For the few of you left: I'm back...

Although I quite enjoyed my working vacation, the blogosphere calls. While I'm still not up to speed on All Thing Abramoff -- and have yet to conduct the Wilkes-related interview promised before Christmas -- one unusual "net discovery" came to my attention. I'd like to share it with you.

Professor Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and author of Cocaine Politics, may be the world's only writer of elegant parapolitical prose and poetry. He recently composed a Ballad of Drugs and 9/11 which deserves your attention.

The bit that floored me had little to do with drugs, the WTC tragedy, or any underhanded covert dealings. Scott offers an illustration of everything that has gone wrong since this nation chucked the New Deal paradigm for conservative ideology:

...and pushing America and Russia
still further down the path
of increasing superwealth
and declining average income

(my starting salary in ’61
could buy a third of a good Berkeley house
whereas a starting salary today
would pay for perhaps a twentieth)

increasing income disparities
the sign our state is declining
the homeless we no longer support
and have grown used to not thinking about

as we step across them
towards our ATMs
what Sallust and Arnold discerned
in Rome and Victorian London

privatim opulentia
publice egestas
until the republic is suborned
by these forces we cannot see

for which the intellectual price
is a shrinkage of our culture
towards the trivialities
of narcotic games and bottom-feeding poets.

Scott loves footnotes so much that he even works them into the margins of his verse, where we learn that his starting salary in 1961 was $7250.

I've long considered making the experiment of studying old classified ads to see what sort of living a semi-skilled worker (receptionist, file clerk, whatever) could expect back when I was a boy in the 1960s. What percentage of income went to keeping a roof overhead? The figure used to be 25%. In today's Los Angeles, many now pay 70% or more.

Years after Scott started his Berkeley gig, my widowed mother had -- if memory serves -- an annual income of less than $4000. She managed to raise two boys with some measure of dignity. Luxuries were rare, but we knew no true privation.

God only knows how women in that situation manage to survive nowadays.

If the New Deal paradigm (strong unions, a sturdy social safety net, very progressive tax rates and so forth) was so mistaken, then why did people live better back then? If the Reagan/Bush paradigm (few unions, few taxes for the wealthy, few regulations on corporations, etc.) is so superior, then why do our lives annually worsen? How many years must this experiment continue before we pronounce it a failure?

Yet the conservative ideologists keep insisting that their way works. Or will work one of these days. Their exercise in faith reminds me of a health nut I once heard about: She insisted that she could cure strep throat without antibiotics. She was sick for two years. At the end of that time, she pronounced her "treatment" a success.

Call it the triumph of ideology over experience.

I'm not much of a poetry fan. The last long poem to arouse my enthusiasm was The City of Dreadful Night, which is the Gothiest Thing Ever. Don't try to read that one in the middle of the day; it will seem silly. Read it aloud at 2 a.m. after you've made your way through a bottle of Port. Under the proper circumstances, City can be chilling stuff.

But not nearly as chilling as Scott's work.