Here, you can marvel and ruminate upon the contents of the Platypus Maximus Media Filter (PMMF). I am the PMMF Custodian. I claim no righteousness, only duty.
I liked this piece so much I decided to post it here.
If you aren't still enjoying the sublime buffoonery of Rush Limbaugh's recent comments about Costa Rica, then perhaps this will convince you that a national petition pressuring him to make good on his pledge to leave us will be necessitated when health care legislation finally passes.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: ME AND RUSH LIMBAUGH IN COSTA RICA Why Rush Limbaugh would go to Costa Rica if Obama healthcare plan passes
I saw this on Yahoo news this morning. My morning chuckle -- what a dramatic story! Oh my God, Obama's plan will destroy US medicine -- presumably because more people in need of medical care will have access to it, and those with endless ability to pay for costly private medical care, like Rush, will somehow be squeezed out.
What is interesting about this story is that Rush's choice is to go to one of the most famously successful examples of socialized healthcare in the world. I know, because this is my business: my company takes people abroad for health care. About half of our patients are uninsured and find themselves utterly priced out of the US market. But their reasons for being uninsured have nothing to do with the "bought me an iPod and a grill of gold teeth and the rest of America should pay for my Cheetohs-n-Video Games lifestyle" trope that seems to pervade any discussion of the state of American health insurance today. They are uninsured because after years of paying in, they were shut out by insurers *legally* refusing to cover their illnesses and accidents.
My husband is one of these people. A herniated disc from a skiing accident led to surgery, with an estimate of $3,000. But that turned out to be the *surgeon fee* only - the hospital fee, which did not include an overnight stay, was ...drumroll ... $25,000.
The surgery was not successful; the surgeon nicked the protective sheath around the spinal column nerves, creating a spinal fluid leak that was visible - fluid collected in a large pouch at the base of his spine - not to mention agonizing. What's more fun than a cup's worth of spinal fluid shooting up your spine and slamming into the base of your brain every time you sit down and stand up? Turns out, everything is more fun than that, while few things are scarier or more painful.
Husband went back to have the leak repaired, and the surgeon failed again. And again. But we were insured, and unworried. Until the day we weren't insured, because the surgical nick was determined to be a 'pre-existing condition' (figure that out now; go ahead, I’ll wait). Our insurance was dropped and we were left holding the $265,000 bag. We were now defined as 'uninsured', a word that does not really connote our history of responsibility in our own health care or that fact that our status is the simple result of being screwed by a for-profit system in which it is perfectly legal to drop members who don't fit the profitability profile. Not only that, we're now uninsurable. Who would touch us?
I said half of our patients are uninsured -what about the other half, who are like Rush, insured and able to afford their health care out of their own pocket, like any responsible American should? Well, turns out lots of smart people don't cotton well to the idea of paying more for good American health care when they can pay a lot less for equally good health care in Mexico, Costa Rica, India, and Thailand.
My business receives more than 800 inquiries a month - coronary bypass, hip replacement and resurfacing, treatment of Lyme disease, oncology surgery, kidney transplant, you name it. We take patients to the best and most *affordable* health care in the world.
Obama's proposals did not ruin US healthcare. Our healthcare system started on its long journey to the present state under the Nixon administration. Today we find that the best of US healthcare is not affordable to the great majority of Americans, not in spite of the health insurance system but because of it.
It's great that people can go abroad for quality, affordable healthcare. But there is a cost -- there is always a cost. Countries welcoming the largest numbers of medical travelers (in order: Mexico, Thailand, India, Costa Rica, Singapore) have not magically solved the conundrum of unfettered capitalism applied to a basic human need like health care. The health care that foreigners seek in Mexico and Costa Rica is generally coming from a private system, not the public option that serves the general population of these countries, where long wait times for necessary treatments are common.
Does Rush deserve better health care than a local Costa Rican because he can afford it? Should the economic prowess of foreigners be permitted to change the health care landscape of less developed nations, creating a wider, faster gap between the health care haves and have nots the world over? I don't have the answers.
I work in a business that provides an essential need to Americans who can't get the need met in America. It's hard work (haven't been around in awhile on OS), but very rewarding because we are helping people with urgent medical needs find a solution that does not ask them to exchange essential health care for economic well being. It might seem like a magic solution to Rush, but it is not. The costs are being counted even now. Costa Rica, like all countries hosting medical tourists, have been considering the long term effects of a health care system that disenfranchises the unwealthy as deservingly unhealthy.
I like the way the health minister of Costa Rica describes this process: “The strengths of our health system (is) that it is universal, that it’s based on the idea of solidarity and that it’s fair,” says Dr. Ana Morice, vice health minister in Costa Rica. “What we need to improve is access to health services. Many times someone requests an appointment and doesn’t receive it until a year later. In that area, we have much to improve.”
To find out about health care abroad: www.healthtravelguides.com toll free 866.978.2573 www.angeleshealth.com toll free 866.668.9263 www.mexicalihealthcare.com toll free 866-464-1132
I never asked for this PMMF Custodian gig. Yet, as Uncle Benonce said, with great power comes great responsibility. And I've shirked mine going on now for over two months. You know why? Because I had to get a real job Working for The Man again. (This coming after a good stretch of sleeping late most days as a lethargic consultant attacked with sporadic bursts of manic productivity, fizzling out finally to a protracted recessionary depression.)
And the Great Playtpus is not pleased. He bellows at me nightly in nauseating lime-green shades of disapproval, with flash-forward dream glimpses of repulsive reprisals. (I gotta tell ya: I am not gonna do another of those long and winding stuffed-sausage expulsions down the gooey green entrails of The Space Toad. The Great One put me there last summer, and I simply cannot do that again.)
So I need to get this out. Or else.
First off, you may be curious as to why I posted the above artist's rendition of The Hobbit Homo Floresiensis. (And the sculpted face model at left ...)
The answer is that we do not know why. I work on impulse, you see?
But consider the fact that these little chimp hobbits -- maybe human, maybe not -- lived and hunted big chubby field rodents on the Indonesian island of Flores for at least 80,000 years, up to about 13,000 years ago. Standing less than 4 feet tall, these guys actually lived at the same time and on the same island with contemporary homo sapiens.
In other news, I've been enthralled with Lantern Jaws vs. Coco. Haven't you? Probably not a lot of folks are aware that Jay Leno used to be a great stand-up comedian. Before he became oh so very lame, this guy had terrific -- even socially relevant -- material, in addition to impeccable timing and delivery.
Since taking over the Tonight Show in 1994, he's morphed into a lowest-common-denominator joke crapster devoid of substance or cleverness. Hey, if you like Sarah Palin, you probably think he's the best. Sarah Palin's book is still on the top end of the Hardback Nonfiction Best Sellers List (selling for about 2 cents a pop, albeit) and she just got a plumb commentator job on Fox Fallacious News. And Jay Leno will soon be back to re-dumbify the Tonight Show.
That's marketing. That's ratings. And that's what Stoopid America likes to eat.
Conan O' Brien, on the contrary, has a weakness for cerebrally edgy, pushing-the-envelope comedic bits -- with a signature wink to twisted and sarcastically angry liberal spirits everywhere -- and he gets shit-canned before he can even get established. Makes sense. Needless to say, I'm with Coco.
And needless to say, the big winner in all of this is sure to be the only living Grand Master of Late Night TV and our favorite Intern Banger. Long live the King, cuz with all the bad karma and negative press surrounding Jay Leno, NBC's Tonight Show will likely take a long and satisfying seismic drop into the ratings dirt. If NBC brass was smart, they'd have paid Coco more money to stay put while kicking the unfunny Lantern Jaw to the curb. Tuning in to see Coco's fantastically wicked two-week flight of skewering NBC and Leno has catapulted his ratings into the stratosphere and made him and his team many new fans. What do you think is gonna happen when Leno is back tossing his conservative, old-hat cookies? One things for sure -- it'll be the teabaggers' Tonight Show.
Healthcare reform is set to make a killing for managed care companies. We already knew it was a gift for them. But now the amazing dropped ball of the Democratic Party and Martha Coakley constitutes a fumble recovery that will be run all the way back for a game-winning touchdown.
So here's a phlegmy congratulations to the executives at Aetna, Cigna, Pacificare, et. al. Your bonus checks and tee times will be an even bigger pre-existing condition for the sick and uninsured.
Finally, you shouldn't be surprised to hear there's been another big shooting tonight. Reportedly, eight people in Virginia are left dead at the barrel of another U.S.-patented crazed gunman who, at presstime, is still hiding somewhere in the woods. Some kind of dysfunctional family situation, evidently.
But at this point, what does it matter? This kind of carnage is an almost a weekly phenomenon in America -- even at our largest Army base. It's a national pastime, fer cripesakes.
Why doesn't this happen with near the frequency in other countries? When there was a school shooting in Germany last year, the entire nation erupted in a horrified conniption fit: "Why us? That kind of shit only happens in the United States!"
According to this World Timeline of School Shootings, only 13 of 57 school shootings with multiple fatalities have occurred in countries other than America between February 1996 and March 2009.
OK. That's all for now.
Please pray that my dreams tonight do not present the hoary maw of a celestial amphibian.
I like watches. The look and feel of a sparkly chunk of metal strapped around my wrist makes me feel (and look) like a hundred bucks. Plus tax.
So you can imagine my happy surprise when I recently learned that Smith and Wesson -- which according to its website is in the business of "designing and manufacturinginnovative solutions that are unparalleled in the field of personal safety and protection" -- is also hocking its own sharp-shooting timepieces. Below, for example, is the Smith and Wesson S.W.A.T. Watch, which I'd wager is worn more by wannabe commandosthan the real professionals.
Of course, Smith and Wesson is really known worldwide for its 157-year history of making and selling guns. (As opposed to "innovative and unparalleled solutions in the field of personal safety and protection." That was a good one, eh?)
Smith and Wesson's mega-zillions in gun sales span from its Old West heritage of gunfighter classics to its modern-day line-ups of assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols and revolvers, and its awesome metal mountains of well-used and discarded Saturday Night Specials, piling up into the gunsmoked heavens.
As such, let's correct the company's hamhanded, PR-pooped deceivery. I hereby submit to Smith and Wesson's CEO and board of directors that the new and truthful company description on its website and other PR/branding materials be changed to:
"For 157 years, Smith and Wesson has designed and manufactured guns that have the specific function of killing and maiming human beings. Who knows how many people have been killed with our guns? But you can bet it's a staggeringly gigantic number that is far larger than the number of American casualties in any U.S. war. Our hunting rifles and shotguns also kill people, but have mostly been used to shoot animals."
Speaking of Smith and Wesson's executive stewardship, CEO Michael Golden has done much to extend the company's well-recognized brand name into numerous other profitable product lines, everything from venison smokers to bicycles and ... yes, it's true ... men's cologne. (And watches, which we'll get back to soon.)
The Smith and Wesson Cologne bottle depicted here, by the way, costs a mere $49.95 and is described by the company as: "Igniting Smith and Wesson fragrance in a solid glass 3.4 fluid oz. spray bottle with the heavyweight Zamak metal cap, this bottle has the perfect fit for the large metal frame."
(Cologne that ignites with a heavy cap from a large metal frame? I bet this fragrance just kills.)
And that's a big 'ol Smith and Wesson 460 XVR Extreme Velocity Revolver Magnum that Mr. Golden is wheezing and struggling to hold up in the fetching photo above. (If Clint ever does a new, geriatric-version Dirty Harry flick, this could be his new toy. But, in all likelihood, the dinosaur detective would still blast his '70s-era vintage Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum. It was "the most powerful handgun in the world," remember?)
Mr. Golden has a lot to smile about these days. In addition to Smith and Wesson's expanded product offerings, the company is enjoying the ig'nant spoilsof the uprising of uneducated teabaggersand assorted gun nutswho continue to stockpile weapons and ammo in response to the gun-confiscating federal storm troopers who are on the way to your town. Right now. (Seriously, they're coming and they will kill you and your family if you don't surrender your guns.)
Quick bit of trivia: In 2004, Smith and Wesson Chairman James Joseph Minder had to step down scandalously because published reports revealed he spent at least 15 years in the joint in the 1950s and 1960s for armed robberies, a bank heist and an attempted prison break. He was known to brandish a sawed-off shotgun.
Anyway, back to the watches.
You see, Smith and Wesson has these various watch models for "public safety" groups, such as the Police Watch, the Firefighter Watch, the Soldier Watch, the Special Ops Watch, the S.W.A.T. Watch and ... get ready for the kicker ... the Paramedic EMT/EMS Watch, which has the EMT logo printed on the dial face.
According to the eBay listing, this watch is "made to honor the brave paramedics and EMTs ... and to serve with precision, too!"
I wonder if any paramedics presently rushing to and fro amid America the Beautiful's unceasing carnage (276 gun deaths and injuries a day, is the most recent statistic) are wearing these very special, honorary Smith and Wesson watches?
So there's this new flick out, Paranormal Activity, reportedly another faux-documentary, jerky-camera horror film, this time about a young couple's troubles with a hoofed demon that gallops and gallivants about their house while they're asleep.
I'll wait for cable. But given my, shall we say ... "colorful" ... background, you can perhaps indulge me for a strange-but-true paranormal tale of a former substance abuser and eccentric trouble magnet who looks back neither proud, nor ashamed. Just glad I'm here, I suppose. (The Great Platypus has again directed me to delve into my personal experiences as an entrée to the terrestrial trappings of his unearthly filter. Annoyed, yes. But duty bound, am I.)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered the ugly prospect of being enrolled down south at Con Collegeand wearily practiced my patented technique of kicking ass at a corporate stress factory job, I lived alone in a house.
A good many of my sleepless nights were spent in the company of a quasi girlfriend who, while seemingly grounded in other ways, believed in ghosts, demons, psychic intuitions and tarot cards. As did her wacky mother. And the mother before her, and the mother before her -- and so on, all the way back to the dark ancestral woods of their credulous family tree, in all likelihood.
At night, we hung out at my place. By day, I auto-piloted my zombie self into an office tower parking garage, and she went to a career college to become one of those ridiculously unrealistic CSI investigators on television. It was one of those bizarre times that failed to normalize. I was on the edge. The cards had forecast a fateful turning point, hinging upon the uncertain outcome of justice against the The Hanged Man, and The Knight of Wands against the gathering storm.
For months, my witchy girlfriend had been saying she sensed a "presence" in my house, a shadowy entity that allegedly hovered in the back corners of the master bedroom. She had consulted with her mother about the situation, as well, and they agreed there was some sort of Beelzebub in my crib.
My amused and dismissive response, of course, was always the same: preposterous superstitious nonsense. But I humored her, focused on keeping the "feel good" alive. Besides, in my manic moments, it was kicks for me to entertain these things.
Until something happened.
After one chemically indulgent evening, she went home where she lived with her mother and young daughter. After she left, I lay on my side in bed, staring out the bedroom door into the hallway, which shot out about eight feet or so before turning left into the living room. The master bathroom light was still on, the door slightly ajar and providing only a dimly lit view, when a very short female figure -- 5 feet tall, at the most -- appeared suddenly in the hallway.
Draped head to toe in some kind of heavy gray shawl, the opening to her face was completely obscured. She scampered straight toward me into the bedroom, stopping at the edge of the bed, then leaned over me and whispered in my ear, "You have 30 minutes to live." It was the thin, tinny voice of an elderly woman, yet unmistakably taunting in tone. As the words were uttered, there was the uncannily vivid sensation of her breath on my face. She then did an about-face, and tip-toed hurriedly back down the hallway, turning left into the unseen living room.
I was startled. OK, sure. But more than that, I was absolutely bewildered. Had I been asleep and dreamed this photographically realistic event, or had I been ... awake? Did I have a dream, or did the dream have me? There were eerie thoughts that perhaps my unwanted guest was still in the house, flitting about in the darkened cavern of the living room. Should I get up and investigate? My ears began noticing noises -- muffled bumps and creaks and shuffling sounds.
Spooked as I was, I am a born skeptic (and cynic), so I decided to try to forget about it and get some sleep. What followed, however, was a terrible bout of sleep paralysis, in which a freakishly tall, shadowy and implicitly evil figure approached the bed from the far end of the room, getting closer and closer, growing larger and larger ... Realizing that I was, in fact, not awake but dreaming, I struggled to move and shake myself awake before I was overtaken, finally breaking through the paralysis and sitting up in bed.
Upon awakening, I immediately recalled the tangibly lifelike experience with the shawled, dwarfish hag and her message of unkindness. I picked up the phone on the nightstand called my girlfriend, the pseudo paranormal expert, who was still awake at her mom's house. I told her exactly what had happened, thinking that perhaps I could snap myself back into the World of Scienceby talking it through with her. But before I could begin intellectualizing and constructing plausible explanations, she said she would be right over and hung up.
Feeling at once foolish and relieved, I next found myself following her about the house as she sprinkled frickin' olive oil (from a bottle fished out of my pantry) between every doorway and entrance in my house. (To my later irritation, this made permanent stains on some of the freshly starched dress shirts hanging in my closet.) Upon each finger sprinkle, she would utter some kind of obligatory "Satan, begone" pronouncement, of course.
After this comical yet somehow essential exorcism of my house, we smoked a joint and agreed that things, well ... things were somehow still not right. There remained a palpably paranoid pall of danger in the place. (Go figure, eh?) And then, as if struck by a bolt of unholy revelation, my amateur exorcist/occultist/medium girlfriend proclaimed she knew what the problem was. The tarot cardsshe had brought over months earlier were still in my nightstand drawer. I had to get rid of them, you see, because they were acting as a numinous, neon-lit welcome sign for evil spirits. So I grabbed the dang things, walked outside into the predawn darkness and threw 'em fluttering down a street gutter. And then things felt better.
Problem solved? Momentarily, perhaps. But perception is reality only for as long as it takes to cede to truth. And the truth was that I was a mess, embarking on a lengthy run that would culminate in a particularly nasty dance with the yayo. Demons? They were between my ears, and I was feeding them by entertaining my girlfriend's superstitious hocus pocus. We had even become diehard watchers of the momentous first season of Ghost Hunters on the SyFy Channel. (Which we'll soon be addressing.)
Sleep paralysis? A recurring phenomenon of my dreams since my earliest living memories. The Shadow Peoplehave visited my nightmares since I was a toddler. In case you didn't know, the word "mare" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "merran," which is literally defined as "to crush." Hence, the term "nightmare" means "the crusher who comes in the night."
As depicted in his 1781 work, The Nightmare, Henry Fuselimight have considered it a case of "the devil sitting on your chest." Or, in my case, it seems I had more than a little touch of "Old Hag Syndrome," given my Little Old Lady of Doom's cheery pronouncement, "You have 30 minutes to live."
But this is also easily explained. Only a few weeks or so before the incident, the girlfriend and I had rented and watched the movie, The Ring. I trust you remember the scenes with the ringing phone, then the creepy girl's voice saying, "You have one week to live." (Another thought: The apparition was actually Paranormal State'sChip Coffey in drag, channeling the ghost of an ancient gypsy woman.)
The bottom line: My brain was influenced by drugs, stress, a longstanding fascination with the supernatural, a superstitious girlfriend, and a knack for screening vividly realistic sleep-paralysis dreams. Thus, it's really not a big stretch that I could have imagined seeing some weird things. Part of me also wanted to believe in my girlfriend's supernatural beliefs and divinations, or at least play along with them. They were sort of a fun deviation, another trippy element I could add to the overall environment of escapism I was cultivating.
Hey, the mind is a funny thing. (Especially mine.)
Right?
As previously mentioned, we watched the entire first season of Ghost Hunters in that time of zaniness. Little did I know that five years later the sprawling shitscape of network programming would be haunted with hordes of paranormal "reality" shows.
The Web also has swelled with paranormal fansites, blogs and scads of skeptical debunkers who dissect and debate the ever-multiplying ectoplasm of noises, blurry images, EVPs and physical encountersrecorded by TV ghost posses and their high-tech paranormal gizmos. (We just gotta take their word for it that the "evidence" is genuine, don't we? I suspect the best nuggets are often concocted and staged before the actual onsite investigations even begin.)
Regardless, you gotta hand it to Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of Ghost Hunters. These two former Roto-Rooter plumbers are the pioneering fathers of today's explosion of paranormal programming, and, by all accounts, they were initially motivated by genuine fascination with the supernatural. They founded The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) on a shoe-string budget, long before it shroomed into their mad-cash reality TV show. (They both claim to have been inspired by personal paranormal encounters, but say they don't want to talk about them.)
Admittedly, I still occasionally tune into Ghost Hunters and find myself actually roto-rooting for these guys. I struggle to see them as kindred skeptics, instead of money-grubbing con artists, who are earnestly exploring a curious realm of otherworldly possibilities.
With Ghost Hunters, skepticism is boldly advertised as an integral aspect of the team's investigative methodology, approaching each site with the intent of trying to disprove it is haunted.
Or, as I suspect, is this professed allegiance to skepticism just a pretentious part of their shtick? ("Hey, these guys are skeptics -- so it's gotta be real!")
The truth, of course, is that Ghost Hunters and other copycat paranormal shows are first and foremost about money, ratings and entertainment value. No paranormal reality show can survive without scary stuff happening in every episode, enhanced with the electronic dread tones of horror movie music and bouncy, Blair Witch-style camera work.
After all, what entertainment value could possibly exist in these shows without mysterious occurrences, startling dramatics and ominous music? How could we be entertained without the perfectly timed footsteps, odd noises and mumbling EVPs that are always right on-cue when the cast members ask the ghosts to announce their presence? Absent all this, we'd have nothing but excruciatingly boring footage of folks squinting in the darkness and tripping over each other with their flat-lined recording gadgets, with no break in the monotony except for an occasional fart from the key-grip guy.
If you really want to goose things up, however, why not do so hilariously like helium-biceped, douchebag wunderkind Zak Bagans of the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures?
My favorite episode is the madcap Goldfield Hotel investigation and its priceless Flying Ghost Brick of Cowardice scene. Ever the drama queen, Mr. Bagans at first struts about the historic old place telling the ghosts that he's not scared of them. But when a brick seemingly comes off the floor by itself, Mr. Bagans flees while channeling the spirits of Fay Wray and the The Great Wilhelm, as you can see below.
Getting back to Ghost Hunters, however, I must say I was disappointed (if not completely surprised) by the controversy surrounding last year's live Halloween special at the Fort Delaware Civil War prison. It appears that Mr. Hawes and Mr. Wilson got royally busted on that deal, perhaps not anticipating that the dynamics of live television are far less amenable to fakery than taping the shows in advance.
But hey, I just might tune in, anyway. With Ghost Hunters, I still inexplicably find myself wanting to believe there is an authentic core of serious inquisition, in spite of the alleged special effects.
Dear Jason and Grant: It's not all about the money, is it? Because if it's not all about ratings and your celebrity bank accounts, then perhaps there's a chance that some of the so-called evidence you've collected truly is unexplainable. Right?
Because, to me, if just one or two of these things can't be scientifically explained, well ... now, that's what I would call real entertainment.
---------------------------------
"We sometimes catch a window A glimpse of what's beyond Was it just imagination Stringing us along? More things than are dreamed about Unseen and unexplained
Looking out my open hotel room window, the humidly familiar subtropical night broke in to subdue the air conditioning. Below, the mighty Southwest Freeway pulsed nocturnally in red, white and yellow laser streaks, cutting a glittering glass-canyon swath, and I passed into a reverie of bygone Bayou City days.
Houston. The best and worst of you still courses the expressways of my mind. As a child, I nursed upon the teat of your oil-boom bosom, running in aimless middle-class kid packs, alongside the progeny of economic refugees who picked up sticks for the boomtown wages and get-rich opportunities of Houston's signature Laissez-faireentreprenuerial euphoria.
In the '70s and '80s, apartment families moved out into new suburban tract houses faster than Earl Campbell could bust through a holeand eject rolling, crumpled defenders out from under his mud-flap thigh pads. Love Ya Blue. These were fast and heady times, when Houston's population zoomed up from being the 7th-largest American city to the fourth-largest, where it still stands today and continues its boundless big-bang business expansion.
Houston's mushrooming suburbs, however, hadno charms to soothe the restless dreams of my youth. Doubtless, no American city would have. The ensuing rebellion of my teens and early 20s had its consequences. Fueled on booze, drugs and adrenalized disenchantment, I zig-zagged the Bayou City's vast muddy underbelly as a young man and got caught up more than once. I was introduced to the city's infamous law-enforcement chokehold.
Growing up, you heard plenty of stories about Houston police and the processions of nightstick-bludgeoned, bloated bodies floating belly-up in the swampy backwaters of Buffalo Bayou. From Jose Campos Torresand the Moody Park Riots to routinely fatal "street justice" beatings and the throwdown-gun murder of Randy Webster (made into a 1981 TV movie), word on the street was that if you got on the wrong side of the Houston Police Department, you might have to worry more about going to the morgue than going to jail. Texas Monthly- a perennial winner of National Magazine Awards and one of my faves - covered this very well in the September 1977 article, Support Your Local Police - Or Else, by the excellent journalist Tom Curtis(whom I had the honor of interning with as a reformed delinquent and college journalism major in 1990).
What I discovered in the late '80s was that if you survived being taken down, hog-tied and trounced like a handcuffed pinata by HPD, then you had the absolute hellhole of the Harris County Jailand its maniacally violent sheriff's department deputies to contend with.
How bad was it? The third-largest jail in America was (and, by all accounts, still is) a lockup in which the greatest threat of bodily harm comes not from other inmates, but from the deeply ingrained, institutional brutality of the guards. Inmate gang fights and race wars? Forgedda'bout it. As I saw for myself in 1988-89, it was the guards who could kill you.
If you so much as inadvertently met eyes with one of these jackbooted goons, they'd sucker punch you and slam you up against a wall, triggering a beserker feeding frenzy in which other nearby guards would drop everything and race up to get in on the action. I saw moaning inmates dragged across the floor into nearby beatdown rooms, where gangs of deputies would run inside with rubber gloves to pummel them into lifeless pulps. (The gloves caused less visible bruising and cuts.) The inmates' cries of pain and pleas for mercy, and the sickening meat thuds of fists and boots striking flesh and bone, would echo and reverberate throughout the jail's extremely overcrowded inmate pods. (A 24-man pod would be overflowing with 100-plus men, with flimsy mattresses and refuse covering every square inch of the filthy floor.)
A bitter bile of anger would rise up as I witnessed the deputy beatdowns, their shrill laughter and taunts punctuating the outrage. Once, while working as a jail trustee, I witnessed two deputies throw a decrepit old man down a flight of stairs. I have no idea if the poor guy lived through the experience, but word on the block was that as the man was being gurnied into the emergency room, the guards told hospital staff he had a "seizure" and accidentally tumbled down the stairs.
"If you don't like jail, don't come here," was the popular refrain of the deputies, as if inflicting terrible pain and humiliation on inmates - frequently jailed on non-violent charges - was some kind of justifiable deterrent. This dumb philosophy, of course, continues to display its effectiveness with America's world-leading prison population, which is the ultimate role model of how to achieve rampant recidivism rates. (Alas, so many jobs and so many billions in criminal justice profiteering relies on the awe-inspiring rehabilitative failure of the U.S. Law Enforcement Industrial Complex.)
So you can imagine the cold slap of resentful recollection when, during my recent Houston visit, I picked up a copy of the Houston Pressand read the very same words highlighted above, as quoted in the Sept. 10 article, Jail Hell, by staff reporter Randall Patterson. Mr. Patterson, who waited outside the jail and interviewed numerous released inmates about their experiences inside, presented eyewitness accounts that clearly indicate that nothing has changed at the abominable Harris County Jailin the 20 years since my experiences there. This, in spite of many media exposes and five-plus years of investigative intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice.
From Mr. Patterson's Houston Press report:
The inmates couldn't help but perceive a general lack of concern for their welfare.
They noticed it through the many acts of omission, as when, during intake, Charlotte Lavan informed the guard that she was both anemic and pregnant, and the guard replied, "We don't give a fuck!" And left her to her fate.
But the inmates mainly felt the disregard as they were being beaten. Justice Department officials were not the only ones with "serious concerns about the use of force at the Jail," as the June report stated. The guards will "beat your ass," said Wade. "They beat my ass."
He told of an earlier arrest on a drunk-and-disorderly charge, and of being handcuffed to a table at a precinct station, "mouthing off" to the cop, when the cop started hitting him in the face. Wade's nose was broken. There was "blood everywhere," and in that condition, he arrived at the jail, where three "big old boys" dragged him into a room in the receiving area, sat him down and resumed beating him in the head. "They kept telling me, 'Put your face up, pussy,'" Wade remembered, and when he wouldn't lift his face to the blows, "that's when one big old cop kicked me in the chest with his boot."
Another man, jailed for the fourth time on drug charges — "Roy Lee Colbert. I am not afraid" — recalled being led out of court once and finding himself alone in an anteroom with four of his jailers. "Get on your fucking knees," said one, and, dropping obediently, Colbert says he was hit once with a fist, "hard force," in the rib cage. Eventually he understood that he had violated the stricture to sit perfectly still while in court, by stretching his arms.
There were other stories — of a prisoner being slapped in the face for trying to explain he wasn't making noise; of a female prisoner being thrown into the wall, kicked upon the floor and pinned there for stepping out of line; of another female prisoner being tossed head-first into the concrete for looking suspicious during a strip search.
What most of the stories had in common was some effort to conceal the violence, at least from other prisoners. Before the inmate was slapped in the face, the guard, according to 18-year-old Salvador Santillan, shouted, "Everyone turn your head! Face toward the left!" And as the other inmate was knocked down for stepping out of line, another guard, according to Rodney, told everyone else to face forward: "All you motherfuckers look forward!"
Wade said prisoners are often dragged out of the holding cells, "but you know they're getting their ass beat, because you hear screams, and then you don't hear nothing." Colbert said, "They'll try to hit you in the body where it won't leave a mark." And if perchance the guards do mark you, Colbert was not the only prisoner to say, they'll tell your family you've lost visiting privileges and put you in solitary until you heal.
And Colbert was told, "You don't like jail, don't come here."
In 1990, after receiving treatment and getting involved in 12-step programs, I began a three-term stint as editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. I was on my way to a journalism career in which I would work as an award-winning reporter and editor at three of the Lone Star State's biggest daily newspapers.
It was during my reformed stage as young Houston reporter that I first fell in love with my hometown. I moved into a duplex in the incomparable Montrose - a resplendently eclectic, sprawling neighborhood rich in art, culture and eccentricity. It's hard to describe the countless layers of coolness in Montrose, a harmonious conglomeration of fine art galleries, museums and street "pop art," speckled with coffee shops, ethnic eateries and sidewalk cafes, junk shops, tattoo parlors, tarot readers, and vintage clothing boutiques. A pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, filled with the lush greenery of old-growth oaks and blossoming botanical shubberies, Montrose encapsulates a charming variety of clashing architectural styles and structures, from kitschy retro diners and stucco mansions to gingerbread houses, gentrified contemporary town homes and rows of brightly painted, hardwood-floored duplexes.
Montrose is also one of nation's largest gay and lesbian communities. As any urban development expert knows, gays frequently lead the charge of gentrification, and Houston's vibrant gay community was undoubtedly the pioneering force of Montrose. Today, my favorite neighborhood of all time is a peacefully co-existing mishmash of hippies and hipsters, bohemians and goths, affluent professionals and starving artists, and immigrant families speaking dozens of languages from dozens of countries of origin.
But hey, that's just one cool neighborhood in the enormous, 581-square-mile expanse of Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city and far and away more cosmopolitan, artistically colorful and culturally diverse than Dallas, which is perhaps the most pretentiously vapid, plastic metropolis in the world. (Gotta give props to Fort Worth, though - great town.)
Houston is mighty, a veritable global powerhouse. The "Energy Capital of the World" label, while true, is really a distraction to everything else, which is far too much to list in one day. Suffice it to say, the Houston economy is high-tech, diversified and internationally influential. Houston is ranked as the No. 2 city for Fortune 500 headquarters, and it currently has more Fortune 100 fastest-growing companies (16) than any U.S. state except for California, which has only two more. The Houston MSA’s Gross Area Product (GAP) in 2007 was $416.6 billion — slightly larger than the GDPs of Belgium, Malaysia, Venezuela and Sweden.
Personally, I have never travelled the streets of any city where you can hear more different languages being spoken by international visitors, except for New York. Much like the Big Apple, this is a city where you stroll along and listen to a group of suits walking next to you speaking in German, while behind you is a woman on her cell phone having a conversation in Chinese. Only New York has more than Houston's 88 foreign consulates.
And Houston's populace is one of the most racially integrated and harmonious to be found in any city of its size. I've often said that Houston is the friendliest big city in the world. This city gave me the priceless pleasure of getting along swimmingly with everybody, regardless of race, creed, sexual preference or political persuasion. It's the melting pot, done right.
The arts? Once again, only New York has more theater seats than the Houston Theater District. Houston is one of only five cities in the world with permanent professional resident companies in all of the major performing arts disciplines of opera, music, ballet and theater.
We could go on forever here. "Houston," the first word uttered by the first human to set foot on the moon, speaking to NASA mission control at Johnson Space Center. The Houston Bay Area - one of the nation's largest boating communities. Houston, home of the Texas Medical Center , the world's largest and finest medical center that treats some 5 million patients each year from all over the world.
And, to get back to the bad and the ugly ... Houston, one of America's most historically brutal law enforcement strongholds. It's the undisputed "death penalty capital of the world," whose former handlebar-moustached district attorney, John B. Holmes, Jr., once remarked on the phenomenon of city cops firing dozens of slugs into unarmed suspects, saying, "The analogy I use, is that if it is okay to kill a guy dead, it is okay to kill him dead, dead, dead."
Mr. Holmes, who I interviewed once as a reporter with the Houston Chronicle in the early '90s, was a real card. Every other word out of his mouth was a profanity. His office was a ridiculous theater of taxidermy, the antlers of slain deer and antelopes and various Wild West conversation pieces enhancing, in my view, the silly stage character of someone who should have never come close to having the government-sanctioned power to kill humans.
A lot of Houston reporters really thought good 'ol Johnny Holmes was aces - the guy cussed like a sailor and colorfully spoke his mind, unlike the evasive, PR-polished gobbledy gook of other city politicians. (Funny how his profanities and crudities never made it in print; he had the Chronicle's reporters tied around his big death-row trigger finger.) But he was shrewd, ambitious and committed. Fueled by the "get tough on crime" political hysteria of the time, Mr. Holmes built one of the most well-oiled and powerful prosecutorial machines our nation has ever seen, doubling his office's staff to 230 hard-nosed prosecutors and operating a $32 million annual budget.
During his 21-year tenure as DA, from 1979 to 2000, Mr. Holmes' hang-'em-high "justice" machine sent untold thousands to populate Texas' exploding prison system - with over 200 of them dispatched to the state's internationally notorious Death Row. Since 1982, the Lone Star State has executed 420 men and three women by lethal injection. Running a distant second is Virginia with 103.
Legendary Houston defense attorney, Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, once said of Mr. Holmes: "Johnny is a west-of-the-Pecos kind of guy. He is not a Renaissance man. His theory is, 'Let's kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Hey, slice it anyway you like. But if this rapacious pursuit of state-sanctioned executions doesn't make a richly revealing statement about the violent psyche of Houston's law enforcement institutions ... well ... pardon me if I just keep on dreamin'.
In addition, it was always abundantly clear to me that any charges or inquiries that had likely come across Mr. Holmes' desk regarding suspicious inmate deaths at Harris County Jail somehow never saw the light of day. The 24/7 routine of brutality and neglect at the jail was never addressed, to my knowledge, in any kind of prosecutorial way. The civil courts have historically been, and continue to be, the only real recourse for the many familes whose loved ones have mysteriously died in Harris County Jail.
Consider the findings regarding the "unnecessary force" used by Harris County Jail deputies in the U.S. Department of Justice report, released only a few months ago in June 2009:
These and other similar incidents suggest that staff use hazardous restraint and force techniques without appropriate guidance or sanction. In some cases, medical records confirm that detainees may have suffered notable injuries, such as lacerations to the scalp or eye. Notably, when force was investigated by supervisors, it appears that the supervisors often determined that staff’s use of force was appropriate without obtaining statements.
Jail policy does not clearly require the individual using force to file a use of force report; nor does Jail policy provide for routine, systematic collection of witness statements. When supervisors review use of force incidents, they do not have ready access to important evidence. Instead, they appear to rely excessively on officer statements to determine what happened during an incident.
If you ask me, these guys have been literally getting away with murder for decades. Courthouse digging will turn up scads of wrongful death suits against Harris County concerning inmates who were checked in alive and checked out in a body bag. According to a Houston Chronicle investigation, at least 101 inmates died while in custody there between 2001 and 2007.
And here's the kicker: a large percentage of these folks, unable to afford bail and down on their luck, are being held on petty, non-violent charges as they await trial for a year or longer, with the presumption of innocence. From last month's excellent Chronicle report by Lise Olsen:
More than half of the 11,500 inmates crammed into the Harris County Jail have not yet been found guilty of a crime but await their day in court confined with convicted criminals in conditions that repeatedly flunk state and federal safety inspections.
The most common accusation against them: possession of a crack pipe or minuscule amount of drugs. Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, at least 500 county inmates have been locked up for more than a year as they wait to be judged, according to an analysis of inmate data by the Houston Chronicle.
About 1,200 have been jailed six months or more though many face only minor felony charges, such as bouncing checks, credit card fraud, trespassing or even civil violations. In fact, around 200 inmates, theoretically innocent until proven guilty, appear to already have served more than the minimum sentence for the crime they allegedly committed, based on the newspaper's analysis of inmate data provided by the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
As detailed last month in this Houston Press report, the latest wrongful death suit comes from the family of a 44-year-old woman who died in custody last year. The suit alleges that jail staff ignored the woman's severe leg pain for three days and taunted her until she died. Nice.
In addition to the atrocity of Harris County Jail, it always seemed clear to me that county prosecutors have greased the grand jury skids for Houston cops who have been caught beating and shooting unarmed citizens. The list of inexplicable no-bills in these cases is astonishing, but typical of most American cities. More often than not, bad cops beat the rap.
Let's hope this doesn't happen with the case of poor Robbie Tolan, who was wrongfully accosted by cops this past New Year's Eve on bogus suspicians that he stole his own car, then shot in front his horrified parents while lying on his back in his own driveway. The shooting officer, Sgt. Jeff Cotton, was recently charged with aggravated assault, but that's a long way from a jury finding he did anything improper.
Houston, you've got a problem. And you've had it for a very long time. I tend to think that nothing short of a complete federal takeover of Harris County Jail can root out the long-entrenched, institutional barbarism of the county jailers. But that will probably never happen - the locals usually con and outsmart interlopers.
In 1977, the discovery of Jose Campos Torres' bloated and bludgeoned corpse in Buffalo Bayou capped a terrible period of escalating revelations and scandals about the Houston Police Department's notorious brutality. Exasperated, then-Mayor Fred Hofheinz lamented, "There is something loose in this city that is an illness."
Flash forward to 2009: Has anything really changed?
Hey, we haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg, here. Did I mention the HPD crime lab, which has performed thousands of shoddy and utterly unreliable tests that have produced tons of tainted evidence used in convictions, including scientifically unsound DNA tests? DNA Super Lawyer Barry Schecksaid Harris County is the worst place in the world for a crime lab scandal: "We already know that they couldn't do DNA testing properly. Now we have a scandal that calls into question many thousands more cases. And this jurisdiction has produced more executions than any other county in America.''
It should also be noted that a 2007 Houston Chronicle investigationof HPD's first 900 taser incidents revealed that no crime was being committed in 350 of those cases. As you know, tasers or "stun guns" are meant to be an alternative to deadly force. (Although many Americans have died from the shock, anyway.)
The Chronicle analysis showed that HPD officers still "shot, wounded and killed as many people as before the widespread deployment of tasers." Moreover, Houston cops used their stun guns frequently in situations that did not warrant violent force, such as "traffic stops, disturbances and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people."
Typical. Used to be that the folks in Houston's most impoverished minority neighborhoods received the brutal brunt of the city's legion of crooked officers, but I think it's much less about race today and much more about the generational, genetically ingrained violence of the city's law enforcement agencies and the plain power-tripping arrogance of being above the law because you are the law.
That's too bad for the good cops and decent jailers in Houston whose commitment to serve, protect and treat citizens humanely is obscured by the goon squads. But it's mostly too bad for the good people of Houston, one of the greatest cities on Earth, still choked with corrupt cowboy cops in an antiquated and unconstitutionally abusive law-enforcement death grip.
And it's more than a little disturbing to me, obviously.
When I closed my hotel room window, I walked across the room to turn up the air conditioning and decided I might try to hit an old Montrose lunch spot the next day for lunch. Then I considered driving out to see my old neighborhoods and check out my childhood homes and hangouts. Nope. Not enough time.
So I may be coming back to see you again soon, Houston.
I just had the lucid realization that in spite of those ugly memories and lingering resentments, I'll always be proud to call myself a Houstonian.
"I'm not sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say 'this is the way it's got to be…' I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders." -Presidential Candidate George W. Bush, Oct. 3, 2000
But today was a real doozy, as you can see in the above photo of stunned Iraqis shambling about the freshly truck-bombed ruins of their Khazna village, near Mosul. At least 50 civilians were killed today in a starburst of bombings throughout Northern Iraq and Baghdad. Hundreds more were wounded. (Actually, more than 100 Iraqis have been killed in the past four days, the worst death toll since the U.S. troop pull-out on June 30.)
You may recall that U.S. Col. Timothy R. Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, made quite a stir last month with his leaked memo, in which he proclaimed it's "time for us to declare victory and go." This so-called "victory" can be found in the comforting knowledge that while "Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes ... we have made the Iraqi Security Forces strong enough for the internal security mission." In other words, the Iraqi government and security forces have a fighting chance to ward off an overthrow by Al Qaedaor Baathists, but the country will likely collapse into utter upheaval on a scale not yet seen after the troops go home. Mission accomplished, right?
According to news reports, today's deadly bombings were carried out by Al Qaeda operativesas part of their strategy to attack and kill Iraqi civilians and foment sectarian tensions. It could be a bloody taste of exponentially worse carnage to come.
Nonetheless, let us savor the sweet victory. Our objectives have been "achieved," according to Col. Reese. (Or we're pretty darn close, anyway.) Moreover, the Iraqi people are better off, according to our trustworthy leaders. Hey, we've done a big favor for Iraqi citizens.
If anybody's interested, Helen & Harry Highwater of Unknown Newshave a well-sourced and credible count of the the cumulative death toll in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which today stands at 753,118 (of which 733,232 are in Iraq). These numbers include civilians, U.S. and coalition troops, contractors, journalists and others. Expect the toll to continue its bloody rise for decades to come. (By the way, if you haven't been to Unknown Newsand kicked back for a relaxing, intellectually enriching visit at Helen & Harry's comfy apartment, you should do so immediately. Helen also makes a mean tunafish sandwich, which she'll mail to you for only $5 bucks. In case you couldn't tell, we are huge fans of these fine folks and the long-standing excellence of their wonderful website.)
Question: Will the maimed and traumatized Iraqi childrenwhose parents, siblings and loved ones have been slaughtered as a result of the U.S. invasion grow up with fond feelings and goodwill for the United States? Surely, none of them will be resentful and want revenge or anything like that. Right? And America's tarnished imperialistc image will surely recover nicely after the troops are gone and Iraq metamorphizes into a gigantic, rubble-heaped bomb hole. Yes?
Ah, well. Americans don't care. Cascades of civilian body parts are just what happen in a good and just war, and diligent Defense Department media censoring keeps most of these unsightly images under wraps, anyway. Americans are entertained, however, by television showsand movies about Iraq and the derring do of our G.I. Joe Super Soldiers. The real stuff is a bore and requires reading.
We like to dress up our wars as entertainment extravaganzas for flat-screen home theater systems. If you think about it, only America can make riveting shows about its own wars while they are still ongoing (or failing). The real horror and maleficent consequences of war are mere fodder for dramatic programming.
Even so-called "objective" news coverage comes with dramatic theme music, exciting war graphics and ratings-calibrated, infotainment enhancements. For example, which stirring network-news war theme did you like the best:
Speaking of Call of Duty, the kids can soon look forward to a thrilling new video game about Operation Iraqi Showdown, to be titled Six Days in Fallujah. Heck, with all their video war games, these kids are already skilled enough to man the remote-controlled dronestations. This is excellent for long-term military recruitment.
U.S. intelligence agencies, by the way, farm out up to 70 percent of work to private contractors like Blackwater, which recently changed its name to "Xe" and urges us to join the National Rifle Association on its weird new "U.S. Training" website, which was obviously slapped together in haste to replace the original Blackwater site after the new outbreak of allegations.
As a result, we have fine patriots such as the two Blackwater Gangstas depicted above running amok in Iraq. (For more about how Iraq has been parcelled out and sold to outfits like Blackwater and other war profiteers, check out Iraq for Sale.)
Now, if the neo-cons would hire these mercenaries to provide security for the rabidly ill-informed Republican ninnies who are gassing up all these healthcare-reform townhall meetings, the GOP would really be getting somewhere.
I am the PMMF Custodian, entrusted by Platypus Maximus, who sees through eyes that only see what's zen. His roots were formed by twisted roots. His roots were twisted then. (I'm also a communications strategist, writer, cultural critic and social commentator.)
