A Personified Symbol Outside My Window

"On the Wings of a Snow White Dove..."
Now it is getting irritating. This noise. This god-damn dove that's just outside my window. It's desperately trying to make contact with a similar species but to no avail, but then what the hell do I know?

The dove is the bird of peace, right? Why? Let me guess, a legend from the Christian Holy Heaven/Hell Book. The dove coming to No-eee on the Ark (how unbelievable is the story of the flood and Noah and the Ark in the Christian Boogeyman Book? The original Mesopotamian legend is much more believable. Was there a dove in the original Mesopotamian legend? There must have been).

When I was a kid out on the plains of West Texas, hearing a dove was an everyday (mourning, noon, and night) occurrence; doves were everywhere, all kinds of doves, most of them greyish in color--that's right, I only remember seeing white doves on magician shows or being released during football games--what the hell was that all about? Certainly not peace.

This dove outside my window may have been born white but he ain't white no more, not after flying around in all the damn soot and residue-shit that's weevilly alive in our sweet Manhattan skies. Like my solid white painted window sill--right now it sits there pearlish grey since I haven't yet taken the Clorox to it today.

I thought these damn computers were supposed to adjust to Daylight Savings Time--except in Arizoney, of course, where they use God's natural time--holy shit, you believe that crap? Man invented time, you stupid Arizona idiots--how come Native Americans don't run Arizona anyway, it's their territory? The Native Americans out there are not as stupid as these scared-to-death white men who run Arizona, especially Arizona politics. Arizona's given us such great champions of human rights as Barry "dress up like a Native American and then dancing around warwhooping like an idiot" Goldwater, William "Where's my morphene?" Remquist, and the late great Byron "Whizzer" White. Which reminds me how I remember watching The Whizzer play for Arizona in the old late great Border Conference, an NCAA football conference composed of Arizona, Arizona State, New Mexico, New Mexico State, Hardin-Simmons (Texas), Texas Tech, West Texas A&M (now West Texas State), and Texas Western (originally Texas School of Mines and now Univ. of Texas-El Paso). It was a great football conference for a kid to grow up with. Hardin-Simmons was a hometown college and they played big-time football with several big stars, like John "Model T" Ford, a fine quarterback when I was a little imitating kid, though I liked 'crosstown ACC quarterback Vernon "Vitamin T" Smith better, except ACC was in the Southwestern Conference, which was lower ranked in the NCAA than the Border Conference.

And I do, I swear, remember a Hardin-Simmons game, they were playing Texas Tech, both were tough teams that year, and at half-time they released a dozen or so white doves. It probably had something to do with soldiers and sailors and WWII vets--you know, thanking Jehovah for this new peace--so it was about peace maybe--and, by God, right, those were damn peaceful times right after that stupid WWII--at least for white folks--I can't say so much for the black and Mexican people who I grew up with in those days--though I did have both a Mexican and a black friend as a kid--and then later in high school I dated a Mexican girl--oh what a deliciously beautiful young woman she was, too--then later I married a Mexican-Choctaw-Welsh girl who was born in both Texas and Arkansas at the same time, though when I met her she lived in right-wing-rabid Anaheim, Orange County, California. My first date with her in Anaheim we went to Sunset Beach but when we thought we were safely alone--you know, we had some lovin' to get to, we soon discovered we had traipsed off too far and had actually trespassed onto a damn Navy base and not only were we humiliated by some Shore Patrol gung-hoers but they almost arrested us--we were both nonconformists and fought back against military or police harrassment--they finally blew us off as hippies--though the incident scared me away from Anaheim forever--I have not been back since, though I have been to L.A. since.

Spring Is Here
Just watched the Mets's David Wright hit his first springtime homerun as I type on this--that's why I subtitled this "Spring Is Here," which I remember as a tune I once learned to play on a flute. But, hell, today, outside, here on yesterday-shivering Manhattan Isle, today, it's beautiful, though windy, though the sun is shining brightly and the air smells sweet whether it is or not. It rained last night and sometimes especially on weekends that clears the air enough you can get a couple'a whiffs of sort-of fresh-cleaned air, enough to give you the courage to face the reentering foul hours of tomorrow.

Full house down in Port Saint Lucie for this Mets's game with the lowly Marlins--the bastards had the nerve to fire Joe Gerardi because he wanted to make them a winning team--the owner of the Marlins doesn't like winning, though every five years or so they seem to just win.

As an aside: I just do not understand commercials on teevee and I was in advertising in this town for many years. I know it's "disruptive" advertising--invented by a Frenchman and based on various forms of advertising then appearing all over Europe, like in Germany, a booze, I think it was Aquavit, simply showed a blue background with a pink slit blooming out of it--I mean, yes, it was definitely meant to look like a completely shaved vagina--and the ad was like "smooooth...leading to ecstasy..." or something like that--I'm making it literate--I don't think their tag was a insinuating as mine but it was in that direction--like all ads really; they all appeal to sex--even the pharmaceuticals ads I used to work on, all of them were beckoning to the patients pain and worries by assuring them that they would be like a phoenix, soon to rise out of the ashes of the disease you've just suppressed with a drug, a toxic drug--to be a new person, able to love again, dig? It's all sex because the opposite of sex is the end of life--DEATH. Even though we all carry a death wish around with us, only the ones who haven't figured life out yet are so afraid of death--hell, those people are afraid of both life and death--they're just F-ing scared of life and the insecurity of it unless you're a lucky son of a bitch like one of these young baseball players getting a chance to make it with the Mets or Marlins--and, like David Wright, go from a wide-eyed cop's son out of the sticks to a millionaire socialite--I mean, David's able to call Paris Hilton up on her private line and hit on her if he's so inclined. That's why when I was an imaginative kid with a sex drive that was ferocious and made me a scoundrel from birth I wanted to be a celebrity, like Marlon or James Dean, not particularly good actors to me, though what the hell did I know?--I could act with a telephone like a pro, you know, faking a phone call--the way they teach you to act in some studios around this town--but getting out in front of a camera and following a script--that was ridiculous to me and I would blow a line and then break into incontrollable laughter that resulted in my being booted out of the acting class. But, man, I could see how cool it would be to be James Dean and, damn, I could, like, hit on Natalie Wood and probably score, man, and that would have driven me off the edge--to have ended up with a chance to bang sweet little innocent-looking Natalie--that movie Daisy something--oh shit, I can't talk about movies; I'm not a Rex Reed--what a fop! I'm not fop enough to criticize movies.

Commercials are sordid; sleazy; bent on being so happy they're pathetic; actors and actresses are so obvious in commercials--no real people look or act like any of the actors or actresses and graphic artists who make our commercials. Sometimes I think commercials are mostly aimed at babies, children, teenagers, and adult women--the adult men on most commercials are cartoon characters, like the Nazi-sounding weirdo-dude on the Optimum telephone commercials--what's the Nazi accent all about; I'm used to the Brit and Aussie accents on a lot commercials--why, for instance, does the Geico Gecko have an Aussie accent? Why do "average" Amuricans love Brits so much? I have been trying to figure that out since the Beatles came over here and eventually ruined our chance to play jazz since the Beatles killed jazz, like the Brit Rolling Stones ruined what was becoming a cool r and b sound--Ike Turner, Motown, making wonderful music--the Rolling Stones came along and insulted American blues and r and b musicians, mostly blacks, by the way, by stealing Rock and Roll, an American white invention off the American black inventions of boogie, blues, jazz, r and b, swing, the jitterbug, etc., and taking it off to the copycat nation of England.

Baseball teams? That's another matter. The Mets aren't looking good right now in this game except for David Wright's home run. The Mets lost to the Nationals yesterday and they're getting skinned by the Marlins today, though it's a close game. Whew, doggies, it looks good though, the sun shining, the stands full of fans, the boys all fresh--though, I know, it's not real baseball yet. When I was a kid we used to follow the Grapefruit League standings--the teams that had spring training in Florida; or the Cactus League, the teams that had spring training in Arizona and California (there were no California teams in the Major Leagues when I was a kid--can you imagine? There were only eight teams in each league--National League was: Saint Louis Cards, Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Red Stockings, Boston Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies. American League--New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators, Detroit Tigers, Philadelphia Athletics, and the Saint Louis Browns/Baltimore Orioles.

Mets just tied the game on a hit by Ruben Sierra--damn, an ex-Yankee who I thought was finished--retired; damn, Willie Randolph's brought him out of mothballs. Good for Willie; he's a class act, man; baseball should be proud of Willie.

I know Marv Backbiter is cruising around Florida (please, now, Marv is a real man in spite of his sordid past) checkin' out the Yankees, his obsession. The Yankees at one time last I checked were undefeated in ST, but that was last week; I'm sure they've surely lost since.

By the bye, I'm sure old Unka Dick the Bandit Cheney has done some dove shooting in his day.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Speaking of Unka Dick; Guess Who It Seems Is Responsible for the Sorry Service Especially to Iraq Wounded at Walter Reed Hospital--Three Guesses; Two Don't Count, Remember...

The Washington Post reports that the Army was pressured by the White House to hire a Halliburton subsidiary to take over patient care at Walter Reed.

IAP is owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm chaired by former Treasury secretary John W. Snow. The company is headed by two former high-ranking executives of KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root. Al Neffgen, IAP's chief executive, was chief operating officer for a KBR division before joining IAP in 2004. IAP's president, Dave Swindle, is a former KBR vice president. The company has worked at Walter Reed since 2003, providing housekeepers, computer analysts and clerks under a Treasury contract.

Swindle! And another name to keep in mind: Cheney, a name which has become synonymous with pressure, and Halliburton.

If you'd like to read the whole article, here ya go:

http://prairieweather.typepad.com/big_blue_stem/2007/03/walter_reed_hal.html

Cursing the Cursed in Words and Symbols

More From "The Inscription Set Upon the Great Gate of Theleme"
Continuing from where it was discontinued several posts back:
"Here enter not base pinching usurers,
Pelf-lickers, everlasting gatherers,
Gold-graspers, coin-gripers, gulpers of mists,
Niggish deformed sots, who, though your chests
Vast sums of money should to you afford,
Would ne'ertheless add more unto that hoard,
And yet not be content, --you clinchfist dastards,
Insatiable fiends, and Pluto's bastards,
Greedy devourers, chichy sneakbill rogues,
Hell-mastiffs gnaw your bones, you ravenous dogs.

You beastly-looking fellows,
Reason doth plainly tell us
That we should not
To you alot
Room here, but at the gallows,
You beastly-looking fellows."

From: Gargantua and Pantagruel, Chapter 50, Rabelais, Modern Library Edition, 1928.

The above "Insatiable fiends," "Pluto's bastards," "Greedy devourers," "Chichy sneakbill rogues," sound like most of our politicians, especially those who seem to be in power for life in this country; yet, no one else seems to see it that way--I've been reading the news today--it is so sordid and vile it turns your stomach as you read it and remember while you're reading it that what you are reading is reality and not what Hollywood says it is or our phony "president" says it is. These creeps are in power for life--and you know the opposite of that statement...don't you? I can't spell it out for you.

No
If asked "did I go to The Daily Growler-sponsored blogger party last night?" the answer is given in the subtitle. Always check the subtitles. Sometimes a lot of truth lies hidden in subtitles.

Again I quote Philip Wylie:
"When man evolved from an apelike ancestor to a creature capable of creating images in his brain, of making mental relationships, and of expressing these vocally, he became a user of symbols. The very sounds he uttered were symbols--for trees or tigers, bad dreams or a big wind. Man needed, also, symbols to express the inward compulsions that drove him, often incomprehensibly (as they still do), to acts of violence or of altruisms and into moods of ecstasy or depression. His instincts, that is to say, required symbols and he gradually personified them. His beastlinesses became beastlike men--horned men--devils. His virtues became gods. In his earliest days his legends, myths and demonologies were populated by these animal-like personifications. But, as his sophistication increased, man's gods and legends--his "archetypal images"--became more sophisticated. Venus is less naive than, say, Thoth. Nevertheless, the stories in all the myths presented unconscious but parallel attempts by all degrees of men to illustrate allegorically the patterns and processes of human instincts." [Philip Wylie, An Essay on Morals, Giant Cardinal Edition, Pocket Books, 1961 edition, p xii.]

We are animals and we are acting like animals in every country in the world today. Where there is peace there is also horrible war; where there is plenty there is NOTHING--animals with NOTHING get nothing; animals with everything get everything; that's the way of instincts, whether described by Rabelais in his gruelingly viciously animal-punishing tome or by the intellectual Philip Wylie in his passionate plea with dumb animals to wake up and use their developed brains to think in terms of paradisiacal ideas rather than ideas that spell out the certain destruction of the world and that there is nothing we can do about it since we are suddenly controlled by our base instincts, which we've turned into gods or devils, and are too lazy to think our ways out of our turmoils. The world has become a battleground of gods versus devils. God spelled backwards is Dog; devil spelled backwards is Lived. I just thought I'd throw that in.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Another Dead Musician--This Time It's Dick Cavett's Drummer (He Did Do "Big Noise From Winnetka" With Bob Haggard, Too, After Ray Baduc Died)

Original Tonight Show drummer dead at 82

Percussionist Bobby Rosengarden died on Tuesday, February 27, of kidney failure. He was born April 23, 1924, and began playing the drums at age four. He performed in Army bands during World War II, then moved to New York City, playing in nightclubs with groups led by Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Skitch Henderson, Gerry Mulligan, and Benny Goodman, and backed up singers such as Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, and Tony Bennett. As an NBC network orchestra member, Rosengarden played on The Steve Allen Show, The Ernie Kovacs Show and in the early years of Johnny Carson's version of The Tonight Show. He moved to ABC to lead the band on The Dick Cavett Show from 1969 to 1974. A versatile performer, Rosengarden played the triangle on Ben E. King's hit Stand By Me, the conga on She Cried by Jay and the Americans, and made the hooting hyena sound for a radio-ready version of the theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He was 82.

Sources: MiamiHerald.com, spaceagepop.com, sfgate.com

The Daily Growler Blogger Party

The Daily Growler Staff Refuses to Go to Austin, Texas
There's a big blogger party in Austin, Texas, this weekend; sponsored by Google we assume since they're the Big Daddy owners of blogspot.com. Free booze it says in their ad for the event. We go for that. Dancing it says, too. And we've seen some hot blogger girls, so the male Growlers wouldn't mind bopping around the dancefloor with one or two or a dozen or so of those, that's for sure; as to whether any male in his or her right mind would want to dance with Franny and Zoe our two-headed girl reporter--I mean, they argue constantly--such bickering--that would remain to be seen.

So, to hell with the Google blogger party in Austin, we've decided to have one of our own--at an unknown location--it could be at thegrowlingwolf's shabby hotel room near the waterfront in Davenport, Iowa; or it could be at our penthouse offices in the ex-Texas & Pacific railroad station in Monahans, Texas--not much to see from our penthouse terrace--the station is only one-story tall--the party's probably not going to be there so don't waste your time booking flights to Monahans--

or Davenport for that matter; thegrowlingwolf never comes to our parties--

but, anyway, The Daily Growler bingers, boozers, and bimbos are going out tonight--coming in from all the angles of the Neo-Con world, while our phony president is tap-dancing dangerously down in South America, in Brazil as we type this and then on to the great democratic Republic of Uruguay--used to be an ex-Nazi haven, didn't it? Bush will end his excursion in Colombia. I remember when Nixon went to Colombia, I think, either Colombia or Venezuela, and his Caddie limo got rocked and egged--"Yanqui go home!" they shouted at that great Amurican president--he shouted back at them, "I am not a crook, you pepper-belly bastards" while he gave 'em the shaft via the peace sign, which in reality was his version of shootin' 'em the Tricky Dicky Bird at those rabble-rousing brownskins.

We wonder if the Colombian's will rock and egg Bush's limo (remember, he has a special limo flown at great expense to We the People in an Air Force cargo plane when he takes these frequent junkets)? Remember, this turkey had never been out of the USA, except for trips to the whorehouses en La Frontera--that's the Texas-Mexican border, folks, before he was appointed "president"--for life, you think?--but since becoming "president," I mean, Jesus, this son of a bitch has made every country in the world by now--he's always travelling--PLUS, you don't see Pickles with him much lately--could that separation rumor still be true? Le'ts see, he's been to Asia a couple of times, he's been to Europe a couple of times, he's dropped in unexpectedly in Iraq a couple of time, then his famous drop in in Afghanistan where Pickles told the women of Afghanistan how fortunate they were, and his trip to India where he gave away nuclear secrets for mangoes, and he's been to Japan, has he been to China?--hasn't he?, he's been to Mexico a couple of times--Mexico City this time and not Boy's Town in Via Acuna, he's even been to Estonia--you even know where Estonia is or care?--they are a member of the Foolish Willing Dwindling Coalition--we think they have 5 gunga dins helping clean out the shithouses (called latrenes in the military) in Afghanistan--anyway, the boy who never travelled has certainly made up for it at our expense. It must cost us several millions everytime this goofball heads out on one of his unknown destination drop offs or one of his scheduled trips, like this one he's on now to South America. In his speech before he left on this junket, he babbled something about how he was continuing the revolution started by our George Washington--George, by the way, had no children of his own so he could be father of his country (that's what Bush said, we swear)--and by their George Washington, Simon Bolivar--and, yes, Bolivar was childless so he could be the father of his country, too (yep, the "president" threw that historical fact in the pot, too). He'd better be careful in Colombia, though; they're in the middle of a thirty-year-old civil war and Uribe or whatever the president of Colombia's name is isn't too popular of late since several of his cabinet members have proven to be cocaine cartel goons and leaders of death squads when they're not living it up in the capitol...

So, we're off to The Daily Growler blogger shindig. Holly and the Ho Tones will be doing the music--we see their tour bus pulling into the parking lot now--oops, we've said too much--we're giving away the location--WOW, is that Donald Trump's private helicopter spinning down out of control for a landing at the helicopter pad?--oh no, oh the humanity of it, smoke, smoke! So now you know; come to where Donald Trump's private helicopter just crashed--you can see the smoke from your luxury suite at the new 55-story Sky Box Hotel--only $20,000-a-night to Growler blogger partygoers. What a deal!

See ya!

thedailygrowlerstaff
for The Daily Growler

For your reading entertainment:

http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/Fish.html

The Longest Jailed Journalist in Amurica Is a WOLF!

http://www.attytood.com/2007/03/its_time_to_set_this_wolf_free_1.html

Vinting a Spleen

Woke Up Pissed
Progress in New York City now means more 55-story luxury apartment buildings and more giant 2000-room hotels. I woke up pissed because at one time in my existence I lived in one of the quietest apartments in NYC--in the back of a midtown ancient structure built with marble floors and thick walls with air pockets in them--yes, those pockets are full of rats and mice and cockroaches--that's just NYC where there are definitely more rats and mice than people, which is true all over the world, isn't it? Why are rats seen as evil and mice seen as cute? Mice are just as smelly and disease-carrying as rats. Mice bite, too. Plus old mouse piss that has dried and turned to powder can kill you if you breathe it in. Remember Bob Dylan almost died when he breathed in some powdered mouse piss out at one of his many, I'm sure, Long Island mansions. You notice that, all these sudden stars, these sudden millionaires, buy fine houses. That must tell the rest of us somethin'--like, hey, land is the only thing worth investing in--like buying a house for 50,000 in the 70s and then selling it in the 2000s for 700 grand, fortune enough for most people entering their sixties when you need tons of bucks to survive, what with our health system been made a Capitalist venture--can you imagine, assholes will close a hospital down now if it isn't making a profit?--F the people in the community who depended on it--F the people seeming to be the motto of the American corporate world, which is the world's corporate world, too. F all Americans--I hear that every day from the various governments we're under--aren't we the most governed people in the world? You know how many laws are on both city, county, state, and federal books currently? There must be millions. Think about it, the minute you leave your apartment you start facing laws--in the hallway--"No Smoking"--you ask why? but you aren't supposed to ask why; somebody's made a law that says stupid human beings can't smoke in the hallways of apartment buildings in NYC. OK, wait'll you get to the street! Aha, we have a little-man, billionaire mayor who wants to ban smoking in the street! I'm not a smoker and I'm not into cigarettes--I do enjoy an occasional well-rolled top-graded-tobacco cigar--like Slick Willie used on Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office those days he didn't have sex with that woman.

Aren't our politicians such jokes? Yet they rule our lives. A lot of these millions of laws come from that Congressional den of thieves every year--I mean, the bastards call themselves "lawmakers," but is that really what their supposed to be doing in Washington, District of Corruption; why not make the original laws work? Why does everything we do constantly need amending? Everything has to be brand new in this country to have meaning, which means in any given NOW you have to be "with it" or you are pitched into the garbage of life just like those BMWs and Mercedes will eventually end up in the scrap yard (both great Nazi automotive giants back in WWII--the Bavarian Motor Works was Hitler's favorite car company though he loved Daimler's big Mercedes tractor-like armored cars to ride through the streets of Berlin in then--Siegheiling all the way, man--Daimler by the way now owns Chrysler Motors, ironically who made tank motors in WWII used to totally level Berlin and the surrounding countryside; Chrysler also made aircraft engines used in the bombers that leveled Hamburg. Life is so full of ironies. That's Mitsubishi advertising, "Hey, Yankees, we kill your grandfathers and fathers in WWII with our fine Mitsubishi bombers; now we kill you on your highways with our fine pieces of shit Mitsubishi automobiles," a company, for all I know, that could still be being financed by the US government from leftover WWII treaties and shit).

It's too big for us. It's too F-ing complicated. Think of it. I used to think hundreds of millions of shares traded everyday down on New York City's Vegas Strip, Wall Street, where the real high rollers hang out, but how surprised was I to learn that when the HALs down on Wall Street went on strike and the market had what they are now calling a "machine-made" drop of 400-plus points, that day over 1 billion shares were traded. Think of that? One billion shares a day for 5 days a week--that's 5 billion shares a week being traded on Wall Street. Who's doing it? Who is buying and selling that many shares a day. For every share bought there has to be a share for sale, you know. That amazes me. At the height of my Wall Street venture, I owned 5000 shares of stock. Today my stock would be worth several millions of dollars had I held onto it. But in this Age of the Salesmen and continuous profits the trend is to buy and sell every second the market is open, just sit and stare at a computer and buy and sell all day--and I guess there are millions of suckers in this world doing just that--like these Texas Hold 'Em dudes I watch on teevee--one of whom, a several-time world poker champion, is from my hometown and though we didn't know each other, we went to high school together--playing cards for hours and hours--why? Why? I don't have to ask why. The answer to that is the amount of money needed for a good lifestyle in this country is either you got it or you don't and hopefully there is some mysterious Big Daddy to help you if you ain't got a dime or a pot to piss in.

Get rich quick. And that leads me back to progress in New York City and why I woke up pissed this morning in a once-totally peaceful apartment whose peace is now shattered on a daily morning basis when at 8 a.m., construction begins on a 2000-room hotel over a couple of long blocks from me; I woke pissed and feeling like writing under the pseudonym of Vint Spleen. [I actually did once write an article in a New Mexico newspaper under that name and I got this nice letter in response to the article; it was addressed to Mr. Vint Spleen in care of the newspapaer--"Dear Mr. Spleen, I have a son named Vint, too. Enjoyed your article. Yours truly, Irene Spleen." Ironies! I love 'em.

Back behind me, two long city blocks over on Sixth Avenue they are just starting construction of a mighty, 2000-room hotel that will totally block out my view west out over the Hudson and across a piece of the Jersey wetlands (For the 1964 NYC World's Fair, Robert Moses tried to change Sixth Avenue to the Avenue of the Americas but it never caught on--you see Sixth Avenue is lined with the flags of all the North and South American countries, plus statues of their heroes, like old Simon Bolivar (wasn't that Jean Paul Sartre's girlfriend? I can't resist that joke. Please don't laugh at me) and some others I never heard of, except good old Benito Juarez is on the Avenue and I always like Benito, a real revolutionary.

This splurge of new huge hotels in NYC are being built in order to offer rich world tourists expensive high-floor rooms and suites with awesome views for their pleasure while they're here doing whatever rich tourists do in NYC. The average hotel room in NYC right now is $575 a night, I kid you not. These new high-floor suites will go for thousands a night and that way keep the hotels viable, filling up the lower junk floors with no views at $575 a night, plus these stupid tourists pay a 14% city tax surcharge on their hotel bills, too--SURPRISE, on a 575-buck-a-night room that comes to 80 bucks extra a night. Holy Cow! Of course, the hicks from Iowa can get tiny rooms in the many India-owned old reconverted hotels that are on nearly every street in this town for $110 a night--WATCH OUT FOR THE RATS! This is all due to our little-man, billionaire, boy from Boston mayor who is determined to turn tourism into New York City's main industry--hell, he's already declared it such--in other words the only jobs being created by these tourist trap hotels and giant luxury apartment buildings are servant (slave) jobs. One of the highest-paid jobs in NYC today, I was reading this the other day, is limo driving.

Tourism has brought such disgrace to elegant old New York, like sightseeing buses--tacky big double deckers with their bottom windows blackened out with gaudy broadside ads and their roofs full of goofy ogling hicks from the bottomlands--I don't know where they come from--retired teachers and cops and shit listening to some actor or actress describing like the Empire State Building to these yokels. And outside the Empire State Building now are lines of tourists, a lot of Asians with their cameras--the Asians and the Canadians travel in huge big tour buses--these buses line the streets where the cheap India-owned hotels are and they leave their motors running--it's against the law, but big bus companies don't have to honor laws--give 'em a ticket, they don't give a shit. I mean we New Yorkers breathe a lot of foul air made fouler by tourism. Another abomination are these phony trolley things--they look like those trolleys at DisneyLand or DisneyWorld, and god are they tacky, especially to someone who feels one of the most dastardly acts of aggression against the American people of the 20th Century was when General Motors decided streetcars in this country had to go and buses had to take their places. GM successfully destroyed super-transit systems in L.A., Dallas, Texas, New Orleans, El Paso, Texas, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland (I think it was the oldest streetcar system in the US), Boston, Mass (I think Boston kept some of their streetcars), etc. I sat in my dentist's office on Canal Street down in New Orleans in 1965 and watched while crews dug up the old Canal St. streetcar tracks--ripped 'em up, and they once ran so beautifully up and down Canal, trolleys out in the center of Canal, which was a boulevard with marble sidewalks, man--and the streetcars ran all the way up the center of Canal out to the Fairgrounds, Audabon Park--to the Sugar Bowl, when it really was held in a football stadium, Tulane Stadium, which was a huge bowl that held 80,000 people. What a mistake to rip up New Orleans's trolleys; and New Orleans had to quickly put a lot of the lines back in because New Orleans became dependent on tourism, too, when all its old industries were bought up by conglomerates and moved out of New Orleans. When I visited New Orleans as a kid, I was amazed by the industry just in the French Quarter--two coffee companies, Luzanne and French Market, were right there on Decatur--the smell of coffee roasting wafting all about lower Canal. Then there were two breweries on Decatur, too, Jax (for Andy Jackson whose statue is right up Decatur in Jackson Square, Andy's on his rearing up horse and under him are the words "United We Stand"--ain't that ironic now that Katrina and our negligent US government (they should go to jail for their handling of the New Orleans devastation)) and Regal (Lager spelled backwards). Now you go to the French Quarter and it's all tourists, drunken Texans and Mississippians; Georgie Porgie once admitted he did a lot of drinkin' in New Orleans--I wrote a song once with a lyric, "Over in a two-by-four/over by The Famous Door/ Bourbon sounding like a whore/everybody wanting more and more around here/this town of my dreams...."

And now that I'm awake and thinking of New Orleans I get more pissed. I loved New Orleans. It was Old South, yes, at one time the largest slave-trading city in the world, yes, yes, all of that, but it was a different town, not American really, enough of the Old World flavor left in it to make it inspirational to progressive musicians and writers and shit--I mean, New Orleans was the source of so many real American stories both of the bad and good kind, but yes it was the South, and, yes, the whites in New Orleans are racist bastards, though some of them weren't, some of them were progressive musicians and writers and shit, but, what happened? In my case, one day, I just woke up and decided it was time to leave New Orleans.

I was sitting one morning having breakfast with the then mayor of New Orleans, Vic Schiro--I've told you, Vic liked to have me and my friend Bonafons around him at breakfast because he liked our sense of humor, so every morning we had great big old Louisana sausages with grits and sorghum and fried Creole tomatoes with the mayor--and on this particular morning, I heard Vic and some of his planning board stooges seriously discussing building a freeway over the French Quarter. Can you imagine? It would have meant tearing down a portion of the French Market--it was needed the mayor argued to get the keiko muckity muck bankers, lawyers, politicians into town from their St. Bernard homes, or their Lakefront homes, or their homes across the Lake in Slidell or Covington--plus there were plans drawn up already to build the World Trade Center (whose head was at one time the infamous Clay Shaw--remember that name?), yep, that's what it was called, down at the foot of Canal where it is today. I went home and told my wife, "Baby, pack your things; it's time to hit the road. They're out to ruin New Orleans." She agreed after I told her the story, and old Vic had given us a huge smoked ham that Christmas, too, and we were still cuttin' sandwiches off it in January when we decided we were moving. And move we did--to Mexico City.

So here I sit hearing that racket over on Sixth Avenue--they are having to wreck a four-story, thick-concrete-floored, steel-beamed construction by using these little Caterpillar things with jackhammers on their fronts while huge big shovel machines dig the rubble up and put it into huge dump trucks who take it and sell it as fill out in the Jersey swamplands or maybe as land fill on the washing-away beaches of Long Island. The steel they sell, too, as scrap. Remember the USS Freedom, or some such silly shit battleship name, the battleship made in New Orleans supposedly out of the steel scraps from the World Trade Center here in NYC?

I get more pissed thinking of the eyesore Freedom Tower these billionaire developers have planned for that cemetery they now call Ground Zero, a tourist attraction, by the way, now. I see hayseeds down there paying to walk up on this special built lookout where they stand in awe looking at Ground Zero--or now, its the basement floors of that middle-finger-looking, bird-shooting tower of plastic and aluminum they are joyously bragging about among the billionaires all over NYC. "Too bad old Harry Helmsley's dead; he'd love to have a shot at managing this pink elephant--remember when he bought the Empire State Building?" What a joke life in NYC is becoming.

Is it time for me to move again?

And here's a post I never posted--I thought it had to be a joke, but it wasn't. Read this and learn about hypocrisy:

Bush Perhaps Seeing Al Queda As Our New Messiah

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/25/hersh-qaeda/

Beautiful isn't it? Lies leading to more lies and all lies coming around in a circle to lie themselves into truths. Edwin Starr told you about War, but nobody listened; oh they danced to the tune, but they didn't listen to the words.

Academy Awards
Helen Mirin, a Brit actress who is notorious mostly for her large rack than she is for her acting ability, won best actress. That she won an Academy Award in Hollywood, USA, for portraying a queen, in this case old, long-living Queen "Who Stole My Scotch?" Elizabeth (a direct descendent of Nazi sympathizers). I mean, come on, what is our great fascination with these Brit actors and actresses? I just read that in the remake of Gone With the Wind , Hugh Jackman is going to play Rhett Butler. A Brit. Well, hell, afterall, when they made the original Gone With the Wind, the director's latest lay, Vivian Lee, got the role, and she was a Brit. Brits, I suppose we love 'em because they backed our slaveholding Confederacy during our Civil War (we love Civil Wars in this country). Why not an all British cast in The American Revolution, the spectacular? They could film it in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hey, that'd be a blockbuster. How about Mick Jaegger as Muddy Waters in The Muddy Waters Story?

I have always been amazed at how faithful to their forefathers white folks are; everything British is fine, white, and wonderful to them; yet, Britain was our enemy in the Revolution; then in 1812 Britain attacked this country again, burning down the White House in the process. God Save Our Queen.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"Mose, Mose, Mose kicked the bucket..."

Ole Man Mose Is Dead: The Daily Growler Hero Obits
Another musician of our knowledge has kicked the bucket, though, hell, he had 87 good damn years before he kicked it. Al never made it big in our jazz book, but we certainly respected his "cool" style of playing--like old Blue Eyes liked him, too. So, adios Al.

"My Way" and "New York, New York" guitarist dead at 87

Guitarist Al Viola died after a brief battle with cancer at his home in Studio City on Wednesday, February 21. Viola was raised in a big Italian family in Brooklyn, bringing home an impressive $22 a week during the Depression from his guitar playing. Viola met pianist Page Cavanaugh during a 4 ½ year stint in the army during World War II and formed a trio with bassist Lloyd Pratt. When Frank Sinatra heard the Page Cavanaugh Trio in the late 1940s, he brought them to New York and Atlantic City to perform with him. Viola worked with Sinatra for 25 years starting around 1954, performing on such hits as "My Way" and "New York, New York." Viola also worked with artists such as Julie London, Neil Diamond, and Linda Ronstadt on over 500 albums, and on the soundtracks for Blazing Saddles, Cool Hand Luke, West Side Story, and The Godfather, among others. Viola was 87.

Sources: alviola.com, Associated Press

And then we have the death of a true Daily Growler hero, "The Man Who Really Was Tarzan."

Actor chosen by Edgar Rice Burroughs to play Tarzan dead at 100

Olympic shot-putting champion Herman Brix died Saturday, February 24 of complications from a broken hip at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Brix was born in Tacoma, Washington, on May 19, 1906. He excelled at track at the University of Washington and played in the 1926 Rose Bowl game. In 1928, Brix earned the Olympic silver medal for the shot put. Following his sports career, Brix began acting and was chosen by "Tarzan" author Edgar Rice Burroughs to play the vine-swinger in the independently produced The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs had tired of his character portrayed as a monosyllabic brute in the successful Johnny Weissmuller films. The Internet Movie Database lists over 100 film and television credits for Brix, most under Bruce Bennett, a name he chose to avoid being typecast following his Tarzan role. Brix played Joan Crawford's husband in the 1945 melodrama Mildred Pierce, for which she won her Oscar, and a prospector in 1948's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. Brix was 100.

So there you go, folks. The Real Tarzan was Bruce Bennett; bet ya didn't know that. And we do remember Bruce in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a great movie, but a greater book, written by the enigmatic and eccentric B. Traven, the European communist rebel wanted in Germany and he fled to Mexico where he said he was a US citizen and became one of Mexico's leading writers and film directors.

Here's the opening paragraph of the novel:

"The bench on which Dobbs was sitting was not so good. One of the slats was broken; the one next to it was bent so that to have to sit on it was a sort of punishment. If Dobbs deserved punishment, or if this punishment was being inflicted upon him unjustly, as most punishments are, such a thought did not enter his head at this moment. He would have noticed that he was sitting uncomfortably only if somebody had asked him if he was comfortable. Nobody, of course, bothered to question him." [B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Time Inc. Book Division, 1963.]

The quote that opens the book reads: "The treasure which you think not worth taking trouble and pains to find, this one alone is the real treasure you are longing for all your life. The glittering treasure you are hunting for day and night lies buried on the other side of that hill yonder."

That's right, folks, the grass is always greener on the other side of the road.

Old Walter Huston acted like he was thinking while he was acting.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Keep on Bloggin'

From the "Keep on Truckin'" Days 'til NOW--and It Is Always NOW
This blog is running upon the end of its first year of being--April 6th will be our one-year anniversary. The intentions of this blog were strictly athletic in the sense it was done on the spur of the moment by persons who call themselves "Improvisationalists," the most ardent and thereby talented of whom has become me, thegrowlingwolf, America's greatest living and breathing pure-dee human-animal hybrid and BLOGGER; a thinking talking wolfman, yes, in the tradition of Lawrence Talbott, but with class beyond Larry Talbott's hirsute dreams. Yes, we were both born under the full moon and, yes, the full moon is my halo, it floats over me day and night, full, bright, and loving, keeping me cool when I get hot and angry and keeping me like ice at night, when a wolf needs cold to keep him warm while he howls on the mountaintops of life, those closer to his darling moon. It is the wolf in me that gives the warning signal; when the wolf in me starts to growl, then the human in me starts to put symbols to it, words to it--the warning develops out of the legends that are my instincts--the wolf instincts--then it's the human instincts that lead me to how to deal with whatever it is, like maybe a quest to satisfy my hunger, my thirst, and then enjoy my satiated situation with some pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. See, it's what stands in the way of that that causes the wolf in me to take heed, to go on the alert, to growl as a sign that contention is right ahead somewhere hidden there in the mysterious full moonlit night when the wolf is at his best and when the human in me does its best, writing and composing, collecting and evaluating, setting up a defense, and doing the howling by burning the midnight oil.

I once wrote a short story about a man whose only language was sets of cliches--it turns out he finds his niche in life by inventing cliches or reinventing archaic cliches or using cliches once demonized but now clever and cute to a generation who never heard them before and doesn't really know they're cliches.

So, anyway, this blog started off as a growling place and remains a growling place (and, believe me, howling is for satisfaction, growling is for protection and this blog has never been intended as a howling place--there already is a The Daily Howler--he's a school teacher obsessed with education--The Daily Growler gives little or no shit about education--all American public education is based on fallacies; fallacies in terms of how best to teach children the necessities of life (something left to home schooling in other primates--like Monkey Public School is in the mothers's arms or lap or vicinity); then, also, a lot of what is taught in public schools is based on falacies, too; certainly historic fallacies, like that Columbus discovered America or that George Washington was a righteous human being who could never tell a lie. Yeah sure! Or that Abe "Send 'Em Back to Africa" Lincoln was the man who freed the slaves--hell no, he wasn't the man who freed the slaves--he was forced to free the slaves by the thousands of truthseekers who saw slavery as the abomination that it was and how could a nation claim all men were equal within its Constitution and Bill of Rights and yet kowtow to the big-bucks-profits of using slave labor to make your nest egg, your fortune--how many families still going today are living well off the backs of the slaves that made their family wealthy, whether off of cotton, tobacky, Florida oranges, Jawjah peaches, sugar, peanut products, lumber, coal mining, steel production (Birmingham, Alabama, named for Birmingham, England, was once a huge steel mill town; right outside of Birmingham is a town named Bessamer--named after the Bessamer way of processing steel). That's one of the problems of Capitalism and one of the problems with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations--it's from a colonial point of view and the British Empire depended on slave labor to make Capitalism work--Captialism all over the world is dependent on slave labor and if not slave labor at least Third World labor (and I include Indonesia, India, Malaysia as Third World labor markets) and illegal immigrant labor. Here in the United States today, all of the street-level jobs in construction, building maintenance, cooks, busboys, waitresses, bartenders, limo drivers, ditchdiggers, house and apartment painters--they are all mostly illegal immigrant laborers doing that work--I can guarantee you the maintenance of New York City's superstructure is all done now by illegal immigrant labor--wanna bet? Why pay a chucklehead American citizen with only a high school education 15 bucks an hour to lay the carpet in your cheaply built overpriced dream home when they can get an illegal bunch of Russian dudes to do it for $7.00 an hour? This nation was build on the backs of illegal immigrants--even my family, if you go back far enough, like deep into the backgrounds of those Wolves who came ashore at Newport in the Baptist Colony of Rhode Island, were all illegal immigrants from the Scottish highlands or the greens of Kent and Coventry down in merry old England, or the bitter streets of Belfast up at the British end of Erin's emerald isle--and god-damn, Ireland is a beautiful country--and so are Irish lassies a bit on the beautiful side, too--at least the ones I know are--especially a fiddler named Marie--but then I'm getting too close and personal for wolfie comfort here. My den is steaming up. But then, I love all women. Remember, in a wolfpack, a female can be dominant.

Money corrupts. That suddenly came to my mind while watching teevee. "Money corrupts." That's a pretty simple statement. Though, another simple statement is that "money makes the world go around," which is the legend that comes from our deep-seated instincts that propel us to never be satisfied with whatever we've accumulated. There's never enough, just like writing these blogs: There's just never enough space to spew out the growling words I love to spend conspicuously--and that I've done for almost a year--1 F-ing year; 365 posts--so far, I've missed maybe 5 days of posting, so I'll be happy when I hit my 360th post.

Bloggin' is a god-damn job; I'll tell ya that. Google gets filthy rich off blogging; Google knows egos and instincts--Google knows blogging is the greatest form of ego-bleating ever conceived--hundreds of millions of bloggers babbling their bullshit daily from all around the world. You say, but blogspot and those other blog places are free. Yeah, they're free, but look at the enormous amounts of information those Google robotic data searches are gleaning from these sites--goofy girls and boys mentioning the celebrities they idolize, the movies they adore, the kinds of lipstick they love--think of that marketing information that Google sells--you bet they do.

Most blogs are pathetic; even some of the famous blogs are pathetic. And, of course, soon we'll have corporate types taking over the blog world. In the meantime, this human-animal-hybrid is shooting for blogging for 1 year. And it's been fun; it's been instructional; it's been educational; and I've been introduced to some interesting people.

The only blog besides The Daily Growler that has truly impressed me is wood s lot and yes hats off to www.languagehat.com--but then I'm acquainted with l hat and he knows he amazes me, but this wood s lot dude I know only that he's Canadian and maybe his name is Wood--I like not knowing the guy; it keeps me going to his blog without any prejudices--but, man, the work he puts into that exciting blog.

Will I continue blogging after April 6th? I don't know. Who the hell knows? I am a writer of books; I am a player of keyboards; I am a singer of blues and my own ditties; I am a self-taught composer; and I am a collector of Americana--I live among thousands of items, baseballs, old photographs, Rockwell Kent lithographs, and Clyde Tombaugh autographed cards--Clyde, in case you don't know, discovered the planet Pluto--and I still call Pluto a planet because Clyde said it was. The last autographed card I have from Clyde, says, "Sorry, I'm just to busy to send you my autograph," signed "Clyde W. Tombaugh." I love that. That's Clyde Tombaugh, a planet of a man.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

And Philip Wylie Wrote and the Wolf Growled

From the Mind of Philip Wylie
"What is Jung's [ed. Carl Jung of archetype fame] fundamental theory? Here, in brief, are the steps which lead to it, together with the hypothesis itself: First--man is an animal. Every day, the work of thousands of scientists brings further confirmation of the fact. It is not yet much accepted or well understood in the world. And even where it is given lip-service, it is usually qualified to leave room for venerable beliefs in the supernatural "essence" of the human being. To understand Jung, man must be thought of as an animal, simply--the present end-product of evolving terrestrial life. Second--animals, including man, are governed by instinct.

"That thesis is repugnant to most people. Even anthropologists, who know man to be the ape's cousin, frequently consider his behavior is wholly determined by a culture or by "reason" rather than by such instincts as cause butterflies to breed or birds to build nests." [Philip Wylie, An Essay on Morals, Giant Cardinal Edition, 1961, pp. x, xi.]

I read on and I came across this; again, ibid. on the book info:

"Sigmund Freud proved man's instinctual nature. He showed that much of adult personality rises out of the effects of the human environment upon the brute cravings of the infant. A generation of careful work by psychologists has left no doubt of the reality of animal compulsions in the babe--or of their continuing function in the 'adult.' Freud defined a constellation of instincts in sex compulsions and sex relationships. To this creative pattern he later added a study of its destructive opposite which he called the 'death wish'." [ibid., p. xi.]

Instincts. 1) First--we're hungry and thirsty; and 2) then we're either unsatisfied or we're satisfied; and 3) then we dance, relax, smoke, take drugs, and have sex. Then recreation turns into procreation and that's what it's all about.

There is a third step to Jung's fundamental theory and that's that "instinct has taken form in man as legend"--yeah verily I say unto thee. That belief in a Big Daddy in a big gold and alabaster metropolis in some distant part of the infinite universe is simply something instinctually inside you warning you you'd better get the hell off this planet because one day will be doomsday and that's the day the Sun dies and leaves no heirs and there is nothing left of that bunch of smart-ass animals who called themselves homo sapiens. To the universe we are not even classified and if we are classified, we're certainly not classified as anything very special. We to the universe are but a whisper among screams.

Wylie Says It Best
"When man evolved from an apelike ancestor to a creature capable of creating images in his brain, of making mental relationships, and of expressing these vocally, he became a user of symbols. The very sounds he uttered were symbols--for trees or tigers, bad dreams or a big wind." [ibid. p. xii.] The personification of instincts hath begun. Here come the horned demons, the holy-slut whores, the risen from the dead, and the allegorical angels, and the Los Angeles Dodgers who think they're legends.

Ohhh, that's good stuff, man; I mean, it gets you to hypothesizing, doesn't it?--and that's what makes poets and writers and mathematicians and baseball players.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
"For human-animal hybrids only."

And by the bye, as I was typing this, 28 people were blown to bits on the streets of Baghdad. You didn't see that in tonight's news, but you did get a little more few tons of despicable information about Anna "Stick it anywhere you like, sugar daddy" Nicole Smith, the white trash Texas trailer camp queen who showed her big enhanced tits and roly-poly rump in Ploughboy...er, ah, I mean, of course, Playdude--no that's the girly magazines Homer Simpson had hidden in the kitchen light fixture...er, ah, of course, Hugh Heifer's Playboy. "Ah, Anna," puff, puff, "ah, it's my philosophy that big tits should be voluptuous more on top than on sagging bottom...yours, Anna, while knock-out fine, need what I call a little upward tweaking, you know, nipples more on top...dudes like nipples more on top--I mean, that's the Playmate style requirement--no sagging titties like my old mother had, dammit, not as long as I'm the head dick here at this god-damn successful jack-off aid publication. Just think of how many men in the world will be jacking off over your tastefully done nude photos by some of the world's best photographers, Anna? Millions. But they like their nipples up on the tops of the tits; no saggies! Please. Here, Anna, I'll pay to get those enhanced; here's $10,000 and my doctor's name. I can't wait to see them--you know when they're fresh and back to normal, then we'll have a cumming out party for them." "Oh, Heifer, you're such a bull of the woods."

Anna Nicole, so tragic, such an American dream gone bad...oh boo-hoo-hoo--in the meantime they don't have a right to be crying in the new US Dependency of Iraq, do they? Not while Anna Nicole Smith is being honored and sanctified. Jesus, I bet her crotch stank.

alittlemoregrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Jesus X. Christ

Something Hit the Wolf Man Today That Affected Him Like That Searchlight Affected the Fabulous Apostle Paul of Antioch on the Road to Damascus--Praise the Lard! and Pass the Biscuits and Jelly
Holy Mary Magdalene! I've been in her church (the Church of the Holy Whore) in Marseilles--she's supposed to have a little more divinity than good ole Mamma Mary to that city's faithful; yes, I mean that Holy of Holy mothers, that Mary, the underage Jewish chick married to an old carpenter named Joe, that, holier than any thou on earth mother from whose free-from-semen eggs miraculously hatched the beatific lil' baby Joshua ben Joseph--"Let's see you top that, whore!" Mamma Mary was once heard spewing like a aroused cat as she riffed with Jesus's favorite babe, if you believe Coppola or Harrison Ford, whichever one of those plebian artists it was who said Jesus had a little bastard with Mary Maggie of the Streets, and I certainly do believe that since I can transcend over into Hollywood reality every now and then without contaminating my sinless messianic nature. But that has only to do with my expletive (isn't blaspheming Jesus and precious Mother Mary a death sentence?--"OH, shit, Lard, I'm gonna die? Really; I believe in Buddha's reincarnation bullshit, so now what'd'a I do?" "I am the fruit of the vine," saith the Lard. That beats my logic. I look over and see Daffy Duck sitting at a stool on the far end of the bar--I'm quoting myself--that's the first line to a novel I was once writing.

After I graduated from college, I was a Master of the Arts, baby, a social observer, a social rationalist, a tolerant, fun-loving, Chevrolet-drivin' fool, me and my roommate for my last two years in college, a dime-novelist, published, pretty well known among the cheap-thrill trailer house trash readers who look upon him as their Hemingway--or maybe more like their James Jones--but hell, nobody remembers James Jones now just like nobody remembers my roomate now (I once worked for a vanity press here in NYC and by God I swear one day in one of their sales brochures they mentioned my roommate as one of their most successful writers--so that bastard had paid to have his damn novels published, but then, shit, I know he got money for two of his novels, especially one called Trailer House Camp Tramp or something like that--I'm sure that was published by Fawcett or somebody--who the hell cares, I stop myself...and he and I were headin' home, him to his hometown just north of Fort Worth and me to my hometown out on the West Texas prairie, and when we got to the cutoff to his hometown, he said, "You wanna go to L.A.?" and I said, "Why not?" We had credit cards. I got about 7 credit cards on graduating from college, from Mobil, from Gulf, from Phillips 66 ("fill up with Phillips 66"--my dad always told me it started out as a airplane gasoline--Phillips headquarters was just a few miles down the road from Enid, Oklahoma, where I was growing up, over in Bartlesville in the Price Tower, an architectural marvel of Frank Lloyd Wright himself--a beautiful building sitting like a majestic American castle in this otherwise hayseed north-central Oklahoma town--can you call it a city?), and an early MasterCard, and I started using them the minute I got 'em--payin' for them! hell, I was a Master of Arts, baby, headin' for the big time (actually I was heading for the US Army, though I didn't have to report until September and it was late June), so why not L.A., Hollywood if I could and by God I could. so out there we went.

And after we had wined and dined and Disney-ed it up in L.A. (I met my future bride in the DisneyLand parking lot in Anaheim on this trip), we headed back to Texas, the credit cards maxed out, though I had one gasoline card, from Sinclair, I think it was, I had saved so we had money to buy gas and oil to get home on. We got out of California and back through Arizona, climbing up out of Phoenix toward the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico via Show Low and St. John, Arizona.

We were pulling into Show Low, just across the city limits, when POW one of my thinned down retreads I'd bought in L.A. blew out; I couldn't afford brand new tires and retreads were like $7 a piece, sometimes really good ones were $11, so that was chicken feed to me, besides most filing stations let me put these purchases on my credit cards, so I had four new retreads on it when we left L.A. and all was going well until the left back one gave up the rubber ghost as we pulled into Show Low, actually flopped and flapped into Show Low.

Hey, wow, St. Christopher be damned, right there to our left was a Sinclair filing station with a god-damn tire repair sign big as Dallas outside the garage area. We put the car up on the rack and I picked out the guy's best retread and then we popped over to a bar we had spotted, just off the highway next to the Sinclair station. It was called Buck's Buick Bar, a little white-painted wooden structure with a big neon sign and beer neons all over its front windows. We went in. Boy was it strange. It was semi-dark in there, smokey, but once our eyes adjusted to it, it was cozy, decorated in Zuni and Hopi stuff, bows, arrows, a tomahawk, some staffs, a warbonnet--a huge one--full of eagle feathers, Buck told us, though my friend and I joked about 'em lookin' more like turkey feathers to us; why there was even a wooden Indian back by a pinball machine. The bar was semi-packed, the front end the bar full while the deep end of the bar was empty except for one dude sitting at the far end of the bar out of the light so out of sight, though his silhouette showed he was humped over, was smoking a cigarette, was turning up a bottle to his lips every now and then, and was wearing a cowboy hat.

We ordered some cold Burgies--we'd come to love Burgermeister beer out of L.A. of all the beers we sampled on this trip--Lucky Lager, A-1 (an Arizona beer), Little Burgies (7 oz. cans--perfect for the road), Ranier from up in Seattle, Anchor Steam from San Francisco, Coors--before it went national, Walthers--another Colorado beer, Berghoff--another Colorado beer, so many I can't remember them all, though I do definitely know Burgermeister became our favorite.

Buck of Buck's Buick Bar was from New York City. He'd been driving his brand new '47 Buick 8 cylinder lickity-split, he thought directly from NYC to LaLa Land with his GI monies in tow, just out of the U.S. Army--he'd done his basic training at the army base in my hometown--and he said just as he got to Show Low, that new Buick broke totally down. Cussin', he got out of the Buick, kicked it a couple'a times, looked up and saw a bar, decided to have a drink, saw a for sale sign in the window of the bar as he went in, and before he'd finished a couple'a shots of Fleischmann's, he owned the bar--Buck's Buick Bar. He still had the Buick; it was parked out in the back; he was savin' up to have it mounted on the roof--a crane out of Phoenix to get it up there was the biggest expense about it, he said, but, dammit, one day he was gonna do it.

Drunk as Lards, my friend and I left Buck's and soon we were headin' away from the setting sun back on the highway to head east into that desolute darkness that led us toward the Zuni Reservation and the highway to Gallup, Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Amarillo, and then home sweet home.

We got just outside the city limits going east, when POW, dammit, another tire blew, this time the front right one. We rimmed it back to the Sinclair station and ended up back in Buck's just as the sun shot down in a blaze of tuscan red to leave the world under a veil of pitch darkness, cold darkness, a deep desert dark.

The bar was still semi-dark, it didn't matter to it whether it was high noon or midnight; it was still as though it were lit by wagon trail lanterns.

Suddenly, the silhouette at the end of the bar got up and came slowly toward us. We were back to drinking Burgies. And then this dude was right by us whispering, "Yanquis want to buy horned toad?" Whaaa! I turned and square-faced him; he was a Hopi or a Zuni Native American, sharp chisled features in hard glistening red stone, wearing a straw cowboy hat whose brim left a shadow over his face that expanded his nose to the point it looked like a duck bill.

Buck said, "Chief, Chief, leave these folks alone now, come on...." then to us, "...he's wantin' money so he can buy another pint of Santa Fe wine; that's his favorite--if you want that horned toad, you like 'em, give him 75 cents for it...." "How 'bout I buy him a bottle of this Santa Fe wine instead? I played with horned toads as a kid; my brother got hit square-dab in his eye from one of 'em when he was a kid--they spit blood out their eyes you know...." "Oh yeah, the Chief has 'em spit blood for the patrons some times, 2 bottles of Santa Fe wine he charges for that, so you see, he never really 'sells' you the toad; it's his pet; but he's been on a 7-day drunk and he needs to get back to the reservation and the bus'll pick 'im up in a couple'a minutes so he needs the bottle for the bus. You boys want'a spend the night here in Show Low?...Miss Dolly up past the Sinclair station has some nice rooms, classy, the Show Low Lodge...." "Naw we can't afford it; we're runnin' low on bucks. In fact, we're gonna try to get the Sinclair guy to give us some cash back on our credit cards if he will so we can get back to Texas at ease."

We drank another hour or so and then the Chevvie was reoutfitted with a new retread and off we went into the pitch-dark night with only the light of the millions of stars visible up in the highest sky in the world it looked like to me and our high-beam headlights to light our way through this thick black nothingness we drove into headin' for the Zuni Reservation--every now and then our headlights picking up a huge white cross (like Jesus was nailed up on except in miniature) glaring back at us along the side of the highway. Around one curve there were four crosses by the road. We knew from Buck these crosses marked a place where people had been killed on this stretch of Arizona highway. I must confess--I think I'm pretty safe, but remember we were drunk and adventurous and at one spot where there were 3 crosses, we couldn't resist. We got out and tried to dislodge one loose from the ground, but it was planted deep in a gravel-packed hole to the right ditch side of the road. So I took the Chevvie and eased it down the sort'a steep ditch and gently ran into the big sign; the car knocked it over enough we were then able to dislodge it whole and set it free to travel with us as a sacred icon. Trouble was it was bigger than our eyes had measured. Jesus, it was as long as the Chevvie and weighed near a ton, but by God, by Golly, by damn, we were determined and by nudging the cross end into the backseat by pushing it in through the window of the front right door, we got one arm of the cross out the far back window and the other fitted comfortably up in the back window. Then by my friend climbing into the car, positioning the foot of the cross through the front door right window, then closing the door, we had it.

I was fine on the driver's side, but my friend was kind'a jammed up on the right side--but it was exciting and worth it for the childish pleasure it gave us, and then after we were on the road again, he said he wanted the cross 'cause he had the perfect spot for it in his mother's garden back home.

All the way home we jived back and forth about that cross, about the poor old soul we were carting away from Arizona all the way over to Texas, to just north of Fort Worth. Later I was to learn that my friend's mother died unexpectedly a year or so afterwards and my friend put this cross at the head of her grave in his hometown cemetery--I wonder if it's still there to this day? I don't really care; but if any of you folks who know the area north of Fort Worth, say up around Jacksboro, and have ever seen a big white cross in a local graveyard up there, that's it, that's our poor soul's memorial we shipped all the way to Texas from over in Arizona, just down the highway from Buck's Buick Bar.

When I got back home, in July, Hemingway shot himself, blew the top of his head off with a prized Belgium-made big game shotgun, splattering his brains all over a mirror just in front of where he did it--was he watching himself? That death and the coverage of the funeral in Life magazine inspired me to start writing a novel--and that novel started off, "I entered this tiny bar on the edge of a nowhere desert as a sun dipped its fire into the blue-swallowing water of the horizon, and after my eyes adjusted to the dundrearied half-light of the joint, I swear I saw Daffy Duck sitting at the far end of the bar by himself, looking woeful, looking defeated."

Yep, the bar at the end of time; the bar at the end of world--and that's when I began seeing existence as a cartoon--a Loony Toons, a Merry Melodies.

I don't know what happened to that novel. I wasn't any good. I remember my character in it going down to the end of that bar and talking to Daffy. The cartoon duck star said he'd just been fired from Warner Bros. They said he was too old now; cartoons had changed, gotten slicker, faster, and Daffy's kind of humor just didn't get to the kids in these new times. "Fuck it all," Daffy said, "Just over there, just one step away, is the end of the world--just one little step out that backdoor and you're gone; you disappear; you vanish. All that's left of you is what there is left in the cans at Warner Brothers--all that celluloid you made, that rotting, disintegrating celluloid." "Don't worry, Daffy," I told him, "I'll make sure you're remembered; I'm writing a book about you and life and shit." That's all I remember. I ran out of frames. No one was laughing at what I intended as a comedy. Couldn't finish it; it was too reel--oops, I'm reeling, reality is a comet sailing around my old wolf head.

And what was this sudden realization that hit me today like that sword of light that hit old heathen executioner Saul of Tarsus on that road to old Damascus? Bingo!--I suddenly realized my time had been all wrong for a damn long time; I had regressed over the years to the point where I started my beats on the wrong breath, on the wrong foot, going down when I should've gone up; it's as simple as that. And-a-one-and-a-two....and let me tell ya, folks, suddenly I started composing again--HUH, a blessed miracle? Nope, just a release of a block in my mind that perhaps has been there since I was a piano-student lad of ten and studying the several composition lesson books I had to learn to use in order to read more difficult sheet musics, those they call concert studies, like Books 1 through 10 of the John Schaum course (I have an autographed photo of John Schaum hanging over my keyboard as I type this).

The beat. It's all about time...and as Charles Parker played, "Now's the Time." NOW is the only time there is.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

thegrowlingwolf's Garbage

Jigs That Are Up
An old pal sent me a clip of Ann Coulter doing her Rupert-Murdoch-backed-backward-thinking thing--her act, which is all any of this shit is, these people's acts. Rush Limbaugh. Now who in the hell in their right mind would take that big bag of fecal-fired hot air seriously? Yet millions do--they love him like they love Jesus Christ--he's a comedian at best, not funny, but that's really all that that big blowhard is--in truth. He's an ex-Dallas deejay who observed Howard Stern's meteoric rise to radio fame in the eighties and decided he could be a mirror-image of Stern and ride his coattails to barrels of big Conservative radio bucks, which he did and which he now spends liberally on oxycontin, illegal Cuban cigars (the favorite cigars of all oral-fixated men whether right-wing or left-wing), oversized toilet seats in his mansions so his balloon butt stays flabbily comfortable while he's on the throne defecating all that corrupted waste his big swollen shit-making body keeps recycling, and of course a young gold-digging wife--Limbaugh eats shit, talks shit, makes shit, hell, he is shit. I think of Ann Coulter the same way I think of Limbaugh or Reilly or Sean Hannity (he once worked for Vince McMahon, the absolutely white trash rasslin' promoter whose act is similarly right-wing warped anti-progressive and as vulgar as watching Ann Coulter douche), I ignore them, never hear them, and in Ann the Jackass's case, I never have read her. Old Babbling ex-OSS Stooge William F. Buckley was more "civilized" than these ex-disc jockeys--I mean, Buckley went to YALE, I say, and he could play the harpsichord and having sailing yachts as his main hobby--yeah, the Buckleys were dirty rich out of Connecticut; why, hell, the Buckleys must have been neighbors of the Bushes--Good Ole Nazi-trick-jiving Prescott Bush and his worthless son, Pappy Bush--GOD-DAMMIT, look how the worthless rise to the top in this country--it doesn't matter their felonious and murderous natures, the only thing that matters is they are rich and the sons of past rich politicians, like Granpappy Prescott and Pappy G. H. W.--amazin' how the Bushes gained such public affection--of course, I understand; most of Amurica is yodelling white trash trailer camp ignoramuses--Jesus, it makes me mad as hell--I'm growling like a baby elk-hungry wolf, these clowns, these Bozos, these voice-hearing creepos, these frauds, these unelected deciders keep getting away with atrocities that defy reasoning--regressive ideas being enforced by repressive and regressive men and now women--men and women who are taught to obey orders even if those orders mean certain death--think of that; that's the pledge you take when you become a combat soldier--if you platoon sergeant sez you go over the top, "Move, move, move, motherfucker!" And you move, into the danger zone, the unknown, every thing that moves in front of you , whether shadows or real people, you have to blow it away, since your thing is you kill them before they kill you so you simple kill or be killed whether what you imagine's in front of you is real or an real-looking image of the enemy you imagine looks like how you imagine he or she looks like.

Let's put Ann to bed and then forget about her. Ann Coulter looks like a jackass. I never learned much from a jackass, except not to approach one from the rear--yet, with a jackass face like Ann Coulter has, it is only natural to try and mount her from the rear--from the front--Holy Cow! sorry, I should say Holy Jackass--only a blindman could penetrate her from that angle and then even he'd be rebuked by the fetid odor oozing from her reconstructed penis-vagina--just like a jackass has no sex.

But, hey, we assume Ann is worth a couple'a mill, right? It's all about fame and fortune, folks, that's all these entertainment acts are about. They've been on radio ever since I can remember--Paul Harvey, Gabriel Heater, old news-gossip flim-flammers; and then there was Joe Pyne, Allan Burke, Long John Neville, and then the wonderfully vulgar but tragically confused idiotic babbling of Morton Downey, Jr. These are all the opposite sides of the left-wing entertainers like George Carlin--I mean, what kind of spoiled sausage could Carlin make of Ann Coulter? Or what would Allen Ginsburg have to say about this male-female jackass-human? Or Gore Vidal? Though those last two she could certainly accuse without much liability that they were homos, queers, pansies--homosexualists, as Gore Vidal would call it. These dudes probably wouldn't waste much time in flushing Ann's fried brains down the toilet of total disrespect.

Was Hitler funny? He said the same things Ann Coulter is saying. Put a little Charlie Chaplin moustache on old Ann "HeeHaw" Coulter and you'd have a strange-looking Schickelgruber look-alike. Is Ann Coulter Jewish?

Tough babes, don't you love 'em.

A Word From Philip Wylie
"I've watched ten thousand Walters [ed. note: Walter Mittys--you could, like Charles Ives, use the name Rollo for Mitty] singing "God Bless America" in the smug assumption that the deed's been done, so that the tepid ditty was not even a prayer but a profanation, not bendiction, but alibi.

"This is the story of the ego. As religions try by their legends, their doctrines and faiths to reassert the simple, lost premises of instinct, and as nations pervert their own history--as every bounden group of men extracts from itself an aura of moral tales, of wonder and achievement that are not truth and but garble Principle the worse--so the man by himself invents a picture of himself in the world to safisfy his vanity and his compulsions and believes he is this image." From: An Essay on Morals, Philip Wylie, Giant Cardinal Edition, Pocket Books, NYC, 1961 (the year Carl Jung and Ernest Hemingway died).

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Great Correction

Isn't It Amazin'
The stock market was merely correcting itself, the major Wall Street bullshitters were spouting all day on the National Stock Market Network or the Columbia Stock Market Network or the Bloomburg Stock Market Network, all expert traders, meaning flim-flammer stock salesmen who depend on YOU buying and selling stocks for their livings, so, of course, they're going to ballyhoo, "Oh, you dumb peones, you stupid dicks, you know nothing about the stock market (like me!) so leave it to us, the experts to tell you, hell, this decline is nothing, a mere bag of shells--why, it's just the stock market correcting itself. You believe that, don't you? I mean you believe in Jesus Christ, why the hell can't you believe God adjusts the stock market occasionally? Come on. Big investors have to take some profits every now and then. Come on. It's just a normal sell off, that's all. It recovered--ah ha, we told you so--WHAAA? It didn't recover but dropped another 140 points yesterday? Holy shit...I mean, oh well, I guess the correction is going on a little longer than we thought." Such hooey. Genuine hooey, too, folks, because I've studied economics, I've studied the stock market, why I once even invested heavily in the stock market and I made a shit load of money, too, but how it worked--I haven't a clue; the same as I haven't a clue as to how a roulette wheel is rigged in a casino, though I know for damn sure it is rigged. Same with the stock market. Something supports it and when that support is taken away, hey, the old building tumbles down. So, hey, take that million you made in no-down-payment real estate and put it all in the stock market; it's the patriotic thing to do.

Exxon-Mobil looks like they're gonna show world-record-breaking profits once again. Always keep some Halliburton stock in the hole--you know, aces always win, and Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil are ace hole cards. Get rich as quickly as you can and then convert your cash to something of tangible value like LAND or diamonds, gold, things corrupt people will kill or be killed for.

'Ten Hut!
I can't understand the appeal of all these ex-soldiers to the Dumbocrats and the progressive indies. Really I can't. Like this morning on Democracy Now when normally "sane" Amy Goodman gave her whole hour to interviewing this General Wesley Clark, who wants to be president so god-damn bad and who I hope, please, never gets elected president. Amy shocked me by giving this army bum credence and holding him up as a progressive-liberal politically saavy man, as an antiwar leader and a social democrat and a believer in equality but also a believer in our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or pleasure as old Father Freud would say).

I listened to about 10 minutes of that interview. What a joke Clark is. Come on, Amy, surely you aren't so mesmerized by this guy's uniform that you can't see through the smoke he shoots out to cover the gaseous bullshit he's spewing. He has a new book out--Jesus Christ, I've been a writer all my life and I still don't see how a nincompoop ex-bad-ass general can knock out two or three books a year with no seemingly dent in his lecturing schedule or his hustling up big bucks to back his perpetual presidential candidacy--even his books are probably hypocritical, though I've never read one of his books.

And General Clark's new book deals with, what else!, "great generals," and listen to these progressive/liberal champions who are heroes to Gen'l Clark: how about Dwight David "Hey, where's the golf course" Eisenhower (he had a secret bunker inside a mountain outside of Denver, which I always suspected was somewhere on the Cherry Hills Golf Course there in Denver, which was Eisenhower's vacationing White House--he loved Denver and especially Cherry Hills. When Ike had his big heart attack, he went to Denver to keep ruling us)?--yep, DD Eisenhower is one of Wesley's general heroes--AND, the other! How about Ulysses S. Grant (the S. stood for the same thing the S. stood for in Hairy S. Truman--it stands for bullShit)? Yep, old Gen'l Wesley C. thinks Ulysses S. Grant was not only a great army man--especially when he had a bottle of bourbon close by--but was also a great president--oh yeah, one of the great presidents of all time.

I listened for 10 minutes and the General was trumpeting about like a fucking peacock, talking army shit--I mean, you people who've never been in the army, hey, you don't get to be a general like old Wes by being an antiwar progressive or a liberal. You follow the military code of justice; you follow the military chain of command; and as a general, you are privileged--you don't have to worry about getting killed yourself, but you can sure have a hell of a lot of troopers killed at will, and we know with the army's "kill or be killed" attitude, a general officer has the privilege of hiding behind the skirts of his troops--whether they kill or get killed.

Clark was an asshole general when he was over there bombing the hell out of the Bosnians and Serbians in Billy Jeff Clinton's little harmless war on god-damn broken up Yugoslavia, which was a thriving country under Marshall Tito, when Sarajevo was one of the loveliest old world cities still standing after an enormous chunk of time, but it didn't take the Serbs but a matter of months to totally destroy that old city, especially its old library so full of so much great Slavic writings and histories. Remember when Billy Jeff's Cabinet dude, Ron Brown, was that his name, Sec'y of Commerce, or one of those cushy Cabinet jobs, died in a plane crash, on a mission no one will ever know what it was all about, a Cabinet member like that flying into a war zone. (Did you ever wonder why it's so easy for Georgie Porgie and Pickles, Unka Dick, Condo-leasing Rice, Rummy, and all these tinhorn tagalongs to just suddenly drop unexpected and uninvited into a war zone?--this is the first war I can remember us being involved in--and I lived through 5 major US war-involvements since I've been on this coil--where one of our presidents or his high cabinet members fly casually in and out of war zones every 30 days or so. Unka Dick said he just happened into Kabul the other day when he almost got his saggy old ass blown away 'cause he needed to use the bathroom.

Anyway, back to these god-damn generals and them trying to finagle their way into politics--I mean, they need a hobby now that they are retired--and these very IGNORANT men get pretty god-damn great incomes for the rest of their lives--probably full pay in the case of a big general like Clark; plus he gets to go to the clean and rat-free areas of Walter Reed Hospital and not in the kennels where they house the dog soldiers; plus he gets extra-pay as NATO gobbly-gooker or whatever the hell he was in Bosnia--I think he admits he commited some atrocities overthere doesn't he? Anyway, dammit, Amy was kissing his ass and I was shouting, "Amy, get that uniform worship shit out of your head and see this general of the army for what he is, just that, a general officer from the most destructive army in the history of the world, the most terrifying, the most inhuman, now an all volunteer army, meaning every manjack and womanjack in the regular army is a career person--they are intending on earning their livings in the military--most of them joined thinking they'd never have to go to war, or if they did, they'd be invincible--you know, teenaged kids see this war like they see the rasslin' matches and all that total bullshit or like they see soldiers portrayed in Hollywood, you know Rambo (played by a little short-shit ex-porn stud who has never been closer to a battlefield where people are getting blown to bits or blowin' the enemy (whoever that is) to bits than one of those phony Hollywood sets. It's like old turkey-necked Clint Eastwood rewriting the story of Iwo Jima to fit his knowledge of American history, which is zilch).

Shit, I'm so irked over this, I ain't makin' no sense--I'm sounding like a growling wolf--only another wolf can get my full meaning.

Military guys are not the right people to turn our government over to. Murtaugh is nuts. McCain is nuts. Kerry is nuts. These are ex-Nam vets; Mc Cain was subjected to horrible tortures for the long time he was held prisoner by the Cong in North VietNam--surely what he went through did make him nuts, just like Bush said when McCain was running for president against Georgie Porgie--remember? --he said, any man who had gone through the experiences McCain had in VietNam had to be god-damn nuts; unlike George W. "Poor Little Spoiled Mamma's Boy Rich Boy" Bush's attitude that tells him (he treats it as a joke) anybody who couldn't get out of serving time in the military or who volunteers for the military is god-damn nuts--that's where the old phony president and I totally agree. And these ex-Gung Ho! creeps are nuts; check out their eyes, that's how you tell. I don't even have to look in Wesley Clark's eyes to know he's nuts; I can tell it by the way he talks--he talks like a general--same attitude.

Generals all have sterness in their eyes. Generals have no sense of humor. They are trained to use mass units of human beings as pawns and knights and rooks in bloody, destructive, devastating, ruinous battles--to direct waves of human beings carrying deadly weapons and explosive devices on their person against other waves of human beings carrying deadly weapons and explosive devices on their person--their whole objective is "To KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL US." You dig that philosophy? That's the only philosophy a military general knows. I don't know if Clark is a West Point grad, but wherever he went to school, he had to go to officer's training school (I've done it--OTS, Fort Sam Houston, Texas--why right off Eisenhower Boulevard, too, by golly), and war colleges, and all kinds of army special schools. Damn, I give up. I'd kick his old army ass F-ing square off the bandwagon and into the silence of the ditch.

Wesley Clark can't be a progressive if he's a retired general. A progressive would never join the military in the first place. Look at your conscientious objectors in WWII; now there are progressives for you. Progressives are antiwar of anykind. Even in WWII the Progressives stayed antiwar even to the point of being called Nazis and Commies all the time--look at poor old progressive gentleman farmer Henry Wallace. Wallace wasn't a commie, he was a true Progressive; yet the bozos, the Rollos, the Yahoos all decided he was bent on sending the USA straight into the arms of those old Marxist-Leninist Big Daddies.

I'm tired. I had a hard day out baby elk hunting.

F Wesley Clark; never trust an ex-general--just like neither a man or a woman should ever marry an ex-general, mark my words.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Semantics of Right and Wrong

Some Rhodes Kill
I have listened to Randi Rhodes for a year now, mostly impressed with her comments, though not at all hog wild over her every comment, and in particular her comments about the relationship of We the People and the US military. Randi toots her own horn excessively, though I understand her approach since I've heard her say more than once she patterns her radio personality after that of Howard Stern, the dude who it looks like now has sunk Sirius Satellite Radio into a 500 million dollar hole that it seems to be able to only get out of by merging with the XM, the other satellite radio.

Stern's idea for contentious radio is based on his theory that if you want high radio ratings you get on the air and act like a know-it-all asshole no matter the subject and no matter the controversy or salacious aspects of your position. Randi approaches radio from the same starting point; it's an approach that Stern used to utter success--the highest yet success in the FM radio market and, of course, now in the satellite radio market, currently claiming over a million subscribers at $14 a month, a sum that hardly covers the 500 million they paid Stern to leave reg radio and joint the superfuture radio.

One way Randi constantly blows her own bullhorn is in the fact that she claims she was once a member of the US Air Force--a noncombat ground job. She claims a strong relationship with the bimbo kids who are "sacrificing" their youth and lives in a rotten war based on total lies and absolute deceit and "evil" sort of conniving in Afghanistan and Iraq. She believes you don't say anything prejudicial against our military personnel and if you do, then Randi gets hostile and threatens to cut you off, calling you a Repugnican lapdog as she does.

A couple of days ago, she got a call from a guy in Pittsburgh. This guy started trashing Randi by first off saying she wasn't a progressive because a progressive cannot support any military attempt at righting the world nor can they support any kind of military action or the troops used to carry out those military actions. Progressives, in the post-VietNam War sense of the word, are totally opposed to war and thereby totally opposed to anything military, volunteer soldiers included. His point was that Randi Rhodes by bragging about her military service is a two-faced hypocrite, a babbler for peace and ending the war on the one hand but a mocking at true progressive ways to end the war on the other hand, her values being more in what we progressives jokingly call "liberal" values.

This guy went on to say people who volunteer for the military can never be progressives. Randi got her hackles up. "You creep, you Republican freak..." The guy interrupts her and says, "I'm not a Republican, I'm a Progressive, and as a Progressive I'm totally anti-war and that means I anti women and men volunteering for the military--that's their careers, their jobs, and that's why I say these soldiers are getting what they signed up for--WAR" [I am paraphrasing]--and this guy, in order to make his point stick, then blurted out that he thought "it serves you right" every time he read about one of our soldiers getting whacked in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which Randi responded by hanging up on the dude calling him a Nazi and blah, blah, blah..."I suppose he's anti-Semitic, too," at which time the guy called back and said no he wasn't anti-Semitic but he did feel if you are Jewish and you, like Joe Lieberman, are so hide-bound stuck on supporting the Israeli government and military in their intent to wipe out all Aaa-rabb dogs who don't look up to Holy Heaven and say, oh yes, please Israel take my land, my home, my farm, my wife and kids and blow it all to Kingdom Come, even at the risk of the annihilation of all of mankind, that you can't be a progressive no matter how unorthodox you say you are. I knew what the dude meant, but Randi took it personally, I think she's Jewish, and called the guy an anti-Semitic asshole and hung up on him again then proceeded to ridicule the guy for two days in a row--she was still going after him on today's show.

This guy was simply saying, according to his way of thinking as a progressive you couldn't join the military if you really were a progressive and in that sense, people currently in the military or ex-military-type politicians (Murtaugh, McCain, Kerry--nutjobs) cannot be progressives nor should they be welcomed to participate in high roles within a progressive political movement; once you've been to war and identify with the dog soldiers, or the jarheads, or the flyboys, or the swabbies--it's an ego thing with males--their military service--even I kind'a brag about my military service, your perspective is out of tilt in terms of the gung-ho killer attitude you were taught on joining the military--that "kill or be killed" one-way street-way of thinking. What I'm really trying to say is, though I am unable to really ID what a true progressive is (I think Teddy Roosevelt was considered a Progressive; so was, believe it or not, Herbert Hoover). Progressives are given credit for the anti-Trust laws, for getting women the right to vote, and Prohibition. Some old Progressives, like Ida Tarbell, weren't absolutely opposed to Capitalism, though they were opposed to corporatism and giving corporations the same Constitutional rights as an ordinary old US citizen, though they weren't for the overthrow of the corporations just the Federal regulation of them--notice, the very opposite of Conservative intent--even a shade off left of Liberalism.

What this dude was trying to get across to Randi was that since the VietNam Peace Movement, a progressive has come to be thought of as totally antiwar, totally for social change--a constant change, by the way; Progressives mean to clear the highway ahead of roadblocks and military checkpoints and overproduction and cheap labor and shit like that. How can a member of the waring military be progressive? How can a Vietnam war vet be progressive? How can a hillbilly governor's wife who then became a president's wife who then became an ineffectual senator from her adopted State of New York--she's done absolutely nothing for the people of NY State since she's been in Congress, running for president the minute Slick Willie beat his impeachment rap ("I did not have sex with that woman") and she started squeezing his tired-old balls--"You bastard, you owe me big time." "OK, Hill, I'm sorry, I mean, honey, you wanna be president--I'll make you president, Hill--will that get me off your meat hook?"--Hillary "Dennis Rodman" Clinton is no progressive; in fact, she's a Conservative in Dumbocrat pants suits--just as conservative as Joe Lieberman and just as likely to turncoat on us when we stupidly elect her president. She'll carry on Bush's failed policies, that I guarantee you.

A Zionist Jew can't be a progressive either.

God, it's all semantics. I remember sitting in a Sociology theory class one time and the teacher, a stone evolutionist-Midwest progressive--said he loved Communism but without the Communists, suddenly looking up to heaven and saying, "You know, the wonderful thing about theories, you can define them any damn way you please since it's all semantics anyway."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Progressive: "Support our troops, disband the military."