WAITING FOR JUSTICE FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY

We remember 1984 mainly for George Orwell’s novel, or maybe for how Michael Jackson swept that year’s Grammies, or Tommy Cooper died of a massive heart attack live on live on TV, or that “Nightstalker” Richard Ramírez started his slay-spree, but how many of us remember Bhopal?

“In December 1984, a cloud of poison gas escaped from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal and went on to kill thousands of people. Twenty-five years later, the tragedy continues to dominate the lives of those who live in the city, as Allan Little discovered.
Swaraj Puri - urbane, eloquent, hospitable - tugs up a sleeve to reveal a series of little white scars on the inside of his left wrist. "I can't remember," he says, "how often they had to puncture the vein to measure the cyanide in my blood. It is amazing I'm still alive I suppose." Mr Puri was the police chief in the state of Madhya Pradesh that night. Roused from his bed after midnight, he made straight for the plant to find out what was going on with still no notion of the scale of the catastrophe that was being unleashed.
"In the control room there was only one official," he told me, "a very junior sort of a person. I asked him what had leaked and from where. He said he didn't know. Did he have any way to find out, I asked. He said no." Mr Puri climbed to the highest part of the plant that night. "It is probably what saved me,"
"The poisonous gas methyl isocyanate is heavier than air so, when it escaped from the plant, it settled in a dense cloud and moved silently through the poor neighbourhoods around the plant. "I could see," he said, "the black density of the poisonous cloud making its slow progress through the dimly lit streets." (Click here for more.)

Thanks to Valerie for the link.

The secret word is Criminal

LIBERALS WON’T SAVE YOUR ASS

I don’t mean to make reprinting Chris Hedges Monday columns from TruthDig a regular thing, but this one is just so damned right.

“Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.” (Click here for the rest.)

SPACE OPERA

DECADENT SUNDAY CONVERSATION

DRYDEN – I once knew this Uzbekian heroin dealer in Istanbul. He kept three king cobras in a glass tank like an aquarium. Big mean poisonous motherfuckers that'd kill you as soon as look at you. Always hissing and spreading their hoods, (gestures like a cobra spreading its hood) Son of a bitch used to hide all his dope and his money under the gravel in bottom of the tank. Figured that anyone trying to rip him off would never have the balls to stick their hand in the cobra tank.
MILNE – When the fuck were you in Istanbul?
DRYDEN doesn't look at MILNE.
MILNE (grins knowingly) – You were never in fucking Istanbul.
DRYDEN (shrugs) – Actually it was Trenton, New Jersey. The guy was some old time hippie asshole with a big beard, looked like Jerry Garcia with bulimia. I only said Istanbul to improve on the story. Shit always sounds better if you set it somewhere exotic, you know what I mean?
CHA-CHA – What you mean is that you're a fucking liar.
DRYDEN – I’m a weaver of lurid tales, kid.
MILNE – I’ll wager he wasn’t Uzbekian either.
(The phone rings, a European-style double ring.)

TO LIVE OUTSIDE THE LAW YOU MUST BE HONEST

Our pal Jon left a comment on Friday’s post "RIDE THAT DINOSAUR, ARYAN JESUS!" in which he used the word “antinomians.” I had no idea what that meant and checked with Wikipedia.

“Antinomianism or lawlessness in theology, is the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality, and that salvation is by predestination only. Antinomianism is the polar opposite of legalism, the notion that obedience to a code of religious law earns salvation. The term has become a point of contention among those opposed to religious authorities. Few groups or sects, outside of Christian Anarchism or Jewish anarchism, explicitly call themselves "antinomian", but the charge is often leveled by some Christian denominations against competing denominations, and for example, by the Jewish Encyclopedia against Paul of Tarsus. The Latin term Sola fide ("[by] faith alone") refers to the foundational Protestant belief in salvation through faith alone, a concept preached intensely by Martin Luther, but who was also an outspoken critic of antinomianism, for example his Against the Antinomians.”
In more modern times…
"George Orwell was a frequent user of “antinomian” in a secular (and always approving) sense. In his 1940 essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale”, the word appears several times, including one in which he calls A.E. Housman a writer in “a blasphemous, antinomian, ‘cynical’ strain”, meaning defiant of arbitrary societal rules." (Click here for the whole thing.)

Aren’t you glad we got that settled?

The secret word is Learnin’

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Siegfried Frozdick wore a nice clean white shirt to the meeting.

CAT POETRY

The inclusion of the poem by Finn the cat in last yesterday’s post generated enough email to make me think that I should throw Doc40 open to other feline poets. Send email submissions to byron4d@msn.com and I will post them. The rules are simple.

The work must be spontaneously generated. Placing the cat on the computer keys would be a breach of honor.

The poem must be accompanied by the cat’s name, a short biography, and a picture. (And don’t make it larger than around 150 kb.)

FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY

That’s back in the day when J. Edgar Hoover had death squads, and the FBI and local peace officers decided to exterminate the Black Panther Party with the most extreme prejudice, and we wondered who they’d get to after that. So how much has the shit changed in four decades? Don’t look at me, motherfucker. I just report the news…

“Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton's apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just 21 years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: That the FBI, the Cook County State's Attorney's office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. We speak with attorney Jeffrey Hass, author of "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.” (Click here for more.)

The secret word is Solidarity

MAYBE WE AREN’T AS BAD AS WE THINK WE ARE

I suppose, as a deviant anarcho-syndicalist at heart, I have to believe in an innate human capacity for charity and cooperation otherwise what’s the fucking point? But having said that, I then find myself beset by snarling Hobbesians who a totally convinced that even the most minor societal breakdown will result in a hell-on-earth outbreak of looting, burning, rape, pillage, and cannibalism among the underclass – in fact just like the lying and wholly fiction news reports that Fox beamed of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Happily, a recent study (sent by our pal Peromyscus) shows that is not the case and that humans are predisposed actually to get along, at least until society’s pliers grip them. Even cooperation still seems part of the natural order. These Londoners sheltering from Nazi bombers in a tube (subway) station during the World War II blitz are sleeping. Not ripping off hunks of each other’s flesh by the light of barbarian fires. On the other hand, they might have been singing Vera Lynn* songs earlier, and that’s a whole other story and also why we needed to invent rock & roll.

“What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help. The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.” (Click here for more.)

And now click here for Vera Lynn* and some damn fine Spitfires in flight. (It’s schoolboy Biggles-wallowing, but what the hell?)

PERFORMANCE PIECE

Finn the cat has taken to draping himself over the keyboards of my computers. In the spirit of Uncle Bill Burroughs we are treating what appears on the screen as found poetry. This is Finn's First Work….

“feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmn 4,eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]16666666666666666666666666666666666333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333330000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000099999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999993.
3 eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee32\”

So buy a copy of my new book Zones Of Chaos (Click here to know all.)

RIDE THAT DINOSAUR, ARYAN JESUS!

Quite by accident, I came across a blog called Snake Oil that appears to delight in the excesses of the evangelical. Its stock in trade is images like the one above, and quotes like this one from serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins…
“I have walked the same path as God, by taking lives and making others afraid, I became God's equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through my own power I come to my own redemption.”
I do try to restrain my prejudices against God-fearing, Rapture-anticipating, Jesus-fans. Really I do. As far as I’m concerned, folks can believe any arrant crap they like as long as I don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately the bloody faithful are incapable, by the very definition of their faith, of keeping anything to themselves. They bomb women’s health clinics, they destructively interfere with the lives of thousands of their fellow Americans. They carry guns to healthcare rallies, and become the devoutly unquestioning tools of the most baleful neo-fascism. The even support deep and evil shit like the death penalty for gays in Uganda.
I am all too aware that they are out their, 400 pounds, living on bio-engineered meat and processed corn syrup, watching reality TV and The 700 Hundred Club. They are ones who make the political career of Sarah Palin possible, who, in turn, is just a ignorant shill for totalitarian corporate capitalism, and the money being poured into her ambition is really being spent to achieve a ultimate goal of sidelining democracy as a powerless sideshow. But I also wonder, what will happen to all these slug-soft worthless and delusionary fools when that same totalitarian corporate capitalism has no more use to them? HAL 9000 will doubtless turn off the life support.

The secret word is Prey

BUT MAYBE THEY AREN’T SO BAD

I mean, here’s a nice t-shirt requesting prayers for the president. Or so it seems until you actually look up Psalm 109:8, and discover that the text reads – “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” In other words it’s a biblical call for assassination. These people disgust me.

SPACE OPERA

If I just had the time to think up a proper title, figure out a plot, write a libretto and score, and raise a few million bucks to mount a full scale production, I could have a wonderful Broadway show and win tons of Tonys and be the toast of the town. (Who shot you, Dutch?)

ARMED BANKERS FEAR THE WRATH OF MOB

This just in from Bloomberg columnist Alice Schroeder. She reports that…

“Goldman Sachs vampires are loading up on handguns to defend themselves against popular uprising. “"I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.” (Lifted from Boing Boing.)

The secret word is Bunker

A SUGGESTION

This gold customized .45 caliber Colt 1911 – with the gilded engraving that looks so much like cash money – should be just the defensive ticket for any nervous Master of the Universe. Even though it’s been in use for almost a century, the 1911 is the perfect prole-stopper and was the favored side-arm of (among others) Mike Hammer, Sonny Crockett, the Phantom, the Spirit, the Shadow, Nick Fury, Walker, Pike Bishop and the rest of The Wild Bunch. It’s ideal piece to persuade the poor that poverty is just God’s way of chiding their stupidity and laziness.

MARS ATTRACTS

Our friends at the Bangalore Film Society sent this link to an amazing War Of The Worlds all-you-ever-might-need-to-know website. Click here.

Sadly, our pal Doctor of the BFS has been in what appears to be a fairly serious auto accident and we all wish him well.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Even by the family’s exceptionally flexible standards, F9C7 Frozdick was considered odd.

COMMERCIAL

“Without my Bennies, I would never have bombed Dresden.”

MARILYN SMOKED DOPE?

“Who? Me?”

While Marilyn has been on a protracted, but maybe much needed, furlough from her multi-dimensional Doc40 adventures, it turns out that maybe the blonde goddess was a stoner. Our pal Mark Haspam has already alerted us in a comment on yesterday’s “THEY SHALL NOT PASS” post in which he reports …

“A silent home movie allegedly showing Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe smoking marijuana has surfaced, retrieved from an attic some 50 years after it was filmed. The reel-to-reel silent, color film was recently purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $275,000 from the person who took the film, who has asked to remain anonymous. Morgan and the person who shot the film gave Reuters permission to use a minute of footage from the four minutes of Monroe on camera. According to Morgan, the footage shows a personal side of the tragic actress, rarely seen by the public after she achieved stardom. The copyright of the image will be put up for sale on eBay later this week, Morgan said. The claim that Monroe was smoking marijuana came from the photographer, who spoke only on condition of anonymity."

Click here for the clip (but you might have to verify your age.) The rare image was supplied by the marvellous Valerie. A similar BBC report comes from our homegirl Hipspinster. Click here.

The secret word is Muggles

IS THIS WOMAN PART OF THE CONSPIRACY?

I really like what veteran writer Chris Hedges has to say, but that doesn’t mean I always agree or endorse. In this piece, he complains that we are being distracted from the abyss by trivia…

“Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama's first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars"? The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.” (Click here for more.)

Okay, he’s probably right, but here at Doc40 – where we pride ourselves on being part of the solution – we rejoice in the madness of the trivial and absurd. Today alone we have Marilyn, Katy, Daleks, and the War on Christmas. In a time when bread is scarce and the circuses suck, it’s the only guard against combat fatigue in the good fight. The Skip Williamson image below is old, but it says it all. (And BTW Cynthia Heimel seems to think Michaele Salahi is a hooker.)

AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH?

NUDE WITH DALEK

Way back in May of 2007, we posted a picture of actress Katy Manning posing naked in boots with a Dalek. At the time it was a thing of modest (or maybe immodest) fun, but since that time, it has taken hundreds – if not thousands – of hits from people with no interest in Doc40 who have been Googling Katy and her evil-robot companion. Well, guess what? Here’s another shot from what has to be the same photo shoot that I happened across while trolling the fringes of the Dr Who universe/time-curve. Grubby fanboys of Planet Earth, start your search engines.

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

The buttons are coming. Stay tuned.

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS STARTS HERE. For years now, the manipulators of the right – O’Reilly, Hannity, more lately Glenn Beck and all their banshee companions have, each December, been trumping up crap about a liberal-commie War On Christmas, but here in 2009, I figure we need one. Now we have Walmart shoppers trampling each other to death in some Hobbesian gift-apocalypse the whole Yule concept has to be very seriously revised. Way back in 1986, I wrote in the old (honest, pre-Lacey) Village Voice…

“It's around this time of year that I'm profoundly glad that I'm not a parent. How do you explain to a TV-soaked brat that all he's getting is a rather small clockwork robot and that there is no way, short of starving through January and February, that the family can spring for the sev­en-foot-long, fully operational G.I. Joe aircraft carrier? There’s a sense of being trapped. You start to feel that even if you went so far as to hide out in the hills, a red red robin would insist on bob bobbing along as a yule re­minder. A simple trip to the supermarket continues the numbing propaganda holly motif. The people on the sidewalk all seen more determined than you are in their will to jollity. It's all too easy to become convinced, like my friend the rummy, that ev­eryone else is as loving and giving as the Cosby family and that you're the only one stifling a humbug. A flip through Decem­ber's Playboy can give a man the impression that there are women out there who give their boyfriends gift-wrapped motorcycles. How come I have to be satisfied with a lousy bottle of after-shave? The only respite is Elvis Presley singing “Blue Christmas.” At least someone once copped to seasonal misery.”

And this was in the middle of greed-is-good, Manhattan affluence. How much worse will it be today here in the 21st century zombie depression? Okay, so celebrate the solstice, Odin, Elvis*, Cthulhu, General Zod**, the Universal Mind, Diana the Huntress or just the simple Return of The Light. (And heaven only knows we could use a bit of light returning to this miasma.) Eat, drink, fart, fall over, but enough with the terminal death-dealing consumerism. We will talk more about this.

The secret word is Ixnay

*Click here for an added Elvis moment.

**Click here for an added General Zod moment.

FROM THE WHAT-MORE-DO-YOU-NEED-TO-KNOW? ARCHIVE

Although I have no independent confirmation, I believe this was the conclusion of negotiations for the Nazi/Zeta Reticuli bioengineering project that would ultimately bring us Sarah Palin. (Image lifted from Adam Gorightly.)

CLICK – What’s that behind you?

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 68

Even Santa’s elves are not what they used to be.