Hammer Mill Days

Five words.

January 31st, 2009

Gosh, but it’s great to be back home! My favorite five words in the alphabet. Wait… did I say something? Did someone just say something…?

Whoa, sorry, friends. I’m a little woozy after that hard landing the other day. Did I mention our landing was hard? Well, if I didn’t (and I do believe I did), let me tell you… it was HARD. We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it’s not like we’ve got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us…. even though we have not one but two Lincolns on board.)

So, down and down and down we went. Objects on the ground became larger and larger. I could see my own broken down car - a crispy 1989 Honda Civic - and Mitch Macaphee could even see a pair of cufflinks he lost last summer at one point. That’s when it dawned on him that we were getting close… too close. Soon we could see even smaller objects… pinheads, protozoa, large molecules, smaller ones…. then, CRACK! We came to a kind of sudden stop. I think we all lost several inches in height - particularly Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who may have compacted one of his hip-gimbals. (He’ll need to consult with Dr. Macaphee on that, no doubt.) My teeth seem to move around a lot more than they did last week. Oh, and the man-sized tuber has a greater specific gravity than he did before. (Mother… now I know why they call it CRACK.)

Okay, so Big Green (like master) is in the cold, cold ground - then what? Well, we did manage to land (by sheer good fortune… nothing to do with piloting skill, I can assure you) within walking distance of the Cheney Hammer Mill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy limping distance, so it took the better part of an afternoon getting over there. (Lincoln and anti-Lincoln grousing all the way, of course…. If I have to come back there again!) In fact, it took us so bloody long that the local constables beat us to the door. So how, you may ask, were we able to run afoul of the law in such a short time on Earth? Well… our Soyuz capsule is apparently considered hazardous waste… not surprising, since it is chock full of noxious chemical substances and was found lying squashed like a cigarette butt in the middle of a beet field. We should have taken Mitch’s advice and set the freaking thing on fire before we limped off into the sunset. Live and learn.

Live and learn? $4,000 for hazardous waste removal? W.t.f. - that’s our entire take from this last few weeks, assuming Zenonian drachmas are still convertible to genuine U.S. currency. (That’s assuming a lot, I will admit.) Easy come… easy go.

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Party favors.

January 31st, 2009

Obama came rolling into office bipartisan guns a-blazin’. He met with congressional Republicans. He met with conservative columnists. He courted, compromised, and curried favor, but never seriously called them out on their incessant whining about insufficient (in their view) tax relief contained within the president’s stimulus plan. Birth control provisions were dropped, tax cuts added. In the end, the stimulus package was far more modest on infrastructure related items than most economists think is demanded by a crisis of this magnitude. (100,000 jobs cut this week alone - good grief!) And yet, when it came to a vote in the House, not one Republican supported it. My first reaction to this news was, well… okay, then can we have the original package back - the one Democrats could have passed two weeks ago? What the hell - the G.O.P. acts like a dog that can’t eat all his food, so he pisses on it. So much for bipartisan good will.

Personally, I think this notion of bipartisanship is way overvalued. For one thing, the ultimate expression of it is the one-party state (and we practically have that now). Aside from that, I don’t see the point in bending over backwards to bring the G.O.P. along if it means adopting a large portion of their program - namely, the same supply-side, deregulatory, neoliberal nonsense that got us into this mess in the first place. Sure, a lot of Democrats - probably most - helped get us here as well, but they have become born-again Keynesians in the face of this almost unprecedented economic meltdown. Republicans are still selling the same old soap as before, whether it’s McCain talking or Boehner or that brown haired buy who isn’t Boehner: tax cuts. Not only that, but “fast-acting” tax cuts… which is to say the same kind as Bush passed (mostly benefiting the rich) with the term “fast-acting” stitched on to make it sound as though the savings would land in anyone’s pocket before May 2010.

They’ve got it ass-backwards, of course. We need to raise taxes on all those folks who made out like bandits over the past 25 years (and particularly since Bush’s last two rounds of tax cuts), including those Merrill execs who took multi-million dollar bonuses home from their failed company. We need to slap excess profit taxes on the oil companies retroactive to the last eighteen months or so. We need to slash the ludicrously bloated Pentagon budget, repurposing the billions mindlessly sluiced into useless aircraft carriers, Virginia-class submarines, joint-strike fighters, and missile defense, into useful projects. We should do all this and more, whether Republicans sit on their hands or not.

He’s back. New Yorkers now have a new senator, a relatively conservative Democrat named Kirsten Gillibrand whom animal rights activists have dubbed “New York’s Sarah Palin” (with some justice, as she is a gun nut / hunting freak). A bit unnerving to me was the sight of Al D’Amato on the podium at her public introduction… standing right behind her. Apparently he’s an old family friend. Gaaaack. It took us 18 years to get that asshole out of the Senate… only so that Patterson could name one of his surrogates. Some justice there.

luv u,

jp

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Making contact.

January 29th, 2009

Mill boy to tuber, mill boy to tuber! Do you read, tuber? What’s your position? Can’t read. Can you turn up your gain? Roger. How ’bout this…. try turning down your lose. Ah… much better.

Ah, you have returned. Good on you. Yes, as you may have surmised, the man-sized tuber… ahem, I mean the intrepid man-sized tuber has made his way into the remote past, fully 145 years ago or more, back to the time of Lincoln. His mission? Very simple… to apprehend the nefarious anti-matter Lincoln (one of our various hangers-on) who has somehow supplanted the actual president and begun to drive what’s left of a Civil War-plagued nation into the sewer. Shouldn’t be too difficult a task for a non-verbal overgrown root vegetable on a cart. At least, that’s what our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had assured me. He said that security was not as tight in those days as it is now, so it shouldn’t be hard for the tuber to catch up with anti-Lincoln to deliver his ultimatum. Piece of cake, right?

Well, not so right. Believe it or not, the tuber has run into some difficulties. For one thing, even though he jumped through the same wormhole as anti-Lincoln, he somehow didn’t land in the same geographical area as anti-Lincoln. Hell, he wasn’t even on the same continent. Tubey and his little cart rolled out of the time warp in Santiago, Chile. Now I know what you’re going to say. Yes, it is a capital. And yes, it is an American capital. But that’s where the similarity ends, my friends. And in any case, similar isn’t enough. We’re talking about the man-sized tuber on a cart a continent away from where he needed to be, in a century when the fastest mode of travel was probably a not-so-fast train. This was not a good beginning. And while tubey bumped around from one end of the Avenue Francisco Bilbao to the other, we set ourselves to the task of working out what to do. (Which involved scratching our heads for a few minutes, then running off to get Mitch Macaphee, who has some semblance of a functional brain.)

Mitch’s suggestion came quickly. Commandeer Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device and fire it directly at the image of tubey, who was just visible as a cloudy outline in the center of the spiraling shape within the time warp. (Whoa, that was a mouthful.) Mitch would then manipulate the controls in such a way as to transport the man-sized tuber thousands of miles across the 19th Century landscape to where he needed to be. Well, we tried it…. and when we next received word of the tuber (when I say ”word”, I actually mean Morse code - we tied a clicker to one of tubey’s more dexterous roots) he did seem to be in a more congenial place vis-a-vis his mission. Which was a good thing… for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), because he has been sitting in the ready room for the last five hours anticipating some kind of back-up rescue mission… a prospect he has not been savoring, I can tell you. Hang in there, Marvin!

So, what the fuck. One thing leads to another, right? My guess is that by the time you check in on this ridiculous account again, something will have happened… somewhere….

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Off target.

January 29th, 2009

Another week, another war… or at least the threat of same. Any week that starts with a nuclear explosion tends to focus the mind a bit, even if it isn’t a very sharp focus in the case of many of those reacting to the recent actions of North Korea. It’s as though we are born anew every six months or so, our past wiped clean, our journey set to begin again. Here we have the grim dividends of a craven policy towards northeast Asia that has become particularly nasty over the past 10 to 15 years (and especially so in the last eight). As it happens, we inched very close to a disastrous war back in 1994, then concluded a framework agreement with Pyongyang that would have provided them with a uranium reactor and ended their international isolation. Due to the vagaries of the Clinton administration and the maniac Gingrich Congress, neither of those provisions was honored. It was then left to the Bush II administration to do its usual job of pouring gasoline on a smoldering problem, placing North Korea squarely within the “Axis of Evil” and setting UN Ambassador John Bolton and others to further antagonize them.

The result is quite apparent. The North Koreans did what numerous other nations have done through the decades when faced with what might reasonably be considered an existential threat: they built a deterrent. Having witnessed Washington’s willingness to invade and destroy nations that clearly do not possess nuclear weapons, Pyongyang apparently opted for what seemed the less risky course. (One can imagine the same kind of thinking taking place in Iran.) It bears remembering, also, that North Korea knows something about the horrors of war. We bombed the place to smithereens during the Korean War, destroying virtually every standing structure in the North - campaigns that resulted in the death of perhaps 2.5 to 3 million people north of the 38th parallel. Regardless of who is to blame for igniting that conflict, it was certainly they who bore the brunt of the destruction. Their culture is largely built around that experience, and it is not surprising that they should engage in what appears to be some defensive saber-rattling.

Sure… that was then and this is now, right? Well, not everyone forgets the past as quickly and efficiently as we do. North Korea is a repressive place run very much like a prison, but its central obsession is national survival. With the change of leadership in the United States, I’m sure Pyongyang is testing Obama’s rhetoric of reconciliation. Seems to me like they’re skeptical that anything fundamental has changed, and frankly, so am I. Consider for a moment the world order we’re living under. Washington and the great powers live under one set of rules with respect to weapons of mass destruction, while developing nations must abide by another. The fact is, the non-proliferation regime requires the U.S., Russia, and other nuclear powers to move decisively towards disarmament, just as it seeks to prevent smaller players from joining the nuclear club. We conveniently ignore the former while waxing righteous about the latter, and while our hypocrisy may not be featured on the Nightly News, it is pretty obvious to the relatively powerless nations of the world.

So, as you hear many voices - the execrable Newt Gingrich among them - calling for military action against North Korea, just remember: a massive war on the Korean peninsula causing hundreds of thousands of deaths is precisely what we want to avoid. So… starting one is hardly a solution.

luv u,

jp

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The robot, it was a chicken. Oh god.

January 28th, 2009

Is the car ready? Good. Engine running? Double good. No, I’m not worried about wasting gas. Last thing on my mind, damnit. Don’t forget your driving shoes - there’s a good chap.

Hello again. Yes, we’re planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about - just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes… you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads…. kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It’s pretty terrifying.

Mitch Macaphee - Marvin’s inventor and our resident mad scientist - has made several attempts to rid Marvin of this scourge. First he tried reprogramming him - no luck. (For a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods - you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime… and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn’t the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin’s problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.

A little tip for all of you - don’t go for a ride with two Lincolns, especially if one is an anti-matter doppelganger of the other. Trust me, one Lincoln is plenty enough company, making speeches, cursing General McClellan, trying out new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you’ve got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They’ll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one “Maharba” (”Abraham” backwards) just to annoy him. So it’s, “Nice speech, Maharba!” Then you’ll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say “Quit it!” That’s when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.

Okay, well…. you’ve got your troubles to attend to, no doubt. We’ll be in the car if you need to find us. It’s a green car with four wheels - you can’t miss it. (This is a small place.)

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Undone.

January 28th, 2009

See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama’s all the way through, though I didn’t bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part - an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note - the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.

There are times when I think Americans, in spite of their news media, will be able to get their minds around the fact that this economic crisis is serious and needs addressing in ways that go beyond merely cutting taxes and interest rates. I’m not certain they grasp the seriousness of some of the other problems we face, not wholly unrelated to economics. The Iraq war is certainly front and center in this category. Through the tireless efforts of politicians, commentators, and news reporters (the kind who pass along lightly altered press releases to their copy editors), we have been given to understand that things are a whole lot better in Iraq now, and that aside from an explosion here and there, it’s really a very normal place. This is pretty sad. It’s like the smoldering remains of a house we burned down - the fire may be out, but the house is still destroyed. Hundreds of thousands have been killed there, millions displaced. This is a severely traumatized society that may never recover, and we can’t simply act as though our work is done there and our “mistakes” can merely be forgotten.

There was a particularly good article on Iraqi refugees in last week’s Nation Magazine. The author talked to families in Jordan and Syria about their experiences, and the stories are pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.

We need to leave Iraq, probably faster and more completely than Obama wants to. But we also have to address the septic problem of all of these battered people exiled in penury. And we have to start yesterday.

luv u,

jp

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Subtract this.

January 28th, 2009

Turn it down a little more. Little more. Okay. Good. Can’t hear that at all. Yeah, that’s right - nothing. Much better. And… hey! Don’t throw things at me!

Sensitive artists, these cohorts of ours. Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant)…. please. He’s been playing the pipe organ on our latest recordings, and, well… a little goes a long way, let’s put it that way. Ouch! Stop chucking stuff, man! Very sensitive. We’ve been asking him to go a little easy on the organ, and he treats that like an insult. (It does sound vaguely obscene, come to think of it.) So it looks like our patented arranging method of starting with every imaginable instrument and subtracting them one by one… that’s not working so good. Thus far, we’ve only managed to eject the glockenspiel, the tin drum, the specially-tuned half-sticks of dynamite, the kazoo, and hell, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we get down to what’s typically needed for a Big Green album. Even sFshzenKlyrn is losing patience with these sessions, and he has a life-span (or half-life) of 57 million Earth years.

We’ll get it done, never fear. In the mean time, how are our current releases doing? Well, let’s check in on a few listener responses to our last single, “High Horse“. Here’s one from a guy who calls himself “UncleOutrage”:

I Hate To Be The Villian, But…..
I can’t quite tell if this song is supposed to be funny or not, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t like it in either case. Honestly much of it has to do with the genre, I’m really not a fan of honky-tonk country music in the least. But even as song writing goes, this was VERY repetitive and I might go as far to say annoying. I’m REALLY sorry, I hate to be negative as far as judging someone else’s work, but I just have to be honest. There was nothing I liked in this track at all.

Well, “Uncle” - glad you enjoyed that. If you want to hear it again (and again and again), just drop by our Web site at www.big-green.net/highhorse. There’s even a ludicrous video. Go wild, son!

Here’s a Garageband review from someone who calls him/herself “SkelingtonBoot”:

ugh
I’m sorry this is just not for me. I don’t think this is indie rock, this is one of those red warning label genres like Country Rock or Comedy. Singer has a sturdy voice and given a willing spirit I reckon he could get you singing along to your granny’s armpits and the melody - very country - is very compelling in a very cheesy way. The lyrics are … ? I can’t talk about the lyrics. Overall the song sounds very proficiently performed and I do believe that humour belongs in music … but, that’s not a carte blanche!

Gosh, “Skelington”, not sure where to begin! Thanks for the kudos on the “willing spirit”, though you should know we eliminated all the “granny’s armpit” sounds kind of early on in the production process. We’ll definitely take your “humour… not a carte blanche” comment to heart, though. From now on, we’ll start editing ourselves more judiciously. We’re going to get all serious, now. Totally. No, seriously.

Well, that’s probably enough fun for this week, kids. We’ve got to interrupt the man-sized tuber’s monologue before people start getting too happy in the studio. Music is a serious business, you know. No time for all this hee-hee and yuk-yuk.

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Evident failure.

January 28th, 2009

News from the front this week hasn’t been so good. Deadly car bombings in Iraq (a.k.a. “normal land”). Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy - like our weapons - seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a “war”), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all… though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about “purity of arms”, they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed with the notion of expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Paging George Mitchell! You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy.

Obama’s message to the Iranians was probably a step in the right direction, but it means little without a palpable change of policy across the region. That means some effort to promote Iraqi independence (from us) and reconstruction (from our assorted ravages), as well as a more speedy withdrawal of troops and military contractors. It also means rethinking the kind of policy that produces more hatred towards America amongst Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And it means a stop to the uncritical support we have given the Israeli government regardless of how they conduct themselves in the territories they have occupied since June 1967 (i.e. Palestine). Let’s face it - we’ve always been on the wrong side of struggles in the developing world, even when “our side” has won. From the Congo to Southeast Asia, from El Salvador to Chile, from Kabul to Baghdad, and everywhere in between, we’ve engaged in the thoughtless application of military might to political disputes and social upheaval, with invariably disastrous results. When will it stop? When will the sun set on this empire?

As the Israelis have demonstrated through their actions, and as we are demonstrating through our own, occupations have a corrupting influence on the occupier. Now seemingly incapable of facing down even a moderately armed irregular force like Hezbollah, the Israeli military seems best suited to attacking captive civilian populations in areas they already effectively control - civilians who have no effective means of defense. For our own part, we have become so used to the idea of civilian casualties that they are almost never deemed worthy of media coverage unless they occur in the double digits. The fact that we leave crucial life-or-death action to pilotless drones illustrates how profoundly we have separated ourselves from any sense of responsibility to the people subject to our military force. The very experience of war and occupation is now limited to the relatively small number of families whose members volunteer for service, our collective knowledge of its horrors growing more and more remote as the conscripts of 20th Century conflicts grow old and pass away.

Leave us face it: the empire is failing. Instead of tinkering with it, we had best consider how to abandon it before it destroys what’s left of our democracy.

luv u,

jp

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Bone throw.

January 25th, 2009

Add a little cilantro. Mmmm…. probably not THAT much. Jesus christmas, Mitch - you’re kind of extravagant with the spicing, aren’t you. Now, don’t get offended, I…. uh, Mitch….?

There he goes again. That’s the second time he’s walked out on me in the course of preparing this meal. Sensitive scientists! Anyway, welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where spirits are always elevated, music is ubiquitous, and science is a child’s plaything. A lot of experimentation goes on here. We’ve seen it all, frankly, from selective negation of gravity to new formulae for cornmeal popovers. (Actually, the two things kind of go together.) What does it all have in common? None of the results are published, that’s what. What happens at the mill stays at the mill, my friends. Just ask Mitch Macaphee, the mad (and extremely thin-skinned, apparently) scientist who advises us on all matters relating to bubbling beakers of goo, primitive electrodes, and massive pressure gauges. Fortunately he has not invented any new robots - Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is quite sufficient automatronic company for any rock band.

What’s happened over the last week or so? Oh, you know… the usual stuff for a virtual rock band. Practice. Recording. Personal appearances. Listening for that fateful knock on the door from the codes department. (Shhhhh…. Don’t tell them we’re here!) Scraping up loose change wherever we can find it. How is the vacationland scheme going? Ah, we let that one drop. Pretty typical for us, really. Get an idea first, then think about it and realize how stupid it is. (Story of our lives.) The only one of us that was truly into doing it was the man-sized tuber. He had polished up all of his customer service skills and was ready to man that front desk. It took a while to break it to him, frankly. I certainly didn’t have the heart for it, and we didn’t want to delegate it to someone outside of the band proper (particularly since that might end up being anti-Lincoln, who would take delight in tubey’s misery). In the end, it was Matt who handed him the clue. (Scribbled on the back of an empty book of matches, as it happened.)

Putting that unpleasantness aside, we’ve been toiling away at our next album (or “collection”, as Mitch insists on calling it). Breaking new ground here for old Big Green. I, for one, recorded my first banjo part ever. (Luckily, John lent me his banjo… though I had to blacken in a few teeth before hitting the record button.) Matt tried his hand at mandolin and washboard, and we both tracked a jug-band accompaniment. What’s the song? Let’s just say it’s a little number about some friends of ours. No, it won’t be stuffed with inside jokes… just a little topical humor (i.e. only to be taken externally). There are a few others in the works, and we’re following the usual production schedule, so don’t pop the earbuds in just yet (unless you’ve got other things to listen to). In the meantime, we’ve been trying our hand at developing recipes for something we plan on calling the “Big Green Cookbook”. Hence the extra cilantro. (An atypical ingredient for blueberry muffins, I will admit.) Another little money-making scheme that’s sure to….

What’s that? Someone has already done a Big Green Cookbook? Who the hell is Jackie Newgent and why haven’t I ever seen her at any band meetings? (Perhaps because I don’t attend them…?)

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Cheney’s hammer.

January 25th, 2009

Torture is in the news again, big time. I just wrote a post about it on a local newspaper’s Web site, in response to someone’s comment about the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer - whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran - makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture (”enhanced interrogation”) program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer’s confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to “300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit.” Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released - the ones that show how effective his war crimes truly were in producing actionable intelligence. I say, tell it to the jury.

Cheney’s not the only one blowing smoke, though he’s certainly among the most visible. (Christ, you can see him from space!) Other ex-minions of the Bush team are creeping their way through the media hive, popping up here or there to offer a spirited defense of the indefensible. Some, like Phillip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to Condi Rice, have appeared mainly to distance themselves from the controversy. But a lot of the noise reflects the same type of argument Bush himself used throughout his presidency - this is not torture, and it is being used to keep your families safe. Doesn’t matter that it breaks both domestic laws and international law. Doesn’t matter that aside from being fundamentally wrong and immoral, it is ineffective and known to produce unreliable information. (In fact, torture of the kind implemented by the last administration was formulated specifically to elicit false confessions.) Doesn’t matter that the examples they provide of terror plots foiled through torture hold not an ounce of water. The big lie continues.

I heard Pat Buchanan on MSNBC this past Friday defending “enhanced interrogation techniques” partly on the basis that most Americans favor their use against terrorists. I don’t know that this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. People have become so used to the idea, both through the actions of their government and via television shows like “24,” that they consider the “smoking gun” scenarios constantly referred to in the media as plausible. This is a bit like the phenomenon of judges - actual trial judges - deciding cases partly on the basis of science used in shows like “CSI”. It’s as if NASA started basing everything they do on the scientific principles embodied by “Lost in Space.” That’s kind of scary… almost as scary as the torture itself. If we’re getting that detached from reality when we set policy or even just consider its effects, we are in “deep doo-doo,” as Bush’s father used to say. Just the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded more than 180 times over the course of a single month should indicate that, as a “smoking gun” remedy, this does not work.

In any case, forget whether or not psychos on the talk shows say it works. If we resort to Cheney’s hammer, we’re sacrificing what’s left of our humanity.

luv u,

jp

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Hammer Mill Days

Five words.

Party favors.

Making contact.

Off target.

The robot, it was a chicken. Oh god.

Undone.

Subtract this.

Evident failure.

Bone throw.

Cheney’s hammer.

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