Oct02

NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(October '02)

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10/6/02

Mr. Watson, I need you...

Greetings from inner Earth, just a mile or two deeper than Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Our seven week sojourn beneath the surface of the planet is now in its home stretch, gratefully, as this ghastly enterprise -- wholly conceived and imposed by our nefarious corporate label Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. -- has been every bit as tiresome as we'd originally imagined. We're all disgusted, all of us. Well...all except Marvin.

Whereas this has been a somewhat confining experience for the rest of us (particularly sFshzenKlyrn, who's used to wide open spaces light-years across), it's been an opportunity for Marvin to expand his horizons far beyond his lot as hand servant to a dysfunctional pop musician back at the Cheney Hammer Mill. For one thing, he has gained hours and hours of valuable experience behind the wheel of our converted 1953 GMC City Coach, amassing a level of skill that will certainly serve him well when we return to the surface.

What's more, Marvin's well-documented debut as a dancing fool allowed his artistic side to show itself...a very healthy development, and one that goes far beyond his original programming. (Mitch Macaphee, Marvin's creator, is baffled by this, and has begun to show signs of Frankensteinian anxiety, obsessing over Marvin's inexplicable metamorphosis.) I, for one, am looking forward to landing Marvin a job with Trailways Bus Lines, so he can help me pay off my portion of the enormous debt we've incurred during this tour.

"Debt?" you ask with astonishment. That's right, little buddy. Our take on these subterranean gigs has been less than adequately remunerative. Once Hegemonic takes their cut, there's barely enough to cover expenses. Naturally, we have to pay our standard retainer on sFshzenKlyrn, who is, after all, a hired gun (we've actually offered to make him a permanent member of Big Green, but he didn't want to take the pay cut). Then there are the generous stipends we allocate to Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable for taking time out of their busy schedules to assist us with our technical and metaphysical difficulties -- they don't come cheap. The remainder (after expenses) goes to John, Matt, and I, and is usually somewhere in the negative triple digits. (We do a straight 3-way split, even though Matt brings the marshmallow squares and I make the lemonade from my own ingredients.)

Even worse -- these clubs have either been short-changing us or paying us in this "local currency" like the kind they use in Ithaca, NY...only there's no Ithaca down here to spend it in, you know? There's no Moosewood to buy dinner, no Phoenix book barn, no going over to "The Nines" for a beer. All you can get with your Subterranean dollars is Lava soap and, well, Puffa Puffa Rice. And pumice...lots of it. Up on the surface, it's worthless scrip. Not worth the pumice it's printed on.

Anyway, that's what they dropped on us for 40% of the door at the Su(b)duction Zone and Levantine's Lava-Rama. The owner at Base Camp Alpha tried to pull that one on us, but we'd wised up by then. (He gave us pumice in lieu of scrip.) Why didn't we give these fuckers a harder time over this larcenous behavior? Well, they've got an old saying along the plainclothes rock circuit down here..."Be nice to the people you meet on the way down, because they'll be the same ones you'll run into on your way back up again." True enough.

Of course, that philosophy leaves us with some serious cash flow problems, like we had before our brief stint with the Bush Administration. Matt and I may have to resurrect our roadside discarded vegetable stand when we get back home. Or maybe I can get Marvin to sell some pumice-flavored ice cream. He's got that open, honest face that people seem to trust -- he should do just fine.

Luckily for us, we've just got a couple more stops before heading topside, then it's Krakatoa, here we come!

Mass Distraction. The incoherent march to war continues, seemingly unfazed by lack of justification, strong societal disincentives, and the obvious cynicism of its most enthusiastic supporters. One wonders how many of these armchair warriors would hoot so loudly if it were to fall to them to "defend" the republic by invading a sovereign nation half a world away. It's not hard to guess -- many of them showed us what they would do during the Vietnam era -- let somebody else fight the grisly, unjust war. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn't be willing to put yourself in harm's way for a particular war, you've got no right to ask someone else to do it for you. (Personally, I think war would become a whole lot less likely if our gung-ho leaders were required to be the first ones at the front...right alongside Rush Limbaugh.)

The administration's efforts to build public support for an unprovoked attack demonstrate the utter contempt they have shown for the public and the institutions of law since their non-election two years ago. While they talk about presenting a convincing case for war, they simultaneously create the impression of its inevitability, treating approval by Congress and the UN as mere formalities, and public opinion as something that should follow policy, rather than precede it. So far, no new evidence has been heard on their various allegations. Tony Blair's "dossier" had no revelations (like his indictment of bin Laden), Bush's UN speech was a bellicose rehash of old news, the new CIA report is more of the same, and so far Condi Rice's and Rumsfeld's pronouncements about Hussein's al Qaeda connections remain unsubstantiated -- just so many more drops in the daily flood of noise emanating from the White House.

But, hey -- this works for them. It's effectively defining the Congressional campaign (perhaps the main target on Dubya's war room board). It's keeping massive financial scandals off the front pages, to say nothing of deficit spending and generally bad economic news (Question: do conservatives still get to be called "conservatives" when they produce a $130 billion deficit?) It provides a cover behind which they can continue their generally unpopular initiatives to deregulate the energy industry, relax pollution controls, and a dozen other things they can connive while everyone's looking the other way. And -- perhaps best of all -- it might potentially secure the vast oil wealth of Iraq under the control of US-based energy corporations...this providing the resource security and leverage to support their plans to impose corporate globalization on an unruly world, utilizing powerful US-dominated institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the Ex-Im Bank, and backed by unchallengeable military power.

Oh...and that brings us to another benefit. Great hunks of additional money for the Pentagon system -- another $200 billion, perhaps. It seems the $350-400 billion we ship the Department of Defense each year only pays for them standing there (with a little extra for Rumsfeld's gag writer) -- if we actually want them to do something that involves shooting, bombing, choking, and other specialties, it's going to cost us more. It's only money.

As we tremble in the darkening shadow of Saddam Hussein's terrifying war machine (including maybe ten or twelve aging missiles big enough to kill you if they fall over in the right direction), this is no time to skimp, folks. So, empty those pockets! Or (better yet) just keep saluting, while we empty them for you.

luv u,

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10/13/02

Hey...

Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? (It took me weeks to make that stuff!)

I'm taking a little time off to jot down this message on my digital personal assistant...Marvin. Yeah, I know most of those things are pocket sized, but I thought, hell...if I'm going to have a helpful robot following me everywhere I go, dogging my every step, why not have him be my palm pilot, as well? So I got Mitch Macaphee to install a magic slate on Marvin's back and now he makes a jolly convenient writing table. I just write out my weekly blog in longhand (as well as letters to my solicitor, my congressman, and my mom) and Marvin's marvelous electronic brain converts it to an ASCII text file. Then I just go through and clean it up a bit afterward using a keyboard attached to the USB port in Marvin's ear canal.

(Marvin's text scanning technology is a little dated and inaccurate, however. That last sentence was originally transcribed as "Broken farm shock manatee can osterize the tibia van hickel." And that's after I had straightened out the characters a bit.)

We're in-between sets at Val's Hallah, an echoey little joint that reminds me of Albany, NY's QE2 circa 1986 -- dark and beery, with iconoclastic wall hangings and an upside-down Christmas tree with arrows pointing at it. That particular display fascinated sFshzenKlyrn no end, who (even as I write) is staring at the inverted tannebaum, trying to unlock its hidden meaning. (We had to bring it onstage with us the first night, just so our Zenite friend would look like he's playing, even when he wasn't.) Anyway, we're doing a six-nighter in this subterranean beer garden, and I'm starting to see the same Morlocks over and over again. This reminds me of work.

There are times when I wonder if any of our recordings have preceded us down here. Nobody seems to know any of this music. What's worse, the patrons at Val's Hallah seemed to be expecting a country western band. As we've seen before, there appears to be a genuine underground following for C&W. You got your Morlocks wearing ten gallon hats, your Troglodytes in string ties, and more Dingo boots than you can shake a petrified stick at. They even bring their own portable split-rail fences to sit on -- a peculiar site against the backdrop of a decidedly alt-rock club like Val's.

As a simple matter of survival, we've been pulling out every Big Green tune you can square dance to, including old chestnuts like Christmas Out West, Matt's twangy ballad about the end of Ronnie Reagan's presidency.

Looka-there, looka-under the tree

Ronnie's place in history

Christmas out west, we'll always wish him the very best

Capital gains tax cut was good news on this ranch

Children give thanks, sing happy birthday to our Lord

Our glorious destiny's assured.

Ronnie's comin' home, leavin' old George Bush on his own

Maybe even Danny Quail will come back from the unknown...

And so on. For this prophetic little number, I even throw sFshzenKlyrn my ancient Hagstrom electric guitar (this thing with about a dozen switches and a bad-ass whammy bar) so he can twang his way through the slide parts. Now there's a crowd pleaser.

One more night at this dude ranch and it's over to the Upshaft Ginroom for a one-nighter, right at the base of the long shaft that lets out through Krakatoa. That'll be our way home this Tuesday...right after we enjoy a nice big....a nice big sendoff breakfast....big sendoff breakfast of...flap....flap........jacks.....(!)

Profiles in Cowardice. Predictably enough, the overfed toadies who rule Congress largely fell in line behind GW (with some notable and honorable exceptions) in his desperate push for war, handing over perhaps the most crucial of their constitutional powers in a sickeningly pavlovian fashion. Pundits and members of the political class in general will crow their smug satisfaction over the reaching of this forgone conclusion, while Congress members may now return to their mid-term campaigns unburdened by the stigma of rationality.

They all, no doubt, anticipate an easy victory (i.e. few American casualties, rapid success, etc.) and this may be the case, since Iraq is a broken country that on its best day was no match for the U.S. military. But the prospects for success, however likely, do not in any way justify this heinous strategy, which could easily leave thousands of Iraqi civilians dead...and which, while purporting to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction, would bring about the only scenario in which they are likely to be deployed.

So weak a case for "war" (the undeclared, extra-constitutional variety) may be made regarding any number of states. While it would seem somewhat, well, imprudent to attack all of them, the key issue here should be whether or not it is right to attack any country simply because we can...and because it is politically expedient for our bungling leadership to contrive such an attack at this time. Far from providing a coherent rationale, the war party has concentrated largely on attempting to knock down selected (and largely misrepresented) arguments against the war. This seems largely for the sake of appearances. Just as they did during the election dispute in 2000, Dubya is building momentum for their position by creating the pervasive sense that the question has already been settled in their favor. This places the burden of argument on those who oppose preemptive attack, rather than those who support it. War has become the default position of U.S. foreign policy.

I swear, I could almost be in favor of this ludicrous war if they'd put its biggest boosters on the front line. Just throw Cheney a weapon -- he'll take out Saddam, no problem-o.

One wonders if they'll want to get this party started before the election just to keep those, well, uncomfortable stories off the front pages. Like sagging stocks, soaring deficits, more economic hardship on the way...and Bush and Cheney's own ethical (and perhaps legal) problems. Though it didn't make my local newspaper (whose editorial staff was too busy fawning over Dubya to notice much of anything else), there was a piece elsewhere about Harken Energy having buried some losses (Enron-style) in a partnership with Harvard University's foundation -- this while Bush was a director of Harken. In fact, he signed off on the deal, according to minutes from a Harken Board meeting. Nothing that unusual -- just the old boys network taking care of its own, as it always does. It's just that these people come from such a culture of criminal behavior, as Alex Cockburn has observed, you can barely imagine them doing anything honest. But never mind that, now...there's a war on!

Nobel Sentiment. Announcing former President Jimmy Carter's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel committee chairman Gunnar Berge commented that the choice "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," as well as "a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States." On FoxNews.com (between ads for chicken hawk Sean Hanrity's new screed and war criminal Oliver North's self-glorifying novel) a Peace Prize poll asked readers to respond either "Yes, it is an insult," or "No, he [Carter] deserved it." You decide...

luv u,

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10/20/02

Where am I...?

Hello, friends. I'm writing you from my bed in the Cheney Hammer Mill infirmary, scribbling this week's "Notes" almost illegibly on the magic slate with my right hand, as my left is temporarily out of commission. Actually, it's got a little ceramic pot of marmalade stuck on it. My left foot, correspondingly, is encased in a block of cement, waiting for the doctor's chisel. I can explain...just give me a minute...

There, that's better. It's a little hard to lie flat -- my ass is scorched from the fires of Krakatoa. Needless to say, we had a rough re-entry into the land of the living. Though any volcanic eruption you can limp away from, they say, is a good one.

How are my Big Green colleagues? Matt's fairly well -- I can see him from here in the patented decompression chamber Mitch Macaphee had rigged up before this tour got started. He only has to stay in there for another two or three days, during which time he can only eat vichyssoise and soda crackers. But he'll do all right. Johnny White's already up and around, though he's still wearing the stained lobster bib from our all-night flapjack eating bonanza just following our gig at the Upshaft Ginroom.

Yeah, that's right. We fell off the wagon again, big time. Only this incident was planned from the beginning -- premeditated by our sinister corporate label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. I know I've mentioned in previous columns how I'd had the distinct impression that the bean counters at Hegemonic were trying to bury us on this tour (quite literally!). Well, this closing night flapjack sendoff was proof positive of their malicious intent. They know about our history of jack abuse...how just the sight of a stack is enough to put Matt over the edge...how sFshzenKlyrn suffered through his last "lost weekend." Hardass motherfuckers, that's what they are.

Anyway, we played the Ginroom gig, then got a skinfull. I was so flapped out that I stumbled into one of those sound recording booths and taped myself playing one of my solo numbers, "Red, Gold & Green." Then I fell down the stairs, smashing my cheap guitar to splinters. By that time, sFshzenKlyrn had already begun to take on his dense, darker flapjack-induced pallor. I vaguely recall Marvin helping me lift the now granite-like Zenite guitarist and strap him into one of the couches of the low-budget ascent vehicle Hegemonic had cobbled together for our trip up Krakatoa's spout. Trevor James Constable -- his belly distended with buttermilk jacks -- had painted half of the vehicle blue, then used a grease pencil to draw arrows pointing at the hatch from all directions. Weird.

I was out of it for the first part of our ascent. When my eyes opened, we were hurtling upwards towards an infinitesimal speck of blue directly above us -- the mouth of Krakatoa! Enormous G-forces had me pinned to my recliner, the flesh of my cheeks drawn back from my teeth. As the blue dot grew, our velocity began to decrease. I was soon able to turn my head enough to one side to see the strained visage of Mitch Macaphee, a copy of Popular Mechanics draped over his chin. He must be on page 32, I thought in the final seconds before our eruption, robot....maintenance....tips.....

The craft exploded in the Krakatoan eruption, and we were flung in all directions. The locals found me in a rubber tree, the jar of marmalade still stuck on my hand from my incoherent flapjack orgy. And the block of cement on my foot? Well...it seems the Upshaft Ginroom has this sidewalk of the stars, like that Chinese Theater in Hollywood, see?....and they insist everyone who plays there leave an impression in the cee-ment, see?.....and, well, I kind of left my foot in there too long, see? (I was reading that robot maintenance article. I had no idea Marvin was so complex!)

Speaking of Marvin maintenance, upon my arrival back at the Cheney Hammer Mill, I noticed a small electronic device affixed to Marvin's left side, near one of his 127 individual lubrication points. (Yeah, seems like a lot to me, too.) I had one of the nurse's aides remove the thing and bring it over to where Mitch Macaphee was lounging comfortably in recuperation. He examined the little gray box for a few moments, then announced that it was a sensor recording instrument utilized by Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., to locate and register new mineral claims. It was only then that it dawned on me why Hegemonic had sent us down there in the first place, where practically no one had ever heard of us before. They were mapping mineral deposits! Thanks to us, they've got enough info to, dare I say it, rule the world!

That is...if they get this little gizmo away from me....(diabolical laughter trails off, plate reverb pots up...and it's back to the studio.)

Draft, anyone? I think Gary Trudeau is right. I think this country's foreign policy has been taken over by dogs. Big dogs. They're waiting for something to limp by so they can descend on it like a pack. And what they can't eat, they plan to piss on.

Good God, they're dense! I mean, Clinton's team were cold, insensitive louts responsible for a lot of misery and death in the "developing" world...but these Bush-ites combine remarkable arrogance with what seems like truly monumental stupidity and incompetence. Dubya has set the tone all right, opting for the most dangerous course available in the name of "safety." Sound familiar? If so, it's because it's the same kind of deal as during the Reagan years, when Ronnie and the boys pushed us to the brink of global war. Of course, today all the Reagan retreads and worshippers will tell you it was all worth it, that we live in a world that is....well, not safer exactly, but....well.....

So we're all doing what we, as Americans, were raised to do -- walk around like consumer goods-obsessed zombies while living under the threat of annihilation without warning...as our government does everything in its power to make that eventuality more likely. (Just like the good old days!) I think if the Bush administration has proven anything in the past year, it's that they can't stop terrorism -- they've virtually conceded this. And Dubya's CIA director has said that Iraq is only likely to use weapons of mass destruction (if it possesses any) in combat or terrorism if a U.S. attack seems imminent and unavoidable. But still the incoherent march to war proceeds, like the Czar putting his troops aboard those westbound trains in 1914, making the inauguration of the "Great War" largely a function of railway timetables.

Throwing more gas on the fire, Dubya met with the circumferentially challenged Sharon for the seventh time this week, opining blandly that Sharon would probably respond if a besieged Iraqi regime lobbed a ramshackle scud their way in its death throes, and that this was understandable to him. Talk about leadership! (So, we're going to start a general regional war for no reason in particular, is that it? Okay, mr. president!)

Here's one way to stop it. Universal wartime conscription, up to age 50. If there's a war, everybody's gotta go, even those with Cheneyesque "other priorities." That would certainly get people to contemplate the purpose of going to war a little more closely...maybe consider whether or not it's worth doing. After all, we've gotten to the point where conflict is like War of the Worlds -- a technology-driven rout fought from an extreme distance, its effects so remote that our people can choose not to pay any attention to it.

That's something worse than moral cowardice. It's casual malevolence on a global scale. What's more, prosecuting such a war -- this war -- will make us more vulnerable to attack, perhaps with biological weapons (which, you may recall, was what defeated the militarily superior Martians in War of the Worlds).

If that happens, it's Bush's fault...but also ours for letting him have his splendid little war. Let's do something about it.

luv u,

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10/27/02

Prosit!

Greetings from the Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green's semi-official headquarters and sprawling home away from home here on the subcontinent. So glad you could open a little browser window on our world. Make yourself comfortable...sure, the appointments are spartan, but even Spartans need to kick back once in a while, right?

Well, it took a week, but we're all fully recovered from that somewhat rough closing to our bogus "inner-planetary" tour -- a total waste of time from a promotional audience-building perspective (though we have gotten picture postcards from a couple of the Morlock dancers). Matt's been released from his decompression chamber, John has chucked the lobster bib, and Marvin has helpfully removed the marmalade pot from my left hand...so now I can actually play instruments again. (Not just any instrument, you understand. Only the ones I could sort of play before.) I'm still clomping around with that concrete block on my foot -- our staff Podiatrist took last week off. She plans to whittle it off with an emery board. This could take a while.

Those of you who are demented enough to read this blog/column every week may remember (or the memory may be recoverable via therapy) that our corporate label's rapacious subsidiary, Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., had surreptitiously rigged Marvin up with a recording mineral sensor device (undetectable to the naked eye) that gathered detailed information about this wacky planet of ours -- data they plan to use to further their dark ambitions. You may also recall that I was determined to keep the device from them at all costs. And I was, damnit...until some goon with an assault rifle changed my mind. (This concrete block makes it a little difficult to effect a getaway.)

Okay...so you face down a crazed mercenary with an M16. I prefer more intellectual pursuits. Like breathing.

Trouble is, as Mitch Macaphee has so helpfully pointed out (damn his eyes), Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., now has the information it needs to gut the Earth from within. Having done some consulting work for a similar firm that will remain nameless (Halliburton), Mitch guesses they're planning to implement the old "bathtub drain" method of oil development. He makes it sound fairly simple: they pick a big oil field somewhere in, say, southern Iraq, then tunnel up from the Earth's core to just below the deposit. Once there, they poke a hole in the bottom of the deposit and pipe the oil via gravity feed to storage facilities deep in the bowels of the Earth. The oil reserves drain not unlike an enormous bathtub -- within a few days, they get all of it. On the surface, no one has a clue as to what happened. It's the perfect crime, er....I mean, corporate strategy! And thanks to our unprecedented inner Earth survey, it's just that much easier for them to execute.

This extraction method works with other minerals, as well, not to mention any number of other types of resources, including cheesefood, almond paste, and other stratified deposits. Why, Mitch tells me he's seen nameless conglomerates (ADM) yank whole corn crops down by the roots. You can even steal earthmoving equipment that way (just look for the tip of a saw blade working its way in a circle around that payloader parked in your equipment yard). There's no limit to the mayhem they can cause.

In light of this revelation, I've told Marvin to hold all calls from our label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., until we decide how to respond. This, of course, means our whirlwind tour of Zenon and Kaztropharius 137b will be pushed back a bit. sFshzenKlyrn is a little disappointed, naturally, but I expect he'll find something to amuse himself with until we straighten this mess out. He was going to place a call to his promoter on Zenon, but Marvin has done something with the phone. (John thinks he buried it somewhere because once in a while we hear this muffled ringing...)

When will we head up yonder again? Before pigs fly, for sure. I'll keep you posted...if I can find that fucking telephone. (It's still ringing!!!)

Life In The Crosshairs. Looks like they caught that DC shooter, and -- lo and behold! -- he's ex-military, another product of our culture of violence, graphically demonstrating the connection Michael Moore makes in "Bowling For Columbine" between our propensity for killing one another (not good) and the swaggering murderousness of our foreign policy (just fine). Moore takes a lot of heat for that observation, but can anyone deny that we've come to accept the death and injury of others so long as they are not connected to us? The more remote the victims of violence, the more casual we become. People in Iraq are just a few pixels on an infra-red viewing screen, if that. Why should we care how a speck feels or what it thinks? Why should the invisible be allowed to tell us what not to do?

Of course, the juxtaposition of a seemingly unstoppable shootist with impending war in Iraq put the reasoning behind Bush's terror war into stark relief. As CIA Director Tenet has pointed out, they can't really stop terror attacks (oh yeah, he also said that other little thing about how Hussein is only likely to use any unconventional weapons if a US attack was imminent, but I digress). Perhaps you saw all those container ships during the five minutes or so when the mass media thought the longshoreman lockout was newsworthy. Maybe 2% of them get inspected. 2%. That number again is 2%. So...what's this "war on terror" supposed to accomplish, again?

This is such horseshit, you can smell it in Sri Lanka. And to listen to sanctimonious speeches from some of the very people who got groups like al-Qaida started (not to mention Hussein), that's just the limit. I hold people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearle, and others personally responsible for 9/11 and the travesty of war that has followed it. This administration won't even comply with repeated calls from victims' families for a thorough independent investigation of the terror attacks. They're sitting on relevant information -- why? And why isn't this bigger news? Because it's not as much fun as dissecting the beltway sniper's background in mind-numbing detail, perhaps? (Here's the guy who sold the sniper coffee in Washington State! Now here's the guy who sold him beer..!) Meanwhile, as they spent the week trying to determine what unique circumstances might have motivated this man to kill, god knows how many Americans died of gunshot wounds in obscurity, contributing to the annual total of 11,000 or so!

If gun fanatics in the White House and Congress hadn't insisted on blocking the readily available technology to match shells to specific guns and guns to specific purchasers, some of those people they drippingly eulogize might be alive today. How about reporting on that?

Wellstone. Tell Karl Rove he can call off the campaign dogs. Tell Norm Coleman's corporate donors they can save their money, now. No need to kill Wellstone -- our old faithful air transportation system did the job for them. There'll be cackling in Crawford tonight.

luv u,

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