NOTES FROM SRI LANKA

NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(May '04)

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05/02/04

Break!

Okay, everybody can put down their bundles of discarded wallpaper sample books. Now raise your hands in the air. That's right -- just like that. Wiggle your fingers like you're waving to a small child. All of you...yes, you in the back; you too. Now hop around on one foot. Faster! Faster! Great, that's enough. Pin a medal on your chest because now you have some idea of what it's like to live in this drafty, mongoose-infested hammer mill.

Here's the update, because I know you've been on pins and needles since last week when we tried the holographic pizza joint ploy, to no avail. (What are the chances that there would actually be a pizza place in this town that caters to mongooses?) In desperation, we asked Mitch Macaphee to break out the dreaded Manilow Ray. I swear I'm not making this up -- he directed a force nine beam of "Daybreak" at those mongooses and they ate it up like flapjacks. Golden..... buttery.... flap... jacks..... (Must stop...) That sent us scurrying back to our zoological texts -- how could we have been so wrong? Turns out Mongooses have no documented problem with Barry Manilow's music. It's Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds they can't stand, and we can't even remember between us what their big hit was. (Mitch always gets them and Manilow jumbled up in his big floppy scientist's brain.)

Next came that special branch of science known as "reekology". Actually, it was Trevor James Constable who came up with this idea. Put some stench producing object on the end of a stick -- a burning tire, say, or Matt's 1980 gym socks (still waiting for laundering) -- and wheel it into the Mongoose enclave in the late morning heat. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was chosen for this detail, since his olfactory circuits can be attenuated, unlike our own. We lit up a leftover tire from our old van (as the socks seemed just too cruel) and sent Marvin on his smelly way, holding the smoking hunk of rubber out before him like a flag of truce. About twenty minutes went by with no sign of any mass mongoose exodus, then our mechanical friend returned, a bit tarnished and blackened, the still smoldering tire hung 'round his brass shoulders. The fuckers had actually necklaced Marvin!

Everyone has their limit, and your friends in Big Green had clearly reached theirs. I mean, I've got nothing against mongooses -- I can even see sharing this ample squat house with a limited number of them if only they would stop inserting themselves into everything we do. The other night, Matt was doing a bass part on one of the songs on our upcoming album (more on that later), and not only did the mongooses insist on sitting in the control room, but I had to let them punch Matt in a couple of times. John can't take a trip to the chemist without six or seven of them piling into the car with him and cajoling him to stop for ice cream along the way. And even the poor man-sized tuber (only just getting his Earth-roots back after his recent space mission) has to deal them into his weekly bridge games. (North and South are now almost always mongooses.) Now I ask you...is that fair?

I asked Trevor James Constable and Mitch Macaphee to really go back to the drawing board and study the mongoose issue in detail -- perhaps convene an international academic conference and invite specialists on the subject to submit papers, etc. They looked at me like I have five heads, but then...maybe I do...maybe I'm just not using all of them at this particular moment. Which I think may be their point (to wit, five of my heads would add up to one of theirs). So maybe they'll do it after all. Or maybe they'll just raise the issue at their next academic conference in some subtle fashion, perhaps employing subtle visual aids. (I have to think that mongooses are the proverbial "800-pound gorilla" that everyone wants to ignore at most international conferences. But then, maybe I'm just a little overwrought...)

Cheers for Progerse. I know, I know... you've been hearing me talk about this vaunted "second" Big Green album for about four years now. And no, we're not nearly finished, but we are making progress, in spite of the various impediments (see above). As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, you can't have progerse in speece with all those cheers in the wirehouse. Which seems like a non-sequitur, but anyway -- we've got four songs under construction, another 10-14 to get started on, and I'm reasonably sure that our sophomore CD will include no holiday related material. Check back soon.

Responsibility. Dubya and his uncle Cheney talked to their hand-picked 9/11 panel this week. Of course, their testimony wasn't under oath (the president had already taken the oath of office, we were informed by a somewhat impatient press spokesman) and no recordings or transcripts were allowed (thought the panel was allowed to bring someone who writes really fast), but Junior was "glad he took the time" to do it, because (after all) he's got better things to do, right? This is "mister responsibility", folks, unwilling to face any kind of public questioning about anything he does in our name... and even his closed-door answers need to be coached by acting president Cheney. This is the guy who gets high marks for what pollsters term "leadership".

The entire Bush team seems blissfully unaffected by this war, like it was something as insubstantial to them as, say, particulate air pollution (which kills thousands each year) or unemployment (which is, of course, a key component of their economic plan). Maybe Counterpunch editor Alex Cockburn is right about these guys being a bit like the gang who couldn't shoot straight, managing to come off badly even in the wake of someone as near-universally despised as Saddam Hussein. In any case, their seeming nonchalance mirrors that of many of our fellow countrymen & women. It's surreal to hear these constant reminders that we are "at war" and yet be surrounded by such indifference at every level of society -- like that invented Star Trek world of Ameniar, where wars were fought by computer simulation and people who were declared "casualties" would dutifully march to the disintegration chamber. More than 130 dead U.S soldiers in April (on top of thousands of Iraqis) and people are still obsessed with how the last Friends is going to turn out. It's like we're sleepwalking through history, headed for the cliff.

I see they've chosen state terror apologist John Negroponte to head the enormous American "embassy" (Vatican city) in Baghdad. Good place for him. Like Jack Crabbe to Custer, I say "You go down there." I was hoping they'd make Wolfowitz ambassador, but I'm sure he has "other priorities," having been forced to evacuate his besieged hotel last year sans trousers. (He's certainly distracted enough not to be aware, even within 200 lives, of how many U.S. soldiers have died for his little Iraq project). Perhaps Wolfowitz has nightmares about being taken to some Iraqi prison for his serial offenses, but I doubt it. Frankly, I just wish the whole Bush administration would pack up and follow Negroponte over to Baghdad. After all, they're the ones who wanted to go to Iraq so badly. They could start their own "reality" show -- The Bushes of Baghdad -- and we could see which one gets voted off the island each week.

Maybe then people would start paying some serious attention to this stupid, murderous, piratical war.

luv u,

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05/09/04

Testing...testing...

Woke up this morning, my head was so bad. No, it wasn't "the worst hangover I ever had," etc. It was the predictable result of using a concrete block for a pillow. Not a very forgiving cushion, I must say, but the only one available in this forgotten stock room at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. As you may have guessed already, our living quarters are still overrun by renegade mongooses (mongeese?), forcing us to repair to long unused sections of our disputed squat-house.

What came of the hastily convened scientific conference on Mongoose relocation? Nothing conclusive, I'm afraid. A lot of questionable theories involving laser light shows, concussion grenades, water cannons and the like. (Someone even suggested embedding winning sweepstake tickets beneath the rinds of ripe breadfruit, but....well....that was just....kind of....dumb.) Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) and Trevor James Constable (our longtime associate) came back from the gathering with a look of palpable disappointment on their faces. They had called in a lot of favors on putting the convention together, and essentially came back empty-handed to a mill full o' mongooses. Talk about discouraging!

Well, you know what they say, don't you? When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So we're going, damn it...even if we have to make our escape in an Estes rocket! That's right -- Big Green is embarking on a 15-planet (plus one asteroid) tour to promote our current EP The President's Brain (Is Missing), featuring our cracked little ode to Dear Leader (Dubya) plus 3 other tracks that won't be on our next album. Of course, we want to get underway with the tour as soon as possible, and no legitimate promoter in her/his right mind would book this tour on such short notice. Ergo, we've been forced to consider somewhat less savory options...fly-by-nighters...slimeballs...you know, actual promoter types. Now before you say anything, let me assure you -- I did not contact our old corporate label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. (They've been too busy with their subcontracting in Iraq to be bothered....something to do with prisons, I believe...) No, no -- I mean unsavory characters we haven't already used before...like the man-sized tuber's strangely southern cousin, Colonel Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber.

Here's an interesting coincidence (yes, we seem to have a lot of them): ever since we met the tuber's cousin Jeremiah on planet Mars this past winter, he's been dropping hints that he might want to strike up some kind of "mutually ad-vantageous bizniss ar-range-mint" with us, like a managed investment fund or an interplanetary tour -- something with the potential for substantial remunerative benefits all around. So the next time he checked in, we told him about wanting to get out of this dump for a few weeks, and he said he'd see what he could throw together. Has he ever booked a tour before? Who the hell knows? Hey, look -- on one of our last tours, we had Tiny Montgomery as our manager, and he'd never done that before. How did it turn out? It was a total fucking disaster, that's how. But that doesn't mean by doing something similarly stupid and reckless we're necessarily going to get the same kind of result. I mean, that would just be too much of a coincidence.

Anyway, Jeremiah's been working the interstellar phones (I understand he's got some interesting opening acts lined up for us...something on stilts, I believe). While he's putting together an itinerary, we're taking the somewhat unusual step of rehearsing some of the material we'll soon be playing in various interstellar venues. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been put in charge of advertising, and he (with some input from the man-sized tuber) has already come up with some slogan ideas. I think the most accessible one so far has been "Eeerbom Eek Memnista", which at least sounds like it could mean something in some unknown language. (Trevor James complains that, read backwards, it sounds like "they have planar warts!" in Urdu, but I can't hear it, myself.) Back to the drawing board, Marvin!

Occupational Hazards. Let me be the first here at BigGreenHits.com to say that I'm shocked! shocked! at the gruesome levels of "abuse" ("torture" to you and me) being meted out on Iraqi detainees. Who would have imagined that we have been mistreating prisoners? After all, we've done nothing in the last 14 months but demonstrate how highly we value the lives of ordinary Iraqis -- just ask Lizzie Dole how utterly kind, generous, and understanding we've been. Now ask her again, just to hear the same speech a second time. Got it? Good. Now look at this little video clip of our soldiers annihilating a wounded Iraqi with a 30mm gun. Now read a couple of accounts of the last few weeks in Fallujah, which Dubya is said to have personally marked for collective punishment (a war crime of the first order). Now take a look at the April issue of Harpers and read some of the accounts of released Guantanamo detainees. Now spend a couple of hours at the National Security Archive.

I guess you could say Bush did some serious traveling this week -- he started out in Denial and ended up in De Tigris, trying to find as many different uses for the word "sorry" as possible without actually being sorry. After all, his mission is to show the suburban swing-voting soccer moms that he cares without alienating his flat-earth, hyper-religious, kill-them-furriners electoral base. So this has to be presented as a very unfortunate (and very limited) departure from our otherwise spotless record of championing freedom and goodness and niceness in the world, already. One of Bush's points in recent stump speeches was that the U.S. has a legal process and will bring those responsible to justice, whereas Saddam encouraged torturers, rewarded them, etc. But for those listening in the middle east, I have to think that the bogus American exceptionalism that Bush represents (we're all virtue, though we make mistakes sometimes) resembles that of Saddam, who (like most absolute rulers) saw himself as a champion and his nation as alone on the path of virtue.

That's not the only similarity, of course. Like Saddam, Bush won't tolerate dissent in the ranks, making an example of Fallujah and other communities, as well as attacking Al-Sadr's people and threatening their leader with imprisonment or death or both. The bogus rationale for this deadly invasion, the subsequent chaos about which we did less than nothing, the overwhelming and often hysterical use of firepower against poorly armed opponents, the careless or deliberate targeting of civilians, and the massive illegal privatization of Iraq's public sector assets -- this is what Iraqis face every day. Saying we're "sorry" about torturing prisoners could not be more disingenuous. We shouldn't be there in the first place -- there's the rub. Still, I have to think that, even in the Arab world, there's some mild comic value in the spectacle of Rumsfeld and his generals being grilled before the Senate while the administration asks Congress for more money.

It has to be some comfort to the people we step on that our leaders are such incompetent fools. Indeed, it may be their only hope.

luv u,

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05/16/04

What-choo-say?

You can pick your friends...you can pick your nose...but you can't pick which friend knows more about interstellar tour promotion. Or at least I can't. (Maybe you can. I probably should have thought of asking you before now.) All the personnel at my disposal, and I had to pick that crazy root vegetable with the cheesy southern accent -- the man-sized tuber's cousin Jeremiah Beauregard.

Buyer's remorse? You might call it that, though we haven't actually given Jeremiah any money yet. It's probably more just a sense of foreboding -- the kind we usually get when the kick-off date approaches and we have no confirmation on any of the venues we're playing. When I bring this up to Jeremiah, all I get is his hoarse laugh and a mildly patronizing "Nah, don't yew wurreh 'bout uh thang -- jus' leave it all tuh little ol' Jeremiah." There's a real confidence builder. Oh sure, he's taken over one of the few offices spaces in the Cheney Hammer Mill that hasn't been claimed by the mongooses...and yeah, I've seen him on the phone for hours at a time, sucking on a mint julep as he chats amiably with whomever or whatever is on the other end. But results? Not too encouraging.

Last week I mentioned some of the opening acts he's lined up. Assorted freaks and sideshow refugees -- about what you might expect to see share a stage with us. (He even dug up The Steels somewhere -- that chromium-oxide family who toured with us several years ago.) It's the stages themselves that have us worried. For instance, he has us tentatively booked into a place on Callisto. He told us it was a "thea-tuh in the round"...but our perpetual sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn knows the spot well and has told us that it's actually a crater. A big, unreconstructed, unrepentant meteor crater. You set up in the center of this enormous pock mark and patrons perch along the rim. Worse yet, it's one of those "bring your own generator" places...so I suppose we'll need to have our spacecraft idling behind us the whole time we're playing and run our gear off a big old extension cord. Sweet.

Here's the kicker, though -- that gig's not even confirmed! None of them are! And frankly, I'm starting to wonder if there actually is anyone on the other end of all these phone calls. I mean, all Jeremiah has shown me so far is pictures of desolate craters, abandoned boulder fields, a patch of desert on Aldebron...none of these so-called "venues" looks as though it's ever been used as such before. But when any one of us starts chaffing about it, Jeremiah clucks his tongue, then orders up another tray of marzipan and makes a few more suspicious phone calls. I don't know....maybe he's on to something. Maybe this tour will be a tremendous success. Maybe every band will start playing empty craters on desolate, airless, alien moons. Maybe this will be the start of the next big trend in pop music -- Crater Rock. Maybe....not.

Never one to abandon a project before its time, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has kept close to his chalkboard, working on his English syntax and trying to develop a viable slogan for our upcoming tour (such as it may be). He's actually not doing too badly -- I mean, he's reached the point where he's using actual words. More importantly, he's discovered irony. That's pretty amazing for a home-made automaton, though he tends to get stuck on those cryptic, self-contradictory nonsense statements that were so popular back in the 70s and early 80s. (They still make my brain hurt, damnit.) Keep trying, Marvin....you've got two weeks to nail it!

"Brain" Featured. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our guerilla publicist Pat Fish, Big Green's "President's Brain" was featured as "Zong of the Week". Take a look.

God's Little Jailers. More than one commentator has reminded us of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which took place back in '69, I believe. This Iraq enterprise seems, in general, like an enormous behavioral experiment in itself, offering us all the opportunity to behave as cruelly as our consciences will allow. An ugly portrait of America emerges from all of this -- one that has gained considerable currency around the globe in recent years -- of an arrogant, ignorant and sadistic people. Of course, it's no more accurate than any other generalization about a very large group. But because we are a "democracy" (republic, in actuality), we are seen to be substantially responsible for the policies of our government...and when our government acts like a thug and a killer, we take the heat.

Hey -- it's a fair cop, pretty much. Though it may be hard for many of us to swallow, we are responsible for our foreign policy...even if we don't agree with it. And when our military people get killed or wounded, and when they kill and "abuse" others, it's down to us. Americans tend to know very little about what their government does in other countries. We're a fairly insular society -- perhaps the most isolationist culture ever to indulge in empire building on so vast a scale. Our leaders encourage and exploit this -- they try to keep our military adventures short and relatively painless (for us), because when a war lasts too long and costs too much, we are given an opportunity to learn enough about the policy to start taking responsibility for it. That's a disaster for any administration, especially one that ducks responsibility as consistently as this one. (Remember Dubya scratching his head at that press conference when asked to name a single mistake he had made. And Rumsfeld...the only way he'll ever leave is if he can find a way to outsource his resignation to Bechtel.)

This is why the black vs. white, good vs. evil, jeebus vs. satan, etc., world view is so useful to folks like Dubya and his crew. For one thing, it plays into that general mistrust of foreigners (the "other") that has been a major theme of American life (you can't trust what you don't understand). For another, it lends instant righteousness to the most malign policies imaginable, including our interrogation practices (supported, I understand, by hyper-religious General William "my God's better than your god" Boykin) -- techniques that are not only widespread, but long established with plenty of precedent in U.S. military intelligence gathering (recall the Phoenix program in Vietnam). I'm not a biblical scholar, but it does amaze me how these fuckers can invoke the name of Jesus when they are cutting down innocents every day of the week (and twice on Sunday).

My guess is, if Jesus were alive today, you'd find him marching with Taayush or at the bottom of some ghastly human pyramid in Abu Ghraib.

luv u,

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05/23/04

Hullo...

What the hell -- where is it? Hey! Anybody seen my steamer trunk? How about my bloody flight cases? I know I left them somewhere close at hand...I think. Too long between tours. I mean, I can't even find my travel razor...or that toothbrush my dentist gave me last year. (She's got cases of those things -- quite amazing!)

As you might gather from the chaos described in the preceding paragraph, we are actually going through with it. Yes, Big Green will soon embark on another interstellar tour -- this one booked by the somewhat questionable Kentucky colonel cousin of our man-sized tuber, Col. Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber, late of planet Mars and just about every other peculiar place you can name. Old Jeremiah put together a patchy itinerary of mostly remote and desolate performance venues that stretch from here to Zenon...and frankly, it remains to be seen whether any of these peculiar gigs will actually pan out. But after careful, painstaking consideration of the matter (flipping a coin), we decided anything was better than sharing a bathroom with a dozen mongooses. (Try it sometime, and you'll see.)

So -- with lift-off just a week away, there is much to do. I mentioned finding flight cases, steamer trunks, complimentary toothbrushes, etc. There's also the important task of preparing our instruments. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been assigned the job of guitar technician -- even now I can hear him changing the strings on my battered Hagstrom III electric (with no less than seven switches!), cranking them up with his clumsy brass fingers, muttering oaths as the strings fail to seat properly on the primitive bridge pieces. (I haven't the heart to tell him that I won't be playing that sucker on this tour.) Just before that was Matt's acoustic (the best-sounding $130.00 dreadnought in the history of Japan), the one with the broken tuning machines. I'll tell you, Marvin was using words I've never heard before...it got so bad, we had ask Judy to leave the control room. Next, he'll have to stretch and oil the accordians. Thankless job.

Everybody's pitching in where they can do the most good. Marvin's inventor, the distinguished mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, has donned his shop overalls and gone to work on the ion-pulse drive of our replica Jupiter Two interstellar space vee-hickle. Never seem him get elbow-deep into the mechanics before -- I think it's something he does in his spare time for relaxation. (Our old colleague Dr. Hump has confided to me that Mitch has a fully-fitted garage attached to his neo-Tuscan villa in Antwerp, but this may just be another one of the good Doctor's fish stories.) In any case, he's promised to improve our fuel economy 15%...and to get the air conditioning working again. And since our tour promoter is sending us in seventeen different directions, ignoring normal routes for space travel, plotting courses through the centers of stars, etc., this is probably a good thing.

How are the rehearsals going? Well...a little on the slow-mo side. Traditionally, we Big Greenites have taken a master list of songs, cut it up into little strips of paper one-song-long, and stuffed them into a fishbowl...so when we rehearse, we just reach into the bowl and play whaterver song we pull out. This time it's a little different. John and Matt have brewed up a big kettle of alphabet soup. We're supposed to stir it up until the letters form the name of a song in our catalogue. So far, we've had to settle for partial matches ("prz" for "President's Brain", "skb" for "Special Kind of Blood," etc.) but even this is time consuming. (The only advantage I can see over the fishbowl method is that when we're finished, we've got soup for dinner.)

Anyway, sFshzenKlyrn gets so exasperated with this ritual that he almost ignites into a supernova, which of course would incinerate all that we know and could ever hope to achieve in a thousand lifetimes. So there are some drawbacks, as you can see. I'll let you know if sFshzen "Incredible Hulk" Klyrn starts going septic. Then you can call the Pentagon and tell them there's something even scarier than global warming.

Downloadable Brain. There seems to be a goodly number of people downloading our mp3 file for The President's Brain (Is Missing), Big Green's current "single." You can be the next! Just go to our CD/MP3 page and help yourself...or scroll down and order the EP.

How The Mighty... This week's raid on Ahmed Chalabi's compound in Baghdad by "coalition" forces was hardly the most dramatic or depressing news to come out of the region. It was one of those stories that leaves you scratching your head a bit and wondering, what the hell are they trying to pull now? Is this some kind of desperate "we need somebody to blame QUICK" ploy? Is it the outward manifestation of the ongoing power struggle between the State Department (hates Chalabi) and the Pentagon (loves him), reflecting DOD's recent (ahem) problems and Foggy Bottom's consequent ascendency? Is this an orchestrated attempt to boost Chalabi's popularity by manufacturing a little nationalist street credibility for him (what better way to help his non-existent polling numbers)? Or is this just The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, part CLCXIV? I mean, you could spend way too much time trying to sort it out -- maybe that's the idea. (Notice that I haven't mentioned the prisoner abuse scandal even once. Doh!)

Anyway -- just to indulge in idle consideration of this farce for a moment longer -- it is more than a little freakish and bizarre to see Bush Administration officials and affiliated journalists expressing how shocked, shocked they are that Chalabi is a.) a liar, b.) an embezzler, c.) an opportunist, and d.) a mega-liar. Suddenly, they're all masters of the obvious...able to see all the facts they've been hiding in plain view for as long as Chalabi has been in the news. I mean, our government has been throwing money at this shyster since about 1991. They started a major war on the basis of the fairy tales his cronies fed an eager White House. It is a little late for them to decide he's unreliable. For Christ's sake -- Richard Perle was only just telling the world and the U.S. Senate what a great guy Chalabi is and how we should have installed him as dictator of the new "democratic" Iraq last year -- this was just a couple of weeks ago!

Dubya and the boys have done some pretty dramatic worm-turns in the past and gotten away with it, thanks to a compliant and uncritical news media., but if they can get people to swallow this one...it would be a rare triumph in the history of flim-flam. Then, I guess, we would be able to proceed on our glorious mission in Iraq, the evil cleansed from our ranks, and Dubya effectively distanced from the recent errors of the Pentagon. Almost childlike, they think if they close their eyes and say a little prayer, it will all go away. Kind of sad, really (NOT). All I know is that, when I open my eyes, I still see us acting like murderous thugs, shooting, beating, and bombing our way through an imperial enterprise that was thoroughly illegitimate to begin with. I see us, on a daily basis, confirming the now almost universal impression that we and the Israeli Defense Forces are the same rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem (and Karbala, Najaf, Fallujah...). Any fool could see it from day one...just as any 5-year-old could spot Chalabi for a con-man from the first time he opened his mouth.

Rafah. Speaking of rough beasts, the IDF's devastation in the Rafah refugee camp near Gaza's border with Egypt is something that needs to be seen. Take a look at Rafah Today.

luv u,

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05/23/04

Roger, capcom...

Ignition sequence start....twelve..... eleven..... ten..... nine..... smoke rising from the mains.... five....... four..... three...... I see flame!.... one.... Lift off! We have lift off! Rockets? Who said anything about rockets? I'm just making toast. The actual launch is tomorrow. You've got to calm down, man.

Yes, friends, while most Americans are firing up the barbecue, your intrepid fellow-travelers in Big Green will be hurtling through the icy void of space toward our first engagement on a remote moon of Saturn -- yet another icy void that any band with any sense would a-void like a plague of dung-beetles. Not us ... at least, not since we engaged a certain Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber as our de facto tour promoter. That ludicrous root vegetable has booked us into some of the most desolate corners of the known universe, all the while promising capacity crowds and record receipts at the box office. Naturally, we're skeptical....but then we've never worked with a tuber before (at least, not as a promoter... road manager, yes), so there's a remote chance that what he's been telling us will turn out to be true. Isn't that enough to launch a space mission on? No? Are you sure that's the right answer? Hmmmm....

No matter. Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) tells us we can't lose, so long as we keep a bead on the black hole that lies between Zenon and Kaztropharius 137b. (Jeremiah's detailed itinerary originally charted a course right through the center of that dark little space emerald, as well as a number of major "hot" suns.) If this tour is a total washout, we can just drive our spacecraft through the black hole and emerge sometime before our launch. It's like a big "undo" button in space, says Mitch, and hell...he's a scientist! (Or at least he plays one on the web.) We just have to make certain we take the right exit off of the wormhole expressway, or lawdamighty knows where we might end up. Perhaps another time, another dimension. Perhaps (dare I say it?) the Fifth Dimension (minus Marilyn McCoo, of course).

It took some doing, but we did get everything packed and loaded into our space RV. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was a tremendous help, putting together all of our changes of clothes, our juju bead dispensers, our hazmat suits, and other essentials for deep space travel. He was even going to handle the valet parking for our pre-launch party, but we insisted on giving him the night off so that he could get all of his fluids checked and his filters changed. We chipped in for a buff job, as well. (His brass took a little polishing, let me tell you... but now he looks like... well.... a very shiny version of himself.)

As part of our on-board retinue, we've invited one of our opening acts -- "The Steels" -- to ride along with us and do their usual weather forecasting routine (you may remember them from our Fall 2001 interstellar tour). Naturally, we're bringing our trusted advisors Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable along, too. The man-sized tuber will be lending Marvin a hand with the instruments, as well as providing moral support for Tour 2004. Fact is, everybody and their cousin wants to climb aboard, since the alternative is staying here in this mongoose-infested Hammer Mill (our prime motivation for going on tour in the first place). Luckily, while there is just about room for "everybody," there is no room for their "cousins," so Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber is opting to stay behind and "man" the phones. (This is good... I'm getting tired of the smell of those Honduran cigars and the sound of him slurping mint juleps.)

So, friends... the engines are primed, the crew is briefed and ready -- just a few numbers to count backwards, and it's up, up, and away! (Holy shit -- we did get to the Fifth Dimension!)

Yesterday Once More. Okay -- sorry if I put that horrible Carpenters song in your head. If it's any consolation to you, you should know that it will be stuck in mine now for at least a week. Oh well, I'm just commandeering this phrase to make the point (again) that this whole "war on terror" thingy smells more and more like the Cold War, and the glorious crusade for the liberation of Iraq fairly reeks of Vietnam. Ironically, the more they say it ain't so, the more they make it so. (They said Vietnam wasn't like Vietnam too, as I recall.) Take Dubya (please!) and his "address to the nation" last Monday that somehow involved his delivering a speech to yet another military audience. Again, he talked about this malevolent ideology that mysteriously unites all of our enemies (i.e. uncooperative people whose resources we covet) in a vast worldwide conspiracy against us. Again, he stressed the importance of staying the course, even as the reef draws nearer and nearer. The administration brags about not reading newspapers -- listening to this recycled Victory in Vietnam speech, I can believe it. Like our last great Texan president LBJ, Dubya comes across as hopelessly out of touch with reality.

Then there's the broader context of the "war on terror." I hardly need mention that yet another study was released this week arguing that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is making us more vulnerable to terror attacks. These reports come and go, and no one seems to pay them much mind -- Bush still gets high polling numbers on fighting terror. But as Chalmers Johnson has pointed out, if you apply the annoyingly empirical measurement of number and frequency of terror attacks both before and after the commencement of our "war on terror," it's hard to escape the conclusion that we are losing. Badly. Dubya might tell you there have been more attacks because we've got the terrorists "on the run," but it hardly matters to the victims... and since they seem to have no handle on who they're fighting and where, it's a little hard to say whether there are more or less of the "enemy" now than before. In what is essentially a war of attrition, this would seem to be important. And since there have been more attacks since we started fighting, it appears to indicate more "enemy," rather than less. Right?

Then, of course, there are the domestic terror alerts -- Ashcroft coming out and giving the scowl of death; Ridge inspiring confidence with every word. There will be another attack, they say, but we don't know what, when, where, who, or how... and we won't raise the color-coded warning level because that tends to inhibit shopping (to the extent that anyone pays attention to it). Like Dubya's speech, it was kind of a non-announcement -- a news report that there is no news today. Basically, what they were saying has always been the case, only now we can expect even worse, thanks to them and their terror war. After all, not only have we followed Ann Coulter's sage advice and invaded "their" countries, killed "their" leaders, and attempted to convert "them" to a kind of free market christianity, but we've also systematically humiliated the entire Arab nation as a matter of policy, while doing all we can to confirm the already prevalent notion that Dubya and Sharon wear the same pants at the same time. And like occupied Palestine (the 22% that isn't Israel), there's no end in sight. So... expect attacks.

New Boss/Same As Old Boss. So Allawi will be Prime Minister of Iraq. Of course, last time a CIA asset got chosen to lead the country, it didn't turn out so well. Guy by the name of Hussein. Saddam Hussein. Heard of him?

luv u,

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