The Cyanide Hole

Who is Jimmy Boone?

2009-08-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

Hollywood bartender Jimmy Boone is the hero of Richard Lange's first novel, This Wicked World (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2009; 401 pp., $23.99). Cast in that role, Jimmy Boone seems a poor fit. He ain't no Sam Spade; he don't crack wise with a gat in his puss. Mike Hammer could beat the crap out of Jimmy Boone and never bust a sweat. Philip Marlowe would notice that Jimmy Boone isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Worse: Jimmy ain't got no class! He dresses like a bum and drinks like a sissy (Scotch, orange juice, sweet vermouth and cherry brandy? Blick!). Worst of all: Jimmy walks mean streets with a toothless, wormy pit bull named Faggot.

Jimmy Boone's parole officer thinks Jimmy Boone is a loser. Jimmy Boone thinks Jimmy Boone is a shit magnet. Loretta the dog-rescue lady thinks Jimmy Boone has a good heart. Jimmy's friend Amy doesn't know what to think of Jimmy Boone. By the time they finish This Wicked World, readers may not know what to think of Jimmy Boone either.

This writer thinks Jimmy Boone is a guy who got tired of kicking himself around and decided to let novelist Richard Lange do the kicking for a while. If that sounds kind of wacky, it isn't, really. Jimmy's life is arguably better under Lange's strenuous management.

Before Richard Lange made Jimmy Boone into a crime-fiction hero, Jimmy did petty burglaries, served four years in the Marines, beat an innocent man near to death, spent four years in stir and ruined his buddy Carl's hifalutin, rent-a-goon bodyguard business. Since Richard Lange made Jimmy Boone into a crime-fiction hero, Jimmy does somewhat better: Jimmy solves a murder, rescues an abused dog, exterminates a gang of stone-cold villains, saves two friends from being thrown into the street, and lays a cool roll of hot dough on the murdered man's widow and child.

The downside is that, while he's doing those good deeds, Jimmy Boone gets tied up, beat up, cut up, kicked, stomped, clubbed, punched, pistol-whipped, shot at, and nearly drowned. Pieces of Jimmy get ripped away and eaten by savage dogs. As if all that weren't enough, friend Amy pisses Jimmy off and leaves Los Angeles for a new life in Montana.

Nasty bitch! They'll do it every time.

Even so, tough guys like Spade and Hammer and Marlowe shouldn't laugh at Jimmy Boone. Bartender Jimmy does have one asset that may yet land him in the Hall of Hard-Boiled Fame with the best of the professional dicks: Novelist Richard Lange, who created Jimmy, writes prose that is lean and mean. From the Prologue:

Los Angeles was not its haughty self in the rain. It was like a wet cat: humiliated, confused. People stepped gingerly on suddenly slippery sidewalks, looking like they'd been lied to. The gutters, clogged with garbage, overflowed, and water puddled in busy intersections.

Oscar waited for the bus with a mumbling loco and a couple of old ladies who shared an umbrella. The rain came down harder, the drops slamming into the pavement like suicides. Oscar zipped his jacket and pulled the hood over his head.

Beyond generous use of his ability to create a mood, a scene, a character, Mr. Lange put a bit of thought into This Wicked World. The book isn't just so much mindless violence. There is stuff here to ponder and to argue about.

For cops and public servants and do-gooders of every stripe: "Most of the people you're dealing with on the street don't want your help. They want to be free to beat and be beaten, to rob and be robbed, to kill and be killed."

Describing the arch-villain, Taggert: "He stares at death in the mirror every morning and carries it around inside him every day, and that gives him all the power in the world. Look into his eyes the next time you get close. The end of everything is in there. You can't reason with a man like that. You can only kill him or follow him."

Put This Wicked World under a magnifying glass, you spot a few mistakes. For example, Lange doesn't seem as familiar with Marine Corps training and the use of firearms as he needs to be and if he is, it doesn't show here: veteran grunts like Jimmy and Carl won't walk into a shootout with weapons obtained from god-knows-who that they haven't zeroed or even bothered to test. There are a couple of places, too, where characters' actions in response to motives detailed seem more than a bit outré.

This writer knows that a competent editor will save an author from boners such as those (Shame on you, Little, Brown!). Readers who don't customarily pick such nits probably won't notice the mistakes because they'll be too busy having fun with Lange's story.

Thus our verdict is that This Wicked World is rock-em, sock-em, arm-breaking, armchair adventure. The message is about doing the right thing, about how much trouble the effort brings us, about what it's worth to us as human beings. Moral ambiguity is a leitmotif in This Wicked World. Good and Evil are a hard pair to separate throughout. Wrong things (even armed robbery and murder) can look like right things if they're done in a just cause by people who for whatever reason try too hard to do good.

So it is with Jimmy Boone. Driven by his need to accomplish just one good thing, Jimmy leads a small crew of his friends neck-deep into the muck of thuggery.

When the blood all dries and the dust all settles, Jimmy Boone thinks he's about through with Los Angeles. The Cyanide Hole suspects, however, that Los Angeles is not through with Jimmy Boone. Fans of crime fiction, having read This Wicked World, will hope that Richard Lange finds new adventures for Jimmy (and a better editor) soon.

Sinking the S.S. Birth Certificate

2009-07-31T09:43:00.000-07:00

Political journalism lately bubbles with talk of "the birthers." "The birthers," as most of the world already knows, are those who insist that President Obama was not born in the United States, that he is a natural-born citizen of a foreign country and is, therefore, constitutionally barred from serving as president of the United States. Birthers imply that the governor and the government of the State of Hawaii are complicit in the alleged plot because "somebody" just had to fake Mr. O's fake birth certificate. "And Hey!" they whine: "If Obama really was born in the United States, why doesn't he just show us his long-form birth certificate and put all of this to rest?"

Some think the birthers' demand sounds reasonable. What they fail to grasp is that if Obama were to show his long-form birth certificate as requested, the birthers would immediately call that document's authenticity into question on the same grounds (i.e.: No grounds at all.) that they question the authenticity of the electronic "short form" that has already been published by the State of Hawaii. Thus, if the long-form document were released, rumors of a forgery would not be quelled but would instead be renewed and revitalized.

Democratic partisans by and large accuse the birthers of racism. They insist that if Obama were a white guy or if his name sounded a little less Arabic, questions about the president's place of birth would never have arisen. The partisans forget that it was Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign that originally questioned the whereabouts of Mr. Obama's birth. So it is that accusations of racism hurled at the birthers are likely misapplied. Instead, recent history suggests that -- whatever the motives of the birthers themselves -- those who pay the likes of Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh to keep the pot boiling are rich, political operatives.

Consider: the GOP lost 2008 by an enormous margin. They lost so badly that, as many already know, the life of the GOP is now in the balance. Republicans are no better than a poisonous minority in the House and probably cannot sustain a filibuster in the Senate. The GOP at this point is driven by a need to hang onto their moneyed contributors (in politics, no power = no money). Toward that end they will do whatever they can, and their options are few.

One option they do have is to fight a rearguard action by diminishing the size of Obama's coattails. They can undermine his authority, diminish his power to lead and hobble his legislative agenda by questioning his right to govern and spreading rumors that he has no such right in fact, that his presidency is illegal, as many birthers insist is the case. That the charges are baseless makes no difference: "The squeaking wheel gets the grease," as the saying goes, and in this particular case public attention is all the grease that matters.

The tactic is not new by any means. We saw it in play after Bill Clinton (in 1992) won a minority victory over Pres. George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. On election night, Sen. Bob Dole was asked to comment on the size of the new president's mandate. Dole responded that as far as he was concerned, Bill Clinton HAD no mandate. In the months that followed, the GOP did their best to make it so.

Rumors about Whitewater, already in evidence, got louder after the election than they were during the campaign (Curious, don't you think?) The government, under the direction of a meticulously vicious Republican special prosecutor, eventually spent $38 million on the Whitewater investigation and found precisely nothing. But they spread the investigation out across eight years (helped along by Bill's greasy, stupid fling with Monica Lewinski).
The Clintons hadn't been long in Washington before their friend and advisor Vincent Foster killed himself. A team of partisan pundits immediately concocted the story that Foster was murdered, that Bill and Hillary were responsible for the crime, and that an investigation would reveal the facts. The pundits were glad to conduct the investigation themselves, in banner headlines. The smear dragged on for many months before it all came to nothing. I don't believe any of those responsible ever confessed to being wrong.
Troopergate was another of Bill Clinton's alleged crimes. Again, the rumors grew louder after the election than they were during the campaign. (Also curious, don't you think?) I read the confession of the twisted liar who invented the story and wrote a book about it, the whole thing -- including the testimony of the Arkansas state troopers allegedly involved -- paid for by rabidly conservative, Republican publisher Richard Mellon Scaife.
Bill's baby brother was another alleged issue. A drunken coke snorter and womanizer, Roger Clinton was the Billy Carter of the nineties. Of course he wasn't the president, but GOP publicists did their level best to make it seem as if he were.
Then there was the Mena, Ark., coke-smuggling operation that supposedly went on during Bill's tenure as governor of Arkansas. It was claimed at the time that the CIA was running those dope flights and that then Gov. Clinton was boss of the operation. I was hounded out of a chat room when I pointed out that the CIA is an organ of the UNITED STATES government and an operation of that sort -- and of such brazen notoriety -- could not have gone forward without the knowledge and complicity of Pres. George H.W. Bush and/or key members of his administration. Nobody in that particular chat room had any use for facts.

Considering all of that, one arrives at the conclusion that the fable of the Obama birth certificate is only one of several other fables that will doubtless gain currency and amplitude as this presidency goes forward and Mr. O's popularity diminishes further. Such things are paid for with money from outfits like The Weekly Standard (Richard Mellon Scaife), The National Review (the Buckley oil fortune) and other radical right sources. Democrats have their own propagandists (the Kennedy fortune paid for George magazine, for example).

Nobody in journalism or in politics (Journalism IS politics -- or didn't you realize that? Journalism as we know it has no other purpose.) takes any of that crap seriously regardless of what they say in public. Those who man the oars that propel these scandals keep their life jackets handy because boats like the S.S. Birth Certificate, being made of substandard material, are prone to sudden and catastrophic leakage.

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John Oliver Takes Down Tim Geithner

2009-07-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

Those who haven't seen John Oliver take down Tim Geithner had better click the link and watch the video. It may just be the funniest thing you've ever seen. Oliver's shtick was never more savage.

The best career move Tim Geithner can make, now that John Oliver is through with him, would be to either kill himself or flee the country. No! Wait! The best career move Geithner could make at this point is to flee the country and then kill himself.

No matter what he does with the rest of his life, Tim Geithner will never get back from where John Oliver has put him.

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Much Stranger than Fiction

2009-05-27T05:14:00.000-07:00

John Gorenfeld's Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon
Created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right,
and Built an American Kingdom
a review

Among those who will read this item, there are probably a few who already believe that followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (aka “Moonies”) are crazier than a trainload of shit-house rats. My hat’s off to those who think so, for they are correct.

Most readers probably won’t believe such an extreme statement. If you are one of them I will not argue but urge you instead to point your browser at Messages from the Spirit World. At the center of the image is a link that reveals “Messages from God and former U.S. Presidents to the United Nations.” Click on the link, and read those messages.

By the time you return from that bizarre adventure, the Moonies themselves will have convinced you (as they convinced me) that they are indeed crazier than a trainload of shit-house rats. And if, like me, your curiosity drives you to learn more about Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, you may be of a mind to read author John Gorenfeld’s book, Bad Moon Rising (PoliPoint Press: Sausalito, CA; 2008; $24.95).

Unlike this critic, John Gorenfeld avoids extreme statements because he is a good journalist. Gorenfeld evidently gives credence to the idea that in making a joke of someone, we discount the possibility that he, she, or they might actually be dangerous. And as a Moonologist of several years’ experience, Gorenfeld also seems to understand and appreciate that while members of Moon’s Unification Church may actually be insane, their collective insanity must be methodically directed because it works toward a coherent purpose.

The Rev. Moon’s story is one of the strangest this writer has encountered. Born Yong-Myung Moon in 1920, the penniless son of North Korean peasants, he became Sun Myung Moon only after he experienced an epiphany in 1935. During Easter, Moon went up a hill to pray. God appeared and told him: “You are the son I have been seeking, the one who can begin my eternal history.”

Moon then went to Japan, where he trained as an electrical engineer. His training finished, he went back to Korea. There he began his ministry but was rejected by his congregation. He was also arrested and imprisoned by authorities in North Korea. Escaped from what amounted to slavery, Moon fled to South Korea. There he started a church that combined Moon’s own, weird take on Christian theology with a virulent anti-communism.

While Moon serviced and grew his flocks, the Republic of Korea created its own Central Intelligence Agency. The ROK CIA then created the Unification Church from whole cloth. Secret agencies being what they are, details of the action are sketchy where they’re not entirely lacking. Somehow the Rev. Moon ended up as leader of the ROK CIA’s new church, and he brought his flock of some few thousands with him. Moon’s Unification Church proved popular in Japan and over the years gained a toehold in the United States and in other countries, as well.

By the middle Sixties, Moon was in America and evangelizing furiously. Here in the States, the message of the Unification Church proved most appealing to confused and rebellious youth, to dropouts who were alienated even from the counterculture, to young spiritual cripples of most every stripe.

Survivors of the crazy, drug-laced street scene of the Sixties and Seventies will recall how it was: after the Manson killings and the Jonestown massacre, parents nationally were terrified of anything that smacked of “cultism.” Moonies -- who did weird things such as travel in flocks and sell flowers on the street -- were one group suspected of “cultism.” They were believed to have been hypnotized or brainwashed -- call it 'spiritually hijacked' if you will. Frantic parents sometimes kidnapped their own children and dragged them home, away from Moonie influence, where the kids were confined for weeks or months under close supervision by professional (and sometimes brutal) 'deprogrammers'.

While Moonie flocks raised money selling flowers, Rev. Moon schmoozed Washington bigwigs. Through well connected Korean friends, Moon gained the endorsement of former President Eisenhower. Using Ike's good name as a springboard, Moon moved boldly to widen his circle of influential friends. He was one of the very few in Washington who openly stood by Tricky Dick Nixon in the depths of the Watergate scandal. Media reported Moon and Nixon praying together in the Oval Office. Moonie faithful marched in support of Nixon outside the beleaguered White House.

Through the turbulent Seventies, Moon and his people persevered despite accusations of “cultism” that involved him and his church in congressional investigations. At different times, Moon made himself useful dispensing money and favors to people such as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jesse Helms, Jack Kemp, William Bennett, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove, organizations such as Empower America, The Heritage Foundation, and a host of other big-league players in the rabidly reactionary, right-wing power grab that America likes to call “Christian conservatism.”

Savoring the worth of propaganda for such purposes, Moon bought The Washington Times newspaper (then defunct) in 1982 and has since then spent billions to get the paper up and keep it afloat. Moonism hit a speed bump in 1984, when former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) had the Reverend jugged for tax evasion. During the nineteen months Moon spent in prison, his public relations campaign went forward without missing a beat. Moon and his church continued in service to the power elite of America’s radical right. Moon’s promo operation went global in Y2K, when the Reverend snapped up the United Press International newswire at a fire-sale price.

Schmoozing paid dividends: Highly placed Moon journalists began to achieve influential positions in government. Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow (now deceased) spent three years as opinion-page editor at The Washington Times before he went to work for George W. Bush. Moonie church member Josette Sheeran, former managing editor of The Washington Times, in 1997 quit her Moonie job and went to work for Bill Bennett’s “Empower America” think tank. In 2001, President Bush named Ms. Sheeran “undersecretary of state for economic, business and cultural affairs.” In 2006 (with the support of U.N. Ambassador John Bolton) Sheeran vacated her undersecretary of state appointment to head up the U.N. World Food Program. And it surely was no coincidence that the Unification Church and its many dozens of “non-profit” front groups stood in line with their hands out when the Bush administration handed out taxpayer dollars to 'faith-based initiatives'.

Now some 89 years old, Moon stands at the head of a church that spans the globe. In the United States alone, Moonies interact with the public through more than 1,500 assorted front groups and businesses -- most of them innocuously named. Globally, Moon’s church is active in 40 nations through more than 2,100 affiliated groups. Steven Alan Hassan’s Freedom of Mind Center attempts to keep tabs on Moon operations and has posted what they hope is a complete list of Moon Church affiliates on the World Wide Web. Reading that list, it is likely that some of those who donate to charitable organizations and political or religious causes will learn that they’ve been donating money to one or another aspect of the Unification Church.

All of that came to a climax (if NOT to a blessed end) on a March evening at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., in 2004. Then and there, members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives gathered for a coronation ceremony at which they crowned the Rev. Sun Myung Moon 'King of Peace'. So far from his humble origin as a North Korean clodhopper, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon today calls himself “The King of Peace, the Lord of the Fourth Israel, the Messiah,” and he has the endorsement of the United States Congress to prove his claim.

Don’t be surprised if you never knew about Moon’s congressional coronation. Senators and representatives involved in the travesty rushed to cover it up as soon as they did it, and mainstream media helped them do so. Everyone involved was ashamed of themselves, you see, because while Moon pretends to be a rabidly patriotic American, his teachings contradict his pretense: Moon teaches that he is more powerful than God; that Jesus was a failure; that Satan loves democracy; that dictatorial rule is best. He claims endorsements from thirty-seven former U.S. presidents (all of them dead) that were channeled to him from the spirit world through a medium (also dead). Moon claims to communicate with God, with Jesus, with Mohammed, Confucius, and the Buddha. Moon also claims to have freed Adolf Hitler from Hell (Toward what end remains unclear. Maybe the good Reverend will have Hitler's ghost appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee. Best evidence suggests he may already have done so.), and much, much more.

Considering what the Rev. Sun Myung Moon teaches and professes to believe, an American patriot has to shudder. What can it mean for America that people who either believe in or carry water for a nutball such as Moon have schmoozed and bought their way into the Oval Office, into the US diplomatic corps, and into other positions of importance in our federal government?

Thus Gorenfeld’s gift to us is not just the story of Moon and his church but the facts of which that story is built. While this review gives only the barest few, Bad Moon Rising is packed with scary and outrageous details. Gorenfeld did years of legwork and compiled a mountain of documented information, which he deploys with skill. His narration is dispassionate but laced with a dry wit. Reading Gorenfeld‘s book, I found myself chuckling wryly when I wasn’t slack-jawed with astonishment.

The Cyanide Hole recommends that you support great journalism, strike a blow for sanity in government and amuse yourself in the process. Buy and read Bad Moon Rising. Then go and vote accordingly.

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George Washington Matsell, Part Two

2009-04-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

This story was first published in TimeLines (Vol. IV, No. 5; September 1998), the voice of the Linn County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission from The History Center of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

History by Bob Drahozal; Copy Edit by Jimmy Montague

George W. Matsell: The Big Chief in The Big Apple

Indians of Eastern Iowa called George Washington Matsell “The Big Chief.” The handle was entirely appropriate: Matsell was not only the first police chief of New York City, but he weighed something near 350 pounds.

Chief Matsell was a native of New York City who came to the Wapsipinicon River country as one of Linn County’s early pioneers. He arrived with a fortune rumored to be in excess of $2 million. He spent lavishly on 3,300 acres of land and a 25-room mansion full of luxuries and curios in which he lived for only three months of each year. He spent the rest of his time pursuing a career in New York City politics. When he was in Iowa, he entertained troops of expensive friends with troupes of expensive actors and carloads of expensive food and beverages. He even published his own newspaper. He did all of that within plain sight of his neighbors, pioneer families to whom money was “as scarce as hens’ teeth,” who lived in unchinked log cabins and with whom he had next to nothing to do. Thus if he made a big splash among them, it wasn’t because he fell in the Wapsi River. If he left a deep impression on them and upon the region, it wasn’t because he was overweight.

None of that will be news to those who read “Remembering the Big Chief” in our last edition. This time, having already told of Matsell’s marvelous Wapsi River manor and the marvels housed therein, we’re going to take a closer look at George Matsell’s life in New York City. In focusing on that aspect of the man, we hope to learn a bit more about him. Perhaps what we learn will go some way toward explaining the Big Chief’s presence in Iowa and his conduct while in residence here.

The Big Chief’s father, George Matsell, emigrated from England to New York City in 1784. The elder Matsell then returned to England, married Elizabeth Constable and brought his bride back to New York, where he opened a tailor shop on Broadway.

Chief Matsell always insisted he was born on Oct. 25, 1806.¹ A 1929 article in the New York Herald Tribune said he was born in 1811.² When Chief Matsell died in 1877, his New York Times obituary stated that he was born in 1807.³ Because there is no substantive reason to disbelieve the Chief in favor of either newspaper’s account, it seems likely that both journals were mistaken.

Another controversy regarding Chief Matsell’s birth arose as part of a political brawl in 1854-55. At that time Matsell’s political enemies — selfstyled “Native Americans” of the Know Nothing Party⁴ — alleged that he was actually born in England, from whence he emigrated with his parents to New York at the age of 5 or 6. Had that been true, it would have meant that Matsell was ineligible to hold the office of police commissioner for the city of New York.⁵ In the end, however, none of it was shown to be of substance.

Young George received some public school training. Then, at the age of 9, he was placed on his uncle’s farm in New Jersey. That life did not suit him. He left at the age of 11, shipped as a ’prentice seaman on the brig Catherine Rodgers, bound for Mobile, Ala. Fifteen days out, Catherine Rodgers was wrecked. Matsell, one of the few to be rescued, subsequently spent several months wandering about the Florida reefs in the company of men who pillaged shipwrecks for a living. He then worked at a saltyard in Nassau, New Providence, for a short time before moving on to Mobile. There he spent some time with the Creek Indians. After that experience he suddenly appeared in New York City, surprising his friends, who had presumed him dead. A few days later, however, he boarded a ship bound for South Carolina. Upon his return from that voyage, he signed on the London Trader. She was a fast Briton in China traffic, a clipper bound for the Orient. Harsh discipline on that voyage evidently cured Matsell’s yen for nautical adventure, for he afterward placed with Messrs. Barrett & Tileston, silk dyers and printers on Staten Island, carving pattern blocks and ideating new designs.⁶

Eight years later, on April 6, 1834, he married Ellen Mariam Barrett. She was the daughter of the senior partner at Barrett & Tileston and was said to be a descendant of George M. Barrett, one of the Minutemen who shot it out with British Redcoats at the Battle of Lexington.⁷

Later that year, young Matsell opened a bookstore on Chatham Street in New York City. His store’s claim to fame lay in the peculiar sort of books he stocked. Works by Thomas Paine, Robert Dale Owen, Fanny Wright and other free thinkers were always found in Matsell’s store. The place became a rendezvous for avant-garde philosophers and windmill tilters.⁸

Matsell joined a political club, the Locofoco⁹ faction of the Democratic party, and thereby gained enough influence to be appointed to the New York Custom House in 1837. There he set up a surveillance system to fight the dishonesty of dock workers, custom agents and businessmen.

In 1840, Matsell was appointed police magistrate at the Tombs Police Court.¹⁰ Newspaper accounts claim he exhibited a sense of fair play and of humor and won recognition as a negotiator while dispensing justice. The papers said he was also a bit of a vigilante, who didn’t wait for criminals to be brought before him. He and three other magistrates led a crew of ‘indefatigables’ through the streets to ferret out crooks and arrest them. Most of the criminals they caught seemed to be drunks, gamblers and other patrons of “dens of infamy,” with which the city was rife. Thugs and burglars also fell to Matsell and his law dogs.¹¹

In 1845, New York City organized a Municipal Police Department of some 900 men to take the place of its old, ineffective, village-watchman system.¹² New York’s was the first fulltime police force organized in the United States. New York mayor William F. Havemeyer nominated Police Justice Taylor, a Whig, as superintendent of this new force. The Common Council, strongly Democratic, rejected his choice. Havemeyer then nominated Matsell, a Democrat, who was confirmed immediately.¹³

Matsell, by the way, remained a Democrat all his life. As a result he numbered many Democrats among his friends, including Presidents Martin Van Buren and Franklin Pierce, several New York mayors and many others in New York political circles.¹⁴ He and Theodore Roosevelt’s father operated excursion boats out of New York City.¹⁵ However, he also included among his friends such staunch Whigs as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.¹⁶

Matsell put his police force into uniforms in the teeth of stiff opposition from his officers, using strong incentives such as summary dismissal. Soon his uniforms, combined with paramilitary training and other changes he wrought, led his loudest opponents to become his loudest supporters.¹⁷

One of his first actions as Police Chief was to place banks, hotels, theaters, ferries, depots and other public places under police surveillance.¹⁸ During the 13 years of his chieftainship, Matsell dealt successfully all manner of disturbances, including the 1849 Astor Place Theater riot in the course of which more than 20 New Yorkers were killed. Through it all, Matsell worked at improving the discipline and efficiency of his force.¹⁹

In 1857 the New York State Legislature passed the Metropolitan Police Act, which set up a commission to make police appointments. Prior to that time, police appointments were the prerogative of the Boards of Aldermen. Mayor Fernando Wood and Chief Matsell disagreed with the Act and continued to run the police department as it had been. An incident arose when Mayor Wood defied a governor’s appointment of the New York City Street Commissioner. A warrant for Mayor Wood's arrest was issued.

Chief Matsell remained loyal to the mayor. He and 800 policemen resisted attempts to arrest the mayor. An armed confrontation between Matsell’s police and the state-appointed Municipal Police ensued. Many of the latter were severely wounded, some fatally. The military intervened, and the courts finally dislodged Matsell and Mayor Wood. Matsell was tried and dismissed from the force. The state-appointed Metropolitan Police thereafter patrolled New York City until 1870, when authority was restored to local officials.²⁰

Those who sought Matsell’s dismissal came to regret it. For when the infamous New York Draft Riots broke out in 1863, both the state-appointed police and federal troops failed to contain the mob. With corpses laying thick in the streets and Police Superintendent John Kennedy beaten senseless by rioters, it was Matsell to whom city authorities turned. A special train was dispatched to bring the Big Chief back from his Iowa exile so he could lead the forces of law and order to suppress the violence.²¹

Chief Matsell was also a journalist, an author and editor. Under the name of G. W. Matsell & Co., the Chief published and edited the National Police Gazette from 1858 to 1876. He also wrote a book, Vocabulum; or The Rogues’ Lexicon, which remains popular today with historical novelists and mystery writers who seek to add authentic dialog to stories of 19thcentury America. Matsell’s Vocabulum is “a comprehensive dictionary of slang expressions used by gamblers, billiard players, stock brokers and pugilists compiled from the most authentic sources.” The Chief’s book provides not only definitions but many samples of proper slang usage (e.g.: “Dakma the bloke and cloy his cole” translates to “Silence the man and steal his money” — an interpretation that is decidedly not selfevident). Matsell also wrote an appendix to Thomas L. Harris’ sermon: Juvenile Depravity and Crime in Our City.²² The appendix is Matsell’s report on destitution and crime among children in New York. A third Matsell book, Rules and regulations for police of the city of New York, was written in 1846 and updated three times in the next seven years.²³

Chief Matsell was at one time thought to be worth about $2 million. It was said that he supported the NYPD out of his own pocket during its war with the New York State Legislature in 1857.²⁴ In fact, Matsell’s personal worth was then and is now uncertain. When he died, his estate was valued at about $160,000, including real estate in New York City and “Western lands.”²⁵

Although the powerful and corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, led by the infamous W. M. “Boss” Tweed, controlled New York City during this time, Chief Matsell is reported to have been remarkably ‘clean’. He opposed the machine’s corruption and was a member of the Committee of Seventy that aided in the conviction of Tweed and his gang.²⁶

In 1873 William Havemeyer was re-elected mayor. He reappointed Matsell Superintendent of Police. Eventually he was appointed Police Commissioner and subsequently elected President of the Board of Commissioners.²⁷ His reputation, however, was subject to a relentless attack by The New York Times.

In July, 1875, the new mayor, William Wickham, came under fire in regard to the Commissioners who were on his governing board. Several were pressured into resigning.²⁸ Charges were made by a Mr. David Twohey to the mayor, stating that George Matsell was willfully and habitually negligent of his duties, was partial and brutal in his conduct, and that he was ignorant and incompetent.²⁹ Matsell resisted resignation and was finally removed from office by order of the Governor on December 31, 1875.³⁰

Matsell's removal was duly celebrated with an editorial by the Times, which had for years charged that Matsell’s Police Gazette was “a synonym for everything that is foul and indecent in journalism.”³¹ But other New York newspapers, showed a high regard for Matsell’s efforts and assert that he made the New York Police Department one of the best in the world.³² After leaving the commissioner’s office, Matsell quietly practiced law, providing advice in criminal cases.³³

According to a news item in The New York Times of July 10, 1877, Chief Matsell had suffered an injury to his toes some 20 years prior when, while investigating a crime, he walked on some glass in his stocking feet, cutting them severely. Although that wound healed when he was fortyish, in old age it reopened and gangrene set in.³⁴ Amputation of three toes, and later a leg, failed to stem the infection. On July 25, 1877, with his wife and four children in attendance, George Washington Matsell died in his New York residence at No. 230 East 58th Street, at the age of 71.³⁵

The Big Chief's funeral at St. Thomas Church was attended by many city officials, judges, prominent businessmen and old friends from City Hall. A hundred uniformed policemen escorted his body. Matsell was buried in Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery at Amsterdam Avenue and 115th Street in New York City.³⁶

Matsell’s wife, Ellen, came to Iowa for the summers with George and returned to New York with him in the fall. However, after he died in 1877, she returned to Iowa and lived here with her children for twenty years. She died on June 12, 1897, at the age of 82, at Matsellton, as the estate was then called. She was interred in Trinity Cemetery in New York City, alongside her husband.³⁷

The Matsells had four children — three sons, Henry Charles (called Harry), George Junior, Augustus (called Gus) and a daughter, Susan. None of them ever married.³⁸

After his father died, George Jr., under his name, and subsequently as the Matsell Brothers, took over management of the farm. During this time the estate came to be called Castle Farm. He kept up the land acquisition and sales project that his father began. George Jr., also made friends in the political arena although he never participated there. He became a close associate of both Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have visited the Matsell farm at one time.³⁹

Harry died on July 23, 1895 at the age of 48.⁴⁰ Very little has been recorded about him. Susan died in Anamosa on December 27, 1915. She was 78. In her Cedar Rapids Gazette obituary, she was described as “a refined and intelligent woman, greatly esteemed by those who had the pleasure of her acquaintance.”⁴¹

George Jr. and Gus accompanied Susan's body to New York for burial. Both brothers took deathly ill from exposure suffered while waiting in an unheated railroad station in Farley, Iowa. George Jr. died from the exposure on January 6, 1916, at the age of 81.⁴² Gus finally recovered and saw to his brother’s burial in the New York City family plot. He then returned to Iowa and took over the farm management. Gus went to live with his cousin, George Finn, on May 6, 1916. He sold the farm in 1918; it was deeded back to him. He resold it in 1925. Gus died at the home of George Finn on January 6, 1929, at the age of ⁸⁷. All the Matsell children are buried in the family plot in Trinity Cemetery in New York City.⁴³

Sources for Episode Two

(1) B. L. Wick. “George W. Matsell.” The Palimpsest, Vol. V, n. 7 (July 1925).

(2) “Matsell Burial Recalls Famous Police Chief.” The New York Herald Tribune, 18 January 1925.

(3) “Death of George W. Matsell.” The New York Times, 26 July 1877.

(4) The Know Nothings were a secret political party that existed from 1849 to about 1860. Members despised immigrants and Roman Catholics. Know Nothings aimed to prevent foreignborn citizens from holding political office and to stymie foreign influence and ideas. The party’s name resulted from its secrecy. When questioned about the party, members always answered “I don’t know,” which led famed editor and publisher Ned Buntline to dub them “the Know Nothing Party.” The name stuck, even though they adopted the name “American Party” at their 1854 convention in Cincinnati. By 1861 the Know Nothings had no seats in Congress. They disappeared from the political arena soon thereafter.

(5) “Death of Matsell.” The New York Times.

(6) Fragment of newspaper article, source unknown. Content shows it to be a New York City paper from 1845.

(7) “‘Gus’ Matsell, Last of His Family, A Friend of Roosevelt, Dies.” The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette and Republican, 7 January 1929.

(8) “Death of Matsell.” NYT.

(9) The Locofocos were a band of radical Democrats who organized in New York in 1835. Led by idealistic reformers, Locofocos were mostly bluecollar laborers who opposed paper money, tariffs, monopolies and state banks. They were in favor of democratic measures and against measures that worked in favor of the privileged class. They won their name at a nominating convention in Tammany Hall: When statusquo goons turned out the lights in an attempt to break up the radicals’ meeting, the insurgents pulled out new, hightech, friction matches — then called “locofoco matches” — with which they lit the candles that each man carried. Thus they were able to continue. The Locofocos realized the pinnacle of their power and success when President Martin Van Buren successfully urged Congress to pass the Independent Treasury Act, which forced the permanent separation of government and banking. Like the Know Nothings, the Locofocos dissolved amid the political turmoil that marked the late ante-bellum period.

(10) “Early American Historical Properties owned by Mrs. Ida B. Finn, Central City, together with notes regarding them, and their former owner, Chief of Police of New York City, George Washington Matsell.” List compiled by the Lawrence Brothers of Anamosa, Ia., dated 28 May 1941. From Dorothy Cummins’ collection of notes and documents on the Matsells, now part of The History Center collection.

(11) Misc. New York newspaper clippings, source and date unknown. Dorothy Cummins collection, The History Center.

(12) William Andrews. “The Early Years: The Challenge of Public Order, 18451870.” Spring 3100. Electronic document, World Wide Web at http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/
nyclink/html/nypd/html/3100/retro.html.

(13) “Death of Matsell.” NYT.

(14) “Mystery of Picturesque Matsell Home, Established Near Viola 72 Years Ago By New York Police Chief, Still Unsolved. The Cedar Rapids Gazette, 30 September 1928.

(15) G.P. Bowdish to Jay G. Sigmund. Letter, March 12, 1934. State Historical Society of Iowa.

(16) On the acquaintance of Chief Matsell with Henry Clay see “Webster, Clay, Calhoun and Jackson — How They Sat for Their Daguerrotypes.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, V. 38, n. 228, May 1869. For Matsell and Daniel Webster see Bell, “Mystery of Picturesque Home.”

(17) “Death of Matsell.”

(18) “Early American Historical Properties.” Cummins Collection. The History Center.

(19) “Matsell Burial.” New York Herald Tribune.

(20) “Death of Matsell.”

(21) On the special train to fetch Matsell, see “Early American Historical Properties.” For the beating of Supt. Kennedy specifically, see Andrews, “The Early Years,” Spring 3100. Follow the link to Draft Riots.

(22) Thomas Lake Harris. Juvenile depravity and crime in our city: a sermon preached Jan. 13, 1850 (Publisher unknown, New York, 1850). LOC call number HV9106.N6 H3.

(23) New York Police Department, George W. Matsell, comp. Rules and regulations for day and night police of the city of New York: with instructions as to the legal powers and duties of policemen (New York: C.C. Childs, 1846). The New York Historical Society has six copies of the work, one of which was inscribed and presented to Chief Matsell by one of his beloved cops.

(24) J.W. Bowdish. “Personal Recollections of Honorable George W. Matsell.” Memoir, Iowa State Historical Society, 1925.

(25) “ExCommissioner Matsell’s Estate.” The New York Times, 5 August 1877.

(26) Wick. “Matsell.” Palimpsest. George Kruse. “New County Park Was Country Estate for Noted New Yorker.” The Cedar Rapids Gazette, 2 April 1967. Dorothy Cummins. “New Linn County Recreation Area Recalls Days of Iowa’s Fabulous “‘Mount Vernon.’” The Des Moines Register, 2 April 1967.

(27) Robert Bell. “Mystery of Picturesque Matsell Home, Established Near Viola 72 Years Ago by New York Police Chief, Still Unsolved.” The Cedar Rapids Sunday Gazette and Republican, 30 September 1928.

(28) “Local Miscellany — Anticipating the Election.” Editorial. The New York Times, 9 October 1875. “The Police Board — Secret Action of the Mayor.” Editorial. The New York Times, 10 October 1875. “The Police Commissioners.” Editorial. The New York Times, 14 October 1875.

(29) “The Police Board.” Article. The New York Times, 25 September 1875.

(30) “Police Board Changes.” Article. The New York Times, 1 January 1876

(31) “The Mayor’s Man Friday.” Editorial. The New York Times, 23 May 1873.
(32) “Matsell Burial.” New York Herald Tribune.

(33) “Death of Matsell.”

(34) ExSuperintendent Matsell Dying.” The New York Times, 10 July 1877.

(35) “Death of Matsell.”

(36) “Funeral of Late Mr. Matsell.” The New York Times, 29 July 1877.

(37) “Gus Matsell Dies.” The Cedar Rapids Gazette and Republican. 7 January 1929.

(38) Ibid.

(39) Ernest P. Mickel. “He Reigned Over Iowa Acres Like a Royal Lord or Duke.” The Des Moines Register, 29 November 1936. Also see Bowdish. “Personal Recollections,” passim.

(40) Henry’s death earned but brief mention in The Cedar Rapids Gazette of 26 July 1895. One short paragraph on page 8 tells readers: “Died at Matsellton, Linn County, Iowa, July 23, Henry Charles, youngest son of Ella Mariam and the late Geo. W. Matsell of New York City. Interment at Trinity, New York.”

(41) “Mrs. Matsell [sic.] Dies at Hospital in Anamosa.” The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, 28 December 1915. The Gazette dubs her “Mrs. Susan Jones Matsell,” despite the fact that she never married.

“Daughter of Pioneer New York Police Chief Appreciated for Worth.” The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, 29 December 1915.

(42) Mickel. “Reigned Over Iowa Acres.”

(43) “Gus Matsell Dies.”

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George Washington Matsell

2009-03-30T01:46:00.000-07:00

This story was first published in TimeLines (Vol. IV, No. 4; June 1998), the voice of the Linn County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission from The History Center of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

History by Bob Drahozal; Copy Edit by Jimmy Montague

George W. Matsell: Remembering The Big Chief

Anyone traveling north from the tiny village of Viola, Ia., in the middle 1800s would, after about five miles, come to a bridge over the Wapsipinicon River. There, at the south end of the bridge, if travelers raised their eyes to the northwest they would see a mansion on a hill above the north bank of the river and, west of the big house, a magnificent set of farm buildings. Crossing to the north bank, a few yards past the end of the bridge, the traveler's view of the mansion and outbuildings would be blocked by huge trees that towered over the road. From that angle, the only sign of the great house was a gate, framed by a pair of stone gateposts -- ten feet tall -- that stood by the south edge of the way. The gate marked the entrance to the mansion, the summer home of George Washington Matsell, the first police chief of New York City, a pivotal figure in the history of law enforcement, and an important cog in the Irish-Democrat political machine known as Tammany Hall, which then ran the city.

How did this big-town police chief discover Iowa, and why did he choose to build a home here? An Iowa neighbor, Irving P. Bowdish, said he was told by Chief Matsell that the scenery in and about Anamosa, Ia., had been recommended to him by a Jesuit priest as some of the most interesting and beautiful in the nation.¹

A second, more fanciful tale is also attributed to Chief Matsell. Supposedly a group of Indians from Iowa once visited New York City. Their hotel room became unbearably warm, and they retired to the rooftop for relief. The manager had them arrested for disturbing the peace. Chief Matsell heard their story and had them released from custody. He then showed them around the city. They in turn told him of Iowa, of its fresh air, good hunting and good foods, and invited him to visit.²

Why did Matsell locate in such a secluded place? Again there are a couple of theories. One has it that Matsell wanted a landed estate which he could use as a summer home and to which he could, in the English custom, eventually retire.³ The nature of the site he chose supports that idea, as it was more suited to sports and leisure than to farming. Only about 15 percent of the place was tillable; the rest was wooded. The home site featured good spring water and a spectacular view of the Wapsipinicon River.

Another story has it that Matsell came to Iowa to escape prosecution for corruption and to use his illgotten wealth to build his own, private empire in the wilderness.⁴ This latter conjecture is disputed by the fact that Matsell maintained a residence in New York and spent only his summers in Iowa. Still there may be something to it, for (as shall be seen in a second article) Chief Matsell had his share of legal problems in New York.

However he first discovered the state and for whatever reason he chose to build here, Chief Matsell bought a lot of land in Iowa, much of it sight unseen. The area he chose for his purchases was in Buffalo Township, Linn County, east of the Wapsipinicon River, between the presentday towns of Viola and Prairieburg. His first recorded Iowa land purchase was on April 12, 1853.⁵ The original estate was some 1,500 to 2,000 acres. Subsequent purchases, including land belonging to neighbor Thomas Sampson, eventually increased Matsell’s holding to around 3,300 acres.⁶ And while the bulk of the estate lay around the presentday Matsell Bridge Natural Area, Chief Matsell’s properties were scattered to the north of that location, upriver into Boulder Township. Altogether, Matsell had four miles of Wapsipinicon River frontage.⁷

Matsell secured some lands through the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. and authorized his agents to locate contiguous tracts for additional purchases. He used the services of New York attorney John C. Clegg to search out veterans of the War of 1812 who had received land patents for their service and who were willing to sell. In the late 1850s, the U.S. government sold land in Iowa for $1.50 per acre, and Matsell paid veterans slightly more than that for their patents. Clegg usually bought the land in his own name and then transferred ownership to Matsell for a small premium. Other parcels were acquired from owners of Iowa land who were located both in Iowa and in New York, purchases for which attorneys R. D. Stephens of Marion, Ia., and Richard Sampson of New York City acted as Chief Matsell’s agents.⁸

Matsell was also on good terms with various Linn County treasurers, who kept him informed of lands going on the block at county tax sales. Those tax sales provided some great bargains for Matsell. Purchases included a 40acre plot in 1856 for a tax due payment of 92 cents (2.3 cents per acre). Between 1862 and 1865 Matsell took advantage of tax sales to acquire 320 acres for $17.66 (5.5 cents per acre), 40 acres for $2.18 (3.5 cents per acre) and another 40 for $2.92 (7.3 cents per acre).⁹

Because skilled labor was scarce on the frontier, Matsell prevailed on his nephew, Matthew D. Finn, an accomplished carpenter from New York, to come with him to Iowa and supervise the construction of his house and outbuildings. They arrived in 1856. Work began on Chief Matsell’s house almost immediately and was completed the following year. Finn and his descendants also settled in Iowa and have been a source for many articles written about the Matsell family.¹⁰

The main house and outbuildings lay in the southeast corner of Buffalo Township near Sweet Water Spring, which provided a clear, cold, safe water supply then as it does today. Most of Matsell’s crop land was situated north of the river. Many of his fields had names. One large tract south of the river was called “Log Cabin Field” due to a large log cabin — the home of Mike LaBarge — that was located there. Other fields had names such as “South Field,” “Violet Field” and “Chief Tree Field,” the latter socalled because Chief Matsell used to stand near a tree there to watch for deer. A large tract southwest of the river named “Storm Springs Farm” had its own set of outbuildings.¹¹

Matsell was said to idolize his namesake, President George Washington, and therefore, in building his own home, copied elements of Washington’s fabled Mount Vernon.¹² If so, resemblance between the two homes was slight. Such similarities as there were included location — both homes were sited on hills that featured sweeping views of a river — and the fact that both had roofed porches that ran the length of the side facing the river.

The Matsell house was framed with lumber sawed from timber harvested on the farm itself. Siding and finishing materials were hauled in from Dubuque by oxdrawn wagons. The masonry was done by a Mr. Coonrod. Matsell was so pleased with the man’s work that the Chief named a large tree at the entrance to his estate “the Coonrod Tree.”¹³

The house that Matsell built had 25 rooms. It featured a veranda and gables straight out of the Hudson River tradition. The rooms had fireplaces and high ceilings. A kitchen and pantry lay downstairs, along with a breakfast room, a dining room, a bedroom, the living room and a guest parlor. The upstairs was walled off into three separate sections, of which the easternmost was reserved for Matsell family members. The other two sections were for the help, who were hired by the year. The middle section housed female servants; west-end rooms were for serving men. The upstairs also had one room on the east side, known as “the Tent Room,” with large French doors opening onto a balcony that provided a magnificent view of the river. The porch below extended across two full sides of the house, the east and the south. On the north side, a covered driveway sheltered the Matsell’s comings and goings during inclement weather.¹⁴ In sum, the Chief’s Iowa mansion was truly spacious and luxurious and was entirely in keeping with his New York City residence, which was in a fashionable neighborhood.¹⁵

One of the few local people admitted to the Matsell home described the place as replete with magnificent furniture, tapestries and pictures.¹⁶ Silver serving sets were used. Two perfectly preserved chairs from the New York home of President George Washington, used when New York was the capital of the United States, were perhaps the most treasured pieces of furniture in the house. The chairs were brought to America from England by Pres. Washington’s parents. Col. H. F. Talmadge, who served under Washington during the revolution, acquired the chairs and presented them as a gift to Chief Matsell. Several other Matsell treasures were also gifts from Col. Talmadge. There was a block of wood from the Dutch Middle Church of New York City which had been demolished in 1835. Talmadge had stabled horses there during the Revolutionary War. Matsell also had a letter to Talmadge from President Washington. And Talmadge, who was a New York City official during Matsell’s term of office, presented Matsell with a double-barreled shotgun in honor of the chief’s law-enforcement service.¹⁷

It seems Chief Matsell was an inveterate collector, and his Iowa mansion housed many of the items he collected. He seems to have been especially fond of souvenirs. In July, 1923, the Cedar Rapids Gazette described a number of Matsell collectibles then on exhibit in an Anamosa store window as part of that year’s Fourth of July celebration. The items were made available by Matsell’s son, Augustus (Gus), who was living with George Finn at the time.

A newspaper article from 1936 listed many such items still in Gus’ possession.¹⁸ Among the curios named were an Oriental broom, two Japanese vases (a gift from Commodore Perry, a friend of Chief Matsell’s, who brought them back after signing the first treaty with the Japanese in 1854) and a white hat which had been worn by Grover Cleveland supporters. There were letters from Washington Irving; a blood-stained, tattered flag from the battle of New Orleans; a drum from early police parades in New York City; a leather pouch and shotgun once owed by Daniel Webster; tickets to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 23, 1883; and tickets to first Jenny Lind concert in this country. A unique item was a white dress shirt that had been worn by President Pierce, acquired when Mr. Pierce (who was in New York on other business) stopped by the Matsell house for a change of linen after being caught out in the rain. Pierce’s soiled shirt remained in Matsell’s collection. There were many relics from Chief Matsell’s New York City police service: A cat o' nine tails, shackles, handcuffs, silver badges, etc. One item, a large dinner bell inscribed with Matsell’s name, was presented him by the captains of his police force when he moved to Iowa. In addition, over Finn’s garage door, hung a Minerva ornament from the Astor Place Theater. It was brought to Iowa by Matsell apparently as a reminder of the Astor Place riots in which his police force had played a major role. Another source lists a letter from Samuel F. B. Morse in the collection, as well as a vast number of newspaper clippings, photos, cartoons and pictures.¹⁹

Souvenirs deemed worth their weight in gold were pieces of stone chipped from the slab upon which George Washington stood to take his first oath of office on April 30, 1789.²⁰ Another major souvenir was an anchor from a British frigate. The anchor had been dredged up from the bottom of New York harbor and given to Matsell. A later owner of the Matsell estate, Fred Witousek of Cedar Rapids, found the anchor, which had been cut in two pieces for use as fireplace andirons. Witousek had them welded back together.²¹

According to a 1967 interview with Matsell’s greatgreat nephew, Everett Finn of Cedar Rapids, a truckload of Matsell’s personal belongings was taken to New York City, where a room in that city’s Historical Society building centers on Chief Matsell. However, an ongoing search of museums and archives in New York City has yet to identify the location of those items. Finn claimed that he still had a number of trunks full of pictures, papers, and clippings, plus the Matsell family bible and George Matsell’s diary. Excerpts from the diary had been published in the Police Gazette as first person accounts of criminal episodes. No record of the disposition of these items has been found.²²

Northeast of the house was a gazebo. South and west of the house were the many outbuildings used for the farming operations. These included a cow barn, complete with calf pen and milk room, that sheltered up to 50 cattle. A horse barn sheltered 16 horses on the ground floor, with hay and grain being stored above. A twostory piggery could house hundreds of porkers. There were corn cribs, a pump house, a large toilet, a goat shed, and a machine shed. The ice house featured a large cellar of native stone, where vintages of all ages were stored. Other nearby buildings were a scale house, a blacksmith shop, a firewood storage shed and a lunchroom for hired help who did not live on the farm. On the driveway leading to the main gate was a house for a livein male employee and his family and a shed for their use.²³

Elsewhere on the estate were an office building, a peacock crib, and even a small print shop in which Matsell published his personal newspaper, The Wapsie Ranger.²⁴ Down the hill, by the river, was a boathouse. A little farther east, Matsell had a theater built in which plays were produced by actors who spent their summers as guests of Chief Matsell. The theater was called the Oak Hill, or Oak Glen, or Oak Hall theater, depending upon which source one chooses to believe.²⁵

English and urban in their tastes, George and Ellen Matsell tried to bring that kind of life with them to their Iowa farm. They lived in the luxurious manner to which they were accustomed in New York. With each trip from New York the family brought with them barrels of seafood, choice wines and liquors, eastern sauces and other specialty items. The Matsells did enjoy giving picnic parties, especially for guests from the East Coast, but disliked the lack of refinement on the frontier.²⁶ For this reason, they lived mostly by themselves and seldom invited rustic Iowa guests into their home. An exception was the neighboring Bowdish family, who were one time invited to an “evening lunch.” Mr. Bowdish commented that as soon as the meal was served, the ladies retired to a different room, and none of them were present at the table.²⁷

The Matsells had a corps of servants — maids, butlers, footmen and cooks — most of whom they brought from New York. All hired hands, imported or local, were required to address George Matsell as Master, his sons as Mister and his daughter as Miss. Any who did not do so were immediately discharged.²⁸

Yet Chief Matsell was a man of kindness. As the winter of 1856 approached and his house was being built, he found out that his neighbor, Bailey Bowdish, was having trouble getting his house built. Matsell sent his crew of carpenters over to work on Bowdish’s house, commenting that “They need a house more than I.”²⁹

In their notes on George Matsell, J. W. Bowdish and W. Lee Finn state that Indians who frequented forests in the area respected the “Heap Big Chief” who never spoiled the woods as other white men did. Matsell allowed no trespassing on his tracts by white hunters or trappers, yet the Indians were always welcome. Matsell’s arrival in the big woods also brought the area welcome relief from depredations by the bands of horse thieves with which parts of Eastern Iowa were then infested. The chief’s reputation as a lawman preceded him, and the crooks decided they had better go while the going was good.³⁰

On Oct. 1, 1925, Col. C. B. Robbins of Cedar Rapids, a former Assistant Secretary of War, purchased some 1,072 acres of the Matsell estate from Gus Matsell.³¹ This included the house, outbuildings and some 400 cultivated acres, the rest being in timber. The tract was valued at about $100,000. Col. Robbins traded 2461.8 acres in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, plus a 10year note for $45,000 for the Matsell land.³²

On March 1, 1947, Fred Witousek purchased the Matsell tract from the Robbins estate. He did some restoration work on the main building, but it was eventually allowed to sit unused and to slowly deteriorate.³³

Over the years, legends grew around the estate. There were stories of a tunnel from the house basement to the river to allow Chief Matsell to escape from enemies trying to harm him or to be used as part of the Underground Railroad before and during the Civil War. No tunnels have been found. Another story has Chief Matsell burying a half million dollars in gold in the house. The gold has never been found either. There is also the story that one of his daughters (however, Susan was the only one known) was locked in a cage in the basement and that the basement was haunted by her ghost.³⁴

In February, 1967, the Linn County Conservation Commission purchased the 1,072 acres of land from a Mrs. Julia Kloubec of Albuquerque, N.M., for $107,000 using a federal grant to cover 46 percent of the cost. The commission did not have enough money to restore the buildings, an estimated expenditure of between $300,000 and $500,000.³⁵ They made a two-year attempt to get private backing with no luck. In 1967 the house burned, and the commission decided to have most of the other buildings torn down.³⁶ Photos and drawings of the structures and main estate area were made and filed by the commission.

Today, the gateposts are still standing. Of the rest of the Matsell estate, only the ice house (with its wooden superstructure modified), the water pump and its foundation, and the foundations of several other buildings remain. Photos of the farm, made in April 1998, along with a narrative description of the area and the remaining artifacts, are available at the History Center.

Over the years, more acres have been added to the Conservation Commission’s purchase, now known as the Matsell Bridge Natural Area, bringing the total acreage to 1757, according to a description published on the Linn County Conservation Commission’s World Wide Web site.³⁷ Facilities at Matsell Bridge include a shooting range, a boat ramp, trails for hiking, for horseback riding and crosscountry skiing, a primitive camping area, hikein campsites, an equestrian camping area with hitching posts, and an overnight cabin (Red Oak Lodge). Hunting is allowed in season. Access is available via the Stone City Road and the Matsell Park Road north from Viola. The boat ramp also provides access from the Wapsipinicon River. In addition to the web site, brochures are available at most county office locations.

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(1) J. W. Bowdish. “Personal Recollections of the Honorable George W. Matsell.” State Historical Society of Iowa, ca. 1925.

(2) B. L. Wick. “George W. Matsell.” The Palimpsest, Vol. V, No. 7 (July 1925).

(3) Ibid.

(4) Robert Bell. “Mystery of Picturesque Matsell Home, Established Near Viola 72 Years Ago by New York Police Chief, Still Unsolved.” Cedar Rapids Sunday Gazette and Republican, 30 September 1927.

(5) Wick. “George W. Matsell.”

(6) Ibid.

(7) George Kruse. “New County Park Was Country Estate for Noted New Yorker.” Cedar Rapids Gazette, 2 April 1967.

(8) George W. Matsell Archive. The History Center.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Bowdish. “Personal Recollections.”

(11) W. Lee Finn. Interview by Dorothy Cummins. Manuscript in the Dorothy Cummins Archive.

(12) Dorothy Cummins. “New Linn County Recreation Area Recalls Days of Iowa’s Fabulous ‘Mount Vernon.’” Des Moines Register, 2 April 1967.

(13) Finn to Cummins.

(14) Ibid.

(15) Bowdish. “Recollections.”

(16) Ibid.

(17) Partial lists of the artifacts in Chief Matsell’s collection appear in several sources. See John R. Battin. “Chair Owned by George Washington on Display at Anamosa Pageant.” Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, 3 July 1923. Robert Bell. “Mystery of Matsell Home.” Dorothy Cummins, “Linn County Recreation Area.” Ernest P. Mickel. “He Reigned Over Iowa Acres Like a Royal Lord or Duke.” Des Moines Register, 29 November 1936.

(18) Ibid.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Bowdish.

(21) George Shane. “House Near Viola Symbol of Iowa Past.” Des Moines Sunday Register, 21 August 1955.

(22) Dorothy Cummins. “Linn County Recreation Area.”

(23) Finn to Cummins.

(24) Wick. “George W. Matsell.”

(25) Wick calls it ‘Oak Hall Theatre.’ A map of Buffalo Township dated 1869 names it ‘Oak Glen Theatre’ in Somers, Mary Shakespeare and Belva Butters, eds. A History of Central City, Iowa, and the Surrounding Area 18391989. Central City (Iowa): Fourth Street Publishing. Karen Taylor dubs the place ‘Oak Hill Theatre’ in “Matsell legend haunts park along Wapsie.” Cedar Rapids Gazette, 2 March 1980.

(26) E.P. Mickel. “Reigned Over Iowa.”

(27) Bowdish. “Personal Recollections.”

(28) E. P. Mickel. “Reigned.”

(29) Wick. “G. W. Matsell.”

(30) Bowdish, Wick. Passim.

(31) “Col. Robbins Buys Old Matsell Estate.” Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, 25 August 1925.

(32) Unsigned letter dated July 14, 1925, assumed to be from Col. C.B. Robbins to agents of the Matsell estate. State Historical Society of Iowa.

(33) George Shane. “House Near Viola.”

(34) Lori Erickson. Ghosts of Linn County, Iowa. Fort Madison (Iowa): Quixote Press, 1987.

(35) George Kruse. “New County Park.”

(36) Karen Taylor. “Matsell legend.”

(37) http://co.linn.ia.us/conservation/parks/natural/natural.html

You May Think It's Funny but It Snot

2009-03-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

Political opinion surveys are a cheat. They always ask me what I think but never let me answer.

I remember when I was a young man; my first exposure to political surveys came during the Watergate scandal. I used to get things in the mail that asked questions like:

"Do you think President Nixon should be impeached? Check one: (Yes) (No) (D'uh)"

What I actually thought was: "President Nixon should be stripped naked, strapped belly-down across a barrel and sodomized by a herd of burros at the center of the fifty-yard line in front of a sellout crowd at Soldier Field. Treat it as if it were a Super Bowl game: have it televised live nationally and filmed for posterity (No pun intended). Cameras should do slo-mo close-ups and instant replays. Get Howard Cosell and Julia Child to do play-by-play (Oooh, Howard! Oooh, look! That stuff running down his leg looks just like brownie batter!). Hire the Dallas Cheerleaders to shake it for the burros. Order the Marine Band to perform at half-time, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir should sing. Set off a big fireworks display after the show. Pass a law requiring all presidential candidates to view the film. That will keep future presidents honest."

A lot of my friends felt the same way. Back then we all inhaled a lot of -- but that's another story, isn't it? My point is that no survey ever discovered how we felt, because no survey offered us a chance to check the Nixon-over-a-barrel option. So it seemed to me then that political survey authors assume everyone either thinks in binary or doesn't think at all.

By and by it dawned on me that political opinion surveys aren't about discovering what I think. If the authors had the least respect for me they would address me truthfully. They would say: "We don't care what you actually think. Instead, we want you to tell us what we want to think that you think."

Almost 30 years later, political opinion surveys hadn't changed at all. Take, for example, the "2001 Democratic Party Survey" sent me by then House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Regarding my feelings about the Bush administration, Democrats then wanted to know:

"Do you believe George W. Bush won the presidency legitimately?"
(Yes) (No) (Undecided)

"Did George W. Bush's cabinet selections make you more or less confident about his oft-stated desire to "unite" America and govern with "compassion"?
(More confident) (Less confident)

I could have answered "No" to the first question but that answer was only half true, for while I didn't believe that Bush won the presidency, I did believe that Al Gore lost it. The fact that I thought so and why I felt that way were things that Gephardt and his Democrats apparently did not want to know.

I could have answered "less confident" to the second question but, once again, that wasn't the whole truth. Had I been allowed to tell the truth, my response to the second question would have been: "Why do you think I place any confidence whatever in George W. Bush? Is it because you suspect I don't trust Al Gore? Truth is I don't trust either of them."

Judging from the survey questions, Gephardt and his Democrats weren't interested in my true feelings. The fact that they seemed incurious explains why I didn't bother to fill out the survey and why I voted third-party in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008.

Having now been alienated from both major parties for more than 12 years, I face today's national crises as a voter who sees almost no hope for the future. For if, in the past, I saw that leaders of our supposedly democratic government lied because they were indifferent to the wants and the wishes and the cares of common people, today I see that our supposedly democratic system is an utter sham. The government designed by Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and the rest -- allegedly built from love of freedom, hope for the future, faith in man and in the power of reason -- is no more. It was buried under a vast heap of lies told by so many liars over the course of so many years that it finally died for want of air and light if it ever, in fact, existed.

The demise of our Constitution was first revealed to America in November 2005, when President George W. Bush declared that the Constitution "is just a goddamned piece of paper." In May 2006, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) buried our old republic for good: she broke her oath of office, wiped her butt on the Constitution and flushed the mess down her office toilet when she took the impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney "off the table."

The Democratic Party took (and still takes) a lot of heat for Pelosi's sellout. Public outrage waxes hotter daily as truth about the treasonous Bush administration leaks out in dribs and drabs. If one can believe E-mails circulated by activists, petitions demanding justice -- supported by hundreds of thousands of signatures -- are dumped into the lap of one or another congressional committee every few days. The fact that Democratic leaders' damage-control efforts are transparent and increasingly shrill reflects the heat that Pelosi and her Congress are taking.

On March 5 of this year, for example, I got two congressional E-mails. The first came from the office of Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL). Wexler's message trumpets the fact that former Bush gangsters "Karl Rove and Harriet Miers have finally agreed to testify under oath and under the penalty of perjury regarding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Rove will also be questioned regarding the politically motivated prosecution of former Gov. Donald Siegelman of Alabama."

The second message came from the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Leahy's message heralds the Senator's proposal for ". . . a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration." Said abuses ". . . may include the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws." Those things ". . . were wrong and must be fully exposed so [they] never happen again."

When I said Democratic damage control is getting shrill, I meant that the lie in Wexler's message is there in plain sight: Out here in the real world, nobody is "asked" or "agrees" to comply with a subpoena. If you or I are served a subpoena, you or I appear in court as ordered. If we don't show up, big ugly goons sporting sheriffs' badges drag us out of our homes and haul us into court. If we won't consent to be hauled, they hose us down with pepper spray, handcuff us, slap us around, and drag us to court without our consent.

Wexler's office wants us to believe that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers live under a different set of rules. When they are served a subpoena they are supposedly free to treat it as an invitation, which they can accept or decline as they please. And so it's nice of Karl and Harriet to "agree to appear before Congress" and testify under oath at a Congressional investigation. The truth is that when Congress subpoenas a witness, that subpoena carries the same power as the subpoena the local judge serves on you or me. If Harriet Miers, for example, doesn't appear when she is summoned, Congress can send big ugly goons sporting federal marshals' badges to Harriet's house and have her hauled in to testify. If Harriet won't consent to be hauled, the goons can cuff Harriet's hands behind her back, shove a baton up her nasty ass and frog-march the old bitch down to the capitol building, where she can choose to testify or go to jail for contempt. This business of Harriet and Karl refusing to testify has only dragged on for so long because Wexler and his Democratic colleagues (for whatever reason) refuse to do their duty.

The lie in Leahy's message is likewise plain to see: If you or I do something wrong, such as kidnap a child (extraordinary rendition) or rob a grocery store (override of laws), authorities will not be content if we confess our wrongs and promise never to do wrong again. Instead we will be arrested. If we resist arrest, it's likely we'll be shot. If we are arrested (or if we survive the shooting), we will certainly be tried whether we confess (fully expose our wrongs) or not, and we will be sent to prison if convicted.

Leahy's office wants us to believe that the crimes of federal officials are different from crimes that you or I might do. Crimes that we commit should be prosecuted and punished. Crimes that federal officials commit should be exposed and publicized -- and forgiven. Says Leahy: "Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. The best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again." According to Leahy, then, if you and I did a murder and were hanged for our crime that would be justice, and justice is good. But if Dick Cheney were hanged for treason (outing a CIA agent) that would be vengeance, and vengeance is bad.

So it is that one real message Democrats are sending is: We have two criminal justice systems in this country. One system operates on the premise that justice happens when ordinary people are punished for their crimes. The other system operates on the premise that justice happens when influential people are forgiven their crimes. One system features hard-nosed judges and prosecutors who take no nonsense from common criminals and punish them harshly. The other system features sympathetic judges and prosecutors who scold influential criminals, slap their hands, and send them to bed without supper.

Having come this far with me, readers may have noticed that somewhere in the distance between my pot-headed youth and my physician-haunted retirement, I seem to have lost my sense of humor. If you're one of those who noticed, I'm only here to tell you that you are right, and that you should quit laughing, too.

The class of people who presently govern this country -- Democrat and Republican -- aren't laughing with you. While you sit with your beer and snicker and sneer at stupid politicians and their stupid opinion surveys and the outrageously stupid lies they tell, they are fitting America for a set of chains from which Americans may never escape. If a life of debt slavery under an Orwellian dictatorship doesn't appeal to you, the time to act is now.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

One for the Bikers, Two for the Road

2009-02-26T08:17:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid eight, ten, twelve years old, I was positively wild about pulp fiction. I loved True Magazine and anything else in that genre. Stuck on a farm in Iowa and desperate to know more of the world, I dreamed of bold adventurers who battled white slavers in Singapore, stalked Komodo dragons, fought man-eating Jaguars in the Amazon basin. Later I discovered Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway and dozens of others until, like Ben Sippy (protagonist of Larry McMurtry's Anything for Billy), I developed a yen to write the stuff myself. Too bad nobody reads it any more -- but that's another story, ain't it? Point is, I've always loved trashy fiction and always wanted to write it.

What's posted below springs from those childhood fantasies and is flavored with a bit of personal experience. It is the first installment of a novella that I then hoped would get serial publication in a venue such as Easy Riders' Magazine, to which I pitched it.

One editor liked my idea but the main man did not. The item was rejected. And when, by and by, I came to realize there was no longer a market for stuff of this sort, I pulled it off my hard-drive and burned it onto a CD-ROM, where it has been hiding for more than ten years. I rediscovered the thing two days ago and tweaked it for The Cyanide Hole. Here it is! Read it if you can stand it --

He wasn’t very big but he was quick and wiry and vicious. He came in low and fast, all business, the six-inch blade a blur in his right hand. When he was close enough, he sent in a thrust. I saw it coming, leapt back, crashed into the wall behind me. He closed and sent in another thrust.

There was a heavy table to my right; I stepped left and blocked with my right forearm. Too slow! I felt a blow midway down my right side. The knife gouged through skin and fat, grazed my short ribs and hit the planks behind me with a solid "CHUNK!"

With my right hand I grabbed the hilts and pulled the knife tighter into the wood. I meant to keep it there. The thing had me pinned like a bug but had missed my guts. As long as it stayed where it was, I knew he couldn't use it again.

Christ, it burned, though. Pain seared through me as we scrapped for control of the weapon. I fed my hurt to the beef I was nursing against the sonofabitch who stabbed me and used my chance to dish out some payback. Ask anybody: I'm a grouch when I get scared.

I reached behind him with my left hand, caught a fist full of greasy pony tail. Rolling my wrist, I wrapped his hair around my fist and used it as leverage. I twisted his head to his left, rolled it back, pulled him up and toward me. When his face was close enough, I buried my teeth in his right cheek and tore at him like a starvin' cannibal.

He screamed twice, but he didn't panic. He held onto his Kabar, jerking at it with both hands; his knees hammered at my thighs and groin. I tried to protect myself with my left leg but couldn't move too well for bein' pinned by the blade.

I was much bigger and stronger than him. Even so, he nearly won. Slippery with blood, my right hand was losin' its grip on the knife when, close aboard, two shots cracked out.

I wasn't hit, but he was. He went where the slugs shoved him, so quick he damn near got away with my teeth. He let go the knife, reeled crazily to my left, crashed into a pinball machine and collapsed. I tried to dive for the deck, but I was beat. All I managed was to sag forward. When I did, the tug of the knife comin' out of the wall spun me to the right.

I yelped in agony and ended up on my knees, clutching at the steel in my side, with nothin' but a table between me and the maddest redhead I've ever seen. She was pointin' an automatic at me, but I didn’t much give a shit because I had other priorities. With my chin on my chest, I glared at the sawdust floor and sucked in big whoops of sour juke-joint atmosphere while I fought off the urge to puke. Seconds later, things had nearly stopped whirlin' when a man's voice, a voice I knew, ordered:

"Put the gun on the table, Bitch, and step away from it, or I'll splatter your ass all over that wall."

I looked left and saw Gunny Lopez behind the bar. He was talkin' tall, straight along the barrel of a 12-gauge pump. The gun was sawed off flush with the end of the slide and looked to be pointed at the redhead's navel. In the tricky light that comes off a neon juke box and a few beer signs, his one eye glinted chrome-hard and deadly: "Do it now!" he snapped.

Not as quick as I'd have done, she laid her pistol on the table between us and backed away. Lopez came from behind the bar, then. He kept the pump leveled on the woman as he stalked over to where I knelt. Without taking his eyes off her, he five-fingered the automatic, eased its hammer forward and offered me the gun with his left hand.

"I know you're fucked up," he said, "but I need two minutes. Can you give me two minutes?"

"I almost fainted a second ago, but that's passed," I said. "I'm bleedin' but it ain't arterial. I'll be OK for a bit. As soon as I get over bein' mad, I'll grow some scabs and we can go dancing. Hurry up, willya? It hurts like hell."

"I will," he said, as I took the pistol. "Keep her here while I lock up. The last thing this place needs just now is a customer." He spun on his heel and walked off.

The gun was a Walther in .380, a nice little weapon. I admired the feel of it while, from 10 feet away, I looked the woman over.

She dressed like she could afford a Walther: Black, kid-leather pants and vest over pearl-gray snake-skin dancin' boots and matching silk shirt. There was a big Hopi bracelet on her left wrist. Silver-and-turquoise kachina pendants swung from her ears; conchos flashed the same pattern at her ankles, waist and vest-front. When Lopez flicked the lights on, I saw she had huge green eyes. They went nicely with the turquoise kerchief knotted at her throat and the 4-pound stack of auburn hair that was comin' apart above her forehead. Her skin would never tan.

At 5-foot-4 and 105 pounds, she was a long-legged heart attack, an escapee from the salesroom of an Albuquerque jewelry store. She looked all of 20 years old. How she ended up in Lopez's place – a Mexican bikers' dive on the edge of Nogales – was way past me.

"Ooohhhh, fuck! I'm shot," bleated a voice from behind me. "My guts hurt! Somebody do sumpin' please!"

Still on my knees, I turned so I could see them both. He lay whining in a mess of blood an' sawdust a few feet to my right, legs working a little, evidently tryin' to get up. Given time, he might o’ done it; but this wasn't his day.

I glanced around the floor. Pieces of the furniture we'd trashed were scattered all over the place. Near to hand was a table leg, a nice, stout two-by-two. I hefted it in my right hand to get its balance, then cracked him hard across the bridge of his nose.

He quit whining, but he wasn't finished. His breath bubbled in bloody snores.

I stood on my knees, raised the club over my head and hit him again, with every one of my 335 pounds. When the club came down it made a wet, satisfyin' WHOCK, like a hammer on a block of ice, and his left eye popped out. I felt bones break under the blow. The effort left me giddy, sobbing, but it was worth the hassle because it cured his snoring problem permanently.

The redhead left off bein' pissed and stared at me, slack-jawed. The look in her eyes said it all but, bein' typically female, she couldn't just leave it there. "He was helpless," she accused. "Why did you do that?"

I took time to catch my breath. Then I looked her in the eye and laid it out flat: "He tasted real bad."

Lopez came back carrying a pair of handcuffs. He hooked a chair with his left foot, heaved it toward the chick and told her: "Sit."

She favored him with a contemptuous glare. Other than that, the only part of her that moved was her mouth. She said, "I don't have to do anything you -- " Then she was a foot off the floor, hanging by her kerchief from the end of Lopez's left arm. Her eyes bugged out and her pretty boots danced in the air, while he smiled and chided her in tones you'd use on a little girl.

"You took your time about givin' up that gun," he cooed. "I didn't shoot you then because you didn't know me. Now you know me better, you won't give me any more grief."

It wasn't a question, but her eyes made promises anyway. When he set her on her feet, she couldn't wait to sit down. And she sat quiet while he handcuffed her to the chair.

Lopez will never age. He's built like pulp artists used to draw Tarzan: nearly a yard across the shoulders, broad chested, slightly bowlegged, no waist at all. When he moves, muscles bunch on his frame like kinks in copper cable. He's big and rangy for a Mexican -- 6-foot-1, 190 pounds -- and lays it onto his grampa bein’ full-blooded Comanche. He sports a Fu Manchu but shaves his black hair except for the yard-long ponytail that, laced together with beaded thongs, hangs from the top of his head. His right eye has been MIA since '68. He covers the socket with a leather patch and hangs a gold skull the size of your thumbnail from the lobe of his left ear.

He was a shit-house legend in Force Recon. I don't know how many black belts he's got. I just know I wouldn't fuck with him if he was bound in a straight jacket and I was armed with a chainsaw. Every few years he gets asked to judge some hifalutin martial arts tournament in Japan. He never goes; he says it's bullshit. But they keep askin' him. When he doesn't feel like workin' out, he rides his horses or hunts and hikes in the hills above Tucson.

When he finished with the redhead, he turned to me: "Can you stand?"

I laid the Walther in his palm and made to get off my knees. He crouched, wrapped my left arm across his shoulders and then stood. Together we turned and walked across the room, where we stood me on a chair so I could sit on the bar.

When I was situated, Lopez ducked into the back room and came out totin' a canvas duffel. He dropped it on the floor in front of me and laughed: "You ain't even gonna like what happens next!" Then he rocked back on his heels and held up the dripping knife.

I didn't see him move to grab it. But I felt it come out of the wound and squawked like a chicken. Blood welled thickly from the gash and puddled on the bar.

Lopez laughed again. "Take off your shirt," he said, "an' lay down, or I'll hurt ya." While I was doing that, he bent over his bag and lectured me:

"Man! You are some piece o' shit. I haven't seen you in 15 years, then you show up and don't even tell me you're comin'. You ain't been here an hour, yet, and you already got a blade stuck in your lard. You must be a hundred pounds overweight!" He stood and looked at me straight. "How the fuck did you get so sloppy that a punk like him could put steel in you?"

"Pardon me," I shot back. "But this is the first time anybody put metal in me since I got hurt steerin' your blind ass out of the DMZ. And how the fuck did you get so sloppy that a punk like him could clean out your cash register? Were you in the shitter jerkin' off? I only ask," I rolled up on my elbow and sneered, "because that's what seemed to be goin' on when I got here."

"Well, he grinned, "you could o' saved yourself a cuttin'. The till was empty." Then he clapped a rag over my face and forced me back down on the bar.

I caught a look at the Budweiser clock behind the bar. It read 10:31, meanin' that six minutes had passed since I walked in the front door. As my nose and mouth filled with the reek of chloroform, I thought sourly that time truly does fly when you're havin' fun. Lopez's laughter was a roaring in my ears, and then it was gone.

I woke up smacking my lips and sucking my gums. A chorus line of cockroaches was dancin' the cancan inside my skull and the urge to puke was back. When I moved to sit up something clawed at my side. I tried to say "Ow!" but what came out was a groan.

Lopez was there. "Easy there, you fuckin’ clod! Don't tear those stitches." He put a hand under my shoulders and helped me sit up. I hung my legs over the front of the bar, cupped my face in my hands and waited for the world to stop rocking. The smell of coffee helped a lot.

When I looked up, Lopez dumped three fingers of Bushmill's into a big mug, topped it off with hot joe and handed it to me. I took it down in two gulps, handed back the mug and said, "More!" Then I sipped at the second jolt while the first one went through me and killed the roaches. I looked around the room.

Twenty feet in front of me the redhead sat with her back to us, still cuffed to a chair. The floor showed no trace of my fight. Lopez had swept up the bloody sawdust and scattered clean in its place. All the kindling was cleaned up. The broken furniture had disappeared and the remainder was rearranged. I didn't need to ask what was bundled in the roll of black plastic and light rope that lay on the end of the bar near the front door. The Budweiser clock was my witness: I'd been out for just more than an hour.

"Who's she?" I asked.

"Susan Bedford. She's 27 years old. Says she's a loan officer at a bank in Phoenix. Says she tailed your friend down here and shot him because he sold her kid brother some bad dope. Says her brother is dead.

"She told me she never meant to shoot you. Says she only pointed her gun at you because you fell between her and the guy she was aimin' at." He grinned, then added: "She says you're a `vicious, homicidal pig,' though.

"The shit who knifed you has been hangin' around Nogales for about two weeks. Called himself Tony Watson. Augie and Choppo were in here talkin' about him the other night. He's been all over town tryin' to deal for some flake, but everybody figured he was scum. You say he was finger-fuckin' my cash register, it's all of a piece. We just gotta get rid of the meat."

"What next?"

"Put this on," Lopez said, and threw me a sleeveless black sweatshirt.

When I raised my arms I felt claws at my side again, and this time I looked at the wound. My right side, from my hip almost to my armpit, was one massive bruise. Worse, it looked as though Lopez had installed a zipper in it.

"Jesus Christ!" I marveled. "What did you sew me up with? I look like a fuckin' purple football."

"Quit whining," Lopez said. "It don't look like much but it's a good job. I washed it out with peroxide, poured it full of sulfanilamide and squirted a shot of mefoxin into your ass. I used 2-0 sutures because they're all I had. The vertical mattress stitch is the only one I know how to use, and by the way," he chuckled, "there are 22 of 'em: 12 in front and 10 in back. That'll teach you not to get cut.

"I called my nephew," he went on. "He should be here any minute. I'll give him the keys to this place. Then you and I are gonna take her and it," he jerked his head toward the corpse, "and go up to my ranch." He shot me a sour look. "We'll think what to do with her when we get there. Are you driving that school bus out front?"

"Yeah," I said. "I live in it."

"Good. It'd be crowded if we had to use my Camaro."

The nephew showed up just then. There were no introductions, but I'd bet his friends call him Tank.

I went out to the bus, changed my levis and kicked the bloody pair under the bed. Then I started the engine and pulled the bus and trailer up to where they blocked any view of the front door from the street.

Lopez came out with the body draped over his shoulder. We laid it on the floor behind the couch. He went back inside and brought out the redhead and the duffel.

Three minutes later we were doing 60 mph, northbound on Interstate 19. The nasal snarl of the engine hung in the air, an audible gauze between us. We sat and talked. I drove. Lopez perched on my ottoman, at the top of the steps by the door.

I tensed a bit when we had to stop at an alien check in a rest area north of Arivaca Junction. But Lopez, looking it over as we approached, said not to worry: He knew the Border Patrol agents who work it. He asked me where I kept my whiskey and then stepped into the darkness behind the driver's box.

Through the open window, the agents asked what was in the trailer.

"Two motorcycles," I said, "and a whole bunch o' parts. I'm glad to open it, if ya want." It was the truth.

Then one of 'em came around the front of the bus and waggled his hand at me like I should open the door. I did, and he stepped inside. When he panned the interior with his flashlight he saw Lopez on the couch, suckin' on a pint of Black Velvet. The redhead's face was buried in the crotch of his levis. Her tight, sweet, leather-clad ass stuck up so the cop had a good look at it and couldn't see that Lopez's pants were still fastened.

"Gunny Lopez," he started. "What are you doin' here?"

"Ain't that what you gringos call self-explanatory, Spencer? I'm with my ol' Recon buddy." Lopez laughed: "We're goin' up to my ranch to plant a stiff. Wanna come along?"

"Ask me again when I ain't on duty," the cop grinned. "We had a lot of fun up there two years ago." He looked pleasantly at me and said: "See you later." Then he ducked out the door and waved me on.

I poked the bus in gear and took off.

Lopez let go the redhead, put the pint back in the cupboard and yelled from the back: "You got anything good to drink?"

"There's a case of Lone Star and some Spañada in the 'fridge," I hailed. "If that don't suit, it's Black Velvet or water or nothin'."

A minute later, he came up front carryin' the ottoman and two beers. He sat and cracked the beers, then handed me one.

"That was quite an act," I said. "How'd you get her to hold still for it?"

"I told her that if she gave us away, I'd break her neck." He smirked: "She knows I never lie."

"Are you sure she's OK? If she gets loose back there, she's got access to some nasty hardware."

He slurped his beer: "Both of her hands are cuffed to the rail at the head of your bed. Can she reach anything from there?"

"No."

Seconds later I asked: "How do you know those feds?"

"I know all the cops around here," he said. "I'm a cop myself, sorta."

"Say what?"

"That's right. I got into the Pima County Sheriff's Auxilliary 'bout ten years ago, after the Border Patrol found 27 wetbacks -- most of 'em women an' kids -- robbed and murdered in the desert. Turned out their guides did it.

"I'm not sure what it was about that particular deal. I mean shit like that's been goin' on for years down here. But that time I got mad. I helped the cops track down the turds that done it. I still track for the cops, whenever I'm sure they're on the right side.

"You should be glad," he added: "That's where I get mefoxin, an' lots of other stuff. I got morphine syrettes in that duffel. Wait'll I show you my weapons.

"I used chloroform on you because I don't like you," he laughed, "an' because I'm 55 years old -- too feeble to carry your sedated shit around.

"This is a nice rig," he said, and waved toward the back of the bus. "But it's no place I'd wanna call home. How'd you end up livin' like this?

I filled him in while we sipped beer. Some of it he already knew. When I'd last seen Lopez, 15 years ago, I'd already been down three years for armed robbery.

That time was for Shelly Bascombe, who owned what must o' been the hottest, greediest cunt in Athens, Ohio. Her daddy owned a liquor store out on Route 56, toward Starr. Me and Brother Lew passed Shelly back and forth for most of a week. Her old man wasn't stupid, though. He knew what was goin' on and he hated Lew and me both worse than sin.

Then daddy got lucky -- or cute: Somebody on a motorcycle supposedly knocked his dump over on a warm summer evening, not five minutes after Lew and I dropped Shelly in front of the place and roared off toward Athens, where we knew some dudes were pitchin' a serious party. The state patrol, coming hammer-down out of Athens, met us comin' in and arrested us on the spot.

They found a .38 in my boot. Lew had a .45 in his saddlebag. The ol' man swore we were guilty, and he was the only witness. Shelly said she didn't see anything; she was upstairs takin' a shower.

There was an eyewitness. We were armed; we rode Harleys; we had long hair; we were from out of state. It was an open and shut case, as the prosecutor said. The judge handed us each 2-to-5 and said he was lenient because we were newly discharged Vietnam vets, with three purple hearts between us.

Lew ended up a nut case over the deal. Some spade dude hit him a little too hard in a fight on the yard at Lebanon. Last I saw of him was in '73. He was livin' with his mom, eatin' like a horse, groovin' Beany and Cecil re-runs.

I thought about that for a while, then asked a couple of bros to swing by Athens and deal on Shelly's dad. But he'd sold out and moved his family away. Nobody knew where.

I got out in December of '72 and drifted. I drove truck some, turned wrenches for a spell. A year later, right after I last saw Lew, I ran onto a pair of blades I knew from the joint, Just Plain Wayne and Famus Anus. The three of us did a lot of speed.

1974 was altogether the craziest year of my life -- worse than the 'Nam, even. Anus and J.P. and I spent most of that year in an amphetamine rage, tearin' around the Midwest, boostin' cars and using 'em to knock over hick-town banks. We hit three of 'em before we got lucky -- well -- J.P. Wayne and I got lucky. We got clean away with almost 45 grand. Famus Anus got shot.

I quit doin' speed after that. Wayne and I laid chilly at his cousin's place, in Arkansas. It was your ideal situation: The cousin was sweet. The locals grew Sensimillia and didn't ask questions. We stayed a year.

I spent the time reworkin' my panhead. It needed a top end and some skins real bad, and, beyond oil changes and tune-ups, I hadn't kept up the small shit since before Lebanon.

Overhaulin' my pan led me into the junk motorcycle business when I took up with a young widow. She'd lost her biker husband in a car wreck. The insurance settled for a quarter of a million, and she used the jack to set herself up in Springfield, Mo., buyin' wrecked bikes and selling parts. Nearly all the money was spent when I met her, but she'd laid it out for a sizeable inventory and the investment was beginning to pay.

Her name was Netty. She had the prettiest gray eyes I've ever seen. She loved kids and scooter people and gingham dolls and cookery. She had guts, an' she was truly decent. We got married six months after movin' in together. I worked at a truck garage every day durin' the week. Nights and weekends I worked for her. We screwed like rabbits whenever we could keep it from her two little boys.

The kids, Jerry and John, craved fishing an' baseball. John didn't care for motorcycles. But Jerry was a maniac on a dirt bike, and he went wild for rides on my panhead. I tried to get ‘em interested in books an' reading, which I'd picked up on in Lebanon. All in all, I had fun playin' Pop.

Then one day the boys didn't get home from school. We searched for a few hours, phoned the school an' all the neighbors. Then Netty called the cops. Two weeks later they found the kids, raped and cut up and stuffed in a culvert, not half a mile from the house. They never found out who did for the boys. A month after the kids were buried, Netty walked off in the woods and hanged herself while I was at work.

One of the things that keeps me movin' is the way people look at me. When you're 6-foot-8 and butt-ugly, bein' stared at is a fact of life that some say you have to get used to. I never put up with it until I met Netty. Bein' with her made it unimportant. After she died, I thought I'd learned to live with it until one of the neighbors told me, point blank, in front of witnesses, that he and everybody else in town thought I killed the boys.

He spent the next six months in the hospital. I spent most of that time in jail. When I got out it took another six months to find a buyer for the business. Then I threw a bedroll over the panhead and split. That ended my first and last try at citizenship.

"That was in '78," I told Lopez. "You were livin' in Phoenix. You had two dojos, then, and three gun shops. Hey, I'm outta beer!"

Tucson slid past while Lopez stepped to the back of the bus and got two more Lone Stars.

"The woman needs to piss," he said.

"There's a plastic bucket under the sink," I deadpanned. "Have her use that."

I got off the freeway on Miracle Mile, then turned north on U.S. 89. We sipped beer while the traffic thinned out.

"So," he said, "you still haven't told me where you been since '78."

"There's not much to tell. When I left you in Phoenix I went to Montana to see Frank Malone. We rode together that summer. Ended up at Sturgis.

"I won the bus in a poker game, in Kalispell. Cleaned it out and fixed it up while I wintered in Texas. You can't buy a trailer like that, so I built one out of borrowed angle iron and sheet metal on running gear that I found in a parkin' lot," I grinned. "Got the whole rig painted in El Paso. Traded a pair of M-14s for the work. Come sunup you'll see it's black cherry and kandy burgundy. I've kept it up, an' it still looks nice over chrome bud wheels.

"Ever since 1980, I just do swap meets. You know, buy and sell bikes and parts and stuff. Other than that, I keep to myself and read a lot of books. I ain't strictly legal, but I don't mess with speed any more an' haven't done a stickup since '74.

"Netty fixed what they did to me in Ohio. Before I got in this scrape," I tossed my head toward the back, "any cop would have a hard time tryin' to bust me for anything."

"Get off here, to the right," Lopez said. "This is Route 77. Follow it to Mammoth."

When we got to Mammoth, we turned north for a piece, then dropped off the pavement onto some dirt roads and, finally, to a jeep track. I threw Lopez a questioning glance.

"No sweat," he said. "It's not as bad as it looks, and we only got two miles to go."

Sunup found us creepin' along the bottom of an arroyo. The diesel clattered idly in low gear. Yucca and saguaro fought with greasewood for space among the boulders on both sides. The air was luminous, purple, gold, pink and green. I caught a whiff of mesquite burning as we rounded one last bend. Then the arroyo dumped us out onto the floor of a valley, and the track ended.

"This is it," Lopez said.

The rising sun was behind us. A hundred yards to my left a clutch of low, rectangular, native stone buildings huddled close against a ridge of boulders and greasewood, where they'd get shade from the afternoon sun. White smoke wafting from a chimney indicated which was the house.

I turned toward the smoke. As the distance closed the layout took shape. A round, half-acre corral adjoined the barn, which stood at our left as we pulled up in front of the house. From around the water trough a half dozen horses stood and eyed us, ears up, curious. Twenty yards to the right of the house, two pickups, a VW sand buggy, a 5-ton grain truck, and a 200-gallon gasoline tank on 8-foot legs stood next to a three-walled stone shed that had to be the shop.

"That one over by itself is a henhouse." Lopez pointed to the right, where 50 yards separated one building from the others. "I only get up here for a few days a month," he said, "and the Apache woman who stays here likes to keep busy. So I built that for her. She trades chickens and eggs to her friends on the San Carlos reservation. Even grinds her own feed."

"Let me tell her how many she has to cook for," he said, as we rolled to a stop. "I'll be right back." He opened the door and stepped out.

I killed the diesel. Then I got up wincing at the pull of the stitches in my side and stepped off the bus. I walked around the rig stiffly, stretched my legs, stopped behind the trailer and took a long, leisurely piss.

When I finished, I stood and basked in the silence. A horse whickered at my elbow, nearly started me out of my skin. I chuckled when I saw the animals were forty yards away. I heard Lopez talking to the woman inside the house. From the bus, the manifolds ticked rhythmically as they cooled.

The coarse sand felt so good under my boots that I bent to peel 'em off. I thought of scorpions and straightened up again.

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KABOOM!

2009-02-16T05:32:00.000-08:00

My ten-year-old computer finally blew up. The motherboard went kaboom! and can't find its memory any more. Turns out the machines are more human than I realized.

Be that as it may, I'm working to correct the problem although it's likely that I won't be back online until the first week of March. At that time, I'll be able to buy a NEW machine and get this show back on the road.

If I see you before then, the computer doctors were lucky.

Cheers!

Jimmy

Jimmy Olsen's Blues

2009-02-06T02:06:00.000-08:00

Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal nature, but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine, you stole sugar. At the age of fifteen, you stole money. At twenty, you stole horses. At twenty-five, you committed arson. At thirty, hardened in crime, you became an editor. . . .
Mark Twain
Lionising Murderers

Only three types of people are entitled to speak of themselves in the majestic plural: ‘We’ are European royalty, editors of newspapers and magazines, and the fellow with a turd in his pocket.
Author Unknown

I first encountered editors at journalism school. I soon learned to distrust nearly all of them.

Some editors are ignorant: The woman who then taught 'magazine writing' was allegedly a magazine editor of long experience. She kicked a short story back at me. Her comment read: "This is fiction! Journalists don't write fiction!"

Some editors are ignorant and illiterate: The first item I wrote for a newspaper argued that "This or that event (Something to do with the local school board, I forget just what.) is doubly ironic," and went on to explain precisely why. An assistant editor who was paid staff, not a student, changed the lead sentence to "This or that event redoubles with irony."

Some editors are ignorant, illiterate, and stupid: Working as a technical writer, I had an editor blow up on me when I used the word 'bore' (as in 'bore a hole in sheet metal') in my first draft of a technical manual. "Yew cain't use thet werd aroun’ here!" she drooled: "H'it soun’s lahk a piiig."

Take just one such yahoo off the copy desk and boot her or him up, into a management position, the results are entirely predictable. To misquote Mr. John Knightley: “Pride of position, working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”

I believe that is what leads some editors to lie to their readers: I know at least one who writes and publishes laudatory reviews of books he hasn't read, some of which just happen to have been written by one or another of his personal friends and colleagues, editors all, who do the same for him on occasion. They regard lying to readers as a form of professional courtesy.

Some editors lie to everyone about everything: Years ago, I submitted an op-ed piece to an online news site. In a ham-handed and idiotic attempt to localize the article, the editor rewrote it to make it read like a news report from Los Angeles. Compounding his abuse, he left my byline on the butchered item as if I had actually written the lies that his own perversity created and published. When I jumped him for his crimes, he tried to bullshit me: “You’re being silly! Everyone does stuff like that.” Had he been where I could reach him, I’d have fattened his lip at that point.

Everyone who writes for money encounters such horrors on occasion. Many writers, more experienced or less fortunate than I, can tell tales much more terrible. Speaking strictly of newspaper and magazine journalism it is safe to say that for every competent editor in the profession there are a hundred as bad or worse than those I’ve cried about here. Where they come from and how they get behind a desk are more than I can fathom, but their presence in journalism does the profession no good whatever.

Never having worked with book publishers, my love of books and literature led me to fancy that book editors were of a higher caliber than those encountered by lowlife scribblers like me. Then I happened on a copy of Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk and Bite: A writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language & style. The first paragraph of Chapter Two reads:

Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by like a unicorn in pajamas.

I don’t know if Mr. Plotnik wrote that of his own volition or if his editor made him write it. The question is irrelevant because, either way, it had to pass an editor’s scrutiny. Thus my faith in book editors is shattered. My faith in Strunk & White is restored.

The editor who writes those phony book reviews erupted in anger when I caught him out and told him he ought to stop. He told me I was stupid and naive, that if I knew anything about journalism I would know that bogus book reviews are a common sin. I had little to say back to him because I myself – then being a new writer, down and out, uncertain of my abilities and overeager for a break – once allowed an author by whose talent and fame I was awed to suggest changes in my review of his (then) latest book. It was a mistake I have never since repeated and one of which I am deeply ashamed.

Today I avoid pangs of conscience and the loss of friends by refusing to review any book written by anyone with whom I am personally acquainted. I do not solicit review copies from publishers. Books I review today are books that I buy, borrow, steal, find in an outhouse or acquire as gifts. I don’t sell advertising and nobody pays me to write, so all of my reviews – whatever their aesthetic merit – derive some virtue from the fact that my opinions are beholden to no one.

Our online community makes much of the idea that we are not like so-called ‘mainstream’ media. To the extent that it’s true, I celebrate our difference from the mainstream as a good thing. After all, mainstream media are presently in a shambles: American newspapermen, having forsaken their fiduciary obligations to the United States Constitution, to American democracy, and to the American people at large, now busy themselves closing newspapers, laying off help, downsizing, merging, and looking for jobs in other professions. Book publishers are in similar straits. Broadcast news, for so many years a rude and stupid joke, still clownishly proclaims the quality of its journalism while it airs nothing weightier than corporate press releases, government propaganda and ‘infotainers’ such as Katie Couric, Limbaugh, Olbermann, O’Reilly and others.

The decline and debasement of mainstream journalism draws a lot of attention. The Powers That Be throw mass quantities of money, brains, ink, and statistical expertise at what they say is an effort to identify what’s going on. Power says it wants to know what has changed, what drives the public to abandon mainstream mainstays such as The New York Times and The CBS Evening News and why the public does so.

My own, nonprofessional surmise is that corporate hacks who serve Power already know the answers to those questions. What the hacks actually worry about is that, as readers desert the mainstream, as the old media circus folds, advertising flees the old venues to seek new homes in Cyberspace. What the hacks truly want to know, therefore, is how to exploit and control the Internet in ways that allow them to regain the ad revenue they have lost and thereby remain useful to Power.

We in the Blogosphere still, for the most part, write our own content and edit our own work. Our pages are infinitely large and we don’t depend on advertisers, so we don’t subject ourselves to the whims and the dictates of corrupt and cretinous word cops. This is not to say the Blogosphere has no use for editors, but only that good editors are mighty hard to come by and there are far too many of the other sort.

Most bloggers are glad to see ad money coming to the Web at last. I wonder how many understand that advertising and censorship are Siamese twins. When the whip comes down, we will be different from the mainstream or we will not. Where we are headed is a shot I cannot now call, but I do remember it was Cyndi Lauper who sang Money Changes Everything.

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Fair Language Covers Foul Hearts

2009-01-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Those who read me regularly know I don’t normally watch television. A few months back, however, I sat in front of the tube just long enough to see Ken Burns’ World War Two documentary. The War – as Burns titled this, his latest work – included some coverage of the Second Marine Division’s apocalypse on the island of Saipan.

One of those who survived Saipan physically unscathed, a Marine from Mobile, Ala., went home for a visit after the slaughter ended. Speaking to Ken Burns’ camera as a senior citizen, the ancient Leatherneck recalled problems he encountered in 1944 as he talked to friends and family who -- even though they knew he'd fought on Saipan -- hadn't the least idea of where he’d been or what he’d been through.

Among other things, the old warrior detailed one of the first changes forced upon young men by Marine Corps training: “You forget all of your adjectives,” he said. “All but two.” He wouldn’t say what those two words are because, he declared, his dead wife would rise up from her grave and scold him for having said them. While he was home in 1944, he said, he had to talk to his friends in slow motion. He had to say every sentence silently to himself before saying it aloud, for fear he would say one of those two words by accident.

At that point I started thinking about my own life: I'm a Marine Corps veteran myself, but the Marines didn't need to teach me to cuss because I already knew. How did I become such a foul-mouthed wretch?

I was born in 1948, in my parents home on a farm in Iowa. How old I was when I became cognizant, I do not know. Neither can I recall a time when I did not know the word 'shit'.

Our barnyard was full of shit. The old man spent a good share of his life shoveling shit up off the ground and hauling shit out to the fields, where he spread shit on the ground as fertilizer. Fifty Angus cattle quartered in the barn made sure the old man never ran out of shit to shovel.

Little boys going out to play were warned not to step in shit, but they often stepped in shit anyway because there was so much shit on the ground that not stepping in shit required focus at a level of intensity that made it impossible to play baseball – or anything else. Kids threw shit at each other when they got in fights or sometimes just for a lark. Kids who got in trouble said: “Oh, shit.” Kids who were astounded exclaimed, “No shit?” or “Willya lookit that shit?” or “I’ll be dipped in shit!”

In rural Iowa, shit followed kids to school every morning. We got up; we got dressed; we had breakfast; we put on five-buckle overshoes and went to the barn, where we waded through shit as we worked. When the bus came, we grabbed our books and rode to school. We walked into the schoolhouse and took off our overshoes on mats provided specially for that purpose. By the time classes started, the mats were covered with many dozens of overshoes, each pair of which was clotted with shit – which may explain why my friends all thought and said that “School is for shit.”

I don't believe anyone has truly lived who has not had suction jerk his or her tightly-buckled overshoe off of a stockinged foot while walking across a barnyard through eight inches of ice-cold, urine-drenched, slimy green shit. I always felt lucky because my ol' man had cattle but not hogs. Those who've had the experience can tell you: pig shit smells worse than cow shit. And white socks are a waste of fuckin' money.

I learned the word 'fuck' in 5th grade. It happened in the lunch room. I was sitting at a table with some big boys from the 6th grade, when I heard one of them refer to the superintendent as “that silly fucker.” The others all snickered at what was obviously some delicious joke. So I asked them: “What’s a fucker?” and got laughed right out of the place.

Not wanting to be laughed at, I never again asked anyone at school anything like that. Instead, I asked the old man at supper: “Dad: What’s a fucker?”

The old man looked at me coldly, and I could see I was about to get my ass kicked. The old lady interceded: “Dad: He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

So I didn’t get my ass kicked. But I didn’t get an answer, either, and the old man didn’t speak to me for several days after. His reaction clued me that I was onto something big.

So badly did I want to know what a 'fucker' was that I started hanging around the toughest boys at school so I could listen to them talk. For a few days I endured some rough handling on the playground – nothing serious, of course – but my curiosity was soon satisfied.

Too bad for me: the answer I got raised more questions. I couldn’t understand why one feller would call another feller a name like that. I mean fucking is what people do -- right? Ever since Eve picked that apple? So how did 'fucker' get to be a swear word? If everyone fucks one way or another, how did being called a 'fucker' become an insult? And what’s all that about 'knowledge of good and evil,' anyway? Is 'good' a hot, rapturous experience? Is 'evil' a bum jump? Or are those icky Protestants right to claim things are actually the other way around? All of those questions and more like them whizzed (no pun intended) through my mind while I worked to get my shit together by improving my fuckin’ vocabulary.

It takes months to learn to cuss fluently and correctly. And make no mistake: an adolescent boy has got to cuss fluently and correctly in order to be cool. First thing, as I've already hinted, is to learn the goddam vocabulary. Next thing is to master the fuckin' delivery. To be really cool, you see, a guy has to cuss casually, conversationally -- as though he ain't cussin' at all. So I hung out with friends who were also learning to cuss. Fuck jokes and shit jokes and cock jokes and pussy jokes were the order of every day -- the more stupid and obscenely outrageous, the better.

Beavis and Butt-head got it right: Thirteen-year-old boys sit around campfires, smoke stolen cigarettes, drink stolen beer, and joyously chant one or another of the Boy Scouts’ bogus, pep-rally cheers. I remember a couple of lines from one in particular:

"Cocksucker motherfucker, dirty old twat!
"Sixty-nine douchebag, tied in a knot!"

I forget the rest after all these years, but a lot of old Boy Scouts could chant it from memory, word-perfect, I'm sure. A fellah's gotta do sump'n at them fuckin' jamborees.

By way of practice, we boys worked on lines like “You lowdown, worthless, pissy-pants, chickenshit sonofabitch! Cocksuckin’ motherfuckin’ afterbirth-eatin’ product of an abortion from the bored-out, bastard daughter of a bunch-punched Mongolian whore!”

We practiced stuff like that because we wanted to amaze each other. In order to amaze our friends, we had to get the tone and the cadence just right, stress the proper syllables, make rude poetry of it (though we never then thought of what we were learning in those terms). And above all, we had to cuss offhandedly: be cool when cursing.

As practice progressed, things got more complex. My friends and I learned to hide our amazement because amazed is not a cool thing to be. My game at that point was to know when I'd amazed my friends (though they tried to hide their amazement) while hiding the fact that I knew I had wowed them. It was learning to look someone in the eye and punch them in the face without telegraphing the blow. It was learning to know when someone was about to hit me without warning. It was playing good poker. It was the social equivalent of fighting a fast-draw duel: I had to get it right or I was dead.

So it was that after I joined the Marines I learned that -- aside from Marine Corps jargon, which is sometimes 'obscene' -- the Corps had little to teach me about cussing. The cursing of the drill instructors was music to my ears not because they taught me a lot of new obscenities (They didn't.) but because they cursed precisely, rhythmically, and by the numbers. Parade-ground Marines don't drop their gees or slur their words: some nasty thing isn't 'a goddam fuckin' mess' but rather 'It Is A God Damned Fucking Mess'. According to some drill instructors, it never rains in boot camp. Instead: "Jesus Is Pissing On Us Again, Ladies! Christ Hates Fucking Marines Because He Is Jealous! He Always Wanted To Be A Marine, And He Still Tries Every Few Years -- But The Wimpy Son Of A Bitch Can Never Get Through Boot Camp!"

The drill instructors' tirades step forward in quick time, 90 beats per minute. Their words are somehow grittier for being clipped. Their enunciation is exact. When they're at their best their tone is musical, as if they were singing cadence. My experience was that the DI is a breed apart. Ordinary Marines (an oxymoron) don't talk like DIs unless they're joking or speaking to someone they do not respect.

Sailors I've met convinced me that the prevalence of obscenity in any man's language is in proportion to the amount of time he spends in an environment without women. The extent to which a man is brutalized by his occupation is another, related factor. Having never worked oil fields or mining camps, I don't know how men in those places talk but I can't imagine their speech is less obscene than any others I've met and is probably more so.

Teamsters spend long weeks, even months, alone on the road. They are among the most fluent and effective cussers I ever encountered. As is true of those who live by any other trade, the language of truckers is idiomatic. He who speaks it best gets ahead of those who don't speak so well. Walk into a repair shop and tell the mechanic: "My truck doesn't have any power." You won't get the attention you would get if you said: "That piece o' shit I'm pushin' wouldn' pull a dead whore off a pisspot."

Some people hold that we today use more obscenities than at any other time in history. I personally don't believe it. Roman soldiers bear me witness: graffiti scrawled on ancient walls use the Latin equivalent of 'fuck'. You can bet, therefore, that troopers at Calvary who gambled for the clothing of Jesus laughed as they played and cussed ". . . . that god-rotting, idjit Jew. The silly sumbitch was crazy enough to tell ol' Herod that he was the king! Wouldjoo fuckin' believe dat shit?"

Robert Graves was a tough old son of Tommy Atkins who survived two tours in the Ypres Salient. In one of his novels (I think it was Sergeant Lamb's America or Proceed, Sergeant Lamb), Graves mentioned that British redcoats spoke 'flash language,' by which he meant the argot of Britain's 18th century criminal underworld. When I was on active duty our speech was a blend of Marine Corps jargon and the slang of the Sixties drug culture, sprinkled with a few expressions borrowed from the Vietnamese. Similar things are true of soldiers of all wars, everywhere. Poets such as Graves have long known the beauty and utility of 'foul' language: there are allusions to it in Shakespeare. And while Mark Twain (in Roughing It) chortled wickedly that a bartender shot through the face with a Colt Navy revolver was "one of the deadest men who ever lived," it's a lead-pipe cinch that when Twain shared that story with his drunken pals in the bars and the brothels of Virginia City, Nevada, he couched the tale in terms yet more colorful.

Times truly have changed since World War Two. Today's economy forces Mom into the workplace with Pop, where both of them scrabble for the family's bread. At work they talk to the same people for the same reasons about the same things in the same way. Thus today's Mom is hardened; she can cuss with the toughest of men and probably enjoys it just as much. Even so: the warrior home from Afghanistan will have to mind his mouth just as did that veteran of Saipan.

The Saipan Marine didn't quite lie to Ken Burns' camera. He was truthful inasmuch as he did live during a time when their loss of socially acceptable modifiers was a problem for returning vets. The old Marine fudged a little, though, when he let on that his cussed language was the biggest barrier between him and his loved ones. The whole truth is that veterans back from a combat tour -- in Saipan or Afghanistan or any other goddam place -- know things about how people are put together and how people come apart, things of which folks at home insist that civilized people do not know and should never stoop to learn.

Therefore I think the measure of a man is not only how he bears himself through the fires of combat, but also how he adjusts to certain facts of life that confront veterans who come back to these United States. Among such facts, one is that a prissy aversion to 'foul' language is cheap armor that covers militant ignorance. Second, militant ignorance on the part of the folks at home is what put the vet in harm's way to begin with. A third is perhaps hardest of all for some: The vet must understand that he is a stranger now to those who knew him of old. If ever again they learn to know him truly, they won't like him any more. He can never be at home among them again.

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Books: A Memoir -- by Larry McMurtry

2009-01-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

McMurtry's latest

Larry McMurtry's latest work is not a crowd pleaser, folks. Over at Amazon.com, where customers rate books on a scale of one-through-five stars, 13 of 28 customers award Books: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008; 259 pp; $24.00) three stars or less. Over at Barnes & Noble customers reacted in a similar way: one review awards the book two stars; another gives it four.

Books: A Memoir purports to be the autobiography of the fellow who leads 'the other life' of author Larry McMurtry. This fellow is not an author but a bookman from whom none of us has heard before. This is a man driven since childhood to collect books in the way that others collect guns or stamps or coins. In being such a memoir, it recalls collectors and books and authors, bookstore customers, booksellers -- a collection of the people and places and things that Bookman McMurtry's acquisitive bent has driven him to meet and to learn and to know and to deal with.

Describing my own feelings about Books: A Memoir, I should start with my impression that a number of the negative reviews I've read react to preconceived notions of what a McMurtry book 'ought to be' and do not consider this latest book on its own merits. Granted it is possible to compare, say, Anything for Billy to Lonesome Dove and rationally appreciate one over the other, there's no way to stand Books alongside McMurtry's western adventure fiction and measure it against that yardstick. Little of the humor, the swagger, the pathos that enliven McMurtry's western adventures is present in Books. When one encounters those things in Books they are muted, less substantial, harder to see and experience.

Readers who snuffle and bawl over the tragic end of Joe Lovelady or Jake Spoon are more apt to sneer at Bookman McMurtry, who is a less endearing protagonist. Whereas Joe and Jake are reckless, handsome bravos who score lots of women as they shoot, brawl, drink, gamble and swagger through their fictitious lives, Bookman's life is much less adventurous and Bookman's peers, according to McMurtry, are often grouchy, snappish, quasi-intellectual cranks who spend their lives and untold sums of money amassing vast collections of great and rare books. Tragedy strikes Jake and Joe when their bravado gets them killed. Tragedy strikes your typical bookman when he wakes up dead one morning, whereupon his inventory (and/or library) -- his great love and his life's work -- is broken up and sold in ragged chunks to unappreciative, mercenary strangers for pennies on the dollar. The tragedies of Books being thus Sisyphean and not Homeric, they are less easily recognized and consequently escape the notice of the idolatrous public. I think that is why, among negative reviews posted at Amazon.com, one sees remarks like these:

"My favorite book by an American author is Lonesome Dove. The other books in that series are also wonderful. Books is not fiction but a look at the author's love of books and collecting books. This may be of more interest to the people with similar interests." (1 star)
"I just finished reading this book and I come away disappointed. While there are a few semi-interesting anecdotes, in total they do not make for much of a book." (2 stars)
"Most tellingly . . . he repeats, very often, anecdotes from his great book-length essay, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Please, if you read this review, and haven't read that, DO NOT read Books, but rather go and get yourself a copy of Dairy Queen instead." (1 star)

Such reviews miss the fact that there are a couple of things to like about Books: A Memoir. The narrative tone is jovial and the narrator is easy to get along with. Until I started to sour on Books, I felt sorta like John O'Hanlan (James Stewart) riding horseback from Texas to Wyoming with Harvey Sullivan (Henry Fonda) riding alongside. On their way to take possession of something called The Cheyenne Social Club, John sat and listened while Harvey droned on, nonstop, for months, about his cousin's three-fingered kid sister and this ol' gal he used to date who could straddle two horses at the same time and that one, poor cowpoke who got kilt when some club-footed Swede totin' a hunnert pounds o' taters fell out of the sky and lit on him alluva sudden like, etc., ad infinitum.

In Books, narrator Bookman McMurtry drones along sorta like Harvey Sullivan. Bookman leads readers from Archer City, Texas, to Houston and Dallas and San Francisco and Denver and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and France and Italy and lots of other places before, at the end, he brings the reader back to Archer City. McMurtry's professional odyssey is less colorful than John O'Hanlan's long ride to Cheyenne. It could be just as interesting, but McMurtry fails to make it so.

Bookman McMurtry introduces readers to a host of people. There's any number of crankishly weird booksellers. One of them chased young McMurtry off the second floor of his shop. Another wouldn't let McMurtry touch any of his books but lent him binoculars with which to peruse the merchandise. There are plenty of others. We, the reading public, have never heard anything of any of these bookmen before, mind you. But several of them are eccentric in some way, and McMurtry tries to amuse us with their foibles.

Bookshop customers are also sometimes quirky: The late Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for example, occasionally popped into McMurtry's bookshop in Georgetown (The place that passes for Bohemia in Washington, D.C.). Sometimes she bought a book; sometimes she sold one. Then there's a woman named Sheri Martinelli. Deeply literate and generously rich, Martinelli was a friend of poets in her romantic youth. We meet her as an old lady sliding into poverty. She lives in a Winnebago with 400 personal letters from Ezra Pound, a bunch of cats and some rotten bananas.

Georgetown is a wonderful place for bookmen because it's full of old, rich, bookish types who obligingly die and leave marvelous libraries to be disposed of by their heirs. The heirs (and sellers generally) are often ignorant of books, of book prices, of technicalities such as issue points and other niceties of book collecting, and of literature generally. As a group, they are eager to sell and easily gulled. Large cities nationally provide happy hunting grounds for acquisitive bookmen, and Bookman McMurtry is definitely acquisitive.

The narrative voice is amiable, as I've already stated. My problem starts with the pace of the narration: Bookman McMurtry turns out to be a name-dropping maniac who is light on facts. In the first 29 pages, for instance, McMurtry lays more than 120 names on the reader. These are ordinary people, authors, publishers, bookmen, book titles, from Thomas Pynchon to Sancho Panza and Susan Sontag to 'Aunt Naomi Mitchell' and 'my dog Scraps.' Books: A Memoir is 219 pages long and by the time I got to the end of it my mind was a soup of names of people and places and books and things about which I knew next to nothing. Most of the people named are named because they bought or sold a book or knew some piece of trivia that McMurtry wanted to know. Then they vanish. If they ever figured in McMurtry's personal life, we are told something such as "they've been a friend these many years." That's very nearly as much of them (or of McMurtry) as we ever get. After checking up on myself by reading it a second time, I am sure: The biggest problem with Books: A Memoir is that there's nothing in it worth knowing.

In The Cheyenne Social Club, Harvey Sullivan's 6-month soliloquy has a purpose: it defines Harvey and John as characters -- as types, that is. Viewers have a good time along the way and, at the end of the five-minute travel montage, we know pretty well what to expect from John and Harvey as the plot develops. In Books: A Memoir, on the other hand, the soliloquy never stops and, being this is autobiography, there is no plot. Readers experience an avalanche of proper nouns and next to nothing else. Occasionally the narration provides a good time but, more typically, readers are starved of facts. Bookman McMurtry gives us narration to no purpose.

When the soliloquy ends on page 219, readers know almost nothing that they didn't know before reading page 1. Of McMurtry's personal life, for example: we know that he was married in the early 1960's. He sold his first novel, Horseman Pass By, for $10,000, to Hollywood in 1962. It was made into one of Paul Newman's most famous films, Hud. We know McMurtry has a son, born in 1962, who today is a singer/songwriter. He has cut 6 albums (titles not given), and McMurtry expects his son will do well in time (Question: Does such faint praise mean that those 6 albums all suck?). There is also a grandson. We also know the names of the son and the grandson. We know that McMurtry writes 10 pages of something every day of his life. His favorite book is Don Quixote. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the prototypes of Gus and Call, in Loneseome Dove. We know that McMurtry has a personal library of 27,000 volumes. He is tired of fiction and doesn't care to read it any more. Instead he likes travelogues and books about world wars one and two. He has met and dealt with many interesting people, about whom he tells us next to nothing. He runs a bookstore called 'Booked Up' in Archer City, Texas, with a lifelong female business partner whom this 'memoir' names but does not discuss. The store has an inventory of some 300,000 volumes. Of book collecting and of the book trade itself, we know even less.

Just as annoying is the fact that there is no discernible plan. This book is not organized by date or by subject or in any other recognizable way. The narration wanders from 1962 to 1990, to 1975 and back again, seemingly at random. If, when you've done, you find you want to go back and read again about this person, that book, or some particular incident, your only option is to leaf through the book, scanning until you find what you're looking for. The huge number of names in this thing absolutely cries for an index, but there is none.

Bookman McMurtry calls that a memoir. I say it's damned little detail to draw from a life of more than 70 years and a career spanning more than 50. It's damned little to give readers who paid twenty-four bucks for an inside look at the life of so famous and successful an author as Larry McMurtry. Speaking strictly of Books: A Memoir, just because negative customer reviews at Amazon.com are poorly informed doesn't mean some of them aren't overly generous. Readers could learn nearly as much about McMurtry by reading Who's Who as they'll learn from this crummy book.

Jimmy sez "Save yer munny, folks. Thissun's a stinker."

✩

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Bad Santa and the Bureaucrats: Maybe We Can Get Rid of Both

2008-12-31T17:24:00.000-08:00

News on Christmas morning was that one Mr. Bruce Pardo, of Covina, Cal., dressed up in a Santa suit on Christmas Eve. He loaded up a bunch of guns and went to the house of his ex-wife's parents, where he shot his ex-wife, and her parents, and five or six other people who were guests at a party there. Then he set fire to the house and burned it to the ground. Had Pardo not been badly burned in that fire, police now say, he would have flown to Illinois, where he planned to kill again. As it turned out, however, Pardo left his inlaws' burning house, drove off somewhere, and blew out his own brains.

Bad, Santa! Bad!

Pardo's is a story that reminds me of William 'D-Fens' Foster, who is a fictitious, Dilbert sort of character portrayed by Michael Douglas in the movie, Falling Down. Like 'D-Fens' Foster, Mr. Pardo was a good engineer with years of experience. Suddenly (through no fault of his own) Pardo found himself among the hard-core unemployed. His wife then left him and, the U.S. economy being what it is, Christmas found him bereft of hope and utterly alone. The sum of it all was more than he could stand, and Pardo went psycho.

Readers shouldn't get me wrong, here. I feel no more sympathy for Mr. Pardo than for the people he killed. I just lump them all together as victims of the human condition and of a society that -- for all the goods and services it may produce -- is arguably the most brutish in the whole of the developed world.

The Pardo episode set me to thinking about the savagery of our times: Americans wave their social fingers as they drive around and shoot each other on freeways. Our kids shoot their chums and their teachers at school. Parents beat each other to death at school sporting events. Snipers stalk the suburbs. Gangbangers, in drive-by shootings, hose each other down with machine-guns and kill a lot of innocents coincidentally. Going postal seems to be our national pastime. How did we become such a murderous society?

Last time I got curious about stuff like that, I decided to survey my neighbors and find out what they thought about it. I was surprised by what I learned.

My friend Pete spent so many years as a broadcast engineer that he now has static in his voice and glows in the dark. He gets invited to lots of parties as a result. When he doesn't have anything else to do, he watches The Sci-Fi Channel on TV.

Pete believes the voice of God comes to us as radio waves from space. He thinks every human being is a sort of spiritual radio receiver. Each person, if he or she is tuned correctly, can receive wisdom direct from God.

According to Pete, people tuned incorrectly are “frequencially estranged from God.” Such people were once hopeless, “But,” Pete crackled cheerily, “I’ve invented a tool that allows me to perfect another person's reception.”

Pete showed me the tool. To my technically challenged eye, Pete's frequency adjuster looked just like a Louisville Slugger. He offered to demonstrate the thing. Too bad: I had an appointment on the other side of town, so I left before Pete could show me how it works.

Anyway: Pete believes that organized religion is the root of all evil. He blames Christianity, in particular, for the savagery of modern America. “It’s the goddam Bible bangers, Jimmy,” he rants. They’re all killin’ mad because they waited two thousand years for the Second Coming and then – Christ almighty! – Bush showed up instead of Jesus. Wouldn’t you be sore?”

I admit that I am. I’m sore about the Second Coming of George Bush. But I'm not a Christian and I wasn’t expecting Jesus, so Pete’s theory doesn’t explain my outrage. Besides: I note that some of the Americans who kill each other are Republicans. Given that fact, they couldn’t possibly be Christians.

My friend John is a real Christian, who drives a trash truck for a living. John used to be a fan of Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker and sent them a lot of money before they got busted for tax evasion and mail fraud. After that happened, John switched his allegiance to Jimmy Swaggart. When Swaggart turned out to be a perverted, whoremongering hypocrite, John started watching Pat Robertson. "Anyone who thinks Hugo Chavez should be killed must be alright," according to John.

I asked John who or what he thinks causes mayhem in America. Not surprisingly, John believes the devil makes us do it.

“It’s Satan,” John said dourly. “Satan took control of the U.S. Supreme Court back when Earl Warren was chief justice. It was Satan who made the Roe v. Wade decision. Once America got used to the idea of killing babies,” John said, “it was easy for us to start killing each other.”

John concluded: “The problem isn't so much that Americans kill each other, but Satan has confused us so we kill the wrong people. Instead of scraping hapless infants out of their mothers’ wombs, we should torture and kill people like Drew Barrymore. I mean just look at her! Can you imagine what Jesus would do to her if he came back tomorrow? Can’t you see she’s one of Satan’s slaves?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell John that I wish Drew Barrymore was one of my slaves, but I didn’t. I value his good will because he’s told me more than once that he prays for me every day and, when I think about Drew Barrymore, I suspect that prayer may be just what I need. Killing other people is not one of the things Ms. Barrymore inspires me to do, though I confess she looks to me at times like she might enjoy being tortured.

Another one of my neighbors is a woman named Charmian Swendling-Bumff. She is a computer programmer and Gen-X spiritualist who claims to be a white witch. She wears dingy black clothes, has spiky hair of several colors and forty acres of tattoos. Her body is pierced in many places. In fact, Charmian has more holes in her body than Bonnie Parker had after the feds shot up all their ammo. If Charmian is ever shot, she won’t bleed. She probably won’t even notice.

Even so, Charmian worries about violence in America. As a solution, she favors tough anti-gun laws. “Americans kill each other because they’re allowed to own guns,” she said snippily. “Government should take guns away from people. Sure enough, it’s people who get mad and it’s people who lose their tempers, but it’s guns that do the killing.”

She also believes that business and technology will solve all the problems that government seems unable to answer. Charmian said: “Today’s technology makes government obsolete. We should just do away with government. It’s a burden we do not need and can no longer afford.” She arched her brows and pronounced the words as if they were Profound Truth.

Charmian knows six computer languages. She prides herself on her command of logic. So I told her it seems illogical to expect that the government we just did away with will take guns away from the people.

She answered smugly: “The police will take the guns away, Jimmy. The police are all the government anyone will want in the future.”

I thought about that for a second, then dryly admitted: “You’re right, Charmian. I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right. The police would be all the government anyone would ever want.”

At that, Charmian screeched: “You’re making fun of me? Well, I know your kind! You’re already dead! You’re one of those soulless ghouls we have to eliminate before civilization can advance! On Star Trek, they beam things like you into deep space! Someday, in a better world, we’ll be able to do that here! In the meantime. . . .” She muttered darkly, threw back her cape and used her genuine, Lord-of-the-Things, made-by-elves wizard's staff to draw arcane symbols in the dirt at my feet.

We ghouls may be soulless, but we know when we’re not wanted. I split before Charmian finished her spell, so I don’t know what sort of hex she laid on me. Two days later my guinea pig, Adolf, suddenly squeaked maniacally and ran in circles until he fell over dead.

For a moment there I wondered -- then told myself: "Nah! Charmian hates things like me, but she wouldn’t hurt poor little Adolf. She believes in the ethical treatment of animals."

Pete and John and Charmian are exceptional people, I admit. Most of the folks I ask about causes of violence in America blame violent media content, especially violence on television. The gist of their argument is as follows:

“Some jerk watches the tube. He sees Sylvester Stallone apply a flame thrower and a bazooka to a gang of drug dealers in a crowded sports arena. The jerk is inspired. He gets up off his couch and turns off the tube. Then he ambles down the street and squirts a machine-gun into a daycare center.”

I call that the ABC Theory of Murder & Mayhem for three reasons: A) it’s handy; B) it’s simple; C) it indicts the television networks.

In one way, the ABC Theory makes a lot of sense: I quit watching television in 1973, and I haven’t killed anybody since. In another way, the ABC Theory makes no sense at all: Before 1973 I watched television almost every night for 25 years, but I didn’t kill anybody then, either -- though I saw Sgt. Saunders and Marshal Dillon kill lots of people.

Fact is, I've never heard a single explanation of violence in America that doesn't fall into one or more of three categories: 1) wholly insane, like Pete and John and Charmian; 2) carefully tailored to suit some greasy sneak's nasty, political agenda; 3) calculated to make the theorist a lot of money. None of the theories I've heard offer a satisfactory explanation for the fact that while the Bruce Pardos of this world are relatively common in the United States, Pardos are freakishly rare in every other nation on the planet.

Novelist Gustav Hasford once wrote that violence is the international language. Hasford might better have written that violence is the universal language. I mean you can walk into any room, anywhere on Earth, and punch somebody in the nose. Some may ask why you did a thing like that but nobody will ask what you meant by it, because a punch in the nose is a gesture that everyone understands. The meaning of words -- written or spoken -- is often less clear and in many cases deceptive.

In the U.S., for example, we have a Department of Education that manufactures illiterates and lays academic credentials on morons. We have a Department of Defense that makes aggressive war on other nations. Our Department of Agriculture serves agribusiness only. The U.S. Department of Justice produces nothing but injustice and incarceration while it tramples civil liberties as if they were insects. America fattens all of those worthless, deceitful, counterproductive, bureaucratic clusterfucks -- and dozens more just like them -- with hundreds of billions of tax dollars annually.

It seems to me, then, that if we defund and dismantle all those deadbeat institutions, we could afford to spend a few million bucks for research that would tell us exactly what it is about life in these United States that yearly drives dozens of good Americans like Mr. Bruce Pardo homicidally berserk. I don't know about the rest of you but I, for one, would surely like to know.

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To Whom It May Concern

2008-12-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

I used to go to lots of 12-step meetings. After the opening formalities, the topic for group discussion was often "happiness."

Many members, especially newcomers, are unhappy without booze and drugs. The discontented want to know when things will get better. They ask the question frequently. Hard cases seem to whine about it incessantly, so it's easy to see them as pests. On the other hand, the question they ask is fair. The famous book Alcoholics Anonymous (In A.A. it is known as 'The Big Book'.) is the seminal book on 12-step programs, and that book makes a number of promises concerning happiness:

• We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.¹

• We are sure God wants us to be happy, joyous and free.²

• We will trudge the Road of Happy Destiny.³

Speaking for myself alone, I think the Founders went a little way over the top when they wrote some parts of The Big Book. That's just my opinion, so of course it doesn't mean anything. Neither does it matter if Alcoholics Anonymous was written by Bill W. and Dr. Bob or by Candide and Dr. Pangloss. Fact is that The Big Book says what it says, and we who age in 12-step programs are often called to explain happiness to those who cannot find it. This essay is my attempt at an explanation. Here goes:

Were I to take the words “happy, joyous and free” literally, as new members typically do, I'd have to conclude that the phrase is a lie. For after more than 25 years of continuous sobriety (thanks to God and a 12-step program), I’m not “happy, joyous and free” in the literal sense and I don't believe I know anyone who is (though I know many who claim to be).

Because life truly is a bitch sometimes, It seems to me that being "happy and joyous” all the time is for a fortunate few of the insane, the retarded, the slap-happy and the sedated. As for “free” – nobody on Earth is truly free. For the people of this planet, at least, things are indeed as Bob Dylan wrote years ago: "You got to serve somebody." Like it or else, those are the facts as I see them.

In the realm of fantasy, I often encounter people who make a god of Santa Claus. I know them when they speak at meetings because they're the ones who declaim that “My God doesn't let bad things happen to good people.” They regard their emancipation from booze and drugs as proof that God favors them. They take God’s favor as a sign that they are good people to whom bad things will no longer happen. Secure in that belief, they say they are “happy, joyous and free.”

Too bad for them: there is no Santa Claus. Sooner or later, the fact that bad things occasionally happen to everyone will (if they are sane) at some point force them to admit that they don't know any “good” people and that they themselves must be “bad.”

That end of Santa's rope looks slippery from where I sit. And if they fall or if they don't, if they are sane they'll have to rethink their ideas about God, about Being, about good and evil, about how we get sober and stay that way, and what it means to be “happy, joyous and free.”

I recall a big meeting years ago in a big city. The air was a soup of cigarette smoke and the Santa Claus gang was in full cry. Smokers all, a half-dozen of Santa's good people stood and testified one after another that they were happy, joyous and free. Then some party pooper got up (Not me. I was a two-pack smoker myself at the time.) and told the room he didn't understand how anyone addicted to nicotine can honestly claim to live life on a spiritual basis.

The irony hit my funny bone like a hammer. I collapsed in gales of laughter, making an utter ass of myself. About a hundred of Santa's flock (nearly everyone in the room) glared at the pooper as if he was one of those bad things that aren't supposed to happen. For just a second there, I thought they would croak the pooper and then lynch me for laughing. I left because I couldn't control my hysteria.

Even so, the pooper's truth gnawed at me like a rat. My sponsor said I should work on it, and I didn't argue because I already knew he was right. I got under the hood of my program and tinkered with it for two or three years until, by and by, I was able to quit smoking. Today, thanks to God, a 12-step program, and that pooper's cussedness, I haven't sucked a butt for over 17 years. So we learn and grow in 12-step programs.

Twelve-step people are great sloganeers. Give us anything that resembles wisdom, we boil it down to what we hope is a terse profundity. Then we make a mantra of that and chant it til we're hoarse. We smear it on bumper stickers and chips and buttons, mold it into key chains, belt buckles, ash trays and other junk, and sell it to ourselves when we need money. We print it, we frame it, we hang it on walls and we read it aloud at meetings.

Our mantras are (or ought to be) harmless, but twisted minds can twist anything. The 12-step member who lives life “one day at a time” may decide that, because she has enough to get through today, she can take tomorrow's grocery-and-rent money to the bingo parlor. The member who reminds himself to “think, think, think” may think about how to stay sober – or he may ponder the best way to murder his wife. If both the thinker and the gambler have heard the old saw about the sober horse thief, both may decide it doesn't apply because neither of them ever swiped a horse.

Anyone with time in a 12-step program knows such abuses occur. The abuse may result from simple-mindedness, it may be pathological or it may express a cold-blooded, cynical misapplication of Program principles toward a selfish end. It may also result when one of our slogans is honestly misunderstood. I myself almost slipped on “Fake it till you make it.”

When I was young in the Program, I was as woeful as anyone: I had no home. My marriage was broken. I had no friends, no job, no money, no prospects, no etc. Of course my real problem was I didn't know how to live without booze and drugs, but I didn't understand and accept that. In the depth of my despair, my problems seemed insurmountable. I was sure I could never be sober and happy – and yet many of those I saw at meetings seemed to enjoy the good life.

Certain I had missed something, I buttonholed one of the fellows whose supposed happiness I most envied (He was handsome and dressed sharp; he had money, a job, a nice car, lots of women). I explained my feelings and asked him: “What am I doing wrong?”

"Fake it till you make it,” he said.

"What's that?” I asked.

"I mean get positive, Buddy. Act as if you're happy. Someday you'll wake up and find you really are happy. And when you finally get happy, your battle with the bottle will be history because people who are happy don't need to drink. That's how it works.”

So I tried that.

One day, weeks later, my sponsor said: “You're actin' mighty strange. You laugh when nobody else laughs. You laugh at things that aren't funny. In fact, you been brayin' like a demented jackass. What's got into you, Fool?”

I told him about “Fake it till you make it.”

“You think that's how we get happy in the Program? I'll tell you what: Go back to drinkin'. Pretend you're sober. See what that gets you.”

"That won't work and you know it,” I wailed. “If I start drinking again, I'll go crazy. I'll end up in an institution!”

He was ready for that: “You'll end up in an institution anyway,” he said cheerily, “if you keep on pretendin’ to be what you ain’t. Think about it.”

"Well then what the hell do all these people mean when they say 'Fake it till you make it?' I hear it at meetings all the goddam time!"

"They mean that if you don't believe the Program will work for you, it probably won't. So fake it. Act as if you believe it'll work: Don't drink; go to meetings; read The Big Book; work The Steps; mind The Traditions; talk to your sponsor; pray for answers. Work hard at all o' them things for a year or two or three. As time passes and you're still sober, you'll come to see that the Program does work. You'll learn that you can stay sober for as long as you want, if you do it like the Program teaches, one day at a time.

"That's what we mean when we say 'Fake it til you make it.' When you know for a fact that the Program works for you, you won't have to fake it any more. Maybe you'll be happy about that. Maybe you'll find some other things to be happy about. Then again, maybe you won't. You're a hard case, Boy. Any pea-brained yahoo oughta know. . . .”

I sat and listened while he read the whole Riot Act. Then I went out and honestly tried to do as he said. It wasn't easy and for a few years it wasn't any fun. But at length I came to believe, first in the Program and then in God. After that, things did indeed change for me.

When I came to the Program, my idea of happiness was “more” — more money, more sex, more booze, more drugs, more toys. My idea of freedom was being at liberty to do exactly as I pleased at any time, in any situation. I had no inkling of responsibility. I lived in medicated ignorance of what went on around me, of whom I hurt with my selfishness, and of the ways in which I hurt them. It was as if my life was a dark tunnel wherein I saw nothing but my dream of happiness, which blazed like a beacon away down at the far end.

Today I believe that the overwhelming majority of people, drunk or sober, pursue happiness in just that way. Most folks run down their personal tunnel toward the light of happiness, never suspecting that long before they get to the end of the tunnel, the light will go out. If they think of what they're doing at all, they shrug it off as “the rat race” and keep on running.

As long as I pursued the light at the end of the tunnel, I had nothing but hope for the future and memories of the past. I could not live in today. Now I don't run any more because the faith I found in the Program is a light I don't need to pursue. It is mine to carry with me if I want. And so I do.

My faith lights the walls of life’s tunnel. It shows me things I never saw before, which allows me to try things I never tried. By the light of my faith, I’m able to focus on what's happening today rather than what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.

Faith makes my perception keener, too. Of the things I notice today, I see that none are wholly good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Thus I find more things to enjoy and fewer things to fall in love with. I am stronger in my new awareness, just as my sponsor said I might be. So faith enables me to stand on my feet, look life in the eye and take what comes without a chaser, even if I'm not always glad to do so.

There is joy.

Where are happiness and freedom?” you ask.

Well, I'm free to die and pay taxes, just like everyone else. Beyond those two proverbial freedoms, my idea of freedom today is shaped by my realization that the freedom I formerly cherished — the liberty to do exactly as I pleased — prevents happiness. In fact, insofar as it kept me in thrall to my id, what I once called “freedom” was a form of idiocy that wrecked my life and nearly killed me.

Today I know that freedom and happiness entail a responsibility to care for myself and others. As long as my behavior exhibits respect for that fact and acceptance of that responsibility, I'm free and happy to do as I please. If I refuse responsibility for myself and others, I lose my freedom and my happiness.

Outside the web formed by my relations with God and other people I can do nothing more significant than use the toilet and I know that if I live long enough, I'll need help to do even that. Thus I find the truth about freedom and happiness is the truth about the human condition, and the truth about the human condition is as simple and profound as the poet John Donne wrote so many hundreds of years ago: “No man is an island.”

That’s just my opinion again, so of course it doesn’t mean anything. If it’s too simple or too obscure for you, if you can’t accept it or if you just don’t believe it, I have no quarrel. And you will have no problem finding alternative theories of happiness in the meetings, the coffee shops, and those smoky, late-night ontology seminars that characterize life for new members of any 12-step program.

Twelve-step programs make natural homes for any number of wowsers, crank theologians, quack psychologists and amateur analysts. Most of them are harmless. Others are not. When you discover you’ve been taken for a ride, remember: “It can’t hurt you if you don’t drink over it.”

Of all Program mantras, I believe that one is the best.

May God guide you in your quest.

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1. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. 3^rd Edition (New York, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1976), Page 83.

2. Ibid. Page 133.

3. Ibid. Page 164.

Kaiser Bill's Beef Roast

2008-11-25T14:48:00.000-08:00

No Turkey Nohow

I ain't eatin' no turkey this year. An' I don't care if I never eat turkey again. In fact, I'd prefer it that way. I quit cooking the stuff years ago.

When I was in college, my roommate and I used to buy a turkey once or twice a month. The stuff was cheap, then: you could score a huge turkey for, like, 29 cents a pound. We used to get a 20-pounder and drag it home and roast it for Sunday dinner. We'd have it with boiled potatoes and one or another flavor of Stove Top Stuffing, and we hosed it all down with some gravy we made from chicken broth and cream of mushroom soup.

After dinner, we stripped the carcass, put the meat in baggies and threw 'em in the fridge. Rest of the week we had Ramen noodles with turkey, hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey salad, Kraft Dinner with turkey, turkey-noodle casserole, turkey pizza, turkey-bacon burgers, etc. We used to get pretty sick of the stuff after a week or ten days of chomping on it.

The upside was that we ate pretty well in college without having to spend much money or much time in the kitchen. The downside was the holiday season. When we went home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, hungry for Ma's home cooking, we'd gallop to the dinner table and eat (ulp!) turkey again.

Believe me: it is hard to be enthusiastic about those beautiful Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys when you've practically lived on turkey for the last three months. I used to load up on Ma's delicious sides and desserts and hope she didn't notice me hiding from her turkey. I think it worked: if it didn't work, she never said so.

The problem went away when I finished graduate school and got a job. Working in the professions, I had money to eat slop like the rest of my friends. Lunch became carb-o-takeout and supper was carb-o-eatout. By and by my health broke down and I became disabled. Since then, I've had time to make a hobby of cookery and today we eat some pretty wild stuff.

On holidays, I like "foreign food," which to me is stuff we don't normally get here in Iowa. Last year, for Thanksgiving, we had shrimp gumbo, red beans and rice with Creole hot sausage, and cornbread. There was a flan for dessert. This year, we're going German: Our menu is sauerbraten, potato dumplings, braised cabbage and homemade, caraway rye bread. We'll top it off with baked apples and wash it all down with cups of hot, homemade cocoa (recipe on the Hershey's can).

I've got a 4-pound, bottom-round roast in the fridge. When I pull that roast out tomorrow and cook it, it will have been 72 hours in marinade. I can almost taste it now! We'll eat our fill and shred the leftover for hot beef sandwiches later this week.

A great many of you will give thanks for your holiday turkey, I'm sure. As for me: I'm giving thanks for the fact that I have a home when so many others do not, and thanks for the Food Network, which has taught me to do so many wonderful things.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May God keep us safe from the turkeys in Washington and in Wall Street.

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I was antiwar when antiwar wasn't cool.

2008-11-17T05:14:00.000-08:00

The item posted below never actually saw the light of day. The only venue I could get to publish it at the time fucked it up so badly that I was ashamed to have my name on it. The editor and I haven't spoken since and I feel the better for that.

I've changed hard drives several times since this piece was written, and I've changed from a Windows OS to a Linux system. Somehow this item disappeared from my active hdd files. I searched everywhere on the Internet, hoping someone had posted a copy of it. I tore my paper files apart looking for hard copy. Then, a few weeks ago, I found an old CD I burned in 2004. Look now and see what I turned up.

Antiwar Protests Miss the Point
© 2003 by Jimmy Montague

CEDAR RAPIDS, IA -- Today is Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003. The news is all of protest. Antiwar marches crowd the streets of Washington, D.C., and other American cities.

Protests ensue because the Bush administration has entirely failed to justify its belligerence toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Said failure leads people to suspect Dubya has reasons for going to war that have nothing to do with national security. So protesters carry signs that read “No War for Oil;” “No War for Revenge;” “No War on the Iraqi People;” “No Race War;” “No Religious War;” “No War for Profit."

While Bush pounds his war drum and protesters pound the streets, America's veterans pound away at Uncle Sam’s indifference to their problems. To tell of just a few:

• At least 7,758 Desert Storm vets have died since the war’s end.¹ Some 209,000 Desert Storm vets have filed for medical benefits; 161,000 collect disability payments. The postwar casualties are due to a malady with diverse, debilitating and sometimes deadly symptoms that is vaguely known as “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). Uncle Sam first refused to admit that GWS exists. Now, after being forced to admit that GWS is real, Sammy remains reluctant to discuss GWS and seems unable to determine its cause. Vets say GWS results from exposure to chemical and biological weapons that American corporations sold to Saddam Hussein, an outrage that Uncle Sam is trying to hush up.² If that's true or if it isn't, the fact remains: Sammy denies it without attempting a thorough public investigation.

• Frustrated by Uncle Sam’s denial and his refusal to act against war profiteers, more than 5,000 Gulf War veterans in 1994 got mad and sued for compensation. Their lawsuit moved slowly for eight years because both the U.S. government and the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) refused to share relevant information with veterans’ attorney Gary Pitts. But the vets' action got a shot in the arm last year when former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter went to Iraq and brought out a copy of Iraq's 1998 weapons declaration, which he obtained from Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and gave to vets' attorney Pitts. The documents list some companies that sold chemical weapons to Iraq before the Gulf War. Pitts has already sued several of those firms and plans to sue the rest.³

• Vets were further outraged just weeks ago, when the Bush administration censored Iraq's 2002 weapons declaration before anyone else had a chance to see it. Among items struck from the document was a list of 24 U.S. corporations that made money arming Iraq. According to Swiss journalist Andreas Zumach, to whom the uncensored information was leaked, the list includes Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Unisys, Bechtel, Sperry, TI Coating, and International Computer Systems.⁴

• Worse still: information Uncle Sam deleted from the 2002 Iraqi declaration ". . . shows that U.S. government agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia, all helped Iraq build its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs by providing supplies and/or training." All of those things -- the component sales, the training and Uncle Sam's abetment -- have been illegal since the 1970s.⁵

• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system has always been underfunded. But the fact was never more disgraceful than today, when Bush and his Congress say government can afford bigger military budgets, a worldwide war on terror, a war on drugs, a war on Iraq, a war on Iran, higher budget defecits and tax cuts for the rich, but can't afford to fund veterans' healthcare. While Dubya and his Congress lie about their priorities, more than 300,000 veterans nationally wait six months or more to see a physician.⁶

• Bush hypocrisy is amplified and aggravated by the Bush economic recession. Tens of thousands of veterans who were getting healthcare benefits from employers have lost their jobs. Those vets now march into the underfunded, overstressed VA healthcare system.⁷

• During World War II and the Korean Conflict, Uncle Sam's military recruiters promised volunteers free medical care for life. Veterans of World War II and Korea were therefore furious when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently decided that Uncle Sam needn't honor his promise because it wasn't written into law.⁸ The vets concerned ". . . received free benefits until 1995, when the Pentagon ended those benefits for veterans over 65 because they were eligble for Medicare. Many of them had to purchase supplemental policies, including Medicare Part B, to fill coverage gaps."⁹ "Congress recently enacted legislation providing free healthcare for all of these older veterans beginning in 2002. What is at stake in this case is the [out-of-pocket] costs, estimated by Justice Department officials as billions of dollars, paid by older veterans between 1995 and 2001." Plaintiffs promise an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.¹⁰ Veterans nationally await the outcome.

• Seen a homeless man lately? Chances are one in four that man is a veteran. The VA says "homeless veterans are mostly males (2 percent are female). The vast majority are single, most come from poor, disadvantaged communities." Some 45 percent suffer from mental illness, often Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Half have substance abuse problems. They are men and women who served in World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, or the military's antidrug cultivation efforts in South America. Forty-seven percent of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam Era. More than 67 percent served our country for at least three years and 33 percent were stationed in a war zone." The VA estimates (nobody attempts an accurate count) that "more than 275,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. More than 500,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year." The VA cares for some 40,000 homeless vets annually. The rest are thrown onto private charity and nonprofit groups.¹¹ The upshot is that most homeless vets are homeless and the nation doesn't seem to care.

By now you probably think I'm driving toward the idea that the Bush administration shouldn't go to war with Iraq until every homeless veteran is sheltered and cared for -- until all veterans are given the healthcare they were promised, regardless of when or where they served. You're right. But my concerns are bigger than just that.

The present commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States deserted from the armed forces of the United States. GOP boosters contend that Dubya completed his Vietnam-era hitch in the Air National Guard, but neither official records nor statements by his superior officers support that contention. Instead, evidence indicates that Bush simply walked away from the last 12 months of his enlistment contract. Why he was never arrested and prosecuted is both a mystery and a scandal, because our statute of limitations doesn't apply to desertion.¹²

Because of Dubya's dubious service record, vets smell bullshit when Bush visits troops in hospital, as he recently did at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His mouth says wounded soldiers are "incredibly brave" and "America's finest citizens."¹³ His actions and his record and his policies all speak otherwise.

America's AWOL chief executive has never been shot at. Neither have his belligerent advisors, save only Colin Powell -- which may explain why Powell seems the most reasonable of the lot. Few of the others ever served our country outside of a cushy government job. Almost every one is a Vietnam-era draft dodger. As a group they are privileged rich kids who found ways to avoid service. Some hold investments in defense firms that will make them richer still, if we go to war. News media call them 'chickenhawks' because that is what they are.¹⁴

Those of us who did serve recently learned what the chickenhawks think of us. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (a.k.a. Reddy-2-Rum-Bell Rummy) spoke during the week of Jan. 5, 2003, about Vietnam-era draftees. Rummy said the soldiers ". . . added no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services."¹⁵ In other words, most of the young men killed and wounded in Vietnam had no value to their country. Rummy later apologized, saying he was sorry for his remarks,¹⁶ but many vets are unimpressed. Some statements cannot be retracted.

So if you're a parent who still grieves for your long-dead son, the knowledge that your child was worthless should help you through the process. If you're a parent who spent the last 35 years caring for a son made quadriplegic by a Vietnamese explosion, Rumsfeld's statement should ease your conscience as you unplug your son's life support, wheel him out behind the garage, and leave him to die of exposure. He was worthless when he was whole, so why burden yourself further? And if you're a parent whose son or daughter will serve in Gulf War II, you ought to think about the fact that if your son or daughter gets disabled, the expense of long-term care will weigh heavily on you for as long as Congress refuses to fully fund VA healthcare.

Now I am at the end of my rage and it is this: as long as there is one homeless, hungry veteran in the United States of America, we are a nation of liars and hypocrites. As long as that is true, we must own that if we are led by a gang of liars and war profiteers, the onus is no more than we deserve.

Antiwar protests of Feb. 15 thus missed the point. We should not protest that our so-called leaders want to war for cynical, self-serving reasons. We should instead protest that until we the people punish war profiteers, until we honor the promises we made to our veterans, until we care for our homeless poor, until we clean up corruption in Wall Street and in Washington, until we are no longer content to be misled and abused by a flock of blustering, profiteering chickenhawks, we and our Uncle Sam are unfit to war for any reason. Until we clean our own house, the people who hate us are right.

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1. "Oops, more unexpected casualties." Col. David Hackworth. Sept. 17, 2002. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28958

2. "Gulf War veterans suing companies for chemical exports." CNN. Jan. 17, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/17/iraq.chemical.suit/

3. Ibid.

4. "A US Media Mystery: The Case of the Missing Information about Iraq's Weapons." The Baltimore Chronicle. Jan. 8, 2003.
http://baltimorechronicle.com/media_ommisions_jan03.shtml

5. Ibid.

6. "AS VETERANS' NUMBERS RISE, SOME WAIT MONTHS TO SEE DOCTOR." Judd Slivka. The Arizona Republic. Jan. 13, 2003.

7. Ibid.

8. "Court overturns ruling on vets' free lifetime healthcare." CNN. Nov. 19, 2002. http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/11/19/retired.veterans.hearing/index.html

9. "Veterans Not Eligible for Lifetime Care." OMO (Out of Many One). Nov. 20, 2002. http://senrs.com/vets_not_eligible_for_lifetime_care.htm
Apologies to readers: Since my story was written, senrs.com is now a dead domain. OMO no longer exists. I've searched Google every way I know how and can't find another link to this article. This is one you'll have to take my word for.

10. Ibid.

11. "Background & Statistics." National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. http://www.nchv.org/background.cfm

12. 'Bush the Deserter' is an old story that was published by The Boston Globe during the 2000 presidential race. The Globe made a good case, but mainstream venues refused to pick up the story and run with it. For some reason, they decided the nerdiness of Al Gore was a more salient issue. The facts remain, however, and the story of 'Bush the Deserter' persists at many places. Here are a few:
http://www.president-bush.com/warhero.html
http://www.boston.com
http://www.bartcop.com/deserter.htm
http://www.awolbush.com/
http://www.awolbush.com/newrephtml.html

13. "Bush Visits Wounded U.S. Soldiers." Voice of America. Jan. 17, 2003. http://www.voanews.com

14. For those who want to know who the chicken hawks are and how they ducked service in Vietnam, our nation's oldest newspaper, The New Hampshire Gazette, published a "Chickenhawk Database." Regrettably, the NHG pulled their database down for some reason but plans to put it back up eventually. One hopes they'll be kind enough to do so: links to their chickenhawk gizmo are pasted all over the Web.

15. "Rumsfeld draft slap fanned fury." Thomas M. DeFrank and Owen Moritz. The New York Daily News. Jan 23, 2003. http://www.nydailynews.com

16. Ibid.

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Chris Floyd vs. the Lost Planet Obamanauts

2008-11-06T03:29:00.000-08:00

Chris Floyd is one of those few journalists whose work is usually too good for journalism. In a profession that boasts of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, the things Floyd writes afflict everybody -- journalists included -- and journalism, therefore, doesn't seem to like Chris Floyd very much.

Your typical Chris Floyd essay doesn't merely inform by asking and answering questions about the subject: it demands that readers examine themselves. Floyd's ironies are prickly at both ends; his questions are double-edged. People get stabbed and cut reading Floyd, which is why -- I think -- Chris Floyd's essays draw an audience of only one-to-four thousand readers from an English-speaking Internet population that must number some two billion people. No matter who you are or what you believe, it takes guts to read Chris Floyd.

So it is with one of Mr. Floyd's latest efforts. Titled WIBDI: A Prism for the New Paradigm, this one is a 1400-word smart bomb aimed at the mob of self-styled 'dissidents' who came to themselves during the regime of George W. Bush and now, having given their all to Barack Obama, expect jobs and many other great things from him. Floyd writes:

As the United States enters a new and unprecedented political era -- or, as killjoy cynics would have it, as the American empire gets a new set of temporary managers -- the fate of the "dissident" movement that arose under the Bush Regime seems occluded. So many of those who set out their stalls as bold outsiders "speaking truth to power" now find themselves on the inside, enthralled by power, speaking for power, as it is personified by President-elect Barack Obama -- who, ironically, has consistently repudiated many of the tenets and principles that provoked the dissidents' outrage in the first place.

I have always disliked this phrase "speaking truth to power" (although I'm sure I've lazily employed it myself on several occasions). No one needs to speak truth to power: power knows the truth well enough, it knows what it is doing, and to whom, and why. What we need, most desperately, are people who will speak truth about power, and speak it to people who might not have heard that truth through the howling cacophony of media diversion, corporate spin and political manipulation.

So for those of dissident bent who would still like to speak truth about power -- and who are not sending their CVs to the Obama transition team or signing on as happy warriors to defend the new imperial managers from revenge attacks by bitter partisans of the ousted faction -- the question of how best to comport oneself in this brave new world takes on some urgency. In this regard, we would like to suggest the following conceptual framework for analyzing and understanding the moral, ethical, social, economic and legal implications of the policies and actions of the coming administration. (And it even comes with its own handy acronym!):

"WIBDI: What If Bush Did It?"

This user-friendly analytical tool provides a quick and easy way of determining the value of any given [Obama] policy while correcting one's perception for partisan bias. Simply take a particular action or proposal and submit it to the WIBDI test: If Bush did this, would you think it was OK? Or would you condemn it as the act of a warmonger, or a tyrant, or a corrupt corporate tool, etc.?

Of course Floyd knows most readers won't actually do as he asks. Tens of millions of people will not, suddenly, wax morally and politically sentient. 'Progressive' Americans are not going to turn on Obama and his Democrats and call their straw heroes to account for the things the 'heroes' have done and said (or not done and not said, as the case may be). There will be no mass demonstrations demanding an end to the wars in Central Asia. No angry horde will march on Washington to compel the repeal of the USA Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, an end to government prying into Americans' private lives, the depoliticization of our justice system, and the prosecution for treason of George W. Bush and his hatchet-men. No outraged, 'progressive' mob will humble corrupt leadership and force a return to constitutional government and the rule of law. None of those things will happen because, to cite the old saw, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

None of the odious things that George W. Bush has done could have been done without Democratic cowardice and complicity. Had Democrats insisted on a rigorous, public investigation into events surrounding 9/11 and the onset of the Iraq War, the bulk of the Bush presidency would never have happened because any rigorous, public investigation would have ended in the impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. Democrats voted "YEA!" on the Iraq War, the USA Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a long list of other perverse, Bush/Cheney initiatives. Democrats laid supine while Bush virtually shredded the U.S. Constitution and nullified, with signing statements, every piece of legislation for which he felt the vaguest distaste.

Speaking of Barack Hussein Obama, who was initially against the war in Iraq: by the end of Campaign '08, Obama had so changed his position on Iraq that he could have served as John McCain's running mate. Along with McCain, Obama went to Washington and stumped for Hank Paulson's widely despised and obviously corrupt $700 billion, Wall-Street bailout package. Obama stood with McCain -- and with Pelosi, Reid, and the whole herd of hypocrite swine who lead the purportedly 'progressive' Democratic congressional caucus -- stood on the stump and told the American people that they had done us all a huge favor; that the bailout was a thing the nation couldn't live without; that they shoved the swindle six feet up our collective ass because they knew the experience would be good for us -- a thing, they obviously believe, that we ourselves are just too stupid to realize.

The facts about Obama and his 'progressive' Democrats are rationally indisputable. They are in the public record of the last eight years. Most Americans over the age of 20 probably learned of them as they happened. Thoughtful people are taken aback, therefore, when they see the 'progressive blogosphere' awash in rhetorical swill: Obama is great; Obama is good; Obama is God's gift to Western Civilization; Obama will save us from the evil Bushmen; Obama will do this or fix that or make (plug in your pet peeve here) right again.

That crap wouldn't be so disgusting if we only heard it from rabid, rank-and-file Democrat partisans. It's the kind of stuff one expects from such as them. But when reputedly intelligent people like Naomi Klein start spouting the same sort of deluded gibberish, it's time to call for a reality check.

In an essay posted on Alternet, Klein asks: Can Obama Stop the Bush Administration's Final Economic Heist? She answers the question this way: Maybe Obama can stop it, but only

". . . .if the remarkable grassroots movement that carried him to victory can somehow stay energized, networked, mobilized -- and most of all, critical. Now that the election has been won, this movement's new missions should be clear: loudly holding Obama to his campaign promises, and letting the Democrats know that there will be consequences for betrayal."

"There will be consequences for betrayal?" Since when? Democrats betrayed their constituency long before Election '06 handed them a majority in the House of Representatives. Of the people who coordinated that betrayal, Speaker Nancy Pelosi won reelection in '06 and '08 by huge margins. Here in Iowa, Pelosi's lapdog congressmen all won reelection handily in '08. Sen. Tom Harkin, who voted for the bailout, easily won reelection in '08. One of Pelosi's personal political goons, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-IL, was named White House chief of staff by Obama on Nov. 5 -- the day after Obama won the presidency. Obama himself -- even though he touted the bailout at a time when public opinion was running a hundred-to-one against the legislation -- beat all third-party candidates by a stupendous margin. So I think Naomi Klein will have to find a way to pardon Barack Obama (I'm sure it won't be difficult) when she finds he is not terrified by her threats of reprisal.

About the idea of forcing Obama to keep his campaign promises, I have two questions:

Promises to whom? I'm sure Obama promised his Wall Street supporters that he would work for a bailout, and he sure enough delivered. Does Klein suppose the president-elect will now reverse himself? Fight tooth-and-nail to get the bailout legislation repealed? Any such move would make the new president a lot of friends -- both in Wall Street and in Congress -- as Klein should know perfectly well. Speaking just for my own self, I suppose Klein had better quit smokin' dat shit.
What promise did Obama ever make to us, the people? I recall he promised "hope" and "change". Speaking just for myself again, I've been hoping for political change every year since Ronald Reagan first got elected, and I've never been disappointed. Every year for the last 28 years, things have changed for the worse. Every year, the changes were helped along by 'progressive' Democrats, so I expect Obama and his 'progressives' will continue in that grand tradition.

Still, "hope" and "change" are good ideas, I think. Maybe Naomi Klein and her grassroots 'progressives' can persuade President Obama to have 'progressives' in Congress emend the Declaration of Independence. Of the new version, the first sentence of the second paragraph should read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and the hope of Change."

I'll drink to that.

A lot.

Whatever President Obama does or doesn't do, the Obama presidency is a wormy apple: its bane already gnaws at its vitals. The fatuous mob who sent him to the White House and now sing his praises will almost certainly howl for his head within two years because Obama is not what they think he is and -- even if he were -- the things Obama is bound to do if he honestly tries to save the nation will cause us, the people, as much pain as would the things his rich sponsors want him to do for them at our expense.

I don't now believe Obama is what he puts on to be and I don't now believe he has the best interests of our country at heart. I do believe he will spend his huge mandate taking care of his rich friends. Still, I am open to persuasion, for I'm conscious that I was wrong when I argued that Obama could never win the presidency. I was wrong about America when I once wrote that there will never be a president of the United States named 'Barack Hussein Obama'.

Knowing I've been twice wrong about him, I wish Obama the best because the United States of America are in dire straits. We need a leader in the White House who is wise and just and strong. So if, by and by, President Obama convinces me that what he's about is all for the good of the country, I will support him in whatever he does no matter how much it hurts.

If the mess we're in hurts you, too, then get on over to Chris Floyd's place and treat yourself to a little rhetorical iodine. It stings like hell but you feel better afterwords, and you won't get bullshit all over your clothes.

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Stardust on the Corn

2008-10-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

In his essay, The Work of Local Culture, poet and rustic sage Wendell Berry famously wrote of a steel bucket that used to hang from a fencepost on his Kentucky farm:

I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

Berry's recognition of a superior artist and farmer at work inside his bucket is, of course, homely recognition of the fact that the universe doesn't need people. The universe got along fine before humans appeared. The universe will get along fine when humans disappear.

Prehistoric Meteorites

Scientists today know that Earth and her ecosystem were shaped in part by a series of meteor strikes. Geological evidence shows, for example, that 65 million years ago a meteor some 10 kilometers in diameter roared down from the heavens and struck Earth near what is now the town of Puerto Chicxulub, on the Yucatan Peninsula. The giant rock exploded upon impact, leaving a crater roughly 180 kilometers in diameter. The explosion filled the atmosphere with clouds of gas and debris that blocked the sun’s light for years. The long darkness caused immediate and catastrophic global climate changes, of which one result was the extinction of the dinosaurs.

About 74 million years ago, some 10 million years before the Yucatan apocalypse, a similar disaster occurred near what is now the town of Manson, in northwest Iowa. The impact and explosion of the Manson Meteorite, as it is called, left a crater 35 kilometers wide. The Manson Crater is 23^rd largest of the 172 meteoric craters known to exist on Earth. Basing their calculations on evidence such as the size and depth of the crater and damage to the surrounding terrain, scientists believe that the Manson Meteorite was about 2.5 kilometers in diameter and was traveling at about 56,000 mph when it hit the ground.

Though human history is filled with wars and floods and plagues and famines and volcanos and earthquakes, neither our written records nor our folklore recall cosmic calamities. The heavens thus far have refused to rain annihilation upon man. Of ancient craters like those at Chicxulub and Manson, no part is now visible. Scientists know those craters exist and can map their extent thanks to evidence from drill cores, from seismic instruments, and from other scientific and technological resources.

Meteorites in Iowa History

Though hundreds of small meteors enter our atmosphere daily, most all of them burn up before they reach the ground. Evidence of their burning, particles of ash sometimes called cosmic dust, perpetually drifts down from the sky.

Some of that dust surely falls into places such as Wendell Berry’s bucket and contributes in some way to the process at work there, though neither Berry nor anyone else could actually see it. The 'stardust' that rains upon us is invisible to the naked eye and can only be detected using special tools and techniques.

The nightly display of 'shooting stars' is all most folks ever see of rocks from outer space. For a meteor to actually strike the ground (only meteors that hit the ground are called meteorites) is an extremely rare occurrence. Some of those lucky enough to witness such an event may be superstitious and attach ominous import to what they have seen. Others may not know what they’re seeing and mistake it for something else entirely.

So it was when, at about 2:50 p.m. on February 25, 1847, a meteor streaked fire and smoke across the sky and exploded over Linn County. Pieces of the thing showered down on a strip of wooded land near the Cedar River, from Hooshier Grove (now the town of Ely) to a spot two or three miles south of Bertram.

Published accounts agree that “The attention of people in that region was arrested by a rumbling noise as of distant thunder; then three reports were heard one after another in quick succession, like the blasting of rocks or the firing of a heavy cannon. . . . These were succeeded by several fainter reports, like the firing of small arms in platoons. Then there was a whizzing sound heard in different directions, as of bullets passing through the air.”¹

The explosions were so loud that they caused alarm in Iowa City, 22 miles away.² Judge James Cavanagh and two of his sons were cutting wood along the Cedar River some way south of the impact area. When they heard the heavy explosions and saw puffs of dark smoke in the northwestern sky, the Cavanaghs and other witnesses thought the town of Marion had been blown off the map.³

Perhaps because Marion was then the county seat and the largest town in the area, or perhaps because early reports told of a single strike in Linn County about nine miles south of Marion, meteoric stones recovered by Linn County residents in the days and weeks after the 1847 strike are known to science and to history as fragments of the Marion Meteorite. It is estimated that between 46 and 75 pounds of the Marion Meteorite were recovered in all, and it is likely that more of it remains to be found. Of that which was recovered, Amherst College got two pieces weighing roughly 20 pounds each. A museum in Tubingen, Germany, got a fragment weighing about a pound, and Chicago’s Field Museum houses two smaller pieces. In 1977 Amherst College lent one of its two fragments back to the State University of Iowa, where it remains on display.⁴

The Marion Meteorite was the first meteor strike in the recorded history of Iowa. It was also the first of several that awed and sometimes terrified Iowans in the 19th Century: At 10:20 p.m. on Feb. 12, 1875, residents of Iowa County saw an enormous fireball come screeching out of the southeast and blast itself to bits in the sky just west of Homestead. People saw the flash and heard the detonation at a distance of 150 miles. It scattered pieces of rock over some 20 square miles. Another big rock smashed to earth near Estherville (Emmet County) at 5:15 p.m. on May 10, 1879, and still another struck near Forest City (Winnebago County) on May 2, 1890.⁵

The Estherville strike was the biggest of the four.⁶ One recovered boulder reportedly weighed 431 pounds. Several others near that size were found, along with hundreds of smaller fragments. The rock’s spectacular explosion caused a dust cloud several cubic miles in volume, according to watchers’ estimates.⁷

In the 20th Century, also, Iowans have experienced several meteorites: On a bitter cold night in November 1916, watchers saw a meteor explode in the sky near the town of Mapleton (Monona County).⁸ Another “detonating meteor” was seen in the sky west of Alta (Buena Vista County), at 9:55 p.m., on May 31, 1917. A 108-pound meteorite believed to have come from one of those two explosions was recovered in 1939 from a cornfield east of Mapleton.⁹

The continuous rain of meteorites globally should remind us all that Wendell Berry is right: The Earth is a sort of bucket hanging on a fence post in the cosmos. The soil, the land, the plants and animals, the people that shelter in the bucket, the moon, the stars, the universe itself are parts of a living process that goes on apace, within and all about us. When any person claims to 'own' a piece of that process, he or she is deluded. To believe we can control it is the utmost folly.

Control issues aside, some Iowans believe they can taste stardust in cornbread. Details at eleven.

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1) Rev. Reuben Gaylord in a letter to Prof. Charles Upham Shepard of Amherst College, qtd. in Ben Hur Wilson, The Marion Meteor, The Palimpsest 39, n. 4, April 1958, 186.

2) C.W. Irish, qtd. in Wilson, The Palimpsest 39, 188.

3) Judge James Cavanagh to C.W. Irish, qtd. in Wilson, The Palimpsest 39, 187.

4) Wilson, The Palimpsest 39, 185.

5) Looked Like the Face of Moon Had Fallen Off, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, 16 July 1967, 5-B.

6) Ibid.

7) Otto Knauth, Recall Days When Sky Rained Stones on Iowa, The Des Moines Register, 24 April 1967, 3.

8) Ben Hur Wilson, The Mapleton Meteor, The Palimpsest 39, n. 4, April 1958, 197-206. For whatever reason, the incident caused so little stir at the time that witnesses were later unsure of the exact date of its occurrence.

9) Ibid. 197.

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Lighten Up a Little

2008-10-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

All the news is bad, so I thought we could all use a joke. What follows is a thing I found many years ago in Chapter 3 of a Buckminster Fuller book, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981) which you might also like to read -- times being what they are.

Fuller called the poem "Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker". It dates from the depths of the Great Depression and reportedly was sung around campfires in 'Hoovervilles' all over the country. In another venue, I can picture someone like Durante and his big schnoz (or Cagney or Cantor or Carmichael), dressed in a striped jacket, a straw boater, white slacks and shoes and a cane. He shuffles across the stage 'making the hat' and chanting the lyrics. It's that kind of stuff. Anyway, Fuller attributed the poem to Ogden Nash. Here it is:

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker

I’m an autocratic figure in these democratic states,
A dandy demonstration of hereditary traits.
As the children of the baker bake the most delicious breads,
As the sons of Casanova fill the most exclusive beds,
As the Barrymores, the Roosevelts, and others I could name
Inherited the talents that perpetuate their fame,
My position in the structure of society I owe
To the qualities my parents bequeathed me long ago.
My pappy was a gentleman, and musical to boot,
He used to play piano in a house of ill repute.
The madam was a lady, and a credit to her cult.
She enjoyed my pappy’s playing, and I was the result!
So my mammy and my pappy are the ones I have to thank
That I’m Chairman of the Board of the National Silly Bank!

Chorus:
Oh, our parents forgot to get married,
Oh, our parents forgot to get wed,
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
When our parents were somewhere in bed.
Then all thanks to our kind loving parents,
We are kings in the land of the free.
Your banker, your broker, your Washington joker,
Three prominent bastards are we, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are we!

In a cozy little farmhouse in a cozy little dell,
A dear old-fashioned farmer and his daughter used to dwell.
She was pretty, she was charming, she was tender, she was mild,
And her sympathy was such that she was frequently with child.
The year her hospitality attained a record high
She became the happy mother of an infant, which was I.
Whenever she was gloomy I could always make her grin
By childishly inquiring who my daddy could have been.
The hired man was favored by the girls in Mummy’s set
And a trav’ling man from Scranton was an even money bet.
But such were Mammy’s motives, and such was her allure,
That even Roger Babson wasn’t altogether sure.
Well I took my mother’s morals and I took my daddy’s crust,
And I grew to be the founder of the New York Blanker's Trust.

Chorus:
Oh, our parents forgot to get married, etc.

In a torrid penal chain gang on a dusty southern road,
My late lamented daddy had his permanent abode.
Now some were there for stealing, but my daddy’s only fault
Was an overwhelming tendency for criminal assault.
His philosophy was simple and quite free of moral taint:
Seduction is for sissies, but a he-man wants his rape.
Daddy’s total list of victims was embarrassingly rich,
And one of them was Mother, but he couldn’t tell me which.
Well I didn’t go to college, but I got me a degree.
I reckon I’m the model of a perfect S.O.B.
I’m a debit to my country but a credit to my Dad,
The most expensive senator the country ever had.
I remember Daddy’s warning -- that raping is a crime,
Unless you rape the voters a million at a time.

Chorus:
Oh, our parents forgot to get married, etc.

I’m an ordinary figure in these democratic states,
A pathetic demonstration of hereditary traits.
As the children of the cop possess the flattest kind of feet,
As the daughter of the floozie has a waggle to her seat,
My position at the bottom of society I owe
To the qualities my parents bequeathed me long ago.
My father was a married man and, what is even more,
He was married to my mother -- a fact which I deplore.
I was born in holy wedlock, consequently by and by,
I was rooked by every bastard who had plunder in his eye.
I invested, I deposited, I voted every fall,
And I saved up every penny and the bastards took it all.
At last I’ve learned my lesson and I’m on the proper track:
I’m a self-appointed bastard and I'M GOING TO GET IT BACK!

Chorus:
Oh, our parents forgot to get married,
Oh, our parents forgot to get wed,
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
When our parents were somewhere in bed.
Then all thanks to our kind loving parents,
We are kings in the land of the free.
Your banker, your broker, your Washington joker,
Three prominent bastards are we, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are we!

Cheers, everyone!

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Journalist Heal Thyself: Walter Lippmann's 'Liberty and the News' revisited

2008-10-07T04:33:00.000-07:00

"Liberty and the News" from Princeton University Press

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), nearly 35 years dead, towers over American journalism just as the Washington Monument towers over the National Mall. His influence stretches, like a shadow, from near the dawn of the 20th century to its end and beyond.

Lippmann surely never saw a personal computer and probably never dreamed of the Internet. Nevertheless, his thought shapes much of the content that professional journalists post on the World Wide Web. High-minded amateurs who set up blogs in revolt against 'mainstream' journalism, many of whom probably never heard of Walter Lippmann or are but vaguely aware that there was once such a person, labor under the influence of Lippmann. Their work, their ideals, their ideas in part are shaped by him if they know it or if they don't. In sum, it is impossible to overstate Lippmann's influence on American journalism and it is good when something happens that recalls journalism's attention to the life and to the thought of Walter Lippmann.

The latest such thing is a reprint of Lippmann's first book, Liberty and the News (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008; 118 pp; $16.95). The original work was published in 1920. This latest edition is updated inasmuch as it features a new Foreword by Ronald Steel and an Afterword by Sidney Blumenthal.

Neither Steel nor Blumenthal manages to squeeze any fresh juice out of Lippmann's book. To treat the modern writers fairly, however, one allows that after three generations of academic journalists and hordes of gradgrinds have pored over Liberty and the News with microscopic intensity it would require genius of a rare order to find and extract even one drop of additional meaning from Lippmann's text.

Ronald Steel, for his part, gives us a Foreword that is learned, lucid, concise and useful. Steel needs less than eleven pages to background readers on the book. He puts Lippmann's thoughts in context and mentions a few of the author's most salient ideas. In so doing, Steel captures and hones the attention of readers who might otherwise be unaware of Lippmann's import and therefore reluctant to stroll for two or three hours through the author's supple-but-sonorous, vintage prose.

Readers who take that brief hike are rewarded, for it's likely that many of those who today yell loudest about bias in journalism have no idea that, almost 90 years ago, thoughtful people were deeply concerned about the same problem. Moreover, it may be that those who shout loudest today are so busy shouting about bias in journalism that they're unaware of other rotten spots in the craft.

Lippmann called attention not only to bias but to those other rotten spots as well, all of which he contended are mere symptoms of problems much deeper and more profound -- problems that, being rooted in human nature itself, threaten to belie Enlightenment ideals such as truth, justice, democracy, and scientific government. At the peroration of Chapter 1, for example, the author got up on his hind legs to ask what verdict history will lay upon a nation that, professing a belief in government by the will of the people, was content to make decisions about government on the basis of 'facts' reported by a class of people who were notorious, professional liars. (Liberty and the News, 8 )

Chapter 2 hits just as hard while asking more and deeper questions. Here Lippmann stumped for a new definition of the word 'liberty' that might serve us better than the definition we now employ. “A useful definition of liberty,” he wrote, “is obtainable only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their response and learn to control their environment. In this view liberty is the name we give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the information upon which we act.” (L&N, 40)

This writer sees Liberty and the News as the expression of a conflicted genius. On the one hand, Lippmann knew that democracy and scientific government depend absolutely on unrestricted access to accurate information. “There can be no higher law in journalism,” he wrote, “than to tell the truth and shame the devil.” (L&N, 7) On the other hand, Lippmann knew that the rivers of information from which Americans drink all flow from a poisoned fount. Human nature, he knew, drives some journalists to lie about the facts in exchange for money, position, prestige. Other journalists, afflicted with a more insidious form of the same disease, unknowingly turn fact into falsehood by filtering fact through a fabric of personal perception, be that perception enlightened or benighted.

The late Hunter S. Thompson once observed that “journalism is a low profession.” Reading Liberty and the News, one sees that Lippmann would have agreed with Thompson but yet held fast to a higher truth, namely: There is no other way forward.

Democracy depends upon access to good information. Not to put words in anyone else's mouth, this review observes that there's more to the story than just that. Civilization itself cannot long endure where truth is absent, where nothing is real, where everyone knows that no one can be trusted. Civilization is not some mere contract that can be broken with impunity and the mess cleaned up by lawyers. Civilization describes a trajectory: the more we know, the more we can trust, the farther away from superstition and barbarism we move. The reverse is also true: the less we know, the less we can trust, the farther we fall back toward superstition and barbarism. Lippmann understood that if the truth must be told, then someone must do the telling. We must have journalism, he concluded, and so journalism must be reformed.

Lippmann used Liberty and the News to call for objective truth in journalism but did not stop there. Though he preferred that journalism be self-regulating, he plainly believed that government regulation of journalism might prove necessary. “The regulation of the publishing business is a subtle and elusive matter,” he argued, “and only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with great evils can the more sensible minds retain their control. If publishers and authors do not face the facts and attempt to deal with them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax. For somehow the community must find a way of making the men who publish news accept responsibility for an honest effort not to misrepresent the facts.” (L&N, 45)

Lippmann also suggested the creation of impartial national and international news bureaus staffed by the finest reporters in the profession. His assertion that “it would be a great gain if the accountability of publishers could be increased” (L&N, 44) implies a belief that a license to practice journalism would not be out of order. He advocated better education for journalists and marveled that those who cannot be led to tell the truth cannot be locked in jail: “If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow,” he wrote, “I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody will punish me. . . .” (L&N, 24)

At the end of Chapter 3, Lippmann concluded that “. . . . our salvation lies in two things: ultimately, in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook; immediately, in the concentration of the independent forces against the complacency and bad service of the routineers. We shall advance when we have learned humility; when we have learned to see the truth, to reveal it and publish it; when we care more for that than for the privilege of arguing about ideas in a fog of uncertainty.” (L&N, 61)

There is much more worth having in Liberty and the News and, for those who think seriously about what Lippmann wrote, there is much to carry away. To read in this book the carefully arranged thoughts of the finest mind in 20th century journalism – a mind shaped in what was then one of the world's best schools (Harvard), where it was polished by the likes of George Santayana and William James – is by itself worth the price of admission.

The nadir of Princeton's Liberty and the News is Sidney Blumenthal's Afterword.

This writer does not object to Blumenthal's short list of Lippmann's sins. Among others Blumenthal mentions: “His immersion in politics while holding forth as a disinterested observer. . . .” (L&N, 63) Blumenthal's account of Lippmann's ultimate failure, of his ideals being “traduced, trampled and trashed” (L&N, 64) by journalists and journalism is wholly pertinent and truthful. But then Blumenthal throws in a lively and factual but sadly incomplete account of events leading up to the mess in which we presently find ourselves, starting with press coverage of 'Tailgunner Joe' McCarthy and ending with the outrageously un-American behavior of the press during the outrageously un-American administration of George W. Bush.

It is at that point that this writer objects to Blumenthal, who was himself a player in the public-relations effort of the Clinton administration. The Clintons, as the whole world knows, ran one of the most prolific lie factories on record. Sidney Blumenthal's experiences and observations from inside that rats' nest would have made a juicy addition to his otherwise fine Afterword. Sadly, his experience and his observations get no mention here. Blumenthal's account focuses entirely on Republicans, the Republican Party, and the Bush administration. Having an opportunity that cries for a mea culpa, Blumenthal passed and gave us a theya culpa.

I suppose this is all too much: why make a fuss over a measly afterword? I'm making a fuss because I see that, with this Afterword, Blumenthal personifies the present, sorry state of mainstream journalism. Having helped (during the Clinton administration) bring the profession to ruin and (at the end of Liberty and the News) having rhetorically interred the ideas and ideals of journalism's foremost saint, Blumenthal stands clueless amid the carnage and expresses an idiot's hope for the future: “. . . journalism may yet be revitalized,” he wrote, “as part of a general reawakening of American democracy that discovers new forms of expression and forces new debate to achieve its ends.” (L&N, 87-88)

What rot! After airing Lippmann's dirty linen, Blumenthal cannot bear to bare his own spotted shorts. Ever the good Democrat, he cannot set aside his political bias and tell us – or even mention – a tale of the Clinton spin machine. One wonders if Blumenthal is pathologically unconscious of the truth about the Clinton White House and one suspects that if we forget about Walter Lippmann and rely upon the likes of Sidney Blumenthal to lead us down the path to democracy, the Blumenthals of this world will lead us to something else.

There may yet be a "reawakening of American democracy," and new media may appear. “New forms of expression,” however, will never appear. The root form of expression must be and therefore always has been language: spoken, written, manual, transmitted to the brain by hot, throbbing hormones – any medium of human communication, any “new form of expression” will ultimately rely upon language or accurate communication cannot occur. Any medium of human communication, any “new form of expression” used by liars will lie to us just like the media, just like the “forms of expression” we've already got.

Jesus taught: “. . . know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) Lippmann knew that lesson: Liberty and the News is his testament. Blumenthal, it seems, is vaguely aware of the argument. At the conclusion of his Afterword, he quotes James Madison: “A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” (L&N, 88)

Were Blumenthal properly armed (Thank you, President Madison.) he might see Lippmann's effort and its failure as a tragedy, exactly in the mode of Oedipus Rex or Antigone. He might also have pointed practitioners – especially youngsters – to an irony of a spiritual sort that Lippmann's thought and career impart: Those who come to journalism determined to change the profession will fail and will instead be changed by the profession in ways they will not like. Those who come to journalism determined to tell the truth, if they remain committed to truth-telling, will change the profession over time whether they meant to change it or not. That irony aside, a "reawakened American democracy" (if ever one appears) will enact regulation that "forces new debate" because it rewards truth-telling and punishes the lie.

The Princeton edition of Liberty and the News is great stuff. Journalists, those who aspire to journalism, useful citizens of any democracy have every reason to read Walter Lippmann. Speaking strictly to journalists: Liberty and the News gives old hands an excuse to reminisce their college days; rookies get something new to stretch their minds; everyone gets something important (for a change) to argue about when they're drunk.

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Drug War Dummies

2008-09-13T00:52:00.000-07:00

In states along the Mexican border, American journalists are going crazy with fear of the drug war that rages in Mexico and, increasingly, in the United States. Today's editorial in the Tucson Citizen tells the story:

"Whether shot, beheaded, mutilated or bombed, at least 2,680 Mexicans have been slain by drug cartels this year. Citizens, law enforcement and government officials are deeply alarmed - and that's just on our side of the border. In Mexico, they're terrified.

"It's our issue, too," the Tucson writer claims, "because Mexico is our next-door neighbor and because we cannot allow its democratic form of government to be destroyed."

The Tucson writer goes on to rave about murders, beheadings, kidnappings, corruption, police murdered, hand grenades, rocket launchers, "powerful automatic weapons," and narcoterrorism generally. The writer bewails the fact that the violence is spilling over onto our side of the border and finally concludes: "Our government must do everything possible to help beat back the drug cartels - for both nations' sake."

It's all a load of manure. The Tucson writer is informed by and repeats lies about drugs, the drug market, and the drug war that have become boringly familiar to all of us who, at one time or another, were into the counterculture and the drug scene. Those lies are so boring, in fact, that I won't bother to refute them here. Instead I will only say that if you believe in capitalism and the free market and the Bill of Rights but yet support the drug war and believe our Uncle Sam can actually win it, you should go and see a psychiatrist because you have problems that logic will only aggravate. Maybe the shrink will give you some (ahem!) drugs (ahem!) that will relieve your symptoms or at least render you harmless.

Perhaps the most stupid lie in that Tucson editorial is the line about saving democratic government in Mexico. Never in all of history has Mexico been a democracy. Mexico has always been governed by the richest of its elites, who -- ever since Pancho Villa scared the crap out of them for 13 years (1910-23) -- act through the president of Mexico in ways that usually (but not always) show citizens at least the semblance of a democracy.

After Pancho Villa, Mexican elites took care to stage an election every six years in which Mexicans got to vote for candidates who all belonged to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). That started to change in Y2K, when Vincente Fox became the first Mexican president elected from an opposition party since 1920. The current president of Mexico is Felipe Calderon. Calderon, even though he belongs to an opposition party (National Action Party, or PAN), seems a throwback to high-handed presidents "elected" by the PRI.

Calderon's election in 2006 was widely regarded as fraudulent. The whiff of corruption follows Calderon wherever he goes and hangs over everything he does. His government is challenged even now by opposition groups that periodically send hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to thwart one or another of his antidemocratic initiatives. Under Calderon, Mexico was all but ungovernable even before he became an ardent participant in Uncle Sam's insanely murderous and corrupt drug war.

If governments by Calderon and his ilk are governments we must save, I wonder why we didn't save the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. In Gorby's old Soviet Union, you know, citizens every few years got to vote on a slate of candidates who all belonged to the Communist Party. Speaking strictly of democratic elections, the former Soviet Union ran a system exactly like the system that the PRI ran in Mexico. Americans who claim that Mexico was a democracy must therefore allow that the former Soviet Union was a democracy. Americans who oppose George W. Bush on the grounds that he was never elected should for exactly the same reason oppose Felipe Calderon.

All of those who fear what's happening in Mexico should take note of what's happening in Colombia these days. In Medellin, Colombia -- once the cocaine capital of the world and home to Pablo Escobar -- where in bygone days five or six hundred people were shot and killed on the streets every month, the shooting has stopped. Just last night I watched The Travel Channel's galloping hedonist, Anthony Bourdain, chomp chorizo in streetside restaurants where five years ago he'd have been shot to death inside of five minutes.

How is Bourdain able to do that today? Those who can add two and two know the answer is simple: Bourdain can do an unescorted gourmand's tour of Medellin these days because Medellin is no longer a hub of cocaine transportation. Those who made cocaine shipping their business have moved their operation to Mexico, where people now undergo torments exactly like the torments that formerly plagued the people of Colombia. And if by some miracle the crooks are driven out of Mexico, they'll simply go somewhere else. Who knows? They may go back to Colombia now that the heat is off down there.

So why should Americans save the corrupt and wildly unpopular government of Mexico? Why should we bleed more blood and spend more treasure to fight the so-called War on Drugs, which, as I've already pointed out, is both insane and unwinnable? We had better instead do all we can to end the prohibition of drugs in America. Spend all the money in the world to pay for all the cops and guns and prisons you can buy, you couldn't do nearly as much to end drug crime as that one, simple, inexpensive piece of legislation would do.

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Remember the Meaning of Labor Day

2008-08-27T04:48:00.000-07:00

In 2008, America is bankrupt. The banking system itself is on life support. Millions of Americans are losing their homes. Millions more are unemployed or underemployed or for other reasons terrified of losing what little income our perverse economy allots them. The hateful Bush administration clings to the nation's back like a ravenous vulture while it picks our pockets and tears viciously at our Constitution and our civil liberties.

Democrats, for their part, just yesterday nominated a pair of fascist lapdogs who would have us believe that the cure for all the ills I've named is war, war, and more war. War on Russia, war on drugs, war on Iran, war on terror, war on everything for the next hundred years or so. Listening to their bellicose noise, thoughtful people can only conclude that the land of the free and the home of the brave has become the land we must flee before we're enslaved.

The idea of enslavement brings to mind the fact that Labor Day is here once again. On this weekend, Americans who still labor and those who cannot find work will feast together at millions of picnics, barbecues, reunion dinners, and other joyous, commemorative celebrations. Precisely what those celebrations commemorate is the business of this essay.

What follows was written because, in observance of Labor Day 2002, National Public Radio aired a story about folk hero John Henry. I give you this item now because, on Labor Day 2008, American labor and America itself are in much worse shape than they were when this piece was written. While fascist boots stomp American labor into the dirt of poverty and humiliation, today seems a good time to recall once again the true story behind the creation of Labor Day. Here, then, is the item I call:

Forget John Henry:
Make Mine Mother Jones!

In observance of Labor Day 2002, National Public Radio aired a story about folk hero John Henry. That was a poor choice. I'm here to tell you why.

John Henry was a tunnel driver on a railroad construction gang. He used a 9-pound hammer to drive drill bits into rock. Not everyone can swing a 9-pound hammer, so John Henry's job seemed secure. When the railroad bought a steam drill, John Henry bet his boss that he could work faster than the machine. A contest ensued. John Henry won, but the effort killed him when his heart burst at the finish. Folk ballads boast that John Henry “died with a hammer in his hand.”

Other fables tout fatal exploits of other blue-collar heroes. Casey Jones, for example, was an engineer famous on the railroad because he always arrived on time. Some stories say he was killed in a high-speed wreck as he raced to get back on schedule after leaving the station late. Other stories claim that his brakes failed on a grade. Gravity pulled the train downhill, faster and faster, until it jumped the track. Jones was “found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, scalded to death by the steam.”

Folklore is heady stuff. Told in song, delivered in dulcet harmony by a trio like Peter, Paul and Mary or in a deific baritone by such as Johnny Cash, folk tales can swell our hearts and even bring tears. But folk tales are inappropriate for Labor Day, as NPR editors ought to know.

Facts about Labor Day are easy to come by, even from mainstream sources. I filched the following three paragraphs from the website of PBS News Hour:

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America's labor unions as a testament to their cause, legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.

The movement for a national Labor Day had been growing for some time. In 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday. In 1894, protests against President Cleveland's harsh [strike-breaking] methods made appeasement of workers a top political priority. In the wake of the [Pullman] strike, legislation was rushed through Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland's desk just six days after his troops [broke] the Pullman strike.

1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born.

There it is. Labor Day is not about some hambone who worked himself to death to avoid a layoff, nor is it about some poor slob who got killed by faulty equipment. Labor Day was not granted us by benevolent government to commemorate victims like John Henry and Casey Jones. Instead Labor Day is a day of rest, wrested by organized labor from corrupt government. Labor Day is an apology for crimes committed by government acting illegally as the servant of capital. It is a holiday snatched by workers from the grasping claws of greedy, ruthless industrialists, the likes of whom killed John Henry and Casey Jones and unsung hordes of other hard-working people.

If NPR wants to commemorate Labor Day, NPR should forget John Henry and instead air an item about a hero of the labor movement.

Hated and feared by union busters, Big Bill Haywood organized for IWW. Fled to Russia to escape persecution.

Eugene V. Debs comes readily to mind. So do Lucy Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, the Haymarket Martyrs and dozens more.

Defenders of NPR may object that the people I just named were rabid socialists and revolutionaries. It's true. They were. So what? It's also true that they led the labor movement through a period when capital and government acted together without restraint to crush the labor movement and murder or in other ways silence labor leaders. The labor movement persevered and survived because labor leaders were as tough and ruthless as labor's enemies. They weren't saints. They were sinners and sometimes criminals.

Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones, UMW organizer. Tiny Irish granny lady led miners in picket-line brawls for most of her long life.

But they were heroes because they led the fight to end child labor - to win the 8-hour day - to get a minimum wage - to get Social Security - to make the workplace safe. And that fight is not history, folks. It continues to this day.

So I say to National Public Radio: Stop telling fairy tales! Any observance of Labor Day that lauds John Henry and shuns Joe Hill is no tribute. If it remembers Casey Jones and forgets Mother Jones, it is a travesty. If it appeals to your hoity-toity, white-collar audience, if it wins you praise from them, it is nevertheless crappy, gutless journalism. If it is in fact the best you can do, then you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

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Moving In; Moving On

2008-07-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

Readers who've been with me since the beginning may see this as a return to my roots. Maybe it is.

I started on Blogger. When I got tired of Blogger's formatting straightjacket, I rented my own domain (cyanidehole.com), set up WordPress, and moved everything over there. I was there for almost two years. Then I got hacked.

Now, having no desire to endure another dehackification, I'm moving The Cyanide Hole back over here. Blogger is indeed a straightjacket, but so far as I know it never gets hacked. So we're here, but we're under construction.

Visitors will have to forgive appearances for a while. Because I'm moving old posts in here, I'm trying to preserve original publication dates and original content and, most especially, original visitor comments. I'm doing that because I believe some of the discussions that took place in the comment section help to clarify the posts themselves. So this move will happen slowly, probably take a month or more, but it will happen, and I'll soon be back in form.

Thank you for your loyalty and your patience.

Jimmy

Obama the Mummy?

2008-06-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

For me, watching the Obama campaign is a little like watching The Mummy. In that movie, the wizard Imhotep promises the destruction of modern civilization and the enslavement of the human race. He has cast a spell upon the unthinking mob. The population of Cairo marches through the streets behind the wizard, in lockstep, beating drums and chanting: Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!), Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!), Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!), while a rain of fire and a plague of flies poison the air around them.

In today's presidential campaign, Barack Obama promises the destruction of entire nations and the continuation of war, empire, and economic enslavement. He has cast a spell upon the unthinking mob. American voters march through the streets behind him, in lockstep, beating drums and chanting: O-Ba-Ma (Boom!), O-Ba-Ma (Boom!), O-Ba-Ma (Boom!), while shit rains and threats of homelessness beat upon their ears.

In Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon expresses envy of people who have "never been cursed with self-awareness." Obama seems to have attracted an army of just such people. And if in fact I have been watching too many DVD movies, still I understand that Obama isn't dangerous. What's dangerous is the ninnies to whom he plays. As long as these 'progressives' keep on as they are, things will get progressively worse for the nation.

Ever since 1984, Democrats have made an industry of denial. My advice to readers is: "Don't worry about Obama. The wheels are going to come off his bogus parade in very short order. The proper thing to worry about is how we're going to survive the McCain presidency."

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Global Famine, World War, and the Impending Suicide of Capitalism

2008-05-04T05:07:00.000-07:00

Wall Street financial criminals and the United States government together are almost certainly responsible for skyrocketing grain prices that are causing food riots globally. This is a story somebody should pursue. I've been pushing it around the Web with little luck. Please take what follows and nag every journalist you know to death with it:

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson are pumping hundreds of billions of inflationary dollars into financial markets. They seek in so doing to prop up the floor under their Wall-Street pals, who suddenly find investments in sub-prime mortgages and derivatives thereof going South in a big hurry. The investors, for their part, are selling their worthless but artificially inflated assets as fast as they can find buyers (mostly U.S. taxpayers) for the junk.

The billions being siphoned out of Wall Street, we are told, are being invested in commodities such as gold and oil and (ahem!) grain. The upshot is that while Wall Street melts down, the price of oil and grain futures shoots up. Now there are food riots in Third-World countries due almost entirely, we are told, to climatic conditions and to the price of energy.

Horse manure.

If I was a journalist who had the resources of an organ like, say, The Washington Post upon which to draw, I bet I could make a few phone calls and dig up more than enough information to draw a straight line between the billions jerked out of Wall Street and the price of rice in places like Haiti and Bangladesh.

Unless mainstream media pick up on that story, hundreds of millions of people will starve and a world war may well have to be fought (and no telling who will win that war). All of that so a lot of crooked, fat-cat fugitives from financial karma can get fatter still by creating famine, war, and human misery in general.

And so it is that when Paulson preaches to starving Third-World nations that they'd do well to avoid price controls on food grains and George Bush pledges billions to help Third World nations buy rice, both men actually work to aid their rich pals by propping up commodities prices in ways that make it look like they're dispensing alms to the poor.

I've been watching all of that develop in the headlines for weeks, from the discomfort of my living room computer desk. To date attention paid the story (when it gets any attention at all) typically comes almost as a footnote buried deep within stories about problems it actually creates. In an article about potatoes, for example, Reuters reports: "One factor helping the potato remain affordable is the fact that unlike wheat, it is not a global commodity, so [it] has not attracted speculative professional investment."

To the extent that Congress thus far pays mere lip service to re-regulation of commodities trading and financial markets, and to the extent that Congress helps Bush prop up the outrageous price of grain (a problem which he and his pals have created for profit), Congress is every bit as complicit in this commodities bubble as Paulson, Bernanke and Bush.

Thus my question to mainstream media: "When in hell are you bigshot journalists gonna wake up and smell the disaster that's swooping down on this country?" Do you realize that, as I write, Third-World grain growers (led by Thailand) are working to create a rice cartel (modeled upon OPEC) that will reduce and regulate the price of rice globally? And don't you stop to think what a successful effort in that direction will mean to America? Can you spell "Chicago Board of Trade Chopped Up & Burned by Third-World Grain Growers"?

Financial writer Ellen Brown wrote recently that capitalism is presently consuming itself. In light of current events, Ms. Brown might better have written that "capitalism is busy creating a global political climate in which capitalism will be a crime." What will it mean to America when one dollar buys one yen, when Wall Street is no longer the financial capitol of the world and the world's greatest commodities exchange is located in Bangkok (or maybe Beijing)?

I have no influence. There's nothing I can do about any of these things. Bigshot journalists like you, on the other hand, sit in a vantage point from which you can yell bloody murder and shake things up. Please start at once. The whole world is watching.

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The Difference Between Users and Addicts

2008-01-30T07:52:00.000-08:00

Iremember once I was a three-stripe sergeant, the NCO nominally in charge of about 20 young Marines. A couple of my kids were hitch-hiking from Yuma, AZ, to Los Angeles -- where they hoped to score a giant, economy-sized bag of LSD. They were standing alongside the freeway just west of El Centro, CA. Ambient temperature was about 120 degrees. They wanted a ride real bad.

The kids got picked up by two women and a man in a van -- all of them longhairs who were obviously zonked on something major. When my kids got in the van, the longhairs were in the middle of this 'heavy' conversation about how important it is to all of us -- as human beings, you know -- that we each do something CREATIVE with our hands.

My kids were invited to join the conversation by the driver, who turned to them and said something like, "Hello! My name's Mary and I weave cloth. This is Johnny: he masturbates [or something]. And this is Sally, who knits dog sweaters for the ASPCA [or something, I don't know what]." Then she asked my kids, in the roundest and most condescending of tones: "And YOU -- what is it that YOU do with YOUR hands?"

The kid with the sense of humor grinned and answered cheerily: "Us? Oh, we're Marines! We kill people."

The van screeched to a stop, the door opened as if by magic, and my kids found themselves standing along the freeway in 120-degree heat once more. The quiet kid wanted to murder the jovial kid creatively, with his hands, but he couldn't do it because he was laughing too hard to make the effort.

My kids did finally get to LA and they brought back some righteous acid. But I enjoyed the story more than anything.

That was all very funny when it happened in 1971. Today I find it's still funny, but it also seems prescient. Hunter S. Thompson was right when, with his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he acknowledged obliquely that the hippie movement never really took off because most longhairs couldn't handle their dope.

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If you have a lousy sex life, remember: you can always get screwed in politics.

2008-01-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

Over on Atlantic Free Press, Stephen Pizzo has posted an article about the current state of the U.S. economy. Mr. Pizzo thinks the economy stinks and will smell worse before it smells better, if in fact it ever does smell better.

I won't argue. I don't know enough about economics to argue with anybody who knows enough about economics to write an article about economics. For me, the nicest thing about economics is that lectures on the subject make me vomit an interesting shade of green.

Pizzo's article caught my eye because it discusses inflation. In that discussion, Mr. Pizzo recalls President Gerald Ford's moronic, 1975 effort to stem the tide of inflation by urging Americans to wear little red buttons emblazoned with big white letters: "WIN".

Old farts like me will recall that WIN was an acronym for "Whip Inflation Now." Young farts probably can't believe that any president of the United States ever did anything so stupid, but they shouldn't laugh. After all: they never knew Gerald Ford, and I hear they're still signing up to go to Iraq.

One good thing about WIN buttons: They were cheap. Mine came as a prize in a sack of potato chips. I remember we were smoking pot and we had the munchies so bad that when my buddy tore the sack open, he pulled a little too hard. The sack came apart and chips flew all over the place. My buddy fought the dog for the big ones. I snatched the WIN button off the floor and consoled myself for the loss of the chips by eating cookies, which were still in a bowl on the table.

We were in college at the time. Just for hoots, I wore my new WIN button to school. Imagine the thrill I got when the most beautiful girl in my history class -- who had never once in six weeks acknowledged my existence -- suddenly developed an interest in me. She sat with me in the cafeteria at lunch. After we ate she took me home with her, where we screwed like a pair of demented weasels all afternoon and evening and far, far into the night.

Next morning I woke up and, of course, reached for the beautiful girl lying next to me.

She did not respond as expected. Instead she evaded my grasp and sat bolt upright on the edge of the bed. Cold as ice, she drilled me with her meanest look. "Get out of here!" she exclaimed. "I'm done with you. I never want to see you again. Go!"

"Why?" I asked. "You were so hot yesterday afternoon and all night last night. I thought you liked me! What is this, all of a sudden?"

"It isn't 'all of a sudden,'" she said. "It's the same now as it was yesterday and last night. I only brought you here because you were wearing that WIN button!"

I was incredulous. "The WIN button? What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

Her answer was unanswerable: "I always wanted to fuck a Republican."

I could have tried to salvage the situation by telling her that I voted for George McGovern. But I didn't. For one thing, I was afraid she might feel cheated and avenge her loss by yelling "Rape!" For another, I sympathized with her impulse and didn't want to spoil her triumph.

So that's how it was: I started out thinking WIN buttons were a particularly stupid joke but ended up thinking they were a pretty good thing. Believe that or else, as it suits you. And thanks, Stephen Pizzo, for the memories.

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John Edwards may know where the bear goes poo-poo, but that doesn't make him smell any better.

2008-01-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

Some of the E-mails I get, you'd think I never, ever say anything positive.

It ain't so, I tell ya! For example: I once said some pretty nice things about cornbread and, among other reasons, I'm here now to say one or two nice things about Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards.

An article in the online edition of The Los Angeles Times for Nov. 14, 2007 hints that Edwards may be one of the few Democrats who actually understands what's at stake in Election 2008. Speaking of those who oppose him in the upcoming Iowa Democratic caucus, Edwards reportedly accused Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of being ". . . entrenched in a system that is broken.

"We have very different views," he told about 50 people at . . . a restaurant in Cedar Rapids. "Sen. Clinton believes the system is OK. . . . The corruption and all of it will be OK."

Speaking of Sen. Barack Obama, the Times quotes Edwards again: "Obama, to his credit, believes you bring everyone together, you negotiate and you get things done. I don't. I believe it's a fight, an epic fight."

Now I understand that politicians in a heated campaign will say just about anything that could conceivably help them win. So I have no way of knowing if Edwards actually meant what he reportedly said. But I do know that what he reportedly said is 100 percent correct.

That's the last of the nice things I wanted to say about John Edwards. Now it's time to exercise the rest of my (related) agenda.

Election 2008 is not about welfare for or empowerment of one or another of the Democrats' cherished minorities. It's not about single-payer healthcare. It's not about gun control. It's not about the war in Iraq or the energy crisis or any of that. It's not even about bringing members of the Bush Crime Syndicate to justice. What's fundamentally at stake in Election 2008 is nothing less than the primacy of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law and, hinging upon those two questions, the survival of the United States of America as a republic and a democracy.

The man or woman who next wins the presidency will inherit an obscene, towering mess. If the new president wants to turn America back toward constitutional government and democracy, cleaning up the mess must be his or her top priority. In order to accomplish the task, he or she will have to be impeccably clean, unimpeachably honest, ferociously brave, highly intelligent, shrewdly insightful, and tougher than the proverbial nail. His or her cabinet officers will need similar qualities because, in order to clean up said mess, they will have to tear the U.S. government to pieces brick by board and, in doing so, reestablish the rule of law. The task will not be easy and it will not be quick.

Short term, reformers will ease their task somewhat by opening an honest, rigorous investigation of the Bush Crime Syndicate. Any such move will do much more than put a lot of Bush henchmen in prison: it will spark a panic among the thousands not yet charged -- those previously unidentified Bush moles in Congress, in the judicial branch, in regulatory agencies, in state governments and elsewhere. Many of them will flee public service and scuttle like terrified cockroaches into any hole that promises refuge. While that panic lasts, the reformers' cause will advance quickly.

In the midterm, the process of media reform will be more difficult and consume more time than the task of bringing Bush and his creatures to justice. News coverage of the Bush regime demonstrates repeatedly and conclusively that the corporate-capitalist model of media ownership does not serve democracy. Before democracy can be reestablished in America, big news corporations must be broken up and new models of news-media ownership must be created.

Said process will be more interesting still because ravages and repercussions of the Bush Crime Syndicate will leave large numbers of Americans unemployed and needy. Thus many Americans may for the first time in their lives have leisure in which to discover an interest in things like politics and press ownership and the interplay between the two. Will the mob sit by quietly while the issue of press-ownership is decided for them? Will the mob elect deputies to make the relevant decision(s) in meetings governed by Robert's Rules of Order? Or will the mob instead take inspiration from great populist leaders such as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Maximilien Robespierre? Other options will certainly present themselves but, regardless of what the mob finally chooses to do, the result will instruct everyone concerned.

Long term, dogged American reformers will find that the strongest and most bitter opponents of democracy and republican government -- both here and abroad -- are sandbagged into powerful positions in global banking and finance from whence they have for long ruled the world without regard to law or scruple. Some such criminals can be brought to justice. But many -- maybe most of them -- are beyond the reach of law and so, probably, are the anonymous few who own and employ them. To free America from the grip of those people will mean breaking America free of the institutions they control. That particular divorce will be the work of years -- of decades, even -- if ever it is deemed final.

Taken all together the task of rebuilding America after eight years of the Bush Crime Syndicate (the ne plus ultra of a hundred and fifty years of corporate rapine and war) promises to be the work of 50 years or more. American leaders in years to come will have to juggle a vast number of priorities, many being of a magnitude that simply boggles the mind. Any reform agenda will have to be accomplished in an environment of global unrest and domestic civil disorders. In short, reform of our present system looks impossible on its face and therefore only a crazy person would want to be the next president of the United States -- which brings me back to John Edwards and the Democrats.

I put no stock in John Edwards. He talks vaguely of taking America back from the corporations, but his demeanor and his rhetoric on the stump emit no heat. I detect no fire in his belly. He does not convince me. Heaven only knows what he truly thinks and feels. Obama, for his part, seeks to fire crowds with talk of uniting Red-State and Blue-State America. Obama thus wants the wolves and the sheep to lie down together. If Obama gets what he wants there will be no reform, and the result will more likely be a generation of shaggy purple offspring who (as soon as they're old enough) will kill and cook and eat their parents. Ruthless corporate managers who presently govern us through their Democratic and Republican jackals will cede no power to anyone who asks them nicely but doesn't carry a club. If Edwards or Obama or their foolish supporters think differently, they will learn the truth soon enough.

A Second American Revolution is coming. You might think that the latest kink in the saga of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Published in the Times of London, yet!) makes a second revolution inevitable, but it does not. What makes the coming revolution inevitable is the adamantine refusal of American leadership -- people such as John Edwards and Barack Obama -- to embrace the necessity of radical systemic reform.

This year's struggle for the leadership of America is indeed an epic fight, just as Edwards told The Los Angeles Times. That's because hidebound conservatism, pursued to its logical end, ends always in revolution. It happened in France. It happened in America. It happened in Russia and China and Romania and in dozens of other nations, over and over, throughout history. If present circumstances are let to run their full course, it will happen here again. And if you think -- as I do -- that it's a damned long time overdue, take a tip from Charles Dickens:

In A Tale of Two Cities, Monsieur Defarge notes despairingly that the revolution is a long time coming. He fears that he and Madame Defarge will never live to see it and, if they see it, they won't live to see what he believes will be its glorious end.

"How long," demanded Madame, composedly, "does it take to make and store the lighting? Tell me."

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that too.

"It does not take a long time," said Madame, "for an earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?"

"A long time, I suppose," said Defarge.

"But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it."

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Curtain Call for Democracy

2007-10-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Oct. 8, a headline in the online edition of the New York Daily News declares: "Iowa caucus or bust for Barack Obama." The article says that Iowa "looks like a last chance" for Democrats who seek to wrest their party's nomination from the paws of Hillary Clinton, who "could be unstoppable if she takes Iowa."

John Edwards is quoted: "Anybody who loses in Iowa will have an uphill battle from that point forward." Barack Obama's campaign manager is quoted: "Iowa - that's the whole shebang!" Gordon Fischer, former head of the Iowa Democratic Party says, "a win in Iowa is necessary for every candidate. . . ."

Listen to mainstream journalism hype the Iowa Democratic Caucus, you get the idea that Iowa and her people are important to the Democratic Party. Listen to the hype, you think Democratic contenders who don't finish first in Iowa will drop out of the race. Truth is, that's all a lot of pig stuffing -- and I ain't talkin' applesauce or carrots & sauerkraut or sage dressing, folks.

Iowa Democrats have a lousy record when it comes to picking winners. Candidates who lose the Iowa Democratic Caucus still enjoy a four-in-nine chance of winning the Democratic presidential nod, whereas candidates who win the Iowa Democratic Caucus have only a five-in-nine chance to win the Democratic Party's nomination. Of the five Democratic presidential nominees who also won the Iowa Democratic Caucus, only one (President Bill Clinton, unopposed in 1996) went on to win the White House. In 1992, Clinton finished third in the Iowa Caucus (3 percent), behind Tom Harkin (76 percent) and Paul Tsongas (4 percent).

To simplify matters absolutely: In nine presidential elections during the period 1972-2004, Iowa Democrats picked only one winner. So it is: If I was a Democratic presidential contender I wouldn't give a spit if I won the Iowa Caucus or not.

The well-heeled shysters who now stump the Hawkeye State don't care who wins the Iowa Caucus, either. Obama, Edwards, Clinton and the rest come to Iowa only because, as members of America's governing elite, they are obliged to act leading roles in one or more of the political farces that are staged to perpetuate and broadcast the illusion that America is a democratic society.

Farce, however, is too light a medium to distract from the real situation. For to say (as many now do) that American politics has gone "through the looking glass" is inaccurate. American politics isn't upside-down or inside-out; it isn't the reverse image of anything. American politics has become something entirely different, something horrid and monstrous and perverse. If politics is theater, the state of American politics is presently so bad that it looks like a thing Bertholt Brecht might create, could Brecht only see today's America and express what he sees in dark and heavy, raucously honking and clanking ironies such as those he wrote into Mother Courage and Her Children.

Imagine if you will: On the vast stage of American politics, little room remains. The bulk of the space is consumed by the corpses of large animals -- elephants and whales and horses and bison and the like. Most of them are rotten; many are in advanced stages of decay. Each of them supports a large sign upon which the name of one or another American institution or idea is writ large: "Congress," "Industrial Economy," "Supreme Court," "Public Education," "Constitution," "Department of Agriculture," "Bill of Rights," "Environmental Protection Agency," etc.

Crowded around each of the dead institutions, citizens fight over scraps of putrid flesh. Those not seeking subsistence focus their attention on big-screen televisions or, as couples, queue up for a chance to copulate in one or another of the derelict cars that litter the space between carcasses. Some adults play in those cars: they sit behind the wheels and pretend steering while they make motor noises with their lips. Every citizen wears a sign that reads "terrorist suspect."

Uniformed police walk around and, every few minutes, beat somebody to death. Greasy preachers wave Bibles, give sermons, pass hats, and offer candy to children. Now and then, from some place on high, a little pink cherub wearing a "Yankee Doodle Dandy" top hat swoops low and dumps a bucket of Monopoly money over the carnage. The flying cherubim trail fluttering banners that say "lottery" or "tax rebate" or "bequest." Everyone smokes pot and drinks beer.

Scuttling hither and yon like a rat amid the riot, we see Richard B. Cheney. A harness strapped on his back supports a light, 10-foot pole that sticks straight up. At the top of the pole is a sign that reads "Undisclosed Location." Centered directly beneath the words a large, black arrow points straight down at Cheney, who is dressed in a ghillie suit and armed with a shotgun. Hanging from his neck is another sign. It reads: "Vice President & Champion of Liberty."

At intervals throughout the play, figures from American history appear and walk through. Among many others, Thomas Jefferson strolls around reading The Declaration of Independence. Lincoln shows up and delivers The Gettysburg Address. Martin Luther King thunders: I Have a Dream as he wanders about. Clarence Darrow declaims his Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail.

Cheney shoots them; every one. After each murder he stands over the body and snarls, "Fuck you!" Then he stomps the face of the corpse and stalks off seeking his next victim.

Stage left, rear, a platform 15 feet tall bears the sign "White House." Atop the platform is a lectern, behind which stands George W. Bush. Across his chest he wears a sign: "The Decider Who Decides." The lower half of his torso is invisible behind the lectern. Bush speechifies incessantly but the theater's sound system mutes his rant, confines it to the background, his voice just loud enough to understand. He is muzak, in front of and over which all other actors must speak.

In front of the lectern at either side, clusters of people wearing Mickey Mouse ears jostle each other as they operate cameras and microphones. At either side of the platform, stairs reach the top. Steps at the right are marked with an arrow pointing up and the words "Going Down." Steps at the left are marked with an arrow pointing down and the words, "Going Up."

Every thirty minutes, one of a succession of characters mounts the stairs marked "Going Down" and climbs to the top. These are people such as Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Dana Perino and Michael Brown, all of them dressed like characters from the Kit-Kat show troupe in Cabaret. As each person reaches the platform, he or she crawls over to George Bush and grovels on the stage at The Decider's feet. Then, without further ado, the groveler crawls inside the lectern and stays there out of sight for five full minutes.

Bush pays the grovelers no mind. He just keeps on talking of this or that except: If the last character inside the lectern was a man, Bush drones on solemnly of God and the Bible, of morality and spiritual growth. If the last character in the lectern was a woman, Bush raves shrilly about Iraq and patriotism and war and terror. When a new character crawls into the lectern, Bush changes his topic -- or does not change -- accordingly.

Characters whose time under the lectern is over crawl away and mount the stairs marked "Going Up." They descend to the left until they are met at the bottom by a character dressed as a bellhop. The flunky hands each of them a sign that bears a title -- something such as "Attorney General" or "Secretary of Defense." Each recipient also gets a gold medal the size of a gong, upon which the words "Heckuva Job" are embossed. A small crowd of Mickey Mouse cameras stands by to photograph the awards.

At center stage, not quite in front, there is a hole in the floor. A small sign, almost illegible, designates that hole: "Iraq." From within the hole come gunshots, explosions and screams. Smoke rises steadily from there, accompanied by the occasional spurt of flame or gout of blood. Every few minutes a squad of soldiers marches in from the wings and, as one man, leaps into the hole. Whenever we hear an explosion, arms and legs and heads fly out of the hole and land on the stage. Weeping, wailing citizens carry the parts away, back into the camps, where the parts are furtively cooked and eaten.

All of that and more goes on apace, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The stage is so vast, the happenings so varied and insane, so rapidly changing that nobody in the audience can take it all in. The one thing everyone in the audience can see plainly is a small space, stage center, front, about six feet square. That space is well lit, and a lot of Mickey Mouse cameras focus there. And that is where farces such as the Iowa Democratic Caucus are staged. Every ten minutes or so, one of today's presidential contenders steps to the center of that space, picks up a cordless microphone and delivers a nonsensical soliloquy. Those "campaign speeches" vary with the state or region of the country in which the show currently plays. But the gross obscenities in front of which all presidential contenders do their shtick are everywhere the same.

In Iowa the pols spout gibberish about "agriculture," "family farms," "rural development," "renewable energy," "ethanol," and other such crap. What they will talk about when they come to your area I cannot say, though events of this week convince me that they'll soon be talking "gun control" everywhere. One thing I can absolutely guarantee: None of them will say "Impeach George Bush." None will say "Stop the war now." Not one will promise to repeal the USA Patriot Act, to stop tapping our phones, to clean up corruption, or to hold specific people accountable for the rape of our nation. None of today's Democratic presidential hopefuls will ever say a word about the mess, the reeking ruin of our country, in front of which they stand as they speak and in which their silence proves them complicit.

To simplify once again: In the light of known facts, Republicans' refusal to address wreckage wrought by the Bush Crime Syndicate is unconscionable but understandable. Democrats who do likewise are utterly outrageous. There can be no forgiveness for them. Members of today's Democratic Party are not American patriots. They are either shamelessly corrupt participants in a thuggish criminal enterprise, or they are the stupidest people on the face of the earth.

On the vast stage of American politics, no place to hide remains. It's curtain-time, folks. It is time to decide: Who and what and which are you? Why are you still a Democrat?

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Everybody's a farmer. Have some cornbread.

2007-09-22T03:49:00.000-07:00

Time was, every farmer’s child grew up knowing that all real wealth comes from the land. He or she knew that every human being is tied to the land, that everybody is a farmer with muddy boots, and that most of the world’s troubles are caused by people who either never knew or have forgotten the fact.

Today’s America is most entirely full of people who know only that money is real. Tell them it ain't so, tell them they're all just farmers, they think you’re crazy or that you’ve insulted them. When occasionally they mention “feet of clay” they speak of their crank religions and not of reality. They are averse to reality and their aversion makes them dangerous. They would rather have blood on their hands than mud on their feet. Small wonder they pick leaders like George W. Bush.

Jimmy, 6 ft. tall, stands beside the crop in south Buchanan County. How tall is that corn, do you reckon?

All of that comes to mind today because, here in Iowa, this time in September sees the start of our corn harvest. The Hawkeye State at this moment is a glorious, tawny jungle of ripe, towering grain. A drive to Cedar Rapids yesterday showed that reapers have already opened a number of fields.

Though the weather is sunny and warm, the farmers aren’t working today because there was a heavy rain last night. The ground is muddy and the moisture content of the grain is up from yesterday, so the machinery stands idle.

In a day or two, when the ground and the grain dry down again, the reapers will go back to work. Barring additional rainfall, operations will go full-throttle next week. The shining acres will for a time resemble a vast freeway construction site as giant machines swarm in the fields and fill the air with clouds of fragrant dust. The roads will shake while an army of thundering, heavy-laden trucks race frantically between reapers in the fields and storage facilities in one or another of the small towns that speckle the Iowa prairie.

If that sounds exciting, that’s because it is exciting. You can’t live in rural Iowa, you can’t know this part of the country and not be thrilled by the sweep and the pace of the spectacle that takes place here over the next few weeks. In the famous German community of Amana they’ll soon have their Octoberfest, and any number of other towns will throw shindigs of one sort or another.

For me -- though the beer and the sausage and the celebrations are grand -- the harvest itself is the whole show. When I climb up on a wagon and see golden wealth pour from the reaper’s spout, when I feel the grain run through my fingers, when I wake in the night and the smell of shelled corn wafts through my open window, then I see and touch and smell what we were all put here to make and to do and to be. I know then that I am whole and that it’s been a good year, and for a blessed time I don't care what sort of poisonous filth spews from flannel-mouthed, greed-head wowsers in Washington and Wall Street and Des Moines. The last few farmers in America are still on the land and they will stay on the land because if they are pushed off the land, America will starve to death. The greed-heads ought to be smart enough to know that -- even if they resent or cannot grasp the why of it.

Some yuppie queen a week or two ago thought she had caught me out. Certain I could never describe it, she asked me what shelled corn actually smells like. I told her the simple truth: “It smells like cornbread on the hoof.” The stupid look on her face was priceless. For a second there I felt like Cyrano at the top of his game.

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The Best Cornbread in the World

Dry Ingredients —
• 1.5 C all purpose flour
• 1.5 C corn meal
• 3/4 C cane sugar
• 3 T baking powder (Karlin’s or Rumford gets the best rise)

Wet Ingredients —
• 3/8 C corn oil
• 3 jumbo eggs
• 3 T honey
• 1 14.5 oz can cream-style corn
• condensed milk

Instructions —
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2) Grease and flour a 9x13 cake pan.
3) Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl — no sifting necessary.
4) Add oil, eggs, honey, and cream-style corn, and stir to mix thoroughly.
5) Still stirring, add UNDILUTED condensed milk — as necessary — to make batter that pours readily but is not TOO runny. This requires a little more or less than one cup of condensed milk.
6) Pour batter into cake pan and bake for 40 minutes, or until toothpick test shows done.
7) Serve hot or cold with real butter.

BUSY PARENTS NOTE! Prep time is ten minutes for this delicious treat. With tall glasses of ice-cold milk and a chunk of fruit for dessert, the stuff makes a perfect, wholesome, high-energy breakfast or lunch for school-age kids. They will gobble it like a herd of ravenous hogs and they will holler for more. So will you. Result guaranteed.

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Michael Moore and his Films

2007-08-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

I went to see Sicko a few weeks ago. Here are my impressions:

Michael Moore comes across to me as a physically repulsive, personally obnoxious individual. I think he struck gold when he learned to turn crassness into an asset. He is a perfectly tasteless, imperfect genius whose tastelessness adds enormous power to the statements he makes and at the same time detracts from the overall power of his films.

Moore’s movies (I’ve seen only Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko.) are a cross between brilliant satiric bludgeons like Peter Sellers’ The Magic Christian and such icky, sob-sister stuff as Barbara Walters might dream up if Barbara Walters sat down on her pity pot and got all fucked up on Quaaludes. Moore is most effective when he shocks me or when he makes me feel ashamed of myself and of the fact that I’m an American. Moore is least effective when he loses control of himself (not to imply that he ever actually has control of himself) and leaves me in my seat with the infuriating suspicion that it’s all contrived and he is playing me for a sucker.

When Moore is effective, I’m outraged by the fact that a poor American woman with a respiratory problem can buy the inhalers she needs in Havana for three-and-a-half Cuban pesos each (five cents, American), whereas she has to pay $120 each (American) for the exact same inhalers when she buys them in the States. The revelation makes me want to drive to Washington, D.C., with a bucket of tar and some feathers.

When Moore loses control of himself, he takes some American 911 workers to a Cuban firehouse and films a brotherly love fest between the trim and fit Cuban firefighters and their fat, dumpy, American “peers.” Moore is so obsessed with the irony he hopes to strike that he screws up his editing and lets me see the understandably cynical Cubans snicker up their sleeves at what is obviously a scripted encounter. I wonder then if Moore actually told me the truth about the cost of those inhalers. The question makes me want to drive to Flint, MI, with a bucket of tar and some feathers.

On the whole a Michael Moore film, for me, is like the guy who is the life of the party until he has one too many drinks. In the beginning he makes everybody laugh. Then he has one too many and suddenly nobody’s laughing because he’s no longer funny. He’s just a drunk making an ass of himself and he’s too drunk to know it. He ends up puking on his shoes.

That’s my impression of Michael Moore’s films and that’s what Sicko was like for me. I wanted to see Sicko because I knew it would tell me things that every American ought to know. I didn’t want to see Sicko because I knew that, before the end, I’d get sick of Michael Moore. I was right on both counts.

On the positive side, Sicko is definitely worth a look. Michael Moore’s tastelessness may or may not make you sick, but Sicko will teach you an awful lot of awful stuff about America’s awful healthcare industry. The film clips of Dick Nixon are absolutely priceless. You’ll be glad you saw Sicko. Sorta.

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The Assault on Reason: Al Gore's Hypnotized Turkey

2007-08-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

I never spend money for political books for the same reason I never buy clothing with a logo on it. Thus I write this now only because my creaky old landlady rented Al Gore’s DVD, An Inconvenient Truth, and watched it. That experience got her so het up that she laid out still more of her precious Social Security dollars for a copy of Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin Press, 2007, $25.95).

Now she’s got the book, the poor woman can’t understand it. She brought it to me and said: “You read a lot. Will you read this book and tell me what you think of it? Please?”

So I read The Assault on Reason, and I told my landlady what I think of it, and now I’m telling the world: She’d have done better to spend her money on a Molly Hatchet souvenir T-shirt – one of those with a kick-ass, Frank Frazetta illustration on the back. She’d look better wearing the T-shirt than carrying the book around town because, while Gore’s book arguably makes a more high-toned visual statement, the shirt would cover more and cover it to a better purpose.

Not to say that The Assault on Reason is entirely Wrong. Assault does in fact have a couple of good points. One is that there’s humor here. On page 35, for example, Gore explains how to hypnotize a chicken – a trick he learned while growing up on a farm in Tennessee. “There’s a lot you can do with a hypnotized chicken,” he writes. “You can use it as a paperweight, or you can use it as a doorstop, and either way, the chicken will sit there motionless, staring blankly.”

I laughed as I imagined walking into the Gores’ home and seeing hypnotized chickens act as doorstops and paperweights and performing other helpful tasks. I couldn’t figure out how I grew up on a farm in Iowa without learning to hypnotize chickens. I laughed much harder when it came to me that I never learned to hypnotize chickens because I had a girlfriend. My laughter grew hysterical when I wickedly pondered how far the story about Al and the chickens might go toward explaining Al’s relationship with Tipper.

I found more good yocks on page 95, where Gore quotes economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it’s just the opposite.” Readers shouldn’t fret if they’re not laughing with me on that one. That the best jokes are never funny is simply one of those ironies that put me in stitches whenever I’m reminded of them.

Another good point about Assault is that it’s built correctly. Gore divided his book of 308 pages into an Introduction and nine chapters of more or less equal length. The front of the book features a Contents section. At the end there is a brief Conclusion, after which Gore pays his debts with some Acknowledgments. The Notes are informative, though I can’t say I care for the method of citation employed. The Index looks good if one doesn’t actually use it. Start asking questions of the Index, one finds it’s incomplete. Strictly regarding appearances, however, Assault includes everything readers expect from a competent author and a respectable press.

Gore’s argument is straightforward. His contentions, stripped of the evidence with which he supports them, can be summarized in a few paragraphs --

-- America’s democratic republic, as The Founders conceived and designed it, relies upon our free press as a marketplace of ideas. It was supposed that literate, politically conscious citizens would visit the marketplace, pick over the wares, inform themselves, and use what they learn to make rational decisions about politics and government. Problems arise when our free press abandons its duty to purvey useful information. If the press devotes itself instead to blind partisanship, inanity and fear-mongering, the marketplace of ideas becomes a poisoned well that cannot sustain our democratic, republican system.

-- The problem of silly, biased, fear-mongering journalism was bad enough before television, when America got the bulk of its news from print media. Today, when America gets the bulk of its news from television, the problem is much worse. That’s because, in order to get the message conveyed by printed words, readers must engage in rational thought about what they’re reading even as they read it. Television, on the other hand, is a medium that bypasses reason and appeals directly to the gut.

-- Television advertising, in particular, is scientifically designed to play upon viewers’ subconscious fears in ways that evoke a gut response of a certain sort at a rate of about once per second. The pace is hypnotic and is meant to be so: Minds mesmerized by fear can be taught to buy things they do not need, to fear things that don’t exist, and to like things that are not good for them. Advances in psychology and neuroscience are seized upon and put to use by advertisers, pollsters and media gurus, who work as hired guns for anyone who can afford them. Just as these people can sell us things we didn’t know we wanted, they can sell us political candidates, political issues, and ideologies we didn’t know we liked.

-- In the early 1960s, television replaced print media as America’s marketplace of ideas. Now, thanks to television, citizens who visit the marketplace to shop for ideas are increasingly illiterate, politically ignorant, and suffer from a diminished ability to reason. Thanks to television, America’s marketplace of ideas has been captured and is controlled by people whose agenda (to say the best of it) is elitist and anti-democratic. Thus television as we know it, Gore tells us, threatens to destroy America’s democratic republic.

Gore buttresses his argument by citing discoveries in neuroscience that explain how fear works on the human brain, how the brain is hard-wired so reactions prompted by fear are shunted around the reasoning process. He throws in evidence from psychology and from history, and in sum he makes a pretty good case.

At the same time, he tries to soften the impact of what he’s saying on those who might be offended by its implications: “I’m not saying that television viewers are like hypnotized chickens,” he writes, “But there may be some lessons for us larger-brained humans in the experiences of barnyard hens." (Assault, p. 36)

No doubt. And no doubt there are any number of teletubers out there who’ll squawk like outraged chickens when they’re told they don’t know as much as some of the birds in Tennessee. Disregarding their objections, however, there’s nothing new or wildly controversial in Gore’s indictment of television. Scholars have argued for decades that TV makes fools of those who watch it.¹ The honest public knows it’s true: They don’t call it 'the boob toob' for no reason.

Having identified television as a bane of rational thought that poisons Americans’ minds, Gore uses chapters 1 through 5 to indict the medium as an accomplice in various crimes against democracy. Chapter 1 discusses “The Politics of Fear” (use of fear to gain power and manufacture consent); Chapter 2 is all about “Blinding the Faithful” (hijacking and weaponization of religion for political ends); Chapter 3 explains “The Politics of Wealth” (corruption, monopoly, media manipulation); Chapter 4 names some “Convenient Untruths” (substitution of crank ideology for rational policy, use of mass deception to justify same, use of secrecy to duck responsibility for resultant chaos); Chapter 5 describes “The Assault on the Individual” (diminishment and/or nullification of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution).

Readers who are not teletubers should find nothing new or wildly controversial in any of that, either. Americans who haven’t spent the last fifty years in a persistent vegetative state have seen all of those evils at play in our national affairs. And honest readers (be they sane) must also agree with chapters 6 through 8, where Gore recounts ways in which our leaders (primarily George Bush and his GOP), using television as described in chapters 1 through 5, have damaged our republic and our democracy.

That’s the last of my good news about The Assault on Reason.

The first problem I noticed with Assault is that it suffers for a lack of candor. On page 1, for example, Gore writes: “The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.” That’s true enough, but it overlooks the fact that, had American leadership always deemed falsehoods unacceptable as a basis for policy, the “reliance” Gore laments would never have been formed.

I also feel compelled to say that, as a reader, I’m willing to credit Gore with being a sane person and with owning a reasonably good memory. But if I do so then I’m stuck with the fact that he is lying to me: For if Gore is sane and has a good memory, then he obviously hopes readers have forgotten the things he said, the “facts” he employed, the rosy predictions he made – “even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary” – when, in 1993, he and President Bill Clinton rammed the North American Free-Trade Agreement down America’s throat.

Gore commits the same crime on page 24, where he justly condemns the use of fear as a tool in American politics. And though on page 42 he writes that “the use of fear as a political tool is not new,” he somehow forgets to mention that he and his allies exploited fear without scruple when, in 1993, they gang-stomped Ross Perot in their rush to get NAFTA ratified.

Gore fudges again on page 81, charging that the Bush administration, in its 2003 rape of Medicare, used bribes and intimidation to extort “yes” votes from congressional representatives. I know he’s right. I also know that in the heat of the NAFTA haggle, the Clinton-Gore lobby twisted congressional arms and spent like drunken swabs in garnering votes to achieve their own corrupt ends. But Gore doesn’t confess that.

Of course the Democratic Party was in bygone times the leviathan of American politics. Gore lives deep inside that ancient, foetid whale and there, in his dank, dark, “visceral prison,” may not see well enough to find his own backside.² So it may be an ideologically induced purblindness and not a pathological dishonesty that causes Gore to make such oversights. But the oversights are there nonetheless, and their presence doesn’t flatter the author – even if they don’t all polish his own apple.

In his Introduction, Gore polishes journalism’s apple. There he tells us that at the time of the O.J. trial, he thought “ . . . exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the trial was just an unfortunate excess – an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.” (Assault, p. 3)

“Normal good sense and judgment of our television news media?” “An early example of a new pattern?” Oh, puh-LEEZE, Mr. Gore! People have complained, scholars and even journalists themselves have written about the imbecility of television news for decades. TV news may be exponentially worse now than it was in years past, but, being nearly 59 years old myself, I don’t recall that TV news was ever such a much.

Gore shines up to journalism again on page 17, where he states flatly that “this generation of journalists is the best-trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are often not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.”

How’s about that one, historians? If Al Gore hadn’t told us so, we might never have known that Judith Miller is a better journalist than Ida Tarbell, that Sean Hannity is better than Ed Murrow, or that Cal Thomas is better than H.L. Mencken.

But perhaps Gore didn’t mean it that way. What seems base flattery of the sociopathic careerists who presently characterize coverage of our national news may be nothing more than an attempt to except or insulate news-media grunts from criticism, which Gore in the next few chapters fires at news media themselves and at the monied interests that control them. If such an exception was his intent, he should have written it plainly rather than couch it in an outrageous statement that raises doubts about his knowledge, his motives, his vision, his judgment and his courage. As it is, one finds good reason to question all those things in this hypnotized turkey of a book.

Regarding the War on Drugs: Gore passes up several opportunities to denounce the drug war or to call for an end of it. Instead, he writes that “ . . . the global challenge of defeating drugs and corruption . . . has never been more serious given the growing strength and sophistication of international crime organizations.” (p. 163)

Regarding the War on Terror: Gore writes that “Our top priority should be preserving what America represents . . . and winning the war against terrorism first.” (p. 177)

Nowhere in Assault does Gore question either the drug war or the terror war as policy. Instead, Gore asserts repeatedly (explicitly or implicitly) that Bush is screwing up those wars and that Gore (or another Democrat) could run them more effectively. Thus there’s nothing new here, nothing bold or innovative, just more of the same old, boringly familiar, carefully triangulated, entirely illiberal and ineffective, Clintonesque, GOP-Light, New-Democrat donkey crap. There may be some difference between positions staked out by Gore in 2007 and those taken by John Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000, but I don’t believe the difference would buy my landlady a used T-shirt at the Salvation Army.

Coming from an influential Democrat, Gore’s argument against television at first seems to hold a great deal of promise. But that argument and the hope it engenders soon get lost, buried beneath tons of rage against the Bush régime. Between pages 102 and 238 (fully half of the text), the word “television” gets no mention whereas Bush and his GOP get their asses beat on virtually every page. When in Chapter 9 Gore finally returns to his prosecution of television, he does so only to offer an uproariously stupid and utterly self-serving solution, which he claims to believe will break the grip that commercial television and its army of brilliantly talented, professional liars now hold on the mind of America. I won’t tell here what Gore’s proposed solution is because – if you’re dumb enough to buy The Assault on Reason after reading this review – you still deserve one good laugh for your money.

At the beginning of The Assault, Gore serves up a caveat: “It is too easy – and too partisan – to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes.” (p. 2) That’s plain enough, and it’s absolutely right. Yet I think it is insufficient because that caveat, like Gore’s indictment of television, gets lost in the tenor and intensity of the Bush bashing that takes over the narrative in subsequent chapters. And while Gore frequently dips into history to add depth and weight to his arguments, his dipping too often works either to puff himself up or to beat Bush down.

Without defending Bush in any way (Nobody deserves bashing more than George W. Bush.), I see clearly that the raw meat and red pepper that flavor Gore’s narration will impress uncritical readers with the idea that the Bush administration is some sort of an aberration, a freak hatched from a cuckoo’s egg nefariously laid in democracy’s otherwise un-fouled nest. My heart is with the partisan Left when I say it’s too bad things are not so.

A longer, more informed view of history recalls Gore’s caveat and would call readers also to the helpful realization that the Bush administration is a symptom, an outcome – a fruit, if you will – borne by the tree of a republic that was poisoned over the course of two centuries by greed, corruption, dirty politics, bad legislation, stupid policy, monopoly capitalism, racism, jingoism, Red baiting, militarism, war, secrecy, a truly lousy education system, and a host of other toxins. The Internet (See Chapter 9.) will not save America from the sum of those evils, and one doesn’t annul the effect of a 270-page anti-Bush rant by tacking two pages of airy rhetoric about Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King on the end. (pp. 271-73)

With this book, with his indictment of television, with the political mojo he's acquired from his environmental activism, Gore could have led readers (especially including rank-and-file Democrats) to see that getting rid of George Bush and Dick Cheney is merely the necessary first item on a lengthy list of urgently needed systemic reforms. With this book, Gore fails (refuses?) to pick up the reins of leadership. Others can say what they will: I say that -- all of its other shortcomings aside -- The Assault on Reason crashes on the rock of that failure, alone.

When I was a young man, I found that going alone for two or three days into the vastness of the Arizona desert deepened my understanding of my self and helped keep me sane in a world that makes no sense. Countless others, better minds by far than my own, have realized personal growth through immersion in solitude. Jesus, for one, spent 40 days in the wilderness and came back preaching the long view: “Repent,” he cried, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 4:17) Al Gore, by comparison, spent four years in the political wilderness after his Y2K defeat and now comes back preaching: “The last two centuries have demonstrated the superiority of free market economies over centralized economies and the superiority of democracy over forms of government that concentrate power in the hands of a few.” (Assault, p. 100)

There it is: Al Gore is incapable of the long view because Al Gore cannot see outside the whale. One hopes for original thought and creative ideas from a mind like Gore’s as one hopes to walk on water. America was clearly wrong to elect George W. Bush president in the year 2000, and America was even more wrong to reelect Bush in 2004. On the other hand, America was right to reject Al Gore. For all he may be a technophile and an ardent environmentalist, The Assault on Reason is a lousy book which clearly shows that Gore is not a man who could or would lead this nation to a democratic-republican renaissance.

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¹ No scholar myself, I arrived at a similar conclusion intuitively and threw the television out of my house in 1974, in the middle of the Watergate hearings. My first exposure to literature about television’s intellectual toxicity was Jerry Mander’s excellent Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978).

² Thank you, St. George.

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There It Was; There It Is

2007-07-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Jimmy's Foreword

At several times in the past, I’ve subscribed to journalism mailing lists. Subscribers are mostly mainstream journalists or journalism students. The kids ask questions; the pros talk shop; everybody talks politics. A few even mention things like the Constitution, democracy, and ethics. All kinds of stuff gets batted around.

Through that experience, and without intending to do so, I found that the most effective way to make enemies in journalism is to argue rationally against gun control. I learned that lesson the hard way when one day someone posted to the list a message that advocated gun control as a solution to any number of America’s problems, and I posted a solid, rational rebuttal. That rebuttal touched off a series of exchanges that grew steadily more unpleasant until I found myself engaged in a shouting match, defending myself from a mob who were bent upon hounding me off the list.

Folks who’ve been on mailing lists already know how such things play out. I’ll spare you all the gory details. As background for what follows, let me just say that after many weary weeks it all came to a head when a fellow I’ll call Jerry posted to the list, about me, a hateful, ad-hominem screed of several hundred words.

I ignored that.

When one of my other assailants japed that Jerry’s post went a little way overboard, Jerry replied: “OK, so *maybe* I was a bit harsh.”

At that point, I posted what follows this foreword. As you read it, you should know that names have been changed to protect those for whom I bear no ill will and who today might be embarrassed (as might we all) by some of the things they’ve done or written in bygone times. I post it here not to get even with anyone, but because I think it’s funny and because I believe it speaks to problems we're all having with the so-called mainstream media. Hopefully, so will you.

Jimmy’s Reply to the Jerks

To Jerry:

For what it’s worth, I don’t think you were the least bit harsh. I think you were expressing your feelings about me and, in doing so, you were perfectly honest about your feelings. I don’t have a problem with that. You’re the one who’s upset, after all. If you want to throw your tantrum in public, that’s entirely your business. I’m not offended or discouraged by your display because the fact is that I don’t care. To be more specific: I don’t care how you feel or what becomes of you. If you should be diagnosed with tertiary syphilis or get married or win a Pulitzer or be eaten alive by roaches or something, it’s all the same to me.

To the rest:

What I just told Jerry applies to all those who posted to express agreement with Jerry. By way of a reply, I now make the following four, related observations:

Those of us who write opinion typically don’t write to make friends and become popular. If we do it for love instead of strictly for a living, we write opinion because we think we have something to say that will make others consider more closely things that they themselves think and say. Journalists more perceptive than recent critics of me know without my telling that the effective editorial typically pisses off more people than it pleases. For the health of democracy, for the good of any body politic, a journalism that doesn’t kill sacred cows is worse than no journalism at all. Those of you who can’t stand having your iconos clasted would therefore (in my opinion) be wise to get the hell out of journalism and subscribe to Reader’s Digest instead of this mailing list.

Among the most interesting things you’ve expressed (prominent in virtually all the hate mail you’ve posted) is the idea that the majority, simply because it IS a majority, is right. In essence, you collectively argue that “There are a lot more of us than there are of you! We are therefore right and you are wrong!” That is, of course, the logic of the lynch mob, the prison yard, the baboon pack. I include baboons in that statement to remind you all that man’s ability to rise above such thinking is supposedly that which separates man from the lower primates. “KittySmitty” and others among you, being not men but women, nevertheless ignore that admonition at the expense of your “right” to sleep indoors, to wear clothing, to eat with a fork, to brush your teeth, and to wipe with paper.

Any person lurking on the list who is afraid to contribute for fear of being jumped on by me or by anybody else is definitely lurking on the wrong list. I do not feel the least bit sorry for you and cannot but speculate as to what kind of journalist you must actually be: Are you soft on business because you’re afraid they’ll jerk their advertising off the pages of your wimpy rag? Are you soft on politicians and bureaucrats, at press conferences and in print, because you’re afraid of being told off in public by an outraged official? Do you refuse to report the police blotter because you worry that one of the crooks whose name you named might drop by the office and punch your silly lights out? If so, and if what you fear should actually come to pass, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving journalist than you – whoever you are.

“KittySmitty” sent to me and to my supporters, and to governors of the list at different times her feeling that she has a right to post her opinions in this forum without fear of having them attacked. I hear the same from many of you. The contention is ridiculous. Yet of all contentions expressed in this lengthy, tiresome exchange I find that one most interesting by reason of two facts: A) It expresses a core belief, conscious or not, that all ideas are created equal; B) I hear it from a group of journalists.

There are a number of people on this list who could discourse at encyclopedic length on the implication of those two facts for journalism, for democracy, for America, and for Western leadership of 'The New World Order'. I, for one, have more exciting things to do than write what would amount to a multi-volume explanation for fools of what it is that makes fools foolish. I expect other thoughtful people will feel likewise. So it remains for you fools to sit down together and explain yourselves to each other. I say so even though I know it’s at least as cruel as locking you all in a round room with instructions to pee in the corner.

On the other hand I am not uninterested in scholarship, and I know that a good part of what goes down on this list bears on questions of whether and why American journalism is increasingly irrelevant. I therefore offer readers who are NOT fools facts A and B (above) as one rational explanation for said irrelevancy.

May God save us all.

Jimmy

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Big Trouble in Little Tombstone

2007-06-06T00:23:00.000-07:00

I once thought George Bush’s core constituency was unbreakable. I thought that the 30 percent of Americans who prop Bush up would remain loyal no matter what. Over the past few years I wrote any number of comments online in which I argued that “George Bush could kick his wife into the middle of the street and slit her throat on live television and he’d still have that 30 percent, who would quickly find some way to blame Laura’s murder on Bubba Bill Clinton.”

As I write this today, it looks as if I may have been wrong. Little George last week stepped into a Texas-sized pile of cow stuffing when he hired on to ramrod the congressional immigration reform drive. Not only did Bush get stinky brown poo all over his pearl-handled rodeo boots but our cowboy president's decision to ride shotgun for the proposed immigration bill enraged his erstwhile supporters, who now shoot rhetorical holes in Little George’s big white Stetson hat. And that’s not all, Pard: Whenever the pistoleros stop to reload, they threaten George and his pals at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with vigilante justice.

The ruckus started when, speaking in support of the immigration reform package favored by Congress (and reviled by everyone else), Bush said those who oppose the legislation are people who just “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” Other GOP tub thumpers agreed. Lindsay Graham sounded scrappy: “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up,” he said. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff shamed those who oppose the measure as people who’d like to see illegal immigrants killed. Another Bush spokesman implied that opponents of the measure are psychotic, that they suffer from latent feelings of “rage” and “national chauvinism”.

What Little George and his gang in their enthusiasm forgot to remember is that the crazy, unpatriotic bigots who form the hard core of Bush’s support network don’t like being called crazy, unpatriotic bigots. And so, you see, it wasn’t long before right-wing news venues were aflame with comments from crazy, unpatriotic bigots who fancy themselves principled conservatives:

I am tired of Washington elites calling me a racist bigot because I believe in the rule of law, fairness and protecting our national identity. – Wes Allen, Troy, AL, letter to the The Montgomery Advertiser, June 3.
George Bush .... will be remembered as the president who discarded American sovereignty, rule of law, language, and culture in exchange for cheap lettuce and fruit. – somebody named John Lillpop, who bills himself 'a recovering liberal,' June 3.
Those who endorse a vigorous immigration crackdown are upholding a sound conservative idea ... namely, the rule of law. – columnist Steve Chapman, The Chicago Tribune, June 3.
It’s a great national concern about observing the rule of law. – Sen. Arlen Specter, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 3.
It's about the rule of law, our national security, the American culture, the English language, national unity during time of war, the constitutional rights of American citizens and the fiscal concerns of American taxpayers and their descendants. – columnist David Limbaugh.
[I]t has not been uncommon for conservative thinkers ... to disagree.... But never before has a dispute degenerated into a street fight. We're seeing one now. – editorial, The Arizona Republic, June 3.

In The Wall Street Journal on Friday, June 1, columnist Peggy Noonan – arguably the most sacred cow in the whole Republican herd – branded George W. Bush a fool and a wastrel. Noonan chased her accusations by urging conservatives to dump the Bush administration because, she ranted, the Bush administration has already dumped conservatives: “This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go,” Noonan concluded. “This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.”

Them’s what they call fightin’ words in Texas, folks. Them’s the kind o’ words a person cain't take back nohow – not even in pollytix.

The next few days and weeks may be interesting as we see how the GOP reacts to such pressure at this moment in history. If crazy, unpatriotic bigots have their way, Noonan’s words may be followed by a giant sucking sound as Republicans run away from the Bush administration like it was an anthrax plague. If party hacks have their way, we may hear a giant rumbling sound as Republicans rush to circle their wagons around George W. Bush.

Of course Money will be the deciding factor. Neither the crazies nor the hacks will walk away from Money, no matter how many conservative principles the pols dig up, dust off, and wave around while they pee their collective pants and moan words like “party loyalty” or “do what’s best for the country.” What Money will finally do is a thing only time can tell, but if Money finally deserts George W. Bush, then he and his administration are headed for the Last Roundup. The only question that would then remain is: Will Money, having deserted Bush, move in with the crazies or stay shacked up with the hacks, or will Money try to hold the coalition together by hooking up with both factions at the same time?

Whatever shape the denouement finally takes, at this moment it has epic potential: George Bush and his gang, like Ringo and the Clantons, ride into town with a view to a kill. Cast as Doc Holliday and the Earps, Peggy Noonan and some other crazy, unpatriotic bigots swagger out to meet the Bushmen. The leader of the hacks (John McCain or Joe Lieberman?) takes the role of crooked Sheriff John Beehan. Money appears as a crowd of drunken, clap-raddled saloon whores come to watch the fight and reward the victors.

The antagonists confront each other through a pregnant silence while, off-camera, Nelson Riddle's trumpeter blows his heartbreaking rendition of El Deguello. Among the bystanders, Henry Fonda (Let's dub him in!) starts the waltz by accident when he nervously cracks a pecan. Sixguns blaze and roar and screaming men fall for 60 long seconds during which we get slomo closeups of Death at Play. The camera then pans back and surveys the carnage as gun smoke, like souls of the fallen made eerily visible, wafts gently over the bodies on the ground. Fade to black.

The Arizona Republic might call that a street fight. But, given the nature of everyone involved, I suspect that those who write the history of our therapeutic culture will label that particular brawl "The Shootout at the Not OK Corral."

How do I feel about it? I'm pleased to have been wrong about George Bush's support network. If the fight actually happens, I won’t cry no matter who gets hurt or how badly. You shouldn’t, either. They’re all a lot of scum, you know.

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The Topicalizer -- and other tools for novice writers

2007-05-16T07:13:00.000-07:00

So far as I’m aware, the first popular writer to point out absurdities inherent in using statistics to assay style in prose was E.B. White, who (some may still recall) was himself a stylist of note. It happened many moons ago, on a dark and stormy night, once upon a time when he was still at The New Yorker.

Somebody sent to White for his evaluation a statistical gizmo, which, its inventor(s) claimed, could accurately assess the 'readability' of any text written in English. Being the sort of genius he was, White immediately put the invention to work in a number of amusing ways and wrote a short, uproarious essay about the gizmo’s performance. As his killing stroke, White used the thing to gauge the readability of the promotional puffery that the gizmo’s inventor(s) had written and sent along with it. Trust me: the result did not flatter.¹

All of that comes to mind because on April 19 I received a newsletter from Mr. Rob Kall, who edits OpEdNews on the World Wide Web. Among any number of other things, Mr. Kall seems all fizzed up about a gizmo called The Topicalizer. Visitors at www.topicalizer.com can paste a text of any length into a tiny window, then click a button labeled “topicalize it!” and view the result. The Topicalizer analyzes the text it was given and spits out a variety of statistical information about that text. Results include numerical scores from three different measures of readability: the Gunning Fog Index, the Automated Readability Index, and the Coleman-Liau Index.

Kall’s newsletter suggests that some of the writers who contribute to OpEdNews might find The Topicalizer useful as a tool with which to improve their writing. No doubt — but still: I thought I’d try E.B. White’s idea and run a few tests just to see what I could see.

I started by compiling sample texts from works by successful writers. I used passages from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code; Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye; Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge; Robert Graves, I, Claudius; George Orwell, Animal Farm; Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito; and Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad.

I chose those books because they are all works of fiction and they are handy on my shelf. I scanned a couple of pages from each book into my computer and, after correcting errors introduced by imperfect character-recognition software, saved each passage as a text file. Then I used The Topicalizer to assay the readability of each sample text.

Results are posted in the table below. Bearing in mind that low scores are supposedly more readable, one sees that The Topicalizer thinks Dickens is least readable of the authors tested and Raymond Chandler is most readable.

Famous Authors

I next converted one of my short stories to a text file and fed it to The Topicalizer. I did that because, after comparing famous authors, I thought it would be fun to compare my own writing to the prose of the greats.

Looking at the table above, you may be surprised as I was to learn that my Gunning-Fog, my Auto-Read, and my Average readability scores are better than any writer tested except Chandler.

Being an egomaniac (All writers are egomaniacs.) I immediately wrote to notify several major publishers and the Pulitzer Prize Board. Before posting those letters, however, I felt I should run one more check on The Topicalizer. So I fed the gizmo 500 words of gibberish just to see what would happen. The result is here:

Gibberish

Comparing numbers gleaned from gibberish with numbers from fiction in the first table, one learns that The Topicalizer finds gibberish nearly as readable as Raymond Chandler and more readable than my short story, George Orwell’s novel, or any of the others.

So it is that now, instead of submitting my fiction to the Pulitzer Board, I console myself with the thought that I won’t have to hire an investment counselor or pack for a book-signing tour any time soon. The dead authors will roll in their graves. Tom Robbins and Dan Brown ought to get drunk. Someone should write and tell them so.

Of course one truth about statistical measures of 'readability' is that they really don’t measure readability. What they measure is terseness — pithiness, if you will. Another way to put it is that statistical readability indexes like short. Short paragraphs built of short sentences that feature short phrases made of short words generally show good in readability indexes no matter what sort of slop the words convey. Another truth is that readability indexes generally prefer active voice to passive voice because it is generally agreed (correctly, I believe) that readers find active voice less tiring: “The truck hit Dick” is better than “Dick was hit by the truck.”

Mention of Dick reminds me: The only thing I found laying around here that The Topicalizer finds more toothsome than Raymond Chandler is a sample text built of snippets from various Dick-and-Jane books. If you read the sample, notice the short words and sentences and paragraphs, and note that it contains no passive voice whatever. Then see how low it scores:

Dick and Jane

If you’re new to this sort of stuff, you might not know that proprietary word processors feature some nifty statistical toys. My personal favorite is the Grammatik tool in WordPerfect. I like it because it’s both powerful and flexible. Using Grammatik, I can compare my work statistically to my choice of a Hemingway short story, or the 1040 EZ tax instructions, or The Gettysburg Address, or I can plug in any other document and measure my work against that. I can even choose which stylebook the program uses to mark up my work. Grammatik measures readability (via the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level yardstick), use of passive voice, and a number of other things.

Fledgling writers might also want to know that I think Mr. Kall is right, up to a point. If diarrhea of the keyboard is a problem for you and if you’ve taste and sense enough to realize that, then statistical tools applied with a mean eye can sharpen your expression nicely. Just, while you use them, remember that misapplied tools are sometimes called “murder weapons”.

About good writing: Novice writers may find it helpful to realize that some writing is almost too good. A master essayist like George Orwell or E.B. White, for example, can lead readers through a complex, multifaceted analogy filled with arcane tricks of rhetoric, elegant turns of phrase and subtle logic to a conclusion of crystalline common sense that hits like a nine-pound hammer. Your typical reader, knocked silly by the blow, may stagger away thinking it’s all very simple. In fact such writing is anything but simple, as critic Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote of White back in 1977:

With his relaxed serendipitous technique of seeming to stumble on his subject by way of the back door, he lends you confidence that you don’t really have to know much about a thing to write about it intelligently; you need only possess the skill to write, along with a lot of sanity. Thus, if you’ve got the hang of it, you can arrive at the subject of disarmament by way of Mary Martin’s furniture, or at the prospects of American democracy by the route of a dachshund named Fred.

Of course, it’s only an illusion that Mr. White gets by alone on skill and sanity. He happens to know a great deal about a lot of things -- about birds and boats and literature, and, best of all, about how silly it would be to worry about the strictures against anthropomorphism and the pathetic fallacy that children’s-book librarians and French new-wave novelists tried to impress upon us in the 60’s.

Those with eyes to see the truth there will understand that Lehman-Haupt nailed it precisely: Great writing springs almost entirely from a lot of things that have nothing to do with statistical analysis or any other tools. Most such things are immeasurable for being intangible and there is no help for the lack of them.

Every year our huge publishing industry spews forth an array of 'authorship software' and hundreds, thousands of self-help books on composition and marketing, each of them touted as a surefire tool with which wannabe authors can overcome writer’s block, compose a bestselling novel and/or get rich quick as a freelance writer. In cities big and small all over America, hundreds of 'writers' of whom we’ve somehow never heard teach thousands of seminars on effective writing yearly (Five nights only $100! Guaranteed results!).

Most all of that is crap. If you’re a wannabe author who doesn’t believe it’s crap, then buy all of the software and the books. Attend every seminar. Join writers groups at bookstores. Go to college. Spend all your money and when you’ve done you’ll find you’re left with a keyboard and a blank screen and none of the junk you paid money for will help you in the least. The most valuable assets any writer can own are skill as a critical reader and raw talent, neither of which costs so much as a dime.²

If you aspire to epic poetry or screenplays or journalism or whatever, you’ll succeed as a writer only if you lovingly marry your skill and your talent to a lonely rigor of hard work and scholarship. E.B. White, Charles Dickens and other greats would be quick to agree: There is no other way.

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1. At this distance in time I don’t remember if the inventor of White’s gizmo was named Flesch, or Kincaid, or Gunning. All that sticks in my head is that the inventor(s) had some sort of white-collar job(s) at General Motors. For some reason I no longer have White’s essay, and I’m too lazy to drive to town and dig it up. So if you don’t believe me, do your own damned research.

2. See my essay on freelance writers here.

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Last Rites for Delusional Reformers

2007-02-27T03:09:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time I set out to critique James Bovard’s book, Lost Rights: the Destruction of American Liberty (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995 -- $16.95). I don’t like to mark up a book, so I put sticky notes on passages with which I find fault. By the time I got through reading Lost Rights, I had so many sticky notes in it that the covers wouldn’t close any more. I found so many things objectionable that I couldn’t think where to start.

After several weeks’ rumination, I felt I had wasted my time: Lost Rights is ideological slop for hogs that normally feed on verbal droppings from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. They’ll ingest Lost Rights because slop is a treat for them, and because they feel a need to flatter themselves and impress their friends with the fact that they’ve actually read a book. No words will sway them; a critique would be pointless. So I cut my losses and went back to reading Mark Twain.

A couple of months ago I read Joel Hirschhorn’s Delusional Democracy: Fixing the Republic without Overthrowing the Government (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2006 -- $18.95). I will not now savage Joel Hirschhorn as I just savaged James Bovard because I do believe Hirschhorn’s intentions are honorable. That is to say: Bovard’s book seems born of a cold, calculating ideologue bent upon deceit whereas Hirschhorn’s book seems born of a lazy author who is a well-intended but somewhat wishful thinker.

My intent here is to rub the two books against each other and hope that, like oracles, we can learn a little by reading smoke signals that arise from the friction. Should the risk of fire become too great, I'll leave off rubbing and simply beat the two books together in hope that something falls out of them other than sticky notes. Here goes.

Plot --

Oooops! Neither book has a plot. They are both political books, which means they don't tell stories but make arguments instead.

In Lost Rights, Bovard asserts that the federal government is a disaster in progress. Hopelessly tangled in red tape of his own manufacture, our Uncle Sam has fallen and can't get up. Worse: Sam cracked his pate when he fell. Badly addled, slaphappy Sam now uses his regulatory powers to take away our liberties rather than reify and guarantee them as the Founders intended Sam should do. Bovard says Americans should elect a reform Congress that will “decimate the federal statute book” and “radically reduce government officials' power to coerce, expropriate, and subjugate other Americans” (pp. 334-35).

In Delusional Democracy, Hirschhorn argues that moneyed interests have seized control of our constitutional, democratic republic and perverted it so that government serves moneyed interests exclusively while it pretends to be a democracy. The book encourages dissenters to organize a third party that will end-run the two-party system and install a reform Congress. The new Congress can then “revitalize democracy” by enacting a number of badly needed changes. We must “fix the republic without overthrowing the government,” says Hirschhorn, because, while the status quo is awful, he sees much in our Constitution that's worth saving.

Method & Criticism --

This reader is certain Bovard misused the word “decimate” (i.e.: kill one in ten) because, after reading Lost Rights, it's clear the author wants to repeal about 95 percent of all legislation passed since the year 1800 (or sometime way back yonder). And we should do so, Bovard argues, because government is best when it governs least. Of course he favors a laissez-faire business environment. He styles himself the libertarians' Pangloss to the New Dealers' Candide.

To make his case, Bovard relies on hard evidence and soft logic. He seeks to sway readers by recounting a blizzard of instances in which wicked and corrupt government, in its ceaseless rage to order, trammels individual rights by doing things inane, insane, illegal or indecent. In 335 pages of text, one finds 2,039 endnotes. Bovard's indictment is thus both massive and well documented.

The upshot is that Bovard's case is convincing if one doesn't stop to think about it, which means that those who listen to right-wing talk radio find Bovard thoroughly convincing. The downshot is that Bovard's case is irrational because it rests upon what logicians call “The fallacy of composition.” In another context, historian David Hackett Fischer explained:

The fallacy of composition consists in reasoning improperly from a property of a member of a group to a property of the group itself. This form of error is not restricted to groups of human beings but extends to all classes of things. And as such, it occurs in two varieties: First, it falsely extrapolates a quality of one group member to all group members. A hypothetical example would be committed by a man who observes that a particular American is rich and infers that all Americans, individually, are rich. Second, it is possible to transfer a quality of a member to the group itself. The man observes one rich American and concludes that America itself, as a group, is rich.^*

So Bovard sees some ineffective and/or counterproductive government regulations and concludes that government regulation, as a concept, is ineffective and/or counterproductive. Bovard sees some abusive federal officials and concludes that all federal officials are abusive.

"But,” readers may say, “Bovard cites hundreds of cases in which government regulations are counterproductive and/or ineffective. He cites hundreds of other cases in which government officials abuse or misapply the law.”

That's correct. But that doesn't nullify the fact that Bovard's case rests upon a logical fallacy, nor does it alter the fact that Bovard's case is further refuted by what I personally call “the law of plane-crash reportage.”

The law of plane-crash reportage, as readers may or may not know, simply asserts the fact that every plane crash makes news while tens of thousands of planes that don't crash are not reported. And so it is with government regulation: For every abusive government official who makes news, there are thousands of decent government officials whose good behavior goes unreported. For every instance in which government in its ceaseless rage to order makes news by doing something inane, insane, illegal or indecent, there are many thousands of instances in which government in its ceaseless rage to order does something sober, sane, legal and moral, and in acting with propriety fails to make news at all. Outrages and foul-ups are investigated, reported, sensationalized, but one hears nothing of good, sensible, effective regulation.

Applying logic and the law of plane-crash reportage to Bovard's book knocks his case against government to pieces. His evidence shows that some laws and regulations don't work at all times and in all situations. His evidence shows that some regulations don't work at all. His evidence shows that some government officials are corrupt and/or abusive. Rationally, it follows that government should fire corrupt or abusive officials. It follows that laws and regulations which don't work as intended should be reconsidered and perhaps repealed. But it isn't rational to look at Bovard's evidence and conclude that regulation as a concept is impractical and ought to be abandoned when, in fact, the vast bulk of America's experience with regulation weighs against any such conclusion.

Bovard may or may not be aware of the issues I've raised here. But, given the contents of his résumé and his rhetorical facility, he ought to be. The fact that he ought to be aware combines with the tone of the narration and pushes me toward the conclusion that Lost Rights is a deceit, as I wrote above: It is slop for a lot of hogs that are predisposed to ingest it without question.

Where Bovard buttressed subtle illogic with documented evidence, Hirschhorn's Delusional Democracy points out real problems to many of which it proposes surreal solutions. It may be tautological to add that Delusional Democracy is badly flawed but now, having added it anyway, I suppose I must explain. So I will.

In the first place, Delusional Democracy is not really a book. It's 255 pages long, it's organized into two parts and ten chapters. It has a preface, a bibliography, an index. It's bound in paperback. Still it is not a book: it is a 94,000-word op-ed column, and I say so because for practical purposes it is completely un-sourced.

To call the bibliography a works-consulted list would be more accurate because a significant number of the works named in the bibliography are not used in the text. For example, the biblio cites The Activist's Handbook, by Randy Shaw, and Is That a Politician In Your Pocket?, by Micah L. Sifry and Nancy Watzman. But neither the authors nor their books are cited in the text or the index. Of 39 entries in the bibliography, at least seven are not used in the text.

Where sources are used, they are cited in the narration rather than in footnotes, as on page 95: “Listen to what William Greider said in Who Will Tell the People:"

Notice that the cite is to the book but not to a specific page. If one wants to check the reference for some reason, one has to paw through Greider's book of 415 pages.

Readers should understand that I do not accuse Hirschhorn of deceit. I read Greider's Who Will Tell the People when it was new in 1992. I know the quote reads like something Greider wrote. In order to prove that Greider wrote it, however, I'd have to spend hours sifting through the text to find the quoted passage.

If only poor citation were the worst of Hirschhorn's crimes -- but it's not. Frequently, the author makes no attempt at attribution. Take the following paragraph (page 79) for example:

Here are some documented George W. Bush statements: “I pray I be as good a messenger of his will as possible,” “I trust God speaks through me. Without that I couldn't do my job.” “God wants me to spread democracy all over the World.” His father, Bush I, held this democracy-limiting view: “I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.” As to the 2000 election, General William Boykin said Bush “was not elected by a majority of the voters – he was appointed by God.” Boykin became Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

I'm not an authority on current events but I watch news more closely than most of the public, so I know every word in that paragraph is true. Still, I can't remember where I learned that stuff. So if I want to play the political activist, if I try to use Hirschhorn's book to convince non-believers that such things are true, I'm going to need some hard evidence to do the job. My word is not good enough. Joel Hirschhorn's word is not good enough.

Poor citation in Delusional Democracy belittles and belies the gruesome work entailed in writing such a book by making it a long, dreary, op-ed rant rather than a useful argument built on solid, verifiable facts. Hirschhorn spent time in the academy and in government. He works as a writer and knows the rules of citation, I'm sure, better than I do. His résumé is impressive but not more so than many others who write books of this sort. The best of them source quotations. Joel Hirschhorn can do the same.

In the second place, I said that Delusional Democracy is flawed by wishful thinking. And so it is. Consider that in 255 pages of text, my word processor found 163 occurrences of the word “must.” Usage on page 82 is typical (emphasis my own):

We must demand that our elected officials and judges not be on a mission for their God, only on a mission to fairly serve public interests according to the laws of the land. . . . Religious bullies must be opposed. Our rallying and battle cry must be framed as "DEFEND DEMOCRACY OR SUFFER THEOCRACY."

So is usage on page 24:

Discontent must produce active dissent. . . . Americans must extrapolate their personal insights about what is wrong to the future. They must see active dissent as protecting their personal future. . . . They must see themselves as political descendants of the Founding Fathers.

My favorite occurrence occurs on page 229:

. . . . Failed American government leads to more public discontent that leads to more disgust with the two-party system and its ability to address genuine public interests that leads to a successful citizens' revolution that leads to a third-party candidate winning the presidency. It could happen. It must happen.

Peter O'Toole famously told Omar Sharif that "Nothing is written." And while I understand that Hirschhorn's use of “must” is mostly advocative and only seldom imperative, it remains: If even half of all Hirschhorn says must happen actually came to pass, the combined occurrences would upstage Noah's Flood, the Exodus, and the Second Coming. Santa Claus must sell ice cream in Hell before I'll own that the plan for reform put forward in Delusional Democracy is anything but deluded.

Now I should make clear that I myself favor democracy. I have nothing against a three-party system or a ten-party system, so far as that goes. I believe Hirschhorn's perception of the political status-quo in America is accurate. I agree that something radical must happen if the situation is going to be saved. I differ with Hirschhorn on at least two points. One: I'm not convinced that our present situation is worth saving. Two: before I'll agree to participate, any plan to save the situation must be rational given what we know about human nature generally and about the nature of Americans in particular.

The upshot is that anyone who comes to Delusional Democracy looking for a catalog of America's political problems is in the right place, and many of the solutions proposed in the book are workable. The downshot is that many of the solutions proposed in Delusional Democracy are not realistic, which makes the plan of action put forward by the book as a whole problematic, to put it kindly.

Hirschhorn's belief in democracy, his patriotism, and the passion with which he wrote all ring like bells on the pages of Delusional Democracy. Nobody, having read it, could accuse the author of insincerity. Yet I conclude that if ever I set out to write a book on politics, Joel Hirschhorn and James Bovard together have shown me how not to write such a book.

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^* David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 219.

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And to think I called Johnson a prick!

2007-01-22T02:14:00.000-08:00

Once I snagged a load of fresh, ice-packed chickens at a slaughterhouse in Cumming, GA. I got out of there on a Wednesday, at 1:00 p.m., Eastern time. Destination was a cold-storage plant in Phoenix, AZ, scheduled delivery Friday at 1:00 p.m., Arizona time. I had 46 hours to make the 1900-mile trip.

I got to Phoenix two hours early. I remember the Mexican dock hands wanted me to pay them $60 to unload the truck. I wouldn't give them any money, so we had a haggle there.

They called my boss and worked it out on the phone. I don't know how, because I went to sleep. Hours later I was wakened by a Mexican who looked like an exceptionally vicious case of Montezuma's revenge. He shoved my freight bills at me and said coldly: "Get the fuck outa here." I took my papers and split.

In Phoenix, in those days, if you were an out-of-town trucker with time to kill, you did your killing at the Roadrunner Truckstop. I ran over there and had the chicken slop washed out of my trailer. After the washout, I drove onto the lot and parked with my trailer doors open, allowing the desert air to dry the inside of the box. Then I found a payphone and called my boss, who asked for a call-back number and told me to sit tight.

At 5 p.m. (Iowa time) I called him again. He explained that our accounts weren't moving much reefer freight out of Phoenix just then. I should call him on Monday at 10 a.m. Otherwise, my time was my own. I had supper, went to a bar, and got pissed up.

Saturday morning I climbed out of the cab, shut my trailer doors, and went to the diner. After breakfast, I went out to the truck and cranked the trailer dollies down. I jerked the fifth-wheel latch, disconnected the tractor's electrical pigtail and both gladhands from the trailer. Then I climbed up in the cab and drove the tractor about 10 feet forward, completely out from under the trailer.

My nearest neighbor was a flatbed driver parked two spaces away. I walked over there and chatted him up a little. He rummaged in the chain locker under his trailer and loaned me four 6x6 wooden blocks, the ends cut at 45 degrees.

I placed those blocks on the ground, one in front of each of my tractor's four, outboard driving wheels. Then I climbed up in the cab and locked in the power divider. I poked the stick into second gear and used the clutch to bounce the drive tires against the blocks, rocking the tractor forward and back four or five times, each time gaining momentum until -- boink! -- the wheels rolled up onto the blocks.

I mashed the clutch and the brake at the same time. Then I shifted to neutral, set the parking brake, got down out of the truck and made sure the drive wheels were squarely on the blocks. Next I wedged my own chocks under the front and the back of the curbside steering tire. Then I unlocked the power divider, killed the engine and released the parking brake.

Outside again, I donned my coveralls and crawled under the back of the tractor with some wrenches, a two-pound hammer and a grease gun. Laying flat on my back and sliding forward as I worked, I adjusted all four drive-wheel brakes, greased the slack adjusters, and checked lube levels in both differentials. I shot grease into all the nipples on the rear suspension and the U-joints on both driveshafts. I checked to make sure all the nuts and bolts were tight. I checked the lube in the transmission, then reached up into the bellhousing and greased the throwout bearing. All the while I worked I watched for wet oil, listened for the hiss of leaking air, and found nothing amiss.

Pleased with that fact, I crawled out from under, climbed up, reached into the cab and set the parking brake. Outside again, I greased the fifth wheel, the fifth-wheel dogs and the shift-linkage knuckles. I pulled the chocks away from the curbside steering tire and checked the lube level in both front wheel seals. Then I shoved a bottle jack under the curbside of the steering axle and raised the wheel off the ground. Crawling under, I greased the kingpin bushings, all of the steering joints and the spring shackles, and made sure all the bolts were tight. I crawled out from under, moved the jack to the driver's side, and repeated the procedure there.

Done under the truck, I put my 4x4 chocks away. Then, standing in front of the vehicle, I removed the radiator cap and checked the coolant level. I pulled the dipstick and checked the engine oil. It was down a gallon, so I added fresh.

Next, I stepped around the tractor and released both cab latches. Using the cab jack, I tilted the cab up and forward. When the cab was high enough, I set the safety so it couldn't fall back.

That done, I ducked under the cab to get up close and personal with the engine. I checked the belts, the hoses, the wiring. I grabbed the big cooling fan and shook it to check for wobble and then spun it to make sure that the hub was smooth and noiseless. I checked for cracks and abrasions on the plastic, "spaghetti" air lines from the shift tower to the transmission. I crawled up on top of the frame so I could check the bolts and keepers on the exhaust manifold. I checked the lube lines on the turbocharger and all of the clamps on the exhaust system. And all the while, everywhere, I looked and listened for leaks.

I hopped off the frame to the ground again, where I opened the battery box and checked the cables for tightness and for corrosion. I made sure the batteries were properly filled and put the cover back on the box. I removed the old fuel filter, primed a new filter, threaded it on and tightened it by hand using a clean, dry rag to grip it firmly.

All of that sounds like a lot, but it only took about three hours. When I was done, I put my tools away, stripped off my coveralls, and threw them in with the tools. Then I humped on over to the filling station. I bought a can of GOJO and went out to the tire bay, where I cleaned my hands and arms to the biceps and sluiced the goop off with water from a hose. Then I hit the diner for lunch. As I recall, the special was chili dogs.

Sometime I gotta write about truckstop chili dogs. They're a subgenre of truckstop chili, you know, which is one of those things you shouldn't ever eat but you try it anyway because you really like chili. Then you keep trying it because you really like chili and you figure it couldn't possibly be as bad in this place as it was in the last place and every time -- it's worse. Some drivers say it's possible for a chilihead to shake the compulsion by having chili just once at every truckstop in the country. Trouble is that no driver has ever survived long enough to complete the cure. Personally, I think it's a lie.

Done with lunch, I went back to the truck, climbed into the driver's box and started the engine. I listened to the big Cummins' healthy, clattering rumble while I watched the gauges climb the dials. Oil pressure and amperage both fine; air pressure climbed quickly from 90 to 125 psi, at which point the compressor unloaded and the spitter valve spat, and I saw the gauge stop moving. Normal. The wheel vibrated in tune with the engine, and the vibration felt good in my hands.

I stood on the clutch and put the transmission in reverse. Then I released the parking brake and let the clutch up off the floor a little. The tractor rolled backward, off the blocks and onto the ground. I stopped, shifted to neutral and set the parking brake. Then I climbed down from the cab, cleared the lumber out from under the truck and returned the 6x6 blocks to the flatbed driver.

That done, I climbed into the cab again. I released the parking brake and backed the tractor under the trailer. Timing the move perfectly, I stomped on the clutch just as the front of the fifth-wheel notch hit the trailer's latchpin (BOOM!), and the latch snapped shut. I shifted from reverse into first gear and released the clutch a bit. The tractor crept about an inch forward before the latchpin hit the back of the fifth-wheel latch with a jerk, just as I expected. I stomped on the clutch, shifted to neutral, released the clutch, set the parking brake and killed the engine.

I leapt to the ground, then climbed up, onto the frame between the tractor and the trailer. There I opened the service doors on the trailer refrigeration unit and checked the reefer's engine oil and belts. I climbed up the service ladder on the nose of the trailer and checked the coolant level in the reefer. Finding nothing amiss, I climbed down again. I shut the service doors on the reefer and hopped down off of the frame. Then, standing between the driver-side saddle tank and the front drive axle, I plugged the tractor's electrical pigtail into the trailer. I checked the grommets on the gladhands of both the tractor and the trailer, and hooked the gladhands together. Moving away from the saddle tank, I stepped to the side of the trailer, grabbed the dolly crank, and spun it rapidly until the dollies were all the way up.

After that I climbed into the cab, where I switched on the trailer lights and put tractor air pressure into the trailer's air system, which released the trailer's emergency brakes. I walked around the trailer, checked all the lights, and listened closely for air leaks. I climbed into the cab again, shut the trailer lights off and pulled the hand valve about halfway down. I went to the rear of the trailer to check the trailer brake lights and listen for leaks again. Then I went back to the cab, where I released the hand valve.

Donning my coveralls once more, I crawled under the rear of the trailer with some tools. I adjusted the trailer brakes and greased the slack adjusters and suspension nipples. While I worked, I listened for the hiss of leaking air and looked carefully for signs of leaking oil. Finding none, I crawled out from under and checked lube levels in all four trailer hubs.

Finally, I walked around the rig and hit the tread surface of every tire on every dual wheel with my hammer (It's sorta like thumping melons at the market: the hammer should bounce and you should hear a nice, ripe "plunk" from every tire; a change in pitch means something's amiss -- either a flat or a low tire).

There was nothing wrong, so I put my tools away, doffed my coveralls and climbed into the cab again. I shut off the lights, set the trailer emergency brakes, and dropped my luggage to the ground. Then I locked up the cab, grabbed my luggage, and walked over to the station, where I took a shower and changed clothes.

On my way back to the truck, I stopped and thanked the flatbed driver for the loan of those blocks and offered to buy him supper. He said that wasn't really necessary but he'd like it real fine. Then he added: "Bein's how it's only four o'clock, how's about we get a sixpack and go do our laundry? When we're done with that, we can find us a decent restaurant. I'm ready to go and I'm unhooked, so I'll drive."

I was game. We found a laundromat a half-mile away. We drank beer and swapped yarns while we did our wash. He said his name was Al.

Al spoke a little Spanish. He asked a few questions at the laundry. When we got out of there, we drove about two miles to a Mexican restaurant that was full of Mexicans, all of them clean and dressed in expensive Western clothes -- designer jeans, dancing skirts with petticoats, embroidery, silk bandanas, hand-tooled boots, Stetson hats, lots of silver and turquoise -- 'Urban Cowboy' does Guadalajara, you get the picture.

The beef tamales were simply wonderful. My side of beans and rice was garnished with the best pico de gallo I have ever tasted. Flour tortillas were two feet in diameter, paper thin, folded carefully, steamed to perfection, moist, chewy, luscious. They also had a green chili, rich with posolé and chunks of tender pork. Today as I write, looking out the window at six inches of bitter-cold, January snow, that chili tugs at my heart.

We bought another sixpack and some ice on the way back to the Roadrunner. We put lawn chairs up on the deck of the flatbed and sat there watching the sun go down while we sipped icy beer and smoked big, fat sticks of savage dope rolled in wheat-straw papers. The tales got taller as the joints got shorter. When we got so high that the air was thinning, everything was right in the world. I climbed into my bunk about midnight and slept like a child.

Sunday was quiet, except that the parking lot began filling up with trucks bound for Monday morning deliveries in the city. Al and I found a burrito stand a few blocks from the truckstop that wasn't bad. We had lunch there. We went back to the Mexican restaurant for an encore supper.

Monday morning, Al caught a load and faded. He left me in the diner with the meanest, ugliest waitress in the world, who looked and smelled like a really bad hangover. She spat curses and threw plate-loads of greasy eggs around like she was slopping a herd of hogs. One guy griped because his coffee was cold. "Piss in it," she advised. "That'll warm it up."

I called my boss at 10 a.m.: "Hello? Jimmy? Jimmy who? Ayuk ayuk ayuk ayuk ayuk ayuk ayuk! No freight yet. Call me at four."

Asshole.

There was no freight that afternoon, either. I murdered the rest of Monday, all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday at the Roadrunner. I went off on a grouch because the food was shitty and all the paperbacks on the rack had titles like Hondo Kills Everybody and Debbie Does Dallas/Fort Worth -- Twice.

Then I got lucky in the drivers' lounge. Buried in a pile of girly magazines, I found a copy of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. The paperback was badly mauled, but it was complete. How it got there I had no idea. I cleeked it and took it out to the truck.

At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, my boss (he was a produce broker) gave up looking for a load out of Phoenix. He wired me $400 and told me to shag my empty ass up to Pocatello, ID. "Be there and be ready on Friday morning. I'll have something for you."

He didn't have to persuade me. I walked around my rig and thumped the tires while high-speed pumps shoved 150 gallons of No. 2 diesel into the saddle tanks. Then I cashed my check and tore off northbound on I-17. I felt high and loose, like I'd just got out of jail.

I stopped for supper at 6 p.m. at Little America, in Flagstaff. In those days, the only thing fit to eat at Little America was their steak sandwich. So I ate a steak sandwich.

I walked through the store on my way out and there was Johnson, whom I hadn't seen since the last time I saw Johnson. He was ogling the cashier's tits while he pretended to ogle some rinky-dink travel game that was hanging by the register, for sale. A big yellow blurb on the blister pack exclaimed: "Hours and Hours of By-Yourself Enjoyment!"

So I said, "It must involve masturbation."

He glanced over his shoulder to see where that came from and, seeing me, shot back: "I bet your daddy knows."

"Awww! Now you've hurt my feelings. How come yer allus such a prick?"

"That's why they call me Johnson."

I followed him back to the diner, where we gossiped while he had a meal. He told me he'd unloaded his flatbed in Flagstaff that afternoon and had been ordered up to Salt Lake City for a load on Friday morning. My trip to Pocatello would take me right through Salt Lake, so we agreed to run together.

We got out of there a little after 1 a.m. and ran north on U.S. 89. I don't know what that road is like now, but back in those days, Arizona had the hard, red-dirt shoulders on either side of U.S. 89 graded flat and smooth and wide as the road itself. Under the half light of a full moon, 89 north of Flagstaff was big and sleek and fast. Using all thirteen gears and almost everything on the tach, my Freightliner ran 92 miles an hour. Johnson's Kenworth was geared a little taller but he stayed behind me so we'd stay together, and together we tore through the Arizona night.

We didn't see half a dozen cars between Flagstaff and Page, AZ. We were still a little south of Page -- maybe it was 3 a.m. -- when I saw a truck a couple of miles ahead. I knew it was stopped or in trouble because its four-way flashers were blinking, and I knew it was a flatbed because load lights blazed over the trailer from atop the headache rack. We geared down, geared down, geared down, geared down. By the time we came up on it, were were only moving about 20 mph.

The driver stood on the center line in the glare of his load lights, waving his hands back and forth in distress. I dropped another gear and rolled past him on the left, pulled off on the right-hand shoulder and stopped. Johnson rolled up behind me.

I blew my brakes, doused my headlights, grabbed my gloves and my flashlight. Then I leapt to the ground and walked back toward Johnson's truck. I heard Johnson's brakes blow, and his boots hit the ground just as I got to him. At idle, his Kenworth's big Caterpillar engine clattered and whined and wheezed serenely. Together we stood in that cloud of noise and sized up the other guy's rig, 40 yards away.

"He's half on and half off the road! He's a public menace sittin' there. Why didn't he get off the highway? Whaddya make o' dat?"

I dunno. Looks like he maybe lost his air and his brakes locked up. He panicked or his timing was bad and he didn't get off the road before the thing stopped. Now it won't move at all. Who knows? Let's go talk to 'im."

Close up, the guy was big enough to be a menace. Six-foot-two, at least, and the Harley-Davidson cap he wore made him look taller still. Shoulder-length dark hair; mirrored, wraparound sunglasses. But the rest of his clothes diminished him, annulled his physical size and the threat of the sunglasses: black, Special Forces, "Mess with the best and die like the rest" T-shirt; black leather vest with conchos; tight black Levis. His black, knee-high engineer boots with eagles stitched in white thread were an absolute scream. Between the huge rodeo buckle at his waist and all the pins and badges he wore, he was probably 20 pounds overweight and all of that was "German" silver. The hair and the sunglasses and the shape of his face together reminded me of John Kay -- if John Kay was a clown who bought cheap trinkets at every flea market in Arkansas.

Johnson spoke first: "What's wrong, Bud?"

"I'm afraid to move that truck enny futher."

"Why's that?"

"The load shifted on me 'bout a half-mile back."

"You know you're parked in the middle of the right-hand lane of a federal highway? You know if a cop comes along and sees you sittin' here you're prob'ly gonna wake up in jail tomorrow? You got any hazard reflectors in your truck?"

"Uh, yup. I guess I do! I'll git 'em out now." He got his reflectors out and went to scatter them down the road, behind his trailer.

Johnson said to me: "Let's us take a walk around this thing and see what we can see."

We took a walk around the thing. The load was lumber, finished 12-foot 2x4s in bundles that were banded tightly, the bundles sitting squarely on 4x4 dunnage. Shining flashlights across, between the trailer deck and the load, we saw that the dunnage was all in place. The load was neatly tarped: the tarps on squarely; plenty of overlap where overlap was needed; "hospital corners" neatly done at both ends of the load; tie-down eyelets laced to the rubrail with sisal rope that was tight as a banjo string. Both the tarps and the lumber were held securely to the deck with 5-inch, nylon straps, the straps correctly stretched across the load, each of them pulling straight down onto a piece of dunnage.

Johnson grabbed a winch bar off the guy's headache rack. He walked down the driver's side of the trailer and used the bar on the winches to make sure every strap was tight. He bounced his whole weight at the end of the 5-foot bar and was unable to gain even one more pawl from any of the eight winches on the trailer.

"Shit!" Johnson cussed. "Them straps is so tight you could turn this trailer upside down an' shake it, that lumber would not fall off. This load is tight and square, blocked right and centered on the trailer. I can't find anything wrong with it. I'd be proud of it if it was mine."

The guy was back by this time. Johnson turned on him: "You sure this load has shifted?"

"Yup: I surely am. I thought the whole fuckin' rig was gonna flip inna middle o' the road back there."

"Do you care if climb up in your truck and try to move it off the road?"

"No. Go ahead if you wanna."

Johnson parked the rig in the middle of the shoulder, 5 yards off the highway. He blew the brakes, doused the lights, killed the engine and got down from the cab.

I said, "Let's look at the inside tires and the suspension. Maybe he had a blowout or busted a spring or somethin'. At highway speed, a thing like that might o' throwed 'im sideways."

We checked and found nothing wrong.

Johnson turned on the guy again. "How's if you get up in your truck an' follow us on up to Kanab, Utah? It's only 90 miles or so. There's bound to be a shop o' some kind there. You can have a mechanic check it out, come daylight."

"Nope. I ain't drivin' that thing another yard. I was afraid to move it 'cuz I was afraid it'd turn over. I think them radial tires is soft enough to let 'er flip right whar she's parked."

"Really. Then what was you plannin' to do about all o' this?" How come you flagged us down?"

"I was hopin' you fellers had some blocks."

"I got blocks. Whaddya want blocks for?"

"Well, I figger if we put blocks under the axles and let the air outa them radial tires, the thing won't flip over before I get a wrecker out here."

"Son: It's 3:30 in the mornin', dark as hell. How come you're wearin' them sunglasses?"

"Am I wearin' sunglasses?" He pulled them off. "Jeez, I didn't know."

Johnson looked at me. I looked at Johnson. We walked away and left him there.

Little more than an hour later we were in Kanab. We found a big dirt parking lot on the east side of the main drag, right across the street from a cafe. It was about 5:00 a.m. We napped.

At 8:30 we were in the diner, tucked into ham an' eggs an' taters an' sausage an' grits an' biscuits an' gravy an' like that. All of a sudden, another guy came in.

The new fella was older, 60 at least, a mean-lookin' cuss. Five-foot-six, iron gray hair slicked down, thick bushy brows, brittle blue eyes, and little round glasses with gold wire rims. He was hawk-nosed and hatchet-faced, had a wide mouth with thin lips and was dressed like a bus driver from 1948: gray, flat-topped, octagonal driver's cap with black, patent-leather visor; gray khaki work shirt and pants to match the cap; black canvas belt, black Wellington boots, and a big, black, chain-drive wallet.

He walked over to a table next to ours and sat. He drilled us with his eyes and then, with no introduction and no windup, he leaned over and asked conspiratorially: "You fellers goin' north or south?"

I answered: "We're northbound. Why?"

"I just wondered," came the reply. "I come up from Prescott an' Flagstaff, myself. Dijoo fellers see a guy with a flatbed load o' lumber there just south o' Page?"

I chuckled and said: "Yeah, we talked to him. Did he tell you what he wanted?"

"Yup: he sure told me."

"What did you think about that?"

"Think about it? They warren't much to think about. I put blocks under his axles while he let the air out of his tires."

I spluttered, got iced tea all up my nose, spewed tea all over my food and even got a little on Johnson, who was trying not to choke his own self.

With tears in my eyes, I finally gasped: "You did what?"

"Yup. You heard me alright."

"How come you did that?"

"Well, after I talked to 'im for a few minutes, I got to thinkin' he needed to be up on blocks." He straightened his shoulders and raised his chin ever so slightly as he finished: "The world is a safer place 'cuz o' me."

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Marley and the Chick and the Beans

2007-01-08T05:33:00.000-08:00

As I start this item, the time here is 7:20 a.m. I've been astir for more than two hours, now. The cats are fed and watered. The fires are built and both stoves are hot. It's beginning to get warm in my bedroom, where I sit at the keyboard.

While I write, I wait for Marley to scratch at the door. Marley is a big, orange, long-haired, blue-tongued, brown-eyed, suitcase-faced, half-collie, half-chow mongrel, who begs door-to-door in the village I now call home. He belongs to a 93-year-old lady, my neighbor across the street. So it's probably due to proximity and not to preference that my house is both the first and the last stop on Marley's daily stroll around town. I count on seeing Marley every day between 7 and 8 a.m. and again between 3 and 4 p.m.

Every day I give Marley a snack, but not always at the same time. Sometimes he gets it in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon, depending on circumstances. This morning he's in luck because I made a pot of ham stock last night. That means I have some large, salty, marrow-rich shank bones to lay on my pal when he shows up.

I get a kick out of watching his reaction to various gifts. If it's something he doesn't much care for, he looks up at me from under his brows in a way that says, "Uh, well, uh, thanks, I guess. I guess I can eat that." He won't take it from my hand. I have to lay it on the ground at his feet. If it's something he likes, he takes it from my hand eagerly. Sparks of grateful adoration flash in his eyes. Then, with his treasure in his mouth and his head held high, he curls his big tail up over his back and prances around the yard two or three times. It seems that's as far as Marley can get toward a football player's touchdown strut, and seeing him do it just makes my day.

Speak of the devil -- Marley's had his snack, now. His reaction was ecstatic.

While I was in the kitchen, I picked through a pound of dried red kidney beans and put them in a deep bowl of water. Late this afternoon, I'll pour off the soak, rinse the beans in clean water, and then cook 'em in some of that ham stock. Supper tonight is red beans and rice -- not because it's Monday, but because I like red beans and rice.

Picking through those beans, I thought of this chick who stayed with me for a few weeks back in the crazy days. Andy brought her to town, a refugee from some fascist girls' school back in Jersey. She thought she was a big-time doper. Andy and I packed a bunch of Spañada in ice, made up another cooler full of sandwiches, filled a paper bag with chips and cookies and stuff, and took the chick camping along the Colorado River.

We were laying around the fire, smoking Panama Red through a corn-cob pipe. The chick said she liked acid and asked if we had any. We didn't. So, as a consolation prize, we fed her a hit of psilocybin and a couple of cartwheels.

Next thing you know, she was screaming her face off. Still screaming, she jumped up and ran around in circles a few times before she took off into the weeds. Andy and I went looking for her after we finished the bowl we were smoking, but we couldn't find her because it was dark out there in the weeds and she'd quit yelling by that time. Maybe we saw her and didn't know it: that was good psilocybin.

At any rate she was back by noon the next day, snake-bit, and lookin' pretty rough. So we loaded her up and hauled her to the free clinic in town, where they fixed the snake bite and gave her a shot or something. Then we went back to my place, where we all had showers and a nice, long nap.

Next morning, Andy and I got back into the Spañada while I cooked breakfast. I was gonna make red beans and rice for supper, and I had to go to the store to get some ham. Andy went back to bed. The chick's leg was swollen so badly that she couldn't go anywhere, so I asked her if she'd sort and wash the beans while I was gone.

"Sure," she said. "I'll do that." Then she asked me for a toothbrush.

That didn't seem odd, considering the hangovers we were nursing. My own mouth was foul when I woke up. I had a couple of spare brushes in the bathroom, so I gave her one. Then I went to the store.

When I got back I found her in the kitchen, bent over a dishpan on the counter. She was using her new toothbrush to scrub those beans one at a time before dropping each of them into a clean bowl. I didn't say anything to her about it because she was working really fast, but I made a note to tell Andy we'd better not give her any more cartwheels.

Cops busted Andy on the street a few weeks later. He went to prison and I never saw him again. The chick stayed with me a few more days before she disappeared. I don't know where she went and, if she's still alive, I bet she doesn't either. Her parents are probably still looking for her.

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Clio No. 1

2006-11-05T03:46:00.000-08:00

We lived in a basement apartment. One large window at ground level offered a fine view of the back yard.

From the house, the lawn rolled downhill through a grove of ash and walnut and ended 50 yards away at the lip of a rocky, brush-choked ravine.

At five o’clock on a December evening, the sun was just down. A warm front had pushed through in mid-afternoon. Now there was no wind. Warm, moist air clotted into fog where it brushed against the inch of new snow that covered the frozen earth. Leafless trees stood stark against the blanket on the ground. It was a black-and-white world in which there were no shadows.

I was making pancakes for supper. Stirring a bowl of batter, I looked out the window and admired the herd of deer that had come out of the ravine to graze on the lawn. There were eight of them. The nearest was only a few yards from the house. Hock-deep in the rising fog, the graceful animals were as black as the trees behind them. It looked like something out of Poe or Hawthorne.

Then, for no apparent reason, one of the creatures leapt into the air and kicked behind itself like a rodeo bronc. It hit the ground and stamped a bit, looking about nervously. When it stood quiet again, it still seemed poised for flight. Seconds later another deer jumped, kicking and bucking like the first. Then a third animal leaped and, moments later, a fourth.

"Gee!" I said to myself: "I never seen deer act like that before. I wonder what's got into 'em?"

Then I saw Clio. She shot up out of the fog like a little black missile and sank all of her claws into one of the deer, high up inside its left rear thigh. The deer jumped and bucked and kicked, just as the others had.

In the moment it jumped Clio sprang clear of the animal. She hit the ground crouched, a furry bundle of springs and hooks and viciousness, sidling away from her still-stamping victim and toward another deer, which she attacked in the same manner.

With my attention focused at ground level, it was easy to see Clio work. I watched in fascination while she methodically drove that herd of deer down the hill and back into the ravine, where I suppose it seemed to her that they belonged. That done, she stalked the perimeter of the yard to make sure we had no more prowlers. Then she came to the window, where she plucked at the screen -- her way of telling me to open the door.

She came in and paced serenely to her dish, where she had a snack and a tiny drink. Then she flopped in my favorite chair and took up washing her feet.

I looked at the clock. It read 5:12. Back in the kitchen, I noticed the calendar on the wall. Clio would be seven months old in a week.

Our landlady lived upstairs. Her name was Mauree. She was then in her mid-seventies and still spry. She had reigned as head librarian of a large school district for many years, so she was accustomed to having the world ordered in her own way and even more accustomed to telling others how that should be done. Mauree had a bluff manner and an acerbic tongue, but she also had an active mind, a lively curiosity, and a scrumptiously dry wit.

I wanted to hear what Mauree would say about Clio and the deer, so I set my pancake batter aside. Then I walked out the door and around to the front of the house, where I stepped onto the porch and rang the bell.

Mauree opened the door, said "Good evening" pleasantly, and asked me what was the matter. I told her. She shriveled me with her best you-have-27-books-that-are-two-years-overdue look and said, "Jimmy, you're a liar." Then she shut the door in my face.

Telling myself I should have known better, I walked around to the basement and went back to work on my supper. Crisp lean bacon and buckwheat cakes with butter, maple syrup and a quart of ice-cold milk will do for any grudge that follows me home.

Emma lived next door to our west. She was a retired schoolmarm with something like 45 years behind the chalk. She was older than Mauree, though how much older neither woman would tell. Emma was a gentle soul who had been a great gardener and a real beauty in her day. Her back yard was still full of flowers, though she'd let the beds go as she got older. When I knew Emma, weeds threatened to choke her flowers. Knowing Emma's story as I did, the flowers and the weeds made a wonderful metaphor.

Emma belonged to some crank organization for old women. I don't know what it was called (It was not DAR) but requirements for membership included having to prove one's matrilineal ancestry back 500 years or some such nonsense. Emma was secretary of the local chapter. At a recent meeting, members had decided that one of Emma's duties would be to keep a genealogical database. That, mind you, and poor old Emma had scarcely ever seen a computer and had arthritis in her fingers so bad that she could no longer type more than a few words per annum.

Emma's back yard was blooming raucously on the first of April, when she knocked on my door to plead for help. She explained about the database and asked me please would I type into the computer while she read to me from her hard-copy membership files. She promised me lunch, and I like lunch -- especially when lunch is cooked by an old Southern belle. So we went to Emma's basement, where we sat with a computer. Sliding glass doors showed off the carnival of flowers that nodded dewily outside the glass, just beyond the flagstone patio.

I typed while Emma read somewhat as follows (names changed here to protect the innocent): "Mary Henderson Smith: born 1827, died 1928. Mary Bowser Henderson: born 1760, died 1907. Ellen Jones Bowser: born 1727, died 1769. Helen Morrison Jones: born 1627, died 1789. Violet MacIntosh Morrison -- "

"Emma!" I said: "Do you realize that Helen Morrison Jones supposedly lived to be 162 years old? And Mary Bowser Henderson, according to your information, was 147 years old when she died? Are you sure these dates are correct?"

Emma stared blankly into the distance, somewhere behind my right shoulder. Her eyes got awfully big and then started leaking tears. She drawled, "Ohhh, Jimmy. . . ."

"Fool!" I thought. "That'll teach you to open your stupid yap. Now you've gone and hurt this sweet old person. Why didn't you just type and be done with -- "

"She's so brave!" Emma finished.

"Who's so brave?" I asked. "Mary Bowser Henderson? But she's dead -- "

Emma cut me off. "Not her." she said dreamily. "It's your little cat. Look out the doors there."

Clio, now 13 years old, guards the porch at Troy Mills.

So I turned and looked outside. Two big deer stood facing one of Emma's flower beds about halfway down the garden walk. Between them and the flower bed, directly in their way, stood Clio. She was up on her toes, back arched, lashing her biggest tail back and forth like a club. Plainly, she was threatening those deer with murder and worse. As we watched, she made good on her threats.

Every time one of the deer put its head down to browse in that flower bed, Clio sprang into the animal's face. She was a hissing, spitting, scratching fury. When the deer moved toward another flower bed, Clio was there before them, eyes blazing, back arched, yowling and spitting curses. She would not let them eat.

The gentle animals had no recourse. In a very short while, they gave up and walked away.

Clio walked down the garden path behind the deer to the lip of the ravine, where she abandoned pursuit. Then she came back to the house and flopped down emphatically, just outside the sliding doors, and washed herself while she watched the flowers. She never once looked at us, looking at her through the glass. It was plain (to me at least) that her beef with the deer was territorial.

Emma thought differently. "Well!" she exclaimed. "I'll sleep better tonight knowin' I won't be attacked by wild deer. Where ever did you find that cat?"

I grinned as I replied: "Right across the street at the daycare center. She was eight weeks old when I met her. She'll be a year old, middle o' May. Ain't she a doozy?"

Back at home, just before sundown, somebody knocked. I opened the door and saw Mauree. She stood on my doorstep and stared at me woodenly as she said, "Jimmy: I'm sorry I called you a liar. I saw your cat with the deer today. She is quite insane."

I had a mind to thank her and ask her in for tea, but before I could say a word she turned her back and left.

Next day I told Emma about Mauree's brittle apology. Emma told me I should be proud. "You're a privileged creature," she said. "I've been close to Mauree for forty years and never knew she apologized to anyone."

I awarded Clio a whole can of StarKist in oil, and I walked on air for days.

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