by: Mark Basquill

I wanted to write something “racially motivated” for Black History Month, maybe something about President Obama’s accomplishments. But I had problems. Mitt Romney railed about the president “failing the American people.” Then President Obama said his health-care summit was “not just a test of our ability to solve this problem but a test of our ability to solve any problem.” Finally, I filled my belly with global cuisine and a homegrown red at the Full Belly Project’s fund-raiser last Saturday night, called “Feast Against Famine.” Conditions dictated that I work the problems.

Mitt cheered me up—Mitt’s part of the majority that failed to find WMD’s or Osama, failed to even acknowledge problems of climate change or economic collapse, failed to win the House, Senate or White House. The irony of anyone from that group shouting about our president’s failures from the shadows of $100,000 speaking fees made me chuckle.

Then the president spoke again about the necessity of collaborative problem-solving. He sounded like a chill Ed Harris in Apollo 13, attempting to stop bickering with, “Work the problem, people!” But this approach isn’t popular and isn’t working with many politicians. They aren’t problem-solvers intent on using the “tools in the room” to bring the boys home, even if it means using duct tape and rubber hose. Reasonable problem-solving efforts are opposed by entertainers, charlatans and the shadows of Rove and Reagan. For 30 years many conservatives have blamed Big Gummit for every ill, running the only play in the Hollywood-insider-turned-conservative icon’s playbook: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Folks believing such absurdity fail to see that in a land where “We the People” govern—assuming government is the problem—we look the problem in the face when we look in the mirror. We fail to see that our society is running out of oxygen, and that government is part of the solution. What possible reason did Obama have to hope that would change?

Finally, I created another problem by attending the Full Belly Project fund-raiser and accidentally spilling house red on its founder, Jock Brandis. For those unfamiliar with this Apollo Program of ingenuity, the Full Belly Project is nonprofit that helps people around the globe devise sustainable solutions to problems of hunger, water supply and economic stability.

The big blue building at 10th and Chestnut is Mission Control for the project. Full Belly folks “work the problem.” Volunteers don’t blame or bicker. They find stone-age simple solutions to complex problems. The project appeals to conservatives and progressives because of its optimism, compassion, reliance on using the “tools in the room,” and roots in the proverb “give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him to fish, feed him for life.” I love all that.

And I love that after I splashed the wine, true to the project’s principles, Mr. Brandis merely found a napkin and wiped the spill. Without blame, his eyes eloquently conveyed Ed Harris’s more famous Apollo 13 phrase, “Failure is not an option.”

by: The Cranky Foreigner

I got an e-mail from Shea, the lovely editor of encore, recently, and I quote:

“So. Cranky Foreigner. I pulled you out of the gutter last year, and for a can of dog food and a pat on the back for every column, you agreed to get us some hate mail. Since the Scrooge piece, nothing. Kick it up a notch, or you’ll be licking envelopes as in ‘Seinfeld,’ if you get my drift.”

Remembering that a funeral was involved in the “Seinfeld” bit, here goes...

I was driving down Market Street a while ago, nice clear day and all that, and I noticed a dust storm up ahead. Looked to me like it was at Kerr Avenue. I know what dust storms look like. Smoke tends to go up, dust stays low. Getting closer, it was obviously coming from the half-demolished Whitey’s Motel. Piles of rubble and wood, trucks and front-end loaders messing about, and a man with an industrial-strength leaf blower, literally kicking up a storm.

It is obviously stupid to try to organize the dust at a demolition site while the demolition is still happening. As a guy with asthma, I took offense that this stupidity became my medical problem. But then I realized that it was a totally appropriate thing to do in modern America.

Basically, leaf blowers make someone’s problem into someone else’s problem. It takes a while to rake and bag leaves and trash, but if they end up in the middle of the street and a big truck comes by fast—hey, that’s life. And that seems to work at many levels of this country. Only traitors, it seems, object to a good war, but who wants to pay for it? Not us, and that’s for damn sure. But our grandkids, surely, will be happy to cough up a trillion or two, plus interest, for the whole Iraq thing. (Mom, the crying you hear from the next room might not have anything to do with a full diaper.) Lop off some mountain tops, and burn the coal so we can have shopping malls cold enough to hang meat in August. Who cares that all that mercury means our kids should only eat two fish meals a month? Stuff those pigs with antibiotics from day one to speed their weight gain. Who cares if that’s the perfect way to produce super strains of drug-resistant germs? Someone else will deal with it. Aren’t there some old leper colonies somewhere where we can send our children who can’t be cured?

So here is my idea: Let’s make it official. That big old eagle with its egg shells crumbling from weird chemicals, that’s so “Old America.” Let’s get with the future and make the leaf blower the symbol of America. A symbol for all that we stand for and hope to become. Postage stamps, Harley Davidson T-shirts, every piece of paper the NRA ever put out. Time for the new look. Let’s outsource all the design work to India, and, before long, smogging up our lungs while blowing the Big Mac wrappers into our neighbors’ yards will be the most patriotic thing we can do.

And so, dear editor, I’ve kept up my end of the deal. Let the hate mail roll in. And let’s see what kind of funky graphic you put up next to this. And don’t just steal something from the Lowe’s online catalogue. Game on!

by: The Cranky Foreigner

So there was that cool picture of Obama, in his cool black jacket, standing on the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall was definitely the world’s most architecturally elegant attempt to keep out the riff-raff. His visit was notably close to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both were temporary successes and long-term failures—just like the Maginot Line, the wall that was supposed to keep German armies out of France. In the end diplomacy did it a lot better and more cheaply.

Today’s most successful wall is the one across the bottom of Gaza. It was part of the Camp David Treaty, and maintaining that wall is insured by the American taxpayer giving obscene amounts of “foreign aid” to Egypt. It guarantees that the only way out of Gaza is through Israel; hence, it’s a wall to keep people in. We have a name for walls like that here. We call them “prisons.” The recent breach of that wall by a hijacked bulldozer and the spontaneous exodus of tens of thousands of Gazans, most in search of food, says a lot about life there. (Yes, the Cranky Foreigner chose the word “exodus” on purpose, because the irony is just too tempting. People don’t just have to part the Red Sea to have an Exodus.) The breach was soon closed, Palestinians were rounded up, and, excepting a few tunnels, the wall is working well again.

The wall on the other side of Israel is coming along nicely, too. Unlike most walls that try to go from here to there to save bricks, it wanders all over the place. This is partly because it is the first wall that’s got a lot to do with water. (Each Israeli consumes four times as much water as each Palestinian.) This wall is only possible because Israel gets huge amounts of U.S. taxpayer money, about $5,000 per Israeli citizen. The State Department doesn‘t even try to explain this any more.

The third big wall project is the one along the Mexican border. Property rights and the environment be damned! This is a really good idea—until Lou Dobbs needs to hire a really reliable gardener or Americans want to buy cheap food. Then we will be told that it is a bad idea. And like the ones in the Middle East, the Great Wall of Mexico is being built by the people we want to keep out. Let’s face it: Laying a concrete block in the desert sun is tough work. Let’s get people better adapted to the heat. Americans and Israelis are great at ignoring the irony that the locals are better adapted, because they’ve been there for a couple thousand years before we arrived and claimed the land was ours all along. Isn’t it neat the way it all works out in the end?

So if we stand back and take a long look, we have to admit that America is investing a lot of money in walls these days. But if we didn’t, all those billions would just burn holes in our pockets. Right?

by: Mark Basquill

Evidence will show that human contribution to natural cycles of climate change will go down with history’s great hoaxes; germ theory, evolution, the Holocaust and the moon landing. I’m no left-wing pseudo-scientist whose stolen e-mails reveal a radical agenda to refute “right” science. I worship the certainty of “right” science and shave every morning with Occam’s Razor.

I abhor conspiracy theories as unscientific. JFK was killed by one bullet. There were no conspiracies then; there are none now. Global warming is the work of just one man. And Claus is the cause.

It’s not lefty radicals. Any one who has attended class at one of Sarah’s left-leaning elitist universities can tell us that herding cats is easier than getting left-wing professors to agree on anything. These professorial cats have compromised “fight or flight” reflexes. They hide behind walls of studies that simple minds cut through with butter knives. These impoverished hybrid-driving weenies might gain 100s of dollars of grant money to continue their “climate research,” but they won’t fight for it. The left wouldn’t even fight for a public option that 70 percent of us support.

To hypothesize a corporate conspiracy is unconscionable. What could corporations possibly gain? I’m a more likely conspirator. I like money. My problem is that I don’t love it. Feeling unloved, money doesn’t stay with me long. But money stays with Exxon, BP and the defense industries. They and their kin have more money than God. By opposing Copenhagen’s climate measures, these giants would gain no more than the health-insurance companies stood to gain from the failure of health-care reform, or big tobacco gained by preventing its product from being linked to cancer for decades. If global warming were real, these giants would profit by re-tooling their human and material capital toward new technologies. Wouldn’t they?

Only the weak-minded revert to conspiracy theories. Copenhagen affirms a revealed truth; the climate has been changing since time began. The catastrophe of Copenhagen is its misrepresenting science. Science is not a matter of global consensus. Does it matter whether China, Brazil and India agree what goes up must come down? No! Everything that goes up comes down with the certainty of “right” science.

Everything except Santa Claus. Wicked Santa defies gravity every Christmas Eve. Scientists agree the warming trend began 1000 years ago when Santa started delivering toys. It’s no coincidence that as our population increases, Santa seems like a rapid cycling bipolar lunatic, and the planet is roasting like a chestnut. It’s not the carbon footprint of the eight tiny reindeer, either. E-mails intercepted from “right” scientists prove Santa’s dilithium crystals emit tachyon pulses that heat the planet’s core and even seek to regulate derivatives.

Does Santa hate us? Raising our hopes while destroying our planet? Certainly not! What better gift could we receive from Santa than to see him tip his red-carbon cap, and hear him sing scientific certainty, “Ho-Ho-Ho! It’s not your fault! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!”

by: The Cranky Foreigner

Will someone please explain this one to me? Especially considering our recent experience with a bunch if little school kids singing a song about three presidents, including Obama, and having Tucker Carlson compare that to the Khmer Rouge. Remember that the Khmer Rouge killed about one quarter of the population of their country? (OK. So if 75 million people show up dead tomorrow, Tucker, I’m sorry—you were right.)

But, as the Cranky Foreigner, I tend to digress. This year, as every year, there is a story that will be all over the TV and multiplex, and neither Rush nor Bill O’Reilly will comment on it once. It’s about a man who sets the standard for how business is done in America. He pays his employees as little as possible, their working conditions are barely acceptable, he couldn’t give a damn about health care for their children, and he scorns charity. He is what we proudly call a “Reagan Conservative.” Then he goes home and gets three almost Biblical spiritual visits and, lo and behold, the next day he wakes up and is a Ted-Kennedy liberal. He suddenly pays a living wage, improves working conditions, spends a chunk of cash on his employee’s family health-care and can be counted on for a generous charitable donation every Christmas.

Let me repeat this: He goes to bed a conservative and wakes up a liberal. And he lives happily ever after. It’s the most blatant liberal propaganda in America. And to my amazement, every year, very conservative corporations, like Disney, will tell it with such tenderness that tears will come to our eyes.

The story, you’ve guessed by now, is A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens—the Michael Moore of his day. So how does this one slip under the right-wing talk avalanche every year?

Maybe it’s the “long ago, Jesus thing.” Jesus tells us we should feed the poor—and not just scraps from the table. We should invite poor people to sit at the table even at wedding feasts. On Sunday morning, we love to hear that, but try actually doing it. Imagine this text message going to your spouse on your daughter‘s big day: “Honey, tell the caterers one more at the head table. I just invited a poor person who was begging outside Food Lion.” Everything would be so much easier if we just did it 2,000 years ago, or in Scrooge’s case, 150 years ago. But now?

Maybe people just don’t see beyond the surface. The Wizard of Oz was a parody of the gold standard economists in the twenties. Oz is the ounce of gold. The yellow brick road is gold bricks. The tin man, (the industrial worker), the scarecrow (the farmer) and the Cowardly Lion (William Jennings Bryan, the gold standard’s chief proponent) meet naive Dorothy and her Toto, who pulls back the curtain to reveal the charade of their economic theory. How many Americans realize that “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” is an economics lecture?

But A Christmas Carol is much more obvious than that. Who can miss going to bed as a Reagan Conservative and waking up as a Kennedy Liberal? Yet, we seem to miss it every year? Maybe it’s the reptile brain thing. Anatomists tell us that our new, fancy cerebrum has grown over the old reptile brain, which still functions in parallel, doing the same things it did 150 million years ago. It handles the four Fs: fighting, feeding, fleeing and fu... let’s just call it sexual activity. Our new human brain writes sonnets and does Sudoko. I think that politics is basically reptile activity. (That would explain a lot, would it not?) And it makes sense that story-telling is cerebral. So our frontal lobe gets us all misty when we see how happy Scrooge is on Christmas morning, and our reptile brain thinks that Mrs. Bob Cratchet is pretty hot and we should have it on. And never shall our two brains meet.

Merry Christmas from the Cranky Foreigner.