Ass Kissers and Boot Lickers: Saving White Charisma for 2016

Blame it on you, blame it on me
Now let's erase the wound that's in our history
Pain in my heart won't let me be
Take it from me but don't you take away my liberty
Father of coal, mother of pearl
Never too black to blush to pick up a white girl
The color of you, the color of me
You can't judge a man by looking at the marquee

- Garland Jeffreys, Hail, Hail Rock 'n Roll, from the album, Don't Call Me Buckwheat

You will be attacked for coming on. And we know you know that.

- Alex Jones, December 2, 2015 

Parting comment to Donald Trump (Infowars.com)

Journalism and history are usually mutually exclusive beings left better to themselves. They don't mix well. The pursuit of one closes the door on the other. But when there's mud on the floor, a big hole in the roof and the rain pouring down, it's a lot easier to drag history and its temperamental cousin out of the building to the back porch for a spanking, a good rinse and some time to dry when the sun comes out. Then they can both lie in peace with one another.

We have a great big new hole in the roof, and through it has fallen the fellow who says he can patch it. Make America Great Again. This time, the stand up, charismatic white guy has enough money to do his own job and he's brought in his own ass kissers and boot lickers. Just when the world thought Citizens United had set the grand stage for a new round of Reagan PAC puppeteers and OZmasters, The Donald plunged through the roof, splattering the American political theater like a bunker buster worse than any Parisian terrorist could invent.

Now, it might be fairly observed that self-styled "alternative media" guru, Alex Jones has crossed even that barrier, because in a recent interview with Donald Trump, he threw himself squarely into the lot of what many Vietnam veterans called "ass wipes".

Look at the interview. If you can get through it, you'll be as clean as you feel after a colonoscopy.

Words, our supposed tools, cannot fully describe the bombast of the 2016 presidential election, because, like the race of an ancient schooner fleet, the charisma challenge is already at full mast, and the winds are blowing hard from all directions. For the onlookers, it's a county fair crap shoot, players huddled and hunched over, hands closed with the dice ready to throw to determine who's the next journalist. But when millions of onlookers show up like pigs at the trough, slopping up the next bucket of feed at the crap shoot table, anyone can be the next Walter Cronkite. Right?

These new great-for-America video colonists, who drag history through the mud as well as many people they don't know, are breeding the underground urchins of the alien in everyone. 

Dare mention the food in the bucket? It's racism, of the kind processed and sold pure and unadulterated, homogenized and pasteurized - everything the silent want in their new political diet, smelling good and familiar and tasting "nice", like Donald describes it. 

It not what we're born with, the type of racism that, on first sight, made the smiling face of my Mexican friend's brown baby grandson turn to a frown and give the stink-eye to the first pasty-face gringo he ever laid eyes on, or the kind of newborn racism my baby daughter exerted when she screamed bloody murder at her first sight of Columbus Greenlee, an old and beautiful angel of a man, a Virginia farmer in coveralls, with a face disguised in skin blacker than a starless night sky. That's the racism I adore. It comes from above, like a rainbow, and its lightning force, though fearsome, is delivered by grace. The rest is taught and preached by man and to my mind, has no value except destruction.

After having becoming afraid of their own shadow on the computer screen, racists of the latter order tune in to shadowy "newsmen" like Jones with a warm welcome for such people as Trump, so he can command the charge to meet the fear head on. As a mutant Glen Beck, he fits in perfectly with the Trump campaign. Fear sells better these days than sex and death, and those two side dishes are always easy enough to use in the new recipe. The silent are not always an easy lot to satisfy, but they love food.

History and its vittles be damned. Journalism, the breakfast of champions, wins the day and the big prize; history is consigned to resurrect somewhere down the road, but rewritten for the times as a slave with a seat at the back of the daily news showbus. With voters like the ones who fawn over Trump, how can America go wrong? No one will ever need to advise Trump to get a charisma transplant as they did for losers like Ford, Gore, Dukakis and Carter. 

There we have it: a new charismatic white boy like Reagan, hiding in the wings, camera and sidearm at the hip, ready to march the silent lockstep into the vacuum, sucking up the ill winds of any possible lingering intellect while the bootlicks direct the lost louts down the yellow brick road. After all, isn't it now verified history: anyone who can stand square and center in front of Air Force One inside a California library surely must have all the charisma necessary to be believed, not to mention a darn good grasp of what it takes to motivate America to be great again?

I sure hope we can drag the two of them out of the place before we get another hole in the roof. The sun is shining brightly outside, but the theater's gone dark, and so many are already mired in the mud.

Goodbye Fortress America, Forward (Force) We Go

The curators of the nation’s foreign policy haven’t yet learned to manage their affairs as efficiently as (telephone sex talkers) Lori or Evita, but certainly they think of their wars and stratagems as works of conceptual art….The Reagan administration apparently wishes to make an avant-garde statement  about America’s place and stature in the world. To what end. Or at what cost, nobody can say. Our geopoliticians don’t know what the United States stands to win in the event of a war with Iran, Iraq or any enemy as yet unannounced, but clearly the excitements of the moment demand something impressive in “a chain of development that may eventually find some form.”  -   Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s, 1987

“We’re going to make our military so big, so strong and so great, so powerful that we’re never going to have to use it. We’re going to have a president who is respected by Putin, respected by Iran.”   -   Donald Trump, 2015

"The past is not dead; it's not even past".

-  William Faulkner, novelist (1897 - 1962) 

"It's déjà vu all over again."
-   Yogi Berra

Beside the Normal Regular Dirt

Beside the normal regular dirt, they’re preparing to do a few hundred thousand dollars of dirty laundry down the road in a couple hours. The beer tents are going up and the track’s still being cleaned and leveled from the rains we had for two days. The horses need it nice when they race down the straightaway. Seventy five to three hundred meters, straight all-out Mexican racing: It is cleansing to the soul, even though it’s a dirty business.

I could just sit it out and listen to the Cumbia and Norteño music on my porch, but why, when I can see my friends and watch it all for a few bucks.

The presidents and the law may change in Mexico every now and then, but one thing doesn’t: horse races. The only change I don’t like is the beer. They sell that godawful Bud Lite – not even Mexican! – and not my old favorite, Tecate rojo. That American diet beer not only has so many chemicals it gives me a headache every time, it tastes like puppy piss. And the boys at the gate don’t like you bringing in your truck with any other brand, so it looks like I’ll be going over completely sober, or maybe a little stilted after a couple Tecates. It’s walking distance. I could practically stumble over there, but northern rural Mexico is no Cancun; it’s a conservative place and I like it that way as well as respect it. Maybe the drunks will be in the salon, on the road, or in the milpas later on tonight, but I won’t, nor will most others in their right mind.

But Mexico is not completely in its right mind all the time, or possibly ever. Next to the family gatherings at the cemeteries on the Day of the Dead, horse races are the best way to have some good clean fun for all ages. Of course there are a lot of strict Catholic women here who would disagree, along with a friend, a recently converted Mexican English teacher who is now an evangelist. Can you imagine a Mexican evangelist who lives down the street from a sicario? Well, imagine.

As for the dirty laundry, you can probably guess what all that is about. No law, too many bad roads, and not enough Americans who aren’t afraid of their shadow, here. But I love it anyway.

‘Gotta go sit on the porch for a ratito. It’s Tecate time, and they just cranked up the music. If I get lucky, a couple friends will stop by for a beer before we amble over. It’s time to crank up my Spanish and cleanse my world. Adios for now.

Christmas at Nick's, Iraq, 2010

Nick came from Lebanon, but he’s American, my age. He used to own a restaurant across from the fallen Twin Towers. He told me he called it the Cedars of Lebanon. 

Nick was my best friend in Iraq, and for him alone, I was sad to leave the war. He would watch Lebanese television for Christmas cheer and tune in to the ceremonies in Arabic. In the midst of radical Islam here was a man whose culture had completely eluded me.

Nick’s family had to leave their home in Lebanon and he wanted to eventually return to reclaim it from Hesbollah, which had overran his little village in an earlier fight with Israel. I had known, from a safe distance, that from time to time the rage between the cultures again will turn violent, but this was the first time I had met someone who was directly affected by it all.

Christmas 2010 was near, and Nick was already thinking about what to cook. Of course, as any soldier or wartime contractor knows, you never really cook in Iraq. The Indians did, and they served you at the DFAC (mess hall). That’s where you ate, unless you wanted to heat up that innocuous noodle soup in little plastic tubs. You could eat so much fried chicken there you could come back weighing 300 pounds.

The local Iraqis who came to work on Delta loved Nick. At least the Christian ones. When I arrived I was put into their area of CHUs – or contractor housing units – a defacto segregated section just a short walk from all the others with whom I was to work, but culturally speaking, it could have been eight thousand miles away. Because of housing shortage, my CHU was to be a temporary location before moving to the "regular" housing units, because that is where they put the "foreigners". I call them that because most of them, while American, were there because of their Arabic language abilities. The Army regarded them as a necessary evil and they gave them the accommodations to suit their commanders’ prejudices. The sand bags that surrounded the concrete bomb and rocket bomb shelters in our section were so worn that the sand was falling out of the broken bags. It was one of the first sections put there, and it showed. I loved staying there, before I had to move to an “appropriate” section where everyone spoke just English.

Nick asked me what I wanted for Christmas dinner. He had decided on everything else besides the main dish, and he announced he was leaving that to me. Outside his CHU stood a small homemade steel grill next to the small, carefully tended herb garden he had cultivated for months in a small wooden slatted frame. I had to say something. I felt like half the world was waiting a response, or at least the dining ghosts of the Twin Towers, all of Lebanon, and most important, a Manhattan chef.

“Nick, whatever you think I will like, I know I will!"

“Well that’s solved then. Souvlaki, Lebanese style”, Nick replied. I could already smell it, and dinner was still three days away. He had read my mind about my preferred course, of course.

Speaking of smell, I had completely lost my sense of smell and taste just a couple weeks before. I was in a quandary. Nick had just invited me to one of the most important meals I would surely ever eat, and I was unable to taste it. I googled my situation and was comforted to know that sometimes taste buds would reappear and "reactivate" on occasion, but it was a known indicator of the possibility of an early onset of Alzheimers. So I resigned myself to take the good with the bad, and the bad was really bad because my father died of that awful disease.

However, Nick's souvlaki was much more important to me than whether I had found out how I might die. I was already in a war zone. I was determined to taste Nick’s food, no matter how many times I ate at the DFAC or ran to the shelters while the sirens blared, “incoming, incoming”. If my sensory loss was triggered by some form of PTSD in real time, I was absolutely determined to beat it this Christmas. 

And, on Christmas Day, for a very brief few minutes, I did. The lamb was stupendous. My sinuses suddenly opened wide and told my taste buds and brain what an extraordinary Arabic culinary delight I was having on my most special Christmas ever. The spices Nick had just picked, the potatoes he made with them – they soothed my body and slaked my thirst for taste for that brief moment. Then, too shortly after, my head closed up again, not to return to sensory consciousness until a week after I returned, seven months later at Indiana’s Camp Atterbury.

A Great Spirit

Amid the din of sound, someone whispered that Forward Operating Base (FOB) Delta (Al Kut, Iraq) was on a communications blackout. I was told this quickly because I was important. I had the clearance to know that before most of the soldiers did. But being civilian, new to this war, I remained a lost tourist.

A young soldier was just killed by a sniper a few hours earlier on a mission from the place I was just arriving. It was twilight, almost dark. Another Chinook landed just behind us a minute or two behind ours. They were ready for his body, but I didn't have a clue. The Chinook set down right next to us just as the giant ramp was lowered from our bird. We all filed out.

An honor guard had assembled near the other bird on the eerie, dark tarmac. The soldiers had not yet come to attention; had they been, perhaps the lost tourist might have noticed in the hazy and gas-fumed desert night. I arrived just on time, to a place at the edge of eternal darkness, the darkness of quiet despair. As history has it, not one other American serviceman was killed in Iraq that month, December, 2010. But that day, that night, the war penetrated the wire inside which I landed. Giant Goosebumps in armor, I was.

Private First Class David Dustin Finch was 24. He married just before he deployed, and he was very well liked there, I found out. I’m still not sure if a child was in his future, but one of his friends told me that he thought his wife was pregnant. I thought about that a lot, and I went to his memorial service a few days later. The sprawling DFAC (mess hall) was jammed with soldiers and civilians alike. The service was somber, graceful and true, and I tried as hard as I knew how to pray for David, and his wife, and myself too. 

I had finally arrived in my new home, Iraq. I sometimes  think of David still, though I never knew him. If there really are heroes and Great Spirits, surely David must be among them. RIP, David.

La Cubana Verdadera

It was in Miami, 1961. Maria Elena Prio, was beyond beautiful to me. Her family had been exiled not once, but three times from Cuba, twice by Batista, in 1952 and then again in 1956, and, after they returned again, Castro booted them out for good in 1959. They finally settled in Miami Beach. 

I was too young, too naive, to understand she came fleeing from anyone. I couldn't think about anything else other than her for a too-short 1950-60s adolescent eternity. She was my world. An inveterate vinyl collector even then, I brought my very first LP album to her birthday party. The Ventures played, and as I dropped the needle on the platter on her back veranda, the world stopped as we danced to Walk, Don’t Run. For me, that was an anthem to the future.

Miami is another country now, only you don’t need a passport to get in. I found out only this year that Maria’s father had taken his own life years ago, according to reports. That news was very hard to take, even after all these years. I finally mustered the courage and talked to her a few months ago. It was very good for my spirit. Maria took law to be her life's work.

Maria’s dad was the last elected president in modern Cuban history. I didn't know all that in 1961. We were in puppy love; at least I knew I was. Maria didn't know what the future would bring any more than I. We were far too young; what else need be said? Batista pushed the Prio family out of Cuba and later the Castro came in to push them out again. That part we all know about. The rest, as they say, is history. People get lost in it. But as often happens, and for some it takes decades, reality sets in, and only the love endures.

Star-Mangled Manner: Joe Biden

Strobe  

(noun)

1. A strobe light.
2. A stroboscope.
3. A spot of higher than normal intensity in the sweep of an indicator, as on a radar screen, used as a reference mark for determining distance. 
- American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.

(Verb)

To give the appearance of arrested or slow motion by using intermittent illumination
- Collins English Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged


Not many people have ridden atop an elevator cab in full speed descent, but like clockwork, millions pour out of elevator high rise doors to the lobby at rush hour to the taxicabs and limousines outside and the subways below.

Few have dug a half mile tunnel (or a fifty foot well) by hand, but there are millions who travel the subways with daily precision. They ride sitting or standing with a grasp, one hand to the bar-hold, the other to a cellphone beamed to the window - inured to the ride but never injured from it - allowing a few feet from the stationary metaphors in motion on the other side of the glass. The windows dull the strobe-like view of the tunnel walls, as old bricks, metal signs and protruding spikes speed by in arrested staccato beat. To the eye, if it doesn't blink, the existential delusions speed alongside beyond the glass in a ceaseless, rapid and dull intensity. People inside are as still as a still shot while the earth races alongside, mangled in motion. No one really notices. The train’s natural manner might beget waves of emotion, but, oh say, can you see them?

Ding, Ding. Two for down. Doors will open. You wait. Doors close. “Next floor, Lobby.” Finally. You can almost feel it. The bodies within the cab issue a collective exhale, then inhale as the doors open. Out we go.

These elevator and tunnel life arrhythmia are silent to the eye and mind, drummed into the body with the irregular strobing pace of movement, the stops and starts, of “next floor - 46”, “next stop - Broadway”. They are the vertical and horizontal movements of the masses at building floors and at streets and in levels below. Vertically and horizontally coordinated, it’s a daily crucifix of human motion.

Vice President Joe Biden likes to reminisce when his life is temporarily out of recovery from any one of his over-sized portion of family disasters. In 2008 he returned to Union Station to bid farewell to the Amtrak redcaps, a farewell to 30 years riding. He had always gone home that way. During the farewell, he stopped to see the ticket agents, the shoeshine man, and of course, the conductors. They all knew him.

Libby Copeland, the Washington Post reporter who covered the event, reports, “He throws parties for retiring conductors, and once had a crewman serenaded by bagpipes. For Biden's first day back at work following two operations for brain aneurysms in 1988, he took the train, naturally. ‘The engineer saluted him with a longer-than-usual toot of the train's whistle,’ UPI reported at the time.” The event made perfect sense. No ride was better for the soul.

Fifteen years earlier, and for five years, (1962-1967), from ages 15-19, I took that train from my Washington DC home to school in Delaware. As if it were yesterday, I recall one particular conductor who always seemed to be there, almost as if he was on shift only for a single student boarding from Middletown. His voice was that of an announcer, megaphone in volume, and it bellowed with a booming melodious bass which signaled the approach of Baltimore, the first stop out of Washington’s Union Station. The endless, dilapidated row houses rolled by, noting the proximity of the upcoming station. The bellow seemed to come directly from the houses through the windows, “Peanuts, popcorn, Cracker Jack, and Baaaay-Bee RUTH!” 

Sold! Out came the money. How could any teenager resist such a call for candy? By the time the products had been consumed, the train was arriving in Wilmington, my stop.

Upon approach and in sight of the station, the booming bass reappeared, resounding down the aisle: “Wilmington, Wilmington, Wilmington - home to DuPonts, and kin.” The Star Spangled Banner always waved its welcome. I’d bet it was still waving for Joe on his last trip. At least, one would hope.

That was not so long ago, but oh, how it’s now so far away.