Agitation Cancelled by Washington State Bureaucrats

WASHINGTON STATE HOUSING bureaucrats have canceled this week's OAN post – and quite possibly next week's too – by slapping the 52-unit senior housing complex in which I live with a surprise inspection. This temporarily shuts down OAN because the time required for the pre-inspection cleanup leaves me no time for anything else.

The inspection, in which our apartments will be invaded by judgmental strangers, is an expression of capitalism's malice toward anyone who is so poor we have to live in housing complexes the construction of which were partially financed by state and federal money.

We are already forced to suffer inspection of our premises four times a year, in March, June, September and December. But at least the quarterly inspections are conducted by the local building manager, a rational and often helpful human being I've known for many years and trust accordingly, while this surprise inspection will be conducted by zero-tolerance state housing officials – who like the cops and the welfare bureaucrats can always find ways to violate our civil rights without fear of effective redress.

Moreover, because I am a cripple, standard housecleaning routines are excruciatingly painful. I am officially disabled by spinal damage inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's obscenely coddled, defiantly habitual drunken drivers – a well-connected moral imbecile who at the time of our encounter had been arrested 19 times for DWI but still had a valid drivers license and had not spent a single day in jail. The injuries he dealt me immediately ended my ability to trout fish in the back country, then deteriorated slowly but steadily. For the past two decades the deterioration and the associated pains have been radically worsened by osteoarthritis.

Though I keep my premises as clean and orderly as I am able, the physical limits on my ability to perform standard housekeeping chores – particularly dusting, vacuuming and mopping – means it takes me four days to prepare for any one of these inspections. I need at least six hours to dust all the exposed surfaces in my apartment, which include nearly 600 cubic feet of books and bookshelves, and by the time I am finished with all the necessary bending, reaching and stooping, I am so exhausted by the pain, I am incapable of further physical exertion until I have had a night's sleep.

Vacuuming the carpets and rugs takes another six hours – again the delay is arthritic discomfort, and again the hurtful exhaustion halts further efforts until the next day. Then I kill another day cleaning and mopping the bathroom, which also takes about six hours, and a fourth day doing likewise in kitchen.

Last, the most truly agonizing chore of all, is the 15 or 20 minutes it takes me to make my bed the morning of the inspection.

After this, my arthritis is so inflamed, I am usually laid up for most if not all of the remainder of the week, while my sore joints return to their normal 24/7 level of relentless low-grade pain, typically about a 2 on the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale.

The surprise state inspection, which is scheduled for 28 May, thus inflicts an additional four days of agony and thereby steals yet another week from my life, which means my Memorial Day will be indeed be memorable, not for any positive reason but for the curse-god-from-whom-all-misery-flows suffering and stress of preparation. Then in the middle of June, I'll have to do all these painful chores all over again for the regular June inspection – four more days of arthritic misery and at least the remainder of the week to recover.

My anger and outrage at this surprise inspection are therefore huge. And they are entirely justified, because – as I noted above – these inspections are deliberate acts of oppression, methodically inflicted punishments by which capitalism deliberately savages those of who are poor.

Save for the emotional release of writing this text, the stress of the surprise inspection would no doubt be ramrodding my blood pressure to potentially fatal heights.

Such is the reality of old age in the USian homeland, infinitely worsened by the de facto Christian theocracy of the United States, the drug policy of which is derived from the biblical doctrine of “redemptive suffering” – specifically the federal government's deliberately sadistic denial of any prescription pain-killers strong enough and in sufficient quantities to banish the agonies of millions like myself.

The worst part, of course, is my nagging fear the inspection will be – in compliance with never-rescinded Homeland Security directives – a de facto warrantless search, perhaps culminating in a post-inspection telephone call to one of the innumerable secret-police agencies: “this old man is obviously a real Red he has a whole library full of books on the Soviet Union.” Yeah, it's getting like the '50s again – read the links – and though I've been on the government watch-list for many many years, I'd rather not have my life further complicated by some self-righteous state bureauc-rat's goading of the neo-Gestapo.

Which is why – sorry – there's no real OAN essay this week. Nor – maybe – any next week either.

LB/25 May 2014

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