Followups--ACTUALLY AUGUST 7, 2006

"Oh the Shame of It...."
I watched a totally, to me, disgusting coverage on common (lower than a common cur) teevee late yesterday afternoon. It was coverage of a five-mile race held in Central Park. The entrants in this macabre race were all handicapped--I couldn't tell whether they were all handicapped from violent events or not, but the primary participants were--and they were all being led and cheered on by this year's head of this run, the Central Park Jogger. Remember her? She was the young investment analyst or whatever she was who was attacked in Central Park while jogging, clobbered with a brick, and then raped and beaten and raped some more and then left for dead--I think there were two weirdo dudes involved, one who raped her and left her for dead and then another creep who happened along and he raped her, too, and left her for dead, I may be overdramatizing this, but maybe not either...anyway, remember her? I never saw much following up on her case; in fact, I thought she was going to be a vegetable for the rest of her life.

Well, here she was yesterday afternoon at this 5-mile race for the maimed and traumatized, very well-spoken, looking very nice, cute, pretty face, spry, pumped up, peeling out a pathetic babbling heart type crowing about how this race inspired these people to keep on achieving...blab, blab, blab. [Remember the Johnny Carson character "Aunt Blabby"? The Central Park Jogger reminded me of Aunt Blabby.]

The Central Park Jogger...doing what? what else? leading a jogging event...well, I guess it was a 5-mile race, a minimarathon.

But the most chilling and the most assinine interview came when the bouncy little teevee "reporter" babe announced that she'd found a guy who'd lost both his legs in Iraq and he was there hyped up and ready to boogie for 5 miles--and Jesus, she trots out this burrheaded dude, a blond Midwestern type, dressed in his army fatigues, with both legs gone, and this poor stupid fool is saying that losing his legs was one of the best things that ever happened to him--that he had more confidence now to try things he never would have tried had he not lost his legs. That almost made this wolfman weep. This poor stupid soul; thanking the U.S. Army for starting the Iraq War and helping him lose his legs so he would finally become a man; all this gung-ho-ness over following faithfully and willing to die for the lies of the bald-face lying never-elected Constitution-defying two-faced hypocritical little spoiled brat rich boy greedmeister, crooked as a snake at night, a stealing, murdering, cowardly weasel of an AWOL special-privileged Air National Guard swindler, who licked his daddy's old filthy asshole in order to save his cowardly ass from having to go to 'Nam, a war started by people like his crooked, enemy-aiding grandfather--THAT THIS POOR BOOB SOLDIER HAD SWALLOWED OUR FOOL "PRESIDENT'S" CALL TO FIGHT HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER, LOSING HIS LEGS OVER IMAGINARY TERRORISTS AND TO NOT GO AFTER OSAMA BIN LADEN WHO MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO DIRECTLY WITH 9/11 BUT TO GO AFTER A JADED OLD RAGGEDITY ASS DICTATIN' FOOL WHO HAD BEEN A PATSY OF THE USA IN OUR HATRED OF IRAN BECAUSE OF THEIR TAKING THOSE HOSTAGES BACK IN THE EIGHTIES AND THE AYATOLLAH AND WE SET UP SADDAM TO FIGHT THE IRANIANS AND HE DID FOR 8 OR 9 HORRIBLE YEARS--100,000s of people lost their lives in that US-sponsored war where we supplied Saddam with not only biological warfare and germ warfare capabilities, but also missiles, bombs, ammunition, etc., etc; we even supplied him with the gas we now accuse him of using on a village of a people and killing 30,000 of them, to the point if he's found guilty, and he's already been found guilty, he will be executed for it. Meanwhile, the guys who gave Saddam the poison gas was our own Pappy Bush, old Don the Rummy Rumsfelt, and Ronnie the Raygun, our infamous Alzheimer's president--DO YOU BELIEVE OUR COUNTRY FOR ALMOST A YEAR WAS RUN BY A PRESIDENT WHO WAS SUFFERING FROM ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE?

Do you see how frustrating all that is going on in the world bothers me? Irritates the hell out of me? I can't think straight. To me, a stupid soldier from the Iraq shameful war who lost both legs in that war should be shot for saying it's the best thing that ever happened to him. What an idiotic statement. Poor guilty bastard. And the teevee swishy babe started heaping all that little-girl-gooey praise on this poor boob and wishing him luck in the race--and shamefully, too, there were other wounded soldiers there ready to run, wearing their monkey suits, their Mickey Mouse military fatigues--those are the burrhead numbskulls who are willing to die for the weasels in Washington, District of Corruption. How can a person of reason stay sane in such an insane cosmococcic world? Jesus, is there any reason anywhere or is it all my dog's bigger than your fucking dog, even among progressives, liberals, commies, socialists, revolutionaries?...where the hell are the heroes, the true heroes? Certainly not Murtha or his types, he's a VietNam nutjob; not McCain either, for the same reason; not that Paul Hackett either; again, he's a nutjob soldier. Bless their stupid hearts, but don't put them in charge of this once-pretty well-off country now going to the wildest and seediest of scumbag dogs. We are now no better than Al Queda, than the Mosad, the Shining Path, Pol Pot in the killing fields of Cambodia, than Idi Amin--the lover of long pig and monkey brains, than Pinochet in Chile, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hiro Hito in Japan...why we're no different than that guy they called Der Fuhrer--what was his name? The Final Solution dude? We're really no different than that dude. Ain't ya proud of that?

God, I can't even listen to my precious music lately because of the bad vibes I get from the world. People just seemingly don't give a shit. They're willing to risk everything just to keep the faith in a stupid flag, or a stupid Pledge of Allegiance to the Jewish god Jehovah and then to the flag, or reading the 23rd Psalm over a loudspeaker in a school...or wanting prayer in our schools.

I keep forgetting we are all animals. Animals sometimes have an urge to kill...they kill for food, but they also sometimes just kill, like a male lion will go crazy killing his own lion cubs out of some kind of twisted instinct that makes him do it. Animals kill. We are animals, so I guess that's it, we are just gonna keep on breeding like Mayflies and then killing like Saturn with his mouth full of babies, scooping up some more.

I really wanted to write about Charles Ives but I can't. Ives hated war and so do I. Ives said God-damn to war and so do I. I was once as foolish as the soldier who lost his legs in Iraq and is proud of it. If I'd'a been sent to 'Nam, I would have gone; I wouldn't have run off to Canada. And I would have maybe had my legs blown off. Shit. I stop right there. I'm putting on Ives's Symphony #4; it will take my mind of destruction and put me back in touch with just plain old evolution.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler Obituary
We at The Daily Growler just noted the passing of one of the greats of Amurican literature, Frank Morrison Spillane; we all called him Mickey Spillane; he claimed his father named him Michael and his mother named him Morrison so he chose Michael as his name, shortened it down to Mickey and there ya go.

Mickey was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, grew up in tough little old Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then, believe it or not, went to, of all places, Fort Hayes State College in Fort Hayes, Kansas, where he was a champion swimmer and first got his interest in writing. Mickey started off writing comic book stories but after he got out of WWII, he sat down and wrote I, the Jury in just 3 weeks, sent it off to Dutton, and, guess what? Dutton bought it and Mickey and his tough-guy cop, Mike Hammer, were born.

Mickey's books sold well over 100 million. They made Mickey rich and for a while he was a big star. Mickey appeared in a lot of movies--he was a guy who was shot out of a cannon in the circus movie Ring of Fear. Mickey also appeared in several of the movies made out of his books. Tough old Mickey. Hey, as Mickey once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. A writer writes books that sell." Writing books was Mickey's occupation; he'd always wanted to be a writer--he wrote in college, but he didn't find his niche until after WWII when he came up with Mike Hammer, based on a comic book cop he had thought up when he was in the comic book game based on his uncle who was a cop--a comic book cop Mickey called Mike Danger. [I'm sure we all know who Nick Danger is, don't we?]

So on July 17, of this year, Mickey Spillane bought the farm in South Carolina, on the beach there [you remember Mickey's great old beach house was blown away in Hurricane Hugo in 1989--when Mickey almost bought the farm then].

So, we at The Daily Growler tip back a growler of strong ale in toast to Mickey Spillane not only notorious for his dumb-boy potboiler paperbacks but also notorious as Ayn Rand's favorite writer, which she admitted to one night on, I think, the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. What a couple of nutjobs; ONLY IN AMERICA, as Don King used to love saying about himself.

Adios, Miquelito. Death finally pumped him full of lead. Mickey was 88 years old. What a man! Mickey became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 and he spent his last years writing children's books and helping build the Kingdom Hall in his South Carolina hometown. As we say, What a man!