NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(February '03)

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2/1/03

Hola,

We're off. Good, hard work and clean living has paid off once again for your friends at Big Green. And they said it couldn't be done. Hah! I say again -- Hah! "They" underestimated the resourcefulness of our ludicrous space entourage and our determination to leave that pathetic pimple of a planet behind us. And what do "they" know, anyway? "They" don't even have names, just the third-person plural nominative pronoun. Hah!

John and Mitch Macaphee made good on their commitment to build an enormous platform beneath our semi-disabled space craft. Sure, it took a little work -- John would knock a shim in under one side of the mock Jupiter 2, then Mitch and others (those of us who weren't sleeping or watching "The Price Is Right" at any given time) would shove another wooden frame into the gap. 

I don't mean to suggest that we did the job entirely without any outside help. We persuaded some of the locals to pitch in, offering them a modest stipend (leftover corned beef hash and a ball of pocket lint) for their labors. In these hard times, there were quite a few takers -- even 12-story mutant cyclops critters aren't immune from the Bush recession, it would seem. With the help of these enormous day laborers, we were able to raise our space RV up high enough to make escape velocity a relatively achievable option. We waited until we were well above the cloud layer before nudging that sucker into drive, then off we flew, skipping across the plane of the galaxy like a flat stone. Eeeeee-yes!

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was particularly pleased to see us get off again. Though he was reluctant to tell me, I was able to wheedle out of him that he had applied for a job as a police robot over the internet, and had been offered the position. It's with the local police constabulary back in our adopted village in Sri Lanka, where the Cheney Hammer Mill awaits our return. I didn't raise the issue of compensation, but I'm sure it's less than what he pays Mitch Macaphee for his maintenance contract. In spite of this, Marvin does seem anxious to get home and appeared to be in a bit of a snit when he learned that we would be stopping over at Kaztropharius 137b en route to Earth. (It's hard to be certain with that poker face of his, but he was a little quiet at dinner and, well, a mother just knows these things...)

I'm glad to report that intensive pizza therapy has brought sFshzenKlyrn back to the full flower of health -- just in time to sling that Telecaster back on and fram through a few rehearsals in prep for our make-good performances on Kaztropharius 137b...assuming we can figure out how to get there from here, pilotless, clueless, and compassless. Trevor James Constable thinks he knows about where we are, but he can't substantiate this notion with facts, so...technically, we're still lost. But (as the old gag goes) we're making great time. 

After all we've been through these past few weeks, I'd hate to have us take too wrong a turn. So -- as a precaution -- I've posted Marvin as a 24-hour sentry at the navigational controls to ensure that sFshzenKlyrn doesn't get anywhere near them while the rest of us are sleeping. Sure, our Zenite friend wants to help...but his kind of help we don't need. He's had his shipmaster's license suspended four times for failure to keep starboard and other moving violations. Plus, because of that alternate perception of time and space thingy that afflicts all those of his world, sFshzenKlyrn's sense of direction is abysmal.

Anyway, the sentry duty will be good practice for Marvin...I've already typed it into his resume. Thing is, he's got to remember to turn his head once in a while to see if our vaporous Zenite guitarist has slipped into the helmsman's chair from another direction. Hey -- it's just possible, you know.

Rogue Statesmen. You may have witnessed young Gee-Dubya's state of the union address spewing out of his oddly misshapen head this week. Coming as it did on the heels of some pretty bleak sounding state of the state addresses, junior seemed almost buoyant about the prospect of borrowing heaps of money from tomorrow's workers to fund additional 

tax giveaways for today's millionaires. While I don't share the "new" Democratic party's aversion to deficits, it does seem like we should be doing something useful (i.e. constructive) with the money we borrow, rather than blowing it on the rich and some high tech shoot-em-up bullshit. 

Of course, there was no talk of costs -- that's always a non-starter. A virtually unilateral invasion of Iraq is apparently going to cost nothing at all, just as regressive tax cuts and new/old Cold War-era weaponry carry no price tag. It's hard to imagine anything more irresponsible, but then this is one of the pillars of modern statecraft. Fear is another, and there was a lot of scary talk from pappy Dubya Tuesday night, as he chillingly intoned the web of hypocrisy, distortions, and outright lies that constitute his Iraq policy. We're protecting ourselves against "sudden attack" from a nation that can't project military power even as far as its northern provinces. The rhetorical conflation of Bin Laden (who?) and Hussein is now complete -- the Beast of Baghdad has become the latest author of 9/11's devastation...an honor that will likely be bestowed upon many others in the hard years ahead. 

These folks count on short memories. They rely on the notion that people won't remember how hard they pushed for war against China in 2001, how little they wanted UN or even Congressional involvement in their vendetta against Baghdad (remember Ari saying how the President already had the authority to act?), how taken aback they were when Hussein accepted the return of inspectors, how they've sought confrontation at every juncture. The world is renewed every day for the electronic president, and so Bush-bot gets up on the rostrum and reads the script his programmers gave him, and we're supposed to just nod and smile and forget what a wanker he's been about this whole thing...and how it's very likely that his beloved war on Iraq will bring about the very cycle of terror Dubya claims it will prevent.  

But then, renewed terror attacks would probably be good news for Bush politically, just as it has been good news for his grisly mentor, Ariel Sharon, who won a decisive victory this week on the bodies of more Palestinians and Israelis. This walking atrocity has built his career on denial of rights, denial of liberty, denial of life itself, and his triumph will likely bring more bloodshed. One can only hope that the activist non-violent spirit of Ta'ayush will grow, and that a truly revolutionary Arab-Jewish partnership for peace and justice will undercut the Killer Whale and his mandate of destruction. One would hope the same for the US, as well. 

Meanwhile, the Iraqi opposition in exile has agreed that up to half a million Iraqi casualties would be an acceptable price to pay for their accession to power. Now, there's statesmanship! 

luv u,

jp

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2/8/03

Halloooooo....

Thanks to a lucky break, we were able to find our way back to Kaztropharius 137b...but only after sFshzenKlyrn got his gaseous pseudopods on the controls long enough to get us into one or two celestial jams. Yes, that's right -- Marvin (my personal robot assistant) botched his first shot at police work. How'll that look on his resume?

It wasn't entirely Marvin's fault. That sFshzenKlyrn is a slippery character, and once he had reverted back to a fully etheric state (having recovered from his semi-solid flapjack-induced stupor) he was able to use the ship's ventilation system as a kind of secret passageway. While Marvin was diligently scanning the closed door to sFshzenKlyrn's cabin, our Zenite companion slipped through the vent just above the helmsman's station and poured himself into the driver's seat. Marvin's big mistake was his utter single-mindedness -- there he was, officer plod, caught flatfooted looking the other way while our crackpot guitarist drove the ship sideways through every Messier object he could find. (Who can doubt that when Marvin finally turned around and noticed sFshzenKlyrn, he uttered the words, "What's all this, then?")

I woke up that particular day to what sounded like garden rakes scraping along the outside of the hull. As Trevor James Constable and I heated up some leftover coffee with his Orgone Generating Device, Matt drew our attention to the lower deck viewing port, which was totally obscured by what looked like a roiling mass of iridescent Puffa Puffa Rice -- a veritable "ocean of energy," so to speak. Mitch Macaphee manned the external glove box module to see if he could dig-a-dig-a bowlful for analysis. That was when I went up to the control room and found sFshzenKlyrn at the helm, having the time of his half-life. He was piloting us through the center of some minor deep space object at full throttle, the radio tuned to an oldies channel and cranking out Carl Perkins at an alarming volume. Marvin, for his part, was seated in the navigator's couch, reading a month-old Sri Lankan newspaper. Useless!

It took several of us the better part of the next six hours to coax our Zenite friend away from the controls. (I think it was the promise of barbecue that did it -- that and switching the radio over to "lite" hits from the 1970s.) In that time sFshzenKlyrn took us through a handful of dwarf stars, one or two uncharted nebulae, the tail of a comet, and any other shiny things he happened upon. Mitch Macaphee managed to get us stabilized and, essentially, stationary in space so that we could start trying to figure out where the hell we were. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a stack of dog-eared road maps of Ohio and eastern Indiana, then began pouring over them in hope of finding a clue. Ultimately, it was John who noticed the Ring Nebula -- big as a house -- out the front viewing port. (sFshzenKlyrn was apparently planning to "thread the needle," as it were.)

What a piece of luck! Finding our way back to Kaztropharius 137b was a simple matter of rudimentary navigation from that vantage point, even without a map of Cincinnati and environs. Mitch yanked out the sextant and did a few quick calculations using terms I'd heard used in pirate movies, then punched the directional information into the ship's navigational computer and throttled us up to speed. Within a few short hours, we were within visual range of Kaztropharius 137b -- home of Big Green's biggest fans (about 12 stories tall, the adults amongst them). 

This seems like a good time to work up a few numbers. Those Kaztropharians have three left feet...and with limos the size of Sherman Tanks, I for one want to keep them happy. Very happy. 

The Big Push. The Fabulous Bush Boys took it up a notch this week, if such a thing can be believed. Latching on to the enormous opportunity for a Reaganesque media moment afforded by the Space Shuttle explosion, our ambulance-chaser-in-chief put on his best sotto voce consoler routine, serving up the kind of pabulum the corporate media thrives on in such grim circumstances as these. With White House correspondents eagerly painting the portrait of a president deeply moved by tragedy, retiring briefly to a private office to compose himself before resuming his duties, the administration set a favorable public relations mood for its presentation before the UN Security Council, delivered by "good cop" Colin Powell. 

It was a week of mug shots, that's for sure. Bush choking back the tears (of course, the TV camera stayed on him a bit too long, showing him revert instantly to his pugnacious, impatient "I'm the President" face when he was supposedly off stage composing himself). Powell glaring at the Iraqi Ambassador. Dubya barking out his ultimatum to the UNSC, repeating the point Powell had made -- either do what we say, or become "irrelevant." That was the only real substance for Council Members amongst the patchy collection of satellite photos, suspicious sounding recordings, and recycled allegations about Al Qaida links (still weak as dishwater). That stuff was all meant for the U.S. viewing public, of which there were perhaps as many as sixty million. We're supposed to be scared of Iraq, a fifth rate power that can't even effectively threaten itself...scared enough to support a massive armed attack against their population centers that could leave tens of thousands dead in the first few days. Not that any consideration of this was allowed to intrude on the General's presentation. Even the reproduction of Picasso's Guernica in the Council Chamber was draped over for the occasion. (That reminded me of Ashcroft throwing a drapery over the statue of Justice -- a burka to conceal her nakedness.)

Once we'd had a couple of days of scary talk from our fearless leaders, hey presto -- Tom Ridge cranks the Terror Alert stoplight up to Code Orange -- Al Qaida might strike! Be afraid! Of course, the warning centers on bio-terror, which conveniently recalls Powell's brandishing those little vials during his speech, drawing a circuitous thread between Hussein, the anthrax attacks (still unsolved but certainly of domestic origin), and a vague but immediate threat. The old one-two. Not bad.

This is clearly getting them where they want to go, just as Reagan's dire warnings about regional heavyweights like Grenada and Nicaragua kept people's minds off the damage he was doing at home. And where they want to go (Baghdad) is a place they know will make Dubya popular for a time, once shots are fired and the Wehrmacht starts to roll. The incentives are all in place, the ultimatum issued. Is war inevitable? Only if we sit back and say nothing. 

One thing's for sure -- if we let them go through with this, it will practically guarantee more terror attacks at home, further erosion of civil liberties, and a grim succession of opportunistic wars that stretches to the horizon. 

luv u,

jp

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2/15/03

Last of man, listen....

After weeks of rudderless misadventure in uncharted and forgotten corners of this great (definitely) expanding universe of ours, we finally got in front of some Big Green listeners this week -- the mega-altitudinous denizens of the planet Kaztropharius 137b, whose Dingo boots are, well, size 137b, and whose contact lenses are the size of manhole covers. (It's hard to imagine losing something so enormous, but you find those things lying around everywhere out here, especially the disposable ones.) I'll tell you -- if we were in food service instead of music, we'd be able to retire on the proceeds from this week's performances alone. Something to think about, you kids out there. But then this isn't career day. 

Mitch Macaphee (our staff scientist) landed our ersatz made-for-TV space craft in the parking lot of the Kaztropharius Comfort Inn, one of the handful of edifices sized right for humanoids. (There's a small expatriate community of Denebians here -- mostly shoe salespeople, opticians, and yes, restaurateurs.) The rooms were okay, though there was some kind of convention there that had revelers riding through the halls on electric scooters and bouncing around on pogo sticks until daybreak. Matt, John, sFshzenKlyrn, and I managed to get some rehearsal in a few minutes before our first appearance -- close enough for rock 'n roll. We were a little rusty, but the Kaztropharians didn't seem to notice from their vantage point, twelve stories up. 

This is weird -- our king-size (or I should say, Kong-size) fans have taken to using these vision enhancement devices that look like Viewmasters. I guess it helps them see the tiny entertainers from that speck of a planet called Earth. While we're framming away on stage, strumming our guit-fiddles and reading comic books, these gargantuan Greenians stare down at us through opaque-looking opera glasses (like those 3-D specs they used to hand out at drive-in movies) and stamp their ample hobnails. When they get happy, you can hear them from space, I'm sure. (Actually, that's kind of where we are already...) 

As part of his ongoing vocational training program, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been drafted into our security/crowd control detail -- a little practice for the gig that's waiting for him back on Earth as a police robot. Granted, there's little he can do to even draw the attention of the giants we're playing for. Marvin goes through the motions, though, wheeling around the perimeter of the stage, occasionally signaling to his fellow guards in semaphore. He can even print out back stage passes in four different colors...though a few of the Denebian conventioneers back at the hotel mistook Marvin for an ice machine and filled his intake manifold with Antarian quarters. (Funny thing is, they got their ice...in buckets! Our Marvin has many hidden talents.)

The cash-out was generous on Kaztropharius 137b, though they insist on paying you in their own currency -- bank notes the size of a Buick. With some difficulty we were able to get the swag over to a branch of the planetary bank and trust (designed expressly for visiting humanoids such as ourselves) where they wrote us a massive bank draft, which Trevor James Constable then shrunk down to a more manageable size using his orgone generating device. Not exactly my idea of fun. Hell, it was more work than the concerts. Those Kaztropharians...they just don't get the money thing. It's supposed to be portable -- that's the whole point!

No matter -- we'll be home in a few days, back in the bosom of the Cheney Hammer Mill with our illicit earnings and our commemorative Kaztropharian glass serving bowls...which look suspiciously like contact lenses. Yuk!

Who Benefits. Meanwhile back on earth, the good old USA took another longish step into candyland this week, with Dubya's team splintering the one treaty organization he actually affects to like while his able domestic security team reconstituted some of the more bizarre aspects of the cold war. Who imagined these cartoon pirates would want to invade Iraq so badly that they'd cause a major rift in NATO and then blandly observe that the alliance was "breaking itself up?" I have to think that the traditional foreign policy establishment is ripping their hair out right about now. Risk the holy Atlantic Treaty over a blitheringly moronic and massively unpopular policy towards Iraq, a 12th rate power that can't even keep its own borders secure? Good grief!

As if that (and the impending murder of thousands of Iraqis) isn't stupid enough, this week our ever-helpful homeland security team suggested a civil defense "strategy" against bio-terrorism that makes the pointless "duck and cover" drills of my youth seem almost rational by comparison. Cover your windows in plastic and seal them with duct tape? That's fair advice if you want to save a little something on your home heating bills (in fact, Matt and I did this to our first "band" house back in 1981 in Castleton-on-Hudson, NY). But the notion that taping up a porous "safe room" offers any significant degree of safety is ludicrous beyond belief. I have to think they suggest these things just to see if we're all gullible enough to go out and do it -- seeing millions of Americans stocking up on duct tape tells them so much more than they'll glean from any opinion poll.

Of course, they've got people good and scared, just like in the fifties and sixties, when my dad very nearly bought the makings for a backyard fallout shelter that would have accomplished exactly nothing. Just recalling other recent "orange alerts," it seems clear that a big part of this is plain old manipulation. But then maybe some of it is just the essential stupidity of our leaders, derived from the warped world view of their ultra-right advisors. (I recall Edward Teller once saying that in the event of an H-bomb blast, you could stand behind a tree for safety.) 

There's also an element of the kind of slap-dash incompetence that characterized cold war contingency planning, which is clearly this administration's model. You know -- a lousy plan is better than no plan at all. Back in the 1980s, it was discovered that the official emergency management policy decreed for my hometown involved evacuating the residents to a smaller town 15 miles to the east, stopping at the McDonald's (!) along the way to pick up thousands of happy meals and cups of coffee for nourishment as we rode out Armageddon in basement Civil Defense shelters. No, I'm not making this up...for all I know, that's still the plan to save Utica from nuclear holocaust.  Or bioterror. 

Hey -- maybe the hit will come, and maybe it won't. There are obviously tremendous institutional incentives for another terror strike right now, and when something wants to happen that badly, it often finds a way. All I can say is, those guys at the helm...don't trust 'em. Because they're either lying, or idiots, or both. And it'll take more than duct tape to spare us from the consequences of their monumental arrogance and stupidity. See you in the street.

luv u,

jp

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2/22/03

Land sweet land...

Not a moment too soon to see the rough contours of that great hulking derelict we know as the Cheney Hammer Mill looming in the twilight mist before us. Yes, friends....Big Green has come home again from our 2-1/2 month sojourn in outer spaaaaaace -- a bumpy ride, to be sure, but then that's nothing new. Glad to see that there's something left of the rum old Earth, what with "Rummy" and the boys in charge. I was half expecting to see a big smoking charcoal briquette orbiting three stops from the sun when we hovered into the general neighborhood. Good to be disabused of that particular notion. 

Our able staff scientist Mitch Macaphee piloted us back from our stint on Kaztropharius 137b (a.k.a. "land of the giants"), aided in navigation by the ultra-sensitive array of Trevor James Constable's orgone generating device. We made good time...a little too good, perhaps. Mitch was lead-footing it all the way, actually. He's got some seminar to go to in Oslo, it seems, and he's just barely got enough time to pick up his lab assistant at Hamburg and shoot over to the convention center before the opening plenary. (The split-level imitation Robinson space craft should prove to be an excellent conversation piece as it exhibits anti-gravity behavior high above the reception room.) 

We weren't overly surprised to find evidence of vandalism at the Cheney Hammer Mill -- the place gets broken into at least twice a month whether we're there or not (that's mostly how we make friends these days, actually). They usually take old abandoned hammers, bricks, appliances, pocket watches, breakfast cereals, band members, and other stuff that you might not notice is missing for a week or more. This time, though, it was clear from the moment we stepped inside that someone had given the place the once over. For one thing, the front door was ripped off its hinges and leaning up against my broken down 1973 Fiat 128. Then the entranceway had ankle-deep water, owing to a fire hose some vandal had left running. These and other subtle clues were salted throughout our decrepit post-industrial squat house. 

It was John who piped up with the idea to send Marvin in there ahead of us. After all, Marvin was going to be one of those police robots they send into hostage situations and crack houses (or out for pizza on slow days)  -- this could prove a valuable training exercise for the boy. We rigged him up with a video camera in his chest plate and told him to take a little tour of the living quarters as we sat in the reception area and watched on a fuzzy T.V. screen. From Marvin's POV, we could see overturned chairs, smashed windows, and other assorted rubbish...all seemed pretty much as we had left it. Then the kitchen came into focus, and we seemed at that point to lose effective operational control of Marvin. The rest of the "program" was a chest-eye view of a robot making a Velveeta and rutabaga sandwich, garnished with hex-head fasteners and lock washers. (It was vaguely reminiscent of sFshzenKlyrn's now defunct cooking show, actually. Same electric mood.) 

Now at this point you may be asking yourself, "What...no surprise party? No reception to mark our triumphant return? No cheering crowds or brass bands?" And the answer is...well....no. Far from hidden well-wishers with kazoos, all Marvin's camera turned up was the interior of our unkempt abandoned factory which may or may not have been subjected to a general ransacking by 2- or 4-legged intruders. Actually, I shouldn't speak for all of us. Some of the folks over at the local police constabulary threw a "welcome home" party for Marvin, emceed by some rent-a-cop they imported from the states -- a guy named Toddy Ham, who kept trying to get Marvin up on stage to sing (it's now explicitly against his programming, thanks to Mitch). They even had a cash signing bonus for my personal robot assistant. I must admit, the cops around here go to pretty remarkable lengths in their recruitment efforts. Like they gotta work this hard to talk a robot into working for them!

Anyway, once we get our bags unpacked and our recipe cards all sorted by color, we can get back down to business: putting our lean-to back to rights. Oh...and making our next record, of course, after innumerable delays and endless squabbles with our corporate label. If we can keep sFshzenKlyrn from popping off to the Great Magellenic Cloud for a little off-season Hubble Stumping, we might be able to squeeze some guitar parts out of him before the world blows up....maybe some strings or pickups, or a tuning peg or two. Who knows?

Breakfast of Champions. Is everybody jumpy? Nervous? Downright panicky? That's good -- it just wouldn't be a true "code orange" without the kind of mass hysteria we saw in Chicago this past week over a little mace sprayed in a crowded nightclub. That's the beauty of our Homeland Security Alert System -- if the terrorists don't show, we make our own disasters. We have the seeds of catastrophe sown in every community, practically. Why would anyone need to import poisons or explosives? Already got 'em. And with our bizarro government keeping us in a state of near hysteria, anything can happen and probably will. 

It's grimly laughable to see ex-governor Tom Ridge lumbering from news show to news show talking up his department's new PR campaign to encourage people to "prepare" for WMD-type terrorism. Of course, most of their ludicrously useless advice (make a survival kit with water, duct tape, and pre-cut plastic sheets; learn more about terrorism...but not too much) assumes that you'll be sitting at home watching your emergency broadcast system-affiliated television channel when disaster strikes, not in your high-rise workplace or on the commuter train or any one of a zillion other much more likely public places to be chosen as an appropriate target. Also...Ridge keeps saying that bit about how the current volume of intelligence "chatter" is the highest since just before 9/11/01. So...he admits they had lots of reason to anticipate some kind of dramatic attack before the towers went down...and did nothing? So where is the independent investigation of this little mishap? (Admittedly it's not on the same scale of seriousness as Clinton's cunnilingual cavorting, but probably worth a look none the less.) And is someone going to resign over this massive failure, aside from the whistleblowers...without whom we would have no notion of its dimensions whatsoever? Bizarre. 

Meanwhile in the great titanic global struggle between Brand Bush and Brand Bin Laden, there appears to be a little consumer confusion. Both brands seem to want us all to do the same things -- make war. Most curious. But then, the more senior amongst you may recall that you once could get a coupon for Bin Laden Kulfa Balls on the back of every box of Raisin Bush Cereal. After all, daddy was not only CIA director, but Vice President during the headless Reagan administration when the largest CIA operation in history was being run in Afghanistan in cooperation with Pakistani intelligence (ISI)...back when Islamic extremists were being recruited by the CIA/ISI all over the middle east to form the core of what later became Al Qaeda. If there's a confluence of interest between our leaders and theirs, it's a little more than an accident. It's because they share a well-established bond that reverberates today, as Seymour Hersh has demonstrated with his stories about our military's allowing the Pakistanis to evacuate thousands of Al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan during the fighting last year. 

It's finally happened -- now being "with us" is the same as being "agin' us," and some of the aid to our allies in Pakistan is probably working its way over to the folks our troops are occasionally shooting at. So no matter what brand you choose in this particular fight, you can be sure it's the breakfast of champions. Dig in. 

luv u,

jp

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