Veterans Day

It wasn't until I went out to get the mail that I remembered that today is the proper Veterans Day, rather than the holiday day, or the furniture sale day, or the day to earn political points on the backs of young (and not so young) men and women who serve as the apolitical armed force of the United States. I went to the oak filing cabinet to see if I could find my honorable discharge certificate and my DD214. Among those papers were some photographs of a man thirty-five years younger, with jet black hair and not a wrinkle. On my expired military ID it had my weight as fifty pounds lighter than I am now--a skinny wretch back then or a fat fuck today? Hard to say, really, though I'm sure some of the commenters will weigh in with their opinions (the ones who know me, anyway). I'm probably healthier now than then. I smoked a pack a day or more then, drank like a young man can and ought to before he gets serious, and was more belligerent than a stupid stringbean ought to be.

It was not a particularly popular thing to be in the military then, but I still was proud of being there. True, I was exceedingly lucky--Russian language training, crypto school, and Berlin, rather than advanced infantry training, survival school, and Vietnam--so I had it much, much easier than many others whose military experience was the kind of adventure that involves mutilation and death rather than simply strange lands and new ways of viewing the world. Across this nation there are men and women who are similarly going through their old boxes of memories, remembering comrades, or still outrunning nightmares. Their sacrifices were surely greater than mine, and I must remind myself daily to be grateful for the grace that their selflessness has accorded me in my life.

It is a time I also remember my grandfather who served the Army in WWI, my father who served during Korea, my uncles and aunts who fought in Europe and the Pacific in WWII, and how as a child I thrilled to look at their photo albums of them when they were young, and dark-haired, and skinny, and immortal.

There are many, many things worth fighting for--I am no pacifist--and when we choose our battles wisely and reluctantly, we can honor the memory of all those who have passed before. Please remember this day that those who wear the uniform do so because it is essential, and that even in the face or irresponsible leadership, they honor us all with their dedication and sacrifice.

Happy Veterans Day.

Let's Sing This Song All Together!

Priceless.

It's Like, Wow Man

I was on my third Pilsner Urquell in thirty minutes at about 8:00PM last night, but I switched to coffee because I needed to be lucid if what I was seeing was to be believed.

And the rest is history.

Then this morning (or whenever the hell it is now), I flipped on the radio, and Chimpie was addressing the press. Well, fuck me like a methed-up preacher man, Donald Rumsfeld is gone! Hell, I think that the Germans have already typed up indictments of him as a war criminal. Can the rest of the Bush cabal be far behind?

Anyway, what really struck me was the punishing, embarrassing, humiliating gap by which some Senate incumbents got punched. Ricky "Man-on-Dog" Santorum lost by a monstrous eighteen points, and Mike DeWine of Ohio got slapped by twelve points. Given the role Ohio played in the 2004 election, such a turn is enormous, particularly when the secretary of state for Ohio, who controlled that election, got beaten in his gubernatorial bid by twenty-three points! I mean, they punished those mofos, boy!

Of course, this is only the beginning. We still have a long way to go before Cheney, Bush, and the rest are in shackles in the court at the Hague, but this is a very, very good start. When the congressional committees open a few innocent-seeming oversight investigations, I think the whole rotten mess that is this corrupt and incompetent administration is going to explode in a stinking mess that will make the 2008 election a complete and total repudiation of the radical evangelical right, the neocon warmongers, the corporate buttboys, and the bigots.

Am I hoping for revolution? You bet your sweet ass I am. (Yes, I am a turtle--comment if you get the reference.)

Okay, I gotta go digest some more. I'm too exuberant to really think just yet.

Cross Your Fingers, Pray to Your God, Party Like It's the Free World After All

I'm off to my neighbor's to watch the returns and drink myself into insensibility. Well, not immediately. First I'm going to cook up four pounds of Molly Katzen's Szechuan Green Beans (sesame oil, tons of garlic, cayenne, slivered almonds (my touch), kosher salt). Serve hot, cold, or at room temperature. Yummmmmmmmmy!

Then we are going to hope for a reason to drink into insensibility because we're celebrating the destruction of the Repuglickkkan Party. As of this blog entry, I hear from CNN and MSNBC that "corruption" is voters' apparent primary concern. And how do we spell "corruption" class?

R-E-P-U-G-L-I-KKK-A-N

A final thought: Rev. Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Ricky Santorum, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, two ounces of meth, 1000 mg. of Viagra, and a Motel 6 room with a queen sized bed with Magic Fingers.

Now there's a party for Rush Limbaugh.

Does Evangelical==Terrorist?

Imagine that you have been faithfully tithing to your megachurch, just like the Rev. Dr. Ted Methead has been saying you must. You took in that Christian family that had been persecuted out of their homeland in Beluchistan. Even though your incredibly curvalicious coworker at Roctite Industries has been rubbing up against you in the warehouse and finally offered to have a no-attachment sexual relationship with you because she really digs clean-cut Jesus lovers, you have remained faithful to your wife, even though she has gotten a bit more shrewish since the birth of your eighth child, has refused any physical contact, and refers to you as "The Big Loser" in your Bible meetings on Wednesday nights.

Then one morning you wake up to find that Rev. Dr. Ted Methead is having a hell of a lot more fun than you are. To wit, he's having methed-out gay boner parties with hookers every month. On Sunday he tells you all about purity and faith and the terrible forces beyond that want to tempt you with homosexual urges and poisonous substances. On Monday, he drives to Denver so he can powder his nose with methamphetamine and then play hide-the-salami with a dude for pay. So what do you do?

You pray for his soul. You curse Satan for the temptations he puts before us. You muse about how insidious that the forces of evil are that they could undermine even so righteous a fellow as Rev. Dr. Ted Methead. And on Tuesday I'll bet you still pull the lever for Republicans all across the board. And you know why you do that?

Because your wife is right. You ARE "The Big Loser."

You're a big loser because you hold to a creed that is provably exploitative of dopes like you and oppressive of the women who marry you. You're a big loser because you refuse to face the evidence that is put before you time after time after time that you are being lied to, exploited, and generally played for a fool by the likes of Ted Haggard, George Bush, Dick Cheney, James Dobson, and a host of other criminals who can spot a sucker loser like you at a thousand yards. These real devils have been building careers and entire empires by picking the pockets of losers like you.

You're a big loser, a stupid freak, and a self-willed moron who refuses to use his God-given gift of free thought and critical analysis to reason through those suspicions you've suppressed whenever yet another "Man of God" gets caught with his swollen hypocrisy jammed into someone's bunghole.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to let losers like you drag this country down.

Tuesday is D-Day for America. We are at the apex between salvation and damnation. It means the forces of the true darkness have swept in because we have abdicated our duty to face truth, to honestly see the world as it is, and to bravely engage that world with enlightened and humble action.

In this final day before the mid-term elections, the Republican shit-throwing machine is doing everything in its power to get the big losers out of their malaise at how much they've been lied to and out to the polls one last time because God really is on their side. Really. God is a Republican. And God engineered Ted Haggard's butt-boy-bongo and Jim Foley's attempts to start up some of the same with underage male Congressional pages just to test your faith. And it's not true, as former White House staffer David Kuo wrote, that Karl Rove and company view you as "nuts" and "goofy." And George W. Bush really, really is a Jesus-loving Christian who only executed 152 people in Texas, sacrificed 2800+ American lives, and 50,000+ Iraqi lives because it's exactly what Jesus would have done had he the largest military in the world instead of twelve stupid deciples.

Yes, Jesus wants you to vote Republican because he hates America. And given our recent history, I'm not the least surprised.