News from the front this week hasn’t been so good. Deadly car bombings in Iraq (a.k.a. “normal land”). 
Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy – like our weapons – seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a “war”), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all… though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about “purity of arms”, they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed with the notion of expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Paging George Mitchell! You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy.
Obama’s message to the Iranians was probably a step in the right direction, but it means little without a palpable change of policy across the region. That means some effort to promote Iraqi independence (from us) and reconstruction (from our assorted ravages), as well as a more speedy withdrawal of troops and military contractors. It also means rethinking the kind of policy that produces more hatred towards America amongst Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And it means a stop to the uncritical support we have given the Israeli government regardless of how they conduct themselves in the territories they have occupied since June 1967 (i.e. Palestine). Let’s face it – we’ve always been on the wrong side of struggles in the developing world, even when “our side” has won. From the Congo to Southeast Asia, from El Salvador to Chile, from Kabul to Baghdad, and everywhere in between, we’ve engaged in the thoughtless application of military might to political disputes and social upheaval, with invariably disastrous results. When will it stop? When will the sun set on this empire?
As the Israelis have demonstrated through their actions, and as we are demonstrating through our own, occupations have a corrupting influence on the occupier. Now seemingly incapable of facing down even a moderately armed irregular force 
like Hezbollah, the Israeli military seems best suited to attacking captive civilian populations in areas they already effectively control – civilians who have no effective means of defense. For our own part, we have become so used to the idea of civilian casualties that they are almost never deemed worthy of media coverage unless they occur in the double digits. The fact that we leave crucial life-or-death action to pilotless drones illustrates how profoundly we have separated ourselves from any sense of responsibility to the people subject to our military force. The very experience of war and occupation is now limited to the relatively small number of families whose members volunteer for service, our collective knowledge of its horrors growing more and more remote as the conscripts of 20th Century conflicts grow old and pass away.
Leave us face it: the empire is failing. Instead of tinkering with it, we had best consider how to abandon it before it destroys what’s left of our democracy.
luv u,
jp
Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.
light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem – he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, 
trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know – maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.
but this is way beyond what I expected. Now that we’ve all been treated to six straight days of red-faced rage, I have to say – this is just fucking surreal. It’s not surprising that people are pissed off, but to see politicians, pundits, and news correspondents gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky is kind of hilarious. What – they’ve never heard of out-sized executive compensation before? Of top-level managers walking away from failed enterprises with a big bundle of cash? Where have they been for the past 25 years? It’s only been happening my entire adult life, practically. Oh sure, I know – AIG took public funds. But plenty of companies with obscenely over-compensated management teams suck off the public feeding tube. Just look at our defense contractors, for chrissake, or Agri-business, fed fat with subsidy. AIG is a dramatic example of something that’s been common practice for a long time, made possible by the very people who are screaming the loudest.
but that they took the payout to protect the interests – get this – of the American people, who had bailed Goldman out and were, therefore, shareholders of the extremely well-connected investment bank. (Insert laugh track here.) When you view this in the broader context not only of massive bonuses (more than a billion to executives of bailed-out Citibank) and ongoing payouts via the Federal Reserve, but of the stuff that doesn’t get talked about at all, like the missing $50 billion or more in Iraq reconstruction funds (remember the pallets of cash?) and the other assorted wild commitments of public funds initiated by the previous administration, AIG is small potatoes. It also provides a good opportunity for the thieves to yell “thief”, if only for a few days.
Let’s see, what was it? Spring back, fall forward. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Set the clocks back, kids… it’s really only 11:00 in the morning.
Big Green and our uncommon lifestyle. And before I go on, yes, I did say discarded soap sculptures. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been going through one of his creative phases of late, and has taken to whittling figurines out of bar soap. This is a little inconvenient, as we are going through lean times and we haven’t a bar of soap to spare, quite frankly. It’s also inconvenient because he leaves his discarded shavings and abandoned projects lying around where they end up under foot… like on those bloody brick stairs. (And by “bloody,” I now mean literally.) Damned self-absorbed artists! And Marvin’s still getting spammed – look at this:
These fuckers never give up. Right, now back to my lifestyle point. Hmmm…. What was it again?
statist reactionaries) on the airwaves lamely attempting to reframe the history of the past eight years, now that it is safely past (and fading from the collective memory). You got your Ari Fleischers, your Frank Gaffneys… a whole rogue’s gallery of familiar mugs, bandaging up what is without question the most sorry record in recent presidential history. This would be amazing if we lived in a sane world – as it is, it’s just kind of laughable. Obama (which is to say, we) should be grateful that Bush rid the world of Saddam Hussein. W.t.f. – grateful for what? Saddam wasn’t even a credible threat to Iraqi Kurdistan, let alone the United States. Is the world a better place without him? Not really. Not that Saddam made it any better, but simply because of the fact that it hasn’t gotten any better since his passing. So even by the standards of the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, this claim doesn’t work. Too many liberals fall into the trap of voicing pavlovian agreement that we are better off without that tin pot Iraqi dictator. I say, demonstrate how, exactly.
terror attack on U.S. soil ever, not after, this defense is pretty thin, too. More Americans have died since 9/11 than on that dreadful day, thanks to Bush’s elective wars, so I guess it depends on just who Ari Fleischer means when he says “us”. This claim is mostly based on the specious assumption that the Bush team stopped terrorist attacks, but if they had uncovered any actual operational terror attempts, they certainly would have broadcast their success over and over again, judging by the extent to which they bloviated over those kids from Buffalo who went to Afghanistan, or Jose Padilla who thought about maybe building a bomb, or those guys who fantasized about blowing up the Sears tower. It’s a little hard to swallow that the Bush boys would have kept the lid on actual open-and-shut terror cases they’d foiled when they made so much hay over these lame examples. And, of course, there are many objective measures that place the threat of terror attacks at a much higher level than before the invasion of Iraq.
Oh, hi. Jesus, the shit you have to deal with around this stupid hammer mill! Crikey… we’ve got songs to record, albums to hawk, hawks to feed, feed to store, stores to shop, shops to… store… just a whole lot of things to do, okay? The last thing I want to be stuck doing is hunting down lost silverware. But, of course, you’ve got to try to keep people happy, and Mitch Macaphee is one of those people. Believe me, it’s not easy to find a really dedicated mad scientist who’s willing to work with a hardly-working rock band. Most of them expect to be paid. (We always assume that to be evidence that they’re just not “mad” enough for our purposes.) Some expect honorific titles and assorted baubles of scientific status. Still others will just as soon vaporize you for even talking to them (perhaps unintentionally). Next to those guys, Mitch Macaphee is downright affable. Even if he does have a private fork. (He’s been using the man-sized tuber as a taster, too… I’ve seen him!)
neutron star. (Not sure if that makes sense, exactly…. someone ask Mitch.) But they’ve all gone, now. Moved on to richer pastures and more rewarding career choices. Let’s face it…. Big Green was unable to offer them the kind of glory every mad scientist craves. We couldn’t even deliver the basics – a few sparking electrodes, banks of oversized v.u. meters, a gothic castle on a hill, the right little gnome. No, sir… all we could offer is a near total lack of monetary compensation and squatting rights in this drafty old abandoned hammer mill. Just try to hang on to a first-rate psycho-genius with nothing more than THAT as an incentive. Just try!
Buenos Aires this year. (Hot ticket, you best believe.) Since bribery is out of the question (lack of funds), we thought the Lincolns might use inescapable logic and persuasion. Not that either one of them possesses those capabilities, but someone has to try it on the rat bastard…. and it’s not going to be me. I’ve got work to do, damn it! There’s an album to finish, and it’s not going to freaking finish itself. As it is, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is doing some of my parts. It’s almost like I’m becoming HIS personal robot assistant.
budget. Through it all, and the concurrent crises unfolding in banking, unemployment, and investments, I keep hearing the specter of socialism raised by nervous acolytes of the imaginary purist free enterprise system we supposedly have now. Nationalize the banks? We can’t go there – that would be socialism! Single payer health coverage? Forget it, comrade – no socialized medicine here in the good old U.S. of A. Even though the Obama administration is nowhere near either of these propositions (alas), it seems as though the prospect of government doing anything remotely useful to the population it’s supposed to serve always brings on this overblown rhetoric about sacrificing our principles, destroying our way of life, etc. Though I hate to use his name (because MSNBC and others have been doing so incessantly for the last week), Rush Limbaugh (that great hulking hippo of hate) represents the rightward bookend of this tendency, calling for the president to fail in his quest to bring about the new International right here in America.
fool! He’s going to save your freaking bacon. Leave us face it – you drove the bus into a ditch, pure and simple, just as surely as your boy Bush crashed and burned on Iraq. This is not the time to complain about how much the tow truck is going to cost. Just sit there, play with your freaking PDAs, and maybe people will forget that you’re the fuckers who got us into this mess in the first place. Personally, I think it’s a mistake to let people off the hook this easily. Our banks may be falling to pieces, but there seems to be an awful lot of rich bankers around still. We should consider relieving them of some of the wealth they garnered over the last 20-30 years, when most of us were losing ground. We should make it a little more uncomfortable for the extremely wealthy, and a little harder to carry their ill-gotten gains someplace more congenial.
Hello again. Yes, we’re planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about – just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes… you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads…. kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It’s pretty terrifying.
a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods – you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime… and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn’t the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin’s problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.
new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you’ve got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They’ll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one “Maharba” (“Abraham” backwards) just to annoy him. So it’s, “Nice speech, Maharba!” Then you’ll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say “Quit it!” That’s when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.
bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part – an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note – the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.
pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.
about the intermittent gravity here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. I keep telling them, lighten up, goddamnit, but… then they float away. Why do they always grouse at me? Bring your complaints to Matt, you damn lazy Lincolns. At least HE has the sense not to respond in any way. (You know those artistic types.) I guess I answered my own question, eh? In any case, Mitch is still messing with the magnetism of mother earth, as you have likely gathered. Perhaps you yourself have noticed some minor glitches in gravitational constancy. Perhaps not. (Hey… there could be a lot of reasons for that floating feeling you get sometimes.)
of your worldly (and in Marvin’s case, other-worldly) goods through that series of tubes. It all started with unsolicited communications our robot friend received by e-mail. This was strange, as Marvin doesn’t have an email account. (I set one up for him just to avoid cognitive dissonance.) The messages kept on coming, and what the hell…. even I started reading them. I mean, look at this shit:
is actually a wireless mouse – laser pointer. Quite handy.) Suddenly, his arms started moving about in circles, his lights started flashing, and the little video screen on his back started showing scenes from “The Creeping Terror.” I brought Mitch in to have a look, and he said that Marvin had been taken over by some kind of computer virus. Now he spends a good part of the day in the lobby, his video screen showing some promotional video about buying digital photographic prints. Odd.