NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(January '04)

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01/04/04

Hola,

The new year is upon us like the pox, and not a moment too soon...as we were fresh out of 2003, the last day having come to an end just a few mornings ago. Luckily 2004 followed quick upon its heels, picking up where its predecessor left off. How? Providence, my friend. Without the capital city of Rhode Island, we would fall into the inky void of space/time. (Or is that spacebar? Which is the one you hit with your thumb? Damnit, are you listening?)

Anyway. Your friends in Big Green saw the new year in with the usual panache -- hoisting a few hearty mugs of I.P.A. in the dusty billiard room of ye olde Cheney Hammer Mill, then breaking out the Zenite snuff and carousing through the streets of Colombo, putting coins in random parking meters and cackling like ravens in the alleys. Our merry-making led us back to our beds around 3:00am local time, where I (at least) resolved to spend much of the coming year (up to a third, perhaps more). Now that's what I call a proper kick off. 

Of course, the tab for the evening was punishing...and hard to focus on that next morning. Try as I might, I couldn't make the two images of that long column of figures converge, and since the others were still unconscious, I decided to hand the bill off to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for interpretation. Well..."handed off" is not quite the term....I actually fed the bill into his data entry slot for analysis. There was a lot of whirring and clicking and flashing of lights, punctuated by the occasional backfire, then the paper emerged from his....his printer egress, which Mitch Macaphee (in his infinite wisdom) assigned to a rather unfortunate quadrant of Marvin's anatomy. According to the calculations of our mechanical friend, our tab for New Year's Eve (including refreshments, replacement windows, and ornamental shoulder-mounted faux parrots) was $47,521.62 (US). 

This seemed a little high to Matt and John, and they questioned Marvin's numbers -- one can hardly blame them in light of my personal robot assistant's recent erratic behavior, stemming from a programming glitch that has yet to be corrected. We sought out a second opinion; something impossible to obtain from a professional source on this long holiday weekend. Failing that, we handed the bill off to the only individuals we could get a hold of on such short notice -- the man-sized tuber and "Squx", Marvin's pet monkey. Each was provided with a copy of the bill, some writing paper, and a pencil, and told to go to work. (Hey, look...so what if it's pointless? Some people watch football on New Year's Day, okay?) 

The results of this experiment? As of this writing, the page put before the man-sized tuber remains blank (he may still be considering his solution). "Squx", on the other hand, began scribbling and stabbing away at the paper from the first moment, making good use of the pencil, a carrot, some fresh fruit, a yardstick, a handful of cowshit, and whatever else she could grab. The product of her frenzied efforts was difficult to express in mathematical terms, but I believe it bore some relationship to the number 17,027... which was far more agreeable a sum than what Marvin had come up with. Yes, it was still more than we had in readies. But -- and this is important! -- it was less than it was before. Nice job, "Squx"!

With debt piling up and Marvin no longer employed at the constabulary, we were faced with the tiresome necessity of scratching around for cash. You know the drill -- stuff like picking up reusable ordinance on Gung-Ho's firing range, dribbling basketballs for vacationing pro athletes, breaking up crackers in people's soup for some spare change...those kinds of things. What a way to start the New Year, eh? Still, with any luck, Mitch Macaphee or some other technical genius will take the time to program the pirate out of Marvin so that he can return to his semi-remunerative post and start paying our bills again. Who knows? Maybe we can even find him a position through Nieman Marcus as a life-size domestic robot for the couple who has every....Hey! Come back, Marvin! I was just kidding! 

History Revisited. Over the holidays I had occasion to stop in at the local Borders® Book Store. There was an intriguing display set out on a table at the entrance to the "Politics" section: not one, not two, but three different hagiographic volumes on Ronnie Reagan (including Peggy Noonan's ludicrous When Character Was King) cheek-by-jowl with two of the most recent anti-Clinton screeds, the titles of which escape me (something on the order of overcoming Bill's bitter legacy). Add one or two hallucinogenic volumes by Coulter and/or Hannity and you've got all of the right-Republican talking points in a single, easy-to-buy stack. And since the Democrats' positions mostly involve timid tactical responses to Republican tirades, this truly represents the national political dialogue in a nutshell. 

Here are two ex-presidents we cannot be allowed to forget. Clinton has been most of what the right has had to talk about for the past eleven years. Personally, I agree that he was a lousy president...but my criticism of Clinton is over the considerable extent to which he shared the political agenda of his right-wing detractors. (Fact is, Governor Ahh-nold has shown us that if Clinton didn't belong to a competitive political brand, the Republicans would fucking love the guy!) From kicking the shit out of third-worlders to cutting Reagan's notorious "welfare queens" off at the knees, to promoting corporate globalization, Clinton was a Republican/Conservative in all but name -- that's the political space he occupies, despite the occasional "liberal" rhetorical flourish. The continuing right-wing vendetta against him is a political act -- an attempt to achieve their maximum political objectives by any means necessary, from innuendo to impeachment. 

These people want more than mere victory. They want to own history. They want to be indelibly "right" in a historical sense, so Clinton becomes a symbol for a "failed liberalism" of the past, which (of course) he never particularly subscribed to. The flip side of this coin is Reagan, to whom the right-Republicans ascribe all kinds of improbable achievements, such as single-handedly "winning" the Cold War (something like being born in a cabin he built with his own two hands). They need both Reagan and Clinton to perpetuate their Manichean view of American political history, which is what they cling to in the absence of any coherent philosophy other than unbridled greed and arrogance. Still, even with all this absurd posturing, the core mission of U.S. foreign and domestic policy remains that of serving the interests of institutional and corporate power, controlled by the narrow ownership class at the very top of our economic order. This will be true under the banners of both Clinton and Reagan...unless and until the vast majority of us (who are currently being screwed by both sides) wake up and do something about it.   

Take care out there. 

luv u,

jp

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01/11/04

Bop-shedoobie,

Is that Homer's rosy-fingered dawn reaching through my bedroom window blinds? Looks to be. Then again, how did he know what color those fingers were...wasn't he blind? Or was it deaf? No...that was Beethoven. Wait a minute -- Milton was blind, damn it! What is it about these epic poets? Oh, never mind...it's bloody first thing in the morning, that's all I meant to say. (So I'm not a morning person.)

Well, you'll be glad to know that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thought better of his decision to leave after hearing my pathetic entreaties. No, he didn't exactly turn on his brass heel in the driveway. It took him the better part of that afternoon to return to the bosom of his fractured family, truth be told. Marvin may be an automaton, but he's got pride just the same as the rest of us, and it was that and little else that kept him meandering through the village until he felt right about coming back home. Frankly, I think he's a little cheesed off at us for not accepting his tabulation of our New Year's Eve Revelry bill at face value. He spent the rest of the day in his room (I assumed he was sulking, but in actuality he was building a crude set of wooden monkey bars out of discarded hammer handles. I think it's for his pet monkey, "Squx".) 

We finally got our chief mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee to agree to come out of his Bolognese villa and re-adjust Marvin's electronic brain to spec. He told Matt that he'd fly out right after the Annual World Conference on Artificial Mind Transfer Experiments (like most of the other delegates, Mitch is giving a paper on non-surgical swapping of a human mind with that of a chicken -- they never tire of that experiment). For his own part, Marvin hasn't undergone any major personality changes in the last couple of weeks. That thing with the accordion playing and the monkey really stuck. Only trouble is, they won't have him back at the constabulary because none of them can stand the racket. (I tried suggesting to them that he may have lost his nut in the line of duty, but they weren't buying.) I'm telling you, we need to get Mitch working on Marvin before he slips any further into goofiness and starts playing banjo or something. (I, for one, would prefer the "or something.") 

In the interests of keeping everyone engaged in productive work as much as possible, we decided to charge the man-sized tuber with working out Big Green's itinerary for the coming year. Just "roughing it in," as it were -- you understand. Using the usual combination of cryptic runes and semaphore, we communicated to the great tuber our intention to do at least one major tour in 2004, preferably another sweep of the outer planets and a jog over to Kaztropharius 137b, where our music still commands a substantial audience. I think we got through to the oversized root vegetable because he began to loom over a tablet of college-ruled paper with as severe a look of intent as I can ever remember seeing on a member of the plant kingdom. We left him alone for a few hours, then stopped in later to check his work. By the looks of things, he had enlisted the help of someone more adept at writing -- probably "Squx", judging by the medium (soil on a stick) -- to produce the scribbled out roster in front of us. 

Hmmm...looks like we'll be booking another interstellar tour for Spring...and it looks like we'll be kicking it off in...Madagascar? Interesting choice. There also appears to be some kind of carnival slated for February-March. And what's this? Laser surgery? That can't be right. Wait a minute -- a cheese eating contest? Whoa. See what happens when you let vegetables rule? We'll have to just work with this a little and get back to you. (Jeezus.)

Miracle Growth. With all the yammering about an improving economy filling the national corporate media, it hardly seems surprising that the harsh reality for most people would suggest just the opposite. I don't know about any of you out there in web-land, but I don't see a lot of hiring going on in my little patch of the country. While job loss has slowed somewhat nationwide, job gains have gone next to nowhere. So what is the nature of this "good" economic news, exactly? Who the hell is it good for? I think you already know the answer -- it's good for the people Dubya was selected to serve...people of wealth and station, the captains of industry, the folks who "own" the country. They're spending like sailors, while the rest of us are maxing out our credit cards (personal debt has doubled in ten years) and picking up the slack for the many who have lost their jobs. That's "increased productivity" for you and me. 

You probably won't hear Treasury Secretary John "CSX" Snow say it, but there's a basic tenet of capitalism that doesn't appear in any of the hyper-optimistic diatribes about growth and boom. Free enterprise relies on a certain level of structural unemployment to maintain downward pressure on wages. "Maestro" Greenspan has alluded to this principle in some of this franker testimony about worker insecurity being a good thing for the economy. With plenty of available labor, the value of labor goes down -- supply and demand, right? People don't ask for raises or promotions when they're afraid of being the next to get shit-canned. On the contrary, they tend to work harder and longer to secure their position and increase their "value" as an employee. That's good news for the John Snows, Dick Cheneys, Don Rumsfelds, and other CEO's of the world. And if it should suck for the rest of us, who cares, right? Losers make winners. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. 

This is why you'll hear, say, a news reporter on PBS talk about tremendous "growth" in India as if it's a great thing, when in fact it's leaving the great mass of that country's population in ever deeper misery. Some people count more than others. The folks in Chevy Chase, MD., enjoy full congressional representation, while the folks next door in D.C. don't. (How long would that last if the latter were mostly white?) Your kids might get killed in the next helicopter shoot-down in Iraq, while Dubya's kids are safe and dry. It's not that this administration invented heinous inequality. It's just that Dubya -- being the product of a highly privileged, old-boy-network, automatic-free-pass society -- embraces those values with a peculiarly obtuse sincerity. Like someone once said, he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple. 

Military Brief. About ten U.S. soldiers (none of whom, I'm constrained to point out, were related to anyone "important") have taken a bullet for Dubya in the last few days alone. At the same time, Colin Powell announces he still stands behind his remarkably discredited WMD testimony. Now there's a good soldier.  

Take care out there. 

luv u,

jp

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01/18/04

Pencils down!

We've had a cold snap here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Had to close all the windows and break up some furniture for the wood stove. It's a sign of things to come, that's what I think...change is in the air, and I'm not talking nickels and dimes. (No, not quarters, either. Keep going.)

This isn't some cryptic reference to that cockamamie itinerary drawn up by the man-sized tuber (with help from "Squx" the monkey) last week. No sir -- we're on a whole 'nother track. Your brethren in Big Green have heard the call of our president, and we will not shirk our duty. As some of you may recall, we spent some time in the early days of the Dubya administration, serving on his Commission for the Study of Extraterrestrial Phenomena (the X-Commission), sleeping on Dick Cheney's living room carpet next to all those marked-up maps of the oil fields around Kirkuk. You remember...anyway, our services were no longer needed after a short time in Washington and we sailed into the sunrise. But now...at the dawn of a bold new age of space exploration, Dubya has tapped his able cohorts in Big Green once again, hoping to draw on our vast experience vis-à-vis the red planet and turn it into positive political capital...I mean, solid scientific achievement. 

Hey -- don't look so surprised. After all, what band is better qualified than us for this venture? The big guy wants to go to the moon -- we've been there many times. He wants to send somebody (Paul O'Neil, perhaps) to Mars -- we know the territory pretty well. What's more, we have an entire space-ready team assembled representing some of the best interstellar exploratory talent in modern pop music. The president knows when he calls us that he's getting more than just three shabby-looking proto-alternative rock musicians...he's also getting Mitch Macaphee, Trevor James Constable, Dr. Hump, and everyone else who has supported us on our various tours, not to mention sFshzenKlyrn, a bona fide space alien. What other group can offer that, huh? 

Of course, this will alter our plans for 2004 somewhat. Oh, we should be able to keep to our grueling tour schedule, but the cheese-eating contest is definitely in jeopardy. Since that was the man-sized tuber's brain child, it's not likely to create a problem for anyone. The only one likely to have a problem with our new government commission is Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Since he wasn't built in the United States (like we were), they probably won't let him enter without...well...either a visa or an import license, I'm not sure which. I know Marvin doesn't like the sound of this, but if we run into trouble at the "border," as it were, we should consider dressing him up like one of those Niemann Marcus robots...or maybe a prototype portable missile on its way back to the Johnson Space Center. Some kind of Texas angle, you know? We could get Mitch Macaphee to take Marvin to a robotics tailor shop and get him a pair of booster-stage trousers. Sounds like a plan. Or...maybe not. 

I know what you're thinking (again). There's some mercenary element to this whole thing, am I right? Perish the thought! Far be it from us to be motivated by crass prurient interests. Having said that, I will now say the exact opposite. Sure, we're as eager as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, or any other NASA/Pentagon contractor to get our hands on those riches ($1 billion in additional funds next year, I believe...Cha-Ching!). But each of us has our own special reason for wanting to participate. For me, it's that spaceman food, especially the ice cream that comes in a foil packet. For John, it's the prospect of an orbital or moon-based live room for his drums. For Matt, it's the opportunity to meet Katherine Harris and other Florida luminaries in person. And for sFshzenKlyrn, it's a chance to escape the flood of Spam email that's choking his inbox every day of the week. (Poor bastard can't get away from it. And he doesn't even have a member...or a mortgage.)

Shoot The Moon. As Graham Chapman once said while appearing in military garb between Monty Python skits, "Well, that was a bit of fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh." Only now we're being treated to the lowest brand of comedy imaginable as we approach this year's state of the union address. The "lines of the day" have been pure Rovian calculation, right down to the dollar amounts Karl's Kreation has been tossing about between fundraisers, each one more ludicrous than the last. The quest for a manned Mars landing is one they took straight out of Poppy's playbook -- a few extra billions to throw at favored contractors, plus a cheap election year stab at the "vision thing" (like Bush I, the Mars project has a long timeline ahead of it...so no tangible progress need be made during junior's tenure, re-election or no). 

From the "line of the day" to the "lie of the day," they're nothing if not consistent. Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neil provided a little background to the obvious. I can tell you, there was buzz amongst the peace activist community long before 9/11 about Dubya's plans to invade Iraq. Frankly, I didn't buy it at the time, recalling 1991 and Poppy's reluctance to see Iraq broken in three. But the word was out soon after the inauguration. At the very least, it was obvious from the start that Dubya and the boys were bellicose as all hell -- recall the standoff with China during the summer of 2001. And O'Neil's classified map allocating Iraqi oil fields to various allies looks like the one that Judicial Watch guy got hold of from Cheney's Energy Policy meetings some months back. So the revelations of the Suskind/O'Neil book are just a few more of those almost daily instances in which major administration figures are demonstrated to be...well...less than trustworthy. Pathologically so. 

Still, when I reflect on how Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about some petty affair with an intern, it amazes me the degree to which Bush has not been taken to task for the most odious campaign of lies you can perpetrate -- the kind that drives a nation to war unnecessarily. Their continuing arrogance about the occupation is costing lives, both American (three more today) and Iraqi, and the lies just keep on coming. Every confident pronouncement about how we are "winning the fight" is a challenge to the resistance -- this in the face of some of the highest non-lethal casualty figures since the start of the war. Even more ominous, the Shi'ite majority in Iraq is showing signs of impatience, demonstrating in large numbers against their continuing penury and the "caucus" system Bremer and Dubya are trying to impose in lieu of elections. The administration wants something that looks democratic, while shutting out the people they don't want participating in government -- particularly those who may expect the U.S. to get the hell out...completely. 

Iraq's Shia are a bit like Vietnam's Buddhists -- a long marginalized majority, they've been on stand-by, watchfully waiting to see how this is going to develop. If they feel they're being screwed yet again, as the Turks, Brits, Baathists, and Americans have done before, they have the numbers to make this Sunni-based insurgency look like a grade school food fight.    

Take care out there.   

luv u,

jp

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01/25/04

Hello...

Back with us again, eh? Good lord, you've got a strong stomach. Who would have thunk that our little window onto the web would attract such persistent attention, week after week. You should get a medal, damnit...hell, after four years of this, you should get campaign ribbons. I've always said, the Miami Beach audience is the greatest audience in the world. Or was it "The Great One" who always said that? Perhaps only when he was in Miami Beach (it probably didn't go over too well anywhere else). But I digress...

Well, as you might expect after last week's news, Big Green is in full training mode, getting our little entourage in shape for the challenge that lies ahead. With the prospect of playing a key role in Dubya's surrealistic new American space program, there is much to be done. Not that we're actually doing any of it quite yet, but we have been pacing around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill with determination, our jaws set firm, our hands at the ready, our minds focused on the project we've been chosen to implement. Every time I pass the closet where we keep our antiquated fax machine, I stick my head in the doorway and see if any new orders have come through from the pope...I mean, the president. (Wrong geezer. The pope's the one with the brimless hat.) I think the others have been checking, too. 

Once we've got all this preliminary stuff out of the way, we'll have to begin our conditioning in earnest. No one is quite sure how that's going to play out. The task may fall to our neighbor Gung-Ho, since he is a government contractor (on the Q.T. -- CIA budget, you understand) and has the facilities (obstacle course, cafeteria, flight simulators, etc.) and, hell, like most next door neighbors, he's right next door. But then, as our recent experience on the lamb (or in the shoe, as it were) has shown us, Camp Gung-Ho is no place for the faint of heart. That leaves me out of it, at the very least...and possibly Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as well. Truth be told, no one is all that hot on the idea, especially the part about the live-fire exercises -- this time without our full Kevlar body armor. (Sounds a bit iffy for prospective spacemen. Whatever happened to "we came in peace"?)

Our good friend and chief mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee (now happily ensconced in Matt's private cupola with a truckload of canapés pilfered from his last scientific conference) has come up with an alternative solution for our training program. He says he can install a customized "drill sergeant" software application into Marvin, swapping out his loveable absent-minded-automaton personality with that of a relentless, hard-driving, dictatorial robo-coach. (My guess is that he would actually turn out more like the stop-action reindeer coach on Rankin-Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, though I have no reason for thinking so.) 

The idea of being ordered around by Marvin is anathema to my fellow band mates, but we all know what's at stake here -- the very future of space exploration itself, already. Hell, we may just end up supervising our own physical conditioning -- which would probably involve, well, pacing around the Cheney Hammer Mill, doing chin-ups on the rungs of our rooftop water tower, hurdling over the man-sized tuber and other slow-moving obstacles...that sort of thing.

So many decisions...so little time. Such is the price of commitment. Nobody said it was going to be easy. (Well...actually, "Squx" said it would be easy...but then, she's a monkey. Serves me right for listening to her.)

Twist & Shout. What a week for American politics, eh? The big Iowa turnaround. Another ludicrous state of the union address (as Dubya entered the congressional chamber, CNN's screen crawl read: "Chimp goes wild"). The U.S. death toll in Iraq passed 500. And of course, Dr. Dean's notorious howl. Have you ever seen a media/pundit culture so overjoyed as this to latch onto a "story" and spin it like a top? Good god, they haven't had to focus on questions of policy since before caucus night -- what a gift! This is how candidates get buried in today's image-obsessed political climate. Bush puts on a flight suit and he's an action hero. Dean gives a revival-meeting type pep talk to 3500 people and he's some kind of "animal" -- far too unstable to guide the ship of state...not because of his positions or even his administrative style, but because he made a scary noise. Sort of. 

So, why is the 40-pc conservative media orchestra (you know, the one that blows hard every time they don't get their way) and its corporate media echo chamber steamrolling Dean over a trifle? Hell -- I thought he was the guy they wanted Bush to run against; the strangely conservative George McGovern of 2004...so why are they so intent on making a Muskie out of him? I don't think it's probably his crypto-Marxist proposal to balance the federal budget without cutting defense. My guess is that it has more to do with fundraising. The massive institutional and corporate interests that own the media (and most of the rest of the country) and fill the campaign coffers of both major parties would rather not take a chance on letting someone who relies principally on $100 individual donations have a shot at the presidency. Even though Dean is politically more conservative on some issues than Kerry, the big money boys don't want anyone in the Oval office who isn't bought and paid for many times over. A national candidate who doesn't need their bribe machine is just too risky for their taste. I think that is partly why we're hearing so bloody much about this "scream" thing.

The objective is clear -- knock Dean out by making most god-fearing, TV-watching American voters uneasy about his becoming president; portray him as mentally unstable enough to do reckless things, like...oh...invading some puny oil-rich country on the basis of fabricated evidence and getting 500+ soldiers killed for nothing, that kind of thing. And while our chattering classes are all obsessing over "the scream," a couple more American kids each day march into oblivion, with many more wounded and otherwise fucked up for life, as the fanatical planners of this Iraq travesty whistle a little tune and go about their grisly business down in Washington D.C., unencumbered by the discerning attentions of our very style-conscious press. This is an election in which the fate of thousands of our fellow citizens (and many others around the world) may well be decided, and the august organs of America's fourth estate are playing it like the makeover team on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" -- Oh, Howard...it's about the scream!

Take care out there.     

luv u,

jp

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