Someone's got to say it: the troops are not that great. I'm sick of every pundit and politician fawning over military service. For all the validation they get, you'd think that troops were toddlers showing off their first finger paintings. Not every upside-down purple tree is a Picasso. Just like not every trigger-happy camouflage-wearer is G.I. Joe. Enough already.

It's reached fever pitch regarding John McCain, who is scarcely mentioned without due genuflection to his stint as Prisoner of War. Since POW isn't a Homeric mnemonic to distinguish McCain from other old Honky-American saber-rattlers, we should be able to move on. Homer's catchy contributions to electoral nomenclature might include Strong-Greaved Achaeans, Tortured-Shoulders McCain, Cross-Dressing Womanizer Giuliani, or Reality-Averse Artic Wolf-Killer Palin.

Unless, while sitting in that Hanoi cell, McCain was reading up on Bismarck's Guide to Realpolitik or The Letters of James K. Polk or Health Care Financing for Dummies, being a POW wouldn't have taught him a whit how to be President. Being a POW would, however, have taught him to dissociate from his surroundings, be impossibly stubborn, and hold a grudge—about the worst traits in a Chief Executive. All the harping by Republican aparatchiks on McCain's Navy stint suggests the key GOP election platform is improving treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Let potheads, derelicts, and malcontents hold highest office, but think twice about torture victims. Even a breezy glance at our "enhanced interrogation" shenanigans reveals that torture messes with a fella's head more than heroin and succubi. People can't recover when they spend the next thirty years seeking bloody revenge on anyone darker than butterscotch pudding, which is McCain's vaunted foreign policy. The White House is not a consolation prize for past trauma. If it were, others deserve it more than McCain. Rigoberta Menchu comes to mind. Instead, honor McCain by making him into a video game—"Grand Theft Nation," complete with strippers, crashed Navy planes, and three fingers of rye.

The national fetish of things military pollutes our discourse beyond McCain. Interminable accolades, replete with hang-dog gravitas from no less a freedom-fighter than Tom Hanks, convey the impression that every darn solider hails from the Marine Corps Good Samaritan Division, Helping Old Ladies Cross the Street Brigade, Snuggle Platoon. They don't.

Don't support all the troops. The troops who enlisted via "moral waivers" despite convictions for homicide and making terrorist threats, maybe not so much. While every convict deserves a second chance, maybe a job requiring proficiency with a grenade launcher in a bazaar is not a winning rehabilitation program. Also, the torturing, Jew-beating, fellow-soldier-raping, unarmed-Iraqi massacring, "Hijack This, Fags"-bomb-painting troops. See, some troops don't deserve support, because of their behavior. It's not their fault they were sent on a dumb mission, but it sure is when they act like knuckleheads whilst completing said mission. They don't deserve a parade, a medal, or the Oval Office.

Respecting military service shouldn't so totally eclipse the millions of unsung firefighters, nurses, teachers, maverick community organizers, and even parents, who do more than most troops to keep the United States of All-You-Can-Eat churning . Their service and sacrifice deserve a few more flags and moments of silence and lapel pins and stirring Michael Bay blockbusters. It might be easier to waterboard with impunity in Gitmo than try teaching math in East Oakland. It might be easier to launch a missile that destroys a home than pull a double shift as a trauma nurse. So don't support the troops—support everybody.

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=6558&catid=4&volume_id=317&issue_id=383&volume_num=42&issue_num=38

San Francisco Bay Guardian
To surcharge, without love

Let them have healthcare

By Nato Green

OPINION With the first linen pants of 2008, this city commenced collecting employer contributions to the Healthy San Francisco universal health care program. Employers that don't provide insurance now must pay the city for the public health care their employees use anyway. A number of restaurants have added "Healthy San Francisco" surcharges of 2 to 4 percent to diners' tabs. These surcharges are at best sour grapes and at worst a diabolical plan to thwart democracy.

Present spite notwithstanding, I spend all my discretionary income on dining. My economic stimulus check stimulated some duck confit and tarte tatin. I'd trade a kidney for dinner at Coi. My disaster preparedness kit includes a Zagat Guide. The stokers of my culinary flame deserve to be treated well. Our restaurant scene should attract the best, the brightest, the most ingenuously-tattooed epicureans. The people of San Francisco deigned to achieve this noble goal by providing a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, and now universal health care. Oh, the decadence! We're drifting dangerously close to becoming a civilized society, which could get us invaded. Don't be surprised when Blackwater goes hunting for Tom Ammiano in a spider-hole.

Some disgruntled restaurants have decided to assess a surcharge rather than raise prices. But all prices fluctuate. When the cost of electricity or halibut goes up, menu prices rise. Regulation affects cost. We knew that when we passed the laws. A surcharge instead of a menu price increase is restaurant owners' way of saying that workers are less valuable than halibut.

Let them have health care. I enjoy clogging my own arteries so much more when the people feeding me get their cholesterol checked.

Owners claim their profit margin can't absorb higher labor costs, hence the price hike. Restaurants have high failure rates and run a tight margin.

But raising prices wouldn't be Armageddon for fine dining in Baghdad by the Bay. Heck, it's not even Shock and Awe. Maybe I'd notice if Bar Tartine raised prices by 4 percent. Maybe I'd be annoyed. But if my $60 meal became $62, I wouldn't head to a taqueria. The amount surchargers would have to jack prices before surchargees stay home is quite high. Most of us eating at Bar Tartine can suck it up like so many amuses bouches.

San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer is wont to blame every restaurant closure on our labor largesse. But restaurants fail for any number of reasons. Could be labor costs, or it could be that Bauer panned them, or that their concept, food, and location were bad, or that the manager was on coke.

Some restaurateurs can't abide the people of San Francisco regulating them. But that's life in a democracy. The same people excusing the surcharge as mere kindly consciousness-raising are currently appealing the Healthy San Francisco law. In fact, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association opposes any improvement in labor standards. The folks there hope that diners, our fury stoked by surcharges, will finally rebel against our labor-loving local legislators, stop imposing our so-called values on restaurants, and demand to be served by disease-ridden, malnourished indigent waiters as God and Milton Friedman intended.

Instead of an irascible surcharge, menus could note: "Our food is organic, local, and sustainable. And the cook gets his asthma treated." People who care will be happy, and people who don't will blithely resume checking the NASDAQ on their iPhones.

So quit grousing. Enjoy the short ribs. See your doctor. Everybody wins. *

Nato Green is a San Francisco-based comedian who has meddled with the primal forces of nature and must atone.

Tuesday June 17, 2008

Classics don't become classic because they were good when they started. They're classics because they stay good. For example, Austin Powers was nonstop hilarity when it came out, but it was so specific to that cultural moment that it hasn't aged particularly well. On the other hand, I can watch Star Wars or Casablanca again and again and still be highly entertained and engaged. Hence, classics.

Classic restaurants are good. I don't need to have my mind blown with shock and awe of the new every time I look at a menu. Sauna-steamed yellowtail cheeks with butterscotch? Must we? Thus I was delighted to be eating at Lulu (816 Folsom St, SF, CA) once again. Well-executed, tasty, and comforting family-style food.

Particular highlights for me were the beef short rib daube, roasted cauliflower with preserved lemon and capers, and molten chocolate cake. Although I didn't explore it, the wine list offering 2 oz. tastes allows the indecisive and adventurous to design their own wine flights. Finally, I was dining with children, and the servers were wonderfully patient with their changing food requests.

Do you have disposable income and tattoos? Maybe an ill-fitted hoodie and worn Chuck Taylors? Answer yes to all of these questions, and Front Porch (65 29th St., SF, CA) is the eatery for you.

Not only is Front Porch bringing some much-needed variety to the Mariachi dominance of the nether reaches of Mission Street. Not only does Front Porch make me feel cooler than I really am--in a surly, insurgent Bay Guardian kind of way, rather than a effete haute coutuer 7x7 kind of way. Not only does Front Porch look cool inside with the funky low ceiling. Not only is the throng of hipsters too loud to hear the Pixies and Nas playing on the radio. Not only can you cope with the interminable wait by bellying up to the bar down the block at the 3300 Club, only to have the owner of Front Porch personally come and fetch you you're your table's ready. Not only does the waiter offer you a water choice of "Pellegrino or Hetch Hetchy." (Try the Hetch Hetchy and subvert the bottled water racket.) Not only all that and a bucket of corn bread, but the food is great.

The cod and pepper fritters. Yum. Chicken liver with onion jam. Yum. Fried oysters with pork belly. Quite frankly, doing too much. Every entre I've had there has validated and enhanced my nerd girth--fried chicken, molasses-brined pork chop, pepper pot stew with wild boar and oxtails. It's all meaty and rich and cozy. Instant food coma.

Only word of caution--the desserts haven't done it for me. They're good, and maybe I'm just worn out by all the fried goodness on the way to dessert, but they haven't excited me. My preference is to skip dessert here and head over to Mitchell's to finish my night one happy glutton.

In the olden days of yore, I was a truck driver, and I roamed all across the land. One of the bonuses of my job that stayed my hand every time I fantasized about plowing my bald-tired pickup into a Murano was trying every taco truck and barbecue shack in the metropolitan region. I ate a lot of smoked and grilled murdered animal. Some good, some bad, and the meat at Roadside BBQ (3751 Geary, SF) is more good than bad.

My approach to barbecue is to control the experiment: I order the same thing at every place, so I have a basis for comparison. You can't compare apples and links, you hear? One of the things I appreciate about barbecue joints is the standardization of menu options. Every place has pork ribs, and calls them pork ribs. Unlike smoothie/juice bars that all have a version of tropical smoothie, but call it by different silly names--Mango Madness at one place and Tropical Tantrum at another. That way, every damn smoothie place I have to study the whole menu all over again and can't just order The Usual.

In the interest of having a perfect laboratory environment, every barbecue place I visit for the first time, I order the ribs and brisket combo. These two dishes show the mettle of the business. Don't bother ordering chicken unless you keep kosher, and links don't showcase the cook or the meat. Ribs and brisket, son.

At Roadside BBQ, the ribs were excellent and the brisket was ok, the difference residing in the flavor. Ribs were tender, moist, and not gristly. Yet my brisket was a little dull. My major complaint about Roadside BBQ was the self-lubricating approach to sauce. They had a choice of sauces on a consol, and the meat came un-sauced. The hot sauce was smoky and sweet with a slow burn, just like my gonorrhea, but I'm opposed on principle to self-saucing. Unless it's the top of the line motherfucking swine (and cow), which this most assuredly wasn't, the meat should be dry-rubbed, marinated, basted, and sauced before it ever reaches me.

I also evaluate barbecue places by the choice and quality of sides. Some places offer ONLY potato salad. Roadside BBQ, to its eternal credit, had a great many choices, and I went with the sweet potato fries and coleslaw. The fries were fantastic, and the coleslaw was tangy and mercifully bereft of mayonnaise.

While I won't be abandoning Memphis Minnie's transcendent brisket for Roadside, if I find myself, as I did last night, killing time in the Richmond before a gig, I might belly up for some satisfying ribs and fries.

I recently got the certificate back in the mail and it's official: Iron Comic is now officially a registered trademark of yours truly, Nato Green. US Patent Office, baby!

Now I can start suing chumps.

Two appetizers that I've had quite enough of are beets and ahi. Not together, because ahi-beet salad would be unusual and that might interest me. But surely as every pimply adolescent guitar hero has to play Stairway to Heaven, every trendy restaurant has their riff on the two appetizers, as tonight at the Wood Tavern in Oakland's Rockridge (aka white flight) District.

Tonight's iteration of the chopped beet salad included bleu cheese instead of the more ubiquitous goat and fuyu persimmon slices. These variations elevated the beets above their usual banality, but only a mezzanine above. I'm not crazy about beets when they're not borschtified, so I usually accept the salad as a vehicle for stinky cheese, which I love. The ahi was seared and had some other stuff with it. Rare ahi is tasty and I like it in an appetizer. However, heed ye Nato's culinary rule 4: tartar, carpaccio, and other rare proteins deserve a complementary strong sauce or spice or texture or something. Just enough pain to remind me I'm not dead inside.

My sternly-worded missive to beet salad and ahi tuna: I get the message. Really I do. Now can we graduate or at least punch it up a whole lot? Like serve the ahi tuna tossed with toasted ground rhino tusk plated on the blade of a scimitar held by a small Moroccan boy. I don't even know whether there are scimitars in Morocco or if the previous sentence made me racist—that's how desperate I am for a new ahi. Or serve the beet salad mixed with the juice of Antonin Scalia's atrophied soul. Maybe it'd taste good.

Before the good people at Wood Tavern feel too bad, my entrée was FUCKING AWESOME! Grilled pork chop with bacon-chanterelle succotash, roasted potatoes, and marsala sauce. I'm generally in favor of any dish that uses one meat (bacon) to add flavor and texture to another meat (pork chop). I am always pro mixing liquor and meat. And whatever tangy brine they put that pork in was a brine I affirm and exalt. I'm pro brine and anti-war, too.

Here's the thing, though: I tend to order the strongest meat or weirdest dish on the menu. I would have ordered the duck breast, except it had a side of asparagus, and I just don't want asparagus in November. The waiter said it was the last winter harvest from LoCal, but since we only get fresh seasonal asparagus in the Bay Area for twenty-five minutes in March, I was suspicious.

For dessert, I had the warm chocolate cake with ice cream, which was great. One of my dining companions had profiteroles, which were ok but I don't like profiteroles anyway so my word is meaningless.

Boo ya.

Michael Moore's new documentary SiCKO is billed as a comedy, but don't be fooled. It's not a comedy in the catch phrase, slapstick, as controversial as baby food, lowest common denominator variety of, say, Corky Romano. SiCKO's comedy draws from the same well that inspired Native American author Sherman Alexie to muse, "There's something inherently funny about genocide." It's the bleak, angry irony of gallows humor.

Detractors complain the film is "one-sided." Uh, yeah, it's Michael Moore. He's not trying to do nuanced, thorough, fully balanced inquiry—that's an assignment for academics with elbow patches, not major motion pictures. Moore gives full-throated opinion, and his fans are rightly relieved that someone, anyone, with a microphone expresses their principles without triangulation, equivocation, or respect for phony bipartisanship.

SiCKO argues three points: 1) The American system of making private, for-profit insurance the gatekeepers of health care is a disaster for patients and a cash orgy for corporations. 2) There's a better way, with results successfully demonstrated by every other modern, industrialized, democratic country, which is free, guaranteed, universal health care (single payer). 3) A country's health care system reflects the quality of its democracy, and ours is a moral outrage.

The movie doesn't argue that everyone in countries like France, England, or Canada has perfect experiences with government-provided health care all the time, or that everyone in the US has a horrible experience. Any grousing about lines for health care under single payer has been decisively silenced by iPhone frenzy. On the one hand, you have mounds of actual evidence and data, like longer life expectancies in countries that have single payer. On the other hand, single payer haters like Bill O'Reilly or my knucklehead Governor have anecdotes: "I had a good experience with Blue Cross." Or, "I know a guy who had a bad experience in Canada." It's a sign of impending Armageddon that "I know a guy" can win an argument against evidence and logic. If you're somebody who doesn't like reality to intrude on your worldview, stop reading right now and go back to listening to the little Jesus in your heart about how Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, and there's no global warming.

Single payer doesn't mean that everyone will get everything they want regardless of cost. It will not solve problems of objective scarcity. There will still be some amount of "rationing" of health care. Under single payer, those decisions will be made transparently by the democratic process instead of by corporations making decisions secretly to boost profit.

The big question is can we get from here to there, and if so, how? What would it take to defeat the insurance and pharmaceutical industries politically? Is SiCKO wishful thinking?

No.

Never before have I seen such a perfect political storm: a major cultural expression like a film galvanizing and focusing on an accelerating social crisis at the same time as a growing grassroots movement is expanding support for a legislative agenda in SB840 in California and HR676 in Congress, and politicians across the spectrum are feeling enormous pressure to do something.

There can be no progressive change if progressives are divided. American liberalism, from Hillary Clinton to anarchists, is divided as to whether bad reform is better than no reform, if the insurance companies can be routed, and if the crisis can be abated without single payer. Whether it's Democrats running for President or in the California legislature, they all genuflect to single payer and then cut a deal on a convoluted, half-baked reform that leaves insurance companies in the driver's seat.

SiCKO's sharp moral line makes all these hacks look like assholes. You're with us or with Aetna. Michael Moore is helping to unify progressives around the only real solution, which gives us a fighting chance to win the center.

The rest of the free world passed national health care with leadership from organized labor, which we finally have. After frittering away the last fifty years on shrinking employment-based insurance, the AFL-CIO this March finally came out for single payer. Now every week another union announces that it's endorsing HR676. Also, Western Europe established national health care after World War II, when the triumph of democracy over fascism was on everyone's mind. Since these Bush years are as close to fascism as we've had in the US, the American people may be similarly civic-minded after saving the republic from neo-conservatism.

The only presidential aspirant who currently supports single payer is the hobbitish Dennis Kucinich, the official candidate of hemp clothing. But that can change: politicians will support single payer if we make single payer a big enough deal that politicians believe it can win elections. Even if Clinton, Obama, and Edwards continue playing footsy with insurance companies, expanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate can get us there without them. It would help indeed if a Democratic President went to bat for single payer, but even if he (or she, although I use the term loosely) didn't, if it passed the House and Senate, a Democratic President couldn't veto it.

So go to the movie, and then join one of dozens of grassroots organizations fighting on behalf of SB840 and HR676. If we all take advantage of the opportunity Michael Moore has handed us, we could make SiCKO obsolete and fix this mess by the end of 2009.

Rise up, bitches.

On June 12, I had the honor of watching the US premiere of Michael Moore's new docu-comedy SiCKO in a theater in Sacramento with 700 nurses. The nurses and the movie were the honor part; being in Sacramento's billion-degree heat was not an honor.

SiCKO is about the corruption of our so-called "health care system," which is more appropriately a "health insurance industry." In addition to exposing some of the ugliness we all know is out there in the experience of the uninsured and underinsured, the movie raises uncomfortable questions about the meaning of a democracy that lets private corporations decide who lives and who dies, literally. We hear that Americans won't go for single payer healthcare, because it might mean waiting in line. I waited in line to see Spider-Man 3, which took years off my life, so of course I'll wait in line for a prostate exam.

It's so easy to get lost in the tedious details of the policy debate over competing plans of healthcare reform/insurance regulation. The movies cuts through all of it to stoke a sense of outrage and indignation at how our current system mistreats people. For me, one of the most eye-popping scenes was when the movie plays the White House tapes of the conversation between Richard Nixon and John Ehrlicman where they invent HMOs: "See you make a profit by denying care." "I like it."

The movie opens THIS FRIDAY, June 29. Everyone should go see the movie opening weekend, because what kind of a fuck you would it be to Blue Cross, United Healthcare, Aetna, PhARMA, to have SiCKO take the weekend box office. The better it does opening weekend, the longer it'll stay in theaters. I remember when Bowling for Columbine came out, it played from 3 to 3:15 on a Wednesday afternoon and that was it.

Also, across the country activists are looking for ways, with Michael Moore's full blessing and support, to use the movie to raise awareness and organize the public behind truly universal, guaranteed, free health care. Single payer advocates are going to have special events at 3000 theaters on opening night. A lot of people are going to walk out of the theaters wanting to declare war on the private insurance industry.

To sign up for a theater near you, check out:
http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/

Nato Green says go to the movies and get sick.

I wanted to share some blurbs in the SF Chronicle about the shows I've been doing at the Make-Out Room.

from the Pink Section, Sunday, May 20, 2007
pick of the week for Monday night:
LAUGHING LIBERALLY LOCAL 415

This monthly comedic showcase lands tonight at the Make-Out Room, center of boho nightlife. Jim Short, winner of the 2004 San Francisco International Stand Up Competition, headlines the bill, which also features Ross Turner, Boxcar and the sketch group Boomtime's Moshe Kasher. Hosted by Nato Green, who organizes the Iron Comic competitions. $8. 7 p.m. The Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. (415) 647-2888, www.makeoutroom.com.

and, going back a bit, the Chron blurb on January 8, 2007 about our benefit for Walid Hassan, the slain Iraqi comedian:

Benefit for family of slain Iraqi comic
Bay Area comedians and writers will perform today at the Make-Out Room at a benefit for the family of slain Iraqi comedian Walid Hassan, who was murdered Nov. 20 during a kidnap attempt.
The two-hour show will begin at 7 p.m. and feature performances by headliner Joe Klocek, Sal Calanni, Ali Mafi, Mark Day, Samantha Chanse, Tessie Chua, Arthur Gaus and Kurt Weitzmann. Comedian Nato Green and writer Stephen Elliott will co-host. Also scheduled to appear are writers Daniel Handler, Andrew Sean Greer, Michelle Tea and Tom Barbash.
The benefit will also feature subtitled video clips of "Caricatures," the sketch comedy show Hassan co-created on al-Sharkiya television. It skewered everyone from the U.S. Army and Iraqi authorities to the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
"The worst thing that happens to most comedians around here is getting heckled in Modesto, but Hassan gave his life for socially relevant comedy," said Green, who organized the event after reading about Hassan's death. "People were really moved about it. Comedians have a special kinship for each other, even if they feel apart from everyone else."
Donations of $10-$20 are requested. Money raised will go to Hassan's family through a special fund at Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization. The Make-Out Room is at 3225 22nd St. in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.makeoutroom.com.
-- Joe Garofoli