How Is Your Stupid Today?

In order to prepare for what columnification I do here, I read far too much news and save bits and pieces on scraps of paper and electronica. One of those bits: Panels with wires sticking out of them depicting a cartoon character making the gesture popularly known as “the bird” sparked panic in Boston, resulted in charges against two men who distributed them, and may lead to further charges against the company that put them up to it.

Some people around here have tried to make out like Seattle is way cooler than Boston in this regard. After all, we got paneled too, at the same time, by the same broadcasting company, and we didn’t go bat-spit freaking Stupid and arrest people and turn on the sirens and redden our terror alert signs.

Upon closer inspection, however, Seattle is not that much different from Boston, just out of temporal synch with it. This is the city that in 1996 arrested and tried Jason Sprinkle, AKA Subculture Joe, for inducing bat-spit freaking Stupidity and a rush-hour traffic nightmare as nine city blocks were cordoned off to protect us all from a truck with the words “Timberlake Carpentry Rules (The Bomb!)” painted on it. So we were the Boston in 1996. Maybe in 2015 Boston will be the Seattle.

The truth is, Americans everywhere are fully as capable of becoming as bat-spit freaking Stupid as any crazed mob in any movie filled with stereotypic foreign babbling crazed mobs you’ve ever seen. That’s the whole reason we’re at war with Iraq right now. We Americans panicked when somebody actually attacked us, so as a nation we went bat-spit freaking Stupid and attacked somebody else who had nothing to do with it, and we’re still so Stupid we’re still doing it, and court-martialing people for trying to save us from doing it.

I was further reminded of what nut-cases we are capable of being when I learned that it was necessary for a three judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to ascertain that it is not OK to arrest a man for using the word “goddamn” at a town board meeting, like happened a while back in Montrose, Michigan. Later, it may be necessary for the Supreme Court to reiterate that fact, because Montrose may appeal.

Again, don’t congratulate yourself that Montrose is the Stupid this time. When you’ve got the pox, you’ve got the pox. You don’t say, “oh I don’t have the pox, it’s just my elbow that has it.” If your elbow has the pox, you’ve got the pox.

Just because Stupidity breaks out in random places, doesn’t mean it isn’t always everywhere. It’s in all of our blood. You could be the Stupid next. Or the Stupid could be your own mayor or your own police chief.

Your could be like the New York dealer of over-priced antiques who is suing four homeless guys for more than a million dollars. He says he knows he isn’t going to get the money. He says he’s suing for the money “for legal reasons.” Yeah, and I’m laughing at him for psychiatric reasons.

Sometimes that’s all you can do.

In the early eighties a writer for the New York Times was reporting on a New Mexico celebration that she said was some sort of “community chicken killing festival.” She also referred to it as a “gang pluck.” Not only did the New York Times fire her for writing like that (even though it’s been reported she was originally hired for the purpose of livening up their prose!) but when the woman died this week they couldn’t bring themselves to quote the “gang pluck” line in her obituary.

Being fired by the New York Times might have been a crushing blow for some writers, but Molly Ivins apparently just laughed out the door and kept laughing all the way out death’s door, too.

We need to all remember how she managed to pull that off. It gives us hope.

Read About Sex Here

If you're like me (and pray to your favorite power source you aren't) you like to sit all day. And when you sit all day staring at a computer, like I do, you get tired of it just sitting there staring back at you with the same cute kitty picture in the background, or whatever. So you push buttons and try to make the screen do stuff.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the things I make my computer do is fetch news stories for me. This is how I, a man who hates to leave his chair even to collect free food, came to know a while back that a rooster in a town in New Zealand was suspected of carrying a bomb. I did not go to New Zealand. I simply read about it in a newspaper story, which I found on-line. I think I had googled "New Zealand terrorist chickens" during an extreme boredom fit. Or some such thing. ("To google" = "to use the Google internet search engine.")

This morning I did something similar. I tried to google "Downing St. Memo." I expected that a story of the magnitude of the Downing St. Memo story had been written up thousands of times, as would be revealed when I searched Google News from among their more than 4000 news sources. But only 27 stories popped up.

Let's put that into perspective. It has been less than a day since Russell Crowe threw a phone at some guy, and the story of his arrest has already appeared in over 300 news outlets.

So, I thought, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. The Downing St. Memo isn't really a memo at all, I thought. It's actually the official British Government minutes of a secret July 2002 British Government meeting called to discuss secret talks between a British representative and the Bush Administration in April of that year, concerning Bush war plans for Iraq, proving that he lied for months to the American people about his intentions, I thought. So I should drop the word "memo" and add the word "minutes", and google the phrase "Downing St. Minutes."

For just a few seconds it looked as though I was making progress! Instead of only 27 stories I found a whopping whole 49! A stunning improvement! Then I looked at what stories I really got and found that all of the new stories I had picked up were sports stories and one from something called "Boston's Weekly Dig" which had an article on 74 Things to Do This Summer. Number one: "Get drunk at Fenway Park." The word "downing" appeared in a passage that discussed the possibility of downing gallons of cocktails in the company of hairy gay men, the event described as "running with the bears." "Minutes" referred to minutes on a ferry boat ride, presumably also spent getting drunk.

OK, eventually Anitra "born to google" Freeman showed me that I needed to spell out "Street," finally getting me just under 500 hits. But, this is for a story that's had over a month to spread.

Googling "Michael Jackson trial" netted 13,300 hits! Even a story as recent as the coming out of Deep Throat got me over 5000 hits, and that's after googling "Mark Felt Deep Throat," rather than just "Deep Throat."

What does it take to get the world's press to take a story seriously? Evidently only six things matter: Sex, booze, sex, celebrities, drugs, and sex. Michael Jackson's trial has at least five of them. The Russell Crowe story has two of them (if he wasn't drunk that would be news), while writing about the Deep Throat story confers license to write "Deep Throat" over and over again, so there's your sex, sex, sex.

Question: Why does everybody know about Abu Graib and almost nobody knows about the Downing St. Memo? Answer: No one was naked at the Downing St. meeting.

Next Time It'll Be A Magic 8-Ball

As you may have already noticed, we here at Real Change can't let an April Fools Day go by without writing some April Fools Day appropriate nonsense. Our sad frail egos are slightly stoked every year when we hear rumors of some of you being taken in even though our Managing Spoilsport always prints warnings to protect the truth.

But the real news outdid us all this year. Our little fib about the guy arrested for pushing a refrigerator down a street pales in comparison to, say, the story from Fort Meyers, Florida, about the plane searched because a psychic intuited that a bomb was on board.

As a spokesperson for the Transportation Security Administration in these times, we can't ignore anything." That's right, we can't ignore anything that might warn us of terrorism. Psychics, entrails, evil stars, voices in our heads, they all can be put to service defending our great nation from stupid terrorists. We need warnings! Everybody call and warn the government about bombs anywhere you think they might be. Somebody call the White House and tell them Rumsfeld has a bomb up his ass.

Then we heard about British novelist Ian McEwan's difficulties getting in to this country. McEwan wanted to fly in from Vancouver, BC, and made the mistake of telling our border guys that he would be giving paid speeches in our country. They actually told him that amounted to coming to the U.S. to earn money to "practice his lifestyle." I have no idea what they thought his lifestyle was, apart from novelist.

Speaking of April Fools, McEwan fooled a lot of people a few years ago with a phony psychiatric case report in an appendix to one of his novels. It was so convincing some psychiatrists quoted it and some critics dismissed the novel as merely an elaboration on a real case. Way to go, Ian!

So, anyway, it used to be that British novelists on speaking tours were given visa waivers at our borders, but Homeland Security officials now say, we have got to be vigilant so that we "don't have another 9-11." You never know when a British novelist might crash himself into a skyscraper on his way to giving a talk at Benaroya Hall.

Our favorite part of this story is the part where, in one of three interrogations he endured, McEwan was asked whether he wrote fiction novels or non-fiction novels. Everybody has read this as evidence that our immigration officials have the combined IQ of a seedless grape, but I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the questioner was thinking, if he answers "non-fiction" that'll prove he's a fake for sure, it will.

Finally McEwan was let into this country. The reason given to allow him in was (this is really true) "this is attracting a lot of unfavorable publicity."

So here's the deal. If you are a suspected British novelist slash potential -terrorist slash lifestyle-offender trying to get into the US, and our border guys want to keep you out, just call all the newspapers on the west coast and make a big stink about it. Our guys will whine about what a threat you are, but they'll let you in because otherwise they'd look bad, even though they are sure you will whack us all with your books!mI've saved the biggest April Fool of the year for last. Every major newspaper in the country was fooled by the story from Fallujah about the four "civilian contractors" who were killed and whose bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets. Pretty brutal stuff to be doing to innocent "civilian contractors".

But just three days later a squad of "commandos" from a private security company were reported repulsing a raid on US Headquarters in Najaf. The "commandos" were working for the same company as the four in Fallujah.

So what were they, "commandos" or "civilian contractors"? Answer: both! They were mercenaries! They were fully armed mercenaries in military style uniforms playing soldier of fortune in what is, let's face it, a war zone.

Look out: the April Fools bar has been set very high for next year.

Bump In The Road

© Dr. Wes Browning

President Clinton says we did all right

To bomb Serbs eighty days and some nights

"We did it the right way," he says gleefully

"We'll finish the job! Take it from me!"

And you know there could be somethin' to that

We might have done right for an actual fact

I heard we bombed Serbians only with bombs

We didn't drop anything else on their lawns.

Sorry about that last rhyme. I meant it to be better but I came to a "bump in the road", such as the ones that slowed the Kosovo peace settlement and the end to our bombing. In my case the bump in the road was the English Language. In America's case it was real bumps in the road from the Macedonian coast to Belgrade.

Those damn bumps! Isn't that always the way it is when you're trying to bomb the bejeesus out of some people and forcing them to submit to your will? I know it is for me. People are always resisting. You're just trying to have a perfect little war with perfect airplanes where no one, absolutely no one, who was anyone important dies, is that asking too much?

But nooooo. There's got to be bumps in the road. I even heard some of the road was blown up! And even where it wasn't, there were actual enemy soldiers who didn't want us to march to Belgrade, and homes full of people lining the roads, that didn't want us to march to Belgrade.

And homes empty of people lining the roads, people who have already expressed their opinion about us marching to Belgrade in the most emphatic way imaginable, by laying their bodies down and dying, to be bumps in the road. It's just so very frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating bumps in the road, and aren't we always, you will find in this issue a story about how our city officials are looking into ways to improve services for the homeless, and incidently cut costs for those services, by tracking the homeless better.

The trouble with the way it is now, every time you turn a homeless person away from a shelter because there's no space left on the floor, you lose that person in the dark of the night, and wouldn't recognize her/him if you saw him again.

Why wouldn't you recognize her/him? Because there are thousands of her/him that's why, if there were only twenty or thirty, everybody could just remember what they looked like.

But I digress. The point is there are thousands of homeless not getting into shelters, and we all know that, but the funds needed to build more shelters are constantly being denied on the basis of the fact that no one knows who those people are.

I know who those people are, they are bumps in the road.

We will have shelters enough for everybody, trust us America, down the road, we are doing the right thing, we are doing it the right way, it'll be a little slower than expected, there are bumps in the road.

Well I got off on a tangent again. I meant to deliver a powerful polemic on the subject of software solutions to hardware problems and vice versa, but I got carried away by this whole road thing.

But what I really regret is that I have failed to make room for the deep sociological analysis that I was going to provide that was going to explain what the War in Kosovo and tagging homeless people in Seattle have each to do with what we all are really most interested in these days, the revelations in the press regarding Charles Kuralt's mistress.

Oh well. Meanwhile here's a poem I wrote in honor of dear Charles, may he rest in peace and good cheer, and may there be no more bumps in his road.

Late to the Wake

We've come too late t' the wake, I see,

The man's been dead two years or three!

His last word said upon his bed,

Was "Pat"! not "Rose Bud"! nor even "Dead"!

Who's Pat? all asked, around the room.

A long lost friend, they'd all assume.

But not so long lost as all that,

A fishing partner was fair Pat!

To be precise, Charles made the fish,

for Pat to catch and make a wish,

then put him back in his fish den

the Magic Fish to leap again

& again & again, for near thirty years,

for Fishing always gave Charles cheer.

The Goddess Dances In, Within

Baby Bop,

Burning Bright

Let's begin with an adventure in prose by Steve Mansour that demonstrates that I am not alone. That's right - there are others who share my artistic sensibilities. Steve is, by the way, an artist/writer who sometimes works at the Street Life Gallery at 2nd and Bell, and not an imaginary person I invented in an effort to fill space. If he had been an imaginary person on this occasion his name would have been Cindy.

Steve writes, "... for me, a true artist thinks and draws, draws and thinks; a true artist thinks and draws, then draws some more and thinks, and draws, and then he thinks some more. A true artist dreams, then draws, then dreams again, and draws, then he/she thinks and again draws, and dreams, and dreams of drawing and draws the dreaming, and thinks less." Can you dig it? I can!

Speaking of digging, I was just talking to my good friend Cindy about the huge blank space at the bottom of this page and she said to me, "You know what you should do? You should write something there. That's what I would do. Then you should lie down, © Dr., `cause you're really looking beat." Just then I thought and dreamed and dreamed the thinking and thought yeah! I am going to have my Beat period. My main influences this morning - now that the bars have closed - will be Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Krebs. Yeah. It's coming to me I'm feeling the beat it's crazy man it's everywhere it's in everything DIG it - dig IT - don't let the Bomb get you down let the Beat do it. Yeah. IT.

I'm outta tea. I send Cindy to the store for more. She comes back. I'm ready:

Sixteenth Hymmnn

to/of the Dumbsainted

or Opus 16, My First Beat Poem

Hey Jack!

I AM a Character in the Bleak

inhuman Loneliness

As I sing the intergalactic song of a

species couchless

Yeah: no couch for me tonight

Pad me on a pad - no hipster pad -

The hipsters pad in their cells tonight -

While I pad the streets of my share

of inhuman loneliness

With: Cindy / she-who-is-not-real

And while I pad this poem of bleak couchlessness

With the aid of: Cindy / she-who-is

Jack: I AM a Genius all the time

As long as Cindy blows through and out my mind.