Sadism

"Why? Because, at bottom, there is a deep streak of sadism running through people. It runs through me, too! I can tell you, I have imagined torturing people who are egregious criminals--such as Hitler, or Saddam Hussien, or Charles Manson, or some smart aleck who pulls in front of me on the freeway--but in a country living under rule of law, we must not give into those urges ever." Eric Bergeson

Call Me (Senator) Al

The man and I saw him live in 2003. Another high point in my life...after the gig we went up to say thanks and shake his hand. He smiled a lovely smile and thanked us. At that time, he was blogging and just starting his Air America radio show, which evolved into television. I was watching that very show when Bush 'won' in 2004, and will never forget how horribly sad Al looked when the outcome was all-too-clear. And now this Comedian/Deadhead/Limbaugh persecutor extraordinaire is almost certainly Senator Al Franken.

With all the evil shit taking place in the world right this very minute, I'm glad there's a teeny bright spot now and then.

I will be writing about the New Year's Eve adventure soon. Spare time is tough to come by lately.

You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon & David Byrne

Help On The Way !!!

'Paradise waits on the crest of a wave...'

Robert Hunter

Mavericks 2008~Pacifica, California ('Mavericks' is purely coincidental.)

Where to start... my heart is full. A little over three years ago, I took up blogging. It coincided with the 'loss' of the election in 2004. My rage was real, and this was solid therapy. I love you all!
(You know who you are!)

'Without love in a dream it will never come true.'

Rainforest Man

Here's my buddy at his workplace on Friday. It makes sense that he works at the Academy of Sciences. Click to see the detail. Much less gory than my daughter's look below, eh? Halloween was jumpin'. We had lots of adorable trick or treaters, now that we are 'townies' again.

I am attempting Nanowrimo for the first time. We'll see how that shakes down. The man and I saw 'Religulous' yesterday. I thought it was really well done, and I got to watch Bill smoke a joint on the big screen. Simple pleasures, I know.

Later, I made mushroom bolognese sauce with fresh oyster mushrooms foraged by a work chum. Mushrooms, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, red wine, fresh thyme, and rosemary. Like that.

One more day! We await vindication, after our involuntary eight year exile.

Directly From My Heart To You

I have been receiving 'Barlow Letters' by email for about ten years now. Barlow was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead for most of the band's existence. He has led an incredible life, and is impossible to pigeon-hole. Today I received the JPEG below attached to his latest screed about last night's debate and John McCain. I proudly share it here, for your perusal. The man gets it said like nobody else.

'We'd Rather Rim Meatloaf. Seriously' (Snap!)

Ten years ago when I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School, I was on a panel with Senator Ted Kennedy and my tragically late sidekick John Kennedy, Jr. The focus of our discussion was determining when the Internet would likely have the pivotal role in shaping a presidential campaign that television had assumed in the 1960 election of their brother and father. Oddly, for a couple of guys who were deeply suspicious of Cyberspace, they both thought this would happen much sooner than I did, possibly as early as 2000. I said it would be a decade at least. It has now been a decade. And this will now be that election.

Among the many lines of division at contest here - between the 50's and the 60's, between football and frisbee, between a high regard for education and a contempt for it, between weed and whiskey, between Monotheism and Pantheism, between love and fear, between greed and responsibility - is the contest between the highly cybergenic Obama and the apoplectic old race-bating, fraudulently heroic, tail-hook gunning, womanizing, pathologically gambling, unindicted Keating 5 co-conspirator who is literally treasonous enough to possibly entrust the American republic during its darkest hour to a woman who has great legs and cheekbones, combined SAT scores lower than either one of mine, and who, with her "First Dude" were helping lead, until recently, the Alaskan Independence Party, a powerful pro-secession movement. (Imagine Lincoln choosing Jefferson Davis as his first running mate and you get the idea.)

McCain, that disgraceful curdle-brain, that grimacing little tantrum of spoiled Naval nepotism whose greatest military accomplishment (if you don't count crashing three multi-million jets while on joyrides, and contributing to a deck fire that almost sank the Forrestal} was getting in getting shot down and breaking under torture, spent the first part of the debate whining about Obama's low blows and then informed the women and children of America that his opponent had promoted an Illinois law that now legally requires doctors to refuse medical treatment to any child who somehow survives an abortion attempt. Given the abortion methods I'm familiar with, I'm inclined to think such a child would also survive the flame-throwers they'd be using against him toward the end of the movie.

But among his other qualifications for being a 21st Century President , Senator McCain remains proud that, like both Bushes before him, he is computer-illiterate and that he makes his wife Cindy deal with all that.

I thought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made me ashamed to be a Republican. But McCain and Palin have pretty well completed the job.

However, since God is merciful, McCain probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's watching the campaign on television where he's presented with an edit of reality that is far less damning to him and his campaign than the one I've been watching on the Internet. John McCain is blessed indeed to be spared the online version of himself.

On the Internet, he would see the "people's edits" immediately, like the YouTube condensation of all 3143 of his eye-blinks during last night's debate into a thirty second segment, or the highlighting of his reference to Obama's "eloquence" in a fashion that left no doubt that this was his painfully polite euphemism for the vile effluent one can squeeze out of an fast-talking sack of lying shit when he talks about the "health" - a word McCain enclosed in finger quotes - of the baby murdering "mother", who is unable to accept that a child is the natural punishment for her coozing around in fornication, which is pretty much all these black Muslim terrorist baby mamas do, if you know what I mean.

If he watched the much more elaborate coverage of the campaign on the Internet, even McCain would have to be in awe of the fact that Senator Obama has shown almost superhuman dignity, humor (as opposed to sarcasm), and that quality that Hemingway defined as courage, "grace under pressure" even while being carpet-bombed, first by the Clintons and now the McCain/Palin Golem, with six months of sucker punches, lies, trivialities, the guilt of distant or even non-existent associations (often involving black people behaving ungracefully), and now, finally, the direct incitement of murderous intent in crowds spiked with many people who are insane with racial hatred, well-armed, and trained by their government in the accurate use of long-range weapons.

He would have seen the look of enlightened acceptance on Obama's face tonight when McCain fiercely declared his pride in the people who attended his rallies, including, presumably, the ones who shout "kill him" and "off with his head." As he pronounced his appreciation for these unmasked Klansmen, someone like me who doesn't have an abused wife he can use as a computer interface could, with a slight enhancement of certain frequencies, make clearly audible the dry, cold wind that was whistling through McCain's dentures.

At this point, I must pause and ask any other digeratum who zoomed into the Senator's forehead pulse at such moments: Who do you want answering the phone at 3:00 am in the White House: someone with unassailable poise and courage or someone whose rage-readiness and blood pressure make him a fine candidate to pop a valve, thus creating the scenario in which the more blink-resistant President Palin returns the call at 3:45 am?

Who do you want salvaging the economy, someone who believes that if the government is going to recover what Bush's and McCain's cronies looted from the public treasury, the very rich will have to pay some taxes, or someone who believes that we can spend extravagantly on war, greed, weapon systems we don't need, and subsidies for our friends, while taxing only the middle class and the poor?

Finally, if McCain were watch this on the Internet, he would have known better than to make a certain Joe the Plumber the unanimous winner of tonight's debate. Apparently, Senator McCain caught a short network soundbyte of Senator Obama's exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher in Ohio last week. Whatever it was, it allowed McCain to think he could get away with claiming that Senator Obama would deny Joe the fruits of the American Dream, since Joe would have to give his money to Senator Obama who would then "spread the wealth around" presumably to other people of his own shiftless kind. Kind of like Washington Hussein Stalin.

However, if you click on the link I've attached to Joe Wurzelbacker's name above, you will see the full 6 minute discourse between Obama and the supposed target of his communist exploitation, as McCain characterized the hapless Joe.

In fact, what you will see will make you proud to be an American.

You will see a presidential candidate stop and take the time to explain more and in more respectful detail about his tax program to a single plumber from Ohio than McCain has ever explained anything - besides misrepresentations of Obama's resume - to the entire American public during the length of this campaign.

(Thanks to McCain, we know more about Obama's perfidious porkpie of a 3 mil planetarium projector - which McCain still thinks is an overhead slide projector - than we know about McCain's entire economic recovery plan. And certainly more that the payments and favors he took from Charles Keating to keep the regulators off Keating's Arizona S and L which, by some estimates exceeded $3 million and kept them at bay just long enough for the Lincoln Savings and Loan to eat the life savings of many retired investors before requiring the Federal Government to bail it out with $3 billion.)

But I digress. I come to praise Obama, not bury McCain (who is doing a fine job already). Anyway, If you watch the whole "Joe the Plumber" segment, you will see Mr. Wurzelbacker listening skeptically but with equal respect to Obama and providing his own knowledgeable addenda. It is the kind of conversation you can't imagine a president being willing or able to have with a citizen in public. This president will, and in so doing, he will encourage the existence the citizens as worthy of that critical role as Mr. Wurzelbacker appears to be.

Unless, of course, one of those supporters in whom Senator McCain takes such pride leaves one of those rallies just amped enough by their "tough" campaign style, a pint of Jim Beam, a terror of terrorists, and his abusive daddy's fury at all things brown that he'll haul out his "Elk-erator": that .270 Weatherby Magnum which, when he's using his own hand-loaded rounds with the 130 grain bullets and the extended casing length generates a 3200 fps muzzle velocity quite sufficient to drop a trophy bull at 400 yards, or, for that matter, to blow ol' Hussein Obama's nappy smart-ass head right off his skinny-ass Armani-wearin' body.

If that moment comes, hope will really die in America, I think, and hope for America will die in the rest of the world.

But right now hope is alive and well and winning. While fear, hate-mongering, and war-lust look moribund, querulous, profoundly mean-spirited, and almost blind with blinking.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America," a book more timely now that when he wrote it in 1835, "America is great because she is good. If she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great." This is the moment when we get to choose which she will be. Watch the whole YouTube exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber and you will know that we are still good.

Then watch the clip on the Internet from four days ago when a Christian pastor named Arnold Conrad opened a McCain/Palin rally with this little invocation that fails to inspire a thoughtful patriot or a true Christian or anyone like me with a degree in comparative religion, but which was, nonetheless, well-received by the crowd and the principal speakers. Rev. Conrad said, "There are millions of people around this world praying to their God -- whether it's Hindu [not a God], Buddha [also not a God], Allah [Arabic for God] -- that [Obama] wins for a variety of reasons. And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because, if that happens, they're going to think that their God is bigger than you." Then you see how fragile and stupid our goodness has become.

Personally, I pray to God and Allah and Atman and Jaweh and the Great Spirit and the Holy Who Knows and whatever else you want to call That For Which All Names and Assumptions Fall Short that goodness will survive this moment and that, in 30 years, we will look back on the next three weeks and know that, at a dark time, the American people, sick of fear, war, greed, bigotry, torture, wastefulness, and a diseased fixation on the past, rose up and voted for hope and love and the future. They voted for Barack Hussein Obama and Joe the Plumber's true American dream. Which started to become real for the first time.

And nobody got shot except maybe the very, very few who had it coming. Most of who are presently in the mountains of Afghanistan getting in the American heroin crop.

(Feel free to pass this on. I can't claim that it is the voice of my better angels. Fortunately, Senator Obama's seem to him so well in hand that I can be allowed a measure of anger and spite. And I swear to God, McCain has been acting like a man who really needs a little of that whup-ass he was gon' put on that Obama last night.)

Dear Hillary,

The Party's OVER.



.

We Were Right. Imagine That!

If you've been here before, you know I love Mark Morford in ways I have trouble describing. It's clear to me that I am drawn to shit disturbers. Those brave souls that put it out there, whether it makes folks laugh, or think, or gasp in horror, he always has his say.

This particular column touches on a topic that has floated around in my head for years. Now that the mainstream has been coddled and coerced by our media to be more conscious of their impact on Mother Earth, or eating in healthful and sustainable ways, or the long list of things that lots of us lived decades ago. We were paying attention, and wanted to try living in more positive ways. Because we thought it mattered. Turns out that it did matter. But not to everyone. The majority of mainstream folks thought we were nuts... for wanting to eat organic foods, and have organic gardens, and recycle, and heal ourselves in homeopathic and alternative ways. Oh, and do yoga, meditate, and have our babies at home, and a million other things that the fine column below brings up. Don't get me wrong, I am glad that many have finally realized that we are destroying our planet and ourselves. I just worry that it's a little late. Too bad you didn't trust the hippies.



The Hippies Were Right!

Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's happening right now in the newly "greening" America and don't say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I'm talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the right thing to do" (read: It's purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don't start caring they'll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it's true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here's a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation -- has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation's incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you're really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there: Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane" and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that might be due to all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

Free Falling

By Andreas Prustel


This country has been in a steady free-fall for the last six (Seems like sixty) years. Like too many bloggers out there lately, it gets tougher to muster the energy to say much. Blech. I'm too busy gasping in outrage. Plus the working and the being mama. I guess I am waiting for all of this to hit bottom, at long last. Then I will be wordy, clever, and dare-I-say... bubbly ?? I've said it many times before, but I really think the G.O.P. shit is going to hit the fan this time. Visualize righteous payback. I did not go to the protest last weekend, as planned. My faithful washer bit the dust during the week. This meant going to the laundromat in the neighboring town, to use theirs. I was hurrying to drive the wet laundry back home, and use my own dryer and clothesline. In my haste to carry two big wet baskets of laundry to the car, I managed to strain my groin muscle. That was a first, and I would liken it to the strain a woman feels in that region after labor and delivery. I'm pretty tough, and this hurt. So, I took it real easy on myself on Saturday. Nothing like a painful reminder that you're not twenty-five anymore. Now I know how dudes feel. Well, sort of. All better now. Thanks to everyone that did hit the streets for peace.

Although I skipped the march and protest this time, I did sign up at
One Million Blogs for Peace, and it was pain-free. Check it out.