NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(December '04)
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12/05/04
Achtung. Attendez.
Oooh, man! Lumpy mattress. My neck is bent like a freakin' pretzel. (So that's how they bend 'em! They just put the straight pretzels in this bunk for a night, and hey presto.) Just call me Mister Salty. Don't know how that Space Family Robinson™ did it for the better part of three years... of course, they wore velour fatigues on burning hot planets and didn't even break a sweat unless some PA was squirting water on their foreheads.
Yes,
with our electrifying BTL GOT
HUM Tour 2004 just two weeks away, we're busily
getting into pre-flight condition here at the abandoned Cheney 
Hammer Mill. My
own personal fitness program chiefly involves spending every other night in one
of those fold-down bunks in our J-2 living quarters... that and taking my meals
from the food synthesizer unit in the ship's galley. Why don't we just hire a
caterer for the trip like any real touring band? Look, friend -- we're
talking fucking plain clothes, here. This is not the Nelson Riddle
orchestra, you know. Besides, we've got to keep our cargo to a minimum; that
means no massive food stores. We just preload the food synthesizers with tofu
and shallots and let the galley computer do its magic. (I only hope they've got delicatessens
where we're going...)
I'd like to be able to tell you that we're fully rehearsed and ready to tear through our set lists on a moment's notice, but that would just... be... not too.... well, true, actually. What I can tell you is that we've gotten to the all-important stage of actually drawing up some set lists -- a precursor to rehearsal, if you will. Now if I can only find the bloody things. Have you seen them? One was written on the back of a take-out menu from the local vindaloo palace; I think John scrawled another list up the side of a brass fireplace match container. Shouldn't be that hard to spot. As you may have noted, we've got a bit of a paper shortage here. Our local stationery merchant has "shut us off," so to speak, because we've been issuing too many memos and making too many copies. (They're a little strict over there.) Since then, I've been writing on the back of just about everything that doesn't move -- flyers, old promo photographs, napkins, you name it. Pretty soon, we're going to get down to bricks... and that could mean real trouble, since this place is made of 'em. (Ever try to email a brick? Virtually impossible.)
In
the midst of our preparations, another matter has come up. Our local financial
advisor, Geet O'Reilly, has urgently advised us to find an investment vehicle
for our recently-acquired ill-gotten gains [to wit, that cash Marvin (my
personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber brought back via tunnel from
the local merchant bank] or else face severe tax penalties. She suggested some
kind of real estate scheme, since that's so red hot now. We brainstormed over
this for a little while yesterday and Matt came up with a pretty good
idea. Since virtually all of the land on this little planet (code name:
"Earth") is spoken for, why not start a development on some other
planet -- Mars, for instance? We could invest in one of those "themed"
communities where all the (ticky-tacky) houses look the same, perhaps all shaped
like...well... Robinson split-level spaceships. That way we could leverage the
nostalgia factor for all those baby boomers with money to burn and, perhaps, a
residual (and frankly puzzling) reluctance to reside on other planets.
When
I told Geet O'Reilly about our investment concept, she looked at me like I had
six heads. (I get that a lot from financial people.) So that gave me 
the
notion to have her set up a limited corporate entity known as Six
Heads Development Group, Ltd., the entity that
would offer for sale plots in our outer space subdivision/theme park. Geet
clings to the notion that investing should be about making more money and not
just throwing cash out the window on stupid shit, but hey -- why should we
change the habit of a lifetime? We could even use our J2 saucer as a model home,
though I may have to cajole somebody (Marvin) into giving it a fresh coat of
paint. Give it a little curb appeal, know what I mean? (So long as he doesn't
paint over the toggles and gauges, that is.)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Home
Safe. They're changing cabinet members like light bulbs in the (mostly) evil
city of Washington DC. Tom Ridge will be packing his little crony's travel bag
and headin' out to pasture this winter, his work done. Perhaps more than most
denizens of the Bush regime, Ridge was able to fulfill his promise to the...
ahem... American People and the expectations of this president, who had
initially opposed the creation of the very department Ridge headed. In ensuring
Bush's re-election, Ridge was able to 
fully
justify his boss's change of heart on the Dept. of Homeland Security. Whereas
previous administrations (Reagan comes to mind) were quite fond of pushing the
panic button every three minutes, none had had the audacity or the opportunity
to institutionalize that practice into a permanent cabinet position and a
massive bureaucracy. Ridge's color-coded terror alert system (which took
"months" to develop, according to him) represents the classic turning
of the screw, allowing them to ratchet up the fear factor at will without having
to invent even a semi-plausible crisis. Just a little non-specific
"chatter" and it's break out the duct tape! So... I wonder how that
fiendish plot to disrupt our elections is going? Should the electoral college be
worried?
Speaking of organized panic, it looks like Rumsfeld is staying. No surprise there. The electorate has already demonstrated to the Bush team that performance doesn't matter in this wacky post-9/11 world -- why change horse's asses in midstream? It would be hard to imagine a policy more ill-conceived, malevolent, and disastrous than the invasion of Iraq, and Rumsfeld has been at the very center of this compounded crime of aggression. Since Bush's foreign policy (motto: Yee-haw!) has been implemented mainly through the Pentagon rather than Foggy Bottom, there is hardly a single aspect of this lunacy that cannot be traced back to Rumsfeld and his old Nixon/Ford Administration protégé, Dick Cheney (the vice presidential object). For those of you who have been paying attention to the Abu Ghraib scandal, the missing WMD's (recall that Rummy knew right where to find them), the Halliburton/Bechtel cost-plus scandals, and the general horror of mounting atrocities in this elective war, here's a message for you from the White House: more of the same.
Interestingly
enough, out in all those other countries of the world (at least, many of the
ones we haven't gotten around to invading yet), there appears to be some desire
to hold our leaders accountable for their serial violations of human rights and
international law, even if the American people have been unwilling to do so at
the ballot box. The fact that large protests greet the president practically
everywhere he travels is nothing new. But prior to 
his
trip to the APEC conference in Chile last month, Bush's handlers took the
precaution of negotiating diplomatic immunity for the boy so that he wouldn't
face any potential legal repercussions proceeding from his recent actions at the
helm of the global hegemon. Efforts to ban Dubya from Canada have also been
attempted, and briefs have been filed in Germany accusing Rumsfeld and others of
human rights abuses. One wonders if these fuckers will face a kind of Henry
Kissinger problem when they leave office, having to be careful where they go,
staying one step ahead of the bailiffs. Of course, for the present, they're
safe, and can feign shock and disgust over the military's discovery of insurgent
"torture centers" in Fallujah -- this in the context of an assault
that has left thousands dead and an entire city refugees.
How low can you go? Looks like we're going to find out, folks.
luv u,
jp
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12/12/04
Receiving you...
Electrodes to power... turbines to speed... Ignition sequence start. Ion reactor, on! Main gyro assembly, on! "Check Engine" light, on! Cabin pressure control system... cabin pressure control... what the fuck happened to the indicator? Main scanner... missing?! Forward viewing port, opaque?!? For the love a.... Marvin (my personal robot assistant)!!!
Greetings,
friends of Big Green. As you can tell, we
are going through the standard pre-launch drills in preparation for our
much-anticipated BTL GOT HUM
Tour 2004 -- a joyous holiday romp across the solar
system's most happening satellites (yeah, baby). As is typical for our
interplanetary tours, we do a number of mock launch sequences prior to the real
thing, just to run the old spacecraft through its paces. Unfortunately, last
week (as you may recall), I asked Marvin to give our functioning J-2 replica a
new coat of paint; just a quick spiff-up before our departure. Now before you
ask me if he actually painted over many of the gauges in the control room.... as
well as the viewing port... I want you to think carefully. Think about Marvin,
now. What would Marvin do with a paint brush? Okay -- now you've got your
answer.
Maybe
I expect too much, but painting over the windows on the spaceship!?!
I mean, I could almost see where he could make an error with little lights and
dials and toggles.... but a 15-foot wide bay window is a little hard to fathom.
(Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has got legions of his lab assistants
working on it now with razor blades and turpentine.) Sometimes I think Marvin
has been working too hard -- after all, we use him as a general dog's body and
all-around jack-in-office. Small wonder he's starting to get a little fuzzy
around the electrodes. I suppose overwork 
could
explain a lot -- the rings around his eyes, the occasional yawn, a general look
of iron-poor-bloodedness. Marvin's got all the classic signs of metal fatigue. I
can just see him now, half asleep on his gimbals, rolling a half gallon of white
primer on those vast expanses of tempered glass, then painting over the entire
space family Robinson. Time for a power down, poor bastard.
Trouble
is, well... we're just a few days from our lift off -- seven, to be exact -- and
we need every hand on deck, so to speak, no exceptions. Everybody's got a job to
do. Matt's riding the elevator up and down, throwing a little light machine oil
on the glide rail and making sure it will function properly in the uncertain
vortex of deep space. (All right, I confess -- he's just doing it because it's a
fun fun ride.) John White is busily re-magnetizing the robot magnetic lock on
the lower deck; then he plans to do some work on the man-sized tuber's terrarium
(I think he's planning a plant-feeding station on one side. Damned thoughtful.)
Mitch Macaphee is still engrossed in his new-found role as our interior
decorator, ordering new pillowcases for all of our bunks (I hear burlap is big
this year); though he tells me he's working on our fuel consumption ratios in
his head while he stitches the suckers together. Even 
tubey
is making himself useful, acting as a vegetable step-ladder for the team of
paint-scrapers busily attempting to give us back some of our instruments and
flight controls.
What about me? Well... since Matt took the coveted elevator job, I've been handling the unenviable task of confirming all our bookings through the first of the year. Barring some final adjustments and unforeseen interplanetary disasters, this is how it stacks up:
BTL GOT HUM Tour 2004
Sun, Dec. 19 -- Departure
Mon, Dec. 20 -- Return (forgot bowling shoes) & re-departure
Tues, Dec. 21 -- Rocky's (Phoebus)
Thurs, Dec. 23 -- Civic Center (Ganymede)
Fri, Dec. 24 -- Xmas Eve Bash (Ganymede)
Sat, Dec. 25 -- Break (Saturn)
Sun, Dec. 26 -- Gorgon's (Titan)
Mon, Dec. 27 -- Medusa's (Titan)
Wed, Dec. 29 -- Press availability (Uranus); Concert (in transit)
Fri, Dec 31 -- New Year's Eve Party (Pluto)
Other dates may be added as we go (or subtracted.. should we have engine trouble or something...)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Defensive.
It's to be expected, I suppose, that when someone questions a member of the
Bush team in any serious (i.e. non-softball) way, it should be considered news.
After all, that soldier in Kuwait did what the major news media fail to do every
day of the week and twice on Sunday morning: confront Rumsfeld with the obvious.
Naturally, these corporate information peddlers have been trying to make the
soldier the story ever 
since
(anything to avoid talking about boring old policy stuff... like where that
$350-400 billion for DOD has been going every year). That's knee-jerk for them
-- personalize everything. I noticed that Rumsfeld's lame initial response
(about going to war "with the army you've got") was played early on as
a sharp, decisive comeback -- always trying to revive the bizarre "Rummy is
a stud" obsession they had going in 2002. But even they seemed to let that
go after a day or two, and ever since then we've been hearing assurances that,
yes, 400 armored vehicles are rolling off the lines every month. I even saw some
military spokesman on TV talking about armor plate kits while guys were welding
the things in place in the background. (My partner wryly observed that right now
there's so much armor plating going on, you can hardly interview a general on
camera without catching some of it.) If this lasts more than a week, I'll
be surprised.
It does amaze me, however, that these people can get away with this sort of thing. For fuck sake -- they chose when to go to war. If they didn't use part of their massive annual Pentagon budget to provide proper protection for the troops, whose fault is it besides theirs? Even if they never allow another tin foil Humvee to drive over an IED again, those thousands who've been killed and crippled for lack of easily-available armor are wholly down to them. There's no bringing back those lives and limbs -- they're gone forever. But Rummy and Dubya are somehow still with us. (No armor needed on their side of Haifa street.) And they're still running away from any responsibility for what they do. The media is a tremendous help in this regard, contrary to what the whiners on right-wing radio will tell you -- they've kept the ugliness of this war out of sight. (For an unvarnished look at Bush/Rumsfeld's real accomplishments, visit the New England Journal of Medicine site's photo gallery from MASH units in Iraq; also Dahr Jamail's images of Iraqi casualties. Warning: these are awful.)
The
soldiers assembled to hear Rumsfeld speak must have a good idea what a load of
shit they were being handed. To suggest to these people that armor isn't much
use against the kinds of explosive devices being used by the Iraqi resistance
can't have gone over too well amongst those who've seen friends blown to pieces.
Aside from sheer callousness, it does fit the profile of the modern DOD
bureaucrat who is willing to spend untold 
billions
on massive programs that a.) do not work, and b.) have no practical military
use, while skimping on the actual human beings in their charge. As it happened,
there was a small news item this week about Rumsfeld's beloved "missile
defense" project -- that multi-billion dollar sop to preferred contractors.
It was basically managing expectations about an upcoming test of an ABM system,
explaining that the point of the test was not to actually hit the
incoming missile, but something more technical and arcane. In other words, it
still doesn't work, even though we're beginning to deploy the system along the
Pacific rim... an act that Asia's nuclear powers (not unreasonably) see as an
attempt to neutralize their nuclear deterrent and establish a workable
"first strike" capability with reduced risk of retaliation. (One with
Dubya on the trigger.)
If we can find money for this kind of destabilizing garbage year after year, what's our excuse on the armor plate?
luv u,
jp
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12/19/04
Hail!
All strapped in? Good. Oxygen supply handy? Good. Never know when you'll need that. How about a Clark bar for the ride? Some Tang? Freeze-dried ice cream? Perhaps a plug of chewin' tobacco? Zenite snuff? Man -- you got some self-control. Maybe we should break out the flapjacks....
Well,
we've dotted the last "o" and crossed the last "Q" on our
itinerary for the BTL GOT HUM
TOUR 2004 -- Big Green's
romp through the major satellites of our solar system. Now all that's left to do
is, well, leave the ground and press forward through the blackness to our first
destination -- the tiny Martian moon of Phoebus, where a little trashed-out club
called 
Roxy's is located. That's this coming Tuesday (Dec. 21), so if you're in
that area of the solar system, be sure to drop in and throw something at us (no,
it's okay....really. Mitch has finished building our new "protective stage
blisters," capable of withstanding the impact of a beer bottle or an ice
cube hurled at 45-50 mph. So chuck away!) But first the task at hand -- what we
hope to be a flawless lift off from the roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer
Mill.
I'm
gratified -- yes, gratified -- to tell you that our replica Jupiter 2
spacecraft has been fully restored to "go" condition for flight by a
veritable army of lab assistants mustered by our mad science advisor Mitch
Macaphee. These somewhat underfed looking young people have fueled, provisioned,
and primed our vehicle like pros... to say nothing of the effort they put in to
stripping the gummy layers of latex paint from our instruments and forward viewing port after last week's ill-fated paintjob by Marvin (my personal robot
assistant). Perhaps most remarkable of all, they hand carried the
spacecraft up from its subterranean holding garage to the roof of the mill,
where Mitch has fashioned a reinforced helipad-like surface that will 
withstand
the massive thrust output from the ship's ion-powered engines. I don't know
where Mitch found all this help, but it couldn't have come at a better time (even
though our Colombo based financial advisor, Geet O'Reilly, is warning us we may
have a little "nanny" problem... times forty). That Mitch -- always
the resourceful one. Me? I'm more like the ballast of the group. Somebody's
got to keep us down to Earth...at least for the next few minutes. (T-minus two
and counting...)
This
tour would be a whole lot easier if we could just get all these moons to line up
in a row, one after another, like enormous billiard balls waiting for the cue.
That's why I gave our old friend Trevor James Constable a call. While prior
commitments have kept him from joining us on this excursion, he has agreed to
use his patented orgone generating device to nudge all those natural satellites
into rough alignment with one another. Now mind you, there's only so much Trevor
James can do on that score. But if his marvelous invention can make the dance
of the planets turn a bit more slowly for the next two weeks, that would be
enough. I provided him with a 
carefully labeled illustration of how we would
like the moons of Jupiter to appear. (I know what you're going to say -- elves
and fairies, right? Well just remember, my friend, there are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dream't of in your philosophy... Not
that you have a philosophy... or that your name is Horatio. But
just the same...)
Back to the countdown. T-minus 20. Marvin's locked into his magnetic pedestal, forestalling any possibility that he might break into an interpretive dance during our ascent. (The team of lab assistants were encouraging him to do so at our send-off party, much to his bewilderment.) T-minus 15. That man-sized tuber switches on his zero-gravity grow light and thumbs through the most recent issue of Dagger. T-minus 10. John and Matt break up the Yahtzee game and strap into their couches. T-minus 5. Mitch Macaphee noodles curiously with a few switches on the main control panel, making every effort to conceal his enormous intelligence. 3 - 2 - 1 .... Phoebus beware!
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Beyond
Parody. I logged on to the Yahoo site the other day and saw a news headline
that should have had its own laugh track. Something like: Bush
Tells Syria & Iran: Stop Meddling In Iraq. Amazing
that this can be presented as serious news... it's the kind of story that seems
tailor-made for The Daily Show. But this is the news environment in which
we live -- the post Bush election era in which every major organ of the press is
bending over backwards to prove its loyalty to a loyalty-obsessed
administration. Not that that's hugely out of the ordinary, but at least during
the election season (when the press had some political cover from a tepid
opposition party campaign) there were the occasional stories critical of Bush
and company, pusillanimous though they were. Now the fourth estate has 
bought
the administration's dubious claim to a mandate, and can now hide behind the
sound market principle of "giving the viewer/reader what they want" --
this just a few weeks after the somewhat reluctant mea culpas from the
Times and a few others over their (ahem) less-than-critical coverage of
the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Don't look now, folks -- they're doing it
again!
I hate to sound like one of Dubya's speech writers, but this is what happens when you don't hold people accountable for what they do. Even with Iraq in flames and spitting out the bones of our young people in uniform on a daily basis, Bush is free to agitate for the next two (or three) wars on the neocon agenda. Even with millions of people out of work and probably the most upwardly distributed "recovery" in American economic history, Bush is free to talk about lending his considerable skills as a ham-fisted fuck-up to "reforming" (i.e. dismantling) Social Security as a meaningful social benefit. There are no consequences for repeated failure; there is no punishment for consistently malign intent or demonstrably illegal and destructive policies. Dubya assembles an "economic summit" made up exclusively of people who already agree with him, who nod in all the right places, who laugh at his lame quips and ersatz frontier witticisms, and the press treats it like a legitimate exercise instead of the Stalinist sham it truly is. Soon they'll be selling us a gradual privatization of Social Security more oblique, costly, and convoluted than Hillary Clinton's hybrid national health insurance plan of a decade ago, but don't expect the same kind of sustained criticism that sunk that Rube Goldberg creation.
Speaking
of unaccountable fuck-ups, there were renewed calls for Rumsfeld's resignation
this week, perhaps only deemed newsworthy because they emanated from Republicans
in Congress, most notably former Senate Majority Leader (and Strom Thurmond
admirer) Trent Lott. (Hey -- when an avowed racist calls for your head, you
better watch out.) I'm sure it has nothing to do with the failure of this week's
test of a "missile defense" kill vehicle, that most beloved of
Rumsfeld boondoggles due for deployment within the next couple of years, ready
or not. Nay, most of the criticisms I hear are about Rummy not winning the
glorious war for disarming ... de-Osama-izing...
um, I mean... democratizing Iraq fast enough. That being the case, he
might just as well stay right where he is. Given Dubya's most recent
appointments, I'm sure he would only replace Rumsfeld with Wolfowitz or some
other neocon fascist who would have to prove himself quickly by pulverizing
large sections of Iraq's heartland and shipping even more part-time soldiers to
the front lines, as John McCain has been urging (sweet guy that he is). Luckily,
the White House has issued its usual statement of confidence in the old man,
confirming once again that they won't let a little thing like competence get in
the way of their policy decisions. Why, that would be "flip-flopping"
and admitting failure of some kind. Zell Miller would be so disappointed in his
new party.
Incidentally, Zell's apparently been judged insane enough to merit his own show on Fox News. Maybe they'll call it "Dueling Democrats."
luv u,
jp
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12/26/04
Ahoy. Ahoy. Ahoy.
Greetings from Ormfal's zero-gravity bathhouse and spa deep in the methane-rich ocean of Saturn's atmosphere -- just a little west and wewaxation (Fuddatonic pronunciation) for the Big Green entourage after the first leg of our BTL GOT HUM Tour 2004. Picture me in a floating lounge chair with a tropical drink in one paw and a poke of Zenite snuff in the other. That's not what I'm actually doing right now... but picture it, anyway. (In fact, I'm trying to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in Urdu. And failing. Badly.)
How's
the tour going? Well.... there've been one or two bumps. Let's start with our
Tuesday gig on Phoebos. It seems there are active volcanoes on Mars --
news to me. (Thanks for the warning, NASA.) In any case, the tiny Martian moons
have been serving as unofficial refugee centers for Martians displaced by lava.
Good for business, yes... but our rooms at the Phoebos Best Western Inn
were all double booked, so we had to sleep in the spaceship on our brutal little
fold-down cots. Not recommended after slogging your way through two sets in a
rowdy club full of drunk extraterrestrials. (Suffice to say that those
protective blisters Mitch Macaphee devised for us came in handy when some
vacationing Arcturan college students learned we didn't play anything by the Scorpions.
Big fans. Really big. About 200 feet tall, in fact.) At one point, it
became necessary to post Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out in the parking
lot on sentry duty -- the local constabulary couldn't spare anyone to provide
security, and we could hear intruder alarms going off every five minutes. (This
space ship is not protected by Viper... so we've asked Marvin to provide
the requisite warning sounds, when appropriate.)
Creaking
along to our next engagement, we encountered some engine trouble in the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter. Our perennial sit-in 
guitarist sFshzenKlyrn
(from the planet Zenon) was kind enough to perform the extra-vehicular activity
needed to repair the damage in mid-flight. (Fortunately for sFshzenKlyrn,
he requires no space suit, being a semi-gaseous creature without form whose
remote ancestors adapted to airlessness in an era when rocks still bubbled on a
new-born Earth already.) He extracted a large hunk of space debris from the
nozzle of our yaw retro rocket, then spent the rest of his EVA skipping from
asteroid to asteroid, twanging his trademark telecaster soundlessly in the
airless, earless, ampless void of interplanetary -- wait for it! --
space. (You've heard of air guitar? This is airless guitar.) Actually, it
took longer for us to get sFshzenKlyrn back
in the ship than it took for him to repair our retro rockets. But then,
everything has its price.
Our
two performances on Ganymede were not quite what we had expected, having never
played this rocky little moon before. We thought we'd scored a real coup landing
that civic center gig... only when we got there, it turned out that the Ganymede's
are only about half an inch long and their civic center is about the size of the
old accounting office at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (the center is a 20-ft
diameter roundhouse). The stage? It looked like a cutting board, about 2' X 3'.
This presented a challenge, certainly for us terrestrials. As a sea of tiny Big
Green fans filled the room, Matt and I were perched on our amps, John
used his floor tom as a bass drum, and sFshzenKlyrn
floated above us, his amp hooked to one amoeba-like Zenite pseudopod. We were
all turned down to about 2 and there was no PA. The tiny crowd floated tennis
balls hand-to-hand around the room and lit tiny lighters by the thousand as we
played Merry Christmas, Children. Then they convinced Matt to crowd surf.
(Those little fuckers are stronger than they look.)
Now we're on a brief holiday, stopping for Christmas and Boxing Day here on Saturn before we proceed to Titan and our triumphant return to this, the great "bull" moon of the outer solar system. There ought to be some human size seats at those gigs, so if you think you may be there, let us know and we'll put you on the guest list. (If you don't get through, don't sweat it. We've been posting the man-sized tuber at the door on most of these performances, and he has a history of being pretty liberal when it comes to ticket redemption.) See you there!
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Strange
Gifts. The war in Iraq continues to produce nauseating headlines, with last
week's suicide bombing at a mess tent in Mosul and more air strikes and
firefights in Fallujah and elsewhere. The administration's response to this
increasingly ugly enterprise is, in essence, to turn it into a PR stunt. Sending
Rumsfeld to visit wounded soldiers in Iraq is like having Judas Iscariot stop by
at Calvary to see how Jesus is doing. But because old "Rummy" has been
under fire of late for not caring enough about the rank and file, the White
House thought this might be a good opportunity to illustrate what Bush was
babbling about a few days earlier -- that he "knows Rumsfeld's heart"
and can see the anguish in the man's eyes when a missile defense test ends in
failure... I mean, when a young soldier is killed or injured as a result of his
poor leadership. Crank that he is, Rumsfeld just 
had to give his standard
speech about not leaving Iraq to people "who cut heads off" -- what,
like in Saudi Arabia? Like what happens (off camera) when our ordinance hits a
crowded city block?
As during the cold war, there is a widening gap between what the government says and what is obviously true. They say we stand for "democracy" and human rights, and yet their contempt for democracy is palpable and their willingness to use torture is well documented. They say this war was necessary, and yet every justification for it has long since fallen apart, every dire warning now overshadowed by the growing menace of this conflict. They say -- somewhat robotically -- that we are making progress in Iraq, but the only progress appears to be along the road to a failed state torn by civil and sectarian warfare, providing a breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists -- just as our multi-billion dollar project in Afghanistan in the 1980s and '90s produced the 9/11 generation. Like Palestine, Iraq is a running sore, growing more septic with every passing week; a factory for hatred against their occupiers and a training ground for radicalized militants whose attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
So,
as the vast majority of Americans sit down to their Christmas tables wholly
unmolested by this war, I can only hope that they take a moment to consider
where Operation Iraq Freedom is headed. And while they're sipping their coffee,
perhaps they can spare a passing thought on the relative wisdom of allowing
Dubya to eviscerate the Social Security retirement system, certainly the most
successful anti-poverty program in 
the history of the United States. (This, of
course, is exactly why they hate it so.) The fact is, Social Security has been
in the sites of government "reformers" for many years -- this latest
assault being simply the culmination of a long process of undermining popular
support for the program. Here again, the rhetoric doesn't match the reality.
Social Security has never been about private savings -- it's an agreement
between American workers to provide supplemental income for one another when
they retire (i.e. today's workers pay for today's retirees). When the system as
it stands will remain solvent for another 40 to 50 years, it's beyond me why
people should consider this to be any more "socialistic" than carving
out huge chunks of federal revenues (including Social Security receipts) to
provide tax breaks for wealthy people and corporations.
They want us all to think only of ourselves. And in so doing, we will all fuck ourselves, while they line their pockets. Pretty neat, huh?
luv u,
jp