Pelosi assumes the position

From today's NYT:

Pelosi stopped short of condemning the president's call for slowing the nation's growth rate in carbon emissions.

"In seeking solutions," she said, ''we need to shorten the distance between inconceivable and inevitable.''

Yep. The inconceivable is that the doormatocats will do anything beyond muttering incoherently in a way designed not to offend anyone -- not the people who vote for them, not their corporate masters, much less their republican overlords.

The inevitable is that they will lay down on the porch to facilitate those who enjoy stepping on them.

Speaking of stupid

I can't help noticing, despite the general silence of the leftish blogs, as well as my own efforts to avoid reading the news, that the doormatocrat party has suffered yet another humiliating defeat by Bush and the republicans. After threatening, and actually voting to withhold funding for military operations in Iraq, they totally caved, gave the idiot everything he wanted, and pocketed $20 billion or so in pork at the same time just to add a whiff of corruption to their aura of imbecility.

How fucking stupid can they be? They chose to fight a high profile battle which they had no chance whatsoever to win. The troops would be funded. They said so from the outset. The question wasn't if they would surrender, it was when? And how?

And Karl Rove must have devised the "and how?" The Democrats did't just surrender, they profited from it, lined their pockets, and/or those of their campaign contributors. Can they really not see that trap? Wasn't Dick Cheney daring them to walk into it a clue? It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which huge blinking signs with the word "trap" point at a trap, yet Daffy Duck walks right into it anyway. They're a bunch of maroons, that's what they are.

It's not like Bush and friends are all powerful super geniuses. They are idiots, widely hated and ridiculed. Losing to them is like getting beat up by a mentally challenged 1st grader. Could the democrats be any more stupid and weak? I don't see how.

The only explanation is that they are not a real opposition party. They are not laying there on the porch with a sign on their back saying "step on me (only $20 billion}" because they are stupid and weak. Who could be that stupid and weak? They are to the Republicans what the Washington Generals are to the Harlem Globetrotters, a team paid to lose.

Poetics, the sequel

Another Sunday has rolled around with no original content on Chuckling, the on-line magazine. Since last week's poem went over so well, I will offer up for sacrifice the other one I've written. If you don't like them, don't worry. I've worked on each for about four years, so it will likely be 2011 before you see another.

It's kind of fun to tell stories this way, with more elevated forms of language, but I won't be putting out the requsite "slim volume of poetry" anytime soon. I don't even submit them to magazines, other than Chuckling, which will publish just about any crap I submit.

In response to several emails I recieved on Pan, although my soul may well be wracked with the tortures of the damned, these poems are just writing exercises for the most part. Pan, like much poetry, takes the perspective of a mythical personage, in this case a forest god tempted by the sea. On the Eleventh tells a similar story.


On the Eleventh

My heart
is confusion
together with my soul
It is desolate
like consuming fire

Conceal yourself for a little while
in the midst of these coals
where living creatures,
torches, as it were,
burn in place of my grief

A vision will come
Life and old age
Counsel and prudence
Secrets of all living things

The days will hasten on fast,
draw together, bone to bone,
joint to joint,
sinews come upon them

To those without sense
from the earth
there will be
nothing
For them, graves

Something completely different

If you've been dropping by regularly, you've probably noticed that I've been struggling for content lately. I'm going through one of those phases where I get so wrapped up in more ambitious projects that I find it difficult to manage a little essay for poor Chuckling, the on-line magazine.

So rather than write a blog post, I will share with you this poem. Please do not get your hopes up. I am not much of a poet. This is really only the second poem I have put together. I've been working on it off and on for several years. It's still not finished, but so what. A week has passed and I have resolved to post something every week, so this is it for this week.

Enjoy, or ridicule. Whatever.

Pan

The harbor lays quiet
I feel a pleasant inward shivering
a thick mist floats up from the sea
and damns the forest
behind a wall of murk

Mist and fog
day like night
a vessel begins to move
but soon it disappears
and the birds fall silent

Then comes a storm
a play for me to stand and watch
the sea flings up
fantastic dancing figures
in seething mist

The heavy rush of wind
the cheerless cold
then all things quiet and still
rain and wind have done their work
my soul is tense

The sun tells false time today
a secret stillness falls
I ponder and am silent
my eyes follow the passing storm
still calling from the drying ground

I find something
in every change of light
the air so full of whisperings
and echos
floating out to sea

I'm burning up my life
for the sake of what?
nights of desolate dreams
a hot breeze stands about my head
the close foul breath of last year's wind

That was no true sun
to show the way
I took the wrong road
with the greatest calm
and came upon this un-true sea

Where all things change a little every day
and the sky is dressed in gold and mauve
and the snow has turned to water
and the ice has loosed its hold
and trickled away

No one ever hears it
and no one ever thinks it
and still it trickles on
this veil of murmuring
always calling me

That little sound of water
the time that went so quickly
the birds that all went silent
that sweetish rotting smell
of dead leaves in the wood

This mysterious current of air
this breath of something strange
these nights and all warm hours
that spirit wanders silent
seeing all through inflamed loins

Hearing music through the fog
the birds of passage gone
yet I do not go away
these familiar trees
mean too much

A snapshot of our lives

From the Washington Post:

Not waiting underground

Here are a few pics from my annual Cherry Blossum photo project. You may notice that I've developed a photographic technique that captures something of the afterlife. If you look even a little hard you can see a few ghosts. My damned head is still spinning.

TK

As is not unusual, I have started making grandiose plans for writing projects, which is not a good idea for a blog. I will try to dole it out in small pieces. We’ll see how it goes.

The pieces are these:

1. The purpose of art. Why write at all? Or take photos? Or do anything for that matter? Someone, I think it was a commenter at Alicublog, wrote that Kurt Vonnegut marveled at how much enthusiasm and sense of purpose a dog could have for playing with a brown rubber representation of an ice cream cone and commented that if he, Kurt Vonnegut, had spent his life happily carrying a brown rubber ice cream cone from one closet to the next, it wouldn’t have made one iota of difference to the universe. And Kurt Vonnegut said a lot of other things about the uselessness of life and art, yet he lived and worked most of his adult life as an artist.

To help me in this analysis, I will lean heavily on the thought of Victor L. Frankl and his book Man’s Search for Meaning. This book has been strongly recommended to me at various times throughout my life. I saw it for sale on the street yesterday and bought it. Couldn’t have come at a better time.

2. You may have noticed that the chuckling character hails from a small town in the heartland and is still in touch with those roots. If so, you’ve probably also noticed that I have unresolved issues with my upbringing there as well as the current environment and the lives of family and friends. People there suffer so horribly. Why?

It may seem a trivialization of Frankl to compare his years as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp to the petty existential angst of the spoiled consumerist heartland, but I think Frankl would be okay with it. Apropos, he writes:

To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. if a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and consious mind, no mater whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

I’d like to examine this phenomenon at some depth. And believe me, there are some depths in which to delve.

3. I recently read The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell. In it, Schell presents military history as a paradigm of progress for non-violence. It contains some very interesting ideas. How does the history of non-violence and the reality of an unconquerable world relate to the purpose of art and the suffering of the heartland.

Well, we’ll just have to see.

Backwater hues

Click here, right here for your backwater hues.

Laugh like hell

I haven't read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut obiburaries. Beside Roy's, I hadn't actually read any until I came across this observer piece by George Saunders. If you only have to read one, this is most likely as good as any.

Yes, a Vonnegut day is just what we need. For those of you who haven't read all of his books, drop your preconceptions and get started. My only advice is to read them backwards from Hocus Pocus. Everyone babbles on and on about Slaughterhouse Five. My advice is to not read it just to be contrary. But everything else, go for it.

Old stand-bys

You might find this little movie interesting. Made shortly after the killings at Columbine, it considers the threat posed by lonely Engish majors with violent stories kicking around in their heads and discusses strategies for dealing with the problem.

Notes from behind the headlines

For this piece, I will go into high pundit mode and extract meaningful insights about the state of the union from anecdotal evidence obtained from drive-by interactions with real people. In case you haven’t read between the lines of my recent posts, I have been on a trip to the nation's heartland.

One of the great things about high punditry is that I don’t have to be structurally original, or even interesting, and I can say what I really think. None of that chuckling shit. No rambling intro. No obscure meaning. No car chases or explosions. No paragraphs with 500 commas. Just straight talk from the commanding heights of punditry.

Since I have the freedom to be unoriginal, I’ll use the old “glance at the headlines” structure to make my insightful observations concerning the beliefs of millions of people based on a few persoal anecdotes. This is not entirely a cheap literary trick. Although I am revising this writing, I really did start by glancing at the headlines and realizing that they were representative of what people were talking about out in the heartland. We east coast journalists in our brownstones and lofts tend to forget that there are real people leading nuanced lives somewhere inside those headlines. Most of the real caricatures are either politicians or journalists, not just angry losers who obsessively listen to hate radio and watch Fox News.


Gas prices about to take spring jump


I had to laugh like hell when I read that. In the coming paragraphs I will discuss a number of headlines and how they relate to any number of individuals, but every single person I interviewed on my travels bitched about the price of gas.

Everyone in the heartland drives. People drive three blocks to the grocery for a pack of cigarettes. They drive to their neighbor's. Quite a few of them drive 50 miles, or even twice that, a day to their jobs and back. And most of them drive gas guzzling pickup trucks or SUV's.

The one extreme was this: I was interviewing a bunch of blue collar types over a six pack or two of lite beer. They were, like everybody else, bitching about the price of gas. Then someone made a snide comment about how we went to all that trouble to invade Iraq and didn’t even get the cheap gas we were promised. How’s that war working out otherwise, I asked. They just snorted in their beer.

On the other extreme, during a long series of interviews with a Republican party activist, he volunteered the explanation that gas would be under $1 a gallon if they’d only let us drill in the national parks. I had to laugh like hell again and snorted in my beer to boot. If that’s all they got for the party line these days, the party’s in a hell of a lot of trouble.

But those are just the extremes. Everybody else just bitched. Price a gas went up 5 cents overnight. Yep. Fucking shit. Yep.

From my high pundit perch, I pronounce that the Republicans are in deep shit over the price of gas.


163rd alerted for new tour



Eight U.S., four British soldiers killed

Honor guards now meet the slain

In an about-face by the U.S. government four years into the war in Iraq, America’s fallen troops are being brought back to their families about charter jets instead of ordinary commercial flights, and the caskets are being met by honor guards in white gloves instead of baggage handlers with forklifts. That, according to the newspaper.

One of my family's friends joined the Marines and is going to Iraq. He had a little time off after boot camp. He's a nice kid, much nicer than me. He saw that my mom's tv was getting old and he bought her a new one. I interviewed many of his family and friends and pparently everyone who knows him loves him. And they are a flag waving bunch, not a college degree among them. And they don't drink lattes. They prefer their coffee weak, with lots of sugar. And no wine, red or white. Lite beer or a Jack and Coke on special occasions. Yet to a person they were furious that he had joined the military. They thought he was an idiot. How could he be so fucking stupid? That's the question I heard again and again as people sadly shook their heads. If a Democrat went on tv and talked like those people, he or she would be apologizing profusely for several news cycles. But these people of the heartland aren't going to be apologizing to anyone.

Why did they think it was so stupid for a nice young kid to go to Iraq? Two reasons.

One, the obvious, that he could get himself killed or fucked up for life in a stupid war that wasn't doing any good for anybody. You can fool them for awhile, but they don't stay fooled indefinitely, and when they realize they were fooled, they don't look kindly on th e assholes that fooled them. Nobody believes a word the government or tv tells them about Iraq anymore.

Two, they felt the boy was stupid for believing the recruiter's lies. Those are their words, not mine. These people generally aren't very good at getting their facts straight, so this isn't about facts. I don't know whether the recruiter lied to the boy or not. They are, however, sincere in their beliefs, and for the most part, it's their beliefs they act on. Facts be damned.

The boy, they said, was promised an education and career in electronics. He's getting four weeks training as a radio operator and will be radio operating on convoys in Iraq. I guess it's like Vietnam where they put the fresh meat on the most dangerous missions. The theory being that if you are going to die in hell, it's better to get it over with quickly. You really have to shake your head and admire those boys. What a world it might be if their best instincts were used for good instead of murder. Unfortunately, this isn't that world.

Anyway, from my high pundit perch, I seriously intone that everyone knows that Iraq is fucking fucked and anyone who says otherwise is considered an idiot and a tool. Not by us high pundits in New York City, mind you, but by the lite beer drinkers out there on the highway in their pickup trucks. The beating muscles of the heatland. You know, real people. And women too. White.


More factory layoffs coming

Whirlpool says slump may be temporary

Hancock Fabrics closing local store


One of the first things I'm always struck by when I spend time in the heartland is the abundance of mansions. A three thousand square foot house with a two car garage on an acre of land is not at all unusual. The countryside is, in fact, scattered with them. Even in the bad neighborhoods in towns people live in sizable houses and all of these places have boats, jet skis, treadmill's, tanning beds, whirlpools, swimming pools, playgrounds, or any number of other luxuries littering their yards and garages. Of course there are plenty of apartment dwellers and trailer park residents, but for the most part you don't see too much of them. You really have to look hard.

But people I interviewed are very concerned about their ability to maintain their lifestyles. Every day there are stories in the newspaper about factories and stores closing down. Shuttered strip malls are common sights on the edge of towns. What was historically the largest employer in the area is up for sale. A Saudi-owned conglomerate is reportedly interested. Other factories have been sold to foreign companies. Many people have been laid off over the last five years. Many more have had to change jobs and take a radical pay cut in the process. The local Republican activist complained about the influx of illegal immigrants to the area and hinted that they were the cause of people's unease, but the issue never came up among working people bitching about the economy. The day may come when pickup driving Americans start fighting for those farm jobs and nursing home work, but we aren't there yet.

From the heights of high punditry, I declare that ordinary Americans are not yet there on "free" trade but are ripe for understanding. They are beginning to make some hazy connection among factors such as the price of gas, jobs moving overseas, foreign ownership, their deteriorating standard of living, and the war in Iraq, but as yet there has been no cataclysmic event that has caused them to see what's going on. They haven't quite connected the dots between the purported need for America to become more competitive and the fact that that means lower wages, fewer benefits, and environmental degradation. I think they will, but unfortunatley, since there is no political party that represents their interests, I fear they will be ripe targes for demagoguery on these issues and things will get really ugly.

Education official linked to loan probe.

Girl locked in truck bed: Mother faces neglect charge

Schools lose funds

Meth lab busted near school



Patient had rat in mouth: lawsuit

Staffing was so inadequate at a California senior center that a rat crawled into an Alzheimer’s patient’s mouth and diesd there before staff noticed, a lawsuit claims. Says the morning paper.

Health, education, government corruption, drugs, social ills – those are all common topics of conversation. Most everyone is suffering through the drawn out death of a relative or two, wondering when to put grandma in the nursing home, scheming to protect the assets. A lot of women work in crappy jobs just for the health insurance. The price of medicine is insane. Some people actually understand why the doctor prescribes them Nexium when they didn't even complain about heartburn. More will learn. High punditry suggests that people's continuing gullibility concerning the idiotic lies of the drug lobby and their political lackeys will go the way of their gullibility about our string of glorious victories in Iraq. Unfortunately, high punditry must lament the fact that people who may someday become ill are a constituency without a party, so nothing positive will come of it.

Regarding edcuation and child rearing, almost everyone has or knows teenagers who are miserable or doing poorly in school. One rural school had two kids hang themselves in one year. A lot of young girls are cutting themselves. Just about everybody drinks and takes drugs. If not, the doctors prescribe them some.

The common explanation I hear for the sorry state of our youth was that kids these days grew up without ever having heard the word "no." I think there's some truth to that. People I've interviewed out in the heartland over the years really are clueless when it comes to properly raising their children. They plead with them to do right rather than make them, then they overreact and hit or verbally abuse them when their pleading doesn't work. I was there for a week and never saw a single kid eat a single vegetable. And they really do try to give them everything they want, from candy all day long to a car when they turn sixteen. And contrary to popular belief among children, giving a kid everything he or she wants will not make them happy. Quite the contrary.

But even though these problems are the result of stupidity, or more accurately poor education, it's still sad, heartbreakingly so, to see how they suffer, both the parents and the children. And I can't help but contrast that with my own situation. I live in and around one of the most liberal environs on earth. My kids go to one of the most progressive schools on the planet and I spend a lot of time around the children of very wealthy. liberal individuals and know their parents, too. The first thing anyone would note about these children is how happy they are. Yet although their parents have the means, they do not give the kids every plaything they want and they say no to them all of the time. And needless to say, they never hit them and rarely slip into any kind of verbal abuse. They do, however, give themm all the educational opportunities they can afford. They buy them classes, travel, educational camps, after school activities and the like. And if the kid doesn't like it, too bad. But they like it.

The high pundit solemnly intones that the coming generation of severely fucked up kids from the heartland who will have little or no economic opportunity better than joining the marines will not be a happy lot as they age. Problems will ensue, particularly as they note the gap, but fail to understand its cause, between themselves and their liberal breathren in the cities.


Climate report offers bleak outlook


I walked into a supermarket with a local environmentalist I was interviewing. She writes a weekly column for the local newspaper and is subjected to a constant stream of put-downs, eye rolls and verbal abuse. A Republican city councilman was there and called out to her, "how ya gonna save the world in here?" I just had to laugh like hell.

Over lunch, she talked about how the bees were mysteriously disappearing and encouraged me to see An Inconvenient Truth. I hope Bob Somersby isn't reading this because I fear it would give him a hemmorage. She said that she could make no headway with the locals because they all had an intense hatred of Al Gore. Why, I asked. She didn't know.

She had moved there recently and was just getting the group organized. They hadn't even named it yet. She said she was leaning towards something with Gaia in the title and asked my opinion. I said that under no circumstances should any group in these parts have the name Gaia in the title. Sounds like Olde English for gay, if you asked me. I emphasized that, to have any hope of success, they would need to get the concepts of religion, patirotism and militarism in their name. I suggested Patriotic Environmentalist Warriors for Christ and Country (acronym pronounced "puke"), She was not enthused, and was not sure whether or not to be amused.

I was serious though. The problem with people like her is that they don't really want regular people to come to their meetings. They want a nice social event with like-minded friends. They will never make any political headway like that. Change will have to come from elsewhere.

And it might. The lite beer swilling masses made a few comments about climate change. They hadn't seen the movie, and didn't really know squat, but they're pretty much to the point where they'll believe anything that is the opposite of what George Bush says. And the weather has been getting weird...

As pundit on high, I profess that it's nice that some people at least try, though fat log of good it will do them. Unless someone comes up with a full sized pickup that gets 100 miles a gallon, it will be impossible to marshall the hillbillies to support an environmental crusade. An oil crusade, however, is a real possibility. They're not bothered by their belief that we invaded Iraq for cheap gas. They're bothered by the fact that gas is not cheap.

‘Living Last Supper’ adds interpretation of Bible story

Larger venues let churches reach out to masses



It’s sunday morning at Zion Evnagelical United Church of Christ, and the Rev. Bob Walker is preaching about love and devotion, or so we're told in a front page "news" story.

With all the economic problems, social ills, stupid wars, and rotten children, along with the fact that most of the "moral majority" political types have been exposed as sex fiends, drug addicts, or just pathetic excuses for human beings in general, it's not surprising that a lot of people would be searching for a way out of the mess and that preachers with collection plates would be there with some easy answers. I did find it a bit surprising, however, to see how much the newspapers have gotten on the bandwagon. There is a religion section of the paper that pretty much functions as free advertising for various churches and it seems at least one pro-Christian article is on the front page every day. The new license plate prominently features "In God we Trust and an American Flag. Most of the kids that cut themselves, I'm told, are Christians.


Kurt Vonnegut Dies


I haven't said anything The editorial pages because they have no influence whatsoever. Still, it's interesting to see what kind of momentous issues the journalistic elite and the ten or twelve people who read them are using to stroke their mighty brains and weighty consciences. On this particular day, they are concerned about the gagging of David Hicks. Hicks is the Australian gentleman who was the first terrorist to be convicted by an American military tribunal. For his terrible crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to nine months in prison, plus time served, in Australia. The only caveat was that he would be imprisoned for much longer if he accused the U.S. of torturing him during the five years we tortured him at Guantanamo.

Although no one reads that kind of shit, it is still instructive, because if they did, they would see that it was shit. How do we know that he was tortured? Easy, because the United States made him sign an affadavid agreeing not to accuse us of torturing him. Who do they think they fool with that nonsense? How stupid do they think we are? Pretty damn stupid, that's how.

So there you have it. A detailed rendering of the souls of the little people of the heartland, the people behind the headlines by the punditry on high. The Republicans are fucked. Now that you know, please go on about your business. Nothing to see here. Nothing you can do about it.

No fly for you

Via Atrios, this article provides more anecdotal evidence that the government is using the No Fly List to torment its critics. Having gone to a peace march, for example, may be the most common clue to why someone is singled out to be harassed at airports.

You might think that more people – people like our elected representatives, the fucking Democrats if nobody else, or even those running for office, not to mention the media, or even the man on the street halfway through his case of Busch Lite or the soccer mom cheering the little tykes from the sideline, pretty much everyone that might someday voice an opinion of any kind on any subject – would be upset that the government puts peace activists and other advocates of non-violence on terrorist watch lists. If this kind of thing can happen to the least violence-prone among us, imagine what will happen when government sponsored petty retribution gets totally out of line. Making snide comments about the price of gas? No fly for you. Wish that kid you liked didn’t get tricked into enlisting? Upset that he got fucked up? Died? No fly for you. Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth? Grounded, sucker.

Ah, but you are not a peace marcher. Frankly, I’m not either. And I don’t drive. The price of gas doesn’t even affect me. And no one I know is in Iraq. Seriously, nobody that’s anybody to me has died in our wars. And I’d sooner drill a hole in my head than pay $10 to see a slideshow about science. Trust me, I’m not in any danger of being put on the No Fly List because I like to watch Al Gore. So it’s really not my problem.

I’m not even sure they go far enough. So many more people die from car bombs than airplane hijackings. Wouldn’t it make a whole hell of a lot more sense to have a No Drive List? Of course it would. And suicide bombers wear vests. Shouldn’t we have a no vest list? And terrorists carry guns and use ammunition to construct bombs. Shouldn’t there be a no guns and ammo list?

Ha ha, just kidding. A no guns and ammo list? Sorry, that’s just crazy. Anyone who suggest it should be put on the No Fly List, and maybe even the No Drive List, if they haven't been already. It’s all well and good that the government harasses old ladies for peace, but the constitution guarantees all men, even suspected terrorists, the right to own guns. I'm not going to to live in some future where they say that first they came for the terrorist's gun, but I wasn't a terrorist...

So you see? Old chuckling has no dog in this fight. They can put anyone on the No Fly List, as long as it's not me. As long as it's not me, I just laugh like hell.

See how those who actually advocate armed resistance to the American government, those who are actively stocking up on weapons for just such an occassion, those who like the communists of old are openly joining the army, serving in Iraq, in order to gain experience for the coming struggle – people whose movement has already fostered domestic terrorism from the assasins of doctors to Olympics bombers to mass murderers like those who killed hundreds at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City – how these heavily armed anti-government wackos are considered less of a threat to the government they hate than people advocating non-violence and popular participation in the American constitutional system of government. You just gotta laugh like hell.

The punchline, of course, is that the war protesters and those who take their democratic responsiblilties seriously and make informed, moral choices when they vote are not a threat to national security. They may be, however, a threat to the national security establishment, which is what it's all about. And that's what's really funny. They are no more of a threat to the national security establishment than they are to hijack an airplane. People who advocate non-violence have zero influence on national policy and they are not going to hijack any airplanes.

The second amendment guarantees the right of terrorists to purchase assault rifles without a background check. The rest of the constitution may be nothing more than a relatively coarse brand of toilet paper, but the second amendment rules. The skys would be safer if everyone carried guns. Everyone but peace activists that is.

And even though the idea that an NRA member would hijack an airplane or commit an act of violence is only exponentially more likely than the people with children, families, and a strong place in the community who advocate non-violence, we have to ask ourselves who the fuck hijacks airlplanes anyway? It’s not something that happens every day. Is there even one a year? Even the 9/11 hijackers flew a lot and didn’t usually hijack their airplanes. The odds of it happening on any one flight, even if Mohammet Atta is on it, are subatomically slim.

Of course the big joke would be if what goes around comes around. Regimes change but tradition based on principle has a longer shelf life. If the tradition is that government harasses its critics based on the principle that they can, then payback could be hell. Wouldn’t it be fun to put every member of the National Rifle Association on the No Fly List? What about the anti-abortionists? And prominent Christians? Fuck, let's include taxidermists. No fly for you, suckers. Maybe you can rent a car? Ha ha. Maybe not.

But although revenge can be a powerful motivator when it comes to trashing our constitution and way of life, I don’t think that fully explains why no one (with the possible exception of the victims) cares about the fact that 100’s of thousands of innocent people are being harassed by the government for no good reason. We really should look into it, appoint a bi-partisan commission or something. But hey, look over there, nappy-headed ho’s. And Sanjaya. What’s up with that? And the price of gas? Wasn’t that supposed to get cheaper when we invaded fucking Iraq? Ooops. I didn’t say that. It was some other guy. No fly for him.

Re-creation

We left New York under a gibbous moon and journeyed far into the past. Our goal was the beginning of time, but we only managed to go back about 40 years.

It began with a drive down the BQE towards the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 am. The lights of lower Manhattan twinkle on the other side of the river. A rush of adrenaline wakes me up as I speed across the bridge and fight for position with the yellow cabs. Then I’m winding down Chambers street dodging potholes. The sidewalks are filled with junkies, prostitutes and the homeless as I near the Holland Tunnel. The whores are calling the cops out for a suck. No, sorry. That’s just Lou Reed on the cd player. This is Tribeca, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S. It looks seedy to an untrained eye, but in reality it's difficult to drive through there without running over Robert Deniro. A few beautiful people are still on the street. That’s about it.

Then New Jersey, PA and WVA. The morning wears on. O-hio, a strange land where so many people still wear their Bush/Cheney decals defiantly on their bumpers. A few, however, appear to have scraped them off.

But Ohio only takes us back to 2004, or 1984 at best. Kentucky’s on the event horizon now, just across the Ohio river. There, I have been led to believe, we can go back all the way to the beginning of time, 4000 or so years ago, when the cave-men and their pet dinosaurs walked the earth.

Sorry, to be so hokey with the tease. The story is this: I came across this article about a Creationism museum the other night. I IM’ed my daughter a few choice quotes and asked if she wanted to go. She was pysched so we decided to make a road trip out of it. The next day I got a car, loaded up the children at 3 am, and off we drove.

As I was saying in the previous post... with all the instant messaging, cell phones, and other wacky new technologies, our family communication has suffered. We sit in our small apartment – my daughter in her room listening to the iPod, my son in his room playing the GameBoy DS, me in my cave, drinking cheap beer and thinking vast and noble thoughts, and communicate by instant message when we are not 50 feet away from each other physically. It makes me yearn for an earlier time.

I think back to the sixties before we had those technologies. How did families communicate? How did they spend time together? Well, one way, perhaps the best way, was to get in the station wagon and go somewhere. Preferably somewhere far away. Being cooped up in the same car for a long day would bring us closer together then. Maybe it would bring us closer together now?

But it didn't appear to be working. We weren’t three feet apart. My daughter sat right next to me in the passenger seat and listened to her iPod. My son was just behind me playing his GameBoy. And there’s nothing like a long road ahead to get the deep thoughts thinking. After a few beers, I decided to resume work on my 13 part treatise on the films of Studio Ghibli. I had become stuck on the fact that Princess Mononoke wasn’t really about the Princess, but now I saw a way around that obstacle. I saw a grand literary prize in my future. Finishing volume XIII would be a cakewalk. What would I wear to the ceremony? Those thoughts consumed me for several hours and nearly half a case of beer.

That was great, but the trip was supposed to be more about togetherness. I wanted it to be an educational experience for the children as well. That’s why we were going to the Creationism museum.

The chuckling household is non-denominational. The kids don’t learn anything about religion at home beyond the fact that it is laughable. Of course they go to a progressive private school where they study the bible, but I wanted them to learn about the real Christianity, not the one you read about in some old book. And it’s not enough that they intellectually know that it is laughable. They need to laugh at it themselves, to witness its irrational senselessness at the apogee of its glory, to feel it in the gut. And what better place to laugh at religion than a Creationism museum? And in Kentucky no less.

I was a child in the sixties and my parents were young and liberal. They paid lip service to the ideas of racial and ethnic equality and I was taught not to discriminate based on the color of a person’s skin or where they were born. The only exception to those fine ideals concerned Kentuckians. It’s sad and I am embarrassed to share this, but it’s true. I, and everyone else in my neck of the woods, was raised to disrespect people from Kentucky.

I don’t guess you could call it racism. Kentuckians weren’t really considered a different race. They were more of a sub-species, like monkeys only not quite as cultured. Sorry, it’s hard to break the ways of our upbringing. They were portrayed as an ethnic group, one like any other in which inbred stupidity and cowardice are the norm. These days we call them Republicans or conservative Christians, but back then they were just plain old Kentuckian dumb fucks. But now I realize that was wrong, that Kentuckians are just as good as anyone else and I vowed not to raise my own children with any of the those horrible prejudices.

Still, even though I have pulled free of my anti-Kentuckian roots, I have to confess that I got a bit of a snicker from the fact that the Creation Museum with its dinosaurs on Noah’s ark is located in Kentucky. Unfortunately however, the joke was on me. The article failed to mention the very important fact that the museum was not yet open and I hadn’t done any other research. When we pulled up at the gates I learned that the Creation Museum not open for another two months.

That was a bit of a blow, I admit, and the teenaged one was, as you can imagine, cruel, but we are a resilient people and I would have to make the best of it.

The plan had been to camp near the museum and spend several days there, but now there was no plan. I drove aimlessly, scanning the horizon for a sign. And it was a sign I saw, in the form of a giant inflatable bottle of Jack Daniels. What the fuck is the matter with these people, I thought. If there is one good thing you can say about Kentucky, it is that they make some damn fine whiskey. Why, in the land of Jim Beam Black, is there a giant bottle of Tennessee whiskey making eyesore of the skyline?

I stopped in to investigate and bought a bottle of Ezra Brooks to help me ponder these things. That’s just whut people like, said the cashier. Just whut people like. Just whut people like. God, fuck, people. Whut they like? This trip was going south. Whut was I going to do? I drove in circles around the giant bottle of Jack Daniels thinking, thinking. Going south, I thought. The trip is going south, so maybe we should go south. That was it. That was the ticket. We got back on the interstate and headed south. Soon we came to Louisville.

I’ve passed through Louisville many times but never learned much of anything about it. On the positive side I knew that both Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Ames, two writers who revolutionized the practice of journalism, came from there. It may seem counter-intuitive that cultured, creative people could come from such a place, but it’s really not so surprising. Talented people stuck in these hellholes just want to get out and the struggle fucks them up. They come out twisted in their own particular ways. I also know that Cassius Clay was from there, though I never quite saw what made him such a hero. I guess anyone that stood up against Vietnam and went to prison for it, especially someone with so much to lose, is deserving of respect, but if there is justice in this world, he may rot in hell for what he did to the English language.

Anyhow, Louisville's Main Street proved to be an artsy little mile. We saw galleries, museums, expensive gift shops, bars and trendy restaurants. We parked and walked around. They had commissioned a lot of art for the sidewalks. We passed various sculptures, a cool bike rack, that kind of thing. My teenage daughter made snide comments about how out-dated my anti-Kentuckian snobism. This place was cool and up-to-date, unlike some people she knew.

It also seemed that there was a vintage car revival going on. We saw several from the sixties, including a very cool Ford Fairlane station wagon that had been restored and painted. Funny how what must have been the un-coolest car of the entire sixties looked so cool now. And there were a couple of guys, not a couple, just different guys, and I don’t even think they were gay, in different locations who were wearing tight fitting gym shorts and t-shirts like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. What was up with that? I was forced to ponder. But that was not all.

We also noticed that Louisville was also doing the Kentucky version of New York’s painted cow thing from just a few years past. We saw decorative race horses at various points throughout the city.
‘
And soon we noticed that it was only 5 o’clock on a beautiful spring Saturday and almost all of those fancy art galleries, gift shops and museums were closed. My son, who is only eight, speculated that it must be a very Jewish city, but my daughter became increasingly angry and began composing Kentuckian jokes of her own. Why do all the shops in Kentucky close before five? So the yokels can get home in time to have sex with their siblings. It was obvious that my lessons against anti-Kentuckinan discrimination had failed, but I confess that I felt a shameful kind of pride. Where I’m from it's a big occasion when a child made its first Kentuckian joke. Sadly, we’re never as far away from our roots as we’d like to think.

But I made a game face. You have to be positive, I said. Think of it as time travel. Traveling to Kentucky is like going back in time forty years. It’s still the sixties here. Of course everything closes as five. But when you’re old and want to revisit your youth, all you have to do is come to Kentucky. They’ll be wearing the same fashion and listening to the same music then as you do now. They'll even be driving the same cars. And wearing the same underwear.

Unfortunately, by that time I wasn’t making much sense. I had drank way too much whiskey and was driving erratically. The only logical thing to do at that point was to get off of the street so I drove faster and took the sidewalk. Before going half a block, I ran over one of those god damned fake New York cows, a rainbow-colored horse and jockey. The damned thing was staring at me across my crumpled hood. I backed up, confused. Fucking Kentuckian horseboy, I yelled and ran over it again.

Umm dad, said my daughter, here come the police. Fucking John Law, I thought, just won’t leave me alone. Still, seeing the lights and hearing the siren sobered me up a bit. I spun around, raced down the street, up the on-ramp to the interstate and headed for the state line as fast as the little car would take me. But two sets of flashing blue lights were gaining on me in the rear view. One was right on my ass.

You may think that I am writing this from my jail cell, but it wasn’t all that difficult to outwit the Kentucky state police and escape across the river. When I came to the last exit ramp before the bridge, I turned on my right turn signal and slowed down as if I were going to exit. At the last second, I gunned it forward. The cop, unable to react in time, took the exit.

That was easy, but the second cop car took its place on my ass. No exits remained. We were on the bridge. I didn’t know how I was going to lose him. It was a conundrum.

Then I thought, what the hell, it’s worth a try. I flipped on the right turn signal and slowed down as though I were going to exit. The cop was totally fooled and drove right off the bridge and his car exploded into a giant fireball when it hit the water.

Nevertheless, our bad experiences in Kentucky taught us a lot about inclusiveness and I think the whole family came away more open minded. And next time we will visit the Creation Museum.

Communication breakdown

Poor chuckling has a teenage daughter and the following exchange will tell you a lot about what that can be like in the year 2007:




I know you have no interest in chuckling's personal life, I only share that as a stepping-off point to discuss larger societal issues.

First one cannot fail to notice the horrible sass a parent must endure in these confused times. It'a not like the good old days when the kid would just scream or call you names. Today, it's all irony and sarcasm. It's not just the jab at my cooking skills. Subtle, am I?

Then there's the avatar. Chuckling's avatar is borrowed from conservative religious imagery, as is appropriate, but the teenage girl seems to think she is Michael Nesmith. That, in itself, is a signifier of the sickness in our society, but to top it off, she looked up Michael Nesmith after noticing he was the producer of Repo Man. She had never heard of the Monkees.

And finally, parent and child, living in the same house, are communicating by IM. We do this all the time, but last night it hit me that something was wrong with that, I don't know why, just because, so I called her on her cell phone to try to re-establish a more traditional way of communicating, but she didn't want to take my call, and I left it at that.

But I realized that I didn't want to just leave it "at that." In the coming weeks I am planning on a re-examination of our family values. That will, of course, remain private, but at the same time we will examine American values in general from a more conservative perspective. The itinerary is not yet fully planned, but I will tell you this: We will begin at the beginning of time. And there will be photos.

Not as funny as we think

We often ridicule the unsophisticated conservatives, and rightly so, for their inability to understand humor. Take the current popular joke making the rounds:

Knock Knock. Who’s there? I’m a stupid ugly bitch who wants to destroy our great nation and install Satan on the throne of heaven. Honey, Hilary Clinton’s at the door again.Tell her to go away, ha ha.

Numerous valid scientific studies indicate that the typical conservative “brain” lacks the ability to find humor in much of anything more sophisticated than that, genitalia, farts, belches, or pratfalls. Many scientists even speculate that the conservative’s evolutionary purpose is to be the butt of jokes, especially considering that the rest of their behavior is so counterproductive to the survival of our species.

Personally, I think that the scientists who claim that conservative’s inability to appreciate sophisticated humor is an evolutionary advantage are just plain whacky. Chuckling believes that there are sophisticated political operatives out there who take advantage of conservative’s evolutionary stuntedness demonstrating that it is anything but an evolutionary advantage. I am on a mailing list that specializes in conservative humor and see the dark side of this phenomena. Take the following for example:

John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks).

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning, John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. But to Farmer John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result? The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making: Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention.........

It is a conservative joke in that its content is about animals having sex, but its purpose is propagandistic. Government just wants to screw you, so you better vote for those who hate government. Of course I could be wrong in this particular instance, but there is a lot of this kind of writing going around conservative mailing lists that never makes it into the mainstream, even the blogs. It’s passed off as homespun humor and/or wisdom, but these things are not written by wise old farmers, upstanding churchgoers, or heroic housewives in aprons and oven mitts. More likely, they are produced by a sophisticated political organization whose purpose is to keep the morons stupid. And they are doing their part. Much more than most anyone suspects.

Living in shit

Chuckling is not a sophisticated character. You may think that because I claim to read such authors as José Saramago or Paul Auster and comment on films by luminaries such as Hayao Miyazaki that I am a professorial type whose ancestors crossed on the Mayflower, but that is not the case. My grandparents on both sides of the family came from mud. At the height of the great flood of ‘37, my father’s family escaped from the second story of their house in a rowboat. The fact that they kept a rowboat upstairs tells you more than you need to know about their economic situation. They were tenant farmers working the floodlands. And my great-uncles were all losers of one sort or another, most of them drunks along with bootleggers and chicken thieves who did time in the county jail. My father was the first to go to college, but he listens to Rush Limbaugh, watches Fox News, supports President Bush, and considers himself an open-minded and good Christian. And I am a high school drop-out. So it’s not all Italian wine, French cheese and 18th century English lit in the chuckling gene pool. If you think of the term “Wild Turkey” as a concept as well as a brand, it can be used to describe chuckling and his family on so many levels.

I only confide that plebeian history to prepare you for what I am about to say, which is far more embarrassing than all of the above. I am a big fan of American Idol. Yes, it’s true. I love the show and watch it often. And furthermore, I think Idol goes beyond the realm of mere entertainment. And I’m not just talking about sociology or anthropology as is the wont of pseudo-intellectual characters justifying their attendance at monster truck rallies. I think that American Idol is art. I think it tells a great story, one worthy of Tolstoy (though not Dostoevsky). It did for at least one year anyway. I have to admit that it sucks right now, but more about that later.

The numbers support the contention that American Idol fans are a bunch of rubes. Nearly twice as many people watch it in the American south than in more civilized parts of the country, and much of the apparent viewership in New York and Los Angeles is made up of tourists in hotel rooms or parents visiting their children. And I’m sure it’s not just the south. Most people in small towns throughout the midwest are without rewarding intellectual lives as well.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that it took me awhile for my hillbilly roots to catch up with me. My cultural free-fall began, as these things usually do, with me stumbling drunkenly through the living room on my way from the blog cave (in which I contemplate universal truths and the like) to the bathroom (one can only hold so much universal truth inside oneself ) and ridiculing the family for watching whatever stupid tv show they are watching as I pass through. From time to time I stop to rest on my way back to the cave and spend some extra time making sport of these programs and occasionally start to watch them myself. That’s how I began watching shows that I eventually came to like such as Star Trek Next Generation and Buffy. (Now they are watching Lost, which I refer to as Loser Island. There’s talk of bricking up a passageway so I’m forced to go through the kitchen instead of the living room, but that’s a different story).

But I never thought it could happen with Idol. Beyond the hype, which is usually more than enough to keep me away; and the horrible singing, which is truly horrible indeed; and the judges, who have their own issues, to say the least; and Ryan Seacrest, who actually comes off as the least annoying of the bunch which is a sad, sad statement – I had an even greater reason to hate the show. During its second season I was commuting to Jersey in an SUV with a couple tech dweebs and just about all they ever talked about was American Idol. Not only did they talk about it, but they actually called in and voted for contestants and complained about not being able to get through. Many were the days I dreamed of the SUV flipping over and skidding in front of an oncoming tractor-trailer in the hopes of shutting them up. It would have been sad for the children, and maybe even painful for me, but at least I wouldn’t have had to hear to another word about Clay fucking Aiken.

But something caught my attention in Idol’s third season. The company I worked for was circling the drain and they had cut my salary which resulted in me drinking cheaper liquor and more of it, which may explain part of my soon-to-be respect for American Idol, but for whatever reason, I found myself stopping off to ridicule the show for longer and longer stretches and by the time the contestants were deep into the finals I was discussing their performances and the idiosyncrasies of the judges just like all those ridiculous people in the heartland (though I have never voted and my wife is under strict orders to shoot me if I ever do).

Seriously though. In order to appreciate Idol as art, it’s important to understand its story structure. Being named America’s Idol is the MacGuffin, the thing that everyone is after. In order to get the MacGuffin, the characters must overcome a series of obstacles, most notably the judges. The judges are a troika of iconic characters: the fool, the drunken bimbo, and the total asshole. Interesting subplots develop among themselves and in their relationships with the contestants. As in most great literature, actually getting the MacGuffin is anti-climactic, a sadly hollow experience. I won’t describe the plot progression from cattle calls and Hollywood hijinks to the finals in which twelve contestants vie for the MacGuffin by singing a new song every week which results in the elimination of one of them from the competition. That tells you no more about the artistic merit of the show than describing The Maltese Falcon as a story about a bird.

In addition to each other and the judges, the idol wannabees also have to deal with theme nights in which they have to sing songs of a particular genre or by a particular entertainer, which makes it difficult for contestants who are only comfortable with one style of music. How they overcome, or don’t, being forced to sing songs outside their comfort zones makes for some good drama. For example when Chis Daughtrey, a fan of mediocre heavy metal, turned Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line into a Bob Seeger-like stadium rock weeper on country music night, it was something special. More often than not though, the result is laughably bad and those who fail to grow fall by the wayside.

The contestant’s ability to grow is what elevates Idol so far above all the other talent shows. Although the judges are portrayed as the most formidable obstacles, it is the contestants struggle to overcome their inner obstacles that is much more interesting. Each contestant must raise the level of her game from show to show – to evolve from being a talented amateur to a polished professional in a mere twelve weeks. The great majority of the performances are dreadful, but there are times when a contestant manages to transcend her limitations and move on to a higher plane. When one of these transformations occurs, and you have watched the individual jump through all the hoops from the cattle call onward, it can come off as truly special.

And just as in literature, the results are not always fair or just. The best singers do not always advance, nor do those who perform best on any particular night. There are politics involved, Q ratings. The judges don’t give a flying fuck about quality. They want ratings, they have focus groups and demographics, they know who votes for whom, so they try to influence the audience to vote for the most telegenic, or at least the most popular contestants so people will continue to watch. And the audience, the unseen character, the deus ex machina of the show, are a fickle bunch. They may vote for a hairstyle, a regional favorite, a fellow Christian, on race-based considerations, or for the worst singer just to be obnoxious. There’s just no way to know for sure, which is not a bad definition of drama.

But although it is so much more, American Idol is also a singing competition and much of its appeal depends on the abilities of the contestants to sing. And that’s ultimately why I watched the third season enough to appreciate the finer literary aspects of the story arc. Fantasia won that year, but there were a number of very good singers who constantly topped each other with transcendental performances. The year after that, the one with Bo Bice and the country chick, I watched less and less. Last year’s show, which was won by a smarmy wedding singer that at his best could manage a decent Joe Cocker impression was mostly insipid.

I haven’t watched this years show much at all, but from what I’ve seen it is truly horrible. There is precisely one good singer, Melinda Doolittle, and the others are as horrible as Simon Cowell’s worst put downs. They are all the bad singers from high school musicals, cruise ships, Holiday Inns, weddings and bar mitzvahs, and karaoke bars that you never want to hear.

And the judges have lost sight of what made the show popular and, as I have argued, art. We, the audience, may be direct descendants of bootleggers and chicken thieves with all of the high culture you would expect based on our backgrounds, but we still recognize shit when it’s hurled at us by a bunch of talentless assholes. When the show was good, the judges recognized that as well and did not hesitate to say, each in his or her own way, that shit stank.

Now, however, they seem traumatized by the near complete lack of talent on the show and are trying to convince the audience that it is really not that bad. Although the ratings are still there, I have trouble believing that much of anyone is buying it.

I’m very sorry to fall back on such a previously popular analogy, but it’s like the episode in Happy Days when Fonzi jumped the shark. Before that, he was cool. After that, he could never be more than a self-parody of something that used to be. I’m sure Idol will sputter on for a few more years. In a desperate gamble to stay relevant, they will bring in Pamela Anderson to replace Paula Abdul or someone like Jamie Foxx whose career is spiraling down the toilet to replace Randy, but nothing they try will work. When they stopped calling shit shit they became shit and although all good things may eventually become shit, shit will never change itself back into chocolate ice cream. If American Idol was ever great art, it ceased to be so after season three. We are not now witnessing the hero’s downfall in the last act of a great play. We are talking sequals and not Godfather II. The current Idol is down there with Godfather III or Police Academy VII.

Living in truth

‘Anti-political politics’ is possible, says Václav Havel, a Czechoslovakian playwright and political dissident. It’s 1978 and he’s formulating a strategy of non-violent resistance to the totalitarian state that imprisons him. At the time, virtually no one on earth thought it possible to overthrow the Soviet Union from within. The state was too strong, the secret police too powerful. To criticize the system meant prison. Violent resistance meant death. Any kind of political resistance was futile and could only end badly.

Yet for all its oppressive power, the Soviet Union was overcome without violence and practically without political resistance. ‘Anti-political politics’ was not only possible, it was powerful, arguably the most powerful political force the world has ever known. No other empire has simply ceased to exist because people simply stopped participating.

The United States today is not the Soviet Union of 1978 or any other year. As citizens, we are free to criticize the government until we turn blue of our own accord. We can participate in politics, tell the president to go fuck himself and generally do or say whatever we want, as long as we do it non-violently. It’s true we could be investigated for our thought crimes, possibly even harassed at work or, worst of all, put on the no-fly list, but we will not be jailed, tortured, disappeared or killed.

Of course those who are not citizens of the United States may not be so fortunate. We reserve the right to arrest anyone we please anywhere on earth for any reason or no reason at all -- put them in secret jails, torture them, then try them in secret courts with secret evidence, or just keep them jailed indefinitely and execute them if the secret court so decrees. Or we can help overthrow their government, seize their assets, train their secret police, bomb their infrastructure, invade their country, kill millions. Literally. Kill millions. We’ve done it. Count em.

Havel lived in an empire that jailed and killed of millions of its own citizens for their politics and would think nothing of killing him. He lived in a workers’ paradise. We, on the other hand, live in a democratic paradise in which we kill millions of other people for their politics. Of course neither regime phrases it that way. They/we kill to protect socialism/democracy, our great nation, our way of life. But it’s all politics in one form or another.

Havel’s insight was that politics is a lie and those who participate, however passively, are living a lie, The only effective resistance is to an all-powerful state, he saw, was to live within the truth.

People who so define themselves do so in relationship to a prior “position.” In other words, they relate themselves specifically to the power that rules society and through it, define themselves, deriving their own “position” form the position of the regime. For people who have simply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they think, to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to create as they want and simply to live in harmony with their better “self,” it is naturally disagreeable to feel required to define their own, original and positive “position” negatively, in terms of something else, and to think of themselves primarily as people who are against something, not simply as people who are what they are.

Chuckling is among the ridiculed few who see the U.S. as a one party state. Of course there are minor differences between the “parties,” particularly on domestic matters, but when it comes to controlling the world through violence, including mass murder on a global scale if “necessary”, the only disagreement between the putative parties is “how much?” The “democrats” and “republicans” are, at best, different wings of the same party. A more cynical interpretation sees their relationship more like that of the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. Resistance to our one party state is probably more futile today than resistance to the Soviet Union was in 1978, though not nearly as painful, at least for us citizens.

But we are not evil and we are not cowards. The great majority of us are decent, moral people opposed to violence and oppression, yet we do nothing to stop those things from being done in our name. Why not?

Well, the obvious reason is that there is no political party that represents us. We have no choice in the matter.

And yes, that’s true, but why don’t we have representation? There is no law against it. There is no state apparatus stopping anyone from organizing a political party or five. We could, theoretically, elect representatives who are actually representative. Why don’t we?

I think Havel’s insight into what was wrong in his society applies to us now as well as it did to the Soviet society in 1978. We are living within a lie. Many people don’t even know what the U.S. does to people abroad and the great majority who do have some facts at their disposal do not acknowledge it, certainly not publicly, but not even in their own minds. The lie is all they want.

I also agree with Havel’s prescription for resistance. Although the U.S. government will not crush its opponents under the proverbial iron boot, people can waste their lives if they choose the path of political resistance. They certainly won’t accomplish much of anything beyond compromising on the lesser of two evils and ultimately being compromised.

But we can engage in ‘anti-political politics.’ We, as individuals, can live within the truth. For whatever that’s worth. Havel’s example notwithstanding, probably not much in the big picture, but maybe a lot for ourselves and those around us. Realistically, that’s the only hope we’ve got.

More harping on the obvious

It is unfortunate, but Chuckling is something of a slow thinker, if not an outright dullard. I only bring that up because I am still thinking about a recent article I wrote on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the questions surrounding random meaninglessness vs. purposeful narrative that they engender.

After writing that piece, I spent days in front of my computer screen, staring unfocused, engrossed in thought and contemplation of those issues. Why do we need purpose in our narrative? Is it some kind of evolutionary thing? After all, there are over 200 billion galaxies all containing 200 billion or so start and the universe is at least 17 billion years old. There are more giant stars in our own galaxy than there are humans and human existence in time is not even a blink of the cosmic eye. Relative to the universe, we are ever so much smaller and less important than ants are next to us. Is our need for purposeful narrative just a lonely whine against the meaninglessness of our existence? I sat for days lost in these thoughts. Actually, I only thought about spending days thinking those thoughts , and only for a few seconds at that. Unfortunately, I had written about Antonioni early in the morning and had to interrupt my contemplation of time, the universe and the meaning of life in order to take a shower and go to work.

Things happened fast after that. Almost before I knew it, I was in Washington, D.C. on a completely unexpected business trip. Normally when I go to D.C., it all ends badly in a haze of booze, drugs, strip clubs and prostitutes, but this time, I vowed, would be different. Of course that’s not actually true about the sex and drugs and this time, as usual, I found myself at the zoo.

It was a cold and windy day. The sun was bright. I had forgotten my sunscreen and had to keep to the shadows as much as possible. These shadows diverted me on my way to the zoo when I noticed I was near Mount Pleasant. It had been many years since I had visited that neighborhood. In the old days it was very dangerous. There were crack dealers on every corner and the sound of gunshots was common. Now it is very yuppified, but not entirely and I was able to find a great Peruvian chicken place where they didn’t even speak any English. The creamy green hot sauce was excellent.

I’ve spent many cold rainy days at the National Zoo. Cold rainy days are the best days to visit a zoo. The animals are out more and seem to act more naturally. I don’t think they like having thousands of people stare at them all day. I’m sure being stuck in a cage is bad enough without that. The point was reinforced in one of the exhibits, a kind of “discovery zone,” one of those hands-on environments where normal people and kids can get a feel for how scientists work.

Observation is, of course, a key to our scientific understanding of animal behavior. An Orangoutang was in a big glass cage with chairs around it where visitors could sit like great zoologists and observe the unfotunate ape, unlike in the regular Orangoutang cage where we could only gawk like tourists. Anyway, professor chuckling, ph.d in zoology, observed the poor Orangoutang for nearly half an hour. Actually, I was hoping that a female Orangoutang would happen along and they would have sex, or that it would at least masturbate, and with Orangoutang’s you usually don’t have to wait that long, but on that day it spent all of its time building a little fort to hide in. The creature piled a big wall of straw around itself and then put a large piece of brown paper over its head. Every now and then it would look out to see if we were still there. Sometimes I hate zoos.

Back at the hotel I rested a little while and read snatches of Invisible Cities, the novel by Italo Calvino. I have been working on a review of that work for quit some time now, but it is not going very well. Invisible Cities is a perfect work. Every word is precisely the right one; each word fits as well as it possibly could within its respective sentence; the sentences work together to create paragraphs of perfection, the paragraphs form perfect chapters, and so on all the way up to the novel as a whole, which is as perfect as its parts. I asked myself, is there any other novel as perfect as Invisible Cities? After some minutes reviewing every novel I’ve ever read, and then some, I realized that yes, there was another perfect novel, Pan by Knut Hamsun. Perhaps if I were to re-read Pan, it would help with my review of Invisible Cities? I rushed right out, after a short nap, to have a leisurely dinner at my heretofore favorite Peruvian restaurant in D.C., which has gone sadly downhill, and then hastened to a used books store on 18th street in the hopes of finding Pan.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Not only did they not have Pan, they didn’t even have any titles by Knut Hamsun or Italo Calvino. At first I was crushed, but an idea began to dawn on me that perhaps this trip had a larger purpose, that there was a book that I was meant to find that would, if not unlock the secrets of the universe, at least give some clue as to the purpose of life. I spent several minutes that seemed like hours, scouring the literature shelves, then the history, the politics, the religious, women’s and gay studies, philosophy, how-to, and humor, all to no avail. Then I thought, maybe I missed something in the H’s? Maybe a Hamsun book was poorly shelved?

And so it was. I found Under the Autumn Star , a thin volume that is more in the tradition of Hamsun’s earlier work than his later. On the way back to the hotel, I noticed a jazz trio playing in a bar. The music was good, the crowd was sparse, I ordered a bourbon and began to read Hamsun. Unfortunately, the band finished their final set before I finished the whiskey and within days I had misplaced the novel without coming close to finishing it.

But I’ll tell you this. I enjoyed the smell of the used books and the whiskey. I enjoyed the cries of the toucans in the birdhouse at the zoo and even the shrieks of the ambulance which triggered memories of the old murder capital days. I relished the sight of the grizzled old jazz pianist and my old neighborhood, and even the White House which is now fenced off like a zoo exhibit. It's similar in that it's filled with dangerous animals, but unfortunately they get out whenever they want.

And now I’m home, the slop from yesterday’s sleet storm is melting and I’m thinking it might be a good day for some Antonioni. You know what I’m saying?

Outside in society

I recently started listening to Patti Smith again and it soon spiraled out of control. I began, of course, with tracks from Horses, but thanks to ITunes I soon had most of her recent work. It’s amazing stuff, but more about that later.

I discovered Horses when I was sixteen. I think it’s common for those of us who leave home to look back and try to peg all the little incidents that helped us get out of our own personal hellhole. I used to hang out at the trailer of my best friend’s older brother Ron. He was one of the smartest people in town and one of the coolest as well, a hard feat to pull off since it’s generally not cool to be smart in hell. We’d smoke dope, play chess, and listen to music. He had a great stereo system, a Yamaha amp with those big old wooden Advent speakers. We were a Ted Nugent, Bob Seeger, REO Speedwagon kinda town and he was listening to Patti Smith. Horses was a revelation for a young troublemaker like myself. Yea, Jesus died for someone else’s sins, and that was the hook, but it was the raw sexuality and ecstatic poetry that conjured visions of previously unimagined possibilities. I wanted to get me some of that life.

I saw the Eastertour in Santa Monica. The only details I remember are of Smith playing an interminable guitar “solo” in which she picked one note over and over again long past the point where it was still interesting and then of her singing an astoundingly beautiful version of You Light up my Life, the Debbie Boone song that was the most reviled radio hit of the day.

But after Easter I pretty much forgot about Patti Smith. I was too deep into the harder side of punk in 1979 to like Wave, then ten years later found Dream of Life unlistenable. Outside of society, that's where I wanted to be. I don’t know what Patti Smith was feeling back then, whether or not she still wanted to be outside of society. Superficially, the choices she made suggest otherwise. She married, dropped out of the New York scene, moved to a Detroit suburb and raised two children. But perhaps for her that was being outside of society?

I saw her again at the annual Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall several years ago. In a truly transcendental performance, she read/chanted Allen Ginsberg’s poem On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa backed by Phillip Glass on grand piano. From a review of the same performance at a different venue:

The program reached a kind of crescendo when Ms. Smith chanted Ginsberg's poem “On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara.” Mr. Glass accompanied her on the piano, playing the music he had written for the poem in a minor key.

“I noticed the Guru was dead,” Ms. Smith chanted. “I noticed his teacher bare-breasted watching the corpse burn in the stupa, noticed mourning students sat crosslegged before their books, chanting devotional mantras.” Ms. Smith's face reddened, tears streamed down her face. “I noticed the sea, I noticed the music. I wanted to dance.”

I’ve noticed that she often plays at various venues around New York, but never got out to see her.

That’s pretty much the recap of my life with Patti Smith up until last week when I downloaded a few songs off of Horses. I was surprised to find that there were two versions of each song, the original and one from a live set. The live versions are fantastic, pretty much note for note with the original but possessing an exceptionally full and well-defined sound and an added urgency. Unfortunately, you can’t just download the live album, the two together are expensive, and the live version of Land is only available if you buy the whole thing. I’ll just have to wait till I find it at a stoop sale someday.

But rediscovering Horses got me curious about Smith’s recent work. I did the 30 second preview thing on most the songs on Trampin’, her most recent release, and bought the songs Gandhi and My Blakean Year. The problem with buying singles from ITunes is that it’s then hard to buy the album. So unfortunately, Trampin’ is another disc that will have to be found at a stoop sale.

My Blakean Year starts out sounding like the Velvets, with a kind of Venus in Furs vibe. It’s based on the work of William Blake.

In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

In my Blakean year
Such a woeful schism
The pain of our existence
Was not as I envisioned
Boots that trudged from track to track
Worn down to the sole
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

Brace yourself for bitter flack
For a life sublime
A labyrinth of riches
Never shall unwind
The threads that bind the pilgrim's sack
Are stitched into the Blakean back
So throw off your stupid cloak
Embrace all that you fear
For joy will conquer all despair
In my Blakean year

She ends the song chanting verses from Blake’s poem “The Divine Image:”

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,

Then ends it repeating Mercy shall embrace.

With no deep knowledge of Blake’s work, I’m not exactly sure what a Blakean year is supposed to represent, but those are some fine lyrics that stand up just fine with the classic poetry.

And the two roads dichotomy is interesting. One is paved with gold, the other just a road. Bitter flack is juxtaposed with a life sublime. She speaks of mercy, love, pity, and peace, but in this song those things are not weak-assed new-agey shit. I have yet to go back and listen to Wave and Dream of Life, but my memory of those works is that the peace, love, etc. that they depicted were not consistent with the wild, powerful stuff in Horses and Easter. In Smith’s Blakean Year, and her recent body of work as a whole, the songs about mercy, love, pity and peace transcend any kind of happy hokeyness. They radiate strength, not weakness. , They were clearly born of violence, pain and sorrow. They are things that were earned, not given.

My other problem with her post- Easter work was the politics. It’s not that I disagree with her politics, I don’t. It’s just that songs like the straightforward political screed like People Have the Power bore me half to death. They are not what I call art. Or even Rock & Roll.

So I wasn’t predisposed to buy a track titled “Gandhi,” but I liked the music in the 30 second clip and although I’m primarily a lyrics-appreciating-type-guy, I’ll forgive a lot for a good sound. Gandhi is classic Patti Smith – the slow, seventies rock guitars and her low voice building incrementally to an emotional crescendo, or two. And, as I’ve found with most, if not all, of her recent work, the art has transcended the politics. Or maybe it’s better to say that the art and the politics work together. In Gandhi, she makes pretty much the same political argument as People Have the Power but does it with greater artistry:

I had a dream Mr. King If you'll beg my pardon
I was trespassing The sacred garden
And the blossoms fell
Well, they dropped like candy
And nature cried
Gandhi Gandhi

The flowing hair And the golden flowers
Of the young girls
Well they dropped all around
They dropped like candy
And people cried
Gandhi Gandhi
Awake little man
Awake from your slumber And get 'em with the numbers
Get 'em with the numbers

After listening to these new songs, I was so happy. Patti Smith was back after all these years.

Of course she had been back for awhile and it was really I coming back to her. But she really had been gone for long stretches. Wave was released in 1979 followed nine years later by Dream of Life. Then it was another eight years until 1996’s Gone Again, so she was almost 20 years out of the limelight.

Chuckling, as you may know, is very shallow when it comes to art reviews. I do not like to speculate about a work’s meaning. I do not like to talk about the artist’s biography and I particularly dislike tying biography to any meaning that a work may or may not contain. Even in cases in which an artist explains his or her art and how it sprang from a particular experience, I don’t want to consider any of that when judging the work. I don’t even want to know about it. If I know I’m going to experience a work of art, I make every effort to avoid all knowledge about how or why it was created. For the most part, I succeeded in approaching Smith’s recent work from that shallow perspective. Although you probably don’t feel the same way, I will try not to give much of anything away. Getting the big picture overview of how Smith spent those years is just a quick Google away. Still, I can’t help mentioning a few details.

After listening to all of the new work, I learned that she had gone to the Detroit suburb to be a housewife. That kind of seemingly reactionary life change was something I was ill-equipped to understand back in the Horses and Easter days. But her recent work shows that she was clearly much more than a housewife. Or perhaps her life demonstrates (yet again) that being a housewife and having a great and productive life as an artist are not mutually exclusive. And Smith’s period of domesticity was not without incident or interest. Nor is her present situation.

After listening to my singles purchases for a couple weeks, I dove in all the way, purchasing Gung Ho, Gone Again, and Peace and Noise, in that order. Gone Again was the first release after her return, followed by Peace and Noise and then Gone Again. Trampin’ followed those and she has a new disc coming out in April.

The new songs may lack the hard guitars and punk sensitivities of her earlier works, but they are on the same level artistically. Her band is a tight group of professionals. They handle the slow parts and the fast parts; they can be a grungy or clean.

Glitter in their Eyes off of Gung Ho is a good example of their professionalism. It is a catchy pop song with clean guitar hooks. But the song is not what you would expect from the title. Glitter in the eyes in this case doesn’t refer to being blinded by the glitter of Hollywood, New York, or Paris. It refers to the glitter of evil, the sick enjoyment of the kill or swindle. It’s about people in power taking from those who either have none or choose not to use it. The song, with its pop hooks, driving guitars, and soaring chorus, is deceptive, not at all what it seems. It is an example of Smith’s ability to package her political sensitivity as art as well.

Other good pop songs include Gone Again and Summer Cannibals and there are quite a few mid-tempo numbers. all very well done. Don’t Say Nothing and Lo and Beholden are good examples.

Of course this is Patti Smith we’re talking about. How many “good pop songs” have lyrics like this, from Gone Again:

Hey now man's own kin
we commend into the wind
grateful arms grateful limbs
grateful soul he's Gone Again

I have a winter's tale
how vagrant hearts relent prevail
sow their seed into the wind
seize the sky and they're Gone Again

fame is fleeting God is nigh
we raise our arms to him on night
we shoot our flint into the sun
we bless our spoils and we're gone we're gone

As well as being a good pop song, Gone Again is representative of quite a number of her recent songs in that they appear to be about death. Some are angry, others contemplative, still others transcendental.

The grimmest songs are on Peace and Noise. Waiting Underground is one of the more explicitly morbid songs you will ever hear:

if you believe all your hope is gone
down the drain of your humankind
the time has arrived
you'll be waiting here as I was
in a snow-white shroud
waiting underground

As Smith sings those lyrics, you can picture her on a stage, fist raised and screaming like some angry Valkyrie. Other titles include Death Singing, Last Call, Dead to the World, Ravens, Farewell Reel, and Dead City. Consider those titles and you may be able to identify a consistent theme.

The transcendental aspect of Smith’s work is more often represented through bird imagery. It has always been a staple of Smith’s writing, going back to BirdLand on Horses. Wing and China Bird, among others, continue that tradition with added depth. From Wing:

I was a vision
in another eye
and they saw nothing
no future at all
yet I was free
I needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful

and if there's one thing
could do for you
you'd be a wing
in heaven blue

Or China Bird:

If they say it's not that way
Hold your view
[Fly above and with my love]
A light anew
Oh spread your wings
The open sky
Is calling to you china bird
My heart is yearning for you

To complete the upward thematic spiral apparent in Smith’s work from Horses to present, we have to consider the “boy” theme along with politics, death, and birds.

About a Boy from Gung Ho is reminiscent of the Horses spoken-word poetry style.

whirling, whirling,
The boy, now that I... have you in my face,
I.... embrace you, I... I... ...welcome you...
I stood among them... I stood alone.

Memento Mori from Peace and Noise is another example:

oh Johnny! some day they'll make a movie about you
and in the making of that movie
some mad apocalypse
it will become even stranger than the simple act
just a boy going up up up
just a boy going up

With the benefit of hindsight we can see the new work bringing Smith full circle. We can see how Horses was eerily prescient of the arc of Smith’s art and life. Boys, funerals, birds, Blake, transcendence: it was all there from the start.

From Land:

And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake
Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,
All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,
“I won't give up, won't give up, don't let me give up,,,

And he put up his hands and he said, “It's me, it's me,
I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up...

And he saw raven comin' in
And he crawled on his back and he went up
Up up up up up up.

Note the boy going up up up from songs more than twenty years apart? It’s like she saw the outlines of her future, artistic and otherwise, in the ecstatic throes that must have been Horses.

I’ll wrap this up on a somewhat different note. Patti Smith once wrote of Dylan that the intensity of his political perspective had only been successfully revealed through abstract expressionism in rock'n'roll. “I look at him and I don't see a guy giving out leaflets, holding a banner. I see a machine gun.” I think that is also an apt description of Smith herself.

Although I haven’t discussed it to this point, the themes of anger and alienation are integral to much of Smith’s early work and they have pretty much been left behind in her new songs. Rock and Roll Nigger off of Easter is an all-time classic of anger and alienation and is part of the sound track of my own angry youth.

Oh, look around you, all around you,
riding on a copper Wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?

Outside of society, they're waitin' for me.
Outside of society, that's where I want to be.

For many years I was unsure of that lyric. I didn’t know if she was saying ”outside of society“ or ”outside in society,“ or alternating between the two. If she was saying ”outside in society“ I understood that as her wanting to be an outsider who goes into society to shake things up, to initiate change.

If we look at the arc of her life as it relates to society we can see that she has managed to do both at the same time: to be simultaneiously outside of and outside in society. She has stayed outside of society in that she has kept her personal and artistic integrity through 30 + years in the music industry, which is no mean feat. And she has managed to be an outsider in society to such an enviable extent that you just know she is at least as special as a person as she is an artist. In addition to going outside in society to communicate her art and political messages, she is an integral part of a society of incredibly accomplished outsiders: Allen Ginsburg, Phillip Glass, Jim Carrol, Lenny Kaye and the rest of her band, Lou Reed, Fred Smith, John Cale, and I don’t know how many others.

I mention all that with great hesitation. As noted above, to appreciate an artist’s work, I don’t give a flying fuck about their personal history, much less who they hang out with. But as a human, not a critic, I admire her for how she’s handled all that she’s been through and I’m happy for her that she belongs in such a wonderful society.

Rock and roll doesn’t have to be all love, sex, and noise. At it’s best it can be art and humanity in the highest sense of those words. Patti Smith’s work is worthy of consideration on those levels.