NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(July '05)
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
7/3/05
Yah-mergency!
Boin, baby, boin! No, we're not talking some allegorical "disco inferno" here, where satisfaction tends to occur in a chain reaction. I'm talkin' genuine oxidation or whatever the hell those science freaks call it. It's hot, it's cracklin', it's....fiyuh! Yes, fire -- man's best friend and most relentless enemy. That seemingly magical process by which solid things turn into smoke and ash. That will be this week's science project, boys and girls. (Next week: construction.)
As
you may recall (perhaps with the help of a hypnotist who specializes in the
recovery of relatively pointless memories), last week a third story office of
the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill was set ablaze by that ne'er-do-well antimatter
Lincoln feller our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee somehow pulled from the
ethers. Matt's flammable objects collection and my valuable cache of kerosene in
open buckets may be fairly considered a total loss, along with at least 475
discarded hammer stocks and some personnel files from the early 1930s. We were
fortunate that John has a friend in the local fire brigade who owed him a favor,
otherwise we would have been attempting to extinguish the fire with the only
portable fluid close to hand in that part of the mill -- namely my stockpile of
gasoline in open buckets that is kept in the room across the hall. (Hey, don't
look at me like that. We're in the midst of an energy crisis here, okay? Those
buckets o' gas are going to be worth a fortune in a few weeks, just wait
and see.) The fire squad brought the old No. 5 pumper and flooded the place with
bilgewater -- just the thing.
Now,
I don't want to leave you with the impression that our little squat house is now
anything less than habitable. Aside from violating every building code on the
books, this joint is built to last, and it would take more than a little
two-alarm fire to bring it down. Having said that, we did wind up with the sort
of situation in that old foreman's office where we might need hazmat suits just
to retrieve anything that might be of value. (I was keeping all my take sheets
in there, as it happens.) Unfortunately, all of our personal hazmat suits were
at the cleaners. We considered hiring these strange Russian 
émigrés
up the street who routinely walk about in hazmat suits, but thought better of it
when Matt suggested Marvin (my personal robot assistant) should be sent in to
handle the recovery project. It would be an understatement to say Marvin didn't
take the request very well -- he had that look he gets whenever you ask him to
do something around the house. (Marvin's going through a difficult phase. His
inventor, Mitch Macaphee, says it will pass, but I'm not so sure.)
So...
what of the culprit? That nasty Lincoln doppelganger with nay beard? You won't
believe this (or perhaps you will). After setting fire to the freaking place (on
his first day of existence, no less!), mister not-so-great emancipator made his
way down to the basement room where Trevor James Constable's spare orgone
generating device was still idling. Our ceiling mounted security camera showed
him leaping right into the St. Elmo's Fire of the orgone generated time warp,
presumably to be carried backward in time to that era to which it was our
intention to send him in the first place. This appeared to be the impulsive
action of a madman, akin to Robert Duvall on the Time Tunnel, only I doubt old
beardless Abe will meet his end in a hive of giant invisible honey bees. As
unlikely as it might seem, Mitch 
Macaphee
thinks there is a strong possibility that anti-Lincoln might disrupt the course
of history in precisely the manner we had in mind -- that is, encouraging the
South to secede, rather than preventing it. (Trevor James, on the other hand, is
not so sure; he thinks anti-Lincoln will probably do something a bit more
subtle, like prevent the development of instant lemonade or put propeller
beanies on people who ride unicycles.)
Ha -- what am I thinking? If he were to do any of those things, we would know about it right now. I called a friend back home to see if some ersatz cracker son-of-a-failed-president was still president, and the answer was yes. Georgia and Alabama are still on all of the U.S. maps, along with all those other Dixie states. Looks like anti-Lincoln had a whole 'nuther agenda. Now....anybody seen my packet of Minute Maid....instant.....lemon...ade......?
(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.)
Cost
and Privilege. Dubya gave a spotlight speech in front of a military audience
this week. Touted as a major policy address on his strategy for prevailing in
Iraq, our erstwhile leader declared the mess in Mesopotamia as "worth the
sacrifice." I have no doubt that he feels that way, as I'm sure do Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice, and all the war's other designers and cheerleaders in the
administration, the congress, and the great hall of pundits. After all, what has
been the "sacrifice" for them? Do they have children, spouses,
siblings, parents on the firing line? Are they themselves at risk of life and
limb? More than one right-wing commentator has opined that Bush is a political
risk-taker -- my ass. He and his cronies were convinced this war would be
a cakewalk, and that he'd be revered as a conquering hero in "six
days....six weeks....I doubt six months," as Rumsfeld said. Working the
American people up into a hyper patriotic lather has been a very attractive
political option for 
presidents
from Wilson to Dubya's father-like object. Of course, politically speaking, Bush
had the enormous gift of 9/11, without which he would never have won
re-election. That was the "new Pearl Harbor" the Project for the New
American Century had been dreaming of.
As Dubya delivered his incoherent rehash of after-the-fact rationales for the Iraq invasion to a stoic Fort Bragg audience, I wondered about these folks in uniform. The Iraq war is, after all, "worth the sacrifice" of their lives, so the man says. Aside from the not inconsiderable constraints of military discipline , I can't imagine anyone being happy about following orders from that little worm... except perhaps for the renowned Subservient Chicken guy. And even as dozens of their fellow soldiers are being killed each month for a cause not worth the life of a single one, the administration has seized upon the election to Iran's presidency of the conservative mayor of Teheran as an opportunity to turn up the heat on that nation. Now Bush has "questions" about the new Persian leader and whether he was amongst the hostage takers back in 1978 -- questions that, of course, have the news media here chattering breathlessly over pictures of bearded men from three decades ago. (Hmmmm...let's see. I wonder if the Iranians have "questions" about Rumsfeld or other administration officials who were up to their elbows in helping Saddam kill close to 1 million of their countrymen during the Iran-Iraq war?) War with Iran may be just around the corner -- more worthy sacrifice on the way, folks.
It
would be disgusting enough if they confined their rapaciousness to the military
option, but there are so many ways to gut a nation and strangle a peasant...so
many. This week the Senate approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), basically an investors' rights agreement that enables multinationals to
ignore international boundaries (and pretty much any inconvenient legal
instruments within them) in the conduct of their business -- namely, making as
much profit as fast as possible. The pact is modeled on NAFTA, so for working
people in any of the signatory countries, it will likely be bad news. Aside from
us, the signatories include the nations of Central America we spent the better
part of the 1980s destroying via state terror (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras)
or by means of a US-organized, armed, and funded terrorist army (Nicaragua,
whose president, Enrique Bolanos, is pictured here in his full magnificent
shrimpiness). In El Salvador, there are no property taxes and a 13% sales tax,
so the poor basically carry the rich around on their backs, depending
substantially on remittances from relatives working lousy jobs in the U.S.
either legally or illegally. Their currency is the U.S. dollar. They are
completely dependent on us economically -- how can you have anything like
"free trade" between two such unequal players? The objective, of
course, is total penetration of every aspect of their national economy...just
like in Iraq.
Making the world safe for multinationals. Is that worth dying for?
luv u,
jp
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
7/10/05
Carrumba.
Here we are again, mum, till the bitter end, mum, shall we ask your friend, mum, why ev'ry thing's the same? Okay, so it's a stupid question. What? Did you say something just then? Are you sure? Hmmm...didn't sound like me. Either way, it is a stupid question, whether it came out of your mouth or not. And for god's sake, put that refrigerator down. Gently, gently!
Oh,
man.... forgive me. I must have dozed off. Was I typing in my sleep again?
Wouldn't surprise me. I've been sleeping in a tent out in the 
courtyard
for the last few days while a makeshift crew of well-wishers tries to get the
reek of burning hammer-stocks out of the third floor of the abandoned Cheney
Hammer Mill. Some local friends of Big Green
are at this very moment scrubbing down the walls with oil soap and wintergreen,
working their fingers to the bone for nothing other than the satisfaction of
doing us a good deed. Who says Big Green
doesn't have a friend in the world? Okay... to be fair, we did tell these locals
they'd be paid, but we didn't tell them how much. So we'll probably pay them in
the currency of the mill -- copies of the desirable Big
Green "box set" without the box: 2000
Years To Christmas, LIVE From
Neptune, and The President's Brain
(Is Missing). That way, not only will they be our best friends in
the whole world, but they'll also qualify as "fans." (Yeah.... we need
to get out more.)
So... that trans-temporal arsonist and great man-imitator anti-Lincoln has managed to effect subtle changes in the present by generally being an asshole in the past. Since disappearing into the space-time vortex created by Trevor James Constable's spare orgone generating device (still parked in the basement of the mill), we have observed the following results of whatever it was anti-Lincoln did while back in time:
-
No instant lemonade. Nada. Zip. (Note: This could be a local convenience store inventory problem.)
-
Bill Frist doesn't have a mustache. That could be a coincidence, but I
do distinctly remember him having one last week. -
Didn't there used to be a state called "Marzapone" just east of Oklahoma? Yeah, well... it's gone now.
-
The Abdominizer™ is missing! What happened to the Abdominizer™
There
are probably a whole sack full of other minor discrepancies between the reality
of pre anti-Lincoln mayhem and that of post anti-Lincoln.... but we can't waste
a lot of time thinking about it. We've got a band to run, damnit! There are
records to make, instruments to mishandle, agents to abuse, money to be lost,
and interstellar audiences to delight with our strange earthly noises. I know
it's been a while since I've said anything about our seemingly endless sophomore
album project (actually, in geologic time, we're ahead of schedule). We're
gradually adding parts to about a dozen songs. The man-sized tuber is
helping out with some percussion duties -- clever yam. Marvin (my personal robot
assistant) has contributed his presence, as well, helping to encourage that
generally positive "vibe" so crucial to a successful recording
session. With any luck, we should end up with 15 or 16 tracks to work with,
perhaps settling on the best dozen or so 
and
sending the leftovers to the music recycling yard so that their constituent
parts may be utilized for the benefit of all humankind.
And our next tour? Well....probably looking at late summer, early autumn. This Lincoln/anti-Lincoln episode has set us back a bit, but with both men momentarily out of the frame, we can perhaps start drawing the ends together for another interstellar extravaganza. Hell... we haven't been "out yonder" since our involuntary stay on comet Tempel 1, which of course just had an enormous hole blown in it by NASA, as promised. Guess they won't be asking us back soon... and if they do, I don't think we'll take them up on it.
(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.)
Payback.
As you know, a group that appears to be loosely affiliated with al Qaeda has
blown up a large number of commuters in London during morning rush hour a few
days ago. More ugly business in a world increasingly defined by terror bombings
of various magnitude from air and ground. First Spain, then England.... care to
guess who's next? My mind goes back to the picture of Bush, Blair, and Aznar as
they announced the opening of a new front on the "war on terror" back
in March 2003. At a safe distance from the continental populations that so
strongly opposed their decision, they committed us to a needless war that
continues to this day -- a war in which scenes like those emerging from the
London Underground are commonplace occurrences. This Iraq "front" in
the 
GWOT
is a proving ground for terror bombers -- perhaps an armory for them as well
(did those missing high explosives ever turn up?). It is also a killing ground
for our machinery of war, which spreads devastation beyond the reach of news
cameras. Are Iraqis' families any less precious to them than ours are to us? If
they do care as strongly as we do, better stay off the Underground for a
while.
Moral
outrage suits neither Blair nor Bush. I'm afraid they just don't have the
credibility for that. Both have an appalling amount of blood on their hands, and
each day the death tally grows, as does the number of Iraqis who bear us ill
will over the loss of a brother, a daughter, a mother, an uncle, a friend, etc.,
in this war that should never have been. It is obvious to them and to people
throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the global south in general that their
lives are assigned a very low value by our leaders and, therefore, by our
societies. It is clear, at least beyond the borders of the United States, that
the case for this war was contrived, paraded about, then abandoned once Baghdad
was initially taken. In fact, even a plurality if not a majority of Americans
are coming around to this ugly realization, despite the fact that the news media
has done a piss-poor job of following 
the
story, no matter what the mad-dogs on the right whine. The closest they get to
covering the story is sorting through the legal implications of Judith Miller's
incarceration for refusing to name her source.
Friday night on PBS's Washington Week, the gaggle of journalists managed to discuss Miller's travails without so much as mentioning the exceptionally disgraceful role she played in selling the war in the pages of the New York Times. More than most, Miller carried water for the Bush administration, latching onto Chalabi and legitimizing the wildest fairy tales about burgeoning Iraqi WMD programs. Irrelevant to the Plame matter? Think about it. Plame was outed by someone in the White House (Karl Rove, it seems clear now) apparently as retaliation for her husband Joseph Wilson's having gone public with the truth about the Niger uranium story, thereby exposing the administration as the world-class liars that they are. Rove and company were willing to compromise Plame's actual work on illicit WMD's to bolster their bogus WMD rationale for the Iraq war, an enterprise of deception to which Judy Miller made enormous contributions. No, she didn't run with the Plame story, but she ran with just about anything else that would make war seem urgently necessary, regardless of how dubiously sourced the information might be. So much for journalistic integrity.
You've got to pray. Maybe one day Rove and Miller will share a cell. They'd sure have a lot to talk about.
luv u,
jp
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
7/17/05
Hoky smokes.
Winter
has descended upon the global south, just as summer broils the north. Refer to
your topographically-correct (and politically inaccurate) junior high study
globe -- the one with two Germanys, two Vietnams, two Pakistans,
and....well...two Koreas (still). That exaggerated line around the middle --
Earth's stretchomatic waistband -- is where summer meets winter, spring meets
fall. With a year like this, it's a wonder this old world doesn't 
crack in two.
(It could start at that volcanic island in Indonesia...you
know..."Crack-in-two-a".)
Yes, yes. Rambling again. And yet there is much to report from the Big Green home front...much indeed. I'm here to tell you that not just one but both Lincolns have reappeared at the Cheney Hammer Mill, just in time to help out with some of the heavy lifting. At some point early in the week (under cover of night, no doubt) anti-Lincoln emerged from the time portal that Trevor James Constable's spare orgone generating machine has burned into our basement store room. I first ran into him as I was having a cup of Bovril on Wednesday morning; he looked as though he'd been in a few scrapes whilst brawling his way through the last century and a half. Thinner, too. In fact, he pulled a loaf of bread out of the pantry, hacked it in two, then arranged practically the entire contents of our refrigerator (including some expired halvah) between the halves and gulped it down. I came upon him sometime later, sprawled amid the empties of Matt's private cache of imported beer, a look of sated stupor on his visage.
Now,
I don't have to tell you folks who've been following our music for the last
15-20 years that I've been known to over indulge a bit myself, to say nothing of
my fellow Big Greenoids (particularly the man-sized tuber). But this prolonged
display of gluttony and drunkenness was...well...sickening, especially since the
actor bears such a striking resemblance to one of 
America's most memorable
leaders. (You know who I'm talking about -- that president guy during the Civil
War...what's his name....) Oh, the humanity! Even so, it's hard to keep a
bad man down. The very next morning he was hard at it again, pulling the ion
generator out of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and chucking it into our
neighbor Gung Ho's minefield. Then he stole Geet O'Reilly's 1983 Toyota and
drove it down an embankment. The complaints just keep coming in. (Matt tells me
anti-Lincoln set the local falafel vendor's ass on fire, but that has yet to be
confirmed independently.)
Then,
as if one Lincoln around the mill isn't bad enough, the other Lincoln --
mister nice president -- turned up yesterday like a bad penny (quite
literally) and took up residence in the west wing of the mill just as if nothing
ever happened. Where had he been these last few weeks? Hmmmm. Apparently he'd
booked some speaking engagements through the South Asia Chapter of the
Republican National Committee. Well...let's say they were more like personal
appearances, since Lincoln's stock rhetoric is a little off-message for the RNC,
so they ask him not to say much, just smile and shake hands and point to the big
barrel o' cash where folks can drop their bribes.... I mean, campaign
contributions. Sitting in his office back at the mill, Lincoln appears to have
forgotten Mitch Macaphee's warning about coming into contact with his evil
anti-matter self -- that remote possibility that the entire universe might cease
to exist, since they represent identical particles of matter and anti-matter.
Granted, this is only a theory (and one borrowed from a hastily-written
episode of Star Trek that 
originally
aired almost 40 years ago), but it seems to me not unreasonable to take a couple
of extra precautions, know what I mean? Restraining orders, full body armor,
that sort of thing.
That doesn't mean these guys can't carry their own weight around here. Even in a squat-house full of remarkable under-achievers, there's always something to do... though it may go undone for a long period. Lincoln the positive (I call him "posi-Lincoln") is certainly capable of clanging a cowbell when necessary (I've asked Marvin to help guide him). As for anti-Lincoln, we set up a row of beer bottles for him to blow on, each filled to a different tone. (Had to use some liquid other than beer because he kept lowering the pitches on us.) Now...how to work them into the liner notes....?
(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.)
Distractions.
After the dust settled a bit from the London bombings, the media focus
turned to Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame case. And as America's one truly
reliable news broadcast, the Daily Show, pointed out, someone kidnapped the
White House press corps and replaced them with real journalists for a day or
two. I must admit, there are few things that give me greater pleasure than to
watch members of this administration squirm, duck, bob, and weave. But there is
really nothing deeply pleasurable about this situation. This is just one element
of Bush and company's campaign of lies to drive us into a war that nobody
needed. Rove was employing his trademark pig fucking techniques to discredit and
punish a credible critic of their bogus case for war, as well as to intimidate
any other would-be dissidents who might spread the truth in public. While the
technical crime in 
question
-- that of revealing the identity of a CIA agent -- is a serious one, it is the
context of the stampede to war that represents the most heinous aspect of this
case. Yet...there is very little discussion of it.
It is plain that we just cannot go there. Just as media discussions of the British government's recent intelligence analysis of disaffected Muslim youth in Britain cannot touch upon one of the study's most important conclusions: that Britain's role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are adding fuel to the process of radicalization and making recruitment a cinch for Al Qaeda. This Iraq policy is very dear to the hearts of those in power both here and in the UK (though it has more detractors, I suspect, on the other side of the pond), and neither administration wants to take the blame for its failure, let alone admit to its illegitimacy from the start. In a sense, the London attacks provided them with valuable cover and the ability to change the subject from almost daily revelations about how the Iraq WMD case was cooked in advance. Bush got a small bounce in the polls as a result -- probably at least partly the product of that familiar army of "terrorism experts" descending upon the network news shows.
Terror
talk always works in the administration's favor. That is the credo by which Karl
Rove has made himself one of the most powerful men in the country...with a
little help from Fox News and similar organs of the 
reactionary
press. It is pretty much the same as red-baiting was during the cold war --
painting your opponents as somehow in sympathy with or not hard enough on an
amorphous foreign enemy that means us great harm. The last two election cycles
have demonstrated the power of this strategy of distraction. That's why I had to
laugh when I read Doug Feith's recent comments on how the WMD argument for
invading Iraq was overemphasized by the administration, and that they should
have relied more heavily on all the other "good" reasons. That echoes
what his partner-in-war-crime Paul Wolfowitz said some time ago. As if these
morons don't know that the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" argument --
the fear mongering campaign -- was the only one that would drive people
to support an unprovoked attack on another nation.
The reporter framed Feith's comments as a rare admission of error by a Bush administration official, as if it were a breath of fresh air. No context in reporting -- that's what we're up against.
luv u,
jp
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
7/24/05
Hey-yah.
Yow, my aching ass. No, I mean it -- my ass is killing me. Now I know how the falafel vendor must have felt when anti-Lincoln set his on fire. Serves me right, I suppose, for helping to bring him into the world. Just a passing notion, a stray desire, shuffling like a vagabond through the cluttered avenues of my mind, lifting trash can lids until one revealed the beardless face of the evil one. Once opened, that lid cannot be closed again. And now my ass hurts. This is justice?
Okay,
let me back up a bit. We've covered a bit of ground this week, so I will try to
give you a semi-comprehensible picture of what has been going on 'round these
parts. Let's see -- there was the usual handful of recording sessions, Matt
tracking guitars of various description and dimension. (Unlike many so-called
"famous" bands, we don't have any lucrative endorsement contracts, so
I will not utter the name of Matt's Fender P-Bass nor his Gibson Les Paul Custom
until such time as those companies fork over some free...oh, goddammit! Where's
the delete key on this thing?) I, too, have been adding bits and pieces to
various songs, editing and adjusting here and there, deciding which notes can
stay and which must go. (I had one of those "death to all E-flats"
days... Ever been there?) John's been banging on things and generally
making a nuisance of himself. And then there are the ancillary members of our
entourage -- those peripheral characters you know and love so well. Hey -- this
album's a big project, and everybody has their job to do.
Though
it's a bit unorthodox, we asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to use his
thesauric randomizer unit to come up with new and novel (new and....new?)
names for this album, now in its second glorious 
year
of production. With a fanfare of blinking Christmas tree lights, the flat panel
screen in Marvin's claws flashed these titles in rapid succession:
-
Autumn Swimfreak
-
The Broken Olfactory Deposit
-
Moby Dick (I think this one may be in use....)
-
Be One By Two Mister
-
Pickle Barrel Gantry
Hmmmm.... not bad, considering the source. To be fair, we haven't given Marvin much to work with. And while he's been kind enough to clang away at that righteous cowbell late into the evening hours, he really doesn't have a handle on what Big Green's music is all about. I can sum it up in three words: food poisoning. No, wait.... that's what my ass ache is probably all about. Big Green's music is about that other thing that starts with "food." What is it again? Wait...it'll come to me.
Anyway,
I don't want to leave you with the impression that we would delegate so
important a task as titling our sophomore album to a mere automaton (hmmmm....
that's a bit harsh....he did win "constable of the year" last
December...). Some serious thought and agonizing soul-searching will go into
title development. In fact, we've already opened the process up to involve other
peripheral characters, like the man-sized tuber, Mitch Macaphee, Trevor James
Constable, and (of course) the positive Lincoln (posi-Lincoln), vaunted author
of the Gettysburg address. It's only appropriate that Lincoln should
participate, since we used his name quite liberally back in Big Green's nascent
bootleg recording days [1986-1995], when we handed out cassette collections with
such titles as "Songs That Remind Lincoln Of The War" and other
misappropriations of his good moniker. We're thinking about putting him (and not
his anti-matter alter ego) in charge of supervising an archival release project
of the type that nearly every band indulges in when they run out of things to do
-- one that 
might
collect the more listenable of the something like 100-150 portastudio recordings
we did in those years....including "Quality Lincoln" and other strange
moments in musical obscurity.
Work, work, work. It just keeps coming. And, of course, we've got our end-of-summer (or end-of-winter, depending on your latitude) tour to throw haphazardly together. Since this almost invariably ends in some sort of disaster, I might hand that one off to anti-Lincoln -- his contrarian approach to everything might result in a good outcome for us for the first time since we started touring the great beyond. More likely, he'll fuck it up royally -- if only to spite posi-Lincoln, who is even now working up a lame ventriloquism act to present as an opener for us on Kaztropharius 137b. Whoops -- got to go. Anti-Lincoln is selling our foundation bricks out on the sidewalk. My aching ass!
(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.)
Route
of Evil. More bombs planted in London; more stiff-upper-lipisms from Tony
Blair and his diminutive alter-ego John Howard, who duly encouraged Londoners to
keep in the cross-hairs those two have helped train upon them. Blair's doing a
stock speech worthy of Dubya, repeating the same string of words at every
opportunity -- "evil ideology based on a perversion of Islam," etc.,
etc. Howard was there to remind us that Bali and 9/11 were before the
Iraq war, so.... hmmmm.... so what? The Iraq war has done nothing but endear us
to Muslims everywhere -- was that his point? The little man from down
under also made a bizarre comment about bin Laden's criticism of Australia in
East Timor, a nation which Howard suggested was rescued by the Aussies. (He left
out the bit about how 
Australia
worked with Indonesia throughout the latter's 24-year illegal and bloody
occupation of East Timor to exploit that tiny nation's off-shore energy
resources, then stood by like the rest of the West while Jakarta burned most of
Dili to the ground after the Timorese tried to vote them off the island.) I know
Dubya's not the brightest bulb on the porch, but you'd think he could come up
with something better than this "coalition of the clueless."
Howard,
Dubya, and Blair are counting on us to forget history...in fact, forget
everything that happened before this moment, with the notable exception of
September 11, 2001, the Bali bombings, the London attacks, and other terror
strikes on the West. Our enemies represent a kind of immaculate evil,
unconnected to anything but itself; as if al Qaeda, its affiliates, and any
other groups they name simply fell out of the sky like space men. It's a comic
book worldview...actually much less subtle than that, since you can't see
thought bubbles over everybody's heads betraying their true intentions (or, at
least, I can't see them). I've said it before on this page -- no one has
been more instrumental in the development of these extremist groups than the
U.S. through our longstanding policies in the middle east and south and central
Asia. We initiated the policy of stalemate in Israel that has resulted in a
nearly 40-year occupation and systematic expropriation of the 22% of historic
Palestine left to the Palestinians after 1948. We nurtured religious extremism
in Afghanistan from the late 1970s and bankrolled jihadists from every country
in the region who wanted to fight the USSR, training the 
cadres
that would later feed al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others. We consistently
backed repressive and autocratic elements in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and (of
course) Iraq, where Saddam Hussein got his first break as a CIA asset and later
enjoyed our generosity and gratitude while he was gassing Iranians and Kurds by
the thousand.
The project continues -- our global aims have remained fairly consistent for the past 50-60 years. In many important ways, we seek the same thing in Iraq as we do in Haiti, Colombia, and everywhere we apply our power -- economies that are fully open to foreign penetration and control, and governments that will put the interests of US-based multinational corporations above those of the people they rule. Each nation must fit into the US dominated global system or be branded a pariah, a rogue, a failed state. That was the project in Vietnam and much of the reason why our plan for that country was so unpopular with its people -- Vietnam in itself was not particularly important to us. It was supposed to provide cheap labor, cheap resources, easy markets, and shut up about it. When they dared to try and control their own destiny, we put it into the hands of the generals. Same deal with Iraq, Haiti, etc.
Yes, Westmoreland may be dead, but his spirit lives on. Think of him every time you hear an explosion.
luv u,
jp
Click here to return to Table of Contents.
7/31/05
Wagons-Ho.
Rain, beneficent rain. Sustenance from the gods, what gods may be. Down it falls, filling the gutters, sweeping the streets clean, drumming on the front door, splatting against the window glass... and coming through my bedroom roof in buckets. Hey, super! There's no soap in the shower! And the reply comes: Run for your life -- we don't HAVE showers! (Okay, I borrowed that cheap laugh...but it was for a good cause, damnit. My squat-house bedroom is turning into an aquarium.)
So
help me out, here - who exactly do you complain to when the roof falls in at
your squat house? The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill -- Big
Green's headquarters for most of the past five years or so -- has
reached an advanced stage of decrepitude, and since the provincial housing
ministry holds the deed, there is no landlord to call...at least, none that
isn't actively trying to evict you. That leaves us to our own resources, and
sadly, home improvement skills are a bit thin on the ground here in Big
Green-land. Matt and I are useless. John knows one end of a hammer
from the other, but he doesn't do roofs. I've thought about asking Mitch
Macaphee to invent a solution, but he's been absorbed by a new experiment that
has him cloistered in his makeshift laboratory for 12 hours at a clip -- he
won't discuss the details. (He had just better not emerge with some
already-known object, like that time he re-invented the electric fan...) And
Trevor James Constable is on summer sabbatical in his native California,
breaking bread with his fellow Reichian wizards and recharging his spiritual
batteries, if you will.
You
know, I hate to lean more heavily on one member of our bizarre entourage than
anyone else, but whenever I need some vital work done, I ultimately turn to
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) -- a faithful (if occasionally taciturn)
companion, always (or is it sometimes?) willing to lend a claw when
needed. He also offers the singular virtue of being programmable, so if he's
having one of his obstinate days, you can crack open his control panel and start
punching in formulae or code or whatever. Actually, when Mitch Macaphee designed
Marvin, he created a unique user interface that involves a series of knobs and
toggle switches, as opposed to 
a
standard QWERTY keyboard arrangement (he is quick to remind us that Marvin was
made of spare parts lying around his workshop -- "bits and bobs" as
they term it in academic circles). I've never quite figured out how the whole
thing works, so typically I'll throw open Marvin's access panel and start
randomly throwing switches and twisting pots until he does what I ask ...
probably out of sheer annoyance. This time around, it took at least an hour or
two of tinkering to get Marvin up on that roof with a tack gun. (Mitch could
have done it in a New York minute. Well, at least a Des Moines minute.)
How
is Marvin as a roofer? About as good as he is at coming up with album
titles...which is to say a bit better than messrs Lincoln and anti-Lincoln. (Abe
may have been a "great emancipator" but his naming skills leave a bit
to be desired.) Marvin managed to get a few roofing nails in the right places,
but most of them ended up in the gutters, down on the street, and through the
neighbor's upstairs window. (Turns out Marvin's "tack gun" was a
Kalashnikov he borrowed from Gung-Ho.) Consequently, the shingles blew off and
it was bucket time again. What the hell -- do we have to call a professional for
everything? What happened to Big Green's
vaunted resourcefulness? Where's that pioneer spirit that put a lean-to in the
middle of a particularly fallow section of Sri Lankan countryside and called it 
home?
Where is that can-do credo that drove a barking herd of mongooses from the
Cheney Hammer Mill not once but three times when the situation demanded
firm and immediate action? Did we just call some "skilled"
craftsperson when faced with adversity before? Well.... yes, in fact we did
more than once, but (and this is important) that doesn't matter now. The
point is.... hmmm....what was the point? Oh, yeah. Where the hell is the
phone book? Gotta find me a roofer who'll work for food.
Don't think for a moment that this has been holding up the important work we've been doing on our upcoming interstellar tour and our sophomor(ic) full-length album. Not a bit of it. The snail continues to climb Mount Fuji, as Issa put it, slowly, slowly. A part here, a booking there, and pretty soon you've got yourself a bunch of blown tracks and a trailway to certain disaster. (Just call me mister sunshine.) My only concern is... if I need all the buckets for my leaky roof, what the hell is the man-sized tuber going to carry a tune in? (boom-crash!)
(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.)
In
Opposition. Is it just me, or is the space shuttle a ramshackle piece of
junk that shouldn't be trusted with people's lives? More than a billion dollars
worth of preparations and foam is still cracking off of that bloody fuel tank.
And yet NASA marches on, its budgets relatively secure within the penumbra of
the Pentagon gravy train, regardless of how poorly things go. It's getting so
the only people who should be willing to volunteer for these missions are those intrepid
devil-may-care types that flew rockets to Mars in all those 50s and 60s sci-fi
movies we love so well. What are these people to be sacrificed for? So that
contracts can be fulfilled as promised? 
That
starts to sound like the war in Iraq (which is going swimmingly, so I gather
from people on CNN and MSNBC. For the real story, see www.juancole.com,
www.independent.co.uk, and
other links). Maybe we should start getting
cartoon characters to handle that project, as well.... or as a local
letter-to-the-editor suggested, send Bush and Cheney to Iraq, and a rapid exit
strategy would soon follow. (Send the gruesome twosome up on the shuttle and you
can bet it would be made safe as houses.)
It was a pretty grim week for Congressional action, as well. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was passed in the House by a margin of 2 votes -- a legislative victory for the president delivered with the help of about 15 Democrats. (Can you say "useless"?) Like NAFTA, this investor-rights agreement will prove detrimental to working people and the poor in every signatory country, putting more pressure on an area of the world still struggling in the aftermath of the sustained attack we treated it to during the 1980s. The House also passed Cheney's beloved energy bill by a much wider margin, again with substantial support from the "opposition" party, whose members benefit from the largesse of the same piratical companies that fill Republican coffers... in return for the massive tax cuts and federal giveaways in this odious legislation. One wonders what life would be like in a state with more than one party... say, the "non-corporate party" or maybe "the party that doesn't give away the store on every issue, every time."
Foreign
policy is another area of sickening consensus, despite all the superficial
political bickering. No need to remind you of how close the parties have been on
Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's take another "Axis of Evil" member state
-- North Korea, which the Clinton team was ready to blow off the map in 1993-94
for the second time (the first being the 
1950-53
war, when we bombed virtually every standing structure in that country to the
ground). The Clinton team cut a deal with the North -- basically, they would
stop their nuclear program in exchange for fuel oil and a light-water nuclear
power reactor. Congress never approved the funding for the reactor (Clinton
didn't push very hard) and ultimately Pyongyang restarted their nuclear program.
Now Condi Rice goes around saying they broke the '94 agreement, and the Dems
have little to say about it, since they've been attacking the president from the
right on this issue for a couple of years now. (Condi just can't understand why
Pyongyang would think we'd attack a sovereign nation without provocation --
damned inscrutable Asians!) Both parties talk clap-trap about a
"denuclearized Korean peninsula" when they all know we reserve the
right to park nuclear weapons in South Korea whenever we please and are building
the "missile defense" system on the region's periphery as part
of improving our first-strike capability -- something that makes more than North
Korea nervous, incidentally.
A real opposition party would call this confrontation what it is -- a sham. Instead, we get two versions of the same bad policy. Solution? Organize, resist. What else is there? Lead and the politicians will follow. It's the only way anything ever changes.
luv u,
jp