The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER...

[DissidentVoice]

62. My aunt lived in Chelsea for several years, and quite enjoyed it.

Seeing this sometimes makes me wish we had the extra to pony up for HBO. No way would you see this on broadcast TV in this country.

Living near the Canadian border, we can get CBC here. Watching CBC, which is owned by the Canadian Government, and watching our corporatist networks is like night-and-day.

Here it all has to be sanitised so there aren't any "potty words," but it's perfectly OK to show violence, murder, rape and other atrocities...because it sells! Right-wingers LIKE seeing our massively superior weapon pound a Third World country back to the Stone Age ("shock and awe," remember?). They don't CARE that the people being pounded are human beings with lives, feelings and families...they're just "a bunch of gawdam'd terrorists." To them, an Iraqi citizen on the streets of Baghdad = Osama bin Laden. Never mind that said Iraqi citizen has suffered massively, first under Saddam Hussein, then under the US puppet government.

The far right has always been good at taking bullshit and wrapping it in God, Guns, Guts and the Flag. However, it's still bullshit underneath and it still stinks.

I was born in 1966. My earliest memories politically are of Watergate. My grade school teacher had a hell of a time explaining to a bunch of kids why the President of the United States had to quit his job. I think she said, "Mr Nixon broke the law, he had to quit, and now Mr Ford is the President."

During the Carter Administration, flawed as it was (I think Jimmy was too nice, too moral and too ethical for Washington) I really did feel as good about this country as a pre-adolescent could. I thought it was "neat" that a peanut farmer could become Governor of a state, and then the President. Plus, my mother had told me stories about FDR and how the WPA had got my grandfather from running bathtub gin to feed his family to honest, meaningful work.

It was during the Reagan years, when I became an adult, that my disillusionment and cynicism really started setting in. The era of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," the emergence of AIDS (but it was their own fault for living a "perverted lifestyle"...I fail to see how that applies to those who DIDN'T cop the disease by unprotected promiscuity), "Dallas," "Dynasty," the "prosperity gospel" and the worship of all things wealthy. Meanwhile, I was growing up in the Rust Belt with my dad working his ass off as a diesel mechanic trying to feed his family...and we were supposed to believe all this "Morning in America" bullshit? Just as long as you waved the Flag, it didn't matter that we were subverting governments around the world. We had to git them gawdamn'd Commies, an' Reagan scared the shit out of the Russkies so bad that Gorby went down and took his country with him.

A great deal of the cynicism is still there for me. We've had two Democratic Administrations since then (both of whom I voted for), but the Democratic Party of today, remade by the DLC to be "electable" in the Age of Reagan, has lost its soul. Granted, half a loaf from Obama or Clinton is worlds better than scraps from the GOP. However, it was incomprehensible to me that in 1994, Bill Clinton rolled over and played dead after the GOP kicked him on health care, and that Barack Obama let Max Baucus kill the public option on his plan. Why didn't either one of them go for full, universal, single-payer health care? They should have known that the Republicans would block any plan they did, so why not go for it all?

Nostalgia for the past is just that - yearning for a time that never truly existed. Even when I was a kid watching "Leave It To Beaver" re-runs, I knew it was fake. My house was never that nice, never that clean and my mother never owned pearls, let alone do the housework wearing them!

We are seriously screwing ourselves, and I don't know if there's a way out anymore.