Hammer Mill Days

Turn it on, the fan. The BIG fan. Broken? Okay, then turn it on, the smaller fan. No smaller fan? What the hell. Right. Then just turn it on, the radio. Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it's sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry - it seemed strangely airless. That's why I'm asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It's times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta' love the motor city! Ooops. Heat prostration briefly turned me into a Borscht Belt comedian. (Shecky Green, perhaps.) Must be incoherent thinking that Marvin would help me out, considering how I failed him last week during the inaugural performance of...

Just a few random thoughts in the wake of this grim Memorial Day week, with many young people still staked out in harm's way in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'll start with the way our public figures memorialize dead servicepeople. They employ verbal false limbs, as Orwell called them, that are almost as autonomic as that ubiquitous closing remark Reagan added to every succeeding president's speech - "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America". But embedded in these solemn pronouncements, mouthed in large part by people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, are implicit endorsements of some very bad policy. Politicians of both parties have a sickening tendency to hide the moral bankruptcy of their foreign adventures behind praise for the valor of those who carry them out. Conversely, any attack on the policy is treated by them as an attack on the troops. Such obfuscation is more effective with today's all-volunteer military, but back when the dr...