cheese it, the cops!

is it distasteful to point out that these people are under "psychological pressure" now? perhaps these giant states with their overwhelming deadly force should stop propping these saps in front of tv cameras and operating their mouths as though they were muppets. as they arrived in england "they" issued a statement about this and that obviously composed by some british bureaucrat assigned to the task. for a "statement" "written" "by" fifteen people, however, it was touching in its sincerity. for the most part when they appeared today they read statements. i think it's fair to say that, at an absolute minimum, these had been vetted and edited by the british authorities.

today:

In a prepared joint statement that Air and Carman took turns reading at the start of the news conference, the six sailors and marines said two Iranian speedboats initially approached the group after it had inspected a ship on March 23 in Iraqi waters just south of the Shatt al-Arab waterway that forms part of the border between Iran and Iraq.

yesterday:

"It goes without saying that we are extremely happy to be back home in the U.K. and reunited with our loved ones," the group said in a joint release read to reporters by Lt. Col. Andy Price, a marine spokesman. "The welcome home we've enjoyed today is one none of us will ever forget. . . . We wish to thank everyone for their thoughts, kind words and prayers."

it's a hard job for fifteen people to write a statement. but with diligent hard compositional work they've managed to imitate both the form and content of official british propaganda, while at the same time expressing their deepest, most personal feelings.

 

really? cause if i was harry reed, working on a war funding bill, i'd tack on an arrest warrant for georgie. it would be a national trauma to impeach the pres and then prosecute him for kidnapping, treason, and murder. then again, we obviously stand in need of a lot more national trauma. we americans have set out to make ourselves deserve extreme extended pain, disintegration, and self-loathing, and succeeded. people rarely get what they deserve, of course, but you never know. maybe the idea was to retroactively make sense of 9.11.

so here, as promised, is the companion to the blind willie mctell lyric: ma rainey's "black eye blues," featuring tampa red on guitar. as annie raines pointed out when i saw her perform this song, it's amazingly perverse. you beat me up etc, but i'm gonna stick with you, simply so that i can take revenge upon you eventually, possibly by castration. ain't life grand? (thanks to annie raines for corrections.)

Black Eye Blues

Down in Hogan's Alley lives Miss Nancy Ann
She's always fussing and squabblin with her man
I heard Miss Nancy say
"why do you treat your gal that way?"
I went down the alley the other night.
Nancy and her man had just had a fight
He hit Miss Nancy across her head
and she rose to her feet and said
"you lowdown alligator,
just watch me soon or later
gonna catch you with your britches down.
You buse me and mistreat me
you dog around and beat me.
Still I'm gonna hang around.
Take all my money, black both of my eyes,
give it to another woman, come home and tell me lies.
You lowdown alligator,
just watch me soon or later
gonna catch you with your britches down.
I mean: catch you with your britches down.
[Tampa Red throws down on slide guitar.]
You lowdown alligator,
just watch me soon or later
gonna catch you with your britches down.
You buse me and mistreat me
you dog around and beat me.
Still I'm gonna hang around.
Take all my money, black both of my eyes,
give it to another woman, come home and tell me lies.
You lowdown alligator,
just watch me soon or later
gonna catch you with your britches down.
I mean, man: cut you with your britches down."

ma rainey (gertrude malissa nix pridgett)

do you know what the complete centrality of $$$ in american politics indicates? that we, the people, are a bunch of perfectly malleable, manipulable cretins, or at least enough so that $$$ can swing an election. nothing, i predict, in the amazing history of human claptrap will ever be as empty as hillary's campaign ads will be. and yet, they'll have some kind of effect, and, bizarrely, it won't be universal revulsion. it's often said by capitalist economists that advertising performs an informative function. this is true when you're advertising barbies or beer, of course. but hillary will refute this theory once and for all, leaving us all to draw the maoist conclusions.

like i say, one should support every single secessionist movement anywhere. hey vermont is a good place to start, even if i might be personally happier with the libertarian republic of new hampshire, or the neo-slave republic of texas. anyway, that piece is very right about where we started and where we're at.

admittedly, the clinton administration looks good from here. but that's no reason to elect a president wholly without principles or courage. sometimes, decisive action is disastrous. sometimes, being entirely incapable of decsive action, because the focus groups are ambiguous, is disastrous too.