I was having coffee with a friend, who finally opened up and admitted she was in dire financial straits, hadn’t worked in over a year. Her features were equal parts relief and misery for she had spoken to almost no one about this. Yes, she had heard rumblings of others in similar circumstances, of course, around the edges of her life. But no one had come forward until now – until I had told her about my own circumstances – which had made me sell my homes, downsize massively and actually find wild joy in the process. She was finding no joy, had been a vastly successful part of Hollywood. (The thing about us entertainment folk is that we have all often struggled between our high-paying gigs, so the devastation had snuck up on her.)

I joked about my belief that 85% of the recent plethora of extremely expensive Bentley convertibles on the LA streets was people on their last 25k, leasing these monsters of extravagance like mental patients, hoping against hope that Obama’s hope would pull them over their approaching abyss, despite the growing “For Lease “signs from downtown LA to the Santa Monica beaches.

I then found myself talking to her about another friend who had looked at her dire circumstances, had talked to experts (she’s an up-and-coming hot lawyer in town). Armed with a careful strategy, this lawyer had defaulted on everything – credit cards, mortgages. Everything. She had renegotiated the whole mess down to paying back thirty to forty cents on the dollar (depending on the various banks). If she hadn’t done this she would have likely lost everything – house, car, grocery money, probably her job. (I should repeat that this is a brutally hard working, very successful lawyer, with a grown daughter and a top-notch mind.)

My friend with the coffee had never even imagined doing this (neither had my lawyer friend – by the way – she had gone through six months of agony before bringing herself to the kind of behavior she would have thought abhorrent a year earlier).

Funny, isn’t it, how our leaders have felt no such agony in bailing themselves out? The rich, the powerful, the arrogant who screwed up everything with their strange beliefs that they knew everything, that they had a right to everything, that they still have a right to everything and anything (even now) that they can grab.

Up at the “top of the world” everything’s still whizzing along like bang busters – massive bonuses, a (more or less) wonderful Stock Market, bigger mansions (a few of those Bentleys paid for with pocket change from these guys, I’m sure). And I’ll bet our friends over at GM and Chrysler are once again looking down at us from their Lear jets.

And yet my two well educated, highly ethical, very hard-working friends are going through agony. They may still go under. I may still go under. But I’m not going to do it without a fight, a nasty, brutal, gloves-off fight, because these guys at the top are dead wrong, They are thieves, liars and arrogant fools and they’re still running this country completely without a hint of consequence for their crimes and inhumanness.

And then I found myself drifting to another strange image with my coffee friend overlooking the hippest part of Melrose Avenue. “Do you want to just let em cart you off to a camp somewhere?” I asked when she told me she just wasn’t sure she could do what my lawyer friend had done. (I had been visualizing Nazis, of course, carting her away – I can be overly dramatic, I admit it.) Nonetheless the theme of fighting back grew stronger on my side of the table. She had smiled, had shrugged, then had laughed – had felt too embarrassed about the whole thing, I guess. But maybe that will change.

And I agree with her: there is something deadly wrong with not paying back all your debt. It eats at the soul, at the very fiber of what it is to be human. It lowers the head, makes the feet shuffle. But it hits me as I remember her now, sitting across from me at that table off Melrose Avenue that we are in a profound war today with an enemy that lies to us constantly on TV, the internet, billboards; that a kid on an airplane blowing up his pants or whatever is a small time terrorist compared to the ones running so much of our country in their fine suits and silk dresses who have their hands on the real weapons of mass destruction – just ask the people over there in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan.

Nonetheless, the last thing I could have ever imagined myself saying to a friend would have been don’t pay back your debt – default instead, finagle, renegotiate, save yourself. Be prepared to fight another day. And hold your head up high as you do it because you are living in a time that will be remembered as a war, as a civil war, perhaps, as a brutal war against the Goldman (let em eat cake) Sachs’ mindset and the Bank of (let em charge us three bucks per ATM transaction) America/Citibank/AIG. These are hard-hearted business geeks who will pull out the money they have gutted from our grand country and take it to wherever else they can dupe trusting, hard working people – China, India, Brazil, Indonesia.

Yes, it’s a war. And sadly, all is fair in war. It’s a terribly sad truth, desperately sad. But others have been here before us. Others, sadly, will most likely be here fighting after we’re gone.

Whether we like it or not, we have been drafted into this long, complicated, yet proud lineage of warriors fighting for what is right. It isn’t easy, far from it. Black becomes white, your debt becomes something you do not pay off – easy to get lost in a war of this kind, easy to be destroyed, to become soulless. But we must win somehow, as others have won before us. And we must risk our souls to do it, I suppose, for no less than the Republic depends on us. No less than the well being of our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are at stake. As for the soul, what else is it good for, but to risk it for that which we love?

On Monday the important banking CEOs were to attend a Presidential meeting at which it was billed Obama (getting slammed in the polls for his entanglements with Wall Street) would dress them down for their unrepentant behavior since receiving hundreds of billions of taxpayer’s cash.

But the biggest CEOs didn’t show up because of “fog and rain”.

Don’t ask if they might not have taken a limo from NY to DC. Or (better yet) the Metro liner. Or (even better) gone the night before to prepare. Don’t ask if they feel any need to help their Obama (at least a little) in the public relations department, even as he has helped them beyond measure (keeping them, for instance, from drowning at the bottom of their deep blue financial sea).

Don’t ask who the hell they think they are? Don’t ask who the hell Obama thinks he is, even as he was elected with the solid majority of millions of us, even as he was delivered a mandate that it now appears he has squandered to such an extent that there isn’t even a peep from him or “his people” as he was snubbed like the butler it appears he is to these gargoyles of human excuse coiled up in their pinstripe suits and “grounded” Lear jets.

So how do I contain my rage at the absolute lack of separation of church and state that now exists in this country? Because, let’s face it, our national religion isn’t something cooked up in the deep Baptist south nor in ephemeral New Age San Francisco. No, it has been built stone by gothic stone down on Wall Street.

Our new Popes are the likes of Vikram Pandit, Robert Rubin, Lloyd Blankfein. Our new cathedrals the multinational sky scrapers that gleam with post-modern panache. Our altars of choice are the numbers rising to heaven on the stock market, which will only fall when the mysterious devil of whatever it is intrudes (not deregulation – God knows – not greed, not murder of ethics, etc).

So how do I contain my rage that unemployment soars; that millions more children have gone hungry in just these past three months; that the mass transportation systems throughout the nation are going the way of a corpse; that school systems slip into the red, chaos and bewilderment; that Health Care becomes another way to say “I love you” to the big boys…while all the while these giant financial tumors of Citicorp, AIG, Bank of America and Goldman (let them eat cake) Sachs — now too big too fail, therefore backed by our government forever — are able to “pay back” their TARP money by raising speculative billions from around the world because…

…well, who wouldn’t invest their money in monsters backed forever by the US government? Who wouldn’t invest in as sure a thing as the United States of America with it’s Army, Navy, Air Force, Blackwater and taxpayers willing to pay for it all till there’s nothing left? Who wouldn’t give as much as they possibly could to institutions that claim to be doing the “work of God” (Lloyd Blankfein’s proclamation last month, CEO of Goldman -let them eat cake- Sachs)?

So is it true that our President is now little more than their butler?

I am reminded of lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“And indeed there will be time/To wonder, ‘Do I dare’ and, ‘Do I dare?/Do I dare/disturb the universe/…For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

Yes, I believe Obama is their butler, albeit an intellectual one (so many of the great butlers were intellectuals, after all) with his “decisions and revisions” which can so easily be reversed – ever the Harvard grad. For hasn’t Obama emerged with the same kind of twisted dialectic ala Alan Greenspan (with his Harvard’s honorary degree) that bankers will ultimately do the right thing when pushed a bit? And yet how is it that even the least sober bum hanging out on Main Street; the sharecropper bumping along in the back of his nasty boss’ truck; the private in any army on this planet; the guy (or more than likely in the coming months – the child) peeling carrots in a kitchen knows better. Again Eliot:

“I grow old, I grow old/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

For what is going to happen to our “thinking” President after all is said in done, sinking deeper into his little war in Afghanistan (graveyard of empires)? His war looks so good on paper, I suppose.

But what is going to happen with what has brought on all this rage in me (and in so many others)?

I am reminded of another quote from a fellow African American that Obama has so assiduously attached himself to: Martin Luther King, a monstrous crowd of humanity swirling around the marble steps he stood on at the time:

“I have a dream…(that) we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Rage was the order of the day then. I remember that brutal time. But Martin Luther King risked everything to gather up that rage to try to use it to hew that mountain.

J. Alfred Prufrock did not.
Obama has not not.
We have not.
Will we?
Can we?

It has struck me (I’m not quite sure why today) that those who are in charge — from the White House, through the gleaming halls of Congress, around plump Wall Street, in the upper, corner offices of the conglomerates and banks — all those folks (deep in their hearts) feel that they are right, that they are good.

I travel enough in their circles to watch them – at the high-end restaurants (I confess I love good food). On their yachts (I have summered in the best places too often), in their hot cars and heavy cars, at their kids’ schools (the best schools).

They have beautiful homes and tasteful (generally) summer homes. Why should they not believe they are correct? The stock market is terrific again. There are the “green shoots” of recovery. They barely felt that nasty plunge back last fall, except on paper and now their paper looks great again. Maybe a few friends disappeared as various jobs were lost, but all and all…

Besides, who else can run this difficult world, if not them? Certainly Obama has agreed (he was allowed to join them, after all: Harvard, etc and now he’s at the top). And, as we have now all witnessed, Obama has kept pretty much everyone of them in place – his cabinet, the guys at GM AIG, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve and so forth – at a massive cost to the US Taxpayer. (Is it true that the actual cost – now hidden – has been somewhere between nine and eleven trillion dollars – not the two trillion reported? This is rumor – but what’s so awful about so many of rumors — of the last eight years or so, for example, so laughed at at the time – is that so many of them have turned out to be completely true.)

But whatever the massive costs it has become clear to all of us now that nothing (at the top) has changed one wit even as that nasty tumble last fall indicated things were far from okay with this system. Everything (at the top) is back to normal.

But what has hit me even more deeply now, wandering amidst the elite, is that none of these people want change. None of them believe in it, except to make things “greener” perhaps. Other than that, things are just fine from their perspective. But even with getting things “greener” it’s a little dicey. I pulled up to a farmer’s market here in Hollywood last Sunday where Chevy was hocking it’s newest new green, green car – trumpeting (via a couple of hip looking kids in the 20s – getting paid by the hour) that it got 28 miles to the gallon (on the highway) — 28 miles to the gallon! Wow! Really green!

How stupid do they think we are over there at GM? I think they think we’re very, very stupid and they think that they’re very, very smart. How many stupid people get billions even after they’ve screwed up as badly as GM?

So is anything going to change after what Obama’s done? Anything? I’m afraid the answer is all too obvious.

So how are things going to change? It’s not a fun thought. How have things changed down through history? That’s not a fun thought either. Human history has not been a pretty picture for those cultures (pretty much all of them) where the leaders didn’t want change, even as things began to fall apart around them (12% unemployment here in California now – which, like Chevy’s mpg, is laughable – it’s probably closer to 20% when you factor in those who have given up looking. Everywhere you look everything’s spun. Not 12%, not 28 mpg, not 2 trillion dollars.

I read a quote yesterday by Timothy McVeigh (of all people). Remember him – the maniac bomber in Oklahoma? Wasn’t he a dull witted idiot of a dishonorably discharged low ranking soldier? Aren’t all right wing people dull witted idiots?

When he was on trial he was asked if he had anything to say:

“Well, your honor, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists… There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government.”

Frightening, for me, for a hundred reasons (here’s three): not stupid; violent (he killed 168 people, after all); and correct.

Something better change fast, my very smart friends who I have shared so much luxury with, something better change real fast or it’s going to get changed for us — the results of which we won’t like, nor will we like the path to it.