NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(March '02)

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3/3/2002

Hasta la pasta,

The sun has popped up over the compound wall here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, and a new day has dawned on the bent and spotty saga that is Big Green. As is the case with any bona fide discorporate rock band, there is a lot more that goes into making us what we are than what meets the eye. From the moment I roll out of my makeshift hammock to the time I retire, my hands are never still with the labor of keeping this enterprise on a steady bearing...straight out to sea. Like Matt's song "Don't Give Up The Ship" says:

Don't give up the ship, be a fool and

hold the course away from the shore. 

Not everyone feels that way. Take the band that's squatting in the abandoned factory next door. They're always playing it safe...never taking any risks at all. Oh sure -- they've got a hugely remunerative record contract with BMG, seven platinum records, arenas full of people cheering their every bowel movement, and a string of aquatic theme parks that stretches from here to Madagascar. But do they have a genuine Zenite guitarist straight from the planet Zenon? No. Do they have teams of scientists designing their next lean-to? No. Do they have their own cooking show? Well....yeah, but it's not as stupid as ours...not by half!

I try to remind myself of how fortunate we are every time I descend the rusted coal-chute into the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill where my cobbed-together studio is now located. I mean, some bands actually have to work for a living (think of that!), setting up in dance halls and gin mills, slogging through their repertoires until late in the evening, then lugging their gear off to the next venue. And all of it on a planet that has a substantial charge of positive gravity! (We, at least, occasionally perform in places where our gear is virtually weightless.) Some of those poor buggers follow a punishing schedule, like the Captured By Robots Spring 2002 Tour. Man, I'll tell you...I would have to be captured by something pretty nasty to keep to so grueling an itinerary. 

Have we ever been captured by robots, extraterrestrials, or something similar? Oh, sure. There was that one incident back in '95 when a group of highly disgruntled automatons posing as stage hands took us hostage and held us in a graveyard for several weeks, demanding a pallet of silicon wafers and thousands of luncheon vouchers in exchange for our release. That was a pretty tight situation. 

Luckily, we had connections back then and could swing a big-time hostage negotiator -- someone those maladjusted robots would listen to. (No, it wasn't Klaatuu. We weren't that well connected. Suffice to say it was a well known television robot whose steely visage would be instantly recognized in any suburban living room in America.) The nasty robots agreed, ultimately, to a significant scaling back of their demands, settling for half the volume of silicon wafers and coupons for a free oil change and New York State Inspection, carried out by an expert. (Then, of course, they were apprehended and sentenced to seven years hard labor in an automated NIKE factory in Papua, New Guinea.)

So, yeah -- even though I'm hard at it with this "LIVE" project, I still feel grateful that I am not now held captive by extremist robots like the ones that nabbed us in '95...or the ones who carried Henry Kissinger off that one time thirty years ago and made him eat 2 quarts of shrimp lo mein with Dung. Clearly, these were very, very desperate machines. (I think parts of one of them may have somehow been incorporated into my dishwasher. It's been looking at me kind of funny these last few years....)

Scene Missing. I haven't seen the movie We Were Young Once, mind you, but it sounds to me by all accounts (favorable and critical) like the kind of historical amnesia Hollywood (and Washington) is famous for. The studios have been crisply reporting for duty since the start of the "War on Terrorism," though jingoistic oversimplification is nothing new for them. After all, Herr Arnold S.'s cinematic blood orgy in Colombia was in the can prior to 9/11, as was the historically sanitized Black Hawk Down, I believe. 

American movies about the Vietnam War are pretty much always enormously distorted, as one might expect. Commonly they have demonized "the enemy" and hewn closely to the tenets of the secular P.O.W./M.I.A. religion, exploiting the camaraderie between soldiers as a means of justifying the war effort in retrospect. I suspect the main failing of We Were Soldiers Once is that its heroic portrayal is historically isolated -- the years that preceded the 1965 battle it chronicles were marked by a withering assault on South Vietnamese society by the U.S., one that included bombing, defoliation, massive population removal, and an invasion by our ground troops. 

If Hollywood had the courage (or the incentive) to make a film about the actual Vietnamese experience, it might be called Operation Cedar Falls or Operation Ranch Hand, and depict our relentless grinding down of the rural society in South (yes, South) Vietnam over the course of more than a decade -- an act of terror from which that nation has not yet recovered. That's the part that people really need to be reminded about, as we throw our hand into every fight on the face of the earth (next stop, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia). Don't hold your breath waiting for it. Jesus...with an "entertainment" industry like this, who needs an Office of Strategic Influence? No wonder Rumsfeld gave it the axe. (Or did he...?)

The Shadow Knows. The Dubya Administration has invoked a Cold War era provision activating an underground "shadow" government of 75-150 officials who will spend shifts in bunkers and other secure locations so that there will be governmental "continuity" in case of an attack on Washington. One wonders who these officials are. Is John Poindexter amongst them, recently engaged by the administration? How about Otto Reich? Elliot Abrams? Do we get to know who would be ruling us should Bush's boys let another major terrorist attack get past them?

One things for sure....whoever they are, they can have no less tenuous claim to legitimacy than Dubya himself.

Keep your heads up. 

luv u,

jp

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3/10/2002

Dear Camp Counselor,

It's 10:30AM in Sri Lanka and time to "rise and shine" as they say back home. We're early-risers here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, sometimes turning ourselves out of our makeshift hammocks as early as 9:45AM. (Matt says he once hit the floor at 9:17AM, but that result has not been independently verified.) That's because we're A-type personalities...real go-getters...not like that other band next door. They get up in the afternoon (which, of course, is morning in the northern hemisphere at this time of year). Lazy fuckers! Scum!

Trevor James Constable says I should see a (Reichian) therapist about this growing hostility of mine. John just shakes his head and goes back to shelling pecans. Why this irrational hatred of the band next door? I don't know -- maybe I'm just soaking up some of the irrational hatred that's washing over every corner of the world at this point in human history. Or maybe it's that stylin' new sports car those bastards drove home the other day -- the one with the rocket sled conversion package and genuine NASA-approved o-ring assembly. Okay, so maybe I'm just jealous and see myself with my neighbors' possessions. YOU GOTTA PROBLEM WID DAT? HEY. HEEEEY. 

Ahem....anyway. Some of us do have reasons for getting up so early. I, of course, have my live CD project, which I'm mastering as a sop to the xenophobic greedmeisters over at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., who are hungry for some product with which they can capitalize on the success of our recent interplanetary tour. That endeavor is advancing slowly but surely. (I have attempted the recipe several times and have only recently produced something edible, if a little extra crispy.) Then there's the new lean-to. 

Now that the foundation hole is dug, it's pretty much time for us to decide what this thing is going to look like. Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James have suggested several different possible configurations for our new abode. We did, however, engage a local architectural firm -- Sringar, Postman & Mehardy -- to draw up some plans and do the cool 3-d CAD drawings. What they gave us was a little disappointing -- the first little more than a hunting lair, with no proper accommodation for the 24-track studio and anti-gravity break room our scientists had in mind (let alone sFshzenKlyrn's in-house sound stage where segments of his now-popular cooking show can be taped before a live studio audience).

Once that plan was soundly rejected as inadequate, SP&M submitted another drawing that was a bit closer to what we were looking for, though Matt pointed out some fatal errors in the post-and-lintel construction -- namely, that there wasn't any. When the firm asked John what he thought, he chucked a half-shelled pecan at them. Obviously, this wouldn't do, either. 

I, for one, had had something of a more classical Italianate nature in mind. You know, columns and friezes and the like. Our last lean-to had been constructed more along those lines, and that had served us very well until we made the mistake of leaving it for Washington after the 2000 election. Then there was that occupation by the mongooses, after which Gung-Ho incinerated the thing with a neutron bomb. You know the rest. Anyway, we just want to get back to where we were before. That's all. Is that so much to ask?

In the meantime, while the architects work to draw up something suitable, I'm busily trying to convince my band mates and the U.S. Defense Department that the band next door is yet another sinister component of Dubya's "axis of evil." If I succeed, maybe that will be enough for Gung-Ho to consider their abandoned factory a "target of opportunity." Then comes the aerosol fuel explosives -- hot dog!

Another War. As the list of active U.S. military engagements gets longer by the day -- the most recent being Yemen, once declared "the next Vietnam" by network news robots in the late 1970s -- the shooting has started up again in Afghanistan, leaving about 8 Americans dead and probably hundreds of Afghan and "Arab" fighters loyal to the Taliban cause. Pentagon briefers have been talking up how well-armed the enemy units are, as if they have even a tiny fraction of the armaments we have at our disposal. Though losses on the U.S. side are indefensible at any level, the ratio of our corpses to theirs surpasses even the Israeli standard. Flag waving or no, we are a risk-averse people, and with good reason. Whenever our government is confident we can stomach risk, it only piles more on us. 

My chiropractor recently showed me a newspaper from the early 1950s -- 1953, I think -- that had a lot of Korean War news on the front page. The casualty numbers -- American casualties -- were appalling by today's standards. Back then, it was what the traffic would bear, as they used to say. The government and our military had us stoked up on the notion of a titanic "good vs. evil" conflict; so much so that we were willing to put up with sickening numbers of dead right up through the late 60's in Southeast Asia. After the massive social upheaval that brutal conflict produced, no administration or Congress has dared to risk substantial loss of life or military conscription for fear of causing the domestic intifada to arise once again, with all its attendant inconveniences for the powerful. 

Perhaps the seeming success of the Afghan campaign will produce sufficient hubris amongst our "leadership" so that they might be crazy enough to start drafting people again, or start putting people seriously in harm's way. Though it might be tolerated for a while, I thing the end would come quickly -- people would reject it as too costly, and start deeply questioning the assumptions behind the same policies they casually condone today. Nothing like a gun to your head to make you start taking life seriously, right? Just ask Gung-Ho.

Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing continues in the West Bank and Gaza (39 Palestinians dead in yesterday's blood vengeance for an attack on an Israeli madrassa in southern Gaza), as well as in Chechnya and a dozen other places not considered particularly newsworthy. And so the War To Create More Terrorism rolls on. 

Keep your heads down, friends.

luv u,

jp

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3/17/2002

May've your attention please...

Woke up to the sound of an angry thumping on the roof of my crawlspace. It was raining breadfruit again. Strange phenomenon. Happens every March around this time. Something to do with an updraft, I believe. Either that, or some vengeful mongooses are chucking them over the compound wall with a homemade sling or catapult contrivance. Nasty business.

As I know I've mentioned to you before (I feel I can confide in you, now), I try to start each day with the uplifting thought that something good can and will be done before nightfall. Once that momentary self-delusion passes, I can get right on to whatever pointless activity I've carved out for myself. Some mornings it's tending to the vast archive of recorded material we now keep in recycled hammer crates in the basement (I've taken on the onerous responsibility of cataloging them prior to the construction of our new lean-to). Other mornings -- like this one -- it's helping Matt and sFshzenKlyrn clear out the breadfruit accumulated on the roof from the night before. We chuck them into cartons, then our Zenite friend mashes them into a kind of confectionery paste he sells on his popular cooking show. And man, he sells yards and yards of the stuff! Next time I need cash, I'm talking to the man from Zenon. 

We -- the "permanent" or "core" members of Big Green -- are always trying to think of ways we can hitch our car to somebody's gravy train. Now Matt, John, and I have an ideal pigeon right here in our midst whose new-found fortune we can attempt to exploit. So far, all we've gotten out of sFshzenKlyrn have been foodstuffs like live apricot tort, chocolate rice au gratin, and other culinary experiments gone bad. But these are early days yet. We three will have enormous opportunities to bask in the penumbra of our Zenite friend's fame, and this "live" project of ours is just one way of doing it. In fact, I'm thinking about throwing one of sFshzenKlyrn's publicity stills on the cover. After all, he's the big draw on Zenon and Kaztropharius 137b, which is where the CD will be marketed for the most part. IF we can get him to agree to it, we could own the Great Magellanic Cloud, own it! (At present, he seems to want to put some choice recipes in with the liner notes. Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., would never go for that.)

Will the CD be available on Earth? Weeeelllll...maybe. Okay, sure...we can do a limited run, a "signature" edition, as it were. Only don't tell our label, or they'll hang us out to dry (and I mean literally). There's this provision in the contract they forced us to sign prohibiting domestic release of products produced for outer space markets. But I think, with the help of Trevor James Constable and his orgone generating device, we can get around this little obstacle. We'll see, eh?

Nasty Neighbor Update: My "evil empire"....I mean, "Axis of Evil" ruse didn't work with the band in the abandoned factory next door. That monstrosity is still standing. I did have another idea, however -- one that doesn't involve the cooperation of any major global military hegemons. Just a subtle way of putting the scare into those fuckers. Hey...the mongooses kept us out of our beloved lean-to right up until the moment of its incineration. Why not put the little guys to work for some constructive purpose, eh? Hey, Mongooses....come 'n git it!

What A World. While the bloated parody of humanity we call Dick Cheney rolls about the Middle East like a half-living snowball, trying to gather mass as he goes by bribing, cajoling, and otherwise pressuring the compromised leaders of a dozen countries into supporting Gulf War II, our generous donations of military hardware are leaving their awful mark in squalid refugee camps and battered  neighborhoods throughout occupied Palestine. Cheney isn't the only witless lump of flesh -- Dubya's envoy Zinni is there also, pushing the CIA Director's plan to achieve "peace" by blaming the victims of Israel's 35-year military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (not to mention Golan) and forcing them to bear the costs of Tel Aviv's illegal land grab. 

Yet in the face of an almost unspeakable violence meted out on Palestinians every hour of every day, there are credible and dedicated practitioners of non-violent resistance against the occupation -- Palestinian and Israeli -- working in a near-total news blackout imposed by the corporate media. These people need broader attention, and they badly need our support. Who are they? Alex Cockburn spoke of two such groups in a recent column in The Nation -- one working on the ground in the Levant (Ta'ayush -- http://taayush.tripod.com/ ), the other gathering signatures and funds for an ad condemning the occupation to be run in the New York Times (Jewish Voices Against the Occupation -- www.jvao.org). 

There are others, and I will provide links for as many as I can find URL's for. But I encourage you, if you are able, to support these groups with a contribution and to spread the word about them as widely as possible. Hey -- it's a way to do something, and a sure invitation to end up on one of Dubya's little lists of subversives. Don't be left out!

Homeward Rebound. You remember the story about the giant watering can in our home town of Utica, NY? That baby's just the tip of the iceberg, my friends, as the go-go years of Mayor Ed Hanna come unraveled. Every week it's another story about some great economic development project gone bad. In a town where politicians preach personal responsibility to the poor, they can't seem to hand out public money fast enough to any corporate entity that spins a yarn about "job creation" or "revitalizing downtown."

After having played a key role in cheerleading many of these initiatives, the local Gannett newspaper now regularly publishes stories on how huge tax breaks, community development grants, and other county, state, and federal largesse have produced mostly private gain, with little benefit to the community. Some time back they ran a story on a local bank whose downtown headquarters was bought and renovated with City and HUD funds in a back room deal the details of which remain obscure. Last week they told of how a commercial real estate development consortium had failed to make even a single payment on a $5 million loan secured by the City for the restoration of a downtown hotel (the City has been making the $50,000 monthly payments out of federal community development funds). 

This week there was the story of how a firm called Mobile Climate Control had received a total of $4.2 million in aid and tax incentives on the promise of creating about 100 jobs...and had never hired more than 11 people. That front-page expose appeared just below an upbeat piece about how a locally-based insurance company plans to move downtown and reap (yeah, you guessed it) millions in tax breaks, development aid.... Expose to follow -- just wait a year or two.

While local working people are patriotically losing their jobs and shutting up about it, the public subsidy of private gain continues unabated. They also serve who line their pockets. 

luv u,

jp

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3/24/2002

Hey...

The sky is falling once again here in Sri Lanka. Winter has decided to take a later flight -- nothing new about that. We're used to the seasons lasting a little longer in the wiggly world of Big Green. Why, the summer of '92 lasted fully three years to my memory. And winter '63-'64 hasn't ended yet. I can still see that JFK funeral procession moving past the grimy window of my room in the Cheney Hammer Mill, and I watch the riderless horse rear up yet again as Johnny bangs the drum slowly...slowly.

What is it about the snow that sends me into these reveries? I think it's because I feel partially responsible for this turn in the weather. You see, I asked Trevor James Constable if he would modify his portable orgone generator to create a reverse polarity bioplasmic energy field over the mill next door, hoping that it would make it rain only on that property. But as every fool knows, you can't manipulate the elements with any accuracy. The short of it is that Trevor James made it snow over the entire island for the last couple of days. I've asked him to turn it off, but he doesn't seem to know how. Now the Weather Channel wants to sue me for making liars out of them and I'm starting to get bills for road treatment services from municipalities in three states. This could get expensive. 

Of course, this would never have happened if my little mongoose friends had taken the rather large hint I dropped on them last week and occupied our neighbors' squat house. No such luck. Those little furry guys are not so easily duped, it seems. (Matt tells me one of them went so far as to become a special advisor to President Lincoln on foreign affairs.) I'll never underestimate them again. I think now with a string of abject failures behind me and the band next door still fully ensconced in their digs, I should probably abandon my childish obsession with evicting them. It's not like I haven't got better things to do with my time...like sleeping, or building bowling trophies out of popsicle sticks, or putting together our LIVE From Neptune CD.

I never thought the mastering process would be so complicated for a live recording -- man, was I wrong! An unbroken line of issues has confronted me since I started this thing -- questions of aesthetics, quality control, etc. For instance, someone (I think it was Mitch Macaphee) said I should add conventional applause at the end of each number, since on Neptune, where these performances were recorded, most of the patrons have little sucker-like appendages for hands, so their vote of thanks sounds like the proverbial "giant sucking sound" we've all heard about. (Mitch heard that and said, "Is that you guys sucking?" John answered, "Nah. That was earlier.")

Also -- if I remember correctly, the takes I've selected were recorded when sFshzenKlyrn was on one of his all-night gambling and cheese-tasting binges. The guy who sat in for our Zenite friend was ex-Big Greener Jeremy Shaw, formerly of the Neptune Ensemble. sFshzenKlyrn insisted that I make this clear on the sleeve so as not to mislead his fans, and I said "peez-a-cake." English not being his mother tongue, he took this to be a luncheon order and soon had one of his stage hands deliver a strange-looking savory cake that I later fed to the mongooses. (They were glad to get it.)

I would be most obliged if you would keep sFshzenKlyrn's absence quiet, as the murderous megalomaniacs over at our label Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., would pull out the long knives should they ever catch wind of this personnel switch. After all, their marketing is concentrated on deep space consumers for whom Big Green is known only by virtue of our association with sFshzenKlyrn. Without his perceived contribution, this live CD might be a drug on the market (in the traditional sense, that is...you know...a bad thing.) So don't say anything, okay? Let's just keep it between you and I, there's a good chap. 

Hmmm. Why do I get this feeling someone is listening in on our conversation? Paranoia? (Stop it!)

The Right Enemy.  Well, it didn't take long for the glorious "War on Terrorism" to turn into precisely the kind of conflict our military planners have been wanting to engage in for some time. Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson said that "the next decade or so may well be defined by the struggle over globalization," and that since Sept. 11th, the Admiral's "expectation of turmoil and uncertainty has heightened significantly." One may safely presume Wilson is not speaking of unrest among the admiralty, but rather what his colleague at the CIA George Tenet (winner of the 1995 J. Edgar Hoover look-alike contest) reportedly describes as "a crop of restless and mostly jobless young people" in "the poorest and most politically unstable nations, mostly in the Middle East and Africa," who will prove "easy prey for those who will blame their troubles on America and global capitalism." (Tenet's remarks are paraphrased by Gannett reporter Carl Weiser).

Well, it seems the restriction has been lifted on discussing the root causes of terrorism (pro-war liberals take note!), but in any case these remarks indicate a full return to the Pentagon strategy that has been in place for years -- that of developing "full spectrum dominance" in military capability to be deployed in defense of U.S. economic interests (i.e. those of U.S.-base multinational corporations) around the globe, much as Britain's armed forces were dispatched to defend its colonial enterprises in the 19th century. That's right where these boys want to be -- as Churchill put it, wealthy men, living at peace among their habitations.

How do we get there? Massive military spending, of course, which includes the full militarization of outer space, with orbital platforms capable of launching devastating attacks anywhere on the planet -- plans on a scale that dwarfs that of "missile defense," a single component in the overall strategy. Spending of this magnitude requires some justification even in this post-rational age; ergo the "Axis of Evil," stitched onto the still quite popular "War on Terrorism." Such non-sequitur associations are essential to mobilizing unwitting public support for what is basically a military enforcement of neoliberal policies imposed by the World Bank and IMF and exploited for profit by players like Enron and the Carlyle Group. 

How to deal with dissent from structural adjustment, privatization, and corporate brigandage on a global scale? Protest=terrorism. A simple equation...just identify the Porto Alegre global justice movement (and, in fact, anyone else you don't like) with former CIA stooge and religious fanatic bin Laden, whose aims and ideas are diametrically opposed to those of the dissenters. 

This is the struggle the Pentagon has been preparing for since the end of the Cold War, one that is in fact consistent with the core objectives of the Cold War period...keeping the rabble in line worldwide, while providing expanded public subsidy to the favored technology sectors of the U.S. economy, whose major players have been on the federal dole steadily since World War II. 

The game's afoot. Let's hope we've all got the belly for it.  

luv u,

jp

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3/31/02  

Aloha,

It is time once again for our annual Spring equinox fasting ritual...a quasi religious observance we picked up from one of Gung-Ho's colleagues in the Special Forces. Each year about this time we forgo all foodstuffs for a period of three full days (sunrise to sunset) during which we may consume only water and little dixie cups of tomato puree (limited to three a day). At the end of the last day, we roast a hogshead full of tofu. The aroma can be detected from miles away and always draws an appreciative crowd. I pull out the accordion, Matt the guit-fiddle, and John his timbales, and together we play the Estonian national anthem until the Yaks come home. 

That's Easter in a tropical climate. Sound intriguing? sFshzenKlyrn just can't figure it out -- the Easter thing. Aside from coincident rebirth metaphors, what does the Earth Mother Goddess have to do with that Jesus guy, rollin' the stone away? he would ask. And I'd answer, isn't that enough? Religions have been successfully marketed on far less compelling coincidences (no, I can't think of a good example off-hand, but give me time...). In any case, our equinox rituals are sufficiently obscure to be deemed ecumenical... enough so to please the Unitarians, at least. Hey, that's what Unitarianism is all about: if there's room for sFshzenKlyrn, there's room for the likes of you. 

Our equinox celebration is really just a warm-up for the record release party we'll be holding later this spring, as per Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm's demand...or request, rather. They thought a kick-off bash would be a good idea (particularly for us, assuming we like having both arms still attached to our bodies) as a starting point for the promotional blitz they're planning in support of our live EP, "LIVE From Neptune!" Of course, those of you who reside on the planet Earth (and I know there are one or  two among you) won't see any of these marketing pyrotechnics, since the target audiences are all on distant planets invisible to the naked eye (unless, of course, you are very very tiny...)

We never had a proper album release party for Big Green's first CD, 2000 Years To Christmas, so this will be an entirely new experience for us. Hegemonic is drawing up a VIP guest list that is liable to include...well, just about anybody who's anybody in the Great Magellanic Cloud. We've put Mitch Macaphee in charge of balloons and crepe paper. sFshzenKlyrn will set aside some of the baked good from his cooking show, and has contracted with a local beverage baron to keep us all stocked up with India Pale Ale. If we time this right, we can even hold the party in our newly-reconstructed lean-to...making it a kind of housewarming (or shack-warming) party, as well.

So as you might imagine, I've got my work cut out for me here in Big Green land. Mastering that CD. Lighting a fire under those builders. Signing invitations. Rolling doughnuts. It's more than any one person can handle, and my various colleagues all have their hands full, too. Luckily, we've got a fully certified (or certifiable) scientific contingent in-house that never runs short on innovation. Acknowledging my predicament, Mitch Macaphee devised a personal assistant out of spare tubes and baling wire, and Trevor James Constable brought it to life with a charge of reverse magnetic flux. I call the mechanical man Marvin, though he insists on calling himself Robotron. In any case, he follows me around like a terrier, doing helpful things like forging checks and melting Hershey bars (He needs a little reprogramming....but then, so do I). 

Anyway....Thanks, Trevor James! Thanks, Mitch! You guys are the greatest mad scientists in the music business!

Death, Inc. The Bush Administration has elected, not surprisingly, to seek the death penalty in the case of the "20th hijacker" from Sept. 11th. One wonders what purpose this? I mean, death penalty advocates within the administration (and there are plenty of them) and without stress the purported deterrent effect of capital punishment, however imaginary it may be. Even Dubya himself talked during the campaign about making people know that "there are consequences" to breaking the law. 

Only...how much scare is this going to put into prospective suicide bombers? And if it doesn't forestall future attacks, what good is it?

An acquaintance of mine in the animal rights movement who happens to be "1000%" behind the war in Afghanistan professes to believe that eliminating Bin Laden and his "network" is essential to forestalling a nuclear strike on Manhattan. One wonders how my colleague feels about expanded programs to control nuclear materials, decommission the old Soviet arsenal, and build an enforceable international anti-proliferation regime. That is the best way to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism -- mind you, there is no sure-fire way to prevent it, as nuclear scientists have been saying since Hiroshima. One can only attempt to lower the risk...and bombing the world's most unstable countries does not strike me as the best way to go about it. 

If this era is remembered for anything, it will probably be for just this sort of madness (the way things are going, who will be here to do the remembering?) -- this broad currency of the irrational belief that force can bring peace, and that massive force can create even more peace. While this formulation may make my animal rights friend sleep a little easier, I cannot help but wonder how many suicide bombers are created every time an Afghan father, mother, child, etc., trips over an unexploded cluster bomb or land mine -- an entirely preventable phenomenon that now kills about 50 a week. I expect we'll find out, one day.

Sharon's Terror. As I write, Israeli tanks are in Ramallah laying siege to what's left of the straw man Palestinian Authority they and the U.S. set up after Oslo to provide cosmetic legitimacy to Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The usefulness of this arrangement is easy to see. Oslo made Arafat the conduit through which all development and aid money flows to the territories. Control him, and you effectively control the only economic power therein. There is also powerful symbolism in making Arafat the embodiment of the entire Palestinian nation. Call him a terrorist, and they are all terrorists. Say he's responsible, and they're all responsible. Isolate him, and you isolate them all. 

That's how it plays in the American corporate media, which is really the only forum that counts. The money to bomb, shoot, and humiliate Palestinians in their squalor comes from America. The planes, tanks, and helicopter gunships come from America. Manipulate public opinion there, and the deadly game continues to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis alike. A good way to counteract this Sharon's-eye view of the world is by visiting sites like  www.electronicintifada.net or the Edward Said archive at  www.edwardsaid.org for a little bit of the other side. Hell...you can even get a more balanced picture by listening to the BBC. Anything beats Fox, CNN, and the New York Times's Thomas Friedman. 

Be bad...but think good thoughts.

luv u,

jp

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