Can You Hear Us Now?

America is apparently not unlike an alcoholic: it had to hit rock-bottom before it was finally willing to ask for help.

Yesterday, Americans went to the polls in near-record numbers, and this morning the political landscape has undergone such a monumental change as to appear unrecognizable; this simply is not the same country it was at this time yesterday morning.

To downplay the extraordinary seismic impact of what has happened would be to dismiss the collective will of millions, yet amazingly, that's precisely what a few of the usual talking heads in the now wounded and limping Republican party are doing. A few hours ago, Tom Delay made the rounds on national television and -- when asked if he accepted that the country was demanding a different direction in Iraq and an end to the kind of scandals in which he himself played such an unquestionable role -- pulled off one of the most impressive feats of self-delusion seen outside of a padded room: he said that the Democrats didn't win, the Republicans simply took a hit because they didn't get their message across. He said that America is a nation with conservative values and the GOP is, and always will be, its national party.

I'll have to assume someone just unearthed him from a time-capsule buried back in 2002.

No administration has ever made its message more crystal clear. Bush, Cheney and their minions repeat the same statements more often than an autistic nine-year-old.

Let's recap though:

The Democrats now control the House, and when all the votes are counted will more than likely control the Senate as well.

They won an assured victory in the House despite redistricting changes made during the past twelve years of Republican rule -- changes which meant that the campaigns for many seats weren't as genuinely competitive as they were during the Republican Revolution of 1994.

In Rhode Island, Senator Lincoln Chafee -- despite having a 63% approval rating, and being an extremely moderate Republican -- was voted out; exit polls showed that voters were willing to sacrifice him to ensure that the overall balance of power was tipped.

The Democrats knocked off more than a dozen incumbent members of the House, and as many as six in the Senate -- winning seats in states throughout the Midwest which have traditionally voted Republican. They basically redefined what can and can't be considered a "Red State."

And finally this fact: not a single Democratic incumbent was defeated last night -- not one representative, senator or governor.

If that isn't winning, I have no idea what the hell is.

But here's what made me breathe a sigh of relief -- for the first time in a very long time -- after hearing Delay's hallucinatory comments: he doesn't matter anymore.

For the first time since George W. Bush took office, the usual pompously preening suspects of the GOP are nothing more than paper tigers. Rush has been neutered. Rove has been pummeled. The God-fearing theocrats have been, for the most part, left out in the cold. O'Reilly and Hannity now in some strange way resemble nothing more than a couple of yapping chihuahuas.

The fearsome schoolyard bully has fallen.

Those on the right, who have governed unopposed -- monopolizing the agenda which has steered us toward oblivion -- now understand that they are not the only residents of this great nation.

And what of their leader, the Naked Emperor, the man whose arrogant and uncontested rule has in just six short years cost this country the lives of 3,000 of its sons and daughters in Iraq, an entire American city at home, and the respect of most of the world?

The former King George is already begrudgingly making conciliatory gestures and talking loudly of bipartisanship -- because for the first time in his painful presidency, he has absolutely no fucking choice. He will have to find a way to table his leviathan hubris and learn to listen.

The noise the voters just made is loud enough that even he might be able to hear it.

Nothing substantial has changed yet, and it remains to be seen if the Democrats can and will do as they've promised. But simply by winning, they've brought accountability to an administration which sorely needs it if this country is to survive.

It took hitting rock bottom, but America finally asked for help -- and as any alcoholic knows, that's the most important step.

Sympathy for the Reverend

A few years back, my wife and I, and one of our closest friends, undertook an adventure which wound up becoming one of the seminal events in each of our lives: we went on a three-week, cross-country road trip. We started in Miami, drove all the way out to Los Angeles, then back. During our journey, we stopped in several major cities -- New Orleans, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Vegas -- but also in the tiniest of tiny towns. It was during the time spent taking-in the smaller blips on the map that most of our fondest memories were created. From an unforgettable conversation with a teenage check-out girl in Erick, Oklahoma -- one that involved my inability to understand the concept of grasshoppers stuck in the grill of our SUV, to stumbling upon an impromptu dance by a group of Native American children in Holbrook, Arizona, to the purchase of a souvenir coconut head in Ocala, Florida, to a drunken 4th-of-July celebration in Odessa, Texas -- the entire experience opened my eyes to the astonishing beauty of my homeland. It's something I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

We saw so many strikingly different kinds of terrain -- met so many wonderfully different kinds of people.

As we pushed inward from the coast, into the heartland of America, we did however notice one particular image which seemed to assert itself inescapably everywhere we traveled (aside from Elvis, whose face -- thin or bloated -- adorns every kind of memoribilia imaginable from sea to shining sea).

That image, is the cross.

You don't fully comprehend or appreciate America's unquestioning adoption of the Christian faith until you realize that a whole lot of people obviously believe there is no landscape so pristine or flawless in its own right as to avoid being improved upon by the insinuation of the ancient torture device on which Jesus was supposedly executed. Whether on a major highway or a lone, isolated road, crosses can be seen everywhere -- in all variations of shape and size. They are made of wood and stabbed into otherwise empty fields; they adorn the tops of steeples which dot the topography; and in the otherwise unremarkable roadside town of Britten, Texas -- they are made of corrugated steel, and literally pierce the sky at a height of 190 feet.

Needless to say, we had to stop.

My friend would later perfectly articulate the overwhelming sense that each of us had while standing in the shadow of a cross the size of a building. "The effect is fearsome and oppressive, a symbol not of love and acceptance and forgiveness, but of domination. Looking up at it, you expect to see a zeppelin moored to its top, illuminated by giant search lights," he'd write. My mind, on the other hand, couldn't shake a much more succinct term for what we were witnessing in the middle of the expansive Texas plains: Industrialized Jesus. We'd witnessed hundreds of franchises of Christianity throughout our journey, and would no doubt witness many more still; this one just happened to be the biggest -- the Jesus Christ Super-Center.

After the requisite time necessary to fully document the giant cross on film -- on the chance that someone back home might not believe the existence of such an object -- we pressed on, continuing our southwestern route through the United States. This course, took us nowhere near Colorado Springs, Colorado -- a place which might have been a required destination should we for any reason have desired to see the true fulmination of the Industrialized Jesus concept. It's there that we would have found the New Life Church, a mammoth structure dubbed, with all possible lack-of-subtlety, a "Mega-Church." It seats thousands and could be mistaken for a shopping mall were it not for that ubiquitous cross making it perfectly clear that what's being sold inside is salvation. Up until yesterday, it was also the religious seat of arguably the single most powerful Evangelical Christian in the country: Reverend Ted Haggard.

Haggard is a man who has spent the past thirty-four years of his life preaching the gospel of Jesus, and the unerrant truth of every aspect of the Bible. Recently, he was the leader of the 30-million-strong National Evangelical Association, and a personal friend and advisor to President Bush -- even participating in weekly conference calls with the White House. He's also been, for some time now, a staunch opponent of gay-marriage, and has worked tirelessly to support ballot amendments which would ban it in eight states this election day.

And that's exactly why, last Thursday, an openly-gay male escort publicly destroyed Reverend Ted Haggard.

What 49-year-old Mike Jones did, was the figurative equivalent of an assassination: he calculated his actions perfectly and timed his shot to inflict maximum damage not simply to Haggard, but to his cause. He claimed to have proof of a three-year affair with the reverend that included not just sex, but regular use of methamphetamines. Before those who would certainly jump to the defense of Haggard could even get their talking points in order -- before the Rush Limbaughs of the world could power up a mic to cry election-year foul -- Jones disarmed them by admitting that political consideration was indeed integral to the timing of his attack; he wanted to expose the hypocrisy of Haggard and the demagogues on the right and specifically chose the moment that would hurt and disillusion them the most. The truth was -- and is -- simply staggering: the leader of America's Evangelical Christians, exposed as a gay drug-user.

Haggard initially denied the accusations -- insisting that he hired Jones for a massage but never had sex with him, and that he bought meth from him but threw it away; although not quite as catchy, both retorts seem destined to become the new "I didn't inhale." Since then however, Haggard has admitted to having a "lifelong sexual problem" -- telling his followers in a letter that he's a "deceiver and a liar," "sexually immoral," and that there is a part of his life which he calls "repulsive and dark."

That sound you hear right now is a whole lot of people gloating with satisfaction.

While the level of hypocrisy and arrogance involved in Haggard's private life versus his self-righteous public crusading is indeed sickening and indefensible -- and there is certainly plenty of legitimate nose-rubbing to be done to Haggard's many intolerant minions -- for some reason, after a reflexive moment of giddy Schadenfreude, the news of this man's downfall and his own reaction to it began to stir a different emotion in me entirely.

Sadness.

Ted Haggard has spent most if not all of his existence living a lie, and he's done so for only one reason: because his unwavering belief in the literal teachings of a 2000-year-old book has taught him that he must. There's a distinct possibility that the reason Haggard found Christ to begin with was because he sincerely hoped that through him, all things were indeed possible -- the suppression of his true feelings and urges being the most pertintent of those things. There are thousands if not millions of Christians out there who hope for the same transformative power of religion. The enrollment in schools which the church claims can "straighten-out" homosexuals is proof of that hope; the success-rate of those schools is proof of its futility.

Many claim that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, does more good than harm; it gives meaning to life and provides its believers a moral compass with which to navigate the world.

Really?

Ted Haggard is married, and has five children -- all of whom don't need to concern themselves with angry threats of an impending hell, because they're going through it right now. The person they love and admire the most has devastated them, simply because he could never admit who or what he truly was and is -- because Ted Haggard the fire-and-brimstone preacher has always believed that the true nature of Ted Haggard the man is "immoral, repulsive and dark," when in fact, it is nothing of the kind; it's only the dishonesty that's immoral. A man's relentless submission to superstition has destroyed himself, the family he loves, and more than likely a small part of those who have respected him and held him up as an example.

The biggest tragedy however, might be that Ted Haggard has wasted the one life he was given.

He's done it by lying to himself, and by trying to convince others that they should do likewise.

For that I blame not the believer, but the belief -- the same belief that would lead someone to plant a giant metal cross in the middle of a place that was so beautiful just the way it was.

Apparently, MTV Europe Doesn't Care About Black People Either

I'll try to make this quick, if for no other reason than because my doctor says I need to cut back on thinking about modern Hip-Hop if I want my brain to run cleanly after the surgery.

Kanye West is a fucking idiot.

Last week, at the MTV Europe Video Music Awards, upon losing the award for Best Video to a band almost no one in the United States has ever heard of called Justice vs. Simian, Kanye stormed the stage and threw what my mother used to call a temper-tantrum -- back in the days when I referred her not as "my mother,", but rather as "Mommy." At the root of his little tirade was his belief that he, in fact, should've won the award, and that by not giving it to him, the entire MTV awards process lost credibility.

Why did Poor Widdle Kanye believe that he deserved the honor?

Let's let the baby speak for himself:

"My video cost a million-dollars! Pamela Anderson was in it! I was jumping across canyons and shit! I stood on a mountain! I flew a helicopter over Vegas! I did it to be the king of all videos and I wanted to walk home with that award!"

Where to even begin.

In the course of this little experiment of mine, I've brought up two phenomena which seem relevant right about now.

One involves the obscene sense of entitlement many celebrities seem to possess and display -- the absolutely psychotic belief that simply by virtue of who they are, they should never be denied any whim which might enter their underworked and overindulged little heads (Veruca Assault/10.29.06). I mentioned it in reference to the demands placed upon a small hotel staff -- one which has signed non-disclosure agreements to protect these celebrities and prevent just such childish behavior from being made public. It's an entirely different story, however, when that kind of mentality -- in all its hideous glory -- is broadcast live and around-the-globe for every living human being to see. Up next for Kanye: damage control in the form of the obligatory PR-firm-approved insincere apology -- and possibly rehab (of course).

The second phenomenon is a far more pointed one; it's the hilariously juvenile assumption by many rap stars that money directly correlates to quality, and that enough of it can buy class, acceptance, and above all -- respect (Jay-Z/Cristal Collision Course/6.16.06). Only someone who subscribes to that flawed theory could honestly believe that spending a million dollars, casting Pam Anderson (!), and flying over Vegas (!!), would translate into an award being handed out in, of all places, Denmark. Many rappers operate under exactly that faulty logic though -- that obvious excess will prove they've arrived and finally earn them a seat at the big-kids table; it won't, and Baby Kanye's reaction to being snubbed only proves to the world what the detractors of him and his ilk have insisted all along: rap stars can have all the money they want; they'll never be more than little children playing dress-up -- Neanderthals in nice suits.

Put simply, they'll never have an ounce of the kind of class which commands true respect.

(If you want to see Baby Kanye's tantrum, Jenny from IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com has been kind enough to post and mock it appropriately (Kanye Is A Whiny Bitch).)

Out to Pastor

I don't even know where to begin with the fact that the Reverend Ted Haggard -- mega-church leader, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, fire-and-brimstone indoctrinator of children at Jesus Camp, and personal friend to President Bush -- is now accused of carrying on a three-year affair with a gay male escort which included the regular use of methamphetamine.

Or that Haggard has, at the very least, admitted to hiring the escort for a massage and indeed buying meth from him.

So I won't.

All I can say is this:

Maybe there is a God after all -- and as it turns out, he is, in fact, infinitely just.

Blow Me

I got an e-mail yesterday from Billy Corben, the 28-year-old director of Cocaine Cowboys. He had some truly kind things to say about my post regarding his film, and as I would have hoped, seems like an eminently likeable and decent guy.

Once again, Cocaine Cowboys is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and South Florida; if you get a chance, by all means see it. In fact, do a few lines and then see it; that should no doubt make you feel just like you were there.

Hey, I saw Requiem for a Dream on heroin.

I don't understand what all the fuss was about; I thought it was the feel-good hit of 2001.

African Amber Alert

So, despite the deafening cries of millions who believe that Kabbalah strings, photo-ops and the desperate needs of an irrelevant, self-obsessed hag constitute a far more damaging environment in which to raise a child than an impoverished Malawian village, Madonna says that she won't rule out returning to Africa to adopt another child.

You know Madge, it'd be so much easier to just do what your kind has done for centuries: build a gingerbread house in the woods and let them come to you.

A History of Violence

"Beyond the ties of kinship lurks the threat of death, and revenge killings among the cocaine traders certainly contribute to South Florida's crime rate. Drug shootouts are becoming a frequent sight in certain parts of Miami. At a busy intersection in Coral Gables last month, for example, a Mercedes Benz was suddenly surrounded and its 30-year-old Colombian driver killed in a burst of machine-gun fire."

-- Time Magazine, November 23rd, 1981

"Cocaine is a hell of a drug."

-- Rick James


Miami is a foreign land.

Strangely, this statement holds true whether you're a tourist or a resident. For the uninitiated, the culture shock of being in an American city which is so only by virtue of its accidental geography can be a bit overwhelming. In reality, it's a place where a majority of the population speaks Spanish -- simply because necessity has never dictated it do otherwise -- and where the rules which govern most residents of the United States can seemingly be bent or broken for the right price or political favor. For even the longtime resident meanwhile, the perpetually morphing landscape -- and the transient nature of those who are drawn to an environment which fosters it -- means that it's entirely possible to wake up in a city that's wholly unrecognizable from the one you went to sleep in the night before. This creates an almost constant state of unease and gives the city an undeniable undercurrent of eerie malevolence -- as if someone were constantly and surreptitiously rearranging the furniture in a room that was unfamiliar to begin with.

True story: a couple of years ago, I was back in my hometown, putting it to the use for which the chamber of commerce believes it was intended: a vacation destination. it was a typically hot, humid afternoon and being that I, like all vacationers, was staying on South Beach, I decided to leave the air conditioning and take a walk over to Lincoln Road's Van Dyke Cafe for a bite to eat. I had gotten maybe a half-block from where I was staying when something on the sidewalk in front of me caught my eye. I bent down and picked it up -- turned it over -- held it in my hand. I'm sure I shook my head and that my face registered shock and recognition at what I'd just found.

It was a small plastic zip-lock envelope -- a flat baggie whose contents were perfectly visible. I had seen enough small plastic baggies in my time to know exactly what was likely inside this one; still, I opened it up and gave it a light sniff just to make sure. When it comes to crack cocaine, I've always taken the good advice of Whitney Houston -- crack is wack; but I had no doubt that what I was holding in my hand was indeed that.

I continued to shake my head -- laughed a little -- then tossed the baggie aside and continued on my way.

In my head, one thing repeated over and over: "Miami: Where the Streets are Paved with Drugs."

Amazingly, that small moment was one of my very rare experiences with cocaine of any sort in South Florida; despite my sterling record as a hardcore addict -- it ironically took leaving my home to find what had always been within arm's reach. This is not to say that I was unaware of the prevalence of that particular drug in my hometown throughout my life; there was a time when it reached into the life of every man, woman and child in South Florida. No matter who you were, you understood that there were cocaine, cocaine traffickers, cocaine dealers, and cocaine money all around you.

The bodies piling up in the street were a testament to it.

If you were alive during that time, and lived elsewhere in the country, you were at least tangentially aware of what was going on in Miami during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In November of 1981, Time Magazine -- a publication whose cover had been devoted to the civil war in Beirut no fewer than three times that same year -- proclaimed South Florida a "Paradise Lost," and through words and nightmarish images, conveyed the unmistakable truth about life in my hometown: it was a war-zone on U.S. soil. The battleground was the street. The soldiers were known as the "Cocaine Cowboys." The victims were the innocent people unlucky enough to call South Florida home during that tumultuous period.

By the time Scarface and Miami Vice came along to glamorize Miami's drug trade -- and the bloodshed that went hand-in-hand with it -- the body count was unimaginable; the level of violence was simply staggering. As with all of the best stories that surface -- like dead bodies in canals -- from the murky depths of South Florida, truth is stranger than fiction. It's this fact which makes the new documentary Cocaine Cowboys so hypnotically engrossing and hideously effective. The film chronicles the reality of the early days of cocaine trafficking in the United States, when vicious warring factions fought a bloody battle for control of the movement, distribution and sale of the most expensive and desired crop in the world. Americans wanted it; Colombians and Cubans wanted to provide it, and -- with South Florida as their trade nexus -- would kill anyone who got in their way. The key word here is anyone; unlike the fantasy which movie-goers before, or wanna-be thugs since, have concocted to keep the brutal truth at a comfortable distance -- namely that there's a certain level of moral ambiguity because, well, gangsters really only kill other gangsters -- the Cocaine Cowboys killed innocents almost daily. Armed with the ubiquitous Ingram MAC 10 sub-machine gun, a weapon with too short a barrel to be accurate and too high a firing rate to be useful for anything but a single blast of deadly gunfire, the Cowboys -- whose motto seemed to be "Leave no witnesses" -- regularly killed not only their targets, but any man, woman or child who happened to be nearby. There were shootouts on the highways, between moving cars. There was gunfire in the most exclusive of neighborhoods.

The documentary by South Florida natives Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman has an astonishing level of access to many of the major players (the ones still alive) that turned my hometown into a place where my father worried about going to work, and my mother worried about allowing her young son to leave her side. At the time, my father was transitioning from Metro-Dade cop, to investigative reporter at WCKT TV; a situation which, when it came to being close to the violence, was like going from bad to slightly-less-bad. Many of the reporters and anchors I grew up sitting in front of the television watching are featured in the film -- a few I even went on to work with myself years later. It was their persistence in uncovering the truth despite the constant threat of reprisal, and the non-stop work of much of the Miami and Dade County police forces which finally slowed the bloodshed to a trickle. During the height of that bloodshed however, it seemed like nothing could stop it.

Cocaine Cowboys illustrates, in vivid color, the lengths that the most powerful traffickers of that time -- one, a Colombian woman named Griselda Blanco, known as "The Godmother," the pioneer of the Medellin Cartel in America and a familiar face on South Florida's nightly news -- would go to, to keep the cocaine flowing and plentiful. In addition to the wholesale murder and dismemberment of her enemies, Blanco at one point pulled off a smuggling stunt which was so impressive in both its creativity and irony as to be almost admirable. During the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial celebration -- when much of America was joyously marking two-hundred years of lawful independence -- several countries from around the world dispatched a colorful parade of tall ships to travel up the east coast of the United States. Colombia's official contribution to this armada was a ship called "The Gloria," which -- unknown to the D.E.A. -- was packed with one-thousand kilos of Griselda Blanco's Medellin cocaine.

Street value: forty-million dollars.

This is a woman who named one of her sons Michael Corleone. This is also a woman who ordered armed men to walk into a store in the Dadeland Mall -- which was, and still is, one of the busiest shopping centers in Miami -- and spray machine-gun fire, killing four people; and a woman who ordered her brutal enforcer, Rivi Ayala (who incredibly, is interviewed for the film) to kill everyone inside a townhouse in quiet, suburban Kendall, including the maid and the gardener.

This is what South Florida awoke to, every morning of every day; it was a situation exacerbated by the influx of 125,000 Cuban refugees and a race riot that left eighteen people dead and a good portion of the city in ashes -- both of which happened in the hot summer of 1980.

This is where I grew up.

Over time, the insanity ebbed and tensions calmed. Hollywood arrived and turned the brutality which had so scarred the city's streets and collective psyche into movies and television. When Scarface premiered, there were the white limos of the new generation of opulent drug dealer lining the street in front of the theater; when Miami Vice announced its plan to glamorize the chaos, the chamber of commerce protested the prospect of yet another very public black eye.

The drugs however, never went away -- only the constant drug violence.

The reason for that is simple: the Medellin Cartel rose to prominence and the trade routes were worked out so that an uneasy relative peace could be maintained, mostly because everyone realized that there was enough demand in America to keep everyone very rich and very happy. The birth pangs were over.

People will always want drugs. Period. And as long as that's true, nothing in the world -- no public service campaign, threat of jail-time, or amount of enforcement at our borders -- will stop dealers, traffickers and killers from making sure the people get what they want.

The "War on Drugs" is the ultimate misnomer. It's over; it was lost from the very beginning.

This is coming from someone who was raised on the front-lines -- a place where the streets are still paved with drugs.