Living in New York City--In the End Times

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2009.
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Everything's Got Two Faces
Jesus, the world's a mess. Let me be blunt, it's a fucked up mess. It's not just We the People of the USA who've been fucked but everybody in the whole damn world. Yes, we are ALL dumb as mules and as humans mostly insane (Norman Mailer way back in the '50s said we were all neurotics). But we're still afloat--somehow--on a sea of worthless dollars, yes, but still afloat. This country still controls most of the money wealth of the world. At least the US and our northern country allies do, i.e., the NATO countries for the most part, control most of the private wealth. Our financial system has to be the filthiest rich of them all--I mean, our swindlers and flim-flammers are still the best and the crookedest in the world. Our corporate raiders and pirates, in spite of the success of the Somalian pirates, are still the best raiders and pirates in the world. And let's see, what's the number of countries housing US military installations? 150? Think of that? What other country's military is in 150 countries of the world? What other country is actively continuing to negotiate opening more military installations on foreign soils daily. We are currently wanting to open bases in Africa--this quest started under G.W. Bush and is being continued (as is always continued) under President Obama (our only hope, the hopeful are shouting--though as we Growlers know, through Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale, a Daily Growler Continual Present Hero, there is no such thing as HOPE, only FAITH IN YOURSELF). So with military bases (with nuclear armed strike potential) in 150 nations of the world that means we are the most military-minded and driven country in the world. No other military can compete with ours in terms of weapons of mass destruction. We are also promoters of terrorism on a much grander scale than any of the terrorists on our War-on-Terror official terrorist list. I've seen reports that say there may be only 100 al-Queda left in Afghanistan and that may even include Pakistan, too. In the meantime, our death-squad forces (where's John "Death Squad" Negroponte these days?) led by CIA goons and Blackwater operatives are currently systematically assassinating al Queda and Taliban leadership targets in Pakistan using our CIA-Blackwater-controlled drone planes to missile where they determine a targeted leader is no matter if it happens to be a hospital or a school. The CIA estimates that perhaps an average of 30 innocent folk may have to die in order to take out one of these so-called terrorist leaders. Our CIA-Blackwater shady forces are ten times more inhumanely vicious than the old KGB and the current Israeli Mossad or the Chinese execution forces.

President Obama is going to announce at any moment [now, Tuesday, in one of his magnificent shield speeches from West Point] that he, as the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is going to send 30,000 more poor old worn out (some going on their fourth tours) or rawly recruited young US fool men and women into the US fool government's most foolish-ever invasion and attempted occupation next to the Iraq invasion and occupation, which, too, is still dragging-ass on. G.W. Bush's righteous war has now been officially deemed President Obama's righteous war. This president who had greatness shoved at him by people who saw in him a new direction--"PLEASE," they were shouting at him, "GET US THE FUCK OFF THIS INSANE ROAD THIS WORST-FUCKING-EVER PRESIDENT, G.W. BUSH AND HIS FUCKED UP CRIMINALLY MINDED FAMILY, HAS GOTTEN US INTO THE RUTS OF. GET INTO OFFICE AND ROLL BACK THE CARPETS AND UNCOVER THE FUCKING DIRT THIS LITTLE WEASEL PRESIDENT HAS HIDDEN FROM WE THE PEOPLE...." I'm panting like a rabid wolf! And sometimes I wish I were rabidly insane. But, my problem is: I'm too fucking sane to even fake insanity. Like Henry Miller, I'm too sane to be insane.

I am old enough to have lived in two distinct times of peace in this country. The first time was right after we gave up in our effort to invade and occupy Korea and the second time was the early seventies on into the 1980s when Pappy Bush decided to wimp-lead us into his famous Gulf War, the idiot war that started all this shit--that gave birth to Osama bin Ladin and the al-Queda movement.

Remember, our little haberdasher president, Harry S. Truman, declared the Korean War wasn't a war but only a "little police action"--a UN-approved police action fought under the UN flag. And Truman was a "little man," like around 5' 6 or so, a short person--and sometimes short people can be mean little pricks. And Harry, a boob really, was a mean little prick of a man. Harry pompously cooked 300,000 Japanese men, women, children, dogs, cats, birds, zoo animals in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Harry in We the People's name nuked Jap asses back to radioactive dust, though in some cases the flash of the explosions left some photographic evidence leaving thousands of people's images in black and white photographic negatives against what building walls survived those two horrendous days. Yeah, Harry didn't bat an eye giving the order as commander in chief of the US Armed Forces to drop those two Fat Boy Atomic bombs on the Japs, the evilest people on earth at the time according to We the People's lying propaganda. And check out Atomic bombs--they were devised, designed, deduced from the minds of such brilliant men, like Albert Einstein, such gentle men; yet, men willing to go on and work night and day with fervid diligence on discovering how to create and encapsulate (in a bomb casing) the most deadly source of energy ever to tumble into the clever little hands of human monkeys--atomic energy, now refined into NUCLEAR energy. Three Mile Island is leaking as I type this; yep, that same Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, PA, that you thought was closed down for good when one of its reactors almost blew sky high way back when now? The same company that runs Three Mile Island also runs the Indian Point nuclear facility on the Hudson River just 24 miles north of where I'm currently sitting writing, New York City, a facility that "leaks" a lot, though it's always covered up with assurances that it's perfectly safe; that is, it's perfectly safe unless it accidentally blows.

I wake up every morning at Ground Zero. Think of that, folks. I'm in Manhattan. I'm in the dead center of Manhattan. I'm in the middle of the fastest-growing tourist industry in the USA, where hi-rise luxury hotels are zooming up into the skies all around my ancient digs, towering up over me, trying to dominate me. I live only ten blocks from what was once The Great White Way--Broadway! The Street of Dreams! And now it is an extension of DisneyWorld and DisneyLand, with huge zoomed up PhotoShop-created virtual billboards promoting Shrek, the Little Mermaid, the Lion King, the Disney Channel celebrities and cartoon characters and ABC Television, the Disney Network, celebrities, all mix-media-ed in with the huge sprawled out half-naked babe models in Victoria Secret billboards or Cal Klein women's briefs flash ads or the constantly 24/7 blinking rolling up and down pink flashing Virgin Records store virtually lighted storefront sign.

Times Square is clogged now with skyscraping towers of commercial worship, 50+ storied towers housing global corporations and foreign enterprises like Reuters, the new Reuters Building being one I can see from my corner of Broadway looking uptown. Ground Zero it is. Freedom Tower is even a pimple on the ass of where the World Trade Center used to be. The real estate tycoons and crooked politicians and corrupt Port Authority officials are still wrangling over the billions of loose money being thrown around as they struggle to get that insulting building built. The question for us New York Citians becomes where's the next towering behemoth Capitalist pig building the mad terrorists will want to blow up?--and yes, New York City is the central focus of the maddened eye of the terrorists's destruction of America intentions--at least that's what my Mayor and his Police Commissioner and the FBI chiefs and the NYPD profilers and the new governor of New Jersey and Unka Joe LIEberman (now a biggy in Homeland Security--"Why, Obama, did you OK this little turncoat weasel coming aboard your Homeland Security staff?") and the US Government advisers keep telling me--"When the al-Queda terrorists...er-ah, or the Taliban terrorists...er-ah, or the Iraqi al-Queda cells still active over there talk about killing Americans, they're talking about killing you smug assholes living in New York City."

Right outside my apartment on Broadway is a huge police camera unit hanging off one of the large light poles our mall-mad Mayor just recently installed when he decided to reroute traffic from off Broadway down Seventh and up Sixth. Broadway for several blocks has now become a bicycle path, parking lot, public area, its once racing flows of traffic now a tacky white-lined none-street as it tackily slops through islands of outdoor tables and chairs for the winos to relax in--with the added expense of City workers taking those tables and chairs in every night at a certain time and then putting them back out the next morning. The largest of these tacky zones is right in the middle of Times Square tackying up worse now very tacky and trashy old now walkway Broadway--traffic finally allowed back on Broadway via one lane at West 32th, where it then shoots up primo slow to become two lanes at West 30th only to run into another one of the mall-mad Mayor's table-and-chair zones in the dead middle of traffic where Broadway crosses 23rd to go on the other side of Fifth Avenue. Plato help us if we have a super emergency in any of these new zones.

All up and down these stretches of Broadway are these police cameras high up on these new light poles--a chain of linked police cameras. Now I'm not saying these cameras work that well since they are owned and operated by the NYPD, but they are if working correctly capable of zooming in and going up a person's nostrils and infrareding what's going on in their brain--I exaggerate, but there is a microwave/cellular transmission/wireless transmission tower system on every rooftop of all the lower level buildings up and down Broadway...up and down Sixth Avenue--interconnected microwave digital streaming transmission towers--capable of sending images, photos, manipulations of computer systems, digital signaling, etc., up and down Manhattan from stem to stern and probably on the highest points of most of the boroughs of this truly faster-than-a-speeding-bullet city that is almost totally now under the control of an illegal third-term mayor, his little man police commissioner, and the NYPD.

Bad news today for several thousand residents and small business owners in downtown Brooklyn. A state appellant court has ruled that, yes, the City of New York is A-OK in using its eminent domain powers for the confiscation of viable properties to them so one of the mayor's asshole developer pals can bring his not-so-hot (in other words "loser") New Jersey Nets basketball team smack dab into the middle of downtown Brooklyn with a huge gaudy sports arena surrounded by hi-rise luxury condos, hotels, and office buildings--a complex that will certainly put downtown Brooklyn on the map as a possible terrorist target. So we here at Ground Zero must suffer 4 more years of this little man filthy rich son of a bitch mayor who has to stand on a box to look you square in the eyes he's so short going about giving Manhattan over to White enterprise and White gentrification and White local and foreign investors pouring in to buy up all our cheap land and buildings--I mean, the tax breaks this mayor and his asslicking City Council are handing out. Just read where Goldman Sachs, after posting the most profits ever in their history, only paid on all of those profits about 1% in taxes. Check out your end-of-the-year earnings and see how many taxes you paid on them--which doesn't include the taxes you pay constantly all day long, taxes which for you keep going up--never coming down like they do for big corporations and their money-guzzling executive multimillionaires.

My apartment sits right over one of Manhattan's largest subway terminals, the 34th Street station. The New York City subway system according to the NYPD and Homeland Security was the target of the recent Colorado-based al-Quedan terrorist who met with the Iman in Queens, New York, gathering information on how to successfully carry out a backpack bombing of the NY subway system in commemoration of that al-Quedan success carried out in Madrid way back when--hey, it got Spain out of Iraq.

So yeah, I live at Ground Zero, which is always New York City.

Our Police Commissioner said awhile back that he intended on having 2,000 spy cameras up and operating around the city ASAP, and that was over a year ago now. Yet, still today, with all their subway surveillance cameras and the huge police presence in all the stations (the big beer-bellied substitute cops work the subways), a goofy antisocial (sociopath) 14-year-old boy managed to avoid being found by the system by riding the subways for 10 days straight--actually living on the subways all of that time. They just today found him when a subway rider recognized the boy from a handmade poster made by the boys's parents he'd seen at the station where he got on the train. Does the cops's hugely expensive spy-camera system work? Hell no. It's all a sham. We are more vulnerable today than we were on 9/11. For one thing, the way Mayor Bloomberg has fucked up Manhattan traffic patterns, there's no direct ways to various areas of the city should another 9/11 happen--especially if it happened here where I am in midtown Manhattan. The belly of this beast called New York City.

One of the alternate plans of the planners of the 9/11 attacks, whoever they may have been, whether friend or foe (we'll never know since this sort of information is always SECRET), was to land a superjet right down the middle of Fifth Avenue, coming uptown--right into the Empire State Building area.

Guess what my apartment building sits immediately under?
The New Ground Zero?

But you know something strange about living here in New York City? Nobody here expresses any fear of any terrorists or bombings or whether the cops are tracking our every move or whether Verizon and AT&T are listening in on our telephone/cell phone conversations or tracking us through our Internet navigations.

I mean New York City's streets are packed with tour buses, several of them similar to the London buses that were blown up by terrorists, always full of gawking eyed tourists from all over the world. Right around the Empire State Building now are going up a ring of hi-rise office and condo towers the tallest of which will be just over on 6th Avenue and 32nd, catercorner from my building--it will be 72 stories. Mall-mad Mayor Bloomberg has intentions of connecting all this ring of towers with a covered above-the-street walkway and shopping mall.

So here I sit in the bull's eye of the number one terrorist target in the USA! With one of the largest subway stations in Manhattan under me--and all up under Herald Square, too. Also on top of this station is Macy's, the new J.C. Penny (the J.C. standing for James Cash), and a multitude of 20-story boutique hotels, either renovated old hotels or brand-spanking new ones, like the one going up just outside my windows.

I mean, you talk about Ground Zero. A direct hit in this area would make 9/11 look like a Girl's Scout picnic.

For me, I'll escape the worst yet to come. I always squeak out of danger by the skin of my ass so I'll avoid the coming worst of this chaotic affair that is affecting the whole damn world and not just us.

It seems President Obama and his military gang, inherited from G.W. Bush, are perhaps actually intent upon going in and securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal (a The Daily Growler prediction). That thought came to me as I empirically contemplated a mental visual of the direction Obama's military strategy (yes, it's the old Surge strategy of General Petraus) seems to be taking. It's going south from Kabul. It's concentrating the bulk of its tired and mentally challenged forces in southern Afghanistan, in Kandahar province and around the poppy fields of Helmont province. Nearer and nearer to the Pakistan border. There are more and more drone attacks being flown with destructive intentions into Pakistan territory every day now. These drone flights are killing double-figure civilians with each attack. Revealed this morning on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now broadcast by one of Amy's proteges, Jeremy Scahill, is the fact that the Blackwater private gang of mercenary thugs who we knew had taken over piloting the drone attacks were now working with the CIA in secret death squad adventures (oh we learned nothing from Vietnam--remember search and destroy missions under old Colon's Pal (read: Colon Powell))--attacks that are focused on killing certain al Queda and Taliban leaders and operatives no matter the cost in innocent lives. But then, that's the run of the mill these days.

In the meantime, the Obamas gave their first state dinner last night and oh what an affair. There was no evidence of any recession last night at the White Man's House. 430+ invited guests, including a full sway of swaggering Hollywood moguls and celebrities, political homeys, Beltway privileged, several Bollywood celebrities, i.e., the "Slumdog Millionaire" gang were all there. I mean money was no object. This state affair was for the President of India, a Mr. Singh (perhaps kin to Growler madcap Col. Singh the Singing Sikh--or maybe the Mr. Singh who owns my favorite deli over on 6th Avenue)--another nuclear power on the rise in the Global Economy. India, like the Chinese, are heavy buyers of our debt. Remember G.W. Bush traded nuclear secrets to India for mangoes! Obama has continued that agreement; carrying on in G.W.'s wobbly footsteps--General Electric is already in India making bundles of bucks by teaching Indian nuclear physicists the tricks of the trade and helping India build nuclear power facilities--and in return--oh hot damn--we get mangoes.

A lot of our nouveau cuisine uses mangoes, so now, we're set for life, even though only a few hundred miles as the crow flies from Miami some of the best mangoes in the world are grown--like in the hills of Jamaica--they grow mangoes down there, Julies and Bombays--but no, no, we'd rather go to India to get them.

I'm not a mango fan; they're too oily for me--same as all these money's-no-object politicians.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Remember to celebrate the White Man's Thanksgiving Day as a Native American Holy Day honoring our great indigenous peoples.
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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
Karl Marx