Whoops! Everything’s Broken

by Jim Washburn

“Everything is broken,” Bob Dylan sang in a voice that pretty well proved his point. If further evidence is needed, watch or read the news. The news is broken, too, of course, but enough of the real woe filters through to realize we’ve tipped well past the tipping point.

Remember Ontario, California’s Tent City that we visited in January? As I write this, police are forcing the majority of the residents to gather what they can of their lives and leave. It’s a muddy, dusty field buffeted by Ontario Airport’s jet wash, the last place on earth where any of these people wanted to wind up, and now they don’t even have that.

It’s not the cops’ fault, nor the city’s. It has limited resources. Meanwhile, over the past three months Tent City’s population doubled, to over 400 people, with more homeless on the way, because no neighboring city was extending even the windblown welcome that Ontario had. There’s not enough food, not enough social services, not enough cleaning supplies, not enough sanitation, not enough security, not enough love to go around.

Anyone who could prove he or she’d resided in Ontario before becoming homeless was allowed to stay, perhaps the only time in recent history an Ontario address has been an advantage to anyone. But many weren’t from Ontario, and even if they were, some of these folks would have trouble proving they’re even residents of this planet. They’re homeless; they’d like to produce that valid utility bill from 2001, really they would, but they left the file cabinet back in their other life, the one that had a roof and such.

KTLA Channel 5 showed brief footage of these people being evicted. “It’s hard to imagine something like this is happening here,” said one of 5’s typically happy morning anchors, right before going back to being happy. Hard to believe? After Katrina’s bloated bodies and broken promises? After the lead in your kids’ food and toothpaste; the Chinese date-rape drugs in their toys; the tainted meat in their schools; the prescription drugs in our drinking water; the poisoned pet food; the unchecked profiteering of the Iraq occupation; the mortgage crisis; the slow squeeze of food and gas hikes? I’ll run out of semicolons before I can list half the ills. Something is broken, kids, and it’s everything.

some lead-laden Chinese toys

Solutions? Sure. With our jobs vanishing, sages say, our future lies in education, so a smarter, savvier America will surf to prosperity on waves of technological innovation. Fine, except the unfunded mandates of Bush’s No Child Left Behind act have hobbled schools nationwide, while with California’s budget crisis, teachers are facing campus closures, layoffs, scant supplies and still bigger class sizes.

Running out of oil? Hey, we’ll use corn and soy! Except, with people already starving aplenty on this planet, that becomes a question of whether we’re going to feed children or your Suburban.

No worry: Haven’t we always been assured that the seas are the breadbasket of the future? Food ahoy! Except the seas are already being fished dry, with many of the main food species nearing extinction; not helped at all by the growing “dead zones” in oceans caused by our agricultural runoff, by global warming’s changes or by mile-wide “ghost nets”—huge commercial fishing nets lost at sea, only to fill with tons upon tons of fish, sink till the fish decompose and then rise to fill again, for hundreds of years, perhaps, given the lifespan of nylon.

If only cancer were edible. Has anybody checked to make sure it isn’t? Maybe with a nice fesenjan pomegranate-walnut sauce? I wonder about this, because things humans like to consume tend to become scarce. If tumors tasted even half as good as caviar, the world might soon be cancer free. And what could be more local, fresh and homegrown than a tumor plucked from your very own person? Yum!

I’ve been thinking about cancer a lot lately. I’ve had tumors going back to 1976, when Paul McCartney and Wings first toured the US, not that a causal link was ever established. The most recent tumors were dug out of my back this January, proximate enough to previous excisions on my chest that I can now tell the old guys at the gym, “Yup, got javelined in ’Nam. John Kerry did it.”

Did I whine like a crack baby to all and sundry about my wounds? You bet I did. I probably even bitched about it to Chris Gaffney, who at the time I did not know had a tumor the size of a Great Dane growing on his liver.

Gaffney’s one of my favorite people on earth, a good friend, a writer of songs that are direct, heartfelt and somehow also idiosyncratic as hell, and he’s my favorite living country singer. He’s better than most dead ones, too, but I prefer him in his current category. Check out his music with his present outfit, the Hacienda Brothers gor with Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts and see if you don’t agree.

As super-sized, honkin’, gonna-gitcha tumors go, his is prime stuff, no skimping on portions there. It may kill him, or he may yet beat the ghastly shit out of it. On a good day, Gaffney could outwit a leprechaun, so my money’s on him.

Chris Gaffney

But it doesn’t help that our healthcare system is also broken. Gaffney has insurance—which, like most musicians with insurance, means he’s married, which is pretty much why and how musicians ever have anything more than a gig bag and a mini-mart sandwich. But insurance covers only so much, and the treatment he’s pursuing will likely mean $60,000 or more out of pocket. Even clowns don’t have pockets that big, so a website and fund has been set up to help him. If you have some bucks to spare, please do. The website even has a thermometer to show how much money has come in, and you know those are always fun to watch.

The healthcare system Gaffney is traversing is more broken than ever, thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling that decided folks couldn’t sue if a medical device harms or kills him. In a piece of marvelously circular logic, the conservative majority on the court ruled that if the federal government has already signed off on a device as safe, then a mere citizen has no business forming his own conclusion just because the device is killing him.

For decades, a chief libertarian argument against government regulation—as regards product safety, pollution, etc.—has been that citizens themselves can sufficiently police business via the civil courts. For the past seven years, we’ve had an administration that has backpedaled from government regulation, inspection and enforcement of workplace safety laws, environmental protections and a host of other responsibilities, certainly including the approval process for medicines and medical devices. Agencies are understaffed and demoralized, with political hacks or industry shills in charge, who continually ignore science to arrive at industry-friendly decisions. Even back when government was semi-functional, it still managed to approve medical products that killed or screwed up folks.

So now the Supreme Court—expected to soon follow its ruling on medical devices with a similar one on prescription drugs—has decreed that any medical device, by virtue of the government’s cozy approval process, is now forever beyond public redress. In essence, the unaccountability that has made Bush’s “unitary executive” governance such a rousing success is being extended to business.

Is government really that broken? Yes. Some folks excuse the administration screwing up the little things like America’s health and housing, arguing that post-9/11 Bush can’t fix his steely gaze on every sparrow, because he’s still trying to find a 6’ 4” guy with kidney trouble in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Efraim Diveroli, arms mogul

That’s where the focus is, you bet. That’s why the Federal government farmed out a $300 million job to arm our Afghan allies to a 22-year-old Miami kid, who, it turns out, has been supplying them with corroded, defective ammo illegally purchased from the Chinese, some of it made in the mid-1960s, when McCartney was still in the Beatles and Bob Dylan was turning them on to weed. That was $300 million of our money, meant to help protect us against terrorism. How did our government catch onto this kid’s scam? The New York Times told them. That’s how damn focused this administration is.

Let’s ignore the billions of dollars missing or pilfered in Iraq, or wasted on a useless missile shield, etc., and just muse upon this drop-in-the-bucket $300 million for a minute. How many homeless people might that shelter? How many school kids would it educate? How many mortgages might it help bail out? I don’t have the numbers on any of that, but it would fill the thermometer for 5,000 Gaffneys.

Instead, everything is broken, and it’s up to people like you to put it back together.

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