NOTES FROM SRI LANKA. (March '04) Click here to return to Table of Contents.
03/07/04
Blast you, Hardy!
Whoa, the walls of this old mill are damp. Even the bricks sweat down here in the tropics. Sometimes you can almost see the beads of moisture squeezing through the cracks in the mortar, nudging their way between molecules of concrete and terra-cotta. It always finds a way, doesn't it? Water, that is. I need to get out more...
Well,
the good admiral Gonutz (ret.), late of the Pentagon's Office of Special Pains,
managed to recover from his close encounter with our somewhat anachronistic
interstellar space vehicle. Funny -- it's almost as if he never even saw the
bloody thing...like it was just too unexpected and out of sync with his notion
of reality (kind of like all that exculpatory evidence about Iraqi WMD's). After
a day or two in
Naturally, we've had to put the tuber through a battery of tests, if only for appearances sake (he has been in space with us before, after all -- don't tell the feds!). It was all the usual stuff -- you know...the rocket sled, the anti-gravity loop-o-plane, the water tank made up to look like a landing site (actually, the thing looks more like a giant aquarium... and tubey looks like a big fat piece of coral for the guppies to swim around). When it was all over, that giant root vegetable was honed to a fine edge and ready to be hoisted into the Mars rocket. His training regimen was supervised by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who insisted on double-timing all of the tuber's calisthenics. Man! I hope he doesn't try to put us through that when it comes time for Big Green to "light that candle."
Sorry.
It's just so exhilarating to be part of history in the making, as opposed to
history in the unmaking (which we have had some experience with).
At this hour, commander tubey is high above the oit, in a 140-mile perigee
orbit, as we plan the particulars of his
Rollback. Haiti fell back into the hands of the old reliable band of U.S.-backed killers and political hacks this week -- the same piratical crew that has run that much abused nation for much of the last century. Constitutionally elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide was carted off against his will by the United States and France (together again!) to exile in another military-run client state, and now the overwhelming majority of Haitians who supported him face a grim and uncertain fate. This ugly episode is most certainly the product of a deliberate campaign of destabilization run by Secretary Powell and Assistant Secretary Roger Noriega (former advisor to Jesse Helms and long-time Aristide foe), as well as other ideologues in the Bush administration, though it is certainly consistent with long-term U.S. policy in Haiti since we occupied that country early in the last century.
One
need only think back to April 2002 and Venezuela to recognize this particular
strategy. With Reagan-era retreads populating the Bush foreign policy
establishment, Washington's proxies in Latin America are making a concerted
effort to rollback any marginal gains realized by
Check out some of the reports at DemocracyNow! and this week's lead story at Black Commentator, as well as sites linked to these independent information sources. Then call the frat-boy-in-chief and tell him this is unacceptable, before they move on to Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere.
luv u,
jp Click here to return to Table of Contents.
03/14/04
Ho-ho!
I'll have another quarter pound of chocolate Resen, Mrs. Mugilawati. No bag please...just put it in the bowling trophy, as usual. Is that a new unicycle you're riding? Sweet. Looks like our recent economic troubles have yet to darken your ledger. Oh, excuse me...I appear to have company.
Greetings
from deep in the heart of Sri Lanka. I was just trying to get a little shopping
done in the midst of what has been a pretty grueling schedule back at the
abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our drafty old adopted home and the nerve center
of what will soon be recognized the
With the tin-can spacecraft in a "parking" orbit high above us, we gathered the sharpest knives in the Big Green drawer to work out tubey's best route to the odiferous red planet. Admiral Gonutz (ret.), our commander on loan from the gods of the Pentagon, was all for the straight line approach, which he illustrated with a smear of ash from his cigar on the solar system chart. Our chief mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee shook his head. "Moving target," he told the stalwart admiral, and the old sea dog made a barking sound. He pulled his long sword out of its rusty scabbard and plunged it deep into the drawing of Mars. "That'll hold 'er!" spake the admiral. Mitch shrugged. It seemed an elegant solution.
All
the time we were talking, in the background could be heard the steady
"pock....pock....pock...." of the man-sized tuber's natural radio
source, the brittle sound emitting from a shabby schoolhouse PA speaker high on
the wall. It was obvious that our trusty space legume was still out there and
awaiting our decision...but communicating with him was a near impossibility. For
one thing, tubey is nearly totally non-verbal, despite his somewhat gregarious
nature. For another, the radio transceiver in that trash-can capsule was on the
blink, so there was no way to get instructions up to him. This was a problem,
since we needed the man-sized tuber to hit the booster ignition switch with one
of his rudimentary root-appendages (doesn't matter which one). We puzzled over
the problem until Trevor James Constable had one of
That evening, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was dispatched to build an enormous bonfire in the recently de-mined patch of waste ground between the mill and our neighbor Gung-Ho's compound. When it was good and roaring, Trevor James Constable focused the full force of his patented orgone generating device on the center of the flame, sending softball-sized sparks high into the troposphere. (It was a wondrous sight to behold). He keyed the handset microphone wired to his invention and barked a simple command: "Ground control to major tuber! Ground control to major tuber! Press the red button. Press the red button." The sparks began to spiral and collide in an almost hypnotic fashion, their glow shifting around the spectrum like an enormous 60s-vintage aluminum Christmas tree with a rotating color wheel on its base. (Yes, it was that awesome.) The check was clearly in the mail.
Back
at mission control (the old lathe room at the Cheney Hammer Mill), the
telemetric indicators showed an extended burn on the tuber's main thruster
rocket. This was good. The big boy was clearly on his way, and there was a lot
of hooting and hand-clapping and high-fiving and victory dancing and six-gun
shooting and other gratuitous demonstrations of mindless joy in that room as
word was passed around. Later that evening, somewhat inexplicably, a
Excuse me...I've got to rescue my trophy-full of Resen from the encroaching flames. Talk to you later.
Feith & Chum. When those bombs went off in Madrid this week killing a sickening number of people, I thought about what reporter Robert Fisk had said after some incident in Iraq where Italian troops were targeted. He wondered when it might be Britain's turn, since it too (like Italy) was a close ally of Dubya in his war on Iraq. Now there's a Spanish 9-11 (3-11) like the Aussie 9-11 in Bali. Seems a particularly cruel coincidence in as much as something like 90% of the Spanish public was against the war in Iraq (I think perhaps Aznar and a few ex-fascists were the only ones on board with junior).
Bush
gets away with appearing "strong on security issues" because the press
gives him a free pass and his party controls all three branches of government.
Objectively, their policies are a total failure...for the majority of us who
aren't rich and well-connected, that is. No point in going through the
full litany on Iraq -- you've heard it here before. I'll just mention, case in
point, that fraudster Ahmed Chalabi's organization is now receiving $340,000 for
intelligence gathering in Iraq. Yes, this is the same Chalabi who
provided probably most of the bogus WMD and Iraq-Al Qaeda connection
"intelligence" used by the snot-nosed Douglas Feith's Office of
Special Plans
Instead, we grit our teeth until November. For two more Americans in Iraq today, that day of reckoning comes shamefully too late, if it comes at all.
luv u,
jp
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03/21/04
Good morning, Vienna....
Hmm...is that you again? It must be the weekend. How did that happen so quickly? I'll tell you, the weeks are just flipping by like cells in an animated cartoon. Makes my head spin...or maybe my head is staying still while the rest of me spins around with this out-of-control planet we live on. This may be as good a time as any to change planets.
I've
been spending a good bit of my time this week in the game room at the Cheney
Hammer Mill, playing ping pong with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and
generally fucking off as we wait to hear news of the first man-sized tuber in
space. That intrepid root vegetable, nurtured from a bulb by Matt's steady hand,
should be approaching the nasty red planet as we speak, its luminous disc
filling the viewing port of his tiny space capsule. Soon his retro/landing
rockets should fire automatically and his
Our erstwhile Pentagon retainer admiral Hermann Von Gonutz (ret.) seems satisfied with the progress we've seen, even though the sum total of our knowledge of the tuber's voyage consists of that strange bleeping sound his internal radio source emits and some pretty crummy telemetric data (which, quite frankly, I think is just discarded tape from the admiral's stock ticker. He's got his eye on the Carlyle Group this week -- smart sailor). Our tracking system could hardly be more primitive -- Mitch Macaphee puts the tuber's "bleep" through a sound analyzer and he makes a considered determination (aka wild guess) as to how far he's traveled based on how much more faint the signal becomes over time. He thinks he's got it narrowed down to the nearest 10 million miles....and, of course, I'm somewhat astounded that there are 10 million miles between us and Mars. (Even more, I'm told.) That's the great thing about the music business -- you never stop learning.
Over
at "mission control," they've given up on trying to make the radio
work and Trevor James Constable reports that tubey is too far out for the
enhanced bonfire communications method we used when he was in orbit. This could
be a problem, though it's probably just as well that news of his landing doesn't
become
While I've been playing ping pong, Matt and John have been busily preparing for an anticipated rescue mission to recover the man-sized tuber from the surface of Mars. Naturally, to do so would be a serious breach of space program protocol, since the craft we would be using (the replica Jupiter two) is far beyond anything dreamt of by modern science, and Gonutz (ret.) is just not supposed to know about it. (He did see it that one time, but I think he considers it one of his more colorful alcohol-induced hallucinations.) My Big Green colleagues think we can scoop up the tuber and be back before the admiral even notices we're gone. We could slip away after he's rolled into his rough-hewn nautical hammock and put the lights out. Might even have enough time to squeeze in a gig at one of our regular tour stops on the red planet. (Or at least stop in at one of those famous Martian truck stops -- you know, the ones that serve those vein-stuffing cheesy meatloaf slices. Mmmmmmmmmm-boy.)
Year
One. Some pretty impressive lapses of memory emanating from the
administration about their somewhat erratic behavior one year ago as they
decided to unleash their world's mightiest military against (yet another)
virtually defenseless nation. As brother Matt says, you can be pretty certain a
country has no weapons of mass destruction if we're eager to invade it. I won't
even bother to detail the ludicrous Manichean rhetoric that Karl Rove gave Dubya
to recite on the stump this week -- you've heard it all before (wid us or agin'
us). Perhaps most cynical was his comments about wounded service people being
anxious to get back to Iraq and rejoin the fight -- on a day when another couple
of U.S.
Also making what should be a laughingstock out of himself on this first anniversary of the Iraq invasion was Donald Rumsfeld, whose sheer mendacity was illustrated quite effectively on one interview show, a performance helpfully posted for your review at moveon.org. Not that he'll be in any way held accountable for his lies. Neither will the execrable Colin Powell, who was duly dissed by Arab journalists this week after one of their number was killed by the U.S. military. With congress solidly in the hands of the Republican party's fanatical right wing, there is no accountability, no oversight, no check on their power. As such, the administration's tactics are remarkably bold and unvarnished. The Medicare prescription benefit legislation is a good case in point -- industry lobbyists craft the legislation, the administration produces and circulates bogus "news" reports praising it, they suppress accurate information about its costs, they ram it through the house using threats, apparent bribery, and other pressure tactics in an unprecedented 3-hour roll call vote...Victory!
Now
the administration and the congressional Republicans have the temerity to term
the Spanish election "appeasement" and "a victory for Al Qaida," in the wake of those devastating train bombings. Meanwhile, they've
done everything they can to ensure that terror bombings of this type will
continue to increase.
WWJD -- Who Would Jesus Disembowel? Reacting to an unfavorable review of his asinine quasi-religious sado-porn film, Mel Gibson said he would like to have columnist Frank Rich's intestines on a stick. Now there's some bona-fide old time religion for you.
luv u,
jp
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03/28/04
Roger that, cap com.
Docility base here...the tuber has landed. Not just any old root vegetable, but the very same man-sized tuber we sent hurtling (or high-jumping) through the cosmos some weeks back on a Quixotic journey to Mars, our nearest neighbor in space (not!). Light the Empire State Building an amusing shade of red and get the ticker tape ready...we've got a big, cruciferous hero on our hands!
Okay
-- "hero" is a bit strong. In point of fact, tubey didn't want to go
on this outer space adventure (and after having had a good look at his
ramshackle space craft, I don't hardly blame him, pardner.) But as some of you
may remember, events chose tubey rather than the other way 'round. It
Confirmation of tuber-touchdown came from none other than Trevor James Constable, who had picked up the tuber's signal on his orgone generating device. He was doing one of his routine sweeps of the heavens, searching for evidence of the "alien intelligences of the UFOs," when he found himself in contact with the unit tubey. Trevor James received several brief text messages from our intrepid space traveler that indicated his arrival on the surface of Mars. Printed out on ticker tape (see paragraph one), they read as follows:
capsule down....rock bottom. engines off.... check cabin....pressure.
Then, a few moments later, Trevor James received this intriguing communiqué:
so arid here.
Over the past week or so, Gonutz had developed a passion for ping-pong. I think it was because he saw Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and I play game after game during the long days of the man-sized tuber's interplanetary journey. Now the admiral (ret.) was monopolizing all of Marvin's time and energy, pressing him into endless volleys at all hours of the day and night, bragging that he could beat our robot friend with his back turned to the table, etc. In this near catatonic state, the only way to get a message through to the admiral was by writing it on the surface of a ping pong ball with a grease pencil and having Marvin bat the sucker at him. Before we attempted this, however, it occurred to one of us (John) that we could have Marvin keep the old man occupied while we slip off in our illicit split-level space craft and retrieve that man-sized tuber before some evil Martian fate should befall him. Sounds like a plan!
Demento Does Dubya. Thanks to the efforts of Big Green friend and tireless animal rights activist Pat Fish, our song The President's Brain (is Missing) was played on Dr. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show last Sunday (March 21), right after the Three Stooges' "Alphabet Song" (excellent placement!). If you'd like a free MP3 of this election-year number or the full-blown CD version (with 3 bonus tracks), go to our Get CD/MP3 page. To request repeat plays of Big Green's President's Brain on the Dr.'s show, submit your request at http://www.clamhead.com/drdrequest.php today, or email the good doctor.
Loyalty.
It's hard to know what to make of former anti-terrorism "czar"
Richard Clarke, the most recent of several Bush Administration figures to go
public with plausible tales of duplicity at the highest levels of this
malodorous presidency. To a greater extent than usual, the press seems to take
him seriously, largely because he "served under four presidents" as
has been observed frequently, and that he was something of a hawk. It's
interesting that with all the discussion this week about missed opportunities to
off bin Laden and otherwise decapitate Al Qaeda and other terrorist
organizations, no one troubled themselves to consider either the morality or the
efficacy of such a strategy. I know, I know...I probably go farther than most in
distrusting the resort to overwhelming military
Then there's the strategy question. I imagine there are those in the administration who may actually believe that pulling an Ann Coulter on these folks (invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to crew-cut christianity) will prompt the followers of bin Laden to merely throw up their hands and slink home, kicking pebbles and muttering oaths all the way. Personally, I think the Wolfowitzes of the world want us to buy that idea, even if they don't truly buy it themselves. There's good reason not to. For instance, anyone who thinks Israel's assassination of wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin will stop Hamas suicide attacks is inhaling a bit too deeply on the power bong. Certainly Sharon and his club-fisted generals know that this action will cost many Israeli lives -- they obviously don't give a shit. Like our own leaders, their careers have been built on this eagerness to exercise the military option....it's a formula for their personal success, after all.
That's
what this pointless muscle-flexing is all about. Did Bob "chicken
shack" Kerry or anyone on that useless 9-11 commission ever suggest that
maybe we should have removed our symbolic contingent of U.S. forces from Saudi
Arabia years ago, since their primary function appears to have been that of
providing an attractive target for terror-bombings and a general provocation for
extremism? I know it's considered tantamount to treason to explore how our
actions as a nation (obsession with middle east oil, single-handed support for
the 37-year old Israel/Palestine stalemate, etc.) may have contributed to
terrorism in general and 9/11 in particular, but it is that very proscription
that should tell us this is where we should look for answers...because they
don't want us to look there. In any case, you can count on two things from
this administration -- that they will go to any length to
Speaking of loyalty, Dubya took an hour off from fundraising to present his annual laugh-a-minute slide show to the National Correspondent's dinner this week, with flip references to the vain search for WMD's in Iraq. This appears to be a big joke for Bush, and all of those overpaid scribblers (with the exception of the Nation's David Corn) were yukking it up right along with him, even though this "joke" has cost thousands of lives unnecessarily and established a disastrous precedent for unilateral intervention. Great bunch of chums. I wonder if they're laughing in Baghdad...
luv u,
jp
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