And knowing is half the battle!

"Living heroes have a tendency to become idealistic after a revolution. They have no concept of the mundane practicalities of government. Dead heroes, on the other hand, are much more malleable."
--Major Sebastian Bludd

This is the place where pop culture and politics collide in unexpected ways.

First, just a little bit of background: G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was a Hasbro toy line from the 1980s, based on an earlier line of larger figures Hasbro produced in the 60s and 70s. The line was planned to be in the same scale as Star Wars figures (roughly 3.75" tall), as these sold a lot better than the 12" figures that had been popular. (Due, I imagine, in no small part to the smaller figures costing less and allowing people to buy more.)

After deciding to produce this new line (around 1981), Hasbro contacted Marvel Comics to produce the backstory for the characters and a tie-in monthly comic book. An editor at Marvel, Larry Hama, perhaps the most underrated writer in the entire history of comic books, dusted off a proposal he'd created a couple of years prior about a team of commandos led by Nick Fury, which had never been approved by Marvel. He changed around some names and costumes, and the initial version of the Joe team was born. Unable to find a writer willing to write a book based on a toy, Hama wrote the series himself, and his 13-year run on the title is legendary.

For, unlike the entertaining but ultimately childish cartoon, the G.I. Joe comic book was, for the most part, semi-realistic. The characters acted like real soldiers and terrorists, even the most vile villains had reasons for being what they were, and, perhaps most shocking to those who never read it and only saw the cartoon, they even died in the line of duty. The characters' names were usually names borrowed from servicemen with whom Hama had served in Vietnam (or, in at least one case, an artist on the comic) or puns and jokes (the first names of the original three Dreadnoks were Tom, Dick, and Harry; their last names, Winken, Blinken, and Nod). And, not surprisingly, Hasbro, who developed the looks of characters before they had names and personalities assigned to them, often based likenesses on real people. (The most famous instance of this, not counting guys like Sergeant Slaughter who were supposed to actually be celebrities, was Tunnel Rat, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Hama himself.)

So, this may be the longest "little bit of background" in human history. Anyway, I was recently discussing the original toyline with a friend, specifically exactly when it "jumped the shark." There'd always been some goofiness, particularly in the costumes of the various Cobra elite. (Dr. Mindbender has got to be one of the weirdest-looking characters ever designed, regardless of how cool his concept was: a mild-mannered orthodontist who tinkered with brainwave manipulation to alleviate pain, tested his prototype on himself, and was transformed into the most maniacal mad scientist the world had ever seen.) One name came up quickly: Cesspool. Cesspool was introduced long after we'd both stopped buying the figures, but, because of the way the Hasbro/Marvel agreement worked, he had to appear in the comic, which we were both still reading at the time (1991). Cesspool was the leader of a group of Cobras called the Eco-Warriors, who wanted to pollute the entire Earth. I'm not sure why a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world would actually want to destroy the world first, but you can tell that Captain Planet was not considered at the time to be nearly as lame as he really is.

So I looked up Cesspool's filecard. Almost immediately, I was struck by a more than passing resemblance to a real live person (aside from his ridiculous scars). And the first sentence sounded a lot like it could be referring to an actual corporation for which said real person once served as CEO: "CESSPOOL was the Chief Executive Officer of a huge multi-national corporation with vast holdings in oil refineries, chemical plants and mills."

Uncanny, isn't it?

Of course, there's an obvious problem with this comparison: Cheney didn't become the CEO of Halliburton until 1995; the Cesspool figure was released in 1991 and therefore was probably designed in 1990. However, I'm not familiar with Cheney's voting record in the Senate, or with environmental decisions he might have made or influenced during the Nixon administration, and I've spent too much time thinking about this already to look them up to see if there might be something in his history that could've indicated to some Hasbro designer the monster he would become.

In any case, I have a word of advice for Destro: If Cesspool invites you to go hunting, tell him you and the Baroness have plans for a romantic getaway in Borovia.

Who gonna bail me out?

I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
--The Who

Almost two weeks. Not bad for a goal of daily, eh? I've had a nasty cold that's kept me from doing much, but didn't realize it'd been this long.

I don't claim to understand the business world. Everything about it seems to fly directly in the face of common sense. For instance, if a retailer's profits don't match their projections or are down from the previous year, this means the company is in dire straits; the stocks plummet and the company might go under in some cases. Stupid me, using only my common sense, thinks, "But there are still profits, and not losses, right? In other words, you made money, just not as much as expected. So how is this not a good thing, even if it's not quite as good as you'd hoped?"

We are on what is likely to be the start of a long and painful recession, if not a full-on depression. And we were brought here, as eighty years ago, by unbridled corporate greed. As a society, we forgot that the Republican economic philosophy, taken to the extreme, falls in on itself. It's a philosophy founded on optimism and faith in human nature: "If you give money to the rich, they create jobs. Stay out of business, because business will do the right thing."

Bulls***.

Corporations are not an evil in and of themselves, but they rarely, left unchecked, become bastions of human goodness. "Human goodness" is a myth in itself. We're all nasty little buggers who try as much as we can to put our best face forward and not let everyone else see how despicable we are. Truth is, the Earth would be far better off if that asteroid had missed 65 million years ago. Maybe a more rational intelligent species would've evolved. Or maybe the world would enjoy the lack of a supposedly developed ruler.

(If you doubt the inherent badness of human nature, go into a Wal-Mart on a weekend. It's savage. And all to save maybe four cents on a damn box of crackers! That's one reason my wife and I refer to the place as "Hell" and refuse to go there unless absolutely necessary.)

The news is frightening every day. Major companies are going under. Homes are worth half of what people owe on them, because the original intent of the federal bailout plan, to buy up bad mortgages, has been abandoned in favor of simply handing money to the banks. But not the auto industry. Screw them and the millions of people who will lose their livelihoods if they go under.

Again, my silly little "common sense" is wondering why we're not buying stocks in the businesses that are in trouble, to infuse them with short-term capital. Then, when the companies are strong again, the government could sell its interests in the companies, and likely at a profit. Why can't we do that? Oh yeah. Socialism. Can't allow that, even if 90% or more of people who are deathly afraid of it have no idea what it means, and doesn't even really apply here.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is slashing rates. If they could go negative, I wonder if they would. But two major banks (American Express and CitiBank) are raising rates to their cardholders, to offset rising costs. How does that work? You're in trouble, so you take taxpayer money, then turn around and screw your customers? Shouldn't that silly common sense again point out that there's a good chance many of these customers will get pissed at the poor customer service and leave, or will have trouble paying at the new rates?

Oh, but they're individual people. They don't matter. Only the big companies matter. Trickle-down, and all. It works. It's not been disproven.

Only it has. If trickle-down Reaganomics worked, the money the banks are getting--our money--would be used for purposes that benefit us, instead of financing executive getaway after executive getaway.

At the head of it all, we have Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury. He once ran Goldman-Sachs, one of the most culpable of the culprits in our current financial crisis, then was appointed to the Bush regime. Once there, he created and continued policies to line the pockets of his former company and other Wall Street titans. Then, when it hit the fan, he lied about the nature of the crisis and his intentions in order to pass legislation through Congress to get his way with little oversight, and is handing out money like candy to banks that are not using it for any purpose that benefits anyone other than their bigwigs and shareholders.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paulson... seems to be a recurring trend here, doesn't there? You come in, lie to Congress, weasel your way out of oversight, then take a massive piss on the country. Hell, even Bush is an oilman who seems to do everything with his eye on oil company profits.

I honestly wonder if Bush is as stupid as he seems, or is a force of destruction determined to destroy America in eight years. I no longer think of him as a Republican. A Republican is someone who has a different idea about how to solve problems (which may or may not involve brainwashing to think anyone who disagrees is evil and trying to take away his guns). Bush and his cronies go beyond that. Even in the face of real danger to the country, their only concern is their wallets--theirs and no one else's.

Using the exact same tactics they used to get us into an unjustified war in Iraq, the Bush regime has now stolen almost a trillion dollars from the (mostly) poor to give to the super-rich. (And all this while arguing that Obama's proposed return to a progressive tax is "wealth redistribution" and somehow not laughing at people who buy into this argument.) Everyone thought the bailout deal was a bitter pill we had to swallow. Well, it's not a pill, but we're being forced to swallow something, all right. It's going to be long and hard, and I can guarantee that guys like Paulson will have a really big smile on their face when they're finished, while we're stuck with the mess.