Memorial Service for Terry Pollard Set for Saturday, January 9, 2010
10am
at
Haley Funeral Directors
24525 Northwest Hwy
Southfield, Michigan
for additional information contact Gary Pollard, 313-399-6651
Foto by tgw, New York City, 2009
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[In case you're interested in learning about Yemen, a fascinating country really, here's a The Daily Growler-approved Yemen-history site: www.eternal-yemen.com/history.htm]
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"I Need to See a Government-issued Photo ID, Please"
My intentions were honorable. I'm a "good" American. I'm whiter than white in terms of race. No way I'm a radical Islamic terrorist--"or am I?," which is of course the question on the lips of the scared-shitless Americans deciding the answer to this question. In my case, this was an Amtrak ticket agent in Penn Station here in NYC.
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[An interruptive aside: the case of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Manhattan.
This is the original Penn Station in New York City--"Penn" being short for Pennsylvania. At that time the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Pennsy, was one of the top great railroad systems in the US. New York City was ruled over by the Pennsylvania Railroad at Pennsylvania Station--built over the huge Pennsylvania Railroad Yards that Donald Trump got the privilege of buying cheap and with huge tax breaks in order to build one of his very tacky Trump Place, the largest-ever single development in NYC history, on NY City's West Side--and the other ruling railroad was the New York Central across town at Grand Central Station. [The large building you drive under when you are coming down Park Avenue going downtown, now named after Harry Helmsley who bought it and restored it in the 80s, is the old New York Central Building (with its 24-karat gold leaf tower top).
]
Both railroads started crashing in the late 60s. In a bailout by the US Government, the railroads were merged in the 70s to become the Penn-Central (the Penn-Central's bankruptcy was the largest bankruptcy in history at the time). With that bailout money, the Penn-Central announced it was going to build a huge skyscraper over the Grand Central site.
Marcel Breuer's original design for the Penn-Central Building. It was very controversial because Marcel, with his advanced Euro-trash architectural wisdom (he was Hungarian born), hated Grand Central Station and wanted it demolished and replaced with his design. A huge outpouring of New Yorkers protested this Euro (phony French) asshole wanting to tear down one of our favorite buildings and replace it with what my generation sarcastically called a "Kleenex-box-on-end" building, the style of Plexiglas-glass-plastic-box architecture (promoted by Breuer and Le Corbusier (a Brazilian)[Mr. Ed: Le Corbusier was Swiss], et. al., in Europe and enfant terrible Philip Johnson in this country) came to fruition in the 1960s (the New Frontier era--away with the old that reminded us of WWII and Hitler's Europe and in with the cleansed and new, like JFK, the new era's skyscrapers designed by the avant-garde architects who evolved out of Europe's rebuilding era after WWII with their ultracleanlined ultrastreamlined designs--jet planes coming into popularity--speed becoming the thing--"How fast will it go?" the common question of the day--"How will it fly with the public?") the ultimate of which was the max-ugly World Trade Center Twin Towers).
In the case of Breuer wanting to demolish Grand Central Station, the people won out when the State of New York took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where Grand Central Terminal (it's real name) was ruled to be too valuable a landmark to be torn down. So that was that for both pissed-off Marcel and the Penn-Central Railroad, which soon went totally belly up.
Later, another developer Big Pappa [Mr Ed: Dear reader, the reference to "another developer Big Pappa"--Big Pappa is an adjective putting down the unnamed developer--please understand satire] wanted to tear GCT down and put up an I.M. Pei building that would have been taller than the Empire State Building. After that was squashed, then the future Wall Street felon (he did jail time), Lewis Wolfson, was allowed to build the Pan-Am Building just behind Grand Central Terminal, tall escalators rising off Grand Central's big room floor to ascend into the bland-lobby of the Pan-Am Building, named for Pan American Airlines, which would later itself go belly up and bankrupt and sell off the Pan-Am Building to Met-Life Insurance. [An interesting aside to this Grand Central Terminal story. When the Penn-Central (the New York Central built and owned Grand Central) went bankrupt it had to sell off Grand Central Station (it was bought by a private equity investment firm) and the famous Commodore Hotel (the Commodore was Commodore Vanderbilt the builder of the New York Central Railroad and Grand Central Terminal), which it sold to a young Donald Trump for 10 million bucks. With huge tax breaks given him by the city and the state he was able to reside the old stone and brick hotel with a mirror-like siding then convince the Hyatt House Hotel Group to partner with him in it and they turned it into the Grand Hyatt House (Grand for Grand Central). Later Donald sold his interest in the hotel for 140 million dollars--the money that started him on his ruthless path to buying up New York City properties at dirt-cheap prices and getting huge tax breaks from his pals in the City Council (don't forget, Donald Trump's father was already a real estate mogul who owned large properties in Queens and Brooklyn). Donald at the same time made the deal with the Pennsylvania Railroad to buy the Pennsy Rail Yard that runs from 57th up to 72nd--the property on which he built the very max-horribly-out-of-place Trump Place--another Trump City--all over town these Trump buildings stand tall, paying no taxes, reaping big time rents for Donald who makes his money buying run-down buildings, renovating them, then getting his investment back when he rents the high floors for millions of dollars a year--or sells them for the money he put into the buildings.]
Ironically, Met-Life gave up its original Metropolitan Life Building in Madison Square in Manhattan one of the most beautiful buildings in the world--so said Mark Twain who used to live in its neighborhood on Fifth Avenue--for the rather tacky Pan-Am Building.
The clock tower of the original Met-Life Building (foto by tgw).
In the 1960s (60-69), New York City went through a building boom with Philip Johnson-Le Corbusier glass buildings popping up all over town but especially on Park Avenue (Johnson designed the Seagram's Building on Park Avenue) and with Rockefeller Center expanding across 6th Avenue to build a whole wall of Plexiglas-plastic-glass-paneled Kleenex-boxes-on-their-ends starting up at 55th with the Burlington Mills Building and coming on back down the street with the J.C. Penny Building, the Equitable Life Building, the Time-Life Building, the Exxon Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and the Chemical Building--all tacky, plain-ass, plexiglas-glass-paneled-side buildings--all similar, indistinct from each other--certainly not distinctive like the original buildings in Rockefeller Center.
It was at the beginning of this 1960s building boom when the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to demolish the marvelous old marble-palace Penn Station. The demolition began to the absolute utter horror of New York Citians in October of 1963. The Pennsylvania Railroad announced that in place of the demolished marble palace it was building a plaza of two 50-story Kleenex-box-on-end skyscrapers, to be called Penn Plaza: 1 Penn Plaza and 2 Penn Plaza, over the left-intact lower-level train tracks and platforms. Adjacent to this plaza was going to be built the new Madison Square Garden, which was in a deteriorating building up on West 50th and 8th Avenue (torn down in the 70s) at the time (this Madison Square Garden is definitely one of the ugliest structures in Midtown Manhattan).
The Demolish Crews Had a Field Day! October 1963: one of the most beautiful buildings ever built in the world is reduced to rubble to make way for--the New Penn Station!
The New Penn Station--that's a Plexiglas-glass-plastic-paneled Kleenex-box-on-end tower above the station entrance on Seventh Avenue, across from the famous old Pennsylvania Hotel (PE-6-5000).
The old waiting room at the old Pennsylvania Station.
The New Penn Station Waiting Room--Watch out for those still-sleeping winos!
From Wikipedia:
The original Pennsylvania Station was] by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910. The original Pennsylvania Station was an outstanding masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City. The station's air rights were optioned in the 50's. The option was executed soon after. The option called for the demolition of the head-house and train shed, to be replaced by an office complex and a new sports complex. The tracks of the station, which were located well below street level, would remain untouched. Demolition began in October 1963.
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So I went down to Penn Station and up to the Amtrak ticket windows. I was wanting to leave New York City--I was going several states away. Without much patriotic thought in my head. I was more excited about taking an Amtrak train to my desired destination. I'm being sketchy about this because it's a very personal reason I wanted to go to this out-of-NYC place.
I boogied straight up to the ticket window and said boldly and importantly to the ticket agent, "Gimme a one-way ticket to Paradise." And the ticket agent replied, "Sir, I'll have to see two photo IDs, please, a current driver's license and a valid credit card." "I have no photo IDs, mam, but I have some photoless IDs--I mean come on, do I look like an al-Queda terrorist? I'm about as white as a white man can get. And obviously by my accent I'm more of an American than you are, lady, since I detect a European accent in your voice and see Euro-nativity all over your face." "I'm sorry, sir, but under the Patriot Act, given to us by the most handsome and cocksure President we ever had, Slick Willie Clinton, you must show two photo IDs, one issued by a government agency, the other an active credit card...or, sir, if you have a US passport, that counts as two, but you must have those to board an Amtrak train." "So you won't sell me a ticket?" "No sir, I cannot break the law, sir."
Damn, I'd forgotten about the original Patriot Act and its 2 photo ID rule. I'm thinking, surely I can get a god-damn flea-bitten bus. So I trotted full speed out the back door of Penn Station, the 8th Avenue end, in order to head up 8th Avenue to the Port Authority Bus Station to grab a Greyhound or whatever I could book on.
Exiting onto 8th Avenue out of Penn Station's back entrance puts you directly in front of another great piece of New York City architecture, the James A. Farley Main Branch of the US Post Office (now called the US Postal Service--a privatized branch of our government that is currently running billions of dollars in the red--and by the way, raising postal rates this month, to boot):
The James A. Farley Main Branch New York City Post Office--the post office is abandoning this building--so far they have no plans to demolish it; instead it's supposed to be incorporated into an all new Penn Station, which now is actually a combination Amtrak and Long Island Railroad station. There were plans to build a 72-story building over this post office though since most of the building sites in Manhattan these days are going broke and a being abandoned they've shelved that project. They'd love to demolish this building, too-- it's right in the middle of Mayor Mike "Mall Mad" Bloomberg's infamous Bloomberg Mall-proposed area--another project of this asshole billionaire mayor's legacy that has been put on hold (the little asshole mayor had his inauguration just the other day--and it was bitterly cold--the little short-ass guy had to stand on a box to reach the microphones as he was sworn in for an illegal third-term as mayor).
And speaking of Mayor "Mall Mad" Bloomberg ruining Times Square with his max-tacky redesign of it, how un-real like was New Year's Eve in Times Square this year! Boring. In the good ole days, you didn't have a stage set up and rock bands playing, you just gathered there to watch the "ball" drop down from the roof of the old New York Times Building--the old building still survives under the many outside surfaces that have been plastered over the old stone structure over the years.
The Original New York Times Tower in Times Square, circa 1940. At the time it was built, just after the Flatiron Building, it became the second tallest building in NYC. In 1964, the above building was resided in a tacky white-bluish paneling to become the Allied Chemical Building. The only photos of the old Allied Chemical Building in Google Images believe it or not are owned by Getty Images (Didn't Bill Gates buy up all the photo archives including Getty Images?) and they won't let you publish their photos without permission and a fee.
Later in the 70s, during his 15 minutes of fame, absurd artist, an absurd man, Cristo wrapped the Allied Chemical Building. Cristo was (he's still alive but he's past tense in my vocabulary) amazing in how he could promote himself and get moneyed people to back him with millions of dollars as he wasted a million miles of plastic wrapping shit doing his wrappings. He sold every little piece of shit he could sell when he did his wrappings. Every sketch he did of a project he sold--he would put books together and sell them at fantastic prices--his wrapping of the Allied Chemical Building was photographed and then Cristo added a sketch to the photo and sold the photo and sketch as a piece of art. Later, Mayor Mike "Mall Mad" Bloomberg allowed this phony bastard to corrupt the natural beauty of Central Park (a man-made park by the way--even the hills and valleys and creeks and lakes are man-made--even the huge boulders were brought in and positioned according to a man-made design) by putting up what Cristo called "Gates." God it was tacky.
Sorry, Cristo, Nature's a Finer Artist Than You Are--Cristo's max-tacky plastic gates he positioned around the pathways of Central Park. Look, they are mounted on what looks like the old garment racks that used to be pushed wildly around the garment district. These tacky plastic flags matched the dyed hair color of Cristo's French mistress who died last year. What a phony; yet the talentless bastard made a fortune off these shams.
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There are a lot of buildings here in New York that you need 2 photo IDs to get into. As a nonconformist, I resent being made to carry photo IDs and having to prove on demand that I am not an enemy of the people. To me this rebukes "innocent until proven guilty." This having to have a photo-ID building pass also started under Slick Willie's Patriot Act (rights denying) bullshit and had nothing to do with 9/11. This is all due to a fear of "encroachment"--any anarchists out there who understand encroachment? I refer you to the 19th-Century US anarchist, Josiah Warren:
GOVERNMENT AND ITS TRUE FUNCTION.
1. With all due deference to other judgments I venture to assert that our present deplorable condition [Mr. Ed: written during the Civil War], like that of many other parts of the world, is in consequence of the people in general never having perceived, or else having lost sight of, the legitimate object of all governments as displayed or implied in the American "Declaration of Independence."
2. Every individual of mankind has an "INALIENABLE right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness;" "and it is solely to protect and secure the enjoyment of these rights unmolested that governments can properly be instituted among men." In other terms, SELF-SOVEREIGNTY is an instinct of every living organism; and it being an instinct, cannot be alienated or separated from that organism. It is the instinct of Self-Preservation; the votes of ten thousand men cannot alienate it from a single individual, nor could the bayonets of twenty thousand men neutralize it in any one person any more than they could put a stop to the instinctive desire for food in a hungry man.
3. The action of this instinct being INVOLUNTARY, every one has the same absolute right to its exercise that he has to his complexion or the forms of his features, to any extent, not disturbing another; and it is solely to prevent or restrain such disturbances or encroachments, that governments are properly instituted. In still shorter terms, the legitimate and appropriate mission of governments is the defence and protection of the inalienable right of Sovereignty in every individual within his or her own sphere.
But what is it that constitutes encroachment?
4. Suppose my house to be on fire, and I seize a pail of water in the hands of a passer-by, without waiting to explain or ask leave--this would be one degree of encroachment, but perhaps the owner would excuse it on the ground of its necessity. Suppose a man walks into my house without waiting for leave--it may or may not disturb or offend me, or constitute a degree of encroachment. If I find that he has no excusable errand, and require him to retire and he refuses, this would be a degree of encroachment which I might meet with a few words, and might need no government to assist me. If he proceeds to rob the house, I may have reason to think that he is driven to desperation by having a starving family, and I may not resort to violence; or I may perceive that he is a wanton and reckless robber or fillibuster, and that this is an unnecessary encroachment, which, in defence of my own rights, as well as the same rights in others, I am justifiable in resisting; and if I have not sufficient power to do so without endangering myself or property, I will call for help: --this help, whether in the form of police or an army, is government, and its function is to use force, to prevent him from using force against me and mine; it interferes, with my consent, to prevent interference with my sovereign right to control my own:-- its mission is "intervention for the sake of non-intervention."
This is from that great Internet site, the Anarchist Encyclopedia, run by Recollection Books:recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm
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So I boogied up 8th Avenue and the Port Authority Bus Station. I went up to the ticket window of the bus I knew went to this place I desired to visit and boldly said, "One one-way ticket to Paradise, please." "Sir, I'll have to ask you to show me two photo IDs, one preferably government-issued, such as your New York State driver's license, or a valid credit card with your photo, or a valid US passport, please." "You mean I can't ride a stupid bus without showing you 2 photo IDs? What am I proving by showing you a photo ID? You know, the Saudi-Arabians who blew up the World Trade Center all had photo IDs. This idiot Nigerian banker's spoiled brat rich son had a valid photo ID. You would have let that enemy combatant on this stupid bus." "I'm sorry sir, it's the law." "So you won't sell me a ticket?" "Not without the proper ID, sir."
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I'll be a son of a bitch. I'm ID-less in Gotham. Like Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, ID-less in Gotham would make a great book title. Looks like I'll soon be up for demolition. My era is over. Kapoot. Nobody reads my writer heroes anymore. Who the hell reads Philip Wylie these days? Larry Durrell? Kenneth Patchen? Even Allen Ginsberg? Jack Kerouac? Joseph Wassermann? Elie Faure? Ernest Hemingway for that matter? William Faulkner? Donald Barthelme? The plays of Tennessee Williams? The plays of Eugene O'Neill? The poetry of Jack Spicer? Blaise Cendrars? Henry Miller? Edward Dahlgren? Scott Fitzgerald?
And, yes, you're right if you ask, why read these guys (I could throw some babes into the mix: Kathryn Anne Porter? Mary McCarthy? Eudora Welty? Carson McCullars? Lillian Hellman? Dorothy Parker? Edna Saint Vincent Millay? Even Willa Cather?)--these people are obsolete --what they write about is irrelevant to today's Wired World. OK. I must bow to that authority.
The music I grew up with, too, has been demolished and all that's left of it left to be overgrown with weeds and imitation plastic flamingos . Even the old original rock 'n roll some of which I thought very progressive (the music of Chuck Berry; the orchestrations of Ike Turner; the very high groovin' music of Sly Stone and Larry Graham (one of the greatest r an b-rock albums ever produced, Release Yourself, during Larry's "Graham Central Station" period, with Chocolate on the Hot Box--whooo!)) has long been carted off to the cultural bone yard.
Then, just yesterday, I was passing by another piece of Turn-of-the-20th-Century-architecture in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the New York Public Library. For some strange reason, I suddenly had an urge to go up and
The New York Public Library
check out the inside of the old building again. I hadn't been in the library since the 70s when I had a writing room there and was writing books for the Catholic Church. I wrote one of my books on the Pope there--and started my coffee-table book on Greenwich Village there. My Greenwich Village book is the book I told my publisher to roll up in a tight hard roll and stick it up his ass--he wouldn't pay me the fee he promised me to write the damn thing and then when he complained, "Jesus, Wolfie, is this all you've got done on this project? This is piss poor and unacceptable." That's when I told him what he could do with the ms. Lost that gig that day--it was a good gig, too, though it got extremely hard to write the books this cat commissioned me to write. I mean, can you imagine me writing about the Pope (Pope John Paul II)? Even the Pope wouldn't approve my book on him. He said it was too liberal on communism! "Love thy neighbor as thyself, Pope!" I shouted back at his Polish ass.
So I went up those famous steps and up past the reclining lion bookends and into the vestibule and then into the main reading room and over to the area where the librarians are.
"Hello, how are you?" I chirpingly said to the young lady librarian. "Listen," I continued, a gaudy smile across my happy face, "I used to have a writing room here and as I'm in the process of writing another Great American Boogie Book and as I was passing by the library here, I was drawn back in here...I'm a book writer, you see...er-ah...not famous anymore, but once pretty famous, and I was wondering, do you still give out writing rooms to writers?" "Yes sir, we still do that." "And what do I have to do to reserve one?" "Well, sir, you have to fill out this form--you can go into the reading room and fill it out...then you bring it back to me...and, er-ah, sir, I'll require you show me two pieces of photo ID also...." Without a word, I slowly turned and walked away! ["Niagara Falls!" "Slowly I turned...." There's a great Three Stooges short where the boyz are managing the rassler Bustoff the Great. Bustoff is a bust as a wrestler until he hears someone say "Niagara Falls" and then he turns into a mauler--and beats the shit out of his opponents.]
So I am having to adjust to a new age here in New York City. An age where a nonconformist (I guess psychologically I'm considered a sociopath) is being forced to conform. Driving me toward libertarianism in the sense Josiah Warren used it. An inalienable right to my "pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness." That's the liberty I thought I'd have in this country by now. A "live and let live" attitude--the true American way. My God, am I turning into a Repugnican! HELP, I cry into the hot air blowing in my face from those who demand I conform!
And now--HOT DAMN--we are going to war in Yemen. We are there already. How about old General Petraus, the Surge creator, already in Yemen--President "War Is Peace" Obama opening up another front against this mighty al-Queda Armed Forces--who surely must have Allah on their side--how a handful of these boobs has been able to bring down the United States of America. Isn't that amazing? This made-up bunch of stooges have been able to not only bring us down to our knees politically but have also managed to ruin our economy. They've forced We the People to rewrite our Constitution (off the books so to speak), the Patriot Act taking precedent over the old worn-out White Colonial Constitution--whose Bill of Rights, however, was a masterful stroke of the pen giving meaning to what our truly inalienable rights truly are--fuck the body of the document that declares Blacks are only 1/5 human beings--and that's still in Old Slaveholdin' Tom's Constitution but not in his Bill of Rights. That's where all men are created equal--not in the Constitution.
Obama has been suckered back into the fold. He's now the black version of Georgie Porgie Faux President Bush. We the People have to take actions to bring this guy back to the point where he was when he got elected. It's been a year, folks, and we are worse off now than we were when Bush was giving away our treasury and Hank Paulsen was sending billion-dollar pallets of bucks to Iraq and throwing the money into the air and trying desperately to start WWIII--a job Bush failed at but it looks like Obama will succeed at. He just closed down our Yemen embassy. Hey, Yemen's our fault. We support the repressive regime there. We have CIA all over Yemen--remember the USS Cole incident--that happened in Yemen--so you know we have naval vessels docked there and certainly a whole Navy fleet out in the Indian Ocean ready to bomb Yemen back to the Stone Age. Obama just announced he's sending a few billion bucks over to help the Yemen ruthless regime boost up its military force--it's police force. [There are currently 200,000 Somali refugees living in Yemen. Northern Yemen is a very hostile area--similar to the tribal zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan--home to a whole bunch of Yemen separatists and Islamic radicals embedded in what they militarily call a vertical terrain. For every Yemenite there are two weapons--Yemen has the most weapons per capita in the world.] We are encouraging more KILL FORCE. We are out to annihilate anyone who we deem a member of this very mobile, sly, stealthful al-Queda armed might that is threatening our precious lives (as if we aren't threatening their lives more--we've killed more Iraqis, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalians, Yemenese (Arabs/Muslims) than whoever blew up the World Trade Center killed Americans--not quite 3,000--and not all of them Americans remember. In Vietnam, old Colon's Pal decided for every 1 of our brave lads killed we had to kill 100 pajama-clad Cong).
Can we afford three wars? Hell no. The solution: START WORLD WAR THREE, which seems to me to be inevitable now. I just heard a guy on teevee say when al-Queda starts its nuclear attack against us, the safest place to be is Kentucky. Oh boy, I ain't gonna survive WWIII then--what's that I hear coming over New York City?--OH MY GOD, it's the al-Queda Air Force carrying weapons of mass destruction and headed right for my building, my floor, ME! Wait a minute! They're dropping shoes out of their planes! Shoes and condoms full of a white powder. Oh no, here come suicide parachutists with explosives sewn into their shorts!
Relative to all this War on Terror bullshit that is sending us all to Hell in a god-damn rowboat, I discovered this little NYTimes article from 1998:
''The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against Soviet troops from Dec. 1979 to February 1989, according to American intelligence veterans…The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia...[and this camp represents] ‘the last word in NATO engineering techniques.’ Some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the CIA’s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden’s banner" (NY Times, 8/24/98, p.A1 & A7).
Were you aware that the Balkans War of Slick Willie Clinton's was caused by Willie thinking Bin Laden was in Albania and moving his al-Queda forces there into Kosovo? A new book coming out this year is going to reveal that the Slick One thought bin Laden tried to assassinate him in the Philippines when he visited there during his administration.
Look on Wikipedia under Osama bin Laden: someone has written a brilliant piece of government propaganda, complete with a huge list of references, condoning all the terrorist charges against the badass Osama bin Laden. Deducing from a statement Osama made about 9/11 that he was actually the instigator and designer of the attack on sacred Amurican soil!
Pancho Villa successfully invaded the US in 1916--burning down half the town of Columbus, New Mexico. We went after his ass, too, Pershing and the US Army illegally crossing into Mexico to chase Pancho's retreating army--only to lose Pancho in his very familiar native Durango mountains--the mountains that were the setting for B. Traven's great book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and in which the movie of the same name was filmed.
Columbus, New Mexico, March, 1916, after Pancho Was in Town and Left
And we've attacked Mexico many times--check out the Mexican-America War. Before we were attacked by Pancho Villa's Army of the North, we were attacked by Great Britain in the War of 1812 when the Brits burned down our original White Man's House. Sure, we sent our Navy to attack English ships on the sea--you remember the story of John Paul Jones and the Bon Homme Richard--where the US Marines come from--the Marine Hymn based on the U.S. Marines who were sent to Northern Africa to fight pirates--"From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli...." The Halls of Montezuma referring the Mexican-American War and the Shores of Tripoli to the 1812 War with Great Britain. Of course, the nasty Japs, not today's Japanese, managed to land on our shores in Alaska's Aleutian Islands; plus, yes, they made one of the most valiant military attacks in war history by attacking Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and destroying most of our Pacific Fleet. I sometimes leave out this Pearl Harbor attack because in some ways, I believe, Roosevelt was aware this attack was coming and he did nothing about it--let it happen, knowing then for sure he could declare war on Japan and continue on the very successful, both militarily and financial in terms of the war economy back home, WWII. Roosevelt was envisioning a New World Order if he defeated Japan like he would eventually defeat Germany--plus, what a way to get us out of the worst depression until the one we're in today.
I'm still feeling sorry for Obama. He's trick-bagged himself into an all-White corner. He has no power over any politicians he's so far tried to compromise with. Our Congress is still dominated by right-wing warmongering racist backwards thinkers--the laissez-faire boys and girls who so loved Milton Friedman they were willing to wreck the nation and drive our way of living down to a Third World level by sticking to his faulty economic principles. People out of work are so easy to control. Why, you can build up a great army with out-of-work people with no way of making a living except by getting a job with the government or joining the armed forces. The US Government is still the biggest hirer of labor in this country. Just think, millions of us depend on government jobs for salvation. And that includes city government jobs as well. I haven't heard another word about the 277,000 government jobs Obama was opening up several months back. Maybe that was bullshit, too. The only thing Obama is good at is making speeches--he's made more speeches--way up in the hundreds--in his first year of office than all the other presidents put together--even more than hot-air bloviater Teddy "Big Stick" Roosevelt. His speeches now however ring false--he's slurring his words more and more, he's stopping more often now and saying "Er-ah" or "Ahhhh...ah, er-ah...." He's boring the hell out of us now to the point his speeches are as hollow as Larry Summers's head.
Lord Chaos, by the way, has spoken to me as I was at my prayer time in my prayer chapel on the campus of thegrowlingwolf University, the University of Holy Praying and Humping, just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the Lord Chaos saith unto me, "Heed ye my words. I will RULE you motherfuckers with an iron hand--I will oppress you by putting my iron bootheel on your flimsy necks. I will separate you into rich and poor and watch you try and deal with my worse-case scenarios!" "How can I stop you, Lord?" I asked. "A revolution is the only thing that will stop me. One revolutionary way would be to cut all your credit cards in half and send them back to your creditor masters and start living within your means. Another revolutionary way would be to take your money out of these big Goliath banks and put it into local Credit Unions (any group of people can start a credit union) or local neighborhood banks. The most successful revolutionary way would be for you fools to quit paying your taxes--to demand your employers pay you in cash--fuck checks--in fact, you should demand your employers pay you in gold. But, harty-har-har, I ain't holding my breath 'til you human fools bust any kind of move in any revolutionary way. You've got the right to revolt under your Bill of Rights...so there ya go, pal. Either revolt or get ready for a little worse Chaos!! It's impossible to get Yahoos to agree on any kind of progressive change--that's where you liberals miss all the boats to safe ground. So wallow in this world mess of your own making. I'm just a theory anyway."
thegrowlingwolf
for The ID-less Daily Growler
1 comment:
Corbusier was Swiss, not Brazilian.
There is no record of a developer named or nicknamed 'Big Pappa'dealing with Grand Central Terminal.
Met Life is still in the Madison Square building.
Le Corbusier never did a project in New York City, he was one of many designers on the UN, led by American Wallace Harrison.
Philip Johnson did not design the Seagram's Building, Mie Van Der Rohe did. Johnson did the Four Seasons Restaurant.
There are no plans to teardown the Farley Post Office Building.
'The Shores of Tripoli' is about the US led effort against the Barbary Pirates who were seizing US and European ships. Thomas Jefferson was president.
The White House wasn't burned down, it was badly burnt in the war of 1812 which is why they painted it white in the first place.
Osama Bin Laden did admit he was responsible for the attacks on September 11.
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