News From A Parallel World

Okay, I didn't know it was happening in the first place, which I'm sure says something about my personal alienation from the political system I used to track like a racing maniac following the ponies.

The first in what will no doubt be a long, long, shall we say fucking INTERMINABLE series of pretended "debates" among candidates for President, was held today in South Carolina, and it was followed on MSNBC by what the network considers 'commentary' but which is, face it, a lot of bilge from a bunch of genuine morons who, having failed at politics themselves, now find themselves paid a lot of money to grace us with their bonehead opinions.

The general tenor of the 'commentary' addressed such topics as whether John Edwards' position on an issue was "out of sync" with public opinion, as MSNBC claimed to measure it, and whether Mike Gravel, who many years ago had a moment of great and supreme courage as a Senator when he attempted to break the temporary ban on releasing the Pentagon Papers by reading them into the Congressional Record, was giving the viewers comic relief by his "naive" views on peace and domestic security.

The big story, if you believe these network flunkies, was that Hillary Clinton looked "presidential." I am not joking.

Apparently, looking "Presidential" is her main challenge. Since she has already abundantly demonstrated an inability to actually BE "Presidential" in her toadying to Bush and company on the invasion of Iraq, torture, and the abolition of the Bill of Rights in the name of "security", all she's got left is appearance, but that is sufficient for the talking heads (sorry, David Byrne) at the network.

The most distinct impression I was given, in the ten or fifteen minutes I managed to watch this post-game analysis, was that the presidential nominating process is actually a matter of giving these people screen tests. Whichever ones impress the media bozos (and raise the most capital to spend on media buys) are considered "real" candidates. These will be the finalists.

Lest anyone mistakenly believe that popular opinion will play much of a role, let me remind you that a little better than three years ago, on the eve of the Iowa caucus, with Howard Dean leading all contenders and John Kerry trailing (and in a dead-heat with Carol Mosely Braun at 7 percent), Dean made the mistake of calling for BREAKING UP the media monopoly in America. He said this on the Chris Matthews show. Within two weeks, Time Magazine and Newsweek each hammered Dean as "unstable" in cover articles (this was before the "scream"). Kerry was acceptable to the nation's rulers; Dean was not.

Popular opinion will play a role only after it has been created. Hillary will be declared "Presidential" or not; Obama will be declared "electable" or not. The mass media will find a way to neutralize Edwards if they can, because he – unlike Clinton and Obama – is not someone who can be trusted to play ball with the corporate rulers of the country.

I missed the "debate" but not the meaning of this ludicrous game show, and I recall all over again why I don't watch. The candidates, were they to express themselves honestly, might be interesting. But through the filter of the media whores, through the mind-numbing, American-Idol-type of circus we've got here, no such thing is possible.

Bread and circuses, that's what the emperors offered the Romans as the empire fell. Looks familiar, doesn't it?

God help this country.

I fully realize that when every idiot in the nation believes that he or she would make a terrific President, when the lists are loaded with even more bozos than usual, there will be a few so barking stupid that they inspire a sense of absolute wonder.

Thus, we have G.O.P. candidate Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin and one-time Bush Administration flunky.

Tommy loves Jews.

Want to know why?

Because earning money "is part of the Jewish tradition."

"I'm in the private sector and, for the first time in my life, I'm earning money," Tommy said in a speech to – get this – the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. "You know, that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition."

What's that, Tommy? Screw the people, I'm getting mine? Avoid public service because it doesn't pay enough?

Thing is, Tommy was only pandering for loot, that's where speeches to religious "action centers" come in. The action is raising and dispensing capital, the substance with which the wheels of a campaign train are lubricated. Tommy needs some, hence his love letter to Jews. Tommy believes that that's where the money is.

Of course, the use of stereotypes to describe minorities of every kind is both a weapon of bigotry and a marketing opportunity.

Next month, according to his staff, Tommy will be telling the African-American Benevolent Society that watermelon is what he always chows on come the Fourth of July. Okay, I just made that up.

What Tommy's ace staff made up was his "clarification."

This is word for word:

"I just want to clarify something because I didn't (by) any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things. What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that."

Takes your breath away, doesn't it?

My further questions for Tommy:

1. Do you know the difference between "infer" and "imply"?
2. What are these "things" about which you are not "inferring" or "implying" anything?
3. Does your spinal column reach your brain?

Thompson's little speech, and his hilarious "clarification" bring to mind the speech given by the crooked Nevada Senator in "Godfather II" in which he lauds the Italian people, as he tries to cozy-up to the mob.

To anyone who enjoys a great weenie roast, the prospective presidential campaign season offers the King Hell of All barbeques. Can you imagine how bizarre it's going to be, with candidates such as Thompson, Guiliani, McCain, Clinton, Gingrich, and God-only-knows who else, and the existence of YouTube?

God help America.

So I’ve started a blog. I think so, at least; from my screen it’s hard to tell... I enter the site and sure enough, there it is, except that there’s nothing there but the title, a few links I have nothing to do with, and a chance to sign in. If I sign in I can then read all of my postings, but it beats me how anyone else can see them. All I get without signing in is a mostly dark blue screen, blank.

Nonetheless, someone must be reading these things (besides the government, I mean), because I get a lot of ‘invitations’ via email to be ‘friends’ with total strangers.

Of course, these may be terrific people. I offer no judgment, not knowing any of them. But it nevertheless feels passing weird that I’m tossing these log entries into traffic and thus giving the entire semi-literate world a shot at whatever musings happen to be escaping my cranium.

Yes, I’m older than, oh let’s say, twenty, which is approaching ancient among the really hip, and so this internet thing is still a little bit of a shock and surprise to me, whereas to my grandsons it’s a completely natural environment.

There is something completely stunning taking place in the world due to the existence of the internet, of the World Wide Web, and nobody – not even your smartest friends – knows yet what that will turn out to be. We’re still on Day One, folks, still blinking at the light and peering out and looking for a nipple.

Such thoughts are oddly comforting to me these days. I am a sentient biped and therefore know what’s going on in Washington, D.C., and am like you properly horrified and simultaneously unsure of what, if anything, can be done about it all. But when I think of the net, the exponentially-growing phenomenon which is transforming our world, the way we see things, the way we interact, the way we learn, I think it is possible, seriously possible, that something unexpected, something totally unforeseen, will show up one of these days and change the story.

Five hundred years ago, give or take a couple, Gutenburg gave the western world movable type. What happened next was an avalanche of logic, rational thought, secularism, and the centralization of workers in cities, the industrial age, and even the birth of modern democracy. Tribal worlds were eclipsed.

We’re in hyperdrive now into a new world, the first glimmers of which could be seen in the tribal totems of the 1960s, the habits and behavior and artifacts which scared the elders and seemed so natural to the kids, but reflective of the birth of the electronic age, the age of information, which is also a return to tribalism. Tattoos and piercings, again scaring the elders, are just the latest obvious signs. The rational, literate West is history. What will emerge is showing itself now only in faint outline, at least to me. Some may have a good idea or two about where this is going. I’m only poking around the edges.

So, total strangers and everyone else: thanks for coming along. Your thoughts are welcome.

The sixties are officially dead as of May 20th. That's the day Marin County's annual Mountain Play, held in the Mount Tamalpais outdoor amphitheater, will open with a bastardized production of "Hair," the musical which tried to explain to our parents just what the devil the kids were up to, and generally failed.

I know, I know, "Hair" itself was not a very faithful explication of the sixties. It was a Broadway production, after all, and we all know about Broadway productions, don't we?
(If not, check out Woody Allen's vastly underrated "Bullets Over Broadway").

But Marin's 40th anniversary "Hair" will be missing not only the nudity (okay, I do know what world I'm living in) but at least one song, "Sodomy." ("Mother, why do these words sound so nasty?")

The original "Hair"opened in New York shortly after the first and only Magic Mountain Festival was held in this very amphitheater. The Festival was miles better. Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Big Brother, I think, with Janis. Maybe even the Doors. Could be. I was there at the time but a lot of brain cells over the dam since then.

Times have certainly changed. The revolution which lived once at least in the minds of millions, fell to the empire which will not permit the nation to be saved. The outward symbols were sold back to us, homogenized, hell, sterile, and now comes yet another reminder, both of where we come from and where we've landed.

"My hair like Jesus wore it..."

Kurt Vonnegut died. The burden just got a little bit heavier.

Peace.

The nutball congressional delegation arrived in Baghdad for a brief guided tour and escaped without incident a couple of days ago with glowing words for the success of Bush’s “new security plan” for Iraq.

The place was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” said congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind).

I hadn’t realized Indiana had become a militarized zone. The delegation to Baghdad, which included Senator John McCain, visited the Shorja market last Sunday, accompanied by more than a hundred soldiers in armored humvees as attack helicopters hovered overhead. Traffic was redirected away from the area, and sharpshooters were posted on rooftops. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests.

Just a normal outdoor market in Muncie.

You know, we are now so through the looking glass that this sort of mindless shit, rather than being featured and ridiculed on the evening news, is taken into the culture as merely another point of view. The security plan for Baghdad “is working,” said McCain.

The owner of an electrical supply shop, one Ali Jassim Faiyad, spoke for pretty much the rest of the city when he asked New York Times reporter Kirk Semple “What are they talking about?!” The Shoja market has been bombed a dozen times since September, the latest killing at least 61 and leaving many more badly wounded. As Kurt Vonnegut says, and so it goes...

The story actually gets worse.

The delegation was accompanied by General David Petraeus, who bought a small prayer rug worth less than a dollar from sidewalk vendor Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, paid with a twenty dollar bill and told him to keep the change. “They asked about our conditions,” Kadhoury said, “and we told them the situation was bad.”

“Everybody complained to them,” said another vendor. “The area here is very dangerous. They cannot secure it.”

Hey, we knew all this, right? The American adventure in Iraq is so fundamentally wrong, so fundamentally immoral, and has been from its bloody inception, that it seems to me a fair statement that anyone who voted to authorize it in the first place on the strength of George Bush’s transparent lies has pretty much the brains God gave geese. What is so desperately frightening about political life in America these days is that both political parties continue to embrace the warfare state mentality. Sure, McCain is a phony and an idiot. But where is the congressional leadership over widespread criminal acts committed as matters of policy? The Homeland Security apparatus is designed to secure domestic order. The Bill of Rights has in significant ways been effectively repealed. Halliburton has been given a five hundred million dollar contract to construct “detention facilities” and no one in Congress seems very curious about it. The Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the country regards the Geneva Convention as “quaint.” The United States seizes people without a warrant and sends them to secret prisons in other countries where they are routinely tortured. What kind of policy is this in a free country?

I know they’ve got us frightened. That’s what 9-11 meant to some people: a spectacular opportunity to scare the holy hell out of a citizenry, to impose various elements of new “domestic security” in the name of “keeping us safe.” But most troubling of all is the plain fact that none of this is keeping anybody safe other than the shareholders at Boeing and Halliburton and ExxonMobil.

On a related note: another Guantanamo prisoner is now confessing to having played a role in several bombings and hijackings, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, supplying steroids to athletes, and the sinking of the Titanic.

The system is working. Just ask John McCain.

When empires go down, daily life generally wobbles at an escalating speed between the bizarre and the prosaic, as though the vibrations are increasing relentlessly into an area where only dogs can hear them. When Rome went, Caligula was appointing his horse as Consul, while merchants competed for the desperate consumer dollar. I’d bet Germany looked like it, and the old Soviets before what was left of the original dream, which was not much, got pissed away in Afghanistan.

Karl Rove “brings down the house in D.C.,” according to the stupefying caption in the Chronicle. Two photos, , one in which the unindicted – as yet – co-conspirator whose felonies exposed a CIA agent and her network, a critical operation in Saudi Arabia designed to thwart the spread of advanced weaponry, one photo in which he is waving his arms in the air, “dancing,” according to the Chron, with “comedian” Colin Mochrie, and another depicting the little Nazi swine faking a white-boy “rap.”

The occasion for Rove’s latest song and dance numbers was the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton. You may recall that last year’s fun was ruined when Stephen Colbert, not ten feet away from King George, utterly destroyed his policies, his administration, and him personally with a commentary so straight and true it was a wonder the President did not turn himself over to prosecutors on the spot. Colbert, for good measure, also mentioned the great integrity and independence of the mass media in its notable cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq and its unreflective acceptance of even the craziest lies from the government.

No one was going to let that happen, ever, ever again. Thus: Colin Mochrie, whoever the fuck he is. We know this about him: he likes to dance with Karl Rove.

And on a related note:

A man in North Carolina was charged last week with animal cruelty after it was discovered that he harbored 77 sheep in his home. The cops were initially tipped off when some of the sheep were found grazing on artificial flowers at the cemetary in Apex, a Raleigh suburb. The suspect, David Watts, said that the animals were “relaxing to be around.”