NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(October '04)
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10/3/04
Down in front!
Jeebus, what kind of a joint is this? They call this luxury seating? I've got a chair spring halfway up my ass, seems like. Maybe it's that box of goobers I picked up at the concessions stand. Hey, you pays your money and you takes your chances, right?
Well,
as you have rightly surmised, we did survive that tight little situation with
the mortar barrage last week. My apologies for leaving you with such a
melodramatic cliff-hanger of an ending. In all actuality, I sort of knew we were
going to come through it all right when I uploaded the column...it just seemed
so anti-climactic to end with Gung-Ho's hotline call saying he'd 
ordered the
battery to cease fire. Hey -- any of you who have done a weblog for more than a
few months know that there's a terrible temptation towards cheap devices that
prompt heightened interest, particularly the ones that exploit fear and anxiety.
I can only promise not to resort to such petty, selfish tactics in the fut...OH
MY GOD! SOMEBODY CALL FOR HELP! THE MAGMA! NOOOOOOO!!!!
(End of transmission...)
Okay, that was the last time. Honest.
Yeah,
so anyway -- those mortar shells got as close as our neighbor's bathtub shrine
before Gung-Ho pulled the plug. I guess one of his flunkies got his map turned
upside-down and mistook us for one of those abandoned target practice buildings
on the other side of the compound. Though the line on the field phone was a
little crackly, you could hear Gung Ho demoting someone two steps in rank...or
maybe three. Seemed a little harsh, truth be known....but he's the boss. At
least our primitive email got through to him in his fortified pillbox. We were
actually at the point of sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out across
the firing range with a note for Gung-Ho. Mind you, Marvin would not have done
it voluntarily. That's the virtue of his new remote control -- now you can 
drive
him around like a radio-controlled race car. Desperate times call for desperate
measures.
Surveying the damage around the perimeter of the Cheney Hammer Mill, we found a number of craters large enough to cause somebody a problem. Already this week, the man-sized tuber got his little pleasure cart stuck in one of them. And one of Marvin's fellow constables failed to notice one of the larger craters and ended up driving around in the sewers for a couple of hours before coming up through the basement level of a local parking garage. Now, I know what you're thinking...because your friends in Big Green were thinking the exact same thing. If there is this subterranean level below every building in town, might it be possible to find a surreptitious way into the neighborhood pizza joint...or music store....or merchant bank? (That's not what you were thinking? Are you sure?) Seemed plausible to us, anyway. Maybe we've stumble onto the proverbial tunnel to the bank we've been looking for since... since.... well, since we were born penniless and "naked as the eyes of a clown," as John Prine once put it. But there was only one way to be sure...someone needed to go down there and check it out.
It
actually wasn't that hard to strap a flashlight to Marvin's head. Putting a tiny
video camera in his instrument panel (next to the built-in cooler) was the real
challenge, and I was wishing for Mitch Macaphee's mad science know-how while I
was sorting out the various power and signal leads. Of course, it's a little
damp down there in the sewers of outer Colombo, so we're having to devise some
kind of Wellington arrangement that will allow Marvin's foot-wheels to
poke through the soles. After that, he'll be ready for the drop. Stay tuned --
there should be some interesting images coming your way from down under.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Duh-bait.
Round one for Kerry, it seems. I must confess, I can never tell which way
the corporate media worm will turn on these matters. It wasn't clear to me which
of the tiresome performances I witnessed in part Thursday night was the more
confident, the more credible, the more statesmanlike, or any of a number of
other pre-defined relevant categories of differentiation. You'd think these two
guys were competing for a part on The Apprentice, the way their bearing
and demeanor are examined in mind-numbing detail. For chrissake, doesn't anyone care
that the president is, evidently, possessed of severe delusions? Or that John
Kerry is attacking Bush on his treatment of Fallujah from the right (i.e.
Bush shouldn't have pulled back after blowing away 600 people in a couple of
days)? When Bush talks about how Saddam Hussein had ignored umpteen U.N.
Security 
Council
resolutions, shouldn't someone really point out the obvious fact that Iraq, as
it turns out, was remarkably in compliance with its requirement to
disarm? Shouldn't a little buzzer go off somewhere?
This last point really goes beyond the level of a campaign issue. Within the last two weeks or so, the administration's most recent team of WMD inspectors returned home empty-handed, declaring in essence that Iraq had no illegal chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. This went virtually unreported. I don't believe it was raised during the foreign policy "debate" between the two major party candidates. Everyone treats the matter like it's irrelevant...as if our standard for going to war should be of no interest to anyone. It would have been bad enough if our government had been merely wrong about their WMD claims. But what makes this weak standard so dangerous is that this administration (and their allies in Congress of both parties) deliberately inflated the "threat" to provoke war fever amongst a public bracketed by post-9-11 fear-mongering. Jeezus, none of their claims withstood even the mildest scrutiny at the time. What does it mean, exactly, when Colin Powell apologizes for advancing a parcel of WMD "evidence" that he knew at the time wasn't worth the powder to blow it to hell? Those people lied us into a war....and what, they're sorry? (Not even that, really.)
Kerry
did start to get at one or two things that needed saying, but the Rand Beers
gene kept kicking in, steering him back to his "kill the terrorists"
rhetoric. He criticized Bush for leaving Iraq's nuclear facilities unguarded
while troops were posted outside the oil ministry -- good point. It might 
also
have been worth pointing out that radioactive pieces of the Tuwaitha nuclear
facility have been turning up in Europe for over a year, including some
quantities of the dreaded yellowcake uranium that was the centerpiece of Bush's fraudulent
war pitch. (Ho-hum.) Bush needs his own words thrown in his face a bit more
often, but it will take more than that to spare the poor folks in Fallujah and
Samarrah, now under full assault by U.S. forces. Either way this election goes,
they'll be looking at more hardship, so long as the majority of Americans
tolerate these Sharon-like tactics. The only difference might be what war will
come next -- Lord knows, Doug Feith and the boys are itching to send people (not
themselves, of course, but other, expendable people) into some
kind of Iran regime change enterprise. A Dubya win would probably guarantee that
outcome. Kerry might aim his cannons at North Korea...hard to say.
Which do you think sounds more presidential?
luv u,
jp
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10/10/04
Howday!
Wow...that's strange. I feel like I've done this exact thing before. No, not deja-vu ... more specific than that. I'm remembering sitting in this chair, typing these words, and getting this odd sensation. Ever get that? I knew that would be your answer! Strange...
Well,
anyway -- our exploration of the marvelous land down under was simply
fascinating. After installing some night vision gear (i.e. a second-hand
flashlight) on Marvin (my personal robot assistant), we rigged a crude block and
tackle and lowered him down into one of the larger holes left by our neighbor
Gung-Ho's recent mortar barrage. We heard our intrepid automaton splash down and
adjusted the reception on the signal from his shoulder-cam: there in the halo of
his torch was the outline of the subterranean world we know as sewer-ville. Just
to be certain, we had the man-sized tuber flush a toilet in the Cheney Hammer
Mill. Seconds later, it 
looked like a bucket of water was dumped on Marvin from
above. Bingo!
A two-way radio link was established with Marvin. Matt took the microphone. "Marvin," he barked, "can you read me?" A familiar sequence of cheap oscillator noises emitted from the speaker grille on the wall behind us -- we had made contact. "Marvin...move forward!" As the response tones came through, we could see the live video image shift from side to side and the arches of the ancient sewer mover towards us. Marvin was advancing...but where? We consulted our resident cartographer (John) for recommendations on which way to direct the intrepid robot next. After a quick glance at his chart, he reasoned that the Merchant Bank might lie beneath a large "X", which he determined to be in a leftward direction from where Marvin was now. "Marvin," Matt called into the handset. (He always says his name first. Why? Who else is out there?) "Bank left. Bank left."
The
underground panorama took a dramatic tilt to the right. Matt shook his head.
He'd forgotten how painfully literal Marvin was. "No, no," said Matt.
"The bank is to your left. Go there. Go there."
Nothing happened. "Marvin," Matt repeated. "Cheney Hammer Mill to
Marvin -- nod if you copy us!" Still nothing. Clearly there was something
wrong with the transmitter hookup. We made several more attempts at contacting
Marvin, without success. Then I recalled the remote control Mitch Macaphee had
contrived before his departure. I retrieved the device from my bedroom and
started punching commands into it as the others watched the TV monitor
anxiously. There was movement -- success. With some little difficulty, I managed
to guide Marvin in the general direction of the bank. This took time. Much
time. In fact, I was beginning to think we'd gone to far when Marvin came upon a
large Frenchman carrying an unconscious younger man on his back. And may I say,
they looked simply miserable. (Do all the world's sewers connect?
Curious.)
Through
the fuzzy TV monitor, we could see a rung ladder leading up what appeared to be
a manhole in the ceiling. Here was pay dirt...only it wasn't clear to me how to
get Marvin to climb. I tried various combinations of commands, holding down the
volume and punching numbers, tapping through codes that apparently made Marvin
do all kinds of strange things. 
(At
one point I had him hopping in circles on one foot while shouting like an
auctioneer.) Eventually I got him to climb, but instead of coming up in the
Merchant Bank, he emerged in our neighborhood music store, where he proceeded to
spend the rent money on used accordions. Oh, well...back to the sewer
charts.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
No Regrets. There was yet another nail in the coffin of Bush's case for war in Iraq this week -- an official confirmation of what we already knew and, in fact, have known from the beginning: that Saddam's Iraq was in compliance with the UN's requirement to disarm. Those of us who were labeled traitors, Saddam-lovers, and "useful idiots" for merely suggesting such a thing two years ago can expect an apology from the Administration and its loony-right allies any day now. [IRONY] Anyone who saw Friday's presidential debate knows the conclusion Dubya drew from his weapons inspectors' final, final report: that he was right to invade to disarm Iraq...and Saddam was a threat. What other possible conclusion could you reach...except that the disappointing absence of WMD's is due to the nefarious work of invisible flying predators?
Okay,
so the president spouts non-sequiturs and appears to be in total denial. All
that means is that his complex rhetorical feeder system has broken down. You
see, poor old Dubya thinks he can sell any crock of shit with a nod and that
"by cracky" glint of his. When he gets a phrase in his hands, he's
like an overactive chimp with a baseball bat. His trainer Karl Rove tries out a
bunch of different rhetorical bats, and when he finds one that's good and
politically solid, he hands it to Bush who wails away until the bat breaks in
half. Then Karl takes it away and gives him another one. Well, looks like
they're starting to run out of bats on Iraq, because now they have Dubya
repeating some pretty tortured Rube Goldberg-like chain of rhetoric that still
attempts to frame Saddam Hussein as a gathering threat and an ally of Al Qaeda.
In essence, it goes like this: Saddam was gaming the UN Oil For Food Program
> By cheating, he hoped to get sanctions lifted eventually > With his ill
gotten gains, he then would build the weapons with which to destroy us all,
using the sinister "nexus" of "groups like Al Qaeda" to
deliver them. Now there's a firm justification for all those thousands of
deaths. Not quite as concise as he's got tons of VX nerve agent and will have
nukes within a year or two and is giving it all to Osama, but they figure it
will do for a bunch of rubes like us.
These
debates make for peculiar television, for sure, and even more bizarre
commentary. I've mentioned the obsession with tics and grimaces, which fills the
void left by the absence of substantive issues. Of course, Cheney gets the Assistant
Principal Of The Year Award for his dyspeptic
monotone delivery; he also deserves the Most
Outrageous Statement So Far Award for actually
holding up El Salvador's 1982 election as a model of democracy and basically
blaming the Salvadoran rebels for the 75,000 people we helped the government
kill and mutilate in cold blood. Even in the context of a discourse that has the
"liberal" contingent talking incessantly about "killing the
terrorists," this was a standout (though not commented upon). Watching
Dubya and Kerry last night, I thought, this is Kirk vs. Spock. Bush, with
his crouching and his arm gestures, behaves like the "evil twin"
Captain Kirk that the malfunctioning transporter created (after some crewman
beamed up covered in what looked like yellowcake uranium, no less). I could
imagine him pointing at Kerry and shouting, Look at the scratches on his
face! See how he's tried to hide them! He wants you to think that he's
Captain Kirk!! Kerry, for his part, lumbers around like the Mr. Spock of
the Star Trek movies -- possibly the one when he was brought back from the dead.
He's got the same gravelly voice, the orange complexion, the superior
intellect.
So what's it going to be, folks? Evil Kirk or warmed-over Spock? The choice is yours.
luv u,
jp
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10/17/04
All right, then...
Hmmm. I don't remember having that many toes on my left foot. And where did that birth mark come from? There was a time when I knew the back of my foot like the back of my hand. Now I need calipers just to make certain they're mine. (Did my knee always bend that way? Hmmm...)
Okay,
so the best of our efforts last week resulted in putting Marvin (my personal
robot assistant) two doors down from the Cheney Hammer Mill (the place where we
reside) in a store full of second-hand accordions. Not exactly the outcome we
had in mind, 
but
that's the way it goes. To borrow a favorite Big Valley-ism once again, I
guess that ol' devil greed just crawled in through our ears and squatted down on
our brains. Still, the concept of a "tunnel to the bank" remains a
popular one around here, particularly in light of the fact that unpaid utility
and property tax bills are stacking up in the mailroom like letters to Santa
Claus on Christmas Eve. Like any squatters worth their salt, we did our best to
ignore these relics of a now-distant and unfamiliar conventional sphere of
existence...until the shadow of a wrecking ball fell across the noble facade of
our adopted home.
Actually,
Matt was helping Marvin bring his new accordions home when he noticed some
flyers posted on the walls of the Cheney Hammer Mill that read: Condemned
By Order Of The Provincial Redevelopment Council! We
were puzzling over this anomaly (typically our condemned notices arrive by
flaming arrow) when we heard the sound of heavy machinery chugging up to the
front of the mill. A look out the window confirmed our suspicions -- a
demolition crane was being erected out on the street. Damn! I decided to break
the habit of a lifetime and actually open some of the more official-looking mail
that had arrived over the past week or so -- it seemed the Province was planning
to raze the mill and sell the lot to some unnamed developer. All they would tell
us was that they were planning on putting a new retail store on this spot...and
that it would offer low, low prices (and have a star in the middle of its name).
So I says to myself, "Self," I says, "You and the boys have gotta' do something about this pronto, presto, vite, schnell...like, now."
As the wrecking
ball loomed closer, we put our heads together. (Let me tell you something. Big
Green may seem a just little thicker than the average telephone poll
from time to time, but we've got more ingenuity in in our whole bodies than most
bands have in their little fingers.)
The
answer came quite quickly. Why, we had only just discovered an enormous web of
underground tunnels. We even had a remote control subternaut (Marvin) to slog
through them. Why not dispatch him through the sewers to the Provincial Interior
Ministry and have him shuffle around a few files and delete a few job orders? Or
-- better yet -- we could have him stop at the merchant bank along the way and
pick up enough pazoozas to bribe the relevant officials out of proceeding with
this ghastly demolition. (Then maybe he could pick up a pizza on the way
home...assuming there's change leftover from the bribe.) We wasted no time in
spelunking Marvin back into the cloistered netherworld below, guiding him
however imperfectly towards the plumbing beneath the Bank of Balinesia, sending
him up through the angled crawl spaces into where stacks of cash sit idle, 
waiting
for someone to make them whole with their greed.
Preparation has never been my strong suit, I'll allow...I sent Marvin on his way without a crucial tool for the job at hand: dollar sign bags! We told our intrepid robot friend to hold his position (somewhere between stall B and stall C of the Bank's executive washroom) while we loaded the man-sized tuber up with swag bags, then put him on his little motor-cart and sent him on his way. "Go to Marvin," Matt instructed his pride and joy, calling down to him from the lip of the mortar hole in the street behind our now-condemned mill. "Hurrrrrry!!" I added shrilly, as we heard the sound of a crane engine sputtering to life around the corner from us. Weeeeeee-doggies. This is gonna' be close.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Not
Off The Presses. Not that anyone in the news media or our political class
appears to think it's all that important, but there was another development in
the missing Iraqi nuclear technology story this week -- one that sailed right by
my hometown newspaper and far out of bounds from the presidential
"debate." Some regular readers of this column (god help you) may
recall my mentioning how it's been reported that Iraqi nuclear sites known and
monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were raided and
scuttled under the noses of the Occupation Provisional Authority (us), with
machine parts and radioactive materials showing up in Northern Europe (not
to mention missile engines, but that's another story). Well, now diplomats close
to the IAEA are saying that this dismantling process went on for many months --
likely into early 2004 -- and that machinery useful in developing nuclear
weapons 
technology
has apparently been removed by people who knew what they were doing (i.e. not
looters) -- people with access to heavy machinery, who were able to work
unmolested for long periods of time. Whole buildings have been removed, and the
administration and Allawi's goons haven't a clue where they've gotten to.
Okay, somehow this is not the biggest story in America right now -- the fact that this administration, which invaded Iraq under the pretense of keeping Iraqi WMD's from falling into terrorists' hands, somehow left these dozens of known research sites unguarded for weeks and months at a time, choosing instead to secure Iraq's oil fields and interior ministry (where documents related to resource extraction are held). This does not even merit a cursory mention in most newspapers. Why the hell wasn't Kerry on this like white on rice this past Wednesday night? Why not right now, in his stump speeches? Here is a policy of supreme negligence that not only puts the lie to the administration's entire bogus rationale for invading Iraq in the first place, but has greatly increased the likelihood of nuclear weapons technology falling into the "wrong hands." What better means by which to highlight Dubya's sheer incompetence as commander in chief? The silence is deafening. Amazingly, a fair number of people I've talked to about this seem nearly as unconcerned by it as our government. It's reached the point where I have to keep slapping myself to confirm I'm actually awake and not dreaming this up. We're on a cattle-car to disaster, and people are praising the engine driver for his decisiveness in getting us there.
One
thing that did make news was Kerry's reference to the Cheneys' gay daughter, to
which Lynne and Dick have strangely taken offense...as if the girl had been
outed or something. I've got to think that this is just part of the Bush/Cheney
campaign's general policy of latching on to anything Kerry says, no matter how
trivial, and trying to make a negative campaign "issue" out of it.
Bizarre choice, if you ask me. Does anyone in America not know the girl is gay?
And if the Cheneys' point is that gayness is not innate, what the hell is the
reasoning behind their opposition to the president's beloved election year
marriage amendment? Now I'm beginning to wonder if Lynne really is the
"brains" of the Cheney household...not that she ever has anything all
that original to say, but then...look at Dick. It astounds me how Dick Cheney
uses the same pat phrases over and over again, year after year, no matter to
what degree events render them meaningless and absurd. I guess he probably
thinks his dyspeptic assistant principal delivery will add gravity to his
delusional ranting. And since we appear to live in a nation where what you say
doesn't count nearly as much as how forcefully you say it, perhaps he's right.
As writer Jonathan Schell has observed, this is a kind of Potemkin Village
administration, working behind a false front of strength and stick-to-it-iveness. Since so many are willing to sit still for the collective
punishment of Fallujah, the deployment of a dysfunctional "missile
defense" system, and so much else, I guess the chimera is convincing enough
for a lot of us.
Question is, come November 2nd, will the convinced add up to a plurality?
luv u,
jp
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10/24/04
Freak out!
Okay, I don't want to catch anyone not dancing. Everybody throw back your shoulders, step away from the vindaloo, and start hopping around on one foot. Not that foot, the other one! No, no, no...that's no bloody good. The watermelon should be rolling up hill!
Oh.
Forgive me. I was just playing one of those painfully complicated virtual
reality web games -- you know... where you design your own universe and find innovative
ways to fuck it up beyond recognition. (Absolute power corrupts
absolutely -- what can I tell you?) I left you with another cliff-hanger last
week, didn't I? And after my all-too-solemn 
promise never to do that again.
Well, sometimes it can't be helped, my friends. At least I didn't stoop to
posting some melodramatic phonied-up pictures of the wrecking ball taking out a
corner of the Cheney Hammer Mill. That would have been a cheap ploy... real
cheap, and I... would never.... Okay, who's been dropping photos into my
column? Matt? John??
Well, anyway... the man-sized tuber got the dollar-sign bags over to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in a reasonable amount of time. (Luckily, the provincial demolition crew was a little on the clueless side -- they couldn't seem to figure out how to get that ball swinging in the right direction, so there was a lot of head-scratching and reading of manuals going on out there.) Then the two of them made their way into the bank vault and began the highly remunerative task of stuffing wads of currency into the bags. We watched this process from Marvin's chest cam. It was a little hard to communicate with them, since the audio transmitter was still on the blink, so we just kind of barked impotently at the video terminal. "The second shelf," we'd shout, seeing Marvin bypass a brick of 10,000 rupee notes in favor of a few stacks of 20's. "Reach higher, you fool!" But it was no good, and ultimately we resigned ourselves to the realization that Marvin would do what Marvin would do and nothing more. (He did take the initiative to throw a few fistfuls of cash into his refrigeration unit...though he had to jettison some leftover vindaloo and a couple of grape Nehi's.)
When
it came time for the two bank robbers to return to their now officially
condemned home base, there appeared to be some confusion on Marvin's part over
exactly what route to take. As you know from reading this column, we have
discovered that all of the world's sewer systems connect to one another... so
this had the potential for real disaster. After all, we didn't want Marvin and
the tuber popping up manhole covers in downtown La Paz and tossing bags of money
onto the street. A quick cell-phone conversation with Marvin's creator, Mitch
Macaphee (who is attending serial mad science conventions in Brussels), yielded
the useful information that Marvin was equipped with a small homing device,
embedded deep in his thorax, and that we can draw him back to the mill by
playing the Elvis recording of "My Way" into a radio transmitter set
to 821.9 kHz. We donned our protective sound cancellation headsets and dropped
the needle on that scratchy old platter, then twisted the transmitter dial to
the recommended frequency and crossed our fingers. (Not all of them. Just
the index and middle fingers on our right hands. And Matt didn't even do that
much.) There was nothing left to do but wait.
Sometime
later, we heard a deep rumble emanating from the ancient plumbing that runs
beneath the ground floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill. Then the manhole cover in
the courtyard popped open and out flew several dollar-sign bags stuffed with
filthy lucre. It took an industrial winch to get Marvin and tubey out of the
hole, but the effort was well worth it -- ill gotten or no, this was enough
readies to satisfy any corrupt provincial development official! As Marvin rolled
off to find the Elvis record, we started counting out the swag and stuffing it
into marked envelopes for delivery to the appropriate authorities. I smell zoning
change!
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Swollen
Honor. Ordinarily I don't concern myself too greatly with delusional
programming on right-wing media outlets -- you know, caveat emptor
and all that -- but these freaks at Sinclair Broadcasting are so fucking
arrogant it's hard to let it pass. I heard one of their corporate spokespersons
more than once profess his company's impartiality, then launch into a Fox
News-like diatribe about how the content of "Stolen Honor" is
legitimate news, that the film has been suppressed by the major networks (I
guess I'm being suppressed by them, as well, since they don't put me on
television), and that their decision to pass on "Stolen Honor" is
comparable to "holocaust denial." Not that I'm any big fan of John
Kerry (he's the "un-Bush," as far as I'm concerned), but this is as
bogus as those bandaids 
with
purple hearts printed on them that the chicken hawks passed around at the
Republican National Convention. If the Sinclair guy is to be believed, the
central premise of this film is two-fold:
-
Generally, veterans should never publicly criticize the military's conduct of any military action, no matter how heinous, and
-
Specifically, John Kerry was personally responsible for the torture of U.S. POW's in North Vietnam and for significant prolongation of the Vietnam War.
Forgive me, but...it is to laugh. You'd think that, instead of invading, torching, and carpet-bombing three countries to an almost uninhabitable state, the Nixon administration had pursued a Gandhian policy of peace and goodwill towards Indochina in the early seventies...and that the interrogators at the "Hanoi Hilton" had waited on Kerry's Senate testimony before even thinking of physically abusing our downed bomber pilots. (Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, our Operation Phoenix interrogation teams were throwing prisoners out of helicopters, while our Saigon allies locked theirs in tiger cages and poured lime on them. I'm sure none of that news ever got back to Hanoi.) "Stolen Honor" is populated by some of the same long-time reactionary political operatives that are behind the Swift Boat Liars ads -- people who for the last thirty years have been claiming, in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary, that veteran's stories of killings and serial abuses in Vietnam were all fabrications. Talk about holocaust denial!
Of
course, this whole routine smells of Karl Rove -- definitely his M.O. One day,
perhaps, we will read with interest accounts of how he conducted his political
"rat-fucking" campaigns. For right now, we are supposed to pretend
that they never resort to such tactics...though reports are filtering in about
West Virginia voters receiving phone calls warning them of how John Kerry is
going to "ban the bible". It's hard to know how the Democrats could
respond in kind -- what's left to make up? Bush is going to 
appoint
a fundamentalist Christian who anoints himself with Crisco as Attorney
General!...(done that already.) Bush is going to put mineral extraction
industry lobbyists in charge of the Department of Interior!.... (done that,
too.) Bush is going to embroil us in a series of pre-emptive wars on the
basis of invented evidence!... (well, you know...) You can see how this
works better for the Republicans -- there are actually a few unbelievable things
left to say about the Democrats. And if they say enough of them, maybe they can
keep people from blaming Dubya's HHS for fucking up the flu vaccine....yet
again! (Not to worry -- influenza only contributes to about 30,000 U.S. deaths a
year. That's only ten 9/11's ... no big deal.)
Perhaps it's time we abandon faith-based foreign policy (and faith-based medicine) for a while and try something else...just to see if it works better. Never know.
luv u,
jp
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10/31/04
Boo spooky.
What's that? Can't hear you -- could you speak up? A bit louder. No, no... I'm not getting you at all. Bloody field phone! Probably got sand in it. Trouble with all this surplus kit is that it's been used pretty hard in its day. And its day was a good many moons ago.
Okay,
so how is it that I'm barking at you through some second-hand walkie talkie?
Actually, it's quite easy to explain for a change. I just got curious about how
far those sewers would take me and...well... I got lost. But good. Let me back
up a bit. We only just got Marvin (my personal 
robot assistant) and the
man-sized tuber to rob the local merchant bank so we would have enough cash to
bribe our way out of the demolition of our squat house, the abandoned Cheney
Hammer Mill. The bribe went smoothly enough -- you just call the local
magistrate and he sends someone over with a strong box. Done! Within a day or
two, the wrecking ball was wheeled away and we were able to return to our
version of normal life: Matt and his bowling pin collection, John bending
pretzels and raising alligators, and me with my hobbies -- a long roster of idle
pursuits to which I only yesterday added sewer exploration. (Tomorrow I'll
strike it off again.)
No,
I wasn't thinking about easy money when I lowered myself into that urban
underground that separates the first and second worlds from the sewerless third
in popular lore. I was thinking more of Jean Valjean... and about those people
who set up elaborate living spaces, casinos, subterranean churches, etc., under
the streets of Paris, moving them from place to place on a moment's notice in
order to avoid detection. Talk about being "off the grid" -- they've
elevated gridlessness to a fine art. I was sloshing through the grey waters in
search of this intriguing phenomenon, armed only with my second-hand guitar and
that decrepit surplus field phone Gung-Ho lent us years ago. I suppose our
recent experience with the wrecking ball was what was driving me forward -- the
desire to find a safer place to squat... someplace where WAL*MART will never
want to plant a Supercenter. The sewer seemed a good realm in which to make a
start. 
(Not
a lot of demographic studies being done down here, mate.) So I spelunked down
into the arches and set my compass for Paris, France. (Cue accordion music...)
Did I find what I was looking for? Well....not exactly. When my sneakers were fully soaked through after hours of slogging, I pulled myself up and out of a manhole and had a look around. The streets of Paris looked strangely familiar. I shook the water out of my field phone and cranked it a few times. To my amazement, Matt Perry (of Big Green) picked up on the other end. "Matt!" I hollered. "Can ya' hear me?"
--"No," said Matt. "I can't hear you. The line is dead."
--"Can you crank a few times on your end?" I myself was cycling away at my tiny generator, hoping to boost the signal.
--"I'd try, if I could hear you," replied Matt. "But I can't hear you. What's your position?"
--"Paris."
--"France?"
--"Right."
There was a pregnant silence on the other side. "Huh," Matt said, finally. "Do you see a large brick building there in...uh...Paris?"
I looked around. "Uh.... Yeah."
--"I can't hear you," said Matt. "Does the building have a parapet?"
--"Yes, it does."
--"Is
there a guy at the rail? And is he waving his hand..." Matt waved his hand
over his head. "...like this?"
I was astounded. "You see everything I see."
--"Are you wearing that green tee-shirt?"
--"Yes."
--"And are you nodding right now?"
I nodded my assent. "Yes."
--"Well," said Matt, "I can't see you, either. And you're definitely in Paris...if Paris is a block away from the mill."
Later on, as I was banging together a couple of hollowed out sweet potatoes for a percussion part, I realized my search for a more perfect squat had led me back to the Cheney Hammer Mill. There's a lesson in this somewhere, but I'll need Trevor James Constable to help me decipher it. So if you run into him, tell him to give me a call. (He knows the number.)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Fire
One. So here we are -- the election is finally upon us, after what has
seemed an interminably long campaign season. As I write these lines, Bush (Kirk)
is now basically campaigner-in-chief, demonstrating his total redundancy in the
running of national affairs (Hey -- he can fuck it up from anywhere in the
country just as good as from Washington D.C.), while Kerry (Spock) is appearing
with "The Boss," with big Bill Clinton, and basically throwing the
day's headlines at Dubya like lethal projectiles. And the headlines have been,
well, explosive -- the kind that would get a Democratic president impeached and
being hung out to dry. The Al Qaqaa 
facility's
377 tons of missing high explosives is damning evidence of the Bush
administration profound lack of concern about security the very weapons sites
they railed about before the war -- a long list of looted sites that include
expertly dismantled nuclear facilities (which I mentioned here a couple of weeks
ago). Of course, Bush/Rove's response is the usual -- deny responsibility, blame
the troops on the ground, then accuse Kerry of blaming the troops on the ground.
Then, of course, there's the heroic Rudy Giuliani's take on this, the latest in
a series of criminal blunders that will cost many lives:
"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
Ahhh. The voice of integrity. Very inspiring.
Bush
blames the troops, too, but in a backhanded way -- a kind of you can't expect
them to search everywhere gambit, which of course puts the onus on them just
as squarely as America's Mayor, only with a bogus facade of magnanimity. He's
saying, in essence, don't blame the help for their evident fuck-up -- they're
overworked. Nothing about the fact that Dubya insisted on doing this war on the
cheap, a la Rumsfeld, with less that 150,000 troops -- a force woefully
inadequate to the task of securing all the known sensitive weapons sites
in Iraq, which was obviously never their intention. Actually, first they denied
any knowledge of it...then they came up with the Rovian lie that the HMX
explosives were removed by Saddam before the U.S. invasion, but this was
revealed to be "Al-ka-ka" when Minneapolis TV station KSTP
produced some embedded reporter video of U.S. soldiers examining the explosives
under seal by the IAEA, this after the invasion, of course. Just another
part of a much larger and more sordid picture that 
includes
the looted Tuwaitha nuclear facility and other WMD-related sites, left unguarded
by Bush and his wacky Pentagon team. Damning... or it should be, at least.
We are in the midst of another Hallowe'en horror show, with Fallujah under threat of imminent invasion (on orders from General Rove) and insurgent attacks escalating. And now it's clear that the number of Iraqi deaths resulting from this splendid little war far exceeds what the Pentagon admits to, particularly those killed in "precision" bombing raids. This is something we must actively and vocally resist, whoever wins the election this Tuesday. I'm personally convinced that Bush should lose because he has in myriad ways shown himself unworthy of a second term (in fact, unworthy of a first term, as well) and because his re-election will only encourage the extremist reactionaries in his administration and Congress to push their bonehead agenda even harder. I encourage you to join me in delivering upon them the ignominious defeat they so richly deserve...and in the subsequent push to end this maniacal war, whoever's President. I know I'll be thinking of that little lever in the voting booth as the launch button for Dubya's trip back home to Texas -- good enough for me. (So long as he brings uncle Cheney with him.)
luv u,
jp