It was such a simpler time, that summer of 2001. Remember it? That last season of America’s (cyclical) innocence shimmers in the memory, sorta like those gauzy images of lovebirds Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby – images so blurry they make you wonder if you need to adjust the focus on your TV. Ah, for those halcyon days! … when the only Washington story most of us cared about was the fate of Chandra Levy, and the most pressing topic on George Bush’s plate was stem cells (because he sure as hell wasn’t paying attention to al Qaeda).

Back then, the Taliban were a nasty band of fundamentalist cusses about whom we knew rather little – apart from the facts that they oppressed their women, didn’t care much for poppy growing, and were somehow in cahoots with that bin Laden guy we’d been hearing about. That summer the biggest Taliban-related news was a minor international uproar over their peculiar decision to use small explosives and machine-gun fire to attack a pair of massive Buddha statues that had been carved out of Afghan cliffs a couple millennia earlier. Meanwhile, a fascinating story emerged (I don’t remember where) about the last two remaining Jews in Kabul, and their daily struggle to observe their cultural traditions despite the Taliban’s strict enforcement of Sharia laws concerning everything from beard length to public worship.

It’s a story that has shown remarkable legs through the years, partly because of this juicy detail: The two aging men were living in the ruins of a synagogue … and they weren’t speaking to one another! Their saga has spawned at least two darkly comic plays: My Brother’s Keeper played in Edinburgh and London in 2006, while The Last Two Jews of Kabul premiered off-off-Broadway last year. Much earlier than that, during those happy-go-lucky days of summer 2001, that first article had inspired me to write what remains my one and only original limerick. So if you’ll forgive my mispronunciation of the Afghan capital…

There was just one Jew left in Kabul
His beard shaven, by government rule
But he was much too distinct
In his lower precinct
So the Taliban shot off his tool

I’m sure you’re wondering what could possibly be my point in dredging up all this (literally) “pre-9/11 thinking.” Could it be I’ve been conditioned by President Obama’s current orgy of analysis to take my sweet time getting to the point when it comes to Afghanistan – to “dither,” as it were? Nah … My point is actually this: When I wrote my little poem nearly 8½ years ago, the Taliban could still be laughed at, even though they posed an existential threat to those two Jews (and a mortal threat to those statues), and they had implemented an alarming program of discrimination against a female population that had always been discriminated against anyway. Those issues, as it turned out, paled in comparison to the danger that emanated from al Qaeda’s Taliban-approved training camps; still, in summer 2001 the notion of America punishing the Taliban for any of that stuff by occupying their country for a decade with 40 (or 60, or 80) thousand troops would have been deemed preposterous — even by neocons who were already hellbent on punishing Saddam Hussein for similar transgressions, and by similar means.

Yet that’s pretty much precisely the point we’re at today – Obama is considering a major ramping up of U.S. forces to save Afghanistan from Taliban crazies who (for real, this time) pose no discernable threat to anyone outside that country’s borders. So why is this even a serious topic for contemplation? Tell us, Mr. President, why is this decision taking so damn long – and why does it seem so much more likely that you’ll give General McChrystal at least some of the 40,000 additional troops he wants, rather than do the responsible thing and get us the hell out of there?

We all know why. Obama long ago deemed Afghanistan “the necessary war,” the one (unlike Iraq) that we were justified to start in the first place, the one in which we had some real international consensus behind our actions – and the one that needed to be finished, particularly considering how badly Bush had bungled it. Talking up Afghanistan was a useful strategy for the Obama campaign, allowing him to bolster his peace-through-strength bona fides while simultaneously reminding the electorate what a bunch of fuck-ups Bush’s Republicans were. In retrospect, it’s difficult to imagine that Obama would have gotten past Hillary, much less McCain, without being willing to double down on at least one of Bush’s two occupations. And once he became president, it was (and remains) difficult to imagine him abandoning that stance – particularly with the perpetually pro-war GOP grading his every move for its supposed anti-Americanism.

But while there is something to the idea that the U.S. should finish what it started in the fall of 2001, does anybody still remember what it was we set out to do in the first place? And even if we jog the memory banks – it was something about denying al Qaeda a safe haven and facilitating the creation of a stable, “democratic” government, I think – does anybody really believe the latter of those goals is still achievable?

It seems McChrystal and congressional Republicans would like nothing better than to hit some invisible “reset” button, start over and do things right this time – the same sort of vision Obama himself encouraged last year (and again this past spring, when he announced his first major policy shift for Afghanistan). But if there’s one thing we should have learned from recent events in that country, there is no reset button. Hamid Karzai’s government is, and to a great extent always has been, a fraud, and is hardly the kind of institution we should be propping up at the cost of American lives and dollars. Our NATO allies have largely bailed out on us, and it’s folly to imagine they will re-commit themselves just because Obama does. The American people have turned against this endeavor in droves. And, most important, all our efforts over the past eight years seem to have done little to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, without whose support our “nation-building” inevitably devolves into its far-less-benevolent cousin, empire building. The simple fact is, America has proven it has neither the talent nor the stomach for nation-building. And after all this time, the Afghan people clearly prefer the Taliban to us – and the Taliban aren’t leaving, ever, no matter how long we stay.

Even that old saw of “defending our vital national-security interests” doesn’t hold water anymore, really. If there’s one thing Bush’s Afghan strategy actually accomplished – if “accomplished” is the right word — it was driving al Qaeda out of the country (rather than destroying it altogether). Bin Laden and nearly all his minions are in Pakistan now; the best military estimates put the number of al Qaeda operating in Afghanistan at fewer than 100. Even if the Taliban succeeded in wresting control of their homeland back from Karzai’s crooked regime, why would al Qaeda bother crossing the mountains again when they’re having such a high time in a country we can’t invade?

That’s our principal quandary in central Asia – figuring out how to work together with, or else work around, the Pakistani government to keep al Qaeda from reconstituting a legitimate threat to us and our interests. (And, oh by the way, to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan from itself becoming a threat, in part because of Taliban destabilization in Islamabad.) That’s a valid national-security pursuit, and it will require lots of strategizing, lots of intelligence-gathering, lots of covert and overt law-enforcement/military work, and lots of that hearts-and-minds stuff that Bush sucked at but which comes naturally to Obama. (The only folks he can’t seem to win over are Republicans, which says a lot more about them than it does about him.)

What safeguarding our interests in central Asia doesn’t require, and hasn’t for years, is a continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan. It certainly would be a shame to leave unfinished whatever construction and infrastructure projects we’ve launched there, and it clearly would cost us a bit of our “We Are the Champions” self-esteem if the Taliban succeed in retaking Kabul and undoing whatever thin threads of democracy and civil rights we’ve helped establish. But you know what? Those things are probably going to happen at some point anyway, no matter how long we stick around. Until then, our maintenance of a “heavy footprint” in Afghanistan will simply be a matter of throwing good money after bad, and throwing away the lives of more young Americans after our goals have already become unattainable.

My thinking on all of this, like that of many Americans (including prominent conservatives like George Will), admittedly has shifted somewhat over the past year as Afghanistan has taken a turn for the worse. Obama was smart to emphasize that country over Iraq during the campaign, and perhaps he was even smart to give last spring’s “mini-surge” a chance to right Bush’s wrongs. But now that we’ve seen the Taliban renew its stranglehold despite our troops’ best efforts – and particularly now that we’ve heard the Pentagon begin spouting the same nonsense about Afghanistan that it’s been spewing about Iraq for years (stuff like “when their troops stand up, we’ll stand down”) – we should recognize that continued occupation is going to bring considerably diminished returns, with no additional benefit to our interests.

In short, it’s time to get out of the way and let the Afghans determine their own future, because they’ve made it clear they don’t want us to do it for them. Total abandonment is not required – we should keep some Special Forces troops and unmanned firepower in the vicinity (based perhaps in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, or at sea) to pursue al Qaeda when we get good leads. Apart from that, though, it’s time for us to dig ourselves out of this Graveyard of Empires – and it’s time to return, at long last, to our “pre-9/11 mentality,” at least as it concerns a nation that no longer poses a real threat to our national security.

Sweden is a monarchy, a governmental structure very far from socialism and from the American ideal that all people are created equal.  Marx, of course, believed that his radical socialist ideal started with the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, which pretty much eliminates a monarchy. The United States was founded on the principle that people did not need a king because they could rule themselves. We might think that the trappings of a monarchy are pretty and that their personal lives are fascinating, but is anyone really excited about the prospects of Prince Charles replacing Barack Obama?

Marx’s version of socialism, Communism, failed everywhere it was tried. No one seriously advocates Communism anymore. Socialism is more complicated, but it is not what Barack Obama or anyone else in U.S. government advocates. (By the way, “The Communist Manifesto” is in the public domain, in English, and it is short.  There is no excuse for not reading it. Frederich von Hayek would be good to read, too, but his books have a lot more pages.)

Setting aside the fallout from a major overhaul in our national ideal, would being like Sweden be so terrible? Do we just blithely assume that ideal auto companies lose money, that something is wrong because Volvo is profitable?

The top tax rate in Sweden is 57%. But consider that in the United States, the top tax rate is 34%. Americans also pay state and local taxes, but those are deductible from Federal income taxes. In addition to income taxes, Americans pay into Social Security. That tax, 15%, is supposedly shared equally between employer and employee, but do you really think your employer pays it graciously? No, your employer reduces your wages. If we assign workers the full payroll tax burden, then our top tax rate is 49%. On top of that, we pay for health insurance. Exact estimates are hard to come by; the Kaiser Family Foundation puts it at 12.7%  of payroll. Add that to the income tax and Social Security burden, and it looks like Americans have a comparable marginal tax rate of 61.7%. I’m not entirely sure that high taxes are bad as long as we get something for them.

Would I be excited about paying a top tax of 57%? No. But is Sweden wallowing in the same misery as North Korea? Sweden’s life expectancy is 80.9 years, better than the U.S.. They have lower infant mortality too. Our poverty rate is 17.0%, Sweden’s is just 6.5%. Even the Heritage Institute admits that Sweden ranks high for its economic freedom.

And, what should be especially exciting to the American right, Sweden has a national religion, and it is Christianity! Not the weirdo Papist stuff, either, but good old-fashioned Lutheranism.

I’m not a fan of monarchy as anything other than a cultural curiousity. (As cultural curiousity, though, I’m fascinated, and I even own Princess Diana’s butler’s cookbook.) I’m amazed that the British people are willing to support the assorted members of the Mountbatten-Windsor clan. Surely, the American experience with two generations of Bushes should put aside any notion that basic competence is hereditary, if we had any doubt.

I also love the American commitment to diversity, which is very hard work at times. We have to manage school holidays, learn what to say, pronounce difficult last names, and generally accommodate people who are not like us. It pays off in the form of wonderful, rich experience. I live in Chicago, a city with an historic Swedish neighborhood. I am fond of a Swedish diner that has the most wonderful cinnamon rolls and is owned by a Chicago alderman who is also an out gay man. Many weekend afternoons, I go ice skating at a park district rink where it’s common to see high-school girls wearing jeans and headscarves; Mexican children who are overdressed for the cold clinging to the side walls; and Russian fathers barking advice to young boys on hockey skates. Assuming they were born in the U.S., any one of those skating kids could become president.

That, to me, is the strength and wonder of the United States. But some people don’t like radical democracy and upward mobility because it means that someone they do not like, who does not look at all like them, can become president. Not everyone here is all right with the kids complaining that the hielo es frio. America is more than its tax rates. Trying to figure out if our doctor is in the network in both her city and suburban offices or just the suburban one is not what makes this nation great. Changing our health care system will not turn us into Sweden – or North Korea.

A nation mourned Wednesday night, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, announced his retirement from the network. Though it’s still unclear which nation is in mourning, experts have conclusively ruled out Mexico.

According to the Associated Press, the controversial newsman “angered CNN management this summer by pressing questions about President Obama’s birth site after CNN reporters determined there was no issue.”

I myself was skeptical of the president’s birthplace until he drank a domestic beer — Bud Light — at the July 30 “beer summit.” Then I remembered that Anheuser-Busch, the makers of Bud Light, sold their company last year to InBev, a Belgian company. Thanks to CNN’s shortsightedness, we may never find out if InBev is secretly run by Kenyan expatriates.

This isn’t the first time Dobbs has left CNN. He was one of its original anchors back in 1980 when it debuted, overseeing financial news and hosting Moneyline. But in April of ‘99, after being reprimanded by the network’s then-president, Rick Kaplan, for cutting away from a speech by President Bill Clinton on the Columbine shootings, Dobbs announced that he was departing CNN, saying he wanted to focus on a new website he’d founded, Space.com, because in space no one can hear you call your boss an idiot.

(I was working at CNN in a bottom-rung position back in 1999, and I would bet money that Kaplan’s voice, which combined the omnipotence of God with the volume of a T. Rex, can be heard in space. If I remember correctly, he was also nine feet tall.)

Kaplan left CNN the following year, clearing the way for Dobbs to return in 2001. Moneyline was renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline, which became Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003, which almost became Lou Dobbs’s America Is for Lou Dobbs and Lou Dobbs’s Friends Only, So If Your Name Isn’t Lou Dobbs or You’re Not One of His Friends, Stay the Hell Out in 2007.

The exit of Dobbs — whose book Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas can be purchased at Borders, naturally — is a big blow for CNN. Earlier this year its sister network, Headline News, lost Glenn Beck to Fox News Channel, leaving CNN without any middle-aged conservatives who dye their hair a color I like to call “faded doorknob.” The dye jobs gave the ultra-right-wing anchors a youthful look, which some might amend to “a Hitler Youth-ful look,” but not me. I think these guys are just acting.

Remember when Bill O’Reilly was a guest on The Colbert Report in 2007 and said, “I’m not a tough guy … This is all an act”? He was admitting that on TV he plays a “version” of himself. (Colbert’s reply: “If you’re an act, then what am I?”)

Similarly, when President Obama says he was born in Hawaii, he’s speaking as a version of the man who was actually born in the deepest, darkest, and therefore most foreign part of Kenya. And when Glenn Beck portrays himself as an unfunny, emotionally unstable bigot on TV and radio five days a week, that’s merely a smokescreen for the gentle, mild-mannered teddy bear that lies beneath.

Or the devil. I haven’t decided yet. But either way, he’s making it work for him.

Besides, as the New York Times reported last week, he’s a big supporter of fiction, especially political thrillers. Everyone enjoys make-believe, particularly claims that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” as Beck said on the July 28 edition of Fox and Friends. It cost him a bunch of advertisers, but what a great racially charged premise for a beach read!

The trend of actors playing versions of themselves in comedic films has become very popular in the last decade, including John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich (1999), Elisabeth Shue in Hamlet 2 (2008), Neil Patrick Harris in the two Harold and Kumar movies, and Topher Grace, Bruce Willis, and Julia Roberts as Tess Ocean as Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Plus, on TV you’ve got Chris Kattan in this year’s IFC miniseries Bollywood Hero, Larry David and his various real-life celebrity friends on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Matt LeBlanc and musician Rick Springfield, who are set to play “themselves” on Showtime’s upcoming series Episodes and Californication, respectively.

There’s also Comedy Central’s Michael & Michael Have Issues. One of its creators and stars, Michael Ian Black, recently described the show-within-a-show concept to the Onion AV Club: “Although we’re playing ourselves, I still very much feel like I’m playing a character, and it’s the character of myself. What that means is, I have to understand who I am — and you can substitute ‘my character’ for ‘I’ — in the context of this television show, and in the context of this television relationship. So the conversation that [costar and cocreator Michael] Showalter and I are always having is, ‘Would I do this here?’ That character is still evolving. Any project has its own voice, and you have to find that voice.”

Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs found their voices a while ago. Now it’s time for CNN to find a new one. (Forget placeholder John King. With that square jaw of his, he should be protecting the world from supervillains, not interviewing pundits.)

May I suggest myself? Yes, I may, because I’m pretty sure the Cable News Network still owes me some backpay from ten years ago. I may not have hair the color of a faded doorknob — in fact I have no hair whatsoever these days — but what I lack in locks, I make up for with a surplus of “version”-al technique. Here are a few of the questions I get asked by readers on a regular basis:

Q: Is Aimiee really your girlfriend?
A: Yes.

Q: But why would any woman with even a shred of self-respect put up with a guy like you?
A: I don’t know. Maybe you should ask her yourself.

Q: Okay. Where is she?
A: Sorry, she can’t come to the computer right now.

Q: I think you’re making all of this up.
A: No. I swear I’m not. Except for these “questions,” of course.

Q: Wait. You’re saying I’m not really the one asking these questions? That I’m not in control of what I’m saying?
A: Exactly.

Q: My head just exploded.
A: Good, because I really need to get back to this column.

So, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, I enjoy all the mirrors in the funhouse. But I promise I won’t be hurt, CNN, if you decide I’m not a big enough “name.” May I suggest an alternate option to replace Lou Dobbs?

He’s a conservative. (Yay!) He’s also a foreigner. (Boo!)

He loved President Bush. (Yay!) He called President Obama “some tanned guy.” (Uh …)

He’s a billionaire. (Yay!) In 2006 he said, “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone.” (Hold on a second …)

He produced the 1992 film Folks!, starring beloved Oscar winner Don Ameche. (Never seen it — but yay! Old people good, death panels bad!) It was a slapstick comedy that derived most of its laughs from Ameche’s character having Alzheimer’s. (What the…?)

After 9/11 he said, “The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.” (Wow. Well, at least he didn’t compare himself to Jesus that time.)

Earlier this year he said he would deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets of his country to combat crime, but when asked by a reporter if that number would be enough to prevent women from being raped, he replied, ”You can’t consider deploying a force that would be [large enough] to prevent the risk … We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful.” (Aww, that’s kinda sweet– wait, no it’s not!)

And he once told the following joke in front of an audience: “An AIDS patient asks his doctor whether the sand treatment prescribed him will do any good. ‘No’, the doctor replies, ‘but you will get accustomed to living under the earth.’” (Who is this monster?!)

He’s Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi! Who knows what’s really going through the man’s mind at any given moment, but you certainly can’t say any of his various versions are boring.

Right now the 72-year-old politician and business tycoon is a little busy dealing with criminal charges of corruption and tax fraud back home, not to mention a sex scandal involving prostitutes and young women. But once his dance card is empty again, I’m sure he’d love a crack at his own op-ed show here in the States, where he’ll find a whole rainbow of people to offend.

Berlusconi started out as a cruise ship entertainer, and although Dobbs says he wants to concentrate on “advocacy journalism” in the next phase of his career, he could easily end up adrift if he doesn’t work on his people skills.

What’s that saying? “Immigrants take the jobs no one else wants”? Dobbs may find himself in rough waters when suddenly even the immigrants decide nothing’s better than something.

Ever since Al Franken parked his rear end in the Democrats’ 60th U.S. Senate seat, the conventional wisdom has held that no matter how much of a fuss the Republicans kicked up this summer and fall, some form of healthcare legislation was bound to reach President Obama’s desk. Taking the midterm election of 1994 as a template for what happens when Democrats spend a year on healthcare and don’t pass anything, party leaders have insisted that such a fiasco must not be repeated, no matter how mediocre a bill eventually emerges. So now that the House has wrapped up its business – taking what was already a warm bucket of piss and vomiting all over it with the Stupak amendment – a nation that not-so-narrowly voted for this agenda turns its lonely eyes to the Senate and screams, “Could you people please just get on with it?”

And the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body” responds, “Not so fast.” The House bill is “dead on arrival,” says Lindsay Graham. “I won’t let the public option come to a vote,” says Joe Lieberman. “We’re ready to take the whole Democratic Party down, rather than vote for a package that might cost us a small percentage of voters in our backwater states,” say Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. (Or, at least, they may as well be saying it.) No one at this moment has a clue how the Senate will proceed, or when – not even its majority leader, Harry Reid, who was against the public option before he was for it, and may soon be against it again.

But you know what? That’s all OK, because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who is actually happy with the House bill. Truth be told, there may be a grand total of 43 such folks – those being the Democrats who voted for the bill after also voting for the Stupak amendment, which bars the inclusion of abortion coverage in any health-insurance plan that participates in the new purchasing exchanges. Already we’ve seen a similar number of progressive Dems insist they won’t vote for final passage of the bill if the abortion measure isn’t stripped out in conference. But even if both chambers eventually agree on a bill, it will undoubtedly cost too much, cover too few (and make some pay too much to buy in), start too late (the new exchanges are delayed til 2013, simply to keep the bill’s 10-year cost projections down), and be positively loathed by far too many.

In other words, Obama and Congress have screwed the pooch completely on this bill. They should pass it anyway.

Stupak is a perfect representation of the depths to which the Democrats have sunk. Dreamed up by an anti-choice Dem for whom the good ol’ Hyde Amendment wasn’t good enough, it passed (with 64 Democrats on board) despite the fact that nobody could agree on its effects. (Sound familiar?) I have to admit that I’m of two minds about all this. On the one hand, expanding the Hyde Amendment – and using a government-created exchange mechanism to limit abortion rights for a subset of the female population – is an onerous, distasteful and inappropriate outcome for a “reform” effort whose intentions are otherwise progressive. On the other hand, I never knew so many private insurance plans included abortion coverage in the first place — at least 13 percent of U.S. abortions, and probably many more, are paid for with help from insurance policies — and I’m frankly surprised it’s such an under-argued part of the larger abortion debate. (A few states do restrict such policies to the usual rape-incest-life of the mother triumvirate, though they allow women to purchase “riders” for broader coverage. And a few more states have implemented even harsher restrictions on the plans of public employees.)

Even setting aside the bizarre concept of a woman purchasing an “abortion rider,” I’m not sure how I feel – and I’m strongly pro-choice – about paying into an employer-based insurance pool that enables a woman to cough up just a small co-payment to obtain an abortion for non-medical reasons. Imagine, then, how a strongly anti-choice person must feel when she discovers that her premiums are helping to facilitate low-cost abortions! With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand conservatives’ abhorrence for the notion of using the new exchanges to make abortions easier to get.

The abortion quandary is far from the only issue that has turned this reform into a dog’s breakfast. The most important, of course, is how we’re going to pay for all the new subsidies – the House’s surtax on the wealthy, the Senate’s tax on “Cadillac” plans, or some other idea we haven’t heard yet. Then there’s the continuing argument over the public option, which Democrats now view as a “silver bullet” to cut costs while Republicans view opposing it as a line in the sand against creeping Socialism. So far, Obama has refused to demand it; hopefully, his commitment phobia is grounded in the kind of best-practices research that has been sorely lacking elsewhere. The fact is, among the many nations that do a better job at providing healthcare than we do, only a few follow the single-payer model that is so envied on the left and so vilified on the right. Most of the rest feature some hybrid of government support (via subsidies, price controls and/or stiff regulation) and private provision of insurance and treatment. None is perfect – England’s waits for elective procedures are too long, Japan’s system is woefully underfunded, and Swiss doctors resent their comparatively low salaries – but they’re all far, far preferable to both our current system and anything that’s likely to emerge from this fall’s legislative morass.

As should be apparent by now, I’m no longer a fan of the Democrats’ work to date on this issue. In fact, I think HR 3962 positively sucks, and there’s no question that the final Senate bill (assuming there is one) will be even worse. Why, then, am I still in favor of seeing it through, in the face of Republican demands to scrap the whole thing and take a mulligan?

The easiest answer, though not the best one, is that I don’t want to see the teabaggers win, because even one victory would be profoundly dangerous to this nation – and Democrats, too long deficient in intestinal fortitude, need to show that the public’s chosen agenda can’t be sacrificed to quiet a small faction’s infantile name-calling and Hitler/Stalin demagoguery. Republicans may be begging now for renewed bipartisanship, but they’re the ones who abandoned any traditional effort at compromise – i.e., the minority party attempting to extract whatever concessions they can in exchange for support of the majority’s basic agenda. So now they’re going to have to sit and watch while moderate Dems continue to do their job for them.

But that’s not the real reason I want this shitty version of healthcare reform to pass. The real reason is that a huge chunk of it – the part that practically all Americans agree on – is not shitty, and if that stuff doesn’t get done now, it probably never will. The stuff like banning insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, or from dropping clients when they get sick. The stuff like making it easier for uninsured individuals to join a pool to buy insurance at better prices. Having seen the variety of ways other countries get to universal coverage, I no longer believe the public option is necessary; in fact, if it’s not a strongly positioned harbinger for a single-payer system, it may do more harm than good. Better that we create a private, nonprofit insurance system that proves so popular that it destroys the greedy for-profit sector. That, alone, would provide a measure of cost containment the current reform can’t even approach.

As for the rest of it – well, no bad (or even just imperfect) law is forever. If the nonprofit collectives don’t work, the public option can be revived later. If the current revenue schemes don’t pan out, Congress can find another way to scrape together enough dough, or else tweak the benefits to fit the money we’ve got. Whatever system is put in place by this legislation no doubt will need to be massaged and manipulated and overhauled to make it work more effectively – but you can’t overhaul something that doesn’t exist. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Republicans controlled at least one branch of the government from 1994 to 2008, and during that time universal healthcare was never even on the table. If legislation now requires 60 votes in the Senate, Democrats had damn well better get this done before next November.

I firmly believe that Americans can achieve a high-functioning, lower-cost health system that reflects our values as a people. I also believe that the roots of that system are somewhere in the colossal mess that’s been dumped on the Senate’s doorstep. So come on, boys and girls – break out the shovels, and let’s start the process of turning this shit into shinola.

This is a drawing of Annie Logue, no relation, a character in a comic novel by Mike Kennedy.

But the story is all about how there won’t be any more investigative journalism or how bloggers are sloppier than Judith Miller when they do their reporting.

No one looks at the real tragedy: the death of the comics. The comic strip is an art form in its own right, but it is also one closely tied to newspapers.  As newspapers cut back, they often eliminate the page that introduces the paper to new readers in the first place.

$12 a week per paper? Shared equally with the syndicate? For a cartoon that’s run in 100 papers, that represents an income of $31,200 – which means you can’t quit your day job. Scott Adams, Garry Trudeau, and the estate of Charles Schultz may have a little negotiating power, but not many other cartoonists out there do. If the strip catches on, there are greater profit opportunities in the form of books, calendars, character licensing, and possibly television. If you look at your daily paper, though, how many of the strips are good enough to get you to rush out for the book?

The low syndication rates date from a time when a cartoonist would most likely be on staff.  The syndication money was meant to be a bonus, not the primary way that the cartoonist made a living. Comic strip writers would often be employed by a newspaper and also create political cartoons or draw illustrations for stories. Very few were completely independent, at least not when they started.

Sometimes I want to smack newspaper editors around. You get readers by running both Dear Abby and Ask Amy, not cutting one or the other. You add comics, not subtract them. What, you can’t afford another $1.00 per day? Syndicated material is cheap. But it has to be printed on paper, and for centuries, that paper was purchased with classified advertising.

Modern kids are learning about comics from books. They pass around Peanuts and Pearls Before Swine anthologies; even if their family still gets a morning paper, the comics sections have shrunk. But books have limitations. Publishers don’t take chance on unknown strips, and not all comics read well in books. Many comics follow a structure in which the five weekday strips have a story arc (even with a gag-a-day strip), the Saturday strip stands alone, and the Sunday strip is large format and completely different. That can be a bit jarring in book form. Moreover, the soap-opera strips like Mary Worth and Brenda Starr move so slowly that a book version would put everyone to sleep.

You can see comics online, of course. One of my favorites, Candorville, is not carried in either Chicago paper, so I have to go to the Web site. However, the Internet is a terrible medium for a comic strip. It’s a hassle going through and clicking the links to all of my favorite strips.

Last week, I saw Lynda Barry and Matt Groening talk about the art of and market for cartooning as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Although he could have afforded to retire a long time ago, Groening still does his weekly comic panel Life in Hell. Most of his alt-weekly brethren have lost steady outlets. Life in Hell is hilarious and accessible (even if not particularly alternative anymore), and so Groening gets to be the cartoonist who stays when budgets are cut. Lynda Barry stopped publishing her strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, when demand declined so much that only one paper carried it. She now puts it up online.

Lynda Barry talked about The Family Circus, her favorite comic. When she was a child in a screwed-up household, she loved how every day’s paper brought a little glimpse into a cute and normal family doing cute and normal things. She says it showed her not only a better life, but also how powerful these little drawings could be.

The funnies inspire people. They bring them into the newspaper. They show them how other people live, whether they be former high-school classmates in Northeast Ohio, Silicon Valley office drones, or students at an historically black college . People in the funnies come out of the closet, build transmogrifiers, are born and die on the funny pages. And it happens fast, while waiting for the toaster to pop or the el train to stop at State & Lake. We’ll all be worse off if we lose them.

We may not have John Edwards to kick around anymore – though that hasn’t stopped us from putting the occasional boot into his backside, has it? – but he did leave us with a paradigm that remains useful in surveying the political landscape circa November 2009. Forget, for the moment, Edwards’ rhetoric about the rich and the poor, and focus instead on the two wildly disparate narratives about the nation’s politics that have emerged over the past 12 months. On one side are those are still living in Bamalot, who see slow but steady progress toward fixing enormous problems in the economy, health care and foreign policy; on the other are those who see nothing but dollar bills flying out the windows of the Capitol. On one side are those who remain quietly, but fiercely proud of what America accomplished last autumn; on the other are those who loudly trumpet their conviction (or who put up with people who remain convinced) that the president himself is not an American.

On Tuesday, in a couple of states, one side sat contentedly on their asses and did nothing; the other harnessed themselves into an angry, energized mini-electorate that drove to the polls and turned their governors’ mansions from blue to red.

There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.

So, yes, the dichotomy was ironic – but it was also a nice metaphor for Tuesday’s outcome. Obama’s voters, feeling like they did their job last year and remaining pretty happy with the way things have gone since then, stayed home and watched TV, while the unhappy folks dragged their butts to the polls and changed the status quo. Such is democracy in America – particularly in these off-off-year elections, when the voters of New Jersey and (particularly) Virginia love to send Bronx cheers to the party in power.

Whether or not Tuesday’s results were a referendum on Obama’s first year depends on who’s punditizing. Maybe Republicans are rebounding strongly from their annus horribilis … and maybe they just benefited from minuscule turnout, weak opponents and/or Democratic complacency. Take your pick. The truth, though, is that none of this year’s “big” elections meant much of anything to the direction of the country at large – except in Maine, where Americans proved once again that they’re not morally or intellectually worthy of being trusted with mob-rule decisions on minority rights. (It’s long past time that the Supreme Court took such decisions out of their hands for good; the whole enterprise of public voting to deny civil rights is patently unconstitutional.)

Even if Tuesday’s results were largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition of mentalities on display during Chris Christie’s victory rally and Obama’s equivalent celebrations last year. Remember all the respectful diversity and joyful weeping that attended Obama’s Grant Park speech last November? In contrast, Christie’s audience was the usual crowd of jackals – the kind we’ve seen regularly since the 1992 GOP convention, but especially since last year’s frightening election season. Note to Republican activists: When your own candidate shushes you because you’re embarrassing him on national television, as Christie did this week (and McCain did repeatedly last Nov. 4), you might want to modify your behavior.

Of course, conservative rally-goers have maintained that feral posture throughout this year, through tea parties and town halls that persistently echoed the worst expressions of racism, paranoia and xenophobia at last year’s Sarah Palin rallies. (HBO really ought to be airing its new Obama doc back-to-back with Alexandra Pelosi’s far more riveting film about those McCain/Palin crowds, Right America Feeling Wronged, which retains its raw-nerve immediacy the same way that footage of, say, Bull Connor still terrifies 50 years later.) Indeed, the positivity of the Obama campaign already seems like ancient history compared with the open, seeping wound of White Man’s Victimization that’s still being picked at on a weekly basis by right-wing pundits and teabaggers.

But then, that’s precisely the point of those efforts – to use lies and scare tactics to cover the fact that conservatives have no ideas of their own for fixing the nation’s problems. While Obama and the Democrats have turned from the generalities of campaigning to the specifics of governing, conservative activists have been left with little legislative influence and no standing whatsoever as purveyors of wise policy, considering the last eight years. So they’ve filled the vacuum by doubling down on the rabid, irrational arguments of fall ’08, hoping to whittle away at public support for Obama’s agenda via amped-up name-calling (Foreign-born! Socialist! Fascist! Socialist-Fascist!) and thinly disguised threats of violence.

Does anybody really think the results in Virginia and New Jersey this week were a validation of that strategy? In fact, both Christie and Bob McDonnell won by sublimating their conservative impulses – or flat-out denying them, in the case of McDonnell’s wingnut thesis – and embracing Obama’s themes, if not his policies, in an effort to win Independent votes. And they succeeded, even as exit polls showed that majorities of the substantially reduced electorates in both states still support Obama, and even favor the public option. Not that these lessons will be learned by the teabaggers, who are far more excited about what they accomplished in upstate New York – using an “independent” conservative carpetbagger to force aside a moderate Republican – than they are about winning the governor’s mansions in Richmond and Trenton. In the process they lost a congressional seat that had been in GOP hands since the Civil War, but never mind that … ideological purity was enforced!

If Republicans are smart, they’ll encourage their faithful to start emulating McDonnell and stop cheerleading for Michelle Bachmann and Orly Taitz. Perhaps a guy like McDonnell, despite his repugnant “past” beliefs, can grab the reins of the GOP and keep it from galloping over the cliff toward which Palin and Limbaugh and Bachmann and Beck have been steering it. Don’t bet on it, though; the teabaggers, empowered by their overthrow of Dede Scozzafava up in Watertown, are now sniffing under rocks nationwide to find primary challengers for districts represented by other insufficiently crazy Republicans. They’ll probably force McDonnell himself to rediscover his old-time religion soon enough.

Meanwhile, as health care reform lurches toward its denouement and Republicans pick their next battle – how dare Obama launch a jobs program! – the gulf between the Two Americas will no doubt widen in the coming year. Democrats need to re-energize their base and remind Independents that their agenda is about more than just spending a mint-ful of money; no matter how successful they are, they face an uphill battle to ensure that next November’s turnout looks more like last year’s than this year’s. Republicans, on the other hand, need to figure out whether they’re the party of Christie and McDonnell or the party of Doug Hoffman.

What’s that? You’ve forgotten who Doug Hoffman is? That’s because he lost on Tuesday – the same way that most every candidate who forsakes the center in pursuit of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck’s endorsements will lose next autumn. If that happens, we’ll still have Two Americas – but one will be even smaller than it is now.

A bargain at twice the price?

The latest trend in the “something for nothing on the Internet” game is the pay-to-bid auction site. The auction operator lets such items as cash and gift cards go at prices far below face value because all the bidders, even the losers, have paid to place their bids. Some of these sites claim to be helping people beat the recession. One, PsychoAuction.com, even has a complicated back story involving a founder, Nick Dickreuter, who was let go when Lehman Brothers failed. According to the PR version of the story, Dickreuter lost all respect for money and now gives things away online.

Except, of course, that Dickreuter clearly respects money. Hs site stands to make a lot of it from those who don’t understand how giveaway auctions work.  It’s not like Dickreuter took a vow of poverty and went out to serve the poor.

PsychoAuction isn’t the only site following a pay-to-bid model. DFWbid.com is another that has been mentioned on different bargain-hunting Web sites. The pitch is that you can get a $25 gift card for $8; the reality is that a lot of people spend money to bid without winning.

These sites charge you for bids. Let’s say that a bid costs $1 each. Four people are bidding on a $25 gift card. The winning bid is $8, but six people placed a total of 20 bids until that price was reached.  The house profit is $3 – $20 in bid fees and $8 from the winner, less the $25 cost of the gift card. The house might make more if the winner has to pay a shipping and handling fee to get that card.

After all, shipping and handling is where the real money in auctions seems to be!

In a bidding situation, people will sometimes force the winning bid over the value of the object. This is known as the Winner’s Curse, and it’s surprisingly common.  It may even be rational, especially if you have to pay to participate in the auction. If you get caught in a bidding war over a $25 gift card and spent $25 to bid for it, winning the card with a $26 bid reduces your net loss from $25 to $1. The value of the card offsets your bid cost. The auction site can win if you get a bargain or if you overpay. Dickreuter is psycho like a fox.

We’re making the assumption that the products for auction on pay-to-bid sites are legitimate; some are, of course, but not all are. Surely everyone knows that if you pay $100 for a new Louis Vuitton purse on eBay, it is a fake. What about the $25 gift card – is it a free-and-clear win, or is it stolen? Who knows?

I expect a lot of interest in these sites in the next month or so as we get into the ridiculous holiday gift-giving frenzy in a down economy.  The idea of getting something for nothing is huge, and I’m always on the lookout for an angle.  However, I am staying clear of these sites. I’d rather give Toys R Us an extra $25 then spend my time and money strategizing on a gift-card deal.

No matter which of the many winter holidays you celebrate (Elvismas, on January 8, is a big holiday in my household), the best way to save money is to cut your gift list down. The fewer people you shop for, the less money you will spend.  I hate to tell you this, but it’s not like folks like what you get them. In 1993, Joel Waldfogel, an economist then at Yale University and now at the University of Pennsylvania, published an article in the American Economic Review entitled “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” He found that 10% to one-third of the value of gifts is lost because the giver gave the wrong item. We all have received items that weren’t quite what we wanted – a size, brand, color, or style that wasn’t quite right; something for the kitchen that is nice but not anything we need; some CDs that are pleasant but will never make it on our Desert Island lists.

That 10% to 33% loss makes paying $26 for a $25 gift card look like small potatoes, doesn’t it? Of course, you could take the lazy way out and just give everyone on your list gift cards.

The following piece originally appeared as an entry in Popdose’s Most Disturbing Halloween EVER! series.

“Everyday People” entered the Billboard Top 40 on January 4, 1969. Six weeks later it was the number-one song in the country, holding onto the top spot for an entire month. The lead single from Sly & the Family Stone’s upcoming album Stand!, it espoused “different strokes for different folks,” with the group’s leader, Sly Stone, assuring listeners that “I am no better and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do.”

Later that year the “psychedelic soul” band from San Francisco — featuring black, white, male, and female members — played the Woodstock festival, taking the stage at three in the morning on August 17 with inspirational anthems like “You Can Make It If You Try” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” which quickly moved the predawn crowd out of their sleeping bags and onto their feet.

In hindsight, it was as high as Sly & the Family Stone would go.

On January 10, 1970, their first single of the new decade, the double-A-sided “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Everybody Is a Star,” landed in the Top 40, and within a few weeks had become the band’s second chart topper.

Ushering in the era of bottom-heavy ’70s funk dominated by bands like Kool & the Gang, Ohio Players, and Earth, Wind & Fire, “Thank You” featured a harder sound than the Family Stone’s previous hits, with Larry Graham’s percussive thump-and-pluck bass dominating the track alongside Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini’s trumpet-and-sax combo. Sly’s lyrics weren’t exactly relegated to the background, but expectations of good-time vibes from the group that recorded “Dance to the Music” tended to obscure lines like “Flamin’ eyes of people fear burnin’ into you” and “Dyin’ young is hard to take / Sellin’ out is harder.”

The lyrics that typically stand out on first listen are the titles of previous Family Stone hits incorporated into the third verse: “Dance to the music all night long / Everyday people sing a simple song.” It comes across as playful — a clever summation of the Family Stone’s triumphs in the decade just ended.

After “Thank You” and the more conventionally arranged “Everybody Is a Star,” no new material was heard from Sly & the Family Stone for almost two years. During that time Sly did produce two singles for his little sister Vet’s vocal trio — appropriately named Little Sister — the second one a cover of “Somebody’s Watching You,” originally heard on Stand!

The Family Stone’s midtempo pop-soul version is sung with sweetness and warmth, pushing the melody into nursery-rhyme territory, a la “Everyday People.” Little Sister’s take, from 1971, is much more spare, the hushed vocals placed higher in the mix so as to foreground the paranoid lyrics:

Ever stop to think about a downfall
Happens at the end of every line
Just when you think you pulled a fast one
Happens to the foolish all the time.

The final verse is even more ominous:

The nicer the nice, the higher the price
And that’s what you pay for what you need
The higher the price, the nicer the nice
Jealous people like to see you bleed.

Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You” was reportedly the first instance of a drum machine being used in place of a human drummer on a mainstream record. The device’s unwavering rhythm makes the downfall mentioned in the lyrics seem like a foregone conclusion.

In November of ‘71, Sly & the Family Stone finally broke their silence of almost two years when “Family Affair,” the lead single off their fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, hit the airwaves. But if “Thank You” was a bit more forceful than what fans were used to, “Family Affair” was a complete 180. The accompanying album caused confusion as well, especially from fans expecting some new rays of sunshine soul. (In contemporary terms, imagine if Radiohead had skipped OK Computer and followed up 1995’s The Bends with 2000’s Kid A.)

One of the most unsettling number-one hits of all time, “Family Affair” speaks of dysfunction — “You can’t leave, ’cause your heart is there / But you can’t stay, ’cause you been somewhere else!” — while behind the scenes there was already plenty of that to go around: singer and keyboardist Rose Stone, Sly’s sister, was the only member of the Family Stone who appeared on the track aside from Sly, singing the chorus through cupped hands. The distinctive Rhodes piano was played by Sly’s old friend Billy Preston, the guitar was provided by Bobby Womack, and the beat was programmed into a Rhythm King drum machine by Sly.

The Family Stone may have gotten the sleepy Woodstock crowd to dance to the music at 3 AM, but on “Family Affair” Sly sounds like most people feel if they happen to be awake at that time of night. It’s a mesmerizing performance — bone-tired yet brutally honest — that’s mostly confined to Sly’s lower register, but he lets loose two phlegmy falsetto screams in the final stretch that ring in your ears long after the song has ended. (His elastic voice was presumably a major influence on Prince’s style.)

Riot includes this peculiar credit: “All songs written, arranged and produced by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone.” (Previous albums had credited Sylvester with the songs, Sly with the production.) Sylvester was the sensitive churchgoing boy who’d grown up singing in a gospel group, the Stewart Four, with his younger siblings — Rose, Freddie, and Vet (née Vaetta) — but as he told talk-show host Mike Douglas in 1974, a fifth-grade teacher misspelled the first syllable of his name on a blackboard. The nickname “Sly” stayed with him. “I think I started even acting like it after that,” he said.

Sly Stewart begat Sly Stone when he was hired to spin R&B records at San Francisco’s KSOL in October of ‘64. The 21-year-old DJ stayed at the R&B station through June of ‘67, then did a short stint at KDIA in Oakland that fall, after which the Family Stone became his top priority.

Sylvester was the student who absorbed not only the new psychedelic sounds he was hearing in the Bay Area — including the Great Society, Grace Slick’s first band — but also the sounds he was broadcasting on the radio: Bob Dylan, Motown, the Beatles, and Stax-Volt soul. (”I’d play Dylan, Hendrix, James Brown back to back, so I didn’t get stuck in any one groove,” he once said.) Sly, however, was the showman, whose outsized personality could sell the songs Sylvester was composing in his head by combining them with the visual hook of an integrated band for integrated times.

But as drugs like cocaine and PCP (and fame, as hoary as that cliche may be) entered Sly’s world in 1970, his identity, much like the sonic quality of Riot, began to muddy. The student was still there, but the showman felt the need to bring him onstage for a bow, hence Riot’s third cut, “Poet,” a precursor of hip-hop braggin’ and boastin’ (”My only weapon is my pen / And the frame of mind I’m in”). Sylvester and Sly were the Jekyll and Hyde of R&B in the ’70s, and the struggle between the two sides is documented on “Family Affair.”

“One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn / And another child grows up to be somebody you’d just love to burn,” sings Sly, putting extra emphasis on the last six words. (He said in an interview on KCRW in May that the song came from “a daydream,” and with songwriting in general, “I don’t necessarily have to have experienced it, but I can see it. I can feel it.”) On the subject of Sylvester and Sly’s uneasy marriage, he croaks, “Newlywed a year ago / But you’re still checking each other out / Nobody wants to blow, nobody wants to be left out.” Each side needed the other to succeed. Both sides were stuck.

Sly was in and out of drug rehab facilities in the ’80s, one of which was the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Fort Myers, Florida. In 1985 Dr. Richard Sapp told Spin magazine, “We didn’t accept ‘Sly’ in our therapy sessions. Sylvester can control Sly … Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester.” Years later his father, K.C. Stewart, was quoted in Mojo magazine as saying, “You can usually tell what he’s been doing from the way he is on the phone. Mama knows the moment he says ‘Hello’ if she’s talking to Sly or Sylvester. If he tries to tell a ten-minute story in ten seconds, then it’s been a Sly Stone kinda day.”

In addition to his own internal pressure at the turn of the decade, the Oakland-based Black Panthers were applying external pressure to Sly, hoping for a militant musical endorsement, while white hippies thought they’d found their crossover superstar at Woodstock. Sly seemed to answer both suitors at once in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” with the lyric “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay.”

Universal acceptance can be a scary thing. Sly sang about being the “Underdog” on the very first track of the Family Stone’s very first album, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, but just two years later his status had changed completely. If everyone suddenly embraces you, there can be a creeping suspicion that everyone thinks they suddenly own a piece of you, that they can control you. Sly was being polite in the lyrics of “Thank You,” but with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he got right to the point: You know nothing about me or my music, and here’s the proof.

“Sly filled an important social void, bridging blacks and whites,” said the Family Stone’s original manager, David Kapralik, in People magazine in 1996. Sly, the radio broadcaster who wanted to reach the widest audience possible, put it more simply years earlier: “What I write is people’s music. I want everybody, even the dummies, to understand what I’m saying. That way they won’t be dummies anymore.”

He addressed the ugly reality of racism in his music only occasionally, notably in songs like 1969’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” whose title is answered by the next line in the chorus: “Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” “The sense here is one of impasse,” wrote music journalist Barney Hoskyns in an essay for the 2007 reissue of Stand! “Following the race riots of 1967 and 1968, and then … the shocking assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, the races in America began to move apart, increasingly distrustful of each other.”

In the documentary Jimi & Sly: The Skin I’m In, which aired on Showtime in 2000, Rose Stone says of her big brother, “When we were little kids and we would go from church to church and sing, if people didn’t stand and applaud and really feel the spirit of what he was singing, he’d cry afterward.” Much has been written about There’s a Riot Goin’ On being Sly’s declaration of political disillusionment, but he never addressed Vietnam in his songs, or Kent State, or MLK or RFK or LBJ. In fact, when asked by Vanity Fair writer David Kamp in 2007 whether or not Riot was a political statement, he answered, “Well, yeah, probably. But I didn’t mean it to be.”

Sly is sly, after all. And good music is good music, regardless of its “message” or whoever made it. To Sly, what mattered was the product of people’s talent and creativity, not the color of their skin.

His disillusionment may have come from witnessing free-form radio, which he’d helped popularize in the Bay Area in the mid-’60s, fading away on the FM dial. The freedom he’d enjoyed in others’ music and expressed through his own, beginning with the uplifting gospel numbers he performed as a child, was no longer being celebrated. By the end of 1970 the Beatles had broken up, and Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Hendrix were all dead. The colors on the musical spectrum were separating once again. On Riot Sly responded in kind by delving deeper into funk and the roots of African-American music.

As pressure mounted, he showed symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, though the ulcer itself never developed. However, “one of the clinical ways to ease the pain is cocaine,” Kapralik told Rolling Stone in 1971. Perhaps he felt that if he’d failed to take his listeners higher, the only way to numb himself from bitter disappointment was to get higher.

“Life was drugs, and it was music,” said Sly’s former personal assistant, Stephani Swanigan Owens, in Joel Selvin’s 1998 book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. “They would spend so many hours — thirty-six to forty-eight hours — in a stretch at the Record Plant, wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs, too.”

Uppers like cocaine and amphetamines gave Sly and company the stamina they needed, but on Riot the core performers weren’t the members of the Family Stone. Friends and colleagues like Preston, Womack, and Jim Ford (who wrote “Harry Hippie” for Womack) were the ones recording with Sly well into the night and the next day and the day after that.

Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis also dropped in to jam and see what this character named Sly Stone was all about. The third track on Hancock’s landmark jazz fusion album Head Hunters (1973) is titled “Sly,” and the influence of Riot’s winding groove can be heard on Davis’s divisive On the Corner (1972). The late jazz legend’s memories of Riot’s recording sessions, as chronicled in his autobiography, Miles, boiled down to “nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns, looking all evil. I told him I couldn’t do nothing with him — told Columbia I couldn’t make him record any quicker. We snorted some coke together and that was it.”

Sly was eating up lots of studio time and label money at the Record Plant, as noted by Owens, and he had a Winnebago outfitted with recording equipment in case he felt like recording there as well. But mainly he was recording at his new home in southern California.

In the fall of 1970 Sly moved into a mansion in Bel Air owned by John and Michelle Phillips — the head of the Family Stone was now in the home of the Mamas and the Papas. (The Phillipses had their own share of dysfunction: John’s oldest daughter, actress Mackenzie Phillips, revealed in her 2009 memoir, High on Arrival, that she used cocaine with her father and had a ten-year incestuous relationship with him, starting when she was 19.)

Sly first learned about the house from his friend Terry Melcher, a record producer and A&R man at Columbia Records (the sister label of Epic, which put out Sly’s albums). At the time Melcher wasn’t showing his face much in public: After declining to sign a musician named Charles Manson to a recording contract, Manson came looking for him at the house he was renting in Los Angeles. Melcher and his girlriend, Candice Bergen, had already moved out, though; another successful young couple, film director Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate, were now living in the house. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant when Manson and his “family” murdered her and three of her friends on August 9, 1969.

“When we first moved into that house, there were rooms that had some things in them that made us think the house was haunted,” said Owens. “We found a Ouija board in there. We found different pieces of paperwork that made us believe they were into witchcraft.” Sly increased the general level of discomfort by bringing his dog, a violent pit bull terrier named Gun. According to Joel Selvin’s article about Riot in the August 2001 issue of Mojo magazine, Sly also owned a baboon, “but Gun killed the baboon and then fucked it.”

John Phillips had installed a recording studio in the attic, which held great appeal for his new renter. Sly could now record whenever he wanted. And he could keep people waiting as long as he wanted while he waited to be “inspired.” In 1970 he missed 26 out of 80 scheduled concerts, in some cases leaving the rest of the Family Stone in limbo backstage while he got high. Fans grew frustrated, occasionally rioting in the wake of cancellations.

As Errico told Selvin, “On one hand, [Sly] had the capabilities of handling all that attention, fame, big audiences. But on the other hand, there was another part of him that didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it, and wanted to be away from it. This fight always went on, where he wanted to be the biggest, the baddest, best, and then, when he got it, he didn’t want to be it; he was scared of it.”

Sly himself described for KCRW a performance of the Stewart Four’s at the Oakland Civic Auditorium: “Towards the end of the song, people started running down the aisle … I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know that they were just happy, [that] they weren’t just gonna come up and grab me. So I turned around and started running … and I’ve been running ever since.” The next-to-last cut on Riot is “Runnin’ Away,” in which Sly sings, “Running away to get away / Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! / You’re wearing out your shoes / Look at you fooling you!” And just as he sang “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay” a year before Riot’s release, he’d continue giving hints about his early retirement on future albums, particularly 1973’s Fresh and the single “If You Want Me to Stay” (”Count the days I’m gone … / Because I promise / I’ll be gone for a while”).

As his band became more and more popular, Sly withdrew further into the Sly Stone persona he’d created, though the showman was aggressively transforming into a wannabe pimp, with lots of money, women, drugs, and guns at his disposal. The nicer the nice, the higher the price.

There’s a Riot Goin’ On was the first Family Stone album not to feature the band on the cover, but it’s also the only one that doesn’t feature Sly, either. The flag that’s pictured is red, white, and black, representing “people of all colors,” blood red being the color we all share on the inside. But the symbolism of Sly’s American flag is as inclusive as the album ever gets. Without question it’s his most introspective effort, with the focus in his songwriting shifting from “we” to “me,” and after Riot he was the only band member to get any face time on the cover, which was somewhat appropriate since the band had stopped recording together in the studio by the time of the Riot sessions. The cover of 1976’s Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back (the title was wishful thinking), a Family Stone album in name only, pictured Sly as a one-man band, but he’d already been operating with that attitude in the studio for years.

For Riot, Sly began overdubbing band members’ contributions onto existing tracks, sometimes replacing them with his own instrumentation if he thought he could do a better job matching the sound he heard in his mind. All the late-night overdubbing and erasing on the master tape is what gives Riot its murky fidelity, a stark contrast to the bright, shiny sound of previous Family Stone albums.

But whether or not the eventual aural atmosphere of the album was completely intentional, there’s no denying that the lo-fi audio adds to the listener’s feeling of being in a drug haze, coming down from the 1969 highs of Stand! and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and being submerged in the dark waters of “Family Affair,” the bluesy, menacing “Just Like a Baby,” and the hypnotically overpowering “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” The bass is so prominent throughout the album, and the drum-machine beats so relentless, that the keyboards on “Africa Talks to You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” and the guitar on “Thank You” feel like needles pricking the skin whenever they make an appearance. We may all share the same blood, but on Riot there’s ice in Sly’s veins.

The album kicks off, in fact, with the sound of a throbbing bass guitar, and as music journalist Touré says in the liner notes for Sony’s reissue of the Family Stone’s 1973 album Fresh, “If you hear a nasty bass line, you know funk is coming.” The funk never lets up on Riot, but it’s not dance funk or party funk or even P-Funk. It’s lonely, claustrophobic, 3 AM funk. The album’s opener, “Luv n’ Haight,” like “Family Affair,” is an expression of the internal and external pressure being exerted on Sly. The chorus switches from Sly singing “Feel so good / Don’t want to move / Feel so good inside myself / Don’t need to move” to Little Sister chanting “Feel so good / Feel so good / I want to move / I want to move” over and over again in the last half of the song, with their vocals switching from the left channel to the right on each line, boxing in Sly (and any listener using headphones), who’s seemingly paralyzed by drugs, his two “sides,” or other forces.

Depending on how you feel about There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the midtempo inertia that takes hold over the rest of the album is either monotonous and enervating or a case of Sly brilliantly pushing the boundaries of popular music as if it were a rubber band that could snap at any second. Stephen Paley, a former Epic A&R executive and friend of Sly’s, said Riot “was almost like brinksmanship. He wanted to see how far from commercial he could go and still be commercial.”

“Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” a dramatic reworking of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” is cut from the same cloth as Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You.” On the new version Sly replaces Larry Graham’s signature slap bass with a thudding “bottom” of his own and slows the tempo to a crawl. Though the echoed vocals sound like they’re coming from a part of your brain you’d rather not know about, the lyrics are no longer hiding behind a bouncy dance groove:

Lookin’ at the devil, grinnin’ at his gun
Fingers start shakin’, I begin to run
Bullets start chasin’, I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle, I was on the top

Is Sly the devil, and African rhythms the source of Sylvester’s strength if he hopes to eventually conquer his other self? There’s a Riot Goin’ On features some gospel-derived “call and response,” but not in the way one might expect. The title of the album is a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier in 1971, and side one’s “Africa Talks to You” receives a grateful “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” on side two. But whereas the name-checking of previous Family Stone hits on the original “Thank You” seemed like clever wordplay, in this context it’s a rejection of all that came before, as if Sly’s mocking anyone who was dumb enough to believe his previous messages of hope, truth, and togetherness:

Dance to the music all night long
Everyday people, sing a simple song
Mama’s so happy, mama starts to cry
Papa’s still singin’, you can make it if you try

If Sly’s intention on Riot was to tear down his music and everything it once represented in order to build it back up again as a new, different beast, then he accomplished what he set out to do. Riot is a hard album to love — its bookends, Stand! and Fresh, are much more accessible — but it’s impossible to forget.

Greil Marcus, who reviewed Riot three times for Creem magazine, wrote in his 1974 book Mystery Train, “With this album, Sly is giving his audience — particularly his white audience — precisely what they don’t want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly’s disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands.”

Indeed, after the commercial failure of the Family Stone’s debut album, the rhythmically expansive A Whole New Thing (1967), Sly was told he needed to simplify his sound in order to get his songs played on the radio (by DJs who were possibly less open-minded than he was during his broadcasting days). His response was “Dance to the Music,” which became one of the band’s signature songs. He even repeated its chord progression on several songs from the accompanying album of the same name.

“He hated it. He just did it to sell records,” Martini told Selvin. “The whole album was called Dance to the Music, dance to the medley, dance to the shmedley. It was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats. We had been doing something different, but these beats weren’t going over. So we did the formula thing. The rest is history and he continued his formula style.” But as Miles Marshall Lewis wrote in his book about Riot for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, “By the introspective, mournful There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly didn’t give a fuck about people pleasing, which is also largely the album’s tale in a nutshell.”

Ironically, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” is the only real band performance by the Family Stone that appears on Riot. (Errico said it’s the one track on the album where he can hear his drumming.) It was supposedly recorded in ‘69 around the same time as the original “Thank You,” after Sly moved from San Francisco to L.A. That’s when the band began to splinter.

Robinson and Martini moved into the Phillips mansion in the fall of 1970, but the rest of the band kept their homes in the Bay Area. They’d travel to Bel Air to record their parts when requested, but as Sly became more isolated and arrogant, he’d keep them waiting around in the house until he was ready to see them. Errico quit sometime during the Riot sessions, fed up with the drugs and the canceled concerts and the endless waiting, leading Sly, the musical innovator, to employ the Rhythm King drum machine on tracks like “Family Affair,” “Poet,” and “Time.”

Time — which “needs another minute (at least),” according to the song — was another source of pressure for Sly. Epic Records, realizing a new album wasn’t coming anytime soon, released Greatest Hits in time for the Christmas shopping season in 1970, adding “Thank You,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and the band’s other post-Stand! single, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” to the track listing. (They had hoped those songs would be part of a new album ready for release in early 1970. Sly had other plans.) The quickie compilation was a smash success, putting further pressure on Sly to come up with a new album that could rival or even top it.

In the meantime, everyone would have to wait. He didn’t allow clocks in the Phillips mansion, and when Sly — clearly stoned — ignored Dick Cavett’s attempts to sign off at the end of his own show on June 8, 1971, by imploring him to “Wait a minute, man,” the talk-show host finally had to say “Time marches on!” over the exit music. Sly had already shown up late for the live broadcast, forcing Cavett to kill time on air. (The band wasn’t asked back.)

“Take your time / But you’ve got a limit,” Sly sings, the second line possibly a veiled apology to everyone who was fed up with him. The man hadn’t lost his sense of humor — his yodeling on “Spaced Cowboy” offers some comic relief even if the growls he interjects remind you of the somewhat frightening company you’ve chosen to keep — but his jokes were bleaker this time around. Side one of Riot closes with the title track, whose running time on the LP is listed as “0:00.” Time, it appears, has run out. Or did the stopwatch never start? “I did it because I felt there should be no riots,” Sly once said of the nonexistent track. Or maybe the riot in question was always meant as a laugh riot and nothing more, with Sly’s growing audience the butt of the joke — Riot was the band’s only album to reach #1, after all.

However, it’s hard not to wonder if Sly was inspired by the Last Poets, the hip-hop forebears whose spoken-word number “Run, Nigger” was featured on their 1970 self-titled album:

Time is running out on our natural habits
Time is running out on lifeless serpents reigning over a living kingdom
Time is running out of talks, marches, tunes, chants, and all kinds of prayers
Time is running out of time

Sly also indicates that time has run out (on the ideals of the ’60s? on the Family Stone? on music?) when he sings “Timber … all fall down!” in “Africa Talks to You,” a fairly explicit rejection of Stand! Those who still believe in the Summer of Love get a reprimand as well: “Watch out, ’cause the summer gets cold / When today gets too old!” Only the “Brave & Strong” survive.

In Jeff Kaliss’s 2008 book I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, Sly himself says that record executives weren’t just pressuring him to manage his time properly: “People were coming from all different kinds of record companies. People were talking to different people in the group, and telling me that I didn’t need this person or that person, or telling [the group's members] how they didn’t need this or that person. They break you up so they can have different concerts every night, and make everybody different stars, with different record sales.” Even so, it’s hard to deny that the main force behind the gradual breakup of Sly & the Family Stone was none other than Sly himself.

On January 9, 1980, a full decade after “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” entered the Top 40, Sly was a guest once again on The Mike Douglas Show. A clip of his appearance, which pops up near the end of The Skin I’m In, shows actress Valerie Harper, Douglas’s cohost for the week, staring slack-jawed at an almost incomprehensible, drugged-out Sly, who sounds like he’s imitating a vocoder as he says, “I’m gonna do one more album real quick, and if it’s not instantly platinum …” He pauses, shakes his head, then sings the words “Bye, y’all, bye, y’all.”

True to his word, Sly recorded only one more album, 1983’s underwhelming Ain’t But the One Way, which was completed by producer Stewart Levine without Sly’s input — he’d gone AWOL after the initial sessions in ‘81 and couldn’t be found (or maybe Warner Bros., his label at the time, decided it would cost less to finish the album without his increasingly unreliable talents). He surfaced in time to promote One Way on Late Night With David Letterman, but even the album’s cover had to be created without him: the camouflage hat he’s wearing appears to be the same one from his 1980 Mike Douglas Show appearance.

The most striking song on One Way is “Ha Ha, Hee Hee,” which includes one of the most directly reflective verses in Sly’s discography:

Ha ha, hee hee
Nothing to do
You beat the genius in you
But who cares if you are through
Or do
You’ll never miss it

Too bad the person doing the reflecting isn’t Sly — “Ha Ha, Hee Hee” was written by longtime musical associate Pat Rizzo. Sly had already checked out.

“Time is here to stay,” he sang in 1971, on “Runnin’ Away.” But he obviously couldn’t make that promise himself.

Just Like a Baby
Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa

Alleged Inside Trader

Even then, it does not seem to have helped him much. The Galleon Group of hedge funds, which Rajaratnam managed, has shut down in the wake of insider trading charges against Rajaratnam and several associates. However, it doesn’t look like the funds’ performance was all that great, so Rajaratnam and company may base their defense on the fact that they did not make excess profits. One of the charges is that Galleon made $500,000 trading in options in Google after receiving a tip from an employee of Google’s investor relations company that earnings would be lower than expected. To make that profit, an inside trader would have to identify informants, figure out how to reach them, compensate them, act on the information, and take the risk that it was good information. These steps involve time and expense that cut into the profits from insider trading. The profits have to be huge to overcome the costs, and they may not be big enough to compensate the inside traders for the risk. And then, of course, the information has to be good. A wise inside trader would probably sit on the first few tips just to see if the tipper has good information. But even a tipper with mostly good information will have a few duds.

All that, for a $500,000 profit (before expenses) in a group of funds with $3.7 billion in assets. That works out to a 0.01% return. A fund manager needs hundreds and thousands of these bets to beat the market. It would be easier to be legit.

This case has a few staples of insider trading cases. Two of people mentioned in the charges were junior staffers, one at Moody’s, another at Google’s investor relations firm. These are people for whom $10,000 or so is enough money (a sum mentioned in the SEC’s filing) to compromise their ethics; they may also not know how wrong it is. If an inside trader can find a weak person in these circumstances, there’s a nice profit to be made, at least on one or two trades.

Another staple is the person looking to impress someone else with their great information. A few of the tippers fit that bill, especially Roomy Kahn, a former Galleon employee who seems to have had financial trouble and wanted to be rehired.

Insider trading is also difficult to prove. Martha Stewart seems to have sold her Imclone stock after receiving a call from her broker, which he placed after receiving a call from the daughter of the Imclone CEO. But for all that, Stewart’s criminal charge was obstruction of justice because the Feds could not prove insider trading.

In the Galleon case, the allegations have been enough for the fund to close. The dishonest and honest alike have lost jobs. Many will have a hard time working again because of the taint of the case, even if they were not charged or are found not guilty. The people who have been implicated have to hire lawyers, and others may decide that it’s a good idea to have counsel now in case they need it later.

I’m not naïve; I believe that people trade on inside information. Why wouldn’t they? People buy and sell securities every day, and a few of them may have an edge some of the time. But do they have enough of an edge to produce consistently superior returns? That, I’m not sure about, but it seems unlikely.

The bottom line is that most people should just buy index funds. They won’t beat the market with them, but they’ll do better than most fund managers, and they’ll do it fair and square.

Now is the autumn of our discontent … at least for us Los Angeles baseball fans. Last night the Dodgers were polished off by the ruthless Phillies, their forever-teetering staff of pitchers finally crumbling in the face of Ryan Howard and that goddamned Victorino. Tonight the Angels may suffer the same fate – and even if they survive long enough to fly back east for the weekend, the Yankees will have their $161 million man waiting.

Which $161 million man? Now, there’s a question that could only refer to the Yankees. The one I’m talking about is CC Sabathia, the team’s most recent nine-figure pitching purchase, who has already shut the Angels down twice in this ALCS. But I could also be talking about first baseman Mark Teixeira, whom the Yankees plucked off the Angels’ roster last offseason for $180 million and who has repeatedly robbed his former teammates in the field this week (though his offensive numbers are pathetic). Of course, I might otherwise be talking about Derek Jeter, who’s nearing the end of his own $189 million contract. And as for Alex Rodriguez … well, he’ll earn $161 million in about the time it takes me to finish this column.

At least A-Rod is earning his salary (for once) this postseason. Still, like most baseball fans who don’t root for the Yankees, I have a hard time watching the Bombers without becoming queasy from the tsunami of dollar signs. In fact, Sabathia, Teixeira and A-Rod have ceased to function for me as human beings; their uniform numbers may as well be replaced with contract numbers – 161, 180, and 275, respectively. (Jeter gets a pass, since he came up through the farm system back in the ’90s, but the mind reels at the thought of the Yankees’ other free-agent acquisitions this decade – including tonight’s starting pitcher, number 82, otherwise known as A.J. Burnett.) If you add up the number of dollars the Steinbrenners have committed to their Big Three free agents through the end of Sabathia’s contract in 2016 – a total of $616 million – you get a number larger than the expected cumulative payrolls of 18 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams over that span, even accounting for inflation.

The reason I bring all this up – apart from my perennial disgust with the Yankees’ patently unfair revenue and payroll advantages, a hatred which frequently needs venting at this time of year – is because yesterday a phrase re-entered the public sphere that recently had been reserved for discussions of baseball and its competitive-balance issues. The phrase is “antitrust exemption,” and now it’s the latest cudgel being used by congressional Democrats to smite the Corporate Villain of the Day, the health insurance industry. Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee voted to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, which removed the industry from federal jurisdiction and instead allowed the states to impose their own regulations. Democrats are furious over a bogus “study” the industry released last week, which claimed that current reform efforts would cause a spike in the premiums that insurers would be forced to charge. Still seething over the timing of that report (a day before the Senate Finance Committee’s vote on the Baucus bill), and frustrated by the continued uncertainty of passing reform legislation this year, the Dems say – or, more specifically, Sen. Patrick Leahy says — that repealing the antitrust exemption will help end the insurance companies’ long history of “price-fixing, bid-rigging and market allocation.” Industry spokesmen, of course, insist that Congress is engaged in an act of vengeance, not policy, and that Democrats are hellbent on fixing a problem that doesn’t exist.

So, what does that have to do with the damn Yankees? Not much, really – except that the last time Congress so publicly bandied about the concept of repealing an industry’s antitrust exemption, the industry was baseball. In fact, such threats have become relatively commonplace in recent years, ever since the players strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series. The issues behind that strike were spiraling costs and a lack of fair competition, which will certainly sound familiar to anyone following the current free-for-all over health-care reform. At that time, Congress — powerless to stop the strike, but eager to lash out at the owners who were shouldering most of the blame for baseball’s problems – reached for the only bow in its quiver, the threat of repealing baseball’s long-cherished exemption. That threat resurfaced several years later, when MLB commissioner Bud Selig considered dismantling the financially strapped Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos, and again when baseball was excruciatingly slow to respond to the steroids controversy. So far, those threats have remained idle ones – primarily because baseball’s owners arguably (and particularly in retrospect) occupied the moral high ground during the strike, and because it was the players, not the owners, who resisted implementing a strong steroids policy.

Of course, comparing Congress’ antitrust threats against these two industries is an imperfect, even contradictory exercise, at least as far as baseball’s labor problems concerned the Yankees. Congress is now lashing out at insurers’ supposed fixing of prices at inflated rates … while in ’94 the owners were attempting to fix salaries at reduced rates. George Steinbrenner didn’t even approve of his fellow owners’ battle with the union; indeed, he was never enthusiastic about a salary cap, since his was the spending the other owners were trying hardest to restrain. So he sided quietly with the players, while Selig and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf steered a course for labor unrest and earned Congress’ ire. Afterward, Steinbrenner’s teams of outrageously paid all-stars became the greatest beneficiaries of the owners’ failure to secure a cap – it’s no coincidence that in the 15 years since then, the Yankees have reached the playoffs 14 times and won four championships (for the moment), all while consistently doubling the payroll of the next-richest team.

So, no, the comparison of these two targeted antitrust exemptions isn’t perfect. More important, Congress’ threats to repeal them have served as little more than spiteful red herrings. One can argue that baseball might be forced to operate more fairly on behalf of all its teams (and the fans) if it didn’t enjoy its exemption, but repealing it wasn’t going to end the ’94 strike, save the Twins or solve the steroids problem. Similarly, punishing the insurers in this way won’t provide anything like the fix that’s required for our health-care system – only a full complement of reforms, including a robust public option (eventually approaching a single-payer system) will accomplish that. Repealing McCarran-Ferguson may be convenient, and it might be temporarily satisfying, but hopefully Democrats will come to realize that revenge is a dish best served comprehensively, and during an elaborate White House signing ceremony.

Still, as long we’re here venting … if, as Bill Veeck supposedly said, rooting for the Yankees once was “like rooting for U.S. Steel,” it’s now certainly true that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the health insurance industry. Here’s hoping those overpaid, soulless jerks take a huge tumble in the next few weeks. Oh – and here’s hoping the Yankees lose, too.