189. DIEBOLD (OR AT LEAST TRIP FORCEFULLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT)

... preferably on top of an electronic voting machine that you permanently disable.

From the Archives

(January 2006) I’ve been pondering what to plant in my yard this spring because, yes, as a matter of fact I do have spring fever already.

Blame it on what writer John Rosenthal refers to as January Spring—that five-week period down south when temperatures suddenly soar into the seventies and the sky turns an unblemished blue that is all the more vibrant because we’ve seen nothing but foggy gray for so long.

We Southerners spy that blue and go into a fit—pull out T-shirts and shorts and freeze our tits off as we stand outside oohing and aaahing over the foolish pink tulip poplars and purple hyacinths that have bloomed way too early again and we silently agree to pretend that we don’t know that it will freeze again before winter is officially over.

•

So it’s 31 January 2006. Thomas Merton’s birthday and the 141st anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment—which I suppose makes it a particularly appropriate day for Coretta Scott King to die.

Then again, maybe she just couldn’t bear the reality of a 58–43 split vote confirming a Supreme Court neocon who is so opposed to affirmative action.

(And then there were none....)

I guess we should all look forward to the boy king bragging about his latest victory in his fifth State of The (Dis)Union Address tonight, huh?

Not that I’ll bother to listen. I know branding and doublespeak when I hear it and would rather read the summary and assessments tomorrow.

And speaking of Bush&Co’s reign of error, Tomdispatch.com points out that four Januaries have already passed since our wanna-be emperor used his address to “brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet—as a World-War-II-style ‘axis of evil.’”

And it’s already been three Januaries since W said, with a straight face, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Progressives are calling for people to “make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out” the Address tonight. This is part one of a two-part Bush Step Down rally that culminates Saturday in front of the White House, where they plan to demand that W step down and take his program with him.

Now I’m all for rallies that might accomplish something—or at least draw attention to an issue that can be addressed—but this is the pure-T definition of pipe dream.

I do hope that more independent news outlets will notice the statistics cited in Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steam the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) and pressure politicians to investigate yet another potential crime committed by this administration though.

Miller says

for GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed, that ‘moral values’ had made the difference.

(Can you say branding?) Miller says theft, not moral values, swung the election. And he uses statistics to back up his claim.

In reference to the 2002 congressional elections, he outlines how, in Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, and

a couple of other states—there was what we might call "Diebold magic" everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by exit polls,

yet all of them won.

During the presidential elections, electronic touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least 11 states and evidence of wrongdoing in Ohio is copious.

Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes, but the various stratagems, tricks and tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots [see John Conyers’ report to the House Judiciary Committee]—all ... add up to a number far greater than 118,000.

Ohio practices were applied in other key states as well, most notably Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New York and New Mexico, where

we're told that Bush won by some 7,000 votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast a vote for president [though] because the touchscreen machines in their districts refused to record a vote for president.

These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas, and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is 10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000 votes.

The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory.

Well that's nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that there was any increase in the number of religious voters. ... Exit polls were most inaccurate—by a big margin—in those areas that used electronic voting machines with no paper trail ... (and particularly noticeable in 5 swing states).

Miller advises people to check out the Election Incident Reporting System website, where you can type in the name of your state or county and see a transcript of all the complaints that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.

And on that note, I am going to change into my gym clothes and go break some things in kung fu class.

178. ANOTHER YEAR OF APOCALYPTICAL EVENTS FINALLY ENDS, OR, ON TO THE HOLY WARS, BROWNIE!

From the Archives

(31 December 2005) Bush, when touring the country to promote his dumb idea of privatizing Social Security, said that his objective was “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

I like a president who kind of does something, don’t you?

The kind of logic behind that official statement makes about as much sense as the Family Research Council's and other conservative groups’ response to the new human papillomavirus vaccine.

We can virtually eliminate cervical cancer by giving every 12-year-old girl this vaccine, yet socially conservative groups oppose it because they believe it provides an incentive to engage in premarital sex.

(Yet they called themselves pro-life.)

•

And now, a poem for the new year. I hope yours is filled with love and hope and creativity and passion and good health and prosperity and music.

LUTE MUSIC
by Kenneth Rexroth

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

Since that wonderful poem was written by Kenneth Rexroth (a poet who once sold pamphlets promising a cure for constipation), I suppose I should include a link to some jazz music here, but you’ll just have to find that new Miles Davis compilation on your own because I am far too busy pondering the fact that three poor counties in my state are apparently competing for a five-thousand-ton-per-day solid waste dump that will turn the eastern region into the fourth largest waste dump in the nation.

It sucks to be poor

(and stinks too).

•

So while I was sipping mulled wine and not even thinking about my New York Times electronic subscription last week, a jury ruled that Wal-Mart must pay $172 million to employees because the chain failed to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers (who, let’s face it, probably purchased their uneaten lunches at Sam’s Club anyway, thus giving the Waltons even more money).

Meanwhile, word leaked out that our government has been conducting secret radiation searches in the homes and businesses and mosques of Muslim Americans (can you say guilt by association?).

Here’s a response from the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

This disturbing revelation, coupled with recent reports of domestic surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be very concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims

. . . or Quakers. Or queers. Or liberals. Or . . .

Hmm. Remember when the US attorney general labeled all environmentalists communists whom our country will weed out one by one by any means necessary?

(Damn tree huggers fucking up our social security system ...

... or something.)

And I’ve been asking myself what it means that King Bush the Younger now flaunts the fact that he so flagrantly broke the law.

Does he actually believe that he is above the law?

(He must.)

Or is this a desperate response from a desperate criminal who got caught red-handed?

Will distracted citizens fall for this preemptive preening?

And ’tis the season, so let’s note a not-so-stellar anniversary: on Christmas Eve 1992, King Bush the Elder (who is not often confused with a wise man) was watching over his thousand points of light when, lo, a star appeared in the east and told him what he had to do—pardon former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other neocons for their Iran-Contra criminal activity as American citizens focused on our eggnog.

(Your illegal actions will still be noted in the history books though, boys.)

Meanwhile, in the hopeful news department, at least 1,500 people attended a Christmas Eve mass held by an recently excommunicated St. Louis priest despite warnings from their archibishop that doing so would be a mortal sin (the definition of which sure has become pedestrian of late).

And Merriam-Webster Online reports that these are the most looked-up words in 2005: (10) inept, (9) levee, (8) conclave, (7) pandemic, (6) tsunami, (5) insipid, (4) filibuster, (3) contempt, (2) refugee—and the word most people needed defined: integrity.

(That paragraph is a found poem, really.)

And, finally, something to keep in mind as you wake up with your champagne hangover: At the first light of the new year, Buddhists all over the world will begin reciting prayers and meditating for peace.

Okay. I’ll close with something to consider as we slide into this new year.

Do you think there’s any correlation between the surprising success of that lame, feel-good, anthropomorphic penguin movie that has nothing to do with reality and how stunned we all felt as the many apocalyptical natural events of the past year wiped out so many of us?

SANG IN SHOWER: Summertime, and the Living is Easy (don’t ask me why ’cause it sure ain’t summer here)

READING: A week’s worth of the New York Times

LISTENING TO: The Holly and The Ivy, as performed by the Washington Men’s Camerata

BEST YEAR-END QUOTE: I’ve never trusted the number 10, or five, or any other multiple of fingers on a simian’s hand when it comes to recognizing excellence. (critic Byron Woods)

175. HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

From the Archives

(November 2005) In case you haven't been paying attention to Bush's illegal NSA wiretaps: article two of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon states that the president committed a crime

by directing or authorizing [intelligence] agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office.

So the Pentagon has been spying on Americans at the insistence of the president—a man who, when told that his wiretapping order violates the US Constitution, replied that it’s “just a goddamn piece of paper” and waaa waaa waaa baby wants what baby wants and he’s perfectly willing to kill 30 thousand Iraqis and your sons and daughters and to stamp out Democracy to get it.

Maybe Nixon said this too before he was impeached (and knowing Nixon, he probably said it afterwards too, since he blamed everyone else for his failures).

Frankly, I want a president who treasures the Constitution more than his fucking LIFE or any short-term goals that he and the lobbyists who define their platform might have.

I want her to value public service over private interests PERIOD.

I want her to consider this belief holy, a calling.

I want Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, or the female equivalent, guiding our country—someone who will stand up to powerful interests and insist on policies that are good for ALL the people, not just the few with deep pockets and persuasive lobbyists.

I mean let’s face it, our Constitution is bigger than any one over-privileged cowboy who probably wouldn’t have even passed high-school grammar without Daddy’s connections

(and he damn well better be glad that Barbara Jordan ain’t around today or he’d already be impeached).

And let me just say that my southern Baptist mother and plenty of other fundamentalists must be aghast to know that this so-called Christian man uttered the phrase god damn out loud—bu we always knew he was an opportunistic poseur, right?

Meanwhile inquiring minds want to know what enemy so threatens national security that we must bypass customary procedures that routinely grant permission to wiretap phones with 4 hours’ notice anyway.

Is it those terrorists that the FBI warned Condi and George about? Those spies with their fingers on a nuclear bomb?

Why no. It’s those scary Quaker anti-war activist terrorists, that’s who.

Run Dick run! Better move us to red alert!!

(You’d think it’d be obvious to anyone who knows anything about Quakers that they are opposed to violence, but maybe the chickenhawks consider opposition to the war to be our greatest national threat [to coin a Vietnam phrase].)

Our president lies blatantly about weapons of mass destruction, about torture, about votes. No wonder we’re all jaded.

Meanwhile, my trunk is loaded down with gifts (which may not be unrelated); my stockings are overflowing and my suitcase is too, so I will leave you with a quote:

For now I am in a holiday humour.—Shakespeare

And, since I may not be online again before New Year’s, here’s another one:

AND NOW let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious and great things.—Rainer Maria Rilke

READING: “It is unconstitutional to teach [so-called intelligent design] as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. ... We find that the secular purposes claimed by the [School] Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom."

So wrote the judge in his 139-page opinion in the PA evolution case.

LISTENING TO: silver bells

BEST-OF SELECT SPAM: MASTERDICK! Do you know . . . I love you?

151. CONSIGNED TO INSIGNIFICANCE

From the Archives (September 2005)

There is no United Nations—John Bolton, Bush’s newly appointed ambassador to the UN.

That’s the same Bolton who wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, that the US is under no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even signed and ratified ones such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Bush is defying.

Deleting The use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort is one of 450 changes that the Bush administration is demanding be made to the UN’s action agenda that culminates at this month’s summit.

Not surprising, given the reality that this administration has an “‘invade first, choose your justifications later mode of crisis resolution” (Phyllis Bennis, author of the forthcoming Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power, as quoted in TomPaine.com’s “A Declaration of War”).

Bennis continues:

The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the world to accept as its own the U.S. strategy of abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, rejecting international law, privileging ruthless market forces over any attempted regulation, sidelining the role of international institutions except for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps fatally, the United Nations itself.

(Warning. This entry [obviously] consists of many news excerpts peppered with blatant opinions peppered with a miniscule amount of half-hopeful poetry and an undercurrent of glee about my benign breast lump and more than a little fury about our failure to help hurricane victims.)

So I wonder if all those photos of impoverished people sitting on their car seat chairs in their one-room shacks in New Orleans by their TVs that are sitting on red plastic milk crates will cause enough sustained outrage to force this administration to at least couch their abandonment of impoverished people in pretty talk? Will these images help well-intentioned Americans realize that our policies create impoverishment? Or will this only be news until the next story comes along?

Interestingly, my conservative sister Dee e-mailed me to say that she and her conservative husband are considering letting a hurricane family live with them in their gated golf course community. Of course, their list of qualifications is so long that it’s unlikely that ANY family would qualify for this, um, pleasure.

As for me, I’d be happy to host an honest lesbian who doesn’t need me to entertain her 24/7. FEMA can send her lover along too (which is important to note, since queers are not only losing their homes, but being separated from their lovers by FEMA, which has announced that it doesn’t recognize nonlegal unions when dividing refugees up for dispersement).

(Note to FEMA: you may want to send queer refugees somewhere other than Utah or South Carolina too.)

•

Bush&Co has given the UN what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the US changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance. But the UN could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the UN itself has some practice in dealing with US threats. President George W. Bush gave the UN these same two choices once before—in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with ‘irrelevance’ if the UN did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the UN made the third choice—the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the UN stood together to defy the US drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what the New York Times called “the second super-power.” ... This time, as before, the US has threatened and declared war on the UN and the world. As before, it's time for that three-part superpower to rise again, to defend the UN, and to say no to empire. (Bennis again)

Why do I suddenly want to move to Vancouver and disassociate myself from this empire?

So that article about the UN prompted some damn interesting posts, including

to any member of the House of Representatives who might, by small chance, be logging on to this website: Please, PLEASE impeach this maniac before he starts World War III. What are you waiting for??? WHAT??? You've got the evidence, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR???? ... Let me see if I got this straight....Bill Clinton, who in hindsight, let's face it, was not that bad a president, lied about having an affair with a half-witted intern and you impeached him, right? Right? OK. Now, George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, invaded a country that was a threat to no one but itself, resulting in the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of men, women and little children—and what??? I'm sorry but am I missing something here? Please explain yourselves. Explain your hypocracy to the mothers and fathers of the almost two thousand dead American kids who have been killed in this fiasco (and that number will at least double by the time this fucking nightmare of an administration is over—that's a conservative estimate)....—Tom Degan

and

American citizens of conscience now face the choice that others have faced. Like a white South African during apartheid, or a German citizen during the Third Reich, etc, you are privileged members of a community who's [sic] leaders are committing crimes against humanity in your name. What are you going to do about it? Failure to face your moral quandary implicates you in these crimes, which are multiple, egregious, escalating. Action or inaction, both are choices.—Boris

and

Why do they want to bring the third world nations up in standard of living while bringing the first world nations down??? So you have a one world low income work force to pick from at a low cost, so you control the water and natural resources of the various nations, so you have an income sufficient in the third world to increase by billions the number of consumers available to purchase your goods and thus increase the wealth of the few. [and it is not lost on me that Bush et al. bypassed the minimum wage for construction workers in the hurricane-stricken areas today] ... It’s not a benign organization. So we have two different issues here. While the average person has an idealistic view of bringing third world poverty to an end and resources sharing to other nations, its not the case with those who control these things. They are simply using the flowery language of idealism to promote their greed agenda as well. - Do not be fooled by either side. The UN is corrupt as is the Bush administration and they are beginning to fight among themselves with us out here being totally ignored. Just ask yourselves ‘why is aids still a blight upon Africa?’ Why hasn't the UN addressed that well before now. It’s been 20 years and nothing is being done? It’s intentional.—Pepper

Then there’s the guy who, somehow, found a tie to marijuana (because someone had to...) and asserts that petroleum would be useless if only people ended cannabis prohibitions:

End Cannabis prohibition. I know it sounds simplistic, but if people were to re-valuate the most useful agricultural resource on Earth, then petroleum would be worthless. If that ever happens, BushCo will lose its economic superiority, which affords political control.

Everything that is made from petroleum can be made better, cheaper, and with less pollution from Cannabis (hemp, 'marijuana' etc.). That is the real reason it is prohibited.

Ending the anti-natural prohibition of the "herb bearing seed" called Cannabis is the fundamental challenge of our time. Among the grave harms being inflicted on humanity by constricting the free market in the world's most useful and potentially most abundant agricultural resource are the following:

1. Induces essential resource scarcity of fuel, food, and shelter for humans, animals and future generations.
2. Institutionalizes a black market economy.
3. Corrupts governments, locally and globally.
4. Creates essential resource disparity, that inevitably leads to wars over energy, water and other essential natural resources.
5. Creates an economic vacuum that has addicted and corrupted our economic system to be dependent on toxic, unevenly distributed and finite resources to provide for our essential needs.
6. Degrades the environment on regional and global levels. "Global Broiling" is the best example of the far reaching effects that mankind's [sic] addiction to chemicals is having.
7. Creates poverty, where abundance could easily exist.
8. Causes malnutrition, illness and death from nutritional deficiencies.
9. Threatens everyone's food security.
10. Perverts human values and social evolution toward violence.
11. Responsible for the rise of GMOs, having created protein shortages.
12. Economically empowers the least conscious [sic] people on the planet.
13. Disrepects Science and spiritual traditions of "Thanksgiving" for the blessings of the harvest.
14. Institutionalizes disrespect for Nature.
15. Inhibits free spiritual evolution.
16. Robs us of our Natural Rights, upon which our government was founded.
17. Robs other creatures, with whom we share this planet, of an unique and essential food resource.
18. Fosters conditions of untruth, and spreads propaganda, which ultimately harms people.
19 Accelerates the spread of HIV/AIDS between infected mothers and nursing infants.
20. Creates a "forbidden fruit" which makes adolescent experimentation with 'marijuana' more likely.

Ending the anti-natural prohibition of the "herb bearing seed" called Cannabis is the fundamental challenge of our time. Yep, that’s what he wrote.

Wars. Famine. Hunger. AIDS. Cancer. Illiteracy. Unfant Mortality. The New Gilded Age. But legalizing cannabis is the challenge of our time. (Just remember. You heard it here first.)

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms—and I’d be fascinated to hear this guy’s story. My hunch is that it doesn’t involve much poverty or illiteracy or random assault.

101. BOURGEOIS BLUES

From the Archives

(May 2005) Found the words and chords to the old Leadbelly song "Bourgeois Blues" a while back and hashed out a tune on the guitar. I've never heard the recorded version, so don’t know if my approach is anything like Leadbelly's, but do like the one I created.

Listen here people, listen to me. Don’t try to find no home down in Washington, DC. Lawd it’s a bourgeois town. oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

White folks in Washington they know how to throw a colored man a nickel just to see him bow. Lawd it's a bourgeois town. Oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

Yeah.

I played it for a pal today and she said my voice is perfectly suited for rot-gut blues. Taught her a few chords too in the coruse of introducing her to Lucinda Williams’s and GIllian Welch's music.

I'm thinking Dm and A7 and B7 and G and C can take her a long ways with them—and everyone needs to learn how to play Lucinda's "Hot Love."

Lucinda’s songs aren’t even complicated really, and some of her rhymes make me laugh out loud. Example: The sun's so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or somethin’. You’ve been traveling a hard road. Sit down Bill and lighten your load. .

I love her twang and her passion, and find her allusions to American poets wonderful.

Lucinda's father runs the Arkansas writing program and is a really good translator.

One of the poets associated with the program committed suicide years ago and this shows up in her songs from time to time (see "Lake Charles," "Pineola," and "Sweet Old World," especially).

So here’s a Miller Williams translation that I really like. The poem is by Nicanor Parra (1914–), a Chilean academic who refused to leave the country after the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Instead he established himself as a voice of dissent.

Carolyn Forché says that Parra's poetry "imparts a quality of multiple estrangement and exemplifies his deep commitment to what he calls anti-poetry—a rejection of poetic language and conventions” (from her brilliant compilation Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness).

SENTENCES
by Nicanor Parra
(translated by Miller Williams)

Let’s no fool ourselves.
The automobile is a wheelchair
A lion is made of lambs
Poets have no biographies
Death is a collective habit
Children are born to be happy
Reality has a tendency to fade away
Fucking is a diabolical act
God is a good friend of the poor.

I scratched that poem onto a piece of silver paper with a nail and posted it on my bulletin board at work. People never fail to comment on it too.

•

In other news, I came across a sobering statistic about our depreciating currency today. The US's deficit in international transactions reached $666 billion in 2004, which is up 24 percent from 2003. That’s 5.7 percent of the economy (2–3 times what economists generally consider sustainable) ... but Shrub is a compassionate conservative looking after our money, right?

So here’s my obscure joke of the day: Q. What nationality are you? A. Depreciating currency.

67. MEMBERS ONLY

From the Archives

(April 2005) Today’s the anniversary of the day Oscar Wilde was arrested on sodomy charges after a Marquis accused him of having an affair with his son.

That was in the 1800s. Today, sodomy is still illegal in many states. (Fall in love (or lust); go to jail. Go directly to jail....)

In other news, if it weren’t illegal, I would steal Cecil’s clever idea and call this entry NEWS OF THE WEIRD because there’s a whole lot of weirdness going on in our country right now.

(1) A Florida sheriff who was pissed at criticism he received in the local paper’s editorial section used the driver’s license database to locate the letter-writer, then sent her a letter refuting her comments. Problem is, assh0le, she has a right to free speech and you violated federal privacy laws.

(2) Then there’s Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin who was stripped of her title (and, I assume, her tiara) after a newspaper article included a photo of her standing. Apparently, the former Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin has muscular dystrophy and spends most of her time on a scooter but, on good days, she can still sometimes walk up to 50 feet. She sometimes stands while teaching too—but I guess that's too mobile for the judges, who believe that she withheld her obviously stellar physical capabilities.

(3) And let’s not forget the news that Hunter S. Thompson’s wife is going to shoot his ashes from a cannon (which, for imagination purposes, I will just think of as a very large bong).

(4) And, now three words about a report that there have now been 35,000 news stories on the pope worldwide: SHUT UP ALREADY!

Were there a comparable number of stories about Terry Shiavo or did it just seem that way? I would love to run a per-character comparison to the articles investigating those theoretical weapons of mass destruction.

(5) No big surprise here, but the shrub’s approval ratings are the lowest ever for a second-term president. Guess he’ll have to start another war, just like Daddy did.

(Oh but wait. Bush The Former started his war because his ne’er-mentioned, ne’er-do-well son Neil’s trial began that same day. In other words, the people who died that day died because it was an opportunistic way to bury a bad story about his fambly.)

(6) The Bush family's high morals must have influenced co-Texan and current House majority leader Tom (shiver) DeLay, whose wife and daughter have apparently been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by hubbydad’s PACs.

(7) And, finally, the Masters golf tournament has begun again sans protestors.

(Meanwhile, women are still barred entrance to the club.)

57. EDUTAINMENT

From the Archives

(March 2005) Woke up groggy so am writing instead of doing catas. Sat on my wet deck for 30 minutes drinking my first cup of java and watching the sun come up. Now I’m stretched across my sofa and coffee table, drinking a second cup with sugar-free butter-pecan ice cream (ran out of cream), which is, well, an interesting taste.

Am checking out Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes magazine, which someone left in our employee lounge, and remembering a resurrection song that my church youth choir sang

Life was filled with guns and wars and everyone got trampled on the floor—I wish we’d all been ready. Two men coming up the hill; one disappears and one’s left standing still—I wish we’d all been ready. Man and wife asleep in bed; he hears a noise and turns his head; she’s gone [a line that always made me snicker uncontrollably, which pissed off my mother]—I wish we’d all been ready. There’s no time to change your mind. The son has come and you’ve been left behind. You’ve been left behind. . . . .

It’s better than some of the make-’em-afraid-make-’em-very-afraid songs that they taught us at Baptist camp but I still wish my brain didn’t remember some of the appalling stuff that it remembers.

According to this magazine, world events make it clear that the end is near. We’re living out the prophecies of Revelations, folks, so save yourself while you can!

Haven’t read Revelations in a while, so am making my own assumptions about what it must say. I assume it describes dark days of exploitation, a time when society dismantles the safeguards that provide at least basic economic security to its neediest members. The endtimes must occur in a so-called ownership society (which, near as I can tell, means that, if you’re not one of the beast’s, er, the Shrub’s wealthy pals then you’re on your own, buddy). The beast must cut funding for food stamps, education, Medicaid, health care, safety inspections for food and drugs, and food for poor children, while forcing the poor and working people to make sacrifices for the benefit of the rich. Then I assume the FDR angel gets so pissed that he gives God a good ol’ smackdown, which must trigger the second coming.

Can’t help but think about Ayn Rand’s ironic definition of laissez-faire capitalism, which she defines as “a system where men deal with one another, not as victims or executioners, not as masters or slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.”Yeah. And now I can’t help but think about Herbert Hoover saying “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy.”

We all have our own interpretations, right?

I saw a KRS-1 performance at Howard University at the height of the Afrocentric education movement. His songs were (by his own definition) edutainment, and one of my favorites explains why the twelve tribes of Israel had to be black.

The words, from memory, are something along these lines:

Genesis, chapter 11, verse 10, explains the genealogy of Shem. Shem was a black man in Africa. If you repeat this fact they can’t laugh at ya. Genesis 14, verse 13, Abraham steps on the scene. Being a descendent of Shem, which is a fact, means Abraham too was black. Abraham, born in the city of a black man called Nimrod, grandson of Ham. Ham had 4 sons—one was named Canaan. Here, let me do some explaining. Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac was the father of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons, for real, and THESE were the children of Israel. According to Genesis, chapter 10, Egyptians descended from Ham. Six hundred years later my brother, re-up, Moses was born in Egypt. In this era, black Egyptians weren’t right. They enslaved black Israelites. Moses had to be of the black race because he spent forty years in Pharoah’s place. He passed as the Pharoah’s grandson, so he HAD to look just like him. Yes my brothers and sisters take this here song. Yo! Correct the wrong. The information we get today is just daft but ask yourself, why is that? . . .The government you have elected is inoperative. . . .

All-righty. It’s 7:30 AM. Time for me to take a shower and get ready for my day.

LISTENING TO: “Damn Crazy,” as performed by disappear fear (I know I’m lazy, but I’m so damn crazy for you...)

READING: Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes. Whee!

SINGING IN SHOWER: haven’t had one yet, so I’ll have to include in a later entry.

22. HARD-ASS TEXTURE GIRL, IN OFFICE

From the Archives

(March 2005) I’m texture girl today in slightly nubby brown raw silk slacks, a moss-colored mini-wale corduroy shirt, a taupe silk jacket with a large shell button, and my favorite brown leather monk shoes.

Have been looking around my office because someone told me that she was once asked in an interview, “If I went to your office right now, what would it tell me about the way you perform and organize your work?”

Hmmm.. Well, a pal met me here last night and we wound up staying for a good thirty minutes because she wanted to explore all the art in here (and there’s a lot of it).

I have a large Mondrian-style rug comprised of squares/rectangles that are any number of shades of brown or orange or dusty pink. My window ledge contains an orchid that doesn’t look so healthy, a vase of fading daffodils, and a nude sculpture of a superhuman man that I molded out of concrete a couple of years ago. He looks like a ruin comprised of a gallic head, super-strong torso, and the tops of his massive thighs. His legs and arms are broken off and taper into fat coarse wire. I left wire in his neck exposed too so he looks a little like a massive Borg, eager to tell you that you will be assimilated.

A large Pollockesque painting that I made some time ago hangs on one wall and there’s a Mexican tile table and two simple wooden chairs beneath it. One chair has a red wool horse blanket that someone brought back from Texas for me hanging on it.

Twenty-four dried white roses in a large orange Mexican hand-blown glass pitcher sit on the tile table (and this is probably revealing more than I should tell ANYyone about me but here goes: I carefully taped the date of every month that Mud and I had been together on the stems of these roses for our second anniversary and attached a beautiful paragraph about love and white roses extracted from Jeannette Winterson’s Written on The Body to the vase.

When I broke up with her (after discovering her Yalie affair), she grabbed the roses and threw them into the trash can with a level of drama that only a red-headed actor can really pull off, then stormed out of the house. I salvaged the roses, removed the month labels, stuck them in the pitcher, and placed them in my office at work because, well, they look really cool here—or maybe I like punishing myself with bad memories.)

A large, Picasso reproduction hangs on another wall. A bookshelf covers a third wall and writing proofs and assignments that need to be graded line the floor beneath it. Each project has a chunky bolt on it to keep the papers and deadlines in place.

The shelf is mostly lined with books, but I’ve got a bottle of balsamic vinegar (for my salads) stashed in between them and an emergency stash of Thai rice soups, along with a couple of cans of mandarin orange sections—you know, emergency food for when I forget my lunch and don’t have time to pick anything up—too. There’s also a Russian harlequin doll from Malevich’s painting Sportsmen standing on one shelf.

Another wall is practically covered by a large 7-foot-tall cork memo board that has all kind of weird sh!t attached to it. My favorite is a large, chunky piece of sky-blue foam construction insulation with the HUD building code stamped on it that resembles a modern-day suburban fossil. Other items include a flyer advertising a long-ago Anne Sexton poetry reading at Harvard; a silhouette cut-out of MLK with his arm raised; a blue poster of Gandhi; and one of my favorite poems taht I scratched onto a piece of gray paper:

SENTENCES
by Nicanor Parra

Let’s not fool ourselves.
The automobile is a wheelchair
A lion is made of lambs
Poets have no biographies
Death is a collective habit
Children are born to be happy
Reality has a tendency to fade away
Fuck!ng is a diabolical act
God is a good friend of the poor.

Several magic-marker drawings that my nieces and nephews gave me, 2 Storybook People sculptures that I purchased near RISD, a CD that I wrote a poem on, a photograph of a billboard that says ”what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" (Charles Bukowski), a Guerrilla Girls poster citing all the tongue-in-cheek advantages to being a woman artist (“No. 3: Having an escape from the art world in your 4 freelance jobs”), a Rilke quote, a poster-size close-up of Shoney’s Big Boy, a short story that a friend’s child wrote entitled “The Mostr” (Monster), a photo of Holocaust prisoners below the words ‘Never Again’ (cut out from an ad for the Holocaust Museum), a “His toughest teacher has always been poverty” sign, another that reads “Now we know why guppies eat their young,” and another one that reads “A truly great sentence has music coming out of it”—Rhoda Lerman.

There’s also postcards of various paintings from various museum shops, a poster that asks “How Will You Know When You Have Enough?”, a picture of George W. Bush as Uncle Sam that says “I want YOU to attack Iraq while I sit on my well-exercised ass,” several holiday ornaments, a silver pine cone, nametags from various conferences, family photos, and a large curling strip of metal that came off the top of a eighteen-wheeler that drove under a RR trestle that was shorter than the truck. (This hangs from the top of the memo board over several pieces of art work.)

Who even knows what all that says about me? Maybe that I'm eclectic and like found art.