May 29, 2007
I call my girlfriend Magpie because she is smart, built for action and she regards me with the experienced eye of a cynic. She is always prepared to turn a situation to her profit.
She frequently admonishes me, “You are not in the mainstream,” and, indeed, I’m not. I believe in a republic of independent thinkers. That’s an easy thing to do when you’re sitting at an outdoor café lushing it up at Happy Hour, though a ride on the subway, with its population of thoroughly put-upon commuters, quickly disabuses you of the concept that people are going to educate themselves enough to arrive at their own conclusions on the issues of the day. They have got enough on their plate with kids, car payments and misbegotten careers that they fundamentally hate.
That is why they allow their opinions to be formed by the reactionary class, who is paid by the big money to hammer away at themes of self-reliance in order to keep tax rates low.
One of the big issues of the Republican Party in recent years has been France and the French, who had the audacity a generation ago to elect the Socialists to power, which the American ruling class took as a direct slap in the face. Tough shit, Sherlock. The French voted themselves a 35-hour week, five weeks’ vacation and various other plums, which they paid for by taxing big corporations. Never mind that these corporations, which are huge even by American standards, were able to pay and still keep functioning, mainly because they are so effectively operating as multinationals.
Strictly speaking, none of this was any of America’s business. Still, the Republicans kept hammering away at the French on a daily basis to ensure that the workforce here would not be contaminated by any of these foreign concepts. This hectoring reached a point of frenzy in the build-up to the Iraq war as the French tried to mount a campaign against the invasion of that country which, in retrospect, was a very shitty idea, not because of the morality of it but because of the reality of it.
I’m not here to cop a plea for people of Iraq, but because as a concept the war has been demonstrated to be an opium dream that has cost our country dearly in terms of resources and manpower. Not that those resources would not have been wasted on some other indulgence due to the arrogance and vapid reasoning of our increasingly redundant ruling class.
“Strong leadership,” as it’s currently perceived, is a black hole into which we are all being sucked because the main proponents of it are all Republicans, who have a demonstrably feeble grasp of reality, or those Democrats who are pandering to the current trend. There are no strong leaders who can point to a demonstrable record of public achievement, or even of having been demonstrably correct in their theory. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who has been hammering away for a generation on the theme of a national medical plan, an idea whose time has finally reached its maturity despite all efforts to derail it. When you consider that one-seventh of our economy is devoted to health care and one seventh of the country is still not covered, it makes you wonder where all that loot is going. In a word, it’s going into the pockets of the insurance combines, and they are among the prime motivators of all the anti-French hysteria, considering that the French did away with all that stealing a long time ago.
Lately, though, since the election of Nicholas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate for the French presidency, the continual anti-French whirlwind of invective has somewhat abated. Sarkozy is the Great White Hope of anti-Socialist sentiment in this country, though the hopes of the neo-capitalists may yet be dashed on the rocks of French public opinion, which may be reluctant to give up its “acquis,” or previously acquired social benefits, to suit the interests of the multinationals. As they have proven repeatedly throughout history, the French are not timid about massively pouring into the streets to put a halt to what they perceive as savage forms of neo-capitalist backsliding. Sarkozy has already conceded that some areas of policy are off-limits to his program of reform. When the full extent of Sarkozy’s exceptions becomes evident, the streets may yet again be full, not of Frenchmen but of bow tied American neo-conservatives, and the gutters of America may yet again flow with French wine.
What of it? Sarkozy’s personal style may at first glance seem to represent some similarities to Italy’s kleptocratic former leader, Silvio Berlusconi, but the historical record argues against his toeing the American line. Sarkozy claims to be the continuation, though much-diluted, of the tradition of Charles de Gaulle who, even in vastly more reduced circumstances, represented the interests of France against a much more preponderant America power.
Anybody who has lived with a woman for any length of time knows the extreme lengths she will go to in order to get a man under her thumb. Screaming fits, nagging, insults are all par for the course in subjugating a man. On the national level we have our party of nags, the Republicans, who have come to dominate our national life by much those same techniques of hectoring by use of a right-wing press that keeps the national level at a fever pitch. Unfortunately, we have no vigorous left-wing press to rebut the agents of reaction. There’s nobody to tell Rupert Murdoch to shut up, so the point of view he promotes is pretty much accepted as the official line which Democrats are loathe to step on for fear of being represented as unpatriotic traitors. As a consequence, the present day insanity of the Iraq war and the 50-year embargo of Cuba continue unabated and uncontested.
They sell us social concepts the way advertising sells us soap, with sound bites and repetitive reinforcement until we are conditioned to think of the Democrats as overly pliable and irresolute, and themselves as firm and unyielding. Of course, the actual product falls well short of its advance promotion. The present Republican leadership consists of Bush and Giuliani, who are completely bogus, and John McCain, who may or may not have leadership standing, depending on how one interprets his conduct leading up to and including his captivity by the North Vietnamese.
I’m not here to debate John McCain’s acceptability as a national leader, except to repeat whit I have read, that he was reportedly cautioned by his commanding officer (“warned” is too strong a word since McCain’s father was commander of the Sixth Fleet, and one does not “warn” the son of an admiral) not to perform “Top Gun” flying tricks with his F-16 while flying above Vietnamese rocket emplacements, which might result in getting shot down. Also, there are stories that the Vietnamese, eager to get rid of this hot potato of an admiral’s son, repeatedly begged him to leave the Hanoi Hilton and go home, which he resolutely refused to consider. You can’t read into the heart of another man but you can speculate about what future political ambitions entertained McCain’s mind during those hundreds and thousands of miserable nights in that cell that he inhabited with such insistence.
Strong leadership. What yardstick might one use to measure such an elastic concept? It’s tempting to return to our much reviled sometimes allies, the French, and the original progenitor of their current political dynasty, Charles de Gaulle. Maybe by shining a light on the salient points of his career we might be able to divine a clearer definition of that much-overused slogan.
De Gaulle, the son of a schoolmaster, graduated from St. Cyr, France’s West Point. In 1912 he was attached to an infantry company commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain, whose military career had been frozen in suspended animation for questioning the official military doctrine of the day. Pétain believed that the official doctrine of aggressive attack was wasteful in light of the overwhelming effectiveness of modern weaponry and adhered to a strategy of static defense, using artillery and machine guns to soften up an area before moving up ground troops.
As a young officer de Gaulle considered this cautionary approach too timid and argued for a more aggressive approach to warfare. When World War I broke out, de Gaulle immediately put his aggressive theory of attack into practice and was gravely wounded. After spending several months in hospital, he was sent back to the front, where he was captured by the Germans, and he spent the next three years in captivity, attempting escape on three different occasions. Each time he was recaptured and punished. He did not see France again until 1918, when prisoners were exchanged as part of the general armistice.
By this time the pendulum of military doctrine had swung in the direction of Pétain. After the horrendous losses of manpower suffered by France in World War I, opinion had swung in favor of static warfare. Pétain, whose career had hung in abeyance for so many years due to his reluctance to needlessly waste lives in suicidal waves of attack, was credited for breaking the back of the Germans at the Battle of Verdun and was promoted to the rank of Marshal, and he was idolized and adored throughout France.
De Gaulle, who was demoralized and filled with remorse for having passed most of the war in captivity, returned to active service in the army and was immediately adopted as a protégé by his former commander, Pétain, who assigned him as an instructor at the War College in Paris. De Gaulle also ghostwrote speeches and articles for use by Pétain.
This favoritism shown to de Gaulle by Pétain provoked jealousy among other military officers. In addition, de Gaulle’s stiff and formal military bearing, entering a class of officers with white gloves and bearing a sword, did not mark him as a “people person.” In addition, de Gaulle insisted upon promulgating his own concept of military strategy involving the use of mobile tank divisions supported by air power.
The French military establishment considered him to be a lunatic and an abomination much the way American strategists persecuted General Billy Mitchell for insisting that the day would eventually come when an aircraft would be able to sink a battleship.
The Germans, however paid close attention to de Gaulle’s treatises on military strategy, and when Hitler assumed power he ordered the formation of three Panzer tank divisions, soon to be followed by five more, all supported by air power!
The French insisted on adhering to their strategy of static defense and built a line of seemingly impregnable fortresses and fortified trenches along their border with Germany, called the “Maginot Line” after the Minister of Defense. Hitler’s Panzer divisions circumvented the line by driving through the Ardennes forest, which the French considered impenetrable, and quickly entered France. It was only at this time, with the Germans already conquering French soil, that the French command conceded the soundness of his thinking and awarded de Gaulle a tank division, various odds-and-ends of armored vehicles, to meet the superbly equipped Panzer divisions supported by Stuka divebombers.
It was no contest, but de Gaulle was brought into the war cabinet of Prime Minister Reynaud, where he was to meet British Prime Minister Churchill in the last days before the collapse of France. Churchill was so impressed by de Gaulle’s military bearing and resolve to fight on that, as the French government was forced to leave Paris for Bordeaux, from whence they would plead with the Germans for an armistice, the British leader sent an RAF plane to bring de Gaulle to London to form a government-in-exile even as the French government, now headed by none other than Pétain, prostrated itself before Hitler.
Immediately upon landing in London, de Gaulle met the same day with Churchill and that evening went on BBC Radio to exhort the people of France to resist the German invaders. He invited the overseas French who inhabited its worldwide empire to come to London to unite under his symbol, the Cross of Lorraine, and fight side-by-side with the British to crush Germany.
The Pétain government, which would later install itself in the resort town of Vichy, immediately cashiered de Gaulle from the military, revoked his French citizenship and sentenced him to death in absentia. (After the war Pétain was convicted of treason and died in prison.)
Nevertheless, de Gaulle, exiled, broke and stateless, rallied around his person, in which he audaciously embodied the honor and legitimacy of the French nation, all the disparate elements of the French empire, and at war’s end was able to march under the Arc de Triomphe in a victory procession as head of state. After the war he retired to his modest country house in Colombey-Deux-Eglises until 1958, when France, once again shattered by the colonial conflict in Algeria and itself on the verge of civil war, pleaded for him to assume the reins of power once more, which he consented to do only after the political establishment agreed to the rewriting of the constitution investing all the power of the state in his office.
As president of France, he ended the Algerian war on terms extremely advantageous to French interests and streamlined the French economy, guaranteeing the country’s continuance as an economic powerhouse.
Now, THAT’S what I call strong leadership, not no Mission Accomplished bullshit or giving little speeches like Giuliani, or falling into captivity because of horsing around with your jet fighter and then refusing to leave!
We fortunately don’t need this kind of leadership because life in this country is good thanks to the industriousness of its working population. But it’s instructive to know the difference. So the next time some moron gives a speech invoking “strong leadership” the readers of this blog (all two of you) will not get sucked into the “mainstream” of imbecilic superficiality.
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/29/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 451 Times
 Send to Friend
|
May 23, 2007
Anybody who doubts my clairvoyant abilities to predict the future had better think again. In a poem I published in this blog last week, “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” I have Governor Schwartzenegger advising Paris Hilton to read the Bible for purposes of meditation while serving her jail sentence of 20 (days) to life for the offense of driving with an unlicensed Chihuahua dog in her car.
Evidently Paris herself or somebody close to her takes my opinion seriously, because the front page of today’s New York Post has a photograph of her looking for all the world like a seminary student and lugging around the Holy Bible as a show of her newfound piety.
Way to go, Paris! I always appreciated you for your intellectual erudition. Where the rest of the world just focused on your pantyless snatch, I knew that under that golden blonde mane there existed the didactic professorial intellect of a biblical scholar.
Paris Hilton is not stupid. She’s a genius. There are a lot of dopey rich girls, but only Paris Hilton found the formula for turning brainless idiocy into fame and fortune, like my heroes The Three Stooges. There are a lot of beautiful, brilliant girls but only Paris Hilton gets paid a hundred grand, a private jet, a penthouse suite and a Lamborghini sports car just for showing up at a photo opportunity.
I am vastly smarter than Paris Hilton and I don’t look bad either, but if I showed up at one of those events all I would get is a boot in the ass.
For my next prediction, I forecast that she will be consulted by the Pope in Rome, will be appointed Secretary of State to solve the Middle East crisis and will minister to the impoverished masses of the Indian subcontinent.
I guarantee you that the next photo of Paris Hilton to appear on the front page of The New York Post will show her lugging around all 36 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Einstein better watch out!
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/23/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 409 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 20, 2007
Our fearless Italian war correspondent, Salmonella Mustaccioli, managed to get an exclusive battlefield interview with the new leader of Al-Queda in Iraq, Moola Marikon.
Salmonella – Thanks for granting me this interview.
Moola – Duck!
Salmonella – Why, is someone shooting?
Moola – No, I saw a duck and I want to catch him for dinner.
Salmonella – Lately you haven’t had much luck killing Americans.
Moola – That’s because we’ve been suffering from Projectile Dysfunction.
Salmonella – Why is that?
Moola – Every time we aim our rocket launcher the donkey moves and shakes the cart.
Salmonella – What do you plan to do about it?
Moola – We’re unveiling our new secret weapon, laser-guided flying carpets. When the enemy steps on one, it moves and the guy falls down.
Salmonella – Do you get a lot of arms from Iran?
Moola – Yeah. Also a lot of legs and heads.
Salmonella – What’s your plan for attacking the Green Zone?
Moola – We’re digging a tunnel.
Salmonella – Why is it taking so long?
Moola – We started digging in Syria.
Salmonella – Do you intend to attack the Kurds?
Moola – You bet. We’re also going to attack the Turds, the Herds and the Nerds.
Salmonella – Do you miss Saddam Hussein?
Moola – You bet! We always missed him, even when he was alive.
Salmonella – You missed Saddam Hussein while he was alive?
Moola – Yeah, we used to shoot at him but he wouldn’t stay still, and we missed him.
Salmonella – How do you get so many guys to volunteer for suicide bombers?
Moola – Easy. We force them to watch reruns of Heather Mills dancing on American Idol. They’ll do anything to get out of that.
Salmonella – How come you don’t like Sh’iite Muslims? />
Moola – When they eat the food falls in their beards, and they smell like souvlaki.
Salmonella – What do you eat in Al-Queda?
Moola – Duck!
Salmonella – You eat duck?
Moola – No, I’m telling you to duck. The Americans are shooting at us.
Salmonella – Thanks for the tip.
Moola – Forget it. Actually, we’re teaching our boys how to make pizza.
Salmonella – Why would you do that?
Moola – So we can deliver the pizza onto the army base and kill soldiers. We slice up sticks of dynamite and use it for pepperoni, then we use our cell phones to detonate it.
Salmonella – You guys are really sneaky.
Moola – Thanks.
Salmonella – Have you ever considered negotiating with the Americans?
Moola – Yeah, we told them that if they give us some virgins, then we won’t have to blow ourselves up to go to heaven?
Salmonella – And what did the Americans say?
Moola – They offered us Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears. Fuggedaboudit!
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/20/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 436 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 18, 2007
Horror of horrors! That indomitable defender of civilized values and defenders of American righteousness, The New York Post, is being maligned by a disgruntled former employee for (gasp)… corruption!
For the same journal that declared Jesus to be a Republican because, as a carpenter, he was a small business owner to be accused of accepting bribes and kickbacks, of killing stories that might prejudice the far-flung business interests of owner Rupert Murdoch, for the paper’s editor to be named as receiving complimentary lap dances at Scores strip bar without even leaving a tip, for Page Six editor Richard Johnson to admit receiving envelopes filled with cash in return for plugging restaurants in his column – it simply reduces my faith in journalistic integrity to…A STEAMING PILE OF MANURE!
Oh, I had my doubts, to be sure. I always suspected that inside that inflated Superman suit of working class respectability there might lurk a loudmouth, drunken twit of a semi-literate screwball basket case. As my dear, departed mother once told me, “Insanity is in the blood,” and I long suspected insanity to be an integral aspect of The Post’s corporate family.
I’ve made jokes about the paper in this blog, but that’s because I didn’t want to confront the possibility that New York’s public opinion was being shaped by a bunch of lunar nut jobs. But between the discreet, middle class dysfunction of The New York Times, with its Ding-Dong School of Arthur Sulzberger, Judith Miller, Jayson Blair, Maureen Dowd and what-have-you, and the wildly bouncing-off-the-walls Murdoch Gong Show (we’ll just leave the largely irrelevant Daily News in its own rubber room for now), my heart went out to The Post. Unlike The Times, which thinks it’s an institution when it deserves to be locked up in one, The Post makes no pretension of being other than a Coney Island freak show of raw chicken-eating geeks, bomb-lobbing reactionaries, loudmouth fascist poseurs and wildly fanatical charlatans backed up by the best staff of sportswriters in the city. At least, with The Post you get fantastic baseball coverage and photos.
I have always maintained that all writers are whores, and The Post has kindly stepped up to the plate to illustrate my point. Look what you got here:
“Accepting [bribes and gratuities] was not only condoned by the Company but encouraged as a way to decrease the newspaper’s out-of-pocket expenses.”
“Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allen “had taken kickbacks and bribes, often in return for favorable Post coverage.”
Page Six editor Richard Johnson, who is a fanatical lush, known for drinking for free in every bar in the city, and current business editor Sean Garner receiving envelopes of cash from restaurant owners in return for plugging the eateries.
These items, published in The Post itself in order to be able to claim deniability before the rest of the news media get hold of them, are contained in a lawsuit by yet another former Page Six stringer who himself reportedly went unhinged and tried to shake down a millionaire celebrity with threats of negative press coverage. The reporter was fired and is now trying to shake down The Post. Oy vey!
I have my own problem with The Post. My former employer, Helmer Toro, tried to stick me with a $20,000 tax bill as part of his ongoing shenanigans with the New York State Department of Taxation. I couldn’t convince the Tax Department that I was Toro’s unwilling sucker and they were about to start proceedings to attach my paycheck. The only way out of it for me was to hire an expensive attorney and go to court, which I had no intention of ever spending even one nickel on this scumbag, Toro.
So I came up with the idea of exposing his whole scam to the newspapers, but I needed a hook that would interest them, so I composed a poem about Toro that called him a fucking stooge and an idiot.
Page Six loved the poem, which is a masterpiece of malevolence, and they ran with it, right at the top of the page. After that, Toro moved fast to get my name off his phony articles of incorporation.
The only problem is, lunatic scumbags that they are, The Post also blasted ME for having a vicious mouth, when all I was trying to do was to get this moron, Toro, off my back without having to pay an attorney.
Now, when you Google my name, up pops this Post item, like a herpes sore, calling me vicious and showing the poem that I wrote about a former employer. Never mind that all the other items about me are really tremendous fiction stories that I’ve had published by respected literary journals here and abroad, the only thing people see is this atrocious piece from The Post. With prospective employers more and more checking you on Google, it’s not helping my employment situation any.
What are you going to do? You live in New York long enough, things are going to happen to you. Back in the old times people caught the plague just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Today the plague is other New Yorkers.
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/18/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 504 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 14, 2007
This is not my first experience of getting unceremoniously bounced from the law firm of Hamburger Frankfurter Pretzel Wingnut & Goofball LLP despite having a perfect work record. I was brought in as a coder to work on the Endrun Corp. case, so named because the company’s whole game plan was played out-of-bounds. The supervisor on that project was a Gay Caballero named Cristobal Chrystalballs, and he loathed the sight of me for not being metrosexual enough.
Prior to entering the legal services field I had been in manufacturing, and I actually knew how to do useful things besides run my mouth. In addition, I am reasonably literate, which right away distinguishes me from 99% of the legal support workforce. Every thing about me sent this little butterball of an attorney, Chrystalballs, into a tailspin.
At least I had an excuse for finding myself among these misbegotten losers. Mostly all the manufacturing jobs had moved to the orient, and I was scrambling to survive in a brave new world of sexless, unskilled drones. In these offices, if you demonstrate any notable qualities at all, you are a marked man, and unfortunately all the hundreds and thousands of hours of tedium during the project, combined with the unbearably dysfunctional personalities, created a fusion reaction of cruel humor in my mind that resulted in hot blasts of meanness from my mouth which took the form of nasty jokes. So sue me! The jokes were actually rather innocuous, but the idea that somebody in the place had the wit to create them at all drove the little munchkins working there into a frenzy.
Naturally a line formed outside Cristobal Chrystalballs’ cubicle of little goofs eager to curry such favor as was possible with this impossible creep of a man by conveying to him such little gems as I had composed about him during those long hours of unrelenting misery.
“200motels said that you served in the Navy as a rear admiral.”
/>
“He said that you played tight end in college football, but that your end wasn’t so tight anymore.”
“He told me that you cried when you left home because you didn’t want to leave your brothers behind.”
It’s all true. I said all those things. But it had become really tiring having this guy giving me little squinty glances of annoyance and disfavor, as though I had been a particularly odious insect that had somehow gotten into his collection of gay videos, when actually I was doing a fine job.
Nevertheless, Cristobal Chrystalballs kept me working on the project because I was reliable and executed high quality work. The bottom line was that he needed the work done.
Of all the inconsequential twits employed in that office, probably the least memorable was a nominally female functionary named Juniper Dorkman. She was a real hick from somewhere in the heartland, and her style, which she considered to be infinitely cool, would have been laughable if it had been parodied in a 1950’s black-and-white teenage sockhop movie along the lines of “Grease.” She thought she was a lioness, but she was a hampsteress. Her relentlessly lame persona of a Riverdale High School hall monitor was living proof that even the biggest moron can function in the New York office culture.
The most notable aspect about her, as she was quick to point out, was her all-black wardrobe, like she was some kind of Paladin in a budget western like “The Man From Schmucky River.” “I always wear black,” she was fond of redundantly reminding you while she cracked her gum. Kind of like Zorro, y’know what I mean? Even during the dog days of August, when everybody was stifling in unimaginable heat, she would show up with her freaking pirate suit. The way her ill-fitting pants suits fell on her shapeless physique, combined with her goofy walk, made her look like Charlie Chaplin without his moustache.
With her dopey wardrobe and her hick attitude, she brought to mind a particularly uninspired high school dramatic society presentation of “Rebel Without a Cause” performed for the inmates of the local state mental hospital. If I were casting her, I think she would be perfect for the part of a waitress, and not in a high-end place, either. Put a tray of water glasses in her hand and she would be perfect as a server in a Greek diner in Astoria. I guarantee you; Juniper Dorkman knew her way around a tray of cokes and grilled cheese sandwiches before popping up as a staff attorney at a white shoe law firm.
Cristobal Chrystalballs eventually laid me off and soon left himself to take a job for Governor McGreevey of New Jersey, as a public toilet inspector for the Turnpike Authority, nice work if you can get it. I spent the next few years at other unsatisfying work assignments interspersed by long periods of enforced leisure until, with my benefits running out, I found myself obliged to return for another go-round at Hamburger Frankfurter Pretzel etc. I sure wasn’t anticipating a happy work experience, but when I arrived there I was confronted by the coding department’s new supervisor, none other than Juniper Dorkman, who had gone to night school and achieved her JD, which made me rub my eyes in amazement because I fully knew that she was illiterate. OK, illiterate in the sense that she could read a little, but she couldn’t write a line. I once saw a page of handwritten prose that she had composed and it was so dreadful that it resembled a third grader’s homework that the dog had declined to tear up.
Her god is Spell Check. Illiterates are very crafty about hiding their disability and they put an enormous amount of effort into dissimulating it, so much effort, in fact, that if they put an equivalent effort into remedial English they would probably all be Shakespeares.
In the event, all the years I had been kicking around at unhappy work assignments, jerked around at the whim of various nut-job employers and idiot colleagues, Juniper had held on in the coding department, an assignment that everybody else in that law firm had disdained for its long hours and the responsibility for getting decent production out of coders, who are an extremely low form of life with excruciatingly poor work habits and an inflated sense of entitlement, and worked her way up to supervisor with JD status.
And, boy, was she letting everybody know it! She had her hooks into that place big-time, and for the first time in her life she was more than just an insignificant twerp.
Juniper, who had not chosen to allow me back in her department and was forced to endure my presence, adhered to the fiction that I was just another beginning coder. That was fundamentally OK with me, as I didn’t have much use for her either. But she couldn’t resist letting me know that she was now my boss, and that’s where the contradictions started to develop like an insult or an irritant to an organism. After a few months of being on the receiving side of her bogus self-important attitude, she really started to grate on me.
One day I e-mailed a question to the woman who was running the project, and five minutes later Juniper came over to me, red as a beet, and started loudly berating me about the department’s “chain of command,” as though she was General Macarthur.
I like idiots. They can be very amusing as long as they’re harmless. When invested with authority, however, they become quite unbearable. In the case of Juniper Dorkman, the triumphalist aspect of her personality had come to define her, like Bush with the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Having learned all her management techniques at the feet of the Gran Maestro Cristobal Chrystalballs, she was the shining star about which the coding department revolved. She sent out e-mails documenting her greatness. “I’m going on vacation next week,” she announced grandly, “but I expect everybody to behave as though I was still here.” Once, when she had apprehended some pathetic losers in the elevator when they should have been at their desks, she ominously cautioned, “You’ll never know where I’ll turn up next…”
Wow, like Zorro! The problem is, saying you’re Zorro does not make it so. Once, while speaking to Juniper, I touched her arm and had the creepy feeling I was touching the arm of an embalmed corpse in a sarcophagus unearthed by an archeological dig in lower Mesopotania, all skin and bones. Thank God I never had occasion to touch her shapeless torso, which I guarantee would have squished under my hand like a bag of chittlins. An exercise regime is definitely not part of her Phalangist agenda.
And Phalangist is not too strong a word. Juniper’s politics are right in line with the authoritarian philosophy of Generals Franco and Salazar, though she is too ignorant to understand the meaning that those names imply. How about Mussolini? The Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller once made a film called “Seven Beauties” that featured an obese, coarse nazi female commander of an Italian concentration camp. Given her unquestioning adherence to authoritarian “chain of command” and her aggressively nationalist Republican sentiments (she is an unreconstituted supporter of George Bush and the jingoistic ultra-right wing of the Republican Party), she could instantly morph into a supremely dedicated black shirt. She already loves black clothes, and that alone betrays a certain authoritarian leaning. Juniper would love to run a jail and she has all the required attributes: a need to be unquestioningly followed by her own hand-selected motley assortment of sycophants; a virtually brain-dead attitude toward social philosophy; an astoundingly low level of literacy; voracious ambition coupled with a weasel’s animal cunning; a creepy talent for toadying to higher authority. Under the wrong set of political circumstances she could evolve into a one-woman social cataclysm equal to a tornado or other catastrophic disaster.
One day she passed out a little flash quiz on coding procedure. After all the tests were completed and graded, she sent out an e-mail reading, “This quiz was not for purposes of punishment.” Punishment! I never heard this term used before in any job. Juniper, until recently only a temp herself, was now openly thinking in terms of administering Punishment!
Even in the most advanced of human societies the spirit of fascism lies dormant like a virus in the human intestine, waiting for the right conditions under which to overwhelm the organism. Under what propitious circumstances, where democracy would be weakened and unreasoning authoritanism allowed to rear its ugly head, might a voracious, self-serving, illiterate woman of no culture be chosen to exercise authority over a broad segment of witless humanity?
Because secret police techniques of surveillance were not beneath Juniper’s purview. She interrogated contract employees about what was being said about her. Like all primal despots, she was intensely interested in controlling public opinion. I had long ago lost interest in socializing with the other temps on these kind of projects, but there was one other person in the building to whom I communicated by e-mail, and as time went on, as I became increasingly dismayed by her self-aggrandizing and power-grubbing behavior, I could not help but complain to him about her. Naturally, she was monitoring my e-mails.
Juniper was interested in isolating her charges from any contact outside the department that did not go through her in order to give maximum expression to her self-endowed supremacy. She meant to be the only center of power over the temps, with ultimate authority over who stayed and who got cut, and she was prepared to be ruthless in achieving this end.
As it happened, I discovered that the paralegal who was in charge of hiring the temps, and who had oversight authority for the project, a willowy brunette named Ginette Pizzola, happened to be the granddaughter of a man who had hired me to replace him as designer/production supervisor for a handbag company many years previously. I was very good friends with the old guy, since deceased, and hoped that my friendship would extend to his granddaughter. It’s natural.
Unfortunately, Juniper Dorkman is unnatural. She would make a great monster in a grade B horror movie, chasing teenagers with an axe. She first went into my e-mail account and deleted some letters between Ginette Pizzola and myself, wherein we shared reminiscences about the girl’s grandfather. Then she invented some monstrous venom about me to relate to the girl, who never spoke to me again.
We are living in an age of thinly disguised fascism, using fascist techniques to battle a shadow army of islamo-fascist terrorists; enforcing authoritarian control at home by methods of conformism and intimidation; slandering dissenting voices with labels like defeatist and traitor; consolidating mind-control by the dissemination of mood-altering substances produced by pharmaceutical conglomerates and distributed by compromised medical professionals; inducing complacency in a somnambulant populace by means of a hand-picked media elite of monosyllabic robo-commentators – these are conditions custom tailored for the emergence of a cadre of garden variety psychos who strive for total power within their cheesy little environments.
Maybe I’m the one who’s out of step, a malcontent whom Juniper Dorkman eventually despaired of ever eventually whipping into line by means of intimidation and eventually found justification for laying off as part of a mass reduction of staff, despite my having a perfect work record in her department. Actually, my employment history since I left the fashion business has not been characterized by remarkable success, tainted as it has been by an inability to eat crow dished out by self-important idiots.
I fully recognize the need for New Yorkers to develop economy-size egos in order to effectively bring home the bacon. Anybody who takes full account of his real insignificance as just another dot in an endless anthill is bound to get paralyzed by fear, with the consequence that he won’t be able to function and his kids will starve.
Nevertheless such large egos attached to persons of such mediocre ability is a bad fit, and incongruous. They become parodies of themselves, and nowhere more obviously than in the law offices of Hamburger Frankfurter and Pretzel.
I once knew this old girl who was obnoxious, insulting and who honked like a goose. I mildly inquired of her, “It’s none of my business, but God gave you a set of feminine techniques for achieving your goals. Have you ever considered using feminine wiles to get what you want, instead of trying to coarsely bludgeon people?”
She broadly replied, “That would be admitting weakness. I want to achieve things the way men do.”
This answer wasn’t exactly a revelation to me. I had long before deduced her motivation – it was the frankness with which she stated it that startled me (we later fell out, and I never spoke to her again).
I believe her to be off the mark. Men, who are widely credited for the ability to work in groups, are, at their best, extremely crafty and calculating in setting and achieving goals, and the women who see them otherwise are falling into a trap of preconceived stereotyping in perceiving them as primitive dolts. Women that attempt to bludgeon people into submission are creating their own stereotypical parody of life. They are unwittingly perpetuating a traditional frontier ethos of taking control in order to civilize uncouth males by the wielding of weapons of domestic destruction like rolling pins. The weapons they wield today may be institutional, like political correctness, but the goals have not changed – to achieve domination through coercion rather than through reason or charm.
There aren’t enough charm schools in the world to polish these frontier females, and since they seem to be gaining on the social front, there is no reason for them to alter their techniques. But they pay a price. As Juniper Dorkman once confided to me in an unguarded moment, “I’m not meeting any men.” Gee, no kidding! Even a cripple would throw down his crutches and miraculously grow wings to fly away through the sky rather than endure a date with this misfit.
As I previously stated, I had a perfect work record in that place. A couple of times during the course of the year I was instructed, with reason, to go back to some of my finished work to make some corrections, but that is par for the course in coding thousands upon thousands of documents, and at no time was I ever formally told that my work was substandard, nor was I admonished for any other reason.
After she let me go Juniper felt the need to dissemble the reason to a friend of mine, that she had made a large cut in the project when, in fact, very few layoffs had been made, as was related to me by somebody still working there.
Her reasons for cutting me were purely personal. She didn’t approve of my politics in the highly charged political atmosphere of the day when even U.S. Attorneys who are not deemed politically reliable are dismissed on the order of hare-brained political operatives. Juniper didn’t feel confident of her ability to manipulate me, which, given the low level of her culture and intellectual capacity, is closer to the heart of the matter.
I had experienced a rough year. I got my arm broken in a bus accident and still showed up for work for months with my arm in a cast. By propping my arm up on rubber wrist supports I was able to type and fulfill my daily quota of documents without complaining or making excuses. I never asked for, nor did I receive, any kind of personal consideration from Juniper, who is not inclined toward any gesture of generosity in any case. Trained in Cristobal Christalballs’ philosophy of management, Juniper adhered to only one consideration, that of obsequious fealty to herself personally, which, considering her feeble personal and intellectual qualities, was out of the question for me.
Since Juniper held me in such low regard, I don’t feel bad about broadcasting my opinion of her. We live in a new world of information, and offenses that previously went unanswered are now subject to public scrutiny, depending on the ability of people to bring them to light.
With the Democrats’ recapture of congress, George Bush is now undergoing much the same process. He thought he was tough but he’s not. All the nasty little gambits that he and his motley little clique have perpetrated are undergoing an aeration in the salutary rainbow of public analysis. The tectonic plates of public opinion are starting to inch in the direction of openness. Do I expect to contribute to this climate by exposing Juniper Dorkman’s dark little games, which owe so much to the spirit of repression and consolidation of personal power as characterized by the electoral coup d’état staged in Florida in 2000 and the naked attempts to disqualify huge swaths of voters through abuses attempted by forcing U.S. Attorneys to file court challenges in congressional and senate races in order to swing the contests in the Republicans’ direction? Do I really expect to influence anybody? That would be naïve. I prefer to think of this boring little treatise as a thumbnail sketch of society in turn-of-the-century New York, no more than that. What I write is for purposes of art. Let Juniper Dorkman and her ilk be exposed to the judgment of history for reasons of entertainment.
But when she poisoned the old man’s granddaughter against me out of a pure spirit of spite and personal vindictiveness, that really bummed me out.
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/14/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 541 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 11, 2007
Allright, this is where I absolutely draw the line!
They told me cigarettes are bad for you and I accepted that. Then it was alcohol, then it was rich food. They’ve been trying to pin something on reefer for decades without succeeding but that hasn’t stopped them from making it into a hanging offense.
Blah blah blah. Everything is bad for you, including telling jokes because you might offend somebody or give them a complex, and given the present fragile mental state of the population, where people are walking around afraid of their own shadows, that’s a real possibility. That’s why everybody’s on Prozac or some other mood-altering garbage.
Now there’s an article in today’s New York Post (what else?) that eating pussy can give you cancer.
According to The Post the vagina contains a virus that causes cancer in the tonsils, and I am definitely at risk because I have eaten more pussy than a wild coyote loose in Westchester County.
According to that logic, all of France is at risk. That would be the ultimate revenge of the Republican Party, millions of Frenchmen dropping like flies because of eating contaminated pussy.
What’s Mayor Bloomberg going to do, put a tax on pussy? “Ladies and Gentlemen, because of the public health menace caused by going down on women, the mayor is instituting a tax on the vagina. We’re attaching meters to women’s pussies and every month our meter reader, 200motels, will go around New York and read the meters. Then we’ll send out a bill to all the women based on the amount of sexual activity.”
A tax on the pussy should definitely cut down on unnecessary fucking and sucking.
Not that this will raise much revenue for the city. A recent issue of New York Magazine dedicated to New Yorkers’ sex lives concluded that most New Yorkers spend their time text messaging and jerking off.
Boy, things have sure changed since I was a kid. Back then, the pussy was a highly prized commodity.
Nevertheless, the mayor should award a medal to Paris Hilton for going around without panties. That way at least, the pussy gets plenty of fresh air, which might make it healthier to eat.
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/11/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 487 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 08, 2007
Forty days and forty nights
The judge sentenced Paris Hilton for driving without headlights
And no valid drivers license to her name
To send a message to the world
That The California Department of Motor Vehicles is not a game
From her My Space web site Paris issued a worldwide plea
Do not allow this injustice to befall on me
Let's face it, I'm not a penniless schmuck from East LA
If it’s just a matter of money I’m prepared to pay
Oh please do not send me to LA County Jail
Where Crips and Bloods and convicted sex offenders dwell
Without my herpes medicine my butt will break out in a rash
There’s nothing in that jail that I can buy with all my cash
With a hue and cry the world’s masses arose to action
The French ambassador to LA demanded satisfaction
The Pope in Rome released a Latin encyclical
Pleading that the LA County Jail was already too full
Mass demonstrations filled the streets of Cairo and Islamabad
And the president of Mexico said in a speech that
Anybody who loved Chihuahuas can’t be all bad
A pardon finally reached the desk for Governor Schwartznegger to sign
But unfortunately for Paris the Governator declined
He said “If you do the crime you have to do the time
“Forty-five days in the pokey is no jokey
“And in the joint you won’t have no weed to smoky
“But in your cell you can read the Bible and meditate
“And during your recreation period you can exercise and lift weights
“Look at it this way, you’ll be out in a month and your life won’t be over
“And with all the loot you got you can afford to hire a chauffeur”
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/8/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 394 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 08, 2007
Vive La France et vive Nicholas Sarkozy! Of course, if Ségolene Royal had won, I would be shouting Vive Royal!
But Sarkozy is the more comic personality – a zappy, animated motormouth rushing off in all directions at once like the buffoon hero of a stage play by Molière or Beaumarchais. He reminds me of Beaumarchais’ character Figaro, a resourceful Everyman who short-circuits rigid class barriers by virtue of his wit and resourcefulness and muscles his way to the top. Every time Jacques Chirac tried to stuff him in a can, Sarkozy popped out again like a jack-in-the-box.
And he has courage. Once he walked into a classroom that had been taken over by a mad bomber wearing a suicide belt and negotiated with the nut, emerging with a crying child in his arms. Contrast that with little Bushie peeking out of the window of Air Force One as it flew over devastated New Orleans or reading "My Pet Goat" to the classroom as people jumped to their doom from the World Trade towers!
When he was the young mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine he presided over a marriage and fell in love with the bride. He pursued her, won her over and got her to leave her husband for him. She later ran away to New York with another man, but Sarkozy again chased her and got her to come back to him.
I’m not going to jump up and down that he got elected, like the New York newspapers, who seem to think that he is going to anglicize the French political culture. They can forget that pipedream – there is nobody more French than Sarkozy. French political culture is due for a big overhaul after the glacial years of Jacques Chirac, but anybody who believes that Sarkozy is going to crawl into the decrepit political bed George Bush occupies is underestimating Sarkozy’s ambition.
Standing 5’5,” Sarkozy definitely has his own Napoleon complex. He made it a point of honor to screw his erstwhile political mentor, Chirac, and he most certainly has the same goal for American neo-conservatives, whom me must surely see as a bunch of hick retards.
I see him as a kind of French version of Silvio Berlusconi, without the Italian leader’s instinct for megalomanic thievery. I definitely see him as the fast-talking hero of an hysterical French comedy movie, like the great comedian Louis de Funès or the adventure hero and stuntman Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom he vaguely resembles.
He’s sure to outrage everybody, from the French left to the American right. But in the end he will leave an indelible imprint on French culture and world civilization, and I’m happy to be along for the ride.
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/8/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 428 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 05, 2007
The women of Iran are up in arms over the government’s harsh new restrictions on feminine dress. Women who don’t adhere to the regulations mandating head scarves and modest clothing are threatened with jail, beatings and five years’ internal exile in some godforsaken donkey shit village in the country’s interior.
Iran, or Persia, as it has historically been known, is an ancient culture of extremely sophisticated refinement. Persian literature and poetry predates Islam and has informed all the cultures of the world, from India to Europe and beyond. The classic beauty and refinement of elegant, perfumed women of Persia have been celebrated worldwide for many centuries. This is one the lovely things that Hafiz, a fourteenth century Persian poet, had to say about the enchanting women of his land:
Send a bouquet of your face with morning breeze
Perhaps inhaling your scent, your fields we envision & trace.
May you live fulfilled and long, O wine-bearer of this feast
Though our cup was never filled from your jug or your vase.
My heart is reckless, please, let Beloved know
Beware my friend, my soul your soul replace.
© Shahriar Shahriari
Los Angeles, Ca
January 17, 2000
The whole western concept of romantic love and longing, which was transmitted to the French by the Spanish, had its origins in Arabic-language poetry influenced by the love poetry of the Persian Safavid Empire.
For the camel humping, flyspeck dotted imams and fundamentalist mullahs to believe that they can humiliate and debase these beauties by forcing them to dress like common fishwives or nomadic goat herders demonstrates how far divorced from reality they dwell.
For these animals to stifle the women of Persia, who are every bit as seductive as Helen of Troy or the great classical beauties of France and Italy, is a crime against humanity of the first magnitude. The fact that this is happening in Persia, a civilization celebrated for the magnificent beauty of its female creatures increases the enormity of the injustice, which, incidentally, has been completely overlooked by the hack journalists of the western press, neutered as they are by the stifling conformism of their profession.
The modern Persian woman favors French and Italian designer clothing, Hermes scarves, Gucci sunglasses and Shisedo cosmetics.
The vanity of the female is a force of nature akin to a hurricane or a tornado, and you interfere with it at your peril. Archeologists in Crete recently discovered the remnants of a gigantic factory dating back 5,000 years dedicated to the manufacture of – makeup!
Ancient Rome more than once tried to restrict extravagant displays of feminine vanity as an economy measure during wartime, only to face violent internal upheaval of enraged women demanding their jewelry, makeup and fancy togas.
As Chairman Mao was famously quoted for pronouncing, Women hold up half the sky. The men who are championing female repression are the same ones who insist on women caring for them and serving their supper. You never know when she’s going to feed you a nice soporific, wait until you are asleep and kill you and dismember you, as recently happened in New Jersey.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not here to defend all of female humanity. Normal people don’t interest me at all. I am only here to stick up for the elegant minority of women who look good in a pair of pink satin pedal pushers and Cuban heels, the kind who don’t even see me, except for the ones who disdainfully put a quarter in my cigar box and admonish me to get a haircut and lose some weight.
Ayatollahs of Iran, your day of judgment is fast approaching, and the coup de grâce will likely as not come at the hands of a woman!
When the revolution comes, the green crescent will be lowered and replaced by a Christian Lacroix cocktail dress. Fundamentalist judges will find themselves judged as defendants in their own courtrooms by female lawyers with their heads uncovered and their eyes shaded by Porsche-Carrera sunglasses. Imams will be paraded in the streets wearing pantyhose and Christian Dior lingerie which they had been found to be wearing all along under their religious vestments.
When the Revolution Comes!
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/5/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 368 Times
Send to Friend
|
May 05, 2007
Former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey was recently ordained as an Episcopal minister. Just what the world needs! His mission, to spread the gospel of brotherly love as he understands it.
“Reverend McGreevey, I am beset by doubts about my sexuality. Sometimes I find myself attracted to women.”
“That’s a common error. Look at me – I was married twice! The woman distracts men from their true mission in life, communing with other men’s backsides.
“That is why, when I was governor, I instituted an engineering project to eliminate barriers between men, particularly in public toilets along the Garden State Parkway. Remember, as Shakespeare once wrote: ‘A butt is a terrible thing to waste.’”
“What play was that in, Reverend?”
“Two Gentlemen of Forty-Second Street. Shakespeare was gay, you know.”
“You don’t say!”
“Yes. His greatest play was originally called Romeo and Homeo, but they changed the name.”
“Reverend, I heard that New Jersey put up a statue of you in honor of your being governor.”
“Yes, and a formidable erection it was too! But they had to take it down.”
“Why is that?”
“Pigeons kept roosting in its butt.”
“Now that you’re an ordained minister do you still intend to live with your boyfriend?”
“Of course I do. Otherwise, how could I continue to receive the sacrament?”
“That’s a delicate way of putting it.”
“In fact, we’re in the process of redecorating our house.”
“Where do you shop for furniture?”
“Homo Depot.”
“I’ve heard you’re quite a sports enthusiast. What’s your favorite sporting activity?”
“Well, we really like skiing. We use skis that have two sets of bindings on them.”
“That must save on lift tickets. Now that marriage between men is legal in New Jersey, have you considered marrying your domestic partner?”
“Indeed! In fact, we’re planning on having a baby.”
“You’re going to adopt?”
“Not at all. With the new advances in technology, it’s possible for a man to have a baby from his butt.”
“You don’t say!”
“Yes, indeed! But you have to wash the little beggar off with a pressure hose to get off all the brown stuff.”
“Do you have any advice for New Jersey’s new governor, Jon Corzine?”
“Well, he’s been having a lot of car problems lately, so I’d like to recommend him my mechanic.”
“Who’s that?”
“Joey Buttafuoco.”
“Is he a good mechanic?”
“I don’t know anything about mechanics, but anybody with a name that sounds like Butt-Fuck is allright with me!”
“Are there any other gay people in your family?
“Oh yes. My father, my uncles and my brothers are all gay.”
“Isn’t there anybody in your family who likes women?”
“Just my mother and my sisters.”
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 5/5/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Read 339 Times
Send to Friend
|
