Saturday, January 2, 2010
November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Two days later his alleged assassin is gunned down on national television. The entire nation enters into a state of mourning that eventually succumbs to depression and paranoia. By 1968 the American military is deeply committed in Vietnam, a quagmire it is unable to escape until the mid-1970s. Not even a change of presidential administrations is able to resolve the war; Nixon in fact escalates military involvement when elected. Throughout these years American faith in government is weakened by revelations of various illegalities associated with the war, as well as the illegal actions of the Nixon administration. The costly war, along with over-dependence on foreign sources of oil, leads to economic collapse and recession by 1980.
September 11, 2001. The World Trade Center and Pentagon are attacked by alleged militant Islamic terrorists. Hours later the twin towers collapse on national television. The entire nation descends into a state of grief and mourning, followed quickly by rampant fear and paranoia as some unknown individual terrorizes the nation with anthrax-laced letters. Months later the American military invades Afghanistan and overthrows the Taliban; in 2003 the US military overthrows Saddam Hussein, long a burr under the American saddle. By 2008 the nation is deeply committed to two military occupations in two countries, stretching the military dangerously thin, increasing nationalist fervor, and revving up the fear and paranoia to Cold War levels. Not even a change of Presidential administrations is able to provide any hope of resolution, as Obama escalates involvement in both conflicts upon election. This period of time sees citizen faith in government almost devastated by incompetence and corruption at the highest offices of the Bush administration, and delivered a near killing blow by the broken promises and corruption of the Obama administration. Two costly wars, coupled with over-dependence on foreign debt, lead to economic collapse and recession by 2010.
Everything old is new again.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
I love this woman. She IS America. Corrupt, corpulent, lazy, dishonest, anti-intellectual, defensive, given to simplistic knee-jerk responses, inordinately blameful, devoid of accountability or responsibility, lacking in philosophical depth, empty on empathy, self-centered, delusional, and destructively selfish. If she runs for President in 2012, I… Read more will vote for her on these grounds alone: a nation such as ours, steeped in the history of individual liberty and democracy, deserves and needs a leader who reflects the qualities of its citizenry. Yes, I love her, the way one loves the pit bull who goes mad every time you walk past the neighbor’s yard. You admire the verve, the tenacity with which the dumb beast continually propels itself into the chain-link fence, as if physical reality will bend to its canine passions. She’s quite insane – you can see it in her eyes, and you don’t have to look too closely either – and it is the same madness that possesses this country now: the insanity that comes from having all the wrong ideas about how the world works now and being continually frustrated that these wrong ideas somehow fail to propel us toward progress; but rather than change the wrong ideas, Palin and America both insist on continuing to perform the same actions while expecting different results. This is of course a hallmark of religious thinking (a stubborn faith which refuses to allow for fact or reason, i.e. a reality-denying belief), as well as an indicator of insanity. (Originally posted on Facebook.)
On the first day he was out of prison he sat in the sunlight so long his face burned red. They used to let him outside for 30 minutes every Sunday. Days it was raining he still went out and stood in the yard until his uniform was soaked through. A half-hour of sunlight a week is not enough to activate skin melanin so he was pale the day he was released and the sun did a good job on him after four hours of direct exposure. It was when he was paying for his barbecue at a roadside stand that he realized he had raccoon eyes from his brand new sunglasses. He raised the glasses to count out pocket change and caught a glimpse of his face, a beet crimson that enhanced the glow of the ghostly halos around his eyes. The girl behind the counter smiled nicely at him. He wondered about her for a moment but then drove the thought from his conscious mind. She had a portable radio back there and was listening to the oldies station. He caught a line from the song that was playing. He’d heard the song before. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” He walked a few feet away from the window to wait for his food. The sunlight was hot on his back and the skin of his face was beginning to sting a bit. I should buy me a cowboy hat when I get to the city, he thought to himself. Two kids played tag around the back of a station wagon parked nearby. The rest of the family sat inside the wagon eating sandwiches and fries. Whoever wrote that song didn’t know what the hell she was saying, he thought. Whoever wrote that never lost their freedom and then got it back. He was free and he had a lot to lose. He was free. He had that.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Journalists have always slandered dead artists. If you’re anyone at all, in the weeks after you die some little gnome at the Weekly or the Times will go to your detractors and spurned former lovers and compile whatever malice their hurtful hurts display as truth. This is why everyone in Hollywood is such a bastard: when you die, they are going to say you are a bastard whether you are a bastard or not, so you might as well enjoy the benefits, however dubious and few, of being a bastard while you’re alive. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to be a bastard to one of those victims of failed imagination who populate the tar pits of local journalism, who will perhaps in turn write the post-mortem wherein you are dubbed a bastard, proving that there is some rough justice in this world, no matter what the bastards tell you.
Jack and Jill were injured today when they fell while fetching water from the hilltop well.
Jack received severe head injuries and is listed in critical condition. Jill received only minor abrasions.
Witnesses said Jack rolled down the hill ahead of Jill and may have broken her fall.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The angels are more confused than ever
For once they call out, and there is no one to listen
–”While She’s Gone,”
Void of Course
Headline in today’s Los Angeles Times:
Today’s White House beer day for Crowley and Gates, who are related
Aleister and Bill? Related? Having a beer with the President? Well… that sure does explain a lot.
Guy goes to the doctor’s office, puffing away on a cigarette, complaining of chest pains. He smokes six cigarettes while waiting to see the doctor. The doc gives the guy x-rays, a lung biopsy, other tests. The guy visits a dozen times and every time he’s smoking, smoking, smoking. The doctor acknowledges there is a problem, the guy is feeling pain and there’s something wrong with his breathing, but the doc cannot figure out what the problem is. The nurse points out the guy has smoked like twenty cigarettes every time he comes into the office. The doctor smiles at the nurse, tells her to give the patient cough drops and painkillers, and pronounces the problem as “something we’ll have to live with.” The guy goes home and dies slowly of lung cancer and emphysema. At the funeral the doctor stands over his grave, says too bad nothing could be done.
When you’re in the shit and its deep enough you can’t see over the top and wide enough you can’t see around the sides. Every day I wake up in the shit and think it’s deeper than the shit everyone else is in. But it’s not. It’s the delusion of being in the shit. The other delusion is that you’ll always be in the shit. This sense of hopelessness that sets in when you’ve been blind deaf and dumb in the shit for too long. Shits gets in your eyes, your eyes, your mouth. All you can taste is the shit. Seems like eventually it permeates your skull and seeps into your brain and one day you wake up, head full of shit. It’s like that. I know, buddy. I know. The actual composition of shit varies from diet to diet. But you can be sure that whether you ate broccoli and I ate burgers, our shit stinks, buddy. It’s the same, all around the world. Comes from the same place, goes to the same place. Shit is shit. If you think someone else’s shit is less than or better than your own, then it’s time for you to pack your shit and move to there the shit isn’t browner and stinkier, that is where the grass is greener, and see if you can enjoy, if not a shit-free existence, then one where the shit is pile not so high and wide.
The boys and me are drunk and looking for you
We’ll eat your frigging entrails and we won’t give a damn
Me daddy was a blue shirt and my mother a madam
And my brother earned his medals at My Lai in Vietnam
–Shane McGowan, The Boys from the County Hell (1984)