NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(March '05)
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03/06/05
Well, raise my rent.
Let's see. If we take the coins in the jar on tubey's bureau... and turn out all the pockets in Mitch Macaphee's abandoned lab smocks... then maybe have one of those charity brick sales... hmmm. That might be enough right there. We've got a lot of bricks... and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is a pretty good sales-bot when prompted with the proper phraseology.
Welcome
back to the locus of joy and despair; the world famous abandoned Cheney Hammer
Mill, recently commandeered by some Christo wannabe for a sculptural
installation of the wrapping variety. (I'm not talking P. Diddy here -- I mean
wrap with a double-you. Think Bush plus Eminem.) Yes, as you might have
gathered, your trusted keepers of the Big Green muse
are once again scraping the bottom of the old money barrel, our finances
depleted by a costly and disastrous interplanetary tour, our wall safe looted,
our bank account zeroed out... and the wolf at the door. (Of course, in this
instance, the "wolf" is the pizza delivery kid... which is why we're
trying to dig up some loose change here. Do they take bus tokens?)
Last
week, after we'd pulled some of the mock-Christo windings of fabric off of the
front door, we managed to convince our financial advisor, Geet O'Reilly, to come
over and give us the bad news in one large dose. She had a few suggestions that
probably made good sense, but I'm not going to repeat them here (because, as you
know, you don't come here for "good sense"). I was mostly interested
in the charts and graphs she had developed based on our volatile financial
trajectory of recent months. One of them looked like Mount Aetna. Another looked
like Lincoln, if you put it on its side. While Geet was talking (something about
numbers), Matt, John, and I did some coloring with the box of crayons she
brought for Marvin. (She 
always brings a little something for Marvin and the
man-sized tuber. It's to the point where they wait for her at the door.) I
colored in the quarterly statement from the greater Colombo Credit Union while
John prettied up one or two of the charts. Matt did Lincoln up in grayscale,
then cut him out like a portrait -- very nice. Next thing I knew, he put Lincoln
on a stick and started carrying him around like a protest sign. Reminded me of a
little ditty Matt wrote some years back that went, "I like my Lincoln on a
string..."
Then, of course, there was Quality Lincoln, which some of you know...
Lincoln suffered from depression, Joe
but it wasn't because of the war, you know
and it wasn't because of his son who died
or the wacky behavior of his bride
Lincoln had a rare disease
They cloned his bones, said a magazine
Well, they didn't have the know-how in those days
(For the full treatment, click here.)
So,
anyway -- Matt's walking around with Lincoln on a stick, John's flying a virtual
767 over a virtual Atlantic Ocean, I'm coloring in the boxes on my tax
return... and, well, Geet O'Reilly gets a bit frustrated and starts packing up
her financial planning articles. "Bottom line," she said on her way
out the door, "make more money. Sell something. Get a job. Rob a bank.
Whatever. Just do it before the roof falls in." Well, now, this
almost made 
me drop my crayon (and it was one of those old "flesh
tone" jobs, too). This was sound financial advice, damn sound. And you
heard it here first.
What are we going to do about it? Well...I've got one or two ideas. You've heard one of them already. (The brick sale, damn it. Pay attention! We've got a lot of bricks... and people might think they're, well, valuable or something.) The other one is, ahem, even more stupid, if that's conceivable, but it could potentially work if the idea catches on. I don't know -- how much do you think people might pay for Lincoln on a stick? It's portable. And he's still one of the most popular presidents. Three bucks? Two? Anybody?
(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
Goes The Bad Air. U.S. Military deaths hit 1,500 this week. No, don't get up
-- just relax, everybody. Nothing to get worked up about. Ann Coulter says the
Iraqi elections were a "smashing success" -- pretty good description
for the entire Operation Iraqi Freedom enterprise, really. They've been very
successful at smashing the place to pieces by shooting it up, bombing it flat,
and inspiring Iraqis to blow one another to smithereens as a way of getting back
at us. Oh, and don't forget the part about smashing the Iraqi public sector to
atoms, then selling them off to multinationals. (Sweet -- Coulter gets it right,
for once.) Still, 1,500 dead -- yet another success story, though it didn't
merit a mention in Coulter's last column. I suppose it might be considered by
some as "not good news," as might the steady stream of badly wounded
soldiers that have been flowing out of Mesopotamia for 23 months. Though I
suppose "not good news" is a better position to be in than that of the
perhaps 100,000 dead Iraqis, which is 
simply
no news at all. So there they go, these people, young and old, American and
Iraqi, walking off into oblivion a dozen or more at a time, and the band plays
on. And Rumsfeld still has his job. (He'd survive the flood -- I'm convinced of
that, now.)
Before you start thinking that this Glorious War on Everyone might just be the death of you yet, look at what's happening here at home. Take our air (please). Right now, our electric power plants alone are churning out enough toxic matter to cause more than 38,000 heart attacks and half a million asthma attacks every year (Check out this piece in The Nation by Rebecca Clarren). Dubya's solution? The "Clear Skies Initiative," which is essentially a gift to the power generation industry, weakening Clean Air Act standards for pollution controls on older plants and allowing 5 times the mercury, 1.5 times the sulfur dioxide, and greater amounts of nitrogen oxide, etc. While it will save the energy industry $3.5 billion on their EPA obligations, it is also projected to cause about 100,000 (there's that magic number again) more premature deaths over the next 15 years. Another smashing success! I won't even talk about the water...
Now,
I don't know about you, but when I hear about this shit, the first thing I think
of is, Hey! Let's let Dubya mess with our national retirement plan! He's driven
at least two businesses into the ground and has done everything he can to bury
our nation in debt with no perceptible public benefit other than a sop to the
wealthiest 10% of Americans (to say nothing of his prowess as
commander-in-chimp). He can do the same for 
Social
Security -- no problemo. I think I may start calling him "Bam-Bam" --
little primitive spawn of a caveman, smashing his way through everything in his
path as uncle Cheney looks on admiringly. (I often think of that self-satisfied
smirk Cheney and Dennis Hastert had on the day they counted the electoral votes
in Congress, as the two of them collected the ballots...two enormously fat rich
white men gloating over their treasure.) They've pretty much resurrected the
Reagan project in its full glory: bankrupt the federal government and run a
global Murder/Torture Inc., while allowing corporate America to do as they
please with total impunity. Breathe deep, everybody!
Joke of the Week. Bush to Syria: Get out of Lebanon by May. In the Middle East, I have to think they put a laugh track on that one.
luv u,
jp
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03/13/05
Hi-dee-hi...
Light again. Morning already? Damned peculiar. What's this? An alarm bell? Kind of distant... maybe a block from here, maybe two. I can hear the flat, metallic sound reverberating through the brick lined alleyways. A burglar alarm? This could be. Perhaps "Honest Abe" has struck again.
Okay,
I'm not a morning person. No one in Big Green
is -- that's why we live in this abandoned hammer mill. That's why we lived in a
three-room lean-to prior to that. Anyway, last week (as you recall) we were
grappling somewhat clumsily with the thorny issue of Big
Green's finances (or lack of same). Our financial advisor Geet
O'Reilly made her best attempt at instilling a sense of urgency in our tiny
little minds. I regret to say that she 
was
less than entirely successful, due to our core virtues as a virtual pop group:
sloth, diffidence, general nattiness, and extreme goofitude. (Did I mention
sloth? Oh, yes. Forgetfulness. That's another one.) We colored pictures
and made paper airplanes and rode unicycles and melted pennywhistles over butane
lighters while Geet talked. But as Nietzsche said, out of chaos comes order, and
he might have been referring to the random impulse that prompted Matt to create
his portable Lincoln placard. (Not likely, but perhaps...)
I'll
tell you, Esreland, those little Lincoln signs sold like hotcakes. Sure, it
might have been because we threw in a couple of hotcakes with each sale, but who
can say for sure which item was driving that bus? Anyway, we set up an
ex-lemonade stand outside the gates of the Cheney Hammer Mill and posted our
trusty companion, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to handle the
transactions. The man-sized tuber ran the Lincoln placards off on the
photocopier over at the post office (I guess Marvin has some kind of
understanding with that machine... don't ask). Before long, it seemed like
everybody had one of those suckers either on a stick or hanging from their car
windows or proudly displayed above their fireplace. Everywhere you looked it was
Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.... and at three bucks a pop, we were raking it in by
the bushel. This was better than the discarded vegetable stand and the flapjack
cafe put together. What's more, it kept 
both
Marvin and tubey out of trouble while we turned our attention to more important
matters... like recording that next bloody album; a task we've approached the
way Issa's snail tackled Mount Fuji: slowly, slowly.
Well,
mark me with a "Q" for being an idiot -- I forgot all about those
pesky intellectual property laws! Here we'd been flogging photos of the Great
Emancipator® without paying a cut to the owner of that image. No, I don't mean
some stock photography house with a particularly zealous legal department. Much
more serious than that. Sometime on Thursday afternoon there was a knock on the
front door. Matt answered it, and in walked President Lincoln® himself. Our
careless use of his likeness was patently illegal (or, rather, registered-trademarkly illegal), the great man told us, and he handed Marvin a
"cease and desist" order signed by General Grant. (I'm not sure why,
but he seemed willing to address his comments only to Marvin, as if he couldn't
see the rest of us.) At that point, Lincoln® took a brief tour of inspection
around the Cheney Hammer Mill, after which he presented his terms for further
use of his 
image:
a big pile o' money, and regular attendance by Matt and I at his weekly Civil
War Reenactment military encampment exercises, hosted by our neighbor Gung Ho.
(John was given a pass -- apparently they already had plenty of drummers at
kill-kill camp.) Then he left with the cash stuffed into his top-hat. Damn!
Okay, so we're licking our wounds over this episode, right? Then it occurs to one of us (I'm not certain which one -- I always get us mixed up) that this fellow may not have been the real Lincoln®, but rather some kind of charlatan. And so, as I'm lying in bed listening to the alarm bell in the distance, I'm wondering if Mr. so-called Lincoln® has found himself another pile of money somewhere. Maybe under lock and key...?
(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.)
Peace
Train. So the question now constantly on the corporate media's lips is,
"Are we witnessing the blossoming of Democracy that was foretold by the
great George Dubya?"... or "Is our children learning?" Same
question, really. It amazes me how patently uncritical these
"journalists" can be. It's as if every day they are born anew, no
memory of any other moment, and all they know is what's on the sheet of paper
Scott McClellan hands them. Apparently the major broadcast news organizations
have no institutional memory of the recent history of Lebanon (let alone the
United States). Sure, I know their 15-year civil war ended 15 years ago,
but that doesn't mean a suicide bomber blowing up former P.M. Hariri is a
positive development for peace in the Middle East. There are very serious
enmities residing just below the surface in Lebanon... and if George Bush isn't 
careful
where he aims his big Texas hammer, the place could explode into fratricidal war
again. Hey -- witness Iraq. That's what this "democracy" thing
looks like.
Our cronies in the Middle East start holding demonstration elections (in Saudi Arabia it's just a sad joke... in Egypt, a virtual one-party contest) and the press take it at the administration's word that this is the happy effect of their enlightened foreign policy. Bush points to the most abject toilets in the region -- the West Bank in its perpetual humanitarian crisis under occupation; Iraq in flames -- and claims there's sunlight shining out of his ass. And so we find the punditocracy actually debating the virtues of this growing disaster, their thoughts so far from the realities of life in the region that they may as well be describing another planet. American power and Al Qaeda-like fanaticism are two sides of the same coin (and yes, we're "heads"), each pressing their own mad messianic vision of a reordered Middle East, each perpetually reinforcing one another's program of vile butchery. (Though, to be fair, the Bin Ladens of the world are pikers next to people like Dubya, who kill tens of thousands with impunity, mobilize the world's most powerful machinery of death, and threaten everyone with WMD's as a matter of bland daily routine.)
Of
course, Bin Laden is the creature of our short-sighted, self interested foreign
policy. We are, in a sense, a founding sponsor of sectarian extremism in the
Middle East, our hand thrust firmly into the mailed glove 
of
autocratic regimes and religious militias alike for many decades. Would that it
were the only region so blessed with our influence, but alas... the wreckage
stretches to the horizon in every direction. Even what is portrayed as our most
noble impulses merely mask the ugly enterprise of American empire. The press
would never make much of the story (because, again, they don't remember
yesterday), but one of the most significant developments to come out of the
Asian tsunami has been resumption of U.S. military assistance to the Indonesian
armed forces, among the most abusive militaries in the world. Wolfowitz (former
ambassador to Jakarta under Reagan, and "visionary" aboard the Bush
pirate ship) has been pushing for this for years. He finally found his best
opportunity with relief efforts in Aceh, where remaining villages are still
smoking from the ravages of Indonesian troops -- outfits like Kopassus, the
special forces brigade that wrought such havoc in East Timor. Freedom is indeed
on the march! (Well... the "march" part is certainly unambiguous.)
luv u,
jp
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03/20/05
Sergeant Ma-jor!
What? Morning drill? Not again! How many times a week am I supposed to... No, don't answer that. What the fuck. I'm staying here -- start the muster without me. Tell old "spotty" Lincoln I've got a fractured tibia or something and that I'll see him on the line tomorrow. Or the next day.
Hi,
there. Yes, you guessed it -- we're having to work off all that intellectual
property we absconded with in order to get Big Green
out of the hole again. That picture of Lincoln has cost us ten solid days of
morning drill at Gung-Ho's Civil War re-enactment preserve, with the Great Emancipator
himself (or an unreasonable facsimile thereof) checking attendance and counting
my cavities every time I fall asleep on duty (which is quite a lot, really, if
you count lunch). How long will it take to work off 
the
money we earned? Damned if I know. This Lincoln character uses some kind of
bizarre accounting system he must have developed for his 19th Century railroad
industry law clients, where every time you make a payment he adds that amount
plus interest onto your outstanding balance. Not exactly Generally Accepted
Accounting Practices (unless we're talking Enron standard). Mystifyin' and
mortifyin'!
This
is purgatory for any musician worth his Zenite snuff. It's up at the crack of
dawn every bloody day. Stand out in a field while some tone-deaf fucker blows a
bugle in your ear. Put on these scratchy, second-hand civil war military get-ups
that look like they've been used for oil rags in an auto repair shop. Then it's
ceremonial inspection and the reading of the Gettysburg address, which I'm
coming to know pretty much by heart after more than a week of this. (I don't
know if you're aware of the fact, but Lincoln has a thin, reedy voice that kind
of grates on the nerves.) After that, we stand around with rifles for about
eight hours, receiving bogus dispatches from some local kid on school holiday,
firing blank shots from an ancient cannon, and writing our imaginary
mothers/wives/fiancées. Sure, we get in an informal jam session (sort of a
Civil War drum circle, really, without the drums) on vintage instruments...Geet
O'Reilly was doing 
our
taxes and joined in on fiddle during a break one afternoon. The day ends with
some half-assed battle reenactment -- repulsing Picket's charge as constituted
by six or seven locals who ham it up a bit too much on the death throes -- while
Mr. Lincoln stands atop an observation ladder with a pair of binoculars and
regards the lame action taking place only a few yards away. (Sometimes he holds
the binoculars backwards so that things look more distant -- it adds to the
sense of melodrama.)
Well,
as you return readers most certainly know, we Big Green-ites
are a tolerant lot, willing to play along with just about anything, so long as
nobody gets hurt. But this whole thing went a little too far when the mock-rebel
army started using the man-sized tuber for practice target -- that was just not
right at all. Then...then they converted Marvin (my personal robot
assistant) into a roll-away samovar, keeping him handy to brew up a batch of Bovril
whenever the mood struck them. That was the squall that smoked the Camels pack
(or something to that effect). Always the most outspoken one, Matt lodged a
formal complaint to Mr. Lincoln, 
who
was busy filming literacy and stay-in-school public service announcements. When
my illustrious brother had finished lambasting the old man, Lincoln was as red
as a penny (which, of course, features the famous president on its obverse
side). I think that was the turning point in the war between the states, quite
frankly.
Anyway, thanks to Matt's well-timed outburst, the costumed re-enactment portion of our payback schedule has been discontinued, and we of Big Green will soon be able to return to the important tasks that await us at the Cheney Hammer Mill -- namely sleeping in, dodging bill collectors, changing the strings on our various guitars (using strings from other guitars -- we rotate rather than replace), and various other avenues of creative endeavor. Sometimes you have to speak up for yourself, know what I mean? By the way -- care for an espresso? I think Marvin's got a batch brewing right now...
(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.)
Party
On. Condi Rice has an answer to the India-Pakistan conflict -- sell F-16's
to both of them. Pretty creative, particularly since Pakistan has just tested a
nuclear capable missile with a range of over 1,000 miles. (Don't worry --
they're ruled by a military dictator.) So long as we incessantly moralize, it
doesn't really matter what we do, right? That's why the Bush Administration --
having made our name synonymous with shit the world over -- can happily appoint
notorious UN hater John Bolton as our UN Ambassador and nominate Paul Wolfowitz,
father of the Iraq invasion catastrophe, to be head of the World Bank. As Jon
Stewart recently observed when Bush demanded that Syria end its occupation of
Lebanon, it appears that now our mission is to spread irony throughout the
world. Who better to charge with that weighty responsibility than Condi Rice and
our new Muslim world spokesperson, Karen Hughes? Dubya seems to have 
two
criteria for assigning people: 1) loyalty to him, and, short of that, 2) loyalty
to his father and/or uncle Reagan. His criteria for "freedom"? Well,
he hasn't quite got a good handle on that yet...but Chuck Krauthammer says he's
been right all along, so even if we don't understand...we should agree.
This was a week of depressingly familiar depredations overseas, while back in the States two stories dominated -- the Senate's consideration of steroid use in baseball and Republican leaders from Congress to the Florida statehouse fighting to keep a hospitalized woman in her vegetative state indefinitely so as to please their hypocritical religious constituents. These people have a heart as big as all outdoors -- I mean, isn't it comforting to know that when you're lying in a hopeless coma, kept alive by some machine, Tom Delay will selflessly drop his career-threatening ethics crisis to make certain no one pulls the plug on you. And since Dr. Frist is so concerned with the sanctity of life, perhaps he should take a second look at the Iraq war appropriations he just spirited through the Senate, which will underwrite sending more people (no relation to him, of course) gleefully to their graves to join the 1,519 Americans and 50-100,000 Iraqis already buried by this great and glorious war for "freedom" as yet to be defined. No, it's not just the Republicans -- plenty of Dems are fanning the flames as well... though not so many volunteering for service, I notice.
If
I were a young suburbanite with plenty of life options ahead of me, I would be
watching this war a bit more closely than most college-bound kids have up to
now. The military is heading for a wall on this project -- people are not
volunteering in the numbers needed to support a prolonged occupation, and they
can't keep re-sending and re-activating the same people over and over again.
Allies are pulling out by the month. If things 
don't
start getting a whole lot better soon, the Pentagon may have to break its taboo
on drafting people and start pressing people into service who really, really,
really do not want to go. The degree to which this war remains tolerable to most
Americans has a direct relationship to the proportion of us being asked to fight
it and to sacrifice our freedom, our limbs, and perhaps our lives to
this...um.....noble cause. In a nation obsessed with something called
"moral values," the vast majority of us are quite willing to sit by
and let working class and poor folks (i.e. people who need military careers)
ship out to that meat grinder, and all we offer them in return is either
lukewarm concern (letters, petitions, vigils, etc.) or sham patriotism (magnetic
yellow ribbons on our pristine bumpers) as we otherwise go about our lives
unmolested. Right now, for us, this war is somebody else's problem and, as such,
we fail the most elementary moral principle of all -- if it's worth your
life and limbs, it's worth mine, too. Cheney's "other
priorities" excuse for avoiding service (while fully supporting the war)
has become our national standard.
How long will the free ride (no war taxes/no draft) last? Not forever. When it ends, then we'll see what we're really made of.
luv u,
jp
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03/27/05
Guitar now...
Hmmm. Which is the business end of this gizmo? They both look the same. And why is it so damn heavy? What's inside the fucker, bricks? Can't... lift... it... Oww, my back! I think this may be the hole where the music comes out, over on this side...but I'm not certain. Damn.
Okay,
so it's been a while since I played my electric piano -- so what of it? Still,
the bloody thing has become such a foreign object to me in the last couple of
months. Think of it -- space travel, jail time on comet Tempel One, wasted days
trapped in a Christo-like environmental art display, and 
finally
the original Log Cabin Republican himself and his insufferable Civil War
Reenactment Club. It's been a busy winter over here, so various members of Big
Green have decided to work on the old chops, woodshed, etc., and try to build up
some muscle tone, know what I mean? This involves, of course, reacquainting
ourselves with our instruments -- me with my keyboards and increasingly decrepit
acoustic guitar, Matt with his bass and six-strings of various magnitudes, John
with his tubs and washboards, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with his
sousaphone (which he used to such stirring effect on The
President's Brain Is Missing). Even the man-sized tuber has opened up
his little trunk full of pennywhistles, sweet potatoes, and mini Alpen horns (Riiiiiiiiiiicolaaaaaaaa!).
Then there are the inevitable switch-offs -- me filching Matt's guitars, John
blowing on the tuba... Crikey, the air is full of song, poorly executed and
chaotic. Panda-freaking-monium.
As
many of you are aware, it takes a lot of conditioning to be a pop star. I have
it on unimpeachable authority that Mick Jagger (famous pop star) used to jog
backwards through his posh neighborhood just to keep his ass looking "like
that" -- probably still does. Not that you'd catch any of us doing
anything quite so healthy or strenuous. (I tend to agree with the Car Talk
guys that exercise only lengthens your life by the total amount of time you
spend exercising ... and it's not exactly quality time.) I can't speak for the
others, but I'm more from the "nobody told me my ass was that big"
school of rock musician... except when we're on short rations. Anyway, our 
exercises
of choice are more targeted to those muscle groups directly involved with the
creation and communication of music. Fingers, for instance -- I will typically
do ten laps around the hammer mill on my finger tips each morning to keep those
digits good and tight. Ears are easy -- just hook a coathanger round the back of
them and attach weights to the other end. Free weights will do, but you're
better off with some kind of nautilus machine, quite frankly. Then there's the
seemingly endless throat flexing and vocal cord calisthenics. Very exacting
work, that. (I feel exhausted just thinking about it.)
With
all this conditioning, you'd think the rehearsals would go a little more easily,
but alas -- we're a bit rusty. It took me about half an hour to remember how to
plug my main keyboard in before I realized it was an upright piano and, as such,
didn't really need any plugging in. John did better with his drums, but then he
had some assistance from Marvin, who has a 20 minute drumkit assembly tutorial
on DVD loaded into his combo drive -- just press play and do what the man say.
Matt experienced some cognitive dissonance brought on by a recent gift of Zenite
snuff from our friend and colleague sFshzenKlyrn,
but he did eventually work out which end of his various axes pointed north and
which south. As mister Lincoln's commemorative war rumbled on outside, we walked
through a few 
numbers.
Between run-throughs, I decided to have a bit of fun with Marvin, telling him to
give me a handstand just to see if he could do it. He whirred and clicked in his
usual way, then rolled out of the room. An hour later he returned with a curious
object he'd fashioned out of discarded hammer-stocks. Suffice to say it was the
high point of the rehearsal.
Not to worry. Left to our own devices, we will ultimately get around to making music, barring interruptions and hostile knocks upon the door. We should probably call our next album "Fifty years" since that's what it's taking to produce. Or maybe we should call it "Too much" because that's what it's costing. Or we could call it "man-sized tuber" since, technically, he's playing most of the instruments. Or "Lincoln's war," since it's in the background of a lot of the tracks now. Got an opinion on which one? Email us and say so. We'll be waiting right here.
(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.)
On
Being Committed. How committed is the Bush administration to the goal of
promoting democracy in the world? Well, they show us the true depth of their
convictions in many little ways. Donny "Somehow Still In Office"
Rumsfeld was on the Sunday talk shows last weekend assigning blame for the
disaster in Iraq to Turkey, saying that if they had allowed the U.S. to attack
from their territory, the insurgency wouldn't have gotten a foothold. Obviously,
he felt confident (and rightfully so) that the corporate media wouldn't remind
him of the fact that, at the time of the invasion, Turkey's newly-elected
parliament had acted in accordance with the will of about 90% of its
population... and that Rummy's second in command, the sainted Paul Wolfowitz,
had promptly chastised the Turkish military for not stepping in and forcing
cooperation with the U.S. So this love of democracy 
is
kind of a new item in their constricted moral universe. Though, really, for
them, democracy is some kind of an election -- any kind -- however empty or
meaningless an exercise it may be.
In the old days, the American global empire used to rely heavily upon dictators and strongmen like Saddam Hussein, Indonesia's Suharto, Nicaragua's Somoza, etc. -- they were much easier to deal with, a single point of contact, as it were. But thanks to the magic of neo-liberalism, countries can have formal democracies if they like, and even vote in socialist parties, with no appreciable difference. These countries are all so hopelessly mired in debt to western banks by virtue of various predatory lending practices, they are easily shoe-horned into adopting draconian "structural adjustment" programs worked out for them by the International Monetary Fund to stay on the good side of their international creditors. This invariably means domestic austerity, slashed social programs, privatization of state enterprises and resources, unrestricted foreign investment, and opening their borders to foreign goods. If they resist, they're an instant pariah state (Venezuela, Cuba) or overthrown (Haiti). Even compliance isn't truly enough -- small countries must be supine and defenseless. This week Nicaragua was threatened with U.S. sanctions for wanting to hang on to a few hundred ancient Soviet-era SAM missiles for their own meager self-defense. Though the ruling party is very friendly with Washington (which, of course, conducted a terror war against Nicaragua in the 1980s), this small transgression was unacceptable to the global overlord.
Anyway,
two little items on the "democracy" news ticker -- "little"
because they barely get a mention except in a narrow, one-shot,
just-the-immediate-facts kind of way. The media is still devoting enormous air
time and column space to the Terri Schiavo story, lending their considerable
publicly underwritten mouthpiece to this painfully obvious ploy to energize the
Republicans' political base. We've got Senator Dr. Bill Frist putting his
two-cents in, with a long-distance Schiavo diagnosis about on par with his
opinions about transmitting HIV through tears. Then there are objects like
Randall Terry (one time candidate for an upstate New York congressional seat)
attaching himself to the woman's family and working hard to raise his own stock
with the faithful (do I smell another campaign coming?) and upstage Ralph Reed,
probably still lurking around Florida somewhere in the wake of holy election
2004. All in all, it's been a rare feast of sanctimonious performances by some
of America's biggest hypocrites, from George and Jeb Bush to Tom Delay and all
the way down the line -- people who wreck lives every day as a matter of
sickening routine. And yet amazingly, the vast majority of Americans still think
they should all mind their own business.
Of course, they won't. Had enough? Good. 'Cause there's more to come.
luv u,
jp