Staying Alive to Be Remembered

Studs Terkel Is 95 Today
I have taken Studs Terkel for granted since the 1960s to the point I had no idea Studs was 95 and that he had recently become the oldest person ever to receive open-heart surgery--at 93--and that since Working he's written three or so books and has his memoirs coming out soon--called Touch and Go, Studs's key to longevity--to remember that everything in life is simply "touch and go." Studs goes on to believe we are all living to be remembered because we all fear being one day totally forgotten. Studs says in order to be known so you can be remembered you have to "stand up and be counted." You can't be counted if you stay seated. That's great sense, man. If you do stand up, however, you must take the count--dig, no matter what you are standing up to be counted for. It might be in defense of a person who is a Communist! (not a Chinese Commie though; they're acceptable these days)--'cause Studs believes you have a human obligation to help your fellow man, to give them a voice no matter what they're accused of, to give them an opportunity to stand up and be counted. Studs believes in what I sometimes see as what I think is our real America and the source of our real American values, those upheld and defended by people like Eugene V. Debs and Henry Wallace and Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson and even old Dave Garroway (does anybody remember Dave and J. Fred Muggs?), who Studs mentions in his memoirs. Especially is Henry Wallace a champion to Studs-- Wallace was the true designer of the New Deal under Frankie Roosevelt. Studs comes down through American history through Thomas Paine, Emerson, Thoreau--Studs even loved old Abe Lincoln--I'm not so sure I like Abe not after what I know about him now--like I long ago scratched old Tom "Black Girl Raping" Jefferson off my favorites list, though old wine-rattled Tom (he loved wine and listening to young girls play the violin for him) once impressed me with his high-flown Renaissance-man desires though his politics were deceiving--he kept being an aristocrat until the day he died--and that meant not freeing his slaves, which included the woman he claimed he loved, Sally Hemmings--he actually started banging her when she was 14--an age she could not have given her consent to any kind of sexual advancements from old Daddy Tom and so Old Tom just went and said, "Strip down, Sally, gal, Old Massuh Tom has to have you, baby, Old Tom's pecker has to have you, too...com'yere, gal." Hypocrite! So I quit liking his old ass.

But old Studs Terkel ain't no hypocrite and he's still talkin' and jabbering and giving out his oral history--on and on. Studs goes back to 1912--born in New York City, moved to Chicago when he was 10 where his mother ran a famous boarding house in downtown Chicago and later his family ran the famous Grand Hotel, a hotel for everybody from pimp and whore to hiding-out statesmen, a workingman's hotel in the middle of Chicago, at that time it really was "that toddlin' town, the city that Billy Sunday could not shut down." And I'm certain Studs remembers Billy Sunday, the ex-big league baseball player turned Yahoo evangelist.

So Studs Terkel is 95 today and Chicago is celebrating big time--even skywriting "Happy Birthday Studs" (no commas, please) over the skyline of Chicago.

A tip of the glass and the tophat to Studs Terkel.

More Total Bullshit From the Mighty and Pious Rudi Guiliani
I did not watch the Repugnican debate last night but I was up early in this morning and I saw the right-wing network news jugheads yahooing like crowing rightwing roosters about Rudi's brave and patriotic prowess against an obvious slate of Repugnican nutjobs, including a Mormon and a crazed ex-Vietnam vet, and a Texas Repug candidate, the Right Rep. Ron Paul, a Repug troublemaker down thar in Bush-Country Texas (yeah, I said the same thing, "Who?"). And Ron Paul's question that freaked old Rudi out was simply asking how Rudi reacted to reports that said 9/11 was the result of our failed foreign policy under Pappy Bush and his gallant Gulf War attack on Iraq back in those glorious of days of his 1000 Points of Light and New World Order. At Ron Paul's daring question, 0h boy, Rudi's neck hairs stiffened and he took on his famous courtroom stance as a pious priest-like righteous man (he's lookin' priesty good, too, I have to admit; seems his mistress-wife has gotten him trimmed down good (or is that the result of his prostate cancer?) and he's had a couple of $400 haircuts, you bet he has) and Patriot Rudi said how he resented that question and how he'd heard a lot of reasons for 9/11 but he'd never heard that the US attacking Iraq was the blame for it--Rudi then puffed up and said Ron Paul should take back that question and apologize to Father Rudi for asking it--Paul refused to do either.

The rightwing asskissing New York Daily News, once a workingclass newspaper that leaned Democrat but now is the same steady corporate-strained news--because at one time it was the working men and women of this city who read tabloid newsrags like the Daily News, the Herald Tribune, and the once almost commie New York Post now owned by Rampant Rightwing Hooligan Rupert "F You Everybody" Murdoch (once an Australian socialist) and given to spewin' his totally abstract Fox News positioning.

New York City has always been a Democrat city--4 to 1 Democrat in most elections. This is the reason I can't stand our current Rudi-loving little-man billionaire mayor (who has his sights on the presidency now that a poll shows New York Citians think Little Mike's been a better mayor than America's Mayor Rudi--whaaaaa! I, too, couldn't believe it) is that he is working his little primpy ass off trying to turn this city Repugnican--ugh, which means he's selling off the best lands the city owns to his buddy developers with the orders to bring the wealthy in droves to NYC so the tax base will bloom heavenwards and then only the wealthy of the world can afford to reside on Manhattan Isle (the rest of the boroughs mayors usually don't give a shit about because Manhattan's the money-making borough), thus the politics of Manhattan will sway way around from 4 to 1 Democrat to 4 t0 1 Repugnicans. Our little-man (nobody likes short people, remember) billionaire mayor is selling NYC out to the monied developers and filthy rich investors and foreigners with Euro-dollars (the new preferred world cash--or did you not know that? Iraq only takes Euros for their oil now. Euro trash with big Euro bucks are coming here like raptors to devour our real estate), even the Chinese Commies and now I read the New Irish are coming over here and investing in developments, too--I mean, I get choked up growling about the filthy rich taking over our once proud truly American city where immigrants came to find freedom to work, to make art, to entertain, to sell things, to climb ladders they never had access to before in their old countries, willing to suffer all kinds of abuses including massacres--oh yeah, the USA has a great history of massacres--but human beings willing to suffer anything in order to find that fabulous pie in the American sky--sorry, don't get me started, except my point is that these people who made NYC what it is today were Democrats, working stiffs, both men and women, tons of blue collars when there were tons of blue collar jobs in NYC and tons of white collars, too, strong unions around then, rent-control guidelines in solid place offering plenty of affordable workingstiff communities right in the middle of Manhattan--but now with all these filthy rich everybodies and nouveau riche Americanos, too, who have no respect for anything in the past--they are only interested in futures, NYC is going Repugnican--it will soon like Berlin during you-know-who's chancellorship; soon only the rich can live here and the rich are always Repugnicans and always have been--they worship money and the power that it gets them. The old New Deal Democratic dream was one where if the corporations couldn't provide jobs--and they couldn't prevent the Great Depression caused by their stupid investing and their margin buying and when the margin accounts were called in it wiped 'em out--the same as a stock market crash today will knock a hell of a lot of the nouveau riche the F flat out--especially the young brokers who will be following their greatgrandfather brokers who back in 1929 were jumping out the upperfloor windows so frequently it was dangerous to walk down on Wall Street--there were plunging humans everywhere holding bales of worthless stock tightly in their little mitts as they jumped.

Then the New Deal said, hey, why can't the government put people to work?--on the highways, in the National Parks, in the city parks, or decorating the post offices or hell building post offices--it saved our culture, which the Repugnicans despise because our culture is a culture of the workingclass--the wealthy class in the USA has no class--ie, look at how gaudy Donald Trump's apartments and homes are. Donald bought a yacht I know something about because I've been on it, the most expensive yacht ever built--built for Adnan Koshogi, the Saudi Arabian whose father had been old Saudi King Feisal's personal physician--and Adnan had got his own concrete plant as a gift from the King for his father's services. Adnan made a fortune off his concrete plant and he came to the United States and he went to Chico State in California and he majored in business and finance and then one day he woke up with a scheme where he could by using Billy Sol Estes's old techniques of convincing stock holders he had billion-dollar ideas based on false figures of success--in Billy's case it was ammonia fertilizers and these tank-like spreaders that Billy gave to farmers as long as they used his fertilizers--Billie failed and went to prison, but Adnan didn't fail and soon found himself through his buying into and investing in the personal and home loan industry the world's richest man. My wife happened to work for Adnan back in the 1970s as an liason between her firm and Adnan's connection to the Saudi Arabian slushfunds--Adnan was eventually able to negotiate a billion-dollar loan to my wife's real boss--and that's how I happened to get invited aboard this yacht--and boy was it max tacky--I mean gold-embellished everything--mirrors, bathroom fixtures, light fixtures, ceiling designs--way too much gold shit, all encompassing tons of board feet in-jeopardy rain forest woods and peasant-cut marbles embellished by Romanesque murals of fat naked white ladies a la Reynolds and Watteau, and a lot of hanging glass and crystal and shit--gaudy to the bone--and that's the yacht Trump bought when Adnan had to bail out--wasn't Feisal assassinated, so maybe Adnan had to change his name and move to Brazil?--I really don't know what happened to Adnan, I'll have to check on him.

My point: the rich have no culture and they hate the workingman's culture--like our music, our literature, our politics, our dreams--because the rich have no class, no taste--all they have is papers that say they are worth any sums they say they're worth. This wife of mine--it's still hard for me to believe she's dead and gone now--worked for some of the richest men in the world and she told me every one of them were cash broke--they were only rich on paper--one rich guy she worked for was harassed constantly by American Express--yet, they wouldn't cancel his card--oh NO; DEBT IS GOOD! When you're in debt you are trapped by the system; you become a Capitalist Slave.

Back to Rudi "America's Mayor" Guiliana:
So Rudi got his back up and put down Ron Paul. But guess what?

Let me preface this by saying everything Rudi Mussolini says is a lie, a god-damn lie, no matter how sincere he looks and how the ladies swoon over him and how the rightwing NYC hack writers and talking heads adore him. He's a liar. All politicians are liars but Rudi's a pro liar.

Here's the truth behind Ron Paul's question:

When Pappy Bush forced the Saudis to accept our troops on its soil so that he could work out of Saudi Arabia in his salvation of Kuwait and babies being left to die in their iron lungs or incubators and going after his one-time ally Saddam Hussien--whatever the lyin' bullshit GWH (Old Pappy) and Rummy and Unka Dick were spreading back in those days of cheap OPEC oil and when Pappy and David Stockman were wrecking our economy with voodoo economics--remember them? "Read my lips."

So here we go: Pappy amassed US troops (Infidels according to the Koran) in Saudi Arabia to attack Iraq in his big Gulf War baloney war. Now at that time Osama Bin Laden was still a CIA agent for us in Afghanistan, you see--yep, he was helping us in our trying to disrupt the Ruskies and get them the hell out of there so the Taliban--you heard me--could take it over--that's something nobody remembers, I'll bet.

One of the things Studs Terkel has harped on all his life is the short memories of Americans both Yahoos and smart-asses--Gore Vidal calls us the United States of Amnesia. Stud's thinks it's worse now; he says we're now the United States of Altzheimer's.

So here's what we've forgotten and what Rudi Guiliani knows for sure but will never admit: Osama Bin Laden did say the reason for his turning against his own country, Saudi Arabia, and for his despite of the United States WAS BECAUSE AN ISLAMIC COUNTRY WAS ALLOWING AN INFIDEL FORCE TO ATTACK ANOTHER ISLAMIC COUNTRY (IRAQ) FROM MUSLIM SOIL (Saudi Arabia)--HEY, THE HOLIEST OF MUSLIM SOIL--WITH MECCA IN SAUDI ARABIA. That was the reason Osama declared Jihad against both Saudi Arabia and the USA. Remember that? There was no Al Queda then. The CIA made that up later.

Remember, the CIA swears to protect its agents against detection, discovery, or having their covers blown--as it recently protected the Cuban terrerist Luis Posada-Carilles, the CIA agent who blew up the Cuban airliner and killed 73 people on board over Barbados back in the late seventies where he also admitted to blowing up airline offices and buildings there before bringing down the jet, his greatest accomplishment for the CIA and why they broke him out of a Venezuelan jail and shipped him over to Nicaragua where he worked for the Contras (remember them, right?)--Posada also tried to kill Castro in Panama--he was going to blow up the auditorium where Castro was speaking before thousands--that plot was spoiled by Cuban intelligence. The US Fed Courts refused to convict Posada recently of any crimes, Bush refuses to allow him to be extradicted back to Venezuela where's he's a wanted man and certainly not Cuba where he's also a wanted man. In fact, the US Fed Courts set this crazy man free and he now lives comfortably in Miami--spending all the millions of dollars the CIA paid him and held in one of their banks for him. What you wanna bet the CIA is also protecting their agent Osama Bin Laden?

So now can you see where Ron Paul was right to say 9/11 was the result of our very stupid foreign policy already developing under Bush--remember, Bush planned to attack Iraq before 9/11--don't you think Bin Laden (Prince Bandar Bush's brother don't forget) knew what Bush was up to? Don't you think he gets inside info from within Saudi Arabia--come on, most of the 9/11 attackers were SAUDI ARABIAN. Also, don't forget, the Royal Family of Dubai go tiger hunting with Osama at his hunting camp deep in the Pakistan jungles. We the People probably pay the rent on Osama's hunting camp.

So once again, FU, Rudi! No apologies and no taking back the truth.

Rudi as president? No way. Rudi's a natural born loser. He'll put his foot in his sorry mouth before it's over--I guarantee--that or he'll see a hot little potato campaign aid--but, can Rudi still perform in the sack after his prostate surgery?

Like the comment I got from the lady to my Rudi-blasting-before-last post said, "Man, you don't like Rudi Guiliana do you?" Hell no. And neither should you. I can't imagine Rudi as president. He'll pardon old Bernie Keric first thing in office that's a fact--and I wouldn't put it past Rudi to give his old suckbuddy and lady-banging pal a cabinet position.

The Next Disgraceful Mayor for New York City?
I couldn't believe my eyes, but lately the New York City rightwingers are trumpeting Ray Kelly as our next mayor. Holy bejumpin' bejesus! Little Man Shanty Irish Ray Kelly? He's the guy that has excused his boys from firing 53 shots into 3 unarmed black men killing one and wounding the other two for life saying they were merely being procedural!! Now the cops are trying to say Sean Bell's (the black man they killed) gang are sending death threats to the accused cops. Bullshit. Such bullshit. Bullshit. Lies. More lies. Ray Kelly is a rat. Check out his felonous record while he was head of US Customs.

Wow, I've got it. Bush Baby, you dipstick, why don't you nuke Mecca? That ought'a do it.

All this Rudi bullshit on the news this morning amongst the constant reports of the Pinelands of New Jersey being burned down after a New Jersey Air National Guard training exercise set the drier than a cheerleader's hair Pinelands underbrush on fire with an astray flare shot from one of their jets--the Pinelands is a premordial-type pine forest in southern New Jersey--why, it's down there in the vicinity of poor old vulnerable-to-terrerism (from Islamic pizza delivery boys) Fort Dix that is, by golly, where those New Jersey National Guard guys are currently in training for guaranteed orders to proceed to Baghdad as part of our brilliant Commander-and-Jerk's "surge" strategy in Iraq--a strategy that has already failed to accomplish what the great commander said it would--"another mission accomplished" gone south.

Yep, the Jersey Guard generales were admitting they had set the Pinelands on total Hell fire when one of their jets let go a flare into the dry underbrush of that National Forest--pine needles full of tar and turpentine and shellack and shit like that--I mean, folks, this shit died to burn--that's its ecological job, to dry and then to be set on fire so it will restore the forest floor to a cleanliness that allows the old forest to be reborn anew--the fire doesn't destroy the Pinelands--except in this case thank the New Jersey National Guard for acting like a bolt of lightning that is the normal cause of such fires.

Oh boy, isn't Iraq lucky; they're getting the New Jersey National Guard weekend warriors overthere to bring them more FREEDOM Neo-Con-Nazi-Fascist-style. Hot damn, here comes the Jersey Guard, all proud and young with pot-bellied businessmen officers who are probably knocking down big bucks by going National Guard-into-action--officers's combat pay is nice, folks; hell, their regular pay is nice, much nicer than the grunts who do the fighting and dying get. These poor dumb boys and girls who join our army now are wishing they'd waited and been hired by Blackwater--the pay's twice the going rate for the US Army--or work as private contractors for the army of contractors overthere making a hundred times what the average dog soldier makes--though they are subject to being blown to bits or kidnapped and having their heads cut off--but still, only 700 or 800 of them have died so far as opposed to 3,600 regular army.

War with Iran is coming along just fine, too, folks, so don't worry, even if the surge doesn't work in Iraq and it won't, we still have an unused air force and navy out in the Persian Straits ready to pound the living holy shit out of Iran--17,000 bomb sites already mapped out on Pentagon planning tables--I'm sure I read it's 17,000--plus did you catch Unka Dick's on-board-the-aircraft-carrier drop in last week?--one of his famous drop ins--Unka Dick was over there because the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia had ordered him back over for another meeting--they own the USA, by the bye, or have you forgotten Georgie Porgie, our little boy phony "president," has sold our ports to Dubai, our city and land developments, our bridge construction, our highway systems, our toll roads, our tunnels, our innercities from NYC to LA--Royal Arab Family monies are pouring into this country--and Saudi Arabia is one of our big debt holders along with the Commie Chinese, the Brits, Japan, and the Israelis. So that's why Unka Dick was over there sucking the you know what of the you know who. [Remember Sheik condoms?]

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Report From Lynchburg: Jerry Falwell has not risen from the dead yet; he's not even buried yet. He's laying there rotting away in some Virginny funeral home--on ice--his blubber keeping him fairly fresh--let's see--will he arise from the dead and be caught up into heaven like Jesus was? Who gets Jerry's Rolexes?

How pathetic was it watching Andrew Young, all fat and bloated, looking like Jerry Falwell right before he wolfed down his last bowl of leftover squirrel burgoo, defend Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank!!! I'm not lyin'--check it out, Andy Young defending Paul Wolfowitz and his woman--they both deserve all the money they need they are so expert and so necessary to the so necessary World Bank--get out'ta here, Andy!!! Wahooo, Andy. Am I fooled into believing the World Bank is simply a branch of our Treasury Department? Old Bob McNamara used to be head of the World Bank.

Politicians, even Andy Youngs, are all liars.