Sunday, November 30, 2008

Another Barack Obama Sunday

The Reasonable
Differences between blacks and whites and whoever else you wanna throw in the pot? Incomplete sentences is all I can manage--the urgency of my understanding--thinking within writing--and today I was set straight by two different attacks, first from another-dimensional woman, a black woman--the other from an Irish girl from Donegal....

I'm a wild thinker, OK? I've explained it using Albert Murray as my muse-on-my-shoulder. Like Murray I think from within a literary context, not a political context. Therefore I see Barack Obama as a literary character. A romantic character. A made-up character. Made up in my mind. And in that process I am sometimes just as wildly wrong as I am usually wildly right, and we ain't talkin' wings here, but right and wrong as in answers to "yes or no" questions--rhetorical or otherwise. Here's attack number one. From a beautiful black woman. From a brilliantly logical black woman...

And as aside, I put a beautiful logical black woman on a bus earlier this morning...

And this 83-year-old black woman from the first attack was Adelaide Sanford, a New York City black woman thinker and educator and reasoner and reckoner...

Read all about Adelaide Sanford: www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=928
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Adelaide Sanford was reasoning outloud and she first attracted my attention talking about "the overserved." She meant by that what Veblen meant by the Leisure Class; what Mills meant by the Power Elite. And Adelaide Sanford explained to me what Barack Obama was up to by choosing both "comrades" and "antagonists" to fill the posts in his administration. She said it was a black tactic, though I'm being more blatant about it than she was. She said it was in the ancient African nature to share--especially to share and shelter those of theirs in need. She said it was also in the African nature to unify. To bring together the agreeable and the disagreeable. She explained that the only way Barack Obama could get anything done was to surround himself with friends and enemies, pasts and futures, etc. Dig? I saw the light. I've been putting Obama down of late, as have the coyotes on the The Daily Growler staff. I thought he deserved harsh criticism after he lavished more praise than they deserved on a war criminal like John Brennan or a just-plain-unregulating asshole like Larry "Fired From Harvard" Summers...or even why in the Holiest of Hades would he hire Hillbilly Hillary Clinton as his Sec'y of State. Adelaide Sanford says Obama has his reasons. Bringing this country together is one of the deepest of his reasons--as though he were Lincoln bringing about the Emancipation Proclamation--as though he were Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down that wall--as though he were Martin Luther King, Jr., too--as though he were Malcolm X--see what Adelaide means!

The brilliant and intelligent and reasonable black woman I put on a bus earlier this morning and I were walking back from a glorious dinner at our fav Persian restaurant on Native-American-Appreciation Day (read: Thanksgiving)--and every shop we passed on our way back from that glorious dinner, rug stores, the Laundromat, the delis, the Made-in-China junk stores on Fifth Avenue, every joint had a picture of Obama in the window--one junk store had a window full of portraits of Obama framed in USA flags--one window had Obama tee shirts in red, white, and blue, and solid black colors. I am still amazed at how people are keeping their intent faith in Obama as if they believe Obama's going to do what he's says he's gonna do though they don't know how he's going to do it.

We have to wait--and I have to wait--and see! I'm a wolf more than a man on this issue. I smell failure. I smell let down. Yet my human side has to step out of the animal skin and reason like only a human can reason. I hope Obama is as black smart as Adelaide Sanford says he is. I'd certainly believe anything that beautiful woman told me--and understand it, too.

George W. Bush looks sunk these days, doesn't he? Like the shit at the bottom of a four-holer outhouse that's been off limits and mellowing for a few months--throw some lime on his rotten ass.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
http://www.tapvideo.com/media%20collection/Scholar%20web%20Pages/Adelaide%20Sanford/sanford%20thumbnail.JPG
Dr. Adelaide Sanford

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

A New Character in the Political Context

BYLINE: Bill Putz
Dateline: The Heart of the Matter, November 27th, 2008.
The trenches aren't very deep. It's tough digging them in concrete. In New York City the police have suddenly come up with a terrorist threat. This time these superslick figments of evil we are all led to believe are al-Queda-trained terrorists out to destroy the United States and especially New York City this time are threatening the New York City subway system--mad bombers; crazed Islamics; insane Muslims; antiAmerican demons; the mujaheddin of Satan himself, one of the greatest military leaders in fictional history. Satan was the military leader who led his armies against the God (Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah) of the desert religions. Yes, he lost and was thrown out of Heaven to fall to earth and of course he fell to earth in Babylon, today's modern Baghdad, where the surge has worked so well the proud people of Baghdad are in the streets in throngs again not showering rose pedals on our peace-loving troops but burning our "president" in effigy. And, too, burning American flags.
http://25thaviation.org/johnkerry/171eb5f0.jpg
Burning Bush in Baghdad
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Again, as usual, this terrorist threat against the New York City subways is vague. It just happened out of the blue. Homeland Security says it doesn't know much about it. This, however, doesn't stop the New York City police from bringing out their automatic-weapon-carrying troops and ramming them down the throats of the millions of riders who depend on the subway system to get them to and from their jobs.

And in India, in the financial city of Mumbai, alleged Islamic madmen (terrorists) started firing their automatic military weapons in a fancy hotel restaurant after coming ashore in speed boats (Swift boats?) from an "al-Queda Navy" ship situated conveniently offshore. Their terrorist objective seemed to be taking over the city itself, though their more-focused objective was eventually the 5-star Taj Mahal Hotel. Media reports kept emphasizing just how powerfully rich Mumbai is. How it is the financial heart of India (sort of the World Trade Center of India one might dare say), and how all the hotels in the area are multistar luxury hang outs of the rich and famous, the Taj Mahal being the 5-star giant in this full-bellied and drunk-with-wealth area of otherwise impoverished India. The Caste System is still very much in place in this city as the Power Elite still rule India there in rich splendor and glee, in imitation of the old Rajah royalty that ruled India for centuries before the British invaded them and occupied them and taught them how to be 5-star hotel operators.

Could this world be dancing on hot coals kept Hellishly hot by the Power Elites of the world vying for territory and the natural wealth that territory represents to them? The Islam Power Elite versus the Mumbai India Power Elite versus the Power Elite Militarists versus the Power Elite Priests and Imans versus the nosey Power Elites of Russia, the USA, China, Great Britain, and Communist/Capitalist China.

I study Barack Obama. He's the greatest political upstart of the new century. He's got the right charm. Though really not a great speaker, he knows how to sound like great speakers are supposed to sound, especially those great American leaders who have impressed him the most, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.

I see how gracefully he moves through crowds. I see, though, too, how monoexpressional his face seems to always be, cocked and ready to either smile brilliantly or frown with dedicated seriousness. His face is molded as though still encased in a mask; a mask that stays serious and charming at the same time. A mask that is talking change yet the change it is talking about sounds so familiar. Going one way, a "yeah" way one day, and reversing himself and going the opposite direction the next day. For example: his stance on taxing the wealthy. He made great grandstanding statements about how he was going to tax everybody making over 200,000 a year--then he changed it to 250,000 a year--and give tax breaks and rebates to the middle-class and poor. John McCain called this "a redistribution of the wealth" and Governor Sarah Palin called it Socialism. And McCain and Palin harped on this socialistic aspect of this Southside Chicago black boy who then we found out hung with the Weather Underground when he was 8 years old and living in Indonesia or somewhere like that--Governor Palin then informed us that this Bill Ayres who was by then Barack's best pal, the man who had pushed Barack into politics, was a DOMESTIC TERRORIST. Barack became a Socialist and Domestic Terrorist all due to his plan to tax the wealthy--and rather than standing up to these charges like a changed man, Barack backed down. He's not going to tax the wealthy afterall; which means he's not going to give tax cuts or rebates to the middle-class either.

The taxing-the-wealthy idea had gotten him a huge following--just as his early-on saying he was going to bring the troops home from Iraq got him his initial political surge. At first it was like he was bringing the troops home immediately--then that immediately gradually increased to 90 days, then maybe a year or two, then after Barack went to Baghdad and seemingly fell in love with General Petraus, he changed his mind again. Yes, he was going to reduce the troops in Iraq--yes, he was going to do that, but then Petraus had somehow convinced him that the surge had worked and the withdrawal of troops had to be slower than anticipated--and then Barack started talking about reducing our troops in Iraq--YEAH! the people were applauding and hollering at his packed rallies when he made that statement--BUT NOT bringing them home but rather deploying them to Afghanistan where he said he intended to use the surge method there to go after Bin Laden--even if it meant sending our troops into Pakistan.

Yet the young people, including hundreds of thousands of first-time voters, educated whites, all blacks, Latinos, Asians, even Jews and Midwest blue-collar workingclass, the jobless, veterans, flocked to this man's clarion call for CHANGE. And then this massive following swept this at one-time totally unknown Southside Chicago politician into the office of the President of the USA. The first BLACK president of these United States! (Though note how our political system is still so based on racism. McCain carried, with the exception of North Carolina, Florida, and Indiana, the slave states, the Deep South states, the border states, then up the backbone of the Midwest, the self-abusing Conservative strongholds of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho--McCain carried them all--even Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. Talk about backlash! And there naturally will be a white backlash. Of course there will be. Yes, Barack Obama is a full-fledged Biblically declared black man to the Deep South still hidebound racist states where the White Power Elite still rules with a Mister Charley iron hand in spite of states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia being predominantly black in terms of population.) But to most Americans, Barack Obama is a Great All-American, a symbol in both name and genetics representing all of those of us who call ourselves Americans (and that includes Latin Americans--even Canadians are Americans), a charming, tall, boyishly good looking man who seems to be saying what the majority of Americans want him to say. And they want him to DO, too. To carry out his campaign offerings.

That night in Grant Park in Chicago when Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech, at that moment he had the whole of the country--even those who down-deep hated him for whatever reason--ready to follow this man into a whole new USA--that New Frontier John Kennedy had promised us--that Great Society Lyndon Johnson had promised us.
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From Johnson's "Great Society" Speech, 1964:

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 .

The \cf2 Great Society\cf0 rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in out time. But that is just the beginning.

The \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 -- in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.

Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.

________________to read complete speech: coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/great.html

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Instead of a Great Society, Lyndon Johnson gave us the VietNam War, based on his lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Talk is easy; action is where talk becomes reality. Change isn't change when you are talking about change. Change demands continuence. If you say you are going to change something it doesn't mean you simply rename the same old cogs in the ruined wheel.

Unfortunately, in his choosing the men and women he did for his transition team, Barack Obama is doing a total 360 from the change he was promising that got him elected miraculously President, a legitimately elected president I might add. The men and women he has positioned around him as advisors, spokespersons, cabinet members...well, I'm sorry to say this...do NOT represent change!

Barack Obama is simply trying to tacitly tell those of us...who so hoped this man would be the man to really and truly bring about a change for the better in this country, for peace, for the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, for grace, honesty, and serious wisdom to be finally installed in our heretofore totally corrupted government...this man who was elected by the best of the American people, this man who was elevated to champion status by this multitude of honesty-seeking, accountability-seeking Americans is simply trying to tell us now that he's sorry but he was all along simply a puppet--a puppet under whose facade you will find the working arm, the controlling arm of the Democratic Party--the same-old-same-old political Power Elite that has controlled this country since the time of the American Revolution, the revolution in which the conscripted common man and freed slave fought to become free, to gain liberty, to gain separation from divine royals and dukes and earls and a pompous lord and master class--

But these will remain lusted-after ideals. Barack Obama is not going to change anything. He's going to play by the Democratic Party book. The Power Elite of Washington groomed this man, tested him against Bill Clinton's wife--saw him win big in IOWA! And then they really kept their eye on Obama after Iowa. And he continued to beat Hillary Clinton in every state and even in the states Hillary Clinton won it was by a close margin. And then Obama began to receive more money than Hillary Clinton and all the Republicans and then John Edwards had to go and have an affair right in the middle of the chance of his lifetime and with a wife dying of cancer! Oh what careless mistakes politicians are used to making and getting away with. But the people turned on John Edwards and then Bill Clinton committed a political faux pas in South Carolina defending his wife against Barack Obama! And then all eyes turned on Barack Obama and he wiped out Edwards and Hillary Clinton and he wiped out the Fundamentalist Christians and he wiped out the Conservative fools and he wiped out the racists!

Yesterday Barack Obama announced he was keeping Robert Gates (creator of the 1 trillion dollar Pentagon budget) as Defense Secretary. Robert Gates is so much more powerful than Barack Obama. And Obama's embracing John Brennan as an advisor.

I don't see any change so far, do you?

bylinebillputz
for The Daily Growler

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Blues Dialog #4

Philo M. Buck
I'm reading Albert Murray. You know him? Black writer. Except I never liked to distinguish. Except now do I have to? Because of Obama? I'm not thinking of Obama as black like I think of Albert Murray as black. I feel a brotherhood with Albert Murray that I don't feel with Obama, but then I know how Albert Murray thinks and I don't know how Obama thinks. I can imagine, but then I'm imagining from too far a'left field angle for it to be even half-ass predictive. Murray on the other hand...the more I know about him the more I know what I really am myself, myself as the other side of the growin' up down south drama. I can't compare my down south drama with the DEEP south one Albert Murray grew up thinking in. We were thinking alike...then I slam on the brakes in my thoughts and remember that Albert Murray is 92 years old, which means there's miles of difference in our ages, I'm way behind Murray in time, knowledge, experience--but I'm parallel to him in terms of living in a literary context--and how difficult it is for one so trapped in the literary context to understand so abstract a thing as the political context. Murray says he hasn't got time to waste on the political context except to put it into a literary statement in a novel or poem or short story or magazine article or filmscript. Makers of myths. We are makers of myths. Murray and myself agree on books, on writers, on the imagination, on a certain moxie a writer must have in having to write no matter the occasion in terms of what's going on outside the library or study windows--like, now, a novel about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that debacle--you see what I'm driving toward--like Stephen Crane wrote Red Badge of Courage without having a lick of military experience--but after a lot of looking into that horrible war from the literary context, Crane was able in his imagination to put on a private's uniform and put himself right in the middle of a bloody charge, the Union charging against a countercharging Rebel force--and old Stephen did such a good job that I read Red Badge with fascinated thrill. It was real enough for me.

And one book Murray mentions throughout all his literary content is The Golden Thread by one Philo M. Buck. And Murray keeps mentioning this book in the couple of conversational interviews he reprints in Briarpatch. So my curiosity got the best of me and I Googled Philo and the first thing up was an eBay listing for a 1936 copy of the book. $4.95, so I bought the damn thing. As I bought it, I had a little dialog with Albert, you know, "OK, Albert, I'm gonna check you out on this Buck dude." Albert nods and tacitly implies, "You'll see...and remember, read it like you would be reading it in college, back in the stacks." Murray was lucky like me to go to a college with a good library--a wonderful quiet place away from the reality of the classrooms and the campus and the jive of the political context. Oh, and how it easy it is to remember all those good times I had as a college freshman in that 6-story architecturally dull but bulky building that had a couple of floors of big open windows through which you could look up from the street and see into the general stacks. My favorite place in that library was up on the reference floor, back in the back, in a little cubicle with a library lamp with a green glass shade--and under that light such wonderful literary context opened unto me, the little wide-eyed laughing boy from the excessive space of land and sky called the lone prairie--a furthest extension of that down south--though Lyndon Johnson specifically declared when he ran for President in 1960 against JFK that Texas was no longer a southern state--it was a WESTERN state--and the lone prairie I come from verifies that more than it does its down home south aspects, though I was reared for five years in Dallas, Texas, and my father's family were from the deepest southern part of coastal Gawjah via covered wagon through Alabanana, into early-turn-of-the-last-century East Texas, staying around there building schools before moving on out for a final stand on the lone prairie. (Greenville, Texas, back when I was a kid had a big sign across its main street, Lee Street, and I mean it was a colossal sign that declared Greenville had "The blackest land and the whitest people." The ironic thing about that: Greenville probably at that time had more black residents than white due to that blackest land on which was grown the whitest of cottons picked by the blackest people overseered by those whitest people.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2016/2269651412_10d4a862dd.jpg?v=0
Greenville, Texas, back in the "good ole days"
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thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Monday, November 24, 2008

New Blues Dialog #3

In a Tim Leary State of Mind
I am a character in a literary hallway. Those aren't shadows passing all around me. Those are literary guides. Stop one. Ask him...or ask her, it doesn't matter. Whoa. The best one to ask is coming down the hall now. It's Albert Murray the writer. His literary character name is Scooter, from Gasoline Point, Alabama. The briarpatch, as he calls it in his lectures. He's wearing glasses. He swears he wanted to be an intellectual as a kid in the briarpatch. I'm stopping Albert.

"I live in a literary context," Albert guides. He's a literary guide. I live in a literary context, too. It was easy and slick as snail glide to learn that from Albert. We're on a first-name basis because I've read his books. He doesn't call me anything because he doesn't know my name but if he did he'd call me by my first name. "...my whole thing is to process it [the stuff of the abstract continuance--Albert Murray refers to the Civil Rights Movement as an abstract context, a political context] into a literary statement. So, I always thought in terms of heroic action, of conquering the world. I was not interested in 'escape,' I was interest in conquest. That's a different thing all together." He's right! He's right! I'm screaming up and down the hallway. Papa Hemingway turns around and speaks to Albert Murray. W.H. Auden calls Albert by his first name. "And don't let me forget to mention Auden, because nobody loves Auden anymore than me. Man, I'm an Auden man from way back. Couldn't write the blues, but he could write everything else."

An Auden poem:
The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
_From Homage to Clio, 1960 ________________________________________

I read this poem very loudly in the hallway. Albert Murray laughs. "That's the way it works, I pick up whatever the other guy's music is--in this case, Auden's--and then I play a tune too. To me, you can write more poetry in prose than if you restrict yourself to certain verse forms." Whoa, Albert, that's good. I like that. More poetry in prose.

It's noisy as hell in the literary hallway. While still in the briarpatch, Albert thought, "'This is a rough place, I'm going to have to be a hero.'" Keep on talkin' Albert. Keep on talkin'. But then we're talking writing. Like writers talk books and libraries and info and experience. Albert talking about growing up in the briarpatch, "I was beating that. I was better than that. I wasn't their conception of me, I was my conception of me. And my conception of me came from the great books of the world. That's what I thought of human possibility, not what some dumb-ass white guy thought a colored guy should be doing and feeling. Do you see what I'm saying? So I was not impressed with certain things as achievements that they thought of as achievements."

This is more or less old Doc Tim Leary's basic philosophy, though Leary to me was like Auden is to Albert Murray. I heard Leary's song; his poetry; "Tune in, turn on, and drop out." That's a simple little poem; easy to memorize. A part of RIGHT NOW, the only NOW, the only point in time where you are really who you are whether you say you are or not.

I duck into a quite place in the literary hallway. Timothy Leary ducks in there with me. Timothy admits he had dreams of being a writer as a young man. "You've written, man," I say, "I read your stuff all the time, though I did acid out in California long before I heard of you and Baba Ram Das--in an Allen Ginsberg interview in some literary journal." And old Tim Leary was big-time for a while until the Feds got him and lobotomized him or atomized him or something then he turned to looking into the cosmos for his truths.

Here ya go, read a little Tim Leary--"go with us now, back in the pages of history, when out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great Doctor Tim Leary..."
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The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.

  • These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
  • They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
  • They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.
  • They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
  • They have claimed private, personal ownership of God'd land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
  • In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
  • In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory educationto coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
  • In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
  • In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
  • In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
  • In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
  • For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
  • In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
  • In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
  • They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
  • In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
  • They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
  • They have enlisted an army of informers.
  • In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
  • They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.
  • They are bores.
  • They hate beauty.
  • They hate sex.
  • They hate life.
We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.
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If you'd like to read more of old Tim, then tune in, turn on, and drop out HERE:
www.erowid.org/culture/characters/leary_timothy/leary_timothy_declaration.shtml
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Tim Leary.

Tim's really high now. They shot his ashes into space!

theturnedontunedin&droppedoutgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, November 23, 2008

What's This? A Joe LIEberman Sunday!

An Uncle Joe LIEberman Sunday!
Believe it or not, it wasn't Barack Obama or Hillbilly Hillary or John "Nutjob" McCain who filled the slots on the right-wing commercial teevee pundit shows this Sunday morn, it was instead the enormously successful and now very popular even with the Dumbocrats Uncle Joe LIEberman. Flip-flopper. Liar. Dumb shit. Politician to the fabulously rich. A Connecticut politician, like the late, great, old fart Prescott Bush and the righteously irReverend Pat Robertson--or perhaps you recall Jim "Carpetbagger" Buckley, the brother of the great, stupid, phony, and big-time dilettante William F. Buckley, Jr. (is Bill dead yet?).

And Uncle Joe--I mean, how lucky is Uncle Joe? First of all, after losing the Dumbocrat nomination for his return to the Senate, he switched parties and ran as an Independent and won with the help of the Repugnicans. With that win, Uncle Joe tossed around the idea that perhaps he'd join the Repugnican Party. I mean he went along with everything Repugnican. Hell, Uncle Joe went along with everything Georgie Porgie "Puddin' Pie" Bush--the most worthless and damaging president in the history of the presidency and yet this sorry worthless piece of rich-boy shit is going to walk away from the world-wrecking disaster he created absolutely free--with all the benefits of that office that this little crooked dumbass drugstore Texan never legally won--first president ever appointed by the Supreme(ly) Dumb Court--I mean think of all the severe-ass things this little prick has shoveled off on We the People's asses! Look at the trillions of dollars this little slick prick has stolen from the U.S. Treasury--with the help of his Wall Street asslicking buddies like Hank Paulson and his Federal Reserve trained monkey--Bernakee or whatever his name is (his name doesn't deserve to be spelled correctly)! And yet, Bush is going to go back to his faux ranch in Crawfull, Texas, and live like a little spoiled brat duke for the rest of his silly ass worthless life--sipping his bourbons and branch water out on his back patio while the house N-worders cook him up some barbecue ribs, all the while cashing his presidential paycheck still every month, getting Secret Service protection, getting office space and a staff, getting a We-the-People-paid-for library to store his volumes of great executive decisions he personally penned during his crooked reign--like from his diary: "September 11, 2001: 'Oh gee golly damn am I a'scared. Unka Dick! Unka Dick! I'm a'scared of those god-damn towelheads! Unka Dick! Damn, Pickles tells me it looks like Unka Dick's hidden out somewhere where nobody knows where he is. God-damn, I'm a'scared. Towelheads, sand N-worders, A-Rabbs!" The George W. "Baby" Bush Library--will it be full of rolls of used toilet paper? The little weasel and all his crooked cronies who have caused the most havoc in the USA since the last spoiled rich-brat president Herbert Hoover fucked up everything back from 1928 to 1932 are getting fat-cat-free away with all the disruption they've brought on this country.

Uncle Joe LIEberman then after he wins as an independent to show the Dumbocrats what a little prick he is, he speaks at the Repugnican Convention--he openly says he's for John "Nutjob" McCain--and what do the Dumbocrats do to punish this asshole? Nothing. There you go. Not a goddamn thing. In fact, good old Henry Reid bent over and gave Uncle Joe some asshole and Nancy Pelosi sucked Uncle Joe's tiny gnarly pecker. They didn't even slap Uncle Joe on the wrist as they welcomed him back wholehawg into the Dumbocrat inner circles.

And Uncle Joe was hot today. He's so dumb and ineffectual as a reasoner. He's just a rather ignorant man--"Well, Uncle Joe, you're back among more ignorant men than you so you can let your hair down and keep on wheelin' and stealin' away--workin' hard for that K Street money and all those million-dollar boondoggles you've arranged for your fat-cat Connecticut constituents. Uncle Joe LIEberman, the perfect Dumbocrat!"

And Barack Obama, what did he do? He put Larry "Fuck the Third World" Summers in his administration. Barack, you sound so great and then you hook up with and praise a lousy son of a bitch like Larry Summers! Come on, Barack, don't fuck this up. This can be the greatest moment ever in American politics! Please don't fuck it up listening to that same old bunch of lyin' motherfuckers you're surrounding yourself with. I'm sorry, folks, Hillary Clinton is not a good choice for Sec'y of State. I'm sorry, she's not. Besides, letting her husband in your house means you'd better hide your wife and daughters for God sake!

Politics is beginning to sour my outlook. I'm becoming once again the most cynical man on earth. I hope the party isn't over, but it damn sure feels like it is.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily "Sunday" Growler

Friday, November 21, 2008

The Daily Growler Gets Analyzed!

"Herr Doktor Freud, is that you?"
Ladies and gents, The Daily Growler has been analyzed. What do you think of the analysis? (I was always amused that the word "anal" is a prefix (a projection?) to "ysis"--a strange enough looking suffix--I can see "Isis" in that--so analysis could be interpreted by future linguists as having to do with Isis's anus.) Here 'tis from www.typealyzer.com/

The analysis indicates that the author of

http://the-daily-growler.blogspot.com/

is of the type:

The gentle and compassionate type. They are especially attuned [to] their inner values and what other people need. They are not friends of many words [?] and tend to take the worries of the world on their shoulders. They tend to follow the path of least resistance and have to look out not to be taken advantage of.

They often prefer working quietly, behind the scene as a part of a team. They tend to value their friends and family above what they do for a living.
______________________________________________________________
"The Gentle and Compassionate Type"

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. I really like "they are not friends of many words"--that should become the The Daily Growler motto.

So there you go, folks. Gather the little family around you and read The Daily Growler to them. Show them its compassionate and caring ways. And when your darling little daughter or son suddenly burps out, "Pass me the fucking potatoes, mom," don't cuff him or her in the mouth, just Praise the Lawdy Lawd your kids are learning the facts of life from The Daily Growler and pass the little bastard the fucking potatoes...PLEASE!

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, November 20, 2008

New Blues Dialog, Take 2

Where's the Dialog, You Ask?
The hungry Caterpillars are crunching tons of dirt in their one-jawed big steel bucket mouths--they started this morning at 7 am, the earliest they've ever started--they didn't finish until 4:45 pm yesterday, the latest they've ever worked.

The noise they make brings blues up in my head. A new blues. A modern blues. And I'm a modernist alright. "Ralph's New Blues" led me into the Bop Blues from out of the Delta Blues and the Chicago Electric Blues--"Ralph's New Blues" appeared on the Modern Jazz Quartets's great album Concorde, on Prestige, 1955. I first heard it at my brother's house. My brother had bought it.

With whom am I having a dialog?

Dia=day/log=logos. Isn't this post a dialog? Isn't blogging dialogging? Even if your dialog is simply with yourself--or the back portions of your mind--or perhaps with your barbarian ancestors!

Like: "So why are you listening to Liszt this morning?" "God-damn it's cold this morning." "What's that got to do with why you're listening to Liszt?" "Make a list: that's a good one, 'Listening to Liszt.' Let's see, what kind of novel does that inspire: Listening to Liszt--sounds like something 'heartbreaking,' something Danielle Steele might write. I gag. I'm listening to the cliche-riddled Hungarian Rhapsodies. They are babe-grabbers, I'm telling you. Liszt was a babe-grabber deluxe. Really great individualists men become babe grabbers. The magnitude of their individual fame and their great shaggy showmanship causes women to want them to possess them. From reading C. Wright Mills and Thorstein Veblen, especially Veblen, I now see how women have been OWNED by men since time began--even the legendary women, like the Lesbian Aphrodite, were owned by men--ah, Dianna--and did I mention that there is a great sexy statue of Dianna the Huntress at the entrance to Chapultepec Park in Mexico City? As you come into the park going down the Reforma from downtown, there it is; and what a babe the sculptor has made of the Lesbian Dianna--she hunted men--her enslavers. And that amused me to think, yes, that even the women of the Power Elite are slaves to their men. The Power Elite have their own WOMEN--the daughters and wives or mistresses of the Big Daddy Power Elite families. Like Warren Buffett's wife--she's his slave--and is happy being his slave. Like John 'Nutjob' McCain's wife. Like Jackie O was a slave to JFK--and boy, when she got released from that slavery after his assassination, she went hog wild. As the world's richest woman suddenly, she had a ball playing the field, fucking her way eventually to the majestic stance of kicking Maria Callas's old-wearing-out ass off Ari Onassis's yacht--then bedding down with greasy, sleazy, bad-breath Aristotle Onassis, willingly becoming his slave--for what?--for power, for wealth, for security, all that women really want from their patron men. There's no proof that Ari was better in bed than JFK. JFK did knock Jackie O up at least three times we know of. Jackie O certainly could have had an abortion or two in her life. I wonder about Hillary, too. Wonder if she's ever had an abortion? Chelsea? Certainly Billy Jeff Clinton has paid for a couple of abortions I'll bet you. I readily admit that in the free-sex heydays of the 1970s in this great land, I contributed to many abortions--they cost $250 at a TLC clinic in those days. The women thought highly of you if you went to the TLC clinics with them as they had their abortions. Ooooooooooooh, evil. I'm a murderer; an accomplice to murder at least. It's OK when these fetuses turn 18 to send them off perhaps to their deaths and certainly to mind-boggling traumatic experiences in the armed forces. That's okay. It's okay to kill them after they're ripe, not yet mature, but ripe physically. We assign these poor powerless birds the legendary title of "heroes" and we love our heroes and turn them into legends, which is all they are, too, legends, which are mostly lies. History is full of lies based on legends. You never read much about George 'I Cannot Tell a Lie' Washington being a bigot, a bastard, a liar--oh no--like we know now George's chopping down his father's cherry tree and then admitting he did it so bravely and honestly is a legend--no truth to it at all. In fact, George Washington was a fop of a phony aristocrat--the son of a Virginia farmer and not a planter, like Old Tom Jefferson. White aristocrats made legends in our history. George Washington was a bigot; a slaveholder; using blacks in the Revolutionary Army--'cause you know honkeys could force blacks to serve their military service for them--and did you know that over 100,000 (Henrietta Buckmaster (that's her name--no pun) says over 200,000 in her book Freedom Bound) freedmen blacks served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, signing up because great white fathers like George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Benny Franklin promised them their freedom and property and shit if they'd serve--after these wars, these old white geezers forgot all about these promises. In fact, the white royalty (the Power Elite) put a lot of these blacks back into slavery--trick bagged them! And the Power Elite are great trickbaggers. 'Hey, Rocky,' said Bullwinkle Moose to Rocket J. Squirrel, 'Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.' He reaches into a huge tophat and instead of a rabbit pulls out a roaring lion. 'I must'a got the wrong hat,' he confesses to Rocket J.

"Yep, these birds have to be magicians, but they're magicians like Bullwinkle Moose--with hats and sleeves full of tricks that they don't know they have--they just haphazardly pull 'em out of the hat--if it's a dove or a rabbit, fine, but if it's a lion, it's gonna eat the dove, the rabbit, and hopefully the magician, too.

"George Washington, in his favor, did warn us, same as old Ike Eisenhower did later, about giving the military too much power--the military is a major source of Power Elite players in this country. High-level military officers (Generals of the Army; Admirals of the Navy; Generals of the Air Force, Commandants of the Marines) are a big part of the Power Elite. George Washington got his key to the Power Elite's executive outhouse through the military. Jefferson got it through landholding and slave labor."
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Meet Henrietta Buckmaster--Unfortunately It's Her 1983 Obituary in the NYTimes

Henrietta Buckmaster, a popular novelist, historian and editor best known for her portrayal of the underground railroad and the abolition movement in the novel ''Let My People Go,'' died Tuesday after a short illness at a convalescent home in Chestnut Hill, Mass. She was 74 years old and lived in Boston.

At the time of her death, she was editor of the Home Forum and the fine arts and literary page of The Christian Science Monitor, where she had worked since 1973.

A prolific writer of children's stories as well as historical novels, Miss Buckmaster was known also for her wide humanitarian interests, which included participation in the civil-rights movement and other causes, such as those of American Indians and prisoners' rights.

Among Miss Buckmaster's other works were the novel ''And Walk in Love,'' published in 1956; ''All the Living'' (1962), and ''A Lion in the Stone'' (1968).

Miss Buckmaster was born Henrietta Henkle in Cleveland. She had once been married to Peter John Stephens, and wrote at one time as Henrietta Henkle Stephens.

Miss Buckmaster had no immediate survivors.

_________________________________________________________________

No mention of Freedom Bound in her obit, but she wrote it anyway. Albert Murray has a review of the book in his Briarpatch book of lectures on the blues idiom.

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It's nearing noon now and I have friend coming in from Atlantic City any minute now to spend a couple'a days in New York City with me. I have to prepare for a guest. I gotta clean the joint with unfettered ablution--a mop and a bucket full of Clorox water! I gotta put the dirty towels I've left draped all over my bath room and put the in the laundry bag. I've gotta get the clean bedding out. I've got housework to do. And since I don't own a woman, I've got to do this barbarian inferior-class labor myself. Oh how I am not a member of any Power Elite.

I'm listening to George Gershwin's 2nd Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. I'm back to American classical music--just listened to Leroy Anderson's Piano Concerto. This is fun music even though you can easily put it down with pro-European criticism. I've quit listening to European classical music--and I once loved Beethoven, especially his last string quartets, the ones he wrote when he was both deaf and blind--I admire amazing musicians--amazing writers--amazing painters--amazing poets...


And speaking of poets, L Hat's post yesterday (Nov. 19) was all about a Website on which you could listen to old Louis Zufkovsky reading his poetry. You gotta love Louis if you're a admirer of good old pure-dee New York City abstractionism--what do you call it--I'm not a literary critic--I don't know the language of criticism. One of my brother's first published pieces, it was published in what was then called The Atlantic Monthly, and it was my brother's satirical formula for becoming a successful critic of any kind. I'd d'rather listen to poets reading their work than read their work. Is that an offensive statement? I read poetry--currently reading Ted Joans and Ezra Pound--I still write poetry, and though I once posed as a poet (in college; and oh the babe's I got with my poet pose. Remember, Percy Dovetonsils?), I never considered myself a poet or even a grand understander of poetry. The first poet I found interesting enough to read with much gusto was Samuel Coleridge. I loved that man. Alexander Pope, too. And Cowper, the Englishman who came and lived on Long Island, New York, for a spell--and, yes, I know these are Brit poets and I'm a big Anglophobe--fuck it, I can't stand Brits--I find them pretentious fops--superficial--avoid of their own culture--living with stolen cultures--even the Beatles weren't originals--they stole all their musics from around the world--and what makes them so obnoxious to me is not their sincerity or musical talents (though I saw no talent in any of the Fab Fops) but the British-Church-Mode foundation of their shit. Even their imitations of black American music is so childish and naive to me. But, I have to break down and admit I did dig Coleridge--The Ancient Mariner is cool as hell--and Alexander Pope--he can be pretty witty--and Cowper--and what about Blake--crazy as a loon, and that makes him a renegade Brit to me, like D.H. Lawrence, who I admire, was a renegade Brit--who came to the USA and lived in New Mexico where I lived and loved--and D.H. loved New Mexico and Mexico same as me--and read Witter Bynner's (a poet) great book A Journey With Genius, about having D.H. Lawrence come down to Witter and his lover, Spud Johnson's Chiapa, Mexico, adobe home and spend a summer there writing (Lawrence wrote his wonderful The Plumed Serpent while there) (Spud Johnson was a poet/author and a big Ezra Pound friend, champion, and devotee--and Ezra Pound, thanks to Spud, wrote a column for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper called "Ez Sez" for a while in the 1920s and '30s. Witter Bynner was connected to Ez because Witter Bynner lived in China and translated many Chinese poems like Ez).
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/images/witter-portrait.jpghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/Spud_johnson.jpghttp://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/05/21/son_lover_narrowweb__200x301.jpg

Left to right: Witter Bynner; Spud Johnson; D.H. Lawrence standing outside Witter Bynner's house in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

D.H., by the way, believed it was OK, in fact very manly, for men to love each other; to wrestle a lot--to wrestle naked--to admire each other's body. D.H. was admired by women--he had offers of sex all the time with some of the great literary-hanger-on women of England--Dorothy York, an English poet who was also a Lady, was madly in love with D.H. She even moved to New Mexico to offer herself to him--I've read several of her letters to him where she's obviously wanting to bed down with him. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a sex maniac to be honest, had the hots for D.H. and wrote a book about him, Lorenz in Taos. So, you see, there are Brits I at least can tolerate. Lawrence's Women in Love; Rainbow; Etruscan Places; The Plumed Serpent--I think these are superbooks. I even like D.H.'s poems. [D.H. called the male organ a John Thomas.]

Morton Gould's Interplay (American Concertette for Piano and Orchestra) is taking me off into the rest of this day. Look at all the music you've never heard of before! You don't know what you're missing.

Now missing in action, I remain,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

New Blues Dialog

A Resting Wolf in a Man's Large Teeshirt
My cup of hot street coffee is sitting on the floor by my chair in which I sit typing on this post. Not a whipping post today.

The noise is ferocious outside my window. Every known kind of Caterpillar destruction machine is just over 20 feet or so from my back window. A huge shovel. And two little Cat jackhammer machines that are irritatingly brash with their cacophony.

Cacophony. A beautiful word.

Plus I was listening to Professor Cornell West, he insists on Professor or Reverend, and, yes, Cornell West is a reverend and a professor (at Princeton). I was listening to Professor West--and he used to be at Harvard and he quit Harvard in a rage over Harvard making Larry "the Snob" Summers its president. Larry hates people of all ilks. Cornell didn't say that outright but he intimated it in his spiel.

Cornell West, in spite of his "confrontational theology" (his theology is Christianity) or whatever he calls it, is pretty hip in terms of all I wrote in yesterday's The Daily Growler in criticism of Obama (the date was actually the 18th and not the 17th as the blog banner says). Like, he's happy with Eric Holder, though, too, he's concerned about Holder being a Clintonista (Robert Kuttner's classification, and Kuttner would make a great Sec'y of Treasury) West says Holder will have to prove his worth beyond any shadows of any doubts or he's in trouble with his own peoples. Of course, West had no good words for Larry Summers. He was puzzled by Obama's wanting the guy on his staff. Yet, like West emphasized, this is the first black president. You've got to believe Obama's quite hip to what these goons he has working for him really represent--maybe his key to the Power Elite executive men's room. West says Obama may be using the Clintons to his advantage. All the white folk cynics like myself just don't trust Slick Willie--come on, he's the guy who ruined his wife's bid for the presidency--shooting his mouth off down South--in the white safety of the Old South--and Cornell West agrees with me on Slick Willie, too. The Slick One once more may be a thorn in his wife's side as she tries to "vet" herself with Obama as Sec'y of State. That word "vetting" still puzzles me as to where it suddenly popped up from. I swear this was the first election I've ever heard that word used. "She's being vetted by...." Who does "vet" these people? The Dumbocratic Party? Obama's coalition--mostly Clintonistas (like Robert Ruben, like Eric Holder, like "Senator" Hillary Clinton)? I'm confused. Like whoever "vetted" Sarah Palin--I mean, come on, aren't they fools? Cornell West got me back out on the growling path...and I said I was avoiding that today.

My coffee is getting cold. Funny how we like certain things excessively hot and other things excessively cold but other things lukewarm--a word I've loved since I was a thinking child (I started thinking at 2).

I accidentally saw a woman on yesterday's Oprah Show (Oprah the Sow, WOW, is she getting fatty fat--look out, Okra, diabetes is next) who can remember every little detail of her life from when she was 8 months old--she can describe every day of her life since then, even minor details as to what clothes she was wearing on certain days--like you say to her, "OK, babe, November 13, 1989." And this woman would start telling you, "I got up that morning at 7 am. I had a bowl of Groat Clusters and then my dad asked me if I'd like to go to Grandpa Milliped's for Thanksgiving." "How do we know you are remembering exactly or you're not making it up as you go along?" "Here, check it out." With that this woman hands Oprah a huge thick notebook marked "1989." "Open it to November 13th." Oprah obeys. "Holy Christ," Oprah bellows on opening the thick book. "This is amazing. How the hell can you read this?" She holds the book up to the camera. It's a calendar-type notebook, you know, weekly calendars with big square places to write appointments and shit in. In each of these squares this woman had written everything that had happened to her on that day in a script that was so minuscule that it was almost impossible for the naked eye to read. I immediately thought of my old pal L Hat and how he can write minuscule. I once knew a young Texas "preacher boy" who also could write minuscule and his Holy Christian Babble was just chocked full of these tiny unreadable-to-most-eyes notations and marginalia. [I myself write pathetically raggedy and sprawling fast--some of my notes being bigger than signboards I'm so rushed to write them down--I need huge margins for my notes.] So Oprah took a magnifying glass to this chick's chicken scratch and on November 13th she read along the notes as this woman spouted out what was written there word for word. "This is amazing, folks, simply amazing." One of Okra's guests asked, "What's it like in your head?" "Sometimes it ain't easy," the woman said (she was a big overweight obviously psychologically bothered woman--an Obsessive Compulsive woman). "Sometimes," she continued, "I'm still a few minutes behind where I am at the moment with my memory--you know, I haven't caught up with myself yet. That's hard sometimes." Hell, I figure the babe is a flim-flammer, but she caught my fancy for the moment.

That's what I love about the fantasy world of commercial teevee--where every word's a commercial--even Okra is constantly harpo-ing on something up for sale--like a book she's read or a movie she's seen that had a "profound" effect on her or perhaps had an effect on her gal-pal Gayle (also beefing up into a stock-like (meaning cow-like) woman)--or the constant stream of Hollywood celebrities she has on who are there to advertise their latest Grade B effort at making a movie. "What's it like to work for John Poo-Poo, the great Chinese director?" Oprah asks some empty-headed bimbo who's on her show peddling her latest movie. "Oh, Oprah, he's so wonderful a man. He's changed my life...blah, blah, blah, babble, babble."

Note: White folks (who name their kids Zack, Jennifer, Charles, Mary, Dick, Jane, and Dweezel, etc.) have always been amused by what black parents name their children; not really understanding that black parents name their kids as far away from white names as they can get. Even if they use a common white name, they pronounce it differently on purpose. That's why a common white name like Darrell when black-a-fied becomes Dair-rell--or perhaps they give their kids what they instinctively know are true African names and there are African names on slave registries--though very few. What's in a name anyway? Nothing much. My name, Wolf, is common as hell. A lot of white folks are named after animals. God, Wolf Blitzer, for instance. How many guys named The Growling do you know? OK, my mother and father were weirdos who named their kids after the phases of the moon and its light's effect on little wolf-boy babies. "Put those fangs back in your mouth and eat your spinach." Spinach has always been considered by whites as a power food. Look at Popeye and what he did for the canned spinach industry. White mothers and fathers all across the USA had to stand over their kids threatening them with a fate short of burning them at the stake if they didn't eat their spinach--not just a couple of bites, but all of it. I hated spinach as a kid. But not as an adult. I love spinach now.

My coffee hath grown cold. Cold coffee is verboten with me. I remember how cool the word verboten became in the 1950s. I never hear it anymore. Like taboo was a big word in the 1940s.
Words. I love words. Words direct us. Holy books are called "The Word" in most religions. Words are stored in books--or they used to be. Now they're stored on these blogs or on Websites.

Suddenly the construction noise has moved up toward the streetfront and all is just as suddenly quite back here in the alleyway. It is baldass cold in New York City today--around freezing all day--getting down into the Thor-like 20s tonight. And tomorrow is Thor's Day. Hey, let's celebrate!

My friends are on my ass to start another blog. A specialized blog. Dealing with music. Dealing with the art of writing. You know, a high-brow blog! "I don't have time," I react. "That's all you do have," they reply. It is tempting. I have so many knowledgeable friends in the music-thinking and music-performing business--thedailygrowlerhousepianist actually makes his living as a musician (hey, he's a big church organist now, too--how close to my Ivesian heart is that?--it is at church organs that many a great musician has evolved). I also know a little drummer boy who knows more about jazz than I'll ever know and he's severely younger than I am. I don't know...I don't know. But, I'm not going to worry about it.

My coffee is ice cold now.

I'm reading Look Homeward Angel as my bathroom reading material. Oh what a glorious writer Thomas Wolfe was (the big oaf writer from North Carolina and not the Old-South fop from Richmond who wears a white suit all the time to identify himself with his public. Thomas Wolfe the big oaf from North Carolina never wore a white suit in his life, I'll bet).

Here, read this--what a colossal writer this dude is:

"A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see being in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

"The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time." [The first three paragraphs of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel--about a stonecutter whose life's ambition is to carve a perfect stone angel head, an ambition that causes old Oliver Gant a hell of a lot of transition and transcendence--what a great piece of American writing--I mean that's exactly what we non-Native Americans brought to this continent of Red Americans from our ancient pasts--pasts that come from all ends of the world--and Big Thomas's point is, he's amazed by how these various peoples and their cultures picked this particular point on the world's map to come to looking for a future--like sailing into Baltimore harbor from England...or from Holland...or forced here from Africa--and Wolfe has problems with "Rebels" and the Old South's racism and its anger at being a loser to N-worder lovers--Wolfe is a universalist and the Old South is reserved, limited to serving old ways and violently opposing new ways! And new ways are hard to take when your ancestry has put you down smack-dab in the heart of the Hills of Catawba--somewhere in those mountains of western North Carolina (Wolfe was born and raised in the awesomely located and interestingly natural and unusually artsy-fartsy town of Asheville)(I have a dear old pal whose roots go back to Asheville and I'll bet you he's a Thomas Wolfe fan, too) and eastern South Carolina--the Catawba--which ironically enough is a Native American word, as so many of our location names in this big country are.

I grew up out on the lone prairie with tons of languages floating around my head--Native American (like Waxahachie) (Comanches and Apaches in my part of the world); Espanol a la los indios del Mexico; the Spanish-English mixture called Tex-Mex ("Hey, amigo, where's el patron, en la cuidad?"); the old original Texas English-Mexican Spanish mixed language they called Texian; then there was an urban Spanglish; Cuban Spanish (Texas took in a lot of Cuban refugees in the late 1950s and early 60s, you know, Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro); German (a dude named Prince Karl founded a colony in Texas called New Braunsfel back in the early 1800s when Texas was still Mexican by birth); Italian (there were Italians who worked the coal mines around Strawn, Texas); Czech--there are tons of Czechs that settled in Central Texas around Itasca; Swiss: there's a town in Central Texas called Swiss Alp; etc. etc.

A part of my family that lived down in the Rio Grande Valley spoke English, Spanish, and German (Schumachers)--my mother's brother lived in New Braunsfel where he ran a movie theater--and during the week his theater had German film nights, Mexican film nights for the Braceros that worked in the cottonfields and picked the mustang grapes of the area--as a result he spoke English, Spanish, and German--he had lived in Scotland and I remember him speaking Scottish with my elder Scottish grannies (Crags or Craigs) on my mother's side. I, however, could never seem to concentrate long enough on any language, including "proper" English, to learn it well--I mean, I was using schoolyard venacular when I was in grade school and that included the word "fuck." It was just a natural way to speak English given my heavy Texas-drawl--I mean, slow talking, slow walking ("slow pokes" they were called--pokes were dudes--like cowpokes) was what I grew up with--siestas were taken regularly; good meals were eaten with gusto. You could go into my old man's shop any afternoon he was open and catch him sound asleep in one of the chairs he had in his waiting room. My old man called it his "see-esta time." He had women customers who would sneak in when he was taking his siesta and kiss him awake--oh, my old man. What a dude. I didn't realize it then. His eccentricities embarrassed me: like the cheapass Roy Rogers cheaply made kids straw cowboy hat he wore everyday except Sunday (when he wore his "good" handblocked-regularly Miller custom man's chapeau (what he called all hats)). Bad enough the straw hat as it was originally, but my old man made it worse by spraying it with a cloudy covering of aluminum paint--and Roy Rogers rarin' up on Trigger's back could easily be seen emerging from that sprayed-on paint that opaquely covered that crappy-looking cheapass kids cowboy hat. Only now do I see this man as an influential character in my wolf-man construction--Jesus, I was lookin' in the mirror this morning and, shit, there the old man was, staring "I told you so" back at me. I even speak the language like he did. My mother's way of speaking! My mother was focused so she didn't say much and when she did it was in proper English, since my mother thought of herself as a poet really--her mother had been a "published" poet--so my mother when she did talk talked proper English. She wrote that way, too--even though now that I think about it my old man wrote well, too. Hell, my old man knew Latin--I keep forgetting that kids in his day and age were taught Latin in high school. In fact, my great-grandfather, an English teacher, probably knew Greek as well as Latin. My father was a great memorizer of poetry--James Whittier and James Whitcomb Riley were his favorite poets--and my dad spouted off their American-frothy lines at will all the time. "A boy stood on the burning deck...." I can hear my dad saying it now--with all the dramatics of an actor, too. Shit, my old man was an actor--and so am I. "To wit." Does "twit" come from "to wit"?

It's now after noon. The cats are growling again--loudly--bothersome--though character toughening--and I'm goin' out drinkin' with the boyz Fry-day night.

Hot damn. I'm listening to Macy Gray--and God-Awlmighty I loves me some Macy Gray. You want'a know the old wolf-man, listen to Macy Gray. especially her On How Life Is, an Epic CD (are CDs totally obsolete now?)--do I have to buy an iPod? I don't want to. I didn't want to buy a Walkman when they became the trendy thing to have back in the 80s but I eventually bought one--I had it up until the big Blackout of 2003. I listened to the Yankees game on the night I had to spend in the deepest Hell of that blackout--when the electricity goes out in New York City it's a scary occasion. Think about it--we had no water for two days--no water to drink, so you had to walk down 11 floors and find a guy from Jersey or Philly in the street selling bottled water--and you bought as many bottles as you could afford and you climbed back up eleven floors--in the dark--in the heat--it was in the 90s--during the Holy Hell night I had to suffer through it was 95--and I tried to sleep with my head hanging out one of my windows but it didn't help--it was too hot to sleep--too hot to do anything but lay around and sweat and curse Con-Edison and the British-constructed power grid that runs all the electricity from Ohio over east to the whole upper East Coast--and I listened to the Yankees game--from California so the game went on up to about 2 o'clock--then I listened to whatever was on the radio the rest of the night.

It amazes me how many songs these chicks like Macy Gray can come up with--and I love Macy 'cause she always gives credit to the blues as her background--though she likes disco, too. Macy's stuff is a compilation of all the cultural beats--you hear some soca, some ska, some reggae (especially a reggae drummer who's shootin' lightnin' bolts all over the head of his unwired snare), some disco, some funky-funky--one of her tunes starts off with a "Fuck-fuck-funky for you"--meaning that Macy is all funky for some funky love--stinky, isn't it?
"Like Cleopatra got the masses at my feet/Gotta living dwell down on easy street/and I'm the latest craze...." from Macy's "Do Something."

I'm hunkering down on into the day. Let's see what comes about.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Monday, November 17, 2008

All Along the Watch Tower: Obama: Real or Fake?

Obama, Wha's Wrong With You?
I was sittin' this morning just reading where here in my hometown, New York City, they're naming a park after Donald Trump. Wow. I also heard last night something interesting: the City of New York once owned the land on which Coney Island's Astroland now sits. Many years ago there was a rumor that the man who'd gotten rich off Kansas Fried Chicken (KFCs, too, Colonel) was buying Astroland and turning it into a Disneyland-like world. That must have fallen through; I heard no more about it over the years. Then, a few months ago it was announced that a playboy developer had bought Astroland from the city for an undisclosed amount of money and was going to demolish it. This swellheaded developer said in Astroland's place, he was going to build a max-tacky Vegas-like hooplah development clogged with hi-rise luxury hotels ("5-star" is their favorite PR adjective when they're blowharding about their intentions) and hi-rise luxury condos with 35-million-dollar penthouses and I suppose eventually casino gambling--I mean, come on, I'm quite sure that was the ultimate intent of this developer. So yesterday how surprised was I to hear one of those talking-head dopes on local teevee sprightly announcing that, "It looks like Astroland and the Cyclone are going to be saved afterall." What the hell?, I asked the air. What's this: the developer is backing out of the deal? What's this?, I am again asking the air. The developer is backing out and...WHAT'S THIS? The city is buying back what they already owned--and they're paying this developer (what'a ya bet he's in financial trouble?) 200 million bucks to buy it back from him.

Remember what C. Wright Mills said, we're under the bootheel of the privileged class, the Power Elite as Mills called it--Thorstein Veblen, a truly unique American thinker, Sociologist, Economist, a cheesehead from Wisconsin, of Norwegian immigrant parents, called this class "The Leisure Class." The Power Elite rules us viciously--ignoring anyone who can't pay the dues to get into their private clubs, their board rooms, their country clubs--anyone who doesn't have the right papers--like proving you have a position on the Fortune 500. Mills further states that the Power Elite is not about to allow a "redistribution of wealth." Don't even talk about taxes around them. That really pisses them off. They are a tightly knit family remember!--in fact, as Mills said in his introduction to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, "Prestige buttresses power, turning it into authority, and protecting it from social challenge."

Remember when the Obama campaign was talking about the "challenge" and then turned that into "change"--Obama won with such force because of the workingclass, blacks, Latinos, and young whites (first-time voters included) who fell for his rhetoric--his moving his slogan from "challenge" to "change." And, oh boy, are the people who put Prince Charming Obama into the presidency going to be disappointed. You know why? The Power Elite already own this poor sucker. How do I know? It's easy. Look at his transition team members.

First of all, his right-hand man is Rahm Emanuel, a true scumbag Chicago goombah-connected politician who was a dirty deeds promoter in the Clintonistas's "getting-your-dick-sucked-is-not-sex" administration. Then Obama says he's thinking of picking Larry "Snob" Summers as his Sec'y of Treasury--holy shit, what a scumbag choice; a man who was fired as president of Harvard, Obama's alma mater, he was such a backwards thinking asshole. [Sorry, Daily Howler Bob, I gotta tell it like it is--I can't pussyfoot around about these characters. I'm not a comedian, those who depend on these backwards-thinking clowns as fodder for their high-pep routines; like this Stephen Colbert, who I just plain don't find funny. I'm amused by Daily Howler Bob's dedicated allegiance to Hillary "Big Hips" Clinton. Plus, he's constantly defending Al "the Bore" Gore and John "VietNam Nutjob" Kerry. So I just had to enter this tidbit here since I read The Daily Howler (and so does thedailygrowlerhousepianist and franny&zoeourtwoheadedreporter--yes, there really is a two-headed woman on our staff) and I highly respect Bob's way of thinking and writing and his rather close-up criticism of the Washington Beltway press and the US's candy-ass Liberals (the only Liberals I see around today are the people who live in Liberal, Kansas, an ironic name for so neo-con-loving a state and citizens). I added this little bit of personal comment because I know bright-ass people like Bob or intellectuals who come across this blog by accident or direction feel I'm the lowest common denominator in the social criticism realm--such language! such grammar! such syntax! such vulgarities!; yet, my shit-detectors (a word I first saw used by Ernest Hemingway when he was a War Correspondent attached to General Omar Bradley (one of Papa's heroes)) keep sniffing out the foul odors that surround these people (whether the good, the bad, or the ugly) when you get close to them--or the fact that they are wearing tons of make up and have been groomed and dressed by professional character builders--they are all PHONIES, dammit. And I just sit here freaked out daily reading the news and finding all sorts of great Googled information and seeing these numbskull bastards who dictate to high hell how I should spend my earnings and my life's work--and I see them for what they really are: 2nd-story members of the Power Elite that rules this country. Their snide intentions are to cover their own asses first and foremost. We the People are to them simply sources of income and wealth and investment bucks and healthcare provisions, and Secret Service protection, and free-mail privileges. We the People are who they depend on for their "nesteggs" since most of Congress started off dirt-country-hick poor in a lot of cases, or urban Power-Elite wannabes as in the case of Emanuel or Robert Ruben. Notice, you don't see any member of Congress or the Executive branch going under in terms of losing their shirts. They certainly know their pensions are safe! They're covered no matter how far We the People fall. None of these birds are having any of their many mansions foreclosed on (including their Washington residences and their homes back in the states that elected them and their new homes in the new states they invaded to get elected to higher offices--like the Clintons moving to New York State--and, yes, they all have summer homes and their island retreats wherever they are--like John "Nutjob, now Loser" McCain having so many mansions he lost track of them; or Charlie "Big Daddy" Rangel having a "vacation" home in the Domincan Republic he knew nothing about! Wow, how cool is a Congressperson's life?).

Check out Bill Clinton's latest scheme for garnering enough wealth to pay on his dues in his membership in the Power Elite. Bill now is chief honcho of his very own "international disaster relief" business--a multimillion dollar enterprise. Remember when Good Ole Bill teamed up with his best pal, G.H.W. "Pappy" Bush (that old wimpy weasel--a contradiction in terms?--NO, he's a wimpy weasel--so's his creepy son, G.W., Jr.) to get their grubby hands on millions upon millions of bucks to aid the victims of the tsunami--how many years ago was that back in time now? (I've never seen any follow ups on how these victims are doing now--do we assume everything's hunky-dory over there now?). These birds don't have to account for how they spend these millions of bucks they collect in the name of charity! Rudy "Mussolini" Giuliani ripped off millions of dollars with his special 9/11 victims's families and dead cops and firemen's families aid fund. 9/11 victims and survivors complained that they never really saw a penny of that money; yet, Rude Rudy got totally away with his scam. Rudy was nothing but a poor fool Federal Justice Dept. prosecutor when he decided he was just the man to be the mayor of New York City. And as a Federal prosecutor Rudy wasn't that successful--oh, he took the glory for busting John Gotti, but we later found out that was bullshit. After he left the Justice Dept., Rudy worked for a law firm called White & Case. White & Case represented a lot of South American dictators and such, and that included a big-time coke dealer named Noriega--remember him? Remember when Pappy Bush sent the troops into Panama uninvited in order to capture his old cocaine-dealing Buddy? Opps, Pappy's wild-bombing the hell out of a Panama City neighborhood killed 400 innocent Panamanians--"Hey, them's the breaks," Pappy said as he put another notch on his Power Elite revolver--and you bet Pappy Bush knew Noriega--they had a photograph of Pappy sitting on a big couch with Noriega back before I suppose Noriega bilked Pappy on a cocaine deal. You gotta know Pappy Bush knows the cocaine business thoroughly. Shit, folks, this all goes back to the Reagan years and the Iran-Contra schemes that netted these bastards millions of dollars in side-pocket monies. Come on, folks, Pappy Bush was once head of the CIA! Bill Clinton while governor of Arkansas knew that the CIA was flying cocaine into an airbase near Mena, Arkansas, and flying weapons out of that same airbase--flying weapons down to the Contras in Nicaragua. And Pappy was there, too, right in the middle of that mess. So, you see, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Clinton, and Pappy Bush are all connected--what a worthless corral of fat-cats--parasites--and Pappy Bush really is a charter member of the Power Elite through his very crooked family, his own father a Nazi sympathizer--his family's Wall Street bank handled Hitler's US bank accounts--Prescott Bush, Pappy's pappy, was Federally investigated because of his family's bank dealings with the Nazis. Great men these guys.

Obama has pissed me off so this is why I'm ranting and raving today--which is Tuesday, no matter the date on the blog banner. I have to go off on Obama. I'm a fictional-memoir writer and armchair Sociologist, so ranking on these beings who rule me and who to me are the dictatorial representatives of the US Gesselshaft (a Sociology term--see below the post for definition) is instinctual with me. I observe social reactions, interactions, theories, utopias, restrictions, situations, conflicts, using measurements (Sociometrics) from statistically derived formulae to find the Happy Medium! Ah, the Happy Medium! That place of perfect peace for the honest social scientist. My observations are trained observations; I was taught what to look for in terms of facts and legend; in terms of fantasy and reality. If a man lives in a discarded refrigerator box, we assume he's a bum and we ignore him--he's got nothing of value we're dreaming about. However, if the same man lives in a sprawling mansion with huge iron gates and security teams and pitbulls to guard him, we consider him near to God's righthand and assume he's so god-damn intelligent and smart he's got the keys to the kingdom we so imagine exists, that fantastic kingdom (like a DisneyWorld kingdom) we all strive to obtain the keys to--why, "He's rich; therefore, he has to have all the answers to all our problems; therefore, he is a celebrity and worthy of worship, no matter how obscene that worship!"

Why am I picking on Obama? Because. First of all, this guy has the opportunity to become a great man of peace. His election win proves the American people want what they are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights (more important than the Constitution), "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"--"Peace, perfect peace." "The peace that passeth all understanding." And my dad, old Dad Wolf, used to say, "The only thing in life I truly desire is peace, quiet, and loving words." That all does make a difference. I was alive in the brief time of world peace right after WWII--and then again for the brief ten years right after the Korean War--and then our next war started--the VietNam invasion and attempted occupation--EXCEPT, Ho Chi Min's pajama-wearing Gooks kicked our asses out of 'Nam--during the Tet Offensive--and the US bailed out of Saigon just as the Gooks were nailing up the "Ho Chi Min City" signs. But we didn't learn. And Obama wasn't around for those 10 tiny years of peace after President Hairy Ass Truman's little Police Action in Korea ended. Then came the snoozy-like Eisenhower Years--peaceful for Whites because old Ike was tired of playing soldier and turned to venting his tensions out on the golf course, where Ike spent most of his 8 years in power, and, yes, Ike Eisenhower was a member of the Power Elite through his military rank, our first 4-star General of the Army who had learned his way of fightin' from General Pompous Ass MacArthur and was a classmate of that wonderful kind man of great army maneuvering knowledge, General George Patton, who hated peace so bad, when it came, he committed suicide. The first window of peace I lived through was a WHITE peace. There was no peace in the black community in those infant days of the Civil Rights Movement. Then came the Freedom Marching, the sitins, the racist rebukes of idiots like George Wallace and Lester "Ax Handle" Maddox. Then Eisenhower sent "advisers" (including Colon's Pal) to VietNam because the flimsy French were getting their military asses smeared all over Dien Bin Pheu by Uncle Ho and his Pajama-Clad People's Republic of VietNam armed forces. And the natural-born-lover French soldiers begged and pleaded with Eisenhower to help bail them out--SAVE OUR COLONY, the French railed, and Eisenhower capitulated and sent advisers over there and soon we were involved deeper than our government admitted and soon we were in a full-fledged war--another phony war, by the way, since "Big Balls" Johnson had to trump up the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident where "Big Balls" said a Cong swift boat had attacked one of our sitting-duck destroyers and that was an act of war and by God we had us a war. And the VietNam scandalous war dragged on until the 1970s--and suddenly in 1972 things began to flow peacefully again in this country--the Civil Rights Movement ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the chance for a New Frontier victory by Bobby "Change of Heart" Kennedy was ruined when he was assassinated (the assassination of JFK really shook old fun-loving, screwing-around Bobby up--he was a smarter dude than JFK, but that didn't save him from a FBI-directed assassin's bullet--by the so-called Sirhan Sirhan (still alive and well in a California hoosegow I assume), a Muslim nutjob--a really wacky dude who claimed he was hypnotized or something--the movie The Manchurian Candidate had been a movie about the Chinese's ability to hypnotize a pack of American prisoners of war--using what was then shockingly referred to as "psychological warfare"--the famous Chinese water torture--where the evil Chinese put a tin bucket over your head and then a leaky faucet above the bucket and then one drop of water at a time for long stretches of time until you curled up in nervous fear like a wadded up piece of discarded toilet paper. It's said to be awesomely irritating, sometimes driving the poor victim totally loony. Of course, this torture was trumpeted as the evilest shit ever devised by an enemy--the idea of torturing prisoners of war! we moralistic Americans screamed--why, that's against the Geneva Agreement.

And that brings me back to Obama. We have a chance for another pocket of peace. The 1970s in New York City were the best. We were a getting-together city then. Blacks were coming for the first time into the middle of the workplaces--the men as mail-room guys and apprentice flunkies (apprentices with offers of maybe never-coming advancements--but advancements that did promote some blacks to high places, like Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, black geniuses like that--and the women showed up in the secretarial and accounting pools. Also, there were tons of liberal whites taking over offices and there were three-hour, three-martini lunches, and the bosses were soused when they came to work, and half the staff was drunk after long lunches, drunk or high on coke or crack or heroin or crystal meth. I remember sitting in William Paley's famous Ground Floor bar and restaurant (in the old Black Rock building) and hearing for the first time about Ecstasy from a chick who was a superstar in the CBS recording division and who muled cocaine in from tiny airports down south and who told me she had just returned bringing some rock into NYC from some pissant South Carolina town and "just last night," she said, she'd been introduced to Ecstasy. She said she'd screwed four guys in a row last night while high on this stuff. Prostitutes, she said, used it in order to turn more tricks. What a time in New York City. And there were clubs all over town featuring jazz, blues, reggae, ska, hip-hop, rap, heavy metal rock, folk, alternate rock--all over town, most of them with no cover charges, or if they had a cover charge they had a free area around the bar where you could sit or stand and dig the music. And the clubs were packed every afternoon after work. And a single man or a married man or a single woman or a married woman could just walk in a club check out the scene, pick out the best-looking woman or man you were attracted to and then begin the "effort" as we called it--and me and my male friends were out every night after work and then on Saturday nights for sure, leaving Sunday as the true day of rest. And this good livin' lasted in New York City until that sad day in 1982 when we all woke up to the news that a strange disease named AIDS had hit town via a Canadian gay guy. AIDS put an end to the celebration times we were having. The AIDS was scary. Oh yes, at first our visionary leaders told us the disease was limited to wild-ass-voodoo-wild-and-crazy Haitians and all Gay men. At first, we were told women couldn't get AIDS. Then we were told that a little drop of Clorox in your dish water would kill the AIDS virus. And we were told we should put a safety sheet of butcher paper around a toilet seat 'fore we sat on it. That sort of bullshit medical information.

So let's see, now back to my bitch with Obama. First off, Eric Holder as Attorney General. Hey, our first black attorney general! Wahooo! But not the first time Eric Holder's been in the Attorney General's office--nope. He was Assistant Attorney General in Slick Willie's and First Lady Hillary "Ham Hips" Clinton's first administration. Holy shit, another Clintonista!

Here's another Obama pick, perhaps, that will be a chicken bone stuck in the throat of any progress and change Obama "promised" us if we elected him and that's the rumor that he's going to keep Good Ole Warmonger and Neo-Con Military Leader Robert Gates as head of the Dept. of Defense. Good pick, Barack. We'll be at war for the next hundred years anyway--so why was John "Nutjob--now Loser" McCain ridiculed by the Dumbocrats when he said we should stay in Iraq another 100 years? Big idiot move--1 for the Neo-Cons and continued war; 0 for Obama and change.

Here's another pick--again, it is rumored: Hillary "Opponent and Racist Baiter" Clinton as his Secretary of State! Bad move, Barack. Bad, bad move. Who the hell's advising you? Oh, that's right, the weak-kneed Neo-Con asskissing wing of the Dumbocratic Party--remember Ralph Nader telling us there is no difference between the Dumbos and the Repugnicans? Tell me, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State? OK, ok, she's better than Colon's Pal getting the job, but surely there's a more diplomatic being than Hillary Clinton out there who really could perhaps bring about a diplomatic CHANGE to the world situation at least in terms of the US government making amends towards peace around the world. Bill Richardson's name was mentioned, too. BADDDD! This New Mexican Dumbocrat has been wishy-washy as hell, first yahooing up the War on Terrerism and the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, then claiming he suddenly is against all that. However, old crusty Senor Beeel is a big promoter of nuclear energy. Why? you ask. New Mexico has huge uranium deposits all over its midsection, that's why.

Dig this: one of Obama's war and security intelligence advisers is--you won't believe this: John Brennan. Does the name ring any kind of bell with youse? John Brennan in any other society would be a war criminal. He was the fool who under George Tenant, when that wimp was head of G.W. Bush's CIA, who gave hooplah apologies for this rendition kidnapping shit pulled off by the CIA--where they grab a profiled Muslim-looking dude off a street, put a hood over his head, then put him on a plane blindfolded, then fly him to some secret prison in Syria, or Egypt (Egyptians love torture), or Afghanistan maybe, where this poor bastard is then waterboarded, threatened with death, confined in a tiny windowless cell for months at a time, deprived of sleep, blah, blah, blah--and for what? There is no evidence that any information ever gained from these rendition kidnappings has helped uncover an Al Queda cell anywhere in the world, much less in the USA--much less even in Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear today that Al Queda is now big time in Somalia--remember when Bill "I Love War and Getting My Speckled Dick Sucked by Buttaface Women" Clinton went into Somalia with the Marines! Somalia that is now the home of the New World pirates who come out of Somalia in Swift Boats, this week actually taking over a huge oil tanker and all its precious fucking oil--Holy shit, what G.W. Bush has started and it seems now no man can put it asunder! Brennan has said he fully backs skipping FISA and eavesdropping on every son of bitch American no matter his or her profile! He also is a big champion of "preventive detention," the obscene Neo-Con act that arrests your ass and sends you to Guantanamo (how much you bet Obama doesn't get to shut it down?) without charges or hope of a trial--not accused of anything, just arrested and sent off to Cuba! How ironic that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the reason we blockade Cuba today is because of Fidel Castro's human rights abuses--and the fact he said he was a Communist. OOOOOOh, scary, scary. Brennan is also big on deporting illegal Messkin immigrants! Obama has already said he's for continuing to build that stupid insecure wall between the US and Mexico--our loving neighbor to the south who Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton blessed with NAFTA.

But the most surprising yet member of Obama's transition team is this woman Jamie Messick (sic). That name I'm sure doesn't ring a bell with youse! This is the ding-a-ling bitch who wrote the speech Colon's Pal gave in front of the UN--how embarrassing was that speech?--where Good Ole Boy Colon's Pal lied like a dog 28 times in that speech--the speech that got us dragged drugged with fear into that stupid invasion and occupation of Iraq--the cause of all our current ills if anyone had the capacity to go back and recall what the hell happened back there in 2003 while millions upon millions of people were marching in the streets of the world yelling, "NO WAR IN IRAQ...!" And Bush and his Neo-Con goons ignored the people like good Power Elitists do and little Jamie wrote her little fictional heart out so that Colon's Pal could make a war criminal of himself before the UN and the world--and that's what Colon's Pal is, a war criminal--but, hey, old General Colon's Pal is high up in the military--therefore, he's a member of the Power Elite--and the Power Elite will continue to rule us and make laws against us and rules against us and control the police, the army, the wealth! No change coming in that department.

Like Harry Reid asskissing Uncle Joe LIEberman today--Holy Shit, how much dumber will the DumbDumbocrats be?--and Obama seems to be going right along with them--just like a good mule working the fields for Mister Charley!

I hate trashing on Obama. He's the best looking presidential possibility I've seen in a huge shitload of presidents I've lived under. But, I remember how hip we were when we young people got JFK elected and how disappointed we were when the New Frontier proved to be a cardboard sky with a paper moon floating over it--in other words, the New Frontier turned out to be make believe. Just like the Obama presidency may turn out to be Make Believe. Yet, four million hopeful Americans want to show up at this man's inauguration. That's amazing to me!

And oh how we Americans love MAKE BELIEVE!

thepissedoffgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Footnote: Gesellschaft (often translated as society or civil society or 'association') describes associations in which, for the individual, the larger association never takes on more importance than individual self interest, and lack the same level of shared mores. Gesellschaft is maintained through individuals acting in their own self interest. A modern business is a good example of Gesellschaft, the workers, managers, and owners may have very little in terms of shared orientations or beliefs, they may not care deeply for the product they are making, but it is in all their self interest to come to work to make money, and thus the business continues.
[from Wikipedia. Reference: Frederick Tonnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge Press, 2001.]
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Sarah Palin News
Ohhh, no, Ted Stevens got his old gnarly crooked ass whipped and lost his Senate seat in hicksville Alaska. Now poor little Sweet Sarah can't appoint herself Senator to take Ted's place when he's bundled off to prison.

However, folks, don't worry about Sarah. We hear she's being offered a 7-12 million dollar book deal--which she'll take--she ain't a dummy when it comes to posing and entertaining fools. The irony here? I don't think Bill or Hillary got that much for their action-packed and truthfully revealing BULLSHIT books.
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