What's missing, in much of what I read in the two daily newspapers I plow through seven times a week, is any written sense of the déjà-vu I'm feeling every day.
Is it be-cause the columnists and reporters laboring in the fields adjacent to Elliott Bay, under the spinning world of the P-I, and those terrified survivors of the first newsroom purge of the year up on Fairview Avenue, are too busy writ-ing to read recent American history? That's a question I can't answer.
But rather than belabor other toilers in the local journalism vineyards, I will attempt to the fill the need as I see it, as is my wont - some might say "bent."
Washington's two distaff senators, Ms.'s Murray and Cantwell, recently voted to raise the federal minimum wage to a tad over $7 an hour. But they and other allies were defeated by a majority of the self-righteous greedheads currently running the country who think $280 is too much for the service jobs they would never deign to do.
Washington state, meanwhile, has the nation's "highest" minimum wage.
As I read attacks on this outrage of remnant Northwestern liberalism, written by tense little business shills and flabbily irate corporate flacks piteously bemoaning Washington state's "high" minimum wage (a whopping $7.35 per hour), I can't help but think back to my wizened German grandfather, my father's daddy, who told me, when I was a boy, about his struggles to secure gainful employment upon arrival in Cincinnati at the age of 10.
He came by boat, in steerage, from Hamburg, and was soon working in some factory, all day, for $4. He laughed, this grizzled nearly-80-year-old, who had "lucked out," got a job at the downtown Post Office, and then held on tight for almost 50 years. He'd retired, owned the duplex my parents lived in, occupying the other side of the wall until his death at 80.
I didn't talk enough to him, a regret many formerly young people have as they grow older and realize they missed a chance to know from whence they came. But I did listen some.
"We didn't have two nickels to rub together," he said.
This despite the fact that Grandpa was a hard worker. He had a much better "ethic" than yours truly. He was always working, even after his retirement.
One of his retirement jobs was as a volunteer for the local Democratic Party. "They were the only ones who cared about us," my Grandpa Wilken said, when I asked him why he bothered with local politics. (Remember, I was a child of the '60s; we were the folks who replaced "Better dead than Red" with "Never trust anyone over 30.")
Anyone who wishes to see where American corporations and our bought-and-sold legislators wish to take us should read about turn-of-the-20th-century America, when the many worked for the few and received none of the protections, including Social Security - something anyone born after 1945 took for granted until the election of George W. Bush.
The stock market endlessly fluc-tuates and sometimes fails. And yet the country's bloated leadership keeps trying to push the "privatiza-tion" of Social Security, many working folks' only retirement plan, onto the working poor, who must have some safety net if this is to remain the America we've known since the end of World War II.
The fact that more than one-sixth of the country currently has no health insurance doesn't seem to bother the five-sixths who do. Then again, it didn't bother the early-day corporate pirates named Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and DuPont much either, if good historians of the period can be believed.
Much closer to home, timewise, is the current war our sitting government shilled us into.
As someone drafted for Vietnam, who watched that debacle from a pretty good vantage point while America turned, slowly, against that misadventure in the Southeast Asian jungles, I'm somewhat amazed that folks keep saying Iraq is no Vietnam.
Anyone who read "good" news-papers in the early '60s should remember that the Kennedy government claimed every day that Viet-nam wasn't Vietnam.
The divide over this war at home, and the lack of honesty coming from the White House about it, almost exactly mirrors what happened 40 years ago. Now, anyone with a library card can read about Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's bullheaded Secretary of Defense, who with no military background drew the country deeper into the Asian morass of war without hope of eventual victory. Donald Rumsfeld may be of a different party, but he is of the same stripe. He has no combat experience, but he does have a healthy disdain for the wisdom of generals. He also has the ear of a powerful sitting president, and once again, after skipping a generation possibly chastened by Vietnam, we live in an America embroiled in a foreign occupation disdained by most of the rest of the world.
At home and abroad, our country seems to be repeating itself.
Domestically we seem to be hearkening back to those heartless child-labor days before World War I, the war to end all wars, according to our leaders then, which didn't end wars, of course.
Militarily we only seem to be re-visiting the '60s, which may have been a good time for movies, music and marijuana but was not our proudest martial moment as a country.
People walking around on Earth always seem to think their moment in the sun is different from all sunny moments that have gone before. Maybe wisdom, however paltry, is merely surviving long enough to recognize what looks surprisingly like reruns. Bad reruns.
The cold reality is, I don't really care much about the freedom of Iraq. I care about one of my two daughters, who lost her job through no fault of her own, and who currently doesn't have health insurance.
I care about the children of immigrant friends of mine who don't have health insurance and are working 10-hour days for less than $10 an hour.
I care about hard-working report- reporters I know who suddenly can't get jobs as the journalism business, more a[[In-content Ad]]
