The Linear Canvas

I wrote this in October 1999. It was published in the USA Today newspaper. I just found it in a box the other day and I thought I’d share it. It was a comment on an article that had been published in the USA Today about how the East Germans were resentful that their lives had changed so dramatically since the fall of communism. The text was heavily edited by the editors at USA Today, but it is mostly as originally written

I wasn’t shocked to read in USA TODAY that some Germans in the eastern part of Germany aren’t liking capitalism as well they did communism ("Glow is wearing off in the east," News, Oct. 11). A certain level of corruption is not unique to either communism or capitalism. Under communism, everyone suspected the government was corrupt, but could do nothing about it. With capitalism, people know the government is corrupt, but unfortunately, they still cannot do anything about it. But of the two alternatives, I prefer at least knowing.

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If you think that the recent Newsweek article that contained a section about the desecration of the Quaran was fiction, I would have to tell you I am not so sure. It is just the kind of thing that our favorite American fascists (also known as the neo-cons), would do. It seems they are quite good at denial, cover up, diversion, and finally shifting the blame to others. There is real evidence that American CIA interrogators routinely abused Muslims and had much contempt for anything connected with their religion too. Why is it so hard to believe that they would stop at destroying a book? The question is not whether CIA interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and other Islamic religious penitentiary’s destroyed the Quaran, it is how many they have destroyed, so far.

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Why does the media not report important news first anymore? It seems that the news that should be on page one is now on page twenty. If the mistakes that the Bush regime has made, were made in the Clinton presidency, there would have been hell to pay. Now Republican moral, policy, fund raising, and governmental financial planning mistakes only merit a small article in the bottom right corner of page 19B, if they are reported at all. Just because Bush’s controllers have him lie and then more than two years have passed, that still doesn’t make his lies true. Where is our media? Is this a knee jerk to the far right that resulted from the mostly moderate media being embarrassed by being called liberal or is this the billionaire media moguls aiding and abetting the revolution that throws out all democratic principles? Arrggh!

I was living in the Toledo, Ohio area when the city council there approved the smoking ban in 2003. I heard and saw the same debate that I now see in the Columbus area news. There were threats that bars and restaurants would close and those customers were being forced to drive or move to other areas so they could smoke. One Toledo bar owner complained in a front-page newspaper story that yes, maybe, more non-smokers would start coming to her bar, but non-smokers would leave by midnight to go home. Only smokers would stay until the bar closed at 2:30AM. Just a few days later a bar customer, said that since he couldn’t smoke in a Toledo bar, he and his friends would start frequenting bars in surrounding communities more often that did allow smoking. When a bar went out of business within days of the ban, smoking advocates pointed to it as an example of this law’s devastating effect.

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When I was a little boy, there weren’t as many things for people to get into trouble doing. The only thing a person could really do that was at least somewhat naughty was to drink heavily or go to Las Vegas and gamble. There were no lotteries then and there was no gambling anywhere else either, that was legal. There were many things different at that time. On Sundays almost every business was closed. There were few gas stations open. If you found yourself needing anything other than spending the day at church, you were pretty much out of luck.

I can remember when Ohio first began its lottery. I was young, so I did not know what it really meant. We had been told by the gambling advocates, that the lottery proceeds would help schools buy the things that they needed. I am not sure, but I doubt that there was ever much truth to that then or now. At the time, I did not realize that the difference between a lottery and gambling in Ohio, was that the lottery was legal.

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Recently there have been many reports about mad cow disease in the news. Those stories concerned cattle owned and slaughtered in the Pacific Northwest. These cows were obviously brought here from Canada, where they had found other infected cattle last year. But because of the close ties the Canadians have with Great Britain, there is no doubt that the incidence of mad cow disease is related to either the actual importation of cattle to Canada from Britain or the feed that was ingested by the cattle. Britain, our Iraq conflict ally, is the world’s largest producer of mad cow disease and has many more cases of the disease every year than the whole world combined.

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When I read about the young man in Washington state who was thrown out of the Eagle Scouts for admitting he did not believe in God, I at first thought how I had been with the Scouts when I was young, totally unaware that they did not allow gays or atheists to join. No one ever brought it up. I am not sure how I would’ve felt about a child that was in my Scout troop that was gay or an atheist. I would say to some it would have been an issue, but to others not so much.

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I went to the restroom at a Chili’s restaurant in Toledo, Ohio last Friday. Like a lot of restaurants, they had copies of that days USA Today above the urinals. One urinal had the front page, the other had the sports section. I chose the front page. I read some of the headlines and was disturbed at the change in political direction USA Today has taken over the years.

I began reading USA Today right after the publication began. I barely missed an issue up until about six months ago. I was even published in the letters to the editor column twice. I felt a bit lost without it when I couldn’t find a copy. Now I won’t buy it at all. I finally had had enough of USA Today’s desire to make government responsible only to right wing conservatives and reactionaries. I thought about the hundreds of copies of USA Today that I had bought and read over the years.

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