Shiva said to Vishnu,
'hey man what've I got to lose,
I got a bad case of them
Nataraj blues,
I feel like dancing but J. Robert
Oppenheimer's got me so confused.
He's playing Jesus
while Mel Gibson's up on TV
reading the news.'
Stop makin' waves,
or we'll send a tsunami.
Stop preaching peace,
or we'll call you a commie.
Stop asking questions
about lies the authorities tell you are true.
You better start stopping now or you're gonna end up
with them Natarajan blues.
You ask for dinner,
but the plates are tectonic.
You ask for justice,
get a plague that's bubonic.
You ask for freedom
and they ask you 'hey will terrorism do?'
We've Gitmoized your rights
as the orchestra plays the Natarajan blues.
Needed a vacation
got sent to Abu Ghraib,
where the dogs of liberation
are so rich they can't beg.
The prisoners all wear leashes,
and the German shepherds do whatever German shepherds do,
while a man outstretched like Jesus
wears electrodes and a hood to dance the Natarajan blues.
Sure must be homesick 'cause my home
makes me sick.
GI-Jesus in the White House
has a miraculous new trick.
Speaks so loud that you can't hear his lies,
but his big stick it wears Edward Teller nuclear designer shoes.
He makes Fallujah disappear while
Mel Gibson reads the Natarajan blues.
Talked to the sheriff,
I said we needed a posse,
but he looked highly suspicous
that I might be highly
Selassie. And on his way to Nuremberg a soldier asked me
'what am I supposed to do?'
I said 'we all gotta Nataraj but
when your orders lead to Nuremberg, hey man,
refuse.'
The other day I heard John Kerry say Saddam Hussein deserved his own special place in hell, but given the criminal and incompetent way George W. Bush had gone about removing him from power, America's security was actually worse off than before.
The next day, Bush, in a wild distortion, accused Kerry of wanting Saddam in power.
So far, so good. Standard Bush lala-land disconnect from reality in his Queeg-like fantasy world.
But then I heard a supposedly impartial news analyst, citing this example, actually praise Bush's skill at summarizing his opponents positions in a way most advantageous to himself. And I thought to myself, an "impartial" and "objective" professional journalist actually approves of Bush's meat-axe logic? Paranoid delusion is now an approved mode of argument?
Alright, so I wonder, how would one equally summarize the positions of President Bush with similar skill?
Bush opposed exceptions to an abortion bill that would protect the life of the mother, or that would make an exception for rape victims, or exclude parental notification in cases of incest, so any man who rapes a woman for the purpose of forcing her to bear his child will be strongly incentivized; similarly, dads who've committed incest will be protected by his parental notification position, and moms with dangerous pregnancies will die in delivery. So Bush is pro-rape, and pro-incest, and favors murdering pregnant moms.
And since Bush opposes gay marriage, he obviously favors gay promiscuity. If he doesn't want gays and lesbians in committed faithful relationships, he obviously favors them out having all the sex they can, massive, profligate wanton orgiastic sex with people who aren't their husbands and wives. Which I suppose means he favors adultery.
Considering the way he lied about knowing that Saddam had WMD, he obviously believes in bearing false witness. Given the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, the thousand American dead, the hundred-odd people he executed as Governor of Texas, he is clearly pro murder.
So seeing as he is pro-adultery, pro-false-witness, and pro-murder he's obviously against the ten commandments. If Bush is elected, the ten commandments are not long for this world. The ten commandments are destined to be, Left Behind.
What next, will he ban religion?; elect Bush and before you know it, it's going to be illegal to read the Bible --- unless of course you're a Satan-worshipping faggot and dyke.
And then there's his stand on abstinence education: since he wants our teenagers to avoid having sex as the only valid means of birth control, he obviously intends for them to be practicing teen fellatio and teen cunnilingus, hell he must be advocating every form of teen perversion and pedophilia known to man. He is pro teen anal intercourse. Teen bestiality. He must want our kids to pile into Abu Ghraib style sex-pyramids, and gigantic hooded jerk-off festivals. What kind of warped sado-masochistic lunatic is this George W. Bush guy anyway?
So, to summarize, a vote for George W. Bush is a vote for rape, incest, mommy murdering, teen cock-sucking, pussy-licking, butt-humping, homosexual and lesbian orgiastic Bible-burning Satan-worshiping atheism. The so-called conservative values.
This, it seems to me, is the level of analysis that now passes for fair-and-balanced professional objectivity in our "Karen Ryan", Sinclair-age kept press.
They want to put Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore.
Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore.
Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore?
I mean, isn't that like just
exactly the opposite of what Mount Rushmore
is there for?
I mean, isn't Mount Rushmore supposed to be reserved for
the Greatest (you know like think here of Muhammad Ali)
the Greatest of presidents?
People like George Washington, the father of our country,
and Abraham Lincoln, the freer of the slaves,
and Thomas Jefferson the father of our Independence
declaration, and
Theodore Roosevelt, the father of the,
the father of the,
OK well, so I'm not so sure what he's even doing up there.
But Ronald Reagan? Ronald Reagan?
Why do you want to honor the guy who sent
Donald Rumsfeld to make nice nice with
Saddam Hussein. Why do you want to honor the guy
who created Al Qaeda by getting the CIA to train
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Peshawar to go fight a
terrorist war in Afghanistan. Twenty years later
and we're still cleaning up the big old messes he left us,
the two Great Frankenstein's monsters he created in Saddam
and Osama.
And that's not to mention the people hacked to bits in
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the thousands and thousands
of people raped, beaten, tortured, dismembered and mutilated
all with the training, assistance, and "material support"
of the Boland-Amendment-violating CIA. Or the way he
dismantled the constitution so he could sell missiles to the terrorists
in Iran, or the way he helped Nicaraguan terrorists to bring cocaine
into the US, like starting a crack epidemic was some kind of urban enterprise zone
for South Central LA. He was so horrible, so-o horrible, why would anyone want to
honor him? Why would anyone want to put him right there up beside
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt?
And that's when it hit me.
Didn't Washington send out what he himself called
"scalping parties" during the French and Indian War
back when he was still fighting for the King of England?
Didn't he send them out with explicit orders to kill civilians?
Wasn't the father of our country really the founding father
of American terrorism?
Didn't he steal colossal tracts of land from native Americans,
and foster a climate of genocide against them?
Didn't he own a large number of slaves and so,
wasn't Abraham Lincoln really
at war against him?
And didn't Jefferson, wasn't he not only the owner of slaves
but a slave
raper?
Didn't he rape Sally Hemings?
I mean, seeing as he owned her,
seeing as she was a piece of his property,
she didn't really have any right to say no,
and so isn't it rape where the thing you are
fucking does not give her consent
because she has no consent to give?
And as for Lincoln, didn't he start the bloodiest war in American history,
didn't he shut down the press and jail his own people for voicing dissent?
And didn't he support slavery if it preserved the union?
Didn't he continue slavery, in the very text of the Emancipation Proclamation,
didn't he continue slavery in the four slave states that never joined
the Confederacy?
Which then leaves TR. The
star of San Juan Hill, back in a war we started,
for empire. The man who continued the slaughter
in the Philippines: 200,000 dead in a war of
imperial conquest. 200,000 dead in a racist war
for white supremacy.
And so looking at Mount Rushmore with its quartet
of murdering, raping, conniving, torturing, genocidal terrorists
and thinking about the real Ronald Reagan, I came to realize that
he belongs there just fine. It's just that
we need to change the way we
see the place, from a place of heroes,
to a place of demons, maybe by changing the name from Mount Rushmore
to Mount Frankenstein. From Mount Rushmore
to Mount Evil.
June 04, 2004
George Washington was born into a world in which slavery was accepted. He became a slave owner when his father died in 1743. At the age of eleven, he inherited ten slaves and 500 acres of land. When he began farming Mount Vernon eleven years later, at the age of 22, he had a work force of about 36 slaves. With his marriage to Martha Custis in 1759, 20 of her slaves came to Mount Vernon. After their marriage, Washington purchased even more slaves. The slave population also increased because the slaves were marrying and raising their own families. By 1799, when George Washington died, there were 316 slaves living on the estate. http://www.mountvernon.org/learn/meet_george/index.cfm/ss/101/
On Jan. 1, 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared free
all slaves residing in territory in rebellion against the federal
government. This Emancipation Proclamation actually freed few
people. It did not apply to slaves in border states fighting on
the Union side; nor did it affect slaves in southern areas already
under Union control. Naturally, the states in rebellion did not
act on Lincoln's order. But the proclamation did show Americans--
and the world--that the civil war was now being fought to end slavery. http://www.nps.gov/ncro/anti/emancipation.html
We begin
as dreams.
Paintings in a parched aboriginal continent of painless
disaster,
move to the next scene as if another life were only a rapid-eye-movement
away. As if the past had no consequences and the point of all being
was play, make-
believe.
Modeling ourselves in the metallic sheen of a bluebottle fly,
a frenzy of speed immune to gravity,
unaware its destiny
is a frog's tongue.
Then, the green of our wet skin as one with the pond of our life,
the chubby puff of our onepiece bellythroat bobbing
as webbed feet plush and we surge through our liquid home, or
uncoiling the fleshy might of our bent-kneed
thrust splurge
into sky,
in the rapier talons
of a falcon's eye. Soar
in a suit of feathers whelmed in windsong
rush. Where whirling swirls and swarming thermals buoy our
spiraling glide and we
survey the fleeting pyramids of ants, and
the color symphonies of elms and autumn maples until one unexpected day
we dream ourselves
in the words of others as they
dreamed back in ours.
After returning repeatedly, begin to imagine an entire history
of shared conversation and others' being, and christen that whole
with the name, reality. The
reality we wake from,
returning each night
in dream.
Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote despite the fact that the Negro constitutes a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?
---Martin Luther King, Jr. (Letter from Birmingham City Jail.)
History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
--- James Joyce, Ulysses
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
--- George Santayana, The Life of Reason
What I am about to say is not news; I expect most of you know it already but repeat just to make sure we are all on the same page.
Government is composed of two things: authority and force. Authority is the name for the valid, force for the invalid exercise of government.
Now, a government that enslaves its citizens is not legitimate and so has no authority; from this I hope you will grant me that the government of the United States had no valid authority prior to 1865.
Further, a government that systematically and formally denies franchise to half of its citizens is not legitimate and has no authority: from this I hope you will grant me that the government of the United States had no valid authority prior to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 which finally gave women the vote.
Similarly a government that refuses to educate its citizens and makes their franchise dependent on the education they've been denied because of the color of their skin is not legitimate and has no authority; from this I hope you will grant me that the government of the United States had no valid authority prior to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Ed, or the 1965 Voting Rights act.
Again, a government that invades other countries and supports global terrorists and lies about it to its own people through a system of classified secrecy in violation of its own laws is not legitimate and has no authority; from this I hope you will grant me that the government of the United States had no valid authority prior to its retreat from the illegal bombing of Cambodia and its defeat in Vietnam in 1975, or the end of the US supported Boland-Amendment-violating terrorist war against Nicaragua in 1990.
Beyond this, a government whose judicial branch overturns the electoral will of the people and the principle of one person one vote (we know who won the election) in what amounts to a judicial coup and a demolition of the Constitution they pretend valid and pretend to uphold --- that government is not legitimate and has no authority; from this I hope you will grant me that the government of the United States had no valid authority prior to --- what time is it --- today, or until the end of Dubya's first term now scheduled for 2005.
Finally, even if none of these problems had ever arisen, if black people and women had been treated equally from the beginning, and the army had never invaded Cambodia and Vietnam illegally, and the CIA had never trained terrorists to wage war against Nicaragua, and the Supreme court had not overthrown the democratic election of 2000, the United States only claim to governing authority over this land would be a claim, wrested at gunpoint from the British whose claim consisted entirely of their having murdered a very large number of the native inhabitants of the western shores of the Atlantic --- in brief, one murderer's right derived from another. From this I hope you will grant that the government of the United States has no valid authority, never had any valid authority, and never will have any valid authority.
I apologize for dwelling so long on the obvious, but people are sometimes in such a hurry to pass over the obvious that they miss it, or at least are not sure that they share the same obvious facts in common.
Given these facts, the thing I don't understand is why people continue to complain TO the government. If you want to complain about murder, say the murder of Amadou Diallo, James Byrd Jr., Timothy Thomas, Mathew Shepherd, Larry Robeson, or David Chain, what is the sense in complaining to murderers? That is their god-damned job qualification! They put it on their resumes. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. This is what they do. Murderers write the laws; murderers enforce the laws; murderers prosecute the cases; murderers judge the trials. If you want justice for murder I can't for the life of me see why you would expect it from the murderers themselves. If you want to complain about torture for example; the torture of Abner Louima or Rodney King, Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, Doris Buck, Elmer Allen --- again why complain to the master torturers who have run the advanced training centers of torture like the School of the Americas? If you want to complain of having your rights denied why complain to the government that denied your vote when it overthrew the election? If you want to complain about greedy corporations stealing your money, robbing you blind in their monopolistic pyramid scheme ripoffs, stealing your air and your water by poisoning them and thereby stealing your health and breath, where is the sense in you complaining to the government that those same corporations bought and paid for about a thousand times over?
And as to you, Mr. Ivy-league Fix-the-system Good-intentions, just in case your pin-prick-focussed-lightning-fast-narrow-mind has missed the sledgehammer of my point, why don't you take 90% of your multi-billion dollar college endowment (you know the one you got from all those Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Carnegies --- the great father figures of organized crime --- yeah we got your Ludlow Massacre covered) and distribute it to the inner city community colleges that actually provide some small prayer of a chance for ordinary decent people? And while you're at it why don't you have open enrollments and lower your tuitions so that working class people can afford to go there. And why don't you take your robot brained intelligence insulting racist eugenic SAT/ACT/GRE admission farces and shove them elbow deep up the lard butted asses of your boards of trustees.
So what? So what am I really saying besides a convenient self serving rehearsal of the evils of the world and the failures of government? Besides implying that if you want a solution you better not look for it from government because IT just institutionalizes the problem?
Just this: history is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awaken, and as to government; YOU'RE HISTORY.
Stop me before I become
a terrorist. I'm tired of being on the losing side
having my rights denied, my opinions and ideas
ignored, suppressed, censored and
lied about. Tired of seeing my children
mentally tortured, brainwashed, propagandized
with sanitized fairy-tale mythologized
history, and amplified material girl materialist
misery, advertising a
commodified perfumed anorexic narcissistic.
sexuality. I am OJ-blade angry over my sisters being
raped, beaten, and mutilated by men exploding with rage at a system that leaves them
powerless and without freedom.
I am napalm-skinned irate
at the brutality of a police state shoving plungers up my brothers asses,
assassinating duly elected foreign leaders,
spraying chemical weapons on non-violent protesters and
seeding the earth with a
roundup of genetically engineered time bombs, and
jailing millions guilty of no crime but pursuing their own (sssss)
happiness. I am Rottweiler bite, Columbine trenchcoat
angry. Dahmer freezer,
McVeigh truck,
Osama bin Laden Nairobi embassy angry
at a system of Criminal Justice
designed to protect the criminals
with the biggest stock portfolios.
I'm signing up with the terrorists and I'm thinking
big.
None of your sold out pissant Camp David PLO.
None of your second-fiddle suicide-bomb Hamas.
None of your pansy-assed tree-hugging
property-crime-only ELF.
No, when I go over to the terrorists it's gonna be
major league.
IBM? --- you know,
the people who automated the extermination of European Jews for Hitler?
Or what about
Union Carbide, they poisoned tens of thousands with cyanide in Bhopal in India?
IMF? Now there's some serious
terror-cred, they've financed mass murdering sweatshop dictator
heads of state from Suharto's Indonesia to Chile's
Pinochet. Or what about
the multi-national pharmaceuticals corporations
holding tens of millions hostage to their
"intellectual property" monopolies on AID's drugs?
But what I dream of is being number 1,
the New York Yankees of terrorism,
the sole remaining superpower of terrorism
I want to work for the good old USA and be,
all that I can be.
Talkin' 10,000 multi-megaton ICBM mass extinction vaporization terror.
Talkin' dumping enough plutonium in groundwater to poison every last person on earth terror.
Talkin' we got more prison cells than you've go young black men terror.
School curriculum this-must-be brainwashing coz it says here George Washington invented
democracy and George Bush got a brain terror.
Talkin' fuck with our puppet state oil monopolies in the mideast, mess with the
Mobil-Exxon-BP-Shell game we run in the Persian Gulf and you better have one hell of a big condom cuz we're shovin' a cruise missile up your ass terror.
Now you may accuse me of
hypocrisy, for joining the organization that has driven me to this extreme.
But, thing is, with just a few of their
savagely beautiful weapons,
I can do more damage,
unimaginably more damage,
from the inside. And I want to be
all the terrorist I can be.
Wake the Fuck up Cleveland You're Living in Denial
Disembodied severed heads
everywhere I go I see
disembodied severed heads
while I buy my groceries
disembodied severed heads
even walking down the street
disembodied severed heads
when I'm watching my TV
disembodied severed heads
when I'm driving in my car
disembodied severed heads
lying on blankets in the park
disembodied severed heads
T-shirts worn on fat man's chest
disembodied severed heads
babies suck'n on mama's breast
disembodied severed heads
on-the-hats of selfmade millionaires
disembodied severed heads
on-the-bus they ride with poor man's fare
disembodied severed heads
they smile at me with big white teeth
disembodied severed heads
they smile at me with bulging eyes
disembodied severed heads
the smile at me like men set free
disembodied severed heads
when killed by broken treaty lies
disembodied severed heads
we paint their skin fire injun red
disembodied severed heads
makes no difference now their dead
disembodied severed heads
Sambo Wahoo that's OK
disembodied severed heads
if he can turn the double play
disembodied severed heads
we broadcast red faced golliwogs
disembodied severed heads
killed like they were rabid dogs
disembodied severed heads
in broad daylight try to hide
disembodied severed heads
the facts that cannot be denied
disembodied severed heads
the founding fathers' genocide
disembodied severed heads
we treat like it's our city's pride
disembodied severed heads
while Wahoo plays our city's shame
disembodied severed heads
is amplified with every game
disembodied severed heads
disembodied severed heads
disembodied severed heads.
In case you missed it, we just won the war. ((sing song)) We won the war. We won the war. Hoo-hoo-hoo-wee-hoo, we won the war.
Our boys went over there and they kicked some Iraqi butt, I mean they smoked those god-damned camel jockeys. Woo-hoo.
We won the war.
Now, does anybody here know what this war was about?
What: doesn't anybody know what this war was about?
It was about --- weapons of mass destruction. Don't you people read? Don't you know anything? We were going over there because we had to destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Remember the UN? Bunch of faggots. Remember how they sent inspectors over there to go look for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? Bunch of fairies couldn't find hamburger in a cattle yard.
Of course they didn't find any weapons of mass destruction: Saddam Hussein is evil. E-e-evil. Evil. They didn't find any weapons of mass destruction because Saddam was hiding them.
How do I know he was hiding them? Because the US government, our government, says he was hiding them. They've got the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, and they know everything. I mean you go to take a dump and they know what your shit smells like before you do. You make a phone call to that pretty little piece of ass you got stashed on the side and they can tell you what perfume she's wearing. You take one step outta line, you do something really dangerous like organize a peace march or plan a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign and they are all over you faster than mosquitoes in a swamp.
So if these guys say Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction you can bet your pretty little nut-sack that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
And if you wonder why they couldn't just come out and say where he had his weapons stashed, well, da-a-a-ah. That would compromise national security. I mean if Saddam Hussein knew what we know about his weapons of mass destruction then he might as well be us, and he could just go and hide them again.
And that's why we sent in those Special Forces and CIA agents deep into Iraq as soon as the war started. Because they knew where Saddam had been hiding them. They went to the ten sites where they were just sure he'd hidden his chemical and biological weapons so that we'd all be secure and we could all sleep easy, and we could prove to the world once and for all that he was hiding his weapons of mass destruction. And what did they find?
Nothing.
That's right, nothing.
Well of course they didn't find nothing. You think Saddam Hussein would be stupid enough to let us find his illegal weapons where we were so sure he was keeping them that we couldn't tell anyone else they were there but we had to start a war just so we could be safe? Of course not. Saddam Hussein is evil. I said that before, evil. Evil. Evil. Evilevilevilevilevilevil. He just wants us to look bad in the eyes of the whole world. He just wants us to look like we don't know what we're doing. He just wants people to think we are just like Hitler when he invaded Poland with some flimsy excuse about protecting the German nation. He just wants the world to think that they can't trust classified US intelligence just because they can't find the weapons they said they were sure that he had.
But let's not lose sight of the big picture here. We just won the war. We just kicked some serious Iraqi ass. It'll be a long time before they start thinking about messing with us again. I mean who did they think they were, living within their impoverished borders and minding their own business and threatening us with weapons of mass destruction that they didn't have and then hiding them so we couldn't find them so that we would look like Hitler to the rest of the world?
I mean nobody knows for sure how many people died there, but it's gotta be at least 5000 or so. And all those people who've been living in 100 degree heat for weeks without water --- think of what that smells like. No running water for weeks. Whole country probably smells so bad by now it would take a century of Chanel No. 5 production just so you wouldn't gag passing through it. And that's even without all the babies shitting their guts out because they've got dysentery because they haven't got no clean water to drink.
And the rest of the world sees those pictures of all those kids just shitting their guts out, and the infants with their heads ripped to ribbons by cluster bombs --- and all those awful things that Saddam wants them to see but we have the good sense not to broadcast here cause we're not giving in to Iraqi propaganda --- the rest of the world sees that just like Saddam wants them to and you know they buy into his lies. I mean, this guy is evil. He is just selling hatred all around the world when we are just their minding our own business and protecting ourselves from those weapons of mass destruction that we can't even find.
Now just you remember, that even if we never find so much as a can of bug spray in that entire god forsaken nation it doesn't really matter, because the other reason we are over there is to liberate them from an awful, nasty, dictator. I mean, when you think of what Saddam has done with his weapons of mass destruction, and the way he has given them to Osama bin Laden… and let me just stop right here because some people are so perverse as to say that he never gave any horrible weapons to bin Laden, so let me just nip that piece of misinformation right in the bud.
I know for a fact that he was giving weapons of mass destruction to bin Laden. You ask me, how do I know? How do I know? Well da-a-a-ah, the people in the US intelligence community told me so. I already told you how they know everything even mostly before it happens, and so if they say Saddam's involved with Osama, then you can bet your left tit that Saddam's involved with Osama.
And while I know that they didn't actually say this on the record, that they actually said exactly the opposite on the record, well still, there are some people high up in the Bush administration who have leaked hints that this might be true, and so that's good enough for me. And don't you go mentioning the fact that they haven't found any of the chem-bio weapons that they said he had because I already explained the way that that is just another sure sign of the way that Saddam is evil and that is all it proves.
So the real reason we are over there slaughtering them by the thousand and destroying their water supply is so we can liberate them. We want the Iraqi people to be free, and it really doesn't matter how many of them we have to kill to do it because it is just a price we will have to pay.
And now that we have liberated them in record time I will admit that there are a few small problems left to solve. OK, so now that Saddam is gone a couple of rambunctious yet thankful Iraqis have started looting, and OK, so there have been some revenge killings, and so OK the situation is starting to look like anarchy and a lot of these newly liberated people are saying they wish they had Saddam back, but still we have started to arrange for the transition to democracy, and started selecting some old Iraqi leaders to help begin the process of keeping the peace. And so OK, the people we have been selecting used to work for Saddam, and the people on the ground are throwing rocks and using knives and swords and any weapons they can get to rebel against the new people who we are putting in charge because they were the old people who were in charge under Saddam, hey, well, that doesn't mean we didn't liberate them.
The fact that thousands of Iraqis have died, and hundreds of American troops have been wounded, and over a hundred killed, and thousands of homes have been destroyed, and billions of dollars of property has been destroyed, and international law has been shredded, and countries all across the globe have suddenly started to hate us, that's a small price to pay for liberating Iraq and putting the same murderers who ran the place under Saddam back in power.
But there is one thing you absolutely, positively have to banish from your mind completely, and that is the ridiculous idea that this war was about oil. That is absolutely ludicrous.
This war was about weapons of mass destruction, liberating the Iraqi people, and stopping terrorism. That's what it is about because that's what the president said it was about and he is our commander-in-chief. And he would never lie, because no American president has ever lied, because we are the greatest country in all of history and we never do anything wrong and we never make any mistakes.
And don't even mention the way the President went on national television a week before the war started and promised point blank that he would ask for authorization from the UN for a war no matter what the whip count was. Remember that, he sounded all so cocky like when he said "whip count." Whip count. Whip count. No matter what the whip count. He wasn't afraid of the UN, no way. He was gonna show them. He was gonna put it to a vote and let the people of the world "show their cards," and "put their cards on the table." He sounded all brave, and confident, and like a real leader, like the hero in some cowboy western who always tells the truth, who acts like he doesn't even know what the words lying or cowardice mean. And then the way that when he realized he was going to get his ass whipped on the whip count, when he realized that he didn't stand a chance if he put it to a democratic vote, the way he just broke his own promise like nothing happened, and the way no one in the major American press even batted an eyelash at this bald faced lie --- I mean don't even mention that. Because if you do we might just start finding leaks from "senior administration officials" that prove that you have been linked to Saddam bin Laden and Osama Hussein, and then whoosh, you might just meet with a little regime change of your own. You might learn all about the creative uses of the term "material witness" and be disappeared like some immaterial ghost of the American Gulag at Guantanamo or wherever we're keeping the wrong kind of people these days.
And then who do you suppose will liberate you, or even dare to mention your name?
Uncountable Orgasms
(This poem is indebted to Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm.)
'When did God make men? When she realized vibrators couldn't dance.'
---Roz Warren?
Leave it to mathematicians to invent something called a
countable infinity; a contradiction
in oxymorons to the lay ear. What they mean
to convey is that whereas infinity is something you know
you can't count to, nonetheless, if you have an infinity
of integers at least you know which one is next.
If you reach 3,458,753 you proceed to 3,458,754.
6,400,079,010 leads immediately to 6,400,079,011.
But then again if you start trying to count what they call real
numbers --- it could be something quite small, 15 perhaps,
you don't know what the next number is. In theory
if you just step to 15.000000001, there are still
uncountable millions of fractions in between. In the
case of 'real' numbers you don't know what the 'next one'
means. In both there is an infinity of numbers
but in the latter case an infinity between each step towards
infinity. It's like the difference
between not having a prayer of getting
where you're going but at least knowing the next step
and not having a prayer of getting where you're going
and being clueless
about what the next step is.
Almost like two different types of people.
A countably infinite person looks down on
an uncountably infinite person for lacking direction.
The uncountably infinite contend that the countable are,
regrettably, not very deep.
I was reminded of these two different types of infinity when I was trying to
imagine the total number of times in history
women have faked orgasms. I figured it was such a large number
(probably one or two for each grain of sand on an ocean beach)
that you might as well call it infinite
in that same poetic imprecision one lets slide with sand.
You see I've been reading about the evolution of vibrators
and medical douches and I've been,
let's see, it's hard to find a word for it….
flabbergasted? (Really, more like gabberflasted? ma-zazed?
fumdounded? sta-monished? pur-srised?
stump-jarted? ) to realize not just how often women fail
to achieve orgasm from plain old vaginal
penetration, but also how long this has been going on and why.
How often, throughout history, they were told this was because of something
wrong with them and they were frigid.
That if they tried to satisfy themselves they'd only be made
more frigid, perhaps infertile. And so women would become
physically ill from unsatisfied sexual desire, diagnosed as
hysterical. Up until 1952 hysteria was one of the most commonly
diagnosed illnesses in hystory. What an amazing thing that the social
construction of sexuality can get so close to a person, so far
inside her head, that it could stand between a woman and her own
clitoris.
The prevailing treatment for women
diagnosed with hysteria? Go ahead, guess.
Would you believe me if I said
genital massage? Yes, 'genital massage'. As far back as the second
century A.D. the leading physician of the time, Galen,
provided a detailed description of how to bring a woman to what he called, 'hysterical paroxysm'; his description complete with
vaginal contractions and release of vaginal fluids leading to
'relief of symptoms'? As Rachel Maines (the author of
'The Technology of Orgasm') observes
doctors have had their hands full throughout history
satisfying the sexual needs of
women otherwise unmet by their husband's penises.
She calls the term 'hysteria' social-
camouflage for 'sexually unsatisfied'.
'Hysterical paroxysm' camouflage for 'orgasm'.
Historically then, doctors have functioned
as (albeit socially prestigious) sex slaves, or,
given the differentials in pay, lucratively
rewarded prostitutes.
I imagine there are those who think such pursuit
the stuff that dreams are made of, but medicine
even then being a volume business, and paroxysms often
requiring up to an hour of devoted physicians' attention,
doctors were quite eager for any technique or device
that could save them labor, increase turnover
so to speak. This explains what might otherwise
strain belief, at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth century, the wide
dissemination in doctor's offices
of that new invention, the electromechanical
vibrator. Responding as it did to a need both
urgent and widespread it nonetheless proves a little shocking
to twenty-first century sensibilities
that the medical vibrator was patented
fully a decade before that
other great labor saving device, the vacuum cleaner.
Achieving regularly in five minutes what men's penises often failed
of for years, and which even a skilled surgeon's fingers might
only succeed at in ten-fold the time, the technological imperative
of such a machine is clear. But
as so often happens in materialist culture what begins
as curiosity soon evolves through convenience to household
necessity, and an earnest and thrifty market learns
to bypass the middleman. So it came to be that
medicinal electromechanical vibrators were widely advertised
in the sorts of ladies journals read by knitting circles
and elderly spinsters, and even the Sears-
Roebuck catalogue.
What then? Shall we call it revealing
or call it odd, that nature (or was it God)
should design a woman's genitalia
in such an inappropriate fashion
(or at least unflattering to the male codpiece?)
That the act of procreation should so often fail
to satisfy feminine lust or (truth be told) masculine
ego? And once this fact concealed
how quickly the healing profession, dominated
by men, should substitute its agency
for prostitution, which because invested with social
prestige, could never be perceived
for what it was? But more again how a
foreign hand should improve on a lover's
virile member, and how a hard, dead, anonymous
vibrator should, at least functionally, improve
on either?
We sound these nether regions imperfectly
with the mind --- finding our egos
always there arrived ahead
of us. But such creatures as have conjured
incubus and succubus alike
to explain what they, neither male nor female, can
comprehend, should only pretend certainty --
with caution. Beneath the skin such turbulent
purposes contend with reason
we both must, and cannot begin
to fathom. Resigned sheerly to function,
our technology has surely rendered us already
superfluous; once the markets
demand it, vibrators will undoubtedly
dance. But these shall sooner coax stars out of the sky
than entrance, whoever the fool and however foolishly,
or achieve the starry devotion of a lover
in the uncountable infinity
of a beloved's sparkling eye.
black & white fotos jim lang color fotos & webwork smith
