Sunday, June 27, 2010

All Things Are We and We Are All Things, Too

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2009
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[Another Jazz Man Has Left Us Benny Powell, 80, American jazz trombonist]

Reading a Book on Animal Behavior

And all this woman, Felicity Huntingford--her book is The Study of Animal Behavior--, is saying in this book is that We, meaning animals (that includes birds, insects, mammals, et al.), are all the same. At least that's what she's saying to me. Everything Felicity gets into in this tome is simply describing human attributes as well as crustacean attributes--including the nuances--and determining all animals are built the same, function the same--like all things DIE--and as such all of us are the same, living for the same reasons, living with the same "natures," and living inspired by the same intentions of those same natures. We've all experienced the same evolutionary accidents that got us all where we are today. One curious thing I feel when I was reading Felicity's book is that though all of us evolved from sea slime, there are some features that we all have in common that haven't been altered at all by the many evolutionary accidents we've all suffered in our existences. For instance: every creature on earth has a face on a head--has a head on a neck--has a trunk part of their bodies, including similar innards, streamling back to a tail end--from whence comes defecation, urination, and at which end most of us have our sexual organs and at which end most of us have sex.

Of course there are eccentric species that break all these similarities to smithereens, though even if they don't have faces or limbs or visible ears or holes where ears usually are or have sex via their faces (cuttlefish, for instance), whatever, even those accidents-gone-wrong still have mostly things that are familiar to all animals--and, if I had the time, I could carry this realization over into plant life, too, which is life (existence is life), isn't it? Trees are living things; yet, like we slaughter cattle, we slaughter trees. Why can't we build our houses out of mud, dirt, adobe, straw (grasses that have died natural seasonal death)? Why wood? Ezra Pound in The ABCs of Economics says that a tree is the perfect economy--man living under a tree has natural shelter; a place to sleep, cook his meals, even a natural source of food if you pick a fruit or nut tree to live under or within--going on to even mention that a tree can provide you with furniture, too, if you're crafty enough. (Something to contemplate: What is craft? Craftsmanship?)
http://danielsanimals.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/chimpanzee_thinking_poster1.jpg
Check out the chimpanzee. Look at his or her head--look at his or her face--look at those ears--they are almost exactly like human ears. Look at those eyes with eyelids. Look at that nose; same as a human nose. Look at those lips. Look at that hand. Look at those fingers.
http://www.maricopa.gov/envsvc/vectorcontrol/images/MuscaDomestica.jpg
Check out that fly. He or she has a head. A face. Two eyes (yes, multiple in vision but normal in terms of being two and on each side of the head). The fly has a mouth on his face. The fly has a tongue in his or her mouth. OK, the fly has 6 limbs that we call legs, though why couldn't those middle limbs be arms and those back limbs be legs--what the extra two limbs up front are--perhaps extra arms--they use them as hands if you watch them eat. The fly has a body--a thorax, a midsection, an elimination system--fly specks--and flies have sex dog-style same as all us animal (humans call them insects; I call them living samenesses (as us)).
http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/biosystematics/invertebrates/spiders/images/WhiteTail_NZ.jpg
Same thing with a spider--so he or she has 8 limbs--so what? Check out the octopus. How do we know our ribs aren't unevolved extra limbs?

Do I believe in God as a supernatural human being? No. Do I believe that gods are inventions of humans? Yes. Most of the life we live and think in is the civilized life of which man is the architect. Other animals to us are uncivilized--unhumanized--and therefore "wild"--"untamed"--human beings are great tamers of wild things!

The irony: though I don't believe in God or gods, isn't it odd that we are all made in the same image?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, June 24, 2010

thegrowlingwolf Laughing His Crying Ass Off

Foto by tgw, "The Moon Is Full," New York City, 2010
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[SAD NOTE: the Obama Administration has just awarded Eric Prince's Private Army, Blackwater, a $200,000,000 contract to guard 2 sites in Afghanistan--guarding normally done by our "hired-gun" army. That's pretty sad, folks. But it's a part of our Power Elite privatizing every aspect of our lives. It's a Capitalist tool. Think about this: a PRIVATE in any man's Army is the lowest rank there is. Just like a PRIVATE citizen is about the lowest form of citizenship in a Capitalist society (which ours is) because it means "You're on your own, Buddy," which is the main meaning of the Neo-Con New World Order principle of self-betterment through "Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps"--like Eric Prince did--oh, I forgot, Eric's father was a big rightwinger nutjob rich asshole--so, yes, Eric pulled himself up by his own bootstraps--and very nice handmade leather boots they were, too! OH YE HYPOCRITES!]

Why Am I Laughing My Crying Ass Off?
Because my fellow citizens, those around me, and those all around me, are lost. Their heads are distracted by their own and those imposed upon them by their superiors depressions and fears. In other words, they've got their heads up their asses. They are lost because they are left to spin in the middle of a road supposedly going to a paradise, spinning like an empty beer can thrown from a car going 100 mph onto an asphalt highway--spinning and ting-tang-pinging in its spinning, singing as it spins out of control, to tumble, to bound, and to eventually end up as trash in a ditch. A road that's going from being a 6-lane paved superhighway to being a trickle of a dirt path leading back into the Hell of the jungle (Nature).

That's why I'm laughing my crying ass off. Being a human-wolf hybrid I see my fellow citizens from two angles.

My human angle, my civilized angle, sees them as so utterly hung up in their own fears and hopes they find their ideals in the irrational. They are hung up on that face they see in the mirror every morning before they start their every-day routines. They analyze that face. Even if it's horribly deformed and therefore ugly they give it "handsomeness" via rationalizations--"I have nice eyes...and I like they way this new thickener works on my hair...my hair's as nice as my eyes...." Never confronting ugliness or the dark side of beauty and glamor and glitter and show biz (Gore Vidal says politics is show biz).

My wolf angle sees them as helplessly trapped in trying to occupy a wilderness (a jungle) the have a mortal fear of. My wolf angle sees them as easily preyed upon in this cowardly condition. As easily tricked. As easily encircled. As easily destroyed (as in guerrilla warfare--the kind of warfare We White Americans used to gain OUR independence from OUR Mother England and her royal highasses. How ironic that Mother England is now busy destroying our whole Gulf Coastal waters and shorelines and offshore island sanctuaries and what's left of a coral reef--and as The Daily Growler reported when this explosion happened so long ago now, there is a worst-case scenario of this manmade disaster in that this explosion maybe had caused pressure on the many methane gas pockets in that area of our Gulf Coast. Cracked 'em open maybe; caused them to start seeping deep down in those Gulf of Mexico waters--a mile or two down there--methane that if loosed in massive doses could not only wipe out the animal life (both water and land animals) but also the human life in the area. Why? Because methane gas, like natural gas, has no odor--it's a silent killer of a most massive destructive kind. Consider turistas to Florida say diving into what the Governor of Florida is currently rush-advertising here in the NYC market as still safe, clean waters, uncontaminated yet--and, hell, even if some of them are, Florida has plenty of beaches, so la-te-dah--and say after they've dived in, and minutes pass and they don't come out, you can bet they'll float in with the tide dead as a door knob later--oh, no, you mean there was methane gas in that uncontaminated water!). [Word Up: Just last night television showed pools of oil drifting up onto the beaches in Pensacola, Florida, on Florida's West Coast.

[Mr. Ed.: We must here note that in criticizing BP's ad showing a Black dude in very casual dress who said he was going to be in charge of doling out the bucks from the BP-promised (not forced on them really) 20-billion buck victim account. The Wolf Man said the dude didn't give his name. A reader has informed us that there is a new BP ad where this dude does give his name. Curiously in this ad the dude says, "That's why I volunteered for this job, because I'm from the area...." We are still skeptical of this ad--very well done in terms of video production--though what the hell does the dude mean "he volunteered" for the job? This ad, too, like all BP's sudden rush of defending-themselves ads, is running twenty-four/seven on New York City teevee. Why dat? you may ask. We answer, maybe because our high-class restaurants here in NYC, especially our many sushi bars, depend on the Gulf Coast for all of its shrimp, most of its oysters, all of its crawfish, most of its red snapper, most of its turtle meat.]

I'm laughing my crying ass off at the truly embarrassing way our Power Elite are acting in public, right before our eyes, these crucial days when they are all really starting once again to en masse run for the presidency--building up their or their choices's campaign coffers.

Our BETTERS are acting pompous and asshole--as witnessed early this week by the down-his-nose actions of the bitter old pompous ass Repugnican asshole Alan Simpson, ex-Senator from (where else) Wyoming (Dick Cheney's faux home address--and where he has a lot of natural gas investments--and I'm sure Simpson is well connected to the natural gas and coal industry in Wyoming). Simpson's old-fart ass (example of the Icelandic insult Prumphaensn (fartchicken) [from Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, Penquin, 2010]) has been chosen by our President to be a member of our President's choice-prime-corporate-oriented committee that's gonna give him solutions as to how to reduce our irreducible deficit (stop the wars, dumbasses). Simpson revealed his disgust with anybody who isn't as nutty as he is when he was caught on video telling a guy representing people on Social Security testifying before this corporate-corrupt worthless committee that he considered people who needed Social Security to survive as lesser people (less than human beings is really exactly what he means). His statement caused a big bruhaha in the dumbcluck media. Turns out, this old doddering fool, he's 79, kicking 80 in the ass, is a big mover and shaker in the Neo-Con (Reaganomics)-New World Order effort to totally wreck Social Security, under the LIE that our Social Security system is running out of money any minute now. A lie started by our Corporate Power Elite. They want to get their grubby little pudgy hands on that huge pool of money they have no total control over yet.

Alan K. Simpson (it's an old "younger" photo of Happy-Happy Alan)

These are the fool wrongway thinkers who are sailing our ship of state PURPOSELY onto the rocks. This old fool from Wyoming, the state with the smallest population in the Union, is following in his old pappy's wrongway footsteps--Alan's daddy was a Senator from Wyoming and a former Governor of Wyoming. Alan's had a very easy life of Wyoming privilege--he admits he was "wild" boy when he was young and free and going to college and driving his convertibles...what a man! Asshole!

Most of Wyoming, by the bye, is owned or controlled through leases by We the People of the USA. That's you and me; we who pay into Social Security all our lives; we who pay the salaries of these parasitical politicians like Simpson and his old Pappy; like Pappy and Sonny Boy Bush...but then my outrage over these fools leads me back to the fools who rule us--and especially those two Bush fools who are the original culprits in our nation's current nosedive crashing headfirst into our own shit. It's not crashing for these fools, of course. They're sitting high up in the catbird seat of privilege--they manufacture from up there all this bullshit through which we're paddling madly upriver to survive.

Why does our President keep calling on the very fools who caused this nation to start sliding down the slippery slope to Poverty Hell to reverse the ruinous downhill motion that's their responsibility?

I suppose Old Alan has stolen enough fortune from We the People he doesn't need Social Security. BASTARDS! ASSHOLES! Self-centered. Mirror-satisfied, meaning when Alan Simpson looks in the mirror he sees magnificence; he sees power; he sees macho; he sees more bucks coming into his retirement coffers. These small-state political birds (Wyoming, Utah, the Dakotas, Alaska) live well, too, folks. The good life. Old Alan coming back to his old asshole buddies in D.C. (District of Corruption) to sit on this committee that leans in favor of the Corporations and not We the People, which means the ways this committee will come up with to reduce the deficit they caused will be to push We the People further down into debt and eventual economic slavery! We'll be forced by these Plantation-thinking elitists to work ourselves til death do us part on a minimum wage these fuckers want to cut back to cents an hour rather than dollars an hour. Hopefully, when we die as economic slaves to the Global Corporate Rulers, we'll be too poor to be buried. How about turning our poor (the lesser people) into Solvent Green?

The Lessers versus The Superiors--the Haves versus the Have Nots.

Another instance of rightwing insanity: a Reagan-appointed Federal judge in Louisiana (appointed in 1983, after Reagan was the permanent Alzheimer's poster boy) has decided it's time to throw another rightwing monkey wrench in President Obama's right decision to put a moratorium on proposed deep-water drilling sites until the cause of the failure of this one is figured out--besides, offshore deep-water drill sites currently in operation weren't affected by the moratorium--one of the most dangerous BP rigs, the Atlantis rig, set to blow sky high any day now, is still in operation). Here's a paragraph from a Reuters report (a British news agency that now has a hi-rise luxury office tower in the middle of our Times Square here in NYC):

Federal Judge Martin Feldman, appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1983, granted the drillers' request for a preliminary injunction that prevents the ban from taking effect, saying that they would likely succeed in showing that the suspension was "arbitrary and capricious".

"The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium," the judge wrote a day after hearing arguments in the case.

One big problem President Obama is having (and trust me, I don't feel sorry for Obama; I called him a trick bagger before he was even elected--another The Daily Growler prediction that came true) is that we tend to forget he spent more money on getting himself elected than any other presidential or any other candidate EVER (even more than our billionaire NYC mayor, Mall-Mad-Poor-People-Hatin' Mike Bloomberg who spent $100 million bucks to elect himself mayor for an illegal third term)! Obama even outspent what G.W. Bush had to spend in order to STEAL two elections over Al "The Bore" Gore (they've uncovered a little side-sex on old cattin'-around Al with a masseuse out in Portland) and John "Is That Ketchup on My Shirt Collar?" Kerry--and what an asshole John Kerry is these days--a wimp--teaming up now with Joe LIEberman in dreaming up monkey-wrench-in-the-works scheme bills and trying to pass them through this gold-bricking Congress--OH WHAT A LIFE THESE PUBLIC SERVANTS ARE LIVING. While we struggle, they play--and, yes, all of this is a big badly written Shakespearean play).

And where did Obama get most of his campaign finances?--NO, not like he and his Clintonista staff tried to tell us, from his grassroots backers--NO, most of his money came from--oh no!: the financial companies he and his predescessor bailed out to the tune of 3 trillion of We the People's taxes on our earnings (I'm amazed how that doesn't cause a revolution in this country--except we're a country of lost wimps, as I started off saying in this post). Obama got millions in campaign contributions from like his favorite Wall Street firm, Goldman-Sachs (such innocent good ole boys), or from the big pharmaceuticals (Pharma, the drug company lobbyist group is headed by an ex-Clinton lackey). Plus, you bet he got millions from the Military Industrial Complex, and, of course, our big old loveable OIL companies (including BP, I'm sure). So I don't pity Obama. He knows who's buttering his toast. He and MIchelle are now certified millionaires, so, hey, guess what, our first Black (he's half-White I keep hollering--doesn't his mother count for anything in his life?) president has now made it into, through the backdoor, of course, our Power Elite. That in itself was quite a feat. Plus, now the Obamas are set for life even if the Teabaggers (Neo-Con paper tigers really--if ignored they disappear--like Falwell's Silent Majority) bludgeon their ways back into Congressional control--and maybe put Sarah Palin into the White Man's House--set for life in that he now has a $400,000-a-year salary guaranteed for the rest of his born days; the best in healthcare coverage for the rest of his family's life; plus free office space and staffs and security staff and security systems in their houses and offices...plus, think of this, probably a new mansion maybe here in New York State where the Obamas could move and like where perhaps Mr. Obama or Mrs. Obama might one day run for the Senate or for Governor or something--hey, that's what the Clintons did--why not the Obamas? Or remember, both Barrack and Michelle are corporate lawyers by desire, so hell, they can get high seats in the Wall Street world of litigational corruption should they come out of the community organizer closet and decide to go that way. Certainly they both have major publishing contracts in their futures--and surely some hack in Hollywood has already written the filmscript for "The Barack Obama Story," starring Will Smith maybe, with his wife, Jada, playing Michelle while standing on a soap box.

It's all so corrupt.

[As an aside: Check out the British invading our pharmaceutical markets through Glaxo-Wellcome's merging with the US firm Smith-Kline to become GSK!:

Glaxo Wellcome-SmithKline Beecham merger creates world's largest drug company

By Robert Stevens
22 January 2000

On January 18, UK pharmaceutical companies Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham announced that they would be merging their operations. Glaxo SmithKline will be the largest drug company in the world as well as the largest company outright in the UK. The merger deal is to be completed in the summer of this year and no opposition is anticipated from the monopolies and mergers commission, the government or other regulatory obstacles.

Jean-Pierre Garnier, the company's new chief executive designate, said, "The new company is global, proud of its roots in the UK and of its corporate domicile in the UK. But a world class competitor cannot operate all of its functions from a market that represents only 6 percent of its existence." He said that the new company would be taking decisions of strategy away from its current UK base.

Source: www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jan2000/glax-j22.shtml

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Smith-Kline, by the way, is an American company started back in the mid-19th Century by a Philadelphia chemist, John Smith (druggist) (all pharmaceutical companies starting as drugstores--or The Chemists, as they were then called--Pfizer, for instance, was originally Charles Pfizer & Sons, druggists, of Brooklyn, NY).]
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BP Botches Another Sure-Fire Way of Stopping That Little Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak Their Cost-Cutting CFO and His Bonus-Greedy Big Shot Executive Buddies Caused
BP is blaming this FAILURE to stop their so-called "leak" on an underwater robot device that supposedly accidentally crashed into BP's latest sham capping of the out-of-control (wildcat) well. And guess what? This latest OOPS! by BP has reopened the well to full gush--back to 200 million (check that out, folks) barrels of OIL A DAY! Oil that is now washing up in floating together pools onto those beautiful white-sand beaches, the San Carlos beaches outside Pensacola, Florida, which means these floating oil pools will soon be coming ashore on further south down that beautiful West Coast of Florida, it's Gulf Coast--down through Tarpon Springs, Saint Petersburg, Sarasota, down through Fort Meyers, the Sannibel Islands, down to Marco Island--OIL pools that will soon be creeping on around the tip of Florida, flushing into Key West, then getting caught maybe in the Gulf Stream and boogie-ing on over to Ireland and maybe rushing into the filthy-already Thames in Merry Old England--OIL for the WORLD brought to you by British Petroleum (and the British government did buy 51% interest in this company when it found oil in Iran way back in World War I and the British going about raping the wealths out of its desert occupations in all those countries--read T.E. Lawrence (Shaw)'s, Seven Pillars of Wisdom; it explains in an interesting read all the skulduggeries that went into the British Upper Crust diplomatic corps and British Military high-flyers campaign to free the Arab tribal chiefs from the Turkish Ottomen Empire rule and thereby gain contol of ALL THAT OIL!). Sobeit.

And to think, some of our fearless leaders (our BETTERS) are defending British Petroleum and blaming BP's being unable to control this spill they caused on the Obama administration! What a bunch of lopsided backward-thinking self-centered FOOLS; yet they've got the power. THEY'VE GOT OUR MONEY, OUR NATURAL RESOURCES (from which our government makes huge hunks of money--and the state governments make huge hunks of money--in terms of BP paying us for those leases and the rent on those platforms sitting in our waters on our seafloor--unaccounted for monies, too), OUR JOBS--they now own most of our foreclosed on properties and homes and businesses; they've taken our once-great industrial complex and shipped it off to China and South Korea and Taiwan and Indonesia and Mexico.

And what about Haiti? It's disappeared from all news, including the BBC's World News that airs nightly on our Public B(British)roadcasting System.

ALSO: What was Slick Willie Jeff Clinton doing with a class seat at the World Cup match between the US and Algeria? There he was. Sitting there with some fat-jowled little pompous ass who looked maybe like an Algerian. And huzzahs to the US team--they're doing, as always, much better than the world soccer smartasses say they'll do. Hey, they beat England, but a fucking Islamic terrorist who, as he admitted, hates Americans, took the winning goal away from them. Just as the US government is corrupt as hell, so's FIFA, and these world cup matches where the teams with the most millionaire players are always the favorites. This year that team is Argentina because they're fielding a whole team of millionaires--not from playing in Argentina, but from playing for the biggest European professional football organizations, like one of the Argentinians plays for Manchester United. So Argentina is supposed to go all the way--probably facing Brasil in the Copa Mundial; that is, if things go the way the wiseass soccer experts predict.
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The General McCrysthal (We Call Him General CrystalMeth) Incedent
Obama is dumbass when it comes to this bunch of military nutjobs he's supposed to be commanding. To begin with, any low-life jerk who's been in the military knows generals or admirals aren't loyal to the USA--to the US government--NO--they are loyal to their military service--the military service in which they have gained top-dog status. That's why there can be military coups and military takeovers of governments--armed forces nuts are loyal to the military FIRST--and this includes the Pentagon and that Bush-appointee Robert Gates--an ex-General. "KILL or BE KILLED" is all these OLD career generals know. They see the enemy in anyone who's not wearing an American official military uniform--an overburdened uniform by the way--with backpacks and heavy weapons and side pieces and this and that while their counterparts are wearing native clothing--you catch my drift?

We've elected several generals as president. Check out their records. Don't be surprised if you find failure in every one of their administrations. And don't throw Ike Eisenhower at me and tell me he was a great president--he was a fool--he was more interesting in his own contentment than he was that of We the People. It was Eisenhower's Cabinet members who gave us the Cold War, the CIA and its shenanigans, and who started sending "advisers" over to South Vietnam after Uncle Ho and the Vietnamese People's Army had kicked the pompous French asses at Dien Bin Phu.

So Obama fired McCrystal-Meth's old soldier ass and promoted another fool to the top spot--General Petraus (who we call General Betrayus), the "Surge" genius who won us the War in Iraq, though we still have the world's largest embassy there--and, oh yes, tens of thousands of US troops still there, too. By the way, innocent people in Iraq are still being killed daily due to our presence there. And, didn't Bush declare the Afghanistan Disaster a NATO war now near the end of his last stolen term in his stolen office? And while we're on that subject, I still can't believe that little jerk Bush is still roaming the world free as a bird--look at all the ruination that little evil prick bastard and his old Pappy's greedy world-domination philosophies have caused us--and still he's free as a bird. [George Herbert W. "Pappy" Bush, by the way, is a big backer of Reverend Sun Yung Moon--whose Moonie family got God-awful rich--Sun Yung rich enough to declare himself Jesus Christ--off their mountain ginseng root business--especially by trumpeting that Korean mountain ginseng root was a miraculous source of healing powers and male-erectile-dysfunction repair in this country starting in the early 70s. [On my first visit to a Korean restaurant in NYC, back in the free-time (briefly) '70s (the free-love was the charm of those years), I had a ginseng root-vodka martini--I ended up on the floor of my girlfriend-at-the-time's apartment. Naked under her bed. I woke up and, yes, she was under the bed with me--naked, too. I supposed in our rush to find out whether ginseng root had magical sexual powers we'd mistook the floor under the bed for the top of the bed--is that possible? One thing's for sure, the vodka made us drunk; what the ginseng root did, I'll never know--because I can't remember. She didn't look all that satisfied that morning over burnt toast and bad coffee.]

What amazed me about this McCrysthal farce was what the hell was that military dick doing traveling around France in limos with his fucking staff in tow? I mean he was there to give his wife a surprise wedding anniversary party in Paris and while he was there he was dining like a duke with French officials. He told all this to the Rolling Stone reporter while they boogied about Europe on a bus while getting drunk and bullshitty on Bud Light Lime beer. As one pundit said, how does one get stinking, sloppy, blabbermouth drunk on that beer? There's more water in a Bud Light Lime than there is beer. Guess who has to foot the bill for McCrysthal's Paris Follies?

Solution: Pull our forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately! Like we did in Vietnam, just fly our forces out of there en masse. Guess what? I'll bet terrorist threats would stop if we'd pull out of these invasions and occupational attempts. I MEAN, both of these stupid costly war games were based on LIES! That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which they didn't; that Afghanistan had been responsible for 9/11, which they weren't. But President Obama like G.W. Bush has his most power in the executive order business and being Commander in Chief--ooooooh, big, big Power being commander in chief.

General Petraus will continue to lead us into DOOM in that unwinable nonsense War in Afghanistan, now the longest-ever and most-righteous war in our long military history--though look at the unrighteous bastards who are so high-classly fiddling away in Paris while Afghanistan goes to disastrous hell in a US-funded handbasket. "Oh, what fools we mortals be." Whoever said that was a shrewd man.

Yes, folks, you asked for it: God has blessed America! He's given us so many Devils to contend with. But, worry not, folks, the White Christian White God (whatever they call HIM these days) has his wings spread over this Christian-based Nation (White Nation) because next to Israel, this is HIS favorite country--why, hell, some Americans think Jesus passed through the US on his way to Japan to meet his Japanese brother. Or, hell, some Americans believe Sun Yung Moon is Jesus Christ returned in a cheap Korean suit.

Is religion the opiate of the people?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Monday, June 21, 2010

Living in New York City Trying to Impersonate a Woman

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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My Gender Switching I Am
I've been peddling writing to a closer-than-close friend, a brilliant young woman with a brilliant mind and so many nooks and crannies of multiple climaxing stories or relations to relate in one of her various multitasking dimensions. Writing as a personal way to promote yourself and your feelings whether inward ones or empirically based ones. She sent me back a short note from her notes--notes she decided to start taking in terms of herself writing. It was funny and I got what she was driving at.

All last night I dwelt heavy with myself when a story idea snuck up on me and I had to deal with it no matter how far away from my routine it took me--a spontaneous way of writing development that imposes its will on me when it baits my actions with such imposing sparkling ideas for tales--I'm going to show what I've written on it so far. Like I ended up telling my closer-than-close friend, I want to lose my self in my writing--yet, my I Am keeps wrestling with my muse for protagonist powers, my muse telling me to deceitfully mask my I Am in...well, say, my closer-than-close friend's aura--can I write and think like a brilliant beautiful female like her? The challenge. Here's how all these imposing baits of ideas tried to fish me out of my deep-diving I Am and into trying to be a female (I Am She):

Benny
"Once upon a time..." the writer wrote before getting wiggly and grabbing for his cigarettes as he started to fall. He fell. In an head spinning effort he arose. Then he fell upon what came after "Once upon a time...". The Queen used to tell him, "Don't you all be goin' back in them woods, 'specially them hilly woods up there where it's always chilled." "Why not, Queen?" he the first time he heard her say it asked. "'Cause Benny's up there." "Who's Benny?" "Benny's a hermit." "What's'a hermit?" "A hermit's a man who ain't got no soul, no heart, no nothing, so as he don't wanna live no normal life, like we're s'pose to live." "Aren't there any women hermits?" "Naw, son, women can't live alone--or if they do they live near they family or sometin', but, no, no woman 'less she's crazy as an outcast coyote's gonna live like Benny does. 'Sides, it takes a man to live off raw flesh." "RAW FLESH," I screamed, "What the hell you talkin' about, Queen?" "Damn right. I ain't lyin'. Old Man Skimmer's said he's seen Benny trap a rabbit with his bare hands, slit its belly open while every thing's still all hot in there, then stick his face in there and come out bloody faced and a chewin' real big and happy like." "Old Man Skimmer's a piece of hot-air crap, ev'rybody knows that, Queen." "OK, smart-ass, how 'bout your own father, the King?" "Come on, my father's seen Benny eat a rabbit raw?...fur'n all, I suppose." "The King said he vouched Benny had the fur of some animal 'round hiz mouth the time he saw him."

But I'm not writing fairy tales. I'm trying to write actual things as this woman, Queen, retold them. Fiction? OK, yes, it's fiction. Isn't history mostly fiction? Aren't most texts of past solutions mostly past being actual anymore? Like 1 and 1 equals 2. Is that still true? So I guess I am writing Queen's fairy tales. That's grim to me. And I joke within myself a lot. I'm in love, so I'm writing as though I'm racing to stay ahead of time, of passing time, time I'm defending my goals against. But I've had Queen and Benny on my mind lately. As a result I started drifting back and being in that big living room with Queen where I was once upon a time. Queen sitting on her throne. A big E-Z rocker like she liked. She called it an E-Z rocker because she said it reminded her of Peter Fonda's motorcycle in
Easy Rider. Or at other times she might tell visitors that she liked it because it matched the special driver's seat The King had custom built for her in her always-new Cadillac. Now she sat in that E-Z rocker and watched television morning, noon, and night.

"TV's reality, son. Hollywood's just a reflection of how we all see ourselves in our mirrors," she'd tell me. "Shakespeare said all the world's a stage and...," I would try to inject. "I used to fake those silly evangelical hillbillies out by declaiming Shakespeare at 'em." "You quoting Shakespeare?" "I was an actress, sonny boy, a damn good actress. You gotta be a good actress to be a band singer. You gotta be a good actress to be a good anything. A good wife. You bet womens is all actresses, while men can be phonies and posers and trick-pony experts--like being their natural show-off selves--women started acting and then men saw they could get the choice women if they'd start being actors, when actually men are all playwrights. You see those hundreds and hundreds of actors and actresses on that hot box there, that 21 inches of open-window-on-the-real-world? They represent our civilized ideals to us. Either we accept their ideals as our ideals or we're off the page and called eccentric."


But back when I was a kid, she was always on the front porch of her castle. Her house. The King's home. And my home. But she ruled it. That's why she was called the Queen. It was legit. Her name really was Queen. Queen Elizabeth Wolfe. She was the wife of who she called The King. My dad, E. A. P. Wolfe (yes, for Edgar Allan Poe). His dad, my grandfather, Al Wolfe, swore our Wolfes were direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe. Later when I learned the truth about how Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a real Poe at all, I hadn't the heart to tell Old Al that he wasn't kin to Edgar Allan Poe if he were a Poe descendant. Although I could hear Old Al (we never called him Grandpa) now defending his ignorance. "Shucks, you shavetails, I was joshing yo'r little jive asses. Of course I knew Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a real Poe--hell, that thar dog over there knows that. I was jest testing you're investigative powers. You know, I'm hopin' you grandkids'a mine grow up smarter than me but not as sharp. You all'll never be as sharp as Al N. Wolfe." That causes me to remember how my uncle's kids used to ask him, "Mister Al, what does the 'N' stand for in your name?" "Nothin'. N-O-T-H-I-N-G...Nothin'!"


Before she was Queen Elizabeth Wolfe she was Queen Elizabeth Lamb. "My mother when she heard who I was marryin' said, 'Holy Moses, I'm feedin' my precious little Queen Lamb to that awful Al Wolfe's son. May God forgive me.'" Truth was, Mother Lamb and Little Queen Elizabeth needed money and old Al had plenty of money and land and Mother Lamb knew full well Al's only son, my dad, the King, was gonna inherit it all when they finally carted Al off to his already paid-for plot in the local high-class cemetery--Rolling Dells Cemetery. Weird name I thought for a flat-line flat cemetery. Rolling dells! I once heard the King say after Old Al's carcass was buried there that they were changing the name to Rolling Hell because Old Al's ghost was in there and in charge of the ghost situation. "You believe in ghosts, King?" "The Holy Ghost, hell yeah, son."
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Back to the Mainline:
You see at the end of what I finished of the tale, I had shrugged myself back into my I Am. I had become my self again. I can't think like women; not even the women I was ever the closest to--and what women were those? I think. I lived with one ten years and to try to think like her twists me into clowny knots. I haven't a clue how that woman thought. Does her spirit haunt me now that she's in her Rolling Dells plot?--under a tree actually in the backyard of the adobe house she built with her own two hands. You see, had I used her in a tale, I would have never had her building a house with her own two hands--hands that I knew in a totally opposite way.

I knew another woman 30 years and if I try to foist myself on her character, I'd be too bittersweet (a great Aretha Franklin song, by the bye) to be fair to her. I mean, this woman could be so "loving" on one side and so fucking frozen-ass cold on the other side.

In the story above, I have no idea who Queen is out of my past. She doesn't think at all like the female I intended to impersonate. Where did she come from? Aha, I hit myself on the dome, of course, she's me; she's simply my I Am in drag.

I can't get close enough to any women I know to become them in drag. But maybe it's possible with this one now I'm wanting to see things like. Yet, the character Queen pops into what started out and still is the Benny character's story. God-damn, I love writing. Writing is my God.

I've been reading one of my fellow bloggers who's spouting into deaf ears that economics is a religion! YES, I hollered back at him--as Huey Newton said, everything is economics and economics is Capitalism in this country and that's what's wrong with this country--Capitalism needs continuous growing profits however it can get them--like Oliver Stone's character in "Wall Street"--the one Michael Douglas was playing--said, greed is the way to a stronger Capitalism...and Greed is certainly a God in the Economics pantheon. When there are no more profits, Capitalists start WARS. Our economy NOW is a WAR economy--WARS defending Capitalism--WARS perpetuating Capitalism. And look at all the global markets that through greed the Corporate World Domination will bleed national economies dry through buying up their land and stealing their natural wealth, breaking their backs, then imposing IMF loans on them to put them then in perpetual debt--where their citizens in order to survive have to become slaves to the Capitalist system.

Whew. I'm Bushed. And so have WE the People of the Good Ole USA been Bushed. The New World Order is upon us. Its bootheel is on our necks.
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I am who I am and can't seem to get out of the rut of it. My I Am is my best friend but also my worst enemy. I am a lone Wolf, but not a lonely Wolf. I do have an ideal woman in my lone Wolf head--and I do know who that woman is. But I must be quiet in my "Howlin' for my darlin'"--I must re-be ME and in the meantime, find out who this Queen woman is--is she my ideal woman? Am I subconsciously creating her in the image of my female self? Oh how utterly fascinating--or as my real dad once commented as we passed a field of dairy cows, "What an udderly lovely scene." So pastoral my dad. So cornfield. So many of his fields seeded in wild oats.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Living in New York City: Where the Richest People in the World Are Saying They Need More and More and More Money

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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New York City Landlords Once Again Claiming Poverty
I am "up 'n Adam" (speaking "Prezian" (the language of Lester Young)) with the dawn. Listening to Shostakovich's very intellectual 1st and 2nd string quartets. I just bought a Decca box set (England) of all 16 (6 CDs) of Shosty's string quartets for 99 cents on eBay (even with $3.oo shipping that's cheap). Nicely packaged with notes by some classical music smart-ass writing as though he's more capable of understanding Shostakovich's music than Shostakovich was himself. We expect this from classical reviewers. They must show their astute musical intelligence in ordinary words. Boring, but I read them anyway. I like reading intellectual boring stuff. Stiffs, we used to call classical geeks. Longhairs was what they were called when I was a little "keed" (speaking "Babe Ruthian") taking piano lessons.

I'm drinking coffee. Black. I did away with milk and cream and shit like that in my coffee years ago. This bean's relaxin' me. I'm "tippin' in" (speaking "Errol Garnerian") to the day on "little cat feet" (speaking "Carl Sandbergian"). S'pose to go up to 90 today and be humid and there's no humor in humidity of that I will be guaranteed today. Ninety in New York City means the temperature in my unair-conditioned apartment will go up over 100--I've seen it at 120 one summer when I went through that summer without even any fans. I was recording one afternoon and looked over my piano out into the room and I saw water floating in the air of the room. How fiercely I loved that afternoon--and I still possess a tape on which I left the mic open and I'm talking about what I'm seeing floating in the air before me, that I am sitting at a piano literally underwater--sucking the oxygen out of the oily vaporous waters into which my lungs they're flowing. (Damn, I like writing sentences like that last one. My editorial-critical nature leads me to rewrite it but my sitting-on-my-shoulder muse--she's female--tells me to fuck the speed limit and full speed ahead.)

Besides, these are the jotted-down-fast words of a solo-flying lone-wolf of a man. I've no more wives--no children that I let call me daddy--I am standing alone looking down this final hill, down the narrow trail that ends at my burial place--or the cigar box my ashes will be preserved in--unless a future relative's child or Alzheimer'd parent mistakes my remains for Nestle's Chocolate Drink Mix and makes a milk shake out of me--and I base my chocolate milk shake analogy on the basis of my nephew's cigar box of ashes that sits handily on a shelf in the dining area of his sister's kitchen--very reachable by a young child curious as to what's in the cigar box--oops--and I forgot about that potential end of me! Spilled on the floor; vacuumed up and sent to hell by maybe a "housekeeper" (new proper word for maid). A man flying solo solo flying in New York City (whoooo, what a beginning to a sentence)--I'm "flyin' home" (speaking "Charlie Christianian") hot, adapted to the beats of all temperatures--from Hellish hot to Hellish cold. I've always been an admirer of statements like, "Jesus, I'm cold as Hell." I used to perform a John Lee Williamson blues I learned from Aleck "Rice" Miller in 1960 called "9 Below Zero." For some reason I remembered the last verse of it as "I'd rather be tied out in the desert/Right out in the falling rain"--to which Bob Guida (theryefarmerfromqueens) playing bass behind me would holler out, "It don't rain in the desert, Wolfie!" Yet, still to this day when I'm asked to repeat my version of the song once again, I sing that last verse whether wrong-or-not that way--though now I wait for Bob's response and it doesn't come.

The heat of loneliness? There's no such thing as loneliness in my New York City life. Yes, there are lonely people wandering all over this town, but one of them is not me. I've never been lonely not even when left alone. Not even when left alone and lost. Not even when lost and left alone.

The sea air of Rhode Island was sweet to breathe. It cleared up my polluted lungs--ridded them temporarily of the highly polluted New York City air remains that were oilily clinging to my easy-going lungs--New York City air that is now being polluted more and more by high-rise luxury apartment and hotel building sites--building 52-t0-62-storey buildings all around me--polluting the air with construction dusts of all kinds and chemical fumes and gasoline and diesel fumes and noise--constructing these buildings that will one day be using enormous amounts of energy and adding another layer of pollution to the already offal-laden NYC air. The air-conditioning systems in these buildings are small buildings themselves sitting atop these architectural monstrosities--gigantic dynamic units needed to pump hot and frigid air through the miles of ducts these behemoth buildings contain--water too coming down from the wooden tanks on their roofs--hidden on some of them, left tank-obvious on others. These maintaining the pressure needed to move that water from the city system up to the tanks on the roofs--and in their basements they need bigger-than-life boilers to heat the water and the building--and these boilers burn enormous amounts of fuel OIL--and their exhaust pipes up on the roofs spew out the fumes from this burnt OIL all up into our air--and it comes back down and into our apartments as oily grit that accumulates in ugly layers on our window sills whether insulated and sealed or not...falling sooty onto our flat surfaces! The emissions from these buildings will add 100% more pollution to the already over 100%-polluted air over this great city. An air full of dioxins, mercury poisons, cadmium leads, the excrement of buildings--their fecal matter. Yet, construction continues though it has slowed tremendously down--some sites shut totally down, others running on lean staffs of nonunion and illegal immigrant construction workers.

I just saw a report yesterday on how with the falling of the Euro dollar, Euro-Trash apartment gobblers-uppers and developer types are turning away from NYC real estate, where just a few months ago, our Billionaire Mayor, Mall-Mad Mike Bloomberg, was jacking us off with how New York City real estate was still prime and how these Euro-Trashers coming over here with their probably ill-gotten Euro bucks were keeping the NYC real estate market in the uppercrust areas (sky high) of affordability. Now, statistics show NYC real estate is taking a tumble, not at the bottom yet--though parts of it are dragging the bottom already. The Mayor's "higher" tax base may be collapsing around us, while ironically, NYC landlords are making big bucks on high rents and added-on charges like $100-a-month added onto your rent if you install an air-conditioner. My nextdoor neighbor with a wife and a kid is paying $2500-a-month for two tiny rooms, a living room-kitchen-bathroom and a bedroom that at one time was the apartment's kitchen. So you bet my landlord is making a profit off that apartment. Yes, these greedy bastards are mortgaged to the hilt, but that doesn't matter to rich people who can afford to buy New York City buildings. Like Donald Trump going bankrupt at a certain time every year in order to bail himself out of failing casinos and unrented or unsold hi-floor apartments he depends on for at least footing the costs of building his tacky buildings. Did you know Donald Trump (a dumbass kid from Queens, New York, whose old pappy was a successful real estate man) probably makes his most "profits" off his tanking teevee show and his real-estate-get-rich scheme than he does creating these very tacky Trump Cities all over the world. Hey, if you had big stolen bucks say from illegal arms dealing or maybe illegal diamond trading or being involved with a drug cartel, or perhaps with a huge offshore bank deposit, why wouldn't you invest (launder) that tainted money through Trump and one of his many building projects going on all over the world? Think about that. Think about how Trump's image is totally accepted as the Amurican Dream "Self-Made Man" by we US fools. So think about how easy it would be for The Donald to launder billions of off-the-books money around the world--mostly out of reach of our overtaxed IRS auditors.

Rich people support their asshole buddies, failures or not (read Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class; C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite)--like G.W. Bush and his many failed ventures (ditto the ventures of Neal Bush, Marvin Bush, the backgrounded daughter, Jeb (named after a Confederate general) Bush). G.W. came out of all of those failures richer and more powerful thanks to his old Pappy's worldwide criminal connections--with cocaine trafficking in South America, for instance. Remember, Pappy Bush knew the Panamanian coke dealer General Noriega--there are photos of them being buddy-buddy together--and then the General decided he was gonna fuck Pappy and handle their joint cocaine traffic himself. That's when Pappy went after his ass--remember? Pappy dropped a bomb on the poor of Panama; killed scores of these filthy savage devils (over 1000(?))--eventually getting his man and setting him up in a Miami-mansion-prison where Noriega has sat for some years now being supported in his comfortable jail life by We the People of the USA.

It's easy for these assholes to launder drug money in their many under-the-table ways. Whereas had you been Noriega but not Pappy's pal, you'd be scratching lines on the wall of some prison for 25-to-life. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws of New York State you'd get life without parole for even a minor drug charge--and ain't it ironic that the Rockefeller Drug Laws were put into effect by an egomaniacal son of the biggest industrial crook of our time, John D. Rockefeller, an oil man who knew nothing about oil--was a drugstore bookkeeper from Ohio. Nelson Rockefeller, the man for whom the Rockefeller Drug Laws are named, died with a smile on his face while getting a blow job from two young women, one of whom is now on the board of PBS--oh, that's right, it was rumored she was there, but that she was not the girl (Megan Marshak) who supposedly was sucking on old Rocky's gnarly knob when he died. [Check out whipitoutcomedy.com/ They've got a list of famous people who've died having sex--my favorite is the Pope who is said to have had a heart attack while sodomizing a page boy. Amazing the antics of our early Roman Catholic (Christian) clerics--I mean, I don't think of priests without thinking of young boys; though there have been you're highly jacked-up hetero priests, one of whom in Whipitout's list either had a heart attack while in the saddle with another man's wife or else he was caught in the act by the husband who then beat the poor Holy Father to a pulp. All referring me back to The Decameron.]

So due to the dying NYC real estate boom--"It's over, Johnny!"--NYC landlords are now crying poverty and asking for rent increases up to 15%. Does it make sense if your building is losing money to raise the rents? Why not lower the rents and rent all your apartments rather than letting them sit empty because you can't get the abominable high rents Mayor Bloomberg has justified as "normal," due to his kissing tourists's and foreign developers's asses. Can you believe that the only industry left in New York City is tourism?

One thing that was kind of sickening on my trip to and from Rhode Island was passing the huge number of abandoned factory buildings from New York City all the way on up to Rhode Island--some huge, like the abandoned Samsonite factory building in Warren, Rhode Island. A huge old red-brick factory building that is now being turned into luxury condos or artist lofts. These properties simply abandoned by these companies as they fly their machinery off to China, where I assume Samsonite luggage is now made.

You look at these old factories and you think about how once nearly everything we buy was made in this country. New York City was the fashion center of the world, not Paris. It was the millinery capital of the world. Men's ties were made here. Rochester, New York, used to be the men's suit-making capital of the US--Hart, Schafter & Marx suits were considered some of the finest made in the world--now gone! Van Heusen made shirts here. Hathaway shirts considered the most stylish pure Egyptian cotton shirts in the world were made here. Remember the Hathaway man with his eyepatch and "sophisticated" look in his Classic Hathaway shirt? Now when I buy clothes I check the labels to see where they're made. Singapore. Malaysia. Indonesia. China. Ecuador. Honduras. It's hard to find any clothes made in the USA. One funny one I saw on a K-Mart shirt the other day was "Made in Mexico Out of Materials Made in USA."

That's the global marketplace, folks. And you know we live in a corporate state now...or did you not know that? We are now consumers only and when we run out of money to consume with, some cell of crooks will issue us more credit cards and offer us time-payment plans galore. I love these "No Interest Until 2014!" sucker ads--especially popular on furniture store ads in NYC. And I'm thinking, the same fools who support the American Idol teevee show (or who idolize Oprah or Ellen) fall for these advertisements. No interest until 4 years from now means that the item you bought for $5000 at 5% per month interest is gonna blow your ass away when you get the final payment total and all that interest piled up over 4 years is coming due.
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How embarrassing are our "public servants" over the British Petroleum bullshit that's being bandied about in Washington at our expense? Especially the southern-drawling racist Congress-Corporate Asslicker, Rep. Joe Barton of, I'm ashamed to say, Texas, a Repugnican, who called what Obama was doing forcing BP to put a 20-billion-dollar escrow account to draw claims from a "shakedown." Turns out Joe reaped a million or so off Anadarko OIL, a subsidiary of BP--why son of a bitch--and it turns out old Joe is on the energy committee. Why son of a bitch! I say if you check all the stock portfolios of these overpaid public servants you'll find 'em chocked full of OIL stocks. Our public servants are servants of the Corporation Massuhs who they really represent--those Plantation-creating Corporations who our Supremely Dumb Court insists are individual citizens, with the same Constitutional rights as you and I. Check out their stock portfolios and you'll find 'em all shucking their BP stock--and I guarantee you all of 'em have stock portfolios chocked full of OIL stocks. [The CEO of BP was seen having a fucking royal old time of it at the yacht races in England today.]

I say, old chap, what the fuck good are these Congressional investigations by these overpaid asshole fat-cat Congresspeople? (No caps on their salaries, you notice.) An American citizen (OK, she was a Code Pinker) stood up during yesterday's sham investigation and screamed that these little lyin' pipsqueak Brit-twit asshole BP execs are criminals and should pay for their crimes by being handcuffed and hauled off to the Capitol jail for pretrail waterboarding--they'd be held as murderers in the animal world court (perhaps with dolphins and pelicans as judges). But the Congressional lackey cops quickly hustled this creepy American citizen out of the chambers--oh so solemn these solons are as they go about their asinine sham investigations. Oh no they snidely defend their actions, these great OILMEN are not criminals, simply brilliant men sidetracked by this big accidental leak--not bad at all, according to BP's precious commercials--respected not as criminals but as pals gone haywire in the tough world of unfair pressures.

British Petroleum should be confiscated by We the People. Come on, Obama, you're kowtowing to the fucking rightwingers again with this OIL catastrophe--you're spouting the same bullshit G.W. Bush spouted when he first flew over and then was humiliated to fly back over and actually land in Mississippi (remember, he said he was there to check to see if his old pal Trent "Strom Thurmond for President" Lott's front porch was repaired yet) after the Gulf Coast disaster caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Remember Bush setting up his own lighting equipment along with his podium with the presidential seal on it in Jackson Square and making that holier-than-thou speech where he pledged he was gonna bring New Orleans back bigger and better than before and with less blacks, too, by golly? Remember that speech?

All this BP trouble Obama's facing now was caused by Unka Dick Cheney and his OIL gang, the misfits who allowed BP to drill-drill-drill, deep-deep-deep rights in our Gulf Coast waters in the first place. By the way, these are the same assholes promoting natural gas as a clean energy source, too--promoted especially by T. Boone Pickens (a poker player turned OILman) and Unka Dick (a Texan turned Wyomingite) both from gas-producing states, T. Boone from the Panhandle of Texas and Unka Dick from Wyoming--eastern Wyoming being drill-drill-drilled dry of its natural gas via thousands of gas wells and blown to bits and dug into to extract heavy sulphur coal out of Wyoming's beautiful rolling plains where the buffalo once roamed and the real Americans worshipped the beauty and providence of this magnificent land--and Wyoming is one of the most scenic Lower 48 states in terms of rugged mountains extending out into rolling grassland plains--from mountain blue rolling out into grassy gold.

Unka Dick Cheney. Oh how lucky this little criminal prick is. We tend to forget this weasel-like old bastard with the evil-bad ticker was head of Halliburton and continued to reap profits from Halliburton even after he was VICE-president under G.W. Bush's two stolen-presidential terms. And trust me, folks, you don't have to guess at it, Unka Dick Cheney (his evil mentor Pappy GWH Bush) is heavily involved in this offshore drilling catastrophe. Halliburton of Dubai, United Arab Emirates--formerly of Ardmore, OkieHoma (becoming a major player in OIL after stealing oil lands from Native American Oklahomans)--now an ARAB company--how fucking ironic is all of this? Nationalize these OIL crooks! We the People own our OIL just like the Saudi-Arabians own their OIL and Iraq is trying to hold on to its OIL and Iran is simply defending itself against those wanting to steal its OIL--like British Petroleum--and like the British Empire, cause of everything WRONG going on in the world today.

All who know me know I am a natural-born Anglo-basher. I'm especially peeved by the Brit accent--and also the Aussie accent--though I now have an Aussie in my closeknit relationships who's a peach of a dude (speaking "Deep South American"). All day long now all over NYC commercial television are Brit fops involved in every-other ad (the Geico geiko speaks with an Australian accent); around NYC are these Outback Steak Houses whose ads emphasize that perhaps Australians invented the "barby," when I know, being a Texan, that barbecuing is simply a way of cooking normal to the way of life of guachos, vaqueros, cowboys--the chuck wagon cooks throwing the big steaks onto grills heated by buffalo chip fires or mesquite-wood fires--though in reality, barbecuing was probably invented by our earliest human neanderthals those who lived in caves and discovered a perpetual flame--the flame of the perpetual fire becoming a symbol of God (the Sun) to ancient civilizations (the artificiality of mankind). Most of our teevee amateur dance and entertainer shows are judged by Brit fops, one Ozzie Osbourne's boring wife (Howie Mandell, a Canadian, also a judge on that show); insults to our American musical and dance history, actually much uniquer than anything the Brits ever came up with--and in dance I respect guys like Michael Fokine, though, hey, these people left London and came to the US because the dance over here, you see, had discovered JAZZ and jazz intertwined with the modern dance forms of de Mille and Dunham and Graham--Black-American-African-Rooted dance blending in to form a way of dancing that was loose as a goose yet so based on American beats and rhythms and times and fantasy.

I watched the teevee show 60 Minutes the other eve and by God they've added a Brit chick to their staff of reporters. Several of the announcers of our US Open Golf Tournament going on out at Pebble Beach Golf Course (owned by a Japanese developer) are Brits and the majority of the players are Brit Empire whites from South Africa, England, Australia, Ireland. The "Vikings" or whatever the hell they are in the Capital One (where did this company come from?) commercials all speak with Brit accents. Cockney is becoming the appropriate way to speak English now! The Brits stole my American roots music right out from under me--a majority of my fellow White American musicians went right along with this notion that is now widespread that the Brits invented modern rock 'n roll. The Brits took the blues out of American music and turned our rock into bubble-gum rock--"Don't put your chewing gum on the bedpost at night"--but then most of us don't remember Lonnie Donegan, do we?

So now British Petroleum has claimed our Gulf of Mexico shoreline as their own. And how insulting are these new BP commercials (why are they running on NYC teevee?) showing this friendly serious Black male who says he's a local boy--he's dressed supercasual--and he's been put in charge of handing out the 20-billion bucks in claims checks from the forced-on BP 20-billion escrow account--the Black guy (actor), you notice, never gives his name during the whole of these insulting commercials. However, don't worry, about BP, they'll make up for their losses with bankruptcies and spinning off smaller entities and getting new tax breaks and future drilling leases and future offshore drilling--maybe they'll change their name and move to Dubai, United Arab Emirates--though isn't Dubai currently bankrupt?

The British Empire lives on--sending the World to hell in a fucking Indian-made Jaguar handbasket--those Woggies, so Brit clever they are. [In an interesting aside, it's rumored that that great patriotic American terrorist, Eric Prince, is moving his private army, Blackwater, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Why don't We the People of the USA simply annex all these states--even Israel--let's make them states of our DISUNION!]

theanglophobicgrowlingwolf
for The Anglophobic Daily Growler

THE FINAL WORD...from our Guest Reporter...MR MET!!!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-GckXqvg4yg/SkBfm2UN8ZI/AAAAAAAAAJs/MbfMVHQUqog/s400/mr-met3.jpg
"Hey, you smug mugs. Go Mets! Huzzahs all 'round por mis amigos. How 'bout our kicking some Yankee ass yesterday! Yee haw! Go Mets. Go Hashimoto, or whatever his name is. I ain't learnt no Japanese yet. I'm still workin' on my Spanish. Go Mets! Who's the hottest team in beisbol NOW, you Yankee assholes! Go Mets! Steinbrenner has Alzheimer's! ARod swung like a pansy last night. And thank you, Jorge Posada--you can't knock one by the great David Wright! Go Mets! KISS MY LITTLE CHINA-MADE ASS! F___! the Phillies. F___! the Braves. GO METS!

"Thank you,

[signed] Mr. Met"
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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Living in New York City: Living With a Family Lie

Foto by tgw, "My Crow," New York City 2010
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We Lost Some More Great Ones
Bill Dixon, 84, American jazz musician.
Garry Shider, 56, American musician (Parliament-Funkadelic)
Oscar Azócar, 45, Venezuelan baseball player (New York Yankees, San Diego Padres).
Jimmy Dean, 81, American country music singer, actor and businessman (Jimmy Dean Foods)
Jack Beeson, 88, American composer of contemporary classical music

My Lying Brother

He's not here to defend himself. He died in 2002. He died believing he knew truths about both sides of our family nobody else knew. Right before he died, blind and deaf already, he took himself to Savannah, Georgia, to the seat of the Southern branch of our family. Our father's family origins. Just because our family name is the same as a famous revolutionary general's name who settled after the Revolutionary War in Savannah gives no verification of kinship to what our family has always considered "the patriarch," referred to in family history as "The Old General."

My brother had credentials. He had such credentials it was hard to challenge anything he wrote or stated as fact. His views were often challenged, but he managed to blow his challengers off with his enormous knowledge and self certainty. One challenge, for instance, to one of my brother's final words came from a much more famous Texas writer who disagreed with his hidebound view of Texas literature. This "feud" became so widespread the New York Times Review of Books carried dual (dueling) articles by my brother and this fellow Texas author.

By the time of my brother's death he had published 28 books, thousands of articles, essays, short stories, and newspaper columns in newspapers and magazines. I think I've established my brother as a source of historical information, yes, concerned mostly with Texas history, but with an eye out especially focused on both branches of his forebears.

According to my brother, the last words out of the mouth of the matriarch of my father's family, our grandmother, was "Find the Old General." My brother was 24 at the time and those words haunted him for the rest of his life. And then one day I found a copy of the Old General's son's several-volume biography of his father and I glance-read through it and knew immediately that I had to send it to my brother. As a result of his reading this biography, he came to the conclusion that since our father's family had originated in Savannah, Georgia, and that my dad's father's oldest brother spelled his name the English way--adding an e to it--whereas my dad's father dropped the e--but my dad put that vowel back on the end of his name--thus reattaching our lineage to The Old General.

My brother wrote me a long letter--right after I sent him the Old General's biography--when he heard my wife and I were going to Cape Cod with intentions of passing through Rhode Island in order to get there. In the letter he big-brother ordered me to be sure and "find the Old General's house in Newport." So my wife and I, in adherence to my brother's wishes, crossed the high bridge over into Newport after leaving Providence. I remember that day clearly--especially driving over the bridge--I'm a fan of high bridges--the highest in the US for many years was the high bridge at Orange, Texas, over the Sabine River, the area where my mother was born (a bridge I used to drive out of my way to cross just to cross it and then recross it when I visited the area as an adult). I remember driving down off the Newport bridge into Newport and I remember driving around there looking for evidence of the Old General and convincing myself I'd found it when I swear I saw a placard on a white frame structure that said it was the Old General's house. Except for passing through it on the bus, I haven't been back to Newport until this past weekend.

This past weekend I found myself in Rhode Island, in Warren, Rhode Island, to be map-like precise. And when my reason-for-being-there took me off for a ride up Narragansett Bay to see the sites, looping around the Bay, suddenly I looked into the distance and saw a high bridge--"Is that the Newport high bridge?" I asked. And yes it was. She was taking me to Newport! Thanks to my brother's great faith in his research, I thought of it as going home!

My close-close friend and I spent several minutes walking around Newport looking for evidence of the Old General but couldn't find any. We couldn't even find the street named after him. Finally, she went and asked some Newportians if they knew where the Old General's house was. They looked at us like we were from Mars. They knew of a small street bearing that name but, no, they'd never heard of the house. OK. No problem.

We gave up looking for my relative's inanimate-structural remains and trundled on out to the Cliff Walk that weaves its way along the sheer walls of an ancient point that has been bumped into by a large piece of Africa that sits like a miniature Rock of Gibraltar just off shore. This Cliff Walk leads you on a secure trail edging that island of rock on an ambling trip that takes your curious self out and around that notorious row of Newport mansions topped off by the Vanderbilt Mansion, a most grand place I must admit, fuck the fact that it was built off the backs of Irish potato famine men desperate for work and Chinese workers called "coolies"--those who built Vanderbilt's railroad empire. It is a magnificent house on a magnificent lawn--on its own promontory that looks out across the Atlantic Ocean. The Cliff Walk continues on its winding way on down toward the tobacco-rich Duke Mansion (ladied over by the now late infamous Doris Duke)--the Dukedom far out on its own point--I saw it sitting over there but we didn't take the trek, returning to her car and then tooling over to the Purgatory Chasm where we found a marker out on a rocky rise on the edge of a bluff that said it marked the site of the Middletown, Rhode Island, Historical Cemetery--but there was only a mound of weeds and sea grass with a block of concrete that contained only graffiti and no pertinent information as to why it was cemetery--there were no gravestones...we assumed it was a point from which they pitched humans, probably slaves, off into the briny deep. And off this rocky point the rock from Africa can be seen just off left in front of you.

I was feelin' really good about being in Newport--hell, I was ready to retire there--and when we returned to Warren, I got back to a point where it didn't matter the hell whether I was kin to the Old General or not. To hell with him and relatives. I had never given a damn much about my forebears. I did have a cousin who married a Mormon who got into delving deeply into our patriarchal family genealogy. But I never subscribed to her request for help in doing her research in Salt Lake at the Mormon genealogy library. My name is a very common surname and especially in the US. I really never was concerned about it until my brother started all of his investigations into it based on my grandmother's dying words. My mother had always considered the extension of the Old General's Old South family that turned into my father's family as White Trash. She considered her old-American family way far superior to that of the Old General's clan. She never had much to do with any of my father's family.

Back in Warren--Sunday morning, along with my old pal, L Hat, I walked around Warren looking for a place that served breakfast and real coffee--and we found it at a place called the Coffee Pot--we walked right by a street named after the Old General and neither of us noticed--so my searching for my family in Rhode Island was over and I was in the mood to get on back to the Apple and get back to living out my normal Manhattan-based life.

Over across the East River, over in Brooklyn, is a whole park named after the Old General, who at one time was leading his revolutionary forces down from Long Island, into Brooklyn, then through Manhattan on up the Hudson to West Point, New York, where he was temporarily in control of the fort there--then later, he even shows up at Valley Forge.

Back in NYC, after a steak dinner and two pints of Bass ale, and after watching Paraguay and Italy end up in a 1-1 tie in the last World Cup match of the day, I came back up to my apartment and began thinking about writing something about my Rhode Island adventure. I decided to Google the Old General, and, boy howdy, what I found knocked me for a loop--my brother was a liar. He didn't know what the hell he was talking about about the Old General in terms of Newport, Rhode Island. I found out the Old General was actually born in Coventry, Rhode Island, in the East Warwick area, which, ironically, was directly west of where I was visiting in Warren.

In another irony, it turns out, my mother's tribe--I knew they migrated from New England via Pennsylvania to Tennessee (the Nashville area)--is not only from Rhode Island, but perhaps from Warren, Rhode Island--the town in which I was staying. And yes I did see my mother's family name on a Warren street and in an ad for a Warren hotel. And Googling my mother's name in Rhode Island history showed me her family was just as prominent in the settling of Rhode Island as the Old General's family--and one of her family members was one of the original founders of the town of Warren.

My brother had never traced my mother's family back like he did my father's because he was hung up on proving our last name went directly back to the Old General. He knew a lot about my mother's family and wrote a chapter about their relations who came to Texas from Tennessee with General Sam Houston in the 1840s and 50s to settle in Central and South Texas. But he never thought about going further back since as far as he knew there were no Old Generals in her family. I had been able to trace that side of my mother's family back to Western Pennsylvania but never thought much about going further back than that. Then while attending a coin show in the World Trade Center back in 2000, I came across a dealer selling Central Asian coins and noticed his last name was the same as my mother's. I told him I was half him and he began to talk about his family in New York City. During the conversation, he mentioned his family had come to New York from Massachusetts and Southern New England. I put that info in the back of my mind until out of curiosity after returning from RI I Googled my mother's family name and found out how prominent her name is in Providence and Warren--equal to though not as dominating as my father's family name.

Ironically, my brother was not known as a liar. My mother used to emphasize how honest a man he was both in his history and his own writing. The Old General phase of his investigations came late in his life. That he wrote he felt at home in Savannah and that there on the land where the Old General's plantation sat he could sense the presence of a man who my brother could relate to in a familial sense. My brother knew a lot of "great" men and women of his generation. There seemed to be a party every night at my brother's house in Dallas. At those parties there's no tellin' who you might bump into--like the leading archaeologist from Israel (a guy I got along with fine since I'd studied archeology with Dr. Frank Hibben out at the U of New Mexico briefly in the 1960s), or as was always some famous writer or newspaper man--always somebody nationally recognizable hanging around his house. My brother didn't need the Old General in terms of his own fame. His obsession with this American history figure was simply a fulfillment he needed to accomplish before he died. Brass-tack facts weren't important to him at that time and it would only be natural for him to say the Old General lived in Newport and was in the shipping business and had a couple of ocean-going vessels in his fleet. Tis true what my brother said about the Old General wiping out his own personal worth by supporting his revolutionary army with his own money--paying them, buying them uniforms, etc., so you see, there is truth in every lie.
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Now back in Manhattan--and like I said, there's plenty evidence of the Old General's time in New York all around me here--I'm back to my own existence. I lost my appetite in Rhode Island. Strange to me. While there I ate a pulled beef barbecue sandwich, about four slices of leg of lamb, one eaten in a tortillo, a half'a scone, several chunks of pineapple, a sesame-seed bagel, and a lot of coffee and Brooklyn Lager beer (when in Rhode Island drink a beer made in Brooklyn--if it's still made in Brooklyn and hasn't been bought by a giant beer consortium and is now manufactured in Latrobe, P.A.). On returning to Manhattan, I was soon in my fav Irish pub eating steak and mashed potatoes--back to drinking Bass ale! Trouble was, since returning to Manhattan I've developed this horrible condition that I think is Acid Reflux Disease--sitting here right now typing this, I have not gone out and gotten my morning coffee, doughnut, and orange juice, the typical on-the-go breakfast in Manhattan. I'm afraid to eat now. Irony, in Rhode Island all my physical problems hit the hay and I was about as healthy over there as I've ever been in Manhattan.

I mean the air in Manhattan is totally polluted. I'm a nutjob when it comes to air-conditioning. I hate it. I'd rather suffer 110-degree heat than be sweaty cool under air-conditioning. I do have two large fans--but they are blowing the polluted Manhattan air directly in on me. Across from my bedroom window is a cell-phone transmission set up--there is one on nearly every building roof in Manhattan these days. There is one on the roof of my building, too. Supposedly these microwave devices send electromagnetic charges throughout our Manhattan-based bodies whether we're home or in the street morning, noon, and night and will eventually lead to respiratory problems, especially sinus infection and asthma. Still.... Manhattan is my home. Though I felt good in Rhode Island and my friends there are truly great friends, one of whom I love very much, but it's not my home, Old General or no Old General.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Living in New York City: We're All Bozos on This Bus

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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"You Old Anti-Semite Bitch!"

I just watched 89-going-on-90-year-old Helen Thomas get the ax all because of a statement she made on video about Palestine belonging to Palestinians and that Israelis should go back where they came from.... "Where's that?" she was asked. "Poland and Germany and America," she replied. Holy Christ on the Cross--huge buckets of vile shit were poured over poor old Helen's wizened head over that statement. As a result of this "divine" condemnation, she's lost her speaking-engagement agent, she's lost her front row seat at White House press conferences, and her newspaper chain, the sleazebag Hearst folks, have announced her "early" retirement from their paper. Helen's known for asking "tough" questions. That's her traditional roll at press conferences. Like keeping asking over and over, "Why are we really invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan?" or "Isn't OIL the single reason we're in both these countries?" G.W. "GeorgiePorgie " Bush, who considered her an old bat, wouldn't recognize her until he had to and then he smirked her questions off with one of his drugstore cowboy dumb acts, "Why, er-ah, Miss Thom-ass, I'm not at liberty to dis-cuss those points, let's see...er-ah, yes, let's go to my old buddy, old hardballthrowin ' Chris Matthews over in the corner there...." "Mr. President, why don't you kick that old bitch out of the room for good with one of your executive orders?"

Sorry, I drifted off course. So that's it for Helen Thomas. Clinton banned Amy Goodman from White House press conferences, now President Billy Jeff Obama has banned Helen from them. If she comes back as an Independent journalist writing for the Nation let's say, yep, Obama will have her thrown out of his press conferences, or if they let her in, she'll be among the 15th row of the SROs, or watching it on a big screen in the Little Johnny area of the Rose Garden. Obama's really dull-ass press secretary condemned what Helen said as being obscene.

What did Helen really say? Her lawyer (you bet she has her own lawyer) said you had to preface her statement (the obscene part where she said the Israelis "should go back where they came from...Poland, Germany, and America") by noting that Israel has driven over 2 million Palestinians off their lands and into refugee camps in neighboring countries, like Lebanon and Syria. These Palestinians are unable to return to their homes and lands and jobs because Israel first of all will deny them reentry and second of all Israel has already destroyed their homes and have taken possession of their lands and are giving these captured lands and homes over to a stream of Jewish immigrants being allowed into Israel by the droves every day. Besides, the Palestinians who are allowed to stay in Palestine, allowed to stay by the Israeli government in cooperation with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. military consultants assigned to the Israeli Army, and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex consultants who use the Israeli Army as a testing ground for their experimental equipment and delivery systems and weapons and missiles and shells and bullets and bombs, are walled in, blockaded, bombed, rocketed, and shot at day-in-day-out--Israel controlling their electricity, their water supply, their sewage, their garbage, their vital-necessity imports (like basic food, medical supplies), and their exports (Palestinian olive oil was once thought of as the best olive oil produced in the world--Israel has also confiscated a lot of those olive orchards and is now producing its own brand of olive oil).

But, of course, the Helen Thomas bullshit was a distraction. While We the People had our attentions focused for us on our government's condemning Helen Thomas for making an obscene remark about the unfair and unjust way Israeli dealt with the Palestinians, Israeli commandos (trained by and armed by We the People of the USA) SWAT-teamed their way aboard an unarmed Turkish vessel that was trying to bring needed medical and food aid to thebootheel -bound Palestinians to the aggressive tune of killing 11 (the count has changed back and forth from 9 to 11) mostly Turkish citizens during this unprovoked attack--ALL OF THIS TAKING PLACE IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS to boot. Israel justified this seemingly overly vicious rather German Storm Trooper way of dealing with these bleeding heart liberals by saying their troops had been attacked by these ill-smelling old Turkish Palestinian (dogs) lovers--one wielding a very dangerous pocket knife and another, the Israeli commandos said, thought to have had a pistol. Those two were gunned down with a blast of rounds from the Israeli commandoAKAs that We the People of the USA supply to them through our Military Industrial Complex gunrunners and arms dealers--all with the approval of our Commander and Chief, our Peace-Prize President, and his old G.W. Bush-tried-and-disproved Pentagon and Military command staffs (the Army of the New World Order, referring you again to PappyGWH Bush's "1000 Points of Light" speech).

What Helen claims she said was that Israelis should go back to where they came from, Poland, Germany, the United States--by which she says she meant in terms of Palestinians not being allowed back into their own country while Jews from Europe, Russia, and the USA are allowed into Israel by the unchallenged droves.

What does all of this bullshit signify to me? That in order to rule over us, our government has to keep us divided! The word "Union" is an anathema to this natural split-in-half rather ILLEGAL nation. That's right. This WHITE nation is phony from the get go. We are living phony lives. White people admit this by calling themselves Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans or Swedish-Americans--that's why Blacks started calling themselves African-Americans. That's why we call Native Americans Native Americans now. White people are divided between the sweet and the bitter--and you can't trust either one of 'em. The sweet--including the syrupy sweet--are like old Billy Jeff Clinton making one of his old buddy-buddy speeches--or like an old southern racist asshole being sincere with you--and the bitter are like Sweet Sarah Paleface from Alaska making a totally bullshit statement simply because she's bitter about the way she was teamed withdumbass John McCain and treated like a ragdoll fool (which she is though she and her many teabagger men admirers think she's a political genius). A White woman fool from Alaska, where the Native Americans outnumber the palefaces...yet the palefaces rule--and Alaska is where there's OIL! Don't forget, Alaska means OIL to the U.S. Government who needs to control Alaska and does so through the White homesteaders who ventured up there after gold, found none, were broke and desperate so they founded Selkirk, Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks--White people who eventually discovered OIL in what was once one of the most pristine wonderland wildnowheres on earth--the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole (that is now sitting in a huge lake of melted ice to which Russian cruise boats go there on a regular basis)--the frozen North that ain't frozen anymore. The place where British Petroleum is drill, drill, drilling, baby, and up for more drilling permits--right now on hold by the Obama Administration as it tries desperately to keep defending British Petroleum against what looks like now the total devastation of our Gulf of Mexico coastline.

But, here again, our government will come up with distractions. Like the elections that happened yesterday--oh how the Teabaggers and the Corporate Capitalists danced with glee as Teabagger Repugnicans swept ashore in Nevada--where they will probably kick ole wimpy Harry Reid back to his second-story law practice working to help the Mafia get casino licenses (the Nevada State Industry). Most of Nevada, by the way, is owned by We the People of the USA--OUR vast acres of Nevada landholdings (We the People also own most of the land in Alaska, I forgot to mention) includes Yucca Mountain, one of the most nuclear-contaminated pieces of land in the world--We the People also own the airbase from which the drone flights from Afghanistan into Pakistan originate--yep, We the People pay the salaries of our citizens whose 9-to-5 job is flying drones from a U.S. airbase in Nevada--out around Area 51--at one time the Las Vegas minor league baseball team was called The 51s--I have an old 51s teeshirt--on the back is a huge silkscreened image of a baseball player hitting a baseball in the shape of an alien's head out into the Las Vegas desert--with a banner saying "For an Out of This World Experience--Las Vegas 51s").
http://www.baseball.ca/images/Las%20Vegas%2051s.jpg
Out in California, two superwomen from the Capitalist world, one the former CEO of eBay and the other the former CEO of Hewlitt-Packard will be the Repugnican candidates, the eBay babe to challenge good ole Jerry Brown (yep, the same ole Jerry Brown who once had the hots for Linda Ronstadt until he discovered Buddhism or some such bullshit--Jerry's dad was good ole Pat Brown, a liberalDumbocrat but subject to some backroom shenanigans also). Jerry means well whether his ideas end up well or not. However, the absolutely backward-thinking Blanche Lincoln from the Great State of Hillbilly Arkansas, still White ruled and still the home of the Chinese-American corporationWal-Mart, was able to eek out a win over the so-called liberal Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas.
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Refinement
Have you ever thought of human animals as refiners? We refine the raw. That's what we do. Our missions in life are to refine the raw. We take CRUDE oil and REFINE it over and over until we have what was once called "pure" oil--and there was once a Pure Oil brand. With take raw sugar cane and refine the hell out of it to get our Pure sugars--"Pure Cane Sugar." Down in Mexico the Mexicans take the blue agave plant and take the raw pulque (juice of the plant) and REFINE it down into first mescal and then into PURE tequilas. We take cow shit and refine it into a PURE fertilizer. We take raw plutonium and refine it into so powerful a form of PURE destruction that one 500 lb big boy of it dropped over New York City could wipe out....

Sorry, I live in New York City, so, yes, everything destructive centers around my hometown. And we can't say anything bad about Israel in my hometown either. Our mayor, Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a Boston-born Jewish fellah, has already shown up in Israel pledging my and my fellow New York Citians support of anything Israel cares to do to its fellow Semitic brothers and sisters in Palestine or its Persian agitators in Iran--even if it means going down in an end-of-the-world scenario clasped in brotherhood with Israel as it decides to end the world as we know it rather than live in it in harmony with its own kind. We the Citizens of New York City--and there are a hell of a lot of people of the Muslim faith here, too, though we assume there are more people of the Jewish faith here--and our Mayor is of the Jewish faith--no, you don't have to be an orthodox or even a practicing Jew to be suicidally loyal to Israel, which, like Helen Thomas said, isn't really the homeland of most Israelis just like the United States is not the homeland to most Americans. And I'm sure a Native American Helen Thomas, if there is one, would be glad if most White people went back to their native homelands and certainly there are Mexican-American Helen Thomases who would be glad if most White people went back to their native homelands, too.

We the People of the USA will stay divided. I see no hope of there ever being a UNION in this country. We are so divided, still along Confederacy and Union lines. We the People of New York City are not unified at all. We are a totally divided city. The Irish still prefer living within their own communities--keeping Irish traditions and culture alive and well; the Latinos are divided according to their homelands--Puerto Ricans still clinging to their old neighborhoods; our new blossoming Mexican population taking over former White and Jewish neighborhoods in Queens. Flushing, Queens is an Indian-American community, though it also is a large Korean neighborhood; and Chinatown in Manhattan, though being encroched upon by the White-invader developers, is still pretty much a Chinese-only community. The Upper East and West sides of Manhattan are still controlled by Donald-Trump-generational Whites--these are the people now paying ultra-high rents and paying ultra-high prices for apartments in pre-WWII buildings that border Central Park until it hits Harlem at 110th Street. And Harlem is still the Black city within the White city, though Mayor Bloomberg is determined to redevelop Harlem into a "middle-class" White neighborhood--developers as I type this are nailing up eviction notices all over Harlem. My Black friend who lives in the heart of Harlem says she now sees more White people on her block than Blacks! An exaggeration, no, I was up there myself t'other day and I saw the same crowd of gay, flary, iPhoned, iPadded, cell-phones implanted in their ears, constantly moving from trend-to-trend twentyish-early-thirtyish White people who are now invading my what-used-to-be-called-Little-Korea neighborhood. Whites now walk around my neighborhood as if all's well with them--their heads high in the air--walking their poodles--small dogs--White women dogs--White males with big huge dogs are usually found in the Village.

My neighborhood is also being subjected to another form of White intrusion into my mixed-blessing hometown: TOURISTS. And these tourists are mostly White. Mostly Euro-Trash whites in my neighborhood--those who come overhere to SHOP! Though, too, there are tons of these White tourists coming up here from the cornfields of Iowa or the backwoods of Maine flocking here to ride a diesel-spewing double-decker (the lower deck is not used) bus up and down Fifth Avenue and then go see a Broadway revival starring some American Idol reject or a downward-headed Hollywood celebrity--paying over $100 a ticket to see a revival of "Guys and Dolls." God. Or to see the 8,000th staging of Disney's "Lion King," a White woman's view of anthropomorphized African animals. Disney's cartoons have always been based on JUNGLE themes, right out of Kipling's Jungle Stories--and Hollywood once loved Kipling's Jungle Stories--Sabu of the Jungle; Sheena of the Jungle; Tarzan of the Jungle. Disney, yes, has always loved animating jungle animals--and at one time, Disney's Jungle movies had big-lipped, darkie-looking, Black Sambos in their Dark Continent jungles--Sambo turning lions and tigers into butter for his pancakes--his Aunt Jemima pancakes. Interesting to note that the only humans in Disney's old Jungle cartoons were the Black Sambos. Was Walt Disney agreeing with our Constitution that Blacks were only 1/5 humans? On the other hand, Mickey Mouse and his permanent girlfriend Minnie are Black--where Michael Jackson got his white glove thing from you think? In other words, how fucking WHITE is DisneyWorld, whether in Anaheim, California (a rightwing political hotbed), Orlando, Florida (another rightwing hotbed), or New York City--where our Times Square-Theater district has been invaded and occupied by Disney and Warner Brothers and Disney's American Broadcasting Company and showbiz people's gaudily designed Tokyo-style restaurants and entertainment venues and sneaker stores and trendy youthy rip-off stores.

We are all Bozos on this bus...so, hey, all you Bozos, honk your beezers and flap your shoes!

thegrowlingbozowolf
for The Daily Growler