Hooey Galore

Morning Network News
I tried to watch the networks this morning for some news. The best and most honest news I heard was that the Yankees beat Boston and the Mets beat the Phillies (a subway series is headed our way!!!, The Daily Growler predicts). The rest of the news was either outright lies or the untriagulated reasoning of US geniuses like Tom De Lay and John McCain. McCain got the most time to trumpet his loser bullshit. What a weak ineffective absolutely crazed human being John McCain is. Just think what this SOB went through in Viet Nam, during the days of military conscription, a term most young people in this country have no idea what it means, except when conscription is reapplied come Jeb Bush's term in the White House, then the little privileged peckers will wake up and see they are at best draft dodgers at worst cannon fodder for the next triumphant war. Anyone who was in any branch of the army during the Viet Nam years or who know anyone who was in Nam knows these poor bastards, especially if they saw combat, did some fraggin', or were put in "tiger cages" by the North Viet Nam forces (like John McCain) are crazy as hell (and this includes fools like John Kerry, too). I had a good friend, Pete the Pool Shark, and Pete didn't know anything, he wasn't trained for anything, except killing people or driving a truck. He tried to make a living at the later but he was hooked on heroine and had to smoke pot to keep from getting the heebie-jeebies from the heroine--he preferred the raw brown Mexican heroine that was being flooded all across our big cities by the CIA operatives, the same folks who put cocaine and crack cocaine from Colombia and Nicaragua on the streets of our cities in plentiful amounts also during the patriotic service of the Contras and the great national leadership of fools like Ronnie Raygun and his VICE president our old pal Pappy GWH Bush. The Contras, don't forget, used an old airbase at Mena, Arkansas (it could have been DeQueen, I'm not sure), to bring the tons of drugs into this country and exchange them there for weapons and shit that were then flown back (by soldiers of fortune, by the bye) to Nicaragua. And who was goobernor of Arkansas at that time? How about Slick Willie Clinton, the great liberal firebrand whose cold-hearted wife is now suddenly qualified to be a senator from New York (not her home state), and now suddenly is qualified to perhaps be president. I am sure the Bush Babies are praying to their god Mammon right now that Hillary is the Democratic candidate in 2008--they figure that's a sure win for them; of course, after they've rigged the voting machines in some key state--I say it's Michigan this time maybe--surely these fools won't try it again in Florida or Ohio--though they could do it again in Ohio, a real lummox state--remember Kent State and the goobernor's and the Ohio National Guard's massacre-ing attitude at that time. Plus, Kenny Blackwell is doing quite fine, thank you, in his run for goobernor of that lower-than-a-dog's-belly state (sorry, I have several friends from Cleveland who are fine folks with fine liberal and progressive ideas, except trouble is, they all agree with me about how backwards Ohio is in terms of progress).

Pete the Pool Shark? Pete froze to death early one February morning back in the 80s. Funny how he made it through Viet Nam combat; yet, he couldn't live through the war against Viet Nam vets he found when he got back home. Thinking he'd come home to be hailed a hero, instead, he came home to neglect. Pete was in heavy battles in Nam, battles that stayed with him and came back home with him to haunt him every night to the point he couldn't sleep without drugs. Some strangers found Pete lying in the middle of a downtown Manhattan street just a few buildings down from the one he lived in. He had fallen after trying to stumble home after drinking himself into a stupor at Richard the Hatband's bar and then stopping by Danny the Chino's place to mainline some Mexican brown. He had almost made it home. One odd thing about Pete. He had this denim jacket that he'd had made for him in Saigon as he was leaving to come home. The jacket had a handpainted design showing a tiger attacking a man tied to a stake on its back. He never told me what that jacket meant to him but he never took it off. Trouble was, that's the jacket he was wearing when they found him dead. It wasn't a very protective jacket; just regular denim. It got down to 20 degrees that night and Pete and his precious jacket were frozen stiff as a board early that next morning when they were found. I always counted both Pete and his jacket as Viet Nam War casualties. You want find Peter's name on the Wall in Washington, District of Corruption, though it should be. Funny thing. Pete had a thing about anybody who looked Vietnamese, which to him was all Asians no matter what country they were from. His thing was he projected what he suffered in Viet Nam onto the Vietnamese people. Pete was a well-trained US soldier. He was taught how to kill Gooks and drive a truck. As he once told me, "I can drive a truck like a born-free motherfucker, but they won't let me drive a truck because I'm a nutjob drug addict; but I can still kill Gooks and you gotta be a nutjob drug addict to do that."

The immigration bill is coming up in the Senate today. Most of the fools interviewed on this matter on this morning's network news were so idiotic I can't even tell you what these anti-human rascals are talking about; it's a very complicated bill and it looks to me like poor ole work-hungry Mexicans are screwed. Why not a green card program for these workers? Nope, these are "messkins" [that's Texas for Mexicans, who the Republic of Texas won a battle over at San Jacinto, just outside Houston, beating the Mexican army under weirdo General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna [what a life he led after the War With Texas, including living in New York City and promoting a new thing he called chicle, what went on to become what we call "chewing gum"] and White Texans [Texas is a brown state, like California] both hate and love and absolutely distrust "messkins."

A lot of young Texas white boys (like our own "president" and his brothers and sister, Dodo) have a period of adjustment in life where they come in contact with Mexicans. First of all, Texas-Mexicans have always gone to school with Texas Whites, not so Texas Blacks. In school white Texans come in all kinds of contact with Mexican kids; though in most cities there is a Mexican section of town same as there's a black section and a white trash section. Mexican boys and girls could always play sports with the whites. Some Texas-Mexican kids go on to become tops in some sports, especially baseball (think of all the great Mexican baseball players, like Fernando Valenzuela, one of the best pitchers I've ever seen pitch--for the LA Dodgers back in the Tommy LaSordid days) and golf. Mexicans, like the Asians, love golf. Lee Trevino, from Dallas, became one of the best golfers to ever swing a club. Another place of two cultures meeting is White boys and Mexican girls. I recall only one white girl in my high school who went with Mexican boys (she was notorious as dating a Mexican baseball player on the Albuquerque Dukes, at that time members of the Class B West Texas-New Mexico baseball league). Every white boy in Texas schools at one time or another fell head over heels for a Mexican girl. I did. Her name was Tina. I met her in my senior year in high school. I went with a bunch of basketball players from a local college to her family restaurant and she was the waitress. I managed to ask her if she didn't go to high school with me. She said yes, and she knew who I was. I was on the high school golf team (two of our best players were Mexicans) so I had a bit of presence in high school affairs. Tina was pretty, pettite, smart as a little whip, saucy as a shooting star, and spoke fluent English. The next school week, I found her in a hallway and reintroduced myself. By God, she seem to really like me. It led to us meeting during our lunch breaks. The first time I kissed her was behind the gym during lunch. We kissed and kissed and kissed and wanted each other. Finally, I got up enough nerve to ask her out. She said I'd have to come to her father's restaurant and be approved by her brothers, both of whom were already out of high school and helping run the family restaurant, the best damn Mexican restaurant in all of that neck of the woods.

I went over to the restaurant. Tina was waiting tables. She came over to my table. "What's up, Tina; are we going out?" "I told my brothers I wanted to go out with you, but they're pissed; they hate blancos --I'm sorry. I told them you're not like most white boys but they're not convinced. They're watching you now." I knew one of the brothers slightly, he was a pretty good jazz guitar player, so I boldly walked over to him and asked him why I couldn't date his sister? He turned on me with hatred all over his face. "Because in our culture brothers watch over their sisters; we are family, man, and we just don't want our sister going out with blancos." "So, you're saying, though she wants to go out with me and I want to go out with her, you decide she can't go out with me at all?" "That's right, amigo." I felt that amigo as a slap in the face. I left without Tina. I went back a couple of nights later to again reason with the brother I kind of knew, but this time the other brother flat told me that if I came around there again hitting on Tina, he'd shoot my ass. "My sister is not going out with a god-damned blanco and that's that." Tina and I still had our behind the-gym-sessions--once when I brought my dad's Caddy to school, she got in it with me and we made pretty good love, though bumbled, miscued, and constantly hitting the horn several times. After she buttoned up and I combed my hair, she told me she had to be careful because if her girlfriends saw her with me they'd tell her brothers, "That's just the way we Mexicans are," she said. After that, I graduated high school and left the area and I never saw or heard of Tina again.

Cultural differences; that's all it was and that's all it is. White Texans love Mexican culture, the food, mariachis, the flamboyant dress and "cowboy" styles. Remember, Mexicans were the first cowboys. All cowboy terms are Mexican: dogies, lariats, rope, chaps, rodeo, corral, pintos, hoosegow, ranch, etc.

Another problem White Texans have with Mexicans is their Catholicism. White Texans are basically Protestant, though there are a lot of White Catholics in Texas, and Protestants are originally (from the get go) opposed to Roman Catholics. Their very name, Protestants, means they are "protesting" the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, a German Barbarian peasant priest went to Rome and saw how lavishly the Pope and his Holy See brethren were living--plush apartments, surrounded by gold accoutrements, nuns waiting on them hand and foot and penis (probably)--while the prelate life of Martin Luther was slovenly, dirty, with most accoutrements covered with fool's gold, and he got so jealous, he turned his theological backside on the Boys in Rome and started his own form of the Catholic Church, making the Protestant religion the source of the first Pure White church (check out Lutheranism; you want find many black or Latino Lutherans). In Mexico, the Revolutionaries, like Zapata, Morelos, and even Pancho Villa, who was president of Mexico at one time, were loudly opposed to the Catholic Church and, in fact, tried to abolish it. Read Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory; it's all about this Mexican Revolution aspect. They accused the Catholic Church of being a demogogic tool that kept the Mexican people in poverty, owning land, owning city buildings, owning schools, owning the government, actually representing Colonial Spain in control of the native Mexican peones and mestizos. One legend that scares the hell out of White Texans is one that Mexican generals got together after the Mexican Revolution and determined they were going to next take back the US lands that they say actually were stolen from Mexico (true). One way they trumpeted they were going to do it was through Mexican-Americans having huge families (they are Catholic remember) and that way they will through numbers take back that land. So far, the Generals were right. Texas is now basically Mexican-American. California is now basically Mexican-American. Arizona is basically Mexican-American. New Mexico is basically Mexican-American. Colorado is gradually becoming basically Mexican-American. "It's workin', Senores Generales!"

I think there was a reason Catholic JFK was shot in Dallas. I lived in Dallas at the time of the assassination and most of us believed the oil cartel and the Havana mobsters in cajoots (oh no, another Mexican word) with the FBI and the CIA killed JFK. Those were the days when you could leave messages on phone lines so you could dial up a phone number and hear a message read to you. Nearly all of these phone news reports in Dallas in those days were antiCatholic, antiKennedy, antiCommunist (same as a Catholic to a White Texan), antiBlack (though the word liberally used in Texas to describe blacks begins with a lowercase "n" and not the letter "B." Also, the "n" word they use doesn't mean "black" in Spanish. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a big lummox from principally Mexican-American South Texas, his father a school principal in a mostly Mexican school, called blacks "Nigros," which I always thought was clever of ole White Lyndon. It was politically correct while being politically derogative at the same time. Lyndon, however, always refered to Mexicans as "messkins," which, like I said earlier, is the correct White Texan pronounciation of the word "Mexican."

What's playing out in front of us all now is purely and simply Texas politics still going national. GWB is a god-damn Texas politician and he's brought his Texas political thought and his Texan political cronies, Karl Rove, Unka Dick, Scotty, Tom De Lay, all Texas assholes, to Washington (you could rename it Austin).

This immigration thing is a farce. A detraction from all the corruption and evil-doing and killing for glory that is going on in the world under this administration. You see, Georgie Porgie, our "president," was busted many a time in his youth by the Texas police. Texas police are rough as hell until they find out you're Pappy Bush's son. Then Georgie Porgie as the killingest goobernor in Texas history, worked hand in hand with the Texas Rangers, the ultimate Texas police force, one of the most decorated of which was a Mexican, and the Texas Highway Patrol, a really ruthless bunch of white snotnose trailor trash made legit by putting them in tight-fitting and tailored "tough bastard" uniforms. To GWB, torture works; they've been torturing blacks and messkins in Texas for a century or so. Hell, yeah. "You torture them sombitches and it may not do any good, but by God they know what they're gonna git if we ketch 'em agin, and, hell, sport, we go out sometimes and just ketch 'em agin just to torture 'em a bit more to remind them who we are and who they are, dirty, filthy messkin pigs. Puercos, that's what the hell them folks is." "But, officer, your wife's Mexican." "Hey, buddy, don't y'all git personal with me now."

All of this is Texas politics brought to Washington, District of Corruption. Texans have been in national politics since the late 1930s when a Congressman from Texas, Martin Dies, started the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, HUAC to you folks to young to remember that far back. Roosevelt's administration was half-based on the power of a true old Texas asshole John Nance Garner, from Uvalde, Texas, a town out in the literal middle of nowhere in a county that is mostly Texas-Mexican in make up. The "great" old Texian writer, J. Frank Dobie, was from Uvalde. These assholes had a condescending attitude toward messkins; they had a totally "F You" attitude against Blacks. John Nance also used the word that begins with "n" when he talked about Blacks--I wouldn't be surprised to find that he once wore a white sheet on a couple of long-ago Texas nights. In the old days, the Ku Kluxers in Texas were called "The Nightriders," ex-Confederate hooligans who rode around at night looking for runaway slaves or white people who were hiding runaway slaves. It is interesting to note, that one of the Haymarket anarchists, Albert Parsons, who was hanged for his innocent participation in the bombing that happened during the otherwise peaceful Haymarket demonstration was a native Texan-- and married to a Texas black woman, to boot.

Later, in the post-WWII US government, Texans Sam Rayburn ("Mister Sam" to White Texans) and Lyndon Baines Johnson ("Die today for LBJ") put Texas politics in control of Congress and also a pain in the side of the Republicans, whose power at that time was based on turncoat Democrats, especially the renegade Dixiecrat Party, formed when that old hypocritcal asshole Strom Thurmond (the evil live long lives--"live" spelled backwards is "evil") walked out of the 1948 Democratic Convention because, "OH MY GOD," the Democrats were talking of giving blacks their civil rights they were given under old Honest Republican Abe (he hated blacks, that I guarantee--remember, Abe was born dirt-poor in ancient old Kaintuck', before moving to racist hellhole Springfield, Illinois, and marrying Mary Todd whose father was the leading pro-Slaver in the whole damn town) and his Emancipation Proclamation and doing away with Jim Crow and the stupid segregated-but-equal bullshit then being urged on us by these asshole southern licker-drinkin' and, as it turned out, "black gal screwin'" reprobates, like the great knothead Strom Thurmond, ax-handle weilding A-hole-deluxe Lester Maddox, evil-eyed, nutjob George Wallace, cracker screwball John Stennis, or old "hang 'em high" Senator Bilbo from the great last-place state of Mississippi.

John McCain
I don't get it. Every news channel this morning had John McCain on, first questioning him on the asshole Immigration Bill these stupid pricks are voting on today. Then switching in the middle of his stumble-bumble explanation of why he hates messkins to "Senator McCain, are you running for president in 2008," old John bumbles about again, nonsense bullshit [hell no, the Repugnicans are not gonna let crazy John be their party leader--NO WAY, I guarantee!], and then, these crackerhead reporters ask him about Iraq. That was the only time on all the morning news channels that Iraq was mentioned. Amazing! Sixty-plus people died in Afghanistan fighting this past week; nothing at all was said about the Afghanistan War. Amazing!

I declare John McCain a total nutjob who should be in a nuthouse not in Congress.

Sad News
I am a strong aficianado of jazz music. It's a truly unique American genre. I got two emails this week from my jazz-lover friends (one one of the top alto saxophonists in this world; the other a fine drummer whose need for money has driven him to give up drums for the big bucks though devastating physical work in the advertising game--monetarily rewarding, but physically destructive).

Hilton Ruiz
Hilton is one of the most brilliant pianists in jazz. He is currently in a New Orleans hospital (I didn't know New Orleans had any hospitals open thanks to GWB and his FEMA disaster; more deadly on New Orleans than the hurricanes). Hilton is in a coma after being beaten in the face until every bone in his face was broken. Then on the way to the hospital, he suffered a cardiac arrest in the ambulance, which he hasn't come out of as of this writing. His wife, Aida, asks all jazz lovers to keep Hilton in their thoughts. Hilton has battled drugs and drinking all his professional life--being a jazz pianist nowadays ain't the good life at all. Hilton had just recorded an album in New York City dedicated to the New Orleans musicians left homeless and jobless and some of them dead after Katrina. He was in New Orleans to make a video to promote the album.

Butch Warren
Not many nowadays jazz fans know who the hell Butch Warren is. Those of us who are jazz oldtimers know Butch. He was the bassist on a ton of the "golden days of jazz"--the way they described the time in this Washington newspaper article I read-- albums, especially those made on the Blue Note label, a label started by a couple of German immigrants back in the forties. I guess the most popular album Butch was on was Herbie Hancock's famous Blue Note album that had Mongo Santamaria's "Watermelon Man." "Waaa-ter-mell-owns," sing it out by syllables loudly and you'll kinda understand what the song's talking about; especially in New Orleans when the Watermelon Man is coming up the street, his old pulling nag half-asleep as it pulls him through the streets.

Butch also worked with the early Theolonius Monk quartet/quintet; Lee Morgan; Hank Mobley. He was steady if not flamboyant and he hit the strings perfectly without sliding or slurring the notes--nothing flashy, just rhythmically on time and perfect for keeping the time exact. The perfect kind of bass player.

Butch is now in jail in Washington, District of Corruption. He has spent the last 30 years in and out of mental institutions, after he checked himself into infamous St. Elizabeth's Hospital because, like Butch said, "I feel at total peace while I'm in the booby hatch."

It all started with booze and drugs, the downfall of most of the jazz greats from Charles Parker, Jr., Lee Morgan, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, John Coltrane, James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Bud Powell...unfortunately, I could go on for a page or two.

So think of Butch as he sits in a D.C. jail. His head's all f-ed up. How come the recording companies don't help these people? Because the recording companies are totally commercial assholes. To them, Kelly Clarkson is a greater American musician than Butch Warren.

That makes me so fucking mad. We treat our great people like dogs. We either kill their asses while they're young or we throw them in a nuthouse and let them rot with the crazy shit going all through their heads. What's ironic about it is, they say Butch can still play the bass beautifully.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"Reason is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes the urge towards the attainment of an end realized in imagination but not in fact." Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason, Beacon Press, 1967.