Thursday, February 13, 2003

There's An Old Saying In Tennessee Are you actually buying any of this paranoid nonsense of the last week? Can't anyone but me see what's going on here? Seriously, people, how much more transparent could any of this monkey business be? A week ago the Bush administration faced trouble on all sides: mounting and willful oblivion on the part of huge segments of the populace. Through-the-roof television ratings for American Idol and a British interview with a whack job who shares his bed with children. Intransigent resistance both domestically and abroad to the idea of a preemptive war with Iraq. Unanswered questions about Saddam Hussein's ties with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. A floundering economy. Damn if those crafty bastards haven't attempted to knock every one of those softballs out of the park with a few feeble swings. First they stage another of their Vigilance Rallies in the name of Homeland Security, raising the national level of alertness to orange or red or whatever the hell the color is that means be afraid, be very afraid. Like all of these announcements, vagueness was the hallmark of this latest call to arms, and blanket insecurity and rampant paranoia were the only truly essential components of the called-for vigilance. Next: you're wondering what Iraq has to do with Al-Qaeda? Ok, we'll tell you what Iraq has to do with Al-Qaeda. Or, better yet, we'll have Rich Little --er, Osama bin Laden-- tell you. If you're willing to believe that the voice on that tape is bin Laden's, well, shit, are you ever a dumb ass. You don't have even the slightest nagging question regarding the timing of this tape's coming to light? You don't think it's even vaguely suspicious that this time around we get an audio tape rather than the usual video footage of the hirsute hunk-pappa terrorist hunkered down on a rug with his glowering toadies sprawled around him? Believe me, video has simply become too dangerous for the propaganda army of the Bush administration, too subject to the sort of expert scrutiny that can detect even the most accomplished dubbing, let alone the hastily arranged Hong Kong cinema-quality dub jobs of so many of the previous bin Laden tapes. Make no mistake, if Rich Little put his mind to it he could be Osama; no problem at all. Little's a marvel, and I realize it's entirely likely that many youngsters might be unfamiliar with the master impersonator's work. But take my word for it, when this man --who has been cozy with administrations going back to Woodrow Wilson's-- channels Richard Nixon you'd swear to God you were right there in the room with Tricky Dick himself. I've listened to that tape several times, and I've pored over the transcripts. It's a masterful job, but I'm absolutely convinced the voice on that tape is Rich Little's, and a friend of mine says he read somewhere on the Internet that Little was in fact seen emerging from a limousine outside a Baltimore radio station at three o'clock in the morning a couple weeks ago. A Pakistani cab driver saw him and called a local talk radio station, where he was ridiculed. I'm also pretty damn sure the script was penned by Mark Helprin. I've scrupulously compared many of the passages with examples from Helprin's stories and novels, and I've uncovered some eerie similarities that, if not Helprin's work, border on plagiarism. And, finally, this business of a "Terrorism Attack Safety Kit," or whatever the hell the addled goofballs who thought the thing up are calling it? Do you honestly think that calling for Americans to stockpile all of these items is anything but a thinly-veiled economic stimulus program? They want to reduce every American home to a bunker straight out of the most paranoid fantasies of B movies. Plastic wrap and duct tape? This is the sort of thing late-stage paranoid schizophrenics come up with when they've become convinced they're under assault from menacing, invisible forces. What are they going to ask us to do next? Smear mayonaise on the plastic sheeting over our windows to deflect gamma rays, like poor Joe Lewis did as he descended into punch-drunk madness? Wallpaper our homes with tinfoil? For chrissakes, do the math. How many homes are there in America? There's what, 280 million people in this country? Let's say even a third or a fourth of those folks go out and stock up for America Under Seige. Twelve-pack of Duracell AA batteries: $6.44. Duct tape: $4.99 a roll. 10 X 25 roll of polyethylene sheeting: $5.97. Super Heavy Duty flashlight combo: $5.91. General purpose first aid kit: $16.97. Chicken of the Sea tuna, six ounce can: $1.49. Northern Glacier water, quart bottle: $1.19. E-T-C, as the Minutemen would say. This sort of paranoia could put a lot of money into the American economy in a hurry. We're talking billions and billions of dollars. Sorry, suckers, but this guy wasn't born yesterday. I'm not falling for any of it. I'll admit that I did invest in one of those nifty new battery-powered turntables, but even then I chastised myself for being a coward. All the same, it is a small comfort to know that if the end of the world does, in fact, come creeping down the dark streets of our town I'll still be able to listen to my Otis Redding records. 4:24:46 PM

Are You Talking To Me? So many people are so small, so fragile, so insecure. Everywhere you turn you have all these little tyrants with everything bottled up inside, afraid that even the tiniest decent gesture is going to tip their hand somehow or deprive them of some imagined position of leverage or strength, as if every single relationship and human interaction has to played like a poker hand or a chess move. No, don't give anything away, mother fuckers, don't you dare spare even one kind word. Save all your feeble passion and all your diminished vigor for some distant maybe and the preoccupying malaise of right now. Spend your spleen on the most insignificant grievances and narcissistic brush fires while the bigger world burns and collapses into invisibility all around you. Go ahead and feel yourself the beleaguered molehill Job, oppressed by everything and everyone from the slow cashier at Target to the idiot adversaries on the freeway to the assholes at work. Fucking foreigners, can't they just shut up? Can't these morons quit calling you trying to sell shit? Could these nimrod weather buffoons get a forecast right just once? Couldn't they even fucking come close? These people I'm talking about, give them an opportunity --or what passes for an opportunity in their small world-- let them get just the slightest suggestion of a foot in the door, and it's off to the races. They'll tell you all about it, it being whatever fat globule of personal grievance or self absorption is obscuring the world outside their heads at this very moment.   More Ghosts, Parading Them poor sick creatures going up the street at two in the mornin', dancing with bells on they shoes, wailin' and barin' they teeth at the moon, just throwin' them heads back and shakin' them devil sticks. It's a racket, I can't deny that, but I ain't gonna go so far as some of the others and say there's somethin' menacin' about the spectacle --the woman across the street, so dramatic, she tells the news man, "It makes the hair stand up on my arms." No, them ghosts or whatever they is don't scare me. They's all so skinny and bat-shit loony that they don't look as if they could hurt a fly. I wish they'd keep more reasonable hours if they's gonna be makin' a public fuss every other week or so, but that's not the nature of they business, I guess. They's late-nighters. They say drugs took most of 'em down, or guns fired in the wicked grip of drugs. We see a lot of that around here, been seeing a lot of that for quite some time. They turn themselves into animals, then poor, helpless children, then savages, and then finally ghosts. Up at Our Lady they do they best. They bury the poor creatures in the poor yard, but trouble is they can't keep 'em buried. They crawl they way back out and go haintin', jinglin' and devil stickin' all up and down the streets where they was children.   3:00:52 PM

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