The Anthony Weiner story is the gift that keeps on giving.

Rep. Weiner (D-NY) tweeted/sexted a co-ed and first, pushed the wrong button so it went public, then provided a grateful public with the most delightfully idiotic verbal gyrations as he tries to get out of being caught red… handed without telling lies he could be held legally accountable for. (Such as submitting a false police report.)

I know, I know, “innocent until proven guilty,” it seems like everyone is prefacing their remarks with that these days. Oh puh-lease, he probably hasn’t done anything illegal, at least nothing seriously illegal. He’s just made an…. a fool of himself in public.

Unlike his equally idiotic but less arrogant Republican colleague Rep. Christopher Lee (D-NY) he’s not admitting anything, apologizing for anything, or indicating he’s even thinking of resigning.

Heavy sigh, what are we going to do with these big playful boys who run this country (usually into the ground.)

A while back I suggested my personal plan for term limits.

You altruistic public servants can have three consecutive terms in office.

After one, you have to spend at least an equal amount of time making an honest living before you run for any public office again.

Or, you can have two terms in office. After which you spend an equal amount of time in jail.

Or, you can have three consecutive terms in office, after which we take you out and shoot your sorry ass because you’re hopeless.

I now see I didn’t really go far enough. What we need in this country is a governing class given autocratic power for life, like the enlightened rulers of China that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman endlessly gushes about.

So here’s my revised proposal. We announce that as of the next national election, the winning candidates will serve for life, with no constitutional limits on their powers.

THEN we take them out and shoot them the day they are sworn in – and for good measure, anybody who sought the nominations too.

Notice we’d be keeping the promise – election for life. We don’t have to mention how long that life will be…

After all, a great nation keeps its promises.

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I’m sitting at home writing this, with a temperature of 101 and diffuse aches throughout my body. I’m cold, in spite of layers of thermal underwear. My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool and my throat feels like it’s been swabbed with sandpaper. And though I’m not coughing much, when I do it feels like two guys with baseball bats have laid into both sides of my lower ribs simultaneously.
In other words, I have the flu.

What’s worse, I have no excuse for it. A few weeks ago I covered a drive-through flu innoculation our city/county health personel put on at the county highway department barn. How difficult would it have been to pay the fee and get the jab myself?

Well, maybe I didn’t want to spend the money, and maybe I’m kind of chicken about shots.

Apparently lots of people are, our City/County Health director said while the event went very well as a preparedness exercise, turnout was disappointing.

I guess the joke’s on me. I had to spend the money and get blood drawn anyway.

Not that that did any good. My doctor said everything was normal in my bloodwork, which simply ruled out a number of other things I didn’t have and confirmed what I knew already. It’s flu.

So I said, “Bed rest, plenty of fluids…”

“That’s right,” he replied, “everything your grandmother would have told you. And, don’t take anti-fever medication unless it gets above 102. Fever fights infection.”

That’s one of the reasons my father, a retired physician, says medical services are overused in America.

“Things that used to be treated with a mother’s kiss are taken to the emergency room these days,” is how he put it.

So now I’ve paid the co-pay to confirm what I already knew, and done my bit to raise the insurance premiums of my co-workers next time around.

In the meantime, I can’t hug my kids (and I could use a hug right now,) I can’t kiss my wife (and she’s going to kill me if she gets sick while the play she’s in is running,) and while nausea is one of the symptoms thankfully absent, nothing really tastes good either.

So do yourself, your family, and your co-workers a favor and take the jab!

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This is the Doonesbury strip from July 1.

Mother Boopsie says, “See how many female protestors there are? That’d be impossible in most Arab societies. Images like that are incredibly empowering to gals all over the Middle East.”

Daughter remarks, “Arab girls need empowering.”

First of all, let me say that I agree whole heartedly.

It almost makes me regret what I’m about to do to Gary Trudeau.

I’ve been following Doonesbury on and off since near the beginning. More off than on these days I’m afraid. Since Gary Trudeau became more a social commentator than a cartoonist he’s been preachy, snide, and to put it baldly – either a liar or woefully ignorant of history.

He recently identified waterboarding as the same torture practices used by the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese in WWII – a lie. Whether you excuse the practice of waterboarding by American interrogators or not, the fact is the torture techniques used by the Inquisition and the Japanese are similar only insofar as they use water.

But the worst sin of all is – he’s not funny anymore. At least not as much or as often as he used to be.

As an Okie, I still treasure his hilarious take on the Oklahoma county commissioners scandal, lo these many years ago.

“Say, you’re Emma Doonesbury’s boy ain’t you? Well, we just want you to know your Uncle Henry is a good ‘ol boy who always took care of his people.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that,” Uncle Henry replies.

“Say Henry, do you think you could do my driveway afore you goes to jail?”

So it’s with a certain “gotcha” feeling that I have to point out to Mr. Trudeau, IRANIANS ARE NOT ARABS YOU TWIT.

And furthermore, I am gobsmacked that anyone who has been so loud about his opinions on the war on terror (silly term though it is) and the Iraq strategy thereof, wouldn’t know that.

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Since I’ve been accused of being a Right-winger and a Conservative (though I must have missed it when that went from being a description of a political position to high crimes and misdemeanors) I thought I should find a representative Left-winger to have a civilized discussion on the problems and issues we face today, and see where we might find common ground.

I thought that we might at least define what the issues are so we could actually agree on the terms of the discussion. I’ve asked a journalist from the Main Stream Media to act as moderator and comment afterwards.

MSM Moderator: Mr. Browne, please open with your first point. The representative of the Left-Wing will rebut.

SB: First of all, I don’t like the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ or even ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ much. The former originally referred to the seating arrangements in the French parliament where the revolutionary Jacobins sat on the left side, and the supporters of the monarchy and aristocracy sat on the right.

As for the latter, only in America does it make sense to define ‘conservative’ as ‘defender of traditional liberty.’ In Europe, conservative once meant something far closer to ‘royalist.’

Note that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the media started referring to old-line Communists as “Conservatives.”

In Europe, I would call myself a Liberal, but in the US the term has come to mean something like what the English call a Fabian Socialist.

L-W: YOU’RE A FASCIST!

SB: Now there’s an example of the confusion of terms I was talking about. Fascism, as defined by Mussolini, is a variety of Socialism that might be called “National Greatness Socialism.”

Il Duce considered himself a Socialist till the day he died (with one of his comrades screaming at the firing squad, “Long live Mussolini! Long live Socialism!”)

The old Italian Fascist program contained a great many planks later co-opted by so-called Social Democrats such as: old-age pensions, women’s suferrage, etc.

In fact, most people who use the term pejoratively could not name a single plank of the Fascist platform – Mussolini’s or the present-day Italian party, and mean by it no more than, “Political position I really don’t like.”

L-W: YOU’RE A NAZI!

SB: Now there’s another great misconception. Nazi is an anagram from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei which means National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That hardly sounds Right-wing, wouldn’t you agree?

National Socialism, like Fascism, is a non-Marxist variety of Socialism that held that the “natural” unit of a nation-state, consists of enough territory to contain all the natural resources necessary for their economy. It is Right-wing only in relation to the farther-Left Communist Party.

This was ridiculous even in the 1930s when the world was far less interconnected than today.

The Nazis also combined it with “eugenics,” a popular pseudo-science of the day that combined a complete mis-interpretation of Darwin’s theories with an ethnocentric doctrine of racial superiority.

L-W: YOU’RE A RACIST!

SB: I utterly fail to see how philosophical Individualism, that demands that all men and women be treated, whenever possible, as individuals and judged solely on their character, as expressed in their demeanor, words, actions and accomplishments, can be construed as racist.

Racism, in the words of Ayn Rand, is “the crudest, most primitive form of collectivism” and the exact antithesis of Individualism and Classical Liberalism.

L-W: THEOCRAT! FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN BIGOT!

SB: Actually I’m an agnostic.

L-W: FASCIST! NAZI! RACIST, RACIST, DIRTY RACIST!

MSM: Well that concludes our discussion. As you can see, the representative of the Left demolished all of the pathetic arguments advanced by the so-called “Classical Liberal” racist bigot, with acerbic wit, humor and impeccable scholarship.

Case closed.

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“This theme is so prevalent, and so obvious, that even though you can see where I am going with it — and hate the inevitable conclusion — you aren’t going to dispute the core fact. You have to sit there and accept one of the most galling things that a bunch of dedicated individualists can ever realize — that you were trained to be individualists by the most relentless campaign of public indoctrination in history, suckling your love of rebellion and eccentricity from a society that — evidently, at some level — wants you to be that way!” [3] (The Matrix: Tomorrow Might Be Different, David Brin http://www.davidbrin.com/matrixarticle.html)

David Brin here points out something that an outside observer, the hypothetical “man from Mars”, might consider both glaringly obvious and seriously weird.

Every society has rebels and cynics, but ours has institutionalized rebellion as normal. If you don’t think so, try calling any American taken at random, a “conformist” and see how they react. I’m betting that the mildest response will be a vague discomfort, defensiveness and a feeling of having been insulted.

How do we do this? How do we socialize our children into the meme of Otherness/ tolerance/ suspicion of authority?

How many of you remember MAD magazine, before it was possessed by the Devil (a.k.a. AOL/ Time-Warner)? If you do, you know what I mean. If your memory is vague you might go to the Wikipedia entry on MAD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_magazine If your only knowledge of MAD is from the post-William M. Gaines era – you have my sympathy.

MAD was born from the death of EC horror comics, the sole survivor of a once-mighty empire of violence-porn William Gaines built on the religious comic book company he inherited from his father. Hounded by a congressional investigation, Gaines shut down the horror line and converted MAD (originally in comic format) into a magazine.

MAD specialized in even-handed satire of EVERYTHING. He assembled a wonderful team of artists and writers and let them run wild. He used to say, “They create the magazine, I create the atmosphere.”

“The usual gang of idiots” were of all kinds of political persuasions. When I asked about them at the Journal of Madness http://www.collectmad.com/COLLECTIBLES/jomad.htm they told me that perhaps the only thing the original bunch had in common were that they were mostly WWII veterans who had in their youth, seen the world descend into madness.

Later they were joined by like-minded artists such as Antonio Prohias (creator of Spy vrs Spy), a prominent journalist in Cuba who fled to the US when Castro took over. He wandered into the MAD offices with samples one day, and never wandered out.

MAD has to rate as one of the most successful magazines of the 20th century. Consider that during Gaines’ lifetime they never accepted advertising of any kind. They supported themselves solely on subscriptions, magazine stand sales and the very limited tie-ins that Gaines allowed.

The effect on us as kids is incalculable. We loved the puncturing of adult hypocrisy and the wordplay. To this day there are a huge number of tunes that evoke for many of us, not the composer’s lyrics, but the MAD parody of them.*

MAD lampooned every sitting president without discrimination, virtually every top-rated movie and TV show, and every genre stereotype in both popular and highbrow culture. I believe they only got sued once, and eventually movie and TV stars didn’t feel they had arrived until they’d been roasted in MAD. After which, the custom was to send them a picture of oneself with the MAD issue they appeared in for the letters column.

The satire was sharp and biting, but like Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series (take-off on the pulp adventure genre), often a loving appreciation as well. You could enjoy the original story and love the parody too.

That’s all gone now. Gaines and the original gang died or retired. AOL/ Time-Warner appointed an editor in the 90s who thought MAD should tap into urban hip-hop culture – and saw the circulation figures drop precipitously. It has never recovered, and now accepts advertising.

A few years ago I took this thesis to the American Studies Conference in Minsk, Belarus. I ran off numerous samples of covers and articles from my complete CD collected MAD (from the start to 1998). It was hard to explain out of the cultural context. (And interesting to note that foreign editions of MAD have done well in only a few other countries. The failures outnumber the successes.)

Anyhow, there were a few American academics there, including a distinguished poet/ professor and an Anthropologist teaching in Belarus for a year. When my presentation came up, they were in the audience and I thought, “Oh my God, these are real scholars. They’re going to crucify me!”

Well what actually happened was, as I was passing around the samples, they were jumping up and down in their seats and going, “Tell them about Alfred E. Newman for President!”

* Since I am again living in Oklahoma, near our football stadium, I frequently have this going through my head on game days when the band is playing:

“Oh-h-h-h-h Oh-seven is the greatest spy there is today!
Though the Empire’s gone, he keeps right on, so you’d better not get in his way!
Oh-h-h-h-h Oh-seven we adore his looks and manly build,
When the going’s rough, he’s got the stuff, and he never let’s himself be killed!

We know in a fight he will win, ’cause he wins every fight he is in,
And that is why-y-y-y-y, when bullets start to fly-y-y-y-y
You’ll hear us crying, you’ll never die oh-oh-seven,
Oh oh-seven, our spy!”

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I’m a writer. That’s right, a writer. I write for publication and get paid for it. (Face it, without the money you’ll never really believe you’re a real writer.) God I love to introduce myself as a writer at parties. John Stakely (author of Armor and Vampire$) once told a group of us at the Norman Oklahoma Science-Fiction Association that the best thing about being a writer is that, (1) you get to be a writer, and (2) you get to write. Being a writer is major cool – even a minor writer who can’t quit his day job.

I started as an expat writer, meaning that the stuff I wrote that got paid for was published in the English-language press that serves the expatriate community in Poland. I also wrote for a (now sadly defunct) magazine for English teachers and students that had a circulation of about thirty thousand, which beat hell out of the libertarian/conservative journals I give my stuff away to. My essays for vocabulary building for non-native speakers have been published in book form in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Novosibirsk, Russia and an English course I wrote has been used in places like Turkey and India.

Of course, I had always wanted to become a writer and from time to time made desultory attempts to set myself essay-writing assignments to practice and polish my technique. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t work for you either, does it? The fact is that for years, everything I wrote that got published was stuff I gave away to amateur publications read only by the faithful. I simply could not, without the discipline of a classroom assignment or a deadline, pick a subject, research and write something about it.

Stephen King, a writer I don’t read much, said that if you lift weights every day, you get big muscles, if you write every day, you get to be a good writer. Yes, it’s probably about that simple – but notice how many people can make themselves exercise regularly. For me, forcing myself to exercise has always been easier than forcing myself to write.

Then, in 1991, I moved to Poland. For two years I lived in a small town, Brwinow, which had a charmingly archaic phone system. The whole town was served by an operator exchange, the like of which I had never personally experienced in the States. The family I lived with had a party line, which I am just old enough to remember in America. All the phones in town were served by three-digit numbers, which you had to tell the operator – in Polish. For our house and the neighbors, we had a code of rings worked out with the operators so we’d know who had to pick up the phone.

To say the least, I felt a little isolated and as it became evident that I’d be in Eastern Europe for a while I realized that I’d have to start writing letters to keep in touch with my friends back home. In my first year in Poland I believe I wrote more letters that I had written in my whole life up to that point. And in my letters I, of course, told stories about what I had seen and done in Poland.

Now writing for publication is like losing your virginity. It’s not racking up scores that’s so difficult – it’s going from zero to one. (I’m counting only published and paid for. Unlike sex it doesn’t really count if it’s given away.)

For me it happened, appropriately enough, in a bar. I was drinking in Warsaw’s expat hangout in 1994 with a decayed Austrian baron who edited Okecie the Airport Magazine, one of the kinds of slick mags they give out at tourist agencies and put in the seat pockets of airplanes.

At one point this fellow turned to me and said, “Gee Steve, you sure can talk. Can you write?”

“Yes I can write.”

“Can you write funny?”

“Yes I can write funny.”

“Can you write me something funny about Polish health services?”

“Not even difficult.” I said.

So what I wrote was basically an article pointing out that the remnant of the socialized health service was not something you wanted to trust any major health problem to and illustrated with a few anecdotes of things that happened to people known to me, including a story of a friend who severed the tendons of his hand pounding his fist through a window at a party. (Where else?).

My friend went to an emergency room where he got sewed up, but was placed on a waiting list ten months long. Might as well not bother, after ten months he would never have gotten back full function of his hand due to tendon shrinkage. This was common in Poland and all the former Communist countries, which somehow never gets through to the admirers of socialized medicine

I also pointed out that many doctors were going private and providing excellent care. My friend eventually went to a private clinic in a converted apartment. The examining room was the kitchen and a bedroom had become the surgery – all spotlessly clean. He was in and out within a week of applying and his hand works just fine now. The price – you wouldn’t believe it for a fairly serious operation. It put a crimp in his beer budget for a while though. . (To give you a further idea, I have a Polish associate who is an MD. She doesn’t practice though because she makes more money providing English lessons.)

Bottom line was advice to expats to make arrangements now, rather than wait for an emergency when you’d be standing like a schmuck with a phone in one hand and a Polish phrase book in the other.

So, after the magazine hit the stands I met my editor at the pub. He was drinking as per usual and sporting a cast on his arm. He informed me that the very morning the magazine was issued the Minister of Health, not the secretary but the Honorable Minister himself had called the offices and demanded to know, “Who is this Stephen Browne guy and why is he saying these awful things about our wonderful Polish hospitals?”

“Jesus, are we going to get in trouble for this?” said I.

“No, no problem. By the way, you haven’t asked me what happened to my arm.”

“So what happened to your arm?” I asked. “A couple of friends of mine broke it.” he said.

(A fairly frequent occurrence. I eventually had occasion to damn near break his arm myself.)

“I got it taken care of in the hospital right away. Of course I had to give them two bottles of cognac to see to it!”

To say the least, he was not very sympathetic to the Honorable Minister’s complaint.

That’s how it started. My editor was delighted to have somebody who could write on any subject on short notice. I was given lots of assignments to write “adverticles”, advertisements thinly disguised as articles, and got to eat free with a date in some of the best restaurants in Warsaw. In return my editor published some of the stuff I was proud of, essays on the history and environs of Warsaw. I even got to write stuff considered a bit dangerous to publish, such as an article about taking taxis in the city. (Dangerous? More about this at another time.) For a while I was writing most of the magazine under my own byline and columns called variously; An American in Warsaw and Through the Eyes of a Foreigner.

My editor has since returned to his true profession of drinking himself to death but I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for him and the great story he gave me about How I Became a Writer.

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