Existing in New York City: Is CHAOS Finally Announcing Its Rule?

Foto by tgw, New York City, February 2012
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Just in: It seems the Mitt Man, backed by the Angel Moron-i, has barely won the Repub Michigan (his home state) primary--due to women, the Yahoo media says. It was only a few-point win over Little Ricky Santorum (who the hell votes for this dipstick?).
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Recovery
I heard this one dude talking about paying off the national debt. His point: we'll never be able in a million years to pay down the debt Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and G.W. Bush drove us into (a debt larger than the total debt (over 200 years) George Washington down to Jimmy Carter ever got us into--and that includes paying for the Revolutionary War, all the 19th Century wars including the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean debacle, the Vietnam debacle, etc., etc). Here's a "truth" about the debt from zfacts.com/p/461.html:

Some Debt Facts:

• Social Security is $2.6 trillion in the black. In 2010 it ran a $68 billion surplus.
• Clinton reduced the debt as a percent of GDP.
• G. W. Bush restarted the deficits with tax cuts for the rich.
• Red ink hit a peak rate of $1 trillion in 100 days just before Obama.
• The Obama stimulus was only $0.08 trillion.
• Only $1.2 trillion is owed to China.
• $10 trillion is owed to America.

Now you see why these Conservative cheapskate rich-boy assholes want their filthy mitts on Social Security (my personal feeling is G.W. Bush borrowed SS broke and filled it with IOUs). Check out the last two bullets. We owe China (a communist country) $1.2 trillion--but the US Government owes We the People of the USA $10 trillion. As the gentleman who said we'll never in a million years pay down these trillion-dollar debts, neither will the Government ever pay We the People back that $10 trillion it owes us. Do we, any of us, have any idea what 1 trillion dollars amounts to? Also note, too, that this debt doesn't include the 15 trillion in bailout bucks the Wall Street pirates (including that pompous ass fool Warren Buffett) stole right out from under our stupid noses.

I've said over and over that We the People of the USA have to be the stupidest people in the world. We are suckers and as W.C. Fields said, "Never give a sucker an even break." And trust me, in this country a sucker is fleeced before he's educated to these facts.

We are currently, whether the stock market agrees or not, in a recession (I say it's a depression, but then we're arguing Economics 101 semantics and Economics is not a true science; it's an empirical science based on number crunching for its "facts"). This recession was brought on by job losses and wages being driven down to Third World status. Our great corporations turned traitor on us during the 1980s and during the 1990s through a whole series of merging with European corporations to form a new nation now known as the Global Market Place. I was in the financial industry during the 90s and saw this whole thing transpiring. I saw that with these new global corporations, our largest corporations could turn traitor against their US charters and responsibilities, abandon their obligations to maintaining their US factories and their US labor force, totally turn their noses up at US regulatory laws (like this Free Trade bullshit that Slick Willie Clinton (an Arkansas hick) forced on us) and state laws to do as they pleased by shutting down US factories and putting millions out of work, selling our factory machinery to their newly found cheap labor pools in China and India and Singapore and Indonesia (remember when Nike went to Indonesia to make their overpriced sneakers?), countries ruled over by dictators who hate their own people and via hooking up with US global corporations inviting a return to slavery as the cheapest labor there is.

I have also said this many times, the Republicans are White racists, all of them. All rich White people are racists no matter their names or their party affiliations. President Obama is trapped in this. The Repug presidential candidates know this--name me someone Black other than the same ole Uncle Toms (Clarence Uncle Tom-ass; Herman "Yassuh Boss" Cain) who's a high-ranking Republican? Like Jesse Jackson recently said, Obama is in the sights of a Republican racist firing line. They seem to be begging for some nutjob to take a potshot at and hopefully hit President Obama. That's not saying Obama is not an Uncle Tom himself. I mean come on, he needs a billion dollars to run for president and what average American can afford to contribute that much money to his campaign? He's got to kiss some rich White ass in order to gain that money advantage.

I'm not at all happy with Obama's presidency. He's missed so many opportunities to be the greatest president we've ever had. Have you noticed he hasn't spoken much about his grass roots support this year; he hasn't ever mentioned FDR and the New Deal; he never mentions that all of this mess we're in now is the fault of ignorant Republicans like Ronnie Reagan (remember the dollars stretching to the moon?), G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush (Voo-doo economics), or G.W. Bush. He has never said that our involvements in these superstupid wars, all of them unnecessary and foolish and downright illegal, are the biggest reasons for our country's dilemma. He has never said Republicans historically have always been pro-rich and a threat to our poor and downtrodden, those that Statue of Liberty that stands so obvious out in my hometown's harbor is supposed to welcome to our shores, the oppressed in the world seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity (remember it was a gift from France).

Of course, a hell of a lot of White Dumbocrats are racists, too. My ex, a Black woman, truly believed in her heart all White people are racists when you pin them down. If White people aren't racists, then why is the world's largest prison system filled with Blacks and Latinos? The White men who came up with these financial schemes that have left the nation bankrupt go free without even getting their wrists slapped. BP, a White (England) oil company that practically wiped out our beautiful Gulf Coast waters and beaches, got off with barely even getting their wrists slapped.

Ask yourself, how can a numbskull idiot like Rick Santorum be a close call in Republican primaries in Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado? Think about the racial divisions in those three states. Michigan that has allowed its greatest city, Detroit, to become a no-man's land. All the Whites fled the city and left it to poor hopeless Blacks. Or Flint, Michigan. Once a proud city with plenty of factory jobs (Buicks and Chevrolets (now made in Mexico or Canada) were once made there) is now the #1 most dangerous city in the USA. And Minneapolis. Come on. How many Blacks have any influence in Minneapolis? And Colorado. Check back in Colorado's history and you'll see its White history is full of murderous actions against Native Americans and Blacks and Latinos. I can recall when the Democrats held great presidential campaign rallies in Cadillac Square at a time when our unions had gotten us off the 6-day work week; had gotten overworked workers overtime pay (name me a corporation today that pays overtime). I remember a time when benefits were incentives for workers to do better work--benefits like decent health care to keep your workers healthy; benefits like life insurance policies in case something tragic happened to a worker or his family; benefits like holidays; benefits like sick leave.

I have said over and over that the perfect Capitalist labor is slave labor. It breeds slave labor. These big White-run corporations are making record-breaking profits; yet, workers in this country not only are losing their jobs every day (to hell with Obama's adding new jobs--he's lost more jobs than he's created new ones--it's easy to check if you have sense enough to use Google); they are having their salaries cut to the bone; they are having their pensions stolen out from under them; they are losing their homes, their land...Jesus, it's so damn obvious; yet, We the People of the US are so stupid we can't see the truth for the boldface lies. Like Newtie "the Excused Adulterer" Gingrich promising if he's elected he'll bring the price of gasoline down to $2 a gallon. That my friends is a boldface lie. Our president has nothing to do with the prices on the world oil market.

The Global Market Place is a plantation system. Cheap labor has always been the goal of this bunch of fat-cat authoritarians. There is currently a big fight over the minimum wage, which is $7.50 an hour. Think about that. Let's say you work your overworked ass off at Walmart (now a Chinese company though still managed by the racist hayseed Walton family out of the backwoods of Arkansas) for 8 hours a day 6 days a week. At $7.50 an hour, you're making $360 a week. Whoooo! Big bucks right? But, wait, they are taking 60 bucks a week out for taxes, which leaves you with $300. $300 x 4 (weeks) = $1200 a month. 1200 x 12 = $14, 400 a year. WOW! In the meantime check out Walmart's profits. They're soaring. While you're making $14, 400-a-year some worthless Walton hick is offshore banking multimillions--all inherited money. Remember, G.W. Bush, that little worthless criminal prick wanted to do away with the Estate tax and Obama has ass-kissed Repuglicans into exempting these sorry bastards $5 million bucks. This is why you see the worthless Kennedy kids driving around drunk in BMW sports cars.

Who Votes for These Fools?
It makes no sense to me why anybody, even a true believer, would vote for this Republican superpack of Yahoos. Yet, somebody does. I actually heard on corporate teevee a woman seriously being interviewed by a "serious" talking-head pundit who gave "serious" reasons why she was voting for Rick Sanatorium. Then you have to remember, our worst president in our history, G.W. "Baby Boy" Bush got elected--OK, so he stole the election--he only had to have his brother Jeb steal 50,000 votes to win in 2000 (a true grey day in our history)--and then he was re-elected in 2004--again, so he stole the vote he only had to steal a few thousand in Ohio to win. In both elections both Dumbocrat candidates caved in and conceded without a fight [those two big spoiled-brat rich phonies, Al Gore and John "Fake Vietnam War Protester" Kerry].

I think it would be quiet interesting if Rick Santorum became president. Think about it. He's an idiot so he'd probably stumble-bum worst than G.W. "Baby Boy" Bush, our worst-ever president to date. Maybe start World War III. How grand would that be? Plus, he'd try to declare Christianity as our national religion. I'd love the chaos just that alone would create. You think Rick would be bold enough to bring back Black slavery--after all, Blacks are condemned by his God to serve the White man.

The Way to Pay Off the Debt
How 'bout we just print up trillions of new dollars and just pay it off?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: The Heart Being a Lonely Hunter

Foto by tgw, New York City, February 2012
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Say goodbye to: Mike Melvoin, a truly fine jazz pianist with a lot of blue notes in his competent style. I first heard him in L.A. with old crazy Frank Rosolino, the absolutely unbelievable trombonist (crazy because he came in one night and shot and killed his wife and kids and then himself) and then later Mike appeared with Frank on one of Oscar Brown, Jr's, 1962 jazz teevee shows, Jazz Scene USA. I hate to see these cats leaving the coil; jazz pianists don't live much past their mid-seventies. Mike Melvoin, 74, American jazz pianist and composer, cancer.

Say goodbye to: Red Holloway, the tenor sax man who was on all those old blues jump recordings that the late Etta James made back before she hooked up with Houston Pearson. Red Holloway, 84, American jazz saxophonist (Etta James), stroke and kidney failure.

Say goodbye to: Maurice Andre, the great classical trumpeter. Maurice André, 78, French classical trumpeter.

Say goodbye to: Louisiana Red: Last time I saw Lawsbanana Red was at a WBAI-New York benefit. He was married to Odetta and they were working together. Louisiana Red, 79, American blues musician, stroke.
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Bellevue Hospital
Leonard Feather was a rather foppish Brit dude who came to this country as a jazz pianist, promoter, journalist, and jazz aficionado who rose to a prominence in the field especially being known for his "Blindfold Tests" in Down Beat in which he played jazz recordings for famous jazz people and then had them try and identify who they thought were the cats playing on those records. In 1945, Dinah Washington with the Lionel Hampton Sextet recorded Leonard's "Blow Top Blues" (Leonard's on piano on the recording). The last verse was:

Last night I was five feet tall/
Today I'm eight feet ten/
And every time I fall downstairs/
I float right up again/
When someone turned the lights on me/
It like to drove me blind/
I ended up in Bellevue/
But I left my mind behind/
I'm a gal who blew a fuse/
I've got those blow top blues

As a very young kid in the process of becoming a jazz aficionado myself and crazy about anything Lionel Hampton put out, I bought a 45 rpm Decca recording of "Blow Top Blues." And that was my first impression ever of Bellevue Hospital. Yes. Bellevue was a crazy house. A rubber room. A funny farm. And then once I had Bellevue pegged as such, I heard the comedians and Hollywoodians making fun of the little men in white jackets from Bellevue coming to get us all.

In jazz, crazy was a big word. "Crazy, man, crazy." And a lot of jazz guys went crazy off and on. A lot of jazz guys had to visit Bellevue. Some were in the crazy bin there; others were sent there by the NYC cops after drug busts.

It is a city hospital. Oldest hospital in New York City. It's the oldest public hospital in the USA. Founded in 1736.

Bellevue Hospital, 1878

But, yes, Bellevue still rhymes with "loose screw" and "purview" and "boo-hoo" and
"unstuck glue" and "fuck you." But also it is a "free" hospital. Did'ja hear me? A free hospital.

Getting to Bellevue
When I was a loose screw, around 8, 9, 10, my family once took a trip over to Palestine, Texas, to visit one of my maternal grandmother's cousins, a man named Mack Dockery. Palestine, named for the Holy Land (truth up: Palestine, Texas, was named after Palestine, Illinois (the oldest city in Illinois--1811), by a weird-side Baptist preacher named Daniel Parker (check out his Wikipedia entry to see how weird he was) who had moved to Texas from this Illinois area (near the Indiana border) named by French explorer Jean Lamotte who first gazed upon this region in 1678. He gave it the name Palestine, as it reminded him of the promised land of milk and honey, as written in the scriptures)--and, yes, Palestine used to be the Holy Land, though now it's the lowest most dog-driven-down country in the Middle East; Israel having taken over now as the Holy Land (a huge portion of the Columbia spacecraft wreckage (remember, it crashed during G.W. "Georgie Porgie" Bush's faux-first-presidency)(in 2003) came to earth just outside Palestine, Texas; ironically, this was the flight on which the first Israeli astronaut died).

When I was young, Palestine, Texas, was home to an annual dogwood festival celebrating the dogwood tree, a Middle Eastern tree that was said to once grow as tall and mighty as an oak tree with a wood so hard and solid, the Romans used it to make the crosses they hung criminals on. Some backwoods Christian legends say Jesus himself was hanged from a dogwood cross and that three days after this fabulous man's death and after his fabulous resurrection all the dogwood trees in Palestine began to wither and die and that after that, too, the dogwood flower had the sign of the cross burned into it.

A Pink Dogwood Blossom--like all Christian legends, it takes a huge imagination to believe them--like this blossom, do you see the sign of the cross in it?

Palestine, Texas, was also a major railroad town back during the 19th and into the 20th Century and is still to this day home to the Texas State Railroad, one of the oldest Texas railroads, which is now a railroad museum and historical site.

Uncle Mack Dockery had worked on the railroad. I, as a little kid, was one curious little dude. I poked my nose into anything that caught my desirous fancy, and Uncle Mack was one of those fancies. When we drove up in Uncle Mack's yard--very few people from that era ever had car garages or driveways with their houses that had been built back before the automobile was invented so you simply parked your car up in their yards--very few houses had grassy lawns; only hardscrabble earth. Trees, yes, and Uncle Mack's house had two huge dogwoods at each corner of the house. Hung on the front of his house was a huge wooden porch embraced by flowering vines like honeysuckle and many pot plants of gardenias, a shady place for cooling off during the hot Texas summers. Like most porches, too, in those days, Uncle Mack's porch had a porch swing and a clustering of other chairs, mostly straightback kitchen chairs.

As we got out of the car I thought I heard a heavenly music. I'd never heard such music before. My ears perked up and I couldn't wait to find out where the music was coming from. Out of the car, we were soon met by Uncle Mack's wife, Aunt Dosie. "Oh, my goodness," she said, "Cousin Elfie and the Wolfes. My goodness gracious alive, I ne'er thought you folks would ever make it over here to see the likes of us. Come on in the house and rest your weary bones." Damn the greetings, I was looking for the source of the music. It got louder as we trooped up onto that porch and soon Aunt Dosie was saying, "Mack, Cousin Elfie and her daughter and her husband and chile are here." The music stopped and soon we were in the presence of Uncle Mack Dockery. "Hickory, Dickory, Dockery, a bunch of Dockeries ran up the clock; the clock struck 15, but another 30 got away."

Uncle Mack was a short man very neatly dressed in a starched white shirt, buttoned up all the way to the top but without a tie, and tan gabardine pants, highwater pants since the cuffs ended way above his shoetops, and were held up even higher by a brace of plain brown suspenders. His hair was solid white grey. I was poking with my nose trying to see if Uncle Mack had been the source of that heavenly music I'd heard on exiting the car. I looked at his hands. In his right hand he held a small metal-looking object; it was shining silvery in the afternoon sunlight.

"What's that?" I suddenly asked with wide-eyed curiosity.

"That's'a French harp," Uncle Mack replied, holding it up high so I could see it clearly.

"It makes music?" I asked.

"Yeah, pretty music," he said, lifting it to his lips and blowing.

Yes, that had been the heavenly music I had heard, Uncle Mack playing his French harp.

I watched intensely as he finished the tune I didn't recognize at all. I watched him huffing-and-puffing blowing on that small silvery metal and wood object. Another matter though soon caught my attention as I watched him take the harp down from his mouth. Uncle Mack didn't have all his fingers on either of his hands. Finger stumps on both hands, mostly long fingers, his little fingers and thumbs still normal.

"How did you hurt yourself?" I asked.

"What'cha mean?"

"You got no fingers...."

He laughed. "Oh, that. I was a brakeman on the old Groveton, Lufkin, and Northern. As a brakeman, I had to hook the cars together. We used what they called a link and pin coupler in those days, which meant as soon as the engineer backed the train into the uncoupled car, I had to quickly drop the pin into the hole that hooked the cars together. Occasionally I got a finger caught in the coupler while trying to drop the pin in and a piece of my finger would be pinched off." He held his hands up. "I lost first the top of a finger, then the next joint, then the middle joint and so forth."

Then Aunt Dosie came out of the house. "Are you two comin' in? We're having some lemonade right now and I'm fryin' up some chicken for supper. Mack, would you go out to the well and bring me in some water. And bring in some ears of corn from the cellar."

Later I would find out what Uncle Mack was playing was more commonly known as a harmonica. Yes, they were also called French harps or just plain harps. I would not see another one until I was married and living in New York City--we had just moved here from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that fall we got an invite to visit friends on Cape Cod in South Wellfleet. While there, one day we drove into Provincetown and went to the Atlantic House whose music venue at the time was the Blues. In one counter in the store area, they had a bunch of harmonicas for sale. On a whim and remembering Uncle Mack's French harp, I bought one. It was a Hohner Marine Band and for several hours I just looked at it, afraid to try and play it. I had no idea really how to play it.

I don't know what happened to that original harp I bought. All I know is I didn't figure out how to play one until further down the line. I really got into harp playing during the 1980s, after being a keyboardist and vocalist with a downtown cult band and with bands that theryefarmerfromqueens and I put together. I have an old recording of my playing the harmonica with the rye master and it's not bad but it's not good either. One other time I suggested I play harmonica with him and he said, "Do you really think you can play a harmonica?" I put it away and that was that for several more years.

Eventually, late 80s and into the early 90s, thebigrig and I formed a band called the New Gringos. We didn't want any keyboards in the band, so I suggested they let me try blowing a harp with the group. Our first gig was a total success. It worked. I was a harmonica king. I blew the dust out the thing and gave it a new life. (Actually, I now carry around 12 harmonicas to my gigs.) I might add here that the harmonica is one of the most difficult instruments to truly master in terms of sucking and blowing. In playing blues, you suck up for your key--like if you are blowing on a C harp, to play the Blues you suck up on it and you're in the key of G. It takes a lot of power and wind to blow on steadily correctly.

The New Gringos lasted several gigs and then thebigrig moved to Chicago and that was that.

Friday one week ago, thebigrig, now back in New York City for several years, called me and said he had gotten a gig at a downtown Manhattan joint (in SOHO) and he wanted me to come sit in. And that's what I did.

My gal and I trucked down to SOHO to the joint and we got a table in front of the bandstand and ordered drinks and food and then the band started playing. About midway through the first set, the Rig Man called me up to do a tune, "Natural Ball," a really open-eneded wild Otis Rush version I had done years ago with this band--up tempo, vigorous, mean--and I went up and started blowing. Immediately I felt myself losing strength. I had to sing wide open, exhausting, but then I tried to take a wild harp solo and halfway through it, I realized, I was totally out of breath. After the tune finished, I went back to my table and I had a bad case of heartburn, I thought.

Sitting there gasping for breath, I remembered one time years before I had gone in my fav bar at the time and I said something about having an upset stomach and the bartender said, "I've got the answer to your problem," and he went and made me this drink and I threw it down and soon my stomach was mellowed out and I felt great. "What was that you gave me?" "A Campari and so-deee," he replied. So remembering that I stopped drinking beer and ordered a Campari and soda and after one sip, my heartburn went away and I felt like a king on a throne and soon the band was calling me back up and I did two tunes, Herman Parker, Jr.'s, "Drivin' Wheel," followed by Fats Domino's "Josephine" and I starred like the champ I am and got great rounds of applause and went back to my table and people started coming over and telling me how great I was, which I love. No musician can resist praise and all that praise made me feel invincible.

I got home that night and my babe left me saying she'd be back the next day late and she came back around 8 at night and stayed here until around 10:30 and I left with her and we parted and I trotted on around on Fifth Avenue and got me a big meal, came home, and chowed down heartily.

At one in the morning I awoke with a tiny stabbing just behind my breastbone. I tried to belch it off but it wouldn't go away. Around three I felt terribly sick at my stomach and I got up and I vomited mightily, upchucking food I didn't even know I had eaten. And then I went back to bed but a few minutes later I was back up throwing up again. The slightly little bugger of a pain still stuck behind my breastbone. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night.

Around 10:30 am, my girl came back bringing with her some Starbucks java. She immediately on seeing me said, "God, you look awful, are you all right?" I macho-ed it up and told her, "Yeah, I've got a little touch of heartburn...it should go away as soon as I get up and get active." But it didn't go away. Finally, my glorious woman said, "I'm calling 9-1-1. I think you're sicker than you think...like you could be having a gald bladder attack...blah, blah, blah." In my best male machismo stance I told her, "Naw, don't do that, I'll be OK." She was by now in a panic mode and I was berating her, "Come on, babe, don't fret over me, I know my body, this will clear up. All I need is a little sleep and I'll be alright." So I went up and got in bed and soon I had dozed off into the netherworld and lost track of civilization. Then I heard my lady waking me up. "I called 9-1-1 and the EMS crew will be here any minute now." I again donned my most male peacock arrogance and said, "Oh, baby, call 'em back and cancel it...besides, I can't afford an EMS trip...they charge out the ass." She went out into my hall pretending she was canceling the order and came back in and said, "It's too late, I can't cancel it, they're already here."

Next thing I know, the EMS guys were here and they put me in the little green-canvas chair with rollers on it and were wheelin' me out to the ambulance, which was parked across my street. In the chair as I exited the building, I was campaign shoutin' and waving at passers by like a Southern politician (from Chuck Berry's "Nadine"), having a young ball until they got me in the back of the ambulance and they got me laid back on a stretcher and one guy immediately hooked an EKG device up to me. The EMS guy, and they were great guys, too, I must add here, looked at me suddenly and said, "Pal, you're having a heart attack...we're taking you directly to Bellevue--they've got a cardiac team ready and waiting for you."

And off I went on my first-ever ambulance ride. Through the streets of New York City. And soon we arrived at the Bellevue ER where I was wheeled on through to the cardiac salvation center like a VIP and next thing I know doctors were inserting the angioplasty tools into my groin and I passed out and when I woke up I was in CPU and feeling fit as a fiddle.

"Wha' happened?" I asked the attending doctor on waking up. "You had a blood clot in the first of the three main arteries that enter your heart, right at the top of your heart. If you'd have waited another hour, you'd be in bad shape, brother, if not dead."

I had undergone angioplasty--the little balloon had been blown up and opened up my artery and after sucking the blood clot out they inserted a bare metal stent. The whole procedure had taken only a couple of hours. "We'll keep you here in CPU for two or three days and watch you carefully and we'll start you immediately on medications...we've got a nitro drip in you now. The problem is the lower half of your heart may be dead--we're worried it's not squeezing the blood out and we've got to thin your blood so a major clot doesn't develop in that end of your heart. You're lucky to be alive. Instead of two in the afternoon, you should have come here at two in the morning. The damage may be irreparable...."

Cool as a cucumber I was. "Do you know where you are?" one doctor asked me, a typical question all patients are asked after such a procedure, and I said, "Yeah, I'm in Bellevue...though I hope I'm not in the psych ward."

And that was that. I had a heart attack.

Five days later I was sent up to rehab and after a horrible night dealing with a crazed Puerto Rican roommate (he had a full-time guard sitting with him), the next morning I told my doctor, a Dr. Wolfe, by the way (remember my parallel-line theory of those you meet), "Doc, you better get me out of this fuckin' psycho's room or I'm gonna go psycho."

By five o'clock the Thursday after I'd enter the hospital on Sunday afternoon, I was released and sent packing after I picked up a paper sack full of medications from the pharmacy--seven different medications, plus an RN taught me how to give myself injections of coumadin, a blood thinner that is an amazing drug--it's also known as warfarin.

Back Home
I've been back home in the saddle now for two days. I'm feeling fine. As fit as a cheap fiddle if not a Stradivarius. I just returned from a big dinner up at my fav Irish pub where they now have me my own table. I've had to give up beer for the moment; certainly no more whiskey; although my Doctor Wolfe said that in the near future, he thought a couple of beers with a very lean steak would be just fine--as long as I didn't overdo it. SMOKING is the big no-no and since the only cigarettes I've ever smoked in my life are Mexican roll-your-owns, and I've certainly giving those up, too, I'm told I should recover nicely and, if I'm lucky, the bottom half of my heart is just stunned and these injections of warfarin I'm giving myself may one day get it to squeezing the blood on through once again.

The Daily Growler almost had to give a "Say goodbye to: our own Wolf Man...blah, blah, blah."

My life was saved by a woman friend I've known for 22 years; I hired her as a proofreader but also got her into editing and got her an editing job where we worked after I was fired. After moving on up to become a director of editing with this world firm, she's now a successful free-lance editor working out of Poor Little Rhode Island. Her insistence to get me to Bellevue has me now obligated to her for as long as my new-old heart can hold on and continue pumping life into me.

And what a great bunch of friends I have; musicians are so lucky when it comes to friends for life and I'm no exception to the rule.

My closing remarks, "It's great to be alive."

thestilltickinggrowlingwolf(tooyoungtodie)
for The Daily Growler

Existing in Pre-WWIII New York City Under the Drones: Going Downtown Again

Foto by tgw, "The Sun Over Sixth Avenue Shot Through Window Glass,"
New York City, Feb. 2012
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Going Downtown Again
People find it hard to believe how bound I am to my Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. My main occupation in life takes place in my apartment, my workplace, my laboratory, my recording studio, my computer center, the site of my collections, where I write, from whence comes my worth, my wealth.

I leave my apartment at 5:30 am every weekday and go out to my Afghan-American coffee man and get my first breakfast...then I read while I'm eating that breakfast. Then I listen to the radio around 8, mostly to Amy Goodman's little goldmine, Democracy Now, mainly for the news, though I'll stick around should she be having someone bright and visionary on; otherwise, if it's a boring 'cast, I'm back working on my own pastimes.

At 9:30 am I take another break for another breakfast when I go back out this time to a deli on 32nd, a place I've been acquainted with for 30 years now--one of the first workers I ever met in there still works there--they treat me like an earl or a duke in there and I frequent where I'm known and respected like that so I go there every morning for their oatmeal, which I lace with real maple syrup, and on the way back to my apartment, I stop a second time at my Afghan-American coffee man's wagon and get some chamomile tea (I curse the gods of my guts for driving me away from coffee)(admitting I drink chamomile tea instead of coffee sounds so not masculine--I have drank some red zinger tea here recently and that doesn't sound so bad as chamomile--it's a silly male thing, women readers) and then a container of mixed nuts from my Afghan-American fruit seller--it's weird buying fruit off the street in the middle of winter. Wasn't it cooler when mothers and grandmothers canned the fresh fruit we didn't eat in the summer for use throughout the winter?--up rears the smell of my mother baking a peach cobbler--or my grandmother baking her famous shortening breads and teacakes on which you spread all kinds of preserves she had jarred for winter use--even watermelon rind preserves--or whole apricots in their own syrup--or whole peaches in their own syrup with pieces of clove in the syrup.

I'm back in my apartment by 10--unless I need something from the drugstore, which is in the next block from me, or maybe I need to go to Staples for some packing supplies or new ink or blank CDs, their store only about three blocks from me over in what was at one time Korvette's (a NYC department store started by a bunch of Korean War Vets, thus the name Korvette's), and when Korvette's bit the dust, the building was re-sided and modernized to become The Herald Center, owned and proftited-from by Ferdinand and Emelda Marcos. To be honest with you, I no longer know what the building's called.

The rest of the day I work at whatever I'm working on at the moment until around 3:30 when I trot out to get my dinner (does anybody still call it supper?). Right now my afternoon occupation is going through hundreds of cassette tapes of me performing in clubs with various bands I either fronted or worked in over the past 30 years. Which brings me to the reason for this post. [I'm trying to be polite so I'm not bringing up for a berating the idiots who rule us in this post...at least not yet, though I'm boiling inside for a chance to growl at these nincompoop crackpots who are fighting like dogs trying to get their jaws on that big meaty bone running for president garners them--a bone that if they successfully get their choppers on it will give them the power they need to go up against the bigger dog, the incumbent dog--the prize being GUARANTEED PARADISE FOR THE REST OF THEIR AND THEIR CHILDREN'S LIVES COURTESY WE THE STUPID PEOPLE OF THE USA...whew, there, I got that out of my system.]

The reason for this post and the reason it's titled "Going Downtown Again" is just that, for the first time in maybe three years, I'm journeying downtown below 23rd Street...all the way downtown to SOHO. Me and my baby are going down to this SOHO joint where this swamp-blues band I used to play with has invited me to bring some harps and come sit back in my old chair with them for as long as I like--no pay, of course...oh, they'll buy me a couple of beers, but I'm still excited by it. I haven't been in front of an audience now in at least 3 long years, so it'll be fun to test my position in this music scene once again. I know all the band's repertoire already and my friend the band leader tells me he's got the boyz cooking on all four burners which is just the kind of band I like playing with...so I'm going back down to Downtown Manhattan. Down there where it was my neighborhood for 5 years...Spring and Greenwich...and what a neighborhood it was: full of Mafia hauling companies and a Chinese grocery warehouse (when this building caught fire one summer, they dumped all the burned can goods out in front of the building, a huge pile of exploded cans of all kinds of Chinese goodies, a tempting pile of goodies that suddenly out of nowhere called forth hundreds of rats to this vermin dining table) and a bunch of old wholesale outlet buildings that the new owners turned into loft spaces--my loft space down there was in an old butter and egg wholesaler building, 5 stories, with a roof terrace--only 900 square feet but brand new and sexy with brick walls and a huge plate-glass window with chicken wire in the bottom panes and with a door leading out onto an old iron fire escape which we turned into a place to sit out in the summer and smoke weed and drink beers and barbecue (and I add here, my first year in this loft I trapped over 100 mice). And down Greenwich on Canal were all these old warehouse spaces artists had turned into studios--and we all hung out at the Ear Inn on Spring Street--it's still there--but oh how that neighborhood has changed. It has been totally taken over by the real estate-developer moguls like Donald "Phony Baloney" Trump (why does a man if he's so rich keep going bankrupt with his properties while depending on a truly dumbass teevee show for his income?--oh sure, I'm sure, the Donald has stashed away millions in offshore banks all around the world--and, yes, I don't deny he's rich, but he's cash poor as Job's turkey--but here I go growling into the hot-air wind again--though it was fun to see one Trump's max-tacky Trump Places on fire here the other night--nice little blaze--put firemen in the hospital, though it wasn't reported as being a bother to the ultra-special-elites who can afford the outrageous rents old Don Boy needs to keep his empire afloat--look out when the Donald develops in your neighborhood. He guarantees he'll ruin it for you).

Leaving my neighborhood is a trip for me; I plan my trip to Downtown Manhattan same as if I were going to Cape Cod or Timbuktu. First of all I need the right clothes--it's cold here these days so I need to wear my nicest winter wardrobe. Next I need to pack what I need to take with me--in this case I need to carry 12 harmonicas--I've considered packing them in my Mexican leather briefcase--plus I need to pack enough money to get me to my destination and then have money enough to pay for the cost of my friend while at the gig and then have enough left over for dinner and the trip back to my neighborhood.

Back when I was younger I could easily walk from my neighborhood to this place. Back in the mid-90s, one day I found myself stone broke. I had to bust open one of my Rhodes electric pianos and dig out some Bicentennial quarters, about ten dollars worth, that I had placed in a thin aluminum slot that ran across the face of this one of my Rhodes from which most of these quarters had then fallen down into the instrument's insides. Then I got this gig playing every Sunday afternoon way down on West Broadway below Canal and I was so poor, living off those quarters--I survived on small coffees and Snickers bars, that I trucked my Korg M1 keyboard on my dolly via foot from 31st to West Broadway and Moore, a matter of several miles. That's no longer possible--I'm not inclined to long-distance walks anymore. You see I got spoiled on the last job I worked on. A job, which ironically I got from one of the persons who came to hear me at this bar where I played on Sunday afternoons. I saw her sitting at the bar working on sheets of paper, working with a pencil as though she were editing...so I simply walked up to her and asked her what she was doing and she told me she was editing and I told her I was one of the top editors in New York City and she said prove it to me and I'll put you to work next Monday morning--so by the next Monday, I was back in the old work saddle again and ridin' the range for a multi-million-dollar pharmaceutical ad agency making the enormous (to me) sum of $40 an hour.

My neighborhood is one of the coolest in Manhattan--though with the encroachment of this plethora of "cheap" hotels springing up all around me and these truly ugly hi-rise condos that are also springing up like nuked mushrooms around me are gradually ruining it; yes, this neighborhood is gentrifying--the most recent neighborhood-destroying invader being a Holiday Inn that took its Israeli-Indian (India Indians not Native American ones--do we White people allow American Indians to own property?) investors 5 years to build and which has now got the union rat out in front of it notifying people that this Holiday Inn's staff is made up of illegal immigrants (nonunion), mostly Mexican and South American illegals, to which they pay minimum or below minimum wages ($8.00 an hour is generally the most you have to pay the most skilled illegal immigrant). Already people are staying at this hotel. The beds sat in that unfinished hotel for two years before they opened just last month--how clean do you think those mattresses are?--how clean do you think that carpeting is? Our neighborhood Holiday Inn was once up a block from me in the old Martinique Hotel, but they soon sold that off to the Radison chain and now that old welfare hotel that held hundreds of single mothers and their crack-dealer boyfriends is "such a charming place to stay," say the tons of hinterlanders and Euro-Trashers who come over here because it's cheap. Soon, I think more and more Euro-trasher types will be moving over here for good as Europe falls into total Chaos--the brave Greek people right now burning down Athens rather than give up 23% of their incomes to a Goldman-Sachs-imposed austerity plan--Goldman-Sachs the very pirates who got the Greek government in debt in the first place. If Greece goes, so goes the Euro Union--and also so overflows that chaotic economics into this country, as Communist China and once peasantland India are becoming the major economic powers in the world. [Did you know there are more billionaires in Moscow than there are in New York City now? Do you believe that? One Russkie billionaire has come to this country and invested heavily in our real estate and even buying one of our professional basketball teams. What if he decided to move the New Jersey Nets to Moscow?]
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Women Are an Abomination
Christians blame original sin on women's vaginas. Why did this Christian fictional God give women inverted penises? Why if it weren't for that hole down there between women's legs men wouldn't have anywhere to proclaim their macho and their power over women. A man's macho power is in his erected penis--his gun--his pistol--his baby-making apparatus--his most pleasurable extension out from his usually pleasure-less body. That hard penis is man's ruling rod. It is his power over women.

Women, you see, were a second thought to this Christian fictional God who is according to the hypocrites the reason this White nation was created. According to the fictional tale from whence Christianity comes, this Big Daddy in the sky somewhere (to early day Christians, most of whom were illiterate and superstitious, that place is just above our planet's clouds) first had to create light. Damn right, this God can't see in darkness no more than we human monkeys can, so he put a little light on the subject. It doesn't say he made the SUN, by the way--for that truly ignorant God thought the Sun sailed around the earth--he also thought this planet he created was flat--kind'a dumb for a God, isn't it? One would assume since there are 8 uninhabitable planets in our galaxy, God had to create and then recreate a whole stew of planets in order to finally come up with one he deemed a garden, a perfect place for this Big Daddy to reside. By the bye, that part of the tale has never been clearly explained by all the Christian tale-spinners and true believers I've ever known. Did God live in his fictional Heaven (Hebbin')? or did he live in the Garden of Eden? Next after he gave illumination to the planet earth only, one assumes this since space is very dark, he created a bunch of wild animals--beasts they are called in the fictional book of Christianity. Was this Big Daddy a zoologist? Why the beasts of the jungle and fields before man? Then one day he decided to make Adam. This fictional Big Daddy in the Sky took a little dust (because you see this Big Pappy later says we come from dust and we will end up dust--except for our bones), spat in it and I'll be damned, out popped Adam. [You see, spit was very important in Christian fables--like Jesus spat a lot into dust to make his so-called miracles (today's medical doctors can perform miracles Jesus had no idea could be performed--like heart transplants)(you know, Jesus brought a dead man back to life after he was already in his tomb--though that doesn't mean he was dead since these birds didn't really know when a person was really dead or maybe in a coma--don't you think those Jerusalem physicians would have proclaimed a person in a coma dead on the spot? But these modern-day Christian trumpeters blow over and over the proclamation that this fictional Messiah they truly believe in (the Jews don't even mention this dude in their histories nor do they see him as any kind of Messiah they're looking for) was supernatural because "HE raised Lazarus from the dead!" There were no life-support systems in those days--so vegetable-ized Judeans were considered dead and thereby buried quickly and forgotten).

I love watching these modern-day "faith" healers at work--yes, I watch my Christian television network faithfully--like the other night I saw this pompous fool, Richard Roberts, he's old dead-and-gone Oral's worthless son, healing his flock of true believers. I mean this rather imbecilically self-centered creature was saying that his Holy Father Oral (his Big Daddy in reality) had passed onto Little Richard on his death bed his healing power and that that healing power was evident only in this son of a lesser god's right hand. So old Richard has by inheritance become a near-God himself. He certainly lives a life of a god, folks, with Rolex watches, Corvettes, BMWs, Mercedes sports cars, his own private jet--hell, Little Dick Roberts inherited his own university, ORU, who do have a good basketball team because of the many converted Africans who come there to get sanctified in the Fables of Oral Roberts but to play basketball, too.

So old Richard (a true Dick) puts his God-powered right hand on the foreheads of his flock of usually older women and then he goes into his supernatural self and he says, "I command that that cancer LEAVES YOUR BODY NOW! I cast it out of your body and leave your body cancer free forevermore...." And this is followed by holier-than-thou groans and a host of "Praise the Lardy Lards" and "Oh, thank you, Jesuses" all around the room. I'm thinking, wait a minute, if Richard Roberts can cast cancer out of people then why wouldn't he be touring hospitals and healing all the millions of cancer patients our pay-or-die healthcare profiteers make billions-a-year off of? Believe me, if Richard Roberts could cure cancer that easily, the for-profit hospitals and the big pharmas or General Electric (they make imaging devices like MRIs) would have him suddenly die in his private jet's crashing somewhere; therefore, it's easy to conclude, this little Oklahoma hick can't cure cancer. And just think, Jesus, the Great Physician, had no idea what cancer was. A cancer-riddled Judean to Jesus was a stone sinner full of demons who were eating him from inside to out.

All of this diatribe due to the Republicans in Congress holding a hearing on contraception inviting only one woman witness to testify and then the committee head, this fool Darrell Issa from California, the Land of Fools, dismissed her as a witness because according to his idiot mind's interpretation of her credentials (she was a college student at a Catholic university), she was unqualified to discuss contraception--so that left only a bunch of male Christian blowhards to testify--all of this because of President Obama and his Repugnican geek opponents are sidestepping the big issues that are ruining this country to wile away presidential-election-year time on issues that are personal, private issues that have no business being ruled over in any way by a bunch of hypocritical male Republicans. My morals are no business of a bunch of true believing so-called Christian men--is Newtie Gingrich, that pig-jowled pompous ass, a qualified Christian? You think Newtie ever knocked up one of his mistresses? You think if he did and didn't want the little bastard he didn't send the mistress to an abortion clinic? Does Newtie have children? You never hear about these fools's children? Like Unka Dick, that true Dick of a feeble-minded and feeble-bodied man, had a Lesbian daughter. Hey, that's OK; at least his Lezzie daughter is a rightwing nutjob who keeps to her place. [Dick just shocked his backwards-thinking fans by saying he backs gay marriage--I guess his daughter wants to get married..."Daddy, say it's OK, please; I'm horny for a wife, Daddy...." Or is she the wife to be?]

The Democrat women in Congress got up and walked out of this hearing--and I'm thinking, whoa, ladies, why didn't you stay and shout the sons of bitches down with your parliamentary privileges. Elinor Holmes Norton (a three-name woman--they have different personalities than two-name women) tried to interject her two-cents worth into the matter but she was gaveled down by old Darrel Issa and his Repugnican male cohorts. No Democrat males defended their Democrat women.

But, hey, ladies, that's the attitude of these Christian men (OK, one's a Mormon, which to me makes him a bigger fool than those who truly believe in Christianity, a big ship of fools sailing off a deep end), including our "Christian" President; women to them are "mothers," "wives," "legal sexual partners," made by God to be in the kitchen cooking the man's grub, or in the bedroom fucking until she bingos with a son--an inheritor (modern men now accept daughters, though it wasn't that long back in our history when women were lower than dogs--our old Colonial White brothers married several women--why? Because a lot of young women died in childbirth in those days; once one breeder woman was dead, our old White forefathers went out and got 'em another young thing, knocked her up immediately, and if she died in childbirth, no problem, they already had their roving eyes on another young thing. Plus, their mistresses, too, got knocked up--look at old White Tom Jefferson's multicolored children).

Woman (the Woe of Man) tempted man into sin. A woman (Eve or Lillith?) got Adam kicked out of paradise. What happened to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve (and/or Lillith) got kicked out into the hardscrabble earth with their two worthless sons? Did it dissolve into thin air? Did God pack it up and take it back up above the clouds? What happened to it? [By the way, I was trying to mention that God made woman only after Adam bitched about not having something to fuck like he saw the beasts of the field and the jungle doing every time they got together when one of them mounted the other one of them, so, dammit, "God, why can't I have one of those?" So God took out one of Adam's ribs...I mean, come on, folks! Do you women want some man who truly believes such a cock-and-bull story to be your ruler?]

Such bullshit. As I've said before, everything coming out of Washington, District of Corruption, is basically lies. President Obama lies like a dog to us every day. Every speech he makes is basically a lie--maybe some truths founded on lies, which makes them lies, too. Like this current bragging by Obama about how 270,000 jobs were created in some last quarter or some such bullshit time period. This is absolutely not true. The truth is we lost jobs in the last quarter--we didn't gain jobs. The honest unemployment rate is around 20%; the lying one is at 8.3%, which is still a very high number of unemployed. And these lies will go on and on and on. H.L. Mencken told us this back in the 20s and 30s. When I was a kid, every adult in my family joked about how crooked politicians were--especially local politicians.

Obama is being lauded by liberals and neoliberals and lefties and women and Black folks as the better of the worst candidates ever even though he's broken every campaign promise he ever made and continues to compromise with total fools, total idiots, and he continues to hedge on the matter of fossil fuels destroying human life, human existence, not the world, we'll never destroy the world, only ourselves. Freud, though condemned today as a sham, was right about this death wish that comes to us through our instincts from the minute we're dropped into this strange place full of strange things and creatures including us.

I having been married three times never wanted children. I can't stand most children. Mainly because I can't stand most parents. However, like all males, I did find sex the most pleasurable of the many pleasures our instincts allow us. My first wife and I had sex but we were careful; women back then were very careful--not with men using rubbers but with an understanding of their cycles. My last wife believed she could not get pregnant at certain times a month. As a result, she and I were constantly having sex--and as a result, surprise, she got knocked up several times, too. We did not want children. So what did we do? We went to the Tender Loving Care center and got an abortion. My second wife was a first user of Enovid, the pill, and she faithfully took the pill and though we had a lot of sex, she never got knocked up. God help any of my wives and I would we have had kids. I'm just no good with kids. I can't tolerate their little irritating ways. I don't have the patience. Nor did my wives want to be burdened by kids. My second wife was a scholar. She was more interested in her privacy, her reading, her philosophizing, her writing than she was in ever being a mother. My last wife had a kid from a previous marriage--I treated him like an adult but if he fucked up doing something or hurt himself or needed correcting, he would not allow me any jurisdiction over him. One time he hurt himself working with me in a garden. He cut himself fairly badly, but when I tried to doctor him, he screamed bloody murder for his mother. He was her kid; not mine.

In the backwards White male-ruled state of Oklahoma, the White idiot nutjobs have just voted via an overwhelming majority of Praise-God votes fetuses human beings and also that male sperm is a human being, too; therefore in Oklahoma tonight not just abortion doctors are murderers but also every young jerk off beating his meat over some girly magazine or Internet girly site and who eventually spends his seed into a Kleenex is a murderer, too! Yeah. How backward can you get? And I owe Oklahoma a lot since I spent several of my earliest years in Enid, Oklahoma. When Oklahoma was still an integrated state; it had not been a state when slavery was legal (just think, slavery was once legal in this country--this land of the free (White men) and home of the brave (White men); this great nation that is now forcing its form of non-democracy democracy on the rest of the heathen world). Our nextdoor neighbor in Enid was a Black family and that situation early made me very aware of Blacks and I think helped keep me from becoming a solid White racist--though here, too, I must credit my family, especially my very modern grandmother the poet, with teaching me to respect all humans no matter their color--my parents really believed in the little song they taught me early in life: "Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world/Red and yellow, black and white/They are precious in his sight/Jesus loves the little children of the world." A bullshit ditty, but I interpreted it as meaning, though my White philosophers were trying to teach me that I was superior to all colored people who were God-and-Jesus-condemned heathen, that I, too, could LOVE Black people like the cute little girl that lived next door to me. You know, White Chrisitans (and White Mormons) believe that Black people are Black because of old Noah's Black son, Ham, the bastard, took a peek into old Noah's bedroom when he saw his old worthless dad dead drunk and naked, probably after just diddling one of his daughters, a wicked sin that thereby got old Ham driven out of paradise and exiled to Africa! To Ethiopia.

Anyway, that's enough diatribe (growling) for today. I'm on my way downtown to later be blowing my harmonicas and singing on stage in front of a packed house I hope and with my best gal along with me for moral and love support (she is one of the great ladies of the world--but that's as much about her as I'm revealing. I'm serious about this relationship so I don't want to jeopardize it by making this woman real. Remember, this blog is a novel in progress--I'm a character, OK, I am the protagonist in this continually present novel, which my last wife called simply "a diary." But then that's what journals are.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing Under the NYPD Drones in New York City: Women in Music

Foto by tgw, New York City, Feb. 2012
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Two Fabulous Women Musicians From Similar Backgrounds Led Down Two Different Paths
On hearing of Whitney Houston (her real name, by the way) leaving reality in the Beverly Hills Hotel--in the bathtub they are now saying--I confess to softening my semi-always-hard heart enough to feel kind of sorry for her--but then on the other hand, no I don't feel sorry for her. I understand her and how the phoniness of that life can be totally deconstructing. A phoniness (a staged life) she was forced into by her mother and her famous aunts and her godmother--can you imagine being young and Black and beautiful, born with a gifted voice, born into a gospel song situation with a mother singing in a gospel group and eventually bringing you into the group and then you were famous on the Black gospel circuit and then your mother crossed over and had a couple of secular hits--sin paying better than righteousness--and soon you are sucked into the artificial (civilized) spotlite by your mother, your famous aunts, and last of all the Queen of Soul as your godmother? And Whitney started off first as a gospel star, then she became a model, becoming one of the top models in the world before hitting it big time in the Pop Music World when old White Daddy Clive Davis came along and turned her into the biggest ever female music star ever--Whitney sold closed to 200 million albums--she had a constant flowing of Top Ten hits--and she got into acting--The Body Guard--and she got more Grammies than any woman ever--I mean you talk about the TOP OF THE WORLD--Whitney Houston was there. But at what a price. Though Whitney kept her right name, the only time she was ever real was when she was a baby and coming awake to the world. The real Whitney Houston was the one that was crying on the inside; that was lonely on the inside; all that in spite of the fame and the attention and attracting the hottest male stars of the time--and then picking the wrong one--Bobby Brown! And by then, folks, it was too late for Whitney. "Come on, baby, you know you dig this shit...you know you even sing better when you high, mama." I can hear old Bobby doing that to vulnerable Whitney--and Whitney Houston had that look of vulnerability in her beautiful but sad face most of her adult life--check it out, but oh what a voice she had, and what control she had, and reach, and she had the face and body to go with it and the fine clothes and then that Hollywood existence--and Whitney's head started getting twisted and Bobby got bored fucking her and started playing around on her, leaving her home scared, lonely, unloved, and knocked down loaded.

I once was interviewed by a girlie magazine's entertainment editor--it was a good interview and I was quite proud of it, even though it was in a man-boy jack-off magazine--anyway, in the interview--it was held over steaks at this very good Manhattan steak house--this guy, on finding out I was from West Texas and grew up out there among the originators of White Rock 'n Roll, asked why I had ended up in New York City singing with a downtown Manhattan cult band, as we were called, and not living like a rock star out in Vegas or Hollywood? And my answer was, "Roberto, if I'd a gotten famous back when I was young, you know, worth a million bucks by the time I was 21, I'd be dead now--you wouldn't be talkin' to me--I be like Elvis, found dead with my head in the toilet--probably in a motel or hotel room."

The musicians I grew up with and the most famous musicians of the day who produced all our music in some capacity got high either before or while they were performing. Before drugs became so readily available, the boys in the bands and especially the bandleaders were all heavy drinkers. My first job as a pianist was in a Dallas midtown club--in the club's piano bar where the piano was up on a stage behind and above the bar--my pay was all the beer I could drink while I was playing plus a case of long-neck Buds at the end of the gig. Many a night after the gig my brother would drive by to pick me up (I was staying with him) and he'd find me standing slumped against the club's front wall half-passed-out and then once in his car smelling like a brewery, though, he got used to it as I kept him supplied with beer for a long time--I worked that gig a couple of weeks--10 days of work, 10 cases of beer--240 bottles of Bud for my brother's fridge.

Later as a jazz pianist in New Mexico and on a road tour I did from Texas over to California, all us musicians had ways of obtaining pot (by the bales) or for a while tabs of LSD, plus we all still got free drinks during the gigs, most of which were in bars or lounges (I drank CC and 7s then). Plus some of the famous cats from around that area when they came back home brought high-grade horse (heroin) with them and thus introduced us to stronger drugs. On one gig, I was introduced to hash by this woman who had been living in Guatemala and knew how to make hash and she later also introduced me to opium-laced hash and smoking opium pills in a real opium pipe my brother had sent back from China when he was stationed over there in WWII--and what a woman she was, too, a musician follower--musicians turned her on so she turned them on in return. And on our days off--dark Mondays--we'd all get together and get high and drunk and eat fabulous meals and party hearty and listen to records all day.

So I can feel sorry for Whitney Houston, though I don't really feel that sorry for her. Though it is such a shame she sold her soul to the conjure devil and the musician's main devil appeared to haunt-corrupt her way all her famous life--remember the Lesbian tapes the London hotel dude claimed he had, Whitney in bed with a babe doing the double-backed beast in hard-rockin' rhythm?

So we say goodbye to Whitney "Lucky It Seemed, But Not So Lucky After All" Houston.

And a Woman Still Very Much Alive
Just before I heard that Whitney had died, I had had a wonderful LIFE experience via television--a good thing that can happen on television--but it was a Black folks tribute to Valerie Simpson and honoring Nick Ashford, who died just this last year, and let me tell you, people, I was taken by surprise. [You can watch a video of the show on the PBS Website.] I never was a fan of Ashford and Simpson. I just wasn't into that style of music--their music evolving out of their experience as song producers for Barry Gordy at Motown. And though I respected the Motown stars and their sounds, I was then nose-in-the-air into Jazz and Blues. Though I had known Valerie Simpson from noticing her as a back-up singer on a jazz album I had--I can't remember the album, though Lou Rawls pops into my head when I think about it, but I truly do remember her debut album, "Valerie Simpson"--and like I was into (and had the hots for) Melba Moore at the time because of her cuteness and the way she pitched a tune, I soon felt the same way about Valerie, all before I'd ever heard of Nick Ashford or knew they were openly married and then a songwriting team (they wrote "Let's Go Get Stoned" for Ray Charles, a tune I used to do in my show without realizing they had written it).

My first surprise was not related to the music but to how Valerie looks now--she's very what we used to call "squatty-roo" now--short and dumpy--and she used to have such a pure sweet-pretty face--but anyway--Jeez, it's hard to believe Nick Ashford was 70 when he died (born in 1941), which means Valerie ain't no spring you-know-what anymore--in fact she must be in her sixties--but let me tell you, folks--what a genuine person she proved herself to be on this television show. Wow.

And then Patti Austin came out--again I was surprised because Patti, who was a cute cute young lady in her heyday and who is still gorgeous of face, has bloomed out into a BIG MAMA type of woman--and Patti Austin did "You're All I Need to Get By," and, let me tell you, the woman can still sing--beautiful voice--and she nailed "You're All I Need to Get By" down "solid as a rock." And the back-up singers and the band were top-flight in a big-league professional way. Then Patti gave the stage up to two singers I had never heard of, Kindred, the Family Soul, a neo-soul group (I can't keep up with all the new genres) from Philadelphia, actually a married couple, Fatin Dantzler and Aja Graydon--Aja one of the biggest women I've ever seen--tall and a whole lot of woman--and they sang their asses off for Valerie--but then, the THANG happened: Valerie hit the stage on her own, first doing her famous solo routine where she sings a capella about how she doesn't need a keyboard, or guitar, or drums, she don't need nobody to sing her song--and Valerie showed 'em all how it's done. Her voice is still strong and her stage presence is the max--she totally dominated the performers--blew Patti and Fatin and Aja away--then going over to the piano and proving herself a fine pianist and accompanied herself with a medley of their songs--with the band eventually coming behind her and she closed the show with a truly magnificent performance--the music totally in her--another musician from out of the church setting, gospel music filled with the spirit of the ancient music that came to America with her forebears and gave Americans one of the most unique evolutionary continuums of musics ever, from Early Jazz (New Orleans), to Blues, to Swing, to R and B (Jump), to Rock 'n Roll, to Hip Hop, and to the classical aspect of it, Jazz. And Black gospel music came directly out of a Blues man, Georgia Tom, who went to Chicago and became Thomas Dorsey, and Valerie Simpson carries those feelings (instincts) and knowledges (practices) with her and expels her music through her singing and playing and performing so powerfully and naturally--and that's the problem with a mechanistically generated music like has taken over our music today--it's so mechanistically produced nowadays--our music production and recording companies global marketplace greed cats who have turned our music into virtual reality engineered "perfect" music beds and Pro-Tooled young men and women singers to the point whether they can sing in pitch or not doesn't matter because that pitch can be synthesized to put the worst of human voices into sync, pitched perfectly, to where weak-voiced White chicks and phony-voiced males can sound like they know perfect pitch and they have good ears--you catch my drift, I hope. Valerie Simpson coming up through the church doesn't need her voice Pro-Tooled. Her voice is natural, untampered with, and thereby so pure and easily manipulated by her musical brain, manipulated to where she knows her range and the places where she's strong, plus she's a damn good piano player (like Aretha Franklin). Well, to make this ramble shorter, I've got a whole new perspective on Valerie Simpson and the same old same old perspective on what brought Whitney Houston down. The comparison is so obvious. Both women learned their music in church. Both women met their future partners in the business. Valerie lucked out and got a real musician and talent in Nick Ashford while poor Whitney fucked up and hooked up with Bobby Brown who knows little or nothing about natural musical talent, his jive all Pro-Tooled and recorded "to perfection" in billion-dollar studios by studio engineers.

thegrowlingwolfoffthecuff
for The Daily Growler

Existing in the Plutocracy of New York City: Protected From Shia Muslims, Praise God

Foto by tgw, New York City, Feb. 2012
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An Insult to We the People of the USA: I just listened to President Obama boasting about the Justice Department "forcing" the world's most criminal bunch of felons to come up with 26 billion bucks to help the victims of their ruthless pirating practices--PRACTICES THAT RUINED OUR ECONOMY; RUINED OUR LIVES FAR INTO OUR FUTURE--THINK ABOUT THAT--AND THESE SORRY BASTARDS ARE GETTING AWAY WITH A FUCKING SLAP ON THE WRIST!!! And instead of being in the street like the Greeks, we're sitting on our asses waiting for the FUTURE to bring change for the better--BUT check out those Greeks, where some say civilization began; they're not taking this Goldman-Sachs-designed bullshit austerity crap. Instead, they're closing down the country; they're not only closing down Greece but these people are out to close down the European Union. HOORAY for the Greeks. Like Lord Byron, I'm ready to go over there and join the battle. I mean, come on, people, whoever you are who read this diatribe, yes, it's diatribe, it's crude, it's rude, but these characters I'm blaspheming are ruder and cruder and more filthy mean than I could ever be--and they have the power to make their meanness a reality--like the meanness that would make Ron Paul let his mother die rather than to charitably pay her cancer-treatment bills from doctors who won't operate on your dying ass if you ain't got a way to pay them their enormous salaries, salaries now guaranteed to keep them in an upperclass state by We the People of the USA.

How stupid are we? I'm doubly pissed because I don't have many more years to live and god-dammit, I was born in a war and after high school my ass was conscripted into the U.S. Army whether I liked it or not because of that insane Vietnam War. And during my early married life in New Orleans there was chaos all around us over the Civil Rights Act and integration and the marches and the beatings and killings and the pompous old Southern colonels yelling about the Confederacy Rising Again--"The South Will Rise Again," sang out White devils like old Leander Perez in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, when my wife and I worked for CORE in New Orleans and we lived an integrated life, openingly associating with Black coworkers or for me working with Black musicians, but still there was a war going on--a revival of the Civil War, another war which is still being fought today. After college and marrying and avoiding going to 'Nam and after the Civil Rights wars ceased, I got sucked up into the anti-Vietnam War movement and then when I first grew my hair long there was We the People's war against the immoral hippies (the counterculture) and then I watched on television as the Ohio National Guard shot to kill its own citizens that horrible day at Kent State--and god-dammit, I was moved further radical by that insane event pulled off by pretend generals ordering their little White monkeys to lock and load, little pimple-faced White boys so oppressed by these pot-bellied National Guard generals (they may be janitors in real life) they are willing to kill their own kind, kids their age. Then Reagan's skulduggery got us involved in the comically ill-conceived Star Wars waste of money and then this pretend president traded cocaine for arms (yeah, don't forget that--it was revealed in the Iran-Contra hearings), deals that were done out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas, while Slick Willie Clinton was the governor of Arkansas making $30,000-a-year, and we were supplying arms to the Contras in Nicaragua (over the Sandinistas and Daniel Ortega, who ironically later became president of Nicaragua anyway) and then Reagan murdered the legal government of Grenada because they were letting Castro's Cuban engineers build them an airport that could accommodate large jets--and Reagan's war follies were followed by Pappy Bush's New-World-Order presidency, this heartless old worthless piece of inheritance-sustained shit who in order to capture his former pal, General Noriega, before he could spill the beans on his and Pappy's and cocaine dealing out of Panama (don't forget the CIA flew drugs in and out of Nam, Cambodia, and Burma during the Vietnam fiasco), sent his Marines down there and after bombing a civilian neighborhood and killing 400 Panamanians captured his old drug-running pal--I STOP RIGHT HERE AND ASK, WHAT THE HELL DID THOSE 400 MEN, WOMEN, and CHILDREN die for?--lose their chance at living a full life--what for? So Pappy could capture Noriega. Just think, our Commander and Chief through his executive orders can bring about the deaths of millions of innocent human beings. Hitler was ostracized and universally hated for killing 6 million Jews, Gypsies, Gays, handicapped; yet since 2001 We the People's worker army (they are paid wages) have killed several million Iraqis and Afghanistanis and Pakistanis and Yemenites and Sudanese and Somalians--we go about the world killing on whims on suspicions on rumors on lies--WE THINK WE RULE THE EARTH!

Where's the PEACE (that passeth all understanding) I was promised as a kid? Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men I was taught every X-mas was the reason for Baby Jesus being born in that manger over there in that "peaceful" Judean city of Bethlehem--Jesus's Pappy and Miraculously impregnated Mammy were in Bethlehem to pay their taxes, by the bye, in case one of these phony Christian jack-offs starts railing against anybody paying taxes--hypocritical jack-offs to boot since all those Christian snake-oil selling fundamentalists collect millions of dollars a year and they don't pay one damn red cent in taxes--you dig it?

So Obama's in full presidential campaign mode now. You notice all the things he's suddenly bringing about--end to the Iraq War (bullshit), trimming the Defense Department's unaudited budget (bullshit), hinting that we'll be pulling out of Afghanistan within a year (also bullshit)--oh, let's see, Leon Panetta, that old hand-puppet stooge, leaked (or babbled) that we were getting out of there by next year--whoops, then an Afghan-based US military big shot said maybe Leon shot his old fart mouth off a little too early--such bullshit, over and over and yet We the People of the USA allow all of this to continue to be dumped on us--

I say let these Tea Party/Republican/Conservative/White bastards succeed from the Union. What states would we lose? South Carolina? Oh, boo-hoo; they're still a Confederate state down there anyway--at least the White folks are still Confederates. Or would we lose Gawjah? Oh my God--Georgia? And I say good riddance since Georgia is where the Atomic Bomb Energy Commission or whatever their name is now just approved the Southern Nuclear death squads the go ahead to build the first nuclear plants to be constructed since the 3 Mile Island explosion and leak. So let Georgia go backwards and nuke itself to death. Or even Minnesota, so what if we lose Minnesota? Seems like there are a hell of a lot of White jerks out there in Minihaha Land, I mean, voting for Rick Santorum to be their president, what kind of nuts are those Minnesotans? But then they put Michelle Bachmann in office, didn't they. And they once elected a phony rassler as their governor. Or South Dakota. Will we really miss South Dakota? or Indiana? or Louisiana? or Mississippi? or Alabama? In all of these states White people are living and ruling on stolen land--WAIT A MINUTE, even I'm living on stolen land--unless we're Native Americans, we all live on stolen land. Wow, that's amazing.

So our brave Justice Department has made a deal with these ultra-modern-day crooks--Wow, this whole thing riles me up--where if these buzzards pay 26 billion dollars--actually they're only going to be out about 8 billion in cash, the rest is paper shit--you see, like readjusting the fraud mortgages offering people struggling to pay these fraudulently sold mortgages lower interest rates--how stupid--and for the cash, these crooked sons of bitches, Bank of America (their stock went up yesterday, in spite of this "punishment"), Wells Fargo (We the People used to rob their stages; now they're robbin' us back), Ally (a conglomerate merging of crooks), J.P. Morgan-Chase (the original Chase was insane; and J.P. Morgan was a little ugly runt of a man who'd gladly sell his own mother into prostitution if he could make a buck profit off the deal), CitiBank...come on, you know who they are--and as for cash, listen to this, these felons are going to give those poor slobs who they wiped out, foreclosed on 'em, took their house, their car, their dogs, their cats, put 'em in the street, they have the nerve to say they're going to give these people $1500 to $2000 bucks a piece. Whooooo Boy! Holy Jesus Fucking Christ...I mean, these sorry bastards who We the People bailed out to the tune of FOURTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS, I say, Trillion, son, not chicken feed, son, but TRILLION...FOURTEEN TRILLION dollars--and they're being brutally punished by having to pay 26 billion...actually only 8 billion in cash.... Do you realize that 8 billion dollars is CHICKEN FEED to Warren Buffett, to Little Billy Gates (and even Old Pappy Senior Gates), Sweet Melinda Gates, Mayor Mikey Bloomberg--and don't get me started on that bastard--he's got a storm on his little-man-female-parts-grabbing hands--he's got the Occupy movement and pissed off citizens furious over his closing of 24, count 'em, 24 New York City schools, including Washington Irving High School, which means he's going to fire a whole host of teachers--this little bastard is moving to privatize the NYC education system--he's invested, as is the Bank of America, in Charter Schools, one of whom in Queens is run by one of Mayor Mikey's old buddies. Blatant and pompous dictatorial and who knows maybe giving himself permanent rule should he declare himself mayor for life--ruling like a Lord of the Manor over 14 million people--one little rich bastard has that much power, folks. Think about this: say you wake up tomorrow and you've won 65 billion dollars--how FREE would you feel? How LIBERATED would you feel? How POWERFUL would you feel? I saw it happen to my own flesh and blood, my brother one day due to stock options and law suits and his winning a big law suit to waking up a multimillionaire.

Again, I surrender...excuse my outbursts. I know where "peace perfect peace" is. And it's coming soon to me, but in the meantime, I'm still asking, where's the peace I was promised as a young American?
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Looking Under Obama's Skin
This current presidential election is becoming a White man's moment. The cream of the crop of White men are running raggedly furious against our first Black president, who, by the bye, is half-White, don't forget. I mean why is this aspect of Barack Obama constantly denied? He's Black on the outside, yes; but he could be mostly White on the inside, couldn't he? He could think like a White conservative, which he does. He's been essentially White trained from his life as a juvenile on up to today. His elementary school experiences were steeped in White rudiments; his high school and college experiences were steeped in White logic, principles, work ethics, and philosophy. His graduate work was in White law at the leading White institution in the USA, Harvard. Yes, having a Black wife and two Black daughters makes Obama very Black, but like I say, that's on the outside. Inside, he's more White than Black. He's more related to George H.W. "Pappy" Bush, Little G.W. Bush, and Ronald "Raygun" Reagan than he is to FDR or Lyndon Johnson or A. Phillip Randolph or Thurgood Marshall or Martin Luther King.

Yes, Obama has suffered racial profiling and prejudices; he still does. Like Rupert Murdoch, that asshole, running the cartoon of the cops shooting the wild-eyed jungle-reverting monkey--remember the monkey that ate the face off the White woman?--the monkey looking exactly like Barack Obama. This you can't deny. On the other hand, his mother's influences had to outweigh those of the father he really never really knew.

Do you think Barack Obama feels nervous around Blacks like Cornell West, Amiri Baraka, or John Lewis? I know he does. Who does he feel more comfortable around? Why the CEOs of our largest and most-criminal corporations, like GE's job-cutting CEO, Jeff Immelt.

From The Cornell West Reader: “In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.”

I wonder just how much Marxism Obama understands? I wonder can he relate wages to our current economic troubles? Think about it: Why do our US CHARTERED corporations send all our factory-level jobs off to India, Vietnam, Singapore, China? CHEAP LABOR!

As our military's Commander in Chief and all the executive power and executive orders that goes with that designation, Barack Obama says that not many civilians are killed in his ordering of murderous drone strikes in Pakistan (14 civilians killed yesterday), Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, the Sudan because of their "scientific" accuracy--which I interpret as meaning "drone strikes are humanitarian in nature." This is how Obama justifies using them. Remember how we condemned Nazi Germany for using the deadly buzz bombs? At least that buzzing gave you notice they were coming and when that buzzing stopped you got ready to dive undercover quickly because the buzzing stopping meant the bomb was dropping and where it dropped one didn't know until the explosion and you were still alive or you were dead and gone.

Voting
I have already declared I'm not voting in this election. The choices are beneath me. So Rick Santorum becomes president? What the hell is he going to do that's any different from what Obama's doing? These creeps are simply extending this New World Order that G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush sprung on us during his administration that took us deeper into debt than even the debt that Ronald "NYC to Tokyo in Three Hours" Reagan put us in. Pappy's "1000 Points of Light" speech told us all about this.

Here's Pappy speaking (the idea came from Pappy's speech writer at the time, Peggy Noonan): "I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding. We will work on this in the White House, in the Cabinet agencies. I will go to the people and the programs that are the brighter points of light, and I will ask every member of my government to become involved. The old ideas are new again because they are not old, they are timeless: duty, sacrifice, commitment, and a patriotism that finds its expression in taking part and pitching in."

The jest of this sounds like Pappy cares for We the People. By a thousand points of light, Pappy is euphemistically referring to people in communities who in spite of their station in life do good; they work with local organizations, etc., in order to bring a moral purpose to Americans, or as Pappy says in the last line of the above excerpt, "The old ideas are new again because they are not old, they are timeless: duty, sacrifice, commitment, and a patriotism that finds its expression in taking part and pitching in." Have you caught Pappy's and my drift yet?

Pappy's worthless son, G.W., a lying bastard who got us entangled in a winless unnecessary war in Iraq turned Pappy's 1000 Points of Light idea into, "Hey, pahd'ner, if'n you wanna be like me, suck-cessful, then, jest like I did and my brothers did and my old Pappy did, you gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Just a reminder, but you must remember that George Porgie said he was going to invade and occupy Iraq (in about 5 days it would all be over and the Iraqis would be showering our conquering heroes with rose petalls, it was first claimed) and going after Sad-DAMN Hussein's ass because he had tried to murder his old Pappy--remember that excuse for that war?--a war that even after Colon's Pal made a mockery of We the People's intelligence in front of the world (I'm sorry, I'm so disrespectful, butt come on, Colon Powell's nothing but a monkey in a monkey suit that gives him military rank--a military Power Elitist who did the accounting of the dead for that son of the Old South, General Westmoreland, in that sorry worthless unnecessary war in Vietnam--2 million Vietnamese died so We the People of the USA could be protected from the very evil, from the Devil himself, Communism that John Foster Dullard (Dulles), Ike "FORE!" Eisenhower gave us this fool as his Sec'y of State, had predicted if we didn't stop it would take over all those Southeast Asian countries like lining dominoes up upright in a soldierly line and then knocking the first one down and they all fall in sequential order--the god-damn Domino Theory--a wild accusation by a bunch of Ivy League idiots--but then Colon's Pal (again, I have to stop and humbly be forgiven for my disrespect) was also involved in lying us into that Vietnam mess by being involved in the trumping up of the Bay of Tonkin aggression, an incident that was totally fictional, but it worked, it got us into that sorry war and killed 2 million "gooks" (that's what we called them--I know, I was in the U.S. Army at the time)("Now, trooper, you got a gook coming at you with one of those Russian AKs, it's either you kill him or he'll kill you." As I've said, the first thing the US Army teaches its new recruits is founded on the military's ability to make a stupid 18-year-old boy or girl put himself or herself in horrible jeopardy--risking his or her life--FOR WHAT? Blood, guts, and glory; yet, our men and women in the service get no glory when they return from our wars--ever notice that? Also, at the same time, that kill or be killed philosophy will turn him or her into a KILLER--it's a kill-or-be-killed situation. So even though Colon Powell so blatantly and embarrassingly lied, playing the role of Uncle Tom to a tee, before the General Assembly of the United Nations, with crude drawings of what Colon Tom said were missile sites with nuclear-headed missiles capable of either zooming all the way here on their own or else coming on one of Sad-DAMN's "drone" airplanes! Remember that charge?--even though these were blatant lies for going to invading and occupying Iraq We the People and our Congress went right along with it, all gung-ho, "YES, go get that dirty filthy Arab bastard--hang his fucking oily ass on one of his own statues! He tried to murder my daddy, dammit. Fuck, bin Laden, I'm not concerned about him any longer." (Remember Little Georgie saying that kind of shit? I've also got to remind you, Georgie Porgie was "elected" to two terms in office no matter what a lyin' skunk of a cruel, evil, criminal jerk off he was.)

I mean it's so hard for me to get to my point when discussing how our government and our corporations and our POWER ELITE delight in wars, wars, and more wars! Wars are profitable. Wars are good Capitalism at work. Look at just in the Armed Forces how many jobs war creates!

How Could He?
That question goes to President Obama: "What in God's holy name made you appoint Mike Taylor to We the People's Food and Drug Administration? What?" Yes, damn, Obama, he put Mike Taylor on our Food and Drug Administration, this little prick who comes to us by way of Monsanto, the company that is trying to monopolize world food production by forcing nations to outlaw heritage seeds (seeds gathered every year off their crops by farmers so they can plant them the next year thereby not having to constantly buy new seeds but actually using the same strain of seeds for centuries. Monsanto's plasticized-Round Up-sedated seeds can only be planted one planting season at a time. To plant your next crops you have to buy new seeds from Monsanto. Plus Monsanto is into the wild-eyed-crazy producing of bio-genetically-designed foods--using pig genes and trout genes and, who knows, maybe horse fetus genes--who the hell knows what genetic confusion these seeds are causing now and in the future, and for what? What do you think, folks? To please their stockholders by showing more and more profits and stock splits and warrants and shit like that. The true 1%--like Warren Buffett and Little Billy Gates--have billions in the stock market--how many bucks have you shoveled into your stock portfolio?

Empirical Dominance in All Fields, Especially Our Farm Fields
We the People of the USA are now living in a militarized society ruled over by a bunch of power-hungry world-power-player strivers--like President Obama truly believes along with that Congressional bunch of idiots that he rules the world; that he controls the action in the world. And now they're talking about militarily getting involved in Syria. And why not? Let's invade every country in the world; let's firmly establish the USA Empire--by controlling all that Middle East oil we will control the world. And Larry Summers, that sleazy jerk, will be head of the World Bank. And with Blackwater's criminal help, Monsanto will finally gain control of the world's food supply. [Note: Monsanto has been given permission from our Food and Drug Administration to start using dioxin (Agent Orange) in their bio-geneticized corn--yes, that's true, dioxin, that deadly substance is now approved to be used in Monsanto's corn.] Monsanto just this week denied it had bought Blackwater but admitted that they were using Blackwater to enforce their Round-up-laced, pig-gened, trout-gened single-season production seeds to be ruled the only seed any farmer in the world will be allowed to use from now on--heritage seeds will be destroyed--fuck food safety--Monsanto's controlling the world's food supply is all that matters. That's Monsanto's corporate vision: to control the world's food supply.

So Monsanto's products kill a billion people? Who the hell cares, just a billion less mouths to feed. Like Ron Paul preaches, and Ron Paul's an idiot, if you can't afford to buy food, you deserve to starve to death. Makes sense to me; how 'bout you?

Maldives Islands
Believe it or not, they just had a military coup in the Maldive Islands. The military there this week put under house arrest the democratically elected president, Mohammed Nasheed, forced him to resign his presidency and turn the job over to his vice-president, Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik. Before Nasheed was elected, the Maldives were ruled by a dictator for many years.

We the People of the USA have already horned in on this incident (in a Muslim country, by the way), Hillbilly Hillary announcing that one of her goons is on his way to the Maldives TO GIVE OUR SUPPORT TO THE NEW PRESIDENT, who Hillbilly Hill said as far as her crack staff could determine, this coup was Maldives Constitutionally approved. What right do we have to impose our noses into every political turmoil in the world?

WHAT? Cutting the World's Largest Embassy's Personnel in Half!
Something's going on in those Washington, District of Corruption backrooms in terms of our military adventures running out of money! Cutting back the World's Largest Embassy, the Green Zone in Iraq, and then deciding not to build that military base in Japan because it would cost too much to move our troops from Okinawa (they hate our military on Okinawa) over to the mainland. If I were a US soldier, I wouldn't want to be stationed in Japan, not after it's air, water, and soil have been contaminated by the fallout from those nuclear explosions and leakings at Fukashima Nuclear Plant--built by General Electric, by the way.

How Ironic Is This?
While Japan becomes contaminated by nuclear fallout, here in the USA, our stupid, ignorant, insane Atomic Energy Commission has approved the building of two new nuclear power plants in this country; the first new plants allowed in many a moon. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE THESE CLOWNS RULING US--RUINING US IS MORE LIKE IT!!!

I feel like an idiot writing about this crap--wasting my literary being on mocking these pretentious idiots--and that includes Obama, too; come on, this fool could truly have ruled the world; truly have perhaps been the Anti-Christ if only he'd have had some nuts down there rather than puckering up his lips and being ready to kiss the White Man's ass, nose deep into the crack of that big, fat, filthy, shitty asshole that our Global Corporations have turned up toward his face and told him kiss it and lick it or else...and "or else" may mean "you may lose your life," for all we know.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler