All posts by Joe

Eviction in progress.

How ’bout that? Isn’t gravity supposed to pull instead of push? Damnedest thing. I’m floating, floating… floating… falling… FALLING!… fall… floating again… Make up your bleeding mind!

Oh, hello. And welcome back to the land of blog. Big Green blog, that is, a.k.a. Notes from Sri Lanka. This is where you come to get the latest on what the hell we’ve been doing all week… expecting what, I don’t know. You’ll have to excuse my earlier outburst — I was finally drifting off to sleep after hours of fruitless effort. Now that I’m back on Terra Firma, I can bring you up to speed as you wait breathlessly for every new detail of our pointless exploits. (Don’t worry about writing this down; the entire sequence will be chronicled in comic strip form on new boxes of Sugar Pops cereal. Look for the special Big Green display card. See your grocer for details.)

Now, now… where was I? Ah, yes. The eviction notice. The Cheney Hammer Mill has been condemned, you see. No two ways about it, our local chamber of commerce has it in for us, big time. As they are busily converting this entire island into luxury vacation flats, the “powers that be” have decided to take this opportunity to clear the decks of all squatters. Thanks to my somewhat ill-advised references to the hammer mill in this blog, our local council has long been aware of our illicit presence within its bowels (the mill’s, that is, not the council’s) and is now taking steps to see us put out on the street where they feel we belong. That means the three members of Big Green — myself, my illustrious brother Matt, and our long-time co-conspirator (and drummer) John White — plus Marvin (my personal robot assistant), his inventor Mitch Macaphee, our mutual friend Trevor James Constable, the man-sized tuber, the two Lincolns (matter and anti-matter), and Big Zamboola will be residents of various gutters and fields in a fortnight or so… unless we take drastic steps. 

What steps, you ask? Don’t ask… tell! We’re clueless over here. 

Our financial advisor, Geet O’Reilly, took a moment away from doing our taxes to suggest that we try some kind of legal intervention. “Why don’t you phone a solicitor?” she asked, and Mitch Macaphee started breaking out in blue spots. (He’s got this thing about lawyers, see.) Once we had his temperature stabilized, Matt asked Mitch to write a letter to the local Chamber of Commerce pretending to be a lawyer… he could, perhaps, invent some bogus letterhead — Macaphee, Macaphee, and Pendergast, LLC. Mitch’s spots turned green. This obviously wasn’t going to work. It was clear that we would have to take a more direct approach. No go-betweens, damn it! It was time to petition the powerful, to take our demands out into the street, to show them we weren’t going to just lie down and take it… that we were going to FIGHT! We’re going to choke that Chamber of Commerce building with protesters. Time to get down to it, friends – are you WITH ME? 

Actually, Marvin is pretty good at holding a sign. The trouble was with the man-sized tuber — he doesn’t really have hands, per se. You kind of have to stick the post of the sign in his husk, then tilt it back so it doesn’t fall on Big Zamboola from behind. Big Zamboola — there’s another problem. No hands, no husk… pretty much all mouth. We didn’t even bother with the sign in his case; we just told him what to holler. In any case, it was a pretty pathetic looking protest, particularly with all the spectacular marches that have been going on lately in the States and in France. From the windows of the mill, it looked like what it was — a straggly gathering of freaks on the steps of the Chamber building. 

Did I go? Hell, no. Neither did Matt or John. We’re back here on a rear-guard maneuver, making sure the demolition crew doesn’t sneak in during our absence. Clever, eh? Pass the nachos, Johnny… there’s a good chap!

Death becomes us.

Has anyone else noticed that Zacharias Moussaoui is a lunatic? The man’s ravings go way beyond incoherence, and he has a total disregard for his own well-being — he’s suicidal, as a matter of fact. So… are we going to execute the criminally insane and, if so, what do we hope to achieve by doing so, other than cementing ourselves on the extreme of those great nations (China, Iran, etc.)  who still employ capital punishment with abandon? That special kind of vengeance we Americans call “closure”? Yes, Moussaoui appears to have been part of the 9/11 plot — that’s a lot more than we can say about the vast majority of people our government has killed in the name of those gruesome attacks. But I don’t believe Moussaoui could have actually stopped the attacks from happening precisely because he is a mad man; I think it’s a stretch to consider him responsible  for more than 3,000 deaths when he was obviously cannon fodder too incompetent to evade apprehension by a wholly dysfunctional FBI. If he is executed, it will be because he was addle-brained enough to get caught… and because the government is anxious to make someone — anyone — pay the ultimate penalty for the crimes of 9/11. These, it seems to me, are insufficient reasons for putting someone to death. 

Granted, I’m against the death penalty in general. But this goes beyond the moral issue of whether or not it’s right to allow the state to kill people. The feds are trying to execute an incompetent for crimes perpetrated by others. What is the point of showing the jury photos of charred bodies from the terror attacks on the WTC and Pentagon? Who hasn’t seen these and/or similar images? The jury is obviously being stoked up with scenes of atrocities committed by long-dead co-conspirators of Moussaoui. He may have wanted to be on one of those hijacked planes, but ultimately he wasn’t. And if Moussaoui might have prevented the attacks, so too might the FBI have done so if they’d been doing their jobs properly. It seems to me the gap between Moussaoui’s intentions and the actual deed may have been virtually insurmountable for him, given his mental state and his apparent lack of self-control. What ever the case may have been, he did not kill those people… he just refrained from sparing them. 

Will adding another body to the heap help the dead rest easier? Will it help their families achieve a modicum of justice? The first question is unanswerable; the second is for the families themselves to decide. I’m sure 9/11 families are all over the map on this one. Some have taken very principled stands against the government’s use of violence under the banner of the terror attacks; others have reacted with bitterness and even indiscriminate anger. I for one can’t blame people for feeling rage over the loss of a loved one in such a heinous way. But the law should not be in the business of using that rage to further specific policy objectives. The push for Moussaoui’s execution is one small part of that misappropriation. Probably the most fascinating aspect of this trial has been what it revealed about the FBI and the Justice Department. After all, there has been a concerted effort to tamp down scrutiny of the administration’s actions leading up to 9/11. Dubya fought the establishment of the 9/11 Commission tooth and nail; when he lost that battle, he tried to hamper its effectiveness in a number of ways — by putting Henry Kissinger at the helm, by restricting it to an impossible timetable, by refusing to give it subpoena power, and so on. He refused to allow Condi Rice to appear before the panel, then relented under pressure. He initially refused to testify, then agreed… but only before select members and only in the company of Dick Cheney, without being sworn and without allowing the Commission members to take notes out of the meeting. Why, exactly? 

Probably the same reason they want Moussaoui dead — smoke and mirrors. There’s Dubya’s “culture of life” for you.