That's what a woman yelled at me once--I don't remember what I'd done to deserve such a salutation, but it stuck with me over the years. I can picture precisely when it happened: After what I thought was a beautiful night in bed with this slick chick, I had just come out of her bathroom after a long cool-hot shower and I wasn't paying any attention to much of anything, expecting to smell the coffee brewin' in her kitchen, humming a little diddy, probably a hit Billy Preston had at the time, "Nothing from nothing leaves nothing"--that hit--I can play it complete in my head but, anyway--I was humming something when I hit the kitchen door and looked up just in time to duck a sauce pan thrown at me and I ducked just in the nick of time or that heavy pot would have beaned me something fierce. And then I saw her, the pot thrower--and her look drooped my eyes to the sad-guilty state, though what I was guilty of I had no idea at the time and even now I do not know what I'd done to feel guilty about--and that's when she looked me dead in the eye and said, "You, Jive Ass Turkey!"--and I initial cap those words 'cause she initial capped them in her tone of voice--and I'll never forget that meanness in her eyes--and I, like the dude caught in the altercation with the Winnipeg whore in the old bawdy song and backroom ballad (my kind of folk music), grabbed my shoes, my shirt, and my britches and I hightailed it out her door. Whew, let me pause and catch my breath; I hadn't remembered that woman in years. I'd met her sharing a ride home one night with a buddy of mine in the insurance business who'd just jive assed a rich dude into swinging a huge life insurance policy his way--on the rich dude's wife--and after treating a carload of us to dinner and innumerable rounds of our favorite "cocktails"--I love using that word--cocktails. I've always supposed that name came about because of the way they used to make the original drinks they call cocktails, like the cocktail glass had a variety of things hanging off the side of it that resembled a rooster's tail--which parallels an experience that happened to me back in my army days--here we go again. One thing you get in the army is a chance to meet people from every nook-and-cranny-corner of the US of A plus a chance to travel to places you'd never even imagined visiting before--like me--being in the army and developing a friendship with a dude from East Lansing, Michigan. Come our first furlough, this dude invited me home with him--and we ended up our first night in Michigan going into Detroit from East Lansing--and this was when Detroit was at the height of its glory--the automobile industry at its highest point ever--the local economy booming--plus, the music coming out of good-times Detroit was THE NEW MUSIC--the new jazz, the new rock 'n roll, the new hillbilly even. Think about how grand Detroit once was--and it was at its grandest when I first saw it--and I ended up my first night there drunk as a soldier boy could get at a club on the river's edge that had a huge red-neon rooster on its roof whose big cocktail flashed in the night sky as the rooster cocked back his head and crowed! All that from remembering the word "cocktail" as being a word I like to use. "How 'bout I buy you a cocktail, baby?" What would that get me if I used that on a today's babe?--though I think cocktail's still used a lot in bars and social events--especially by noveaus of any type--and I write that very snottily!
So, yeah, the girl that called me a Jive Ass Turkey was in that insurance salesman's privileged-friend pack that night, too, and afterwards we all piled six-or-seven deep into his Pontiac...
[An Aside (skip it if ye wisheth): GM quit making Oldsmobiles a few years ago; now they're going to stop making Pontiacs--no more American brands will be left soon. Chrysler's trying desperately to dump its Jeep division after the Nazi car company Daimler threw Chrysler to the wolves after they joint-ventured with it and lost big time--though Daimler came out it clean as a hound's tooth leaving We the People to now bail out Chrysler, for the second time in our history, too--remember the Lee Iacoca days?--we bailed Chrysler out then to the tune of millions (it would be in the billions in today's way of big-bucks thinking). The Jeep was once called "the vehicle that won World War II for the USA"--making it ironic that this American-invented vehicle that won WWII for the USA ended up being bankrupted by the surviving Nazi vehiclemaker Daimler (formerly Daimler-Benz, from which came Mercedes Benz, now just plain old Mercedes)(Daimler-Benz made all of Hitler's limos, even building him a huge Mercedes whose back wheels were tank wheels)--other surviving and successful Nazi car companies: how about The Bavarian Motor Works that's still going strong, especially selling overpriced trick-bagged cars to filthy rich Americans--or how 'bout the People's Car?--it's still going strong--I was just watching one of their stupid, still-rather-Nazi-like teevee commercials last night--the little bug of a car said to have actually been designed by Hitler himself--and Hitler had been an artist at one time don't forget--he was also a bestselling author in Germany--so there--Hitler knew how to design a more lasting automobile than anything USA designers could come up with!
I once had a good friend, a drummer of mine back when we worked the motel circuit between Midland, Texas, and Barstow, California--can you imagine playing jazz in a highway club in Yuma, Arizona. And this good drummer friend was a good drummer, a trained drummer, but he'd been in the Marines in WWII, and he'd been in combat on Guadalcanal and finally on Iwo Jima. WWII vets didn't like remembering and talking about their war experiences--only in nightmares was the recall of that horrible war vivid to them again--so they seldom talked about that side of their lives. My drummer friend was no exception to this statement unless you really got close to him and got him going strong on a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and then in a sort of a Scotch coma, he'd let slip a war story or two, like the time he drunkenly slobbered out the fact he'd been in the same Marine division with Ira Hays the Pima Native American Medal of Honor winner who ended his life a stone alcoholic, and one morning after he'd left the reservation bar and stumbled off towards his home. They found Ira the next morning drowned, face down in a puddle of water by the side of the road. My friend that night told me about his role in the taking of Surabachi Hill, the highest point on Iwo Jima Island, that battle one of the bloodiest battles of the South Pacific campaign between the Gyrenes and the Japs (or Nips, if you chose, speaking World War II "derogatories"). Check out Hollywood's version of the Battle of Iwo Jima; it's called The Sands of Iwo Jima.
So my old Marine drummer pal would not own anything Sony, anything Nissan, anything Datsun, anything Mitsubishi, anything Japanese--he said he just couldn't in good conscience use their products. Once while watching a Mitsubishi car commercial on teevee, after a wild flailing of his arms--if he'd a had a gun, like Elvis, I'm sure at that moment he would have shot the teevee--he looked over at me and said, "You know Mitsubishi made bombers and pursuit fighters that gave us hell on Guadalcanal and even on the troop ships that carried us to Iwo...now look, they're selling us automobiles. And the reason they are selling us automobiles is due to that sorry son of a bitch Douglas McArthur--we troopers hated that bastard, you know? And when he took over Japan he took it over as a god-damn emperor--he ran Japan and he decided to set Japan up as a new USA--with him as president of the new Republic of Japan he envisioned in his egotistical dreams--that's the son of a bitch who...." He'd get so livid he'd have to stop and go take a nap--he suffered from shell-shock and was on thorazene--he went up to a U.S. Army psychiatric unit in Colorado twice a year to be reevaluated and he'd always came back from that with a new prescription for some new mind-leveling early-day psychotropic drug.
The Jeep began its life as a contest offered by the US Government to any car company that could come up with a new war vehicle--a vehicle that could surmount the roughest of terrains, a vehicle that could literally drive over anything. The best design came from the Bantam Car Company--they made Little Bantams--little cars--and I do mean little--minicars, I guess you'd call 'em today. The next best design was submitted by the Willys-Overland Car Company--with its powerful flathead engine and large production facility. Also Ford submitted a good design, too, but the government eventually chose the Bantam design, which introduced the world to the 4-wheel drive. But since Bantam didn't have the production facilities Willys-Overland had, Willys got the contract--to build essentially Bantam vehicles--and thus the Willys (pronounced "Will-us" and not "Willies" as the oldtimers used to pronounce it. I pronounced it "Will-ess" as a kid) Jeep came to be--the name "Jeep" coming from the government model designation as a "GP" (General Purpose) vehicle, thus a "Jeep." Popeye had a marvelous dog named "The Geep," though Popeye's dog had nothing to do with the vehicle's name--but never is reality as colorful as the myth developed out of it.
Willys was a very successful car company because of the Jeep--and after the war they came up with bestsellers like the Jeep Wagon, the Jeep Truck, and the Jeepster. Willys was so successful the original company accepted an offer from the Kaiser-Frazier outfit to buy them out. Henry Kaiser was a California Power Elite rich asshole whose left-behind empire is still in rule in California to this day--Kaiser Healthcare HMO, for instance, was one of Henry's accomplishments. Henry was a man of great leisure and a boldass conspicuous consumer who had money to waste on experimenting with his own car company. He turned out Kaiser-Frazier automobiles--the Kaiser Manhattan was the best seller of the bunch. Fraziers flopped badly and were soon dropped. Later after he bought Jeep, he put out his minicar, the Henry K--it was a big flop, too. Kaiser was losing so much money with his car company, he sold the works to American Motors, which had at one time been two separate companies: Packard Motors and Nash Motors. American Motors soon became AMC--their founding father was George Romney--a big lugnut from Michigan--Michiganders know about "lugnuts." George was the father of the now infamous Mitt Romney, the raving lunatic Mormon--a privileged little asshole rich-daddy son who inherited his wealth and privilege and never had to work a day in his pampered life. AMC gave us the old Nash Ambassador retooled as an AMC Ambassador, then they screwed up and gave us the Gremlin. Soon AMC was going belly up--after all it was being run by a Romney! Next stop "The Ground" with a Romney at the controls, and soon they sold out to Chrysler--and that's how Chrysler got hold of the Jeep. Thank you, and good evening.]
[And now, back to our story. When we last left our hero, he was telling how he met the lady who called him a Jive Ass Turkey] So, yeah, the girl that called me a Jive Ass Turkey was in my insurance-selling friend's privileged pack that night, too, and afterwards we all piled six-or-seven deep into his Pontiac...and I pushed my way into the backseat and next thing I know I'm touching a hot thigh with my right thigh and I'm smelling a scintillating perfume coming into my right nostril and I am sensing the presence of the opposite sex being pressed up tight against me opposite me to the right of me--and when I turned and looked, she was looking straight at me, blowing cigarette smoke up at the ceiling of the car, and she said, "I was wondering when you were going to notice me." And my insurance-sellin' friend behind the wheel turned around and said, "Yeah, Wolfie, she's been buggin' me all night to meet you. I think you're gonna get lucky tonight, my man." And the packed car burst into salacious guffaws, a honking of guffaws. And I did end up at this chick's condo apartment in Queens that night--and once there, she played B.B. King while we made "whoopee" (what she called it) on her livingroom floor--and later over a great dinner her sister catered to her before I'd gotten out of the shower after the whoopee session she told me her father owned three "short-stay" hotels in Jamaica Queens and that she was his favorite daughter--he'd given her her Mercedes just that X-mas--and so he sent dinner over to her every evening--and, man, I chowed down on that meal be-bop style, okra fritters, and grilled Jersey centercut pork chops, with a big bowl of fat-back-laced collards, complete with a bottle of Mr. Frank's Hot Sauce--oh lordy-lordy, I thought I'd died and gone to the best level of the better part of Hell--and I had hooked up with the Devil's daughter to boot. I went to bed with her that night happy as a baby boy with a new choo-choo toy, though the next morning the jive-turkey incident put an end to that. Damn, just think, I could've been drivin' around Queens in a Mercedes, smokin' a 12-inch Macanudo, with my father-in-law's hot daughters waitin' on me hand and foot, me, the Big Daddy to the Best-Loved Daughter--me--to inherit Big Daddy's empire when he passed on and passed it on to his favorite daughter! I hit the jackpot...but no. In the end, yes, I must have truly fucked up bad after we went to bed to have been hustled out of the empire by the favorite daughter sailing a sauce pot at my noggin' and then calling me a Jive Ass Turkey to boot!
What am I driving at. On the release yesterday by our government that Social Security and Medicare were going bankrupt stirred up a hornet's nest in my solar plexus. "Now's the time!" I hollered. Bird was right, Now's the Time--we can't shillyshally any longer--I can't hide from this downhill reality by writing bad poems all day--I can't keep trying to be sane on this site-- but Fuck IT--I'm sane no longer. It's me against the fucking world now. Let me put it more succinctly: We've been Jive Assed by a Jive-Ass Turkey. Who am I growling about?--that fucking President Obama. What the fuck is this son of a bitch doing to us? And I hate to sound like a Rush Limpballs--and I'm not a Rush Limpballs--I'm not a Missouri hillbilly hick former deejay--on the radio--in Conservative Dallas, Texas--no, I'm from Dallas, Texas, but I transcended that aspect of Dallas, Texas--I accepted the world as my address--and I transcended that Texas-idiom for New York City, the city that used to be a haven for my type--the freelancer type--and that's where I excelled in life, as a freelancer, a knight in armour with lance ready to fight for any damn army--a soldier of fortune--freelance editor, freelance musician, freelance critic, freelance arbitrator, freelance raconteur, freelance soothsayer, and freelance Sociologist--and now freelance blogger--unless you consider Google my chief editor and employer--Jeez, I never thought of Google in the publishing sense, but, hey, David Simon, that's what Google is, a fucking publishing empire in the New Internet World Order. Did you know Google is going around to great libraries and offering to digitalize all their books? But then when these libraries accept the offer, they suddenly realize digitalizing their books didn't really help them that much--so what, in other words? Then they next realized that now that Google owned all the digitalized books, they actually suddenly had control of all the content in those books--in other words, Google can charge you for downloading one of those books but the library it came from doesn't get a cent--they gave the rights to Google when they agreed to let them digitalize their books. But libraries have always been run stupidly by Library Service men and women who aren't very bright when it comes to managing the buck-stops-here problems (same as indy bookstore efforts) that left unsolved are a detriment of all our great libraries. I remember seeing a cartoon where Uncle Sam is holding up the Library of Congress and dumping all of that library's books into a bin entitled "The Internet." It's true. Yes, it's true. Always when Lord Chaos hits town, the book burnings start--the library wreckings start--Chaos garbles information, leaves it changing constantly and inevitably like fractals.
In my weakest moments--those moments when I forget what Admiral Stockdale taught me about faith in myself (that god my brother saw in that mirror he looked into when he was a poet) when I begin to worry, fret, and get distraught...unlike Hunter Thompson, dammit, I'm not going to put a bullet in my head because the world is going to Hades in a handbasket. I must just prattle off what I'm observing--I am an observer--a social critic--ooooh, I like that, except then I remember what Hemingway wrote about critics--how they smelled to him the same as the armpits of a sweaty overworked whore. As a new writer, Hemingway said, if you're not successful after five years of effort, then you either put a bullet in your brain or you become a critic! Hunter Thompson felt nobody was interested in his writing anymore and he was too proud to become a critic...though he was critical--and I am critical--so I recall that word social critic--how about social fiction writer. When called a liar, Hemingway said, no, I'm not a liar, I'm a fiction writer. That's what I am, a fiction writer, though there is so much truth in our best fictions.
Obama is a trick-bagger deluxe. He's a fucking Jive Ass Turkey, more White than Black--sorry, Black folks, but I warned y'all about Obama being half-White--trained by his White mother to not be a Black man or a White man but to be a World man--and Obama is following his White mother's principles--they are political principles--his mother was a community organizer--worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia--how intriguing that must have been politically--her boss in Indonesia Timothy Geithner's father!
Obama won the highest advertising award you can get last year for his political campaign--yep, he beat out all the big corporations--he even beat out the largest advertiser in the world, the US Government--he's the first Individual to ever win the award usually given out to advertising agencies. Obama hoodwinked us silly people into believing he represented the change we so passionately and desperately hollered for, elected him president for--a change away from the anti-citizen workings of the Neo-Cons and even the Dumbocratic Party's right leaning majority--and yet, since he's been president he has taken us even deeper in debt than G.W.; he's even more deeply involved us in those two illegal and filthy invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq--and even now he's doing an about face about leaving or staying in Iraq--due to a sudden "surge" in the violence in that country--and also due to the false-hope these awful asshole generals, G.W. Bush's generals, are giving this young pup--they are pulling the expensive Pentagon wool over his eyes--and in an attempt to show them he's commander in chief with the same executive privileges G.W. inflicted upon us, Obama hasn't rescinded any of G.W.'s executive order privileges--those he used to approve of spying on American citizens; those he used to just up and say someone was an enemy combatant--to just arbitrarily accuse someone of being a terrorist--then take them on a secret flight to a secret foreign soil where they are tortured to near death (and now evidence is arising showing several of those poor bastards who underwent the extremist forms of our President-blessed torture died as a result of it--one man suffocating while being waterboarded), then thrown into the deepest, darkest, back part of Guantanamo (Obama hasn't closed it yet) or Bagrum Air Base where they are tortured again to near death; one of those prisoners recently in Iraq hung himself leaving a note behind saying he had been forced to confess to something he knew nothing about--he'd rather die than continue being tortured and put in isolation, put into cells with no light--do you know what it's like to be imprisoned in a small dungeon room with no windows, with no electric light, with no bed, with no bedding, with nothing but darkness?--and some of these poor buggers endured that for sometimes up to 45 days on end. Can you imagine! In a dark cell it's like you are blind--you only have your touch, your hearing and your smell to guide you about the strange room. Then say you have to piss or shit--and there's no toilet--so you feel your way into a corner not really knowing which corner it is, and you take a shit, or you take a piss, and then you notice the odor. The smell of the shit and piss doesn't leave the room--the room's iron cell door is shut tight--the only light you ever see is when they open the small slot through which they pass you your food--after that brief ray of light, you then eat whatever the food they've given you in darkness, not knowing what it is your eating, picking some of it up in your fingers and bringing it to your nose and it's so foul smelling you start puking--and then you feel something crawling out of the food onto your hand--but you are starving--think of this. There are literally thousands of poor suckers sitting in torture jails all over the world as I rail on about the hypocrisy rule we are being forced to live under--torture jails in Germany, in France, in Egypt (where, isn't it interesting, Obama's going to make his appeal address to the Islam world from Egypt, the country where torture is a national sport; where terror is bred and nursed; where Mubarek is an asshole who's scared to death of his own people. So why is Obama going to Egypt to address Islam? It's getting more jive ass day by day. And just think of the poor souls G.W. and Unka Dick sent to Egypt to get whacked, waterboarded, kicked, deprived...Lord Chaos loves such worship!
I can't stand this, but I can't just sit back and write poems or out-of-date lovesongs or count my many blessings, not when these assholes are fixing to declare how they've blown all our Social Security pool and now our Medicare pool. You know what pisses me off about this?--the fact that the Medicare program may be the only Federal program that works! It's single-payer healthcare! That's the only reasonable solution to our national healthcare crisis. But single-payer healthcare would mean the demise of the HMOs--it would fuck these insurance giants making profits off our health or sickness. I was reading that even doctors are fed up with these profit-making HMOs who let people just the fuck go ahead and die rather than approve a medicine for them or approve an operation that would save their lives! HMOs don't want to eliminate disease. Hell no; there's no profits in that. Why not put the bastards out of business! So how insulting to We the People was it that Obama's handpicked panel to study national healthcare had no single-payer advocate at that table? The chairman of the panel is a cheap-ass Congressman from Montana of all places (Max Brackish, I call him) who has arrogantly said already that single-payer health insurance is off the table--not even worthy of consideration by Obama's team. Case closed he says. And today when a woman doctor who's a leading advocate of single-payer insurance stood up and loudly yelled out her message and challenge and protest--as a reward from Obama's panel, she was handcuffed by Capitol police and arrested as a common criminal--the Montana-cowboy chairman refused to allow any of the single-payer interrupters to be heard. Obama is not listening to the people who elected him so courageously--so hopefully--so excitedly--so happily! And now the bastard is turning on us--today he decided--changed his mind--to not release the photos showing US soldiers torturing scumbag terrorists! He thinks it will add more coals to the already hot-burning hatred of the USA gathering like war clouds around the world if he lets those photos out--of course, the Internet will published them anyway--somewhere on the Internet they'll show up--and Obama's supposed to be so hip with his Blackberries and his computer knowledge--bullshit! He's a Jive Ass Turkey!
Here's how Obama explains his stand on single-payer(or) healthcare:
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I’ve said this before. If I were designing a system from scratch, then I’d probably set up a single-payer system. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the terminology, single payer basically means that you’ve got one government-funded program. It doesn’t have to all be government-run, but it’s government-funded. Everybody—Medicare would be an example of a single-payer system, if everybody was in Medicare.
But the problem is we’re not starting from scratch. We’ve got a system in which most people have become accustomed to getting their health insurance through their employer. And for us to immediately transition from that, and given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs—you’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up—making that transition in a rapid way, I think, would be very difficult. And people don’t have time to wait. They need relief now.
So, my attitude is, let’s build off the system that we’ve got. Let’s make it more efficient. We may be, over time, as we make the system more efficient and everybody is covered, decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.
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And here is a reply to the above statement from Dr. Quentin Young, the Chicago physician who is a leading advocate of single-payer healthcare and was once a close friend of Barack Obama's--a confidante:
DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, it’s one of the few times when Barack has been dishonest. He knows and all America knows that our experience with employment-based insurance and these other Mickey Mouse things have been increasingly a total disaster. You have a $2.5 trillion industry with vested interests—the private hospitals that are for profit, the HMOs, the health insurance industry—making billions upon billions, and things getting worse. He knows and should act on the fact that time is running out.
The American people are hurting. Over a million Americans go bankrupt due to medical bills each year, and there’s a new study, incidentally, that will show that 50 percent of the bankruptcies are due to health costs; it will be 60 percent. So we have a worsening situation. And a man who wants to lead a country which is in great peril had best do some courageous things.
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This comes from Amy Good(wo)man's Democracy Now Website:
www.democracynow.org/2009/3/11/dr_quentin_young_obama_confidante_and
Interesting reading.
Well, toodle-doo, I'm off to mi cama for a little shut-eye.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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