9/3/03 11:55 PM: I shouldn't watch TV.

Every week I tape whatever TV shows I want to watch -- I don't have cable, and it's summer, so all I have to watch is X-Men: Evolution, Static Shock and Roeper & Ebert at the Movies. I finished my newspaper production around 9 (also, every Tuesday night, I do production on the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch so the printer can get it Wednesday morning) and I was in a somewhat private mood, so I decided to stay home and catch up on stuff. Emails. Calls. Et cetera.

So I watch my taped shows (including "Static in Africa" which I wanna give to my nieces and nephew) and turned off the VCR just as Nightline was coming on. Ted Koppel, who must be seventy nine billion years old, was speaking grimly about Iraq. How the White House wants (as of this time) $87 billion additional dollars to ... well, it's not really clear what they're gonna do. "Nation building," I think, or "reconstruction." I can't glean a hard answer from any of it.

There's this big congressional hearing, with Senators like McCain and Kennedy and their boys grilling the deputy secretary of defense Wolfowitz and some of his toadies. The Department of Defense guys illustrate no ability to find their own asses, given both hands, a map and a flashlight, and I chuckle, wondering if that's what the system working looks like. Kennedy railed on 'em as "incompetent." McCain chases a guy for an answer, for more than five minutes, and ends up by telling the guy his answer was unsatisfactory. Hi-freakin'-larious.

However, immediately after, the pundits reported that since $66 billion of that is earmarked "for the troops," no politician will jeopardize his career by voting against it. The lies, the incompetence, the dead US soldiers -- irrelevant. Keep pouring money into it. Right.

Then I started to remember: I pay sales tax. I have money taken out of my income tax. That's technically my money, being used to fund Haliburton or Bechtel contracts in Iraq. I looked down to the remote control, and saw it stuck to my hands with the blood of children and lawyers.

A few weeks ago, my favorite white columnist Jon Carroll (long story why I refer to him that way) exposed me to this blog, which ... well, it's a hard read. This clearly intelligent, educated, thoughtful Iraqi woman describes what is happening around her. Desperate for clean water. Shaking her fist at a computer screen. Walking along a road, lined with burned cars and dead bodies, very few of whom were participants in the "war against terrorism," and finding a neighbor, long dead and decayed.

Then I flip to another link and find that a 12-year-old has settled a lawsuit with those bastards at the RIAA, who sued her for downloading music. God pound us all.

I thought about my largely charmed life -- I don't make a ton of money (anymore, heh), but I have (mostly) clean water and a dry apartment safe from random gunfire (again, for the most part), a car I can drive anywhere, food, sleep, and a great deal of relative happiness. Even acknowledging that I live under essential occupation, even knowing that I am guilty of paying for the murder of people abroad and at home, even knowing that I face employment and economic discrimination that will likely never change in my lifetime. I am blessed, but I am guilty. I am happy but I am oppressed. I am fulfilled, and I am helpless.

Several months ago, I wrote what I thought would be one of my last political pieces -- I read very thoroughly about the McCarthy era "witchhunts" and really, talking about this stuff feels terribly futile staring back on my three decades (and my mother's five, and so on, and so forth). The older I get, the less I believe in talking to people about change for the better, since I believe action is the only language people can hear. There are precious few things I can do to effect change, and only they can work. My talking, my writing ... I have less faith in me standing on this Soapbox and preaching for any effect at all, in addition to, you know, John Ashcroft pulling this up as evidence of how un-American I am and how I should be locked in the Geronimo Pratt cell. Blah.

But I'm stuck. I don't have much else to do. I linked months ago to a column by Ron Daniels which advocated "being ungovernable" (the link and the site have since gone away -- the only links you can really trust are your own), of reducing the government's ability to tax you (I knew a guy who not only paid no taxes but had an international driver's license, through a complicated series of paperwork and legal wrangling), removing yourself as much as possible from a life under the thumb of the government. Saving money, investing wisely. I'm trying -- economically I'm still recovering from my divorce, but I'm making inroads -- but I always feel myself coming up short, unable to conceive of enough ways to be free, feeling like I should email and comfort a blogger in Iraq but afraid it would (again) put me on watchlists, not able to stop the juggernaut of white world supremacy and US imperialism with my piddling efforts, too sotted on my self-absorbed joys.

A wussy, in the shadow of Hampton and Delaney's legacies.

When I write stories -- I turned in a spec piece for Marvel Comics last week -- I often slip subtle points inside. My staunch Republican jock character is conflicted by the weight of his family's expectations, and will be forced to weigh his beliefs against horrors of poverty he can't deny. I've never written a story without a fully realized Black character -- even the f'ed up ones are complex and layered. It's the weapon I have. It's the war I can fight.

But sometimes, reading things like this ...

"Washing dishes is another problem. We try to limit the use of dishes to what is absolutely necessary. Most of the water we store in buckets and tubs is used to wash people. We wash using the old-fashioned way- a smallish tub full of water, a ladle, a loofah, soap and shampoo. The problem is that because of the heat, everyone wants to wash at least twice a day. The best time to wash is right before going to bed because for a few heavenly minutes after you wash, you feel cool enough to try to sleep. I have forgotten the delights of a shower ... I'm not whining - I'm ranting. You can't see me right now, but I'm shaking my fist at the computer screen, shaking my fist at the television, and heaping colorful, bilingual insults on Rumsfeld's head (hope the doves crap on him)... I'm angry."

... makes me feel like a failure.

The right things to do are unthinkable. To remove yourself from American public life is unimaginable. The amount of paper my old friend deals with to have his international driver's license, his taxless income and his quest for justice ... it's impossible. Except it isn't. It's just too much for me -- scatterbrained, lonely, creative, angry, blessed me.

Most of the time I've got my head too far up my own @$$ to notice. Defending myself against the horror that easily equals the glory of this world. Singing karaoke. Playing board games in the middle of the night. Cooing in the ear of a beautiful woman who's as well-fed and safe as I am.

Tonight ... it bothers me.