inexplicable randomness of life and death. He wrestled with the possibility that there is something more to life other than the ceaseless turn of the wheel from good to evil, a cosmic view that allows us to see our existence as logical and meaningful afterall. His poems and stories are an extension of a quest to see if there is more to life than drinking, fucking, gambling, fighting and shitting. Bukowski didn’t find the answer before dying of leukemia, in 1994, but riding shotgun for him vicariously through his work is worth the ride. He’s often hilarious and he takes you places you’d be afraid to go alone and he shows you things you’ve only heard about.

  

To get a better angle on Charles Bukowski make a trip to a bookstore. His books fill more shelf space than any American poet. The lurid titles are intriguing: Love is a Dog from Hell, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, The Days Run away like Wild Horses over the Hills, To Kiss the Worms Goodnight, At Terror Street and Agony Way. An unusually good anthology of fiction and poetry is Run With the Hunted a Charles Bukowski Reader (Harper Collins, 1993).  Bookstores report that at a time when most poetry books can’t be given away, Bukowski’s are the most frequently stolen.      

 

Of his novels, start with Post Office (1971), Women (Black Sparrow Press, 1971), Hollywood (Black Sparrow Press, 1989) or Pulp (Black Sparrow Press, 1994), a noir style detective story.

       

 

 

CARAVAGGIO -- HE COULD PAINT LIKE THE DEVIL AND ACT LIKE HIM TOO

 

 

 

 

Supper at Emmaus

[Author's Note: Caravaggio's usual name was Michelangelo Merisi. Two books written about his life by contemporaries referred to him as Amerigi (first book) and Merigi (second book). His father's name was recorded in the public records as Merici and then Morisi. Documents of the Roman court have him as Merisio at first and later as Morigi. There are eight more variations of his name. He signed his name as Marisi. For my convenience, I've adopted the practice of Peter Robb author of  M The Man Who Became Caravaggio, Picador, 1998, 1999, and refer to him alternately as M or Caravaggio.]

This is my story of M. M, the diabolically gifted painter and art revolutionary whose work electrified painting in the early years of the 17th Century. M, the mystery man known not by his true name but as Caravaggio, the name of the small town where his family came from just east of Milan where he was born in 1571. M, whose stunningly beautiful religious paintings--masterful compositions of intense light, sullen darkness and sumptuous color, many of which were dismissed as trash, abandoned, discarded and lost amidst the detritus of an ever evolving culture for over 200 years-- has won acclaim as the equal of no less than Michelangelo and, among some aesthetes, is arguably the greatest painter of all time.  

The historic event is no surprise to art sophisticates. It is an eagerly awaited  pronouncement of M's standing among the all time greatest painters, one embraced by critics and art lovers alike in the year marking the 400th anniversary of his death. Unquestionably the most significant art event of the year, it is being celebrated with a major exhibition of Caravaggio's masterpieces at Scuderie dei Quirinale in Rome, Italy.

You cannot gaze into the majestic ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without becoming   instantly aware of the genius and supreme vision of Michelangelo. Before now, few would have given serious thought to the prospect of any painter being exalted as having achieved parity with, let alone having surpassed, the most renown artist in history.

Just as with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, it is doubtful anyone can come face-to-face with a Caravaggio without instinctively knowing they are encountering  another of art's great minds, one with a different theory about the relationship of color, light and composition.

Diffuse lighting, a staple of painting for so long, was seen as integral to the art. It occurred to Caravaggio that it wasn’t. He chose to use sharp contrasts between darkness and light to infuse every scene with dramatic intensity. Using oversized canvases, he increased the size of central figures and kept them closely grouped around the primary one. His compositional style draws viewers into a scene, effectively making them witnesses, not mere bystanders.    

Next, Caravaggio created provocative new images of saints and sinners. By choosing common laborers, petty criminals, whores and grimy street people as models for Roman Catholicism's most sacred beings, he was outside the lines of the Church's written maxims that all human figures were to exude majesty, decency and divine gravity. Ethereal beauty was what was desired while Caravaggio strove for realism. 

His resistance to the Church on this subject was not a matter of artistic obstinacy. He reasoned that the heroes and heroines of the Bible were, more often than not, commoners. Joseph was a carpenter, the Apostles were fishermen. There were tentmakers, shepherds, homemakers, itinerant evangelists and so forth. Given their life circumstances, he reasoned, they most likely did not resemble the idealized, well-groomed and handsome people who inhabited all religious art. It is an argument that he sometimes won and sometimes, lost.

His intriguing use of color and light against deep, dark shadows caught the attention of contemporary painters and created immediate interest in his painting. If one or two of the aspects of his art formed the extent of his artistic development, he may have remained unknown. What sparked his one man revolution in European painting was his introduction of rich color and stark light against deep darkness, his subtle use of composition to encompass viewers and his resistance to the Church's preferences in the portrayal of religious icons.

So stunning are Caravaggio's paintings that it is tempting to abandon writing about them and just print one after another to allow the images to make their cases for themselves. As tempting as that is, it would deprive you of a full understanding of M's art and his thunderstorm of a life.

His career began in 1584. He has been called an apprentice to Titian, regarded as the greatest painter of his era. M never met Titian, who had been dead for years. However, as was the practice of the time, Caravaggio was apprenticed to Simone Peterzano, a well-known painter with whom he lived in Milan throughout his four-year apprenticeship. Peterzano had been a student of Titian's in Venice and, having distinguished himself under Titian's tutelage, he was authorized to promote himself as a titiani alumnus, a certified teacher of painting in general and the manner of Titian in particular.

Caravaggio immersed himself in the Titian school, absorbing every aspect and theory of painting he could. He wasn't just learning how to paint, he was creating his personal theory of art. Upon completing his apprenticeship he returned to Caravaggio and spent four years roaming the hills of Lombardy to converse with local artists and learn about painting in the “Lombard style.” While he did paint a few portraits, his main purpose was to observe the colors and shapes of the natural world and perfect his painting of plants, flowers and fruits.    

During this period he made trips to Venice, Titian’s home, to educate himself with the styles of its artists. He was particularly taken with the work of Giorgione, a contemporary of Leonardo. What most attracted him was Giorgione’s use of varying shades of color to depict light and perspective, the technique that brought a brightness or glow to   Giorgione’s paintings.

Most exciting to Caravaggio, however, was that Giorgione viewed drawing as an interruption to the very act of painting. Painting living things demanded applying paint right from the start, he insisted. If you wanted to replicate the natural appearance of things, you had to forego the distraction of first drawing them. It became M’s only way of painting.       

Caravaggio in Rome

In the summer of 1592 Caravaggio moved south to Rome.  If you were an artist who dared to be measured against the best, if you wanted to make a name for yourself, the road led to Rome.

It was the perfect time and place. The city was digging out from the rubble and chaos of massive restoration. After a half century of near destruction by invaders, sporadic flooding by the untamed Tiber, an outbreak of the plague and consecutive years of crop failure, a comeback was in the making. New pope Clement VIII insisted the rebirth of the city make steady progress without sacrificing perfection. He was equally passionate about success as leader of the Vatican’s counteroffensive against the Reformation.

 The Church saw it as essential to its image, that Rome return from its near death in greater splendor than ever. The doors to the Vatican’s massive treasury were flung open to create thousands of jobs for workers in the building and allied trades. Skilled and unskilled, they poured into Rome from all over Italy and Europe.

.

The city the Church envisioned required painters, sculptors, stone masons and other artisans to add finishing touches to architecture that would elevate Rome to a height of unparalleled elegance.     

   

In reaffirming Catholicism as the supreme voice of Christianity, it was also going to remind believers and those who had wandered that this Church was the home from which all saints emanated. The powerful emotional appeal of religious art was chosen to deliver the message. Lucrative commissions were used to attract artists who would create the most impressive collection of religious art ever assembled. Adorning churches and placed strategically throughout the city, the retelling of Catholicism’s history through inspirational art would bring Rome back to its status as the religious capital of Europe.

 

Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome was humiliating. The accounts conflict as to whether he was “naked and extremely needy,”or that “he was needy and stripped of everything.” Either way, how he survived in a city where work was plentiful but food scarce is a wonder. He spent his first years living here and there, coping with near starvation and searching for an employer who was not out to exploit workers.

   

One of his early employers was Giuseppe Cesari, a painter who was a papal favorite. A cagey businessman, by virtue of his connections to Vatican insiders, he won far more commissions than he should have based on artistic merit. Cesari ran an assembly line in his studio where paintings were mass produced. His employees, among whom was his younger brother Bernardino, worked for a man who ruled with an iron hand and a tight fist. Narcissistic, Cesari was awed when he saw how exquisitely M painted flowers and fruit. He made sure that trivial things were all M would ever get to paint. There would be no chance of M outshining him by painting something that would draw public attention to him.

When a disgusted M decided to take his chances selling his work in the streets, his luck began to change. Two paintings shot his reputation up quickly. The first, The Fortune Teller, (below) shows a gypsy girl filching a ring off of an adolescent boy’s finger.

The picture was extremely unusual because it wasn’t about religion. The posing of the couple, evoked a sense of eroticism by late 16^th century standards. M sold it for a pittance. When it made the circuit around the streets, it rapidly created a stir. Here was something new indeed. It was realism with a hint of sexual tension. This was a picture of life in the real world where this audience lived. It was exciting and fresh.

The second painting, The Cheats, involves three figures and is more sophisticated in

composition. Another scene from real life, they are playing cards, something certainly new. The suspense created by two of them attempting to dupe the third, who is focused on studying his hand, was unlike any painting people had seen. Moreover, the violence implied if the cheating duo is detected gave viewers a heightened sense of drama.

The Cheats was greeted with another burst of enthusiasm and prompted raves about

M, the art sensation who was creating a new kind of painting that imitated real life and showed ordinary people in exciting ways. The debut of these paintings put M in the limelight. Young painters began copying them and enthusiastically talking about this fellow called M. (See picture below left.)

One of those most intrigued with The Cheats was Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, a man of great influence in the papal court. He bought the painting and, being so delighted with it, gave Caravaggio a place of honor in his home. His hospitality included lodging, board and a pension. The struggling painter now had a home among gentlemen.

Being under the sponsorship of Del Monte meant more than living in comfort. The prelate was one of Rome’s leading connoisseurs with a circle of wealthy, art-loving friends. Their patronage freed Caravaggio to return to his realism and concentrate on religious themes. M knew that the realism this group was enthused about was of a restrained kind. Nevertheless, every new painting would serve to keep his reputation on the rise among connoisseurs and artists. Eventually he would make a break through.

M waited impatiently for what he saw as the only way to acquire a legitimate reputation:

public commissions.  The opportunity came in 1597 (probably through the influence of Del Monte) when he contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San

Luigidei Francesi. It was an imposing challenge—painting, on a large scale, three pivotal scenes from the life of St. Matthew. The assignment placed M’s future directly in his hands; successfully executed it would make him a pictor celeberrimus, renowned painter.

 

Caravaggio was elated. He wanted to succeed with this project, but kept to himself his intent to do so would be by dint of his realism, or not at all. He would find a way around the pictorial formulas of the Church and insert his dramatic realism. All he learned under Peterzano, all he had trained for during his years in Lombardy, all of what he took away from his visits to Venice, his personal theory of art—everything he knew about painting would be laid bare before the public. It was time.

   

He got off to a bad start. The first piece, designated for over the chapel altar, was St. Matthew and the Angel. M’s initial version mortified church officials. Never having seen  “such a horrible representation of a saint,” it was harshly rejected. They complained that he had painted a saint to look like a crude laborer. His feet

were far too big and clumsy looking. The cross-legged pose was undignified, even vulgar. The clerics demanded it be redone. (See revised painting at right.)

 

Below is the second painting, The Calling of St. Matthew.  It shows Christ entering a toll collector’s station. A strong beam of light passes over his hand which is pointed towards Matthew, who is pointing to himself as if to say, “Who, me?” The painting is symbolic of those who hear Christ’s call and those (the two men at left counting coins) who are preoccupied with this world.

The third and most dramatic is The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. M freezes the action at the moment when a soldier has forced Matthew to the ground and is about to strike the first of many blows in his assassination of an old man. (Seen below right.)

The debut of these paintings in 1602, created what Caravaggio hope for: public surprise and  astonishment. The excitement about them in Rome led to a spurt of orders  from private collectors and the Church. Suddenly, M overshadowed his contemporaries, the majority of  whom were polarized in their opinions of him. Many denounced him because like a violent late night thunderstorm, he had uprooted everything they knew about painting and the way they had been accustomed to painting for years.

These men weren’t interested in emulating Caravaggio. They didn’t admire his stark

realism. Nor did they understand his way of working: Drawing is essential to painting. How do you compose without first drawing? How can you paint a hand without committing its delicate shape to memory by drawing it? They were incredulous.

Most of all, they could not accept that this rogue painter with crazy ideas had become the idol of many younger artists. They followed M around, they tried to paint like him and even began dressing like him. It was rich irony. Caravaggio was a loner. He never wanted any eager young followers. He had no assistants, he worked alone. He wanted no part

of any school and hotly repudiated his imitators.

 

His success at the Contarelli Chapel spawned a demand for religious works that dramatized the suffering, torture and deaths of the saints. There was however, a disconnect between Caravaggio and his buyers. They did not understand it was his realism that created the dramatic intensity they sought. Perfect people dressed in fine clothing and bathed in golden light didn’t cut it for him. The debate over creative differences raged on.

The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected and had to be re-painted.(It’s replacement Conversion on the Road to Damascus is shown above right at Caravaggio in Rome.)

The Madonna di Loreto (Shown directly below.) was refused because it shows a barefoot Virgin holding baby Jesus. Her robe, due to the child’s weight, clings to the contour of her right leg and was seen as salacious. The scruffy-looking old couple at her feet were not suitable figures. Caravaggio ignited an uproar with Death of the Virgin when it came to light that he had used a well-known prostitute as the model for the Virgin.

Every painting kicked back to him was a public affront that drove Caravaggio wild and was cheered by his former competitors. But there were always rich private buyers who were delighted to snap up what “proper people” and the Church rejected.

As he rose in prominence his public conduct made him notorious. Dressed in black, he caroused with other young men, looking for a fight or whatever trouble they could make. M’s reputation for violence spread with entry after entry in police records. He became known as a brawler, a friend to whores and as deft with a stiletto as he was with a paint brush.

 

 

According to an account retrieved from historical records:

--when he’s worked for a fortnight he goes for a couple   

    of months with his rapier at his side and a servant behind him,

    moving from one tennis court to another and always looking

    for fights or arguments, so he’s impossible to get on with.

    Caravaggio—Howard Hibbard

     

 A painting done in 1606 was hung over a small altar in St. Peter’s Basilica. Named The Groom’s Madonna, it shows the Virgin and a naked Jesus (about six years old) visiting his grandmother St. Anne. A serpent writhes on the floor between Jesus and St. Anne, who is supposed to be old, but M’s depiction is extremely unflattering. Mary is bending forward toward Jesus and is, shockingly, showing cleavage. The painting lasted all of two days before being whisked away. A Vatican secretary wrote: “In this painting there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust. . . . One would say it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought. . . . “

 It is not possible to decipher what the effects of  long term  rejection, severe criticism and derision—whether from the Church, the public or his contemporaries—had on Caravaggio. Throughout his career his work was controversial by choice and sometimes his poor judgment. Frustration goes with being on the cutting edge. Yet in 1602 when it appeared he had gotten his feet under him with the spectacular reception he the St. Matthew trilogy received, his violent, aggressive behavior instead of tapering off, escalated.

When not feverishly painting, he was prowling the streets like a predatory animal. His sword or dagger hanging by his side, he was looking for an excuse to use either. There are several works Caravaggio did between 1602 and 1606 that are every bit as good or better than the St. Matthew paintings. No matter. His life continued cart wheeling out of control until it was too late.

In May of 1606 he had a confrontation with a young man near the tennis courts. The hot war of words ended with Caravaggio striking a fatal blow with his stiletto. The man bled to death and Caravaggio fled Rome.

But even in flight he was drawn back to painting. While police, assassins and shadowy people with personal vendettas were hunting for him, Caravaggio could become a sea of calm and focus on a canvas with the tenacity his previous works reflect.

After Rome, he resided in Naples, Malta, Sicily and Naples again. Although a fugitive, his ties to powerful friends in the Vatican, Naples and Sicily were able to direct important Church commissions and prestigious, well-paid private ones to him. If he felt pressured, his work does not appear to have suffered as he produced several notable works during this time.

  

In July of 1610, he learned that he was about to receive a pardon, and hurriedly headed back to Rome. He never got there. How his life ended remains undetermined as his body was never found. There are at least three  theories of how he died, none of them is conclusive. One says he died at an unidentified location. Another says his body was found on a beach on the Tuscan Coast. A third puts him at a hospital in Porto Ercole, also  on the coast of Tuscany,where he died of fever three days before his pardon was posted.

      

In December of 2009 a team of anthropologists began examining remains found in an

underground crypt in a cemetery in Porto Ercole. They have DNA samples from male descendants of Caravaggio’s brother. By using carbon testing, CAT scans and DNA analysis, they hope to end the mystery of M.

 

 

 

    

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INGLORIOUS REPUBLICAN BASTARDS!!!

The Republicans Need Serious Psychotherapy & Big Time Meds

Have you ever seen so many people in need of long term commitment to a mental hospital? They have enough certifiable nutcakes (see Tea Party) among them that theyqualify for cut rate transportation to one and group discounts for psychiatric treatment, EST field trips, haldol beer and all the frozen Prozac and Valium cocktails they can gulp down to calm their shattered minds.

As Health Care Reform struggled towards passage, the thin Republican facade of decency, fairness and dignity showed hairline signs of cracking. The mask crumbled and fell as the landmark new law became a reality. After eight years of  the full tilt college beer party ambience they reveled in with control of Congress and the Whitehouse, the Republicans are now howling like wounded elephants. When they were running the show, they plowed through the Democrats like the Cal football team ran through the Stanford marching band.

Now, the Party of  No Way is freaking out after losing the biggest legislative battle in over 60 years. They're a herd of deranged elephants who've thrown off the vestiges of tameness and are stomping through Washington smashing everything in their path. Their trunks swing wildly from side to side, breaking rythm only to trumpet racial epithets, homophobic slurs and oaths of retribution at Democratic opponents they spot along their way. They're also doing a lot of plain old cussing.

So drenched in rage and self-pity, many forget they are throwing their tantrums before the national media with all of their actions being recorded for posterity. Having dropped their veneer of decorum, they are belting out tons of stupid things they won't be able to take back when this all calms down. It's fun to watch them acting  just like the  all around nasty bastards they really are. They are flying their true colors--colors matching that of yellowed scum and greenish bacteria overgrown in a toilet.

 "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."

The Republicans chose to play a down and dirty game so to now call them poor losers or bad sports is weak . They are nuclear crybabies who are taking losing to an all time low. In the NFL, the commissioner  would be forced to suspend them ten games for hurling themselves on the field, bawling, spitting at opponents, thrashing their legs and hurling the N-word and other salacious bon mots at their Congressional competitors. It's going to take a long time for them to mop this mess of lost vanity up.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, who had repeatedly bellowed his warning "Hell no, you can't!" at Democrats working to pass the health bill, took the loss particularly hard. But not before stating that Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va) was a "dead man" for voting "Yes" on the bill. A couple of  looney Tea Baggers took Boehner at his word and posted what they thought was Perriello's home address on the web just in case any gun nuts wanted to follow up on Boehner's hint. The address turned out to be that of Perriello's brother.

Following the final vote, Boehner reportedly spent the entire night sobbing on the floor of  his House chambers. To his credit, he did manage to rise up, refresh his ManTan and lacquer his hair back into place before resurfacing publicly to lead cheers for unruly Tea Baggers and wave  to them as they ominously milled about the Capitol grounds looking for another physically handicapped man to mock and scorn as they did in Columbus, Ohio.

Thanks to the Republicans' example, Right Wing Crazies hunkered down in the hinterlands began placing anonymous phone threats to the offices of  Democratic officials. One was Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich), an anti-abortionist who voted for health care reform only after getting a promise from the President to sign an Executive Order prohibiting any reform money from being used for abortions.  

The nastiness wasn't restricted to the surly mob roaming the Capitol's lawn. In true Joe "You Lie!" Wilson style, earlier Rep.Stupak had the words "Baby Killer" shouted at him  by Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Tx) during  debate before the final vote.

As the ominous phone calls spread cross country their tone grew sicker. One caller hissed to Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) that the children of every supporter who voted for the bill would be killed. 

Obligation and common sense demanded Republican leaders step forward to calm their Tea Bag brethern who had  invaded the House and stormed the balconies waving posters and banners while chanting "Kill the bill! Kill the Bill!" Instead, Republicans applauded and cheered. As Tea Party hooligans outside menaced news media and bystanders, Republicans gathered in the porticos of the Capitol building were seen giving them the thumbs up sign, grinning and rejoicing in the tumult as they held up their own signs and a "Don't Tread On Me" flag. 

Republican Party Chief Jester Michael Steele, Rep. George Petersen (R-IA), Rep. Steve King (R-MA) and other mentally disturbed Republicans who've been encouraging dissent through lawlessness are violating their oaths of office and adding to the risk of  public harm. Uncaring of the message their own conduct is sending, they are blending into the mob, without a thought about how they are helping to tarnish America's overseas image by welcoming  racism and fascism into public debate.

Most know precisely what they are doing yet persist by offering clumsy excuses for their despicable words and claiming they aren't meant to be offensive. How else are we to take irresponsible statements by Republican incompetents like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) who told supporters, "What I want is every Minnesotan to be armed and dangerous!" ?  Or those of, another House member who read a definition of the word "revolution" to a steamed up crowd of  Tea-Baggers: "The complete and forceful overthrow of government in every place."  If not to encourage violence, what purpose do their words serve? 

Advocating  violent protest by government leaders is an abandonment of standards of conduct citizens have a right to expect and demand from all office holders. The Republicans who resorted to fighting words and encouraged violence have disgraced themselves and demonstrated they are not fit for public office.