Living in New York City--Valentine's Day With thegrowlingwolf

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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Shot by Cupid or Shots With Cupid
An arrow through the heart represents Valentine's Day. It is Valentine's Day here in New York City, right in the middle of Manhattan--right up Broadway from where the Sunday morning network teevee shows are being unreeled as I keyboard this post.

I'm drinking my French roast coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. I don't give a shit if the damn thing's carcinogenic. It fulfills its functional duty. It keeps coffee hot for hours! I bought this Styrofoam cup of Joe at 6:15 am from my Oaxacan friend over on Fifth Avenue and now it's 8:28, so that means my coffee's stayed hot for 2 hours and 13 minutes--a lie since time is flying on by as I keyboard this--I feel so out-of-touch trying to be hip and moderne using the word "keyboard" to mean "typing." Yet, you do have to learn how to type to use a computer or a cell-phone keyboard don't you? So it is still typing. Besides, to me and 20 million musicians (I know, that's a low figure--there's got to be more--there are 20 million American Idol goony contestants aren't there?) the word "keyboard" means "piano" or "organ" or "synthesizer," though, yes, it does mean "computer keyboard" to us, too, doesn't it? Did I think of a typewriter's keyboard as a keyboard when I first started typing? I don't recall. I don't think so. I remember "keys" sticking or breaking. I remember talking about my "E" sticking on my typewriter but I don't see me ever saying "My E's sticking on my typewriter keyboard." I remember my high school typing teacher telling us to put our hands on the "home keys" but I don't remember her using the word "keyboard."

But, yes, the keys on a typewriter were called keys. Same as keys on a piano. I played the piano first and then from there when I saw my first typewriter I thought that since I already could play the piano surely I could type. I pestered my grandmother so persistently that she finally broke down and taught me basic typing when I was eleven years old. Why my grandmother? Because she was a poet and novelist and had the only typewriter in my family; in fact, she may have had the first typewriter ever on her side of my family. She bought her first typewriter, an L.C. Smith, in 1922. After my grandmother's death in 1961, that typewriter became my first typewriter.

I started the first novel I ever attempted to start on that typewriter. I titled that novel: Hot Like Bread and Pepper----with a subtitle "Sweet Like Cherry Wine"--from a Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett) theme song, "Howlin' for My Darling." The novel attempt took place in the 1930s in Texas when a White salesman's car breaks down in Fate, Texas, which turns out to be an all Black town.

There really was a Fate, Texas. I had remembered it from once traveling through it on one of my family's yearly vacations--the year we went for a drive, as my dad called it, around the Ozark Mountains through Oklahoma, Arkansas, and lower Missouri.

I clearly remember stopping in Antlers, Oklahoma, on this trip, to visit my mother's Ozark hillbilly relatives (one of those culturally straying branches of her otherwise thinking-highly-of-itself family). I remember my mother's female cousin being a rather pretty and very shapely woman who was wearing a very flimsy dress without a slip--I was 11 and had just had my first "little piece"--so I had already started judging all women by my sexual attraction to them. She did appear much more cultured looking than my poetic nature had expected. Plus, this distant-cousin-to-me had a very sexually delicious-to-me-looking daughter my age.

This Ozark cousin was a feather healer. Which means she took certain special feathers she plucked out of the tails of whatever bird around those parts symbolized the healing power of Jesus, probably a mountain dove or mountain quail or maybe a prairie chicken or a red hawk or a barn owl or maybe some of the regular old chickens that were running loose around her house--whatever. What she did was first have you take your shoes off, sit back in a chair and put your feet up on a stool. Then she would start a process of tickling (to me it was tickling though she called it massaging) the soles (souls) of your feet with those feathers claiming while she did it that via this Ozark hillbilly-scientific treatment she could absolutely heal any blessed soul from any troubling illnesses no matter how firmly the Old Devil (Old Ned to her maybe) had planted them within it. Interesting woman--and daughter--I wish I'd a gone back to see them when I was actually pretty close by them where I went to college.

So I had remembered this Fate, Texas, from that trip. And I remembered it from that trip as an all-Black town--whether it was or not I never ventured to find out. [Mr. Ed: Yes, there still is a Fate, Texas, and, yes, it is where the Wolf Man remembers it was. At the time Wolfie and his family drove through Fate, its population would have been around 100 folks--most of them, I'm sorry to say, White folks. The area was at that time a huge cotton-growing area so what Little Wolfie saw were the Black people picking the cotton in the fields around Fate--there was a cotton gin in Fate at that time, too.]

My first novel (typed on my grandmother's old L.C. Smith typewriter) went on from there--I got about three chapters of it written--70 pages I'm guessing--pretty good for a first-time novelist--when I decided the title was the best part of the book and abandoned the effort. Later, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one snowy winter day in front of my living room's Navajo-style fireplace, standing in front of my floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the city of Santa Fe down the mountainside below me as well as all the way over due west to the Rio Grande River and beyond to the Jemez Mountains and the city of Los Alamos, my young, young beautiful wife handed me individual manuscripts of short stories, poems, essays, and novel attempts, which then I either deemed worthy of keeping or else sentenced to death in the literary hellfire of my pinon-log fire blazing away merrily in my Navajo-style fireplace. I burned that day what my wife and I deemed to be approx. 2 million words of these disgraced manuscripts, including Hot Like Bread and Pepper. Up in smoke they went. Afterwards, I felt like God resting after making the universe. I was so exhausted my young wife had to run get me a cold cerveza Cruz Blanca out of the fridge--"Help, baby, help, I need some firmament, quick." Was I ever her Valentine? I don't think that ever crossed our paths.

It is now 8:52 and I just threw out my Styrofoam cup of mocha Java--so that carcinogenic-packed petroleum-based-plastic cup kept that coffee hot for 2 hours and 45 minutes. That's what you can expect from a Styrofoam cup. Is drinking coffee from it more harmful to me than the coffee I'm drinking from it?

I remember the first Styrofoam I came across. I bought a case of Busch Bavarian beer (Budweiser's cheap brand) in a Dallas liquor store. After the sale, the liquor store dude said because I bought a case of BB I got six brand new-type can holders courtesy the Budweiser distributor--can holders he guaranteed me would keep my Busch Bavarian cold ones cold for at least as many minutes as it took me to drink one. The dude brought me out a plastic-wrapped set of six what proved later to be Styrofoam tumblers. Each big enough to hold pretty much entirely a can of beer. You took a cold one out of the fridge, popped its top, then slid it into one of these Styrofoam mug-like things and you headed out to poolside (all apartment buildings when I was of the beer-drinking-partying-every-day age in Dallas, Texas, were built around swimming pools). Your beer was guaranteed to stay frosty cold in these mugs while you ogled the babes or in order to get their attention made out like you were reading a great book, like Raintree County was a very large and bestselling novel at the time that especially the babes had read and further especially had read since the movie of the book had come out to big publicity since it starred Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (yeah, the big fat cow one you see today--once one of the hottest of Hollywood babes--at the age of 15 she passed as a full-grown woman, and I'm sure was being diddled at that young age on all the Hollywood casting couches--I mean her first famous movie was with that little letch Mickey Rooney--who's still with us over in the Poconos the last time I checked the Wikipedia Death List). The success of this one-hit-wonder's (Ross Lockridge, Jr.) novel and the fact that he couldn't complete his three-book contract for his publisher drove him to commit suicide.

There he is Ross Lockridge, Jr.; he wrote the great American novel but that was it...so, like a writer who no longer can write has to do, he committed suicide. He's a hero of mine for that--but also I read and liked Raintree County. I've written about Ross in a long-past Growler post--unlike top-ranked blogs I can't link you back to that post--sorry--I'm just not into this blog shit like these site-development-minded bloggers are. Like The Daily Howler is, for competitive instance.

I recently with love Googled "the Top 50 Blogs" and first up got the Guardian's Top 50 list of the most hit on blogs. Number One was The Huffington Post...I call it the Huffing and Puffing Post--like the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing and trying to blow the Three Little Pigs's houses down--a job he does pretty damn well, from a wolf's point of view--he demolished 2 out of three of those little porkers's houses, which ain't bad. Why do we teach our kids that the Big Bad Wolf was bad because he was trying to get him some pork for dinner? "Shut up, Little Billy, and eat your grits and hog maw. And hand me that bucket of lard overhere while you're at it. You know how your dad likes bacon refried in bacon fat."

My question is, how the hell did this phony woman Adriana Huffington get to be the liberal beacon of pundit truth in the blogosphere? I mean come on, only a few years ago this phony strumpet was a rightwing Hapsburgian backwards thinker married to one of the most rightwing assholes in California business and political history--ranking up there with the likes of John Birch, Richard Milhouse Nix-on-us, Grade B Actor Arnie Schwartzenegger, Tapdancing George Murphy, and Grade B Actor Ronnie Raygun Reagan. And I have to stop my huffing and puffing here to remember that Good Ole Ronnie Raygun thought up our "Stars Wars" defense system to protect us from Soviet missiles (as Norman Mailer said, Soviet missiles that were always pointed directly at New York City)--a system that is still occasionally refunded unawares to We the People every 5 years or so to this day--G.W. Bush tried to trot it back out--I'm sure President G.W. Obama will be trotting it out again soon. I mean Obama's already proven he approves of George W. Bush's plan to put missiles in former Soviet Union satellites like the Czech Republic--but they protested they didn't want it--so G.W. tried Poland--and Poland said they'd think about it--but G.W. didn't get his missile-defense system approved. Obama, that crafty devil, has talked that great democracy of Romania or Rumania or Romanyvania or Transylvania into accepting this expensive missile system. Actually I knew a Romania woman--dated her one time. She was a banker and I met her opening an account and I asked her could I meet her for a drink after the bank closed and she took me down to a Romanian bar in the Village and introduced me to a host of her Romanian friends and they weren't bad sorts at all; in fact, very poetic and romantic--well, hell, they should be since they are leftover Romans!

I suppose if I were a country like Romania in need of a couple of billion bucks in good ole USA military aid I would let the US build whatever they wanted on my soil. The military certainly has enough worthless billions of US-Chinese dollars to throw a few billion at Romania as long as they get to use the money they've already gotten from We the People to build this piece of shit Star-Wars-like worthless defense system. Obama has accepted G.W. Bush's fear of Iran's Weapons of Mass Destruction--another phony charge that Obama has accepted as reality--and so here we go trying to keep World War Three alive on the backburners of our secret war rooms.

Remember: the only way the Democrats know how to end a recession is with a War. The Korean War was started during a recession in the late forties and early fifties. That recession carried on into Eisenhower's first term and it was during Ike's administration that the Vietnam War was brewed. However, it took the Democrats under JFK and Lyndon "BB" Johnson to finally get us ass-deep involved in Vietnam.

The exception to this generalization happened after Pappy Bush (G.H.W.) and his New World Order (Neo-Cons) pals and his Family Values gang and his Wall Street buddies drove our economy into a deeper hole than Raygun Reagan's Voodoo Economics had driven us. At this point in our wrecked economy, Pappy turned Democrat and started the infamous Persian Gulf War--"Glory in the Desert"--the bungled and backfiring attack on Pappy's old pal Saddam Hussein--who, by the way, Pappy and Donald Rumsfeld had made sure had enough biological and chemical warfare units in his US-military-aided arsenal that he would be able to gas as many fucking in-the-way-of-the-oilfields Kurds and borderline Iranian and Turk Kurds as he by-Allah wanted. Remember, Iraq was at war with Iran for 10 years or more with the backing and encouragement of the US of A. Of course, we'll never know what the truth is about this Iraq-Iran bullshit because G.W. "Spoiled Little Rich Brat" Bush rushed to hang-by-the-neck Saddam Hussein, when I would have thought that by giving this Eviliest Man in the World impunity in some instances he might have spilled his guts with the truth about this whole Middle East bruhaha we now find ourselves embroiled in--SACREDLY and DIVINELY--according to our President and our Congress.

Today, as I'm typing this (there, I'm back to normal), sadly, our troops are committing autrocities in a Southern Afghan city--massive U.S. troops and "Afghan soldiers," as the commercial pundits are calling these raggedy ass three or four hundred semi-loyal Afghans who rather than starve or be blown up in a car bomb join the Afghan Army--where at least they get some clothes and some food and get to hang with the U.S. (so-called NATO) troops for protection. So far, the US Army has admitted two NATO troops (read: US troops) have been killed versus 20 what they are calling "oppositional" troops! That's the old 10 enemy to one US troop formula our old forgotten-now pal Colon's Pal (you know him as Colon Powell) used in reporting Vietnam war casualties. Our foolish government is involved in another Falujah-type Surge and Destroy mission here. It will fail--and it is failing, I'm reading in Yahoo News. Remember, Obama is using the same military nutjobs as G.W. Puddin' Head Bush used in both his failed attempts at invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. [Subsequently it was revealed that a missile gone off course hit an Afghan civilian house and killed a family of 12. "Ho-hum," said our military; "It happens." "It's war. What'cha gonna do. It's we kill them or they kill us, what'cha y'all want?"]

And by golly old "Ye Are Forgiven of Thy Sins" G.W. "Spoiled Brat Middle-Aged Man" Bush is back out there doing his dumb little quirky speech on teevee. Remember now, G.W. has joined up with his dad's new best palsy-walsy, Billy Jeff Clinton, to form what they are trick-bag calling the Bush-Clinton Haitian Relief Fund. They are asking We the People to contribute $10 online to this fund. Wow. Billy Jeff Clinton is heading another relief fund--remember his and Pappy Bush's Tsunami Relief Fund?--whatever happened to all of those millions of dollars? There's never any accounting for any of these relief fund billions of dollars. Never. And remember Hillary claimed her running for the presidency broke her. Yet, don't you bet there's a Bill and Hill Foundation set up somewhere--or a Bill and Hill Fund or a Bill and Hill stock portfolio. Come on! These sorry bastards! Why doesn't that bother anybody but me? Why are thousands of goofy inane girl-brats sending Slick Willie Valentines today?

I've tried reading the pundits who palaver on the Huffington Post. It's a lot of high-flown journalistic prattle. As Grandpa Al Lewis used to say about such prattle--"All you're doin' is preachin' to the choir. That ain't gonna get nothin' accomplished...the masses have to get off their asses to get anything done." And Grandpa was right.

And back to Adriana Huffington. Remember, not that long ago, she was involved in a big-time California-Hollywood-style divorce--she and old Huffy were multimillionaires--oh so brilliantly polished and glamory but true rightwingers. UNTIL after the divorce when suddenly Adriana Huffy decided to turn leftie. Was it maybe to spite her ex? How better to fuck with him than to do a 360 on his political positions--and to somehow using this revenge ploy manage to get her blog zoomed up to such "important" proportions. Millions hit on her royal highass's blog all day long. That gives me the willies, yes, but it also is consistent with my view that most of my fellow Amuricans are Yahoos.

What is so appealing about this woman? She's from Austria. At the time of her rise in Austria, its president was an ex-Nazi, Kurt Waldheim, Jr. "Vat, nein, that's not me giving that Nazi salute in that picture. Nein! Well, OK, maybe it was me, but I'ff changed; I love Jews now, look, I'll kiss this little kike baby here."
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So this is my Valentine's Day gift to all of you dear one or two readers of The Daily Growler--I'm being sarcastic of course--looking for pity. You'd be surprised who reads The Daily Growler.

I had written a long diatribe piece ridiculing just about every son of a bitch robbing us blind in Washington, District of Corruption but I decided to be lenient on our crooked leaders on this day of love.

One of Cupid's arrows penetrated my heart today--I GOT A VALENTINE from the most beautiful mentally and physically woman in the world--so I'm joyous and loving and just down right forgiving--or am I? I can only think of the word "politician" and I start growling....

Ah, fuck it, the sun is shining brightly through my newly cleaned big bay window; I'm dreamily looking out over the southern length of Manhattan--if I climb up on a ladder and look out the window's very top, I could probably almost see the Statue of Liberty and a certain sore-thumb hi-rise office building over in Jersey City.

Remember what Karl Marx said:

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Happy Valentine's Day to one and all and to all a Good Day.

theveryluckygrowlingwolf
for the Valentine's Day edition of The Daily Growler
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thegrowlingwolf On Us(A) Being Yahoos

[Newly EDITED Version]
Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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The Hypocrites Have Us Yahoos Cornered
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Acc. to Swift, the Yahoos were a race of brutes who looked like and acted like man--and to Swift at the time he wrote Gulliver's Travels the "Man" these brutes looked like was the White Man--since I'm sure Swift, as good and witty a man as he was, probably did not consider Black people human beings--what do you think all you Swiftian scholars out there? Thomas Hobbes saw Man as Barbarians--whom Swift surely would classify as brutes.
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As Native Americans say, "The White man speaks with a forked tongue." A snake tastes with a forked tongue. So does a lizard. It's a bifurcated tongue really. I assume a babbler has a forked tongue. Salesmen are babblers. Preachers are babblers. Philosophers are babblers. Flim-flammers are mile-a-minute babblers. Economists are babblers. But of all the babblers, the most two faced and bifurcated tongued are the politicians, and especially our president.

And by calling our president a babbler I'm just categorizing him like I see him. I'm not purposely bashing Obama by ridiculing him; in fact, I like the guy enough I hesitate to really ridicule him. He's a cool dude when he's loosy-goosey relaxed and out of the White Man's House, like when he showed up at the Georgetown-Duke basketball game last week--that was cool--he looked comfortable at courtside. Then why, I ask, does he sound so stupid and dull and same-old-same-old when he gives one of his shielding speeches or commercial-television interviews, like a very stupid one he had this past week with that great investigative reporter and ex-cheerleader, Katie Couric. Why can't he feel he's running this sort of PR shit into the ground--and that not only is it not working, but it's getting to him, too; check the greying hair--that's how you tell how vexed these guys are--even old G.W. Bush's hair is totally grey now like Clinton's hair is.

He acts like a Yahoo when he tries to reason with Repugnicans; when he tries to convince them he's an Abe Lincoln-Ronald Reagan-combo-type president and that he's also still respecting G.W. Bush's Nazi-like military and homeland security policies and executive-order-writing privileges. I mean, come on--just like in basketball the same in politics, you gotta drive against your opponent's defense and get into the paint (disrupting the core of that defense) to score the most points--you can't rely on spectacular 3-point shots to carry you through--3-point-shot attempts that the Republicans and the Conservatives in his own party keep blocking--then taking the ball down and scoring against him at the other end of the court (the spectrum).

At the moment, We the People are being ruled over by two hick Dumbocrats, this Blanche Lincoln, from the hillbilly backward low-populated State of Arkansas, and this high-plains knucklehead from Nebraska, Ben Nelson. These two creepy backwards-thinking undemocratic Dumbocrats are siding with their true buddies the Repugnicans to block every regulatory move (FDR-New Deal moves) or progressive political appointees Obama's attempting to push, and it doesn't seem to matter to his opponents how lop-sidedly in favor of corporations his policies actually are. The Repugs are just going to oppose anything he proposes as long as they can get away with it and as long as the President's own party is acting like the Cowardly Lion when facing the Bull-Connor-firehose-like aggressions against them by the Yahoo-propelled Repugnican Party.

I'm pissed off at how come this Ivy League-educated Black-White man can't wake up to the fact his ass is grass unless he busts a move against these minority creeps. I know he knows he's under a racist-Fascist attack from the Repugnicans. So then why can't he lay the law down to the Repugs and to his own spineless party members (they still have the majority in Congress in terms of headcount and percentage) that keep turning their backs on him? "Throw down the gauntlet on 'em," as my dad used say.

Why can't Obama rebel against his whimpering party as it shows its innate cowardness under the ignoramus tactics of the teabagging teabaggers of the corporate spin doctors who are like earwigs in the Dumbocrats ears warning them, "You'd better go along with our directives or we'll dry up your campaign coffers and you'll be easily beaten by a Repugnican, even if he's a Repugnican black man wearing a jackass suit." So Nancy "Rich Bitch" Pelosi (richest woman in California) and Harry "Easy Read" Read (from the great State of Nevada, of which We the People are the largest landholders--a land that also holds the largest deposit of nuclear waste on US soil--a state whose major industry, gambling, was started and run for years (supposedly not the case now--yeah sure!) by the Mafia) are bending way over and opening up those butt cheeks ready to take a good screwing from Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Joel "Independent Idiot" LIEberman, and Fascist/Racist Repugnicans in order to keep their high-roller status with the Power Elite that really rules us. [By the bye, the above-mentioned freeloaders living off you and me have the finest in health insurance coverage man can have--in fact their coverage covers their whole families, including their dear old mothers. Plus, though these people enter Congress low-paid bureaucrats, they will leave Congress very rich. And this further goes for those who enter Congress rich (like Unka Teddy and the JFK-Bobby offspring): they will definitely leave Congress richer.]

Like Diogenes, I'm keyboarding this as though I have pebbles in my mouth--truth is such a deeply hidden treasure!

Yes sir-ree, We the People provide these so-called representatives with the best healthcare in the god-damn world--here I go again actually became the "--but this issue rankles me since I am not getting any younger and every day I get older I start especially noticing how more and more warnings and threats of impending death are being hurled at me. I'm in the zone now where I have lived beyond that certain statistical milepost that roomful of number-crunching healthcare industry economists have figured out is the point where you are most vulnerable, your defenses are weakening, to killer diseases UNLESS you immediately run to your HEALTHCARE PROVIDER (that's a new term that replaced "YOUR PHYSICIAN" when the HMO industry took over our hospitals and organized our doctors and nurses into profitmaking machines and the HMOsHealthcare Providers").

[Yesterday, Slick Willie Jeff Clinton was in Manhattan--visiting his swell Harlem office We the People pay for we assume to check on his email and speaking-engagement schedule and maybe to see how his ghostwriter is coming along on Slick Willie's new book enterprise. "Let's call it The Compassionate Bill Clinton, wha'd'ya think?" He even managed to get up to the big mansion in Chap We the People bought him during his whirlwind visit--remember, the Slick One and his new best palsy-walsy's worthless son, G.W., are now Obama's advisers on how to use Haiti to benefit their palsy-walsies in the construction industry, the oil industry, the financial industry--I mean, like these same ripoff jerks who rebuilt New Orleans (and two of those construction companies are already drumming up business from the Haitian government--now housed in a tent, we assume), are now going to rebuild Haiti--under the authority of the invading and occupying US Army, under the commander and chiefship of our Abe-Lincoln-Ronald-Reagan-adoring president--I digress--by nature, I assume--so the Slick One was in town and suddenly he had chest pains. And certainly Slick Willie knows bad chest pains when he feels them. So what happened? No problem. The Slick One was rushed to the best god-damn hospital in New York City, New York Presbyterian, and in a matter of minutes he was in the Operating Room getting a stent put in one of his reblocked arteries. Evidently the Slick One has been maybe eating too many of those $250-a-piece Kobe steaks lately or maybe he's back to eating Arkansas Hillbilly food at McDonald's and Burger King again. Anyway, no problem for the Slick One when he gets a heart attack. Remember who pays for his healthcare insurance.]

Here's what I'm beating around the bush about: like there are some new teevee doctor shows that are scary as hell for a person like me who is reaching the top of the hill of life and will soon be able to clearly see his ending at the bottom of the other side.

One of the worst and scariest new teevee doctor shows is this Oprah-produced Hollywood-if-he-could trickbag Dr. Oz's new Fox Network-carried show. Oh my God is this real-life doctor/actor made for teevee medicine. First off, you have to know this dude's a surgeon. So you should know then that the whole point of his teevee show is to keep you watching it--and the best way to keep you watching it is to dramatically expose you to the scariest scenarios in terms of your age and your weight and your diet and your personal health in general. When you watch the handsome Dr. Oz (ladies drool over this dude--and he dwells a lot on scary women's diseases), you soon see his character on the show is one that is intending to scare everybody to bloody death with his macabre descriptions of all the deadly diseases he digs out of his invasively cut-open patients--and how all of us are probably suffering from the beginnings of these horrible diseases old Doc Oz digs out of his patients: COLON CANCER; ESOPHAGUS CANCER; PANCREATIC CANCER; THYROID CANCER; BONE CANCER; BREAST CANCER; UTERINE CANCER (poor women)--and in order not to find we suffer from every symptom for one of these horrible diseases Dr. Oz digs out of his patients, we have to stop the tape and ask ourselves, "Whoaaaa, wait a'minute here, besides hustling on teevee, how does a surgeon like Dr. Oz make his big bucks?" the answer being "Doing more operations!"

But being older, the point to all of this healthcare peeve of mine, means that you have to face threats like those Dr. Oz poses seriously because you're being pestered by what will happen if you don't check out even a sudden little tiny pain, say in your left side under your second rib, or say perhaps when you wake up one fine morning you have a hot feeling in your chest or say you suddenly get a leg cramp that won't go away as you're walking your dog (did you know that cancer is the biggest killer of pet dogs in this country?)(did you know that animals like dogs carry anthrax spores in their fur?)--I mean bastards like this Dr. Oz have older people--some in perfectly good health--worrying over this little ache or this little sudden wart or this sudden pain in your back. These doctors like all doctors insisting that something we Yahoos consider no problem at all could mean we may be going to die in a couple of months--I mean suddenly one little pain, we run to the doctor and sure enough we have: CANCER, HEART DISEASE, CANCER, STROKES, DIABETES, CANCER--and suddenly we are facing the immediate choice of just going on and suffering the pain and eventually dying or having to empty our life savings and all our collaterals into the coffers of the likes of Healthcare America, for criminal instance. I mention Healthcare America because they are currently being sued by a Philadelphia family whose young son was born with a rare cancer and who has been given successfully a drug that though it won't cure his cancer it will keep him alive for a longer period of time than if he gets no treatment at all--plus there have been signs this drug even reduces some of the tumors in this type of cancer. Healthcare America replied, "Sorry, Little Jimmy's just gonna have to bite the bullet and die because fabulously profitable Healthcare America (hell, our CEO got a 20 million dollar bonus the other day) ain't gonna pay out one dime for this 'experimental and untested' treatment. Case closed, suckers--and by the way, you owe us a payment on your debt to us at 100%-per-payment interest. WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO PAY YOUR BILL?" The Philadelphia hospital where the boy's being treated is not charging the family for the treatment--banking on Healthcare America eventually being forced into paying for this treatment by being made to feel guilty before the public.

I just heard that healthcare horror story on the news this morning as I was keyboarding this post. OK, I'll put the brakes on and explain: I'm told by my Internet computer-hip sources that the young and the restless no longer use the word "type" as in the phrase "I am typing this...." The new hip way is to say "I am keyboarding this...." And, yes, I agree, young hip kids do redefine how we use words in our language--god-dammit, they do--and getting older also puts you in a pissed off state when it comes to having to compete with these young know-it-all jerks fresh out of UC-Berkeley or MIT or some Ivy League bastion of elite thought or fresh off some 50-million-selling rap record or suddenly being the star in some record-breaking movie.

By the way, here's an explanation by a big Healthcare Insurance giant WellPoint why your healthcare insurance company will be raising your premiums 39% like WellPoint is doing to their customers in California (hot off Yahoo News):

INDIANAPOLIS – Health insurer WellPoint blames a shift in demographics and rising medical costs for its planned 39 percent rate hike for some California customers. In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, WellPoint Inc. tells Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that because of the weak economy, healthy people are dropping coverage or buying cheaper plans.

These politician clowns and corrupt corporate money jugglers have told us so many lies over the past 200 years, they are solidly confused themselves as to what is real and what is almost truth and what is real and phony and prefabricated and reworded and redefined and rewritten and reentangled and rescinded. They lie so much lying becomes their way of reasoning.

As we here at The Daily Growler have been spewing in a cantankerous but we hope amusing way since our humble beginnings back in 2006--EVERYTHING YOU SEE OR HEAR IN THE NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, ON RADIO, IN THE MOVIES, IN THE PULPITS, IN SCHOOL, ON TELEVISION AS FACT IS A LIE! And, all the government statistics you read and hear flung at you daily are lies--"Today, the Labor Sec'y announced that unemployment has dropped under 10% for the first time in 5 months." Hey, yes, there's truth in that statement--that is if the truth is it really did drop under 10%--that's the area where they've lied so much even they don't know what the hell any of their statistics prove or disprove. As I've often said, the first book you're handed, or used to be, in Statistics 101, a required course for Sociology and Economics majors in my day, was entitled, How to Lie With Statistics.

If Obama says the economy is recovering, know for sure the economy is in worse shape than ever. Reasoning: If the economy is at a worse shape than ever, backwards thinkers see that as the economy recovering. Reasoning: "Surely, god-dammit, that's as low as you bastards are gonna let it go, right?" Neo-Con Reasoning: "Nope, Brother Obama, Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss taught us, it's gotta go all the way to the fucking bottom before we can then say 'you damn right it's recovering.'"

Remember, all these lies are just Capitalist tools to keep us working longer and longer hours for lower and lower wages. Capitalism needs CHEAP LABOR to keep it profitable, what the Repugnicans have represented since the Dumbocrats somehow managed to become the party of We the People, though originally that was the role of the Repugs--the Republicans of Lincoln, the Republicans Obama is trying to lure out to his way of down-the-middle-of-the-road thinking. The Republican Party in the late 1800s was taken over by the Power Elite, who then came from the Industrial Revolution, those days when our racist mostly Dumbocrat Supreme Court ruled that corporations were the same as citizens of the USA. [The source of today's Repugnican rightwing nutjob agenda is seated in the Old Boy Network that came out of the Dumbocratic Party when back in 1948 when old racist-hypocrite Strom Thurmond took racist Democrats (all of the ex-Confederacy States for sure) out of the party and formed the Dixiecrat Party. This racist action led Southern Democrats and Middle-American white Democrat working stiffs to join the Repugnican Party and today they make up that party's rightwing Yahoo wing. Even the Southern Democrats who stayed in the Democratic Party and kept a little power still sided with their racist relatives who are currently the idiots running the Repugnican Party. Check out how Indiana politicians are thorns in the flesh of Democracy.

The whole Neo-Conservative Manifesto is determined to ruin our former American-Dream lifestyles--you know, those where if you were a man you were expected to go one step further into the American Dream than your father or if you were a woman farther than your mother managed to cover her ass--or nowadays men and women are expected to rise to a better lifestyle than their parents. The trouble happened when the Baby Boomers got prominent in the political eye--when the Sociologists started giving out their guesstimations as to what effect this large bundle of growing-up unambitious spoiled-brat kids was going to have on the workforce, the availability of jobs, the markets, on low-populated areas, on urban areas, on interstate corridors, on interstate commerce, on international commerce, on international relationships, on the flag, the "Stars Spangled Banner" (what a stupid song--all about how great the USA is at WAR), on Social Security, on Medicare, on the coming nuclear war. You see, Baby Boomers were so spoiled, they figured if they didn't find their ways with their college degrees (these are the kids who started getting B.A.s in Business Administration--"Live and Play With a B.B.A"--we used to chant outside the School of Business), when their parents died, they would inherit the city place, the farm, daddy's stocks and bonds, and live off the reapings of their inheritance. Like the Kennedy kids. Remember when all the Baby Boomers wanted to end up like the Kennedy kids?

George W. Bush is a spoiled-brat Baby Boomer. Our faux two-term president who openly, dumbly, stole both elections through ballot-counting trickery--the first one stolen when his brother, the Governor of Florida, screwed up the Florida vote count to the point the Supreme Court stepped in and appointed G.W. Bush our first son of an idiot president, an idiot himself, Supreme-Court-appointed president in the history of this country--a move that Constitutionally is illegal--the Supreme Court has no authority to determine elections! This is the same nutjob Supreme Court that recently verified that corporations are the same as individual citizens--and gave them a First Amendment right to BUY the candidates they need in order to BUY the elections they need in order to BUY more and more POWER.

But then, wait a minute, I forgot, We the People are Yahoos! We the People are numbskulls. We are dumber than our relatives the chimps. We are as the book back in the 60s predicted, "a nation of sheep."

We the People are the idiots who are now a part of the 37% who are in agreement with the teabaggers (I notice the Yahoo press is now referring to them as the Tea Party. To me that means the Marijuana Party. Figure it out). We are the dumber-than-dumb People who are frightened to death of our own shadows. We are the Yahoos who keep allowing this truly asinine woman Sarah Palin national attention and speaking platforms and we buy her powder-puff-logic book and we grovel after news of her--"What's that wacky Sarah Palin up to now? You know, she may be wacky, but, by God, I think she really does speak for most Amuricans, don't you?" "Oh gosh golly gee, yes, I agree with you, my hillbilly friend, she does speak for most Amuricans and that's what's so fucking scary about how she keeps on keepin' on in spite of the most ignorant and totally stupid things she says."

How dumb are We the People? Like why do we keep putting our money in these cheesy crooked sons of bitch banks like Chase Bank or Bank of America? Right around the corner from me on Fifth Avenue, right in the damn middle of Manhattan, I was walking along t'other day when I looked up the street and saw a sign saying a new bank was opening there soon--and when I got in front of the site, HOLY COW, the new bank soon to come into being in Midtown Manhattan was The Bank of Wilshire! The Bank of Wilshire!!! What the fuck is an L.A. bank doing in NYC? AND, why would a New Yorker want to deposit his or her life savings in an L.A. bank? There's also a Valley Bank in my neighborhood. Where's the Valley here in Manhattan? It's not here; it's in Phoenix.

I think we should own our own banks. My dad taught me that a banker at one time was simply the dude in the town who had the biggest and safest safe. Usually a mercantile dude. Some early local banks were called mercantile banks. When I lived in Dallas, Texas, the biggest bank in town was the Mercantile Bank on Commerce Street--it was shaped like the Empire State Building. Now it sits today a dwarf on the skyline, though if you look closely, you can still find it. My family's hometown bank was called The Farmers & Merchants bank. The other one was the Citizens Bank. My dad used the Farmers & Merchants bank because first of all he was a merchant, a business owner, and second, he was a good friend of the president of the bank; they'd gone to high school together. When my dad would ask old Malcolm for a loan, the dude knew everything about my dad's ability to pay a loan back because he knew my dad personally and had handled my dad's finances since my dad's first job and opening of a bank account.

When I first arrived in New York City, there were still neighborhood banks--in Manhattan there were tons of different banks--the Amalgamated Bank (the union bank); there was the Dime Box Bank; the Bowery Bank; the Bank of New York; the First National City Bank of New York; the Chemical Bank; the Marine-Midland Bank; Banco Popular; the Carter Savings Bank, the Harlem Savings Bank (now the Apple Bank, I think); the Franklin National Bank; the First Bank for Women. All the boroughs had neighborhood banks--the Ridgefield Savings Bank in Queens still in business to this day out in the Forest Hills area. Then there was the Williamsburg Bank in that beautiful old tower, the tallest building in Brooklyn, now owned by Magic Johnson who has turned it into luxury condos--no chance for his average Brooklyn black brothers and sisters to ever live there. Magic's no dumbass. He's been buying up New York City property for years. He opened a movie complex just up at the East Side end of my street. He bought a skyscraper in Newark for pennies on the dollar and turned it into a luxury condo building. Like I say, Magic's no dumbass. His luxury condo building in Newark is by the new sports arena they just built over there. The Williamsburg Bank building, by the way, is right up the street from Mayor Bloomberg's old developer (Bruce Ratner) buddy's getting eminent domain rights to destroy the Brooklyn Center City area (via the Atlantic Rail Yards) in order to build his new super-Brooklyn downtown, with its new hi-rise luxury hotels and hi-rise luxury condos and its new supersports arena (to be named in honor of Barclays Bank) that will soon house the unsuccessful New Jersey Nets basketball team (also the "mogul rapper," as he is referred to by the Yahoo press, Jay Z, is an investor in this development)--soon to be the unsuccessful Brooklyn New Jersey Nets! This is a real scumbag Power Elite move to turn Brooklyn into a rich boys's playground. The new controlling owner of the New Jersey Nets (already called the Brooklyn Nets on paper), by the way, is a real "American" patriot of a dude, believe it or not, he's a RUSSIAN fat cat (how did a former Russian Commie become a rich Capitalist after Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union?). Yes, that's right, the precious Brooklyn Nets--bringing sports back to Brooklyn--ironically on the very site Walter O'Malley wanted Brooklyn to build him a new stadium or he was taking the Dodgers to L.A.--is owned by a fucking Russian billionaire.

Billionaires are killing us all, folks. They are. Why don't we tax these bastards?

[By the way, don't believe all the hype you are hearing the Liberals spouting about John Murtha, the Congressperson that just died this week--I mean I've heard Liberal pundits spieling out what a great antiWar Democrat this big lug was! HE WASN'T! In fact, old John Gung-ho Murtha was voted the crookedest Democrat in Congress for the past 5 years running. An asshole is dead. I'm not mourning him. He ploughed in onto the scene when the Dumbocrats were desperately trying to counter G.W. Bush's wild war adventures around the world with anti-Bush ex-Clinton military men, like that awful little General Wesley Clark creep! Lying phonies, all of them.]

We the People of the US of A are on a ship of fools--and the damn thing has pretty much sunk--and the US Marine Band is playing "Nearer My God to Thee"--yet we claim we don't hear that--instead we hear Queen Latifa (gained fame as a rapper) singing (off key) "America the Beautiful" (Ray Charles made that song popular with Black singers back in the 80s (or 90s))--I love the way we love "America the Beautiful," which in truth is just as stupid as "The Stars Spangled Banner." Here's the last verse of this diddy--the verse you never hear anybody sing--and the verse a Black person surely couldn't sing with any kind of sincerity. Here ya go, check out the last verse of the precious "America the Beautiful":

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

Kind of a scary verse if you're a Black person isn't it?

A little bitchin' and moanin' type of growlin' from your pal,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Living in New York City--Unable to Avoid Politics

This has been reedited--now's it's a pretty good little taleFoto by tgw, "7th Century, Imitation Byzantine Gold Solidus of Heraclius, From Northeastern Afghanistan."
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President Obama Now Has the Right to Assassinate US Citizens Should He Think They Are Terrorists

I just finished reading the Franny story from Salinger's Franny and Zooey and I'm sitting here stunned. What a great story. And I knew the story first hand and hadn't remembered it--how Salinger delivered that story--and what a brilliant way of delivering it--and that's hit me, that was what I liked about Salinger. The way he wrote--the way he delivered a story. The way he joined his words together into such a spin of engaging clues, back and forth personalities, use of sweet harmonics that then turn sour, turn dissonant.

Franny. After rereading Franny I now remember it and I remember it because now I remember I knew it first hand when I first read it and remembering it later vis-a-vis my own first-hand experience.

My Franny was named Jannice (pronounced "Jan-eece"--accent on the "eece"). And my Franny came to my college graduation--and we were such a noticeable couple--and everyone would say, "Oh, aren't Wolfie and that Jannice made for each other!"

And then one fall I went off to the US Army.

After my six weeks of basic training was up at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, I was ordered over to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, only a couple a'hundred miles north of my hometown. At Fort Sill, I went through an artillery course, many long hours out at Cache, Oklahoma, on the gun range, the big guns, the howitzers--sitting around waiting for orders to fire. Boring. I'd read till I fell asleep--awakened suddenly by a whistle in my ear. "Up and at 'em, Gunner, we're firing in 15. Get your men in position." I got so good at artillery school I got an opportunity to volunteer for Officer Candidate School, which was at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. I hated the army, but my best friend in my barracks talked me into this trial adventure of at least getting in at the bottom of the top of the military chain of command and seeing intellectually what it was like. "Hey," my buddy said, "when we come back, Wolfie, we'll be junior jumpshooters, man. They'll have to salute us...Walter, Red, those dudes, they'll have to salute us, Wolfie, think about it. Plus we can hit Goldberg and those 90-day wonders and they'll have to salute us, too. Think of that, Wolfie." "But what about the shit we're gonna have to go through down at Sam Houston?" "We can take it, Wolfie. It'll be just like getting your ass beat by your principal in school--you grit your teeth and take the humiliation and it'll be over before you know it."

I had stayed at Leonard Wood during the Christmas holidays so soon after artillery school, before my orders came to go to OCS, I got a week's furlough. It was right at the beginning of March. That March Saturday after inspection, I got my pass and then bummed a ride with a Spec 4 I got along with who was from just south of my hometown.

Two and a half hours later, I was so jittery with anxiety to see Miss Jannice, who I hadn't seen in nearly 6 months, that I had hardly set my bag down before I was on the phone calling her.

The last time I'd seen her was the night I before I left my hometown with a couple of my join-up buddies for Dallas to meet the rest of the recruits going with me to Leonard Wood for basic training. I knew that right after I'd left she had started her freshman year at Texas Tech in Lubbock. She sent me several letters that fall. I was expecting gushy love letters but instead I read them as kind of dull letters--not much interest in me shown in them at all--just college girl-type letters--"I'm taking Psychology 101. I like the teacher but I don't know. Betsy sends a hi. She and I are in the same dorm along with a girl from Dallas who is a direct descendant of Mark Twain, though her name is Clemens." I read no "I miss you, Wolfie," or "Under a full moon tonight...and I was swooning with missing your hot arms around me...." She didn't even show any disappointment when I wrote her that I couldn't get home for Christmas holidays as I was still confined to base and was even probably going to be out on a bivouac in the Ozark Mountain woods during that time, which it turned out I was.

In January I got a letter from her saying she had dropped out of Texas Tech after one semester and instead of going back to college she was going to stay home and work at our hometown newspaper as an intern. She sounded excited about being a reporter even though she was so far, she said, just running copy back and forth from the copy room to the printers--or maybe they'd hand her some yellow sheets and ask her to proofread them. But it was a chance to get into journalism and she took it, blah, blah, blah. Nothing about "I was so looking forward to perhaps seeing you Christmas." Not even a "hope to see you soon." Or "Miss you." Or "Love you." In fact, no "Love yous" at all at the end of her letters. Maybe little x's before she signed her name--"xxx, 'Neece." I figured those were perfunctory marks she put on all her letters. [Only years later while I was living in Mexico City did my wife find Jannice's letters to me among some of our books. She handed them to me with a sarcastic comment; she knew all about my involvement with Jannice; she hated Jannice as a result. There were 11 letters altogether. All of them handwritten and of about 5 stationery pages long. I started reading them and...well, I couldn't believe what I was reading. They didn't read anything like they had read when I'd gotten them at mail call at Leonard Wood. Now, it had been 6 years, they totally read totally different. Remember I had been looking for love in them but couldn't find it? NOW, there was love all through them. It was between the lines but it was there, so evidently there...and I had totally totally missed it.]

I dialed Jannice's parents's house. Her sister answered the phone and flippantly said she was the only one there. Her parents were in Acapulco. And, oh, yeah, Jannice, the reason she knew I was calling, was at her Grandpa and Nana Madison's, "I forgot." "Why's Jannice staying over there and not with you?" I asked, concerned about her. I had tried to call her from Fort Sill when I knew I was coming and no one answered the phone. I never thought of her being at her grandparents. "Ask her yourself," was the reply I got; then the sister hung up on me.

I called the grandparents's house and sure enough Jannice was there. And right off I was disappointed. I told her how desperate I was to see her but her reaction was, I thought, nonchalant. As if she didn't care if she saw me or not.

I made a date to take her to see "Bell, Book, and Candle." It was being performed at my hometown community theater run by a friend of my brother's. That fact and my buying two tickets got me an invitation to the big cast party after the performance--all the cultural bigwigs of my hometown would be there.

I picked Jannice up at her grandparents. She looked freshly beautiful to me, especially in her face--though I noticed in the light her arms and her shoulders looked paler--her color was only in her face. And she was a perfectly pretty girl; that's how I used to describe her to people. I also noticed something else about her, but I kept that to myself since it was the kind of thing you just didn't come straight out and ask a girl about.

We went to the play. She allowed me to put my arm around her and she put her head on my shoulder during the whole play. That got me excited and I started pouring love out to her--pheromones, too. At the end of the play I started talking enthusiastically about the cast party and how much fun we were going to have but she pulled me aside and said, "Do you mind if we don't go to the party? I'm not feeling so well." "What's wrong, babe? I thought you looked a little pale...." There were what I thought were tears in her eyes. Her face was crumpling up as though she were fixing to really start bawling. She excused herself and went off toward the Ladies Room. I waited out in the foyer.

She was taking a long time. I was beginning to shuffle about--an itchy sort of shuffling--you know, worrying about her but at the same time pissed off at her for acting so strange and taking so long in the Ladies Room. I mean I'd looked forward to the cast party. I knew it would be the best of food. Probably catered by the Petroleum Club; and they ate high on the hog at that rich boys's club. Now she'd thrown a monkey wrench into the works. So, as long as she didn't want to go to the party, at least maybe she'd go with me out to a back road where we could park and talk and hopefully start making love. It had been almost 6 months since we last made love--a fiery lovemaking, by then we had learned passion, at her parents, on the rug in front of the fireplace. I had been barbarically horny that night. We kissed so hard our lips bled as we came.

Finally she came back from the Ladies Room. Damn, she was paler than ever. Now even her face was pale. Her eyes were watery and her nose was red. "What's wrong, Neese? You OK?" "Let's go. You've got to take me back to Grandpa and Nana's."

In the car driving back to her grandparents's she sat silent. I drove attentive but confused. What the hell was wrong with her? At a red light, I tried to kiss her. She pushed me away and turned her face toward the window. As the light changed and we started off again I finally got up the nerve to say it--that question I had dared not ask earlier. I had been holding it in all night. I sensed it, too, while sitting watching the play when I had my arm around her and her head was on my shoulder.

"Are you gaining weight, Neese? You look like you've gained a lot of weight." There I asked it. I said it. She looked over at me. I glanced over at her while trying to keep my eye on the street.

She looked frightened. She started crying. Really crying. Big tears. I had never seen her cry like this--I had never even seen her cry. I pulled the car over. "Keep going," she said. "I want to be back at Grandpa and Nana's, please...." "Jannice! What the hell is going on? Why the fuck are you acting this way? Cold-shouldering me, like you're disgusted with me. God-dammit, I haven't seen you in nearly six months...I mean, I've been off in the god-damn Army, baby, thinking of you night and day...so anxious to see you again. Now here I am and I get this shit. What the hell's going on?"

She looked at me hang dog. Her eyes were shining dark brown back through glistening tears, as she drilled them into me sorrowfully. "Wolfie. Wolfie. I'm so sorry. Wolfie, I'm so sorry. I did love you, Wolfie. I did. But...." "BUT WHAT, JANNICE? WHAT? What the hell has happened?...I mean...come on, Neecy, sweetheart...." "Please, Wolfie, don't touch me...Wolfie, I'm so sorry. Don't touch me." "What the fuck, Jannice, god-dammit, what the fuck are you doing to me?" "Wolfie, I'm pregnant."

"There," she continued, "I didn't want to hurt you, Wolfie, but I'm pregnant." "Why didn't you say something, sweetheart? How long have you known? Why didn't you write me? I mean, isn't that something I should know about? And surely we damn sure have to talk about this...come on, Neece...surely." "NO, WOLFIE. NO. Don't even look at me, Wolfie. I'm so sorry." "What are you trying to say, Jannice? What the fuck are you trying not to tell me? What the fuck, Jannice?" "The baby, Wolfie. The baby. It's not yours, Wolfie." And with that she rolled up into the corner of the seat and just started outright sobbing, long gulping sobs, wringing sobs, flooding my nice leather seatcovers with tears.

I took her over to her grandparents. We didn't say another word on the way there. She jumped out of the car and made a mad beeline for the house the minute I pulled into the driveway and stopped.

Driving home was horrible. I was so fucking naive. I had no experience in dealing with such a dilemma. I cursed myself for being so fucking stupid. Yeah, so fucking stupid for believing Jannice was signed, sealed, and delivered MINE. I mean, we'd been going together 4 years. We saw each other every weekend I was home from college--and in the summer we went out every weekend. Everyone knew we were a couple.

I sat in the car for an hour before I finally went in the house. How was I going to explain this. My parents loved Jannice. They had gone to high school with her parents; they knew her grandparents; her Uncle was my brother's wife's baby doctor.

In the house, in my bed, I lay there thinking things like "When the shit had she fucked this other guy? Who the hell was this other guy?" I knew she had a boyfriend when I first met her but I knew he'd moved to Florida and she told me she hadn't even heard from him since they broke up. I knew there was a guy who went to high school with her who asked her out all the time, sent her flowers and shit, but he wasn't her type. It couldn't be him. I decided it must be some dude she met at Texas Tech. Maybe she fucked him one weekend after a wild party or something. I could forgive her that discrepancy. But then I thought of the kid. Holy shit, what the hell did I want with a kid who wasn't mine? Bitch! BITCH! I started screaming into my pillow. BITCH! And next thing I know I was crying like a fucking baby. Big tears. Tears of hurt. Tears mixed with shouts of "BITCH!" into my now wet pillow.

I didn't sleep that night. All night long I cussed Jannice's ass out. How dare her. Who the fuck had she fucked? Who the hell had knocked my girl up? I thought about driving over to her grandparents and demanding to know who the hell this fucking dude was. She must have been fucking him the whole time she was seeing me...but that was impossible. We had been dating steadily for almost 4 years. Though we weren't engaged, we always talked as if it was natural we would one day get hitched. She was MY girl, dammit. Yet, if she was just now only showing being a little fatter...Jesus, that means she found out she was pregnant just recently.
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My story gets more involved than Franny's. My story turns into a sort of Flaubertish-Henry Millerish drama--of my wanting revenge, of barbarically getting it by flaunting an affair with her best friend in her face--and finally, my ultimate revenge: of commiting adultery with her!

And that's what I like about Salinger's writing. He's not my generation--he's the generation before me, my brother's generation--but he got the dilemmas of my generation down pretty pat. Franny states she has decided to fuck conformity in the tale. And my tale turned me even deeper into my nonconformity. Turning me against the proper--like marriage! Fuck marriage. Like having kids. Fuck kids. This made me swear in my own blood that I would never get married and if I did I would never have kids. Fuck marriage. Fuck God and country. Fuck the law. Fuck having to work my ass off for a living, too.

I made it through Officer Candidate School--2 weeks of total mean harassment, belittling, cursing me down into a sniveling fool, then whipping me up into an erect-standing soldier monkey in my soldier monkey suit--I was drilled into an erect monkey perfection: as a 2nd Lieutenant in This Man's Army--qualified NOW to lead my men (my platoon) and myself into certain death in VietNam. Hot damn. VietNam. "Give me an 'F'--Give me a 'U'--give me a 'C'--give me a 'K'!"

Give me an "F!  ..."F"! give me a "U"! ..."U"!
Give me a "C"! ..."C" Give me a "K"! ..."K"!
WHATS THAT SPELL? ..."FUCK!" (x5)

Well come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again,
he got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam,
put down your books and pick up a gun, we're gunna have a whole lotta fun.

CHORUS
and its 1,2,3 what are we fightin for?
don't ask me i don't give a dam, the next stop is Vietnam,
and its 5,6,7 open up the pearly gates. Well there aint no time to wonder why...WHOPEE we're all gunna die.

now come on wall street don't be slow, why man this's war a-go-go,
there's plenty good money to be made, supplyin' the army with the tools of the trade,
just hope and pray that when they drop the bomb, they drop it on the Vietcong.

CHORUS

now come on generals lets move fast, your big chance is here at last.
nite you go out and get those reds cuz the only good commie is one thats dead,
you know that peace can only be won, when you blow em all to kingdom come.
CHORUS

(spoken)- listen people i dont know you expect to ever stop the war if you cant sing any better than that... theres about 300,000 of you fuc|ers out there.. i want you to start singing..

CHORUS

now come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to vietnam,
come on fathers don't hesitate, send your sons off before its too late,
be the first one on your block, to have your boy come home in a box

From www.lyricsbox.com/

And not a word about politics...or are you sure this post isn't pregnant with politics?

At the end of that last chorus of Country Joe's Vietnam song, after "...send your sons off before it's too late, be the first one on your block, to have your boy come home in a box" there should be a wildly flung "Yipppeee!" Where the Yippies came from. "Don't eat the brown acid. Warning, don't eat the brown acid."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Embarrassed in New York City

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2008.
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Em-bare-ass-ment
Of course I am embarrassed at being caught in such a scandalous gender change as I was in the Tuesday (Feb. 2) Growler (in my tribute to J.D. Salinger), though I'm just as embarrassed by revealing how many of the things I fly over by the seat of my pants are so incorrectly mapped on my flight plans. If I look down and see a huge scar on the earth's surface, I might write, "Wow, I flew over the Grand Canyon this morning and was disappointed in how not awesome it was." Then the radio control tower radios me that my position was not over the Grand Canyon as I wrote but I was several thousand miles off course and I was actually flying over a ditch along US Highway 8o, the highway on which I was born flying by the seat of my pants.

Music is what threw me off course in life (meaning: able to fuck up a factual remembrance in favor of a spontaneous response that is half wrong).

As a young piano student, I soon sat on that piano bench and self-analyzed myself deciding I was destined to be a cultural sociopath. I wanted to be a pianist, yes. I was already picking out tunes of my own creation on a piano prior to taking piano lessons and was raising eyebrows I was showing so much idiot-savant promise. But then when I started taking piano lessons, from a woman who looked like my mother (let's get Freudian), that's when I started defining myself as an advanced cultural sociopath, a maturing cultural agnostic. I started defining myself in terms of the self I saw when looking in the looking glass of those approaching me--of those trying to instruct me (Charles Horton Cooley's brilliant "Looking Glass Theory"--see footnote below sign off below), which led me to see myself, and as I found out society would see me, too, as a full-fledged Non-Conformist!

For instance, if I were not practicing my piano lessons and started doodling out a pretty firm boogie-woogie of my own bringing forth--playing my boogie instead of practicing the Chopin etude I'd been assigned to learn. If my mother or my piano teacher (they looked alike) corrected me--like saying, "Go back to your Chopin, sonny boy, and quit wasting your time playing that old Devil's music!"--then in rebuttal, I determined to overlearn boogie-woogie and fuck Chopin and my mother and my piano teacher who looked like my mother anyway. This attitude tarried over into everything I did from then on--a determination from right then on to fuck conformity. Conformity meant I had to like and perform music that my parents and my piano teacher could understand and take pride in bragging about how much input they had had on my being the greatest living interpreter of Chopin's piano music or of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier or of Tchaikovsky piano concertos.

I know I've told the story before but maybe not so roundly of how one day I arrived at my piano teacher's for my piano lesson and there was another woman there--a woman my piano teacher's age who also looked like my mother. My piano teacher introduced me to the woman and said she wanted me to play my assignment piece for this Mrs. Cliburn from Longview or Kilgore or somewhere like that--I knew it was over in East Texas somewhere. I wasn't shy so I whipped through my assignment piece--a Bach WTK exercise probably. I rushed it. I rushed everything in those days. It was the boogie-woogie in me--you see. The non-conformity in me. At the end of the Bach I had so much energy left I blusterishly started wailing the Bach line in boogie.

My God, you'd a thought I'd a'taken my dick out and flashed it at these two women who looked like my mother. This Mrs. Cliburn came over to the piano and pinched me on the cheek (God, I hated that--I was told by my mother it was because I had cute dimples and cute dimples tempted mothers to want to pinch them--lovingly). "You played Bach so lovely, " she cosily said. "My best advice to you is, stay with Bach, sonny boy. Let Bach guide your hands to perfect pianistic pleasure" (of course I'm putting words in her mouth, but she was as buttery or syrupy as that--however she worded it that afternoon). With this elderly advice, she chortled on toward the door and was soon gone.

My piano teacher came back beaming! "Little Master Wolfe, you know who that woman is?" "No, mam." "Her son, Van, is going to be the next Rachmaninoff, the next Rubenstein, the next Horowitz. You should listen to Mrs. Cliburn and stay with your Bach. I was embarrassed when you played that awful old jazz while she was here." That did it. Fuck playing Bach. Fuck playing Chopin. Fuck playing exactly like my mother, my piano teacher, and this Mrs. Cliburn from Longview or Kilgore, and her son, Van. They wanted me to play Bach--and I was gonna play what I wanted to play--boogie-woogie for the moment.

And by golly, there she is, Van's mother--she who pinched my sweet dimpled cheek one summer afternoon in Dallas, Texas.
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So through my music I learned I was a Nonconformist. That's why I fell so readily into the arms of Madame Zzaj--Duke Ellington's mother of Jazz--wasn't she impregnated by the Drum?--Jazz was a totally improvised music--an improvised music free of Bach and Chopin--with improvisations that sounded like they were coming from an ancient distance and not Europe--improvisations based on heartbeat (instinctual) rhythms and harmonious oneness--into the swinging drones, wails, chants, sing-songs, accompanied by the polyrhythmic writhings, shaking the hips in polytonal abstract directions--directions within directions--and when I'm deep into a jazz improvisation--I'm lost within my deepest well of a self that only the lacing together or laddering together of long measures of improvised progression to find my way out of the well and into the light of day (somebody's ears perhaps) dressed in the character of an accomplished pianist. By my teenage years, I'm totally conforming to my nonconforming self's needs--I'm rocking my solar plexus in the bosom of my own Abraham. And from jazz came my politics.

"YOU WILL BELIEVE IN GOD!" I was ordered by my parents and their adversaries in the Christian church sales departments. "Oh yeah!" I smoked back, "Let me tell you how I feel: Fuck God! I don't see no God? 'Hey, God, this is the little Wolfe boy defying your ass! How 'bout a bolt of lightning to prove me a liar!'" Of course there was no bolt of lightning. Only my father's belt when I got too defiant of God, country, and the police. My father as he laid into me with his "Jesus Is Love" belt said, "As the Good Book says, sonny boy, spare the rod and spoil the child, so hold on, here comes some Holy Spirit." WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit had me running for the Atheist Mountains. I couldn't conform to such barbaric means of teaching truth.

So my generation was not the generation of rebels without causes--that generation represented by Marlon Brando and James Dean and Robert Lindner's analysis (though I loved reading Rebel Without a Cause and Lindner's 50-Minute Hour); nope, my generation had a cause behind its rebellion. The cause was the determination not to conform to anything without first thoroughly playing it as many different ways as there were keys on a piano. Conformity I quickly denoted as wasted time and wasted devotion to long-ago proven wrong solutions to the problems of evolution--wasted time and devotion to learning morals, to trying to understand and make fact out of religious hocus-pocus, to learning "good" manners, to respecting God, country, and the local law enforcement agencies, all of that and also being expected to "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" and the way they teach you to go. In other words, follow in your parents's footsteps, the first commandment of Conformity.

In my case I was supposed to follow in my father's footsteps. My father's faltering footsteps. To follow in his footsteps was to fail. I easily recognized that by the time I was 6 or 7. To follow in my mother's footsteps would have made me a mamma's boy. I never liked my mother--didn't even think of her as a woman--she was "Mother." I quickly learned the kind of love I was expected to show my mother was an abstract one and not a primal one as instinctively I tried to have sex-love with my mother but couldn't get it up for her or feel lust for her (OK, I know, it's Freudian, but I didn't deduce it theoretically when I was developing--I hadn't read Freud at 2, when I started figuring these kindred-love relationships out). I wasn't about to be a mamma's boy. I wanted to develop on my own cognition.

All of that self-analysis just to return to the reason for this post, my embarrassment at being caught at such a fuck up in terms of changing Franny Glass into Zooey Glass in terms of forgetting, having not looked at the book probably since it hit the bookstores in 1961 (I was in my Holden Caulfield state then), that Franny stayed Franny in both stories, and because out of all of Salinger's women, what man doesn't wanna make it with Franny?--even her cat Bloomberg has the hots for her and crawls up between her legs while she's stretched out in a bathing suit--"...he's absolutely mad about me."

And last night I found my copy of Franny & Zooey (it has an S. Klein pricetag in it--$2.65--yes, S. Klein on the Square (Union Square) was still in business when I moved to NYC) and started rereading it. I read enough Zooey to realize the idiocy of my blunder--my having forgotten the whole Glass tree under which the Franny story evolves and under which the whole of Zooey develops and the shattering of Glasses is really getting loud as Zooey Glass's wise-ass story emerges!
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In rereading Franny & Zooey, I suddenly had this realization: how overwhelmingly influenced we are by the Ivy League ways of thinking and classifying and expecting. How ruled over we are by Ivy League graduates.

What got me thinking this way really was in the beginning of Franny. Franny arrives in New Haven on the train up from New York City. Her current boyfriend Lane is a Yaley and has been anticipating her arrival to join him for the big Yale-Harvard football game weekend. After she disembarks from the train she starts talking about the other girls on the train, playing a game as she rode along bored with them of judging by their individual behavior which Ivy League women's college they attended. She admits this is how she judges her best friends as well. For instance, one girl on the train who stayed in the train's toilet for an excessive length of time Franny determined was a Bennington girl, commenting that the girl was in the toilet so long because she was probably in there sculpting or painting--doing something arty. As I read this, I started chuckling to myself. I could personally vouch for Franny's comment about Bennington girls being artsy-fartsy types by referencing two rather involved love affairs I had with two Bennington girls back in wild-life 1970s. The first Bennington girl with whom I spent one summer of happiness, a Texas-born girl whose father was the US ambassador to a Central American country, was a graduate Pottery major. She had her own private kiln set up in the woods just off the Bennington campus and had a catalog of her pottery designs printed up as her Master's thesis. The other Bennington girl I had an affair with was simply too rich to have a major--she was directly kin to the Rockefellers--though when she talked about her life at Bennington, she declared she was working toward a degree in the Theater Arts. I'm not mocking this young woman--in fact, I found her a wonderfully down-to-earth young woman to be so fucking rich who saw something in me that made her fall stalkingly madly in love with me that same summer I was trolloping around with the ambassador's daughter. To be quite frank with you all, I could have had a partial wedge of that Rockefeller pie, folks, had I realized just how hoi-poloi this young lady was. I mean she wasn't bad to look at and she was warm and very loving toward me--but, like I've tried to convince you, in my head at that time I would have considered living off a rich wife beneath my nonconforming dignity.

There's one of my "wives" that I very seldom mention--for a reason--it involves a lot of denial--besides, the woman bitterly hates me now--and "I'm too young to die" as the old bluesmen used to sing when trying to resolve troubles they had with their old ladies--and besides, hey, with the destruction of Haiti and all its records, I could still be legally married to the Welsh-Mexican-Choctaw lady, wife Numero Dos--so I don't want to be accused of bigamy. I will, however, mention that this unmentionable wife fits perfectly into this discussion since she was a Sarah Lawrence grad. Where Bennington trains young rich girls in the arts & crafts, Sarah Lawrence considers itself a promoter of liberal women intellectuals--especially women writers and poets--my particular sidekick studying writing with E. L. Doctorow, who, as she quipped, was on a sabbitical most of the term--though he did check in once or twice and give a lecture, as she would add, "...with his hat still on and his bags still packed and waiting for him by the door."

One more parallel line I'm on with Ivy League graduates, my only niece went to Smith. She has a Smith attitude about life, too, though she claims she's not that kind of woman, dammit! A Smith attitude is one of making rich girls smart enough to marry Harvard men--so Smithies evolve from a Smith attitude into a Harvard attitude about life--and my niece spent her final years at Harvard (a feat of hers of which I'm very proud, though she will berate the hell of me for writing about this aspect of her fabulous life. I tell her, hell, you had your own Wolf attitude built in to you--as a Wolfe-woman, you ended up much smarter than a Harvard man).

And Smith girls are so different from Sarah Lawrence and Bennington girls. They're first of all politically rightwing. Bennington and Sarah Lawrence girls can be the daughters of lefties and anarchists and such.

[And, yes, I'm aware that most Ivy League women's colleges are now coed. I was once sort-of friends, though I saw him every day for a while, with the first male graduate of Vassar College up in Poughkeepsie from which he was turned out as a Futurist--Also, didn't the Steely Dan dudes meet at Vassar? Somebody will fact-check that statement, I'm sure.]

Since Teddy Roosevelt, we've had 19 presidents, ten of whom went to Ivy League schools--mostly to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. JFK transferred all over the place, from London School of Economics to Stanford to Princeton to Harvard. Two of our presidents, Woody Wilson and Ike Eisenhower, were presidents of Ivy League colleges: Woody: Princeton; Ike: Columbia University (the story I heard was Columbia really wanted Ike's brother, Milton, who at the time was President of the University of Pennsylvania (an Ivy League school, don't forget), but somehow Ike thought they meant him and he accepted--I can't imagine Ike as president of any college much less an Ivy League college--Columbia U, by the way, originally was a Brit college--it was called King's College. WKCR is Columbia U's radio station. Those call letters stand for King's College Radio.

President Obama attended two Ivy League schools, starting at Columbia, then going on to Harvard Law, where he became editor of the Harvard Law Review. In fact-checking this portion of this post, I was surprised to see that President Obama while in Chicago attended the University of Chicago Law School--no wonder he defends Neo-Conservative Trotskyite ideas!

But just look at Obama's advisors and cabinet crowd--Larry Summers (Harvard)(as president of Harvard Larry was a total failure--a dunce of an educator--he was fired by the students and teachers there)--Larry being an Ivy League Economics major--kin, I'm pretty sure, to the late Paul Samuelson. Then there's reconfirmed Treasury head and money-printing fool, Timmy Boy Geithner--he's a Dartmouth grad--snooty Dartmouth--Timmy Boy trained as a Civil Servant--what poor little rich boys with no ambitions except what their father's force on them end up majoring in--getting a Civil Servant degree from Dartmouth means you are suited for an easy fucking high-paying job with the diplomatic corps or to becoming a future Sec'y of the US Treasury. And, of course, that old meistercigardiddling ex-President Slick Willie Clinton got himself an Ivy League degree--and so did Little Miss Hillary, too, after she did her undergraduate work at the Ivy League girls school for quirky girls, Wellesley.

From fabiusmaximus here's the whole bunch of these Ivy League rascals in Obama's cabinet and advising him (and it includes wife Michelle) and now ruling us (how weird was it to see that Rahm Emmanuel is a Sarah Lawrence graduate!--wow, I'm laughing my ass off):

Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

What we tend to forget, is that Harvard and Yale started off as religious schools--schools of divinity. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at one time also were all-White Male-only institutions. Blacks for damn sure weren't allowed on campus except as slaves and servants to the rich asshole White sons of the rich asshole White Power Elites--the aristocratic forefathers we so give honor to as great men of decency and democracy, an honor none of these White Men can live up to if you put them under a historical-research magnifying glass.

Check Out This Ivy League Christian Union (Dumb Christian Backwards Thinking--"Rah-Rah-Rah, JESUS!")

Why focus on the Ivy League? Here the Christian Union has a pragmatic vision. It recognizes that graduates from these universities are disproportionately influential in the world. (Consider the fact that eight of nine Supreme Court Justices graduated from Ivy League Schools, as did George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. FYI: John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy.) If students of the Ivy League can be drawn to Christ and encouraged to live out their faith in action, this will have a major impact on the world, according to the Christian Union.

From: www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/ivyleaguecongress.htm

What a brilliant idiot this Mark D. Roberts. But, hey, this idiot is correct about infiltrating our future Ivy League rulers with the 2,000-year-old Judaic-voodoo religion called Christianity.
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Some of the heavy thinkers I respect didn't finish college--some of them didn't even finish high school. Eric Hoffer. Henry Miller. Ernest Hemingway. But, and I must admit to this, a lot of the heavy thinkers I do respect went to Ivy League schools. F. Scott Fitzgerald (he was so out of place at Princeton). Philip Wylie. Gertrude Stein (just think, Gertrude went to Harvard--a Jewish girl at White Christian Harvard--studying pragmatism under America's own pragmatist, William James). Norman Mailer. Most of my professors in college were either Harvard or Yale PhDs. I also had an unusual lot of University of Chicago PhDs in my college careers, one of whom taught me Economics--he probably knew Leo Strauss!

Oh my God! Connections. Look how easily we can connect ourselves to trends. There I was studying economics with a god-damn Trotskyite, one of the pupils of the professor from whence came the Neo-Conservative movement, and still I leaned toward Marx's sociological view of the class system and Capitalism and colonialism and provincialism and monopolies and oligarchies and cartels and plutocracies and plantations and masters and rulers and sovereigns and on and on and on into the history I have survived up until now and naturally rebelled against. Neo-Conservatives are ultra-Libertarians. They are national socialists. In other words, the economy and national wealth lead to the strongest nations and the strongest nations prove they're the strongest nations by a show of FORCE--a show of MONEY FORCE--and a big show of KILL FORCE!

I must abruptly interrupt myself and get off this Ivy League-dominance bullshit and...well, talk about eternal life and how the offering of eternal life is the trick bag that has led us to the brink of our own self-annihilation. I use as an example of what I mean, the profession of old Oral Roberts--who recently left the coil to go up and join Big Daddy and Jesus in runnin' Hebbin'. You can't knock old Oral if you really do believe in God and Capitalism. Think about it: Oral's old-timey-religion, rolling-in-the-ailses, speaking-in-tongues God let this old snake-oil peddler live 92 damn-good years. Plus, Oral's Eternal-Life-Jesus-flim-flam act left him rich as a god-damn rajah when he died and left all his wealth to his utterly worthless son, RICH-retard and his young-boy-teasin' wife, Lindsay ("Would you show Miss Lindsay your hard little boy tool if I were in your room naked? Praise the Lord!"). (I know all about these creeps--I grew up with them in West Texas and Oklahoma.)

Also, think about this, Oral was so privileged as a man who filed his preacher's license with the Federal government proving he got his orders straight down--ZOOOM--from the God himself--so privileged was Oral in the Orders of Yahweh, We the People gave him the divine privilege of not having to pay a lick of taxes on those hundreds of tin buckets full to the brim of thousands of sweaty greasy hard-earned dollar bills (cash only) he collected at his Selling Jesus pep rallies--which is all old Oral was, a Jesus peddler--a Jesus sales pep-rally cheerleader--offering pep to his assembled audience of scared-to-die yokels and rubes--offering those hayseed and hillbilly goonies the pep to jump up and down and roll all over the ground and get up spouting shit like "Eno-y-bo-ahbray-eel-hey-lo-um" and "Praise the Lord" and stopping in the midst of his hullaballoo and saying, "Hold on...er-ah, the Lord is talkin' to me--don't you feel his man spirit in the room right now?--all you horny-for-Jesus ladies out there--don't you feel him inside you now? He's telling me there's a lady in this audience who has breast cancer--big, big breast cancer--Praise the Lord--er-ah, and the Lord's telling me, Brother Oral, if this woman will stand and speak in tongues and come forth with that thousand dollar bill in her holy little hands, I will through you, my son, HEAL HER...." And 20 or thirty big overweight hillbilly women would tumble down and roll in the dirt of old Oral's tent church--trucked in from Tulsa, Okie-homa--with grubby dollars in their hands--pour down to old Oral's high chair--Oral used to sit up on a big high stool with a mic in his hands and preach and heal and shit--sitting at Oral's big-boater clodhopper feet to get healed of breast cancer.

You ever notice in your Christian churches how the preachers, priests, ministers, eunuchs, profligate cleric are always above their followers? The followers faces (and noses) are beneath their feet. Remember, their feet don't stink because a part of becoming a priest is the washing of feet--Jesus washed his disciples's feet--a custom in those days when men and women wore Jesus sandals--I mean, your feet got caked with crap--just think--when a Jewish woman went out to feed the chickens--she walked through all of that chicken shit--then traipsed it back into her dirt-floored house--and those feet--ohhhhhh, how the hell they must have stank! So you see, since the preacher's had his feet washed by Jesus, his feet don't stink anymore--so the worshipers can come easily and worship at Jesus's feet, the priest's feet by proxy actually Jesus's holy feet. Jesus Christ this is simple shit. Jesus Christ it's hard to believe that people who went to Ivy League colleges believe in this shit.

The key to these creepy dudes's success--and we include in this dude bag (it is a male profession) our own dear thedailygrowlerofficialspiritualleader, Pastor Melissa Scott (damn she's looking good these days--she's back on NYC teevee--at 1 am now)--is their offering of ETERNAL LIFE--a life of never dying--Jesus dying for you--and guaranteed by Yahweh--guaranteed by the priests saying God has told them he approves of it, too. "Thou shalt never die." "For Yahweh (same as Allah) gave his only misbegotten son that whosoever is cheeky enough to believe this little bastard Jewish boy is his son shall suffer eternal life...blah, blah, blah."

I remember from my Christian past my mother and father and their church pals arguing over who got Eternal Life! My mother believed it was those who were baptized by immersion (the full dunk) who would receive Eternal Life--and along with this belief came the belief that once you accepted Jesus as your personal savior you were saved (you had Eternal Life--that's what "saved" refers to in Jesus Script). The less holy than my mother were those who baptized by "Sprinkling"--as done in Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian (Church of Scotland), Episcopalian (US Anglicans), Anglican (Church of Henry the VIII) churches. And, yes, Baptists come from "the immersed" type of baptized Christian. Baptism being the substitute for the real true form of sacrificing--human sacrificing.

In all religions there is sacrifice. In the earliest religions a human being had to be sacrificed by the priests on the Altar of Whatever God in order to merit certain salvations--maybe salvation from starving to death. In the Torah that's why Yahweh told Abraham (the Poppy of the Jews, not the Juice of the Poppy) to take his son up to Abe's holy altar and put a Bowie knife through his heart.

Now here's the Christian trick bag. You see, old Jesus the Essene Jew, a crazy pep-talker who wandered the land yodeling out the Essene message of Jewish reform. The message that Jesus eventually turned into his own way of making a living--with Jesus coming to the shores of Lake Galillee, the largest fresh water lake in Judea (now Israel)--from whence most Israeli cities and supposedly Palestinian cities get their water supplies--a Salvation Lake--a place of eternal life--containing both water and food. That's why Jesus chose his fishermen pals as disciples--they knew how to fish for food. Plus, Jesus knew all these Nazareth dudes--probably went to Hebrew school with most of 'em--a burly bunch of MEN they were, too.

[Have I mentioned before that in the Christian legend of Adam and Eve, God at first didn't think of making Eve. He saw no sense in Adam having a woman. Think of that. Adam had to say to God, "Hey, Big Daddy, what the hell are those animals doing when those ones like me jump on the backs of those who have holes where I have this pole and start humping away. That looks like fun, Dad. Where's my me with a hole instead a pole?" Thus, God, made woman--Man's woe. The originator of original sin.]

Holy Crap. The selling of eternal life. That's what the USA has come to stand for. Whew! I've been talkin' to God, folks. Well, I am a soothsayer, even though I missed remembering Zooey was a MAN--Franny is the woe of MAN...and thus I'm back to being embarrassed about my Tuesday's woeful blunder.

thecrucifiedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Holy Growler: "The Book of the Ivy Leaguers"

Charles Horton Cooley (born Aug. 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) was an American sociologist and the son of Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, and he was a founding member and the eighth president of the American Sociological Association. He is perhaps most well known for his concept of the looking glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others.

From Wikipedia