NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(October '05)
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10/02/05
Maize!!!!
You call it corn. Or maybe you call something else corn. Some people call wheat "corn", while I have met others who refer to rice as "corn". What's up with that, eh? Different people calling different things the same thing for different reasons. It's like some kind of linguistic labyrinth...or "maze", if you will. (You call it corn.)
What
has gotten me on the subject of corn is those two individuals I obliquely refer
to as posi-Lincoln and anti-Lincoln -- the matter and anti-matter versions of
our nation's Great Emancipator whose molecules we wrenched from a distant past,
much to our continuing consternation. While their very presence should
effectively cancel one another out (and perhaps all of creation into the
bargain), they have persisted long enough to accompany us on this our latest
interstellar tour -- THE
BIG ZAMBOOLA: Big Green Interstellar
Tour Fall 2005 -- and they
are now making their presence felt in the most irritating ways imaginable. Oh,
sure... you may think that having two such distinguished historical figures on
board our vessel would be a boon (to say nothing of an aid to navigation), but
don't kid yourself. These two couldn't navigate their way around the galley
except to fill their plates.
Which
brings me back to the subject of corn. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we were
having some issues with provisioning. While ensconced on the planet Kaztropharius
137b for a series of performances,
posi-Lincoln took it upon himself to augment our larder with some dry goods.
Bear in mind, now, that this is a 19th Century man we're talking about
here. We're not even talking horse and buggy -- it's just HORSE. Anyway...so
what do you suppose he picks up at the interstellar farmer's market on
Kaztropharius 137b? Corn. No, not just a grocery bag or two full of sweet corn,
but about half a silo's worth of unmilled corn. I was sitting on the 
bottom rung
of the spaceship gantry, enjoying a few minutes down-time in the company of
Marvin (my personal robot assistant), when this massive hovercraft pulled up
bearing the Cargill logo on one side. Before I could say "Jimmy
Crack....", a massive chute opened and quite nearly buried the landing gear
in kernels. Hard as rocks they were, too. Not a pleasant experience.
How
did anti-Lincoln work himself into this? Well, he got his greasy little palms on
a boiler and a masher, then he started making up this disgusting slop that I
wouldn't give to a member of the Bush Administration. It was grainy and yellow
and smelled like burnt corn. MMMMmmmmmm-boy. I saw one of the Lincolns (couldn't
tell which one, 'cuz it was dark) taking a couple of forkfuls, then galloping
off to the atomic-powered can we have on the lower deck. Dr. Hump hovered near
the pot for a while -- I think he may have thought it was some kind of
intriguing experiment. That was about it for the humanoids, though. Matt, John,
Mitch Macaphee, and Trevor James Constable left the ship and wouldn't return
until the fetid 
odor was dispelled. That only happened after sFshzenKlyrn
found the concoction and, gluttonous cloud that he is, consumed the entire lot,
reek and all. Mine eyes have seen the glory! Hallelujah, brother sFshzenKlyrn.
Crikey. Between those bloody euglena fans dogging our steps and the freaking dueling Lincolns (and Marvin trying to pick a fight with the "fighting spaceman" of Andromeda), I'm beginning to wonder if this tour was such a good idea after all. Especially when we get hung with a bill for 40 metric tons of seed corn. There goes the take from the last five nights, right down the old corn chute. (Or is it up?) What the hell are we going to do with all that stuff... except maybe....maybe....feed it to BIG ZAMBOOLA?
(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.)
Plastic
Turkey. Welcome to the Potemkin Village of modern politics, where the false
fronts on the houses fail to meet the quality standards of even the most humble
high school play. The travesty of the Iraq war -- a charnel house of death and depredations
that could only be considered a success by those training the next generation of
jihadists -- is masked by the thinnest of chimeras about spreading
"freedom" and "democracy", like trying to conceal a mastodon
under a lace handkerchief. And now the unbridled opportunism at work in the
planned reconstruction of New Orleans is being packaged as a forward-looking
public works project; the birth of a "new" New Orleans whose ghettos
will be replaced by "mixed income" bastions of multi-racial harmony,
driven by a new generation of 
urban
homesteading and massive federal investment. You can see the gleam of altruism
in Dubya's eye as he expounds on his next big social experiment, an opportunity
procured by God Himself.
Naturally, it's all a shabby little lie -- one that should be the stuff of headlines in every major newspaper across the nation. The simple fact that favored contractors Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor should be collecting federal money (sans bid) after their remarkably poor performance in Iraq is a major scandal in itself. But it's worse than the usual old-boy network dole out. As Naomi Klein has reported, "free market" ideologues in the administration, Congress, and New Orleans itself are treating this as a chance to put their mad theories to work, much as has been attempted in Iraq, with disastrous results. In the Big Easy, they'll do it with "Free Enterprise Zones," suspension of labor rights, suspension of environmental regulations, and perhaps more crucially, no serious effort to repatriate those many underprivileged, unconnected people who were made refugees by the storm. Like in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," it appears the plan is just to wash them away.
So
here comes Dubya with the promise of rebirth, like a big plastic turkey he can
hold up for the cameras. His "ownership society" is really an
on-your-ownership society -- one that only holds promise for the 
stakeholders,
the stockholders, and the old fraternity brothers. They get the substance -- the
very wealth of this nation -- and the rest of us get the image, the clumsily
packaged lie, handed off to the non-elect in a manner so inept as to suggest
that the powerful are convinced there is nothing we can do about it. Meanwhile,
on the other side of the political aisle, the most visible Democrats are trying
to imitate Bush's swagger, hoping to hop onto his bull ride machine after he's
had enough. Probably good to know that oft-mentioned presidential hopeful Bill
Richardson shares Madeline Albright's opinion that the 1990s sanction regime
that cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives was "worth the cost",
and that he also shares Hillary Clinton's opposition to withdrawal from Iraq.
Not much space between that and "Long John" Wolfowitz, who maybe
should consider getting the World Bank involved in the rape of New
Orleans.
Plenty of booty there, we hear.
luv u,
jp
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10/09/05
And now...
This is strange. Haven't I seen that star cluster before? Could've sworn we passed that one a couple of hours ago. And the quasar in sector 3. Know I've spotted that sucker. Real twitchy. Got a mean and hungry look about it. You sure we're not traveling in circles? Lemme look at that astrogator again. Hmmm. All right -- I stand corrected. Not circles. Figure eights.
Well,
friends... three or four weeks out (not even sure anymore) and we've been
reduced to sneaking around the nether-regions of intergalactic space, hiding
behind dark matter and the occasional planetoid, secreting ourselves away. Why,
you ask? (Did someone ask why? No? Well, I'm going to tell you
anyway.) Ha! Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Remember those highly
tedious preparedness tests Mitch Macaphee was making us take over and over again
before we left planet Earth? And how we named our tour after the rogue,
multi-fanged planetoid featured in one of those scenarios -- "Big
Zamboola"? Well, turns out there really is such a planetoid. We encountered
it en route to a concert venue in the small Magellanic cloud, at which time it
began to pursue us with intent to kill. (I believe it had an issue with our
using its name to promote our concert tour -- trademark infringement was what
made Big Zamboola get so ugly with us.)
Okay,
so here comes Big Zamboola -- big as the moon and twice as mean -- flapping its
enormous jaws at us as we throw our space RV into overdrive. So we're all trying
to remember what we did during the simulation that, it turns out, was exactly
like what we were experiencing now. (What are the chances of that?) I know
that I was reading comic books in the storage room for most of the exercise -- I
tried to go to my "battle station," as it were, but somehow couldn't
move. Like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), my feeble little brain could
not accept the possibility of 
Big
Zamboola's existence. (Well... it wasn't exactly like Marvin. Smoke was
coming out of his feeble little brain. Mine only smokes when I think
about fire.) Fortunately, we had some of the greatest minds in the entire warped
sub-discipline of mad science on board our vessel. The inimitable Professor
Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin. The illustrious Dr. Hump, brain-in-a-jar par
excellence. And the indescribable Trevor James Constable, whose complex orgone
generator array has gotten us out of just about every jam it's ever gotten us
into. And... last but not least... our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn,
who has mastered the mad science of blind gluttony, and whose natural
particulate radiation constantly skews the calibration on our delicate
navigational instruments. (It also makes the man-sized tuber glow like a
100-watt light bulb.)
Trouble
is, we're a little short on leadership here in Big Green land. I mean, getting
these mad scientists to work in concert with one another is like herding cats.
Trevor James Constable was all for hitting Big Zamboola with a full-stop barrage
of orgone rays, while Dr. Hump was following his own line of inquiry into
reverse-positron repulsor field technology (his favorite of studies). Both of
these efforts were undermined by Mitch Macaphee, who was soaking up all the
surplus power with an attempt at making our space craft invisible... which, I
understand, turned out to be... well... impossible. (Good to know.) So
those three were, in essence, canceling one another out. At the same time, the
two Lincolns (remember them?) were busy with a little experiment of their own --
distilling liquor from the 
remaining
ton or so of corn kernels they picked up on Kaztropharius
137b. Nice thought, but basically useless against
Big Zamboola (who has pretty much been on the wagon since its college
days).
As it happened, it was sFshzenKlyrn who saved our sorry asses... not for the first time, I might add. Being a large, semi-solid cloud of volatile pre-stellar gases, he was able to hop outside the spacecraft and distract Big Zamboola with super nova imitations (big fun at card parties back on Zenon) and, failing that, cheap taunts aimed at the planetoid's apparently unsteady self-esteem. That enabled us to scoot behind some dark matter. How long can we keep up this hide-and-seek routine? Hmmmm. Big Zamboola will probably decay at roughly the same rate as our moon, so 3 billion years is the target. (Should have packed my toothbrush....)
(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.)
Worse
than Useless. Don't know about you, but I get a boatload of email from
liberal political action groups, including at least four regular communications
from the Democratic Party or sources closely associated with it. (How they got
my email address is another matter -- probably from Dr. Dean, though I never
signed onto his list either.) I don't believe any of the Democrat's emails made
any mention of the anti-war protest before the event, but just a couple of days
ago I got spam from Barbara Boxer's PAC making some oblique reference to the
march in Washington. Mind you, only one Congressional Democrat actually
participated in the rally -- 
Cynthia
McKinney, who gave an impassioned speech. Her colleagues, on the other hand,
couldn't get far enough away fast enough, just as the party itself is bizarrely
distancing itself from any calls for withdrawal from Iraq. And yet Boxer's email
mentions 100,000 marching in front of the White House, even though she was
probably on the other side of the continental divide at the time. So... why
bring it up?
Well, think about it. The establishment Democrats have seen the polls and know the war is increasingly unpopular. They can hardly ignore the fact that a supermajority now think it's not worth fighting (the fact is, everybody who is not there fighting thinks it's not worth fighting, but that's another story). They want to take advantage of the president's weakness and glom onto the popular will....only they've spent the last three years putting themselves squarely on the opposite side of that will. So they send this email to what they know is a politically left-leaning "activist" list of names. They write it so that, if you don't read too carefully, you'd get the vague impression that Barbara Boxer was right at the front of the march, arms locked with Cindy Sheehan and Ramsey Clark, calling the White House to account. It's only when you read closely that you'll notice Boxer is calling for some vague standard of "success" in the Iraq strategy as a precondition for withdrawal. That's because her party's front-runners for the presidency have authored legislation calling for sending 80,000 more troops to Iraq, picking up on John Kerry's losing theme of "managing" the war more effectively. How cynical is that?
Jesus
freaking christmas. This is what happens when corporate lobbyists are in the
driver's seat at both major parties. Here the Republicans' entire leadership is
either under investigation or under indictment (times two with Tom Delay, it
seems), the president's polling number are in the toilet, the bankruptcy of his
administration's policies exposed for all to see, and the Dems are a virtual
no-show. How much more political advantage do they need before they'll take a
stand on something? You probably already know the answer to that one. With the
exception of some principled voices around the edges of the party, the Democrats
have remade themselves into interventionist Republicans, weighing in on the side
of imperial adventure and big money interests. Waiting for them to act like a
true party of opposition is like waiting for Godot. So Bush/Cheney and company
can go on repeating themselves, delivering the same lantern-jawed victory speech
over and over again, fucking up everything they touch, and the Democrats do
little more than say, "Yeah, me too.... only not quite so much."
Those of us who oppose the war... we're pretty much on our own. So what's new, right?
luv u,
jp
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10/15/05
Gaack!
Ka-hop tooey. Goddammit, anyway. How'd that sucker get in my lung? Nothing like a little corn on the cob crammed sideways down your windpipe. What, did I sleep with my mouth open last night? Gaack! Don't remember... because (what?) I was asleep, right? Funny how that works. Ahem. Ah-hem. Mmmmm. That's better.
What
the hell -- I shouldn't be surprised that my pipes are filled with chafe. The
air is thick with it ever since we decided to off-load all that seed corn (or,
as you call it, "kahn") way out in deep space. Didn't I tell you about
that? Right. Haven't talked since last week. What am I thinking? Anyway -- Big
Zamboola. Not the tour, the deadly planetoid. Him was in hot pursuit of yours
truly and the rest of the oversized Big Green
entourage. sFshzenKlyrn, our trusty
guitarist from the planet Zenon, tried to distract that nasteroid with the
enormous cake-hole, but it only worked for a short while. Seems we had to plug
that ravenous gob with something. And about the only something we had enough of
was that corn (or, as you call it, "cone") -- all remaining sixteen
ton of it down in the cargo hold. Nothing else for it, my friend.
Isn't it funny how people say "ton" when they really mean "tons"? And those British -- they say "tonne". What the fuck.
Anyway,
with our backs to the wall, Mitch Macaphee improvised a grain cannon which we
were able to aim out the back hatch... with a little help from Marvin (my
personal robot assistant), who doesn't require air. (Big advantage.) Marvin
pointed the sucker right at Big Zamboola and pulled the lanyard. We all felt a
jolt. Not a big jolt -- more of a medium-sized one. We looked out the aft
viewing port. Rock-hard corn kernels were hitting the rogue planetoid like
thousands of tiny meteoroids. Zamboola looked a bit confused by this unexpected
interstellar hail storm. Did he then turn tail and run? I'd have to say no. In fact,
he seemed to actually LIKE it. After the first ton or so, he was one happy
asteroid. He started bobbing like a cork in a bathtub. It was the damnedest
thing we ever saw...pretty much. (At least with respect to killer asteroids,
that is.)
What
was the reason for this bizarre and unexpected turnabout in our deep-space
fortunes? Well, the answer wasn't long in coming. It seems there's a little
known principle regarding the transportation of foodstuffs through the universe.
Trevor James Constable explained it to me. Apparently when you travel through
space at velocities exceeding the speed of light, grains and other starchy
products undergo a molecular change similar to fermentation. This process
resembles accelerated aging more than anything. (In fact, Trevor 
James often
launches bottles of grape juice into orbit in the morning so that he can have Beaujolais
Nouveau that evening.) So the corn (or as you call it, corn) that we
cannoned at Big Zamboola was fully fermented and probably about 150 proof, like
corn liquor. Turns out Zamboola's a bit of a lush. Who knew?
Now if that isn't weird enough, the Big Zamboola is now tagging along on the last leg of our tour, joining the massive euglena encampment. This might be something of a "lost weekend" for the big guy -- don't know. He's enjoying it for the time being, anyway. And his presence dovetails nicely with our tour promotion. (He's kind of like our stage set now. Pretty impressive, eh? A big, drunk asteroid. What could be more appropriate?) He also knows his way around the galaxy, which is handy...since I've been consigned to the pilot's seat. (Mitch Macaphee's been hitting the corn, as well....)
(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.)
Power.
I keep wondering when people will get used to the idea that we're living in
a one-party state -- a single political organization has effective control over
all three branches of our federal government. (When you add to that the fact
that the two major parties share many of the same policy goals and the same
corporate funders, the picture becomes even more monochromatic.) What we are
witnessing at every level of our political culture is the consequence of the putsch
of 2000, when the voting public lost the last vestige of meaningful
participation in the selection of our leaders. Mind you, I didn't vote for
Gore/Lieberman and feel that their administration would have been a disaster in
its own right. But they won the election, and when we accepted the fact that
Bush/Cheney had 
taken
the White House by judicial fiat (an activist decision joined in by the
now-sainted Sandra Day O'Connor), we agreed to our own disenfanchisement.
What about Bush's somewhat more decisive re-election? Hmmm, yes -- I remember that day very well. It was September the 11th, 2001, and the electorate was former Reagan/Bush protégé Osama Bin Laden (veteran of the CIA-funded Afghan war -- the Iraq of the 1980s, where that generation of jihadists cut their teeth), his four votes delivered by Saudi, Egyptian, and Lebanese proxies. Two votes hit the World Trade Center; one hit the Pentagon. The fourth ballot was discarded in a Pennsylvania field, but was counted for Bush/Cheney nevertheless. That was the day Bush's re-election was decided, since the only thing he has ever had going for him is the jingoistic exploitation of those attacks for political advantage and to advance the neo-con program of expanding empire. Since 9/11, every national election has gone to the Republican right, so that now we have a nearly monolithic government, politically speaking. If Bin Laden's aim was to make us live under a totalitarian regime run by hyper-religious warmongering racists, he has succeeded.
When
power rests entirely in one camp, the constitutional checks and balances are
rendered meaningless. Much has been said about 2nd-term presidencies being
marred by scandal, but all of the prime examples -- Nixon's Watergate, Reagan's
Iran/Contra, Clinton's... er...blow job -- were driven by a Congress at least
partly controlled by the opposition party. It is unimaginable that the current
Congress would undertake a serious inquiry into the misdeeds of this president,
let alone initiate impeachment proceedings if called for. 
The
fucker could burn Washington D.C. to the ground and they'd still line up
behind him. So even with all the buzz about Rove and the Plame investigation, I
doubt anyone is sweating too profusely over at the White House. Then, of course,
Congress is busily wrapping up large hunks of the federal treasury and handing
it off to their corporate donors, the latest example being the House's passage
of massive subsidies for the energy industry -- you know, the ones that are
being buried in a mountain of profits right now. Because the putsch party
controls the House, they are able to grossly manipulate parliamentary
procedures, keeping votes open for ridiculous periods of time until they cajole,
bribe, and threaten enough reluctant members to deliver a razor-thin
majority.
Sure, their approval ratings are in the toilet. But do they care?
luv u,
jp
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10/22/05
Bugger-all.
Put that bottle away -- this instant! No, no -- I didn't mean drink it down like a shot. Put it down, damn you. Not that way! Don't drink -- that's what I'm saying. Don't drink. What are you...doing? Lookit -- eating liquor is the same as drinking it, there's no difference. Mother of pearl.
You'd
think I had enough to do. Now I'm running some kind of traveling interstellar
halfway house. Actually, that crossed with a zoo. Let me back up a tick. Here we
are, on the last leg of THE
BIG ZAMBOOLA: Big Green Interstellar
Tour Fall 2005, and in the
midst of limping from planetary venue to planetary venue, our hardy (or is that
hearty?) team of space voyagers has turned into a bunch of substance abusers
extraordinaire. No, I'm not referring to the hard stuff. (We've been off
flapjacks for a couple of years now, and I won't let the batter anywhere near
our galley.) I'm talking about plain old hooch, or as you call it,
"grog" -- alcohol, as plied by the recently reformed planetoid, The
Big Zamboola, who just a little more than a week ago was treating us like a
canapé, but is now yet another useless travel companion...and a drunkard,
besides.
Not
that I am immune to the petty virtues of alcohol. Man's got a right to have a
little drink every once in a while. Nothing wrong with that. And I've been known
to glug a few when the spirit moves me. However, when it gets in the way of
performing, that's another story. That's when it's absolutely CRUCIAL to imbibe
liberally. We of Big Green
are known for our kind of boozy singing style and staggering rhythms -- alcohol
is a 
positive boon to our way of performing, I'm not making any excuses about
it. And there's the rub. This Big Zamboola character -- he's hundreds of
miles wide...and he's drinking everything in sight. How the hell are we supposed
to get a decent pre-gig buzz on with such an alcoholic black hole in our midst?
Great googly-moogly. It's beyond my comprehension how he does it. Even
sFshzenKlyrn is impressed, and
he's a transdimensional creature whose appetite defies all physical laws.
It
has gotten so dry on this ship that I've resorted to sending Marvin (my personal
robot assistant) out on the occasional beer/wine/gin run. Trouble is, he's not
very well checked out on the typical package-goods store transaction. They card
him, and he just stands there, blinking his lights. Then a little slip of paper
emerges from one of his many printer slots with his date of activation on it. Of
course, that date is well short of 21 years ago, and there's nary a liquor store
owner in the Magellanic cloud who will take anything less than a county
sheriff's I.D. these days. Particularly on that planet run by great danes. (Oh sure -- back a few millennia ago, ANYbody could
get their hands on a cheap bottle of rum. No more, my 
friend.) So more often
than not Marvin comes back empty-clawed. And when he actually does bring
something drinkable home, it usually gets snapped up by that insatiable
asteroid... or carried off by one of the giant euglenas.
Hey, the news isn't all bad. Actually, despite the fact we've had to play the last few jobs stone-cold sober (with the exception of a few moderate helpings of sFshzenKlyrn's Zenite snuff), the shows have been going over pretty good. Could be the stage set. How many bands have their own floating planetoid, singing beerily along with the numbers, bobbing about like an intergalactic bouncing ball? Not many, I'll wager. Not very many.
(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.)
Justice.
Saddam Hussein is on trial again. Hmmm... what an interesting proceeding that
could be, if justice were more than just another weasel word to be tossed about
by the powerful -- a standard applied only to the losers. In such a world, we
would be on trial with the big boy, since our government has been complicit in
Saddam's most heinous crimes and instrumental in his rise from small-time thug
to tin-pot dictator. Our CIA might be called to the stand to answer charges of
encouraging Saddam's assassination attempt against Iraqi leader Kassem back in
the early '60s. I know it's hard for us Americans to picture this, but imagine a
vastly greater power (one that openly coveted our natural resources) had
bankrolled Lee 
Harvey Oswald; now imagine Oswald becoming absolute ruler within
20 years of shooting Kennedy. That's something like what happened to Iraq, and
since the US was obsessed with the specter of communism and the possibility that
Iraq's vast oil wealth might be kept out of reach, this was considered a good
outcome. Hey -- it worked in Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Brazil,
and.... so on.
Back to Saddam's trial of the imagination. Let's call George Schultz and Cap Weinberger to the stand, so that they can talk about our tilt towards Iraq through the Iran/Iraq war (which Saddam started) and all of Saddam's worst atrocities. Remember Rumsfeld's 1984 handshake with the now-unspeakable dictator? Offered in full knowledge of Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians. Then the "tanker war" of 1987, when Kuwaiti oil tankers were reflagged under US colors and given escorts by ships like the Vincennes, which shot a civilian Iranian airliner out of the sky. Saddam's military shot up the US Stark... and our response was nil (a privilege previously accorded only the Israelis when they destroyed the Liberty in 1967). Saddam gassed the Kurds and we initially tried to hang it on the Iranians. Still the aid flowed, including enormous agricultural credits staunchly defended by farm-state Congress members right up to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Our Pentagon shared intelligence with Saddam; our biotech firms were allowed to provide him with pathogens. Even after the worm turned and he became Bush senior's great Satan, our massive military on Iraq's southern border stood by while Saddam's forces used helicopter gunships to perpetrate his last great bloodletting, the suppression of the Shiite uprising which Papa Bush had encouraged, now brutally put down within eyeshot of "Stormin'" Norman Schwartzkopf, who had authorized the Iraqi's use of non-fixed wing aircraft.
So....call George H.W. Bush to the stand. Call Norman Schwartzkopf to the stand.
While
we're at it, let's call big Bill Clinton to the stand, along with Maddy Albright
and company, who colluded in the strangulation of war-ravaged Iraqi society in
the 1990s with a sanctions regime that amounted to passive biological warfare
against the population, falling particularly hard on children, 300,000 of whom
died from water-borne diseases, malnutrition, and lack of adequate medical
supplies -- a toll Democratic party heavyweights still regard as "worth
it," in Albright's words. (Speaking of remorseless arrogance.) There's also
the small matter of repeated bombings, with occasional flourishes like the 1998
"Operation Desert Fox", which left many dead and ended the WMD
inspections regime. That takes us directly to the current contrived catastrophe,
perhaps Iraq's most serious to date, built on lies and boundless arrogance,
executed with a studied carelessness, and facilitated by a stenographic fourth
estate that passed along transparent falsehoods on the front page. So call Dubya, Rummy (again), Cheney, Powell,
Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, and Judy
Miller to the stand.
One can only dream, I suppose.
luv u,
jp
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10/30/05
Holy Jomo Kenyatta,
Keep the ball rollin', keep the ball rollin'...yes the name of the game is....whoops! Here we go again with the interstellar jukebox, running amok. Can't get the bloody tunes out of my head. Signals flying in from an Earth long dead. They're just hearing about the Boxtops out here. Donovan is on the charts. We're in pig heaven, boy, pig heaven.
Yes,
we are on our way back home, as the song goes, the spacecraft stereo system
cranked up to 11, playing the interstellar equivalent of A.M. radio
hits....which is to say stuff that's been traveling through the void for better
than 40 years now. Kind of like listening to A.M. late at night and hearing
those way-distant stations. This one is like light-years away, and hell.... in
space, it's ALWAYS midnight, right? We're hearing about the Beatles' upcoming
American tour and other scrambled bits of 1960s media chatter. (Seems they had
some kind of pointless war going back then, stoked up by a psychotic Texan in
the White House. Imagine that!) Isn't that a hoot? The crew is really stomping
to the hits. All except Matt and John, who are catching up on lost shut-eye.
Trevor James Constable, of course, is making his usual ruckus. And sFshzenKlyrn
has been doing "play-along" on his Telecaster. Even Dr. Hump is
blowing bubbles in his spirit jar in time with the music.
For
his own part, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has assigned himself the task
of keeping the stowaways in line. "Stowaways?" you may ask...and well
you may. I'm referring here to the colony of giant euglenas that have attached
themselves like microbes to the interior hull of our vessel. These suckers just
THRIVE on pop music, and that 60s radio stuff makes them swarm in circles like a
hurricane on that big weather situation board. That would be quite enough for
one automaton to keep track of....but the euglenas are not alone in stowaway-ville.
We have also inadvertently 
brought on board our vessel that strange
intergalactic phenomenon known as THE BIG ZAMBOOLA. How so, him being so huge
and all? Man, you're full of questions today. Well, the answer is simple --
like ALL of our answers. Trevor James Constable trained his patented orgone
generating device on the asteroid. There. What else do you need to know?
Oh,
right. There's the part about getting him on board. Well, actually, he snuck on
board while we were stopped at a refueling station near Aldebron. Now we've got
ourselves a king-size animated beach ball with a full set of china -- man, what a
mouth! He even makes the Robinsons cringe, and they don't even exist in the same
space-time continuum. (That's right -- in addition to ancient radio broadcasts,
we're seeing holographic images of television characters from the 1960s as well.
What could be more appropriate than the Robinsons on board our ersatz Jupiter 2?
Talk about good luck -- we could just as easily have ended up with the cast of
Hee-Haw or Petticoat Junction.) Together with Marvin and the
man-sized tuber, I don't have to tell you that they made for an interesting
group photo -- one for the collection, my friends. All that was 
missing were the
two Lincolns. (Playing backgammon in the engine room, I believe.)
One party that was not amused by the change in our ship's complement was the border patrol agent that checked our vehicle before re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. (I'll tell you, this anti-immigration thing is getting way out of hand -- check points in space??) The officer in charge wasn't amenable to our pet asteroid, and when sFshzenKlyrn gave the man an argument, he threw our Zenite friend in a holding cell. Didn't think there was a cell that could hold that boy....but frankly, I think he kind of likes it in there. Inspiration for the blues, don't you know.
(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.)
Hard
road ahead. Another milestone in Iraq -- now more than 2,000 U.S. military
personnel have been killed since the March 2003 invasion. White House and
Pentagon spinmeisters have worked to minimize the significance of this number,
telling us how focusing upon it reflects some kind of morbid fascination with
what's going wrong at the expense of what's going right, that progress is being
made in our war against faceless, bloodthirsty killers, and that the seeds of
democracy have begun to sprout amongst the ruins of Iraqi society. It's
manifestly obvious that these folks will never draw this gruesome enterprise to
a close without significant pressure from people like us. A million mutinies
now! as V.S. Naipaul put it. 
But will it happen? Not without leadership from
military people and their families. Cindy Sheehan demonstrated the power of
"Gold Star families" as advocates for peace and accountability. If
more service people were to abandon the sham-patriotism of Bush's war rhetoric
and start actively resisting, the nation would follow. (And, a little later on,
the politicians.)
It's ironic that this responsibility should fall to the people for whom opposition to the war carries the greatest risk, and that the rest of us who may protest with little fear of sanction hardly ever bother to do so. That's the reality of this war -- unlike Vietnam, the vast majority of American families are insulated from the conflict; they will not be asked to fight it and are encouraged in the delusion that they will not bear the cost of its prosecution nor its aftermath. Sadly, for all the overheated rhetoric and magnetic ribbons declaring our "support" for the troops, very few of us care enough to speak up on their behalf. The administration's hypocritical attempt to define opposition to the war as hostility towards those fighting it should be dismissed with the utter contempt it deserves, and yet too many tacitly accept this false premise. Meanwhile, the so-called opposition party in Congress (with a few notable exceptions) offer lame half-measures in response to polling data, hoping to ride the war out to a default victory in the 2006 election -- a "strategy" that is supposed to maintain their "strong on defense" position as first runner-up in a field of two parties. For soldiers staked out in the cataclysm that is present-day Iraq, there will be little help from this quarter.
Alex
Cockburn has suggested that it would take a mutiny to stop this war, just as
happened in essence during the Vietnam war, when the Pentagon was losing control
of its massive army of disgruntled conscripts. There has been, of course, a
number of impressive instances of resistance amongst 
low-level
soldiers, but little more than grumbling thus far amongst the brass. Former
commander of U.S. military prisons in Iraq Janice Karpinsky has been speaking up
about the takeover of Abu Ghraib by military intelligence -- she alone was
busted from Brigadier General to Colonel for what others did in the abusive
"prison within the prison" sanctioned at the highest levels of the
administration. Then there was a devastating email reprinted in this month's Harper's
from an Air Force captain serving as a military prosecutor in Gitmo and
describing a calculated policy of deceit in which the guilt of the accused
detainees is decided in advance, sans evidence. So some career military are
standing up to the lawlessness of our "War on Terror," but in the
absence of a draft, very few people are connected to this war, so building
meaningful activist opposition will take a while. Sadly, that means the 2010
dead (10 more added since I started this writing!) U.S. service people will have
their sacrifices "honored" by the waste of God knows how many more
lives, and that Iraqis will continue to perish at an even more appalling
rate.
Neo-Convict. Irving Lewis Libby (his actual name, as Juan Cole has reminded us), Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted as a result of the White House's whispering campaign against Joseph Wilson, who called into question the central lie in their bogus case for war. I say let's get down to the real crime here -- the one that's still killing people to this very day. Now there's your trial of the century.
luv u,
jp