Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Sauna

Man, do I love Finnish sauna. I have a sideline business installing them and I have one myself. Just did one, in fact. Best thing ever. The protocol is this:

Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round one
Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round two
Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round three
Hot, soapy shower, scrub with brush, cold rinse, dry down
Optional, if you have a sweetie: soapy massage

Now get a stiff drink. I mean it. I'm going to hit you with something hard. Here we go. Deactivate whatever you have in the way of visualizing skills. Turn it off. It's for your own protection. The proposal, the prescription, the decree:

Dick Cheney does a sauna, with his sweetie (his wife, one hopes). Repeat as necessary.

Oh, man. You okay? The idea is, if we could get the Republicans to do saunas, it might just sweat the meanness out of them. The resentment. The indifference to human suffering. We may have to have sauna internment camps -- spas, we'll call them --and employ a regimen, but just the thought gives me hope.

We have the opposite problem with the Democrats, how to get them pissed off. How to get them to fight back. I think everyone engages in projection, to a degree, so the Democrats think the Republicans are normal, when they're wackers, and the Republicans think the Democrats are foaming, when they're harmless. The Democrats are mild-mannered, generally. Constitutionally even-tempered. Regular residents of Lake Wobegon. Soft spoken. Respectful. Non-confrontational. Alright, maybe not quite so saintly but, still, it will take a lot to stir them. So, I'm thinking, severed heads. On the lawns of prominent Democrats.

Thing is, there are these severed heads cropping up in Mexico and, I mean, we paid for those. Our money. The provenance is indisputable: our money, drug lords, severed heads. Some of those must surely go unclaimed by the families. I understand there may be some trouble with customs, but we'll deal. I wish we would own our shit and do away with the drug war, but this is America. We don't do that. We unload our problems on innocent people elsewhere. Next best thing is to make good use of what we've bought. Just a thought. A modest proposal.

So somebody go get Dick. He's usually elbow-deep in the red meat at NumNuts, his favorite restaurant, or on the golf course, or blasting his friends with the twelve gauge. Forgot about that, didn't you. While we're waiting here's another idea: waterboard his ass. Not his ass--you know what I mean. If he's guilty of half the stuff it appears, well, he makes the bearded guy look like an amateur. And if that's the way you get good info, good intel, true confessions, we've got to use it.

The problem is the disparity. The Republicans are fighting a war. Against I don't know what. Good question. Certainly truth, justice, the American way. What do they want? I guess it's a vision thing. A feeling. Authoritarian. Arbitrary. Mean. Maybe more than a feeling. A program for a social model. Plantation. Or prison, maybe.

And the Dems. How many times do you have to get cold-cocked before you get it, it's not a game to them. They want to kill you.

Last time you looked in the mirror did you see Yugoslavia? It's hard, human nature, I suppose, to see your own shit. And the US is as divided a place as Yugoslavia ever was. A third of the country under apartheid, ruled by terrorists, with religious underpinnings, for most of our history.

Then what? Desegregation. The hated Yankees telling us how to live. Ain't going to hand our nuts to us again in a dessert cup, like the last time. All of a sudden after desegregation, the country turns inexorably to issues supposed long settled. States Rights. Gun Rights. Religion in the Schools, the Workplace, fucking everywhere. Nullification. I mean, Nullification? What century is this? Secession? How obvious does this have to get? And Property, Property, Property. A biggie south of the line, owner or owned.

And, my god, do they hate the government. And social programs. What's the big deal? Oh, wait, it's not our government, the apartheid government. It's the Yankee government, giving free shit to undeserving black people. And something goes off in their heads. It must be destroyed. It... must... be... destroyed... (picture the zombie walk here). At any and all costs. So the question is not, will we live by 'the constitution,' it's which constitution, and the Confederate one is now in force. So says the ghost of Lee Atwater.

How to destroy. Drown it in deficits. In debt. Very Norquistian. A bathtub of debt. And leverage. Use leverage. Get 'em by the nuts. You don't need a majority, when you got 'em by the nuts. That's a song in one of my plays.

And there we are folks. We've just been through it again, courtesy of the Boehnerites. And now Sarah, god help us, or someone from the tea tribe has the Boehner balls in her teeth. GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, red-state style. Glad we turned that imaging apparatus off.

All the while Rove's Reich, at the real governmental headquarters, attacks everything we thought the country ever stood for. I see it in the mists--was it that long ago?--when the US did not torture people. FUCKING PERIOD. But the gates are open now.

So, Dick. And I mean, "So, Dick," with sinister undertones. Never waterboarded a guy with a pacemaker. Could be interesting. You never had the training, did you? The military training. Interesting. So much for the sauna.

This has been so unfair. The sauna has immunized me against the harshness of what I've written, with the mellowing effects. But not you, gentle reader. James, you still there? It goes to show the power of sauna. I'm feeling strong. That's right, James, you have one as well, don't you. I wasn't thinking. So get your white ass in there.

Mull all this over and report back. The rest of you, well, maybe you can use mine. Or, then, there's ketchup. Natural mellowing agents, I've heard. A home remedy from the Wobegoners, a peaceful tribe. They use it in their casseroles. Wait a minute, maybe we can douse Republicans in that. I'm open to suggestions here.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

White Women

White women, I want a divorce. Have the complaint right here. Treason. Infidelity. Disorderly Conduct. Irregularity. Default. Obfuscation. Embezzlement. Unpredictability. Infringement. Fraternization. Obstruction. Truancy. Alienation and Affectation. Promiscuity. Callousness. Excessive use of Force. Heterophobia. Failure to Yield. Going Right and Red. Sleeping at the Wheel and on the Job and with the Enemy. Snoring. It's all there. Civil, Criminal, Custodial. White collar, Blue collar, Clerical, Eton, Nehru. I'm throwing the book. You hurt my feelings. And, by the way, I want full custody of Junior, the Democratic Party.

You lost me, girls--man, that feels good--when you voted for what's-his-ass, a known mass-murderer and war criminal, in '04. Thirty years or so of hearing how you were the good guys and then that. Girls is good, boys is bad. Guilty until proven innocent, if you're a guy. I'll admit it, we screwed up. What with interminable wars and the Holocaust and other mishaps. And you said, and I believed, that it was a guy thing. Testosterone. So you not only didn't get the job done you invalidated that argument and implicated yourselves in the whole history of human grief. Lysistrata, righteous girl, where are you now?

Okay I'm trying to understand it. Maybe you wanted to mother him. After all he was pretty arrested. As in he wasn't toilet-trained. His whole life he just shit on everything. And they'd come riding in on their horses, James Baker and the Texas ass-wipes, toilet paper streaming, and clean him up and put him back on his feet. Anyway that last time, I mean, there wasn't enough toilet paper in Texas. He shit the whole world. They tried. There was that panel or committee, bi-partisan, and James Baker was on it. Got ignored. Pivotal moment. The music wells up in the movie version. He's ready for Wheaties. He knows he's a man. What dwama.

I don't think that was it. It doesn't ring right. I think you bought the machismo. But it was fake. Just some frat boy stuck in a cave in developmental and evolutionary time. You need to make it right. To start with you need to go global, galactic, whole-hog, big picture. Maybe intergalactic, the full Douglas Adams. Blow it open. Stop talking about women's issues and the vajayjays. Too parochial, especially that last one. Americans don't want to hear it. They're tired of it. Offends the sense of who we are. Talk about the country, the planet, freedom, democracy, justice, fate, destiny, sin and redemption, profit and loss. The whole, huge enchilada. Strange, the dems really are individualists, and they talk constantly about their beloved groups and narrow issues. And the other side, they're all about their virtual plantation or country club, selfish as hell, and they talk about freedom, fairness, democracy. Oh, inverted world. It won't matter. If we can win we'll just do what we want, women's issues and all. That's what they do. They just do all the wrong stuff.

Damn, that "we" word. I forgot, we are separated. Shit! Hard to avoid. Oh, well. I guess you're still kind of family. Black women been saving your white asses, by the way. Righteous voters if ever there were. Make the statistics look way better on the women's front. Black people as well, too parochial. All about the black stuff. But they get a pass. They were so screwed for so long and so insidiously. Still are. At least they vote Democratic. You think the black guys would be in prison if the white boys didn't want them there? Come on. They're concentration camps. And the white boys, they're privatizing the thing. Going to make money on it. Our despised tax dollars into their pockets. Republican pockets. And that's the tip of a very big iceberg.

They hate welfare but love prisons. I don't have much in the way of illusions about welfare but it beats prisons, and jobs beats all. No such thing as bad jobs just bad pay, that's what I think. So all the black guys get jobs. Public works, post office, whatever. When all this got started, affirmative action and such, I wanted to get straight, get honest about it and, let's say, turn the post office over to black people. Don't fire anybody, just hire only black people. Why not? Makes as much sense as anything. And UPS. Wait, we don't own that. But the black guys look great in those uniforms.

So I guess, to be fair, we make sure all the black women have jobs as well, with decent pay. And the unemployed whites. EUREKA! Jobs for everybody. Copyright. Patent Pending. Am I thinking straight? Can't be that simple. Follow that line of reasoning back for me, will you. You say Paul Krugman was sitting there in a wing chair? Who's that heckler? Rush? He says there's not enough money? Well, he's got plenty. What did he ever contribute? And that's a big fat idiot's lying liar's lie. There's tons of money. Pallets. Like what they littered on Iraq. Our huge inheritence, built up over generations by Americans who actually got stuff done. They want to spend it on their pet project, the Cheneyfeld Memorial Maginot Defense Initiative/Corporate Feeding Trough, a massive sink-hole, and enriching people who don't contribute shit. Your money, our money, what's left of it.

Anyway, that was the WWII plan, as far as ending the Great Depression, employ everybody. I don't think we need a war to do that, white boys, and it worked good. Everything was better for everybody. Find fault with that, morons. Sorry, that was mean. We really are all in this together. But it's so wearing, sometimes, trying to talk sense, a lonely voice in the black forests of the Boehnerites. A little guy in the tatters of his health care, at the soaring walls of the citadel of Rove's Reich.  I'm tempted to hitch a ride off the planet, with Zooey Deschanel. Oh, I bet she's got a guy. There's a couple women out there, though, been on my radar. Oh, darn. Those white women. I like them. I can't help it. Let's see if we can get it done. Together.

on the importance of not being earnest

Earnestness is a drag. It's not entertaining. Must to avoid.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Pledges

Don't tell anyone but I tapped the cable running from Koch boy headquarters to Grover's Corners, cracked their code, and I now have full access to the darkest crevices in the darkest place anywhere, Norquist's Noodle. I hear everything. They keep saying the same thing over and over: they want more money.

Or maybe it was honey. Here I expected all kinds of high flown discussions about what was good and right, think tank stuff. I mean they spend a bunch of money, hire all these people with advanced degrees from Patrick Henry or wherever and talk about freedom and the constitution and the founding fathers and all the big stuff in their official publications and pronouncements, and then they just talk trash when you're not looking.

And, you know, I'm not naive but I expected a little more respect. For something. It kind of turned my stomach after a while but they don't give a shit about anything. Not that I could discover.

Grover has a closet full of tee shirts that say "It's Unanimous!," in fond expection of the day when all his charges vote the same all the time, and the few lost lambs that don't already take the pledge succumb. What a photo op when they all show up in the hallowed halls. There's frat paraphernalia, Kappa, Kappa, Kappa, all over the place.

And woe, and I mean woe--distilled, concentrated, ready to be unleashed--to those that don't toe. The new breed. Kamikaze drones. They fly right into you in the primaries. Kind of unstable and hard to control but super lethal. What's a little collateral damage among friends, among allies. There's different models, even. The T-2 (pekoe) and so on. It's a hive. Who cares if you lose a few, long as the immense queen, the breeder, is safe in Wichita, or wherever.

They're an invasive exotic. No known control. Don't fuck with the hive. Interestingly, they talk the worst trash about their own guys. Just dripping. They can't believe how cheaply they could buy them, I guess. They underpriced themselves, the drones clubbers. And the religious crowd, they really despise them. The nicknames. Yikes. I don't even like them, their guys, and I couldn't stand it.

The thing they can't believe, and I don't blame them, is how easy it was to get the entire working apparatus, of the most powerful country ever, by the nuts. And they're pretty good-sized gonads, last time I looked, what with the nukes. It all comes down to the pledge. It was so simple. Most all of the the elected representatives of the red persuasion now take two oaths when they show up in the revered capitol.

They take the oath of office, the boilerplate, as they call it, and then toddle over to Grover's place, kowtow, and take another oath. The real oath. The one that's binding. Enforcible. Ever hear Grover brag about putting the screws down? Chilling. And they call this democracy. Not the old red, white and blue, as I thought of it. But, hey, it's a new world. Virtual everything. Or maybe a new world order.

Sorry, I just woke up. Have I been writing in my sleep again? Oh, darn. That happens sometimes. Sleepy. Too tired to revise. So, whatever I've written, there may be elements of reverie, facts may be suspect, but you be the judge. You know how dreams are. Impressionistic. Dozing off again. Sorry, that you, Puck? Oh, shit. Mickey Rooney. Ian? Now, wait, Helen Mirren? There we go. I can sleep now.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Charming Billy

This is outside of my expertise, but I think Billy Graham is going to Hell. To be with Ruth. Is that mean? Okay, it was in a whisper. Somewhere in there the man went over the line. What's his name--oh, I've repressed it--but the guy who won or at least stole the '00 presidential election, and went on to wreck the nation and kill tens of thousands of people, aren't you supposed to not do that? And didn't Billy help get him there, big time? And did he ever repent? Not publicly, that I know of.

I don't get the idea that you can die assured of salvation. I would be quaking in my Birks. Talk about presumption. And evidently Ruth expressed concern, before she passed, that America had lost its way or broke bad or whatever. I don't think that countries exist, as a unit of account, in the Christian scheme. Countries don't go to heaven or hell. Salvation is personal, period. Point is, to the extent that the US has any claim to be a Christian country, it's about individualism. And standards of behavior. It follows.

The Republicans are about anything but individualism. They're about identification. About conformity. Unanimity. Power is policy. Privilege is principle. Or maybe the other way around. Anyway, there is one way to do things, their way, the right way. So what happens in their heads when they screw up? Like throwing the whole world into an economic death spiral with their deregulatory madness? Millions of people went over the line from subsistence to starvation on that one. DENIAL.

And isn't that kind of unchristian? Aren't you supposed to own your shit, as in repent of your sins? Not in their air force. They think they're right irrespective of how they behave. They've got the franchise, own the patent, got the card stamped. So of course, if any Democrat, on a bad hair day, criticizes the USA in any way, they're all over it. Apologizing for America! When really the Democrats just believe that we're as right as we act. Makes you sad for the countries that have to deal with us. Ever been involved with someone who thinks they're existentially right?

So, they're a little touchy about dissent. As in they want to annihilate you if you disagree with them. And do they ever love privilege. Something for nothing. God's way, I guess, according to John Calvin or someone. But the Christian way is not tribal, where rightness is a group attribute, and the Republicans are tribalists, corporatists and elitists. It's a bad sign when people worry more about other people's morality than their own, and the Republicans excel at this.

The Christian way actually gives you something that looks like an ecosystem. Multiplicity. Diversity. That's the brilliance of a free system, relatively unencumbered by privilege. Everyone can find their place, make their contribution. And benefit and be held responsible, as an individual. It doesn't give you (the-name-that-must-not-be-spoken) as president. That's privilege. Didn't he put out a book, "Revision Points"? This guy will never own his stuff. Lost cause. God may forgive him. Not my call.

Freedom gives you diversity. And what's true of your stocks, if you have any, is true of everything, there's strength and stability in diversity. It's nature's way, God's way, but not the Republican way. The Republican way gives you a weed free lawn of white men, the most unstable thing ever. And, according to the laws of ecology, it takes an enormous energy subsidy to run. Hence their sucking up of the resources of the world, all into their death star.

And this is what Billy bought into. Sorry, I don't mean to pick on you, Billy, but it's supposed to bother us when we screw up, and you should come out and say "I backed the wrong rhino," or whatever. Best wishes to you, really. No hard feelings. You must be old as hell.

Help Wanted

I have ideas for plays that I come up with and evolve to an extent but don't have time, or probably the skill, to write up for presentation, way off-Broadway. Like, Carrboro off-Broadway. So, if you know anyone with the time and the skill, send them my way.

The first is DAMN YANKEES, on the new dawn of the South. It has a chorus of Southern White Boys (SWBs), in hula skirts and drag, and a hit song, Yankees is So Stupid.

This one is more presentation than plot, with a SOUTH PACIFIC feel, and is an evocation of how great it is to see the plantation economy reborn and to have all the black guys in jail. There's a black guy in the wings, of course, with a wang that makes the white boys wince. A mechanical phallus is employed. He makes out and makes off with Fannie Mae, the wife of a member of the chorus.

On balance, though, the SWBs are feeling triumphant. We're torturing people, the USA, a great sign. And there's so much else to celebrate. The unprecedented concentration of wealth, the attack on anything that helps anybody. Anybody that needs help, that is.

But there's an irresolvable tension. I mean, really a sea of the shit. And it's structural. Ain't going nowhere. When you buy your mojo at gun shows, well, the cool thing is you can buy more mojo. The problem is that somebody could possibly take it away.

Woe to them that try.

Yankee scum probably never even read Sir Walter Scott. Don't understand Southern Culture. No sense of honor. And they're so fucking sentimental. Damn Yankees! Who cares some turd in Bangladesh dies making my bermuda shorts. They're turds, really. Sorry, got to go to church. Pray to Jesus. No darkies there. And not in my schools. And not in my pools.

Then there's another play, DOG EAT DOG. That's the name of a PAC, man. Who knows where the money came from--the Koch cloud financing program, probably--but the lawyers are the best out there. The SWBs are thrilled. Gonna sue. Ain't nothing in the Constitution says you can't fight dogs. That's in the articles, in the brief, that exact language. Powerful stuff. Convincing on the face for those that knows, the Real Americans.

And it goes to the Supreme Court--of the US--and they're hung, four to four. Clarence is on medical leave. But--lo--he's lowered, slowly, magisterially, down in his chair, from above, center stage, his crotch bandaged. Clarence will decide. He will even speak. And he does. Dog fighting is legal, he decrees.

And, as the patriotic music wells up, he orates: dog fighting is the most American of sports, the real national pastime, the sport that embodies the real ethos of America, the Randian competition that makes us great. Do or die--in the ditch. Makers and takers. The strong and the weak. Supermen and scum. And the dogs? They're valuable assets, Clarence points out, and therefore very well treated.

Like to see you make this into a Capra movie. There's a chorus, of course, with sound-effects (lots of growls), and various subplots. Butch in the chorus is gay, it turns out. And the others are all having anal sex with someone, mostly their wives.

Clarence, by the way, if you were concerned, has had plastic surgery. To shorten his dick. A mechanical phallus is employed. Okay, I like them. Saw one used in a presentation of Aristophanes' THE CLOUDS, at UD (Dayton), back in the day. Great production. And we think "the cloud" is new. The Greeks discovered it all.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Harley

My dog has dementia. "Canine Cognitive Disorder," I guess. I used to walk him, most mornings, up the trail, the old wagon road to Hillsborough, as far as the headwaters of Morgan's Creek. He could always get a drink there, even in really cold weather. He never got lost. At least not that he let on. I would see a brown streak shooting through the beautiful woods every once in a while, that was all. He ran his ass off. Now he gets lost on my property. I think maybe even in the house. I'm not sure. My kind neighbors called today to tell me that he was walking, "pacing," back and forth at the other end of the place, inside the fence. I came home and rescued him.

I was going to write about "instant forgetting" and the Republicans and the deficits they so obviously created and now want to remedy on the backs of those they've already screwed, and the stunning gall of Paul Ryan and his ilk in calling themselves fiscal anything, but the dog just makes me too sad. I don't have the stomach. He's so sweet and appreciative of everything, but he's really out of it, and so much so like a human. He's really helpless. There's an occasional turd-drop in the house, and he's night-active, which is a change, so I'm having my sleep interrupted, and he falls down and crashes into things. Three times he's gotten stuck under my bed. He never was that great a dog, really. Hard to engage. Handsome, though. And we have a lot of history.

When my last dog, Edgar, died I was amazed and embarrassed at how hard it hit me. He was a cool guy. We would ride the town in the Miata with the top down and he would know people I didn't know. They knew him through affiliation with his previous owner, Clarissa "Gooey" Engstrom, who left him with me when she went to Scotland to study with the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep. Gooey was going to go to Pakistan and use her DVM as a donkey doc for the folks there, eventually. I think politics prevented, but she had a very interesting life thereafter until she ended it herself. There's an article or obit on her online. It seemed to me that something died with her, and I was just an acquaintance, but Gooey could affect you that way.

Edgar was a fetch monster. Stick or ball, on land or lake, he would bring it back. It was great for me. Who knew you could hit tennis balls with a golf club to such effect. Had to train the dog not to lunge at the ball pre-whack, though, or I might have taken off his nose. And the tennis racket I had used to fight the carpenter bees was used to hit the fuzzy ball way out into the lake on the property now owned by the Tobens. Great. Wear him out and cool him off at the same time. It was the last thing we did together. He got out of the lake and collapsed, finally. Bad cancer.

So I'll have to have Harley have the shot, one of these days. It will be hard. I don't know how hard, truly, and I don't know when. I'd like to get him through the winter. It's good to have time to get used to the idea, and to take care of the guy. He doesn't have to worry that Ryan and the Boehnerites will keel haul his health care or hang it from the highest yard arm, after all, or impale it on Vlad's sharpest stake, be they on land.

What the fuck is wrong with these people, anyway, I wonder. Do they watch Capra's classic at Christmas and then go out and vote for Pottersville or Boehnerburg or Kochtown knowingly? Do they root for the flying monkeys, the wicked witch? The banker scumball in STAGECOACH? Do their hearts wither in disappointment as Scrooge's melts? Do they dream of remakes of MR SMITH and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU? How would they cast YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU? Oh, Robert Preston, if only he could.

I once met the man, Frank Capra. He came to Xavier when I was there to give a talk and stayed at the Jesuit residence, where I worked as a receptionist. They failed to get word out and almost nobody showed up for the talk. My heart is softening again thinking of the massive compassion and humanity of his movies. I won't lambast the luddites no more. I think I love my dog, and I'll go care for him. I hope someone will care for me when the time comes.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Dayton

Once in a while I get on a jag thinking about the old home town: Dayton, Ohio. If ever a place got collateralized, downsized, de-industrialized, pink-slipped, made redundant and just generally screwed I think Dayton is it. Dayton had the highest percentage of patents per head of any city in the country in 1900, I've been told. The Wright Brothers didn't come from there for nothing. In 2003, anniversary of the fabled first flight, I tried to explain to some tarheels--tactfully, I thought--what the Wrights did just do. However you describe it, it was to Dayton what tobacco was to North Carolina. It was everything. Whole basis of the economy.

I'm fine with "First in Flight." You can have it. I used to picture billboards at NC's borders with the face of Jesse Helms (back when), and a caption reading "From the State that Gave You Lung Cancer," but that's an aside. The Wrights were amazing. One example: when they realized that the available lift tables were useless they made their own apparatus, a wind tunnel, and figured it out. They also figured out that a propeller is a rotary wing. Lift and thrust. Different applications of the same principle. Their propellers are efficient even by modern standards. And they were the first to control an airplane, or even try, in three dimensions--three axis control. Everyone else was trying to fly Fiats. Good for them they didn't get it up. It would have ended poorly.

Anyway, they were great, and so was Dayton. But, you know, when Rove's Reich began its revolutionary driving down of all that is good and decent and productive Dayton and places like it were doomed. When you believe, as an article of faith, de facto, a priori, that whatever big business wants is "good for America," and big business wants nothing more than cheap labor, and cheap labor is plentiful in China and elsewhere, your jobs are toast. It goes back beyond Rove, really, but it culminates with these scoundrels. And it was probably somewhat reversible until his invasion of the job snatchers.

I haven't been back to Dayton since dad died, in 1989, and I don't have many ties there, but I do have a smart phone. I download apps and mess with them. So I download "Realtor.whatever" and look at houses in Chapel Hill for some reason. And then--I mean, how many ZIP's do you know?--I look in Dayton. Not good. My part of town is in foreclosure, pretty much. Great houses on the block for nothing. Siebenthaler's North Store, on their old family property, looks bad, and is chopped up into little commercial rental spaces. Man, it was beautiful in the 60's. I played there as a kid, un-permitted, and worked there once. Salem Mall is gone. And so on.

And I think about Dayton because of Bob Pollard, the greatest writer of rock songs ever. I would love his stuff anyway, I'm sure, but he's so deeply Dayton, down to the Converse on his feet, back when. The dirt, the vast energy, the ringing chords of industry, the sadness, the sadness, the sadness. Even when it works. The roar of jets, and the flak thrown up at the brave factory pilots by Rove's blood-sucking hooligans. Maybe I'm reading that last one in. When it doesn't work? He's there, I'm not. Got to be hard.

I think he had the same sports-driven intense boy friendships I had, for sure. Did the crazy stuff. Played ball day and night. I don't want to think about it. Some of the shit I did horrifies me, and I miss it so it aches. I may have played ball against Bob. Those loose summer league games when I pitched for Chaminade.

You hear about the banality of evil, the strange and unexpected ordinariness of it. Look at those Republicans. Pillsbury dough boys from hell. But the banality of genius? The Wrights were so normal. And Bob Pollard. Working class kid. Not what you'd expect, if you tried to reverse engineer the guy from his output. But, man, what songs. I've known people with such dexterity and physical coordination--my father was one--that they couldn't seem to do anything ungracefully. Pollard writes great songs while face-planting on Bud Lite, or so it seems. Pollard's opus has a kind of stunning, inevitable, aboriginal authenticity. And it's huge. Really, I'm in awe of the guy.

I collect paintings. I think I get art. My friend Marvin Saltzman--the real deal. And a normal guy, more or less. Cranky normal, sweet normal, caustic normal. And his paintings have great depth.  Pollard? No clue about the man, really. But the music is remarkable. Great depth. Layers. Poetry. Emotional range. It's all there. The music of the spheres. Cubes, maybe, for the creationist crowd. And it captures Dayton, for me, existentially. Somehow embodies it. Listen for yourself. Give him time. It was an acquired taste for me. Life's a collage, you know. We paste it all together best we can.

With the advent of the republican administration in Raleigh I had to stop with NPR. I was going to shoot somebody. Not really. But maybe somebody named Goolsby. The Republicrats must have gladiatorial training camps hidden somewhere in the mountains, among the militias. They're drones. They must smoke cigars in their drones' clubs. Jeeves cleans them up and looses them on the world. Berties with bludgeons. Woosters with wrecking balls.

Giving up on NPR was hard. I had to start to listen to music in the mornings instead, on weekdays, which seemed kind of decadent at first. But, whatever voice is guiding Robert Ellsworth Pollard, Jr, praise be to it. Bob has saved my ass for now. Thank you, Bob, and God bless you.

OOPS!

Okay, I'm totally new to this, but here goes:

Here are notes on the national insanity, probably provoked by the horrible spectacle of the Boehnerites' latest efforts to de-modernize, medievalize, deconstruct and reconstruct the US Government into a facilitator of the planters' paradise, with the darkies or chinamen or whatever singing melodiously in the fields while the white boys play golf and eat steaks. I mean, we're there already but it can clearly get worse, or they wouldn't be working so hard to make it so. The "Reign of Error" is a nod I guess to Thomas Frank.

The wrecking crew's tee shirts all say "OOPS!" in large letters. Half a million dead Iraqis. OOPS! A trillion dollars up in smoke. OOPS! World economy on the ropes. Matching his and hers OOPS! tee shirts to Phil and Wendy Gramm on that one! The deficit debacle. OOPS! It's a Republican Deficit after all. Their creation. All the while the white boys play golf, eat steaks, and paint pussycats, evidently.

Their fear is that people will one day have a "blink" moment, an instance of zen mind clarity, look up from their plate of palaver, and ask themselves if someone like Tom DeLay ever deserved to be one of the most powerful people in the world. I mean, really. Which of these doesn't belong?
1. Thomas Jefferson
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. John F Kennedy (even)
4. Tom DeLay

Sorry, but the man is an irredeemable piece of shit. Ditto Lee Atwater (was), Newt, Jack, Rove, Rush, Hannity.... Ralph Reed? Who the hell let him off the used car lot. They've got the troops, you have to admit. Das Boot. A great tactical team in the service of a strategic nightmare squad.

When your only tools are a wrecking ball and jack hammer everything looks like a burned out building. Oh, wait, there are people in there! Children and Oldies last! Every man for himself! Sorry, you say there's assets in there? I'm going in! Personal Property first!

And meanwhile The Hammer, King Herod in Hush Puppies--Hush Puppies with cleats--carries on in the self assurance that he has a personal relationship with The Man. The King will come again, Sir Tom, and you will not see Him. He will come to the sweatshops, not the pro shops, to those with nothing, not those with platinum cards and their white legs sticking out. Oh, they love their little balls. Whack, Whack, Whack. Let the darkies get the divots!