STRIKE PART 2, by Bryan Adrian

Not only is American humor slipping away quickly. So are optimism and dozens of other native strengths needed to weather our current storms -- tempests which are quickly approaching the dimensions of Russia's difficulties. Any reform or popular program that might lift people up in a wave of enthusiasm for change and improvement is under vigilant and constant assault.

One conspicuous example of the failure of our present day social spirit that quickly comes to mind is the loss of the Jewish-American radical social reform spirit of the 1920s and 30s. Compare it to today's denial and passivity. Scarcely in evidence today, radical reform is going ... going ... gone.

The contemporary Jewish magazine of conscience, TIKKUN, can't be compared to the genius nor the activism nor the unquestionable spirit of self-sacrifice demonstrated in the 1920s. The list of enthusiasms extinct today is long and limp. The insincerities of vibrating lips abuzz with hollow rhetoric thunderclaps throughout both the liberal and the conservative landscape.

Perhaps in today's climate only eccentrics like Durst can morally inspire the general population -- all those many Americans slipping on the rocks of current economic uncertainties who need able leaders to find their way toward safer ground -- to take imminent and calculated risks.

We haven't yet at this dangerously late date begun to find the solutions to the problems laid out on the workbench years ago by Francis Fukuyama in his book "The End of History and the Last Man." We need more men and women of action who can translate needed social change into practice. The urgency to find solutions is critical today.

The endless conciliations of President Clinton's proposals and gestures seem to be well intentioned, but he practices his terribly ineffective compromises on a daily basis. This method worked far better in his pre-Presidential days on his cushy Hilton Head Island retreat among trusted buddies, than in the jaws of the lion where he now resides -- known by the various pet names -- "The Loop" and "Lobby" and "Secret Intelligence Cabalas".

It has been duly noted in some government circles, and denied in a Penthouse feature article, that Vince Foster was murdered by Mossad agents because Mr. Foster was investigating parental complaints concerning the suicides of more than a dozen U.S. soldiers who had blown the whistle and reported to their commanding officer their observations of large drug shipments carried by military convoys through interstate highways.

The media is trying to pin this dubious Foster suicide on Clinton instead of investigating the urgent pleadings of the overwrought and silenced parents. Still, Clinton drinks at the same trough as Mossad (U.S. tax dollars) and continues with his empty speeches.

Noam Chomsky, world renowned linguist, contributor to "Z Magazine" and astute political diagnostician, and Ben Bagdikian, author of "The Media Monopoly," are among the few lucid voices in the kitschy theme-park of 1990s America-Lite.

Another penetrating voice is that of Edward Said, author of many books that illustrate the numerous mechanisms of electronic and cultural control that lead us to foolishly think that our chemically flavored popcorn at the movies might be real buttered lobster if only we tried a little harder to play the game.

Our new Paul Revere of the 1990s, Edward Hermann, who in a recent article detailed unacceptable excesses perpetrated by the AIPAC Lobby in Washington , has heated up the Letters to the Editor section of several radical and cultural publications. These are the brushstrokes we should take to heart as a nation, and paint our own future modeled on the earlier efforts of the previously mentioned freedom fighters. We need this now more than ever, especially since our President seems to be suffering from a massive hearing disorder.

Considering the anti-Arabic and Japan-bashing prejudices whipped up by our ever merging "media monopoly," it seems unlikely that today's immigrants will have it as good as the Dursts and other Americans who have "made it" in the last three centuries.

With our exploding numbers of unemployed and homeless, new immigrants will face severe competition in the brutal realities of our streets. Many will never find or build a home.

Unless more reform minded news publishers and broadcasters, without special agendas, do something socially constructive very soon, we all stand to suffer as the nation weakens from being poorly managed and advised. Our trust has been badly misplaced into the hands of a few owners of nearly all our television, newspaper, film, and publishing and sports institutions.

It has been the case in American history, by and large, that what is good for the immigrant is good for America as a whole -- for all Americans. Most of our forefathers came here from Europe as immigrants, bringing the same aspirations and vitality as today's new Asian and Arabic mix of immigrants.

The only citizens who can claim a heritage other than an "immigrant" past are the descendants of black slaves brought here by global free marketeers, and native-american indians, who were the first to be forced into retreat and extinction here in this land. Let's hope the newer tribes that have taken root here, legally and spiritually, are not treated likewise by global free marketeers, and ground down into fertilizer for agribusiness or any other trans-continental corporation.

We just can't deny it -- Americans will always be fundamentally different than the peoples of European nations on the other side of the Atlantic and from old cultures, such as Japan or Palestine, that have traditionally maintained only a few number of historic tribes.

It is our unique identity to be a land of immigrants with no common genetic base and we should fight to preserve it. We can't for another election afford to fight one another. With some patience, and forceful new leadership, we must struggle against the truly antagonistic forces: homelessness, corruption in high office, special interest groups with awesome control of elected officials, and last but not least the astonishing degree of moral lapse and extreme financial prejudice directed against us by our corporate boards as they entrench themselves on our soil and abroad.

Our duty to aid the homeless, the unemployed, the uninsureds, and to assimilate new legal immigrants into the traditions of our American way of life -- before all of us are discarded or dehumanized -- brings with it numerous benefits to the greater whole.

Americans of African descent are to this day still denied equal-access to the well-traveled avenues of opportunity and affluency already rubbed smooth as glass by the better mobilized "minorities" that came here with privileged status, bringing with them thousands of years of nomadic experience and networking skills from other highly developed worlds to our "multicultural society."

Black intellectuals must be constantly vigilant if they dare to even hesitantly question the sanity of FBI or MOSSAD policies on our soil, or the unending banalities and cliches streaming out of our mainstream media, which blindly follows the cult-like obsessions of The New York Times.

Mexicans, predating the mythological cherry trees of George Washington's father by many centuries (the old legend of "George cannot tell a lie" was one of our first publicity stunts through manipulated information channels), must still contend with second-class status.

Native American Indians, comparable to the bald eagle in their vulnerability, lack the wings which might enable them to fly away from toxic dumps placed on or near their reservations, or to soar high above the federal agents who periodically harass them over their inalienable freedom of religious expression or their legal empowerment to operate casinos on their land won through decades of painstaking treaties.

The Dursts are no longer an underdog. Today they are members of a very well positioned movement -- the most autonomous, wealthy and powerful religious-political entity in our republic -- the 20th Century American ruling class. They should serve us well as a lighthouse, shining to all others who land onto our fabled shores, arriving with no more than hope in their pockets and ambition in their eyes.

Without towering models of accomplishment, how could any national group, legal immigrant, or the numerous daily additions to our swelling ranks of homeless, unemployed, and uninsured, manage to climb out of their hole and make it?

Why do so many financially and medically cornered and pinned down people of our nation feel that their lone protectors are the homegrown militant militia groups that rightfully mistrust the intentions of impostures claiming to be representatives of our people, our "government?" These protective groups run a broad gamut, from Louis Farrakhan's black Nation of Islam to the white Michigan Militia. Both black and white sense they are cornered by outside obstructions. They should be on the same team since they are threatened by the same forces.

We need intelligent new programs. We need legally prescribed public accountability procedures for our business leaders and government officials. We don't need jobs sold down the river by somebody high in a skyscraper or on a luxury boat, who for indefensible reasons wants simply to improve a "balance sheet," or to service an acronym that rhymes with NAFTA. Nor do we need voodoo healing as the Clintons lull us to sleep with their mantras from Sociology 101 textbooks.

Let's not let special interest groups and unacknowledged networks be the demise of our still promising and no longer young, nearly 300-year old nation. And let's not let irresponsible government officials play with property and housing and tax-bases to such an extent that people are forced into the streets.

The multitudes of people forced into submission and failure will soon have only the cold electron glow coming from interactive television sets to keep them warm. Cold-blooded social and economic engineers sitting behind bullet-proofed windows with emotionally dwarfed techno-cybernerds will seldom if never step away from their computer screens and into the vortex to help this bewildered multitude.

Nor, should we blindly assist the "information superhighway," now being discussed so uncritically, to become little more than an extension of the housing and employment imbalances already written into our social formulas.

We don't want to see fiber optic cables used by people in despair to hang themselves more effectively. The fiber-optic cable transformation must be legislated for restricted uses only -- such as job training and enhancement, or to examine the accomplishments of genius from the nations of the globe, or to greatly reduce on-line downloading rates for independent research.

We have enough shallow entertainment rubbish in our radio archives alone at this time to carry us mindlessly through another 200 years. The last thing we need is increased volume of our current inventory. Rock hard laws are needed to protect the privacy of citizens. Never before has the prospect of so much invasion of privacy been before us as now, with the ever deepening penetration of information superhighways. We must immediately enforce anti-trust laws that are already in the law books.

Do we want to see abandoned or unused or unrented buildings used as Economic Refugee Camps, rather than refurbishing them into adequate and affordable schools, hospitals, homes and factories? NO! All the interactive TV sets in the world don't equal one home or one school that displays integrity and true value, nor one factory that endows a town with a self-respecting livelihood.

We can overcome these most unpleasant of scenarios if we simply step out of our daily routines and join the homeless and the proud, the conscientious and the caring, in a national chorus, and sing together "Song of the Streets" to new Broadway melodies and lyrics still unwritten, that we compose for ourselves and become, as our Constitution trumpets gloriously to the world, truly self governing -- and not mindless mickey mouses, nor saddled like ponies by powerful special interest groups.

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