June 29, 2007
Let’s all go downtown and get shit-faced! I got a lot to celebrate. I just got the latest telephone, the FU69, which has a Bluetooth that you stick up your butt. The ringtone has got Britney Spears singing “La Cucaracha” and it shows a video of Yosemite Sam blasting the shit out of Speedy Gonzalez every time he tries to cross the Mexican border. When the phone rings, you hand it to the guy standing next to you, and when he puts it to his ear a boxing glove pops out and punches him in the head.
We’ll drink a toast to George Bush, the sorriest mutherfucker who ever lived. He’s going down fast and he’s dragging us all down with him. Don’t blame me. I voted for Kerrey, who would have won the election if they hadn’t published that photo of him windsurfing. It wasn’t the surfboard that buried him – it was those fruity tights he was wearing, which made it look like he was carrying a load in his pants. That’s why God invented surfer shorts, you moron!
Meanwhile, Tina Brown’s latest stale rehash of Princess Diana is Number One On The Charts With A Bullet. She knows she’s shabby but she’s laughing all the way to the bank. “I’m blown away with sheer delight,” she exalted. I’m glad somebody is getting blown.
Paris Hilton sold the exclusive rights for her baby pictures to People Magazine for $20million. Now all she has to do is get pregnant. Omigod, Paris Hilton’s baby, how’s that for a concept! With all the shit she’s taken and the VD and the herpes, the baby should make the cover of “Shock Magazine,” with a foot growing out of its two heads.
The CIA admitted that it tried to kill Fidel Castro. They infiltrated some of that Chinese toothpaste into his medicine cabinet to make his teeth fall out. Then they substituted plastic explosives for his Preparation H, so that when he sat down his butt would explode. When that didn’t work, they planted a bomb in his ’54 Chevy, but the car wouldn’t start. Finally they slipped him one of those Cialis pills, figuring that the four-hour erection would kill him, but the old geezer loved it so much he ordered a whole case.
I give up. Bartender, fix me another double!
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Posted on 6/29/2007
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June 28, 2007
The revelations disclosed in CIA documentation released this week about the Agency’s plot to kill Fidel Castro do not go far enough.
All these elements, CIA collusion with the mafia, CIA feeding LSD to unsuspecting victims that resulted in their suicide, CIA spying on anti-Vietnam demonstrators, were widely known and written about at length for so long that they were a running joke in society that even Jay Leno could make gags about on TV.
It’s a salutary aspect of society that these details should be admitted by the intelligence (and I use that word loosely) agency, but it begs the question: how much more is there?
The fact that this story exactly mirrors the narrative laid out in Oliver Stone’s conspiracy movie “JFK”, wherein the president is murdered by a combine of interests including the mafia, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, Cuban exiles and Kennedy’s presidential successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, should not be lost in the debate.
All the facts lead to the conclusion that the CIA had a deciding presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The present CIA should not be let off the hook of revealing the whole history of what did it do and when did it do it, but should be doggedly pursued until all the truth has been extracted. A prosecutor doesn’t permit a criminal to get off the hook by only telling part of what he knows. A good prosecutor goes after the whole truth in order to present it in a court of law. Prosecution of murder is not limited by any statute of limitations.
The current CIA revelations prove that the JFK conspiracy theorists were at least half-right in their accusations of nefarious acts committed by that agency, by its own admission. These facts prove that the people who accuse the conspiracy theorists of being crazy are themselves the crazy parties, crazy for believing the propaganda being shoved down their throats by self-serving, guilty interests, not the least of which was the Warren Commission, which was charged with “investigating” the affair.
There are also other assassinations to be looked into for CIA complicity, noticeably those of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but not limited to those victims. Sad to say, but Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, who died of “heart failure” in his bathtub in Paris at age 27; Jimi Hendrix, who supposedly died of an “overdose” in London; and Janis Joplin, who also died of an “overdose”, all within a very short span of time in 1970, could very well have been victims of an agency that saw them as the vanguard of an uncontrollable social revolution and that deserved to be liquidated. Couldn’t a rogue agency that was not above drugging its own operatives with LSD to see what they would do have determined that sending these undesirable culture heroes to the next level by similar methods would be a just and fitting solution for ridding society of troublesome miscreants?
This hypothesis may seem ridiculous to sober, correct-thinking people, but these solid citizens, by means of their erect and responsible attitudes, are directly to blame for the madness and historical distortions that have led society to the edge of the abyss.
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Posted on 6/28/2007
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June 24, 2007
For those readers who care to put a face on this insanity, this is what I look like in my current incarnation as a human being. This shot was taken during a reading I was invited to do at a literary conference in Aardvark, Pennsylvania.
Boy, did those people hate my act! The other writers read essays and freeform poetry dealing with relationships and modern living. The story I read (on the instruction of my editor, Alyce Wilson, though that’s no excuse) featured a passage where three fashion designers named Larry, Moe and Curley slapped down Halston for possession of a jeweled tiara from Bulgari.
I’m not defending my behavior. I am a swine, universally loathed by everybody who knows me and even by people who have never met me. I ain’t no lovable Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, that’s for sure, and it goes back to when I was a kid. Fortunately, I had the good fortune to be a young adult during the years of the counterculture and I fit in perfectly with those weirdos and misfits, but when society reverted to normalcy I found myself on the outs once more.
What of it? Being out of your mind is a requisite trait for being a writer of any talent, regardless of the current thinking that you have to go to Princeton to know anything. Yeah, right! I have a cousin who went to Princeton. He thought he was a writer but he’s a freakin’ bagel. The guy went to far as to fashion himself into a reactionary so that he could differentiate himself from his environment of Upper West Side cottage cheese cellulite liberals. In a world where modern conveniences have rendered meaningless the traditional characteristics of masculinity, the less reflective American males have fallen on empty gestures and images to buttress their feelings of hollow inadequacy, most notably behaving like irredentist reactionary pricks in the mode of Lewis Libby, who was able to seduce New York Times reporter Judith Miller into introducing many instances of false intelligence into that paper to suit the aims of the Bush administration. This blunderbuss approach, which may be successful for little birds that puff up their feathers or hip-hop fanatics who bulk up using padded North Face ski jackets, are pathetically unsuccessful for impressing anybody but other equally dim-witted bottom feeders. The Upper West Side liberals that this guy was seeking to impress by this lame gambit, while not being geniuses, were vastly too intelligent to be taken in by it, and they scorned him and him to the point where he went crying on his web site that “we are your bastard children.” Oh boy, is that rich: the reactionary pointing the finger of guilt at the heartless liberals!
Women can’t stand me. I never fathered any kids because no woman ever considered me to be an appropriate father for her children. No woman ever tried to trap me into paternity because I never even had enough money to be considered an eligible sucker. Plus which, I am out of control. I have so many personalities that this one woman I was dating broke down in tears, sobbing, “I don’t even know who you are. You have a different personality every day!”
I replied, “Which one of me are you squawkin’ to?”
Finally I met a woman schizophrenic just like me. Comedians have a gag where if one guy laughs in the audience, the comic tells him “Run around the room and make believe you’re a crowd.” Well, between my girlfriend Magpie and me, we constitute enough personalities to create a mob scene.
I met her in a tequila bar, and after a courtship that lasted approximately two hours, we immediately went home and had it off. That was sixteen years ago, and when you’ve got all these multiple personalities bouncing around off the walls together you got multiple problems. We would have walked off on each other plenty of times, except that external pressures forced us back together. First she needed money and I couldn’t let her go down, then I was out of a job and she was working, then our shit collapsed completely and we had to move in together.
I call her Magpie because she is sleek and intelligent. Unfortunately she is so nuts that she needs special software just to manage all her insane complexes. Happily we have multiple points of common interest like tropical vacations, beaches and eating seafood. We are privy to a lot of secrets that are unknown to most New Yorkers, like where to eat the best seafood. The place for that is the Brazilian section of Newark, New Jersey.
New Jersey has always been a huge running joke for me because the people are so retarded. So sue me! It used to be the Garbage State of industrial pollution. Naturally, it’s always been known for the mafia, which in its updated form is now typified by Tony Soprano.
Talk about a New Jersey mafia bait-and-switch! The Sopranos promised a big bang-up series ending and nothing happened, because in typical New Jersey fashion they figured they could milk the show for a few more mil going forward, so all we got was a blackout. That show is about as mobbed up as the real mafia, with one actor on trial for murder and various other ones in court for sundry offenses like assault and robbery. They may be jokers, but as usual the joke is on the civilians, namely us.
But the Sopranos have got nothing on Governor McGreevey, Mr. Gay American. He has added on a whole new layer of idiocy to a state that has always been a laughing joke. Not only was he having sex with strange men in public toilets when he was governor and feeling guys up while he was being chauffeured around by state troopers, but he appointed one of his boyfriends as Commissioner for State Security, to protect New Jersey from terrorists. I sure would feel safer knowing this guy’s on guard! After he resigned as governor and moved in with his boyfriend, McGreevey was ordered by the judge to take down a life-size photo of a fellow with his ding-dong hanging out as a condition of his child visitation rights. Then he called his wife a homophile and she sued him for causing her to lose book sales.
If this wasn’t enough, New Jersey’s new governor, Corzine, broke his neck speeding to mediate a meeting between Imus and the Rutgers nappy-headed ho’s basketball team. Oh yeah, New Jersey’s real normal! Nevertheless, I don’t believe the place is dysfunctional. It functions. In fact, New Jersey is one of the world’s great moneymakers. But when you go there you have to morph into one of them or you’ll never be able to figure out what’s going on. For a New Yorker to go to New Jersey and figure that the regular laws of human behavior apply is a guaranteed recipe for tragedy. Traveling to New Jersey is like walking through the portal in that “Stargate” show on the Sci-Fi Channel, where you’re transported to another world.
Recently I took Magpie to Newark to eat seafood at one of the great seafood restaurants in the Ironbound neighborhood, so-named because it’s a former industrial neighborhood. For over a century it manufactured arsenic-, lead-, asbestos- and mercury-based products, but now they say it’s safe to live there. Suuuure it is! After all, wasn’t it Christine Whitman, former (what else?) New Jersey governor who was head of the EPA, who assured the world that the air was safe to breathe in lower Manhattan after 9/11, and now everybody connected with the place is coming down with mesothelioma and every other disease under the sun?
Anyway, we weren’t going to Jersey to put down roots, just to get a seafood dinner. The restaurant, Forno, has a huge u-shaped raw bar where you sit on bar stools and gaze upon islands piled high with shrimp, lobster and Dungeness crabs. New Yorkers don’t even know this place exists. In fact, they don’t even know Newark, NJ exists except as a depressed crack market with an astronomical murder rate. New Yorkers believe that you have to go to the Hamptons and pay $100 a pound to eat lobster salad. Even if they knew, they’d still be too afraid to venture to Newark.
Fortunately for Magpie and me, the Brazilians and Portuguese who populate the place, having arrived from the slums of Sao Paulo and Belém, have a clearer understanding of what really constitutes trouble and are not likely to be deterred by a few poorly-armed crackheads, and fortunately for us they brought their appetite for seafood with them. When you talk to Magpie and me about crack, we think you’re talking about cracked lobster.
No sooner were we happily ensconced at the raw bar when a guy approached the empty seat on the other side of me and, still standing, engaged the waiter on the subject of a shrimp cocktail. He was no kid, and, with thick arms sticking out of a well-worn t-shirt, would not have been out of place wearing an irridescent work vest and waving a red flag at a highway construction site, or heaving a dumpster full of rubbish into a garbage truck with a forklift. In short, he looked and spoke like he had just stepped out from the set of one of The Sopranos waste management episodes.
It was none of my business, but the negotiations taking place between the construction guy and waiter over the shrimp cocktail seemed to be taking an overlong time, rather like haggling over a used car. The construction guy was insisting on a proper, decorative shrimp cocktail in a fancy dish from the kitchen, with the waiter advising him that that would take too long and instead proposing the guy a big plate of fresh shrimp from a large tub on the serving island behind him, the difference being that these shrimps would have to be peeled by hand.
New Jerseyans, though not being long on metaphysical concepts, are nonetheless capable of being very long-winded about subjects close to their hearts, like shrimp cocktail. Finally the waiter’s point of view prevailed. The construction guy agreed to the shrimps from the service island and said, “Just leave it here. I have to go and get my friend in the other dining room. Just to show you I’m serious, I’ll pay for it now,” and shot the waiter a $10.00 bill. He said to the waiter, “Remember, I’m here.”
“No problem,” said the waiter.
Then the guy said to the waiter in a very loud voice, “And don’t eat it!” and walked off.
I observed to Magpie, “This guy’s off his rocker.”
She said, “That was all for your benefit.”
“What are you talking about?”
She said, “That guy’s gay and he’s trying to impress you.”
“Get the fuck outta’ here!” One of Magpie’s complexes, that she shares with legions of New York women, is that she thinks all men are gay or hiding it. When we first started going out she accused me of it too, even though I had been laying on top of her body so much I was leaving treadmarks on her. I attribute it to living in New York surrounded by men and not being able to get a decent date for years. You know, “Water water and not a drop to drink.”
Our food had come and we were having a blast with paella, lobster, clams, beer and wine. Next to me sat the guy’s plate overflowing with shrimp. At length he returned, but instead of sitting down he just stood there staring at the plate. Then he turned and addressed me. “Did you eat that?” Totally nonplussed, I answered him with my mouth full of food, “No way!”
He said, “Well, you eat it. I’m leaving!” And with that he marched around the raw bar and pushed himself out the door.
“Jeez,” I said to Magpie, “You were right!” Magpie may be bonkers but sometimes she’s right on the money, like a roulette ball that lands on your number by pure chance. Or maybe her interest in abnormal psychology, derived from a lifetime of living amongst New York nut-jobs, yields her a more profound insight into deviant motivations.
Nature, as we all know, abhors a vacuum. The lack of interest that women hold for me is more than compensated by that of homosexuals, who consider me to be absolutely divine. They think that they are going to get rough sex from me. If I was gay I’d be a millionaire by now, to paraphrase Howlin’ Wolf, judging from a lifetime of offers and sighs of longing proffered by them in my direction. Unfortunately for the Rainbow Coalition, these sentiments of admiration are destined to go unrequited. Not that I have anything against rough sex, but a vagina has to be at least peripherally part of the equation.
The waiter came over and asked, “What was that all about?” I said, “The guy told me he changed his mind about the shrimp, and for me to eat them.” With that, the waiter scooped up the guy’s change and walked away, leaving the plate of shrimp for our disposition.
I was elated. Not because of the shrimp, but because in true archeological spirit, I had located the true New Jersey missing link between The Sopranos and Governor McGreevey. Sure, the jails are filled with tough homos, but as Lenny Bruce once delicately observed, guys will do it with mud, and once they are released they generally revert to women. This guy actually tried, in his own ham-handed way, to proffer me a courtship offering, as though he had stood beneath my balcony and recited me love poetry:
I’m a garbage man
With a master plan
To make you love me
In a garbage can
Ooooh baby I’m a garbage man
Now I knew I was really in New Jersey. Not just geographically, but in the New Jersey of the Spirit, like the African veldt where nature’s secrets are unfolded at every twist and turn.
Recently four Newark lesbians were sentenced to long prison terms in a New York court for beating and stabbing a straight guy whose only provocation was to offer to “fuck them straight,” that is, to kindly offer them some dick so sweet that they would forever renounce Sappho and embrace the penis as their true deliverance. Sounds like a good deal, right? These girls didn’t think so, and they signaled their displeasure by almost killing him right there on the sidewalk. If Tony Soprano, a whacked-out murderer with oedipal issues, is the true north of New Jersey popular culture and Governor McGreevey, an imbecilic swish who likes taking it in the behind in public toilets along the motorway, is the true south, then it stands to reason that there exists between those polarities a hybrid of the two extremes – whacked-out, murderous deviates. That would certainly fulfill the promise of modern New Jersey, and I like Dr. Leakey, was thrilled to have been present at a sighting of the missing link, the sogreevey buttfucquis. Maybe I’ll be honored at an award dinner of the Explorer’s Club, as the first New Yorker to brave the wilds of Newark, NJ, surviving the harrowing Meadowlands gridlock, to actually feast with the natives and receive a peace offering from a sogreevey buttfucquis, like a grape proffered by a male toucan to the object of his affections. I can regale the other explorers with home movies of the primitive ceremonial dances and mating rituals that take place in Newark after dark. Maybe I can sell the concept of a reality show between 12 consenting males who frequent the public toilet behind the neon-lit Celia Cruz Memorial overlooking the Union City expressway.
Now, that would be immortality!
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Posted on 6/24/2007
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June 20, 2007
The rage in New York City today is Mayor Bloomberg’s “surprise” decision to abandon the Republican Party the way you might discard an inflatable sex doll that has long been suffering a slow leak – there’s not enough left to lie on, so into the rubbish she goes.
He was forced to leave it after getting caught smoking a joint backstage at the Oral Roberts University Right to Life Prayer Breakfast in Open Crotch, Arkansas earlier this month.
Nevertheless, if Bloomberg is counting on winning the presidency he’s been drinking too much New York City tap water. Having lived his whole life in Boston and New York, he is discounting the countless millions of lawn mower professionals and car detailers who inhabit the nether reaches of our great Republic, to whom he is a horned, tailed, cloven-hoofed disciple of Satan. As these Okies told me during a Caribbean vacation recently after spotting the Star of David hanging from a gold chain around my neck, “We never met a Jew before.”
“How do you like it?” I inquired.
“It’s awright,” he allowed.
Jeez, what a relief! Nevertheless, while I wish him well, I don’t have high hopes for Bloomberg’s presidential bid and I seriously doubt whether he will ever win the endorsement of the West Texas Butt Riders Association with his wingtip brogues and Brooks Brothers Suits. Recently I saw him on TV attending a Yankees-Mets game and he was wearing a canary-yellow v-neck sweater from Madison Avenue, which is just around the corner from his townhouse on 79th Street. Not exactly the attire to instill admiration in the rednecks stalking the power tool section of Wal Mart in search of a new pair of work boots.
Bush, who has got the kind of money that Bloomberg can only dream about, succeeded in endearing himself to these idiots because he’s a moron himself. Also, he’s not a Jew. Anyway, it’s my contention that Bloomberg still has his work cut out for him here in New York. He may have done wonders with the crime rate, but he’s no Pied Piper: we’re still overrun with rats and roaches. The latest eating establishment to get hit with a rodent attack is the Pinkberry frozen yogurt store on Second Avenue in my neighborhood of the Upper East Side. A passerby happened to look inside the place after closing hours and saw some mice running around the floor. Using his cell phone, this solid citizen immediately called that great public servant of news information, The New York Post, and they sent over a reporter toute de suite!
These cell phone people are everywhere ready to rat you out for anything. They are paying a fortune of money for the privilege of running these toys, and they need a reason to use them. One guy was walking his dog and looking in the windows of parked cars, and he saw wires sticking out of some stereo equipment, so he called the cops and they blew up the van only to discover that the equipment was a stereo. It’s reached the point where you can’t even mind your own business and jerk off on the 7 train without some busybody broadcasting your photo all over the Internet.
The difference is, Pinkberry does not serve a minority clientele as does KFC, whose rat problem earlier this year resulted in a nationwide scandal and the shuttering of multiple stores. Pinkberry is savored by an elite class of white people that you will never see hanging around a Dairy Queen. As a result, instead of massive headlines accompanied by full-page photo reportage, the Pinkberry coverage was confined to one-third of a column with no pictures, buried deep in the darkest interior of The Post.
Remarking on this disparity, I immediately assumed my mantle of investigative reporter and rushed over to Pinkberry to gauge for myself the severity of the public health menace. I ordered the fresh fruit sundae and was immediately suspicious to see that it was topped off with suspicious little black speckles.
“What are these?” I demanded of the counterman. “They look like mouse droppings.”
“What do you care,” he responded insouciantly, “as long as there’s no rats in your ice cream? There’s rats all over the city. Get used to it!”
The guy had a point. I have mice in my apartment. Every morning there are droppings to clean up in my kitchen area. For a while there were actual large rats getting in through holes in the wall behind the refrigerator, before I had the holes plugged up.
New York is plagued by rodents from the top of Rockefeller Center to the mansions of Fifth Avenue. One time this woman told me that she loved living in New Jersey because she loved being surrounded by nature. I responded, “Hell, I’ve got nature living right in my apartment.” She gave me a look like she had just smelled a damn rat.
I’ve got glue traps, spring traps, poison, roach bait, you name it. But the rats and roaches just keep on comin’!
Once I had to take a job managing an industrial bakery in Hell’s Kitchen. Part of the job was keeping the rats, roaches and flies out of the food product and I had my own little army of undocumented aliens to keep the little buggers at bay. The rats and roaches, they weren’t that bad, but the flies were impossible. They used to fly right into the dough mixing machines as the doors were closing, to get mixed into the 400 lb. batches of dough, I kid you not. Next time you eat a bagel, try to focus your mind on the little fly particles contained therein. Oh goody!
The FDA is fully aware of this. That’s why the regulations make allowance for a certain percentage of insect contamination to be permitted in your food. Food processing is the most gruesome industry you can imagine. The fact that we live a long time in this country is testament more to the industrial strength of our digestive acids than to the magnificent detective work of our food inspectors.
I had just gotten outside on the sidewalk and was preparing to enjoy my rodent infested frozen yogurt when this girl stepped onto me and got her titty stuck in my ice cream. She was topless and the titty was all mixed into the kiwi fruit and the blueberries.
She screamed at me “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, you asshole!” A bicycle policeman in short pants and a helmet happened to be sitting on his bike nearby eating a frozen yogurt, and he broke out laughing.
“Hey,” I said, “aren’t you going to arrest her for going around topless?”
“Nope. The court ruled that it’s legal for women to go bare-chested. My sergeant said not to arrest them.”
So, while Bloomberg is running around the country running for president, the mice are running Born Free in the frozen yogurt and the women are rampaging bare-titty through the streets of New York. Look at it this way, folks, if Bloomberg wins maybe you won’t have to come to New York. Maybe the rats and roaches and the bare-titty girls will come to you.
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Posted on 6/20/2007
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June 16, 2007
Forty years ago Norman Mailer wrote “Why Are We In Vietnam?”, a book in which he seemed to imply that we had engaged in that war out of a neurotic, predatory god complex. Given the nature of the times and the prevalent quality of leadership (Johnson, Nixon, Hoover, etc.), that analysis had the ring of reality to it.
The collective self-analysis generated by that war might go down in history as one of our nation’s finest moments, wherein we actually tried to analyze our actions and correct them. Books, plays, movies and debate led to protest, political action, and impeachment and criminal trials.
No kind of soul searching seems to be accompanying our latest current adventure in Iraq. Certainly, the nature of an empire leads it to believe that it is always under threat at its periphery. That is the motivation that drove the British Empire to battle the Russian Empire for control of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century and that motivated the Romans to build Hadrian’s Wall so far from Rome.
No matter how rich you are it’s never enough, and the more you have the harder it is to keep it. Like a shark you have to keep moving forward to survive, and sharks are not known for their reflective nature.
Empires always function best when their brightest minds keep focused on the acquisition of wealth, and excessive philosophical meditation has led to the derailment of many great powers like Britain and France, who arguably began to stumble when their educated classes forsake the ledger books for literary fiction and criticism.
Too much thinking is definitely bad for business. So maybe it’s a positive thing for America that the biggest controversy in the public forum is whether Dan Rather was being sexist when he criticized Katie Couric’s vapid presentation of The CBS Evening News (these news announcers are specifically chosen for their bland personalities, like processed cheese slices, and then slammed when they fail to electrify) and that the runaway literary hit of the best seller list is Tina Brown’s latest reheat of Princess Diana, who was stale copy even before she shuffled off to that great runway show in the sky.
I’m not knocking it. Intellectual life can be pedantic and stultifying, and I am just as happy with a joint and a bottle of tequila, dreaming away my life while grooving to Chicago blues. Thinking isn’t everything.
As the Mayan priests were fond of pointing put when they weren’t ripping some poor guy’s still-beating heart out of his chest, time is not linear - it’s cyclical. Life is repetitive. This is old news to anybody who grew up reading science fiction epics like “Foundation,” which dramatizes the rise and fall of galactic empires, but it puts the lie to Churchill’s axiom that “those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” According to the Mayan syllabus, even if you learn the lessons, you’re still doomed to repeat them. The Mayan texts are lost, burned by the Spanish, but it’s a sure bet that in the 7,000 years they inhabited the lowlands and highlands of Central America they witnessed the rise and fall of empires, the ethnic cleansing of whole races, charismatic leaders, the clash and crash of civilizations. Do we need to relearn those lessons?
What’s the point? So it ever was, and so it is and so it will ever be. Maybe Ronald Reagan had a point with his “Morning in America.” Forget all that past history and go forward. The wheel of history is going to turn whether you’re aware of it or not. In the meantime, let’s make hay while the sun shines.
This sunny American exclusivity can’t be exclusive to America: there’s nothing new under the sun. The fact that it seems original probably illustrates its hopeless futility as an approach to social organization. It’s likely that past societies that ever took our la-di-da attitude were either exterminated as a result, or eventually survived by transforming themselves into realistic cultures of fatalism, given the realities of human nature and the dynamics of the physical world.
Reaganism is doubly insidious as a doctrine of social organization since it virtually precludes any intellectual activity as superfluous and subversive. This begs the question of the sharp American decline relative to the rest of the world since the end of World War II, at which time we controlled 50% of global wealth and manufacturing capacity. Since that time our standing has declined by half and predictions are that our share will continue to decline, though at a slower rate.
How much of this decline is due to the normal advance of the rest of the world and how much to structural deficiencies inherent in our own system are proportional calculations open to debate. Less open to debate are miscalculations and false assumptions arrived at as a result of this sunny “Morning in America” philosophy, which disdains planning and calculated marshalling of resources to achieve rational goals. It’s as if nobody is flying the plane and everybody is depending on automatic pilot to achieve a soft landing.
If the hieroglyphics engraved into the Mayan ruins could talk to us, how many stories would they tell of states destroyed by the unwise or illogical decisions of corrupted or conceited rulers, of tragic military expeditions based upon false assumptions, or squandered or lost resources resulting in misery, discontent and the revolt of subjugated populations? Just as wise and preservative rule can preserve and enhance nations states, so may profligate and wasteful stewardship accelerate their decline.
That is what seems to happening here. Harmful decisions concerning vast amounts of invaluable resources are being taken in an almost defiant manner, as if to coarsely reinforce in the most reckless mode who is charge. Alliances of state are shoved aside insouciantly and friendships abrogated for unclear reasons. It’s as though the players are caught up in a diabolical cycle of plagues and disasters and manipulated against their conscious will like stringed marionettes by infernal demons from hell. The Mayan texts on astrology were explicit on the effects of the stars on human behavior. Could our descent into chaos and madness, hurricanes and mass destruction, war and insane rule have been foreordained and predicted in ancient times?
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Posted on 6/16/2007
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June 09, 2007
I suppose that the world needs newspapers but I would be hard-pressed to tell you why, except to say that it’s easier than lugging around a computer. Except for one or two good newspapers like Le Monde of Paris or The Financial Times, newspapers are a total wash in my estimation. You can’t believe a word you read in them and the writers, if you can dignify them with that appellation, are a bunch of sanctimonious, hypocritical pricks.
This blog is to some extent an expression of my revulsion over having been a captive to these editorial dorks over the course of a lifetime. All those years of reading half-baked opinions of a group of imbecilic louts have caused me to want to hock a big goober of phlegm, if I may be so indelicate, all over the journalistic profession.
I don’t write journalism and I don’t write opinion. I write strictly for porpoises of entertainment, and a lot of porpoises read this blog. I know that because when they blow air out of their butts I can figure out their secret code. They’re telling me “Keep writing. We dig it!”
The big problem this country faces is one of sexual morality. There’s too much of it. If people aren’t passing judgment on each other’s sex lives, they’re vaunting their own preferences. What do I care if the hare lipped base-playing dyko in the back seat of your Hummer gets off being juked with a baby octopus and spewed-upon with creamed corn, or that she's gotta have it with a Yoo-Hoo bottle (or a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda or a Cel-Ray) or she goes apeshit? Spare me all the gruesome details, just do it!
On the other hand you got the advocates to a return of the sexual repression That Made This Country Great, which is why 50% of the country is obese, from sublimating their sexual drive into Big Macs and Kraft Macaroni Dinners. The most noteworthy advocates of this climate of repressive morality are the half-wit jackasses who staff (or should I say, stiff) the editorial section of The New York Post, which spends half its time teasing you with adolescent titillations and the other half moralizing about the sexual degeneration of society. Blah blah blah…
The latest manufactured horshit is called “Sex Addiction.” In the final triumph of Anglo-Saxon prurience, people are now checking themselves into rehab to have themselves cured for being horny. Some moron with a cellphone camera catches A-Rod fooling around in strip clubs with a blonde while his poor wife is pining away in her 40,000 sq. ft. mansion with the baby, and right away The Post digs up an expert who says that A-Rod is a “sex addict” in need of rehab. (You don’t find Joe Torre complaining – A-Rod is having a very good season, and the Yanks will too, I guarantee you. Their luck is already changing)
These days you’re nothing if you don’t do rehab. Judge Garson gets ten years for taking bribes, he cries “I need rehab.” Mel Gibson goes into rehab. Amy Fisher and Joey Buttfuck? Rehab in Dr. Phil House. Lindsay Lohan, Mike Tyson, Robert Downey, Paris Hilton (oh no, not again!), Naomi Campbell, Brittany Spears, David Hasselhoff, L’il Kim, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson rehab rehab rehab!
And rehab doesn’t even work! It’s a revolving door. In and out, in and out. You dry out, and then you go out and get shitfaced and you go back in again.
The world is getting richer but it’s not getting any smarter. Some people are smarter but they’re not any happier. In Fellini’s epic movie about Roman decadence of the 1960’s, La Dolce Vita, the paparazzo Marcello places all his esteem in the stability of his intellectual friends who counsel him to abandon the superficialities of life and adhere to the eternal values to be found in classical culture. At the end of the movie he is dumbfounded to learn that this model couple has jumped off their balcony in a suicide pact, leaving their young children as orphans.
I like to work out. I go to work every day when I have a job. If I feel I need to inflict myself on people I write a blog or I go onstage and do my comedy act. What works for me is: I try not to let society or other people do my thinking for me. If I feel the need for guidance I read a book. Ninety-nine percent of the people who know me consider me to be a head case, but they’re more confused than I am.
My plan is to live out the rest of my days on a desert island off the coast of Mexico, swimming with the fishes and grilling lobsters on an outdoor fire. Do you think I’ll make it? Do you believe that the Mexicans will leave me alone?
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Posted on 6/9/2007
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June 07, 2007
I am sooo relieved that sweet, charming Paris Hilton has been released from that awful jail, where she was being confined with rapists, murderers and sociopathic career criminals.
Nevertheless, poor Paris’ travails are not over yet. She still has to spend the next forty days confined to her Beverly Hills mansion, and she can’t even go in the pool for fear of getting her compulsory ankle bracelet wet.
I predict that by this time next week all the smart young girls are going to show up in the clubs wearing jewel-encrusted monitoring bracelets around their shapely ankles in solidarity with poor Paris, who is really a political prisoner, incarcerated by public demand to satisfy the vindictive passions of millions of less fortunate persons in flyover country for whom public flogging and drawing and quartering of this beautiful heiress would not have been punishment enough.
At least back home she can smoke a joint and drink champagne with her girlfriends. She can fuck her brains out.
I guess this means that she's going to give up studying the Bible. What a drag! I was looking forward to seeing her sermon on Jacob and The Coat of Many Colors on The Sunday Bible Hour.
It could have been worse. If the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office had really wanted to be mean, they could have forced Paris to wear the bracelet on her butt as a way of monitoring her sex life. That would have been cruel and unusual punishment. If they had done that, I would have personally volunteered to go over to her house to read the meter.
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Posted on 6/7/2007
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June 06, 2007
My clothes are made in China but the shirt is missing buttons and the zipper on my pants broke and I got arrested for indecent exposure. The sole of my Chinese sneakers came unglued and I stubbed my toe.
I bought some stock in a Chinese company, but their stock market collapsed.
I bought a Bruce Lee DVD but it was a counterfeit Made in China and it wrecked my television, which was also Made in China.
Then I brushed my teeth with Chinese toothpaste and they fell out. After that I ate a bagel made with Chinese flour and I got sick, so I took some medicine, but it was counterfeit from China, so I got even sicker.
The ambulance came, but it had been repaired with counterfeit parts Made in China, so it broke down. I decided to walk to the hospital but while I was on my way I got run over by a Chinese deliveryman on a bicycle.
Finally I got so pissed off that I wrote a letter of complaint to the Chinese Ministry of Trade, but my Chinese computer crashed.
Then I read that the Chinese government official responsible for all the shabby exports had been sentenced to death by firing squad, but since the rifles were also Made in China they didn’t work, so he lived!
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Posted on 6/6/2007
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June 04, 2007
Every morning Venezuelan President-for-Eternity Hugo Chavez surveys the oceanfront leading to the Lake Maracaibo petrochemical region. If he doesn’t see an American naval armada poised to strike, he breathes a sigh of relief and goes about another day of building socialism.
Maybe he prays to the spirits of Simon Bolivar and Che Guevara in a Santeria ceremony, spraying rum from his mouth like a Chinese shirt presser onto a chicken and blowing cigar smoke into its face before cutting off its head with a knife and letting the blood from its severed neck shoot over an alter of flowers and fruit.
He would be imploring the spirits to grant another day of life to his benefactor, George W. Bush, whose prosecution of the Iraq war has depleted American military strength to such a degree that the American neo-conservative Masters of the Universe can only observe in total impotence the utter destruction of a Latin American empire that had been an unimaginably lucrative American sphere of influence almost from the inception of the North American republic, when the Latin American colonies, having thrown off the yoke of Spanish domination quickly found themselves squeezed in the loving embrace of their new protector.
But nobody ever said that transforming this former fiefdom of Standard Oil and the Rockefeller family into a freestanding socialist model economy was going to be easy, and Chavez still has several pressure points of internal discord to contend with. The U.S. military may be otherwise occupied but the American intelligence services still have plenty of cash to spread around and not a few willing Venezuelan operatives to help them spend it.
This is not to state that all of Chavez’ problems spring from the head of Eliot Abrams and Condoleeza Rice. There are plenty of domestic elements that stand against him out of distaste for his close association with godless commie Fidel Castro. Or maybe families who were accustomed to running the country for generations and now finding themselves dispossessed by an uncouth, dark-skinned cowboy are absolutely blowing their lid.
The latest crisis to bring the university students into the streets is the Chavez regime’s refusal to renew the broadcasting license of their favorite TV network. Students in Caracas have always emptied into the streets no matter who was in power. Ask Nixon. When he was vice-president, Eisenhower sent him on a “fact-finding tour” of Latin America to get him out from under foot for a while. What other reason would have Eisenhower had, for Nixon to find “facts”? Nixon always made up his own facts.
At any rate, when Nixon arrived in Caracas the students went berserk and stoned and spit on his motorcade. Like Monica Lewinski with the blue dress, Nixon never had his suit cleaned. He kept it as a souvenir and, returning to Washington, barged into the Oval Office still wearing it to show Eisenhower, “Look, I want to show you what they did!”
Anyway, the kids don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore but they still have to differentiate themselves from the previous generation, even though the establishment they are protesting now is the one responsible for giving them free university tuition, free medical care, money in their pockets and subsidized food and rent for their families.
No matter. They want their MTV. The station they are fighting to keep on the air has all their favorite videos and cartoons. This is a case where the CIA finally got things right, feeding chickenfeed for retarded minds to an adoring audience.
Tele-Maricón, it’s called, and it has all the features an adolescent mind can appreciate. Since most of the programming is written by Cuban exiles, a lot of the shows poke fun at Chavez personally, with titles like “Chavez al Carajo,” a fictionalized account of the president taking it in the butt during his student days at Patrice Lumumba University; and “Chavez Cabrón,” a biography of his mother working as a prostitute at the Caracas Fish Market. There was even a show called “Chavez Bailando Con Las Estrellas,” a Venezuelan take on “Dancing With The Stars” with computer-generated images of Chavez dancing with Chairman Mao, Karl Marx, etc. For Chavez to get offended at these innocent jokes shows that El Caudillo has no sense of humor, and that he has not been indoctrinated into the North American mentality of political correctness.
This writer, being fortunate enough to watch some of these broadcasts through the modern marvel of satellite television, was intrigued at some of the unique products being advertised on Tele-Maricón, products not offered anywhere else throughout Latin America, like “Pinochet Lavadora de Cerebro,” which offered a 4-minute brainwashing complete with a free wax job for bald-headed men.
I located a Venezuelan bodega in Jackson Heights where I could obtain a can of “Tío Sam Sopa de Pato,” duck soup with a distinctive labeling showing Uncle Sam having sex with a duck whose head resembled El Presidente. When I got home I was shocked, shocked! to discover that there was no duck in the duck soup. When I called the telephone number listed on the can, which was an Arlington, VA, exchange, to complain, a message came on in execrable Spanish telling me “¡Chinga tu madre y no me joda más, coño!”
I anticipate that Chavez will hang on to power as long as oil prices hold up and the U.S. military is otherwise engaged, but we can’t dwell on him forever, particularly when the natives are restless “South of the Borderrrr Down Mexico Wayyyy!”
The beautiful thing, as a walk down any street in my neighborhood of the Upper East Side will tell you is: you don’t have to go to Mexico. It will come to you. New York’s Spanish-speaking population used to be predominantly Puerto Rican. They had no concept of upward mobility, with fathers bequeathing their blue workers’ uniforms and janitor jobs to their sons the way Jews passed down rent-controlled apartments. That’s why they’re all named José, because that’s the name that’s embroidered on the shirts.
Then the Dominicans took over, and they are rather more entrepreneurial than the Puerto Ricans, with a lot of Dominicans getting rich in business and even more making a good living running small enterprises, though a walk through Washington Heights will reaffirm that most Dominicans prefer drinking Brugal rum and playing dominos, while their women engage in the island’s second favorite sport after el beísbol, pitching bags of garbage out of second- and third-story windows and trying to land them in the sidewalk garbage cans, which are already full, in a kind of Washington Heights variation on Coney Island skee ball, to the rocking rhythms of Los Pendejos de la Lachuga singing “Basurero.”
Saque tu tanque por fuera
Llega el basurero
Yo soy el basurero
Que busca la basurera
[Stick out your can here comes the garbage man]
Having been blessed by the opportunity to visit the Dominican Republic on several past occasions, I know that the population there is endowed with a very rudimentary concept of public hygiene. Due to an extremely primitive system of solid waste treatment it is not possible to flush toilet paper down the toilet. In the popular quarters each bathroom contains a can for the disposal of paper wastes, which are then put out for regular garbage disposal with the household garbage.
Unfortunately, early toilet training habits are extremely difficult to break, and there is no public orientation to tell new arrivals to New York that it is OK to flush toilet paper into the sewage system. Consequently, some of the garbage bags pitched out the windows in the course of domestic housekeeping contain not just traditional kitchen waste, but rather unmentionable sanitary by-products as well, and when they miss their target they sometimes burst upon hitting the sidewalk, which results in an unbelievably sordid scene reminiscent of the ravine that traverses the provincial Dominican city of Higuey, which has been used since time immemorial as a provisional garbage dump and open-air trench latrine that the municipal authorities, reasoning that most of the waste is biodegradable anyway, have neglected to address. It is a far cry from the charming beach resorts of nearby Punta Cana, let me reassure you!
In recent years, though, New York has, along with the rest of the United States, been inundated by a veritable tsunami of Mexicans, who are more reminiscent of Miami Cubans – hard working, serious and focused on the money – than of the more personable hard-partying Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who preceded them (this is an oversimplification, naturally. Nor does it include many other large ethnic groups like the Ecudorians, Brazilians, Colombians and Peruvians, all of whom exert their own distinct fascination). Mexicans are here strictly for the money, and not to integrate of assimilate. They know us better than the other Latin Americans, and have no illusions about the kind of welcome they will receive here, and they are prepared to take jobs that the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans won’t do so that they can send money home. They know what we think of them and they don’t care. Just show me the money.
When NAFTA was established, it was conceived strictly as a tariff agreement without provisions for immigration or regulatory issues, unlike Europe where it was understood that only a global agreement was realistic in view of the inevitable dislocations of population that would occur as a consequence of industrial contradictions. Also, NAFTA was never considered as a means toward political union the way the common market originally was. NAFTA was designed by Americans for the benefit of American interests and successfully sold to the Canadians and Mexicans as mutually beneficial to them as well. Whether is possible to have an open borders policy with regard to goods and not labor remains to be seen in the long run.
The short-term consequence of NAFTA has been for industrial jobs to move south and agricultural jobs to move north, and also menial job openings that Americans and more established immigrant groups refuse to consider. Into this vacuum rushed superfluous Mexican labor who faced starvation in their own country as a result of the avarice of their own political and financial élites. If you think the Republicans are bad: in Mexico there is no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance, no welfare, no public health insurance, no public assistance of any sort. Mexican political leaders, who continually complain about American immigration restrictions against Mexican laborers never utter a syllable about improving conditions in their own country that might induce their people to stay home.
A large part of the problem is historical. If Mexicans jeer the American soccer team or Miss USA, what they are really complaining about is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resulted in half of their national territory being annexed by the Americans. Not just half, but the best half: Texas, with its oil and agriculture; California, with wealth beyond description; and everything in between. To be sure, part of it was their own fault: the area was theirs on the map, but in 300 years the Spanish colonial regime and then the Mexican governments had never seen fit to populate it, aside from a few small outposts on the California coast and some isolated Catholic missions.
The Mexican government had some success in populating Texas by soliciting immigration of European and American settlers in the early nineteenth century, but they revolted after that government tried to abolish slavery, creating the Republic of Texas. In 1846 the American army invaded Mexico on the pretext of a border dispute and made that country “an offer they couldn’t refuse” in which 1.3 million square kilometers (500,000 sq. mi.) of territory, half the country, were ceded to the U.S. in exchange for a payment of $15mm.
Transfers of territory to the winning side after a war are a normal procedure. Borders and adjusted and provinces are annexed, but to annex half a country’s territory is, to put it mildly, a little irregular. No, really irregular! Of course, this occurred during an epoch when European powers were starting to grab really large pieces of land – the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, for example, so the Americans, despite their stated ideology against imperial conquest, were right in step with the times.
Most Americans, whose ancestors only arrived after the fact, are willfully ignorant of how this territory arrived in our possession. They think that land was given to us by the tooth fairy. Unfortunately, the Mexicans have a longer historical memory, so it’s not surprising that they curse us out. We’re getting off easy by having to endure a few insults. If you rob a man blind, you should be able to laugh it off if he later calls you a bastard. In fact, it’s shocking that the Mexicans have accepted the loss of half of their territory with such equanimity and that a charismatic populist demagogue hasn’t emerged to exploit the seething resentment of the masses with thundering denunciations, shaking his fist at the north and exhorting the people to mobilize and avenge the country’s lost honor.
Maybe that’s the reason the American establishment has stuck its neck out in the face of militant anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, to soft-peddle the illegal immigration issue, hoping to mollify revanchist sentiment in Mexico. We own the best part of Mexico. Better to let their disenfranchised population come here to work than for armies of them to mass at the border armed with weapons.
During the debate over NAFTA the American labor unions worked to get provisions added that would force the Mexican government to address labor and environmental issues to bring them more into line with American standards. The reasoning was that these modifications would level the playing field somewhat, and that American jobs would not just get sucked into a snake pit of industrial misery and polluted filth.
That was a very astute and responsible approach. Maybe today’s politicians could learn a thing or two from that, and instead of just treating Mexican immigration as an isolated issue Bush, Clinton, Kennedy et al should expand the debate to address the social conditions in Mexico that force Mexican to crawl through rat-infested sewers and traverse searing deserts without water so that they can work as porters and laborers, driving bicycles loaded with take-out food the wrong way down the sidewalk.
That would bring us closer to the thinking of the European Commission, which realized long ago that trade, immigration and social welfare are all really interlocking issues.
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Posted on 6/4/2007
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