Hammer Mill Days

Dubya - or as Jon Stewart calls him, "still-President Bush" - pulled another grand tour this past week, dropping in on our various European allies, mugging with the crypto-fascist Sarkozy (perhaps comparing notes on how to be slightly less unpopular than he is right now), and generally doing all he can to undermine any chance of a reduction in international tensions. He took a few ceremonial swings at the Iranian punching bag, made some thinly veiled threats against Syria, etc. Quite a performance. What a pity he has to come home so soon. Wouldn't it be great if he just kept traveling until after inauguration day? Though I suppose it doesn't do any harm for people to see him around the White House with some regularity, if only to serve as a grim reminder of how idiotic we were to put him there in the first place. Not that a simple trip to the gas station shouldn't be enough to accomplish that. One place he hasn't stopped in on lately is the failed state he cr...

Need a couple more of those buckets. How about some pale green in the upper left hand corner? And put that HMI light just behind the plastic fichus tree. That's the ticket. Ah, visitors. Welcome, welcome. Reading this, you may ask yourself, "What the fuck - do these guys do everything themselves?" (No, I'm not affecting to give you permission to ask such a question. Nay, I believe in free will, and am merely speculating on the character of your thoughts. Affected, me? Perish the thought!) And the answer to that question might be yes, if by "everything" you mean "everything that can be done in that run-down mill." (If you mean something else, well... what can I say?) So... yes, we do... uh... do everything around these parts. Well... most of us do, anyway. (Some of us don't do everything... or "do nothing", as the saying goes.) Oh, sure - we have the equivalent of domestic help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) counts as a domest...

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Leave the mill immediately. Proceed to the exits marked "exit". We apologize for the absence of standard, lighted exit signs - crayon on cereal box will have to do. Oh, hello. Sorry for the confusion - just affecting a temporary evacuation of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Actually, it's more complicated than it sounds. The place isn't actually abandoned in the sense of being vacant - just abandoned by its owners. We, the members and various hangers-on of Big Green , actually live there, and therefore must be told to leave the building when a) a natural or fire-related disaster strikes, b) the land agent arrives to chuck us out, or c) Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, builds a more-dangerous-than-usual monster with which to amuse himself. (You know... just the usual things homeowners fret about day in and day out.) And we are faced with one of those exigencies today. See if you can guess which one. Go ahead...

This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that's not a typo nor a brain fart - Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It's kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us - swap a few nouns around and you've got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ's escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China we...

Lesson one: if you find yourself staked out in an abandoned hammer mill with your bandmates, never... never let your resident mad scientist work unattended. Negative consequences will be had. What do I mean, specifically? Just try it and find out! Yes, you aspiring bands out there... get yourself a mill and a madman, shake vigorously, and wait until it starts to fizz. Then you will have your answer. In our case, we didn't even need the vigorous shaking. Our resident mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, sort of shakes himself up. You may recall that last week he had taken up a new hobby - sculpting. We of Big Green thought little of this... our cohorts are always trying new things, starting new trends, discovering new interests. (Like the man-sized tuber and his harmonica playing. Or John and his anti-matter bicycle collection. Or me and my cucumber sandwich juggling.) But soon we noticed some disturbing signs that Mitch was perhaps taking his new thing (or " thang ") a l...

Had to kind of shake my head a few times this week at the thought that Robert Kennedy's assassination was 40 years ago. I mostly remember the morning after he died of his wounds, more than a day after the actual shooting, I woke to the sight of my mom pulling the Kennedy bumper sticker off my bedroom door, her grave expression rendering the news superfluous. A sliver of the sticker remained on that door for some time. Nasty days indeed. So are these, of course, only the pain seems more concentrated in the lower echelons of society than it was in 1968, as polarized as we were in those days. Today, only volunteers are sent to war, and they are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class and poor... so a needless war like the one we started in Iraq can grind on year after year without any sign of ending, just arrogant squawkery about how much more successfully the enterprise is proceeding. Likewise, income inequality is now so extreme that those with the greatest insecurity are hobble...

Look at that. Chip off the old block, eh, Mitch? You should be proud, very proud. You are ? Good, good. (Arrogant sonofabitch...) Whoops . Didn't know I was typing my thoughts as well as my spoken words - very careless of me. Do me a kindness and overlook that last remark... I'm just not in a very good state of mind right now vis-a-vis Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist. Truth be known, he's not arrogant. The son of a bitch part is fairly accurate, but I wouldn't call him arrogant. Stubborn, perhaps. Okay, okay - obstinate. But not arrogant. And I am trying to hold my tongue around him, as it took a good long time to convince him to return to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Wouldn't want to be responsible for sending him packing once again. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would never let me hear the end of it. (A devoted son, it seems.) Why am I annoyed at Mitch? Well.... I'm told I'm being unfair. After all, it was he who ultimately shifted ...