Always For You -- Even More Annual Reprint Heaven: Is The Wonderful Is This Life

By I. Rabschinsky

[Yes and it is this time again. It is Chanukah (Hoo boy; we missed getting this in last night), and also the time of the Birthday of the redoubtable Moldavish Guy. We will eat a little parve apple cake in his honor. Okay; a lot.

[And always of course of course of course, we are watching the Mister Ed marathon on television cable at Great-Uncle Yehudi's house and open the big jar Of Mama Putin's Chicken Heads. And we remember how lucky we are being.

Beaver: Good For You, Nize For You;

What We Watch At Great-Uncle Yehudi's

[And you are being lucky today also. This film history for you, now being the annual every year repeat. Always too, Great-Uncle Yehudi is saying, "Don't Stand In Way Of The History!"  Enjoy.]

George Bailey Guy Making The Panik

So always in the America there is at this time the fooding, and also the Sports Produkt on the television. Many people filling themselves with Holiday as if they about to be told, "Next year, you cannot eat!". I am thinking they are the hostage of their Hindbrain, which is still Neanderthal and wishes to fight with Mastodon. But, still.

And, I am noticing specific films which is only appearing on Amerikanyets television at these months between like maybe September and the time of your New Year.

My examples: At Passover, some of the television is showing The Ten Super Big Mitzvah Rules, with Charlton Heston Guy -- you know, movie where Moses stop making fooling around to pretend he is Big Guy of the Egypt, and decides to get real job saving People Of Israel.

This requires lots of people walking around, always saying "Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses" -- like, if they say this three times, they will be teleported by magik into better movie. Navarone Kind Of Big Guns, maybe, or Socialist-Colored Panther.

Place Which Is Gone Forever: Amerikanyets Driving In To Movies:

"Moses, Moses, Moses -- What is happening with our Drive-Ins?"

At another time in year, they are showing same Heston Guy what is Moses in Big Mitzvah Rules in another movie, Ben Of Her. However this is basically film of Jewish guy who becomes like early Jesus guy, but by accident.

Movie is good; he is Number Forty-One guy in slave ship, rowing like animator for the Disney; there are becoming big boat battle, and he gets to be some kind of honorary Goyim, with big ring and parties with the Girls, and other Guys clasping him on the arms frequently.

Later, there is an exciting thing with horses and carts -- but it is not the porn film, so too bad for you. Go to web sites where they have not blocked you.

Charlton Ben Heston Making The Ramming Speed, 1959

At finally, with the Christmas, every year since somebody discover the Secret Of Fire there is this broadcasting this movie, It Is Wonderful This Life, made by Frank Capra Guy in 1947, showing the kind of place which everybody wanted to believe was the Amerika. Small town, everybody knows everybody; values is good and everybody work hard and knows their places.

Just like village in the Moldova, except animals do not leave defecation in the street, everyone is speaking English, and most people have job. Plus concrete used in apartment buildings is better quality.

Every single year they are showing this film. It is now a classic also, like Wizard Of Odd and Potemkin Kind Of Battleship and Mister Hulot Goes To Beach Place. It is as big movie as The Tanks Know The Truth (Very popular Great Patriotic War movie made in the Russia. My Great-Uncle Yehudi claims he is in this film as Extra; but still, we love him).

Big Scene From Tanks Knowing The Truth: Are They Knowing?

Well, They Are Tank; You Are Person. You Want To Be That Sure?

It Is Wonderful This Life story is maybe simple: Guy, George Bailey Guy, living in small town wants to die, because he thinks his life is shit. And there are the angels, who show us life of this Guy in the little town, and how he is The Good, and there is the Rich Guy who is The Bad. And George Bailey Guy never gets to do things in the Life because the Fate is not for him.

Then there is mistake with money (a problem made from the Rich Bad Guy), for which he is blamed, and he runs from family and goes to place of Publik Alkohol; finally he goes to bridge to jump in freezing water so his family will get small piece of Insurance money. Very Sad (There is also squirrel in another scene which is sad, but never mind). Also very Petit-Bourgeois.

So, Angel Guy comes to the Earth and shows this George Bailey Guy his life is maybe kind of okay, not so much the shit; and boom boom boom, problem with the money goes away in big scene at end when everyone gives him their money, and everyone sings. So happy, little bells on tree and big bells of church ring; America wins the World War Two and future is filled with television and freeway. The End.

But this is too simple, my friend. No way is actual life like this. So, maybe some of me thinks this is kind of the Propaganda about America, to keep us from seeing the Truth of the Things.

And, there is forbidden version of this film, which is other kind of the Propaganda. Please -- allow me to introduce.

---

борьбе за построение социализма во время Угнетение
(также называется "Любовь и революция" после 1991)
("Love And Revolution", Directed By Frank Kapronovich [1949]; Starring Pytor Chost, Gravnik Bolodorin, Irina Valutin. Special appearances by the Spirit Of Revolution, also Che Guevara, Samuel Beckett, and entire 12th Guards Motorized Infantry Regiment)

SO, movie opens with Guy, Georgi Edwardovich Bailey Guy, at the Bridge. He is unhappy, this Guy; boy oh boy he is like making the panic. He goes to public alkohol place and tries to think, but he only finds himself between the forces of dissent and confusion!

TROTSKYITE GUY: River not so bad, after five minutes.

EXISTENTIAL GUY: Wait, but no one comes. No one cares.

Hoo boy; Georgi is in big fix. This guy has family with SmallChilds, and tiny Policy Insuring The Life -- and he is believing everybody would be better off if he would jump and get it over with, already.

GEORGI: My life is steaming pile of animal things,

because the Rich Guy will always win. Now I am jumping.

But, Georgi is being watched at Bridge. Not by some angel Guy (none of this reliance on things which cannot be proven by good Socialist science!) -- but even better -- is Spirit Of Revolutsya!

(Spirit Of The Revolution Watches Georgi)

And, The Spirit saves Georgi! He takes him to place where they can speak of things, of the Truth -- and slowly, Georgi's eyes are opened to not only the forces of historical determinism, but the inevitability of struggle against the oppressor classes!

GEORGI: So you're saying that when the consciousness

of the People is raised sufficiently, that armed struggle

is not only necessary but inevitable?

SPIRIT: You got it, Comrade.

So, Georgi, now with eyes opened thanks to the words of the kindly Spirit, is seeing that the world is filled with inequality and criminal things so big your head feels like kicked soccer ball. It is like understanding that, not only are you living as Dog, lapping up the vomit of the Rich Guy, but you work in factory to make guns to force others to live like this (Also, the Rich Guy pays you in fake dog vomit and those X-Ray glasses which do not work).

For Georgi, this is whole bunch of dried fish to eat in one night (Like story by that Guy, Dickens Guy, Carol Burnett Christmas, or something). This is the Life? He is asking himself.

A World Of Things For Them, But Not Food For Children

Economy And Bad Fate For Peoples Means Nothing To Them

For Them, The World Is Something To Carve Up, Like Beef

While The Many People Lose Everything To The Illegal Foreclosure

So now Georgi is filled with indignant and bad feeling for The State Of These Things. He feels the pain of the oppressed, working masses, and is being filled with Revolutionary Fervor -- and he goes to talk with the People in his little village, to tell them what the Spirit had revealed to him -- and the Spirit sends along friend, Che Guevara Guy, to help.

GEORGI: We don't have to live under the heel of Potter's boot!

He's just some, bloodsucking animal! Feeding on all of us -- and I'm

tired of living on fake dog vomit! We have to run things!

CHE GUEVARA SPIRIT GUY: Ay, Yi Yi! You listen to this guy.

The People, moved by Georgi's words, march with him to the place of the Bad Rich Guy, to demand Justice, the chance to make something other than guns, and to be paid in actual money instead of rubber dog vomit and X-Ray glasses which do not work.

BAD RICH GUY: You realize that the manufacture and sale of

weapons around the globe is the backbone of our nation's industry?

GEORGI: You don't understand -- the days of taking your rubber

dog barf are over, Potter! We're going to run things!

MOB: No fake dog barf!! No fake dog barf!!

BAD RICH GUY: My family has run this town for fifty generations.

All I have to do is close the factories. How long will it be before

your little rag-tag mob starts to starve? They'll come crawling back

to work -- and for half the rubber dog barf I gave you before!

Then, Georgi takes the Big Step -- the one which all oppressed people are taking in these movies when faced with Oppressors who pay them with rubber dog vomit: He crosses line from intellectualizing his oppression to active revolutionary.

Otherwise, we would have no resolution of all this rising action; and only ending for this film possible is that everyone would go for Pizza. This is unsatisfying from view of the Socialist imperative.

GEORGI: You're wrong, Potter -- you, and people of your

class are finished. Now you're going to face Justice for your

crimes -- because the People own the means of production!

And so The Bad Rich Guy is taken away by the People; his house later becomes hospital, day-care center, and place where revolutionary theater troupes practice before going into the streets.

And, of course, there is a proper celebration at the Georgi Bailey house, with the Revolutsia Spirit and the SmallChilds.

GEORGI: Gosh, Spirit, I don't know how we can thank you.

SMALLCHILD 01: Spirit, can't you stay and have some Fair

Trade™ coffee with homemade whiskey with us?

SPIRIT: No, SmallChild; I must go. There are so many oppressed

peoples in a world beset by unspeakable monsters of Capital.

But I will take a shot of that whiskey -- neat, please.

Finally, after long discussion between Rich Bad Guy and the Organs Of State Security, he faces Revolutionary Justice and the verdict of The People.

RICH BAD GUY: Long live International Capitalism!

PEOPLE'S MILITIA LEADER: Fire!

And, of course, Georgi and his lovely wife are pausing in their labor to build a New Socialist Future to share a moment's reflection on the plight of The Peoples, and also to suggest some hygienic sexual activity between them which may occur later.

...and in the background, The Internationale swells on the soundtrack, sung by the Sad Vlad Orphans Choir Of Greater Moscow!  Please to show the credits!

This film has not been shown since its original release; big shame, also, because it is at least as good as movie with Bert Landcaster in it but of the name, just now, is escaping me.

Great-Uncle Yehudi likes Revolutionary Love. He thinks it is wonderful comedy; but, still we love him. If you can find this film on DVD, then okay. If not, well then it is big world out there! Be That Guy -- go find!

I, Rabschinsky, say this -- to Moldavish Guy; you also.

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Judgement At Nürburgring

Give Up Your Arbeitsbruden

The New York Times reports that, in an attempt to be seen to "get to the bottom of its emissions-cheating scandal", The Volkwagen Group has "pressured [Volkswagen division] employees to tell what they know" and announced an amnesty program for any informants who would come forward.

In a letter to employees ... Herbert Diess, chief executive of the division that produces Volkswagen brand cars, said people who provided information would not be fired or face damage claims. Mr. Diess cautioned, though, that the company could not shield employees from criminal charges.

The offer applies only to union employees, covered by collective bargaining agreements, and is not available to managers or executives, or persons chosen at random on the street. The offer expires at the end of November.

The interviews with potential snitches informants persons who had knowledge of 'past practices' are held in an abandoned aircraft hangar at an undisclosed location in the Ruhr.

INNOCENT ARBEITER No. 1: "I only followed orders. Workers on the assembly line were told to install emissions sensors which were nothing but blank tabs of plastic. No sensors were put in at all... What? No, I never did these things myself, you understand. I only saw them being done by others. Will you give me this Amnesty in writing, please?"

INNOCENT ARBEITER No. 2: "... the emissions filters were just cloth bags, filled with CheeseWhiz. They forced me to do this. It was the only way I could get a promotion. Do I receive a reward for my confessions?"

INNOCENT ARBEITER No. 3: "I changed the code in the software package which operated the emissions detectors. Each time the car was mounted on a test machine, the software sensed this -- and the auto sound system would come on, playing Heino, singing 'Liebe Mütter' at 320 Decibels. This upset the emissions technicians so much that they would do anything to get the car out of their shop.

"I don't know why anyone should be surprised by this -- 'It's a massive conspiracy; a wholesale defrauding of governments and consumers; harm to the environment', blah blah blah. Doesn't anyone get it? Corporations do not care about anything other than profit. They will do whatever they want in order to get it. Period.

"You going to put that in your report? Nein? Imagine my astonishment."

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It's Just As Bad As You Thought

Persistent Aggravating Barking

Yet again, that terrible Dog gets on his little Soap Box and barks and barks and barks.

Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Tax at the Institute for Policy Studies, recently published a study with a colleague, Chuck Collins, entitled "Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us".  Hoxie also contributed a piece to Reuters, providing an extremely high-level summary of the issues and alternatives. An even shorter form version: It's every bit as bad as you may have thought.

Or, maybe not -- it's possible people out there simply don't give a damn any longer. Or, they believe that Trumpolina will lead us "back to greatness", that Greg Stillson Ted Cruz will lead us all to Big Jesus. Once again, America -- holding a tear-stained image of Saint Ronald The Dim -- will sit tall in the saddle at the top of the Darwinian heap.

It's just possible that a large number of people are so willfully ignorant that they don't understand: If the current situation continues, their children and grandchildren will live at an enforced lower standard of living. All to benefit a tiny number of 'Owners.'  

...the richest 400 people in the United States together possess more wealth than over 60 percent of the country, a striking 194 million people and more than the populations of Mexico and Canada combined...

The Forbes 400 members have a combined fortune of $2.3 trillion. This is more than the gross domestic product of India, a country with more than a billion people. By comparison, the typical American family has about $81,000 in wealth — their total combined assets minus their debt. [It would take the combined wealth of] 36 million such typical families [to equal] the wealth of the Forbes 400.

The wealth gap in America is especially startling for people of color. Median household wealth for African-Americans is just $11,000 and for Latinos is $13,700...

Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Ogg Ogg

This rising inequality, which has accelerated in the last decade, has devastating implications. Extreme inequality has been linked to negative health effects... for everyone in these unequal societies, not just those at the bottom. In fact, according to British public health researcher Richard Wilkinson, we are better off living in a community with a lower standard of living but greater equality than living in a community with a higher income, but more extreme inequality...  [because] greater inequality tears the social fabric of society — we care less for each other and collectively suffer as a result.

High levels of inequality also erode social mobility — the ability of those born into poverty to climb the economic ladder into the ranks of the middle class. This is the result of a now-broken ladder of opportunity — the public investments in things like housing, education, and healthcare for those at the bottom and middle required to help people build wealth. Today, the United States is among the least socially mobile... countries in terms of earnings: children are less likely to earn more in real terms than their parents did...

Instituting a wealth tax or any other policy that strikes at the growing wealth divide is unthinkable in our current Congress, which has shown little interest in serious discussion about tax reform, especially before the presidential election. But a generation ago, the thought that Americans would be experiencing such massive inequality seemed similarly unlikely. If we fail to take bold action, wealth will continue to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands.

In the early Go-Go, "Lil' Boots" Bush years, the Department of Labor's bureau of statistics simply stopped reporting the number of layoffs announced in the U.S., and the amount of U.S. currency in circulation (a reference point known as M2).  Just -- stopped.  The CBO was also told to stop publishing a report which detailed how much the top layer of Our Wealthy paid in taxes, as compared with "ordinary" Americans.

When studies like Hoxie and Collins' are no longer news items; when reports that document how much of a Gilded Age is being created, at the expense of most of us, are no longer published or funded -- then you'll know things will have changed sufficiently that polite conversation, or impassioned civil discourse, won't be enough to bring about any kind of relief.

Past a certain point, the old claim that simply to be here in America -- to "live in the greatest country on earth" won't mean as much. And that thought should concern those 400 people in Forbes' little list. It ought to concern them deeply.  But I doubt it.

_____________________________________________

MEHR, UND NOCH IMMER MEHR:  Not like things have changed in half a decade.

And it's not like I haven't barked about all this over and over, and again and again, as if repeating the same facts ten different ways might help bring about that change we all talk about but never see.  Talk about ego.

And, I don't have a good feeling about this mission. You shouldn't, either.

 Additional Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo At Close Of Blog Thing
_____________________________________________

Random Barking: Turkey Day

Sad Vlad Eyes The Menu


Click To Enlarge -- It's Easy And Fun !

                                               ___________________________________

November 22

We Interrupt This Program For An Important News Bulletin

CBS News' Broadcast Interruption: 12:48PM CDST, November 22, 1963

For longer than I want to remember, I've been gnawed by a feeling that the world has deteriorated since JFK's assassination. Inexorably gone, right into the toilet. And, it's not possible to consider that without also remembering Martin Luther King's. And Bobby's. But this isn't a conversation about conspiracy, so much as the relevancy of November 22nd to America in 2015.
                                     ________________________________________

On November 22, 1963, it was as if the universe had shifted on its axis in Dealy Plaza... and later, on the second floor landing of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis... and then in a service corridor near the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.  And without those events, my sense is this world of 2015, in all its dangerous splendor, might not have happened.

It's just a feeling, not a fact -- and given that humans (and Dogs) tend to remember the past as a time when things were more secure, more full of promise than the present, it's no surprise that 1963 seems better. But even with that understanding, my feeling won't go away.  Every year on this date, I take that sense of things out of the memory box and look at it again.
                                     ________________________________________

Most Americans unconsciously accept the notion that we're special, god-blessed, preeminent in the world; we are best representatives of human civilization. It's a High School Civics Class view of who we are: a narrative of endless natural resources and boundless personal opportunity, in a democratic Republic protected by two huge oceans and two pliable geographic neighbors.

Our country developed in response to the tyranny of the Old World -- where powerful cabals ran things and murder to advance their interests could be common; where royalty could imprison you, or take what little you had, on a whim. They owned you from birth, and when you died they would rent your children pennies to place on your eyes.

The New World, The United States Of America, was a place where that couldn't happen -- because here all are equal before The Law, and all have an equal shot at becoming rich as princes themselves.

You're agent Hoffman, yeah?... German extraction? ... My name's Donovan. Irish -- both sides, mother and father. So, I'm Irish, you're German -- but what makes us both Americans? Just one thing... the rule book. We call it the Constitution. We agree to the rules, and that's what makes us Americans; it's all that makes us Americans. So don't tell me there's no rule book -- and don't nod at me like that, you son of a bitch.
-- Tom Hanks, as James Donovan [speaking circ. 1960], Bridge Of Spies (2015)

It's tempting (particularly if you were there for it) to believe the early 1960's were a golden age. JFK's assassination was a tragedy -- but it's too simplistic to use his death as just a metaphor for everything that's gone wrong after. I happen to believe the metaphor (the most favored was Camelot; the death of Arthur and the end of a golden age) has a good deal of truth in it -- but his assassination means something more seminal for all of us than the death of a noble man. Context is everything.
                                     ________________________________________

The Cold War defined the post-WW2 age. The West had seen Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' descend, then the Berlin blockade; an ugly proxy war in Korea; the suppression of Hungary by Russian troops. Finally, Cuba's 1959 revolution was too close to home; the CIA (as led by John Foster Dulles) was already attempting to assassinate Castro, or remove him through a planned invasion by CIA-backed anti-communist Cubans at the Bay Of Pigs. 

Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's Vice-President, was a known quantity for the Pentagon and 'The Company'. It isn't much of a stretch to imagine they hoped for a Republican victory in 1960.  In their plans to defeat the Reds, JFK wasn't supposed to have become President.  Nixon would rubber-stamp whatever the CIA had developed.

But the 1960 election was the most closely contested presidential race in the 20th century: Kennedy beat Nixon in the popular vote by just 0.17% -- less than two tenths of one per cent. But he also beat Nixon in enough key precincts in key states to win more than 270 electoral votes. In that contest, it's the only math that matters.

However, there were hints of voter fraud which benefited Kennedy in some of those key precincts. Immediately after the election, influential Republicans tried convincing Nixon to demand a recount, but Tricky -- wounded, angry and self-pitying -- rejected the advice... luckily for America, and the world, as it turned out

JFK wasn't Nixon, but he agreed to the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba.  When it failed, within hours of it's start, the military begged Kennedy to commit American air, naval and ground troops to support the invasion force. Kennedy refused (an Admiral asked JFK about sending in Navy jets and was told, No. "Why not?" the admiral asked. JFK, amazed at the question, replied, Because they're American planes! The admiral paused, then asked, "Well, what if we paint out the [aircraft identification] numbers?"). Attacking Cuba would be a first strike without a declaration of war, Kennedy said, and America's declared policy was never to act 'like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor'. 

Kennedy believed that Dulles and his CIA had lied, and attempted to manipulate the country into war: the sheer arrogance of it nearly left him speechless. Eventually, Kennedy fired Dulles and the head of the CIA's Operations Directorate, Richard Bissell, and said he wished he could "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds"  

(This was a dangerous mistake. Kennedy believed he understood politics, and how tough things could get -- but in the end, people didn't kill each other. He assumed that the CIA, for all its power, was just another government bureaucracy. As President, he never appeared to understand that the agency might contain persons deluded and arrogant enough to have him killed -- if, in fact, that's how it went down.)

A year later, JFK was President when Soviet IRBMs were discovered in Cuba,  in part as a response to the Bay of Pigs. Only by careful backchannel diplomacy, by defying the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and luck, did Kennedy and his core advisors avoid a full-scale nuclear war.

We know now there were nearly 60,000 Soviet troops on the island, possessing tactical nuclear weapons under the control of local commanders. If Richard Nixon had been President in the fall of 1962, I doubt he would have resisted the advice of the Joint Chiefs to bomb the missile sites, followed by a full invasion of Cuba.  I doubt any of us would be alive to read this.
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In 1963, Kennedy was murdered, in public; later, so were MLK and RFK. I understand how it can feel true that the world has gone to hell in a plastic bag since, but the currents which created our present situation had been in motion long before that morning in Dallas.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West... There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
-- Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen; "Network" (1976), Written By Paddy Chayefsky

Commerce had been globalizing beforeWW2.  Intelligence agencies, once a backroom adjunct to diplomats and the military, became secret, unaccountable instruments of U.S. foreign policy (in the eight years of the Eisenhower administration, Dulles' CIA destabilized governments and arranged the murder of national leaders -- actions Americans had never done before).  Industrial processes and chemicals that affected our water, air, and food chain were used on an increasing scale with little or no oversight.

The Cold War paranoia of the McCarthy era was still in the air, and it lasted for decades. Even in the 1970's when applying for jobs, I had to sign a Loyalty Oath to the Constitution and the government, a requirement to swear you were not then and had never been a member of an organization advocating the violent overthrow of that government. Hoover's FBI keep track of anyone of interest.

And underneath it all, like an underground river moving in the dark, was our unacknowledged history of disenfranchisement, slavery, exploitation, prejudice, hypocrisy and inequality. The facts about what business and intelligence connections were doing wasn't common knowledge, but people sensed things in America were... not right, but in the social contract of 1960, you didn't acknowledge them. If you did bring them up, it was -- well, impolite: Don't make waves. Don't be disagreeable. You can't fight city hall. Don't spoil the party for others. And, You don't like it here, go to Moscow !
                                     __________________________________

I don't pretend to know who was responsible for killing JFK. I don't believe we will ever know. A Gallup poll taken in November, 2013, noted that eighty per cent of adults contacted replied that they believed Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy.  Who ran that conspiracy -- the Mafia, the CIA; Lyndon Johnson; the Commies, or Space Aliens -- is less clear.

The common wisdom is that 'They' killed him. And Martin. And Bobby.  That whoever 'They' are, They're powerful enough to murder an American President, his brother, and a Baptist minister who was the spirit and conscience of Black America. Powerful enough to keep it a secret for 52 years.

Woody Allen's joke in the mid-1960's, that he was "still waiting for a non-fiction version of the Warren Report", made people laugh -- not because it was funny, but because it struck a nerve: the Report's conclusions were Official History and almost everyone sensed something was wrong with it.

After November 22, 1963, The Sixties that followed, everywhere, were partly driven by a shared understanding that we were living in a lie. The cognitive dissonance between the Official History of America, and that feeling we weren't being told the truth, ended up fueling a tremendous amount of social change.
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This is the real metaphor of JFK's assassination. His murder and the inquiry that followed was a lie told in public and made into Official History. His death was like some original sin, the truth of which would bring down empires if known. So other acts, more protective lies, grew around that original sin like scar tissue.

It almost doesn't matter any longer who killed him. What matters was that we were lied to in order to hide the guilt of those responsible. In America, murderers aren't supposed to be above the law -- but these are. By birth or wealth or influence, they're exempt from the kind of accountability and punishment an ordinary American would face. 

JFK's death is symbolic of that gulf between the narrative we tell ourselves about America, and the truth of where we've been.  The greater the difference between the two -- the further we are from the Freedom, Equality and Opportunity, from the Equal Justice Under The Law in our national story -- then the more we feel cheated, manipulated, lied to.  The more we feel like We, The People, aren't more than chattel for someone else's enrichment and amusement.

... That's where we are today. And, at least for me, that's what November 22nd represents.
                                     ________________________________________

A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
-- John F Kennedy; Amherst College Address: October 26, 1963

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Paris

Once Again, The City Of Lights

Once again, we sit and watch violence being done in the heart of France and one of the capitals of human culture.  Offer up a prayer, in whatever way you conceive of that to be, for the victims, their friends and families.

Some are going to say that the Russians have shown the way in dealing with the thing that is ISIS -- simply, we will have to kill them all. 

Others will say that after "Lil' Boots" Bush's imbecilic, unnecessary invasion of Iraq, western governments can't do as the Russians have done. We can't send troops -- no government in the Middle East wants our military (or France's, or the UK's) in their countries. America can't afford another military commitment economically, and neither the Right, Center or Left in the U.S. can afford it politically.  It's why, so far, we've only sent fighter-bombers to strike IS positions, and a limited number of special-forces soldiers.

Still others (like Little Rupert and his issue) will use yesterday's events to raise the overall climate of paranoia and fear ...in order to sell advertising time or space, and to support their pet, right-wing politicians (I swear before Almighty God: If Hitler were to reappear, Fox/News Corp would give him his own half-hour show).

The Middle East may be a snake pit of clan, tribal, national and religious loyalties; a tapestry woven out of blood feuds thousands of years old, into which outsiders step in at their peril (A Fool Lies Here / Who Tried To Hustle The East).

I don't know how it all will end.  I've been in situations where violence was the common denominator (or, simply, common).  Violence will be required to remove IS; that is their raison d'etre and they want to cause as much of it as they can. But if the way all the events in the region conclude is through violence and only violence, then we've learned nothing. We are facing global issues that demand we act interdependently, cooperatively, with compassion.  Violence will not help us, our friends and families, and strangers bound to us by a common humanity, to survive.

For any broader solution to be more than window-dressing before the next proxy war or excess of evil: the only way to end violence is simply to stop. Some will be amazed at how crazy or stupid I must be to offer up something so simplistic -- but I must be crazy, because it seems just that simple to me.

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He Rises

Elekshun 2016

More soon to come from the Land Of The Brave and the Home Of Whatever We Are, as the Republikannerfest becomes stiff, nasty, and something that goes Bump In The Night -- and the Zombified Ronnie Rayguns comes once again to eat eat eat lead America out of our Slough Of Despond, once again to reclaim the mantle that is Mickey and the Name That Is Legion.  Arooo.

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Reprint Heaven: Two Men From Utah Beach

(A reprint; for November 11th.)


Infantry Under Fire, Huddled At The Utah Beach Seawall,
June 6, 1944 (Smithsonian Collection; Public Domain)

Today, the New York Times, one of the last newspapers where publishing Obituaries is an art form (one of the last newspapers, come to that), reported two men who had once been at Utah Beach at the same time on D-Day -- J.D. Salinger -- author of Franny And Zooey; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; and, aber natürlich, Catcher In The Rye -- and Louis Auchincloss ("Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite"), died at ages 91 and 92 respectively.

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Portrait Of Auchincloss By Everett Raymond Kinstler, 2008

Auchincloss was a member of America's hereditary, monied elite. He was raised in a world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Maine; private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad. However, as a child Auchincloss thought of himself as "neither rich nor aristocratic": In a 1974 autobiography, A Writer's Capital, he noted, “Like most children of affluence, I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer."


Facades Of Brownstone Mansions, New York City 2008
(Photo: New York Times Online Real Estate Section)

His path through life was predictable enough for one of his class -- a comfortable childhood, preparatory schools; guaranteed entry to Yale in 1935; he seemed predestined for the life of a Gentleman of his class; a man with means who did little beyond tending and adding to the Family fortune. But it was in his Junior year at Yale that the wheels came off his little Bourgeois wagon.


Not For You And Me: Summer Home In Bar Harbor, ME

Auchincloss yearned to break from the well-travelled path of the monied and privileged and wrote a novel. When it was subsequently rejected by a major New York publisher, Auchincloss decided “that a man born to the responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist or writer if he were a genius.” He dropped out of Yale, which he found suffocating, and decided upon taking up a profession, one that his milieu wouldn't reject, and entered the University of Virginia Law School on the eve of WW2.

He was surprisingly good at the law -- and, Trusts and Estates law, at that -- a specialty almost solely devoted to the hereditary wealthy. In WW2, he volunteered for the U.S. Navy, was commissioned an officer and served in Naval Intelligence (typical for a Knickerbocker), but left that to command an LST at Utah beach on D-Day at Normandy, then in the Pacific after V-E Day. Even with his normal duties, he had completed a second novel, but "threw it in the trash".

It wasn't until 1947 that he completed The Indifferent Children, published after he returned to his law practice. It appeared under the pseudonym Andrew Lee, in deference to his mother, who thought the book “trivial and vulgar”, and feared it would damage his career (the horror of publicity, too, a trait of the rich).


Auchincloss At His New York City Home, 2005

I remember reading a New Yorker portrait of him several years ago while waiting in my Dog Trainer's office, and was struck with how much a man of his class he was -- and yet, he wasn't. He felt no sense of guilt at who and what he was (there isn't a trace of it in his writing). And, although I haven't read much of his work (which, like a wine, had hints of Edith Wharton and John Updike-ian highlights, though Auchincloss was far below Updike), his characters were drawn from his own world, and in chronicling their human failings, Auchincloss pointed up the value of at least an ethical rectitude if not a moral one.

The very wealthy are rarely seen by the likes of you and I. Where they live, where they eat, travel and shop is inside a Magic Circle of privilege and exclusivity. If he hadn't been an author, and his books hadn't possessed some merit, Auchincloss would have moved through life inside that Circle, acting as lawyer to his own tribe; his mark would have been made in helping them to preserve and maintain wealth accumulated over generations. His friends and clients would have been "his crowd... the right sort", who knew people he knew, summered where he did, voted Republican, and may have had their suits, shirts and shoes custom-made by the same Gentleman's tailors and reclusive cobblers.

But that wasn't his life -- or, not all of it. When he was writing, he was temporarily freed of the bourgeois world he swam in so easily. Auchincloss couldn't escape what he was as a man, but as an author he tried to see further, explore the human condition and bring back an artifact from his travels for a wider audience.

Commenting to an interviewer for some Tony Manhattan publication in 2007, however, Auchincloss reminded us that the world of the wealthy never really goes away in what are, for the rest of us, good times or bad:

Even near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in one!,” he told The Financial Times in 2007. “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs — are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today. Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about?” he asked. “I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

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J.D. Salinger, Surprised By A Fan's Camera In Cornish, NH,
On His 89th Birthday In 2008: "woe betide any of those fans
who track him down just to explain that they, like, totally
love him and can so relate to his retreat from a world of
phony bastards. “No you don’t,” he told one such visitor.
“Or you wouldn’t be here."

Jerome David Salinger was once groomed by his father for a career in the ham business, which, fortunately for American letters, never quite congealed. He was born in New York City, attended Progressive and Prep schools; he had just begun to publish short fiction -- in The New Yorker, no less -- when he was drafted in 1942. Initially a rifleman in the 4th Infantry Division, he was transferred to serve as a Counterintelligence specialist, trained to interrogate prisoners and review captured documents and maps -- meaning Salinger had to possess an above-average ability with spoken and written German.


Camp Ritchie, Maryland, During WW2 (Contemporary Postcard)

(Training for all CIC specialists was conducted at one location -- Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and is detailed in the book, Germans, by George Bailey [1970]. I wonder if Salinger and Bailey knew each other; they were at the Camp at the same time, 1943, and had to know the same instructors, characters, and fellow voulnteers, many of whom were German-Jewish refugees from the nazis who had taken U.S. citizenship.)

Salinger went ashore on D-Day at Utah beach with elements of the firat wave of the 4th Infantry. I've wondered from time to time whether Louis Auchincloss, commanding an LST in carrying that first wave in to Utah on June 6th, ferried the future author of one of America's enduring, classic postwar novels that day; it's not impossible.

In December of 1944 and into 1945, Salinger fought in the Battle Of The Bulge -- when everyone on the line, for weeks, no matter what their MOS*, were riflemen. After The Bulge, he was was hospitalized with "battle fatigue", the forerunning terminology for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

[*MOS = Military Occupational Specialty, a term more familiar to Vietnam-era draftees]


Salinger, In The U.S. Army, Circa 1944 (Unknown)

After release from hospital, he remained in Germany for at least a year, helping Allied authorities track down nazi functionaries wanted by the Occupation powers. He married a German woman, briefly; very little is known of her, or this period in Salinger's life.

(We might be able to infer what some of his duties may have been, again from George Bailey's book: Many of the CIC specialists in 1945-46 also helped to resettle refugees from the Soviets in various small German communities -- who were under Allied military jurisdiction and had no choice but to, uh, follow orders.)

(This involved a degree of subterfuge, quick wits, and a sense of both the scale of physical and moral destruction the nazis had brought on Europe and their own country; and a heightened sense of the kind of absurdity peculiar to the U.S. Army, which appears in novels like Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five.)

Returning from the war, Salinger also returned to New York City and in 1948 published a short story, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish", in the New Yorker -- a kind of shot-across-the-bow to announce a different kind of writer was in town. After several other short stories were published by the magazine, in 1951 Salinger's seminal novel, Catcher In The Rye, was published.

Salinger had A Major And Serious Jones for attention as a literary genius; and, he'd proven he had the chops for it. While in college, he had bragged about his literary talent and ambitions -- and his short fiction had marked him as a real talent. But, when Catcher became a runaway bestseller and critical success, being in the 'eye of the comic book hurricane' was more than he bargained for.


Salinger On The Cover Of TIME, 1953: From The Bulge
To National Notoriety In Less Than Ten Years

It wasn't just being lionized by the Establishment press and New York literary mafia; the book was a landmark of postwar American alienation. Salinger seemed to give a voice through his narrator, Holden Caulfield, to the conflicted, shamed, vainglorious, and noble patter which runs through all our heads on a daily basis; Caulfield was nearly an archetypal figure -- and the novel resonated.

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
Holden Caulfield, Catcher In The Rye

And it did resonate with the feelings of being lost, an undefined longing, in so many people who read the novel that Salinger was subjected to what eventually would be termed 'stalking' from readers -- some enthusiastic, many others troubled; but all of whom believed Salinger had a finer perception of the world we live in, and could be that "terrific friend" and help them. They wanted answers to The Big Questions.

(Sometimes, it's the author of the moment you look for. In the 70's, after The World According To Garp had appeared, four friends from my time in New York and I borrowed someone's car and drove up into New England; there was talk of trying to get a glimpse of Salinger -- rejected by the eternal Mick Koznick [A guy as big as Lucca Brazi, drunk, in black leather jacket and Ray-Bans, punches you in the chest with a forefinger and says, "M'eye right? I'm right. M'eye right? I'm right"] as "too bourgeois" -- turned into a search for Putney, Vermont, and author John Irving; which might have succeeded, but for the fact that we were most of the time drunk.)


First Paperback Edition Of Catcher In The Rye

The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on between self and culture.
Phillip Roth, 1974

Eventually, Salinger told his editors that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of Catcher in the Rye and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953, Salinger moved to a 90-acre parcel of land in Cornish, New Hampshire, which had a long history as an artist's colony.

And, for the most part, Salinger was never publicly seen again. He was rumored to have achieved a mystical state of satori and left the physical plane; or to be writing novel after novel to be published after his death (and so removed from attendant publicity); or to have decayed into an abberated, Howard-Hughes-like paranoid, long-haired recluse. College students tried staking out his property, or -- once it became known he had a PO Box in Cornish -- his local Post Office. sightings of Salinger were few, and brief; the man was smart and quick.


James Earl Jones As 'Terence Mann', The Salinger Character
From W.P. Kinsella's Tale Which Became Field Of Dreams

In the early 80's, when W.P. Kinsella wrote his novel, "Shoeless Joe" (turned into the film Field Of Dreams in 1989), he put J. D. Salinger into the novel, going to New Hampshire to bring him back to Iowa and the magical baseball field Ray Kinsella has built in his cornfield. Salinger would have nothing to do with the production and didn't want his name used; the reclusive author figure played by James Earl Jones became 'Terence Mann' ("I don't have any answers for you -- and I don't know the secret of life. So piss off").

In 1997, Ron Rosenblum wrote a piece for Esquire magazine, "The Haunted Life Of J. D. Salinger": The silence of a writer is not quite the same as the silence of God, but there's something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone who we belive has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation.

Still, Salinger could be seen in and around Cornish, if you were diligent. He would be outdone in the reclusiveness department by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., author of his own engrossing postmodern novels ( V.; Gravity's Rainbow; Crying Of Lot 49; Mason & Dixon; Vineland; Against The Day), who has only been publicly seen twice between the early 1960's and the late 1990's -- and not at all since.


Thomas Riggles Pynchon, Jr., In 1953: One Of Seven

Only seven published photographs of him known are to exist -- six yearbook photos, and one as a seaman in the U.S. Navy in the mid-to-late 1950's.

Okay, Pynchon's done a few 'Simpsons' voiceovers, where his cartoon character has a paper bag over his head; and Robert K. Massie thanked Pynchon in the afterword to Massie's amazingly good 1991 book, Dreadnought; but he still makes Salinger look like a publicity hog.

Unlike Salinger, Pynchon (who is 73 this year) isn't demanding, Garbo-like, to be left alone; he simply prefers anonymity. Doing the occasional 'Simpsons' guest spot is Pynchon's way of mocking his own sense of privacy -- something Salinger would never have done, and proof that hanging out with Tom for an afternoon or over a beer wouldn't be a waste of time and might even be fun.

Wikipedia notes: In the early 1990s, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson — a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt — and fathered a son, Jackson, in 1991. The disclosure ... led some journalists and photographers to try to track him down.

[I]n 1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan. Angered by this invasion of his privacy, he rang CNN asking that he not be identified ... "Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed." In 1998, a reporter for the [South African] Sunday Times managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son.

I don't know enough about Salinger's inner life, or Pynchon's, to know why they removed themselves from the barest hint of the public spotlight. But, I don't have to. Their lives -- like mine, or yours -- are no one else's business.

I don't agree with John Fowles' autobiographical-fictional narrator in his novel, Daniel Martin, when he notes that creative persons put themselves up on a public soapbox and suffer all that doing so entails. I'm a fairly private person, and Pynchon (or Salinger)'s ire at being stalked like a Snow Leopard by a National Geographic film team is wholly appropriate.


“Here’s your quote. Thomas Pynchon loved this book. Almost
as much as he loves cameras,” a reference indicating that
Marge Simpson’s novel sucks Brontosauruses. Fellow Recluse
Salaman Rushdie describes Pynchon as "Still Crazy After All
These Years".

Salinger was married several times, and divorced; in the 1990's, his daughter would publish a book about being the child of an obviously brilliant and obsessive-compulsive man, the only look into his world anyone had been granted in almost forty years. One tantalizing glimpse from the book: Salinger had a bookcase in his Cornish home, packed with what very well may have been manuscripts written over the years.


Salinger And His Wife, Circa 2009 (Paul Adao, NY Post)

About the same time, in his early eighties, Salinger married a nurse "considerably younger" than himself, but did not change his reclusiveness or irascibility. His new wife adopted Salinger's desire for privacy. He only had his name brought back into the public spotlight when forced -- as he did last year, when a Swedish author wanted to publish what amounted to a sequel to Catcher, titled "Sixty Years After". The Swede claimed it was a parody, like Jane Austen With Zombies. Salinger was plenty steamed, and a court agreed with him.

After breaking his hip this past winter, his health declined rapidly, and he passed away -- peacefully, it was reported -- last night. Like Auchincloss, he lived his life on his own terms; not comfortably provided to him, but -- for better or worse, like all of us -- one made by his own hand. But I believe Salinger will be missed, and his works read by new generations (Catcher In The Rye still sells over 250,000 copies a year) long after Louis' writings fade into a genteel obscurity.

I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
Holden Caulfield, Catcher In The Rye

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You Cannot Un-See What You Have Been Shewn

Not The Details, But The Journey

The three persons and the Superintelligent Parakeet who read this blog know that Before Nine isn't exactly a repository of the sunny, perky, fun-filled bits of Life's flotsam, or warm moments featuring Kitties or Small Dogs. Rather the opposite -- but we do try for Teh Funny. In the Words of Saint Roger The Rabbit: sometimes, it's all we have.

When we bring on the funny bits, though, they usually leave a ring of Schadenfreude around the Tub 'O Culture that we collectively bathe in here in Blogtopia. It's a tall order, but someone has to fill it -- and passing these items on frequently results in rioting, bad press, and muttered threats about being hit on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

... and today's offering is no exception:  I discovered a web news outlet which, on its face, looked like a virtual fountainhead of Teh Crazy: "Now8 News First In News", where we were told employees at a Target store in Kansas City (Missouri, or Kansas, wasn't specified) found a young woman lying on the floor of the Women's bathroom, pleasuring herself with an 'Olaf' hand puppet from the store, while singing "Let It Go" -- a recognizable tune from the Disney CG cartoon film, Frozen, which features little snowman Olaf as one of the main characters.

My first thought: Jeez; what a pathetic attempt to increase hitcount to this news site.  Or, it could be even more evidence of the Decline of Western Civilization, our being purchased by Commie Red China, and forced to sing "The Great Helmsman Is, You Know, That Guy".

The saga continued:

Kansas City Target employees walked into a scene in the woman’s bathroom on Tuesday that they say left them “speechless.” A 26-year-old woman with a history of mental issues ... was taken into custody after employees found her lying next to the trashcan in the woman’s [sic] bathroom crying as she sang the popular song from Disney’s 'Frozen', “Let It Go.” But ... [a]ccording to the employees... it was what she was doing while she was singing that left [them] in utter disbelief and shock. 

One of the employees described the woman in the bathroom as lying "on the floor with her pants around her ankles [and] with an Olaf puppet in one hand and a carrot in the other. What she was doing ... I don’t even have words for it."  The employee added that the scene would be "etched into my mind forever". Regarding the hand puppet, the employee said, "We definitely can’t restock that item.”

Another Now8 Story, And Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo

Then, showing Team Target loyalty, they took an opportunity for a cheap shot at a competitor: "We really pride ourselves on not seeing these types of things at Target. This is something you usually see at Walmart, not here.”

The [woman in the bathroom] ... kept repeating the same thing over and over again until police arrived: “Let it go, let it go, can't hold back anymore, turn away and slam the door!” ... Police say that [she] was listed as a missing person two weeks prior to the incident and had been off of her medication for schizophrenia / bipolar disorder.... [she] is currently under psychiatric hold in a Kansas City Hospital.

I laughed. I laughed hard enough to break things. It was straight up-from-the-gut laughter you can't stop. I laughed hard enough to involuntarily wet myself -- something which isn't that embarrassing for Dogs, but an event usually confined to literature, or very old persons. However, last week, I couldn't find my glasses for ten minutes; and together with this new incident, it seemed like another proof that soon, I'll be taken to the Vet and Put To Sleep.

Time passed; I padded back to the kitchen for some Single Malt, calmed down, and began writing this... and then saw a link on the "Now8 News" site, to another story -- one about a 61-year-old man, one Marshall Leonard, who set off an explosive device in a Tupelo, Mississippi, Wal-Mart parking lot because police would not allow him to have sex with a goat.  The article stated 13 people had been killed, and the goat taken to an animal shelter for treatment of, uh, abrasions in the neither regions.

As a Dog who has worked in both news reporting and law enforcement, and as a blogger who routinely Photoshops images to increase their humorous potential (example below), something about the Goat Story was off.

Obligatory Fake Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Thing

 It was the reference to Goat injuries, is what did it.  Even if you're a hack writer, you don't follow a paragraph about the death of thirteen people with a reference to a goat's, uh, "lacerations". If you're a news editor, you don't allow such manifestly poor reporting to see print, or you'll be explaining it to the Managing Editor the next day. And, with all due respect -- would your average Target employee use such a phrase as, "It will be etched in my mind" ? Maybe. Just maybe.

A look at a legitimate Mississippi news site yielded a story about 61-year-old Marshall Leonard -- the same person mentioned at the Now8 site -- appearing for a bail hearing. It seems Leonard was angry that a local sporting goods store would no longer sell the Mississippi state flag (with the Confederate States' "Stars and Bars"), so Leonard tried setting off a bomb made of fireworks in the shop's parking lot. Fortunately, the device made smoke and noise, but injured no one.

Then, we hit the Google machine to search local crime sections of legitimate news sites for Kansas City Missouri, and Kansas City Kansas, searching on the phrase, "Target store":  plenty of references to Target's planned layoffs, and to a Target employee arrested for "up skirt" photography in women's dressing rooms. But, no references to a crazy woman doing the She-Bop with a Disney character in a bathroom.

Just by chance, I did an image search on the photo of the straw-haired blonde who appears on the Now8 News site as the "26-year old woman" in the now-infamous Hand Puppet Incident.  As it turns out, the photo is actually of a 35-year-old woman named Tracey Mabb, who had "stripped off her clothing on a highway near Pompano Beach, Florida.

[Mabb] was "vulgar and indecent" as she pulled up her long shirt and showed passing motorists and pedestrians her breasts, vagina and buttocks while hanging out on the South Dixie Highway...  She refused to stop exposing herself and said, "I don't give a f---" to police officers...

The Google machine wasn't working quickly for me earlier; my initial search ("is now8news a hoax site") hadn't come back while I took the long road through Tupelo and Kansas City. When it finally coughed up its results, Snopes.com, for example, did have a longish list of Now8News stories that were, as my Oma would say curtly, "Falsch"; not true.

Proving Godwin's Law (Photo: Hoaxbusters.org)

But, we live in a time when all opinions are equally meritorious and all are given equal weight, rather than offend anyone or suggest an appearance of prejudice. In my Google search results, no one definitively would state that 'Now8 News' were purveyors of bullshit -- humorous bullshit; but, still.

So what started as an odd news story led to side-splitting laughter, momentary minor incontinence, intimations of mortality, single-malt whiskey, and then on to the kind of follow-your-nose stuff that reminded me of The Old Days -- before the Google machine.  It was all fun, and in the end didn't matter if the original story was true or not. The journey was good -- and as in so much else, that's what matters.

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Everything But The Headline

Trumpola !

The Republican party continues its descent: In a Reuters / Ipsos poll, 31 per cent of Republicans believe Donny is "the Republican candidate most trusted to manage the economy, deal with foreign leaders and serve as commander in chief."

  

And, more Republicans "would trust him with the nation’s nuclear weapons than most of the rest of their party's presidential primary field."  When asked, these same Republicans believed Elvis may have faked his own death, and that the Occupy! movement was financed by Commie Red Chinese Island-Building Oligarchs. 

"We need someone like Trump to stand up to the Chinese," said Bigelda Hure of Steeltown, Ohio. "It's time to kick butt. We need more narcissistic, sociopathic brinksmanship in our foreign policy. We need leaders who will continue to impoverish the vast majority of Americans for the benefit of 'The Owners'. That's what will make America great again. That, and more megamergers."

Meanwhile, Jebby ! attempted to reignite his flailing campaign. Standing in front of several people and a Superintelligent Parakeet at the parking lot of a Foodway in Tampa, Younger Bush waved away the advice of his critics. "I can't be someone I'm not," he said. "Chang The Mystic Warrior told me to say that." The Parakeet narrowed its eyes at Younger Bush, a sure sign that all is not well and will not be well.

Superintelligent Parakeet: Cute, But Don't Waste His Time. Ever.

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