Sunday, September 25, 2011

Living in the Police State of New York City

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The New York Police Department Terrorist Squad
[As a Prelude:
I must apologize to New York City Top Cop, Ray Kelly. I didn't hear him say on 60 Minutes that the NYPD could blow a plane out of the sky! Wow, the NYPD is a military force now! Of course, Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg smoothed it over by saying that Ray was just emphasizing that the Mayor's billionaire friends and real estate developer moguls--those who live in the high floors of Manhattan's taller-and-ever-taller hi-rise luxury condos--like NYC's basketball-team-owner Russian playboy; all those Wall Street bonus babies, and Wall Street pirates, and especially the Power Elites at Goldman-Sachs (a corporation now proclaimed "rulers of the world"), and the many billionaire Chinese land buyers and hi-rise hotel building developers and Chinese and Indonesian child-labor goods moguls, and, of course, those members of the Saudi, Dubai, and Oman royal families who have penthouses in Manhattan that they are perfectly safe from harm's way when it comes to the next time New York City is under attack from (now revealed Saudi-funded) al-Queda (an amazing military organization--still a threat to the USA after nearly all of their top leaders, including their founder and spiritual leader, have been assassinated, murdered by unmanned drones, or rounded up and stashed away in Guantanamo; yet al-Queda is still so powerful and well heeled and well equipped and well organized enough to be such a threat to New York City that our police department is spending billions upon billions of taxpayers's dollars turning this once-great American city of CHANCE into a Corporate-run Police State Plantation. Scary stuff. Ray Kelly is a very scary dude. Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg is scary as hell to as he goes about believing he's divine, a prophet, a protector, a guide, a GOD!]

60 Minutes, the CBS current events show (all television programs are shows, for entertainment purposes (ratings), even supposedly "serious" shows like 60 Minutes), last night (Sunday, September 26, 2011) did a puff piece (my opinion) on the elaborate and money-wasting terrorist unit of the New York Police Department as narrated and promoted by NYC's little-man police commissioner, Ray Kelly. Oh how modestly proud Top Cop Kelly was as he unrolled all of these multi-billion-dollar schemes the NYPD has come up with in order to protect somebody in this city state of approximately 20 million people from a handful of raggedy ass terrorists (as always undefined but always related to the attack on 9/11, an event that had nothing really to do with the New York City Police Department's ability to stop it from happening).

As Little Ray Kelly unspooled his pride and joy SEAT of Power, like the 2,000 cameras (and more to come, Ray proudly boasted) set up all around NYC, most of them in Manhattan--and most of those down around Police Headquarters--this because the cops are more afraid of these terrorists than the average New Yorker who is too busy humping his ass in daily work so he or she or they can pay the exaggerated rents and living expenses it takes to live in what our billionaire Mayor considers an island of safety for the world's wealthiest institutions: the banks, the Wall Street pirates, the financial industry, the real estate industry, and tourism, the backbone of New York City's importance in the world. Again, not protecting the people of New York City but rather protecting NYC's source of the largest tax revenues and pocketed lobbyist and influence monies (our Billionaire mayor, for instance, since he's been Mayor, has increased his own income by billions--a job so valuable to his honor's increased wealth that he spent 100 million dollars of his own money to get himself elected to an illegal third term, to a job that he claims he only takes a buck-a-year in salary for--that to me is suspicious in itself--so the salary We the Citizens of New York City offer our mayor is too pitiful for this billionaire creep to accept so he pushes it back in our faces by demeaning the job to a dollar-a-year salary).

Two-thousand cameras--big boxes up on light poles--in my neighborhood there are hundreds of them going up and down Broadway (a once grand avenue that Mayor Bloomberg has now reduced to a runway of comfort stations for the tired tourists as they go about the city spending their worthless credit-card dollars shopping at the cheap-Chinese-made-goods stores (like the Disney store in Times Square) and trashing our streets with McDonald's and Burger King Styrofoam plastic food containers and drink cups and the tissue papers and napkins and the chicken bones and excess packets of catchup and mustard and staying in the plethora of bed-bug-infested Arab Sheik-owned or Indian-investment-group-owned or Commie-Chinese-built hi-rise luxury hotels--hotels that if only half-full every day make huge profits--and from which NYC collects a 14% hotel room tax). Two thousand cameras and all these tough-mother assault cops wearing tons of armor and carrying military-type weapons (supposedly against the law for city police to carry) and looking mean and tough, prowling through our streets and train stations and airports, on the prowl looking for what? for whom?

Then Top Cop Ray K reveals that as a part of this multibillion-dollar wasting of monies, he has a fleet of million-bucks-a-piece armor-plated vehicles that are roaming the city smelling out terrorists. Why then he further reveals he's got special million-dollar-each boats prowling he waters around NYC sniffing out terrorists coming via water--and then he says, he's even got special submarines under those waters looking, I assume, for al-Queda submarines trying to sneak into town via New York Harbor (out of NYPD's jurisdiction really)!!!

Then Little-man Ray is bragging how he's done all this with Federal bucks--Federal bucks meant to improve our transit system and roadways and bridges and tunnels or to allow funds for affordable housing--billions of dollars for what? The glory of the NYPD? (The 60 Minutes host then tells us all that the NYPD Terrorist Squad is a larger adventure in futility than the whole FBI! That's right, folks, the NYPD Terrorist Unit is bigger than the FBI.)

After showing all these billion-dollar projects, like the central spy room in which sit hundreds of dumbass cops watching hundreds upon hundreds of monitors, each monitor showing a blurry image coming from all those two-thousand cameras spying on New York Citians, with thousands of people from all over the world pouring into town on a daily basis--the right kind of Muslims, the terrorist-list-absent Arab Sheiks and the Saudi-Arabian and Dubai royal families, and our former enemies, the Chinese Commie real estate speculators and investment weasels, and Russian billionaires (one who now owns one of our professional basketball teams) and these turkeys can come in and out of this city at will--all of this bullshit with more and more evidence coming in daily that the whole idea and funding of the 9/11 attacks came directly from Saudi-Arabia and not Afghanistan.

And then this idiot police commissioner of ours after revealing all this billion-plus-dollar terrorist-stopping technical crap (cops carrying little meters that tell them when there are nuclear materials near at hand) makes his grand statement--why, already, all of this waste of money has stopped 13 terrorist attacks on New York City. THIRTEEN? He doesn't specify the individual attacks. One attack the NYPD terrorist squad stopped was a bunch of goofball Bronx kids who were out to bomb a synagogue with phony bombs given to them by FBI agents who lured them into the plot in the first place. He also takes credit for disrupting the Times Square bomber's fizzling out bomb that blew up the back seat of his SUV; HOWEVER, it wasn't the cops who discovered the bomb but a Black man who just happened to be walking by the SUV, saw the smoke, and notified a nearby cop who hadn't noticed it at all. Another citizen told the cop where the guy who owned the SUV got off to.

My question is, how the hell does all of this terrorist squad bullshit prevent another 9/11? Does Ray have special ICBM missiles in place ready to shoot down one of those airliners next time the invincible al-Queda airforce attacks us? (Ray Kelly has hinted at using drones to patrol the skies of our city to replace the terrorist-sniffing-out specially equipped cop helicopters that roar over Manhattan constantly)--like which building are these terrorists going to slam into this time? Like maybe they're waiting for that ex-Freedom Tower, now called 1 World Trade Center, to be finished so they can attack it--the most expensive building ever built at 20 billion estimated final cost--which the good citizens of New Jersey are paying for by paying higher and higher tolls on the bridges and tunnels coming into New York City--how about $15 to come across the George Washington Bridge or to go through the Lincoln Tunnel? $15 a day--$75 a week just to get to work--and of course rapid transit prices have gone up, too. Why? Because this is a project of our Power Elite-managed Port Authority of New York and New Jersey--a building built in defiance of these so-called terrorists. A challenge for them to strike again at a World Trade Center building. The World Trade Center from the very get go the target of the militant Islamics's intention--Osama bin Laden saying that the attack on the World Trade Center towers was in retaliation for Pappy Bush's using an Islamic state to attack another Islamic state in order to force Islam to conform to USA rules of order! Bin Laden saying the World Trade Center towers represented the worst of USA secularization.

Of course, Ray Kelly and his billion-buck-plus terrorist squad can't stop another attack on New York City. But just think of the power he has as boss of it. He's in a SEAT of power! If you've ever read Ortega y Gasset's little book, The Revolt of the Masses, you'll understand about "the SEAT of power." When a nation is divided, there is no unified public opinion--there are conflicting opinions, yes, but these lead to barbaric battles--only when there is a united public opinion can one sit down and rule! We are then controlled by SEATS of Power. Thrones, the Mayor's office, the Oval Office...when these SEATS of Power lose track of public opinion, then they have to stand up--thus we then have a police state or a military presence--you see--controlling changing public opinion.

New York City is now a police state. It's a Fascist state. We are ruled over by a billionaire mayor (originally from Boston, a very small town compared to New York City) who as far as he's concerned is in that SEAT of Power eternally, like God represents the eternal--could Billionaire Mike Bloomberg consider himself a God? Yes, I think he considers himself DIVINE.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Gawjah Justice: Haul That Gurney in Here and Let's Kill Us a Niggrah!

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The White Man Teaching the Black Man a Lesson
All over the State of Gawjah today Whites are celebrating the death of Troy Davis. Davis's last words were still defending his "innocence" and wishing peace on the MEN who killed him. As most White folks know, all criminals claim they're innocent. Especially those on the many Death Rows around this great Land of the FREE and Home of the Brave! That is they claim they are innocent unless they are mentally retarded and don't even have the cognizance to even realize where they are and what they've done and what's going to happen to them.

The son and brother of Officer McPhail, the off-duty White cop the White Gawjuh justice system ruled Troy Davis killed, was present at this killing. Sitting right there up front, front row center on the killing floor--thrilled in their souls that they were getting closure--I imagine them sitting there delighting in watching this Black man die. Sentiment: "Hell, yes, that god-damn nigger killed a good White man, an officer of the law, and he definitely, guilty or not, deserved to die. We the good White people of Gawjah feel sure in our White hearts, Office McPhail is celebrating this secular victory up in Heaven at the righthand of the Savior and his Big Daddy Father, that triumvirate toasting with goblets of Heavenly firmament the good White Christians of Gawjah's elimination of this Black murderer. Why this savage doesn't even deserve to be called Black, nope, he's a niggrah pure and simple, a murdering niggrah, his black definitely the color of evil, and black is the color of all savage demons. Praise the vengeful Lord. Praising the vengeful and chastising Lord God of the blessed White race and raising shouts of hallelujah as we watch this god-damn nigger's soul being shoveled into the furnaces of Holy Hell!"

We the People of the USA live in a divided state. Union versus Confederacy. Yankees versus Rebels. States Rights (including the right to own slaves) versus Constitutional Rights.

The Republicans represent the Confederacy. The Republicans represent the Plantation system of Fascist governing. The Democrats do not any longer know what the hell they represent. It seems to the general public they also represent the Confederacy. They also represent slavery (cheap labor). They also represent the Fascist form of Corporate/Military rule.

As I'm sitting here typing this, someone here in New York City gets shot and killed every 18 hours. When you project that statistic worldwide--DEATH never takes a holiday.

Governor Rick Perry, if you believe the Death Penalty ritual of killing mostly Blacks and Latinos and poor retarded people of all races, and even women is good for the morale of vengeful Whites, is your candidate for President. Governor Rick, the Christian Soldier, has executed over 250 mostly Black and Latino men, whether innocent or guilty, it doesn't matter to Rick. Rick is ironically one of those Christians who refuses to follow the teachings of his so-called "Lord and Master," the hard-to-find-historically Jewish rebel called Jesus Christ, who once declared as a prelude to the stoning of a Jerusalem whore, Mary Magdalene, that if anybody among the crowd was without sin, then it should be he who casts the first stone! That seems like a good idea to me--I believe the Great Confederate State of Gawjah should have allowed Officer McPhail's brother and son the privilege of juicing Troy Davis on that gurney of righteous murder.

So three cheers for the Death Penalty. As all the infomercials on commercial teevee assure you, so do the defenders of the Death Penalty assure us: "It REALLY works!" How does it work? Does it prevent murder? Well, no, not really. Does it save lives? No, not really. So what DOES it do? IT GIVES WHITE PEOPLE CLOSURE.

JUST AS JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S SIN, SO DID TROY DAVIS LAST NIGHT.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Irony:
Family members of James Anderson, who was killed on June 26 in Jackson, Mississippi, are asking the District Attorney not to seek the death penalty for Anderson's killer. Deryl Dedmon, a white teenager, was charged with Anderson's murder after he and other white teens took turns beating him. Dedmon then drove over Anderson with a truck. Barbara Anderson Young, the victim's sister, wrote a letter to the D.A. on behalf of their mother and two brothers, saying that their opposition to the death penalty is "deeply rooted in our religious faith, a faith that was central in James' life as well." The letter continued, "We also oppose the death penalty because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing whites. Executing James' killers will not help balance the scales. But sparing them may help to spark a dialogue that one day will lead to the elimination of capital punishment." On September 21, Texas executed Lawrence Brewer, a white supremacist who dragged an African-American man to death in Jasper 13 years ago. Some members of the victim's family also opposed the death penalty.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Another Gawjah Lynching

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Troy Davis: He damn sure looks like a KILLER to me; how 'bout you?
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Gawjah on My Mind

Yeehaw! Give out the old rebel yell. They're lynchin' a nigger in Gawjah tonight. Troy Davis. A Black man. A Black man who happened upon a scene where a bunch of bros were beating the shit out of a homeless man and an off-duty White cop came along to help the homeless dude, you know, he probably used some White Gawjah cop choice slang as he dove in to help this guy, and about that time, one of the bros at the scene shot this off-duty White cop and killed him and 9 folks stepped forward and pointed the finger at Troy Davis. "He did it, Mister Suh, Mister Massah, Suh, Troy, he did it." Nine people testified that Troy did it though Troy had no gun on him and there was no forensic evidence tying him to the shooting--the only one who had a gun, the same caliber that killed this off-duty White cop, is the man who turned Davis into the cops as the shooter in the first place, a bro, a fellow Black man turning in his bro to save his ass. As long as the White man gets a guilty Black man to lynch, they could care less if he's innocent or not! Being Black makes him guilty.

I wonder why our first Black president isn't stepping in to investigate this matter? But then our President is a killer himself. We learned yesterday that Obama is allowing the CIA to act now as a military unit by building secret drone-launching airfields around Ethiopia (the Horn of Africa)--the CIA's drone air force--launching these drones into Somalia where we are sure there is a huge al-Queda presence. I mean, don't you think, and it's simple logic, that al-Queda is going to be the world's deadliest terrorist group for many years to come? We've got to KILL them; ASSASSINATE them, whether they are guilty or not. Look what we did to bin Laden! Look what we're doing to the Afghanistan people! Look what we did to the Iraqi people!

We Americans are KILLERS. We love killing things and we love seeing our own kind killed. Last night on commercial teevee's many cop and Navy cop and FBI cop shows at least 20 evil people were blown away by endless-round-shooting automatic pistols, machine guns, two or three were stabbed to death, and 5 at one time were blown to bits by bombs--all the shows using hot babes--and I mean some of these cop babes are out-and-out sexpotty slut-angel women--women who show wonderful cleavage--women who wear tight-tight tops and skin-sticking pants--all carrying automatic pistols--Glocks--and all able to blow away the evil ones with quick-drawing accuracy and in cahoots with their James-Dean-look-alike male never-miss guntoting counterparts killing madly and wildly (in wild gun battles) the evil ones, also all well armed, though none of the evil ones no matter how well armed can't hit the red side of a 20-story barn when they gun battle it out with our teevee hero cops.

The truly worst of these cop shows is this show Criminal Minds, a show that purports to fictionalize the gung-ho actions of an FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit--and last night Criminal Minds was a repeat of a show where this split-personality geek, he had a kind side but his evil side was controlled by his God-revenge-spouting father--the geek's voice changing from wimpy whiny good guy to gruff and evil father all in the course of this guy conversing with himself as he kidnaps young girls--young girls get horribly tortured and eventually killed on this show every episode--young girls that the father side of this paranoid-schizophrenic geek told the good side that these girls were evil and should be killed (paying for their sins--the sin being they are young women). And how did this dude kill these girls? By chaining them up in a pen full of hungry Dobermans who then literally tore these girls bodies to shreds and ending their existence by gobbling them down for a good dog-pack dinner.

This is one of the most popular shows on television.

So Gawjah, one of the most White racist states in the divided Union, is enforcing the eye-for-an-eye Code of King Hammurabi (1700 BC) rather than our Constitutional law that says a person is considered innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of any doubt.

The Supreme(ly Dumb) Court gave Troy a reprieve though not to retry his case on the fact that 7 of the 9 original accusers (those who claimed they saw Davis kill the White cop) have retracted their testimonies--they were coerced they say into identifying Davis. No, this Supreme(ly Dumb) Court reprieved Davis on the grounds it was up to him to prove he wasn't guilty--the Gawjah prosecutor saying since this Black man was found guilty by a jury of his peers there was no way he was innocent no matter how many witnesses retracted their testimony or no matter how truly guilty the man who turned Davis into the cops looks.

Lynch him high, boys. Why this will be a lesson to any other Blacks who have a notion they're gonna kill a White cop and get away with it.

Hang him high, Gawjah justice!

And you don't think this country is once again divided along Mason-Dixon line separation? North and South. Confederacy and Union. Yankees and Rebels! It's the White Man's showing Blacks and Latinos and fur-rain-ers who's boss in this country...this is the White Man's country--a White nation under the White Man's law.

It would seem to me that instead of being at the UN trying to block Palestine from becoming a UN member state, President Obama should be going down to Jackson, Gawjuh, intervening on behalf of this poor Black dude who is otherwise definitely going to DIE TONIGHT!

Check this irony out, of the countries who still have the Death Penalty and who execute its citizens under it are the USA, Commie China, Iran, Pakistan, and the Great Democracy of Saudi-Arabia (the country that is actually responsible for 9/11)(a country that beheads its evil ones).

"All of us must die tonight, Hail to Father Christmas...."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Monday, September 19, 2011

Living in New York City on a Beautiful Blue Monday

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Evolution

I've been soaking my head in a basin of philosophical cool waters here lately--reading again in Ortega y Gasset's little Revolt of the Masses book and also Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead's history of civilization, which is really what Ortega y Gasset's book is about, too.

Ortega y Gasset in support of noble men and women writes that the downfall of Europe began at the end of the 18th Century with the social evolutionary arrival of the Middle Class--Capitalists, industrialists, religious intuitionists. According to Ortega y Gasset, specialization leads to mediocrity--meaning a person specializing in one venue loses touch with the reality of the whole as opposed to a well-rounded Renaissance man or woman. Like, for instance, physicians who aren't satisfied specializing in one aspect of the human body but rather enchanted by the macro as well as the micro study of the human body as a living whole (Gestalt medicine)--it is this type of "noble" man or woman that Ortega y Gasset calls a superior man or woman. Superior in the sense these people aren't satisfied with being directed or ruled over or merely practicing only what they've been taught to practice--of being "shown the way"--but instead become directors and leaders just because they can think way ahead of the herd (mass-man).

All of this philosophy has made me cynically aware of what's going on in our current brand of civilization where we Americans try and convince ourselves our leaders and rulers (especially our Power Elites) truly do know what's best for us, though their method of leading and ruling--due to their mediocrity--is oppressive and in some instances very harshly cruel, antihuman, like say the nuclear power sales force who even though they know their product could bring about the end of mankind (but not the planet) they continue to try and sell nuclear power to mankind (salesmen are liars; they have to be), that being their specialized occupation.

The world has progressed on ideas of conquest and rule, ideas designed and adorned by the most mediocre of men--like the religious nuts who forced Galileo to renounce his truths as false, though Galileo himself in saving himself from being burned at the stake managed to stay alive and keep his truths active in his mind and his laboratory work (his notebooks) on that course that did say the earth circles the sun and is not flat and that in the universe are greater truths than anything our religious mythologists have invented and forced upon mass-man as realities. Galileo is the noble and therefore superior man in this illustration--he's thinking beyond the accepted, the followed--he's thinking into the future, which is what looking into space is, thinking into the future.

Even with all the philosophical lessons available to us, those who claim us as simply animals are still ridiculed and threatened with being burnt at the stake. Considering us as supernatural beings is simply mediocre man proclaiming himself a "superior" being to other animals, those he defines as beasts, some as savage beasts. This is the same man who sees slaves as work animals; those that our White Man's Constitution declared as 1/5 humans and 4/5 work animals. Man, if he is supernatural (these are White men making these determinations), you see, is not a beast. Why? Because man believes in his own invention: Civilization. Through civilization, even though most civilizations are based on slavery and not humanitarianism, man proves his own supernatural existence, an existence conceived for him by a human-like cosmic MAN (God, the Big Daddy-type God, is always a Man) who lives off in a celestial part of the universe, about which MAN knows very little, though Galileo offered man a way to look out into that universe and study the truths it offers us. If there really is a God, God is simply the Big Bang Theory (not conclusive yet, for some day the universe might reveal even that the Big Bang Theory is no longer actual)--perhaps, as I've said many a time, Chaos really is our true God (though, of course, in our galaxy (our section of the universe), the Sun, a very complex LIVING entity, is our God, the source of our life, which is all our fictional gods represent anyway: instructions on how to stay alive, how to endure slavery, how to endure torture and ridicule, the rewards of which, even if you are killed while enduring these oppressing tribulations, is eternal life, what man is continuously seeking--eternal life being a means for staying alive as long as possible, in spite of the slavery, the torture, the ridicule, the inhumaneness, and DEATH).

We spend a whole lot of time and money denying DEATH. The religions are all concerned with life and death. Even religions depend on sustenance coming from Nature--at least some religions recognize the overwhelming importance of nature--like the reincarnationists who find their eternal life in coming back to life as a lower form of being, like an insect or a snake-eating hedgehog. The ancients, those confronted by the overwhelming darkness of mystery, dealt with DEATH every day of their primitive lives. Every waking moment they were out killing...or chancing being killed. In order to eat, they had to kill. In order to kill what they had to eat, they had to risk their own lives--their own being eaten by others who, same as humans, every waking hour are out hunting up something to eat, or sniffing out some water to drink, or marking out some oasis of a territory where they can have "animal" sex and then raise their next generations. As Freud put it, our primitive instincts are based on the pleasure principles, those that satisfy our thirst, our hunger, and our being driven to procreate. That's about all there is to life, whether it be the life of a man or a "beast."

Is raising our meat on ranches or farms or in pens or cages civilized? We have to kill to survive. Why? Because we're animals. OK, then does that mean vegetarians are the most civilized of men and women? It's alright to eat vegetables--they aren't living beings. Isn't anything growing in the living earth living? Isn't a plant alive? Isn't that plant first a seed, then it develops a root system that ties it to the earth and the earth's nutrition, and then it starts to grow as it goes about satisfying its hunger, its thirst, and its reason for living, to procreate itself, by growing into a full-grown plant, to then blossom forth in sexual unity and then to expel its seed on the creatures that take care of it--the birds, the bees, who by God are living creatures, too?

Even a rock is alive.

So, dammit, right off the intellectual bat all of our philosophizing and intellectual reasoning is justifying our beastliness in terms of human guilt. Like a man who can without any feelings slit the throat of a pig and let it bleed out while it's still alive, catching its fresh hot blood in a bucket in order to make blood sausage or else mix it with milk like the Masai, I mean, come on, what kind of a supernatural man is that? Hey, civilized supernatural people love their sausages in the morning with their eggs and home fries, so somebody has to kill these damn pigs for them--they're not going to kill them, not in this civilized progressive era of human existence as supernatural beings and not as carnivorous animals. A pig is an animal; therefore killing a pig and draining it of its blood while its heart is still beating is not cruel because it is a sacrifice to the creator of supernatural man--the pig gives up its life so that civilized therefore supernatural humans can continue to LIVE.

LIVE spelled backwards is EVIL.

"Hey, Wolf Man, then what the hell are we supposed to do...starve to death? With your reasoning that's what we'd have to do."

Not my point at all. My point is: we are animals just like the animals we have to eat and other animals have to eat in order to continue living as long as we can. Why, if there is a celestial paradise out in the cosmos somewhere where we supernatural humans never die and never suffer hunger, thirst, or sexual drive, do people who believe such civilized rationalizing care whether they live or die? I mean such believing should recognize suicide as salvation, but instead, it condemns suicide as being against the wishes of the gods (and I know there are exceptions to this case (outliers)).

Life on earth continues on whether human beings continue on or not. That is what is really hard for us self-defining supernatural human beings to contemplate.

We look at a chimpanzee and we don't see ourselves in it? To me looking at monkeys is like looking in an ancient mirror. Chimps do eat vegetation most of the time, but occasionally their carnivorous instincts (the same instincts we humans bear in our solar plexuses) get the best of them and they go on killing sprees, going up trees after lesser monkeys, like Gibbons, easy to capture meaty monks and throw them down to the ground where the awaiting meat-hungry chimps catch them and immediately begin tearing them limb from limb and eating them raw, while the meat is still hot and bloody and oozing with fatty juices and while the meat-providing cousins are still screaming for help.

We do condone human beings killing other human beings, but not killing them to eat them. What a waste. Why how long would wars go on if the troops who kill each other had to eat those they killed?

Rick Perry is a human being who considers himself a direct descendant of the Christian-Judaic God Jehovah (or whatever they call him nowadays), the vengeful God and not the merciful God--I don't think humans have yet learned what mercy really is. Rick Perry, a blatant Christian, has overseered the executions of way over 200 (257?) human beings in his decade of being Governor of Texas, which he justifies not under Christian law but under the Babylonian law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Only Rick's life is meaningful to him. Think about that before you think about voting for this so far leading Repugnican presidential candidate over poor old letting-us-all-down Barack Obama. Rick Perry as president will not give one damn shit for anybody's life but his own. Rick is checking his "mirror-mirror-on-the-wall" 24/7--checking the hair, the make up, the shirt, the tie, the suit--the shoes--he must be spiffy--he must be adored. But Rick Perry is not a noble man. He is a mass-man. He is mediocrity at its worst level. But then all our past presidents have been mediocre. Not progressive at all. Why? Because progress, in the sense of progressive politics and humanitarianism, is scary to these people--progress might prove this God these guys end all their speeches asking to bless America is a bunch of mirror-produced flim-flam--and that no matter how long one is on one's knees bellowing out "Save me, Daddy, please, save me, Big Daddy" prayers off into the ethereal, one's still gonna die one day--in the twinkling of an eye, too, brother and sister.

thephilosophizinggrowlingwolf
for The Day-Late Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:
http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/artists_l-z/marsh/5.marsh.jpg
East Tenth Street Jungle, 1934, Reginald Marsh (1898-1954)

I first came across Reginald Marsh in John Dos Passos's great USA Trilogy for which Marsh did the illustrations. His art to me has a true American art feel to it--though after graduating Yale, he did go to Paris to study art, where he was muchly impressed with the paintings at the Louvre. Ironically, Marsh was born in Paris. His mother was a miniaturist and his father painted industrial scenes. He left Paris as a lad to grow up in Nutley, New Jersey. He graduated Yale before coming to New York City where studied at the Art Students League with John Sloane and George Luks (of the Ashcan School).

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

thegrowlingwolf Considers Rick Perry as President

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"Beautiful, Beautiful Texas...."
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Where I Come From
I am a West Texan by birth. My father was born in North Texas. My mother was born in South Texas. My brother was born in West Texas. My father, my mother, and my brother all died in Texas and are all buried in West Texas.

Every summer in Texas when I was growing up in both Dallas and Abilene, it got hot. As a kid, I thought nothing of going out in 100-degree heat and playing. I didn't wear much clothes at all in Texas summers. Shorts, tee shirt, barefoot. Sometimes I disposed of the tee shirt and went topless. I didn't tan, however, I burned. Turned beet red. Blistered. Then my skin peeled. Big wads of dead skin peeled off my body. Especially my neck (where the term "red neck" comes from) and back. And my forehead.

My dad had a more serious problem with the sun; he couldn't stand to get sunburned. His reaction to sunburn was to get headaches and dizzy spells and heart palpitations. My dad had the same reaction to bee and wasp stings. The sun stung him. It merely blistered me.

A deep sunburn can be quite painful and certainly is irritating. I used to rub shaving cream over my blistered skin and it helped a bit to cool it down. One of the big pranks you faced if your peers knew you'd suffered a bad sunburn was the big friendly slap on the back. "Good to see you're back!" SLAM. "Argggghhhhhh! God-damn you, you son of a bitch...." And then the laughter and hooting began. "Come on, man, you pulled that on me last year when I was burned to a crisp."

When I was a teenager, water skiing became popular. There had been aquaplaning in the past, but water skiing was just that: putting on a pair of skis and going skiing on the water, being pulled behind a motor boat while holding onto a crossbar attached to a long rope leading off the back of the boat. One of my best friend's family had a summer cabin on Lake Brownwood, outside of Brownwood, Texas, a small town about 50 miles south of Abilene. These lakes were all manmade, Lake Brownwood formed by damming up a tributary of the Colorado River.

I couldn't swim, but ironically, I could water ski thanks to a life preserver. My first time water skiing was on Lake Brownwood. It was August. July and August are the hottest months of the year in most any climates in the US. In August in Texas, the sun is a brutal anvil-striking sun, sitting as it does high up in the high sky and beaming laser-like harshly straight down.

When you were out in the middle of the lake, you got hit by the direct killing rays of the sun, but you also got burned from its reflection off the lake's mirror surface. By the time you came in off the lake after being on it most of an afternoon, you were baked to a lobster red. One of my friends was dark so he tanned. My other friend was a redhead and he suffered immensely from sunburn. But this guy was a fighter, he loved challenges, and while my other friend and I applied Coppertone or a homemade mixture of baby oil and iodine, he refused to give in to such man-made remedies; he faced the sun protectionless like a real man. And he would come back in after an afternoon session on the water skis, baked as red as his hair and the fires of Holy Hell. But then, ironically, so did my other friend and I come in burnt to crisps, too. Coppertone and baby oil and iodine really didn't work against that fierce sun. The difference, our burns weren't as serious as his burns.

Summers in my part of Texas were always dry. By mid-August rainfall was scarce to nonexistent. By August the lakes started evaporating, their water levels sinking fastly. Some time before the Labor Day weekend, Lake Fort Phantom Hill, one of the water supplies for Abilene (Abilene had four lakes from which it drew water: Lake Fort Phantom Hill, Lake Kirby, Lytle Lake, and Lake Abilene), would be evaporated down to where the lake-bottom weeds and dead trees started showing up above the lake's surface. Back in your home, the tap water began to taste funny. "Gyp water" the oldtimers called it, the earth out in that neck of the plains full of gypsum--and there were a couple of big sheet rock plants run by U.S. Gypsum over near Sweetwater 25 miles west of Abilene--sheet rock called gypsum board at one time. The combination of the gyp water with the rotting-weed water made drinking Abilene water during a rainless summer a task. Sometimes it got so bad you had to hold your nose to drink it.

Rain. When rain came it came with a bang. From suddenly roiling up skyscraping thunderhead clouds. Clouds packed with excitement. Massive blue-black clouds that buzzed down lightning bolts of a frightening magnitude. Lightning followed by atomic-bomb-blasts of thunder. All of that commotion and then a gushing of rain, those clouds vomiting out big gulps of rain that was cold rain and was sometimes full of golf-ball-up-to-baseball-size hailstones. Gully washers these storms were called. These storms passed over the city very fast and were followed by beautifully clear-skied refreshing hours--till the next day when the sun came out dressed in its devil costume and gave forth its forked-tailed hellish heat once again--though passing fastly over the city, these rains would leave behind parts of Abilene flooded, especially the low areas of town, like on the east side when Lytle Creek would flood or in my neighborhood that was located between two large creeks, on the east, Catclaw Creek and on the west, Elm Creek. Catclaw Creek would flood out over South Seventh Street and flood the low areas of Fair Park. The bigger and deeper Elm Creek would rise up mightily and look so terrifying as it neared flood stage, though it was deep enough that it only flooded up over the South Seventh Street bridge that traditionally spanned it and sometimes flooded the backyards of the big fine homes that gaggled together along the eastern banks of that creek on Elmwood Drive, the street bearing the oldest high-falutin' neighborhood in Abilene.

Abilene had a past history of flooding, a major flood that flooded the whole of the downtown happened back around the late 1900s. So, yes, there was flooding in Abilene but that was rare. Most of the time Abilene is bone dry and hot as Hades in the summer.

During the 1930s, Abilene was in the Dust Bowl that wiped out the plains states farmers and ranchers from Kansas down into Texas. These dust storms giving birth to the Dust Bowl Refugees who left Texas by the droves and headed out to Lotus Land, California. And a big chunk of my family ended up in the Los Angeles area and another chunk of them ended up in Portland, Oregon.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3305/3422389349_8fa4572e48.jpg
"Drought Refugees From Abilene, Texas, 1936" by Dorothea Lange.

Above is the famous Dorothea Lange photograph showing the packed car of a family of Dust Bowl Refugees leaving Abilene as migratory workers working their way to California (see John Steinbeck's magnificent novel, The Grapes of Wrath).

A few years back, West Texas underwent an eleven-year drought that left some towns without a water supply. They trucked water to these towns or in some cases, they built temporary pipe lines from towns with a good water supply (well water) over to the towns that were caught bone dry. The average yearly rainfall in West Texas is under 3 inches--probably more like 2 inches--I could check it but I lived out there for almost 26 years--from birth to marriage (I did spend 4 of my early years as a wee lad in Enid, Oklahoma) so I have a pretty good memory of the weather during my time there. I remember summers so hot that when ponds or creeks and things dried up, the mud at their bottoms would form octagonal plates that could be nearly as hard as concrete--huge plates of red clay mud, maybe 12" x 12", which you could disattach from the earth and sail them like Frisbees. Red mud. Red waters. Red skies. Red sunsets. Sometimes tap water running red.

The frontrunning Republican candidate for president, the honorable Rick Perry, was born in Paint Creek, Texas, in Haskell County, just 50 miles north of Abilene. His father was a rancher and community leader, a staunch Democrat, which Rick Perry was, believe it or not, too, at one time. Why Rick was even Al Gore's Texas Campaign Chairman, in the Democratic primaries of 1988. Rick became a turncoat Democrat (like Joe LIEberman) in 1989 when he became a Republican.

Is Rick Perry nuts? He's a compulsive neurotic like most American males. Is he a dumbass? Yes, in the sense he considers himself a purveyor of ideals. His problem? As a compulsive neurotic, he's overdisciplined. He's a Christian-Military man, an "Onward Christian Soldier," with a Texas A&M (with its corps of cadets) degree and then time in the Air Force, coming out of it with the rank of captain and as such a holder of authority over the lower, the weaker, the mass-man.

Texans love mavericks. Texans are proud of their outlaws. Texans like to think of themselves as "rangers," as in the Texas Rangers (whether the law-enforcement agency or the Major League baseball team (that G.W. Bush once owned)). Texans still like to think of themselves as Republicans as in the Republic of Texas, proudly exclaiming the fact that Texas was once an independent nation. Carrying on how Texas once covered a territory that ran from the Tex-Mex border all the way up into Colorado and beyond. One condition of its statehood in 1836 was that it could be divided up into other states, which it was, though what was left to Texas made it up until Alaska got statehood the BIGGEST state in the Union, and that BIGGEST state thing settled into the Texas subconscious and even though it hasn't been the largest state in the Union for 50-plus years, the Big Tex attitude stuck (Texas was and will forever be the biggest state in the Lower 48), that is unless Texas decides to secede from the Union and become a Republic again, which Governor Rick Perry has already proposed in one of his "wildest dream" threatening statements.

Growing up in Texas you heard a lot of anti-Federal-government talk. Bureaucracy and excessive paperwork and Federal intervention into States Rights was blamed on the Federal government, even though the bureaucracy in Texas politics is just as sordid and crooked and deceiving and complicated--probably even moreso.

But Texans like to think of their politicians not as crooks but as BAD ASSES. They loved G.W. Bush because he was a little bad ass bastard, a tough little prick who took no nonsense from the Federal Government. Texans have always been indoctrinated to the fact that Texas could survive on its own if it was forced to.

Rick Perry fits the Texan bad ass image to a tee. Rick Perry is a better G.W. Bush than G.W. Bush. Dig it? Like I've been under the delusion for years that G.W. Bush held the World Execution of His Fellow Human Beings Record--he executed 157 human beings, mostly Blacks and Latinos, but also one woman; innocent or not, G.W. pumped 157 human beings full of chemicals that caused them to be paralyzed to the point they could no longer breathe. But, by damn, I've recently seen Rick Perry's execution record! Holy smoke, Christian Rick has mercilessly eliminated 250 human beings (though ironically such executions haven't done anything to stop murder down in Texas, a guntoting state). Texas is still under Old West traditions--a true rightwing Libertarian state--where by God you're on your own in terms of protecting your land, your possessions, and your family, etc. And being on your own means you don't want the Federal Government (the Yankees; the Union), meddling in your affairs.

We bring up Rick Perry because, afterall, the people of Texas remember preferred G.W. Bush to the more liberal and Democrat Ann Richards. Rick, as Bush Baby's lieutenant governor, became governor in 2000 when Georgie Porgie announced he was running for president and then stole his first presidential election. Since 2000, the voters in the Great Burning-Up State of Texas have reelected Captain Rick Perry, the Onward Christian Airman, 3 times, which makes Cap'n Rick the longest serving Texas governor ever and the second-longest-serving governor in US history--a governor of Iowa served longer.

What progressives and liberals don't understand is that this country is a right wing country. Remember, the Republicans have been in power in this Land of the Brave for more years during the 20th and 21st centuries than all the Democrats put together. Since 1897 with the election of McKinley, the country has steadily elected Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt took office after McKinley was assassinated. Then Wilson, a Democrat, was in office for two terms (during World War I--Democrats used to always start wars) only to be followed by Harding and Coolidge and Hoover before FDR took office in 1932, after the Harding and Hoover administrations in cahoots with Wall Street and the U.S. Army (as General Smedley Butler said at that time, the U.S. Army doesn't work for the American people but rather for American banks and corporations (and Smedley was referring to the United Fruit Company (now cutely called Chiquita, as in Chiquita Banana, a cartoon character based on the phony Brazilian (she was Portuguese) actress and original "Coochie-Coochie" girl, Carmen Miranda)) ruined our economy and sent the nation into what so far is still known as the Great Depression. And, yes, Roosevelt and his New Deal policies did through government hiring put millions of Americans back to work, though New Deal policies didn't really get us out of the Great Depression. World War II did that. And as we now know, it was after the Japanese made a "miracle" attack on Pearl Harbor--while Hawaii was still a US territory (owned mainly by the Dole pineapple people)--that Roosevelt quickly made his famous "day that will live in infamy" speech that got us into World War II, first in the South Pacific and then later into the European campaign (something Winston Churchill (remember, his mother was an American) had been trying to get Roosevelt involved in for several months before Pearl Harbor).

Immediately after Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman took office, the Republicans again began attacking the presidency, this time led by the racist Dixiecrat (pro-Slavery and States Rights) Party under the leadership of Democrat turncoat Strom Thurmond who soon, in revenge against Truman's integrating the US Army, took Southern Democrats over into the New South Republican Party, an effort that got the Republicans under Ike Eisenhower (his Oval Office was on the golf course--Ike played more golf than any other president ever--why, Ike even built a golf hole on the White House lawn) back into office over poor old typical Democratic wimp candidate, Adlai Stephenson, who made the mistake of thinking the American electorate (mostly all White up until the Civil Rights Act was passed under Lyndon Johnson) were intelligent beings and tried to reason with them with big words and a high-faluttin' attitude that most Americans took as looking down his nose at them to the point the Republican power brokers got to calling him an egghead, a very insulting call in terms of the ignorant and the dumbass (Mass-man, according to Ortega y Gasset). As a result, Ike trounced poor old Adlai very badly mainly with the help of the racist White Southern Democrats switching parties and becoming what they publicized themselves as "Dem-Ike-Crats."

In the Eisenhower election, FDR and the New Deal were slandered meanly--like with the singsong parody: "Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel. This is the Promised Land," a slogan that had been started by the Wendell Wilkie (Nazi sympathizer) Republican effort to unseat Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential campaign, used to picture the successful Works Project Administration's job program as being Socialist and a Welfare Program giving free rides to what to Republicans were wastrels and lazy asses (liberally applied to poor White trash and all Blacks and Mexicans). These same Taftian Republicans (Torys) also attacked Social Security for the same reasons, though the original Social Security program put the retirement age at 65, which at the time, most Americans were dead before they reached it (Life expectancy figures for men and women during the half-decade 1935-1940: 1935. 59.9. 63.9. 1936. 56.6. 60.6. 1937. 58.0. 62.4. 1938. 61.9. 65.3. 1939. 62.1. 65.4. 1940. 60.8. 65.2).

Roosevelt after all was an aristocrat from a Dutch family that went all the way back to New Amsterdam days. The Dutch once they gained their independence from Catholic Spain in the 1600s became very successful investment Capitalists, bankers, mercantilists, colonizers, and slavers. It was the Dutch whose trading (stockholder) companies (they were military forces, too) built forts along the African coastline from whence they brought thousands upon thousands of slaves to Brazil (a Dutch colony before the Portuguese took it over) and their possessions in Central America and the Caribbean (Aruba, St. Maarten, etc.), and New Amsterdam (soon to become New York). At one time in New Amsterdam, it is said perhaps 40% of the population were Blacks. New York City was built on the backs of Black slaves, who at one time lived in what is today Greenwich Village, though gradually the Whites pushed the Blacks up the Island, first up into what is today Chelsea, then up into what became known as San Juan Hill, and finally up into Harlem at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Since Eisenhower, the Democrats have only won the presidency every now and then--Kennedy and Johnson following the defeat of crooked lawyer and "I am not a crook" politician, Richard Milhouse Nixon--a drunk, too, and whose wife, Pat, was also a drunk (so was Mamie Eisenhower a drunk).

Lyndon Johnson so trounced Barry Goldwater--in the "In your heart you know he's right" 1964 presidential campaign in which the Johnson forces ran the ad with the little girl playing and the big red glow of an atomic bomb being exploded suddenly on the horizon behind her as she played--it was said the Republican Party was dead in the water after that election, basing it on that election's voting records where the Democrats out-registered the Republicans by a 4-to-1 margin.

Then the Vietnam War (actually started by Ike Eisenhower, the 4-star general president) ruined Johnson's liberal look and he was forced to drop out of the race in 1969 due to the Vietnam War protesters and the Hippy movement. As became their future habit, the Democrats put up another wimp, Hubert "Pleased as Punch" Humphrey (a Sociologist via education and a very liberal Minnesotan (when Minnesota was a liberal state)) to run against the drunk and self-abusing neurotic bully Richard "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon and his gang of Republican criminals (including the war-crimes criminal Henry Kissinger (still alive and kicking with a consulting firm that has a big office in Beijing, China)). And Nixon easily beat the wimpy Hubert H. and once again the Republicans (Tories) took over the White (Man's) House. These fools were in power until Tricky Dick Nixon was caught with his pants down around his ankles in the Watergate Scandal, a political shenangigan that got him almost impeached and put Gerald "The Man Who Can't Chew Gum and Walk at the Same Time" Ford in the White Man's House, after Nixon had beaten the next Democratic wimp and loser, George McGovern. Gerald Ford was an unelected President same as G.W. Bush.

Finally, in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, a Democratic wimp, Jimmy "Mr. Peanut and Rocket Scientist" Carter got elected--I mean Gerald Ford had the personality of a nitwit while Jimmy Carter and his wife and his mother offered a new hope for America, which is always why Democrats get elected. After Jimmy Carter fucked up and didn't bring that new hope to Americans, they trashed his ass and elected a Grade B actor with henna-dyed hair whose great claim to acting fame came as a second banana to a monkey. And Reagan soon became in the eyes of dumbass Americans a great president who to this day is still praised as the Great Communicator and is still highly respected by all Americans--I mean, he's even revered by our current Democratic President, the Great Compromiser, Barack Obama, a Democrat who the American people elected again with great hope that he would bring about change in the same vein as FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson brought about change or the promise of change. "Yes we can" Obama said over and over--per Martin Luther King, Jr.'s alliterational speech making--"I have a dream...(blah, blah, blah)...and I have a dream that...." Obama has just recently used this same alliterative type of speechmaking in promoting his Jobs for Americans speech--"It must be passed now!" In fact, Reagan's administration put us into debt and took away a lot of our rights and played bully by shooting missiles at Omar Kha-DAFFY (killing one of his daughters, I believe) and invading the small Caribbean Island nation of Grenada in which the US infiltrators killed Maurice Bishop and his whole government--assassinated them all because they had allowed Cuba to be building them a modern airport--I mean, tourism was Grenada's only means of income.

After Reagan left office (remember, his last years in the White (Man's) House he was an Alzheimer's poster boy with Nancy Reagan and phony psychic Jeanne Dixon running the government, Interim President Dixon basing her psychic authenticity on the fact she'd predicted the Kennedy assassination--something anybody living in Dallas, Texas, at the time was predicting. I recall on the day of the assassination, I went into the staff room of the juvenile home where I was the office manager. That staff room's windows overlooked the Trade Center (another World Trade Center) where Kennedy was to make a speech. As I entered the room, one of my cohorts, a guy I'd gone to high school with in Abilene, a joker of a dude, was acting as though he was sighting down a rifle aimed at that Trade Center and going "Pow...pow...pow," as though taking out Kennedy--ironically this little farce was almost in sync with when Kennedy was actually being assassinated as he drove around Dealy Plaza in order to get to the Stemmons Expressway which was then to whisk him up to the Trade Center.

My Whole Point
I didn't watch the 9/11 ceremony Sunday, though Little Georgie Porgie Bush and Pickles were there beaming and smiling and getting glad hands and wide-eyed admiration. I certainly didn't hear of anybody trying to arrest this little prick of an ex-faux-president. And Barack was there, too, and I heard a little of his speech--he quoted the Christian Book of Hooey and talked about God and his love of America--that is whatever God it is politicians thank and ask to bless America after every one of their rousing speeches. And boy howdy, folks, hasn't this God really blessed us!--recently blessing us with a hurricane, an earthquake, nuclear explosions happening, a tanking economy, jobs going asunder, banks controlling our lives, money being our true God, --so why not just say "Money Bless America."

Then later while watching the Jets and Cowboys football game from what was once called Giant Stadium but is now called Met-Life Stadium--everything is commercial now--the Mets stadium is now named after a crooked bank--CitiField--and our Randall's Island stadium is named for Carl Icahn, the junk bond crook--but enough of that--what amazed me about the football game was that Georgie Porgie Bush showed up at it for a personal appearance--and, damn, you should have seen the respect he got--the crowd went wild when he trotted out to center field to flip the coin that decides who kicks and who receives--and the players were all beaming and shaking his hand and the bands were playing "God Bless America" and then they unfurled this damn football-field-size American flag--and the crowd (mostly White males) went absolutely jerky mad with applause and pride.

The majority of White people in this country, especially the drugstore cowboy men and the addlepated men-adoring women (remember bouffant hairdos?), love Texas type males--

My point: Don't be surprised if Rick Perry turns out to be our next president (remember, three of our modern presidents have been Texans--plus, Unka Dick Cheney is a Texan).

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:
http://mattkuhncollection.com/Will-Shuster,Zozobra1935.jpg
One of the original "Los Cinco Pintores" of Santa Fe, New Mexico, WILL SHUSTER, admiring his "Zozobra" creation in 1935--the original burning man. This is a photograph by the great American photographer Ernest Knee.

I had the privilege of knowing and spending many a wonderful evening with Will Shuster when in the late 1960s my young wife and I lived in Will's studio in back of his Camino del Monte Sol home. Will was in his 70s and suffered badly from emphysema, an illness that had forced him to retire from painting--a hell of a bad state for any kind of artist. Will smoked cigarettes and he drank cheap vodka (he told me many a night how he drank charcoal-filtered vodka because of its purity). The emphysema came about when he suffered a mustard gas attack while he was fighting with the US Army in France during World War I. Will died in 1969 shortly after my wife and I left Santa Fe for New York City.

Will was a native Philadelphian and he studied art there with John Server. He left Philadelphia where he suffered badly from his emphysema for the drier air of the Southwest and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1920. Later, Will became a close and lifelong friend with Ashcan artist John Sloane. Living in Will's studio, I had access to all of Will's and John's letters to each other over the years. It was in one of John's letters to Will in whose margin I discovered a sketch of a woman's breasts with a note saying, "You know, Will, the nipples on a woman's breasts do not point straight out at the viewer but one goes off to one side while the other one points straight out...." That amused me to the point I had my wife show me her breasts--and, by God, as many times as I had worshipped those breasts in wild and maddened love (sex), I had never noticed that perspective in terms of her nipples.

The last time I was with Will we went through a storage room to the side of his house where many of his canvases were stored. He offered me any of them for $400 each--but I didn't buy them--too bad, Will's art--as is the art of Santa Fe and Southwestern artists--is hot today, paintings I could have bought for $400 are now selling in the $25,000 range.
http://www.nmartmuseum.org/assets/images/NMHistory/NM600/Shuster-Blessing.jpg
Blessing, Will Shuster (1893-1969)

The following is a long interview with Will conducted by the Smithsonian in 1964. Will led a fascinating life and he was a fascinating man:


www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-will-shuster-13208

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Let the Bullshit & the Hoopla Begin

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Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to Be Present a 9/11 Celebration
First of all, I'm asking, why is Bill Clinton at this thing? He had nothing to do with 9/11. Oh, but then I forget, he kind'a invented Osama bin Ladin and al-Queda, didn't he? Remember when he fired missiles into Afghanistan in order to blow away Osama's famous al-Queda training camp--remember those photos of dialysis-machine-laden bin Ladin firing his assault weapon and riding about on his horse? (I think instead of hitting Osama's training camp Big Dog's missile hit a school or something like that). That series of films shown over and over--never any updated photos of this "terrorist" of a man who now we'll never know whether he was real or not since Obama and the CIA and the Navy Seals blew his supposedly body to bits and then dumped it in the ocean off Pakistan. How weird was that? And remember, Obama rehired Leon Panetta, Clinton's CIA head, to head his CIA.

And how dare George W. Bush show up at this trumped-up event. This little AWOL coward who we now understand from recent exposed documents was shuffled off to Omaha, Nebraska, from his important reading of My Pet Goat to the elementary school kids in his brother's state of Florida, and also why Unka Dick Cheney was shuffled off immediately to his private bunker in that CIA-infested Virginia mountain installation. Omaha, Nebraska, in case you didn't know, is home to the Air Force's Strategic Air Command, the love child of old General Curtis "Bomb 'Em Back to the Stone Age" LeMay. Omaha, Nebraska, is also the home of our second wealthiest single US human being, Warren Buffett.

Now you are asking, why wasn't G.W. Bush (our two-stolen-term faux-president), who was surrounded by Secret Service agents and FBI agents and we assume CIA agents while he was staying at a resort in the Florida Keys (did you know Allan Dulles, the first head of our CIA, was a Wall Street banker and Nazi sympathizer?), immediately hustled off to safety by these presidential protective agents and instead was allowed to go on reading My Pet Goat to those little Florida kids before finally being hustled off not back to a base near the District of Corruption, but instead sent immediately, accompanied by fighter jets, to Omaha, Nebraska?

Webster Tarpley (yes, he is the Webster Tarpley who was once in cahoots with Lyndon LaRouche, though he broke with him in 1990s), believes this was done for a reason. He believes 9/11 is simply the set up for a military-Wall Street coup to take over the government and that G.W. Bush and Unka Dick (he had just had his 5th (?) heart attack) weren't in control of it at all and neither were the Neo-Cons--they were just as surprised by the attack as most Americans were. OK, another conspiracy theory, but, dammit, there are Wall Street conspiracies going on every day of our lives--corporations constantly spy on each other and put undercover infiltraters into competing companies--especially the big global corporations, which include the Military Industrial Complex, the gunrunners, the bombmakers, the nuclear-weapons designers--those who get rich off of wars and rumors of wars. Those corporations, like the oil companies, who make fortunes off wars. Or the big pharmaceuticals who make fortunes off wars--think of the supplies of medicines and antiseptics and immunization serums and bandages and plastic casts and X-ray machines the armed forces of the world have to buy in large supplies during wars.

Just like we'll never know who really assassinated John F. Kennedy, we'll never know what really happened on 9/11. (Ironically, another CIA intervention that led to death and destruction happened on September 11...this one in 1973, when the CIA and Chilean armed units ran a coup against the newly democratically elected President of Chile, Salvadore Allende.)

I lived in Dallas during the Kennedy assasination and I remember the many many contradictions that floated all over Dallas and the surrounding area about who was behind this assassination attempt. Most of these contradictions--like the shots fired from the grassy knoll--were totally ignored during the Warren Commission's investigation of this killing of another US President, this time determined by ex-Pennsylvania D.A. Arlen Spector to be a single shooter affair. We've had several of our presidents assassinated or attempted to be assassinated: Andy Jackson survived an assassination attempt; Lincoln was assassinated; Garfield was assassinated; McKinley was assassinated; someone attempted to assassinate Teddy Roosevelt; FDR when he was speaking in Miami; we all remember when an assassination attempt was made on Reagan; and we should also remember that one of Manson's Angels tried to shoot Gerald Ford. Assassination plots were uncovered against most of our modern presidents, like Harry Truman, even G.W.H. Bush; and Big Dog Clinton (was his assassin the guy who flew the plane into the White House?); and even little Georgie Porgie Bush, so it has been said. Remember, too, we are the gun-totingest and assassination-attempt country in the world; plus, we manufacture more pistols, and rifles, and rocket launchers, and bombs, etc., etc., than way any other country in the world--and most of the weapons used in the many wars we are currently involved in by both sides of these conflicts are weapons made in the USA. The Taliban in Afghanistan have access to US weapons--remember, recent released documents show that the US gives the Taliban billions of dollars a year in order for the contractor convoys to get through their checkpoints to our troops with supplies and our military convoys to get through their territory to the battlefields. How do you think these rag-tag military outfits continue to obtain weapons and keep on bombing and shooting missiles at and blowing up our CIA operatives and bringing down helicopters in which 30 US troops and CIA agents, most from the same Navy Seals unit that killed Osama, are killed, and that killed Karsai's brother, and are car bombing Kabul. And in Iraq, there are daily car bombs and suicide bombers killing several dozen, in some cases up to 6o people, a day with weapons made in the USA.

Currently here in New York City we are under a siege. My city is tonight and Sunday full of NYPD cops and National Guardsmen carrying assault rifles and machine guns in our subway stations, in our train stations, at our airports, and on our streets, where they have been all day yesterday and today stopping traffic and searching automobiles. The NYPD under the auspices of Little Man Shanty Irish Ray Kelly is warning us of an imminent al-Queda attack focusing on disrupting the phony 9/11 10th Anniversary celebration at Ground Zero--an admiration society event where politicians will yodel out the same old platitudes about the poor slobs who were killed on 9/11, a death-toll figure that started out at an estimated 25,000 killed that morning, to then begin to slide down, until it was hard to confirm the fact that 3,000 people died in the tragedy--and now they are saying, "almost 3,000" died in this strange affair. In terms of a military act, I call the attack on the World Trade Center, if we are to believe the official story, one of the greatest military attacks in military history.

al-Queda has to be one of the greatest military outfits in history anyway. I mean, we've now eliminated Osama bin Ladin, the originator of this armed force; we say we've killed his right hand man (I think we've killed this dude several times over); we've recently killed the Number 2 man in al-Queda--just last week or so; and we have the mastermind of 9/11 in Guantanamo; yet, al-Queda is still together enough with weapons and operatives enough that Shanty Irish Ray Kelly, our NYPD commissioner, is saying he's pretty sure al-Queda is planning something big for us here in New York City during this sham of a celebration.

All going on around this world's most costly office building; yes, the building NY Governor George Pataki (Grandpa Al Lewis called him Governor Potato Head) dubbed the Freedom Tower, but that now the builders of this White Elephant (our Power Elite-managed Port Authority) is calling One World Trade Center since this unneeded office tower is anything but representing freedom. This most-expensive-ever office building--currently costing 10 billion with estimates that it will go upwards of 20 billion before it's finished--so far has only two tenants: Conde Nast (the man managing the renting out of office space in this behemoth cost-overrun white elephant formerly worked for Conde Nast) and...GUESS WHO the only other tenant is? Why it's the Commie Chinese foreign-development agency--a Commie Chinese state-run-and-financed real estate and product-promotion company that is over here to buy up American land and buildings and forming Chinese companies in America used to promote Chinese projects and landgrabbing ventures and outlet merchandise, like Walmart of China, for their products. The rest of this giant waste of space has not been rented. New York City is currently glutted with hi-rise office buildings sitting empty.

Here's another irony about this stupid tower. The steel for it is coming from Germany. We have steel mills in this country sitting idle, but, no, we need that German steel, imported over here at an enormous cost. The glass, a special impenetrable glass, is coming from Communist China! A glass that has never been made before and which so far has cracked easily under a blow from a sledge hammer every time they've tested it. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company of Pittsburgh, PA (my father used to work for them), turned in a lower bid than the Commie Chinese for this specialized glass, but since the Commie Chinese were the biggest renters going into the building, they got the glass business. Remember, we recently learned that the Martin Luther King memorial statue was the work of a Chinese artist, the statue itself being foundried in Commie China. Are we under the bootheel of the Communist Chinese? It looks that way, doesn't it.

So tomorrow (now TODAY) here in New York City, the big 9/11 sobbing and tear-jerking ceremony will take place. Big Dog Bill Clinton will be there. G.W. Bush, that little pecker, will be there, we hope along with Pickles. Rudi "Mussolini" Giuliani will surely be there wearing his patriotic flag lapel pin and spouting out praise for himself and his heroics during this amazing military attack--We New Yorkers know the truth of Giuliani's cowardly heroics at that time (unhappily, Bernie Keric's serving a little jail time so he won't be by Rudi's side)--just like we saw all the big fat NYPD cops running like scared rabbits from the tumbling buildings while NYFD firefighters were running to get into the buildings--as a result, hundreds more firemen died in this mess than cops.

I was at work, at my desk, when my office partner, L Hat himself (see www.languagehat.com), who every morning went on the New York Times Website (it was free in those days) to check the latest news, said, "An airplane just hit one of the World Trade Center buildings...." He had barely finished researching that plane crash when he said, "My wife just called and said another airliner has hit the other Trade Center building...." And then we heard screams all over the office. One woman near us was screaming and hollering that her fiance worked in WTC Building 1 and she had been trying to cell phone him and was getting no answer. Then the big shots announced that we were all dismissed and I went out into the streets and already fire engines were racing down Lexington toward the billowing up of dark smoke that was very visible where the twin towers once loomed, a dark cloud of billowing smoke streaming into the otherwise clearest of blue skies; and it was a beautiful day in this fair city. I walked home; actually, I walked passed my apartment and went to my fav Irish pub and joined the rumor-ridden people jammed into it, one a Toronto newspaperman who said he had been down to Ground Zero taking photos and trying to get permission to go through the outer perimeters of cops but he was refused admittance. I remember him saying, "I saw no evidence of any planes on the ground...like no jet engines or metal debris...it was as if everything had been consumed by that enormous fire ball...." And if you look at any of the hundreds of photos taken that day of the planes hitting those buildings, you see a huge fireball explosion happening UNDER where those planes hit--that fire that evidently turned all of that steel and concrete and glass and human bodies into powder (dust).

Since 9/11, New York City has become a police state. The NYPD has placed around Manhattan and the five boroughs over 2,000 cameras and sound dish receivers (to pick up conversations). And there are camouflage fatigue-wearing National Guardsmen with assault rifles prowling through our train stations, like Grand Central Station. And big bellied NYPD male cops and tough-looking women cops in the subways. Yet, with all this SECURITY, it hasn't stopped Ray Kelly from constantly either spoiling terrorist events or warning us of another eminent terrorist attack. But it was not the NYPD but a private citizen who cued the cops in on the famous Times Square bomber whose bomb fizzled out and went POP like a big firecracker--plus, we never get any follow ups as to what happens to these so-called terrorists--or the dudes from the Bronx who were going to bomb synagogues--I have no idea what happened to those phonies (it was later proven they were coerced into such action by an undercover NYPD unit).

It's been ten years now since this attack occurred. G.W. Bush's War on Terror (John Brennan was its leading proponent and guess who is still with us working as President Obama's terrorist expert? If you said John Brennan, then you are correct sir or madame), with Bush's Bad Boys still in charge of this War on Terror--Bush's General Petraus (the inventor of the famous Surge) is now head of the CIA. I mean, come on, does this all seem curiously suspicious to you like it does to me? I don't cater to any of the these conspiracy theories, but, dammit, you can't ignore them. Like Webster Tarpley's saying that Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex are behind all of this. One reason why President Obama's hands are tied since everyone in his administration has a suspicious role in this War on Terrorism, a war that has killed way more people than were supposedly killed in the WTC attack--like in Afghanistan and in Iraq and in Pakistan and in Somalia and in Yemen and now in Libya. The reason for us attacking the innocent people of Afghanistan was because they were harboring bin Ladin and his superior military force we call al-Queda, so why then now that bin Ladin is dead are we still holding Afghanistan responsible for 9/11?--bin Ladin was safe harbored in his end time by the first Islamic country to have a nuclear weapon--AHA!, could that be why we are in Pakistan now killing men, women, children with our drone flights?...but then that's a conspiracy theory and as we all know, there's no such thing as conspiracies.

And how sickening was it to see Big Dog Bill Clinton and G.W. and Pickles Bush over in Pennsylvania celebrating with political glee--Pickles had a big teeth-baring smile across her face as she waved to the teary-eyed yokels wringing their hands and a waving their bloody shirts over the loss of American lives--but remember, some foreigners were on those planes, too--and also remember, some of those who died in the World Trade Center were not Americans--in fact, some of them were from Arab countries. This Clinton-Bush farce happening over in Pennsylvania where supposedly that airliner that was headed for the White House went down due to the passengers taking control and forcing the rag-tag drunk-the-night-before boxcutter-wielding Saudi-Arabians to crash the plane into that farmer's field, a plane by the way whose wreckage was never found, though rumors said that wreckage was taken and dumped in a nearby lake.

No, we'll never know the truth of all of this. If Webster Tarpley is right, this Wall Street-Military Industrial Complex coup was successful. This War on Terrorism has wrecked our economy, ruined the buying power of the dollar, put trillions of our tax monies into the corporate coffers of our financial industry--WHY, this sounds exactly like what C. Wright Mills said in 1956 was the goal of our Power Elite or like what Leon Trotsky defined as Fascism.

C. Wright Mills wrote in 1956:
In the twentieth century, among the industrialized nations of the world, the great, brief, precarious fact of civilian dominance began to falter and now - after the long peace from the Napoleonic era to World War I - the old march of world history once more asserts itself. All over the world, the warlord is returning. All over the world, reality is defined in his terms. And in America, too, into the political vacuum the warlords have marched. Alongside the corporate executives and the politicians, the generals and admirals-those uneasy cousins within the American elite- have gained and have been given increased power to make and to influence decisions of the gravest consequence.


And, from Leon Trotsky:

After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini -- the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role -- but it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism....

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily (Worker) Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

http://www.artcyclopedia.org/art/robert-henri-snow.jpg

Snow in New York, 1902, Robert Henri (1865-1929). The father of the Ashcan School of American Art.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Trying to Stay Miles Ahead


"Jamart #1" artist: tgw
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Miles Ago
I'm sittin' here thinkin'. Or I could be doing the alternate verse, "I'm sittin' here drinkin'...." But I'm not drinkin'--but I am thinkin'--and while I'm thinkin' I'm listenin--and I'm listenin' to Miles Davis's absolutely intriguing melodious thunk album recorded back in 1986 entitled after the title track: Tutu. And who doesn't like Bishop Tutu?

Miles Davis and his contemporaries had to develop into geniuses since their mentors were definitely geniuses, i.e., Bird, Diz, Monk, Klook, Bags, Duke, Count, Hamp, Bud, Prez, Hawk, Fat Girl, Little Jazz, Tadd Dameron, etc.

Jazz isn't an easy music to get just right. Most of it isn't written down. Not that musicians who followed the jazz muse, Madame Zzaj, her voice coming to them from the jungle of natural imaginational instincts couldn't read or write music; in fact, most of them were very good readers. A lot of them learned to read music in high school bands. Several of them went on to college and studied music. But a lot of them, too, were self-taught. But Jazz is based squarely on improvisation. And what you improvise on can be melodies that have been written down, you know, like in sheet music form. But the improvisational music was written down in these musical geniuses's heads. All they needed was a key and a set of chord changes--a count of the time, a brief statement of the melody or head-arranged theme, and then it was: BOOM, and an improvisational evolution began, unique, never to be heard that way again.

Jazz derives directly from the master drummers of Mother Africa, those drummers who conducted the evolution of the music (the music of ceremony and ritual) by setting the underlying beat and who then orchestrated the other beats to come into the mix, with eventually up to maybe 20 drummers under the master drummer's control, each playing a different part of the multiphasical and polyrhymic beat--and on a certain series of beats then came in the voices--female or male--each with a different line to chant, monotonous in terms of melody, but enchanting in terms of their intensifying the meaning of the beat. All out of the master drummer's head, everything controlled through remembrance of past masters drummings, the memory capable of continuous improvising, playing for days and nights, the music (la musica), the first language in any culture. The drums talking the heartbeated reverence of natural man.

I got attracted to this American music that got tagged (by White promoters) "Jazz," when I was 5 years old. This at a time down the line of the transition where the electricity-less 19th Century had rolled over into the middle of the Age of Electricity, the 20th Century.

Some of the earliest musicians to adopt electrified instruments into their music were the blues and jazz musicians of the 1930s, when one year Count Basie's trombonist and arranger, Eddie Durham, rigged up an acoustic guitar with an electric pick-up device--amplified sound played eventually through an amplified-sound speaker (electrified-amplified speakers were being used already in terms of microphones) or what just became known as an amp. And thus happened the electric guitar and thus American music whose fountainhead was those ancient drumbeats and accompanying dances was translated into the electronic age--and from the electric guitar came the electric bass, the electric piano, the electric organ, followed by the electric everything--like today, I have keyboards with enough Artificial-Intelligence digitalized sounds on them that I could write a whole symphonic piece using just one keyboard and a multitrack recording set up--electricity gave us recorded music!

And in Master Miles's Tutu I hear a totally electrified jazz. Miles the genius at looking ahead--Miles Ahead was one of his themes, one of his album titles--looking Miles ahead and seeing the potential of staging an all amped orchestra--with even his golden trumpet electrified--and, too, by 1986, when Tutu was issued, even the drums were electrified--and street-effect drums were in the AI sounds, too, and you can hear Miles's use of the earliest of hip-hop electronic uses, with those street-drum effects, the scratches, and slidings, and clack-clackings, and chock-chockings, and oscillatin' whirlaways--and in Tutu all these acoustic, digitalized, electrified, artificial-intelligence sounds come together in what Miles was attempting in the earlier 1970 album In a Silent Way.

And Miles became a member of the Jazz pantheon due to his Miles ahead attitude and stance. And Miles was a band leader (a master drummer) and under his genius tutelage came forth the genius of Miles ahead musicians like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams and John McLaughlin and Bill Evans.

But today, where has that genius gone?
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I am the epitome of obsolescence, an Achilles heel of mine I've admitted to all my life. I am so obsolete, that I finally after decades have a digital recording studio under my bed on which I'm burning some of my best-ever-sounding CDs, an obsolescent way of recording now--and yet, I'm getting such a pure sound, which digital sound is, and my music is blossoming forth out of my Altec-Lansing speakers--makes me sound like a true genius myself...BUT my genius is on CDs. My musician friends chide me about it, too. "Wolfie, nobody these days buys CDs...I mean, Wolf Man, get hip, you can find any album ever recorded on the Internet and for chicken feed you can buy them, put them on your MP3 player, plug it into your stereo system, and voila, Wolfie, your sounds are in the ethereal."

I just composed an electronic thing I call "Ancient Jazz Dance" (Eddie Harris wrote "Freedom Jazz Dance," which Master Miles did on one of his albums). Totally improvised. I did get a melodic line stuck in my head and I did improvise from that 6-note melodic riff--I used it as the focal point throughout the work--divided into two parts--one part based on a celeste-like sound underscored by a street drum kit AI preset on my Korg N5, a very obsolete keyboard--you can buy one now over at Rogue Music for $200. You can probably find one on eBay for $75. Still I love it; I've broken it in to my liking--the way I play--I play a keyboard as though it were first a percussion instrument, which it is, a member of the drum family. A melding of drum strokes onto a sound box to form first a kalimba that then advances into the future to come out an electric keyboard.

I know being obsolete puts me Miles behind in terms of there are characters out there with million-dollar sound studios in their basements; there are brilliant people out there creating musics that leave my obsolete musics spinning in the middle of a lonesome highway--like an empty beer can flung from the driver's side window of a car going 100 mph spins like a well-gyro-ed top for a while in the middle of the highway, only to then finally wind down and flip itself off into the roadside ditch where it lies in honor as a dead soldier.

Ancient Jazz Dance...and I know several dancers who I'd like to see what they could do with it dance-wise. I'd imagine a slow side-to-side rhumba-like action. I'm wildly imaginative tonight.

Ironically, while Obama was campaigning in the Teabagger Heartland and promising a 300-billion-dollar job-creation program (it will fail, guarantee you), the U.S. Postal Service has suddenly popped up hollering bankruptcy! They need 5 billion bucks by September 15th or the Postmaster General says the Post Office will go out of business. This like meeting the payment on our debt is usually a mere ceremonial approval every year and the Post Office goes on again losing money because of slow service, high postal rates, very crazy ways of charging you for parcels and boxes, etc. The Postmaster G is also threatening to fire 200,000 workers! Think of that! Two hundred thousand postal workers to be laid off. Remember, pissed off postal workers go to gun shows and buy AKAs and then come back to their post offices and blow away staff and patrons, it doesn't matter when you lose your job that you thought was kind'a guaranteed since the Postal Workers Union have a no lay-off agreement in their contract. Look for the Teabaggers to start saying we don't need a postal service anymore. Give it away to Federal Express (did Sam Phillips come up with this?) and United Parcel Service. And watch these two private enterprises botch up our mail and package shipping then--higher and higher rates will be inevitable, as will the yearly bailouts when both these private enterprises start saying they're going under.

I'm so obsolete, I still ship packages through the post office and in the past 10 years they've given me excellent service--I've never had a delivery not delivered and I've never had a package stolen or dead on arrival. Yes, some of the postal workers are prissy assholes, though I can't imagine doing their jobs staying successfully charming given some of the customers they have to deal with. Everybody, however, on a long line at any post office begins inevitably vilifying the postal workers.

Oh well, looking Miles Ahead I don't see much to be looking forward to. In fact, the future through analytical eyes looks grey and deceptively opaque and smokey and fiery--like what's happening all across my old home state of Texas as I sit typing this late on this Tuesday September eve with a very cool and refreshing breeze blowing across me coming from the south, from out in New York Harbor. Didn't idiot Governor Rick Perry recently lead a 30,000-idiot-attended prayer meeting, praying for God to bless Texas and send a series of devastating hurricanes across the sinful East Coast--and whoopee, thanks a lot, God--Big Daddy in the Sky surely answered these idiots's idiotic prayers (blown off into nowhere) by blessing Holy Texas with Holy Smoking fires--fires around Austin yesterday destroying 500 homes in one fell swoop.

But hey-nonny-nonny, there's no such thing as our weather patterns changing or global warming--while up in Greenland, observers were surprised to see a huge chunk of that world's largest island crack, split, and then break off into the sea. Oh well, God won't let the world be destroyed; at least that's the assurance I get from my spiritual guide, the Reverend Dr. Jack Van Impe and his weird-lovely wife, Rexella. Jack swears to me that God will not allow the earth to be destroyed because it is on this earth that God's only son is gonna come down on that big white stallion through the parting clouds and establish his Holy Kingdom...HEY, I just surmised, maybe that big hole widening more and more in our ozone is actually the Heavenly Gang opening up the heavens so Jesus's big white horse can come galloping through it...surely such nonsense can't be believed...but then one of the largest growing populations in this country is a crowd of numbskulls joining fundamentalist megachurches.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:
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Large Snow Scene on a Winter Evening, 1924, Fremont Ellis (1897 - 1985)

I had the privilege for several years living next door (in Los Cinco Pintores painter Will Shuster's studio) to Fremont Ellis (also a member of Los Cinco Pintores) on the Camino del Monte Sol in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Though I never met the man, I saw him many a day--and one day, my wife and I stopped seeing him and soon found out Fremont had moved and his house was up for rent or sale and we went over and went through the house and what a wonderful castle of a house, a big adobe mansion--the living room was so grand--an atrium like room, with an open ceiling of pine beams and a timbered boards with a skylight at the very top, which was two high stories up. And there was a balcony coming off the second floor, and a stained glass window on the wall facing the Camino and a Mexican hand-hammered tin and set-in mirrored chandelier on a long chain hanging down gloriously from the skylight to add light at night in that big opened-to-the-high-sky room--with the Navajo fireplaces--a glorious room. The house was later purchased by a Santa Fe Opera administrater, a very nice man and his wife who my wife and I met and liked very much.

thegrowlingwolf