Questioning the SILENCE

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Ben Metcalf, the Literary Editor for Harper’s Magazine, wrote a wonderful, brave article for their June issue. Do yourself a favor and read it. It's on page 9. But in case you don't get around to it, I have included a couple of paragraphs from it below. Metcalf asks a question that I'm sure has crossed the minds of more than a few decent, rational, upstanding citizens in the last few years, at least it has crossed mine.

Excerpt from "On Simple Human Decency"
- by Ben Metcalf - Harper's Magazine, June 2006

"I am therefore led to wonder what the common citizen is allowed to "say" anymore, in print or otherwise, and still feel reasonably sure that some indignant team of G-men, or else a pair of gung-ho local screws, will not drag him away to a detention center, there to act out, with the detainee as a prop, that familiar scene in which one hero cop or another is patriotically unable to resist certain outbursts against the detainee and what were once imagined to be the detainee's constitutional rights. Because I am loath to violate whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of what used to be called simple
human decency:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?"

Given the mess Bush has gotten us into, I'd say Metcalf's question is a reasonable one. Not only is Bush an idiot, he is a corporate shill who has pimped the White House out to his shady, corporate cronies. And besides being stupid and pathologically unethical, Bush is also dangerously insane. He consults religious fundamentalists to make sure his foreign policy suits their wet dream vision of the Apocalypse. He is also personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, children, animals and our own, beautiful, young American soldiers who he sent to death based on his lies that he covered up by an act of treason, a crime punishable by death in a time of war. Then there's the illegal spying on Americans, the systematic shredding of our Constitution, the corporate rape of environment, the dismantling of our already inadequate health care, what to speak of his current, mad plan to embroil us in yet another war, this time with Iran etc, etc...oh god, the list does go on.

I am grateful there are at least a few brave writers left in the mainstream media who are willing to challenge the suffocating silence that blankets us today but I'm not going to be a spoiler. You'll have to read the article to find out whether or not it's okay to write:

I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands.

Sir! No Sir!

harper's magazine ben metcalf constitution question president bush

Rove indicted

Supposedly on Friday Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gave Karl Rove's lawyers an indictment for the squishy bastard charging Bush's Brain with perjury and lying to investigators about his role in the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame. I sure hope it's true. You can read the complete story yourself at several places including Truth Out and Oped News.

Apparently, Turd Blossom has 24 hours to get his affairs in order. That would make today THE DAY. Please oh please oh. Perhaps Dirty Dick is next? Seems that Fitzgerald has some incriminating notes on the subject penned by the Dickster himself. I can only hope that Sneaky George gets outed as well. They are all treasonist bastards.


Alternate realities: Al Gore on Saturday Night Live




rove indictment patrick fitzgerald cia leak valerie plame cheney bush al gore saturday night live

Mother's day video card

A couple of days ago Mr. Lee sent me this little movie about brothers making a m's day photo. You may have seen it but I pass along here anyway in case you are still looking for that special something.

So...Happy Mother's Day whatever you are.




mother's day mother brothers

Peeping Tom

In case you're wondering, I did finish reading Tom Wolfe's latest book, "I am Charlotte Simmons". It stinks. He should have called it, "I am Peeping Tom Wolfe". It's a wank from start to finish.

On his website, this novel is described as a "much-anticipated triumph by America's master chronicler immortalizing the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed college life of the '00s". Hardly. If you ask me, this book chronicles a senior citizen's creepy obsession with the sex lives of young people. At the end, Wolfe has a dumpy, tenured relic of a professor force a moral reckoning upon the characters but it's a weak attempt to give the novel a point. The "Man in White" is lost in the revels of self-indulgence. It's kind of sad but fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. As an aside I found it interesting that Wolfe and Bush are great fans of one another. Figures. They'd make quite a duo at a karaoke night club.

Excerpt from page 270:

" The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to run — if you could really call it running — without taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and "pumping" on a bicycle. There were many girls...Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, running shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as...girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back...was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage...Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in low-waisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated, royal blue basketball jersey. She didn't have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You have to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to...happen in this so-called fitness center...The push of a button, the flick of a switch...and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut..."

Obviously, it's ol' Tom who's rutrutrutrutruting.




wolfe books fiction writing

Tombstone Stories, Reno

I've taken a lot of photos of graves in the Nevada outback. They are scattered throughout my Nevada Journal along with other quirky pictures from the region. The graves in the desert are generally from the 1800's and have mellowed into colorful, anonymous history. The wind and grinding sand have rubbed names away but not the sense of a journey with high hopes and strong bonds.

This memento beside Interstate 395 near Reno's Hilton Casino marks a different end along the road that came later, after the pioneers and explorers carved a path through the west and vanished along it. These stones mark the end of a hopeless journey that, as the story goes, no one took to nowhere.

SF short

The Cobert thing interrupted the regular ebb and flow of things around here so it's merely coincidence that I'm posting the link to another video at this point. This is a short one called "They are made out of meat". It's based on a story by Hugo Award winning SF author Terry Bisson. I find it wonderfully quirky. Perhaps you might enjoy it as well.