NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(December '02)
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12/1/02
Hey-o.
Hope this Thanksgiving weekend finds you well and in good spirits. What -- did you think I'd forget? Just because we've made our home on the subcontinent doesn't mean we've abandoned all pretense of American traditions. No, sir -- Thanksgiving Day is high on our list of obligatory ritual observances, hovering somewhere between Michaelmas and Gung-Ho's birthday in order of profundity. Hey, you think I just fell out of a tree? Huh?
The
fact is, we laid out a pretty good spread this year, what with our new-found
fortune. I sent trusty Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out with a handful
of gold coins to procure the most sumptuous celebratory 
feast
obtainable on this island nation. Of course, that was a mistake, since Marvin
knows nearly as much about Thanksgiving as I know about tapioca mining -- squat.
He came back several hours later, wheeling a cartload of boxed macaroni and
cheese, his coin poke empty. The next morning, a semi pulled up and unloaded two
pallets of Cheer® detergent -- enough to last us through the next six or seven
Earnest Hemingway® look-alike key lime pie eating contests. (Those white safari
shirts don't come clean easily.) Since then the buzzer at the loading dock has
rung about eight times, but no one has had the stomach to see what's
there.
Our preparations for the holiday went far beyond the scope of what we put on the dinner table. For instance, Mitch Macaphee celebrated Thanksgiving by lending technical support to Gung Ho during the latter's annual War Zone Potlatch -- a harrowing three-day orgy of feasting, test firings, and mock battles, some involving decommissioned naval vessels converted for land use (this was where our neighbor particularly needed Mitch Macaphee's renowned technical expertise).
From
the top floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill, you could actually see the
superstructures of WWII-vintage destroyers moving past one another just over the
hill, accompanied by the joyful sound of howitzers discharging their little
packages of holiday cheer at one another. Sometimes it almost sounded like
turbo-bass hip hop car stereos all playing in sync with one another, as if
Gung-Ho had invited that little homophobic skinhead eminem® over to play out
his made-for-television whiteboy rage against cardboard cutouts of Moby® with
targets drawn on them. That Gung Ho...now there's an army of one.
John,
Matt, and I joined Trevor James Constable over at the lean-to building site to
mark our holiday in the usual fashion -- a couple-three bottles of India Pale
Ale and tofu snausages grilled on an open hibachi or on red hot rocks from the
local volcano. In point of fact, this year we just lined the snausages up on a
tray and had Trevor James bombard them with M-rays from his orgone generating
device. They plump when you cook 'em, so it's easy to tell when they're done --
with this method, that takes about 
4.73
seconds (Trevor James puts his orgone generator at its lowest setting: 0.01. The
setting 99.99 is a planet buster. How do I know? Don't ask, that's how.)
When the dishes were all cleared away, the leftovers placed into hollow gourds and buried, and the shell casings collected and distributed to the needy, it was time to discuss logistics for our two-week run to Kaztropharius 137b and Zenon -- our promotional "tourlet" for Big Green LIVE From Neptune, the EP we're hawking out that way (for more about that, click here). This is when all the crucial decisions must be made. Sushi or peanut butter? Spacesuits or scuba gear? Pachinko or gin rummy? Now we must choose. Hey.... while sFshzenKlyrn is running his pseudopods off playing advance man for us, we've got to show him we're making progress back home...it's a matter of pride. So, Marvin -- get busy!
Good
Hands. Sometimes I think they're just trying to get a rise out of us -- that
they're putting their arrogance right in our faces and saying, "fuck
you...do something about it!" I mean, picking Henry Kissinger to head the
panel investigating 9/11 -- wow! There's a name synonymous with
integrity. I suppose there's a sort of twisted logic behind appointing our most
prominent living human rights abuser/war criminal to head an inquiry into what
went wrong leading up to the most notorious human rights violation/war crime
ever committed on American soil. But then there's the matter of his remarkable
incompetence and lack of vision....qualities that make him ideal for the job, in
Dubya's clubby little world. And part of the 
"old
boy" network -- better still! Get ready, Georgie...here comes yet another
free pass.
Henry K. is charged with "follow(ing) all the facts wherever they lead"...though presumably they won't lead to Paris, where Henry narrowly escaped being summoned for questioning regarding his knowledge of Pinochet-ordered murders and disappearances. I would steer clear of Madrid, as well...those pesky Spanish judges, you know. Yes, our chief 9/11 sleuth may have to limit his itinerary to ports of call firmly within the U.S. sphere of influence, but that shouldn't matter. And since "we" no longer care at all what the rest of the world thinks, it also shouldn't matter that Henry Kissinger is seen in the developing countries for what he is -- an architect of saturation bombing in Indochina, the godfather of Pinochet's bloody regime in Chile, Mr. "wink-and-nod" to Suharto's invasion of East Timor, the father of U.S.-sponsored "stalemate" with regard to Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights, major contributor to the bloody Angolan civil war...it doesn't stop there, but I will.
If
you don't want to stop there, there's plenty about Kissinger at the National
Security Archive, much of it online. Christopher Hitchens did a decent
indictment of him (The Trial of Henry Kissinger) before he (Chris) went
totally 'round the bend. Take a look at some of Noam Chomsky's essays on
Indochina and Israel/Palestine in Towards a New Cold War or browse
through the Noam Chomsky
Archive online. Hey -- you might as well bone up on the guy's bona
fides. Lord knows the media won't make a big deal out of it, any more than they
made a big deal over the fact that convicted Iran/Contra figure John Poindexter
will soon be sifting through 
our
credit card transactions, looking for evidence of evil and treasonable deeds.
Irony is dead...at least while there's a Republican® in the White House.
Another Triumph. Sharon won his Likud primary, beating back a challenge from Benny "Mr. Tact" Netanyahu, who tried to make the butcher of Qibya and Sabra-Chatila seem too Ghandian for the job of Israeli Prime Minister. Either way, it would have been good news for the settler movement in the West Bank, now 400,000 strong (up from 200,000 in 1993) and now in effective control of 45% of West Bank lands. Echoing Sharon's exhortation of five years ago to "take every hilltop," a fanatical religious movement known in Israel as the "hilltop youth" have established over 100 outposts in the occupied territories, only a handful of which have been dismantled by the Israelis (and those only for PR value). As our government continues to support the occupation, the seeds are being sown for future decades of conflict. The brave folks of Ta'ayush certainly have their work cut out for them.
luv u,
jp
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12/8/02
Greetings and felicitations,
Hear that sound? That's right -- nothing. Exactly what I'm talking about...the sound of silence. That means Gung-Ho's annual War Zone Potlatch has lurched to a grinding halt and we can all take a deep breath before starting our detailed damage assessments (i.e. counting how many teeth have shaken loose).
I'm
not certain, but I think our martial-minded neighbor has truly outdone himself
this time, laying waste to vast areas of our little corner of Sri Lanka, setting
fields aglow with spent depleted uranium shell casings, leaving deep ruts in
many of our byways (even the paved ones) and attracting the attention of the
ubiquitous U.S. Air Force, stationed on Diego Garcia. We 
had
more than one skull rattling flyover, though it's unclear whether the pilots
were working for Uncle Sam or Neighbor Gung. I'm not certain there's a
difference. They both play rough. And they never clean up after
themselves.
Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, thinks old Gung-Ho is doing contract work for the Pentagon, what with all that newly appropriated cash being thrown about. As you may recall from last week, Mitch was consulting for Gung-Ho during this year's Potlatch, helping him put wheels on a few WWII-era destroyers he'd acquired somewhere so that they may be used in land-based mock battles. Now Mitch is of the opinion that Gung-Ho may have been doing a little R&D for Don "Mr. Big" Rumsfeld. After all, those mag wheels he put on the ships could very well breathe new life into the U.S. Navy, which has seemed, well, "rudderless" in the age of air power, with the exception of a few high-profile collisions. Imagine a task force of naval vessels wheeling over the hill at a staggering 4 mph, bearing down on their unsuspecting foe with all batteries a-blazing. (Except Mitch says, "batteries aren't included." Dang!)
Of
course, there's little time to dwell on the issue right now, what with our
whirlwind tour of the planets Zenon and Kaztropharius 137b right around 
the
corner. We hired the ship this week, and got a line on a decent rent-a-pilot,
since no one wants to board a ship driven by sFshzenKlyrn
ever again. The gold in our pirate's coffer has paid for adequate provisioning
this time 'round....unlike our disastrous "Journey To The Center Of The
Earth" tour of a couple of months back. (We can actually afford food
this time. Thank you, pirates.) And, by Matt's insistence, we've replaced the
navigational system in the replica Jupiter Two, so that we won't end up on
Preplanus...or that dreaded Planet of the Apes. Or perhaps the Junk Planet --
that bourn from which the Robinson family never returned. Or....
While
I could really use his help at this stage of our preparations, Marvin (my
personal robot assistant) has been a bit preoccupied. No, he's not collecting
taxes...the Ministry of Finance gave him the boot when they discovered he had no
birth certificate (just a bill of lading from Mitch Macaphee's lab in
Stockholm). Marvin has, in fact, rented himself out to Gung-Ho as a spent
depleted uranium shell casing prospector. Basically, he goes around with a Geiger
counter and locates the "hottest" bomb craters, then digs up the
fragments of radioactive metal so Gung-Ho can have his 
merry
elves reconstitute them into new munitions. Not the kind of job anyone's going
to fight him for, exactly...particularly since he's being paid in marshmallow
squares. And they're not even home made!
Likely my next dispatch will be posted from somewhere in the great inky interstellar void of outer spaaaaaaace, if sFshzenKlyrn has gotten his tour dates straight. If all goes well, Matt, John, Mitch, Trevor James, Marvin, our pilot, and I should be donning our flippers and goggles sometime this coming Wednesday. Yeeee-haw!
Slouching Towards Baghdad. Clearly disappointed by the as-yet unfettered inspection regime in Iraq, the rough beasts in the White House have continued to beat the kettles for war, portraying compliance as non-compliance, keeping their prize issue on the front page day after day, as they urge a distracted nation to join their incoherent, slouching procession towards Baghdad.
When
Bush was making a soundbite-laden address to yet another military audience (the
only kind he seems to feel comfortable addressing these days), I turned the
volume down on C-SPAN 1 and watched the repertoire of grimaces, smirks, body
language, dramatic pauses, all signaling the palpable arrogance of a man who now
has way too much power -- an extra-constitutional portion, really -- and who is
ready to kill by the thousand to achieve his ends. Hey -- sounds a bit like
Saddam in the good 
old
days, back when the Reagan and Bush I administrations were happily exchanging
coded fluids with him and his now most despicable regime.
The Iraqis -- Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd -- are the medium over which this game is played. Saddam kicks them in the teeth to prop himself up; we kick them in the teeth to rip him down. Of course, ours is the monopoly on the means of mass violence, don't let anybody tell you different. I'm sure war-hungry neocons equate that sentiment with being a friend of Saddam and an Al Qaeda fellow-traveler, just as opposition to the Boer war made you "pro-Boer" and protest against the Vietnam war made you red. Who cares what illusions these tiny minds allow themselves? What makes them think they can bait us into their puerile false choice between supporting George II's war or loving Saddam?
Hell,
if things had been just a little different, those two might have been great
pals, neighbors even, living in the same swank suburb, playing golf together,
borrowing each other's house servants and uranium enrichment centrifuges. Dubya
and Saddam could have enjoyed the kind of over-the-fence camaraderie that you
see on popular sit-coms like "Father Knows Best," "The Dick
Van Dyck Show," and "The Agency." And hey, 
with
bodies stacked up like cord wood on both of their curriculum vitaes, you
know they'd have a lot to talk about.
Black Thursday. If you're going to let the economy grab the headlines for a day, make sure it's on a positive note, right? So as unemployment tops 6% (which old Jack "Perkmeister" Welch thinks is still pretty low) Dubya shitcans that crank Paul O'Neill (who was reportedly on the point of suggesting that we all turn our W.I.N. -- "Whip Inflation Now"-- buttons upside down to read N.I.M -- "No Immediate Miracles"). And so now we can all pretend that with a new economic team in place, the failed policies of massive tax cuts for the rich and rampant military adventurism will be somehow new baptiz'd. I don't know about you, but I'm wildly optimistic. After all, it's all uphill from here.
luv u,
jp
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12/15/02
Do you read me?
I'm sitting in one of those girder-like reclining deck chairs in the control room of our replica Jupiter Two spaceRV, dictating this column to my personal robot assistant Marvin, who is still aglow from his stint as a depleted uranium salvage yard task monkey for Gung-Ho. He's furiously typing my words into the QWERTY keyboard installed in his left thigh, his nose blinking red every time he hits "return" or "enter" -- same difference.
We've
been in deep space for nearly thirty-six hours now, having achieved minimal
escape velocity a mere six hours after our nearly flawless lift-off from the
roof of our beloved Cheney Hammer Mill (not to be confused 
with
any undisclosed locations). And so I can verily say unto you...Greetings from
Outer SPAAAAAAAAAACE!
I can anticipate your questions. First, did we secure a pilot? And did he come with his own official cap and pressure boots? Well, the answer is a mixed one. Yes, we did find someone to do the driving, but he does not own any of the traditional pilot's accoutrements. No matter. Our helmsman on this lightning journey to Zenon and Kasztropharius 137b is Urich Von Braun, a shirt-tail relative of the famous Nazi V-2 rocket scientist, on loan from the Institute of Deep Space Travel and Snack Ideas in Vienna. Unlike the original pilot of the Jupiter Two (Major Don West), Urich is a pretty quiet, keep-to-himself sort who spends his spare time in the galley making mock-prawn canapés and a kind of low-gravity milkshake he calls "The Super." (At least that's what I gather he calls it, from my limited understanding of German. Or it could also be translated as "The Lord Mayor's Hairpiece.") The language barrier is proving a minor inconvenience (Mitch Macaphee does a fair Helmut Kohl imitation...that's about it), but so long as the guy can navigate, he's muy bueno by me, as they say over in Hamburg.
Our
far-out split-level traveling space pad offers more than adequate comforts, even
when we're going in the wrong direction, and we all find our own ways of passing
the time. John, for instance, has taken it upon himself to rig a
"live" drum room in the chariot garage, since we have no chariot on
this trip. Matt prefers the stock room just this side of the ship's "power
core" as his personal workspace. Meanwhile, Trevor James Constable has set
up his orgone generating device so that the array is pointed out through the
downstairs viewing port (an effort to spread a virtual "red carpet" of
positive
energy before us as we proceed). And Mitch Macaphee spends much of his valuable
time in the co-pilot's chair, offering Urich the occasional tidbit of advice on
whether to zig or zag at any given moment.
Luckily for Marvin, the mock-Jupiter Two is equipped with a fully functional magnetic lock pedestal designed to hold the Robinson family robot. Marvin spends a good bit of time there, flashing his nonsensical little lights, waving his arms, and saying "affirmative" and "negative" and "danger, Will Robinson" at odd intervals, no doubt daydreaming about going on some destructive rampage that would send the ship out of control, deep into uncharted quadrants of space where men in chicken suits eagerly await our arrival. How cathartic for him!
With
sFshzenKlyrn's home planet of Zenon only a
day or so ahead, the anticipation has built up to a near fever pitch. Mitch
keeps trying to raise Zenon on the radio, but so far no luck. Matt has taken to
saying "Are we there yet?" every ten minutes or so. To break the
monotony, Urich has 
done
a little trick flying, taking us through the center of the Ring Nebula a couple
of times, flying upside-down (he tells us -- who can be sure?), doing barrel
rolls, that sort of thing. Hey, it's just a bit of fun, and if it gets too real,
we an always ride it out in the freezing tubes. (I hope sFshzenKlyrn
has got a warm hotel room waiting for us up ahead...)
Lott To Answer For. Well, it's been yet another banner week in the Great & Glorious War on Terror -- itself as good an example of pure ham-fisted agitprop as anything I can remember. What did we learn this week? Yuh jus' cain't trust 'em, that's whut. Same thing we learned last week, right?
Here
we're busily trying to keep Iraq in the crosshairs and the rest of the dreaded
"Axis of Evil" starts going septic on us. Of course, they're perhaps
not quite as evil as the Iraqis, since we don't seem to be jumping all
over their shit, as they say in the vernacular. But then I suppose their turn
will come, since we are now at permanent war with the rest of the world, and
each of our fellow nations is distinguished in our tiny minds only by the
descending order in which we consider them a target (everybody's got a
number...and though I can't tell you who's got which, I know Britain's last in
line). And, of course, saber-rattling at Christmas wouldn't be complete without
making the point that you're willing to use nuclear weapons...not 
only
first, but "pre-emptively," which the administration took pains
to point out this week, as Phillip Berrigan was laid to rest.
Even with that kind of holiday specialness, though, it was actually a week dominated by domestic political news (not that the "war on terror" is much of anything else) as Dubya replaced Paul "Alcoa" O'Neil with the guy who ran CSX -- a corporation best known in my neck of the woods for trackside chemical spills, and one that paid no federal income tax last year (yea, received a refund!) despite its profitability. This would seem a hopeful sign to Dubya's corporate boosters, who are hungry for another massive tax cut and perhaps even a refund on their Alternative Minimum Tax payouts, as was promised by the last Congress. (Enron would receive something in the hundreds of millions in refunds, for instance.) That'll work.
Then,
of course, there was Trent "fresh air" Lott's little homage to the
days of American apartheid, bubbling out of him as he joined his fellows in
sickening praise for arch segregationist and all-around national embarrassment
Strom Thurmond on the old man's 100th birthday. Lott's 
views
on this score are not news, and his record has made the rounds before. What's
notable about this is that almost no one in the all-white club of the U.S.
Senate seemed too disturbed by the remark, until members of the Congressional
Black Caucus made their anger known. Dubya, too, was a tad slow to react,
letting Ari handle his bleat of dismissiveness at first, then jumping in when it
was obvious those ornery black folk weren't going to let this drop. Then came
the flurry of ritual apologies, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments, in
hopes of minimizing damage to the Republicans' glorious electoral victory (+2
seats in the Senate), precipitated in part by that lucky Minnesota plane
crash.
Should old Trent resign? It's a bit like taking the confederate flag down from atop the South Carolina statehouse. With or without it, the place is packed with racist fucks -- why pretend otherwise?
It's
Those Associates. Actually, it's been a good couple of weeks for
resignations, the latest coming from war criminal-at-large Henry Kissinger of
Kissinger Associates, who got cold feet when, on the insistence of 9/11 victim
family members, he was called upon to make his client list public (an indication
of how well he would have done with uncovering uncomfortable truths about 9/11
failures). One or two Saudi names on there, you reckon?
I wonder which member of the Carlyle Group Dubya will name to replace old Bloody Hanky. Maybe it'll be pops.
luv u,
jp
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12/22/02
Good evening, all!
Hail to you from fair Zenon, mother of sFshzenKlyrn, mysterious jewel in the crown of the Great Magellanic Cloud, gathering point for music aficionados from throughout this sector of the universe, and first port of call on our whirlwind tour to promote the Big Green LIVE From Neptune EP. I'm writing to you from one of seven anti-gravity lounges here at the Zenon Hilton, kicking back with a Rigelian Highball and a generous poke of Zenite snuff. They really take care of you here. It's great to be back!
Always
a man of action, our able Zenite guitarist sFshzenKlyrn
did an admirable job of stirring up interest in our performances in the weeks
leading up to our arrival. Of course, the Zenites -- being semi-contiguous
clouds of sentient nebulosity -- don't rely on conventional media for their
information and entertainment (at least, not on their home planet, though back
at the Cheney Hammer Mill sFshzenKlyrn has
been known to kick back in front of the tube and crack a beer or three). Their
"media," as it were, consists purely of thought-wave transmissions.
Instead of calling someone on the phone, for instance, they just shoot them some
telemetry. That's how sFshzenKlyrn spread
the work about us, mainly. He generated omni-directional thought waves at
regular intervals, so that his fellow Zenites would receive several promotional
thought messages a day, including one at dinner. He also sent faxes. (Zenon
still has fax machines. Go figure.)
The
interesting thing is what Zenites do with our CD's. I guess all they 
have
to do is stick them in their "mouths" and suck all the data out of
them. (Same thing with DVD's and video cassettes, though 8-track tapes remain a
problem). What they do with the disc afterwards is a matter of some
indifference, I suspect, since I have noticed 2000
Years To Christmas being used as drink
coasters here and there. sFshzenKlyrn
tells me that when a Zenite likes a song, it's like when humans get a song stuck
in their heads...only the Zenites can put it on shuffle play with 20 other
numbers. Concerts work about the same here as they do on Earth, though...except
for the part about no general admission. And they collect lighters at the gate.
Strict, these Zenites.
What's
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) been up to? He's gotten pretty tight with
our pilot, Urich Von Braun, and the two of them have taken to Zenon's equivalent
of the club scene -- prowling their way through smoky 
pressure
domes littered with drink and snuff, shuddering with techno-dance music, and
packed full of expatriate prospects for cheap thrills. Of course, the whole
thing is an artificial contrivance cooked up by the Zenites to accommodate the
growing humanoid tourist trade...but then that's just fine with Marvin, who is a
bit of an artificial contrivance himself.
He does tend to forget about his duties as our guitar technician from time to time, however. At yesterday's Big Green performance, our mechanical friend looked more than a little green around the gills, having only just rolled in from an all-night rave. When he strung Matt's Les Paul upside-down, we knew he had a problem. (John tried to keep him clear of his drum set...but poor old Marvin kept staggering back there like a sleepwalker, knocking over cymbal stands and adding avant-garde percussion fills to every number.)
Oh,
hell...we'll get him through this phase, like all of his others. Just a few more
nights here on Zenon anyway, then a Boxing Day departure and it's over to
Kaztropharius 137b for some more thrashing and waving and smiling and raving.
What the...? You must excuse me. [YELLS:] Tell Urich to keep the J-2 warmed
up...and get Trevor James away from his invisible flying predators! We've got
work to do!
Moral Midgets. Now that Lott has resigned his leadership post, we can all pretend the U.S. Senate is just one big happy ball of tolerance, run by a heart-lung transplant surgeon who saved Big Pharma from the terror of liability and whose family health care company defrauded the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Setting the moral tone for that august legislative body is Joe Lieberman, who has once again latched onto violent computer games as the source of all evil in our decaying society. Who can deny it?
Big
Joe objects to games like Grand Theft Auto III, in which you can get valuable
points for screwing prostitutes and extra credit if you murder them afterwards.
Demented? Oh, yeah. But is it even a patch on Lieberman's beloved war on Iraq,
which will cover much of the same territory -- murder, rape, blood-spurting
violence -- only for real, as actual people desperately fight for
life under attack from our "precision" weapons systems? (Sounds like a
great scenario for the next Tom Clancy thrill game.)
My
guess is that Lieberman hasn't raised any moral qualms about some of the recent
advertising by our own military, which draws a direct line from the video games
kids play to the organized violence of our new high-tech, remote control armed
forces (tag line: "We've been waiting for you"). Or the TV spots by
multi-billion dollar "defense" contractor Northrop Grumman, which
makes killing in this highly de-humanizing and sterile fashion seem just sooooo
totally cool! In both cases, the Pentagon and the industrial high-rollers on its
burgeoning dole are overtly seeking to 
exploit
the same deranged indifference to human suffering that Lieberman supposedly
deplores, putting the game-boys to work in the hot new war on everybody. Except,
unlike Lieberman's targets, their game involves real killing -- so it's nothing
to get upset about. That's a good thing...and not at all a bad example for the
little children.
Just One Hitch. As Dubya and the boys double the number of troops on Iraq's borders and clear out their appointment books for mid-January, they're getting support from what once might have seemed unlikely quarters, such as one-time Nation columnist and soon-to-be vice admiral Christopher Hitchens, who along with other pro-war liberals has complained about the intellectual simplicity of antiwar placards that read "No War For Oil" and the like. Of course, the administration's case for war (which Hitch supports) amounts to little more than a placard saying "Make War Against Evil." Welcome to the land of soundbite politics. Lord knows, even when war advocates have an opportunity to talk at length (like Hitch did this week on Bill Moyer's PBS show), they are no more convincing. Maybe that's why they spend more time taking shots at war opponents than actually making their case. Whatever works, eh?
luv u,
jp
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12/29/02
Happy freaking holiday!
Here comes a big fat burst of holiday cheer from deep in interstellar space. Ready? Have a merry...Wait for it!...Christmas and a happy new year; a joyous Hanukah and a wonderful Kwanzaa; a bountiful Saint Smithen's day and a rollicking Thursday Afternoon; and the best sFshzenKlyrn's birthday ever. Got that? Great. Now here's another happy little message from your friends in Big Green. HAAAAAAAAALP!!!
I
guess you might say things were going just a tiny bit too smoothly during our
stay on Zenon. The hotel was comfortable, the audiences appreciative, and the
atmosphere within tolerable levels of breathability. We even got paid for
our trouble -- quite a novelty in our recent career, what with our Corporate
label Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., taking us to the cleaners
every time we go on tour (our recent subterranean adventure perhaps the most
egregious example of their rapaciousness). Truthfully, aside from a few
all-night benders for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and our pilot Urich
Von Braun, Zenon was a smash-up success right up to our flawless lift-off the
day after Christmas. Once in space, everything went to hell.
It was on our second day out from Zenon that we noticed something was amiss. In point of fact, something was a-missing. Namely, the cashout from our Zenon gigs. The wall safe in Matt's cabin had been forced open by a middle aged man with a slight limp on his left side who doesn't have natural gas installed in his home. A man nearly six feet tall with blonde hair and a splash of acid on his neck. How do I know this? Elementary deduction, my friend. Matt saw the guy breaking into the safe -- it was Urich, our pilot.
Near
as I can determine, he wrapped the swag in one of those space-age reflective
blankets, made a quick zero-gravity beverage for himself, then jumped into the
Robinson space pod and effected a getaway. I'm pretty sure that's how it went
down because I actually saw him doing it, and while I'm occasionally given to
hallucinations, this seemed concrete enough. Oh yeah -- before he left with our
cash, he threw a monkey wrench into our inertial guidance system -- quite
literally. That's right, he took our prize jumbo plumber's helper and smashed
through the glass dome of our central astrogator, then ran cackling all the way
into the space pod. "Auf 
Wiedersehen!" he shouted just before
the door slid shut, then hit the retros. Urich must have thought to turn on the
control room transceiver before his hasty departure, because we could hear his
diabolical cackling on the loudspeaker as he rocketed away. Talk about thinking
ahead!
I sounded the "general alarm," and within ninety minutes our full contingent (sans Marvin) was on deck, slouching at attention, as the ship hurtled toward an uncharted sector of the galaxy where, rumor has it, they arrest strangers just for being strangers. (Seems there's this sheriff Ashcroft out that way...but that's another story.) I took a poll of suggestions as to what the hell we should do. John's hand went up. "Turn off the radio," he said. (Urich's transmitted cackling had gone on so long, I'd become inured to it.)
As
Mitch Macaphee went to work on extracting the monkey wrench from our
navigational system, the rest of us started going over our available star
charts. About an hour later, Marvin came up the elevator with an ice bag on his
head. Urich had slipped him a mickey. Actually, more like half-a-dozen. Marvin
likes mickeys, especially when you give him the little stirrer thingy with the
plastic mouse ears on it. His eye diodes glowed a dreary red as he stood in a
washbucket and spit quarters. Just then, his 
inventor Mitch Macaphee crowed with
triumph. "That's got it," he cried, holding the extracted monkey
wrench in his hands.
"Will it work now?" Matt asked.
Mitch turned the adjuster on the pipe wrench back and forth with ease. "Just like new," he said, pleased with himself. Just then, Urich's cackle came back over the loudspeaker. Marvin had clicked on the radio, looking for an oldies station. He left it tuned to the cackle thinking it was the beginning of "Wipe Out."
Anyway...while
the pipe wrench was in good repair, the astrogator was out of commission. You
see, the thing is like an enormous compass with numbers and arrows,
glow-in-the-dark paint, and a little flip-up site on one end so you can figure
the azimuth of something-or-other. It also has an attitude adjustment gyro (no, not
a Greek sandwich that fights depression) for controlling the pitch and yaw of
the J2 in flight. By throwing the wrench through the device's protective dome,
Urich snapped off the viewfinder and flipped the gyro-saucer upside-down. 
Now
the alphabet soup of little engraved compass points no longer spells the magic
word "Birmingham" ...which means the ship may be in real
trouble, or so Trevor James Constable tells me.
So, with a small fortune in performance fees waiting for us on Kaztropharius 137b, we are now headed in very much the wrong direction at breakneck speed, out of control, bound for god-knows-where. Mitch Macaphee is hopeful that he can rig something he calls a "manual tiller," but until and unless he can accomplish this, all we can do is sit back and enjoy the ride. (Mental note: no more hiring pilots on Marvin's recommendation...even if they do provide their own bakery goods.)
Wrong War. Weeks like this I'm glad to be hurtling powerlessly through uncharted interstellar space rather than sitting at the epicenter of global belligerence, waiting for the inevitable thud of the next sickening development in the snowballing crisis back home. Hey -- at least I know I'm going to hell in a hand basket. Back in the US of A, you'd never guess from reading the newspaper, watching TV, listening to news radio, or checking the headlines on the web, that this international unraveling is being fed by the arrogance of our national government.
What
standard of success or failure is this administration or this congress being
held to, anyway? If their aim is to ignite a global war, I'd say they're
succeeding. Their contempt for international agreements and their unwillingness
to even give the appearance of reasonability in diplomatic 
affairs
has fueled reaction in every corner of the world, placing our markers down in
half a dozen conflicts, with strong opportunity for at least two major wars at
the same time.
Not to worry -- Rumsfeld says we can fight two at once, as well has been the Pentagon's posture since the end of the cold war. Looks like that interesting little theory may be put to the test sooner rather than later, though not for any reason other than the arrogance of the Bush crew and their supporters, right, left, and center. I consider liberal war-lovers doubly contemptible in as much as they dress their support for this ludicrous policy in sanctimonious rhetoric about democracy and human rights. They see the Iraq war as some kind of crusade to save Iraqis from Ba'athist tyrannies, lamenting Hussein's well-known abuses, his tortures and killings, his fanatical war-making. Nothing said about the liberating effect of massive "precision" bombing on Iraqi population centers, of cluster bombs and daisy cutters, of prolonged occupation and likely civil war. Liberals' "war of liberation" will probably only deliver Iraqi Kurds up to our Turkish allies, once the news media has turned to the next war. Recall that the United States (under the direction of many in the current Bush administration) supported both Turkey and Iraq through their worst atrocities in Kurdistan. With Saddam gone, the Kurds would lose their usefulness, and Washington would no doubt abandon them yet again.
What it comes down to is that you don't get to pick the kind of war you want this to be. If you support Dubya, you support the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Pearle/Wolfowitz war. That's going to be a screw job for the Iraqis, plain and simple.
The
Big Why. Why does North Korea want to start building bombs again? Well,
there's probably only five obvious reasons. 1.) The U.S. has dragged its feet on
building a "safe" reactor as per the 1994 agreement. 2.) Dubya named
North Korea one of the three "Axis of Evil" countries, putting them on
the very short list of candidates for pre-emptive war. 3.) The
administration's Nuclear Posture Review singles out Pyongyang for possible 
nuclear
attack. 4.) A news story surfaced this year about the Clinton team's plan for a
nuclear strike against North Korea back in 1994. 5.) Dubya has demonstrated his
eagerness to strike at countries without provocation, undeterred by UN
restrictions or world opinion.
Of course, we (being rubes) are supposed to feel outrage over Pyongyang's arrogant refusal to wait quietly in queue until we get around to hammering them. Meanwhile, the "A-Team" of White House chickenhawks digs in, increasing the prospect for a devastating war on the Korean peninsula.
Christmas Cheer. Unemployment benefits ran out for laid-off American workers this weekend. I guess Congress was too busy working on that vast unaccountable National Security bureaucracy known as the Homeland Security Department to be bothered with such trifles. Take a look at their benefits package sometime, folks. And remember them in your prayers.
luv u,
jp