"All Along the Watchtower" With thegrowlingwolf

"Life is high school with money"
I was watching the NCAA basketball tourney (I'm bored with it already) when this Cadillac commercial came on--and that's what it said, "Life is high school with money." You know me, like Apollinaire I believe there is an art to advertising, and I certainly have known and hobnobbed with adwriters in my days in that world--and I got to contemplating this adwriter gem and I decided I agree with it, "Life is high school with money." The object of the Caddie ad went on to say it was now time for the car buyer--YOU-- to graduate up from high school and spend that money on a big bulky gas-guzzling Cadillac truck-car so you can drive in style in the big-grinning snobby world of Cadillac owners, a world of instant education, a world of instant recognition, a world where whether you are or not you look like you're rich as hell while fact'is, you're broke as hell and in debt up the ass--but what the Cadillac ad's saying is right, true life is being as pretentiously phony as possible and becoming as in debt as possible in the factual-actual world in which you should be driving at least a hybrid if not an electric car. I mean the sun's dying anyway (George Gamov, Death of the Sun) so why not mine the sun of its energy rather than rape-mining the poor old paradisiacal earth of its energy--we mortal fools can't suck the sun dry no matter how hard we try.

Of course, all who read this should know my feelings as an ex-advertising person that all ads are lies, lies, and more lies--there is no truth whatsoever in advertising no matter the sincerity of the advertisement--take those British Petroleum ads--they call themselves "BP" in their commercials--where they claim they're 100% green and 100% caring about the environment while every day of our lives BP (British Petroleum)'s Alaskan refineries spill hundreds of gallons of oil into those far North Pole waters and their refinery stacks are putting tons of pollution into what was once absolutely pure naturalized clean air so easy to freeze and BP is also using the infamous Alaskan Pipeline to shoot their oil through that steel pathway (built by We the People against our own wishes way back in our forgotten past) that runs from our northern limits down to the oil ports at Anchorage, that steel intrusion into that once virgin wilderness area, that forced-through manmade intrusion whose daily use and upkeep has BURNED a huge barren stretch of burnt land through that once virgin wilderness and has leveled that huge several-miles-wide swath of land that is necessary to contain pipeline's massive size and length that also has roads bulldozed on either side of it all along it and helicopters are flying over it constantly day and night and also there is the fact that the poison heat fumes from that artificially heated pipeline are affecting the environment for miles and miles along and around that ugly intruding unnatural pipeline, too

--And pharma ads, I'll guarantee you over me old mother's grave pharmaceutical and over-the-counter drug ads are all lies--most pharmaceutically prescribed drugs will kill you in their strongest doses--even aspirin--the way they work is the same as any kind of poison works, the stronger the dose the deadlier the result; "chemists" (what druggists originally were) control the "killer" in these drugs by controlling the dosages--they adjust the dosages of these biochemical creations to a thin-line limit (they use mice by the thousands in testing all pharmaceutical drugs--mice that die by the thousands or who suffer all sorts of tortuous tests so that stupid, ignorant, easily gullible, not-near-as-assiduous-as-mice man can live on longer so he can fuck up more of the earth and its precious airs and waters).

--A lot of these drugs don't work at all, like Vioxx or Celebrex, because their dosages aren't high enough to be affective against the inflammations they are triumphed as "reducing"--under FDA (phony) regulations pharmas supposedly can't claim their products "CURE" a disease, only that they can "keep a disease under control" or in remission--to beat out ibuprofen--which is all Vioxx and Celebrex are, ibuprofen substitutes, Celebrex claiming it unlike generic ibuprofen and branded Vioxx doesn't cause bleeding in the gastro-intestinal area, even though if you read Celebrex "Prescribing Information" you'll see that in every clinical trial there was gastro-intestinal bleeding especially when used with NSAIDs and if you read deep enough you'll even see there were several deaths during these clinical trials. "Prescribing Information," known as a P. I. in the ad business, is the finely printed info inserts that come with all drugs even over-the-counter drugs that are so finely printed and hard to read most people toss them in the garbage and rely on their doctors and pharmacists to get the recommended dosage right, which they often don't, which is another story--we average in this country 150,000 deaths a year due to overdosings of drugs by doctors or nurses or pharmacists--while prescribing the wrong drugs or hospitals prescribing you wrong drugs or drugs that have a fatal interaction with other drugs you're already taking cause another 150,000 deaths (The Daily Growler advises you to avoid ever having to check into a hospital--staying healthy enough to avoid having to even go to doctors (arrrghhh!): the Growler further recommends you avoid hospitals and doctors by eating almonds and drinking a vegetable-fruit juice mix every day of your life and doing the 30 essential mid-body movement exercises every day and walking a lot and staying in the sun 15 minutes a day and drinking lots of as pure as possible water you can find every day, throw out the salt and sugar, the wheat products--and carry a rabbit's foot or a $5 gold piece if you don't want to be cruel to animals (how come it's OK to be cruel as hell to human animals?) around with you at all times). Anyway, you get the picture I'm trying to create here with all these immediate words. I'm saying the art of advertising is in perfecting the lie to such a degree it is open-armedly taken as truth--and if not truth maybe if you're a lucky writer your lie will be taken as "fact," a strange word that we seem to value more than truth--because we are pragmatists by education and therefore see truth as fiction and only seeing some shapely form is believing. That's how Gertrude Stein, a student of William James at Harvard, developed her style of writing, based on instant observations, instant dialog, instant histories, instant dreams and ambitions, instant life all written out in terms of a continuing present tense--what Gertrude called "the continuing present" and Jack Spicer the American poet called the "Outside Real," as Jack was trying to make poetry from without like Gertrude was writing novels from without to within. Reversed imagination. Ironies developed as instantly as possible through dialog and that unrelenting between-the-lines descriptions and judgments--so pragmatic an approach to the reality of art.

In a continuance of this Cadillac commercial's meaning, I find it ironically funny how American car companies just refuse to deny they're losing money making truck-like automobiles like these huge Caddie Escalantes instead of following their-own-created Japanese automakers in suddenly bringing all these small hybrid cars to the market, Toyota already has one selling like hotcakes and so does Honda and Hyundai, but not General Motors yet though they say they're going bankrupt--and not Ford yet either and they, too, say they're going bankrupt--and not even Daimler (once Hitler's favorite carmaker and maker of Nazi tanks, etc.) wanted Chrysler, which, too, is said to be going bankrupt (and We the People bailed failing Chrysler out once before--we bailed 'em out big bucks back when Lee I-a-coconut had his 15 minutes of in-the-camera fame--and now he's a "Who?"). Of course, I'm sure most American cars and trucks are assembled outside the US these days--I remember a few years ago when GM ran a commercial talking about how the Chevvy Camaro was "the All-American car" and then it was found out that Chevvy Camaros were made in Canada.

Japan is a country We the People of the USA made over after we were the victors and to US went the spoils in our WWII win over Imperial Japan, a country whose whole manufacturing industry We the People retooled from making military machinery to making what We the People knew how to make best: automobiles, teevees, cameras, stereos, movies (we sold all our old movies and all our old recordings and our major record labels, too, to Sony), even our recording technology--why RCA-Victor had a huge "Nippon" factory at Kawasaki that began recording American records in Japan immediately after WWII--a business which was eventually dubbed JVC (Japan Victor Corporation) (we cynics called it "Japanese Victory (over the USA) Corp.")--and Japan's whole economy was reorganized by General Asshole MacArthur and his US industrial buddies to be a miniature of the American economy before WWI--the time of the American Industrial Revolution--including basing the Japanese banking system on our own banking system thus giving rise to the splurge of huge Japanese banks that bloomed during the time when our corporate rulers were telling us Japan was taking us over--remember how the media broadcast how the Japanese were making fun of our school children as being dumb as hell and hillbilly backwards compared to the whiz kid Japanese children? Why for a while there my CEOs and middle-management bosses were saying the American management forces were going to have to learn Japanese in order to be equally involved in the coming "global marketplace" that started being designed by American corporations in the 1980s just as desktop computers were coming online and this sort of instant communications world was opening up to the big corps and the computer-science geniuses came in an set up networks and databases and all that computer-connecting crap and the big shot CEOs starting spouting about how American corporations were "Bridging the Gap," meaning, "spanning the Atlantic and Pacific oceans instantly"--and the gap was bridged in the merger-mad nineties under Pappy Bush's failed economic and done-away-with-regulations policies--those leftover from Ronnie "I Got Alzheimer's and I'm Still Your...er-ah, What Am I Mommy?" Raygun's voodoo economics--and Pappy Bush's administration and its asshole-buddy cooperation with US corporations eventually got us the deepest in debt we'd ever been until his stupid son got elected illegally in 2000 and that stupid Bush baby (still sucking his thumb) got ahold of our economy and managed to break both Ronnie Raygun's voodoo-economics national debt record and his old Pappy's even-worse debt record by imposing on us and our future generations the absolutely worst DEBT ever in the history of any country ever on earth (and he's done this with impunity--he's lied and cheated us to almost Chaos using this assumed impunity--AMAZIN!, AMAZIN'! to a mortal wolf-man hybrid like me--shouldn't this failure be like serving some prison time?--ironically while these worthless human beings have wrecklessly led us into the deepest of all-ever debts, the American (Global) corporation Exxon-Mobil (that had to merge because independently they were both claiming they were hitting the skids toward bankruptcy--so which administration allowed this giant merger? Ask Hillary about that one...don't worry, nobody will) has for two years now turned in the largest profits ever made in the history of Capitalism! Exxon-Mobil now has billions upon billions of both open and hidden profits--remember, big corporations keep more than one set of books--in the famous BCCI bank case, Price Waterhouse's team of creative bookkeepers admitted to keeping three sets of cooked books on that crooked customer--BCCI: the Arab bank network from Pakistan to dear old Saudi-Arabia--headquartered I believe in Dubai or one of those friendly royal democracies--that was funding the Islamic jihad, a jihad started in Saudi-Arabia, and continued on over into Pakistan and then into Afghanistan backing Saudi-national Osama Bin Ladin and his CIA-created and -trained Mujaheddin forces that were used by the US to put the Taliban into power back in the Pappy Bush days in another episode of our still-Cold-War posturing against Russia, which we are still doing to this day, posturing against Russia and Little Boy Bush's old pal Pootin' the Terrible (ex-KGB bigshot--killing some goof with his bare hands was an everyday pleasure for a cop-type like Pootin' the Terrible back in his KGB heyday!--the Russkies are scared to death of Pootin' the Terrible, they know the database he has on their asses--plus, they know he was once a raving member of the Soviet Communist Party--still alive in Russia, still very much alive in a country that has been ruled by tyrants since its very beginnings when it was a mixture of tribal nomads brought under control first as city states and then later as a "united" Czardom. The following is from www.etymonline.com/

1555, from Rus. tsar, from Old Slavic tsesari, from Gothic kaisar, from Gk. kaisar, from L. Caesar. First adopted by Russian emperor Ivan IV, 1547.

The spelling with cz- is against the usage of all Slavonic languages; the word was so spelt by Herberstein, Rerum Moscovit. Commentarii, 1549, the chief early source of knowledge as to Russia in Western Europe, whence it passed into the Western Languages generally; in some of these it is now old-fashioned; the usual Ger. form is now zar; French adopted tsar during the 19th c. This also became frequent in English towards the end of that century, having been adopted by the Times newspaper as the most suitable English spelling. [OED]

The Gmc. form of the word also is the source of Finnish keisari, Estonian keisar. The transferred sense of "person with dictatorial powers" is first recorded 1866, Amer.Eng., initially in ref. to President Andrew Johnson. The fem. czarina is 1717, from It. czarina, from Ger. Zarin, fem. of Zar "czar." The Rus. fem. is tsaritsa. His son is tsarevitch, his daughter is tsarevna.

"Life is high school with money"
I agree that most Americans are probably stuck fast in their high-school days. You know, when you were naive yet confident you knew every god-damn thing there was to know about any and every thing, unaware of death, confident in your learning in your understandings and confident if faced with a problem that you could solve it on your own and you damn sure didn't need any help from any old fogies or smarty pants college types or your parents controlling you or giving you monotonous advice. I kinda figured the adcopywriter who came up with that line for Cadillac was implying the same thing, hung up like he or she probably still is with their high school days--most of these people growing up on the East Coast, most in New York City, where high school companionships meant so god-damn much to your future--like Ralph Lauren's New York City-Bronx Jewish boy success story--or read Philip Roth's books--but then high school companionships meant a lot to me as a high school kid. My best friend in high school was in a way a better mentor to me than any teacher I later ran across in my college "career" (including two Texas colleges, New Mexico University, and later New York University).

I must admit I hated my high school days when I was living them. But while I was living them, I certainly was already aware of what this "today's" Caddie commercial is implying--yes, high school with money was the way to go and all of my high-school friends had money--my best friend's father was a millionaire songwriter, entertainer, and radio station owner--my best friend's father drove Cadillacs! But, hell, that wasn't anything, my father who wasn't a millionaire, hell, he drove Cadillacs, too; one a Caddie I drove all the time to high school. I got my first sex with a high-school girlfriend in that Caddie. I graduated from high school and lost my dad's Cadillac. I graduated from a Cadillac in high school to a used Chevrolet Power Glide in college. My first car out of college, though, and the first car I bought on my first job? If you said Cadillac, you're correct.

Yep, I didn't really have a worry in the world when I was in high school, though I worried constantly.

Jots and Tittles From the Wolfman's Traipsing Along the Watchtower
--I find it funny how the corporate media is now trumpeting all over every channel how John "VietNam Nutjob" McCain is now leading both Hillary RodHAM Clinton and Barack (Osama) Obama in the national polls! Can you believe that? I think you can.

Bush's popularity rating is still at 31%--it's been there for a couple'a years now--and those 31% are goofball true believers who'd follow any warmongering president or king or dictator right into the pits of Holy Hell regardless--it's the "America love it or leave it" crowd, the old sotty rich, the old haggy and pissed off John Birchers and Raygunites and it's the white hillbillies and Old South bohunks (as H.L. Mencken called 'em), the rightwing chickenhawks, the corporate (read "corrupt") CEOs and upper-level managers and scared shitless Middle-Amurican whites--constantly scared of anybody who ain't white as the white stripes in the US flag--suspicious of all "foreigners," even though at one time, and the Native Americans sit around on their reservations and laugh at all this, these Amuricans were all foreigners themselves--and according to Barack Obama's spiritual leader, all white folks are intruding foreigners anyway--and, hell, ain't he right about that?--I think that 31% of Amurican white lemmings who still kiss Baby Bush's phony lyin' ass feel that way anyway--and 31% is enough to win the presidency back--I mean, come on, this country is pretty much split down the middle in terms of side of the aisle bullshit--most white people if given the choice prefer white people--I can understand from this why all black people prefer their own kind--isn't that kind of natural? Check out the apes. And if you don't think human beings evolved from apes...well, then you're still livin' life as though you're still in high school and you've got gobs of money no matter what color your stupid skin is.

theboredgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler