I love Alaska! We are for sure coming back. The road into Exit Glacier from Seward has little pull-offs are regular intervals specifically designed to allow a larger vehicle pull in and spend the night. No charge. The larger pull-offs, the gravel pits, the parking lots are full of campers and tents, all at no charge. The place is made for free-wheeling, away from KOA’s. Next time here, we will rent a conversion van and camping equipment, all of which is much cheaper than a rental car and motel.

This was a learning trip for us, what to do, what not to do. We loved Kenai in all its magnificence, and riding with a hungover bush pilot was a trip in its own, in addition to being a real trip. We saw the great brown bear, flew up and around a volcano, saw a pod of whales down below. There are very few airstrips up here, so when it is time to land, they look for an open stretch of gravelly beach. Quite a surprise to those of us expecting a runway.

We are on the Glenn Highway, away from the big attractions. There are some massive glaciers here, and the whole area is sculpted by glaciation in addition to ancient volcanism. But the hiking is sparse, and we were warned about bear activity, advised to stay close to people. We drove into Lake Louise, not THE Lake Louise, and there was eighteen miles of paved road leading to a small resort and some houses. The road is four years old and wavy, badly in need of repairs. The resort owner wants the state to fix it for her.

How did these fortunate few people get a million dollar highway to their (probably summer) homes?

Can’t say for sure but I’ve a hunch. Ted Stevens, the man they named the airport after, the guy who wanted to build that bridge to nowhere that Sarah belatedly opposed.

Not much time, and my reflections on what I’ve seen are like those of a mosquito on a moose. There is so much more here. Tonight we board a plane at 10:30 PM and fly to Denver. It will be 102 in Boulder tomorrow.

We have Internet today. We are at a B&B north of Seward, on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. We met a nice group of folks from Ohio at breakfast, and are headed out to hike up to “Lost Lake.” Since there are so few names to give lakes, they chose that one. Timber, Jewel, and Hidden were taken.

Sarah Palin is very popular up here, it seems. And our Ohio breakfast companions spent quite a bit of time in Wasilla trying to find her house. She’s kind of a phenomenon, a showgirl kind of appearance, full of folksy wisdom. It will be interesting to see if money actually backs her up in a run for president. In my view it is unlikely, as she cannot be controlled on stage, and at times her ignorance is painfully obvious even to supporters. Money tends to like the Reagan/Obama type – handsome, well-spoken, and easily managed.

Off and running. Hi David.

The view out our window is simply stunning – a long string of mountains across Cook Inlet. Take the view of the Tetons across Jackson Lake, multiply if by five, add the massive Grewingk Glacier, and that is what we see.

We aren’t paying very much for this view. It’s expensive to be here, but more money does not buy more view. It’s all the same up and down the streets of this town, the whole peninsula, in fact. Everyone gets a piece of it.

I did not bring the cord that allows me to upload pictures from the camera, so someone else took these photos. Our motel room is a square box facing the inlet, simple and functional. The only thing interfering with the few is another set of boxes like ours fifty yards away.

We are animal-starved. We’ve been up and down the highway looking for moose and bear with no luck. We hiked in a nature preserve yesterday with no sign of bear – no scat, no tree scratches. The brown bear only occasionally wander through and are rarely seen, but black bear are common – to everyone but us. And moose – you’d think they’d offer up one lousy moose.

The drive up the other sided of the peninsula last “night” was uneventful. The area is one suburb, Alaska-style, with houses on five and ten and thirty acres lots instead of quarter-acres. We went sixteen miles, and in all those miles did not see one convenience store. The area is a rain forest with houses every few hundred yards. It covers an area perhaps the size of Spokane, but with only a small fraction the number of people.

The houses are all functional, no McMansions. The essential businesses are located in the little town that started this place. People drive many miles for a quart of milk. The roads are good, and the winters mild by Alaska standards, we are told. It’s an idyllic life, on the surface, but there’s a veneer of faux wealth over the poverty of the area. You can see it in the old cars and in the businesses that have not done a face-lift in decades. Occasionally there is a 20×20 box-style two-story house, and a few people living on buses. The only industries are fishing and tourism, both tough ways to make a living. There isn’t much prosperity here.

We were to fly over the inlet to see some brown bear yesterday, but everything was socked in. They said they would call if it opened up, but cell phones only work in town proper, and we weren’t about to sit around waiting for it to ring. So we headed out to see some country on foot. And, sure enough, around 4PM they called telling us to come on down and hop a flight. But we didn’t get the message until 5PM. So we are set to go Wednesday morning, our last chance at seeing the famous brown bear before we head north to Seward Wednesday afternoon.

We did go on a short flight out and back yesterday – the pilot, Scooter, from Boulder, CO, was just checking to see if he could land across the inlet. It was only my second time on a small plane, and exciting. In the next life … gonna get me a plane. A friend in Bozeman owns, or owned, a small plane. He could not afford to keep it post-retirement. It is expensive, and if you do not turn those machines into cash flow, they will consume your IRA in a hurry.

Oh yeah – the “Spit” – a five mile landing strip jutting out into the inlet. It’s in the photo above. There’s a large marina, and maybe a hundred little businesses, mostly fishing-related. There’s the usual gift shops, and all of those bear things – watch chains and statuettes that are made in China and sold in every part of the country that has a bear. Nothing is fancy here, but everything is expensive. We paid $22 for a cheese pizza out there. It’s a tiny building. We paid downstairs and then went up a flight of stairs outside the building to a small sun room overlooking the Inlet. Very nice.

Two days ago we went down to the ‘beach’ below our motel room. It’s rough and unwalkable, made of rough rocks and littered with natural debris. There’s a makeshift hut up a few hundred yards, and nearer us were two young boys who had ridden their motorcycle and ATV down there and built a fire. They were friendly, but talked about how “punks” and “hippies” come down there at night and build bonfires and drink beer. I told them that every beach in the world is a magnet for young people to build fires and have parties. But they only know this beach, and are already developing a redneck attitude. But the boys were tan and muscular specimens for twelve-year olds. They are Alaskans, through and through.

So today we aging punk-hippies are going to walk the beach – maybe get ten slow meandering miles in. We can’t drink beer, as we might stumble and fall and break something. We didn’t come here to fish or hunt – just to see the place and walk some trails. But the forest here is very thick, and trails are a rarity. Not that we care – we would walk the highway just to feel the breeze and smell the flowers and trees and salt air. This is Alaska!

Flying up here, looking out over the Canadian Rockies, was reassuring. As far as I could see was nothing but snowy peaks jutting through the clouds. No one lives there! May it always be so.

Here in Colorado we are having quite a kerfuffle over “plagiarism” involving Scott McInnis, Republican candidate for governor. It seems that a while back a private foundation run by the Hasan family paid him $300,000 to write a policy paper on water issues. He gave back “Musings on Water.” It turns out that his musings were actually the musings of other people, notably a sitting judge. He lifted not a passage or two, but whole pages of material.

When exposed, McInnis said that he had depended on a paid researcher, and that this researcher was the real plagiarizer, and not him. Today the assistant said (Denver Post) that the McInnis people had crafted a letter having him take responsibility for the whole mess, but that he had refused to sign it. So now we have McInnis not only plagiarizing, but also pissing downhill. What a guy!

McInnis is toast. His likely opponent in November, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, is no prize himself. It’s not like we are faced with momentous choices. As so often happens in this country, our choice is one of method of screwing: Do we prefer Phillips, or standard screws?

Something far more interesting and revealing happened here. McInnis’s “Musings on Water” is not an important document, and was read only by a few people and then filed away. Because we live in the Google age, someone was able to nail him for the passage lifts. Stuff like that goes on everywhere. Scott’s lesson to the rest of the political class is they need to be more careful in the art of disguised bribery.

Far more important is this: McInnis was a fair-haired boy, no towering intellect, but a man seen with statewide potential for higher office. The Hasan Family Foundation was not buying “research” from him. They didn’t care about his ideas on water policy. Surely they were smart enough to see that he was no policy wonk. They were buying him. They were buying influence, maybe even lodging themselves as his own personal closet skeleton.

Three hundred thousand dollars! It is not peanuts, and it was not for research. It was a disguised bribe.

Scott McInnis is nothing, was nothing, and will be a well-paid something in the future, just not holding public office. In the meantime, there are quite a few Colorado politicians of “both” parties hitting the Ambien at night as they try to keep their minds off the payments they received for fake work done for people who have an unseen interests in public policy.

This whole affair reminds me that while we need campaign finance reform, corruption will not ever be easily undone.
______________________________

By the way, this train of thought was triggered by a few words from a much smarter guy than me, David Sirota, who wondered about the bribery aspect this on AM760 this morning. It is a very confusing set of circumstances until put in that framework. Did not mean to pull a McInnis on Sirota.

Why only two parties? There’s a reason, and that reason is systemic, and stems from the workings of financial power. Like Crips and Bloods, there’s only two choices, and each mirrors the other.

One of my favorite books was written in 1965 by Jacques Ellul, and called “Propaganda”. I have never met another person who has read it, or will read it. Perhaps it is the name – “Propaganda” calls up images of Korean indoctrination camps, Soviet commissars and Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Ellul wrote on a very high level, detached from the power centers, and so described public opinion management not just in the totalitarian centers, but also in the democracies of that time.

The U.S. was not exempted form his analysis, and “United States propaganda” was just another type alongside French, Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others. Further, Ellul was not a man given to emotional outbursts about human nature or democratic governance. He even thought that propaganda was inevitable in societies using mass communication methods, and so ought to be constrained to serve our broader interests.

This did not sit well with American elites, who would not even acknowledge propaganda’s existence on this side of the pond. It was only something that happened beyond the Iron Curtain. The idea too that it could serve egalitarian purposes must have chafed.

One of Ellul’s observations was that we suffer from illusions, one of which is “progress.” We buy electric razors because they are “better” than the old blades. They are not, but they are newer, and thus represent progress. In fact, he said, progress doesn’t really exist even as technology improves.

So I assume, if he is right, that our current cloud computing web-based society is essentailly no different than the one he wrote about in the early 1960’s. Then, as now, we were a two-party state, and most people thought that was the normal state of affairs.

Ergo:

Of course, the political parties already have the role of adjusting public opinion to that of the government. Numerous studies have shown that political parties often do not agree with that opinion, that the voters – and even party members – frequently do not know their parties’ doctrines,

and that people belong to parties for reasons other than ideological ones. But the parties channel free-floating opinion into existing formulas, polarizing it on opposites that do not necessarily correspond to the original tenets of such opinion. Because parties are so rigid, because they deal with only part of any question, and because they are purely politically motivated, they distort public opinion and prevent it from forming naturally.

Two parties then existed, and people cling to them because they know no other way. They don’t even represent our opinions.

A party or a bloc of parties as powerful as a would-be runaway party starts big propaganda before it is pushed to the wall. This is the case in the United States, and might be in France if the regrouping of the Right should become stabilized. In that situation one would necessarily have, for financial reasons, a democracy reduced to two parties, it being inconceivable that a larger number of parties would have sufficient means to make such propaganda. This would lead to a bipartite structure, not for reasons of doctrine or tradition, but for technical propaganda reasons. This implies the exclusion of new parties in the future. Not only are secondary parties progressively eliminated, but it becomes impossible to organize new political groups with any chance at all of making them heard. … On the other hand, such a small group would need, from the beginning, a great deal of money, many members, and great power. Under such conditions, a new party could only be born as Athena emerging fully grown from Zeus’ forehead.

Ross Perot’s American Independence Party was such a manifestation of Athena, as he had millions to invest and a strong message that resonated well. Perot was crushed, of course, and to this day if asked, most people will offer up some version of “he was on target, but crazy.”

Ross Perot is not crazy. That people think he was is the power of propaganda. Since his time, our two parties have fixed the system so that no future Perot will ever upset them as the one of the 1990’s did.

Ralph Nader’s futile attempts in 2000 through 2008 prove Ellul’s point. It will never happen. There isn’t enough money to overcome the big two. So, no surprise, Nader’s latest book is called “Only the Super Rich Can Save Us.” He too has realized the Athena paradox.

What to do? That’s a question often asked. Over at 4&20 over the weekend, they wrestled with immigration … what to do? The author of the post is a Democrat, and had harsh words for Republicans, who are not ‘offering solutions’ to that problem.

We now have 11.5 million illegals here. Most are here due to Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, also supported by the ‘other’ party. They are not going anywhere. We need to melt them in with us, bring them under our laws, and adapt. But bringing them under our laws would not be enough, as our laws are designed to thwart popular organizations. The illegals have to be blended into the current propaganda structure, and so must be shut out until they adapt. So the two parties are merely fighting for the votes of the Hispanic population while not doing anything concrete about the ‘problem.’

There is no solution to be had, or alternately, the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of immigration is, like so much else, an illusory goal. There is no electric razor that will fix that problem.

And so that’s the way it is in the bipartite state. We must seek solutions that cannot be had until we break from the two parties, and the two parties are too powerful to break.

Editorial pages of mainstream newspapers are boring affairs. Is it just me? Most people automatically turn to the letters, as the editorials and op-eds are predictable, pompous, and heavily tilted right.

Most newspapers have glop of local luminaries, usually tilting towards business and academia, that form the “editorial board.” These people write the opinions on the left-hand side of the page.

Group constrictions usually mandate that the glop avoid extremes, and so the opinions are predictably either non-ideological or right-leaning. These opinions are unsigned, either the product of group consensus (yawn), or an outlier opinion. The latter will usually tilt right.

On the op-ed side, there is a stable of right-wing writers who grace every newspaper in the country. These range from George Will to Pat Buchanan to John Fund and Ann Coulter, and here in Denver, the local right-wing radio jock. These folks are usually unrestrained in their writings, as there is no natural force in our business or political culture acting as a damper on right-wing radicalism.

There is hardly any published voice on the “left” to counteract the extreme right wing extreme views that find their way into mainstream print. Editors feel little restraint on their right side, but on their left it’s a little different. There is a need for perceived “balance,” and so opinion page editors look for “reasonable” voices to represent the “other” point of view.

But it cannot be a lefty point of view. Usually, they settle on Ellen Goodman,

the mild-mannered Boston centrist. In American media, the right wing is allowed any offense or disposition, but the left must be polite. Otherwise, we are offensive.

I call it the “Goodman Line” – “this far, and no further”, as Captain Jean-luc Picard said of the Borg. In the mind of a typical opinion page editor, even Ellen is pushing some kind of “left-wing” agenda. They are that extreme, these editors … and yet, when we are mostly right wing extremists, does anyone notice? They are usually self-avowed “centrists.”

It is not a conspiracy, but rather by the power of money. It is no different than metal particles aligning themselves under a magnet. And it is not just the opinion page. All who work for a media small and large, colleges and universities, feel the force of the right-wing magnet.

Typically, an editor will say that there is an impenetrable wall between news and opinion, but as we all know, only lead can stop Superman’s x-ray vision. All editors feel power, no matter how pompously they parade their independence.

Poor old Gary Trudeau (Doonesbury), who tends to be critical of powerful people now and again, is usually relegated to opinion page where he is “balanced” by some lame-brained talking duck. Even the comic page guy knows about the magnet!

Wherever two people have lunch and talk about a third, there’s a conspiracy afoot. That’s been true since caveman days. Conspiracies are all about us, and are interesting and fun to ferret out. But they are not nearly so important as power itself.

We are not relegated to two right-wing parties and hundreds of right wing newspapers because of conspiracy. Our form is a result of our structure. We are allowed to legally bribe politicians, so that it naturally follows that politicians will serve moneyed interests. Since those moneyed interests are usually bent on wealth preservation and expansion, elimination of regulation, minimal taxes and access to the commons, they generally tend to be “right wing.” They are the magnet that controls the particles.

Newspaper owners and editors, radio and TV station managers are intrinsically aware of the magnets of money and power in the community. It all tilts right.

The only answer, if we really cherish freedom, is to take money out of politics and to foster and fund public broadcasting without corporate interference. Until such time, we will be a land of right wingers, half of whom imagine they are not.

In a land of no left there are only right, righter, and rightest.

Glenn Greenwald has written persuasively that the Office of the President is a powerful force in affecting bills that are being debated on Capitol Hill. I have seen the same thing, witness health care: The president was helpless, sat on his hands, as progressive ideas such as Medicare opt-in, Public Option were being discussed. (In fact, he had bargained away a public option before the process even started, but that is off-topic.)

When all that was left was a bad bill, when Public Option was gone, when cost controls were gone, when AHIP and PhRMA had everything they wanted, the president flexed his muscles, threatened, cajoled, bribed …anything and everything to get his bad bill passed.

To those liberals and progressives who are still waiting for his little light to shine from under that bushel basket, please. Accept reality. He’s powerful, he’s interested, but he’s a Blue Dog – a Conservadem. We’ve got ourselves another Clinton.

From Greenwald:

Here’s Politico today on last night’s victory of Blue Dog Democratic incumbent Rep. Jim Matheson in Utah over his liberal primary challenger:

He was the beneficiary of late support from Organizing for America, President Barack Obama’s grassroots organization, which used e-mails, text messages, and campaign mailers to urge Democrats pull the lever for the incumbent.

Similar to what they did for Blanche Lincoln, the Obama White House unleashed its OFA Army to help protect a Blue Dog incumbent against a progressive challenger. Being able to do that, or not do it, or doing it in the other direction (i.e., to support the primary challenger) sounds to me like some pretty substantial leverage to use over members of Congress.

We are seeing it here in Colorado, where Obama is doing everything he can to support the campaign of Conservadem corporatist Michael Bennet over Andrew Romanoff.

And this is not new, nor recent. It started on November 8, 2008, with the appointment of conservative Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff. From there we got appointment of Conservadems to fill vacant senate seats (with the exception of Illinois’ Roland Burris, appointed as a slap in the face of Obama by Rod” Blagojevich. Conservadem Tammy Duckworth was slated to take that seat. Burris has been squeezed out now by this supposedly weak and ineffective president.)

Progressives need not apply for work in this administration. That’s all.

Civil libertarians (should that not be all of us?), Democrats and democrats, patriots and citizens of all stripes were rightly enraged that the Bush Administration used its sharp elbows to usurp power and encroach on personal liberty. It made up a new power- to kidnap a foreign citizen, take him anywhere in the world, torture him, and be accountable to no one. (It was done routinely before, but never openly acknowledged. The real usurpation there was to create acceptance of totalitarian behavior by the American public.)

That’s some pretty bad behavior, and there was pushback. In 2004,Bush probably lost the election, but another of his innovations, the paperless and unauditable voting machine, handed him the win. (Oddly, Democrats never offered up resistance to the machines, and the reason is likely that both parties want the power to alter election outcomes at will. The recent Arkansas senatorial primary is … suspicious.)

In 2008, in an oddly clean election, there was overwhelming push back, and Barack Obama assumed office. A new day in America, blah blah blah. And here is the problem with our one-financier-two-parties system: when Bush got out of hand, the partisans of the Democratic Party were enraged. Now that Obama is president, and has invented for himself the right to assassinate an American citizen without trial, without evidence, much less proof of guilt, and you hear …. [chirp].

This is the worst aspect of the Democratic Party – their indifference to the behavior of Democratic presidents. Once a Democrat assumes power, they fall asleep. The president from their party has to be vetted by the same power centers as the other party. He has to pass muster in the corporate media. He has to be glamorous and well-spoken. He has to speak vaguely and carry a small stick.

In other words, as Alexander Cockburn said about Obama long before he was elected, whatever bomb was ticking between his ears had long since been defused. He presented no threat to power.

What we have as a result of this indifference is not a mean old Republican Party and a somewhat good Democratic Party. It is quite the opposite. The Democrats present far more danger to our former Republic. They can get away with things the Republicans cannot. HICPA*, the Health Care Reform Bill, is a Christmas tree for the insurance industry, reinforcing their power over us and profits for them in perpetuity. Could the Republicans have passed such an outrageous insult to intelligence? No way.

I often say that “Democrats are the problem,” but seldom take the time to explain the concept. It is this: We need organized opposition to concentrated power in this country. Democrats assume that mantle, and then do nothing with it. In fact, as with Obama pronouncing the death sentence on American citizens, they often run further and faster than Republicans can.

I am often countered with the notion of “gradualism,” which Martin Luther King called a “tranquilizing drug.” Were it just that, it might be bearable. But it is worse than just a tranquilizer. It is an illusion. There is no gradual progress with Democrats. Concentrated power advances with them in office. It is the opposite of gradualism. It is erosion.

So to those who say that third parties are futile, that we get most of what we want from Democrats, I say nonsense! We do not get less than what we want, we get none of what we want, most of what THEY want, and we are gelded in the process.

I am not a Democrat. I am not a “progressive” if Democrats have usurped that name. I am not a “libertarian,” though I like their independent spirit. I am a NOT. I am waiting for NOT to be a viable alternative. I support all NOT candidates who fight Democrats and Republicans to get on ballots.

But more than that, I support movement politics. The ballot box is a nice illusion, but once elected, if an office holder lacks a support base, nothing happens.

It all starts on the streets and in the neighborhoods. Democrats exist to stop movement politics, to absorb movements and suffocate them with the pillow of gradualism. Democrats are the problem.

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*HICPA = Health Insurance Company Protection Act

The link down below is to a podcast/mp3 by Dan Carlin. Yes, I know no one will go there, and that’s OK. I wouldn’t either. The thing is over an hour long and only suitable for treadmill listening.

The thing that grabbed me about it is that Carlin embraces my whole outlook on the D vs R phenomenon. He says it so much better than me, but takes us back to 1992, and H. Ross Perot. Agree or disagree with Perot, he did one important thing: He showed the nation that the two parties were really in agreement on virtually every important issue. Campaigns were about silly stuff, because the big issues were already settled.

After 1992, the parties got together and vowed “Never again.” The requirements for entry into presidential debates were made so stiff that no one besides one of the two could ever hope to make it in, and more importantly, were flexible, so that if there was a threat of a third party rising, they could simply raise the bar.

And sure enough, in 1996, Perot didn’t qualify for the debates. No one ever has since. Having a third party shatters illusions.

Carlin made another point that has me scratching my head – can it be so? Here’s a hypothetical: Suppose Max Baucus, who hired Liz Fowler of Wellpoint to write the Health Insurance Company Protection Act (HICPA), aka “Health Care Reform”, owned a bunch of stock in Wellpoint. He would be in an insider’s position on that company, and would be able to buy low and short as he pleased based on his inside information.

That should be illegal. Right? It’s not. According to Carlin, citing a Wall Street Journal article, insider trading is perfectly legal for Congresspeople and Senators. There’s a bill that has languished now for four years to make it illegal.

It’s amazing corruption. It is a fouled, dirty, rotten and contaminated system of government. None can join it without being sullied.

The Reform Mirage by Dan Carlin

I was sitting in a chair in the middle of our family room, half watching a football game, half listening to a conversation between my then-wife and mother-in-law when the words came out of the TV …”Dead on arrival.” John Lennon had been shot. Shocked, unable to control my emotions, I broke into tears, and mother-in-law was unable to comprehend. Why does that man matter?

In the many years since his death I have been able to put Lennon in his place. He was an incredibly gifted man who best spoke through music and words in music. The songs he wrote were not derivative or cute, not always even melodic. The word “shoot” interspersed between the lines of “Come Together” … who else would have even imagined such music? I think of my current wife when I hear the words “She’s not a girl who misses much…”.

Then last week I accidentally played “God” on the ITouch, and cannot get the words out of my mind … “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Context is everything. What the hell was he thinking?

I don’t know. Good song though. I’ve heard and read his interviews after the breakup of the Beatles. He wasn’t really very good outside of music. He was actually kind of muddle-headed, trying to explain how music speaks to our emotion by using the example of a chair, Yoko sideboard muttering incomprehensible half-sentences. Maybe it was the drugs. He was clear about that. He said that he and the other Beatles did a lot of drugs, but that he went way beyond them. They would stop. He could not.

So I have wondered what the future held for him had he not died? Would he have continued to be a cultural icon? Would his music still cut the edge while at the same time offering up sweetness and angst and base emotion? Would he even be interesting?

Yes, I think he would be interesting. He would have dumped Yoko, no doubt, formally. He had already tired of her, and moved on to May Pang who he would have dumped for who knows. His entanglements were legend. He would have continued to speak out on public issues. He would have joined marches, cut his hair, appeared on (Late Night) Letterman and SNL and Stern but never Leno. He never would have endorsed a product, might have written a catchy tune mocking Apple, the corporation and the label.

But the drugs, the cigarettes, the angst … the man was tortured. God forbid, he might have taken Prozac, calmed down a bit, became introspective in a too-serious kind of way, and become boring. And slap me for saying this, but I would rather remember him as the dream weaver, the Walrus, and not just John.

So perhaps his death came at the right time, before the anti-psychotic medicines took hold. Nature does not care about pain, and pain gave us John Lennon as he was, brilliant and flawed at once. Better that death took him from us than Zoloft.