NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(November '03)

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11/2/03

Goodbye...

Back in the bosom of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill again. Back to the familiar trappings of our cavernous and drafty adopted home. Every tour has to end somewhere, right? And I believe I speak for more than just myself when I say what a relief it is to slip out of our interstellar Winnebago and into someplace more or less firmly planted in the ground. Little did we expect that our little time travel detour would come back to bite us in the ass. Let me 'splain you...

Even before we had unpacked our personal effects (Matt's life-size knock-offs of the Elgin Marbles had yet to be carted off the ship and uncrated), it seemed like time was collapsing in on itself. No, I'm not talking about that phenomenon we experienced on tour when one of us would suddenly appear in 19th Century garb. I mean little things...temporal distortions...like clocks running backwards, peaches ripening before our very eyes, the mail arriving on time...that sort of thing. When the man-sized tuber sprouted roots and began growing into the courtyard, we decided something had to be done. 

Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had an idea of what the problem might be. He said that when we returned from the remote future of 5 million A.D., we may have arrived slightly out of phase...perhaps only a few nanoseconds off from our actual time. Then he went into some incomprehensible dissertation about string theory that made my teeth move about in funny ways (physics always has that effect on me). In effect, though, it's like that Rolling Stones song....Mitch was saying to us, baby baby baby you're out of time...and while it's not clear that the Stones were singing about temporal displacement, we knew what he was driving at. So Mitch scurried off to his laboratory and went to work on the problem, taking the man-sized tuber with him as an experimental subject, I suspect. 

Of course, this was bloody inconvenient, as we were eager to get back to work on not producing our album. (Did I say not producing? I meant producing, of course...) Then a strange thing happened. On the second day of Mitch's experiments, we could hear the sound of us playing Sensory Man (one of our warm-up songs) emanating from our rehearsal space, the old hammer testing room. I stuck my head in there and saw, well, us at our instruments, framming away like chimps. The music stopped and doppelganger Matt put down his bass. "Oh, Christ!" he said. They all scowled at me. "Loogit," doppelganger me told me with some irritation, "just go to Mitch's room and tell him to put you through the temporal de-accelerator. Get the others and do it now!" 

Of course, the others wanted to see for themselves, so I brought them over to the rehearsal space. The music stopped again. "Fuck!" my double spat, then turned to John's double and said, "You were right. I forgot about the second time." He spoke to us again: "Just go to Mitch's room. Trust me." They started playing again. 

Well this was unusual, to say the least. So we went to Mitch's lab and found him working on something that looked like a garage door with the image of Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel painted on it. Mitch told us it was a temporal de-accelerator gizmo that would cast us back in time about a half-hour and put us on the right time-space thread, so to speak. (He claimed to have tried it on the man-sized tuber with some success.) Well, we puzzled over this for a while, then decided to take the plunge. What followed was what seemed like several hours of floating through a spiraling vortex filled with flying electric toasters -- a celestial screen saver, if you will. (Will you?) When we emerged, it was like we had turned the clock back a half-hour. Mitch had saved our sorry asses once again.

We repaired to the practice room and had started playing Sensory Man when an alternate time/space me stuck his head in the room. Matt put down his bass. "Oh, Christ!" In all the excitement, we had forgotten about our previous selves. I heard myself saying, "Loogit, just go to Mitch's room and tell him to put you through the temporal de-accelerator. Get the others and do it now!"  Previous me went away, but then came back a few minutes later with the other previouses, just as John said they would. "Jesus," I said to John, "You were right. I forgot about the second time." I told the specters of ourselves: "Just go to Mitch's room. Trust me." After that, everything was pretty much normal...except for this strange feeling of deja vu...ever get that?

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was fortunate to have missed all this. Being an automaton, the temporal distortion did not affect him. And he may have been too busy to notice anyway, what with all the back-slapping he was getting down at the constabulary due to his promotion to Major. They've made a kind of folk hero out of our Marvin -- his confrontation with the "tumbleweed gang" has become a staple of local lore, even though it happened on one of our interstellar tours. No matter -- he was still the toast of the town. A celebrity's welcome, and no pesky doppelgangers for him to send packing (he more or less specializes in apprehending varieties of desert brush, actually). 

Good News. The cocks of supply-side economics were crowing this week with the news that U.S. 3rd quarter economic growth came in at an annual rate of 7.2% -- the highest rate since the last time these cartoon pirates were in control of everything, borrowing like gamblers, spending massive amounts on military gear, and cutting taxes for their pirate pals. The corporate media pretty much stuck to the administration's play card, describing this place called "America" where consumers' wallets were "stuffed" with tax refunds. I can tell you this -- nobody I know got one, though I do know some people who got laid off this past quarter. In our upstate New York home town, the companies that are doing the best are military contractors and medical related providers...not too hard to figure that out. Oh -- I have noticed some new luxury cars popping up here and there, as the well-heeled continue to spend like sailors while 12 million U.S. families now qualify as "food insecure" -- up considerably over the past three years. 

Think about this when you see the faces of those killed in Dubya's splendid little wars. The economy hummed along pretty good at the start of the Vietnam War, too, though I hardly think anyone sane would consider that to be a good model. And as things explode at an increasing rate in Mesopotamia, the Bush P.R. offensive continues back home...even to the point where they were willing to risk a daytime press conference. It was the usual performance from Junior, by all accounts, perhaps most memorable for his attempt to slink away from responsibility for the triumphant "Reaganesque" rally aboard the Abraham Lincoln a few months ago. I imagine even his closest aides struggled to keep a straight face over that one. (They later issued a "clarification" of Dubya's comments.) Just another element of the big lie falling to pieces, right alongside the Iraq occupation itself. (They appear to be making a "Strategic Hamlet" out of Saddam's home town, now -- circling it with barbed wire and issuing I.D. cards. That should make them love us...like they oughta.)

The big lies can fall to pieces now, of course. They've served their purpose. Fact is, in spite all the bad news for the rest of us (lost jobs, trashed social programs, dead or injured military friends and/or relatives, etc.), the news really is good for the people who matter to this administration. Corporate America is getting the activist, interventionist government they've always wanted -- one that operates even more aggressively on their behalf and in their interests. Even more so than their predecessors, this administration is pushing U.S.-centered globalization not only through trade policy but at the point of a gun, as well. It is building a culture of economic insecurity for workers at home so that their expectations can be more easily managed and their demands kept at a minimum. It is pressing an extremist environmental agenda that promises to gut even the inadequate restrictions placed on mining, drilling, and industrial pollutants ("Clear Skies" will certainly result in more deaths from respiratory illness). And Bechtel, Halliburton, DynCorp, and many others are growing fat on the public dole...while enlistees and reservists get shot to pieces and have to scratch around for decent care. 

Sure, the news is good. Just not for us. That's why it's time for them to go. 

Take care out there.

luv u,

jp

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11/9/03

Hola.

It's warm and breezy here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in old Sri Lanka (home of the disbanded parliament) and your good friends in Big Green are just settling in after a hard day's slog. Just another marathon of rehearsal, avocado picking, panhandling, and swilling rotgut cider from last year's apple harvest. Stuff's got enough acid to keep Haight-Ashbury lit for a month of Tuesday afternoons. Quite a season. 

Time to do a little housekeeping, I think -- you know, tying up a few loose ends from previous dispatches. For instance, I know some of you have been wondering where sFshzenKlyrn was hiding during our recent sojourn through time and raggedy raggedy space. Well, friends, since our Zenite guitar maven is, in fact, a semi-plasmatic being of no determinate mass, temporal location, or volume (actually, he's got a few volume issues on stage, but that's another story), he was able to avoid our inadvertent detour through the wormhole simply by exercising a metaphysical maneuver known on Zenon as "agility side-step", which he picked up in his junior high gym class (along with a bad case of athlete's pseudopod). When our ship crossed the event horizon, sFshzenKlyrn simply shuffled between the lines of time/space. His raw score was sixty, but his achievement level was an enviable eight (out of ten)...though he lost points on the squat-thrust endurance test. (I blame dry drunk syndrome. Don't ask me why.)

Another question that has frequently (twice) plagued readers/listeners is, what about that Venus gig? Are we ever going to play it? That, too, is a thorny topic. You see, Mitch Macaphee tells us that now, at this time of year, the sun is between us and Venus. As some of you may already know, the surface of the sun is very hot -- hot enough to fry eggs in mid-air, I'm told -- and while Mitch is a good (i.e. not great) pilot, he is not confident of his ability to maneuver around that toasty little sun without reducing our ship's hull to a cinder. Also, committing to a make-good gig on Venus at this point would just be too hard on Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is now adjusting to his newly expanded responsibilities as a Major in the local constabulary. He's got a lot of extra paper pushing to do these days...not to mention the training drills he has to lead, using commands most police cadets have never even heard before, let alone obeyed. (They even use him as a postage meter and stamp dispenser...all this on $170 a week. Now that's getting your money's worth.)

Naturally, Marvin's thin paycheck isn't enough to cover all of our squatters' expenses. That's why we've taken to picking avocados in our spare time. Matt's man-sized tuber lends a "hand" by "manning" (or, more precisely, "root-vegetabling") the roadside stand where we resell our poached avocados. (That's right...we get a pot of water boiling and lower them in using little metal cups.) This works out pretty well, except that on occasion passing motorists will mistake tubey for a giant cassava and try to cart him off. We're hoping a warning sign will be enough to discourage these bargain hunters who obviously think the man-sized tuber would make good eating for a good long time. Not recommended. 

One more small piece of housekeeping, as it were. I was able to get our old friend Trevor James Constable on the phone the other day, and he told me that one possible cause for our brief experience with temporal displacement (see last week's column) may have been the fact that our hosting service switched our  web server over the past two weeks. In as much as we remain a "virtual" pop group, this could explain a lot. Mitch Macaphee didn't think much of this explanation, but that's only because it flies in the face of everything he's ever known to be true. It's not like he has any serious objections to it. (Though Mitch does seem to be in something of a sulk. And I saw travel brochures with pictures of the French Riviera on the floor of the men's room just outside his laboratory. May be time for a little scientific R&R.) 

In any case, we're home for a while and able to hammer out the contours of our next album, featuring all new tracks with such intriguing titles as Enter the Mind, Welcome to the International, Your Majesty's Amusement, and more. When will it be finished? Good question. Keep an eye on the west side of the Cheney Hammer Mill. When you see smoke coming out of the fourth story window, it means either there's a new Pope or Big Green is about to release a new album. 

Heroes. Yet another lively week in the world of hurt we call America. The administration is definitely pulling out the red meat for its fanatically religious political base, getting the troops mobilized at the grassroots in preparation for next year's election. What better way to accomplish this than through the ever-useful target of abortion rights? This week saw Bush signing (with exaggerated histrionic satisfaction, no less) a law banning that rare medical procedure the Party of God refers to rather bizarrely as "partial birth abortion," a chorus of sorry-looking legislators standing behind him, not a solitary woman amongst them, I might add. No risk of disastrously life-threatening pregnancies there! I noted with some amazement that my local Gannet chain newspaper finally provided a somewhat accurate description of what the newly-banned procedure actually is and how often it is used -- a grand total of approximately 2,500 times since 1973. This is not an operation performed for birth control -- this is typically about saving the mother's life. But no matter...Santorum, Hatch, Delay, and the boys all have something to show for the faithful back home -- the prospect of forcing badly deformed fetuses to term regardless of the consequences for the health of the mother. Praise the Lord!

They won't stop there, friends. These superheroes are on a mission. Next on the block is RU486, which I've heard them refer to as "baby poison." (Baby poison? A morning-after pill? What does that make condoms...baby trashbags?) Their angle on this is a particular individual who died after taking the pill...so really, they're concerned about women, see? Much more so than they are about men, apparently, since a substantial number of people have died after taking Viagra and I don't see the Republicans lining up to ban that little number (though I have seen one of their "elder statesmen" advertising it). Once they've saved us from "abortion" at both extremes of pregnancy and in the middle, as well, they'll try to finish the job they've started on birth control. (An important part of their "abstinence-only" education craze has been the contemptible lie that condoms are useless against STD's like AIDS -- a claim also advanced by the Catholic Church, no less, at the cost of God knows how many lives around the globe.) Then -- who knows? -- maybe they'll outlaw calico cats as minions of the devil. Ashcroft would be well pleased. 

Speaking of heroes, it looks like we're going to get another generous helping of the PR-inflated Jessica Lynch story, with not one but two books on offer, a made-for-TV production, a spotlight Diane Sawyer interview, and plenty of details about her harrowing experiences at the hands of those Iraqi "fiends", including a road map to every bone broken in her body and intimations of a "sodomizing rape" committed (or not) upon her person. Just like the first time we heard about her dramatic (literally) rescue, Ms. Lynch is being wheeled out at a time when things are not going so well at Iraqi Freedom Enterprises, Inc., with more than 30 Americans killed this week alone (though no cabinet members among them) and signs of a growing insurrection obvious to anyone outside Dubya's increasingly small circle of friends. They need this kind of story to distract us from their burgeoning disaster in the Gulf, which is putting so many people out of action that the DOD has taken preliminary steps toward reactivating local draft boards...looking ahead a year or two, no doubt. 

Personally, I think we should send the Rumsfeld Brigade -- Rummy, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams...and Dubya too, what the hell.  They're the ones who wanted this stupid war -- let them fight it, and send the rest of those poor bastards home where they belong. 

luv u,

jp

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11/16/03

Greetings...

The monsoons have arrived a bit early here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, the rain coming down in sheets, streaming over the wavy glass of the remaining window panes (the ones those mongooses didn't smash the last time they occupied this place). Mind you, the rest of this island nation is okay...it seems only to be raining on our abandoned Hammer Mill, which has got me a bit disconcerted, frankly. Call me neurotic (no wait, call me paranoid, that's more like it). When the forces of nature start to single me out, it feels like a problem. 

Sadly, Mitch Macaphee (Big Green's official mad science advisor) took his leave of us a few days before the rain got here. He really took the heat over our having accepted the counsel of his old cohort Trevor James Constable on a minor point of science, and the next thing any of us knew, he had packed up our rent-a-spacecraft and zipped off to a Mediterranean destination. I think he just got tired of being cooped up with us -- you know, two months in the same spaceship, then hanging around the Hammer Mill...who could take too much of that? Besides, Mitch has scientific conferences to attend, buffet tables to skim, and some of Europe's most highly regarded professorial elbows to rub. And as I mentioned last week, I'm sure a little down-time is on the Macaphee itinerary. (He apparently swiped Matt's last bottle of Bain Du Soleil on his way out the door -- what does that tell you?)

The others think Mitch may be to blame for the highly selective bad weather we've been experiencing -- that the mad professor may have directed storm clouds to rain upon us with extreme prejudice, if you will. Matt has gone so far as to start referring to Mitch as the rainmaker. (John just avoids mention of him in polite conversation...not that John engages in much polite conversation, but anyway...) I myself am inclined to think this bifflestickian rain cloud effect may be the result of some experimental weapons research going on over at our neighbor Gung-Ho's compound, but I have no proof of this, either. Fact is, weather control is really more in the line of Trevor James Constable, whose patented orgone generating device has been known to scare up a rain cloud or two in its time (as well as those pesky flocks of invisible flying predators). 

Blame is a game any fool can play, as my just-invented great-grand uncle used to say. For chrissake, there are people on the mainland who think we -- Big Green -- are responsible for the Orissa fireball. I mean, really -- just because we happen to spend a fair amount of our time in outer space doesn't mean we're responsible for everything that comes hurtling out of the void. If we're considered the cause of stray meteors, next thing you know they'll be blaming us for the appearance of that rare legless lizard that also appeared in Orissa state. (Actually, sFshzenKlyrn may have been responsible for that one -- a possible frustrated reaction to all the spam email he's been getting lately.)

The effect of all these ludicrous claims has been more negative than that of our own private rainstorm. We're getting a "rep" among the local population for being...well....bad luck, I guess. As a result, people have stopped patronizing our vegetable stand, despite the best efforts of Matt's man-sized tuber to attract passing motorists. (I can't say as I've ever been partial to banjo music, but in the "hands" of tubey, a four-string resonator can be a lethal weapon.) Even worse, the locals have begun nailing things to the front door of the Cheney Hammer Mill -- bunches of rutabagas, old discarded shoes, those sorts of things. I guess the idea is to ward off the miasma of misfortune that has somehow enveloped us, but none of these tactics have had any measurable effect...except that of making the front door more difficult to swing open. (Of course, that discourages us from going out into the village...so maybe there is a practical side to this magic, after all...)

I began to wonder if this would affect Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in his now skyrocketing career as a law enforcement officer. He's climbing the ladder of constabularian success as fast as any automaton in history, I don't doubt. Has our "curse" brought him low, as well? Not as such. But it has "put him into conflict with himself," as Chuck Connors once complained of Royal Dano on The Rifleman. Directed to investigate our apparent possession by evil (or, perhaps, merely silly) spirits, Marvin faced a classic dilemma of divided loyalties, pitting profession against hearth and home, etc. Which was the victor? How can you ask such a question? One look at Marvin's honest, open face should be all the answer you need. (He tried to book us. That's when John pulled the battery pack clean out of his hide.) We're certain the other cops will be by to see what happened to Marvin...so if you don't hear from me next week, call Amnesty International. 

Round Two. Our song Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2) has made it to the second round competition at www.garageband.com, the only one of about a half-dozen songs we've posted at that site to survive the preliminaries. As you may recall, it reached the top 200 out of six thousand alternative songs earlier this year. The hits just keep coming!

The Real War. Many more deaths in Iraq this week -- we may never know just how many, since the U.S. media has remained complicit in the Pentagon's policy of not reporting Iraqi casualty figures. It was the Italians' turn to take a big hit, with twenty-five or more of their relatively small contingent paying the ultimate price for Berlusconi's monumental stupidity. One wishes little il could be out on the firing line instead of his unlucky soldiers...I for one would like to see him shoulder-to-shoulder (or probably more like shoulder-to-wrist) with Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Blair, and a few other war enthusiasts in the Rummy Brigade. In "response" to this and other attacks, Dubya's commanders have stepped up the punitive raids, dropping bombs and lobbing shells into Baghdad for the first time in months. There is talk of "Iraqization" of the conflict, particularly now that several nations have backed off their dubious pledges to send troops. This is all starting to sound more than a bit familiar.

One aspect of this roiling disaster that has not been adequately addressed by either the press or the antiwar movement is the selling off of Iraqi assets. Journalist Naomi Klein has written in the Guardian and The Nation about how U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer is overseeing an unprecedented application of economic "shock therapy" in Iraq, privatizing government owned enterprises and implementing new rules that allow 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi assets and 100% repatriation of profits to foreign investors -- both barred by Iraq's previous constitution. Klein points out that this is in flagrant violation of U.S. obligations under the 1907 Hague convention and the U.S. Army's Law of Land Warfare as an occupying power....not that the observance of "legal niceties", as Charles Krauthammer has put it, should impede us from our imperial project. 

There is, however, the small matter of ensuring the sanctity of contracts proceeding from this privatization frenzy. The Coalition Provisional Authority has no standing to privatize public assets in Iraq, and any legitimate Iraqi government could revoke these transactions if it so chose. This has made international financial institutions -- including Bremer's old firm -- reluctant to underwrite foreign contracts in Iraq. In effect, the U.S. Export/Import Bank (i.e. U.S. taxpayers) is being employed to serve as an insurer of last resort to protect the profits of Halliburton, Bechtel, and other gold-rushers. 

This, my friends, is the true battle of Iraq, because it is also the battle being fought in practically every country around the globe -- people vs. neoliberal economics. The administration is making Iraq a test case for total corporate penetration of a subject economy -- it was already a test of their new National Security Strategy doctrine of "preventive" (i.e. opportunistic) war. The two doctrines go hand-in-mailed glove. Peace activists should take note, as Klein rightly points out: withdrawing the troops will not change this reality one iota. Dubya and the boys will attempt to put a sufficiently compliant quisling regime in place in Baghdad to allow this sacking of public property to continue. So as you call for the troops to come home, call for and end to corporate occupation of Iraq, as well. 

Go here for Klein's article...and pass it around: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031124&s=klein

Take care out there.      

luv u,

jp

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11/23/03

Hiya-ta heeyah...

Criminy. I'll never master this language. No, I don't mean Urdu. I mean the lexicon of the mole people as portrayed in Trevor James Constable's personal memoir, a dog-eared copy of which sits on my night stand. Trevor James spent some months among these denizens of the deep -- long enough to crack the language barrier. What's their word for "good morning" again? Something like, Hiyah-ta heeyah mungame. I'd check the glossary, but that would be cheating. 

Why am I studying the arcane tongue of a strange and almost certainly imaginary race? Well, it may be necessary for us to go underground for a spell, and I want us to be prepared. As you may recall, the local constabulary sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to apprehend us last week in the belief that we are somehow playing host to malevolent spirits. We were, of course, compelled to deactivate our robot friend until one of us could figure out how to program the "stupid" out of him. That took a little doing, as well as an emergency call to Marvin's creator, Mitch Macaphee, who is now enjoying lavish accommodations at a luxury convention center/casino in Monaco. (He's reportedly attending a seminar on the cognitive aspects of human pleasure...who says science is dull?) Mitch graciously interrupted the champagne/canapé phase of his experiment to fax us a schematic of Marvin's control interface. (Ironically, Marvin usually serves as our fax machine -- you plug the phone line in his ear and the paper comes out of his ass. He's nothing if not versatile.)

Well, I wasn't certain that we were reading the schematic correctly -- not having any technical background, I usually defer to whatever egghead happens to be squatting with us at the mill. But all of our eggheads were out of the country, so John made most of the adjustments, with a few suggestions from a pizza delivery person who was waiting for a tip. (I won't repeat the suggestion. This is a family web site, motherfucker.) Once Marvin's headbone was reconnected to his clue-bone, we plugged him back in and waited for him to warm up. He whirred and buzzed and clicked, then teetered off in the direction of the courtyard. No arrests and no stern warnings. Success!  

A little later on the same day I happened to pass a window looking out onto the courtyard and caught sight of Marvin juggling highway cones. Normally I wouldn't have thought much about it, except that he appeared to be wearing a new pair of athletic shoes. Our robotic companion is not big on footwear, so this was odd, to say the least. It was when Matt later casually mentioned that he had seen the man-sized tuber wearing tenny's that I became deeply concerned. A few phone calls and a pinch of Zenite snuff later, I had my disconcerting answer: Marvin had signed an endorsement contract with Globoshoe, a subsidiary of our estranged corporate label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. Clearly we had turned a certain knob in Marvin's abdomen a little too far the wrong way. Either that or it was that old devil greed what climbed in through his ear and squatted down on his brain.* (*Attribution: semi authentic frontier gibberish supplied by James Whitmore on The Big Valley, circa 1965.) 

Marvin's hostile takeover by corporate vultures didn't forestall the local constabulary's efforts to apprehend us in connection with the "miasma of misfortune" we had allegedly brought upon the surrounding community... a specious charge, but one that carried sufficient urgency to justify the use of a battering ram on our front gate. (The gate was unlocked. Possibly the constable in charge of the assault team hadn't noticed.) After a whole lot of pounding, the great portcullis flew open and our adopted home was officially lousy with coppers. 

This was one of those rare occasions when you're actually grateful for some of the more humiliating aspects of a corporate sponsorship contract. Like the big, embarrassing sneaker-shaped car Globoshoe gave Marvin to drive around in. While the bulls were negotiating their way through the bowels of the Cheney Hammer Mill, we piled into the enormous shoe like a bunch of circus clowns and had the man-sized tuber drive us out through the front gage and into the village. Admittedly, it's a bit of a challenge to keep a low profile when you're speeding through town in a giant sneaker that's piloted by an over-sized root vegetable, but it was either that or our likely arrest...and I don't much like the clammy accommodations over at the constabulary lock-up (they haven't bought a new toothbrush in years, and the television is locked on the "Spike" network). So we may be on the lamb for a little while...I'll keep in touch by sneaker-phone. 

London Calling. Dubya was greeted by an enormous column of protesters on what was originally planned to be a victory tour of Britain -- another "focus group" in session, giving a definitive thumbs-down to his imperial product. Though my hometown (Gannett chain) newspaper didn't carry the photo, there was a good shot of the crowd pulling down a paper mache statue of junior...much more convincing than the ludicrously staged toppling of the Baghdad Saddam likeness in a square cordoned off for the cameras by the U.S. military. The England trip was a decidedly granite-jawed affair -- it could hardly be anything else, since Dubya and his handlers were unwilling to consider canceling or rescheduling in light of the massive public distaste for our Dear Leader. Bush and Blair delivered their stock performances on the dais, referring incoherently to their Manichean world view, demonstrating a near total disconnect with reality and portraying it as Churchillian determination. (Modest, aren't they?) 

The people out in the street -- and a majority of Britons besides -- see the Iraq war in terms of less complimentary historical antecedents. A world superpower invading and overthrowing by force the corrupt leader of an impoverished, war-weary country, claiming that this tenth-rate military power is a threat to "the homeland" with nothing to support this claim except exaggerated or wholly fraudulent "evidence" -- who does that sound like? Not Churchill, exactly (though he was no stranger to bombing Arabs). I have to think that many of those British who lived through the blitz are angry over any comparisons between this "war on terror" and the battle of Britain. They experienced a time of real, undeniable threat from a military machine that had just rolled over the rest of Europe. Bush and Blair face an array of irregular forces associated with a number of different conflicts, whose strongest ties to one another exist only in the rhetoric of opportunistic policymakers in America and Europe. Attacks in Iraq have little to do with al Qaeda -- more to do with the presence of a large occupying force. Suicide bombings in Israel are a grisly manifestation of that decades-old conflict, prompted by Israel's continuing denial of basic Palestinian rights. But to Bush, it's all the same. 

While Dubya entertains the queen and babbles on about how we're picking off the "mid-level management" of al Qaeda (a rather tortured attempt to get himself off the hook for being unable to capture bin Laden or stop the actual car-bombers themselves), his commanders in Iraq are dropping more and more ordinance, mounting more punitive raids, fencing off whole communities and issuing I.D. cards, detonating buildings....more or less following the pattern of failed campaigns of past and present (America in Vietnam, Israel in the West Bank). And when one follows the same strategy, one may expect similar outcomes. 

Take care out there.     

luv u,

jp

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