thegrowlingwolf Advises Obama: Be Like Lyndon Johnson

Foto by tgw, New York City, January 2011
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Hey, YO, P Diddy and Russell Simmons, You Corporate-type Dudes, Where You All At?--Hangin' With Your White Backers? And, By the Way, Fuck Free Healthcare.

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OH TO BE IN CAIRO! POWER to the PEOPLE!

photo courtesy, neontommy.com
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Son of a bitch how I'd love to be in Cairo this week. Come on, folks, it's a real people's revolution in our time--a revolution that's gonna shake up the Islamic political world (and has already changed the government in Tunisia and Jordan)--like in Iran where the people aren't anything like their politicians and representatives and religious nutjob leaders--wackos wanting to remain in Medieval times, in the days of the Golden Horde and the Caliph movements, except NOW (hey, Obama there is no past, no future, only NOW), the young people of this Islam world are getting the true message of the TRUE New World Order via Facebook in this case it seems--a New World Order of our Youth arising--and it is the youth arising who always take to the streets (meanly) when they finally can't take any more from their out-of-date elders who are still trying to impose their morals and principles on their children--a parental problem--and isn't that the trouble with all of us? Sorry, I'm a Freudian and I love slipping into some Freudian psychobabble--but, hey, in this instance, and in all instances, this is children revolting against old folks. Come on, there has always been a rebellious nature to youth when it came to getting along with their parents, no matter the power of the more powerful (and no matter whether a happy home or not)--look, for instance, at those Kennedy kids having to ruin their lives by following the dictates of their asshole reprobate dictator father and the wimpy responses to their father by their mother, Mama Rose, so Catholic she endured earthly hell in order to one day get fucked by her heavenly husband Jesus Christ (I kid you not)--just think, if JFK hadn't'a follow the dictates of his father, he might still be alive today--outliving Uncle Teddy probably, who his father condemned as a wimp in favor of his more best and brightest sons--starting with Joe, Jr., his openly favorite son, whose death in WWII old Papa Joe the Boston Bootlegger held over Johnny and Bobby--fuck Teddy and the imbecile daughter who old Bootlegger Joe had lobotomized--he showed her ass--I mean, come on, it's because of our parents. Please forgive me for jesting during such a serious comment.

I've always admired the Egyptians. All Western thought comes through Egypt, Egypt being a sieve for the original civilizing knowledge that came out of the Saharan cultures, Niger, Timbuktu--why, the first library and university was in Timbuktu--some of the original manuscripts from that first library are still extant there--and all that knowledge came up the Nile from the great Black African civilizations--Nubians, Tauregs, those whose caravans crossed the Sahara to bring their goods and culture to Northern Africa. And I know just the Egyptian woman I'd want to look up and hook up with if I were in Cairo now, though she once told me if she ever confronted me in combat she'd cut my throat--and her father was a great Egyptian writer--and there have been some great books written by Egyptians and great books written about Egypt (Larry Durrel's Alexandria Quartet for one). And this Facebook revolution started with the Tunisian revolution--again the young people of Tunisia massing in the streets to prove We the People of our countries do STILL HAVE THE POWER in our hands--though the dumbest of us have no way of understanding this kind of revolutionary thought. Our dumb need MASTERS; they need MONARCHS--like Jesus Christ to Christians is their Master; he's their KING! But I wail through my Wolfian bullhorn: Fuck dictators. Fuck corporatists. Fuck the Power Elite. Back in 2003, 2 million New Yorkers filled the streets in protest against Bush Baby getting us involved in the Bush Family private war with Saddam "He Tried to Murder My Pappy" Hussein in Iraq--what a wonderful time and sight and experience it was--I marched in it, I know--have film of my marching in it--but it did no good. Why? Because that day we were peaceful. We obeyed. We shouted and roared but the media ignored us and we didn't storm those teevee stations and demand they cover us. The police were everywhere--why, they even had plainclothes dudes with cameras marching along with us--and we didn't mock them or defy them. We didn't revolt--we didn't march on Wall Street and set it on fire--we didn't take over our Federal property and camp out in it until we got our voices heard and if they came after us with the tanks and the AKs and teargas launchers we would simply burn the mothers down--like they are doing in Cairo--WOW, the Egyptians taking over, defying that USA-backed Mubarak--with his nose up both Saudi-Arabia's and Israel's asses--and with the USA-big-fat hand up his ass working his mouth and brain--And you know the real reason for both revolts in Tunisia and Egypt? The fucking IMF, a US institution, mandatorily manned by an American--which imposed its draconian will on Egypt back when Mubarak took over from murdered Sadat. [By the way, Egypt is famous for its torture--our CIA, that blessed patriotic organization, sends Islamic terrorists and enemy combatants there to be tortured.] Same thing in Tunisia, too; the IMF imposing their cruel will on Tunisia after bailing them out of a money crisis. All because, too, of Wikileaks leaking those memos from the US State Department (how haggard is Hillbilly Hillary looking these days?) to our Embassy in Tunis that threw the Tunisians to the jackals. AH, what a glorious time to be in Cairo--and this revolution could sweep on across Northern Africa, across the Middle-East--how about a revolution in Saudi-Arabia! Wow. Jordan! Yes. Yemen! Yes. Hot damn. I love revolution.
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Calling 'Em All Pig Fuckers
I was just on a right wing blog whose reason for being it announced proudly in its banner head was to keep on "Kneecapping" President Obama (the White righties never refer to Obama as President). As to why the right-wing nutjob dumbass flat-worlders hate Obama is never precisely said. This particular right wing moronic blog [ rightwingagenda.blogspot.com/ ]
when confronted with Obama continuing the Neo-Con palaver and executive ordering of the G.W. "Worst Never-Honestly-Elected Faux-President Ever" Bush declare openly and proudly that G.W. Bush was a liberal Republican! Hoooooooo-BOY! Are these crankjobs lunatics or not? They are openly and defiantly calling Obama and all Dumbocrats pig fuckers and the Dumb-ass-crats are responding namby-pambily, weak kneed, as though their kneecaps have already been blown Mafia-style, which is what "kneecapping" refers to, should you not remember your Mafia revenge tactics (key words).

Here's an excerpt from the host of this right-wing blog, a Kevin Mark Smith, a backwards-state (Kansas) lawyer (former DA?) in which he reasons out why he hates Obama (calls him "Comrade," a term I still suppose stands for "Commie" to a left-out-on-the-plains-to-dry-a-stick-in-the-mud lawyer from Kansas. This is the same kind of fool who will shop at Walmart, where almost 100% of their stock comes from COMMUNIST CHINA...plus he probably drives a Japanese car [recent statistics reveal General Motors makes more cars in China than it does in the USA]--and, yes, I'm calling this guy a pig fucker (he calls left-leaning Liberals (whoever they are) "loons")--well, here's his reasoning on why he hates Obama:

When Bush 41 increased taxes it had the predictable outcome. The economy slowed and killed his chances for reelection. Obama did go against his class warfare mantra. However, the net effect of his giving in will be to kick start the economy. We are no longer unsure what the next two years will bring. We know that our tax rates will be stable and are free to speculate, invest, and pursue our business ventures without worrying about how much more a percentage of our income will have to be set aside for taxes. We will see a 2% drop in unemployment by the end of 2011, and Americans will soon forget (as they did with Clinton) what Obama tried to do to America. Put another way, who gives a flip about the whiney libs who hate Obama for letting all of us (even the rich) keep more of our money? Productive, successful Americans will show up in droves and vote the economy. If it improves by 2012, guaranteed to happen now that the tax issue is resolved, most greedy, selfish Americans will forget social policies and Obama's efforts to gut the Constitution and vote with their pocket books.

Tell me I am wrong. I don't think I am. If I am correct in this admittedly elementary analysis of Comrade Barack's rehabilitation, the long term damage will be catastrophic. We will likely see two Supreme Court Justices retire and Obama will replace them with more judicial positivists. The gains the current conservative court has made in the past decade or so will be swept away. State's rights will be rolled back. Individual rights will be gutted. And the next Democrat President will be given even more tools than Obama had to kill the American Dream.

I defy anybody with a 5th-grade education to tell me just what this Kansas goose is honking about. "...most greedy, selfish Americans will forget social policies and Obama's efforts to gut the Constitution and vote with their pocket books" What the hell does that mean? Or what about this goofy statement: "If I am correct in this admittedly elementary analysis [like we said, fifth-grade education] of Comrade Barack's rehabilitation, the long term damage will be catastrophic. ...The gains the current conservative court has made [!!!] in the past decade or so will be swept away. State's rights will be rolled back [here's the racist angle in the disguise of "State's Rights"]. Individual rights will be gutted [that is what individual rights we have left after Clinton and G.W. Bush and their wacky Patriot Act]. And the next Democrat President will be given even more tools than Obama had to kill the American Dream."

President Obama gutting the Constitution? White folks are weird. They don't like the fact that a Black man trick-bagged their asses, too, just like he trick-bagged his own Black constituency plus a whole host of "progressive" (more educated?) Whites, especially young progressive Whites. Obama as a Corporatist is "moving on up" in terms of his own bank account, stock portfolios, two daughters's future. As a Progressive he's Tom-ing--and doing it with his hat in his hands, too--but then, we here at the The Daily Growler have been "whining" about how President Obama is not a Socialist--how can a Corporate Lawyer with a degree from Harvard Law be anywhere even near to being a Socialist? Gutting the Constitution! I don't recall President Obama being a rabid anti-NRA opponent--in other words, he's not done much of anything in terms of gun-control legislation--and this with several wild US-rightwinger shooting sprees that have left scores of US citizens no matter their leanings dead. These right-side-of-the-aisle gunmen go right into Christian churches and shoot their victims (remember the Abortion doctor killed while attending his heathen Christian church in Kansas?). President Obama in his State of the (Dis)union address didn't even comment on the incident that had just happened in Arizona except to praise the "heroes" of the moment. In terms of this Supreme(ly dumb) (Rightie-stacked) Court making corporations US citizens --something they already did back at the end of the 19th Century, the Century these rightwinger revengers want to take us backwards to, President Obama didn't mention it. If Comrade Obama is stacking this Court with Progressive Dumbocrat goons (so far two New York City women who are anything but lefties--and in some cases I don't think they're even liberal) how come the Court is still just as wide-angle wacky as the policies it finds strictly Constitutional--"the right to bear arms" its mainstay and also, and more and more Teabaggers (that's what I call these White men with drooping testicles (like the testicles of the elderly Koch Brothers)) and their gun-moll babes (Sarah and Michelle), are now referring us to the STRICT Constitutional statement that Black people aren't FULL citizens.

It's the White man's revenge, that's what all this Teabagger shit is--and that's what all this political chaos is: SHIT. Obama spreads the bullshit out the "left" corner of his mouth while the Teabaggers, like Kevin Mark Smith, who is still sleeping away, snoring loudly, as he continues to defend what he calls "the American Dream" are calling him a pig fucker. Like I said in my just-past post on "histories" (yours, mine, theirs), to whom does that "American" in the American Dream refer to, a Bolivian? A Mexican? A Canadian? An Eskimo? A Native American Indian? Seems to me, if you follow Kevin Mark's directions, the American Dream is coming true in Communist China right now. I remember the time when these same right-wing nutjobs were hollering "America Love It or Leave It." It seems that wave-the-bloody-shirt refrain was meant for Commie Lovers and Nigger Lovers. Now why aren't we so-called "Liberals" (I say there is no true Liberal in the USA anywhere) hollering this into the faces of these Teabagger-Boneheads who are now determined to make us pay for sins none of us have committed yet--like turning this country over to the Islamic militants who are already set up in this country, real Islamic-al-Queda-backing Imans who are out to destroy this country--which is, believe it or not, the holiest agenda for our new Teabagger head of Homeland Security, the truly magnificently dumbass (Droopy) Peter "I Wanna Monarch" King of Long Island, New York, home of the Brook Haven nuclear lab that has leaked nuclear contaminated waters into the Long Island water supply for years--with the blessings of jerks like Peter King.

I am crying to President Obama, "Hey, dude, please drop the respect you have for Ronald Reagan and instead study the politics of the greatest Dumbocrat president we've had this Century, Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson. If it hadn't been for the Vietnam War, which Johnson allowed himself to be blackmailed into by the Department of Defense and its phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson today would be thought of as a progressive genius. Johnson was a Texas Democrat who came on the scene during WWII. Together he and Mr. Sam, Sam Rayburn, also from Texas, ruled over the House and Senate. Both were progressive Democrats, though, yes, typical White Texas racists--though Johnson grew up in a Mexican-American-high-populated area. He taught Mexicans as a school teacher; plus he used them to work his ranch near Johnson City, Texas. Lyndon said, "Call him a pig fucker." "But, Mr. President, he's not a pig fucker." "Let him prove it...." And with this attitude, Johnson was able to get some of the finest domestic policies into law, including the Civil Rights Act, an Act, I guarantee you, these Neo-Con, Teabagger, flatearthers are going to try to destroy; Medicare--and YAHOO, you know they're trying to destroy Medicare; the Job Corps; the War on Poverty, etc.

In Chaos we gloat.
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According to a blogging consultant who showed up at the The Daily Growler new office complex in Dick Cheney's old Virginia bunker (the one, like the coward he is, Unka Dickless Dick fled to the minute he was told by the New World Order than the staged 9/11 attack was succeeding) the other day looking for a consulting job: our posts are too long. He says most people tooling around the Internet are looking for blogs that quickie-read blogs, with just a few sentences--and if the post extends into longer bounds, then put a "continue reading" link in there and that's that. His guaranteed offer was his plan to show us how to make the Growler more popular--how to get more HITS. And HITS have always been the key to success in the American Dream state. You need a HIT of some kind to keep on keeping on in this country. A HIT of horse. A HIT of Jack Daniels. A Top Ten Hit of any kind. A HIT movie. Baseball players need HITS. Broadway show producers need HITS. Rock stars have to have HITS. If you can't HIT you can't play in today's Global Market Big Leagues.

The financial pirates who cleaned out our coffers are splitting up the booty already with great gobs of stolen taxpayer cash being poured into the offshore bank accounts of our Great American Pirates: Goldman-Sachs (whose CEO is now worth billions), J.P.Morgan-Chase (Sam Chase was a true American nutjob), Bank of America (their new hi-rise luxury office building is almost ready for occupancy), AIG Insurance (this gang of thieves also has a new hi-rise luxury office building bearing their name), Bank of America (and, yes, they, too, have a new hi-rise luxury office building), etc., etc. President Obama's new Chief of Staff, sick old reprobate Richard "Dead People Vote" Daley's lamebrain son, leaves Goldman-Sachs worth over 300-million dollars to take a civil service job advising Obama on economic recovery (he's just another Larry Summers, I'm sorry to say, folks). Surely a crook that successful (he woke up inheriting his American Dream from his old reprobate and crooked daddy) can recover the economy he helped wreck! Obama still thinking Wall Street's way and not OUR (We the People of the USA) WAY is the BEST and BRIGHTEST way. Has anyone ever figured out what would have happened if instead of bailing out his Wall Street heroes (he says they are his heroes in his book) he had bailed out We the People?--I mean 1 trillion dollars would have helped immensely out-of-work, no medical insurance, living in their cars, living in tents Americans...AH TO HELL WITH "IFs"! I can't imagine being worth 300 million dollars, can you? I remember in 1970 when my own flesh-and-blood brother won a 4.5 million dollar lawsuit against the largest media transaction in US history up till then and became overnight a MILLIONAIRE. And he became, in Dallas, Texas, a MILLIONAIRE among MILLIONAIRES--and all of my brother's friends had millions more than he did, one of whom (H. Ross Perot--remember him?) was said to be and probably was worth a billion by then. Becoming a MILLIONAIRE was considered the luckiest thing to ever happen to my brother--now in retrospect, I see it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Once you are a millionaire, you begin to suffer what all rich people suffer, the stress of trying to hold onto your millions.

To me, Obama is a Dumbocrat Corporatist as President and a G.W. Bush-executive-order dictator when it comes to his role so far as Commander in Chief. Unfortunately he believes the trickle-down theory works. And he also believes war is good for the economy, which has been a USA position since the ex-Brit White Plantation masters decided the Holy White Jewish God YHWH had given them the biblical rights to invade and massacre an aboriginal people (and White people are the best when it comes to genocide) and occupy their lush land in the name of kings and weird White Jewish gods). President Obama is now barking up the competition tree in order to revitalize his limp-dick performance as a man of change as well as a man of peace.

THIS IS A WHITE COUNTRY, dammit, and I'm White, so why not take advantage of my White privilege and thereby network myself up to an immense fortune where I then become a member of the Power Elite and get to do as I damn well please, my status putting me above all laws, no matter their source? This is the White mentality We the People all have to get used to unless our youth get wise, stand up on their hind legs, and revolt against us regressive elders. We are currently in the brink of another Civil War in this country. The South (in terms of traditional White values) is rising again, folks...that's all this bullshit going on in Congress is all about--it boils down to White racism, from which has come White Power.

As long as We Whites consider ourselves invincible in terms of fact and fiction--mostly fiction--this country will stay Chaotic and divided. Yes, the economy has recovered in Obama's corporatist world, and yes he can prove it with the STOCK MARKET--that Wall Streeter's gambling hall (the bourse)--rising miraculously to back up near 12,000--with billions of shares a day trading. Oh, why not put a stock transfer tax on every stock transaction?--there was a City of New York stock transfer tax at one time but then Good Ole ass-kissing and who-knows-who-sucking turncoat progressive Dumbocrat Ed Koch did away with it when Wall Street threatened to move to Jersey City back during the Krotch Man's original term. I shouted to high heaven then, let the bastards move to Jersey City--yeah sure! I can see all those Wall Street crooks enjoying their power breakfasts at a Jersey City diner. But good ole Ed Crotch, he kowtowed to these assholes and did away with that tax--a 1-cent-per-share-traded tax, by the way. New York City has a progressive population; yet the city electorate keeps insisting on electing dumbass White rich mayors (in recent years Republicans) who do all they can to keep progress at bay during their terms. Like our current Billionaire Mayor is wrecking the New York City public school system, once the best in the world. He's wrecking it by privatizing it. The best educations in this privatized system (by invitation only) go to the rich kids--those who can afford to transfer to the better charter schools--those able to afford tutors for their dumbest little bastards so they can get in Exeter or one of those other White rich-boy prep schools. Sorry, I must apologize for some of my vulgar-growling outbursts, but, hey, these people are messing with my happy times, my end times, the times I'm supposed to be playing golf down in Florida with Arnie and the Bear and not sitting around worrying about whose gonna be knocking at my door--and whoever it is, what the hell they knocking on my door for?--or snooping in my email--or taking my iPhone and downloading my files from it--I mean, I've been living in New York City, which is a rich-boys playground protected by New York City's finest and their cash of weapons and surveillance gear, where now almost every day We the Citizens of New York City are being accused of something wrong--something as simple as whether I want to put a cupful of fucking salt on my trans-fat-fried Freedom fries or not--my billionaire mayor now on his own teevee channel broadcasting everyday his instructions on how he expects HIS city's citizens to behave. Anybody looks suspicious...nail 'em, throw 'em in the clink. If we put enough of 'em in the clink, then our new governor Andrew "Mario's Worthless Son" Cuomo will build in the tradition of his father more Upstate prisons--I mean, the Upstate New York economy is based on however many state prisons it has.

Privilege, folks. And that's something the privileged individual Whites (and the White electorate in this country is composed of Teabagger-leaning rightwingers) and the White Power Elite will never give up. Check up on what happened when We the People of New York City elected a Black mayor, David Dinkins. Oh boy, soon after he was elected the privileged Whites started tearing into Sweatin' Dave who seemed to love playing tennis more than he did being mayor. First the Hassidic Jewish community, true nutjobs all of 'em, went after him, calling him a Black racist after a Black kid stabbed a Hassidic youth after a car driven by a Hassidic man jumped the curb...also, the Asian community tore into Dinkins, calling him a Black racist, because of Harlem business owners who said these Asians (mostly Koreans) were coming into their community and driving Black cafes and delis and grocery stores out of business by buying up stores and shops and such. Blah, blah, blah. That's when Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani came on the scene with his White clarion call to fight back against these Black bastards who think just because they've got a Black mayor they are going to become the privileged race in New York City. And White New Yorkers came out and did it again--they put another right-wing nutjob in as our mayor.

Humans never learn. They are born naturally dumb. All of us. All the people of the world. Oh God, am I sick of politics; yet, these bastards are fucking up my dreamworld--so you can't turn your back on politics--you can't. These bastards will skin us alive and sell our hides on the Global Hide Market--and we'll all end up like the Uighurs, unwanted citizens of the Great People's Republic of China.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Living in New York City: thegrowlingwolf on Histories

Foto by tgw, New York City, January 2011
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President Obama's State of the (Dis)Union Address--MY OPINION: Pure-dee Doublespeak; in other words: Pure-dee BULLSHIT. As the ex-mayor of Salt Lake City (a guy named Rocky) put it, this speech was Obama's first 2012 campaign speech--and, folks, yes, that's about as much as you can say about it--it was a pathetic, lap-dog-like speech for a man who was given a chance by the world to rule the world back in 2008. As the The Daily Growler has all along warned progressives, liberals, antiFascists, etc., in his book, President Obama clearly stated that he admired Reagan for his ECONOMIC policies (free trade and tax cuts for the rich; no taxes at all on corporations; restricting workers rights to unionize and strike) and his heroes were Wall Street financial geniuses (the reason Obama took hundreds of millions of dollars from them in his 2008 campaign in which he spent the most money, right at 1 BILLION dollars, in the history of presidential elections; the reason Obama continued the unConstitutional Bush-Neo-Con bailouts to the tune of trillions of our openly crooked financial industries, which should include our insurance industry as well since they make more money off their outside investments than they do forcing outrageously expensive insurance schemes on our scardy-cat asses (pardon my everyday American English). President Obama has stayed true to those two admissions--he is steering in exactly the course Reaganomics sent us off on--Reagan's Administration leaving us with the largest deficit in this country's history, a deficit-spending record that held up until G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush smashed it during his ruinous administration, a deficit-spending record that held up until Pappy's worthless, dumbest, and most unconcerned son, G.W. Bush, smashed it to the smithereens (chaos) it's in today. Pappy Bush called it what it is: Voodoo Economics. This is the Economics Obama believes in. Obama is also under the thumb of ex-Clinton advisers because Obama believes the legend that Bill "Big Dog" Clinton left office with a surplus budget and a brighter future for what White people call America.

In Memory of a Great Self-Made Man

Listening to Stuff Smith in a Swoon of Remembering
My Uncle Bob the Robin is sitting in a big overstuffed chair drinking a can of Grand Prize beer. "You wanna know the secret to life, keed?" "Yeah, what is it, Uncle Bob?" "Concentration." "Concentration?" "Yeah, like the reason Hitler put the Jews in concentration camps." "So they could concentrate what?" "No, not that kind of concentration. I'm talking about the concentration of wholes. That's what I'm talking about."

Uncle Bob wasn't an intellectual. He bragged about dropping out of an Alabama one-room schoolhouse when he got too big and too old for the third grade. "I couldn't concentrate on facts just my dreams and my dreams weren't in a schoolroom." "What did ja do?" "I hit the road. In those days you could hit the road. Didn't matter your age. Didn't matter 'bout anything except staying alive and on course." "What cha mean 'on course'?" "When people say something and then tack on, 'you probably knew that, of course'. That kind of of course. Course means the road. When you're on course, you're headed in the right direction."

That's a part of my history. What is history? Gertrude Stein thought history was in the continuing present tense. So do I. History is in the eye of the beholder. What is a historian? Someone fascinated by history? But what history? Whose history? Like the history of the USA? What's the true history of the USA? Does it lie in the customs of the Mongolians who came across on the ice bridge between today's Russia and the former Russian colony of Alaska? Or does it lie somewhere in the legends of Aztec Mexico? Or in the bones and ash fragments of Clovis man or Folsom man? Or how much of it came to the country in the remembrances of the slaves? How the hell do you ever know a true history of anything or anybody? I grew up thinking a man named Christopher Columbus discovered America. I grew up thinking America meant the USA. I grew up not thinking of Mexicans as Americans. I grew up not thinking of the people of South America as Americans. Nor the Canadians. Do you think of Canadians as Americans? See what I mean about history? Do Canadians think of themselves as Americans? We White Americans use terms like Canadian-Americans, meaning a Canadian who has moved to the US...or Mexican-Americans. I like it that Mexicans refer to US Gringos as Norteamericanos; and when I lived in Mexico being called a Norteamericano or a Yanqui was much more seriously worse than being called un gringo. See how confusing our histories can be, even when piled into compilations? And Mexicans and Canadians have their histories, too. Check out the Internet. There are millions upon Googles of millions of histories everywhere you turn. Websites are actually binary webs run by some very seductive spiders offering opportunities of self-gratification if you only go ahead and let yourself be trapped in the Web, once called the World Wide Web. Of course, We Americans (USA type) know the Internet is American.

Like the history my Uncle Bob carried around with him. I knew all about Bob the Robin before I even met him. He was legendary in the family. I knew for instance he had killed a man in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was like 14 going on 15. Can you imagine history as written by a 14-year-old boy? Not a ninny of a 14-year-old either. Rather a 14-year-old who owned and packed a revolver and ran away from Alabama to go to Memphis, Tennessee, a Sodom of a town in those days. A Mississippi River town. A wild town. Cotton. Cotton bales by the thousands on the Memphis docks. A lot of work on the Memphis docks if you didn't mind working side by side with ex-slaves--blackamoors--Uncle Bob called them blackamoors. It took me a long time to get the connection. Uncle Bob liked Blacks. He said they were a trustworthy people, especially if you were on the lam, as Uncle Bob referred to that part of his life after Memphis when he was on the lam for 18 years.

My Uncle Bob is sitting talking, sipping from the can of Grand Prize every now and then. He continues talking in his slow-drawal crawling way. "I went from Memphis first to Little Rock, Arkansas [he pronounced it "R-kan-ziz"] and found my mentor. A Mr. Phipps. And Mr. Phipps was a Renaissance man. Had studied law in college. Was a medical doctor, too. Studied medicine with the Union Army during the Civil War. Read books in German...I've seen him. Had books all over his house and office. My mentor. You've got to have a mentor and Mr. Phipps became mine in Little Rock. He showed me, like a good mentor should, the course...or he taught me the course. Mr. Phipps was a good teacher. He knew, you see, how to concentrate on avoiding the wrong kind of confrontations. He didn't leave his office during the daylight, for instance...because he didn't want to have to bend and bow and scrape to people, you see. At night he could pass among people invisible, you see, but not in broad daylight. I mean he could explain shadowy tricks of staying alive and free to me, and me with a 3rd grade education, mind you, things like geometry and perspective and forward thinking, like you have to do to play good chess. That stuff. After he'd just run it down a couple of times, I could easily grasp it--concentrate my thoughts on it--single it out, understand? Single it out and learn it and then add on the next course. You know you have courses during a meal. Courses in school are the same as courses of a meal."

"How did you hook up with this Mr. Phipps?" I piped up...and the story continued: "I got to Little Rock and headed straight for Main Street where I checked out the second-story offices along the street there. That's where the shysters and Shylocks, the lawyers, have their offices. I'd just dash up the stairs to these establishments and offer my services for stipend enough to see me through until I could work up enough money to move on...to get back on the lam. One of those offices was Mr. Phipps's. He hired me as a delivery boy. You know, like he'd get a wire from one of his clients concerning something they needed from him and he'd then package that something up, usually forms or documents of some kind, put them in a manila envelope, and I'd run them as quick as a fox to wherever in town the client's office was. By now I'd taught myself enough reading, and writing, too, to read those addresses and the directions Mr. Phipps's secretary gave me. One night we worked late. The others left the office. Mr. Phipps called me into his office. He was looking very serious. 'How old are you, Bob?' I told him honest I was fifteen-going-on-sixteen. 'Are you in trouble with the law, Bob?' I suddenly thought I'd better run like hell out of there...except, I didn't have any money--Mr. Phipps paid for me up a week in advance at a boarding house--room and meals--but he had only given me a dollar advance in pay. 'No, sir, I'm not in no trouble,' I said, you know, my voice trembling, my body sweating like a mule. 'You're lyin', boy,' Mr. Phipps said. 'You're lyin' like a sad-eyed hound, son. I like you, boy; you're a good worker and though you're ignorant you're not dumb; in fact, you're a bright one, quick witted. I like you, boy.' He chilled me down and I fumbled around awhile but then thought, dammit, this man seems honest to me, so I spilled the beans to him. 'I knew it, son. I was over at the court house yesterday and saw a bill from the railroad dicks in the Sheriff's office alerting the Sheriff to be on the look out for a 14-year-old Memphis man believed to be traveling west on the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad--wanted in regards to the murder of a prominent Memphis saloon proprietor. The description fit you to a tee, my boy.' I waited to see what he was going to do. 'Son, I tell you what I'm gonna do...you see one of my properties is a sanitarium just outside'a Lil' Rock...nice place...a resting place for the weary.' 'Sanitarium...that's a nuthouse isn't it?' 'Well, let's just call them "the weary"--right now there are no criminally insane in there.' 'Any wolfmen? I don't want nothing to do with wolf men.' I was serious. I'd heard tales back in Alabama about the loboes and lycanthropy and full moons and using garlic and wolfbane...that's right, I knew more big words than most people thought I could possibly know. A lot of the ancient ones in this family used what we called 'dictionary-size' words.

"So, Mr. Phipps, took me out to this sanitarium the next day and they put me to work immediately. Peaceful Grove, it was called. Old mansion. Not bad really. The doctor-in-charge, he was Mr. Phipps's partner in the place, assigned me to a ward as an assistant ward keep. The ward super I was assigned to was known as Cruel Charles. My job turned out to be watching Cruel Charles being cruel. Then after he had dragged the poor bastard out of his cell, he took him down to the concrete pit where Charles would douse him with buckets of ice-cold water. While Charles was 'baptizing,' that's what he called it, the patient, I was told to clean the cell down and check it for bugs, you know, lice, rat droppings, but also contraband. All I found were puddles of piss and piles of shit all around the walls of the small cell. I refused to clean that shit up and when Cruel Charles brought the poor bloke back all raggedy and naked and dripping wet and threw him in the cell with a vengeance, I told him frankly, 'I refuse to clean that shit up in there.' 'That's all right, me boy,' Cruel Charles said, 'Old Quentin'll clean up the shit himself.' 'You trust him with a shovel?' 'No, lad, no. Old Quentin there, he'll clean it up by eatin' it. Saves the place a lot of money.' He let out a yowl of delight. Looking into the dark dank cell, he said, 'Yeah, Quentin, old pal, you'll clean up yere own shit, want you, lad?' We walked out of the cell area and back into the office."

Uncle Bob needed another Grand Prize. "Grand Prize is not the best of beers, you know. I drink it 'cause it's brewed in San Antonio where they have deep well water and German beermakers...a lot of Germans down in and around San Antonio, you know, keed." Back with beer in hand, Uncle Bob carried on. "Yes sir, boy, you need a mentor. You see, turned out Mr. Phipps was right about me working at a nuthouse. He reasoned with me about it. 'Bob, you can always get a job at a sanitarium...they're jobs that aren't that popular...besides no lawman's gonna find you at a sanitarium.' By then I had learned the ropes of being a ward attendant from Cruel Charles...to the point of learning the dispositions and attitudes of the wards under my care...you know, being able to read them...like knowing when they were on the verge of a fit or a spasm attack. Working in the nuthouses made me strong as an ox...it was brilliant advice. I worked sanitoriums after I left Little Rock from Joplin all the way to Pueblo, Colorado."

Slouched down in that easy chair, relaxed, wearing suspenders, the suspenders holding his pants up high on his overripe watermelon belly. Wearing a stiffly starched very clean white dress shirt--"A benefit from working at a sanitarium is you get great laundry service--I mean look at this shirt, starched, bleached, and ironed to perfection. You have got to look good, keed. Wear your clothes with class." Soon he sailed back into his story: "All my stories from the time I left Little Rock have to do with the insane. They actually made me saner...them and beer. I love beer." He pops open another Grand Prize as he makes that statement. "This is shitty beer, this here Grand Prize. Up in Colorado I met these German guys--when I worked in Pueblo, for instance, and they brewed up beer in their store basements--great beer, too. Made the Old World way...that Coors brewery in Golden...that's those same Germans. Sold beer by the buckets in those days. Miners in every Colorado town--silver miners, gold miners, coal miners, lead miners--and on their days off, Sundays in those days, they flocked in droves to the bars and casinos. In Leadville, I learned to drink what the miners called a Bloody George, a glass of beer with tomato juice in it." "Did they have tomato juice back in those days?" "Sure they did, keed. They had canned goods back during the Civil War, keed. Trouble was, they used lead to seal those cans. You ate stuff out of an old can, rusty, you know, there was a great possibility it would kill you. Can you imagine being so hungry you'd eat contaminated food with the possibility of it killing you? That's the point in life where you separate the men from the boys. Gunfighters were that kind of men--their careers were careers of challenging life--you challenge life and lose, you're dead." "Concentration, right?" "You're catching on, keed, you're catching on."

Uncle Bob's time and tales is a unique part of my history, a part I consider unique in terms of the way I remember it, writing it down directly from memory--a fresh brilliant memory of Uncle Bob sitting in that same ole easy chair with the table by it with the lamp on the table and always a newspaper on the table. Yes, you may have as colorful a character as my Uncle Bob in your life, maybe an even more enlightened man say; yet if you don't present him in a certain entertaining spotlite, then your Uncle Bob's not that unique among Uncle Bobs. That's a truth about history. History can become His story...or your story...or her story. Stories. Las Cuentas those other Americans call them. Tales. Tails.
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Many of my histories turn out so much different than the histories of others. This is especially true of my history of my involvement in learning, appreciating, and incorporating into my lifestyle the basics of what I call American Roots Music--and, OK, it will include all American Roots Musics--Nortena, Tex-Mex; South East Texas cajun music; South Texas Black blues; Deep Elum Street in Dallas Black blues; San Antonio Western Swing; the original rocking and rolling of young Buddy Holly and Wayland Jennings and Roy Orbison; or Willie Nelson over in Fort Worth; or Johnny Winters and Shiva's Headband in Austin; or Janis Joplin being born down in Port Arthur, Texas; or Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys working out of Waco, Texas (famous statement of Hank's: "If Bob Wills is the King of Western Swing, I guess that makes me the Queen of Western Swing"); or even Spade Cooley's band--all of these influences in my American Roots Music history.

Gertrude Stein wrote: "Picasso and I were talking the other day." That right there stopped me in my historical tracks. Oh that I could say I was talking with Picasso the other day. I suppose I could have--Picasso lived to be 90--he was around all of the early part of my life--and, yes, he is a part of my history. Gertrude continues, "I always said I never minded living in France. I write with my eyes, not with my ears or mouth. I hate lecturing, because you begin to hear yourself talk, because sooner or later you hear your voice, and you do not hear what you say. You just hear what they hear you say." That last part is good. They who make it history do put words in your mouth--but they can't understand what she means by "writing with her eyes"--that's a part of Stein's history they've never discovered. Critics called her an experimental writer, but not me. Stein let her mind write words, which she eyed as she wrote them--and by eying them, she was able to keep her words in what she called "the continual present." Stein said, "As a matter of fact [history], as a writer I write entirely with my eyes. The words as seen by my eyes are the important words, and the ears and mouth do not count. I said to Picasso, 'When you were a kid you never looked at things.' He seemed to swallow the things he saw but he never looked, and I said, 'In recent years you have been looking, you see too much, it is a mistake for you.' He said, 'You are quite right.' A writer should write with his eyes, and a painter paint with his ears. You should always paint knowledge which you have acquired, not by looking but by swallowing. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed." [From: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, "A Transatlantic Interview 1946," p. 31, Black Sparrow Press, 1971.]

History is fickle. That's my point. Even speckles of history are fickle. Even thunderous roars of history are fickle. How do I know my Uncle Bob's history was actually his true actual history? Surely he salted it a bit too heavy--for that flavor, you know. Most storytellers salt their stories heavily--to preserve them, I suppose--that salting a way of illuminating themselves. We are much bigger in terms of our ears and mouths than we are in our eyes.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Living in New York City: J. Orlin Grabbe on CHAOS

Foto by tgw, New York City, January 2012
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So long to: Roy Hartsfield. As a kid in Dallas, I remember Roy as the Dallas Rebels's second baseman in the Texas League. Later he went to the Majors after managing in the minors for years...and was the first Toronto manager. Adios, Roy. He had a good long life. Roy Hartsfield, 85, American baseball player, first manager of Toronto Blue Jays, complications of liver cancer.

Gus Zernial, another old-time Major Leaguer just died, at 87 (I remember him as a Detroit Tiger). Gus was a heavy hitting catcher. Gus Zernial, 87, American baseball player (Athletics, Tigers, White Sox), congestive heart failure

Reynolds Price, the man who learned to write by imitating William Faulkner has bought the farm. Came out of the closet with his "very sexually frank" essays. He was the protege of Eudora Welty. Nice Southern boy who really did think he was the regenerated Faulkner. Reynolds Price, 77, American author, professor at Duke University.
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The Charms of Chaos or How to Approach Chaos Intellectually
We definitely are living in Chaotic times. I first came upon Chaos in the writings of Henry Miller and the paintings of his friend Hans Richter.

Hans Richter: Visionary Portrait--Emmy Hennings, 1917
I have since become a great believer in the inevitability of Chaos (or Entropy: the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics); in fact, I truly believe it is now a living presence in our current-day HUMAN world. The World itself is Chaos splendiferized. The World is the purveyor and controller of Chaos. To the World an exploding volcano, i.e., Krakatoa, is merely a pimple bursting on its face or its ass. To the World having a meteor hit it simply results in a common headache--a few more spiralings around the Sun and soon the headache is forgotten and the damage is incorporated into the workings of the working world.

The following is a lecture given by one of the great minds of our time, the mind of J. Orlin Grabbe, called a genius by all who really knew him, though they also called him a curmudgeon. A man of conspiratorial thinking and disruptive Economics and Sociology, a man who used the sleaziest forms of sexuality as a reminder that we all live sexually chaotic lives, though we seldom openly admit it--and, therefore, since we live sexually chaotic lives, most of our production and thinking and creativity is based on these sexually chaotic lives and our feeling deeply guilty about them. Grabbe in this lecture details the 3 Schools of Theoretical Chaos. It's brilliant stuff. Like this excerpt:

Change, the fundamental motion of
the universe, is bad.  If a business goes broke, it's never viewed as
a source of creativity, freeing up resources and bringing about
necessary changes.  It's just more unemployment.  The
unemployment-inflation tradeoff as seen by Sixties Keynesian
macroeconomics is in the Second School spirit.  These endemic
evils must be propitiated by the watchful Priests of Fiscal Policy
and the Federal Reserve, and you can only reduce one by
increasing the other.  This view refuses to acknowledge that one
of the positive roles of the Market is as a job destroyer as well as a
job creator.

Like I said, this is brilliant thinking. It's a thinking I prefer. And, yes, Grabbe is a curmudgeon; his points are like barbs--enough barbs break the neck of the opposition, which is a good thing in the Grabbean way of deduction. Read ahead with pleasure:

From the The Daily Growler Hall of Famer, J. ORLIN GRABBE, a Lecture on CHAOS. [J. Orlin Grabbe died of a heart attack in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 2008.]

In Praise of Chaos

by J. Orlin Grabbe
Speech Presented at Eris Society, August 12, 1993.
Version reprinted Liberty, April 1994.
@1994 J. Orlin Grabbe, 1280 Terminal Way #3, Reno, NV 89502
Internet:  kalliste@delphi.com

Introduction:  The Intrusion of Eris

Chaos has a bad name in some parts.  It was chaos that
brought us the Trojan War (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths,
chapter 159).  Eris, goddess of chaos, upset at not being invited to
the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, showed up anyway and rolled a
golden apple marked "kalliste" ("for the prettiest one") among the
guests.  Each of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite
claimed the golden apple as her own.  Zeus, no fool, appointed
Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy, judge of the beauty contest.
Hermes brought the goddesses to the mountain Ida, where Paris
first tried to divide the apple among the goddesses, then made them
swear they wouldn't hold the decision against them.  Hermes asked
Paris if he needed the goddesses to undress to make his judgment,
and he replied, Of course.  Athena insisted Aphrodite remove her
magic girdle, the sexy underwear that made everyone fall in love
with her, and Aphrodite retorted Athena would have to remove her
battle helmet, since she would look hideous without it.

As Paris examined the goddesses individually,  Hera
promised to make Paris the lord of Asia and the richest man alive,
if she got the apple. Paris said he couldn't be bribed.  Athena
promised to make Paris victorious in all his battles, and the wisest
man alive.  Paris said there was peace in these parts.  Aphrodite
stood so close to Paris he blushed, and not only urged him not to
miss a detail of her lovely body, but said also that he was the
handsomest man she had seen lately, and he deserved a woman as
beautiful as she was.  Had he heard about Helen, the wife of the
king of Sparta?  The goddess promised Paris she would make
Helen fall in love with him.  Naturally Paris gave the apple to
Aphrodite, and Hera and Athena went off fuming to plot the
destruction of Troy.  That is, Aphrodite got the apple, and Paris got
screwed.

While the Greeks had a specific goddess dedicated to
Chaos,  early religions gave chaos an even more fundamental role.
In the Babylonian New Year festival,  Marduk separated Tiamat,
the dragon of chaos, from the forces of law and order.  This primal
division is seen in all early religions.  Yearly homage was paid to
the threat of chaos's return.  Traditional New Year festivals
returned symbolically to primordial chaos through a deliberate
disruption of civilized life. One shut down the temples,
extinguished fires, had orgies and otherwise broke social norms.
The dead mingled with the living; Afterward you purified yourself,
reenacted the creation myth whereby the dragon of chaos was
overthrown, and went back to normal. Everyone had fun, but
afterward order was restored, and the implication was it was a good
thing we had civilization, because otherwise people would always
be putting out the fires and having orgies.

Around us in the world today we see the age-old battle
between order and chaos.  In the international sphere, the old
order of communism has collapsed.  In its place is a chaotic matrix
of competing, breakaway states, wanting not only political freedom
and at least a semi-market economy, but also their own money
supplies and nuclear weapons, and in some cases a society with a
single race, religion, or culture.  Is this alarming or reassuring?  We
also have proclamations of a New World Order, on one hand,
accompanied by the outbreak of sporadic wars and US bombing
raids in Africa, Europe, and Asia, on the other.

In the domestic sphere we have grass roots political
movements, such as the populist followers of  H. Ross Perot
challenging the old order imposed by the single-party Democratic-
Republican monolith.  We have a President who is making a
mockery out of the office, and a Vice President who tells us we
should not listen to any dissenting opinions with respect to global
warming.  Is this reassuring or alarming?

In the corporate-stateist world of Japan we see the current
demolition of  the mythic pillars of Japanese society:  the myth of
high-growth, the myth of endless trust between the US and Japan,
the myth of full employment, the myth that land and stock prices
will always rise, and the myth that the Liberal Democratic Party
will always remain in power.  Is the shattering of these myths
reassuring or alarming?

In fact, wherever we look, central command is losing
control.  Even in the sphere of the human mind we have increasing
attention paid to cases of multiple personality.  The most recent
theories see human identity and the human ego as a network of
cooperative subsystems, rather than a single entity. (Examples of
viewpoint are found in Robert Ornstein, Multimind, and Michael
Gazzanaga, The Social Brain.) If, as Carl Jung claimed, "our true
religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it,
coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary
autonomous systems," then it can be said that psychological
polytheism is on the rise.  Or, as some would say, mental chaos.  Is
this reassuring or alarming?

Myth of Causality Denies Role of Eris

The average person, educated or not, is not comfortable
with chaos.  Faced with chaos, people begin talking about the fall
of Rome, the end of time.  Faced with chaos people begin to deny
its existence, and present the alternative explanation that what
appears as chaos is a hidden agenda of historical or prophetic
forces that lie behind the apparent disorder.  They begin talking
about the "laws of history" or proclaiming that "God has a hidden
plan". The creation, Genesis, was preceded by chaos (tohu-va-
bohu), and the New World Order (the millennium), it is claimed,
will be preceded by pre-ordained apocalyptic chaos. In this view of
things, chaos is just part of a master agenda. Well, is it really the
case there is a hidden plan,  or does the goddess Eris have a non-
hidden non-plan?  Will there be a Thousand Year Reign of the
Messiah, or the Thousand Year Reich of Adolph Hitler, or are
these one and the same?

People are so uncomfortable with chaos, in fact, that
Newtonian science as interpreted by Laplace and others saw the
underlying reality of the world as deterministic.  If you knew the
initial conditions you could predict the future far in advance.  With
a steady hand and the right cue tip, you could run the table in pool.
Then came quantum mechanics, with uncertainty and
indeterminism, which even Einstein refused to accept, saying "God
doesn't play dice."  Philosophically, Einstein couldn't believe in a
universe with a sense of whimsy.  He was afraid of the threatened
return of chaos, preferring to believe for every effect there was a
cause.  A consequence of this was the notion that if you could
control the cause, you could control the effect.

The modern proponents of law and order don't stop with the
assertion that for every effect, there is a cause.  And they also
assert they "know" the cause.  We see this attitude reflected by
social problem solvers, who proclaimed:  "The cause of famine in
Ethiopia is lack of food in Ethiopia." So we had rock crusades to
feed the starving Ethiopians and ignored the role of the Ethiopian
government. Other asserted: "The case of drug abuse is the
presence of drugs,"  so they enacted a war on certain drugs which
drove up their price, drove up the profit margins available to those
who dealt in prohibited drugs, and created a criminal subclass who
benefited from the prohibition. Psychologists assert:  "The reason
this person is this way is because such-and-such happened in
childhood, with parents, or siblings, or whatever."  So any
evidence of abuse, trauma, or childhood molestation--which over
time should assume a trivial role in one's life--are given infinite
power by the financial needs of the psychotherapy business.

You may respond:  "Well, but these were just misidentified
causes; there really is a cause."   Maybe so, and maybe not.
Whatever story you tell yourself, you can't escape the fact that to
you personally "the future is a blinding mirage" (Stephen
Vizinczey, The Rules of Chaos).  You can't see the future precisely
because you don't really know what's causing it.  The myth of
causality denies the role of Eris.  Science eventually had to
acknowledge the demon of serendipity, but not everyone is happy
with that fact.  The political world, in the cause-and-effect
marketing and sales profession, has a vested interest in denying its
existence.

Approaches to Chaos

In philosophy or religion there are three principal schools
of thought (in a classification  I'll use here).  Each school is
distinguished by its basic philosophical outlook on life. The First
School sees the universe as indifferent to humanity's joys or
sufferings, and accepts chaos as a principle of restoring balance.
The Second School sees humanity as burdened down with
suffering, guilt, desire, and sin, and equates chaos with punishment
or broken law. The Third School considers  chaos an integral part
of creativity, freedom, and growth.


I.  First School Approach:  Attempts to Impose Order Lead to
Greater Disorder

Too much law and order brings its opposite.  Attempts to
create World Government will lead to total anarchy.  What are
some possible examples?

* The Branch Davidians at Waco.  David Koresh's principal
problem was, according to one FBI spokesman, that he was
"thumbing his nose at the law".  So, to preserve order, the forces of
law and order brought chaos and destruction, and destroyed
everything and everyone.  To prevent the misuse of firearms by
cult members, firearms were marshaled to randomly kill them.  To
prevent alleged child abuse, the forces of law and order burned the
children to death.

* Handing out free food in "refugee" camps in Somalia
leads to greater number of starving refugees, because the existence
of free food attracts a greater number of nomads to the camps, who
then become dependent on free food, and starve when they are not
fed.

* States in the US. are concerned about wealth distribution.
But, to finance themselves, more and more states have turned to
the lottery.  These states thereby create inequality of wealth
distribution by giving away to a few, vast sums of cash extracted
>from  the many.

The precepts of the first school find expression in a number
of Oriental philosophies.  In the view of this school, what happens
in the universe is a fact, and does not merit the labels of "good" or
"bad", or human reactions of sympathy or hatred.  Effort to control
or alter the course of macro events (as opposed to events in ones
personal life) is wasted.  One should cultivate detachment and
contemplation, and learn elasticity, learn to go with the universal
flow of events.  This flow tends toward a balance.  This view finds
expression in the Tao Teh King:

The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.
(Chapter 57, Stephen Mitchell translation.)

You don't fight chaos any more than you fight evil.  "Give
evil nothing to oppose, and it will disappear by itself" (Tao Teh
King, Chapter 60).  Or as Jack Kerouac said in Dr. Sax:  "The
universe disposes of its own evil."  Again the reason is a principal
of balance:  You are controlled by what you love and what you
hate.  But hate is the stronger emotion. Those who fight evil
necessarily take on the characteristics of the enemy and become
evil themselves.  Organized sin and organized sin-fighting are two
sides of the same corporate coin.

II.   Second School Approach: Chaos is a Result of Breaking
Laws

In the broadest sense, this approach  a) asserts society is
defective, and then b) tells us the reason it's bad is because we've
done wrong by our lawless actions. This is the view often
presented by the front page of any major newspaper. It's a
fundamental belief in Western civilization.

In early Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity, evil is
everywhere and it must be resisted. There is no joy or pleasure
without its hidden bad side.  God is usually angry and has to be
propitiated by sacrifice and blood. The days of Noah ended in a
flood.  Sodom and Gomorra got atomized.  Now, today, it's the
End Time and the wickedness of the earth will be smitten with the
sword of Jesus or some other Messiah whose return is imminent.

In this context, chaos is punishment from heaven.  Or chaos
is a natural degenerate tendency which must be alertly resisted.  In
the Old Testament Book of Judges, a work of propaganda for the
monarchy, it is stated more than once:  "In those days there was no
king in Israel:  every man did that which was right in his own eyes"
(Judg. 17:6; 21:25).  Doing what appeals to you was not considered
a good idea, because, as Jeremiah reminds us "The heart [of man]
is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" (Jer. 17:9).

And in the New Testament, the rabbinical lawyer Paul says
"by the law is the knowledge of sin" (Rom. 3:20), and elsewhere is
written, "Whososever committeth sin transgresseth also the law:
for sin is the transgression of the law." (1 John 3:4).  And,
naturally, "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23).

New age views of karma are similar.  If you are bad, as
somehow defined, you built up bad karma (New Age view), or else
God later burns you with fire (fundamentalist Christian view).  For
good deeds, you get good karma or treasures in heaven.  It's
basically an accountant's view of the world. Someone's keeping a
balance sheet of all your actions, and toting up debits or credits.
Of course, some religions allow you to wipe the slate clean in one
fell swoop, say by baptism, or an act of contrition, which is sort of
like declaring bankruptcy and getting relief from all your creditors.
But that's only allowed because there has already been a blood
sacrifice in your place.  Jesus or Mithra or one of the other Saviors
has already paid the price.  But even so, old Santa Claus is up there
somewhere checking who's naughty or nice.

What is fundamental about this approach is not the specific
solution to sin, or approach to salvation, but the general pessimistic
outlook on the ordinary flow of life.  The first Noble Truth of
Buddha was that "Life is Sorrow". In the view of Schopenhauer,
Life is Evil, and he says "Every great pain, whether physical or
spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if
we did not deserve it"  (The World as Will and Representation).
Also in the Second School  bin of philosophy can be added Freud,
with his Death Wish and the image of the unconscious as a murky
swamp of monsters.  Psychiatry in some interpretations sees the
fearful dragons of chaos, Tiamat, lurking down below the civilized
veneer of the human cortex.

The liberal's preoccupation with social "problems" and the
Club of Rome's obsession with entropy are essentially expressions
of the Second School view. Change, the fundamental motion of
the universe, is bad.  If a business goes broke, it's never viewed as
a source of creativity, freeing up resources and bringing about
necessary changes.  It's just more unemployment.  The
unemployment-inflation tradeoff as seen by Sixties Keynesian
macroeconomics is in the Second School spirit.  These endemic
evils must be propitiated by the watchful Priests of Fiscal Policy
and the Federal Reserve, and you can only reduce one by
increasing the other.  This view refuses to acknowledge that one
of the positive roles of the Market is as a job destroyer as well as a
job creator.

More generally, the second school has generated whole
industries of "problem solvers"-- politicians, bureaucrats,
demagogues, counselors, and charity workers who have found the
way to power, fame, and wealth lies in championing causes and
mucking about in other people's lives.  Whatever their motivations,
they operate as parasites and vampires who are healthy only when
others are sick, whose well-being increases in direct proportion to
other people's misery, and whose method of operation is to give
the appearance of working on the problems of others.  Of course if
the problems they champion were actually solved, they would be
out of a job.  Hence they are really interested in the process of
"solving" problems--not in actual solutions. They create chaos and
destruction under the pretense of chaos control and elimination.

III. Third School Approach:  Chaos is Necessary for Creativity,
Freedom, and Growth

You find this view in a few of the ancient Greek writers,
and more recently in Nietzsche. Nietzsche says:  "One must still
have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star."  The first
fundamental point of view here is:  Existence is pure joy.  If you
don't see that, your perception is wrong.  And we are not talking
about Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science denial of the facts.  In
this approach you are supposed to learn to alchemically transmute
sorrow into joy, chaos into art. You exult in the random give and
take of the hard knocks of life. It's a daily feast.  Every
phenomenon is an Act of Love.  Every experience, however
serendipitous,  is necessary, is a sacrament, is a means of growth.

"Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the
will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very
sacrifice of its highest types--that is what I called Dionysian, that
is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic
poet.  Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order
to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge--
Aristotle understood it that way [as do the Freudians who think one
deals with ones neuroses through one's art, a point of view which
Nietzsche is here explicitly rejecting]--but in order to be oneself
the eternal  order of becoming, beyond all terror and pity--that joy
which included even joy in destroying." (Twilight of the Idols).

It is an approach centered in the here and now.  You cannot
foresee the future, so you must look at the present.  But because
"nothing is certain, nothing is impossible" (Rules of Chaos). You
are free and nobody belongs to you. In the opening paragraphs of
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller says: "It is now the fall of my
second year in Paris.  I was sent here for a reason I have not yet
been able to fathom.  I have no money, no resources, no hopes.  I
am the happiest man alive."

Your first responsibility is to take care of yourself, so you
won't be a burden to other people. If  you don't do at least that, how
can you be so arrogant as to think you can help others? You make
progress by adapting to your own nature. In Rabelais' Gargantua
the Abbey of Theleme had the motto: Fay ce que vouldras, or "Do
as you will."  Rabelais (unlike the Book of Judges) treats this in a
very positive light. The implication is:  Don't go seeking after some
ideal far removed from your own needs.  Don't get involved in
some crusade to save the human race--because you falsely think
that is the noble thing to do--when what you may really want to do,
if you are honest with yourself, is to stay home, grow vegetables,
and sell them in a roadside market.  (Growing vegetables is, after
all, real growth--more so than some New Age conceptions.)  You
have no obligation under the sun other than to discover your real
needs, to fulfill them, and to rejoice in doing so.

In this approach you give other people the right to make
their own choices, but you also hold them responsible for the
consequences.  Most social "problems", after all,  are a function
of the choices people make, and are therefore insolvable in
principle, except by coercion.  One is not under any obligation to
make up for the effects of other people's decisions.  If, for example,
people (poor or rich, educated or not) have children they can't care
for or feed, one has no responsibility to make up for their
negligence or to take on one's own shoulders responsibility for the
consequent suffering.  You can, if you wish, if you want to become
a martyr.  If you are looking to become a martyr, the world will
gladly oblige, and then calmly carry on as before, the "problems"
unaltered.

One may, of course, choose to help the rest of the world to
the extent that one is able, assuming one knows how.  But it is a
choice, not an obligation.  Modern political correctness and
prostituted religion  have tried to turn all of what used to be
considered virtues into social obligations.  Not that anyone is
expected to really practice what they preach; rather it is intended
they feel guilty for not doing so, and once the guilt trip is
underway, their behavior can be manipulated for political purposes.

What would, after all, be left for social workers to do if all
social problems were solved?  One would still need challenges, so
presumably people would devote themselves to creative and
artistic tasks.  One would still need chaos.  One would still need
Eris rolling golden apples.

Conclusion

In the revelation given to Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley,
authors of Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and
What I Did to Her When I Found Her, the goddess Eris (Roman
Discordia) says:  "I am chaos.  I am the substance from which your
artists and scientists build rhythms.  I am the spirit with which your
children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy.  I am chaos.  I am
alive, and I tell you that you are free."

Today, in Aspen, Eris says:  I am chaos.  I am alive, and I
tell you that you are free.

Courtesy of www.spunk.org/

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

FREEZE!

Foto courtesy www.benzinga.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Gunmen, Outlaws, Renegades
We the People of the USA love our guns. We totally fear death. Therefore, we love scary stories. We love stories where we human beings face all forms of death and either conquer it or succumb to it. We revere gunslingers, whether individual gunslingers or troops of gunslingers. We love security. Our security is that security that protects us from death. From the day we are born our parents or wards start teaching us about how to avoid death. From the beginning of our lives we are taught how to avoid confrontations with death. We become indoctrinated in the avoidance of death. We are taught that all of our professions, whether Sociology professor or highly decorated military commander, are professions that seek to save us from death. As a result, we love elaborate allegories and legends and fables that try and instruct us how to avoid death. All our holy books are revelations of salvation from death. All our laws and regulations (this past Congress passed approximately 34,000 new laws, bills, regulations, etc.) are geared to protect us from death.

From childhood until our own demise we love stories about heroes and heroines overcoming death either through real methods or supernatural methods. We love murder mysteries. We love detective stories and cop-bad-guy teevee shows. Back before teevee, one of the most popular publications in the US was the Police Gazette, a tabloid-type magazine chocked full of Public Enemies and FBI Most Wanted lists and stories about past solved and unsolved crimes, though especially murder. The most popular radio shows back in the old days were the murder-mystery-type shows: "Inner Sanctum," "Murder Inc.," "The FBI in Peace and War," "Sam Spade, Private Eye." The writings of Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler topped the bestseller lists. And yes, out in Hollywood stars like Jimmy Cagney, Eddie G. Robinson, Richard Widmark, George Raft had vast box office successes playing gat-carrying thugs.

Today, on any given night of television viewing you are going to see mostly shows concerning death or the avoidance of death. Cop shows. NCIS shows. CIS shows. Private (Blackwater ) or secret (special forces, CIA) military unit shows. Star Trek/Star Wars-type shows. 48 Hours mystery shows. America's most wanted shows. Missing persons shows. Serial killer shows--one of the most macabre shows on television is the very popular "Criminal Minds," each show depicting the antics of the most viciously mean and sorry serial murdering sons of bitches in the USA, usually a crazed nutjob of a man who loves serial killing young women--I don't believe I have ever seen a show where a woman is the serial killer--I'm sure there are such shows but I don't recall seeing one recently. Women are readily depicted as individual murderers but seldom as serial killers.

Since 9/11, We the People of the USA have been dipped in huge vats of overwhelming fear. Fear of what? What do we have to fear from these "Terrorists"? So they killed 3,000 human beings on 9/11? Why should that frighten us more than the fact that our US police forces might kill that many perpetrators or guilty-appearing human beings every year? Our own homegrown terrorists (including Tim McVeigh) have stacked up a pretty huge amount of victims over the past few years: the Virginia Tech shooter and the Fort Hood army psychologist shooter killed over 60 in their sprees. Or how about the fact that approximately 300,000 of us die each year from wrongly prescribed pharmaceutical medicines (toxins). Or how many of us die each year from automobile accidents (why are our cars made to go up to 160 miles per hour? one teevee commercial brags about how its cars go faster than the competition's)? Or how about the fact that We the People of the USA are the gun-totingest people in the world? Check out how many of us are killed each year by handguns? That doesn't frighten us? No. And you know why? We see guns as security. When you're packing a piece, you feel tough--as tough as Burt Lancaster in that great vicious-gunplay movie called "The Lawman." Why do White people so admire our Old West gunslingers? Because they represent to us our true love of rugged individualism. A Libertarian attitude of "By fucking golly, give me a good Buffalo gun and a couple of six-shooters, and, by God, I'll take care my own and myself, fuck the government, fuck the law, fuck the odds."

I grew up in West Texas in a gun's-a-plenty town in a gunless family, though guns were certainly prevalent in both of my families's historical pasts. My greatgrandmother on my mother's side was a tough-as-a-boot Pioneer White woman who on marrying at 13 a 75-year-old Texas Revolutionary War veteran became the stepmother of one of the most notorious of Texas gunmen, Wild Bill Longley. In a dime novel written about Wild Bill, it was rumored his gun butt contained 22 notches before he was hanged by his neck down in Giddings, Texas, back in the late 1800s. She herself became a gun-toting woman after being threatened by this elderly husband's other sons, one threat made on her life by one of the sons holding a pistol to her head. She escaped this marriage and these threatening sons by running by herself through a swamp to finally a week later get to a relative's house and safety. After she married her second husband, my greatgrandfather, for protection against Comanches, Night Riders, roaming drunks, roaming murderers, she took possession of a long-barrel Colt revolver and a Winchester rifle, which became her steady companions.

There was one story this old lady told over and over about how one Saturday midday her husband via horseback left she and her daughter (my grandmother) alone to go off to sing and play his fiddle at a local social, something he regularly did to make a little extra money since farming or cattle ranching in the area was a tough business and his school-teaching job paid next to nothing. Usually at these affairs my grandfather who was a natural-born heavy drinking Scotsman got smashed, depending on his horse to get him back home safe and sound. My greatgrandmother would hear the horse coming into the yard at a usual time and knew it was probably her husband and she'd open the spy hole in the dugout in which they lived to see that it was his horse bringing him home drunk. Except this particular Saturday night late, she waited up waiting to hear the horse bringing him home. She waited and waited, but still no horse. However, way past time for her husband be home though she was still sitting up waiting for him, she did hear a noise coming into the yard. It wasn't a horse coming into the yard. No. It was someone on foot. A heavy foot. It was a man. She could tell that further by his heavy breathing and deep-gruff coughing. She looked through the spy hole and saw a black image coming right at the door filling the spy hole with an imageless blackness. She was afraid--cold afraid--her Colt revolver loaded and cocked. Soon she heard this man messing with the door, pushing at it, shoving against it, then shoulder-butting against it. The door began to buckle and in a panic, she fired that Colt into the door, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, three fast shots. With the last shot she heard a mighty roar of pain followed by a sweet call for HELP. A sweet call for help she immediately recognized as the voice of her husband. She hurriedly opened the door and there was her husband, drunk as a Lord, writhing in pain on the doorstep. Two of her shots had hit him in the right thigh.

The daughter of that woman was my mother's mother. She was a gentle woman. A poet. A florist. A milliner. A librarian. She thought of herself as very civilized. As cultured. Guns to her were extremely primitive, old fashioned. Ironically, her eldest daughter, my mother's sister, did possess a pistol. She was a very pretty sexy and brazen hussy of a wild woman who played a mean honky-tonk piano and who loved to dance and who ended up marrying two rather wild men, the first one I never knew, but her second husband was my Cajun uncle Stub (his name was Stubblefield ), a very heavy drinker who had a bad habit of going off on benders that would take him away from home for days at a time. He would eventually sober up and limp back home seeking forgiveness. When he went off like that, he left my aunt home alone to fend for herself, except he did one day provide her with protection, a cool little silver-plated Smith & Wesson snubnose, which she kept loaded on a nighttable by her bedside. Most times, she sensed when he was due to come back and then she knew for sure when she'd hear his pick up come sputtering up the gravel driveway to park it under the carport by the kitchen door. One night, after Uncle Stub had been off a day or so--and she wasn't expecting him back for at least another day, she was awakened deep in the middle of a very dark night by her sensing somebody was just outside her bedroom door in the hallway. On caution, she grabbed the snubnose revolver and tiptoed over toward the door where she heard a strange sound right outside the door and then suddenly a BANG up against the door. She hollered out her husband's name but there was no answer. That's when she let go a blast from the snubnose. POW. It was followed by a deep morbid moan. A familiar moan. She opened the door and there lay Uncle Stub floundering in his own blood and piss--he'd been taking a leak against the hallway wall when she shot him--moaning in the pain from the bullet wound in the thigh of his right leg--the very leg her Pioneer grandmother had shot her drunken husband in the night he came home horseless and unannounced.

On my father's side of the family, his oldest brother was said to have murdered a man in Memphis and then gone on the lam for almost 18 years before showing back up at his mother's doorstep one day a changed man denying vehemently that he was a murderer, swearing that he had shot the man in self-defense. I don't ever, however, remember any guns among my dad's brothers and sisters. None of them were hunters; except my Uncle Roi (he was in WWI and wore his Croix de Guerre everyday no matter the clothes) who had a farm out in what was then called the rattlesnake capital of the US, Mulberry Canyon, and surely out there among the rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and various crop-destroying varmints and birds he had a rifle rack in his house or at least in his pick up (I remember the most curious thing about visiting Uncle Roi's farm was he had taken a fairly new Nash automobile and converted it into a tractor. You could jump in the backseat of that tractor Nash and ride along with Uncle Roi or one of his sons as he ploughed his vast mountainside fields).

I remember as a very young kid (13) becoming fascinating one day with the rifles shown in a Sears & Roebuck catalog. I had just read a book on tiger hunting in India and I had been fascinating by this old British Colonel's description of his hunting rifles and windage and sighting in on these vicious death-to-human-threatening beasts. I decided I wanted my own big game hunting rifle and I found a Winchester .22 rifle in that catalog (I know it's not a big game rifle but I was a kid with a wide imagination) I soon desired beyond the dream stage. I went to my parents and asked them for the $90 the rifle cost and both went into tirades against guns. "There'll be no guns in this house," my dad declared.

Later on in high school I became best friends, he was a year older than I was, with this guy who just happened to be a gun fancier (he also had a world-class poisonous snake collection in a room over the family garage). It was with him one day that he came over in his dad's pick up with his new rifle he'd gotten that Christmas and one of his old rifles. We drove way out in the country south of my hometown in the range of hills called the Callahan Divide and out there in a lonely canyon I finally got to fire a rifle. A Remington single-shot rifle. After that, this guy and I got to regularly going out in that pick up, just after the sun had gone down, out on way-out-in-nowhere farm roads--dirt roads mostly--where we used the military spotlite this pick up had on the driver's side intending to spot big rattlesnakes, which we'd then get out and bag in a burlap bag in order to take it back for his snake collection. But also we'd spot on big fat jackrabbits, which when you shined a spot on them, like deers get caught in the headlights, you confused them to the point in escaping you they ran right straight dabbed down the middle of that light's path. We soon made a sport out of shooting at jackrabbits. We'd take turns laying out on one of the pick up's front fenders while the other one drove the truck and spotlit the rabbits. You'd fire at the rabbits off that fender.

One night way out south of town, again out in the Callahan Divide, we were spotting rabbits and shooting at them--we very seldom hit any in case you were concerned about the poor rabbits--and I was out on the fender with repeater rifle, eight-round clips, and I got a jack spotted and started firing at him. Suddenly, this wily jack jerked a hard right and headed out across a field. My friend kept the spot on him as he bounded madly across this field-- and I let go a blast of shots, wild shots wildly missing the intended target, shots echoing off lost in the dense solid wall of darkness. Next thing we know, suddenly, two bright heavy spotlites come on off the road in the vicinity of the field in which I'd been firing at the jackrabbit. The spotlites coming blindingly back at us were on the side of a large white framed farmhouse. We quickly turned that pick up around and dug the hell out of there. "You think I hit that house?" I was shaken. "Hell yes you hit the house. You missed the jackrabbit but you might have hit the farmer's wife or something. Wanna go back and check? Claim your kill?"

Again later on, this guy's little brother, he was 12 at the time, showed up at one of our shooting sprees with a pistol. It was a big pistol. Heavy as hell. We sat up some beer cans on some stumps and the kid handed me the pistol and showed me how to handle it, cock it, fire it, you know. I took the pistol. I didn't even know how to sight down it. I just held it out in front of me on the line I thought was aimed right at one of the cans and I pulled the trigger. Holy crap. The backfire (recoil) knocked me back on my ass. And that was the last time I fired a pistol the rest of my life. In the US Army as a second lieutenant, I was issued a sidearm, a handgun, a GI-issued .45, but I never fired it. I was never even issued ammo for it. This is the pistol that was so inaccurate, legend had it you had to be about three feet from your target to hit it with this piece. I did, however, handle (break down and clean) and fire weapons in the army. I did learn to shoot the M1 rifle. I also had training on the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and a 30-caliber submachinegun. I also was trained to fire and command the firing of several different sizes of Howitzers. And one summer at Fort Hood, Texas, I was trained on the Honest John missile--a truck-trailer consist that was capable of firing its huge missile upwards of 25 to 30 miles down range and on target. The one firing of the Honest John I was on (I was the commander--gave the order from command post to fire) missed the target by 5 miles hitting instead in a zone that was designated as a friendly fire zone. In other words, my Honest John missile would have killed my own men.

After I left the Army, I have not since owned or even fired a firearm.

Here in New York City, I'm actually pretty safe in terms of madmen with pistols firing randomly into crowds. If you get shot by a pistol in New York City, it's probably in the possession of a New York City cop. Remember this is the police department several of whose finest put 42 shots into Amadu Dialo, the poor kid who was trying to take his wallet out to show them some ID, wrongly suspected of being a drug runner they were after. Here's a list of the top ten states in terms of your getting killed by a handgun (per 100,000 population):

Rank	States	Amount
# 1	District of Columbia:	31.2
# 2	Alaska:	20
# 3	Louisiana:	19.5
# 4	Wyoming:	18.8
# 5	Arizona:	18
= 6	Nevada:	17.3
= 6	Mississippi:	17.3
# 8	New Mexico:	16.6
# 9	Arkansas:	16.3
# 10	Alabama:	16.2

Check out that list. The murder capital is the District of Corruption. And, why, lookee there, Arizona's #5. So the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was nothing new in that state. And look at #2 state, why it's Sarah Paleface Palin's great lowly populated state of Alaska. Of course, you'd expect the lower ranked states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama to be guntoting states. So if you've got a hankering to do a little gunning down folks or blasting it out with the cops, like, you know, you wanting to get blown away--simply go down to one of these top ten murder states and if you want to do some killin' then you'll be able to easily purchase a brace of handguns, perhaps you might as well go ahead and buy an Egyptian-made AKA while you're stocking up. If you want to get shot, then get out in the middle of a street, say in the middle of Tucson, and declare you are an atheist abortion doctor who is in the state to help the illegal immigrants (Messkins) and indigents--you know, or perhaps you just declared yourself a secular humanist--then surely some Lone Ranger wacko will shoot your ass.

We love our guns. In his speech in Tucson, President Obama spread a lot of syrupy words over the whole mess, ending by calling on God, which God they never say, to bless America--another futile effort at compromise politics. Not once did he mention the lack of gun control in this whole country, or the obvious anti-Mexican racism prevalent among the Whites of Arizona, those who control the state that once belonged to Mexico and was taken over (invaded and occupied) by the USA in the deceitful and fraudulent Gadsden Purchase--La Frontera--the border on which G.W. Puddin' Head Bush decided to build a fucking thousand-mile-long fence--a boondoggle for the Boeing folks, a wall which President Obama has continued constructing, pledging to do so when he campaigned in that area of Texas during his run for office.

I kept growling during his speech, "Come on, Obama, why aren't you saying, 'I am, and I'm sure you are, too, sick and tired of this Teabagger bullshit and these deadly fucking games they are playing with We the People of the USA, the true government of the USA.'" Like I would have said, "Look, you traitorous bastards, you sons of bitches who refer to me as not a natural-born American. You who refer to me as a Muslim extremist...and do you remember when Rupert "Aussie Traitor" Murdoch ran that monkey cartoon where the monkey was ME and the cop shooting my ass was referring to me, too...I mean, folks, fuck compromising from now on...from now on you tear down my achievements and I'm going to veto every god-damn bill you manage to get through Congress...blah, blah, blah." But nope. Obama got out the soft-soap and instead turned the great gathering of people, 30,000, into a hypocritical joke session filled with huzzah-type propaganda--all this praise of these brave souls who either got shot by the Teabagger nutjob or almost got shot protecting other people but no condemnation at all of the Teabagger agenda that provoked this guntoting nutjob into action--and that's what these clowns are, US action-figures--like G.I. Joes converted to militiamen action figures.

Again, our Nobel Peace Prize-receiving President is unable to bring peace to his own nation. Didn't the District of Columbia recently try to pass severe gun-control laws and Congress or a Federal court overturned them? "Hey, we gotta keep the District of Corruption tops in handgun deaths."

The safest states in terms of handgun murders: New York is one; New Jersey is one; Connecticut; Rhode Island...all original 13 colonies--you see, all the guntoters and gunslingers and hunters headed West--ending up in those Wild West White states, all of which have the most liberal gun-control laws in the country. Arizona is one of three states where you're allowed to carry concealed weapons. MSNBC a few months back ran a news feature in which they said ironically deaths by handguns were going down faster in states with no gun-control laws at all than in the ones with tough gun-control laws. Remember, it is so easy to lie with statistics. Statistics like your blood pressure change several times a day--hell several times an hour.

So better start packing heat. This is a gun-loving country. This is a country intrigued by murder mysteries. Intrigued by outlaws. Intrigued by the Mafia. Intrigued by James Bond types who have a privilege of killing with impunity. A White Male is supposedly unfortunately a human monkey with smaller than average penis. Could the White Man's love of guns be a denial of his small penis?

My late great best friend ever in New York City once dated a CBS executive who told us one day that every time she rode a subway, she had her pistol in her purse, which she had open and with her hand inside it with her trigger finger on the trigger of her pistol--just in case, she said.

I've had several New York City friends who've been mugged with guns to their heads, but none of my friends were ever murdered. I did recently, however, lose the only one of my brother's sons who became a gun toter. How was he killed? By putting the barrel of his favorite shotgun in his mouth and blowing the top of his head off.

It may be true that if you have a gun in your possession you're probably one day going to have to use it or have it used against you. (I refer you to a past Daily Growler post in which I related the story of Escar the Geologist who was awakened from a deep sleep by a clicking sound in his ear to find the clicking sound was coming from the pistol his wife, Helen, had pressed against his temple--fortunately for Escar the pistol misfired and he lived to tell the tale. Otherwise, dead men tell no tales.)

thegunlessgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
One of the Great Old-Time Ballplayers, Red Borom, Just Exited the Coil at 95
I just recently sold a baseball that was signed by a mixed MLB and Minor League all-Star team of baseball players who played the army base circuit in World War II with Red signing the sweet spot as the manager of the team. I first heard of Red Borom when I lived in Enid, Oklahoma, a city at the time that had the US champion semi-pro baseball team, the Champlin Oilers (all the oil companies used to field baseball teams made up of old pros and young whiz kid athletes (I myself played semi-pro ball one year for one of my hometown oil companies--we played in the Brazos Valley Fast Ball League--we were the Drillers and we played other oil field teams, called the Spudders, Oilers, Gassers, Mudders, Flares, Wildcats (for Wildcat wells))--sponsored by the Champlin Oil Company--for several years back in the early 1940s--and Red was player manager of that team. He went on to manage other semi-pro teams, like the famous Wichita, Kansas, Bill Lear-sponsored team, and later down in South Texas where he managed the Plymouth Oilers out of Sinton, Texas. Then later in Dallas as a kid, I knew Red as a long-time Texas League player of championship quality. Red became one of the winningest semi-pro managers in the history of semi-pro baseball in this country. Red's now passed on. I'll never forget old Red though I'm sure the baseball history books have buried Red many a year ago. Lift one for good old Red Borom:
Red Borom, 95, American baseball player