As I write this today, the Veteran’s Day Parade is traipsing up Fifth Avenue, headed north, though Fifth Avenue runs downtown. If there’s a particular sacred spot to vets in this town, wherever it is, it must be north of me; otherwise, why march up Fifth Avenue? But these are old vets, old soldiers, or are they? I just saw a huge bunch of them riding motorcycles; what’s that got to do with Veteran’s Day? I mean a hundred motorcycles. Can’t be Viet Nam vets; they’re all too poor to afford motorcycles, aren’t they? Unless they’re John “Loser” Kerry or John “Still-in-a-Tiger-Cage” McLain. I’m being facetious; of course; I’m sure a lot of Viet Nam vets are successful and can afford hundreds of motorcycles.
Up by Fifth, too, some contractor was tearing up the street, jackhammering the hell out of the street, the dust flying, the jackhammer noise reverberating all around the walls of the canyoned neighborhood from far west by Broadway way on over east past Fifth to Madison, down the pipe of 31st Street and god only knows how far and wide. Noise. Weekend noise. When you expect peace, you get noise. Even on Sunday; these contractors don’t give a shit. They’re adding feed lines of some kind into the new 50-story luxury high-rise down there, that tacky piece of plain-old-tipico crap building: plastic, plexiglas, aluminum studs, sheetrock, bolted into concrete slab flooring, nothing really substantial holding the building up—probably second-grade concrete pillars and pilings—that’s gotta be all that’s holding it up—it’s the kind of building that pancakes flat down during an earthquake, and believe you me, if NYC ever has an earthquake, forget 9/11 and Katrina.
I live in an old carved stone-façaded, brick exteriored building, built in the 1870s, iron infrastructure, with marble slab floors, plaster over wire double-thick walls with air pockets between them for insulation.
Yes, the hi-rise luxury jobs will be flopping down like flapjacks while I’ll be trapped in rubble but probably still alive, though one never knows do one? It might be fun, however, from a writer’s (an empiricist) point of view. Like Malcolm Lowry said that he had to stay drunk all the time since most of his characters in his books were drunk all the time—you know, in pubs, bars, cantinas, so, therefore, he had to frequent pubs, bars, and cantinas in order to keep up with his characters.
There goes a huge fire engine covered in American flags, loaded with firemen in their fire gear—the engine’s cacophonic airhorn is blasting away frantically overwhelming the infernal jackhammering for a moment. I’m asking, what does the New York Fire Department have to do with the Veteran’s Day Parade? NY cops and firemen show up for every parade there is. Why? Do they need the glory?
Here we are just days after the American people hugely voted against the phony president and his illegal Iraq War and we have a bunch of so-called veterans blaring up Fifth Avenue waving the damn flag like it belong to them exclusively because they were forced to go to a war and fight an enemy they knew nothing about either, they, too, to young and dumb to know what the hell they were doing in yet another war. The only flags that actually end up belonging to them are the flags draped over their coffins or wrapped around their body bags when they ship their dead asses home for burial. All these wars that keep occurring, these wars that keep our economy going—cash for arms—cash for oil—cash for this or that—yes, that’s right, folks, that’s what these warmongers do during these wars based on lies and rumors and nonsense, they move cash around all over the offshore banking world, all over the Swiss bank account world, all over the world—cash being traded for weapons and ammunition.
How do you think all these petty little guerilla armies get their weapons? How do you think the Iraqi Army is financed? How do you think Halliburton gets paid off? In US Treasury checks? Hell no; nobody in their right mind will take a Treasury Dept. check except people on Social Security or getting tax refunds and those they have directly deposited into their accounts. You can’t cash a US Treasury check or any government-department-issued check at any check cashing store I know around the NYC area.
The lobbyists pay off in cash and so does the government. The Saudis pay in cash. The Chinese buy things with cash. Oh hell yeah, folks; that’s why wars are so profitable. Al Queda is a nothing force, trust me; but they do have oil money backing them—oil money from Saudi Arabia, Dubai, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait—that’s right; Al Queda’s power, if Al Queda does exist outside the fabricated history of the CIA, is in its oil-money backing. Like the Taliban. Where do they get their weapons? Where do they get their ammunition? You need a lot of F-ing bullets to fight the kind of retaliatory wars folks like the Taliban and Al Queda are fighting. From whom do they get them? Who repairs their weapons for them? Who works on their vehicles; their mortars—where do they get mortar shells from? Where do they get their missiles from? These things are available all over the world, usually available from sleazy Greeks or Mafia Russians, all crooked as snakes in the deepest part of the night, Egyptians are big in arms trading, South African whites, and certainly the Chinese will sell you arms for cash. That’s how Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression—through selling arms to European nations for cash (and gold—that’s back when Fort Knox was where the US stored its gold reserve. That has to be long gone by now. Has anybody lately ever heard any jokes about “all the gold in Fort Knox”? Hell no; nobody even knows where Fort Knox is today). Hey, I wouldn’t put it past Roosevelt to have supplied arms to Germany and Japan for the right price. War is Hell and in Hell just about anything goes.
So the old cheesy headed veteran’s were hobbling up Fifth Avenue, making a hell of a lot of noise, with a modicum sideline crowd. I saw a couple of older men waving American flags at the marching vets. For the most part, the vets were a shifty looking bunch of dudes who seemed to know each other fairly well—I mean 100 of them on motorcycles all driving along together—a pact, I would assume.
Then old Georgie Porgie down in Washington, District of Corruption, went out and put his tacky wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (didn’t they identify the last unknown soldier in that tomb—it’s probably as empty and unused as the “president’s” head these days). Wonder what We the People pay for those wreaths? What a stupid ceremony. First of all, what is this unknown soldier tomb bullshit all about? What’s it suppose to symbolize—that some of us will die and disappear from the face of the earth one day—not even our bones will bear our names or our true accomplishments.
Just think, a lot of these soldiers we blow trumpets and shoot guns off in tribute to were only 18 years old when they got blown to bits or at least left in an unidentifiable state. I see nothing heroic about being a soldier much less a dead soldier. Seems to me it’s like kowtowing to a Supreme Commander, serving with no questions asked—of course, today’s army is a volunteer army so the troopers fighting in Iraq are paid soldiers—like mercenaries, they’re on a salary; that’s the job they’re doing over there; except fighting in that illegal war is not what we should be paying them for. I believe they originally were meant to protect our perimeters from attack. They failed to do that on 9/11. They’ve failed to really accomplish anything the “president” said they were going to do. “Mission Accomplished” turned out to be just another lie. So when the “president” says he’s proud of the service our soldiers are doing in Iraq he’s lyin’ like a dog. Remember, everything the phony president and his henchmen say is a lie, so in order to find out the truth, you just turn it around and that’s the truth. So when Georgie Porgie said, “Hell no I ain’t gonna get rid of Rummy Rumsfeld; why I’m proud of his service to this country; irreplaceable.” So you turn that around and find out what that dumbass was really saying, “Damn right I’m getting’ rid of that stupid son of a bitch Rummy. The quicker the better, damn his F-ing me up with that eye-rack mess I thought the hell was over when I put on that codpiece out in San Diego Bay for that ‘Mission Accomplished’ photo-op. Why I’ll spit out the F-ing White House window and whoever the spit falls on, hell, that’s Rummy’s replacement; it’s that damn easy.”
Now Georgie Porgie is saying we’re gonna have to stay the course in Iraq. That really means, folks, veterans, army folks, we are bailing out of Iraq, leaving it to the wolves…and Bushy Boy will be moving next to protect himself from impeachment. It will be interesting to watch this fool trying to work with an opposing (we hope) Congress, though as a cynic, I can’t see that many turnarounds coming. The Dumbocrats are still trying to shake the confetti out of their ears—they still don’t understand how they pulled off that return to Congress. They still aren’t saying it’s because of the American people being tired of the Iraq War, even the Afghanistan War, both of them, and the people are tired of being lied to and being robbed blind at the same time. But the Dumbos don’t see it that way…or they don’t want to see it that way.
God, I’m so pissed. These poor dumb soldiers aren’t heroes, and as employees of ours, they’re not doing the job they Constitutionally are paid a salary to do. And the veterans! What the hell have they got to be parading about? Bush has cut their benefits; has cut their health benefits; has cut VA hospital budgets drastically; does not issue them their own armor—and why should they? These are volunteer soldiers; why shouldn’t they buy their own outfits and armor; why shouldn’t they pay for their food—and they are, I’m sure. Halliburton is charging We the People prime sirloin steak prices for canned dogfood they’re actually serving those goofball soldiers, now once again getting killed on a steady 5-to-10 a day now. So while these proud geeks were marching the wrong way up Fifth Avenue today, another 100 or so Iraqis were killed and at least 16, I think, American servicemen were killed today, too.
Howard Dean, that crazy poor little doctor rich boy, is getting credit for leading the Dumbocrats to victory. F him. Nobody led the Americans to vote against Bush but Bush—that bastard is the reason these people came out of the woodwork to vote—WE the People want his impeached—85% of the American people according to that MSNBC poll I quoted you yesterday.
Shit. I’m throwing away my Army camouflage jacket; and I love the damn thing, too; but I was wearing it when the Korean driving the SUV pickup truck ran me down. Ironically, at that same place yesterday, an SUV jumped the kerb and smashed through a window of a cheap Korean-made clothes men clothing store injuring several people, though none fatally. Ironies make the world go ‘round, the world go ‘round, the world go ‘round, ironies make the world go ‘round and we’ve got plenty of ironies to keep the world whirling for ages and dark ages to come.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Gore Vidal's third novel, in which two buff dudes do it under a "lovely dark sky," then tumble "back on the blanket" and do it again, came out in 1948. Vidal was only 23. The City and the Pillar was the English-speaking world's first mainstream book to conjure vivid man-to-man sex without damning anyone to hell. It is virtually impossible to grok now how new that was then.
Nearly 60 years and as many books later, Vidal was one of the first famous Americans to start calling the Bush administration a junta.
His knee is titanium. His skin sags. He ran for Congress in 1960 and the Senate in 1982, against Jerry Brown -- long before many now buying Vidal's new anti-war books were born. After burying his longtime companion in 2003, he left the villa near Naples where his house guests had included Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev and Hillary Clinton. He moved into a Hollywood Hills house he had bought in 1977 but planned never to inhabit before "the Cedars-Sinai years" -- Cedars-Sinai is a nearby hospital. Call him hostile. Call him radical. Call him anti-social and controversial, as critics have. He couldn't care less.
"Controversial? I can't say that I have ever had much interest in what I've been called," Vidal tells me now. "What others think is their business, not mine. What I mostly do is examine contradictions in public discourse. This sometimes causes distress, but 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' as Plato says Socrates said. ... Now that we are post-Runnymede," he tells me, invoking the Greeks and the Romans and the Magna Carta, what frightens him most in America is "the loss of habeas corpus."From alternet.org
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