NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(February '05)
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02/06/05
Yea, brother...
Full power to the mains. More. More! Now, twelve-second burst on five. Kick in the overdrive, we need linear velocity, damnit! Throttle at maximum. Reactor is straining. What the...who left the emergency brake on? All right - it's time. Jettison the Pop-N-Fresh Rolls. All of them. No, no... you don't have to crack them open first! Jeezus....
Greetings.
This is Big Green on the celestial lamb, as
it were, just a couple of star lengths ahead of a Tempelian pursuit vehicle, its
red lights flashing, 
its siren screaming pointlessly in the airless void of
interstellar space. As promised last week, we made our dramatic jail break,
commandeered our vee-hickle, and headed for the stars without so much as
a "How's your father?" or a "Thank you kindly" to the
six-armed comet-dwelling creatures that have been holding us (and feasting
us) against our will for the past three weeks... a hostage-taking in retaliation
for NASA's recent launch of the "Deep Impact" space probe, which is
scheduled to slam into Comet Tempel 1 on July 4th, 2005. Rather than take the
rap for a bunch of overpaid administrators and Kool-Aid drinking space
scientists, we decided to "cut and run," as the now popular euphemism
goes, and to do so long before the belligerent "Deep Impact" thingy
shows up on the Tempelian's long-range defense radar screens.
Okay,
let me back up a bit. We were in the cell, see? Me and Mugsy. So I calls one of
the screws over and I says, "Listen, screw... there ain't a cell in
dis joint that can hold Mugsy and me..." Hold on... I guess I backed up a
bit too far. The relevant facts are these: magnetic lock > M-Rays > flight
> grand theft spacecraft. Got it? What... more detail? All right, all
right. Our mad science advisor Mitch "Mugsy" Macaphee managed to plug
a few circuits around backwards inside Marvin (my personal robot assistant) such
that the automaton began emitting a concentrated M-Ray beam, which we then
directed at the magnetic lock on our cell door. It took a while to get the lock
unstuck -- we had to work at night, with the man-sized tuber on lookout, then
conceal Marvin inside one of the bedsprings to avoid 
detection. (John suggested
this last step may not be necessary, but I always prefer to err on the side of
caution.) On the third night, at about 3:45am Comet Tempel 1 time, the lock gave
way and the cell door swung open. It was now or never.
We swarmed through the labyrinthine passages of the Tempelian prison like escaped convicts looking for an egress (which, of course, was just what we were). As a diversionary tactic, Matt and Marvin had fashioned some phony extra arms out of our bedding, so that a couple of us would have the requisite six arms and, perhaps, pass for Tempelians in the event we were spotted from a (very great) distance. Though it took some convincing to get Mitch Macaphee to move along (his M-Ray disfigurement was weighing on his mood) we relied on his unerring sense of direction, following the narrow halo of his torchlight up a long set of stairs and into what looked like an enormous parking garage. I swore under my breath. Valet parking! We would be expected to provide a tip, and a generous one at that, in exchange for our impounded vehicle. Everyone turned their pockets inside out -- that yielded oo-gatz! The best we could come up with were some spare luncheon vouchers one of us had stuffed into Marvin's courier box. This would have to do.
I
stepped up to the valet window in my Tempelian guise, four false appendages
hanging lifelessly at my sides, and nervously made the transaction. My attendant
must have been a part-timer -- he actually brought the mock Jupiter 2 'round
without any obvious sign of suspicion. I handed over the luncheon vouchers and
gestured to the others, who quickly trundled up the gangway...just as a
Tempelian security officer pulled up in an ion-drive hovercraft. I sounded the
alarm and Matt and I (perpetual stragglers that we are) ran for the ship just as
Mitch nudged it into drive. We lurched out of the garage in a trice, leaving a
saucer-shaped hole in the garage door, no less. Hence the pursuit I mentioned at
the opening, still underway. Clearly the Tempelians have no compunctions about
high-speed chases...or about shooting wildly at moving targets. It's enough to
drive you into...into.... hyperspaaaaaaaace!!!
(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.)
Response
& Responsibility. Some of you (and you know who you are) are aware that
we're from upstate New York, just a stone's throw away from Hamilton College,
which for the last week or so has been ground zero in one of those
O'Reilly-driven political dust-ups that periodically grip the nation for about
ten seconds, then go away. You've probably heard something about it -- how Ward
Churchill, the writer and American Indian Movement leader, was asked to
participate in a forum at Hamilton when someone latched onto an essay he'd
written soon after 9/11 suggesting the victims of the terrorist atrocities bore
some responsibility for the depredations of our national government. Mind you,
the essay was a little over the top, describing the people in the towers as
"little Eichmanns" and employing other language pretty much guaranteed
to get a rise out of people. But the response to this essay (not that anyone
appears to have 
actually
read the thing) quickly spun out of control, stoked by the usual right
wing radio and blogospheric bigmouths. Suffice to say, Hamilton ultimately bowed
to pressure and "uninvited" Churchill, but only after some ditto-head
threatened to bring a gun to the forum... and after every tin-pot politician and
two-bit newspaper editor had had a chance to put the boot in. (Never one to miss
a trick, Governor Pataki called Churchill a "supporter" of terrorists.
Our local newspaper editors sanctimoniously deplored Churchill's
"nasty" essay... then a day later, started running Ann Coulter's
column.)
Of
course, the elephant in the room is this uncomfortable question about to what
extent we are all responsible for what our government does... and to what extent
we shall be held responsible. At the core of Ward Churchill's angry and
vituperative essay is a cautionary observation that we ignore at our own peril:
if we care nothing for the massive suffering and loss of life our foreign policy
causes, people in other lands will care nothing for our suffering and
loss of life. It is pointless to deny that we have meddled in the affairs of
just about every nation on this planet at one time or another. Some, like Iraq,
have been the subject of sustained attack over the course of many years, from
the enormous destruction of the 1991 Gulf War through the sanctions regime that
left hundreds of thousands dead to the current fiasco (to say nothing of the
effects of our earlier open-ended support of Saddam Hussein's regime). It might
be, well, healthy for us as a society to acknowledge that this is a problem for
us in the world. After all, there is nothing unique about Osama bin Laden, no
special skill sets, no particularly compelling charisma. Certainly there are
thousands, perhaps millions who could accomplish what he has if they are
determined enough. 
The
more people who despise us, the greater the chance that one will succeed... and
that people who might otherwise impede an attack would be disgruntled enough to
just look the other way.
Think for a moment about what we have demonstrated to the world just since November. We've validated our choice for maniac president -- no question about whether or not his claim to the White House is legitimate, at least from a non-American perspective. We have assaulted the city of Fallujah in Grozny-fashion, killing thousands, generating 200,000 refugees and destroying 75% of its buildings. As we've ratcheted up our aerial bombardment of Iraq's cities, we've continued our policy of not counting civilian casualties resulting from the actions of our military (Powell recently said he had "no interest" in these figures). We have elevated the man most closely associated with the policy of prisoner abuse and torture to our chief law enforcement officer. We have promoted the woman who enthusiastically peddled lies about Iraqi WMD's to be our chief diplomatic officer (pictured here showing European leaders the direction our foreign policy will be headed in over the next four years). Rumsfeld and the neocons are still ensconced at the Pentagon and are now making threatening noises about Iran.
In short, we appear to be fully behind a policy that is rabidly out of control and promising repeated interventions like the one in Iraq. What will the world's response be? Well...it's probably worth a moment's consideration, maybe during the half-time show... y'think?
luv u,
jp
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02/13/05
Hello...
Okay, here's a riddle for you. What is it that's smaller than a planetoid, yet bigger than a red giant star? That's like a brick wall and an open window at the same time? That's so freaking bright you can't even see it? Give up? Coward! All right, one more clue -- it's like that thing you pour your rent money into every month. Now you've got it. BLACK HOLE.
Yes,
friends, Big Green and company, in their
haste to break free of the six-armed denizens of comet Tempel 1 (now under
threat from NASA's killer "Deep Impact" probe) inadvertently nudged
their second-hand space craft into hyperdrive (when I say "they" I
mean 
"Mitch
Macaphee", our mad science advisor and pilot on this
tour-gone-badly-wrong), a state of momentum that defies all known laws of
physics, particularly those pesky ones that keep us from hopping easily between
galaxies. Our experience of this phenomenon was vintage hyperspace -- room
tilted, passengers frozen in dramatic positions, a reddish monochrome filter
over everything with a slight negative photo-effect. Oh, yes... and a loud WoooWoooWooo
sound that lasted either a moment or countless eons in the time of man, though
probably something in-between those two poles. Imagine, too, a great spiraling
shape turning slowly in a clockwise (or if you're below the equator,
counter-clockwise) motion, with our spaceship in the center spinning even more
slowly in the opposite direction, getting smaller, ever smaller. (No, not that
small... a little larger than that.)
When
our hardy expedition emerged from the other end of this phantasmagorical
experience, we found ourselves in some uncharted quarter of the universe -- no
familiar stars, no distinguishing characteristics, no little booths maintained
by the chamber of commerce. Nutting. Scanning the heavens, we made out a few
novel constellations by connecting the dots -- Mitch Macaphee came up 
with
the "Great Hoagie" (it was sometime around lunch, of course), while
Matt distinguished himself with the discovery of the "Southern Badger"
and "Olaf, The Drunken Bicycle Courier" -- but these memorable
landmarks did little more than distract us while our better minds worked on the
somewhat more urgent issue of WHERE THE HELL ARE WE??? Marshalling a bewildering
array of gizmos, Mitch, John, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) attempted
to retrace our intergalactic steps, searching for any radioactive bread crumbs
we may have strewn in our wake.
Speaking
of crumbs, did I mention that our provisions were practically exhausted? Hell,
yes, my friends -- after more than a month in space, the cupboard is very nearly
bare. Some may recall that we had only planned to be away for a couple of weeks
-- naturally, we didn't stock the galley too heavily (our financial advisor back
on Earth, Geet O'Reilly, was quite adamant on that point. Spoiled food = bad
investment.) Now we've barely a latke to our names, and here we are out
in some uncharted sector, no all-night groceries, no mini-marts, no decent
take-out joints. (Oh, sure, there's an Olive Garden a few parsecs from
here, but Jesus... we're not that hungry yet.) I think it's because of
all that good grub we had on comet Tempel 1 that none of us seems that concerned
about what might be considered an impending crisis. I 
mean,
just yesterday morning, the man-sized tuber whipped up this Florentine egg salad
that probably consumed most of what was left in our food storage units. You can
tell -- this is one root vegetable who's not used to going hungry. (Though he
may be getting some excellent practice quite soon.)
Okay, about that black hole. Actually, Mitch Macaphee found it using his "stellar infrarometer" (in other words, he stumbled upon it wholly by chance). And even though Marvin's little tin-plated brain cannot accept the possibility of its existence, Mitch believes this collapsed sun to be our ticket home... an interdimensional Holland Tunnel that may lead us back to where we were when we went into hyperspace (though, hopefully, not precisely where we were, since those Tempelians were chasing us and shooting at us and calling us bad names). Mitch's theory will soon be put to the test. Not a moment too soon... that egg salad is almost gone. Event horizon, here we come!
(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.)
Coulter
Country. There's a lot going on in the world these days -- the phony
"peace process" in Israel/Palestine, the bloody transition to an Islamic
republic in Iraq, the assault on essential social programs at home, the
onslaught of a terror-based foreign policy around the world... plenty to talk
about. Still, I want to return briefly to this Ward Churchill matter, since it
illuminates an aspect of our political media economy that helps to make so many
of our deepening problems 
possible.
This week, loony reactionary columnist Ann Coulter (pictured here with fellow
barking head, Bill O'Reilly) was the latest to dogpile on Churchill for his
"Some People Push Back" essay about 9/11 -- particularly ironic, since
Coulter is famous for her comments in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, to
wit: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."
Still, from the national soapbox of her syndicated column, this apologist for
terror is able to mount several ad-hominem attacks against Churchill, namely:
-
That Churchill has a "phony war record -- just like John Kerry," thereby perpetuating one discredited slander with the initiation of another.
-
That Churchill isn't a real "Indian" and that he should probably "pack up the old teepee" rather than peddle any more "conspiracy theories" about Federal harassment of Native American activists. (In case you think she's the only racist on the op/ed page these days, check out Krauthammer's comments this week on how "Arabs respect strength.")
-
That by mentioning Iraq and 9/11 in the same essay, Churchill was somehow acknowledging a Saddam Hussein/Terrorism operational relationship, the validity of which Coulter still clings to, despite the fact that this, too, has been utterly discredited.
This,
of course, is vintage Coulter. The column didn't discuss Churchill's essay in
any serious way; just her trademark resort to slander and deliberate
disinformation -- the very tactic she accuses those traitorous liberals of
espousing. It is, in effect, a neo-McCarthyite screed about who should be
allowed to teach and/or speak at American colleges and universities... and who
should not. I'm sure Lynne Cheney and her fellow campus-PC brownshirts are well pleased
with the shit storm generated over what would otherwise have been a very obscure
academic event at Hamilton College: Ward 
Churchill
is being lynched in the mass media, his career destroyed by hacks like Coulter.
More importantly, academia in general and dissident intellectuals in particular
are given one more cautionary example. Speech is only free... if you
agree.
Cheap reactionary pundits didn't start this flap -- they just do the necessary work of fanning the flames. And since commentators on the extreme right can say anything...I mean ANYTHING... they please without fear of the slightest consequence, the smallest fire can quickly become a national conflagration. Reactionary media like Fox News and bloggers like Matt Drudge stoke up a story, then hand it off to the mainstream press, which adopts the framework and context established by the O'Reilly's and Limbaughs of the world. This is how the most narrow political and social viewpoints dominate our culture -- how a hypocritical quasi-religious moron like Dubya can manage to squeak into office twice in a nation that consistently polls more progressive than the greasy politicians who "lead" it. If we are to stop these lunatics from ramming more bad policy down our throats, we will have to behave like those who lived in the Soviet Union -- be skeptical of everything the government and the mass media tells us; organize and build independent popular institutions that can overcome those that the well-heeled right have constructed over the last forty years.
Hard work. But it's the only way, friends.
luv u,
jp
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02/20/05
Ahem...
Testing, testing... one, two, six. Is this thing on? Can you hear me way in the back, there? Good. This one's going to be easy -- I want you all to put your hands together. That's it. Clasp your fingers above your head, then let your hands drop to your sides. Now hop up and down and sing The Volga Boatman. Faster! Faster!
Okay,
you can stop. Sorry to put you through your paces so early in the whatever time
of day it is. Just a little limbering up exercise in preparation for this week's
column -- you want to make sure you stretch properly beforehand to avoid
charliehorses and the like as you follow my lumbering circumlocutions of logic
and questionable facts. (Ouch!) Anyway, last week as you recall, the intrepid
band of space travelers known collectively as Big 
Green
(or, in some circles, "those morons" or "los moronos")
were on the point of making contact with that most mysterious of outer space
phenomena, the dreaded Black Hole.
Beyond the threshold of this dark interstellar riddle it was hoped by our finest
minds (Mitch Macaphee) that we would find an interdimensional tunnel back home
to the lush, green Earth. (No, not that ragged, war-torn, misery-encrusted slag
in space you're always complaining about -- the perfect Earth
dreamt of wistfully by space sojourners great and small.) It is this promise of
home that drove us to take a risk no human being has ever faced before -- to
plunge into a black hole... without even the marginal benefit of halogen fog
lamps. (Hey -- they weren't standard equipment, okay?)
Our
passage through the "event horizon" was, well, uneventful. Aside from
being stretched into a ribbon of atoms fifty light-years long and one micron
thick, we came through it relatively unscathed. (You can never be too
long or too thin, you know.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant)
encountered some mild unsettling of his equilibrium-maintaining mechanism, but
this was nothing more serious than a case of acid reflux. No, it was after that
point when the experience became more of a roller coaster ride. You think I'm
speaking metaphorically? Not a bit of it. No, I mean a roller coaster ride,
like the Cyclone at Coney Island... an actual roller coaster. There was a
ticket
booth and everything. (It was a Tuesday, so all rides were half price if you
brought your parents or a robot friend.) Man, there's this one big climb that
takes about five minutes to reach the summit, then you go straight down into a
trough of water (well, it looked like water, anyway). The man size tuber
screamed like a chimp the whole way down and halfway up the next hill. We had to
put him back in his climate controlled terrarium for the duration.
Okay,
here's the thing to remember about black holes. You can ride all day for a
couple of bucks... but the designer of the universe knows you can only
stand it for an hour or so. That's why the egress is so clearly marked. You ride
though this funhouse section, duck a few ill-aimed throws from the arcade booths
(punters hoping for a kewpie doll), and it's out through the main parking lot.
This we did, despite whining from the back seat (if I have to come back there
AGAIN...!), and once again our anemic and ruddy molecules were stretched like a rubber
band around a wad of junk mail thick as your ass. We passed through the
interdimensional portal and, as luck would have it, popped out of a crater on
the dark side of the moon... Earth's moon. (You know the one -- large,
spheroid object in the night sky, with a kind of smudgy smiley face blasted into
it by eons of meteor impacts and volcanism... look up tonight, you can't miss
it.) And so, our fuel almost 
exhausted,
we coasted the quarter million mile journey home to the big blue-green marble
that, after so long in space, looked somehow unfamiliar to us.
That wasn't all that looked unfamiliar. A piece of advice for those of you contemplating long space journeys -- hire someone to keep an eye on your squat house while you're away. No, the mongooses didn't take over our living quarters again. But somehow over the past two months, Christo and Jeanne-Claude must have dropped by and wrapped the entire abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in fabric. Even the doors and windows. Now, I've got nothing against modern art...but this is a bit too real for my taste.
(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.)
Field
Promotions. The week started with the United States of America
criticizing a country for occupying another country with its military. No, really...
you probably heard about it. Syria should withdraw from Lebanon now, we say --
it has no business being there. Fancy that. How many Syrian troops are in
Lebanon? Probably around 15,000 -- maybe 10% of what we have stationed in Iraq
right now, if you count some of the mercenaries... I mean, contractors
Rumsfeld relies on so heavily. Syrian forces were encouraged by the U.S. and
others to enter the Levant back in the mid-seventies, and like many occupying
armies, they don't seem to know when or how to leave. As unwelcome and
illegitimate as their presence clearly is to many Lebanese, one can imagine a
more rational justification for it in the "vital national interests"
vein than we've been able to muster for our much more destructive stay in Iraq.
Scenes like the bombing that killed former prime minister Hariri are an everyday
occurrence there, and yet our leaders persist in trying to frame this enterprise
as something 
positive
for the entire region. Whereas Syria's occupation of Lebanon is intolerable and
Syria is out of step with the new Middle East the U.S. is hammering together
with high explosives. (Funny -- it seems like the Syrians are more "with
the program" than we give them credit for.)
I see, too, that Negroponte has been tapped to serve as National Intelligence Director. That particular crony of poppa Bush and old mother Reagan always seems to be getting chosen for something. What has it been, eight months since he became our first ambassador to the amazing new perpetually exploding Iraq? Not a very long hitch, but probably well long enough to accomplish what he was hired for -- establish the world's largest CIA station and put native Iraqi death squads in action... basically the same service he provided in Honduras during the early eighties. He's probably an ideal choice for National Intelligence Director, since he'll be presiding over a newly emboldened military/intelligence apparatus that is, as we speak, busily recreating the abuses for which they became so notorious in previous decades. Negroponte has all the right "I know nothing...I see nothing..." bona fides for a major cabinet position. And of course, with his valuable contributions to the administration's ongoing failures in Iraq and at the U.N., it was time for a merit promotion anyway. You've earned it, John -- good going!
In
any case, the Iraqi death march continues, mostly off the radar screen of the
corporate media... but what is shown widely is bad enough. The place is now the
world's most important proving and training ground for jihadi militants, it is
broadly conceded -- a live-fire zone where they can refine tactics and personnel
for deployment elsewhere, the consequences of which we will be grappling with
for many years beyond the tenure of the current band of jackals running our
national government. It might also be wise to consider what this is doing to our
own people. For the first time in decades, seriously battle-hardened troops will
be filtering back into their communities (if they're ever able to de-mobilize,
that is), carrying with them the physical and mental/emotional damage that all
wars produce in those condemned to fighting them. And as the rest of us continue
to lead our consumer lifestyles with hardly a thought to the distant abstraction
of 
the
Iraq war, our tax dollars are funneled into more weapons systems and more
aggressive efforts to entice young people to witlessly volunteer for this
gruesome project. Army, Navy, and Air Force ads now openly portray the targeting
of other human beings as an unbelievably cool thing to do, as if war were just a
somewhat more realistic release of Quake or Grand Theft Auto. (You
get to fire "real rockets" ... at real people!) And, of course,
there's the money card, as the Pentagon offers signing bonuses that kids from
economically depressed communities find hard to turn down. Even so, recruitment
is down. I personally hope they lower the age (and sanity) restrictions so that
folks like Jonah Goldberg and Ann Coulter can finally have the opportunity to
take part in this war they love so well. There's a lot of great fighting spirit
out there in pundit-land waiting to be tapped -- let's use it!
Eternal Question. When should we withdraw from Iraq? Here's the best way to decide. Put yourself on Haifa street with car bombs going off all around you. You're wearing the uniform of the occupier like a big bull's eye. Now do you know when "we" should leave?
luv u,
jp
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
02/27/05
Good on ya...
Anybody seen my pocket knife? How about a pair of scissors? Broken bottle? Any sharp edge will do. Got to get some sunlight in this bedroom of mine, damn it all. Bloody Christo and his bloody conceptual art! No sunlight -- now there's a concept.
Yes,
friends, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill -- the place in which we flop -- has
been tightly wrapped by the renowned French artist (or some shameless pretender)
to the point where we can't even see out the stupid windows. Gradually over the
past week we've ripped open a few air holes and gaps in the mauve fabric through
which some light may shine, but hell -- this is a three-week installation and I
don't think I can last half that long before tearing that sucker into dishrags
and selling it as another form of art entirely. Perhaps little pennants mounted
on hammer stocks... or parachutes for tiny plastic skydivers. (Our financial
advisor Geet O'Reilly would be pleased to hear me talking this way about turning
our peculiar circumstances into money making opportunities, particularly in the
wake of a disastrous interplanetary tour that ended up costing us money
due to... well, due to a different set of peculiar circumstances. Hey...
what are you lookin' at?)
This
whole Christo (or mock-Christo) mill wrapping thing has turned what should have
been a grateful homecoming into an enormous pain in the butt, quite frankly. I
mean, aside from the problem with our doors and windows, we've 
also
got bunches of people out on the street gawking at us at all times of the day
and night. I went out on Monday to get some staples -- no, not paper fasteners;
essentials, like cumin seeds and banjo strings -- and as I squeezed
through the crowd on the sidewalk, some rubberneck in a purple tam and Nehru
jacket stroked his van dyke and muttered to an affected looking companion,
"The squatters are fabulous. Nice touch." Arts & Leisure
reporters from the local newspapers and TV channels are constantly in our faces
-- in fact, some clown even did a "root on the street" interview with
the man-sized tuber on the eleven o'clock news! Jeezus -- here we just completed
an interplanetary tour that led to a month-long hostage drama on a condemned
world at the edge of our solar system, and do you think ONE of these fuckers is
even mildly interested? Not! All they want to talk about is
sculpture, sculpture, sculpture. What a crock.
To
tell you the truth, I have my doubts about the provenance of this
three-dimensional design creation our beloved Cheney Hammer Mill has become.
This seems more like a copy-cat installation of some kind. Matt and John are
with me on this, as I suspect Mitch Macaphee would be as well...if he hadn't
scurried off to his precious mad science convention the moment we touched down.
Our worst fears were confirmed Wednesday night when Marvin (my personal robot
assistant) became the victim of a drive-by wrapping on his way back from the
local third-run cinema (he was seeing "I Robot" for the fourth
freaking time). Now, such wanton acts of random sculpture don't happen all by 
themselves...
and I happen to know that the real Christo is in Brussels right now,
winding bolts of fabric around the convention center where Mitch Macaphee is now
presenting his depraved formulae and drinking way too much free booze. So what
we have here is some kind of vendetta by a very frustrated terror-artist.
Chilling prospect indeed.
Distraction, distractions. Like we need this right now, right? As it is, we've been trying to meet with our financial advisor on how to get out of this hole we're in, but this wrapping business has put the scare into her. Once I can get Marvin out of his windings, I'll send him over with a message of reassurance. (I'm sure as hell not going out there.)
Look Who's T-40. Hey, kids -- Motley Crue has a top ten hit. Surely this is the end of days.
(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.)
Road
Warrior. Bush was off to Europe this week, following the slimy trail left by
his charming new Secretary of State, shaking hands and assigning new nicknames
to various heads of state who look mildly uncomfortable in the presence of a
madman. Propelled by his pre-fab crusade for "freedom", our fearless
commander wasted no time in wagging a corrective finger at the Evil Ones as he
checked off his string of photo opportunities. Settle down, Iran -- my good
friend Jacques Chirac and I have got your number! Not so fast, Dear Leader, Vlad
(the impaler) Putin and I are gonna' teach you a thing or two. All of this
is calculated to make us think YES -- This is a BRAND NEW DAY! Old Mother Europe
is back at the table and drinking the kool-aid -- those ugly divisions are all
behind us now. We're all mates on the same pirate ship now, hoisting the jolly
roger with 
Dubya
at the helm. Arrrrr, me hardies! There be plenty o' doubloons fer
all-a-ye, so stop yer bellyachin'. Haaarrrrrrrr.
What doubloons? Why, the neoliberal project that stretches from one side of the globe to the other, that's what. This is what Bush means by "freedom" -- it's the stake they're planting squarely in the heart of Iraqi society, no less. With Washington's people seeded throughout the new Shia fundamentalist government, America can be assured that radical structural adjustment to that nation's economy will be implemented in large measure over the objections of the vast majority of Iraqis, including privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and foreign control of its natural resources. With an occupying force of more than 130,000 and the largest U.S. embassy in the world, America has literal veto power over the actions of Iraq's new government, including who will be its prime minister. This is what the Bush-ites mean by "democracy". This is what our economically-conscripted, stop-lossed, and reactivated retiree armed forces are being press-ganged into sacrificing life and limb to defend. This is how we will maintain the crucial leverage over the Middle East's enormous petroleum reserves that our strategic planners have been coveting for over fifty years.
Was
this a legitimate reason for going to war? Obscene as it is, the question did
not even arise. The fact is, people were manipulated into supporting this war on
the basis of rationales that had nothing to do with reality. Even now,
discussions of "exit strategies" in the corporate media won't raise
our longstanding obsession in the region (strategic resources) as the principal
reason for "staying the course." This works. Generally speaking, the
American people are not focused on this war to the extent they would be if there
were a draft...or if they were being forced to pay for it up front. It's easy to
bamboozle people when they're uninterested in the truth to begin with. Militant
blather from pundits who've never been within a mile of military service (like
Ann Coulter, who's closest brush with the military is the fact that she vaguely
looks like one-time soldier Lee Harvey Oswald) probably sounds right enough to
those of us who are not paying attention. We have the luxury of treating the war
as an abstraction -- an effort that's worth the sacrifice so long as we are not
the ones being asked to sacrifice anything. The longer the administration can
maintain this level of disinterest, the more time they'll have to build the
framework for a permanent U.S. presence in the region.
Take care out there.
luv u,
jp