November 2006

Our final Rant/Rhapsody reading of 2006 was played (is that the right word?) to a nearly full house, and the readings were typically ecclectic, spanning the emotional gamut from Eulogy to Reverie. And there seemed to be an emergent theme of food and gardening that was appropriate given that this was, after all, the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend. On this night we heard from Ted Hamm, Keith Miller, An Xiao, Naeem Mohaiemen, Matt Power, Anna Lappé, and yours truly, Mark W. Read. We read the following, OUT LOUD

MARK W. READ

"Rutabagas on Asphalt"

As some of you may know I not-so-long ago ventured on an extended/distended/slow-creeping foray into middle America- a month long crawling bike circus caravan through the cultural wilderness of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia. I am now returned to this Citadel of the intellect, this capital of commerce and culture, this lingering stronghold of lefty politics, and I am here to report that things are not nearly so fucked up as they might seem. Contrary to what you might conclude if you are one of the daily throng that reads the meticulous cataloguing of disaster, murder, corruption, cultural divide, and governmental duplicity that comprises the NY Times, there is an uninvestigated yet incontrovertible abundance of creativity, compassion and plain old common sense that resides out there in the foothills and the flatlands; the hamlets and the town halls of what too many of us have come to secretly, disparagingly refer to as “middlebrow America.” Don’t get me wrong, I am not blind to the signs that Babylon is falling, and am not asserting here that all is well in the republic. I know that Karl Rove is methodically laying the groundwork for long-term corporate fascist rule, and am now, more than ever, intimately aware of the legions of Christers who have been enlisted in his cynical and unholy cause of forging an eternal, indestructible Evangelical-Capitalist Alliance. I know too, in my heart of hearts, that these political problems may only be symptoms of a much more insidious and intractable disease, a sickness that can be summed up most efficiently as, simply, Car Culture. It is, after all, the atomizing, eco-cidal logic of the automobile that has given rise to this cookie-cutter, degraded, degrading, vacuous, consumptive sprawl of Taco Bells, TGIFridays, Cineplexes, Starbucks, stoplights, smog, asphalt, McDonald’s and Walmarts, all of which conspire to deprive us of ANY sense of connection to ANYTHING save the characters on our favorite tele-dramas, and sitcoms and sportscasters and, more to the point, our favorite televangelist preachers, who tell us that we’re not alone, and that there’s an enemy, and that he goes to fancy schools and thinks he’s better than you and you make sure that you don’t forget where you’re from and that you’re one of us and not one of them.

Yeah, I know all that, but I know something else, too. “The system” doesn’t operate at anything near peak efficiency. Try as it might to terrify us all into isolation, or entertain us into impenetrable apathy, innate curiosity, desire, and generosity are as virulent and widespread as ever. The world still opens up to the willing, and should you hurl yourself heedless, plan-less into the maw, you are still far more likely to find yourself suckled than devoured. People are, by and large, ever-curious and ever-thirsting for genuine connection

I had been riding with the Flying Rutabaga Cycle Circus for only a couple of days, after having met up with them in Louisville Kentucky, when we first crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. For the next three weeks we would travel slowly up that wide brown river, bouncing between Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, stopping in small towns and big cities alike as we toured this once booming cradle of industry now known sarcastically as “The Rust Belt.” The Rutabagas had already been going for more than a week before I joined them. They had begun their tour- what they were calling their “caravan across the cornbelt,” in St. Louis Missouri, the home of the Monsanto Corporation and the site of the Monsanto-sponsored World Agricultural Forum. It was also the site of the aptly named counter-convergence, BioDevestation, which is the event that had drawn the Rutabagas to St. Louis in the first place, and, for that matter, the event that had inspired the idea for the tour itself. The plan was simple: Travel by bike from “Biodev” in St. Louis to the WTO agricultural meeting in Washington DC, stopping along the way in cities and towns to perform an educational and entertaining circus show about Genetic Engineering. They had made connections with organizers and set up performance dates across the entire route. They had gotten a grant to help with food purchasing. They had constructed a handful of bike trailers from recycled bike parts. They had developed shows and written songs and practiced acrobatics in preparation. What they were unprepared for was the all-out assault on them that came from the St. Louis Police Department. Perhaps they could have seen it coming. The Police had been conducting a fear-monger campaign for weeks leading up to the demonstrations, as has become the standard tactic for handling any kind of national mobilization since Seattle in 1999. The citizens of St. Louis were being braced for hordes of bomb-throwing, window-smashing anarchists. Video clips of the Seattle protests had been played as B-roll over any mention of the Bio-devastation convergence on the local news over and over and over again. The Mayor promised “zero tolerance.” Still, the Rutabagas were undeterred and gathered in St. Louis a few days before the convergence, to get the show ready and, in many cases, simply to get introduced to one another. They had come from all over the U.S. and Canada, from Austin, Toronto, Montreal, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York and Wisconsin, 23 in all, willing and ready to travel almost 1,000 miles to raise the alarm against the Biotech industry.

On the morning of the first day of the demonstration, about half the troupe rode out from the Bolozone, the collective house that was housing them in St. Louis while they were there. The other half had remained to help clean up the house and had planned to meet the first group in a park at noon for a rehearsal. Around 10:00am, the Bolozone was surrounded by police in riot gear, while, simultaneously, the riding contingent of the Rutabagas was pulled over and arrested for “bicycling without a permit,” a law which, as it turns out, hadn’t been on the books for over 50 years. After a brief standoff over the issue of a warrant, which the police did not have, the Bolozone was raided and subsequently boarded up. The police confiscated everything the Rutabagas had- clothes, bags, bikes, food, books, diaries, cameras, phones- and much of the Bolozone residents’ things as well. All of them- Rutabagas and Bolozoners alike- were held for over 48 hours. It took them a week to get their belongings returned, and when they were returned, the tires on their bikes were slashed, their bags and clothes had been urinated on, and their address books, cameras and cell phones were “missing.” They had missed virtually the entire convergence. Their departure had been delayed. They were rattled and dispirited. The prospect of canceling the entire tour was a real possibility, discussed over many hours in difficult, emotional meetings. In the end, I think, it was their spirit of defiance that won out. Bagging the entire tour would have been an unacceptable capitulation to the forces that had harassed and persecuted them in St. Louis. And so, a modified tour schedule was concocted, an altered show was rehearsed, and off they rode, into the heartland.

Like I said, I didn’t meet up with them until Louisville, where they performed a couple of spirited shows, in a park and on a college campus, and where they caught up on sleep, fixed up their bikes and purchased enough bulk food to make it to Cincinnati, the next major metropole on the route. They were still a bit rattled, and more than a little pissed off, but after a couple of days they were more than ready to get rolling, and I was more than happy to be moving with them.

Traveling upstream along the Ohio River, the gradient rises at such a gentle pitch that the road seems flat, and the riding feels effortless. It is late June, and the honeysuckle is in full bloom, cascading down any slope or thick foliage it can find, infusing the cool morning air with a sweet, perfume-like scent so thick it makes you woozy, like you’re taking in some kind of opiate. Along the river we pass the husks of dormant factories, the remnants of industries that were once the bedrock of the economy here. With little effort one can imagine the hustle and bustle of these places, the men coming to work by boat or by trolley; the barges destined for ports afar, carrying their goods to market; the smoke and the stench and the sounds of unbridled industry. It is a strange feeling, like walking through a graveyard that has gone untended and become beautifully, sumptuously overgrown.

On my third day we took a turn away from the river, and embarked upon a section of “rails-to-trials” trail. I had never heard of this phenomenon, but was struck at the simple genius and almost poetically symbolic beauty of the concept. Thousands upon thousands of miles- 13,600 to be exact- of old, unused rail lines have been turned into well maintained nature trails for pedestrian and cyclist use. This was made possible through the work of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, which got started in 1987. In 1998 they successfully lobbied for legislation that put 1.8 BILLION dollars towards expanding this network of trails, and maintaining the ones that they, or we, already have. It is a locally driven, nationally expanding phenomenon. Folks hear about the one in the neighboring community and they contact the national organization, which helps them figure out how to go about creating a similar model in their own community, and also turns them onto potential funding sources to get it all done. And then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on. 100,000 members. Twenty years in the making. These rail lines were once the vital infrastructure, the circulatory system, of the expanding American Industrial Economy during the gilded age. That age has passed, leaving behind relics and refuse that have no use in today’s post-industrial world. Reclaiming them for bikes is a stroke of genius I would have thought impossible to accomplish in our culture. It’s like something out of a dumpster-diver’s wet dream. And yet, there they are, these beautiful paths that wind through forests, along rivers and creeks, for miles upon miles, and days upon days. I find myself giddily riding no-handed for what must be a full thirty minutes, at sunset, somewhere in southern Indiana. That night we cook donated Broccoli and Quinoa over an open fire, with dumpstered ring dings for desert. I dream of steamboats and catching fish

Indiana is arguably the most Republican-Dominated state in the country, and one of the most culturally conservative. It was the headquarters of the KKK in the 1920’s and is now home to over 100 militia groups. When we crossed into Indiana, a chill of fear went through me, and I felt, honestly, like we were entering into “enemy territory.” But you can’t always trust the Newspapers or the history books, and Indiana’s history is no more one-dimensional than the rest of the country’s, and kids rebel there just like they do anywhere else, and people are curious and generous the world over. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, at the end of a long and arduous day, after two bike breakdowns and numerous missed meet-ups, I would find my Rutabaga friends sprawled out in a Gazebo in Madison Indiana overlooking the Ohio River, surrounded by a small group of curious skate punks who were begging us to stay the night in their town, in their houses, on their floors, in their backyards, offering to feed us and asking us to perform our show. The troupe trickled in slowly as the sun set yet again. We ate snacks and, after concensing as a group to remain in Madison, discussed whether or not there was enough energy and enough of an audience to do a show. The group was split, and couldn’t decide immediately, so some of us took a walk along the riverside park, where we found a plaque that described how this town of Madison had once been a stop on the Circuit Chautauqua, and that Williams Jennings Bryan himself had stopped here. We were excited but curious. I knew a few things, as did one or two others, but details were scant amongst us- What WAS a Chautauqua, after all? Before we could finish wishing for more answers we saw, next to the plaque, under a plastic rain-guard, a loose-leaf notebook binder, which contained the whole story:


“Founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister, later Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, Chautauqua's initial incarnation was in western New York State on Lake Chautauqua. The programming first focused on training Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its range and was the first to offer correspondence degrees in the United States. This summer camp for families that promised "education and uplift" was too popular not to be copied and in less than a decade independent Chautauquas, often called assemblies, sprang up across the country beside lakes and in groves of trees. The goal of the Circuit Chautauquas was to offer challenging, informational, and inspirational stimulation to rural and small-town America.

Circuit Chautauqua begun in 1904 and by the 1910s could be found almost everywhere. At its peak in the mid-1920s, circuit Chautauqua performers and lecturers appeared in more than 10,000 communities in 45 states to audiences totaling 45 million people.

Lecturers were the backbone of Chautauqua. Every topic from current events to travel to human interest to comic storytelling could be heard on the Circuits. Chautauqua would swell by the thousands to see William Jennings Bryan, the most popular of all Chautauqua attractions. Until his death in 1925 his populist, temperance, evangelical, and crusading message could be heard on Circuits across the country. Another popular reformer, Maud Ballington Booth, the "Little Mother of the Prisons," could bring her audiences to tears with her description of prison life and her call to reform. In a more humorous vein, author Opie Read’s homespun philosophy and stories made him an enduring presence on the platform.

Music was also a staple on the Circuits and bands were particularly popular. Opera stars Alice Nielsen and Ernestine Schumann-Heink were familiar faces. Numerous Jubilee Singers companies, based on the original from Fisk University, could be seen on the Circuits every summer. For the largely white audiences these spirituals demonstrated a very different way of seeing African Americans in performance than minstrelsy offered. There were also numerous singing and instrumental groups performing everything from contemporary favorites to sentimental ballads to nostalgic music from "the old country."

Once the Circuits were established there was nothing during their heyday that evoked the excitement and promise of summer more than the coming of the brown tent. One manager remembered them as "the essence of an Americanism in days gone by." The Great Depression brought an end to most Circuits, although a few continued until World War II. Their arrival brought people together to improve their minds and renew their ties to one another. As a sort of diverting, wholesome, and morally respectable vaudeville the Circuit Chautauqua was an early form of mass culture. As one spectator concluded, "[our] town was never the same after Chautauqua started coming.... It broadened our lives in many ways."

We took a breath after reading this, looked up at one another, smiled and decided then and there that we had to perform here, in this town, on this slow summer night in June, as heirs to the Circuit Chautauqua. We went back to the Gazebo and rallied the other Rutabagas, who were as awed as we were by the evident synchronicity at work, and rushed themselves down to the plaque to read the tale for themselves. We turned to our new best friend, the dreadlocked skateboard punk rock kid Johnny, who within the hour had rallied an audience of 30 or more for an impromptu show there in the park where he had found us, on the Ohio River, where Chataquas had once-upon a time stopped while on their tours of the country’s river byways, just as they had stopped in so many towns, towns like Martin’s Ferry, George’s Run, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and yes, Madison, yes right there where we stood, and sang, and stomped and shouted, right there where we let it all shine for those 30 kids who couldn’t get enough of it and who all came over to Johnny’s afterwards and sang songs and drank cheap beer until far too late into the night.

In the morning I woke to the sounds of Anton playing softly on his flute, still wearing a dress from the show the night before, makeup still caked to his young angelic face. I sat up and wrote these three lines:

There ARE cracks in the petrol-soaked asphalt.
There ARE weeds that no pesticide can kill.
There is a power in our hope and our history that abides.

MATT POWER

"Arbor Day for Rudy"

I really did try all the conventional methods. Really. I wrote imploring letters to the Office of the Mayor, I called my City Council members' secretary at all hours, I testified at public hearings before assorted half-awake bureaucrats. Nothing and again nothing. It would have been less frustrating to tell it all to the guy at the token booth. I had gone through all the channels and still over 100 community gardens from around New York were on the auction block for May. In a city with a 2.1 billion dollar budget surplus. Beautiful little patches of green, slivers of Eden that bring communities together and reclaim neighborhoods from blight. My garden, where I had been working for a year, was wedged on a tiny triangle of land between the Bruckner Expressway and a housing project in the South Bronx. And it was on the auction block as well. There were hundreds of us trying to save the gardens, but there was no response to our requests except to be accused of being "stuck in the era of communism" by Mayor Giuliani.

It’s difficult to conjure up those long ago days, six years ago, when Giuliani was a perfect stock villain out of a silent melodrama, instead of the Mayor of the World, the Churchill of 9/11, the highly paid security consultant and presumptive Dick Cheney replacement he has become today. For the community gardeners, we were just the latest in a series of the authoritarian Mayor’s targets: squeegee men, the homeless, squatters, cab drivers, jay walkers, fare beaters, sidewalk artists, elephant-dung representers of the Madonna. Giuliani had started a fight with the gardeners and now we were going to take the fight to his backyard.

You had only to take a walk around City Hall Park to sense the enormity of our Mayor's paranoia, during that spring of 1998 (that his paranoia would someday be born out, none of us suspected). Under renovation, it looked like a medium-security prison, surrounded by eight-foot chain link and concrete barricades.

It was on such a walk that April that the idea came to me, and I couldn't get it out of my head. The perfect, crystalline vision of moving into one of the mayor's trees and not coming down. If he's going to sell my garden and cut down my trees, I thought, I'll just have to use his. And from that seed the idea grew.

I scouted the park with a friend of mine from Earth First! and found the perfect tree, a fifty foot ginkgo outside the fence on the park's edge, with low bottom branches, good visibility from the street, and an easy climbing route. I felt like Raskolnikov going through the paces of his crime, sizing up possible trees around the park's periphery. The police surrounding City Hall suspected nothing.

By the arranged day (Arbor Day, of course), everything was ready. I had my supplies: trail mix, water, extra clothes, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and the huge sunflower headdress I had built last Halloween out of coat hangers (generously donated by the dry cleaner on my block) and yellow satin curtains ($9.95). And a great many rolls of Duct tape (this was also an era when Duct tape had more innocent associations). My friends were all there with me, just outside the City Hall stop of the 4,5,6 on a beautiful morning on the last day of the last cruelest month in an over-eventful millennium. The sunlight had an almost liquid quality. Each strand of the Brooklyn Bridge was as precise as a line drawing in the clear air. The trees shook their heads, with new leaves bursting out everywhere in a regeneration that seemed unlikely at best only weeks before. I was pretty nervous, but seeing as how it had been my idea, there I was, the voluntary sacrificial lamb, who had only to climb a tree and wait.

I crossed the street and stood, casually as I could, at the corner of the park. A policeman stood only thirty feet away, directing traffic at the intersection. I half expected him to run and tackle me the moment I touched the tree. Some forest spirit left over from before the Dutch arrived on this island must have cast a spell over him, because he suddenly left the intersection and walked around the corner, out of sight. So cued, up I went.

The first branch was about seven feet high, and after a brief scramble where I thought I was too shaky to climb, I made it. Looking back at the street corner, I realized nobody had even noticed. So I went higher and higher, my pack getting caught on branches, my face brushing against the new ginkgo leaves. I grew up on an apple orchard in Vermont, and have been climbing trees my entire life, but never anything quite like the mayor's ginkgo.

There is a feeling one only has up in a tree, with people scurrying unnoticing below, seeming pointlessly rushed, disconnected from themselves and their surroundings. And so it seemed when I reached the top, looking down on the unquiet desperation of morning rush hour at the corner of Centre and Chambers, everyone running to their cubicles and not a one looking up. I took the sunflower out of my pack and "donned" it, to use the term the newspapers would later use. And still no one looked up. My friends had all congregated at the bottom of the tree, and began holding up their signs and chanting, calling on the Giuliani to stop the auction.

He didn't come out. As it turns out, he wasn’t there, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.

And nobody seemed to be paying much attention to our brilliantly orchestrated plan. Finally, a lone cop on a scooter pulled up, looked up at me, and shook his head.

"You wanna come down?" he called up, barely audible over the traffic.

"No thank you."

"They're gonna lock you up."

"They'll have to come up and get me first."

I had been arrested before, but never quite so theatrically. I called down to my friend Brad Will, an old hand at these sorts of endeavors, and asked him what I should do.

"Well, whenever you come down, they're gonna put you through the system. So you might as well stay up there and be free for a while."

I know I kept shouting down to the people on the ground from time to time. I know there were, at some point, reporters and cops shouting questions at me, and that a crowd started to form on the corner. The entire line for the bagel cart across the street was turned and looking at me. The realization that the proximity to the city courts meant that, in all likelihood, an equal number of prosecutors and public defenders were witnessing my actions, brought little comfort. But somehow, despite all the noise and commotion below, I was in an envelope of stillness. Somehow I slipped out of the awareness that what I was doing, to the vast majority of people in this city, was completely insane. Bellevue, Ward’s Island, men-in-white-uniforms certifiable nuts.

I could see an inchworm crawling on a branch a few inches away. A light breeze off the water shook the new leaves on all the trees, and I could feel myself swaying as though I were out at sea. Birds flitted from the stoplight to the branches, and then dropped to the ground to peck for crumbs. Sunlight dappled the branches. It seemed, up there, that this feeling was really the whole point of trying to save community gardens, that in a city with so little open space for so many, gardens allowed some of the feeling of tranquility I felt up in that tree. What were those poor people on the ground scurrying so much for? Come up in the trees! Live! The world seemed so far away. Brad was right: up in the tree I was free, and down on the ground I would not be.

Particularly considering the number of disgruntled public servants that were gathering at the base of the tree. I was awoken from my reverie when I realized that coming up in the trees was exactly what they intended to do. Four Emergency Services vehicles screeched up, one a truck with a boat on the roof. In case I tried to catapult myself into the East River, apparently. The driver jumped out and must have forgotten his emergency brake, because the huge truck began to roll backward very nearly hitting an NBC reporter and a squad car. There were about thirty police under the tree by this point, and a dozen reporters. A huge air bag was inflated beneath me.


And then a ladder was placed against one of the lower branches. I climbed a little higher. There wasn't much tree left. An Emergency Services officer in jumpsuit, heavy gloves, and climbing gear ascended the ladder. I was still another twenty feet above its top. He began to climb, nervously.

"You don't climb trees much, do you?" I asked.

"No. Bridges." he replied, struggling to get his arm over a branch, and then clipping his safety harness to it.

"Are you gonna come down?"

"Come up a little higher," I replied.

He made it up, after some struggle, to the branch beneath me. I perched above him. He looked scared. He had his arm around the trunk like it was a ship's mast in a storm.

"Look," I said, "I don't want anyone to get hurt. If you shake my hand and tell me that community gardens are a good thing, I'll come down."

Holding the trunk still, he reached up with a gloved hand and we shook.

"Say it." I said "Community gardens are a big thing." he mumbled.

"Good thing."

"Community gardens are a good thing." He wouldn't look me in the eye.

"Okay, I'll come down."

"You gotta put on the harness or I'll get in trouble."

No wonder he couldn't climb. His safety harness felt like one of those lead aprons they have at the dentist's. So he descended and I followed. Down the tree, slowly, retreating from that peace of which I had felt a glimmer, like pulling down a shade against the morning light. I stopped at the top of the ladder and straightened my petals before climbing to the ground.

I had, vaguely, the sense of handcuffs snapping around my wrists, of flashes bursting in my face and the eye of a television camera peering at me as I was ushered off by many, many cops. Questions were yelled and I shouted back answers. I should have yelled "I'm just a pansy," like some arboreal Lee Harvey Oswald. Hundreds of people were staring at me from across the street. At some point, the sunflower costume was pulled off at the behest of an angry captain.

And then there was the fingerprinting (now digital), and giving them your shoelaces, and the kind cop whose father had a farm upstate gave me girl scout cookies through the bars, and let me read Calvino till they took me to The Tombs, where the identical twin junkies and the guy who got arrested for bringing a python on the subway called me "tree climber" with some sort of respect, and the night court judge twelve hours later burst out laughing before sending me out onto the streets of Chinatown on my own recognizance.

And through it all, even in the fluorescent lit, institutional-green dungeon of Manhattan Central Booking, I felt the branches swaying beneath my feet and the spring sunlight on my face, a feeling not even the mayor of New York could put up for auction.

But it wasn’t until the papers came out the next day that it really sunk in.

PROTESTER GOES OUT ON A LIMB TO SAVE GARDENS

COPS PLUCK PETULANT CITY HALL PROTESTER

PLANT LOVER UP A TREE IS PRUNED BY POLICE

Even the New York Times editorial page got in on the act: "Despite months of discussion and last week’s highly public arrest of a man dressed as a sunflower…"

And somewhere in all of it, amid the protests and the shouting and the dozens more arrests, the Mayor sensed the tide of public opinion was against him on this, sensed (it seemed to us, at that moment) his political mortality for the first time, and called off the auction at the eleventh hour. Which back then was all the victory we could imagine. If you walk around on a May afternoon, on the Lower East side, past all the little gardens on 9th street and 6th street and Avenue B, or all the way up to 136th and Cypress in the South Bronx, you’ll see why.

ANNA LAPPE

"Food Quiz"

FOOD QUIZ





1. What’s the new job of Rob Horsch, former Monsanto VP?

a) Deputy Administrator, EPA

b) Senior Program Officer, Gates Foundation

c) Deputy Administrator, USDA

d) Member, National Organic Standards Board



2. Who said: “There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians”?

a) President Richard Nixon

b) Dwayne Andreas, Archer Daniel Midlands Chairman

c) Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa

d) Richard Crowder, US Trade Rep and Chief Agricultural Negotiator, former Monsanto VP



3. Philip Morris spent millions rebranding itself in the wake of Big Tobacco lawsuits with which brilliant new corporate name?

a) Humana

b) Virtua

c) Respira

d) Altria

e) Beneficia



4. What’s Hawaii’s most popular food?

a) Spam sushi

b) “Spamburger”

c) Chicken-fried Spam

d) Spam poo poo platter



5. Match the Tagline: “Nature Talks, We Listen”

a) Dow

b) Syngenta

c) Dupont

d) Monsanto

e) Biotechnology Industry Organization



6. Match the Tagline: “Biotechnology—A Big Word That Means Hope”

a) Dow

b) Novartis

c) Dupont

d) Monsanto

e) Biotechnology Industry Organization



7. What percentage of non-GMO cucumbers seed does Monsanto now control?

a) 18%

b) 28%

c) 38%

d) 58%



8. From this list, name the countries that don’t require GMO labeling?

1) United States

2) China

3) Canada

4) Australia

5) France

6) All of the above



9. What’s the likelihood that an African-American or Latino child born in the U.S. will develop Type II diabetes?

a) 1 in 3

b) 1 in 5

c) 1 in 8

d) 1 in 10



10. How many toys does McDonalds sell or give away every year?

a) 250 million

b) 500 million

c) 1 billion

d) 1.5 billion



Bonus Question: Which do we have more of… prisoners or farmers?

October 2006

October was our best night yet. We had a full house and an even fuller array of subject matter than usual. The audience heard readers rhapsodize on subjects ranging from dumpster diving, to lesbian kisses, to cuddling. Rudolph Giuliani and Democratic Strategists were two of the objects of the more rant-ish ravings. And there was a eulogy of sorts, to our fallen friend Brad Will. We heard selections from Williams Cole, An Xiao, Stephen Duncombe, Andrew Boyd, Jean Railla, Mark Read, Doug Cordell, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. They read the following. OUT LOUD:

JEAN RAILLA:
Digging Trash

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field,
you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan,
and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your
undertakings. --Deuteronomy 24:19

Streets with overcrowded and Glittering store windows ... the displays of
delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity,
stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its
products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of
scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. -- Jean
Baudrillard, from Consumer Society.


Trash can inspire. I was reminded of this the other day when viewing the
documentary the Gleaners and I, directed by the Grand Dames of French
cinema, Agnes Varda. In it, the seventy-two-year-old filmmaker explores the
French country-side, philosophizing about consumption, trash and art, and
interviewing gleaners people who live off the refuse of others. From
gypsies who pick through potatoes left in the fields, to gainfully employed
city-dwellers who rifle through garbage cans as a form of protest, and
artists who use furniture and scraps left on the street as creative
material, everyone she meets takes a stand on and about waste.

I love this film. Maybe it¹s because my own family comes from rural France
and I recognize my grandmother Meme¹s stoop in the poor women gleaning for
food in the fields depicted by Millet in his 19th century painting Le
Glaneuses. Maybe it¹s because gleaning appeals to my moral principals in a
waste not, want not, sort of way (Meme had grown up dirt-poor and knew what
it was like to go hungry, like so many people in Varda¹s film, and taught me
to make soup out of old vegetables and fish bones, to eat the organ meats no
one else wanted, to enjoy good food, but to never let it go to waste.)
Maybe it¹s because I have experienced the rush of finding clothing,
furniture and electronics on the street. Or maybe it is simply love. My
dog Bookie was a product of my husband¹s gleaning; Steve found him shivering
under a car, barely a year old, on Delancey Street in New York City.

I first discovered gleaning as a kid when my best friend Laura¹s little
brother, Michael, started coming home with bunches of flowers, equipment,
wood and sometimes candy. He had found his treasure in large dumpsters in
the back of the stores that line Ventura Blvd in the suburban San Fernando
Valley.

One Sunday afternoon we set out on bikes, Michael ahead of us in rubber
boots, Laura and I following in shorts, flip-flops and tank shirts, our
pubescent bodies alive with adventure. We hit the party-supply store¹s
dumpster first. Although neither Laura nor I actually jumped into the large,
steel, green container, we stood to the side as Michael did and gladly took
the coffee-stained stationary and stickers. (Their plastic wrappers
protected the actual products.) Then it was on to the florist. I couldn¹t
believe all the beautiful--albeit wilted--flowers that had been thrown out.
We greedily picked through the piles, placing together motley bouquets to
give to our mothers. Finding that stash was invigorating, a rush. I hadn¹t
yet begun to think about the environmental ramifications of waste. My joy
was a gambler¹s high; getting something for nothing, beating the odds. Free
shit.

Years later, in my late twenties, living in New York city, my gleaning
became more intense, both because my proximity to trash was greater as I
spent hours walking the city streets each week and New Yorkers seem to cycle
through their stuff more often, swapping out the old for the newish at an
alarming rate. As urban dwellers, we have small apartments. We don¹t own
cars. Everything gets tossed to the curb. And while donations to the thrift
stores might suffer, gleaners gain. At least 50% of my current furniture,
plants and appliances were found on the street.

It¹s not only in New York and LA that people are finding treasures from the
trash. Chris from Oakland, CA found a working washing machine (she simply
brought it home and hooked it up), a complete set of luggage, a few winter
coats, kitchenware and a lot of books in the trash. Amy from Baltimore
found a Kate Spade purse and a black computer chair. Janet, a Tulsa girl,
found a brown leather couch, with nary a stain. The possibilities for
treasure from the trash are endless.

Gleaning is crafty activity not merely because of the fun of finding
something for nothing (although that¹s clearly a large part of the joy) but
also for what we do with it once we get it home. Often times the gleaner
transforms the items from the trash into something new, with a use for which
it was not intended, like turning an old door into a writing table. For
instance, Becca, a cross-stitcher from Atlanta, found a vintage refrigerator
on the street and converted it into a computer desk. Suzanne, the domestic
engineer from Washington, came upon an old eight-pane window in the alley
behind her house. She cleaned it up, left the hinges and latch on and made
it look 'distressed.' Then she dug up some old black and white snapshots of
her grandmother¹s house and had them matted, using the window as a big
picture frame. She proclaims, ³It looks so beautiful hanging above our
fireplace!² Becca sees the inner-desk in the vintage refrigerator just
aching to come out. Suzanne glimpses the picture-frame in an abandoned
window. When a gleaner sees a piece of trash, her mind starts reeling. She
thinks about how to distress it, noticing the hinges and latches give it a
certain appeal, and starts plotting out her attack, even before she gets it
home.

Gleaning is visionary work. You must be able to come across a pile of wood
and see that within these scraps lie the makings for a shelf to hold your
CD¹s. You have to know that the planted tree that looks a slightly brown,
down and dejected will flourish with a little love, water and sunlight. To
glean well, you must be able to look beyond something¹s obvious state, to
abstractly conjure up a new use or purpose for the object. Like a good
thrift-shopper, the true gleaner must spend time imagining not what is, but
what could be.

To glean is to accept the abundance that the street offers. It does not then
follow that one must subsequently live without luxury. In fact, for me, it
is just the opposite. I keep bottles of expensive L'eau D'Issey perfume on
my dumpster-diver end table. In my closet, my prized three-inch Manolo
Blahnik heels, found in the trash on Mott street, sit side by side with the
black patent leather boots that I bought new at Sigerson Morrison, a high
end shoe shop on the same block. I love the art and craft that goes into
what someone¹s mother might call finery. I cherish my writing chair, with
its exquisite ergonomic design. I bought it on Ebay from a failed dotcom in
Atlanta. I adore handmade clothing by small local designers, which are
thoughtfully cut to enhance my shape. I enjoy getting facials and massages
and putting fancy creams on my body. I have no problem reconciling my inner
dumpster-diver with my luxury-item diva.

A few of my more hardcore gleaner friends look askance at my taste for fine
perfume but, truthfully, I¹ve received more flack for my love for trash
pickings. Walking down the cobblestone streets in my Soho neighborhood,
going through the piles of waste, I get dirty looks from the black-clad
folks who frequent the fine restaurants and designer boutiques, and they
don¹t even live here! Because trash-picking is most often done by those
without resources, there is a distain for the practice by the very people
who waste the most in our society.

Reality-check: Our trash dumps are reaching epidemic proportions.
Americans generate more waste every year. In 1990, we collectively created
247 million tons of trash. In 2001, 409 million tons. That¹s almost double
the amount of trash produced in ten years, and that¹s taking into account
recycling programs! We are running out of landfill space and there are
more and more reports on the dangers associated with our dumps, including an
increase in birth defects in surrounding areas and the pollution of
underground water sources. Yet, stores still place barbed wire on their
dumpsters, because they don¹t want to give anything away for free. They
would rather it rot. We need to readjust our thinking, to look at the fan
that someone so recklessly threw out and think: it probably only needs
cleaning. We need to think twice before we so readily trash our
possessions, only to buy something similar. The truth is, most of us know
that our society is overly-wasteful, but we find it difficult to put our
theories into practice. Gleaning is a good way to start. We should
consider it sacred activity. In my world-order, the Gleaners shall inherit
the earth.


AN XIAO:

chinese lesbians


outta my way,
he grows, you
fucking chinese lesbians

we're standing on a street
corner on the lower east side,
holding hands like it's our right to

she, a jappo lesbo
me, a flip chick with some kind
of sexual minority status

hey,
i yell back as the
self-righteous motherfucker makes
his way up first -
we're not chinese
and i have an unspecified queer identity

i figure he doesn't hear me
or maybe he's just too embarrassed
that he flubbed his slurs,
because he just keeps walking
and she and i make out
just like the straight couple
on the other side of
the street


And here is my rant:


Dignity, or,
Angry Fantasies About Conservative Old White Men


1.
I'd like to make you want
to wear dresses at night.

I'd like to watch you struggle to fold your wife's
laundry back the way you found it
and wash out the stains from your
private little night of excitement.

I'd like to watch you
struggle with make-up
and its infinite intricacies,
just to see you go outdoors for the
very first time and know how it feels when a
car honks as it speeds by,
when men grunt and your skirt flaps
and the cops eye you just a little too long
and all you know is that this all
feels "right,"
the way a pervert feels "right,"
and even though you're messed up, you've
got to keep on trying.


2.
I'd like to watch you
stare in the mirror, every day
every night
and wonder who you are, or why
you are
and then carve
out "freak" onto your hairy arms to remind
yourself that your life
sucks and there's nothing you can do about it.


3.
I'd like to let you dance your little dance
and hop your little hoops
and grovel for that little letter from
your shrink that says
you can have your hormones now,
your body now,
that "you're not quite normal so we'll have to treat it"
now

and I want you to know just what it's like
to scrap together every last penny
for a so-called cosmetic surgery
covered by an insurance plan you don't have
in a job you won't have
paying for a life you can't have
as you cry out your little eyes just trying
to make ends meet with
whatever little dignity you have left

MARK READ:

Remembering Brad Will

The night after I found out that my friend Brad Will, an independent journalist and activist, had been murdered in Oaxaca by government-backed right wing paramilitaries, there was a vigil for him held at the Mexican Consulate. I planned on going, but also knew that there would be other opportunities to honor his life, including a protest about the ongoing violence in Oaxaca that was scheduled for the coming Monday, and I had other social obligations to attend to. It was a Saturday night, and one of my oldest friends, my old college roommate, Buck, was having his birthday party. I hadn’t seen him, or his children, for some time, and it was important to me to connect with them. For the first three years that I lived in New York I, along with some friends, rented the 3rd and 4th story duplex in Buck and his wife Beth’s brownstone in Park Slope. I watched his son Roan go from toddling to tee-ball, and I was around to greet his daughter, Janet, days after she was born, when she came home from the hospital. Needless to say, I love them all a great deal.

For a short time, while he was “between living situations,” Brad stayed with me in that apartment. By then we had become pretty good friends through our work with Reclaim the Streets, a radical street-party-protest collective with a decidedly anti-capitalist agenda. Brad acted as a kind of direct-action trainer and tactical adviser for the group. He’d been trained by Earth First folks in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, which was more than the rest of us could say, so his words were given considerable weight. Brad, for me, defined a certain type of radicalism, an uncompromised and uncompromising way of living life. Treesitter. Folk-Punk. Anarchist. Pagan. Dumpster diver. Squatter. The dude wasn’t play-acting. He was a true believer. I loved him for that, and admired him, but he didn’t exactly fit into Buck and Beth’s world. Don’t get me wrong, Buck and Beth lean pretty well to the left- it’s what brought them together in the first place- but theirs is a settled life, and sensible, their politics moderated by the practical realities of raising two kids and paying a mortage. As we’ve grown older, and remained friends, and as my choices have led me down a path that has significantly diverged from their own, I have often felt like a bit of a freak in straight clothing when around them. Brad’s stay with me kind of amplified those feelings, and heightened the sense of contradiction that I often felt, and still feel, as I go about living what seems like two lives- one amongst the landed, child-rearing professional class, where I am a good lefty professor and documentary filmmaker, and another where I am the guy blocking traffic, screaming at the cops, or writing inflammatory broadsides. Brad lived one life and one life only: as a soldier in the struggle to defend planet Earth and rid the world of the scourge of capitalism, and I think this sometimes made more settled people a bit uncomfortable, including me, and definitely including Buck and Beth, who, though they seemed to like Brad well enough (he was charming as hell, after all, and funny, and hard not to like), were a bit, I don’t know, startled by his more hobo-ish qualities; his patches and his scraggly beard and his funkily-repaired glasses and his equally funky smell. There was more than one casual, comical, kind of .patronizing remark about one or another of these qualities during his stay with me. Meanwhile, Brad either didn’t notice that Buck and Beth were a bit uncomfortable around him, or he just plain didn’t care. He was infinitely comfortable in his own skin. But he was an exotic to them, sort of a man from another planet, and I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that I could feel them seeing me differently having seen me with him, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.

Societies- and specifically I mean those privileged parts of a society that benefit from the status quo- have a way of dismissing political views that challenge the foundations upon which privilege is built. It’s a reflexive, automated response, like a body fighting off a pathogen. The dismissal doesn’t even register as such, and is generally forgotten as quickly and as thoroughly as the thought, or the person, being dismissed.. I was, and am, capable of seeing how Brad was dismissed by “straight” culture: as a well-intentioned but impractical dreamer, or worse. An Extremist. Unstable. Marginal. I recognize also that I might share in that fate, and this both frightens and infuriates me. I mean, who wants to be treated like a pathogen? Who wants to be seen as, well, a little bit crazy.

The fact is that Brad, and others like him and yes- hell yes- that means me, are fundamentally correct about many things. The planet is fucking burning. We have an illegitimate government waging war for private profit and control over a deadly and diminishing resource. Multinational Corporate Capitalism is an inherently exploitative, violent and destructive system that oppresses people while threatening the health of all life on Earth.

Does this sound extreme?

So, on the night of the vigil, I planned on just stopping by Buck’s birthday party before heading to the Consulate, but I never made it out of Park Slope. In part this was due to my weariness and need to step away from the real sadness and grief that I was processing. However, I also chose to stay because an opportunity to experience a uniquely sharp set of contradictions presented itself, and it seems I have a thing for contradiction.

Around 7:30pm, Eduardo, a friend of a friend of Buck’s, and a high-up functionary at the Mexican Consulate, arrived at the party. I didn’t know that he would be there, but at that point I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Here I was, drinking wine and chatting with a representative of the government of Mexico, which was responsible for my friend’s death. I couldn’t leave. I needed to hear from Eduardo what he had heard about Brad. What did he think of all of it? What did he know about the situation in Oaxaca? What was going to happen?

Of course he knew all about Brad’s murder. And he was aware of the vigil, and of the small protest the previous evening. He was afraid that the consulate would be under attack every day for weeks, and that this would make getting work done impossible. The consulate, he pointed out, has no influence on what happens in Oaxaca. It was just a target. They were not to blame. Oaxaca, he told me, was a disaster. The APPO (Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca, the group that Brad was working with, whose story he was documenting with his video camera), had taken over the city, erecting dozens of barricades, shutting down the government, and throwing out the police. They were trashing the Zocalo, he complained. They had “no sense of aesthetics.” They “cared nothing for the artistic heritage of the city of Oaxaca”. And they just pumped out this “tired rhetoric from the 1970’s,” he said.
“Yes, the same old rhetoric,” I thought to myself. “Yes, lacking subtlety. “ But I couldn’t help thinking that not much has changed since the ‘70’s. I mean, it’s been the same fight more or less, and against the same enemies, and using the same arguments:

The planet burns.
America wages wars of Empire.
Capitalism Kills.

I am conflicted because I enjoy contradiction, even to the point of ignoring the obvious. I prefer complicated conversation, in part because I want to be seen as sophisticated by others. Brad saw the obvious and did not flinch or turn away from what he saw as his responsibility to fight the good fight, with whatever means he had, and wherever the struggle presented itself. He was fearless and uncomplicated. He was also, without a doubt, seen by mainstream culture as an extremist. And when I, or others, articulate views similar to Brad’s, we too will be seen as extreme, and maybe even unstable. However, throughout history, truthsayers have almost invariably found themselves in similar predicaments, and often in similar danger. The only way I can conceive of faithfully honoring my friend’s life, and avenging his untimely death, is to stick to my guns. I, for one, think we need a few more extremists. I miss my friend.

DOUG CORDELL

“Victor and Me”

I met Victor through Craig’s List. I was planning to stay in LA for two or three months over the winter--maybe longer, I wasn’t sure--and I was looking for a furnished room somewhere, something quiet where I could get some writing done, and with a little outdoor space to zone out in the afternoon sun and imagine how cold it had to be back in New York.
When I pulled up to Victor’s place in my rented Taurus, I knew I had found the spot. It was a classic 1950’s Silverlake bungalow, perched atop a steeply sloped street, with a vintage Cutlass in the carport. As I got out of the car, a wiry little guy in a sock hat came out on the front patio holding a coffee mug and waved me in.
Right away, I had a good feeling about him. He was intense, you could see that, but a genuine bohemian, it looked like. The bookshelves in the living room were packed with hardcover originals of all the beat classics, as well as a few tomes of Eastern philosophies, some art books, and the entire, seven-volume, leather-bound set of William Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I had the sense Victor might’ve been the one person in the world who’d actually read the thing, too.
“This is just what I was looking for,” I told him, taking in the room.
“Me, too,” he said, regarding me with a thoughtful nod.
I moved in that night, and the two of us stayed up til two or three, drinking and talking about pretty much everything while Victor hopped off the couch every few minutes to throw on something from his impressive vinyl collection: a bit of early Stones, into Pharoah Sanders, and then the Circle Jerks, and so on, into the night.
Soon we were hanging out together quite a bit. I didn’t know many people in LA, and Victor seemed to have burned a few bridges in the last couple of years. He rented a guesthouse in back to a sweet-natured lump of a guy named Yorin, and I got the idea that he and Victor had been good friends at one time. Now, though, Yorin shared the guesthouse with Helga, a gorgeous young German. According to Victor, she didn’t pay rent; Yorin let her stay there for free because he liked having her around. “And he’s not even fucking her!” Victor told me, sounding disgusted with Yorin about the whole arrangement.
So that left Victor and me to one another. A few nights a week we’d pick up some beers and take his Cutlass for a spin, stopping here and there to play pool with junkie hipster chicks in a Mexican bar in Echo Park, or get cocktails in Chinatown, or just drive up and down Sunset, Victor taking the occasional pull off his flask and drumming the dashboard while I dug the warm night air and the look of the silhouette of palm trees arching above the lights in the hills.
Once, as Victor took a turn off the boulevard at maybe 40 miles an hour, he offered me the flask and yelled over the music, “You should meet my buddy Mongo! You’d like him.”
“He’s not like us, though,” he shouted, grabbing the flask back and flooring it as we tore through an alleyway. “He’s a crazy motherfucker!”
I truly liked Victor, thought he was the real deal--an edge character, for sure, but a seeker, which is a rare things these days. There were, however, increasingly unsettling aspects of living with him. For one, he began to imitate some of my daily routine--on top of which, he would proselytize to me about his new habits, as if he’d stumbled across them on his own.
I would exercise in my room every morning, just to burn off the existential angst I usually wake up feeling, and within a few days I began to hear Victor in his room grunting his way through a workout, doing pushups or skipping rope.
“Nothing like starting the day with intense activity!” he told me, coming out of his room soaked in sweat, with a towel around his neck. “You should try it. Changes your whole perspective.”
I’d also taken to reading in the early evenings on a little settee in the small room off the living room, mostly because Victor spent that time in the living room, watching Kung Fu DVD’s. I would bring candles and a TV tray from the kitchen and set myself up with a glass of red wine, then put on classical music, just loud enough to muffle the sounds of the Chop Sockey adventure coming through the wall.
A week or so after I moved in, I came home in the evening to find Victor reclining on the settee with a book in his lap, classical music playing and candles glowing all around, a glass of red wine on the TV tray beside him.
“I used to read on this couch all the time, you know. Then I fell out of the habit. I don’t know why. But I realized I needed to get back to that. So good for your mind.”
As time went on, I was also more reluctant to sit around the house all night and drink with Victor. Not because I had anything to do the next day, but because he got extremely maudlin the more he drank, alternately swigging from a bottle of wine and taking a snort from his flask. Once, around three in the morning, after several hours of booze and talking, he leaned his head back on the couch, stared at the ceiling and began to sob openly. After a couple of minutes he sat up straight, took another gulp of wine, then gave me a wild look, as if he was entertaining the possibility of cracking the bottle over my head.
After that, I began going to bed earlier.
One morning I woke up to a light rain and saw Victor out my bedroom window, pacing around the front yard, hands on hips, eyeing the base of the house. It turned out the foundation was sketchy and whenever it rained the house was in danger of sliding down the street. (The guesthouse was slowly sinking into the ground.) Apparently, Victor didn’t have the money to remedy the problem—which would’ve required hoisting the entire house and laying a new foundation—so all he could do was pace around, nervously monitoring things and cursing the rain.
Money was a major issue for Victor, in that he didn’t seem to have any. That’s why he was renting out the room in the first place. He was an out-of-work grip trying to bang his way into the union, where all the sweet gigs were. In between his surveys of the foundation of the house, he was on the phone in his bedroom calling his grip buddies for leads on jobs.
That morning, after the rain had stopped, he came bouncing into my room with a manic grin, telling me about a job someone had turned him onto.
“Here’s the thing,” he told me. “I need some clean urine, because these fuckers are going to test me. You mind if I borrow some of yours?”
The request kind of caught me off guard. I think I mumbled something like, “OK,” before I realized what he was asking. Then, before I could clarify the situation, he gave my shoulder a solid squeeze, said, “Thanks, brother,” and bounded back to his room. I thought of following after him and telling him that, in fact, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea, but I could hear him on the phone by then, all hopped up, telling his buddy he was going to take the job.
Later in the day, after Victor had left, packing an airline-size Chivas bottle filled with my urine, I was sitting alone on the back steps of the house wondering whether this scenario might blow back on me somehow. At that moment, I looked up and saw Helga, the beautiful young German, step out of the guesthouse in a terri cloth robe and heels and wave in my direction. I’d never spoken to her before, only nodded and smiled as I came and went from the house, so I wasn’t sure she was signaling to me. Then she tottered across the lawn on her heels and stood at the bottom of the steps. Would I mind photographing her, she asked in a heavy German accent. She had a little digital camera, nothing special, it looked like, and she handed it to me as she talked: something about a foot model job, the internet, I wasn’t sure what. It was hard to concentrate because she had ditched the robe and was standing in front of me now in a black lace thong and bra, asking for suggestions on a good spot to shoot.
“Something that shows off my body,” she said, in a clinical, Teutonic tone.
Soon I was clicking pictures of her stretched out on a lawn chair, leaning over the picnic table, and spread-eagled against the garage door. At one point she ducked into the guesthouse and came out in an ensemble of white lace underwear and matching heels.
I did my best to invest in the scenario, suggesting poses and saying things like, “Yes,” “Nice,” “Fantastic,” like we were shooting somewhere on Ibiza. I thought that might help me convert the Dear Penthouse setup into an actual tryst.
Eventually I became more daring in the poses I suggested, but she simply struck them dutifully, ignoring any entreaties to playfulness. Then, when she stood next to me, examining the pictures I had taken so far, I tentatively reached out and traced my finger along her thigh, telling her how beautiful she was. She looked at me and smiled, to acknowledge this obvious truth, then studied the pictures more closely to see if they had captured it.
No matter what I tried, I wasn’t able to change the dynamic. Her matter-of-fact, European manner about cavorting around in her underwear in the back yard in the middle of the day, coupled with the bright, flat afternoon light, seemed to take the idea of an overtly sexual encounter off the table.
The only whiff of that I got from her was when we were done, and she was putting on her robe and thanking me for my help.
“Now you haff something to think about when you write today,” she said, giving me a wink and a broad, flirtatious smile. Then she turned and tottered into the guesthouse.
Within seconds, I was back in my room jerking off furiously.
That night, Victor came back late. I was on my bed reading one of his Isherwood diaries, with a story from the 40’s about a picnic in Topanga Canyon with Aldous Huxley, Greta Garbo and Krishnamurti, when I heard the front door slam.
“Fuuuuuck!” he yelled, as he stomped past my room into the kitchen.
I gingerly stuck my head into the hall, wondering if there was any way to avoid dealing with him at that particular moment, when he stomped back my way, chugging from a bottle of wine.
“Fucking New York bitch!” he said, pushing the door open.
“What?”
“That whole job was ruined by some fucking New York bitch.”
He started pacing the room.
“Fucking miserable hag wanted me to work til midnight on some goddamn Vanity Fair photo shoot. I spent the whole day taping up 9 by 12’s--using my own money on tape!--so they can shoot some television bitch at Mickey Rooney’s fucking ranch. Can you believe that? I told her I was done for the day—I wasn’t gonna stay there all night—and she starts balking about my money, saying the job wasn’t done, and she wouldn’t ever work with me again, and how I’d been difficult the whole time. When I slaved for that bitch. She better send my check, too, or I’ll follow her back to New York and cut her fucking throat.”
“Meanwhile, check this out,” he said, pulling a large telephoto lens from his parka.
“You took that?”
“Yeah, they’re not gonna know; they have so much shit. So what did you do all day, besides sit around in your sweatpants?”
“Well, I had a little photo shoot of my own. With Helga.”
“Helga in the guesthouse?”
“Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon taking pictures of her in her underwear in the back yard. She said she wanted them for some modeling job, I don’t know.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Why you?” he said, sounding pissed.
“I don’t know. I was here.”
“I knew that bitch was hot. Did you fuck her?”
“What?”
“Did you fuck her?”
“No.”
“You didn’t fuck her?”
“No. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.”
“It wasn’t that kind of vibe?! What does that mean?!”
“It just wasn’t that kind of energy.”
“She’s walking around in her panties in the back yard!”
“I’m telling you, it wasn’t that kind of thing. If you’d have been there, you would’ve seen.”
“If I’da been there I would’ve fucked her on the picnic table!”
“Trust me, it wasn’t like that. I know women--”
“I fucking know women!” he said, stomping out of the room and slamming my door behind him.
“I know ‘em enough to fuck them when they’re asking for it!” he called out, marching down the hallway.
The next thing I heard was the Cutlass engine revving in the carport, then tires squealing down the driveway.
After Victor left I realized I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about the urine sample. I began to wonder if there was some way they could use it to trace the stolen lens back to me. Would they DNA test for a telephoto lens? And who knows what else he did…
That’s when the phone rang in Victor’s room and his machine picked up.
“Victor, this is Marcia Temple,” an angry, piercing voice announced. “You cost a lot of people a lot of money today, and let me tell you, they are not happy about it. My advice to you is to do what you can to rectify the situation, and you know what I mean.”
She called back two or three times over the next couple of hours, leaving even more heated messages. But I couldn’t tell if she knew about the missing lens.
When I went to bed, around two, Victor still hadn’t come home. Meanwhile, I had decided that maybe it was time to get back to New York.
The next morning I waited until Victor had had his coffee, then told him I didn’t think I’d be staying past the end of the month.
“Whatever,” he said, not lifting his head from the newspaper.
We didn’t talk much for the couple of weeks before I left. The calls from Marcia Temple eventually tapered off, so I didn’t feel the need to pursue that. Victor told me he’d have to inspect my room from top to bottom before I’d get my security deposit, and that it’d probably be a while, anyway, since I was leaving on short notice. I didn’t bother to make an issue of it; I had the feeling that when all was said and done, he’d do the stand-up thing.
When the van to the airport rolled up in front of the house on my last morning there, I went to look for Victor. I wanted to say my goodbyes and maybe put a positive cap on the whole experience. I found him on the back steps, hunched over the phone, dialing around for other jobs. I thought of tapping him on the shoulder and giving him a wave, then noticed how tensely contorted his body looked, and thought better of it. Instead, I went back inside, grabbed my things and left.
A light rain had started by the time I loaded my stuff into the van. As we pulled away, I looked out the rear window to see Victor in the front yard, pacing around, hands on hips, eyeing the foundation of the house.

ANDREW BOYD:

How to cuddle.

I met up with Diana at Milano's, a bar down in Noho, just around the corner from my sublet on Mott St. It was back when my father was still alive. I'd been living for several months in a scrappy studio a few blocks from my parents' apartment. We ordered a couple of Black and Tan's. Diana and I had been friends since college. We don't see each other that often, but when we do there's a light, flirtatious energy between us, that on this night the beers stoked right up. After 20 juke-box songs and another couple rounds we quit the place. As we walked out onto Houston Street I was remembering that our last evening together had also ended with us on Houston Street, also with us a little drunk. I remembered getting nervous right at the end. Should I make a move? Do I even want anything to happen? But just as we flagged her down a cab, I figured why the heck not and invited her over. She demurred, saying she didn't want to mess up our friendship. So there.
This time I said, "Look, why don't you just come upstairs and we'll cuddle?" I'm sure it sounded like the oldest and lamest trick in the book. But the thing was, I wasn't trying to trick her, and I wasn't even trying to trick myself. That was all I wanted to do. I wasn't particularly horny. I too liked our friendship where it was. But I was lonely—and I was thinking that maybe she was too. I wanted companionship. I wanted physical closeness. I didn't want to fuck, I just wanted to cuddle. I really really really wanted to cuddle.
She looked at me askance. "Cuddle?"
"Yes, cuddle."
"OK. That would be nice, actually."
We went upstairs, washed up, and—with some uncertainty as to protocol—stripped down to our t-shirts and underwear. We climbed into bed, and we were cuddling, and it was nice. I was spooning her: her shoulders up against my chest, my knees under her thighs, that one extra arm you wish was detachable, scrunched into the bed, my other hand curled around that lovely spot on a woman just where her hip turns into her waist, pulling her gently closer. So there we were cuddling, talking softly. We were still a little tipsy, and there was still a trace of the chemistry we had at the bar. Were we just going to lie there cuddling? The big test. We were both with somebody new, we were curious. Was I going to just rest my hand on her hip, without wanting to slide my way down her thigh, or run my fingers up along her flank, and collarbone, and at least brush my forearm against the outer curves of her breast? So there we were cuddling: neither of us talking now, me spooning her, me running my hands slowly, tenderly over her, kissing her shoulders. And it felt sweet, almost Platonic. Yes, Platonic. OK: I was touching her thighs and brushing against her breast, and we're mostly naked and lying in bed, and inevitably I'm getting a little hard and there are no chaperones—but it felt Platonic. And it felt good. And it was all I wanted to do. Nothing more. For once: I'd told a woman I just wanted to cuddle, I'd told myself I just wanted to cuddle—and it turns out to be true, it holds true.
"Look," she said, pulling herself away, and sitting up in the bed, "We're going to have to fuck—or I'm gonna have to leave."
"Uh..." My face, even in the half-light, must have let on some of my dismay.
"Look, I should probably just go."
Through her t-shirt I could see that her left nipple was hard. "And those are my only choices?" I asked.
She nodded.
But I really just wanted to cuddle. I didn't want to fuck. I didn't want to get all wet and squirmy and deal with organs. I just wanted to cuddle (well, and maybe touch a bit). Why couldn't we just lie there together (and touch a bit), and wake up in the morning together, all warm and entangled? But she was serious. It was all or nothing for her, and there was no way I was going to send her home in the middle of the night. So, we fucked. And it wasn't too weird. Actually, it was OK. And then, finally, we cuddled. And it was a lovely thing to again be bundled up in her smell and warmth. And as we drifted off to sleep, I was thinking about all the things a guy has to go through sometimes just to cuddle.


WILLIAMS COLE:

Giuliani's Fantasy

My Diary Entry – October, 2006
By Rudy Giuliani

Look people, I’m not stupid. I’m writing this now with the knowledge that, if all goes according to plan, what I say will be open for all the activists and wimpy dimps to see. And as I’ve commanded it, they’ll see it on September 11th 2020, at the 6th Anniversary of the Giuliani 9/11 Memorial National Security and Crime Reduction Center.

But by then I’ll have nothing to lose, so now I want to impart my no nonsense wisdom. As a straight shooter, I just want to give you my take on what’s going on in late 2006. I ain’t going to mince words. I’m going straight up pre - 9/11 Rudy. Boy, did I have fun in those days.

This is what I think: Basically, I’m going to be President. He he he. “Sure you are, Rudy,” many people say. They say I love homos, abortion and tail too much.
“The Christers will never let you in. You’ve even got a vowel at the end of your name” they say.

Yeah, well let me tell you. It’s close to the midterm and the days of the Last Days folks are coming to their last days. They had their shot, starting back in the early 80s. Trust me, I know. When I was in the Reagan administration those guys were like pushing up at our nuts all the time. They fluttered about, motivated and singular in their zeal. Even Ronny didn’t know what to do with them sometimes. Yet he slurped their biscuits up with a grin. He was grateful. They made inroads. And after the Bush-Reagan years they were only just primed. By the late 90s the base was really stroked. But let me say that going after Bill and Monica’s oral high jinx was I think some, let’s say, premature ejaculation.

I’ll explain, but let me say first that I learned a lot from that crew.

Look, I went to NYU in the 60s maaaan, I knew about context, about the grayness of it all. But then I saw these Christers coming up with all these over the top proclamations from God with this certainty. They weren’t wavering even though they were drinking four bottles of sherry and licking each others’ shoes (I swear I saw some young Christian Coalition guys do that once at one of Casey’s parties in ’82). And they stayed on point even though they had naked time with each other (Look, back then, you either hung at the lake house with Foley or not. I didn’t, end of story).

Hell, they were the ones who really pushed getting all that coke money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. And NO ONE said anything. It was like anything was acceptable if it contributed to the means to get to the ends. I could relate to that! I learned from that.

Let me put it this way: what I learned is that Gray is NOT the way. If you want to be poor and weak than you should believe in context and be a progressive or whatever you want to call it. If you want to be powerful and maybe rich then you put forth the black vs. white, us vs. them, in certainties – no matter what you’re doing. It’s fucking simple people.

OK, so that’s not serving Georgie and Co. well anymore. But the thing is that they really don’t have the chops. That’s to say, how can a Christer like Dubya really be tough? Toughness is certainty with respect. Why do you think I used to always mimic Don Corleone? The WASPs just don’t have it. Old Ronny Reagan wasn’t tough. Georgie Boy, even when in jeans and a cowboy hat isn’t tough. Even when he tries to be all pissed off it looks dumb, right? Look back at the tapes, he looks like he’s about to smile all the time, chuckle or something. It’s embarrassing.

Real toughness means intelligently knowing your enemy. Back in my Mayoral days all I had to do was size up the enemies at hand. C’mon, Al Sharpton? Hippy activists? Professors? Please. All the general American public cares about (and OH YES I was always thinking about them!) is the price reduction for the matinee of Phantom of the Opera or, you guessed it, terrorists destroying the biggest fucking buildings on the East Coast.

So, to all you snotty New Yorkers who go on about civil liberties and the poor and all that, I was like: “bring it on!” And while you’re at it throw some documentary filmmakers in the mix, even Michael Moore if you can get him off the can. Bushie and the Boys – well, they were messing with fire and their horse blinders just burned away and sizzled their eyeballs.

The Last Days folks? I think they’ll just stop hovering for a bit and touch the ground, eat a little dirt. I’ve talked to their leaders and they like me. If things go like I think they will, they will need my REAL toughness to keep the pansy-wansies out of office. They know that. Even the Christers are getting pissed at Bushie and his Boys. I mean, their sons are the ones with no limbs or fragments buried in their abdomens. And, as much as they’re obsessed with the moral rules that preachers have shoved down their throats for so long, really they are also as much a Hollywood obsessed, perverted and substance-abusing bunch like the rest of us (though they do do it in their own way!).

The reality is (remember that phrase of mine, it’s one that keeps on giving!). The reality is that I’ve created my own world. And it’s a world of 9/11 dust. That dust travels into the gullets of the country and stays there. The footage of me covered with that dust, decisively walking right when the towers fell, is the contemporary version of MacArthur walking onto the beach with wet pant cuffs.

I’m the future Mr. Security. The Mambo King of Anti Terror. No one can take that away from me! Just try it! I decree a moral imperative of toughness. And I will take that into the gullets of the world. And I will take you lily livered liberals with me, just as I did in New York City.

The strength of fear is the primary strength. And America is all about fear. And I love fear more than most Americans do. You want freedom? Well, freedom is about authority and it is ruled by toughness. Freedom is really about fear.

(pause)

Wow, I’ll tell you, writing in a diary is a lot of fun. I get carried away. But after this coming November Tuesday, I have no doubts that my phone will be ringing off the hook.

One more thing: If I’ve fucked up and I wasn’t President – Jesus, O Glorious Father, will you please have me in your Kingdom. Remember, my gullet is chock full of 9/11 dust!

STEPHEN DUNCOMBE:

Politics in an Age of Fantasy


In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U. S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles it was well-written, well-researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon to be (in)famous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president. The exchange went like this:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in an oversized, multicolored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.
What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much liberal and left animosity and felt something else: excited, inspired….and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.
How could my reaction be so different from so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there is something about progressive politics that has become increasingly problematic.
The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan of “Take your desires for reality” were now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. The left and right had switched roles: the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”
Dreams often make those left-of-center nervous. Fantasy and spectacle have been the property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism, and, more recently, the unspeakable horror known as Entertainment Tonight. Traditionally we are more comfortable with those things mumbled by the Times reporter underneath his breath: “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.”
It’s not surprising that progressives feel an affinity for the Enlightenment and empiricism. It was empiricism that broke the Church’s grip on the interpretation of the world. By challenging the Church on its explanations of the physical world, the empiricists opened up an assault on its political and spiritual power as well. Likewise, the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, reasoning creature undermined the hierarchies of feudalism and the foundations of divine right. Traditional “common sense” held that common people could not govern themselves nor act orderly in the marketplace. Contesting these assumptions cleared the way for new forms of politics and economics. The religious festivals and entertaining spectacles mobilized by church and crown to excite or divert the masses and cement religious or royal power could now be replaced by town meetings and coffee houses where enlightened citizens debated the issues of the day. These reasonable citizens, understanding reality as it is and not as it is imagined, would guide democracy and rationalize the market, breaking forever with a reactionary past cloaked in magic, mystery, and manipulation. In other words, and more to the point, progressives throughout history embraced the Enlightenment and empiricism because historically these ideas were progressive.
But all this is history. Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of the past, or rather, past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images, political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news. More and more of the economy is devoted to marketing and entertainment or the performance of scripted roles in the service sector. We live in a “society of the spectacle,” as the French theorist provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. Yet, faced with this new world progressives are still acting out a script inherited from the past. This is a mistake, for those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.
Walter Lippmann, the influential writer, popular newspaper editor and informal political adviser to nearly every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, argued that democratic theory has little to do with democratic practice. Democratic theory resides in the coffee houses and government buildings where enlightened men hold reasoned conversations, examine evidence, and arrive at rational decisions. Theoretical democracy is a heady process. Its practice aims a bit lower. To win elections among a large and diverse population and get the majority to agree upon policy or go along with decisions, politicians, like their commercial counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, speak to people’s fantasies and desires through a language of images and associations. By manipulating symbols, exploiting memories, and spinning stories the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. “The practice of democracy has turned a corner,” Lippmann argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” He called this revolution the Manufacture of Consent.
Those of us opposed to rule by a political elite learned an important lesson from Lippmann. If democracy is to be sustained, and citizens are to truly govern their lives, then the manufacture of consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed. Political stagecraft must be relentlessly attacked with our arsenal of facts and reason.
We learned the wrong lesson.
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form. A politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational. A politics that employs symbols and associations. A politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.

JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER AND AMY RICHARDS;

Introduction: Take the Cake, Girls.

Courtney Love is already more exposed than her journals could possibly reveal. Still, you get the feeling that she'd be furious if she caught you reading her diaries. That is part of the essence of Courtney: a contradiction. Hiding behind her dramatic persona is actually a very ordinary girl and the girl who seeks what Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann called “mass love” doesn’t edit herself for the sake of public approval. She’s one of those rare people who might be exactly the same wherever she is and whomever she is with, whether it is walking down the red carpet or solo in her house checking her email. She’s always Courtney Love, difficult but rewarding.

In many ways Dirty Blonde is a kind of performance, just like her Hole shows, her star turns as Althea Leasure (Larry Flynt's wife) or Lynn Margulies (Andy Kaufman's girlfriend), and her make outs with Drew Barrymore. She's bad and brilliant, surprising and predictable. Performing comes naturally to Courtney, as do her other attributes: being passionate, political, spontaneous, and vicious. Despite Courtney's sporadic claims throughout the book that she doesn't want these tknumber pages published—that “the editors are idiots” and she doesn't want her “fucking diary published!” (in her words)—she loves to be in the public eye.

But why do we—the public—care about Courtney Love? Why should her diaries be published? People love Courtney, in part, because she is easy to hate—fulfilling the role of “bad” woman to catch our free-floating cultural anxieties about women in general. For some, she is a modern day Yoko Ono—the real reason the guitar gods are no longer with us—and punished with rumors and anti-woman screeds. For others, she is simply iconic. She is like Roseanne or Sandra Bernhard, she takes up space and causes problems and never says sorry. She is the spiritual daughter of Janis Joplin—wild, smart, un-beautifully sexy, boy crazy and vulnerable to drugs’ dark allure. She's also a rawer version Madonna—she isn't a victim of sex, she wields the power, and she controls her image. And yet, after all that, she's just an average girl we can relate to: “In her little-girl dresses and bright red lipstick, Courtney Love gave more the impression of a child playing dress up than of an adult rock star,” writes Debbie Stoller, Bust's co-founder and editor in the Bust Guide to the New Girl Order. “Her girlie-girl style, coupled with her very unladylike, out-of-control performances, helped to convey her rebellion against the stereotype of the demure, selfless female and won her loyal following of young women who were grasping for a model of female adulthood and sexuality that could include anger and aggression.”

An amalgam of letters, emails, song lyrics, photos and mementos, these diaries are the emotional fragments of an outcast girl, a troubled teenager, a striving twentysomething, a superstar mother in her thirties, and a somewhat tragic figure in her forties. Looking at that characterization, Courtney might say, Fuck you. Her ambition and her ability to constantly reinvent herself defy feminine conventions. She is unscripted—and that is a frightening state for a woman, which makes her all the more heroic.

People love Courtney because she's fragile and yet protects herself by being over-confident and by exposing herself before others get the satisfaction of doing so, not unlike other iconic (tragic) women like Marylin Monroe and Billie Holiday. The fact is that Love is seeking attention for reasons many women understand—she wants love and feels ugly and drank too much and made mistakes and all of that is part of her allure. She's not perfect, but she's powerful—she’s human.

People love Courtney because she is an icon—not due to her crazy antics, but because she has been an emboldening presence in the lives of so many women and girls. The real essence of Courtney is her impact, the storms she leaves in her wake, the gumption and defiance she so naturally inhabits and makes possible for others to possess. Because of Courtney Love, there are 22-year-olds who picked up guitars, 16-year-old girls in Ohio who learned about feminism by reading the word in a SPIN interview with Courtney, and women who don’t feel held back by society’s expectation of what it means to be a lady. Girls and women, including us, have been inspired to be more aggressive and to ask for more because of Love's example.

“I want to be the girl with the most cake,” she sings in “Doll Parts”. And who wouldn't want to be?

—Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
New York City
June 2006

September 2006

The September incarnation of Rant Rhapsody brought some new folks to the stage, as well as some familiar faces. It was, as uaual, funny, sexy, irreverent, poignant, sentimental, silly and infuriating. Matty Vaz reprised for us, as did Jason-Flores Williams. New faces were Marika Josephson, Savitri Durkee, and, of Course, Reverend Billy. Here is what they read. OUT LOUD.

REVEREND BILLY

"Friends"

FRIENDS

At the time of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, I went through a time of death. Friends, and friends of friends, were passing away. People in their 20’s and 30’s or their 90’s. Lots of other friends were in prison, jailed by Republican-led police who couldn’t read, or wouldn’t read, the Constitution. So we were embarking on a time of slow motion lawsuits and hushed memorials.

*****

Every day that week of the RNC -- I tried to take a long bike ride through the park near my home, before going into Manhattan for the puppetry and chanting and die-ins and re-enactments of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and performances of long unemployment lines – Peace work. On one of those days, I was peddling through the park and saw that the gate to the Quaker cemetery was left open. Someone was working on the grounds. I had never seen the gate to the war resisters’ remains open like this.

I walked in. I found the caretaker down in one of the centuries-old groups of bodies, below the gate in a dark swale. The trees here are primeval. It is said that this is the original forest, never logged, one of the few in New York City. The white oaks with their great operatic branches go up and up. I got the generous hand-wave yes -- I could walk around, and I wheeled my bike up toward higher forests and meadows filled with sunlight.

At the fork in the road, where it divided to go in a circle around the forest and around the graves, I stopped again. Tiered back into the hill, were many dead, whose presence was now becoming the fact of my visit, that unmistakable ruling stillness. Then I noticed a sign, about as tall as me, really a thick totem-pole kind of thing, painted white. Vertical black letters made words down the sides of the pole, and I saw that on the faceted surface of this pole, as I walked around it, were messages in English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, Indian and Russian.
a
“Let Peace Prevail on the Earth.” That is what it said, with the “Let” on the high end and the “Earth” down near the grass. Then I looked up the hill at the graves, the separate small cemeteries from different Friends’ meetings in the city, and from different times in history. Hundreds of them up there, old bodies and child’s bodies. I became aware of my status in my upright body, steadying my bike with one living hand, this extraordinary living body loaned to me by some mysterious source.

These people under the grass of this beautiful hill had worked for Peace. They are Friends. They are Quakers. This pole with the eight hopeful prayers came from the authority of all that work. I could feel the hope for Peace down in the minutes of their lives, in each heartbeat, now steadied in the larger heartbeat of this lovely park. The eight Peace prayers kept repeating as I walked by the names and the years and days.

Then a new feeling swept through me from all this, an unmistakable feeling that would, I sensed this right away – that this would always be there for me to remember. All the deaths around my community and family in recent weeks had somehow conspired to give the feeling of something terribly wrong in the world. From the Sudan and Chechnya to my neighbors and friends -- it all felt that way. And the hopelessness was not exactly the worst of it. There was something darker than your usual hopelessness. There was the feeling that life actively did not make sense - not so much the absence of hope but the presence of good peoples’ deaths in a pattern of directed confusion. We were being beaten by life, surrounded by a re-awakened death, a death that didn’t fit at the end of the life. These last weeks I’d felt the presence of the demons I never believed in.

But the feeling I had that day - there at the strange language pole on the road through the graves – came from this phrase that these people had agreed to repeat as one by one they passed into the hill. Let Peace Prevail on the Earth. The dead Friends were saying this to me in unison. The leafy shadows and pops of sunlight moved back and forth across the gravestones. I could hear them talking, looking up from all their work. Let Peace Prevail on the Earth.

It was one of those thoughts that had been waiting a long time. It came through me like a physical aftermath. The peace message is spoken by the dead here and also by the living who painted the pole and know that they will go into the earth here soon. They both speak “Let Peace Prevail…” at the same time. It’s an intra-life chorus. The faith is: when you live your life making more life, then death fits into it, because life wasn’t cheated by premature bullets or bombs. The Peaceful dead have their fully wrought lives continuing in the world, as they rest. They have sent life out beyond themselves and the living are reading this script too, the words looping in and out of the ground.

We can leave this simple wish up in the sun for the living to understand while they pass by. I will say this too.

MATTY VAZ:

"Lou Dobbs Ain’t No Damn Indian"

“At the bridge today,” explains a man waiting for the R train at 36th street in Sunset Park, on April 1st. “I been here eleven years. Luchando cada dia. Perro hoy, vamos a celebrar. It’s a day to show pride. To let people know we live here. We work here. No somos criminales. Somos obreros, and we love New York City. We love Mexico too. That’s why we got the flags,” he explains as he points to his two friends, who are both holding flags of red, green, and white. “My name? Emiliano. Emiliano Z., from Morelos Mexico, home of the revolution.”
At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge tens of thousands have gathered on a cold and rainy day to put together New York City’s first show of strength in the political and social debate over the fate of the many millions of immigrants who are currently in the United States without the official sanction of the government. But in downtown Brooklyn there is no debate at all. There is only agreement. An agreenment that HR 447 must go. The controversial bill, constructed by congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner, which seeks to make felons of all undocumented immigrants, has woken up the political force of latinos around the nation, and has reminded New York City, that the town most closely associated with immigration cannot sit on the sidelines at this important moment. That is why so many flags are waving and so many people are chanting “Si Se Puede!”
A human stream spans the length of the bridge as people march, chant, and wave to the cars that are backed up on the exit ramps. The Brooklyn bound drivers honk their horns in solidarity with those on their feet. A woman takes the blue and white flag of Barbados off the headrest of her car seat, and waves it out the window. “Somebody shoulda call me,” she shouts. “Why nuhbody didn’t call me. If you havin’ rally, next time, call me up,” she says as she honks her horn. The marchers wave and blow their whistles in response and then continue across the bridge. On the Manhattan side, the crowd is blessed by Reverendo Rueben Diaz, and everyone agrees to meet up once again on April 10th, at city hall.

On the 10th of April, at the 36th street train station in Sunset Park, a transit worker, Ernestine Woods, explains that there is an immigrant on trial at the State Supreme Court building in Downtown Brooklyn. “They prolly gone give ‘im twenty five to life. ‘Cause that’s how they do,” She explains as she hoists a garbage bag out of a garbage can and begins to tie it up. “That’s how they do. Lock you up an’ throw away the key. They maybe don’t even have no key.”
Ms. Woods proves correct, in that there is indeed an immigrant on trial. On the seventh floor of the State Supreme Court building, a man from Trinidad, by the name of Roger T., stands in front of Judge Theodore Jones, inside of a packed courtroom. The front row and the jury box are filled with dozens of journalists, all of them white, except for Ray Sanchez of New York Newsday. The back rows are filled with transit workers, most of them black, many of them grandmothers. The lawyer representing the Attorney General of the State of New York, a towering man, stands and explains why we are all gathered together. “We are here because at approximately 3am on December 20th, Mr. Roger Toussaint announced a system wide strike. When asked about the legality of that strike, he said only, ‘There is the law and there is justice.’” The judge hands down a ten-day sentence for the man from Trinidad, and the courtroom empties out.
The many workers who had filled the back of the courtroom, now fill an entire car on a Manhattan bound R train. Two female passengers riding the train look on in shock and confusion, as the sight of TWU Local 100 colors leave them wondering if the strike is on again. “Don’t worry darlin’. We just goin’ to the immigration rally,” explains a female transit worker, carrying a sign that says “We Are All Immigrants.” At City Hall the group climbs the steps to join the crowd that has gathered together to inform the government of their intentions.
Flags are waving everywhere. Ecuador, Mexico Haiti, Peru, Guyana, Panama, Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Russia, Honduras, El Salvador, Ireland, China, and countless other nations are all represented. The crowd shouts, “Si Se Puede!” and “Un Pueblo Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido!” Many famous politicians have already spoken and gone home for the day. Yet the crowd continues to grow. Large television screens and banks of speakers have been set up every few blocks so that the crowd can see and hear whoever is at the podium. The speakers at the podium express pride and call out to the various nations on hand.
“This is beautiful. You can only love this,” explains David Abney, a 63 year old guidance counselor from Crown Heights Brooklyn. “All these people. It’s a beautiful thing. They parta this country, jus’ like Goerge Bush is. I was born here. But I’m glad to see these folks. Happy they could join us. And man, that borders wide-open baby. People runnin’ for they lives. And I’m happy to see ‘em when they get here. We gotta get ‘em some rights now. But see, a lotta people don’t want that. They want business as usual. Jus’ happy makin’ money. They rely on indentured servitude. But we lookin’ to change all that. We out here for total amnesty. See, you gotta know your history brother man. This country is based on total amnesty. You got Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. They started a war in the name of slavery, and half a million people got killed. And you see what they got. They didn’t spend one day in jail. They got total amnesty. So we out here in the American tradition. Total Amnesty.”
Signs with political messages are spread around, interspersed among the flags and the faces of the young and old. “This is a family day,” explains Carmita Oquendo from Ecuador. “Everybody is out here in peace. Look, there’s more babies than grown ups. There’s whole entire families. I’m here with my mother, my father, my bother, my sister, my nephew, and my niece,” she explains as she points to her brother who is wearing a shirt that says “End Deportation Now,” and her nephew who is a baby in a stroller, waving a Jesus flag.
“Kyan’t deport peace an’ love,” explains a man with a Jamaican flag draped over his back. “Kyan’t deport love. Y’undastan’ bruddah? Kyan’t deport love. All de people yuh see here. Dem ‘ave only love. Look on de news bruddah. Is hijackin’an’ kidnappin’ all ovah de eart’. Is war everywhere. But de people on de street today. Dem don’ ‘ave not one tank an’ gun. Yuh see dem bruddah? Dem don’ ‘ave not one tank an’ gun. Dem ‘ave only one love. My name? Mista Brown. Mista Dennis Brown, livin’ in Flatbush Brooklyn.”
Mr. Muaad Al-Hamza from Yemen has been here for three years. “I am living in one-furty-five streed. I wurdk in store,” he explains. “Evryday is haad wurdk. Evrybuddy wunt to play mega-meellion. Bacon, egg and cheese. Shouting and screaming. Is haad wurdk. But this is my home. In one-furty-five streed. Muaad from Yemen.”
Bobby McCoy is a union electrician, who arrived in New York from Ireland six years ago. “Legalize the Irish. That’s what I’m tellin’ ya. Hell legalize everything green. Bush seen how hard we work. How hard all the immigrants work. Legalize everybody,” he shouts as he is swept along with the crowd.
A man with a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around one wrist and a Dominican flag wrapped around the other, stands on a manhole cover, as the crowd streams past him on all sides. “Nah. I ain’t movin’ papa. I was born right here. They givin’ electric shocks in New York City. On the manhole covers son. You step on a manhole cover and catch a shock, then Bloomberg gives you a million dollars. It was in the Post. He gives you a million cash. He keeps it right in his pocket. That’s why I’m not movin’. Even when this is over. I’ll be right here, cars swervin’ around me. I’m not movin. Yo look at that bullshit,” he says as he gestures to one of the large screens, which is flashing the number 125,000. “You gotta be kiddin’ me. Its way more people than that out here. Cops hasslin’ people everywhere. Half these Mexicans just waved they flag then turned around and went home. Who gave ‘em that number? Pataki? They brought Giulianni back so he could count people? They got that number from the New York Post. That’s why we gotta boycott the Post. They stay lyin’ all day and all night. Its no less than less than five million people out here right now. Maybe ten million. Somewhere between five and ten million people. No question papa. See everybody just does what Bloomberg says. Bloomberg says its only eleven people out here, then its only eleven people out here. Bloomberg says George Steinbrenner needs to use your livin’ room, then you just go outside an’ wait ‘till he’s done. C’mon man. No. I’m not movin’ from this manhole cover. I’m tellin’ you that right now. Uh oh. Look at this guy. They brought this guy out here now,” he says, as he gestures to the screen once again. “Nobody move, nobody gets hurt.”
Featured on the giant screen was the man from Trinidad, who had recently arrived from downtown Brooklyn. “I just came from the State Supreme Court,” he explains. “They say I’m a criminal, and the leader of 35,000 criminals. I am to go to jail….There is something wrong with this country when 11 and a half million people are called criminals just for trying to do an honest days work and take care of their families in the richest country in the world…..Everybody here today should think long and hard about what is happening here in America. We have a government that creates immigrants by the millions, and then mistreats them when they get here. If you have tyranny and oppression and famine and poverty around the world, you are going to have immigrants coming to the US. No wall is going to stop them. No fence with barbed wire on the Mexican border or frozen moat on the Canadian border. It will just make it easier to arrest and brutalize them. We don’t need a wall. We need a new foreign policy so people can make a decent living and live in peace in their home countries…. If we are all criminals, America needs a new set of laws. That’s why we say, NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE! Say it with me. NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!”
“You know what’s gonna happen to that guy right,” said manhole cover man. “See, he told Pataki to go fuck himself. Now he’s out here shoutin’ with all these Mexicans. Man, he’s gonna be in Guantanamo Bay. That’s where he’s headed. Guantanamo Bay. I’m not playin’ wit’ chu papa. For real. And I ain’t movin’ from this spot for nobody. That’s between me an’ Bloomberg. I want total amnesty. Total amnesty for all these people out here. Bush and them clowns started a war, and killed all those people, and they got amnesty. They shoulda got the electric chair. But they got amnesty. They said they did it so the Iraqis could vote. Guess what. These people right here wanna vote too. But chu don’t need no goddamned war about it. We want amnesty like Bush and them got. But man, you got this guy on TV everynight. The fat guy on CNN cryin’ about immigration. Yeah, Lou Dobbs. Exactly. Yo this guy, maaan. He’s too much. Let him mow his own motherfuckin’ lawn. You know what I’m sayin’. Let him deliver Chinese food on a bicycle. Ridin’ around Brooklyn an’ shit. Gettin’ robbed for tips in the stairwell. Fat bastard. Lou Dobbs ain’t no damn Indian. Everyday on TV shoutin’ call the police. Stop cryin’ arready man. Damn! You could write that down. You could tell ‘im I said that. He could look me up in the phone book. My last name is Perez. If its more than one Perez in the phone book, I’m the one that’s in the Bronx,” he concludes as he remains planted on the manhole cover, while the crowd continues to flood past him
Pablo Picatto, an immigrant from Mexico, is a professor of Latin American History at Columbia University. “We are seeing something very important,” he explains, as he looks at all of the faces around him. “People are asserting themselves. They realize this situation of having no rights cannot go on indefinitely. People are realizing this on a massive scale. And we are witnessing something that goes beyond this day. Something that goes beyond this year. Something historic.”
Perhaps he is right. After all, we got Emiliano Z. from Morelos Mexico out here. And we got Roger T. from Trinidad who announced a system wide strike at 3am on December 20th. And we got Ecuador, Mexico Haiti, Peru, Guyana, Panama, Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Russia, Honduras, El Salvador, Ireland, China, countless other nations, and evryday is haad wurdk. They givin’ electric shocks in New York City, and its five to ten million people out here, an’ dem don’ ‘ave not one tank an’ gun. The border’s wide-open baby, and people runnin’ for they lives. Bring your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your niece. Don’t worry about Lou Dobbs. He ain’t no damn Indian. He sees the baby with the Jesus flag, and he shouts call the police. He needs to learn the words. Si Se Puede! Total Amnesty New York City! One Love! No Justice, No Peace!

SAVITRI DURKEE:

Short Lila- a rant

I was at a big store buying underwear. They were of different colors and patterns and happened to be on sale. I was broke, but not too broke to buy four pairs of silk underwear for no other reason than they happened to be on sale. I could buy things, I just didn’t have any cash. The line was very long, I stood behind eight other people, three of whom had carts and coupons. I estimated I would be there for at least twenty minutes. I eavesdropped.
A man said,
Oh he knew what he was doing allright
and a woman said
well he’s never exactly been in his right mind.
and the man said
you say that whenever someone does something stupid.
and she said
well it’s the truth.
And he said
No it ain’t. it aint the truth, he’s in his right mind allright, he
just plays dumb so nobody’ll blame him for anything.
and she said
I ain’t saying he’s not to blame, I’m saying he’s never been, as
far as I can tell, in his right mind.
And the man, loudly,
Oh bullshit Pauline.
and they were quiet.
I had been up to that point, on the man’s side, the man talking. The woman had a weak voice and seemed untrustworthy. They were joined by a fat young boy in a monster truck t shirt.
Mom, he said, gimme fity cent so I can get me a soda. She gave him fifty cents and a minute later he returned from the machine to stand beside her.
Mom, he said, you think I could get one of them hats? He pointed at a shelf stocked with blaze orange hunting hats in all different styles.
Which one she said
I don’t know, he said. He walked over to the shelf.
He started trying them on. His hair was black. He checked them all in the mirror, one after another. As far as I could tell they all looked about the same.
What kind does Jimmy have? his mother said, and the man, who
had been silent for a while said, Who the hell cares what kind of hat Jimmy has?
Well I was just wanting to know, she said,
Jimmys’ like this, the boy said, holding up a mesh baseball cap with a long brim, but I don’t like it, he said, and I don’t like
Jimmy much neither.
Boy, don’t you get smart with your mother, the man said. You watch yourself, he said, I’ll whup you.
You get whichever one you want, the mom said and the father said, no, he ain’t getting one. Boy you go on outside that door before you spend all my money. he said
But they’re only two dollars, the boys said,with a little whine in his voice
and his father yelled, loud, so everyone stared, Boy, I told you, get the hell outside the door and quit running your mouth.
Ahead of them a lady holding some lottery tickets winced and smiled at the boy sympathetically. The line inched forward and the couple was silent behind me. I wondered how they met. The man walked away from the woman towards a tower of reading glasses. He was lean and his skin was blasted white. He tried on glasses in much the same way his son had
tried on the hats, stooping and glancing at each pair in the mirror, taking them off and then cramming them carelessly back on the rack.
Why you trying those on, the woman asked
Because.
He put on a pair of very thick magnifying glasses and looked right at me, his pupils enlarged to the size of poker chips. He glared , I was frightened and looked away. He came back and handed the chosen pair to his wife.
Why you getting those, she asked again
Because, he said, I’m old and I can’t see.
Oh. said his wife.
Suddenly it became clear that the boy, their boy, was fighting
with three girls on the sidewalk outside. Their shouts weren’t loud enough to hear through the glasss but when the man opened the door the words yo, fat and ass hammered through. The man grabbed his son by the arm and dragged him off down the street..
I felt funny. And I guessed I didn’t need those panties at all., what I needed, I realized, was to get away from there. I abandoned my purchase on a mountain of discount candies and ran out the door. I turned down the alley toward my car and saw the man and his son in front of a truck down the block. The father was hitting the boy in the face . The son was already crying and exhausted, his arms rising to his face for protection a little to late, a little too low. He was programmed to lose. I screamed really loud and threw myself across the hood of a car. The metal was hot in the sun.Perfect for a cat, I thought. Then it was like someone shook me awake. I opened my eyes. The man and his son were gone, their truck was gone, the whole street looked empty. Everything had changed.
I went back to the store and recovered my panties from the mound of candy and dried up chocolate. I got in the line , and considered the man in front of me. He was buying plastic flowers and a gold framed print of a cheetah, he had sneakers on and his pants did not fit very well, the cashier rang up his order and he handed her a credit card just like mine.

Flag- a rhapsody

There was a day in the seventh grade, when I still had perfect marks and got selected for extra activities like door decoration and flag duty and that day I asked if Jason Ivey could come with me to take it down because the kid who usually did it with me was home sick and I couldn’t fold the flag alone and the teacher said okay fineyou have 23 minutes exactly.
It was autumn, October, the trees were changing color and the fields had started to harden and gray, Jason and I hid behind a rust colored van and smoked stolen pot out of a small wooden pipe. A few fields away we could see the school busses lining up at the elementary school. We were talking about the Russians. It would be a day like this. He said. With little clouds and a dangerous blue sky, I said, They will choose a great day to destroy us, I said don’t you think? We we weren’t scared though, not at all, we were laughing. By then we only had 12 minutes to get the flag, fold it and be back in class so we ran to the pole, and started taking it down. We weren’t paying attention, or were hurrying to much and we tangled the rope badly, and then we just kept making the knot worse, I could hear the blood in my ears, and fingers felt rubbery and time got all slippery. Jason found a piece of metal and wedged it in the knot and we finally got it open and the flag slid down on the rope and then we had that big flag in our arms like a quilt and I told Jason maybe I didn’t think it would be on a day like this , if we were going to have that war we already would have, or even maybe we have already had, I mean other than the time we already did ---why are you saying “we” he asked me---why do you keep saying we?
And then everyone started pouring out of our school, in tidy little rows, and they came out of the elementary school too, everyone, dozens of little lines if people pouring out, like worms escaping an apple and Jason and I shook our heads in disbelief- “I knew it, he said, I knew it and I felt a pit in my stomach opening like thunder and we dropped that flag and started running, straight at the school as fast as we could, until I saw our teacher waving at us, with both arms, like he was directing a plane---and I grabbed Jason’s arm and steered him away toward the soccer fields and we ran and ran until we were just into the woods on the far side of the goal and only then did we dare look back – and everyone was just going back inside, the buildings were still there and the sky was still blue and the little kids were piling on the busses and jason started laughing and said, “it’s a fire drill.” And my eyes fell on a deer, standing motionless in the trees, 50 yards in front of me, looking back at me. I grabbed Jason’s arm, but he was still laughing and didn’t see her, we turned and started the long walk back across the fields toward the pole and the great big flag in a little heap beneath the rope.


MARIKA JOSEPHSON:

A Memo from Rummy
by Marika Josephson

September 1, 2006

From: Donald Rumsfeld Office of the Secretary of Defense To: Democrats

RE: My Job Performance

Dear Democrats,

My word, you’d think the sky was falling and the world was about to collapse with the way that all of you have been complaining recently. All I hear these days is “Rumsfeld is incompetent for this,” and “Fire Rumsfeld for doing that.” My goodness, I’ve never seen people get into such a tizzy over a job! I know that most of you Nazi-loving ex-hippie, ex-flower children haven’t spent much time thinking about the strategies of war, so let me try to highlight our main defense mechanisms in words that even you can understand. That way you’ll all know how complicated the work is over here in Defense and you can all quit your bellyaching.

1. Things Explode

So you’re worried about body armor, are you? Well let me tell you something: When you’re at war, things explode. That’s just the way it is. We put large bombs on airplanes, the airplanes drop the bombs on the ground, and the bombs break open into gigantic fireballs that throw pieces of building and earth everywhere. You think body armor is going to save you from that? Of course people are going to get hurt—don’t you think that some people probably pulled a hangnail when we dropped the bombs over Hiroshima? But let’s remember that Iraqis can pick up and leave Iraq any time they want—nobody’s forcing them to stay in a country filled with militant Islamo-fascists. So if some “innocent” people are killed, they’re not completely innocent if they refuse to leave their godless, warring nation, are they? Remember, the death of inno_cents_ is not the same as the death of innocence. If Iraqis die—hey, dying happens. We had to break some eggs to get rid of the Nazis during World War II, didn’t we?

2. You’re Not Allowed to Know Everything

Secondly, you’re not allowed to know everything—it’s called national security. Let’s not get our panties in a twist over this domestic spying program. Come on, do you really think anyone cares about your pointless conversations about your Nana’s recipe for blueberry pie, or the best way to whittle balsa wood? Get real. And if you are a terrorist, of course we’re listening—we always have been. But we can’t just tap you on the shoulder to make sure you know you’re being monitored all the time. I mean, do you think that we told Hitler we were listening to his conversations with Eichmann? “Oh, excuse me Hitler, I just want to let you know that the American government is listening in on this conversation about wiping out an entire race of people by loading them onto cattle cars and throwing them into death camps.” I don’t think so.

But look, we’re all realists here—if you just can’t get over this whole phone-monitoring thing there are some steps you can take to protect yourself. First of all, I’d just stop talking about the President, or about things you’d like to do to Dick Cheney in general, period. Stop saying words like “U.S. government,” or “bomb,” or “Sometimes I wonder about Islam.” And furthermore, I’d stop mentioning famous landmarks, places where security looks lax, empty warehouses, airplanes, boats, buses, long tunnels, subway stations, bridges you have to cross everyday on your commute to work—you get the picture. If you want to keep talking about that stuff, look, you’re fair game, that’s all I’m saying. You might as well just admit right now that you’ve memorized Mein Kampf and walk around with a little moustache under your nose and your arm permanently raised toward your great fascist forefathers. You’re going to be labeled a “known phone,” as we say over here, no longer a “phone unknown.”

3. Terrorists are Terrible and Diplomats are Diplomatic

Which brings me to my next point. I know that most of you don’t have to worry about this on a daily basis, working at your yoga centers and health food stores, but those of us who work in Defense have to watch out for terrorists, okay? That’s our job. Day in and day out. And it’s not easy—do you want to know why? Terrorists are not sympathetic, they’re not funny, they’re not adorable, they’re terrible. That’s why they’re called terrorists. Terr-i-ble. If they were pacifists, they’d be peaceful—they’d believe in pacifism. If they were herbalists—you all should know this one—they’d believe in herbalism. (And herbalists plant a lot of things, but they don’t plant bombs on airplanes.) But they’re terrorists, so take a wild guess—what do they believe in? That’s right, terrorism.

Now, this seems like as good time as any to address the little tiff over the photo of myself shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein. I know this is going to be shocking to you all, but, what did you expect me to do? Of course I shook his hand—I was a diplomat. And, follow along with me people, what do diplomats do? You got it—they’re diplomatic. But beyond diplomacy, you know what? I don’t have any control over what Saddam Hussein does. Saddam Hussein is going to do what Saddam Hussein is going to do. Doing happens. I mean, we had to fire on the Axis soldiers to invade Normandy, right? Are you saying that we never should have invaded Normandy? Should we just pretend that all of Nazi Germany never happened?

4. Time is Long

And lastly, I want to say that war takes time, and time is long. Goodness me, it’s not like you can just fight a war in the time it takes to make a bag of microwave popcorn. Of course we may have initially underestimated the number of troops we needed by a few thousand, but as I’ve said above, terrorists are terrible, things explode, and doing happens. I don’t expect you to understand all the details since you’re not allowed to know everything, anyway. So let’s just calm down here, folks, we have plenty of people in our military to go around. Around and around. Fighting for the long lengths of time. I really can’t explain any more than that to you people if you can’t get your wheatgrass-drinking heads around it. So let’s just take a deep breath and count to ten before making any more outrageous assertions about my job next time—that way it will be more obvious to everyone who’s who, and what’s what, and just who sanctioned the gas chambers at Auschwitz anyway.

In faithful service,

Donald Rumsfeld