Couldn’t think anything but bad thoughts Sunday when I heard it in the other room: “Santa Claus is Coming To Town.” Clay-mation or stop-action-mation or however they made those cool Christmas specials featuring lights and snow and joyous elfin jesters back in the day.

This was the original, the story of how it all began, the story of the Revolution in Somberville and the War Against Toys.

Kris a subversive young man with extremely bright red hair, is raised in the woods by rebel elves called “Kringles.” Kringles are artisans, craftsmen, who reject the authoritarian regime of nearby City of Somberville. They and their leader, a woman known as “Tanta,” teach Kris readin’ writin’ rithmetic’ and how to make toys.

And get this: Kris makes friends with animals in the woods, develops this noble savage/Rousseau/Sioux medicine man thing with squirrels, birds, rabbits, reindeer and a little penguin who looks remarkably like the universal Linux logo (is this where Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman got the idea?) They teach him to run, jump, think and LAUGH like an animal. He grows up and sets out to distribute the Kringles’ toys because – because the Kringles want children to enjoy them.

So the Man in the Red Suit saunters into Somberville, a dark ghetto full of depressed, oppressed, repressed white people (well, not EXACTLY white: looks like a shtetl out of a Shalom Aleichem story, real Fiddler On The Roof stuff) run by this mean old Nazi, the Burgher Meister Meister Burgher, who prohibits toys or fun of any kind. It’s A War Against Toys.

But Kringle manages to corrupt the children and their pretty, young, extremely red-haired school marm, Jessica, by getting ‘em all high on fun. He melts the icy heart of the Winter Warlock with the gift of a toy Choo-choo train. He even gets the Burgher Meister off with a psychedelic yo-yo until one of the Meister’s henchmen reminds him he’s breaking his own law, so The Man In The Red Suit splits and –

– commercial break. Grim reality, so called.

This woman says to me, “You’ve got a yeast infection.”

I say, “No way.”

She says, “Yeah you do, and you use greasy, gooey topical creams.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’ve got a yeast infection and you cover it with cream to hide the shame of your stanky cooter. Admit it. It’s okay.”

“NO!”

But there’s a way outta this mess, she tells me. I don’t need to rub this wretched, thick cream on my itchy labia if I just swallow this little pill. Don’t smear. Swallow.

“Wait a minute, Lady, what’s in that little pill?”

But poof she’s gone, and some old fart with a face like a scrotum tells me he can cure my hemorrhoids with – guess what? – a little pill.

“Hold on there, old-timer. What’s in that little pill?”

But back to the story:

Something obviously subversive about a guy (in red, no less) sneaking into a town full of oppressed repressed and depressed workers who work morning to night every damn day till the weekend during which they work on looking busy, and the Burgher Meister says so.

“You are a radical unt a non-conformist!” the Meister barks, to Kringle mit heavy Deutsche gutturals.

Musta been written by lefty Jews, this Christmas special, what with the dark-haired ghetto folk lorded over by a fat German autocrat, and red-haired, red-suited Kringle, like the slap-happy fool we wish Schindler had been, distributing colorful, hand-crafted artifacts created solely for the health and enjoyment of children — for free! Kringle actually shouts out joyously, “I love my job!” ARREST THAT MAN!

And the authorities sure try, but Kringle’s got a whole support network, including Jessica, the school-marm; the now kindly but impotent Winter Warlock (no more magic powers — what’re they saying here about wickedness and power I’m confused); the children; the animals and the Kringle elves who make the toys and actually ENJOY their work and were only sad because no one else could enjoy the fruits of their labor until Kris became their fence, their middle man, their bag man (literally) to distribute PRODUCT.

Of course he ends up in the slammer — how can he not, with that nasty burgher king and his goons always on his case? But he busts out by feeding the reindeer these magic seeds that make them fly (can we get in any MORE drug culture versus authority references here? I don’t know whether to refer to a Oliver Stone’s NIXON or Euripides’ THE BACCHAE).

And there’s all SORTS of subversive goings on: rebel kids on the circuit leaving their doors open (and getting caught); kids hanging stockings for Kris to stuff with toys at night (and getting caught); Kris climbing down the chimneys cause the doors have all been locked (and getting caught).

And every time THE MAN tries to crack down, the network of rebel thrill-seekers grows until Kris – who grows a Che Guevara beard and changes his name to “Claus” after a wanted poster names the clean-shaven Kris Kringle PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE – is welcome among fellow travelers and creatures of the woods like Che himself among the peasants.

Santa and Jessica marry outdoors amid trees decked out with sparkling trinkets galore. They exchange vows and gifts among their friends – animal, vegetable and mineral – before god, but they don’t say which god, and it’s implied by the ceremony we’re dealing with Dionysus or the Green Man or some polytheistic party god/goddess, not pissed off Yahweh or his Hippy Son (nice guy, but so damn serious – all those issues with Dad, I guess)

Cut to yet ANOTHER commercial:

“You’re depressed,” a somber but not-too-blue lady (might scare consumers if she looks too bummed) tells me.

“Not anymore, man. Santa Claus is COOL!”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Millions of Americans are depressed.”

“That’s cause they work too much, play too little, and have to deal with a farbisseneh like you! Beat it.”

So she goes on to tell me how I can stop being depressed by asking my doctor to prescribe me a dandy little pill.

“But what, I ask you, what IS IN THAT FUCKING PILL?”

Poof she’s gone and a guy comes on singing about how he’s so happy (must have taken a fistful of those pills: he’s wearing a tie and in the middle of an office-suite labyrinth of corpse-gray cubicles) cause he bought this PDA (personal digital annoyance) palm pilot thingy to help him organize his work and be not twice but thrice as productive – DOING WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU MAKING? TOYS? AT LEAST THE FUCKING ELVES CAME THROUGH WITH PRODUCT! – and he bought it on Ebay right before the digital gavel closed the bid. He beat the competition so he could get a good deal on this pain-in-the-ass gadget he plans to use to help his employer beat the competition. Gadzooks! Get away from me you freak, get off my screen before I turn zap yer ass with the remote -

–but back to Christmas. Santa and his posse realize Somberville’s just too hot with the TEA (Toy Enforcement Authority), so they start this free commune in the North Pole where they make toys all year round and Santa revs up his sleigh on Christmas eve and distributes hand-crafted playthings among the good children of the world. He has this “naughty and nice” clause – it’s why they call him “Claus” – but its only a formality. As long as you don’t pout and whine all the time and instead use your energy creatively to buck authority, you’re cool with him. You may not get a super-electronic “KILL TERROR” computer game like you wanted, cause that’s not his thing – Santa and the elves are into craftsmanship, the personal touch, everything handmade – but you sure as shit won’t get a lump of coal.

Finally the narrator – who’s Fred Astair by the way, Hollywood’s own Nijinsky tippy tap tap tapping his holiday rendition of the Rites of Spring – tells us that though Santa’s not an outlaw anymore, and the Burgher Meister and his crowd died away and were replaced by a more liberal administration (we’ll see how long THAT lasts), there are some folks who still hate Santa Claus, and damned if they didn’t cut to:

A HARASSED SALESCLERK in a department store getting yelled at, poked and prodded by adult CONSUMERS who want SERVICE, like, IMMEDIATELY

and THEN to

A CIGAR-CHOMPING EXECUTIVE in his depressing office through the window of which we see a horrible sooty filthy goddamn factory with smokestacks burping toxic smoke into the pure pink lungs of Christmas. And this guy, who’s obviously stacked (no pun), but miserable, says, “Who can think of Christmas in a world like THIS?”

I mean, who wrote the script for this baby, Herbert Marcuse?

Man what a lesson, what a show! I remembered the first time I saw “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” (goddamn!) thirty years ago. I was working on this wood-burning set my parents got me for Hanukah – of course – and it seemed so apropos, the craft I was working on and the craft of the elves, and even now, remembering, I could smell the sweet smoke rising from the wood when once again-

cut to a commercial for yet another little pill to stop my farts from making noise or god knows what, and yet another adult dancing — like a puppet, not a pagan — through the isles of some department store, Stuff-Fer-YOU, or whatever, and the stuff was a bunch of doohickeys with which to thrill your kids, if you can afford kids, and the batteries are not included and there’s no guarantee they won’t be obsolete two days outta the box and say, you look DEPRESSED, anxious, stressed – what you need is this little ol’ pill that’s GUARANTEED to burn that Holiday fever right outta yer Yiddisher Kupf…

Oh Youth! Oh Santa — get me outta town!

I used to think we were all a bunch of clowns.

Where did I get the arrogance, the audacity, the sheer chutzpah to believe we were equal to clowns, who after all, are entertainers, in their own way, make-up artists, acrobats, performers who get paid at the end of the night, scrub off their grease-paint, twist off their rubber noses, and sleep well, while we, we are merely children in the audience bedazzled and beguiled by the clowns while outside the big top, under the benevolent watch of the Strong Man, The Knife-Thrower and Lobster Boy (”support our freaks”) our parents are signing away the family farm, our inheritance, and that of our children, to the Ringmaster, who orders the Strongman to bugger Dad while Lobster Boy and Knife-Thrower do unspeakable things to Mom, for after all, they got paid for the gig, gotta make ‘em earn their freak. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t be natural.

That we dare flatter ourselves with such attributes as clown, buffoon, jester, jackanapes, lummox, oaf…another testimony to our unmitigated gall.

Communication Breakdown in the Great Beyond (Apropos Fox, not Cox)

How telling that the television ghost-hunters (all right, we’ll go along with it: “there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio,” yadda yadda yadda) were worried about entering the haunted basement because of the POWER PROBLEM. That is, there was no place to hook up their fancy high-tech ghost hunting doo-dads, so they had to bring down a generator. Interesting that even in the “other world” communication depends on non-renewable – or re-incarnationable – energy sources.

Cox Says “No!” to Unmarketable Drugs

We paranoids don’t do well with hallucinogenics. Then again, maybe it’s the epoch; it’s not like I’m hanging out with Grace Slick on a warm June night in San Francisco, circa 1967. The sixties had pot and acid; the seventies had heroin and Quaaludes; the eighties cocaine and Ecstasy; the nineties anti-depressants; and our current era a mishmash of anti-depressants, benzodiazepams, and highly caffeinated “soft drinks.” Booze and nicotine throughout, of course; the timeless “legal” drugs we are actually encouraged not to “say no” to — don’t let the anti-smoking ads fool you; besides encouraging smoking as an act of rebellion via corn-ball reverse-propaganda, the hardest drug of all to kick is Nicotine gum. It’s like chewing cocaine.

We’re All Better Now: The Post-Election Irrelevance of Cox

The modern president is like a systems administrator of a system that’s been fixed for years with minor “patches” and “upgrades,” only making it even more complex and subsequently closer to chaos, a system that can only be “fixed” by a complete “power down” and rewrite of the kernel and OS code; no matter how colorful and dazzling the screen-saver, it’ll only save what it’s meant to save – the screen; thousands of lines of code between pressing a key and the instant appearance of a letter or number on the screen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if The Board of Trustees (whoever they really are) sat McCain and Obama in a room and said,

“We need an articulate, relatively young, black man to take off some of the heat, ease tension, bring back that Kennedy/MLK sense of hope and ‘change.’ Sorry, John, you represent the so-called ‘old school.’ Barrack, you’re in. Congratulations. No hard feelings, John. Our men at Diebold have been instructed to give you a number of ‘red states’ so it won’t be an embarrassment.”

“Yes. I understand, sir. Congratulations, Barrack.”

“Thanks, John. If there’s anything I can do, you let me know.”

Comedians as Letter “C”

Ten pies-in-the-face, “to-go”, for the clowns who managed to take a once outrageous weekly (5 minute) skit on the real Saturday Night Live 1975-80 (imagine if, after 1970, they hired a four new guys every couple of years to write and play crappy music and called them The Beatles or The Doors? What’s in a name?) into hour-long ACTUAL mainstream “news shows” with ACTUAL mainstream guests (who they josh around with with all the investigative chops of Jay Leno) and call it “comedy.” For some reason this pisses me off even more than the fucking election, which is at least a “sort of” funny joke. This “Fake News” using “actual mainstream news” with some limp, sponsor-approved “satire” would make Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and the real “SNL NEWS” satirists WISH they were dead, if they weren’t already dead, and therefore, most of them being dead, damn proud of it. What did I just say?

Modrun Media Medicine: a Possible (Mis?)Reading of Cox

Actors, formerly lowest of life forms, became icons — literally – once their owners had the technology to reproduce their images so they could earn money off the actors not merely from one or two stage performances a day, but thousands of movie screenings a day throughout the world, not to mention magazines, memorabilia, free media publicity etc. Unfortunately, the actors, never the brightest of the lot, took this to mean that they themselves were somehow more important.

Surgeries don’t matter anyway, especially for women, who once they pass 40 have to wait till they’re over sixty or so to play 40-year-olds and such. Cheaper for celebrities to dress in diapers as a means toward regaining lost youth and more effective than surgery; also, they can “grow into them” as they age…

But the surgeries made them look like teenagers strung out on heroin. So the Owners began to harvest real old people, the ones who still had enough memory left to remember lines (not that it mattered much; in film, you only have to say one or two lines between ‘takes’); also, the old people died before they became annoying; so the owners told the filmmakers to make movies about old people; but the young people weren’t interested in seeing such films; so the Owners had Big Media churn out magazines, websites, television shows etc. portraying the old people as desirable, THE PEOPLE to be; so the young people began buying fanzines and going to films starring old people. Soon the young people wanted to be like their heroes. They tried heroin, but that didn’t work well for more than a few weeks, or minutes, for most; so the stores began selling old people masks and props to make the young folks look old with sagging breasts and low scrotums like melting wax; and the wealthy young people had this done via surgery; so everyone, even the doctors who lost so much business making old people look young — which was way passe — were happy….

To Paraphrase Cox…

Capitalists and their “enablers” cannot be reasoned with or “talked to.” There is no dialog. If there were enough space, and a lot less people, that would be fine with me. They stay where they are, I stay where I am, and we’re happy as pigs in poop with our own peculiar notions about what “is” is. However, Capitalism, which began as a malignant tumor some 500 years ago (some would say “Civilization” itself which began around 8000 years ago), has metastasized to engulf the globe. There is no “escape” unless you’re rich enough to buy a temporary Disneyland off the coast of some third world “paradise” which will, ultimately, be engulfed by the tidal waves of climate change “inspired by” industrialism and post-industrialism – whatever that is. We are what we eat, (i.e., the planet).

The ultimate goal of capitalism is one “legal” Man – the Chief Executives and Board – celebrating absolute monopoly over the wasteland, all the while eying each other hungrily and wondering “gee, who will ‘we’ exploit next?”

…and Add My Own Two Cents

That said, once someone crosses the “line” into my “space,” and worse, threatens to eliminate me in order to occupy said “space,” I don’t think “love” or “tolerance,” as preached by capitalist clergy, are the affectations that are in my “best interest.” In such situations, an absolute devotion to defending “one of god’s creatures” (i.e. moi) BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, is in order. Just a thought.

American Bards and Cox Reviewers

Of course, Cox’s Sick Planet , if it’s read, as it certainly should be, will probably generate all sorts of “opinions” among the millions floating around “the information super highway that’s gonna bring us all together” these days, including this one. But I prefer to think of opinions not “like assholes, but like original minds; not everybody has one.”

Beyond Cox and Evil

Maybe all that mumbo-jumbo (see Ishmael Reed) mythopoaeic poppycock about the “dead king” sacrifice which culminated in Jesus appeasing his mean old dad for the sins of mankind in order to save mankind was not as wickedly conceived as the mind of mankind is capable of and consistent in conceiving.

Men hate and fear god. The way they hate and fear THE CORPORATION. But like THE CORPORATION, the old testament god, Yahweh, is invisible, immortal, untouchable. But Jesus, his “representative” on earth, was quite mortal, visible and touchable. Better yet, he was capable of being harmed.
Men nailed him to the cross in vengeance, their only means of redress, against the merciless, implacable, unreachable Yahweh.

So what might this mean in terms of seeking “redress” against THE CORPORATION?

In an EMERGENCY SITUATION, such as ours, one must come to terms with whatever interpretation of the cosmic order one may have, then put a lid on it and let’s get down to brass tacks – and use them…

Concluding Unscientific Post-It^TM

those who can’t do, leach
those who can’t sing, preach
those who can’t grab, reach
if
   agent manage sale
then
   go to beach
else if
   agent manage fail
then
   prayer (pitch) = beseech

Personally, I viewed the whole thing like a boxing match (CNN or FOX or whatever even had an advertisement for election coverage featuring McInsane and Bareback Obama faced off in profile, like fighters). Say, Holyfield versus Tyson (the re-match, after Holyfield’s ear was sewed back on). Ignored the hype qua hype, but once the “bout” began, consciously or unconsciously “took sides.” Just like I wanted Holyfield to give Tyson his “come-uppance” (and just as I wanted the similar thing when Clinton took away the 12 year Reign of Terror by Reagan/Bush I for the heavyweight title in ‘92), I “rooted” for Obama.

Then I had second thoughts. Since, like any other sports event/entertainment, the outcome wouldn’t make much of a difference to this huge sick planet, I thought it might be funnier, more hysterical, just for kicks and guffaws, if McCain was actually “elected” — then succumbed to his melanoma after a few months to issue in the “Palin era.” Also, I actually prefer an outright bully/gangster/thug, like Dubya or John Gotti, who lays his trick cards on the table, to a “friendly executive” like Clinton or the fictional Michael Corleone, who’ll “let you win” then stab you in the back as you’re leaving the Casino.

Then again, what do I know, other than for me, Obama represents the latter?

Regardless, the whole circus reminds me of ‘92, when I was still “green under the apple boughs…”

“Nobel Laureate” (I read once that Nobel created the prize because he didn’t want his legacy to be that of the inventor of the — then — ultimate weapon: dynamite; I think the “Nobel Propaganda Prize” is far more of a danger to all living things) Al Gore, warming up the crowd as opening act for Bill Clinton, having everyone in Madison Square Garden (broadcast to the world) repeat the refrain, “It’s time for change…” after he’d announce, point-by-pithy-sound-byte-point various failures of the Reagan/Bush era, pausing as the “home crowd” chanted, “it’s TIME for CHANGE.”

Yeah. Tell that to one of the dead Iraqis whose murder was “worth it.” Or a Palestinian in Camp Gaza. Or a Serbian in the once-beautiful city of Belgrade. Or a “welfare queen” forced to leave her kids alone so she could be an indentured servant to “work-fare” when the whole reason she went on “welfare” was cause she couldn’t both support and nurture her kids while working 60 hrs a week for “minimum wage” at McDonalds etc. etc. etc.

Meanwhile. MEANWHILE…

Dionysus reigned supreme last night in Union Square park. They — mostly NYU students — were partying till 4AM. Thousands jammed the park, chanting, singing, whooing, hooing and hee-ing and haw-ing (imagine if “they” had done that four years ago, but in protest, when BushCo. stole the election). Worse, the cars, trucks, buses. Honking horns as they passed to the delight of the drunken crowd. I guess I don’t blame them, in a way. I remember being young and stupid and so fucking happy when Clinton ended the Reagan/Bush Reign of Terror that so dominated my entire young adulthood. They’ll sober up when Obama cancels their guaranteed student loans to help pay for the Wall Street bail-out, the noble “wars” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon Iran. As for the car-truck-bus crowd: their oil has peaked, I think, or is damn close to it. Again, I understand people’s need to feel part of a “group,” a “celebration” of “change” and the “official end of racism” etc. But I couldn’t help thinking how ironic it was that thousands of people expressed “political commitment” not by gathering together to soberly plan the Next Move (i.e. putting the president elect in the hot seat), but by behaving like a bunch of typically arrogant, indulgent, selfish, drunk, overbearing Americans….

I mean, my wife had to get up for work at eight, and I had to DO work — I do both my “paid” writing: hack copywriting, ghost-writing etc. and “leisurely” work, such as this here, at night. WE sure felt the ramifications of “change…”

The irony is…

My wife works at the Digital Animation Center at the NYU Film School. Those were some of her own students keeping her up all night. While she, like me, is a “gym rat” and in better shape than most 20 year olds, she, like me, is in her early 40s, and just can’t “party like it’s 1999″ till 4AM and get up “for class” at 8AM like her students, who will no doubt be full of pep and energy and good cheer, awaiting “change” as I was when Clinton ended the Reagan/Bush nightmare to create his own. Well, I wish them well. But I wouldn’t wish the kind of “change” Obama (now the number one corporeal representative of the invisible, immortal corporate body known as THE MAN) will be bringing on anyone…

Bad news that the New Prince-in-Waiting made some unfortunate veiled threats to the REST of the planet in his Live-From-Chicago acceptance speech, a more corporate, user-friendly, lawyer-ish version of “yer either with us, or against us.”

Often think of the millions of people who lived entire lifetimes — 70, 80 years — thousands of years before Homer was in baby booties. Moments of love, fear, happiness, pleasure, pain, etc. experienced by REAL people, who just didn’t have camcorders to record it all for the infinite boredom of posterity — Humanity’s Home Movie; interesting if you’ve never seen any type of movie before, or suddenly found 30,000 year old DVD and spent an evening watching “a day in the life” of our ancestors, but if passed along like our own over-recorded/photographed/digitized antics, a yawner for sure…

Ah, for the (allegedly) good ol’ days of Matriarchy, before some dudes got together with a bunch of sharp objects and realized, with some verbal acrobatics, they could “rule forever and ever look on these works ye mighty and despair.” On the other hand, there are non-matriarchal tribal cultures like the Sioux, Navajo etc. in which men and women were “separate but equal,” each having their own work, responsibilities and value. The whole Judeo-Christian-Islam (and other “civilization” religions) scam is a waste of life-energy and a royal pain in the ass for all involved. Not to mention the near absolute exploitation of women either as phony Hillary/Palin type “feminists” (absolute opposite of what my friend Barbara Mor, wrote about in The Great Cosmic Mother — terrible title; Harper-Collins’ idea; her real title was the excellent: The First God) trying to be like men, who themselves have long since become “machines” or cogs in THE MACHINE, or generally downtrodden sex slaves, house-keepers and/or shielded from all light in burkhas. Why would any heterosexual man want women to be dressed in lampshades? Then again, why would any sentient being want women with plastic breasts, silicon buttocks and faces “re-invented” by surgery????

On the other hand: “Yawn.”

Other words for these people (a corporation is a person, according to “our” law, if not Nature’s, no?) might be “parasites,” “free-loaders,” “bums.” The bill is long overdue, and we, not “our corporate sponsors” or “our government” will be paying it for generations.

The consequences of our energy-addiction and the technology-trumps-life system of the corporate/government “dealers” who supply us with or “junk” are everywhere.

For instance, the Beef Industry is not only a source of high cholesterol and a “Treblinka for animals,” as I.B. Singer described the modern industrial slaughterhouse, it’s a colossal consumer of water.

“In the Southwest, if you want to divine the truth, follow the water. Sooner or later you’ll end up at a cow. More than 80 percent of the water diverted from the Colorado River goes for agricultural irrigation. And that means cattle. The water goes largely to multi-millionaire ranchers and ranches owned by transnational corporations and banks. The water no longer goes to the rural Hispanics, Apache, Hopi, and Navajo, who had developed a truly sustainable grazing and small agriculture based on the ancient system of acequias and other indigenous irrigation systems,” St. Clair writes in Bad Sky.

Just how did the U.S. “make the dessert bloom” with cities and industries that never belonged their in the first place? Why, by diverting water from rivers with huge, government-sponsored dams. Public works. That’s good, no? No, according to St. Clair. When water is diverted from its natural course to provide energy, often via Nuclear Power plants, the result, besides a transitory burst of power for toasters and TVs, is horrendous pollution, nuclear waste, water made toxic after “processing” by power plants, and the dead, stagnant water within the dams themselves.

Then of course we have the Timber Industry, which would, if it could (and due to government “oversight” basically can or will) shred every tree in the West until none are left standing (but those last few trees will yield quite a profit). As St. Clair points out, it’s not about a limited number of lumberjacks losing jobs over a few spotted owls, rather vast multinational corporate forces and we, their consumer/constituents, disrupting and destroying complex eco-systems in the name of “progress” and profit. Disturbing indigenous eco-systems cause unpredictable consequences for the global “environment” of which even we humans are a part. “The Environment” is not something “out there,” yet another enemy we can fight with slogans like “The War against Pollution,” or what-have-you. We are part of the environment, and the environment is in us. Or are we composed of petroleum-based plastics too?

If, according to Chaos Theory, one butterfly flapping its wings in South America contributes to weather patterns in North America, what does the destruction of thousands of birds, bears, wolves, deer, trees, and entire ecosystems, however small or large, have is store for us? This is, ultimately, the theme of Born under a Bad Sky: the consequences of our chaos as detailed by St. Clair’s lucid writing, on-site experience, and meticulous reading and research. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” corporatist, “free-marketeers” like to say. Jeffrey St. Clair proves how right they are in these dispatches from Hell – our beloved “Homeland.”

II

For this reviewer, reading Bad Skywas much like watching the movie, A Clockwork Orange. The reader wants to turn away, but is too fascinated with the almost surreal horror of it all, so the he/she will go one, must go on, even, if necessary, “with eyes wide shut” (to borrow from another Kubrick film). All Americans should read this book, particularly those who still believe that buying and recycling curvaceous pints of Poland Spring water, made with “30-percent less plastic” (so you’ll buy 50-percent more with a “clean conscience”) is, as the bottles advertise, “eco-friendly.” Bad Sky forces the reader to wonder not only how anything made of plastic can be “eco-friendly,” but just WHY we must — to be on the “safe” side — buy bottled water in the first place.

Bad Sky is divided into three sections:

“Way out West” relates, in excruciating detail, the devastation wrought upon the natural world, our (or rather, the Indians’) inheritance. Such acts of eco-cide (and homicide) include nuclear tests done by “our” government in the 1950s and 1960s that exposed thousands, perhaps millions of Southwesterners to dangerous, “down-wind” radiation.

“Politicians and Other Strangers” examines certain bizarre myths, such as that of an environmentally friendly Al Gore. As the reader will discover, case after case, corporate deal after corporate deal, Gore is anything but “Green.” Other such myths include the “benevolence” of such Big Business-friendly government agencies such as the EPA, FDA, Department of Agriculture, FEMA, the Bureau of Land Management and countless others defending corporate/government/military interests with our tax dollars.

“The Beautiful and the Dammed” tells of two trips by the author down the Green and Colorado rivers in the dammed-off Glen Canyon region. Passing along a “preserved” (that is, dry) area of the Canyon, St. Clair and his companions encounter both beauty and horror in desolation wrought by dammed areas, some scheduled to be flooded but “saved” at the expense of other areas via political wheeling and dealing. The “heart of darkness” the author finds during this trip down the river is not the so-called “savage wildness of Nature,” but rather, the allegedly rational, systematic forces that destroyed it, and our own “hearts” in the process.

The scope of Bad Sky is wide, and St. Clair’s insight into the systemic destruction of our land, air, water and future is deep. But the devils are in the details….

Remember when we were in our teens and early 20s, the incredible gamut of living authors to choose from? Pynchon, Gaddis, Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Delillo, Salinger, Brautigan, Cathy Acker, Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Grace Paley, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Charles Olsen, Jack Spicer, Allan Ginsberg, A.R. Ammons, Burroughs, Coover, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and on and on and on? Ever been to a bookstore lately? Check out the “new” poetry and fiction? Like the soulless music, the childish movies and TV shows, etc. there’s nothing but “dead grandma” stories, straight “narratives, up-lifting “personal dramas” for the Oprah crowd…

I’m bored. I need something to READ.

I guess I wouldn’t be chewing such sour grapes if there were enough real publishers to give readers and writers an actual choice beyond the .current “marketable” 19th century-style novels with 20th century signifiers offered up by B&N (remember when there were OTHER bookstores?) Jane Austen and the Brontes wrote great books. Why do so many of “today’s writers” try to re-write them, as if two centuries of industrialization, modernism, technology, insane wars etc. hadn’t passed?

On the other hand, there’s Mickey Z.’s CPR for Dummies. Not so much an “experimental” novel, but a novel that wisely follows the legacy a century of modernists and post-modernists left to him. Wry, dry humor; “real” events interposes with fictional lives; a Henry Fielding-type “performance” by the author/narrator. It’s everything a novel tackling the mystifying “real world” of today SHOULD be. It is thoroughly original not so much in formal invention –considering his predecessors, which he learned from as every good writer does — but in personal style. It is a novel that could only have been written by one person: Mickey Z. Which is how all creative works should be: unique, alive. But most aren’t.

CPR for Dummies is the first fiction I actually enjoyed reading since the near simultaneous deaths of William Gaddis, Kathy Acker,,and William Burroughs in the late 1990s — early 2000s. It’s kind of like Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion got together to produce a very strange, very funny, but ultimately very frightening “child.”

CPR is a montage of real and fictional events. The unbelievable, insane, grim, horrific realities, and Mickey Z’ wonderfully life-affirming fictions.

At the center of it all is Janie, aspiring actress and Gal Friday for a pornographic magazine.

Janie is one of the sexiest fictional characters since Betty and/or Veronica (whomever you prefer; both would be nice). Hence, she is held hostage by a lecherous priest [name] who convinces his sexually repressed septuagenarian flock (plus Ruth, a young women confused about a lot of things, mostly sexual in nature) that Janie is the Second Coming, her initials are “JC,” while he plots to get into her pants. But while she is mistaken for a male deity, “JC,” she displays all the qualities of the matriarchal, pre-civilization goddess (though not the somewhat sinister, civilized Aphrodite): sex, art and creative anarchy trump repression, control, and ultimately destructive violence. The primordial power of unreppressed (though not promiscuous; she is loyal to her boyfriend, Lenny D) sexuality, leads to a kind of “contact” with life that is closer to a true “spiritual experience” (i.e. Janie gets the old folks and Rachel to go-go dance their hyper-civilized cares away) than the strictures and ultimate hypocrisies of “organized religion” as manifest in Father [Muscles] castigating them on one hand, while jerking off with the other. Janie is a true “healer” — as Ruth would testify — as well as the kind of messiah I would want coming (and coming again; a second coming?) to save my sorry ass by reveling in LIFE rather than the phony world of “the spirit” — a contrast that resulted, ultimately, in the mess we’re in: allegedly “spiritual” people worshiping death, denying LIFE — and hence, sex and women — in favor of some mean-assed god who has nothing better to do than brow-beat a bunch of nomads in the desert (or old folks in a church basement). This is, for me the center of the book. The character of Janie versus the macho construction workers, the priest, the niggling old women and their perverse husbands (all of whom have dirty secrets, as opposed to Janie and the innocent Ruth, who is, “as a child” in her naiveté; hence, the perfect candidate for “apostle.”).

In other words, Life, Sex, Creative Anarchy versus Technology, Repression, Atomic warfare.

Now THAT’S worth reading about.

Also, one of the many sub-plots in CPR for Dummies is that a meteor is heading straight toward earth and we are all going to die, quite soon. Enjoy.

II: Talking to Mickey Z.

Holden Caulfield wished he could call up authors of books he’d enjoyed and “shoot the breeze” with them. I tried to imagine “today’s” fictions are expressions of personal ideas and imagination by real people rather than novelizations of sit-coms written by teams of corporate hacks. In other words, I “called up” Mickey Z. (as if such a person actually exists) via email and asked him some questions about CPR for Dummies…

Adam Engel: One of the most interesting techniques you use is the “narrator as performer,” which was used by guys like Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, and Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five and several other novels, but seems to have disappeared. By “performer” I mean that the narrator “talks” to the reader while he’s ostensibly creating the story, commenting on his own scenes, characters, sentences, constantly “keeping the ball in the air.” As if it’s all happening “live” as part of a performance. You acknowledge doing this in the CPR as a way of making the nightmarish realities cited in the book more palatable. Was this a political decision, an aesthetic decision, or both? Why do you think this technique is no longer “in style,” replaced instead by the somber, sober, more “formal” 19th century voice?

Mickey Z.: I’m not sure why this technique is not all the rage these days. Everything else seems so self-referential: movies, TV, pop music, etc. As for my use of the “narrator as performer,” it came about for two main reasons. Firstly, it felt necessary at times. I was genuinely concerned that I might have gone overboard with the rapid changes in direction, so to speak, so the narration served as a Greek chorus of sorts. The other reason was simply that it I enjoyed it doing it so much. I always loved the wisecracking asides of early film comedians. For example, in Horse Feathers, Groucho Marx is asked by a jealous husband: “What are you doing here?” Groucho replies: “I’m the plumber. I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.” Then he turns to the audience and adds: “That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” CPR for Dummies gave me my chance to join in the fun and, as you say, to give it the feel of a live performance while offsetting the more intense vignettes.

AE: Speaking of intense vignettes: the novel seems to be a kind of tennis match between Life (Janie and the Church-a-go-go, Ruth, sexuality, Lenny D. etc.) and Death (the horrifying facts about nukes, war, etc). Death is related in factual accounts, yet Life exists only in fictional vignettes. Why is this?

MZ: Good question. I’m not sure I consciously planned it out like that but it sure does mirror my life at times. I’m typically a well-liked, friendly person with a calm demeanor but I’m also the one voted most likely to shatter an illusion. Someone’s talking about cell phones? That’s my cue to bring up coltan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Eastern Lowland Gorillas. Eating meat? Well, get ready for some slaughterhouse facts. Believe the Obama hype? Don’t worry, Mickey Z. is here to tell you about his support for the death penalty and how he voted against single-payer. Factual accounts to offset the fictional vignettes in our life.

AE: Okay, then what about the “oddly” named “Lenny D.” On one hand, he’s like a zen martial arts master or samurai (except when he’s having sex with Janie), quiet, moving little, dispassionate, what “we Americans” would call lazy. On the other hand, when a friend or loved one is attacked or even merely offended (Janie, his grandmother) he becomes a lethal weapon. This is the opposite of the truly violent characters in the book, such as cops beating protesters, sexist construction workers, nasty priests, and of course, those who drop bombs, i.e. all who refuse to “live and let live.” What does the character of Lenny D. say about the nature of rightul violence or self defense against mis-used power?

MZ: Your question hits on two important angles here—one overt, the other somewhat below the radar. Firstly, I very consciously made sure no single character served as my surrogate. I infused many of the characters with traits I identify with (or wish I had) but none of them is what, say, Chinaski was to Bukowski. As for Lenny D., he has a sentimental perception of right and wrong but, you could say he lives by the immortal words of Patrick Swayze (as James Dalton in Roadhouse): “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”

AE: In general, at least since the mid-nineteen eighties/early nineties (I’m guessing), American “artists” who receive wide — or any — distribution to the public, “create” bland, corporate-approved movies, books and music. Do you agree? If so, why do you think this is?

MZ: A: I’d agree this is true, as you say, in general. I’m old enough to remember pop culture in the pre-cable TV and pre-VHS and pre-Internet days. Sure we had TV and radio but the faster-than-the-speed-of-light technology did not yet exist to completely homogenize the culture so artists weren’t creating for a monolithic target audience. This development had to play a role not only in the dumbing down of art but in the dumbing down of artists. Just the other day, I was having conversation about how Bob Dylan was well-versed in and influenced by classical poetry but many who were subsequently inspired by Dylan knew little of his influences. The next generation – influenced by those who were influenced by Dylan — were one more step removed. And so on. Still, having said all that, some film, literature, and music is still being made today. Not enough…but some. Consider this: When reporting on the infamous New York School of abstract expressionist painters in 1947, art critic Clement Greenberg pondered, “What can fifty do against one hundred and forty million?” It wasn’t so much an entire population stacked against a band of radical painters that Greenberg was contemplating. Rather, it was 140 million Americans essentially ignoring a movement that would eventually change the face of art. The U.S. population has more than doubled in the fifty-plus years since Jackson Pollock dripped his way onto the cover of Life magazine and there are still plenty of movements being ignored by the majority. In fact, lurking below the one-size-fits-all surface of today’s consumer culture, there’s a broad range of indefatigable rabble-rousers doing their thing. As Ani DiFranco sings: “Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel, there’s a fire just waiting for fuel.”

AE: The minority of Americans dubbed “the reading public” prefer, or the Pavlovian Publishers who ring the dinner bell prefer, “realism” in poetry, drama, fiction. But “realism” itself is a device of — primarily — 19th century artifice. Kafka, Joyce, Stein, Breton, Woolf, Beckett, Stevens, Burroughs, Pynchon etc., in fact, the majority of late 19th to late 20th century writers attempted to capture a more psychological/unconscious reality based on individual perception. In CPR, the “realism” of the historical facts recounted are questioned, if not outright lampooned by the wild, satiric, romps that occur in the “fictional” sections. What gives? Both with this “new” fad of Tolstoy/Flaubert “realism” — appropriate for their day, not ours — and with your satirizing of such alleged “realism” in CPR?

MZ: When I hear the word “realism,” I can’t help but think of “reality TV.”What a progression, huh? Anyway, my idea of reality/realism is more in line with this: A little more than two years ago, a cousin of mine killed himself and I thought, My cousin no longer lives on this planet…but yet the subways are still jammed, bars and restaurants remain full, blogs get updated, Jane still does the laundry every Wednesday, and Joe never misses Sportscenter. Yes, of course life (so-called) goes on with or without us…but at some point that week, I was probably walking around my neighborhood feeling sorry for myself in the heat or maybe contemplating the big trade the Yankees just made. Meanwhile, at that precise moment, my cousin was out in the woods of Pennsylvania with a rope around his neck. Makes me wonder what’s happening somewhere (perhaps to someone I know and love) just as I am typing this. It’s enough to make you insane. Moral of this story (and every story?): There are no happy endings. In CPR, this concept is manifested as you describe above.

AE:If I could spend a night with any three people, real or imaginary (uh…if I weren’t married to my beautiful, wonderful wife, of course…) it would be Mary Shelley, circa 1816; Grace Slick, circa 1967; or Janie, circa — immediately. Comment?

MZ: That is the strangest compliment I’ve ever received. I’m flattered you think so highly of Janie and your appraisal helped teach me more about her than I ever knew. As I said earlier, I very consciously made sure no single character served as my surrogate and Janie is the ultimate example of that. She’s brimming with characteristics I admire and only a select few traits I possess, but mostly, she’s my fictionalized heroine (maybe she’s my Cassandra). There were instances where the mere act of typing her dialogue had me smiling ear to ear. Janie is full of contradictions, like any human, but she’s also someone finding her way better than most in this insane culture of ours. She nurtures, she heals, she listens, and she speaks her mind freely and clearly. Without the pomposity and pretension of most educated (sic) activists and radicals, Janie is – in her own way – fighting the battles we should all be fighting if we weren’t so paralyzed by fear, self-interest, and a modicum of comfort. Plus, Janie is a female and I very much enjoy the company of women and deeply value feminine energy.

So what are these two spirited, but politically powerless, young women to do?

Go down! Down the rabbit-hole — the empty socket where Bunnista’s pre-vivisection right eye had been? — for a non-human, all-too-non-human glimpse of “our” current reality.

Down to a world in which invading alien robots, machines from outer-space, whose diet consists of animals, vegetables and minerals, that is, the LIVING Earth, are able to bribe their way through the Corporocracy by offering the President of the United States unlimited supplies of the gold they expel from their mechanical anuses (they’re machines, after all; what would we expect them to shit?).

A world in which multi-national corporations become concerned that the alien robots are eating the planet — because that’s the corporations’ job. Those darn machines are eating into corporate profits. Big no-no. The Corporocracy demands that the President rescind the permits he granted the aliens, which allow them to eat the planet, or they’ll kill him, just as they would any other corporate slave who threatened the bottom-line. Nothing personal.

A world in which Bunnista is labeled a “terrorist” by the corporate media for liberating abused animals from the torture chambers of a vivisection lab then blowing up the empty building. Moreover, the “terrorist” rabbit blew up a dam in order to save the lives of fish. No one was hurt, but corporate property was damaged. Furthermore, there was a school some miles away from the vivisection lab; hence, the “news-casters” announce, cute little “innocent, innocent” children “might have been harmed” had they somehow managed to be near the lab Bunnista destroyed in the middle of the night.

A world in which Kranti and Bannanabelle, refusing to snitch on Bunnista, are thrown into a concentration camp built to contain rabbits, all of whom are now “potential terrorists,” simply because they’d been labeled “bunnies” due to a “bureaucratic error.” Even a flesh-and-blood prison guard, observing them at close quarters, believes, in spite of her own eyes, that they are bunnies because their ID tags list them as such. An apt metaphor for the Power Elites’ ability to make us see what they want us to see, even if we don’t actually see it.

But despite all this, despite the Life against Death circumstances of our “current situation,” As the World Burns is not a book for doomsday pacifists or nihilists.

Jensen and McMillan, like their characters — animal, vegetable and mineral — are warriors for LIFE.

So what’s the solution? What are Kranti and Bannanabelle going to do to stop the machines — alien, societal and corporate — from devouring the planet?

A little bird tells them. A little bird, and other “earthlings” — animal, vegetable and mineral. The “solution” is something wild, far wilder than most of us domesticated human machines, ensconced in our machine-like social orders, can comprehend. Most of us, but not all. Nevertheless, it is not until a substantial number of us — animal, vegetable and mineral – unite to destroy ALL machines — mechanical, societal and corporate — that the Living Earth can continue to live. Otherwise, sooner rather than later, she’ll become just another blank planet, a cold, dead rock, or a very, very hot one.

“All plots end in death,” Don Dellilo wrote. Not necessarily so, according to the authors of As the World Burns. The plot of Jensen and McMillan’s graphic novel is open; the “end” (or the new beginning) is ours to decide.

The proverbial “writing on the wall” has long since become illegible, scrawled over by layers of agit-prop graffiti screams. We are among children, terrified children longing to be dead. Unix/Network programmers and systems administrators — keepers and maintainers of yet another machine — have a term for broken bits of code, cut loose by a faulty “killing” of a particular program: orphans. Orphans, these fragments of once “living” applications, wander the System, until they become “zombies,” dead code cluttering the System. They must be located and neutralized lest they jam the System, cause it to crash and become inoperable. We are such “zombies.” The question posed by Jensen and McMillan is whether we submit to neutralization, allowing the System to continue, or can we somehow “patch” ourselves together into a new program (not a machine, a living system) — one that will destroy the Machine in order to save its victims: the living?

True, we’re in a terrifying situation, despite the soothing words of the nice, pretty people on the TeeVee “news,” but Jensen and McMillan’s message is simple enough for even WE MODERN CITIZENS to understand: we’re being suckered, had, taken, fooled, bamboozled. “Yeah, yeah,” we shrug. “Everything is a crock.” But there’s the rub. We don’t know “everything.” We don’t know anything. We don’t even know what “is” is.

The problem is not that animals, trees, mountains can’t “speak,” but that we can’t or won’t hear. The problem is, we’re in a world of six billion head-trips and most of us keep tripping over the same fat heads. The problem is our much vaunted “way of life.” For who or what in the world is more dangerous (within the Greater Machine itself) than the “productive citizen?” Even the “destructive consumer” converts some of the junk to energy before it becomes waste. We “productive citizens” produce and produce and produce only waste. Too much junk to be consumed. Too much junk for the planet — even to the depths of her polluted oceans — to absorb.

I always thought the line, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is hard to Find, was the ultimate “reality-check,” the ultimate wake-up call. Not so. The majority of Productive Citizens/Consumers would plod on through their “American Way of Life,” more or less unaffected by a bullet to the head. As the World Burns is just such a bullet: absolutely necessary for the rude awakening of humanity; unfortunately, there’s little humanity left, and at this point, it seems, even a high-velocity depleted uranium round would arrive too late — for most of us.

Derrick Jensen is an activist, philosopher, and the author of Endgame, A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and other books.

Stephanie McMillan’s comic strip, Minimum Security, appears five times a week at United Media’s comics.com, and has run in dozens of publications worldwide since 1999. The strip was published as a book in 2005.

The arrival of these outsize U.S. “hunter-killer” drones, in aviation history’s first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.” — Associated Press, July 16, 2007.

So BushCo solved the PR problem that might possibly have grown into a credible anti-war movement by alleging to guarantee less American casualties which, let’s face it, is all Americans really care about anyway. Otherwise, we would have protested the massacre of the first “Gulf War” in which Iraqi soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in their cars while trying to escape Baghdad.

Forget all that “military honor” nonsense. What kind of monsters fire on retreating troops AND fleeing civilians? Despite all the movies and TV shows referring to “American casualties” in 1991, including that movie with Meg Ryan, only about 200 Americans died in that war as opposed to 150,000+ Iraqis, mostly civilian. The movie, JARHEAD, unique among Gulf I movies, depicts burnt corpses on a highway crammed with cars and trucks bombed fleeing American air power and “smart bombs.”

Gulf War Syndrome…that’s a different story. Poisoning our own troops is not very heroic. But the Pentagon doubts GWS is a real disease, much less caused by our own poisonous artillery, DU and all the rest. And if the Pentagon thinks these alleged “GWS sufferers” are really a bunch of lay-abouts looking for a hand-out merely because they “risked their lives” for their country. But again, the Pentagon knows they didn’t really risk much of anything; it was an air war for chrissake. Well just because the Government has treated war veterans like doo-doo ever since Vietnam doesn’t mean…well, forget it. Who am I, who is anybody, war-veteran or not, to question the U.S. Government?

But let’s imagine for a moment that Iraqis are actually human beings. Or better yet, imagine a country 100 times more powerful than the U.S. bombing all our major cities, then slaughtering the survivors as they attempted to escape in their cars (stuck in traffic jams; literally sitting ducks). Imagine if after this 3 week nightmare resulting in the equivalent of millions of American casualties, the Attackers forced an embargo for twelve years, in which hospitals could not get medicine, vehicles could not receive spare parts, and food and water were scarce, not to mention the destruction of the infrastructure and occasional air raid. THEN imagine that after twelve years of this, the ATTACKERS struck again, this time with the intention of taking over the country, stealing its natural and cultural resources, and basically leaving the U.S. not a society, but a chunk of bombed-out land populated by sick, hungry, wounded, terrified walking zombies. Would we fight back, like the “insurgents?” Or would be throw flowers at our ATTACKER? Would we even call those Americans who, like many French in WWII, resisted, “insurgents” or “Patriots?”

In a high school history class I opined that if I could go back to 1938, strapped with explosives, enter an event populated by Hitler, his top officials, and even their WIVES AND CHILDREN, I would willingly “give my life” to blow up the building and prevent WWII. The teacher applauded my bravery and self-sacrifice. But that was 22 years ago. Today, I suppose I’d be labeled a “terrorist” for even contemplating such a thing. Especially against our friends the Nazis!

Honestly, did anyone, even in the planning stages of 2001-2002, expect that the Iraqis might not appreciate the wholesale destruction of their country? Because “we” didn’t like their government (which “our” CIA help put in place)? People all over the world condemned our invasion of Viet Nam and Cambodia. If they had the means to “change our government” and punish U.S. citizens for the mistakes of that government, would it not be more or less the same thing?

Did anyone really believe the BushCo’s arguments for war in the first place? I remember several large demonstrations against the war before it started in April, 2003. But even so, we don’t give a damn about the Iraqis, only “our troops,” an invading force, including torturers and psycho-killers. For all of Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war work, we didn’t hear much from her until her son was killed while attempting to kill Iraqis. Perhaps, before he was killed, he killed many Iraqis. Did Cindy fly to Iraq to bring him home before he did any more damage?

Well, I suppose we won’t have to worry as much about the safety of our invading, marauding army. We can “support our Robots” instead, as unmanned planes, named, appropriately, The Reaper, murders Iraqis, destroys more homes and “secret insurgent hideouts” ( among their families, friends and other non-combatants, in Iraq), and secures the area for Truth, Justice, and the American Way (massive oil consumption, militarism, predatory Corporatism, racism and all the rest).

This is not about “honor or bravery or sacrifice,” any more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki had been. It’s pure cowardice, killing without having to put “our” troops in harms way. “Support our troops” indeed. But we know what we are, so why fight our own selfish, cowardly, murderous intent? Must a dog learn to meow or a cat bark? Why pretend we’re something we’re not? “We” didn’t create the largest military on earth because we’re decent, peace-loving, democratic do-gooders.

We’re afraid. Very afraid. Fortunately, the wicked cunning of our scientists allows us to have our oil and choke on it too.

I feel safer already knowing our patriotic killer-robots are in Iraq, a button-push, dial-turn or lever-switch away from blasting those evil, freedom-hating prepubescent terrorists back to the … uh … ante-bellum stone-age.

While poets like William Carlos Williams wanted poetry to represent “natural” speech, his work became more complicated later in life when he realized there is no “natural” speech. There are as many different dialects of English as there are Burroughs in every English-speaking city.

Politically, poems and novels written in “regular” language, are using the language that injected racism, sexism, capitalism and nearly everything we know into our brains, where language either is or influences thought.

Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, who remain unreadable to many, though it is not difficult to learn to read them (the idea that art and literature be “demanding” of close scrutiny, as opposed to “throwaway culture” of mainstream media is consistent throughout the avant garde in the 20th century) began to challenge the language of the dominant society by repeating words and sentences, re-ordering syntax (grammar rules either form spontaneously or are dictated from ON HIGH) etc. They were followed by the New York School of poets and painters, which included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, De Kooning and other radical artists.

Since the early seventies, a new group of artists, loosely referred to as the LANGUAGE school, took the breaking off of “allegedly reality-based natural language” as a serious political issue. First of all, they began, taking off from Stein, to view words as signifiers first and foremost, rather than as “pointers” to the signified. This means that, rather than describing an object “realistically,” which is a form of artifice in itself, they would use words as singular units of both meaning and ambiguity. For instance, the famous Gertrude Stein sentence, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” refers to the fact that the word, “rose,” means nothing but itself. Also, Stein, and later the LANGUAGE poets, described objects often with nouns and syntax that evoked the thing without using dead, cliched, description.

More recently, LANGUAGE poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman (also an inveterate blogger) have conducted poetry and prose “experiments” in which, for instance, in the case of Silliman’s “Ketjak,” each sentence is viewed as an individual unit, often unrelated to the ones that came before and immediately after. In the same work, he repeats various sentences throughout, in order to show that the same sentence can have numerous meanings, depending on context.

In addition to creating what Silliman called, “The new sentence,” these writers have written brilliant literary criticism on how to read their work, why they write against, rather than for the language of Newscasters and politicians and even many respected writers. Marjorie Perloff’s “Radical Artifice,” is an excellent introduction to avant garde poets and painters who create “unorthodox” works, like Jackson Pollok and Andy Warhol, and others who influenced both poetry and painting (the two have had an incredibly creative relationship with each other since the turn of the century, when Stein began to try to write like Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and others painted, creating “landscapes” with words). Her “Tender Buttons,” which you can download for free on line, and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolklas,” are also primary introductions to this radical theory of art.

I am writing a series on Stein, Zukofsky, the New York School and the LANGUAGE school not to enhance people’s appreciation for poetry, but rather because I believe the Left, in order to create a new world, must toss the racism, sexism, egotism etc. that is inherent in “regular” language, the language we were born to, receiving daily doses of images and words by the thousands each day. What one learns immediately is that nearly all the sentences created by copywriters, who often write better poetry for advertisements than many Establishment poets publishing in the New Yorker, are in accordance with the alleged “plain speech and grammar approved by the corporate culture that commissioned them.

This is directly applicable to the cliches, tropes, “pre-fab” sentences (i.e. “Have a nice day!”) of corporate, mainstream media and advertising, print and image, that leftists rightly complain about. Yet, though the average article found in most “alternative” zines/sites is better written and reported than anything one might find in the mechanistic “journalese” of the Post or Times or reinforced, along with carefully selected sound bytes and video clips of TV, they are using the language of the Master to tear down HIS house.

Thus far, only a small group of avant garde artists have found the means to combat this language. Rather than complain that Americans are duped by the Media into wars, corporatism, environmental neglect etc. etc., we should present an alternative method of reading as well as writing. William Blum’s “Killing Hope,” was researched by Blum using the radical technique of relegating his sources to mainstream reports available to anyone. For him, it is not so much a matter of reinvigorating the language with real (original) sentences and syntax, but teaching people to “read between the lines.”

In addition to teaching us a different way of reading, many writers are creating texts, such as Lyn Hejinian’s wonderful, short (115pp) MY LIFE, an autobiography in which places, times, dates, are deliberately ambiguous, and proper nouns are never used. The author transitions continually between “her” and “she” and the present and past tense, and reaches an element of “strangeness” which I’ll talk more about in a later essay, that one will almost never encounter in mainstream TV, advertising, or literature. Reading LANGUAGE poetry requires thought and concentration, as contrasted to “mind candy” of Media.

Linear narratives, a phenomenon of 19th century Industrial culture, are no more “real” than non-linear. Does the story really end on the last page? Does “realism” actually describe reality? Perhaps the surface world created by corporatism, but it is no more absolute than Newtonian physics, which was taken to be “reality” until Relativity and Quantum Mechanics went deeper into the “unseen” in the 20th century. Just as painters became more abstract when “realism” was supplanted by photography and film, language must reflect the subjectivity of the author, not the accumulation of artificial detail and dialog that creates the “heroes” and “characters” of mainstream fiction. In LANGUAGE writing, the main event is the language itself, in which the smallest unit of signification is not the paragraph, as with the novel and many poems and plays, but the sentence.

Thousands if not millions of brilliant essays have appeared on the web, but how can we expect people whose minds were deliberately closed by the age of 12 or so by media and “education” to refute corporate media or even understand alternative ways of thinking if their deepest thoughts were not come upon by research or experience but “injected” by media? People say we are a nation of children, and they are right, but that is because the language of capitalism/corporatism/militarism, the language we were born to, is supplemented daily by the very sources that are allegedly “informing” us, i.e. mainstream “news,” political speech, corporate advertising, and even corporate approved Pulitzer prize winners who appear on Oprah. Does anyone even know who Pulitzer was and what he was about? It sure wasn’t excellence in what we might call reporting or literature, but tabloid, “yellow journalism,” like that of William Randolph Hearst’s empire, pointers to the status quo and compliance to corporate/government authority.

I will try to present various “alternative” writers not to study literature or writing, but to explore how various techniques of reading, writing and the creative use, of grammar, idiom and words, once learned, can literally radicalize readers by pointing to new ways of thinking and deflecting the explosion of propaganda that fills our days, whether we’re looking at magazine ads, billboards, TV, listening to radio, or even reading mainstream newspapers without seeing what the words, in their “correct” (economically and politically authorized) grammar are really saying.

STUMBLING UPON IDEOLOGY

In the spirit of LANGUAGE writing, I tried an experiment of my own. Using a program called Stumble (http://www.stumbleupon.com), which “spins” the web like a roulette wheel, stopping randomly at a site culled from the millions of English language pages in existence, I “lifted” a sentence from each site, then randomly stumbled on to the next. Of course, there is an element of subjectivity, for I chose the sentence from each website; nevertheless, my options were limited to the sentences available on each site. A few times I linked some sentences with connectives or added a word or two of my own – in brackets – but ultimately, this is a sampling of the language of the web (I did deliberately skip the occasional “lefty” site.). My “theory” was that, outside the small number of left/progressive sites, a more-or-less random sampling of sentences pulled from mainstream websites would create a “collage narrative” of our culture. Additionally, though I chose sentences from numerous sites arbitrarily, one sentence per site, the “voice” of the piece would sound as if it were written by one author, for in the general discourse of our “society,” there really is one AUTHOR, and that is the language itself, an “official” language reflecting our obsessions with money, technology, violence. Again, my purpose is not literary so much as political. To explore the possibility of subverting the language of Media, suffused as it is with the predatory, authoritarian propaganda that, regardless of the text or who actually “wrote” it, is ultimately the language of Power in the form of technology/corporatism/militarism.

“The page is only the documentation,” wrote the poet/blogger Silliman, “or the page is more, the field, resistance.”

Below is the result of my experiment of creating a “prose-poem” using a sentence from each page I randomly “stumbled upon:”

MEDIA FRANCA, by THE INTERNET

At about the same time University College London published a number of establishment legal positions, the US declared itself Libya. “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” said Oscar Wilde (or maybe he wrote it). Archery goes back thousands of years, yet today’s equipment has made improper advances. Anyway, there are various ways to exploit and use the Internet profitably.

Where did that end and this begin? ‘This’ is everything to everyone, regardless, so why not let our mortgage experts help you determine “how much house” you can afford. Or perhaps refer the matter to Mr. Johnson Wang, Managing Director of Sinosteel Corporation. We deal on the following Products listed: [product product product, uhn; product product product, uhn!] One of our backers is an American soldier about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

“You want to catch them off guard,” he whispered. “You want to catch them in their sleep,” he winked.

A kitchen then they have a storage shed-type deal. Each tool is described by one or more attributes: natural cleaning formulas, concoctions and witches brews. MOST are non-poisonous.

As any geek can tell you, Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and of course, flags everywhere, not to mention the C++ and AWK programming languages.

Arrogance, ignorance, and principal errors of judgment created the anarchy and warfare that engulfs Iraq today. And lest we forget, “seven” is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that is not constructible by straightedge and compass. [On the lighter side], hundreds of well-known on line stores like Barnes and Noble, Staples, and Amazon.com have a place within their shopping cart that gives a percent or dollar amount off your purchase. You might even know someone who has had it removed.

As Sun Tzu said, “All war is based on deception.” This is only the beginning of proof we were all lied to. For instance, according to the Constitution, Congress cannot suspend habeas corpus except in times of rebellion or when public safety requires it.

George Bush originally displayed neither a love for nor disdain for religion, but the feeling that the New World Order should not involve itself in matters of religion. He had fallen into a classic trap — he forgot why he went into politics in the first place. But, he reasoned, fundamentalist skills make you look great in the kitchen. Final Signs are everywhere. APOCALIPSA is coming Soon. Your picture will be shown.

Whether you work for a business or want to start your own, check out our articles on marketing, hiring and more. String theory is radically changing our ideas about the nature of space, opening up the possibility that extra dimensions, rips in the fabric of space, and parallel universes actually exist, leading to focuses on top management and those aspiring to positions of corporate leadership in business. Don’t keep it to yourself.

Want to melt those years away? Travel to an outer planet! Stop wasting time folding shirts the normal way!

Here come the odious excuses. If you have set yourself on fire, do not run. A lighthearted measurement of which famous artists have the greatest “mindshare” in our collective culture. Manage your server infrastructure efficiently.

A little known naturally-occurring gemstone called [moishenite] is superior to diamonds in every essential way: cut, color, clarity, durability, fire, brilliance, and cost. The house was designed for young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career… For everyone’s easy reference, let’s discuss plunder. If you need help, start here.

A South African monkey was once awarded a medal and promoted to the rank of corporal during World War I. With this in mind I started to ponder making my own book: Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future of the Internet. Do not feign respect for technical incompetence. We are not claiming to be experts on anything, we are merely doing what we can to gather knowledge and share the acquired information with the public.

We are conducting a survey about your usage of media. It describes the laws of motion for atomic particles and describes the spin of electrons that had previously been predicted.

Where did that end and this begin? ‘This’ is everything to everyone, regardless.

What if your country were not the land of opportunity, merely of opportunists?

What if you had not an enemy in the world capable of harming you, and a trillion dollars to spend on housing, schools, hospitals, transportation, and most important of all, preventing as best as possible the dire consequences of a compromised environment?

What if “The Environment” were just the green fields and mountains and stuff you know from postcards, ads, and TV, but have never actually experienced with your other four senses?

What if someone lied to you in order to prevent you from spending the trillion dollars on the aforementioned public necessities so they could spend it on a war against a foreign country which had neither ability nor intention of ever attacking you, but who did harbor a great supply of the oil that is destroying your planet?

What if someone told you that the war was of immediate necessity because the Enemy harbored weapons of mass destruction (just like your country and its “allies”)?

What if thousands of your “countrymen” were wounded, dying, or dead?

What if hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of The Enemy’s children had been killed by bullet or embargo, thousands killed daily or dying in barren hospitals since your daughter, now in college, was born?

How come the number of offenses by Corporate/Military/Political elites against the people outside the Nation and the Nation’s own people cannot be counted by mere men in time, but like the fractal, must undergo millions of iterations by computer, to reach completion?

Why are people dying of cancer in the street, or if not on the street in hospitals or homes and why is everyone always dying of cancer?

Why won’t the Nation treat its cancerized citizens who don’t have health insurance? Why do sick people have no homes? Why does anyone have no home?

Why is the “National Institute of Health” (NIH) taking government money to do research to create drugs that will be sold back to the taxpayer at exorbitant prices? Is there a “National Free Clinic?” Is there a “National Free Aspirin?”

Why is my friend dying because he doesn’t have health insurance? Why am I dying because I don’t have health insurance?

Is that why the “Indians” died, because they didn’t have health insurance? Is that how Lincoln died?

If we’re the “good guys,” why does everyone want to kill us? Are we lone cowboys like Gary Cooper and John Wayne?

What if all these questions were asked of a ten-year-old, the age at which, it seems, the Modern American Mind closes, shutting down all alternatives to racism, corporatism, imperialism, and savage, restless violence?

How many questions about America are there? Enough to fill every database on the Internet?

Your father died during his first week in the first War to End All Wars, which was about to end anyway. Your mother named you Dread, after Dred Scott and the pain of life.

When you were four years old your mother married, Kurt, who wore a suit, made money, and let you call him “Dad.” When you were eight, Kurt and your mother had your little brother, Manley. The Depression came. Kurt stopped wearing a suit, stopped making money, started drinking. He smelled bad and beat on you, Manley, and especially your mother.

You weren’t too upset when Kurt was stabbed to death in a poker game.

It fell upon you and your mother to bring in money. You worked odd jobs for whatever legitimate businesses would hire you, usually for the day, served as a “mule” for drug dealers, stole whatever food and necessities you needed to get by.

Your mother took in white peoples’ laundry until your brother was old enough to spend the days with other children — their crowded street games a security tactic; in unity, strength — and the nights with you. She then stayed overnight six days a week cleaning a white family’s house and raising their kids.

You swept roads and streets under the WPA program then managed to survive the second War to End all Wars from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, cleaning and cooking for white officers, at first, then fighting German white people overseas.

After the war you were hired to cook for the same Harlem restaurant you’d work for for the next forty years (even when it became an “institution,” serving soul food to white Columbia students, poets, and professors, and downtown artists and musicians from the late 50s to early 70s when the clientele became black again).

After the war you married a young teacher named Sara, who bore your first son exactly five years after Hiroshima and a few months before your little brother Manley was killed in Korea.

Your first son, Blake, was killed in Vietnam; your wife grew ill. Though your second son, Michael, came back physically unharmed, the war had done things to his head. During his short migration from prescription painkillers provided by the VA for the pain in his head, to sniffing, then shooting heroin, his girlfriend had two beautiful daughters by him, one a straight A student, the younger one not brilliant but bright enough to become a nurse. She cared for your wife, who died without health insurance, leaving you alone, sad, angry and confused. Your older granddaughter went to Harvard to study Law, and the nurse went into the Army to pay them back for putting her through school.

There weren’t many wounded Americans in this first war against Saddam, and most of the Iraqis were killed by planes and helicopters well before she reached them. She came home to work in a VA hospital. She had a child with a Drinker.

You knew enough about drinkers to predict the beatings she and the child would receive, but you could not predict the illness that forced her from her the Army, her job, and made her weak and tired of life at age 23 (the Drinker left when she could no longer support him). Her sister, a lawyer now, sent money, and you helped by renting two rooms of the apartment you’d spent your life in to two men your age. You quit the restaurant to spend the days looking after the baby until he was old enough for school.

Your grand-daugher the lawyer wrote letters asking why the Army would not admit to any such thing as Gulf War Syndrome, nor pay those who suffered from it, like her sister, disability or retribution or something. The Army answered all of her letters, politely saying nothing.

Meanwhile, your great-grandson, who could no longer be contained in the house by you or his sick mother, joined a gang, and in a few years was arrested for activities involving the gang, activities which could not be proven, but, as the boy sharply noted, he was ultimately guilty of being part of a huge gang called “N–” He had a quick wit, but the authorities narrowed his life to two choices: jail, or the Marines. He chose to be shipped off to Iraq, where his mother had gotten sick, and he was killed.

You and your grand-daughter, the lawyer, took his body from the secretive military and had it buried and services performed.

His mother was too weak, sick, stricken to attend.

So here you are, 89 years old on this hot May afternoon, on your way to the apartment of a guy known as “Medicine Man” for making two or three trips a week to Canada — depending on demand — for groups of mostly older folks who pay him to pick up their medicines cheap. Even with the sizeable cut he takes, its cheaper than buying it from the supermarket drugstore and pharmacy chains.

You are approached by two young white men — late twenties — in expensive suits and corporate hair-cuts.

“Hey nigga! Hey dude!”

Rage ricochets like a bullet in your skull.

You notice their Columbia fraternity/graduation rings, dating back six years. They must have come back to Alma Mater to celebrate the current graduation or get together with old Frat brothers or who the hell knows what. Booze on their breath, fear in their eyes. Must have learned that talk from the rap albums they’d been listening to since high school. Drank too much and crossed the park for weed. Liquid courage dare cross Morning Side Park like in the Old Days, before the suits and haircuts and graduation rings. Before whatever office cubicles imprisoned them. You want to punch their pink faces to pulp and explain that the “N-word” is no longer permitted to leave white lips, for it was siezed and re-signified by black people long ago.

Instead, you laugh out loud, for the first time in what seems many years.

Here, in America, Land of the Free, two young, clean-cut white men in expensive suits and Ivy League rings have to skulk around the region of their worst nightmares, a hot day in Harlem full of the angry black folk their parents and schools and TV programs had warned them about all their soft lives, just to buy a bag of herb. Weed. Dried up leaves of hemp.

“God Bless America,” you say as you brush past them on your way to “Medicine Man.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” they call after you. “Sir? Sir? We just wanna score a coupla joints. Sir?”

“I don’t smoke,” you call over your shoulder. “Bad for your health. Like being white and racist on 119th and Lex.”

No time for Main Stream politics now, NONE AT ALL. Either we come up with radical solutions to this radical problem of Climate Change, or we swab the deck while the Corporate Elite (Republicans AND Democrats) and their aristocratic equivalents around the world, man the life-boats — Billionaires, Silicon-enhanced Women and Pure-Born Royalty first.

I don’t believe for a minute that a) humanity and all of life can sustain itself under the current system. However, the current system will use anything in its power, including Nukes and WMD, to stop the threat of even the slightest change. That’s why the whip came down in Seatle in 1999, during the halcyon days of Democrats, because the activists, however ingenuous and trusting AND unarmed, had gotten way to close to the real and only issue: accept Capitalist Civilization’s planned reduction of all living things, all wildlife into dead consumer goods, or die.

We’ve learned what damage a fist-full of Republicans can do in a few years, and it’s only marginally worse than damage done in the “good old days” by droves of Democrats.

We’ve NO TIME for Democrats! They gave up the 2000 and 2004 elections to Bush; the Democrats in Congress voted for the war and nearly every other nefarious, attack on civil rights and public assistance proposed by their Republican “colleagues” or Bush himself.

And just when were the “good old days?”

Democrats were in charge during both the Korean and Vietnamese wars, the McCarthy Period, and gave Bush nearly unanimous support after the panic unleashed by 9/11, when critical thinking, important questions and balanced observation were in order. Democrats dropped two nuclear weapons on real people, set up legislation that allowed Bush to score the “goal” of the PATRIOT ACT, not to mention killing almost a million Iraqis “softly” with sanctions. So we’re supposed to worship Roosevelt for the pennies he threw to the poor and working classes — which, like today, form a far higher, wider base of the economic pyramid than ever before or since — earning him scorn from the “business class,” though his welfare Trojan Horse effectively neutralized all “third-party threats” such as socialists and communists, from the “national debate,” which comprised, essentially, his “fire-side chats,” answered by countless letters from “citizens” voicing their opinions, which are always inspiring though irrelevant on such occasions when Power wins the battle, then generously allows you to keep your wasted farm and half-dead mule.

It might be a good idea to stop and think about things before accepting, rejecting or even responding to your next web article or blog piece, this one included (perhaps in particular).

What has this “System” called “Civilization” actually achieved beyond baubles for the very rich and famous? What has this “Civilization, now about 6000 years old and not about to change, brought to humanity? After it slaughtered and/or enslaved ALL indigenous people, Asians, Africans, Native Americans, fought a few Holy Wars after burning many “lesser” religions out of History’s prayer-book and even after “god was dead” managed two world wars in one particularly bloody century.

Here in the “land of the free,” after a bloody civil war, the chattel slave was converted into the wage slave just in time for the factories to begin “production.” See, the Civil War wasn’t about “freeing” black chattel slaves to much as ensuring the corporate wage state would be large and powerful enough to enslave YOU (if you happen to be black, that’s double-jeopardy).

For merely tinkering with the System to ensure people, in general, had at least a small income from Public Works, and social security and the rest, Roosevelt was called a “communist” and a “traitor to his class.” Meanwhile, it’s the old MLK/Malcolm X split: would MLK have gotten any concessions at all if the possibility of Malcolm X and other more militant, more violent radicals wasn’t waiting in the wings?

There were a lot of angry, desperate people during the 1930s, many of them veterans demanding rightful benefits; Communists demanding revolution; even socialists demanding permanent government sponsored food, shelter and health care (now that’s REALLY sick). According to former Marine General Smedley Butler, one of the most “decorated” soldiers in American military history and author of War is a Racket, some super rich people, you know, the folks who really run America, wanted him to lead a coup against Roosevelt, turn America into a true plutocratic oligarchy.

You can get the basics about the Climate Change issue, the ultimate and only issue at this time, by reading Rand Clifford’s three-part essay, “Perspectives on a Changing Climate,” or search the WEB for any number of articles. Or if you want to go deep into the whole shebang, read Derek Jenson’s two-volume, End Game, or Lewis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine. Or read “alternative” magazines, such as this one, to get a broader perspective than Mainstream Media. I hear Mainstream Media is starting to admit, here and there, that there “may” be a problem with the Environment that sustains all life, from the Redwood Forests to the Lower East Side. There’s really not a lot one needs to know, now that there’s one issue that must be dealt with before others, though it helps to be as knowledgeable as possible, to get a sense of the facts we’re not supposed to know, facts that make it ever more difficult for the Imperial government to pull the wool over our eyes — again. But if we remain in our state of arrested development (most American minds close in what, the fifth grade? sixth grade?), another Katrina will blow by, this time taking NYC or LA with it, and FEMA will send in the Marines — or better yet, a “private” security firm — to restore order to the desperate, starving, homeless masses. Well, I hope citizens in “high risk” areas get their gats while the gettin’s good.

Again, if you want to check out the evils of the hierarchical, plutocratic, patriarchal order that we’ve called “civilization” for the past 6,000 years (Ironic: it all began in Iraq or thereabouts; can’t say THE MAN doesn’t have a sense of humor!) It’s a mind-blower, how the broad range of greed, corruption and waste, beginning from the top down in civilization, has turned 90 percent of the planet into urban wasteland and suburban sprawl. The Natives of North America lived in the same regions for at least ten thousand years; and we’ve managed to destroy 90 percent of the earth in six millennium, mostly the last 150 years of Corporate Capitalism. And America, the “New World,” soiled its own didies, perhaps irrevocably, in a mere 500 years. If even if the remaining ten percent of the “Natural World” were saved for some possible future generation who would learn to live with Nature, not against it, the struggle will be fierce; hundreds of millions, including yours truly, will die, perhaps Billions, to get the population of humans down to a sustainable level. The Native Americans, who were almost made extinct by the “American Dream,” were a model of sustainability and ecology. Again, they lived in the same regions for over ten thousand years, always replacing, in some way, what they took from the land.

Compare the at-least-ten-thousand to the “almost 500″ (really the past 150: the Industrial Revolution) and you gotta wonder: which of the “fittest” were meant to survive, or even, what exactly does the word “fittest” imply…

We’re in serious, serious trouble. “Debate” with Mainstream representatives of the Corporate/Military state was unsuccessful even in the late sixties (remember the Chicago riots, the Chicago Seven, COINTELPRO, FBI harassment of U.S. citizens?) when the business class, realizing Vietnam would ultimately be costly unless it were turned into some kind of cheap market or production site — which is exactly what happened, according to the women who work in its sweatshops) — and the Military class realizing it was not equipped to fight an “invisible” indigenous population, that it would have to take a holiday and regroup, pulled the plug on the war.

Speaking of which… I STILL see bumper-stickers urging us to “support our troops!” You think Germans and Japanese didn’t “support” their troops during WWII? What did that “support” amount to? A desire to kill Americans, if only to “get them before they got your son.” Then again, just cause they’re murdering people who posed no threat to them BEFORE they landed in Iraq (we invaded a foreign country; what did we expect, to be greeted with flowers? Oh yeah, we DID expect that, didn’t we?), and we know now what we pretended not to know before the war that Iraq had no WMD and posed about as much a threat to us as the Sandinistas allegedly posed Texas in the 1980s. It doesn’t mean that we should stop “supporting our troops,” even though some of the more faint-hearted among us might “condemn” the war itself. If we stopped supporting “our” troops, why, they might get all depressed and start reading books and smoking marijuana and learn about all the terrible things our addiction to oil is doing — the most important of which is the global climate change destroying every living thing on the planet. They might even put down their guns and stop fighting and go against ALL orders and join the surviving men women and children of Iraq in rebuilding their culture into the “cradle of civilization” it once was. As soon as that happens, who knows what’ll fall next? If their older bothers and sisters stop obeying the dictates of a deranged, psychotic “Commander-in-Chief,” who’ll eat our Aunt Jemima frozen bleached white flour waffles slathered in white corn syrup with artificial maple flavoring and caramel color, and Uncle Ben’s plantation style White-Wash rice?

What’s so horrible is that if the Iraq war ends tomorrow, and peace is declared around the globe, with all oppressors giving aid and retribution to the oppressed, and all territories shared etc. etc. we’d STILL be doomed cause someone was stupid enough to declare a war against Nature (like the war against drugs, war against smoking, war against poverty, war against racism, terrorism, ismism — wow, we’ve lost a lot of wars, haven’t we?) and kept burning the gas in greater and greater quantities and burning plants and animals to extinction, and now Nature is incomprehensibly pissed. Think about all the “odd weather” and natural disasters we’ve had in the past 20 years, then multiply it by orders of magnitude, and that’s the inheritance you’re leaving your children and, if they survive, grand children, great grandchildren, etc.

No more compromise with Corporations whose basic function is to turn life — plants, animals — into death — “products, merchandise.” We need radical action. We need a worldwide commitment to keep the population down, feed the living, and clean up. Rebuild sustainable housing, replant whatever near-gone plants we can salvage, turn this planet into something livable and beautiful, again. There will be organizers, engineers, various “officials” and plain old laborers. But even the unskilled laborers — among whom I’ll be — picking up litter, will know their work is meaningful, as opposed to upping productivity of widgets for MegaCorps so that powerful Casino called the stock market can give it a higher “earning potential” and Return on Investment (appropriately acronymed, ROI) numbers and cash Sounds like a long shot, but if humans can organize for this one 100-plus year task, perhaps the balance between humans, and nature (which means all other species and plant life) will be restored.

Of course, to reach the ideals expressed in the previous paragraph is a long shot, possibly just short of fantasy. But that’s the situation we’re in. Either the “people of the earth” take down the Current System immediately and put everything they have into cleaning the earth, air, water and planning, and creating a sustainable life, or their progeny might not survive and the last sunset humanity will enjoy will come down in about 100 years, maybe less.