Memory Lane

Remember So As to Remember What Is Worth Remembering
I know for sure there are two Spanish War vets still alive in the US, Moe Fishman and Clarence Kailin. Moe’s 91 and Clarence is 92. I met ‘em both back in 2006 [I did a post about it in April 2006] at the million-person anti-Iraq War (Afghanistan War, too) march in NYC—they were there at a table at the side of Broadway with a sign saying “Survivors of Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the International Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, 'We’re too old to March but we stand by you and encourage you to keep on marching.'" At that time I met them and praised them because I literarily grew up on that war since Hemingway was my ideal in those young days of mine when I was let loose from college and the US Army to find my slot in life and I came across Hemingway—and Hemingway’s books became my guidebooks to life and tons of Hemingway’s writing was devoted to his love of Spain and then his involvement in that countries civil war and I knew the film Spanish Earth. I still have a copy of it and watch it every two years or so—it is a quite serious look directly into the eyes of a war that if the US (old aristocrat Roosevelt) and Britain (old ass-licking Brit fop Neville Chamberlain) had stepped into that Civil War and pushed the Roman Empire Fascists and the Prussian Empire Nazis back into Germany, followed them on in, with Russia attacking them on their push into Austria, they would have weakened them to the point they could not have carried out the mass death and destruction they eventually carried out—and over 60 million folks met their unfortunate fate in that mele, another war to end all wars--war over and over and over and over again and again. If Roosevelt and Chamberlain had not have been protected aristocrats and listened to their people and in Roosevelt’s case his own wife, Eleanor, who was 100% behind aiding the Spanish Republicans in that war—we didn't even have to send them troops just arms and ammunition and trucks and cannon and a few airplanes—that’s all they needed and they could have kicked Franco and his Nazi and Fascist pals out of Spain on their asses easily—but, no, these aristocratic foul bastards took a noninterference stance—let Spain handle their own problems—besides, Roosevelt and Chamberlain both knew American financiers had financed Germany’s military buildup—why, look’a here, here’s old Prescott Bush from Connecticut admitting that his family was financing Hitler—banking his holdings in their Wall Street banks—there probably were several trays of gold teeth taken from the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in those bank vaults—but NO, we love war, the bigger and messier and more destructive the war the better we love it--we love making profits off war. It’s always, wait’ll you see WWIII—you thought WWII was bad. I can’t wait. I’m gonna die before Armegeddon gets me—I ain’t no Christian; I ain’t no Jew; I ain’t no Muslem; I ain’t no Hindu; I ain’t no Buddhist; I ain’t no Dalai Lama Asskisser; I ain’t no whacko Mormon; I ain’t no Cargo Cultist, so I ain’t gonna let no religion and its hatred of all people just because God must be a damn monkey since we are all made in his image—Holy Ape Shit, God’s a damn Gorilla.

This got me to remembering—what this blog is really all about—just teasing your memory no matter how old you are—even if you’re only 6 years old and just learning to read—and what better place to learn to read than trying to read The Daily Growler? Come on, kids; get hip; get hop; get a growler attitude. Remember, it’s all gonna be yours soon.

Oh my mercy goodness, can you imagine having to live say 50 years from now? What the hell is it all going to look like then? Will there be anything left? Einstein said we have 4 years to survive when our bees disappear. Our bees are disappearing. They are flying off from their home hives and never coming back. Scientists are speculating it might be due to so many cellphone electromagnetic waves shooting all through the airs all over the airs that splatter all over the world it's confusing the bees, messing up their homing devices and they are lost in space, so to speak.

I grew up with a woman born in 1857. I remember hearing the stories she told, especially at night--she didn't use electricity; instead she used coal oil lamps, big glass ones that my grandmother told me were as old as my great-grandmother, or she burned candles in hurricane lamps, candles she made herself in a cauldron she had buried in the back yard of her house. It sat over a firepit and in it she made her own lye soap, candle wax, home brews, potions, and likkers--she was the owner of a recipe for a certain tea, my grandmother said it might have newts in it and certainly a frog or two, but if you could stomach it it would give you vitality beyond compare, the urge to live at full speed. I was too young to remember any of her stories firsthand; oh yes, they were told over and over again the older I got; when I heard her tell them I was only 5 years old. I do remember hearing her talking about remembering hearing about Abraham Lincoln being elected president and then the night he was shot and killed--though and I do remember this, it was several weeks after it happened before my great-grandmother, then 8, heard about it.

I remember very clearing when I was that age and President Roosevelt died and I remember standing with my mother on the curb in front of our house and all the cars passing us had their headlights on--at mid-day. I asked my mother why the lights were on and she said, "Because President Roosevelt died last night." Then I started noticing how in funeral processions the cars turned on their lights even though it was high noon. My dad told me one time that's so cars pulled over to let the funeral pass could tell when the procession was over.

Oh but I could have remember so much more about my great-grandmother than I did. A lot of memories of my ancient family are lost now. Oldtimers; and I put them down as fossils--only now that I am approaching ancient times in my life do I wish I had documented that old witchy woman's tales--and god she had so many of them. My brother wrote a series on her for a Western American magazine--but I know all the stories he told about her in that series as well as he did; it's those other stories that are lost forever--like our bees.

asentimentalgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Barkings of a Jealous Musician

Strumming a Guitar Reminds Me of Masturbation
I can see where artists, very sensitive people, can get to a point where they give up. Like a lot of them, some my favorites, like Ernest Hemingway and Doctor Hunter S. Thompson decided to blow the tops of their heads off. I had a nephew do that, too; and a distant poet cousin who jumped off the highest building in my hometown. Aside from my nephew (and he had tried to commit suicide once before but it was so stupid no one in his family took him serious), however, I’ve never known a suicide potential closely, like as a friend (though I have had friends commit suicide but it was long after I was out of their lives).

But I can see where an artist could be frustrated to the bone by such pain as that attributed to unsuccess, not a pain of failure as much as a pain of total dead-end-type confusion. Why aren’t I successful? That’s a hard question for anybody to answer but totally unanswerable by an artist. Why you aren’t successful could be as simple as just not having the right friends, though an artist seldom has very close friends who are helpful in terms of success or no success and when he or she does have close artists friends they are usually competing artist friends and unable to answer the question themselves much less answer it for you or other friends.

Friends artists need are sometimes artists who aren't really artists, like Kerouac’s Neal Cassady or Hemingway’s host of hangers on, mostly sportsmen and military types, or Henry Miller’s gaggle of antiart friends, including a fop fortuneteller and one of the most sexually inclined women of the 20^th Century, Anais Nin. The women are always wrong for the male artists—and men can’t replace women in most female artists’s lives. [Armchair psychology yes but, hell, I'm not a psychologist but as a writer I am an armchair psychologist--spoken just like a social scientist, which I think writers and other artists are.]

I sometimes have no friends. And as an artist that frustrates the hell out of me.

I can’t reconstruct the way I think. I can and have had to retool the way I do my art. No more pencil stubs with worn down erasers that left black marks when you tried to use them to erase something brilliant you’d written but which just didn’t read right and so you worked on it and you reworked on it and maybe, ironically, you ended up reworking it to where it comes back to the original way you wrote it. Now, I just let Microsoft Word do the spellchecking and stop me when I've used a bad sentence or wrong verb tense. No more pencils. No more Exacto correction papers. No more trying to make corrections using a Selectronic electric typewriter. Or, Jesus X, remember the early DOS writing and editing programs? I loved WordPerfect at one time.

In writing music, I no longer need a pencil either--we have Finale now, a music notation writing program--so simply even a rapper can use it--you can play the keyboard right into Finale, then quantize it, and then print it out--and you got a piece of your own published sheet music. Needs some tweaking, yes, but here we go editing again.

Editing! Little Bill Faulkner bragged that he’d never been edited, going on to say he’d rather have his wife banged by his stable boys than to be edited [thanks to l hat

( www.languagehat.com ) for this one!].

I know how that feels. I’ve been on both sides of that coin; I’ve been both a published writer and a successful editor. I know the writer in me hates the editor in me but when the editor in me reads over what the writer in me has written sometimes, the editor screams—“Holy crap, I thought you said this was masterpiece writing?—read this BS—it makes no sense, it's too wordy, too uncrafted—your verbal sense doesn’t agree with the nouns in your subjects and look you don’t spell ocasionaly that way." The editor knows really how dumb the writer really is; and the writer knows how dumb the editor is, too. One dumb writer and editor. But sometimes when I write something that is totally brilliant, ohhhhh the feeling! and then I edit it and make it even better and ohhh somemore good feeling!—sometimes the feeling is so good that I break out in tears as I reread the best of my writing or hear a test recording of one of my new songs--and then it hits me, dammit, I am a writer--and dammit, I am a songwriter.

As a musician, and a serious one, not in terms that I play “serious” music but that the music I write and perform comes from deep studying, deep experimenting, deep uses of musical notes the same way I use certain words and phrases (vernaculars; idiomatic shit) when I'm writing, but deep music only to me. Measured by my depths.

Then I listen to current music. The flow of it. Flowing faster than the oil is being depleted from under the earth’s poor old sagging crust. And the current music flow flows to the strumming of a million guitars and I’ve never been a true lover of the guitar, though it has meant a hell of a lot to blues and then to r and b and finally to white rock—but in jazz, it is still simply a miscellaneous instrument. The great jazz forbears went for the heavy instruments like saxes and pianos, like trumpets and trombones, like basses and drum sets—guitars? Yeah, there was always a guy strumming on a guitar in all the old bands but until they got electricity they were pretty modest when it came to solos—like I say, when they electrified the guitar back in the 30s, then the guitar became a horn and yep it started showing up as a solo instrument in the blues, in r and b, and in white rock—so much so it now totally dominates those musics, which have led us to pop music and in pop music either you play a bad guitar or you play a really bad guitar—and you strum and you sing your little naive songs…oh but I am so damn jealous of guitar players, though I was once told by an old jazz bassman tolearn to play the bass and then I'd always have a gig, man. The dude was forking over the truth. Bass players do work. Put a band together and look for a good bass player to nail down for it—yeah sure? You might as well get your daddy’s checkbook out—a good bass player never works free—not even rehearsals.

This was all brought on by my watching Channel 25 here in NYC, a city-owned station, owned by the Board of Education, I think, but they have a lot of far-out pop music shows on sometimes all night long (rap, white rock, leftover punk, and new world music (African dudes playing guitars)—and it all sucks to me) and interviews and this morning some older black dude was interviewing two nouveau-computer-age indy band producers—I mean, it’s an indy recording company, two young Long Island boys it looks like, hustling their favorite music through auditioning these thousands of guitar-core bands with wildass punky white boys who sing way off key (that’s the trend), whose lyrics are tinged with teen tragedy—as if a teenager knows all about life and love and shit like that. They are soapy at their worst and slightly poetic at their best. Their music has no purpose the same as their lives. At best it’s noise; at least it’s cacophony—all within the confines of the guitar strum—the upstrum or the downstrum. All the same; Amurican? Yes. White rock seems to be all guitars—two guitars, a bass, and a wildass beating-everything drummer. Drummers haven’t changed much in a century—but then, neither have guitar players.

Another frustrating thing about being an artist nowadays is who the hell is your audience and how do you find your audience?

I’ve been putting my writing on this blog now for 300 exclusively me times. Say five pages per post: YIKES! That’s 1500 pages of thegrowlingwolf's growlings. A tome in anybody’s language. But oh the editing it would take to make a book out of my growlings! Too much for this editor who hates editing but who loves a well-edited piece of writing.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From www.woodslot.com : More on Our Canadian Psychiatrist Who 40 Years Ago Took an LSD Trip and Who 40 Years Later Had to Pay for Such a Dastardly Sin Due to Google

"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.

U.S. Border Patrol Bars Canadian Psychotherapist With Drug Research Far In His Past Linda Solomon
The Tyee

While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.

When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare. ... (more)

Entheogens and Psychotherapy
Andrew Feldmar2

Janus Head Special Issue: The Legacy of R. D. Laing
Spring 2001

______________________________________

Thirty-two years, however, turned out to be but an instant in the long, unrelenting U.S. war on drugs. Last summer, in an incident that has just come to light, Mr. Feldmar, now 66, was banned from entering the United States because of his long-ago use of LSD.
Because Mr. Feldmar had never been charged with possession of the once-popular illegal drug, privacy advocates are even more alarmed by the way U.S. border guards at the busy Peace Arch crossing near Vancouver found out about it.
The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head.
Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer involved in privacy issues for 20 years, said the incident sends a frightening message to Internet users, particularly those who bare their souls online.

globe and mail

New US Border Check Tool: Google

The Day Was Too Beautiful to Be True

Coming Hell
I'm almost sure the absolutely "heavenly" weather we're having in Gotham these last few days is the advent of what will eventually turn out to be the most scalding summer ever in the history of this part of the world. Another black out! Yep, probably--especially since our power company has CON in its name, too--Con-Edison (yep, old Tom Edison's corporate child--I think old Tom had some Nazi dealings in his patriotic past same as old Henry "I Never Met a Jew I Trusted" Ford--both Nazi and Japanese Imperial dealings (scrap iron, I believe was Henry's help for the Imperial Japanese Army and good ole "'scuse please," Hiro Hito [Hey, schoolkids, you know who Hiro Hito was? How 'bout Hitler?].

We are at war in Somalia now, speaking of wars and more wars. This time we're aiding and abetting Christian Ethiopian forces against the rightwing Islamics who were that nation's elected leadership but the Christians fear the Muslims something fierce in that area so we, the good ole USA, the world's policeman, are helping the Ethiopians drive the Muslims out of Somalia and into the desert where they belong. I heard a Kenya newspaperman say it's over OIL. Did ya hear me? Somalia has oil. The Sudan, too, probably. Certainly Kenya has oil. OIL OIL OIL OIL OIL. The liquefied bones of ancient life forms. Does anybody know why the earth produces oil?--and what effect on the infrastructure of the earth draining all that oil dry from it will have on it? Is that oil a necessary part of keeping this earth from collapsing upon itself, for instance? Sorry, I'm just a wide-eyed Sociologist taking an empirical look at things. Don't mind me.

WAR IS BEAUTIFUL. WAR IS GOOD. PERPETUAL WAR MEANS PERPETUAL PROSPERITY.

WAR.

Another fascinating story I read--I don't know if it's true or not, but l hat sent me this story of a Canadian professor--a scientist, tops in his field--a native of Hungary whose parents escaped Soviet-controlled Hungary for Canada and this prof grew up a Canadian.

So this dude is coming down from Canada to meet a fellow scientist in Seattle and while he's in the good ole USA, he's contemplating going down to LA and visit is son and his family. So he gets to Blaine, Washington, is that the site of the great Friendship Arch? (the Peace Arch), and the US Homeland Security folks politely tell him to step out of his car for a routine search--while he's waiting for them to search his car, he starts talking to one of the Homeland Security goons. The goon asks him what he does for a living and he tells the dude he's a psychologist. The goon types the prof's name into Google. Up comes an article the prof wrote and published on line at some highly thought of academic on-line journal site [see my April 29th post--that's tomorrow--for the article]--a journal devoted to professional articles on psychiatry. The goon read the article: the article described how this prof had participated in an LSD study back when LSD (invented by a doctor who did his research and development of it in Canada) was thought to be a useful drug in treating alcoholism and schizophrenia. I've actually read studies out of California that prove it actually did curb addiction to alcohol. Anyway, in this article, the good honest prof admitted he'd taken an LSD trip. The prof was promptly arrested, handcuffed, and carried off to the onsite hoosegow where he would sit for hours awaiting Homeland Security's decision as to whether to allow him to get on to his Seattle meeting or not.

The goon came back and with more goons--"Sorry, Canucky, old pal," they patriotically spouted at him, "but you ain't comin' in this here Land of the Free ever again. The only way you're ever comin' to this country again is if you appeal to Homeland Security to take your name off their forbidden-entry list and good luck on that; nobody ever gets taken off that list. So head on back to your Canuck mammy, pal, we don't want a terrerist like you in this country."

The prof pleaded with them. He's sixty-six years old now. The LSD trip he was writing about in the journal happened 40-some-odd-years ago. Still Homeland Security told him to get in his car, turn it around, and head back to Eskimo land--he was forbidden to enter the USA ever again. Why? Because he admitted to using an illegal substance--which, according to our great and kind Patriot Act (put on us by Slick Willie Clinton whose wife is now considered a leading progressive Dumbocrat presidential candidate--poor old abused Hill seeking revenge on Slick Willie and his perverted taste for young plump Jewish girls who are easily excited, "Why I did her with a Cuban cigar--that's not having sex with her." What a bunch of pompous asses we have leading this country. Assholes all of them) is a FELONY and therefore means you are a terrerist risk, pal.

So, according to Homeland Security, if you admit in public--like on the Internet--or anywhere or sign a confession to the fact that you once used an illegal substance--that's pot, coke, heroin, crack, that sort of thing, not alcohol, ibuprofin, oxycontin, cigarettes, caffeine--oh no, that's fine, welcome to America--but admitting you went on an LSD trip 40 years ago gets you banned from coming to this country...or travelling out of this country, too, fellow patriots.

Hasn't Phony President Bush admitted to using cocaine heavy at one time in his privileged life? See the irony in all this bullshit?--LIES, LIES, LIES, and LIES lead to WARS and WARS ARE GOOD AND DIVINE AND BEAUTIFUL, especially perpetual wars.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

And This Just In From Beautiful Baghdad
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 17 minutes ago

BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala as the streets were packed with people heading for evening prayers, killing at least 58 and wounding scores near some of the country's most sacred shrines. Separately, the U.S. military announced the deaths of nine American troops, including three killed Saturday in a single roadside bombing outside Baghdad.

"Aw shucks," says the American press and television news.

Friendly Fire

Growls List: Number One on the List
It's kind of sad, but, damn, cops once again prove themselves to be as gun happy/whacko as Virginia Tech's Cho the Shooter, in this case the New York State Troopers that just burned a young white boy at the stake for, and the kid was preaccused all over the press and then adjudged by the cops, being a copkiller! And, yes, he was stopped at a filling station, and, yes, he had stolen a van, and, yes, he was armed, and, yes, as he fled that scene he did fire his weapon at the cops, wounding two, I believe--then he fled to an old farmhouse--ironically owned by an ex-cop and this guy had that house loaded with an alarm system that alerted the cops the minute this kid, Travis, I think his name was, broke into the place--it was closed up until summer.

So the NYHP raced to this farmhouse, you know, in dozens of black SUVs with their blue and red lights violently flare-flashing and their sirens wailing [seems like you'd want to sneak up on the "suspect" in this situation, wouldn't you?]--it was all caught on teevee--we watched it as it happened here in the Big Apple--and they jumped out of those SUVs with their guns a blazin'--blasting away full force like good dumb cops--not only now obviously shooting one of their own in the back but also firing teargas canisters into this old house and soon the whole damn house was ablaze a la David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, back when Janet Reno was roasting nutjob religio-sociopaths and their innocent, naive, scared followers, and these enthusiastic cops burned this old farmhouse clean down and they made sure they roasted everything moving or otherwise within that house including poor old scared-shitless in dead trouble Travis--leaving poor old white Travis black as the Ace of Spades to boot--burnt to such a crisp even his mother would say "sweep that up and throw that it in the ash bin, it can't be my boy." So Travis wasn't a cop killer after all, though the trooper's fellow cops were, but, hell, it don't matter, the Repugnicans are hollering for the DEATH PENALTY to be enforced--none of the "Let's Kill 'em All" dudes (politicians) can show you where killing cop killers ever stop cops from getting killed--also, would I be wrong in assuming the cops kill more innocent citizens every year that citizens kill them--would that be a fair guess? You'll notice in the report below from Yahoo News the reporter makes sure you know Travis did shoot the dead trooper, too, though his shot didn't kill him. Cops are so dumb. They are such bumblers. They won't bumble when Bush puts them in brown shirts and teaches 'em how to goosestep.

Trooper David C. Brinkerhoff, a member of the force's elite mobile response team, was shot in a gunfight Wednesday as he and other troopers went into a Catskill-area farmhouse where the armed suspect had holed up.

Although the suspect, Travis Trim, shot Brinkerhoff, "the fatal wound was made by a .223 (caliber) tactical round that was believed to have been fired by an MRT member," said acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton.
[From Yahoo News]

These troopers use "Kill or be killed" as their motto same as Bush's Great Amurican US Army that's getting its butt mortally kicked in Iraq as I type this--though goofball nutjobs like John McCain swear otherwise--old Viet-Vet John is now officially a presidential candidate (he'll take home a couple'a million for his own use out of this I'm sure)--how 'bout the cojones on this old Bircher-Right-Winger; what gall this John "the Captured Captain" McCain has--"Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"--god-damn he's a funny son of a bitch, too, isn't he? Any of you Iraqis laughin' at this goon? You Repugnicans love that kind of humor, though, and believe me, they've used it on old scrambled-brain John, too, don't ya just know it! You might better NOT laugh at old John; anybody know what kind of weapons collector he is?--check out that bunker out there at his Phoenix mansion--could he produce a Virginny-bought Glock on the floor of Congress, say in a fit of sociopathic antiheroic rage? Watch out! I'm giving you a profile of true terrerists--scary sons of bitches, including one woman, Condo-Leasing Rice, and, wow, she's a scary bitch; she looks like Unka Dick's "woodpile" daughter--sorry, using woodpile in that sense is very racist of me--but, damn, check Condi out--especially look in her eyes, then flash over and look in Unka Dick's eyes--the same expression; but then, Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie, our Little Spoiled Rich Brat Son of a Wimp Great Deadly Military Leader and Decisionmaking Fool Genius "president," has that look, too. Oh, Jeez, could Georgie be Unka Dick's love son? Mammy Babs?--sonny boy looks more like mommy than he looks like daddy...er-ah, heh-heh, I'm jokin', folks, please--like Imus, this is humor, dammit; laugh; except don't laugh at the seriousness of what I'm cartooning--the seriousness of the dilemma these failed losers have gotten us into--these Neo-Cons (New Con Artists), with their backwards and very pompous attitudes of Permanent War Is Godlike with the same intentions Goebbels had when he started the War Is Good, "perpetual" war that is, BS to get the Germans to produce--and those Good Germans produce--using a slave labor, too, right? the Jews were cheap labor--those who could produced, produced, those who couldn't--off to the showers with 'em!--cheap f-ing labor was necessary for the Aryans to prove they were the superpeople of Evolution--and Hitler did make monkeys out of the Germans, except Monkeys turned out to be the smarter of the two.

By the way, our US Immigration situation right this minute has Halliburton, the Dubai Corporation, building concentration camps along the US border with Mexico--there currently is a round-up going on in this country of Mexican immigrants--this pompous-ass government militaristic agency that calls itself ICE (Immigration Compliance Enforcement, I think it means) makes surprise attacks on schools, places of employment, and the private homes of Mexican workers whether legal or illegal, and they break into your home and haul you and your family off--or they raid your place of employment and drag you off your job and then haul you off--or they wait outside schools until Mexican mothers come to pick up their kids and they bust the mothers and haul them off--totally inhumanely in these latter cases as these mothers are rounded up and hauled away no matter how many children they have with them and that includes even babies sucking at their breasts--these ICE dudes and Amazon babes rip those babies away from those mothers and haul the mothers away anyway--haul them away to where?--to private-company-run "immigration detention centers" (read: Concentration Camps)--and, of course, since it's Unka Dick's true home state as well as Bush Baby's also-adopted home state (he even lies about being a Texan), a hell of a lot of these hellholes are in Texas, which will soon be a hellhole when the hottest summer on record hits there later this year--one of these concentration camps is at Reynosa, Texas--it's a huge tent city surrounded by barbed wire fences and towers guarded by private security guards carrying military-type weapons. They put young kids 5 and 6 year olds in these concentration camps as illegal aliens--locking them in solitary as they await deportation back to Mexico, even though some of these 5 and 6 year olds are American citizens since they were born in the USA.

And by the bye, you'll be happy to know none of these employers who employ these illegal aliens when ICE raids these plants and hauls these people away have anything done to them--except maybe they get a cash-under-the-table reward for aiding and abetting ICE in these horrible Nazi-like raids and imprisoning of a heroic and stoic people who risk their very lives to come to this country to work long enough to make what to them could be their life's fortune--getting here and getting a good job is like hitting the lottery to a Mexican and his family--think of the bravery of these people--los cojones on these brave Mexicans--crossing one of the meanest deserts in the world, the Sonoran Desert, to get to, of all places, NOGALES! Arizona--holy shit--they reach the US dehydrated, almost dead, those that do make it--several hundred of them die and become a buzzard's dinner in that Sonoran Desert do to neglect by the Border Patrol--who truly wish they could pop off these stinking bastards as they try to sneak across that long and in some places desolate border.

Bush's solution in Arizona is the same one he's now employing in Baghdad--building a huge concrete fence for a jillion miles--"There," he boasts with pompous glee, "that'll keep 'em out, the pachuco bastards!!"

White people hate Mexicans you know--it goes way back in White American history--it involves land--as we all should know, Mexico used to be bigger than it is now--it used to extend further north than it does today--much farther north and out west, too--it included all of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming--Texas. White Texans are really scared of Mexicans--that's why White Texans act so "gringo" when they're around Mexicans--they're really making fun of them--the Frito Bandito mentality--Fritos, by the way, are a natural-born Texas food product--Fritos--from San Antonio. My mother could make the best Frito pie you've ever hoisted into your feedbag--Frito pie is made same as a regular pie with a bottom crust made with a layer of Frito chips, crushed and mashed, and covering the bottom of a Pyrex pie dish. Next you put a layer of good meaty 5-alarm chili--I like Wick Fowler brand "5 Alarm" Chili-makin's with chopped sirloin with some chorizos blended in for some pork flavoring. I met old Wick once--and Frank X. Tolbert, too, at a Chili Cook Off down in Terlingua, Texas, one time when I was a tassle-headed kid-- and I liked old Wick, thought he was a funny man, and I especially liked Wick's costume and the fact he said he put armadillo meat in the particular chili he had entered in the contest the day I met him.

So after a layer of chili, then you add a layer of queso de el raton --Texans call it Longhorn cheese, but it's actually what we also called "rat cheese"--because it was only fit for rat traps, as my dad used to say as he whittled off chunks of the grainy cheese with his Imperial Cracked Ice pocket knife from a big wheel of rat cheese we always seemed to have in the larder. And, yes, I've heard my mother call my dad a rat a couple'a times in my life.

Then you put another layer of chili on top of the layer of rat cheese and then you put a layer of crushed Fritos over the top of all that, pressing it down firmly over the last layer of chili, like you put a pie crust top on say an apple pie or a chicken pot pie--on top of this top crust you put a layer of rat cheese with some onions, tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers chopped up spread around over the cheese and then you put that in the oven and bake it at 350 degrees until the cheese and peppers on top the pie are bubbling and golden browned. Watch out for heart attacks as you gulp this down by the tablespoons, but it's worth the risk. A true Texas-Texian culinary dish. Such a shame. I love Mexicans; I love Mexico--though now they don't love me down there anymore--not now thanks to this disgusting guy who calls himself a Great Decider and is leading the only country I know as my own over the brink and into oblivion.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Nikki Giovanni Is a Hokie!

One of the striking aspects of a university renowned for football, engineering and agricultural studies was that Virginia Tech is the academic home of poet Nikki Giovanni. Once known as the "Princess of Black Poetry," Giovanni has for four decades written uncompromising works about civil rights and Black Power, revolution and sexuality. In the books Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgment (1968) and recent works about hip-hop and her ordeals with cancer, she has written the kind of jagged poetry that agitates the comfortable. She is a 63-year-old woman with a tattoo that reads "Thug Life" in honor of Tupac Shakur. She is also a part of Hokie Nation. (And had the gunman as a student). A shard of comfort in this horrid ordeal was hearing Giovanni speak in the convocation that followed the massacre. Giovanni had the generosity and dexterity to draw on both her politics and the Hokie's football chants to bring the crowd to their feet. (This shouldn't be too surprising. A little research shows that she wrote a piece in her 2007 book Acolytes about a "grandmother's strong support for Virginia Tech Hokies football.") Here is a transcript of her poem: "We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech.... We are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory...neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all this sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech." This was followed by the entire auditorium, the tears running freely and without shame, chanting "Let's Go Hokies" while Giovanni pumped her fists to the skies. A mother of a Virginia Tech senior wrote about this on her blog. "I listened to poet Nikki Giovanni at the Convocation read 'We Are Virginia Tech' and thought that some listeners must have thought it odd for a poet to talk about "We are Hokies." I would have thought the same before my son started Tech. I associated Hokies with sports, especially football, and the overwhelming volume of fans at the stadium. But it is more than that. When the students chanted 'Let's Go Hokies' or just the word 'Hokie,' that too must have seemed odd, perhaps irreverent, to some given the circumstances. It absolutely was not that." No, it was not. Soon thereafter, the No. 1 Hokie Michael Vick came forward to donate money to help with funeral costs and other support services and said, "When tragic things like this happen, families have enough to deal with, and if I can help in some small way, that's the least I can do." Their coach, favorite son Frank Beamer, has also come forward to say, "We're going to beat this thing. We're going to overcome. This one guy isn't going to dictate how we're going to feel." Frank Beamer and Nikki Giovanni. Two peas in a pod. Who woulda thunk it?

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Got'cha!

The Old Sociologist Thinks
I'm thinking all the time--yes, a lot of my time is spent thinking about money and all the abstract wildness that such thinking conjures up--and yes, I spend a lot of my time thinking about myself and all the abstract wildness that such thinking conjures up. I'm tied in knots of thinkings; yes, plural, more than one thinking going on, thinkings thinking about thinking and thinking; it's gettin' infinite, folks, thinking upon thinking upon more thinkings, layered thinking, and, hell, I'm cryin' "Uncle!" to a bunch of thinkings long enough to think about until the Reaper comes for me. "One never knows, do one."

You see, let me start like this: I worked in pharmaceutical advertising--and I mean right smack-dab in the middle of it--Madison Avenue--nice view from my desk--though it froze in the winter due to the casement windows having not been repaired since the building of the building, but it was a "precious" old building to those of us who grew up writer-would-bes with a lot of our writing hopes being based on NYC magazines accepting and publishing our work, and this old building was the architectural landmark at 51st and Madison that once housed one of the US's best-selling magazines--beautiful building but cold as Hades in the deep winters--and I spent several deep winters in Hades there "tweaking" pharmaceutical advertising copy. We created ads hawking our stable of pharma companies's products--and I'm not here to talk about advertising--it's all lies, trust me on that--though I'm a fiction writer, my fiction doesn't lie--I bow to Ernest Hemingway on twisting his original "I'm not a liar, I'm a fiction writer." [Oh how easily I could fall off my original direction here and start yack-ing on American fiction writers--especially something on Little Bill Faulkner l hat sent me t'other day--oh it's so wonderful, but so condemning--like the wolf-rat I am right now, I back out of the corner on this one...

What I'm hearing this morning as I write this is that the Government of Thailand has stripped Abbott Laboratories of its patent on one of the second-level retrovirus drugs used in containing HIV-AIDS and are going to start producing it generically in Thailand--it's based on Abbott's refusing to reduce their prices on this particular AIDS drug and Thailand claiming they had the right under the World Trade Org to do this patent stripping by claiming Abbott was keeping life-saving treatment from a country suffering an AIDS epidemic (the mostly forgotten epidemic now here in God's America where I just read we have 30-to-40,000 new AIDS cases a year--A YEAR, folks). Abbott Labs is of course protesting and acting hurt and by God they're going to sue--God-dammit, Abbott's 400-million-a-year CEO wants revenge on these damn Thais [let's be flies on his office wall], "God-dammit, you mid-management VeePee in Charge of Asian Affairs, F those bloody diseased-ass Thai bastards. You ever been to Bangkok, Simpson?" "No sir, only Club Meds, sir; I never trust foreign beaches." "I understand that but that's bullshit compared to Thailand 'cause, by God, I have been to Bangkok, Mister Ass Kisser, and as far as I'm concerned they should call it 'Bangin' With My Cock.' Youngest ho's I ever saw in all my field reppin' days, you understand, I mean, I was right out of Parsons School of Chiropractic Medicine and a lowly 4 million-a-year sales manager in charge of Asian Development--hell, I wasn't married, or was I, can't remember, and I was feelin' my oats, and there I was in Bangkok, rich, makin' money by the fistsful, hangin' out with Prince This and Prince That, bangin' Princess This and Princess That, dinner with the King every night--I used to slip the King samples--I was actually testin' 'em on him--oops...whoa now, what was I doing with samples, you askin'? We have laboratories in Thailand and they gave me buckets of samples. Hell, I had tons of samples with me, bags full, anyway, back to these Thais...so I sowed my oats all over Bangkok and one night I met this little slanteyed ho down on one of the raunchiest canals on a ho boat I knew was kind'a clean, but, damn, I fell in love, Simpson, and it was mad love, too, and, shhhhhh, by the way, should my wife ever ask you about this--anyway, Simpson, to make a long CEO adventure short, I caught the clap and the looey from this little tramp--and then one of our Bangkok managers cornered me and said, you know, brother, all those little canal sluts have AIDS, man--and, whoooo-boy and jumpin'-jesuses, I was scared shitless. I sneaked immediately to my Thai doctor and got checked out and fortunately I didn't have the AIDS. It was a striking moment in my life...." "Sir, what does this have to do with anything, sir?...oh, wait a minute, sir, er-ah, I should have immediately seen you're logic, sir, your dazzling logic....." And so goes the conversation. In the meantime, several thousands of Thais are lounging around in the Thai hospitals in total pain and throes of certain death unless they get this Abbott Laboratories retrovirus drug. Abbott Labs says, F 'em all, our loyalty is to our stockholders--F stupid AIDS patients--they should'a worn rubbers anyway.

Holy Madness. That's what sparked an irritant flame in my growl's dragon-style flame-broiling this morning...the idea of having first of all the power of being filthy rich yourself--and I'm talking about Abbott Laboratories (all of these pharmaceutical companies are former drugstores--chemist shops--they are chemists and not doctors of curative medicine--a drug company CEO with a Dr. in front of his name is probably not a Doctor of Medicine unless its Nuclear Medicine or Biochemistry) decisionmakers at the high levels of company management, the quantitative management boys, those who break everything down on the computer models into possible-profits based on production and mark-up and all the miscellaneous charges and these are the guys who draw the bottom lines in the sands of the Pharmaceutical Wars, and believe me they are wars--big-time wars--like Pfizer taking on Glaxo-Welcome--a battle of billionaire corporations--all with their heads up each other's filthy rich and dirty asses.

Oh the brutal life and death power these powerful rich MASSUHS have, white men for the most part--though the pharmaceuticals do like slick women, especially women doctors they hire by the wagonloads to go on television talk shows and network morning shows and pretend to be experts in their fields and some of them really may be when what they are doing is promoting a pharma company's product--back at my pharma ad agency we used to joke about one of our pharma-company-bought doctors because of her very scatalogically vulgar last name--I laugh like a cousin hyena now remembering Doctor Cacacita...I used to do a Three Stooges as doctors routine when I made fun of all these doctors whose clinical trial gobblygook we gave a semblance of dishonest sense to--you know the Stooges's routine, "Doctor Moe, Doctor Curley, Doctor Larry! Doctor Moe, Doctor Curley, Doctor Larry, emergency, emergency." My favorite scene from that routine was when Doctor Moe during surgery turned to his nurse and holding out his hand shouted, "Annapoonatang!" I swear that's what Moe says, "Anna-poo-na-tang." Correct me if I wrong all you Three Stooges devotees--are the Stooges remembered much at all anymore?--great actors those Howard Brothers and Mr. Fine. The Stooges went to pot after Curley and Shimp kicked the bucket.

I stagger away from the Stooges. In passing, I think I could survive in a Stooge world; like I believe this is all a cartoon strip. In college one of my roommates went about the dorm dancing with a broom saying, "It's all done with mirrors, mah friends, it's all done with mirrors." Old Duffy. Duffy, my man, you were right, whatever you're dancin' with now.

But the power of life and death in one man's hands. That's what's frightening about all of this. I mean look at the power Hitler had; Stalin; Roosevelt; Mao; Lenin; Pol Pot; the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia--yeah, that's one MAN, the purest of the bloodline they can find due to the old original daddy's many bastard sons--not many daughters survive, ever notice that about the Saudi Royal Family?--wait a minute, I take all that back--they are members of the Coalition of the Fool Willing--or are they? Let's see, weren't most of the 9/11 attackers Saudi Arabian? One Jordanian or something, too? Why didn't we attack Saudi Arabia after 9/11? You think Congress people ever know this shit?...do they think like I do?

By the bye, cheers to Brother Bill Moyers and his teevee comeback last night on PBS. It was the best job of teevee reporting I've seen on television--Bill did it. I'm gonna quick puttin' Preacher Boy Bill down in my growlings. He gets a The Daily Growler "Daily Growler" Golden Wolf award (I think you have to go to Monahans, Texas, to get them--but Bill's a Texas boy, he can whiz out to Monahans in his limo one day and pick it up I'm sure).

thegrowlingwolf
for The Growling Wolf

For You Yankee Haters
The Yankees just lost their sixth game in a row. Boston won, so the Yanks are now buried in the basement of the AL Eastern Div. 5 games back. They got shut out tonight by the Blue Jays--God, a Canadian baseball team--how heretical! 8-12. Worse Yankee start ever in my memory. The Yankees have no confidently professional pitchers and the ones they have a millionaire goldbricks walking around bitching and moaning about backaches, shoulder pain, or like Carl Pavano, one of the great goldbricks of all time in Sports--even more goldbricking than the old Knicks basketball center, Bill Medley, who missed so many games because of injuries the fans called him "Medical Bill"--this was back in the days when the regular old fans could sit down floor level, where now only celebrities get to sit protected from the people who have made the rich gods. I say throw beers at them; but then...I'm pissed.

thegrowlingwolfdiehardYankeefan--I stayed with them even during the Major Houk days--the late sixties--those days when Hector Lopez and Roy White were their only stars and the Yankees lingered all year in the second division....

The growlingwolf Knows Where HEAVEN Is!!

Marshall McLuhan's Ghost Is Looking Over My Shoulder
The Internet! The Internet! Blog news reporters! Wow. I'm listening to Brother Bill Moyers confessin' on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now radio show--you gotta love Amy--she forced her way into journalism and came out the queen of Indie media when she and Juan Gonzales became the possessors of Free Radio's (that was once the idea behind Pacifica (the founder of Pacifica was a conscientious objector in WWII and Pacifica means Peace and not because it was situated on the West Coast) Radio--free radio for everybody) Democracy Now--and I, off the top of my head, believe Amy and Juan did put that show together originally from WBAI Pacifica here in NYC--Amy's an interesting character--but later for her...bye, Amy--"Hey, Bill Moyers, c'mon over here, pal...."

Bill's confessin' away. He's on Amy's show promoting his PBS return show Bill Moyers Journal --this after Bill gave up when the Neo-Cons tried to ruin PBS and kicked Bill's bleeding-heart liberal ass off the air and Bill swore he was giving up, goin' fishin', whatever a rich dude does when he retires...but NOPE! Bill's back and he's rarin' to go. You can't keep an old journalist down, and that's true, I grew up with a journalist brother who kept writing his column right up until the day he died and he knew Bill Moyers, too, and I've met Bill Moyers a couple'a times, though Bill Moyers would flick me off his ass like he would a flea were I to go up to him and say, "Hey, Bill, Brother Bill, it's me thegrowlingwolf, come on, man, you remember me...hey, man, get your hands off me...me and old Bill go way back...." and I'd be booted into the gutter on my ass.

The world is driving me nuts. I just heard one of the superastronomists saying these guys who gaze at the stars all their lives have discovered a planet very similar to Earth out there--way out there of course--and guess the heck what I think I know? YOU READY FOR THIS? Quick, call Pastor Melissa Scott to her titanium laptop with her gold initials and an enamel photo of old Doctor Gene on its hull--surely if there's a heaven, Doctor Gene should have bought it by now and had Melissa beamed up--I know, if I ended up in Heaven and Jesus asked me did I want any favors, I'd say, "Jesus, damn you, dude, could you get me my woman up here?" "You mean Sister Melissa, my son?" "Oh yes, Lard, now that my prostate's back whole, could you ship her up here sort like you did that dude back in the Old Testesment, Lard--Enoch, wasn't that his name?" "You mean Enoch Schmull, my butcher? You want I should bring that sweet Melissa up here to be a butcher's assistant?" It's complicated in Heaven---BUT LISTEN, I, thegrowlingwolf ,do hereby propose that this new planet be named the Planet Melissa--dig? BECAUSE I THINK this NEW planet that so resembles EARTH IS ACTUALLLLLY...are you sitting down?...this is a Daily Growler X--cluuuuSIVE!

I believe with all my wolf heart that this planet resembling Earth they've discovered outside our solar system, too, PRAISE THE LARD...IS IN REALITY HEAVEN!!!!!!

Can I hear some Hallelujahs and Hosannas?...thegrowlingwolf has discovered Heaven!

Sorry, folks...oh, especially if you're still with me after that tirade! I just thought I had a thing there, something maybe I could start a religion on, you know, like I know where Heaven is--see!; look at all the money I could make! Set up little observatory chapels all over the place--"Come, view Heaven and Praise the Lard and pass the collection bucket at the same time at thegrowlingwolf's Church of the Visible Heaven!!! God-damn, I was born to this. I'm an advertising genius. Ask those who've seen me work; they'll tell you in unison I'm the greatest creative mind in NYC, which means the world, folks, the world....[I'm laughing like a hyena as I wolf dance around my shabby room].

So I heard Bill Moyers confessin' to Amy Goodman and this is what drove me to "pen" this (feels weird how obsolete that term is now--"to pen"...as with quill, I suppose) episode of lunacy in my daily blog-swamped existence. Bill Moyers confessed to Amy that he was a proud pusher of the Vietnam War until he started talking to David Halberstam when he came back his first time from covering the Vietnam War live from the fields of battle and told Bill the war was all baloney and was causing horrible death and destruction--and tip your hats, your bottles, or at least salaam to David Halberstam--he saw the light in Nam right off the bat--Best and Brightest, wasn't that his book?--funny how that title became a corporate trick of deciding who to fire in the late 80s and early 90s, the computer age, the age of corporate reengineering--ironies!--and after talking to David Halberstam Bill began to have serious doubts about the Vietnam War....

In all my Bill Moyers-tracking days I've never heard Bill confess this, you know, talk honestly about those days he was Johnson's press secretary--handpicked by Lyndon who thought of Brother Bill as his own son--remember Lyndon was sonless, the father of two "semi-beautiful" daughters (that was the way the cynics described his daughters)--though I kind'a thought Lucy Baines was a pretty good-looking babe--even old Lynda Bird wasn't bad either, but Billy Moyers was Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson's sonny boy. And Bill was Lyndon's mouthpiece for 2 years--Bill spread the word about the Gulf of Tonkin, the phony sea battle that never took place yet started our serious involvement in the Vee-et-naam Wahr--yeehaw, Commander and Chief Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson.

And so now Bill has come clean--yes, he promoted the Vietnam debacle--but he didn't ever say, that I know of, that the Vietnam War was wrong, based on a big lie, same as all wars we've gotten ourselves into since we became turncoats against the British Crown, our Great White Fathers. Lies cause wars.

In the meantime, Mean-ass Rudi "America's Mayor" Guiliani is campaigning wildly around the country even though it's over a year and a half until the next election; yet, all these glory seeking nest-egg hatching stary-eyed, two-bit career politicians are chasing after their chance of a lifetime to be the world's most powerful asshole...I mean, mark my words, it doesn't matter who gets elected in 2008, nothing's going to change--there'll still be death and destruction ruling over life and conversation--and there'll be more and more shooters out there coming after us--one today in New York State shot 4 New York State troopers after they pulled him over at an upstate New York gas station--then he escaped to an ex-cop's country estate--a beautiful old upstate farm and farmhouse--and from there this dude pumped a hundred rounds or so at the cops, killing one of the troopers. After declaring this young white male a verified cop killer (cops are ruled by Babylonian law, by the bye; you know, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth") the police then set the country house on fire--and quite a blaze it was--and the whole farmhouse burned to smithereens in a matter of minutes--all shown on NYC television. They later said the dude's body was found sitting upright in a burnt out doorframe, his body cooked to a sizzling crisp (Teevee Chef Daisy Martinez pronouced him overcooked and then proceeded to explain the falacy of cooking humans over an old farmhouse open fire--"That's too much heat for this 170-lb human--and it was fully clothed, too, which is like cooking a chicken in a paper bag--which, by the way, I'm featuring on my next show....").

Guns are good though. Like Goebbels said WAR IS FOREVER, We the People say GUNS ARE FOREVER! We have a Constitutional right to carry muskets with powderhorns and ballshot or rakes or pitchforks when we have to form state militias to fight an invading force, like our own government turning oppressive, for instance--and now we have the right to carry Glocks and AKAs and submachineguns and missile launchers. I can't wait for the first modern-day gun battles in the street--say Blackwater declaring war on another Security Agency Army--or even the US National Guard units--oops, I forgot, they're all serving triple-time-call-backs in Iraq aren't they? That means we've lost our state militias to the Iraq War; which means, we have no local protection against a private army taking over one of our large cities--like Chicago maybe; like Los Angeles maybe.

Thought it was kind'a funny to hear Bill Clinton, that phony hillbilly bastard, praising Boris Yeltsin, the vodka-drinkin' fool who wrecked the Soviet Union without a public referendum and left the Russian economy in total chaos, as a champion of democracy. Shows you how many faces old Bill can throw your way when he's in the spotlite. Hillary is so dull, I can't believe people seem to really like her. Why? She's dull. She has what seems like no honest reasoning ability--she's been coached to act like every other politician you've ever seen, except as in all of these kind of elections, the Dumbocrats once again are being so polite while the Repugnicans, like Rudi Guiliani, what a crass totally LYING son of a bitch this goombah is, are already spewing totally inane accusational trash against the naive Dumbocrat candidates. Roarin' Rudi has now became a military genius, this a coward of a man who ran like a dog when he was pompously rambling with his henchmen after 9/11 and looked up and saw those mighty invincible towers come tumbling down as if they were so much nothing in terms of invincible--and oh boy, Rudi's black SUVs with the darkened windows squealed out of there as though shot from a cannon. Rudi's a man, by the way, and surely we all know this, you shouldn't trust around your women, which makes me wonder how many abortions Rudi's paid for over his Casanova-career? You think Bernie Keric ever paid for his concubines to get abortions? You think if you knocked up a public figure celebrity woman like Bernie was bangin' in the dusts of the 9/11 aftermath (Judy, better have your lungs checked) she wouldn't get an abortion should she find out she was carrying a little 9/11-damaged fetal freak?

Rudi the Loser's new move as front-running Repugnican candidate (he was that in his New York senate race he lost to Hillary Rod-HAM Clinton--that's how Hill got to Congress) is to accuse the Dumbocrats of screwing around the Iraq War mess when they know not what they're doing (as though Rudi does know what's going on overthere) and saying the Dumbocrats by calling for troop withdrawal by a certain date are giving Al Queda all the information it needs to know to begin its own surge in Iraq--where, just think, five years ago, there was no Al Queda presence in Iraq. Ain't that strange! Isn't that the SUBJECT these Dumbocrats should be raising?--raising these issues up to levels of brilliance before the American people enough that the furor will enable THIS Congress to impeach this whole administration rather than just keepin' on going along with it and giving it more cannon fodder young American men and women to ravage and kill and more billions and billions of our whole National Treasury to squander? Dennis Kocinich today proposed impeaching Unka Dick! Dennis, Dennis, it's Bush you want to impeach, pal, then Unka Dick will be out on his ass, too. What is wrong with Dumbocrats? Why are they so afraid of going up against this little phony weasel of a president--come on--he's easy; you got him on the ropes, now beat the shit out of him. This is the world title we're trying to get back from the fight-throwing, fight-fixing lyin' dog of a phony never-honestly-elected "president," our first-ever appointed president--you don't do it fighting him with powder puffs.

Dumbass spoiled brat Baby Boomers...oh shit, folks, nearly all of my best friends are Baby Boomers.

THE STUPIDITY OF IT ALL. More death-row dudes are getting out of Illinois prisons today due to DNA tests proving they were innocent when busted and sentenced--the guy today freed after serving 25 years--can you imagine that! 25 years and you're innocent. "Hey, it's a joke, son." That's the state's attitude--though I saw where a lot of these guys are winning multimillion dollar suits against these states and will at least get to live what few years they have left in a good high-style of free life--with mansions and Hummers and shit. Think of how many innocent men had their lives electrocuted away, hanged away, or shot up with paralyzing drugs so that their last hours on earth were hours of the most torturous way to die there is, being paralyzed to death--and they died also with the pain of still knowing they were really innocent. Think of that.

And hundreds of more people died today in Iraq. Oh, well, that's OK. Those are people who hate our Christ and our Living Gawd--so their annihilation is eminent--why, sounds like the same thing Goebbels was saying the other eve, WAR IS GOOD...

And today the stock market zoomed over 13,000 for the first time ever. Did you invest in war stocks today? Too bad you didn't. WalMart--buy. Exxon-Mobil--buy. Halliburton-Dubai--buy. Bechtel-Dubai--buy. Blackwater--are they on the stock exchange yet? Toyota, also, I read, is now the largest automaker in the world. Well, Praise the Silly Lard--wasn't Japan our enemy at one time? We love our enemies as we love ourselves and Britain: there are 5 countries whose economies are outdistancing ours by miles and millions and billions: Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands!! Do you think the Euro dollar is soon to become the monetary unit of world measure? I think the Great Democratic Government of Iraq has recently voted to base their money on the Euro dollar and not the US dollar. Good thinking Iraqis. What a mess Wall Street's gonna be the day this stock market implodes and explodes into Chaos. Did you ever ask yourself why a Bin Laden wouldn't have bombed the NY Stock Exchange instead of the WTC?

Get ready to learn Arabic.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Go Yankees....yeah sure....we're in the basement--there is nothing worse than a New York Yankees fan looking at the standings and seeing the Yanks in the basement, under the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for God's sake--though, hell, they're still only 4 games out of first and Boston and Baltimore have dropped two in a row. That's baseball folks! There's no 4-corners defense in baseball; there's no first down to make; there's no extra points to be kicked...but without pitching, and this year's MLB pitching is very lousy throughout the league, baseball will be exciting, yes, but not expressive of the best teams coming out the deservingest winners. Also, this influx of Japanese pitchers on the majors is not proving to be much help to any of the teams they're on; Japanese pitchers are not invincible after all, but then, they do bring in those muy rico Japanese businessmen into those boxseats and luxury boxes--those high-priced baseball venues that keep making MLB owners richer than all the Holy Roller preachers's tax-free billions combined.

The Mets. They're a half a game ahead of Atlanta.

Voters Want Impeachment...Instead...

Congress Gives Bush 100 Billion More of Our Hard-Earned Dollars
With the Dumbocrats acting so typical American hypocritical in giving in to anything the warmongering lyin' dog administration asks for, giving today Bush 100 billion dollars for his illegal war that he should be impeached over; instead: Hillary is mumbling something about change--she mumbles so I don't what the hell she's talking about and then bringing on her sick-looking Slick Willie to boost her cause with the babes and the men--she's desperate for the black vote, especially now that Obama's in the race and black people like him--of course we men, black, white, or whatever, look upon Slick Willie with jealousy--rumor was he got Barbra Streisand by just calling up on the Oval Office phone--a few years ago I wouldn't'a minded of pickin' up the phone and making a date with Barbar--I used to think she was cute in a special Jewish Princess way I like--I really think it's her nose--I love Jewish girl noses. I'm such a racist pig.

Obama?...I can't figure him out. He's not saying anything of substance either really. He's certainly not getting mean with Bush, not challenging him. They're all just talking political hot air--which to me is total BULLSHIT. It's as though these Dumbocrats actually love old G.W. "Bush Baby" "Spoiled Little Rich Brat Son of a Illegally Rich Wimp" Bush, our phony "president"--the vote-stealing champ of all time--and they love him for that--they love him for the way he does as he pleases and still millions and millions of bucks are poured into his coffers--and then he steals another trillion or so--where does that go?--and they also admire Bush Baby because he out-vote-stole old Mafia-aided JFK (and now after he's dead and we know he was a big-time philanderer, no wonder he had a bad back, so bad he had handmade rockers made using We the People's money at a cost of over 10,000 smackeroos a piece--just so his bony profligate ass could be comfortable--so stupid, stupid, stupid).

And I had intended to write on how stupid We the People are in this country. Our young people are totally stupid; even the little smartasses are stupid. Dopey. Daydreamers ("Only thing that comes to a dreamer is another dream..." American composer and musician, Lowell Fulsom) and believers in fairy tales and striking it rich without having to work for it. "Daddy gives me money; why do I have to work?" Baby Boomers are the really stupidest Americans there are. These are people raised by WWII vets and people who got rich off WW II and then in the "peaceful" fifties raised our economy to one of possible prosperity and long life, though they forgot one thing, to teach their kids the meaning of being responsible for themselves. Like my brother who got rich after WWII. The way he handled his Baby Boomer kids was to give them every god-damn thing they wanted so they'd leave him alone so he could work and make another million or two--with one of his sons once saying, "As soon as dad dies, I'm buying me a brand new Cadillac...." Without daddy now, his kids are swimming lost in a big-sea world; they really know nothing about reality, except they are smarter than the average Boomers, but they are confused and their intelligence just makes it worse because intelligently they know they are unprepared for the reality of this real life, living this life as a stupid human animal, the evolved monkey--from a child of a mother monkey to transcend science and reality to become a child of a "living" God--what the hell does that mean? Where's Pastor Melissa Scott when I need her?--where? at the bank tallying her tax-free collection of good ole US dollars?--by the barrelsful cash is collected in these god-damn churches--THEY PAY NO TAXES, FOLKS. Look at pig-jowled Jerry Falwell, wallowing in the overweight of being a lucky hillbilly Christ-pusher who scored big with the frightened scared-to-death white hillbillies down there in the same wildwoods of the Old Dominion State as the hillbilly campus of Virginny Tech to become sort of overnight back in the Raygun years a multimillionaire able to just reach down into one of those buckets full of cash dollars, grab a handful, go out and buy him a Lincoln towncar, and then talk about how God gave it to him. Praise the Lard and pass them mammy biscuits and that soppin' syrup, please. Sure looks like old Jerry is eatin' high on them hogs he has out in his backyard. A hillbilly feels lonely without some pigs runnin' wild around his trailer house. Yee-haw.

Since the 33, including Cho, died at Virginny Tech, way over several thousand Iraqis and American soldiers and contractors and private army dudes have been killed--and 10s of thousands injured. 9 American soldiers died yesterday, but Praise the Lard, Congress made sure Bush the Impaler has enough money (100 billion dollars) to ship some more cannon fodder over there to replace those 9--oops, 5 more today). Bush tells Gates, "I don't give a god-damn how many of these GI-stupid assholes have to die; that's what they're doin' in the Army, isn't it? I mean, come on, if they were smart, they wouldn't be in the Army, would they? I'm smart, ya see, I knew how to get out of the Army; these dumbasses only know how to join the Army--they volunteered! Nobody in my day volunteered!! So F 'em, they're there to die so hell they have to die, unless they shoot first dammit. It's kill or be killed--that's the way that great Amurican Ko-Lean kid put it to those smartass intellectual kids down there at Virginia Tech--his message--and the NRA and the Army certainly back him up on this, "Kill or be killed." You fight 'em there or you fight 'em here. I heard a good statement the other night, some guy, Gore-balls or somethin' Kraut like that--you know, we have a lot'a krauts in central Texas--down there by mah prefab ranch daddy bought me in Crawford--Krauts, Checks, Eye-talians in there, too--anyway, this Kraut, Gore-balls, said, war should be permanent--that war is the honorable way for a free nation to defend its principles--War is good; War should be permanent. So, hell, send another 30,000 National Guardsmen over there--I was in the Texas Air National Guard, you know? I went in an officer, too, thanks to one of Pappy's army friends--yeah, that guy that blew his brains out before he could testify against me in tryin' to accuse me of goin' AWOL. Hot damn, I was clever in those days...ah, those days down in Via Acuna in Boy's Town--whew, boy, cocaine, booze, and Messkin girls--blondes, redheads, darkies--they got all kinds'a gals down there in them border boys's towns. Oh well, I gotta quit remembering the good ole days. Let's kill some more towelheads today, boys, and don't worry, I'm vetoing any bill that orders me to stop that illegal war and bring those cannon fodder wimps home--it's gonna be a cold day in Dubai before I end that war--that's my war--that's my war I'm finishin' for my wimpy old Pappy. What's that? Are my parents moving to Dubai? Who told you that? That's a national security secret--how'd that get out that Pappy and Mammy Babs were moving to Dubai. I'll make sure they get dual citizenship. What's that? Telephone for me? Who? Prince Bandar Bush? Oh hell, let me talk to my brother there; please, Karl, Unka Dick, give me some privacy--I gotta lick some Bin Laden ass here, boys! By the way, print me up some more money! I like this building walls over there in Iraq. I'll show those towelhead bastards--Israel used that wall of theirs to keep those greasy Palestinians out of pure Israel--hey, Karl, why can't we give Israel statehood?"

The Beat Goes On
Here's what The Daily Growler Neo-Con expert saw all this war shit years ago:

What are the implications of NeoCon ideology and hegemony for Iraq? Bush's NeoCon administration is rushing to impose a colonial-style occupation government on Iraq. NeoCon apprentice, retired General Jay Garney is to be the U.S. proconsul of occupied Iraq. The NeoCon Bush administration began its conquest of Empire by declaring war on Afghanistan (which it continues to bomb), and then invaded Iraq (after the UN Security Council refused to go along). The buzz in Washington D.C. is the next conquest will be Syria. "Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and their main ideological ally at the State Department, undersecretary John Bolton, have all made menacing public remarks about Syria in recent days" (RoundUp, Apr 10). Other sites of Empire-conquest include Iran, southern Lebanon, North Korea,Philippines, and Palestine.

http://www.peaceaware.com/NeoCon.shtml

Cool Out With Another Jack Spicer Poem
"Real bad poems
Dear Sir: I should like to --
Hate and love are clarifications enough of themselves, do not
belong in poetry, embarrass the reader and the poet, lack
Dignity
Or the dignity of a paper airplane
That you throw at someone's face
And it swoops across the whole occasion quickly
Hitting every angle.
Hate and love are clar--
Dear Sir: I should like to make sure that everything that I said
about you in my poetry was true, that you really existed,
That everything that I said was true
That you were not an occasion
In a real bad scene
That what the poems said had meaning
Apart from what the poems said.
Dear Sir:
My mouth has meanings
It had not wanted to argue."

[from Fifteen False Propositions Against God, #IV, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Black Sparrow Press, L.A., 1975.]

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Nazz Takes Another Great One

Tribute to the GREAT Tony Scott
I have this absolutely great CD, Tony Scott Sung Heroes: Featuring Bill Evans, Scott La Faro, Paul Motian [in other words the greatest Bill Evans Trio--with poor old unfortunate Scotty La Faro (killed in a car wreck on Long Island) (Great bass players die young sometimes, ie, Jimmy Blanton, Tommy Potter, George Tucker, Scotty La Faro--even Paul Chambers and Sam Jones)]. This is on something called the Sunnyside label, a French label (Tony Scott lived expatriated in Europe after jazz started being killed by the Brit rock invaders (the British have stolen their cultures since the days of the blessed Empire), living especially in Rome for many years.

I quote from the "liner" notes to this CD--the words are Tony's: [Talking about the jazz fab fifties and 52nd Street and the Old Cats, Tony says] "The older men were interested in young musicians in those days. The 1940s were different; there was something special among people who really wanted to play.... Ben Webster took me under his wing; he watched over me and became my teacher. He told me to move from club to club along the 52nd Street strip and pick up as much as I could. Just being around provided the sort of experience that young players can't find today [1989].... The great drummer Sid Catlett -- he gave me a few lessons. 'WHAT!' he'd always say, nostrils flaring, if somebody made a mistake. 'The Street' wasn't perfect. But we didn't realize how valuable it was until the clubs began changing their policy in the late 1940s. For a while they were strip joints, then closed permanently." "The laboratory was gone" the liner note writer adds, and that's the truth. The laboratories are all gone when it comes to jazz now--unless you're in the New Orleans new jazz world, that world created by Wynton Marsalis who, though he has a large knowledge about jazz, he's not the master he seems to be--not to me, at least--I understand Herbie Hancock's rejection of Wynton's right to be the definer of jazz. Herbie followed Miles into fusion, which perhaps was the right direction for jazz. Miles last works were some of his best starting with that truly wonderful In a Silent Way album around 1977--after Brit Rock had driven jazz from the FM radio dial--when I moved to NYC there were three jazz stations. WBLS was a jazz station. Riverside Radio, the radio station of Columbia University, had hours and hours of jazz--Phil Schaap would play every recording ever recorded by as many masters as he could--I've recorded the complete works of Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Charles Parker Jr., Miles Davis, Roy Eldredge, Gene Krupa, Bix Biederbeck, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Andy Kirk, Duke Ellington, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown--STOP--oh what a great trumpet player Brownie was--killed in a car wreck near Buffalo, New York, hurrying back to NYC from Cleveland or somewhere Clifford Brown-Max Roach gig to make the next gig--Max Roach and Harold Land flew back to NYC but Clifford and Bud Powell's young brother, very talented pianist Richie Powell, decided to drive back--they were slammed head-on going fast--jazz guys drove fast--they had to, and it killed both Richie and Clifford--damn! Jazz guys are tragic heroes to me--the things they went through to get this wonderfully unique American music out of their blood, their minds--if you don't have music inside you that has to come out you can't understand this--you know like when I was 6 years old I looked at a piano and just knew I had to learn to play it--and I did, I learned to play Bach, Chopin, von Weber, Mozart, but it wasn't my music--it wasn't what I had in me--and then I heard Charles Parker Jr. and Dizzy Gillespie, and "Groovin' High" and "Billie's Bounce" and "Birk's Works" and you know them if you know where I'm coming from--and that music was the music I knew was the music I felt inside me and dammit, I started learning first how to get on the beat--the downbeat--and then how to breathe right and-ah 1 and 2 and 3 and 4--and then you played the intro and ran down the melody and then, the release, then the finger pointed at you and you were free to pour your whole musical force out your arms out your fingers and onto those wonderful ivory keys of a real piano, especially an American old Steinway grand--the most wonderful pianos every made--digging your fingers into those keys to hit them solidly and then you rocked from side to side and not up and down like the 2/4 white bands played.

Charlie Parker totally dominated Tony Scott's thinking after he first heard Parker on the laboratory street, 52nd Street, and in those early 1950s, Tony was a poll-winning clarinet player, he and the great swinging Buddy De Franco (Italian clarinet players), were one and two for years in the Downbeat Jazz Poll, the jazz poll in those days. And Tony became a Birdhead--and Bird lived in him on after Bird died like Bird lived in all of us who came under his influence--we learned Parker's solos note-for-note and played his licks over and over, our scales, and if a piano player could learn to play a Parker line, by God you were a winner--we learned every Parker note of every Parker tune--dig?--and that's how Charles Parker, Jr., Bird, continues to Live on to this day in us "old" jazzmen/women, jazz people like myself and certainly Tony Scott.

So I hadn't thought about Tony Scott in years, though I listen to this Sung Heroes CD a hell of a lot (Tony also was a proficient pianist, guitarist, and saxophonist); you know, I hadn't thought about whether he was dead or alive. I knew he'd have to be pretty old, so I went looking for him on the Internet and I found a Website for him run by one of his daughters from Italy. I was absorbed in the site in Tony's writings--he has a huge book on his site he wrote about Charles Parker--it has never been published (hey, opportunity for one of you rich guys--publish a nice edition of it and give it to the jazz world)--but the latest update I could find was like 2000 and then no more. I accidentally came across the Website of bass player Doug Ramsey [Doug wrote Take Five a biography of Brubeck altoist Paul Desmond] and sure enough, Doug sadly reported that Tony had left the stage--at 85 years--and god-damn great years--except a divorce from his precious Fran, mother of his two daughters, left him kind'a whacky in Rome, but really not--in some of his later notes he mentions a nice young lady he's just had a weekend with in Rome--we jazz guys get over losing our women--we have to we lose them so frequently. So here ya go. Let me link you to Tony's site and then scroll on down and read Doug Ramsey's tribute to the GREAT TONY SCOTT. Paradisio! Tony!

http://www.tonyscott.it/

And now from Doug Ramsey, a Letter From Tony:

Tony Scott

Tony Scott's death at eighty-five in Rome on March 28 set off a flurry of remembering by people who may not have thought about him for years. A clarinetist with a large sense of daring, a massive sound and nearly supernatural upper range, Scott was an important player in the New York bebop milieu of the late 1940s, an intimate of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He was an encourager of post-bop talent in the fifties. He exposed Bill Evans as the pianist's career began to accelerate in the mid-1950s, hiring Evans regularly and featuring him on recordings.

Whether or not he initially intended to be, with a big-selling album, Music For Zen Meditation, in the sixties Scott was a pioneer of what came to be known as new age and world music. He was also a character known, even celebrated, for his conviction, flamboyance and occasional outrageousness. Jazz Times has a comprehensive, if rather dry, Scott obituary on its web site. The New York Times obit includes a splendid latterday photograph and the late critic John S. Wilson's description of Scott "playing his clarinet in his own uncompromisingly distinctive manner, a manner which encompasses both a feathery, light-as-air impressionism and an intense, emotional ferocity that makes the old-time 'hot' men sound as though they were blowing icicles."

Scott and I conducted a sporadic correspondence that began after I did a radio program about him in 1967. It fell off for a few years, then resumed in October of 1982 with a letter from Rome. I'm sharing the letter with you because it gives a sense of Scott's personality and the passion with which he lived his life. I retain his punctuation, spelling and usage. My clarifications are in parentheses.

Hello Doug are you still there? I left NYC for Europe 1967. To Africa 1968/70. Live Italy 1970 till now. I am still alive and kicking. I have written a book. 700 pages of my life in jazz with Bird Lady Ben (Charlie Parker, Billie Holday, Ben Webster), 52nd St, Harlem, jazz in NYC 1939 till I left in 1959. My life in jazz with the giants, my travels, philosophy. About 100 photos I took of Lady Miles Ben Prez Mahalia (Holiday, Davis, Webster, Jackson).

My past has been 1967 to Europe with wife/child. 1968/70 to Africa playing a jazz show with locals I trained in luxury hotels. Then settled in Senegal 5 months study African music/rhythms.

1970 to Italy Roma to settle. Played mostly with Romano Mussolini on tour. Enjoyed life in Roma. 1975 divorced. Wife remarried. Two daughters Nina 10 Monica 5 live in Roma. I leave Italy for jobs in Europe for 2 years. Tired of travel. Stay in Roma 1977/78 see daughters - practice piano write music for big bands in Italy and Europe. Pays aboutr $3000 a show total for 3 day rehearsal & radio concert with public. 1979/80 travel around Europe always based in Roma.

1981 in and out of Italy. 1982 stay Holland 8 months with nice lady. Have $10,000 dental work. Lose feeling to play clarinet. Write book. Made a suite "African Bird" dedicated to Charlie Parker in 1981. Recorded in London. Glenn Ferris (USA) trombone, percussion, marimbas, flute, alto and vocal. Hope to sell in USA when I come in November for one month to sell book and "African Bird."

See lots of old friends on tour Dizzy Buddy Blakey (Gillespie, De Franco, Art Blakey). Seems they are all here to work. I like Italy. My roots. I played with Kenny Clarke (drummer) in Sicily at festival. Good success. We played bebop. I want to do college tour with Kenny plus talk and photos & films of old days, Bird Monk Harlem. Kenny is 69 but OK and wants to make college tour with me. I need to play with my cats to get an urge to play clarinet.

My Music For Zen Meditation gives me money to live on. Sells 15,000 a year for 10 years now. 10,000 in Europe, 5,000 in USA. Japan put out my RCA Big Band with Clark Thad (Terry, Jones), Bill Evans. Made 1956. Have you got it?

In USA, thinking of teaming up with Buddy De Franco for a clarinet clan show. Regards to any fans or friends.

Tony

Scott's autobiography has never found a publisher. I'm told that members of his family are still trying to place it. His web site, yet to be updated with his death, has historical sections and photos.

Posted by dramsey at April 5, 2007 1:05 AM

Doug's Rifftide notes can be found here:

http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/

thegrowlingwolf GOODBYE, TONY SCOTT--Still Livin' in Me, Tony, Baby!
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, Dumbday

God Awful
I don't have Cable. I had Cable once and it didn't matter. Television sucks no matter how it comes into your heart and home. It, however, doesn't suck to millions; for instance, look at how many geeky people adore this American Idol phony BS--American music being determined by a sarcastic Brit, a has-been disco queen (who screws the best-looking young men on the show), and a black guy who nobody had ever heard of until this stupid show)--but, oh no, to millions of airhead Amuricans television is their sole connection to a world they truly believe they live in, a world of fear, a world of scary predictions, a world of threatening statements with no solutions, a world two-faced interviewers interviewing two-faced people (today ABC had Newtie Boy Gingrich on talking about the Virginia Tech shootings--and what a sick old joke and white man Gingrich is), like politicians (television is currently promoting the Rudi Guiliani presidential campaign--and just yesterday I heard a right winger saying that Rudi was leading in the polls against both Obama and Sister Hillery), stock market experts (call them "touts"), moral investigators, tinhorn preachers, megachurch preachers, pansy-looking priests (they are, they are!), Con Ed reps, trendy babes from like Money Magazine (I worked for Time Inc. when it was founded by a man who wasn't an economist but simply a journalist), and these constantly cooking chefs, and the ever-present 30-minute pesky infomercials (I to this day cannot see why anyone would buy items off television. I mean anything from jewelry, to juicing machines, to clothes, to coins--to Kevin Trudeau who has the answer to everything in the books he hustles, very successfully, too, I might add, even though Kevin is a felon, having spent some time in the hoosegow for some of his infomercialing). Like these training machines, weight-loss schemes, no-down payment and foreclosure real estate get rich quick schemes, and the newest sucker thing being these stock market analyzing software programs in which green and red tell you when to buy or sell--all these programs are base on the same stock market theory, the one invented by a Frenchman back in the late 1800s. The Frenchman said there was a median level in stock market upward and downward moving that if you invested on this line, you couldn't lose; of course that's bullshit, but hey, several white men are getting quite rich promoting these things as sure ways to make like one infomercial stooge said he made: $35,000 a month--and any logically thinking human animal surely knows that's surely ridiculous. It's like if you are a statistician (the basis of Sociology) you know if you have one person making (winning) $35,000 a month on the stock market there has to be someone losing $35,000 at the same time. For every stock sold there has to be a buyer or vice versa.

In the physical fitness scam world there is a new-type training machine infomercial on every thirty minutes on the cheap channels. The Butt Wrangler, the Ab Attainer, the Thigh Thinner, the Training Ball--that's one of my favorites, a big round rubber piece of crap looking ball that already trim and hot babes stretch their workout suited bodies over--hey, I can see young boys masturbating to these commercials--though, maybe not, it's too easy to get naked babes off the Internet these days doing just about anything sexually that will drive a young boy mad with masturbatory lust.

That's all television is: Masturbation. It's like watching Oprah masturbate at 4 pm every afternoon. Plus she has an audience full of adoring masturbating women (mostly white women, you ever notice that?). Or David Letterman masturbating on his late night show. You name the personality, all they are doing is tooting their own dominance over you and me--the stupid jack-offs who watch these shows and give them credence of some kind. Oprah's entertaining and that's what television is, a bad bad form of entertainment. Even PBS, which originally was going to honor the best that can be produced in television has turned out to be a failure due to the political struggles between the right wingers and the left wingers it has had to suffer since it's beginnings--the Repugnicans have always hated PBS and wanted it unfunded.

PBS is currently running a very right wing look at how America going about the world starting these wars and decimating these countries is actually a good thing--it is bringing freedom to these poor people who live in the desert and wear towels around their heads--we love Jews; we hate Arabs. We think Iranians are Arabs; we really do. Yet, ironically, we are selling new weapons to Saudi Arabia this week! Hot damn, ain't irony fun? More ironically is we are selling our ports and highway systems to Dubai, which is a democracy, right? Hell no, it's ruled by a Royal Family same as Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates. (Notice how Yemen is not longer a hotbed of commie and Arab revolt?)

And cartoons. Forget it. Watch some of these billions of kiddie programs they have on most of the mornings and afternoons and even on network television on the weekends. I mean there are the normal corny shows like Sesame Street (I never understood why this show is so well thought of--it's corny as hell to me), but then there are these very strange shows that use cartoon sloths (I kid you not), squirrels, rabbits (I like the episode with the gay rabbits), piglets, dragons (dragons are big, big on teevee), strange-looking anthropomorphic beasts of unknown origin (except the cartoonist's mind; probably the mind of a Taiwanese cartoonist since most of our cartoons are now drawn, colored, and animated in Taiwan), and monkeys--monkeys are cute, though a mad chimpanzee will eat your baby in the jungle--chimps turn meateaters occasionally. (Remember, you can be savage with impunity in the Jungle.)

And, by the way, while I'm on the monkeys, yep, the chimp (check out my tribute to Cheeta (Jiggs) a few posts back) and us have almost the same DNA, and I heard that on television, too, on one of those PBS nature shows that simply are remakes of past nature shows over and over again, like shows on monkeys, lions, tigers, cheetahs, alligators/crocs, snakes--how they screw comes first--and it's perfectly all right to show beasts F-ing on teevee but not humans (again, go to the Internet if you wanna see human animals doing it--and by the way, if we followed our chimp forebears in sexual practices we'd be a much happier society), then how the babies are born, and then how they have to eat--ah, nature photographers love watching their favorite beasts tackling, choking, then eating raw say a lowly wildebeest, or poor antelope or giselle (I've eaten giselle steaks before and they are damn good grilled over an open fire). Very seldom are grass-eating animals studied on these nature shows (except for elephants, which man adores but is scared to death of). A lot of nature photographers, too, are interestingly husband and wife teams. See what you can learn off teevee. By the way, human animals want to arrest all other animals and put them in jail--ZOOs--take over their natural habitats and ruin them for the benefit of Chinese commie steak eaters.

And cartoon human animals. My God, check out their eyes, that's the giveaway that they're all drawn in Taiwan. Asians love oval eyes; they hate their almond eyes--so stupid--forced on them by the white invaders that have invaded their countries viciously since the imperial ventures of Britain, Germany, the French, the Dutch, and, of course, the good ole USA in the late 1800s near the turn of the 20th Century--chinks, gooks, slanteyes--yep, that does tend to make even a superior to you feel inferior. In loving oval eyes, these cartoonists exaggerate them--all white kids in cartoons look bug-eyed their oval eyes are so big--even though you still see the almond eye in the oval eye since Asian artists draw eyes naturally as almond eyes--the oval eye is a distortion to them.

Plus the messages in these cartoons. What the hell are they?

Everyone on television or who makes their living on television is phony, two-faced, living in a world that most of us will never really experience, a world of constant smiling--even when trying to be sad teevee personalities still keep a sort of a jolly way of speaking when they're reporting on something as ludicrously vicious as the massacre at Virginia Tech--a world of constant condescension, too. Even the tons of chefs on teevee are pompously condescending. They assume we're all eating out of cans and drinking a quick beer to wash it down--and that may be true, because how many of us can afford to eat in these chefs's restaurants--or for that matter, who amongst us can afford the cost of these meals these superchefs cook on teevee?--and, too, these chefs are mostly all successful restaurant owners, like Lydia or Ming. They all go to the same schools, too, if you listen closely to them--like Ming and the hot Spanish babe with the big bazooms, Daisy, both claim they studied with Julia Child, or at that Paris culinary school, Cordon Bleu--I'm tired of this already it's even boring writing about teevee. I'm yawning now instead of growling.

Teevee is totally full of shit. Believe nothing you see on teevee. It's all staged--even the baseball games are dependent for their starting times on Fox Network; because of this players have to play in late afternoons in ballparks mostly facing east so that in the afternoons the sun is dead in the players's eyes, unless the grandstands are huge and then, that throws a huge shadow running from the plate almost out to the pitcher--so that when the pitcher throws the white baseball from the sunshine into that shadow--well, you can see how it might effect the outcome of a game. Baseball is supposed to be played around 12:30 or 1 pm--the perfect time to play baseball. In the old days, doubleheaders were called twilight doubleheaders because the second game of a double header would start after the sun was sunk low enough the shadow wasn't a consideration.

By the way, Yankee fans; forget it; until we get some reliable pitching, we're facing another year like last year, except last year the Yankees swept Boston in five games the first time they played--this time Boston is sweeping the Yankees--and yes, Boston will win today; the Yankees are pitching a guy who is a A ball pitcher who pitched only two games in Double A ball--and who accidentally won his first outing as a Yankee--though he did give up 6 runs including home runs. This is why you are going to see more and more Japanese pitchers coming into our leagues. Japanese pitchers must pitch many more years under contract to the Japanese leagues before they are considered free agents and up for grabs by the American teams. That means these Japanese pitchers are well-seasoned by the time they come here. They usually don't last, but when they first come here and start pitching they look like phenoms. Same with Japanese hitters.

By the bye, did you know that when Jackie Robinson played MLB baseball, there were more blacks playing in both leagues than now. There honestly never were many blacks on the Yankees--though the Yankees have always had a Latino or two on their teams. MLB-ers don't consider Latino players black, no matter how black they are. Latinos and whites now rule the roost in MLB. There are fewer and fewer black players every year--replaced by Japanese maybe? Baseball is a white sport, folks--so are football, golf (a Dutch-derived word--the Dutch sailors started the game when they while on shore leave would hit balls made of gutta percha at holes they dug along the beaches (why a lot of Brit courses are seaside)), volley ball, hockey (one black player ever in hockey), and basketball.

Yesterday morning, I heard one of my favorite wolves in priestly clothing, Father Lawrence Lucas, the Catholic chaplain at Rikers Island (the city prison) in NYC, say, "I lost interest in baseball when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and they tried to sell Jackie Robinson to the damn Giants."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Check Out Father Lawrence Lucas Writing About Himself

Father Lawrence Lucas

As for my background, I’m an African “American” male, 73 years old, a longtime activist in the city, state, and especially Harlem community where I was born and reared. I was formerly a union delegate for District Council 37 and am currently a member of DC 37, Local 371. I am an author, lecturer and educator, former first vice president of Community School Board No. 5 and Community Planning Board No. 10. I currently work for the NYC Department of Correction as Deputy Director of Ministerial and Volunteer Services, with an office on Rikers Island. I’m also a Roman Catholic priest, having pastored for over 30 years in the Harlem community.

I learned activism very early from my mother, who was a one-woman army fighting greedy and uncaring landlords in our Harlem tenement. In the 1960s I wrote a syndicated column, produced a TV program for the NBC affiliate in Indiana, authored the book, Black Priest/White Church: Catholics and Racism, and cofounded the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus. In the 1980s I was in the streets as an organizer of the December 12th Movement that protested racist murders and police brutality, and worked with other social justice movements that followed.

Contact: fatherlucas@justiceunity.org