For anyone who doesn’t know this already, always treat any lifetime warranty as a complete and utter scam. I have piles and piles of Meineke and Midas “lifetime warranty” packets in my files, each one representing new mufflers and brakes on the same vehicles. You see, the “lifetime warranty” never covers the type of wear you have actually experienced.

Latest liar: Safelite Auto Glass. Their windshield split horizontally on me from edge to edge in the space of about 10 minutes while driving across town. They claim to have a lifetime warranty as well. I just went in circles with their rep. An instant crack the entire length of the windshield is not condsidered a defect in workmanship, it is considered incidental damage or normal wear. After arguing with their rep for twenty minutes, I have been made to understand that a “defect in workmanship” that would get replaced under “warranty” occurs only if the installer brings a piece of glass that is already cracked, somehow doesn’t notice, installs it in your car anyway, and you manage to spot it before he leaves. That’s when the warranty kicks in. Careful, though… if you don’t happen to notice the crack until after he leaves, then too bad… they won’t cover it, because they won’t have any way to verify that you’re telling the truth about it being cracked from the start and that you didn’t put the crack there.

I got them to “escalate” me to another number, supposedly a direct line to the warranty people, but of course, it just gives me an answering machine.

Not that I really believed that Safelite’s “lifetime” warranty would be any better than the cut-rate muffler shops’ examples. I did, however, hope that a difficult-to-replace and rather expensive component like a windshield would last longer than something like a cut-rate muffler. But I was wrong… They each last exactly nine months before turning to shit.

Hippy, dippy, socialist Europe has tons of consumer protection laws for these situations… laws that we in this country hate. I’m so glad we’re not like them. In this country, we prefer that companies be allowed to make any claims they want, to offer worthless warranties to us for big bucks, and we don’t care if they really mean it— because the government is bad (even though it’s “of the people”) and more importantly, The Marketplace will make it all right in the end. If you’re rich, you deserve to be, and if you’ve been scammed, you deserved that too– The Marketplace knows what it is doing; it is never wrong. And in the meantime, we each can know that we’re doing our part for the economy and for freedom and the fight against terrorism by buying American.

I’ve been listining to a local radio talk show, a host I actually respect (Doug Wright) even though his politics and mine don’t always match. Today a caller called in and mentioned the “Program for a New American Century” by Wolfowitz et. al. and Doug poo-poo’ed him and basically said it was a nutty conspiracy theory and said that he’d never heard of documents describing these things.

My heart sank, because it made me realize (yet again) that the Bush administration is so far right (as in Nazi party right) that most people simply don’t believe that they’re as bad as they are. Such things just don’t happen in America, as far as most are concerned.

PEOPLE! Go to your librarian and ask for a copy of the “Project for the New American Century” by Wolfowitz et. al. Read it. Read about this “possible” strategy for American supremacy that seeks to a) colonize the Middle East in order to re-gain financial control of its resources, b) minimize the political leverage of western Europe and the United Nations and c) guarantee long-term supremacy of the American military by pre-emptively removing any competing military that proposes to expand its capabilities beyond mere fundamental levels.

Understand what this program proposes and then look at the actions of the United States of America since Bush was elected, and at who’s in charge (Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) and realize that we are living this document now. After you’ve read the “Project for the New American Century” go back and read the now famous document on national defense strategy (read: preemption) released by the Bush Administration late last year.

We are living the “Program for a New American Century” right now, as we wage our “war on terrorism.” In terms of implementation, the two are nearly indistinguishable. You, kids, are living in the middle of the new Nazi regime, and the lovely postmodern irony bit is that it’s precisely because it’s so conspiritorial and so aggressive (i.e. so completely unbelievable) that it’s relatively little-known, even though the cabinet members themselves have written the compelling (and frightening) roadmap documents.

Gotta get outta here, folks.

Taylor Branch of the New York Times today has a column celebrating the 40th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech. In it, he makes the insightful statement that Dr. King has become another of our founding fathers. What a simple, profound insight! It’s the first time in living memory I’ve actually appreciated the use of the phrase (“founding fathers”).

Just finished “Bowling for Columbine” (finally). As is my wont, I avoided any reviews until I had actually seen the piece and formed my own opinion about it. I then went online to read a few reviews and got more or less what I expected… A lot of people who worship Moore and a lot of people who feel that he is the antichrist second coming of Lenin, full of commie lies and America-hate.

But what really got me writing here is that in reading this latter group of reviews I again saw many instances of a kind of sideways reference to America’s urban areas that paints them as some kind of lunatic fringe. The statements go something like: ‘The only way you’ll buy this liberal garbage is if you live in San Francisco. Only people in Hollywood and South Central Los Angeles like this bleeding heart crap. Only America’s urban populations, which are clearly biased toward the left and elected the likes of Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi will believe these kinds of hate-America-first facts.’

My rhetorical question is this: why do so many people (including many in the media) often use minimizing qualifiers like “only those people in places like …” when discussing San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York or other urban areas in the context of left-wing politics?

Only? Do any of these rhetorical wizards or the people who listen to them ever stop to think that these “looney left” urban areas actually represent fully fifty percent of the American population? I get tired of people treating the entirety of San Francisco or New York City as though they were tiny specs of fringe liberalism in an ocean of proper “American” evangelical conservatism.

Oh well. Let California fall into the ocean because who needs those damn commies anyway, and in the meantime, Don’t Mess With Texas, right?

I am often at odds with myself over my decisions in life. I am sitting here having a beer and listening to Latif Bolat. Turkish folk music has a way of reminding me that there are things I’d rather be doing… that I’m not doing.

Why am I not doing them?

I dont’ know. I’m schooling instead. I’ve no idea why, beyond a few petty ego issues. I realize completely that I’m going spend years and go into debt to get my Ph.D., only to throw it all away. I know I’ll throw it away because I’m incapable of doing anything else; on the day that I die, I want to die a simple man, not a “doctor.” But while I’m still alive, not dying, I want to be a “doctor.”

People are funny things, aren’t they?

I have to go now so that I can clap my hands and dance around to the Sufi music.

“…and if you don’t believe the sun will rise…
stand alone and greet the coming night
in the last remaining light.”

(and anyway, ain’t nobody nowhere on the road to

I’m sitting here watching C-SPAN2, Conference on Black Youth & Media. Aaron McGruder just spoke at length, and now Cornel West is on. It’s like porn for the thinking man. Beautiful.

And as a side note, seeing him here brought back an odd image from the recesses of my memory. Is it just me, or did Cornel West appear once on Sesame Street when I was small?

I was watching CNN Presents and in it heard perhaps the most insightful argument I’ve heard in a long time. What the world currently faces is not a fight between Islamic Fundamentalism and “freedom.” What we face is a fight between Islamic Fundamentalism and American Fundamentalism.

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with that phrase, to realize that you know what it means.

American Fundamentalism.

It is the new willingness to attribute to George Washington and his ilk, in their trinity of roles— that of white-man-warrior and slave owner, that of currency and capitalist face, and that of omniscient elder statesman– those same powers traditionally attributed to the Christ or to Allah. Supernatural powers. Omniscient moral authority.

You know you’ve seen it, when that car drives through your neighborhood… the one with no fewer than twenty U.S. flags attached to it, with the stickers on it that say “Liberals go to Hell” and “Sand Niggers Die of Thirst.” It is every bit as ugly as Osama Bin Laden’s vision for the world.

And whichever wins– Islamic or American fundamentalism– is perhaps the Great Satan of our time. Hopefull we’ll be able to forge a third option, an alternative. The only question is whether the adherents to both sects will be swayed, or whether they will continue on their gleeful marches of hate and death… leaving the rest of us to try and pick up the pieces of whatever is left…

I begin to get older. I begin to wish for a clearer picture of future events, in particular… my future events. I routinely find myself wondering about the future… ten years from now… twenty years from now… I begin to think about progeny.

Quote of the day:

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

(Ariel Sharon, 1998)

Who you gonna join?

“I was sitting just by the window in the late summer afternoon… the blinds were partially drawn, enough to let in a bit of light without making me feel any more vulnerable than I already felt. I’d poured myself a little bit of brandy and set it down next to the ungainly stack of social sciences textbooks on my desk.

“As I was about to pick up the first book and begin my study, the smallest ray of light found its way from the world outside, past the small opening under the blinds, into the room and through the brandy glass. In the solemn gray glow, the brandy cast a pale brown shadow across the room, across the map of the east on the northern wall and across my shaking hand.

“I burst out sobbing without knowing precisely why. I grabbed up the glass, drank my brandy, and then picked up the book and began reading, sobbing all the while.”

I am so exhausted. It’s almost like it would be easier if I suffered a coronary or a stroke in the middle of the night and never came to. So many things to worry about. So much stress. So much crap. I just don’t know sometimes if I really have the stamina to maintain my little identity here in my corner of the world, in the face of it all.

There is so much hate in this world, so much apathy on our tiny planet… it’s hard not to become swept up in the pain, not to lash out in kind… it’s hard not to become immobilized by it, not to become despondent, not to fear everyone.

And yet, hidden in the little nooks are crannies are such moments as you’ve never imagined until you meet them; things that make you love, things that make you cry, things that make you hopeful that someday we will all be one small world and one small family.

I only wish the people who fostered this kind of understanding weren’t as a matter of course so modest, so hard to discover… I feel as though I have so much to learn from them, yet while they live they tend to be so unknown…

Perhaps death is sometimes reality’s way of allowing those who have given enough to transcend the world in which we live…

Remember 1989? Remember 1991? Remember when the children of tomorrow were freed? Where has that feeling gone? Sometimes life is too bittersweet. Sometimes I just want to die.

One thing I will never understand… why are peacemakers and teachers so completely hated in America?

I am lonely. I would guess that most people in the western world are lonely, but only rarely admit it to themselves, and never to others, because the advertisements tell us to avoid other lonely people, and so we do, carefully.

I am going to Hawai’i to love everyone. Watch me.

I’m sitting here (yes, yes… I’m… … again) and I’m thinking back on all the times I’ve been “In Love” in my life… and the women (and girls) that stand next to those words. I don’t actually have very much to show for any of these relationships just now, in the present… just a few memories I can barely relate with any clarity but that somehow nevertheless manage to touch me on some level…

I don’t really know what else in life matters.

Or does it matter? I don’t know. I’m listening to “Home and the Heartland” on the Riverdance soundtrack (yes, I own it) and I’m frozen. immobile, caught in a panic of longing that doesn’t end.

I don’t know why I’m going back to school. I know, I know, I’ve been warned, the worst thing you can possibly do is go to graduate school not knowing why you’re going. I suppose I’m going because I haven’t found my life here… or anywhere else in the west… and I’m hoping to find it in the east. Myself and my camera and a CTA station. That’s the thrust of things at the moment.

Truth is, though, that I don’t really even know why I’m alive. Yes, yes, there are relgious reasons and dogma that could keep me occupied for years. But when push comes to shove, God is just another mime on the boardwalk, looking at me silently with his wide eyes and trying to communicate something that I can’t at all fathom.

It’s all too much to bear. I have to…

I need to redesign the site. It’s not feeling like home any longer. Seems like I just adopted this look. Really, at this particular moment, I’ almost want the 2001 version back. I could use some peace right now, some kind of serenity.

It seems to me that each of us is, in the end, is trapped inside our own head, completely unable to truly see the perspectives, the concerns, or the needs of others.

Sometimes in desperation you just give up on seeing others’ points of view, in order to protect your own sanity, since they are just as unwilling to see yours.

Sometimes I wonder if it is worth anyone’s time to form relationships at all, given the underpinnings of the culture in which we live and the fact that anyone who is not a mercenary is, by definition, a lunatic.