davydog

Katrina’s Diaspora

I happened upon Bruce “Shorty” Allen on NW 19th Ave., about half a block from Burnside, while walking up to Stadium Fred Meyer to buy some peanut butter. There’s a machine in their “nutrition” department that lets you grind the roasted peanuts into peanut butter. The self-grind tastes better than anything Skippy ever stuffed into a plastic jar. It was the Eve of Thanksgiving Eve. The days are short this time of year; nightfall came several hours earlier. Shorty sat in the shadows of the poorly lit street, on a knee-high concrete wall that acted as a divider separating the sidewalk from the abrupt drop-off to the car wash parking lot below.

As I approached, Shorty greeted me with “what’s up, old hippie!” then laughed. In my younger years I might have felt slightly offended at someone calling me “hippie.” After all, weren’t hippies those folks who wear hemp clothing and Birkenstock sandals, maintain uninterrupted membership in KBOO Radio’s Jerry Garcia Memorial Collective, dwell on or near SE Belmont, Hawthorne or Lower Division and carefully affix “Keep Portland Passive-Aggressive” stickers to the bumpers of their Subarus or Vanagons without the slightest trace of irony?

But nowadays I no longer automatically cringe at such insults. My lysergic-cannabinol; hardcore punk; grunge media impresario; and “urban professional” days are all long behind me. Sporting an unkempt graying, greasy mop and seedy, grizzled demeanor, I’m sure most folks in my neighborhood assume I’m a bum anyway, if they see me at all. So being mistaken for a “hippie” looks like a step up. On paper, at least. Shorty reached out and we shook hands as he remarked “I always know my own people.”

Shorty said he’d come down here to Portland from Seattle, where FEMA had relocated him after the flood. He told me he’d lost fourteen family members in the Katrina cataclysm. Shorty broke into tears as he described how he tried, and failed, to save the lives of a drowning baby and her mother. Just talking about that experience seemed to transport him back to the moment. Back into the murky, filthy, moccasin-infested floodwaters, trying–and failing–to pull those particular doomed victims to safety.

Shorty asked me if I’d buy him a burger, but quickly corrected himself, requesting “Chinese rice” instead. The Panda Express restaurant sat just on the other side of the car wash. Unsure if he wanted me to actually go into the restaurant and buy him his meal, or just fork over a few bucks, I decided to give him the ten dollar bill I found nestled next to two singles in the little change pouch I found tucked in my front-left pocket.

Shorty had suffered much in his forty-two years on this planet. His many hardships left visible marks on his face, in his eyes, and on his beaten down body. One of the side effects of having gone through so much trauma is the inevitable alienation trauma leaves in its wake. Your story, your experiences set you apart from others around you. It imposes an insurmountable barrier between you and the reigning social “norm.” Your story makes others uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear it, or may doubt or dismiss the story you tell.

It was important to Shorty that I understood he was not bullshitting me or telling me lies. His experiences, his traumas, were real. They really happened to him. As if to prove to me that he actually existed, Shorty pulled out his I.D. card to “show” me he was for real. Shorty wasn’t the first person I’ve encountered who did this. Even so, it astonished me each time I witnessed it. It was a gesture that never failed to usher in an awkward and deeply poignant moment in which words failed. How do folks get so thoroughly beaten down that they feel compelled to justify their existence to a stranger?

In better times, Shorty had traveled extensively. He worked for Unocal on oil rigs off the Gulf Coast and around the world: Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, Trinidad and other faraway lands. His seventeen year-old daughter lives with her mother in Rio de Janeiro and his twenty-one year-old son is enrolled at Texas A&M University.

But on this particular evening Shorty found himself, on the cusp of Thanksgiving day, sitting alone on a concrete curb, nursing a tall can of malt liquor discretely tucked into an inside pocket of his overcoat. No place in Portland to call home, Shorty lived on the street. He was too scared to return to his former home in New Orleans, which likely no longer existed anyway.

His experiences had clearly traumatized him; during our conversation he repeatedly emphasized that he had a lot of “gratitude.” His survival mantra. For as bad as he has it, he knows that there’s someone else, somewhere, who has it worse. And then he would weep. He desperately clung to the belief that his “God” watched over him. I gathered that his repeated use of the phrase “my God” was meant to distinguish his God from whatever “god” the Republican member of Congress referred to when he quipped “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” I asked Shorty if he might consider writing down his story. I appreciated his sharing it with me, and pointed out that his story is important. Others should hear it.

I didn’t make it to Fred Meyer that night, but–after walking Shorty to the door of the Panda Express restaurant–I slowly and dejectedly walked back to my tiny studio apartment. For many of us, even those of us spared the horror that Shorty and so many New Orleans citizens went through, Katrina and her aftermath signaled a turning point. It unmasked the mythical and fraudulent “American Way Of Life.” The “non-negotiable” delusion our society has tortured and murdered so many to protect and uphold. Katrina guaranteed the death and damnation of this rancid “Way Of Life,” which now rots in a hell of its own design.

Oh yeah, uh, happy shopping!

Whitey On The Moon, V.1

Whitey On The Moon, V.2 (Redux)

Whitey bombs the moon.

Source: NASA’s mission to bomb the Moon

As our society continues its slide towards “populist” fascism, corpostate-mandated totalitarianism and cultural depravity, America’s dwindling middle-classes might at least consider sitting up and taking notice. After the Putsch, wouldn’t you agree that you (those still left alive, of course) might find it worthwhile to at least have some understanding—however dim—of how and why our society drove itself off the cliff?

Tea Baggers At Play

12. SilverFox | 09.14.09
I’m just drove back from the 9-12 march & I’m saying that this is now a Movement!! It’s We the People……not you the government!! Keep going EnterStageRight. com & booksbyoliver. com — The Revolution is Coming!!

13. Voyo Milenic | 09.14.09
Yes foam at the mouth and keep up the fanatical propagandist inversion fear mongering. You people on the far right are so out of touch you actually believe you’re lies to power program are going to be successful! There are far more common sense, rational, honest, REAL AMERICANS just lying in wait right now. Every stupid little action like that pathetic sham of a march on Washington keeps adding steam to the big push-back coming! Now bring on the snide petty immature remarks and throw your rotten tomatoes but don’t forget what I say!

Sequential commentary in response to Matthew Shaer’s blog post, published on September 14, 2009 on the Christian Science Monitor website.

The Big Stick

In 1969 Amon Düül II, a bedraggled coterie of Krautrockers from a disbanded Munich commune, released their first album, Phallus Dei (that’s “God’s Penis” to you English speakers). The band attained an “underground popularity for its free form musical improvisations” and “performed around the happenings and demonstrations of the contemporary politicized youth movement.” With their “liberal attitude to artistic freedom,” the former members of the “radical political art commune” valued “enthusiasm and attitude over artistic ability.”^*

Had Amon Düül II harbored more focused ambitions, perhaps they could’ve recruited an obscure economics professor to help promote their record in the United States. They might have even asked him to set up the band’s first American tour. After all, how could’ve our intrepid Krautrockers found anyone with a more perfect name than Dick Armey to help thrust God’s Penis deep into the hot-’n’-clammy fundamentum of America’s psychedelic rock-’n’-art-’n’-acid scene?

A Phallus Of One

Alas, it’s doubtful the Marching Dick would’ve accepted an offer to play with God’s Penis from a rag-tag band of Krautrock acid freaks like Amon Düül II. Instead Dick Armey would wait a decade and a half before groping for bigger things—god’s pecker, for instance. This particular appendage was attached to a different god, of course—the god of big business, political power and reactionary religious cults. During his 18 years as the U.S. Representative from Texas’s 26th congressional district—including eight years as House Majority Leader, and as one of the engineers of the “Republican Revolution”—Dick Armey found that wielding god’s pecker would prove infinitely more useful than anything he might have achieved by playing with God’s Penis.

The battles Dick Armey waged as a Congressional Representative ended in 2003 after he temporarily lost his grip on god’s pecker while engaged in a pissing match with James Dobson, the Focus On The Family kingpin, Republican king maker, and key architect of America’s theocracy-minded “Christian Right.” Dobson, who—according to Armey—“scolded” him for failing to sufficiently “deliver for Christian conservatives,” succeeded in momentarily snatching the (un)holy phallus right out of Armey’s grubby hands. Pecker in hand, Dobson pinned Armey to the wall with it while asserting that Republicans “owed (their) majority to him, and that he (Dobson) had the power to take (it) back.”^*

Although Dobson ruthlessly crushed Dick’s balls after Armey foolishly allowed their petty dickering to “come to blows,” all was not lost. Armey instinctively understood that—though his tenure in the Congressional Club’s ultra right wing was coming to a close—he could continue brandishing his “big stick” as he marched through Congress’s revolving door and straight into the “private sector,” where he could wield it to ruthlessly enforce the edicts of big business and high finance.

In recent months Dick mobilized his “Armey” in an obsessive drive to completely scuttle efforts by the Obama Administration to pass “healthcare reform” legislation. Dick’s Armey insists on total victory. They’re not satisfied that the proposed legislation currently “on the table” is a terribly compromised version of what Barack Obama promised to help deliver to the American People during his run for the White House. Dick’s shock troops have prevailed in a few strategically impressive skirmishes. Last month a large group of disgruntled “tax protesters” marched on Washington to protest what they claimed as “out-of-control spending by an expanding federal government.” According to an article on the Fox News website, the march “was part of the so-called Tea Party Movement that gathered steam in April.” Their arrival in Washington D.C. was “the culmination of a 34-city, 7,000-mile bus tour that began Aug. 28 in Sacramento, Calif.”

What makes mass mobilizations of people protesting “out-of-control spending”—instigated by the likes of Armey and his gang of would-be Dick-tators—so stunning is the near total absence of these same folks to protest the escalating hyper-pillage inflicted on regular people by Wall Street, big business, the Pentagon and other predatory institutions. A rapacious plundering abetted by their whorish K Street-walker allies in big government. Not only have these predations become more pernicious and systemic in recent decades—and dramatically more-so in recent years and months—but the devastation they inflict on the rest of us is almost impossible to miss. Yet when proposed legislation comes along that might provide at least some benefit to regular Americans, but could also threaten “out-of-control profiteering by an expanding Kleptocracy,” the corporeich’s brownshirts are immediately deployed. Presumably the only “out-of-control spending” allowed is that which stuffs massive wads of cash into the offshore bank accounts of our society’s most ruthless crime lords on Wall Street and in plush corporate boardrooms.

Killing Hope

For a regular schmo like me, what’s most disturbing about these spectacles is the cultural malaise they represent. We live in a culture that has completely lost its way; victims of our own self-abuse in a society gone mad. Even our culture’s most substantive pretenses at “debate” are merely tawdry sideshows: lowbrow performance art fueling our collective hallucinations. Our business and political elites, with rare exceptions, relentlessly sell everyday people like you and me down the river to achieve selfish, short-term gain. But the worst is that we regular folks have all-too-often gone along with this madness. We buy into their senseless wars, their absurd economic dogmas, their planet-destroying consumer culture with its strip malls, gas guzzlers, endless sprawl, and the horrifying psychic sewage mercilessly pumped into our nervous systems through television tubes, radio signals and computer monitors.

The “self-regulating market” ideology driving much of this horror has long since been proved a sham. But we can’t seem to break free of the delusion. Part of the reason is because corporate-funded opportunists like Dick Armey and so many of his ilk have mastered the art of playing us off against each other. Keeping us off-balance. Provoking us to fight their battles for them. Over the past three or four decades the result has been an immense transfer of loot from our pockets to a handful of criminal kingpins on Wall Street, in business boardrooms, in government offices and into the hellbent-for-theocracy covens of our society’s most notorious religious cults.

Even though the policies foisted onto us by these charlatans have plundered our pockets, ravaged our natural surroundings, trashed our economies, tossed millions of our neighbors into prisons and poisoned our minds with theological hucksterism and planet-destroying consumerism, the perpetrators can’t see fit to toss us the occasional bone. Like allowing us to piece together a rational method for healthcare delivery. One similar to any of the healthcare delivery systems enjoyed by people living in virtually all of the other “developed” countries, and even in a handful of the “developing” nations. One that would cost a hell of a lot less and deliver much better results than the corporate protection rackets currently forced down our sore throats and up our HappyMeal McAsses.

For any of you Tea Bagger’s who’ve plowed into this blog post this far, I’ll ask you for a favor, although I’m sure it’s probably too much to ask. Particularly from members of a “grassroots” organization foolish enough to christen themselves with such a vulgar epithet like “tea bagger.” But here’s my request anyway. Do your homework. Discover how fascist movements take hold in a society. Compare the similarities of those movements with your own. Then observe what happens to societies that allow themselves to sink into such depravity.

Lost souls from the “sole remaining superpower.”

Hideyuki, in your letter you quote a phrase, “There are no images of the defeated.” What were you thinking about? … (W)hat about Vietnam? There are an infinity of images of America in Vietnam. How absolute was the American defeat? Since this defeat on the battlefield brought Reagan and Bush to power, since it gave birth to the strategy of the New World Order, and later imposed the necessity of some war, any war, like the Gulf War–was the original defeat in Vietnam not the start of a process during which the USA would eventually commit Imperial suicide? If so, it is a defeat of global proportions, an epic like “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” documented in the most minute and thrilling detail.
Robert Kramer, “A letter to Hideyuki”

British Empire’s Invasions, Wars & Occupations In Afghanistan
- First Anglo-Afghan War: 1839 ? 1842
- Second Anglo-Afghan War: 1878 ? 1880
- Third Anglo-Afghan War: 6 May 1919 ? 8 August 1919
Collapse of British Empire: 1945 ? 1997

Soviet Union’s Invasion, War & Occupation In Afghanistan
- Soviet?Afghan War: 27 December 1979 ? 15 February 1989
Collapse of Soviet Union: 1?31 December 1991

United States’ Invasion, War & Occupation In Afghanistan
- Operation Enduring Freedom: 7 October 2001 ? [day] [month] 20xx
Collapse of United States of America: [day] [month] 20xx

The arms merchants and the generals each had a problem. The arms merchants wanted to increase sales; the generals needed a new mission. Their solution was to conjure up a “need” for a “secure Homeland.”

With help from their friends in media and government, they issued dire warnings of grave “threats” that “terrorists” presented to the “Homeland.” To adequately defend the Homeland, the generals told the people that “we must fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

Sadly, the Homeland’s inhabitants foolishly overlooked the most glaring flaw in the generals’ argument: killing “terrorists” “over there” will only produce more “terrorists” everywhere. Distracted, self-absorbed, corrupt and cowardly, the people went along with the generals’ plan.

As directed by the generals, the Homeland’s mercenaries ruthlessly slaughtered all “terrorists” they came upon “over there,” aided by chronically burnt-out “kill-machine pilots” back in the Homeland. But for each “neutralized” terrorist, several more would immediately emerge. Eventually the mercenaries and the other hired killers succeeded in killing every single human outside the Homeland, all having converted to “terrorism.”

Outraged that nobody outside the Homeland was left alive to produce their consumer goods, buy their debt and pamper their every whim while traveling abroad, the Homeland’s people focused their wrath on the generals, and on the generals’ friends in the media, government and the arms industry. Naturally the generals considered the peoples’ responses “acts of homegrown terrorism,” and ordered their mercenaries to eliminate these new “internal threats to the Homeland.”

Caught up in their own genocidal fury, the mercenaries not only slaughtered every one of the Homeland’s citizens, but also managed to kill each other. Surveying the carnage wrought as a result of their campaign of “global war on terror,” the generals suddenly felt remorse, followed by anger. They began pointing fingers and blaming each other.

Their recriminations grew more hostile. Suddenly one of the generals reached for a sidearm. The others quickly followed suit, and each shot a colleague in the skull point-blank. Realizing that no other human was left alive, the last general left standing once again reached for her sidearm and quickly shot herself.

At last, the Homeland was secure.