Cowboy Confessional

Rarely is political payback played out as quickly as it was this past half year.

There is no secret that Barack Obama is the darling of government workers. After all, he was the candidate whose stated mission was to “make government cool again”, which shows both his disposition toward authoritarianism and disconnection from reality. Naturally government workers – who tend to earn more, retire younger and have fatter, taxpayer endowed pensions – shoved Obama into the White House.

Obama returned the favor. His massive spending bill primarily creates work for the government, but the earliest dollars were spent to assure that state and local workers didn’t suffer the same recessionary woes as everyone else. No cut hours, no salary reductions, no layoffs – nothing like what your family is enduring. Indeed when Obama claims his spending plan saved jobs, it was exclusively government jobs that he rescued.

Payback Phase I complete. Phase II is now in full swing.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO) is running television ads pushing Obama’s health care plan. This seems a bit odd given that the people wasting your time at the DMV already have solid health plans and do not need any help from Obama. Indeed, they should be completely disinterested in health case legislation as their personal outcome is not affected whether ObamaCare soars, crashes or vanishes in a puff of legislative smoke.

So their TV ads are payback … partially. It is also ideology, and one that openly despises what government workers don’t do, namely invent, create, build, market and generate wealth – what you used to do before your hours were cut or your pink slip arrived. After all, what has ingenuity and gumption ever done for government employees?

Have a peek at their latest television campaign. Notice that your employees – the ones whose salaries your tax blood provides – are openly advocating Obama legislation to strip your insurance provider of their profits and cancel CEO salaries.

Inside a nut’s shell, Obama’s chief supporters advocate government killing American capitalism. They should worry that American’s don’t return the favor.

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For a state that prides itself upon cultural sensitivity, California’s junior senator certainly seems unburdened by it.

In less than a month Senator Barbara Boxer has managed to instigate two controversies through ignorance of cultures or crass assumptions of the same. Not content to merely castigate a soldier for his practiced politeness, this week she made a citizen’s race a point of her attack.

Strom Thurmond displayed better racial outreach than Boxer.

Later last month, a Marine general who still had Iraq dust on his boots addressed a Senate committee. During interrogatory, Brigadier General Michael Walsh answered Boxer by addressing her as ‘maam’. Barbara succumbed to a minor meltdown the likes of which Republicans prayed Justice Sotomayor would. With shoulders slumping under excess padding, Senator Boxer pantingly demanded that she be called ‘senator’ and not ‘maam’.

Oddly none of the men that the general called ‘sir’ voiced complaints.

Though not born of the southern noblesse oblige with which I am familiar, the general’s use of the common reference of deference is a cultural phenomenon and one to which temporarily sitting senators should show sensitivity. Down south, we call everyone sir or maam. Elderly people address children with the same words. Wives and husbands trade the titles. It is considered the minimal civility and one offered to strangers as a matter of principal. The cultural bias at play is that one assumes the best of all people until given a reason not to.

This includes politicians who are normally held suspect from the beginning.

The military maintains similar modes on behavior. Children raised in Dixie or soldiers sweating in boot camp are acculturated to show respect. A returning soldier I greeted at the airport called me ‘sir’ despite us having never met before that moment. Cultures that install politeness – be it southern born or military bred – are recognized and appreciated by everyone living in this largely impolite world.

Aside from self-important people, that is.

As insensitive as Boxer is to cultures that incubate kindness, her more recent affront to African-Americans would make her an honorary member of the Dixicrats. Harry C. Alford, the CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce was, like the general, staring down the business end of Boxer’s distemper. Speaking to how proposed legislation might hinder business, Boxer pointedly produced a counter argument published by the NAACP.

She saw his blackness and raised him a few chitlins.

Alford, who also was once in Uncle Sam’s military, showed the self-restraint that only cultural discipline instills. “All that’s condescending … As an African-American and a veteran of this country, I take offense to that” adding “You’re quoting some other black man. Why don’t you quote some other Asian. You are being racial here.”

California is, if nothing else, the ultimate American melting pot. We potentially have the widest selection of cultures, subcultures and counter cultures in the inhabitable world and D.C. Strolling down any San Francisco street will induce sensory overload as global languages and aromas assault from every angle. Like most of America, we get along because we learned how – sharing our space with neighbors completely unlike ourselves and attempting to show a little sensitivity. Native Californians like Alford understand this.

A nice Jewish Brooklyn girl like Barbara should too.

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A memorial service for an Iranian was held in an Irish pub today … and, no, that is not the opening line to a bad joke.

The San Francisco bay area is filled with walking contradictions as well as unbridled expectations for happiness. Reza Honarkhah was both. Reza fled Iran in 1979 as theocratic insanity consumed Persia. 30 years later he finished his mortal tour tending bar at McGrath’s Irish Pub in Alameda. This thin fellow – with a mustache that easily outweighed the rest of his body – created around him what he had left behind in Iran; a family.

The one he left in Tehran has been hard to reach lately and still may not know of his passing.

McGrath’s was an odd place for Reza to land work. McGrath’s is the Bay Area’s home for that genre of music known as Blue Grass, which Reza called Tennessee Torture. That was part of the man mourned today – that he found humor in all things, even tunes that irritated he senses. The Kentucky Twisters, at Reza’s request, agreed to play in the convalescent home in which Reza was dying, but they arrived a day late.

Someone suggested that Reza knew a banjo was coming and decided to check out early to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Reza invested his humor and overdose of charm on utter strangers. Some half drunk frat boys came into the bar on a night that Reza worked. Being in an Irish pub they asked if Reza knew how to make a drink called an Irish Car Bomb. Reza said “I’m Iranian. I can make any kind of car bomb.”

Little wonder that McGrath’s was packed from backroom to bar’s end today. Reza had an attachment to people and to the string of moments that make up a life. Even the ugly moments.

Reza was a smoker, and in his 50th year the habit caught up with him, eating a hole through his neck from the inside. When a friend stayed with him the first night Reza was in a rehabilitation center, Reza instantly told his pal to “Tell the nurse.” About the fifth time he prodded, Reza’s friend said “I already told them I’m staying here tonight” to which Reza said “No, tell them what size diaper you want.”

Brings a new perspective on laughing to death.

Reza had no state-side family, aside from the hundreds of people who knew and loved him at the bar and who managed to squeeze in there this afternoon. Having survived the bay area’s high cost of living on a barkeep’s pay, Reza’s musical buddies held a couple of fund raiser shows on his behalf. They knew the money would mainly go toward cremation since survival was not an option.

And he passed, as he and we knew he would.

I showed up at the memorial a bit ahead of the mob, side dish in hand, and was surprised when I came in the door. His friend – the one who Reza suggested needed to place a diaper order with the day nurse – was handing out tickets good for free drinks and saying “This is from Reza.” Seems the cost of cremation was a fair bit less than local bands had raised on Reza’s behalf. Since there was no need for cash in Paradise, Reza had to find a use for the money.

So he bought the bar a round.

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Senator Grassley has dropped the property rights bomb on Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor and she has dodged the issue completely. Sotomayor shows complete comfort with the Kelo revision of the Fifth Amendment and thus lacks respect for the Constitution. Confirmation should be denied on this basis alone.

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It took a while for me to realize that San Francisco is an ongoing set of contradictions. Little wonder then that our local scandal sheet is similarly schizophrenic.

Despite my occasionally poking a finger in their editorial eye – an unwise affliction for a writer who pens op/eds – the San Francisco Chronicle is a decent paper. This may be faint praise given the current state of American journalism. As Bagdikian observed, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.” Yet the Chronic strives to at least be a fine rendition of Tip Toe Through the Tulips.

But some days the Bay Fish Wrapper is accidentally comical.

Today’s Insight section – a few pages devoted to opinion and occasional puddle-deep analysis – carried an editorial demanding the U.S. Senate enact President Obama’s green house gas cap-and-canard (even my green friends admit it is a tax and nothing more). The paper’s impassioned piece implored “It’s time to take the undeniable problem of global warming seriously …”

A few pages earlier their columnist Debra Saunders cited an Environmental Protection Agency analysis showing global cooling over the last eleven years, a period in which the industrial ascendancy of China and India have ejected more carbon into the sky than every before.

Page six scientifically states things are cooling while page 10 claims the sky is boiling. The former was based on analysis and the latter on too many mushrooms at the last Rat Dog concert.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s fevered favoritism in all things ecological reminded me of the passion shown for their present paramour Obama. I have it from a reliable (unnamed) source within the Chronicle news division that during Obama’s campaign interview in the Baghdad by the Bay, Chronicle reporters were issued knee pads, though the option of which side of Obama to osculate was left to the individual journalist.

San Francisco Chronicle reporting of the new administration said nothing remotely negative of the green (as in new) administration. Today was no exception though the Chronic did relate that during last week’s whistle-stop in Africa, Obama said:

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

Quite a stern lecture, from a man who during the presidential campaign assured:

“We’re not going to get countries to embrace our values simply by lecturing … “

Shame that the Chronicle did not mention this most recent Obama contradiction. That many major mirrors in one editorial page would have given the Sunday paper two comic sections.

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