ONE BULLSHIT PLANET

Friday night in Hollywood, and the cars cruise past beyond the windows (yes, stuffed with eyes) and pulsing with hip-hop bass. I swear a new generation of the stone deaf are being created. And if that wasn’t enough, the LAPD choppers circle the building, like it was 1969 in Saigon, annoying the drunks in Plummer Park with their sunguns, and drowning out my TV with that recurrent Doppler bass boom. Whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp-whompity-whomp-whomp.

Meanwhile, hearing the news today (oh boy) I learn that an HIV vector and maybe actual test-positive infections have closed down the porn industry in the Valley, or is this just some Justice Department black-disinformation op that has stilled the cameras in Chatsworth? The next advance of oppression after Janet Jackson’s Reichstag tit?

Meanwhile, a GOP propaganda web site features a game where players can be President George Bush killing terrorists who have invaded the White House. (No, I ain’t giving you a link to that.) So are you of anything approaching sound mind – you out there in Middle America, where you all believe Monkey Boy is some kinda John Wayne and doing just great? As a good socialist, I have defended you to friends and acquaintances. You the People simply can’t be that stupid. But listen, now you’re making a monkey outta me, and I cannot tolerate that. I look bad. This shit has got to go, or I turn violently elitist, okay? As I recall, the last world leader to accompany his troops personally into battle was King George II (I think), who led a quick safe cavalry charge during the War of Austrian Succession (maybe) but then headed swiftly back to his tent, his mistress, and several nice bottles of vintage port.

Maybe it’s just that it’s the nominal end of a long week, but -- despite Patti Smith singing good, but looking like Willie Nelson’s sister on Letterman, and Lenny Kaye healthy with a green Fender -- this seems like one bullshit planet right now, and I want out. Intelligent life? Forget about it. Have the greased Scotsman beam me up. Like, with some urgency?

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER!

This is a short poem made up entirely of actual quotations from George W. Bush. These have been arranged, only for aesthetic purposes, by Washington Post writer, Richard Thompson. It’s come via Roger in Scotland, where GWB is held in low estimation, laddie.

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope,
Were our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

CRYPTIQUE – In the sky with Elvis.

I’M BACK

The last few weeks have not been exactly halcyon days of technology. Indeed, they could well be described as Valium, Jack Daniels and wanting-to-throw-the-hardware-at-the-wall days, as the battlestar went into system collapse. But I loosed myself from the clutches of the 900-number technical support boiler-rooms of major corporations, and found a nice funky repair shop between Swing House rehearsal studio and the Formosa (venerable landmark to the alcoholics of Hollywood since something like 1931). It was run by a guy who looked like a retired roadie, and who was repairing a thirty year-old Mini-Moog for some strange low-fi keyboard player, and I knew it was where I wanted to be fixed. Now I have a new hard drive, and thus a new prosthetic memory, and all now works as it should again, although I am refusing to think about all the ideas, notes, outlines, synopses, hallucinations, dirty pictures, and correspondence that went the way of all electrons in the meltdown. But if I can’t remember them, what the hell? They never really happened, and if I can, they can be reconstructed. Thus I console myself that I also got rid of a fuck of a lot of garbage. Hell, I can work without notes. Unlike the President of the United States who can’t even work with notes, and can hardly claim English as a second language.

I must confess, though, a certain unreality lurks as I approach my cleanslated laptop. It’s all too quiet. All too normal. Ideas and even fantasies are a little tentative, like maybe they overloaded the old C-drive in the first place. There’s been too much frustration and desperately logical focus. I would like to take to my bed for the weekend, but I have a book of quotations to finish and several tons of email to answer. I swear I never worked so hard in the 20th century.

But Doc40 is tranquil and this will leave you with a short piece of harmonious inspiration sent during my times of trial by our favorite southern belle...

THE STREAM

Picture yourself near a stream.
Birds are softly chirping in the crisp cool mountain air.
Nothing can bother you here.
No one knows this secret place.
You are in total seclusion from that place called "The World."
The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.
The water is clear.
You can easily make the face of the person
Whose head you are holding under the water.
Look.
It's the person
Who caused you all this stress in the first place.
What a pleasant surprise.
You let them up...just for a quick breath...then ploop!...back under they go...
You allow yourself as many deep breaths as you want.
There now...feeling better?

CRYPTIQUE – Fuck you, Squiddly!

NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED TOMORROW

The battlestar has a new hard drive, and is up and running. But after all the configuring I have no more mind or with which to post. But hang in there m'hearties. The fire and ire is building.

CRYPTIQUE -- Bleccch.

Postscript
(which in the blog world precedes the script because time runs backwards)

In this Hellmouse set-up, where Doc40 is pink on white, like a bloody wedding cake, I can't even access the comments board. Someone email me and tell me what's doing, or, better still, send me the actual comments URL and see if I can get to it that way.

I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP (and I don't wanna do the timewarp again!)
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
but it would seem that I can cut and paste. Hmmm.

Or should I just start to hallucinate and describe that? Maybe while watching Bush's press conference?

This may all cause me to lose my sanity. Don't all snigger at once.

Well friends, here's the story so far. Last Friday (yeah, Good Friday, that one) my computer crashed with signs of dangerous hard drive distress, and for the interim, as I seek to get it fixed, I'm working on a model T clunker without enough ram to scratch it's own ass, and that gets cranky when more than three screens are up at once, and in fear that, although the major works are saved to disk, all manner of notes, ideas and jottings are lost to the world, which as an artist kind of makes me sick to my stomach. Thus Doc40 will stagger as best he can, if it's only to be pissing and moaning about the ill fortune that has recently been besetting the technology. Like I just told Larry Wallis in an email, it's like trying to play Hendrix on a clapped out $20 mail order guitar. But, hey, thanks to all of you who have offered advice, help, possible loaners, and general sympathy. Email is late being answered, but tomorrow I see the fix-it guy and maybe all will be well.

Cryptique? Are you kidding? I can hardly read the blog itself on this machine.

THE DOCS COMPUTER HAS CRASHED. BADLY
More info when I'm not on a ten-year old machine.

BAD? AS OPPOSED TO WHAT?

History never looks like history when you’re are living through it. – John W. Gardner

I don’t want to alarm anyone but, this is all looking exceedingly unpleasant. Reading between the war-media bullshit, as we have trained ourselves to do, it would appear that, in Iraq, the US is losing control of the cities, and calling down airstrikes, while reluctant allies pull out of the hotspots. Both Sunni and Shi-ite insurgents move through the civilian population like Chairman Mao’s fish through water. Civilian casualties, and incidents like yesterday’s aerial blitz on a Falluja mosque strengthen Iraqi resolve, and move matters inexorably towards a full-scale popular uprising – something with which the US military is totally unequipped to cope. A mendacious and unnecessary war has gone beyond being illegitimately waged and is now being arrogantly lost, in classic ‘Nam fashion, and at mind-boggling speed. Meanwhile the poor fucking grunts, some already there a year, have their tours extended, and spring moves towards summer in one of the most environmentally unappealing places on the planet. In a parliamentary democracy, it would only be a matter of time before a vote of no confidence would be organized, and the current leadership removed from power. But that is not the American way, and so the gang in the White House fumblingly presides over what may well be the collapse of the First Crusade of the Third Millennium, and who knows what the hell will follow, as the whole of Islam, in all its infinite numbers, engages against us. I’d just love to be wrong, but I’m started to worry that these larcenous pygmies-in-power may have actually triggered an epic, if not an apocalypse.

MAYBE GREENLAND MELTING?

And as the war hots up, this story from Nature comes at me...

Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the globe if emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming are not reduced, scientists said on Wednesday. A meltdown of the massive ice sheet, which is nearly two miles thick would raise sea levels by an average seven yards, threatening countries such as Bangladesh, islands in the Pacific and parts of Florida. ''Any area that is less than seven meters above sea level would be flooded,'' said Jonathan Gregory, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in southern England. Researchers have already calculated that an annual average temperature rise of more than three degrees Celsius would be sufficient to melt the ice sheet in the future.

LINK

I wrote the cover story in today’s LA CityBeat. It’s a profile of publishers-to-the-damned Adam Parfrey and Richard Metzger. http://lacitybeat.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Check with the Mamalukes. Bang or whimper?

ECCLES?

A while ago I started to collect found email poetry of the kind that’s used to beat spam blockers, but then I got bored and gave it up. But I decided to post the following because it included the world eccles and I wonder how many of you out there are old enough and English enough to recall the Famous Eccles.

compassion shoelace splint gracious mitigate degree fowl biaxial salaried alden munich sherbet adverbial calcify
bank lobule gczk jzdk
pistachiopocketful swag eccles numinous cecil who'd inaugurate was inequity rerouting artillery haiku october

But with Jungian synchronicity, Beck sends me this...

This is an authentic subject heading for a Viagra email ad I received today. Since I know what the ad is for, this phrase is evidently to be taken to mean something about virility and tumescence, or to paraphrase Neil Young, the wiener and the damage done. So while I'm disconcerted about the word shrink in the beginning, "tete bidirectional denial" clearly states that this product is designed to circumvent psychological problems within the marriage, and promises that taking this pill will result in a "transoceanic revolt muscle tsunami, " especially on intercontinental flights. I leave the Bulldog Drummond part and the rest to your imagination.

Subj: aberrate shrink vicar polarimeter bissau individualism tete bidirectional denial transoceanic revolt muscle tsunami ccny mistress drummond rhenish signboard

But I guess this is just one way to take some time out from the ugly fact of a full scale shi-ite uprising in Iraq, and avoid commenting that one of the most provocative things an Army of Occupation can do is this start shutting down newspapers. I guess Bush and his gang are too fucking stupid to learn any of the lessons taught to the Brits in Northern Ireland over the last 30 some years.

CRYPTIQUE – We don’t need no stinking cryptique.

I'LL LIVE

Thanks for all the cards and flowers, friends and neighbours. I'll be answering the email in dribs and drabs. The old bolshevik is recovering and now reflecting on how even staying indoors these days can give a boy combat fatigue. Talking it slow, but gotta give you a heads up for Thursday when Condee meets 9/11. After all the prima donna stalling, she better play like it like Joan Collins in Dynasty or she's the sacrificial toast.

More tomorrow, I hope.

CRYPTIQUE -- Fax more soup and bourbon.

FIRST THE TECHNOLOGY

First the technology crashes and then the humanity. Doc40 has to take a couple of sick days. (And no, I haven't been drinking.) With luck, I'll see you all in a day or so.

CRYPTIQUE -- Who needs it?

CAN THIS BE FATKIDGATE?

Monday night, the Letterman show aired a clip of GWB making yet another nebulous speech in Florida. Among the anonymous deer-in-the-limelight folk who stand beside and behind political speakers during sound bite speech snatches was a fat kid, age thirteen or so, who, in terminal boredom, yawned, stretched, and all but fell asleep. I didn’t think he picked his nose, but he might have done. The spectacle went on so long that I was moved to discuss with Newton the cat whether the kid was real or morphed. The cat wasn’t sure but I though probably morphed. Later CNN picked up on the clip, and ran with it, until the White House started complaining. CNN copped out by claiming it was a Late Show fabrication, but, Letterman's people denied it. They morphed no morph. Then the White House denied they’d ever called CNN. Then they admitted they had and CNN apologized to Dave. Complicated? Sure, but whatever the ultimate outcome, one thing is clear, there are people in the White House who watch more TV than the unemployed, and then attempt to put the frighteners broadcasters who do things they don’t like. The American Ministry of Virtue in the making? Or are the Bush thralls way less confident of the peerless leader’s reelection than some or our own comrades? The fat kid is on Letterman tonight and will be a cyber phenom like the dancing baby and fat Jedi kid by next Tuesday.

Press release...
So what's new with the CNN/White House flap? Monday we showed a clip of a speech given by the President from March 20 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Directly behind the President stood a boy of 14 or so bored to tears. While the President spoke, the lad yawned, stretched, yawned some more, checked his watch, took a knee, yawned, and fell asleep standing up near the end. It was a very humorous actual clip we uncovered. Well, CNN played the clip the next day, Tuesday morning, stating that the White House had called and said the Late Show did some editing to the piece and it never happened. Two hours later, CNN showed the clip again and this anchor person said that the boy was at the speech, but was not standing behind the President as we had seen. Dave informs America that neither statement from CNN is true. The boy was at the rally and the boy was standing behind the President. Something strange is going on, and Dave smells a cover up. CNN is now saying the White House never called them. But why would CNN say the White House HAD called if the White House never did? Hmmm. And Dave reveals that our source, a very good source, confirms the White House DID call the CNN. Hoo boy, this is getting interesting. While Condoleeza Rice is testifying in front of the 9/11 Commission, perhaps she can shed some light on this as well.

And on the subject of weird broadcasting, who heard the Howard Stern April 1st parody Cross and Lopez, a perky “Fun Without Filth”, supposed replacement after Howard was pulled off the air? Had me for almost 45 minutes, and it was vx2 scary.

SOMETIMES MUST HAVE TO STAND NAKED

HC Beck writes...

Bob Dylan is the pitchman for the new Victoria's Secret commercial. Caught it on TV this evening. Bob sings ands looks menacing while girls cavort in their knickers. (No one will guide you, through Armagideon time)

CRYPTIQUE – An old bolshevik in search of a dentist meets the Buddha on the road. Who kills whom?

WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT ISN’T?

A couple of days ago, up on the comments board, Boarg asked the strange but obvious question. Are all the people who visit, comment, and generally contribute to Doc40 real, or did I make them up? For my part, I can truthfully say I didn’t make anyone up, and if I had, I would freely admit it, proud of the diversity of my creation. On the other hand, Billy Oblivion, on the comments board, comes up with the perfect answer. “Of course we’re real...I think.” Almost a paraphrase of Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum. "I think, therefore I am." Like “I think...(therefore)...I am”, with the final reduction to “I think I am.” And that’s the joy of the web. The surfer – behind the pseudonym or screen name – can be whoever or whatever he or she desires. It’s worth thinking about. But the night is late and today is a deadline day and have to leave you with more action on the aforementioned comments board, and with two other things...

There’s a piece fine by me on the 9/11 hearings (and also a highly weird April 1st cover story) in the new LA CityBeat – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=793&IssueNum=43

And, from fidicen, an unpleasant tale from the Axis of Logic site...

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN By Stephen Pizzo

During the Taliban rule of Afghanistan the world got a good look at what happens when religious zealots gain control of a government. Television images of women being beaten forced to wear burkas and banned from schools and the workplace helped build strong public support for the President's decision to invade Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

But even as President George W. Bush denounced the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul, he was quietly laying the foundations for his own fundamentalist regime at home. For the first time far right Christian fundamentalists had one of their own in the White House and the opportunity to begin rolling back decades of health and family planning programs they saw as un-Christian, if not downright sinful.

Since 2001 dozens of far-right Christian fundamentalists have been quietly installed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress. Three years later this administration has established one of the most rigid sexual health agendas in the Western world.

It began immediately. One of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to issue an executive memorandum reinstating a global abortion "gag rule." The rule was first implemented under Ronald Reagan but revoked during the two Clinton administrations. The rule prohibited federally funded family planning providers from even discussing abortion with their clients.

For the rest, click – http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_5981.shtml

CRYPTIQUE – I yam what I yam.

JESUS H.

You may well have heard, or actually not heard, how, on last night’s Letterman show, the audio was dumped out when Janet Jackson said the word “Jesus”. During last week’s tech crisis I uttered the same word, and with considerably more emphasis, while on the phone to a corporate tech support thrall who was telling me that I should move my files to another computer and totally reinstall my entire system. I was immediately reproved. “Please don’t say that. It offends my religious beliefs.” Offending Christians is being rapidly elevated towards criminal status, as far as I can see, and we’ll soon have to leave the bar and curse in the street, for fear of giving offense by second-hand invective. Damn it to hell.

But the real problem in this is that a whole bunch of things offend me. And unfortunately one of them is computer tech support. I was already developing a theory that the tech supporters were making it up as they went along, and the only real object of the exercise was to get me and my problems off the phone as fast as possible. Then Henry C. Beck sent me the following first-hand account from Salon of life in a outsourced tech hell-hole. (Won’t link salon.com because they want money.)

Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. As long as we could answer the phones and provide records that we'd done so, the company would be paid every time we thanked someone for calling technical support...The most incompetent among us could have written a manual on how to answer calls and log them properly. As for how to actually troubleshoot and fix computers, we were largely on our own. Beyond a cursory overview of the computers we were in charge of healing, the closest thing to a troubleshooting tool we were taught was The Mantra. We repeated it over and over, the words seating themselves deep in the folds of our brains until the breakup of class began to feel more and more like the end of a cult meeting...The Mantra is simply, "We don't support that." On the face of it, it's completely logical. We're here to help with problems related to your computer hardware, but we don't pretend to know anything about your digital camera, or how to get the most out of Adobe Photoshop. Without The Mantra we'd waste precious time trying to answer questions beyond the scope of our expertise. Never mind that the scope of our expertise was largely limited to reciting The Mantra and logging calls. The important thing was that we understood our mission was to answer questions that fell within the limited margins outlined in the computer's warranty. Beyond that we didn't have to do anything.

WE’RE ALL DOOMED PART III

But offending people seems to be the theme of the week, if not the era. Seems that I have sadly upset Jay Babcock with yesterday’s response to his email. He resents that I misrepresented him as a defeatist. I assume the mail he sent me today was not intended for publication, so I can’t exactly give you chapter and verse, but he did want his posts removed, and I have agreed to that, only I fear it won’t be tonight because I’m too deadline beat to do the tech brain-surgery on the archives. He was also pissed I didn’t provide a link to Arthur, so here it is. Read Jay on his own turf. I think that’s fair.

http://www.arthurmag.com

Meanwhile there’s a whole bunch of related stuff over on the anarchic comments board from A-B-C, nigelr and some charming practical suggestions from philosohoe. (Long posts can be mailed to byron4d@aol.com, I’ll post ‘em.) And Beck (again) weighs in with...

“Look, it's *over for liberals in this country. Has been since Kennedy was killed -- possibly even earlier than that. It's a conservative nation and it's getting more that way with each year.”

I don't agree. I think the boomer generation went through a conservative phase in their thirties and forties, due to a kind of natural bio-sociological phase, and I think that same group will start to open up a few notches in their political waistbands as they get less nervous--one reason why Bush and his cronies are so determined to keep fear alive and ever present.

It's entirely possible that the success of movies like The Passion aren't about a movement towards religio-conservatism, but rather a reaction to an encroaching liberalism and the ever-greater slackening of religious bonds and beliefs. Dude, where's My God? Wasn't that a Bergman picture?

This doesn't make me any less cynical, because liberal or conservative we are and will remain a passive-aggressive people. But the hefty sales of books like Moore's, Clinton's, and Franken's seem to indicate there's a real shift out there--the new Silent Majority, maybe...

LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs about jury service at http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

While fidicen draws our attention to the Washington serious, but highly informative http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

QUOTES OF THE DAY

When you’re smashing the state, keep a song in your heart and a smile on your lips. – Skip Williamson

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts. – Dorothy Parker

CRYPTIQUE – beep! beep!

WE’RE ALL DOOMED – PART II

Following yesterday’s exchange, Jay Babcock comes back with the following, (although it might be a plan to read ABC’s rant up on the comments board first.)

Look, it's *over for liberals in this country. Has been since Kennedy was killed -- possibly even earlier than that.It's a conservative nation and it's getting more that way with each year. Carter won cuz of a scandal and was promptly booted after one term. Clinton won cuz of a third party candidate -- he was the least-popular two-termer ever, and was almost removed from office. Gore *almost won because of the economy, the power of incumbency and because he ran with an essentially happy-faced Republican agenda. Republicans control the nation. Repeat: Republicans control the nation. It's a Republican nation. Not only do they own the media, they have the state governorships, the state legislatures, the House, the Senate and the White House. They've been building towards this for 50 years. We are in a period of Republican entrenchment, and it's not going to end any time soon. I'm not saying anything novel here. Did you not read the articles that ran on this in December in the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Weekly Standard???? (Lemme know and I'll send em right over.)
Bush is not "fumbling." Bush does not have to make a comeback. The only people following this day-to-day crap is a very small portion of the population: political junkies of all stripes, and died-in-the-wool liberals. The bast majority of the public DOES NOT KNOW, DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW and DOES NOT CARE TO KNOW. They tell this to pollsters -- don't you read the polls?
Bush has got this in the bag.

And even if he didn't: Kerry hasn't given even the slightest indication that he would alter America's imperialist ways. You've put an awful lot of what is charitably called 'misplaced faith' in this man, for some reason. Sure: I don't like Bush. He's irritating. He's an obvious smallbrain
and greedhead. I'd like to see him lose. The thought of a family of one-termers makes me cackle. But so what? I have no illusions about what a Kerry presidency could/would mean. I take him at his word: he won't withdraw US troops from anywhere; he'll continue the corporate agenda for the nation and planet; and he'll be able to construct complex sentences without squirming. Big fucking deal. The sooner this Empire falls, the better for the planet. I think another term of Bush would hasten that fall -- a Kerry administration would just prolong the demise, causing greater harm to the planet, on balance. Kerry is Eugene McCarthy redux. If he tries the RFK route, he'll get shot. That's what we do to insurgent liberals in this country. Can Nader win? Of course not. Should we make fun of him then? Should we denigrate him? No. If a man speaks Truth, you should applaud him.

Confronted with Jay’s total defeatism, I can only wonder, once we’ve finished applauding Ralph Nader, (and reading the Weekly Standard?) what do we do then? Hole up in the basement and shoot dope until they come for us? Join some outlaw militia unit in Montana? Move to Europe? Empires don’t usually collapse under their own inertia. Most times they need a few barbarians to kick in the gates. Those that do, like the USSR, tend to make a terrible mess, and the collapse of a monolithic superpower like USA21C would be catastrophic, to the point of famine, plague, and multiple civil wars. Even accepting the hugely elitist idea that Americans are too stupid for democracy (which I don’t, otherwise why bother?) there is the matter of post-McLuhan, under-the-radar cultural perception. If Bush can be turned from Peerless Leader to the demon Chuckie in the months we have left, we might have a fighting chance. Let the chimp miasma fall. It worked with Vietnam. Perception was turned with massively less communications tools. Strange bedfellowships will occure, though. Like Howard Stern. Most of you probably don’t like or don’t give a rat’s ass about Stern, but if Boy Powell’s FCC drives Stern off the air, you will have 18 million formerly Bush-worshiping Maxim readers extremely pissed off, and if only a percentage of them vote, it makes a difference.

And even if the defeat of Bush is a completely lost cause, I, for one, will continue to fight out of a sheer sense of romance and a need to keep my self respect. I believe I’ve already noted somewhere in past blogs that Spanish Civil War songs make me choke up.

(Comments can be posted on the board or sent to byron4d@aol.com . Much more on media perception in the next LA CityBeat. I’ll post a link Thursday if the website is configured right. And, oh yeah, the Leno/Letterman column from last week can now be read at – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=783&IssueNum=42 )

QUOTE OF THE DAY – Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. -- Napoleon Bonaparte

CRYPTIQUE – Starvelings smell the coffee.

E-CONFLICT

Yesterday I wrote...

"folks like Jay Babcock of Arthur mag telling me that I’m being essentially Stalinist in my unilateral insistence that backing Kerry is the only way to evict Bush from 1600 Penn"

Jay replied...

Never said or intimated any such thing -- please don't misrepresent me.

I simply said Ralph was right when he said both parties are bought and paid for by the same people. Kerry's courting of the corporation 'vote' this week was just the latest evidence. You get Bush out, and then what? THINK two steps ahead. What do you really think is going to happen? Come on. If you're lucky you get Clinton II -- and Clinton did plenty to set this world backwards. NAFTA, China Most Favored Nation status, 'welfare reform,' zero 'peace dividend,' etc. Empire with a more palatable face, but Empire all the same.

To this I can only respond...

Sure, maybe I did misrepresent you, but basically to trigger the debate that I hope will now ensue. I lack detachment in this. Mad as hell and not going to take Bush any more. At the end of last year, the given intelligence was that Bush was invincible, and four more years were inevitable. After a couple of obvious Bush fumbles, and a general moving out from under the evil smokescreen that criticism of the war leader is treason, we now see a glimmer of hope and some optimistic polls. Kerry is the only battering ram we have. And let’s not pretend that unseating Bush is going to require anything else than total effort, massive energy on all fronts, and some very strange and shakily pragmatic alliances. (Progressive feminists and Howard Stern?) We still face any number of horrendous scenarios by which Bush might stage a comeback. And horrendous can mean a lot with that bunch of crooks. This not to mention all the nasty little laws like the Clean Airwaves Act or the Lacy Peterson law that are currently being rushed through the legislature, the outrageous judicial appointments, plus the possibility of anything from a November state of emergency to mass polling fraud. I become quite emotional in my insistence that, right now, the entertainment of symbolic and unelectable third party candidates, and debates over whether Kerry will only be a less charismatic Clinton – but with his pants zipped – are a luxury we absolutely cannot afford. The only priority now is to save the bloody Empire from being turned into a totalitarian corporate theocracy with Clear Channel and the Ministry of Virtue eliminating though crime. Once that game's been thwarted, we can make a start on imperial destructuring

Let’s not forget that, if Kerry does make it to inauguration, he will be beholden to a lot of people including us thought criminals on the internet who have done so much to reveal Bush in his true light. He must be made aware that we’ll be looking to collect. Me, I want an immediate cease fire in the War on Drugs, funded stem cell research, and a decent space station. What does everyone else want?

Of course, my attitude may be genetic. We English are a tad blase about both the building and dismantling of Empires. And maybe the Doc40 brits should get in on this because the Blair dilemma is such an exact parallel.

AND TALKING OF CHINA

Our pal Ellen Sander is teaching in China. She writes...

Expatriate life, and particularly the trip home makes me appreciate America more even as it has escalated my skepticism and anxiety. The current reprehensible (and hopefully soon to be revised) administration has degraded international credibility and respect and as John Kerry puts it, fueled anti-American sentiments. Things get worse in Iraq, not better, and this resonates in allied countries. I think the bombing in Madrid, and its political aftermath bottomed out my last hope that there might be a positive outcome to the war in Iraq and by most standards, I’m a latecomer to this conclusion. The pre-existing overseas envy and apprehension in place before the Bush coup has now coalesced into a dark cloud of suspicion and rancor. Hegemony is a word I hear often when America is the subject of conversation. I must admit that word was not an active part of my vocabulary before. With the American economy sagging, the notion that U.S. primacy may not be indestructible is a fairly widespread one overseas. Americans themselves exacerbate this by remaining ignorant of the natural dynamics of international trade as they eat up politicians’ promises to keep manufacturing and technical jobs from being exported. Defying even basic logic, much less basic economics, Americans believe other countries, primarily China are at fault for domestic job loss – hello, who gives that work to offshore facilities and why? It’s aggravating to see even my more world-aware friends and family regard China with a 50-year old sensibility when it’s growing and transforming before our eyes. This is not your father’s China.

THANK THE LORD FOR ALCOHOL

nitroski writes reminding us of the important things in life...

Next time you happen to be alone and in a drinking mood...Erza Brooks black label.
Straight from the bottle, don't sully it with a glass,
might make you forget all about scotch for a while.
Myself, quit drinking 20+ years ago...curious side effects. i enjoyed my drinking, everybody I knew and some people I didn't all but insisted I stop.

CRYPTIQUE – How do ya spell Yalta?

READY FOR A HISTORY LESSON?

It’s short and there won’t be a test. (LEB OK?)

In the NY Times, David Kahn gives a fast historical perspective of how Bush and his WMD fantasy, while still mendacious and asinine, are hardly new in the chronicles of lost wars...

In 1941, Stalin disregarded reports that Hitler was about to attack Russia; millions of unnecessary deaths followed. In 1944, a Luftwaffe intelligence officer laid a photomosaic before Hitler showing that the Soviet Union had assembled the greatest artillery concentration of all time. Hitler swept it furiously from the desk. In 1973, Israeli intelligence believed that Egypt, having lost the 1967 war and having expelled Soviet advisers, would not attack. But on Yom Kippur it did. And during Vietnam intelligence reports that the conflict was unwinnable were rejected by President Richard M. Nixon. All these refusals to face facts cost gold and blood. Two centuries ago, Carl von Clausewitz concluded that "most intelligence is false." A century later, the chief of the German general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, added a psychological explanation for this: “The higher commander generally makes himself a picture of friend and foe, in the painting of which personal wishes provide the main elements. If incoming reports appear to correspond with this picture, they are laid by with satisfaction. If they contradict it, they are discarded as entirely false.”

PLAYING CATCH UP

After Doc’s recent battle with the corporate Borg (TTC, OK?) there is much catching up to do. Where, you ask, are kaymo’s revelations on elk milk? Well, dearly beloved, that’s being edited, so just remember the old Lou Reed line – “First thing you learn is that you’ve always got to wait.” Of course Lou was talking about copping heroin, and all we have here is a weblog but the same applies.

Meanwhile, kaymo does suggest that if you have any complaints, the thing to do is to email the President. (LEB OK?) That’s what he’s there for. Here’s the addresses...
president.@whitehouse.gov

...or if you think Dick Cheney might be of more help.
gov vice.president@whitehouse.gov

and – with the note that Chernobyl is the Ukranian word for wormwood, the active ingredient of absinthe – kaymo also provides us with a link to kiddofspeed’s site that tells the true adventures of a very strange young woman who rides her high performance motorcycle around the ghost town left by the former-Soviet nuclear meltdown and takes photographs. (And if that ain’t sci-fi made flesh...)
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

THE SQUARE ON THE LEFT

The Third Page literary site has just been updated and if you follow the link and click the square on the left, you’ll find a newly published Mick Farren poem. http://emptymirrorbooks.com/thirdpage/indexstars.html

SUBLIMINAL CADRES LACKING ONLY SECRET DECODER RINGS

LEB = League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (or Let’s Evict Bush)
TCC = Thwart The Corp

This are essentially half-formed concepts in cyber-anarcho punk agitprop. What we need is a manufacturer of secret decoder rings as a sponsor. (The revolution will not have sponsorship? Discuss?)

DEBATE

Since I wrote a piece in LA CityBeat (who still haven’t put their lame website to rights, dadnab it) trashing R. Nader as an egomaniac, I’ve been getting all this email from folks like Jay Babcock of Arthur mag telling me that I’m being essentially Stalinist in my unilateral insistence that backing Kerry is the only way to evict Bush from 1600 Penn. I stand by it. Chimp begone and then work it out. On the other hand, if Kerry wins and doesn’t halt the war on drugs tout fucking suit, there will be trouble, as in...

QUOTE OF THE DAY -- Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy

CRYPTIQUE – Netscape, schnetscape...

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SUPPORT FREE SPEECH! BUY A BOOK! (Preferably one by me.)

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This is a test.

THE DOC MOVIES SHAKILY TO WARP SPEED

On a whole new provider, Doc40 enters a whole new phase this Saturday morning. The last few days have not been nice and I have learned a whole lot about the bowels of the corporate culture. The gods help us all, it really isn’t nice either, but that’s nothing new, except I’ve made it this far on a kind of winsome charm and brute psychology, and that ain’t gonna play much longer, because the portals will be guarded by goons who never deviate from the script (which doesn’t take too much perception to recognize as fascism in Nikes.) So the battle will be rejoined with some new cyber toys, and maybe speculation as to how the corps can be thwarted. TTC – Thwart The Corp. On this theme all thoughts are welcome.

I still have to figure it all these new and unfamiliar screens right now, and so this post should be looked on as something of a test, and we will proceed with the real thing with increasing vigor and panache.

In the meantime, here’s a poem about hangovers that some of you may have heard before. It was inspired by a cocktail involving tequila mixed by Eric, the bartender at Canters in Hollywood...


DIABOLO'S CADILLAC
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Room 101
A ratcage on my face
The pain is close indescribable
The horror, the horror
Last night I took a ride
In Diabolo's Cadillac

Morning is beyond the drapes
And demons wrench at my eyelids
With steel pliers
Blessed Virgin just show me mercy
Or give me a Valium
Last night I took a ride
In Diabolo's Cadillac

My brain is as dry and shrivelled
As a motherless sponge
And I dread the ultimate re-entry
Of the blood
When the torture of the damned
Will resemble a bright day at the beach
Last night I took a ride
In Diabolo's Cadillac

Jesus, God, give me a break here will you?
It's only a chemical analogue
For those two old dogs
Pleasure and retribution
I've heard that twelve steps
Can lead to salvation
But I also recall that one more
Will take you to the gallows
I don't need a stinking program
Just a remission from guilt
And some show about hitler
On the History Channel
While I collect my scattered senses
Last night I took a ride
In Diabolo's Cadillac

CRYPTIQUE – There really is never a penguin when you need one.

WEED & GUARANA

Okay, so it turns out to be one more day running on impulse power. Serious insomnia plus a weirdass dream about Ozzie Osbourne dropping dead at my feet (I swear) meant I really only made it through the remains of the day on grass and guarana, and did not feel sufficiently coordinated to refigure the warp drive. Metaphoric dilitium crystals can turn nasty on the tired and stoned.

Also TCM showed a unfuckedwith version of Norman Jewison's original Rollerball with James Caan, and I decided, since I haven't seen the film in yarons, I should be considered a cultural override on all levels. And, boy, has it stood the test of time. Aside from a really stupid 64k scene with Raph Richardson and a huge compter, the 1970s vision corportate totalitarianism in 2018 wholly holds water. The plan seems to be coming true before our eyes. The imagined exectutive pleasure girls even had the same smug vacuuity we see in the face of Paris Hilton.

Tomorrow I will brave the labyrinth of a new internet provider and all that may entail, even though the changing of the passwords alone is daunting.

CRYPTIQUE -- Wandering bootheels?

"NEVER OFFER EXCUSES..."

...it shows weakness." Wasn't it Gen. George Patton who said that (played by George C. Scott in the movie)? Well, I'll quit my crying about unwinable battles with AOL because you're all probably sick of hearing about it, and, I hope, by tomorrow, I'll have installed a new provider which I naively think will all go as advertized, and the Doc40 subversion-cyberparty will no longer be in emergency mode, and I'll can roll out all the great stuff on conspiracy and elk milk. I must thank all the crew who've emailed concern and encouragement, lead by HCB who shot me over me a bit from Salon that confirmed all of my worst fears and most acute observations as to how corporate tech support is little short of consumer fraud, and no CEO gives a rat's ass about a vital infrastructure or nation communication resources.

I was going to leave you with a handcrafted link to LA CityBeat and my latest TV diatribe against Jay Leno, but -- although flatteringly strapped on the cover of the print edition -- whatever genius updates the LACB website forgot to post it. Maybe excuses will be offered. Who knows?

Hell, if I was a paranoid as I used to be, I'd probably go back on drugs...

...but what the fuck? (And there is a load of fine readin' in the archives over yonder on the right.)

CRYPTIQUE -- Yarbles.

SINCERLY, THIS SUCKS

My battle with AOL goes on, but I'm learning to be calm. I reject anger even though this mega-corp will not allow me to talk to a human being about the problems their systems failure and fragmenting programs are causing me. I will not be consumed by fury, and I will not contemplate a suicide attack on their corporate headquarters, or employing dark, Lovecraftian forces to conjure deformities among their empolyees. I am learning patience.

Fast LEB Emergency Fact -- Our President was once a cheerleader.

CRYPTIQUE -- And if you believe the above...

WRITER LOSES MIND (But We Shall Be Revenged)

This is actually well past being funny. After the best part of a week on the phone to AOL, I now realise that their outsourced tech support is not a matter of fixing anything, but simply processing as many complainants through the system as possible by convincing them that the problem is nothing to do with AOL. They simply lie. It's rather like the HMO principle of starting by denying all claims. I can only think I now have to enter the nightmare of signing up with another provider and all the time comnsuming bullshit that entails.

Meanwhile good stuff piles up unpasted and unposted. But, in this wretched situation, I can at least leave you with a couple of links, as the one to the report on the death (murder?) of Athan Gibbs who was attempting to expose the possibility of the fixing of the Diebolt voting machines. (And after you've read the story recall that Karen Silkwood went to same way.)

And also a truly weird cybergraphic.

CRYPTIQUE -- I hate this

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FOR THE SECOND TIME IN A WEEK DOC 40 HAS FALLEN VICTIM TO AOL. DON'T KNOW WHEN WE'LL BE BACK UP. MAINLY BECAUSE I KEEP HAVING TO PAY HP $40 TO TELL ME AOL ARE LYING.

For any one who knows about these things, the AOL controls on the emergency AOL 6 I have to use since AOL 9 crashed, will not paste into Blogger. (Although it will cut.) Anyone who knows what's up with that email me a byron4d@aol.com

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SATURDAY MORNING FEVER (A buncha stuff for the weekend)

In fact, it’s a whole mass of bits and pieces served up pretty much as they come...

QUIZ

First a quick quiz, as in, who said the following?

“Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all it is the leaders who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Anne Coulter?
Don Rumsfeld?
No my friends, it was that old transvestite junkie Nazi and Hitler’s fattest henchman, Hermann Goering, who was reflecting on his political life in Allied captivity shortly before he offed himself.

DOOM

From MSNBC A steep decline in birds, butterflies and native plants in Britain supports the theory that humans are pushing the natural world into the Earth's sixth big extinction event and the future may see more and more animal species disappearing.

THE PRICE IS NOT RIGHT

(From AOL news) ...that would put presidential spending in the $455 million range - not counting the tens of millions of dollars the Democratic and Republican parties and outside groups will pour in.

CONDENSING JOE KLEIN

(From kaymo) For those who missed it, Joe Klein, Time Magazine's leadoff hitter ran a column he must have been saving up for months this week."Bush and 9/11: What We Need to Know." Klein points out that the GOP propaganda machine wants the US public to focus on the plush monkey on his most memorable day as Resident. Sept 14 2001, when with bullhorn in hand he stood atop the rubble among firefighters etc. This is why the White House has been so reluctant to cooperate with the independent commission investigating Sept 11 2001. But soon Bush will have to face some questions. So Klein asked around Washington, among those who know stuff, to find out what questions they would ask. These are them.

1/ Why didn't you respond to the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole (Oct 12 2000) ?After that attack the Clinton Admin concluded that Al Qaeda had to be smashed. But they thought it best to leave the job to the incoming Bushies. Apparently Condi Rice believed that China was the biggest threat to the US, not Al Qaeda.Did Bush know about the Clinton determination re: Al Qaeda? Did he consider an aggressive response to the USS Cole attack, or the foiled plot directed at LA International Airport in Dec 1999?

2/ Why didn't Bush deploy the armed Predator drones in Afghanistan in early 2001? The technology was ready and would have offered the best chance of killing Osama. The CIA and the Pentagon were squabbling over who would be in charge of pulling the trigger so nothing happened until after 9/11. Was Bush aware of this dispute? Why wasn't he able to resolve it and get the job done?

3/August 6 2001.. Bush was told that Al-Qaeda were planning an attack in the USA, perhaps using airplanes. What was his response to this? How closely was he following the reports on Al-Qaeda, which had taken on an extremely urgent tone by late spring? Was Bush aware that Ashcroft had opposed increasing counter-terrorism money for the FBI?

4/ In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 why did Bush allow planeloads of Saudi nationals including members of the Bin Laden family to leave the US? Who asked that the Saudis be given special treatment? Was Bush aware that members of the Saudi Royal family contributed to charities that
funded Al-Qaeda?

Naturally, these are not the questions the Republicans want Americans to be thinking about come November 2004.

AND JUST WHEN YOU NEED A DRINK...

Also from MSNBC Some 100 Bahraini Islamists shouting "God is Greatest" stormed a French restaurant serving alcohol in the pro-Western Gulf Arab state and threatened diners with knives. The assailants, opposed to the consumption of alcohol banned by Islam, also threw gasoline bombs at customers' cars parked outside the restaurant near the capital Manama late on Wednesday, damaging nine vehicles.

LINK – Our pal hipspinster has a blog on fog – http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – There’s never a penguin when you need one.

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SUPPORT FREE SPEECH! BUY A BOOK! (Preferably one by me.)

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WHERE THE REAL SCIENCE FICTION IS BORN

After yesterday’s rant of wolves, (or wolfs if you prefer the Doc40 creative spelling) I turn the forum over to kaymo, for a short saga of rock and ice and sulphur eating bacteria by the black smoker taking advantage – and doesn’t that sound like a perfect weekend in Las Vegas.

Okay, here's something to lighten our darkness, or just for a moment dispel that disturbing vision of the plush monkey on Chuckie Demon batteries that's running for reelection.

So yesterday we all heard the news about Sedna. We now have a 10th planet in the solar system, albeit a frozen mini-world out there on the fringes of the Oort Cloud. What's to say about Sedna that hasn't been said about Pluto? Not much. It's even further away and probably a tad colder. However, it may be just the first of a plethora of similar ice balls yet to be found that are out there on the distant fringes of the system. But a report last month concerning the planetary systems that are being detected around nearby stars was much more fun.

Everyone has now picked up on the grim thought of inward migrating Super-Jovians, that is-- great big gas giants that suck up stuff in youngish solar systems laden with asteroids and suchlike and thereby lose orbital momentum and thereby spin inward to take up orbits close to their stars. On the way they either absorb any Earths or Marses, or knock them out into interstellar space to freeze and die. Super-Jovians have been detected orbiting a number of nearby Sun-like stars now.
Definitely not good for the chances of life evolving in such solar systems.Except that, just as in our system we have a Jupiter, we also have a Saturn parked out there beyond it, and beyond that we have Uranus and Neptune. In a system with a migrating Super-Jovian the possibility exists that as it moves inward it will tug the outer planets in behind it.

An outer planet like Uranus or Neptune pulled into the inner reaches of a solar system would then undergo some interesting changes. The hydrogen in the atmosphere would boil off, the ice would melt, so would the methane and ammonia. A lot of the atmosphere would bleed off as it
heated up. And down at the bottom, above the rocky core, there would form an ocean of water, anywhere from 20 to 50 miles deep.

Of course the atmosphere would start out like Earth's did, heavy on ammonia and methane, without oxygen. But life on Earth probably started around "black smokers" on the ocean bottom where sulphur eating bacteria evolved to take advantage of a ton of their favorite food being spewed out of volcanic vent. Those kind of bacteria are still doing their thing down at the bottom of our oceans today. The geology that leads to black smoker type vents spewing sulphur rich gas into the bottom of the ocean is likely to be the same on all planets that are warm enough to have liquid water and an active mantle.And once you have halogen feeding bacteria it's only a matter of time, quite a lot of it, before you have all sorts of other kinds of bacteria and eventually other things too.

Since we're finding a lot of systems with these huge Super-Jovians parked close to their stars, it's quite possible that in some of them there will be warmed up Neptunes covered in vast oceans fifty miles deep, in which life can begin and evolve.

Okay, fun's over, back to the plush monkey

CRYPTIQUE – The roof is on fire.

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BACK AND REPAIRED!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!

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CRY WOLF AND LET SLIP THE DOGS

(Luckily this story was written yesterday, before Doc40 became as sick as a dog and AOL (and it’s India-based tech support) started to do their level best to destroy both my mind and my computer. Fortunately that had now been put to rights – mainly by the Doc’s blind intervention rather than any effort of corporate support, and I’ll be catching up on work and email forthwith.)

I have always been inordinately fond of wolves. I think the romance started with Kipling’s Mowgli books, which were handed to me before I could actually read, but it was really cemented during the summer that I worked at the London Zoo in Regents Park in my transition phase between student and wastrel. I was having an affair with a girl called Jane, who was kinda conflicted about why she was spending too many of her nights with me. On one hand, I guess I functioned as some kind of low-budget Bob Dylan surrogate, but, on another, I was way to the weird, bohemian left of what she still thought of as her middle class station. Thus there were bouts of off and on, and, during the off times, I would sit and feel depressed and lovelorn, smoke a covert joint, and look at the wolves on their enclosure, while the wolves looked at me.

I don’t know if it’s the same today, but back in the 1960s the wolves in London Zoo were confined in a long narrow enclosure that ran all the way down the east side of the zoo, which allowed the wolves to gallop, but also provided a major deterrent against human unlawful entry. Thus it was easy to see them from the outside of the zoo – and, indeed, the same scene is played out in the movie Withnail and I when the washed-up Withnail stands in the pouring rain, staring at the wolves much as I did.

With all this personal history going on, I was therefore mad as hell when I read that the wolves were being legally exterminated in Alaska, as part and parcel of the Bush administrations opening up of the wilderness to the rankest capitalism. For the dispassionate facts, let’s go to the NY Times of 3/15/2004..

For 30 years hunting lobbyists have campaigned for what is euphemistically called wolf "control." Thanks to the compliance of Gov. Frank Murkowski and the state's official game board, the legal protections for Alaska's 7,000 to 9,000 wolves have been seriously eroded. In nearly 20,000 square miles of the state it is now legal for private citizens to shoot wolves from airplanes and helicopters. In one district the limit has been increased from 10 wolves a year to 10 wolves a day.
In these districts, the new regulations call for an 80 percent "temporary" reduction in the wolf population. But a reduction on that scale is merely likely to be the first step towards the total elimination of wolves. This isn't sport hunting – there's nothing sporting about deploying an air force to unt animals. The real spirit of hunting has always been about working within the balance of nature. But not in Alaska. There is already a hunting and trapping season for Alaskan wolves, and some 7,500 wolves have been legally killed in the past five years. But hunters want more moose meat on the table, and the state has promised them unnaturally high numbers. Instead of setting sustainable limits for the moose hunt, the game board has decided simply to kill the animals that prey on moose – wolves and bears. According to the game board, "moose are important for providing high levels of harvest for human consumptive use." In other words, moose are important, wolves are not. Wildlife biologists disagree, and so do most Alaskans, who have voted against aerial shooting twice, in 1996 and 2000. But now the extremists have taken over. Any notion that wolves and moose are part of a functioning ecosystem has been abandoned. The hunting lobby demands that moose be managed as livestock destined for harvesting by hunters – the more the merrier, with anything that gets in the way destined for destruction. In Alaska, wolves are now merely competitors seizing valuable human resources.

The final sentence is what pisses me off about the general attitude to wolves. “Wolves are now merely competitors seizing valuable human resources.” That has essentially been the bad rap against wolves for centuries. The Big Bad Wolf, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and bloody Red Riding Hood, on close examination, all turned out to be little more than evil, 19th century agri-business propaganda. The legend has always been that wolves ate people; that they were one of the few species that disputed the human place at the top of the food chain, but, in reality, the incidence of wolf attacks on people run zero to minimal. On the other hand, wolves do not make distinctions between fair game and domestic livestock, and a propensity for carrying off sheep and cattle made them a threat to the farmer and his profit margin. Not content to make the case on that level, however – to simply state that the wolf was bad for business and had to go – faux-primal fear was injected into the story, and the myths of wolves carrying off babies, of wolf packs chasing one horse open sleighs through the forest, of the gleaming hungry eyes around the trapper’s campfire, were inserted into the folklore, particularly of Central and Eastern Europe, and then brought to America with the waves of immigrants. (And one might note an ugly similarity to the mythology employed in organized anti-Semitism.) In the twentieth century, the fiction of the killer wolf was nailed into the culture by both Bram Stoker and Lon Chaney Jr.. Dracula morphed into a white wolf, the werewolf grew fur and fangs at the full moon. Wolves were evil and must die.

The saga of saving the wolf is another of those battles that we thought had been fought and won in the 1960s when folksinger Pete LaFarge and sections of the American Indian Movement protested the strychnine killing of wolfs and coyotes, and, gradually, the thinking – especially behind wildlife management in the National Parks – came round to the idea that predators like wolves and bears were an essential part of a balanced ecology, and, in the lower 48, wolf populations have been growing. But Murkowski and these bastards in Alaska, have turned all this around and seem once again happy to extinguish a entire species if it suits their corporate agenda.

MEANWHILE,

Our pal Belle de Jour has become famous, has a book deal, and is being outed, and all kinds of other exciting stuff. http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – HOOOOWOOOO!

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AOL would appear to have crashed Doc40's computer. We wonder what happens next.

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IDES OF MARCH

I have a lot to say about wolves, but, the way the day has gone, it doesn’t seem as though I’ll have the thing fully written until tomorrow, so I’m going to have to leave you with a clip of inspired Bush bashing from Maureen Dowd in the NY Times. I hope all of the Doc40 crew from outside the US will bear with these constant assaults on the president. It’s illegal for a bunch of senators to emulate the assassination of Julius Caesar and stab the bastard to death (not that they’d have the balls to anyway) so it’s down to we the people to spend the next eight months making the malignant simian look so pathetically absurd that he will be voted out of office, and some relative normality restored to our lives.

Mr. Bush's subtext is clear: If it weren't for all these awful things that happened, most of them hangovers from the Clinton era, I definitely could have fulfilled all my promises. I'm still great, but none of my programs worked because, well, stuff happens." It's as if his inner fat boy is complaining that a classic triple cheeseburger from Wendy's (940 calories and 56 grams of fat, 25 of them saturated, and 2,140 milligrams of sodium) jumped out of its wrapper and forced its way down his unwilling throat, topped off by a pushy Frosty (540 calories and 13 grams of fat, 8 of them saturated).Mr. Bush has been in office over three years. It's time to start accepting some responsibility. Republicans have a bad habit of laying down rules for other people to follow while excluding themselves. Look how they beat up Bill Clinton for messing around with a young woman, while many top Republicans were doing the very same thing. Mr. Bush's whingeing was infectious. The very House Republicans who greased the skids for the cheeseburger bill got in a huff over John Kerry's overheard comment to some supporters in Chicago that his Republican critics were "the most crooked, you know, lying group" he'd ever seen. These tough-guy Republicans, who rule the House with an iron fist, were suddenly squealing like schoolgirls at being victimized by big, bad John Kerry. J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, said Mr. Kerry would have his "upcomeance coming." Tom DeLay sulked that the public was getting "a glimpse of the real John Kerry." The Hammer was talking like a nail. Marc Racicot, Mr. Bush's campaign chairman, accused Mr. Kerry of "unbecoming" conduct and called on him to apologize. Oh, the poor dears.

For the full story – http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/opinion/14DOWD.html?th

(Except the NY Times seems to be dicking around with the web link. It's been checked so if you have a problem, the story was on the editorial page of Sunday's edition.)

THE GOOD NEWS

Seems like we have a new planet or planetoid in the solar system. It's been given the name Sedna, which is supposedly that of an Inuit godess, although it looks a lot like Andes spelled backwards. And they were never my favorite mountain range, not after those Rugby players ate each other. Could it not have been called something cool like Joe, or Betty -- or maybe Elvis?

CRYPTIQUE – Swing on a star, Monkey Boy.

WITHOUT COMMENT

This came in from fidicen, and I figured that the only thing to do was to post it without comment, except that I had never seen the full lyric in print before, plus to do this is probably illegal, but fuck whatever media corporation thinks they own the poetry. Let ‘em sue me. I’m in the mood for conflict. I cry at Spanish Civil War movies, and so did Joe, so I doubt he'd mind. I also hear that Aznar's out and the socialists took power in the Spanish elections, and will pull their troops out of Iraq -- but at what a hideous price.

SPANISH BOMBS (Strummer/Jones)

Spanish songs in Andalucia
The shooting sites in the days of '39
Oh, please, leave the vendanna open
Fredrico Lorca is dead and gone
Bullet holes in the cemetery walls
The black cars of the Guardia Civil
Spanish bombs on the Costa Rica
I'm flying in a DC 10 tonight

CHORUS
Spanish bombs, yo tequierro y finito
Yote querda, oh mi corazon
Spanish bombs, yo te quierro y finito
Yo te querda, oh mi corazon

Spanish weeks in my disco casino
The freedom fighters died upon the hill
They sang the red flag
They wore the black one
But after they died it was Mockingbird Hill
Back home the buses went up in flashes
The Irish tomb was drenched in blood
Spanish bombs shatter the hotels
My senorita's rose was nipped in the bud

The hillsides ring with "Free the people"
Or can I hear the echo from the days of '39?
With trenches full of poets
The ragged army, fixin' bayonets to fight the other line
Spanish bombs rock the province
I'm hearing music from another time
Spanish bombs on the Costa Brava
I'm flying in on a DC 10 tonight
Spanish songs in Andalucia, Mandolina, oh mi corazon
Spanish songs in Granada, oh mi corazon

CRYPTIQUE – They shall not pass.

WHOLLY HOLY SUNDAY

Shall we all get right with God, brothers and sisters?

I suppose if we were truly devout we’d be spending Sunday doing absolutely nothing, which would come a major relief to me, at least, since I appear to spend all my time writing until my typing hands hurt. Also, since there would appear to be no biblical proscriptions against smoking weed, we could be doing nothing plus being as high as kites, which is, if I recall correctly, is how I spent a considerable part of my youth, when, I swear, things were a great deal fucking easier. (No worries about God on the reefer count, though, the marijuana laws are just a matter of rendering unto Caesar that about which Caesar is irrationally demented.)

Okay, so here we are, Sunday, stoned, and totally doing nothing, exactly as the Bible instructs, except maybe scratching our feet. Shall we take it a stage further and try for a vision? Let’s pretend that GWB was reelected, and, while we’re waiting for the prime time death-stoning of evil-doers on Fox, hosted by Jay Leno, what better moment to review the brand new Federal regulations governing marriage. Strictly biblical right? Well, my friends, our good pal kaymo has sent us a resume of just what these new rules of bible-based marriage would need to include to make them 100% guaranteed devout...

Just in the hope of elevating the debate, I note that a constitutional amendment to codify marriage on biblical principles would need to include these provisions:

1. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

2. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

3. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If she is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

4. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:109; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30

5. Since marriage is for life, neither this constitution nor the constitution of any State shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

6. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall either be slain or pay a fine of one shoe. (Gen 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

So there you have it, oh ye of little faith. Maybe a tad hard on unbelievers, wives, sluts, and brothers in law, but weren’t we always warned that God was fucking mysterious? Now if anyone has chapter and verse on the biblical strictures against homosexuality and fornication, we can really get jiggy wit’ it.

MEANWHILE...

Up on the comments board, a debate over fun v politics seems to be gathering momentum. Join in, enjoy, that’s what the thing’s there for. (And both by default and because the majority seem to like the anarchy of it all, the comments will remain as they are until they finally explode. Which I guess is the basic Doc40 theory of blog maintenance.) You can also email – byron4d@aol.com.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY – A true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. – Che Guevara

CRYPTIQUE – Lay down in green pastures.

MORE DISSENT IN THE RANKS

I see from the comments board over yonder that the sound muttering may be rising in the audience about how Doc40 has been getting too grim and political lately. In fact, blanche and some girl may be right. I’m constantly catching myself sounding as though I was on a one note bender of Bush, culture wars, and impending doom. Is this true I ask myself? And back comes the answer: “Of course it is. Lighten up now and again.” But then one of the other voices in my head counters with, “How could it be otherwise? Who the fuck do you want to be? Ryan Seacrest? Yesterday some assholes blew up Madrid.” So thus I wrestle with the dilemma of how to fight the good fight...

(A bloody great spider just walked across the legal pad next to my computer. I shoo it away with a Post-It. Begone child of Shelob.)

...without becoming a fucking bore?

FUN STUFF FOR SATURDAY

Well okay, I thought. It’s Saturday. Let’s get down with the light hearted trivia and see where it takes us. And then I looked around at what there was and found a tip-off on the new David Mamet movie from Henry C. Beck and wadda y’know? The movie is bloody grim and bloody political. Then I find a website called God Hates Shrimp, but that turns out to be political satire – but funny in an Old Testament, exoskeletal kinda way. (http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/)

Which leaves me with Safe For Work porn site which seems humorously to demonstrate how porn will look if we lose the culture war. (http://www.area29.com/sfwporn/)

And then there’s the chance for a sick grin at the expense of the mundanely demented at Group Hug (http://grouphug.us/) where strangers post anonymous confessions, as in...

I slept with one of my best friend's girlfriend. I feel guilty about it, she feels guilty about it, but I would still do it again given the opportunity. She's so hot.

or...

I sniff white out and magic markers all day while at my desk. I have an office job.

or...

I live with three other girls. I like one of them and want the other two to die. I dream of axe murderers breaking down the door and them dying. They are fat slobs who just eat bacon and sound like elephants.

And finally we have Lithium Journals which the is the blog of a strange young man from an “imaginary metaverse” who writes like some seriously depressed 21st century neo-Burroughs and whose work I really dig, while finding it a trifle disturbed and disturbing. (http://lithiumjournals.theoutcast.com/) Here’s a taste...

razors and guns. the coolest fucking bandaids, ever. they will fix you right and proper and when they are done, the only scab left is you.

i am an unwilling survivor of a life i never wanted. i speak to the ghost of the child who died inside my mother months before i was born. she tells me, she says, "luck of the draw." i look at my hand and i see the two jokers, the jack of spades, the queen of diamonds and the king of clubs. the jokers mock and laugh, the jack of spades regards me with mild curiousity. the queen of diamonds looks at me with hatred and contempt while the king of clubs whispers, "fold while you can

BECK ON SPARTAN

As to Bush and the administration– In the new Mamet thriller, Spartan, which I saw the other night, the President's daughter is picked up at a cat house and dragged off to be the plaything of some white slavers in the Middle East. The slavers don't know who she is.
Spoilers:
Val Kilmer thinks his job is to rescue her, but when she ends up dead (somewhere else altogether) he takes it to heart. Why I mention all this is that in Mamet's movie, the Prez is out with her secret service detail getting his horn scraped, leaving her vulnerable. And when she goes missing, the White House fakes her death, more than anything because she's an embarrassment, it's a re-election year, and they could give a fuck if she's getting passed around the camel lads. The woman (secret service) who actually raised the girl says to Kilmer, "These people are savages. They don't even know how many kids they have." There's more of that sort of exposition that I can't remember offhand, but it's a very very nasty picture of politicians in general and the Presidential family specifically. One doesn't often see such a bitter and dismal and probably accurate view of the heartless ruthlessness of the people on top. A bit of a surprise, actually. It's like the church--Bishops and administrators pretending they are unaware of the huge volume of in-house abuses, when dealing with the mold on the human soul is their very raison, venality their stock-in-trade. If it weren't for sin, they'd be out of work. There's no room for illusion on their end. How many confessions do you suppose a priest has to listen to before his faith in human nature, assuming he ever had any, is reduced to compost?

CRYPTIQUE – Smile when you say that.

GRIM AND GRIMMER

I really wish we could be talking about shoes, sex, drunkeness, Captain Midnight, obscure movies, or how great I think my new novel is now I’m reading the page proofs, but everyday the shit piles up, and the atmosphere becomes even more tainted. As Madrid suffers its worst taste of hell since the Spanish Civil War, a link to an excellent site, the Daily Mis-leader, (http://www.misleader.org/) raises the old but still-nagging-and-spectral question. “What did the goddamned president know and when did he know it?”

As President Bush visits a memorial for victims of the 9/11 attacks today, he continues to refuse to clarify dishonest comments he and his national security adviser made denying they had any warning that a terrorist attack was imminent before 9/11. In May 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that [Al Qaeda] would try to use an airplane as a missile." Similarly, President Bush denied having any idea about the threat, saying on 5/17/02, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." The problem is that these denials contrast sharply with warnings the White House did receive prior to 9/11. Specifically, the Administration was warned before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to use airplanes in an attack against the United States and that the terror group had recently considered using airplanes as missiles. ABC News and Dateline NBC reported that White House officials acknowledge that U.S. intelligence officials delivered a one-and-a-half page document to President Bush on August 6th that warned that "bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes." Those warnings came at the same time that U.S. and Italian officials were warning that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the [July 2001] Genoa summit of industrialized nations." These warnings came at the same time top Administration officials were being told to change their own personal flight plans because of "threats." Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and instead began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines" because of "what the Justice Department called a 'threat assessment."8 (To this day, the details of that threat assessment have never been made public.) Similarly, Newsweek reported that the day before the 9/11 terror attacks "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."

fidicen, who supplied the link, waxes considerable more agressive...

I know you surely know about this, but seeing this information go more mainstream is just so tantalizing. I've got to believe Kerry will unleash it at the right time. I mean, where does chimp go when people find out he had a specific warning about planes and terror on 6 August 2001--while he was beginning the second longest commander in chief vacation of all time (one day short of the record) in the midst of a major economic recession and a mere six months into his term, meanwhile his minions went from public to taxpayer-funded private airline travel and both he and his administration vehemently denied they had anything to inform them that plane attacks were pending but regardless have opposed the Attacks Commission every step of the way and continue to stonewall on testimony and documentational disclosure but constantly use images from the attacks to display their unique fitness for four more years of office. I mean, FAWK, you just can't win an election in the face of that? Can you?? I suppose you could always foment terror in Europe throughout the summer and pin it on towel wearing Ay-Rabs, thus creating the specter of fear amongst an already quivering populace of fat, ignorant chickens without actually doing it in Der Homeland itself and inviting more inquiry into one's intelligence failures and regime machinations. I suppose you COULD try that as a last resort, especially if the markets were tanking, gas prices were spiking, and jobs of both collar colors were being exported, with a li'l help from federal tax incentives and programs, to the subcontinent and far east. I reckon it wouldn't hurt either if it helped the electability and powers of your stooges over there. So I suppose you COULD.Though I would still expect you to lose a fair election by at least five points--in the popular vote if nothing else.

AND GRIMMER STILL

I firmly believe, and I wish I didn’t, that WMDs – that’s plain speaking for fucking atom bombs – will soon be on sale for about the price of their weight in cocaine while we're being distracted by gay marriage, radio decency, and Jesus. The following is clipped from yesterday’s NY Times (which is probably illegal, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn)...

But all in all, the risks of a nuclear 9/11 are increasing. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if nuclear weapons are used over the next 15 or 20 years," said Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, "first and foremost by a terrorist group that gets its hands on a Russian nuclear weapon or a Pakistani nuclear weapon." One of our biggest setbacks is in North Korea. Thanks to the ineptitude of hard-liners in Mr. Bush's administration, and their refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations, North Korea is going all-out to make warheads. It may have just made six new nuclear weapons. Then there's Iran, which has sought nuclear weapons since the days of the shah, and whose nuclear program seems to have public support. "I'm not sure there is a way to get an Iranian government to give it up," a senior American official said. Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation, Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and North Korea, and we don't know who else. It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute. It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation — it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election. Another puzzle is why an administration that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere. The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds — but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat reduction" with Russia.

AND TALKING OF RADIO DECENCY

My thoughts about Howard Stern are nailed down in today's LA CityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=740&IssueNum=40

CRYPTIQUE – Nuke ‘em from orbit.

THE ELVIS FACTOR

I’ve noticed over the last ten days or so, I’ve heard mention made of something called the Elvis Factor in reference to the presidential election. I will confess these references did not come at a time when I was paying any more than subliminal attention, and I can only imagine it was some pig-benighted columnist or TV news show casting for an angle, and remembering Bill Clinton.

Yeah, in the world of politicians where all things are relative, Clinton had plenty of Elvis. You only had to watch him get down with an Abyssinia Baptist Church. Both the dead Kennedy Brothers had some Elvis, but it tended to bring out the lone gunmen. I could write a whole lot about the Elvis Factor and probably will sometime, but suffice for now to say that it’s an intangible that makes girls adore and crowds act irrational. The discussion is totally spurious, however, because, trust one who knows, J.F. Kerry doe not have the Elvis. The best he might come up with is a Mt. Rushmore Johnny Cash if he smiled now and again, and the caught-on-mike aside when he called Bush “crooked” is going exactly in that direction, and I doubt it will hurt him at all.

Bush on the other hand comes in with an Elvis negative deficit. He might even be the anti-Elvis, I meditated long and hard trying to conjure a singer with whom Bush might be equated, but the best I could come up with was Andy Griffith’s malignant shitkicker in Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd. Or is that too easy? Some days I have trouble seeing GWB as human. He seems more like a toxic plush monkey animated by a Chuckie Demon. And that’s a hell of a long way from Graceland.

SOME GIRLS DISSENT

some girl writes...
so i was rooting around on the internet, vaguely feeling dissent re your last doc40 post and seeking something to back up my half-baked notions that the people are not as dumb as you think they are (or as w thinks they are), but and instead i stumbled upon some links on the
drudge report (useful, that; despite him), including this article on the latest congressional action re "obscene" broadcasts.(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43113-2004Mar9.html)

i found this part to be interesting:

Perhaps most controversial will be an amendment by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) that would impose a moratorium on rules passed by Congress late last year that allow for some media organizations to get larger. The amendment, which passed on a 13-10 vote, directs the General Accounting Office to study the relationship between indecent programming and media consolidation before the new ownership rules can take effect.

indecent programming -- ya mean, like fox news and jerry springer and stuff? huh. of course it would take so-called "public outcry" (try religious-right complaint campaign instead) over "indecency" to get them to look at media consolidation. nevermind thought monopolies and the lack of a true spectrum of viewpoints/lifestyles/etc. represented in mainstream media/entertainment (cable or no) -- THAT'S no cause for concern. and no doubt people who have to do business w/media companies -- production companies, say (at least the ones not already owned by a media conglom), or bands -- also get screwed. but...hey, too bad. that's the market. and the market, as we know, is always right. (hah.)

(Doc 40 notes – Which would seem to be a veiled way of linking some kind of “decency rating” to the ability of media corporations to acquire new radio and TV stations. Its obvious application under the Bush FCC would be to hamper the competition, and give Tom Hicks and Bush’s other pals at Clear Channel a clearer path to become the American right’s corporate Ministry of Truth.)

some girl resumes...

finally, at least there's still SOME highly ironic insanity in the world (instead of just boring old horrible insanity):

from Newsday...PANAMA CITY, Fla. -- A videotape of an underage girl exposing her breasts is not child pornography, a judge decided Tuesday in a criminal case against the producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series. Joe Francis, 30, and several of his employees were arrested at Panama City Beach while filming during spring break last April. Bay County sheriff's deputies charged Francis with racketeering related to prostitution and other crimes, based largely on videotapes of girls under 18. Many of the 43 counts he faces hinge on what conduct is considered illegal or pornographic. "This ruling shows that the entire fabric of that claim is wrong," said defense lawyer Aaron Dyer of Los Angeles. Dyer said he expected the ruling to undermine at least 90 percent of the case. Circuit Judge Michael C. Overstreet made his decision in ordering that defense lawyers be allowed to copy tape confiscated during a search of Francis' rented condominium last spring. Prosecutors had tried to prevent the copying on grounds the videotape showing a girl "flashing" her breasts was illegal child pornography. Florida's child pornography law makes the depiction of "sexual conduct" illegal and defines that term to include physical contact. There was no physical contact in the video. State Attorney Jim Appleman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Prosecutors contend Francis and his video crew enticed girls they knew were underage to expose themselves. The defendants deny the allegation and say the girls had lied about their ages. Francis owns Mantra Entertainment Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., which produces and distributes the videos.

CRYPTIQUE – Let’s get real, real gone for a change.

DOC40 ALMOST TAKES THE DAY OFF

Goddamn ninety degrees again in LA. The local sun-bunnies chirrup about how lovely it all is, but Newton the cat is still put out and I feel decidedly unwell, while the state of my art makes me attend to a barrow-load of pointless details. I was planning to write at least the start of an analysis of the Elvis Factor in modern politics, but I frankly I don’t have the strength. Thus I leave you with the following, so no ones goes away empty handed...

A SHAGGY DRUNK STORY

From MSNBC – DWPP – Driving While Pre-Pubescent.
This, thanks to a California man who had a few too many. His one smart move: he did not drive while drunk. It was downhill from there, however. First he put a 14-year-old girl behind the wheel but he later gave a 10-year-old girl a shot at driving. When a cop pulled over the swerving car, he found the three of them, the 10-year-old behind the wheel, and beer bottles at the feet of the adult male, Lionel Cerda. Cerda said the two girls were relatives and that he was teaching them how to drive. While the 'relative' part of that story appears to be true, Cerda's driving lesson did not impress the officer. He was charged with DWI, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and child endangerment.

AND MORE BUSHWHACKING

President Bush's re-election campaign says it will ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate a Democratic-leaning group that will air $4.5 million worth of TV ads against Bush, beginning Wednesday. The Media Fund's initial two-week ad run in 17 competitive states will include commercials that criticize Bush's policies and priorities, and mention the president by name. Financed in part by billionaire George Soros and headed by former Clinton administration adviser Harold Ickes, the group expects to raise tens of millions of dollars to run ads this election year.

OH YEAH, AND...

Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Danielle Keough (Lisa Marie’s daughter with Danny Keough) just signed with a modeling agency, and will be the new face of Dolce and Gabbana.

CRYPTIQUE – The Velcro is pre-cut.

FEAR EATS THE BRIAN

Fear is the mind killer. – Bene Geserit maxim

It’s a campaign of fear and consumption. – Marilyn Manson

I know your deepest secret fear. – Jim Morrison

I have been wishing lately that FDR had never coined the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It would be so useful right about now. I finally saw one of the Bush TV commercials, and it was so plain that the name of the game is now going to be fear for the whole of the election. Eight fucking months of unrelenting trepidation psychology. That much was clear to my, by now, expert eye. So far, other anti-Bush commentators have raged against Bush’s lack of taste in using images of national tragedy to make his pitch. (See Jimmy Breslin below.) I find myself a little beyond that. Taste isn’t even on the radar. The ads are straight subliminal massage. Scientology should be so deft. Expensive and slick, the Bushites have their hand right in the pants of the numbed of the nation. Horrible scary threats – foreign and domestic – abound, and George, and only George will protect us. George is deep-selling himself as what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the Strict Father model with the added plus of God as his corner-man.

That I see George as more performing simian that warrior patriarch, and have real problems with those grown-voters who might buy such a clearly nonsensical and nursery illusion should probably disqualify me from further comment, and maybe I should accept my sensei-status and fuck off to a cave. What worries me, however, is that, for this strategy to succeed, the electorate have to be reduced to an infantile near panic. This is clearly the plan of the cognitive scientists of the right and the post-Orwellian consumerists who are getting their fat consultancy cheques from the Bush campaign

The knee-jerk reaction to the Bush psycho-strategy is obviously to fight fear with fear. I rumble of corpo-fascist take-over and warn that “if we don’t defeat Bush in November, there may not be another election.” But is that the way to go? If the battle – and the larger culture war – is being fought between the cognizant of the coastal margins and the willfully stupid of the interior, how sensible is it to play on the fears of the cognizant? Do we really want to go the same route and infantilize the only ones who may have a clue what’s happening? But then again, how the hell does one get across a radical, positive, hopeful, maybe even utopian sales-job in a climate of abject terror of terror itself?

Does this require some discussion? The comments board is over there, or, better still, write byron4D@aol.com for longer postings.

You might also notice that I have used quotes from Frank Herbert, Marilyn Manson, and Jim Morrison at the head of this post, wondering also what might be found in the annals and rhetoric of our own culture to counter all this ugly and bloodily judgmental religion. Are we ashamed of our own poets of resistance, or afeared they will antagonize the dumb and dumber?

I hope this can be the start of something productive. If you agree, please mail it around...

JIMMY BRESLIN

Breslin, as a columnist, was one of my early-scribe heroes. Fidicen sent me a link that indicates he’s still rocking there at NY Newsday. Here he is on the Bush commercials. Just a snippet, hit the link for the full story

In his first campaign commercial, George Bush reached down and molested the dead.
But this only in keeping with both Bushes. George Bush, Sr., had the badge of officer Eddie Byrne, who was gunned down in South Jamaica, and he stood up at Christ the King High School in Middle Village and held it up and said he would have this badge on him forever. Some chance. Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.
Now, right off, this second George Bush came up with the badge of a Port Authority cop, George Howard, who died. He was from Hicksville. His mother gave Bush the son's badge. When Bush came back to the trade center a year later, he reached into his pocket and whipped out that badge and he had a tear in his eye. What makes it worse is that this George W. Bush acts like he's entitled to treat the remains of a dead man like a souvenir. Now he shows a commercial with dead bodies, or body parts, covered with an American flag being taken through the smoke and flames of the world trade center attack. It caused people who had lost family members in the attack to complain about using the dead or parts thereof being used for a politician's gain.
"Bush is afraid to let us see the dead being brought back from Iraq," one fire fighter said yesterday.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/nyc-bres0306,0,4578571.column

CRYPTIQUE – Would Adam or Steve please pick up the white courtesy phone?