May03

NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(May '03)

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5/4/03

Welcome...(hee hee)...welcome...

Let it be heard throughout the land -- the moment of truth has arrived. Which truth, you may ask? The one about the tiny parcel of land we have chosen as the site for our reconstituted lean-to. And the nature of this truth? Just this: We've been hosed, Davy...we've been hosed.

Let me explain. On my last visit to the building site, I encountered an impenetrable ring of police tape surrounding the excavation. (Actually, it was duct tape with the word "Police" written on it in yellow crayon.) Though I was about a hundred yards away, I could see a band of goons milling about the place, lugging containers around. There was something oddly familiar about them...the way their knuckles scraped the ground as they walked...I felt I had seen them before.

As I followed the tape line in hopes of a better vantage point, I caught site of a large panel van driving up the main approach from the highway -- it was one of that immense fleet of vehicles owned by Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., the mining subsidiary of our nasty corporate label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. The Jakarta-based pirates had reoccupied our beloved "homeland," to be sure...but why?

My answer came with the next morning's paper. Cheesefood is hot...hotter than the filling in a microwave burrito (which is, of course, partly cheesefood anyway). As a virgin resource (i.e. still in the ground), cheesefood has jumped in value since the start of Gulf War II (all those cheesy MRE's, you see), climbing to the top of the commodities market in just a few days. The spike has raised the value of our deposits to the point where our small tract of land now falls into Hegemonic's "automatic expropriation" category -- that is, an earthbound resource so rich that its great value more than off-sets the minimal risk to the company in stealing it. Great Scott! We've been sitting on a gold mine! That's why Hegemonic's CEO Jay "Billy Bob" Garner sent in the goons!

Needless to say, the other members of Big Green were shocked and outraged at this...this...this shocking outrage. John flew his pedal-driven ultralight helicopter over to Gung-Ho's compound to discuss the possibility of a military response. Here within the dank and crumbling walls of the Cheney Hammer Mill, Matt and I paced out our anger, rending our garments and gnashing our teeth as we wore a deeper and deeper track into the indoor-outdoor carpet of the primary mezzanine. It was Matt who first suggested we dash off a letter to our nefarious label, so I blew the dust off my trusty 1920 Underwood, ratcheted up a sheet of onion skin stationery, and started to type. I had gotten no further than "Dear Fuckers," when a massive explosion interrupted my train of thought. From a third-story window, we could see smoke billowing up over the hills that lay between us and the building site. Blasting!

Relying on his experience as a police robot, we press-ganged Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into doing a little surveillance run. He was a bit reluctant at first, but when Matt broke open the tool chest and started examining the 5/8" crescent wrench (most of Marvin's bolts are 5/8"), Marvin understood the gravity of the situation. As a gesture of moral support, we sent Matt's man-sized tuber along to help assess the ongoing mining operations. Marvin's little chest-mounted web cam sent back pictures of physical degradation that rivaled the aftermath of Gung-Ho's last garden party. (It also showed one very confused-looking root vegetable...but hey, he's learning...)

Well, there's no doubt about it...we're looking at a major resource grab. They're pulling that cheesefood out of the ground so fast it's already affected the exchange rate. (Funny how stuff always seems to be worth more underground. I'm thinking about burying all of our CD's, just to bring the price up a little. What do you think?) It's just a good goddamned thing we've been too busy with pre-production for our next album to finish that lean-to, because if we'd been living there when the Hegemonic goons pulled into town, we'd be somewhere under that enormous slag heap they've generated. And that could've ruined our whole day.

Victory At Sea. This has got to be the most superficially presented war of all time; just one photo-op after another...and enormous brutality concealed behind a cardboard cut-out of official information, passed along Pravda-style by the corporate media. With twenty Iraqi demonstrators killed by U.S. troops in Faluja (many more wounded) and Baghdad hospitals packed with children suffering from water-borne diseases and injuries from unexploded ordinance, our man in Mesopotamia Jay Garner commented that Americans should "beat their chests" with pride at how swimmingly the war has gone, observing that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq. There's a man in touch with his subjects.

Meanwhile, on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln aircraft carrier, the smirking chimp-in-chief announced the end of the "combat phase" of his unprovoked attack on Iraq with these words:

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because that regime is no more.

Set 'em up and knock 'em down, junior. Talk about blowing smoke. "Ally of al-Qaida"...give me a break! Then there's the arsenal of the invisible to contend with. Suppose we assume for a moment, in spite of the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, that Dubya's claims about Iraq were true -- that the Hussein regime was a great pal of Osama bin Laden and that it had tons and tons of chemical and biological weapons. That would naturally beg the question...where are those tons of weapons? Isn't it possible that some of them fell into the hands of Hussein's "allies" in al-Qaida? Likely, even, in Bush's warped universe? This is a "crucial advance" in the war on terror? For the other side, perhaps.

Could such an evident failure of policy lead to problems for the administration in the likely event that terrorists again strike the U.S.? Remember -- the victors write history. You would think deep involvement with the Iraqi regime on the part of members of the Bush team would have been a problem, as well, but it hasn't. That takes an independent media with some sense of civic responsibility, to say nothing of an opposition party willing to criticize our increasingly autocratic rulers. But the "narrative" of this war is already being assembled -- my local Gannett newspaper provided an instructive timeline this week that pretty much sums up how the administration would like us to remember Gulf War II:

Key Dates

March 23

Twelve U.S. soldiers, including Army supply clerk Jessica Lynch, 19, missing after ambush of convoy.

March 26

Northern front opened as 1,000 Army troops parachute into Kurdish-controlled enclave.

April 1

Lynch rescued from hospital by U.S. special operations forces. Eight bodies buried nearby later identified as members of her unit.

April 7

U.S. tanks enter Baghdad. Bunker-buster bomb hits buildings where Saddam and other officials are believed to be.

April 9

American commanders declare Saddam's regime no longer rules Baghdad. Jubilant crowds greet troops, topple a 40-foot statue of Saddam.

Note the concentration on the high points of their propaganda campaign. Point One: The Jessica Lynch POW saga -- diabolical ambush, heroic rescue, and America's POW drama is redeemed in a single week. Then the bombing of Saddam's purported hideout -- later examination reveals the bodies of 14 civilians, including an infant (the U.S. has lost interest by this point). But Point Two is made: Saddam is probably dead. Finally, the "jubilant crowds" toppling the statue -- a staged event populated with Chalabi cronies in an otherwise deserted square. (Check out the photo at www.counterpunch.org/statue.html) Which gives us Point Three: the grateful Iraqis thank their liberators.

Too simplistic? I can't tell you how many times I've heard people comment on these three points, particularly the last one. And as the rage continues to rise in Iraq and throughout the Middle East (where Islamists are finding easy recruiting), Americans will shake their heads at the ingratitude and short memory of those towel heads. And they'll no more remember the truth than they remember Rumsfeld's handshake with the Butcher of Baghdad.

History is for losers, after all. Take care out there.

luv u,

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5/11/03

Sidney...do you copy?...

How's that for a distress signal? I figured Sidney was as good a shot as any, in as much as our transceiver hasn't worked in five years or so. All smashed up inside. Turbulence, you see. Not good. Not at all a good thing.

I know what you're thinking -- he's paid by the word. Not so, folks...I'm in earnest about the smashed radio gear and the distress signal. As I may have mentioned last week (don't quite recall), those rubberfaced goons from Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., have arrived in force at the construction site of our beloved lean-to and are now in the process of yanking our underground treasure trove of virgin cheesefood right out from under us, now that it's worth something. In some circles, this might be considered piracy...but back where Hegemonic comes from, it's fine art. They're at the top of their game, too. Never seen mineshafts dug so fast...I guess total disregard for health and safety standards probably saves a lot of time. And then there are those shaped charges of C-4 plastic explosives. Stand back!

Our reconnaissance team -- led by deputy assistant police constable Marvin (my personal robot assistant) -- ran into a bit of trouble last week on its first sweep of the ongoing mining operations. It seems they were "ambushed" by a ragtag group of Hegemonic subcontractors hired to handle security. The grossly underpaid and poorly equipped paramilitaries wound a few lengths of duct tape around Marvin to restrain him, then brought him and Matt's man-sized tuber back to their makeshift encampment, which amounted to little more than some empty explosives containers with knapsacks rolled out in them.

Now, I don't know when the last time was that these guys had stood in a chow line, but I'm here to tell you they were hungry enough to want to cook the man-sized tuber. (I think they quickly judged Marvin inedible.) They went so far as to build a fair-sized bonfire and were preparing to chuck the hapless root vegetable on top of it for a good roast. Luckily, Marvin's chest mounted web cam had been transmitting images of the encounter back to us the whole time, and we asked neighbor Gung-Ho to send over a detachment to "liberate" our comrades. Mission accomplished.

Though it sounds pretty sinister, it's actually kind of funny to watch the video playback now. Like an even cheaper remake of The Blair Witch Project, only with a guy in a potato suit hopping around in the middle of the action. Shaky camera, jerky playback...the whole nine yards. It's probably got the makings of a good music video, though I'm not sure which song we might apply these particular random images to. (I've got to dig back through our catalog and see if I can find any numbers that mention root vegetables. Got to be at least one...)

It appears from the grainy reconnaissance photos that Hegemonic has brought in one of its big Number 7 vacuum extractor units...a massive piece of machinery that literally sucks the Velveeta out of the ground. It makes the devil's own noise when you start it, so we should have no doubts about exactly when the resource grab will begin in earnest. Gung-Ho has counseled us to mount a pre-emptive strike, citing multiple precedents (though not the recent Iraqi adventure, since there was obviously nothing to pre-empt there...except bad network television shows and PBS fundraising). Our neighbor offered us the use of his air force on a "cost-plus" basis. John figures we can borrow the money using our cheesefood reserves as collateral. Assuming rapid and easy victory, we can then pay the bank back with the proceeds from the cheesefood that hasn't either been extracted or destroyed by Gung-Ho's happy bunker busters ("collateral damage," if you will). Brinkmanship? Sure, but what the hell. If it works for Rumsfeld, why not for good old Big Green, eh? Eh?

Meanwhile, back at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we've been "hammering" out the scratch tracks for our next album. I think we've got about 15 songs started...we'll probably round the initial list up to 20, then see which ones work. (Yeah, that's right...we make our songs work. Everybody pulls his/her own weight around this place, no exceptions.) When we started this project, I was almost certain it would be mostly older material, but now it looks like nothing but new. So what should we name the fucker? A few working titles have suggested themselves:

Man-Sized Tuber
Cool & Unusual Punishment
The Sound Of Music

(Personally, I think that first one has been used.) Any ideas? Send them to stupidnames@biggreenhits.com

This Just In. Hey -- Big Green's "Merry Christmas, Jane (Part II)" has reached the stratospheric ranking of #235 on the Garageband.com alternative charts out of a field of around 6,500 songs. C'mon, baby! Double digits with a bullet...with a bullet....!

Go Tell The Spartans. I know you're getting tired of hearing this from me, but Jeezuz this administration is thick...or maybe just impossibly single-minded in their adoption of piracy as their preferred method of statecraft. They are the very essence of philosophical Reaganism, concentrated into a kind of toxic syrup -- just mix it with oil, drink it, and you forget everything that happened up to five minutes ago. This is what modern American society has been building towards -- total ahistory; a kind of political Alzheimer's for all ages. How else could the Bush team pull off these policies that render satire superfluous?

I heard one of their military administrators on NPR a few days ago speaking about "post-war" Iraq and how they were unprepared for civilian administration because the war went so much faster than they expected. Wha-at? Weren't these the guys that were anticipating almost immediate capitulation after "Shock & Awe"? Didn't they have two years to think about what they had clearly intended to do in Iraq since their first days in office (and before)? You almost hope that they're lying...because the thought of people that stupid running the world is just too scary.

Of course, it is a damned lie. Civilian administration just isn't something they're particularly interested in...except to the extent that it generates contracts they can dole out to their corporate cronies. It's quite clear to the rest of the world what their priorities are. Just judge their intentions by their actions -- it's simple, really. All the scare talk about weapons of mass destruction was just that -- a pretext for their long-planned invasion. They are only now in the process of assembling teams to search for WMD's -- why such a leisurely pace? Why did they leave the Tuwaitha nuclear facility outside Baghdad unguarded for days, allowing it to be hit by looters, some of whom (as the Independent has reported) walked off with radioactive material? Their astounding casualness about the matter proves that it was never a serious concern of theirs. Even if they find an arsenal now, enough time has elapsed for elements of it to have ended up on the black market and in the hands of retail terrorists. Before the war, this was the nightmare scenario...now it's, "Ho-hum...what's the hurry?"

They did, however, quickly secure the oil fields. They grabbed the Oil Ministry and Interior Ministry buildings, both containing information key not only to the state's ample petroleum wealth, but also regarding transactions with US-based companies over the years. This while letting looters (and, it appears, organized arsonists) sack the National Library, the Talmudic Library, the National Museum, pretty much every hospital in Baghdad, and quite a lot else. Records of diplomacy and land transactions going back to the Ottoman period went up in smoke. As one observer said, this is "year zero" for Iraqis. Control the resources...erase the past...sounds like a plan.

Having Halliburton -- Cheney's bribe-wielding firm -- run the Iraqi oil industry is the crowning glory of 60 years of pernicious US involvement in the Middle East. The political objective, dating back to FDR's administration, has always been control -- control the oil, directly or indirectly, and you have leverage to employ against Europe, Japan, and anyone else who may at some point disagree with you. This empire thing? It's nothing new for us. They've just taken the gloves off, that's all.

Lucky Bill. Q: Where does Bill Bennett go for gambling advice? A: His "little bookie of virtues." Forgive me...after so many years of hearing him moralize, I couldn't resist.

luv u,

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5/18/03

Last of man, listen...

Yeah, I know...I've used that one before. We're starting to recycle everything over here at the Cheney Hammer Mill now that austerity has become a way of life. I'm writing on the backs of used pieces of paper...Matt's turning old lunch bags inside out and reusing them...we even use the same plates and silverware over and over again. Talk about monotonous!

Your friends in Big Green are living like dogs even as a fortune in cheesefood is literally being vacuumed out from under us by the rapacious crew at Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., a rogue subsidiary of our corporate record label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. They've activated the old #7 vacuum extractor unit, and the ground is shaking with the sheer force of what's taking place just a few miles away at the site of our lean-to reconstruction project. The resulting environmental degradation is appalling. Over on Gung Ho's bombing range, you can already see additional pits and craters caused by the collapse of once-rich seams of cheesefood that are marbled through this whole area. Cave-ins are taking place everywhere (and no, I don't mean those trendy sit-on-the-floor parties where everyone dresses like Trog), even under the mess hall at Marvin's (my personal robot assistant's) constabulary headquarters.

That should prompt them to sit up in bed and take notice. Our local police are being pretty casual about this whole thing -- I suspect some combination of Hegemonic's usual bribery and threats have contributed to this. Still, it's a little hard to ignore the kind of destruction being wrought right under their ample noses. After all, there are plenty of precedents for cheesefood extraction-related injuries all over the world. Look at Jackson Hole -- you think that just appeared of its own accord? Not a chance. Cheesefood removal, that's the culprit. The Marianas Trench? Again...cheesefood. And Death Valley....what, you think it started life below sea level? Give me a break. Cheesefood extraction -- that's what done it.

In the midst of these not-at-all-good outcomes, we are once again faced with the prospect of taking the law into our own hands. The police have obviously been bought off -- in fact, rumor has it that they've been using Marvin as a kind of Bribe-O-Matic, stuffing unmarked currency inside his abdominal compartment and sending him 'round to collect hush money from disreputable local merchants. (I'm thinking we deserve a piece of that action, as Marvin's handlers.) Anyway, this leaves us with but one recourse -- rent Gung-Ho's mercenary army for an all out assault, using what remains of our mineral wealth as collateral for a bank loan to cover the costs. The risks? Well...Gung-Ho tends to go a little overboard. The last time we asked him to do something like this, the "liberated" area was uninhabitable for a number of months...and then he was just trying to discourage a few mongooses from building a subdivision there. (It's a little hard to explain. Check my back pages for the full story.) Expense is another obstacle. He has offered us the use of some of his low-rent classic battlefield re-enactment soldiers, but...I don't know. Broadswords versus M16's? I just don't know.

Decisions...decisions. That's the music business for you -- one thing after the bloody other. Crikey. At least we're making some progress on the CD project -- we should have a demo disc in a week or two. So, hey...we may be broke when it comes to cheesefood deposits, but they can't extract our bizarre little muse. (Actually, their parent corporation has the contract on that...)

Hit Parade. Whoa! Merry Christmas, Jane (Part II) topped out at #213 this week on the Garageband.com Hot 6,000 alternative list. I, for one, am ecstatic. (That makes one...)

War & Remembrance. Bombs going off in Riyadh probably surprised a lot of people in the U.S. this week -- at least those people the major pollsters talk to who think that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden share several internal organs and that the murder of thousands of Iraqis (on the heels of a 13-year economic and military attack by the U.S. that left upwards of a million dead) has somehow made us more secure in our little cubicles. I can think only of that scene in Blazing Saddles when Dom Deluise stops the action in the flamboyant production number he's directing and puts his megaphone up to the ear of an errant dancer: WRONG!

The hyper-confident swagger of triumph has been replaced by indignation and accusations leveled at the Saudis for not trying hard enough to control their clerics. This of course fits the world view of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith cabal very nicely, since they envision regime change throughout the Middle East, with the exception of the one nation, bristling with WMD's, that is actually run by a bona-fide terrorist (Sharon). All-in-all, though, this wasn't the best week for Junior's empire...though they've been trying to keep a lid on it, it's clear that Jay "beat your chests with pride" Garner has been a total bust as Viceroy, and has now been superceded by a Kissinger protégé whose new "get tough" policy on looting appeared to vacillate between "just shoot 'em" and "only shoot when they seem threatening," seemingly settling on the former as one looter was shot dead this week. The search for banned weapons has been all but abandoned; oddly, they've chose this week to inspect the already-looted Tuwaitha nuclear facility. Public services are in tatters, the looting still continues (yes, I'm still talking about Iraq...though it does sound like home), and about 250 people have died violent deaths in Baghdad over the last three weeks. Sweet.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dick Cheney emerged from his badger hole to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on a $350 billion tax cut that will eventually put quite a lot of extra cash in his and Dubya's hands, as well as those of their corporate constituents, by virtue of a gradual repeal of dividend taxes. Fact is, pretty much everyone in the administration, including Treasury Secretary Snow, will make out really well on this deal...this while people throughout the country are seeing double digit tax hikes and major cuts in services on the local level (thanks to cuts in Federal and, therefore, State funding, my school tax is going up 32%...and the district is laying people off!) Another personal plus for Cheney is the lucrative (and burgeoning) contract his firm Halliburton has garnered in Iraq without bid, essentially running the oil industry. Yes, we Americans are a generous people...with our "leaders."

There's more, but I'll stop with this thought. If the Democrats nominate someone who doesn't beat these fuckers over the head every day with this shit, they deserve to lose. Not that a progressive winning the presidency would be anything other than a minor victory. Win or lose, the corporate/hard right alliance has a 40-piece orchestra behind their agenda, with control of congress, a network of well-funded think tanks and foundations, media conglomerates, and an array of lunatic commentators. Short of old-fashioned organizing, Progressives have a kazoo's worth of voice in this political economy...that and majority sentiment on just about every major issue. There's a lot of work to do, and it won't end with any election.

Keep your head down out there.

luv u,

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5/25/03

Hi-yo...

Mmmm...what? Did someone say something? Oh...I thought so. Sleeping on the sofa in the reception area of the Cheney Hammer Mill again. Lumpy old fucker (the sofa, that is). If it were out in the town square, the other homeless bands would pass it up for the park benches. Youch!

I'm passed out on the sofa because it's been next to impossible to get any sleep around this place in the last few days. Things came to a bit of a head just recently between our neighbor Gung-Ho and the nefarious goons extracting cheesefood over at our lean-to building site. It seems Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., has been slant drilling into Gung-Ho's cheesefood holdings -- this according to digitally enhanced sonar images provided by our neighbor's recently acquired balsawood and duct tape drone aircraft. (Also, there was a massive cave-in under his motor pool, which irked him a bit, as well.)

This brought a swift and angry response from the Gungster, pretty much eliminating the need for us to negotiate rental of his mercenaries from any one of six luminous historical eras (according to the brochure). I could hear the first wave assault sometime around noon on Wednesday -- massive explosions, war hoops, the sky black with deadly aircraft. That went on until about 5:00am the next day, then it all started again after midnight...and it's been pretty much every night since. This is why I've been losing sleep, you see...or just not gaining sleep...that's more like it. What was I saying? Who are you again? Ahem...

Well, aside from my solution of simply sleeping on a lumpy sofa remote from any large windows, I decided to try to find out more about what was going on at our property. So John and I popped over to the local chemist and rented a hot air balloon for the day. We set off in the direction of the lean-to project/battlefield to see how the Hegemonic goons were holding out against Gung-Ho's battle-hardened shock troops. I asked Matt to come along, but he was busy fashioning a hand-tooled canvas binding for his new collection of song lyrics. He did, however, graciously send his man-sized tuber to accompany us, and I press ganged Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into coming along as well...just to provide us with a little extra muscle in the event things got sticky. (He may look like a ramshackle hot water heater with spindly limbs, but he's got the strength of ten ramshackle hot water heaters with spindly limbs.)

Okay, my first mistake was bringing along my jumbo western guitar. Before I could stop him, Marvin grabbed the thing and started cranking out a tin-horn version of "Up, Up and Away!" What a noise! It sounded so bad, the man-sized tuber almost fell out of the gondola...and he was our only ballast!

When our rent-a-balloon drifted lazily over the building site, I was astonished to see the place abandoned. Had Gung-Ho used one of his new "bunker-buster" H-bombs? I wondered. Marvin's built in Geiger counter said no...but then where the hell was everybody? Then John reminded me that those Hegemonic workers were mostly rent-a-killers from the Indonesian armed forces, and I put 2 and 2 together. They were probably all in Aceh right now, kicking the shit out of helpless villagers and burning schools to the ground for freedom. The cheesefood extraction project had been abandoned, once again...our vital resources saved by the global war on terror. Woo-hoo!

Only trouble is (gee whiz) they're bombing our lean-to away. Something must be wrong with Gung-Ho's surveillance systems. Looks like it's back to the drawing board on the balsawood drones. (I think, personally, that Gung-Ho does them at the kitchen table with wood glue and dope.) It's a little hard to communicate with our militant neighbor when he's got operations underway, so we gave up on the radio transmitter and pointed the balloon back to the pharmacy from whence it came, dodging incoming all the way. We'll just have to figure out some way to get Gung-Ho's attention...or our lean-to site will be just another moonscape. And we've had quite enough of that living on deserted, crater-pocked planetoid stuff...or at least I have. Now back to that sofa.

Safety Dance. Corr-blimey! We're back to orange alert! Didn't they just drop that sucker back down to yellow right after the made-for-TV liberation of Iraq...that heroic campaign that struck a stupefying blow against the international specter of terrorism (or not)? With bombs going off from one end of the US-client middle east to the other, it's beginning to look like what any sane person might have expected it to. I wonder what Rumsfeld's special advisory cabal thinks we all should do now? Attack two more countries at once? Go massive? How much more will this handful of delusional white men have to destroy before we're well and truly safe from all that threatens them...I mean, us?

Maybe I do mean them. I don't know about you, but I'm really happy about this idea of half-a-dozen unelected officials making wild threats against most of the world in my name. It certainly cuts the deliberative process of a functional democracy down to nothing. And since everyone's dream appears to be the establishment of a fascist imperial dictatorship, why not insist it be run by the least competent individuals imaginable? There's pretty much no question but that the administration's primary case for "preventive" war against Iraq was a tissue of lies, calculated to scare people into supporting their piracy. It's quite clear that they will continue to manipulate information, intelligence, etc., to fit the circumstances of whatever they've decided privately amongst themselves that we should do. The fact that people are not demanding an explanation for a.) why there are no WMD's in Iraq, b.) why no serious effort was made to secure known sensitive sites during the invasion, and c.) why the Bush administration seems even a bit bored with the subject now...all of this is proof enough that their strategy works and it will encourage future adventures.

This works for them in a number of ways. It moves them closer to their foreign policy objectives, essentially extensions of long-term policy goals regarding US global hegemony. It also allows them to pursue their domestic agenda relentlessly (the homeland front of their foreign policy agenda), taking advantage of their thin majorities in both houses of Congress. War is an excellent distraction, so long as you're attacking an enemy that is virtually defenseless. Between the wars, we need the constant buzz of these terror alerts to keep us scared and looking the other way. It's like in those cheap westerns when the gunslinger shoots at some victim's feet and says, "dance!" That's us...the dancers. (Christ, they even have TV western names. Marshall Ridge. Deputy Ashcroft. Wild Dick Cheney.)

What they don't have (or shouldn't have) is any credibility on "keeping us safe," since 9/11 sailed right past them (they were busy with other priorities like threatening China and fighting gossip) and their remarkable unwillingness to release information about what happened that day suggests even greater failures than have been made public thus far. Still...we'll keep dancing, Marshall Ridge. Yee-haw!

Take care. Don't fly over the Vincennes.

luv u,

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