Hammer Mill Days

It's the last train to Loserville and I'll meet you at the station. Wasn't that a Monkees song? No? Okay ... that earworm crawled away decades ago. Well, here we are, kicking around the mill, just me and my shadow ... and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Brother and bandmate Matt Perry has taken up residence in some other abandoned structure. We get together for recordings, podcast sessions, etc., then he goes home to his shack and I to mine. The mansized tuber has planted himself firmly in the courtyard; I bring a bucket of swill out to him every couple of days. Livin' the life, as they say. As you can imagine, the utility costs here are fantastic. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is, as I have said many times, a drafty old barn of a place, and most of the heat goes straight out the window (the same window, incidentally, that the rain and snow comes in through). Whoever is paying the fuel bills must be ripping his/her hair out by now. And then there's the ...

If there is one enduring truth about America, it is this: we are extremely good at making a mess and abysmally inept at cleaning it up. The Veterans Administration controversy has been over a decade in the making, and is nothing unprecedented or even particularly unusual. Recall that the Afghan and Iraq wars were supposed to be conducted, in essence, free of charge with minimal casualties. The Iraq war, in particular, was low-balled by Bush administration officials, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, who opined to Congress that it might cost us a billion or two. They were convinced that the war would be short and sweet. They did not plan for the occupation of Iraq, nor did they plan for decades of health care services for returning veterans. It was going to be a cake walk. Yeah, not so much. But it did sound good at the time, didn't it? And now, many deaths, dismemberments, and billions of dollars later, we are faced with an enormous backlog of wounded and battle-stressed soldiers, a...