Today's Stories

September 20 / 21, 2008

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

Weekend Edition
September 20 / 21, 2008

Viagra at 10

One Billion Pills Later

By DAVID ROSEN

Since Viagra was introduced in 1998, approximately one billion pills have been sold. According to its manufacturer, Pfizer, an average of three pills have been dispensed each second that it’s been on the market. And an estimated 35 million men worldwide have used it. [US News & World Report, March 27, 2008]

Unfortunately for Pfizer and other manufacturers of FDA-approved drugs designed to address impotence, its revenue erection seems to be softening. The revenue of the big pharmaceutical companies from U.S. (as opposed to international) sales of drugs treating what is euphemistically called “erectile dysfunction” seemed to have peaked and now is in decline.

Mike Huckman, CNBC’s health beat financial analyst, recently questioned: “I wonder if the weak American economy is causing men to cut out Viagra from their budgets. Or maybe more of them are cutting their pills in half.” No one would question whether during a period of economic uncertainty, with debt, foreclosure and unemployment figures rising, men’s erectile organ should be falling. [CNBC, July 25, 2008]

The decade since Viagra was introduced marks a most peculiar era of American male masculinity. In was an era in which a real Yankee cowboy, a character from a bad made-for-TV movie, acted out on the world stage the false masculinity that only Viagra can induce. Unlike a TV cowboy, this one had real power and misused it.

The most perverse demonstration of Bush’s false masculinity was when he jumped from the cockpit of the Navy S-3B Viking and, posing against a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished”, strode assertively across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Here is an iconic image like Roosevelt meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, Kennedy huddled over the Cuban missile crisis or Reagan at the Berlin Wall, Bush-the-Lesser (as Arundhati Roy calls George W.) will be forever immortalized in his fetishistic Top Gun get-up. Imitating Tom Cruise imitating a John McCain fly-boy, America’s Viagra president strutted about in a high-tech nylon-poly jumpsuit. Like the super-stud captain of a small town Texas high school football team, Bush symbolized masculine potency, the president as hard-on.

Yes, America has had a leader who is tough and assertive, willing to employ preemptive, penetrating power. Unfortunately, as we all know and all Viagra users’ experience, he is a leader displaying the same fictitious masculinity that, when the rhetorical rage of patriotism, imperialism and Christian crusade ebbs, will, like a Viagra hard-on, shrink to reveal his true, pathetic natural manhood.

Now, as the ’08 election approaches, one can only hope that if the McCain-Palin ticket looses, we shall soon see John and Sarah, like Bob Dole a decade ago, appearing together in a Viagra commercial.

* * *

Viagra is part of a class of drugs known as PDE5 inhibitors (phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor) that restricts the enzyme that regulates blood flow in the penis. It enhances the hardness and duration of an erection. Perhaps most appealing to many men, it increases the ability to achieve a new erection shortly after achieving ejaculation. In fact, once a man takes a little blue bill, the erection is involuntary and cannot be reduced until the drug wears off. Among some of Viagra’s principle competitive FDA-approved drugs are Cialis from Lilly and Levitra from Bayer (GlaxoSmithKline).

According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in 2007, more than 18 million men in the U.S. suffered from erectile dysfunction. Impotence is a complex phenomenon involving physiological and/or psychological factors. Physical factors range from disabilities (e.g., injury to the penis), drug reaction (e.g., to beta-blockers), hormonal system imbalance (e.g., testosterone production) and circulatory system malfunction or vascular problemes (e.g., blood flow). Pyschological factors range from stress (e.g., work, income), fear of causing pregnancy, unresolved sexuality or identify issues and fear of having a heart attack during sex. And then there is self-medication, the drug and alcohol abuse which are among the leading causes of impotence.

In 2000, Forbes reported that Viagra took off faster than any drug in history, racking up some 3 million prescriptions in the first three months on the market. In 1999 the drug had worldwide sales of $1 billion.

Viagra is a pharmaceutical-industry solution of a simmering crisis of male masculinity that emerged in the wake of the ‘60s-‘70s counter-culture and women’s movement. According to Angus McLaren, author of “Impotence: A Cultural History,” a new form of impotence was discovered in the 1970s. “While the old impotence affected tired, older men bored with their middle-aged partners,” he observes, “the new impotence was purportedly experienced by younger men increasingly daunted by the demands of sexually liberated women.” [New Scientist, April 28, 2007]

Popular acceptance of a pharmaceutical solution to impotence can be dated to Bob Dole’s 1998 appearance on the CNN Larry King show. While the show focused on the former Senator’s prostate-cancer operation, during a commercial break King supposedly asked Dole, mano-y-mano, how he was handling the sexual consequences of the surgery. Dole admitted he was part of a Pfizer clinical trial of a wonder drug that solved all his problems.

The drug quickly became a social status symbol, the capitalist master-of-the-universe could now sport, like his high-priced car and trophy bride, a perpetual erection. Like his latest marketplace triumph, all asserted his virility. So quickly did it become accepted within mainstream male culture, Alan Greenberg, chairman of Bear Stearns, donated $1 million to finance Viagra prescriptions for other, equally needy men.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the majority of men suffering from erectile dysfunction are age 65 or older. In the Massachusetts Male Aging Study conducted in 1987-1989 about erectile potency, more than half (52%) of men aged 40 to 70 reported some form of impotency, with complete impotence at between 5 to 15 percent. So real is complete impotence that approximately 25,000 men annually undergo penile implant procedures. Nevertheless, one can only wonder if anything has really changed with regard to male plumbing in the decade prior to Viagra’s introduction and the decade since? [“Impotence and its medical and psychosocial correlates: results of the Massachusetts Male Aging Study,” Journal of Urology, January 1994]

If, as likely, nothing physiological has changed, one can only assume that something other that bodily necessity drives the Viagra craving. America is a society lubricated by drugs. We rely on a host of drugs to get through the day, whether caffeine or cocaine, Prozac or Ritalin, meth or mary-jane, ecstasy or alcohol, RU-486 or Viagra.

The obvious public secret is that Viagra sustains a man’s erection whether he is diagnosed suffering impotency or not. While senior citizens in retirement communities could get Viagra on Medicaid prescription until January 1st, 2007, a growing customer base among younger men, both straight and gay, who like the sustained erection it provided.

Urban party-going young men use it as part of an erotic drug-fest. Known as “poly-pharmacy”, the taking of a handful of different party drugs, these drugs help counterbalance the different altered states induced during a night on the town. Taking Ecstasy or Special K (Ketamine hydrochloride) often kills the sex drive as does alcohol and cocaine. For serious party players, Viagra solves one problem. It allows a guy to party, in every sense of the word, all night.

A recent report in the “International Journal of Impotence Research” found that “there was less use [of Viagra] for medical necessity." The principal researcher, Tom Delate, found that Viagra “use increased 312 percent in men ages 18 to 45, while it rose 216 percent among men 46 to 55 years old.” He also found that men 56 and older continued to receive the majority of Viagra prescriptions. [HealthDayNews, August 5, 2007]

* * *

The last decade has been a period of sex scandals and Hummers, of a War on Terror abroad and culture wars at home. The same year that saw Viagra introduced was witness to the grand spectacle of Bill Clinton’s denials and impeachment. But ’98 also brought revelations of the Navy Tailhook scandal and the adulterous liaisons by such upstanding, moralistic Congressmen as Henry Hyde, Dan Burton and Newt Gingrich. Now, a decade later, the recent scandals, from Mark Foley and Larry Craig to Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards, may mark the appropriate bookend to the Viagra era.

Men have long been traumatized by a fear of impotence. While some men (and women) have been unable to conceive off-spring, the inability to have an erection has a different historical resonance. Since the Greeks, Western men have turned to a host of natural aphrodisiacs, rituals and prayers, hormonal treatments and mechanical devices and a growing number of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) drug to address the problem. Unfortnately, with Viagra and other PDE5 inhibitors, erection becomes an end in itself and impotence is reduced to, in McLaren’s words, a “fixation on penetration”.

Now, the mantra of penetration seems to be softening. The Viagra-induced erection symbolically represented in the domestic culture wars and in preemptive imperialist intervention seems to be declining. As this happens, a deeper crisis of masculity is being revealed. One indication of this apparent develoment is reflected in CNBC’s health analyst Huckman’s observations about the sales of PDE drugs. Pfizer’s revenues are shrinking, Bayer’s are flat and Lilly’s reflect flat sales but increased pricing. This loss of revenue is, ironically, coming at the same time that GM seems to have decided to sell off its Hummer division. Together, they suggest that the era of false masculinity, most symbolically embodied in America’s cowboy president, may be coming to an end.

David Rosen can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.

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