Kill or Be Killed

"'Tennnn 'Hut!"
I remember clearly when the bus I was on pulled through the gates of the Ozark Mountain resort near Rollo, Missouri, I had been invited to spend some time at by my avuncular pals in the U.S. Army. I was 20 years old and had just graduated college. The letter I got inviting me to this resort said I had no choice, so I might as well come and enjoy life there or else get my ass immediately over the border and into Canada and be branded a chickenshit coward and a draft-dodging felon by the "big brass" in Washington, District of Corruption. The letter was signed by the head of Selective Service, arch-asshole General Lewis Blaine Hershey, yep, same as the chocolate company, except this Hershey's kisses were kisses of death, maybe sugar coated, but death just the same.

This U.S. Army resort was called Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Now I knew forts already. I had enjoyed the hell out of the sinful depths of Fort Worth, Texas, when I was a college superidiot. Hell, good ole Fort Worth was full of bars, blues, beer, whores, cowboys, oil folks, airmen from Carswell AFB, stock yard workers, railroad workers, coat-hanger abortion doctors, dope peddlers, ex-cons and connies, flim-flammers, Mexicans, Blacks, Crackers, White Trash, Cedarchoppers, clodhoppers, hotels like the Jackson Hotel (I wrote a song about the Jackson Hotel called "Texas Reality"--don't ask; nobody ever recorded it), pool shooters, Willie Nelson's family, great golf courses, and women hot enough to melt male hearts of cold steel.

Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, looked nothing at all like Fort Worth, Texas. Fort Worth was a fort in the sense of a place name; Leonard Wood was a fort in the sense of being a "fortified place occupied only by troops." And as that bus entered that fort's gate, I suddenly became not who I thought I was, a human being who wanted to write and dance and drink and sing my way through life, but rather a numbered "trooper," or in other words, I became a soldier.

That bus whipped in through the big gate out at the Rollo entrance. The country was woodsy as hell, hilly as hell, and hot as hell, and it was already late September when I got there. After the gate guards cleared us, the bus turned into a sideroad that wound down off the main road and ended up entering a big driveway that wound up a hill, passed a very military-looking building, painted white-flesh white with olive drab trimmings all topped with a steeple with a cross on top; Jesus, a church right here in the middle of this army base. Was Jesus in the army? Didn't he promote peace? Didn't Jesus protect whores and stuff from brutality? What does Jesus do in the army? A million questions had been running through my knockin' noggin for every day and every night after I had signed up out of desperation at the end of that fiery hot summer I graduated college; I had signed up when I was 18 and then got a college deferment; that's the way you did it in those days if you were middle-class enough to be able to go to college. I had no idea at that time who was getting killed in 'Nam. Nobody from my hometown I knew of was overthere. Two of my high school friends also just graduated from college, one an architect, the other a geologist, both just married, got on the bus in Dallas and that was cool that I had good friends going into the same shit as I was, but they were just as dumb about what we were in far; in fact, they didn't even really believe there was a war in Viet Nam yet. Like, Lyndon Bullshit Johnson hadn't declared it a war yet--he hadn't invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident yet (another lyin' son of a bitch president--think of that).

I knew I was coming to this place for what they called "basic training," but I wasn't sure what it was nor was I worried about what it was. I felt invincible, I suppose, based on the fact that I was still full of myself after making love especially animalistically in the backseat of my dad's big caddy the very night before I got on that bus. I still had no connection yet to what I was fixing to experience, something I had heard about all my life from my uncles from World War I, the war to end all wars, my brother and his friends from World War II on through the Korean War--I was a baseball fan in those days and believe it or not a semi-Red Sox fan--I really was a St Louie Cardinal fan--but I knew Ted Williams was a jet fighter pilot in the Korean Police Action-- on into the war that Eisenhower had instigated and that JFK had continued prepping for and then suddenly there it was, yet another war, this one they were calling the Indo-China War, which started actually as a threat against Laos and only finally against VietNam (all due to the colonizing-selfish French assholes who got their butts kicked by Uncle Ho (a great man who idolized Abe Lincoln) at Dien Bien Phu in 1954). I had had a much older brother who had been in World War II with the Marines in the Pacific, but those guys never talked about that war and neither did my brother unless you got him drunk and then he'd tell you about his running a whorehouse in Tsingtao, China, and that's about it. He never really was in any heavy action, but he was a Marine medic at Guadalcanal and saw the blown-to-bits bodies being brought into the Marine hospital there from the fierce fighting on that had just happened on Guadalcanal and the awful bloody action going on at the same time on Iwo Jima. So I know he'd seen blood and guts and gore and detached arms and legs and maybe sacks full of a mixture of soldiers--you know, they were blown up together and entangled--or maybe even heads in sacks, the only parts left of blown-up young men--but he never talked about it. And I had been a mere baby of a kid during WWII, though I do remember my brother going off to Great Lakes Naval Training Center and I remember him being in the Mariana Islands, at Truk and at Guam, and then over to Guadalcanal, then onto China before coming home to Dallas when I was just beginning to stand up straight and walk. The reality of war, however, I couldn't grasp, nor was I, like I said, worried about it. I had no idea I was headed in the direction of one of worst losses in this nation's long War History.

The bus pulled into a large parking lot surrounded by a complex of one-story buildings. We all, from all over Texas, piled out of that stale Army Greyhound as a collection of gullible-looking human oddities and onto this large parking lot area. A friendly corporal in fatigues that were starched to immaculate stiffness and combat boots that were flashing diamond-like facets of reflection they were so highly polished, met us as we came off the bus. When I say the corporal was polite I mean he seemed to be treating us decently, you know, telling us what to expect, how we were to get in line, by first letters of our last names, what documents we were to have with us (papers), blah, blah, blah. Then he shuffled us on the trot over to this big army-looking building, like the church but with no steeple and cross on top. This building was off-yellow with olive-drab trimmings. It was two-story and it was sitting up off the ground on large concrete block foundation posts set every five feet or so under the "billets," as the first sergeant we were introduced to said after we were in our billets--and I was told I was in Battery B of C Company, which had four batteries assigned to it. C Company was part of a training battalion that had four companies in it.

The corporal told us to put our footlockers (we were instructed to buy our own footlockers before we came to camp and I bought mine from a preacher-boy high school friend of mine who on the side sold army surplus goods, so what Jesus didn't bring in, the spoils of war did) in front of our bunks. I bunked with one of my friends from high school; I got the top bunk, which I didn't mind since I loved upper berths or sleeping up in the air. After we positioned our footlockers, the corporal had us stand by our bunks. Then he marched us out of the billets and then double-timed us over to a big warehouse-looking building where we were given our military uniforms, tee shirts, belts, gun belts, canteen, field kits, trench tool, air mattress--a whole bunch of junk, including two pair of fatigues and two fatigue jackets, a full dress uniform and two pair of combat boots and one pair of regular black dress shoes. Then we trotted back to the billets and the corporal showed us how to put our uniforms in our stand-up lockers and the rest of the stuff in our footlockers. Then we were rounded up again and trotted over to the base barbershop. I didn't have long hair then but I didn't have a crew cut either; the me a crew cut was a sign of a hillbilly, roughneck, or right-winger; soon, I had an G.I. cut, something half-ass between white sidewalls and a bald head. I looked like shit, but I didn't give a shit since I was enjoying the experience. It was keeping my mind off realizing what kind of crap I was being basically trained for. I wasn't thinking of blood and guts; I was thinking of when do we get a break so we can play poker or shoot some craps. No such thing. The rest of the day and into the evening, we were trotted all over the camp lastly going through the medical center and being hit with our innoculations, hit with five shots at once by the cruel and vicious medics out of this huge vacuum-powered needle gun. A lot of the weaker specimens fell to the ground as they left the medical center and hit the roaring heat of the early eve; it was stiffling day and night in among those Ozark woods.

Back at the billets, it was 9 pm and we were called to attention by the corporal. From a door to a room at the far end of the billet came a short, leather-tough-skinned, blocky, 70-year-old-looking face on a teenage-looking body. His face was as though it was hacked from granite. It was set in a stony hawkish look. It never changed. It was always hawk serious; like a hawk's eyes are constantly darting looking for prey or danger. The corporal introduced him as our first sergeant, Sergeant Val Kilmer. The first sergeant walked out in the middle of the floor in the middle of the room in between the rows of bunk beds. He didn't say a word. He then revealed that he was carrying a riding crop, like they used to carry in the horse troops, the cavalry, and he took that crop and whapped it over his palm. I cracked just like a bull whip. "That, troops, could be the sound of an enemy rifle being fired directly at you!" He then went over to a rather fat kid--I had no idea who anyone was except my bunkmate--the rest of them were strangers; I didn't even remember seeing any of them on our "from Texas" bus. In front of the fat kid, the sergeant whapped in on a post right by the fat kids ear. The fat kid jumped like a scared motherf-er and put his hands automatically over his ears. "You crazy bastard, that could have been an enemy weapon going off right by your f-ing ear. You coward. Don't worry, son," it was a though Sergeant Kilmer had a touch of fatherly compassion for this fat kid, "I'll make an f-ing man out of your jelly ass...look at you; I'll have that blubber off'a you in two weeks are I didn't kill more gooks in Laos than any other god-damn combat trooper over there." He moved back into the center of the room. "It's called Laos, men. That's where all of you are headed. You're headed to war, men, and, men, war ain't sweet like that little filly you left back at home with her legs spread and your best 4-F friend doing here right now as I speak. No, men, war is not sweet. War is bitter." He said that with triumphant ice in his voice. I marked him off as a nutjob and still didn't catch on. Then, he was standing in front of me. "You wanna kill, son?" He was right in my face. His breath tasted like old people smell right before they die natural deaths. "No, sir," I said, "I don't wanna kill nobody." "You what? Speak louder." "I don't wanna kill, sir." "Well, aren't you a silly stupid son of a bitch? Then are you ready to die?" "No, sir." "So you're not ready to kill and now you're not ready to die. Well let me set you straight, you silly bastard, in this man's army, it's either you learn to kill or you get killed. You got that? You either decide you're gonna learn to kill or you're gonna get killed. Because in this man's army, it's kill or be killed and you are gonna be trained by me and none of my men wanna be killed and by the time I get through with you bastards, you're gonna be KILLERS! You got that?" Nobody said anything. "You say, 'YES SIR!' Say it!" "Yes sir." We chirped. He was furious. "God-dammit," he walked back over to me, "Yell it out, YES, SIR. I'M GONNA BE A KILLER." I did. I yelled it right square-dab in his fucking granite-frozen face. "By God, I like you, son. You're gonna be my best killer if you keep that attitude." He turned around and walked to the end of the billet. "Lights out in 30 minutes. We'll be getting up at Oh-4:30, men, so you'd better get to sleep; you're gonna need your strength tomorrow. Killing isn't as easy as you think."

Kill or be killed. No mention of peace anywhere around me now. The only piece we all were thinking about were the whores we would soon be looking for in Saint Louis after we got our first liberty, which didn't happen for 6 more long difficult weeks. At the end of that 6-week period, I felt so pent up, penned up, and fucked up, I felt like killing Sergeant Kilmer, that's for sure, that asshole.

thegrowlingveteran
for The Daily Growler

Poetic Justice

What the Hell Is a Poet?
I grew up with a poet. She wrote poetry in her bed. She had had two books of poetry published by the time I was born. I didn't like poetry. To me it was something school forced me to memorize and stand like a fool and attempt to recite. An episodic adventure in my case that inevitably ended up with me choking due to stage fright and then feigning insanity as I hub-doubled my way up the miserable hill of whatever dainty verse it was I was supposed to be reciting until the angered teacher slammed me back into my seat with a public scolding and then with a real bitch-or-rat-bastard flourish add an F by my dishonored name in her gradebook. I liked limericks, yes I did, and the more popular ones of the day I could spout back at you in perfect remembrance on stage out behind the proverbial woodshed. Truth is, I didn't really know limericks were poetry at that time, but I knew instinctively how to memorize them. I wasn't interested enough in poetry to want to study it or even wonder what it really was and where it came from.

And, like I say, I grew up with a poet. She lived with us, in her own apartment attached to the back of our house. She planted gardens, too. She had been a florist at one time in her hardtack life and she saw huge beauty and thrills in flowers, especially peonies, large mummish-headed flowers that come on quiet palettes of pastel colors. Her favorite color for peonies was white. But for irises, it was cobalt blue. Her flowers grew bigger than ordinary flowers because she talked to them, my mother told me. "She recites her poems to the flowers. As a poet, she is very close to her flowers and she says they whisper poetry in her ears." Those colossal flowers were symbols of miraculous expression to her, growing as they do from seeds you shoot in a tight deep hole in a moistened earth where they meet in that earth's womb and begin to grow into those flowers I could see out there in my grandmother's garden as I peered at her from behind my honeysuckle vine fortress just outside my bedroom window on a trellis of white holding-hand crosses now literally python-wrapped around by the strong and lustrously blowing up honeysuckle vine.

My grandmother would take her little stool, sit on it, then take her handheld gardening tool, dig a small hole, scrape the dark earth up into a tiny hill, then suddenly poke her middle finger of her right hand deep into that little mound, and as soon as that finger slid out, her left hand shot the seeds deep into the mound's wide open hole, which she then quickly with a two-hand movement closed and patted slightly down, to hop up and then sprinkle that mound, as if a god, with water from her watering can. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of gardening and take a dirty notebook from her gardening apron pocket and write, for what seemed to a kid like me a dragging-on-and-on of minute after minute. Everytime I looked up she was still writing madly in that dirty little notebook. Then you would hear her typing away during the afternoons as she sat at her L.C. Smith typewriter that sat gothically on her old mahogany desk she had facing abrupt to her picture window so she could look straight into her passionate garden with its cheering bed of flowers and its guestlist of hummingbirds, bottle flies, dragonflies, butterflies, sparrows, chicadees...my grandmother even knew and loved the bugs in her garden.

One day I learned in school about an alexandrine--and even today I still remember that an alexandrine was a type of poem some oldtimer wrote honoring Alexander the Great--and how an alexandrine fit a certain pattern based on syllabic time counted by iambs and I'll be damned if I learned where the caesuras go. Too many marching alexandrine feet for me, pieds, like the pied in the Pied Piper or the Piedmont, but not impediment, though I once saw a man wearing a pedometer the Lone Ranger had sent him. No lie. I believed him. The gadget had a picture of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on it. That's how young of a kid I was when I watched my grandmother writing poetry.

Once I tried to read one of my grandmother's poetry books but I couldn't finish it. The Christian Bible I could read, though I admit, even risking being dubbed a heretic, I really only liked to read the Bible for the nasty parts, where they talked about pomegranites and does and things like pomegranites and does, things like my mother had, though my mother wasn't blessed with pomegranites and does, more like lemons and cellos.

I didn't start writing poetry until I was in college and in love and drinking too much and galavanting when I should have been studying. I hated college but I loved the library. I loved books. I had grown up surrounded by books. Poets have a lot of books. They have a lot of reference books, too, especially a rhyming dictionary or a synonym dictionary or a dictionary of fables or a dictionary of pied a tiers, or a dictionary of dictionaries, and always large volumes of Shakespeare's sonnets, the British Poets, the New World Poets, Leaves of Grass, and my grandmother's favorite of them all, Lord Byron's works. I tried to read Childe Harold back then, and that got me nowhere fast. I may have gotten to Portugal with the good Lord B, except sleep, extreme sleep, attacked me once during that reading to the point I never attempted that work again until I was anciently older.

What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
The blight of life--the demon, Thought

Oscar Wilde's Reading Gaol , however, I read with gleeful joy and surprise. Now ain't that strange?

Yet others rapt in pleasure seem,
And taste of all that I forsake;
O, may they still of transport dream,
And ne'er, at least like me, awake!

I once came rushing into my grandmother's room to trick her. "What's an iamb, grandmother?" "It's like 'ah-CHOO,'" she roared, " or it's like 'ahh-loftt.'" Poets must be eccentric. I mean, come on, a poet who isn't eccentric? Where you livin'? Out around those cowboy poets in Montana and Nevada? "I rode Old Paint till he stumbled through his gait/...ah his fate, I'll now relate/Old Paint did faint and we thought him dead/so we just up and shot him through his god-damn head." Yee-haw, I'm cowboy poet of the year, the year of the steer, and I'm steering away from the meaning of my play on finding just "What in the Hell Is a Poet."

Through many a clime 't is mine to go,
With many a retrospection cursed;
And all my solace is to know,
Whate'er betides, I've known the worst.

My grandmother lived to be 82. I thought she would never die. I was in college writing poems during her approach to death. I wrote a poem about a telephone pole and a flying red horse and it was accepted for publication by the Piggott, Arkansas, newspaper's poetry section. Actually a pretty good one run by a woman who herself was a poet. She was addicted to quail hunting, too, she once wrote.

What is that worst? Nay, do not ask--
In pity from the search forbear;
Smile on -- nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there.

I wrote poetry at my makeshift desk in my garrish room. My desk had an empty Cherry Kijafa bottle, that's what I drank in those days, a Percy Dovetonsils twuth, sitting on it. I used to put a fresh flower or just a stem in the winter in that bottle and use it for my inspiration to write my poems. I got another one published in the next semester, in the spring, and it was about a baby being eaten by a Persian rug. Later I found out Mark Twain had written about a man grabbed by a carpet-making machine and woven into a carpet. I'd never read Mark Twain at the time I wrote my poem. I was in love though with a high school girl who read T.S. Eliot. Damn she would read T.S. Eliot to me while I was undressing her and wanting to have sex with her. Damn, I've had sex with a girl reading away at T.S.-fucking Eliot while my refrains were yowlings of...oh well, but oh how I loved that girl. Every time I read T.S. Eliot now I think so lovingly and wantingly of her, with the short hair, the glasses, and the tight torredor pants that were poetry in motion, if you would pardon my crass exaltation. She was smart as a damn whip and cute as a bug in a rug, a phrase that reminds me of my father who wasn't a poet but a fine tenor; he sang poems very well, thank you.

And late in the spring just as spring sprang over into summer, I went home one weekend to see my girl and when I got there I found that my grandmother had suffered a mild stroke and she didn't recognize anybody and was acting strangely, goofy, discombobulated, raising up and asking what time it was, with a smile on her face, even though she didn't know you from a dog and no matter who you were she called you her dog's name, and he was there, too, always laying by her bed looking up at you dog-eyed sad.

And one fine afternoon, I was just sitting digging on her, watching her in rented hospital bed set up in her room, facing that window that faced her flower bed. The room full of flowers, her pot plants, and then the "Get well soon" flowers and plants in all sorts of enfoiled and baby's breath laced states that had come pouring in from her many friends and admirers. She was still surrounded by her books, her paintings, her life's work. A really great setting for approaching death. As I was poetically eying her, the doorbell rang far up in the front of the main house. My grandmother's eyes opened wide as pies and peonies and she looked over dead at me and said, "Son, you had better hasten to that front door, that doorbell's being rung by your friend Tee Moore, and your friend Moore is here to say, that he's here to see you, and it's a lovely day."

She died that night. My friend Moore was amazed by the story as I told it to him as he looked down at my now sleeping grandmother. He had always believed my grandmother was haunted. Nope, we all said, she's just a poet.

Note: the italicized verses above are from Childe Harold, by simply "Lord Byron"--and his was a weird Lordship, yere Lordship, from "Canto I, "To Inez," verses VI-IX. Voila! Lord Byron. What a life! Oh the loves!! And he limped.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Philip "Momism" Wylie on Congress

The Daily Growler's Memorial Day Message:
From Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, the 1955 edition from Pocket Books,

"Congressmen—with a Footnote on Mecca"
from Generation of Vipers

Philip Wylie

The colleges send to Washington little that has meaning to help govern the land.

The people send even less.

It is a waste of words here to berate Congress. The people are doing the job. In doing it, the people are indicting themselves, of course, for the men in our Senate and the men in our House of Representatives are, indeed, the representatives of the people. Each ribald hoot at the selfishness, the arrogance, the stupidity of our elected statesmen does not ricochet into nowhere, but bounces straight back, burning and sharp with inescapable consequence, into the bodies of the hooters: the citizens themselves, the voting public. The withered emasculation of our democratic statesmanship is the withered emasculation of America. The witch-hunting savagery of pompous male sluts in our national halls is that quality of all the people. The petty greed and relentless solicitation of these quasi males is our own. The sacrifice of power, of dignity, or responsibility, of national security and interest to a little patronage or the achievement of a trivial local profit is the measure of our universal loss of aim, purpose, moral worth, view, vision, integrity, and common cause.

The appalling stupidity of these men, highlighted by the ferocious peril of these hours, is the exact measure of the stupidity of the people in our states, cities, towns, and villages. When we condemn them, which we rightly do with nearly every dispatch concerning their multifarious and nonsensical agenda, we condemn ourselves. When we say these men have abandoned their strength to the administration, because of pressure, we state how great has been our own eagerness to lay down the chore of civic duty and let an administration--or nobody--pick up and exploit our united strength. When we perceive that they are talking without knowing what they are talking about and doing without being able to guess the results of their acts, ignorantly busy giving unearned pensions and collecting unjust taxes, digging canals and having to fill them in, we are saying how little we, also, know or care about these matters. When we describe their pompous vanity and take exquisite pleasure in putting calipers on the immense littleness of their avarice, we are making records of our own littleness and avariciousness. When we see them knuckle to lobbies, abandon sense to the demand of minority blocs, weasel, quibble, and fail, we are watching the progress of a disease in ourselves, a democratic sickness, metastatic, and so far advanced that democracy may yet die of it--not because democracy was a mistaken plan for living together, but because the people have eschewed it out of their own greed and attached themselves to a bloc, to labor, to farms, to capital, to legionnaires, to pensioneers, to states, to congressional districts, to any of a thousand gangs within our democracy--but only rarely to democracy.

By putting this small mob fealty ahead of allegiance to all of ourselves, we have steadily moved closer toward the place when mobs will fight openly to rule us, and one of them, or a group of them, may win the foray. Then they will take to fighting among each other until it becomes necessary to appoint a dictator. If that is done, the wheel will have come a full turn and democratic man will again have lost his liberty, having spat upon it, abused it, laughed at it, neglected it, and so given it up because each individual man of him was not yet good enough for liberty.

* * *

www.centerforbookculture.org


This was written in 1942 by a young man of brilliant words, a brilliant thinker in the genre of Gore Vidal, another writer who can think things out with passionate and barbic words that should sting home a message, though obviously Philip's words were thrown in the trash and his "Momism" theory put up on a witness stand and grilled endlessly ignoring the true meaning of this viperish little book on a whole generation of vipers.

On this Memorial Day, we sit and are amazed at the pathetic tributes being forced upon us by the patriots of this country, men who draft-dodged and got their daddy's to keep them from having to do what they are forcing our young men and women to do in all of our names. I am ashamed to be an American today. You should be too. The "president" and all the male sluts in Washington that rule us are bent on a dictatorship, just like Philip Wylie warned in the last paragraph of the above reprint. Wylie's "Footnote on Mecca" asks why we can't move the seat of the government out of Washington, District of Corruption, where he says all the government buildings and momuments look like tombs in a rich man's cemetery. Hear! Hear! sayeth The Daily Growler. You know, have it like a moveable feast.

Down and Out in the World

From Hunger
I woke up this morning extremely hungry. It was a growling hunger, a hunger that made me blue. Remember a few posts back I said I might be entering a zone of poverty in my life since my rent was due, my phone bill is due, my ISP bill is here, and I owe a friend $350, and I don't have a pot to piss in. I make my living off my wits and so far in the past month, my wits have only gotten promisory monies, over 500 bucks, but this is a long holiday weekend so I have no hopes of getting a sou of it until Tuesday when the mail gets delivered again, so, "What Me Worry?" and my reply is hell no; right NOW in the NOW, I'm fine and dandy, and I'm having fun right now contemplating poverty.

In the meantime, I reminded myself of Eric Blair's (George Orwell) rich little book, Down and Out in Paris and London. I quickly "Googled" the book title and, Aha!, there it was, the complete book. I right off the bat devoured 8 chapters of the well-written, fast-paced little book.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter 4, last paragraph.

Of course, that was Paris in the late 20s and early 30s (Down and Out was published in 1933) and this is the USA in the 6th year of a new century and hardtimes nowadays are ferociously biting and tearing at your flesh, like the weasels that ripped old Frank Zappa's prostate to pieces. Why hell, a coffee and a roll costs you $2 these days as compared to pennies in the 20s. Still poverty progresses right along with everything else in this world, so today's impoverished may be a little better off than those of the 20s. And rooms and rent? Well, here, Orwell tells you about his room:

My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week.
Ibid. Chapter 1.

Sounds like where I live now--"Davenport, Iowa, drinking Keokuk moonshine" remember? Except for the marching troops of bugs. I got rid of cockroaches many years ago. First of all, I quit cooking in my room. Second, I live amongst Asians and they know how to get rid of cockroaches. At one time, when I first moved in this two-bit room, both regular-old cockroaches and those frightening Palmetto bugs (the huge cockroaches that used to rule the roost in Key West, Florida, when I lived there) came and went as they pleased, settling down for the night maybe in my laundry basket or perhaps in the stack of newspapers, magazines, and books that usually surround me as I hack away at my writing in my loft bed. These atomic pests are mostly gone now though an occasional Palmetto giant gets loose and goes about nest searching in my bathroom in the hot months of the year. Storms approaching also sometimes set the Palmetto bugs to doing rather psychopathic things, like running about in circles or suddenly buzzing and then flying like a maniac for a few wing flaps and then falling as though dead to the floor. Touch them with you healing shoe and they miraculously come back to life. Mice? Well that's for another "down and out" time.

One thing is for sure, after reading Down and Out, I will never eat in an expensive hotel again, whether in New York or Paris, and certainly not in Davenport, Iowa. Getting the food prepared and served is what is important in very large eating establishments. Cooking it is not as important as the time involved in prepping it, cooking it, and serving it. If a steak falls on the floor, so what? Wipe it off and serve it anyway. If the cook sneezes in the soup, you should consider yourself lucky; the cook usually spits in the soup,too. I once met a man who told me he had run a Childs Restaurant in New York City. After he told me what went on behind the swinging doors that lead from the kitchen to the dining room, I was suspicious for years when eating in any restaurant and I actually used to demand to see the kitchen if I were eating in one of those chi-chi joints that charge and arm and a leg. Kitchens are naturally dirty, but one that seems clean is good enough for me. Whether the cook spits in the food or blows his nose in it or sweats all over your plate, that you can't predict. If you go to a restaurant during the slow times, then perhaps you'll get cleaner and better prepared food, though there's no guarantee about anything once it leaves the kitchen of a restaurant.

One good hint I learned from Down and Out. If you only have a crusty three-day-old roll to eat, spend a sou for a head of garlic--or steal one, as Boris the Russian in Down and Out would advise you--and rub garlic all over the roll. Orwell says it leaves an aftertaste in your mouth that fools your stomach into believing you have just had a huge meal.

Another thing about this book, it's called a novel by a lot of people, but I didn't read it as a novel when I first read back when I was a kid. Burmese Days, that I read as a novel because that's how it was presented to me. By the time of Animal Farm (need I tell you it kind'a shows you how a totalitarian regime rules), I was a semi-intellectual, so everything I read was turned factual in my novelistic way of intellectualizing.

thegrowlingliterati
for The Daily Growler
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Continue to have a happy holiday weekend.

From The Daily Growler Wastebasket

Item #1

Sequential aviations
Flights to brain realms
Test piloted for the 1st time
T-I-E-M-P-O
(Times in Eternity Man Pulls Out)
Of a spin on tales

Jet drone
An introduction to true cerrulean
Rocket glare
Red horsetail clouds

Universal zeroes adding up to Nada
Star pits among the zeroes
Exits into pure colorless nonexistence
Memoirs of a brain in the air
Whorls apart
As a brain thinks, so goes its flight

Jotting down tittles as I fly through meteor showers
Seeking the plane of tranquility
Driftin' in a space stupor
Inculcating outerspace-real real eggs
A fertile opening in the stratosphere

A baby with a thousand heads all going in one direction.

Anonymously written; on crumbled up page out of a Square Deal composition schoolboy/girl notebook; entitled "a play on words"; dated May 2, 1984. We found it interesting.

Item #2
A cheat sheet from the trash of theoldmusicianfromanotherage:

Mercy Dee Walton (1915-1962) was born in Waco, Texas. Started playing piano in juke dives around Waco when he was 13. In 1938, when he was 23, he moved to Los Angeles. [California had been the final destination, especially up the San Andreas fault from Bakersfield up over the Tehachapis up the San Fernando Valley to Fresno and Modesto, for a lot of Dust Bowl refugees, Okies, Texans, Arkies, Jayhawkers, and Cornhuskers, who knew California as the "Garden of Eden" (read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, not only a true picture of those folks but a damn well-written book, to boot) and took their music with them.] Mercy recorded his first record,"Lonesome Cabin Blues," in 1949 in Fresno, California, on the Shire label. The record was a big seller in the blues field. [Mercy Dee or Mercy Dee Walton, as I knew him, was a typical Texas-style blues and half-boogie pianist, a la Whistling Alex Moore, the great Dallas pianist who is given credit in Texas blues circles as inventing what became known as the "barrelhouse" (where they had barrels of whiskey and beer) piano style. It was called "honky tonk" piano when white folks played the piano this way, except the measures were shorter and the times more like guitar strums, more 2/2s, 2/4s, rather than the more broad and expanded wingspans of Alex's or Mercy Dee's flights of rolling 12s that never flatten out to the 8-to-the-bar boogie beats of players like Albert Ammons or Meade Lux Lewis from Chicago.]

Later in Los Angeles, Mercy Dee started recording for the Bihari Bros. on the Specialty and Flair labels. His big hit came in 1953 on the Flair label, "One Room Country Shack." "Just sittin' here thinkin', in this one room country little shack...all I got in my possession is a 11-foot Bemus cotton sack." Some white boys, I think it was the band Chicago, made a bastardized version of this blues classic. Every time I hear their version, my skin crawls, and I have to run quick and find a copy of Mercy Dee's real version and relax back into the trance the song is suppose to put you into. "I wake up every night 'round midnight, Lord I just can't sleep no more...all the crickets and the frogs a'hollerin' while the wind is whirrin' 'round my door."

Mercy Dee laid off recording for a handful of years but returned to the studios in 1961 where he made several albums on the Arlhoolie label, accompanied by his band in those days: K.C. Douglas on the guitar; Sidney Maiden on the harp; and Otis Cherry on drums. Mercy Dee Walton died in California in 1962; he was only 47.

Some of Mercy Dee's album titles: G.I. Fever, Danger Zone, Pity and a Shame, Troublesome Mind, One Room Country Shack.

Item #3
We found this on the floor under thegrowlingwolf's desk (he actually has no desk; he has a laptop growing out of his groin):

Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie
Am I crazy or is Georgie Porgie looking kind'a helpless, especially during his total crap session with Tony "Soon Out on His Ass" Blair? I mean Bush looked f-ing tired and down on his ass. And did you check out those bumbling words of admitting he made a couple'a mistakes. He kind a chuckled, you know, and looked up with his best puppy eyes out of that little spoiled brat tucked head slouch, the one that used to work so well on Babs "GW w/Boobs." Then at West Point yesterday, Holy shit, did you hear what that silly ass told those poor dumbshit cadets? By the way, let me direct a couple'a sentences to that West Point graduating class. Gang, in a tough-ass war like the Viet Nam War was, and what this Iraqi mess is going to turn into if we don't get the hell out of there with the troops and start bringing in the food, and water, and electricity, and humanitarian sanity they need. But anyway, going the way we fools are going, if you get in a war like the Nam thang, then you are perhaps going to be introduced to what the troops call "fragging." Check it out. It especially happens to looeys on up to shavetail captains. Look what those friggin' Semper Fi sons'a bitches did to those hapless Iraqi women, children, and old elders; they killed them like they kill on the Sopranos and I'm sure those gyrenes love the Sopranos or American's Most Wanted or Cops, anything where buddies are tougher'n Hades warmed over--"You hurt one of our Corps brothers and we gonna' give you a Marine trial and verdict. Semper Fi! boys, let's kill some towelheads." And that poor ole hanghead Georgie Boy after admitting his mistakes the day before, this time gave his troops bold courage by telling them he got 'em in this mess but it was gonna be on their stupid shoulders to get us out of it. Hot damn, what a "president." Hey, We the People, ain't'cha proud?

That's all there was to it. Where's the growling wolf? we asked about the warehouse office; all we got was a secret sign and a bottle of Armagnac.
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Stymie
Did you ever wonder why Stymie on the Little Rascals -- Buckwheat's little brother?--was called Stymie? "Stymie" is an old golf term. Before 1952, if your golf ball landed on the green and another golfer's ball landed directly between your ball and the hole, you were said to be "stymied," meaning you were unable to putt straight at the hole. You "laid stymied" so you either had to bend the putt around the ball in front of you, like a masse shot in billiards or pool, or you chipped the ball over the other ball. After 1952, you got to mark your ball if you landed in front of another ball using a 50-cent piece, which you move just to the left of right of your ball so you can respot it once the stymied golfer putts his ball. Stymie comes from a Scottish word stimie, who started using it on their links in 1902.
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Remember the Hundreds of Millions of Those Who Have Died As a Result of War
most of whom were buried in unmarked graves, what was left of them that is.

Happy Memories
from The Daily Growler

Hall of Crooked Fame

"Kenny Boy" Going to Prison for 45 Years
I can't believe that. Kenny Boy's lawyers are talking appeal. Hang it up in court for years; the federal judges may have been bought with some of Kenny Boy's dirty money over the Pappy and Georgie Porgie presidential years. Unka Dick chimes in: "You want me to take some of those judges hunting, Kenny Boy?" "Wow, yeah, Unka Dick. Would you do that for me? I can't believe that judge apologized to you for shooting him in the face. That's cool, man. You're the best, Unka Dick." "Kenny Boy, let me tell you. I'm more powerful than that squeamish little asshole 'president' ole Pappy Bush himself forced on our asskissing asses, me and Don Rumsfeld; why, what we've done for Pappy Bush, Jesus, there's one man I can't shoot in the face, but judges, now, son, that's another story. By the way, Kenny Boy, I may just have to take you hunting one of these days." "Oh, no, Unka Dick. I'll take the Fifth all the way, don't worry. I'd never reveal how many hot bucks I threw your way and vice versa, Unka Dick. That's safe with me. And, too, tell Pappy I'm not going to act like I even know who his worthless little rat son is." "Good, boy, Kenny." "Thank you, Unka Dick. Can I take my nose out of your filthy old hemorrhoidal ass now, please, sir?" "No, Kenny Boy, I like it there. Unless you want to move around to the front here and practice what you're going to be doing in prison." "Don't tease me like that, Unka Dick. You made me think I was invincible." "Deeper with that nose, Kenny Boy."

It's wonderful to see these Republicans stepping all over themselves as they are beginning to wallow in the shit of their own legislations and power giveaways and tax deductions and openly flaunting their outlaw attitudes, their total flim-flam. A flim-flammer eventually gets revealed. A liar is always easily cornered. Lie after lie after lie eventually get so entangled even the liar can no longer remember the sequence of them so he'll F up and step all over his tongue, finally, like Georgie Porgie was trying to do yesterday with that prissy little asshole Tony "You're Out on Your Ass Soon" Blair (he will get a job with the Carlyle Group as soon as he stands down next election in Britain).

Like global warming. If you deny global warming consistently and have phony scientific papers written up by your many think tanks (full of rich-boy foundation monies) proving not only is global warming not a problem, but just the opposite is true: fossil fuel emissions are actually good for the atmosphere. Trees thrive on carbon monoxide, so burning fossil fuels is helping preserve the forests of the world! What I'm saying is, there comes a time in all liars's lives when they're caught naked; the liar (or liars) have no idea what reality is so he makes his own reality up and with such power as being president of the United States commands, the suddenly the liar feels like everything he says or thinks reality and that's that. To deny he a liar would crumble him into a wimp, just like what happened in the case of Georgie Porgie, our "president's," old President Pappy after his lying ass got us into the Persian Gulf War, a war we'll never be told the truth about how devastating that was on that generation of hired soldiers, those troops who were trumpeted as haven't overcome the embarrassment of losing the Viet Nam War (their spin was that the Peaceniks wouldn't let Tricky Dick Nixon, then commander and chief of the US Armed Forcers, bomb the bejesus out all the Holy Hell of North and South Viet Nam, all of Cambodia and Laos, and hell, just like McArthur wanted to do to win the Korean War by going across the Yalu River and into China and bomb the Chinese back to the Stone Age. Hairy Ass Truman, the man who blew away over 300,000 Japs (that's what they were officially called in the US in those days) with two ATOM BOMBS, fired his ass for disobeying his commander and chief.

They are all tripped up on all their lies to the point any grain of truth that accidentally slips into the cogs of their insane works can bring them to a halt, drive them to wimpy witherings away into their fortified rubber rooms or to the mail room of the Carlyle Group. These creeps will eventually ruin themselves (a la Newt Gingrich--that big clumsy ox fool; a la Tricky Dick Nixon; a la Pappy Bush the Wimp--isn't a son of a wimp probably a wimp, too?). The problem before us citizens is, will these lying bastards who live in the reality of their lies drag all of us down with them like Kenny Boy Lay's honest lies did to the 5,600 Enron employees and to its many, many shareholders, too. Aren't all of us citizens of the good ole United Snakes now owed reparations after this government takes us under?

Kenny Boy Facts
-- Son of a jake-leg (moonshine-caused physical defect) Baptist preacher, after ol' Pappy Lay went bankrupt in the farm machinery business. Failed business runs in the family.

--Kenny Boy has a PhD in Economics from the University of Houston (1965)
--_______ worked for Humble Oil while getting his PhD. Humble was a Standard Oil creation (Esso Extra gasoline--S. O. standing for Standard Oil) that went on to become Exxon, now merged with Standard Oil's Mobil, which originally was Magnolia Oil and Refinery Co., "at the sign of the Flying Red Horse"--therefore, these are simply Standard Oil's Texas operations coming back together once again into the gas and oil monopolies they've always been.
--in 1971, at 29 years of age, Kenny Boy became Undersecretary of Energy under Nixon's Sec'y of Interior Rogers CB Morton, a political toady from Kentucky (brother of Thurston Morton), became Nixon's Sec'y of Commerce first, then replaced Walter Hickel as Sec'y of the Interior, when Kenny Boy Lay became his Undersecretary of Energy. Morton went on to be Gerald Ford's campaign manager in his unsuccessful run against Jimmy Carter, the cracker Navy nuclear physicist/peanut farmer and brother of Billy Beer founder Billy Carter, long gone, and famous for taking a piss on the tarmac at the Libya International Airport while meeting Kadafi for some kind of shady deal we'll probably never know about; Jimmy has gone on to have himself portrayed as a great peacemaker and humanitarian--remember, when he was commander and chief he flubbed up his "brilliant" rescue of the hostages in Tehran, from the Iranians who had already been paid off by Ronnie Raygun's goons (wasn't Don Rumsfeld around in those days, too?) to keep holding the hostages until after Raygun was elected president over the ineffectual Mr. Peanut, though he only beat the Jimmy man by 3% of the vote (you think Raygun stole that election?).
--3 years after becoming Undersecretary of Energy, Kenny Boy got a job as an executive of Florida Gas (natural gas) (both Texas and Wyoming are big natural gas states (see: Pappy Bush and Georgie Porgie of Texas; Unka Dick Cheney of Wyoming)). In just 7 years as a VP, Kenny Boy became president of Florida Gas in 1981 at 39 years of age (pretty damn good networking for a PhD in Economics).
--In 1982 Kenny Boy moved back to Houston to head Transco Energy Co.
--2 years later, KB became president of Houston Natural Gas, which after it merged with Omaha, Nebraska, corpsemaker, InterNorth, became Enron, with Kenny Boy as the CEO.
--In 1982, the Vice President of the United States hired Kenny Boy to set up an energy conference in Houston, Texas. Guess who that vice president was? I'll give you a hint: I call him Pappy Bush.

Please, though, don't worry about Kenny Boy going to prison. It won't be bad. He'll go to one of those Federal big-shot prisons where they have golf courses and tennis courts and workout rooms. He'll maybe have to do two years and probably become a born-again Christian, too--maybe even Brother Jerry Fallintohellwell could ordain Kenny Boy's ass while he's bent over in his prison cell, Praise the Lard!--so that by midnight, December 31st, 2008, Kenny Boy will get a free pass out of prison. Why?, you ask. He'll be pardoned by our "president." "You've done a heck of a job, Kenny Boy. Besides, you're my buddy and you know what happens to my buddy's."

One of Kenny Boy's Schemes (You, too, Could Do It If You Ever Get Rich)
In 2000, Kenny Boy took 14 million buckeroos and started the Linda and Ken Lay Foundation. Of that 14 million tax-free dollars, Kenny Boy and Linda Girl gave $2.1 million to charities and museums, mostly in Texas. The other 12 mil? Who the hell knows? Maybe it's in a Cayman Island British bank offshore bank account with Georgie Porgie's 49 billion he stole when it disappeared from the government books shortly after he stole his first election.

Kenny Boy and Baseball
Georgie Porgie, our "president" screwed the city of Arlington, Texas, by forcing them through eminent domain schemes and cost-matching schemes to build that grand stadium, and it is a grand stadium (I don't know its corporate moniker), I'll admit that, for the consistently losing Texas Rangers, who, by the way, are managed by Buck Showalter, who has constantly had his suitcase packed since George Steinbrenner fired him as Yankee manager prior to Joe Torre. Following in his hero's footsteps, Kenny Boy helped save the Houston Astros from leaving Houston in 1999 by getting the Houston business community to bail them out. Then he pledged 100 million bucks over 30 years to the Astros in exchange for them naming their new stadium (aha, how much did that cost the kind'a poor mostly black and Latino city of Houston?) Enron Field and plastering the Enron "crooked" E logo all over the walls of the joint, just like he spent 100 million bucks to plaster the Enron crap all over their headquarters building in Houston. Kenny Boy threw out the first pitch at the inaugural game played in the new Enron Field. What a great night that was for an old hillbilly hickass economist from Missouri, the home of the mule. He-haw.

Addendum: Yes, Kenny Boy Lay was over the years the largest contributor to Pappy Bush's and the Bush boys's, Georgie Porgie and Jeb, political campaigns, over $737 million dollars, most of which he bilked out of Enron employees and clients. You are crazy if you think Georgie Porgie ain't gonna pardon this worthless rascal. Check it out here.

thedailygrowleranarchangel
for The Daily Growler
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A Daily Growler Award for Motherhood
We give our first motherhood award to Britney Spears. Yes, poor lil' ole white trash honey from by God low-white-life Lawsbanana, Kentwood, honey chile, to be exact, is our ideal mother. I mean, hell, she's been programmed to be a great mother by the Big Daddy recording industry. In other words, this poor little dipstick is manufactured, as is true of most of our culture these days, especially our popular music, which is for teeny boppers, who are the basic idiots who buy these billions of dollars worth of CDs and downloads and who use cell phones the most--this is the money crowd the recording industry has hynotized. Britney is a teenage girl's envy and every goofy pimple-face teenage boy's masturbational ideal--"Wow, look at her ass! I gotta whip it, boy howdy, do I."

Mother Britney was born Britney Jeau (that's hillbilly for Jo to you dumb f-ers) Spears in 1981. Holy shit, I remember 1981 like it was yesterday, but I'm an old F now so I'm supposed to hate young people, except I don't. The ones who have honest talent amaze me; the youth is responsible for innovation; us old F-ers are into progression and evolution--they are the virgins, we are the jaded.

At eight years old, Mammy Spears took little Britney down to Walt Disney's Frozen-in-Time Glory World and tried to get her a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club. Mammy Spears was a smart old trailor-house trash woman, because though Britney was too young to make the cartoon mouse's tits and ass and boy banger teeny bopper masturbation club, a New York City agent liked her little ass enough to take her to Gotham and put her in something called the Professional Performing Arts School Center--I never heard of it, but it must exist among New York City agents.

In 1991, Britney appeared as a child actress in the Off-Broadway play "Ruthless."

In 1993, Britney's mom's dream came true and Britty landed alas a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club, shaking her cute little ass for old bug-eyed Mike Eisner. She gigged at Mickey's place for 2 years.

In 1995, she sent a demo tape to Jeff Fenster at Jive Records (I'm sure they recorded a whole lot of jive, too)(don't confuse this with The Daily Growler's Jiveass label). Jeff was hooked by Brit's cute ass. He fell. He turned her over to Eric Foster White, the genius who produced and wrote for Boyzone (?) and Whitney Houston (when she was really good--before Bobby Brown and drugs crapped her out--though those two are still living a better life than most of us will ever see, no matter our addiction and bad marriage situation), and Max Martin of the Backstreet Boys (ohh, what happened to that very talented Menudo-copy-cat group?--whatever happened to Ricky Martin, speaking of the little Menudo boy bangers put together by the PR pervert who introduced the boys to sodomy, or at least that's what he was brought up on when he was busted down in Puerto Rico, I think-- you never hear any follow up on any of this shit, do ya?). These dudes produced Brit's first single, "Baby, One More Time," and her first album of the same name. She was 17.

In 1998, Britney toured sponsored by Teen magazines; then she joined the NSync tour. Whatever happened to NSync? They've got to be living in great fun sin somewhere in a fabulous part of the world. Did they marry each other?

1999, She went to the top of the American Charts.

Britney claims she was a virgin until she met little flip-a-coin Justin Timberlake. It was love at first time with the double-backed beast for both of these starry eyed self-amused stars, so Justin's pimples bursted and blended with Britney's bursted pimples, but no baby came from this exchange of liquid fluids. They broke up when tearful Justin said Brit was cheating on him with every damn hustling son of a bitch that came in contact with her, especially her back-up dancer, Kevin Federline. Since Britney's dream was to follow in her idol Madonna's barefoot steps, she married her back-up dancer too and had her first little legit celebrity baby--was Madonna's back-up dancer-produced baby legitimate? I can't remember. There are a hell of a lot of little bastards running around the entertainment world. After dumping the good but a little odd Kevin, Brit married, she claims she was drunk and pilled out, her childhood hump, Jason Alexander. Poor dupe. He got to bang her one night and that was it. Brit was claiming annulment the next day, and that was that for that marriage.

By now, Brit is rich and to flaunt her wealth, she bought her brother a 4 million dollar apartment in New York City, now Brit's legal address; we wonder if she had her brother's Manhattan apartment decorated so it looks like the inside of a 50-footer, four-bedroom, two-bath trailer house?

Now Brit's pregnant again; still drinking; she's Louisiana white trash, think about what that means: drinking moonshine, hating black folks (called the "n" word by Britney's clan, that I'll guarantee), and keeping that humpin' image out there naked and shakin'--keeping an eye out for that next "toy boy" a la Mad-Donna, the Holy Mother of the entertainment biz.

By the way, what the hell has happened to Cher? Britney has taken Cher's ass-fame away from her.

Three Daily Growler cheers for our sacred mother, Britney Spears! Huzzah.

theentertaininggrowler
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"What this man ['a luxurious idler'] inherited from his father, and on which we say he lives, is not actually wealth at all, but only the power of commanding wealth as others produce it." Henry George, Progress and Poverty, The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation 100th Anniversary edition, 1979.

Hooey Galore

Morning Network News
I tried to watch the networks this morning for some news. The best and most honest news I heard was that the Yankees beat Boston and the Mets beat the Phillies (a subway series is headed our way!!!, The Daily Growler predicts). The rest of the news was either outright lies or the untriagulated reasoning of US geniuses like Tom De Lay and John McCain. McCain got the most time to trumpet his loser bullshit. What a weak ineffective absolutely crazed human being John McCain is. Just think what this SOB went through in Viet Nam, during the days of military conscription, a term most young people in this country have no idea what it means, except when conscription is reapplied come Jeb Bush's term in the White House, then the little privileged peckers will wake up and see they are at best draft dodgers at worst cannon fodder for the next triumphant war. Anyone who was in any branch of the army during the Viet Nam years or who know anyone who was in Nam knows these poor bastards, especially if they saw combat, did some fraggin', or were put in "tiger cages" by the North Viet Nam forces (like John McCain) are crazy as hell (and this includes fools like John Kerry, too). I had a good friend, Pete the Pool Shark, and Pete didn't know anything, he wasn't trained for anything, except killing people or driving a truck. He tried to make a living at the later but he was hooked on heroine and had to smoke pot to keep from getting the heebie-jeebies from the heroine--he preferred the raw brown Mexican heroine that was being flooded all across our big cities by the CIA operatives, the same folks who put cocaine and crack cocaine from Colombia and Nicaragua on the streets of our cities in plentiful amounts also during the patriotic service of the Contras and the great national leadership of fools like Ronnie Raygun and his VICE president our old pal Pappy GWH Bush. The Contras, don't forget, used an old airbase at Mena, Arkansas (it could have been DeQueen, I'm not sure), to bring the tons of drugs into this country and exchange them there for weapons and shit that were then flown back (by soldiers of fortune, by the bye) to Nicaragua. And who was goobernor of Arkansas at that time? How about Slick Willie Clinton, the great liberal firebrand whose cold-hearted wife is now suddenly qualified to be a senator from New York (not her home state), and now suddenly is qualified to perhaps be president. I am sure the Bush Babies are praying to their god Mammon right now that Hillary is the Democratic candidate in 2008--they figure that's a sure win for them; of course, after they've rigged the voting machines in some key state--I say it's Michigan this time maybe--surely these fools won't try it again in Florida or Ohio--though they could do it again in Ohio, a real lummox state--remember Kent State and the goobernor's and the Ohio National Guard's massacre-ing attitude at that time. Plus, Kenny Blackwell is doing quite fine, thank you, in his run for goobernor of that lower-than-a-dog's-belly state (sorry, I have several friends from Cleveland who are fine folks with fine liberal and progressive ideas, except trouble is, they all agree with me about how backwards Ohio is in terms of progress).

Pete the Pool Shark? Pete froze to death early one February morning back in the 80s. Funny how he made it through Viet Nam combat; yet, he couldn't live through the war against Viet Nam vets he found when he got back home. Thinking he'd come home to be hailed a hero, instead, he came home to neglect. Pete was in heavy battles in Nam, battles that stayed with him and came back home with him to haunt him every night to the point he couldn't sleep without drugs. Some strangers found Pete lying in the middle of a downtown Manhattan street just a few buildings down from the one he lived in. He had fallen after trying to stumble home after drinking himself into a stupor at Richard the Hatband's bar and then stopping by Danny the Chino's place to mainline some Mexican brown. He had almost made it home. One odd thing about Pete. He had this denim jacket that he'd had made for him in Saigon as he was leaving to come home. The jacket had a handpainted design showing a tiger attacking a man tied to a stake on its back. He never told me what that jacket meant to him but he never took it off. Trouble was, that's the jacket he was wearing when they found him dead. It wasn't a very protective jacket; just regular denim. It got down to 20 degrees that night and Pete and his precious jacket were frozen stiff as a board early that next morning when they were found. I always counted both Pete and his jacket as Viet Nam War casualties. You want find Peter's name on the Wall in Washington, District of Corruption, though it should be. Funny thing. Pete had a thing about anybody who looked Vietnamese, which to him was all Asians no matter what country they were from. His thing was he projected what he suffered in Viet Nam onto the Vietnamese people. Pete was a well-trained US soldier. He was taught how to kill Gooks and drive a truck. As he once told me, "I can drive a truck like a born-free motherfucker, but they won't let me drive a truck because I'm a nutjob drug addict; but I can still kill Gooks and you gotta be a nutjob drug addict to do that."

The immigration bill is coming up in the Senate today. Most of the fools interviewed on this matter on this morning's network news were so idiotic I can't even tell you what these anti-human rascals are talking about; it's a very complicated bill and it looks to me like poor ole work-hungry Mexicans are screwed. Why not a green card program for these workers? Nope, these are "messkins" [that's Texas for Mexicans, who the Republic of Texas won a battle over at San Jacinto, just outside Houston, beating the Mexican army under weirdo General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna [what a life he led after the War With Texas, including living in New York City and promoting a new thing he called chicle, what went on to become what we call "chewing gum"] and White Texans [Texas is a brown state, like California] both hate and love and absolutely distrust "messkins."

A lot of young Texas white boys (like our own "president" and his brothers and sister, Dodo) have a period of adjustment in life where they come in contact with Mexicans. First of all, Texas-Mexicans have always gone to school with Texas Whites, not so Texas Blacks. In school white Texans come in all kinds of contact with Mexican kids; though in most cities there is a Mexican section of town same as there's a black section and a white trash section. Mexican boys and girls could always play sports with the whites. Some Texas-Mexican kids go on to become tops in some sports, especially baseball (think of all the great Mexican baseball players, like Fernando Valenzuela, one of the best pitchers I've ever seen pitch--for the LA Dodgers back in the Tommy LaSordid days) and golf. Mexicans, like the Asians, love golf. Lee Trevino, from Dallas, became one of the best golfers to ever swing a club. Another place of two cultures meeting is White boys and Mexican girls. I recall only one white girl in my high school who went with Mexican boys (she was notorious as dating a Mexican baseball player on the Albuquerque Dukes, at that time members of the Class B West Texas-New Mexico baseball league). Every white boy in Texas schools at one time or another fell head over heels for a Mexican girl. I did. Her name was Tina. I met her in my senior year in high school. I went with a bunch of basketball players from a local college to her family restaurant and she was the waitress. I managed to ask her if she didn't go to high school with me. She said yes, and she knew who I was. I was on the high school golf team (two of our best players were Mexicans) so I had a bit of presence in high school affairs. Tina was pretty, pettite, smart as a little whip, saucy as a shooting star, and spoke fluent English. The next school week, I found her in a hallway and reintroduced myself. By God, she seem to really like me. It led to us meeting during our lunch breaks. The first time I kissed her was behind the gym during lunch. We kissed and kissed and kissed and wanted each other. Finally, I got up enough nerve to ask her out. She said I'd have to come to her father's restaurant and be approved by her brothers, both of whom were already out of high school and helping run the family restaurant, the best damn Mexican restaurant in all of that neck of the woods.

I went over to the restaurant. Tina was waiting tables. She came over to my table. "What's up, Tina; are we going out?" "I told my brothers I wanted to go out with you, but they're pissed; they hate blancos --I'm sorry. I told them you're not like most white boys but they're not convinced. They're watching you now." I knew one of the brothers slightly, he was a pretty good jazz guitar player, so I boldly walked over to him and asked him why I couldn't date his sister? He turned on me with hatred all over his face. "Because in our culture brothers watch over their sisters; we are family, man, and we just don't want our sister going out with blancos." "So, you're saying, though she wants to go out with me and I want to go out with her, you decide she can't go out with me at all?" "That's right, amigo." I felt that amigo as a slap in the face. I left without Tina. I went back a couple of nights later to again reason with the brother I kind of knew, but this time the other brother flat told me that if I came around there again hitting on Tina, he'd shoot my ass. "My sister is not going out with a god-damned blanco and that's that." Tina and I still had our behind the-gym-sessions--once when I brought my dad's Caddy to school, she got in it with me and we made pretty good love, though bumbled, miscued, and constantly hitting the horn several times. After she buttoned up and I combed my hair, she told me she had to be careful because if her girlfriends saw her with me they'd tell her brothers, "That's just the way we Mexicans are," she said. After that, I graduated high school and left the area and I never saw or heard of Tina again.

Cultural differences; that's all it was and that's all it is. White Texans love Mexican culture, the food, mariachis, the flamboyant dress and "cowboy" styles. Remember, Mexicans were the first cowboys. All cowboy terms are Mexican: dogies, lariats, rope, chaps, rodeo, corral, pintos, hoosegow, ranch, etc.

Another problem White Texans have with Mexicans is their Catholicism. White Texans are basically Protestant, though there are a lot of White Catholics in Texas, and Protestants are originally (from the get go) opposed to Roman Catholics. Their very name, Protestants, means they are "protesting" the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, a German Barbarian peasant priest went to Rome and saw how lavishly the Pope and his Holy See brethren were living--plush apartments, surrounded by gold accoutrements, nuns waiting on them hand and foot and penis (probably)--while the prelate life of Martin Luther was slovenly, dirty, with most accoutrements covered with fool's gold, and he got so jealous, he turned his theological backside on the Boys in Rome and started his own form of the Catholic Church, making the Protestant religion the source of the first Pure White church (check out Lutheranism; you want find many black or Latino Lutherans). In Mexico, the Revolutionaries, like Zapata, Morelos, and even Pancho Villa, who was president of Mexico at one time, were loudly opposed to the Catholic Church and, in fact, tried to abolish it. Read Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory; it's all about this Mexican Revolution aspect. They accused the Catholic Church of being a demogogic tool that kept the Mexican people in poverty, owning land, owning city buildings, owning schools, owning the government, actually representing Colonial Spain in control of the native Mexican peones and mestizos. One legend that scares the hell out of White Texans is one that Mexican generals got together after the Mexican Revolution and determined they were going to next take back the US lands that they say actually were stolen from Mexico (true). One way they trumpeted they were going to do it was through Mexican-Americans having huge families (they are Catholic remember) and that way they will through numbers take back that land. So far, the Generals were right. Texas is now basically Mexican-American. California is now basically Mexican-American. Arizona is basically Mexican-American. New Mexico is basically Mexican-American. Colorado is gradually becoming basically Mexican-American. "It's workin', Senores Generales!"

I think there was a reason Catholic JFK was shot in Dallas. I lived in Dallas at the time of the assassination and most of us believed the oil cartel and the Havana mobsters in cajoots (oh no, another Mexican word) with the FBI and the CIA killed JFK. Those were the days when you could leave messages on phone lines so you could dial up a phone number and hear a message read to you. Nearly all of these phone news reports in Dallas in those days were antiCatholic, antiKennedy, antiCommunist (same as a Catholic to a White Texan), antiBlack (though the word liberally used in Texas to describe blacks begins with a lowercase "n" and not the letter "B." Also, the "n" word they use doesn't mean "black" in Spanish. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a big lummox from principally Mexican-American South Texas, his father a school principal in a mostly Mexican school, called blacks "Nigros," which I always thought was clever of ole White Lyndon. It was politically correct while being politically derogative at the same time. Lyndon, however, always refered to Mexicans as "messkins," which, like I said earlier, is the correct White Texan pronounciation of the word "Mexican."

What's playing out in front of us all now is purely and simply Texas politics still going national. GWB is a god-damn Texas politician and he's brought his Texas political thought and his Texan political cronies, Karl Rove, Unka Dick, Scotty, Tom De Lay, all Texas assholes, to Washington (you could rename it Austin).

This immigration thing is a farce. A detraction from all the corruption and evil-doing and killing for glory that is going on in the world under this administration. You see, Georgie Porgie, our "president," was busted many a time in his youth by the Texas police. Texas police are rough as hell until they find out you're Pappy Bush's son. Then Georgie Porgie as the killingest goobernor in Texas history, worked hand in hand with the Texas Rangers, the ultimate Texas police force, one of the most decorated of which was a Mexican, and the Texas Highway Patrol, a really ruthless bunch of white snotnose trailor trash made legit by putting them in tight-fitting and tailored "tough bastard" uniforms. To GWB, torture works; they've been torturing blacks and messkins in Texas for a century or so. Hell, yeah. "You torture them sombitches and it may not do any good, but by God they know what they're gonna git if we ketch 'em agin, and, hell, sport, we go out sometimes and just ketch 'em agin just to torture 'em a bit more to remind them who we are and who they are, dirty, filthy messkin pigs. Puercos, that's what the hell them folks is." "But, officer, your wife's Mexican." "Hey, buddy, don't y'all git personal with me now."

All of this is Texas politics brought to Washington, District of Corruption. Texans have been in national politics since the late 1930s when a Congressman from Texas, Martin Dies, started the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, HUAC to you folks to young to remember that far back. Roosevelt's administration was half-based on the power of a true old Texas asshole John Nance Garner, from Uvalde, Texas, a town out in the literal middle of nowhere in a county that is mostly Texas-Mexican in make up. The "great" old Texian writer, J. Frank Dobie, was from Uvalde. These assholes had a condescending attitude toward messkins; they had a totally "F You" attitude against Blacks. John Nance also used the word that begins with "n" when he talked about Blacks--I wouldn't be surprised to find that he once wore a white sheet on a couple of long-ago Texas nights. In the old days, the Ku Kluxers in Texas were called "The Nightriders," ex-Confederate hooligans who rode around at night looking for runaway slaves or white people who were hiding runaway slaves. It is interesting to note, that one of the Haymarket anarchists, Albert Parsons, who was hanged for his innocent participation in the bombing that happened during the otherwise peaceful Haymarket demonstration was a native Texan-- and married to a Texas black woman, to boot.

Later, in the post-WWII US government, Texans Sam Rayburn ("Mister Sam" to White Texans) and Lyndon Baines Johnson ("Die today for LBJ") put Texas politics in control of Congress and also a pain in the side of the Republicans, whose power at that time was based on turncoat Democrats, especially the renegade Dixiecrat Party, formed when that old hypocritcal asshole Strom Thurmond (the evil live long lives--"live" spelled backwards is "evil") walked out of the 1948 Democratic Convention because, "OH MY GOD," the Democrats were talking of giving blacks their civil rights they were given under old Honest Republican Abe (he hated blacks, that I guarantee--remember, Abe was born dirt-poor in ancient old Kaintuck', before moving to racist hellhole Springfield, Illinois, and marrying Mary Todd whose father was the leading pro-Slaver in the whole damn town) and his Emancipation Proclamation and doing away with Jim Crow and the stupid segregated-but-equal bullshit then being urged on us by these asshole southern licker-drinkin' and, as it turned out, "black gal screwin'" reprobates, like the great knothead Strom Thurmond, ax-handle weilding A-hole-deluxe Lester Maddox, evil-eyed, nutjob George Wallace, cracker screwball John Stennis, or old "hang 'em high" Senator Bilbo from the great last-place state of Mississippi.

John McCain
I don't get it. Every news channel this morning had John McCain on, first questioning him on the asshole Immigration Bill these stupid pricks are voting on today. Then switching in the middle of his stumble-bumble explanation of why he hates messkins to "Senator McCain, are you running for president in 2008," old John bumbles about again, nonsense bullshit [hell no, the Repugnicans are not gonna let crazy John be their party leader--NO WAY, I guarantee!], and then, these crackerhead reporters ask him about Iraq. That was the only time on all the morning news channels that Iraq was mentioned. Amazing! Sixty-plus people died in Afghanistan fighting this past week; nothing at all was said about the Afghanistan War. Amazing!

I declare John McCain a total nutjob who should be in a nuthouse not in Congress.

Sad News
I am a strong aficianado of jazz music. It's a truly unique American genre. I got two emails this week from my jazz-lover friends (one one of the top alto saxophonists in this world; the other a fine drummer whose need for money has driven him to give up drums for the big bucks though devastating physical work in the advertising game--monetarily rewarding, but physically destructive).

Hilton Ruiz
Hilton is one of the most brilliant pianists in jazz. He is currently in a New Orleans hospital (I didn't know New Orleans had any hospitals open thanks to GWB and his FEMA disaster; more deadly on New Orleans than the hurricanes). Hilton is in a coma after being beaten in the face until every bone in his face was broken. Then on the way to the hospital, he suffered a cardiac arrest in the ambulance, which he hasn't come out of as of this writing. His wife, Aida, asks all jazz lovers to keep Hilton in their thoughts. Hilton has battled drugs and drinking all his professional life--being a jazz pianist nowadays ain't the good life at all. Hilton had just recorded an album in New York City dedicated to the New Orleans musicians left homeless and jobless and some of them dead after Katrina. He was in New Orleans to make a video to promote the album.

Butch Warren
Not many nowadays jazz fans know who the hell Butch Warren is. Those of us who are jazz oldtimers know Butch. He was the bassist on a ton of the "golden days of jazz"--the way they described the time in this Washington newspaper article I read-- albums, especially those made on the Blue Note label, a label started by a couple of German immigrants back in the forties. I guess the most popular album Butch was on was Herbie Hancock's famous Blue Note album that had Mongo Santamaria's "Watermelon Man." "Waaa-ter-mell-owns," sing it out by syllables loudly and you'll kinda understand what the song's talking about; especially in New Orleans when the Watermelon Man is coming up the street, his old pulling nag half-asleep as it pulls him through the streets.

Butch also worked with the early Theolonius Monk quartet/quintet; Lee Morgan; Hank Mobley. He was steady if not flamboyant and he hit the strings perfectly without sliding or slurring the notes--nothing flashy, just rhythmically on time and perfect for keeping the time exact. The perfect kind of bass player.

Butch is now in jail in Washington, District of Corruption. He has spent the last 30 years in and out of mental institutions, after he checked himself into infamous St. Elizabeth's Hospital because, like Butch said, "I feel at total peace while I'm in the booby hatch."

It all started with booze and drugs, the downfall of most of the jazz greats from Charles Parker, Jr., Lee Morgan, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, John Coltrane, James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Bud Powell...unfortunately, I could go on for a page or two.

So think of Butch as he sits in a D.C. jail. His head's all f-ed up. How come the recording companies don't help these people? Because the recording companies are totally commercial assholes. To them, Kelly Clarkson is a greater American musician than Butch Warren.

That makes me so fucking mad. We treat our great people like dogs. We either kill their asses while they're young or we throw them in a nuthouse and let them rot with the crazy shit going all through their heads. What's ironic about it is, they say Butch can still play the bass beautifully.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"Reason is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes the urge towards the attainment of an end realized in imagination but not in fact." Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason, Beacon Press, 1967.

Entering Poverty

The Progressions of an Impoverished Man
If I were to have died last night, yes, I would have been found because I have a friend staying with me for a few months, so I would not have had an invisible death (the way the utterly poor die). A few months from now when this friend has her own domicile and her days with me will have been utterly forgotten and I die, then an invisible death could very well be my ending.

The first thing I notice when you're poor you haven't much time to think of death since you are too busy trying to figure out how to survive alive. When you're hungry, you don't think of dying, you can only think of food, trying to assimilate it into your body through thought. Remember in the old Bugs Bunny cartoon days, the days of Fritz Freleng, when a cartoon was a bit of true comic art, when Bugs or any of his cast of character pals got terribly hungry everybody they saw looked like a dressed and golden brown-cooked chicken. Or a dachshund looked to Bugs like a walking hot dog, complete with mustard and onions. The imagination invents food but not the way out, which of course is death, the way out of any overwhelming life-threatening event like hunger, or starvation, or simply just being too f-ing poor.

So far, I'm still flush enough I haven't felt poor yet. I know I am poor but I haven't felt it yet. My cool Gap jeans just got a rip in the knee that pretty much ruins them for me except I got on the elevator with a teenage girl the other day and she had the same kind of rip in her Gap jeans so maybe I can get away with these deteriorating jeans for another month or so. I have two other pairs of jeans but these are a size I was when I had 20 or so extra pounds on me. One thing poverty does, it gets you thin in a hurry.

[For you weight watchers, the best diet I ever tried, and I once weighed 265 pounds at 5' 10". I didn't realize how big I was until my wife took an 8 mm movie of me one time up in June Bug Park in Red River, New Mexico; I was climbing up out of a culvert with a forest of aspen trees shimmering their golden applause at my culvert-exiting efforts. I was watching the film with some friends when one of them, the restaurant owner, said, "Jesus, look, there's Big Foot; you caught Big Foot on film." It wasn't Big Foot, though even I had to look twice to recognize it was me. I was wearing a really fine forest green Allan Paine cashmere sweater, too. When I got back to our adobe hacienda, I immediately started checking out diets. I found one. It was called the Canadian Air Force diet, or, a more attractive name to me, "the drinking man's diet." That got me. All this was was a pre-Atkins low carbohydrate diet. I found it in a little minibook on a paperback rack in a bookstore. It was published by Dell and all it did was simply list carbohydrates and their values in terms of fat considerations. Beer, which at that time I was drinking by the case, ordering a case of Heineken a day from my liquor dealer, was the big loser carbohydrate in the book, right ahead of white bread, doughnuts, gravy, salad dressings--you know. So I went on this diet. I ate no breakfast. Then at lunch I would make myself a huge salad with every conceivable salad-thing in it: lettuce, onions, scallions, shallots, cukes, radishes, bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, celery, tomatoes. Then I made my own dressings out of low-fat milk and very high-class rochambert cheese (goat and sheep milk much less carbed up than cow's milk), or powdered mustard in olive oil and vinegar. I was allowed 1 bottle of Heineken at lunch. Then for dinner I would have a steak, a baked potato with only real butter on it (real butter had less carbs than margarine), some broccoli, and a couple a shots of Jack Daniels, or I could have another Heineken. I lost 90 pounds in 6 months; I kid you not [remember Jack Paar?]. I went from a 44 waist (no lie) down to a 38 and eventually a 36, Jenny Craiging out at 170 pounds, still too fat for my build but Jesus a hell of a lot slicker looking. One sad truth? I had more sordid affairs of the heart as a large dude than I did after I lost weight. My charm was in my roley-poley shape I suppose and had nothing to do with any sexual appeal I had as a thin man.]

Eating poor isn't necessarily bad, you see. Now, salads are pretty cheap. For $10 a day, I can eat pretty damn good, with a Korean deli salad (they charge by weight) and then a container of Korean/Mexican-made soup topped off with a cranberry juice. Sometimes there's enough left for a large coffee. God, I love coffee. I started off drinking it black. As a kid I went to New Orleans a lot and my first cup of coffee ever in my life was in a church over on Camp Street. We were visiting good friends of my parents and it was this guy's big old formerly Catholic church with a beautiful old rectory and a huge breakfast room, and that first time I drank coffee was because all this preacher's kids got a big steaming cup of coffee and I wanted one, too, and my dad said, "Well, see how much of a man he is, give him a half-a-cup'a black." To my dad, it was like letting me smoke a cigarette. The discomfort it caused me might keep me from trying a cigarette ever again. Faux logic, but hey, my dad was an old-timer. He truly believed that giving me a cup of black coffee would turn me off coffee forever. How wrong he was. That first cup of coffee I had was a cup of French Market coffee, a chicory coffee, because, you know, New Orleans at that time was more French than Americaine. A cruller rolled in powered sugar and a steaming cup of Chicory Joe was a marvelous way to start a day in New Orleans. After that I drank French Market coffee until I was 30 years old and living in the middle of Manhattan Isle lost without my French Market coffee. One desperate day, I went in a coffee store in the Village and sure enough there high up on an unreachable-without-help shelf were 5 tins of French Market coffee. I bought all five. When I went back to replenish my stock 6 months later, Hell's bells, there were no more tins. I haven't had any French Market coffee since. The rival chicory coffee back in those days was Luzanne coffee, though I never got in the Luzanne mode. Now I drink street-vendor coffee. Who knows what the hell that is? A guy who worked at the big Savarin Coffee Plant in New Jersey when it was still up and running, told me that the burnt remains left in the bean roasters was scraped out, powdered, and turned into instant coffee. Instant coffee never tasted worth a crap after he told me that. I have not had a cup of instant coffee in over 30 years now. At least that's what I think. People who have served me tons of coffee over the years may know better than that. Office coffee, without a doubt some of the worst coffee ever milled, may be instant coffees packaged to appear like gourmet blends. Deceit is the name of the advertising game, so who knows what's really real when it comes to coffees, teas, sodas, or Mes.

To be poor is to be as witty as you can ever be in your life.

American Idol
As a musician who has studied music to the bone; as a singer who taught himself how to sing out of a book I bought at a music store, I have never watched American Idol, nor have I ever heard one of their instant-star winners ever sing one of their songs all the way through. I was forced to listen to one of the dude winners one time since I was involved in the backstage action of where he was appearing--not Claude Akins, that was an old character actor, but one of the first Idol winners, Craig maybe was his name? Kelly Clarkson, I think, is the most successful of the Idol winners. I believe she has at least made the Top Ten after multimillions of dollars were spent to get her up that high, especially against some women who I think are pretty damn good singers, like one of the Mickey Mouse Show-trained girls like Christine Aquilera (but not Britney Spears, that piece of low-life Louisiana spoiled white trash tramp crap). The big fat black guy they called "the Burger King" I have not seen since he supposedly became a pop star. Any others, I apologize they have come and gone so fast I have no remembrance of any of them except the ones I mentioned. But then I've never watched the show, so, hell, it must work, I know three of them still, but only Kelly's full name do I remember. Kelly Clarkson is getting fat; that means her career, like Linda Ronstadt's after she porked up, will likely tank soon and Kelly will be covering Barbara Cook or Rosemary Clooney tunes in her new chanteuse role.

To me, American Idol is, yes, a market-grabbing vehicle for cruddy Fox television, but in terms of improving on American music; hell, a hundred Kelly Clarksons can't equal one Ella Fitzgerald, or Sarah Vaughan, or Carmen McCrae, or Diana Ross even, or Whitney Houston before Bobby Brown and drugs brought her down to the fiery wreck state. As to hip-hop chicks, like Mary K. Blidge--I don't know how to judge them. Hip-hop is so black it's beyond my comprehension. I don't get it. It sounds like one long fucking sing-song chanting to me; like doing 5,000 Hail Marys after you've banged a young choir boy back in the rectumry.

Another Televised Message From Osama
By God, it's amazing how Osama bin Ladin (I've heard that name before--wasn't he Saddam Hussein's partner in terrorism and threatening us with Weapons of Mass Destruction. Every word in that just-past sentence is bullshit. I still argue that bin Ladin only exists in the mind of a bunch of dudes in the CIA who made this clown so world-shakingly scary. Bin Ladin, if he is still alive, is on a f-ing dialysis machine; yet, the latest video footage from him, shows a big righteous-looking very healthy dude standing with his ass-crack-licking buddy--a dude I thought we killed a couple of years ago--standing in front of what looks like a fleet of Bradleys, those military retro mobile gunships made by the dear ole Carlyle Group.

The Daily Growler predicts: another tape from bin Ladin whenever it is necessary to sidetrack us US fools from all the excessive corruption going on in the District of Corruption at the Capitalism Building and the Hauls of Congress. Look out for another plane attack in the months before the 2008 elections.

elpobrecito
for The Daily Growler
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The Quote of the Day
"...it is not from any scarcity of capital that the poverty of the masses in civilized countries proceeds. For not only do wages nowhere reach the limit fixed by the produtiveness of industry, but wages are relatively the lowest where capital is most abundant." Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition, 1979.
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Note: Osama bin Ladin was a CIA-sponsored "freedom fighter" in Afghanistan when we armed Pakistani troops who under bin Ladin were attacking the Russian presence in that war-torn and ravaged desolate country back in the late 80s. Osama bin Ladin is still a CIA agent. Remember that. If he is still alive, then the CIA knows exactly where he is. Certainly Georgie Porgie Bush Baby, the "president," knows where he is since Georgie has been trying to give our seaports away to the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, all terrorist-supporting countries, who definitely know where bin Ladin is. Also, Prince Bandar Bush surely knows where his own "outcast" brother is, though Osama and Prince Bandar have about 56 brothers and sisters by as many mamas; old Pappy bin Ladin was quite a man, though I've heard Saudi princes can't F for dick shit. If the government admits Osama is dead, then they have no excuse for continuing their deceitful and murderous hoax of a War on Terrorism.
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