April 30, 2009

Which Animal Should Represent Europe?

Many countries have come to adopt a national animal that they imagine symbolizes their finer qualities. The Mexican flag proudly displays an eagle flying with a snake in its mouth, mythology adhering to its Aztec past. The Canadians are characterized by the beaver, which is an industrious, constructive creature appropriate for a nation whose wealth is partly derived from its abundance of hydroelectric power.

The Russian bear is emblematic of that great people’s strength and fearlessness, while the Central American country of Guatemala has adopted the multicolored quetzal bird for its flamboyant, tropical plumage.

But what of the European Union, which was wished into creation for reasons of commercial ambition and to avoid a reprise of its senseless history of internecine bloodletting. Europe is an entity that can’t agree on a constitution, whose rotating presidency changes every six months, has no foreign policy or integrated armed force.

Europe is a very large achievement with a central bank and stable currency, free trade and free movement across borders for those citizens who wish to relocate, which goes a long way toward smoothing the contradictions arising from free trade among countries at various levels of economic development. It is an ambitious scheme, masterfully executed. But it is still very much an ongoing project. The small nuances of nationhood, like a unified sense of identity or pride of place have largely been deferred to the future by the mechanical necessity of establishing a yet ever-growing entity. 

#ffcc99; ">Nevertheless, the whimsical notion of a European national animal has been seized upon as Europeans, idled by the current economic morass, find they have nothing more useful to do with their time than debate those supranational qualities that unite them and how they might be applied to the nomination of a European animal symbol to represent their aspirations. Finding myself idle as well, I came across this debate while reading up on the current French corporate turmoil as reported on the business web site latribune.fr.

Exhibiting the traditional French qualities of originality and contentiousness, the readers of latribune.fr had no shortage of opinions on the subject, with well over a thousand suggestions on what form Europe’s national animal should take:

Patrice – The wolf, representing the forests of Europe. At once solitary, though living in groups. Symbol of piercing vision. Though territorial, the wolf is willing to traverse frontiers when necessary.

Forestier – The wild boar, an animal of the European forest possessed of great symbolic and historical value.

Pourquipic – the pig. Biologically close to humans. A hypocritical animal (cloven hoof). Eats anything, like humans (genetically modified food, plastic, rubber, iron bars). Doesn’t break down toxins, and likes to expose itself (no fur).

Auguste – the horse, which carries the man who conquers the world.

Henri – the Loch Ness monster.

Canary – the chameleon that changes colors for all the nationalities of Europe.

Emanuelle69 – The swan.

Kiki – the amoeba, which grows any which way and has no shape.

Will – the dolphin, because Europe forged the maritime routes that conquered the world.

Canard35 – the tortoise, for its speed. Or the mole, for its vision.

Lakme – the female wolf, which fed Romulus and Remus and symbolized the Roman Empire.

Taipan – the white bull, which has been the symbol of Europe since eternity.

Bertignus – the duck, which is a water bird but attached to the land. Not aggressive, beautiful without being graceful. The duck adapts to its environment without losing its nature as we do our values. Protects its young. Is sociable but jealous of its autonomy. Expresses itself, like us.

Chepadrole – the fox, who is handsome, tricky, intelligent, clever – in short, the opposite of our politicians and bankers.

Bebert – The rooster, which is the only animal that sings while standing in [manure].

James – the sheep, because 98% of them stupidly obey the other 2%.

Au boulot – the bee, symbol of life, fertility, dynamism, courage and usefulness. The bee was the symbol of Napoleon’s empire.

In addition to the above were hundreds of other suggestions. Among them: the platypus, chimpanzee, dove, ostrich, Nicholas Sarkozy, black widow spider, snake (this one is not so crazy. The snake was featured on one of the first American flags under the motto “Don’t Tread On Me”), snail, unicorn, owl flea, etc.

After a few minutes of reading these ideas I started playing the game myself. My idea: a genetic mutation engineered at the Barcelona Medical Research Park consolidating all of the aforementioned features: the craftiness of the British fox, the fierce pride of the Italian wolf, the courage of the Spanish bull, the elegance of the French dressage horse and the wings of the Austrian eagle.

But would it fly?

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April 28, 2009

Send These Dummies Some Real Pills

 Somebody show these turkeys how to kill themselves. In Japan they have got the right idea - when you screw up, you remove yourself from the scene and spare everybody else having to be around you.

The latest idiot to try and fail killing himself is ex-Nets basketball chump Jayson Williams, who composed a suicide note and then failed to deliver on his promise, forcing cops to Tase him and lock him up in a rubber room. Now poor Jayson has to decide if he wants to cop guilty to negligent manslaughter in New Jersey for slaughtering his poor limo driver, Costas Christofi, in a hail of friendly fire when Christofi was taking a leak in a New Jersey field behind Williams' mansion and a drunken Williams and his friends went out to shoot off guns in the middle of the night. Wotta genius!

He follows in the footsteps of another basketball great, Isiah Thomas, who elected to check out by overdosing on Lunesta tablets, after making the Knicks, whom he had been entrusted to manage by their genius owner, Thomas Dolan, commit long-term mass suicide on the basketball court. Their last season under him was what, 20-62? The only problem with Thomas was, he wasn't any more proficient at killing himself than he was at running the Knicks, so now he is inflicting himself on a South Florida college basketball team.

I say, let's all chip in and buy these idiots a case of tuinol or seconal so they can do a proper job of it. And while they are at it they can take Michael Vick and Pacman Jones along with them.

But why stop there? Professional sports has got enough numbnuts losers to fill up a whole Jonestown of suicide prospects. We can start with Stephon Marbury and Eddy Curry, whose contribution to sports culture has been a wholly negative one. Give me the money. I couldn't do any worse. Then you got Danilo Galardi, Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni's star draft pick, who played one game before injuring his back (in all fairness, Galardi managed to pick up a little bit toward the end of the season. He just deserves a one-way ticket back to Tomatoland, not the Big D).

Then, naturally, you got James Dolan himself, who is a living example for why women should be allowed to terminate their pregnancies. Of course, we can't leave out the Swinebrenner brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledumber for moving the Yankees into the most extravagant stadium in the history of baseball and then making the team step on a rake and smack itself in the face in front of the whole world. Oh yeah, let's not forget Joe Girardi and Brian Cashman, who are proving that they are not even capable of managing one of Yankee Stadium's $10 hot dog stands, never mind the whole team. Who ever told these jackasses they knew anything about managing baseball? Oh yeah, George Steinbrenner, who gave a new dimension to the concept of dysfunctional stooge-ocracy.

And let's not forget Fred Wilpons, who owns the Mets. OK, the Mets aren't quite as disgraceful a bunch of losers as the Yanks are turning out to be, but it takes a special kind of imbecile to invest $500 million with a schmuck like Bernard Madoff, who looks like the face on a kid's blow-up punching bag, and let him steal the whole $500 million.

You might ask yourself, why is the writer of this blog so ticked off? Well, I'll tell you why: New York is going to hell in a handbag faster than a New York minute. The whole thing stinks. There's no jobs and no money. When you take a domesticated pig and release it into the wild, it almost immediately reverts to its primitive nature of a vicious, dangerous beast. And that is what is happening here.

So, when I turn on the TV (I certainly can't afford two thousand bucks for a ticket to Yankee Stadium), the last thing I want to see is a bunch of bozos who are behaving like they tied their own shoelaces together.

What New York City sports needs is a good hurricane!

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April 22, 2009

LATIN LOVE

One thing I particularly enjoy is reminding people of inconvenient things that they have done that they would prefer to ignore. Everybody screws up, but they shrug it off in the interest of “going forward”.

The problem with that course of action is, as Churchill astutely observed, “Those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them”.

It takes a big man to face up to his mistakes, even if he didn’t commit them. As the old saying goes, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.

That’s why President Barack Obama was able to sit through a quarter-hour diatribe by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega at the Organization of American States conference in Trinidad without batting an eyelash. Everything Ortega told him was true: how the US unmercifully inflicted unspeakable horrors on the people of Nicaragua for an interminable period of years, occupying that country for a quarter century and then, on our way out, installing a merciless dictator, Somoza, who tortured and slaughtered its indigenous population for several more decades. When that prick was eventually overthrown, the U.S. mustered and supplied an equally gruesome mercenary army of exiles to harass its revolutionary government, which at the time was led by none other than – Ortega!

Obama wasn’t responsible for any of this mess, but Ortega rejoiced that he was finally able to personally deliver his complaint to its source, and in permitting him to blow off steam, Obama did a service to humanity by letting him get a load of his mind and clearing the air.

Naturally, the Republican opposition in this country went berserk. They excoriated the president for not getting up and walking out on the diatribe. That’s their solution – throw your weight around, and if the natives have the audacity to complain, you swat them off like flies. In fact, George W. Bush put it exactly in that context. “I’m not here to swat flies”, he said – right before another bunch of natives crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center.

Oh, but the Republicans are not finished! They’re howling about Obama consenting to shake hands with Venezuelan president-for-life Hugo Chavez, who exclaimed, “I want to be your friend,” and pressing a book on him. They don’t have to worry about Obama reading the book. Obama is no dummy. He already knows what’s in the book:

• how the U.S. unmercifully massacred Guatemala’s indigenous population in the interests of that country’s European land-owning elite, staging a military coup to rid Guatemala of its popular government in 1954 and igniting a civil war that lasted 50 years, killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants

• how the U.S. inflicted a 70-year embargo on Haiti after that country’s population threw out its French colonial masters in 1802 as a lesson to our own black slave population

• how the U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic over a period of 30 years, installing a dictator, Trujillo, who dominated the country for another 30 years. And after he was machine-gunned on the steps of the capital, we went in there again

• how we installed Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, who turned that country into “the whorehouse of the Caribbean”, and then punished that country for overthrowing him by imposing a 50-year embargo that survives to this day

• how the U.S. installed military dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, etcetera etcetera etcetera

Yeah, the Monroe Doctrine of 1820 excluded the European powers from interfering in Latin America, leaving it as a theme park for us to jerk around as we saw fit, and we made the most of it.

But all good things must come to an end, and now we are on the receiving end of payback – just when we need these countries most. They still have resources that we need more that ever. Obama put it succinctly. “We are the most powerful country, but we are not the only one.” We need them as badly as they need us.

Fortunately, all these countries are willing to forgive and forget. But they still insist on telling us how they feel, which is a good thing. What if they remained so enraged that they refused to communicate with us at all? If somebody treated me like that, I would never speak to him again.

Obama is more than a genius. He is an analytical, feeling human being. He knows what he has to do – as he puts it, listen. Eventually, when these countries have expressed their historical resentments and antagonisms and blown off all their steam, we can begin to negotiate on the basis of our mutual interests.

Unfortunately, the president’s biggest problem is right here at home, in the form of the Republican opposition and media interests. They’re idiots who don’t appreciate the tectonic shift that has taken place in world power relationships. They want to go back to the bad old ways.

They’re deluded, but they’re still dangerous. And they certainly have expertise in the area of overthrowing legitimately elected governments. Fortunately, owing to the previous administration’s psychotic fantasies, the armed forces are displaced in Iraq, half-a-world away. Nevertheless, with Dick Cheney ensconced in Washington, having set himself as a pole of reactionary discontent, and knowing his unhinged, anachronistic proclivities, Obama would do well to consult with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her techniques for dodging sniper fire.

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Posted on 4/22/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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April 21, 2009

THE DORK ARISES!

Anybody who writes off the Republican Party is turning a blind eye to the self-regenerative power of stupidity. It’s easy to discount a bunch of idiots dancing around a park with tea bags hanging off their hats the same as it was easy to discount Ronald Reagan as a boring, primitive dork; the same as it was easy to laugh off Tom De Lay’s little ceremony of congressional candidates marching four-abreast to sign the Contract With America; or to ridicule George W. Bush’s destructive demolition of logic.

How about Richard Nixon, who was peddled like a low-grade soap product to a brain dead electorate, until he ultimately won and came this close to staging a coup d’état complete with martial law and internment camps for anti-Vietnam radicals (read The White House Watergate Tapes).

The thing to remember is that these campaigns were calibrated to a perfect pitch of imbecility to appeal to morons. But they were not designed by morons. They were designed by very intelligent corporate and dynastic moneyed interests that were motivated to consolidate their power by manipulating the low intelligence of the masses. As H.L. Mencken once observed, “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

This tea party concept is the inspiration of Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., who knows a thing or two about low marketing. It has two basic premises: taxes and no representation. Taxes, as we all know, are the tripwire of Republican ideology. They don’t believe that taxes, like death, are inevitable, and they want to abolish them. As far as the bit about no representation, being reduced to a powerless rump party from their previous unassailable position of power has made Republicans feel like a cornered, endangered species.

One of the first pronouncements coming from Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano was an alert about the rising danger of domestic terrorism arising from the activities of right-wing extremists. I’m sure she has been receiving some very alarming intelligence reports. Concurrently, the news broadcasts have been reporting a run on ammunition and automatic weapons from gun shops and gun shows.

Anybody who has ever read “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo knows that the Paris insurrection of 1830 was not a spontaneous explosion, but was meticulously prepared at the grassroots level by small cells of activists that traded in weapons and intelligence despite the overwhelming presence of army and police brigades in the city. Small groups of dedicated individuals can create chaos, and now more than in the past. As has recently been exposed, the whole power grid is computerized and could easily fall victim to a couple of lunatic hackers.

I don’t mean to be alarmist. But in these tough times there are a lot of trained persons circulating in society who may feel that they are being displaced by a new order of things that is a threat to their understanding of what the natural order of things should be e.g. their own privileged positions. They are being prodded by propaganda organs like Fox News to behave destructively.

President Obama and his advisors, like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton, have proven their capacity to divide and confuse Republicans, who are anyway not the sharpest tools in the box. They shouldn’t let interests like Murdoch get the jump on them with gimmicks like this tea party nonsense, stupid as it may seem, but should confront it with the same alacrity that they did against Rush Limbaugh.

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Posted on 4/21/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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April 20, 2009

New York's Pathetic Pantheon of Puerile Power Pussy

               Throw them some meat!

New York City has got the loudest, pushiest women in the world. Mostly, they have got trumpet voices that can break glass like a Memorex commercial. I used to believe that all that screaming hysteria was counterproductive. My idea was to draft these broads into federal charm schools to teach them to talk like normal women and use the traditional female qualities of charm to achieve their aims. In addition, they would learn what to do with their hair, and learn not to go into the subway with sleeveless blouses exposing huge glops of roll-on deodorant when they lift their arms to hold the rail. Ugh! It’s not an appealing package. It’s not exactly a European runway show, y’know what I mean?

The prevailing view held among New York girls is: I’m tough. Why should I resort to decadent European subterfuge when I can get right in your face and scare the shit out of you with my big mouth? God gave me a powerful set of lungs and two fists. You don’t like it? Forget you!

Now, like so much of female delirium, this used to amount to a bunch of deluded nonsense. They are never going to get the edge on a 220 lb. male dummy with pierced ears and a fistful of silver rings. Nevertheless, in the last few years, due to the enhanced police procedures established by Police Commissioners William Bratton and Ray Kelly, most of the bad guys are jerking off in jail cells up in Poughkeepsie and Ossining, turning New York City into a mostly demilitarized zone. This has opened up vast opportunities for the biggest mouth to prevail. And nobody can touch the women of New York for bone-chilling loudmouth screaming.

You think I’m kidding? Then you obviously haven’t seen the Internet video showing ex-Mets superstar Art Shamsky being chased down the street by his ex-wife, Kim, who is being forced by court order to pay him millions in alimony after he divorced her, citing (what else?) hysterical screaming fits. She is getting a taste of what women have been doing to men since time immemorial, taking them to the cleaners. And she is finding it a very bad fit.

“You faggot! You bastard!” she is seen to be screaming. “I had to have my uterus removed because of the unholy sexual diseases you transmitted to me, you bastard!” In court papers she filed against him, Kim Shamsky accuses Art Shamsky of engaging in sexual improprieties involving women, men and any various combination of the denizens of the Bronx Zoo.

Hey, why not? All’s fair in love and war. The days of Ralph Kramden threatening Alice with a one-way flight to the moon are anthropological history. Art Shamsky is running away and not even talking back. Only, this peaceable reaction on the part of the men is not being reciprocated by a lessening of the volume on the part of the females. Indeed, they have seized the initiative. Translation: the women win. Men are anthropologically too stupid to learn how to talk back. I see the evidence of men’s brutish incompetence everywhere I look. The women have got all the money and all the power. The men are getting their salaries attached to pay child support, and they still get daily phone calls from the mothers of their children drafting them into involuntary servitude. “Pick up your daughter from school, you knucklehead, I’m going out with my girlfriends.”

I used to do the payroll, and I know how many guys are having their salaries attached to pay child support. It’s not a pretty picture. Men are working two jobs, and they are still broke and living in dingy basement apartments, and sweating it out. It shouldn’t have to be that way. In Scandinavian countries the state picks up the majority of the expenses for bringing up kids in one-parent families. People are always screaming about the population decline and the future projected manpower shortage, but they are allowing kids to suffer and holding a gun to the fathers’ heads. We are living according to the law of the jungle, rich people being off the hook for paying their fair share for social welfare. They say, “Why should I pay if that guy can’t keep it in his pants?” Well, I’ll tell you why: in a civilized society everybody has to pay to give children a decent life without subjecting the father to a lifetime of slavery. As Hillary Clinton wrote, “It Takes A Village”. Forcing one guy to pay the whole cost of a kid from a failed relationship for his entire life, while hedge fund traders are paying taxes at the rate of 15% is an abomination, and the voracious mendacity of some women to intentionally trap guys into a life of servitude just makes it worse.

When times were good, the women were more discriminating about the suckers they chose. In order to get a date you practically needed to have a tee-shirt printed up showing your financial statement. Now that times are tough, any idiot can get a date so long as he has a paying job. Forget about cigarette boats and a house in the Hamptons. The dividing line today is job or no job. But the rule is the same – the girl has got a crowbar to pry you loose from your money. Nothing personal…

You don’t hear too much any more about woman saying “I’m high maintenance” One time I had this ol’girl tell me “I’m high maintenance.” I told her, “I got a horse that’s high maintenance”. These days women are happy to latch on to any maintenance. Forget about a guy who’s suave and debonair. These days a guy could have an extra foot growing out of his head, but if he’s got a paying job he’s suddenly appealing. A blue collar is all of a sudden a sought-after fashion accessory. Bond traders and bankers are out and butchers are in. Especially butchers: a scientific study from France (where else?) recently showed that female chimpanzees are more inclined to give sex to males who give them meat, which motivates the males to be more aggressive hunters. Give them some meat, and they’ll beat your meat. Since our females are themselves not too far removed from the animal kingdom, this is a good reason to show up for your next date with a couple of nice, thick rib steaks instead of clutching a bouquet of useless flowers.

I know I’m not politically correct, but political correctness is going to be the next victim of the economy, as people find they have more pressing issues to worry about. May it die and never return.

As if to add insult to injury, women have also taken over the news media 100%. Every time you pick up a newspaper, you end up getting a lesson in civilized behavior from some nitwit female. From The New York Post, you get: a daily morality lecture from Andrea Peyser reflecting 50 year-old blue collar Queens moral values; a calcified, sclerotic Cindy Adams referring to Icelandic composer-singer-musician Bjork as an immoral“piece of excrement”; Michele Malkin excoriating liberals and waxing nostalgic for the administration of Big Dummy Supremo George W. Bush.

OK, what do you expect? At 50¢ it’s cheaper than a comic book. The Post itself admits it’s a piece of worthless horseshit. Recently, in response to a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled former employee (what other kind is there?), The Post was forced to admit in a court filing that it encouraged its “journalists” to accept graft in order to keep salaries low. It’s pay to play all the way, which is so hysterical about The Post complaining about grafting politicians. That’s what keeps publicists in business, cash payments to Cindy Adams and Page Six to give a favorable plug to a new show or restaurant. Last year, when Yanks slugger Jason Giambi admitted to a web site that the Yanks were prancing around the locker room like a bunch of sissies in gold lamé thong panties, the Post sportswriters killed the story, which is a good joke if I ever saw one, when the Swinebrenner brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledumber, threatened to cut off their free Yankee passes.

But if The Post is a useless piece of fish wrapping, The New York Times is infinitely more invidious because it masquerades as a serious news organ. Never mind that The Times long ago lost its marbles. Controlled by the inbred Sulzberger family, which has been marrying cousins in order to keep their money in the family for so many generations that they are beginning to resemble the inbred, moronic inhabitants of an Appalachian trailer colony, The Times is hemorrhaging money faster than a sieve, and since people under pressure are inclined to say extraordinary things, its editorial policy has adopted a more convoluted grab bag of politically correct constructions than a Prospect Park parenting website is able to conceive. It’s a mess, with female rabbis and gay marriage announcements competing for space with a stable of brain-addled neo-conservative columnists who leave even Republicans holding their heads in amazement.

Naturally, right at the top is a myopic insistence on gender-bending role equality that flies in the face of hundreds of millions of years of sexual evolution. I don’t have anything against sexual equality issues, aside from a distaste for the whole concept of identity politics per se, and the idea that a news organization would attempt to peddle them so aggressively in an effort to mainstream what I essentially believe to be fringe attitudes, I find not only counterproductive but also endlessly tedious. Maybe I have fallen behind the times, but I’m comfortable with the Clinton-era concept of “don’t ask don’t tell” and Obama’s program of civil unions between consenting adults (including men and women, like me and my girlfriend). But The Times, with its unhinged insistence on exploration of new frontiers of social irrelevance, is a total bore.

Maybe the writers there feel bad that they had missed out on the culture wars by playing it too safe, and are now trying belatedly to assert their relevance, even as the rest of us have passed along to something else. Basically, The Times employs mediocre writers of both genders. It’s criteria for hiring staff rest on their academic credentials, an Ivy League diploma seeming to be the standard, even as they admit that due to grade inflation a high grade-point average in school is indicative of nothing more than assiduous attendance in class, which any idiot can achieve.

But The Times’ stated goal of leveling the playing field in favor of promoting women and minorities has led to some astounding gaffes, which reflect on the reliability of their reporting and commentary. Jayson Blair, the cokehead reporter exposed for deranged fabrication of front-page news stories comes to mind. More recently, the bizarre case of Judith Miller, who was found to have acted as a conscious shill for the Bush administration’s campaign of disinformation, published a whole series of fictitious front-page articles relating to Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capacity that The Times endorsed even though she was blatantly deranged. “I do what I want”, she bragged.

The Times was finally forced to unceremoniously kick Miller out the back door, even as they were covering up another tacky story concerning Susan Sachs, the Baghdad bureau chief who, finding herself on the losing of bureaucratic infighting, decided to send some “anonymous” emails to the wives of Times reporters, informing them that their husbands were involved in a little extracurricular hanky-panky with Iraqi women. These “anonymous” missives were traced back to her in about a New York minute, and she as well ended up with boot prints on her butt.

I once had a female colleague of well-below average intelligence who thought she was a freakin genius. She was pushy, and when she spoke she honked like a flock of wild geese flying over Rockaway. She was a typical blowhard New Yorker in the mould of Eliot “I am a fuckin bulldozer” Spitzer.

Just for fun, I asked her, “Did it ever occur to you that you might be able to accomplish more just using intelligence and charm to achieve your goals?”

She replied, “That would be dishonesty”. Naked aggression and coarse intimidation dressed up as honesty and tough love are the standard operating procedures of the day. Remember Sarah Palin’s line about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull terrier being the lipstick? Obama’s rejoinder: dress up a pig with lipstick and it’s still a pig.

Speaking of screaming, pushy females, here is one last example from the hallowed corridors of The New York Times. Managing editor Jill Abramson was reported by Page Six of The Post (it’s gotta be true!) to have gotten into a screaming match at a dinner party with a playwright whose show had been savaged by The Times. “The Times is the arbiter of good taste in New York,” she screamed hysterically, which must have done wonders for the digestion of the other diners.

Not long after, this arbiter of good taste was standing in the gutter on West 46th Street, waiting for the light to change and yakking on her cell phone, when she got her foot run over and broken by that ultimate New York status symbol of good taste, a garbage truck! Good taste, give me a break!

Historically, the American female has seen herself as the civilizing influence needed to smooth out the rough edges of American manhood. Where this comes from, I don’t know. It seems to me to be just another puritan punishment exacted to wreck people’s enjoyment of life. Frankly, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. No female qualities visible to me would seem to suggest such an exalted social status. One time, I inadvertently brushed a bleached-blonde suburban Republican woman in a crowded store with a gym bag I was lugging around. She suggested that I apologize to her, but this being New York and sometimes crowded, I ignored her, at which point she started screaming “You motherfucking faggot!” That type of etiquette lesson I can do without.

Now, with the absolute and utter collapse of the triumphalist Anglo-Saxon business model and concomitant social breakdown, our whole concept of social interaction may be due for a reassessment, purely in terms of effectiveness, if not quality of life.

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April 19, 2009

Yanks = Wall Street. Total Collapse

                 Where's the beef?

First of all, I blame Brian Cashman. It's clear that whatever coherent strategy he may or may not have had has been a total disaster. New York, instead of being at the vanguard of modern thinking is the armpit of it (or worse). Look at the Wilpons family, the genius owners of the Mets, who lost $500 million to the schmuck Madoff. Anybody who would entrust that kind of money to a guy who looks like a nebbishy character in an animated children's movie is an idiot.

Then you got James Dolan, whose business model for the Knicks does not include winning games. He figures, what's the difference, the fans will come anyway.

As for the Steinbrenner brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledumber, Jonathan Papelbon had it right - these dorks couldn't even throw the baseball and hit the side of a barn. They know less than nothing, because any moron who thinks he's a genius is living in negative territory.

These New York sports teams are the mirror image of Wall Street, where greed and sloth are king, and all the geniuses are too lazy to get out of their soft leather chairs to check out what's going on. Look where it's gotten us to!

The Steinbrenner family should immediately fire Cashman, and then they should fire themselves and bring in somebody who knows the game. I recommend somebody from the Marlins or Diamondbacks organizations, who pay the whole team less than Johann Santana makes, but still figure out how to field contending teams. It's not a question of money. It's a question of shoe leather, getting out to the far reaches of baseball civilization and finding talented players who are desperate to win.

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April 07, 2009

200motels fiction: "Housecreeping"

Brendali popped her gum happily as she arranged the fresh bagels in the plexiglass display case. She was part of the display herself. Where the women in the factory were prohibited from wearing jewelry and forced to wear paper hairnets, Pato Gonzalez encouraged his shop girls to put on a nice appearance for purposes of customer relations. It couldn’t hurt.

As a result, the shop assistants were bonded by a certain elite status. They were the glamour girls of the operation. Brendali played up this distinction for all it was worth. She flaunted the prohibition on chewing gum around the food product, which, along with the ban on jewelry was conformant with hygiene requirements to ensure that foreign substances would not end up in the mouths of customers. Pato had over the years been forced to pay expensive cash settlements to customers who had had to endure painful oral surgery as a result of biting down on cheap dimestore earrings that had infiltrated the bread product. Naturally, there was no end to it due to the overwhelming vanity on the part of the bakery workers and despite the vigilance of harried foremen and managers.

Brendali exploited her elite status to gain an advantage in the competition for the men in the place. During periods of slow customer traffic she was constantly freshening her makeup, filing her long nails and fixing her hair. All these were prohibited practices, driving La Creta crazy as she watched the young mantrap on the video monitor in her office. When La Creta wasn’t monitoring Porteño she was watching Brendali, and when the two were together nothing could tear La Creta away from the video monitor. It was obvious to her that they were carrying on.

Everything that La Creta loathed about Porteño, his arrogant authority, physical strength and macho preening, were enchanting to Brendali. She was Mexican and Porteño was pure white Argentinian and rough, like a vaquero from the Pampas or a boxer from the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. When Porteño showed her his bullet wounds from his past career as a policeman in his country, it made her swoon.

She had tried to seduce Frank Perdue, among others, but he wasn’t having any of it. In his years of working around industrial installations that employed Spanish women, Frank Perdue had seen the walking wounded, in terms of men who had initiated liaisons and later suffered grievous consequences when they tried to break them off. Naturally, once a girl has established a stake in a man, she is going to immediately try to exploit it. Factories are different from offices, where a woman will take pride in being independent. Factory girls always need money, and lots of it. If a girl can get her hooks in a manager, which is, realistically speaking, their supreme fantasy, she will look to get paid more money, or get paid for not showing up at all. She will immediately let the other girls know that the guy is off limits and workplace relations can take on tortuous dimensions under conditions where romantic possessiveness becomes a factor.

Spanish people are notoriously possessive, and if you toy around with a woman and then attempt to walk out on her, you had better be prepared for any unintended consequences up to and including a knife in the back, poison or a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Frank Perdue had witnessed all of these at one time or another.

He had once enjoyed a fine romance, outside the workplace, with a charming South American beauty, Clara, from Bolivia. Following a passionate interlude, Clara had suggested, “Why don’t you take out a life insurance policy naming me as the beneficiary? I would be willing to pay the premiums.” Though Frank was no genius, far from it, he immediately foresaw the consequences of such an action. “Sorry, baby,” he told her, “if I die, I want you to cry, not laugh.” Soon after, Clara left him for an alcoholic banker.

Brendali had a husband who was forced to return to Mexico for a family tragedy and not able to gain re-admittance to the U.S., leaving her alone in New York with a small baby. Fortunately, because of the generous social welfare provisions in New York she was able to enjoy a comfortable, if marginal existence. But it left her lonely, and with a lot of time to fool around.

This is where Porteño came in. He was a good catch, a foreman with the ability to get unlimited overtime. The catch, naturally, was that he had a young Dominican wife and a new baby. But this never impeded any woman in history from going after the object of her desire.

Unfortunately for Frank Perdue, he found himself as the unintended intermediary in this love triangle. Not given to philosophical reflection, he nevertheless adhered to one ironclad rule of thumb: mind your own business. The newspapers were full of cases where people got involved in each other’s business and lived (or not) to regret it.

He already had a full plate to deal with, particularly on weekends, when he was responsible for paying the factory hands. Pato Gonzalez’ paychecks not being worth the paper they were written on, it was left to Frank Perdue to scramble around and assemble the cash to redeem them, or suffer serious consequences to the company’s physical premises and his own person.

The stress began at dawn Saturday, when he arrived at the plant. Having left the premises in pristine condition the evening before, it was always a shock when he arrived the next morning to be greeted by filth and garbage strewn up and down the block in front and the inside of the place worse than a Dominican Republic shanty town in the aftermath of a particularly nasty rampage by its inhabitants.

The night shift, commanded by Hector Guebón, knew that city inspectors only worked during daylight hours, and was consequently very relaxed about maintaining housekeeping standards. Which is to say, they didn’t observe any at all, and West 46th Street was littered with trash, broken garbage bags with huge chunks of greasy dough and reeking garlic and onion drenched in linseed oil, which was naturally irresistible to the flocks of filthy pigeons and rats who lived in the vicinity and made their living from the waste from the bakery.

Various forms of rubbish and debris littered the street and sidewalk on both sides of the street all the way down the block, where it was met at the entrance to Zi-zu’s little den of horrors, where vegetable and animal waste bulged out of dumpsters, garbage bags and cardboard boxes. Zi-zu’s elderly father, who walked stooped over at a practically 90-degree angle, presided like a monarch seated in the middle of the whole obscene mess on a plastic chair. Frank Perdue would try to motivate the senile old geezer to shake a leg and get his part of the garbage cleaned up, using a reasoning approach. “What do you say there, man, do you think you can get some men out here to clean up before the cops arrive?”

“Yeah yeah yeah…”

Frank Perdue walked away. It was a ritual. He would go and oversee the cleanup in the bakery and return in a half hour to give Zi-zu’s father second notice. “My friend, do you think you could shake a leg and get this mess cleaned up?”

“Soon. Soon.” By this time the Arab food vendors would have started arriving and would be out on the sidewalk in the midst of the greasy swill monkeying around with their motorized food carts.

Half and hour later Frank Perdue would come out for one last time. He would take a more insistant tone. “Look, pops, the street inspectors are going to give out tickets for this porquería. Who’s gonna pay the tickets, you?”

And the old guy would give him the finger. “Fuck you!” the food vendors would turn from their falafel wagons and give Frank Perdue a hard stare. This was the part in the customary scenario where Frank Perdue would say, “I don’t have any more time for this nonsense. Where’s the real boss of this shithouse?” and, pushing aside the greasy plastic slats, he would enter the shadowy netherworld of the Middle-Eastern food vendors, where certain of them would be engaged at their carts, chopping up vegetables and chicken parts. Sometimes it would be too early for Zi-zu, and Frank Perdue would have to negotiate with his Senegalese assistant, Mahmoud, who was a much harder case.

“Hey, Mahmoud, could we get some guys to clean up that mess on the sidewalk out there before the inspectors arrive?” Mahmoud would stare at him with pure loathing, made even more alarming by bright-red bloodshot eyes shooting sparks like burning embers from his smooth ebony face. “Have to be later. I got nobody.”

If Zi-zu was there, installed in his office of decrepit wood paneling and oriental rugs, Frank Perdue would get a much more cooperative reception. “Zi-zu, help me out. The sidewalk looks like a disaster, and your father is refusing to get it cleaned up.”

Zi-zu, who had a merchant’s charm, would be immediately sympathetic. “Let’s go outside and I’ll talk to him.” The two would emerge and Zi-zu would speak kindly to his father in Arabic. Then he would tell Frank Perdue, “He’s going to take care of it right now.”

“Good. Thanks a lot.”

The old man would give him the finger, “Fuck you,” and Zi-zu would laugh in delight like the indulgent parent of a precocious child. “Ha-ha! Isn’t he funny!”

Frank Perdue had a small window of opportunity of about three hours to get the factory cleaned up before the day’s production would start and the route drivers would start arriving with their receipts. Fundamentally, the place would have to be ship-shape by 9:30 AM.

But nothing could be resolved unless the garbage, several tons of rancid bakery waste and equally disagreeable non-food refuse, was picked up. The worst experiences happened when one or the other of the refuse collectors failed to show up. Then the place would seize up in a kind of industrial constipation, there being no room to store the monstrous stuff, and two days’ accumulation would come close to shutting the place down – which was not an option.

San Juan Bagels had separate pick-ups for bakery and non-bakery garbage, and the factory manager was responsible for ensuring that the twain would never meet, because that being the case, these guys’ discernment would come to the fore and they would subject the offending supervisor to the full extent of their exasperated indignation. “I’m not taking this.”

“Why not?!”

“Because there’s solid waste in the same dumpster with the dough. This gets fed to animals. Who’s gonna separate it, me?
“Anyway, when I loaned you these dumpsters, they were in perfect condition. Now look at them – the tops are missing, there’s wheels missing, theyre all busted up to shit. What kind of idiots do you have working here?”

“Look for yourself,” Frank Perdue would retort A glance at his assembled laborers, who resembled, likely as not, the characters in an animated children’s movie, would be enough to terminate that line of conversation. Frank Perdue would be reduced to pleading, which was, of course, the desired point of the conversation. “Do you think you could just this one time haul it away and I promise you, I swear you, I’ll go through it myself, personally, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Well, just this once,” the tough driver would concede. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

“It won’t,” (until tomorrow, you schmuck)

Once the garbage had been hauled away and he was relatively certain that the workers could be trusted to scrub the outside premises with hoses and wire brooms, Frank Perdue could make sure that the retail store was tidied up and the refrigerator was stocked with food and soft drinks. He would walk into the huge walk-in freezer, where thousands of cases of bagels awaited shipment to Japan, France and the United Arab Emirates to check the thermometers, which had to be kept at –20o F. Like every other aspect of this operation, the sclerotic refrigeration system was permanently on life support and could never be taken for granted, even for an hour. Pato Gonzalez never believed in paying for anything if he could find a way to improvise a solution on the cheap, and he had rigged together a series of mismatched, obsolete compressors on the roof that wheezed and coughed like terminal cardiac patients in a charity ward. When the fire inspector had got a load of the mess, he issued a whole catalog of citations, and the task fell to Frank Perdue to keep getting extensions from the court, to buy time for Pato to come up with a political solution, which was not an unreasonable expectation, considering that he had been plying New York’s political establishment with free cases of bagels since time immemorial.

Pato’s brother Johnny, who had taken a few courses in refrigeration at the vocational institute, for which they had placed a $14,000 lien on his salary, was the technical expert charged with maintaining the refrigeration system. He had mainly arrived at a permanently provisional solution of forcing any refrigerant through the leaking, hemorrhaging system that its diseased arteries would accept.

The whole thing was complicated by periodic flooding caused by the rupture of illegal PVC pipes, which seeped into the –20^o freezer, creating an ice-skating rink several inches thick on the floor and freezing cases of drenched food product together into icy mountains reaching all the way to the ceiling, the wooden skids anchored to the icy floor in a frozen, rotting hell that could only be cleared out by gangs of workers laboring in the freezing room with pick axes to chip the ice and then attaching chains to the rotten pallets and dislodging them by ripping them from their frozen roots with an electric jack, which skidded around on the slick surface with roaring, ferocious power, jeopardizing life and limb.

The PVC pipes also had a tendency to rupture above the flour storage tanks that were adjacent to the walk-in freezer. This happened when the drainage system which cleared water from the second floor would become clogged, and workers, removing the drain coverings, would stick broom handles down to break up blockages. The broom handles broke through the plastic pipes, initiating a flood of filthy waste water into the flour tanks, contaminating the flour and providing a warm, nourishing environment for insects to thrive.

The company was currently operating on two of the four flour tanks, which led to disruption in scheduling the bulk flour deliveries. The two contaminated tanks were being emptied by hand during the week, but only later in the day, after it being determined that there would be no surprise visits by health inspectors, who only arrived early.

But this was the weekend, and Frank Perdue was preoccupied with getting the factory in order before he had to collect the route receipts from the drivers, so he could start assembling enough money to cash the workers’ paychecks and avert a civil disturbance. On his rounds, he would conscript employees to do various tasks as he saw them: sweeping stairwells, brushing flour off surfaces, making the forklifts were plugged in and their electric batteries had water. Using a small, powerful flashlight, he inspected obscure corners for rodents and insects.

In this housecleaning he was assisted by the energetic, attentive Porteño, who knew the place better than he ever would. Porteño was a natural leader who could inspire his subordinates by example, but he had one enormous flaw – he knew no English. And at forty years of age, learning English well enough to operate in a working environment was all but an impossibility.

“Maybe you could go to school at night,” Frank Perdue offered hopefully.

“What, after working in this place all day?”

“I see your point,” Frank Perdue concluded. “Nevertheless, being in the United States and knowing only Spanish, it’s like a prison.”

“And Pato Gonzalez is the warden.”

Frank Perdue could only empathize with Porteño. Porteño evoked from him admiration in the same measure that he provoked the loathing of La Creta. Frank Perdue had consented to go to work in this sinkhole in the middle of an economic downturn, and just as his unemployment benefits were running out. Pato Gonzalez had engaged him because he was up to his neck in regulatory troubles from OSHA, the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets, the Health Department, the Fire Department, you name it, and he needed somebody educated to run interference for him with these governmental agencies. In addition, Frank Perdue spoke good Spanish and had industrial experience.

But the anecdotal evidence was that the economy was now in an upswing, and during one of his many violent arguments with Pato, Frank Perdue told him frankly, “I don’t care if you fire me. I came in here to get out of the rain, and now it’s not raining anymore.” With Porteño, it was another story. There were few options in New York for a bakery foreman who knew no English. With a captive workforce like this, Pato Gonzalez had grafted a feudal latifundista oligarchy onto the streets of New York, and he was the reigning monarch, who essentially ruled these poor, impoverished souls as he saw fit.

Well, almost. There was one small detail standing in the way of Pato’s untrammeled supremacy, Local 22 of the Bakery Workers Union. Pato seethed with resentment and loathing at the thought of those bastards, and he thought of them constantly. As unions go the local was clumsy, maladroit and corrupt, but it nevertheless constituted a recourse that his employees could turn to as a last resort. The Local impeded him from squeezing the workers as he thought he should be entitled to do, and the little union representation that there was cost him dearly in terms of vacation pay, holiday pay and overtime pay.

Contract negotiations were coming up and Pato had high hopes that Frank Perdue could be his ace in the hole to break the union. He intensely disliked Frank Perdue with the disdain that working class people hold for the educated classes. The man was totally immoral, living with his girlfriend without benefit of marriage. But maybe Pato could harness that immorality to his benefit.

Pato Gonzalez saw business as a function of animal aggression. This Frank Perdue might think he was tough, but he was soft. When the time came, Pato was confident he would break Frank Perdue. He would show that stuck-up prick who was boss, make him eat shit and like it. But right now he needed him.

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April 04, 2009

G20 Pussy Smackdown

Forget about power politics or the economy at the G20 Summit. The real showdown between France and the U.S. is:

WHO GOT THE BEST PUSSY?

This week on Strasbourg, France, the American champion met the French Ooh-La-La, Carla Bruni for a taste test.
The judges were: for the Americans, former Secretary of State Henry Kissing-ass; for the French, Napoleon Boner-part; representing the non-aligned third world countries, Venezuelan President-for-Life Hugo Chav-ass.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Kissing-ass – “Ja, vell, I been around de vorlt, but I always been happy to come home to the USA, vere de women’s crotches smell like an Arby’s roast beef sandvich”.

Napoleon – “No! Fish! Dat’s my favorite dish. I prefer the girl’s butt to smell like a ripe camembert cheese dat’s been left outside to ferment in the sun for a coupla’ hours. It’s only good to eat when it starts to ooze fat and it draws flies”.

Hugo Chav-ass – “You’re both wrong. South of the Border, we only like the chocha picante garnished with hot chili peppers and laying in a bed of guacamole”.

200motels – Now, for the first event the contestants will model the national panties of their respective countries. Carla Bruni is wearing a red, white and blue lace thong with a tiny emblem of Pepe le Pew, the Franch skunk from the Loony Toons cartoon series. I must say, it shows off her firm, immaculately tanned butt. Ms. Bruni has chosen to leave on the wax from her bikini wax job.

Kissing-ass – “Ja! Just stick in a Tampax and you could light the string for a candle to see in the dark”.

200motels – Now, here’s the U.S. champ wearing panties from her native Chicago, cut in the style of Dr. Scholls orthepedic bloomers and sewn entirely from Polish sausage casings.

Kissing-ass – “Ach, there’s no place like home. This reminds me of so many nights I have spent in the Windy City, where I would send out for some barbecue beef sandwiches and a pizza, and then, for dessert, I would have my wife, Nancy, sit in the pizza box to soak up the grease.”

Hugo Chav-ass – “In Venezuela, the women wear homemade panties fashioned entirely from banana leaves, and they leave in the banana”.

200motels – Now for the next event, the judges will put on blindfolds for the smell test. Napoleon Bone-apart, you will go first.

Napoleon – “Mais oui! This is the French contestant. I can tell, because she smells exactly like the alley behind the fish stalls in the outdoor food market in Marseilles, where the hookers hang out”.

200motels – Right you are! And how do you rate her?

Napoleon – “I give her a ten. Five for mussels and five for calamari”.

200motels – Now it’s your turn, President Chav-ass.

Hugo Chav-ass – “I believe this must be the American. It smells like the gas escaping from one of the oil derricks we expropriated from the yanquí imperialistas.”

200motels – Another winner! And now, the event that the TV audience has been waiting for – the taste test! Dr. Kissing-ass, you go first.

Kissing-ass – “Das is easy. If it’s chocolate, it must be the American contestant.”

200motels – Quite right! And how do you rate it?

Kissing-ass – “I rate it Rocky Road, with some coconut thrown in for granular texture”.

200motels – Now for Napoleon Boner-apart.

Napoleon – “Aaah, French vanilla, with a hint of canelle. Vive La France!”

200motels – And now it’s time for the voting.
Wait a minute, there seems to be some disruption coming from our studio audience. Who is that superhero with the orange pantsuit?
It’s a bird. No, it’s a plane. No, it’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton! She’s wearing a bright orange iridescent pants suit with the words “WIDE LOAD” stenciled across her butt. She seems to be dodging sniper fire coming in from the Bosnian contingent seated in the balcony.
Wait a minute, who’s that with her? It’s Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen Degenerate! Let’s call Rosie O’Donnell onto the stage. Rosie, what’s the meaning of this?

Rosie O’Donnell – “We’re here to protest the demeaning treatment of women in this contest”.

200motels – You mean the blatant sexual exploitation of women for commercial porpoises?

Rosie O’Donnell – “No, I mean I wasn’t given a chance to be a judge”.

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