Holy Ghost

Enough Is Enough

Victor said, “I read in the paper about two dolphins trying to drown a man in Greece or someplace. You always hear about noble dolphins saving someone from drowning. Not this time; they were pushing him out to sea. I asked myself what was different about this poor bastard. It turned out he was Russian, naturally, and maybe a little drunk. Why does the reverse of the normal always happen to us? Maybe the dolphins had rescued him a dozen times before. Enough was enough.”

—Martin Cruz Smith, Three Stations

Eggman Slags Lloyd

The Drudge Report is a fetid sewer of lies. Owned and operated by an illiterate closeted troglodyte known as The Eggman, its sole purpose is to sound as carny barker for the seamiest elements of the Republican Party. The truth is not in it. Those who rely on it as anything other than a running indicator of the current obsessions of the racists and retroverts who infest the rightbent precincts of this nation, are fools.

Though his page is always a monument to mendacity, occasionally The Eggman will gird his shriveled loins and stoop below even himself. It is as if he is out to prove that, in his world, the Well of Wrongness knows no bottom.

Today has been one of those days. As of this writing, The Eggman has featured for more than eight hours a story out of Fox News that is a flat-out falsehood. The placement of this story on The Eggman’s site has already caused the hebephrenic hate-show host Michael Savage to have a near-stroke right on the air; assuredly, more of his fellow clowns on the AM dial will burst blood vessels come the morn.

The Fox lie that The Eggman is joyfully smearing across the intertubes, from where it then spreads, as it always does, into and out of the many putrid orifices of the rightwing noise machine, is that John Cusack—a.k.a. Lloyd Dobler—has called for the “satanic death” of Fox News, as well as a couple of GOoPer has-beens.

Haas Hears A Who

Scientists searching for “lost amphibians” have discovered the Old World’s smallest frog, living in carnivorous pitcher plants in the jungles of Borneo.

As in the Dr. Seuss fable Horton Hears a Who, the pea-sized creatures were detected only because of the sound they made.

According to Malaysian herpetologist Indaeil Das, who discovered the frog with his colleague Alexander Haas of Germany, it was the wee beasties’ “harsh rasping notes” at dusk that drew their attention.

“We heard the calls of this frog and we knew the calls of all frogs in the area and this was different,” Das told AFP. ”At first we couldn’t see it, but eventually we found it. I had to trap the frog in one of my baby son’s clean white diapers in order to really see what it looked like, it was so tiny.”

“You often get tiny frogs making quite a noise,” confirmed herpetologist Robin Moore, who is leading expeditions worldwide bent on rediscovering a hundred species of “lost amphibians” declared extinct. Das will join Moore in Indonesia in September, to search for the Sambas stream toad, last seen in the 1950s.

The frog heard by Haas and Das had not previously been classified; museum specimens collected more than a hundred years ago were misidentified as juveniles of another species.

The frog has been dubbed Microhyla nepenthicola, in honor of the Nepenthes ampullaria species of miniature pitcher plant that it needs to breed.

Although the micro-beast is “definitely the tiniest [frog] in Asia, Africa and Europe,” says Das, it is not as small as this frog, Eleutherodactylus iberia, which lives in Cuba, and as yet has no English common name.

Peasant Palate: Knead Long And Prosper

The science people, they are always wondering: why don’t the French die?

The cheese they eat. The meat. The butter. The cream. The wine, and drinking it, all the live-long day. Why don’t their arteries fill with filth, causing them to keel over, gasping, ushered into death via coronary heart disease, like normal Americans?

There are many answers to this question. The first concerns the “Big Gulp.” Americans seem to believe that bigger is better. You think we would have learned by now, with our military. Though for more than 60 years the American military has been by far the biggest bully on the block, it hasn’t managed to prevail in any armed conflict since the close of World War II, with the exception of that little dustup in Grenada . . . and even there it was nearly run off the island by a handful of Cuban engineers. Oh, and Panama. Where the “bands of brothers” buzzed blithely around leveling hospitals, in pursuit of their own CIA agent, and incidentally abrogating the treaty that returned the Panama Canal to the people of the country in which it is located.

Anyway. Americans like their food, like their military, big. Big portions. Big steaks. Big drinks. But, just as our big military is killing us, so too are our big meals. When Americans eat, they eat too much. Which is bad for you. And Americans snack. All the time. Which is also bad for you.

The French do neither. The concept of the “Big Gulp” is unknown in that country, except in the hideous fast-food joints which Americans have imperialistically forced upon them, and which French patriots destroy whenever they get the opportunity. The French do not snack, and the portions they consume, when at table, are moderate.

The Weight

As if the planet were not already under enough stress, now we learn that more than 30% of the people in 9 southern states here in the US are clinically obese. This is up from 25% just three years ago. Meanwhile, over 25% of the people in 38 states nationwide are obese. In 28 of these states, people are fatter today than they were a year ago.

Gravity exercises constant pressure on the earth; to this we must now add additional pressure from millions of lumbering fat people. As global warming inevitably raises the level of the oceans, so too shall global fattening lower the level of the land. Not good.

Animals, at least those in the wild, don’t become obese. A person may think an animal looks fat, but that’s simply a mistake in percep-tion. Sea lions may appear pretty obese, but in truth these creatures are built that way for a reason: to thrive in waters cold enough to freeze to death a human being in less than five minutes. Bears in winter go into the den “fat” so they don’t have to get up and eat for six months; when they emerge in the spring, they’re pretty darn gaunt. And grumpy. A mallard may seem to be carrying a lot of weight there in the chest: well, you try flying 3000 miles, under your own power, and then tell me how much poundage you’d like up there.

Ever notice that those motorized carts in grocery stores are these days occupied less by disabled people than by people so obese that they really ought to think twice about purchasing all those groceries? Animals are not able to avail themselves of these sorts of “fat carts.” An obese rabbit can’t crank up a fat cart to flee faster into the brush; s/he just becomes dinner. Just as an obese hawk will go without dinner.

Fat City

My short-story teacher at the University of Oregon was a guy named J.B. Hall. He was a controversial character there because he wore white shoes. At that time, wearing white shoes meant that you were either a faggot or a commie, or maybe both. Anyway, he at one time pointed out to me a part in a short story called “Soldier’s Home” by Hemingway in which this guy Krebs has come home from the war and he’s sitting there in the morning wondering what to do with the day—whether to go watch his sister play indoor baseball or just exactly what. His mother wants him to go get a job, but he doesn’t want to move. As he’s sitting there, he watches the bacon fat harden on his plate. And J.B. Hall says, “See, that’s what it is. There’s where it happens; right there.” And I saw it. I saw, “Right! That’s what it’s about! That’s what literature is about!” And a door opened up to me and it’s never been closed. I thank this man from the bottom of my heart. It’s a turn-on like—it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with somebody grabbing somebody and saying, “I know something that’s good. I’ll give it to you for nothing. You’ll have it all your life.”

—Ken Kesey, “Earthshoes & Other Remarks”

Woman Scorned

Not many people are aware that Eve was not the first mate to Adam.

First Adam got jiggy with the various beasts, birds, and other living things that Yahweh paraded before him. As Robert Graves and Raphael Patai record in Hebrew Myths:

When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam—being already like a twenty-year-old man—felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried copulating with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: “Every creature but I has a proper mate!”, and prayed God would remedy this injustice.

Yahweh then presented Adam with Lilith, a human female. A being run up from the same sort of dust from which Adam was created. Rather than yanked from Adam’s own flesh as a rib, as was, later, Eve.

Adam, however, proved a boor, and Lilith left him. Graves and Patai recount what happened:

Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. “Why must I lie beneath you?” she asked. “I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.” Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

As Lilith was not around or involved when Adam and Eve consumed the forbidden fruit, she was not subject to the penalties inflicted by Yahweh upon the rest of the human race: death, the pain of labor, enmity between wo/man and nature. Some say Lilith lives to this day in the Edomite Desert, among satyrs, pelicans, owls, ostriches, arrow-snakes, and unicorns.

“We Protect The Taliban”

The Wikileaks release of classified documents involving the War on Terra in Afghanistan contained no surprises for anyone who has attentively followed Operation Enduring Fiefdom. Among the non-surprises: that the government of Pakistan, America’s putative ally in the War on Terra, has in fact ignored, enabled, or actively assisted the Taliban, throughout the latter’s nine-year fight against the United States.

Last Sunday, the New York Times printed one of the more provocative stories yet involving this Pakistani-Taliban relationship.

It involves the capture in January of Abdul Ghani Baradar, identified as one of those ubiquitous ”number two” most-wanteds, in this case “number two” to Taliban chieftain Mullah Muhammed Omar.

Throughout the War on Terra, it has generally been the “number twos”—of which there seem to be an unlimited supply—who get snatched or snuffed . . . never, it seems, any “number ones.”

In any event, number-two Baradar’s capture was at the time heralded as a model of US-Pakistani cooperation, as well as the usual “breakthrough” in the crusade against Wrong People.

Now, however, we learn that Baradar’s capture was engineered by Pakistan, and its purpose was to shut down peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Talks from which Pakistan had been excluded. And which it feared might in some way benefit its bete noire, India.

Around the same time, Pakistan also rolled up some 23 Taliban leaders inside its own borders, people whom the Pakistani government had been protecting for years. Because they too had the temerity and effrontery to consider ending the conflict, without first consulting Pakistan.

“We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,” said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. “We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai and the Indians.”

Great.

What’s Good: Moonbows

I like it when I stumble upon a form of magic that I never even knew existed.

That’s what happened Thursday, as I desultorily flipped through A Book About A Thousand Things, the 1946 magpie’s-nest from George Stimpson that addresses such burning questions as “how do bees hum?” and “does fright cause the guinea fowl’s flesh to turn blue?”

And therein I learned that there is such a thing as a “moonbow.”

Rainbows by moonlight, known as moonbows, are unusual but not rare phenomena. Aristotle referred to lunar bows about twenty-two hundred years ago, and they are well known to scientists, although they are not often observed, chiefly because of the faintness of the light at night. Only under exceptional conditions can the colors of a moonbow be seen. Lunar rainbows are most likely to occur after showers on nights when the moon is bright but not too high in the heavens. Similar lunar bows are periodically visible in the spray of certain waterfalls, such as the Cumberland Falls about eighteen miles southwest of Corbin, Kentucky.

That’s a Cumberland Falls moonbow, of the harvest kind, up yonder. More moonbows beyond the “furthur.”

Simplemente Roja

Extraordinary Cruelty And Evil

A federal district court has ruled for the first time that the 1994 Congressional statute known as “the Torture Act” is constitutional. This statute, 18 USC §2340-2340A, provides that the United States may prosecute those who have tortured human beings outside the confines of the United States, so long as the accused is a US national, or found within the US. The Torture Act was approved by Congress following the adoption by the United States of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture.

The defendant in this case, Charles McArthur Emmanuel, more familiarly known as “Chuckie Taylor,” is the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who is himself currently on trial before an in-ternational war-crimes tribunal in the Hague. Emmanuel had argued that Congress im-permissibly exceeded its authority in approving the Torture Act. But in its 87-page decision in US v. Belfast II, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit told Emmanuel to blow it out his kiester.

“The United States,” the panel held, “validly adopted the CAT pursuant to the President’s Article II treaty-making authority, and it was well within Congress’s power under the Necessary and Proper Clause to criminalize both torture, as defined by the Torture Act, and conspiracy to commit torture.”

That the Torture Act has been ruled constitutional is not good news for those BushCo War On Terra-era US government agents and contractors currently under investigation by the extraordinarily tight-lipped special prosecutor John Durham. Because the Act would apply to them, too.

Why I Haven’t Posted Here Much Of Late

Tell Mama

Science People at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab have determined that a phone conversation with Mom can release in young girls as much of the calming and caressing chemical oxytocin as actual physical motherly love.

Sixty-one girls aged 7 to 12 were placed in a stressful situation: solve math problems in front of strangers; deliver an impromptu speech. After, some were allowed to hug their mothers, others were only able to talk to their mothers on the phone, while still others were compelled to watch March of the Penguins, which apparently put many of them to sleep.

The results? Oxytocin levels rose almost exactly as much in the girls who were comforted in person, as in the girls who’d been calmed via phone.

Oxytocin has been found to promote such qualities as generosity and empathy. It is believed that the chemical evolved to allow human beings to surmount their natural wariness of one another long enough to come into the close physical contact necessary to mate and thereby procreate. Without the stuff, apparently, we wouldn’t even be here.

Scheherazade, Munich To Moscow, August 1991

Arkady set a table of brown bread, cheese, tea and cigarettes and sat facing the radio as if it had come to dinner.

The bread was fresh and the cheese was sweet. A breeze drifted in the open window and the curtain stirred like a skirt.

Listening, he found himself leaning toward the radio. He felt ridiculous, as if he should be holding up his side of the con-versation.

The news was not important; he hardly heard it. It was her voice and breath transmitted across a thousand miles.

She was Scheherazade, Arkady thought. Night after night she could tell him tales of oppression, insurrection, strikes, and natural disasters, and he would listen as if she were spinning stories of exotic lands, magical spices, flashing scimitars and pearl-eyed dragons with scales of gold. As long as she would talk to him.

—Martin Cruz Smith, Red Square

La Musica: Earworms

“Earworms” are songs, or snatches of songs, or jingles, or various assorted other musical blats, that compulsively sound in one’s head, beyond any effort to control or expell them.

They’ve been around for a while: Mark Twain wrote about the things in his story “A Literary Nightmare.” Marketing professor James Kellaris, who has studied earworms professionally, describes them as “ex-cit[ing] an abnormal reaction in the brain.” He says that while 98% of all human beings are afflicted with earworms at one time or another, they tend to linger longer in, and irritate more, women.

Generally earworms are perceived as negative creatures—persistent irritants like “Wooly Bully,” or the “Frito Bandito” TV commercial, both of which have, over the years, recurrently haunted me unto near-weeping.

But sometimes there sound in my head earworms to which I don’t begrudge at all the cranial space. Now is one of those times. There are three particular tunes ringing now and again in my brainpan, and I like all three of them. None of them have any real serious application in my life right now, which is a good thing, because one is a sort of curse, the second is a “here’s-the-door” invite, and the third is a yearner. But I like listening to them all the same. If you don’t mind possibly contracting yourself these songs as earworms, follow on along after the “furthur.”

This Wheel’s On Fire

In 2007 the French people mistakenly elected Nicolas Sarkozy president. Now, in a transparent attempt to strengthen his 2012 re-election bid, by scooping up Gallic rightists who ordinarily cast ballots for perennial presidential contender and flaming bigot Jean-Marie Le Pen, Sarkozy has decided to whomp on the Roma.

Specifically, he has publicly condemned what he claims are “the problems posed by the behaviour of some of the travelling people and Roma,” ordered the dismantling of some 300 Roma campsites his government has declared “illegal,” and apparently approved the deportation of all Roma who cannot properly produce ze papers.

The government has said that Roma and Gypsies from outside France—many, including those kicked out of the Saint Etienne camp Friday, are from Romania—that commit crimes will be expelled back to their countries of origin.

However the top French official for the region said that all Roma without proper papers were being ordered to leave France.

“It is clear what I did this morning was in line with presidential instructions,” Loire region prefect Pierre Soubelet told journalists.

“There have been recent instructions to ask Roma to return home. There is no future here for Roma whose papers are not in order.”

Sunday the Roma responded by twice blocking a major highway in Bordeaux and a bridge over the River Garonne, seriously snarling traffic at the close of a major holiday weekend.

Tying up traffic to protest government dunderheadedness is a peculiarly French institution. French truck drivers, for instance, routinely close the approaches to the city of Paris whenever they Feel The Need. In this, therefore, the Roma have proven themselves to be quintessentially French. So Sarkozy should be instructed to return to his bunker, where he can continue to fret over his lost popularity, while the Roma should be permitted to remain.

Sometimes The Magic Works . . .

. . . sometimes it doesn’t.

Chief Dan George, as Old Lodge Skins, said that, in Little Big Man. And it’s true.

It is also true that, as in many things in life, sometimes the magic sorta works, and sorta doesn’t.

Thus we have Cheryl Carroll-Lagerway, an Australian Aboriginal woman who notified police after dreaming that the body of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, could be found at a sacred Aboriginal site, Nurragingy Reserve, at Doonside in western Sydney.

When the Aboriginal elder and police authorities journeyed to the remote creek, they indeed found a body. But it was not that of the child. Instead, they located a dismembered torso wrapped in plastic, which, pending formal identification, is believed to be that of Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman missing since June.

Caroll-Lagerway, who dreamed of the child crying out to her, believes that Kiesha’s remains are still somewhere in the reserve.

Shine Little Glow Worm

Nearly a quarter-century after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the wild boar of Germany remain radioactive. Der Spiegel reports that government payments compensating boar hunters for lost income have quadrupled since 2007.

Germany’s Atomic Energy Law mandates government compensation to hunters who shoot animals that are too radioactive to consume. In regions particularly problematic, all boar shot are checked for radiation; there are 70 measuring stations in Bavaria alone. Especially in southern Germany, boar routinely test out with high levels of cesium-137, rendering them unfit to eat.

Wild boar are prone to the glow because they consume in large quantities mushrooms and truffles, which are very efficient in absorbing radioactivity. According to Der Spiegel, “the contamination of some types of mushrooms and truffles will likely remain the same, and may even rise slightly—even a quarter century after the Chernobyl accident.”

Mushrooms are 90% water; water accumulates radiation at a rate a thousand times greater than soil.

So one can imagine the lingering effects of Chernobyl in the water that falls and flows and pools throughout Germany. And the rest of Europe. And the world.

Something Cool

Because it’s the middle of August, so we need something cool. The inimitable Eddie Harris, complaining, tongue firmly in cheek. More Eddie Harris here: scroll down a ways.

Mad Tea Party

Fox News, indefatigable promoter and enabler of those hapless atavistic ignoramuses known as the teabaggers, has filed an amusing story in which various fit-to-be-tied bag people allege that Democrats and other varmints are attempting to pass themselves off as baggers in order to Confuse People and Steal Elections.

Now, Newspeaking numbskulls like Sean Klannity have been assuring us for months that the teabagging movement crosses all party lines, attracting Democrats and inde-pendents, as well as Republicans. This despite those actual pesky facts that demonstrate that teabaggers are indistinguishable from the Republican Party: the two are, in truth, one and the same.

Fox has apparently now abandoned this ludicrous Klannity line (and someone better forward quick to poor dim Sean the new memo), because its piece is full of breathless prose in which the mere hint of any Democratic connection is assumed to be evidence of faux baggerism.

As the midterm election nears, allegations are surfacing across the country that Democrats are exploiting conservatives’ faith in the Tea Party name by putting up bogus candidates in November—the claim is that those “Tea Party” candidates will split the GOP vote and clear the way for Democratic victories.

The theories may prove to be more than just conspiracy talk. Some of the allegations are coming directly from local Tea Party activists who are trying to flag the media and election officials as soon as they smell something fishy on the ballot. And they say they’ve got proof.

“It’s obvious it’s a Democratic play,” said Jason Gillman, a Tea Party activist from Traverse City, Mich.

And so on.

I feel for these people, because it is not pleasant, when others try to be you.

So I have a simple, helpful suggestion for them. One that will easily and completely separate true bag people from any mischief-making pretenders.

And that is that the true teabaggers should just honestly and openly proclaim that they are racists. For that is what they are. That is the core of their movement, which sprang into being, howling that the government is tyrannical, only when that government fell under the direction of a black man. That is what assorted polls and surveys of teabaggers always show: that they are racist “dumbasses” who believe that President Obama is not an American citizen. Racism is what drives Dale Robertson, founder of TeaParty.org, and the man featured in the photograph there to the right. Teabaggers are racists. Period. Without racism, there would be no teabaggers. If the “true” teabaggers merely proudly proclaim their innate and inherent racism, there will be no confusion.

Problem solved.

For Whom The Tubes Toll

Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash Monday about 10 miles northwest of the village of Aleknagik, on Bristol Bay in Alaska. Stevens and eight other people were in the midst of a fishing trip, aboard a single-engine DeHavilland DHC-3T, when the plane crashed into a mountainside. Stevens and four other people were killed; four survived.

“Aleknagik” is of the Yupik language, and translates into English as “Wrong Way Home.”

Stevens was 86. To me, there is something quintessentially Mr. Ha-Ha about an 86-year-old man, who has for so long successfully evaded all the many traps and snares of mortality, perishing in a plane crash.

Then again, it could be said that Stevens was gifted with an additional 32 years of life, as he survived the crash of a small private plane in December 1978, a crash which took the life of his wife, Ann, and four other people.

Maybe it’s just me, but death a la Icarus seems a particularly mortifying way to go. Because aloft in the air is not a natural place for human beings; in a crash, there is time to recall that. So too through the millennia have sailors feared most death by drowning, and miners death underground; for neither are human beings created for life in water, or inside the earth.

Stevens was not of my political karass, but I suppose that here in my own fragile corporeal container I will always maintain a small place of fondness for him. Stevens will remain immortal, so long as I am mortal, because it is he who named the Internet “the tubes.”

Demon Seed

On 26 de Julio I wrote about the Muslim clerics in Malaysia who, though not real happy that Malaysian fans of the UK soccer team Manchester United had adopted clothing sporting cartoon representations of the devil, concluded that such apparel should not be banned.

“We just advise people not to wear this,” advised Harussani Zakaria. “Satan is, for us, our enemy. It’s the wrong value. Satan is always bad.”

Turns out these folks are more tolerant than some Americans—specifically, than Pastor Donald Crosby of God’s Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ in Warner Robins, Georgia, and 30-some of his followers, who Monday disrupted the beginning of classes at Warner Robins High, demanding that the school cease forthwith employing “demons” as a mascot.

The principal Warner Robins demonic being is a red devil with horns, wielding a pitchfork. During football games, a large representation of this Agent of Evil is wheeled out to tower over the end zone. When Warner Robins scores, sparks shoot from The Beast’s pitchfork.

“A demon never has a good connotation. Never,” Crosby ululated to a Macon TV station. “If you look it up in Webster’s Dictionary, there’s nothing good about a demon.”

And so Crosby and his people descended upon Warner Robins High School on Monday, determined to drive out the demons. Instead, they were ordered first by school officials, and then by the police, to disperse. But they persisted in their picketing, Crosby declining an offer from Officer Harry Dennard to accompany him back to his office so he could help Crosby prepare a request form for a permit. “You’re just going to have to lock me up,” Crosby said.

So they did. Crosby was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and picketing without a permit, both misdemeanors. “Let them lock all of you up!” Crosby reportedly instructed his people. None of these, however, elected to follow him into the pokey.

Of course, none of Jesus’ disciples were real eager to follow him, when he was led away, either.

Sunday Services: “You Can Have A Kind Heart”

Good evening, good people.

None of us were promised this day, so it is well that we begin by acknowledging it. As Brother Sephius says:

A new day I never seen before nor will I ever again.

Be glad in it.

For this, can I get a witness?

Ground Zero

As further proof that the Obama administration is absolutely indistinguishable from the George II administration—what: you mean it’s not?—the United States Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, was dispatched to the official Japanese ceremony mourning the obliteration of the city of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb. This marked the first time that a US ambassador to that country had ever attended such a ceremony.

Until Friday, American officials had always skipped the annual ceremony, fearing their presence would renew the debate over whether the United States should apologize for the World War II bombings, which together killed more than 200,000 people in explosions so intense that many victims were vaporized, leaving only ghostly shadows on walls, while others died in agony from burns and radiation sickness.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also attended, also for the first time, and also called for the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. It is time, he said, to move from “ground zero to global zero.”

While Roos did not speak at the ceremony, the US embassy in Tokyo issued a statement reaffirming the Obama administration’s position that “for the sake of future generations, we must continue to work together to realize a world without nuclear weapons,” and that in Hiroshima “it is fitting that we renew our determination to ensure that such a conflict is never again repeated.”

Obama is set to visit Japan in November. In light of his April 2009 speech in Prague calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, many Japanese, and other enlightened peoples, believe that a stop in Hiroshima would be appropriate and right.

A new sense of hope that the world’s nuclear powers, and particularly the United States, may finally share a desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons seems to have permeated this city. In front of City Hall, a large sign proclaimed Hiroshima to be part of an “Obamajority.”

However, because a majority of the people in this nation seem to be immured in ignorance, knuckledragging Know-Nothings, a visit by Obama to Hiroshima would be politically dicey. While an actual apology for the unnecessary slaughter occasioned by the atomic incineration of Hiroshima would probably be a form of political seppuku. Too many Americans are not ready for either. Too many believe that nuclear weapons are “necessary.” Though they are anything but. As too many are wedded to the persistent fiction that it was “necessary” to detonate nuclear weapons in Japan in order to stop WWII. Though it was not. And too many are determined that the United States shall never apologize for anything. Even when, as here, it was in the wrong.

The Gift Of Life

I am not alone, see? This tree and the stray animals who come to visit me are all my friends. Even the sun, the wind, and the rain are my friends. Do you recall Hanuman’s parting words to Rama in Ramayana? Beautiful words that speak to the oneness of creation, he said, and, picking up a book beside him, read aloud: Dear Rama, we are indeed your old friends from long ago, and your companions of ancient days come to help you. We are your forefathers. We are your ancestors, the animals, and you are our child man. As for our friendship, we have known you a long time, Rama, and the number of those days is lost in silence.

Ah, the silence of being, said Guatma as now he took his eyes off the book, sighing. Human dreams have no end. Oh, if we would stop hate and wars we would inherit not just the earth but the universe. Listening to what the universe is telling us is the only way for the nations of this our earth to come together and find union with life. Light comes from the sun. Let there be universal light. Space is our refuge. Let’s oppose all intents to take death to space.

They went away wondering if what they had just saw and heard was not coming from a man who had lost his head over the loss of the Mars Cafe.

Clouds were darkening; rain seemed imminent. They passed near Paradise. They drifted from group to group till they came to a crowd around a storyteller with a single-stringed violin.

At that very moment, A.G. shouted, “True! Haki ya Mungu, that is exactly what the Wizard of the Crow did.”

The people listened as he sang the story of his search for the Wizard of the Crow, hoping for a blessing from him: the thing of life. “Let nobody lie to you—the Wizard of the Crow will never die. True! Haki ya Mungu!”

A.G. appeared crazed, and Nyawira thought that he feigned that to be able to say the things he was saying without interference.

“It’s him,” Nyawira whispered as they walked away.

“A.G., who once chased us from the gates of Paradise?”

“And also snatched us from the gates of Hell!”

Kamiti and Nyawira went homeward holding hands, a mixture of teardrops and raindrops running down Nyawira’s face, the sound of the one-string violin and the man’s voice following them. To the sound of the violin Nyawira added her own from her guitar, and the two blended inside her. She let the fusion linger in her mind, knowing that they might never meet him face-to-face to say: “Thank you, A.G. Thank you for the gift of life.”

—Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow

So Strung Out

Last year on this date, August 6, Willy DeVille passed. I knew he’d been sick, but not that sick. While undergoing treatment for Hepatitis C, DeVille was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He went fast. DeVille lived hard, and American men who live hard often have a hard time making it through their fifties. DeVille didn’t make it. He died at 58.

Though he inked his first record deal with Mink DeVille, a five-piece performing in the mid-’70s as “house band” for the NYC punk club CBGB, DeVille was never punk. Or “new wave.” He was a romantic troubadour. Working in a style all his own, one combining, among other things, rock, soul, Cajun, blues, R&B, New Orleans second line, Tex-Mex, cabaret, mariachi, and salsero. The music always in service of his one lyrical preoccupation: Big Love. “What I usually do,” he once said, “is try to shoot for the heart.” That he did.

I was only a few months into rediscovering DeVille’s music when he fell ill and passed. I’d found on these here intertubes work from him I’d never knew existed, for I’d lost track of him during that long period when his records were released in Europe, rather than the States. I’d bookmarked in my life his “Mixed-Up, Shook-Up Girl” when it was first released back in 1977, but in the weeks before his death I came across the performance of that number embedded below, from 1994 in Montreux, and it’s been more or less at the top of my personal hit parade ever since. It renders the original, compelling as it is, something of a rough draft. In 1994 in Montreux, DeVille had found the right arrangement and the right players, and he knew exactly what the song was about.

“Mixed-Up Shook-Up Girl” is of a genre of songwriting I’m particularly fond of, one wherein young males think they’re writing about women, when they’re actually writing about themselves. If and when they belatedly discover that fact, the songs take on renewed power. Probably the classic example is Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman,” which, when initially released, came across as one of his many smug put-down songs. But by the time he performed it for the Concert For Bangladesh, he knew that it was himself who “breaks just like a little girl”: there was real, raw, naked pain in his performance.

DeVille claimed as late as 1994 that “Mixed-Up Shook-Up Girl” was “about a woman I know who was a drug addict. She was mixed up and she was shook up. That’s what it’s about.” But when he spoke those words DeVille knew that explanation was bogus—because that’s the same year as occurred the performance offered below. And in watching it, it’s clear that he long ago learned that the song is about him, Willy DeVille. He’s the one mixed-up, shook-up, strung-out in his love. He’s also the one strung out on the opiates. For at this point DeVille was closing in on 20 years of heroin addiction (he would finally, permanently kick about two years later). This is at once one of the most beautiful, and one of the most sad, pieces of music I have ever witnessed. It is astonishing, in the old and reverent sense of the word. From out of agony, conjuring ecstasy.

I never wrote about DeVille when he was alive, and for that I feel like a heel. But DeVille saw such things coming. “I have a theory,” he said in 1991. “I know that I’ll sell many more records when I’m dead. It isn’t very pleasant, but I have to get used to this idea.”

Never Get Out Of The Swiftboat

Bone-ignorant racist and serial liar Sean Klannity opened his radio program last Tuesday with a hit piece on Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Despite all that was going on that day, Klannity was unable to resist an atavistic return to the halcyon days of 2004, when he was instrumental in blowing holes in Kerry’s presidential aspirations, via non-stop air time gifted to those mendacious merchants of lies traveling under the Orwellian rubric Swiftboat Veterans For Truth.

A Massachusetts resident, Kerry had berthed a yacht in neighboring Rhode Island, where the craft was built. Rhode Island does not levy a sales and use tax on yachts; Massachusetts does. The Boston Herald, which hates Kerry almost as much as Klannity does, broke the “story.” It was then picked up by the Eggman, one of several slime-buckets from whom Klannity daily drinks his “news,” before regurgitating it for his listeners.

As this story explains, New Englanders—whose states, combined, comprise a land mass smaller than most California counties—commonly cross borders, in pursuits ranging from purchasing liquor to establishing businesses, in order to take advantage of wildly disparate tax laws. But Klannity, and other bellowers into bullhorns in the rightwing echo machine, portrayed Kerry as some sort of cross between Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, and Al Capone. By week’s end, Kerry had forked over $400,000 to Massachusetts, the amount he would have owed that state if his yacht had been built and berthed there, and thereby told Klannity and Klan to stuff it.

Kerry actually was involved in something newsworthy last week, but neither Klannity nor his Klan wanted to talk about it. Kerry responded to the release by Wikileaks of some 92,000 classified documents on Operation Enduring Fiefdom by stating that “they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right, more urgent.”

No Mas

Parliament in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia voted July 28 to ban bullfighting. By the end of 2012 it will be gone, throughout the region.

Simpleminded US and UK news reports mimicked the Spanish rightist line in dismissing the vote as a sort of hot-headed regionalist-nationalist instant-response to a June constitutional-court ruling declining to define Catalonia as “a nation.” This tired spin, however, neglects to note that people in Catalonia have been working against bullfighting since 1909, that by 2004 polls showed that over 80% of all Catalans opposed it, that last week’s vote was necessitated by the presentation in November 2008 of a petition signed by 180,000 people re-questing an end to the “sport,” and that the final vote last week, at 68-55, was merely a reaffirmation of a similar vote on January 1, which came in at 67-59 (and which I wrote about here). At that time too, it was claimed, falsely, that Catalans were less concerned about bulls, then about spitting at Spain.

In truth, Catalonia has banned bullfighting because Eros is winning, and Thanatos is losing. Blood sports of all kinds are in steep decline all over the globe. As they should be.

For bullfighting begins like this:

It’s a highly orchestrated spectacle that begins with the breeding of bulls in preserved areas known as dehesas. They are raised by their mothers for the first year, then taken away, branded, and kept in single-sex groups. At around two years of age, bulls are tested for aggression toward horses, and are not allowed to encounter humans until they enter the bullring. During their stay, they are encouraged to use their horns in tests of strength and dominance over other bulls, which often ends in severe injuries and even death.

And ends like this:

[W]hen I came to write a book about Barcelona I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn’t last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal’s pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.

The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker than you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.

The Catalan moniker for the campaign against bullfighting—”Prou!” or “Enough”—quite appropriate.

As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, more than a century-and-a-half ago, “one must be really quite blind or totally chloroformed not to recognize that the essential and principal thing in the animal and man is the same”; “it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man.”

Two Lights On Behind

Blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready in ambush the moment one walked out of the church. Unlike gospel, blues was not a music of transcendence; its equivalent to God’s Grace was sex and love. Blues made the terrors of the world easier to endure, but blues also made those terrors more real. “You run without moving from a terror in which you cannot believe,” William Faulkner wrote in one of his books about the landscape he shared with Robert Johnson, just about the time Johnson was making his first records, “toward a safety in which you have no faith.”

We comfort ourselves that we do not believe in the devil, but we run anyway; we run from and straight into the satanic images that press against the surface of American life. I think of Robert Mitchum, the mad preacher in Night of the Hunter, with LOVE tattooed between the knuckles of his right hand, HATE tattooed between the knuckles of his left—and he seems, again, like the legacy of the men who began the American experience as a struggle between God and the devil, the legacy of a Puritan weirdness, something that those who came after have been left to live out.

The Puritans did not take their dreams from the land; they brought them along. They meant to build a community of piety and harmony, what their leader, John Winthrop, called “a city on a hill”—an idea, in its many forms, that we have never gotten over, nothing less than America as the light of the world. They had a driving need to go to extremes, as if they could master God and the devil if only they could think hard enough; that, and a profound inability to make peace with the world as they found it. They failed their dreams, and their community shattered. “This land,” Winthrop wrote before he died, “grows weary of its inhabitants.”

The Puritans came here with a utopian vision they could not maintain; their idea was to do God’s work, and they knew that if they failed, it would mean that their work had been the devil’s. As they panicked at their failures, the devil was all they saw.

The image of the devil is a way of touching the sense that America is a trap: that its promises and dreams, all mixed up as love and politics and landscape, are too much to live up to and too much to escape. It is as if to be an American means to ask for too much—not even knowing one is asking for too much—and to trade away one’s life to get it, whatever it is.

The most acute Americans, in the steps of the old Puritans, have been suspicious, probing people, looking for signs of evil and grace, of salvation and damnation, behind every natural fact. Robert Johnson lived with this kind of intensity, and he asked old questions: What is man’s place in the world? Why is he cursed with the power to want more than he can have? What separates men and women from each other? Why must they suffer guilt not only for their sins, but the failure of their best hopes?

This is a state of mind that gives no rest at all.

—Greil Marcus, Mystery Train

Elective Affinities

(This story I found last week in the same sort of intertubes wormhole where dwells “Rope’s End.” It has something of a farcical history. In October of 1998, while working for the same shooting-star newspaper that published “Rope’s End,” I set out to try to explain why I thought the press and the public had become obsessed with the peregrinations of The Clenis, then absurdly dominating the national discourse. But the piece quickly grew so long that it would no longer fit in the newspaper. So I cut it off, announcing at the end that the story had become a series. That first installment is lost; this is the second one. There was to be a third—which explains why this piece ends so abruptly—but before it could be published, the paper died.

(After the paper expired, bits and pieces of this story popped up on the tubes now and again, when plucky souls attempted to use it as reference to alter Wikipedia biographies of such notables as Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and Bob Barr. Always these attempts have been spurned by Wikipedia mandarins. Which is one of many reasons why I have no respect for Wikipedia: because everything in this story is true. I’m posting it here because I performed a lot of research in writing this thing, and some of the historical info may prove useful at some point, such as the next time some political figure is found to have awkwardly dropped his (or her) pants. Which, things being what they are, should come any minute now. And which, unless said pants-dropping has the effect of hurting people (see, for example, Schine, McCarthy, and Cohn), is really none of our business.)

The sexual shenanigans of Ronald and Nancy Reagan were never a secret. Both were most relentlessly promiscuous while in Hollywood, locus of the nation’s largest, longest, strongest, and most obsessively tended gossip grapevine. Many a starlet seeking studio entree via the well-traveled smile-and-spread circuit hopefully ungirdled her loins and passed under Reagan, while Nancy’s name was routinely circulated among executives in search of a fast and practiced backseat blowjob. Power to the mavens of the entertainment press meant possessing such tantalizing tidbits; once the Reagans began their improbable electoral ascent, the information easily passed through the flimsy scrim separating the Hollywood desk from those patrolling the political beat. Campaign operatives and reporters shamelessly swap gossip with nearly every breath, and thus the Reagans’ sexual adventuring eventually became such common knowledge that even I, who have always occupied only the very outer arm of the political-gossip spiral, knew of Nancy’s legendary mouthwork long before Robin Leach coyly alluded to it during Reagan’s first term, and had heard as well tales involving Reagan’s on-the campaign-trail seduction of an 18-year-old true-believer, a sort of atavistic return to his Hollywood days, which were replete with libidinous, bibulous blackouts, when he would not uncommonly awake not knowing the name of the woman—or sheep (kid-ding, kidding)—ly-ing beside him.

Though until Kitty Kelly I’d never heard the tale of how Reagan blithe-ly bounced the bedsprings with lover Christine Larson while wife Nancy, alone in the hospital, struggled to give birth to daughter Patti (a daughter Nancy would later so abuse—her favorite weapon a hairbrush—that Patti had herself sterilized before the age of 25, terrified that she might abuse her own children; Nancy’s serial abuse came during her 40-year addiction to prescription pills, something she—nor anyone else—never managed to mention while serving as pious diva of the ludicrous “Just Say No” to drugs campaign). Still, I was one of probably millions of Americans cognizant of the open joke of Nancy’s cuckolding of the increasingly befuddled Ronnie with Frank Sinatra in the residence quarters of the White House. And anyone in the nation who paid attention to the numbers—and could count even to nine—realized Nancy was four months pregnant when she pledged to Ron “I do.”