Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

One Month Until Manmade Disaster?
My question is, since this latest Al Queda plot they've uncovered was to blow up airliners coming from England to the U.S. using British nationals (read: British-born members of the Muslim faith) carrying liquid explosives then how come American citizens have to be subject to these new "you can't bring nothin' liquid on a flight" British rules now..."And, I say, my dear, that jolly well includes those bottles of baby formula; you're gonna have to use your natural dairies there, sweetie, or you can't fly on this man's airplane."

Another question that bothers me: why are We the People responsible for protecting airline passengers? Why aren't the airlines held accountable for the safety of their passengers? Like how come they don't have protective-type screenings built in to their entrances or why don't they have their own inspection stations set up and screen their own passengers? Like when you sell a ticket why not check that person out at that moment, you know, see if they're British-born Muslims or Saudi Arabians on phony passports (I mean, since so far the most successful terrorists have been from Saudi Arabia, so why not an imposition on those bastards?). The airlines hold no responsibility for hijackings (the terrorist move in the good ole days), groups of Arabs wearing military-like outfits (Banana Republic seconds) and carrying box cutters and phony passports, or for their planes blowing up in mid-flights from mad bombers, faulty repair work, faulty parts, whatever. The airlines hold no responsibility for any of that. OK, so the airports are under the rule of the cities who built them and the running of the airport is under Federal regulations.... See how confused I am? That's why I don't fly anywhere anymore? Flying was always risky, come on?

My wife and I had booked an Eastern flight to the West Coast out of New Orleans one time and we got to running late, my personal cab driver was ready and waiting out at the kerb and we rushed like MF-ers jamming bags into the cab and then Mr. Courbillon had to drive like a bat out of proverbial hell and we didn't make it to Mosiant (now Louis Armstrong) Airport in time, and, dammit, we were cussing because we missed our flight. It was depressing. It was only when we got to the ticket counter that we found out the flight we were booked on, the flight we had just missed, had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain after take off, lifting slow at first and then hitting a wind shearing or a strong downdraft of air and splatting nose down into old Pontchartrain's drink, a very deep drink, too, I might add. We looked out the big glass arched window of the terminal out toward the lake and there were cops and firemen and trucks and emergency cars suddenly everywhere. Turned out there were no survivors on that flight, except my wife and I. We drank Bacardi cocktails the rest of the night at the Napoleon House back in the French Quarter. We flew out the next day on American and thought nothing about it, except my wife couldn't look out the window as we took off over Lake Pontchartrain, though neither could I either, though I never admitted it to her.

One time I flew into Dallas to visit my brother and I had a bad flight; a lot of turbulence, plus my niece had just told me about a flight whose tail section had broken loose from the rest of the plane on landing at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport just a few days before, and when we landed at D-FW, the first thing I realized is, damn, I was sitting in the tail section--something that hadn't hit me until we were landing. It was thrilling, but I blew it off as coincidence.

I was at my brother's for three nights, I stayed in a room out in what had once been horse stables he had turned into guest apartments, and the night before I was to fly back to NYC, I had a hell of a lot of trouble getting to sleep and then when I finally did get some shut eye it turned out to produce the damndest clearest and most real dream I'd ever had.

In the dream, I got to D-FW Airport and went to book my flight and every airliner I got booked on couldn't take off due to mechanical trouble. I was put on one after another airliner and every one of them started taking off and then returned to the boarding area due to mechanical difficulties, like once an engine caught fire right outside my window.

Finally, I was paged by an airline and was told they had a seat for me on the only airplane going to NYC for the rest of that day. They put me on a terribly dirty, lousy looking, Mexican-repaired piece-of-crap-looking plane that only a Saudi Arabian with a boxcutter could fly--the only plane they had and what a hunk of junk--but I boarded it anyway since I was desperate to get back to NYC and I took my seat and quickly ordered my two preliminary little bottles of vodka and a beer, checked out the stewardesses. A few years earlier I had fallen head-over-heels for an ex-airline stewardess, my girlfriend's roommate, and it's a long story, but I learned a lot about stewardesses from that woman and so every time I flew from then on I made a point to check out the stewardesses, you know, for possibilities. The stewardess on this dream flight was from the finals of the Hades Beauty Pageant--I think Donald Trump owns it [Whatever happened to the Tour de Trump bicycle race?--and how great is it that our stupid Tour de France winner is a steroid head--or a testosterone head, as the officials put it? I guess the jack off thought they'd figure he just had a hell of a lot of testesterone in him naturally, more than any Frenchman, that's for sure, and he's still lyin' his ass off about it, following the advice of the best lawyers, "Deny, deny, deny." You've got to learn to do that denying, brother and sister, in case you are ever accused of something BAD--DENY, DENY, DENY. Even if they're holding the smoking gun right in your face--DENY, DENY, DENY. Hey it worked for Schwartzenegger when all the women accused him of sexual harassment and butt and booby grabbing. "Ja, so; I like mein boobies and mein steroids." Hey, we pump our race horses up until their hearts explode. It's all about winning, folks. Amuricans can't stand a loser, unless it's the Chicago Cubs].

The stewardess from the Hades Beauty Pageant on this dream flight was old, with bad stringy hair like Marie Laveau, with bad teeth, a hag, and she was serving already opened packages of stale peanuts, some of which had small rocks in them; and then she brought around several servings of pickled eels covered in a slime sauce.

Suddenly, the pilot came on the loudspeaker and announced that he was having engine trouble and for us to buckle up our seatbelts and hang on but not to worry, lean back and enjoy the thrill. I looked out the window and there was a lake below us and we were diving right at it. It was a huge lake; a lake like that area around Dallas had never seen--I kept thinking, "That's too big to be Grapevine Lake or Lake Dallas--Jesus, what the hell is that lake?

The plane started spinning out of control, swirling head-first right the straight hell for that mysterious drink that was barrel-assing up toward us as though a falling meteor headed right at us. Just as we were about to crash, I woke up in a cold sweat, trembling, still believing the dream was real.

I couldn't sleep the rest of the night and as preposterous as the dream was, like I said, it was so real, I literally thought that if I flew out of Dallas that day, the plane was going to crash and that's all there was to it. It sounds foolish as hell to me now, and I'm not a man of superstition, nor am I a believer in psychic shit--hell, I'm not even a believer in a God, but, dammit, for some strange reason, maybe it was the Mexican cigarettes, I was certain that dream was a forecast of my fate.

Needless to say, I had nothing to fear but my own concocted fears. The flight went without a hitch; in fact, up a few rows ahead of me I spotted a woman I had gone to high school with who was coming to NYC to attend a conference of children with hearing defects and it turned out to be a very profitable three days for my salacious testestoronic appetite. Thank god I mainlined that vial of Big Brawny synthetic testesterone before I seduced her.

But the big scare is on. The teevee geeks are having a ball. They are devoting tons of hours of analysis on the subject of this terrorist plot that the British had broken up, like talking seriously to our current NYC two-time loser police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who has to have some kind of dirt on our illustrious mayors, he keeps getting fired and then reappointed--check out the NYC police commissioners over the last 20 years, Bernie Kerik's among them; go back to '90 and check out Lee Brown and then come on down to Howard Bratton and then Howard Safir; a great honking gaggle of lying-dog, scheming crooks, all about benefitting themselves and F serving the citizens of the City of New York, who the mayors, especially old self-hating Rudy Guiliani-paisano, and these commissioner birds always consider criminals and place us under an overexcessive number of laws and rules and ordinances and cop privileges they can use against us. The current commissioner was commissioner back in those 90s, a little Irish joker of a man who would whack his own mother for a promotion, was convicted of bribery or something while he was down in Washington, District of Corruption, I believe with U.S. Customs--but then he was well-loved by old Slick Willie Clinton who tried to make him head of the FBI but Little Ray turned it down. He did, however, later take charge of a lot of big government agencies, like Customs, where Little Ray was in charge of billions of dollars--that he was accused of scraping a little off the top for himself--hey, everybody in Washington, District of Corruption, does it--so a pat on the ass was his punishment for that little quickly overlooked bit of skullduggery. Hey, a guy's gotta make a livin', right?

Another problem with Ray is--he's the only member of the New York Police Dept. to move from the cop ranks all the way to commissioner--and ALSO, he is a Viet Nam vet--got out of 'Nam with a Marine colonel designation--and you know how I feel about 'Nam vets, especially combat Marines--they're all F-ed up in their heads--they can't separate common ordinary city crimes from war operations tactics in 'Nam and they see all New York City residents as threats, the same as when they were in 'Nam and were taught not to trust one living soul they got used to blowing away grandmas, pregnant mothers, teenage girls, and babies because they knew down deep in their military-trained-murdering hearts those bitches were guilty of something--just being a gook was a being guilty enough for the jarheads like Little Ray to blow people away, men, women, children, horse, dogs, cats--blow 'em away--or better yet, drench 'em in Agent Orange, made by the benevolent folks at the humanitarian corporation Du Pont.

Look in Little Ray Kelly's eyes; look deep into them; you'll see a cold hollowness in them; you'll see there's no sparkle of any kind of life in them; you'll see there's no sense of humor for sure in them. These little jerks aren't truly happy without a deadly combat mission to complete. The same look is in John McCain's eyes. In John Kerry's eyes, too. It's there if you know what you're looking for.

So old Little Ray the Customs crook is assuring all New Yorkers that he's got everything under control except they're going to crack down on us New Yorkers a little harder than before because old "Doin' a Heck of a Job" Jack Off Chertoff has hit the red button on the famous Homeland Security Terrorist Alert board and we've got to get scared to death of now they're are saying 19 bumbling London Muslim dudes who Scotland Yard was accusing of plotting to blow up 10 airliners coming to the US of A--were they coming to New York City? The answer to that is always "Yes," as if every flight from England is coming to New York City. Little Ray thinks that anyway.

Sorry, all you all, but I'm am one New Yorker who is not afraid of any of these terrorists. I see Muslim men everyday; they're thick as hops in my neighborhood and, yes, they are weird and, yes, they do talk about God all the time--they are fiercely devoted to the rules and regulations old epileptic Mohammed set down in the Koran and cursed them all to follow in 666 AD (REALLY? WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE CONQUERING CALIPHATE THE YEAR OF THE BEAST?).

I'm talking out my wolf ass now, of course, but, hey, maybe God is talking to me while I'm typing this; you never know. The founder of the Kansas City Southern railroad, the only truly independent railroad still operating in the USA, it runs from Kansas City down to Port Arthur, Texas, Arthur Stilwell, believed that ghosts spoke to him all through the night--he did everything according to their instructions and he wrote a ton of books about his ability to communicate with the dead, to the point that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that after reading these books he had concluded that Arthur Stilwell was the most psychic man to ever live. The City of Port Arthur, Texas, was Arthur Stilwell's dream city; so much so, he named it after himself. My point, these are the kind of psychotic men under whose bootheels-on-our-heads leadership we have to survive. George W. Bush, our "president," is a man like this. Years of cocaine and alcohol abuse lead to wild holdover visions--I mean this is where the term "heebie jeebies" comes from. These assholes have the Heebie Jeebies, folks. That's what's wrong with 'em. We've got to quit adoring these assholes and stop allowing them to run our company, which is the United Snakes of Amurica--a BUSINESS, god-dammit. Georgie Porgie has already ruined several businesses and a baseball team; now he's ruining the biggest business he's ever run--AND THE LITTLE PSYCHIC ASSHOLE IS DOIN' A HECK OF A JOB.

I have no time to read poetry anymore. I have no time to read about Charles Ives. I have no time to practice my piano. I have no time to promote myself in what I do best. Why? Because I'm constantly fighting being a New Yorker and being subject to the daily fears pumped on us all, fears I don't have but have to keep dealing with, in terms of paying more for things that used to be very inexpensive, like a subway fare--25 cents when I came to the Apple--now $2.50 and rising--going up they say to $3.00. The crooked-as-a-snake-at-night Metropolitan Transit Authority says they are broke one day then they change their tune and say they have a surplus they didn't know they had, then they say they're broke again now because of Homeland Security expenses, blah, blah, blahs, you know, they say they need to install so many infrared cameras and put so many big pot-bellied cops into the subway itself (it's hot down there, too, folks), etc., etc., all because of this fear we are supposed to have of a totally unidentifiable bunch of Saudi Arabian men who seem to be able to hold us for ransom any god-damn time they feel like it, whether they be imaginary or real. So far, none of these RED alerts have panned out to be anything authentic. Every damn one of them have proven to have been a hoax or a misinterpretation with absolutely no evidence that there was ever a plot in the first place--like the British cops blowing away the Brasilian guy after the British-born Muslims blew up the buses and a couple of underground trains last year simply because he looked suspicious--with impunity, I might add. I mean, that's power, folks, when you can blow away the suspicious with impunity. That's what I'm facing daily here in NYC, whether the fear is of terrorists or maybe ConEd F-ing up and our electricity suddenly exploding off with a lightning crash or, as the news jocks also threaten, it's the scary New Orleans-type hurricane season and this year, these untrained quacks are hollering, those 5-scale hurricanes are going to devastate the East Coast this time--especially Manhattan Island. [Diversionary tactic to take our concentration off New Orleans and it's now being more vulnerable to a lesser hurricane than Katrina and subject to another wipe out this summer later on.]

Am I, too, paranoid? I don't think I'm paranoid, but I sure do think my government and the sleazeballs who are making the laws are damn sure paranoid; they're paranoid schizos of the worst kind and if they quit taking their medicines (quit drinking their bourbon and snorting their coke), they go psycho and have to kill a bunch of folks to get relief from the voices they're hearing telling them to KILL, KILL, KILL--that's part of a schizo's paranoia, dig? Lyin', too; boy howdy, can a schizoid lie like a sag-eyed dog after it's crapped all over your new carpet.

And guess what, I was just informed that the AP is now saying THE WHOLE BRITISH TERRORIST PLOT SHIT IS PROBABLY NOT REAL AFTERALL. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?

LET'S THROW THESE RASCALS OUT ON THEIR ASSES. YEAH, RAH, SIS-BOOM-BAH, THROW 'EM IN THE HOOSEGOW AND LET 'EM ROT. That's what my old pal, Charles E. Ives, would say to do.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler