NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(December '03)

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11/30/03

Hey...over here.

Pretend you don't know me. That's right. Be cool, be cool. Okay, now put your ear up to the water pipes...I'll tap out this week's message in code. You can read silently while I klang aloud. 

Okay -- I'm exaggerating, I admit it. We obviously don't need to adhere to that degree of stealth in a region of Sri Lanka that's as quiet as this. That's not to say Big Green hasn't gone to ground -- sure we have. Anything to keep the constabulary boys from collaring us on trumped up charges of bringing misery and misfortune to an already miserable and misfortunate community. Damn, we can't help it if the local Safeway decided to close its doors, or if old uncle Arup's gout has gotten a bit worse since our return from outer space. This is simply guilt by logical fallacy -- post hoc ergo propter hoc. Don't the cops around here understand causality? (They do back home...especially in Miami, where if officer plod can't find a riot, he makes one.)

So we've been on the lamb...or rather, on the shoe, keeping one giant step ahead of the police in the sneaker-shaped clown car Globoshoe gave Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as part of his endorsement contract. The motorized cross trainer carried us out of harm's way with the man-sized tuber at the wheel, who instinctively directed us to the safest place he/it could think of -- a local onion field where we used to pilfer produce for our used vegetable stand. The tuber has an uncle there who let us pitch our tent for a couple of days. (You never met a more magnanimous yam.) The nights started getting cold, however, so we took our really big shoe over to our militant neighbor Gung-Ho's compound and checked into his barracks while most of his mercenary army was off on bivouac somewhere.

What about Marvin? Well, with his slightly re-arranged programming, he seems to have gone a bit 'round the bend, so to speak. Last week it was juggling highway cones and endorsing athletic footwear. This week he's collecting cinderblocks and swinging from a trapeze. I suppose that's better than placing us under arrest, but it does make one wonder what he'll do next. Rumor has it that the constabulary is considering a revocation of Marvin's recent promotion to major, busting him down to sergeant and putting him behind the information desk at the local "festival of lights" holiday display (they've already suspended him without pay for insubordination and excessive silliness). Marvin just doesn't seem to care -- he's totally focused on rounding out his lifetime cinderblock list and working on his triple-somersault. (I guess he's doing pretty good on the trapeze...enough so to attract yet another corporate endorsement contract, this one from the Greater Colombo Cinder Block Manufacturers Association. They underwrite most of his expenses if he agrees to carry a cinderblock on a string around his neck whenever he performs. Seems fair enough. 

Gung-Ho's hospitality has been a great help in our time of need, and we are grateful...but the martial atmosphere of his compound is a little unnerving. Even with most of his mercenary goons off somewhere practicing their garroting techniques, there's still a reveille call at 5:00 every morning. That's not so bad -- it's the calisthenics that irk me. And I don't know about any of you out there, but my experience as a musician has not adequately prepared me for climbing sheer walls, running through old tires, or going hand-over-hand across a 40-ft gorge. (That's more a country music thing, I think. I'm sure if we were, say, Toby Keith's back-up band, we'd probably have to be more combat-ready.) For Gung-Ho, all of this is just a little light-hearted fun, and he just wants to share with his guests. We hate to disappoint the big guy, especially since he's been so generous with his 1940s vintage wooden barracks. (I'm not sure I like the sound of these "live fire" exercises he has set for next week, though. I tend to bruise easily, especially when people are shooting at me.) 

Well, enough about my personal problems. You probably want to know more about when we will resume our album-making activities, I presume. Sure you do. To that we can only say, when the shooting stops...and when the local constabulary lads get tired of looking for us and return to running numbers, bilking widows, and other normal police work. When that happens, we'll park our shoe back at the mill. 'Til then, write us care of:

Gung-Ho

Barrack 13-HZ (behind the water pipes)

Alliance Proving Grounds 

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Golden Turkey. Nothing like a little Rovian melodrama to brighten the holidays. Is there anything the Bush claque won't do to score political points? Flying the president of the United States halfway around the world for a photo-op in a war zone has got to be the most reckless PR project I've heard of in a good long while. Anxious to overwrite the now-sullied public memory of Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the U.S.S. Lincoln, Rove probably conceived this as the perfect accompaniment to Dubya's recent appearances with the grieving families of fallen servicemen -- a full-court PR press to demonstrate that the president cares about the service people, that he'll risk his safety to offer his support, that he's with them and one of them, etc., etc., even as service people continue to fall with sickening regularity in support of this dubious (or Duby-ous) Mesopotamian enterprise. 

It had all the elements -- the sneaking around in disguise, the publicly acknowledged false stories, the embedded press corps, the first family kept in the dark, the drama on the tarmac when a commercial pilot spots Air Force One (Ooooh!), the blacked out windows flying into Baghdad International (Aaaah!), the commander in chief's willingness to "turn this baby around" at the last minute, the comic flourish of Bremer's surprise introduction, bringing Bush on like a rent-a-Santa at a children's Christmas party....a hundred little details that can be parceled out to an eager corporate press a handful at a time, ensuring days and days of positive image-making. I've been reading accounts of the visit in my local Gannett chain newspaper, and I've yet to see mention of the fact that this "Thanksgiving Dinner" was served to bleary-eyed troops at 6:00 a.m. Baghdad time (can't think they suspected that anything unusual was in the offing). As with most of these fairy tales, I imagine we'll hear more about the various contrivances in the coming weeks and months...only they'll be on page 14b instead of front page, above the fold.  

Of course, these warm and fuzzy presidential pix will figure prominently in the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign (theme: Pants On Fire!), cheek-by-jowl with photos of Dubya comforting service widows, photos of Dubya consoling California wildfire victims, and photos of Kerry and Gephardt attacking Dean with pruning hooks at the instigation of "moderators" like Tom Brokaw. Last week's Democratic food fight on MSNBC was as good an indication as any of how Karl Rove's opposition campaign will operate. And the anti-FTAA protests in Miami are a good indication of how it will all play out in the streets, particularly when New York hosts the Republican Convention next September. With public opinion as evenly divided between the two major parties as it was three years ago, this is bound to be a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners national election, fueled by Dubya's endless wheelbarrows full of campaign cash and the Democrats' abysmal lack of party solidarity...as well as the front-runners' seeming inability to concentrate on issues over dogfight politics. 

Forget what the economic pundits say -- people are hurting out there, and if the Dems don't connect with that experience in some concrete ways, they'll not only lose...they'll deserve to lose.  

Take care out there.     

luv u,

jp

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12/7/03

Teennn-Hut!

Hello everyone...and greetings from camp Gung-Ho-Na-Soke. Hope everybody's doing okay. I'll be working on a birch bark canoe this week -- my camp counselor says I've got a 50-50 chance of getting it right. Please send some bar soap. All they've got here is this sandy pink powder in bowls that won't dissolve in water. And thanks for the cookies, by the way. John ate 'em. 

No, we're not at summer camp, but it's close enough for indie rock. Our sojourn at neighbor Gung-Ho's compound has lasted a bit longer than anticipated, due to an unexpected display of tenacity on the part of our normally lackadaisical constabulary. Those boys actually seem determined to bring us to "justice," though we've been correct in the assumption that not a man-jack of them would dare cross the minefield Gung-Ho has cultivated along the borders of his property. It's like the old saying goes -- good minefields make good neighbors. (Or is it dead neighbors? I forget.)

How did the "live fire" drills go? Not too badly, considering we're all in our forties and have no experience with military training, soldiering, or physical exertion of any kind. I suppose to Gung-Ho's robotic goons positioned behind the sandbagged gun emplacements, it probably seemed like one of those little shooting galleries they used to sell on TV in the 60's -- you know, Ring the bell! Rock the clown! Hit the rotating ducks! (I won't suggest who "the clown" amongst us might be, but he got rocked a few times, for sure.) To say that we escaped without serious injury is to be a little disingenuous -- our good host did, in fact, provide us with Kevlar full body armor, so we were never in any real danger...except from those coordinated attacks by Gung-Ho's surplus F-16 fighter-bombers. (I got grazed by a heat-seeking missile. Talk about unnerving!) And then there was the Daisy Cutter proving grounds to cross. Nasty business.

I'm glad to say that we've been able to get some work done back at the barracks. That's been largely thanks to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who has gone right off his trapeze career. Now he just carries an accordion wherever he goes...and he seems to have acquired a small monkey. (I didn't ask.) Marvin appeared at our door the other day, and since that time we've been benefiting from his enormous talents as an auxiliary power supply, plugging our PA into his spare AC outlet. (I won't mention where he keeps that -- let's just say it's "downtown". Waaaay "downtown.") This works out pretty well for our pre-tracking rehearsals, since Gung-Ho's 60-year-old wooden barracks are not equipped with electricity beyond the single light bulb hanging by a hairy wire from the ceiling. (When the light's hanging low, that means there's a secret message inside the chess piece. You learn these things when you live in a place like this.)

Magnanimous as our host can be, it's been our observation that he could feed his mercenaries a little better. They always seem to be scrounging for extra grub, and this is not a good thing. The other night they carted off Matt's man-sized tuber and were looking to make an enormous roasted vegetable ravioli out of him. Luckily, we stumbled upon their culinary preparations a few moments before they started to peel that thick hide off of him. I'll never understand why people think that bad boy is edible. Imagine trying to stuff a wiry old tuber inside a sheet of pasta. The idea is bizarre, ludicrous...and yet, strangely alluring. Marvin! Put the kettle on!

Just kidding. The tuber's safe with me. And now that we're into pre-production, I don't have the time to work something so large into our dietary guidelines. Yes, we'll be eating dirt for the rest of this project, trust me. Nice, clean, wholesome dirt, straight from the minefield. Grab a spoon and join us -- there's always plenty to go around. 

President Gap. We've arrived at that place Orson Welles once described in "The Begetting of the President"... a place called "Credibility Gap." I have to think that a good many people share my skepticism when some piece of information comes wafting out of the White House these days. Bush and company have simply lied too much for any reasonable person to believe anything they say anymore -- an astonishing accomplishment. I almost think they are aware of what a problem this can become, since conservative commentators like the ossified Charles (peace = surrender) Krauthammer have been deployed to talk up the growing phenomenon of anti-Bush hysteria (a shirttail relative of the charge of anti-Semitism that attends any criticism of Israeli military policy). It's not that they're liars and pirates -- it's that people who disagree with them are irrational! Never mind the fact that their primary justification for elective war in Iraq has fallen to the ground, and that their actions since the fall of Hussein have confirmed the worst suspicions of the anti-war movement. They're just not getting a fair shake, that's all. 

Not that it matters. Even when caught in an odious lie, the Bush crowd continues to behave as arrogantly as before. After all, what is the penalty for doing so? Have they been brought to book over any of their lies, blunders, or patently criminal actions? Not yet...and not likely. The enforcement mechanisms, weak as they were, have been effectively disabled by a fanatical congressional majority and a soggy opposition party that's too divided and intimidated to raise much of a stink. 

Take the Valerie Plame affair (please!)...even this has fallen from the pages of the corporate press, largely because there's no political cover from the Democrats. So pig-fucker-in-chief Karl Rove continues to guide the White House by the most reactionary political stars, even though he's probably responsible for the most significant lapse in national security (deliberate disruption of WMD intelligence gathering) since 9/11. (So...how's the investigation going? Has O.J. found the killer yet? How 'bout the Ramseys? And how's Ashcroft's investigation of his pal Karl going?)

There is a price, though...and that is credibility. It's openly conceded that the White House has lied shamelessly on everything from Iraqi weapons programs to Jessica Lynch's capture...even the number of Iraqis killed in Samarra has been seriously disputed. Pretty soon, everything they say or do begins to look as bogus as the phony thanksgiving turkey centerpiece Bush is holding in that campaign photo from Baghdad airport. And like Pravda in the Soviet years, everyone merely assumes it's horseshit. Hey -- you don't have to stand out in the street with a sandwich board to figure that out. 

Take care out there.     

luv u,

jp

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12/14/03

Ahoy in the ship!

Here we are again, friends. Up the proverbial shit creek without a proverbial paddle. I'm sure you've been here before -- who hasn't? Nothing you can do except keep bailing and hope for the best. Grab a bucket and join us. Bring a friend, relative, or passing stranger. 

No, this is not a drawn out metaphor. We really are in a boat, bobbing around in the trackless expanse of the Indian Ocean. How did we get here? Well...it started back at Gung-Ho's military compound, where we had thoroughly exhausted our welcome by this time a week ago. After scrambling through minefields and obstacle courses with nothing but our wits (and full body armor) to protect us, Matt, John, and I had begun to put our minds to how we might effect our return to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our longtime squat) without causing a commotion large enough to attract the attention of the local police, who were still seeking us on charges of "promoting bad luck" and "being a Jonah." (We've also heard rumors of charges that we are "persistently and unrepentantly foreigners" and that we "smell illegal," though these were not included in the original indictment.)

As part of our cunning plan to return home, we decided to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to the Cheney Hammer Mill first -- since he is still a member of the local constabulary, it seemed safe enough...and we felt certain he wouldn't betray us now that he is fully consumed by his new hobbies (accordion playing, card sharking, juggling, and pirate history re-enactments) and his new companion animal, a small monkey named "Squx." At least, we think that's her name...though it is one of Marvin's most-used unintelligible words. (She seems to respond to it, anyway.) Gung-Ho was kind enough to lend us one of his surplus observation balloons to carry our mechanical friend over the Hammer Mill and drop him right into the courtyard. 

We let a few days pass, then -- hopefully -- we set out in the sneaker-mobile under cover of darkness and made our way to the Mill, following a serpentine route that brought us to the front gate just before sunrise. In the dim morning light we could make out a big new sign across the front of the building -- I heard Matt's bewildered voice reading the legend aloud as I read it silently: "Marvin's Hideaway..?" Our mechanical cohort had apparently undergone yet another epiphanic shift in his cognitive programming and discovered the hotel proprietor within himself. Our squat was now the subcontinental equivalent of a good old American roach motel, except without the roaches. (Mongooses, yes. Roaches, no.) 

Sure enough, when we took a look through the building, there were guest everywhere. Marvin had put up a clutch of German businessmen in our sleeping quarters. There was a Japanese school tour group bunking in our practice hall. Some sight-seers from the mainland were occupying the garret...I mean, every inch of the place was rented to somebody. That robot must have been making a fortune! After a bit of poking around, John found Marvin in the old Mill office, playing his accordion, his monkey looking over the day's receipts. 

Now, you wouldn't think Marvin would be all that great at convincing people to come work for him, but I suppose success can be a strong persuader. I mean, it took about half an hour for him to press gang the man-sized tuber into running his front desk for him. Some of the web trolls over at the BigGreenHits.com headquarters had taken jobs as wait staff, char-people, bus persons, valets. When off-duty cops showed up to turn down some beds, I knew it was time to book. Luckily, John had a "john-boat" stowed away in the brickyard for just this kind of situation. While the local constables were carefully placing a mint under each pillow, we scurried out the back window, down the fire escape, then toted the boat over to the canal and started rowing, rowing, rowing. 

So, hey, this is fun...until it's not. How about flagging a cruise ship down and telling them to pick us up on the way to Madagascar? If we keep rowing in circles like this, the cops are bound to notice us eventually. (Maybe we should stick one oar out each side, instead of both out the same side. Y'think?)

The Spoils. As a writer on the Counterpunch web site commented this week, now we can be certain of what the troops are dying for. Citing "security" reasons, the Bush Pentagon team -- led by Paul "shiver me timbers" Wolfowitz -- barred France, Germany, Canada, and other nations from bidding on reconstruction contracts in Iraq because of their opposition to the U.S.'s elective and extra-legal war. This is a remarkably brazen demonstration of their arrogance as an occupier -- we have no legal standing to hand out contracts in Iraq, let alone single out nations for reward or punishment on the basis of their vote in the Security Council. Even in the wake of an unprovoked attack against an incalculably weaker nation, the U.S. is bound by law to be a good steward of that nation's assets. In other words, we're not supposed to scuttle the place like a bunch of cheap pirates. The Bush Administration's response to this charge? Aaaarrrr! 

Then, of course, there's the matter of the preferred contractors. In my spare time I try to imagine what the reaction would be if some company once run by, say, Al Gore, had been given an exclusive, no-bid contract for pumping the massive reserves of ultra-profitable sweet crude out of a country we had just invaded on a fraudulent pretext...and if that company returned the favor by overcharging the U.S. government (and taxpayers) more than sixty million dollars for deliveries of gasoline -- a gouge so blatant that even Pentagon auditors (!) woke up and took notice of it. Cheney gets his usual free pass, of course, and only need suffer a modest level of wholly non-binding grumbling. Gore, on the other hand, would have been impeached and convicted faster than Rush Limbaugh could get the cap off of a bottle of Oxycoton. Nothing sticks to Dubya's pals because there's no one to do the sticking...so we can all help Halliburton pay off Cheney's generous severance package and still get to hear the bloated old freak tell us how well things are going in the "war on terror" (which for him started back when he was insisting Nelson Mandela should remain in jail). Arrrrr. 

And things are going really really well, despite the fact that we're back to losing one or two service people a day again (none related to Cheney). This week no fewer than 15 future terrorists were killed in Afghanistan -- through the application of Israeli military tactics (blow up an entire block with an aircraft-fired missile to kill one guy who might be there), we gloriously eliminated those kids before they even had the chance to learn to hate all the freedoms we stand for. Now, don't you feel a special glow of pride over the good works we're doing in the world?  To be sure, if anyone in the Islamic world ever saw a distinction between the American military and the IDF, they don't now. We're encircling whole villages with wire and issuing I.D. cards. We're dressing up like Arabs and knocking people off. We're killing an appalling number of people under 16 years of age. We're detaining people for months and even years on end. We're using overwhelming force in a hysterical fashion, frequently firing at random. This is the way to win hearts and minds...for Osama. 

Maybe Dubya should consider dialing it back a notch or two. At this point, it's going to take more than a roast turkey centerpiece to convince these folks we're not out to break them. (Hell, that didn't even work on us!)   

Take care out there.     

luv u,

jp

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12/21/03

Blimey.

Still no sign of land. Eight days adrift in an open boat, bobbing like a cork in the ocean, tossed by tempests, assaulted by the relentless tropical sun. I scratch another notch on my trusty oar...nine days now. Salt on my tongue. Land...where is land...? 

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. Truth is, we paddled around the harbor a few times, then ditched the boat near a small private marina up the coast a ways. We wandered the back roads for a couple of days, spending the nights in open fields and abandoned vehicles, keeping a low profile until it became manifestly obvious that no one was taking any notice of us. No constables in hot pursuit. No black helicopters hovering overhead. No armored assault vehicles tearing up the roads to find us. Most curious, considering the seriousness of the charges leveled against your friends in Big Green...(that we had brought bad luck to all and sundry in our little village). 

As we meandered our way back to the once-abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (or rather, "Mavin's Hideaway" resort hotel, as it is now known), we decided to test the waters by passing slowly in front of the constabulary headquarters. Nothing. We shook tambourines and did cake walks on the front steps. Still nothing. We built human pyramids and broke dishes on the sidewalk, then invited a visiting mariachi band to blow "Saint Thomas" at a considerable volume right through their front door. Again, no reaction. The constabulary boys had reverted back to their natural state of near total professional lethargy, the warrant for our arrest yet another meaningless slip of paper lost in the stack of unfinished business that filled their "in" baskets. We were free to go, it seemed...and off we go'd to reclaim our squat from the commercial depredations of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). 

What do you do with a plant full of unwanted foreign guests? Marvin's patrons still crowded the halls of the Cheney Hammer Mill when we returned, and since many had paid for their accommodations in advance, there seemed no obvious way of shifting them...particularly in light of the fact that Marvin had already blown all the proceeds on his bizarro hobbies, buying pirate costumes and juggling pins for all of his friends, plus a little electric vehicle for "Squx", his pet monkey. We found our slightly mis-programmed robot by following the sound of accordion music -- a tortured melody that led us to our rooftop rehearsal platform. Marvin was having a little yo-ho-ho-down with his piratical friends, hoisting the jib and doing their weird little nautical two-step dances as we looked on in horror. It was obvious we would need to summon Mitch Macaphee (Marvin's inventor) to straighten Marvin out once and for all...but first things first. 

The fact is, there was one sure-fire way I could think of to send those tourists packing. No, I wasn't thinking of one of our typically loud rehearsals (even without our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn, our practice sessions run a little high on the decibel count). The quickest way to a guest's brain is through his or her stomach. So we appointed the man-sized tuber head chef for Marvin's Hideaway. Sure enough, just a few short hours of tubey in the kitchen was sufficient to clear the place out. Hey, look -- these folks were well-fed types. They know mediocre French cuisine when they taste it...and the man-sized tuber's coq au vin is not all it should be, truth be known. (He's been hitting the cooking sherry pretty hard lately, too.) 

So now all we have to do is straighten this place up, take down the sign, and get Marvin deprogrammed or reprogrammed...whatever. Then we can get back to whatever it is we do around the holidays. (About the same as the rest of the year, if memory serves.) 

Justice Denied. Looks like Santa came a little early for Dubya this year...and he brought a whole mess o' swell presents. The administration got so excited about capturing Saddam Hussein that they forgot he had been out of power for the past eight months -- that's the reaction they're hoping to foster in the American public mind, and I think to a certain extent they've succeeded, with a little supporting play-by-play commentary from the corporate news media. Aside from Robert Fisk and other real journalists, the press has been playing this as an imperial triumph, reporting on the political implications of the capture as if it had been the primary goal of the invasion of Iraq. Once again, they have substituted Hussein for Osama bin Laden, whose arrest was the ostensible (if not actual) reason behind the assault on Afghanistan. The press was complicit with the government in conflating the two by implication, and now they're reporting on the effects of this popular misapprehension as if it were fact, never troubling to remind their viewers, readers, etc., that the stated purpose of the Iraq invasion was to stop the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. 

The sports page-like coverage of this political story has also worked to resuscitate the flagging campaigns of pro-war Democrats Lieberman, Kerry, and Gephardt, all of whom wasted no time piling on their front runner. They are portrayed as having been right all along, while Dean is described as stubbornly maintaining his stance in "direct contradiction" of the President's nonsensical rhetoric, daring to point out that we are less safe now than before the Iraq war -- a fact blandly reported by the media in a succession of page 7 stories both before and after the capture. (Kucinich, Mosley Braun, and Sharpton are simply ignored, though their antiwar stance has been far more nuanced and principled than Dean's.) Sounds like another corporate dream election is under construction for 2004 -- two major candidates who basically agree on everything, from the war to "free trade," and voters on the left either voting Green or staying home. 

While the war continues pretty much as before the capture, the administration (and the "free" press) can focus everyone's attention on the trial of Hussein. This is an interesting concept. A nation that has just committed the most unambiguously criminal act in the canon of international law -- invade another country without provocation and commandeer its people and treasure -- is talking about a war crimes trial for one of its former CIA protégés. So we're going to encourage his prosecution for crimes we helped him commit? We're going to hang Hussein on the basis of mass graves filled by virtue of both our eager support and our willful ignorance, at various points? What about the hundreds of thousands killed by our 12-year sanctions regime, largely the victims of ailments resulting from a water purification and transport system we destroyed in 1991 and wouldn't allow Iraq to rebuild -- a policy Madeleine "Madame Secretary" Albright felt was "worth the price" in human lives? Where is the justice for their families?

My guess is that the Iraqis will make their own justice in their own time. It is the occupation that is on trial right now, and it would be folly for us to expect leniency on the streets of Samara. 

Don't fly over the Vincennes.     

luv u,

jp

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12/28/03

Halloooooo!!

Let me be the first (no...probably the last) to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Sure, I know...you think because we're a hard-nosed rock band forged in the proto-alternative Pleistocene era (1987) that we have no time for niceties like Christmas and other major consumer holidays. Not a bit of it. Aside from our one major commercial release being a "Christmas" album (2000 Years To Christmas), we observe ironclad holiday traditions that stretch back at least three years...maybe longer. 

Mind you, these are observances developed on the open road, in the back of a panel van, squeezed between scruffy Cerwin-Vega cabinets and guitar cases, then (somewhat later on) in the comfort of our now-defunct seven-room lean-to, the site of which has been converted to full blown cheesefood extraction. We've since adapted these traditions to our new life at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and I must say, they still seem to mark the occasion quite well...even when we're so disoriented from our revelry that we couldn't carry our brains in a bucket. Say what you like, there's no chance the big guy (whose name is an anagram of Satan) will miss this hammer mill...unless he asks the wrong person for directions. So here's to tradition...and here's to your good health, from all of us here in Big Green-land.

For your edification, our Christmas always begins with the ritual exchange of cheese wedges. We usually use jarlsberg because it keeps fairly well, but any cheese will do -- particularly the hard-ripened ones. Anyway, the ritual: each of us takes a wedge of cheese in the left hand, then stands back against the ornamental pillar in our courtyard. On the count of forty-seven, we each turn to the band member to our immediate right and hand him the cheese, while taking the wedge from the person on our left with the free hand. We then take a bite out of the top (thin side) corner of the cheese, spit it out, and declare in unison: "My goodness me -- the curd has gone sour!"   Then on the count of Monte Cristo, a mysterious stranger appears in the village and demands restitution for some long-forgotten wrongdoing...

...No, wait! I've wandered a bit. What I meant to say was that, on the count of fifty-seven, we put all our cheese in a basket and throw it into the holiday bonfire, which can only be built out of useful combustibles, like your bad furniture (or our good furniture). There is some macabre recitation that Matt reads over the melting jarlsberg at this point in the ritual, but I've never been able to make out what he's saying. So the last component to this holiday observance I can report on is the wheelbarrow race around the dying embers of the bonfire. This, along with the cheese related elements, represents a kind of seasonal renewal...a cycle of life pantomime with a different outcome nearly every time. (Though I haven't won the wheelbarrow race yet. That's a pretty reliable predictor, come to think of it.)

Then there's the traditional Big Green holiday dinner, prepared this year by Marvin (my traditional personal robot assistant). Yeah, I know what you're thinking -- Marvin's loopy...don't let him near the food, right? Well, it's true, he did go off his nut and convert our home into a sub-luxury hotel for a while...and he has appeared alternately as a juggler, a trapeze artist, and a pirate in recent weeks...and he does have a small simian friend named "Squx". It's also true that Marvin is still waiting for service on his defective headbone from Mitch Macaphee, who claims to be too busy finding other things to do to attend to it now. But none of this could overcome the stubborn fact that we hate cooking and (even more importantly) we don't know how. So crazy Marvin was elected by default, with the man-sized tuber as his able assistant. 

How was the meal? It was...well...strange. Very strange. I don't believe I've actually ever heard of sweet potato, barley, and fruit loop pizza before, let alone had it. (Those of us who had enjoyed it before never had it with the asparagus ice cream garnish.) And then there were the cedar chips dipped in treacle...there are still a few left, if you want some. Quite frankly, I think Marvin was letting "Squx" and the man-sized tuber handle most of the cooking, while he and his cronies shared bogus nautical anecdotes with one another. (This would explain the stacks of plantains and husky coconuts stacked in every corner of the dining room. Nice touch.) Or maybe the tuber was taking "Squx's" cooking tips a bit too literally. Either way, the result was something freakish and indigestible, though it offered the advantage of being virtually untouched by human hands. 

We try to take our holiday revelry as seriously as the next band...though it's hard to determine what that means in real terms, since we don't know who the next band is. Suffice to say that your friends at Big Green send tidings of good cheer...and hope that your jarlsberg remains firmly in hand for the New Year. Carry on!  

Misinformation Superhighway. Last week veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk (see The Independent, also Counterpunch.org) followed up on what a U.S. military spokesperson had termed "Operation Iron Hammer" (and, alternatively, "Iron Fist" and other dramatic titles) -- a series of strikes against "guerilla bases" in an area south of Baghdad. What he found was an empty field beside a U.S. held fortress, where American troops were firing blank test rounds through their artillery pieces as a maintenance activity.  It turned out that these "strikes" consisted of a volley of fire directed at a hit-and-run group of Iraqi resistance fighters who had taken a shot at the fortress and quickly disappeared. This blandly routine policy of misinformation seems to attend everything our military does in Iraq these days, from casualty reports to details of fire fights -- even the "coalition's" story about the capture of Saddam Hussein is a little foggy on the specifics. 

Of course, our adventure in Iraq was founded on lies and fabrications -- why should we expect anything different from the continuing occupation? This administration clearly announced its intention to use misinformation as a weapon many months ago, and they have been brandishing it like a club ever since, inventing stories about surrendering armies and heroic exploits, staging the fall of Hussein's statue for the cameras, filming the dramatic rescue of Jessica Lynch long after the departure of Iraqi forces from the hospital, and so on. They've got the enemy disoriented to the point where they can't trust anything they hear anymore. Pretty effective, eh? Trouble is, as far as I can determine, the enemy is us. After all, we are the only ones who can put a definitive end to their rule of force and intimidation in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. We have the power to pull the plug on their crusade for corporate globalization and the neo-Stalinist concentration of private power. Therefore, we must be kept utterly in the dark. 

Remember Rumsfeld's Orwellian "Office of Strategic Influence"? Just generalize that principle throughout the entire U.S. government, particularly in the national security establishment. The administration's core ideologues -- Wolfowitz, Feith, and others -- view the spread of disinformation as a crucial tool of governance. Of course, they also obfuscate to protect themselves and secure their warped reading of history from unwelcome scrutiny (thanks to the good work of the National Security Archive, we now know more about Rumsfeld's second trip to Baghdad in 1984 to reassure Hussein of U.S. intentions to improve relations regardless of his known use of chemical weapons). So now when I look at a newspaper, I have to wonder how much of the front-page news from Iraq will be revealed as bogus on page 14 some weeks or months later. It's like reading Pravda in the Soviet era -- there's a kind of reliability about its lack of reliability. One can only hope that more people will catch on to the fact that we're all being manipulated, lied to, and trussed up with pseudo-patriotic hokum so that they can put us on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare and the costs of an empire none of us wants. 

Today's paper? Four more U.S. soldiers dead...and Chuck Krauthammer thinks we're winning. What the hell...neither he nor his buddies Dubya & Cheney have any kids out there in harm's way. How can they lose?

luv u,

jp

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