NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(April '03)
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4/7/03
Goodbye...
There's a contrary greeting for you (or not). And since we all live in upsy-downsy world now, where war is peace and tyranny liberty, it seems only appropriate to adopt the habit of the "contrary warrior" -- it may be the only way to live in sync with the times. (I mean now, not the newspaper. And no, I don't mean the Bill Moyers show...though it is pretty good. Where am I?)
So
what's new at the Cheney Hammer Mill? Well, like just about everyone else we
know, we're having a little "cash flow" problem here...namely that
there ain't no flow. Now that our pirate booty is just about exhausted (back in
the pockets of privateers, for the most part) your friends in Big
Green have had to rely a bit more heavily on their wits than has been
our practice of late. It isn't easy to scratch a living out of the unforgiving
landscape of this forgotten corner of the world, but we're all doing our part.
How? Oh...selling discarded hammers...peeling sheets of whitewash off the walls
and hawking it as antique-finish wallpaper from Madagascar...taking turns
swiping Marvin (my personal robot assistant)'s paycheck every Thursday 
(this
week it's Matt's turn). Y'know -- all the obvious stuff.
I know people all over the world groan with me when I say that are costs are steadily on the rise, as well. I mean, because we're squatters, we don't have to pay the 30% property tax hike, but the water and electricity both went up a quarter -- yikes! What's worse, cheese food is on the rise as well (double yikes!)...and while we still own title to significant virgin deposits of unprocessed Velveeta-grade ore, it would take a great deal of up-front investment to make those resources pay -- mining machinery, transport lines, smelting plants, those oblong-box shaped molds. We'd have to get those nut cases at Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., involved, and then how do you get them off your back? Nah...it's easier just to pick Marvin's pocket once a week and hope for the best.
We've been getting valuable (non-monetary) tips from various quarters on how to fund our next album without crawling back to our rapacious corporate label and begging for mercy. Our good friend Dr. Hump over in his Bologna laboratory has offered his view that we should borrow cash from some of our other (i.e. not him) scientist friends using our cheese food-rich land as collateral. He has it on the very best authority that our long-time associate Mitch Macaphee is making a killing in the legitimate science industry (a bit of a departure for a mad scientist of his repute). It seems old Mitch has published a new theory on human evolution that boils our collective distinguishing characteristics down to three simple attributes that are, as it were, uniquely human. Humankind, says Mitch,
-
walks on hind legs
-
eats soup
-
rides bicycles
This
theory has carried him into crowded lecture halls from Oxford to Berkley to the
University of Canberra, and his speaking fees have reached 
unprecedented
heights. What a scam! And to think Mitch's greatest achievement prior to this
was a variety of low-gravity pudding and the invention of Marvin. He's got
to lend us some of that e-z money, just got to!
Seems there's big money in science these days, even outside the military-industrial complex. I mean, there's no question but that we could clean up on the discovery of, say, some unusual deep space object. I mean, if we could get our extraterrestrial guitarist sFshzenKlyrn to do his Hubble-stumping on a certain day in a certain quadrant of the sky, we can claim to have discovered a new nebula. Where's the money in that? Think of how many signed photos of Pluto (the planet, not the cartoon dog!) Clyde Tombaugh sold...and the profit margin on those suckers is way beyond what we make on a CD. (Whoa, baby! Get sFshzenKlyrn on the phone!)
Would
we stoop to swindling our way through a new album? There's a three-letter answer
to that question. Our last attempt at recording stalled due to lack of
funds...this time around, the only thing that can stop us is sloth. Like, say,
if a giant three-toed sloth planted himself in the middle of our
"live" room -- that would probably slow us down, at least. We might
have to arrange to have Marvin deputized as an assistant animal control officer.
Right now, he's assigned to keeping an eye on anti-war protesters 
and
people at candlelight vigils. (Personally, I think he's being a little
obtrusive...what do you think?)
Nevertheless, Matt and I have started the laborious process of doing scratch demos, and if we can get through that phase, we'll know we're making progress. And in our spare time we'll try and see if we can get our lean-to to...well....lean to. Stay tuned.
The Best Defense. This brutal and gratuitous war in Iraq is just the sort of adventure great powers contrive when they're confident their armed forces won't be needed for anything so pedestrian as national defense. So the U.S. has fully rejoined this proud imperial tradition -- welcome to Rome, everybody! In the spirit of the administration's incoherent ranting about their new "preventive" war doctrine (a standard that could be used to justify unilateral attack against any nation at any time), they've committed an enormous portion of our military to a crisis of their own making, reducing our ability to respond to any more urgent circumstances that might emerge. Must be the boys in Washington feel pretty safe...because more than anything else, they've demonstrated exactly why we don't need an enormous "defense" establishment. Perhaps it's all just an elaborate form of entertainment for our valiant leaders. ("Ooooh, Tony...look at the cool 'splosions!")
It
does frost me a bit to hear Dubya's sanctimonious speeches (delivered to one
military audience after another) declaring his concern for the troops, 
most
of whom are economic draftees who opted for the military because it's the only
federal jobs program available for poor and working-class kids...thanks in large
part to failed leadership like Dubya's. Many of these young people are courted
with offers of big signing bonuses, tuition grants, great pay, etc., aside from
the taxpayer-funded barrage of advertising that makes war seem like a too-cool
Tom Cruise action-adventure movie trailer (I think it's the Navy that has the
slogan, "Accelerate your life"...right to the end.) They are not
political actors in this war -- they are, in fact, among its victims.
For
the flag-wavers who claim to "support the troops," I have but one
question: Did you want this war? Because if you did, you don't "support the
troops" in any rational sense. Sending them into an elective, non-defensive
war on the basis of a bankrupt, ideologically-driven foreign 
policy
is a demonstration of how expendable you consider them to be. It's hard to
imagine a greater hypocrisy than that.
So if you're part of the vast majority of humanity that is against this war of aggression, be not ashamed to say so. Don't let the cheerleaders define your position -- they've pulled the same cheap hat trick in every conflict since the Boer War, and it just won't wash. We're all in favor of pulling our troops out of that hell hole...not to mention sparing any further atrocities against the Iraqi people. If others consider that to be a political impossibility, that's their problem. Personally, I'd like to see Dubya carried off to the Hague...but I'd settle for an end to the hostilities. Make no mistake -- no matter how this war proceeds (easy or hard, long or short, etc.) advocates of a sane foreign policy have a long, hard fight ahead. I say, let's roll.
Keep your head down. (And your chin up.) Hello.
luv u,
jp
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4/13/03
Start transmission...
Whoa, momma. What was that, an earthquake? Oh, wait...that's just my 28.8 modem kicking in. Connecting....connecting....connecting....there we go. Hi-de-ho, folks! It's you're old pal, Plato. (Did I say Plato? I meant Mojo. Always get those two mixed up.) Ahem. Should I start again? My web producer is shaking her head. Very well...
Welcome
to your weekly dose of Big Green news,
gossip, and generally useless rantings. An important part of our job here at the
abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is keeping you informed, and we take that 
responsibility
quite seriously. In fact, you can think of me as your own personal news
correspondent, "embedded" with (or impaled on) the world's original
dis-corporate rock group, reporting breathlessly on their dramatic day-to-day
struggle for survival and the fulfillment of their bold mission of conquest.
Yes, friends -- I'm right here at the front lines...it's a tough job, but
someone must endure the privations and allow the truth to be outed. If
sacrifices need to be made, well then I...what's that? Hold on a
minute...
No canapés for me, thank you. Not after that six course luncheon. Just the champagne, that will do nicely. I'll ring when I need anything else.
Ahem.
Excuse me. What was I saying? Oh, yes -- sacrifices. (SATIRE)
We've all had to give up more
than a little something to keep our ship afloat, throwing vices, excesses, and
obsessions overboard like so much ballast, baling like mad. It's a strange and
unlikely kind of lenten ritual for this most secular of "pop" groups
-- we've never been much for lent (more 
the
Mardi Gras types, in truth. And yet here we are. Matt has given up stilts, John
juggling, I weapons testing...and we're all on a diet of lentils. What has sFshzenKlyrn
sworn off of? Well...certain kinds of salami...and watercress, which he never
much liked anyway. We had to go easy on him so he would agree to pretend to be
Nebula BigusGreenus2003D -- an obscure deep space object that's going to
get us on the cover of Science for being the first rock band since ABBA
to discover...well...an obscure deep space object. (Matt keeps telling sFshzenKlyrn
to make himself look more like the Ring Nebula, but frankly, we'll be lucky if
he stands still long enough to take the picture.)
Though
an automaton, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is observing our secular
"lent" ritual by giving up his paycheck...to us. (This week, it's
John's turn to cash it.) I know what you're going to say -- that we lazy rock
musicians with our lax morals and our three-scowling-white-guys
proto-alternative attitude are taking advantage of poor, good-natured, ever
faithful Marvin...that we're building our next musical endeavor on his labor 
alone,
rather than troubling ourselves to go out and get honest work. Is that what you
were going to say? It's not? Whew! Thought you were on to us for a
minute there. (SATIRE)
Actually, Marvin's been real handy with the pre-production phase of our new CD, quite apart from ceding his paycheck to us. As many of you recall from previous columns, our mechanical friend has an internal metronome and rhythm arranger, and he's providing the click track for our scratch recordings. Will Marvin reprise his tour role as a country western gee-tar strummer in the upcoming album? Well, that depends upon how lazy and lax we are when it comes to recording the various instrumental parts. Wouldn't rule it out. (Yeee-haw.) Maybe we can get him to play telephone-cable bass on Sweet Treason, one of Matt's earlier songs we may reprise for this disc -- his first true Big Green song, in fact, written as a birthday message to yours truly in the year of our lard 1984, which explains "personalized" lyrics like:
Joe owes much to Gym class
Joe is "happy fitness," thanks to JFK.
And:
Joe, the mayor's systematically going through your mail.
He's sifting, but not finding.
He's searching for some west end sandwich,
ten years good and stale.
I think there's a lesson in that for all of us.
Triumph
of the Kill. It was a week when things went more according to Dubya's plan
-- a lot of shooting, explosions, mass killings, and mayhem. What a vindication
for their policy! This is Rumsfeld's (pronounced "Rump-smelt") idea of
"freedom"...an impoverished and overstressed society bombed into a
state of near chaos, in which hospitals are looted, medical treatment is
performed without electricity or anesthetic, ten year olds are shot for
collecting discarded weapons, families are massacred for 
driving
while Arab, and most of the remaining public resources have been given the axe.
Sounds a lot like the administration's domestic policy, doesn't it?
Dubya televised his obligatory "Welcome to Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)" speech from a transmitter on board an Air Force plane. Probably the surest sign to those Iraqis who have televisions (and power) that the Ba'athists had fallen was the fact that the smirking idiot from the west didn't have the word "Idiot" flashing helpfully over his image. Though another sign was the 16 columns of smoke (per Robert Fisk) rising over their "liberated" capital. American forces -- responsible for maintaining order as the "high contracting power" according to the Geneva Conventions -- have done little more than to "secure" the oil fields. (Thank God those are safe!) Those Bushites who believe that the law of the jungle should prevail in international affairs are quite content to see it applied locally as well, it appears. Special effort was taken, however, by U.S. forces and their journalistic allies to stage the felling of Saddam's statue, in a square that was virtually empty -- see the full picture here, thanks to the Kynn blog site and IndyMedia. (Desperate for signs of jubilation, CBS network camera people turned to two Iraqi men holding a big sign that said, "GO HOME, U.S. WANKERS.")
Of course, the self-destructive aftermath of this arrogant and violent campaign is unlikely to be limited to lootings, arson, and payback killings. The volatile factionalism of Iraq may yet pull it apart in three directions -- a centrifugical process that will take more than Dr. "Embezzler" Chalabi and a few ex-officio Reaganauts to reverse. But then, we don't want to make Mr. Rumsfeld angry with our idle carping, now do we? This was his odious contribution to civil administration yesterday, delivered angrily to a cowering Pentagon press corps:
It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.
Hmmm...sounds
like he's talking about Ken Lay. Anyway, take heart, legless boy, motherless
child, and homeless legions -- Rumsfeld's freedom is on its way. And now, we'll
treat Donny Boy to the same privilege we accorded Dubya last week (thanks again
to Big Green
friend J. Yeandle).
Off to the Hague with you, you sawed-off little fuck!
I feel much better now. Take care out there...
luv u,
jp
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4/20/03
Omigod...
I only just realized what day it is. This week went by like greased lightning, and now I'm typing furiously, attempting to get this dispatch off to you before the sun pops up over the horizon. Last minute Charlie strikes again. (Thank God Marvin's hear two Czech miy spellyng...)
So, how is everybody, eh? No, really...you can level with me. I'm not just asking as another way of saying "hello" -- your health and general well-being truly interest me. In fact, why not fill out a little dossier and email it to me...or send it to my current address, which is:
General Jay Garner (Ret.), Viceroy
Behind the hot water pipes
2nd floor (north) men's room
Abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill
Colombo, Sri Lanka 13502-6110
Please
note that I'm employing a crude pseudonym to ensure prompt delivery of said
parcel. (Sometimes our local postal carriers won't bother to 
enter a condemned
building and stick a letter through a hole in the wall unless they think someone
important is in there. Curious thing.)
Thank gott that "lent" thing is over -- at least for those of us in Big Green. Our cash flow has marginally improved over the last ten days, so we can start eating normally again (which means I can finally take those false teeth out from between the cheeks of my ass). Not that our situation is cause for great optimism. Actually, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has started working double shifts for the police, directing traffic during the day and counting bribe money from 11pm to 3am -- that's where the extra cash is coming from. Does this 'round-the-clock schedule wear him out? Absolutely. We hook him to his battery charger for a solid four hours while he's home -- that usually puts a spring in his step. And, of course, being an automaton, he doesn't need sleep like you and I (or, at least, like I, with my virtual sleep addiction). So if you're asking whether Marvin is adjusting to his 24-hour lifecycle, I'd have to say...absolutely!
One
other thing I'm grateful for is that we can stop eating lentils for a while.
That was getting a bit old. Sure, I like those nourishing little legumes as much
as the next person, but every day...every meal...yiiiii! Who
invented this torture? It's kind of a pity, since we get our lentils fresh from
the local mines less than a mile away. Unless you've had them straight out of
the ground, you don't truly know how good they can be. Anyway, we're back to
ordering pizzas and roasting tubers again. Just the other day, Matt hauled in a
man-sized tuber he dug up near the construction site for our new lean-to. That
could feed us straight through the holiest week in the Christian 
calendar and
the subsequent, somewhat less holy week (number 49 on the holiness roster, I
believe). Cool deal.
The additional calories will come in handy as we forge ahead with Big Green's new CD project. I'll tell you, friends, we've been working our fingers to the bone on our stepped-up pre-production schedule. It goes a bit like this:
3:00am We pass out from the activities of the day before.
10:30am Matt checks his sundial/falls back asleep.
4:45pm John's snoring wakes me up. (3rd time)
5:15-6:30pm Breakfast. (lentils)
7:30pm I stagger into the studio. Matt goes out to dig tubers.
8:45pm Matt arrives carrying his new songs in a wheelbarrow.
9:13pm We run through "Dinos" as a warm-up.
10:45pm I insist on playing the Bob Hope in Vietnam album.
10:47pm Matt leaves in disgust.
12:05am Repeat.
Okay,
so it may take a little extra time this way...but it's the best method we've
happened onto up to this point. Maybe if we manage to pawn that picture of sFshzenKlyrn
off as a genuine nebula, we can afford to hire a producer with some semblance of
discipline (right now, our stand-in producer is...well....Marvin...because no
one else wants to do it). Issues, we got. And we got 'em a-plenty.
Too
Stupid To Rule. Has there ever been an empire led by stupider people? The
Bush team goes beyond thick -- they are anti-knowledge, like their core
constituencies of religious fanatics and rapacious corporate boneheads. Proof
can be found in the rubble and cinders that once was a large portion of our
shared cultural heritage -- more than the history of Iraq/Mesopotamia, but that
of humanity itself. Trashed, looted, and burned, under the steely gaze of our
imperial legions...and perhaps with the active cooperation of their commanders.
Is this worse than the murder of innocents and the needless slaughter of
thousands of poorly armed, poorly 
led
Iraqi conscripts? No. But it's pretty damned heinous, and this administration is
fully responsible, regardless of its usual attempts to avoid blame and conceal
its own criminality.
While the evidence of 5,000 years of civilization -- painstakingly assembled over the past two centuries -- went up in smoke, what were our war managers doing? Oh...they were distributing packs of playing cards depicting senior Iraqi leadership figures they'd allowed to escape -- a little PR prop you can now purchase on the Internet (Saddam is, remarkably, the "ace of spades") and whose manufacturer you can hear about on your local news channel (film at eleven). Like all the other Fox "reality" shows, this war comes complete with cheesy merchandising gimmicks.
Well...now
that Bechtel has been awarded the major reconstruction project for postwar Iraq,
the circle (jerk) is complete from Rumsfeld's not-so-famous handshake with
Saddam nearly 20 years ago. Along with good tidings from Ronnie Reagan, old
Rummy brought a pitch from Bechtel for an oil pipeline project -- something for
him and Saddam to chew over amiably while the latter openly committed the
atrocities Rumsfeld and friends now so righteously deplore. Though prospects
were good, the deal fell through and Bechtel had to wait for Kuwait to be gutted
before they saw any profit out of Hussein. Now this most well-connected of
construction firms will see its patience rewarded and reap a good return on 
its
million dollars plus in campaign contributions over the last few years.
CHA-CHING!
Don't feel so glum, Dick Cheney. There'll be plenty of slush to go around, and Halliburton won't be left out. In fact, the federal tap is wide open for all the top war profiteers -- so pull up to the trough and start gorging, boys!
Why They Hated Us Already. The Independent's Kim Sengupta put the matter fairly succinctly in a recent dispatch from Baghdad:
...Unicef
reports show, the destruction of the previous war brought typhoid, dysentery,
hepatitis, cholera and polio. The diseases had already reached endemic
proportions and were the prime killer of children under five.
Half a million
dead children seems like reason enough.
Keep safe, friends.
luv u,
jp
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4/27/03
Hullo...
Just got back from a little day trip over to our website headquarters building. How exhausting! And I've left myself only just enough time to tap this sucker in. Why didn't I just write my blog while I was over there? Just never you mind, that's why. (That's been my reason for everything lately, so don't take it personally.
The
wind is whistling through the old abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill this 
morning,
setting just the right ambience for the work that needs to get done here over
the next few months. That's right, friends...old Big
Green is rolling up its sleeves (those of us who have them, anyway)
and getting down to the business of what it is that gives our lives meaning and
makes our struggle seem worthwhile: making perogies. (The annual perogie
festival is only minutes away here in Sri Lanka, not that I would have to remind
you of that.) Oh yeah, and there's that album we have to do, on pain of death
from our corporate label. We're getting around to that, as well...no fear.
Our
observance of the annual pagan rites of spring may be described as uneventful
and, well, sedate...relatively speaking. In deference to the earth mother
goddess in whose name the holiday is celebrated, we did the foot-thumping dance
that Seneca chief Jack Preston showed me back in 1980, describing a circle
around the mill and carefully avoiding any new green weed-tips poking their way
up through the crumbling tarmac. Now, we're pretty bad dancers, with the
possible exception of sFshzenKlyrn, who
tends to float about four inches off the ground (he has to "carry" a
wooden 
pole to do his
thumping) ...but I'll be damned if it didn't start raining on our third
revolution. Coincidence? I don't think so!
Over to the next property west of us, our neighbor Gung-Ho marked Easter in a somewhat more noisy fashion, staging mock battles between decommissioned Navy surplus frigates on wheels, dropping "daisy cutters" on football field-sized mock villages, and generally making a commotion. It was a bit unnerving to the participants in our annual dinosaur egg hunt, but we pulled it off without too much of a problem. John dug up a handsome diplodocus zygote, its fossilized shell still bearing the shadows of 40 million-year-old green spots. Matt found a clutch of duckbill eggs (how they got those little plastic bills to stick to that petrified eggshell, I don't know). For my own part, I uncovered a dozen hard-boiled eggs left by British paleontologists, but they shattered with the concussion of one of Gung-Ho's beloved army-surplus "bunker busters" (non-nuclear variety, I believe).
We
were encouraging Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to join in the fun, but he
was a bit worn down from the seven consecutive shifts he'd just 
worked.
The boys a working machine, quite literally, thanks in part to the local
constabulary's policy of mandatory overtime. It is a bit ludicrous how far they're
willing to take it -- for instance, on Thursday they had Marvin scheduled for
two traffic details at the same time, on opposite ends of the city. Matt was
kind enough to lend Marvin his man-sized tuber as a stand-in at one of the
intersections. (That could account for the rather heavy police blotter in
Friday morning's paper.) Ever been ticketed by an enormous root vegetable? It
isn't pretty.
I am hoping Marvin will be on hand to help us with our new album. Matt and I are still chiseling out the scratch tracks and, as such, we can pretty much cope on our own...but once the serious recording gets underway, we're going to need a production assistant to handle important jobs, like copying track sheets and serving as a substitute microphone stand. These are tasks that Marvin is uniquely qualified to handle. Oh...and crowd control. We'll need that, too. (Not so much holding them off, but keeping them in. Nothing like a throng of "fans"-- even a contrived one -- to boost morale. Ask Chalabi.)
With
no imminent tours on the horizon and no presidential calls for service, 
Big
Green should have the time we need to get this project rolling this
spring. Then, hopefully, we can have our new album in stores across the known
universe before the next war starts (that gives us a few weeks, anyway).
Mission Creeps. Much as the major media (and its local subsidiaries) attempt to put a cheesy "happy face" on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, one can see grim vindication of what many anti-war voices have been saying all along about this nasty enterprise. Sure -- my local newspaper never tires of running the carefully selected photo on page one -- Monday's edition featured a smiling US soldier holding a newly-baptized Iraqi baby -- but close inspection of even the most sanitized reporting reveals the troubling reality that is "liberated" Iraq, not to mention the new new world order.
Just as the relative failure of "Shock & Awe" appeared to take official Washington by surprise, so has the political strength and organization of the Iraqi Shia Muslims. There have, of course, been the predictable threats against Iran with accusations that Teheran is funding and fomenting rebellion. (It's hard to calculate the enormous hypocrisy of US officials warning Iran...or anyone... not to interfere in Iraqi affairs!) But the amazing part has been the public head-scratching over Shi'ite nationalism and the desire of this 60% majority community for an Islamic state -- one free of foreign occupation and domination. Is it possible that Dubya and the boys never considered this?
But
then, being racists to the marrow, they are so reflexively dismissive towards
the desires and aspirations of non-white subject peoples that it probably didn't
seem all that important what the majority thinks. (Come to think of it, they
have contempt for majoritarian sentiment in the white countries, too...) In Tom
Brokaw's over-hyped sweetheart interview with Dubya (Brokaw having been
"embedded" in the presidential entourage for a day), when little Tex
was asked about growing unrest in "friendly" Arab countries, he
pointed out that the important thing was their governments' support for his
splendid little war. Who cares what 90% of Egyptians, Jordanians, etc., think?
They'll just do what they're told...or else.
So
while our man in Baghdad Jay Garner decides where to put the new Wal-Mart, a
confrontation is brewing in the mosques and meeting houses. Perhaps it will mean
the break-up of Iraq...perhaps an Islamic state...who knows? The die has been
cast. And weapons of mass destruction? Mostly we can expect more clumsy lies out
of the Pentagon, White House, and State Department (see Judith Miller's
repackaging of a DOD press release in last week's N.Y. Times). Of course, the
real WMD news this week was the administration's announcement that they intend
to produce (not consider, not research, but produce) nuclear "bunker
busters" -- relatively low-yield H-bombs that will be deployed as casually
as they drop "daisy cutters." This major escalation (unprecedented, in
fact) in our nation's nuclear weapons posture merited a four-inch single-column
story tucked 
inside
my local paper...I saw no mention of it on the major "web portal"
sites I frequently scan. Why is this not front page news?
And Saddam Hussein -- where is he? Robert Fisk has a hunch he's in Minsk, Belarus (see his recent interview on Democracy Now!)...but as with Bin Laden, it doesn't seem to matter much, now that the administration has gotten its way. Look forward to a presidential re-election campaign mounted from atop an M-1 tank. What better perch from which to cut aid to cities, underfund our health and emergency response systems, and make devil-may-care policy decisions that leave the majority of Americans wide open for another devastating terror attack...one from which Dubya may reasonably expect to derive substantial political advantage?
Be safe. And don't be sorry.
luv u,
jp