alias Bruce.

Government Gets the Flu.

I have to say, and I've written, that I've been afraid of this for years. The minute the Bush Administration began gutting public agencies and replacing career regulatory and health experts with political hacks and their underlings, it raised the danger that any sudden public health crisis would overwhelm a broken public health sector.

Now here we are, dangerously close to such a scenario. The World Health Organization has just upgraded its swine flu alert to Phase 5, the second-highest level, meaning that a flu pandemic is "imminent," according to the New York Times. This from today's Times story:

“All countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans,” Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the organization, said at a news conference in Geneva. “Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.”

The first death from swine flu in this country — of a 23-month-old child from Mexico who was being treated in Houston — was reported on Wednesday, along with more infections and hospitalizations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 91 confirmed cases from 10 states, up from 64 cases in 5 states on Tuesday.

Dr. Chan emphasized the need for calm, but at times spoke as if a pandemic had already begun, saying, for instance, “W.H.O. will be tracking the pandemic.” She also emphasized that developing countries tended to have more severe flu epidemics than rich ones, and said her organization and others would need to make special efforts to help poorer nations.

Here in the U.S., a huge problem is that states, starved by the recession and by slashes in federal funding, are sorely ill-equipped to handle the kind of public health emergency that may be about to fall into their laps.

It is not the fault of the corrupt Bush Administration, and the complicitly government-weakening Clinton Administration, that the world's next flu pandemic may be about to happen. It is, however, the fault of those who have cynically monkey-wrenched government capability and expertise that the public sector is now incapable, by recent design, of adequately caring for the public.

Our nation seems to learn cyclically, again and again, why sound, solid government matters. What a tragedy that this is a repeated lesson. Here's hoping that the human costs this time don't continue to dramatically mount.

Soul Priority.

So I'm casting in a trout stream a few evenings ago. It's a downright holy beautiful dusk, about 75 degrees, the light softening into dull orange as the last of the sun filters through the contours of a riverside cornfield littered with straw-colored stalks from last year's crop. The water is ice-clear and swishing-fast and I can feel its cold through my waders. A friend told me the fishing would be incredible for these few days after the big rain that swept the muck out of the stream, and she was right: the trout are leaping out of the water for mayflies, and I already have a hefty brown on my stringer that I'll gratefully take home for dinner after having returned maybe a dozen smaller trout to the water.

I am wading back upstream toward the riverbank trail to head home, and I have basically let go of fishing for the day but I figure, hell, why not cast my way back. So as I slosh upstream I make maybe my second or third casual cast, and a few feet from my left leg -- whammo! -- fish on. Nice one. Whoa. Really nice one. I give it line, play the fish out, try to avoid doing anything stupid, and I clumsily if effectively land it, and, man, it's an even bigger brown than the other, just gorgeous, fat and the length of half my arm and wet-sheened with its brown and yellow skin and red and black speckles. And now, suddenly, I have dinner for two days instead of one. I thank the river and this trout -- which is the least one can do before eating a creature -- and I resume wading upstream, shaking my head. I'd been barely fishing at that point. I'd thought I was done. Who knew?

All of which is a way of saying that time spent without intent is a good thing.

Don't get me wrong; intention matters. A lot. You'd starve without it. Ask anyone who has been hungry. Grasping intentionality, actually, has been one of the great lessons of my life. But there are also many things that planned intention will never, ever bring. A big trout in a spot where you'd never reasonably expect a trout to be is one of them.

Fact is, a nonstop diet of schemed-out intent is a bad thing. It is one of our afflictions as Americans. So many of us rush around in this moment-to-moment stream of appetites, each one 10 minutes long but cumulatively consuming a lifetime: I want this. I need that. I'll accomplish this. I'll have that. And when we look up we're fat, unhappy, sick, and then dead. Because it is never enough. Faster is not more; louder is not stronger; fuller is not happier. It's a starvation diet of gluttony. Because the less the soul gets, the more it craves, and the more it claws for satisfaction in moment-to-moment appetites, the less it receives.

I am convinced, for instance, that this soul starvation is what is behind the current product category of "Extreme" experiences: Extreme sports, Extreme amusement park rides, Extreme vacations, Extreme contests, Extreme caffeine drinks. It's a kind of buried desperation, a panting place within us that lusts for what every next moment might deliver: Wanna feel. Wanna feel.

Action -- in the sense of ceaseless American pursuit -- will never get us there.

But certain kinds of anti-action, or at least interludes of anti-action, will. This antidote to consumptive addiction goes by a million names, and each works pretty well in its way. Meditation, a temporary suspension of intent, is one. Prayer or reverence, a surrender to one's sense of a greater reality, is another. Plain old silence and stillness without plan or destination is another. Call it whatever you want. Do it in whatever way you want. But without some measure of it in your life, you are on a gerbil wheel. Which is why I think so many Americans -- including the followers of a certain goal-directed narcissism that passes itself off as fundamentalist religion -- are spinning out in the hyper-pursuit of true feeling.

A drummer I know, driving home the point at which blindingly-fast technique becomes intuition, said to me one day, "Some things are impossible to play at the speed of thought. But they can be played at the speed of feeling." A Buddhist friend of mine cited a quote: "The great matter of life and death is at hand. Do not waste time." It's all the same thing: your soul, or, if you like, the awareness at the heart of you, wants to be entirely here in the world. When it is not, it gets frantic and unhappy.

This is what, on his best days when he is not caving to expediency, President Barack Obama can now bring to American political identity: soul. I don't mean soul in the sense of cool moves and brother-with-a-red-phone power, although that's all good. I mean soul in the sense of moral integrity. Not the phony kind that praises Jesus while torturing at secret prisons, but the genuine variety that sets and follows humane and just standards for what it means to be an American. Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist put it this way in writing about the current controversy over torture:

And still, we're asking the wrong questions about torture--meanwhile the newspapers still label it as 'harsh interrogation techniques,' like this semantic bullshit means we didn't do something horrible, unspeakable and immoral. Alas, the question still being asked comes in the form of today's New York Times headline story: 'At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?'

That's not the right question or even assumption to debating torture. Torture is immoral and unspeakable under any circumstances. Its efficacy shouldn't even be considered. Why am I such an absolutist about this? Because once we torture we lose our soul. There is nothing left to fight for after that, no brutality that will not be considered or implemented. We are either civilized, enlightened human beings or we are not.

We are a nation in search of some kind of equilibrium with the larger world. This will not come with proud ambition or strutted prowess or studied expertise. It will come only with an honest reckoning of what is right and how to act in accordance with how we ourselves would want to be treated. It's the kind of thing that comes only when you are not trying to prevail: when you have caught your trout and you are headed upstream toward home, having let go of any demand for more.

It's enough to make you want to sit and be quiet for a little while.

David Simon on Drugs.

Here's an irony: For the kind of ruthlessly frank discourse on drug crime and drug policy that most of our journalists won't touch, watch the in-depth interview with screenwriter -- that's right, screenwriter -- David Simon on the April 17 edition of Bill Moyers' Journal.

Simon, a former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was creator of the HBO series The Wire and The Corner (both set here in Baltimore), among others. As I recently wrote while devouring episodes of The Wire on DVD, Simon is the consummate example of how incisive social-drama fiction can be more truthful than the offerings of journalists whose outlooks (and job prospects) are wedded to officially-accepted assumptions about how the world works. Sure, artists have always served as truth-tellers via the decidedly mixed blessing of their disenfranchisement. But Simon is a rare animal: a social reformer who found a commercially successful dramatic vehicle for his political message. Again, the irony is that Simon left journalism because of how insistently the profession closed its eyes and ears to the stories he found needed telling.

In the interview with Moyers, Simon talks with brutal clarity and conviction about what drove him to leave the corporate newsroom; how and why the War on Drugs is a long-dead-and-buried policy failure that today's police embrace solely for the cynical sake of arrest statistics and coveted federal funding; how the narrative of real-life drug addiction and drug crime blatantly contradicts the Page One and Evening News stories; and what it will take to actually get a firm and effective handle on America's criminal and medical drug addiction problem.

If you wonder how a purveyor of TV drama can wade in such deep water and keep his footing, watch the interview. You will not be disappointed.

There is also, by the way, an interesting March 30 profile of Simon -- and his indictment of corporate journalists for their not holding bad policy and corrupt leadership accountable to the public -- on the British news and commentary site The First Post.

Chickengate.

This from my hometown of Rochester, NY: It seems that the local Popeye's chicken franchises advertised an incredible deal offering an 8-piece chicken meal for $4.99. Talk about a recession special. People took Popeye's by storm. But two of the area restaurants failed to order enough to meet demand. Soon there were lines of angry chicken-hungry customers at two Popeye's locations that had closed early and sent employees home because they had sold every drumstick, wing and thigh in the joint.

But things went from worse to crazy when a TV station sent a photographer not to both Popeye's locations (a heavily-white suburb and a heavily-black neighborhood near downtown) but only to the mostly-black one. Result: an aired news report that showed black person after black person after black person proclaiming, sometimes in guttural terms, that they wanted their fried chicken and they wanted it now. There wasn't a white face to be seen in all of the on-camera fried-chicken-fussing.

Viewer reaction was swift and divided. On its website the station posted its own frank, and necessary, self-scrutiny. As always with such debacles, this isn't just about chicken. (The idea of a mass convergence on a Popeye's fried chicken sale is, in fact, kind of funny until you factor in the desperation with which a lot of people are trying to feed their families.) It's also about race: it's about Little Black Sambo and his pancakes; and the way that TV shows about white protagonists are for "everybody" while those about black protagonists are mostly reserved for "black" audiences; and the ease with which many whites continue to view blacks as a bloc while reflexively treating whites as individuals. This is why a TV newscast's fried-chicken-and-black-people snafu carries weight far beyond an 8-piece dinner. People are still talking, and arguing, about it online in Rochester, where I posted the following comment about the TV news account:

1.) I think this is a news story that was probably overplayed. If a chain runs a killer promotion and a lot of people show up, upset, at a closed-down shop, it's a lightweight story that deserves lightweight treatment. It probably got more play than it deserved because of the tendency of corporate TV news affiliates to lean on cheap, easy-to-cover "event" stories (accidents, shootings, fried chicken shortages) rather than more publicly significant news that's more time-consuming and expensive to cover.

2.) The story, as aired (I saw it), is careless in how it reinforces stereotypes. Both Lake Ave. and Penfield had a run on chicken and ran out, angering streams of customers. People in mostly-white Penfield like fried chicken, too. From what I understand from people at WHAM, the photographer who went out didn't know about Penfield and simply went to Lake Avenue, where, by simple probability, s/he encountered mostly or all black customers. So we saw a procession of irate black people complaining about not getting their fried chicken. This misrepresents the actual story, and it was easy to avoid with journalistic good sense. An editor needed to look at the footage, declare, "We need more than this," and send the photographer to Penfield to get a truthful mix. I think the problem wasn't malevolence at WHAM, but carelessness and thoughtlessness, which are damaging enough. In a society where a customer places a large monkey book in the middle of a Barnes & Noble Obama window display and it stays there for days, and where a WHAM radio host tells black and brown girls to "keep your legs together, sweet cheeks" and keeps his job, showing an understanding of stereotype matters. Those who show contempt for this concern as being "PC" are themselves proof of the belligerent ignorance that sustains the problem.

3.) Sadly, WHAM has provided fodder for a YouTube video post at which dull-eyed viewers can snicker about "blacks and their fried chicken."

The radio host of whom I speak, by the way, is the race-baiting Bob Lonsberry, a ranting yokel about whom I wrote when he made those remarks.

Anyway, that's the story. Absurd, silly, and persistent. Today it's chicken. Tomorrow, who knows?

Piracy, Pollution, Plunder, and the Press.

Before you accept without further scrutiny the prevailing American narrative about Somalian piracy -- that it is the savage product of anarchy, poverty, greed, and opportunistic anti-Westernism -- consider the case for a much messier scenario: one in which illegal overfishing and dumping of toxic wastes, including radioactive materials (according to the U.N. envoy to Somalia) by industrialized nations have decimated Somalian fishing waters and sickened coastal residents to the point where a nation already without a government now gives its pirates a 70 percent approval rating as protectors of the national interest.

The story itself is radioactive. Wherever it and the evidence supporting it have surfaced here and in Europe, mostly online, something close to open warfare has broken out among readers and commentators. And it should, in fact, be treated as radioactive. Unfounded and reflexive charges of such magnitude would be reckless. Unfortunately for the industrialized world, though, unfounded and reflexive denial of such charges, if they are true, is just as reckless and exponentially more harmful.

So, after you have digested the standard American accounts of ruthless Somalians on the high seas, don't even think about making up your mind until you have at least read and pondered the following:

• Johann Hari's incendiary piece in The Independent in which he writes, in part:

As soon as the [Somalian] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

• The Daily Planet reprint of a 2007 African News Journal story detailing European toxic waste dumping along African coastlines, including the coast of Somalia.

• The EarthFirst account linking overfishing, waste dumping, and Somalian piracy.

• An essay by Somali-Canadian activist K'naan tracing the recent Somali history of governmental breakdown, illegal foreign fishing and toxic dumping, and the resulting rise of piracy and popular sympathy for pirates, published at the Huffington Post.

• Pieces in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times that cite the ire of Somali fishermen and pirates at alleged rampant Western illegal fishing and poisoning of the waters off Somalia, and that quote Somalis to this effect as they express their approval of pirate attacks on large vessels.

Interestingly, L.A. Times reporters Abukar Albadri and Edmund Sanders and New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman seem to show no interest in either verifying or debunking the allegations of illegal fishing, wanton pollution, and resulting coastal sickness. And that's the problem with most of the American coverage we see of the piracy crisis: as it has with terrorism, it fixates on the "sudden" spectacle of violence against Our Way of Life while showing little curiosity about how the industrialized world's role in the longer-term suffering of others may have helped lead to this impasse.

Labeling these questions as anti-American won't cut it here. Are we interested in the whole truth, or aren't we?

"Make Me Do It."

Cornel West was on Tavis Smiley's radio program the other night, and one of the points West made was how crucial it is for progressives to push President Obama to follow through on needed policy moves that would serve public over corporate interests. This is not news -- a lot of people, including me, have been saying this for some time -- but it continues to be the key political wild card in determining the kinds of policies we ultimately get on health care, the economy, public education, infrastructure, war policy, civil liberties, and taxation.

West referred back to Lincoln as an example of a president's needing the left to provide the necessary political cover for his more progressive tendencies: in West's words, an implicit presidential plea to "Make me do it."

Obama is now in this position. To take one example, with the Obama team now negotiating gilded terms for fantastically dysfunctional and incompetent financial giants (such as working behind the scenes to help corporate bailout recipients sidestep restrictions on managerial pay imposed by Congress, in the belief that a healthy economy requires a happy plutocracy), progressive agitation may serve as the fire line between Administration moderation and outright capitulation to the reckless demands of capital. Obama, a man by nature both conciliatory and well-intentioned, is in effect silently mouthing to today's left, "Make me do it" on the political and economic issues that carry the greatest moral weight. Personally, I believe that more often than not Obama wants to do the right thing. But in his realpolitik calculus he often lacks the ability, or the will, or both, to carry it off without a wave of political momentum behind him.

This is not unique. West cites Lincoln's moment of need for a good shove; I and others have cited FDR's. And now Obama has his.

And the shovers? That would be us.

(In the photo above, Obama is signing an executive order to close Gitmo.)

Stuff White People Do.

The blog Stuff White People Do recently posted an extended excerpt from my latest book, a passage about many people's ritual avoidance of young black men and the beneath-the-skin workings of what's going on here on all sides of the divide. They even ran a big photo of me, so there's no doubt about who said this stuff.

I've long believed and written that what I call the "skirt-the-contagion" dance, AKA the generalized "uh-oh, it's a young black guy" reflex, carries brutal casualties for folks on all sides. I see the psychological and bodily carnage of young brothers' predictable obsession with "respect," and I see the chronic borderline panic of whites who move daily through public spaces at the mercy of the jerking puppet strings of their own exaggerated terrors. I watch processions of my white brethren jolt and cringe in my presence, and I feel sorry for them. What a way to go through life. There are two obvious lessons here for all of us: 1.) black rage wreaks havoc with body and soul, and 2.) white privilege is no path to health and happiness.

Check out the post and the reader comments that follow, and see what you think.

True Fiction.

As I like to do with TV from time to time, since I have never had cable, I have recently been mainlining DVD episodes of The Wire, HBO's late great series about the Baltimore street drug trade. It strikes me with this show, as it often does with wickedly well-done social issue drama, how much better a job alleged fiction does at conveying reality than does alleged journalism. This is not a unique irony; it is true of fiction, poetry and music pretty much wherever you'd care to look, from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Percival Everett's novel Erasure to the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and Lucille Clifton to Grandmaster Flash's proto-hip-hop classic The Message and the millinenial global thread of myths and folk songs. Official news reciters with lapel microphones may do better with the names and dates, but storytellers and troubadours do better at telling the underlying truths.

As does The Wire (pictured above, from season one). In a town like Baltimore, where drug addiction and drug trade rivalries account for most of the city's 300 yearly homicides, coverage by the Baltimore Sun and the what-bleeds-leads local TV news affiliates gives us a blinding stream of seemingly meaningless atrocities, with each news account duly supplying dates, locations, details of death, and the requisite quotes from shell-shocked neighbors and agonized loved ones. The Wire, however, gives us the story: Who ends up on junk and why; Who sells it and why; How the marketing operations (two-for-one days, name-brand reputations, wildfire rumors of potent product on X block on X day) entice strung-out customers to literally line up for sales; How and why certain addicts decide to try to kick and how they succeed or fail or both; How the local drug CEOs handle their mega-million-dollar empires and their tiers of managers and employees with various psych-ops, incentives and intimidations; How the sellers think and the codes they observe; How addicts feel and how they address real life; How cops work in a culture that can include slaving at trying to do an impossible job, showing care or abusive contempt toward citizens, lying about evidence, kicking the crap out of suspects in interrogation rooms, or sabotaging other cops' cases for personal position or perceived self-preservation; How teenaged kids take care of households full of young children, feeding and supervising them and sending them off to school, before leaving for their own day's work at the neighborhood drug operation. Yes, this is television drama. But at its core it is truer than most of what you'll see in the news media about street drugs and the people who use, sell, and police them.

So this is a story that today's frightened commuters and urban professionals, sadly, hardly ever get from journalists. Yes, the Baltimore Sun has, every once in a great while, run a story or a series that gets at some of the actual lives and real human decisions behind the proffered daily circus of the Page One narrative on drugs. But what does it say about corporate news media that they literally make it their business to chronicle the carnage and occasionally profile a dealer while telling us little or nothing about how and why the drug life persists? Meanwhile, David Simon, a former Sun police reporter, decided that someone needed to tell the real drug story. So he took it to HBO – an entertainment network.

Don't get me wrong. I am not deifying the routine parade of TV melodramas and sneering laff fests. But it so happens that in this case the one getting it right on the drug problem is, if you like, the troubadour.

At least somebody is telling the story.