When I hauled out of Newark (NJ) for the pastures of upstate New York some 25 years ago, intent, for reasons which today I honestly cannot recall, on adding another degree to my vita, I figured I’d stick around just long enough to complete what coursework I needed in advance of my dissertation and then get the hell out. Lovely country, to be sure, but after the thrills of Newark–at that time, car hijackings at high noon on main street was the sport of choice–Binghamton seemed, let’s say, a bit … placid. Tame. OK: downright freakin’ dull.

To my surprise,  I stayed on for a decade. Binghamton turned out to be manageable, libertarian (rustic style, and that ain’t a bad thing), maybe even a good place to raise a brood, and not incidentally chock full of lively bars featuring astonishingly cheap beer, wings made the right way,  blues bands out of Syracuse, and other stuff you do not need to know about.  But the local economy–heavily dependent on IBM and Martin Marietta–took a nosedive when quarterly earnings reports called for one big-ass axe, and when I left Binghamton for Philly,

  I found I didn’t much miss it. The resurrected city-slicker in me found it easy to turn up my nose at the provincials stuck out in the hinterlands. Those small-town folks with their small minds and small problems! What did they know of the wild and woolly ways of our great cosmopolitan centers, bastions of both arts and commerce, grooving with fevered visions of brave new worlds, fueled 24/7 by greed and caffeine and crack?

Needless to say, they knew pretty much what they needed to know. There’s no small virtue in a properly-cooked wing. And the older I get, the more I understand the appeal of the Binghamtons of the world. Especially when that bumper-to-bumper shit on 93 extends from Morrissey Boulevard to the Route 3 exit, when I’m suffocating in an overstuffed and overheated Green Line car ass-to-ass with the unwashed-for-a-week and oh gee we’ve come to yet another inexplicable stop in some rat-infested tunnel and there go the lights, when I’m avoiding eye-contact with the ranting gin-soaked prophets  around Boston Common, turning a blind eye to the squalor and filth on every block and endleslly dodging the never-ending barrage of slings and arrows that fly from every direction in our latter day gothams without falling victim to the numbness and lassitude that beckon every city-dweller. To fade far away, and quite forget…. The weariness, the fever, and the fret.

Yeah. It’s moments like those that I look back, and I think back for a minute, (or forward, perhaps,  to Greenfield and Brattleboro…) but … fact is, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I loved New York. I loved Philly. And I really love Boston. Newark, ehh, maybe not so much.

All that by way of explaining my astonishment at finding Binghamton in the news recently. A positive story about Binghamton on Michael Moore’s site? The mayor interviewed on Amy Goodman’s show, and not because he’s some bumpkin determined to run the illegals outa town by sundown, but because he’s actually saying things like

And we’ve had nine years now of a military budget that I believe is out of control. And we can’t make those same mistakes if we’re going to meet our goals to take care of our citizens, provide good infrastructure and public safety and all the services that they deserve.

So this is just a reminder to the citizens and trying to start a debate about what actually is being spent. I don’t think people reflect on it every day, that we are spending, you know, almost 60 cents out of every tax dollar on the military. And that’s just not sustainable, if we’re going to do the other things that are important, the other important services that governments are supposed to undertake.

Well, hot damn. Seems the good people of the city have taken a closer look than have we sophisticates at what some of  President Obama’s merry little adventures are costing them–namely, the God-damned war in Afghanistan–and they’ve decided that it’s in the best interests of the denizens that everyone be aware of what the “war tax” has cost Binghamton, which is set to come to, oh, around $138 million dollars come the end of this fiscal year.

So the mayor’s planning to mount a “cost of war” ticker right up on City Hall for all to see.

Man, that’s transparency.

Needless to say, I’m impressed. I’d love to see every city, every town, every damn hamlet in this country do the same. Because I’m at wit’s end as to how to light a fire under this nation’s fat, complacent ass when it comes to this folly. That our own casualty toll hit 1000 yesterday doesn’t seem to matter much. No one I know found it worth mentioning on Facebook. Not sure why it passed unremarked. Because commemoration might call for reflection, and reflection, re-assessment, and re-assessment might call for … action? In any case, what Obama, in his moments of Shakespearean bombast, likes to lament as all the “blood and treasure” we’ve spent, has proved to be nothing but a Miltonic “waste of wealth and loss of blood.” So spectacular a failure, in fact,  that the so-called “insurgents”–as though the shockingly corrupt Harzai puppet government has any claim to legitimacy whatsoever–launched an attack yesterday on the largest US base in the area. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone much either. All those wedding parties “NATO”–you know, the “coalition of the willing”–strafes in misbegotten nighttime attacks don’t seem to be taking much of a toll on my neighbors either, though I can’t but wonder if they’d be so serene about the pits full of “collateral damage” were we liberating Ireland or England or Poland.

I do remember how they reacted to Reagan’s death squads.

To Grenada.

To Panama.

To the first Gulf war.

And to the wars we’re engaged in now–when they were Bush’s wars.

So, maybe they’ll react to something else. The  $138 million that Binghamtonians might have lavished on something more humane, moral, and successful–which would be, yeah, just about anything. The 2-3 trillion dollars the war is going to wind up costing us as a country. Yeah, you read that right. Two to three trillion dollars. Meanwhile, the erstwhile evangelist of change, half-maddened by whatever’s in the rarefied air of the Oval Office, is tying off and cooking up and just waiting to mainline another $33 billion.

The House is expected to put up token resistance. Rest assured they won’t put up anything resembling a genuine fight unless YOU demand that your rep does just that.

This isn’t some complex international byzantine geopolitical chess match whose resolution is beyond the ken of the commoners. It’s a freaking local issue, and it’s having a very real impact on YOUR day-to-day life–if you live near me, where Brockton has just laid off 400 teachers and Mansfield just cancelled all of their sports and after school programs, you know damn well that those trillions aren’t simply piles of spare lucre mouldering away in the Capital basement. Uh-uh. That’s loot coming right out of our wallets, and stolen from our schools, our municipal workers, our infrastructure–our future.  Whatever we have left of one.

So I was cheered, if you can call it that, and even secretly proud, to read about the mayor of my onetime residence. And I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I heard GRP gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein mention the idea of a debate between gubernatorial candidates that might introduce the subject of, yes, the wars. That jolted me–it seemed blatantly obvious, but it made me aware, and not in a good way, of the silence on this issue by our own governor (and mayors, and city councils, and clergy, and school boards…). Because the war is every inch a local issue, and our towns are being screwed over by yet another administration that actually believes, all evidence to the contrary,  that you can bomb your way to peace in far away feudally-run lands.  

Jill Stein knows this. And I’m guessing that Messrs. Patrick and Cahill and Baker know it too. But knowledge ain’t enough. It’s the role of our venerable federal representatives to gamble away our cash on whatever frolic suits their fancy–but  it’s the role of Governors to protect our states from exactly that.  And I smell dereliction of duty in that hole.

Everything connects. Binghamton and Kandahar, Cambridge and Kabul. When you’re talking about trillions here and there, it might as well be Monopoly money. When there’s no money for textbooks or teachers, it seems very real indeed.

Think you can’t stop the war? Well, somebody has to. You and I can make a start by voting for voting for antiwar candidates–and that means from the local level right on up. Obama sure as hell isn’t listening to us on this–but our local and state candidates will, and with enough of them in office, we might get the message to the princelings who pilfer our local economies in vain pursuits of imperial grandeur.

Start, maybe, with Governor. Seeing as how we’re in the middle of election on here in Massachusetts

I want a governor who understand these connections. I want a governor who isn’t too  cowardly to make those connections publicly. What I don’t want is a governor whose slavish allegiance to a party powered in no small part by massive campaign contributions from defense contractors sacrifices the welfare of kids in Brockton to flatter his patron’s imperial fantasies. Fortunately, I’ve found one. If for nothing else, and god knows there’s plenty else, Jill Stein’s  understanding of the localized effects of the war and her resolute opposition to more-of-the-same would earn her my vote.

I urge all antiwar activists and opponents of the wars here in Massachusetts to re-localize the war with a vote for Jill Stein this November.

Kentucky just sent their own message by getting behind a dark horse and nominating Teabagger Rand Paul. Wrongheaded? I’d say so, except that the alternative–a candidate handpicked by the Mitch McConnells of the establishment GOP–isn’t exactly a shining example of common sense either. But right or wrong, at least it showed that the residents of the state aren’t a bunch of wusses.

Are we?

Little Michael Franti & Spearhead  for ya. Sly & Robby Armageddon mix version. (Original lyrics below). I like this version. And I’m actually likin’ this amateur video take on the song.

Please tell me the reason

behind the colors that you fly

love just one nation

and the whole world we divide

you say you’re sorry

say, there is no other choice

but god bless the people them

who cannot raise their voice