Friday, December 17, 2004

ARTpiece 4/dKos

(This will be the first post I make thinking of dKos. I hope I am not out of line. I cannot seem to write in my diary yet, so I will post this on my home page. I am somewhat freaked out. I wrote the piece below during a particular busy time of the intifada. I wrote it in order to make manifest how banal suicide bombing had become among the Palestinians by laying the whole varying trip out in American cultural archetypes.

Why? So we could talk about this perversion rationally. Believe me, for every Muslim parent that is "proud" of her "hero" son's suicide, there are ten who privately thank Allah that the perverted purveyors of Death have not ensnared their son.

Then our despicable government offers $15000 to all new Nat Guard recruits. Dare I notice that this is $5000 more than either Saddam or the Sauidis paid their heroes? Dare they change the name of the Guard or the Reserves, into the National Suicide Brigades? Is our new Baghdad battle cry, "Banzai!"? What is the recruiter's tag line? Better than Hamas and you may even survive? All I know is I want the poster contract.)


A SWIFT PROPOSAL

Nature abhors a vacuum. B. Spinoza


Every year over thirty thousand Americans commit suicide. Most are depressed, in pain, exhausted, fearful; many are failures or believe they are failures. They are put down, ignored. chided and even encouraged to eventually succeed at this entropic wish. Some even believe that suicide is one of the methods our Social Being uses to adjust to changing environmental conditions. (If not, why are there more suicides on rainy days?)

There are some people who commit suicide with big smiles. Like that loopy group that drank cyanide and waited for the spaceship hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. There is, I suppose, little better we can offer such madmen. But for the majority, those who suffer from short circuits in their hardware, or who are missing a few lines of program, a more humane channel of egress can be provided.

Also, consider the repercussions which arise from our not offering such a solution as I propose below. Some suicides shoot themselves: pieces of bone, brain and blood get all over the rug and the furniture. It is a real gross out to clean up. It dictates a closed coffin. Car crashes are similarly messy, though they are outside and can be hosed down. There is also, generally ancillary or collateral damage. Ditto for jumping off rooves. Barbituate overdoses, with heads lying in pools of puke, are probably the least disorienting to we survivors.

But what if we could make the entire experience a positive one for the suicide, his friends and family, and our whole society. My idea has something for everyone.

For openers, suicide hot-liners wont suffer from the angst of losing a caller. If a resolute caller insists that he has only called to tell them where his body may be found, the counselor switches the call to the following taped message:

Don't be stupid. Suidide can be a beautiful and useful act. Don't fritter away this chance.
We can make your death painless and momentous. We can assure your memory will be enshrined. And you can dedicate your act to any person or cause of your own choosing. The whole event will be videorecorded and assigned a library of congress catalog number. Your family will receive a copy of this video and many other bonuses including a framed parchment copy of the Jihadi's Prayer signed by the President. Don't miss this opportunity! Call the UJA at 202-555-5555.

The UJA (The United Jihadis of America) is, of course, located in a corner office at the CIA in Langley, Va. When contacted, they offer to pick up the suicide in a limo. They fly him (or her) to a secret training camp and give him three out of every four drugs he asks for. He is shown how he must wear the special vest filled with C-4 and ball bearings under his loose fitting clothes. After his training, we drop him in the center of certain intransigent capitals with instructions to find terrorists and blow them up. If he can not find any terrorists, he is then instructed to "get a malted". As he savors the icy chocolate ambrosia, he need only lightly press the button. In any case, it leaves the mess for others to clean up. Meanwhile, we all get to enjoy the pictures.

* * * * * * * * * * *

My cousin comes into the room. I ask her to read this and comment. I instantly realize that suicide is not an alien subject to her and that although I am making a political point, I wonder if I am being insensitive. She reads through to this point and says, "Arty, you need to say more here. No?" I ask her if she is familiar with Swift's "Modest Proposal", the first political satire in the modern English language, and she says "No." And repeats, "but you have to say more."

It is like a one punchline story, I am thinking. Once the cat is out of the bag, it can only get tedious. "In part 2", I tell her, "I try to give it the true ghoulish perspective." But she persists, and I see that she is right. Nowhere do I specifically point out that the suicides already exist in all cultures at all times. What is different in the Middle East is that there are sickos, kissing cousins to child abusers, who seek out these disturbed youths not to talk them out of it and send them to be checked out for hormone imbalances, but rather to enable them! In our part of the planet, such behavior is a sin, a crime, a really repugnant act that could turn a prison full of felons into a Shiite jury.

While in the Middle East, I have seen mothers whose hearts are as assuredly broken as ours would be, having to lie to the camera (from fear; from hope) long enough to accept a $10000 check from a gloating pervert.

Some would say that a culture that foments and encourages its suicides to co-opt their individual pains in order to homogenize them into a political message would be a rather depraved culture. I would merely point out that Islam is a rather new religion and can not really be faulted for passing through this expected adolescent stage; i.e., the one where it goes around saying, "My God is bigger than your God." This is a ridiculous statement that brings with it only pain and death. A healthy culture should soon realize that if there is only one God/Allah/Ormuzd et al, then He created everybody and everything and He has not lied to anybody, and that no one should presume to know what Allah had in mind and use such human delusions to underwrite the Political Will in order to unleash the most un-Godly acts against the Body of Our Common Lord, or however one might restate this as a purely scientific equation.

We, of course, would never encourage suicide. May God/Allah/Ormuzd et al, perish the thought. We establish suicide hot lines all over our country and we try to talk people out of committing suicide. It is only those suicides who are clearly committed, and who volunteer for the glorious honor of using their deaths to promote the often banal political motives of our oligarchs that are ever allowed near any of our secret training centers.

Perhaps, our superior humane approach to life can best be seen reflected in the many letters we have collected from the family members of our heroes. Here is one:

Dear Director Rumcheney,
Thank you for the wonderful video of our dsaughter blowing herself up. To think, she might have jumped off a bridge in Idaho and we would never have known what happenned to her. With your lovely video, even though we missed the actual explosion, as your cameraman was being arrested by the Syrian police, we could make out actual pieces of our daughter flying past a few ducking pedestrians in the background. It makes me feel really good to live in a country where even a fragile suicide can contribute to the common good. I also take comfort in reading the Jihadi's Prayer. It is an inspired piece of poetry that owes nothing to Randall Jarrell or Patton.
We will always be proud that our daughter gave her life to help promote the murky political agenda of our leaders. To paraphrase another great American, "I regret that I have only one child's life that I can give for my country."
Mrs. Alice Smith
P.S. The new house is great, but do you think you can find us a similar unit in Southern California? And could you also let us know if accepting the check from the Defense Department will adversely affect our welfare eligibility?


PART 2

Nature abhors a vacuum. Enough history has already flowed under this bridge that those of us looking over the railing cannot fail to have noticed that in Nature: like opposes like. For example, electrons play with electrons, atoms with atoms, molecules with molecules, foxes with rabbits, stars with stars. Notwithstanding the fact that everything is interconnected in some way, this may inform our otherwise incoherent policy of "preemption" a concept which just pooped itself into the middle of our democracy. It shoud be viewed as a sort of last good college try before the next Big Bang, a hail mary attept to stave off our descent into global chaos, which may be, after all, only the expected response of our genome to Global Warming or just too many people.

But for now, we should just take note, one team is already on the field practicing; can it be much longer before the game begins in earnest?


Wednesday, December 08, 2004

MINI-ME 1

(My next few posts are somewhat black. Without knowing me, you may not know if I have my tongue in my cheek or my foot in my mouth. Of course, I would like to keep it straight as well. I do not post as often as I would like, but I have to borrow my kid's computer. I have a bad back and I can't sit for long. I would get my own laptop, but first I have to learn to use this contraption. In these pieces called MINI-ME, you can find sketches towards a future autobiography. ARTpieces are meant to explore issues in ways they seem not to be being explored by others. They are not full of news and I assume you know the usual spin on most issues. My next post is a piece called, A SWIFT PROPOSAL, and it is about suicide bombings. My publisher tells me noone wants to read about suicide. But it is not. If I wrote anything about suicide itself, it would be too long and I would not like to write it either! But, before we get to that, I would like to tell a tale that illustrates how one should never assume that one knows the whole story. I welcome any and all feedback. I do not have fact checkers and sometimes I really blow it. I may blush, but if I need to, I will stand corrected.)

In the Summer of 1960, I hitchhiked down to Miami from New York to meet up with Ned. He was a folk guitar stylist and I read poetry. We hung out in the few coffee houses in Coral Gables, next to the Univerity of Miami. The owner of one was the unofficial mayor of, or Pied Piper of, Coconut Grove. He found us a place to stay in the grove.

The Grove, on the surface, seemed a lot like where I had just come from. It was my first time down South and the advance publicity was not good. I confess that I had not gone down to register black voters. As always, I had come to observe first and then, maybe, I would know how to act.

There was a shoe shine stand by the corner of Douglas and Grand. It had a sign on it that said, "We's integrated, how about you?" I always chatted with those guys as I walked by. I ate at Rod's Bar BQ, a take out rib joint in the "black" section of the Grove. I copped a matchbox of ganja from a Haitian dude I ran into. I had no idea that this little "paradise" extended for only a few miles.

We ran into a guy from Philly who was opening a new coffee house in Hialeah. I signed on as cook/manager and Ned became waiter/dishwasher. We featured local acts, and if noone showed, Ned and I would fill in. Every day began the same. We would have less than $10. We would charge a $1 cover charge. When customers started to come in, we would take their orders. Then I would jump into car and go to the local grocery store and buy what we needed to finish the orders. (Our specialty was roast beef sandwiches and a wicked orangeade.) Some of our customers and some of our acts were black. I thought that a new South must be aborning because this was nothing like the South I had read about.

Then one day about a dozen police showed up. I was making a sandwich in the kitchen and first became aware of them when I heard one of them say, "Take a picture of that. An open loaf of bread..." I size things up pretty fast; I don't always make the right decision. I picked up the loaf of bread with two fingers, "We don't use open bread in this establishment.", I told them and proceeded to toss the bread over my shoulder into the garbage. Four cops grabbed me and slammed me against the wall. They cuffed me. Their leader asked, "What are you busting him for?" "Opposing an officer," came the reply.

"And what were you arresting him for before he opposed you?" the boss promted. And the cop he was speaking to turned to me and asked, "Do you have a work permit?"

Of course I didn't. They had passed the law requiring non-residents to obtain work permits only a week earlier; in order to deal with our "threat". Ned sat down and pretended he was a customer. I was booked and the owner was cited for not having a grounding wire on the clock in the kitchen. God bless all moms. His mom bailed me out of jail. $375. Her lawyer friend told us that the way it worked down here, we could expect my fine to equal my bail. I was broke, so I called home.

Though ten miles and fifty years from the Grove, Hialeah, thankfully, was still not Mississippi. They really had it in for us. They scheduled my hearing on a Jewish holiday. I had a Jewish pubic defender and a Jewish judge, both pissed that they had to work on a holiday. My lawyer opened with, "If they want to proceed on the resisting arrest charge we will be forced to file a misuse of force complaint against the arresting offficers." Case dismissed; except I was fined $15 for working without a permit. I got fired from my next job, at a hospital, because I said I had never been convicted of a crime and then this "record" was uncovered.

So the coffee shop closed. Our benefactor, the mayor, found us an apartment in the Grove. It was the servant's quarters of an old estate. The main house was still occupied by an elderly matron. She began hating us after we used the swimming pool. Upstairs lived this bass player, Jay K. He played country music and was kind of Republican. He came downstairs to tell us the house rules according to the missus. He was accompanied by David Ferrie.

We hung around the Grove that Summer doing our part. Freddy Neil, Vince Martin and the regulars who had breakfast every morning at the Grove Drugstore, including Ned and I, sat at the back tables with a musician friend of ours, K.C. Anderson, who was not of the white persuasion. They allowed blacks into the store. They could buy things and even order food to go, but the tables were for whites only. We monopolized the tables and waited them out. Eventually, the manager came out, assessed the situation and told the waitress to take our order. But again, this was in the most liberal part of the whole state. When we tried the same thing across the street at the Tom Thumb Restaurant, they physically kept us out and remained closed till we split.

One day, a guy shows up and says, "I need musicians who want to play at a rally." Most of the musicians I knew signed on and we all went out to Crandall Park where there was a flatbed truck set up as a stage. It was for a guy named Collins who was running for Congress. Jay and his bass were there. Other people were playing. I was leaning comfortably collapsed on the truck bed. I saw David Ferrie walk by and then back up. So I looked up at him, and I could see Jay's stand-up bass, between us, leaning against the piano. Before I could even react, he smashed the neck of the double-bass over my head. I was taken to Mercy Hospital where they gave me four stitches.

I always figured it was a sign of discontent. I thought the locals wanted us to leave. We were attracting too much attention. When I got out of the hospital, I went back to New York to convalesce. Perhaps, Ferrie, who was a pilot, was smuggling drugs, I thought.

A few years later, I was living in New Orleans. I was living on Decatur Street, in the French Quarter, above a bar that my friend was running. I walked him over to pay the rent a few times. I met his landlord. It was a guy named Clay Shaw. My girlfriend at the time was best friends with DA Garrison's secretary and we heard rumbles about how Clay Shaw was involved in the Kennedy assassination. When I heard that Ferrie was supposed to have driven Shaw to Texas to meet with some Mafia types, it made sense to me. Clay Shaw seemed to be the kind of cat who would just love to be dominated by Ferrie, and Ferrie seemed genuinely up to the task.

Now, I never spoke to Oliver Stone. Once, while I was downtown Chicago, I was handed a flyer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I tore its arguments apart for a rhetoric paper. I got an A on it. I still see the face of the guy who handed it to me. It was Oswald. I have no idea what place these two facts have in this story.

I finally got to see the movie (i.e., JFK). Then I googled David Ferrie. There it was. It seemed he was working with the CIA training Alpha-66 for an invasion of Cuba. The night before I got bopped on the head, Ned and I were walking through the Grove with a new friend we had been introduced to, Mario G. We were splitting a j. sitting on a bench by a bus stop, when a police car slowly began to roll up to us. Mario took the pot and put it in his pants.

"Where are you going?", they asked us. (There were two officers.) We had no ID's on us. They explained that we were liable for arrest for "aimless meandering" if we did not cooperate. Then another cop car pulls up. This one had a dog in it. "We smelled marijuana when we first pulled up. You weren't smoking were you?"

The dog was going bananas. They opened the back door and the dog ran right up to Mario and began licking his hand. "Hi, Rusty.", Mario said, stroking the dog. And then Mario told the shocked cops, "I live next to Det.XXX. He trained this dog and we used to play together all the time." A call and a harrumph later, we were on our way. They are going to stay with me tonight, he told the cops. And that was that.

About a year later I asked my friend the Mayor, whatever happened to Mario. "He was implicated in a murder. He went back to Cuba to avoid getting arrested." Later snippets had it that involved a traitor to Alpha-66 and though the FBI came to investigate, the CIA got Mario out of the country.

I do not believe any longer that I was attacked because I upset the sensibilities of some local White People. It seems, instead, that I just got too close to the CIA. So you see, you might really never know whether you have got it right or not.

HARBOR DAY

Today, in honor of Pearl Harbor Day, a little math. JAPAN '44: PACIFIC OCEAN : : USA '04: THE PLANET.

By WWII, Japan had about 80 million people. Their seven hundred or so islands could probably feed about fifteen million people. But they discovered that they could think of the entire Pacific Ocean as theirs to play with by filling boats with well armed soldiers. In the best of times they traded for rice and whatever else they needed. But no one could say no if times weren't good.

One day we discover that we have a Pacific Coast. We are fighting a war in Europe. It is a good war, a just war. We tell the Japanese that we are going to need Indonesian oil and that we do not think it is right for Japan to be stealing this oil. We told the Japanese we intended to blockade Indonesia and keep them out. Now Japan has only 0.03% of the world's known oil reserves. They watched our ships gather in Hawaii and thought, "We only have one months'supply of oil, we better do something."

What they did was stage a pre-emptive strike against our threatening armada gathering in Hawaii.

The USA has gotten itself into a similar bind today. We are like Japan found itself in the nineteen-forties: too many people and not enough oil. WE made a pre-emptive strike to protect our interests. . . and it is starting to look like the whole planet is thinking that we are now what Japan was then.

Of course, Japan was also just looking out for her own people. Sometimes, things can seem to be right from both sides. Of course, the "Rape of Nanking" did not help the Japanese win any friends or influence any people. It seems that the lesson to be drawn from that fact has totally eluded our clueless President and his handlers.