Back to Ohio

As I got my new Ohio driver's license Tuesday I compared the photo of me to the one I had taken in November of 2004 the first time I moved to Ohio. The six-and-a-half years have not been kind to me or my country. The stolen election of 2000 was the decisive turning point for this country, but back in November 2004 there was still plenty of time to turn things around.

On that day at the Department of Motor Vehicles in 2004, I was just about to start my dream job at The Columbus Dispatch. On Tuesday I was contemplating eight months of unemployment, discontinued unemployment benefits and no job prospects.

You can see the happiness in the 2004 license photo compared to my forced grin on Tuesday. Granted the unemployment beard - more Joaquin Phoenix during his "acting retirement" on David Letterman than Ernest Hemingway just before he ate his shotgun - adds to the depressing comparison, but I'm definitely keeping pace in America's race to the bottom.

My first day at the Dispatch was Election Day and voters waited up to nine hours in the rain in Columbus to vote while voting machines were in short supply in Democratici not as fradulent as the 2000 election when the Supreme Court effectively appointed Bush president by stopping the Florida recount, I'll always wonder how the country would've been different if Ohio had gone Democrat and Kerry had defeated Bush.

I lasted less than a year at the Dispatch due to carelessness, bad luck and a touch of hubris, but at least the price I paid was my own fault. After Bush's re-election, what chance did most Americans, Afghanis and Iraqi's have?

Not that Kerry didn't run an inept campaign or that his centrist politics were radically different from Bush's, but maybe Kerry's combat experiences in Vietnam - which the right successfully smeared in Swift Boat attacks thanks to a complicit corporate media - would've made the Iraq quagmire a little less deadly, by withdrawing instead of surging.  Perhaps the John Kerry of 1972 who asked a congressional committee, "Who want to be the last man to die for a mistake?" might have briefly reappeared.

Maybe Kerry would've declared victory in the Afghanistan War quagmire and withdrawn instead of doubling down on disaster like Barack Obama. O.K., that's probably wishful thinking on my part.

However, Kerry certainly wouldn't have botched Katrina as badly as Bush - Republicans hate government too much to govern well - although I suspect the financial meltdown would've happened on Kerry's watch. At least Kerry might have attached a few strings to the bailout.

Of course despite all the hooey about shared sacrifice, there will be no bailout for the victims of the cannabalistic capitalism on Wall Street. Some of the hardest hit victims are here in Ohio, a state with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate and a new Republican governor.

Gov. John Kasich is determined to scapegoat public workers for the lack of revenue in Ohio which is mainly due to the tax cuts for the rich he pushed for as a nine-term congressman and the Wall Street criminality that occurred while he worked as an executive at Lehman Brothers. Kasich parachuted to a gig as a Fox News anchor before the crash, but most of us in Ohio and the rest of the nation are still in a freefall.

I can't help wonder what might have been if we were out in the streets the last few years marching, fighting and striking like those brave Egyptians last week who helped topple the US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak. Of course they probably won't get the democracy they seek with the Army now in control and mass protests and strikes in America, not corporate-sponsored posturing by ignorant, whiny Tea Partiers,  are inconceivable.

Most Americans are too apathetic, ignorant or just too busy trying to make end's meet and get through the day to organize against heads they win, tails you lost capitalism and the us-against-them politics that perpetually divides us. But to go down swinging sure beats the long humiliating decline of a once great nation.

As a middle-aged reporter with black marks on my resume trying to get a job in the terminally ill newspaper industry, I confess to being a pessimist. But despite record-high corporate profits in the third quarter, does anyone seriously believe in the oxymoron of a jobless recovery? Or that Obama's toothless financial reform and continual capitulations to Republicans on cutting taxes and the social safety net won't lead to another meltdown and bailout?

Factor in the coming environmental catastrophe of climate change, endless wars against terrorism and it's hard not to be apocalyptic. We cling to hope because it gets us through the day, but false hope does not change reality or put groceries on the table. Like a driver's license, you can only renew it so often.

If there's anything left to bail with. There certainly won't be any room on the lifeboat for those of us in steerage class.