Hammer Mill Days

What the hell. Is that what we sounded like back then? We still sound like that now! Man freaking god damn. It's like being sealed in amber. Greetings from the Mill of our discontent. Well, it's mild discontent, let's say. Been a long time since the book of love. Wait ... why did I say that? Oh, right - I was listening to tapes from the 70s and 80s, so naturally my mind goes back to my neighbor's Led Zepplin albums. (I didn't have any; just Simon and Garfunkel, Josh White, and Mario Lanza. Oh, and some weird stuff.) We didn't sound anything like them, of course. In fact, we sounded strangely like us in the 2010's. It's as if we've been playing the same tune for forty years. FOR FORTY YEARS...! Why am I listening to old recordings? Simple ... we live in an abandoned hammer mill, we haven't toured in three years, and there's nothing else the fuck to do around this dump. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is discontented. He even forg

We heard more from John Kerry this week. Kerry, who voted in favor of the Iraq war back in 2003, is eager to demonstrate that he "gets it" and that this time is different. There is a post-modern cast to this drive towards war, as if by simply acknowledging past abuses the administration inoculates itself against committing them again by doing much the same thing in much the same way: aggressive war, waged against a nation that has not attacked us, under the banner of protecting the world from a brutal dictator armed with WMD - the "problem from hell," as U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power termed it. Only it's completely different now. You see, this time, the dictator used the weapons of mass destruction. Last time, sure, he had used them, but only more than a decade before (when he was our ally). Totally different. Obama, Kerry, and others have latched onto this trope about defending an international norm that goes back ninety years; one that only Hitler and Sadd