Another gambit gone bad.
April 17th, 2009
You hear that sound? A little subtle, eh? Well, it’s cotton on cotton. That’s me turning my pockets inside out and shrugging my shoulders. Bottom scraped, my friends.
What happened with Big Green’s massive coin salvage program? Well, all of the jars and old sofas have given up their treasure, and the booty is already spent. That’s right - we pulled together about $47, all of which went to the electric company. (No, I don’t mean the children’s television program from the 1970’s… I mean the fuckers who keep the lights on.) Then there was that fiver that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) found lying around the forge room. I don’t want you to think we’re turning on each other in our hour of need, but I will admit that there was a minor tussle over that bill. Mostly it was Marvin (who was too clueless to let it go) and anti-Lincoln (who was determined to get an absinthe over at the local watering hole), but before long we were all involved, flailing away like drunks, growling like mad dogs over a stolen soup bone. A pitiable sight, to be sure.
Yes indeed. Anti-Lincoln got his absinthe, for all the good it did him. (He’s mad already, I tell you…. MAD.) Once we all regained feelings in our extremities, we tried to take collective stock of our position. Not a very promising one. Matt asked Mitch Macaphee if he could invent some money - that drew a snarky look, and we all went silent. Most of
our ideas had gone flat. The portraits with Lincoln didn’t pan out. People refused to believe he actually was Lincoln. I think it was because we had one Lincoln on both ends of town. (We nuked our own credibility on that one, I’m afraid.) There was a suggestion - I think it may have come from me - that we put the man-sized tuber up for sale, but that didn’t fly either. (The bottom fell out of the tuber market months ago.) It seemed as though the only thing left was to start searching for honest remunerative employment. Odd jobs, perhaps. Like bending pretzels and raising alligators. (Apologies to Mad comics.)
Then it struck us. Why don’t we try that thing that Dr. Smith did on Lost In Space when the Robinson’s went away and left him in charge of the Jupiter 2? (Need help on that? Oh, all right…) We can rent the abandoned Cheney Hammer
Mill out as a luxury resort hotel! Apart from the luxury, we have everything we need. I could print tickets. Matt could borrow some floral umbrellas from the local sporting goods store. John could stop by the lumber yard and pick up some groceries. We could rename the mill something like “Falcon’s Harbor” or “Happy Acres”, even though there’s no harbor and there are no acres. (It’s what’s called the “Pelican Cove” principle, after a planned community by that name that had neither pelicans nor a cove.) We could start selling reservations on the internets - just post a message on any old site and patrons will flock toward us like lemmings. It’s just that easy.
Or maybe not. But it beats working. Got better ideas? Send ‘em here.

triumphalist rhetoric about some military action against a “worthy” opponent. But the U.S. Navy vs. some teenage pirates… that’s about as lopsided a contest as I can imagine. Sure, they needed to get that ship captain out alive. Perhaps there was no other way to resolve the standoff - I can’t say, really. But this is nothing to crow about, and certainly not some enormous success that strikes a blow against tyranny. These pirates are desperate young men driven to a bandit’s life by circumstances we can barely comprehend. The very life’s blood of international commerce flows right past their shores in the form of these enormous freighters and tankers, and they see this as a meager opportunity to scrape some wealth out of a global system that passes them by. Not surprising that they grasp this nettle, even at risk of life and limb.
control their coastal waters, they have been unable to compete with unregulated fishing vessels from elsewhere in the region as well as Europe. Groups of Somalis have attempted to interdict illegal fishing, and these efforts have been conflated with piracy. There has also been a history of illegal dumping of toxic materials in Somali waters - something
Yes, yes, my friends - it’s just as it sounds. Broke again, fighting the mice for scraps of cheese. Matt just had a smack-down with a praying mantis that was making off with a fragment of stale halvah. (Did Matt prevail? Let us pray.) I’ve asked Big Green’s mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to put his considerable skills to good effect and invent us some money (or maybe a pizza), but he can’t be bothered with such trifles…. not when he’s preoccupied with his unified field theory. (Not going so well, I perceive.) And now we’re rifling through drawers (not with real rifles, you understand), rummaging through garments, and shaking the hell out of every cup and jar in the joint looking for loose change with which to keep our lights on for another week. What? What do you mean you hocked the lights? You moron!
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) just how much of a problem lack of money can be for us humans. Marvin, of course, has no need of crass commodities such as food, water, heat, clothing, etc. I’m certain he thinks we’re just obsessive and addicted to our well-entrenched consumer behaviors. Of course, he’s partly true - our fondness for Zenite snuff has proven a little difficult to shake. (I blame sFshzenKlyrn, who is always arriving from the Small Magellanic Cloud with a fresh poke.) But that exception aside, we’re really just talking about basic necessities here. Marvin - whose batteries are self-regenerating, drawing energy from gravity and the relative proximity of matzoh bakeries - fails to grasp our predicament. I swear, I thought I heard him grumbling as he fished around in the bottom of a storage crate, looking for stray quarters. (Sometimes the metallic squeaks his joints make sound like a gruff voice saying, “loser, loser“. Or maybe it’s me.)
know. But the bill still has some value, and the fact that we have not one but two Great Emancipators in our entourage means that both can be put into service attracting $5 bills. Actually, John had the best idea - set up booths on opposite sides of town offering patrons the opportunity to have their portrait taken with Honest (or Dishonest, depending on which one you get) Abe for… well, for $5. So in a way, it’s like trading one portrait of Lincoln for another, but hey… it’s the best idea we’ve got, okay? And aside from the occasional meltdown by Anti-Lincoln (who rails against the very notion of being put to work like a beast of burden), it might actually help us make back all that credit default swap cash Loathsome Prick Records lost on our behalf.
stone’s throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He’s the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it’s disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn’t give up a meal at Wendy’s to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we’re a nation at war, but it’s not so - we’re a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of underwriting the global projection of military power. Not worth that young person’s life… nor anyone else’s.
As I write these lines - not long after beginning this column - news has come through of five more U.S. soldiers killed in Mosul, Iraq. This comes on the heels of a multi-billion dollar supplemental appropriations request from the Administration to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This feels like a perpetual motion policy machine to me. Bush is gone and Obama has climbed into the cockpit, promising to be a better, more thoughtful driver than his predecessor… but it is still this massive killing machine designed to do only one thing. The only thing powerful enough to stop it is, well, us. Only we have to be aware of the fact that it needs stopping. And right now we’re busy with other stuff. As Obama said, you gotta be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let’s take his advice.
Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be band leaders! Not that this band has any leaders, per se - we kind of pass the talking stick around, and who ever happens to be holding it has the floor. (In truth, we don’t really have a stick here in Big Green. We just take turns in non-stick holding ways.) However you cut it, it’s hard to make music in this abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill environment, particularly with patience running thin in the midst of such a serious economic downturn. Oh yes, my friends - it affects us, as well. Big Green is not immune, no sir. We put our pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else. Except the man-sized tuber, who doesn’t have legs. Or Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t wear pants. (He’s made of metal, you see.) Or sFshzenKlyrn, who is a transcendental being of no fixed mass, location, or temporal displacement, and therefore does not need pants, not in the least. So that thing I said earlier about pants… well… just forget it.
Prick, who currently handles our intergalactic CD sales, ran into a little trouble with a small business unit they established some years back down here on terra firma. It’s called LP Financial Products and it specializes in something called, um…. let’s see…. credit…. credit default swaps. Yeah, that’s it. Whatever the hell they are. Anyhow, they ended up owing a whole lot of cash to somebody, and I’m not quite sure how or why. Interesting side note: I went over to their office the other day and saw our A&R rep leaving by the freight elevator with a large suitcase. Must have been in a hurry - he apparently closed the suitcase on some $100 bills he was packing. (Damned untidy, I thought. Curious thing.)
believe they sunk most of it into a doomed asteroid - seemed like a good bet at the time) and LP Financial Products was asked to pay up, they… well… defaulted. Now they’ve applied for an AIG style government bailout. My guess is that, with a name like Loathsome Prick, they should have no worries. In the meantime, our reps have apparently decided to go on a hastily planned vacation to …. well, they didn’t say where, exactly. All I know is that they must have been running a little late. (Never seen a car take a turn on one wheel before….)
did a somewhat incoherent interview with the organizer, an elderly sounding gentleman who said he was bringing together people who represent a broad range of political tendencies, left to right, to protest taxes against the backdrop of Fort Stanwix in Rome, a tourist-oriented recreation of the Revolutionary War era outpost. His contention was that, like the colonists during the revolution, he was encouraging people to take a stand against taxation. Actually, I think the founding fathers took issue with the notion of taxation without representation, but nevermind. This is a very 21st Century type of revolution - a bunch of people gathered at a local tourist trap to complain about something that will be with us as long as we have an organized society. It’s kind of like protesting gravity. Jump as high as you like - eventually, you’ll have to come down.
The truth is, they’re not against running deficits - their own alternative budget provides for a $1.7 trillion shortfall. They’ve just against the notion of that borrowed money going to benefit ordinary people in any tangible way. So I have to wonder what that guy who’s picketing Fort Stanwix hopes to achieve, except perhaps a completely dysfunctional government that still runs massive deficits.
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!
listener responses to our last single, “
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.
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.
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.
Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.
light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem - he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, sFshzenKlyrn is a transcendental being of no fixed hairstyle and can slip from one place in time to another. (Yes, but can he go from one time in place to another? Huh? Can he?) So he simply dials himself back several months to the precise interval needed for transmission, and he’s right with us. (Monitoring is a little complicated - I’ll skip that bit.)
trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know - maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.
but this is way beyond what I expected. Now that we’ve all been treated to six straight days of red-faced rage, I have to say - this is just fucking surreal. It’s not surprising that people are pissed off, but to see politicians, pundits, and news correspondents gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky is kind of hilarious. What - they’ve never heard of out-sized executive compensation before? Of top-level managers walking away from failed enterprises with a big bundle of cash? Where have they been for the past 25 years? It’s only been happening my entire adult life, practically. Oh sure, I know - AIG took public funds. But plenty of companies with obscenely over-compensated management teams suck off the public feeding tube. Just look at our defense contractors, for chrissake, or Agri-business, fed fat with subsidy. AIG is a dramatic example of something that’s been common practice for a long time, made possible by the very people who are screaming the loudest.
but that they took the payout to protect the interests - get this - of the American people, who had bailed Goldman out and were, therefore, shareholders of the extremely well-connected investment bank. (Insert laugh track here.) When you view this in the broader context not only of massive bonuses (more than a billion to executives of bailed-out Citibank) and ongoing payouts via the Federal Reserve, but of the stuff that doesn’t get talked about at all, like the missing $50 billion or more in Iraq reconstruction funds (remember the pallets of cash?) and the other assorted wild commitments of public funds initiated by the previous administration, AIG is small potatoes. It also provides a good opportunity for the thieves to yell “thief”, if only for a few days.