How have you been feeling lately? Good, I hope… because if you’ve been ill, you’re probably discovering how massively expensive it is to get treatment, even if you have health 
insurance. In America, it really takes a major illness to know whether or not you have what could be termed adequate coverage (and if you’re one of the 47 million who have no insurance at all, the question doesn’t even arise). But the utter failure of this system shows up in the little details as well. Not to bore you with my personal foibles, but for the last five or so years I’ve had dental insurance… which means, in my case, if I have any substantial work done – crowns, for instance – I can expect to pay $1,000 out of pocket instead of $1,600 (assuming it happens no more than once a year). Don’t know about you, but that grand is a little hard to put my hands on, so I tend to throw it on the old credit card and whittle it down month by month. That, in miniature, is one illustration of how people can get into serious financial trouble simply by being unfortunate enough to get sick or injured.
Okay, I’m probably considered a bad example of what’s wrong with this system. But sometimes bad examples like me can illuminate the problem as much as the good ones do. I’ve got a decent job, good health insurance, okay dental, and generally good health thus far. Not so very long ago, though, I had one of those no-frills policies that politicians (who enjoy superior government-supplied coverage) often recommend for us ordinary folk. And it’s real easy with a plan like that to end up thousands in the hole if just a couple of things go wrong at the same time. At one point, a trip to the doctor and some blood work ran me $500. My plan picked up $0. (That’s right: $0. Never saw a dime out of them.) With a plan like that, even relatively routine preventive care kicks the shit out of you financially. I don’t even want to contemplate what a prolonged hospital stay would do.
This is the magic of the marketplace. As a prole, I was supposed to be pumping money into the health insurance company at that point, not pulling money out. I know I’ve mentioned this before in these pages, but it’s worth saying again – our mostly-privatized health care system is an example 
of “lemon socialism”; privatize the profitable part of a business and socialize the costly part. The government provides coverage for the elderly, the poor, the infirm, etc. … all of the folks who require more care. That leaves the rest of us to the marketplace, where these massive private health insurance companies can decide who to cover, whose bills to pay, etc. Young and middle aged workers tend to pay in more than they take out of health insurance – by leaving them out of the government system, we create a situation where that system will inevitably run massive deficits over time. If we all participated in the same system, the healthy would compensate for the chronically ill, the elderly, etc. That’s the way it works in other industrialized countries – it could work here.
Forget “Harry and Louise”. I hate to sound like a tin-pot nationalist, but this is America. If other nations can do it, so the hell can we.
luv u,
jp
Good god, man. Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure? We never used to be so risk averse. We used to bear to the left and take chances. Now look at us. (You can use a smoked glass lens, if you prefer.) We’re worried about lack of gravity, lack of oxygen, exposure to radiation – what a bunch of wimps! The only one who’s really not intimidated by any of this is the mansized tuber. (At least he hasn’t said anything about it to me.) Fact is, we have to do these tours on the cheap, what with a recession on and all that. Money’s tight, and our corporate label is even tighter. They don’t even want to budget for us, let alone a ship to carry us in. Looks like we’ll be relying on comped meals again. Ever try to get a free lunch on Uranus? Hah. Take it from me – it’s even less appetizing than it sounds.
Leader is so very fond of. Mitch reasoned that, in as much as that type of rocket had successfully put a satellite in orbit just a few short weeks ago, it would probably serve us well. When I pointed out that the thing had actually, well, fallen apart and crashed into the ocean, he seemed a bit irked. It’s almost as if he wants us to crash and burn. Sometimes I wonder about Mitch. What kind of mad science advisor is he, anyway?
winter. (I think the plows hit it – terrible thing.) So Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had little to add to this debate. Fact is, he’s thinking about joining the Marvin Depreciation Society, a facebook group devoted to “Marvin the Paranoid Android”, who is a character in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I think Marvin is having a slight identity crisis over the fact of the other robotic Marvin’s existence, and is hoping the depreciation society will devalue the other Marvin, thereby enhancing his own value. Yeah, it’s complicated. (In addition, he and Professor John Robinson had words the other day, so it could be the Jupiter 2 option is off the table.)
The Times of London quotes a U.S. commander as describing this action in terms of a “D-Day Moment”, but in the context of a conflict that has lasted nearly twice as long as America’s part in World War II, this would seem in relative terms more like a second. Also, rather than attacking the flank of the most powerful military force in the world, we are invading a battered, impoverished region of one of the planet’s most miserable nations – a place where people struggle to subsist, and where large-scale conflict will likely result in a major displacement of the population, perhaps approaching the scale of what is now occurring across the border in Pakistan’s tribal departments.
WAR TAX LEVIES. Our system has corrected for this oversight, which proved the undoing of our last major imperial enterprise – the Indochina wars. By eliminating these two age-old institutional pillars of warfare, we have effectively disconnected the bulk of our population from the costs of warfare. Fueled by borrowed treasure and the victims of economic misfortune, our wars have become self-perpetuating. Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be a great deal harder to stop than was Vietnam (and it was hard to stop the Vietnam war, with the end coming far too late for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). This flurry of recent fighting is just another flare up in what has proven a far longer, more difficult campaign than anyone thought going in. The real D-Day question is, when will our V-E day arrive?
Nah, Big Green’s not doing oldies – no sweat, man. Been there, done that. Besides, if you try to pull that off in the Crab Nebula, they’ll cook you for dinner. Literally. (Ask 
our notes, all of our old song lists, and pore through the lot, writing down the ones we want to do, crossing out the ones we don’t. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has his personal favorites, and his understanding of music is limited to a few lines from the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which his inventor Mitch Macaphee inserted into his memory banks as test data. (Hey… he’s going to be traveling with us to the great beyond, so why not allow him a few requests, right? I said, am I right? Hel-looooo?)
York State Senate. In fact, in the midst of our desperation, we’ve asked Mitch Macaphee for his assistance. (Sometimes a mad scientist can see his way out of a conundrum much more easily than, say, an unemployed musician or an oversized root vegetable.) It took Mitch about three hours to come up with a solution of sorts. He walked in from his lab with a small, oblong metal box which he called the “Tune-o-matic.” He pressed a red button on the right side of the machine, and a slip of paper emerged from a small slot on the opposite side. The paper has some writing on it that appeared to be in Vietnamese. Mitch took one look at that and stormed out of the room with the tune-o-matic under one arm. There has since been some banging and swearing from behind the closed door of his lab… I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this wondrous device presently.
that network operates on a definition of politics that is nearly indistinguishable from that of personality and celebrity. So much of the discussion is about individuals, about style, about posture more than policy. Incidents like Jackson’s death put it in harsh relief. They’ll be on this for days, turning it like a roast on a rotisserie… and they won’t be alone in that. It’s just the type of narrative our pop culture loves best: the mega-star, staggeringly popular yet strangely isolated, follows a long downward trajectory into a very public disintegration, then dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Elvis all over again. That and the myth of the young crash-and-burn star (e.g. Curt Cobain) are particular favorites. I’m sorry Jackson’s dead, but honestly… is he the only one today?
mansion to the hospital, one wonders how many Iraqis met their end as a result of the violence we ignited; how many Afghans were shaken down by a kleptocratic state run by warlords and fueled by international aid dollars; how many nameless detainees were beaten, starved, electrocuted, waterboarded, or worse in some third-world dungeon on the orders of a faceless bureaucrat. And those are only the fires we started; there are also those we merely profit from, like the continuing blood-letting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (And yes, before you email, we did have something to do with putting the Congo in the state it’s in today, funding and directing a terrorist army in the sixties that secured the deranged Mobutu’s grip on power.) In short, there’s no such thing as a slow news day… and no day when it becomes any less important to talk about injustice the world over.
Stage props? Never really thought much of them, frankly. What the hell are we, summer stock? We’re a bleedin’ band, man! Oh, all right, all right. But just the enormous styrofoam sphinx. No pyramid. I SAID, NO PYRAMID!
Yeah, it’s hard to keep everyone happy around here, particularly now that we’re in the planning stages of our next interplanetary tour, tentatively titled: “Destination Space: Big Green’s Galactic Tour 2009″. What’s the itinerary? Glad you asked. Nothing is written in stone, as you might well imagine. All we’ve got around the mill is pencils and pens, no chisels. What we’ve got written on paper, however, is perhaps worthy of mention. Can’t really share all the details, but what I can tell you is that, if you happen to be in the neighborhood of the planet Neptune sometime in mid-July, you may get the opportunity to see us bomb-out at yet another airless alien pub. We’re determined to book better venues this time out, but if things go the way they usually go (and, well… they usually do), we’ll probably play those other places as well. Part of the deal, friends. 
Now, to be fair to Anti-Lincoln, he’s not the only one who wants to add some kind of visual element to our performances. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) even went so far as to do a sketch of a Big Green stage set – one that has an enormous planet hanging down in the middle (either that or a cantaloupe, I’m not sure which). I think he envisions some expanded performing role for himself and for the man-sized tuber. They used to be satisfied with grabbing a tuba or a banjo or a second-hand guitar and framming away on one side of the stage… now it has to be something more dramatic. I think for the tuber it’s all about that heady experience he had during his trip back to the 1860s. Or maybe it’s just aphids. (He’s been looking a bit badgered lately.)
around the fringes in our system, when the margins are relatively tight. Iran has much more serious, systemic problems. Even so, the people there obviously know what to do when things go badly wrong – get out in the street. These are the people we want to bomb so badly. I hope Americans are taking a close look at those folks out in the street, putting their necks on the line. This is the enemy, folks – the “axis of evil”. Whatever Bush used to say about having no quarrel with the Iranian people, it is they who would suffer in the event of any confrontation between our countries, just as they have suffered in the past, when we overthrew Mossadeq in 1953, through the decades of rule by our ally the Shah, and under massive assault from our other ally Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. Just take a real close look.
Does this Iran election controversy have a familiar ring to it? If so, perhaps it’s because something very similar happened in Mexico in 2006, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ran against Filipe Calderon and most likely won the election, but was chiseled out of the presidency by Calderon (with the full support of the Bush administration, of course). To look at news coverage of Mexico today and its relationship with the United States, you would never know that there was any question surrounding Calderon’s election. Massive street protests yielded no change, no re-run of the election, no nothing. Could be that Iran’s current uprising will end the same way, despite the hopes of many. That would be sad for the many in Iran who wanted things to change, but with respect to U.S. policy, it is we who must change, whoever the president may be. We’ve invaded and occupied countries on both sides of Iran, we regularly threaten them with massive destruction, and yet we speak of them as the outlaw state. Hypocrisy, anyone?
It seems I’m too trusting. We all are here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s crap shack of distinction. Oh, we’ve had a lot of crap shacks through the years, from a tumbled-down house on Irving Avenue in Castleton-On-Hudson to the slightly less beat up place next door to it…. (and one or two others, if memory serves). Then of course there was the lean-to in Sri Lanka. (What happened to that? It leaned fro.) Anyway, next to all those joints, this abandoned hammer mill is the next best thing to being someplace decent. And yet, here we are… lights off, phone disconnected, water intermittent, gravity reversed (Mitch Macaphee’s been at it again)… It all comes down to one thing: frankincense. No, wait. It’s another word…. Money. Yeah, that’s it. Bleedin’ money. 
why he’s the only one with any cash around here. For chrissake, the government has dropped more than one grant on him for developing “hybrids”. The fools think Mitch is building cars; instead, he’s formulating a cyborg army in his spare time. I should have him pay the electric bill – he’s the bastard that’s using it all. One might suppose that Marvin (my personal robot assistant), built some years back by Mitch, was some kind of prototype, but not a bit of it. Marvin is pure robot; no organic components whatsoever. He’s clean, man. Ergo, he has no role in the coming reign of the cyborgs. (Not to worry, friends. This is just one of Mitch’s pipe dreams. All mad scientists must have them.)
the situation calls for, including standing out in the street and selling #3 pencils. Particularly when we specifically ask him to do this kind of thing… which, of course, we did, just as soon as he wheeled himself out of the time warp and back into the 21st century. And yes, I did say #3 pencils (we sold out of the #2’s last week). Truth be told, his take has been somewhat disappointing thus far. Perhaps he needs bigger pencils. Marvin! See if we’ve got any of the big number threes! 
keeping things from getting out of hand. I’ve talked about the foreign policy establishment in the Obama administration not being all that different from the late Bush II administration (or that of Bush’s father, for that matter). On the domestic policy front, we see more of the same. All of the major economic decisions are being shaped by Wall Street types, focusing on the health of companies rather than the well-being of workers. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the auto company bailouts. Obama’s automotive task force is made up largely of financial types, and their solutions reflect that experience. What the hell – we could have gotten THAT from McCain. 
some major financial institutions? The fact is, some of them wouldn’t even exist anymore if it wasn’t for our massive infusions of cash. Maybe we should, I don’t know, direct them to provide some capital to expand industrial production in the United States, focused on useful stuff (rather than superfluous weapons systems). Yes, I know… that sounds an awful lot like central planning and socialism, but what the fuck – if we leave this up to the corporate boards and the financial mavens, what’s left of our industrial capacity will have vanished in a few short years, along with our infrastructure for research and development. Nothing will be made here, nothing will be invented here… and the majority of us will be living in Hoovervilles. (Too many of us are right now, frankly.)
Oh, hi. Good god, y’all…. this is a grueling task. To what do I refer, you may ask? No, I’m not making gruel, at least not this evening. (Tomorrow’s menu, however, may include that dubious delicacy… who knows?) Lord, no… many of us here are engaged in finding evidence of the man-sized tuber in various historical accounts, including encyclopedias, history textbooks, comics, etc. After all, it is HE who saved the Republic from a fate worse than death. It is HE who rescued the honor of our most revered president and restored him to the exalted position he once held in the pantheon of the American story. And it is HE who introduced the chocolate cream pie to the post-civil war dinner table… and this BEFORE the invention of the refrigerator. Yes, this is one man-sized tuber that’s larger than life. 
seem an impossible objective: wrest control of the nation away from that nefarious usurper, anti-matter Lincoln, who had inserted himself into the machinery of state like a log in the works. Some kind of conspiracy, you say? An evil effort to subvert the judgment of history and render meaningless the near-incalculable contribution of one man-sized tuber?
Mitch Macaphee to apply his massive brain to the problem. He actually very cleverly reached back in time to the instant anti-Lincoln arrived in the past and snatched him back to futureland before he could do all that damage. Near as we can tell, all is back as it was before. Except for one small detail. This will make you laugh. Remember president George H. W. Bush? Well, because of some insignificant act on the part of anti-Lincoln back in 1864, Bush’s son George W. became the 43rd president. Weirdest thing.