Israelis celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of statehood this week. The festivities drew our lame duck president 
like a moth to flame, so in a sense, the Israelis gave us a gift for their birthday, by taking custody of Mr. 28% for a few precious days. Dubya was able to find people who adore him there – principally a bunch of failed politicians who wouldn’t last a week in office were it not for our massive decades-long investment in the ongoing stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. The press dutifully played Bush’s visit as an effort to move the “peace process” forward (even as he pushed for war with Iran), but any child can see that there is no chance for a meaningful settlement under the current conditions… namely the fact that Israeli politicians have built their careers on the occupation and American politicians have built theirs, in part, on supporting and underwriting it. It is a hideous and corrosive symbiosis that those folks smiling about, whatever the people in the streets of Tel Aviv may be celebrating.
Sixty years ago a historic wrong was committed against the Palestinians, some 750,000 of whom were driven from their homes and into squalid refugee camps likely intended to provide shelter for no more than a stretch of months. Many are still there, along with their progeny, waiting for the dream of Palestinian nationhood to become a reality – a diaspora of several million now for whom the only hope of deliverance lies within the 22% of historic Palestine comprised by the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is a hope that has consistently been squelched by Israel and the United States, which have invested fully in the policy of stalemate hatched by the Nixon administration back in the early 1970s. The two-state solution most recently re-introduced by the Saudis has in fact been on the table since that time and before; it has been accepted in principle by Palestinians, many (if not most) Israelis, and the rest of the world. But Washington and Tel Aviv have continually blocked this option, masking their rejectionism with advocacy for a vaguely defined version of Palestinian sovereignty that allows Israel to continue building on its interconnected settlement blocks in the West Bank, retain its control of the Jordan Valley, and incorporate East Jerusalem into Israel – a Potemkin Village peace plan that merely validates the ever-expanding occupation.
The spectacle of Bush and Olmert congratulating one another on this historic failure is enough to make anyone nauseous, apart from the dwindling number of people in either country who support these men. For myself, I can only swallow hard and make a few simple observations on this anniversary. 
First, Israel is a nation as legitimate (and as illegitimate, founded on violence and dispossession like the U.S.) as any other and, as such, has the same rights and responsibilities as any other. Second, in the territories it occupies beyond the Green Line, it has no rights, only responsibilities, as Noam Chomsky and others have frequently pointed out. This is true of any foreign occupier, so it is true of Israel. Third, the practice of meting out collective punishment and dictating terms to an occupied people is intolerable and a very serious war crime by any reasonable standard of international law, as is the continuing practice of colonizing occupied territory, which Israel has pursued for 40 years, through good times and bad. That this has been allowed to continue unchecked is no cause for celebration, in my opinion.
Those who hope for a U.S. brokered solution will likely be disappointed – whatever our sentiments, we behave like a nation of sheep, led by jackals who gladly sacrifice thousands of lives for political gain. It seems the only hope lies with the Israelis themselves – that they take the initiative and tell their leaders to end this occupation before their nation gets a single year older.
luv u,
jp
Avast, me hardies! Full astern. Hoist the mizzen-mast. Lower the, I don’t know… gang plank. Do something nautical, for chrissake. We’ve got some timbers to shiver.
Why do we bother with such elaborate efforts? Well, it has to do with resource allocation. Oh, yes – we’re thinking conservation here, folks. You see, studies show that root vegetables use considerably less water when they’re being entertained. (What studies? I don’t freaking know – ask Mitch, he’s the scientist!) And we ourselves found that, after a solid ten days of these couch potatoes laying about the mill, the local water table had dropped at least 14 inches. (In as much as it’s only about two feet deep to begin with, we obviously had to do something fast.) So it was on with the pirate hats, the peg legs, the eye-patches, the shoulder parrots, and up with the Jolly Roger. (Or the “Jolly Roget,” if you want another word for it.)
these are root vegetables, for chrissake. They can’t tell a pirate from a palindrome. (What the hell – even tubey thinks “Long John Silver” spelled backwards is still “Long John Silver”.) Why would Marvin ever think he has to put on the whole nine yards? Just a little nod in the buccaneer direction would be enough to satisfy even the most discriminating of these yams. (Come on, Marvin. You’re making a total ass of yourself, honestly.) 
high-tech air-delivered munitions on people who live on less than a dollar a day, hitting hospitals, killing children, all by accident (of course), though how you can drop bombs on a densely populated slum and not presume that you’re going to kill innocent people is beyond my understanding. (By the standards established at Nuremberg, this doesn’t hold any water as an excuse.) We’re also dropping bombs on Somalia, the other other war – the one in which we took the side of an invader, the repressive government of Ethiopia, and played a key role in bringing Somalia back to the brink of famine and chaos. The UN and NGOs are issuing warnings about hunger in that sorry object of our attentions. They are also putting out grim advisories on Gaza, where relief programs are being stymied by the siege Israel is imposing on that territory’s citizens, cutting off fuel supplies at a time of critical need… with our full support, of course. 
Rest assured, our president is thinking very, very deeply about the implications of this policy. (“We’re killing them,” he was recently heard to say.) He represents the worst case of senioritis I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Far from “sprinting to the finish,” Bush is drifting through his last year, letting the dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, watching the lawn go to hell, and saving his dirty laundry for the trip home. Just bobbing along, not a care in the world. Let me tell you, friends – there’s going to be one hell of a party chez Bush when January 21 gets here… get your tickets now. As a warm-up, Dubya will continue to lob explosives at the neediest, building separation walls around Sadr City, and sending his legions into that sprawling slum that is home to 2.5 million – close to 10% of the total Iraqi population. No party for them.
No I can’t get the phone. Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full? It’s a shovel, you idiot – what do you think? I’ve been using it all morning. And I don’t know the first thing about kneecap replacement surgery, so bugger off.
of the deep funk he’d fallen into, pining for the fields of his youth. It would hardly do to let the fellow down again, especially now, in front of all his fellow tubers. Yeah, it’s inconvenient. Yeah, I’m getting sick of hauling fertilizer over from the local ag supply store (at great personal expense, I might add) and pressing it around the roots of some oddly misshapen mega-yam. Yeah, there’s a limit – but we haven’t reached it yet. At least I haven’t. (The Lincolns reached theirs a long time ago. I think anti-Lincoln would sooner debate Hillary Clinton than raise another shovel of topsoil for tubey’s relatives.) So on with the work assignment. One hand tied behind our back. No Lincolns. No Mitch. No Marvin (my personal robot assistant).
ganged by his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, to assist in one or two little experiments the esteemed scientist has taken on during his sojourn chez Big Green. What’s he working on? Don’t ask. No really, you don’t want to know. Okay, okay, I’ll tell you about one. It’s a zombie thing. Yes, Mitch is a mad scientist, so this comes up once in a while. Turn your back for a day or two and he’s resurrecting Frankenstein’s monster. The thing with him is, he gets all the hard stuff right (giving it life, for instance) but skimps on the details. Like his latest zombie creation has been stumbling around for just a few days or so and it already needs a knee replacement. Couldn’t he see that coming? (He borrowed the body parts from a carpet installer. I mean, even I could guess the knees would be history.)
course). This campaign is beyond inane – too insipid to even qualify as absurd. Does anyone really, really, really care about what Barack Obama’s former preacher thinks? Is Wright running for president? Is anyone taking a microscope to the sermons and unrelated public statements of any other politician’s spiritual mentors, friends, associates, neighbors, etc.? Has anyone, for instance, taken a close look at Franklin Graham, who offered prayer at Bush’s inauguration and lectured us all on being squeamish about the use of nuclear weapons? No controversy there. And if Obama’s time on a board with Bill Ayers is fair game, why not Hillary’s time on the board of Wal-Mart? After all, Bill Ayers just talked about demolishing things – Wal-Mart has demolished hundreds of small town shopping districts and driven virtual slave labor in the countries that produce the garbage they sell. Is that all good?
like McCain (pictured here in front of an American flag, by pure coincidence). Clinton’s take on it is a bit more ludicrous, because she is playing it as a working man vs. Big Oil issue – i.e. we’re going to make the oil companies pay the tax all summer, via a windfall profits tax. My ass. Anyone who thinks that that piece of legislation would pass through congress and be signed into law by Mr. 28 Percent before the annual weekend at Myrtle Beach is seriously on crack. Far more likely is that the tax would be dropped and then never added back again (lest Congress members, facing election, be accused of “raising taxes”). I haven’t heard this mentioned more than maybe once since this issue was raised, but the gas tax is a feeble attempt at addressing the actual cost of our car-based economy, with the revenue going to maintaining and repairing highways and bridges. This infrastructure is falling apart now, even with the revenue – without it, the neglect will be considerably worse. And with oil prices steadily climbing, the slight price reduction at the pump will disappear in a matter of weeks, particularly with the summer driving season kicking in.
There’s the old lumber storage shed. Then there’s that ancient grain silo – hasn’t been used for years. Oh, yeah… and that little room in the north corner of the foundry – forgot about that.
problem with a few extra guests, right? We’ve got a whole abandoned mill to work with – surely we can find the room. Okay – first of all, we’re not talking about conventional two-legged humans, the kind that can crash on a couch or sleep in the bathtub. (As long as they don’t bathe on the couch, I’m okay.) No, no… our guests are relatives of the man-sized tuber. In an attempt to coax him out of his funk (and out from under the tool shed), we made the somewhat ill-advised promise to invite all of his living relatives over for a week or two. Now, I admit, I did not fully consider the implications of this when it left my lips. (New experience for me.) 
working on the problem right now, though each has been busy with his own personal obsessions. (Yes, Marvin is still whirring and clicking about that Canadian space robot named Dextre… so much so that I can’t even get a shovel into his lazy hands.) Mitch has designed an irrigation system for the courtyard that could help get us through the next few days, but with more heat in the forecast, we can’t leave those suckers out in the sun for too long. Don’t want to think of what might become of them. (Some kind of casserole, no doubt.) 
was well worth it. Or sort of, anyway… since it’s still hard to see how Hillary can walk away with this nomination short of spontaneous combustion on Obama’s part. No matter – the race continues. In a year when a Democrat should certainly walk to victory in November, the party is inventing a way to lose against a pretty lame candidate on the G.O.P. side. Start with two parts ambition – the kind the Clintons pursue at the cost of all they claim to believe in. Certainly, I’ve never been a fan of theirs, but I would dislike them a whole lot less if they simply stuck to articulating their positions, outlining policy differences with their opponent in a civil fashion, and refrain from all the exaggerated accusations about sixties radicals, anti-American (Marine veteran) preachers, and out of context remarks worthy of Sean Hannity or Matt Drudge.
This is a principle as old as organized society. The beast must be kept in its cage. That is why the political culture minimizes or excoriates the mass movements of the 1960s and ’70s – because people were participating in our democracy and involving themselves in policy matters to a degree elites found distressing, prompting them to fret over a growing “crisis of democracy” – the crisis being that the “d” word had any meaning to it at all. It’s the reason why anytime pop culture looks at the civil rights movement, for instance, they focus on Martin King and his “I have a dream” speech, not the thousands and thousands of people who risked their lives alongside him to bring about change. No, the wealthy have no desire to see a return to that level of participatory democracy. Perhaps they understand better than we do how much they rely upon a supine working class to create value in the businesses they own, to purchase the products and services they profit from, to serve their needs in every imaginable way, and so on.
Here, boy. Heeere, boy! That’s a good boy…. come on, got a little treat for you. Over here, boy. That’s right. Over…. oh, goddamn it!
up with him. (Good thing he didn’t break down in front of the vegetable stands – he might have ended up the catch of the day for some hungry vegan.) Between the four of us (Matt, John, anti-Lincoln, and myself), we wheeled the tuber back into the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and locked the gate behind us. No more escapes, we thought. Of course, we didn’t anticipate the option for internal exile… our tool shed has a door that locks from the inside, strangely enough, and the man-sized tuber took refuge inside, throwing the latch behind him. Why? Could be the dirt floor reminds him of mother. (I’m guessing. It’s probably a lot more complicated than that.) 
Canadian space robot whose name must not be spoken. Please… don’t say it!) And of course, the return of mad scientist Mitch Macaphee and his notorious ticking steamer trunk. (Turned out to be a forgotten alarm clock he’d borrowed from the Buenos Aires Hilton. Again… keep this to yourself.) So what the hell, we’ve been losing a few pounds a week in pure sweat over here – a little too preoccupied to notice the subtle mood swings of an overgrown sweet potato. My apologies, for chrissake. Next time I will have my litmus paper ready, just in case he gets a little less acidic than normal. (The tuber’s dropping acid again…. not good.)
at least a cursory hearing, you will have been severely disappointed. This is turning out to be the first 100% issue-free election season, stuffed with infantile claims, charges, and counter-charges that would shame an elementary school contest. An astounding 45 minutes was spent at the outset on 3 points of earth-shattering concern to every American:
These events should be hosted by some neutral institution, with questions that reflect people’s actual concerns, not the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. Instead, we have Gibson and Snuffleupagus acting as the arbiters of political virtue and personal propriety, asking Obama at one point if he feels that Reverend Wright is “as patriotic” as Obama is; declaring the flag pin “controversy” as somehow relevant because it is “all over the Internet,” and so on. I don’t know quite what the standard should be for determining debate questions, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t include suggestions from the like of Sean Hannity, who can’t even be bothered to look into the William Ayers comments before opening his festering yap (i.e., Hannity excoriated Ayers for making comments about Weather Underground bombings on 9/11 “of all days”, when it hardly takes a genius to work out that his comments were printed in the New York Times on 9/11/2001 and made a long time before that date). That’s ABC’s research department: FoxNews.
Still hear it. Try again. Nope, that didn’t work. I can still hear it. Try something else. No, no – that’s worse!
his gear all packed away and his mad science experiments reconstructed to his satisfaction (there was the one with the bishop’s head transposed onto the body of a ginseng root…. not sure I want to know how that comes out), Mitch was ready to start ordering the help around. He started with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), which was a good choice, because that gave him the opportunity to see just how screwed around our mechanical friend’s mind had become since last Mitch saw him. I think there was a certain amount of shock involved. (Marvin isn’t properly grounded. I’ve talked to him about this a number of times.) Hopefully Mitch can work through Marvin’s serial issues. (No fruit loop jokes here – I can spell, even if you can’t.) 
Matt and John both know it’s my fault for signing on with Loathsome Prick Records – a label too cheap to pay for mastering. It’s getting so that the only one talking to me around this lousy place is Big Zamboola, and his conversation tends toward the tedious, to put the matter delicately. (Always going on about gravitation. I guess planets have kind of a rivalry going on that point – a “mine’s stronger than yours” sort of thing.) I mean, even the man-sized tuber is pissed off at me! (Not enough plant food in the watering can.) And the Lincolns prefer Booth, frankly.